Almost Perfect Read online

  And he desperately needed to be what they wanted him to be.

  They might not be getting a paragon, but at least they wouldn’t be getting much more grief from the Wannamachers.

  Those two boys—men—were cowards, he thought derisively. Bullies who sneaked around in the middle of the night spray-painting threats on a widow’s property. Like all bullies, what they needed was a lesson in who was tougher.

  Pete replaced the paint can lid and drove his heel down on it to seal it closed. That’s what he’d do to the Wannamachers, Bubba and Jimmy. He’d grind his heel in their faces until they were crying for him to let them go.

  For the first time since he came to Carolyn’s ranch, he knew the why behind the why he’d agreed to join her. She was the reason he’d said yes, but the reason he’d come and stayed was simply because he could do what no one in Almost seemed able to: he could face down a pair of bullies with one hand tied behind his back.

  He’d done little else for ten long years.

  He’d show those Wannamachers what “get out or get dead” really meant. He had plenty of experience in the latter.

  Carolyn was sure breakfast the next morning could have been an exceedingly awkward affair, but two things stopped any uneasiness cold in its tracks.

  The first was the delivery of five kittens by Ralphette, the barn cat. Ralphette, a Siamese cross with one battered ear and a complaining disposition, announced the arrival of the new mousing team after the first rooster’s crow. Pete was still pulling on his boots as he hopped along behind Shawna and Jenny, each of whom had a portion of his parka in their hands, propelling him forward.

  Carolyn, watching from the kitchen window, chuckled a little at the sight of Pete’s ungainly progression across the track between the bunkhouse and barn. Ninety-eight percent of all men would have told the girls to wait and the other two percent would have grumbled at them to get lost. Not this man.

  She may not know where he came from or anything about his past, but she knew that, at his core, Pete Jackson was a good man. No man so kind to two unruly girls could be anything else.

  As a former social psychologist who had specialized in prison parolees, she knew her logic was specious at best. Prisons were filled with men and women who were good with children and still capable of murder, rape, theft and a host of other aberrant behaviors. Because someone hopped on one foot while trailing a couple of eager children didn’t make him a superman. It only made him human.

  All too human, she thought, remembering the hot satin of his tongue, the forceful pull of his hands at her back, the electricity that sparked so effortlessly and so tremendously between them. And so mysteriously and terrifyingly.

  Just as she was tensing up again, anticipating his exit from the barn and his walk across the grounds to the kitchen door, the second tension-reducer occurred in the form of Doc Jamison.

  Though she’d gotten to know him well during their month’s residency, largely thanks to the acquisition of Bratwurst and Ralphette, she’d become acquainted with the Almost veterinarian many years before, while visiting Almost with Craig. Still, for all that their relationship went back some ten years, he’d never driven his mobile clinic van onto their property before the sun was even over the horizon.

  She slipped on a jacket hanging near the back door and stepped out of the house at the same moment Pete slipped out of the barn. She was shocked to see he carried a gun in his right hand. Not Craig’s gun. Something entirely his own, an extension of his hand. Something deadly.

  “Doc!” she called loudly, running down the porch steps to greet him. Doc was looking at her so probably hadn’t seen Pete’s potentially deadly welcome nor his rapid disappearing act.

  “Hey there, Caro,” he said, unknowingly using her hated nickname. He threw his truck into Park and hopped down from the cab. “How’s life in the fast lane?”

  “What on earth are you doing out this way so early in the morning?” She meant the words sincerely, but she heard the accusations hang on the air: what are you doing checking up on me? Who asked you to do this?

  If he hadn’t blushed ten shades of scarlet, she might have believed any excuse he might have offered. But his discomfiture gave his mission away. Craig’s salty aunt, Sammie Jo, had sent him to check out Pete Jackson.

  “It’s cat and horse day,” he said, lying through his teeth.

  “Is it really?” she asked. “So soon?”

  Doc had given all her critters, feline and otherwise, shots and teeth-cleanings only two weeks before.

