My beloved is mine, and I am his.

—Song of Solomon 2:16
(Left on the Wall of Wisdom by Blaine and Heather, proud new owners, Harmony Shores Bed and Breakfast, Moses Lake)

Chapter 2

Love is a many splendored thing. There’s a more classic history to that phrase, I’m sure, but I learned it from a Sinatra album—the old-fashioned vinyl kind my father played on an ugly console stereo that looked like something out of The Jetsons.

The night after my sixth birthday party, that song tugged me from my bed. I moved to the sliding glass doors, pulled back the curtain, and saw my father out for a late-night swim, trying to coax my mother into the pool. She was curled in a chaise lounge, wearing a long, filmy negligee. The feather-edged sleeve floated diaphanous and light on the breeze as she playfully slapped his hand away. Laughing, she let her head fall against the cushion, her gaze rising into the starry night.

She never saw him coming. Without warning, he scooped her off the chair and carried her across the patio as she protested, squealed, and told him what she’d do to him if he ruined her new loungewear. He ignored her completely and swept her straight down the steps and into the water, deep blue under the smoky patio lights. The hem of her nightgown floated to the surface, her body and his disappearing into the darkness below as he kissed her.

I’d never seen my parents behave in such a fashion, never even considered whether they kissed or hugged or got romantic like the Bradys did on afternoon cable reruns. But after watching them in the pool, I knew that love really could be the way it was in the movies. From that night on, I believed in the possibility. Even if I’d never been lucky enough to find the right guy, I clung to a yearning that made me want that kind of intensity. All of my life a still, small voice had been whispering in my ear, If it can happen to Mom, it can happen to anyone.

My mother was about as stiff, proper, and practical as a woman could get. If she could be swept off her feet, anybody could.

I was off my feet almost from the moment I met Daniel Webster Everson. Both in the literal sense and the figurative sense. I twisted an ankle running for a subway train the day after the spilled-bill incident, and I was wearing a walking cast later that week when I hobbled into the office of James V. Faber, honorable congressman from Arkansas. Two steps in the door, and I found myself once again face to face with the startling green eyes I remembered from the rotunda.

Congressman Faber’s home district was big in poultry production and processing. Daniel was a biochemist working for the USDA, visiting The Hill at Faber’s request to discuss some particulars in a pork-barrel (or in this case poultry-barrel) rider to a bill working its way through committee. I’d dropped by Faber’s office to personally pick up a LOI—Letter of Intent—that would make Faber a cosponsor for my boss’s Clean Energy Bill.

Suffice to say that a freakish alignment of legislation brought me together with Daniel Everson for a second time.

Or perhaps it was the Irish legend.

Choose to believe as suits you, but God does create soul mates, and Daniel Webster Everson was mine. I knew it from the first time I saw him, and by the second time, I knew I knew it.

I limped into his life once again carrying an armload of papers. Daniel glanced up from the leather sofa in Faber’s receiving area and noticed my uneven walk and the cast, attractively embellished with Sharpie drawings by office coworkers and the Gymies.

“Looks like things haven’t quite taken that upturn yet,” he observed. Very astute of him. Then he laughed softly and smiled, and I forgave him for making light of my unfashionable situation.

I noticed those boyishly thick lashes again. And his smile. If I had to feed Kaylyn’s romance novel habit for a year, or ten, I had to know who he was.

“It’s been that kind of week,” I admitted. “Month, actually.”

There was a flash of something in his eyes, as quickly as a car passing at the other end of an alley, but I saw it. A look that said, Yeah, me too. That kind of week . . . month . . . year.

I shifted the stack of papers onto my hip and tried to look as though one arm wasn’t slowly growing longer than the other. My foot was hurting. I needed to get off it. The doctor had prescribed limited walking for a couple weeks while the ankle healed. You can’t limit your walking on The Hill, not and be in the know. It’s a big place. My position as a legislative assistant put me about halfway up the congressional staff ladder. There were plenty of young kids hungry for advancement, and each of them had two good feet. My only advantage was charm and the fact that, even though I’d tried for anonymity, word had gotten around. People knew who my father was.

