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“That works both ways,” Kate retorted. “How’s your shin?”
It still hurt like the dickens where she’d bruised it. But he wasn’t telling her that! “None of your damn business.” With a groan, Sam sat up all the way.
“I’m not afraid of some bad behavior, Sam. In my line of work, I see that all the time.”
Sam narrowed his eyes at her skeptically, taking in her finely arched brows, pert, slender nose and nicely curved lips, before returning to her wide-set, light blue eyes. “You get kissed and groped?” Sam didn’t know why, but the idea that Kate might have been manhandled that way by anyone else rankled.
“No, you were the first,” Kate said, crossing her arms against her waist in a way that accentuated the curves of her breasts beneath her sophisticated-yet-oh-so prim-and-proper dress. “No other patient has ever lashed out or acted out his grief and anger in quite that way. Not that I’m all in a tizzy about it, since I know darn well that what happened last night happened only because you were drunk.”
Sam had news for Kate: he hadn’t been that drunk when he’d made the pass. If he had been, he wouldn’t be able to remember it nearly as well as he did. He wouldn’t have had to spend half the night, and another quarter of the bottle of Scotch, trying to obliterate the soft, sexy feel of her lips or the responsiveness of her slender body as it molded sensuously to his. Because the last thing he had wanted last night was to get aroused. The last thing he had wanted was any proof he was still alive. When he had made that pass at her, he had just been angry, and looking for a way to vent.
Sam glared at her, wishing she would just go away. And stop acting as if she had something to do with the mess his life had become since Ellie died. “I’m not your patient.”
Kate looked at him as if she wished he were her patient. “I think before all is said and done I’m going to end up helping you and your boys.”
“That’s going to be hard to do if you never see us.”
“Oh, but I will see you, all of you, all the time, starting tomorrow afternoon.”
Sam tensed. “How do you figure that?”
Kate circled around the desk. She leaned against the edge, arms still folded in front of her. “Because you’re going to let me move in here until you find a suitable housekeeper for the boys.”
Sam blew out a contemptuous breath and tipped back in his swivel chair. “Dream on.”
Ignoring his hostility, Kate crossed her legs at the ankles and continued sweetly, “And you want to know why you’re going to do that…?”
Sam knew the sparring was juvenile. But he couldn’t help himself. Maybe because Kate was the first person in a very long time who wasn’t tiptoeing around him, oozing nauseating amounts of sympathy and pity. He rubbed a palm across the stubble on his face, and drawled in a voice meant to annoy, “I can’t wait to hear.”
“Because if you don’t, I am going to tell Lilah and John about your love affair with the bottle as well as the very un-called-for kiss and grope last night.”
Sam glared at her menacingly. He didn’t want to think about the way he’d tried to scare her off, his reaction to her soft body and softer lips—the fact he’d gotten turned on for the first time since Ellie’s death.
“And you know what they’ll do if that happens, don’t you?” Kate continued, oblivious to his pain. “They’ll cancel their trip to South America, and lose this chance to do medical missionary work.”
Sam knew how long his uncle John and aunt Lilah had been looking forward to that. This had been several years in the planning and was the culmination of a lifelong dream. He couldn’t do that to them. They deserved better.
“Not to mention,” Kate continued, “their month-long second honeymoon trip to New England in October to see the fall colors. It would be a lousy thing to do, depriving them of those two trips. And even in as bad a shape as you evidently are, you wouldn’t want to do that. Now would you?”
Sam didn’t need Kate reminding him how much John and Lilah had done for him and his family. For the past ten years or so, they had filled the void left by the deaths of first his and then Ellie’s parents. They had been “parents” to him and “grandparents” to his boys.
“I’m not asking my aunt and uncle to cancel anything,” Sam snapped.
“You and I both know John and Lilah won’t leave town unless they are sure you and the boys are going to be taken care of in their absence. And right now, for that, I’m your only option.”
