Heavenly Stranger Read online

  Her shoulders drooped. “Don’t you want my help?”

  He thought it curious that Maddie would fight him over Wayne’s integrity but back down on something she obviously wanted to do. He felt himself wavering even though he knew the best thing was not to see her again. “You really want to mess with all that sticky stuff?”

  “Yes.” She looked at the hull. “Today’s the first day in a year that I’ve had some kind of purpose. I like it.”

  “All right.”

  Her smile was worth giving in when he knew better. “I’ll even bring lunch.”

  Maddie was going to be a problem. He was already looking forward to seeing her tomorrow. And it had nothing to do with lunch.

  “Can we go out on your boat?” Q asked as he and Maddie walked away from the warehouse.

  “No, we can’t.”

  “Don’t you have the Dinky no more?”

  “I imagine it’s somewhere around here. Going out there…” She nodded toward the bay glittering in the late afternoon sun. “makes me a ten on the sad meter.”

  Going out on the Dinky without Wayne was unimaginable. But she had to admit she missed the sunsets and the shelling. What surprised her most was how much she missed being held by a man. Sure, Dad gave her a hug once in a while, though he wasn’t too comfortable showing affection. But being held by Chase was different. She’d felt her body melt against his and her blood thicken to the consistency of hot fudge. Her mind had shut down and let her body take over for a minute. She’d been afraid to do more than put her hands on his hips. If she’d slid them all the way around him, she might not have been able to let go.

  “Baby, what in Heaven’s name are you doing here?” a female voice said, rocking her out of her thoughts.

  Carol Schaeffer, her mother-in-law, was coming toward her on the walkway. She was an attractive woman with bright blonde hair and a made-up face that always seemed a little over-done. She was not impressed by Maddie’s bedraggled appearance, but then again, that was the look she’d always given her. “Dick said he saw you here this morning, but I told him surely he was mistaken. But here you are, and what have you been doing?”

  “I’ve been helping work on Barnie’s boat.”

  That got a raised eyebrow, a finely tuned one at that. “With that strange man?”

  Maddie watched Q wander to the docks and peer down into the water. “He’s not strange. He needs help, and it’s nice to be working again.”

  Carol gave her the laugh that wasn’t really a laugh. “Baby, you’ve never worked a day in your life. Why start now? You’ve got it made, with us running the marina and you just sitting back collecting the revenues. It works out well, don’t you think? Don’t push yourself. It’s been a hard year on all of us, but especially you. Everyone knows how much you loved Wayne, and they all understand that you need to take your time to get over him being gone.”

  “I appreciate that, and all that you’ve done to this place and handling the day-to-day duties. But maybe I should come back and—”

  “No need for you to face this place and its terrible memories. Dick and I don’t mind in the least making sure everything’s running smoothly.” Her forehead wrinkled. “You do think we’re doing a good job, don’t you?”

  “Of course, but I—”

  “Then you just sit back and let us keep handling it. It’s good seeing you again, Baby.”

  Carol headed onward to Sugar’s, probably getting a mid-afternoon mocha like she used to do. Something bothered Maddie about the conversation, probably that the Schaeffers were doing all the work at the marina. But Carol seemed happy to keep running the place, so she let the feeling go.

  Q was spitting into the water and watching to see if the fish were interested. She walked over, afraid he’d fall in and hit his head and drown.

  “Think fish like boogers?” he asked when she joined him.

  “Ew, yuck! Don’t say that word.”

  “But it’s not a bad word. It’s a funny word.”

  “It might be a funny word, but it has an unfunny meaning. Come on, let’s get home.”

  “And you can just butt out of my life,” Maddie told Colleen as they were getting dinner ready that night.

  Colleen’s eyes widened. “Baby, you can’t seriously still think this guy is your angel.”

  “You went to see the guy?” Mom asked Colleen.

  “It was for Baby’s own good. I mean, he could be a serial killer for all we know.”

