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The teen was gone before the words were even out of his mouth. Only after the sliding door closed behind him did Ross suddenly realize his nephew’s defection left him alone with Julie.
“You know, lots of parents establish a no-call zone during the dinner hour,” Julie said mildly.
He bristled for about ten seconds before he sighed. Hardly anybody had a cell phone twenty years ago, the last time he’d been responsible for a teenager. The whole internet, e-mail, cell phone thing presented entirely new challenges.
“Frannie always insisted he leave it in his room during dinner.”
She opened her mouth to say something but quickly closed it again and returned her attention to her plate.
“What were you going to say?” he pressed.
“Nothing.”
“You forget, I’m a trained investigator. I know when people are trying to hide things from me.”
She gave him a sidelong look, then sighed. “Fine. But feel free to tell me to mind my own business.”
“Believe me. I have no problem whatsoever telling people that.”
She gave a slight smile, but quickly grew serious. “I was only thinking that a little more consistency with the house rules he’s always known might be exactly what Josh needs right now. He’s in complete turmoil. He’s struggling with his mother’s arrest and his father’s death. Despite their uneasy relationship, Lloyd was his father and having a parent die isn’t easy for anyone. Perhaps a little more constancy in his life will help him feel not quite as fragmented.”
“So many things have been ripped from his world right now. It’s all chaos. I was just trying to cut him a little slack.”
She stood and began clearing the dishes away. “Believe it or not, a little slack might very well be the last thing he needs right now. Rules provide structure and order amid the chaos, Ross.”
He could definitely understand that. He had craved that very structure in his younger days and had found it at the Academy. Police work, with its regulations and discipline—its paperwork and routine—had given him guidance and direction at a time he desperately needed some.
Maybe she was right. Maybe Josh craved those same things.
“Here, I’ll take those,” he said to Julie when she had filled a tray with the remains of their dinner.
After he carried the tray into the kitchen, he returned to the patio to find Julie standing on the edge of the tile, gazing up at the night sky.
It was a clear night, with a bright sprawl of stars. Ross joined her, wondering if he could remember the last time he had taken a chance to stargaze.
“Pretty night,” he said, though all he could think about was the lovely woman standing beside him with her face lifted up to the moonlight.
“It is,” she murmured. “I can’t believe I sometimes get so wrapped up in my life that I forget to enjoy it.”
They were quiet for a long time, both lost in their respective thoughts while the sweet scents from Frannie’s garden swirled around them.
“Can I ask you something?” Ross finally asked.
If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he might have missed the slight wariness that crept into her expression. “Sure.”
“How do you know all this stuff? About grieving and discipline and how to help a kid who’s hurting?”
“I’m a trained youth counselor with a master’s degree in social work and child and family development.”
She was silent for a long moment, the only sound in the night the distant hoot of an owl and the wind sighing in the treetops. “Beyond that,” she finally said softly, “I know what it is to be lost and hurting. I’ve been there.”
Her words shivered through him, to the dark and quiet place he didn’t like to acknowledge, that place where he was still ten years old, scared and alone and responsible for his three younger siblings yet again after Cindy ran off with a new boyfriend for a night that turned into another and then another.
He knew lost and hurting. He had been there plenty of times before, but it didn’t make him any better at intuitively sensing what was best for Josh.
He pushed those memories aside. It was much easier to focus on the mystery of Julie Osterman than on the past he preferred to forget.
“What are your secrets?” he asked.
“You mean you haven’t run a background check on me yet, detective?”
He laughed a little at her arch tone. “I didn’t think about it until just this moment. Good idea, though.” He studied her for a long moment in the moonlight, noting the color that had crept along the delicate planes of her cheekbones. “If I did, what would I find?”
“Nothing criminal, I can assure you.”
“I don’t suppose you would have been hired at the Foundation if you had that sort of past.”
“Probably not.”
“Then what?” He paused. “You lost someone close to you, didn’t you?”
She gazed at the moon, sparkling on the swimming pool. “That’s a rather obvious guess, detective.”
“But true.”
Her sigh stirred the air between them.
“Yes. True,” she answered. “It’s a long, sad story that I’m sure would bore you senseless within minutes.”
“I have a pretty high bore quotient. I’ve been known to sit perfectly motionless on stakeouts for hours.”
