Anything for Her(18)

“I can’t believe this,” he muttered.

Nolan laid a heavy arm across his shoulders. “I wish I’d had you when you were that age. We’d have come to the zoo a lot.”

That earned him a skittish look he’d seen before. Sean had trouble believing Nolan truly wanted him as a son, or that he’d give a lot to be able to go back in time and save the boy from all the uncertainties and deprivation of his life.

Huh. Maybe if he bought that car now, Sean would understand it was a kind of promise, one that said, You will be staying with me.

“Oh, this is going to be fun,” Allie exclaimed enthusiastically. “Do they have snow cones here? I love snow cones.”

“I think maybe they do.” Nolan bumped his hip against hers. “You’re easy to please.”

She bumped back. “Am not. Usually the only place you can get a snow cone is the fair.”

“You went?”

She gave him a humorous glance. “Are you kidding? I always enter some quilts. Both in the Evergreen State Fair and the Stanwood Fair.”

“And win, I bet.”

“Naturally,” she said with dignity, then spoiled it with that scrunched nose. “Sometimes I get robbed, but then, there are people with no taste wherever you go.”

He laughed. Sean gave her his “what are you” look.

Nolan paid the entrance fees and grabbed a map, steering them all toward the safari enclosure that held zebras and the stately, ungainly giraffes. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sean gaping as he leaned against the railing.

“There’s a baby,” Allie said with delight. “Sean, look!”

By the time they reached the elephants, Sean had shed his teenage cool. He was exclaiming right along with Allie, only taking occasional glances around to make sure no one in his age range was looking.

They got lucky enough to see two otters romping in the extraordinarily natural stream, shooting down over rocks like kids on a playground slide, then scrambling back up to do it again. A lioness snatched a huge fish from the water with brutal speed, making the human audience gasp. A gorilla mother cradled a young one, and when Sean crouched by the glass both stared at him with intelligent dark eyes while he stared back.

“Wow,” he said after that. He sounded awed and uneasy. “They look so human. Not like they should be in the zoo.”

Partway through, Nolan bought everyone hot dogs, sodas and, eventually, snow cones. He was having more fun watching Allie and Sean than the animals. The two of them were as entranced as any pair of five-year-olds, and not hiding it. Allie didn’t leave him out, though. Every so often, she’d grab Nolan’s hand and drag him forward either to make sure he saw something or just to be close to him.

He got to wondering whether she’d had a normal share of satisfying childhood experiences. Maybe she possessed the rare quality of being able to throw herself into the moment without self-consciousness, but he kept noticing the nearly identical expressions of astonishment and even wonder on hers and Sean’s faces. Nolan kept pondering her reactions without arriving at a conclusion.

She sounded as though she was close to her mother. Maybe closer than usual, even, for a woman her age. And there had been a father. She’d said she was seventeen, Nolan thought, when her parents split up. That implied a sort of regular childhood, didn’t it?

But the fact that the father had evidently walked away without compunction bothered Nolan. And then there was the brother, who’d also disappeared from her life.

Yeah, that was strange enough to unsettle Nolan, coupled with today’s childish delight. It made him realize how little she’d really said about her background.

He had to shrug at that, though; he hadn’t exactly been chatty about his own. Their now was a lot more important than what their lives had been like when they were eight years old or ten or fourteen. There was an even more logical explanation, too, it occurred to him. Zoos tended to be in large cities. Her family might have lived far enough from one that they’d never gone.

Still...he was curious. And he knew himself. Curiosity and unease had eaten at him from the first time he set eyes on Sean and his then-foster father. Nolan hadn’t felt satisfied until that phone call this spring when the gruff boy/man voice on the other end said, “You gave me your card a while ago and said to call you if I ever needed anything.”

Mostly, Nolan wasn’t that interested in people. He went out of his way to be sure his curiosity wasn’t aroused. But once it was...he was a stubborn man.