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Joe smiled. “I’ve heard the name, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a reader. Not anymore, at least. Not since…” He pushed aside the cloud of memory to think back. “Not really since high school.” The realization surprised him—had it really been that long since he’d indulged in the simple pleasure of reading a novel?
Fortunately, before these people managed to find out what size drawers he wore, the electrical contractor returned, giving Joe an excuse to sidestep any further discussion about his personal life and retreat once again into the safe, generally orderly world of bids, supplies and schedules, a world over which he had a fair amount of control.
As opposed to the world where he had virtually none.
On brutally hot days like this, by midafternoon not even the littlest ones were much interested in moving. So Taylor usually settled them in the grass under one of the big old cottonwoods out behind the church, reading aloud until their parents came to get them or they nodded off. She loved changing her voice to match each character, seriously getting off on the glow of delight when she’d glance up and see a batch of wide eyes and, sometimes, open mouths. And the giggles. She lived for the giggles.
And at the moment, she’d give her right arm to hear Seth Salazar giggle.
When he wasn’t checking the huge watch smothering his narrow wrist, the boy was attentive enough, sitting cross-legged a little apart from the rest of the children. Although his slender fingers absently plucked at the blades of grass in front of his ankles, his solemn gaze stayed on her the entire time she read. But when the other kids howled at Junie B. Jones’s antics, Seth would barely crack a smile. His body was there, but clearly his mind was elsewhere.
“Joe!” he cried, leaping to his feet.
Like wondering when his brother would come rescue him, Taylor guessed, as the boy tore across the yard.
While the younger counselors herded the remaining kids inside for the last snack of the day, Taylor got to her feet, her knees protesting at sitting on the hard ground for so long, her brain giving her what-for for putting off the inevitable. Which would be—she turned—seeing Joe Salazar scoop his little brother up into his arms.
Strong, solid arms.
Against a strong, solid chest.
All barely hidden underneath the soft folds of a dusty blue workshirt.
Yep, it was just as bad as she thought it would be.
Taylor plastered a smile to her face and trooped over to the pair, just in time to hear Seth give Joe grief about being late.
“It was only a couple minutes, buddy,” Joe said, lowering his brother to the ground. “Besides, I didn’t want to interrupt the reading.”
“You were listening?” Taylor said, thinking, hmm…when was the last time some guy had made her stomach flutter? No, wait, she remembered: Mason. Her ex.
The fluttering might have degenerated into a vague nausea had Joe not smiled for her. Not exactly a laid-back, no-holds-barred smile, but a smile nonetheless. A smile sparkling in a face darkened by a suggestion of late-day beard shadow.
As Blair and company would say, this was so not fair.
“I was listening,” Joe said, and something in his voice or eyes or somewhere in there made Taylor suspect she wasn’t the only one here dodging a few red flags. A revelation which, aggravatingly enough, managed to flatter and annoy her at the same time. “Although I’m not sure who was having more fun—you or the kids.”
He wasn’t flirting, she was sure of it. Well, as sure as someone who hadn’t been flirted with in about a million years—except for Hootch Atkins, and he definitely did not count—could be. Then she noticed Seth’s head bopping back and forth between them, and Didi’s cocked eyebrow when she came outside and saw them standing there, and then fourteen-year-old April Gundersen tripped over a tree root because she was gawking at them instead of watching where she was going. Taylor realized she wasn’t sure of anything anymore, except that she didn’t feel much older than April, which probably wasn’t a good thing.
Then, to her horror, she heard herself going on about how she’d always been a big ham ever since she was little, how she’d set up her stuffed animals in rows—and her little sister, if she could get her to sit still long enough—and perform, making up stories as she went along and how she’d even thought about becoming an actor at one point, but had given it up when she realized all she really wanted to do was…teach…kids.
Whoa. Hot flash sneak preview. Not fun.
“Well,” Joe said, not looking a whole lot more comfortable than Taylor felt. “You’re very good.” Then he turned to Seth. “So how was your first day?” When all he got was a noncommittal shrug in reply, he added, “That good, huh?”
Another shrug.