Daniel stood up like he’d been pushed out of his seat by a loose spring. He reached for the documents. “Here. You look like you could use some help with those.”

The rest was history, or a whirlwind, depending on your point of view. I asked about Daniel; he asked about me. Faber’s personal assistant gave us irritated looks for muddying up a congressional office with an obvious flirtation. We exchanged business cards before Daniel headed for a consultation in Faber’s office. After he’d passed the snotty personal assistant, he turned around, pointed at her and made a face, then mouthed, I’ll call you, as if we’d known each other forever.

The grouchy lady swiveled a stern look over her shoulder. Daniel made a show of turning around and heading for the congressman’s door.

I giggled.

I fell in love.

My ankle didn’t hurt anymore, because I wasn’t standing on it. I was floating a few inches off the ground.

Within four hours, my artsy cast and I were having dinner with Daniel at a hole-in-the-wall Italian place with decor that was vintage Dollar Store. I didn’t mind. The food was good, and it hadn’t taken me very long to figure out that my newly discovered prince, my gypsy king, my romance novel cover guy was, unfortunately, fairly broke. He had a master’s degree in biochemistry, two years of university research experience, two years of interesting stories from having traveled the world doing crop science for an underfunded non-governmental organization, and a couple years of teaching experience at a city college. His recently acquired position at the USDA was his first real eight-to-five job. He also had a healthy supply of student loans, medical bills from a car accident a few years back, and a three-and-a-half-year-old son who, that particular week, was in Ohio with grandparents.

It was a lot to take in on a first date. I had a feeling that Daniel didn’t usually share so much information so quickly. I wondered how much of his life he normally offered up to women he’d just met. Then I found my brown eyes going a little green over the idea that he met other women. Ever. I felt strangely possessive.

That didn’t matter, as it turned out. For the next two weeks, we were together every evening. Both of us knew we didn’t want to see anyone else.

Kaylyn started hounding me to pay her romance novel bills and to admit that Amy Ashley’s Irish love legend had validity. Irish magic aside, the night before Daniel’s son was to come home, I was worried. Other than roughhousing with my nieces and getting them in trouble with their mothers, I had no idea what to do with children of any size, particularly not a three-and-a-half-year-old. Aside from that, I’d grown up in a family full of girls. Boys were a complete mystery.

I was trying not to classify little Nick as a stumbling block, but a sense of loss and foreboding had begun needling me, even though I didn’t want it to. It wasn’t mature to think of a preschooler as the competition, but I liked things the way they were. Life with Daniel was . . . perfect. We were perfect. Just the two of us.

I hated myself for having that thought. I really did. I knew all about Nick. He was adorable—a towheaded version of his dad. I’d looked at his pictures in Daniel’s apartment. I’d laughed at many a “Nick” story over dinners and lunches with Daniel. I’d stood in the doorway of Nick’s room when Daniel wasn’t looking, studied Nick’s toys and his little race car bed, trying to imagine him there. I’d sympathized with Daniel when he’d snuggled me under his chin and brooded because Nick had started to notice that other kids in day care got picked up by their mothers. Nick wanted his mother to pick him up. Nick didn’t have a mother. Not that anyone could see, anyway.

“Nick’s mother doesn’t ever get in touch?” I asked, trying to picture her. There were no photos of her in Daniel’s apartment. I suspected that was intentional. Daniel’s face revealed an obvious pain whenever Nick’s mom came up in conversation. “She doesn’t ask to see him?”

A sigh deflated his chest beneath my cheek. “She didn’t want kids. She’s into her work.” The bitterness in his voice worried me, if I wasn’t worried enough already. I already knew that Nick’s mother worked for an oil company and traveled around the world. “Nick wasn’t planned,” he added.

“I wasn’t planned, either, but my mom didn’t just walk out on me,” I said, and then admonished myself for overstepping.

“It is what it is.” Daniel’s arm tightened around me in a way that made me feel good. I was reassured that I hadn’t said the wrong thing. I tried again to imagine Nick’s mom. I conjured an image of an executive. In my mind she was tall, svelte, with the face and body of a fashion model. Blond, probably, judging by Nick’s hair. He didn’t get that from his father.

