Table of Contents

Cover Page

Excerpt

Title Page

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Copyright

October twenty-sixth marked Corinne’s fifteenth birthday.

It fell on a Saturday. An afternoon at the beach, complete with a picnic supplied by Hally, was planned.

Two nights ago, Corinne had made the final payback of the money she had “borrowed” from the cookie jar. She had earned it by cleaning Hally’s mother’s studio and washing her car every week, in addition to baby-sitting the kids next door every Monday after school. She was also getting paid now for doing chores at home.

Mike owed it all to Hally. The woman was subtly, but inexorably becoming a major presence in their lives. A friend to his daughter. But what to him?

It was a question that lately had been robbing him of sleep. Right along with, What did he want her to be to him?

Love, Marriage and Family 101
Anne Peters

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ANNE PETERS

shares her Pacific Northwest home with her husband, Manfred, and their aged dog, Adrienne. Anne treasures her family and friends, her private times, her creativity and, last but by no means least, her readers.

Chapter One

Mr. Michael John Parker was fifteen minutes late.

Through the glass partition of her socalled office—the only private office available—Halloran McKenzie glared at the large clock on the far wall of the school gymnasium, fingertips doing an impatient drumroll on her battered metal desk. It was her opinion that since she’d been accommodating enough to agree to a meeting after school hours, the least Corinne Parker’s father could do was to show up on time.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plans of her own. This was the first day of her aerobics class and it was due to start in forty-five minutes. She owed it to her hips and thighs to be there. Not to mention that Garnet Bloomfield would think she’d once again reneged on her commitment to lose those saddlebags.

Impatience urged Hally to her feet. She paced the confines of her cubicle, thinking it was a good thing she’d at least had the foresight to change into her workout gear. This way she could be out of here and on her way the minute she was done laying down a few pertinent ground rules to the father of her truant young student. Provided he showed up within the next—Hello!

Hally’s dark thoughts careened to a halt as, through the glass in her door, her eyes homed in on the man dodging the junior varsity basketball team’s practice shots as he strode hurriedly toward her office in the back corner of the gym. Well, well.

If that was Mr. Parker—and who else would be bearing down on her office at this hour?—then he was everything she’d ever imagined a typical corporate army’s top general to look like: grim-faced and pulled-up socks to the max.

In other words, precisely the kind of father most redblooded teenagers would feel honor-bound to rebel against, not that that excused Corinne Parker’s absences and chronic tardiness. It did throw some light, however, on the girl’s penchant for grunge fashion and hacked-off bleached hair. No doubt she wanted to spite a father who expected his fourteen-year-old to wear pinafores and Mary Jane shoes.

Who should know better than she?

Hally pulled back from the glass a bit lest the man catch her watching his approach. She was appalled by the strength and instantaneousness of the antipathy she felt toward him, a man she’d never met It had been years, after all, since she had been a rebellious fourteen-year-old with a father whose only resemblance to the man approaching her office lay in the sternly set facial expression, the immaculate business suit and flawless haircut:

All of which, admittedly, provided quite a startling contrast to the sweaty group of scruffy adolescents he was skirting with preoccupied grace and agility.

And to their coach, too.

Oh, for heaven’s sake! Moving away from the door altogether, Hally impatiently chastised herself for that disloyal observation. After all, Gilbert Smith was her…well, “boyfriend” would do as well as anything else. And when he wasn’t in ratty sweats and red as a beet from yelling at his team, Gil looked quite presentable, too. She on the other hand…

Hally glanced down at herself dressed in workout clothes and was suddenly irrationally self-conscious about her appearance. She wished she hadn’t changed clothes, after all. More, she wished she already weighed five pounds less so that she wouldn’t look as if she were stuffed into her leotard like a five-foot sausage into its casing. And though she scolded herself for these unprecedented and idiotic thoughts and feelings, she frantically cast around for something with which to cover as much of her lessthan-perfect shape as possible.

She spotted a denim shirt and snatched it up. She had one arm in a sleeve when, after a cursory knock, the door opened.

“Ms. McKenzie?” It was the GQ cutout, of course. Entering at her distracted nod, he introduced himself. “Mike Parker. Sorry I’m late. Traffic…”

“That’s all right.” Struggling to appear composed, Hally fought to get her other arm into a maddeningly uncooperative garment.

“Here, let me…”

Mike Parker was helping her into the shirt with efficient courtesy before Hally could do more than stammer a flustered, “Th-thank you.”

Up close, the man was physically even more imposing than he had seemed across the gym. He towered over her by a good head. Heat radiated from him—it had been ninety degrees out at noon and now it was certainly hotter. He smelled of clean male, starched linen and crisp aftershave. Hally stepped away from him the instant her shirt settled across her shoulders.

Excruciatingly aware of the glance with which he swept her leotarded frame, she retreated behind her desk and sat, all the while bemoaning her uncharacteristic lapse in professional appearance and demeanor. Ordinarily, given her lack of physical stature and—to her—terminally cute blondness, to establish credibility she always strove to dress and conduct herself with reserved dignity during first meetings such as this.

Very much afraid that in this case she had totally blown it, she tried to regain some lost ground with a cool smile and a hand gesture that silently invited her visitor to sit, as well.

He didn’t. Instead he disconcerted her anew by ambling over to the pegboard wall to study her displayed diplomas. Well, let him, she thought, trying for unconcern. She had, after all, graduated with honors. And anyway, this meeting was about him, not her.

“Mr. Parker.” Hally tightly folded her hands on the desk. Her posture was as erect as ever her mother could have wished it to be. “I’m afraid I have another appointment in a few minutes, so I’ll come straight to the point. Your daughter Corinne…”

“Is lucky to have you for a teacher,” her visitor disarmed her by interrupting. “If your credentials are anything to go by.” He went to the chair and sat.

Not sure how to reply to this double-edged compliment, Hally looked down at her folded hands. Noting whiteknuckled tension there, she willed herself to relax. She decided to forego a reply and to stick to the subject at hand.

“Corinne is a very troubled young woman,” she said. She forced herself to levelly meet the man’s eyes and was momentarily thrown off guard by the flicker of pain her words seemed to cause. It was masked so quickly by an expression of wary neutrality, however, that she decided she’d only imagined it in the first place.

Certainly his tone revealed nothing but skepticism as he said, “Isn’t two weeks a bit soon to make that kind of sweeping assessment, Ms. McKenzie? After all, Cory is not only new to Ben Franklin High, being a freshman, but new to Long Beach, too. We only moved here a month ago.

“I understand that,” Hally said. “And believe me, I’m not the kind of teacher or counselor whose first course of action is a complaint to the student’s parents.”

“I have only your word for that, though, don’t I?”

“No, Mr. Parker, you can check with the principal, too.” Hally kept her tone pleasant but firm. Parker’s bristling defensiveness, identical to every other parent’s reaction to criticism of their child, was exactly what she’d needed to relax and regain a professional perspective. This was familiar ground and she trod upon it with confidence. “I’ve taught here at Ben Franklin for seven years—”

“This isn’t about teaching, though, is it?” Michael Parker injected stiffly. “It’s about you psychoanalyzing a student you barely know and—”

“Mr. Parker,” Hally interrupted. She was not about to let him put her back on the defensive. “Quite aside from the fact that I do have a degree in psychology—”

“A bachelor degree,” Mike Parker said dismissively. “With all due respect, Ms. McKenzie, they’re a dime a dozen.”

