Carolina Home

by Virginia Kantra

  Dare Island had a year-round population of fifteen hundred souls. Matt knew most of them. Ernie Simpson had worked at the fish house until it shut down, eight years back, and he moved off island with the rest of his family. The son, Kevin, was a few years younger than Matt and a real tool. The daughter…

  “You dated Dawn Simpson,” he said to Luke. “Back in high school.”

  Dated being the nicest word Matt could think of for screwed every chance you got.

  “Did you know about…” Matt’s gaze cut to the kid in the chair.

  Luke shook his head, still looking grim around the mouth. “Not until the lawyer contacted me in Kandahar a month ago.”

  Well, that was something. The situation still sucked, but at least his brother was taking responsibility. The way Matt remembered, Luke had been pretty broken up when Dawn dumped him their senior year and started banging Bo Meekins.

  Matt wondered if his brother had demanded a paternity test.

  Not a question he could ask in front of the kid. Anyway, she looked like him, same clear blue eyes, same kiss-my-ass chin.

  Luke, a father.

  Matt could hardly believe it.

  “Where’s Josh?” he asked.

  Tess set another plate of cookies on the counter. “I sent him to turn the rooms. I’m putting you in Calico Jack’s room,” she said to Luke. “And Taylor in Anne Bonney.” The rooms at the inn were all named after pirates of the North Carolina coast.

  “Has Josh met…” Matt indicated Taylor with a jerk of his head.

  “Not yet,” Tess said.

  “Right.” Matt rubbed his face with his hand. So it was up to him to explain to Josh that he’d somehow acquired a cousin. And maybe deliver another lecture on the importance of always, always using a condom.

  “I’ll help him finish up, and then we’ll get out of your hair.”

  “I thought we’d have dinner as a family tonight.” Tess’s eyes dared him to object. “To welcome Luke and Taylor home.”

  Luke looked like he’d rather go unarmed into a known terrorist hideout than face a family dinner. Matt felt a twinge of sympathy.

  “I don’t want to butt in,” he said. “You all have a lot to talk about.”

  “After dinner,” Tess said.

  “Nothing to talk about.” Tom locked his gaze on Luke. “You get her an ID card yet?”

  A muscle twitched in Luke’s jaw. “Yeah. I drove her down to the base yesterday, set her up for benefits. Tomorrow I’ll go to the bank, open an account you can draw on for expenses.”

  “We don’t need your pay,” Tom said.

  Tess squeezed his shoulder. He patted her hand, volumes of communication in a simple touch. Seeing his parents like that—united, rock steady—brought a lump to Matt’s throat.

  “You’ll take it anyway,” Luke said. “And Taylor’s got some money from her mother.”

  Matt raised his brows. The Simpsons hadn’t exactly been rolling in dough back when they lived on the island. Not that it mattered. What mattered was what the girl needed now.

  “You should enroll her in school,” he said. He had a vision of Allison Carter standing on the dock, tall and cool and complicated, and shook it away. “As long as she’s staying.”

  “Who’s staying?” Josh asked.

  The teen sauntered into the kitchen, drawn, as Matt had been, by the smell of baking. He scored a cookie from the counter.

  “Hands off,” Tess said. “Those are for the guests.”

  Josh flashed her a grin, shoving the cookie in his mouth. “What about poor, starving hotel workers?” he asked around the crumbs.

  “On the table.” Tess smiled. “Don’t spoil your appetite.”

  Josh turned obediently toward the table. His blue eyes widened. “Unc Luke!”

  Matt watched them hug, their two heads close together, his brother’s short bleached cut against his son’s sandy mop, and something in his chest expanded and contracted painfully.

  “You’re taller,” Luke observed, holding Josh at arm’s length.

  Josh straightened proudly. “Some.”

  “Still ugly, though.”

  Josh’s eyes gleamed. “Dad says I take after you.”

  Luke snorted. “Maybe. If you lost the Justin Bieber hair and weren’t so scrawny.”