“It’s just harder now that he’s asking, you know?” Daniel’s hand slid up and down my arm, raising a pleasant tingle on my skin. I felt an expectation in that caress, in Daniel’s words, in the absence of Nick’s mother. There was an empty space to be filled here, for both Daniel and Nick. But I’d met Daniel only two weeks ago. How could either of us possibly know whether I was the person to fill it?

I wasn’t a very likely candidate. If I met Nick now, we might only be setting him up for disappointment. On the other hand, if I didn’t meet Nick, how would I continue to spend time with Daniel? With no relatives living nearby, Daniel was a full-time single dad. The last two weeks had been an anomaly.

Real life was headed this way, safely strapped in a car seat in the back of the grandparents’ minivan.

“I don’t usually let him . . . meet people,” Daniel offered, and I felt sick. He was having second thoughts, trying to gently tell me that we needed to cool it for a while. Maybe now that Nick was coming back, Daniel was rethinking things altogether. Now that there was a child involved, perhaps Daniel was sensing the thing that men seemed to pick up on innately: I was hopelessly nondomestic. I couldn’t even make macaroni and cheese, the boxed kind.

I understand. I knew that was the correct response, but I couldn’t force the words out. I felt another unwanted stab of competitiveness toward little Nick. Looking across the room, I took in a picture of him dressed in a Giants jersey, a massive football helmet hiding his face in shadow, so that only a huge smile showed. I envisioned myself getting into a squat like an NFL lineman and knocking him off the playing field. I was bigger than he was. . . .

The thought was reprehensible, of course. It was only proof of what I already knew: I was the spoiled, self-centered, overindulged, late-in-life baby of the family and would never grow up. Completely hopeless.

“So . . . then . . . what . . .” What are you saying? What does this mean? What do you want me to say? I reached up and rubbed my eyebrows, then pinched hard, a little pulse thrumming beneath my fingertips. The I’m-not-going-to-cry feeling stung my throat. Daniel’s parents would be here tomorrow, road weary after driving from Ohio, and on their way to visit their other grandkids. Daniel and I had already established that this wasn’t the best time for me to meet them. They’re a little touchy because of Nick, he’d explained. Now Daniel was having cold feet, too.

“He’s getting old enough that he notices things,” Daniel remarked vaguely.

“Things?” My voice trembled a little, just getting that much out. I felt like I was groping in a dark room, waiting for Freddy Krueger to jump from the shadows and slash my heart in two. Another relationship meets its gruesome demise.

A soft little laugh-snort ruffled my hair and my thoughts. Now I was completely confused. Daniel found this funny? I was dying here. “Yeah, like the other day on the phone, he asked me why some people at Nanbee’s and Grandpa’s have one name, and some people have two. The second cousins, even the teenagers, who seem like grown-ups to him, are Angie, Chris, Corrie, and Zack, but the great-aunts and uncles are Aunt Tammy, Uncle Carl, and so on. The nursery ladies at their church are Miss Lori and Miss Teresa. He’s all confused.”

“Oh.” So was I—all confused.

Daniel shifted on the sofa, forcing me to sacrifice the warm spot under his chin, so I could see him. Those eyes, those beautiful green eyes, took me in. They were so pensive, so concerned, as if an invasion of the Daddy-body-snatchers had stolen away my gypsy king.

I felt every heartbeat in my chest, felt the teary lump rising and growing more imminent by the minute. Please don’t say it. Please don’t say it.

“So, anyway, I was thinking . . .” he began.

Here it comes, here it comes. I braced myself. Or tried. For some reason, a snippet of Josh and Kaylyn’s video-game programmer talk raced through my mind. Shields, shields, raise the deflector shields . . .

“ . . . what do you think he should call you?” Daniel finished.

“I . . . huh?” My disembodied self melted back into the carcass of the highlighted-blond, brown-eyed girl on the sofa. Seriously? I wanted to say. You scared me to death for that?

