With a Little Luck (2 page)

“I’m going home,” she stated.

“I don’t have any place to go but home, either,” he said. “So why don’t we go some place together? Then we won’t have to go home.”

“I want to go home,” Eve insisted firmly, despite the faint quiver that was spreading up her arm from the restraining touch of his hand.

“Why? It’s lonely there.”

She had difficulty imagining a man like him ever being lonely. It was obviously a line. She wasn’t going to be strung along by it.

“Let me put it another way: I don’t want to go with you.”

“I think I’m giving you the wrong impression.” A half smile slanted his mouth, casually disarming. “I want to go someplace where we can talk.”

Another line, Eve guessed. “I doubt that you’re interested in talking,” she returned with a tinge of sarcasm.

“It’s true,” he insisted, and moved to stand more to the front of her, without letting go of her arm.

Eve stared straight ahead in an effort to ignore him and the strange leaping of her pulse. His other hand moved to touch the side of her silky brown hair. Instinctively she jerked away from the soft caress, preferring force to his present means of intimidating her. She turned her head to stare at him.

When she met his gaze, Eve realized he was a man who communicated by touching — with his hands or his gaze…or his mouth and his body. Unbidden, her mind had added the last. She didn’t doubt his expertise in any area. Her composure began to splinter a little, undermined by her unexpectedly wayward imagination.

“It is true,” he repeated. “Don’t you know that a man can talk to a brown mouse?”

Which was hardly flattering in the light of her own low opinion of her sex appeal.

“Would you please not call me that?” Irritation flashed through her as she refused to comment on his observation.

“I always wondered if a brown mouse would retaliate when it was backed into a corner. There is some spirit there, behind that apparent timidity.” It was obvious by the look of satisfaction on his face that she had heightened his interest. Eve wished she had kept her mouth shut. “A brown mouse. That’s what you are, you know. With your brown hair and your brown eyes and your brown coat.”

He was baiting her, but this time she ignored him. “I am a brown mouse who is anxious to go home, so would you let me go?” She injected a weary note in her voice, as if she were finding him quite tiresome. Fleetingly it occurred to her that she wouldn’t be in this situation if she had accepted the Reverend Mr. Johnson’s offer of a ride home.

“If you insist that’s what you want to do, I’ll walk with you to make sure you arrive safely and no cat pounces on you on the way home.”

“I can think of only one ‘cat’ that might pounce on me and that’s you,” Eve retorted.

“Touché!” he laughed, and she was upset with herself for liking the sound of it.

She faced him directly. “If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to have to scream.”

“Mice squeak,” he corrected, but his gaze had narrowed on her, judging to see how serious she was about her threat.

“This brown mouse screams,” she insisted.

She could, and if she felt sufficiently threatened, she would. It hadn’t reached that point yet, but this conversation had gone on long enough.

“I believe she does,” he agreed after a second had passed. He released her arm and lifted his hands in a mocking indication that he wouldn’t touch her again.

“Thank you.” Eve wasn’t sure why she said that. Immediately she began walking away, trying not to walk too fast. She could feel him watching her with those magnetic blue eyes. It was an unnerving sensation.

“Good night, brown mouse.” His low voice called after her, a hint of regret in its tone.

She didn’t answer him. For another ten feet, Eve wondered if he would start following her. She forced herself not to look back. A few seconds later she heard the tavern door open and close. She glanced over her shoulder, but he wasn’t in sight. Since no customer had come out, he had obviously gone back inside. She didn’t have to wonder anymore whether he would come after her. Instead Eve found herself wondering who he was.

It was after ten when she reached her home. Both her parents were in the living room when she walked in. Neither of them was particularly striking in his appearance. Her father was a tall spare man with hazel eyes and thinning brown hair, while her mother was petitely built, with graying brown hair and brown eyes. It was a toss-up from whom Eve had inherited her common looks.

“Choir practice must have run late,” her mother observed. It was a statement of conversation, not a remark about Eve’s lateness in getting home.

