by Nora Roberts
In the little powder room off the hall, Sybill splashed water on her face. She was hot, nervous, and vaguely sick to her stomach. She didn’t understand this family, she thought. They were loud, occasionally crude, pieced together from different origins. Yet they seemed happy, at ease with each other, and very affectionate.
As she patted her face dry, she met her own eyes in the mirror. Her family had never been loud or crude. Except for those ugly moments when Gloria had pushed the limits. Just now she couldn’t honestly say for certain if they had ever been happy, ever been at ease with each other. And affection had never been a priority or something that was expressed in an overt manner.
It was simply that none of them were very emotional people, she told herself. She had always been more cerebral, out of inclination, she decided, and in defense against Gloria’s baffling volatility. Life was calmer if one depended on the intellect. She knew that. Believed that absolutely.
But it was her emotions that were churning now. She felt like a liar, a spy, a sneak. Reminding herself that she was doing what she was doing for the welfare of a child helped. Telling herself that the child was her own nephew and she had every right to be there, to form opinions, soothed.
Objectivity, she told herself, pressing her fingertips against her temples to smother the nagging ache. That’s what would get her through until she’d gathered all the facts, all the data, and formed her opinion.
She stepped out quietly and took the few steps down the hall toward the blaring noise of the ball game. She saw Seth sprawled on the floor at Cam’s feet and shouting abuse at the set across the room. Cam was gesturing with his beer and arguing the last call with Phillip. Ethan simply watched the game, with Aubrey curled in his lap, dozing despite the noise.
The room itself was homey, slightly shabby, and appeared comfortable. A piano was angled out from the corner. A vase of zinnias and dozens of small-framed snapshots crowded its polished surface. A half empty bowl of potato chips sat at Seth’s elbow. The rug was littered with crumbs, shoes, the Sunday paper, and a grubby, well-gnawed hunk of rope.
The light had faded, but no one had bothered to switch on a lamp.
She started to step back, but Phillip glanced over. Smiled. Held out a hand. She walked to him, let him draw her down to the arm of his chair. “Bottom of the ninth,” he murmured. “We’re up by one.”
“Watch this reliever kick this guy’s sorry ass.” Seth kept his voice down, but it rang with glee. He didn’t even flinch when Cam slapped him on the head with his own ball cap. “Oh, yeah! Struck him out!” He leaped up, did a victory boogie. “We are number one. Man, I’m starving.” He raced off to the kitchen and soon could be heard begging for food.
“Winning ball games works up an appetite,” Phillip decided, absently kissing Sybill’s hand. “How’s she doing in there?”
“She appeared to be on top of things.”
“Let’s go see if she made antipasto.”
He pulled her into the kitchen, and within moments it was crowded with people. Aubrey rested her head on Ethan’s shoulder and blinked like an owl. Seth stuffed his mouth with tidbits from an elaborate tray and did a play-by-play of the game.
Everyone seemed to be moving, talking, eating at the same time, Sybill thought. Phillip put another glass of wine in her hand before he was drafted to deal with the bread. Because she felt slightly less confused by him than by the others, Sybill stuck to his side as chaos reigned.
He cut thick slices of Italian bread, then doctored them with butter and garlic.
“Is it always like this?” she murmured to him.
“No.” He picked up his own glass of wine, touched it lightly to hers. “Sometimes it’s really loud and disorganized.”
* * *
BY THE TIME he drove her back to her hotel, Sybill’s head was ringing. There was so much to process. Sights, sounds, personalities, impressions. She had survived complex state dinners with less confusion than a Sunday dinner with the Quinns.
She needed time, she decided, to analyze. Once she was able to write down her thoughts, her observations, she would align them, dissect them, and begin to draw her initial conclusions.
“Tired?”
She sighed once. “A little. It was quite a day. A fascinating one.” Blew out a breath. “And a fattening one. I’m definitely going to make use of the hotel’s health club in the morning. I enjoyed myself,” she added as he parked near the lobby entrance. “Very much.”
“Good. Then you’ll be willing to do it again.” He climbed out, skirted the hood, then took her hand as she stepped onto the curb.
“There’s no need for you to take me up. I know the way.”
“I’ll take you up anyway.”
“I’m not going to ask you to come in.”
“I’m still going to walk you to your door, Sybill.”
She let it go, crossing with him to the elevators, stepping inside with him when the doors opened. “So, you’ll drive to Baltimore in the morning?” She pushed the button for her floor.
“Tonight. When things are fairly settled here, I drive back Sunday nights. There’s rarely any traffic, and I can get an earlier start on Mondays.”
“It can’t be easy for you, the commute, the demands on your time, and the tug-of-war of responsibilities.”
“A lot of things aren’t easy. But they’re worth working for.” He caressed her hair. “I don’t mind putting time and effort into something I enjoy.”
“Well . . .” She cleared her throat and walked out of the elevator the minute the doors opened. “I appreciate the time and effort you put into today.”
“I’ll be back Thursday night. I want to see you.”
