Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

He knew he’d be different. He had to be.

Ten years later he and Lilli were married. Eugene grew fond of his son-in-law. “I swear, John,” he would say, “sometimes I forget you’re even a Pembroke.”

He’d lived to be reminded.

Now, so many years later, John ran his hand through his thinning gray hair and wiped the sweat from his brow, pushing aside thoughts of what might have been. He had to focus on what was. His wife had disappeared ten years into their marriage, and he’d become a bum and a wanderer and no kind of father to their only daughter.

Looking around him, he realized he’d missed the hundredth running of the Chandler Stakes. He glanced at the scoreboard. The homely bay had won. If he’d bet just fifty bucks…

“Look at yourself,” he whispered. “What’s become of you?”

He pulled himself away from the fence and almost ran straight into a brick wall of a man. He started to apologize, then the fellow said, “John Pembroke,” as if he were a ghost.

John squinted. “Who are you?”

The man smiled, not a particularly friendly smile. “I take it you don’t recognize me. I’m not surprised. It’s been a while.”

But John only needed a minute, a chance to pull himself back out of his memories and self-recrimination. He was good at faces, and he’d read the book on Joe Cutler, and had heard his younger brother had quit college and gone into security work.

“Zeke Cutler,” he said. “You and your brother came to my office looking for my mother.”

They’d refused to tell him why, and he’d sent them packing. A couple of country boys from Cedar Springs, Tennessee. Mattie didn’t need them pestering her. She’d never mentioned if the two brothers from her hometown had found her, and he’d never mentioned he’d seen them. Mattie was entitled to her discomfort with her past. John had enough with his.

He looked at the man Zeke Cutler had become. It couldn’t be easy being Joe Cutler’s little brother. “What do you want with me?”

“I thought,” Zeke said in his calm, efficient way, “you might want to walk up to the Pembroke with me.”

Given his daughter’s disposition, John decided having a security and protection consultant at his side was a pretty good idea. Besides, he wanted to talk to Zeke, find out if they were in Saratoga Springs for similar reasons.

Scratching his head, John appraised Cutler’s impressive physique and hoped to hell they were on the same side. Slaying dragons had never been his long suit.

“This way,” Zeke said.

“Yes,” John said, stupidly irritated at being treated like a stranger. “I know the way.”

Dani didn’t relax until she was on her pine-scented driveway. When she reached her cottage, she paced in the garden, debating all the different reasons her father could be in town that didn’t have to do with her, her missing keys or Zeke Cutler.

“You should learn to relax.”

She whirled around at the sound of her father’s voice. He walked through the gate, looking as devil-may-care as ever. “Pop,” she said. “How can I relax with-”

But she stopped midsentence when Zeke followed her father into the garden.

Her father walked past her to the kitchen door. “Sit down before you run out of gas, Dani. I’m going to get something to eat. Then you can skewer me, okay?”

He disappeared into the kitchen, and Zeke came onto the stone terrace, moving with that surprising grace and economy. “We walked up together from the track,” he said. “Your father’s an interesting man. He told me he used to play spy in the rose garden when he was a kid.”

“I don’t understand him.”

“Oh, I think you do. Maybe too well.”

“Are you packed yet?”

“Haven’t even seen the damage. Think I should sue the Pembroke?”

The humor danced at the back of his eyes and played at the corners of his mouth. He had a way of making her think things and notice things-about him, about herself-that she’d prefer not to think or notice.

When she got rid of him and her father, she’d call Mattie and insist they have a heart-to-heart talk about the Cutler brothers of Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

Her father emerged from the kitchen with a peach, a paring knife and a paper towel. “You know, you don’t have much over me in lifestyle. I scoured the entire kitchen for a napkin and had to settle for a paper towel.”

“I only have cloth napkins.”

“La-di-da.” He plopped down at her umbrella table and ate a slice of peach off the end of the paring knife. He’d lost weight in the months since Dani had last seen him. He had a gaunt look that made her wonder if he shared her affliction of insomnia. His clothes seemed even more threadbare than usual. “Place looks good. First time your mother and I took you up here after you could talk, you said you’d paint the cottage purple. You were just a little tot. How the hell old are you now?”

“Thirty-four.”

He shuddered. “I must be getting old. Well, kid, it’s good to see you. Going to have a seat, or are you planning to give me the third degree standing up?”

Zeke appeared to be observing the proceedings between father and daughter with great amusement. He’d already taken a seat at the table.

Still keyed up, Dani brushed crumbs off the table.

“You’ll give yourself ulcers,” John said.

She shot him a look. “Why are you here?”

“In Saratoga?” He lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug that was not convincingly innocent. He’d always been a notoriously rotten bluffer, in life and in poker. “It’s blistering hot this time of year in Arizona.”

Weak, Dani thought. Very weak. “You could afford a plane ticket?”

“I’m here.”

“It was hot in Arizona last summer and the summer before.”

“The truth is,” her father said, “the thought of coming here used to scare me to death. I had enough reminders of your mother in my life. Lately, though…” He leaned back and stared up at the clear, beautiful blue sky. “I don’t know. Reporters have been pestering me for a quote about Lilli, the Chandler Stakes, even that gold key you found. I suppose it’s all been working on me. I woke up the other morning and thought, my God, it really has been twenty-five years.” He set his paring knife down on the table. “So I booked a flight and here I am.”

“Nice try, Pop,” Dani said.

He ignored her. “This place-” Squinting, he looked around the transformed garden, then waved one hand, as if to take in all of his great-grandfather’s property. “It isn’t what it used to be. It’s changed. Everything around here’s changed. I don’t feel as if I’m stepping back into my past.”

He was lying. Dani knew it, and so, she felt, did Zeke. It wouldn’t have surprised her if her father had already told Zeke the real reason why he was in Saratoga. He had always found it easier to talk to anyone but his own daughter. They were so different. For years she’d struggled to embrace the past-to remember her mother in every detail, to relive every moment of their too-short time together. All her father wanted was to run as far as he could from the past. Yet now here he was in Saratoga, immersed in it.

But Dani didn’t press the point. “Did Mattie send you?”

“I haven’t talked to her in a couple of weeks.”

“Then she called Nick about the burglary, and he sent you.”

John sighed, but it couldn’t have been a surprise to him that she understood the peculiar dynamics between him and his parents-and where and how she fit into their jumbled worlds. “They’re worried,” he said.

“Nobody needs to worry about me.”

“But they do. We’re your family, Dani.”