The Perfect Match

  Rowena felt a tug on her hand, drawing her out of the past, memories both painful and sweet. “So did you pick the magic whistle?” Mac asked, her eyes wide, even Charlie looking intrigued.

  “I did.”

  “Can me an’ Charlie see it?”

  Rowena went to her desk, slipped the whistle out. The silver chain it dangled on draped over her hand.

  “It’s awful little,” Mac said, obviously disappointed. “And it’s not very shiny. Too bad you didn’t pick something else.”

  “Mac,” Charlie objected. “You didn’t really believe all that stuff was true, did you?”

  “Well, Rowena said it was magic.”

  “If it’s magic, how come she leaves it in that drawer?” Charlie turned penetrating eyes to Rowena. “How come you don’t wear it all the time?”

  “I guess I’m scared I’d lose it,” Rowena said, but that wasn’t the whole truth. She’d taken it off as a teenager, when her sisters would give her no peace. And yet, though she hadn’t worn the thing for years, she’d carried it with her, to college, to vet school, her secret talisman. Even when she’d moved to Whitewater with Auntie Maeve’s blessing, Rowena hadn’t consigned it to one of the neatly labeled boxes she’d filled with the other bits of her childhood too precious to throw away. She’d kept the whistle here in the shop for luck.

  “Even though I don’t wear it, I keep it handy where all the animals are. That way before I leave at night I can play it if I need to. It brings them to me, calms them down, puts them to sleep.”

  “Sort of like a lullaby?” Mac asked.

  “That’s right. Lullabies dogs and cats understand.”

  “Oh.” Mac considered. “We don’t do lullabies at my house. My daddy sings real bad.”

  Rowena chuckled, trying to imagine Cash singing off-key. “Well, the songs I played on the whistle sounded bad at first, too. But I practiced, so now I do better.”

  “Show me,” Mac demanded.

  Rowena raised the whistle, moistened her lips. Then softly, she blew into the mouthpiece. A haunting melody drifted on the air. Even Charlie stilled at the sound. Mac stared, wonderstruck. From where he was lying on a cool spot of tile, Clancy lifted his head, cocked it to one side. He climbed to his feet and padded toward them. The girls stared, stunned, as the big dog laid his muzzle on Rowena’s lap.

  “Look at that, Charlie!” Mac exclaimed. “He just came right to her. Like a spell. Rowena, is that what fairies really sound like?”

  “So my fairy godmother told me.”

  Charlie regarded Rowena, the dog and the silver whistle.

  “Clancy just came because he likes the whistling sound,” she argued. “Jimmy Wong whistles for his dog, too. It doesn’t mean it’s magic.”

  “Is so! You’re just going to ruin the whole story,” Mac complained. “And the magic’s going to go away forever.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Rowena said, wanting to reach out to Charlie, banish at least some of her disillusionment. “That’s one of the big secrets about magic that no one ever tells you. You don’t have to believe in it all the time. You can think it’s gone, be so sure it’s not real, but the magic will still be there, waiting for you when you’re ready. It’ll reappear for you the instant you get brave enough to look for it again.”

  Charlie seemed to consider. She touched the whistle with one small finger. “I know that’s not true,” she said stubbornly, then her voice dropped so low Rowena barely heard her confess, “But I wish it was.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “NEVER TRUST A SAILOR,” Elvis the parrot warned with a suspicious squawk as Rowena scooped up a tray of fruit and parrot mix and crossed to the African Gray’s cage. She smoothed the feathers on the bird’s breast.

  “Does that apply to any man in uniform?” she inquired dryly, remembering Mrs. Delaney’s warning, Bryony’s fears. “How about trusting a deputy?”

  “Don’t ask me, I’m just a bird.” Elvis stretched out his beak to nab a green grape and cocked his head.

  She pushed aside the niggling doubts that had troubled her since the day Bryony called, then laughed out loud, knowing the minute she had time she’d have to call Vinny and tell him Elvis had demonstrated another phrase the ex-cop had added to the bird’s repertoire. Along with “Jeepers, creepers, Miss Marigold’s got some peepers.”

  All things considered, Rowena owed Mr. Google a steak dinner.

  Not out of guilt, but out of gratitude.

  Too bad she couldn’t cook.

  The “peeper” gem had actually lured Rowena’s neighbor into the shop, Vinny had announced with pardonable pride the day before.

  It had taken him almost two weeks to pull it off. He’d struck up little conversations with her, told her how pretty her flowers were. Asked her to come in the shop because he’d been teaching the bird new tricks.

  He’d been balanced on crutches as he took one of the dogs out and told the tea shop owner how heavenly her pies smelled from his side of the fence, him being a bachelor and all.

  She’d brought him a lattice-crusted piece of cherry pie with the sole purpose of warning him off. That girl’s not right in the head, talking to animals the way she does.

  Vinny had told Miss Marigold there were days even he would like somebody to talk to. Even if that somebody couldn’t talk back. He’d bet Miss Marigold sometimes felt the same way, too.

