Blame it on Cupid (14 page)

And if that wasn't enough, she seemed to be falling, hard and hopelessly, for the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place.

Life had to get better after this, right? It couldn't get any lower?

W
HEN
J
ACK HEARD THE
knock on the back door, he assumed he'd imagined it. The popcorn in the microwave was making a lot of racket, and he didn't dare leave his position right by the stop button. The last time he'd tried walking away to do something else, the microwave caught on fire. Cooking was tricky. Even for basic food groups. Still, with the boys here—and a B-ball game on the tube—obviously popcorn was mandatory. Kettle corn, tonight, since U Conn was playing.

He rarely had the boys during the week because school was such a long commute, but Dianne was out of town on business. The one and only thing he and his ex-wife always agreed on was that it was never, never smart to leave teenagers alone without an adult. Besides which, he loved having the kids.

Again he heard a rap on the back door, and this time spun toward it. At first glance, he saw no one there, but then he glanced down to the bottom of the door pane and recognized the bitsy body. Quickly he opened the door.

“Hey, honey—”

“Oh, Mr. Mackinnon, can I come in? I really, really,
really
need your help!”

“Of course—come on in.”

Charlene shot him a grateful look, then quickly peeled off her jacket and heeled off her shoes. “I'm supposed to be asking you if you have a C battery. But just say no. It'll be okay. I know where the batteries are in the house. But that gave me a minute to come over, you know, and…Oh. You've got the U Conn game on in there?”

She went to the doorway. His boys caught sight of her, said an immediate, “Hey, short stuff,” and “Hey, Charl.”

“Hey, Kicker and Coop. Who's winning?” she demanded.

“Who do you think? Take a seat.”

“Aw man, I wish I could watch,” Charlene said, but with a sigh bigger than she was, turned back to Jack. “Could we just sit at the table for a short two secs?”

“Sure.” Since she motioned to the kitchen table, Jack assumed the child wanted to ask him something away from the boys—but he was completely mystified as to what. Charlene had been in his house a zillion times, had always been her dad's sidekick. His boys had always been good to her, adopted her like a mascot or an honorary little sister…but she was on the quiet side. Certainly she'd never specifically sought him out about anything.

“Mr. Mackinnon, I'm hoping you can help me understand women,” she said miserably.

“Oh. Um…” Hell. He couldn't smile. He didn't dare. But he did have a sudden impulse to take off for Tahiti before this conversation had a chance to go any farther.

“This is about Merry.”

“Yeah, somehow I guessed that.” And he fully understood the kid's confusion, since he'd been struggling to figure out Merry ever since that fateful near-seduction. The one he'd started. The one where his brain turned into fuzz.

The one he mulled over and over and over, as if the images were Scotch-taped in his mind, and no matter how zealously he'd avoided her in the last few days, refused to go away.

“Everybody likes her,” Charlene said wearily. “She made cookies for three teachers. She's been volunteering for everything at school. She's been to the music store, buying all these CDs of groups that kids are supposed to like. Then she's all about shopping for clothes she thinks girls my age will be into. And then you know what she did Tuesday night?”

“No.” And actually, Jack was almost dead positive he didn't want to.

“She put mayonnaise in our hair. And that wasn't all. After that, she used the blender to make this cruddy mix of oatmeal and sour cream and orange juice and put it on our faces. Said it was a mask for our skin. Then she put Crisco all over our hands. And we had to wear gloves for a half hour.”

“Um…”

“The thing is, she was trying to do this stuff for
fun,
Mr. Mackinnon. She was going on and on about being able to do all kinds of girl stuff without needing to spend a ton of money, just using things that were already in the kitchen.” Charlene dropped her head in her hands. “I can't take much more of this. But the worst, the absolute worst—”

“What?” If the kid was just old enough, he'd have poured her a drink. As it was, the only commiseration he could offer was a bowl of fresh popcorn and popping the lid on a soda for her.

“The worst is that there's this Valentine's dance a week from Friday. It's the first sixth-grade dance. And I don't want to go.”

“So…don't go,” he suggested carefully.

“Yeah, that's what I said. Only the school called and got Merry to agree to be a chaperone. So now I have to go. Even if I wanted to go—and I'd rather drink vinegar than getting anywhere near that thing—I still wouldn't go if she was the chaperone. I mean, come on. This is beyond horrible.”

“Couldn't you just tell her how you feel about this, Charl?”

Charlene dug straight into the kettle corn. Which the boys evidently smelled, because they suddenly loped into the kitchen like ungainly giraffes and took up seats near the bowl—after turning on the game on the kitchen TV.

“You don't get it,” Charlene said desperately. “I can't tell her. She's trying to do all this stuff for
me.
Any time I try to tell her I don't like something, she looks like I kicked her. And ever since Mrs. Innes came over—the lady from the court?—it's like Merry's pulling out all the stops. She has girl ideas every second we're awake. Can't you help me?”

Jack looked at his boys. “Honey…I'd be happy to. But what do you want me to do?”

“I don't know. But there has to be some way out of this dance thing. And I was thinking that, you know, you'd know about women and all. So maybe you'd have some ideas for me. I can't go on like this much longer. I wake up every morning and don't know what she's gonna put me through next.”

Kicker clapped her on the back in a big-brother move, which was apparently his way of offering support. Cooper, though—the son he never quite understood, the son who always seemed to do things that threw him for six—said, “You got it rough, shrimp. But I've got an idea.”

“What? Anything!”

“Make Dad go with her.”

“What?” Jack said.

“What?” Charlene said.

“You know. Go with her. Be a chaperone with her at that dance. That way, he could keep her busy, and you wouldn't feel spied on and watched all the time.”

