The Parent Trap(2)

Not that she would ever admit her mild neuroses to another living soul, but she had worried about this day ever since the empty-nesters who had lived there retired, set out to fulfill their lifelong dream of traveling the world and found a tenant willing to sign a one-year lease on their home. Bill and Marjorie hadn’t just been good neighbors; they were good friends. Six years ago they’d been there for her and her daughter after her husband died in a car accident and she had struggled to fit the jagged pieces of her life back together.

If Sarah could, she would push the pause button on her current life and keep everything exactly as it was—happy, stable, secure—because if she disliked anything more than change, it was not knowing what that change had in store for her.

The small West Coast community of Serenity Bay had only one real estate company, and Sarah knew the two agents who ran it, so getting a little background information about her new neighbor had been easy. Jonathan Marshall was the new physical education teacher at the high school, a single dad with a teenage daughter. But that didn’t tell her who he really was, nor did it explain why he was a single parent, why his daughter lived with him and not her mother, why they had moved to Serenity Bay.

What she did know, from having surreptitiously watched from her office window, was that Jonathan Marshall’s blue jeans and white T-shirt portrayed a man in the kind of shape his profession would demand. Tall, well built, well proportioned, of course, but he also had an easy rhythm when he walked, a genuine smile for the people around him and a charming way of stabbing both hands through his hair while he made a decision. She was sure it was unconscious on his part, and she wished it wasn’t so completely endearing.

His daughter appeared to be about the same age as Casey, but while Casey was equal parts tomboy and bookworm, that girl could have stepped off the page of a teen fashion magazine. Sarah could spot a designer label from a mile way, and that dad would have easily paid two hundred dollars for his daughter’s skinny jeans. Then there was the bag slung over the girl’s shoulder. There was a chance it was a knockoff, but Sarah would wager a week’s worth of sales that it was the real deal. On a teacher’s salary? That didn’t compute.

Then they disappeared into the house, the man carrying a small pet carrier, the sullen-looking girl straggling behind, empty-handed.

“Have you met them yet?” Casey asked. “Did you take them the cookies we baked last night?”

“No, I thought we’d go over together.” Last night the cookies had seemed the neighborly thing to do. Pillsbury refrigerated cookie dough was one of her specialties, after all. Today the cookies seemed to hint that she was angling for a way to meet Serenity Bay’s newest and most eligible bachelor. Would he think she was being neighborly or out to snare him?

Oh, for heaven’s sake, they’re just cookies. Who cares what he thinks?

Casey slid Sarah’s iPad out of its case and turned it on. “You said he’s a new teacher at SBH, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What’s his name?”

“Oh, um, Jonathan Marshall. I think. Why?”

Her daughter tapped on the screen. “Marshall. One L or two?”

“Probably two. What are you doing?”

“Searching for him online.”

“Casey! You shouldn’t do that. It’s like an invasion of privacy.”

“If it’s on the internet, Mom, it’s not private.”

“That’s true, but it still seems kind of stalkerish.”

“Yep, but everybody does it.” Her daughter grinned widely, angling the device so Sarah could see the screen. “Does this look like him?”

“Oh. Yes, it does.” And she didn’t have to ask the identity of the woman next to him in the photograph. The stunning brunette was Georgette Ogilvie, who last year left her job as news anchor at Vancouver’s top-rated TV station, divorced her husband, and was already remarried and living in Europe. So...Jonathan Marshall was the ex-husband.

“He used to be married to that lady from the TV.” Casey swiped the screen. “And they have a daughter named Kate.”

Sarah stood and glanced out the window in time to see him on the driveway below, opening the back of his SUV and hauling out two potted plants. Thinking that a man who kept houseplants must have something going for him was silly, but she thought it just the same. And he was a teacher, after all, and a parent. Probably a good parent, since he seemed to have custody of his daughter.

“Says here that he used to teach at a high school in West Vancouver and...oh, he coaches soccer. Cool. I wonder if he’ll coach my team.”