For the Children

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “What future?” The brown eyes were sullen again, staring out into the early darkness that had fallen. December in Phoenix meant it was dark by five. A fact that had gone unnoticed by Kirk for most of his adult life. As had the blue skies and sunshine that characterized Arizona days.

  He opened his mouth to give Abraham an answer.

  “Forget it,” Abraham said before Kirk got out the first word. “I’m supposed to take care of my mom. I’ve known that for a long time. If I can’t even do that, what good am I?”

  Kirk had a ready answer for that one. “You’re—”

  “There’s no point in my being here,” Abraham interrupted, his voice bitter. “There’s nothing for me to do, and everyone else just wants to tell me what I’m thinking and feeling, and telling me they understand when they don’t know a damn thing.”

  Kirk nodded. He had a feeling the boy was more right than wrong about that.

  “There were problems at home, Abraham,” he said, looking inside for the intuitive sense that had guided him through years of successful negotiations. “You were pretty badly beat up.”

  “I fell—”

  “Don’t give me that line of bull,” Kirk warned before Abraham could compromise himself with another lie. “I’m guessing one of your mother’s friends did it to you.”

  His stomach came close to rejecting the dinner he’d just eaten when Abraham’s silence acknowledged the truth of Kirk’s words.

  “Did he do anything else?” Kirk wanted to avoid the path he was taking, but knew he couldn’t. “Before he hit you?”

  “No!” There was too much vehemence in the boy’s voice. More than mere offense at the question.

  “Did he try?”

  The boy turned, and while Kirk couldn’t be sure, he suspected there was a hint of moisture in the boy’s eyes. “So what if he did?”

  “So nothing as long as he didn’t succeed,” Kirk said, his blood boiling with a need to find the bastard and squeeze the breath from his body.

  “He didn’t.” Abraham was staring at the floor and Kirk could tell the boy wasn’t being completely honest. But because he was fairly certain from Abraham’s tone that the man hadn’t done more than try, he didn’t know, at that moment, how much it mattered that Abraham talk about it.

  “And you don’t think that was reason enough to take you out of there? Next time you might not get so lucky.”

  “I wasn’t at home when it happened,” Abraham said, looking over at Kirk. “The guy wasn’t one of my mom’s, uh, anyone she—he’d never been to our house. He wanted to come over and she’d told him no because he gave her the creeps. He was just some drunk that asked her out and she turned him down.”

  “So how’d he find you?”

  “I don’t know.” Abraham shrugged. “I was hanging out down the street and he pulled up and started talking to me. Asked me if I knew where Carla Billings lived. I lied to him. Gave him directions to where one of my old teachers lives. An hour later he came looking for me.”

  The muscles in Kirk’s neck were so tight they hurt. “And where was your mother when all this was going on?”

  “Home,” Abraham said. “Working. But she’s the one who saved me, Coach. I was in that parking lot, thinking I was a goner and she came rushing up out of nowhere like she’s a superhero or something. She kicked the guy and screamed so much he took off before someone could come arrest his ass.”

  An ideal life for a twelve-year-old.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Abraham said, his voice calm now, as though he were the adult and Kirk the child, the one needing assurance. “But that kind of stuff happens to all kinds of kids, Coach. It could happen to me here just as easily as it did there, probably easier ’cause I don’t know the ins and outs like I do at home. And my mom takes care of me, Coach. I know things don’t look so great, but we’re all the family we’ve got. And family is everything. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  Out of the mouths of twelve-year-old kids….

  “Yeah, I learned that,” he said, his throat dry. “But, honestly, Abe, wouldn’t you prefer a normal home life?”

  “Normal compared to what?” the boy asked. “I know kids at school whose dads beat ’em up on a regular basis. I just got beat up once. Besides, this is the life I was given.”

  “It doesn’t have to stay that way,” Kirk said, arguing a side he wasn’t sure he agreed with. Valerie had made a mistake about Brian, and Kirk believed she’d made a mistake in supporting her peer on this one.

  “Listen,” Abraham said, an adult in a kid’s body. “At least before, I had something, you know? Now I got no family at all. Maybe for some kids this would be better, but not for me.”

  “You haven’t even tried.”

  “What’s to try?” he asked, bitterness returning to his voice. “My mom’s the one I belong to, she’s where I have a place and a job to do. If I can’t do that, I’m nothing.”

  The boy was wrong about that, but Kirk was unable to help Abraham to see things any other way. Maybe because he wasn’t clear on the whole thing, either. Instead, he saw something in a disadvantaged young man that, as a thirty-four-year-old multimillionaire, he hadn’t understood himself. A sense of what mattered most.

  Against the prompting of an inner self he didn’t often get along with, Kirk pulled up in front of the Mortons’ at eight o’clock sharp, just as he’d said he would, and dropped off a young man who’d lost everything that mattered to him. A boy who was giving up.

  A STRANGE KIND of adrenaline pumping through her veins, Valerie barely got around the corner from dropping off the boys the following Friday afternoon before picking up her cell phone.

  “How would you like to go to dinner?”

  “Valerie?”

  She couldn’t blame him for his surprise.

