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Looking around the kitchen as if it were his own personal purgatory, his heart did a slow roll. He smelled fudge brownies. A dozen multicolored scribbles adorned the refrigerator. An army truck, complete with mounted machine gun, lay on the floor in front of the sink, perfectly placed to be tripped over. The sound of incessant banging on an electronic keyboard—the kind of noise only a kid could call music—pounded through the house from the dining room.
All of it, the sights, sounds, scents, could have belonged to any family. Even his, a few years ago.
Matt caught himself, stumbled through the kitchen on numb feet, passing Jeb and his keyboard in the dining room, and paced the living room, collecting himself.
Wondering what was taking Caroline so long, and what he was going to say to her when she returned, he paused at the bottom of the stairs. It was quiet up there.
As it was down here. The keyboard music had stopped.
“Caroline?”
No answer.
“Caroline? Is Jeb up there with you?”
Still no answer. Swearing under his breath, he headed for the dining room. It wasn’t his business. Caroline was the baby-sitter, not him. But he still had to be sure the boy was okay.
Matt found Jeb in the kitchen, with Alf. Blood pounding in his temples and a headache already well entrenched at the base of his skull, Matt swooped across the worn linoleum. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he roared.
Jeb pulled his head out of Alf’s fur, looked up with unseeing eyes. His thin arms clamped tighter around the dog’s neck. Alf thumped his tail and wheezed.
When Jeb didn’t answer, Matt unwound kid from dog. Holding Jeb by the upper arms, he lifted until the boy’s sneakers swung a foot off the floor. “I asked what you were doing.”
Jeb’s dark eyes pinched shut. His mouth gaped and pursed like a fish. But instead of an answer, the boy let out a wail that half the county would probably mistake for the tornado siren.
The hairs on the back of Matt’s neck jumped to attention. He almost dropped the kid in his hurry to save his eardrums.
The sound abated as quickly as it had begun. Jeb crouched on the cold floor, his chest heaving. His eyes rolled wildly.
Matt steadied himself with a breath, waiting for his buzzing nerves and ringing ears to quiet, then brushed his fingers across Jeb’s trembling knee. “Hey, kiddo—”
Hardly a blur he moved so fast, Jeb sprang to his feet, lashed a solid kick into Matt’s knee and squirreled under the table. Against the wall, he curled into a ball, arms locked around his knees and head buried between his elbows, and rocked himself, sobbing silently.
Matt watched him, guilt and self-loathing swelling inside him. Jesus, God, what had he done?
Bare feet slapped across the floor behind Matt. Caroline flung herself into the room in a dead run, grabbing onto the doorjamb to stop her momentum. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
Her gaze fell to the crumpled boy beneath the table. She dropped to her knees next to him. “Oh my God.” She reached out to Jeb. “Hey, little rebel. What is it? What’s wrong?”
Jeb pulled tighter into his little ball.
The fire in Caroline’s eyes scalded Matt. “What happened? What did you do to him?”
Matt tried to move. To help her. But his feet might as well have been stuck in cement. The cement might as well have been sinking in a foul river. He couldn’t breathe, either.
She gave him one heartbeat to answer. Two. Then her lips curled back in a snarl. “Get out.” Fury swam close to the surface in her voice. “Get the hell out. Now!”
He stumbled back a step. Then another. He turned. He could hear Caroline cooing and clucking behind him, childish, nonsense words. The screen door slammed shut behind him as he made it out of the house. Out onto the porch. Into the air.
But he still couldn’t breathe.
Chapter 3
“I thought you’d gone,” Caroline said, pushing open the squeaky screened door and stepping onto the front porch. Matt’s big frame was hunched over on the steps, elbows propped on his knees, head bowed. He looked so miserable that it was hard to stay mad at him. She couldn’t possibly hate him more than he hated himself right now.
“I wanted to be sure he was…okay.”
“He’s okay now.” It had taken Caroline ten minutes to talk Jeb out from beneath the table. Now, he was sitting at the table plucking out a sort of childish dirge with one finger on his electric keyboard, with a glass of extra-chocolate milk she’d put in his free hand.
She thought about sitting next to Matt. Decided to stand. “Tell me what happened.”
He straightened himself with the agility of someone twice his age. But when he was upright, he sat tall. Like an accused man before a jury. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“You didn’t hurt him,” she had to admit.
“I scared him.”
She sighed and sat on the porch swing he had fixed a few days ago, rocking the seat backward with her feet. “He gets scared easy.” She looked up at her husband. “He’s had good reason to be afraid of big, strong men.”
She saw when the truth clicked in his mind.
“Damn,” he said. “I knew it. I saw it in the way Savannah carried herself, like she was always ready to duck.”
“Her and Jeb both.” When his eyes widened again, Caroline knew he’d figured it all out.
“Jeb’s blindness?”
“His father threw him into a wall when he was ten months old.”
“Why the hell didn’t Savannah get out if she knew he was abusive?”
“She did. He found her.”
Matt went deadly still, his muscles coiled like a snake ready to strike. “I hope the bastard went to jail.”
Caroline rocked the swing back and forward again. “He got six months. He’s out now.”
