Beside a Dreamswept Sea (5 page)

His smile fell to a frown and his skin knitted between his brows. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I know that.” She clicked her tongue to the roof of her mouth and rolled her gaze ceilingward. “You came to help me.”

Acceptance. Sweet acceptance. He savored it for a long moment and, when he answered her, his voice sounded unusually gruff. “Yes, I did.”

“Well, then, what I want to know is if you can get us a new mom. Selena says . . .”

Joy bubbled in his chest. God, but he loved children. A pang of longing, of wishing he and Hattie had had the chance to have their own, slid through him. He shunned it. Their situation wasn’t perfect, but at least he was here with his beloved—more or less. “Who’s Selena?” Suzie had mentioned her earlier.

“My grown-up friend. Uncle John’s little sister. Do you know John Mystic and my aunt, Bess?”

“Yes, I do.” Boy, had those special guests given Tony a run for his money. They’d narrowly escaped divorce. He and Hattie had been thrilled with the outcome of that case.

“Selena’s old. At least twenty-five—maybe more.”

Tony repressed a smile by the skin of his teeth. “Twenty-five. Well, that’s old, all right. So what does Selena say?”

“My dad says time makes things better. My doctor does, too. We talk and talk every week but I still keep having the dreams, anyway. That’s how I know time won’t work. They’re not lying though, just wrong.” Suzie fidgeted. The covers under and over her crinkled. “But Selena says the only way to get better is to get and keep both oars in the water. I think she’s right. If I can get Jeremy and Lyssie a new mom who’ll love them, then maybe that’ll fix things. Lucy Baker said love fixes broken stuff, and not having a mom is kind of being broken, don’t you think?”

Tony wanted to hug the child. To wash the hurt away. But he couldn’t. Yet he could help her to learn to live more constructively with the hurt. “I’d say it can be.”

“It is,” Suzie said. “I’m hoping Miss Lucy is right. I don’t know if she is or isn’t. But Jeremy’s four and Lyssie—Alyssa—is two. They’re little. Other people can love little kids easier than big kids, and they don’t even remember Meriam. She was kind of our mom but she didn’t like us calling her that so we called her Meriam. Well, me and Jeremy did. Lyssie was too little to talk when Meriam went to heaven.”

Suzie paused for breath, giving Tony time to mentally catch up, then pulled her quilt closer and rubbed her thumb over the appliquéd carnation’s petals. “Jeremy and Lyssie are little so they really need a mom. I don’t ‘cuz I’ve never really had a mom and I’m nine now, so it doesn’t matter to me—as long as she loves them.” With a telling shrug, Suzie stared at the ceiling, clearly seeing far beyond the swirls of white plaster. “But if she bakes peanut butter cookies like my friend Missy’s mom does, then I wouldn’t mind having one, though. Mrs. Wiggins won’t let us have cookies. Meriam told her not to—sugar rots your teeth—but Daddy does, sometimes. Mostly when Mrs. Wiggins isn’t home. She fusses, and he’s too tired to listen to it.”

A knot squared in Tony’s throat. Suzie wanted a mom more than anything in the world. He hadn’t missed that she’d been hurt at having to call her mother by name. Nor had he missed the tremor in her voice on admitting she’d never really had a mom, or her obvious distaste for Mrs. Wiggins, the old battleaxe of a nanny who’d arrived at the inn three days ago with Bryce and the children. Every morning over coffee Bryce read Wiggins’s list of Jeremy’s previous day’s infractions. He was just four, for pity’s sake.

Tony bent down beside Suzie’s bed then clasped her little hand in his big one. “We’ll have to wish really hard for a mom, then—for Jeremy and Lyssie.”

Suzie nodded. “How come your fingers are cold?”

He stared at them. What could he say?
I have no life. And the absence of life renders the absence of warmth?
Would she accept that?

“Tony? You promised never to lie.”

He tried, but he couldn’t make himself meet her eyes and maybe see her condemnation of him reflected there. “Being alive makes you warm, Suzie.”

“Outside.” She touched his jacket over his heart. “But you’re warm in here. That’s where it’s important—Selena said.”

To Suzie, Selena obviously was
the
ultimate authority. “She’s a wise woman.” And with the gift Suzie’d just given him, if he’d ever doubted it, Tony now had seen it proven true: Seascape
was
a magical place. And how he prayed he had the skills to bring Suzie a gift she’d treasure as much as he did her acknowledgment that he had heart: a new mom.

He and Hattie certainly would do everything possible, and they’d pray hard—more than hard, if he knew his beloved, and he certainly did—that the special guests did their part.

“Tony.”

“Hmm?”

“I lied to you.” Suzie blinked furiously then forced her gaze up to his. Guilt radiated from her in pulsing waves. “I really do want a mom.”

“I know.” Understanding what that admission had cost her, he swallowed down a hard lump from his throat and stroked her sleep-tangled hair. “Sometimes when something’s really important to us, well, we all tell ourselves it isn’t important so it won’t hurt so much if we don’t get it.”

“Even you?”

“Even me.” He met her big brown eyes, thinking of Hattie. “But I’ll share a secret with you. If we wish really hard, you might just get a new mom.”

Remorse slithered through him. He shouldn’t have told Suzie that. He hadn’t meant to, but the longing in her had struck a chord in him, the same chord that reminded him of all those nevers between him and Hattie, and it had just slipped out.

