Loe raamatut: «The Colorado Fosters»

Chapter One

Cotton-puff snowflakes shimmered in the glow of the neighborhood’s streetlights as they lazily dropped from the sky. A pretty sight, Parker Lennox thought—the way they twirled and whirled in the air with gentle, perfect grace reminded him oddly of the ballets his late wife used to drag him to when they lived in Boston.

Hard to believe that the last ballet Parker attended was over seven years ago now, and that Bridget had been gone for close to six. Didn’t seem possible some days. Other days—like today—those six years were akin to an entire lifetime. Either way, he missed his wife.

Everything about Bridget, Parker missed. Her wide, effortless smile, her laugh—sometimes sweet and quiet, other times chortling and boisterous—the way she would look at him from across a room and how her body spooned into his while they slept.

Lord. Six years. How had that even happened?

In that time, he’d packed up his two young daughters, Erin and Megan, and moved them to his hometown of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to settle and get away from the constant memories of Bridget. Remaining in Boston, with the same restaurants and parks and shops and, well, the same everything, let alone living in the house they’d shared as a family, had quickly become an act of torture. For him, but more important, for his daughters.

Erin had been only four, Megan two, when Bridget’s cancer won its long-fought, grisly battle. The aftermath of losing their mother had left his little girls in a somber, colorless world filled with pain and heartache. Him, too, naturally, but age made a huge difference in how a person processed grief. As an adult, he knew he had to push through the darkness of Bridget’s death in order to find whatever light existed at the other end.

His girls, though? They did not understand this, and the morning Parker had found Erin and Megan huddled together in his bedroom closet with their mother’s clothes wrapped around their small, slender bodies and tears coursing down their cheeks had made that fact crystal clear.

That morning had ended his ongoing mental debate on whether they should stay in Boston, where the familiar could, over time, prove healing, or relocate to Steamboat Springs, where the girls might find breathing—just breathing—a little easier. So, despite his mother- and father-in-law’s objections and just shy of a year following his wife’s passing, Parker sold his house, quit his job and brought his family here, to a less expensive home and new surroundings.

And in the five years since, he’d doubted this decision only once. A skiing accident had come too damn close to taking his life and leaving his precious daughters as orphans. In those precarious seconds and minutes after the accident, and during those first awful few weeks in the hospital, his choice to move had seemed foolhardy. If they’d stayed in Boston, he likely would not have found himself twisted in a broken heap halfway down a friggin’ mountain.

Fortunately, he’d survived, and another three years had somehow elapsed, along with a multitude of other positive and affirming changes. His girls were flourishing here, and Parker’s momentary doubt had long since faded into nothingness. Steamboat Springs had become more than a new place with new surroundings. They had created a home here, in every way possible.

But yeah, the damn dancing snowflakes reminded him of those ballets and, therefore, his beautiful, loving wife. The good—the glorious years they were lucky enough to spend together—and the bad, the years since, the years that cancer stole from his family.

Sighing, Parker stopped at a red light about three blocks from the elementary school and yanked himself to the present. Two hours ago, he’d driven this exact path to pick up his daughters and take them to dinner. Now they were returning to the school for the upcoming Christmas play tryouts. Afterward, they’d go home and finish their evening routine, and since it was a Friday, he’d let the girls stay up a bit later than normal. Then he really should put in a few more hours of work, otherwise he’d have to fit it in over the weekend.

In Boston, he’d supervised the marketing department of a large national corporation. Ever since their move, though, Parker had worked for himself. In the beginning, he focused solely on designing websites, blogs and the like, but due to his clients’ needs, he had eventually broadened his scope to include a range of internet marketing services.

Finances during those first few years were rough, but he budgeted every penny of Bridget’s life insurance benefit, along with what was left over from the sale of the Boston house after buying their home here, in order to make the transition a success. He used the living room, kitchen, his bedroom and sometimes—specifically the nights either Erin or Megan were ill or having trouble sleeping—the hallway outside their door as his roaming office. Didn’t matter, really, where he worked. To him, the point was that he was at home. With them.

