Kelton's Rules (Harlequin Super Romance)

by Nicholson, Peggy

  One week, she reminded herself. No more than a week.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PIZZA FOR BREAKFAST wasn’t such a bad idea, after all—if you ate it outside on a blanket, on a glorious sunny morning in southwestern Colorado.

  Picnic completed except for a last cup of coffee, Abby limped along the weed-choked perennial border between her cottage and Jack’s. Once upon a time an ardent gardener must have lived here. The remnants still bloomed: several sprawling rambler roses, a late lilac of an exceptionally gorgeous shade of violet, a clump of daisies splashed white against the rioting green. Blue flag irises unfurled their petals to the sun, while at their feet, ruby and white alyssum duked it out with the dandelions. A bit of unkempt heaven just begging her to reach for pen and ink and watercolors.

  Kat and Skyler had insisted that DC-3 should join their feast, and now Sky lay on the blanket with the tomcat crouched on his chest like a rampant lion. Abby cut another branch of blowsy pink roses, arranged it in a chipped blue stoneware pitcher she’d filled with water, then glanced around. “Where’s Kat?” Just a minute before, the girl had been perched on the old swing that hung from the branch of the gigantic oak tree shading the back of their house.

  “Went to get something at her place,” Sky said as he stroked a knuckle down DC’s outstretched throat.

  How close an eye was she supposed to be keeping on this girl? Normally, Abby wouldn’t have thought twice about allowing a visiting neighbor’s child to wander back home, back in suburban New Jersey. But here in Trueheart she didn’t know the rules or the dangers.

  As far as she’d been able to see last night, the town was safe as could be, near idyllic. Small enough that strangers, good-intentioned or otherwise, would be instantly noticed. So small that any adult would know all the children—and more to the point, their parents. Her cottage was on a narrow road serving perhaps twenty nineteenth-century houses set on deep, old-fashioned lots that had been laid out at a time when each family probably tended a vegetable garden or kept chickens and a milk cow out back.

  “Maybe you should go find her,” Abby suggested. She wouldn’t have dreamed of entering Jack’s domain uninvited, but somehow Sky wouldn’t seem quite such an intruder.

  “Don’t need to.” Her son nodded at the fence, where Kat was just now wriggling between two missing pickets. Abby swallowed a laugh. The girl hadn’t bothered to deviate thirty feet out of her path toward the street, to where a garden gate stood ajar under an arching, rose-smothered trellis. Kat was a straight shooter in every sense of the word, Abby was finding. Another trait she’d inherited from her blunt-spoken father.

  And where is her mother? Abby had wondered that several times already this morning. Not that it was any of her business. “Oh…Kat,” she murmured helplessly as the girl arrived beside her to offer a pair of garden shears.

  “Do you want to use these? They were in our junk drawer.”

  “Much better than this old knife,” Abby agreed, accepting them. “Thank you. And I see you…fixed your eyebrows.”

  Kat’s brows had been scorched to ash in whatever fire had burned her poor little hands in several places. Abby had attempted to question her while she’d smoothed antiseptic cream on her burns then rebandaged them. But beyond claiming that she’d been welding last night, Kat had scowled and refused to elaborate.

  “They were so icky I figured I’d shave ’em,” Kat confided now.

  She had. She’d shaved them off entirely—then redrawn them, with what looked like black ink from a felt-tipped pen. She’d drawn them the way a child usually pictures eyebrows, in continuous arching lines rather than short, hairlike strokes. Worse yet, she’d placed them a quarter-inch too high and given the left one a zany, quizzical slant. She looked like Groucho Marx, astounded.

  “Yuck!” Skyler had come to join them. “You look weird! Loony!”

  Kat bristled. “No loonier than you, goggle-eyes!”

  Sky went as pink as the roses, and Abby fought the urge to rush to his rescue. His weak eyesight was a constant source of woe. Bullies at school had singled him out for attention, using his thick lenses as a point of derision, even snatching his glasses off his face.

  But on this occasion, Sky had been the first to make a personal remark and so should pay the price.

  “Least I didn’t burn off all my hair,” he retorted, unrepentant.

  Oh, Lord, if he gave Kat the idea of shaving her head! “I wonder what Kat would look like in glasses?” Abby intervened hastily.