“Nevertheless.” In spite of her resolve to remain unruffled, Hally began to seethe with resentment but didn’t bother to point out to the man what he already knew very well from looking at her diplomas—namely her Masters in English. “I have taught school for seven years and I don’t need to be a therapist to know that Corinne is having emotional problems beyond those related to a new environment”

Leaning forward, she drove home her point. “Are you aware, Mr. Parker, that out of the nine days school has been in session, your daughter has been absent four and tardy the rest?”

“Impossible.” Betraying emotion at last, Parker surged to his feet. “I personally drop her at the front steps of this school every morning. Let me see this.”

Hally reflexively shrank back as he reached across the desk and snatched up Corinne’s file. But though she had tensed to object to his high-handedness, she took a deep breath instead and held her tongue.

Let him see for himself the lengths to which a child will go to defy an overly controlling parent, she thought snidely.

And was ashamed of her pettiness the moment she saw the betrayed and thunderstruck expression with which the girl’s father thumbed through the ream of obviously forged handwritten excuses in the file.

After several minutes of heavy silence, he muttered something harsh and succinct. He tossed the folder down on her desk. He turned away from Hally’s gaze, one hand rubbing his mouth, the other clamped to the back of his neck. After a moment he dropped both hands with an audible sigh and the set of his shoulders lost some of its starch.

“I’m sorry,” he said, flicking Hally a dark, sideways glance that, combined with the emotion-rough timbre of his voice, shook her up a lot more than it had any right to. “I had no idea….”

“I understand.” Hally felt oddly self-conscious suddenly in the presence of this man’s bewilderment and hurt, as if she’d trespassed on some private moment of grief. She felt bad, too, about her initial snap judgment of him. The unsettling resemblance she thought she had discerned between him and her father had long since been dispelled. She knew now that they were nothing alike. Mike Parker, whatever else he might or might not be, cared about this daughter. Whereas James McKenzie….

Well. Hally shook off the disturbing comparisons. Who knew? Feebly, she gestured to the phony excuses in the file. “Could anyone else have written these? A grandmother, or—”

“No.” Mike Parker went to his chair and heavily dropped into it. With his elbows propped on spread knees he bent his head and, his features taut with strain, stared fixedly at the fisted hand he cradled in his other.

Because they were extremely large hands, Hally stared at them, too. Raw-boned farmer’s hands, they struck her as incongruous, sticking out as they did from the sleeves of an unmistakably hand-tailored suit. And they presented another difference between this man and her father whose hands were graceful and slim—the hands of a surgeon.

“Cory and I are alone, Ms. McKenzie.”

“Yes…” It was in the file, of course. She glanced at his face. It was shuttered, devoid of emotion. Still, Hally’s marshmallow heart went out to him even as her mind, after a quick glance at the clock, registered the fact she’d have to cut this conference short right now if she hoped to make her aerobics class on time.

But, of course, she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. They hadn’t resolved anything yet. She sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” His glance acknowledged her sympathy, but his tone made it clear he wouldn’t welcome pity, in case that was offered, too.

It wouldn’t have been. Mostly because Michael John Parker looked too tough in spite of his polish to be in need of it, or welcome it. His nose had clearly been broken at some point in his past and never been properly set, giving him the kind of face—interesting rather than handsome—that would draw second glances from men as well as from women. Second glances…but very little empathy.

Yet, Hally, though she fought against it, was filled with it. She’d always been a bleeding heart. “How long since…”

“A year.” He spoke curtly, still staring at his hands. It was obvious he didn’t relish her questions and resented the necessity to answer them.

Hally sighed and stifled a need to apologize. After all, she wasn’t idly prying, she was doing her job. Unfortunately for Michael Parker, it required that they communicate beyond the customary impersonal chitchat of strangers.

“Corinne is your only child?”

A mute nod confirmed what hadn’t really been a question anyway. No siblings were listed in the records, and something about the girl’s solitariness and oddly mature self-possession marked her an only child.

“And the two of you had no problems prior to your move to Long Beach?”

“I didn’t say that”

“Then you did have problems?”

“Doesn’t every family?” Mike looked up from his hands with a dark-eyed glare of resentment.

“Mr. Parker.” Struggling for patience, Hally took a deep breath and quietly let it out. “I appreciate how difficult this must be for you…”

“Do you?”

“Well, y-yes….”

“How?”

“Well, I….” Thrown off balance, Hally momentarily faltered. Her earlier empathy waned in the face of his tightlipped challenge. Affronted, she angled her chin. “Are you baiting me, Mr. Parker?”

“Not at all.”

“Then what was the point…”

“The point, Ms. McKenzie, is that I very much doubt you can have any idea what it’s like to lose your mate and suddenly find yourself on your own with an adolescent child you think you know but don’t.”

On his feet again, Mike paced the few steps of Hally’s confined office space with the same agitation and pent-up violence her cat, Chaucer, displayed in his carrier during trips to the vet.

“I’m at my wits’ end here, Ms. McKenzie.” Parker’s tone was low, but fierce. “And what I need from you is help, not simpering platitudes about knowing how I feel.”

He grabbed the edge of the desk and pinned her to her seat with his eyes. “You don’t know squat about how I feel.”

“I know that you’re angry and that it has nothing to do with me,” Hally said steadily. The flare of alarm she’d initially felt at his outburst had been only that—a flare, as quickly extinguished as ignited by the recognition that frustration, not violence, had driven him to it. “And I’m quite convinced now that you care about Corinne…”

“You doubted that?” He pulled back, his tone as incredulous as his expression.

Hally shrugged. “Corinne is a new student with—you’ll excuse my bluntness—nothing much to recommend her so far. And you…”

“What about me?”

“Well, to be frank, everything about you shouts ‘upwardly mobile executive,’ which leads me to wonder just how much of your time you can spare to hands-on parenting.”

“I can spare as much time as it takes,” Mike growled, furious at the implication of parental neglect when he’d been knocking himself out trying to do the right things. “But I do have to make a living, I can’t be in two places at once, and until you finally did your job and notified me, I had no way of knowing that my daughter wasn’t in school when she was supposed to be. Now did I?”

His eyes drilled into her, daring her to refute his logic. Hally couldn’t, but that didn’t mean she was prepared to back down. She stared at him with all the authority she could muster and waited in silence until he sat down.

“Thank you,” she said coolly, much as she would say to one of her students after she’d subjugated them with one of her looks.

So secretly—and unprofessionally—thrilled was she with this minor victory over the formidable Michael J. Parker that she forgot all about the extra inch on her thighs and the fact that her tights offered nothing in the way of camouflage.

She shoved her chair back from her desk and crossed her legs. “Now that that’s out of the way,” she said briskly, “let’s discuss how the situation should be handled….”

Troubled and pensive, Mike slowly traversed the nowdeserted school parking lot on his way to his car. Strange woman, that Halloran McKenzie, he thought. Talk about contradictions—the mind of Dr. Joyce Brothers in Shirley Temple’s head and Marilyn Monroe’s body. Combined, those traits made for a very tantalizing package, however, he had to admit. And he doubted many boys missed her English class.

This somewhat wry reflection abruptly recalled him to his troubles since it reminded him that his daughter evidently did miss English and every other class with frightening regularity.

Grimly, he started the car and pulled out into traffic, knowing he would have to have a serious talk with Cory when he got home. He dreaded it. It seemed not a day went by that they weren’t at each other over something. And, man, he was tired of it. In fact, he was tired period. Being mom and pop, housekeeper, breadwinner and disciplinarian to a recalcitrant teenager was wearing him out.

