A Triple Threat to Bachelorhood
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Marie Ferrarella
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12
Chapter One
“So, how long are you going to pretend you don’t know she’s back?”
Carl Cutler looked up from the fresh batch of wanted posters he was tacking up on the bulletin board and fixed the man who was both his boss and his cousin, as well as the sheriff of the thriving though undersize town of Serendipity, Montana, with what he figured was a vague look.
“Who?”
It wasn’t like Carl to be devious, Quint thought. But his young cousin’s demeanor had definitely changed in the last two weeks. It was time to stop standing on the sidelines, waiting for nature to take its course and to give nature—and his surprisingly stubborn deputy sheriff—a little shake.
“Melinda Morrow,” Quint said.
Carl picked up another poster and four thumbtacks. He did his best to sound totally uninterested. “It’s Greenwood now, isn’t it?”
“Was.” It was hard gauging a man’s response when all you had to look at was the back of his blond head. Quint shifted in his chair, trying to get a glimpse of Carl’s face. “She dropped it when she dropped that loser who took her away from here.”
Carl shrugged, pretending that Melinda Morrow hadn’t dwelled on his mind, at least fleetingly, every day for the last seven years. Ever since she’d left town for what she was certain was a far more exciting, wonderful life with Steven Greenwood elsewhere. Elsewhere being anywhere but Serendipity.
It’s too homespun for me, too predictable. I want to feel alive, Carly. Haven’t you ever wanted to feel alive?
He couldn’t tell her when she’d asked then that he felt alive every time she was anywhere nearby. That she was the one who made him feel alive. They weren’t his words to say. Melinda had thought of him as her best friend, her confidant. Someone to tell her secrets to. Like that she was in love with Steve Greenwood and that the two of them were going to “reach for the moon together.” Which meant getting out of Serendipity.
But not out of his heart.
Carl’d tried to shut her out, to forget about her. He’d tried to shed memories of Melinda just as he had shed the last letter of his name. To everyone in Serendipity, he was Carl now, a name he felt was far more befitting a deputy sheriff.
But while the letter was easy enough to leave by the wayside—after reminding everyone in town half a dozen times or so to call him Carl—memories of Melinda were not. They came with the haze that was tucked around his brain when he first woke up each day and snuck back just as he drifted off to sleep each night, giving him no rest.
Damn, but a man shouldn’t be making a fool of himself over a woman he hadn’t even kissed, Carl had upbraided himself more than once. But it never did any good. Because each time he thought he was over Melinda, something would happen to trigger a relapse and he’d have to start all over again, trying to root her out of his life.
He’d allowed himself to be set up with other women by his well-meaning extended family, hoping that something would click, that he’d feel that surge of elusive chemistry that had ambushed each one of his five cousins, bringing them all to the altar in quick succession.
But it never happened. No chemistry, no spark. Just a series of nice, meaningless dates with attractive women that led nowhere.
And now Melinda was back. Back with her children, three adorable kids he’d heard, two girls and a boy, each a carbon copy of the other. Triplets. And they all looked almost exactly like tiny, blond miniatures of Melinda, to hear Wylie Pruitt tell it. The old man was almost a fixture in front of the general store and most of Serendipity passed his way sooner or later. He was better than a newspaper, and more animated. Wylie had given him vivid descriptions of all four of them. It made Carl ache, but that was neither here nor there.
He studied two posters before him, not seeing either. “I know she’s back, Quint.”
“You haven’t said anything.”
Carl looked up sharply. It wasn’t like Quint to prod this way. “Like what?”
Ordinarily Quint could wait almost anything out with the patience of Job, but he sighed now and shook his head. Of his three brothers and one sister, he was the only one Carl had ever confided in about the feelings he had for Melinda. Carl wouldn’t have said anything to him, either, except that Quint had learned how to read him like a book and guessed at the extent of his feelings. It had never been in Carl to lie.
Carl had always been the open one, the one who took an interest in everyone. It wasn’t like him to hold back this way.
“Like you’re going to go over and see her to say hello,” Quint prodded.
