Allie was suddenly positive he had never willingly shirked a responsibility since that terrible day. “Your mother probably feels exactly the same about the choices she made. If she hadn’t gone shopping on just that afternoon, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. I’m sure she doesn’t blame you, Gage. No mother could.”
“Maybe not consciously. But I can see it in her eyes every time we’re together. Like I said, it’s easier on everyone if we just go on the way we have been, each busy with our own separate lives.”
Though she wanted to argue the point, she knew she couldn’t, not when talking about his sister was far more painful than any physical therapy exercises.
They finished the exercises in a stilted silence, each lost in thought. Allie couldn’t bring herself to make inane conversation, not now, when she was beginning to suspect her feelings for Gage McKinnon were undergoing a monumental shift.
Somehow in the course of the last few days, she had gone from being attracted to him—a woefully mild word for the heat that sizzled under her skin when she was around him—to feeling something more. Something deeper. A terrifying storm surge of emotions lurked inside her, just waiting until she could find a moment of peace to sort them all out.
This was not that moment, though. Not when his skin was warm under her hands, and tension still seethed and coiled between them and he watched her out of those veiled gray eyes that saw entirely too much.
After they finished the exercises and Lisa left, Gage transferred to the wheelchair and maneuvered as close to the bedroom window as he could manage. Here he could look out on the backyard, at the masses of flowers his landlady tended so assiduously and the leaves of the big maple fluttering in the breeze and the sunshine gleaming on the grass.
The door had been left ajar, and he could hear Lisa moving around in the kitchen, no doubt busy with preparations for his dinner. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t at all hungry, to order her just to pack up her girls and her pretty little face and the compassion in her blue eyes and leave him the hell alone for a while.
He couldn’t wait for her to be gone, to be alone for the evening. He craved solitude, needed it like a man who was starving to death yearned for a mouthful of bread.
Why had he spilled his guts to her like that?
He hadn’t intended to. One minute they’d been arguing about his mother, the next all that terrible wash of guilt and shame had gushed out of him like blood from a gaping wound.
He shouldn’t have said anything. He couldn’t quite figure out why he hadn’t just told her to mind her own damn business about his family, to let the whole subject drop. He didn’t owe Lisa Connors any explanations. None whatsoever. She wasn’t his pal or his therapist or, heaven knows, his girlfriend, despite their charged kiss of the day before.
She was only his nosy neighbor, his hired baby-sitter. Nothing more.
Yet once again she had somehow managed to wring out of him words he had no intention of revealing to anyone.
Yeah, the unexpectedness of Wyatt’s visit had left him off balance and disconcerted, but that wasn’t explanation enough for why he had shared his most private thoughts with Lisa.
What was it about her that inspired such confidences? He didn’t know, but whatever it was, he’d sure like to be able to bottle it and whip it out the next time he was interrogating a suspect in a case.
Maybe it was some combination of those unfeigned emotions she made no effort to hide. When he had told her the whole grisly story about that August afternoon, he had seen compassion and empathy and a heartfelt sorrow in those blue eyes.
She was genuine. Lisa Connors had a softness about her, a sincerity that he hadn’t encountered in too many people. Unlike a lot of women he knew, she didn’t play games or try to hide what was going through her head. When she looked at him, everything she was thinking was right there out in the open for the world to see.
And she didn’t hold much back. Whether she was chasing her daughters across the grass in that backyard out there or talking to that home-care nurse, Estelle, or trying her best to comfort a cranky lawman with two bum legs, she threw her whole heart and soul into the task at hand.
He had to admit, she had taken good care of him during the time she’d worked for him. To a man used to eating out and bachelor fare, the meals she cooked were manna. He hadn’t eaten this well since before his parents split up. Beyond that, she was always careful to make sure he had everything he needed within reach.
Lisa Connors was a nurturer, clear to her bones. It was obvious in everything she did, from the frequent affectionate hugs and kisses he saw her give her daughters to the fresh flowers she cut for his room each day, to the care she took to inflict as little pain as possible whenever she had to fuss with his injured legs.
He wasn’t sure why that aspect of her personality appealed to him so much but it drew him to her. Maybe because he had lived so long in a hard, unforgiving world that being around her soft gentleness was like sitting for a few moments somewhere peaceful and quiet like that garden out there.
It would be far too easy to develop feelings for her.
The thought scared the living hell out of him. He couldn’t afford to have feelings for her. He had nothing to offer someone like Lisa, absolutely nothing soft or gentle inside of him to give back to a woman who had already lost so much.
As soon as he could get around again on his own, he would return to work and they would go their separate ways. She’d get a job at some hospital or nursing home or doctor’s office somewhere, and they probably wouldn’t even see each other again, except maybe for the occasional encounter on the way to the mailbox.
She and her sunny smile and her spring-like scent and her daughters would be out of his life, and he could go back to normal.
That’s the way he wanted it, the way things had to be. So why did he find the prospect so depressing?
