“Where will you go?” she asked. Amazingly, her voice still worked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll transfer posts. There’s some great apartments along the lake in Grand Haven. Or I could move east to Detroit.”
“Detroit? Gus won’t want to live in the city.”
He turned away from her, his face set hard as stone. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll figure something out. Maybe I can find him a nice farm to live on.”
“A nice farm?” she repeated. It hurt to hear he was still in love with Darcy, but this was ten thousand times worse. She had to be misunderstanding him. “You’d give Gus up?”
Mike looked straight at her. He had to have seen the horror on her face, the revulsion in her voice and the hope in her eyes that she’d gotten it wrong, but he just stood up. “Hey, he’s just a dog.”
“Just a dog!” she shrieked, leaping to her feet, too. “He’s not just a dog. He’s your friend. Your buddy. Your best pal.”
“He’s a dog,” Mike insisted. His voice was careful and controlled. “I am his owner, not his daddy, not his friend, not his pal. If it doesn’t work out to keep him, I won’t.” He turned away and picked up the mop.
In two quick steps, she was at his side. She grabbed his arm and swung him around to face her. “You can’t mean that,” she insisted. “You can’t give him up. He loves you.”
“He’s an animal. He doesn’t love.” He plopped the mop down into the bucket of water with enough force that half the water splashed out. “He’ll lavish his devotion on whoever feeds him.”
Casey couldn’t believe he was saying these things. How could she have been so wrong about him? He wasn’t kind and loving and gentle. The man she’d thought she loved didn’t exist. It should make it so much easier for her. But it didn’t.
She just shook her head, her eyes filling with tears so that she could barely see or speak. “I hate people like you,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “You deny your responsibilities because they’re not convenient anymore. They don’t fit your life-style. They’re an embarrassment. Too much trouble. So you throw them away like they’re empty cans of pop, not living, breathing creatures with feelings and fears and a lifetime of knowing how you didn’t want them.”
Mike’s expression had gone from glaring to confused. Casey knew everything was getting jumbled in her head—Snowflake, Midnight, herself as a baby. But she didn’t care.
“Snowflake was about seven when she was brought to the shelter where I volunteered. You know the reason presented for giving her up? ‘No longer fits my life-style.’“ Tears were streaming down her face and she wiped them away impatiently. “That’s what the heartless no-accounts gave for a reason. Snowflake was devastated. She refused to eat. We had to take away her water dish because she kept putting her face into the water and we were afraid she’d drown. I hand fed her for weeks before she began eating on her own, and it was months before she began to trust that when I left in the morning, I would come back.”
“She was lucky you were there,” he said.
But the very gentleness of his voice only made Casey more angry. “And Midnight was ‘set free’ by some woman who’d gotten her as a plaything for her kids and then said she was too much trouble. So she dumped her in a parking lot. It was close to her house, though, and someone recognized her. But I wouldn’t give Midnight back to her for a million dollars.”
Casey took a breath, then rushed on before Mike could speak. “And then there’s Zeke, who’s living with my dad and stepmother. He was dumped at the shelter because he had an ear infection. An ear infection! It took a week’s worth of medicine to clear it up, but his owners couldn’t be bothered. The poor thing was so depressed and scared it was pitiful.”
“This isn’t exactly the same thing,” Mike argued.
She was beyond listening to him anymore. “What about all the babies that are dumped someplace because nobody wants them? Just thrown away because they were a mistake. Who cares if they live or die? Babies. Cats. Dogs. We live in a society that throws everything away.”
“I’m not throwing him away,” Mike snapped. “You’re blowing this all out of proportion.”
“Oh, sure. It’s all my fault. Blame me. Blame Gus. Blame everybody else.” She wiped again at those stupid tears. “I don’t know how I ever could have thought I loved you.”
She turned and ran for the door.
“Casey!”
There was nothing he could say that would change anything. She raced down the stairs and back into the house.
Chapter Twelve
Mike stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. He felt like hell, but that’s what lying awake all night did to one. He’d known he had to talk to Casey—had to end it with her—but he had never imagined it would be as hard as it had been. It had worked—he had to admit that—but he hadn’t meant a word of it. Not the stuff about Darcy, not the stuff about Gus.
But there was no doubt about it—Casey hated his guts now. He should be happy. And eventually, he’d probably be able to look at himself in the mirror in the morning. He was not at that point yet.
After dressing, he went down to the kitchen. He still didn’t have a cruiser, which meant another day at home. Great.
Casey was in the kitchen, cleaning up the cat dishes while her pets sat on one of the kitchen chairs watching her. Gus was sitting at her feet, adoring her, which was what any sensible man would be doing. Seeing her slender body sent shivers down Mike’s spine. The way her hair bounced when she moved made his breath catch.
Casey turned. And the disgust in her eyes reminded him of what a crud he was.
“Good morning,” she said stiffly.
“Good morning,” he answered.
“I’ve already had breakfast,” she said. “Would you like me to leave the milk and stuff out?”
“No.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not hungry.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you, anyway.”
