Still the One

by Robin Wells

  She pushed the door open, rattling the cowbells, without a glance at him.

  “Hey—where are you going?” Zack called.

  “To Katie’s. I’m not going to stay with you.”

  “Don’t you want a ride?”

  “No. I’ll walk.”

  “It’s getting ready to storm.”

  “So? I like walking in the rain.”

  She’d told him during those first few days in Vegas that walking calmed her down. Given her current frame of mind, a walk would probably do her good. “Want me to take your books?”

  Ignoring Zack, she turned toward Dave. “Have you got a plastic bag?”

  Before he could answer, she reached over the counter and helped herself. She stuck the books in the bag and, without a backward glance, stalked out the door.

  Zack shook his head as the door closed behind her. “Jeez. You’d think I was her sworn enemy.”

  Dave gave a sympathetic smile. “It’s the age. My boy went through the stage, too. She’ll outgrow it.”

  “I hope so. How long does it last?”

  “ ’Til they’re twenty-one or so.” Sadness filled his eyes. “But then, my son and I went through it again after he was grown.”

  Zack looked at him, curious about the remark, but not wanting to pry.

  Dave stuck his hands in his pockets. “I guess Katie told you about me, huh?”

  Zack shook his head. “She hasn’t told me anything.”

  “Ah. Well, you’re bound to hear it somewhere or another, so it might as well be from me. One of the traits of a small town is that everyone knows everyone else’s story.”

  Zack waited as Dave rubbed his jaw. “I wasn’t much of a dad, and even less of a husband. Only thing I was really good at was drinking. One night I had too much to drink—that is, even more than usual—and I blacked out. I came to in my secretary’s bed. That was the beginning of a full-blown affair. Annette caught me in the act and she divorced me.” He looked down. “My son wouldn’t have anything to do with me after that.”

  Out the window, lightning flashed across the sky. Thunder crashed a couple of seconds later. “He died before I could make things right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as me. Katie was trying to get him to soften up when he…” He stopped, drew a breath, and swallowed. “When he was killed. It’s funny how hard it still is to say that. Anyway, I’ve been sober a year and a half now.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Yeah. Well, it takes what it takes, I guess.” He shifted his stance. “At least you don’t have a lot of baggage to wade through with your child.”

  “Not being around for her whole childhood seems like a pretty big piece of baggage to me.”

  “She’ll come around. Just be patient and hang in there.”

  “Thanks.” Zack reached for his wallet. “I’d like to pay for those magazines.”

  Dave waved his hand. “No. I see Katie as a daughter, so that makes Gracie family, too. I like being able to do things for family.” He looked at Zack a moment. “You did a good thing, bringing Gracie back into Katie’s life. She and my son… they wanted to have a child awfully bad.” He cleared his throat, looked down, and straightened a stack of red-and-white bookmarks on the counter. “You know, Katie is a terrific woman.”

  “I know.”

  “She and my son—they were really happy together.” He turned the bookmarks around. Zack read the title: The Art of High-Wire Dancing. Why did Zack get the feeling that’s what Dave was doing?

  “I’d like to see her happy again,” Dave said.

  “I would, too.”

  Dave bobbed his head as if they’d just settled something. Zack wasn’t sure if he’d just been given a blessing to pursue her or warned off from doing so. Either thought made him uneasy.

  A smattering of raindrops, fat and heavy, plopped noisily on the roof. Through the glass door, Zack watched one hit the pavement and explode. “I’d better get to my car before it starts pouring.”

  “Yeah. Try to stay dry.”

  “You, too.”

  Dave’s lips curved into a wry smile. “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m not going to mess up a year and a half of sobriety.”

  Zack paused. “I didn’t mean…”

  “Oh, I know you didn’t. That was just a little AA humor.” He waved him out the door.

  Zack ran through the rain and reached his car just as the heavens opened. Katie’s house was only four blocks away, but he didn’t know if Gracie had had time to get there. He didn’t know if she was a fast walker or more of a stroller. The things he didn’t know about that girl far outnumbered the things he did.