I pretended to have a tickle in my throat and something in my eye. In reality, tears of joy had begun to seep onto the bridge of my nose. “Sorry. I must have gotten a whiff of something.” I fanned myself, my body hot, then cold, then hot again. My gosh. I was crazy about this man. How was that possible after only a couple weeks? “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.” Because I know absolutely nothing about kids. To my nieces, I was just a big kid—someone fun to play with, but completely useless at mealtime or bath time.

Daniel scratched the nape of his neck, seeming to agonize over the question. “It’s just that . . . well . . . however we get him started, that’s what it’ll be forever. Kids are creatures of habit, you know?”

I nodded. Nope, didn’t know. This whole issue had never even crossed my tiny little mind, nor could I really focus on it now. I was still stuck on one word of that sentence: forever. Forever, forever, forever.

“Why don’t you pick?” I suggested. “I’m okay with whatever you decide.”

Whoops. I instantly sensed that I’d given the wrong answer. He looked disappointed—as if I’d blown off something he considered important, indicating that I didn’t understand the weight of it. “Okay, let me think a minute.” I said. Think. Think, think, think . . .

I’m not his aunt. I’m not his mother. Well, not yet, but a girl can dream. These were changing times, but I had always been taught that children didn’t call adults by their first names. My mother found the familiar way my older nieces spoke to me to be completely distasteful. Since they wouldn’t use Aunt Mallory, she had attempted to convert them to Tante M, the French word for aunt, which, in her view, had greater hipness to it. It was a flop, unless the nieces were trying to tease me. Then, when Mother asked who’d spilled Kool-Aid on the kitchen floor and failed to wipe it up, they’d call out, Tante M did it, with an emphasis on the French.

It crossed my mind that whenever I did finally work up the guts to confess to my mother that I was seriously dating a divorced guy with a three-and-a-half-year-old son—at which time she would frown gravely and remind me that I was recently out of a two-year relationship—she would not be impressed if Daniel’s preschool-aged child was calling me by my first name.

“How about Tante M? It’s French for aunt. It’s sort of a weird handle my mother made up. She hates it when the nieces call me by my first name.”

“Tante M.” Daniel licked his lips, tasting the word.

I watched his lips, felt myself swoon. Everything about him lit me up like a Christmas tree. He hadn’t even tried to put the moves on me, which, considering that this was DC, was shocking. Daniel was a perfect gentleman, old-fashioned in his view of things. I found that as charming as everything else about him. I’d almost lost faith that there were guys like that around anymore, but deep inside me, there was that image of my parents romancing in the pool. I’d always known that casual relationships were no substitute for true love and lifetime commitment. Aside from that, Great-grandma Louisa had avidly assured us girls that a man does not buy the cow if he can get the milk for free. You don’t forget a mental image like that one. Ever.

“But we can pick something else if you don’t think that seems good.” Maybe he thought the whole foreign language thing was dorky.

He shifted, bracing a hand on the sofa arm and leaning toward me. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I want some other man talking to you in French.” His voice was throaty and rich. “You might like him better than you like me.”

“Not possible,” I whispered, and he kissed me, and the storm of worry in my mind whirled off into a corner, growing smaller and smaller, until it was just a little swirl, like water spinning down the drain after a hot bath.

Not possible that I could like someone better than you. In some hidden part of my soul, I knew that like wasn’t the word I meant. I didn’t just like Daniel. I was in love in every way a girl could be. If two weeks was too soon to be using that word, I couldn’t help it. This was it. The Amy Ashley romance novel kind of love. I wanted to be his Irish bride.

No other man I would ever meet could possibly make me feel like this, I was certain.

But as it turned out, little Nick took a pretty good stab at it the very next day. I liked him the minute we met, over a picnic of fried chicken and soggy potato wedges. I’d been burning the midnight oil at work, and the best I could do was a quick brown-bag dinner in Bartholdi Park. I was, at least, newly out of the walking cast, so the stroll over was no problem.

Nick was not only adorable, he was funny, articulate, and—perhaps because he felt the absence of a mom in his life—surprisingly attuned to women. Moments after we met, he told me he liked my hair. I’d let it dry wavy that day, and he said it was princess hair. I fell in love. While Nick explored the softly trickling water feature nearby, I told his father he had competition for my affections.

