Father Most Wanted

But ultimately there was no way around it. He knew he had to do it. And he had to do it alone.

Time, everyone had said, would help him heal. Time was sure taking a hell of a lot of itself about it. The irony made him shake his head.

Impatience burrowed into the weariness, making itself known. He raised his eyes to the clock again.

She was late.

He felt a pang. Maybe Carla wasn’t going to call tonight. Maybe she couldn’t get away. They’d both agreed that she wouldn’t call him from the house. There could be consequences, and it was too much of a risk to take, even though everything so far appeared to be going smoothly.

But appearances could be deceiving, and he wasn’t about to take chances. Not with his sister’s life and certainly not with the girls’. Losing Gina had been far more than enough for him to endure.

The telephone on the side table next to him rang, slicing through the faraway sound of his daughters’ voices. Tyler quickly covered the receiver with his hand and yanked it up to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Is this the party to whom I am speaking?”

Dark half-formed thoughts vanished into the evening. “Very funny, Carla. I thought maybe you weren’t calling tonight.”

“Things came up.” He could hear the unspoken apology in her voice. “I couldn’t get away. Enough about me. How’s everything with you?”

He looked around the room with its unpacked boxes of possessions that had never been his. Possessions that gave credibility to the life he had assumed. The room reflected his life, as well. “Chaotic, utterly chaotic.”

The voice on the other end laughed with distant memory. “Sounds just like you. Are the girls adjusting?”

Pride whispered through him. His daughters were resilient and undefeatable. “Better than me.”

“They’re younger,” she said. “You’ve got more to deal with. But you’ll get used to it.” She paused, then added, “You were always good about rolling with the punches.”

He wished he shared her optimism. Wished it could snake its way through the phone lines and infuse him. Just long enough for him to get beyond the walking wounded and begin to move on. But it’d been nine months, and all he was doing was still going through the motions.

“I’m not now, Carla. This time it feels like I’m down for the count.”

“Not you. Never you,” she said. “Look, I’d better go, just in case.”

He glanced at his watch and realized that she must have looked at hers. Wariness had become second nature to him. “You didn’t use the same public phone, did you?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

He laughed, affection sneaking forward. “The jury’s still out on that.”

“Still have that wry sense of humor, I see.” And then her voice became softer, more serious. “I miss you.”

He wished she wouldn’t say that. But even so, the words comforted him. “Yeah, me too.”

“Watch your back.”

“Always.” It was never himself that he was concerned with. He had to be careful for the girls’ sake. Until he could be sure that everything was really truly over. Finally over. “Same time next week.” It was more of a hope than a question.

“I’ll try.”

He couldn’t ask for any more than that.

Tyler hung up and looked thoughtfully at the telephone. The only thing he had of the past was a disembodied voice whispering in his ear for the briefest of calls. Anything longer might be asking for trouble, at least for now, and trouble was the one thing he had to avoid at all costs.

So far, the cost had been very high.

A small figure stood in the doorway. Tyler separated himself from the past and returned to the present.

“Daddy, you promised to read to us.”

He rose. There were now three of them eagerly spilling into the room. “So I did. Which story shall I read first?”

“Mine.”

“No, mine.”

“Me first, Daddy.”

Three books from three different sets of hands were thrust at him from three different directions. Tyler smiled to himself. Here we go again.

“Okay, where do you want this, Oma?” Brooke asked. Her father’s mother had been “Oma,” the German word for grandmother, to her ever since she could remember.

A grunt accompanied Brooke’s question. Unable to see, she felt her way into the kitchen, shuffling as she went. But there was good reason for that. Somewhere on this floor was Jasper, her grandmother’s longtime pet. Thirty-one pounds of territorial, caramel-colored, generally unfriendly cat. There was no way Brooke wanted to take any chances of stepping on him. Jasper was as unforgiving as they came.

“Right on the table will be fine, dears,” her grandmother called out.

From the pitch, Brooke guessed that the woman who had spent more than twelve years raising Heather and her was not in the room with them now.

“Great. Now all I need to know is where’s the table.” Behind her, Brooke heard a loud thud. It was the sound of Heather depositing the box of books she had brought in with her on the floor.

“Well, I can tell you that it’s not here,” Heather announced, blowing out an exaggerated breath as she massaged one forearm.

