by Rachel Lee
Amelia.
For a long moment she simply stared back, and he was suddenly aware that he had nothing on but a pair of very worn jeans. Even in the yellowish glow of the light outside the door, he could tell she was blushing. Finally she lowered her head with a sharp little jerk, as if yanking her gaze from him.
“Hi,” he finally said, and it sounded lame even to him.
“Hi,” she answered, still not looking up. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but…”
Luke drew back sharply then, wondering how long she’d been outside, how much she’d overheard. She stopped speaking and still wouldn’t—or couldn’t—meet his eye, which made him guess she’d heard quite a bit.
“Amelia?”
David’s question came from over Luke’s shoulder, and he thought he saw relief flash through her eyes. “May I come in?” she asked.
Luke was fairly sure it would be the dumbest thing he’d done all day, but he stepped back and held the door. Besides, what could happen with David there?
“Hello, David,” she said as she stepped into the room.
The boy got to his feet. “Hi.” He frowned suddenly. “How come you’re out so late?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” she said. “And probably should.”
David’s chin came up. “I wanted to see Luke. I got a right to see my own brother, don’t I?”
“I would think so,” Amelia said easily.
“Damn right,” David said, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself as much as anyone. “I don’t care what she says. I won’t hate him just because she does.”
“That’s never a good enough reason for anything,” Amelia agreed, her tone still light, nonchalant. “But I’m not sure sneaking out is the answer.”
“How else am I supposed to see him? Besides, she’ll never know.”
Amelia put a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’m afraid she already does. Why do you think I’m here?”
Good question, Luke thought, and was more disappointed than he wanted to admit that apparently she was here only to look for David. And that realization made him very glad they were carrying on this conversation without him; who knew what he would be stupid enough to say if he opened his mouth.
“You’re…lookin’ for me?” David asked.
Amelia nodded. “Your mother called me.”
David swore, and Luke felt the urge to tell him to watch his mouth in front of her. She just had that effect, with that quiet, good-girl demeanor of hers.
“She was…worried.”
“Yeah. Right. Pissed, you mean.”
“That too,” Amelia admitted. Luke supposed it must have seemed pointless to her to deny it to the two people who knew the woman best.
David’s eyes widened suddenly. “You’re not gonna tell her, are you?”
“If you go home, I won’t have to.”
“But I’m not going home. Not ever. Well, maybe to get my stuff, but then I’m going with Luke.”
Amelia’s gaze flicked to Luke. His mouth tightened, and he gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, hoping she would understand that it was David saying that, not him.
“You’ve worked that out with your mother?” Amelia asked.
For the first time since she’d known him, David flared up at her. “I’m just going, and don’t you tell her!”
“She’ll find out, David. The law is on her side.”
“I don’t care. I want to live with Luke! Don’t I get a say about my own life?”
Luke took a deep breath. “She’s right, David. Your mother will find out, and when she does, she’ll take you back. And if you don’t cooperate, she’ll send the cops to get you. And me.”
“But…can’t you be my guardian? You’re an adult now, you could go to court or something, couldn’t you?”
Luke rammed a hand through his hair. What had been merely an effort to take himself off that cracked pedestal David had him on became something much more painful in front of Amelia. But it had to be done; he couldn’t save his pride at the risk of his brother’s future.
“Remember that reputation of mine you’re so proud of?” he asked the boy.
“Yeah,” David said slowly, warily.
“That’s the very reason no court in the world would trust me with you. No way they’d even considered releasing you to me, not with my record.”
Watching his younger brother’s face change, watching his hopes crumble into anguish, was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.
“It’s not fair!”
“Life ain’t,” Luke said, bitterness creeping into his voice, feeling like he’d somehow let down this boy he hadn’t seen in eight years.
David looked at them both a little wildly. Then he bolted and had the door open before either Luke or Amelia could move. She was closer and started toward him.
“David, wait!”
He was gone, racing down the long walkway in front of the motel. Amelia stepped outside quickly, starting after him. “Amelia, stop.”
She looked back over her shoulder at him.
“Let him go.”
He caught up to her just as she said, “No! He’s too upset.”
The moment the words were out, a look of surprise crossed her face, as if she couldn’t quite believe she’d said them. Was it so rare for her to disagree with someone?
“I know you want to help, but going after him now will only make it worse,” he said.
“But it’s the middle of the night. He could get in trouble.”
“Right now he’s going to be looking for someplace to hide, where he can be alone, where he won’t have to talk to anyone.”
“But—”
Luke reached out and gently took her shoulders. “Trust me on this. I’ve been where he is. He needs to be alone for a while.”
She looked at him for a long, silent moment. Then, under his hands, he felt the tension seep out of her. But still she expressed concern. “What if he runs away?”
“I don’t think he’s quite ready for that yet. He’s on the edge, but he’s not ready to jump.”
She looked up at him very intently. “And if you’re wrong?”