Irritation flared, surprising Carl. He didn’t usually get annoyed with anyone, least of all Quint. Banking the foreign feeling, he kept his voice mild.
“Melinda doesn’t need me saying that. Plenty of people in Serendipity can say that word to her. And lots of others besides.”
“Don’t pretend to be thick, Carl, you know what I mean. The way I see it,” Quint said easily, “she needs a friend.”
There was a time when he would have wanted to be everything to Melinda, she’d only have to say the word, Carl thought. But that time was gone. A man had to look out for himself once in a while.
Quint closed the box of thumbtacks, forcing Carl to look at him.
“If she needs a friend, that would be Morgan,” Carl told him, naming his youngest cousin. “They were pretty close once.”
“That would be you,” Quint corrected. “You were closer to her.”
Carl closed the empty folder that had housed the posters, dropping it on his desk. “Not close enough. Otherwise…”
He let the word stretch out before he dropped it. There was no sense in saying that Melinda hadn’t shared her plans about leaving with him until almost the day of her departure. That he had hoped, prayed really, that she would see the light and decide to stay. With him. He’d always thought of Steve as being too superficial, too interested in himself to be any good for Melinda.
God knew the man was good-looking enough to get fan mail from roses, but his heart was another matter. There’d only been room enough in Steven Greenwood’s heart for his own selfish interests.
Carl had wrapped up his courage into a ball and told Melinda that. And she had turned her back on him, said he was like her father, wanting to keep her in a two-bit town forever.
It was the last time he saw her.
The next thing he knew, he’d overheard Morgan telling her mother, his aunt Zoe, that that Melinda was gone. Melinda’s father had been angry, saying he’d been expecting it, that she was just like her mother, running off with some man.
Except that Melinda hadn’t left behind a husband and little girl the way her mother had, Carl thought.
All she’d left behind was him. And she probably hadn’t a clue about that, anyway.
Quint leaned back in his chair, his clear blue eyes squinting as if that could somehow help him delve into his cousin’s mind. “Never knew you to carry a grudge before, Carl.”
“It’s not a grudge.” The retort came out a bit too quickly, he calculated. Carl tempered his voice before continuing. “It’s been seven years. What am I supposed to say to her?”
“Like I said, ‘hello.”’ Disgusted, Carl waved a hand at Quint. The latter tried another angle. “All right, how about, ‘welcome back’? Or, ‘nice to see you’?”
There was no point in going around and around about this. Carl had no intention of seeking Melinda out like some lovesick puppy from the past. If they had any business together, she could come to see him. Otherwise, it was best, as the old adage said, just to let sleeping dogs lie.
“Yeah, maybe,” Carl murmured, looking through the middle drawer of his desk for a report he could have sworn he’d placed there. But it wasn’t there. Annoyed, he shut the drawer a little too hard and stood up again. “If I’m not too busy.”
Rising, Quint crossed to Carl and laid a hand over the man’s shoulders. They’d broadened considerably since he’d first taken over as big brother for his only cousin, but the feeling was still the same. He was the older one and that meant comforting Carl as best he could whenever the need arose.
When they’d been growing up, he’d felt Carl needed someone because his cousin’s parents were so aloof, so distant. Just the way Wyatt McCall’s had been. But, at the time, his future brother-in-law had been a close friend while Carl was blood. And as such, Quint felt his own duty was clear. He had to take Carl under his wing, make him feel part of something.
It had worked like a charm. The Cutlers had swallowed Carl up lock, stock and barrel, caring about him as if he’d been born to them directly instead of via Quint’s uncle, his father’s brother.
Quint felt Carl’s shoulders stiffen the second he put his arm around them. This, too, wasn’t like him. The man, Quint thought, had it bad—and he wasn’t even admitting it to himself, which just made it worse.
“We all appreciate you helping out at the house now that we’ve all left the roost, so to speak, but Carl, you’ve got to take some time for yourself, do something for yourself once in a while.” His mother had told him that Carl turned up almost every evening for dinner and to do whatever needed doing around the ranch house.
