Whispers

by Lisa Jackson

  Sam rolled her eyes. “Sure—oh, Mom, the pancakes?”

  Smoke was rolling from the griddle, and Claire tossed the first batch of burned hotcakes into the disposal. “Why don’t you take over for a second?” she asked her daughter. “I’ll track down Sean.”

  “Sure.”

  She had already opened the door when she saw a Jeep wheel into the drive. Her heart sank. Kane was driving and Sean, jaw jutted forward rebelliously, eyes downcast, sat in the passenger seat. She could barely move for a second. Couldn’t Kane see it—how much Sean resembled him? Straight nose, blade-thin lips, broad shoulders, and bad attitude, all rolled up into a hellion of a boy. Though Sean had yet to develop into the lawless, arrogant son of a gun Kane had been, he was on the right track. Her fingers were suddenly sweaty and she felt as if the earth was shifting beneath her feet. How could she tell either of them? Sean would condemn her for her loose morals. Not only had she sheltered him from the truth, but she’d lied as well. He’d never forgive her.

  Nor would Kane. When he discovered that Sean was his natural son, what would he do? Demand custody? Call her a cheap tramp? Or open his arms and heart to his son? She cleared her throat of all emotion and tried to concentrate on the problem at hand. “What in the world—?”

  Before the Jeep had come to a full stop, Sean bolted from the vehicle and strode toward the front door. He wore black jeans and a ripped black T-shirt along with a pair of dilapidated running shoes. Claire met him on the porch. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Where’ve you been?”

  “In town.” He tried to brush past her, but she caught hold of his arm. His nostrils flared and he jerked away.

  “What happened?” From the corner of her eye she saw Kane approach at a leisurely pace, as if willing to let her grill her son before being part of the argument that was brewing in Sean’s stormy eyes. Battered leather jacket, white T-shirt, disreputable jeans and boots in sore need of polish were his companions and only served to remind Claire of the boy he’d once been, the hoodlum to whom she’d lost her heart sixteen years before. She’d been such a simpleton, such a stupid romantic.

  Right now she had to deal with her boy. “Sean?”

  “I got in trouble, okay?” Sean started for the door again, but Claire planted herself in his path.

  “What kind of trouble?” she asked, her heart pounding. Sean was so volatile these days, always on the edge, ready to explode. “And no, it’s definitely not okay.”

  “It’s no big deal.” He shot a look at Kane, then rolled his eyes and swore under his breath. “Oh, hell, I got caught shoplifting.”

  “Shoplifting.” She froze. Stealing? This was worse than anything he’d done in Colorado—well, worse than anything she knew about. She turned to Kane and hoped she’d get the straight story. “What happened?”

  Sean shifted from one foot to the other and chewed on a thumbnail that hardly existed as it was.

  Leaning against one of the rough-finished posts supporting the roof, Kane crossed his arms on his chest. With a nod to Sean, he said, “I think you’d better fill your mother in on all the details.”

  “Who cares what you think?” Sean shot back, his words spiced with hate.

  “Sean!” Claire pointed a finger at her son’s chest, and one of the horses nickered softly. “Don’t be rude. Let’s just get to the bottom of this.”

  “I tried to jack a pack of smokes.”

  “Cigarettes? You were shoplifting cigarettes?” Her heart sank. They’d been in town less than two weeks, and already Sean was looking for and finding trouble. Big trouble.

  “Yeah and a bottle of Thunderbird.”

  “Thunderbird?”

  “Wine,” Kane supplied and received a “drop dead” stare from Sean.

  “Oh, God, now what?”

  Sean nodded toward Kane. “He caught me. Made me put everything back and apologize to the store owner.” Sean’s face was a deep shade of purple, his gaze still stonily rebellious, cast to the floorboards.

  “Chinook’s a small town,” Kane explained. “Everybody’s got his nose in everybody else’s business. You don’t want to get yourself a reputation, ’cause it’s hell to live down. Trust me, I know.”

  “What? You were some kind of crook or somethin’?” Sean asked.