A walk in the winter air would do him good. Put a little cold oxygen in his lungs and clear the cobwebs out of his brain. He strode briskly into the mudroom and put on his boots and jacket. No gloves again. Damn cat. Well, he didn’t need gloves, anyway. How cold could it be? This wasn’t the North Pole, for goodness sakes.
Casey came to the mudroom door. “I would like to move into the garage apartment for the rest of the time I’m here,” she said. “I think it would be best.”
Great. Instead of imagining her every move here, he could imagine it there. “If that’s what you want. I’ll move some furniture over later this morning.”
“There’s enough over there,” she said. Her voice was cold enough to give the snow freezer burn, but Gus didn’t seem to notice as he sat at her side in the doorway.
“There’s only a table and a few chairs over there,” he replied.
“I have a sleèping bag.”
She wouldn’t even take furniture from him? He’d done too good of a job. “I’ll move some stuff over when I get back. You can use it or not. Come on, Gus.”
But the dog just sat there, looking from Mike to Casey.
“Damn it, Gus,” Mike snapped. “You want to come for a walk or don’t you?”
“There’s no need for that.” Her words came out even sharper than his.
“Fine.” Mike stomped to the back door. “He can stay here. I don’t care what he does.”
“Gus, sweetie. Be a good boy. Go outside with Mike and keep him company.”
Gus bounded forward and slipped outside as Mike opened the door. Damn it. He didn’t need any company. He was a lone wolf. Someone who didn’t need anybody or anything extra in his life.
“You’d do anything to show me up, wouldn’t you?” Mike muttered to the dog as he closed the door behind them.
The walk to town was uneventful and breakfast was even worse. The scrambled eggs were hot, the ham was tender, the toast was warm and the orange juice was cold. And Mike couldn’t eat a thing. He just kept
seeing the hurt in Casey’s eyes when she’d thought he was willing to give up Gus.
“Next time I’ll just open a box of cereal,” he said.
Casey was moving a dresser into the garage apartment—two drawers at a time—when they got home. She was halfway across the ice-covered driveway.
“Couldn’t you have waited a half hour?” Mike asked, and tried to take a drawer from her.
“I can carry it,” she snapped.
“Fine.” It wasn’t heavy, after all. “I’ll get the rest of it.”
“I can do it.”
“So can I.”
He found the shell of the dresser in the bedroom she’d been using and carried it down. This really would be for the best, he told himself. It didn’t matter that he’d miss her like hell. It would be best for her. She’d forget about him and find someone who’d really make her happy.
She was coming down the garage steps when he reached the bottom.
“Want me to take the top?” she asked.
What, he was too weak to carry a dresser up some stairs? Maybe that was the real trouble all along—she’d always seen him as weak or sick or something other than himself. No, wait. He was the one who’d broken it off.
“I can do it.”
He heaved the thing on his back and almost fell over, but he’d be damned if he’d let her know. With careful steps, he climbed to the top, proud that he hadn’t bumped the sides of the stairs once. She’d see what a man he was. But when he put the dresser down at the top and turned around, she was gone.
“Just as well,” he told Snowflake, who was frowning at him, at the room, at the world in general. “Hey, it wasn’t my idea for you three to move in here.”
Casey came back with a box that looked too heavy for her, but Mike knew better than to offer his help. He just went and got the roll-away bed. It was pretty damn heavy itself, but he could handle it. It weighed less than that frown she was aiming at him.
After an hour or so, all the furniture she would accept had been moved into the apartment. It shouldn’t have looked cozy—the place badly needed painting and the furniture would have been rejected by most rummage sales—but it did. She and her cats added a life to it that defied description. Mike just stood in the doorway, feeling as useless as he had that first night when he’d brought her a blanket.
He wanted to beg her to let him into her warm circle. He wanted to tell her that everything he’d said last night had been a lie, that he’d only been trying to save her pain down the line.
“Thank you,” she said. It was a dismissal.
“Anytime.” He left.
His house had turned bleak and cold in that hour or so, and he had no need to loll about in its emptiness, so he picked up an old ice chipper lying around the garage and began hacking at the ice on his drive. He cleaned the drive thoroughly, until there wasn’t an ice patch more than a half inch in diameter on the whole damn thing.
Then he noticed that the widow McLaren’s drive could stand some cleaning. He thought Dubber normally took care of that, but obviously Tiffany had him tied up. Mike shook his head as he trotted down to Mrs. McLaren’s house. Hopefully the boy would learn. And before it was too late. Mike started hacking away with his chipper.
“Land sakes, boy, what are you doing?” the widow called to him from her front porch.
“Just cleaning the drive, ma’am,” he said. “Having a base of ice could cause you trouble.”
“You got problems at home?” she asked him, loud enough for the whole county to hear.
“No, ma’am. Just being neighborly.”
“You’d be better off putting that energy to fixing the troubles in your life and leave my driveway alone. It’s just gonna ice up again.” With that, she went back into her house.
It took him the rest of the morning to clear the drive, but after a quick lunch down at the diner, he went over to the Joneses’ house to do their drive. Orville had problems with arthritis and Maybelle could hardly see.
Mike shook his head and laughed to himself. There were people who accused him of not having any Christmas spirit. Hell, he had more Christmas spirit than a hound dog had fleas. With his life in order, Mike started chipping away.