Craning her neck as far as possible, Brooke tried to peek around the box she was holding. Hers was larger and heavier than Heather’s—she’d insisted on it. She managed to glimpse the edge of the kitchen table and hoped there was nothing on it as she made her way over. Finally finding something to rest the box on, she eased it onto the flat surface.

“It wouldn’t have killed you to help guide me, you know,” she said to Heather.

In response, Heather clasped her hands over her heart, rolled her eyes heavenward and pretended to sway. “Oh, yes, it would. The pain, the pain.”

“You are, you are,” Brooke responded before sucking air into her lungs.

She was going to have to get out more, she told herself. There was no reason to feel so winded, carrying books from the car in her grandmother’s driveway to her kitchen.

Of course, the books did weigh a million pounds…

Ada Carmichael came into the kitchen, a welcoming smile on her perfectly round face. She looked at the two girls she considered as much her daughters as her granddaughters, each, in her own way, so like their father. Great affection coursed through Ada’s veins as it always did whenever she saw the duo.

She looked from one box to the other before pausing to open the one on the table. “So, these are them?”

“These are them,” Brooke confirmed. Crossing to the sink, she poured herself a glass of water and drank half of it before continuing. “Seventy-five copies each of Willie Wanders off to the Wilderness and Willie Wanders Home. The hardback issues.” Her father’s creations, they were two of her personal favorites. “So, what’s up?” She placed an affectionate hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. The older woman barely topped five feet, and Brooke towered over her. “Are you planning to go into business yourself selling Dad’s books?”

Ada began taking out the books, placing them on the table in piles of five. “Not into business, exactly.”

Brooke studied her. She almost always knew when her grandmother was up to something. With an active mind and a body that refused to recognize its chronological age, there were times the woman was hard to keep up with. “Then what, exactly?”

Having made four piles, Ada looked at her oldest granddaughter proudly. “These are for the scouts.”

“Scouts?” Suspicion crept into her voice. She glanced at Heather, who merely shrugged her ignorance and went back to paying homage to the sprawled-out tabby on the floor, scratching him behind the ears. “What kind of scouts?”

“Little ones. I think they call them Brownies. Silly, naming them after something you bake in a pan. Do they still call them Brownies?” Ada asked.

“Yes, Oma, they still call them Brownies.” Brooke could remember her grandmother taking on a huge group of girls because Heather wanted to experience being a Brownie and there were no Brownie troops in the vicinity. Ada had started her own. Maybe her grandmother was getting nostalgic. “Did you volunteer to help some troop’s den mother out?”

“No.” Ada smiled at her matter-of-factly as she continued taking out books and placing them in neat piles of five. “I volunteered to be some troop’s den mother. Two troops, actually, but the second one’s only temporary, they tell me.”

Brooke should have suspected something like this was up, but she’d thought that her grandmother had asked for the books because she’d had a sudden whim to donate her father’s books to a local school. “Don’t you need a short person of your own before you can do that?”

“Not really.” Ada laughed at the quaint notion, moving around to gather books out of the box Heather had left on the floor. “And Elaine Wilcox is pregnant.”

Again Brooke looked at Heather, but her sister met her with the same uninformed expression. Big help she was. Just who was Elaine Wilcox? “There’s a connection here, right?”

“Of course there is. There’s always a connection, dear.”

“Okay, then, what is it?” Brooke took the books out of her hands, forcing Ada to stop and look at her in surprise.

“She can’t lead her troop anymore. Doctor’s orders. Something about a delicate constitution, she said. Sounds suspicious to me.” Ada shook her head. “But no one else could take over the troop and they were going to have to disband. Same with Sarah Nelson’s troop, but she’s just laid up with a sprained ankle. I couldn’t refuse them.” Ada looked into Brooke’s eyes. “You remember what it was like. If you could have seen all those long faces…”

“No,” Brooke said patiently, “I don’t remember what it was like. It was Heather who was a Brownie, not me.”

Bemused, Ada could only shake her head. “Oh, I am sorry, dear. Did you miss not being a Brownie?”

Brooke closed her eyes and exhaled a long breath. The conversation was going around in circles. Nothing new there. “No, not really.” Opening her eyes again, she pinned her grandmother with a look. Or tried to. “The point is, when and where did you see these long faces?”

Ada reclaimed her stack of books and continued divvying them up. “Monday. When I was driving home from my aerobics class.”