  “Yeah.” Sky whipped them off and held them out. “I dare you! Let’s see if you look any better.”

  Apparently “dare” was the magic word. Kat settled them on her nose and gave him a haughty glare.

  Skyler smirked. “Now you’re a goggle-eyed loon.”

  “And you’re another!” But Kat wriggled her brows, made a maniacal face—and Sky burst into giggles.

  “If you c-could see what you look like!”

  They trooped off into the cottage in search of a mirror and Abby let out a sigh of relief. Storm averted for now, anyway. Life would be so much easier this next week if those two got along. And Sky had been dreadfully lonely these past few days, mourning the loss of his friends on the East Coast. He was a bad mover, as she’d always been, shy and therefore slow to reach out, to make new friends.

  Another reason Abby felt guilty. Was she totally crazy—utterly selfish—dragging him away from his hard-won pals? From the only town he’d ever lived in for more than a single year?

  But what about me? She’d hadn’t chosen a new life; she’d been launched into it willy-nilly when Steve had left her for a young woman who was determined to bear his children.

  But once he’d done that, didn’t Abby have the right to make the best life she could, someplace fresh and new and unencumbered by old hurts and worn-out dreams? Where she wouldn’t have failure rubbed in her face each time she encountered her replacement? Biting her lip, she cut another spray of roses, a handful of daisies, and shoved their stems into her pitcher. Then she stood, hugging the bouquet of flowers to her breast, staring vaguely around her at the overgrown yard and woebegone cottage. I wanted a new life for us, but look at this! This wasn’t part of the plan.

  She raised her head at the sound of distant engines coming nearer. Then a parade of vehicles burst from beyond her far neighbor’s pine trees and came rumbling down the street. In the lead rolled an enormous, open-backed truck whose drab olive color and rugged design suggested some sort of military surplus. It towed a crimson bus—her bus—effortlessly behind it. Jack Kelton’s Jeep brought up the rear, a pile of lumber angled up over its stern. He lifted his hand in a jaunty wave.

  Didn’t even think to ask me if I wanted my bus here—or somewhere else, she thought, half vexed, half amused. He’d simply decided what was best for her and forged ahead.

  The truck turned down her driveway, while the Jeep continued on to Jack’s. When the vehicle stopped beside her, Abby stood on one wobbly tiptoe to peer into its cab.

  “Ma’am.” A weathered old cowboy touched his battered Stetson. “Reckon you’d be Miz Lake?”

  “Abby.” She stepped onto the running board to accept his extended hand, dry and gnarled as a knot of driftwood. “And you’re Mr. Whitelaw?”

  “Whitey, and this ol’ cuss is Chang.”

  In the dimness of the cab, Abby had taken the lump of white and orange at his side for a heap of rags. But now a rounded head reared up; two rheumy-brown pop-eyes considered her with an air of jaundiced malevolence. An ancient Pekinese. The dog lifted his black lip in a toothless snarl as she stretched out a hand to pat him—then changed her mind. “Pleased to meet you both, Whitey, but however did you drag my bus up that hill?”

  “Huh! This truck could yank that oak out by the roots, if I asked it to—” He jerked a thumb at the swing tree. “Now, where’d you like your bus?”

  JACK JOINED ABBY and the children to watch Whitey maneuver the bus farther into the backyard, working it
around so that it was finally parked, hood toward the street, tail-lights a few feet from the listing toolshed that stood near the back fence. The bus was nicely shaded by trees, with a strong limb overhanging the engine, in case Whitey needed to set up a block and tackle.

  Jack nodded approval, then glanced down at his daughter and flinched. “Katharine Kelton, what am I going to do with you?” To look at her, you’d never guess that her mother had been—was—a beauty. As feminine as a pink powder puff or a feather-trimmed, high-heeled mule.

  Kat stuck out her stubborn chin. “I like ’em better this way.”

  “Glad to hear it, ’cause if that’s my pen you used, it’s permanent ink.” He sent Abby a rueful look, meant to show he had no hard feelings. You watched the Kat every minute of the day, which, of course, was impossible, or you learned to live with the consequences.

  “Oh, I’m sure we can get it off, whenever she likes,” Abby murmured, laying a slim hand on Kat’s shoulder.