  He started his engine and his windshield wipers, then carefully edged away from the curb. The wipers gave him only a second of visibility before the windshield returned to a gray, watery blur—a blur that echoed the shape of his life ever since Gracie had entered it and he’d learned that Katie had never really left it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Rain slashed horizontally against the windows. The branches of the massive oak in Katie’s backyard scraped against the porch, screeching like a choir of owls.

  Katie wrapped her arms around herself and stared out the living room window. Her last four appointments at the beauty shop had canceled because of the weather, so she’d closed the salon early. She’d sent Bev and Rachel home half an hour ago. Rachel lived all the way in Hammond, twenty miles away, and Bev lived out in the country off a dirt road that crossed Little Tchefuncte River and sometimes flooded.

  Katie had texted Gracie and learned that Zack had already picked her up from work at three-thirty. They were probably at Zack’s place, safe and sound and dry.

  Katie wondered if Gracie shared her fear of bad weather. Probably not, she thought; Gracie had grown up in a nice house in the suburbs, not in a trailer park. Katie had spent too many nights huddled under the blanket of her bed, listening for the freight-train-like roar of a tornado, to ever be comfortable in bad weather. Everyone knew that trailers were unsafe in bad storms, but Katie’s mother had never cared. After her nightly rounds with a bottle, her mother could sleep through anything—including the announcements broadcast from the loudspeaker atop the sheriff’s car, ordering residents of the trailer park to seek safer shelter.

  Lightning zapped the room in eery light and thunder shook the rafters, causing Katie to jump. That was close; the sound and the light had occurred almost simultaneously. Her heart pounding hard, Katie ran her hands up and down her arms. She was so nervous that she was actually shivering.

  She’d go grab a sweater, she decided, then head to the kitchen and make some tea. Maybe that would calm her down—or at least distract her.

  She’d just stepped into her bedroom closet and flipped on the light when another jolt of thunder, more deafening than before, rocked the house. Half a second later, she heard an even more earsplitting crash—a crash so close and acute and splintering that the walls seemed to shift and the floor seemed to move under her feet.

  And then everything went black.

  Zack found Gracie hovering under a live oak a block from Katie’s house, clutching her purse and the plastic bag to her chest, her hair dripping in her pale face in dark spikes, looking like a drowned kitten. Relief surged through him, rapidly followed by irritation. Didn’t she know that standing under a tree was just about the worst place to be in a thunderstorm? He braked, leaned across the passenger seat, and opened the door. “Get in,” he said tersely, raising his voice to be heard over the rain.

  She stubbornly hesitated. Another stab of lightning gashed the sky as an eardrum-jolting crash shook the ground. Gracie dove into the car.

  “That hit something close,” Zack said as Gracie closed the door. “You’re lucky it wasn’t you.”

  He turned back to the windshield. The wipers swept across the glass, giving him two seconds of vision. And in those two seconds, he saw a billow of smoke ahead on the right.

  His hear
t jumped into his throat. He put the car into gear, pulled away from the curb, and drove through the slashing rain, telling himself that it couldn’t be, it wasn’t, there was no way that it was…

  Katie’s house.

  “Oh my God!” Gracie stared out the side window as he pulled up to the curb.

  Zack bent his head and gazed at the house, straining to see through the torrents of rain. His heart constricted to the size of a pea. The house was split in two, a giant water oak resting in the middle of it, right where half of the living room and the kitchen had been.

  And Katie’s car was in the driveway.

  “Call 911 and stay put,” he barked. He bounded out of the car like a jackrabbit on crack and raced toward the house, his eyes stinging, the water sluicing down his face.

  “Kate!” he bellowed.

  He dashed toward the house. The door was superfluous, because the wall next to it was flat as a pancake. He stepped onto the rubble. “Kate!” he yelled again as another roar of thunder crashed overhead.

