A Second Chance for the Single Dad Read online

  She was about to knock one last time when she heard Luke speak up from inside the den.

  “Come in.”

  Her hand on the doorknob, she opened it only far enough to peer into the room. “I just wanted to remind you that dinner is going to be at five, Lucas. I trust you’re planning to be here,” Barbara told him pointedly.

  His eyes met hers. He still wasn’t 100 percent sure about dinner tonight. He was certainly undecided about the wisdom of doing this.

  “I’m a doctor, Barbara. That means I’m on call twenty-four hours a day,” he reminded her.

  “Well, actually, you’re not,” Barbara contradicted. “I spoke with Stephen Barrett and he agreed to take any of your calls should an emergency come up.”

  “He agreed?” Luke asked incredulously. He didn’t know whether to be angry or impressed. For the moment, he just tried to keep his cool, and then he asked, “How did you manage that?”

  Barbara smiled in satisfaction. “You forget that my husband didn’t just act as your mentor. There’s a whole legion of doctors that Dan trained. A few of them are in your orthopedic medical group. All I had to do was mention his name and Stephen was more than happy to step in as your substitute if the need arises.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You didn’t happen to tell him why you were asking him to be on call, did you?”

  Barbara gave him a reproachful look. “I’m not senile yet, Lucas. I just said something had come up. Vague enough for you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  It was a grudging acknowledgment but it was an acknowledgment. “And if you have any thoughts about ducking out at the last minute, I would advise against it.”

  He’d thought about it, but he didn’t want to put his mother-in-law on the spot, even though she apparently had no such compunctions in regards to putting him on the spot, he thought.

  “Is that why you’re having dinner at five?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “That and Lily wants to be there. She gets very tired around seven. This way she can visit for a little while before it’s her bedtime.” Again, Barbara looked at him pointedly. “She’s really looking forward to meeting ‘the doughnut lady.’ By the way, it’s a lovely day. Why don’t you go outside and take advantage of it by doing something with Lily?”

  He had no idea how to “do something” with Lily. Luke suppressed a sigh. He was outmaneuvered and outnumbered. He felt like a fish caught on a hook. The more he thrashed, the worse it seemed to be for him. So he resigned himself to the situation—although if the occasion presented itself for him to successfully duck out, he still might, he told himself.

  * * *

  The thought of ducking out became more enticing as the morning wore on, giving way to the afternoon. As he was seriously considering taking a ride somewhere just for the sheer novelty of it, his path to the car was blocked by just over three and a half feet of determined little girl.

  As he looked down into Lily’s face, it struck him that she definitely had something on her mind. Something that would make him feel like a fish out of water.

  “Lily, why don’t you help Grandma get dinner ready for your guest?” he suggested.

  “Grandma doesn’t want any help,” Lily answered without any hesitation. “She says she’s got everything under control.” Lily cocked her head much the way he’d noticed Quartermain doing about a week ago. Maybe it was a quirk common to stubborn women, regardless of their age. “She said that you could help me.”

  Lily had never sought him out for anything before. He couldn’t very well turn her away now, but he also wasn’t very good when it came to the things that little girls were into.

  “Help you with what?” Luke asked his daughter gamely.

  Raising her chin and looking very determined, Lily said, “I wanted to give the lady who’s coming to dinner something special.”

  “That’s nice.” He nodded absently. “You mean like a drawing?” he asked.

  The look on the small oval face bordered on impatience. “No, everybody can do a drawing,” she said, then told him, “I want to give her a leprechaun.”

  Luke congratulated himself on not laughing out loud. Instead, he merely repeated, “A leprechaun.”

  Lily bobbed her head up and down with the energy and enthusiasm that was the exclusive property of the very young and idealistic.

  Luke continued to play along. “Do you happen to have a leprechaun lying around somewhere?”

  “No, silly. Leprechauns don’t just lie around,” Lily giggled.

  It was the first time that he recalled ever hearing her giggle and the sound captivated him. And perhaps, for the first time, he was beginning to see her as an individual, not just a little girl who was a carbon copy of so many other little girls.

  “We have to catch one,” Lily told her father.

  “And how do you suggest we do that?” he asked her, curious to hear if she had this all worked out or if this was the part where she just handed the problem over to him and waited for him to come up with a plan.

  Apparently, he learned, Lily had it all worked out. “We build a box and draw a rainbow inside of it. And maybe we put a piece of gold in front of the rainbow. Leprechauns like gold,” she informed him assertively. “We tie a piece of string to the box and once he goes inside it to get the gold, we pull the string. Bang!” she declared proudly. “The box goes down and we’ve caught a leprechaun.”

  Luke laughed, charmed. He shook his head in disbelief. That was a pretty sophisticated plan for a five-year-old, he couldn’t help thinking. “You really do have all this worked out, don’t you?”

  She bobbed her head up and down, golden curls bouncing back and forth. “Uh-huh. Grandma says, ‘Do it right, or don’t do it at all,’” she told him, deepening her voice to imitate her grandmother.