Cruising the route home on automatic pilot, and removed by time and distance from the dedicated Ms. McKenzie’s ardently persuasive plea for patience, Mike thought that giving in to Cory’s demands just might be the best thing to do after all.

Why not let her go back home? Why not let her go back to Idaho, to Marble Ridge, to Becky’s folks? Lord knew they were at him about it almost as much as Corinne was, if for different reasons. Cory professed to hate him, whereas the Campbells simply didn’t deem any man alone capable of raising a teenage daughter.

And maybe that was why he wasn’t letting Cory go—because his in-laws were right and, aside from the fact that he didn’t much care to be pressured, he needed to prove them wrong.

Mike knew that wasn’t really the reason he had so far hung tough, though. Part of it, sure. But another part was that, while alive, his wife had clung way too tightly to her parents, and even to his, only three miles further down the road. Becky’s dependence had given the older folks the impression they could butt in whenever they felt like it, an attitude that didn’t fly with Mike at all.

But even that wasn’t the main reason for his determination to bring up his daughter himself from here on in. That had strictly to do with himself and Cory. She was his daughter, his child. She was the baby he and Becky had been so happy to have created. And she’d grown to be a stranger.

His fault. Drilling for oil all over the globe didn’t leave a man with much family time. Nor was three weeks of home leave every four months anywhere near enough time for a father to bond with his child. A child who didn’t understand why he wasn’t around like other daddies; who considered his long absences a form of desertion no matter how often he tried to explain the real reason for their lifestyle.

Not that he hadn’t understood Cory’s bewilderment and agonized over her increasingly resentful attitude. After all, what could something as intangible as the dream of a horse ranch possibly mean to a young child? Or for that matter, to anyone other than Becky and himself?

It was their dream. Just as it had been their decision to live as they had—he overseas in his oil camps, Becky home with Corinne in Marble Ridge—to one day make that dream a reality.

Where else could a geologist earn the kind of money Mike had brought home than in those faraway oil fields? Money a fair chunk of which they had faithfully put into savings each month. Watching it grow—every dime and dollar reducing by minutes and hours the time they’d have to wait to be a family again—was what had made it all bearable.

And then, just like that, time had run out

First, Becky had become strange and secretive, increasingly so. And then her illness had taken its toll, draining their savings account as relentlessly as the cancer had sucked the life from her body. And their dream had collapsed like a house of cards in a windstorm with Becky’s death.

Cory’s grief had been as terrible as his own bewilderment. He couldn’t seem to figure out how everything could have gone so wrong. And while the loss should have drawn them closer, it had, instead, driven them further apart.

Cory had been livid, wild, out of control with rage when she’d seen him packing to fly back to Saudi three days after the funeral. She didn’t want anything to do with him, was more than happy to live with her maternal grandparents, but she was nevertheless outraged that he was leaving.

Nothing he or Becky’s parents could say had been able to make her understand the necessity. She didn’t care about Mike’s unbreakable contract, didn’t want to hear that they were practically bankrupt, or that the sizable sum he’d earn in the next six months would allow him to take another position with his company for less pay and with virtually no travel.

That was the position he now held here in Long Beach, California. A town that, in many ways, was as far removed from Marble Ridge, Idaho, as the moon. But even so, it was a community in which Mike had hoped to make a new beginning for himself and his child. To make up for lost time. To become a family.

So far, their month here together had been a disaster.

Sighing, Mike pulled into the lot of the supermarket he’d come to know better than he ever thought he’d have to. Grocery shopping was just one of the many new dimensions to his life.

Pushing his cart up and down the aisles, he hoped to spot the items they were out of since he’d forgotten—again—to bring the list he’d made that morning. Cruising the aisles wasn’t the most efficient way to shop, but what the heck.

He detoured abruptly when he spotted the by-nowfamiliar—and dreaded—redhead who lived two doors down from him. A forty-ish and still quite attractive divorcée, Pamela Swigert had been the first to welcome Corinne and him into the neighborhood. She had two children, both of whom had names Mike considered as strange and outlandish as their mother’s flamboyant wardrobe. The daughter, Latisha, was Corinne’s age, while the poor kid named Warlock was twelve.

Latisha didn’t go to Corinne’s school, but the two girls had struck up a desultory friendship of sorts. Though not sure how or whether to discourage the association of these two vastly dissimilar girls, Mike was nevertheless uneasy about the changes Cory’s appearance had undergone with Latisha’s tutelage. Instead of the preppy, brown-haired young girl from Idaho who favored Laura Ashley, Corinne now dressed in Goodwill castoffs and had bleached her chopped-off hair a sickly white.

As to Pamela Swigert, upon learning that there was no Mrs. Parker, she had taken to unexpectedly dropping in with offerings of food and parenting advice, neither of which Mike particularly appreciated any more than the flirty come-hither attitude that accompanied them.

He had neither the time nor the inclination to enter into any kind of romantic liaison with a woman, any woman. But most certainly not with a neighbor, even if she had been his type, which Pam decidedly was not. Trouble was, he had no idea how to let her know that without hurting her feelings.

Which was why Mike chose avoidance whenever possible, inconvenient though that was. Like right now, with Pam Swigert in the frozen food section where Mike needed to get some things, as well. A pizza, for one thing. It was Cory’s favorite food and Mike figured if they shared one for dinner, the talk they were going to have to have just might go a little easier. Hell, he’d get her Rocky Road ice cream, too. As soon as the coast was clear.

Mike backed up a few steps and peered around the corner. And stifled an oath when he found himself practically nose to nose with a delighted Pamela Swigert.

“Mike!” she exclaimed, fluttering night-black eyelashes that never failed to fascinate Mike, they were so impossibly thick and long. False, Corinne had scornfully proclaimed them. “I thought that was you I saw skulking by a minute ago.”

She tapped him on the arm with a flirty moue. “Not trying to avoid me, were you?”

“Lord no.” Mike mustered a grin. “Just a bit preoccupied, I guess.”

“Problems?” Pam was instantly all sympathetic concern. “Anything I can do?”

“Oh, no.” Heaven forbid. To change the subject, Mike craned his neck to look past her. “This the frozen food aisle?” he asked, as if he didn’t know. “Thought I’d get us a pizza—”

“Pizza?” Pam squealed, pointing to the two large rounds in her own cart. “Can you beat that! Great minds do think alike, I swear. I’ve got enough here for you to join Warly and me. It’ll be fun.

“Come on,” she insisted prettily, gripping his arm when Mike pulled back, ready to say no. “Don’t be a poop.”

A “poop"? Mike shook his head, chuckling a little ruefully as he gently but firmly peeled Pam’s fingers off his arm. Sparkly little hearts on. her inch-long, deep red nails momentarily arrested his gaze before he lifted it to her skillfully made-up face.

“Thanks for the invite, Pamela,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s just not a good time for us to be sociable right now….”

Pam’s smile remained in place, but one pencil-sharp eyebrow arched. “Since by ‘us’ you obviously mean yourself and Corinne, dear heart, I suppose that means you don’t know after all.”

“Don’t know what?” Anxiety slammed into Mike’s gut like a boxer’s fist.

Pamela’s light laugh held an edge of uneasiness. “About the rock concert at Milton Stadium. I dropped the girls off there half an hour ago.”