“I do. I am. I like being there for Uncle Jake and Aunt Zoe. With all of you married, they miss having someone around to fuss over. And I don’t mind the fussing. Besides, nobody’s ever been kinder to me than your parents have been.”
That wasn’t the whole story, and they both knew it, but Quint turned it to his advantage.
“Then you know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of kindness,” Quint said slowly. “Maybe you’d like a shot at making someone else feel that way.”
Carl frowned. He knew exactly where this was going. “What makes you think Melinda needs kindness?”
That was a no-brainer. “She’s back with three kids, no husband and is living with her father. What would you say she needs?”
“A huge loan from the bank,” Carl quipped.
Quint surprised him by saying, “She’s already put in for one of those.”
He’d only meant it as a joke. The concern was immediate. “Why? Steve leave her with a lot of debts to pay?”
Quint shook his head. Crossing to the coffee machine, he poured himself a mug of extra-black coffee. The aroma wafted between them. “She’s trying to start a day-care center. Put her education to use while taking care of her three kids.”
A day-care center. Morgan had mentioned something once about Melinda writing that she was going to become a teacher. That was when she’d first left Serendipity, before communication had completely stopped.
Why wasn’t she trying to get a job at the local school?
Carl looked at his cousin. “You seem to know an awful lot about her business.”
Quint spread his hands. “Hey, I’m the sheriff here. I’m supposed to know things about the people in my town.” His eyes narrowed just a bit. “And as my deputy, you’re supposed to know a few things, too.”
He knew things all right, Carl thought. More than a few things. Like how Melinda’s hair smelled with the spring breeze playing through it, tantalizing him because she was always just beyond his reach. Or the way her smile seemed to light up the darkest evening, sending sparks out through the blackened sky.
Oh, he knew things all right. He knew too much for his own damn good.
“Isn’t that a redundancy?” Carl asked him, a poker expression firmly painted on his face as he turned toward Quint.
Quint laughed softly. “Boy, send a guy off to earn a couple of college credits and suddenly he thinks he’s Aristotle. You’re squirming around, avoiding the issue, you know.”
“There is no issue, Quint,” Carl insisted. “What I told you seven years ago is just that, seven years old. In the past. Dead.”
The phone rang just then and Carl took it to be a reprieve.
Since Tracy, the woman who doubled as their secretary and dispatcher, was out to lunch, Quint picked up the receiver himself. “Sheriff’s office.”
This, Carl decided, would be a good time to go out to lunch himself. Maybe once he was back, Quint would have allowed the subject of Melinda’s return to die a natural death.
Mildly curious about the call, Carl found himself at the door, listening as Quint said, “Uh-huh,” “Hmm,” and “I see.”
He hung up just as Carl put his hand on the door-knob. “Hold up, Carl.” Carl turned to see Quint writing something on a piece of paper. “This one’s for you.”
This was nothing out of the ordinary. Unless it was something major, they took turns checking things out. “Domestic dispute?”
Quint finished writing and placed his pen down. “Nope.”
“Not a robbery, is it?” Though he liked Serendipity the way it was, there were times when Carl did want a little excitement that went beyond Sally McCormick’s grandfather Axel walking down Main Street wearing his rain boots and nothing else. “We haven’t had one of those since Billy Wesson took his old man’s car out for a joyride and the old man pressed charges.”
Quint allowed a slight smile to find a home on his face. “Nope.”
Carl’s wheat-colored brows drew together. Quint was playing this one very close to the chest. “Do I get a hint?”
“Think ‘cat’,” was all Quint said as he held out the piece of paper with an address on it.
Carl frowned as he took the paper from Quint. He scanned the address quickly. Recognition washed over him like a breath-sucking wave. He placed the paper back on the desk. “You go.”
Leaning back in his chair, Quint rested his feet on top of his desk. The personification of the immovable object. “Can’t.”
Where had this temper come from, Carl wondered as he struggled to keep it in check. He never used to be like this. “Why?”
