Waking Hearts

by Elizabeth Hunter

  Ollie couldn’t remember when he’d had a better time. He hated—absolutely hated—that he had to leave for work. He looked at Allie, who nodded and headed toward her room, probably to change.

  Ollie stood, holding on to Loralie when she clung to his neck. “We gotta go, guys.”

  “Nooooo!” Chris wailed dramatically, clutching Ollie’s leg.

  “Do you work all the nights, Ollie?” Loralie asked.

  “Yeah,” Mark said, glancing at Ollie from the corner of his eye when Kevin tossed him the spare controller. “You should come back on a night you’re not working and hang out. We could play Xbox again.”

  Ollie tried not to react as his heart lurched in his chest. “That’s up to your mom.”

  Allie ran back in the living room, slipping on her shoes by the door. “Okay, guys. Not too late. Kev, you know where the ice cream is.”

  “Ice cream!” Chris screamed.

  Mark covered his ears. “Dude!”

  Loralie ran a tiny hand down Ollie’s beard. “Your hair is curly like mine.”

  “But not as pretty.” He blew a raspberry on her cheek and handed her over to Allie, who kissed her and handed her over to Kevin who was already nodding as Allie gave him instructions about the younger kids.

  Amazingly, they were in the car with five minutes to spare.

  Ollie looked over his shoulder at the glowing lights of the house. “How do you do that?”

  Allie was texting on her phone. “Do what?”

  “Juggle the madness.”

  “Well,” she said, “the madness doesn’t come all at once. It slowly builds until you don’t remember when there wasn’t madness.”

  “Like the story about boiling a frog?”

  “Exactly. How to boil a fox: add one child every three years until her brain is entirely gone.”

  Ollie chuckled and pulled out of the drive. “Dinner was fun.”

  “The kids enjoyed having you over.”

  “Just the kids?” He glanced sideways at her.

  She was smiling a little. “I did too.”

  “Good.”

  She leaned back and closed her eyes. Ollie watched her in the oncoming lights as he headed toward the bar. He wanted to bypass work and take her to his place. Roll her onto his king-sized bed and let her sleep.

  For a while.

  “Maybe another time.”

  “What?”

  He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud. “Uh, maybe I can come over another time when I don’t have to work. Play video games with the boys again.”

  “They’d love that.”

  “Also, what are you doing after church tomorrow?”

  “Nothing much, I don’t think.” She was texting on her phone again.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah, just letting my dad know that the kids are with Kevin and I’m at work. He’ll go by later.”

  “Tell him he might see Elijah and Paul around too.”

  Allie frowned. “Your younger cousins?”

  Ollie nodded. “Pop put them on alternating nights hanging around your place until we figure out what’s going on with Joe.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Ollie. Those boys are just in high school.”

  “Do you remember how big I was at their age?”

  “Not much smaller than now,” she muttered. “Still, I don’t think—”

  “Pop isn’t going to argue with you on this one. He’s worried about you and the kids, so his boys are going to be there. They’re both smart, and they’re not impulsive. Plus they know I’m only a few miles away. I only told you so you don’t worry if you see them hanging around.”

  “What about church tomorrow? Why were you asking?”

  They were just pulling into the Cave. Ollie parked in his spot by the back door, happy to see the lot already filling.

  “We need to go up and talk to Old Quinn. If we catch him Sunday afternoon, Sean will be there too.”

  “About the boys Kevin fought with?”

  How much to tell her without spilling the information Kevin asked him to keep private?

  “About that. But also because I think some of the snakes might know something about Joe.”

  Allie sighed. “Why is this not surprising?”

  “We need to ask. Old Quinn doesn’t like me much—”

  “You have filed charges against more than one of his nephews.”

  “Only when they break furniture or faces at my bar. But if I bring you, he’ll talk.”

  Allie grinned. “Because he loves me.”

  “Everybody loves you, Allie-girl.”