  As if on cue, Elvis had piped up, and Vinny had explained he’d taught the bird himself, because Miss Marigold had such pretty eyes. The woman had blushed as if she were sixteen. In fact, if Rowena’s matchmaking skills had included people as well as animals, she might have predicted neither Vinny nor Miss Marigold were going to be quite so lonely anymore.

  Rowena smiled, warmed by the possibility. Whatever happened between the two older people in the future, at least there was some hope that Miss Marigold wouldn’t bar the door when Rowena and the girls finished the surprise.

  They’d been working on it together, the kids in tough leather gloves, Rowena’s hands bare as they sorted through the colorful pieces of broken china, arranging them in flower shapes and hearts and stars. But when Mac recognized kitty pieces, she’d insisted they make animals. Without so much as a protest, Charlie had swept the table clean of her own painstaking work. And her blind acceptance of Mac’s dictates made Rowena ache for her. No doubt about it. In this corner of the kingdom, MacKenzie Lawless was queen.

  Rowena empathized with the little girl. There was so much Mac couldn’t do. And yet…Charlie was the one who got lost so often. In the rush to therapy. The complications of loading Mac and her wheelchair onto her special schoolbus while Charlie wandered alone to the regular bus stop at the neighborhood corner.

  Rowena wondered how Charlie felt about it. Not that the child would say. Rowena had probed gently, but Charlie had closed up tight, her eyes on the floor so no one could see the sad in them. She’d just do what her sister wanted with a stoic determination that drove the color and laughter of childhood out of her eyes.

  Even in the playroom, they played whatever struck Mac’s fancy at the moment. Though Charlie seemed content enough, as long as the games starred Clancy.

  It didn’t seem possible that only two and a half weeks had gone by, their lives settling into a familiar rhythm: Vinny minding the shop while Rowena drove the kids hither and yon. Cash, on day shift now, home around dinnertime.

  Instead of warning her off, Mrs. Delaney and Bryony had roused even more protective feelings toward Cash and his girls. She’d felt the same sensation she did when she’d first held the broken teapots in her hands and tried to figure out how to mend them.

  Impossible, she’d thought at first, and yet, even if they couldn’t be whole and perfect again, maybe the fragments could make something new, something just as beautiful.

  Rowena had suspected Cash was a good father the day she’d surprised him during Mac’s therapy. But as time slipped by, she’d peered deeper than the pictures on the wall. She’d caught Cash danc
ing Mac around the room in his arms, the ballet video from the little girl’s last dance recital playing on the television. She’d heard him reading about Dangerous Fish with Charlie. And on the nights Cash was working, he’d call right at bedtime to tell his girls he loved them.

  Little things, and yet, they haunted Rowena long after she left the gray house every day. Like the vulnerability she sometimes caught in the curl of Cash’s lips, the heat in his eyes when he didn’t think she knew he was looking at her. His hands—such strong, patient hands, hands that lifted Mac to the top of the sliding board when her own legs wouldn’t climb the ladder. Hands that helped Charlie make Lego castles and tucked his children in at night.

  Hands he had buried in Rowena’s hair when he’d pulled her mouth to his.

  Rowena shivered at the memory of those moments he’d let himself want her and she’d wanted him back. Time so brief, yet so powerful it seared itself into her very soul. Until every brush of hands, every smile he gave her, every time their gazes met, held, reminded her of that stunning moment Cash’s mouth had captured hers. And the fact that he slept alone.

  Two years’ worth of loneliness had lodged in his kiss, had bled Rowena’s heart raw. He’d shaken her to the core, his mouth so hot, the roughness in his palms so arousing, his hands unsteady with emotion as if he knew even then that anything more between them was impossible.

  Maybe it was true, what Bryony had said. That Rowena believed so deeply in the healing power of touch that she would never have called a halt to the sharp-edged desire that had sprung up between her and the man she’d begun to admire. And yet, frustrating and contrary as it was, part of the reason she respected Cash Lawless so much was the fact that he’d drawn the line between them.

  She belonged to his girls in Cash’s mind. He’d sacrificed his own needs for theirs, as he had for the past two years. And, Rowena knew, even longer.

  He’d made that choice, a man of honor. Sacrificed dreams Rowena sensed no one else would ever know. He’d looked his mistakes square in the face and done his best to make things right—for everyone but himself.

  So every night he went to bed in that stark, cheerless room, where the empty spaces were visible and the nights were solitary.

  And why was he alone? Mrs. Delaney had said Cash was hard—and Rowena herself had seen that steely quality in him the first time they’d met. A sensation that he was stronger, somehow more powerful than anyone around him. The kind of man weaker people might break themselves against, pounding against his unshakeable will.

  Was that what had happened to his wife?

  She hated it here…she begged him to leave Whitewater…

  Rowena shivered. She knew how it felt to be trapped in a place she didn’t belong. That panicky sensation in her chest when she couldn’t breathe. How can you blame Lisa Lawless, a voice inside her mocked, when you ran away yourself?

  But I didn’t leave my own children behind….

