The One Who Changed Everything (The Cherry Sisters)

by Darcy, Lilian

  He knocked, and yes.

  Her.

  Wearing her white cook’s jacket and those blue-and-white-checked pants, looking trim and busy and a little messy, with a smear of flour on her cheek and tiny wisps of hair escaping from a net.

  “Finished,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’m heading off. Jackie will email the final invoice, and if there are any problems we’ll be back to fix them as soon as you let us know.”

  She nodded. “Okay, thanks.”

  And he couldn’t move.

  She seemed to be having the same trouble. They stood there looking at each other, and it was beyond horrible, and he didn’t know what to say.

  “Tell me you don’t want me, Tucker,” she blurted out. “Can you do that? Can you tell me we’re not both standing here, burning for each other, connected down to our bones?”

  Yeah, but it wasn’t relevant, it wasn’t what counted.

  “Ten years ago,” he told her, “if you’d given the slightest sign that you were feeling the same as I was, I would have thrown your sister over without a second’s pause for thought. I did throw her over. We’re all just lucky that she and your parents never made the connection. We’re lucky Mary Jane kept her mouth shut.”

  She was furious. Her glare almost hit him in the face, with a blazing energy that he would have flinched from if he hadn’t been holding himself so tight.

  “I’m sorry you’re angry—” he began.

  But she wouldn’t let him finish. “You might be sorry I’m angry, but you have no idea why. Do you know what your problem is, Tucker? Do you know what’s really happening here? I’ll tell you. I wasn’t going to. I’ve been stewing over it, feeling so powerless. How can you fight an enemy who doesn’t exist anymore?”

  “Doesn’t exist?”

  “Maybe you’re not ready to hear this, and maybe you never will be, but here it is anyhow. You won’t stop beating yourself up because you never got to beat up your dad.”

  “What?”

  “You’re beating yourself up, you’ve been beating yourself up on and off your entire adult life when it comes to sex and love because you never got the chance to beat up your father.” Her voice gentled a little. “And you never can get that chance, so shouldn’t you let it go? Find a way to move on? I’ve had to learn that you’re not the man who gave me grief in California. You need to learn that you’re not your dad, and that beating yourself up isn’t ever, ever going to settle the score with him.”

  The words hit him so hard, he couldn’t speak.

  Beat up his dad.

  Beat up his father.

  Hell, yes!

  He pictured it. Eighteen-year-old self yelling, punching walls, cracking a blow across his father’s face, knocking him to the floor.

  Knocking him from his hospital bed.

  Of course he’d never done it. He’d thought about it, and had been racked with guilt every time.

  How did Daisy know? She was standing there, waiting for a reaction, her body soft with empathy and understanding, and shaky—he could see it—with all the things that were trembling inside him.

  He still couldn’t speak. Not about this anyhow. It was too new. Too shocking.

  Too true?

  In a splintered voice he repeated, “Jackie will send the invoice,” and got himself out of there. Down the steps. Over to the pickup. Numb hand pushing in the key.

  Daisy was watching him. He knew she was, even though he hadn’t turned to check. He just knew she’d be standing there, hanging on the doorknob, watching him leave, not understanding what she’d done to him.

  Because he still didn’t understand, himself.

  Made everything better?

  Made everything worse...

  He stopped in at the apartment for a shower, the office and showroom and yard of the business he was so proud of silent and unattended below, and arrived at his mom’s on time. Mattie and Carla were there; Carla with Adam and the kids, Mattie with a new girlfriend who seemed to be fitting in just fine.

  Who can I talk to about this?

  It was the wrong time, the wrong occasion. And yet when they sat down to the big midday meal and he looked around him at his family, what Daisy had said made total sense. He wanted to beat up his father and he couldn’t, so he was beating himself up instead, demanding an impossible standard of perfection in his own behavior as a bizarre kind of punishment delivered to the man who’d loomed so large in his adolescent life.

  See, Dad? You couldn’t do it, but I can. This is how to behave, Dad. I’ll show you...

  The feeling of light shed over his inner workings was suddenly euphoric.

  This.

  This is why some things have seemed so hard. This is what I’ve been doing to myself, and I don’t have to, I can just stop.

  And Daisy was the one who knew.

  Of course she was the one who knew.

  It was a really nice meal, a great meal, long and lazy and with way too much food. Carla and Mattie had grown into such great people. Adam, Carla’s husband, adored his wife and kids. The new girlfriend, Alice, laughed at everything Mattie said, and gave as good as she got. They worked as a couple, and he got the feeling she might be around for a while. He stayed until after five, helping to clean up but resisting his mom’s and Mattie’s pleas for him to sit and watch football.

  And then he just couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Mom, I’m going. There’s something I need to do.”