“A little.” She shrugged out of her brown coat and wondered if she would ever wear it again without thinking of herself as a brown mouse. “Mr. Johnson offered me a ride home, but it was such a lovely evening I decided to walk. So it took a little longer.”

She didn’t mention the stranger outside the tavern. They were still her parents. Eve didn’t want to cause them needless concern. It had been a harmless incident anyway, not worth recounting.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT Toby McClure rolled onto his side. His long, little boy lashes fluttered, his sleep disturbed by a faint sound. He slowly let them come open, his sleepy blue eyes focusing on the door to his bedroom, which stood ajar. Listening, he heard hushed movement in another part of the house. A smile touched the corners of his mouth and deepened when he heard the person bump into a chair and curse beneath his breath.

Throwing back the covers, Toby slipped out of his single bed and walked to the hall door. His bare feet made no sound on the carpeted floor. He opened the door wide and waited until he saw the towering frame of his father separate from the darkness. He was walking unsteadily, trying so hard to be quiet.

The light from the full moon streamed through the window at the end of the hallway where Toby stood, including him in its path. The instant he saw the boy, his father, Luck McClure, stopped abruptly and swayed, bracing a hand against the wall to steady himself. A frown gathered on his forehead as he eyed the boy.

“What are you doing out of bed? You’re supposed to be asleep,” he accused in a growling voice that had a trace of a slur.

“You woke me up,” Toby replied. “You always do when you try to sneak in.”

“I wasn’t sneaking.” He emphatically denied that suggestion and glanced around. “Where’s Mrs. Jackson, the lady who is supposed to be sitting with you?”

“She was going to charge double after midnight, so I paid her off and sent her home. You owe me twelve dollars.”

“You — ” Luck McClure clamped his mouth shut on the explosion of anger and carefully raised a hand to cradle his forehead. “We’ll talk about this in the morning, Toby,” he declared in heavy warning.

“Yes, sir. I’ll remind you if you forget,” he promised. A mischievous light danced in his eyes. “You owe me twelve dollars.”

“That’s another thing we’ll discuss in the morning.” But it was a weak facsimile of his previous warning, as a wave of tiredness washed over him. “Right now, I’m going to bed.”

Luck pushed away from the wall and used that impetus to carry him to the bedroom door opposite his son’s. Toby watched him open the door to the darkened room and head in the general direction of the bed. Without a light to see the exact location of his destination, Luck stubbed his toe on an end post. He started to swear and stopped sharply when Toby crossed the hall to flip the switch, turning on the overhead light.

“Why aren’t you back in bed where you belong?” Luck hobbled around to the side of the bed and half sat, half fell onto the mattress.

“I figured you’d need help getting ready for bed.” Toby walked to the bed with all the weary patience of an adult and helped finish tugging the pullover sweater over his father’s head.

“For an eight-year-old kid, you figure a lot of things,” Luck observed with a wry sort of affection. While he unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt, Toby unfastened the buttons on his shirtfront.

“You’ve gotta admit, dad, I did you a favor tonight,” Toby said as he helped pull his arms free of the shirt. “How would it have looked if Mrs. Jackson had seen you come home drunk?”

“I’m not drunk,” Luck protested, unfastening his pants and standing long enough to slip them down his hips. Toby pulled them the rest of the way off. “I just had a few drinks, that’s all.”

“Sure, dad.” He reached over and pulled down the bedcovers. It didn’t take much persuasion to get his father under them.

“It feels so good to lie down,” Luck groaned, and started to shut his eyes when Toby tucked the covers around him. He opened them to give his son a bleary-eyed look. “Did I tell you I talked to a brown mouse?” The question was barely out before he rolled onto his side, burrowing into the pillow. “You’d better get some sleep, son,” he mumbled.

Shaking his head, Toby walked to the door and paused to look at his already snoring father. He reached up to flip off the light.

“A brown mouse,” he repeated. “That’s another thing we’ll discuss in the morning.”