She slipped her key card out of her purse. “I can’t be sure right now what I’ll be doing at the end of the week.”
He simply framed her face with his hands, moved in and covered her mouth with his. The taste of her, he thought. He couldn’t seem to get enough of the taste of her. “I want to see you,” he murmured against her lips.
She’d always been so good at staying in control, at distancing herself from attempts at seduction, from resisting the persuasions of physical attractions. But with him, each time she could feel herself slipping a little farther, a little deeper.
“I’m not ready for this,” she heard herself say.
“Neither am I.” Still, he drew her closer, held her tighter and took the kiss toward desperation. “I want you. Maybe it’s a good thing we both have a few days to think about what happens next.”
She looked up at him, shaken, yearning, and just a little frightened of what was happening inside her. “Yes, I think it’s a very good thing.” She turned, had to use both hands to shove the key card into its slot. “Drive carefully.” She stepped inside, closed the door quickly, then leaned back against it until she was certain her heart wasn’t going to pump its way out of her chest.
It was insane, she thought, absolutely insane to get this involved this quickly. She was honest enough with herself, scientist enough not to skew the results with incorrect data, to admit that what was happening to her where Phillip Quinn was concerned had nothing whatsoever to do with Seth.
It should be stopped. She closed her eyes and felt the pressure of his mouth still vibrating on her lips. And she was afraid it couldn’t be stopped.
EIGHT
IT WAS PROBABLY a chancy step to take. Sybill wondered if it could possibly be illegal. Loitering near St. Christopher’s Middle School certainly made her feel like some sort of criminal, no matter how firmly she told herself she was doing nothing wrong.
She was simply walking on a public street in the middle of the afternoon. It wasn’t as though she was stalking Seth, or planning to abduct him. She only wanted to talk to him, to see him alone for a little while.
She’d waited until the middle of the week, watching from a careful
distance on Monday and Tuesday to gauge his routine, and the timing. Habitually, she now knew, the buses lumbered up to school several minutes before the doors opened and children began pouring out.
Elementary first, then middle, then the high school students.
That alone was a lesson in the process of childhood, she mused. The compact little bodies and fresh round faces of the elementary children, then the more gangling, somewhat awkward forms of those who hovered around puberty. And last, the astonishingly adult and more individual young people who strolled out of the high school.
It was a study in itself, she decided. From dangling shoelaces and gap-toothed smiles to cowlicks and ball jackets to baggy jeans and shining falls of hair.
Children had never been a part of her life, or her interests. She’d grown up in a world of adults and had been expected to acclimate, to conform. There had been no big yellow school buses, no wild rebel yells when bursting out of the school doors into freedom, no lingering in the parking lot with some leather-jacketed bad boy.
So she observed all those things here like an audience at a play and found the mix of drama and comedy both amusing and informative.
When Seth hurried out, bumping bodies with the dark-haired boy she’d decided was his most usual companion, her pulse quickened. He whipped his ball cap out of his pocket and put it on his head the moment he was through the doors. A ritual, she thought, symbolizing the change of rules. The other boy fished in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of bubblegum. In seconds it was wadded into his mouth.
The noise level rose, making it impossible for her to hear their conversation, but it appeared to be animated and included a great deal of elbow jabbing and shoulder punching.
Typical male affection pattern, she concluded.
They turned their backs on the buses and began to walk down the sidewalk. Moments later, a smaller boy raced up to them. He bounced, Sybill noted, and seemed to have a great deal to say for himself.
She waited a moment longer, then casually took a path that would intersect with theirs.
“Shit, man, that geography test was nothing. A bozo could’ve aced it.” Seth shrugged to distribute the weight of his backpack.
The other boy blew an impressive candy-pink bubble, popped it, then sucked it in. “I don’t know what’s the big damn deal about knowing all the states and capitals. It’s not like I’m going to live in North Dakota.”
“Seth, hello.”
Sybill watched him stop, adjust his train of thought, and focus on her. “Oh, yeah, hi.”
“I guess school’s done for the day. You heading home?”
“The boatyard.” There was that little dance on the nape of his neck again. It irritated him. “We got work.”
“I’m going that way myself.” She tried a smile on the other boys. “Hi, I’m Sybill.”
“I’m Danny,” the other boy told her. “That’s Will.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“We had vegetable soup for lunch,” Will informed everyone grandly. “And Lisa Harbough threw up all over. And Mr. Jim had to clean it up, and her mom came to get her, and we couldn’t write our vocabulary words.” He danced around Sybill as he relayed the information, then shot her an amazingly innocent, wonderfully bright smile that she was helpless to resist.
“I hope Lisa’s feeling better soon.”
“Once when I threw up I got to stay home and watch TV all day. Me and Danny live over there on Heron Lane. Where do you live?”
“I’m just visiting.”
“My Uncle John and Aunt Margie moved to South Carolina and we got to visit them. They have two dogs and a baby named Mike. Do you have dogs and babies?”