“Guess he forgot about the worms we had for lunch,” Taylor said, which earned her startled looks from both brothers.
One day, maybe she’d start acting like a normal person. But the world probably shouldn’t hold its breath for that one. Joe muttered something about their needing to head to the store to find something for dinner, then left, Seth’s hand securely in his.
“Don’t look now,” Didi said behind Taylor, scaring her half to death, “but you look like you just saw the mother ship land in Cal Logan’s pasture.”
Taylor grunted and headed back to the Sunday school building, thinking she’d take a close encounter with a horde of little green men over one with Joe Salazar any day.
And if that didn’t make her certifiably insane, she didn’t know what did.
What the hell had just happened?
Joe yanked a grocery cart loose from the nested mass at the front of the Homeland, making Seth jerk beside him. Blessedly frigid air-conditioning soothed his heated skin, but not the dumb, pointless, totally off-the-wall fire raging inside him.
Five minutes. Five lousy minutes, he’d spent with Taylor. Five minutes of inane, completely innocent conversation. No sexual overtones whatsoever. Yet here he was, fighting to walk straight. What kind of man gets turned on by a woman reading a children’s story, for crying out loud?
The kind of man who was currently standing in a crowded supermarket with an eight-year-old beside him and thinking about breasts.
What the hell? Joe never thought about breasts, for God’s sake. At least not as often as he did when he was seventeen. Or twelve. But now, suddenly, mammary images crowded his thoughts like steak a starving man’s on a desert island. He shut his eyes to get his bearings, and saw nipples. Pink ones, on pale, translucent skin.
Like redheads had.
“So…you like spaghetti?” he barked to the child depending on him not to get distracted by things like sex and breasts—
No less than five women scowled at him.
—and a silky voice that changed like mercury as she read, making children laugh.
“Not really,” Seth said.
Joe let out a long, ragged breath and the breasts went away. Thank God. Strangling the grocery cart handle, he glowered at his little brother. “Whoever heard of a little kid who didn’t like spaghetti?”
The poor kid flinched, his brows practically meeting in the middle. “It makes me gag.”
Terrific. The one thing Joe knew how to cook with any reasonable success, and the kid didn’t like it. They’d eaten out most of the past three weeks, but that was in Oklahoma City where there were a few more restaurant choices than Ruby’s Diner or the Dairy Queen halfway between here and Claremore. Not that Ruby’s didn’t seem like a great place, but he’d lay odds Ruby Kennedy was the kind of women who had pity running in her veins. For hurting kids, for lost souls, for lonely men who couldn’t cook and who hallucinated about breasts in supermarkets because they couldn’t remember the last time they had sex worth remembering.
And anyway, if he was going to have this kid living with him for the next ten or so years—a thought which damn near stopped his breath—they couldn’t eat out every night. Which meant one of them was going to have to learn to cook.
“So what do you like?”
“Tacos?”
Okay, he could probably swing that. Joe steered the cart toward the meat section, Seth not exactly trotting along behind him. Every few feet or so, somebody would smile and nod, or say, “Hey.” Joe nodded and smiled and heyed back, but all this friendliness was beginning to get on his nerves.
If he didn’t know better, he’d say he felt trapped. In this town, in this life, by circumstances. By phantom, probably pink-tipped breasts he was pretty sure he’d never get to see.
A smile he’d never get to kiss.
“What else besides tacos?” he said, tossing a package of ground beef into the cart.
“Hamburgers. And fries.”
Yeah, the kid had put a few dozen of those away. Once he started eating again, that is. The first week had been sort of dicey, with Joe beginning to worry he’d be jailed for letting the kid starve to death. Not that Seth ate much even now, but Joe’s mother had reminded him that he’d never eaten much as a kid, either, not until he hit his late teens, at least.
Thinking about his mother brought him up short, making him realize it’d been nearly a week since he’d talked to his mom and Kristen, his sister. A dull pain tried to assert itself at the base of his skull.
“I like fried chicken, too.” Just as Joe was about to say he wasn’t sure he could handle fried chicken that didn’t come out of a box, the boy added, “But only Mama’s.”
