Impossible Dreams (47 page)

Book View Café Edition
December 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61138-131-3
Copyright © 2002 Patricia Rice
www.bookviewcafe.com

I am a rotten person.

Biting her lip, Cleo Alyssum painstakingly printed this fact
into her journal. She thought the whole idea of a journal of emotions about as
silly as it got, but if the counselor wanted honesty, that’s what he
would get.

She would do anything to transform herself into the kind of
mother Matty needed. Anything.

Of course, that’s how she’d got into this
situation in the first place. Sitting back in her desk chair, she gazed out the
sagging windowpanes of the old house she was restoring. She missed Matty so
desperately, her teeth ached, but the court had set December as the deadline
for his return—provided she danced to the steps the counselor called.

Matty needed security and stability, they said, and her sister
provided it.

She’d tried suburban life with Maya, but she just
couldn’t hack it. Trouble found her too easily in crowds. Out here on the
island she could get her head together without too many people in her face. She
was far less apt to jeopardize Matty’s return if she stayed away from
people.

These last few years she’d learned to restore old
buildings, turning decrepit dumps into useful, viable businesses and homes, and
she loved the satisfaction of seeing the visible results of her hard work. Too
bad the difference she was supposed to be making in herself wasn’t as
obvious.

The opportunity to buy a small town hardware store had
opened up just as she’d run out of buildings to restore, and at the time,
it had seemed ideal. She knew the business inside and out, loved the isolation
of the South Carolina coast, and when she’d found this run-down island
farmhouse for a steal, she’d known she’d found a home.

The beach cottage down by the shore might be beyond hope,
but she hadn’t given up on it yet. Maya and the kids might visit more
often if she could fix it up. In the meantime, she was diligently turning the
main house into the home she’d never known. She hoped.

If she could only convince her federal supervisor she was a
fine, upstanding citizen, she’d be free and clear soon, and almost in a
normal world for the first time in her life.

Having a job she could do without hassles from any boss, and
a home where she could lock the doors against the world, she thought she
finally had a chance of living a civilized life. She wasn’t doing this
for the feds, though. Matty deserved a sane mother, and she was doing her best,
if the process didn’t kill her first.

At least now when he visited on weekends, she could give him
her entire attention, and he seemed to be blossoming into a new kid with the
change. Even Maya had noted how much happier he was.

Cleo ran her fingers through her stubby hair and returned to
staring at the almost empty page of the notebook. She didn’t think she
was capable of verbalizing all her conflicting emotions about her sister. Maya
could have written an entire essay on how Cleo felt about her. Cleo would
rather hammer nails.

If she compared her mothering skills to Perfect
Maya’s, she was destined for failure.

The muffled noise of a car engine diverted her attention. A
fresh breeze off the ocean blew through the windows in the back of the house,
but the only things coming through the floor-to-ceiling front windows were
flies. Thickets of spindly pines, palmettos, and wax myrtle prevented her from
seeing the driveway entrance or the rough shell road beyond.

She didn’t encourage visitors and wasn’t
expecting anyone. A lost tourist would turn around soon enough.

She returned to the blank page of her journal and printed
:
People are pains in the a… She struck out the “a” and
substituted “butt.”

She crinkled her nose at the result. One word probably
wasn’t any more polite than the other.

The smooth hum of the car’s powerful engine hesitated,
and Cleo waited for the music of it backing up and turning around. Someone took
good care of their machine. She couldn’t hear a single piston out of
sync.

She rolled her eyes as the obtuse visitor gunned the engine
and roared past the four-foot blinking NO TRESPASSING sign. One would think a
message that large would be taken seriously, but tourists determined to reach a
secluded beach were nearly unstoppable.

“Nearly” was the operative word here.

Biting her bottom lip again, Cleo reread her two-line entry.
She had to go into town and open the store shortly. She didn’t have time
for detailed expositions if that’s what the shrink wanted. It looked to
her like a few good strong sentences ought to be sufficient.

