Vindication.
There was the name right on the mailbox. A. Burnadette. The very same name that had flashed on Bowen Reeve's newly purchased Caller ID machine last night at midnight.
He had him. He had the little punk who had been pestering him with prank calls two or three times a week for the last three weeks.
"'Are you my daddy,' indeed," Bowen muttered to himself, and sank low in his truck seat, pulled his ball cap over his narrowed eyes, and surveyed the house.
Truthfully, it wasn't quite what he was expecting. Kids who were running wild at midnight usually came from homes where nobody gave a damn about much of anything. And he considered himself something of an expert, having once been a kid who ran wild at midnight.
But looking at that little white house of A. Burnadette it was evident whoever lived here gave a damn. The picket fence was freshly painted, the grass in the small yard was neatly trimmed, red flowers bloomed in the window boxes. On the covered verandah a colorfully cushioned swing swayed gently in the slight breeze.
That was a good thing, Bowen told himself. A. Burnadette gave a damn. As a phys ed teacher at Montgomery Bridge Memorial High School, he dealt with lots of parents who didn't. Lots of parents who, if he confronted them about their child being the prankster calling at midnight, would look at him blankly and wonder why he didn't unplug his phone.
Why hadn't he unplugged his phone?
Bowen had stubbornly picked up the phone every single time, even though he knew he had only one midnight caller, even though he knew the exact pattern of the call by heart.
"Hello."
His greeting would be followed by a long silence.
"Hello?" he'd say again, irritated now, and then there would be another long silence.
And then a voice, cleverly disguised to sound like a young child, would whisper, "Are you my daddy?"
It was some sort of terrible cosmic joke, of course, that out of several million potential victims the prankster had found him, Bowen Reeve, a man haunted by a choice made while he was still in high school.
"I've decided to give the baby up for adoption," Becky had said.
The right choice, of course. The only choice. They'd been unmarried, young, and poor, not so much in love as looking for an escape from the grim realities of their lives. Becky had moved away shortly after the birth of the baby, and Bowen had been saddened to read of her death in an automobile accident two years ago. It should have been the end of the chapter, but it wasn't.
Because he had held his baby, his son, once.
It was something a man never forgot. Even though he tried. Even though, in the aftermath of that terrible time, he had made the decision that he would make a difference to other young men trying to find their way in a rough world, and even though he had followed through on that decision, he could not forget that somewhere out there was a child. His child.
It was this fact that made him so furious at the midnight caller. Bowen never went right back to sleep after. Oh, no. He had to reopen all the eight-year-old wounds, revisit all the old hurts. It made him so cranky he could barely stand himself.
"Coach," one of his kids had finally said, "don't bite my head off. What's with you?"
"Sorry, Barkley. I've been getting prank calls. I'm not sleeping."
Barkley had looked at him and rolled his eyes, a look reserved for those who had technology impairments. "So, you ever heard of Caller ID?"
As a matter of fact, he hadn't.
But now that he had, this miracle of the modern age had led Bowen Reeve right to where he wanted to be. Sacrificing his Saturday had paid off.
Vindication.
As he studied the little white house that slumbered in the early spring sunshine, the garage door suddenly began to open.
He slumped down farther in his seat, and then began to smile.
There was the culprit, exactly as he had pictured him. Maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, the boy had his back to the opening door, and was squatted down beside a miniature motor bike, like the ones the monkeys rode in the circus.
He was a typical delinquent. Too large white T-shirt, a large streak of grease on one sleeve, vest over it, baseball cap on backwards, long dark brown hair protruding out from under the cap. The kid looked downright scrawny.
No match at all for six feet and one hundred and eighty-two pounds of angry football coach.
Still, just in case he did not look intimidating enough, Bowen lowered his sunglasses over his eyes, got out of his vehicle, slammed the door.
Bowen walked right up behind the kid, folded his arms over his chest and planted his legs. He cleared his throat.
"Excuse me."
He was rewarded with a little squeal of fear, but his enjoyment was short-lived. The boy stood up and whirled around.
And was not a boy!
Bowen stared, startled, at the delectable curves under the T-shirt. And then, embarrassed, he looked up.
She was no girl, either. Perhaps thirty, her face was a small heart, dominated by huge eyes that were part gold and part brown. He realized he could study those eyes endlessly trying to decide what color they were.
At the moment, the eyes were sparking with irritation.
"You scared me," she said, and folded her arms defensively over her chest. "I'm sorry." Then he felt annoyed with himself. He had pictured this conversation from beginning to end ever since the name had come up on the call display last night, and never once had it begun with the words I'm sorry.
She had a little smudge of grease across the bridge of her nose, and Bowen was aware of the strangest desire to reach over with his thumb and wipe it off.
Of course, there was the little matter of the wrench she was wielding. She looked prepared to use it if he took one step closer to her.
And there was the little matter of why he was here, which he felt suddenly a whole lot less certain about.
Obviously she was not making prank calls at midnight.
His mind seemed to be moving sluggishly, caught in the current of her eyes.
"I'm Bowen Reeve," he said, finally, and offered his hand. It occurred to him this had not been in his script, either. Not even close. "I teach at the high school. And coach football."
She hesitated, and as he had hoped, took his teaching position as proof he was not a door-to-door salesman, or worse. She juggled her wrench to her other hand, and accepted his proffered hand.
He saw immediately that it had been a mistake to take her hand. It was soft and delicate, not the hand of a woman who made it a habit to work on tiny motorbikes. He let it go abruptly, but not quickly enough to escape the little shiver of awareness he felt.
"Ashton Burnadette," she offered. "What can I do for you, Mr. Reeve?"
"Make it Bowen." What was he doing? He wasn't here to make friends! "Have you got a child?" he asked, forcing himself to be all business.
She looked suddenly wary, as if Oprah had been coaching her not to talk to strangers and she suddenly realized she had not demanded proof that he worked at the high school.
"Not old enough for you to be scouting for the Mountain Lions," she said.
She knew the name of his team. Before his ego lapped that up too eagerly, he said, "Actually, I'm here about some phone calls I've been getting."