Joe muttered a bad word under his breath, only to realize this was the first time Seth had mentioned his mother since the boy had come to live with him. The lady from social services in Oklahoma City had said Seth’s talking about his parents would help him to accept their deaths and eventually heal some of his pain, but that Joe shouldn’t worry if it took a while for that to happen. Joe knew nothing about his father’s second wife—she could have been a saint, for all he knew, even though he did know the couple hadn’t been living together at the time of their deaths—but he sure as hell knew his father. And a not-so-small, unhealed part of himself was hard put to wonder how, or why, the child would grieve Jose Salazar at all.
Except Joe certainly had, hadn’t he, all those years ago?
“Joe?”
He looked down at Seth. The boy’s forehead was a mass of wrinkles.
“You mad at me?”
“No,” Joe said on a rush of guilt. None of this was Seth’s fault. And there was no way he would’ve refused to take his brother on. Still, that didn’t mean he was a hundred percent okay with the situation, either. Full-time responsibility for an eight-year-old boy you’d never met before wasn’t something easily slotted into your life, especially one already crammed to the gills. But more than that, Seth’s sudden appearance had stirred up a whole mess of issues Joe’d thought he’d dealt with years ago and was not at all amused to discover he hadn’t. Not as much as he’d thought, at least. The social worker had suggested counseling to help Seth through this, but Joe was beginning to think maybe he was the one who needed help getting his head screwed on straight. “Just got a lot on my mind, that’s all. And it’s been a long day.”
Seth nodded, but didn’t say anything, leaving Joe wrestling with another brand of guilt—that he didn’t feel more for the kid than he did. Sure, he cared about what happened to him, and he hated seeing the boy so unhappy, but if he thought he’d feel a strong attachment right off just because they were brothers, he’d been dead wrong.
“Hey. You want some ice cream?”
After a moment of apparent contemplation, Seth said, “C’n we get chocolate chip?”
“That your favorite?”
Seth nodded.
“Huh. Mine, too. Let’s go see if they’ve got some.”
As they walked up and down the aisles until they found the frozen-food section—not only did they have chocolate-chip ice cream, they had five different kinds—it struck Joe that he’d better damn well work on forming that attachment, because right now the only thing that mattered was making this kid feel secure again. And the only way that was going to happen was by Joe’s devoting as much time and attention to him as he possibly could. No distractions allowed.
Especially distractions with red hair, a generous smile and green-gold eyes that saw deeper inside a man than this man wanted them to see.
Chapter 3
Taylor was officially in a cruddy mood. And it had nothing to do with the heat, or her hormones, or even that Oakley, her four-legged roommate, had devoured the salad she’d made for lunch today, leaving her with nothing but tuna fish. She only kept tuna fish in the house because it was easy to fix and lasted forever in the can, but truthfully, she wasn’t all that fond of it. No, her cruddy mood had something to do with Joe Salazar. She just wasn’t sure what, exactly.
From her perch on the edge of the Sunday school room’s low stage, Taylor took a bite of her tuna sandwich, but it tasted like dust. Fishy dust, at that. For heaven’s sake, she’d barely even seen the man this past week. He dropped Seth off every morning and picked him up every evening—although Taylor did notice he got later and later every day—but mostly he talked to Blair, since she was Seth’s counselor. Which was just how Taylor wanted it.
But even totally non-Joe-related events or situations would set her off. Like last night, when she got home and her house was empty. Well, duh, she lived alone; of course her house was empty. But usually she walked in and felt “Ahhh.” Last night, she walked in and felt…actually, she wasn’t sure what she felt, but it wasn’t pleasant. And why she should connect this unpleasant, undefined feeling to a man she didn’t even know made no sense whatsoever. But there it was. And there she was, in a cruddy mood.
“How’s he doing?”
A cruddy mood clearly destined to get worse.
Taylor didn’t have to ask to know who the pastor’s wife was talking about. She glanced across the room at Seth, listlessly picking at his sandwich and still doing his best to ignore the other children. Since Didi could obviously see for herself how he was doing, Taylor guessed the older woman wanted her take on things. Which unfortunately smelled to high heaven of ulterior motives.
