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“Oh, just coffee.” She laughed. “Well, you heard me pouring it, didn’t you? I’ve always told you, I’m not a breakfast eater, but you never believed me, did you?”
If Claire didn’t make it, she wouldn’t bother. In fact, she hardly ate at all if Claire didn’t put a meal on the table.
“I’ll get a bite while I’m out,” she’d say airily. She went out a lot, most evenings, and came home after midnight even on weeknights. Claire would hear her fumbling at the door, the key missing the lock, until finally Mom got it open. Then a whispered goodbye to whoever had brought her, and then thumps as she knocked into furniture on her way to the bedroom. Sometimes she would pause in the hall outside Claire’s room, a dark silhouette that swayed unsteadily.
It was Claire’s job to get her up in the morning. Sometimes she’d miss her bus when Mom groaned and put the pillow over her head and wouldn’t get up at all, or had to run to the bathroom to throw up. Her mother had a delicate stomach. She was always better if she’d had a real dinner the evening before. Claire wondered if Mom was sick every morning now.
“Is everything okay at work?” she asked, not wanting to say Have you been fired again?
“Oh, they’re being the usual poops, but I’m fine. They need me,” Mom declared. She had noticed the clock again and said a hasty goodbye.
Today, the last thing Claire said to Linnet before they separated to go to class was, “Well, I won’t stay with Dad, no matter what! Even if I have to live on the street in Seattle.”
In her math class, the teacher handed out a quiz. They were doing graphing, and Claire didn’t get it. She hadn’t even opened her book in three days. She stared at the paper and decided not to bother scribbling any answers at all. Instead she stood up and said, “Mr. Wilson, I don’t feel good. I need to go to the nurse’s office.”
His eyes narrowed. “Fine, Ms. Whitcomb, I’ll write you a pass, but I’ll expect you after school to make up the quiz.”
She ignored the whispers. “I have to take the bus.”
“Then tomorrow during the lunch hour.”
“Um…sure.” She didn’t quite curl her lip. Yeah, right.
The nurse bought her story of an upset stomach, since she didn’t often use it. She spent the rest of the afternoon lying down in the nurse’s office, only leaving when it was time to catch the bus.
She was hurrying out, trying to ignore all the creeps who went to this school, when a girl she really hated named Alicia called out from a bus line, “I heard you ran away.” Her expression was avid. “Did you sell yourself?”
Claire looked her up and down and said coolly, “Is that what you would have done?” Amid laughter, she continued toward the bus.
“Claire!”
She turned at the sound of her friend’s voice. Linnet was tall and skinny, but she took dance classes, which made her graceful. Her light brown hair hung all the way to her waist. Right now, she looked pretty with her cheeks flushed as she rushed up to Claire.
“I’ve got to go, but I had this idea,” she said, the words tumbling out. “Maybe you could live with me.”
“You?”
“I’ll bet my mom would agree. I’ll ask her, if you think you’d want to.”
Dumbfounded, Claire stared at her. “You really think she’d say yes?”
“I know she likes you.” Linnet glanced toward her bus line. “I really, really have to go. Do you want me to ask?”
Little fizzes that might have been excitement or hope rose in Claire’s chest. What she wanted most was to live with her mom, but until she could figure out a way to do that…
Somebody bumped her from behind, and she was being pushed away from Linnet toward the yawning door of the bus. “Yes!” she called.
“I’ll phone, okay?” Grinning, Linnet ran.
In a daze, Claire found a seat and didn’t even care that it was next to some seventh grader who had opened her notebook and was actually doing homework—homework! Claire was just glad not to be bugged.
Claire didn’t know why Linnet’s mother would take in somebody else’s kid, but Linnet had sounded so sure. Was there any chance at all that Mrs. Blanchet really would agree?
If she did, what would Dad say? Claire frowned. He had all kinds of reasons why she couldn’t go home to Mom, but none of them applied to Mrs. Blanchet. She didn’t drink, and Linnet went to school every day—in fact, she was almost a straight A student, which was an argument Claire could use in her favor. But Mrs. Blanchet didn’t seem to make Linnet do stuff. When Claire was spending the night, she’d ask for help sometimes, but nicely.
“Any chance you girls could empty the dishwasher?” she’d say with a smile.