"Phone calls?"
"Prank calls. At midnight."
"That's impossible. Justin goes to bed at eight thirty. Besides he isn't that kind of boy."
Bowen had heard that line a few thousand times since he had started teaching. It was never their kid.
He should make his point and leave. But somehow making his point had become secondary to finding out if she was a single mom, or if a husband shared this cute little house with her and her prank-calling kid.
"Maybe I should come back when your husband is home," he said.
"I'm a widow," she said with stiff pride.
"I'm sorry." There, he'd said it twice, and this time he didn't mean it at all. He was glad she was single, which did not bode well for his mission here.
He might as well admit he had totally lost control of the script and leave. He tried to salvage something. "Look, if you could just talk to your kid about it. I need to get some sleep."
"Mom!" A little boy came whipping around the corner into the garage and screeched to a halt. He looked from Bowen to his mother and back again, his chocolate hair falling over his eyes.
Bowen stared at him. The child's eyes were huge. And green. The pure, undiluted green of an Irish meadow.
Bowen had seen eyes like that before. He saw them every morning when he looked in the mirror.
"Justin, this is Mr. Reeve. He teaches at the high school," said Ashton.
Her son came forward and politely extended his hand. "How do you do, Mr. Reeve?" he enquired solemnly.
Bowen listened carefully, trying to decide if this was the voice that haunted him at midnight. He took the small extended hand and shook it. Could such a well-mannered child really turn into Captain of the Telephone Terrorists at the stroke of midnight?
"Fine, thanks," Bowen said gruffly. This was the problem with being technologically impaired. Could the new-fangled device sitting on his bedside table supplying him with the phone numbers of all who called lie? Could it make a mistake?
He was going to have to ask Barkley. Meanwhile, he felt himself trying to judge the kid's age, and no matter how he looked at it, Justin Burnadette looked like he was about eight years old.
Bowen told himself sternly that it just wasn't possible that this was the child he had held in his arms, so briefly, eight years ago. How could it be? How could a mere child track down his natural father?
Was it some kind of wishful thinking on his own part?
"Mr. Reeve says he's been getting strange telephone calls, Justin. For some reason " Ashton sent Bowen a dirty look from under lashes that were as thick and sooty as a chimney brush " he thought you might be involved."
Bowen focused very intently on the child now. He'd been teaching long enough to spot discomfort.
The boy seemed to shrivel before him, and he looked down and scuffed the garage floor with the toe of a worn sneaker.
"Not me," he said, without an ounce of conviction.
Bowen would be willing to place odds that this was the boy who belonged to the voice on the other end of the midnight calls. But he suddenly knew, in the boy's mind, it was not a game, not a trick, not a prank.
He glanced at Ashton. She was looking at her son with alarm and puzzlement.
And suddenly, Bowen's desire to be vindicated died completely.
"This is 2218 Birchwood, isn't it?" he asked. He hoped Ashton was as technologically impaired as he was, and that she would accept Bowen had traced his tormentor by address and not by name.
Her face melted into lines of relief. "Oh, no," she said, and smiled. "It's not. That's two blocks over. This is 2218 Lodgepole."
The smile was devastating to Bowen. It brought a light to her face that transformed her from pretty to beautiful.
He reminded himself, firmly, that he was a man who disliked complications. Women, generally speaking, were complicated. Ask one out for a beer and a pizza and before you knew it they were expecting a diamond ring and a wedding date.
And Ashton Burnadette came with more complications than most namely the boy beside her who had Bowen's own green eyes and had been calling in the middle of the night making daddy enquiries.
This was a situation a sane man would not touch.
"Well," he said, "sorry to have bothered you. Two blocks which way?"
She pointed, not even trying to hide the fact that his departure filled her with relief. Apparently she was not one of the ones in search of a diamond ring and a wedding date. Bowen was amazed to find himself slightly miffed at this rare display of immunity to his masculine charm.
In a moment of insanity, he thought of staying, making small talk, getting around to the pizza and beer thing.
Sanity came back in a gratifying rush. This situation promised to bring nothing but confusion and chaos to his well ordered life.
He turned swiftly to go, promising he would never look back. He would never think about that question in the night. "Are you my daddy?"
He would never think about the little boy's large green eyes or her somber golden brown ones again.
He would make a clean getaway. In moments he would be back to his neat and tidy life. He was willing to bet the prank phone calls were over.
But his clean getaway was impeded by a sturdy little body that was suddenly planted in front of him.
"What grade do you teach?" Justin asked, his words laced with just a touch of desperation.
Desperation that made Bowen realize the only one he'd been fooling was himself. He could never walk away from the Burnadettes without knowing the answer.
Was he this little boy's dad? The possibility was remote. One in a million. One in a billion. One in a trillion, maybe.
But people did win lotteries all the time. And they got struck by lightning. Weird coincidences threaded human existence. At school last week, all the female teachers had been talking about a TV program they'd seen where two guys who met in a bar and became best friends for life later discovered they were brothers.
He could see that Ashton was not happy about this delay in his departure, and he had a purely masculine need to change that, to know if she felt even a little bit of the same sizzle he was feeling.
"I teach grades ten, eleven, and twelve boys P.E.," he said. "And I coach football. Our senior team has been division champs three years in a row."
"Cool," Justin said.
But his mother looked unimpressed. Bowen had seen that look before. It was the look the cute librarian on campus reserved for the jocks.
Bowen tried to think of a way to quote some Shakespeare without looking like he was completely off his rocker, but he couldn't think of one.
"I play hockey," Justin confided, sidling a little closer to him, smiling.
"Really? What position?"
"Goalie. I'm pretty good. You could come see me some time."
"Justin! Mr. Bowen is a complete stranger. Besides, hockey season is over for the year." She didn't have to add thank God when it was written so clearly on her face.
Bowen snuck a little peek at her. She was blushing wildly and looking embarrassed. Now he understood her haste to be rid of him.
Her son was matchmaking. Justin probably had just picked his phone number out of the book at random. Or maybe seen his picture in the paper when the senior team had done so well.