  “They don’t feed me enough,” Josh said, reaching over Taylor’s head for the cookie plate.

  The girl scrunched lower in the chair, glaring as his hand brushed the top of her head.

  Josh smiled down at her cheerfully as he grabbed a handful. “Dibs.”

  She shot him a look of disdain from under the brim of the baseball cap. Very deliberately, she extended her arm and selected one cookie. With her gaze fixed on Josh, she took a small, precise bite. Her first. Matt could almost hear her thinking, Bite this.

  He swallowed a grin. “Josh, meet your cousin Taylor.”

  Josh’s jaw dropped. “My…?”

  “Cousin.” Blandly, Matt met his stunned look. “Taylor.”

  “She’s going to live with us when your Uncle Luke goes back to Afghanistan,” Tess said.

  “Are you shitting me?”

  Matt cuffed him lightly, aware the girl had stopped nibbling on her cookie and was watching them with wide, blue eyes. “Watch your mouth.”

  “But…”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Matt said.

  They had lots to talk about. Like the dangers of high school sex and the consequences of not using protection.

  Spare me the sermon, bro. I’m just following in your footsteps.

  Not an easy road, Matt thought. For any of them.

  He’d been barely twenty when he’d stumbled home after pulling double shifts at the Food Lion to find Kimberly waiting at the door of their rat-hole apartment, Joshua crying in his crib and a suitcase packed at her feet.

  But at least he’d had a couple of months to get used to the idea of being a father. He’d had the advantage of knowing and loving his child from birth, the help and support of his parents.

  They’d taken in him and Josh without question. The family had stood by him then. Back to back to back.

  The family would take care of Luke’s child, too.

  TESS LIVED BY The List.

  Planning had served her through countless moves in her married life, had saved her through deployments and redeployments with three children in tow. Organization ensured the running of the inn and the functioning of her family.

  With her arms full of dirty linens, she descended the front staircase, every tread and spindle painstakingly restored when she and Tom had purchased the inn more than twenty years ago. The flowers in the front hall needed replacing. She put that on The List for tomorrow. New guests were coming in, the Martins from New Jersey, she had to figure out someplace else to put them now. Tomorrow.

  She bumped through the double doors into the silent kitchen, stopping to stuff the sheets and towels into the laundry room. A tiny light glowed over the stove. Mentally, she reviewed The List, dishwasher running, rolls rising, service laid out for tomorrow’s breakfast, check, check, check, everything under control.

  Almost.

  She tested the back door—locked—and set the coffee to brew for the morning. Should she go with Luke to enroll Taylor in school tomorrow?

  Better not, she judged. Her son had to forge his own relationship with his daughter in the little time they had.

  Luke, leaving. Don’t think about that now. Dawn, gone. That poor little girl upstairs…

  Tess wiped down the counter by the sink, focusing on the familiar routines to distract herself from grief. The child needed new clothes. Shoes. Supplies. Too soon to take her shopping, perhaps. The girl wasn’t comfortable with her yet. With any of them. Maybe by next weekend…

  Tess opened the door to the master suite, part of the addition Tom and Matt had built with young Sam Grady, and heard water running in the bathroom. Tom was shaving, as he had every night before bed all the years they were marr
ied.

  The sight of him standing before the sink, long and lean and shirtless, steadied her. His chest hair was gray now, his boxers drooping on his narrow hips, but his shoulders were still broad, his face still handsome and infinitely dear.

  She waited until he lifted the razor from his chin before she slipped behind him and slid her arms around his waist.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  The smell of his skin, the scent of his shaving cream, spicy and familiar, enveloped her. She pressed a kiss between his shoulder blades.

  “Helping Luke make up his bed.”

  Tom frowned at his reflection. “You think after ten years in the Marines, the boy can make his own bed?”

  She smiled at his grumpy tone. “I don’t mind. It’s nice to have some time with him alone.”

  “You work too hard,” Tom said. “He takes advantage of you.”