Chapter 11
Her arms aching, Allie hurried through her house to the laundry room off the kitchen, then set down the heavy plastic basket full of soaking-wet bedding.
It was just her luck that Gage’s dryer decided to blitz out on her when she still had three loads of his laundry left to do that day. Until Mrs. Jensen had a chance to send her son over to take a look at the blasted thing, Allie would just have to cart everything over to her own place to use her dryer—either that or she could hang it all up to snap and blow in the June sunshine.
As if she needed one more thing to worry about. Her blood glucose levels were being wacky, she hadn’t slept well the night before and she’d nearly had a heart attack earlier that morning on the way back from the grocery store when a police officer had followed her for six blocks.
The squad car had eventually pulled off onto a side street, but her pulse still hadn’t settled down. If she couldn’t manage to somehow develop a tougher skin and stop panicking at every little thing, she would never survive life on the run.
And if she didn’t hurry here, she would never get through the laundry, she chided herself. Sighing at her own paranoia, she removed the load of towels she had thrown in the dryer the night before then quickly transferred Gage’s linens inside.
She had left Anna and Gaby playing in his backyard and she didn’t want to be away from them for too long. Still, she decided she had time to fold that batch of towels rather than leave them on top of the dryer. That would be one less thing she had to do later that night when she and the girls returned back to their own house.
Except for that day’s near encounter with the Park City police officer, things were going quite well, she reminded herself. She had nothing to complain about.
Working for Gage really was a perfect situation in nearly every way, almost like working from home, since she was close enough to run over here if she needed anything—if the girls ran out of toys or she needed to run a test strip or, like now, she just needed to run over and toss a load of clothes into the dryer.
Gaby and Anna had settled into a routine where they played to
gether outside or watched a video in the morning, then went to the park with Jessica Farmer and her younger siblings for a few hours in the afternoon.
They loved those times with friends but also seemed to be basking in the extra time and attention Allie was able to give them in the mornings. It would be hard on them all when this little idyll ended.
Not exactly an idyll, she corrected herself. Maybe it would be if not for Gage and her tangle of feelings for him. But she was coming to care for him far too much, and it scared her worse than any Park City police officer tailing her in a squad car.
Their conversation the day before hadn’t helped matters. She thought of his reluctantly shared revelations about his sister’s kidnapping and the guilt he still carried inside him, more than twenty years later. Sadness flooded through her again just remembering it. No child should have to cope with that burden of shame and culpability.
Why hadn’t his parents sensed what he was feeling? They should have insisted on counseling of some sort for both Gage and his brother to help them cope with the tragedy and their own loss.
Did his mother truly look at him with blame in her eyes when they were together, as he said? She couldn’t imagine it. What loving mother could encumber her son with such a millstone?
She didn’t even know his parents, probably never would, but for a moment she wanted to find them and give them both a good, hard shake. They should have done more to reach out to their son so he wouldn’t still be carrying this heavy load into adulthood.
Of course, it was easy from the outside to pass judgment on what had happened more than two decades ago. How could she presume to know the hell his parents had gone through?
Gage said they had divorced and gone their separate ways shortly after his sister disappeared. Obviously, the stress and grief of losing their youngest child had been more than their fractured family unit could survive. Somehow his complicated feelings about his sister’s disappearance had slipped through the cracks of their broken home.
What he had told her did much to explain his prickly exterior. Of course he would be impatient and frustrated by his injuries and the inaction that had been forced upon him.
For a man so passionate, so dedicated to his career—and to atoning for the mistakes he believed he had made—finding himself at loose ends must chafe terribly.
She wasn’t sure if she liked being able to see past his thorniness to the man inside. Knowing and understanding what drove him only showed her what a good, decent, caring man he was.
Oh, she was in trouble. She cared about him far too deeply already. Allie folded the last towel and blew out a breath. She was afraid to use a word like love—how could she love a man she had only known for a few weeks? It seemed impossible, wholly inconceivable.
But she couldn’t deny the burgeoning strength of her own emotions. How could she, when they seemed so wonderfully familiar?
She and Jaime had shared a deep, satisfying love for five years. When he died, she thought she would never know those feelings again. It terrified her to find them fluttering to fledgling life inside her again—and for a hard, callous man like Gage McKinnon, someone so very different from her gentle, lighthearted Jaime.
When the time came to move on with the girls, how would she be able to avoid having to nurse a broken heart along the way? She didn’t see any way around it. A broken heart was all she would receive from Gage McKinnon. All she could receive.
She could see no good outcome. How could there be anything but heartache and pain? Any way their time together ended, it would end badly. Either she would be forced to run again, leaving him without a word, or Gage would discover she was a fugitive.
He would hate her for deceiving him these past few weeks!
She sensed he was a man who didn’t give his trust easily. It had taken a huge measure of trust for him to confide in her the day before about his sister, something she sensed he didn’t tell many people. If he found out how unworthy she was of that trust, he would be livid.
She had lied about her identity, about her past, about everything. She had no doubt that Gage was not the sort who would be quick to forgive such a betrayal.