She glanced at him, then away again. “A simple background check would tell you this in five seconds but I suppose I’ll go ahead and spare you the trouble. I lost my husband seven years ago. I’m a widow, detective.”
Chapter Seven
For several moments, he could only stare at her, speechless.
She was a widow. He would never have guessed that, not in a million years, though he wasn’t quite sure why he found the knowledge so astonishing—perhaps because she normally had such a sunny attitude for someone who must have lost her husband at a young age.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you to talk about something you obviously didn’t want to discuss, especially after you’ve done nothing but help Josh and me.”
“It’s okay, Ross. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t wanted you to know. I don’t talk about it often, only because it was a really dark and difficult time in my past and I don’t like to dwell on it. I prefer instead to enjoy the present and look ahead to the future. That’s all.”
“What happened?” he asked after a long moment.
He sensed it was something traumatic. That might help explain her empathy and understanding of what Josh was dealing with. He braced himself for it but was completely unprepared for her quiet answer.
“He shot himself.”
Ross stared, trying to make out her delicate features in the dim moonlight. “Was it a hunting accident?”
The noise she made couldn’t be mistaken for a laugh. “No. It was no accident. Chris was…troubled. We were married for five years. The first two were wonderful. He was funny and smart and brilliantly creative. The kind of person who always seems to have a crowd around him.
“After those first two years, we bought a home in Austin,” she went on. “I was working at a high school there and Chris was a photographer with an ad agency. Everything seemed so perfect. We were starting to talk about starting a family and then…everything started to change. He started to change.”
“Drugs? Alcohol?”
“No. Nothing like that. He became moody and withdrawn at times and obsessively jealous, and then he would have periods where he would stay up for days at a time, would shoot roll after roll of film, of nothing really. The pattern on the sofa cushions, a single blade of grass. He once spent six hours straight trying to capture a doorknob in the perfect light. Eventually he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, with a little manic depression thrown in for added fun.”
Ross frowned. He knew enough about mental illness to know it couldn’t have been an easy road for either of them.
“You stayed with him?”
“He was my husband,” she said simply. “I loved him.”
“You must have been young.”
“We married when I was twenty-four. I didn’t feel young at the time but in retrospect, I was a baby. I suppose I must have been young enough, anyway, that I was certain I could fix anything.”
“But you couldn’t.”
“Not this. It was bigger than either of us. That’s still so hard for me to admit, even seven years later. For three years, he tried every possible combination of meds but nothing could keep the demons away for long. Finally Chris’s condition started a downward spiral and no matter what we tried, we couldn’t seem to slow the momentum. On his twentyeighth birthday, he gave up the fight. He returned home early from work, set his camera on a tripod with an automatic timer, took out a Ruger he had bought illegally on the street a week earlier and shot himself in our bedroom.”
Where Julie would be certain to find him, he realized grimly. Ross had seen enough self-inflicted gunshot wounds when he had been a cop to know exactly what kind of scene she must have walked into.
He knew her husband had been mentally ill and couldn’t have been thinking clearly, but suddenly Ross was furious at the man for leaving behind such horror and anguish for his pretty, devoted young wife to remember the rest of her life. He hoped she could remember past that traumatic final scene and the three rough years preceding it to the few good ones they had together. “I’m so sorry, Julie.”
He wanted to take it away, to make everything all better for her, but here was another person in his life whose pain he couldn’t fix.
The unmistakable sincerity in Ross’s voice warmed the small, frozen place inside Julie that would always grieve for the bright, creative light extinguished far too soon.
She lifted her gaze to his. “It was a terrible time in my life. I can’t lie about that. The grief was so huge and so awful, I wasn’t sure I could survive it. But I endured by hanging on to the things I still had that mattered—my faith, my family, my friends. I also reminded myself every single day, both before his death and in those terrible dark days after, that Chris wasn’t responsible for the choices he made. I know he loved me and wouldn’t have chosen that course, if he could have seen any other choice in his tormented mind.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time and she couldn’t help wondering what he was thinking.
“Is that why you work with troubled kids?” he finally asked, his voice low. “To make sure none of them feels like that’s the only way out for them?”
She sighed. “I suppose that’s part of it. I started out working on a suicide hotline in the evenings and realized I was making an impact. It helped me move outside myself at a time I desperately needed that and I discovered I was good at listening. So I left teaching and went back to school to earn a graduate degree.”
“Do you miss teaching?” he asked.