“What?” Mike had to hold on to his cart with both hands to keep himself from grabbing the woman and shaking her till her capped tceth rattled. “You took Corinne to a rock concert without my permission?”

Faced with his barely leashed fury, Pamela blanched. “W-well,” she stammered before gathering herself together with a flare of indignation. “I thought she had your permission.”

“Did she say she did?”

“Not in so many words, no.” Pam tossed her glossy mane with obvious pique. “But she certainly had, the money.”

“Money?” Just that morning Corinne had demanded her allowance—fifteen dollars—because she was broke. Mike had told her she’d get it as soon as she did her chores.

“How much money?” Mike asked, sickness gathering in the pit of his stomach.

“She had a fifty-dollar bill.”

She had a fifty-dollar bill. Letting himself into the house, Mike was still reeling from that statement and its implications. His daughter was no longer just a rebel at odds with herself, her father and her circumstances, she was a thief. A thief!

Thunderstruck, Mike had abandoned his grocery cart and walked out of the store without another word to the visibly shaken Pamela.

Dropping onto a chair at the kitchen table where a cereal box and two milky bowls bespoke this morning’s hasty departure, he felt as if he had taken a beating—defeated and sore right down to his bones. He felt so deeply and utterly betrayed that he would have wept had he had the tears.

Putting his elbows on the table, he dug his fingers into his scalp and despaired of ever being able to reach his daughter after this.

What had the teacher said after he’d spelled out to her how things were between Corinne and him?

“Time, patience and love, Mr. Parker. That’s what your daughter needs from you right now. Except for the basics such as pulling her weight around the house, leave the rules and the discipline to me here at school for the time being….”

So how do you propose I handle this, Ms. McKenzie?

Mike raised his head. He looked around the cozy kitchen, his eyes flicking over each familiar item they’d brought with them from Idaho as if he’d never seen any of it before. His gaze stopped at the white porcelain cat with its slightly chipped, raised black paw.

It was Becky’s cookie jar, which now served as the bank for the emergency cash he liked to keep around the house. A couple of hundred dollars, for those unexpected incidentals. It was a carry-over from his parental home, and probably no longer even necessary in this day of credit cards and ATMs.

Slowly, his eyes never leaving the silly cat, Mike rose from his chair and walked over to the shelf on which it sat. He stood in front of it for a long time, staring at it and debating with himself whether he really wanted to do this or not. He leaned heavily toward not. There really was a certain comfort in not knowing the truth.

Coward? No.

Jaw set, Mike grabbed the jar. Putting one hand on one of the cat’s ears, he raised the lid. He set lid and jar down on the counter and reached inside. Irrationally, his heart lifted a little as his fingers latched onto several bills. As if having Cory steal from strangers was better than having her steal from him. He pulled the bills out There were four of them. He fanned them a little. Three twenties and a ten.

His chin dropping to his chest, Mike closed his fist around the bills, crumpling them. A sound very much like a dry sob rose into his throat and refused to be swallowed. It burst from him with terrible force as he blindly stared at the crumpled bills in his hand and raggedly exhaled.

In all, the bank was short one hundred and thirty dollars.

Chapter Two

It was well past six o’clock when Hally pulled her classic, buttercup yellow convertible VW Bug into the drive on her side of the duplex she co-owned with her mother. The house was a white stucco affair, pre-World War II, and each half had its own sweep of wide steps leading up to its own pillared veranda and its own front door. A lawn hardly bigger than a place mat separated the two sets of steps that were each flanked by flowering shrubs.

A one-car garage sat back from each side of the house at the end of the respective driveways, but neither Hally nor her mother used the squat little building for its designated purpose. For Hally it served as a catch-all storage place while Edith Halloran McKenzie had converted the garage into a studio in which she created her fabulous stained-glass art.

Hally could hear the telephone through her screened open windows as she unlocked her front door. Hurrying inside, she tripped over Chaucer who, as usual, appeared out of nowhere and was trying to beat her into the house.

The cat yowled his indignant protest, drowning out Hally’s muttered epithet. In the kitchen, she lunged for the phone just as its ring abruptly stopped.

Garnet Bloomfield, she thought with a baleful glare at the instrument. With a sigh of vexation, she plunked her bulging tote on the nearest chair and her keys on the kitchen table. Probably called to read me the riot act for not showing up for aerobics.

As if I had a choice.

Out of sorts, Hally bent and absently stroked Chaucer who was winding himself around and between her legs in a bid for apology and attention. She fretted. The meeting with Michael J. Parker had been necessary but, darn it—this new school year was supposed to be the beginning of a whole new chapter in her life. Her horoscope had said as much. Her bank account agreed—come June it was time to cut loose and make a change.

Which meant that come June she would pack her bags, lease out the house and hit the road to Florence, Italy, for the year-long sabbatical that had always been her dream. Or, if not always, at least since a certain medical student had cured her of romance back in college.

Before the trip began, however, she planned to be a whole different person. For one thing, she intended to have a leaner body. And long, smooth tresses that could be swept back into a simple and classic hairstyle. She also meant to acquire the kind of simple and classic wardrobe in basic black, taupe and cream that never went out of style. Especially in Europe.

“I’m gonna have to get tougher with my time, Chauce,” she muttered, and puffed out another long breath of vexation as she straightened. Today’s aerobics class was to have been step one on the road to Fiorenze. Tomorrow night’s Italian language class would be step two.

“And nothing’s darn well going to interfere with that,” Hally emphatically informed the cat. Living alone, conversations with Chaucer were a normal occurrence. “I’ve waited too long for this to let myself get sidetracked by other people’s problems.

“Oh, all right.” Giving in to the cat’s insistent pleas, Hally grabbed a can of cat food out of the cupboard, opened it and dumped it into a bowl. “If you aren’t going to listen, you might as well eat.” She set the food on the floor. “Here. Stop complaining.”

As Chaucer fell on his meal as if he hadn’t had nourishment in years, Hally filled another dish with water, set it on the floor, as well, and flicked on the radio.

“Police used tear gas and water hoses to subdue hundreds of rioting teenagers at Milton Stadium where the Leapin’ Lizards, a popular rock group, unexpectedly canceled their scheduled appearance….”

Horrified by what she was hearing, Hally stood frozen at the sink. Teakettle in hand, she stared at the radio. Almost certainly some of the kids involved or affected by the mob scene would be students of hers.

“One death and scores of injuries are reported. Details in—”

Hally didn’t wait to hear more. Her resolution of nonextracurricular involvement forgotten, she had already scooped up her keys and was out the door.

It was not very far from her house to the stadium, a couple of dozen blocks. Hally broke several traffic laws on her way over, ignoring stop signs and speed limits alike. A sense of urgency spurred her on; she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was needed at the site.

Pandemonium reigned on the street in front of the stadium. Hally got out of her car several blocks away and ran the rest of the way on foot. Patrol cars, lights flashing like psychedelic beacons, formed a four-direction barrier around the milling crowd that was surrounded by officers in riot gear. Several ambulances with rotating lights like glaring strobes were inside the parameter. The air smelled of sulfur and hovered like rancid fog over the nightmare scene. The noise was incredible—shrill, desperate and angry human voices trying to make themselves heard over sobs, screams and curses punctuated by sirens, and the thud of nightsticks connecting with the backs of those who still dared rebel.