  * * *

  It was dark when he reached Spruce Bay. The restaurant was all lit up, inside and out, and the extended deck looked just the way he’d envisaged, inviting and beautiful. Their meal had been scheduled for a four o’clock start, so it was still going. As he climbed out of the pickup, he could hear laughter and conversation and music.

  Was it crazy to be here?

  Yes, since he still didn’t know exactly what he was going to do. Thank her?

  Apologize...again?

  He went to the wide steps that led up to the deck and just stood there, looking inside. He saw Daisy bringing out desserts. They were serving them family style, setting down whole pies on the tables and cutting slices right there, adding ice cream or whipped cream. She looked busy and flushed and she was smiling.

  He didn’t need to hear what everyone was saying to know that the meal had been a huge success. She was right in the middle of it, taking the praise, passing out pie, hips sliding between the crowded, happy tables, wearing the chef’s uniform that made her look so neat and competent and...well...beautiful. Always. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, but she didn’t see him at all.

  Mary Jane did.

  She froze for a moment, then gestured at him, making a round-the-back movement with her finger, before disappearing into the kitchen and emerging through the staff door in time to meet his hurried approach.

  What did he look like? He had no idea, but she must have seen something. “You’re here for Daisy.” A statement, not a question.

  He said, suffering, “Mary Jane, I need...I need your permission. Don’t I?”

  There was a beat of silence, then she said with conviction, “No, you don’t. You need Lee’s.”

  “Lee’s?”

  “Yes. If you need anyone’s permission, it’s Lee’s. Not that I’m telling you you have to get it, but you look like you need something, some way to move forward.”

  “I do.”

  “So call Lee. Come on, I’ll take you over to the office where it’s quiet. I’m sensing you’re not in a patient mood right now, so just do it.”

  He did it.

  Got her on the second ring.

  “Hey, Lee? It’s Tucker...”

  Mary Jane stood in the doorway with her arms folded and listened to the whole conversation, t
he way his mother used to stand over him sometimes when he was a kid tidying his room. When it was done, with a lot of confession on his side and some very generous and sensible words on Lee’s, Mary Jane was smiling. “See why I never wanted to see her hurt?”

  “She’s a great woman. I never doubted that.”

  “Just not the right woman.”

  “Just not. Daisy is. She told me something today... She saw something in me...” He shook his head. Couldn’t say it. Not to anyone but Daisy herself. Hell, he was going to cry if he didn’t get this done! “Is she still frantic in there?” He tilted his head in the direction of the restaurant.

  “She’s good. If she’s still cutting pie, I’ll take over.”

  “Thanks. You’re the best.”

  “Go. I’ll close up in here.” She shooed him out of the office as if he was a stray puppy, and he sprinted back across the grounds because he might die if he didn’t get this said...done...in the next two minutes.

  When Daisy saw him appear in the kitchen—she was standing by the sink, unloading a vast pile of plates—her eyes went wide and her mouth went soft and that gave him hope. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?” She wiped her hands on her jacket and stepped away from the sink toward him. She touched her hair and he wanted to pull off the net and bury his face in those golden strands, but not yet, not yet, they had to talk first.

  “You know for what. For taking so long to understand myself. For letting it hurt you, even for a minute. What you said...about not beating up my dad. All sorts of things have been about doing that. Trying to do it. Trying to punish him when he was beyond punishment. Getting engaged to Lee when we should only ever have been friends. Marrying Emma to help her and Max, and then feeling bad for Mom and Max, and even for Jackie, for heck’s sake, that my marriage never turned into the real thing, even though Emma never wanted it to.”

  “Oh, Tucker...” She reached him and looked up into his face, and did what she’d done so many times before. She touched his arm. Asking him. And the answer was yes.

  Yes, Daisy. I want you. I love you.

  “And then you said it,” he told her. “And it was like a shaft of sun hitting a rock. It freed me. It just did. Made something click in my head. Like the lock turning on a prison door. I thought about it. Had Thanksgiving with my family, with it going round and round in my mind and making more and more sense. And then I came back here, because...hell...you don’t know how impatient I got after that. And I called Lee.”

  “Lee?”

  “I needed to. Mary Jane helped with that.”

  “And Lee—”

  “—is great. The best. But she’s not you.”

  “So...”

  “Apparently I didn’t need her permission, but I got it anyhow, and I’m here.”

  “You can tell I’m happy about that...” She was smiling, reaching up to his face.

  “I want you in my life, Daisy. For always. I want to marry you. If it’s not too soon for me to say that.”

  “Oh, it’s not!”

  “Is it ten years too late?”

  “It’s not that, either... You know.”

  “So say it for me right now. Say we’ll get married.” He dipped closer, brushed his mouth across hers, light yet lingering. “Because I’m going crazy over this.”

