and desperate measure.
Now they were on this dirt road lined with heavy timber, in the embrace of deep forest. The timber thinned and then gave way unexpectedly. The road was lined on either side with roses. The bushes were huge, with flowers—a cascade of pink and yellow and red. Brian didn’t remember the roses. He thought it might have been winter when he last ventured down this road.
But now, in the last days of June, the flowers bloomed in untamed abundance. Their intoxicating scent poured through the open truck windows, wrapped around him, and filled him with the most dangerous of things—hope.
The vet had said to forget it. The puppy was not thriving. He would not live. He had recommended a merciful end.
Michelle had turned away at that pronouncement, tears spilling black down her cheeks as their hot saltiness melted her heavy-handed mascara. Brian had tried to touch her and take the puppy, but she had closed her body around it like a shield, refusing to part with it or be comforted. She had rushed by him and gone to sit in the truck.
Brian Kemp was not a man who asked favors of the universe.
But at that moment, watching through the window of the vet’s office as his niece sat hunched in the truck, he realized that she was still such a child—barely thirteen—and he felt a sense of failure and helplessness that were not totally unexpected. Hadn’t he known right from the start that he was probably not a good choice for the job of guardian? He had a track record of failing to bring happiness to the female of the species.
He was a cop, and even though Victoria was not a huge city—with a population of only 300,000—Brian dealt with his fair share of tough and terrible stuff. That was his job. He considered himself good at it. His lack of sensitivity was something he’d considered an asset in his life—right up until now. Now he realized that nothing about handling tragedy and chaos on a nearly daily basis had given him even the smallest inkling of how to handle a young girl’s breaking heart.
So, standing alone at that window, he had been humbled and amazed to find himself saying out loud, just as if something or someone was listening, “I don’t know what to do.”
It was a horribly hard admission for a man to make. But especially for one who prided himself in knowing how to take charge of even the most disastrous of situations. The truth was that most of the disasters he dealt with weren’t in any way personal. In fact, he was something of an expert at avoiding anything that smacked even slightly of the R word—as in relationships.
A man with no track record when it came to others did not a good guardian make. But six months ago his niece had been orphaned when her parents—Brian’s brother Kevin and Kevin’s wife Amanda—had been killed in a car accident. Brian was Michelle’s only living relative. She’d arrived, not as the little girl of Brian’s once-a-year Christmas memories, but as a young woman full of the hostility that comes from losing too much.
A desperate man, Brian had surprised her with the puppy two weeks ago, hoping it might give her something to do over the quickly approaching summer holidays and, deep inside he hoped it might be some sort of answer to the problems in their relationship. It had looked like it might, too.
After pretending indifference for five minutes, Michelle had named the golden retriever O’Henry, and the pair had become inseparable. The dog slept tucked under her arm. Brian caught her trying to smuggle it in her bag to school. Sometimes he heard her laughing, and it wrenched his heart that she wouldn’t do it in front of him, as if laughter was something she needed to feel guilty about.
Now, this tiny puppy, the life preserver Brian had tossed to his niece, was going to be taken from her, too?
“So, if you know what to do, show me. Please,” he had said, and then frowned at how the words sounded suspiciously like a prayer. His frown deepened when a memory tickled his mind. Of another girl, a very long time ago, bent over another dog.
She might not even live down this road anymore. It had been at least fourteen years since he had been here. They had both been in high school. A lot could happen in that many years.
The road opened abruptly into a clearing, and Brian felt his mouth drop open. It was the same place, but transformed, whether by season or by time he was not entirely sure.
The road of his memory had not ended in a place like this. This road, the one his desperate heart had led him down, ended in enchantment.
The clearing was filled with flowers, topsy-turvy, cascading, peeping, climbing. Long grasses were braided with dainty yellow blooms. There were clumps of reds and oranges, towers of blues and indigos. He recognized some of them—the deep purple of Canterbury bells, the sassy white of daisies—but most he could not name. Colors, wild to mild, danced together, and scents sweet and sharp mingled, tickling his nostrils and his mind.
Off to the side of the blissful abundance and embraced by the deeper greens and shadows of towering cedars, was a cottage. It squatted on a stone foundation, small, steep-gabled, green, blending into the space around it.
Even Michelle momentarily forgot her distress over the puppy. “Oh-my-god,” she said, her favorite expression. “It’s awesome.”
“You almost expect seven little men to come trundling out, don’t you?”
He’d managed to say the wrong thing again, because his niece shot him the ever popular you-are-hopeless look. Did she think he had mistaken her for a baby because of the reference to Snow White? He wanted to ask, to try and cross this minefield between them, but she had already fenced him out and returned her attention to O’Henry.
A miniature pickup truck—red and shiny—marked the parking area, which was a half-circle of gravel. Brian pulled in beside the vehicle and cut the engine. Bird song, riotous with joy, filled the air. A butterfly flew in one window of the truck and out the other. He watched its crooked, floating flight.
“Is that her?” Michelle asked.
He turned his head toward his niece. She was looking out the near window and he followed her hopeful gaze. Then, despite the tranquility of the scene, he felt his own heart plummet.
So, she was not here. He should have guessed that fourteen years was too long to expect a person to stay in one place. He should have guessed that a new owner, with an eye for creating beauty and a green thumb, had taken over. He should have guessed that his memory of a hardscrabble little cottage and weed-filled acres had been more accurate.
For that couldn’t be Jessica Moran, rising out of the flowers with her straw sunhat askew.
Jessica had been a short, pudgy girl, hopelessly homely, her hair a peculiar shade of red that had hung long, with untamable bumps and waves in all the wrong places.
The woman who emerged from the flowers was as lithe as a woodland sprite, her naked shoulders slender, tanned and toned. She wore a white sleeveless tank that molded to her small shapely chest and hugged the line of her flat tummy. She had on those pants that men didn’t quite get—something between shorts and slacks that ended just above a shapely calf.
Capris, he remembered Michelle correcting him with a roll of her eyes when he had called them pedal pushers.
The slacks were white, too, or had started out that way, but were now smudged dark at the knee.
The woman took off her hat as she came toward them, and her short hair sprang free and danced around her head in a fury of cheerful-looking auburn curls.
She had a basket over her wrist that overflowed with freshly cut flowers and greenery. Under different circumstances, he might have appreciated her loveliness and that of the scene a great deal more. But all he could think now, was, It wasn’t her.
He got out of the truck, and she skidded to a halt. Her eyes went very wide, and then she glanced over her shoulder, looking like a deer who wanted to bolt back into the safety of the deep green forest that surrounded this little meadow.
He was a big man, and he knew his size could be intimidating, especially to a woman who was in the middle of nowhere and not within shouting