Once a Family

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Out of the truck before him, Tatum headed for the public entrance, though she now had access to a more secure, resident entrance in another location unknown to him.

  “Sleep well, squirt. I love you,” he said while she was still close enough to hear. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if Tatum shuddered. Because she was crying?

  It took all he had not to run after her. To haul her into his arms and promise her that he’d make her world perfect again if she’d only give him the chance.

  “See you in the morning,” he called out instead. And had to give himself a couple of extra minutes before phoning Del Harcourt’s father to confirm that his son did indeed still attend a private school for boys, after which he followed his sister into the shelter.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SEDONA DIDN’T KNOW what to expect as she followed the instructions on her GPS system to the address Tanner Malone had given her the following Saturday. It was her first day outside of court since Tanner’s sister Tatum had arrived at The Lemonade Stand.

  Tanner was expecting Tatum to be with her. The teenager had refused to come. And before she pushed the issue, Sedona had to find out why.

  Or at least try to figure out what the troubled teen was not telling them.

  And she knew what she might find—but didn’t want to find—was evidence of the truth Tatum was trying to get everyone to believe. After three days of after-school sessions with Sara, Tatum still had not wavered from her story at all. Tanner was the one who’d hit her, but she absolutely was not going to admit that to anyone outside of The Lemonade Stand staff.

  Sara, who’d yet to meet Tanner, didn’t completely believe that Tatum was telling the truth about the identity of her abuser, but she was one hundred percent certain that the girl had been physically harmed. More than once.

  “Are you sure this hasn’t been going on for some time?” the counselor had asked Sedona the evening before when, after a long day at work, Sedona had given up Friday evening with Ellie on her beachfront balcony to meet with Sara at the café by the shelter.

  “You think it has?”

  “I think Tatum has issues that are deeper than a sock in the arm a week or two ago.”

  “How much deeper?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s been going on pretty much forever—or at least as long as the girl can remember. She’s got defenses that have clearly been engrained over a lifetime.”

  Sedona hadn’t wanted to hear the words. And thinking back over them now as she approached Tanner’s home, she didn’t like the counselor’s suppositions any better than she’d liked them the first time around.

  Whether Tanner had been the one hitting his sister or not—and she still didn’t think so—something was going on here. Something that, according to Sara, had been going on for a long, long time.

  She’d seen abused women with their abusers. They flinched. Exhibited some kind of discomfort or fear around them.

  The other night at the café, Tatum had clearly wanted nothing to do with her older brother, but she’d exhibited no sign of fear.

  Sedona wasn’t the least bit afraid either as she drove to Tanner’s home. But she was nervous. And not just because she wasn’t delivering his sister to him. She’d primped like a teenager on her first date as she prepared for this meeting and couldn’t quite convince herself that her sweaty palms were due to the malfunctioning heater in her old car.

  She was looking forward to seeing Tanner Malone again. The way a woman looked forward to seeing a man... According to the talk she’d had with herself in the shower that morning, she was only excited about seeing him as a means of exorcising his effect on her. Once she saw him again, she’d realize she was overreacting.

  Pulling onto the dirt path drive that led to what had obviously at one time been an opulent home, Sedona appreciated the cleanliness of the unlandscaped front. The yard could use some sod. And a flower bed or two.

  But the front porch, though old and in need of paint, looked solid. In good repair. As she parked and made her way toward the three cracked cement steps leading up to the front door, she noticed that the porch looked as though it had been sanded at one point, as though someone had been intending to paint but then never completed the task.

  “Where’s Tatum?” Sedona jumped, her heart squeezing against her lungs for a second as Tanner Malone came around the side of the house, his tone of voice demanding an explanation even while he kept his volume down.

  His presence was explosive. At least to her libido, which had apparently not gotten that morning’s message in the shower.

  “She didn’t want to come.” And he shouldn’t be surprised by that. As of last night, Tatum Malone still had not spoken to her brother. She climbed into his truck every time she was expected to do so. She rode with him to and from school. But after that first day, she never spoke to him. Or responded when he spoke to her.

  It was all in her records, from her meetings with Sara. Tatum Malone wanted nothing to do with her older brother.

  “Her appearance here today wasn’t up to her. Or negotiable. This is her home. Maybe if she came back, she’d remember that she used to like it here.”

  They weren’t negotiating. They were talking about a young woman’s life. And his ground was tenuous. All it would take was Tatum telling the police that he’d hit her and everything would change. At least temporarily.

  Sedona had no doubt whatsoever that he knew that. His sister’s residency at the shelter was evidence enough.

  “I understand my sister is struggling, Ms. Campbell, and no one wants to help her more than I do, but catering to her whims is not going to do it. She’s had four days at the shelter, three sessions with a professional counselor. She’s still not speaking to me or, it sounds like, to anyone else about what’s really going on here. And we have no idea how much time we’ve got before whoever is influencing her makes another move. We have to know what that move will be, and if you aren’t going to find out, I will.” He headed toward his truck, which was parked in the circle drive in front of Sedona’s old Thunderbird.

