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Duncan made a choked noise. “Ah…been a while since you were around kids, hasn’t it, Ben?”
“Yeah.” Ben’s eyes never left his son’s face. “Your uncle Duncan means I wasn’t supposed to say ‘damn.’ You shouldn’t, either.”
“Okay.” Zach squirmed around so he could capture Gwen’s face in his two small hands. “Mom, put me down. Put me down now. I’ll show my dad our suitcases. I bet he can carry all of ’em. He’s really big.”
Slowly she lowered Zach to his feet, stricken by a pang of separation so acute it was a physical ache. She wanted to scoop him up and run away, but it was already too late. “Keep hold of your father’s hand, Zach. Don’t be running off.”
He held up a hand, his face turned up to Ben’s in sunny confidence. “C’mon. Mom packed hunnerds of things. I brought all my army guys. We’re gonna stay with you for two weeks!”
“So I hear.” A large hand reached down and swallowed the little one. Ben glanced at her. “I won’t let him get lost.”
She nodded. “I’m not sure which carousel is ours.”
“I’ll find it. I know your flight number.” He looked down at Zach, his expression soft and grave. “I don’t know if I can carry hundreds of things. I might need some help.”
Zach giggled as they set off. “It’s all in suitcases. Do you have a dog?”
Gwen smiled. And swallowed hard. Dammit, she was not going to cry.
“Ben’s good with kids,” the man still beside her said quietly. “And he’s already gone on this one.”
“Zach’s good with everyone.” She gave Duncan a smile—and looked quickly away. Damn, damn, damn…
“I take it your flight was uneventful?”
“Aside from reading Green Eggs and Ham twenty times, yes.” What was wrong with her? Couldn’t she get anything right? She tried to pull her thoughts together, watching as Ben and Zach stopped at the first of the baggage carousels.
Ben hunkered down, putting himself at Zach’s level. Zach was chattering away. His clear voice carried enough for her to catch a few words—something about his army guys. Then he pointed at a blue suitcase. Ben stood and heaved it off the conveyor belt.
They were so delighted with each other. She couldn’t do anything to mess that up.
The man beside her spoke quietly. “The two of them look right together, don’t they?”
“Yes. Yes, they do.” Her body was humming to itself, making her feel so alive. Making her feel, for the first time in so long, very much a woman.
Stupid, treacherous damned body—this wasn’t the first time it had betrayed her. “We’d better catch up with them,” she said. “My luggage isn’t blue.”
Chapter 5
“Hey, buddy, you paying attention? Gotta bid if you wanna stay in the game.” Pat grinned at Duncan. “You chickening out on me?”
Pat looked just as he always did, the red hair a few weeks past a trim, his fatigue shirt unbuttoned. His stubby little excuse for a nose was peeling as usual—Pat always said he could get a sunburn from standing under a hundred-watt lightbulb. He was sitting in the notch of the old oak out back, leaning against the trunk, holding a hand of cards.
Duncan was straddling the same wide limb, his legs dangling down on either side. He used to sit out here like this with his brother Charlie.
Part of Duncan knew this wasn’t right; Sgt. Patrick McConaughsey didn’t belong to the time of his life when he’d sat in this old oak. But it seemed rude to ask Pat why he was here in Highpoint when Duncan was so glad to see him. “Hey, Pat, it’s good to see you.”
“You gonna play cards or not? It’s jacks or better to open.”
Duncan glanced down. Sure enough, he was holding a hand of cards. All jacks. All red Jacks, in fact. Alarm trickled in. “Pat, there’s something wrong here. Something wrong with my hand.”
“Is it your hand or your eyes? Look again.”
There was something wrong with his eyes. He couldn’t seem to focus. No, maybe it was getting darker. He looked around, his alarm deepening. Everything was dark, murky. “There’s some weather moving in. We’d better get inside.”
“Duncan, we need you on the force.” That was Jeff, standing on the ground beneath the branch Duncan straddled. “We need you to kill for us. You’re good at it. Here’s your rifle.” He tossed it up.
“No!” But he caught the rifle one-handed—he couldn’t let it fall to the ground. It was loaded. He knew it was, and even as he protested, his hands were checking it out, making sure everything worked. “You don’t understand. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Duncan, you playing cards or not?” Pat demanded.
Horror bit, clear and sharp through the darkening air. He remembered. “Pat, you’re—”
Gunfire. They were under attack. They—
“It’s a backfire,” Jeff said. “Just a bunch of kids. Nothing to worry about.”
“Duncan,” Pat said again, but his voice was wrong. All wrong, breathy and liquid. Duncan knew what he’d see when he turned his head, but he couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t stop any of it.