“That's a sick idea,” Jack told his son sternly.

Cooper shrugged. “I didn't say it was a
good
idea. But nobody else is coming up with
any
ideas.”

“Well, it's lousy,” Jack informed him.

Charlene, though, seemed to have perked up some. “It's lousy,” she agreed, “but it'd be sure better than her going alone, with nothing to do at the stupid dance but hover over me the whole time.”

Kicker munched down another handful of corn, and said, “You could pretend to be sick the day of the dance.”

Again Charlene brightened, but Jack said quellingly, “You can dock that idea, Kicker. That'd make Merry worry. And if she even started worrying, she'd probably drag Charlene to a doctor. And the school would lose out on a chaperone they counted on. Lying like that always gets complicated. It never pays.”

“Sometimes it does,” Kicker said.

Cooper lifted his hands, as if communicating he wasn't going near that argument with a ten-foot pole, and then ambled back to the big screen in the living room. Jack stared after his son with narrowed eyes. Cause all that trouble and then get to walk away? That boy was smarter than the rest of them combined.

“I don't know. I kind of like the lying idea. I'm pretty good at lying,” Charlene volunteered. “But if you don't like it, Mr. Mackinnon, what about what Cooper said? Like chaperoning with her, to keep her out of my hair?”

“Wait a minute,” Jack said, feeling desperation reduce his vocal cords to a coarse whisper.

“It's too much to ask, isn't it?” Charlene said. “It's okay. I understand. I could just die. But it's not like it's your problem.”

When Jack heard another knock on the back door, he thought,
No, no, God wouldn't give me any more trouble to handle tonight.

That fast, Trouble poked her head in. “Jack? Charlie?”

She spotted him, about the same instant he spotted her.

He'd avoided her so well the last few days that he thought the sting would have worn off, the way eventually, given enough time, a bee sting stopped driving you crazy. And he vaguely remembered feeling a bucket load of guilt for coming on to her…she'd had a terrible night in that storm, and it had clawed at his craw that she'd made that crack about his being a good friend/good dad. De-sexed him, so to speak. As if he couldn't ring her chimes, was past his prime, past the juicy stage of life.

But mostly he'd forgotten that guilt.

Mostly all he remembered was being sucked in by her. By that velvet skin. That soft, small, liquid mouth. That lustrous hair, spilling through his fingers. That surrender in the taste of her, the I'm-yours sway of her body into his, fitting his, igniting his.

Hell. Maybe
he'd
thought he was past his prime—but she'd sure cooked that goose. He'd been hotter, harder, faster than he'd been at fifteen—and God knows at fifteen he could turn on from the mere look of a girl.

There was just something about her. Beyond the trouble. Beyond the pain in the neck stuff. She'd sunk into those kisses as if there was nothing else in the universe right then but enjoying them, enjoying him, sipping in the textures and tastes and moment and to hell with whatever else was happening in life. That kind of sensuality, honest, open, vulnerable…it wasn't real life. It was crazy to be that open in real life.

She'd wanted him. He knew it. Knew he could have taken it the rest of the way. Wanted to.

He looked in her eyes right now and thought she'd known it, too. That they could have finished on a mattress. Her gaze claimed she wouldn't have regretted it. That she'd been asking as much as he'd been offering. That she'd been a little confused at his shutdown.

But for God's sake. One of them had to have some common sense. Didn't they?

“Um, earth to Dad.”

He vaguely heard a distant voice, but nothing seemed to break the connection between them until Cooper actually stepped in front of him. His son lifted a hand to Merry.

“I'm Cooper. And I know you're Dad's new neighbor. Miss Olson, right?”

“Merry,” she corrected him with a warm smile.

And then Kevin pushed his way toward her too. Nothing wrong with his sons' eyesight. They might be young, but they still recognized a damned pretty woman. “I'm Kevin. Although everybody calls me Kicker.”

“Kicker…as in soccer?”

“Actually as in football.”

“I knew it was one of those ball sports.”

Jack winced, but thankfully his boys didn't. They were clearly in love at first sight. Jack figured it was lucky they weren't drooling. And Merry might not know sports, but she seemed to have the sense not to say “you boys sure look alike” or any of the other adult comments that immediately seemed to distance teenagers.

“We really like your car,” Kicker said.

“Yeah,” Cooper affirmed. “Ever since we got here, we keep looking in the driveway, checking it out. It's ultra cool.”

Jack had a second to catch his breath, which irritated the hell out of him, since he hadn't realized he'd been short of breath. There was something about that woman. Something damned dangerous. Above and beyond her being on the ditzy side.

Charlene popped into sight between the boys, like they were all old friends, chatting about the Mini Cooper as if they were long-term car cronies.

Charlie told the guys, “She's got rear disc brakes. Four wheel abs.”

“Five speed?” Kicker asked.

“Yeah. And she's been getting 28 mpg even in the city.”

“Performance stats?”

Charlie started pelting out numbers and stats that obviously Merry had never heard of, because she shot the kids a confused look. Eventually, though, she gamely tried to rejoin the conversation. “To tell you the truth, I picked out the car because it was blue and had heated seats.”

Charlene shot another look at Jack, as if to say,
See? See what I've been talking about?

But his boys didn't seem to mind. They commented on the “frantic” blue color and styling, making her feel part of the group. In fact, Cooper seemed to especially hang close, doing the same unconscious big-brother thing he did with Charlene.

Once the group had finished their car rant, Merry glanced up at Jack again—this time with more composure, and thank God, he'd found some of his by that time, too. “I swear, I didn't mean to take up all this time. I just asked Charlie to come over to see if you might have a C battery, but I started to worry when she was gone so long.”