Nancy Herkness

Shower of Stars

by Nancy Herkness

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004, 2011 by Nancy Herkness

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Cover design © 2011 Nancy Herkness

Cover design by StoryWonk

For information, contact Nancy Herkness at

[email protected]

Published by Red Car Press

Also by Nancy Herkness:

A Bridge to Love

Music of the Night

To Rebecca and Loukas,

who have shown me that love is truly infinite

Acknowledgments

Friends are a treasure in all aspects of one’s life. However, for a novelist, friends become an invaluable resource in one’s work. My hearty thanks go to:

Lawrence Jenkens and Catherine Drake, professor and lawyer (and also relatives), for answering my many questions about the adoption process. Without them, Charlie would still be childless.

John Lacey, Esq., for his assistance with the legal aspects of my story.

Elena Brunet, translator extraordinaire, for making Miguel linguistically correct, right down to his fondillos.

James Sturm, professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University, for his help with the Princeton commencement ceremony, and recommending just the right restaurant for the graduation celebration.

Kathleen Brower, EMT, for her information on how an ambulance squad would check for concussion. From her description of the symptoms, I think I may have one.

Lynn Freeman Scott, for donating her professional proofreading skills and for never doubting that I would be published someday.

Robert Jenkens (who also happens to be a relative) and John Fahey, for giving me the most wonderful food and shelter so I could spend my days at the Smithsonian Institute reading every single label in the meteorite exhibit.

All errors and/or omissions are entirely my own.

One

A dog the size of a pony streaked across the New York City street.

Charlie Berglund slammed on her brakes, sending her Volvo station wagon into a skid on the drizzle-dampened pavement. The taxi driver in the next lane wasn’t as alert, and she gasped in horror as the dog bounced off the cab’s bumper and crumpled in a heap.

“Heartless creep!” she yelled, putting her car in park and leaping out.

The car behind her honked angrily, and she made a rude gesture at the driver as she ran to the dog. He looked like a mountain of matted gray fur piled up on the pavement. Crooning softly, Charlie knelt down to see if he was alive. “Poor fellow. That rotten cab driver didn’t even stop. How can people be so hardhearted?” She found a steady heartbeat but the creature’s eyes were closed, and he didn’t stir when touched. She checked for blood and conspicuously broken bones but found none. She stroked the unconscious dog’s head. “Now how am I going to move you? I have a blanket in the car, but you must weigh about a hundred pounds…”

She checked her wristwatch, swiping her sleeve across the crystal to clear off the rain droplets. Three o’clock, exactly time for her interview with Jack Lanett, the newly famous meteorite hunter. I’m going to be late. And wet. Looking down at her silk blouse, now clinging transparently to her skin, she muttered, “Damn, damn, damn!”

She had wangled an interview with the man who had found the most valuable space rock in the world: Sahara-Mars, a meteorite that almost certainly held proof of life on the red planet. Not only that, he was a man who never gave interviews. Was she really going to blow this chance at a killer article for the Times? The dog whimpered under her hand, and Charlie instantly made her decision.

“Your need is greater than mine,” she said, giving his unkempt fur one last pat.

She stood up and scanned the street for a likely assistant. All she could see were two elderly ladies shuffling along under umbrellas, and a young woman briskly pushing a plastic-covered baby carriage. The rain had sent everyone else indoors… Well, Jack Lanett lived one block up, and he was expecting her. Charlie left her battered Volvo where it was, protecting the dog from oncoming traffic, and sprinted up the street to Lanett’s building.

Nice entrance, she thought as she pushed the highly polished brass bell labeled J. LANETT. “But no doorman. Tsk, tsk.”

“Yes?” a male voice with a trace of the deep South came through the loudspeaker.

“Mr. Lanett, I’m Charlie Berglund from the Times. I have a favor to ask you. A very large dog was just hit by a taxi, and I need some help getting him into my car. Would you mind giving me a hand? You might want to put on a raincoat.”

For a moment, there was silence. Then the voice came through the speaker again, this time with a pronounced drawl. “You want me to come out in the rain and carry a dead dog to your car?”

“He’s not dead.” Yet.

Charlie heard a muttered string of what she assumed were curses before he said, “I’m on my way.”