Quint raised and lowered his shoulders. “I’m busy.”
Damn it, he was too old to be playing games like this. “Doing what?”
Quint’s grin grew wider. He wasn’t given to premonitions as a rule, but this time he had a hunch that things might actually work out for his cousin. If Carl didn’t suddenly turn mulish on him.
“Delegating.”
“Well, the guy you’re delegating to doesn’t want to take this call. You take it, I’ll take the next one. The next two,” he threw in obstinately.
But Quint shook his head as he tapped his badge. “No dice. This gives me the authority to tell you to take this call—unless you want off the force.”
He didn’t want off the force. Carl loved being a deputy, loved being there for the people, especially the children who seemed to take to him as if he was the embodiment of every single hero they had ever fantasized about. And he liked being that for them. Being the one who made them feel safe because he was around.
He stared down at the address on the paper. The place he’d been to too many times to count as a kid, then as a teen.
Her house.
Carl raised his eyes to Quint’s. “You know what this is, don’t you? It’s dirty pool.”
“No, it’s a cat in a tree.” Quint laced his fingers behind his head and rocked back in his chair. “And the cat is all yours. Mr. Whiskers, if you want to address him by his given name.”
Carl opened the door. Sheriff or no sheriff, he gave Quint a dirty look. “I’d like to address you by a name, but it wouldn’t be your given one. At least, not the one that was initially given.”
Quint laughed, the office absorbing the resonant sound. “I’ll tell Ma on you.”
His own parents were gone now. It concerned Carl every so often that the fact didn’t bother him, that their absence was nothing more than a vague notation on his brain. But his uncle and aunt, well, that was another story. Especially Aunt Zoe. All his fond memories of childhood centered around her and the long, wide kitchen table where everyone would gather—to do homework, to talk and, at times, to dream.
And now he was heading out to retrieve his dream’s cat. The world, he decided, was sometimes a very strange place.
Carl doubled back to get his hat. “If you talk to Aunt Zoe before I do, tell her that I’m really sorry her second-oldest son turned out to be such a sadist.”
“I kind of think she’d approve—if she knew,” Quint added before Carl had a chance to ask. What he’d been told was in confidence and Quint saw no reason, though they were all close, to share it with the others. If Carl wanted to share his feelings—as he clearly didn’t now—then it was up to Carl, not him, to say something. “Be gentle with the cat. It’s a Turkish Angora.”
“Right.”
A Turkish Angora cat. What the hell kind of cat was that, anyway? He wasn’t up on his cats, or most other creatures for that matter, either. To him, the animal species, other than horses, of course, because ranching was in everyone’s blood here, were divided into categories that bore just their names. Dog, cat, bird. He didn’t pay much attention to subvarieties. It was people, not animals, who had always caught his attention.
When he was younger, he’d liked hanging back and observing. Hanging back had always been safer in those days. Opinions, whenever he’d voice them, would like as not get him a wallop from a father who knew sobriety only fleetingly. It taught a guy to be closemouthed for reasons of self-preservation.
Melinda Morrow felt overwhelmed.
She was trying, she really was. But there was just so much to do, so many details to attend to when it came to starting a new life from scratch that, at times, she couldn’t even catch her breath.
Well, not scratch exactly, she amended silently a second later. Starting from scratch would mean that she was alone and she wasn’t. She had Mollie, Matthew and Maggie and that was far from being alone or starting from scratch. That was starting with a full house, she thought. A fun house like the ones in the carnivals that used to come through Serendipity when she was a child.
There was no doubt about it. Her triplets kept her hopping.
They also kept her hopeful, she thought, grounding her in reality while holding out the promise of a wonderful tomorrow. She hadn’t known she was capable of loving as much, as strongly, as she found herself loving these three little half-orphans. Half-orphans because the man she had given her heart to in an almost-rebellious act of defiance wanted no part of the small beings he’d had a hand in creating. They were “all hers,” as Steve had said when he finally called it quits.