  Tess knew her man. She’d loved him for almost forty years, since he was a cocky Leatherneck on leave in Chicago, sauntering into her family’s restaurant in Little Italy, trying to pick her up before she could write down his order.

  “You’re not upset about the bed,” she said.

  Tom didn’t answer. He didn’t talk about his feelings. He never had.

  She twisted around him, keeping her arms loosely linked around his waist, until they were front to front. “It’ll be all right,” she said softly. “Luke needs us. Taylor needs us. She’s our granddaughter.”

  Tom grunted. “What happened to her mother? You get that out of Luke while you were making his bed?”

  “Dawn’s lawyer told Luke it was some kind of brain bleed from a congenital condition. No prior symptoms, no warning.” Tess shivered. “It was all very sudden and horrible.”

  Tom stroked her back, instinctively giving comfort. “Christ. Was Taylor with her?”

  “No, Dawn was at work when it happened. Apparently she was a receptionist at the law office. The lawyer said they got her to the hospital right away, but it was already too late.”

  They stood a moment in silence. What if it had been her daughter, her baby, struck down like that in the prime of life? Tess wondered. She couldn’t stand it.

  “How’s Luke?” Tom asked.

  He had always counted on her to keep up with the details of their children’s lives, to tell him as much—or as little—as he needed to know.

  “He doesn’t say.” And in that, Tess thought, their younger son was very like his father. “But you can see he’s affected by her dying like that. He’s not heartbroken, he was over Dawn a long time ago, but he still feels it. And now this business with Taylor…It’s just so much for him to deal with right now, in the middle of a deployment. Did you see how thin he is?”

  “He’ll be all right as soon as he gets back to his squadron.”

  She bit her lip. “It’s still a distraction.”

  “Not as much as you think.” He rubbed her neck, his strong hand reaching under her hair. “Men compartmentalize better than women.”

  They were still pressed together, front to front.

  Tess grinned suddenly, realizing her husband’s focus had shifted. “Is that what you call this? Compartmentalizing?”

  His fingers found the knot at the base of her skull. “That’s one word for it.”

  She sighed in pleasure, letting her head drop forward as he kneaded the ache away. “I just worry about them, Tom, no matter how old they are. Matt’s not happy, and Meg’s living with that man who’s never going to marry her, and now Luke—”

  “You can’t live their lives for them, babe.”

  “I’d do a better job,” she mumbled.

  His laugh rumbled in his chest. “You did a good job already. It’s their turn now.”

  “But I want them to have what we have.”

  “I’d be happy if they’d just stop dumping what they have on you.”

  She raised her head. “Tom!”

  “We’re not getting any younger, Tess. It would be nice to have the house to ourselves before we’re too old to enjoy it.”

  “Mm. You, me, and an inn full of guests. Very romantic.” She settled her weight more firmly against him, enjoying the feel of him hot and potent against her stomach.

  He patted her butt affectionately. “You don’t want me going soft in my old age, now, do you?”

  She laughed at him. “I can feel just how soft you are.”

  He smiled down at her, the old gleam in his eyes, the one that still made her breath come faster after all these years. “Why don’t you come to bed and I’ll show you?”

  Three

  THE PERIOD BELL buzzed. Released from their seats, Allison’s students rose like a flock of gulls, more interested in flight than the consequences of Hester Prynne’s doomed passion for that weed, Dimmesdale.

  At sixteen, they were still blind to the connections between their own struggles with conformity and identity and poor Hester’s fate.

  It was Allison’s job to help them see.

  “Make sure you get those permission slips signed by Friday,” she called as they jostled past her desk. “Anyone who doesn’t have a signed form for Easy A will spend both periods next week in the library.”

  Her students grunted and shuffled by. Most of them had turned in their slips days ago. There were only a few holdouts.

  She spotted one of them making his way through the rows of desks to the front of the classroom. “Joshua, can you stay after class a few minutes?”

  He regarded her without expression, a tall boy with broad shoulders and steady blue eyes. His father’s son. “It’s my lunch period.”