I hope you walk faster than you talk, she said to herself as she took a quick look out the entrance door. Her car was still standing sentinel over the motionless heap of gray. She hoped the poor thing wasn’t bleeding internally. Catching sight of her reflection in the brass plate around the doorbells, she quickly tucked stray pieces of blond hair back into her bun. She pulled her damp blouse away from her skin, flapping it wildly in an attempt to dry it enough so her lace bra wasn’t outlined in quite such vivid detail. She should have followed her own advice and worn the raincoat slung over the passenger seat in her car.

The elevator dinged. Charlie let go of her blouse and peered through the glass of the vestibule door. The man striding impatiently across the marble floor looked nothing like the one grainy photograph she had been able to track down of the reclusive Jack Lanett. In the photo, jet-black hair had reached his shoulders. Now, its color ranged from dark iron to steely silver, and it waved neatly back away from his face to just touch the top of his collar. Of course, there was no raincoat over the sky-blue polo shirt tucked into gray flannel slacks. Typical macho man! She just had time to observe that he moved like someone who gets where he’s going efficiently when he opened the door and stopped.

“You’re a woman!”

Charlie sighed. With her nickname and her gravelly voice, people who spoke with her by telephone often assumed she was a man. “I’m afraid so.”

A look of purely male appreciation softened Jack Lanett’s scowl for a moment. Charlie was used to that too; she was very blond and tall enough to have long legs men noticed even when she was wearing slacks.

She looked back appraisingly; the polo shirt outlined a broad set of shoulders. He was tall too, at least six inches above her own impressive five nine. He should be more than equal to the task of lifting a large limp animal.

“Let’s get the damned dog,” Jack growled as he pushed open the entrance door.

“Don’t you like dogs?” Charlie asked as she led the way to the car.

“Only if I’m very hungry.”

“I know this is an inconvenience, but you don’t have to be snide.”

“Snide? Lady, when you’re stranded and starving in some godforsaken country most people can’t find on a map, you’ll eat anything.”

The reporter in Charlie filed away that piece of information for future use, but her attention was focused on the poor creature lying in the rain. His eyes were open now, so she approached him slowly and spoke calmly, “There’s a good dog. Poor hurt puppy. I’m here to help you.” She’d been bitten a few times in her animal rescues and always took basic precautions. This dog, however, tried to lick her hand when she knelt down to stroke his head. “What a sweet boy,” she said, probing his filthy fur with her fingers. “I don’t see any blood but I’m afraid he may have internal injuries. There’s a blanket in the back of the car. Would you get it so we can slide it under him?”

After a moment, Jack appeared beside her, shaking open the old plaid wool picnic blanket Charlie kept for such emergencies.

“What are you, the Florence Nightingale of the animal world? There’s enough dog and cat food in your car to feed an army.”

“I was a Girl Scout so I’m always prepared.” Charlie took an end of the blanket and laid it beside the dog’s back. “Could you help me shift him back onto this?”

Jack had already slid his hands under the animal’s rump and was gently lifting and easing him onto the wool. “He smells worse than a wet camel,” he complained, but he continued to help Charlie carefully slide the dog farther onto the faded plaid fabric.

“If you were homeless, you’d stink too. He doesn’t have a collar but he’s not hostile toward people so he must have been treated well for part of his life.” Charlie was working the wool under the big creature’s legs. Except for an occasional whimper, the dog offered no resistance.

“You’re a good boy,” Charlie assured him, stroking his head whenever she was about to move him. “Okay, he’s centered. Now we have to get him into the back of the wagon.”

Charlie glanced up to see the meteorite hunter frowning down at the dog.

“I don’t want to risk hurting him by picking him up alone,” he said. “I think that if you take the blanket corners by his tail and I take the ones by his head, we can keep him relatively flat and still. He’s heavy. Do you think you can hold him?”

“I’m an alumna of the Navy SEAL Training Academy. I can manage,” Charlie said as she walked around to the other side of the dog.

Jack’s gaze focused on her for a long moment, and Charlie discovered he had the iciest blue eyes she’d ever seen. The rain hitting her neck and shoulders suddenly seemed frigid against her skin, and a violent shiver shook her body so hard that her teeth clicked together.

“Let’s get him in the car before you catch pneumonia,” Jack said as he knelt by the dog’s head.

Charlie rubbed her hands up and down her arms in an attempt to erase the goose bumps. Then she knelt opposite Jack and took a firm grip on the corners of the makeshift stretcher.

“Now,” he commanded, holding the fabric taut and braced against Charlie’s counterpull.

She saw the muscles in his arms flex as they both slowly rose in such perfect synchronicity that the dog seemed to float upward between them. Glancing up, she once again met those cold eyes, the blue so pale that the black of his pupils seemed bottomless. But now she felt heat rather than cold radiating over her skin.