“That ain’t going to get you out of the doghouse,” Orville yelled to him from an upstairs window. “Get on home and say you’re sorry.”
“I haven’t done nothing to be sorry for,” Mike lied.
“There ain’t a man alive who can say that and be telling the truth,” Maybelle told him.
The anonymity of a big city sure looked appealing.
“Don’t you worry none,” Casey told Gus as she grabbed up a box of computer printouts. “I’m just moving over to the garage. I’ll be back here to cook my meals. Mike is the biggest jerk that ever lived, but I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Gus just wagged his tail. Casey had hoped he’d disagree with her estimation of Mike, tell her she was wrong, that all those horrible things last night hadn’t been said. Or if they had, that they were all some sort of misunderstanding. But no, Gus just kept on wagging his tail as he followed her out of the house, across the driveway and up into the apartment. He obviously knew the truth, too.
Casey put her box down and sat on the bed. The place was a dump. Oh, it was clean and snug and quite cozy. But it was filled with castoffs, and she didn’t just mean the furniture. Snowflake came over to be petted.
“It’s all my own fault, you know,” Casey told the cat. “I should have known better. All the signs were there. This was not a guy to get involved with. So why did I?”
It was as if she’d been possessed. That was it. Simon had done it.
Gus had been sniffing around the apartment, but stopped suddenly. Stopped and ambled over to the door. Sure enough, Casey heard footsteps on the stairs.
Her heart skipped a couple of beats. Mike? It had to be. He was the only one who’d think she was here. Maybe he was coming to tell her he’d been wrong. That it had all been a joke or a test or a fit of madness. She pulled open the door.
Tiffany was on the other side. “Hi, Casey.” The girl came in and closed the door. “Whatcha doing up here?”
Becoming a basket case. “I have a lot of research to do for the work I’m doing for Mrs. Jamison,” she said. “So I’m setting up in my own space here.”
Tiffany looked thoughtfully at her, nodding. “Yeah, I heard you and Mike weren’t getting along.” She sat at the kitchen table.
“That’s not it at all,” Casey tried to protest, but her words lacked any backbone.
Great. The whole town was discussing them. Well, there was nothing she could do but ignore the whole thing and hope it would blow over. Although it didn’t really matter, since she’d be leaving in two more days to go home for Christmas. And there really was no need for her to return. She’d have her research done by then and that was the only thing keeping her here. The absolutely, positively only thing in the whole world.
A burning in her eyes said she was on the verge of tears again. She needed a diversion and quick. “So what are you doing here, Tiffany?” she asked as she sat down.
“I was waiting for Dubber and Mrs. Randall, and I saw you moving stuff in here.”
Great. By now the town’s wireless telegraph had spread that piece of information and the word was being pushed out into the rest of the county. By this time tomorrow, the whole state would know she’d moved out of Mike’s house and into the garage.
“Yes,” Casey said, nodding. “I’m all moved in.”
She glanced toward the window and could see the arrival of winter’s early dusk. Along with the grayness came large snowflakes, floating and hanging in the air. By morning Mike’s clean driveway would be all covered again. That should make him happy. It would give him a way to continue to avoid her.
The electric heater’s fan took that moment to rumble into action, filling the room with gusts of warmth. She looked over at Gus, sleeping peacefully, and thought how nice it would be to just f
lop down herself. Casey slid farther down in her chair.
“Sometimes you have to smack them around a little. You know that, don’t you?”
Casey forced her tired eyes to focus on Tiffany.
“I mean the guys,” Tiffany explained. “Not so that you hurt them, but just enough to keep them in line.”
“I’m not into hitting people, Tiffany.”
The girl tried to hide her impatience. “I don’t mean you should really hit them. Just smack them to get their attention.”
Not being up on the nuances of physical force, Casey wasn’t sure what the differences were, but she just smiled and nodded, hoping Tiffany would drop the subject.
“You don’t want to make them bleed.” Tiffany looked disgusted. “You do that and you get screaming and whining like you’ve never heard before. Momma always says if men had to give birth, there wouldn’t be no human race.”
Casey could almost follow the connection, and she found that a little frightening. “When you get older,” she said, “you’ll find that smacking people isn’t always the best way to go.”
“Yeah, that’s what Momma keeps telling me.”
For the first time since she’d met Tiffany, Casey thought she saw a chip in the girl’s bravado. A shred of concern and doubt.
“Sometimes you have to let them go,” Casey said. “A man who doesn’t share your beliefs isn’t going to change his mind because you threaten him.”
“I guess not.”
“You have to be yourself and hope that’s enough.”
Tiffany had found a scratch in the tabletop and was running her finger along it with precision. “Some of the girls in class are wearing makeup and—and…” She paused in her scratch inspection to look down at her own flat chest. “And other stuff.”
“Men don’t fall in love with makeup or a big chest,” Casey said. “They might be tempted by it, but it’s not why they fall in love. What you are inside is what keeps them with you.”
Tiffany just sighed and went back to her scratch. “What if what I am inside isn’t enough to keep Dubber?”
Christmas Magic Page 20