Suzie’s eyes sparkled and her mouth dropped open into a big O. “Honest? You’re not just telling me that? Grown-ups do that sometimes. I don’t like it.”

How could he recant after that? “No, I’m not just saying it. It could happen, Suzie, but it could
not
happen, too. That’s why we have to wish hard. It all depends on your dad and, er, the lady who’s coming.”

“She’s coming here?” When he nodded, Suzie’s eyes stretched even wider. “But what if we don’t know it’s her? She could go away, and Jeremy and Lyssie—”

“You’ll know her. I promise.” Tony touched a finger to the flower at his lapel. “She’ll be wearing a yellow carnation, just like this one.”

“But—”

“Shh, it’s time to sleep now. And, remember. No nightmares, not at Seascape.” He tucked the thick quilt up under her chin then tapped a fingertip to her nose. “Miss Hattie would pitch a fit.”

“Miss Hattie doesn’t do that.” Suzie giggled, then sobered. “Mrs. Wiggins might, though.”

Tony grunted. The battleaxe surely might. “I want you to listen carefully, Suzie. This is very important, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We can’t interfere with your dad and the lady who’s coming here.” He dropped his voice to a soft whisper and spoke straight to the child’s soul. “But—and this is a promise—if only one has the courage to believe, miracles can happen beside a dreamswept sea.”

Suzie looked awestruck, then frowned, clearly worried. “But I don’t believe in miracles anymore. I even told Missy and Selena.”

The child had grasped the significance of his words to her; no doubt about it. “Then you’ve got to try to believe in them again. So you’ll heal.”

For a long moment, the child stared at his jacket buttons and worried her lip with her teeth. Then she looked back at his eyes, her own filled with resolve. “I can’t promise, but if you say it’s true, then I’ll try hard to believe it. I really will, Tony.”

Her leap of faith touched him. “Why?”

“Because you promised, and you didn’t lie.”

Her mother. It had been her broken promises, so many of them, which had taught Suzie skepticism and a fear of believing anyone but her father. Yet Tony couldn’t judge Meriam harshly for it; the poor woman had fought her emotional demons, too. How well Tony knew she had from her visit here. She’d, unfortunately, been one of his failures; too far gone before she arrived to trust in herself, to trust in him, and to heal. “Thank you, Suzie.” He placed a fatherly kiss to her soft brow, and whispered a silent prayer that he wouldn’t fail her as he had her mother. “Sleep peacefully now.”

He started to disappear, thought better of it, then walked toward the door.

“Tony?”

Gripping the doorknob, he looked back over his shoulder at her. “Hmm?”

“A yellow carnation. I won’t forget.”

She wouldn’t. She’d be more attentive than Batty Beaulah Favish next door with her goofy binoculars. “Good girl.”

“Will it be soon—that my new mom will come?”

The longing in Suzie’s voice cut through him like a knife. “Very soon. But, remember now, she won’t know she might be your new mom. We don’t know for sure, either. We have to let her and your dad figure it out.”

“Why can’t I just tell them?”

“Won’t work, little one.” Tony had tried that often enough to know it for fact. “Some things grown-ups have to figure out for themselves. That’s how love operates. We can encourage, but they have to decide.”

“Shoot.”

Tony raised his brows.

“Well, sometimes grown-ups take too long.”

He supposed they did. “Then we’ll have to be patient.” He winked. “And wish hard that they hurry.”

Suzie squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her jaw, putting her heart into it. Tony grinned. If wishes alone could do the trick, this case already would be a done deal.

But with Bryce and Caline’s challenges, their healing enough to maybe find love would take far more than wishes; it’d take a fistful of miracles. And Tony only hoped they’d find them, and that this case would become a done deal. For Suzie, and Jeremy and Lyssie, but also for Bryce and Caline. Their odds weren’t the greatest, but then if they were, they wouldn’t be here. Both seriously need loving. Desperately needed loving. And just as desperately, they both needed to love.

Tony eased into the hallway. Slumped between wall and floor, Bryce shivered in his sleep. Eons ago, Tony had grown accustomed to his presence cooling temperatures, though, truthfully, it still rankled. He visualized Hattie’s crocheted afghan, draped it over Bryce, then stepped back to study him. If the man held his head at that weird angle long, he’d awaken with a heck of a crick in his neck.
“Well, why not?”
Tony thought.
“In for an ounce, in for a gallon.”
He visualized a pillow, too.

After situating it under Bryce’s head, Tony straightened up, then walked down the hallway. There was a consolation to him chilling rooms. As soon as Suzie spilled tonight’s events to Miss Hattie—which would most likely be at the crack of dawn—Tony figured his beloved would be glaring at the ceiling and railing, heating up his own ears plenty.

A smile curved his lips. Heading up the stairs to his attic bedroom, he rubbed his hands together, hardly able to wait. Few things held the appeal of a righteously indignant Hattie Stillman. Even if, in this instance, she had every right to be furious. He never should’ve told Suzie that “new mom” bit. Never should’ve interceded into her dream without first knowing the costs. Yet he’d had no other choice. None he could live with anyway. And again he wondered. What would be the penalty for interceding?

And who will be penalized?
Sunshine asked in a phantom whisper.

Fear trickled down his spine. Tony came to a dead halt, clutched the banister in a death grip. Why hadn’t he considered that his actions
could
affect someone else? Could affect Hattie?