Desperately Seeking Daddy Page 8

  Heller laughed, but not because she was amused. “Why, Mother, I’m shocked. Aren’t you the one who’s always said that life without fun and games makes Heller a dull girl? And now you’re worried because I might be playing some? Why don’t you just say what you mean?”

  Fanny puffed out her chest and folded her arms beneath it. “A man like that isn’t for you, Heller. He can’t have no real feelings for you. He feels sorry for you because you live on the wrong side of the tracks and you haven’t got an education, but I know you, Heller. You think ‘cause he pities you and he wants you between the sheets he’s in love with you. Maybe he even tells you that, but you can’t trust it, Heller. He’s going to break your heart, girl, unless you wise up.”

  Heller shook her head, marveling that her mother didn’t realize that she was breaking her heart now, as she had so many times before. Tears gathered in her eyes, but she’d be seventy and blind before she’d let them fall. “It’s nice to know just how well you think of me, Mother,” she said lightly. “I’m to understand that I’m not good enough for a man like Jackson Tyler, whatever he might tell me. Isn’t that about right?”

  “All I’m saying, Heller, is that if you count on him for more than fun and games, you’re going to get disappointed.”

  Heller leaned forward. “Well, you don’t have to worry, Mother, because there’s nothing to this. Carmody’s talking out of both sides of his head, as usual, and that’s all it is, talk!”

  “Carmody’s not the only one talking,” Fanny said complacently. “And where there’s smoke, my girl, there’s fire, you can count on it.”

  “Not this time!” Heller insisted. “You think what you want about me, but Jack Tyler is a kind, caring, decent man.”

  “Yeah, well, those kind gotta have it, too,” said a new voice.

  Heller turned on Boomer with fire in her eye. “I’m telling you he’s not like that!”

  Boomer raked bloodshot eyes over her suggestively. “He’s a man, ain’t he?”

  “A gentleman!” she snapped, bracing both arms against the countertop.

  “All that means,” Boomer jeered, showing a broken tooth, “is he won’t respect you in the morning, no matter what he tells you the night before.”

  Heller trembled with outrage. It was so unfair! They were talking about Jack as if he were a cold, scheming lecher! They seemed to think God had given them the right to make assumptions about that kind, good man: her mother, who had never denied herself anything she ever wanted, whether it be in bottles or jeans; and a man so shallow and degenerate that he actually believed he had a responsibility to moralize, for his friends, the sexual performance of any female stupid and tasteless enough to oblige him!

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” she lectured, dividing her glare between them before settling it on her mother. “For starters, Jack and I aren’t involved that way. Secondly…” She shifted her glare to Boomer. “A gentleman’s thoughts and feelings are as foreign to you as Latin!”

  “A gentleman is he?” Boomer sneered. “What kind of gentleman scopes out the mothers of little kiddies for a good time?” He slid a look at Fanny. “Wonder how many other skirts he’s got under that way?”

  Heller lost it. She had to go up on tiptoe and lunge forward to get a good swing, but she slapped him hard enough to actually send him staggering backward into the candy display. He dropped the bottled six-pack, spewing beer all over. “Get out!” she screamed. “Get out now!”

  “God, you’re crazy!” he exclaimed, but he said it picking his way hopscotch-style toward the door.

  Fanny was bawling about getting her spandex pants and best red high heels wet, but Heller wasn’t hearing any of it. “You, too!” She swung a finger toward the door imperiously. “And don’t come back talking that filth!”

  Fanny huffed and whined and struck belligerent poses, but she was retreating the whole while. “I was trying to help!” she proclaimed from the door.

  “Lies don’t help anyone, Mama!” Heller retorted.

  Fanny stuck her nose in the air, whipped her bleached platinum hair off her shoulders and spun away. Agitation enhanced her wiggle to the point that she nearly fell off her stilettos.

  Heller doubled up both fists and pounded the countertop. Damn that Carmody! He’d done this, and he’d done it for pure spite. Anger quickly gave way to despair as she thought over all her mother and Boomer had said. Dear God, Carmody was going around telling everyone that she was sleeping with Jack- Tyler, and like her own mother, they were bound to think he was taking advantage of her. She closed her eyes, moaning at the full implication of what was being said.

  Lake City was like every other little town in the world. Gossip was a main pastime. They’d tear Jack up one side and down the other, and a man in his position couldn’t afford that! Heavens, what was she going to do? This was all her fault. If she hadn’t accepted that ride from him, hadn’t mentioned that she’d have liked to check on the kids, hadn’t let him kiss her, he wouldn’t have come back, Carmody wouldn’t have walked in on them, none of this would be happening!

  She wondered if Jack had heard the talk yet. If not, it was just a matter of time. She put her hands to her head, desperate to find a solution—for his sake. But what could she do? What could she do?

  Jack was feeling pretty chipper. He’d stayed away five whole days, and this after putting the fear of God in Carmody Moore. His knee was feeling fine, which meant that he could walk almost normally, and for the last twenty-four hours he’d hardly thought about her, not more than five or six times, anyway, and never once on the golf course. Of course he’d only played nine holes. The guys had teased him, implying that he was saving himself for something—or someone—more interesting, but the truth was, golf just wasn’t as much fun lately as it used to be.