Hally pushed and elbowed her way through the volatile crowd of spectators, parents and freaked-out kids who surged against—and were barely held back by—the human bulwark of the riot police. She didn’t know whom she was looking for. No one in particular she would have said, if asked. She only knew she had to be here, to be available to help in case—

When she suddenly saw Mike Parker, grim-faced and ashen, at the far edge of the crowd, the realization that she’d come here looking for him smacked her in the face like a stinging slap. Oh, no-oo…

Appalled, she tried to spin on her heel and run the other way. Hemmed in by the crowd, however, this was impossible. She did the next best thing and sharply averted her face, though not before noting with a pang that the man seemed to have aged ten years since leaving her office less than two hours ago. And that his formerly immaculate hair was a mess of rumpled waves, his suit jacket hung open, and his loosened tie was askew. He looked like he’d been through the wringer.

Because all of her nobler instincts urged her to rush to him and offer assistance, Hally fought desperately to stay where she was. Face contorted from battling herself as much as from the jabs, shoves and pushes the milling crowd was inflicting, she sternly reminded herself that what Michael Parker and his daughter needed was more than she was willing to give. She had her own agenda, her own plans and goals, and they didn’t include a troublesome widower with an even more troublesome daughter. She had given him the best professional advice she could.

Oh, damn! She gasped as a sharp elbow stabbed into her ribs and heels ground down on her instep. She swiveled around and once again caught sight of Mike Parker. He looked lost and terribly alone as he scanned the crowd for a glimpse of his daughter.

“Michael!” Hally yelled, the name erupting from her without conscious will. Realizing that there was no way he could hear her, she shoved and strong-armed her way toward him. “Mr. Parker!” It was like fighting an incoming tide. Worse, it was like one continuous series of headon collisions that soon left her battered and breathless.

And yet she fought on, drawn by something from this man she barely knew, and resenting it every step of the way. Still, she continued to yell his name, continued to wave one arm above her head while pushing forward with the other.

And all the while calling herself every kind of a fool.

When Mike finally became aware of her struggle toward him, for one brief instant the terrible strain and anguish that marred his face eased into something like gladness and relief.

Hally felt an answering gladness inside of herself, which she instantly squelched with a stern, You’ll help him find his daughter and that’s all. She watched him move in her direction, using his superior height and visible determination to meet her halfway.

He had almost reached her when something hard smacked Hally right between the shoulder blades at the same time as her legs got tangled up with someone else’s. She lost her footing and her breath simultaneously. She stumbled and fell to her knees, and the sea of humanity closed in around her. She tried to get back on her feet. Couldn’t. Couldn’t get up, couldn’t breathe. Feet stepped on her, bumped her. She screamed.

“Halloran! Halloran McKenzie!”

Hally could hear Mike Parker’s voice, but blackness was closing in. She was being smothered, trampled. Help!

“Oh, God. There you are.” Strong hands hauled Hally to her feet, supported her as she swayed, gasping for air. “Are you all right?”

Hally blinked back the fog clouding her vision. Her ears rang. Mike Parker’s worried face wove in and out in a dizzying pattern. She choked back a wave of nausea and dug her nails into his sleeves. “I’m f-fine…”

“I doubt it,” she saw as much as heard Mike say before he half dragged, half carried her to the edge of the crowd. Like a distant observer she was aware of him wiping dirt off her face and smoothing down her clothes. His ungainly hands were incredibly gentle.

The moment that registered, Hally stepped away from him with a choked, “Thanks.”

Mike’s hands dropped to his sides, closed into fists. “What’re you doing here?” His face was gray. “You could’ve been killed.”

“Yes, well.” Gradually the world slid back into focus and Hally was able to meet Mike’s bleak, searching gaze. She ran a shaky hand through her short crop of curls. She cleared her throat.

“C-Corinne?” she croaked.

If possible, Mike’s face grew grayer still. “All I know is that she’s here. Somewhere…”

“I was afraid of that.”

For just an instant they stared into each other’s eyes and recognized an emotional connectedness that neither would have consciously welcomed or acknowledged. It was gone with the flick of a lash as Hally heard the frantic call of her name.

“Ms. McKenzie! Ms. McKenzie!”

She looked around and spotted another woman in the thick of things. She was waving her hands and bobbing up and down like a cork in the sea some fifteen feet away. Hally recognized her as the parent of one of her former, as well as present students.

“Mrs. Undser!”

“Have you seen Susan?” the woman shouted as the jostling crowd dragged her in a direction away from Hally and Mike.

Hally shook her head, hard. “No. But I’ll keep an eye out for her, okay?”

The woman’s answering nod was distracted. She was fighting against the current of humanity just as Hally had been.

“Look.” Mike’s fingers bit into Hally’s arm and reclaimed her attention. “Over there. Corinne.”

Hally swiveled her head in the direction he pointed. Sure enough, Corinne Parker’s spiky bleached hair surfaced for a moment in the sea of restlessly milling youngsters the police had cordoned off.

“Come on.” Grabbing Hally’s hand, Mike shoved toward the line of patrolmen with aggressive purpose.

Hally used her own free arm and hand to help him clear a path. “They’re herding her into that police van over there!” she yelled, needlessly, since Mike could certainly see what was happening, too.

“Officer.” They had reached the armored human wall around the kids. “Please,” Mike implored the nearest policeman. “I’ve got to get through. That’s my daughter over there. She’s only fourteen, an innocent bystander. I know she didn’t do anything.”

Except steal from me.

“Move along, sir,” the beleaguered lawman said curtly.

“But she didn’t do anything!” Mike repeated with angry exasperation. “If you’ll just let me go and get her…”

“I’m telling you only once more,” the officer bellowed. “Move along. They’re all innocent to hear them tell it.”

The officer glared at Mike, brandishing his nightstick. “Move now. Get”

“Come on, Mike.” Hally tugged on Mike’s arm to end the glaring contest she knew Mike had no chance of winning. The policeman held all the cards.

“Where are they taking the kids?” she asked the patrolman.

“Downtown.”

“Come on.” Hally pulled the fuming and reluctant-tocapitulate Mike forcibly away.

“There’s nothing you can accomplish here,” she told him across her shoulder. “But at least you can be at the other end to bail her out. Where’s your car?”

“Don’t have it,” Mike said grimly.

Hally frowned at him. “Then how…”

“Got a ride from a neighbor.” Mike clenched his teeth, rage consuming him. Damn that stiff-necked policeman. And damn Pam Swigert for getting Corinne into this mess in the first place. He didn’t care that it wasn’t entirely fair to blame the woman, any more than he cared to admit that this stranger his daughter had become would have found a way to get here, no matter what. He needed to blame someone—anyone.

And for the moment he was too overwrought to concede that the only one he should be blaming was himself.

“Where is he?” Hally asked, meaning the neighbor.

“She,” Mike absently corrected, frowning as he looked around. He had only just become aware that Pam had become separated from him somewhere along the line. “I don’t know. She’s a redhead…”

He scanned the crowd, concerned now for his neighbor’s well-being in spite of his anger. What if Pamela had fallen and been trampled, like Halloran McKenzie had nearly been? This was no place for anyone alone, least of all a woman.

“Is that her?” Hally pointed, already moving that way.

Mike followed. “Yes.” Alarm slammed into him. Pam was surrounded by several other women. She was crying. Black rivulets ran down her cheeks. Her always perfectly coiffed hair looked like a swarm of birds had gotten tangled up in it. She was obviously in great distress. “Pamela!”