  The lightest of touches, but it seemed to align woman with girl, consigning Jack to the outside of an invisible circle. Leave her to me, said that gesture.

  Fine; so he would. He hadn’t a clue what to do with Kat and it got worse every year. He turned to Sky for some masculine support—and groaned out loud. The kid gave him an embarrassed smirk from under an inked-on mustache, à la Adolf Hitler. “Whatever.” Too much to hope for that Abby would bring a note of sanity to the neighborhood. She was just a new kind of craziness.

  He pulled her aside, noting as he did that her ankle was still swollen but apparently functional. “Whitey says the gears are stripped. That means a new transmission, plus the new exhaust. And he thinks your radiator is shot—rusted through at the bottom.”

  She’d crossed her forearms under her breasts, as if to hold herself together. “Yes, I knew about the radiator.”

  It took real effort to keep his eyes focused on her face. “He can work on it for fifteen dollars an hour plus parts, if you like. That’s less than half of what you’d pay a city mechanic. But he thinks maybe you should junk her. Sell her for whatever you can get.”

  “Darn…” Abby tried for a smile. “What a sucker I was. If she hadn’t been such a wonderful color…”

  Jack frowned. “Come again?”

  “I fell in love with that crimson. It’s why I bought her. I could just picture her parked in front of those red-orange cliffs you see in Arizona Highways with that blue desert sky. I even brought along some green-and-purple striped canvas to make an awning for her.”

  “That would’ve been…bright,” he allowed. You’re losing me here, Abby. You make life decisions based on color? Still, he felt himself leaning toward her, she looked so little and lost. “But maybe it’s time to let her go. Buy something a little more practical.” Like a car. “You could rent a truck to get you and your belongings to wherever you’re going, then—”

  “Sedona. That’s where we were headed.”

  Sedona. He should’ve guessed. Sedona, Arizona, where all the hippies and mystics and misfits and tofu-eaters and New Age scam artists congregated, drawn by power vortexes and drumming circles and too many juice bars. Well, that explains a lot.

  “I have a friend out there, a Feng Shui consultant, who owns some land. She was going to let us park our bus on her property. We were going to live in it for the summer while we built something permanent. An adobe, I was thinking.”

  Ah, yes, he’d seen this so many times before. A clear case of the Divorce Crazies. “Have you, um, ever built a house before?”

  “Well, no, but how hard can it be?”

  Jack turned with relief to Whitey, who’d been unhitching the bus and now stumped over to join them, his moth-eaten Pekinese waddling at his worn-down boot heels. “You tell her what I said?” He leaned aside to spit a stream of brown tobacco juice, then pulled out a yellow bandanna to dab primly at his mouth. “Gettin’ the parts is gonna be the hardest thing. Might take some fancy scrounging. There’s a yard over on the reservation. Seems t’me they had an ol’ bus or two.”

  “Do you…have any idea how many hours it would take…to fix her?” Abby asked.

  How much it would cost, she meant. Jack wondered what kind of settlement she’d gotten. Whether she’d had a competent lawyer. Dithering soft women like this one always seemed to hire kindly bumblers, while their husbands hired sharks.

  “There’s no telling. I’d put one foot in front of t’other till she’s done or till you say ‘whoa.’”

  She stood, arms clasped tightly around her middle. “Could you tell what caused the brake to fail in the first place?” she said at last. “Or how it popped out of first gear?”

  Whitey and Jack exchanged a quick, wry glance, then the old man shrugged. “Driver error.”

  “But I wasn’t—” Her eyes widened. “You mean, Skyler? Sky did this? I know he tried to stop it, but you think he—”

  “He’s a boy, ain’t he? When I was his age, anything on wheels was fair game. How else is he s’posed t’learn?”

  “Driver’s Ed when he’s of legal age!”

  “Pshaw! Most ranch kids’re driving by the time they can see over the steerin’ wheel.”

  “But he’s not—” Abby swiped a lock of hair behind her ear and blew out her breath. “Okay. What’s done is done. About fixing it, though. Whitey, you really can’t give me an estimate?”