I’ll slit my throat, Luke thought. “If I’m wrong, I guess my reputation around here as a screw-up gets enhanced.” He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I’m probably getting credit for Davie getting off track anyway.”
She lowered her gaze, and he knew he was right. He’d figured as much, that the gossip would be that David was turning out just like his brother.
“I don’t know how they can blame you,” she said softly. “He was only seven when you left.”
“But I left him a fine, grand image to live up to, now didn’t I?”
She seemed to consider that for an inordinately long time before saying, “Do you believe in genetic memory?”
He blinked. As a non sequitur, that one would be hard to beat. “What?”
“Genetic memory. That you can have ideas or thoughts that don’t come from your own personal experience but from the common experience of your ancestors.”
“I’m sure,” he said slowly, “that there’s a reason you brought that up just now.”
She gave him a sideways look. “You said you never knew your father. But just then you sounded as Irish as they come.”
He blinked again. “I did?”
“The way you phrased that reminded me of a colleague of my father’s who visited us from Dublin once.”
The idea that he carried some innate habits that might have come directly from the father he’d never known startled him. For a moment he just stood there, toying with the idea, wondering how he felt about it. It wasn’t until Amelia shifted her feet, as if tired of standing, that he realized how long he’d been lost in that reverie.
“Sorry. I know it’s late,” he began.
She nodded. “I should go.” All of a sudden she sounded nervous again, like she did so often. He wondered what he was doing that set her so on edge.
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He didn’t want her to go, he realized. He wasn’t sure why; he just knew that, unlike his brother, he didn’t want to be alone right now.
“The coffee shop here is open twenty-four-seven,” he said before she could turn away. “Would you like something? Before you go, I mean?” She hesitated. “Maybe we can think of something to do about David. And I’m sure they have decaf,” he added.
She smiled at that and finally nodded. “All right.”
When they walked into the small café, he thought the waitress looked at them rather intently, but Amelia didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. Although her mind was obviously elsewhere, because she glanced at the pay phone just inside the door and said, “We should call…David’s mother.”
“Afraid she’s worried? Don’t be,” Luke said shortly.
“No,” Amelia said, surprising him yet again. “More afraid she’s called the police by now.”
She had, he had to admit, a point. “You’d better call, then. The last thing David needs is for her to know he was with me.”
She nodded, and he waited as she made the call. It was strange to think it was his mother she was talking to, when he himself hadn’t spoken to her—except for that mocking exchange at the community center—since the day he’d walked out for the last time. Strange, but not painful; there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that his decision had been for the best. His only regret was that he hadn’t done it sooner. But he’d stayed to finish high school, more for David’s father than anything; it seemed one small way to acknowledge the man’s efforts to treat him well.
Whatever the waitress had been speculating when they’d come in, apparently she’d set it aside. In less than a minute they were seated in a booth with rather unsettling olive green vinyl cushions, had cups in front of them and the place to themselves.
And after a moment he found he couldn’t resist the urge to pick up where they’d left off, and somehow he knew that he wouldn’t have to explain who he was talking about, that she would understand.
“You know,” he said, “I don’t even know if he knows I exist. I could never get my mother to tell me if he ever knew she was pregnant. She wouldn’t discuss him at all, and all her mother ever said was that he seduced and abandoned her.”
“I think,” Amelia said softly, “that you should assume he never knew. That if he had, he would have come back.”
His mouth twisted. “That’s a kid’s fantasy.”
“Every kid should have one.”
“Did you?”
She took a sip off her coffee. “Of course.”
“What was it?”
“I’m not sure I’m ready to share that,” she said honestly.
He leaned back, the vinyl creaking. “Fair enough,” he said, knowing he wouldn’t really want to share his own, either. It would be far too pitiful to admit that all he’d ever wanted as a kid was for his mother to love him. “I wonder if David has one,” he said almost idly.
Her silence was almost pointed, as was the way she stared down at her coffee cup. He was just noticing that her lashes were rather amazingly long and soft looking when it hit him.
“I get it,” he said, a little harshly. “David’s fantasy was that his big brother would come back and save him, right? And I just blew that all to hell.”
“Luke—”
He cut her off with a sharp, disgusted exhalation. “I can’t win in this town. I never should have come back.”
“Yes, you should have,” Amelia said, so positively that puzzlement took the edge off his anger.
“Why?”
“Because later, when he’s calmed down, it will matter to David that you came. Even if you couldn’t do what he wanted you to do.”
“Right.” He knew he sounded surly, but he couldn’t help it.
She looked at him then. “Would it have mattered to you if your father had come back, even if he couldn’t have taken you with him?”
I’d have lived on it the rest of my life.
The words came out of nowhere in his mind, startling him. He’d never thought of himself as fixated on the father he’d never known, but apparently it was closer to the surface than he’d realized.
“Yes,” he finally managed, his voice a little tight. “It would have mattered.”