And he continued to work entirely from home until his youngest daughter, Megan, was firmly settled in first grade. By then, Parker’s business was solvent enough to rent actual office space about three miles from the school. Most of the time, he managed to complete his work responsibilities during their school hours, but every now and then—like tonight—he’d finish one project or another at home, using his laptop and the kitchen table as his desk.

Life was busy, but good. Oh, there were the stray melancholy moods that elicited memories of his wife, along with the random bursts of loneliness that sometimes popped into being, but Parker was grateful that he had nothing of true merit to complain about.

Thanksgiving was a mere two weeks away, and he had so very much to be thankful for. His daughters were healthy. He was healthy. They had food on their table every night, a roof that didn’t leak over their heads, sufficient funds in the bank account, friends and family to cherish, and plenty of activities to keep them involved and happy. Other than the impossible wish of having Bridget back in their lives, what else could he want?

Braking again, this time at a stop sign, Parker glanced in the rearview mirror and said, “Almost there now, girls. Are you excited?”

“Yes!” said eight-year-old Megan from the back seat. “I can’t wait! I want to be one of the angels! But so does Erin. Do you think both of us can be picked for angel parts?”

“Don’t be silly, Megan,” said ten-year-old Erin, offering her opinion in her typical to-the-point fashion. “There’s lots of angels in the play, so of course we can both be angels.”

“Only if we’re chosen,” Megan argued. “Only if we’re good enough.”

“Well, I guess I don’t know if you’re good enough, but I am. So maybe I’ll be one of the angels and you’ll be a...a...star or a tree or—”

“Daddy!” Megan squealed, interrupting her sister. “Erin’s being mean! And besides that, she’s wrong. If only one of us can be angels, it will be me because...because I have blond hair, like angels are supposed to!”

“Angels can have any color of hair, even red,” Erin fired back, her voice indignant. “And telling the truth isn’t the same thing as being mean! And I didn’t say you weren’t good enough to play an angel, Megan. I said that I didn’t know if you were. That’s different!”

“Girls, stop,” Parker said, crossing the sleepy intersection and driving toward the school parking lot, which was about a half a block straight ahead. “Hair color doesn’t matter at all. And you’re both good enough, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get the parts you want.” Every kid who showed tonight would be involved in the play, in one way or another. Whether that would be as an angel, a star, a tree, some other part, or helping behind the scenes. “Let’s try to remember that the goal is to have fun and celebrate Christmas. Okay?”

The girls were silent for a few seconds before a muffled chorus of “Okay, Daddy,” reached his ears. He hoped either they’d both be cast as angels or neither would, otherwise keeping the peace for the next six or so weeks would become highly difficult.

On the other hand, he supposed if such a scenario were to happen, it would provide a valuable life lesson that the girls would eventually have to learn. He just hated any possibility that brought so much as a lick of pain or disappointment to his daughters. In his estimation, they’d already faced their fair share of heartbreak in their young lives. If the choice was his, Parker would move heaven and earth to keep Erin and Megan from experiencing another drop of sadness. He couldn’t, naturally, but the wish remained.

“Oh! Look, Erin,” Megan said as they approached the school, “is that a—”

“Watch out, Daddy!” Erin hollered. “Don’t hit the angel!”

Don’t hit the...what? But her words, along with her volume and the frightened quality of her tone, shocked Parker into a state of alert awareness, and his heart leaped to his throat as he saw that, yes, an angel—or rather, a woman dressed as an angel—was barreling at top speed from the sidewalk to the street, in chase of some type of large, fast-moving animal. A dog? Maybe, but the beast seemed to have horns, so he couldn’t say for certain.

Acting on instinct and adrenaline, Parker muffled a curse and swerved slightly to the left, in the opposite direction of the halo-adorned female, while simultaneously braking the car. He would not be father-of-the-year if he ran over a friggin’ angel, especially with his daughters—both of whom were now yelling, “Daddy! Stop! Please stop!”—as witness.