Unfortunately, that was true, Sam thought. His cousins were all busy with their own lives, careers, families. As for housekeepers, they’d already run through quite a few. Finding another one was not going to be easy, given the bad rep in the state his boys had conjured up for the family. None of that, however, meant Sam wanted Kate’s help. He glared at her, resenting the position she’d put him in. “I know you mean well, Kate. But you living here will never work.”
“We’ll never know until we try,” she said practically, at that moment looking every inch the determined grief counselor she was. “So what’s it going to be, Sam?” Her fingertips curled impatiently around the edge of his desk. “Are you going to give me a chance to help you and your kids before this turns into the kind of crisis you can’t come back from, or do I call John and Lilah now and tell them you are in worse shape than even they realize?”
SAM DIDN’T ANSWER THAT. He didn’t have to. No one, not even the busybody Kate Marten, needed to tell Sam how important it was to shield his family from the way he’d given in to the pain and frustration and bottomed out the night before. Bad enough that Kate had been there to witness his behavior firsthand. Fortunately, he thought wearily, his kids hadn’t been around to see it. And by the time they got back from John and Lilah’s, there would be no evidence that anything had happened any differently than any other night.
He met Kate’s stare head-on, his anger under tight control. “I’m going to take a shower.” He gave her a hard look, making it clear he expected her to be gone when he returned. Then he dragged himself out of his chair, up the stairs, and into the privacy of the master bedroom suite he’d shared with Ellie on trips back to Laramie. Sam’s throat ached as he glanced at the huge four-poster where he and Ellie’d made love many times and he still slept. I love you, Sam, Ellie had whispered every night before they went to sleep as she cuddled close. I love you so much. He would murmur the words back without really thinking about what they meant, what she meant to him. Scowling, Sam shook his head. He’d had so much, for so long, and he’d taken it all for granted.
In the hierarchy of things to be done, Ellie rarely if ever took the time to see to her own needs. She was always busy seeing to everyone else’s. Had he just paid attention to those first signs, her sluggishness and unexplained weight loss. If he’d just insisted she go in for a physical, instead of letting her put it off… Instead, he had believed her when she said it was probably nothing. And by the time they discovered the tumor on her ovary, the cancer had spread. He’d known it was bad, but he still hadn’t believed she was going to die. Nor, when it came down to it, had she. After all, she was so young…just thirty-two when her illness was discovered. She had her whole life ahead of her, a husband to love and sons to raise. She’d been as certain as he that she would beat the disease. Realizing now how foolish and naive they had been, Sam shook his head and stripped down to his shorts. Leaving his clothes on the floor where they lay, he headed into the bathroom to shave. A glance in the mirror did nothing to lift his spirits. He looked even worse than Kate had indicated or he’d expected. His face was haggard beneath the stubble of his beard, his eyes puffy and red, the corners of his mouth drawn in an expression that revealed just how miserable he felt inside. There were harsh lines on his face; a grim look in his eyes. He hadn’t slept more than three or four hours a night in months and the strain showed in his gaunt, tired appearance. Kate Marten was right about one thing, Sam thought as his lips twisted in bitter gallows humor. He was a hell of a role model for his sons.
The regret inside him mounting, for all the times and ways he had failed his family, Sam picked up the can of shaving cream. Scowling, he spread the foam over his face and began to shave. He needed to start eating right and to get a decent amount of rest every night. But even as he thought it he knew: even if he hadn’t been drinking last night, he probably wouldn’t have slept. The insomnia was just one more thing he didn’t know how to deal with. It had started during the first days of Ellie’s illness, when their days and nights were filled with worry. This couldn’t be happening to them…her tumor wasn’t really malignant…her cancer hadn’t really metastasized. And even if it had, nothing was going to happen to her. Not with all the specialists he had flown in, the strings he and his uncle John McCabe—one of the most respected and well-connected family doctors in Texas—had pulled to get her the very best of care possible, the most up-to-date, comprehensive treatment.