Ordinarily Brooke was very proud of her grandmother. A lot of other women of seventy-five had long since retired from life. Ada Carmichael believed in squeezing out every last drop that life had to offer. But this was squeezing it a bit too much.

“Maybe that aerobics class made you a little light-headed, Oma.” Brooke looked at the stacks and envisioned little girls to go with them. Energetic little girls. “This is a lot you’re taking on.”

Ada’s eyes met hers, amusement shining in them. “When has that ever stopped me?”

Brooke surrendered. Oma was what people liked to call an indomitable force of nature. There was no stopping her. “You’re right, what was I thinking? It hasn’t. But maybe someday it should.”

“We’ll talk about it then.” Finished stacking, Ada shifted her eyes to her other granddaughter. “You’re awfully quiet this evening, Heather.”

Still stroking the cat and getting infinite pleasure out of it, Heather looked at her sister impishly. She’d been biding her time, waiting for the right moment. It was here. “Brooke met a man.”

Brooke saw her grandmother look at her with sharpened interest.

Great, just great.

Leave it to Heather to get things all confused and sic Oma on her. Hoping to stem the tide she knew was coming, Brooke countered quickly with, “I meet men all the time in my store.”

Rising to her feet, Heather made a futile attempt to brush off the preponderance of cat hair she’d managed to accumulate in the short amount of time. “But this one made her smile. A genuine smile, Oma.”

Brooke gave her sister a withering look. Heather hadn’t even been in the store at the time. She’d just walked in a moment after Tyler and his daughters left. “How would you know?”

Undaunted, Heather grinned, lifting her chin. “I’ve got great distance vision.” For safety’s sake, she got on her grandmother’s other side, out of Brooke’s reach.

Blocking Brooke’s access to her sister, Ada looked up at her. “Tell me more.”

I’ll get you for this, Heather, Brooke thought.

She shrugged nonchalantly. “Nothing to tell. He has triplets, one got lost, I helped her find him, he was grateful and they bought books.” She aligned the piles on the table with one another. “End of story.”

Ada looked genuinely saddened. “Pity. Grateful men are the best kind.”

Was everyone missing the obvious here? “He has triplets, Oma.”

The fact left the woman unfazed. “Was his wife with him?”

“No, but—”

“Aha.” Triumph made its appearance in her eyes. Ada cocked her head again. “Nice-looking? Him, I mean.”

“To die for,” Heather interjected.

“Aha.” Triumph went up another notch.

Fun was fun, but this was really getting out of control. Brooke placed her hand over the closest pile of books. “Stop saying that, Oma, or I’ll take back the books.”

But the books had been temporarily forgotten. “Did he pay cash?”

“No, a charge card.” Brooke’s eyes narrowed. Now where was she going with this? “What does that have to do with—”

“You have his name, then. Track him down if you like him,” Ada said.

Yup, way out of hand. Why did her grandmother insist on trying to match her up? She knew what she’d gone through with Marc, how badly her heart had been broken. She wasn’t about to go on that merry-go-round again, at least not anytime soon.

“Oma, I didn’t say anything about liking him.”

Ada’s sharp green eyes went right through her, saying she knew otherwise. “This is the first conversation we’ve had about a man who wasn’t your father that’s lasted more than six seconds.” Point driven home, she continued, getting down to the practical. “Now then, there are places on the Internet that can cough up entire histories of people if you know where to look.”

Brooke felt as if she was standing in the path of a runaway train, and if she didn’t do something right now, she was going to be flattened. In self-defense, she picked up a book and held it out to her grandmother. “Tell me more about this Brownie troop.”

Ada waved away the question and ignored the book. “You don’t want to hear about them.”

When pushed to the wall, Brooke could be every bit as stubborn as her grandmother. And right now she was being pushed. “Oh, yes, I do. Passionately.”

Momentarily diverted, Ada smiled. “Wonderful. Then you won’t mind if I bring them to the shop tomorrow. First thing in the morning. Only one troop at a time, I promise. It’ll be our first field trip.”

She’d walked right into that one. Brooke shot Heather a look that clearly threatened her with bodily harm if she dared to be late tomorrow.

There were thirty-eight Brownies in all.

Thirty-eight girls under the age of ten wandering through her store the next morning. For the most part, Brooke had to admit that they were quite well behaved.

Nonetheless, it didn’t hurt to keep her fingers crossed while they remained in the store.

