The Next Little Thing (Jackson Falls #4) (5 page)

He'd returned home shaking in his shoes, terrified of how Casey
would react. She'd taken a single look and her mouth had fallen open, and while
he stood there feeling like he was about to face his own execution, she'd just
stared at him. And stared at him.

Then the tears welled up and spilled over, and he thought,
Oh,
shit. I really stepped in it this time.
"Ah, baby, don't cry,"
he'd said miserably. "It doesn't have to be permanent. It's only hair.
It'll grow back."

"No," she said. "No! That's not why I'm
crying." She stepped closer to take a better look, and said through tears,
"Just look at you, Flash. You have ears!  Who knew?" She circled him
slowly, touched a hand to the nape of his neck, bare for the first time in two
decades, and ran her fingers up the back of his head to the crown, where David
had left it a little longer. "At least they left enough for me to run my
fingers through."

"I told him to make sure to leave enough to get a good grip,
because my wife likes to yank it out by the roots when we're having sex."

She slugged him, hard. "Keep it up, funny boy, and sex will
become nothing more than a distant memory."

"Hah!  You wouldn't last two days, Fiore. I don't want to
sound like an egomaniac, but I happen to know that for you, I am like the most
potent form of crack."

Then she was standing in front of him again, and she was smiling.
Still weepy, but smiling. "I'd hit you again," she said, "if you
weren't right." She studied his face. "Oh, my. It's going to feel
like I'm kissing a stranger."

"As long as you're still willing to kiss me."

"Are you kidding, MacKenzie?  There will never come a time
when I'm not willing to kiss you. And I'm crying because I don't know when or
how you got here."

"Here where?"

"How you got from that scrawny, scruffy, disreputable-looking,
guitar-toting twenty-year-old
kid
to this beautiful, well-put-together,
gorgeous, sexy man. I can't figure out when or how it happened."

He suspected that a couple decades of living might have had
something to do with it. And while it had been a sweet thing for her to say, he
had to admit that he still couldn't see it. He sure as hell hadn't been aiming
for sexy; his loftiest ambition had been presentable. But every damn female in
her family, from her sixty-eight-year-old stepmother right down to her seventeen-year-old
niece, had fawned over him like he was Robert Fricking Redford.
Who knew?
they all kept saying.
Who knew
what was hiding underneath all that
hair?
Which he supposed meant he must have achieved his lofty goal of
presentable, and possibly even surpassed that gleaming goalpost by a yard or
two.

Paige was making macaroni and cheese in the oven. He could smell
it as he came down the stairs. His daughter was turning into quite the cook. Of
course, she was learning from the master. His wife was one of the best cooks he
knew, second only to his mom. Some of her kitchen skills came from her mother.
Some of them had actually come from his mother, who'd taken Casey under her
wing back in the days when she and Danny were newly married and had spent half
their waking hours at the MacKenzie house. He liked the fact that she was
passing this knowledge down to the next generation. There was a continuity to
it that comforted him.

While they ate, Paige peppered him with questions about the baby.
Height, weight, coloring. "Do I get to see her tonight?" she said.

"Absolutely. I'm going back to the hospital after we
eat."

"You have to bring flowers. I think it's a legal
requirement."

"Shit. I never thought about flowers. Where am I supposed to
get flowers in this hick town after five o'clock on a weekday?"

"We'll pick them from Casey's garden. The tulips are all in
bloom. She loves tulips."

So they picked a huge bouquet of tulips, put them in a vase, and
Paige held them while he drove. Instead of heading directly toward the
hospital, though, he swung up onto Ridge Road. "We stopping at the new
house?" she said.

"Doucette handed over the keys to me this morning."  Was
it really possible that had been just seven hours ago?  It felt more like seven
years. "Casey went into labor, so I never got my walk-through. I thought
we'd do it together."

After months of nail guns and power saws and men wearing tool
belts, the house seemed oddly silent. He took his time walking through with
Paige at his side. Together, they opened closets and cupboards, ran water in
the sinks, flushed each of the toilets, flipped every light switch. He'd given
Casey free rein with the design. Although she'd consulted him on just about
everything, he'd let her make the final decisions. The house was his gift to
her, and he didn't care what it looked like, as long as she was happy with it.
What mattered to him was the symbolism of this house as a new start. What was
that old saying? 
Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Yeah.
That was how he felt about the house.

And her decisions had been dead-on. Fabulous. Italian tiles in the
kitchen, gleaming hardwood throughout, a beautiful oak staircase that led to
the second floor. Little surprises here and there, like the stained glass
windows in the master bedroom and the cedar closet in the upstairs hall. The
house was whimsical in design, with its fish scale shingles and gingerbread
trim, its wraparound porch, and the turret, where the master bedroom was
located. Their bedroom was a cozy space tucked under the eaves, small enough to
feel welcoming, big enough to fit a king-size bed and its matching suite of
furniture. Outside the windows, lit by the late-afternoon sun, spring leaves
glowed a brilliant green. He felt like he was standing in a tree house. That,
too, had been Casey's idea, and they'd designed the house around the big old
maples that already grew there.

"I am so in love with this bathroom."  Paige's voice
echoed off the hard surfaces of the master bath. He stood in the doorway and
watched her, sprawled in the sunken Jacuzzi with her head back and her eyes
closed. "I am so friggin' jealous."

"Yeah?  Well, when you grow up, you can design your own house
and have your own master bath. In the meantime, you're stuck with what we give
you."

Her eyes popped open, and he saw the deviltry in them. "And
when you're not looking," she said, "I intend to sneak in here and
use the Jacuzzi, every chance I get."

She was so much his daughter that sometimes it was frightening,
but she probably wouldn't appreciate being reminded of that fact. Distraction
was a much better weapon. "Which bedroom do you want?" he said.