“You’d think we did this every day.” Charlie spoke to dispel the disquieting sense of connection.

“I get the feeling that you do,” Jack said as he backed slowly and smoothly toward the rear of the wagon. Charlie followed him at an equally deliberate pace.

“You know, for someone who considers dogs starvation rations, you’re doing a great job of handling this one gently.”

“I’ve learned to go along with other people’s obsessions,” he said as they slid the blanket and their burden into the station wagon’s capacious storage area.

“It’s not an obsession; it’s my small attempt to help a fellow being,” Charlie said.

Jack stretched forward to shift the dog farther into the car, and their shoulders brushed. She expected to see steam rise from the point of contact between his warmth and her chill.

“He’s in.” Jack lowered the door and then closed it firmly.

Charlie resisted the urge to ask him to wrap his arms around her for just a minute to share his body heat. Instead she held out her hand. “Thank you so much for your help. I know you weren’t expecting this when you agreed to an interview, but you’ve been terrific. I apologize for the inconvenience. I’ll call you to make another appointment.” She wasn’t nearly as confident as she sounded about setting up another meeting; he would probably tell her to go to hell after this.

He reached out to take her hand, and the warmth of his skin was delicious against her palm.

“As much as I hate to say this, I’m coming with you. Wherever you’re driving this monster, you’ll need help getting him out of the car.”

Charlie couldn’t stop the grateful smile that tugged at her lips, but she shook her head. “You’ve already done more than enough. I can get help at the animal hospital.”

Using the hand he still held to turn her around, her self-appointed assistant placed his left palm in the small of her back and propelled her toward the passenger door. Swinging it open, he said, “I’ll drive while you make the arrangements. I assume you have a cell phone.”

Stunned to silence, Charlie nodded as she slid into the seat. In the seconds it took him to walk around to the driver’s seat, she found her tongue. “You’re bossy, aren’t you? Where exactly do you think you’re going?”

Jack had turned the key and put the car in gear. “Out of the middle of the street before we get hit,” he said, tucking the Volvo neatly in beside a fire hydrant.

“Oh.” She covered her discomfiture by grabbing the cell phone out of its hands-free cradle and scrolling down to the number for the animal shelter in her hometown of Bellefont, New Jersey.

“Hey, Allan, it’s Charlie. I’m on the Upper West Side in New York City, and I need some help.” She explained her problem and got directions to the nearest emergency veterinarian.

“That’s in the Bronx,” Jack said scowling.

“People who help animals for a living can’t afford Park Avenue,” Charlie said.

As her unexpected chauffeur took the car out into the flow of traffic, Charlie looked up the vet’s office on the G.P.S. attached to her dashboard. She also called the office to warn them of the emergency coming in. Allan Schumann, the director of the Ocean County Animal Shelter, had already been in touch and smoothed her path. Pushing the disconnect button, she dropped the phone in her lap. “Everything’s set for Major’s arrival.”

“You’ve named him already?” Jack’s voice held a hint of amusement, and Charlie glanced sideways. For the first time since she’d met him, the man was smiling—only slightly—but the corners of his mouth were definitely turning up. Instead of straight angry slashes, his eyebrows had relaxed into a slightly ironic arch. And Grumpy had a dimple! She bet he hated that.

“I’ve been reading up on the stars—for obvious reasons—and an appropriate name just popped into my head.”

“Stars, eh? Let me guess. Major?” he said, frowning in concentration. “Canis Major. The Big Dog.”

“Exactly!” Charlie said, pleased he got the joke. “One of Orion’s hunting dogs in the sky.”

“Congratulations on doing your homework, Ms. Berglund. By the way, why did you fool me into thinking you were a man? Did someone tell you I don’t talk to female reporters?”

About to protest that she hadn’t tried to fool him, Charlie found she was more interested in his second question. “Is that true? I thought you just didn’t talk to reporters, period.”

He made no response.

She sighed. “I wasn’t trying to fool you. I have a raspy voice and a man’s nickname. You’re not the first person to get the wrong idea.”

“You have a voice like the air inside an Irish pub: pipe smoke and whiskey. It doesn’t match the Norse ice princess look.”

Should I be flattered or insulted? It wasn’t her fault she had blond hair, greenish gray eyes, fair skin and a husky, contralto voice. “Sorry my mixed-up genes don’t meet with your approval.”