  Maddie wrinkled her nose. “Well, if he is, it won’t matter none because he can’t remember who he is. Besides, I spent the whole day with him, and he didn’t try to kill me once.”

  Colleen hunched her shoulders and gave her the vulture look. “He’s probably sizing you up, waiting for the right opportunity.”

  “Sheesh, and you call me fatalistic!”

  Mom set the green bean casserole on the counter with a thud. “Wait a minute. Colleen, you told Chase that Maddie thinks he’s her angel?”

  “Fine, shoot me, I did. I’m worried about Maddie’s safety. And my son tells me he met her down at the warehouse, so now I’m worried about his safety, too.”

  “What did Chase say to you?” Mom asked Maddie.

  “He said he wasn’t my angel and kissed me to prove it.”

  “Kissed you!” Colleen yelled. “He’s a rapist. I knew it!”

  “He’s not a rapist. He was trying to prove a point.”

  “Yeah, that he’s a rapist!”

  Mom frowned. “Mm, he wasn’t supposed to do that.”

  “What do you mean?” Maddie asked, setting a platter of roasted pork on the table. “Don’t tell me you talked to him, too?”

  “Well….”

  Colleen smirked. “Let me guess. You asked him to go along with it.”

  “I didn’t think it would hurt anything. And what do you mean, he doesn’t remember who he is?” Mom asked as she rolled the new potatoes around in a bowl of melted butter.

  “Just that. He has no memory of who he is. A Portuguese ship found him on the ocean hanging onto a Cuban refugee raft. He was in some kind of mass something state and he lost his some-kind-of-memory. Anyway, he can remember things about life in general, but not his identity. Which just goes to prove that—”

  “Maybe it’s not a good idea, you seeing him,” Mom said. “I have to agree with Colleen on this.”

  Colleen dropped the tub of butter on the table. “You do? You agree with me?”

  “Baby,” Mom said, taking her hands in her own. “You know I’d go to the ends of the earth to make you happy. But Colleen’s right—”

  “I can’t believe she keeps saying that,” Colleen said as Dad and Q walked into the kitchen. “I mean, I know I’m right, but no one ever sees it.”

  “Whether he knows who he is or not, we don’t know who he is. I was hoping he’d say a few things to you, maybe tell you you’re healed or whatever, and that’d be that. But you spending the day with him, and him kissing you…it’s just not good.”

  Maddie wished she’d left out the kissing part. She definitely wasn’t going to mention the hug.

  “He hugged her, too,” Q offered. “But he didn’t make her any less sad on the sad meter.”

  “He hugged you?” Mom looked more horrified than she had over the kiss. “That’s it. You’re not seeing him again. He is no angel, sure as shootin’.’” Mom looked over at Dad. “Tell her what not a good idea this is.”

  “I never thought the whole angel business—”

  “Would go this far, I know,” Mom finished for him. She clasped her hands together. “I know you want to find this angel. But it’s not this Chase person. Discussion closed, let’s eat.”

  “Discussion not closed,” Maddie said. Everyone stopped mid-movement and looked at her. “Maybe…okay, maybe Chase isn’t an angel. Maybe—”

  “There, now you see the light,” Mom said. “Let’s eat.”

  “Wait a minute!” Maddie looked at her father, who had an understanding
expression on his face. Mom had never cut her off before, but now she realized how it felt…which was pretty darn annoying actually. “Chase may not be an angel, I’ll give you that. But Wayne sent him to me just the same. How else can you explain how he ended up here when he’s searching for his identity on the other coast of Florida? How else can you explain that a man who looked like Wayne told him about the job when Barnie hadn’t advertised or told anyone over there?”

  Maddie couldn’t quite bear to tell them what Chase had been saying to her all day. She felt as though she were betraying Wayne’s memory just thinking about it.

  “Quigley,” Colleen said. “Sit nice and eat. No playing with your food.”

  “Baby, you know we love you, and we want you to be happy as a lark,” Mom said. “But there are limits, and you hanging around some stranger passes those limits. Now please cooperate and give up the idea of this man having anything to do with Wayne. Sit nice and eat.”