  “Prevention...you know,” he said.

  “I know,” she answered dryly, then smiled to take away the sting. “You want some coffee?”

  “You bet,” he said. He cast her a commiserative look of mingled apology and regret.

  The girls pelted out of the barn.

  “Doc!”

  “Ralphette has five baby kitties!”

  “Come see! Come on!”

  Jenny and Shawna skidded to a stop just shy of bowling Doc down.

  “Pete says Ralphette’s in-dis-criminate,” Shawna said.

  “Will that hurt the kitties?” Jenny asked anxiously.

  Doc met Carolyn’s eyes with a grin in his before turning back to the girls. “Not that I ever heard of.”

  “Come see, Doc. Make sure they’re okay.”

  Each girl took one of the vet’s hands and dragged him toward the barn. At least he already had his shoes on and wasn’t being pulled by his sheepskin jacket, Carolyn thought, watching him go with the girls.

  Why couldn’t Doc Jamison set her heart racing the way Pete did? She knew Doc. She respected him. The whole town did. Like Pete, he was good with her girls. And he, as she suspected of Pete, had a good heart. He was good-looking, taller than she, and had an easy manner around humans and animals alike. He was smart, funny and always ready to lend a hand to a person or critter in need. And he had to be lonely, having just become a widower about the same time Craig died. So why couldn’t it be him who made her knees turn to jelly and made her forget every single cautionary rule? Why did she have to feel this way for a virtual mystery man?

  However reticent Pete might be with her—despite the inherent eloquence of his lips—he appeared to have no difficulty with Dr. Charles Jamison. Before they even tossed their jackets onto the pegs by the back door, she could see that some kind of click had taken place between the two men.

  “...some twenty years now and sometimes I think I’m still considered a newcomer,” Doc was saying as he wiped his feet on the mat.

  “Mom, one of the kittens looks just like that weird yellow cat over at the Greathouse’s farm.”

  “Yeah, and another one is all black but has one white paw. I’m naming it Paintbrush ’cause it looks like it dipped its paw in the paint on the barn.”

  “What paint?” Carolyn asked.

  “You can’t name all the kittens!” Jenny insisted. “I’m naming the Siamese-looking one...Beatrice.”

  “Beatrice?” Shawna asked, sounding horrified. “Why?”

  “Why not?” Jenny rebutted.

  “What paint?” Carolyn asked again, only to be ignored by everyone present.

  “Boston man, aren’t you?” Doc asked, and at Pete’s nod, he grinned broadly. “I’d recognize the accent in my sleep.”

  “Harvard?” Pete asked.

  “To my shame,” Doc said, and grinned. “My father never could understand why I went to a big-name school only to come practice in a backwater desert. You?”

  “Not so ritzy. Boston City.”

  “Business or law?”

  “And one of the kittens has a big splotch of brown in a perfect circle on her butt. Her tail sticks right out of it. It’s so funny, Mom. Pete named her BB for brown butt. Can you believe it?”

  “Hush, girls, you’re interrupting,” Carolyn said, wishing she’d issued the reminder earlier...if she had, she wouldn’t have missed Pete’s low-voiced answer to Doc’s question.

  He’d been in their
house how many days now and she hadn’t even guessed he was from Boston, hadn’t suspected he’d attended college, let alone in either business or law. Law? Like Craig? Impossible, and yet business didn’t seem to fit at all.

  This time she missed the prelude question. “What can I tell you?” Doc asked. “They think they’re cowboys, that the ‘code of the West’ is carrying a can of spray paint and scaring people to death,” Doc said.

  He went on. “Trouble with the Wannamacher boys is that their daddy had more money than anybody around here knew what to do with. I take it from what people say about them, they never had to really do a day’s lick of work. They were in and out of trouble as regular as other people change their socks, but never spent a night in the hoosegow because their daddy always knew the judge, the marshal or the D.A.”

  Pete apparently noticed the silence in the kitchen about then and looked from Doc to the girls. The message was clear to Carolyn, and apparently to Doc, for the veterinarian looked at Carolyn suddenly and asked if the offer for coffee was still on.

