Only it seemed that maybe they still did.
Back then she was in the society pages a couple of times a month, going to this charity ball and that fund-raising luncheon, wearing the latest designer fashions and with what he ’d come to think of as her boyfriend of the month in tow. He ’d known the posse of girls she hung out with for about as long as he’d known her, but they, and he, existed in different milieus. Theirs was the country-club set, his the working-stiff set, and the two rarely mingled. Pulling himself up by the bootstraps by dint of sheer hard work, hobnobbing with wealthy Lexington power players on a somewhat equal basis for the first time in his life, he watched his boss and his boss’s boss kowtow to moneyed families like the Grants and realized just how wide the gulf between him and Lisa still was.
Then, while he was still feeling his way into his career, she was gone.
After that he saw her around only occasionally, when she came home to visit. She was as sexy and beautiful and sure of herself as she had always been, but by then he’d grown up and wised up and learned that it was best to leave trouble the hell alone whenever possible. He still wanted to get in her pants, and he was as sure as it was possible to be that she wouldn’t exactly run shrieking in the opposite direction if he made the attempt, but he didn’t. Exactly why he didn’t he couldn’t have said, because as her party-girl reputation made far too clear, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been taking anything that wasn’t widely available. Except maybe that was it. Maybe he had a burning aversion to becoming just one more choo-choo in the train. Or maybe he just had too much respect for Miss Martha, who had done more for him, growing up, than anybody he could think of—certainly more than his own kith and kin—than to bed her wayward daughter. Yeah, he liked to think that was it.
When Miss Martha’s health had brought Lisa home in October, he ’d been aware that she was back, even caught a few glimpses of her, but he ’d been content to keep his distance. His career was taking off; he was making plenty of money; he had ambitions that included the governorship someday. He was working hard, focused, getting the job done for the county and for himself. The last thing he needed in his life was to find himself jonesing for Lisa Grant again. A fling with a socialite who was in town only until her mother died and she could hightail it back to Boston didn’t fit into his plans. Then she ’d come to him and asked for a job.
Hell, he’d known better. He ’d almost said no. But she’d looked at him out of those big caramel-colored eyes and explained her situation, said that she’d take anything, that she was asking for her mother’s sake, as a favor, and he’d caved. He hadn’t really thought she’d take the research assistant position that he ’d offered her, but she had accepted on the spot.
Since then, since he ’d boneheadedly allowed her back into his life on a near-daily basis, she ’d bugged the hell out of him. Oh, not by coming on to him. Thank God she’dgrown up enough to have cut that out. She wasn’t even doing it on purpose, he knew. But just having her around bugged him. Knowing she was there in the same building bugged him. Hearing her voice, seeing her frown over a brief as she worked in her cubicle, watching her walk past his office with that inimitable sway of hers, getting a glimpse of her standing in line for the copy machine, even having to listen to other people talk about her, bugged him.
Watching her kiss Joel Peyton from his window that morning had bugged him most of all.
Tonight, when she ’d suggested they go to Jimmy’s together, he ’d still been bugged enough that he had almost taken her up on it.
Then he ’d regained enough judgment to turn her down. The plain truth was that he was hot for her and she was almost certainly willing, and given those facts, that meal at Jimmy’s could very well have wound up with them in bed. Though he’d fantasized about sleeping with her for most of his life, he had just enough sense left to know that actually doing it would be a mistake. The kind of gigantic, catastrophic mistake that could derail him, personally and professionally.
He wasn’t going to let it happen. He’d worked too hard, and too long, to get where he was.
The thing was, seeing her on the swing had taken him back. He ’d grabbed the ropes, just as he had many times many years before, and she’d tilted her head back and laughed at him. Even as he pushed her, it had hit him: They were all grown up now. He could have her if he wanted.
Heat had blown through him at the thought. He ’d been just smart enough to turn around and walk away.
Congratulating himself for using the intelligence God gave him was what he ought to be doing about now. Instead he felt more like punching a wall.
The ringing of his cell phone distracted him. Glancing down, he saw the number scrolling across his caller ID and grimaced: Janie.
He didn’t pick up.
Janie Ungar was a twenty-six-year-old loan officer at his bank. She was a college graduate from a middle-class family in Lexington. Bright and pretty, with short brown hair and a petite but curvaceous figure, she was exactly the kind of nice, wholesome girl he ought to be seeing. He’d taken her out regularly throughout the spring, enough so that she had started to think of them as a couple. Only they weren’t, not in his mind, at least. He ’d realized she was getting too serious and he ’d started backing away, and then when that hadn’t worked he’d spelled it out for her, although as gently as he could. All that had happened about three weeks ago.
Ask yourself why.
All right, so the timing coincided loosely with Lisa’s arrival in his office. He didn’t like to think that the two events had any bearing on each other. But probably they did.
I was just trying to be nice to you.
Lisa’s parting shot still rankled. If he let her, he had no doubt she would be nice to him, all right, just like she ’d been nice to no telling how many guys before him. Then she would move on to the next poor fool with as little remorse as a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, and he would be left to deal with the wreckage she left behind.
