He snapped his mouth shut and plopped down on the couch next to S.G..
“That’s better.” Kate let out a breath of relief. She wasn’t used to dealing with minors. If only most clients did what she said so quickly. “Can you tell me why you came to Lost Harbor?”
He didn’t answer, apparently determined to wait for Darius.
“Okay, let’s try something else.” She turned to S.G.. “How did you get to know Dylan? You don’t have to share any of his personal details.”
S.G. waited until Dylan gave her a go-ahead nod, then answered. “He’s a runaway like me. We started talking at the high school pool. Anyone can swim there, and take a shower afterwards. I was curious about him because he was just like me when I first came here, afraid and lonely. So I followed him after swimming and found out that he was camping near the playground. No one else is camping yet, it’s still too cold and muddy. No wonder he had to take so many showers.”
A runaway. Well, that complicated things. Where were his parents? Who was responsible for him? Denaina had signed his work permission slip.
“You told us you were staying at Denaina’s,” she told him sternly. “Was that not true?”
“I am staying there. But…” He ducked his head. “She doesn’t know it. I’ve been staying in the well house. It’s heated and no one goes in there. Except S.G..”
Lovely. This just got more and more complicated. Would that be trespassing?
“Did you forge Denaina’s signature when you applied for the job here?”
Neither of them answered that, which served as answer enough to her.
“Okey-doke. So far we have arson, destruction of property, forgery, and trespassing. Not to mention pissing off Emma Gordon, which ought to be a crime in and of itself. And then there’s getting your friend into trouble.”
Dylan threw S.G. an anguished glance. “I didn’t mean to. You shouldn’t have followed me, S.G.. Why are you so good at that?”
“Tracking wild game,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “You have to be very very quiet. You’re lucky I didn’t have my bow and arrows with me.”
Dylan’s eyes widened.
“Welcome to Alaska, kid,” Kate told him. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“I’m from Texas,” he muttered. Finally, some information. Maybe S.G.’s offhanded comment about bows and arrows had distracted him.
“Texas is a very long way from Alaska. How’d you get here? That must have been quite a trip.”
For the first time, he answered a question with something like eagerness. “It was great. Part of it was on the bus and part was hitchhiking. I used a fake ID at the border.”
“Great. Let’s add that to the list.”
His face closed up again. “I know I’m in trouble. You don’t have to keep telling me.”
“Look, kid, if you’re going to work with me, you’ll have to get used to my sense of humor. It’s how I deal with shit.”
One corner of his mouth drew up, and she had an odd sense of familiarity. Maybe she was seeing her teenage self in him.
“That’s cool. Me too.”
Emma came back into the room with three mugs of tea, which she planted on the old captain’s trunk that served as a coffee table. She looked marginally calmer than before.
“Kate, if you actually want to help this boy, you should take the Alaska bar exam like I keep telling you.”
Kate had to laugh. Trust Emma to jump on any opportunity to encourage her to stay in Lost Harbor. “Nice try,” she told her. “Right now, we’re just talking.”
“Better talk fast.” Darius stood in the doorway, wiping his sooty hands on his pants. A smudge of ash darkened his cheek, adding to the effect of his overnight stubble. His expression was extremely forbidding. The atmosphere in the room instantly changed to one of dead seriousness. “You put my crew at risk with your stunts. Emma, too. Her shed, her chickens, her flowers, her livelihood. You want to talk now or after I call the police chief?”
Dylan’s face shut down and he huddled deeper into his hoodie, like a turtle into its shell.
S.G. jumped to her feet. “Don’t call Maya yet! Really. You have to wait until he explains.”
Darius’ eyebrows drew together in a fierce frown. “Why? He set a damn fire, S.G.. Maybe all the fires. Why shouldn’t I call the police?” He paused for a beat, maybe waiting for Dylan to say something.
When he didn’t, Darius pulled out his phone and scrolled through his numbers.