  “Yeah, I know, we don’t do dinner, but I just left the boys with friends who’re taking them camping overnight. I have a free evening and I don’t want to waste it.”

  Strange how spending some time with him was the only thing that didn’t seem like a waste of time at the moment. Freedom did strange things to an otherwise focused and responsible single mother. “Besides,” she continued before he could answer, “I want to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “I’ll tell you at dinner.”

  “Is that a bribe to get me to go?”

  She pulled up to the stop sign at the next intersection. And, with no traffic behind her, stayed there. She’d been thinking about him all week, about his teenage years. And the man he’d become.

  She admired him. A lot.

  “Do I need one?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She hadn’t thought so.

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN the wine.

  There was no other explanation for the fact that she was sitting out by her pool with Kirk Chandler later that night. They’d had dinner—her treat, although she’d had to excuse herself, find their waiter and pay the check before Kirk figured out what she was doing. She’d thanked him for the miracle of Brian’s doctor’s appointment that week. Her son had gained ten pounds. And she’d admitted that his way of handling Brian’s problem had worked.

  Then, somehow, they’d ended up with a bottle of wine and two glasses, relaxing on the upholstered lounge chairs on her landscaped patio.

  “Did you ask the doctor about Blake’s stomachaches?” Kirk asked after they’d been sitting there, quietly enjoying the night, for several minutes.

  She nodded, smiled again. It had really been a good week. “He said to give him a daily laxative for the next week or two. Who’d have thought the solution would be so simple?”

  “Has it helped?”

  God, it felt great to be here with him, sharing concern for her kids. “It’s too soon to tell.”

  Christmas carols played softly in the background, piped outside through the sound system Thomas had had installed when they’d built the house.

  “I can’t believe there are only two mo
re days of school before Christmas break,” Valerie said, thinking of all the shopping she had left to do. She still wrapped and hid Santa gifts for her sons, although she suspected the tradition was really more for her. Thomas had disillusioned the boys about Santa when they were seven. He hadn’t been willing to expend the effort to keep up the pretense.

  At least she’d already sent off all the packages to her various family members.

  “Did the boys tell you they’re supposed to drop off their clean uniforms at the gym tomorrow?” They’d lost the last game before the finals the previous afternoon.

  “Yeah. They’re all ready to go.”

  She sipped her wine, astonished by how different life could feel in such a short period of time. A week ago she hadn’t been sure how she was going to hang on. Tonight she thought she could take on the world. And win.

  “Who did your fountain?” Kirk asked, gesturing to the rock waterfall and flowers by one end of the pool area.

  “My husband.”

  “Talented man.”

  He’d had a lot of talents. Just not a lot of values. Something she hadn’t known until it was too late.

  The antithesis of Kirk Chandler. She’d never met a man with his priorities so completely focused on the things that mattered in life.

  Leaning her head against the cushion, she let the wine, the unusual freedom, take her away.

  “So why aren’t you doing more with your talents?” she wondered aloud, finding herself in a state of drifting relaxation…and giving in to it.

  One part of her recognized that if it hadn’t been for that state, she would never have asked the question.

  “Which talents might those be?” Kirk’s voice sounded just as relaxed.

  “Whichever ones allow you to afford a mint-condition 1965 Corvette.” Her boys had told her the year. And many more things about the car that she couldn’t remember.

  “That would be merely the gift of receiving,” he said lazily. “The car belonged to my father.”

  “How long have you been driving it?”

  “Seventeen years.”

  “And you’re what, thirty-five or six?”

  “Thirty-four.” He glanced over at her. “How about you?”

  Three years older than he was. Valerie took another sip of wine, watching the lights from the pool reflect the natural-rock waterfall.

  “Thirty-seven.”

  The youngest female judge ever to sit on the bench in Arizona’s Superior Court. And three years older than he was. When she was a senior in high school, he’d have been a freshman. But hey, her brother, Adam, would’ve been in sixth grade when his current girlfriend was a senior.

  She lowered her glass, stared at him in the soft patio lighting. “Your father gave a vintage Corvette to a seventeen-year-old?”

  He shrugged. Sipped his wine. Frowned at the pool. “He liked me.”

  “I like my boys, too, but I sure won’t be giving them even a beat-up nonvintage sports car at that age.” It was too much too soon. In the hands of a young and restless spirit.

  “I was an only child.”

  “That’s still no reason. Did you at least have to work for it?”

  “No.”

  “Was it always that way? Expensive toys just handed to you?”

  He emptied his glass, refilled it, and topped hers off, too. She didn’t intend to drink it. Based on how loose her tongue had become, she’d already had too much.

  “Always,” he said several seconds later. “Toys and clothes. And places on teams.”

  Valerie would have gasped out loud if his sardonic tone of voice hadn’t stopped her.

  “You never had to work for anything,” she said, her voice softening as she glanced over at him. Wishing he’d look at her instead of out into the night.

  “I worked hard at getting into trouble.”

  “You rose above it.” And she knew the value of that. Knew how seldom it happened.

  He sipped again. “So it would appear.” His eyes narrowed as he spoke.