Still, the crimson in her cheeks gave him the smallest little shiver of pleasure. Ashton Burnadette was not nearly so indifferent to Bowen Reeve as she wanted to be.
"Maybe I can come see one of your games next year," he suggested, and when the little boy's face lit up, he was instantly ashamed of himself. He'd made the remark to get a reaction out of her, and he had certainly succeeded.
She was glowering at him and looking very much like an angry kitten.
"That would be great," Justin said, awestruck, a reminder to Bowen of what he was playing with. You didn't play games with little kids' hearts.
"I better go," he said.
She nodded vigorously.
"Wait!" Justin wailed. "Do you know anything about motorcycles?"
It was his way in, and he knew it. He was going to have to risk her wrath, but it would give him an opportunity to find out if the boy was his kin.
Besides, her wrath looked like it wouldn't be without its attractions.
"I do know a little about motorbikes," he said. "Why? You having a problem?"
"It won't start. My dad gave it to me. He died. He was on a fishing trip and "
"Justin," she said firmly, but her eyes were tender, "Mr. Reeve doesn't need to know our life story. And if I can't figure out from the instruction manual how to fix the motorcycle, I'll bring it in to the shop. Mr. Reeve has to leave now. I'm sure. Don't you, Mr. Reeve?"
"As a matter of fact, I have a few minutes."
She glared at him, folded her arms over her chest and tapped her foot, the message clear.
He chose to ignore it.
He leaned over and looked at the motorbike. She already had the engine cover off, and it was obvious, at a glance, it was missing the spark plugs. But if it was going to be his excuse to hang around a bit, he might have to find something a little more complicated than that.
He lifted up his sunglasses to have a closer look, and then glanced over at her, trying to read exactly how much she knew about the machine.
Her gasp, as her gaze met his, was audible, and she bit down on the knuckle of her index finger.
Bowen Reeve realized she had just seen his eyes.
Ashton tried to recover her composure. Bowen Reeve's eyes were green. Surely it wasn't that big a deal? A certain percentage of the world's population had green eyes!
Still, she had seen that particular shade, like emeralds sitting on the bottom of a pond, only once before. Justin had those eyes.
"Is something the matter?" Bowen asked her.
Oh, yes, something was the matter. Her heart was nearly beating out of her chest, as it had been since the moment he had walked up behind her.
But, really, if she was honest, only the first three seconds or so of her rapidly beating heart could be attributed to being startled by his arrival in her garage.
After that it had been pure awareness of him. Bowen Reeve was powerful and intimidating masculine perfection. He was long-legged, broad across the shoulder, and deep through the chest. His dark hair was short and neatly trimmed, but a wayward shock of it fell boyishly over his brow. His facial features were clean and strong straight nose, high cheekbones, and a faint cleft in his chin. She had decided he was absolutely and dangerously gorgeous, even before he'd lifted the sunglasses off those remarkable eyes!
It was the fact that she was having such a feminine reaction to him that had caused this absurd overreaction to his eyes.
"Ashton?"
Bowen stepped very close to her. His scent, like sun-warmed earth, filled her senses and made her feel dizzy.
Then he touched her shoulder. His hand felt exactly as she had known it would, strong, heated, full of the promise of passion.
She jerked her shoulder away from his touch, and took a step back from him. "I'm fine," she said. "Nothing's the matter."
Unless she counted the fact that she had vowed love was much too painful, and fate was taunting her by dropping the most gorgeous man in the western hemisphere on her doorstep. She didn't want to care that she was dressed like an auto mechanic, and that there was a dab of grease on her nose the kept making her want to cross her eyes. She didn't want to care, but she did. She gave her face a surreptitious swipe with her sleeve.
She was not, she told herself, ready for a relationship. She might never be. She was appalled that some part of her insisted on calculating, and quickly, that Daniel had been gone for fourteen months. More than a year, surely a suitable period of mourning.
Love was an uncertain force, too wild and too unpredictable. She had loved and lost, and now she did not think she was strong enough to tangle with that force again.
She told herself, righteously, that her lack of interest in a relationship was about Justin. Providing a stable home for her son was her top priority, her reason for being. She was determined that the winds of passion would not disrupt the security of a childhood that had already been so severely disrupted.
Bowen Reeve would qualify as a wind of passion. A hurricane, even. She could tell by looking at him how disruptive a man like that would be. Her heart, pounding erratically, reacting totally without her permission, was all the confirmation she needed.
"Really," she said, "I'd rather you didn't do that."
"Touch you?" he asked quietly.
"Repair the motorcycle! There's a service station just down the street where I can take it."
"It's not a problem," he said smoothly. He squatted down beside the bike, unconcerned about getting grease on his hands. In seconds he had the motorcycle in a distressing amount of pieces, all lined up neatly on the garage floor.
Justin was hanging over Bowen's shoulder, hero worship evident on his face.
If Justin needed someone masculine to worship, she would sign him up for a Big Brother. Hopefully she could request what she wanted: a scrawny, bespectacled boy in high school, someone the winds of passion did not stir around quite so strongly.
"So, Justin must look like his dad, huh? He doesn't take after you."
Bowen did not look up from the blackened piece of steel he had in his hand and the question appeared to be purely conversational. It was a comment Ashton had heard before.
"Daniel and I adopted Justin," she said.
"Oh," he said. "Justin, could you find a rag and clean this for me?"
Justin would have gone to the moon for him, had he asked.
"I think I can have this running in an hour or so," Bowen decided.
An hour or so? What was she supposed to do for that hour? Stand here and watch his muscles flex? Very tempting.
"Do you have a socket set?" he asked her, making himself at home.
"No," she said a trifle tersely.
"Yes, we do, Mom. It's over on the work bench there in that black box."
How did Justin know what a socket set was? Were males born knowing these things? Gritting her teeth, she went and fetched the socket set. And clean rags.
And against her better judgement, freshly squeezed lemonade.
"So, what do you do for a living, Ashton?" Bowen asked, taking a long drink of the lemonade, his green eyes meeting hers over the rim of the glass.
She watched his Adam's apple bob.