  She blushed and turned for the mugs. She had forgotten all about coffee or breakfast.

  “Do we have to go to school today?” Jenny asked.

  “It’s not every day Ralphette has kittens,” Shawna pitched.

  “Can we take them for show-and-tell when they get older?”

  “Give your mother a break,” Pete said suddenly, and a little gruffly, causing every Leary female to turn startled eyes in his direction.

  “Yeah,” Doc agreed. “It’s only dark-thirty. And she hasn’t had any coffee yet.”

  Carolyn turned her face away from the group in her kitchen and stared at the full coffeepot in her hand. A ridiculous grin hovered on her lips. When was the last time anyone had thought about her, her needs, her wants?

  A long, long time, she thought. Too long.

  “I’ll get the cream,” Pete said, right behind her.

  For some odd reason, she felt like the cat that had already eaten the cream.

  Chapter 6

  Pete lit a cigarette and the chilly February breeze snatched away his exhaled cloud of smoke and melded it with the predawn murkiness. He half wished he could disappear as easily. The whole setup on Carolyn Leary’s ranch was getting to him in a host of ways.

  Carolyn accounted for some of his uneasiness, as did her daughters. And the unexpected sharp pang of loneliness he’d felt after encountering them that first day. And the sense of displacement he’d felt, that sense of being really out in the world for the first time in ten years.

  He’d been on the Leary farm just shy of a week and already they seemed to accept him as a member of the family. It hadn’t been so tough when the girls went to school and a whole lot easier when Carolyn had joined them, substitute-teaching the last few days. But today was Saturday, the first day all three would be around the place all day. No school. No escape.

  He reviewed a list of projects he had in mind for the day, things that would keep him busy and out of sight of the house—and its occupants—most of the time. The list was so extensive he knew he would only get half done, but thinking about it kept his mind from the thought of Carolyn inside all day, working on school papers perhaps, or stretching out on her bed for a deserved nap.

  Repair the lintel over the barn door and set the double doors with spring hinge. Paint the backside of the barn, completing his cover-up of the Wannamacher brothers’ work. See what he could do with the defunct rototiller in the machinery side of the barn. Carolyn had mentioned something when Doc Jamison had come around about the Farmer’s Almanac saying planting could start on March 28 this year.

  Why should he worry about that? He would be long, long gone by then. Like the proverbial ill wind he would simply blow away. Still, it would be a rather helpful farewell gift, readying Carolyn’s garden. Something about the notion gave him a sense of inner peace, as if by preparing the soil for her garden, he was giving her a bit of himself that would last beyond his departure. The vegetables she would harvest in the summer and fall would be there because of him.

  From habit, he carefully excised his cigarette, twisting the hot coal from the filter, then pocketed the spent paper before stepping off the short porch at the bunkhouse. That unfamiliar grin spread his lips as he thought about the work facing him. The labor around Carolyn’s place had been therapeutic in a strangely satisfying way.

  For the past ten years he’d been forced to literally wallow in the negative side of man. At every turn, he’d been confronted with the pressing awareness that the positive elements in society seemed to be falling apart. Television newscasters touted violence as a plague; prisons burgeoned with misfits, bullies, violence-driven sociopaths.

  But out on a small ranch near Almost, Texas, each board replaced, each strand of wire tightened and straightened, the muck cleared from the corral and the stock tank cleaned and refilled, all became tasks that seemed to address a basic requirement for order in his life.

  At the end of every project, large or small, Pete felt the satisfaction of having restored a measure of symmetry to an out-of-sync world. His hands ached and his shoulders were stiff with the unaccustomed physical labor. And his mind felt curiously quiet, as if at rest.

  It was only his heart that seemed to question why he lingered at the Leary ranch. The longer he spent there the harder it would be to leave. And he would have to leave. Once Carolyn knew about his past, however justifiable the things he’d done, she would want him out of her daughters’ lives. And she would want him out of hers. And, even if she didn’t, he wouldn’t drag her into the morass that represented his past.

