by Cara Colter
But all of that, all her motives, were fading so quickly as she continued to see something about Houston Whitford that made her feel weak with longing.
He couldn’t keep up with children hand-making him tidbits. In minutes he had every child in the room demanding his attention. He solemnly accepted the offerings, treated each as if it was a culinary adventure from the five-star restaurant he was dressed for.
He began to really let loose—something Molly sensed was very rare in this extremely controlled man. He began to narrate his culinary adventure, causing spasms of laughter from the children, and from her.
He did Bugs Bunny impressions. He asked for recipes. He used words she would have to look up in the dictionary.
And then he laughed.
Just like he had laughed in the garden. It was possibly the richest sound she had ever heard, deep, genuine, true.
She thought of all the times she had convinced Chuck to do “fun” things with her, the thing she deemed an in-love couple should do that week. Roller-skating, bike riding, days on the beaches of Long Island, a skiing holiday in Vermont. Usually paid for by her of course, and falling desperately short of her expectations.
Always, she had so carefully set up the picture, trying to make herself feel some kind of magic that had been promised to her in songs, and in movies and in storybooks.
Molly had tried so hard to manufacture the exact feeling she was experiencing in this moment. She had thought if she managed this outing correctly she would show Houston Whitford the real Second Chances.
What she had not expected was to see Houston Whitford so clearly, to see how a human being could shine.
What if this was what was most real about him? What if this was him, this man who was so unexpectedly full of laughter and light around these children?
What if he was one of those rare men who were made to be daddies? Funny, playful, able to fully engage with children?
“I told you, you don’t laugh enough,” she whispered to him.
“Ah, Miss Molly, it’s hard for me to admit you might be right.” And then he smiled at her, and it seemed as if the whole world faded and it was just the two of them in this room, sharing something deep and splendid.
Molly found herself wanting to capture these moments, to hold them, to keep them. She remembered the camera he had given her, took it out and clicked as he took a very mashed celery stick from a child.
“The best yet,” she heard him say. “To die for. But I can’t eat another bite. Not one.”
But he took one more anyway, and then he closed his eyes, and patted his flat belly, pretending to push it out against his hand. The children howled with laughter. She took another picture, and Molly laughed, too, at his antics, but underneath her laughter was a growing awareness.
She had thought bringing Houston to her projects would show her the real Houston Whitford. And that was true.
Unfortunately, if this laughing carefree man was the real Houston, it made her new boss even more attractive, not less! It made her way too aware of the Molly that had never been put behind her after all—the Molly who yearned and longed, and ultimately believed.
“Will you stay for story time?”
No. Nothing that ended happily-ever-after! Please! She suddenly wanted to get him out of here. Felt as if something about her plot to win his heart was backfiring badly. She had wanted to win him over for Second Chances! Not for herself.
He was winning her heart instead of her winning his, and it had not a single thing to do with Second Chances.
“Not possible,” Molly said, quickly, urgently. “Sorry.”
It wasn’t on the schedule to stay, thank goodness, but even before the children started begging him, it seemed every one of them tugging on some part of him to get him up off the floor, his eyes met Molly’s and she knew they weren’t going anywhere.
With handprints and food stains all over the pristine white of that shirt, Houston allowed himself to be dragged to the sinks, where he obediently washed his own hands, and then one by one helped each of the children wash theirs.
After he washed “Princess’s” face, the same child who had sat beside him at snack, she crooked her finger at him. He bent down, obviously thinking, as Molly did, that the tiny tot had some important secret to tell him.
Instead she kissed him noisily on his cheek.
Molly held out the camera, framed the exquisite moment. Click.
He straightened slowly, blushing wildly.
Click. She found herself hoping that she was an accomplished enough photographer to capture that look on his face.
“Did you turn me into a prince, little princess?” Houston asked.
The girl regarded him solemnly. “No.”
But that’s not how Molly felt, at all. A man she had been determined to see as a toad had turned into a prince before her eyes.
Again she realized that this excursion was not telling her as much about Houston Whitford as it was telling her about herself.
She wanted the things she had always wanted, more desperately than ever.
And that sense of desperation only grew as Molly watched as Houston, captive now, like Gulliver in the land of little people, was led over to the story area. He chose to sit on the floor, all the children crowding around him. By the time they were settled each of those children seemed to have claimed some small part of him, to touch, even if it was just the exquisitely crafted soft leather of his shoe. His “little princess” crawled into his lap, plopped her thumb in her mouth and promptly went to sleep.
Molly could not have said what one of those stories was about by the time they left a half hour later, Houston handing over the still sleeping child.
As she watched him, she was in the grip of a tenderness so acute it felt as if her throat was closing.
Molly was stunned. The thing she had been trying to avoid because she knew how badly it would weaken her—was exactly what she had been brought.
