He was doing his best to make sure his daughter made it safely through these risky years, he thought wryly on his way to his bedroom. Which didn’t guarantee, of course, that she wouldn’t go wild or get into the wrong crowd or all those other possibilities that would keep him awake nights if he dwelled on them.
He was relieved that Meagan and her sister had helped Alice choose an appropriate outfit. Not that he’d worried too much that they wouldn’t. Judging from Nina’s initial assessment and his own impressions of Meagan so far, she was rather conservative, herself, and could be trusted to serve as a good role model for Alice. At least, he hoped he was right about that.
And she thought he was—
He sighed heavily.
Apparently, it had been much too long since he’d been with a woman.
Meagan felt a bit self-conscious entering the school auditorium Tuesday evening. She figured most parents and students at the private academy knew each other, and would probably wonder about this stranger who had wandered in to attend the junior high choir concert. The turnout was certainly good. She had arrived almost twenty minutes before the program was to begin and the parking lot was already almost full.
Accepting a program printed on a folded sheet of red paper, she entered the auditorium. Rows of fold-down wooden seats arranged on a sloping concrete floor faced an elevated stage draped in black and burgundy velvet. Most of the seats were filled. The noise level was quite high, with people talking and laughing, children chattering, a few toddlers shrieking, almost drowning out the generic recorded music playing from surrounding speakers. She was glad she’d decided not to dress too formally; her green knit top and casual khaki pants fit in very nicely with the other attendees.
She had deliberated for quite a while before she’d decided to attend this event. Alice had mentioned at lunch Saturday that she would be singing in a choir concert this evening. She’d said she would have to wear her required choir dress but she would wear her new shoes with it. Rather wistfully, she had added that her father wouldn’t be able to attend this end-of-the-year concert.
“He’s only missed a couple of my school programs before,” she said quickly, in case Meagan or Madison formed a poor opinion of her beloved father. “He hates having to miss them, but he said he’ll be in a big meeting in Hot Springs Tuesday and he doesn’t think he’ll be back in time for the concert. They always start at six because the teachers want to get home early. Sometimes my grandparents from Heber Springs come to my concerts and things, but they can’t come this time. But Nina’s going to be there. She said she loves to hear me sing.”
Meagan had told herself there was no need for her to attend the concert. Alice would probably be perfectly happy with Nina there to appreciate her performance; she seemed very fond of the housekeeper who’d been employed by Seth for several years. Would it really mean much to the girl to have her neighbor—a woman she’d known for only a week—applauding in the audience?
But somehow Meagan had found herself in her car that evening, headed for the school. As hard as Alice had tried to hide it, she was obviously disappointed that her dad wouldn’t be there. Meagan doubted that she made a suitable replacement, but maybe Alice would appreciate having another friend in the audience, anyway. Besides, it was another excuse to get out of the house for an evening. And how bored was she getting that a junior high choir concert sounded more interesting than another night of reading and TV?
She really needed to get back to work soon.
Thinking she might sit with the housekeeper during the concert, Meagan had looked for Nina when she’d arrived, but couldn’t find her in the crowd. She assumed Nina had taken a seat close to the front.
Because she hadn’t wanted to wander up and down the aisles searching for Nina, she chose a seat closer to the door instead. She thought she’d be able to see well from there, though a child a few rows ahead of her kept standing up in his seat. Other than the empty seat next to her, the section was full. People around her laughed and talked and waved at acquaintances across the auditorium. Feeling a bit like an imposter among all the friends and family members waiting for the concert to begin, Meagan smiled and nodded to the older woman sitting beside her, who murmured a greeting in return then turned away to chat with her companions.
“Excuse me, ma’am, is this seat taken?”
In response to the polite question only minutes before the concert was to begin, she glanced up automatically from the program she’d been studying to assure the speaker that the seat was free. The words died when she saw who stood in the aisle, smiling down at her.
Seth’s hair was a little tousled, she noticed, and he looked just a bit disheveled, as if he’d rushed to get there. He wore a beautifully tailored gray suit, more formal than most of the more casually garbed audience, but he’d loosened the blue-and-silver tie at the collar.
Definitely cute, she thought, remembering the teasing conversation with her sister. And when he took her up on her gestured invitation and dropped into the seat beside her, he was close enough that their arms brushed when he shifted his weight.
The concert had just gotten even more interesting.
Chapter Three
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Meagan and Seth said at almost exactly the same time.
They laughed, then she said, “Alice said you had to work late tonight.”
“I was able to get away a little earlier than I expected. I might have driven a little too fast to make it here on time. I saw you when I walked in just now and I had to look twice to make sure it really was you.”
“Alice told me about the concert during our outing Saturday. She invited me to come and it sounded like fun.”
“You must be getting cabin fever if this sounded like fun.”
The unwitting repetition of her own earlier thoughts made her laugh again. “You could be right.”
He wasn’t smiling now. “Or maybe you were being nice. You didn’t think I’d be here, so you wanted to make sure Alice had more than our housekeeper supporting her in the audience.”
She didn’t want him to think Alice had said anything at all critical of him, or had deliberately played on Meagan’s sympathies. “Alice made it very clear you wanted to be here, Seth. She said you almost never miss any of her programs or performances. I didn’t come because I felt sorry for her or anything like that.”
His lips quirked a little, as though he were almost amused by her reassurances. “I appreciate that. I can’t help feeling guilty when work threatens to interfere with Alice’s plans.”
“I’m sure every working parent, married or single, struggles with that guilt.” Which was why she wasn’t entirely sure she should ever take on that responsibility, she mused as the overhead lights blinked to notify the noisy audience that the program was about to begin. Had she been back at work, it would have been very difficult for her to attend a six o’clock school program—not without reshuffling her usual work schedule, anyway.