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“I’m fine,” Jack insisted. “Sarah doesn’t have to come anymore. I can make our breakfast.”
“Toaster waffles are not breakfast,” Sarah stated.
“Says who? They’re whole grain.”
She sighed. “You should start the day with fruit, protein and whole grain that aren’t processed into pastry.” She made a beckoning gesture. “Come on. I brought vegetarian sausage, cheese and veggies for an omelet, and grainy bread for toast.”
Jack shook his bed-head at Ben, wearing a weary grin. “She’s such a tyrant. I don’t know what you see in her, apart from beauty and brains.”
“She’s already paid off her student loans, so if I marry her, she can start on mine. I’ve got a sunny future sewed up.”
Sarah shook her head and looked from one brother to the other, then gave Ben a quick hug, loving the easy relationship between them. She’d met Ben when he’d stopped her doing fifty through town on her way to work five months ago. She’d been late and he’d been charming, even though he’d still given her a ticket! He had a degree in Business Administration, but loved police work. And she loved him because he cared about his family and his community.
“Come on, Jack,” she encouraged. “If you’re starting work today like you said, you need nutrition. I know you can’t recover overnight from all you’ve seen and been through, but a healthy breakfast would be a good start.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got an hour before Vinny.”
“Vinny?”
“Vinny Caruso, my first client of the day. He’s eighty-four, about five foot six and maybe a hundred and forty pounds. He was an insurance salesman and a musician on the side. He’s about as skilled in the kitchen as you two. But he lives across town, so let’s get moving.”
“All right, all right. I’m right behind you.”
Sarah was now very familiar with the Palmers’ large, comfortable kitchen. Twenty years ago, Gary Palmer, Ben and Jack’s father, had renovated the inside of the spacious Victorian home on the edge of town to suit his family’s purposes. The more recently updated kitchen looked out onto a wide lawn that sloped to the bay on the central Oregon coast. Four fat blue hydrangea bushes now turning green and purple in the September weather crowded a simple wooden gate at the edge of the slope. The gate served no purpose, but Gary had put it there, thinking it provided a pretty sight from the kitchen window.
The room was painted an herbal green and the cupboards and details were rustic with hinges and pulls Gary had salvaged from an old bakery. Sarah loved working in this room; it made her feel connected to past generations. As someone disconnected from her former life, she appreciated that.
Ben placed bread in the toaster while Sarah dropped the sausage into the frying pan. She pulled a bowl of fruit out of the refrigerator and spooned some into three bowls. She topped them with strawberry yogurt, then turned the sausage.
“You all right?” Ben asked, pushing the toaster lever down and moving closer to study her. He frowned at a bruise on her upper arm.
“I’m fine.”
“I warned you not to try to wake him.”
“Ben, he was screaming. I can’t hear someone cry out and not investigate. And, if you recall, when you came to my rescue, I had the upper hand.”
“Upper hand,” he repeated skeptically. “I hate to disillusion you, but the self-defense class you took at the college wouldn’t hold up against military combat training. Had he been a little deeper into that dream, you’d have been in three pieces.”
She rolled her eyes. “Next time he screams, I’ll ask what’s wrong from the doorway.”
She turned the sausage patties again and pointed to the toaster where browned bread had popped up. “I put a jar of strawberry jam in the fridge.”
“Do you have a night job tonight?” he asked, retrieving the jam.
“No. Just Vinny and Margaret. No Jasper today. He’s gone to Portland with a friend. But I do have a meeting with my boss after lunch.” They’d all been her daytime regulars for the past few months. Vinny loved her cooking, Margaret was a lady of the old school and loved Sarah because she was willing to iron her sheets, and Jasper Fletcher, a blind man in his late fifties, counted on Sarah to listen as he told her about what he’d learned from books on tape. Her goal was to make their diets nutritious, as well as to keep them active and social. “I’m done in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Good. I’m off to Eugene in the morning for a weekend cop conference. Want to have dinner tonight?”
“Sure. I’ll fix something for Jack.”
“He’s planning a Blue Bloods marathon.”
“Wouldn’t you rather stay with him? You’d probably love a Blue Bloods marathon. We can have dinner another time.”
He leaned over to kiss her gently. “We haven’t had an evening alone together in two weeks. Prime rib special at the Farmhouse tonight.”
“Okay, I’m in.”
“Seven o’clock.”
“It’s a date.”
“It is,” he said, a different note in his voice. “We have things to talk about. I’ll pick you up.”
“No, I’ll stop by to deliver something for Jack’s dinner. What do we have to talk about?”
He narrowed his gaze on her, as though looking for something in her eyes he wasn’t finding. “A lot,” he finally replied.
His tone put her on alert. So far, theirs had been just an easy, romantic friendship. Today, though, he looked very serious. She hoped he wasn’t thinking what she suspected he was thinking. He’d make a wonderful husband and father, but while she’d like to have the one, she didn’t intend to ever have the other.