  “None that I’d care to stand by.” Whitey shifted from his good leg to his bad and back again. “You know, you might want t’chew it over, Miz Lake. I’m in no hurry. Can’t work on her anyways, ’cept Saturdays and Sundays. We’re pretty hard-pressed out at the Circle C, since Kaley dropped her twins this spring, smack in the middle of calving season. Been up to our ears in puke and diapers ever since, ain’t we, Chang?” He looked down at his feet, then quickly around when he didn’t see the dog.

  A feline screech and a flurry of barks dragged everyone’s eyes across the yard. DC shot out from under the truck with the Pekinese snapping toothlessly at his heels, bellowing blue murder.

  “Dadblast you, Chang!” Whitey yelled, “Get on back here!”

  The tomcat swarmed up the swing oak and disappeared beyond the leaves. Chang hopped twice, scrabbling frantically at the bark—then collapsed in a wheezing heap at the base of the tree.

  “Gonna give yourself a stroke someday,” Whitey scolded, though Jack could tell this was for Abby’s benefit. The old man’s face was pink with pride. “I’m mighty sorry, ma’am. If a cat looks at him sideways, he can’t control himself.”

  The kids had hopped out of the bus at the first sound of mayhem. Sky leaned against the trunk, staring upward. “DC? DC! What if he falls, Mom?”

  “He’s not an outside cat,” Abby explained to Jack. “I don’t think he’s ever been up a tree before. Certainly not a high one.”

  He was an hour late for work already and his ladder was across town at the building site. Jack clamped a lid on his instinct to ride to the rescue. For Abby, anytime, but not for a cowardly hairball. “Not bad for a beginner.” And what goes up must eventually come down. No use breaking his own neck speeding the process along. “Once Chang goes away…”

  “He’s leavin’ now. We gotta get a move on.” Whitey whisked his snarling companion into the truck, clambered up, then poked his head out the window. “You sleep on it, Miz Lake, and give me a call, okay?” With a wave to the children, he rolled off toward the street.

  “I can get him,” Kat declared, peering up into the branches. “If I had spiked boots like a lumberjack it’d be easier, but if somebody’d boost me up to that first limb…”

  “Uh-uh.” Jack tugged on her ponytail. “You’re grounded, kiddo, and that means what it says. Both feet strictly on the ground.”

  She gave him a disdainful look, or it would have been, except for those funhouse eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the office?”

  He showed his teeth. “I am. Soon as I set you up. Go get the extension cord out of the Jeep and plug it into
the carport plug. You’ve got some sanding to do. Lots of sanding.”

  Kat made a terrible face, but she knew when to stop arguing. Off she trotted.

  Sky looked from the tree to the departing girl squeezing through the gap in the pickets. “Don’t you try and climb this, either,” Jack warned him. “He’ll come down when he’s hungry.”

  “DC’s always hungry.”

  “Then we’ll see him soon.”

  Sky nodded doubtfully, then brightened. “Can I help Kat, Mr. Kelton?”

  “Not for a minute. I suppose you can watch, but don’t let me hear that you helped, Skyler. Kat earned every inch and splinter of this job and now she pays up.”

  They watched the boy hurry down to the gate, then through. “There was a fire?” Abby inquired after a pause.

  “Mmm.” Jack hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and braced his back against the tree trunk. “She snuck out on her baby-sitter last night, then went over to where I’m building a house, across town. Played with my butane torch and somehow set a can of kerosene on my workbench—and then the bench itself—on fire. Luckily Sheriff Noonan happened by while she was trying to beat out the flames.” And if Noonan hadn’t? His shoulders jerked in a shudder. “At this rate I’ll have white hair before I’m forty. I had a pet raccoon when I was a kid that could open any drawer, any cabinet, any package a human could, but Bandit wasn’t half this much trouble.”

  “She is rather…high-energy.” Abby laughed softly. “What’s her punishment?”

  “I stopped by my site and collected enough rough lumber to build a new bench. But it all needs sanding, then painting. Her eyebrows will grow in before she’s done with the eighty grit.

  “And that reminds me.” He caught Abby’s arm—blinked at its silky warmth and slender definition—then eased her toward the gate. “I’ve decided to give her baby-sitter, Marylou, one last chance. But if you happen to see a red pickup parked outside my house anytime today—anytime this week—would you let me know? Marylou can entertain her boyfriend on her own time, not mine.”