God must have tuned in at the exact right second, because several blessed events happened in quick succession. One, he managed to stop the car without too much hassle and he did not hit the woman or the runaway creature. Two, the left-hand side of the road—where half of his car now resided—stayed miraculously free of oncoming vehicles.

Parker inhaled a long, stabilizing breath and put the car into Park. The angel-woman now stood almost directly in front of him, and the car’s headlights illuminated her startled expression and rounded eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself and her lips moved in an expletive that Parker identified without being able to hear her voice. Lord. That was close.

Mirroring his thoughts, Megan said in a hushed and somber voice, “I can’t believe you almost killed a beautiful angel, Daddy. That would’ve been so bad. Very, very, very bad. The police would probably have put you in jail! And thrown away the key! And...and—”

“Look at her again, Megan,” Erin said. “She’s not a real angel. She’s close enough now that I can see it’s really Miss Bradshaw.”

“Oh! It is Miss Bradshaw,” Megan said. “Why does she look like an angel?”

“I bet she’s dressed that way for the tryouts,” Erin said. “So Daddy almost killed our music teacher, not an angel. That would’ve been bad, too, because she’s really great.”

“Yeah! Really bad!” Megan chimed in. “We love Miss Bradshaw!”

Hmm. This woman was the new music teacher? Why didn’t he remember meeting her at the school’s open house last month? He always made a point of talking to the girls’ teachers, to explain about Bridget in the hopes of avoiding confusion, but Erin hadn’t felt well—the beginnings of a cold—and Megan’s excitement level had skyrocketed through the roof that night. Those two hours had passed swiftly, and no...Parker wasn’t sure if he’d met Miss Bradshaw.

“I did not almost kill anyone, angel or teacher,” Parker said, unbuckling his seat belt. Even if he had hit her—and yeah, thank God he hadn’t—he’d been driving slow enough that it was unlikely a collision would’ve caused life-threatening injuries. Probably, anyway.

He could’ve hurt her, though, and it did not matter in the slightest that the woman—Miss Bradshaw—should have known better than to run pell-mell into a street, especially at twilight. The possibility of what could’ve occurred made him sick to his stomach.

“But you might have,” Erin said, “if you’d hit her with the car.”

“But I didn’t,” Parker replied.

“Yeah, Erin. He didn’t!” Megan added.

“Well, I know that, Megan. I do have eyes, you know!”

“Wait here, girls,” Parker said, breaking into their almost argument. “Let me make sure your angel-teacher is okay, and then—”

His jaw slammed shut as Miss Bradshaw, in attempting to walk toward his side of the car, slipped and lost her balance. She landed on the ground, bounced to her feet instantly and scowled while wiping the snow from her behind. Ouch, that had to hurt. And again, she mouthed an expletive that he easily identified without the benefit of sound.

“Wait here,” he repeated, flipping on the emergency lights. Once he knew that she wasn’t hurt in any way, he had to get his car out of the wrong lane of traffic. “I’ll only be a second.”

By the time he exited the car, she’d moved closer and was standing only a few feet from where he stood. “I’m so, so, so sorry,” she said in rushed syllables as they came face-to-face. “Roscoe—that would be my dog—got loose, and I...well, I was only thinking of catching him before he got too far away or hurt. I wasn’t thinking about the road at all.”

And oh, if ever a living and breathing human could actually be an angel, it was this woman. She was as close to fitting the description of ethereal as Parker had ever seen, with her long, pale blond hair, thickly lashed eyes—green, he thought, but he’d require better light to be 100 percent positive—full mouth and the gentle, almost-delicate arc of her cheeks.

A white, ankle-length and cinched-at-the-waist dress—complete with wings attached to the back—didn’t hide her curvy figure, and while he had no idea if she wore high heels or flats, he guessed she couldn’t be taller than five feet plus an inch or three. There wasn’t any way he wouldn’t remember this woman, so no, Parker had not met her during the open house.