  “Or somethin’.” Kane’s eyes found Claire’s, and in the short span of a heartbeat she remembered him as he was, the roughneck of a boy with a crippled father. Always in trouble. Always outrunning the law. Smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and riding his motorcycle hell-bent for leather. And she’d loved him. With all her fickle heart. Now, as she looked into his golden eyes, she experienced the same rush of adrenaline that she’d always felt around him, the acceleration of her heartbeat, the sudden shortness of her breath. All the might-have-beens chased through her mind.

  “I can’t believe you did this,” she said to her son.

  “I didn’t take anything!”

  “Because you got caught.”

  “So?”

  “So you’re grounded. For two weeks.”

  “Big effin’ deal,” he muttered. “There’s nothin’ to do in this place anyway. Who gives a shit?”

  “Don’t—”

  Angry and embarrassed, he flung open the door and strode inside. Claire wanted to collapse on the front steps. At times like this one, she regretted not having a husband to count on, a man to back her up in her decisions.

  “He’s angry,” Kane observed, his eyes finding hers.

  She swallowed hard. “About a lot of things.”

  “Including his father?”

  She nearly stopped breathing. Seconds slipped by, counted by the rapid beat of her heart. Why hadn’t Kane seen the similarities—the resemblance to his own features? “Paul let us all down.”

  “He was a shit.”

  She wanted to argue, to tell him it was none of his business, but she couldn’t. “He’s . . . he’s still the kids’ father. I don’t think it’s necessary to put him down.”

  “Just callin’ ’em as I see ’em.” Kane’s smile, enigmatic and crooked, touched her heart. “Tell me about Sean.”

  She licked her lips. He’s asking, so tell him the truth. Tell him he’s a father!

  “You’ve got your hands full with that one,” he observed, his eyebrows slamming together as he glanced at the screen door, where Sean had made his gruff exit.

  “He’ll be all right.”

  “Not unless you sit on him hard.”

  “So now you’re Dear Abby?” she asked, slightly irritated and fighting all the conflicting emotions running through her veins. Tell him, her mind screamed. Tell him that he’s Sean’s father! And what then? How would he react? And what about Sean? How would her son feel to know that his mother had lied to him for all these years? Her stomach twisted into a raw knot of anxiety and she avoided Kane’s eyes, focusing instead upon a bumblebee as it flitted from one rosebush to the next.

  “You don’t want any advice about your kid?”

  “No.” She reached for the door handle. “Sean’s having a tough time, not only dealing with all he knows about his father, but also about the move here. He left a lot of friends and . . .” Her heart squeezed as she thought that she might be messing with her son’s life. “. . . and living here is an adjustment.”

  “It’s not so bad, though,” he said softly, and, for a second, as he gazed into her eyes, she expected him to reach forward and touch the side of her face with those callused fingers. “You and I made it.”

  “Did we?” she wondered aloud, then cleared her throat. Every time she was around this man the clarity in her mind suddenly clouded, and the atmosphere seemed to change, to become more dense and sticky. She licked her lips.

  “Yes.”

  Swallowing hard, she yanked on the screen door. “Thanks for saving Sean’s skin,” she said. “I appreciate—oh!”

  The flat of his hand slapped the door shut. Bam! In a second he stepped closer, so that his body nearly touched
hers. The toes of his boots were a hairbreadth from her own sandals, his chest was only inches from hers and his face was close enough that she could see the striations of color in his eyes, feel the heat and hostility radiating from his body. “I came by for another reason.”

  “And . . . and that is?” she whispered, her skin alive at his nearness, her pulse leaping in her throat.

  “To apologize for last night.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “You took off like a scared rabbit.”

  “I—I didn’t know what to think . . . to do,” she admitted even though her blood was already racing, her throat tight, her breathing shallow.

  “Sure you did,” he cajoled and he placed his other hand on the door as well, trapping her head between his arms, keeping her pressed against the door by the nearness of his body. He was lean and muscular and tough. No longer was there a trace of any boyhood in his features, no longer was there any part of him that was soft with youth. His lips curved down and he sighed as if about to admit his darkest secrets. “I can’t stay away from you, Claire,” he said. “I told myself when I took on this project that I’d keep my distance, reminded myself that what we had a long time ago was gone, but I just can’t seem to convince myself.”