“Dylan!” S.G. cried. “Tell him.”
No response from the boy.
Kate wondered if she should step in, but she held her tongue. Darius was playing the “bad cop” magnificently. Also, he had every right to be pissed off.
Darius hovered his thumb over his phone. Before he could press it, S.G. launched herself into the air to tackle him.
If Darius weren’t such an oak tree of a man, he might have staggered. Instead, he caught her with one arm and quickly set her back on her feet.
“Don’t!” S.G. cried again. “Please don’t.”
“Why not?” he demanded.
“Because you’re Dylan’s father!”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The phone slid from Darius’ hand and hit the floor. He barely noticed. He stared at S.G. while her words seemed to bounce off a funhouse mirror. He must have misunderstood. Or she was making things up to keep him from calling Maya. But her wide eyes showed nothing but sincerity, and he’d never known S.G. to be deceptive.
Other than hiding out in his damn firehouse.
Since then, she’d been entirely honest.
Slowly, he swung toward the kid, Dylan. He hadn’t paid much attention to him when he’d been sitting in the truck. A wet boy in a hoodie, that was the sum total of his observations.
The boy was staring down at the floor, as if he wanted to sink right through it. Under the weight of Darius’ scrutiny, he slowly raised his head. And Darius saw in his eyes that it was true—or at least that he believed it to be true.
“Explain,” he ordered the boy, causing him to flinch.
“Darius, lighten up,” Kate said softly. She came next to him and touched his arm. “He came a long way. Seems he’s from Texas.”
He did a quick calculation. Gillian.
Holy fuck. It couldn’t be. Could it? She’d wanted to have a child—they both did. If she’d gotten pregnant, why hadn’t she told him?
“Is your mother—” He broke off because his voice was so hoarse he scared even himself.
“Gillian O’Connor,” muttered Dylan.
He stared at the boy, noting the ski-jump nose that was just like Gillian’s, and the rounded shape of his face—a male version of Gillian’s. No doubt in his mind; this was Gillian’s son. But was Dylan his son?
“Who’s the O’Connor?”
“O’Connor is my stepfather’s last name. Buck O’Connor.”
“O’Connor….” That rang a bell. The memory came swimming back. “Her boss. The owner of the restaurant chain she worked at.”
“Yeah. He’s a big shot, all right.” His bitter tone made Darius do a double take. “I knew he wasn’t my real father. He didn’t really bother to pretend after I was about six.”
Pretend. His alleged son had been raised by someone who hadn’t bothered to pretend he was a real father. Darius flexed his fists, ready to rip something apart with his bare hands. Like the cast-iron wood stove or the sheetrock in the walls. Something big. But nothing was as big as this.
“How do you know…” He cleared his throat, not quite sure how to ask the next question.
“That you’re my father? My mom told me when I was ten. She said she thought someone who owned a restaurant would be a better father because you were still in school. I guess they were having…” He shrugged, letting the sentence trail off.
An affair. He’d known about that part. He’d gotten over the cheating part of the story many years ago. Hiding his son, however…that went way, way
beyond anything he could accept. “Where is she now? Why are you here?”
“Mom…” Dylan chewed at his lower lip, suddenly looking much younger than—wait, how old was he? He must be…Darius did the math. Fifteen? “Mom died six months ago.”
A murmur of shock and sympathy swept the little group. S.G. sat back on the couch and scooted closer to him. He caught a glimpse of Kate’s dark eyes shining with sympathy.
But Darius couldn’t feel anything, at least not yet. The hits were coming too fast, one after the other.
A son. Raised by someone else. And now Gillian was gone. Really gone, not just gone from his life.
A hole opened up in the pit of his stomach. “How?” he managed.
“Cancer. Cancer sucks,” he said fiercely. “I fucking hate it.”
With that one outburst, Darius got an inkling of what this kid had been going through. “I’m sorry. Gillian and I have been out of each other’s lives for a very long time, but I loved her. You’ve…uh, been through a lot.”