Back in his moonlit room, Toby crawled into bed. He glanced at the framed photograph on the table beside his bed. The picture was a twin to the one on his father’s bureau. From it, a tawny-haired blonde with green eyes smiled back at him — his mother, and easily the most beautiful woman Toby had ever seen. Not that he remembered her. He had been a baby when she died — six years ago today. His gaze strayed in the direction of his father’s bedroom. Sighing, he closed his eyes.

SHORTLY AFTER EIGHT the next morning, Toby woke up. He lay there for several minutes before he finally yawned and climbed out of bed to stretch. Twenty minutes later he had brushed his teeth and washed, combed his hair and found a clean pair of jeans and a yellow T-shirt to wear.

Leaving his bedroom, he paused in the hallway to look in on his father. Luck McClure was sprawled across the bed, the spare pillow clutched by an encircling arm. Toby quietly closed the door, although he doubted his father would be disturbed by any noise he made.

In the kitchen, he put a fresh pot of coffee on to perk, then pushed the step stool to the counter and climbed it to reach the juice glasses and a cereal bowl in the cupboard. Positioning the stool in front of another cupboard, he mounted it to take down a box of cornflakes. With orange juice and milk from the refrigerator, Toby sat down to the kitchen table to eat his breakfast of cereal and orange juice.

By the time he’d finished, the coffee was done. He glanced from it to the pitcher of orange juice, hesitated, and walked to the refrigerator to take out a pitcher of tomato juice. Climbing back up the step stool, he took down a tall glass and filled it three-quarters full with tomato juice. When he returned the pitcher to the refrigerator, he took out an egg, cracked it, and added it to the tomato juice. He stirred that mixture hard, then added garlic and Tabasco to it. Sniffing the end result, he wrinkled his nose in distaste.

Taking the glass, he left the kitchen and walked down the hallway to his father’s room. He hadn’t changed position in bed. Toby leaned over, taking great care not to spill the contents of the glass, and shook his father’s shoulder with his free hand.

“It’s nine o’clock, dad. Time to get up.” His statement drew a groan of protest. “Come on, dad.”

With great reluctance, Luck rolled onto his back, flinging an arm across his eyes to shield them from the brightness of the sunlight shining in his window. Toby waited in patient silence until he sat up.

“Oh, my head,” Luck mumbled, and held it in both his hands, the bedcovers falling around his waist to leave his torso bare.

Toby climbed onto the bed, balancing on his knees while he offered his father the concoction he’d made. “Drink this. It’ll make you feel better.”

Lowering his hands part way from his head, Luck looked at it skeptically.

“What is it?”

“Don’t ask,” Toby advised, and reached out to pinch his father’s nose closed while he tipped the glass to his lips. He managed to pour a mouthful down before his father choked and took the glass out of his hand.

“What is this?” Luck coughed and frowned as he studied the glass.

“It’s a hangover remedy.” And Toby became the recipient of the glowering frown and a raised eyebrow.

“And when did you become an expert on hangover remedies?” Luck challenged.

“I saw it on television once,” Toby shrugged.

Luck shook his head in quiet exasperation. “I should make you drink this, you know that, don’t you?” he sighed.

“There’s fresh coffee in the kitchen.” Toby hopped off the bed, just in case his father intended to carry out that threat.

“Go pour me a cup. And take this with you.” A smile curved slowly, forming attractive grooves on either side of his mouth — male dimples — as he handed the glass back to Toby. “I’ll be there as soon as I get some clothes on.”

“I’ll pour you some orange juice, too,” Toby volunteered.

“Just straight orange juice. Don’t put anything else in it.”

“I won’t.” A wide grin split Toby’s face before he turned to walk swiftly from the room.

With a wry shake of his head, Luck threw back the covers and climbed slowly out of bed. He paused beside the bureau to glance at the photograph.
Well, pretty lady, do you see what kind of boy your son has grown into?
The blue of his eyes had a pensive look as he walked to the bathroom.