“Maintaining. Barely.” Compunction about not letting herself get too close to the boy had been increasingly gnawing at her for several days. “Mostly he’s just hung back and watched.”
She most definitely did not like the silence that greeted her comment. “I don’t mean to butt in,” Didi said at last, almost provoking a laugh, “but don’t you think you should, um, get a little more involved?”
“Blair’s doing fine.”
“Yes, she is. But Seth isn’t. Honey, this is a special case—”
“I know that.”
“Then why in tarnation are you sitting back and doing nothing?”
“I’m not sitting back and doing nothing. I’m here if Blair needs me. And it’s not as if I’m ignoring the child.”
“Taylor.” Didi hauled her petite, but ample, form up onto the stage beside her, setting short, fading blond curls all aquiver. “The poor kid follows every move you make. If anyone could help him over this, it would be you.”
“And there’s also a real danger of his becoming too attached—” she bit off another corner of her sandwich “—and then what happens when the summer is over and he has to leave?”
“You’ll heal.”
“I’m not talking about me—”
“Aren’t you?”
Oh, yeah, her mood was definitely worsening. Especially when Didi added, “And I don’t think it’s just the boy you’re afraid to get close to, either.”
With friends like this…
“No comment?” Didi said.
“Not in a million years.”
That got a chuckle. Then Didi crossed her arms and said, “Still, sometimes you gotta worry about the present and trust the future to take care of itself.” A pause. “And hiding out from life isn’t exactly trusting, now, is it?”
This was hardly the first time the pastor’s wife had hinted that she had problems with some of Taylor’s choices, most notably her moving to an itty-bitty town where there weren’t a whole lot of choices. In jobs, in housing, in prospective relationships of the man-woman variety. But it wasn’t as if Taylor hadn’t known from the start what she’d be getting into when she accepted the teaching job here. Still, after her marriage’s collapse, there was a lot to be said for being able to go to sleep every night grateful for her relatively complication-free life.
A cop-out? Maybe. But ask her if she cared. She loved her job, and her little house nestled in the woods, and she was perfectly content with her safe, calm, orderly life, one where she could face the world each morning with a smile that she didn’t have to pull out of a drawer and paste on. So how come Didi’s words weren’t rolling off her back the way they usually did?
As Taylor watched Seth’s large eyes alternate between cautiously surveying his surroundings and withdrawing into his grief, old wounds began to seep open. Wounds she’d thought had long since healed. Memory yanked her back to just past her eleventh birthday, right after her father died, when she’d been convinced she’d never be happy again.
Seth was only a little kid. All he knew was now. And somehow, she had the feeling his big brother, although he meant well, was as clueless as the kid. Conflicting instincts clashed inside her—compassion versus self-preservation, the need to help duking it out with the realization that wanting to help didn’t necessarily mean she could.
But could she live with herself if she didn’t at least try?
Taylor slurped up the rest of her bottled juice as she watched Blair sink into a small chair beside Seth, trying to engage him in conversation, as she’d been doing without much success the whole week. If anyone could get through, it was Blair. Not only did the teen adore little kids—she’d already talked to Taylor about majoring in early childhood education in college—but she, too, knew what it was to lose someone she loved. In her case, it was the uncle who, with Jenna, had adopted and raised her before anybody knew Hank was her father and who had died of cancer a few years back. But after a minute or two, the little boy shook his head and Blair got up, shooting Taylor a helpless glance before sitting down at another table where a group of little girls were having giggle fits over heaven knew what.
Never in her life had Taylor been able to see a hurting child and not try to comfort him or her. And she had about as much chance of success at trying to resist comforting this one as she did of staying away from chocolate.
“Maddie Logan’s coming in this afternoon to help. She could take over your group,” Didi said, as if reading her mind. And with that, Taylor sighed, heaved her duff off the edge of the stage and gave in to the inevitable.
Even if the distrust in Seth’s eyes as he watched her approach wasn’t exactly inspiring her with confidence. She shooed the rest of the kids outside and then sat at the table beside him. He’d brought his lunch today, a banana and cookies along with the sandwich, Taylor saw. She imagined Joe packing it for him, unable to squelch the warm feeling attendant thereto.