  Jack parked between two pickup trucks at the curb in front of the store and got out. As usual there were half a dozen people in the store. Most of them were kids, though, and like most kids, they grouped together, whispering and giggling and pretty much having fun. They recognized Jack the moment he walked through the door and filled the place with greeting.

  “Hello, Mr. Tyler!”

  “Hi, Mr. Tyler!”

  “How are you, Mr. Tyler?”

  He lifted a hand in greeting. “Well, hello, kids. How are you enjoying your summer?”

  “Great!”

  “Great!”

  “We’re playing volleyball down at the lake.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. Have a good time. School will start again before you know it.”

  They made gagging, moaning sounds, which made him chuckle as he strolled around the counter to the side of the enclosure, which Heller had blocked off. He noted that she had thus far ignored him, but he put it down to her being busy punching out lottery tickets. He leaned against the counter and waited. Before long she finished with the customer. He caught her eye, winked and smiled.

  “Can I do something for you?” she asked blandly.

  He nodded, grinning. “I can wait, though.”

  She said nothing as she turned back to the other side of the counter. The kids all made complicated purchases. The boys went for tins of bubble gum meant to resemble chewing tobacco and little tablets of temporary, press-on tattoos, all of which had to be investigated to be sure that they were “way cool.” The girls were more concerned with spending every penny in their possession without bothering to calculate anything, so that every time Heller gave them a total and they found that they still had money, they produced another piece of candy or bag of chips.

  In the end Jack gave them seventeen cents to finalize the last purchase and get them out of there. The two men waiting to buy packaged sandwiches and cans of beans for lunch were grateful, so Jack magnanimously waited for them to conclude their business before claiming Heller’s attention for himself again. He hoped to have a private moment with her, but the frequency with which customers kept walking through the door made that impossible, so he se
ttled for what he could get.

  “So what was it you wanted?” she asked almost disinterestedly.

  He took that for an attempt to sound businesslike and leaned forward, keeping his voice low. “What I want,” he said confidentially, “is to take you out. What do you say to dinner and a movie?”

  Her expression for a moment was almost sad, but then that cocky, strong-willed Heller took over and she tossed back the long ponytail that had fallen over one shoulder. “Just when did you expect me to work in something like that, Tyler? Do they show movies at three a.m.?”

  He had thought of that. “Don’t you get a night off? It doesn’t make any difference to me which night, you know. My time’s my own for several more weeks now.”

  “Well, lucky for you,” she said wryly. “My time, any free time that I have, belongs to my children. I’m afraid that dinner, the movie and anything or anyone else that takes me away from them is out. So—no, thank you.” She turned away from him, smiled at a thin, middle-aged woman who wanted a pack of cigarettes and began chatting as if she hadn’t just shot him down in flames.

  Jack was too stunned for a moment to do anything but stare at her back. Then slowly the truth sunk in. She didn’t want anything more to do with him. Probably, now that he thought about it, she never had, but he’d been too caught up in his own attraction to her to realize that. He turned away from the counter without a word and left the store. He was sitting in his car, blindly trying to fit the key into the ignition, when the full import of what had just happened hit him.

  What a dolt he was! The woman had never been interested in him. He had shoved his way into her life without the slightest invitation from her, and he’d kept shoving his way in until, the very first time he’d given her an option, she’d calmly rejected him. It was Lillian all over again.

  He’d been so sure that they’d been right for each other, Lillian the perky, blond cheerleader, him the varsity football player. She had been seeing the captain of the team, a guy whom Jack had known to be a bona fide jerk, so he had bided his time. Sure enough the jerk had dumped her, and Jack had stepped in to pick up the pieces. He hadn’t waited for an invitation, and he hadn’t taken no for an answer. He’d seen that she needed someone, and he’d decided to be that someone, period. Even after he’d dried her tears and sworn that she was the most attractive collegiate cheerleader in the nation, she had resisted him. But he’d worn her down. Right after he’d been named one of the top players in the nation and guaranteed a place in the professional draft, they’d gotten married, and for a little while, everything had been fine.

  Then he’d blown the knee and the possibility of a pro career with it. Oddly enough, she had been much more disappointed than he had. He’d felt that it wasn’t the end of the world. Football wasn’t everything, after all, and he had his education to fall back on. But Lillian had never bargained for marriage to a schoolteacher. She’d vehemently denounced him for a failure and claimed that she could’ve had her old boyfriend back if she’d only tried, which, thanks to Jack, she hadn’t done. It didn’t help that the old boyfriend was quarterbacking an expansion team. Even then Jack had been unwilling to give up, though.

  He’d honestly believed that his marriage had been worth fighting for, and he’d set out to win her all over again, even going so far as to take a job with her father’s real estate firm. But they’d both been miserable. He’d hated selling real estate, and Lillian had hated being married to a disappointment. In the end he’d told her that he couldn’t go on doing something he hated. He’d decided to teach, and he very much wanted to begin this new phase of his life with her at his side. If she couldn’t be happy with that, however, he would give her a divorce and divide the assets they had acquired between them. She’d grabbed the money and walked away without the slightest compunction. She’d even taken a savage satisfaction in telling him that she had never loved him. She’d wanted to be married to a sport star, one of the American elite, and he had looked like a winner so she’d married him. But that was all he’d ever meant to her, and if he had just listened to her in the beginning, he’d have known that.