  The bell jangled, and Rowena looked up to see Cash striding toward her. Guilt flooded through her at the way she’d been dissecting his life in her head. And if she had any instinct at all, the raking over of gossip wouldn’t stop there. Her heart flipped, then thudded at the memory of Mrs. Delaney’s sharp eyes at the whole sex conversation. Doubtless the one word she’d missed was the most important one—as in no sex. Rowena hadn’t lived in Whitewater long, but she was sure that Enquiring Minds in the town would want to know.

  “Cash.” Rowena tried to quash the flutter in her voice. “You’re supposed to be at work.”

  “I had to stop by the school to drop off Mac’s permission slip for the field trip tomorrow. I stuck it in my pocket instead of her bookbag.”

  “I hate when that happens.”

  “I don’t. Especially when it gives me an excuse to stop by and see the girls. How are they doing?”

  “They’re in the playroom. Charlie was supposed to be doing some work on her science project—you know, the one about the animal world? She’s doing it on dogs.”

  “Big surprise there,” Cash grumbled.

  “Anyway, she worked for a while and then got distracted. Mac needed her help for a game.” She led him past the bird cages and a stack of sacks of dog food to where he could get a clear look.

  Cash stiffened the instant he saw Clancy. The dog rolled on its back, while Charlie slid over his body like a slide. “Won’t the dog bite them?” Cash asked as he watched Mac try to scrabble around the dog’s massive bulk.

  “Bite them? Are you kidding? Look at him.” Rowena pointed to Clancy’s face. The dog’s eyes twinkled, his mouth lolling open in the canine version of a grin. “He’s having as much fun as they are.”

  Cash couldn’t deny it. He stared, silent, astonished.

  “But then,” Rowena explained, “they are at Disney World.”

  “Disney World?” Cash echoed, bewildered.

  “The girls told me all about it on the way home the other night. Clancy is their personal version of Space Mountain. Before the tidal wave hits, that is.”

  “Tidal wave?” Cash repeated, as if that would help him understand what the devil she was talking about.

  Rowena laughed and he felt his heart squeeze. “Never mind,” she told him. “The important thing is the girls are having a ball. Apparently Clancy’s the roller coaster and the kids are those little cart thingies that ride over the bumps.”

  Cash turned back to the view through the glass window. “How long have they been playing like that?”

  “Practically since they got off school. It was Clancy’s turn in the playroom at three o’clock and they wanted to go in there with him. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Rowena kept talking, but Cash didn’t hear her. He stared at Mac, scarce daring to breathe, half afraid to believe his eyes.

  “Cash?”

  Rowena touched him, jarring him to look at her. Her face creased with worry.

  “Cash, is something wrong?”

  Cash stared down at her, stunned. “She’s pushing with her legs.”

  “What?”

  “Mac. Look at her. She’s pushing with her legs. Hard.”

  Rowena looked through the window. Cash felt her watching in as much astonishment as he was as the little girl scrambled around the big dog. Mac was pulling mostly with her arms, but that wasn’t all. In her eagerness and excitement, she was digging her toes into the floor, as well. Cash clutched onto the image, tight.

  “Remember when you broke into the house because you thought I was hurting her?” he breathed. “That’s what I was trying to get her to do.”

  He heard Rowena gasp softly, knew she remembered all right. Mac’s sobs as Cash pushed her to work her weakened muscles. Hurts, Daddy…why do you always hurt me… The words were razors, still cutting him.

  “My turn, Charlie!” Mac cried in outrage. “You can’t get two turns when I only get one. It’s no fair!”

  “Hurry up, then,” Charlie urged. “Daddy’s coming and he won’t like it if we’re in here.” Cash felt a twinge, the girls so sure he’d quash their fun.

  “Rowena said we could play with Clancy!” Mac thrust out her lower lip, but she shoved even harder with the toes of her pink tennis shoes, stubbornly determined not to give up her fun. Her elfin face crumpled, hints of pain mingling with the determination in her face. “I got lots more rides to go on. I won’t go ’way from Disney World. Daddy can’t make me!”

  Rowena tugged at Cash’s arm and he glanced at her, seeing apologies and uncertainties in her eyes. Without a word, he turned back to stare at the little blur of motion that was his MacKenzie, amazement in his eyes. “My God, Rowena,” he breathed. “Look at her.”

  Rowena squeezed his hand. He wrapped his fingers tight around hers, holding on.

  “It’s wonderful, Cash. Isn’t it?” Rowena asked.

  “Pretty wonderful.” He watched his daughters, his throat too tight to speak. His ears thirsty for the sound of childish laughter. When he could finally squeeze out the words he s
aid, “There’s just one problem with this.”

  “I know,” Rowena confessed, abashed. “You don’t want the girls getting attached to him. I let them play with the other animals, too. It’s just, Clancy is their favorite.”

  “That’s not the problem,” Cash growled. She looked up at him, so serious, so concerned.

  “Then what is?”

  “How in the Sam hell am I going to fit that dog in my house?”

  “Your…house?” Her jaw fell open, her eyes saucer wide. And the sight of her, so filled with wonder and hope, made Cash feel a little less tarnished, a little less old. “Cash, do you mean…?”