  A vehicle most guys drooled over and he hadn’t even seemed to notice. Not then, understandably, but not the other night, either, when she’d walked him outside after a brief tour of the common areas of The Lemonade Stand.

  As Tatum’s guardian, he had a right to know where she was staying, since, legally, there was no suspicion, and certainly no charge, against him.

  It was a fine line they were walking here. And as she stood there in the dirt with him, Sedona felt as though she was teetering dangerously.

  He might not have noticed her car, but he’d noticed her. She’d seen the look in his eye when he’d first come around the corner. She’d seen it the other night, too. Or thought she had. And then convinced herself she hadn’t. The slight lowering of his lids, the intensity of his gaze, made her glad she’d taken care with her appearance—for the brief second it had taken her to remember that she couldn’t go down that path.

  She also sensed his growing frustration as though it were her own. And her heart yearned to help him.

  “What are you doing?” He’d opened the cab of his truck.

  With one hip lifted up to the seat, he turned to look at her as she came around the front of his truck, her heels digging into the dirt. “Going to get her, that’s what,” he said. “This clearly isn’t working.”

  “You’re disappointed,” she blurted out. His feelings were none of her business. “I understand,” she continued without taking time to think. “If you rush out there now, you could certainly bring her home. It’s within your rights. But for how long? You going to chain her up here? Hope that she doesn’t run from you like Talia did? And what happens if she gets desperate enough to leave that she calls the police on you? Can you trust that she won’t lie to them about you?”

&n
bsp; He still had one foot on the ground. And was looking toward it.

  Sedona was glad. She didn’t want him looking too closely at her, afraid of what he might see. She was doing all she could to protect his sister. And would continue to do so.

  But she wanted to help him, too. Almost as much. She wanted to know what it felt like to have his affection aimed at her. To have his arms around her.

  “She’s got defenses that have clearly been built over a lifetime.” Sara’s words came back to her.

  She couldn’t let him bring his sister back there. Not until she knew what was driving Tatum away from him.

  But he was obviously hurting. And had given his life to raise his siblings...

  “Please give her a little more time,” she said now. “It’s only been four days, Tanner. I know it seems like a long time, but it’s not. Why not show me your vineyard? Give me a tour. Show me the house, Tatum’s room. Let’s have lunch just like we planned. Help me get to know you as you asked me to do.”

  Her heart shouldn’t respond to the prospect. This was business. Period.

  “Someone’s hitting her and she needs help,” she said now, though, of course, she had no solid proof of that. Just instinct. Tatum’s word. Tanner’s testimony about the bruise on his sister’s arm. And Sara’s professional opinion, an expert witness who was certain Tatum Malone had issues dating back as far as Tatum could remember.

  Enough to build a strong, albeit circumstantial, case.

  If she didn’t believe so strongly that Tatum needed help, and that she could offer the help, she’d let Tanner bring the girl home. And then see if she and Tanner could be friends—or more.

  Worried about where her last thought had come from, Sedona almost walked away.

  “I realize she needs help,” the man said. The way he stood there easily, one foot flat on the ground while his butt rested against the seat of his truck, accentuated his long legs. Currently encased in the jeans he seemed to wear nonstop, those legs were interesting to her.

  And they absolutely should not be.

  “It’s pretty clear that she’s not going to talk to you about it,” she said, focusing on the case. Because it really did come first.

  “Agreed.”

  “I know you love your sister, Tanner. Why not give Sara a chance to help her? I swear to you that I’m in touch with them every single day. And will stay in touch with you, as well. You’re seeing her every morning and afternoon of every school day. And I’ll continue to encourage her to spend time with the two of us together.”

  With an arm resting on the window jamb, head slightly bowed, Tanner glanced over at her. “I’m not saying how long I’ll be patient.”

  “Understood.”

  “Fine. For now, you win.”

  It was a curious turn of phrase. As if they were playing some kind of game. And if that was what this was to him, a game, all three of them were going to lose.

  * * *

  HOW THEY MADE it to his small winery, Tanner wasn’t sure. He was making a name for himself in their tiny portion of the wine-making world, producing top-shelf quality grapes that he sold to larger, established wineries upstate. Producing his own wine was a dream that might or might not materialize into a money-making venture.

  “Pinot noir is my favorite wine,” Tatum’s lawyer told him as she looked over the few dozen cases of bottles he had packaged in one corner of the small barn he used for his own production.

  Tatum’s lawyer. He had to remind himself. To keep things in perspective. Because if he didn’t, his body was going to win the battle he was currently fighting. The one in which he had a beautiful woman admiring his life’s work. He wanted to haul her up against him to see how she felt. And to know if she’d like how he felt.