Put your hand in the fire and it’s gonna get burned.
Appropriate as it was, the warning that popped into his head had been issued in another context, and Scott found himself frowning at the memory it evoked. They’d burned a lot of trash in the yard when he was growing up, and his father’s method of teaching him to keep away from the fire had been rough and ready: a warning, delivered in a drunken taunt and accompanied by grabbing his wrist and thrusting his hand out over leaping flames that were just high enough to singe his fingers and palm. It had been right after his mother’s death, so he’d been about six years old, but he could still remember the searing pain and the cry he gave as he snatched his hand to safety while his father laughed.
Bastard, he thought dispassionately of the old man as the Jeep reached the end of the lane.
Braking, he glanced over at his father’s house, which should have been dark and deserted, and was surprised to find that it was not. Lights were on in the living room and kitchen, and a car and a pickup truck were in the driveway. The white Ford F-150 he thought he recognized: Unless he was mistaken, the pickup belonged to his brother. The green Lawn-Pro logo painted on the driver’s door clinched it. Lawn-Pro was the yard-cutting service that his brother owned.
As far as he knew, Ryan hadn’t spoken to their dad in more than a year. What was he doing at the house? And who did he have with him?
Whatever was going on, if it involved Ryan, it probably wasn’t anything good.
Blowing out a sigh, wishing that he was anywhere else, knowing that the problem was his to deal with, Scott turned left, bumped up onto the lawn, stopped the Jeep, and got out.
7
Thumping, bass-heavy music greeted Scott’s ears, barely muffled because it was blasting away inside the house. He and Ryan were the opposite of close, but it wasn’t the kind of music he would have expected his brother to listen to. Of course, Ryan was clearly not alone.
Knowing his brother, that left open all sorts of unsavory possibilities.
There
was no way Ryan could have managed to get their dad out of jail. Bail hadn’t even been set yet, and unless Ryan’s finances had changed considerably, Ryan wouldn’t have had the money to bail him out in any event. So the possibility that their dad was one of the people in his house seemed remote.
Surely Ryan hadn’t brought some friends—he didn’t even want to think about what kind—to party in the empty house.
It was full twilight now. The purple of encroaching night should have softened the worn steps, the dusty porch that retained only a few slivers of its original gray paint, the scarred black front door. But nothing had changed since he’d lived there, and Scott ’s memories of the place he ’d used to dread coming home to were too entrenched to allow for any softening. The curtains were drawn over the front window as they had always been, so that from the porch you saw the stained, once white linings of the puke-green dollar-store specials that had been hanging in the living room for as long as he could remember. Bud Buchanan watched a lot of TV, hated glare, and was obsessed with the idea that people were looking in at him at all hours of the day and night, and never mind that only a few people ever drove past and the nearest neighbor, Grayson Springs, was too far away for anyone to see in even if they were interested, which they weren’t.
Music pulsed through the door, and he could hear a number of voices. He tried the knob and wasn’t surprised to find that the door was unlocked. People rarely locked their doors around there. Although he had locked this particular door himself not more than an hour previously, the new arrivals clearly hadn’t felt the need. Pushing it open, he stepped into the lamp-lit living room, took in the scene at a glance, and stopped dead.
For a moment everyone else in the room stopped in mid-motion, too, while they all stared at one another with roughly the same degree of shock.
The kids—he’d walked into a roomful of teenagers—recovered first.
“Oh, shit,” one of the boys said. Then they all started to scramble, off the couch, off the floor, out of the chair, pinching out joints, putting beer cans on the ground. The sickly-sweet smell of pot wafted beneath his nose.
“What the hell?” Scott broke off as a slight blond kid with shaggy hair, saggy jeans, and a skull and crossbones on his black T-shirt sauntered out of the kitchen, chugging a can of beer. Spotting him, the kid choked on the mouthful of brew he was swallowing and froze in his tracks, the can now clutched in a death grip, his blue eyes going wide, while Scott’s eyes narrowed on his face. On their feet now, banding together at the far side of the room, the rest of the kids, five in all, three guys and two girls, eyed him with alarm.
“Chase.” Scott’s tone turned grim as, in that moment, the scenario became crystal clear. This wasn’t his brother but his brother’s only kid, who was, if his memory served him correctly, a fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school. Ryan, who lived in Lexington, shared custody of Chase with his former wife, Gayle, who lived in Versailles. Given that Ryan’s truck was parked in the yard, Scott was pretty sure that the kid had come from Ryan’s. One thing he knew for sure: Chase wasn’t yet old enough to drive.
“I thought you said your grandpa was in jail,” one of the boys said in an accusing tone. “I thought you said the house would be empty.”
“My grandpa is in jail.” Chase recovered his aplomb. “My bad about the house being empty. This is my uncle. Hey, Scott.”
With an elaborately casual nod at him, Chase resumed his walk into the living room, taking a swig from the beer in his hand for good measure. The purpose, Scott knew, was to prove to his friends just how cool he was.
Shit.