But Dylan hunched back into his shell, AKA his hoodie, and shrugged. “Everyone has their shit. Before she died she told me where to find you. I have all the paperwork and everything.”
Kate spoke up gently. “I take it you stayed with your stepfather after your mother died?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“Maybe.”
Okay then. Back to monosyllables. The boy looked so miserable, slouched on the couch, the weight of the world bearing down on him, that Darius couldn’t take it. He stepped to the couch and crouched before him so he could connect with him at eye level. “Listen. I promise you that I didn’t know you existed until just now. Gillian never told me. I never suspected. Never had a reason to.”
Dylan didn’t show any obvious reaction, but Darius knew he heard every word.
“I’m happy you found me. I want to know—” He broke off, because the idea of getting to know his own teenage son was too overwhelming right now. One step at a time. “There’s a lot that I want to know. But the first thing is whether Buck O’Connor is looking for you. Does he know that you’re here?”
“I left a note that I was going to find my real father. He knows who you are, so I guess he just doesn’t really care. He’s probably relieved that I’m gone.”
“Okay. Well, just in case, we’re going to have to get ahold of him.”
Dylan shrugged, as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.
“My other question is, why’d you set those fires?” Even though he tried hard to keep his tone gentle, an edge of outrage entered his voice. Fire wasn’t something to mess around with. The idea that his own son had been setting fires around his town…it stuck in his craw.
“I don’t know.” Dylan finally looked up, revealing an expression of honest confusion. “I guess I was just mad.”
“At me?”
“No. I don’t know. I guess. You have a good life. You’re all happy and shit. You have a hot girlfriend. It’s like my mom and me never existed.” The hurt words burst out of him, seeming to surprise even himself. “I didn’t want to hurt anything. And I didn’t, not really. So what if a bunch of junk got burned up? I just wanted to mess with you. Like, why should everything be good for you and everything sucks for me?”
“Okay. I guess I can see the logic. Sort of.” He glanced back at Kate, who offered a mystified shrug but no advice.
Great. Where was the guidebook for how to deal with an angry teenage son you never knew existed? An angry teenage runaway son. An angry teenage runaway firebug son.
A son. He had a son. This complete stranger of a kid was his blood. He could barely comprehend it.
But one thing he knew for sure was that this boy needed him. He was all alone in Alaska, in trouble with the law. He needed adult supervision.
“I want you to come stay with me.” His brusque statement made Dylan’s head whip up. “You can stay on the couch.”
“But I set all those fires.”
“And you’re going to have to answer for that. But right now, that’s not the point. You’re my son and I want you to stay with me. You came all this way for a reason, right?”
“I guess so,” he muttered. Darius put a hand on his shoulder, feeling the young bones under the thick hoodie. What had those bones been like when he was a little boy, or a toddler, or a baby? The thought twisted his heart, but he couldn’t let his own emotions get in the way here. The important thing was Dylan.
“Then it’s settled.” He squeezed lightly and caught a tiny nod from the boy. Darius rose to his feet and looked down at S.G.. She was practically plastered to Dylan’s side. “S.G., did you know anything about the fires before tonight?”
She shook her head quickly. “He didn’t tell me that part. He just told me he was here to find you. I couldn’t tell you before because it wasn’t my secret. I mean, I did tell you eventually but that’s because Dylan was being so stupid and stubborn.”
He gave a wry chuckle. “Maybe it runs in the family.”
Even though Dylan’s head was still lowered, Darius caught the slightest hint of a smile from him.
Emma cleared her throat loudly. “I’m going to bed. I never did like soap operas, and now I know why. I’d like my house to myself now, if you all don’t mind. Be nice if someone can feed my chickens on the way out.” She marched out of the room.