“No . . . no, I don’t.”
“You can get them,” he told her. “You can go right to the animal shelter and get a dog—that’s what we did. And you can get married and make a baby so it lives in your stomach. There’s nothing to it.”
“Jeez, Will.” Seth rolled his eyes, while Sybill only managed to blink.
“Well, I’m going to have dogs and babies when I grow up. As many as I want.” He flashed that hundred-watt smile again, then raced away. “ ’Bye.”
“He’s such a geek,” Danny said with the shuddering disdain of older brother for younger. “See you, Seth.” He bounded after Will, turned briefly to run backward and flipped a wave toward Sybill. “ ’Bye.”
“Will’s not really a geek,” Seth told Sybill. “He’s just a kid, and he’s got diarrhea of the mouth, but he’s pretty cool.”
“He’s certainly friendly.” She shifted her shoulder bag, smiled down at him. “Do you mind if I walk the rest of the way with you?”
“It’s okay.”
“I thought I heard you say something about a geography test.”
“Yeah, we took one today. It was nothing.”
“You like school?”
“It’s there.” He jerked his shoulder. “You gotta go.”
“I always enjoyed it. Learning new things.” She laughed lightly. “I suppose I was a geek.”
Seth angled his head, narrowing his eyes as he studied her face. A looker, Phillip had called her, he remembered. He guessed she was. She had nice eyes, the light color a sharp contrast to the dark lashes. Her hair wasn’t as dark as Anna’s, nor light like Grace’s. It was really shiny, he noted, and the way she pulled it back all smooth and stuff left her face right out there.
She might be cool to draw sometime.
“You don’t look like a geek,” Seth announced just as Sybill felt heat begin to rise into her cheeks under his long, intense study. “Anyway, that would be a nerd.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure if she’d just qualified for nerd status and decided not to ask. “What do you like studying best?”
“I don’t know. Mostly it’s just a bunch of—stuff,” he decided, quickly censoring his opinion. “I guess I like it better when we get to read about people instead of things.”
“I’ve always liked to study people.” She stopped and gestured toward a small two-story gray house with a trim front yard. “My theory would be that a young family lives there. Both husband and wife work outside the home and they have a preschooler, most likely a boy. Odds are that they’ve known each other a number of years and have been married less than seven.”
“How come?”
“Well, it’s the middle of the day and no one’s home. No cars in the drive, and the house looks empty. But there’s a tricycle there and several large toy trucks. The house isn’t new, but it’s well kept. Most young couples both work today in order to buy a home, have a family. They live in a small community. Younger people rarely settle in small towns unless one or both of them grew up there. So I’d theorize that this couple lived here, knew each other, eventually married. It’s likely they had their first child within the first three years of marriage and the toys indicate he’s three to five.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Seth decided after a moment.
However foolish it was, she felt a surge of pride that she might have avoided nerddom after all. “But I’d want to know more, wouldn’t you?”
She’d caught his interest. “Like what?”
“Why did they choose this particular house. What are their goals? What is the status of their relationship? Who handles the money, which indicates the disposition of power, and why? If you study people, you see the patterns.”
“How come it matters?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Who cares?”
She considered. “Well, if you understand the patterns, the social picture on a large scale, you learn why people behave in certain manners.”
“What if they don’t fit?”
Bright boy, she thought on another, deeper wave of pride. “Everyone fits some pattern. You factor in background, genetics, education, social strata, religiou
s and cultural roots.”
“You get paid for that?”
“Yes, I suppose I do.”
“Weird.”
Now, she concluded, she had definitely been relegated to nerd status. “It can be interesting.” She racked her brain to come up with an example that would salvage his opinion of her. “I did this experiment once in several cities. I arranged for a man to stand on the street and stare up at a building.”
“Just stare at it?”
“That’s right. He stood there and stared up, shading his eyes from the sun when he had to. Before long someone stopped beside him and stared up at the same building. Then another and another, until there was a crowd of people, all looking up at that building. It took much longer for anyone to actually ask what was going on, what were they looking at. No one really wanted to be the first to ask because that was an admission that you didn’t see what you assumed everyone else was seeing. We want to conform, we want to fit in, we want to know and see and understand what the person beside us knows and sees and understands.”
“I bet some of them thought someone was going to jump out of a window.”
“Very likely. The average time an individual stood, looking, interrupting their schedule, was two minutes.” She believed she’d caught his imagination again, and so she hurried on. “That’s actually quite a long time to stare at a perfectly ordinary building.”
“That’s pretty cool. But it’s still weird.”
They were coming to the point where he would have to veer off to go to the boatyard. She thought quickly and in a rare move went with impulse. “What do you think would happen if you conducted the same experiment in St. Christopher’s?”
“I don’t know. The same thing?”
“I doubt it.” She sent him a conspirator’s smile. “Want to try it?”
“Maybe.”
“We can head over to the waterfront now. Will your brother worry if you’re a few minutes late? Should you go tell him you’re with me?”