  Luke nodded, trying to look solemn. He was doing his best not to laugh again.

  “That certainly does sound just like her,” Luke agreed.

  She was still staring up at him, her eyes wide and beseeching. “So will you help me?”

  How could he say no to that face? So, nodding, he said, “I guess we’d better get started, then.”

  Deep blue eyes softened around the edges as a smile curved the small rosebud mouth. “Then you’ll build me a box? Grandma says there’s some wood, a hammer and some nails in the garage.”

  No longer shy and now on a mission, Lily took his hand in her tiny one and tugged on it, beginning to lead him into the garage.

  “Okay.”

  This sounded much too easy and smelled like a setup, he thought. Following Lily into the garage, he saw the wood.

  The planks were all different sizes, leftovers from some project. Whose, he hadn’t a clue, although he vaguely recalled that Jill had once taken a woodworking class because she’d thought it was a good way to distract herself while he was in medical school.

  That was a long time ago, he thought, trying to keep the memory and everything it conjured up at bay. The wood was probably rotten.

  To his surprise, the wood turned out to be all right. As a matter of fact, it was more than all right. It was of a high-grade quality.

  But, high-grade quality or not, the planks weren’t going to do him any good if he couldn’t find a way to cut them down to one uniform size.

  Putting five planks down on the workbench, he glanced around the garage. “Lily, you wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a saw around here, do—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish his question. His daughter ran over to what turned out to be a tool rack and then pointed. Someone had taught her to keep a respectful distance away from anything that could accidentally hurt her.

  Crossing to where Lily was standing, Luke felt a wistful pang in the center of his gut.

  You did a great job with her, Jill
. And you did it all without me, he thought.

  He was a highly skilled, very respected surgeon. However, that did him no good when it came to being a handyman. That meant that cutting five equal pieces of wood and then hammering them all together to form a makeshift box in order to capture a mythical leprechaun was not exactly easy.

  The hardest part, though, was not letting loose with a string of choice words when he missed the nail and hit his thumb instead—not once but a total of three different times.

  The third time, he hit it so hard that strong tears sprang to his eyes.

  That was when Lily slid off the stool she’d been sitting on and, taking his hand in hers, surprised him by bringing his thumb up to her lips and giving it such a gentle kiss it made him think of a butterfly fluttering down and lightly perching on the petal of a flower.

  She was a sweetheart, he thought.

  “There,” she pronounced, letting his hand go and stepping back. “Whenever I had a boo-boo, Mommy would kiss it to make it all better.” Big blue eyes looked up at him. “Is it all better, Daddy?”

  It would be wonderful if everything were just this simple. Out loud, he told her, “It’s good as new.”

  Her small face puckered up as she tried to understand. “Then why are there still tears in your eyes?” she asked.

  “Must be the dust in the air,” he said. He took his handkerchief out and proceeded to elaborately wipe the “dust” away.

  Tucking his handkerchief back into his pocket, he got back to work.

  “There—it’s done,” he declared several minutes later.

  “Not yet,” she told him. He looked at her quizzically. “Don’t forget the nail for the string,” she reminded him, sounding exactly like a little old lady. “Without the string, we can’t pull down the box and the leprechaun will get away.”

  “Certainly can’t have that,” Luke agreed.

  He drove a nail into the front of the small wooden box and attached a string to it, then tied the string tightly around the nail.

  “Don’t forget, we need a rainbow,” he noted. “Do you need a piece of paper and a box of crayons?” he asked.

  “Already got ’em,” she said. “The rainbow will be ready in a jiffy,” she promised. Armed with her “tools,” Lily plopped down, tummy first, onto the floor and threw herself into the job.

  It took her only a few minutes to draw the all-important rainbow. Stopping, she critically surveyed her creation before retiring the crayons back into the box. He caught himself thinking that she had to be the neatest five-year-old ever created.

  “Finished!” she announced, holding out her work of art.

  Taking the drawing from her, he was surprised to see that it looked a lot better than he’d expected. Most children in kindergarten drew things that resembled a mass of scribbles. Lily’s rainbow actually looked like a rainbow.

  The colors ran together a little here and there, but for the most part, it was a rainbow that was “guaranteed to fool any leprechaun,” he assured her.

  “We still need a piece of gold,” he told his daughter, thinking that would be a sticking point. “And I’m afraid that I—”

  Again, he didn’t get a chance to finish.

  Lily dug into her pocket, then held up something in the palm of her hand.

  “Will this do?” she asked innocently.

  It wasn’t gold, although the coin was gold in color. What she showed him was a one-dollar coin minted in 2000 honoring the Native American guide who had taken Lewis and Clark to the Pacific coast.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  “Grandma gave it to me when I told her I wanted to capture a leprechaun and I needed some gold. Will it work?”

  So Barbara was in on this. He should have known.

  Luke nodded. “The leprechaun will never know the difference,” he assured her.