  Her smile fell, but she rallied as she opened her door. “Not everyone. I better get in, or Tracey’s gonna put me on lunch shift again.”

  Ollie nodded. “I’ll be right in. Gonna… call Sean about tomorrow.”

  Man, he could be stupid sometimes.

  “Everybody loves you…”

  Clearly not. The person who was supposed to love her the most had up and left.

  Nice reminder, asshole.

  Ollie didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He had teenage kids telling him off and hormones jumping like he was still in high school. He wanted Allie. And her kids. The whole damn package. But he didn’t know how to tell her, and he didn’t really know whether she was flirting with him to flex newly single muscles or whether it meant something more.

  “Stop thinking.” He finally pushed open the door. “The drinks won’t pour themselves.”

  Chapter Seven

  AN HOUR AFTER CHURCH, ALLIE had gotten her four kids situated at Cathy and Thomas Crowe’s house, where Jena, Caleb, and their brood were also hanging out. Ollie had picked her up there and was driving them up into the canyon and over to the old Quinn place where Sean had been staying.

  “You talked to Sean last night, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, he said he needed to work today, so he’d be around.”

  Sean was a freelance photographer who had roamed the world until only last year. He’d also been one of the last of her friends to see her ex-husband.

  “What’s he working on?”

  Ollie frowned. “I don’t know. Editing, he said? I think he’s helping a friend out, doing the digital editing for a shoot while she’s out on location.”

  “She, huh?” Allie grinned. “So is this a friend, or a girlfriend?”

  Ollie kept his eyes on the road. “You think me and Sean sit around painting our nails or something?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “I thought you two were getting together for beard-care spa days or something.”

  “Please,” Ollie grumbled. “Sean only wishes he could grow a beard like me.”

  Allie laughed. Sean and Alex had both been growing their beards out and had taken more than a little teasing from their friends about competing with Ollie for the mountain man look.

  She turned toward him, watching his profile. “Your beard is a thing of manly magnificence, Oliver Campbell.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched up. “Don’t be jealous just because you can’t grow one.”

  “But I am. So jealous.”

  “I can tell. If you make me brownies, I might tell you my conditioning secrets.”

  “Motor oil and hamburger grease?”

  “Damn it,” he said. “Who told you?”

  “I’ll never tell.”

  He chuckled, and Allie realized she’d heard him laugh more in the past few days with her and her kids than she had in the past year.

  The road to the Quinn place took a sharp left after Sandy Wash, then they were crawling up an even steeper hill with rocks dotting the road, so she had to keep her eyes straight ahead or get really carsick as Ollie swerved to avoid them.

  Ollie had always been a quiet man, but the past couple of years, he’d been heading almost into antisocial territory. He was discreet about his dating life, worked a lot, and kept busy taking care of his extended family. Though he was an only child, he had
first and second cousins who were all close. The bear clan wasn’t big—not anywhere near the size of the Quinn or McCann clans—but it tended to stick closer to home. Anyone who didn’t live in the Springs lived in Palm Desert, Indio, Barstow, or Vegas at the outside.

  “How’s your family?”

  He glanced over. “My dad and Ashley?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She didn’t know what had happened to Ollie’s mom, other than that she’d left the Springs when Ollie was young, but Nathan Campbell had met his new wife when Ollie was a teenager.

  “They’re fine,” he said. “Roaming around in Canada right now. They’ll point the bikes south now that the temperature’s dropping up there.”

  She glanced at her phone. “One hundred and one today. It could be winter anytime now.”

  “I’m with you.”

  Yeah, I wish you were.

  She sighed and tried to get her mind off it. Ollie had been flirting with her a little, but it could mean anything. He could be trying to mend the gap that had grown between them. He might just think she needed an ego boost. Sean flirted with her, but Sean flirted with everyone.

  “Hey,” he said. “Where’d you go?”

  Nowhere. I’m going nowhere.