  “I’m just experimenting at this point,” he told her, recognizing that kid-in-a-candy-shop glint in her eye. And responding to it, too, in spite of himself. “Those bottles are just for my own education,” he clarified. “Until this week, I only had one oak barrel. Now I have four. I’m nowhere near the point where I could actually make enough wine to label and sell it.”

  “I’d love to taste it.”

  No one tasted his wine. He wasn’t ready.

  “I bottled that stuff as an experiment,” he repeated.

  “So tell me about the process.”

  It had been clear to him during their tour of his four-acre vineyard that it wasn’t her first rodeo. The woman had a wine tour or two under her belt. Or was a damn good study with books and videos. She knew his business.

  And he wanted to know her. But couldn’t trust her. Because he’d learned a long time ago to trust no one but himself. To rely on no one but himself.

  “The barrel can make or break a wine,” he explained, anyway. If she was looking to trip him up, testing him to find out if he was legitimate―in winemaking and in his assurances that he’d never, ever hit his sister―he could play along, on both counts, with complete confidence. “Most of a wine’s flavor comes from the barrel,” he continued. “French oak is widely accepted as one of the best trees for making barrels. Right now, in the U.S., one French oak barrel costs twelve hundred dollars. It will last for three to five seasons. In barrel production, the oak is heated through a special process that caramelizes the inside of the barrel and that’s what flavors the wine. As time passes, the wines that pass through the barrel soak up all of those caramelized properties and the barrel becomes virtually useless.”

  She raised her brows. He’d told her something she hadn’t known?

  “At that time, you either shell out another twelve hundred dollars a barrel or, like a lot of American wineries, use the services of a cooper, who reburns the barrel, which brings about more caramelizing. That process costs about three hundred and fifty dollars per barrel. That alone means that, until my sister is through college, I can’t afford to produce the quality of wine my grapes are grown to produce.”

  “What about steel barrels? I’ve seen them in use.”

  “Vintners put oak chips in them to flavor the wines, but in my opinion, they don’t produce the best wine.”

  “And being the best is important to you?”

  She was looking at him then, not his wine. He moved behind an oak barrel to hide his hardness. He promised himself he wasn’t going to act like a fool. He also wasn’t going to answer her question.

  * * *

  SEDONA SAW CLIENTS all through the day that next week. Still only four years into her practice, she didn’t have her own paralegal, but she had a woman that she hired by the case to do a lot of the time-consuming case law research. Everything else―the filings, the phone calls and correspondence, the billing―she handled on her own.

  And now, she’d added older-brother-sitting to her list. She wasn’t just a lawyer. She had a life. And she wasn’t keeping up with it.

  Neither could she desert Tatum Malone. The girl and her brother were on her mind any time it wasn’t occupied with another client.

  Which was why she found herself, the following Wednesday evening, on her way to dinner with her parents, sitting in the passenger seat of Tanner Malone’s truck.

  She’d issued the invitation under the guise of spending time with him alone—on the way to and from dinner—but she knew that justification was weak. And she’d guessed from his lengthy pause before accepting her invitation that he knew it, too.

  She also knew that no matter what might or might not be going on between them, Tatum came first. For both of them. The girl needed help and somehow the two of them had to work together to find the answer.

  Despite the sexual awareness between them.

  He drove with the same easy grace that he seemed to do everything else. Leaned back, his long legs open to accommodate their size beneath the steering column, one hand hooked over the wheel. He’d picke
d her up from her two-room office suite, ten minutes from The Lemonade Stand, wearing jeans again, but black instead of blue, so if they bore grape stains, the stains didn’t show.

  His shirt, another button-down, which was all he seemed to own, was black-and-white-striped and equally unblemished.

  She felt completely overdressed.

  “I thought I saw Del Harcourt coming out of Tatum’s school again today,” he said as soon as she’d buckled herself in.

  “But you just called Mr. Harcourt last Wednesday night and he confirmed that his son attends Brophy.” An all-boys Catholic school in between Santa Barbara and Santa Raquel.

  “That’s correct.”

  “I asked Tatum and she said the same thing.”

  He drove a mile or two per hour above the speed limit. She was a strict, right-on-the-limit girl. The little Italian eatery they were heading toward, a beachfront place owned by a couple her parents had known in college, was a half hour down the coast toward Los Angeles.

  “There’s no way she can be seeing him, Tanner,” she reminded him, not nearly as convinced as Tanner was that Del Harcourt was the only threat to his sister. Tatum had only known the boy two months. Her issues were years in the making. What if Tanner had been right the first day she’d met him? What if their mother had somehow gotten to Tatum? “She’s either at school, with you or at the shelter. She has no time alone right now.”

  Which was the point. For now, Tatum Malone was safe. It was her goal to keep her that way.

  “Do you have any way of contacting your mother?” she asked now, hating to bring up the woman Tanner so clearly despised, but concerned enough to do so.

  “Not really,” he said. “Not easily. She changes her last name like most of us change underwear. Legally, and not. But I’m looking for her. Why?”