She wished, suddenly and irrationally, that she did something interesting. That she trained tigers for the circus or owned a little lingerie shop or led guided hikes through a pristine rainforest.
"I'm a secretary for an accounting firm," she said.
"Really? Which one?"
"Barnes and Cooter."
"Does Jerry Childers still work there?" he asked. "I went to school with him."
"Yes, Jerry's there." She recognized a pathetic desire rising in her to quiz Jerry on Monday to find out what Bowen Reeve had been like in high school.
As if she didn't already know popular, athletic, the kind of golden boy who had never even noticed shy girls like herself were alive.
It was ridiculous to feel furious about that now after she'd been out of high school for more than a decade.
"Mommy, I'm getting hungry. Is it supper time?"
She glanced at her watch and realized it was nearly time for dinner. Somehow the afternoon had melted away. The motorcycle looked no closer to being reassembled.
"Could we have macaroni and cheese?" Justin asked eagerly. "My favorite," he confided in Bowen.
"Yeah," Bowen said dryly, "it's served at my place regularly, too. Bachelor food."
"Bachelor food," Justin said happily.
She was cooking bachelor food for her son? It made her feel as inadequate as she had felt over a decade ago.
"Not that I'm insinuating you can't cook," Bowen told her.
She was hopelessly transparent! "Cooking is no longer a prerequisite for motherhood," she said sharply.
"Of course it isn't," Bowen said soothingly, which only made her madder.
"I just had the greatest idea," Justin said, completely oblivious to the strange tension in the air in the garage.
She could hardly wait to hear it.
"Mr. Reeve could have supper with us!"
"I'm sure Mr. Reeve has other plans for dinner," Ashton said firmly.
Bowen considered his plans: a frozen pizza, an ice-cold cola, and a televised baseball game. Staying here seemed like it would be infinitely more interesting.
"Actually," he said, as if he had missed Ashton's lack of enthusiasm, "I could have a bite to eat with you and Justin, if you don't mind. Then I could finish the bike after dinner. I'd be out of your hair in no time."
He could tell she did mind, and that the out-of-your-hair part was the only part that appealed to her, but with a curt nod, she marched off, slamming the door of the garage behind her.
It was running through his mind, over and over, that Justin was adopted. This child, standing less than three feet from him could be the son he had given up!
Confirming it would be as easy as asking Justin when is his birthday.
But somehow the question caught in Bowen's throat. What was he going to do if Justin was his son? How would Ashton react? What right did he have to disrupt a life that looked as pleasant and peaceful as hers did? Did Justin already know something that he and Ashton did not? How could he?
Bowen, a man of action, and proud of it, had an unfamiliar sense of being paralyzed by not knowing what to do. If Justin, by that one-in-a-trillion long shot, was his son, he could hardly expect that Ashton was going to be thrilled by that news.
He glanced at the boy and felt this unexpected tug of tenderness at his heart. He decided just to enjoy this moment, and he and Justin worked side by side, an ease between them, as if they had known each other a very long time.
"Dinner," Ashton called from inside the house.
Justin took Bowen's hand and showed him the way.
The whole problem, Bowen thought as he took his seat at the kitchen table, was that he needed a plan. The fact that the midnight prankster might not have been kidding when he whispered those words "Are you my daddy?" was not even a possibility Bowen had considered.
Now he was in the middle of the game, uncertain of the rules, and with absolutely no game plan.
So it was obvious; he needed a brand-new game plan. As a football coach, he knew that. You didn't just charge ahead. You looked at all the angles, you weighed all the possibilities, you gathered all the facts, and then you followed a carefully laid out plan to get to where you wanted to be.
Of course, you had to know where you wanted to be.
And in the long term, he wasn't sure where that was. But in the short term, sitting in Ashton's kitchen, eating dinner would do.
"So, Justin," he said, inching toward a game plan, "How old are you? Six? Seven?"
Justin looked at him scornfully. "I'm eight."
Bowen's heart leapt in his chest, but it felt more like panic than excitement. He reminded himself that there were probably several million eight-year-olds in the country. Still, he had to focus intently on the dinner to keep his shock off his face.
As it turned out, Ashton's idea of macaroni and cheese was not quite the same as Bowen's. She set a large pasta dish in the middle of her kitchen table. It bubbled with a layer of freshly melted cheese.
"You have a nice place," Bowen commented. Her kitchen was a charming blend of beautiful old mismatched furniture and scatter rugs. Her red-checked tablecloth matched the kitchen curtains, and a string of red peppers hung in the window.
"Don't you have a nice place?" Justin asked.
Bowen laughed. "I live in an apartment close to the school. I'd say it's a typical bachelor place."
"I don't know what bachelor means," Justin said.
"Well, it's a guy who isn't married," Bowen said.
"Does he want to be married?" Justin asked eagerly.
An hour ago the answer to that question had been so simple. An hour ago Bowen had actually loved his spartan apartment, the central feature being a forty-inch TV set with surround sound. Now, sitting in this kitchen, so bright, so warm, and so cozy, he felt an ache.
Or maybe it was sitting with Justin and Ashton that caused this ache to leap to life within him, and made him not as certain of that answer as he had been such a short while ago.
"I guess a bachelor might get married if the right woman came along." It would be the wrong time to look at her, but Bowen slid her a glance anyway.
She was pushing macaroni around on her plate, blushing wildly.
He liked her blush. It occurred to him that he liked her. She was trying to appear prickly, but the fact that she was shy and sensitive shone through. He guessed she was trying desperately to get over having her world turned upside down from the death of her partner. It occurred to him she was courageous.
It also occurred to him that he did not want to be the one to test her courage. He felt himself torn between wishing Justin was his and hoping he wasn't.
"Would the right woman be someone like my mom?" Justin said.
"Justin! Stop it!" she said in a ferocious whisper.
"Let's not embarrass your mom," Bowen agreed, but an answer formed, unbidden, in his mind. I think it might be someone just like your Mom. Bowen felt the shock of his silent answer.
Justin looked like he wanted to pursue it, but one glance at Ashton and he decided against it.
"So, what does a typical bachelor place look like?" Justin asked.