She was glad Jeb was still inside, where he couldn’t hear what Matt said next. No telling where the boy would repeat that kind of language.
“What happened in there, Matt?” she asked so softly that the rumble of the storm moving in almost drowned out her words.
“I told him not to pet Alf.”
Caroline laughed mirthlessly. “This was all over a dog?”
“It isn’t safe for Jeb to play with Alf.”
“Agreed. Unsupervised.”
Matt blinked, clearly he hadn’t quite caught on to her train of thought.
“But what would it hurt for you to let him pet the dog a little with you standing by?”
“No.”
“Alf used to love to play fetch with Brad. Jeb could throw the stick.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why not? Is it Jeb you’re protecting?” She rose and put herself in front of him. “Or yourself?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lightning slashed across the sky, lighting his face. The storms that had threatened all day had finally arrived.
“You can’t even stand to look at a child. Any child.”
He didn’t deny it.
She stood, watching the lightning in the distance, and crossed her arms over her chest. “You say you want to get on with your life, look to the future, but you can’t. Because you haven’t accepted your past.”
“Because I don’t want another baby, like you?”
“In part.”
“You think another baby would make everything better? Make me forget about Brad?” He dragged a hand through the wild waves the wind kicked up in his hair. “Jesus, Caroline. Children can’t just be replaced, like puppies from the pound.”
Thunder battered the old house, and Caroline was glad for it. The shaking ground covered the tremors his words shot through her.
She’d been a fool to think a year would make a difference. A fool to leave Matt, knowing she was pregnant, without telling him about his child. She had hoped that time would heal his grief as it had healed hers, or at least diminish the pain. She hoped he’d be able to love another child.
She’d been wrong.
Matt rose and paced to the porch rail and back again. As he passed by the front door, he stopped, listening. Jeb, fully recovered now, banged randomly on his keyboard, singing the same verse from a nursery rhyme over and over and laughing.
Matt tilted back his head. “How can you stand to live with that every day.”
Her heart sinking, she understood instinctively that Matt didn’t mean Jeb’s bad singing, but the sounds of a child having fun. Of life.
The first fat drops of rain fell like blood against a crimson sunset. In the kitchen, Jeb hit a particularly discordant note. Caroline closed her own eyes and almost smiled. “How can you stand to live without it?”
Nothing had changed at Mahoney’s, Sweet Gum’s local saloon. The tabletops were still scarred, the chairs still didn’t match and the alley out back was still cleaner than the men’s room.
Matt sat alone, picking the label on his beer. He’d already had two bottles, and really shouldn’t have ordered the third. Not without a designated driver.
But even sitting in a bar, staring at beer he couldn’t drink, was better than going back to the Johnsons’ and lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling and trying not to think.
About anything.
Ah, hell. He lifted the bottle and took a long swig. Then another. By the time the Jimmy Buffet fan at the jukebox had run through the singer’s entire repertoire and someone else had put on one of those New Age punk pieces of garbage, five empty bottles littered Matt’s table. The sixth still had a little bit left in it.
Under the bottom curve of his bottle, he saw a pair of boots. Not the work boots the farmers or ranchers in the area wore. Oh, no.
These were patent leather jobs, knee high, with heels chunky enough to block a car on. Between the top of the boots and the bottom of the miniskirt stretched a long length of smooth, slim thigh.
Slowly, Matt lowered the beer bottle.
Gem ran her tongue around her lips while her eyes laughed at him. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Wham-bam-no-thank-you-ma’am.” She scooted her little bottom into the chair next to him.
Too next to him.
He edged to his right, away from her.
“And here I thought you were too pristine to land in a joint like this.”
“What’re you doing here, Gem?”
She reached for his beer. He swung it away. “Who says I have to have a reason?”
“Where are the twins?”
She drew back, almost a recoil. “They’re okay.”
“I’m sure they are. Caroline would never let anything happen to them.” He checked his watch. “But you’re three hours late to pick them up.”
He thought he saw a flash of guilt, of humanity, in her fine-boned features, then the tough street face covered it up. “Well, if you’re going to be that way.” She scraped her chair back and started to walk away.
He snagged her wrist. “You’re also underage and on probation.”
She struggled to pull free, but he held tight. “So call a cop.”
“I am a cop.”
The blood drained from Gem’s face. “I— She didn’t tell me.”
“Obviously. Now what are you doing here?”
“M-my car wouldn’t start. This guy gave me a ride is all. He wanted to stop here awhile, then he’s going to take me home so I can borrow a car to go pick up Max and Rosie.”
“Lame, Gem. You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“Really,” she squeaked, pulling harder on her wrist.
“Where is this guy?” Matt had a few words for any man that would bring an obviously underage girl to a bar.
“He’s not a guy, exactly. He’s just a kid. My age.” Her head swiveled, her gaze scanning the sparsely populated tables around the room, probing the dark shadows around the pool table. “I—I don’t see him.”
“Uh-huh.” Matt let go of her wrist and pushed his hand into the small of her back, turning her toward the door. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” Her voice rose like a frightened child. Which, he figured, was exactly what she was.