  She swallowed hard, and he watched the movement of her throat.

  “Christ, you’re beautiful.” With a finger he captured a curl that had fallen over her face. Her skin, when his fingertip touched it, nearly sizzled. “Too damned beautiful.”

  She wanted to melt into his arms. Over the thudding of her heart and the rush of blood in her ears, she heard her daughter, yelling from the kitchen.

  “Mom! Mom! The pancakes are done.”

  She shoved one of his hands away. “Look, I’ve got to go . . . but . . .” Don’t say it, Claire. Don’t invite him in. For all you know he could be using you, trying to weasel information out of you for his damned book. He’s dangerous! “. . . if you haven’t had breakfast yet . . .”

  “Is this an invitation?” His smile was so sincere it nearly broke her heart.

  “Yes.”

  He glanced into the interior of the house, to the foyer where the mutilated railing of the stairs was still visible. “I think I’d better pass this time. You’ve got a lot to work out with your kids.”

  Disappointment shrouded her insides, but she forced a smile. “Another time.”

  “I’d like that.” He shoved away from the door and turned away quickly, as if afraid to second-guess himself. Claire sagged against the exterior wall and caught her breath. What was wrong with her? Certainly he was a lover from her past, one she’d buried deep in her heart, but that was years ago. A lifetime.

  “He’s a prick!” Sean’s voice filtered through the screen as he bounded down the stairs.

  “Wait a minute. Don’t talk like that.”

  “He is. I saw the way he looked at you. He just wants . . . well, you know.”

  She opened the screen door and found her son, freshly scrubbed from a shower, hair wet, clean shorts and T-shirt, standing on the bottom step of the staircase and towering over her. He’d grown so fast and he looked so much like Kane. Why neither one had noticed, she couldn’t fathom. But, for the time being, it was a blessing.

  “I don’t trust him,” Sean said, glaring through the mesh of the screen. “Not half as far as I could throw him.”

  He was waiting for her. The minute Miranda drove into the garage of her row house in Lake Oswego, Denver Styles climbed out of a rental car he’d parked across the street.

  Great, Miranda thought, just what I need. Grabbing her briefcase and purse, she locked her car and pressed a button to close the garage door. Not that it mattered. By the time she walked up the five steps to the living room level, he was at the front door, leaning on the bell.

  “Determined son of a gun,” she said, tossing her briefcase and purse onto a chair in the kitchen before walking to the foyer and opening the door. “What is it?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss.”

  He arched a serious black eyebrow. “I think so.”

  “I said everything to you I needed to when we met with my father. I don’t know why he’s obsessed with the idea that any one of my sisters or I had anything to do with Harley Taggert’s death.”

  “Because he halted the investigation himself and he knows that Kane Moran won’t give up until he finds out the truth.”

  “The truth is that we were at the drive-in and—”

  “And I would think you’d want to know what happened to Hunter Riley.”

  Her knees nearly gave way. “Hunter?”

  “You were involved with him.”

  Sixteen years were suddenly stripped away and she was eighteen again, running along the beach, holding Hunter’s hand, meeting him at the cottage, making love to him until the wee hours of the night. Her heart nearly collapsed on itself. “Hunter . . . Hunter was my friend.”

  “Who left you.”

  “He took a job in Canada.”

  “Did he?” Styles’s eyes, gray and harsh, didn’t flinch. His lips compressed. “He never made it to the logging camp.”

  She held on to the wall for support. “But Weston Taggert told me—he showed me employment records.”

  “And you believed him?” Styles shoved his hands into the back pocket of his jeans. “From what I understand there was no love lost between your family and the Taggerts.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” she admitted, hardly finding her voice. What was he suggesting? That Hunter had lied to her? To everyone? That he skipped out because she was pregnant? An old pain, raw as if it were brand new, sliced through her heart and nearly drove her to her knees.

  “Except for your sister Claire. She was engaged to Harley.”