Brooke leaned in close to her grandmother. Ada was surveying the scene much the way Queen Victoria might have at a family gathering—except with a great deal more amusement. “It looks like a miniature-Scout jamboree in here,” Brooke commented.

Ada nodded her agreement, then looked around. There was no one in the store except the Brownies. “I hope I’m not scaring away your business.”

Brooke began to deny the allegation, then thought better of it. “It’s for a worthy cause.”

“Speaking of business, here comes a customer.” Ada nodded to her left at the man entering the store. There were three little girls with him. Identical little girls. “That wouldn’t be your man, would it?” Ada asked, smiling.

Though Brooke loved the woman with all her heart, she fought the urge to stuff her into the supply closet—just until Tyler left. “Oma, you have got to stop listening to Heather. If you’ll excuse me.” She began to walk away to wait on Tyler.

“Never with more pleasure,” Ada said. If she could have, she would have given Brooke a push to send her on her way. “Heather was right. He is gorgeous.”

Brooke wished her grandmother came with a muzzle.

Tyler was looking around the store as she approached, and from where she was, he looked more than a little taken aback.

“Hi, I didn’t expect to see you back so soon.” She shifted her attention to the girls. “Finish your books already, girls?”

“Yes,” Stephany told her shyly.

Tiffany, it appeared, couldn’t take her eyes off the girls milling around the store, all of whom were glamorously older than she and her sisters and, thus, to be looked up to. “Why are those girls all wearing brown dresses? Do we have to wear brown dresses to be here?”

“You can wear whatever you like.” Brooke saw that an explanation was necessary. “They’re wearing brown dresses because they’re part of a group called Brownies. That’s the group you join before you become a Girl Scout.”

Bethany digested the information before looking up at her father. “Can we be Brownies, Daddy?”

One step at a time, he thought. “We’ll talk.”

Brooke had the impression that he didn’t think scouting was quite right for his daughters. She was getting the feeling that the man was the overly protective type.

“Is this a bad time?” he asked her.

He looked ready to leave and she found herself not wanting him to. “No, a good time. I like business.”

Tyler shook his head. She’d misunderstood. “No, I meant a bad time for us to stop by.”

She spread her arms, welcoming them all in. “The more the merrier.” And then she leaned back and said to him as if in confidence, “You know, it might not be a bad idea at that.”

He hadn’t been under the impression that they were discussing anything. “What might not be a bad idea?”

“Letting your girls become Brownies.” She knew her grandmother would welcome three new members. Nothing Oma liked better than a houseful of kids. “If they’re new in the area, I can’t think of a better way for the triplets to make friends.”

Her enthusiasm wasn’t shared. “They can do that in school.”

“True, but—” She took her cue from the look on his face. The look that told her she was trespassing. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to tell you how to raise your daughters.”

With the apology tendered, he felt like a heel. “And I didn’t mean to sound as if I was biting off your head.” He knew he was still far too edgy about the situation. He was going to have to work on that. “Actually I stopped by to ask if there was any way I could repay you.”

The last thing she wanted was for him to feel indebted to her. “For what? I really didn’t do anything.”

He wasn’t accustomed to selflessness and modesty in the same package. He put his hand on Tiffany’s shoulder. If he could, he would have had all three fitted with tracking devices. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

She pretended to go along with the idea. “Well, in that case, I’ll take a big-screen TV and a ticket for a round trip to Hawaii.”

He laughed. She had an offbeat sense of humor, but he liked it. “The girls were thinking more along the lines of going to that old-fashioned malt shop in the mall that sells candy.”

“The big place with the little tables,” Tiffany chimed in.

“Please?” Stephany asked.

“We want you to come,” Bethany told her.

She knew the place they were talking about. The one with the decadent chocolate sundae. “I think that might be arranged.”

He nodded toward the Brownies. “What about them?”

“Heather can handle them.” She indicated her sister in the far end of the store. “Besides, they can’t stay here forever. My grandmother just brought them by for a short field trip.”

“Your grandmother?” he repeated, puzzled.

Pausing for a second to locate her, Brooke pointed Ada out. “That sprightly-looking woman standing over by Rolphie the Runaway Rodent.”

“Your murals have names?” he asked.

She laughed and the sound charmed him, reminding him of notes plucked on a harp. “My murals are based on cartoon characters.”

“You should know that, Daddy,” Tiffany said.

He suppressed an indulgent smile. “I guess my education isn’t as complete as I thought.”

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