by Terese Ramin
Chewing Megan out the way a mother chewed out an almost grown-up daughter.
The vision gave him pause. But it was the fear and accusation staring at him when Megan briefly caught his eye that made the iron band form around his heart and start to squeeze.
Life moved forward.
In spite of the children’s best efforts to drag summer on forever, August twenty-sixth arrived and with it, a new school year.
The repairs to the guest cottage were finished, and with a mother’s blessing and misgiving, Kate watched Tai and Carly move into it together. It was, she knew, probably the best solution all around, allowing Tai to remain on the farm while giving him the distance and privacy he and Carly wanted and needed at this stage of their relationship. But she couldn’t help but wish they’d kept the “living together” part of things for after their wedding.
Funny how upbringing always seemed to meddle in your druthers, no matter how liberal you thought you’d become.
Hank did not move himself and Megan back to their house in town with the start of the school year as planned, but instead coerced, then charmed Kate into letting them stay with the simple promise—or was that threat?—that he’d move into Tai’s vacated room on the third floor, but he intended to live in her pocket until their baby was twenty-seven, so she’d damn well better just get used to it. He did return to work with the DEA, but he went back unwillingly and against his better judgment.
Against the wishes of both his heart and body, he did not set foot in Kate’s bedroom. He stole a kiss from time to time, but went no further. Giving her room. Giving them room was often the better part of valor, especially when he didn’t want to make things worse. Still, not touching her was one of the hardest things he’d ever asked of himself—pregnancy gave her a glow and a scent he could neither ignore nor resist—but he knew that the more often he was with her, the more difficult it would be to leave her. Until she understood her own heart for the long term, he wasn’t willing to settle for the short.
Kate missed his physical presence badly, but discovered it was the simple sharing, the emotional closeness that had begun to grow out of their physical intimacy that she craved most.
With her father back to the regimen eight-, ten- or twelve-hour days away from home, Megan once again began to dress in unrelieved mourning, stopped communicating with anyone at Stone House and though no one knew it spent much of her time in a furtive search for chemical and herbal relief for the ache in her heart. When she was around, she watched Kate relentlessly. More often than not, however, she made up school-related excuses to be gone.
Kate and Hank suspected, but only Li knew for sure that Megan was lying.
The thing that Kate came to realize with a heavy heart was that it was impossible to know your teenager by living with her.
Chapter 16
September 18—11:53 p.m.
Fifth anniversary of Gen’s death
Sweating in the late-night heat, Megan learned against the still-warm brick on the south side of Stephen Gorley’s house at the back of her old neighborhood, shivering. She was dizzy, weak and her heart felt funny, pinging, then pounding in irregular cadence, and she couldn’t seem to breathe properly.
Beside her Zevo rolled his cheek along the bricks seeking a cool spot to chill the fever in his brain.
“Man,” he whispered, “I don’t feel so good. Can’t get the right stuff since the cops closed down Danny’s. Maybe we shouldn’ta messed with a different brand of ecstasy. Never know how it’s mixed.”
“Ya think?” Meg muttered.
Through the open windows and doors of the Gorleys’ house the illicit parents-out-of-town-back-to-school party raged. A little louder and the neighbors across the road and six acres away would call the police. There weren’t enough trees to block the sound.
“How many’d we take anyway?” Zevo asked.
“Nine,” Meg said. “Salesgirl said the best buzz came with twelve.”
“Nuts,” Zevo whispered. Hand reaching toward Meg, he slid laxly against the wall. “I think I took more’n you.”
She looked at him. By the light from the garage he looked pale and gray, his eyes too bright and wide. Bad.
She hadn’t seen him much since the day outside the Hallmark store. Funny thing, she’d always assumed she’d only ever gone out with him to annoy Hank, but when Zevo wasn’t around, she missed him. Even after he’d banged her into the wall. Stupid and sick, she knew, but she’d read somewhere that even soldiers on leave occasionally missed the abuses and uncertainties of war. It was all in what you got used to; anything new was scary.
Kind of like her and adrenaline rushes and better the devil you understood instead of the angel you were afraid—for reasons you couldn’t quite define—to trust.
Like Kate staying healthy and happy while she was pregnant, and Hank not leaving Megan to fend for herself because he had a new and easier child to raise. God knew, she was having a hard enough time holding onto herself.
“Meg?”
Next to her, Zevo slid along the wall, his hand fumbling at her breast. She slapped it lethargically away. She might have missed him, but she hadn’t missed him that much.
“Meg.”
His voice was a breath exhaled and lost on a syllable. His fingers groped for her once more. In something like slow motion, she turned her head a half a degree at a time, watched without comprehension while Zevo sagged unseeing toward her, skidded roughly down the brick and collapsed against her legs.
Unable to sleep, Kate flopped from one side of her bed to the other, restless in the heat. Flat as it still was, her abdomen felt tight and swollen—even her forgiving cotton underwear seemed confining tonight—and her breasts ached.
For and because of Hank.