“Sometimes. But when I was teaching six different classes, with thirty kids each, I didn’t have the chance for the one-on-one interaction I have now. I can always go back to teaching if I want. I still might someday, if that seems the right direction for me. I haven’t ruled anything out yet.”
“Do you ever wonder if anything you do really makes a difference?”
How in the world had he become so cynical? she wondered. Was it his years as a police officer? Or something before then? It saddened her, whatever the cause.
“I have to give back somehow. I’ve always thought of it as trying to shine as much light as I can, even if it only illuminates my own path.”
He gazed at her, his dark eyes intense, and she was suddenly painfully aware of him, the hard strength of his shoulders beside her, the slight curl of his hair brushing his collar.
“You’re a remarkable woman,” he said softly. “I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone quite like you.”
He wanted to kiss her. She sensed it clearly again, as she had earlier in the evening. She could see the desire kindle in his eyes, the intention there.
This time he wouldn’t stop—and she didn’t want him to. She wanted to know if his kiss could possibly be as good as she imagined it. Anticipation fluttered through her, like the soft, fragile wings of a butterfly, and she caught her breath as he moved closer, surrounding her with his heat and his strength.
The night seemed magical. The vast glitter of stars and the breeze murmuring through the trees and the sweet scents of his sister’s flower garden. Everything combined to make this moment seem unreal.
She closed her eyes as his mouth found hers, her heart pounding, her breath caught in her throat. His kiss was gentle at first, as slow and easy as the little creek running through her yard on a hot August afternoon. She leaned into it, into him, wondering how it was possible for him to make her feel shattered with just a kiss.
She was vaguely aware of the slide of his arms around her, pulling her closer. She again had that vague sensation of being surrounded by him, encircled. It wasn’t unpleasant. Far from it. She wanted to savor every moment, burn it all into her mind.
He deepened the kiss, his mouth a little more urgent. Some insistent warning voice in her head urged her to pull away and return to the safety of the other side of the patio, away from this temptation to lose her common sense—herself—but she decided to ignore it. Instead, she curled her arms around his neck and surrendered to the moment.
She had dated a few men in the seven years since Chris’s suicide. A history teacher at the high school, a fellow grad student, an investment banker she met at the gym.
All of them had been perfectly nice, attractive men. So why hadn’t their kisses made her blood churn, the lassitude seep into her muscles? She supposed it was a good thing he was supporting her weight with his arms around her because she wasn’t at all sure she could stand on her own.
In seven years, she hadn’t realized how truly much she had missed a man’s touch until just this moment. Everything feminine inside her just seemed to give a deep, heartfelt sigh of welcome.
They kissed for a long time there in the moonlight. She learned the taste of him, of the wine they’d had with dinner and some sort of enticing mint and another essence she guessed was pure Ross. She learned his hair was soft and thick under her fingers and that he went a little crazy when she nipped gently on his bottom lip.
His tongue swept through her mouth, unfurling a wild hunger for more and she tightened her arms around him, her hands gripping him closely.
She didn’t know how long the kiss lasted. It could have been hours, for all the awareness she had of time passing. She only knew that in Ross’s arms, she felt safe and desirable, a heady combination.
They might have stayed there all night, but eventually some little spark of consciousness filtered through the soft hunger.
This was dangerous. Too dangerous. His nephew could come outside to the patio at any moment and discover them in a heated embrace.
Although Josh was almost eighteen, certainly old enough to understand about sexual attraction, she had a strong feeling Ross wouldn’t be thrilled if his nephew caught them kissing.
She wasn’t sure how, but she managed to summon the energy and sheer strength of will to pull her hands away and step back enough to allow room for her lungs to take in a full breath.
The kick of oxygen to her system pushed away some of the fuzzy, hormone-induced cobwebs in her brain but for perhaps an entire sixty seconds she could only stare at him, feeling raw and off balance. Her thoughts were a wild snarl in her head and she couldn’t seem to untwist them.
An awkward silence seethed around them, replacing the seductive attraction with something taut and clumsy. She struggled for something to say but couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound silly and girlish.
Ross was the first one to break the silence. “I swear, that wasn’t on the agenda for the evening,” he finally said.
His hair was a little tousled from her fingers and he looked rumpled and rough around the edges and rather dismayed at their kiss.
She found the entire package absolutely irresistible.
“I believe you.”
“I’m not…I didn’t intend—”