"Imagine what this place would look like without your Mom, and you got it."
"Wow," Justin said. "Messy, huh?"
"Not messy exactly." Sterile. No pictures. No colorful throw rugs. No red peppers hanging from a string by the window.
"That means he hides the dishes in the oven when he has company coming over," Ashton told Justin.
Bowen looked at her. She was actually smiling.
"How did you know that?" he demanded, with false indignation.
"Oh, you know. College. About a hundred years ago." She said that as if she was ancient instead of so young and beautiful and vital.
She looked so lovely when she smiled, and it occurred to Bowen that maybe she didn't smile much because she worried, because the weight of the world had been placed on her slender shoulders.
He had already decided he would not add to her burdens if he could help it. Now a brand-new idea occurred to him.
Could he lighten her burden? Just give her a day or two of good old fashioned fun? Make her smile like that again? He realized he wanted to hear her laugh out loud.
"What were you planning on doing with the motorcycle once it was running?" he asked.
"I'll let Justin ride it up and down the back lane. He did that before Daniel died. I'll be very careful."
Bowen thought maybe part of her problem was that she was very careful. Too careful about everything.
"If I get it running, what would you think of taking it out into the country tomorrow? I have a buddy with a piece of land twenty minutes from here. It would make some great motorbike riding." When she looked doubtful, he added helpfully, "Very safe."
He realized, too late, that he was leaping ahead without having properly developed the game plan.
"Mom, say yes, say yes, say yes," Justin pleaded out loud.
Say no, say no, say no, Bowen pleaded inwardly.
Ashton looked from one to the other. The exasperation melted from her face, and she sighed. There was that smile again.
"Okay," she said. "Yes."
"That helmet always makes me think of martians," Ashton said, watching her son, smiling. "He looks like he should barely be able to hold his head up."
"Watermelon head," Bowen agreed, with a smile. "He's a good little biker."
They were sitting on a blanket in the shade of some poplars, while Justin roared around them on a large, twisting, well-worn track.
"Daniel taught him."
"He taught him well."
A part of Ashton still could not really believe she'd said yes to this, and that she was sitting across from this awesomely attractive man. What had gotten into her? Some small voice had insisted she say yes, instead of no, that for once she just take a chance and go with the flow instead of being so cautious.
"He's never had such a good place to ride, though," Ashton said. "He'll never want to get off that bike."
Bowen looked at her lazily from under the fringe of his lashes. "Are you getting bored?"
"Oh, no!" And it was the truth. Sitting here in the dappled shade, she found herself enjoying the scenery, and enjoying her son's pleasure.
But if she was really honest, what she was enjoying most of all was Bowen's company. She had thought she would be uncomfortable with him, but nothing was further from the truth. He had none of the conceit she might have expected from such a good-looking man.
He was funny and amazingly easy to talk to. He had drawn her out, his eyes so intent on her face as she spoke, that she had probably talked far too much. He knew her whole life story. It made her realize that she had grown very lonely since Daniel's death.
"So," she said, "tell me a little about you. How did you decide to teach high school? You don't really strike me as a teacher."
"Really? What do I strike you as?"
A cowboy. A pirate. A secret agent. "You strike me as someone who would like adventure," she said, "excitement."
He threw back his head and laughed. She stared at the strong column of his throat, and his teeth flashing brilliant white in the sun, and she felt weakness radiate out from her stomach to her limbs.
"I guess I got enough excitement in my younger days," he said. "I grew up on the poor side of town. I did lots of wild things, crazy things. But I made some really poor decisions, ones that had life-long repercussions, and that made me grow up really quickly. When I was offered a football scholarship, I took it. And after two years at university, I knew I had to go back to the places I had come from, and offer a hand to the young men coming up behind me. That's why I became a teacher at a tough school like Montgomery Bridge."
Somehow what he had just said made him much more a hero to her than if he had been a cowboy or a pirate or a secret agent. It seemed to Ashton that he had said yes to the greatest adventure of all.
"You're using your life to make the world better," she said softly.
He looked embarrassed, but hid it behind a boyish grin. "Oh, sure. Make the world a better place and get the whole summer off at the same time. That's really why I became a teacher. Because of the holidays."
It was her turn to laugh. It felt like it might have been the first time she laughed, really laughed, since Daniel died.
"What?" she said, her laughter finally dying. He was looking at her so intently, the green of his eyes deep and dark.
"I was hoping you'd laugh today," he said softly.
"You were?"
"I wanted to hear it. You looked so serious yesterday. You have these little worry wrinkles, right here." And he touched her forehead with his finger and rubbed gently.
She closed her eyes and leaned into his touch. The tenderness of it made her feel as if she would cry. It had been so long since anyone above the age of eight had cared about her, since anyone even noticed if she laughed or not.
The motorcycle engine quit, and the silence was abrupt. She yanked herself back from his touch, but not before she saw the look in his eyes.
Justin swaggered over, the motorcycle helmet under his arm. "I'm hungry," he announced.
"When aren't you hungry?" she teased her son. He was absolutely glowing with happiness. It was the happiest she had seen Justin since they had said goodbye to Daniel.
When they had made their arrangements for today, Bowen had insisted on being responsible for lunch. Now, as he went to his truck, she watched him with a hunger that had nothing to do with lunch. She liked the way he moved, his body so strong, his movements so easy and fluid.
She liked the way his blue jeans hugged his rear end, and the way his biceps bulged at the hem of his short-sleeved shirt. She liked the way, when he turned back toward them, basket in hand, his shirt molded the strong lines of his chest and his flat belly, and she liked the way his jeans hugged the rigid line of the large muscle of his thigh.
Through lunch, Ashton was aware the comfort she had felt all morning was dissolving into something else.
A fine tension.
A wanting.
It was a hunger that could not be erased with the bucket of chicken he had produced, the basket of strawberries, the sparkling apple juice.
Thankfully, there was no need for her to make conversation. Justin relived every second of his morning. He chatted happily about grabbing air and burning rubber. His narration was punctuated with plenty of motorcycle engine noises.