  Smoke rose from the side of the house. It was likely an electrical fire; chances were that other live wires could be buried beneath the rubble.

  But he didn’t have time for caution. Katie might be hurt or trapped or…

  “Kate!” he yelled again, taking another step into the wreckage. It was difficult—damn near impossible—to see through the deluge, but something red and moving caught his eye. He blinked against the rain and made out the form of a woman in a red blouse in a doorway. His heart vaulted with joy. Katie.

  “Stay put!” he yelled. “I’m coming to get you.”

  He worked his way through the rubble toward the side of the house. Katie stepped out of the doorway of the closet into what was left of her bedroom and stared up, her face pale, her eyes blinking against the rain—no doubt shocked to discover her roof was gone.

  She was likely to be in shock, period. She saw him and took a step forward.

  He did the same, then heard a sizzle. Oh, God—a raw electrical wire whipped like a snake on the ground between them, shooting sparks, a mere two feet away from her. “Stop! Don’t move! There’s an electrical wire right in front of you.”

  She froze. He rapidly threaded his way through the wreckage, then grasped her arms and anxiously peered down at her. “Are you all right?”

  She gazed up at him, her eyes large as knotholes, and nodded. Her whole body shivered.

  “It’s okay. I’ve got you,” he said gently. Bending down, he hooked one arm under her knees and lifted her.

  The acrid smell of burning plastic filled the air. Holding her tightly against his chest, he headed through the still-standing half of the living room, past the fireplace mantel.

  “Wait,” she whispered. “I can’t leave…”

  He knew what she wanted. Stepping closer to the mantel, he set her down and handed her the urn. As she cradled it, he lifted her again and headed out of the house, carrying her across the lawn. He reached the car to discover that the passenger seat was empty.

  Oh, Jesus. Now Gracie was gone. His heart squeezed with alarm as he settled Katie in the front seat. “Just a moment,” he told her, forcing himself to sound calmer than he felt. “I’ll be right back.”

  He turned toward the house, ready to head back into it, when he saw a bedraggled black-and-white figure moving beside the house. He dashed toward her.

  “Gracie—what are you doing? I told you to stay in the car!”

  “I had to get my photo album.”

  Part of him wanted to explode at her that it wasn’t worth risking her life for. Another part of him realized the pictures were her connection to her parents. Yet another part of him was so damned glad that she and Katie were all right that nothing else mattered.

  Zack draped his arm around her as they headed to the vehicle and he opened the back door for her.

  “Are y-you okay?” Katie asked through chattering teeth as Gracie climbed in.

  “Yeah. You?”

  Katie twisted around to look at her. “Y-yes.”

  Gracie looked at the urn in Katie’s lap, then lifted her photo album. She leaned over the console between the front seats and gently touched the album to the urn in a solemn toast. She looked at Katie, her eyes warm. “Guess we got the important stuff out.”

  Katie gave a tremulous smile. “Yes.”

  Zack’s heart squeezed tight. We damned sure did, and it wasn’t a bunch of ashes or pictures. It was the two women who meant more to him than anything in the world—two women who seemed to be sharing a mother–daughter moment.

  A siren sounded in the distance. He leaned his head back against the seat and drew a breath. It felt like the first one he’d drawn since he’d seen that tree on Katie’s house. He’d never been so terrified in his life. If anything had happened to either Katie or Gracie…

  He refused to let his mind go there. As the sirens drew nearer, he wiped his face with his hands, relieved that the rain could explain the moisture below his eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The events of the next hour were a manic jumble to Katie. Both of the town’s two police cars arrived on the scene, followed by fire trucks and an ambulance. Against her protestations, Zack insisted that she let the medics check her for shock. When she passed muster, Zack drove Katie and Gracie to his house.

  Katie carefully set the urn on a side table in the entry hall, then went upstairs to change into dry clothes. Only problem was, all of Katie’s clothing and most of Gracie’s were at Katie’s house.