He surged toward her, Hally in tow. “For God’s sake, what happened?” He let go of Hally to take hold of and support his distraught neighbor instead.

“Some kids beat on her pretty good,” one of the other women said when Pam just wailed and buried her face against Mike’s chest.

“Take me home,” she cried, blindly reaching out with one hand. To Mike’s shock and surprise, Latisha was there to take it. Corinne’s socalled friend.

Rage overcame him once more. “Why aren’t you with Cory?” he shouted at the hapless girl who, he only then noticed, was sobbing and as disheveled as her mother.

“W-we g-got se-separated and…and….”

“Never mind,” Mike said tiredly, his anger gone as abruptly as it had been aroused. It was all such a mess, such total madness. And there was nothing to be gained by yelling and carrying on.

“Halloran…” Guiding Pamela and her daughter out of the melee, he turned to Hally. “Look, I’ve got to drive them home. Could you…I mean, I know it’s an imposition, but could…”

“I go to the police station and find Corinne?” Hally finished for him when he hesitated. And as everything inside her yelled, No, no, no, she heard herself say, “Sure. Though you realize I won’t be able to spring her.”

“I know. I’ll get there myself just as quickly as I can. And, Halloran—” He gripped Hally’s shoulder and stopped her as, with a quick nod, she started to move away to go to her car. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” Hally said, averting her eyes because the weary gratitude in his was making her feel like a phony. The last thing she wanted to do was to go to that police station. She moved away from Mike’s touch, thinking, How do I get myself into these things?

It smelled of dust, sweat and unwashed humanity. People were everywhere. Some clean, some not so. Some drunk. All of them unhappy to be there, even the police officers on duty, it seemed to Mike. Certainly they had long since given up on cordiality or even professional courtesy.

Tempers were short on both sides of the counter.

As promised, Hally was there, waiting for him. She had ascertained that the van carrying the adolescent miscreants had arrived and that the kids were being held in one large cell at the back of the building.

Irate parents were demanding the release of their offspring, Mike included. Harried officers were wrestling with the paperwork that would allow them to let go of their unwanted guests in the back, and thus clear the station of the throng of outraged citizens in the front.

Conversation between Mike and Hally was sparse as they waited for Corinne to be escorted out. At odd moments throughout the drive home with Pam, on the subsequent drive in his own car over to the station, and even during his dealings with the law, Mike would recall that he wasn’t alone in this fight for and with his daughter, and he’d experience a sense of wonder that left him puzzled and discomfited. And not a little scared.

Scared because Halloran McKenzie was the first woman since Becky who’d stirred in him a desire to know her better. A whole lot better.

Which, of course, simply could not be. He had enough on his plate without adding the complications of a romantic fling. If he knew what was good for him, he’d best get things back on a strictly professional footing right away.

“Ms. McKenzie.” Taking a deep breath, he slanted her a strained smile. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Then don’t,” Hally said. She was tired and also a bit put off by the waves of reserve now emanating from this brooding man like chilled air from an open refrigerator. She spoke curtly. “I’m heading home, but I expect to see Corinne in my office a half hour before class tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll see to it,” Mike promised, uncomfortably aware that he had affronted her, but in no condition, emotionally, to try to rectify the situation even if he wanted to. Which he didn’t.

The woman was his daughter’s teacher and assigned counselor. It was in the latter capacity that she had rushed to the stadium, looking to help. It had not been him personally she had aided out there, or even here at the station—it was the parent of one of her charges.

As she spoke to him, her face, smudged with dirt and lined with fatigue, was stern. And her tone was cool and professional.

“As we agreed,” she said, “I’d like you to pick Corinne up from school as well as drive her to school for the next several days, just to let her know we’re working in concert and that tabs are being kept. Please understand, however, that my interest can, of necessity, not go beyond her performance at school. I’ve got nine other students to counsel and I’d be a nervous wreck if I got personally involved in their home situations beyond what pertains to their studies. You do see that?”

“Absolutely,” Mike said, telling himself that was exactly what he wanted from her and no more. “Our family problems have nothing to do with you.”

“Well, at least not directly. So—” Hally shoved back her hair and met his eyes “—I’ll say good-night then.”

“G’night.” Mike half raised his hand as she backed away from him toward the exit. “Thanks again.”

Out on the sidewalk Hally congratulated herself on having made her position clear. Having done her good deed for the day, she told herself, she could now get on with her life. Future contact with Mike Parker would be minimal, confined to her office and school hours.

Bone-weary and longing for a bath, she stuck the key in the driver’s side door of her car. Turning it, her gaze slid down and sideways, past the front wheel to the pavement. Only to snap right back to the front tire with a gasp of dismay. It was flat. The darned tire was flat!

What next? Momentarily overcome by what was definitely the last straw, Hally let her forehead drop to the roof of the car.

What have I done to deserve this? she questioned whatever unkind fate had decreed she shouldn’t go home just yet. I’m tired, I’m hungry….

“Ms. McKenzie?”

Hally’s head jerked up. She took a deep breath and slowly turned around. In front of her, looking concerned, stood Mike Parker. And next to him, managing to look both truculent and defiant, stood Corinne.

“What’s the matter?” Mike asked, frowning. “What happened?”

As Hally wordlessly pointed; her gaze remained on her student. “Are you all right, Corinne?”

The girl gave a careless shrug and looked away, lips set in a stubborn line. But something had flickered in her eyes before she had averted them, and now she visibly swallowed.

She’s not as tough as she wants us to believe, Hally thought.

And knew with a kind of sinking feeling that all the rhetoric she had spouted earlier to Mike and herself about not getting personally involved had likely been just that—rhetoric. Looking at the girl, involvement seemed somehow inevitable.

As it usually had been in at least one case, with at least one student, every year for as long as Hally had been teaching.

Maybe it was because she could have used a sympathetic counselor herself when she was young and lost and so terribly at odds with the world. Her mother, dear friend that she since had become, had at the time been too miserable in her crumbling marriage herself to have been much support to her bewildered and unhappy younger daughter.

Whatever, some kids simply struck a chord; kids who needed understanding and support above and beyond the job description. Corinne Parker was one of those kids.

And it had nothing to do with the girl’s father.

To underscore that, Hally replied brusquely to Mike’s offer of help. “You get your child home, Mr. Parker. I’ve changed tires before, thank you very much.”

Ignoring his taken-aback expression, she bid both of the Parkers good-night and went to get the jack, wrench and spare tire out of her trunk.

Only to be elbowed aside, and not very gently. “I’d appreciate it, Ms. McKenzie,” Mike said without making a secret of the fact that it cost him to approach her after her outright rebuff, “if you’d have a word with Cory while I tend to this. She refuses to speak to me.

“And, yes…” He grimly forestalled the protest he was sure Hally was about to make. “I do realize that my request exceeds the boundaries you established, but—”

“I wasn’t going to refuse,” Hally interrupted, not bothering to argue any longer with him about the tire he was wrestling out of the trunk. “If you’ll hand me your keys and point out which car is yours, Corinne and I will go sit in it.”

“It’s the Buick,” Mike said, handing her the keys. “Seems like I owe you thanks all over again.”

“No, you don’t,” Hally said. “I haven’t done anything yet.”

She walked away, but she did hear Mike mutter, “That’s where you’re wrong.”

Not sure what to make of that, she touched the girl’s slumped shoulder, making her jump. “Come on, Corinne. Let’s go sit in your dad’s car.”

“While he fixes your tire?”