  She chased the contact and pressed her parted lips against his. He felt the dart of her tongue and the delectable, plummy softness of her mouth. She tasted of ice cream, and she whispered against his skin, “Please, can we get married, Tucker? And can we do it soon?”

  He kissed her again, sweet and deep, while the Thanksgiving party went on beyond the closed kitchen door. “I want you for my wife so much, Daisy Cherry.”

  “I want you, too,” she whispered. “For everything. Forever.”

  And as he held her, he just knew, down to his bones, what he’d known in his heart for so long—that this was right.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from A Very Special Delivery by Brenda Harlen.

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  Chapter One

  When she woke up the morning of November first staring at water stains on a stippled ceiling, Julie Marlowe wondered if she was having a bad dream. Then she remembered that uncomfortable twinges in her lower back had forced her to take a break on her journey home the day before, and the closest available accommodations had been at the Sleep Tite Motor Inn.

  She managed to roll her pregnant body off the sagging mattress and swing her feet over the edge. The bathroom’s tile floor was cold beneath her feet, and the trickle of spray that came out of the shower head wasn’t much warmer. She washed quickly, then dried herself with the threadbare but clean towels on the rack. She had another long day of travel ahead of her, so she dressed comfortably in a pair of chocolate-colored leggings and a loose tunic-style top. Then she slipped her feet into the cowboy boots she’d bought “just because” when she’d been in Texas.

  Seven months earlier, she’d had a lot of reasons for wanting to leave Springfield. But after traveling eight thousand miles through twenty-seven states and sleeping in countless hotel rooms, she was more than ready to go home.

  She missed her family, her friends and the comfortable and predictable routines of her life. She even missed her father, despite the fact that he could be more than a little stubborn and overbearing on occasion. The only person she could honestly say that she didn’t miss was Elliott Davis Winchester the Third—her former fiancé.

  Julie had told her parents that she needed some time and some space to think about her future after ending her engagement. Lucinda and Reginald hadn’t understood why she needed to go—and how could she expect that they would when there was so much she hadn’t told them?—but they’d been supportive. They’d always been unflinching in their support and unwavering in their love, even when she screwed up.

  When she left Springfield, Julie was determined to ensure that she didn’t screw up again.

  She felt a nudge beneath her rib, and smiled as she rubbed a hand over her belly. “You weren’t a mistake, baby,” she soothed. “Maybe I didn’t plan for you at this point in my life, but I know that you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and I promise to be the best mommy that I can.”

  The baby kicked again, clearly unconvinced.

  Julie couldn’t blame her for being skeptical. Truthfully, she had more than a few doubts of her own. She and Elliott had talked about having children and neither wanted to wait too long after the wedding before starting a family, but she hadn’t known she was pregnant when she gave him back his ring and left town.

  After a quick visit to the doctor confirmed that she was going to have a baby, she wasn’t even tempted to change her course. Though she’d known Elliott for two years—and had been engaged to him for six months—she’d suddenly realized that she didn’t really know him at all. What she did know was that he wasn’t the kind of a man she wanted to marry, and he certainly wasn’t the kind of man that she wanted as a father for her baby.

  Of course, that didn’t change t
he fact that he was the father of her baby, but she hadn’t been ready to deal with that reality in the moment. Maybe she’d been running away, but over the past few months she’d accepted that she couldn’t run forever. In fact, in her current condition, she couldn’t run at all anymore. The best she could manage was a waddle.

  And she was ready to waddle home.

  * * *

  Lukas Garrett snagged a tiny box of candy from the orange bowl on the front desk—the remnants of the pile of Halloween candy from the day before—and emptied the contents into his mouth.

  Karen, the veterinarian clinic receptionist and office manager, shook her head as he chewed the crunchy candy. “Please tell me that’s not your lunch.”

  He swallowed before dutifully answering, “That’s not my lunch.”

  “Lukas,” she chided.

  “Really,” he assured her. “This is just the appetizer. I’ve got a sandwich in the fridge.”

  “PB & J?”

  “Just PB today.” He reached for another box of candy and had his hand slapped away.

  “You need a good woman to take care of you.”

  It was a familiar refrain and he responded as he usually did. “You’re a good woman and you take care of me.”

  “You need a wife,” she clarified.

  “Just say the word.”

  Karen, accustomed to his flirtatious teasing, shook her head.

  “Go eat your sandwich,” she directed. “As pathetic as it is, I’m sure it has slightly more nutritional value than candy.”

  “I’m waiting to have lunch after I finish with the morning appointments.” He glanced at the clock on the wall, frowned. “I thought for sure Mrs. Cammalleri would be here with Snowball by now.”

  “She called to reschedule,” Karen told him. “She didn’t want to leave the house in this weather.”

  “What weather?” Luke turned to the window, then blinked in surprise at the swirling white flakes that were all that was visible through the glass. “When did it start snowing?”