“Figures.” Daniel let his head droop forward, his shoulders rounding in a display of surrender. “Nick always gets the girls. You should see him at day care.”

“I think you’re doing all right yourself.” I stretched onto my tiptoes for a kiss while Nick wasn’t looking. The next thing I knew, something was pushing on my knee, trying to force me away from Daniel. An instant later, I realized that it was Nick, and that we’d been caught. Guilt sledgehammered me. I’d watched the talk shows. I knew that this first meeting should have been about getting acquainted in a nonthreatening way that was easy for Nick to adjust to. Less than a half hour together, and I’d blown it already. He hated me. Step away from my daddy, the pressure of that little hand said. Who do you think you are, strange-princess-hair-woman?

Daniel and I yielded to the push in unison. There was a hand pressing on his leg, too. When we looked down, Nick was poised between us like a tiny Atlas, trying to hold two worlds apart. Daniel cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable. He gave me a worried look. I was sorry that we hadn’t waited for a less rushed time to begin introductions with Nick—maybe allowed him a few days to reacclimate to DC.

“Sorry, buddy,” Daniel said, and Nick just rolled a look at him—the kind of honest scorn that comes from a little psyche not yet attuned to hiding feelings in order to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy.

We’d really screwed up.

Daniel extended a hand to take Nick’s. “C’mon, bud. Let’s go see the water.”

I took a step back. Now would probably be a good time to exit, since this hadn’t gone so well. “I should . . . ummm . . .” I thumbed over my shoulder, wincing apologetically. “Go back to . . .”

I never finished the sentence. The most amazing thing happened, and in that moment, I felt certain that angels must have been swirling overhead. They smiled down on us as Nick turned to me, his face rising into the light, his blue eyes framed with his father’s thick lashes. He reached upward, fingers extended, all ten of them, as far as they would go, and in the space of a heartbeat, I understood that he wanted me to pick him up.

Daniel and I glanced at each other, and he just shrugged. “Well, I can see I’m second-rate.”

I picked Nick up, swinging him onto my hip somewhat awkwardly, but he didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he flashed an over-the-shoulder smirk at his dad, a pleased look with perhaps a hint of gloat in it. Daniel grinned wider and shook his head, a dark curl toying near his eyebrow. “I think someone’s after my best g-i-r-l.” He spelled the last word, and Nick squinted at him, trying to discern the meaning.

I felt like a queen, like a rock star, like a supermodel with adoring fans crowding in at the edges of the catwalk, fighting over me. Nick wasn’t pushing me away from his dad. He was pushing his dad away from me.

Nick wrapped his little arms around my shoulders, and from that moment on, we were friends. He quickly discovered that although I didn’t know how to properly cut up a hot dog into toddler bites and I could not even begin to name the characters on Thomas the Tank Engine, I could keep a balloon in the air for a long time without reusing any part of my body, I was pretty good with a soccer ball, and I had a poor short-term memory that made me easy to beat at the memory match card game. Time after time, it was a mystery to me which card had the purple dinosaur under it and which had the rubber ducky, and so on. Nick loved that about me. He also knew more farm animal sounds than I did, and he loved that, too. I had no idea what a goat might say, and I didn’t know whether a bull would moo like a cow or snort like a fire-breathing dragon. Nick knew because his grandparents lived in a rural neighborhood with farms just down the road. I didn’t mind losing parlor games to a kid who had yet to graduate from day care to official preschool. I was just happy that the three of us were bonding so well.

We made dinners together. We played games. We did things on the weekends. We watched the last of the spring blossoms fall and new leaves come in. The Gymies, fearing that I’d been kidnapped by some underground government agency, began reconnoitering, sniffing out the situation, asking concerned questions.

“Don’t you think things are moving a little . . . fast, though?” Kaylyn wanted to know when I called to ask Josh if I could borrow a few of his Disney DVDs for a couple days. Daniel had to go out of town to some sort of symposium about fertilizers and genetically modified super crops, and due to a snafu with the baby-sitting he’d arranged, I’d agreed to stay with Nick through the weekend.

“I mean, it sounds like you’re practically moving in over there.” Kaylyn’s romantic notions of St. Patrick’s Day magic and Irish destiny seemed to have faded away. “It’s only been, like, a month, y’know.”