* * *
JACK WALKED INTO the kitchen, doing his best to look well-adjusted despite his earlier freak-out. That was just a small indicator of his serious problem. Behaving in a normal way in the kitchen he’d grown up in since age eight, in the small-town life that had been all about fishing and building and girls, when just two weeks ago he’d carried an M4 carbine and jumped out of helicopters, was harder than it sounded. Bullets had whistled by his ear, people around him had died or suffered unspeakable injuries; he’d exchanged gunfire and felt a time or two as though he might die. And somehow he had to dial down the adrenaline that pulsed into his blood and figure out how to live again in this kitchen, in this life.
“A step at a time, Jack,” his shrink at Fort Polk used to say. “A step at a time.”
Sure. Easily said. But even if he managed to cope with old memories, what did he do about new ones? Like waking up with his brother’s girl straddling him? He could still feel her knees pressed against his hips, smell the floral-vanilla fragrance of her clinging to his T-shirt.
He shook off the sensory image and took the plate of buttered toast from Ben, put it in the middle of the table, then went to get utensils. He smiled reassuringly at his brother and Sarah as he passed them. He took the opportunity to keep thinking.
Why in God’s name had he seen his mother’s face in his dream? Images of his little sisters had haunted him for years, ever since they’d all been separated when their mother had gone to jail for manslaughter after murdering her boyfriend. He’d had nightmares since then of himself running away through a dark, blurry night, the girls screaming and footsteps right behind him, gaining on him. But he’d always been very much alone. What was his mother doing in his dreams? And in Iraq? He scowled fiercely.
“Jack?”
He looked up at the sound of his name and saw Sarah holding up an egg. “You okay?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Good. Two or three eggs in your omelet?”
He smiled. “Two, please.”
Ben put the jam down in front of him. “You’re starting to scare me, bro. You sure you’re okay?”
Jack kept smiling. “Thanks, I’m good. You know how real dreams can be. I’m just having trouble putting it out of my head.”
“Afghanistan?”
“No, Iraq. For whatever reason, it was the Humvee explosion in the middle of my first tour that keeps coming back to me.”
“You can talk about any of that, you know. I’d be glad to listen. I know I wasn’t there, but I kind of understand war.”
“Thanks.” Jack knew cops saw ugly things all the time. But terrible memories of war entangled with ugly childhood memories made for an awful hybrid.
It would be hard to explain to Ben what was going on in his head. He and Ben had been friends as children, then brothers when the Department of Human Services had allowed Ben’s parents, Gary and Helen Palmer, to adopt Jack. At the same time, his younger half sisters had been sent to live with their respective fathers.
“I’m going to be fine,” Jack insisted. “I just have to get my head together.”
Ben looked him in the eye, clearly trying to read what Jack wasn’t saying. “You know it’s more than that. No one can survive such things without venting it to somebody.”
He’d been doing that to his shrink at the fort, and although being home again was gradually pulling him away from the past six years, the sharply revived memories of his childhood and the big-time return of his dreams were driving him toward the only solution he could think of to get his life on track again.
“Actually,” he said, “I have an idea about how to help myself.”
Ben put down his fork. “What’s that?”
Jack met his waiting gaze and said, as though it was going to be easy, “I’m going to find my sisters.”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_37825b7d-ed38-5b6e-a1ae-71ec690f0c8d)
BEN SHOOK HIS head and stabbed his fork into a bite of sausage. “Jack, it’s been too long. You have no idea where they are, and they have different names.”
“Yeah. But technology puts the world at my fingertips. I’m going to find them.”
Sarah saw the zealous light in Jack’s eyes and the defining caution in Ben’s. They were two very different men with one very strong connection. They weren’t brothers by birth but by the courage that brought them together as boys and now defined them as men—the soldier and the cop.
“I hate to see you get hurt, Jack. And you’re kind of...vulnerable right now, don’t you think? You’ve had about all the pain you can deal with.”
Jack shrugged as though he had no control over his need to reconnect with his sisters. “I have to do this.”
“Why can’t it wait until you’re...adjusted?”
“Because ‘it’ has waited so long already. And this is as adjusted as I’m going to get until I find them. I promised our mother that I’d work on the carriage house out back. That’ll help me regain my carpentry skills, hopefully, so I can get Palmer Restorations going again, and in my spare time, I’m going to start looking for Corie. Or Cassie. Whoever I get a lead on first.”
Sarah knew that Helen Palmer had long dreamed of fixing up the old carriage house, now used as a storage shed, to rent it out to writers. For the past ten years Helen had been a freelance editor for a Portland publishing house. Over the years she’d hosted several writers in this home while they’d discussed revisions. She’d often talked about how good it would be for a writer to spend time in a comfortable spot in this country setting with more privacy than the guest bedroom could provide.
“What are you going to do with all the stuff in there now?” Ben asked.
“Rent a Dumpster, throw away the junk, save the good stuff and store it in your room.” Jack spoke with a straight face and spread jam on his toast while Ben looked heavenward.
Since Ben had moved back into his old room, he’d been less than tidy. It had become a family joke.