Adding “Men are the root of all evil” struck her
as funny, but she supposed a male counselor wouldn’t appreciate it. She
left it there anyway. The counselor had said he wanted honesty. Of course, she
was probably sabotaging all her efforts. She’d had enough therapy to
acknowledge her self-destructive tendencies. Now, if she’d only
apply
that knowledge…

She lifted her pen and waited for the car engine to reach
the next turn in the half-mile-long lane. The sound of waves crashing in the
distance almost drowned out the wicked screech of her mechanical witch. Still,
she heard the car tires squeal as they braked. The battery-operated strobe
light was particularly effective at keeping teenagers from turning this into a
lovers’ lane at night. During the day, well…

She shrugged and capped the pen. That was enough
introspection for one day. The counselor ought to know she was a mucked-up
mess. She shouldn’t have to lay it out in terms a first grader could
understand. Another thought occurred to her, and she grabbed the pen again.

Baring my soul is not my style.

There. That ought to be letting it out enough for one day.

Her head shot up as the car engine drew closer, evidently
bypassing the scowling witch. Stupid bastard. What was she supposed to do, dump
a load of pig turds on him to get the message across that this was a private
drive? That might work if they were in a convertible.

They usually were.

She despised the arrogant, self-confident yuppie asses who
thought the whole world was their oyster. Didn’t “Private
Property” mean anything to them?

Apparently not. The car engine zoomed right past the pop-up
sign she’d rigged in the middle of the lane. Forgetting to turn off the
system before she’d left for work, she’d driven around the sign one
too many times herself, and the dirt bypass was clearly visible. She’d
plant a palmetto there tomorrow.

Slamming the notebook into her desk drawer, she picked up
her purse and donned her sunglasses. She hadn’t quite perfected the
mechanism to shut the swinging post barrier on the access road. She hated the
idea of erecting a fence across there. The moron would simply have to drown if
he insisted on using her beach. A bad undertow past the jetty made this a
dangerous strip for swimming, but she supposed the NO SWIMMING signs
wouldn’t stop the nematode either.

Maybe she could rig a siren to a motion detector. There
wasn’t any law out here for it to summon, but tourists wouldn’t
know that.

Pulling out her truck keys, she almost didn’t hear the
purr of the engine turning into her drive, but the shriek of a hidden peacock
warned of the intrusion.

Damn. Did the jerk think the house deserted? Admittedly, she
hadn’t bothered painting the weathered gray boards and the sagging
shutters, but she kind of thought them picturesque. And it wasn’t as if
she’d not littered the place with warning signs.

If the town council insisted on encouraging film crews to
work here, she’d be prepared to keep them out. She hadn’t traveled
an entire continent to have that California lifestyle follow her.

She waited as the barking guard dog yapped through its
entire routine. A real dog would scare the peacocks, but the tape recording was
usually effective. Amazing how many people were frightened of barking dogs. The
mailman had quit delivering to the door after he’d heard it.

Cleo sighed as the driver shut off the car engine instead of
turning around. Determined suckers. Only Maya and Axell ever got this far past
her guardians. She could slip out the back way, but curiosity riveted her to
the window. She knew she was far enough back not to be seen, but she had a
partial view of the walk and porch. She couldn’t wait to see how her intrepid
guest reacted to her burglar alert system.

A pair of long-legged, crisply ironed khakis appeared
beneath the porch overhang. A man. She should have known. Men had to prove
themselves by showing no fear. It didn’t seem to matter if they showed no
intelligence while they were at it.

The lean torso decked in a tight black polo appeared next.
She was sick of looking at fat slugs with pooching white bellies and hairy,
sunken chests cluttering the view from the beach. At least this ape strode tall
and straight and…

My, my. She stopped chewing her fingernail to relish the
loose-limbed swing of wide shoulders and a corded throat topped by a long,
angular face with more character than prettiness. He was all length—arms,
legs, nose, neck—but they all fit together in a casual sort of package.
He had his hands in his pockets as he gazed up at her mildly eccentric porch,
so she couldn’t see his fingers, but she’d bet they were a piano
teacher’s dream.