Guiltily, she realized she was barely listening, that in fact, she was waiting for her son to get back on his little motorcycle.
Unless she was mistaken, Bowen, who kept casting her glances from under his lashes, was feeling the very same way.
"Well, I gotta get back to it," Justin announced as if he had an important job waiting for him. Apparently he was unaware the adults had barely touched lunch.
"Have fun," she said to him, and watched him go. He climbed on the bike, started it and was off.
Suddenly, she felt very shy, afraid to even look at Bowen, as if she was the high school bookworm who unexpectedly found herself in the company of the captain of the football team.
She felt his finger on her chin, and he turned her head gently toward him.
"Where were we?" he asked softly.
"You were erasing the worry wrinkles from my forehead," she said, trying to be funny. Her voice sounded like a weak squeak.
"I think I was finished with worry wrinkles," he said softly.
"You were?"
"Mmm hmm."
"Oh."
"Ashton, would it be okay if I kissed you?"
Dumb, Bowen thought. Dumb, dumb, dumb. He had just asked Ashton Burnadette, a woman he hardly knew, if it would be okay to kiss her.
But it didn't feel like he hardly knew her. It didn't feel that way at all. It felt like he had known her forever, like he would always know her. It felt like his life had been half lived until he heard the delightful music of her laughter.
But even so, kiss her? Where was that in the game plan?
Last night Bowen had gone home, gotten enough distance from the warm golden brown of her eyes that he had been able to figure everything out so carefully. The first thing he was supposed to do this morning, according to the game plan, was ask Justin his birth date.
Once that was out of the way, and he had determined Justin was not his son, then he would be free to do the knight-in-shining-armor thing give Ashton a wonderful, carefree day of fun.
But when she had come down the walk, pushing the motorcycle, her eyes sparkling with eagerness, the birthday question had eased right out of his mind. And maybe it hadn't just been the laughter in her eyes.
She was wearing a white button-up shirt and jeans, and both items of clothing hugged all the right places. His mouth had gone dry at how effortlessly lovely she looked. He had escorted women to elegant parties who, in all their finery, could not hold a candle to Ashton in blue jeans.
Still, it wasn't okay to kiss her, and Bowen knew it. It was not anywhere on any game plan he had formulated.
If she had an ounce of sense she was going to say no.
But at the moment she seemed to have even less sense than him, because she leaned closer and she whispered her answer, so low that he almost didn't hear it.
"Yes, Bowen, it would be okay to kiss me."
So he did.
He was not sure what he had been expecting. She was shy and sensitive and so perhaps he had expected innocence.
He had thought her lips would taste cool, like mint.
But there was nothing chaste in the meeting of their lips. Rather than being cool, her kiss was red hot.
Her lips were soft beneath his and tasted not of mint, but of cinnamon hearts. There was fire there, licking just below the surface.
Bowen Reeve had kissed a lot of women on that stretch of road that started at beer and pizza and always ended well short of diamond rings and wedding dates.
He thought he knew all there was to know on the subject. So he was amazed to find himself, twenty-six years old and learning something brand-new.
That a kiss could open places in a man that he had not known existed. That a kiss could make him yearn, not for sex, but for love. That a kiss could promise to find empty places in his soul, dark places, and fill them to overflowing with light.
"That's the problem with game plans," he muttered against her ear.
"What?" she whispered, and took his lip and gently gnawed it with her teeth.
The problem with game plans was they couldn't always be put into effect. Bowen knew the other team could throw all kinds of unexpected obstacles in front of you. A game plan was not a guarantee that anything was going to go your way. In fact, the success rate of a good game plan, if he calculated it mathematically, was probably pathetically poor.
On the other hand, what wasn't going his way, at the moment, even if it wasn't going according to plan?
It was a beautiful day, and he was with a beautiful woman.
Who happened to be kissing the living daylights out of him. What could be better? He gave in to the tantalizing temptation of her lips, tasted her, savored a sweetness that he knew went to her soul.
Repercussions, he reminded himself. He was the expert on repercussions, right? This was not going to turn out well if he was stealing kisses before coming clean. If Justin was his son, she was never going to forgive him for taking things so badly out of sequence.
In the natural order of things, truth should come before kisses.
He disengaged his lips from hers.
"Don't stop," she whispered.
For the first time in his life he understood addiction, understood how a force could be so strong it could overpower and crush absolutely anything in its path, especially something as weak and ineffective as a man's willpower.
When he had taken his lips from hers, where there had been warmth, a great cold emptiness took its place.
Using the force of his entire will, he stayed her lips, putting his finger on the soft fullness of her bottom one. When she kissed his finger lightly and then nipped, he thought he was lost.
But he marshaled what was left of his will and wrapped his arms around her, pulled her in close to him. After a moment, he felt her nestle her head against his chest, trusting. Trusting him to be exactly who he had said he was.
He felt the warmth of her, and how sweetly feminine she was. But he also felt her fragility. "Gosh, your kid is bold," he said, watching Justin grab air over a dirt pile. "What sign is he?"
He hated himself for this, for edging closer to an answer when she didn't even know there was a question.
"You're not into astrology!" she said, and tilted her head up and looked at him.
It was true, he wasn't. It had just seemed like a subtle way to get around to Justin's birthday. His sense of self-loathing grew. "I'm an Aries," he said, leading her along.
She looked at him quizzically, not buying it, but playing along anyway. "How does that go with Capricorn?"
How the hell did he know? "Great," he said, "if you're a Capricorn."
She grinned with such openhearted delight, and he realized he'd done it again, put the cart before the horse.
Bowen, he told himself sternly, find out the kid's birthday. If he's not yours, you can keep on kissing her. And if he is
"Justin's a Gemini," she said. "May 30."
Bowen knew his life had just changed, forever and for always.
"What on earth have you been up to?" Tracey McMilligan, who worked at the next desk, asked Ashton on Monday morning.
Could it be that obvious? Could it? "What do you mean?"
"You look like you're in love," Tracey said, regarding her thoughtfully. "My God, girl, shining eyes, blooming cheeks. Give. Tell all to Auntie Tracey."
So, it could be that obvious!