Linnet was never grounded, like Claire seemed to be half the time.
It had to be better than Dad’s.
She hugged her day pack to her chest and stared out the window past the seventh grader.
If Mrs. Blanchet said yes, and Claire’s father said no, she’d never forgive him.
Never.
CHAPTER TWO
DINNER WAS BUBBLING on the stove when the door-bell rang. Surprised, Grace wiped her hands on a dish towel and hurried to answer it. No clatter of feet from upstairs; Linnet must have her headphones on, or else she’d be racing to beat Grace, sure one of her friends was here.
Grace opened her front door and was immediately sorry that the caller wasn’t Erica from down the street, wanting to share a new music CD. Because, instead, a very angry man stood on her doorstep.
Claire’s father was a devastatingly attractive man with dark brown hair, hooded eyes and bulky shoulders that belonged on a construction worker, not an executive. If he would just once smile…But on those few occasions when they’d met while exchanging daughters, his expression ranged from preoccupied to tense.
Today, he didn’t bother with a hello or a “we need to talk.” He glowered. “How dare you tell Claire she could move in with you!”
A spurt of anger surprised Grace, who rarely let herself be bothered by other people’s foul tempers. Suppressing it, she gripped the open door. She didn’t want the neighbors to hear a brawl on her front doorstep.
“I did not,” she said very carefully, “say that your daughter could live here. What I told my daughter is that I would discuss with you having Claire stay here on a temporary basis and with stipulations. If you agreed.”
“Really.” David Whitcomb’s voice was soft and yet icy. “Claire announced to me that you had given permission and she was ready to pack.”
Thank goodness for the headphones that kept Linnet deaf while she did her homework. Grace had tried to give this man the benefit of the doubt and to convince Linnet to do the same, despite all of Claire’s complaints. If Linnet saw him in a towering rage once, she’d be ready to do anything to aid her friend. Which, given their age, might be something very foolish.
Trying to lighten the mood, Grace said, “Surely you know better than to take every word a thirteen-year-old says at face value.”
If anything, his voice hardened. “And yet, you professed to be shocked when I questioned whether Linnet was telling the truth.”
This time, she let herself be offended. “My daughter knows when it’s important to be honest.” If she spoke crisply, she didn’t care. “Which doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes have to delve for the real truth, not the truth as she sees it.”
He swore and shoved his fingers through his disheveled hair. “Why in the hell should there be a difference?”
For the first time, Grace felt a pang of sympathy. The lines in his face were carved deeper today than on the other occasions when she’d met him. Genuine bafflement was tangled with the anger in his eyes. He wore a beautifully cut dark suit, but the silk tie was yanked askew and the top button of his shirt was undone. He’d probably come home from work and hoped to pour a martini, put on dinner—although she had difficulty picturing him cooking—read the newspaper. Instead, his daughter had hit him with this, using all the subtlety of a jackhammer.
“Would you like to come in?” Grace suggested. “Probably we should talk about this.”
He grimaced. “I can’t imagine why you would want to.”
“I like Claire.” At his open disbelief, she smiled ruefully. “Okay. I feel sorry for Claire. And I like my daughter, who has faith that I will extend a generous hand to her best friend. How can I fail her?”
His expression closed, became stony. “Let me count the ways.”
“What?” she asked, startled.
“I seem to be failing my daughter on a regular basis. The only trouble is, I’m not quite sure how. Or why. When I figure it out, I’ll tell you.”
“Oh, dear,” she said on a rush of real compassion. “You do care, don’t you?”
He rocked back, that same hard stare not disguising the faint shock in his eyes. “You thought I didn’t?”
“Some parents don’t, you know,” Grace said gently. “How was I supposed to know?”
He frowned. “I was hunting for her.”
“That didn’t mean you loved her.”
David Whitcomb made a guttural sound. “It’s hard as hell to love her.”
“But you do.” Why she was so certain, she couldn’t have said, but she would have bet her paycheck that this man was hurting right now. “Please.” She stepped back. “Come in.”
He hesitated, then gave an abrupt nod and stepped over the threshold, the glance he gave toward her living room wary.
Grace took a guess at the reason. “Linnet’s upstairs.”
