I’d thought meeting Tom’s mother was nerve racking, but this was ten times worse. So much was riding on it. I’d already heard a great deal about his daughters. Like any proud father, Tom had talked nonstop about his girls. Whenever he mentioned their names, his eyes lit up and his voice softened. A blind and deaf person could have seen that these two little girls were his life. If we were going to have any kind of successful marriage, Taylor and Sadie needed to accept me.
“Hi, girls,” I said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”
Taylor just stared at me, clear challenge in her eyes. Seven years old, she was the spitting image of her father. She had Tom’s dark hair, his narrow face, and his blue eyes, which right now were studying me with a wariness I understood better than most people would. It was the same wariness I’d shown toward the various women my father had brought home over the years. Not quite welcoming, not quite trusting. The word stepmother had such negative connotations, and Taylor was no fool. She’d adopted a “wait and-see” attitude that I found totally understandable.
Four-year-old Sadie, on the other hand, was as guileless and open as a six-week-old pup. There was no trepidation in her eyes, just avid curiosity and a willingness to accept me for what I was, her dad’s new wife. The two girls couldn’t have been more different if they’d come from different parents. Not just in attitude, but in looks. Although I searched Sadie’s face for any trace of resemblance to Tom, I didn’t find it. Taylor might have inherited her father’s dark good looks, but Sadie, with her peaches-and-cream complexion and her blond curls, must have taken after Tom’s late wife.
She smiled shyly and buried her face against her father’s shoulder. “Hi,” she said.
Life hadn’t been easy for these little girls. They’d been so young when they lost their mother. According to Tom, Elizabeth’s death had hit both girls extremely hard. Even now, two years after their mother’s death, Sadie still had nightmares, and Taylor had trouble trusting new people. It hadn’t been easy on Tom, either, playing both mother and father while trying to maintain his medical practice and his sanity. He’d freely admitted to me that without his mother’s help, he wouldn’t have made it through.
That was one of the things that had drawn me to Tom. After the initial attraction, of course, when I first saw him sitting in the next chair at the dinner table and felt the jolt all the way to the marrow in my bones. But it was the subsequent conversation, the hours we spent together, that cemented my feelings. They say every woman seeks out a man like her father to marry. On the surface, Tom Larkin and Dave Hanrahan were as far apart as the poles, but there were a few things they did have in common. I’d lost my own mother at a young age, and I’d spent my childhood watching Dad struggle to raise me alone. I believe it takes a special kind of man to do that. So I knew where Tom was coming from. And I respected him for it.
Because I’d been through it myself, I knew I needed to tread carefully with Tom’s girls. I couldn’t expect to just jump in and take over where their mother had left off. Sadie might let me get away with it, but Taylor would never allow such a thing. She was old enough to remember, old enough to resent anyone who tried to take Elizabeth’s place. If I hoped to win Taylor over, if I hoped to mold us into a family, I’d have to practice patience.
But I didn’t have to rush. There was plenty of time for that. After all, we had the rest of our lives.
Wind battered the house in a relentless siege. Pine cones and debris rapped at the windows. Somewhere at the rear of the house, a loose shutter banged. But the place held fast. It had been built during an era when homes were designed to withstand a little wind, a little rain. That was a good thing, because we already had three inches of rain, and it was showing no signs of letting up. With wind gusts up to seventy-five miles per hour, the ancient pine that towered over the house creaked and moaned like an arthritic old man. I hoped to God it stayed upright; according to the radio Jeannette kept running in the kitchen, trees had been uprooted all over the county, and if it fell, that pine tree would go straight through the roof. Power lines were down everywhere. Twelve thousand people in the state were already without electricity, and that number was expected to rise.
But indoors, we were cozy and warm. Although we hadn’t lost power, Tom had brought out the candles, the matches, the flashlights, and he’d lined them up on the kitchen counter, just in case. Dinner was roast pork, with steamed asparagus and tiny red potatoes swimming in butter. After an initial hesitation, I forgot manners and just chowed down with my customary enthusiasm. I have what people euphemistically refer to as a healthy appetite. The first time Tom witnessed it, at the buffet table aboard the Island Princess, he’d been floored by the amount of food I was able to ingest without gaining an ounce. He actually found it charming that I have the appetite of a stevedore. I find it annoying that no matter how much I eat, I still look like Olive Oyl, Popeye’s seriously anorexic girlfriend.
Conversation around the dinner table was light and innocuous; Tom and I were asked about the cruise, about how we’d met, about our moonlight wedding and how we’d known so quickly that we were meant for each other. I was just reaching for my third potato when his mother dropped the bomb.
“You haven’t told us anything about your family, Julie,” she said with a smarmy smile. “I’d love to hear about them.”
I hesitated, my fork hovering over the serving dish, and met Tom’s eyes. My husband knew it all. I’d told him everything, the good, the bad and the ugly, and I wondered whether I should regale his mother with the whole sordid truth or a slightly sanitized version thereof.
Beneath the table, Tom slid his foot over to touch mine. His reassuring smile gave me strength. I glanced around the table at all the expectant faces, all these people waiting with bated breath for the life story of the anonymous woman who’d quite literally blown into their lives on the winds of a hurricane.
I speared the potato and put it on my plate. “Well,” I said as I sliced it in two and slathered it with butter, “I’m pretty much alone in the world. Or I was, until I met Tom.” I gave him a shaky smile, and he returned it full force. “I was divorced about a year ago. Before I married Jeffrey, there was just my dad and me. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, left us when I was five years old. Dad died six months ago. Liver cancer.”
I didn’t bother to elaborate. I didn’t tell them that Dad had died of a broken heart and too much boozing. Let them read between the lines if they wanted to. I’m all for honesty, but some skeletons are better left in the closet.
I ate a bite of potato. “My father was…” I trailed off, wondering how on earth to describe Dad in words that normal people would understand. People who’d never had the privilege of knowing him, with all his quirks and oddities. “Very independent. A freethinker. A little to the left of center.”
The girls watched me with wide eyes. Jeannette’s brows were drawn together into a small frown. Probably wondering if there were some family history of severe mental illness that was about to infect her future grandchildren. Directly across the table, Riley seemed curious, waiting. “He was a musician,” I said.
“Ah,” Riley said, as though that explained it all.
“A musician?” Jeannette said. “How interesting.”
Having grown up as Dave Hanrahan’s daughter, I understood only too well that interesting was a euphemism for horrifying. I speared another piece of potato. When I saw the affection and approval in Tom’s eyes, I decided to go for broke. Dabbing my mouth with my napkin, I said, “He was pretty well known at one time, until his career went south and my mother left him. When his career tanked and his band broke up, my mother ran off with the drummer. At that point, his life sort of fell apart.”
That was a polite way of putting it. The truth was that after my mother left, Dad drank himself to death. It took him twenty-seven years, but Dave Hanrahan was nothing if not persistent. The day she walked out the door, he decided that life was no longer worth living, and he spent the rest of his days proving the validity of that theory.
“Good