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“Well, is he still good-looking?” her meddling sister asked with a twinkle in her eye.
“Better than ever,” Kara whispered, then she bit her lip and wondered why she hadn’t censored herself.
“What’s he do for a living?”
“He’s a cop.” She got all tight in the pit of her belly when she said it. Why did knowing he was a police officer make him even more attractive to her? “I’m not sure where.”
“Chicago,” Vidalia said. “At least that’s where he was the last time I spoke to his father, God rest his soul.”
Might as well have been the moon, as far as Kara was concerned. “I invited him to dinner tonight. He’s got a friend along, another cop named Colby... something. Seems like a nice enough guy.”
“Good girl,” Vidalia said. “And dinner will be as good a time as any to tell him your plans for his house.” Then she sighed. “It’ll be nice to see that boy again.”
He was hardly a boy, Kara thought. He was all man. And she was probably going to spill something on him or dump soup into his lap at dinner.
* * *
The boarding house was not ideal for Tyler. The rooms were all upstairs, and Tyler detested being carried. But with the braces and the crutches, doing it himself was as risky as it was frustrating and time-consuming.
He convinced Ty that piggyback rides up and down the stairs were a lot of fun, but after the third trip the novelty of that wore off fast. Poor kid.
Clever kid, too.
He’d just about melted Kara Brand’s heart with that hug he’d doled out this morning. And Jim knew his son too well to think it hadn’t been deliberate.
Colby sat beside him. Tyler was having a snack and watching TV, and the two adults were out of his earshot, on the far side of the living area of their three-room suite at the only boarding house in town.
Jim had been avoiding Colby’s questions all afternoon, but he knew he’d run out of time. Colby was his best friend and he knew him far too well.
“So what’s the story on this Kara Brand?” he asked.
Jim sighed and knew there was no getting around it. “I’ve been thinking about that all day. Hell, Colby, you wouldn’t believe how much she’s changed. At least on the surface. Wait, I’ll show you.” He went to the bedroom he would be sharing with Ty and got the old high school yearbook he’d brought along, flipped it open to the page that showed Kara Brand and brought it back to shove it into Colby’s hands.
Colby looked at the awkward-looking skinny girl in the photo. “No way is that the same girl.”
“It is,” Jim assured him. “I just hope the changes are only skin-deep.”
“Why’s that?”
He sighed as he sank into his seat, took the yearbook back and looked down at the ugly duckling who’d grown into a swan. “Because she had a heart as soft as a chocolate bar in the sun.”
“Did she?”
Jim nodded, his eyes on the face in the photo, seeing now things he’d missed as a shallow high school jock. The Audrey Hepburn cheekbones, the delicate jaw and perfect nose. The wide set of her eyes and their exotic shape, thick lashes. So much natural beauty, but she’d kept it to herself.
“Whatever kid was having the worst time of it, that would be the one you’d see at her side. She’d latch onto them and protect them like a mother hen. Foster kids moving in and out of our district. Kids whose parents were going through a divorce. Kids so poor they came to school in secondhand clothes that didn’t quite fit. Kids with disabilities.”
“The outcasts,” Colby observed with a nod.
“Yeah. She had this tendency to... I don’t know... take care of people.”
“I know the type. Rarely meet one, though.”
“Yeah.” Jim smiled, remembering. “She even tried to take care of me once.”
“Since when were you an outcast?” Colby asked.
“Just once. Just once. Championship basketball game, tie score, seconds left on the clock. I had the ball and a choice to make—pass it to the benchwarmer who was wide open right under the basket or take a hot-dog shot from half court.”
