Kit suppressed a smile. She liked this kid. Liked her forthright manner and unconventional clothes. Her grime and her grit.
“You’d better head home before your aunt worries about you.” She opened the cooler. “It’s hot. Want a soft drink to take with you?”
Before Alex could answer, a pickup truck came to a sliding halt at the end of the driveway.
“Alex!” A big, dark-haired man leaped out of the driver’s side, scowling. “Your Aunt Emily’s been worried sick about you,” he barked as he charged up the driveway. “She called me at the pound to say you’d disappeared. You were supposed to stay in her yard.” His anger rolled before him like breakers on the beach.
Standing firm before his wrath, Alex pointed at the yard sale sign listing on its stake. “I saw the sign and came down for just a minute, Dad. To see if there were any Seafaring Cecil books.”
Kit pricked up her ears at the mention of Seafaring Cecil. But she hesitated to speak, cautious about coming between the man and his daughter.
“Alex—” the father’s anger quickly abated, replaced by weariness evident in the tiny lines fanning the corners of his eyes “—how could you see the sign if you weren’t already halfway down the street?”
Alex fumbled in the pocket of her overalls. “With this.” She retrieved a folding telescope Kit recognized as one of the offerings on Seafaringcecil.com.
The man seemed torn between exasperation and relief.
“She’s only been here a couple minutes,” Kit offered. “She told me she needed to get back. So as not to worry her aunt.”
Alex flashed her a grateful look.
As the man turned his attention to Kit for the first time, she sucked in her breath. She would know those dark eyes anywhere.
He held out a hand. “Sean McCabe.”
Oh, yeah.
Back when they’d gone to high school together, he’d been the cream of the crop, both scholastically and athletically. Every girl with a hormone to her name had lusted after him.
And Kit had not been immune.
Once, right before graduation, Sean had unexpectedly asked her out. Once and only once. And even then, he’d stood her up.
Kit could have sworn he’d only asked her out as some locker-room bet. The guys were always trying to find out if she was as easy as her mother.
At the unpleasant memory, Kit stiffened, but extended her hand, nonetheless. “Kit Darling.”
As his big, work-roughened hand enveloped hers, a flash of recognition crossed his face. One corner of his generous mouth twitched.
“Do you know this lady, Dad?” Alex tugged on her father’s jeans.
Kit swallowed hard. No one in Pritchard’s Neck had ever called her a lady. With one innocent question, this little girl managed to lay bare a vulnerability Kit didn’t want exposed. Especially not to Sean McCabe.
“We went to school together, punkin.” Sean spoke to Alex, but never took his eyes off Kit.
Could he possibly remember how he’d stood her up as if she hadn’t mattered? He’d been such a big man on campus. So why was Mr. Most-Likely-To-Succeed standing before her now in a T-shirt, jeans and lobstering boots instead of pinstripes and wing tips?
Kit withdrew her hand from his, unwilling to admit, even to herself, that he still made her pulse race.
Standing surrounded by the castoffs of her mother’s reckless life, Kit felt on display and unguarded in front of the one person in this podunk town she’d ever allowed herself to admire.
Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. She needed to wrap up Babe’s affairs and hit the road before she was tarred—once again—with her mother’s brush. But the problems she’d inherited from Babe required cash, and right now Kit had a cash-flow problem. She needed to stay in town long enough to liquidate what her mother had left behind to salvage her own credit rating. And to prove that at least, she, Kit, had character.
The clouds on the horizon had grown thick and dark. An uncomfortable prickly tension charged the air.
Alex sensed something was going on between her dad and this lady with the cool name—Kit, like the adventurer Kit Carson—but Alex couldn’t figure out what. Dad had said they’d gone to school together. He’d gone to school with lots of people in town, but he never looked at them the way he was looking at Kit.
Dad didn’t pay much attention to looks and always urged Alex not to either. But it was hard not to with Kit. She had purply-red streaks in her hair, two gold hoops in her left eyebrow and a cool tattoo like a skinny vine on her upper right arm.
Maybe Dad was interested in the motorcycle Alex had seen parked around the side of the house. When she and Dad read their adventuring books and planned their trips, they talked about how they’d get there. Alex always picked a motorcycle, and Dad eventually said okay—because it was all just pretend. This lady rode a motorcycle for real. Red. Like her cowboy boots. It was Alex’s favorite color. The color of the travel lines she and Dad drew on their maps.
A big raindrop fell on Alex’s head.
Her father put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get moving, scout.”
More raindrops fell. Alex glanced at all the stuff spilling over the front yard, then at Kit. Her eyes had a squinched-up look. Like she was trying hard not to cry. Or scream. Alex would scream, too, if her things were about to get ruined.
The rain began to hammer on the porch roof.
“Dad, we gotta help put away!”
She wasn’t sure he would. Though he’d do anything for his family and friends, he was real stand-offish with strangers. But Kit wasn’t a stranger. Dad had said they’d gone to school together.
“Please, Dad!”
“Not necessary!” Kit cried out as she kicked off her boots and dashed out into the yard barefoot. She looked mad as she hauled a nearby box full of shiny pillows out of the rain and onto the porch. Like maybe she hated all this stuff. Or the rain. Or Dad.
No way! Everybody liked Dad.
Alex pulled on his hand. “Puh-leeeese!” She suddenly needed Kit to like her dad, too.
“Okay,” he said, his voice real rough and funny sounding. “I owe Kit one.”
Now, what did that mean? Sometimes Alex did not understand grown-ups.
Reluctantly, Sean followed Kit into the rain.
Kit Darling.
The last person he expected to find his daughter hanging with. Damn. Alex had enough wild ideas of her own without picking up pointers from Kit.
Still, he’d heard the rumors. This yard sale had to hurt her pride. Big time.
And…he did owe her one.
He picked up a card table loaded with half-burned candles and headed for the porch, passing behind Kit who wrestled unsuccessfully with a stationary bicycle. Putting the table down, he went to help her.
“Go away!” she snarled, rounding on him like a cornered alley cat. A stray with attitude.
So, she didn’t want him here. He opened his mouth to call Alex. Started to turn his back on Kit, whose claws-bared approach to life had always made her more enemies than friends.
But her makeup did him in.
The rain sluiced down her face, making the heavy black mask she’d drawn around her eyes run in a muddy mess. She reminded him of Alex the day she’d fallen