After all, their lives had been charmed up to that point. Sam had professional success beyond his wildest dreams, he and Ellie had a lively, loving family that was the envy of all their friends. They had money and clout. And Sam hadn’t been afraid to use it to help his wife. But none of it had done any good in the end. Through endless rounds of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, Ellie’s cancer had continued to grow and spread. She’d gotten weaker and thinner by the day. And all Sam could do was be strong for her and the boys. Behave as if everything was going to be fine, even when he and Ellie had been told by the doctors that she had very little time left. He’d wanted to level with the kids immediately. Prepare them for what was to come. Ellie had resisted—vigorously. “I don’t want them grieving while I’m still here,” she’d told him emotionally. “I want our last days together to be full of love and laughter and joy. Not weighed down with unbearable sadness.”
So Sam had prayed hard for a miracle and pretended she would survive, even when he knew her lungs ached with every breath and her pain required larger and larger doses of pain-killers to keep it manageable. When the boys had entered her sickroom she had smiled and been the mom they needed and depended on. Only with Sam, in the last few days of her life, had she let down her guard and told him the truth, that the suffering she felt was getting to be too much. She felt so unbearably weary. Weak. Sick. It was time to move on, Ellie had whispered tearfully as he’d held her in his arms, crying, too. She was beginning to want to move on. And quickly after that, she did. Slipping away from them peacefully in her sleep. Leaving him to face their boys’ wrath—at having been misled about the terminal nature of her illness—alone.
It wasn’t easy seeing the disillusionment and disappointment every time he looked into his sons’ eyes, Sam thought as a single tear slid down his cheek. Harder yet realizing just how much of their family’s happiness had centered around Ellie. His family and friends kept telling him the numbness, the disorientation, the relentless anger over Ellie’s fate would go away with time. But it hadn’t, Sam realized as the spasms shook his body and a harsh racking sob rose in his throat. Instead it seemed to get worse, Sam thought as he sank helplessly down onto the cool tile floor, buried his head in his arms, and wept the way he hadn’t, even on the day of her funeral. He’d loved Ellie so long and so much, he wasn’t ever going to get over this.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FOOTBALL TEAM had just started running drills Saturday morning when the black Jeep Wrangler pulled into the parking lot on the other side of the chain-link fence. Mike Marten frowned and glanced at his watch. Whoever it was, was late.
Seconds later, a lanky six-foot-plus kid strode through the gates and down the clay running track that rimmed the football field. He carried himself with an accomplished athlete’s confidence and was dressed in a T-shirt, running shorts and athletic shoes. Mike Marten didn’t have to see his dark buzz-cut hair, good-looking mug or familiar blue eyes to know who it was. The seventeen-year-old kid had arranged to see Mike that morning, through Laramie High School’s front office and Mike’s assistant coach Gus Barkley, and he was the spitting image of his dad.
Will McCabe tensed as he neared. “Coach Marten?”
Mike nodded, and tried not to let the gut-deep resentment he still felt for the kid’s father affect his treatment of Will as the two of them shook hands. If there was one thing he prided himself on when it came to his work, it was his fairness to every one of his players.
“I’m Will McCabe. I called about getting a tryout for the football team.”
“Right.” Mike nodded, forcing himself to put his personal feelings aside. “You played quarterback at your school in Dallas?”
“Varsity, last two years,” Will confirmed with a man-to-man glance at Mike. “I didn’t get much playing time my sophomore year, but last year I started every game.”
Zeroing in on the pride in the kid’s voice, Mike blew his whistle and waved one of his running backs over. He nodded at the sidelines. “Grab a football. Let’s see what you can do.”
Mike put them through a series of increasingly complicated passes. Given his obvious tension, he had expected Will to start out nervously and maybe get better as he went along. Instead he started out great and continued at the same level, no matter what Mike asked him to do.
When the rest of the team finished a series and took a water break, something that had to be done frequently in the summer heat, Gus Barkley came over to the sidelines to stand beside Mike and watch. He shook his head in awe. “Man, that kid’s got an arm. Speed and accuracy, too.”
All should have been qualities Mike welcomed. That was hard to do when every time he looked at Will, he saw Sam, and by association, Pete.