Kate beckoned to the kids. “Come on, let’s give her some space. Dylan, you got your first chicken-feeding payback opportunity. I’ll show you the drill.” As the kids got to their feet, she added, “By the way, Darius, I’ve already offered Dylan my legal expertise. I can’t represent him, but I can help out in any other way that you need.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
“Oh, it’s not for you. It’s for him. I know how it feels to be a kid alone in the big wide world.”
“He’s not alone,” Darius corrected her. “Not anymore.”
A strange look came across her face, a very un-Kate-like expression of pure tenderness.
As Dylan gained his feet, his hood fell away from his face. For the first time, Darius got a chance to really scrutinize him. His resemblance to Gillian really was striking. Even his eyes were the same summer blue.
Kate looked back and forth between the two of them. “You know, I thought Dylan looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He looks just like you.”
Darius shook his head. “He looks like his mother. Spitting image. Same coloring, same features.”
“Maybe so, but he also looks like you.” She gestured at Dylan’s chin. “It’s all in the chin. The stubbornness. His smile is like yours too. I’ve only seen it once, but it did ring a little bell.”
Looking fed up with their inspection, Dylan pulled his hood back up. “Are you guys done arguing?”
“She’s arguing,” Darius corrected him. “I don’t argue.”
“Of course you do.” Kate shook her head at him. “You just don’t like to call it that because I usually win the arguments.”
“Oh, is that how you see it? Interesting.”
“Are you guys arguing about arguing now?” Dylan asked.
They both looked at him, and burst out laughing. “Busted,” Kate said cheerfully. “Let’s get going. We can argue on the way home.”
Home. The word suddenly felt so much more complicated. Home already had an upstairs landlady who rocked his world. Now it was getting a strange kid who’d just blown up that world.
The whole situation would have been so much more awkward without Kate around. After they said goodbye to S.G., the three of them drove home in Darius’ truck. Kate peppered Dylan with questions about Texas and what music he liked, what he did for fun, what he liked in school. Basic stuff. It gave Darius a chance to know more about him, without the burden of figuring out what to ask.
When they got back to Fairview Court, he panicked. It was almost six in the morning and they all needed some sleep—but Kate had her own bed to r
etreat to. That meant he’d be all alone with his brand-new son.
Kate gave them both a sleepy smile and a wave goodbye as she headed for the outdoor stairway.
He longed to kiss her goodnight. Or good morning, actually. Or maybe give her a “thank you for everything” kiss. Or an “I want to throw you down on a bed next chance I get” kiss.
But Dylan’s presence made him think twice about any kind of kiss. Was it appropriate? Would it upset the boy? Fuck, this was confusing.
He skipped the kiss and beckoned Dylan toward the downstairs entry. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Kate.”
That sounded more formal than he’d planned. She paused on the staircase and gave him a curious look over her shoulder. “Okay. Let me know if you need anything. Either of you.”
She hurried the rest of the way up the stairs. Darius had the strangest feeling that she was receding out of his reach, like a wave on the shore.
But why? The fires had been solved. There was no need for her to leave anymore.
He shook it off and ushered Dylan into the apartment. “The couch is there.” He pointed toward the very obvious couch in the middle of the living room. “Bathroom’s back there. I’ll get you a sleeping bag. We can pick your things up from Denaina’s tomorrow. Do you have much stuff?”
“Backpack. Sleeping bag. Not much.”
Darius nodded and went into his bedroom closet to search for a sleeping bag. His heart was hammering and he felt almost feverish. He had a son. A nearly grown son. What were you supposed to do with a son that was almost grown up already?
“When’s your birthday?” he asked as he came out with a North Face bag and one of his spare pillows. “I figure you’re about fifteen, yeah?”
“I’ll be sixteen on August third.”
“August.” He didn’t want to do the math, but he couldn’t help it. If he’d been born in August, Gillian had been three months pregnant when she’d left him.
But what was the point in rehashing the past? Gillian was gone. Dylan was here now. That was what mattered.
Naughty All Night (Lost Harbor, Alaska Book 5) Page 19