Another nod was the only response, but he seemed marginally less tense when she led him into the kitchen of the compact town house. “I was working on dinner,” she explained.
She had gradually and completely remodeled since buying the place after Roger’s death. The pale colors that seemed to be standard issue these days had struck her as cold, echoing too much the bleakness of grief. Now the floor of the kitchen was tiled in terra-cotta, the countertops in peach. She’d stripped and stained the cherry cabinets herself, until they glowed to match the antique table in the small dining room. Touches of copper, baskets and rough-textured stone-ware all added to the warmth of her kitchen.
As she went to the stove, she covertly watched her guest. His expression showed surprise and, she thought, reluctant admiration.
“Can I pour you some wine?” she asked.
He stood by the table looking awkward, a state that was probably rare for a man with his presence. “Thank you,” he said.
When she handed him the glass, she was careful not to let their fingers touch. Why, she couldn’t have said.
He took a deep swallow, then met her eyes. “This isn’t a good time. Why don’t I come back?”
“And what are you going to say to Claire in the meantime?” Grace stirred the sauce simmering on the stove top. “No. Actually, right now is fine. Dinner won’t be ready for fifteen or twenty minutes, and Linnet is occupied with homework. Let me say my piece.”
His frowning gaze continued to hold hers. She kept stirring to give herself something to do.
“Linnet tells me Claire has run away several times.”
He gave another of those sharp nods that seemed to be his speciality.
“Apparently going to live with her mother is not an option?”
“No.” For a moment it seemed he would say nothing more, but finally he added grudgingly, “My ex-wife is an alcoholic. She is also seeing a new man who is apparently not interested in being a stepfather.”
“Oh.” Poor Claire, Grace thought sadly. She’d been wrenched from a drunken mother who had lost interest in her into the care of this remote, uncommunicative man who admitted it was hard to love her.
“Claire is convinced her mother needs her.”
Grace stirred, processing the information. “I see.”
“Do you?” His gaze was ironic.
“Well, no.” She hesitated, knowing she was crossing an invisible line but choosing to do it anyway. “What I don’t understand is why she is so determined not to live with you.”
“You haven’t been fed stories of abuse?”
“No-o, not exactly.”
He gave a rough laugh that held no humor and turned from her to stare out the window at her tiny brick patio. “Do you want to know the honest-to-God truth?”
She felt unforgivably nosy, but… “If I’m to become involved…yes. Yes, I do.”
“Then here it is. I don’t know. I have no idea why my own daughter hates my guts.” He faced her, expression raw. “I wouldn’t blame you if you can’t buy that.”
Did she? Was it possible to be genuinely ignorant of where you had taken such a monumental misstep?
“I don’t want to ask,” Grace said slowly, “but will you tell me more of the background? How long you’ve been divorced, for example?”
He picked up the wineglass from the table, looked at it, set it down. “Six years. Claire was seven. Miranda’s drinking was a problem between us, but she didn’t drink and drive, and I thought Claire was better with her. I thought, for a girl, that her mother was important.”
At last Grace put down the spoon. “And Claire?”
He shook his head. “There was so much tumult, I just don’t know. I assumed she’d rather stay with her mother.” Sounding stiff, he added, “Obviously now she wants to be with her, so I guess I was right.”
Or very, very wrong, Grace thought but didn’t say.
“I assume you continued to see her.”
He began rubbing the back of his neck. “Not as often as I should have. I was transferred up here from the Bay Area. I talked to her on the phone, but when you’re not living with someone it gets harder and harder to think of anything to say. She was supposed to spend summers, but Miranda had her in swimming lessons and an arts program, and I work long hours, so—” his eyes closed briefly “—I took the easy road.”
“She never came?” Grace couldn’t help sounding shocked.
“Oh, two weeks here and there. It was…not comfortable.” His eyes met hers, his hooded. “I’d take time off, but she didn’t want to do anything. She was always sullen. I thought it was her age. Or later I figured it was me. I wasn’t real life for her. Eventually—” he grimaced “—I realized that real life was doing the grocery shopping and coaxing her hungover mother out of bed in the morning and making excuses to the boss if she couldn’t. The first couple of years, Claire would show off her report card. This past couple, she stopped. I found out that’s because she had so many tardies and unexcused absences, she was flunking. I flew down for a visit at the end of the last school year and talked to teachers and Miranda. Claire threw a fit, but I packed her up and brought her home with me. She’s been trying to run away ever since. And that,” he said, “is the whole pathetic story.”