  “But she broke it off that night,” Miranda said, scrabbling to grab onto the rags of her composure. She couldn’t slip, couldn’t allow Denver Styles to find a chink in the armor that was her alibi.

  “That’s right.” He looked past her into the house. “Why don’t you invite me in?” he suggested. “I think we have a lot to discuss.”

  Tessa was back. And looking better than she had the last time he’d seen her. With shaking hands, Weston lit a cigarette and walked out to the back deck, where Kendall insisted he smoke. Why he put up with his wife, he didn’t know. Maybe because she had a certain class to her, maybe because he knew she’d take him to the cleaners if he ever made noise about divorce, or maybe because she turned her head and allowed him his little dalliances. She was nothing if not loyal, his wife.

  He leaned against the rail and looked out to sea. A fishing trawler was moving slowly along the horizon, and a few hazy clouds deigned to hide the sun. From this monstrosity of a house on the hill, he could look over the town of Chinook and feel as if he were the king.

  The house was Kendall’s idea. Glass, cedar, brick, and tile, it curved along the face of the cliff and glinted in the reflection of the sunset. The largest and most ostentatious house on the northern coast, it fit him and his passion for building his own empire. He hadn’t been content to run his father’s businesses. No, when he took over, he’d pushed for expansion and now there were three more resorts on the coast, an interest in a casino on tribal lands to the south, and two more sawmills in western Washington. And each time he outbid Dutch Holland for another scrap of land, each time he raised a bronze sign for Taggert Industries over another development or building, each time he heard that Dutch’s interests were dwindling, he felt a moment’s satisfaction. Take that you old bastard. That’s what you get for fucking my mother.

  “You’re home early.” Kendall’s voice surprised him, and he turned to find her, as was her custom, balancing a pitcher of martinis and two glasses on a slim tray. She placed the tray on the table under the oversize umbrella and poured them each a glass.

  “I’m meeting someone tonight.”

  “Here?” Kendall was surprised.

 
“No.” He never discussed business with her, and she never asked. It was their own unwritten agreement.

  “Paige was going to stop by.”

  The thought of his sister turned his stomach. She was still a pathetic, overweight, sneaky bitch. And she hated him. She’d never even tried to hide her animosity. Weston’s back teeth clenched as he took the drink from Kendall’s slim fingers. She was a beautiful woman with her pale hair and big blue eyes. She kept herself in shape, hadn’t gained a pound in all the years that they’d been married, and dressed with flair. Even after Stephanie had been born, Kendall had been careful, losing the few pounds she’d gained, refusing to breast-feed as she was concerned that her breasts would flatten, and exercising with a personal trainer until she was her usual size four. He couldn’t complain. Except that she was boring as hell.

  Not like the Holland women.

  “Isn’t Paige taking care of Dad?”

  “Not tonight. The caregiver’s there. So, I thought we could barbecue and watch a movie.” Kendall’s slim fingers wrapped over his wrist. “Come on, Weston, you haven’t seen much of Stephanie lately.”

  He felt a tiny prick of guilt. His daughter was special, no doubt about it. Regardless of the fact that his plan for Kendall to trap Harley had worked all too well and she’d ended up pregnant, and that had Harley lived, she would have passed the kid off as his, Weston loved Stephanie. More than he loved anything on the earth. He should have slapped Kendall around when she told him she was pregnant and that since Harley was dead, he would have to step up to the plate and claim his child. He should have insisted that she get an abortion. He should have told her to fuck off. But he hadn’t. And the one thing in his life he didn’t regret was his kid. The trouble was, Kendall knew it and used it to her advantage.

  “I’ll see Steph tomorrow. We’ll go looking for a car for her,” Weston offered.

  Kendall laughed. “She’s only fifteen.”

  “Sixteen soon enough.” He ground out his cigarette and took a long sip from his martini glass. The drink was always just right. Kendall took special care. He should love her, he supposed, but decided he was incapable. Besides, love and all romantic notions were for idealists and had nothing to do with reality. Weston’s feet were firmly planted on the ground.