Pat leaned against the trunk of the tree, his legs straddling it as before. But he wasn’t grinning. He didn’t have enough face left to grin. In the middle of the dripping, meaty mess that used to be his face, the blood bubbled.
He was still breathing.
“No!” Duncan screamed and he grabbed Pat’s shirt and shook him. “No, no, no—damn you, don’t keep doing this, coming back and dying on me. Damn you!” he said again and shook him over and over, and his friend’s blood spattered everywhere, on his face, his chest, his hands—
Knocking. Someone was knocking on…on his door?
Duncan sat bolt upright in bed. Daylight slanted through the blinds to fall in bright bars on the blue bedspread covering him. He shoved his hair out of his face. His hand shook, but it wasn’t bloody.
God, he was sick of that dream.
Rap. Rap. Rap. Out in the hall, but not on his door, someone was knocking. A little boy said impatiently, “Aren’t you ready yet?”
Zach. Duncan recognized the voice, but hung still between horror and waking. What did Zach want him to be ready for?
“Mo-om!” the boy’s voice rang out.
The bathroom door opened. “Shh,” Gwen said in a low voice. “Keep it quiet, okay? I think your uncle Duncan is still asleep.”
Oh. Right. The boy wanted his mother, not his uncle. Of course. Duncan had a sharp sense of dislocation as he swung between the horror of his dream and the cheerful, everyday sounds outside his door.
He threw back the covers, climbed out of bed and crossed to the window, lifting one of the slats of the blinds so he could look out. Mrs. Bradshaw, the neighbor who used to baby-sit for his mother back in another world, was digging in her flower bed.
His unconscious mind wasn’t exactly subtle. Over and over it hammered home the same points. The script changed slightly—this had been Jeff’s first time to make an appearance, for example—but the essence was the same every time. At the start of the dream, Pat was alive and well and wanted to play poker. At the end he was a bloody wreck…and still horribly alive.
Zach’s whisper was every bit as audible as his normal voice. “I’m hungry, Mom.”
He heard Gwen say something, her voice still low. A giggle from Zach. Then the thud of little feet, fading as they headed down the stairs.
This was supposed to be reality, wasn’t it? Crisp, sunny spring mornings. Neighbors weeding their flower beds. Little boys who were hungry for breakfast, mothers who tried to keep them quiet. It was all so blasted normal.
It was a reality he didn’t fit into anymore.
Get a clue, he told his unconscious. Pat was dead. One hundred percent dead, not breathing in bubbles through his ruined face.
The ruined face had been all too real, though. Duncan scrubbed his hand over his own face. So had the blood.
He turned away from the sunshine and grabbed his sweatpants. She’d headed downstairs with her kid, which meant the bathroom was empty. He wanted a shower, hot as he could stand it and as soon as he could get it.
The bathroom smelled of woman stuff. There was a tidy little makeup case by the sink and a plastic cup holding a yellow, adult sized toothbrush and a smaller red one. The yellow one was damp. The shower stall was wet and smelled like flowers.
One good thing, he thought as he scrubbed skin that didn’t show the bloodstains from his dreams. At least he’d gotten over his weird initial reaction to her. He’d discovered that when he’d gone with Ben to pick up her and her son at the airport. Not that he’d stopped reacting, but that spooky whatever it was he’d experienced the first time he’d seen her had faded to normal lust. He could handle that.
He lathered his face, then reached for the razor he kept on the small shelf. There was another razor beside it. A pink one.
Had she noticed his razor when she showered earlier?
Oh, no, he told himself. Don’t go there. But it was too late. The instant mental picture of her, wet and naked, annoyed him as much as it aroused him. He held the skin of his cheek taut with one hand and started shaving. She needed to be sharing a bathroom with Ben, not him. But Ben’s bathroom opened off the master bedroom. Chances were, she’d start using it once Ben talked her into his bed again.
Ouch. Damn. He’d cut himself.
Ben had better start paying more attention to her than he had last night. First he’d insisted Duncan go to the airport with him. Then he’d barely spoken to her, either on the ride back to Highpoint or once they arrived. That was no way to impress the woman. Duncan had suggested that he go out for a while, leave the three of them alone, but Ben had been unusually nervous—about seeing Gwen again? Duncan wondered, frowning. No. Nervous about getting to know his son.
Well, what of it? He snapped off the water. Of course Ben was focused on Zach. That was the way it should be.
It did seem that if he’d been half as interested in Zach’s mother five years ago, he would have known about his son all along.
But that didn’t make any difference. Gwen wasn’t free, not in any way that counted. Maybe he didn’t see her as a sister-in-law yet. That, he thought grimly as he dried off, was going to take time. But once she was sleeping with his brother again, his body would get used to the idea that she wasn’t available.