On the other hand, if—when?—she was forced to flee with the girls, her abrupt disappearance would likely make him confused and angry.
What a tangled mess. She supposed one of the first rules of life on the run was not to allow herself to form any attachments to anyone. Far better to stay aloof and isolated than to have to deal with these kinds of painful complications.
Too bad there wasn’t some sort of fugitive handbook that spelled such things out, but she supposed she would have to make her own stumbling way. In the future she would just have to forsake any close ties, no matter how foreign that might be to her personality.
The trick now was how to unravel herself from the mess, to safeguard what was left of her heart so she wouldn’t be left completely devastated. Surely she was strong enough, smart enough, to protect herself. She just had to be as tough and remote as Gage.
With firm resolve to avoid further emotional encounters with him, Allie picked up the empty laundry basket and headed back toward his house. On the way, she decided to make a quick detour to his backyard so she could check on Gaby and Anna.
Her mind was still on her jumbled emotions when she opened the latched gate and slipped through, into the fragrant, beautiful garden Ruth Jensen had created. Her gaze scanned the garden, the towering spires of the irises and the smaller, delicate alyssum and the bright, cheerful clumps of daisies.
Nothing moved but the old wooden swing the girls loved to play in swaying a little in the breeze and a magpie on a tree branch screeching at the neighbor’s cat, which had decided one of Gage’s windowsills made the perfect spot to stretch out in the sun.
Where were the girls? For one terrible moment, all she could think of was Gage’s sister, disappearing from his life in one foolish instant of inattention. Her breathing quickened, and raw fear clutched her stomach as she scanned the garden again with wild eyes.
Settle down, she chided herself. No need to panic. Gaby and Anna probably just went inside for a drink of water or a bathroom break. Still, her heart pounded as she rushed up his back steps.
She heard them before she saw them—high-pitched giggles and then a lower rumble, like an oboe base line set against a duo of flutes.
Relief flooded her, sweet and pure, and she pushed open the door separating the utility room from Gage’s kitchen. The greeting she started to give them jammed in her throat at the sight that met her gaze and her jaw sagged.
“Oh, my,” she whispered, unable to say anything else.
Anna and Gaby giggled again. “Look, Mommy,” Gaby exclaimed with glee. “We’re playing beauty shop.”
“Don’t say a word,” Gage warned on a growl. “Not one single word.”
She blinked several times, but the same image reappeared each time—the three of them at the kitchen table, the girls grinning at Gage in his wheelchair, masculine and commanding and brusque.
And currently decorated with what looked like a hundred pastel barrettes stuck in his short dark hair, tufting it out in every direction.
“Oh, my,” she said again. How on earth had this happened? She couldn’t have been gone longer than ten minutes. Leave it to Hurricane Gaby and her little sidekick to wreak havoc in their mother’s absence.
“Me and Anna wanted to try out the new barrettes you bought us at the store today and Mr. McDonalds said it was okay.”
“McKinnon. Remember, I told you his name was Mr. McKinnon. Not McDonalds.”
“Gage is probably easier to say,” he said, his voice gruff.
“Gage,” Anna said suddenly. “Gage, Gage, Gage.”
Allie didn’t know what to do about the warmth flooding through her. So much for her determination to protect the intact remnants of her heart. Oh, heavens, it would be far too easy to tumble hard and fast, completely, for this man!
“Doesn’t Gage look nice?”
Gaby asked.
“Yes. Very.” Despite her sudden fear that any barriers she tried to build between them now would go up far too late, she couldn’t hide her grin. “I especially like the row of ducklings there in the front.”
“I did those,” Gaby said proudly.
A ruddy color accented his cheekbones like the russet feathers of a mallard drake and he looked as if he would rather be anywhere else on earth than here in this warm kitchen with her two little budding hairstylists. Allie couldn’t help but take pity on him.
“As nice as Mr. McKinnon looks, I think we need to take out the barrettes so they’ll be ready for the two of you to wear another day.”
Both girls opened their mouths to protest but she forestalled them. “Why don’t you each get one of those Popsicles we bought at the store? You can take them out in the backyard and eat them.”
As usual, the promise of sugar provided an alluring enough distraction. Gaby hurried to the freezer and pulled out two frozen treats. After handing one to her younger sister, she led the way outside, leaving Allie and Gage alone in the kitchen.
“You do look very nice,” she teased after the back door slammed shut behind her two little beauticians in training. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to leave them in for the rest of the day?”
“That’s not funny.” He glared at her, in the midst of pulling out one of the barrettes along with several strands of hair.
She couldn’t help laughing again. “You might think differently if you could see what you look like. Wait,” she said suddenly. “Don’t take any more out for a second.”
It only took her a moment to rush to the front room where she left her purse and find a mirrored compact inside. She returned to the kitchen and held it out for Gage.
She might have been offering him an anaconda for all the enthusiasm he showed as he took the compact from her, but as he studied his reflection, a wry smile lifted the corners of that sensual mouth.
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