She was seeing Houston Whitford in the context of family. Watching him, she felt his strength, his protectiveness, his heart.
She had waited her whole life to feel this exquisite tenderness for another person.
It was all wrong. There was no candlelight. It smelled suspiciously like the little girl might have had an accident in her sleep.
Love was supposed to come first. And then these moments of glory.
What did it mean? That she had experienced such a moment for Houston? Did it mean love would come next? That she could fall in love with this complicated man who was her boss?
No, that was exactly what she was not doing! No more wishing, dreaming! Being held prisoner by fantasies.
No more.
But as she looked at him handing over that sleeping little girl, it felt like she was being blinded by the light in him, drawn to the power and warmth of it.
Moth to flame, Molly chastised herself ineffectively.
“Sorry she’s so clingy,” the daycare staff member who relieved him of her said. “She’s going through a rough time, poor mite. Her mother hasn’t been around for a few days. Her granny is picking her up.”
And just like that, the light she had seen in his face snapped off, replaced by something as cold as the other light had been warm.
Selfishly, Molly wanted to see only the warmth, especially once it was gone. She wanted to draw it back out of him. Would it seem just as real outside as it had in? Maybe she had just imagined it. She had to know.
She had to test herself against this fierce new challenge.
As they waited for a cab on the sidewalk, he seemed coolly remote. The electronic device was back out. She remembered this from yesterday. He came forward, and then he retreated.
“You were a hit with those kids.” She tried to get him back to the man she had seen at lunch.
He snorted with self-derision, didn’t look up. “Starving for male attention.”
“I can see you as a wonderful daddy someday,” she said.
He l
ooked up then, gave her his full attention, a look that was withering.
“The last thing I would ever want to be is a daddy,” he said.
“But why?”
“Because there is quite a bit more to it than carrot sticks and storybooks.”
“Yes?”
“Like being there. Day in and day out. Putting another person first forever. Do I look like the kind of guy who puts other people first?”
“You did in there.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“You seem angry.”
“No kidding.”
“Houston, what’s wrong?”
“There’s a little girl in there whose mom has abandoned her. How does something like that happen? How could anybody not love her? Not want her? How could anybody who had a beautiful child like that not devote their entire life to protecting her and making her safe and happy?”
“An excellent daddy,” she said softly.
“No, I wouldn’t,” he said, coldly angry. “Can you wait for the cab yourself? I just thought of something I need to do.”
And he left, walking down the street, fearless, as though that fancy watch and those shoes didn’t make him a target.
Look at the way he walked. He was no target. No victim.
She debated calling after him that she had other things on the agenda for today. But she didn’t. This was his pattern. She recognized it clearly now.
He felt something. Then he tried to walk away, tried to reerect his barriers, his formidable defenses, against it.
Why? What had happened to him that made a world alone seem so preferable to one shared?
“Wait,” she called. “I’ll walk with you.”
And he turned and watched her come toward him, waited, almost as if he was relieved that he was not going to carry some of the burden he carried alone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HOUSTON watched Molly walking fast to catch up with him. The truth was all he wanted was an hour or so on his punching bag. Though maybe he waited, instead of continuing to walk, because the punching bag had not done him nearly the good he had hoped it would last night. Now it felt as if it was the only place to defuse his fury.
That beautiful little girl’s mother didn’t want her. He knew he was kidding himself that his anger was at her mother.
From the moment he’d heard Molly laughing from under the pile of children a powerless longing for something he was never going to have had pulled at him.
You thought you left something behind you, but you never quite left that. The longing for the love of a mother.
The love of his mother. She was dead now. He’d hired a private detective a few years back to find her. Somehow he had known she was dead. Because he’d always thought she would come back. He would have left Beebee’s world in a minute if his mother had loved him and needed him.
It had been a temporary relief when the private eye had told him. Drugs. An overdose.
Death. The only reasonable explanation for a mother who had never looked back. Except, as the P.I. filled in the dates and details, it wasn’t the explanation he’d been seeking after all. She’d died only a few years before he made the inquiries about her—plenty of time to check in on her son if she had wanted to.
She hadn’t.
And he was powerless over that, too.
There was nothing a man of action like Houston hated so much as that word. Powerless.
Molly came and walked beside him. He deliberately walked fast enough to keep her a little breathless; he knew intuitively she would have a woman’s desire to talk, to probe his wounds.
He could feel his anger dispersing as they left the edgier part of the Lower East Side and headed back to where Second Chances was in the East Village.
“This is where I live,” she said as they came to a well-kept five-story brownstone. “Do you want to stop for a minute? Meet Baldy? Have a coffee?”
She obviously intended to pursue this thing. His feelings. He was not going to meet her bird, enter her personal space and have a coffee with her!
On the other hand, the punching bag had not been working its normal magic. He hesitated. And she read that as a yes. In the blink of an eye she was at the door with her key out.