  Everyone started piling food on their plates. She traded a look with Q, feeling as though she were six, too. She couldn’t remember a time when she had gone against her mother’s wishes, but the thought of not seeing Chase again made her stomach ache. Besides, she’d promised him she’d help, and Barnie sure couldn’t do it.

  “Mom, don’t you think that Wayne’s spirit could have—”

  “Baby, after all we’ve done for you, I don’t understand how you can doubt my judgment on this. When everyone else tells me I’m sheltering you too much, I’ve told them that you need lots of extra love and attention during this trying time. I have gone out of my way to help you through this. Please don’t repay my kindness by worrying me.”

  Colleen was smiling, and not trying awfully hard to hide it. Maddie sank her fork into a new potato and broke it in half. She was actually hungry for a change, owing no doubt to working. Her arm muscles ached in a good way. Mom started talking about the reception her apricot muffins had received this morning, and that was that.

  She wasn’t giving Chase up. Okay, maybe he talked to her like she was a kid, too, but when he’d kissed her, she’d felt like a woman. Forget the kiss, she told herself. She liked the way she felt when she was around him. Even if he was telling her things she didn’t much want to hear. Being with him made her feel…special.

  She caught Dad’s gaze across the table. Mom told him what to do, too, and cut him off before he’d had a chance to say what he wanted. But he got around her directives in a most time-honored way: sneaking around them.

  And so would Maddie.

  CHAPTER 7

  The whole Chase discussion had been closed as far as Maddie’s family was concerned. After dinner and cleanup, Dad went out to the garage to work on his car, Q sat on the couch playing Nintendo, and she, Colleen and Mom worked on a puzzle around the coffee table. Unfortunately, it was a clown puzzle.

  “Baby,” Mom said. “Clowns are good things. They’re happy, they make people laugh.”

  “I think it’s a conspiracy. Expose your kids to it while they’re young, infect their minds. All that face paint, all a lie with the phony smile.”

  “Someday I’m going to change your mind about clowns,” Mom said.

  Colleen put another piece in place. “Let her hate them. Why does everything about Baby have to be a campaign? Every sniffle, every upset.”

  Instead of phasing out, Maddie felt…annoyed. It had never bothered her before when they talked about her as though she weren’t there. She found a piece of the puzzle that didn’t have a part of the clown in it and put it in a group of the same color. “I want to start working at the marina again.”

  Both women looked at her. As if in punctuation, one of the Nintendo creatures died with a whirling sound.

  “I realized that I’ve dumped everything on the Schaeffers, and besides, I’m getting restless.” Being at the marina would give her a good excuse to see Chase. And was much more entertaining than the “trash talk shows” she watched when no one was around.

  Mom looked as though Maddie had announced she had a fatal disease. “Baby, are you sure you’re ready? Being at the place where Wayne went away. The Schaeffers don’t mind running things, you know.”

  Colleen snorted. “They were horrified when they found out the marina was going to you. And more than happy to take it back.”

  Maddie didn’t remember her own reaction to the news, much less theirs. All she could remember was that everything looked gray and bleak, and there was no hope of ever seeing colors again. Until that rainbow. “I saw Carol yesterday. She did act weird, like seeing me there was not a good thing. She assured me that she was happy to continue overseeing everything. But I’d like to get back into the groove again.”

  Mom had her concerned look, one she’d honed to perfection over the years. “I think it’s too sudden.”

  “Mom, she’s been moping around for a year! It’s time…”

  An explosion sounded from the vicinity of the garage. “Daddy!” Maddie screamed, bolting to her feet and running toward the door.

  “The car just backfired,” Mom said. “Nothing to get into a lather over.”

  Maddie couldn’t help but imagine the car in flames, her father trapped beneath it.

  The old Buick was grinding away, not a flame in sight. Her dad was under the hood cranking on something.

  “You all right?” she asked, though she could see he was.