Gus frowned, seeming to read Mike’s mind. Gus, too, had worried about the potential for animosity between Sam McCabe’s son and Mike. Mike had assured him it wouldn’t be a problem. Now that it was happening, he wasn’t so sure. Especially when the loss he felt had returned—at the mere sight of the kid—like a sucker punch to the gut. Mike frowned. He thought he had buried all that years ago, along with Pete.
“Want me to get him outfitted with some gear?” Gus asked, the anxiousness in his eyes contrasting to the easy-going camaraderie of his voice.
“Not until after I talk to him.” Mike motioned Will over to him and Gus, and let his running back know, with a nod in the other direction, that he could take a break with the other players. Will trotted over. He looked at Mike hopefully.
“No guarantees about starting or anything else,” Mike warned gruffly. He didn’t care how naturally gifted a kid was. That went for Will and everyone else. “Whatever you get on this team, you earn. And you haven’t earned anything yet. Got it?”
Will nodded and, to his credit, kept his composure despite Mike’s underlying message that this was not going to be easy. Will was not just going to be “given” a slot as starting quarterback on Mike’s team.
“You’re also going to need a physical before I can let you on the team,” Mike said, turning away from the disappointment in the kid’s eyes. Obviously he had expected to be praised for his performance on the field. In fact, had probably been used to that in Dallas. “Assistant Coach Barkley will take you inside the field house and get you the forms. You can come back when you’ve gotten them filled out, and not before.”
WILL KNEW IF HE WANTED to get a football physical fast, he’d have to arrange it himself. He could hardly ask his dad to do it, he was so preoccupied and out of touch with what was going on with the rest of the family he might as well have been on a different planet.
Of course, it hadn’t always been that way, with him and his brothers left to fend for themselves for practically everything. When his mom was alive all any of them had ever had to do with a problem was go to her. She’d be on the phone and two minutes later everything was all fixed. Didn’t matter what it was, Mom had known what to say and do to take care of it.
That had changed when she’d gotten sick, of course. But even when she was really suffering there at the end, she’d call the shots, while his dad stood around, helpless to do anything except comfort her physically and fly in more specialists.
On the domestic front, his Dad hadn’t a clue. And thanks to the succession of ridiculously bad and bossy housekeepers, he still didn’t. Will knew the reason why his dad wanted those idiotic ladies there. It made it easier for him to go off to work and forget all about the rest of them, the way he always had before Mom died.
Only it wasn’t like before, Will thought as he turned his Jeep Wrangler into the hospital parking lot. Life was hell. Home was worse. The best he could do was try to make this year as bearable as possible by finding a girlfriend and playing football. Then go to college and never look back. Maybe never even come back.
JACKSON MCCABE was waiting for Will, as promised, in his office at the hospital. Young, handsome, successful and newly—happily—married, Jackson was everything Will wanted to be when he grew up. “Thanks for doing this for me, Jackson.” Will handed over the forms. “I know it’s a Saturday morning and you’re a surgeon not a family doc, but I really need this physical right away. Otherwise, I can’t show up for practice Monday morning with the rest of the team.”
“Not a problem.” Jackson gave Will a look that let him know he understood how chaotic life had been for him and his brothers since their mom had died and that he didn’t mind the last-minute call one bit. He ushered Will onto the scale. “What are second cousins for, anyway? Besides—” Jackson shifted the metal weights on the bar until it hung perfectly in balance at one hundred and eighty seven. “I know what a stickler Coach Marten is for the rules.”
“That’s right.” Will stood perfectly still while Jackson measured his height. “You used to play on the L.H.S. football team, too, didn’t you?”
“A couple years after your dad.” Jackson paused to jot down Will’s weight and height on the form. “I sure did.”
Appreciating the way Jackson treated him—as a man instead of a kid—Will walked with Jackson into the adjacent exam room. Figuring Jackson was enough of a straight-talker to tell him the truth, he asked, “What did you think about Coach Marten?”
Jackson checked out Will’s ears and throat. “He’s an excellent coach. Tough. Demanding. A little blustery at times, but don’t let that worry you. His bark’s worse than his bite, if you know what I mean. By the time you finish playing on his team, you’ll know the sport inside and out. And probably a lot more about yourself, as well.”