That was the humiliation of it, she thought, circling the giant oak tree again, looking for a path Mr. Whiskers could take down. She’d told everyone that it had been her idea to leave, that Steve had refused to grow up—and that much was true—but in truth it had been his idea to leave their marriage. She would have stuck it out, hoping that he was a late bloomer and would eventually catch up to her. That fatherhood would finally sink in instead of sinking what they had between them.
But it turned out that what they’d had between them were good times and a future that promised more of the same. Their life together wasn’t real. It was a fairy tale into which true responsibility was not allowed access. And, as it turned out, a fairy tale where the prince and princess had no place for children in them.
Steve had wanted to palm off the triplets on his parents, or her father, it didn’t matter to him who or if there was any love waiting to greet the children. When she’d told him that there was no way she was going to give her children up, even for a little while, Steve had said goodbye.
“And that,” she murmured aloud, looking up at the tree where her children’s beloved Mr. Whiskers was housed, “was that.”
So she’d returned home because she had nowhere else to go and little money to go with. And because of all the towns in the country, Serendipity was the one place where she knew she could safely raise her children. Since they were deprived of their father, she wanted at least that much for them. Melinda wanted them to be safe and feel safe.
The day-care center would be her way of getting back on her feet. If that, too, didn’t turn out to be a dream. At the very least, it would be putting her teaching experience to good use.
“Mama, Whiskers, Whiskers,” Mollie cried, pointing impatiently up into the oak tree. “Make him come down. Now.”
Melinda ruffled the little girl’s blond hair. “You have the makings of a first-class dictator, my love,” she told the oldest of her triplets. “We’ll get him down, sweetie, I promise.” Her hands fisted at her waist, she looked up at the tree. I’m just not sure how at the moment, that’s all.
Why was it a cat could go up a tree, but couldn’t come down?
Chewing on her lower lip, Melinda shoved her hands into her pockets and circled around the tree again slowly, thinking. She’d called the sheriff’s office, asking for help, but if no one showed up soon, she was going to climb up into the tree herself.
The way she used to, she thought with a half smile. When she’d been young and fearless and every day had been an adventure. The problem with growing up, she mused, was that you realized the consequences of your actions. If she fell out of the tree, who would take care of her children? Her father had taken them in, but she knew that was only temporary.
When had life gotten so complicated and difficult?
“Tell you what, let’s get you and the rest of the motley crew down for your naps and Mr. Whiskers’ll be back in the house, looking down his nose at you, by the time you’re up.”
Hands on the tiny shoulders, she turned her protesting daughter toward the back door and herded her into the house.
Melinda had bought Mr. Whiskers when Maggie and the others had fallen in love with him at the animal shelter, chanting “cat, cat,” over and over again until she’d broken down and brought the animal home for her children.
All kids needed a pet, she reasoned. Even a finicky one.
Mr. Whiskers was more Mollie’s cat than her siblings’, which explained why two-thirds of the triplets were holed up in front of the television set, glued to every word that a big yellow dog was saying.
An advertisement came on for the latest video games, blaring every word at her. Three sets of eyes grew huge as they watched the animation.
She should have gotten them a mechanical cat, Melinda thought belatedly. No kitty litter, no finicky behavior, no trees scaled.
Too late now, she thought.
She shut off the television set to a chorus of groans. “Naptime,” she announced. The groans intensified.
Shutting out all feelings except those that belonged to a deputy sheriff sworn to uphold the law, Carl rang the doorbell. He rang it two more times before he decided that the din coming from inside the house was completely drowning out the chimes of the doorbell.
Fisting his hand, he knocked, loud and hard. He wasn’t about to back away and leave. That would be cowardly and he’d never been that before. Mentally he called Quint a few choice names.
The front door opened a few seconds later.
It was hard keeping his mind on his role and not on the woman in front of him.
The girl who had left Serendipity at eighteen was beautiful. The woman who had returned at twenty-five was stunning.
Finding his tongue, and the wits that were threatening to scatter from him like so many marbles on a board that had suddenly slanted, Carl said, “I’ve come about the cat.”
