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In the shadows Lincoln tensed, waiting for Linsey to look into the falling night. The air had grown unnaturally still; every sound carried as if it were magnified. He found himself holding his breath and keeping Diablo under a tight rein as he awaited discovery.
“A tall man with a humongous horse? I don’t know who you mean, tiger.” The porch lay in shadow now, obscuring Linsey’s features. “Is this a character from TV?”
The boy shook his head with the emphatic impatience of the young. “Nope. A real man.” A finger pointed. “He was over there.”
“He was?” Linsey’s chin lifted sharply. Frowning, she concentrated on the area her son indicated. “Do you see him now?”
“Nope. I could see him from the loft, though.” The boy, whose hair was as dark as his mother’s was fair, gestured again toward the bit of deserted trail visible from the porch.
“You climbed to the loft?” Linsey’s smile faltered. Even to a watcher, hovering and hidden, her demeanor changed, though she spoke kindly to the boy. “We discussed that we had to go carefully here. The house and barn are old, they’ve been empty and neglected for a long time. Do you remember what else I said?”
“There could be rotten boards to fall through, and spiders, and snakes,” the boy finished for her. “I remembered, Mom, and I was careful. Real careful.”
“Why did you go there?” Linsey wasn’t yet pacified.
The boy lifted both shoulders in a vague response. “I dunno, ’cept I just wanted to look. It’s pretty, Mom. I could see the river and the trees, and almost to Oregon. But I won’t go again, if you don’t want me to.”
“Promise? Just until I can get around to repairing it?”
Solemnly the boy drew a sweeping cross over his chest and stomach. “Cross my heart.”
“Promise accepted.” A loving finger tapped his nose, signaling his trespass was forgiven but not forgotten. “What do you say we finish the chocolate pudding left from supper?”
“Can I have my horse, too?”
“The humongous one?”
“Yep.”
Linsey hugged him again. “We’ll see. Good enough?”
“Yep.”
“Can you say anything but yep, tiger?”
“Yep,” the boy answered gravely, then dissolved into giggles at the repartee that was obviously a long-standing game.
In a dancing step Linsey took her son to the door. Pausing there, she turned back. For a sinking moment, though he knew she couldn’t see into the dark cave of trees, Lincoln could feel her gaze strafing over him.
For too long she stood in the doorway, looking from the treeline to the stream, then toward the end of the trail. But Linsey was new to the area—she wouldn’t know this was the passage she’d heard Lincoln call the escape route. She wouldn’t know the long-abandoned trail had led a traveler back to the farm again.
Lincoln’s tension telegraphed to Diablo, the stallion whickered and tossed his head. With a soft click of his tongue and a soothing touch, Lincoln quieted him. As quickly as the small rebellion was settled, there was still the dread of being discovered skulking among the trees like a voyeur.
But Linsey didn’t hear. She didn’t see. Satisfied there was no one about, she passed through the door into the light of a house that had been too empty and too dark for too long.
When the house was quiet and only a light in the bedroom that had been Frannie Stuart’s still burned, Lincoln steered the stallion toward Belle Reve. After bedding Diablo down for the night, enduring a short command-visit with his father, and refusing the dinner Miss Corey had prepared, he drove to his small pied-à-terre on the outskirts of Belle Terre.
The small city, deeply steeped in old Southern traditions, was the hub of this part of the South Carolina lowcountry. Lincoln’s home, situated in a sleepy cul-de-sac on a little-traveled street, was uniquely antebellum, with many of its historic treasures still intact. A single, as the narrow houses with walled and private courtyard gardens were called. In these days when he divided his time between Belle Terre and Belle Reve—with considerably more at the plantation since his father’s strokes—the tiny house was all he needed.
An hour later, as he wandered the moonlit courtyard, he realized how much he’d missed the quiet, the solitude. A place that was his alone. Yet the familiar pleasure of it escaped him. His mind was too full, too chaotic. Too filled with memories of Linsey and the boy.
“The boy.” Ice clinked against an heirloom crystal glass as he took it from a wrought-iron table. Draining it, he poured another drink from a decanter he’d brought into the garden with him.