Will watched as Jackson jotted down some notes on the paper, then fit a blood pressure cuff around Will’s arm. “What do you mean?”
Jackson took Will’s blood pressure. “This is going to sound like one of those really hokey sports metaphors, but it’s true.” Jackson paused to look Will straight in the eye. “Coach Marten doesn’t just teach you about football—he also teaches you about honesty, integrity, responsibility and commitment. Playing on his team changes a guy—for the better. If you let it.”
Funny, Will thought. Jackson, never a guy to wax eloquent about anything, was speaking almost reverently about Coach Marten. His dad hadn’t mentioned any of this. In fact, his dad hadn’t looked all that happy about the prospect of Will playing on Coach Marten’s team. Though, as usual, he’d done nothing to discourage that or any other extracurricular activity his kids wanted to pursue.
Puzzled, Will slipped off his T-shirt so Jackson could listen to his heart and lungs. He breathed in and out as directed. Something was going on here that they weren’t telling him, just like when his mom had died. Damn it all, if they were deliberately keeping something from him again, he was going to be pissed.
He looked at Jackson curiously. “Did Coach Marten and my dad get along?”
Jackson tensed slightly as he unhooked the stethoscope from his ears. “Why would you ask that?”
Gut instinct. Something was off here. Will just wasn’t sure what. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, doing his best to put all the little signs together to come up with something. “Usually when I do something around here that my dad or mom did when they were a kid, people get all nostalgic or something. Coach didn’t.”
Jackson sat on a stool. Suddenly he looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Maybe he just wanted you to feel like you were there under your own steam, not as a relation to anyone else,” Jackson finally said.
And maybe, Will thought, the bitterness that had been with him since his mother’s death rising up inside him once again, there was something else they weren’t telling him. Something he had every right to know.
KATE SPENT SATURDAY afternoon conducting two back-to-back grief groups and the evening juggling her schedule and calling her associates at the hospital to let them know she would be taking her accumulated time off to deal with a personal emergency. She waited until Sunday afternoon to tell her parents where they would be able to reach her, starting that evening. Her mom hadn’t said much when they spoke on the phone. But fifteen minutes later, both her parents were on the doorstep of her apartment, which was located on the second floor of a big white Victorian that had been converted into four separate dwellings, each with its own outside entrance.
Kate’s mom, a homemaker with gray-blond hair and pale blue eyes, had obviously been baking. She still wore her blue denim chef’s apron over her coordinating shorts set. Kate’s dad, wearing a burnt-orange Laramie High School knit shirt, shorts and coach’s cap, had a roll of antacids in his hand. A big bear of a man, he was known for his blunt speech, admirably strong character and often brutal honesty. He was also still extremely protective of “his little girl.” Part of it was that he didn’t want anything to happen to Kate. He’d already lost a son and he didn’t want to lose his one remaining child. The other part was his protectiveness of women in general. He just wasn’t sure members of the fairer sex should be out on their own, without a man to watch over them. Hence, he couldn’t wait for Kate to marry her intended, Air Force Major Craig Farrell. But that wasn’t going to happen until much later in the autumn. Right now, at the beginning of August, Coach Mike Marten, and his loving, dutiful wife Joyce, apparently felt they had a problem on their hands. As Kate suspected, it didn’t take her father long to get to the point.
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, honey, but this is the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”
Out of respect, Kate tried to not roll her eyes as she continued moving around her apartment, packing up a few of her things. “Thanks for being so supportive, Dad.”
Mike sighed, lifting his burnt orange coach’s cap off his head and running his hand through his short salt-and-pepper hair. “You’re a professional woman,” Mike declared, replacing the cap low across his forehead, “not a domestic hire.”
“Meaning what?” Kate interrupted, not about to let her dad talk her out of doing what she knew in her gut had to be done. “I can’t help out a friend?”
Mike Marten looked at her steadily. “Sam’s not your friend.”