A board creaked somewhere in the house and she jacked up on an elbow wondering if he was up. Everything made her think of him lately. Of course, everything had made her think of him fairly constantly for the past three months, so that was nothing new. It was the way she thought about him, of him, of late that was different.
She rested her chin on her folded hands and stared at the lightly billowing lace that lent an aura of privacy to her room. Moonlight spilled through the filigree with the scent of mown grass. She’d been taught from birth that people were to be loved, that love was the thing you gave with an open heart to anyone who crossed your path-and everyone who didn’t—irrespective of how they treated you. She’d been taught, and learned to believe, that love could move mountains, change attitudes, devour hatred. That you didn’t have to like a person in order to love them. That love was a simple willingness to accept people as they were, to treat them as you hoped to be treated. And in that way, she’d loved Hank easily from the beginning, even while she didn’t like him and was hard put to accept the person she’d been told he was.
In spite of how she’d seen her parents together, her brother Mike and his wife, the thing she’d never really been taught was that love had degrees, could confuse and be tangled with emotions previously foreign to her.
She’d long understood, of course, how the fierce quality of protective love she felt toward her children, toward the infant growing inside her, differed from the unexpectant “love” she kept open for other people. But the way she felt about Hank... lost, insecure, anxious, greedy, aching, lusting, found, full—as if a bubble was expanding inside her chest, buoyant and tight to bursting all at once.
As if she needed to hear how he felt about her before she could spill her heart to him.
As if she shouldn’t need to hear how he felt in words, should be able to read and accept it in the illustrations he left for her every day.
She pouched her lips into a self-derisive knot and rolled onto her back. He’d stunned her when he sat her and Tai down earlier this evening and asked if they couldn’t use him full time around the farm. He’d been thinking about it for a while, he’d said, especially the past few weeks back at work, returning only to watch Megan getting further awa
y not only from him but from all of them.
He needed, he’d said, to be around to keep better track of Megan until she didn’t need him anymore. Told them that by returning to the bureaucracy at his level of law enforcement he’d rediscovered how much he hated it. Told them that he needed to make a change in his life, wanted to try another direction and that here was the direction he wanted to go.
He’d pointed out what he could do and where—between the llamas, the Christmas trees and the workshop—they could use him most effectively, reminded them how useful they’d found having him around over the summer. Offered to buy into the farm as a partner, take some of the weight off Tai. A new baby, he’d told them—mostly told Kate—would take up more time than any of the kids she’d raised so far, including Mike who hadn’t been quite two when his parents died.
Life was risk, he’d told them, but there were some risks he’d lately learned were worth more than others. Stone House was one of them.
Tai, of course, had been willing to shake hands and make a deal then and there. He’d never made a secret of how much he liked Hank, but Kate hadn’t realized before how heavily the weight of the farm sat on her son’s shoulders, nor how much the burden had eased for him with Hank around.
It was difficult to accept—heck, it was nearly impossible to even contemplate—that after the many years she’d spent almost believing she knew it all, that she truly knew next to nothing. Knew nothing about Tai, nothing about Li and less than nothing about Megan.
Knew nothing about Hank, or even about herself.
He’d come to her to learn how to deal with his daughter, but Kate was the one who’d received the education.
That Hank would so willingly humble himself to come to her—and not only her, but Tai—in search of a job, a new life...she couldn’t think. He floored her, flabbergasted and crushed. She’d decided he was one kind of man—terrific and sexy and great with the boys and all that rot—and here he showed her he was somebody else, too. What kind of a man was strong enough to come to a pigheaded woman and a kid half his age with his hat in hand and, in the same breath he asked for help, arrogantly describe why they needed him around, anyway? To change the direction of his life on a moment and a prayer.
A wry half smile tilted her mouth, chased the answer out of the cobwebs where it had hidden for more than a month and made her admit it. A man on whom it might be worthwhile risking the unexplored areas of her heart, that was who. A man who should be told how she felt about him, confusion or no, no matter what he did or didn’t say to her aloud in return.
Whether they married or not. And in the past couple of weeks she’d come to find she wasn’t nearly as opposed to the idea as she’d once been. Or else she was beginning to at least get used to the thought.
The desire for it.
She rolled onto her side and shut her eyes, pursuing rest if not actual sleep. In the morning she would talk with Tai about accepting Hank’s offer, then she would find the man in his room or at his office and make him one of her own.
“Kate?”
Her name and the light tap on the door brought her quickly around, heart pounding with anticipation. “Hank?” Speak of the devil.
Or was that speak of the would-be guardian of her angels?
“Yeah.” He eased through the partially open doorway, careful not to nudge it to the creak.
She sat up and the sleeveless cotton shirt she wore to bed gapped open. “What’s up?”
Hank let himself look once, then shut his eyes. The vision played inside his lids, disruptive and enticing: the disarray of her hair straggling out of the unruly bun atop her head; the soft glow of her skin and eyes in the peekaboo moonlight; the invitation in the hand she splayed open to indicate the bed beside her. God, what kind of woman mothered seven kids, got pregnant, turned down marriage but willingly, lovingly invited the father of her unborn child into her bed without conditions whenever he wanted to come?
