“You haven’t even touched your coffee.” Harry strode past the trio of dogs who hopped to their feet to follow him. He heard Daisy’s boots on the floor boards behind him. “You must have stopped by for some reason. We have lots to talk about, don’t we? Your dog, Tango? Your friends who were wounded in that IED explosion? Are they okay? Were you hurt? I mean, I can see the scars, so clearly you were, but—”
“That was a different skirmish.”
“You were hurt more than once?” Harry had his cap on, his coat zipped and the front door open when Daisy grabbed his arm with both hands and tugged him to a halt. “Wait.”
Her fingers curled into the sleeve of his coat, tightening their hold on him. Harry glanced down at her white-knuckled grip, frowning at the unexpected urgency in her touch before angling around to face her.
“Please don’t leave.” Her face was tipped up, her eyes searching his as if she was struggling to come up with the right words to say. Odd. Words didn’t seem to be a problem for her. “If you really have to go, I understand. And if you don’t want to talk, that’s okay. But...” She looked back over her shoulder, past the dogs and holiday decorations before she finally let go of his sleeve and shrugged. “Totally unrelated thing, but, before you go, would you do me a favor? I’m not saying you owe me anything. I mean, you barely know me—”
“I know you better than most people.” Correction. He knew the person who’d been his lifeline to normalcy and home and hope. This chatterbox with the wild hair and effusive personality felt like someone different. “After reading your letters, that is. You shared a lot. About your ex, your parents, this house...” He glanced around at the refinished wood and fresh paint of the drafty old Colonial that was far too big for one person—even if she did live with a pack of dogs. “Some of your school stories made me laugh or made me want to wring someone’s neck.”
She took half a step back. “You remember all that?”
He’d memorized nearly every sentence. Laughter. Concerns. Wisdom. Compassion. The Daisy Gunderson he knew had shared her heart.
“I know the men and women I work with,” he clarified. “My sister and her husband... I mean, you’re not the only person I know.”
He couldn’t tell if the pinch at the corners of her mouth and eyes meant she was touched by his confession, or if she felt a little sad to learn how few connections he had outside the Marine Corps. “Thank you. I feel like I know you better than someone I just met a few minutes ago, too. You wrote some touching things that, well, some of them made me cry.”
He made her cry? Harry shifted uncomfortably inside his coat. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. You shared the truth about what was on your mind, what you were feeling. I was honored.” She hugged her arms around her middle. “You made me smile sometimes, too.”
So why wasn’t he seeing that smile? The Daisy in his dreams always smiled. This was not going well. Daisy Gunderson was supposed to have a serene smile and a calm demeanor that made all the crap he had to deal with go away. But just because the real Daisy didn’t fit the ethereal angel he’d imagined, it didn’t mean he should blow her off. “You were going to ask me something?”
“Right.” She shrugged one shoulder. Then she pointed at him, at herself, then back at him. “I’m here by myself and I wondered... Would you...?”
Now she couldn’t come up with words? “Ma’am, I really should be going.”
Her manic energy returned in a burst that faded into breathless hesitation. “One. Don’t call me ma’am. My students call me ma’am, and it’s after hours and I’m off duty. Besides, it makes me feel like I’m old enough to be your mother. And two... I could use a man right now.” Now wasn’t that a suggestive request. The parts of him south of his belt buckle stirred with interest, even as his chest squeezed with anxiety at the possibility she wanted something more than a pen pal, too. “But I don’t have a big brother or a boyfriend or a dad to call and...” She gestured down the hallway toward the back of the house. “Would you check something out for me?”
His disappointment surprised him more than the relief he felt. “You’ve got a problem?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” She tucked a stray lock of hair back into the purple and brown waves behind her ear. “I hope not, but...”
He could change a flat tire for her, or do some heavy lifting or pull something down off a high shelf. He owed the fantasy Daisy from his letters at least that much. But as Harry waited for the details, he read something more troubling than the awkwardness of this conversation in the blue eyes behind her glasses. She was scared.
Seventeen years of military training put him on instant alert.
“Show me.”
Stopping only to put on her coat and order the dogs to stay inside the mudroom, Daisy walked out onto the back deck, and Harry followed. She went to the railing and pointed down into the snow. “Those footprints. Something seems off to me.”
This was about something more than tracks through her backyard. Her cheeks should be turning pink with the dampness chilling the air. Unless the colored lights were playing tricks on him, her skin had gone pale. The buoyant energy that had overwhelmed him earlier had all but disappeared. Seemed he wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.
With a nod, he accepted the simple mission she charged him with and went down into the yard. Stepping farther out into the snow so as not to disturb the suspicious tracks, Harry switched his phone into flashlight mode and made a quick reconnaissance. This was an awful lot of traffic through the yard of a woman who lived alone. And all of these tracks were too big to be Daisy’s. His boots were digging into snow instead of sand, but the hackles at the back of Harry’s neck went up just as they had overseas when he sensed an enemy lurking somewhere beyond his line of sight.
Trusting suspicions he wasn’t sure he was equipped to deal with yet, he retraced his own path a second time, kneeling to inspect some of the deeper tracks. They’d frozen up inside after a bit of melting, meaning they’d been there long before the afternoon sun had reached them. He pushed to his feet and moved closer to the house to confirm that the deepest boot prints were facing the house, a good five feet beyond the gas and water meters. Harry looked up to a window with a shade drawn halfway down and curtains parted a slit to reveal the blackness of the room inside.
Harry glanced up at Daisy, who was watching his every move from the edge of the deck. She was hugging her arms around herself again. Something definitely had her spooked. “That’s not just a case of a new meter reader guy thinking he could get out on that side of the yard, is it?”
“I don’t think so. He’d only have to see that part of the fence once to know there’s no gate over there.” And yet her visitor had walked back and forth multiple times, then stopped here to look inside that window. “What room is this?”
She paused long enough that he looked up at her again. “My bedroom.”
Harry walked straight to the deck, braced one foot on the bottom planks and vaulted over the railing. The snow flinging off his boots hadn’t settled before he’d turned her toward the door to walk her back inside. “You need to call the police. You’ve got a Peeping Tom.”
Harry sat in the darkness of his truck watching Daisy’s light blue Colonial with the dark blue shutters and dozens of Christmas lights, wondering if she was going to give the balding guy at her front door the same kind of hug she’d given him when he’d left a half hour earlier. He already wasn’t a fan of the older gentleman who’d insisted she leave the barking dogs on the other side of the glass storm door and finish their conversation on the brick porch where Daisy was shivering without her coat. If she hugged the guy, then Baldy was definitely going on Harry’s