“I mean, really,” Jack went on with a grin at Sarah. “You could hide an elephant in there. You’ll barely notice lumber and storage boxes.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I’ll clear a corner of the basement,” Jack said seriously. “You can look over the iffy stuff with me. We’ll save a pile for Mom to check out before I throw it away.”
“Yeah, well, much as I’d love to do that, I’ll be busy busting perps and saving lives. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”
“Does it really come to that in Beggar’s Bay? I mean, isn’t it more directing parking at the fairgrounds and taking runaway dogs to the animal shelter?”
“Just the other day,” Sarah said gravely, “Ben jumped into the bay to catch a drunk driver evading arrest, remember?”
Jack wrinkled his nose. “Hard to forget. He smelled like a salmon for two days.”
“But, still. Heroic.”
Ben made a sound of distress and turned to Sarah, pretending hurt feelings at her dubious defense. “Hey. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, remember?”
“That’s for married people, Ben.” She gave him a wide-eyed look of innocence, phony but very sweet. It gave Jack a mild case of arrhythmia for a minute. “People just dating get to harass and annoy.”
Ben stopped her, laughing, and leaned toward her for a kiss. Jack had seen enough. As if his life, his recovery from the ugliness of war and his bizarre nightmares weren’t complicated enough already, he had to be attracted to Sarah Reed, his brother’s girlfriend.
He pushed away from the table. He could deal with it. Attraction, after all, was such a small thing as far as love was concerned, and attraction was all he was going to allow himself to feel. He hoped.
Fortunately, neither Sarah nor Ben had noticed.
The table was littered with empty plates. “All right,” Jack said, standing and pointing to Ben. “You go save lives.” He smiled at Sarah. “And you get to work before Vinny and your other clients expire without you. I’ll clean up.”
There was no false reluctance to leave him with the task. They were both gone in an instant. He cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, then grabbed a jacket and went outside to check out the contents of the carriage house.
* * *
SARAH DROVE THROUGH the three-block commercial area. She passed the Episcopal Church and continued up the hill, past the nearly finished retirement village and the elementary school across the road, toward the over-55 development where Vinny lived.
As she drove, Sarah breathed as though she were in a Lamaze class. Since Jack had come home, she and Ben had talked a lot about family, but very little about children, except that he’d asked her once if she liked them. She’d said that she did, just hadn’t mentioned that she didn’t want any of her own. But now that she felt certain marriage was on his mind, she had to tell him that and explain why.
Her first job after acquiring her Bachelor of Science in Nursing had been as a pediatric nurse in Seattle. Her dream had been to go on to a Master of Science and work toward becoming a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner.
For several years she’d loved the work. Eventually, however, it became evident that while nothing could compete with the emotional highs of success in children’s care, nothing was as dark and ugly as failure.
At first she’d been philosophical about doing the most that could be done for sick children. Then a five-year-old patient, Jerica Warren, had been admitted with the flu. Despite an underlying asthma issue, she hadn’t been vaccinated against the flu because it was early in the season. Sarah had told Jerica’s worried parents how hard the doctors worked at Puget Sound Children’s Hospital. How they’d used every medical advancement known to man and saved nine out of ten children. “She has to live, Sarah,” Jerica’s father had said. “Because if she doesn’t, we won’t survive, either.”
Jerica had been brave and trusting, held Sarah’s hand while the doctor put a line into her small arm to fill her with antibiotics. But not only had she had Influenza B, but also MRSA, a superbug infection. Sarah had sat with the family as Jerica’s organs began to shut down. She remembered every moment of those awful days.
Jerica died on a sunny day in early October, and the look on her parents’ faces had been like eternal winter. That had been two years ago. Sarah had stayed on the job another month but had been unable to shake the sense of loss and a new lack of faith in a medical system that should be able to save all children. The good work done at the children’s hospital couldn’t make up for Jerica’s loss.
Sarah quit, spent a month with her parents, helping around the house and in the garden, and simply absorbing the comfort of being home. Her sister, Kate, who was married and had beautiful four-year-old twin boys, visited regularly. Sarah had enjoyed them until they coughed or sniffled, whereupon she’d found herself listening for wheezing sounds and checking skin color while unreasonable fears mounted inside her.
“You’re just burned out, sweetheart,” her father had said when she explained her feelings. “You’ll recover. Or maybe you should find some other kind of nursing that isn’t so hard on you.”
Conducting a job search online, Sarah had discovered Coast Care in Beggar’s Bay and had worked for the owner, John Baldrich, for the past year. Most of her clients were seniors. They were sometimes cranky, but for the most part, they appreciated her visits.
Sarah guided her sturdy white Jeep through the maze of homes that made up the community and pulled into Vinny’s driveway. His house was a small two-bedroom with bright colors and a lot of style. Vinny’s wife, who’d died the year before, had had an eye for design.
Vinny met Sarah at the door as he always did, leaning heavily on his cane as he ushered her inside. He wore a bright red flannel shirt with gray sweatpants and had combed his thin gray hair. Horn-rimmed glasses sat on a formidable nose over a bright smile of original teeth.
“How are ya, gorgeous?” he asked.