Tousled sable hair fell across a tanned brow, and she was
almost sorry she’d left the security system on. If he was selling
insurance, she wouldn’t mind listening to his pitch just to hear what
came out of a package like that.

The aviator sunglasses were a downright sexy trim for this
parcel.

“You are under alert!”
The loudspeaker
blared as soon as the intruder hit the first porch step. She’d used an
army drill sergeant for that recording. It would scare the pants off any normal
person. This one halted and removed his sunglasses now that he was in shade,
but his gaze traced the bellowing voice with curiosity and not fear.

“
Turn back now. This is your only warning
!”

Cleo bit back a sigh of exasperation as the jerk bent over
to examine the step for wires. Did he think her an idiot to put wires where
someone could cut them?

“
Your location has been verified, and you are now
under surveillance. Put up your hands, or we’ll shoot
.”

The man straightened and seemed to be whistling as he craned
his neck and surveyed the underside of the covered porch from the step.

Shaking her head, Cleo reached for the “off”
switch, but she waited for his reaction to the final performance. Sure enough,
her visitor disregarded the warning and fearlessly breached the porch gate.
Sirens screamed, strobe lights flared, and a fedora-hatted skeleton dropped
down between him and the front door.

***

Jared McCloud came eyeball to eye socket with a six-foot bag
of bones baring a smirk through a cigar clamped between its teeth. He’d
been given enough warning to expect it, but he couldn’t help grinning in
appreciation of the coup de grace. At night, with the shrieking siren and
strobes, it would have any potential thief shitting his pants.

“Pleased to meecha, Burt,” he murmured,
inspecting the wires which must have held the freak to the porch roof. He
didn’t know anything about mechanics, but he knew an overactive
imagination when he saw one. “Guess this means the old witch isn’t
at home.”

“Guess it means the old witch is on her way
out.”

Jared blinked at the apparition in the doorway. He
hadn’t heard the door open. Shouldn’t the hinges of a place like
this creak eerily?

He smiled in satisfaction at the full impact of the
skeleton’s creator as she emerged from shadows. Far from being an old
witch, she was his newest dream of perfection. Not too tall or too short but
sturdy, she packed a lot of punch into a compact, sexy bundle. Her knee length
man’s checked flannel shirt effectively disguised the best of her curves,
but he loved exploration and discovery even more than having it all laid out
for him.

Generally, women didn’t appreciate being ogled, so he
respectfully raised his gaze to absorb the rest of the glorious sight. Rumpled
short hair revealed roots of auburn beneath a mousy brown dye job. Tinted half
glasses attempted to hide eyes of a spectacular green—not contacts,
either. He could see specks of brown in them.

He thought he was in love.

Of course, he’d been in love last week and the week
before, and mostly it was a major distraction he didn’t need right now.
If he didn’t finish the piece of idiocy they called a screenplay by
December first, he’d be in breach of contract. Another failure and his
name would be mud, even if the last failure was more the fault of
death-by-committee than anything he’d done.

His agent was already antsy over the cancellation of the
comic strip by some backwoods string of newsrags claiming his teenage nerds had
become “tiresome.” It had been quite a few years since he’d
been a teenager, but from his current outlook, that’s what teenagers
were—tiresome.

None of that seemed relevant to the moment.
“Name’s Jared McCloud.” He smiled with as much charm as he
could summon. Maybe this was a young relative of the old witch the kids had
warned him about. “I’m looking for Cleo Alyssum.”

“She’s not here.”

She said that so promptly, Jared figured this had to be her.
Well, well. Curiouser and curiouser.

He produced a business card from his pocket with his hotel
phone number scratched on the back. “I’ve been told Miss Alyssum is
owner of the beach property back of here, and I’m interested in leasing
it. I’m prepared to make a generous offer.” From the look of this
rundown sprawling plantation-era farmhouse, she could use the cash.