  “After class or after school,” Allison said firmly.

  He shifted the three-ring notebook on his hip—the only book she’d ever seen him carry—and glanced toward the hall. “I guess I have a minute.”

  Lindsey Gordon stood in the doorway, twirling a strand of hair around her finger.

  “Save me a seat,” Joshua said to her. “I’ll be right there.”

  Allison waited until the girl left for the cafeteria before she spoke. “You were awfully quiet in class today.”

  Joshua shrugged, giving her non-news the non-response it deserved. He was quiet every day, and they both knew it. What she didn’t know was why. She’d seen his transcript. His test scores. She’d talked with his other teachers. Everyone agreed he was a bright boy. All of them acknowledged he was falling behind.

  And not one of them appeared particularly concerned about it.

  “You have to understand it’s still the beginning of the school year,” Gail Peele, who taught geometry and trig, had said this morning in the faculty lounge. “And the end of tourist season. Most families around here depend on the season to get by. These kids won’t have their heads back in their books until October.”

  Allison wasn’t convinced. Her other students were at least turning in their work. October could be too late for Joshua.

  She handed him a dog-eared paperback. “Here.”

  Something flickered behind his eyes. “What’s this?”

  “The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I want you to read it by Monday.”

  He made no move to take the book. “I mean, why are you giving it to me?”

  “Last year’s students had the option of donating their used books and supplies to the school. Since you apparently don’t own a copy, I’m giving you this one.”

  A red flush crept under his tan. “I’ve got a book.”

  “Then you should be doing the reading.”

  He lowered his head, shuffling his feet like a bull tormented by a matador.

  Like Miles.

  The memory of her brother caught Allison in the chest, a sharp and unexpected pang. She couldn’t afford to hang her heart on the success of every student. But there was no way she was leaving this ring without a fight.

  “I’ve been busy,” Joshua said. “Working.”

  Well, Gail had warned her. He probably needed the money. Or his family did. H
ow much did a fisherman make in a year?

  “Do you think that’s the wisest investment of your time?” she asked.

  “Not really. My grandmother pays me in cookies.” He offered her a smile, quick and crooked as lightning. “I’ll do a lot for chocolate chip, but I can make more money going out with my dad.”

  The image of this lanky teenager toiling for cookies was unexpectedly charming, his humor even more so.

  But his words confirmed Allison’s fears. “You work for your father.”

  “When I can. Now that I’m stuck in school all day, I’m cleaning toilets at the Pirates’ Rest. That’s my grandparents’ place,” he explained.

  The bed-and-breakfast overlooking the harbor. Allison had seen it on one of her exploratory bike rides. Not the kind of place she’d spent her vacations as a child. Richard and Marilyn Carter preferred luxury hotels with heated pools, well-stocked bars, and private balconies. But Allison had admired the Rest’s weathered charm, the neatly painted trim, the blooming garden.

  The upkeep on an old place like that must be tremendous.

  She drummed her fingers on her desk. “You work there every day?”

  “Just about.” His grin transformed his sullen expression. Allison blinked. No wonder Lindsey was hanging around waiting to walk with him to the cafeteria. “My dad says it keeps me out of trouble.”

  His dad.

  Allison’s mind flashed back to the dock, to Matt Fletcher’s hard-packed abs and sweat-dampened hair. She flushed. Thank goodness she wasn’t like Lindsey, sixteen and susceptible. She couldn’t be dazzled anymore by a handsome face and a pair of broad shoulders. Okay, maybe dazzled, but not distracted.

  “Did he talk to you last night?”

  Joshua stared at her blankly.

  Allison sighed. “Your father. About your schoolwork.”

  The boy shook his head. “Like I said, we were busy.”

  Ridiculous to feel disappointed. Parents didn’t always follow through on their promises. Why should Matt Fletcher be any different?

  She folded her hands in front of her. “I don’t know what you’ve been getting away with in your other classes. But you’ve got to do the work to get a passing grade from me.”