“Linsey, the boy, and Brownie.” His voice was strained even to himself, and he wondered if one drink had made him drunk. “If it hasn’t,” he muttered as he lifted the glass before the blaze of an ancient gaslight, “hopefully the next one will.”
The boy. The words slashed endlessly through his mind like a broken record he couldn’t shut off. The boy. It was always that, never more. The child’s name was Cade. Yet, for reasons he wouldn’t define, Lincoln couldn’t bring himself to call Linsey’s son by his own name.
Dropping into a chair by the table, he lifted his drink again, watching the play of flames reflected in amber liquid and delicately etched crystal. Fire, the force that changed all their lives. Fire and Oregon. Abruptly Lincoln crashed the glass down with such ferocity it should have shattered, as most of the scotch splashed over the rim.
“Who is he, Linsey? Why is his hair dark when Lucky’s was fairer than yours? Who gave him my name?” Drawing a shuddering breath, he whispered, “Why? In God’s name, why?”
Burying his head in his hands, he didn’t speak again. As darkness gathered, beyond the babble of the fountain, the tap of footsteps along the street, and the clink of glass against glass as he poured another drink, the garden was silent.
When he roused, putting away memories he kept locked in the nether regions of his mind, Lincoln didn’t know how long he’d sat in the gloom. As he nursed a rare third drink, he didn’t care.
Time didn’t matter tonight. He was too restless for it to matter. Too confused. Pain lay in his chest like an iron weight. Whatever he did, or didn’t do, emotions he didn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with tore at him. And with the better part of those three scotches in him— the most he’d had to drink since he and his brothers had given up their carousing, brawling ways—he shouldn’t, by damn, be feeling anything.
“Hell,” he grumbled, and took another sip, more melted ice than alcohol. “I’m the serious, pragmatic Cade. The logical Cade with all the cool-headed answers. Or so they tell me.
“Yeah,” he mocked in harsh sarcasm, “sure I am. Sure I do.” Fingers curled into an impotent fist. “So, why not now?”
He was the second of Caesar Augustus Cade’s four sons by four wives. The son born of a Scot. Surely she passed along some fine Gaelic practicality in her genes, even if she had died too young to instill it with her teaching. A handsome mouth quirked in a grim smile. “Yep, Gaelic practicality, that’s Lincoln Cade.”
Yep. The boy said that, he remembered.
“The boy.” The glass banged down a second time and still survived. Skidding back his chair, Lincoln rose, and from his great height stared down at the perfect haven he’d created. As the Stuart farm had been, this was his place to come when life with a father like Gus became too much. Or when the world weighed too heavily.
“Where do I go now?” he wondered aloud as memories he couldn’t exorcise and questions he couldn’t answer filled every corner of his heart and mind. When bitterness, black and ugly, joined grief and guilt, how did he deal with them?
“What about the boy?”
His whisper seemed to echo in the small space. Surrounding him, engulfing him in his own voice, asking over and over, what about the boy?…the boy?
Laughter from the street broke the illusion. Adult amusement, but in it Lincoln heard the haunting laugh of a child.
But whose child?
Turning to the house, forsaking the garden and his search for peace he knew would elude him for a long time to come, Lincoln knew what he must do. He knew what he would do.
For Lucky, for Linsey, for himself.
For the boy.
Three
“Look, Mom. Look.”
Chuckling, as she made another entry on her growing list of things to do, Linsey wondered what new marvel Cade had discovered. She’d spent the morning taking inventory of needed repairs in the house and barn. Prioritizing each, she balanced their importance against her limited budget while her son resumed an exploration cut short the night before by dinner and bedtime.
Clipping her pen to the small tablet, she smiled again. Recalling that, as he’d drifted off to sleep each of the three nights they’d spent in the old house, Cade had declared the Stuart farm “the bestest place ever,” Linsey went to see what new bounty had been added to the exuberant child’s list of “bestest” things.
“What is it, Cade?” Blinded by a flood of light, she stepped from the barn. “What have you discovered now?”
Grubby fingers pointed toward the stream. “Company.”
Shading her eyes with a hand at her forehead, Linsey stared at a truck fording the shallow part of the stream as if it weren’t there. Who would come calling so soon? she wondered. Only the utility companies knew Lucky Stuart’s widow and her son had taken up residence in the old Stuart farm. Even if the linemen were gossips, it was unlikely word could spread so fast. She hadn’t even stopped in Belle Terre for groceries.