Right now, all he had to do was go downstairs and act normal. He grimaced as he opened the bathroom door. That shouldn’t be too hard. He’d been acting normal for a month now.
The mingled smells of coffee and bacon drew him to the kitchen. He paused in the doorway.
Ben stood at the stove, pouring batter into neat circles onto the griddle. Zach sat at the table, elevated on one of the couch pillows. He had a milk mustache, a piece of bacon in his hand and a plate empty of everything but syrup. His mother sat beside him with her back to Duncan. She wore a sweater the color of raspberries. In the bright sunshine, her pale hair was almost incandescent.
They looked like a family.
“Hi, Unca Duncan! My dad made us fatjacks for breakfast!”
A smile eased onto his face. “Fatjacks huh? Is that sort of like flapjacks and do I get any?”
Ben spoke from the stove. “I’m putting yours on now. You’ll have to flip them yourself—I’ve got to get out to the site.”
Gwen pushed her chair back. “Come on, Zach, let’s wash a few layers of syrup off your hands and get you dressed.”
“No need for you to rush just because my day starts early,” Ben said.
“I need to rent a car, remember?” She flashed Ben a quick, polite smile on her way to the sink, where she yanked off a paper towel and dampened it. “I was hoping you could drop me at a rental place on your way in. Hold out your hands, Zach.”
Ben’s jaw set in a way Duncan knew all too well. “You don’t need to rent a car. I told you that. I’ve got my work truck, so you can use the Chevy. It’s old, but I keep it in good shape.”
“Thank you, but I’d rather rent a car. I explained that when I agreed to come here.”
“If an old Chevy isn’t good enough for you, you can use Duncan’s Mustang.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “How kind of you to offer me the use of your brother’s car. As I said, however, I prefer to make my own arrangements.”
Oh, but she did that well, Duncan thought, a grin tugging at his mouth. Princess to peon, with more than a whiff of mad for flavor.
“Why spend the money on a rental when you don’t have to?” Ben demanded.
She finished wiping her son’s hands and gave him a pat on the bottom. “Upstairs, short stuff. I laid your clothes out on the bed.”
Zach protested, glancing uncertainly between his mother and Ben. Kids always picked up on it when there was anger in the air, Duncan thought. And these two fairly simmered with old anger.
People didn’t carry anger around this long unless other strong feelings were involved. He made himself face that. While Gwen was busy with Zach, he crossed the room, took the spatula from Ben and said under his breath, “Try to remember you’re not her big brother.”
Ben shot him an annoyed glance. “I’m real aware of that.”
“Then stop grabbing the reins. She’s an adult. She doesn’t need you to steer for her.” Gwen didn’t really know either of them, yet she was living in their house. Of course she wanted to have her own car, rather than depend on them.
Zach ran out of excuses and left to get dressed. She carried his plate to the sink, every stiff inch of her announcing her displeasure. “I would rather we didn’t argue in front of him.”
“Okay, you’re right about that,” Ben admitted. “Look, can we settle this later? I need to get out to the site if I’m going to have any chance of finishing up early enough to take Zach to the movies the way we planned.”
“If you’re in a hurry,” Duncan said mildly, “I can drop Gwen off at the rental place on my way to the shooting range.”
Ben scowled. “All right, all right. Do it your way. I should be back by noon.”
The door didn’t quite slam behind him, but it came close.
“Well.” Gwen slid the plate into the dishwasher. “Thanks for offering me a ride. We’ll be ready whenever you are.”
“His bark is worse than his bite, you know.” Duncan flipped his pancakes. They were a little singed.
“No doubt. I’m not crazy about being barked at, though.” She grabbed another paper towel and began wiping off the table.
He sliced a chunk of butter into a small bowl and stuck it in the microwave. “Ben can be bossy, but he’s not a tyrant. Just stubborn.”
“Maybe so. But I’m not one of his employees.”
There it was again—that princess lilt to her voice. He shook his head, wondering why that cool, snooty tone appealed to him so much. “Oh, Ben picked up the habit of being in charge long before he had any employees to boss around. He’s been running the family—or trying to—ever since our folks died. God knows what would have happened if he hadn’t taken charge of the lot of us then.”
She paused, a little V between her eyebrows, the crumpled paper towel in her suddenly motionless hand. “I didn’t know. I mean, I knew his parents were dead. That was in the PI’s report.”
He stared. “You had Ben investigated by a PI?”
“I needed a PI to find him.” She jerked one shoulder in a quick shrug. “I thought I might as well find out if he’d gotten married or something in the past five years. Since I was planning to introduce him to his son.”