"I just met him," Ashton said. "How could I be in love?" Of course, that was the same question she'd been asking herself since Bowen had dropped her off yesterday.
It was too soon to hope, anyway. After the kiss, he had seemed withdrawn, and very shortly after that he had announced he thought it was time to go.
There had not been another kiss at her doorstep, even though Ashton had longed for one.
"Well, tell me what sign he is," Tracey, the office horoscope expert, said, "and I can at least tell you if there's any hope."
"He's an Aries." How silly to actually want Tracey to delve into her mysterious books for this information, but she did.
"And you're a Capricorn, right?" Without waiting for an answer, out came the book that Tracey consulted for all kinds of office issues. Ashton's coworker apparently felt not an ounce of guilt about pursuing this interest on office time.
Ashton watched her friend frown. Tracey snapped the book shut.
"Sorry, Ashton, it's not in the stars."
"What?"
"Unless you're older than him. Then it might work. Rams can work with old goats."
"I have no idea how old he is! He looks the same age as me." She couldn't believe she was putting credence in Tracey's hocus-pocus! Was she prepared to be an old goat, even for Bowen Reeve? She had to admit the short answer was yes!
"Morning, Jerry," Tracey called.
Jerry! Jerry would know how old Bowen is! They had gone to school together. Jerry would know all kinds of things about Bowen Reeve.
Watching his office door out of the corner of her eye, Ashton waited for Jerry to go for morning coffee. Her plan was to casually follow him.
Ashton had not felt like this since she was a schoolgirl. No, that was not true. Even as a schoolgirl she had never given herself over to fluttering heartbeats, sweaty palms, breathless giggles, what the stars said!
It wasn't that she hadn't loved Daniel madly. It wasn't that at all. She had just known him forever. They had grown up next door to each other. Saying yes to him had been as comfortable and as right as choosing a favorite rocking chair.
Nobody was ever going to mistake Bowen Reeve for a comfortable rocking chair!
At five to ten, Jerry's office door opened and out he came, coffee cup in hand. Ashton grabbed her own and met him at the staff coffee room.
"So how was your weekend, Ashton?" he asked.
"Interesting. I met an old friend of yours."
"Really? Who?"
"Bowen Reeve."
She watched his face carefully and was pleased when it lit up.
"Bowen! My God, how is he?"
"He seems to be doing very well."
"Does he still teach at Montgomery Bridge? And coach football? That amazes me. He never seemed to be the high school teacher type to me."
Exactly what she had thought! "What type did he seem to you?"
"He was wild and fun and completely fearless. A daredevil. I remember he rode his bike along the edge of the high school roof one day on a dare. He used to get a gang of big guys together and we'd pick up Miss Mitchell's little Austin Mini out of the parking lot. We'd put it on the football field, or haul it into the gym. She could never find that car. Of course, he was a hell of a football player. I heard he had a chance to go pro, and picked teaching instead. Nuts, huh?"
"Nuts," she agreed, and remembered Bowen's voice telling her about the boys he had gone back for. He had never mentioned a pro football career. Was there any doubt left that she was falling in love with Bowen Reeve?
With very little need for encouragement, Jerry was off and running, reminiscing happily about Bowen Reeve, a charismatic renegade, a mischief maker, a superb athlete, a lady-killer.
"A high school teacher," he finally said with a shake of his head. "I can't believe it. I occasionally wondered if he might end up in jail, but I never pictured him in teaching."
"He said something happened to make him take life more seriously," she said.
"Yeah. Something did."
"What?"
There are moments sometimes in a person's life where they know what they are going to hear next is going to alter their whole existence. And she had that feeling, but just a hair to late to stop Jerry from speaking.
"He got into some trouble our senior year. He was never the same after that. It was like the fun was gone out of him. He became very serious. Mature."
Don't ask, she told herself. But there was her voice, asking, "What happened?"
Jerry hesitated, then shrugged. "He got a girl pregnant. She was nearly as wild as him, as I remember it, and drop-dead gorgeous- Sorry, that was an unfortunate choice of phrase. I remember reading she died in a car accident a few years ago."
"The baby?" Ashton whispered.
"They gave up the baby for adoption. All the rest of us were getting ready for grad, celebrating life, and I remember him and Becky looking so sad, as if they would never be young and carefree again. It was as if it broke something inside of him. His heart, I guess."
She stared at Jerry. A baby, born near the end of the school year. That would make it a spring baby. Possibly even a May baby.
A baby given up for adoption.
Green eyes.
"How old are you, Jerry?" Her voice sounded like it was coming from a great distance.
"Huh?" he said, not following the quick change in conversation.
"How old are you?" Her voice sounded shrill, agitated.
He gave her a puzzled look. "I'm twenty-six."
Absurdly, she realized she was older than Jerry. And Bowen. That she could be Bowen's old goat, after all, if her whole world wasn't falling into pieces.
Ashton's mind raced. If Jerry and Bowen had graduated when they were eighteen, that would be eight years ago. Eight years ago that a baby born in the spring had been given up for adoption.
Green eyes, like nothing she had ever seen before, like emeralds dropped into the bottom of a pond.
Ashton stood up. Her legs felt very odd, as if they had turned to putty and were folding in on themselves under the pressure of her own weight.
From a long way away, she heard Jerry call her name.
And then her world went black.
Bowen Reeve felt both foolish and exhilarated. He was standing on Ashton Burnadette's front porch with the biggest bouquet of flowers he could find.
He had never bought flowers before, but he thought they might signal his intentions far more clearly than pizza and beer.
He had a game plan, finally. It was such a relief to have the whole thing mapped out, and to know exactly where he wanted to go with it.
Justin Burnadette was his son. Bowen had to explain that to Ashton, to tell her everything, beginning at midnight phone calls and ending with his arrival at her garage door. And then he had to ask her if she would consider him being a part of their lives.
Not just as a father to Justin.
No, he wanted to taste her lips again. To hold her. In the long run, he was thinking diamond rings and wedding dates.
He pounded on the door again. Justin peered out cautiously then flung the door open.
