Teresa Hill – A Little Bit Engaged (страница 10)

“Sure. Ready for coffee?”

“Please. I’ll spring for espresso from the café, if you’ll go get it.”

“Deal,” Gretchen said.

She was back before Kate even knew she was gone, delivering caffeine and saying, “Okay, I’ll be at my desk. Who do you want to talk to this morning?”

“No one,” Kate said.

“No one? Sisters? Brother?”

“No.”

“Joe?”

“Especially not Joe.”

Gretchen frowned. “Are you okay? Is something going on? Because I’ve had two phone calls myself from friends of mine who said… Well…”

“What?” Kate didn’t want to know. Really, she didn’t.

“That you broke up with Joe. Or that he broke up with you.”

“Anything else?” Kate dared to ask, ready for something about the priest.

“No.”

Kate closed her eyes and let out a breath. “We didn’t break up. I just don’t want to talk to him.”

Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense, now that she thought about it.

Gretchen waited, probably looking for more information. Kate offered none.

“Okay,” Gretchen said again. “I’ll just be out here, taking messages, all day. No one gets through. I can do that.”

She probably thought Kate was nuts all of a sudden. Wait until the priest rumors started making the rounds. Then the phone would really ring off the hook.

“Ahh!” Kate groaned, not able to hold it in any longer…

The door popped back open. Gretchen stuck her head in. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Kate insisted. She must have been louder than she realized. Either that or Gretchen was listening at her door. “All I did was volunteer with Charlie’s wife’s organization!”

“Big Brothers/Big Sisters, right?” Gretchen said tentatively, hovering in the doorway, half in and half out.

“Yes. Charlotte brought it up in front of Charlie, and you know Charlie. He knows everyone. His firm is the biggest one in town. Just getting a little bit of his mortgage referral business would be great for us, and he loves it when people volunteer to help his wife’s organization.”

“So you volunteered? To get in good with Charlie?”

“Yes,” Kate confessed. “I went yesterday, and there was the cutest little girl, Allie, with wild, kinky, curly hair and no front teeth. She wanted me to be her big sister, which I said I’d love to do. And I was thinking it was okay, even if I’d come for the wrong reasons. I mean, sometimes good things just happen, right?”

“Right,” Gretchen said.

“But then… Well, then—”

“Is this the part where the priest started hitting on you?” Gretchen asked.

Kate groaned once more.

Kate hid quite skillfully all day. It wouldn’t last, but by 4:15 p.m., she’d successfully avoided all contact with anyone but her clients, their attorneys, their real estate agents and the myriad of other people involved in getting people into a home of their own. The only nonwork item that got through was from Melanie, telling her that her little sister could meet her at 5:30 p.m., if that worked for Kate.

Chicken that Kate was, she had Gretchen call to confirm.

The meeting was set for Magnolia Falls Park, a long strip of land that ran along the river though town. Kate arrived promptly at 5:25, excited for the first time since the whole Big Brothers/Big Sisters debacle began.

She couldn’t wait to see Allie again. Surely things would go smoothly from here on out, at least between her and her new little sister. With two real sisters of her own, Kate felt like she could hold her own with any little girl, especially one as outgoing and happy as Allie. All Charlotte asked was that Kate touch base with Allie once a week, hopefully get together for two hours or so, the activities of their own choice, from educational to pure fun.

Pure fun had never been Kate’s forte, but maybe Allie could teach her.

Once the girl arrived.

Kate stood at the meeting spot—next to the ice cream stand in the midst of Magnolia Falls Park—at precisely five-thirty and fought the urge to pace.

The only young female she saw was…well, frightening was the first word that came to mind.

Nothing impish or cute about this girl.

She might be thirteen and she might be twenty. It was impossible to tell. She wore a little ribbed tank top that clung to her uncharacteristically pale skin. A disreputable-looking black leather jacket and oversize black cargo pants with a huge black belt and what looked like army boots.

So…she definitely wasn’t a shoe person.

She’d probably done that really bad dye job on her hair herself—inky black, of course—and had pierced her ears too many times to count, plus her eyebrows. She’d painted her fingernails black and managed to find purplish-black lipstick somewhere.

She pursed those wicked-colored lips and took a slow, deep drag off her cigarette, staring belligerently back at Kate and arching a blackened brow as if to say, What is your problem?

Kate nearly laughed at that. This girl was the one with problems.

She dismissed Kate with another smirk and started to blow smoke rings into the air, much to the annoyance of the ice cream man, who was trying to wave it away with his hands.

“It’s not Halloween yet, is it, Kate?” Bernie, the ice cream man, asked.

The girl looked bored, as she took another puff on the cigarette, her gaze remaining dismissively on Kate.

“Not for another few days, Bernie,” Kate said.

“Can I get you something, Kate?”

Nerves getting the best of her, she said, “Sure, I’ll have a fudge bar.”

He dug it out of his cart and Katie took it, handing him a dollar bill and thanking him.

No one else had shown up. This was the only ice cream cart in the park. It was in the same place every day. Everyone in town knew where it was.

Waiting impatiently, Kate wondered how much of her own life story she should share with Allie. Kate’s own father died at the hands of a convenience-store robber when she was only eight. And of course, her mother died of cancer six months ago, when Kate was twenty-seven. Life had not been easy for her, and yet she thought she and her siblings had turned out okay, her current situation with Joe and that odd thing with the priest notwithstanding. There wasn’t a wild, rebellious, indignant or irresponsible bone in Kate Cassidy’s body.

Which made her think of the girl beside her. If Katie had to guess, she’d say the girl was at least wild and rebellious, and she seemed to have a good head start on indignant, just looking at Katie, in her favorite black suit and her pretty black pumps. How could anyone object to a classic black suit?

She glanced at her watch. Five thirty-four.

She ate her fudge bar. Ghoul Girl, as Katie had come to think of her, finished her cigarette and threw what was left of it down onto the ground.

“Hey,” Bernie warned her. “That’s not where it goes, and believe me, you don’t want to find out what the fine for littering in this park is.”

That earned him a glare, too, but the girl picked up the cigarette butt and threw it into the trash. Katie finished her fudge bar and threw it away.

Five thirty-seven.

She had hoped to make the 6:15 advanced-cardio-burn class at the gym, but time would soon become an issue. Katie pulled out her cell phone and paged through the numbers programmed in the phone, for Charlotte Sims’s number. Charlotte, cheery as always, answered.

“Hi. This is Kate Cassidy. I was supposed to meet my little sister seven minutes ago, but she’s not here. I was wondering if she’d called to cancel?”

“Katie. Hi,” Charlotte said. “She’s not there? I hope nothing happened. I’ve got her cell phone number right here. Let me try her and see. Can you hang on?”

“Sure.” Thank goodness for cell phones. She tried to never be without hers. Although, a six-year-old having a cell phone…? That sounded a bit odd.

Charlotte put Katie on hold, and, oddly enough, someone else’s phone rang. Ghoul Girl’s. Even her phone was all black.