“Are you okay?” Parker asked, vastly more concerned in establishing her welfare before worrying about her dog’s, who seemed to be long gone. “Not feeling faint or anything, are you?”

“A little shaken, but that’s to be expected. Again, I’m so sorry for almost running smack into your car.” She shivered from the cold, her fall or the near collision with his car. Or, Parker supposed, all three. Angling her body, she scanned the stretch of sidewalk and houses across the street from the school. “But you should probably move your car and I need to find my dog.”

“I... Right. Of course, but I’d like to help. Let me get my kids situated in the auditorium and I’ll come back out.” He noticed with some humor that the band around her forehead had slipped, causing her halo to droop and giving her the appearance of a disheveled angel. It was, Parker decided, fairly adorable. She shivered again and her teeth chattered, so he took off his jacket. “Here, wear this,” he said, handing her the coat, “before you freeze to death.”

For whatever reason, he expected her to argue, but she didn’t. She surprised him with a grateful smile and small nod. “Thank you. I’m Nicole, by the way, and yes...if you really don’t mind, I’d appreciate your help in locating Roscoe.”

“Wouldn’t have offered if I minded, and I’m Parker.” He was about to say more when he noticed the headlights of an oncoming car. Yeah, definitely time to get out of the middle of the road. “Be careful,” he warned as he opened his door. “And I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

“Miss Bradshaw!” Erin yelled from the back seat, taking advantage of the open car door. “It’s us, Erin and Megan Lennox! You look very pretty and I’m glad we didn’t run you over.”

Nicole shielded her eyes and laughed. “Well, hello there, Erin and Megan. I’m glad you didn’t run me over, too.” Looking at Parker, she said, “You’re their father, I take it?”

“I am.”

“Nice to meet you, Parker-who-is-Megan-and-Erin’s-father.” She put on his coat, which was large enough on her frame to cover her wings, and zipped it to her chin. And darn if that halo of hers didn’t droop a little more, increasing her adorable quotient by two. Or three.

“Likewise.” Waving, he got into the driver’s seat and buckled his seat belt, his interest and curiosity about Nicole already sky-high, and said to his girls, “Okay, no harm and no foul. Let’s get out of the road and into the school, before anything else crazy happens.”

“Yeah. No more crazy stuff!” Megan said. “Just fun stuff!”

In a matter of seconds, the girls were once again talking about the play and the possibility of both of them being angels. As they did, Parker watched Nicole cross to the other side of the street without incident and, even through his closed window, could hear her shouting “Roscoe!”

He grinned at the sight of a disheveled angel searching for her dog, and hoping she’d find him quickly, he turned off the car’s emergency lights and veered into the proper lane. Less than a minute later, they were in the elementary school’s parking lot. The girls were chattering in their normal manner as they left the car, and Parker tossed in a teasing comment or two.

But his thoughts were wholly focused on Nicole Bradshaw and the sizzle of electricity that had sped through his bloodstream as they talked, as he took in her crooked halo and—to him, anyway—ethereal features. He recognized the sizzle well enough, even though years had passed since he’d last experienced the sensation.

Because until just a few minutes ago, Bridget was the only other woman Parker had ever looked at and felt that same pop of awareness, of innate chemistry and bone-deep attraction. It happened on the very first day he set eyes on Bridget Delaney, later to become Bridget Lennox, and every precious day they had together thereafter.

She was the woman he’d loved with every part of his heart and soul. The woman he’d had every intention of creating a long life and growing old with. The woman he still missed and longed for on a consistent, if not daily, basis. His daughters’ mother. His wife. His Bridget.

Frankly, Parker did not know what to think of having the same—and up until now, unique—initial response to Nicole that he’d had with Bridget. But he sure as hell planned on exploring that reaction and discovering if lightning really could strike twice.