Cade moved a step toward the house and the truck, eager for the adventure of meeting someone new. “No, Cade.” Linsey’s fingertips settled on his shoulder. “Wait.”
“Who is it?” A friendly, fearless child…only her touch kept him from running to greet the visitor. “Do you know?”
“No, and I can’t think of any reason we might have a caller so soon,” she said. “Unless…” Speculation died on her lips as she remembered the horse and rider she’d dismissed as a creation of Cade’s vivid imagination. As the truck drew nearer, with a fleeting glimpse and a sense of the inevitable, she recognized the one man she’d hoped to avoid.
At least for a little time. Until she had mind, body, and heart settled and steeped in Lucky’s past and in his home.
“Unless what, Mom?” Cade glanced curiously at her.
Linsey had no ready response. But she was saved the effort as the truck halted before the front steps, its door swung open, and a tall, dark man emerged. With a sinking heart, she waited, held motionless by the man, by his magnetism. By memories.
He was tall. Taller than most men, and slender. But when he reached into the truck for a pair of gloves, the startling width of his shoulders strained against the seams of his shirt. His legs were long and provocatively molded by sensible jeans riding low at his waist. Equally sensible low-heeled boots added an unneeded inch or so to his already considerable height. His hair, barely visible beneath the broad brim of his Western hat, was dark and cut short. Yet it grew in an all-too-familiar defiant swirl over the back of his neck.
When he turned from the truck, his solemn gaze found her as he drew on the supple gloves. Refusing to flinch beneath his wintry stare, even as countless questions raced through her mind, Linsey realized he was as handsome as ever. And, a glance at Cade proved, as singularly charismatic. As fascinating.
Don’t, she wanted to cry out. Don’t like him too much. Don’t admire him too much. Don’t love him, or he’ll break your young heart, too, she wanted to warn her son. But with all that had gone before in her son’s young life, she knew it was too late. It had been too late from the moment this stalwart, cold-eyed modern-day knight errant emerged from his gleaming metal steed.
Cade had been taught to love and adore the mystique of this man all his short life. Now, with his simple act of walking toward them—gloved, booted, bigger than life with a tilted Stetson that seemed to touch the sky—Linsey knew her son would love and adore the flesh-and-blood Lincoln Cade even more than the image Lucky Stuart had deliberately created.
“Linsey.” Her name spoken in his quiet voice and a touch at the brim of his hat was Lincoln’s only greeting as he halted before her. Eyes dispassionate and as gray as a rain-washed sky settled on her face, seeking out every nuance of change. With no altering of his expression, his study moved on, lingering on hastily banded hair the color of sunshine, a shirt worn precariously thin, and jeans faded and more white than blue. Then finally her boots, whose best days had passed miles before.
His silent perusal complete, his attention flicked down to Cade. The same dispassion catalogued the sturdy body, the bright, intelligent face. And hair as dark as Lincoln’s own, grown too long over arching brows. When gray gaze met gray gaze, one remained steady, unreadable. One stared unabashedly, filled with the first of youthful wonder.
A nod and another touch at the brim of the Stetson accompanied a softly drawled recognition, “Boy.”
“Sir.” Cade smiled courteously, Linsey’s rigorous training not deserting him even in awe.
“Do you know who I am?” Lincoln addressed the spark of recognition in the boy’s face. To Linsey, who had never forgotten the cadence of his voice, it held the whet of strain.
“Yes, sir.” Cade’s head bobbed, confirming Lincoln’s speculation as dark hair fell over his eyes. With curled fingers, he brushed it back. “You’re Mr. Cade. Once upon a time, when trees burned, you and Lucky jumped out of planes with my mom.”
Lincoln visibly relaxed, but didn’t turn his attention from the child. “Yes, we did. Once upon a time—a long time.”
“I got your name,” Cade piped up with a proud lift of his head. “When we lived in Oregon, some of the other kids thought it was funny. But Lucky said two last names is better than one old first name any day of the week.”