  “I’ll go back and get your things as soon as the fire marshal clears the site,” Zack promised. In the meantime, Katie was forced to change into a pair of Gracie’s sweatpants and a junior-sized Nickelback T-shirt.

  Zack’s gaze flicked over her appreciatively as she came down the stairs, self-consciously pulling the tight shirt away from her breasts. “You look seventeen again.”

  She tried to offset the way the compliment affected her with a show of casualness. “Thanks for the rescue,” she said.

  “My pleasure.”

  She grinned at him. “I was actually perfectly fine, but you looked like you needed a superhero moment.”

  He grinned back. Instead of easing the tension, her teasing seemed to accelerate it. “I appreciate your efforts to shore up my fragile ego.”

  There was nothing fragile about him. He’d changed into dry clothes as well, and looked so big and tough and strong in his worn jeans and navy T-shirt that she felt weak-kneed all over again.

  The doorbell rang, providing a welcome interruption. Zack opened the door, and Katie saw the Gantors on the porch, holding a batch of warm brownies. The Chartreuse grapevine was apparently in full swing, relaying not only what had occurred to her home but also her current whereabouts. Over the course of the evening, half the town trooped through Zack’s house—the police, who reassured Katie they’d keep watch on her house throughout the night to protect her possessions; the fire chief, who told her that the falling tree had caused an electrical fire in the hallway; and a parade of neighbors and friends, bearing cookies and casseroles and offers of help.

  Katie’s insurance agent, Gordon Stuart, stopped by to tell her he’d already seen the house and started the paperwork to file a claim. She was relieved to learn that she’d only be out the deductible; her policy would cover all her losses.

  And it was a good thing, because those losses would be considerable. The tree had crushed through the main support beams, and the fire had ruined much of the rest of the house. Katie’s home would need to be rebuilt practically from the ground up—and most of the contents were soaked.

  “How long do you think it will take to rebuild the place?”

  “It’s hard to say,” the insurance agent said. “I would guess about four to six months.”

  “Six months!” Katie exclaimed after she’d signed the claim forms and Zack had closed the door behind the gray-haired man. “Where am I going to live in the meantime?”

  “That’s simple,
” Zack replied. “You and Gracie will stay here with me.”

  “No,” Katie said swiftly.

  “Why not?” Zack demanded.

  “No. It wouldn’t work.”

  “Sure it would. This house has three bedrooms and three and a half baths, plus a garage apartment. There’s plenty of room for all of us.”

  There wasn’t enough room in the entire town for Katie to live with Zack, but she didn’t want to tell him that. “It’s not just Gracie and me; Annette is planning to stay with me when she’s discharged from the inpatient rehabilitation next week.”

  “Well, she can stay here too.”

  Katie shook her head. “She won’t be able to climb the stairs.”

  “So she can have the master bedroom and I’ll move into the garage apartment. We’ll make it work, Kate.”

  “Zack, that’s really sweet, but I don’t think she’d be comfortable here. She doesn’t know you. And considering that you and I… that we…” Oh, God. What was she about to say? Have a history? Are attracted to each other? Look at each other in ways that make other people in town assume something is going on?

  “That we what, Kate?” he pressed.

  She swallowed hard and went for the least inflammatory remark she could muster. “We have a child together.”

  “So?”

  “So… she’s my mother-in-law.”

  “You mean your ex-mother-in-law.”

  Every time someone applied that prefix to Paul or Annette, it rubbed her the wrong way. “No,” she said curtly, shaking her head. “Ex implies a divorce, and that’s not what happened.”

  “Former, then. Or late.”

  He was not going to negate or minimize her relationship with Annette. Anger flashed through her. “Annette will always be my mother-in-law. She’s the mother I always wished I had. Nothing will ever change our relationship.”

  “Okay, okay!” He held up his hands. “Look—I didn’t mean to upset you. I think it’s great that you two have such a strong bond. I just don’t see why her relationship to you means we can’t all stay in the same place.”