“I’m sorry.” She stirred uselessly again. “This must be very difficult.”
“Being her father?” he asked ironically. “Or admitting to you how inadequate I am?”
“Well, both.”
He said something under his breath that she suspected was profane, and then took a swallow of the wine. The stare he gave her held a challenge. “You were the one who was going to say your piece, as I recall. Somehow, I seem to have done all the talking instead.”
“Yes.” She made a business of turning off the stove, setting the pan to one side. “Well, here it is.” She lifted her chin. “If it would help you and Claire, if you need some space to work out your problems, she is welcome to stay here for the time being.” Here was the hard part. “But only if you both make some promises. And keep them.”
His eyes narrowed. “These being the stipulations.”
She nodded, mute.
“And they are?”
“Claire has to promise not to run away. And to go to school every day. No cutting classes. Plus to, well, follow my house rules.” She gestured vaguely. “You know. Help clean the kitchen. That kind of thing.”
David Whitcomb inclined his head, his watchful gaze never leaving hers. “And what do you expect from me, aside from support money?”
“That you become very involved in her life. Take her places, join us for dinner, call her, look over her schoolwork…be her father.”
He scrutinized her for the longest time. “I’d be over here constantly.”
“That’s okay.” Was it? she asked herself, with a faint, fluttering sense of panic. Too late.
“Claire won’t want me here.”
“But that’s the deal,” Grace said firmly. “She, too, has to promise to work at being your daughter. And one of my house rules is that we are all polite to each other and to guests.”
“Guests.” He tasted the word as though it was questionable wine.
And who could blame him? His position would be awkward, to say the least. His daughter was choosing to live with someone else because she detested him. He would feel constantly as if he was foisting his company on strangers—and on Claire, who would be civil, if at all, simply because her foster mother insisted on it.
Not a palatable option. Except that his only other one was to go on the way he had been—with his thirteen-year-old daughter determined to hitchhike to her mother in California.
The struggle, visible on his face, was severe but short. She had to give him that much credit.
Jaw muscles flexed, and then he gave one of those brief, off-putting nods. “I’ll talk to Claire.”
Grace pressed her lips together. “If you think I’m presuming—”
“What?” Irony edged into his tone. “That I can’t cope with my daughter? You’d be right.”
“I’m trying to help,” she said gently.
He looked at her with a disquieting lack of expression. “I know you are.”
“Mr. Whitcomb…”
“Hadn’t you better make it David?” he suggested sardonically. “Since we’re going to be one big happy family?”
A gasp from behind him startled them both. Linnet stood in the doorway, Lemieux draped in her arms. The big snowshoe Siamese struggled as she squeezed him.
“Claire’s going to live with us?” Linnet’s face glowed with hope.
“Her dad will talk to her,” Grace said repressively. “And, you know, if Claire does come to stay, it won’t be one long sleepover. You’ll both have to do homework and chores.”
“But it’ll be like having a sister.” She hugged the cat again, so hard he uttered a cry that sounded very much like “no-o-o!”
“Sisters,” her mother said dryly, “often get tired of each other.” Grace was very conscious of Claire’s father, silent and stiff.
“Not us. We never will.” Linnet set poor Lemieux down and twirled into the kitchen. The cat shot a look at David and bolted. “Can I call her?” Linnet begged.
“No. Dinner is almost ready. And Mr. Whitcomb and I haven’t made a decision. He and Claire need to talk. This is between them.”
“Oh.” She halted her pirouette and showed the whites of her eyes as she rolled them toward her friend’s father. “I didn’t mean…that is…I mean…”
“I think he knows what you mean.” Grace held out two plates with silverware piled atop. “In the meantime, please set the table while I show him out.”
“No need.” His face and voice were wooden. “I’m sure we’ll be talking.”
She’d hardly had time to set one foot in front of another when she heard the soft sound of the front door opening and closing behind him. She was left with the horrifying realization that she’d gotten herself into something she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to do.
It should have been Claire she was thinking about. Unsettled, Grace had to admit, if only to herself, that she was far more worried about dealing with the grim father than with the sulky teenage girl.