Leave it to Dad to hit the nail on the head in two seconds flat, Kate thought. “Ellie was, when we were kids.”
“But you rarely saw each other,” Mike pointed out.
“Only because she was so much older than I was and she moved to Dallas after she married and then I went off to college. That doesn’t erase all the kindness she showed me both before and after Pete died.” At the mention of her brother, her father’s face turned to stone. “Is it really so wrong of me to want to return the kindness?”
Silence fell between the three of them as Mike looked to Joyce for help. Joyce nervously wrung her hands together. There was nothing she hated more than family discord of any kind. She would do or say whatever she had to do to try to keep the peace. “I think what your father is trying to say, sweetheart, is that we don’t understand why you have to move in there in order to help Sam McCabe and his boys.”
Even as Kate had rued telling her parents where she could be reached for the next few weeks, she’d known there had been no avoiding it. It would have been worse had they found out any other way, and in a town as small as Laramie, they would have found out. “There are a lot of reasons. Number one, the boys are too much for Sam to handle on his own. Kevin’s accident proved that.”
“So let him hire a housekeeper,” Mike interrupted.
“He’s hired ten,” Kate spouted back, beginning to resent her father’s protectiveness as much as she loved him as a parent and a man. “They’ve all quit within a matter of weeks.”
“And what makes you think you’re going to do any better?” Mike demanded impatiently, peeling another antacid tablet off the role and popping it into his mouth.
Kate grinned and offered her father a disarming smile. “The fact that I’m your daughter and you taught me to never be a quitter.”
Mike’s brows knit together. “Don’t try to charm your way out of this, Kate. I have serious concerns here.”
Kate sobered immediately. She sat on the edge of her bed. “So do I, Dad. Sam’s boys are in trouble.” So was Sam for that matter, but Kate figured it was best to not get into that just yet. One thing at a time, and Sam’s boys were first on the priority list.
Mike shrugged, not unsympathetic to Sam’s plight, just more realistic—in his view, anyway. “So let ’em come to the hospital for your help like everyone else who can’t handle things on their own.”
Kate ignored the faint hint of derision in her father’s voice. Mike, not only one of the premiere football coaches in the state with more state championship experience than anyone else in the Triple A division, was a staunch believer in survival-of-the-fittest theories. He approached every life situation as though it were a game to be strategized, played and won. In his view, there was no room for failure of any kind, and only the weak needed counseling. Unfortunately his “survivor strategies” very possibly cost Kate’s older brother his life, which was something her own family was still trying to come to grips with.
“Sam doesn’t believe in any kind of therapy or grief counseling for the kids,” Kate said quietly, putting her own hurts aside.
“Well, I can’t say I blame Sam there,” Mike Marten muttered.
“Mike.” Joyce gasped.
“Oh.” Mike looked sheepish. “You know what I mean.”
Kate surely did. If her mom and dad had only believed in counseling, her brother might have talked out his feelings instead of acted them out. If only her parents had gotten help at the first sign of trouble with Pete, instead of trying to ignore his problems, maybe Pete wouldn’t have felt so misunderstood and behaved so recklessly. And maybe the three of them wouldn’t have suffered for years after Pete died. Knowing there was no way to change the past, only ways to deal with it honestly and openly and move on, Kate had eventually resolved her feelings about her family’s tragedy. She wasn’t sure her parents had yet, or ever would without the appropriate help, which they were determined not to get.
Watching as Kate closed the suitcase containing her clothes Joyce said gently, “I know you feel like you owe John and Lilah McCabe a lot for helping you start your grief and crisis counseling program over at the hospital.”
Not to mention what she owed Ellie, Kate thought, for all the times she had cried on Ellie’s shoulder the year after Pete died.
“But can’t you just help them out in some other way?” Joyce continued.
“Such as?” Kate asked impatiently, wishing her parents were not so difficult about this.
“Maybe you and I could just act as general coordinators for them, to help get them through this emergency. We could enlist other women to cook dinner for them. Find someone else to clean the house on a regular basis. Teenagers to baby-sit the little one in Sam’s absence.”