Only Kate Anden, the keeper of his heart.
Not now, he cautioned himself. Not yet Someday...
“You seen Meg?” he asked, hauling himself forcibly away from the brink of forgetting why he was here in favor of remembering how it felt to love Kate. To be with Kate.
“She’s not in bed? I thought she had a past-curfew date she cleared with you, but I thought I heard her come in already.”
“No. The note she left me made me assume she was spending the evening with Carly and Tai.” The shortest route to hell, he’d learned long ago, was through assumptions. He’d allowed himself the shortcut, anyway. “She’s not there, either.”
Kate compressed her lips against the discouraged slump in his voice, then twisted to find her clock. “What time is it?”
“Little after midnight. She should have been in an hour and a half ago.”
She swung her feet out of bed. “Did you check with Li?”
Hank nodded. “Li thought Lynn came by to pick her up and she went into Brighton to pick up some stuff from the house. I called both Lynn and the neighbor who has a key to the back door. Whoever picked Meg up, it wasn’t Lynn. She’s not at the house, doesn’t appear to have been there and nobody’s seen her.”
“Zevo?”
Shaking both with apprehension and her own weakness and unsteady heartbeat, Megan slid carefully down the wall to jiggle Zevo’s shoulder.
“Hey, Zevo. You okay? You all right?”
The youth lay atop her legs, a dead, unmoving weight. She wasn’t sure she could feel his breath.
“Oh, sh—Zevo!”
Feebly she tried pushing him off her, away, but the weakness was almost a kind of numbness now, affecting her hands. They seemed separate somehow, not part of her and she could hardly use them. In some part of her brain, it didn’t seem to matter anyway. She almost wasn’t part of her body anymore and, somehow, that didn’t seem too bad a thing. If she couldn’t feel, she couldn’t get hurt again, the ache would be gone.
Off to one side the light was suddenly brilliant, blinding. A dark figure in what looked like a dress stood inside it. Megan relaxed.
“Mom?” she whispered, lifting leaden fingers toward the figure. “Mom?”
Restive and uncertain, Hank paced the kitchen while Kate puttered about for something calming to do, finally settling on folding laundry at the kitchen table.
The silence went long until at last Hank slammed the flat of his hand into the wall in frustration.
“I hate this,” he exploded. “Where the hell is she? Why the hell can’t I do something?”
“What could you do?” Kate asked quietly.
“I don’t know. Look for her. Find her. Wake people up until I know where she is and if she’s all right.”
“Run around like a chicken with your head cut off,” Kate supplied seriously. “Tie up the phone so she can’t get through if she’s in trouble and remembers to call—”
The phone rang. Arrested by coincidence on the far side of the kitchen, Hank swallowed and looked at the instrument. Automatically noting the name Frank Gillespie on the caller ID display, Kate picked it up.
“Megan?”
“Mom?” a teenage male voice said.
Kate shook her head at Hank. who closed his eyes on displaced hope and did not relax.
“Who is this?” she asked, instinct causing her to mentally count heads upstairs despite the fact that she didn’t recognize the voice and could come up with a full in-house complement to boot.
The voice on the phone said something in gibberish.
“Who?” Kate asked again. Something in the youth’s cranked-up tone put her on reflexive parental alert. She pointed at Hank, at the caller ID display, jerked a finger to tell him to come check it out. He came immediately and without question.
“Brandon,” the voice managed.
She yanked the phone book out of the phone-table drawer and handed it forcibly to Hank, once again indicating the ID display, then the phone book. “Brandon who?”
More gibberish cluttered by
party noises in the background, then “Mom, I’ve smoked too much crack and I don’t think I can do this life anymore.”
A wrong-number suicide call? Damn, damn, damn! Keep him on the phone, she told herself. Keep him talking.
“Brandon, where are you?”
More gibberish followed by a sobbing giggle, then the click of a broken connection. Breathing hard and swearing in a manner she normally didn’t employ, Kate replaced the receiver and whirled on Hank.
“Did you get it?”
He nodded. “It’s an address in Brighton. What’s up?”
“Suicide call from a party,” Kate said and grabbed the phone as it rang again. The same caller name crossed the display. “Brandon?”
There was the sound of the party, an instant of babble and another click. Replacing the receiver once more, Kate shoved a hand through her hair and covered her mouth.
“Think,” she muttered to herself, “What do I do? Call the police.”
She reached for the phone. Hank stopped her.
“Tell me first,” he suggested calmly. He hated being at loose ends, but a crisis he could handle.
Kate looked at him, took a deep, tranquilizing breath and repeated the call verbatim.
“Okay.” Hank considered the situation for half an instant. “Call the number back. If you can get through ask for Brandon. If not, call the police.” He pulled his car keys out of his pants pocket. “I don’t know the people, but the address is in the neighborhood adjacent to mine and I can get from here to there as fast as the police or paramedics can.”