  But just hearing the girls giggling made his own lips curve into a grin. Day by day, the grin felt less unnatural on his mouth and every question they asked seemed to loosen his tongue a tad more.

  And just seeing their mother made his heart thunder in his chest and his loins tighten painfully. Sometimes when her eyes took on a faraway look and he knew she was thinking about what she’d lost, was remembering something Craig said or did, he had to fight the urge to draw her into his arms and comfort her. And had to face the knowledge that comfort was far from what he really wanted to offer her.

  The Wannamachers hadn’t returned since their spray paint foray two nights before. Carolyn had suggested that the Wannamachers had discovered that she and the girls weren’t alone on the place any longer, that the thugs had found out about Carolyn’s new handyman. She seemed relieved and the girls appeared to have forgotten all about the Wannamachers.

  Pete hadn’t forgotten them nor was he relieved. Bullies as bold as the Wannamacher boys didn’t give up at the first sign of opposition. His presence on the ranch simply represented a new challenge, a new opportunity for mischief.

  They knew the land wasn’t theirs; if it was,‘they’d go’ through normal channels. Pete still had no idea what it was they truly wanted, but suspected they didn’t even care about the property as such. He’d seen their type too many times before. Deep down he knew what the Wannamachers wanted was simple: they wanted to terrorize Carolyn and her daughters. If they succeeded in driving her from her land, they gained the ultimate prize. They had time, incredible nerve and a total lack of conscience on their side.

  They would be back. He knew that as surely as he knew the sun would rise in the morning and set again at night. But the Wannamachers would be in for a little surprise: Carolyn Leary’s new handyman would be waiting for them.

  The rooster crowed and seconds later the screen door banged against the side of the house—but didn’t make a single other sound—and his morning escort pummeled across the dirt driveway.

  “We’re having pancakes for breakfast!” Jenny said, skidding to a stop at his feet.

  “We always have pancakes on Saturday.”

  “Nuh-uh. Sometimes we have waffles. And sometimes—”

  “And Aunt Taylor’s bringing the boys out so they can ride Bratwurst,” Shawna said, ignoring Jenny’s interruption. “They don’t have a horse.”


  Jenny abandoned her litany of alternate Saturday breakfasts. “They’re triplets. Dentical ones.”

  “Aunt Taylor’s Daddy’s sister. Her husband died, too. It was so sad. He was a state trooper, you know.”

  “Uncle Doug. But we didn’t know him very well. They lived here and we lived in Dallas.”

  “Yeah. You know what? Jacob Sanderson—he’s a boy in our school—says there’s a curse on the Leary women. You don’t think that’s true do you, Pete?”

  “No,” Pete said, angry at the unknown Jacob Sanderson.

  “Good, ’cause that would mean me and Jenny would be cursed, too.”

  “Don’t believe it for a second,” Pete said.

  “That would be cool if we were like cursed with magic or something,” Jenny said.

  “That’s silly,” Shawna said from her superior age.

  “It isn’t, either,” Jenny said, but her heart wasn’t in the argument. “Our cousins are okay,” she added as if she weren’t too sure about it. “I can tell them apart now. Mostly. And you know what? They have a dog named Elephant.”

  “Is he big?”

  Jenny giggled. “No. He’s about the size of Ralphette’s kittens!”

  Pete shook his head, grinning, and followed the girls to the main house.

  The sight of the tall, smiling man stepping through her back door literally took Carolyn’s breath away. She felt a strange catch in her heart as she watched him take the girls’ jackets from their outstretched hands and hang them on the pegs. Her daughters seemed unaware they’d conscripted Pete to do this simple task for them.

  “When we get a dog, I’m going to get a great big one and name him Mouse,” Jenny called out, cackling at her own joke.

  Pete ruffled her hair gently and guided her around his long legs to her place at the table. He made certain both girls’ chairs were pushed in before moving to the one he’d taken as his own.