Maureen Child - Colonel Daddy

Surrendering to the inevitable, he followed her gaze to the four women hurtling up the walkway. Each one well into her sixties, they wore jeans or the same kind of tights Evie was wearing. Sweatshirts, T-shirts and running shoes completed the ensembles, and Tom had to admit they looked nothing at all like what he would expect from a bridge club.

“Girls,” Evie announced proudly, “this is Tom.” She paused for effect, then added, “He’s a Marine. A colonel.”

Tom shifted uneasily as four pairs of interested eyes turned on him.

“Where’d you find him, Evie?”

“My, what a looker!”

“Whose is he?”

“Can we keep him?”

This last from a tiny woman with carrot red hair and an eager glint in her eye.

Tom met that look and took an instinctive step backward. Where were all of the nice grandmotherly type women he’d known when he was a kid?

From behind him a door opened and he almost groaned in relief when he heard Kate say, “Tom?”

Taking advantage of Evie’s surprise, Tom pulled his hand free and made a quick move for the blond woman standing in the open doorway. He didn’t remember ever being so glad to see her as he was at this minute. The porch light glimmered on the lightest blond streaks in her hair, making the short, curledunder cut shimmer like silver and gold threads. The dress she wore was enough to destroy a lesser man, and the light, flowery scent he always associated with her enveloped him.

She smiled up at him as she closed and locked her front door behind her and his heart hammered against his chest. Yep, he told himself. Worse than a teenager.

An audible sigh of disappointment came from “the girls.”

“Hello, Kate,” Evie said brightly. “I was just introducing Tom to my friends.”

“So I see,” she said, and fought down a ripple of excitement that shook through her when Tom’s arm brushed against her. She didn’t even want to think about the look she’d seen in his eyes a moment ago.

“Going someplace nice, are you?” Evie asked, her gaze fastening on Kate’s dark blue, brushed-wool dress.

“I don’t know,” Kate said, shooting a look at Tom. “Are we?”

He rubbed one hand across the back of his neck. “I was thinking about the Pasta Pot.”

“Good choice,” Evie told him, then began to herd her friends toward her front door. “Have a nice night. And Kate? Maybe you can join us for cards next week?”

“I’d like that,” Kate said, smiling at the woman who’d become a friend in the past month.

“I didn’t know you played bridge,” Tom muttered.

Before she could correct him, her neighbor did it for her.

“Bridge!” Evie exclaimed on a laugh. “That’s for old women. We play poker, honey, down and dirty.”

“Poker?” Tom repeated, and Kate dipped her head to hide a smile.

“Five-card stud. Wimps and wusses need not apply.” She sailed into her apartment with a wave and a high-pitched “Toodle-oo!”

After a long moment of stunned silence, Tom muttered, “Now there goes a completely terrifying woman.”

The tension she’d felt all afternoon shattered, Kate looked up at him and laughed. “Wonderful, isn’t she?”

“Interesting,” he said, then confessed, “For a minute there, when ‘the girls’ arrived, I knew just what it felt like to be a nicely browned Thanksgiving turkey when dozens of hungry eyes are locked on it.”

Kate looked him up and down quickly, covertly and couldn’t really blame Evie and the others. He looked good enough to eat. Black hair with just a dusting of gray at the temples. A red knit shirt that stretched tight across his muscled chest and broad shoulders was tucked into the narrow waistband of a pair of jeans that hugged his long, truly great legs. No wonder Evie and her friends had briefly captured him. It wasn’t every day a gorgeous man wandered up that walk.

Something inside her quivered, like a guitar string plucked and left to vibrate. Kate swallowed hard and strived for a calm, easy tone in her voice as she said, “When I first moved in, Evie made me dinner every night for a week. Said I shouldn’t have to bother with anything other than unpacking because moving was such a bitch.”

He chuckled, and the sound brought back memories of black nights, starlit skies and soft music. She could almost feel his warm breath on her neck. Almost taste the champagne they’d used to toast each other their last night together. The night they’d made a baby.

A shriek of laughter rose up from next door, and Tom glanced that way, unaware of Kate’s spiraling thoughts. “She’s something, all right,” he said. “I look at her and try to imagine my own mother wearing that outfit.”

“And can’t?” she asked, dropping her keys into her purse and starting down the walk.

“Angelina Candello?” he asked as he followed her. “In neon? I don’t think so.”

“Angelina’s a beautiful name,” she said softly and waited for him to unlock the truck door.

“Yeah.” He held it open for her. “You would have liked her.”

“Would have?”

“She died about six years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged but she caught a glint of remembered pain shining briefly in his eyes. Then he closed the door and walked around the hood to climb in beside her. As he fired the engine and pulled away from the curb, Kate watched him, her mind racing.

Three years, she thought. Three years she’d known him and yet she really knew so little. Swallowing back the sadness welling inside her, she asked quietly, “Your father?”

“Died when I was a kid.” Tom kept his eyes on the road, “Angie raised me. What about you?”

Kate’s hands smoothed the fall of her dress across her knees and watched the ripple of material as she said, “I never knew my father. My mother died when I was fifteen.”

“So we’re both orphans.”

She shot a look at him from beneath lowered lashes. “Yes. I guess we are.”

Another long moment of silence stretched out between them until finally, when they stopped at a red light, Tom spoke. Gently he asked, “Do you realize how little we know about each other?”

“Strange, isn’t it?” Strange and sad and lonely. She’d loved him from the moment she laid eyes on him. She could map every inch of his body from memory. She’d held him inside her, found magic in his touch and was now sheltering his child within her and she didn’t even know his middle name.

“What is your middle name?” she asked abruptly, determined to start mining him for information.

He stared at her, brow furrowed in confusion. “My middle name?”

“It’s a place to start, don’t you think?” She crossed her legs, black silk stockings swishing. She linked her shaking hands around her knee.

Someone behind them honked, and Tom turned his head forward and stepped on the gas.

“Yeah, all right.” He nodded and moved into the left lane. The fingers of his left hand tapped nervously against the steering wheel. “Nice night.”

She stared at him as he steered the truck into a well-lit parking lot. When he didn’t say anything else, she commented, “You’re stalling.”

“Hmm? Why would I be stalling?”

“You don’t want to tell me your middle name.”

“That’s ridiculous.” He snorted a laugh as he pulled into a parking slot, set the brake and killed the engine.

“I think so.”

He winced. “You haven’t heard it yet.”

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. Was he embarrassed? Another piece of information to add to the paltry store of things she knew about the man she loved.

Kate locked her fingers together tighter to keep from reaching out to touch him. In the dim, muted glow of the overhead lights, his face was shadowed but she still read the stubborn reluctance on his features.