“That’s right.”

“I thought you knew how to do that yourself?” the girl muttered sullenly, keeping her eyes on the ground as she shuffled along at Hally’s light prod in the back.

“I do,” Hally said calmly. Sullen lippiness was something she could handle. Most kids resorted to that as their first line of defense. “But I wanted to talk to you.”

“You mean, he wanted you to talk to me,” Corinne sneered with a baleful glance at her father, hunkered down by the front wheel of the VW Bug.

“Yes, he did.” Hally unlocked the door of the latemodel Buick that Mike had indicated was his. It was her policy to be strictly honest with her students. No games, no subterfuge, no secret pact with their parents. And she expected complete honesty from them in return.

“Get in.” Sliding in behind the wheel, she reached over and unlocked the passenger door.

She watched with weary amusement as Corinne plunked herself down on the seat with a put-upon air. It was hot in the car and, like Hally, she left her door ajar. Slouching, she looked down at her hands. In profile, with traces of baby fat still rounding the contours of her face, she looked achingly vulnerable and oh, so young.

“Were you one of the rioters?” Hally asked. The outright question startled some life into the girl. She turned her head and blinked at Hally.

But her answer was predictably rude. “So what if I was?”

Hally regarded her calmly. Her gaze held the girl’s, who clearly wanted to look away. “Did you know that someone was killed there tonight?”

Corinne visibly swallowed. She sucked her lips inward. Her lashes fluttered and Hally saw a sudden sheen of tears glaze her eyes before she turned her face aside.

Hally’s voice softened. “Now, do you really want your father and me to think that you had a part in that?”

Looking down, the girl gave her head a quick, negative jerk.

“I didn’t think so.” Hally reached out to give Corinne’s hand a reassuring pat. It was instantly jerked away.

Hally ignored the rebuff. In truth, it was no more than she had expected. “I want to help,” she said, “if you’ll let me.”

“Humph.”

“Your father is not the enemy, you know,” Hally said quietly. And was startled in spite of herself by Corinne’s vehement and venomous retort.

“He hates me.” The girl’s face twisted into an ugly mask of anguish and disdain. As if sensing that Mike had come to stand outside the open door—or maybe it was the dismayed glance Hally directed just past the girl’s head that gave it away—Corinne turned to look right at him as she raged, “And I hate him.”

Chapter Three

The expression of raw hurt on Mike Parker’s face before he blanked it as deliberately as if he’d pulled down a shade, stayed with Hally as she slowly drove her car toward home. The spare tire did not allow for speed, which was just as well as she was in a meandering frame of mind after all the drama and trauma of the past several hours. She stopped briefly at the service station and dropped off her tire to be fixed.

Poor Mike, she thought. And poor Corinne, too. It would take a lot of time, patience and love for those two to find their way to each other. She ought to know; she and her father hadn’t found that way yet. And it was what—ten years later? Something like that.

The only thing Mike and Cory had going for them that was different from Hally’s situation with her father, was that Mike was there. His “defection” was not a fact, but a fixated notion that Corinne had come to wholly embrace as fact.

Doctor James McKenzie, on the other hand had, after years of philandering and sporadic, overstrict parenting, literally abandoned his wife and emotionally deserted his two daughters to marry his already-pregnant-with-his-child receptionist.

Hally pulled a face. Now thirty-four, Sweet Eva—their stepmother—was the same age as Hally’s sister Morgan, and only two years older than Hally herself.

It had all been rather sordid and sad, and to this day relations between Hally and her father were strained and contact practically nonexistent. Hally had only seen her father’s new wife and little half brother, now nine, a handful of times at a distance.

Stoutly in her mother’s camp, it was Hally’s choice to maintain the animosity, to ignore James McKenzie’s occasional olive branches and overtures. Reestablishing a cordial relationship with her father would have made her feel disloyal to her mother. Her sister, Morgan, did not see things that way. Morgan had always been their father’s pet, of course. And though she’d initially been hurt by his defection, with marriage and the birth of her own little boy—Kenny, now six—all had apparently been forgiven. Why, she even stayed in her father’s house during her infrequent visits to Long Beach.

Well, to each his or her own, Hally thought, a little righteously. But, seeing again in her mind’s eye Michael Parker’s look of anguish at Corinne’s hateful words, she wondered for the first time if her unrelenting attitude might not be causing her own father pain, as well.

Nonsense. Pulling into her drive, Hally resolutely brushed that unsettling notion aside. James McKenzie was much too arrogant and successful to let something as minor as the loss of one daughter’s trust and affection wound him in any way. Especially with his other daughter as doting as ever.

Getting out of the car, Hally absently glanced at her mother’s side of the house. No lights. She’d gone out.

Hally let herself into the house with a twinge of disappointment—some of her mother’s tea and sympathy would have been a good antidote to everything that had gone before. She sighed and resigned herself to a hot shower and some tea on her own.

She was greeted in the kitchen by an indignant Chaucer. Crouching and scooping the loudly meowing cat up for a hug, Hally hurried to apologize. “Did you get trapped in the house, you silly old thing, you?”

Chaucer was not big on displays of affection, however, and soon squirmed to be free. “Well, off you go then,” Hally groused good-naturedly as she let him out the back door. “Have fun….”

With a sigh—the house seemed strangely quiet and empty to her—she returned to the kitchen. She stood and looked around, irresolute. Was she hungry? She hadn’t eaten and a while ago she’d been starving. But somehow food held no appeal now. A novel occurrence. Maybe losing that five pounds wouldn’t be so difficult, after all.

Rolling her eyes, she considered a cup of hot tea but, spotting the blinking red light on the telephone console, dismissed that notion, too. Crossing over to the small planning desk, she pressed the Play button on the answering machine. Wine, she mused as the tape rewound with an audible whir. A nice glass of Chardonnay, that’s what she wanted.

There were obviously several messages that always seemed to send her dinosaur of a machine into a tailspin. It took forever to rewind to the beginning of the tape. As she poured the wine Hally decided she’d simply have to get with the program and order voice mail.

“Hally!” Ah, it speaks.

Setting down her glass, Hally picked up a pencil and bent over the desk, poised to jot down names and phone numbers. This was Morgan, however, sounding distraught. Of course, she often did. “Do you know where Mother is tonight? I’ve been calling and calling. And what are you up to, anyway? Phone me.”

Right. Hally rolled her eyes. With Morgan, who now lived in Detroit, everything became a crisis when she thought she was being excluded from the loop of family news.

“Hey, why weren’t you at aerobics?” Garnet Bloomfield. “I knew you’d chicken out, McKenzie. God will get you for that! I want to hear from you and it better be good. Signed, your conscience.”

Oh, brother. Straightening, Hally tossed down the pencil. She massaged an ache in the small of her back. She was thinking nothing was going to be important enough to write down when the next message had her scrambling for the pencil and notepad.

“Ms. Mckenzie. This is Sergeant O’Rourke, L.B.P.D. Don’t be alarmed, but please give me a call at 555-5000, extension 24. It’s in regard to your mother. Thank you.”

Oh, dear God. Hally sank down onto the chair in front of the desk and had to listen to the message twice more before she got the sergeant’s telephone number down on paper. Her hand shook as she stabbed the digits and pressed the phone to her ear.

She gave the extension number when the police operator answered. It seemed to take forever before a male voice barked, “O’Rourke.”

“Um.” Nerves momentarily rendered Hally incoherent. She took a deep breath. “This is Hally McKenzie returning your call.”