He still had a chance to back away, but for some reason he didn’t. In fact, he ordered himself to keep walking, to call after her, Maybe some other time. But he didn’t.
Instead, feeling oddly powerless again, as if she might have something he was looking for, he followed her up the three flights of stairs to her apartment.
“Close it quick,” she said, as he came through the door behind her. “Baldy.”
And sure enough out of the darkness of the apartment a tiny missile flew at them, a piece of flesh-colored putty with naked wings. It landed on her shoulder, pecked at her ear, turned and gave him a baleful look.
“Good grief,” he said, but he was already glad he had come. The bird was so ugly he was cute. The tiny being’s obvious adoration for Molly lightened something in Houston’s mood. “ET call home!”
Still, there was something about that bird, looking as if it, too, would protect her to the death, that tugged at a heart that had just faced one too many challenges today.
The bird rode on her shoulder as she guided him into the apartment which looked to be all of five hundred square feet of pure feminine coziness.
The bird kissed her cheek and made a whimpering noise that was near human. She absently stroked his featherless body with a tender finger. The bird preened.
“Just have a seat,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”
But he didn’t have a seat. Instead he questioned his sanity for coming in here. He studied the framed poster of a balloon rising over the Napa Valley in California. He turned away from it. How was it her humble five hundred square feet felt like home in a way he had never quite managed to achieve?
It must be the fresh flowers on the coffee table between the two sofas.
“Nice flowers,” he heard himself say.
“Oh, I treat myself,” she called from the kitchen. “There’s a vendor on the way home from work.”
He went and stood in the doorway of her tiny kitchen, watched her work.
“No boyfriend buying you flowers?”
That’s exactly why it had been a mistake to accept her invitation into her personal space. This was going too far. He’d chased her with a worm. And danced with her. He’d felt the exquisite plumpness of her lip on his finger when he’d fed her from his hand. Now he was in her house.
In high school, he scoffed at himself, that might count as a relationship. But for a mature man?
“Believe me,” she muttered, “the boyfriend I had never bought me flowers.”
“Really?” he said, and some of his dismay at that must have come through in his tone. What kind of cad wouldn’t buy her flowers? He would buy her flowers if he was her boyfriend.
Now that was a dangerous side road his mind had just gone down!
Her tongue was caught between her teeth as she concentrated on putting coffee things on a tray. She pressed by him in the narrow doorway, set the tray on the coffee table by the flowers.
It all looked very cozy. He went and sat down.
She poured coffee. “He was more than my boyfriend. My fiancé.”
“Ah.” He took a generous gulp of coffee, burned his mouth, set it down and glared at it.
She took a tiny sip of hers. “His name was Chuck. We were supposed to get married and live happily ever after. Instead, he emptied my bank account and went to live on a beach in Costa Rica. That’s what finished me for being a romantic.”
Why was she telling him this? He got it very suddenly. They were going to share confidences.
“Now I see it as a good thing,” she said. “It got me ready for you.”
He stared.
“Hardened me,” she declared. “So that I’m not a romantic anymore. So that I can handle all the changes at work.”
And he wa
sn’t aware he had stopped breathing until he started again. For a suspended moment in time, he had thought she was going to say losing her fiancé had freed her to love him. What would give him such a notion?
Still, it was very hard not to laugh at her declaration that she was hardened. “But there’s such a thing as being too hard,” she went on.
“I guess there is,” he agreed warily.
“I’d like you to trust me. Tell me why the situation at the daycare with the little girl and her mother made you so angry today?”
Her perception—the feeling that she could see what he least wanted to be seen—was frightening.
What was even more frightening was the temptation that clawed at his throat. To take off all the armor, and lay it at her feet. Tell her all of it. But the words stuck.
“When I was little,” she told him, still thinking it was a confidences exchange, “my mom and dad fought all the time. And I dreamed of belonging to a family where everyone loved each other.”
“Ah,” he said, unforthcoming.
“Do you think such a family exists?”
“Honestly? No.”
“You’re very cynical about families, Houston. Why?”
She wanted to know? Okay, he’d tell her. She probably wasn’t going to be nearly as happy to know about him as she thought she was going to be!
“Because I grew up in one just like yours. Constant fighting. Drama. Chaos. Actually it would probably make yours look like something off a Christmas card. And it made me feel the opposite of you. Not a longing for love. An allergy to it.”
“Isn’t that lonely?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. “Maybe,” he finally said. “But not as lonely as waiting for something that never happens. That’s the loneliest.”
“What did you wait for that never happened?”
This was what he had come here for. For her to coax this out of him.
He was silent.
“Trust me,” she said quietly.
And he could not resist her. Even though he pitted his whole strength against it, he heard himself say, his voice a low growl of remembered pain, “Once, when I was quite small, I was in a Christmas concert.”