  “Just backfired. Scared the piss out of me.” But he didn’t look scared. He looked happy, even more so when the engine smoothed out to a hum. “Ah, there she goes.”

  “You really like working on cars, don’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Do you still want to open your own garage? I heard Mr. Baker once say he’d take his car to you anytime if you had your own place.”

  Dad shrugged. “I thought about it, but it really isn’t feasible. We’d lose our benefits and taking a vacation would be hard.” That warm, happy look had faded from his face as he recited things she’d heard Mom say over the years.

  “But you want to, don’t you?”

  “Wanting something and it being the best thing aren’t always the same.”

  She thought of Bobby’s dream of opening his own cabinetry shop.

  Dad turned off the car’s engine and leaned against the side. “You okay, pumpkin?” He was a big man with a pocked complexion. The kids used to be afraid of him until they got to know him. He’d dwarfed Wayne.

  “Thinking about going back to work at the marina.”

  “It is yours.”

  “I don’t want to run it or anything. Just…be there. Contribute.”

  “But your mom doesn’t think it’s a good idea,” he said.

  “You got it. What do you think?”

  “When you’re ready, you’re ready.”

  Another of Dad’s non-answers.

  “Thanks, Dad.” She gave him a kiss on his grease-smeared cheek and pushed away from the car.

  Bobby had helped a friend build a boat once. Maybe he had an extra pair of gloves or other tools she could borrow to impress Chase with. She walked across the street, breathing in the warm jasmine-scented air and discovering herself enjoying life for a moment.

  All because of Chase.

  Which made her think of that kiss again, and how long it had been since she’d been kissed, and how nice it felt. She felt a strange stirring in her stomach, or maybe it was lower than her stomach.

  For the first time in a year, the subject of sex popped into her mind.

  It jolted her. When Wayne left, she swore she’d never think about sex again, would never want it. The thought of making love with another man was preposterous. Wanting another man was unthinkable.

  But for that moment, she had wanted another man.

  She pushed onward, erecting a wall of guilt between her and those thoughts. If Wayne had sent this man to her, and she was sure he had, she couldn’t have those kinds of feelings for him.

  In the distance she could hear kids splashing in a poo
l and music coming from Bobby’s workshop in their back yard. She started to knock, then realized between the music and whatever tools he was probably using, he’d never hear her. So she opened the door—and found a bare, freckled butt bobbing up and down.

  Um…what? It took her mind a second to unscramble the scene before, kind of like a puzzle piece.

  Bobby and Wendy, Wayne’s sister, were going at it on a towel behind the bench saw.

  Her gasp of surprise startled them into a frenzy of yelps and arms and legs tangling and untangling. Maddie was rooted to the floor for a moment, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. Had she conjured this up with her thoughts of sex? Her heart squeezed as she realized this wasn’t her imagination.

  Bobby was shoving his long legs into a pair of jeans, and Wendy struggled into a T-shirt. Maddie turned and fled.

  “Baby, wait!” Bobby yelled.

  She couldn’t outrun him. He swooped up from behind her and lifted her into the air. Before she could make sense of it, he’d set her down again and faced her. “It isn’t what it looked like.”

  “You were…and she was…naked!”

  He kept one hand on her shoulder, probably to keep her from running, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He at least had the decency to look embarrassed. “All right, it is what it looked like.”

  Her face felt hot with both anger and embarrassment. “How…how long has this been going on?”

  “Just a couple of times. I built a dresser for her, and we got to talking, and before I knew it, we were kissing.”

  Her face flushed again at the memory of how easy that could happen. “But she’s married. You’re married!”

  “It was a mistake. It won’t happen again.”

  “What are you going to tell Colleen?”

  “Nothing. And neither are you. Can you imagine how hard it would be for either of us to tell her this? And I know how fragile you are. Your whole world would tilt again, with Colleen getting all of Mom’s attention, and nothing would be the same among all of us. You’ve got to promise me you won’t say anything.”