“Lucky said that?” Lincoln was so still, his gaze so intent on the child, even his breathing seemed to cease. His gaze drifted over the dark head, blazoning in his mind the curl a droplet of sweat encouraged at the boy’s nape. He considered the tilted chin that would be chiseled, once the gentling softness of youth gave way to maturity. “You call your dad Lucky, do you?”
Throughout the exchange, Linsey had stood like a pillar of stone. Nothing hinted at her tension. Nothing until her half-smothered cry in response to his question.
Lincoln didn’t notice, nor did Cade. Both man and boy were locked in a moment in which nothing beyond those steadily held gazes could exist or intrude.
Cade nodded his answer.
“Do you know why, boy?” For reasons he wouldn’t try to explain even to himself, he couldn’t call the child by the name he’d been given—his own name. At least not yet.
“Yes, sir.” For the first time, a worried expression marred Cade’s smooth and even features. Long dark lashes fluttered down to brush his cheeks. In the silence a cricket chirped, and from the depths of the barn a wild cat, likely the descendant of one of Frannie Stuart’s pets, growled its displeasure at this disturbance in its domain.
No one paid heed to the complaint. But as if the sound prodded him to answer, Cade drew a long, quiet breath, his frown fading. When the dark cloak of his lashes lifted and he looked at Lincoln, his gaze was calm and sure. In the brave angle of his head a promise of the strong, resolute chin was repeated.
“Yes, sir, I know. But it’s a secret. Something Lucky told me. Just me and no one else, man to man.”
“Telling would be breaking a promise?” Lincoln suggested, admiration for the boy moving to another level.
“No, sir.” The little chin jutted again, but only an increment. “Telling the wrong person at the wrong time would.”
Linsey caught back the sound of stifled grief, but Lincoln’s focus was riveted on the boy. “Knowing the right person, the right time, and making that decision? That’s a big burden for a young boy. Even one as brave as you.”
“That’s what Lucky said, at first. Then he told me the secret of how I would know.”
“This secret, that’s part of the promise, too?” Lincoln moved a step closer to the boy, drawn by the unique maturity born of courage. “Lucky taught you that?”
“Yes, sir.” Cade’s lips began to tremble. Grief crept over his face. “He taught me lots.”
Lincoln had struggled to hold himself aloof from this engaging boy who bore his name. Now, seeing stark grief in the trusting eyes, he bent to Cade, the brim of his hat shading them both. “Lucky was a special person. He taught me about courage, too. In fact, he and his mother taught me a lot of things.”
“They did?” Cade’s face brightened. “Lucky taught you?”
“Sure.” Lincoln’s hand closed over Cade’s shoulder. “What he taught me helped me be as brave as he thought I was. It will be the same for you, too.”
“It will?”
“Just wait, you’ll see.” Lincoln straightened but kept contact with Cade. “Think you could lend me a hand? I brought wood to repair the front steps. I could use your help with it.”
A smile chased grief from Cade’s face. “You could?”
“I can manage,” Lincoln replied. “But an extra pair of hands would be a great help.”
“Lincoln, no.” Linsey had stood aside, silently watching the first meeting of Lincoln Cade and his namesake. Now she felt compelled to speak out, to buffer the burgeoning camaraderie. “I’m perfectly capable of repairing the step.”
Lincoln didn’t turn to Linsey. His grip eased but didn’t move from Cade’s shoulder. “I know you can, Linsey. But the boy and I are here now.” A smile flickered over his face as he left the final choice to Cade. “Right, boy?”
Cade’s laugh trilled, his grief not forgotten but put aside in a time of healing, youthful glee. “Right, Mr. Cade.”
“Don’t, please.” Linsey moved closer to Lincoln yet dared not touch him. “This isn’t a good idea.”
He turned to her then, his gray gaze even colder now than she ever believed it could be. “It’s just steps, Linsey. From the look of this place there’s plenty more to occupy your time. The boy and I can make quick work of it.” With a finger he riffled the pages of the tablet she clutched at her breasts. A gesture that could have been intimate, even teasing, but was perfunctory instead. “Then you can get back to your inventory.”
Dismissing her objection, he turned to Cade. “Ready?”
“Yes, sir.” The dark head bobbed, the thatch of hair dipped. It was Lincoln who brushed it aside a second before he dropped his own Stetson on the boy’s head.