  Luke watched her eyes sparkle, and to his amazement, he found himself suddenly falling in love with a five-year-old.

  “Well, I guess we’d better get this set up. Do you want this in the front yard or the back?” he asked Lily since this was clearly her safari.

  She never even stopped to think.

  “Front,” she answered with unwavering conviction. “Leprechauns don’t like backyards. They like big open spaces so they can escape really fast if they have to.”

  Luke smiled warmly at the imaginative little girl. “And how do you know all this?”

  “Mommy told me,” she said solemnly. “And then Grandma read this story to me about leprechauns and how smart they are.”

  Luke nodded. “They are, you know,” he concurred, getting completely into the spirit of this venture. He thought this was as good a time as any to warn his creative daughter, “So we might not catch one today even after all your hard work.”

  She surprised him with the degree of maturity in her voice as she answered, “I know, Daddy. But it’s the thought that counts and the doughnut lady will know I was thinking about her when I did this.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell her if she doesn’t figure it out on her own,” Luke promised.

  Lily’s eyes crinkled as she smiled at him. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  He felt something really strong grip his heart. “My pleasure, Lily,” he told her as solemnly as a knight speaking to his lady just as he was about to ride off into battle.

  After walking around to the front lawn with Lily beside him, he placed the box on its side so that she could tape her drawing of the rainbow inside. Propping it up on a stick in order to allow the rainbow to be seen, he held the box steady so that she could put the “gold coin” meant to tempt the leprechaun on the grass.

  All that remained after that was to run the length of string as far as it would go and then wait for the leprechaun to make his appearance.

  * * *

  Lily, he discovered, had a great deal of patience as she waited for the mythical little man in green to show up. He expected her to grow tired of the game in half an hour if not sooner, but she lasted a lot longer than that. Her perfect little face appeared solemn as she watched the mouth of the box, ready to pull the string should the leprechaun put in an appearance and venture inside the box to claim his “gold.”

  She was so intent on capturing a leprechaun that Luke found himself wishing there were some way to make the mythical creature appear, just for a moment. He couldn’t help thinking that such dedication and perseverance should be rewarded.

  * * *

  Kayley realized she had driven right by the house. She’d been glancing at the addresses painted on the curb as she passed each of the homes on the residential through street. She didn’t bother looking at the address of the house where a little girl was intently working on something with her father, because it never occurred to her, despite the fact that Dr. Dolan had a daughter, that he would be doing something with her like a typical father. There was nothing about Dolan that was typical.

  Realizing her mistake, she drove down the block, turned around and made her way back. Playing it safe—what if she was wrong?—she parked across the street from the father and daughter in question. She got out and cautiously made her way across the street, watching the duo the entire time.

  That was Dr. Dolan.

  There were obviously things about her employer that she didn’t know, Kayley thought with an amused smile.

  They seemed completely oblivious to her until she was right behind them.

  “What are you doing?”

  The melodic voice coming from behind pierced the bubble around Lily and him, startling him.

  Feeling like an idiot, Luke jumped to his feet even before the voice had fully registered and he’d realized that the question was coming from Kayley, who had managed to draw close without either of them hearing her.

  Li
ly came to life immediately. “We’re waiting for a leprechaun. Daddy built the box and we were going to trap him and give him to you as a present,” Lily said excitedly.

  “Really?” Kayley cried with the same enthusiasm that Lily had used. She slanted a glance toward Luke, humor shining in her eyes. “Well, that has to be the nicest ‘almost present’ anyone ever thought about giving me,” she told the little girl. “I am really touched. Thank you.”

  Kayley put her arms around Lily, giving the little girl a warm hug. Rather than pull away, the way he’d expected her to, his daughter melted against her, threading her small arms around her legs.

  “You’re welcome,” Lily said, her voice slightly muffled against Kayley’s body. Tilting her head back, she told the woman, “Daddy worked hard on this, too. You can hug him if you want.”

  Yes, I ‘want’ but I think that might just throw your Daddy off if I did.

  But, to her surprise—and quite possibly his, too—Lily tugged on her father’s hand and brought him over toward her so that he could carry out the hug the girl had verbally set up for them.

  Given no choice in the matter, Kayley went through the motions of hugging Lily’s father.

  “Thank you for my almost gift,” she murmured.

  “Don’t mention it. Please,” he underscored, stepping back. It almost sounded like an order.

  Chapter Nine

  “Well, what’s all this?” Barbara asked with a delighted laugh.

  She’d been drawn out by the commotion she heard coming from in front of the house, wondering what her granddaughter and her son-in-law were up to. This had to be a first. Ordinarily, Luke didn’t interact with his daughter beyond exchanging a few words at the dinner table. That he appeared to be doing a project with her was heartwarming.

  “Daddy and I tried to catch a leprechaun as a present for the doughnut lady,” Lily told her, speaking up. “But the leprechaun hasn’t come yet even though I made a rainbow for him. We put out some gold for him, too. Do you think he’s sick?” Lily asked, concerned.