  “Just wondering what you think the Quinns might know. And wondering when we’ll know for sure. I know that’s part of the reason Kevin snapped on Friday. He and Mark are both on edge, waiting to hear about their dad. I probably shouldn’t have told them.”

  “And if they’d found out later, they’d have been angry. Your kids are smart, Allie. Give them as much honesty as they can handle.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  He reached over and took her hand. “You’re doing great.”

  “There’s no manual for this,” she said. “I lost my own mom when I was Mark’s age, and I still don’t know what to tell them if Joe’s really dead. It’s not the same. My mom loved us and died in a car accident.”

  “Loss is loss, no matter what. They’re already dealing with some of it with him being gone. You’ve done the best you could with that. Trust me, I know how hard it is when a parent leaves.”

  Allie bit the edge of her lip and Ollie squeezed her hand.

  “What?”

  “I will never in a million years understand your mother, Ollie. Never. How she could leave her own child—”

  “How could Joe? How could a father leave four kids? It doesn’t make sense either way.”

  “If she ever came back to town, I’d hit her.” Allie grimaced. “Maybe Kevin got the violent tendencies from me.”

  He smiled. “Don’t fool yourself, we all have them. And you don’t have to worry about my mom coming back. She’s well and gone.”

  “Did you wonder?”

  He nodded.

  “How long?”

  “Years. But I always had my dad, Pop, and Yaya. And I always knew they loved me. Then my dad met Ashley, and I saw how happy he was. Saw how devoted she was to him. And me. She’s not my mom, but she’s family. Ashley put things in perspective.”

  “How?”

  “Made me realize how insignificant my mother really was in my life. How she was the one missing out, not me. Ash wasn’t even my mom, and she liked hanging out with me. Liked going to my football games and making cookies and doing all that ‘mom stuff.’ So I couldn’t be all that bad, you know?”

  She said nothing. Ollie was still holding her hand, and she didn’t pull it away. It was too nice to let it lie there, being all big and warm and comforting. If he wasn’t pulling away, she wasn’t either.

  The car bounced over a particularly rough patch, and she gripped his hand tighter.

  “My kids will be okay,” she finally said. “Whatever happens will hurt, but they’ll be okay.”

  “Yeah, they will.”

  She dashed the tears from the corner of her eyes and asked, “So, the Quinns and Joe, huh? Not all that surprising, I guess. What have you heard from your biker friends?”

  “Nothing yet.” He glanced over. “They don’t really keep what you’d consider regular hours. It might be weeks before I hear anything at all.”

  “Weeks?”

  He shrugged. “If I don’t hear anything by next week, I’ll give Tony a call. Maybe remind him how many free beers his boys have drunk.”

  Allie felt the color drain from her face. “Ollie, I didn’t even think about this costing money. I don’t want to cost you money—that’s not fair.”

  “It’s not money, it’s favors. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But—”

  “Pop would have asked me to look into it anyway, darlin’. Don’t worry about it.”

  “What do you think the Quinns know?”

  He cleared his throat. “You know Joe liked to gamble?”

  “I have the bills to prove it.”

  “He didn’t just like casinos. He was actually a hell of a poker player. Did you ever play with him?”

  She shook her head. “Never gamble with a coyote.”

  Ollie laughed. “That’s the truth. I did, and I lost. He was really good. He only got sloppy when he drank too much.”

  She leaned her head against the window. “And he was almost a full-blown alcoholic by the time he left.”

  Another hand squeeze. “Yeah. But the Quinns didn’t care about that. I know for a fact more than one of them won money off of Joe, but even more lost it.”

  Her eyes went wide. “You don’t think they had anything to do with his death, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can’t be positive until I talk to Old Quinn. But very few of them are violent. It’s more… petty shit. Cons. Stuff like that. But even more…”

  “What?”

  “Let’s face it, Allie. If the Quinns killed someone, the body would never be found.”