He didn’t want to embarrass the kid, but there was no way he could let this pass. He barely knew his nephew, just like he barely knew his brother anymore. Just as he himself had, Ryan had done his own thing since escaping from this hellhole, and if they spoke once every three or four months they were doing something. But here he was, a presumably responsible adult, faced with a roomful of kids breaking the law in so many ways he didn’t know where to start. That one of them was his own nephew was simply the icing on the cake.
So handle it.
“Go pour the beer down the sink in the kitchen,” he said in a level tone as Chase, chugging from the can again, high-fived one of his relieved-looking friends. Another of the boys—older-looking, taller than Chase but still spindly in the way of teenage boys, with spiky black hair and a single earring—was already leaning down to retrieve his beer from the floor. Straightening with it in his hand, he met Scott’s gaze. There was defiance in his eyes, but Scott thought that beneath it he detected a trace of uncertainty, too.
“All of you,” Scott added firmly. “Go pour it out.”
“Man, that ’s a waste of good brew,” the kid protested.
“Do it.”
Chase shot him a challenging look. “Just because you’re my uncle don’t give you the right to tell me or my friends what to do.”
“Then how ’bout just because I’m the Fayette County prosecutor with the power to throw all of you into juvie hall?” The smile he gave Chase was grim. Pulling his cell phone from his pocket, he held it up for them to see. “I’m giving you all to the count of ten to go pour out the beer and get back in here or I call the cops. Oh, and you can put any pot or anything else illegal you have on you down there on that coffee table when you get back. You don’t take this chance to come clean and I find it on you later, you’re in big trouble. And anybody getting the bright idea of running for it, forget it. I took down your license-plate number before I came in.”
The lie came easily to his lips.
“Is he for real?” the kid holding the beer asked Chase.
Chase shrugged, looking sullen. “Maybe.”
“Yeah, I’m for real. Believe it. One.” Scott started to count, while his nephew cast him a look of loathing. “Two.”
“Come on,” Chase said in a sulky tone to his friends. Gathering up beers, shooting him angry looks, they trooped to the kitchen. Scott moved so that he could keep them in view. When they trudged back into the living room, Scott was on seven.
“Pot.” He indicated the rickety faux-maple table that had occupied pride of place in front of the ancient green tweed couch for as long as he could remember. In a nice counterbalance to the differing shades of green offered by the couch and the curtains, the walls were a faded mustard and the only chair was a brown vinyl recliner. His dad ’s pride and joy, an aging, console-type big-screen TV, stood in front of the closed curtains. A cheap landscape hung over the couch, and a rectangle of carpet remnant in a never-show-dirt shade of brown covered most of the floor.
“Satisfied?” Chase glared at him as his friends dropped a few joints on the coffee table.
“Nine. I’m telling you, this is your last chance.” Scott glanced sternly around the group. One girl was plump, with long, dyed blond hair and too much eyeliner. The other was thin, with short, black hair and a ring through her nose. Both were about five-foot-five and wore tight tees—pink for the blonde, green for the brunette—over tiny little shorts. One of the boys had glasses and a blond buzz cut. Another had a sweep of brown hair carefully styled to cover one eye. All wore saggy jeans and tees. The kid with the sweeping hair grimaced and dug into a pocket of his jeans. He came up with a baggie, which he dropped on the table. In the baggie was a whole lot of what looked like crumbled grass. Pot, enough for maybe a dozen or more joints. Enough so that the idiot kid was looking at possession with intent to sell.
“What ’s your name?” he asked the kid.
“Austin.”
“Austin what?”
“Spicer.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“You dealing?” The amount of pot prompted the question.
“No! It’s just for us.”
The indignation on his face convinced Scott he was telling the truth. Which made the situation better but not a whole hell of a lot better.
Shit again. This I do not need.
<
br /> “Please don’t call the police.” The plump blonde was visibly shaking. Her eyes, which were ringed by enough black eyeliner to do a raccoon proud, beseeched him. “I’ve got a three-point-eight grade point average. My mom says if I keep it up I can get a scholarship to maybe an Ivy League college. But if I get arrested, I probably won’t even be able to get into college. Any college. My mom’ll die.”
“Juvenile records are sealed,” the guy with the spiky black hair said scornfully. “You get arrested when you’re under eighteen, nobody ever knows.”
“You been arrested?” Scott asked him. If this kid had priors, it would make a difference.
“No.”
“Then where you getting your information?”
“I heard it around.”
“Any of you been arrested before?”
He was answered by a chorus of scared noes.
“Who drove?”
The kid with the spiky black hair held up a hand. Scott’s lips thinned.
“Besides the whole being underage thing, you ever hear of the law against drinking and driving?”
“I wasn’t drinking and driving! I just opened up this one beer after I got here. I didn’t even get a chance to take a sip.”
Scott had already concluded that he ’d interrupted the group almost immediately after they’d arrived. Nobody’d had time to get so much as a buzz going.
“Who else drove?”
Silence greeted that. Between the guilty expressions and the scared ones, and adding in his brother’s truck, Scott was pretty sure he knew the answer even before Chase gave him a truculent look and said, “Me.”
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