DAVID HEAVED CLAIRE’S SUITCASE out of the trunk of his Mercedes and found his daughter was already hurrying up the brick steps to the front door of the condo. Her step was light; he could feel her joy as she raced toward liberation from her father. The door was swinging open even before she reached it, the two girls squealing, vanishing inside with their arms around each other’s waists.
He was left with a lump of heavy, rough concrete where his heart should have been and with the certain knowledge that, once again, he had taken the low road.
He was her father, damn it. He’d walked away once, and here he was essentially doing it again. He wasn’t tough enough to see his own child through a bad patch. Despising himself, David thought, Hell, no, hand her over to someone else. Let them deal with her.
He wondered how sternly Claire’s foster mom would hold him to his part of the bargain. Would Claire meld gradually, naturally, into Grace Blanchet’s family? Or did she really expect him to somehow become the father Claire needed?
Grunting at the thought, David picked up the suitcase and started after his daughter. The woman was a legal secretary, for Pete’s sake! How the hell could he think she would do for him—and Claire—what licensed psychologists couldn’t?
But did it matter? his mocking inner voice asked. So what if he failed, again? At least Claire was out of his hair. He didn’t have to come home from work every day to the deep, obscene beat of rap music, to a kid who’d rather sneer “I’m not hungry” and starve than sit down to dinner with him.
Grace was waiting for him in the open doorway. This being a Saturday, she had her hair in a ponytail and she wore jeans and a blue flannel shirt tucked into them. Casual, but her loafers gleamed like her warm brown hair. A classy lady who invariably left him feeling unsettled for reasons he didn’t understand.
And wasn’t in any hurry to identify.
“Why don’t you take that right up?” she suggested. “The girls wanted to share a bedroom, but for now I’m giving Claire our spare.” She lowered her voice. “I’m guessing that they will eventually want their privacy, even if they don’t believe me.”
Now, how did she know that? The way those two had hugged and squealed had him guessing the opposite. But then, his insight into a thirteen-year-old girl’s mind had been skewed from the get-go. Grace Blanchet had the advantage, at least, of having been a thirteen-year-old girl once upon a time.
“Sure,” he said, and started up the stairs behind her.
Even burdened with his daughter’s possessions and his own foul mood, he found his gaze lingering on Grace’s tiny waist and gently curved rear end. In her usual conservative suits, she looked skinnier than he found appealing in a woman. Snug jeans and the soft flannel of her shirt made plain that she was more womanly than he’d guessed. Half memory, half imagination stirred, and his palms briefly tingled with the knowledge of how her bottom would feel gripped in his hands.
He was grateful to reach the top of the stairs and be distracted by her gesture as she stood aside.
“Second door on the left.”
Although she’d said it was for guests, this bedroom had as much personality as the downstairs. A puffy denim comforter covered the antique bed. The maple bedside stand with spooled legs matched the bed. On the wall above the bed hung a small quilt, beautifully hand-stitched even to his uneducated eye, and old, he thought. A lacy valance matched a doily on the carved oak bureau.
The girls had flung open the closet doors and pounced on the suitcase the moment he walked in. Ignoring him, Claire unzipped it while he headed back downstairs for another load.
He was carrying her CD player in when he heard Linnet say, “You can do whatever you want to this room. You can put posters everywhere and—”
“I don’t think so,” David said. “Claire, you’re a guest. You can’t punch holes in the walls.”
She gave him a spiteful look.
Behind him, Grace intervened, her voice easy. “Of course, you can put up posters, Claire. Just use the sticky stuff that peels off, if you don’t mind. Do you want me to take down the quilt?”
Claire held the blistering look for one more moment, then turned her back. “I don’t mind it, Mrs. Blanchet.”
Grace laughed. “Somehow it doesn’t look right for a teenage girl. You need a poster of…who, Freddie Prinze, Jr. there?”
He doubted very much that his daughter would choose anyone so innocuous to emblazon on the walls. She preferred men with multiple body parts pierced, lank greasy hair and foul mouths.
“Dad had me bring my posters,” she said. Her tone suggested he’d ripped them off the wall and shoved them down her throat. Where, in fact, she was the one to strip her bedroom bare, as if she never intended to come back.