"I'm so glad you're here," he said. "My mommy's sick. I'm scared."
Bowen dropped the flowers, bolted past Justin, and looked in two doors down the hallway before he found her.
Her room was in darkness. She had the covers pulled up right to her nose.
And her face was all blotchy. She'd been crying.
She opened her eyes and pulled the covers right up over her head. "Go away," she said. "I never want to see you again."
Bowen ignored her. Instead he entered her bedroom, sat down on the edge of her bed, and pulled the covers back down over her nose.
She regarded him furiously. "You're his father," she said. "Jerry at work told me all about your May baby eight years ago. You came here looking for him. You tricked me. You made me think " she stopped abruptly and put her head back under the covers.
He pulled the covers back down. She had a firmer grip on them this time, so it was marginally harder. "I made you think what? I care about you? I do care about you!"
"Oh, sure. I get it all now. You gave him up for adoption, and then you decided you wanted him back, didn't you? Life-long repercussions, you said."
"That's not how it happened," he said.
"I don't want you around me."
"You're scared to death of falling in love again."
"I am not! You snake. Tracking him down. Not telling me who you are."
"Mommy?" Justin appeared in the bedroom doorway.
"Not now, Justin."
"It wasn't like that," Justin said in a tiny voice. "Bowen didn't track us down. I tracked him down."
She went very still. Very slowly she sat up in bed, and patted the place beside her. Justin came in and sat down.
"How could you have tracked him down?" she asked softly.
Justin held out a worn leather-bound book to her.
"That's Daniel's journal," she said, taking it.
"You gave it to me after he died," Justin said. "Remember?"
She nodded, running her hands over the soft leather cover. "I didn't read it. I couldn't. But I thought it would help you know the kind of man your father was. Your real father," she said, shooting Bowen a look, "which happens to be more than a function of biology."
"Read the page that the corner is bent over on," Justin said.
She turned to it. Bowen leaned close, inhaled the scent of her, prayed whatever was on that page could help them through this moment.
"'I went to pick Ashton up at work today,'" she read out loud from Daniel's journal. "'I was waiting in the coffee room for her, and I picked up the newspaper. There was a color picture of the Mountain Lions' coach, and I found myself looking at it thinking, This is what Justin will look like when he grows up.
"'Then Jerry Childers came in. He saw me looking at the picture and mentioned he'd gone to school with the man. He said he was surprised the man, Bowen Reeve, became a teacher because he'd been so wild throughout their high school years. He mentioned Bowen had fathered a child in his senior year.'" Ashton's voice caught in her throat, and then she continued reading. "'I think this man is Justin's father.'"
Ashton was choking back tears.
"Later on, he finds out for sure," Justin said, looking at his mother with concern. He took the book from her. "Look what he wrote at the end, the very last day before he went on his fishing trip."
Justin thumbed through the pages, then cleared his throat and read.
"'Justin and I played ball after work today. I watched the sun on his hair, the sturdy strength of him, and I know I have a complete stranger to thank for the marvel and the miracle that is my life. Bowen Reeve, wherever you are, thank you. Someday I hope the universe rewards you for the great gift you have given me, though how it could ever find a gift to equal this one is beyond me. Bowen Reeve, may you be happy and blessed.'"
Bowen could feel the sting behind his own eyes. Ashton's hand crept into his, and he held it with all his strength.
"I read Dad's journal lots," Justin said, "and then one day, I just had this idea, maybe he would be in the phone book. And he was. And I didn't really know what to say. I was kind of scared and mixed up. So, I just asked if he was my daddy, and then I'd listen to his voice for as long as I could before he hung up the phone."
"But I don't remember you ever phoning anybody!" Ashton said.
"I set my alarm for midnight and put it under the covers so you wouldn't hear it."
"You were the prank caller!" Ashton guessed softly.
Justin nodded. "Bowen knew right away it was me, but he didn't tell you."
"Why?" She turned her huge, tear-filled eyes on Bowen. "Why didn't you tell me?"
He caught the tear with his fingertip as it chased down her cheek, and lifted it to his lips, tasted it tenderly.
"I didn't think it was possible it was really my boy calling me. So when I first came here, I was just fighting mad. This prank caller was triggering my deepest loss and I wanted it stopped. Of course, as soon as I saw Justin's eyes, I realized maybe I was his father. I wanted to find out for sure before I troubled you. I know it would have been as easy as asking his birthday, but somehow I couldn't bring myself to ask. Not right away."
"Are you glad you're my dad?" Justin asked.
Bowen scooped him up in his arms and held him close to his chest. It felt as if his whole life had been in preparation for this moment.
"Nothing has ever made me happier. Ever. I hope your Mom is going to allow me to be part of your life for a long, long time." He remembered the game plan, suddenly.
He hopped off the bed and ran down the hall. The flowers were scattered all over the place, and he put them back together as best he could.
He went back into the bedroom. She was sitting on the side of the bed now, hugging Justin, and they were both crying.
Bowen got down on one knee and offered her the bedraggled bouquet.
"I was hoping not just that Justin would be part of my life, Ashton. I hoped you would give me a chance, too. To be part of your life and your future. That would be my greatest dream."
She took the flowers and buried her nose in them, and then looked up at him with shining eyes.
In her eyes, Bowen saw the gift.
It was a gift a stranger had wished for him, long ago, before he deserved it, if one could ever deserve such a gift.
A stranger, having no idea how his wish would be fulfilled, had wished Bowen Reeve a world filled to overflowing with love.
And that was what he saw in Ashton Burnadette's eyes. The potential for love beyond his wildest dreams.
Justin, catching the spirit in the room, let out a whoop of celebration and flung himself at Bowen. Since he was on one knee, he couldn't keep his balance and the boy fell on top of him.
And then Ashton was down there on the floor in a heap with them, hugging them both, laughing and crying.
"Do you think he knows?" Justin asked, when the laughter had died and they just lay there all wrapped up in each other, bathed in happiness. "Do you think Dad knows?"
"Yes," Ashton said. "He knows."
"Thanks, Dad," Justin said, softly. And then he turned to Bowen. "Welcome home."
The End