  Finally, she understood his lack of motivation. He’d never had to work for anything, which meant he’d never been taught a proper work ethic. She could help him with that. Work ethic was something she’d been born with.

  And if she hadn’t, her parents had instilled it in her as a child.

  Valerie took a couple of sips of the wine she wasn’t going to have.

  She had to sit down with him, list his talents, find out what he loved. And hated. They’d find a place for him—something to do that used all aspects of his talents instead of just some.

  His parents should have done that with him before he ever left high school. Was this why he’d been so unhappy in the corporate world? Because he’d had no goals? Nothing to work toward?

  “What did your father do?”

  “Owned and ran the Desert Oasis regional supermarket chain.”

  “Oh!” She shifted in her chair, smiling. “I used to go to one of those stores—about ten minutes from here. I loved that place! And it was always so crowded. I couldn’t believe it when it closed five years ago. What happened?”

  More wine. More staring. “He slowly handed his stock over to someone he trusted—who turned around and sold him out to a national chain.”

  “And they closed him down?”

  “He was well compensated.”

  “Yes, but some things matter more than money.” She shook her head. “To have worked so hard and then lose everything like that…”

  “He survived.” With a glance at his hardened expression, Valerie let it go. Yet she couldn’t help wondering about the bitterness in those last words.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  KIRK WASN’T GOING to sleep with her. He knew that. He didn’t even want to. On an analytical level. But physically… Emotionally…

  “I don’t even know where you live.” They were standing at her front door, allegedly so he could leave. He just hadn’t opened the door yet. Neither had she. And they’d been standing there for more than twenty minutes.

  “Not far.”

  She frowned. “Kirk, don’t you think, after all this time—after I bought you dinner and acknowledged that you were right in the way you handled my son—you could lose at least some of the evasiveness?”

  She had no idea what she asking.

  “Is our friendship only one-sided, then?” she asked, taking a step back.

  “No.” It was because he valued her friendship that he didn’t tell her who he’d been before he became Kirk, the crossing guard. Didn’t tell her he’d been exactly the same as her ex-husband. The things that man had done to her had raised enough walls inside Valerie to keep Kirk locked out forever if she ever saw the two of them in the same light.

  “I live a couple of blocks over.” He named the street.

  She stared at him. “It backs up to the mountain.”

  “Right.”

  She stepped forward again, so close he could smell her perfume. And the wine on her breath.

  “Those are the most expensive homes here in the foothills.”

  He nodded, his gut tight. She was getting too close to something he’d shut away. His past? Or a future he couldn’t have?

  “Let me guess, your father gave you that, too?”

  The knot in his stomach loosened slightly. “It was his house, yes.” One Kirk had built for his parents ten years before. And then moved into himself after the divorce. They’d already been in Florida by then, and the house had been sitting empty, anyway….

  She blinked, her eyes a little cloudy from the late hour, the wine—and maybe something more? Some of the same confusion that was clouding his usually rational and single-focused mind? “And you can afford the upkeep?”

  One corner of his mouth turned up. “You afraid I might end up on the street?”

  “No.” But she was still frowning.

  “I can afford the bills.”

  “Do your parents send you money?”

  Kirk lifted a hand to smooth
the frown from her forehead, trailing his fingers down the side of her face. Distraction was his only goal.

  “I made some money on the sale of the family business,” he said. It was more than he wanted to tell her. More than he’d told anyone in his new life. He couldn’t seem to lie effectively to this woman.

  “So you’re independently wealthy.”

  She hadn’t stepped away or removed her face from his touch.

  “I can afford to pay my electric bill,” he said dismissively, much more interested in the smooth skin beneath his fingertips. It had been a long time since he’d allowed himself the luxury of caressing a woman.

  He discounted that night with her in the park, when he’d kissed her but hadn’t been able to give in to the need to enjoy a simple touch. The last time had been with Susan. The evening he’d seen her at their daughter’s grave…

  “Still,” she said, her voice soft, growing huskier, “a man should use his talents….”

  Kirk kissed her. He hadn’t made any kind of conscious decision. Just needed to shut her up.

  And to taste her again.

  He waited for her to pull back, fully aware of her rules, counting on those rules to protect them both.

  Her breasts pressing into his chest didn’t feel as if she was pulling back. Nor did the sweet lips opening beneath his. With a vague sense of assurance that she’d stop them soon, Kirk deepened the kiss, his lips playing with hers, tasting, discovering.

  She was sweet, with wine—and with her own unique essence. Her tongue was bolder than he’d expected, confident, not at all shy in either advancement or exploration. The intrusion set his blood on fire, making him instantaneously hard.

  And if he’d thought she wouldn’t notice that reaction, she quickly disabused him of that idea as she pushed her hips against him, fanning a flame spreading quickly out of control.

  “Valerie?” He drew back, breath ragged, wondering if he’d have to be the one to prevent a disaster from happening. Though, at the moment, with the wine slowing his brain, he wasn’t sure how anything that felt so incredible could be a disaster.

  “Mmm?”

  Her eyes opened slowly, focusing on him. He waited for reason to dawn. And while she stood there, gazing up at him with a peculiarly peaceful expression on her face, he continued to wait.