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Her heart fluttered at his touch, his smile, and the thought of a day just being with him. But she giggled. “He just wanted to practice baking for the show without us hanging around.”
Dane laughed with her. “So true.”
Once they had their fill of the sweet air, Dane stood, pulling her with him. “There’s a place I’d like to go. It’s maybe a mile and a half walk. But I haven’t been there in years, and I’d like to see it again.”
She tipped her head, having no idea what he could be talking about.
“It’s called Portals of the Past. I’ll tell you about it when we get there. You game?”
Lord, to be with him, she was game for anything. Thank goodness she wasn’t wearing heels.
They strolled the sidewalk, few cars passing them. The more popular part of Golden Gate Park was on the other side of Nineteenth Avenue with the Japanese Tea Garden, the Academy of Sciences, and the de Young Museum. They didn’t talk about the job or the resort, or even her uncle’s passing.
Instead, falling into the smile on his beautiful lips, she waited for something… momentous.
Dane asked, “When you were a little girl, did you wear your hair in pigtails or braids?”
Chapter Sixteen
Cammie laughed so hard she had to put her hand over her mouth. “Neither. With my red hair…” She flicked her curls. “I would have looked like Pippi Longstocking.”
He blinked. “Who’s Pippi Longstocking?”
The inane conversation was delightful, even making her heart flutter. “She was the nine-year-old heroine in a series of children’s books I used to read when I was a kid.” Then she turned the questioning back on him. “What about you when you were a little boy?”
With a straight face, he said, “My hair wasn’t long enough for pigtails or braids.”
She slapped at him playfully. “I didn’t mean your hair. What did you like to do?”
He held her hand as they walked, nonchalantly, almost as if he didn’t notice what he was doing. But she felt the warmth of his palm and the strength in his grip. “I was all about animals. I had a pony. Later on, a horse. And if there was ever an injured animal out there, I found it.” He tapped his chest as if he was proud. “And made sure I healed it. Then I released it back into the wild,” he added with a flourish.
She knew he’d wanted to be a vet, that he’d been in his third year of college, with veterinary school in mind. He’d never made it.
“What was your favorite pet?”
He tipped his face skyward. “There are so many to choose from. I had a wild turkey with an injured leg. I found her when I was hiking and walked right into a flock of wild turkeys with all these chicks. Turkey chicks are called poults—and they were so damned cute.” His eyes shone when he looked at her. “She was their heroine, hobbling off in the opposite direction, squawking and shrieking, trying to draw me away from the poults while the other female led them to safety. She thought I was some sort of predator, and I admired her heroism.”
When he looked down at her, she could almost see the little boy in his face, the young child chasing after a turkey so he could heal her leg.
“I caught her, took her home. I thought I could fix her.” His voice rose as if he still remembered his hopefulness. “But she’d been born with a deformed leg. She liked to wander around the yard, even though my parents complained—at least when they were home—about the poop on the grass.”
“Did you at least clean up the poop?”
His eyes still glittering, he shook his head. “You can’t just clean up turkey poop, let me tell you, especially when the whole flock joined her. Now that really drove everyone crazy. But she was great, even ate out of my hand.”
“What did you name her?”
“Stumpy.”
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Stumpy? That’s just plain mean.”
Dane’s smile shone down on her, as warm as the sun on the top of her head. “She always came when I called, so she must have liked it.”
“You’re terrible,” she complained, walking again. “What happened to her?”
He shrugged. “One day, the whole flock just moved on. I’m not sure why. Could have been a predator that drove them away.”
“Did you miss her?”
“For a while.” He sighed. “I hoped she’d come back. But she never did. Sometimes you just have to accept that the things you love don’t always come back to you.”
She thought how incredibly sad that was.
But then Dane smiled. “I figured she’d gone on to enjoy life elsewhere. That’s what I hoped for all the animals and birds I rescued. That they moved on to a better life. If I didn’t do that, it would have been too depressing.”
