Lone Star Rising. Darlene Graham
too, the scarred hardwood flooring in the entry hall, the finely detailed newel post at the foot of the stairs, the weakly lit miniature chandelier overhead.
He’d never paid much attention to this house from the street. It was one of many Victorian-era relics in Five Points, barely visible behind mounds of overgrown arbor vitae bushes. But he could see now that the place certainly had potential. Who was renting it out to Robbie Tellchick? Old man Mestor, most likely. He owned several in this part of town, all in disrepair like this one.
The living room opened off the narrow hallway with a set of double pocket doors, which stood open a crack. Walking past, he caught a glimpse of Robbie’s round tummy and heard her irritated voice interrogating the boys. “Where on earth did you get a golf ball?”
A childish voice gave a defensive reply, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“All right.” Robbie’s voice came back high and sharp. “I want you guys to go upstairs and do your homework and get your baths and put on your pajamas.”
“Even me?” Zack heard Mark protest.
Zack dug the necessary items out of a toolbox mounted in the truck bed under the rear window. He’d have to ask Robbie if she had a spare cardboard box. Since she’d just moved that seemed likely.
He went back to the kitchen, and she came trundling in on his heels.
“You really don’t have to do that,” she said.
Of course he didn’t, but he wasn’t going to argue the point. “Have you got a broom and a dustpan? And a cardboard box? And maybe some duct tape?”
“I think so.” She went to a door that opened to a cramped utility room, where Zack could see a washer-dryer set beyond. Thank God, Zack thought, she at least had that, with a baby coming and all. He’d never caught himself having such a purely domestic thought before. It flat out startled him.
She disappeared and flipped on a light. The room was apparently a converted porch, with a crooked old wood floor and a bank of bare windows rattling in the wind. Piles of dirty laundry and other clutter were scattered everywhere. After she rummaged around for a minute, she came back with the broom and dustpan and a sizeable cardboard box, wrestling it into the kitchen on her front like an out-of-control boat.
“Let me.” He dashed to her side and took hold of it, levering the carton flat in one swift motion. At her quizzical look he said, “It’s for the window.”
“Ah. Good idea.” She blew out a frustrated puff of air that made her frizzy bangs lift. “I guess it’s too late to get anything done about replacing it tonight. The glass shop’ll be closed.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said as he jerked on the gloves.
She rubbed her arms, clad in the sleeves of a clingy little white T-shirt under the overalls. “The temperature’s supposed to drop tonight.”
He squatted to the floor and started scooping up glass with the dustpan. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You know, every time you call me ma’am, it just makes everything ten times worse.”
He gave her a grin over his shoulder.
“I hope you don’t think that this—” she made a wild, frustrated gesture at the chaos around her “—is the way I usually live. I’m normally very organized, but it seems like it’s taking me forever to get settled.” She stuck out her bottom lip and huffed, making her bangs fly up again.
“And to top it all off, I’m cranky and pregnant. That ‘ma’am’ bit makes me feel like a little old lady or something. Oh, I know I’m four years older than you. I remember you from high school, at least I did once my sister reminded me about you. She claimed you got the Eagle when you were only a freshman.” She gave him an assessing look. “Did you really?”
The Eagle. Zack had forgotten about it. The award stood for leadership. Integrity. Strength. Invariably the honor went to a senior, a top athlete who excelled in academics and inspired his teammates. Part of getting the Eagle entailed bench-pressing more weight than any of the other guys during football training. Even at the age of 33, Zack could still press 300.
It was that physical discipline that had enabled him to carry a heavy man like Danny Tellchick out of a burning barn with no air. Not that putting his air mask on Danny’s face had done any good. The man was already dead. The fire marshal had finally confirmed that to Zack yesterday. Roy Graves had blamed the coroner for the delay. Zack just wanted to know the truth, whatever that was. When they’d held the critical stress-management session after the fire, Zack had made sure everybody clearly understood that he was the one, the only one, who would be taking any bad news to Robbie Tellchick.
Zack covered all these thoughts with another engaging grin. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Cut it out. I’m not that much older than you, even if I do look it at the moment.” She raked the frizzed hair back from her forehead. “So you can just stop the ‘ma’am’ stuff, okay?”
“Whatever you say…ma’am.”
That got a perturbed little laugh out of her and Zack’s heart lifted. He hadn’t seen her smile, really smile, once in all the times he’d been in her presence or glimpsed her from afar in the months since her husband’s death. She smiled at her customers at the diner, of course, but it was the glazed charm of a girl whose feet hurt. If they asked him, he could tell a person exactly the when, where and how of every instance when he’d seen Robbie Tellchick since the night of her husband’s death. He could tell a person what she had been wearing, how her face had looked, the vivid color of her wounded green eyes.
She seemed suddenly lighter in spirit now. “Well, get busy.” She flapped a hand at him as if she were bossing the boys.
He laughed and they chatted while he swept up the rest of the glass.
The house was interesting, he allowed. It had possibilities.
She agreed, filling him in on some of its odd little features.
“Your boys are sure cute kids,” he said.
“A handful,” she countered. “Do you have kids?”
“No,” he said, “not even married.”
When he’d finished duct-taping the cardboard securely over the window opening, he said, “Okay. Have you got a flashlight?”
“Omigosh.” She jerked open a drawer. “The dogs! They could get hurt. They stay out there in their doghouse at night. We’d better check for glass outside the window, too, hadn’t we?”
He realized he had liked the sound of what she’d just said. She’d said we. There hadn’t been any we in Zack’s life in quite a while. Dates, yes. Plenty of dates. But nothing deep. Nothing lasting.
“You know, that’s a good thing,” Zack said as he followed her back down the hall.
She gave him a puzzled look over her shoulder.
“I mean, that you’ve got those dogs out there. They’ll act as protection tonight—” He bit off the sentence, wishing he hadn’t drawn attention to the fact that she’d be sleeping alone upstairs with nothing between her family and the outside world but a flimsy piece of cardboard.
The dogs were curled up on the porch, which was also rotting in places.
They stood up and trotted over when Robbie murmured to them. One, a fat little blond pup with sawed-off legs, looked part corgi. The other, slender of build with a long black-and-white coat, looked like he had a lot of Border collie in him.
Robbie petted them, talking baby talk as she did so, and Zack was inordinately fascinated with her long fingers as they ruffled the dogs’ silky coats, and with a glimpse of maternally lush cleavage. She straightened, pushed at her back with a palm, stretching and groaning as she did, and he found himself inordinately fascinated by that, too.
“Angus,