A month? Had it really been only a month? “I’m just watching Nick for the weekend while Daniel’s gone. I’m not moving in.” But in the pit of my stomach there was a giddy little domestic feeling that I hadn’t told anyone about. I was looking forward to spending the weekend with Nick—boiling hot dogs, working on my ability to make boxed convenience foods, watching Disney movies, and reading favorite storybooks before tucking him into his little race car bed.

“What’s your mom think about all this?” Kaylyn had been dragged along on enough of my mother’s DC shopping visits to fully understand the undertows between Mom and me.

“I haven’t . . . exactly . . . said anything to them,” I admitted.

“You haven’t told your parents?” Kaylyn’s shock caused me to hold the cell phone away from my ear.

“I will. I will,” I ground out, the pressure pinching like a hermit crab nested under the mop of hair at the back of my neck. “I’m just waiting until I go home for Easter next week. That way, I can tell them in person—sort of ease Mom into it, so she doesn’t go berserk. The whole thing about Daniel being divorced-with-kid might throw her a little. She thinks divorced guys are damaged goods. She’s prehistoric that way.”

“You haven’t told your parents anything?” Kaylyn reiterated, then she covered the phone and shared the news with Josh, who was probably hard at work on the other side of their cubicle, creating fantasy characters and pixel-based swords for some new video game. “Mallory hasn’t told her family anything about Mr. Wonderful or Little Mr. Wonderful.”

I heard Josh’s response. “Whoa. That’s radical.”

The conversation went on from there, Kaylyn’s admonishments heaping guilt and trepidation on me until I almost gave up my quest to wrestle away some of Josh’s prized Disney DVDs.

But I wanted those movies, so I persevered, and an hour later, I was picking them up on my way to grab Nick from day care. Kaylyn was concerned about my ability to handle over forty-eight hours of parental responsibility. She dredged up the issue of the little window-hanging finch feeder she’d given me for Christmas. The one that sat empty while disenfranchised birds cast wistful looks from nearby electrical lines.

“I’m not going to forget to feed the kid,” I insisted as Josh caressed the stack of Disney movies, appearing to have second thoughts. “I’m not. Seriously, I’ve got it all planned out. He’s just one little boy, and he’s adorable, and we have a blast together. What could possibly go wrong?”

I should have known that such questions only tempt fate.

Nick picked that weekend to get the stomach flu.

I learned about thermometers and wet wipes, sensitive skin and Desitin, sponge baths, dehydration, throw up, washing sheets, washing sheets again, scrubbing stains out of carpet, and calling the emergency hotline in the middle of the night.

I also learned what fully qualified caretakers already know. The stomach flu is contagious.

By the time Daniel came home, Nick and I were a couple of washed-out rag dolls, strung across the recliner, nibbling soda crackers and blearily watching Bambi for the umpteenth time. Daniel went down to the Chinese restaurant on the corner and bought soup for us. When he came back, he fixed trays and then got to work cleaning up the offal of towels, clothes, DVDs, toys, and empty Pedialite bottles that had overtaken the apartment during our quest to survive. The phone rang while he was carrying an armload of stuff to Nick’s toy box. He took the call in the bedroom. When he came out, he was as pale as Nick and me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. He looked like someone had died. I immediately thought of his family in Ohio. I only knew what Daniel had told me. He had a mom, dad, grandparents, and various cousins, aunts, and uncles all living within a thirty-mile radius, and a brother who lived in Boston with his wife and kids. Like my parents, Daniel’s parents still owned the house he’d grown up in. I hoped the call hadn’t brought bad news—a car accident or something.

“I think I just got offered a job,” he said, his jaw hanging slack after the words, a hint of five o’clock shadow testifying to the fact that, in his rush to return home to Nick and me, he hadn’t even shaved this morning.

“A job?” That didn’t sound like bad news. Why the horrified expression?

He nodded slowly, his eyes shifting toward the bedroom doorway, as if the spirit of something large and life-altering were hovering there, and he expected it to come storming up the hallway any moment.

His next two words explained everything. “In Texas.”