  Well, at least part of that painful lesson had pounded its way into his head. He might have blundered into Heller Moore’s life without thinking, but he wasn’t about to follow up that colossal mistake with another. He could thank Lillian for saving him from making a total fool of himself for a second time. It was good to know that he hadn’t suffered that experience for nothing. That knowledge did not, however, quite mitigate the very real pain he was feeling at the moment.

  “Think of it as reinforcement,” he counseled himself aloud. He’d think twice, thrice and more before pulling this stunt again. He’d finally learned the full lesson. He couldn’t save the world, after all, and just because he was needed didn’t mean that he was wanted. Most importantly, he must never ever again assume that just because he found himself interested in a certain female the feeling was mutual. In fact, he probably ought to swear off that kind of involvement for good. He apparently just did not inspire romantic thoughts in the opposite sex.

  He started the car, backed it out and drove away, telling himself that this bleak mood would soon lift. He hadn’t lost anything he’d ever really had, after all, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that he’d done some good, at least. If he hadn’t actually lightened Heller’s load permanently, well, that wasn’t his problem. And only a fool would wish that it was.

  She saw that she had hurt him. It was in his eyes. The pupils were so wide that they left only narrow bands of his green-gray irises, and it seemed to her that through them she could see straight into his heart. He was confused, and he was hurt, and in some indefinable way, he was embarrassed. She was trembling when she turned away from him, but she’d had lots of practice at maintaining that tough shell she’d encased herself in as protection against so much of the world. It was usually automatic, but not this time. She’d had to use a great deal of concentrated effort to keep to her course. And she was surprised at how very much she wanted to take it all back. If he’d spoken in those last awful moments, she feared she might have dissolved in tears of recrimination and apology. With relief and regret, she felt him walk away, and strangely, as soon as he moved away, she could not take her eyes off him.

  She watched him grapple with her cold rebuff in a kind of horrified fascination. He just sat in the car for several long minutes, staring off into space, and as awful as she found the sight, she couldn’t quite look away. It had mattered to him, she had mattered to him. Even after that awful scene with Carmody, he had still wanted to see her. She marveled at him and wished that it was not so. It would have been so much easier if he had washed his hands of her and kept his distance. To know that he was able to care so generously made him all the more attractive.

  When at last he drove away, she silently pronounced herself free of guilt and regret. It was for his own good, after all. How else could she combat Carmody’s vicious slander except to cut the connection? There was no point in continuing it, anyway. Nothing real or lasting could ever come of it, no matter how big a heart the man had, because as much as Heller hated to admit it, her mother was right.

  Heller knew that she wasn’t good enough for a man like Jackson Tyler. How ever she looked at it, she couldn’t get away from the facts: she was a high school dropout of unsuitable background; she had three young children to support due to a very messy divorce; and she was still not free of the aftereffects of it. Her mother contributed to Heller’s unsuitability. Indeed, Heller’s parents were notorious in Lake City.

  The family tendency toward alcoholism and wildness was well known. When her younger brother had died drunk behind the wheel of a fast car, before he was even old enough to acquire a driver’s license, the consensus of the local community was that it was a miracle it hadn’t happened even sooner. It seemed that the only ones shocked by what had happened were her parents. Heller still remembered with painful vividness how her parents had shown up at his funeral so
plastered that the minister had angrily taken it upon himself to delay the service long enough to pour hot coffee down them until they could be trusted to behave properly.

  That particular episode had been the talk around town for months. The buzz had finally begun to die down about a year later, but had been revived when, on the anniversary of her brother’s death, her father had revived the gossip by literally drinking himself into a coma. He had died the next day. The official cause of death was listed as alcohol poisoning. Fanny seemed bent on following her husband down that very same path.

  No, Jack didn’t need or deserve her kind of trouble. He was a well-respected educator in the community, and she could not in good conscience allow herself to jeopardize that. She owed him too much to let that happen.

  She couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for herself, though. He had really been interested in her. It wasn’t just the white knight in him, and she refused to believe that it was mere lust. He had actually asked her out on a real date, dinner and a movie. No man had ever taken her to dinner and a movie in the same night. Probably, no man ever would.

  She went through the motions of taking care of customers, plying them with meaningless chatter and false good cheer, while telling herself that she had done the right thing. She could even be proud of having put his welfare above her own, especially as it would have been so easy to let him sweep her along in the wake of his generosity. If that didn’t do much to ease the pain she felt, well, she supposed that time would eventually take care of it.

  Precious time.

  The one commodity of which she never seemed to have enough. No day was long enough, no week sufficient for its needs, while relief from the relentless effort of enduring always seemed months, years away. She watched her children’s lives flying by, mired in regret because she seemed to share so little of it with them. She both longed for and dreaded the far-off day when their needs would consume less of her hard-earned salary and she could grant them more of her attention. Time was ever her enemy.