“Ah, yes,” the officer said, his tone a bit less brisk. “Ms. McKenzie…”

“Has something happened to my mother?” Hally asked, bursting into the policeman’s slight pause. He was no doubt finding his notes on the case or some such, part of her brain thought irrelevantly.

“She’s all right,” Sergeant O’Rourke assured her. “But she asked me to give you a call and to say would you pack an overnight bag and bring it to Memorial Hospital, room number—”

“Hospital!” Hally heard nothing beyond that dreaded word. She surged up off the chair. “What’s wrong with her? What happened? Why wasn’t I—”

“She says she tried to call you. You didn’t answer.”

The phone call.

“She hung up before I could get the phone,” Hally explained tonelessly. Was there to be no end to disaster tonight? “She didn’t leave a message.”

“Yeah, well. She was in pretty bad shape, just barely managed to dial 9-1-1. She fell into some glass. Lacerations…”

“Oh—” With an inarticulate sound of distress, Hally pressed a hand against her mouth. Not her hands! She swallowed down nausea at the visions the officer’s words conjured up. “What was that room number again?”

The pencil jerked in her hand as she wrote down what the sergeant said.

Operating in a daze, she went over to her mother’s side of the house and stuffed toiletries, undergarments and anything else that seemed necessary into a bag. And all the while she thanked the Lord that her mother’s studio was out in the garage, meaning she wouldn’t have to look at the accident’s bloody evidence. She had never been able to stomach the sight of blood. This queasiness was one of the many things her father—a surgeon—had endlessly criticized her for.

On the way to the hospital Hally wondered if she should have called Morgan to apprise her of the situation, but then decided she’d do so after she’d seen their mother and taken stock of the situation firsthand. The last thing she needed after everything else that had occurred today, was to listen to her highly pregnant-with-her-second-child and therefore even-more-easily-unhinged older sister.

Bumping into James McKenzie at the door of her mother’s room was another thing Hally could have lived without.

“Father,” she exclaimed, too tired and rattled to try to keep the appalled tone out of her voice or to edit her words for diplomacy. “What in the world are you doing here?”

“Well, I am a doctor,” her father said mildly, looking Hally up and down in that way he had, that way that had always made her feel inadequate. It galled her to realize it still did. “And this is my hospital,” he went on. “At least to the extent that I’m the chief here.”

“Oh. I didn’t, er, didn’t know…”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, Halloran.”

“Yes, well…” Despising herself for reverting to the very behavior—awkward ineptness—that had always drawn scathing comments from her father, Hally clenched her teeth and met his gaze with much of the same youthful defiance that had always been her defense. And here she’d been so sure she had outgrown that sort of response, too. “If you’ll let me by, I—I came to see my mother.”

“Of course.” James McKenzie stepped aside. “It seems your mother fell and hit her head on the edge of her workbench. There was some bleeding, but nothing too serious. She’s sedated, but she’ll be all right.”

Hally drew herself in so that she could move past without touching him in any way. Her gaze flicked to his once more, and what she saw in his eyes made her gasp. He actually looked hurt.

Furious with herself even more than with her father, she jerked her eyes away and stumbled almost blindly into her mother’s room.

The nurse at the bedside looked up at Hally’s entrance. She put a finger to her lips. “She’s just drifting off,” she whispered in very British English as Hally tiptoed closer. “Doctor gave her a sedative.”

Hally mutely nodded her understanding. She was still undone by the unexpected emotions she’d glimpsed in her father’s eyes, and horrified by the sight of her mother’s bandaged right hand on top of the bedsheet. She let the bag drop to the floor and leaned closer to peer into the dear but pale and too-still features. They were usually so animated. A rather nasty-looking purple bump and bruise marred the high forehead.

Ever so gently, lovingly, Hally touched the injury, letting her finger trail down the velvety cheek before pulling her hand away. I love you, Mom.

“Concussion?” she asked in a low tone.

The nurse shook her head. “Doctor wouldn’t have sedated her if he thought that. You’re family, of course.” It was a statement rather than a question.

Hally nodded. “Her daughter.”

“Oh,” the nurse said, her interest obviously aroused. “In that case, you’re…”

“Doctor McKenzie’s daughter, too,” Hally finished for her. “Yes.” Wanting to forestall any further comments, she asked, “Will my mother be asleep all night?”

“I would think so, yes.”

“I’ve brought her some things.” Hally picked up the bag. “Where should I put them?”

“In the nightstand would be fine,” the nurse said, leaving the room. “She’ll be discharged in the morning.”

Hally took her time unpacking the small bag. Rather than hang it up, she draped her mother’s robe over the foot of the bed. Likewise, she arranged the satin slippers she had packed so that they were ready to be stepped into should her mother need to get up in the night.

She glanced often at the still form on the bed, hoping against hope that her mother would wake and know she was there. When everything was done, feeling helpless, needing to be needed but realizing that there wasn’t anything else she could do, Hally softly kissed her mother on the lips and took her reluctant leave.

“I’ll be back, Mom,” she whispered. “First thing in the morning.”

After a drive home that was filled with a heavy silence neither Michael nor Corinne Parker was inclined to break, father and daughter walked single file into their house. Corinne would have proceeded straight to her room, but Mike stopped her.

“I want to talk to you.” He jerked a chair away from the kitchen table and pointed to it. “Sit.”

Folding her arms across her chest, ignoring the chair, Corinne pointedly propped her hip against the counter and didn’t move.

A rage that was the culmination of everything that had gone before brought Mike over to her in one long stride. He gripped her upper arm with viselike strength.

“I said sit,” he bellowed, yanking the chair closer still and pushing her down onto it. “And by damn you’ll sit, young lady.”

Releasing her as abruptly as he had grabbed her, Mike pivoted and stalked over to the window. He was breathing heavily as the veil of red fury slowly receded from in front of his eyes. Never could he remember having been this angry. He shoved a trembling hand through his hair, inhaling deeply and struggling for a modicum of calm before facing his daughter again.

“Things are going to change around here,” he finally said when he trusted himself to be rational. “You are going to act like a civilized human being…”

“Yeah,” Corinne drawled, her voice and expression full of contempt. “Like you just did, right?”

“Oh, no, you don’t”. Mike glared at her. “You’re not going to turn the tables and lay a guilt trip on me for manhandling you just now. Granted, I lost my temper, but you’d push even a saint to mayhem with your stubbornness and rotten attitude. And it’s going to stop.”

“Pfuh.” Lips twisted, her arms once again folded across her chest, Corinne turned her face aside as if bored.

Mike had to silently count to ten to keep himself from exploding all over again. He knew that if he hoped to get anywhere with her, it wouldn’t be by shouting. On the other hand, he had no intention of letting her off the hook. She had become a liar, a thief and a truant He intended to put a stop to those practices before they became ingrained.

He walked to the shelf, took down the porcelain cat and brought it over to her. He set it on the table. When she refused to look at it, he firmly but not roughly took her chin and forced her face around.

“There was two hundred dollars in that jar,” he said. “Now there’s seventy. I want to know what happened to the rest of it.”

“How should I know?” Corinne muttered. But she wouldn’t look at him, and her face flushed a deep red. The sight of it filled Mike with relief. It proved to him that she still had a conscience, that she wasn’t too far gone to be reached.

“Look at me,” he ordered, still holding her chin.

She complied with deliberate slowness, defiance blazing from her eyes.

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