"Already picked. Come see." She climbed out of the
Jacuzzi and scooted down the hall, her footsteps echoing in the emptiness as he
followed at a more sedate pace. "This one!" she said from inside the
corner bedroom at the opposite end of the house. He stood in the doorway,
amused by her enthusiasm. "This one has a bay window, like your room. With
a window seat. I always wanted a bay window."

"Just don't get any ideas about climbing out that window and
sliding down the gutter pipe." 

That was something he would have done at her age, if he'd thought
he could get away with it. Of course, he never would have gotten away with it.
Mary MacKenzie had eyes in the back of her head, and some kind of psychic power
that alerted her whenever one of her kids was up to no good. And his dad hadn't
been averse to using the belt once in a while, if he felt it was called for.
Nowadays, that kind of thing was frowned upon, but families were smaller now.
How else could his folks keep nine kids under control, except by putting the
fear of God—otherwise known as Mary and Patrick MacKenzie—into them?  His dad
hadn't needed to use the belt very often. Mary's tongue-lashings were far more
frightening than Patrick's belt. Somehow, all nine of them had survived the
trauma and managed to become productive adult human beings. Somehow, his mother
had managed to avoid spending the best years of her life in a psych ward with
an intravenous lithium drip.

"Ha, ha," Paige said, her head stuck out the bedroom
window she'd flung open. "Very funny. So when are we moving in?"

 "I don't know. It could be a while. Casey will need some
recuperation time before she's ready to take on that nightmare."

With a single smooth motion, she slid the window closed and said,
"How long will she be in the hospital?"

"Probably until the day after tomorrow. Why?"

"I was just thinking…if we could get everybody together to
help, why couldn't we move now?"

"Now?"

"Tomorrow. Get it all done before she comes home. Surprise
her. We already have pretty much everything packed."

"I don't know that we could pull it off. Besides, I have no
idea where everything's supposed to go. If we got it wrong, heads would
roll."

"She has a chart."

He raised both eyebrows. "A chart?"

"A diagram of every room, with the furniture drawn in the
proper places. And the boxes are already labeled. With ruthless precision, I
might add."

He should have known. That kind of organization, that kind of
attention to detail, was classic Casey. If he'd been in charge, he would've
just tossed everything into the nearest box and sorted it out later. Of course,
it wasn't lost on him that six months after the move, he'd still be trying to
find the can opener. Casey's method was vastly superior. Impossible for him to
imagine, but vastly superior.

"If we got enough people together," Paige said, "we
could assign one person to each room to pull it all together once the stuff
gets here."

It was a crazy idea. So crazy it just might work. Compared to the
alternative—waiting weeks until Casey and the baby were up to the drudgery of
moving—it sounded pretty damn good. "You think we could pull it off?"

"I think
I
could pull it off. You have other things to
focus on. Like keeping her occupied while we're moving everything. If you give
me the okay, I'll make a few phone calls tonight. Just leave it in my hands.
I'll take care of everything."

* * *

The maternity ward was on the second floor. They stepped out of
the elevator and strode down the corridor together, long legs rapidly eating up
real estate. They must have made quite an impression, father and daughter, both
of them tall and lean and lanky, with strong features and matching strides and
that wild blond MacKenzie hair. Without exception, each nurse they passed
simpered and said, with a flirty little smile, "Hi, Mr. MacKenzie."

"Nice gig if you can get it," Paige said. "Being a
famous rock star."

She knew how he felt about that expression, but she liked to
torment him with it anyway because he was an easy target. He squared his jaw,
scowled, and corrected, "Rock
musician
."

"Semantics," she said. "Different words, same damn
thing."

"Oh, shut up."

His daughter grinned. He gave her a little shoulder nudge, and the
grin widened. There had been a time, after she first came to them, when he
wasn't sure he would ever see a smile on Paige's face. She'd been hurting,
furious with the universe over the death of her mother, and she'd blamed him,
the absent parent, for everything that was wrong with the world, probably up to
and including that grassy knoll in Dallas.

It had taken time and a few missteps on both their parts before
old wounds had healed to the point where she was willing to let him in. Now,
they had an easy relationship, and as long as he didn't push too hard, it
stayed that way.

At the door to Casey's room, he paused, bouquet in hand, his
weight resting loosely on one hip. His wife lay on the bed, baby cradled
against her breast, her mouth pressed lovingly to a tiny pink fist. For one
blinding instant, he was yanked back eleven years in time, to another hospital
room, another newborn infant. The woman had been the same, but that time, the
baby had been Danny's. His insides knotted up as old ghosts and unspoken goodbyes
sent uncertainty flooding over him. Then she glanced up and saw him standing in
the doorway. The déjà vu dissolved, and it was just the two of them and two
decades of history, palpable enough to be touched. It was always there between
them, that shared history, a silken cord that bound them. All the years,
everything they'd been through together:  the good, the bad, the ugly. Their
connection was as much spiritual as it was sexual. They'd loved each other, in
every way imaginable, for fifteen years before they'd finally become lovers.
Now, after two years of marriage, he wasn't sure he'd be able to breathe
without her.

Her face lit with that Mona Lisa smile that never failed to turn
him inside out. Softly, she said, "Hey, hot stuff."

"Hey, gorgeous."

Her eyes focused on the bouquet he carried, and pleasure lit her
face. "You brought me flowers."

"From your garden. Because, y'know, I'm an idiot, and I
didn't think about flowers until the only florist in this hick town at the edge
of nowhere was closed."

"Are you kidding, MacKenzie? This is far more personal than
flowers from a shop. They're perfect. I can smell them from here. And you
brought my girl!  Come over here, Paige, and meet your little sister."