She nodded. “And someday it will be important to David that you cared enough to come.”
“You mean the older we get, the less we settle for?”
“I suppose you could put it like that. I like to think it’s more learning how to make the most of what we have instead of wasting energy and effort on things we can’t change.”
He ran a finger up and down his coffee cup, the inexpensive, thick ceramic insulating him from the heat of the beverage. “Is that the voice of experience?”
She took another sip of coffee, then set down her cup. She stared into it for a long moment, as if the answer were in there. “In a way,” she said finally. “That…that fantasy you asked about? I wanted to be Amelia Earhart. A risk-taker, a daredevil. I wanted to go faster, higher…. But I never will. I’m…not brave, not adventurous, the exact opposite in fact. I’m just me, and I’ve learned to be content with that.”
Luke stared across the table at her, a bit taken aback at her unexpected confession and oddly stung by her rather biting self-assessment. Especially coming from the woman who had diverted a knife-wielding kid named Snake with a book.
“You know, Ms. Blair,” he said at last, “I think you might be just the tiniest bit wrong about that.”
She looked up at him. “About what?”
“The risk-taking part.”
Her brows furrowed. “Hardly. The biggest risk I’ve ever taken was going to college a hundred miles from home.”
“And,” he said, gesturing at their surroundings, “sitting in a public place in the middle of the night with the scourge of Santiago Beach.”
She looked up then, sharply, and he grinned at her.
Slowly, like the dawn breaking over the rim of a canyon, a smile spread across her mouth.
“There is that,” she said.
And Luke felt like he’d worked a very small miracle.
Chapter 7
By noon the next day Amelia was thinking that Luke’s joking words had been truer than she would ever have guessed. Apparently a simple cup of coffee, taken with “the scourge of Santiago Beach,” was one of the bigger risks she’d ever taken. At least, judging from the reaction.
She supposed the waitress must have recognized them; she had looked vaguely familiar. And she had apparently wasted no time in spreading the news that the respectable bookstore owner had been out with the highly unrespectable Luke McGuire, at a very suspicious hour, in a coffee shop. A motel coffee shop. And most of the people she’d told seemed to have decided it was their duty to stop in and ask Amelia what on earth she thought she was doing.
At first she’d reacted viscerally, wanting to defend Luke. After all, she was the one who had heard him tearing himself down to his brother, trying to destroy the heroic image the boy had built up, trying to convince David he wasn’t worth imitating, that, as a role model, he was a lousy choice. He’d been brutally, painfully honest, and she knew it hadn’t come easily. But he had done it—for his brother’s sake.
But no one here would understand that. They probably wouldn’t even believe it if she told them. They had made up their minds long ago about Luke, and she, the relative newcomer, wasn’t going to be able to change them. She had to accept that.
What she couldn’t accept was the rest. The fact that when she explained that they had been talking because they were both concerned about David, she got only looks ranging from doubt to outright disbelief. She was not used to being thought a liar, and it made her angrier than she could remember being in a very long time. And gradually she became defensive, deciding that if they wanted to believe the worst, let them.
A thought struck her then that this was what Luke must have gone through every day of his life here. Th
at he must have constantly faced the blank wall of preconceptions, the smug certainty of minds already made up, closed and locked. No wonder he’d given up trying to change anyone’s perception of him. And she thought, not for the first time, that for all the problems it caused, her parents had had only the best intentions in keeping her in their protective shell.
Maybe, she thought after the worst of them all, Mrs. Clancy, had warned her in a very stern way that she would ruin what was so far a good reputation if she kept on, she would make up a good story. If they wanted something juicy, maybe she would just give it to them. Tell them she and Luke were plotting some nefarious crime, or that she was involved in a hot, torrid, passionate affair with him.
Her body cut off her thoughts with a burst of sudden heat that startled her.
A hot, torrid, passionate affair with Luke.
With a tiny sound she hated to admit could have been a moan, she pressed her hands to her face, the heat of her cheeks making her fingers feel almost icy.
The very idea was absurd. The idea of her having a hot, torrid, passionate affair with anyone was absurd; she just didn’t have it in her. But the idea of having it with Luke, well that was just—
Breathtaking. Stimulating. Titillating.
Arousing, she said to herself, making herself face the fact inwardly, even if she couldn’t out loud.
Was that what this was, this sudden rush of heat at the mere thought? Her experience was so limited: one high school romance that had ended before it had really begun, when she’d refused to leap into bed with him; one in college that had crumbled when an ex-girlfriend had returned; and the last one shortly after her father’s death, when she’d been feeling vulnerable and had tried to find something to fill the sudden void in her life in the bed of a man who, while nice enough, hadn’t been looking to cure a member of the walking wounded.
But never had she ever experienced anything like this wave of sensation at just the idea….
Luke McGuire…and her? Quiet, meek, timid Amelia Blair? It was impossible. Worse, it was absurd. No wonder people were going into shock.