  ALLIE saw Sean Quinn standing in the front yard, tossing a baseball back and forth with a boy around Chris’s age when they pulled up. Sean had the lean, whipcord-strong build typical of most of the snake clan, along with the dark Irish coloring that made him stand out like a black slash in the red rocks around his great-uncle’s house. His natural form was a diamondback rattler, but Sean was one of the most versatile shifters Allie had ever known. From the time he was thirteen, he’d honed his abilities to an astonishing degree and was able to shift into more reptile forms than anyone Allie knew.

  Old Quinn hadn’t laid gravel in over twenty years, so they kicked up dust as soon as they pulled in. Sean and the boy turned their heads, squinting into the sun as they waited to see who had arrived.

  “You gotta get the old man to lay new gravel,” Ollie said.

  The boy grinned up at Sean. “Told you, Uncle Sean.”

  “Get outta here.” He batted at the brim of the boy’s hat. “And make sure all your homework gets done before you open Harry Potter.”

  “Yessir.”

  They watched the skinny boy scramble over the rocks beside Old Quinn’s house and up to the road that ran along the top of the ridge where many of the poorer Quinn families made their homes.

  “Told you what?” Ollie asked.

  “That’s Aiden.” Sean tapped his temple. “Let’s just say he’s… perceptive.”

  Allie’s eyebrows rose. “Like Bear?”

  Jena’s youngest boy, Aaron, was called Bear, even though everyone suspected he’d shift toward his father’s clan, which had been wolf. The boy also had an uncanny way of perceiving things that he shouldn’t have known.

  “Maybe a little,” Sean said. “He said we’d have visitors today and one of them would be a bear.” He winked at Allie. “And the other one would be a fox.”

  Allie smiled and took the arm Sean held out. “You’re making that up.”

  “Only a little. He mentioned the bear. And I’m taking note of the fox.” He nudged her shoulder with his. “You look gorgeous today.”

  “That’s ’cause I got dressed up for church, you heathen. You should try it sometime.”<
br />
  “Quinns get struck by lightning if they enter that chapel anytime Father Heney isn’t in residence,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Lying’s a sin, Sean Quinn.”

  “Good thing I’m not lying about how pretty you are.” He looked over his shoulder. “Hey, Ollie.”

  “Oh, am I here?” the man growled.

  “Yeah, but you’re not as cute as Allie.” He grinned at her. “Where’re the kids, gorgeous? You finally leave them with their grandpa so we could run away together?”

  “Sure. Right after we question your uncle about what my cheating, lying ex-husband was up to and why my son started beating up your cousins over it at school.”

  Allie heard Ollie stop behind them, and she turned her head. “What? Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out after you decided we needed to come up here? I know my son, and I know what sets him off. Those boys were talking about his dad, right?”

  Ollie pursed his lips together. “I can’t say.”

  “I can,” Sean said. “I already talked to them. Uncle Joe had them cleaning out their grandmother’s attic yesterday. Hot. As. Hell. They won’t say another word to any of your boys.”

  Allie hugged his arm. “Thanks, Sean.”

  “Now, let’s go get some sweet tea and talk to the old man.”

  OLLIE had been right. If Allie hadn’t been with them, Old Quinn probably wouldn’t have let them through the door. There was a natural animosity between the bears, the largest and most protective of the shifters, and the Quinns, the smallest in shifted form and also the most frequent troublemakers. The fact that Ollie and Sean had remained friends through high school was considered something of a miracle. And a scandal.

  “Okay,” Old Quinn settled into his seat with a mason jar of sweet tea in his hand. “What do you want?”

  Ollie said, “Be polite, old man.”

  “Why am I interested in doing your work for you?”

  “Please.” Allie leaned forward. “Uncle Joe, if you know anything about what my ex was doing, I really need to know.”

  Old Quinn looked kindly at her. “You’re better off without him. You can start over. Bright young thing like you—”

  “He’s my kids’ dad,” she said. “We need to know what happened.”