by Gina Wilkins
Kent’s younger sister, Sophia, emerged from the kitchen with a tray of canapés, which she set on the coffee table within reach of everyone. She moved to chat with her uncle Larry, an eccentric mathematics professor, and his son, Steve.
Having earned a degree in business administration, thirty-one-year-old Steve served as Kent’s spotter and was also the team’s business manager. Steve’s girlfriend, Heidi, a young veterinarian with an engaging smile, hovered nearby, her gaze on the horses that could be seen through a large window, moving through the winter-browned pastureland that surrounded the hundred-year-old farmhouse. As far as Tanya could tell, the edginess she was feeling wasn’t coming from that group.
Which brought her attention back to Kent. During the two years she and Kent had been together, she had believed she’d seen all his moods. Yet she’d never known him to behave quite as oddly as he had since she had joined him here at the farm today. Something was different about him, and she couldn’t quite define what it was. Though he had assured her nothing was wrong, there had been something in his eyes, something in the way he had smiled that had nagged at the back of her mind, making her think he wasn’t being entirely honest with her.
When she questioned him further about it, he said only that he was getting ready for the upcoming season, worrying about a few problems he was having with his crew chief, preoccupied with plans and schedules and upcoming commitments leading to the big Daytona kick-off. But she had seen him in pre-season mode before, and this was very different. He had never been too distracted to give her a kiss hello.
There had been no hello kiss today. When she’d arrived, he had greeted her with a strained smile and an expression she couldn’t begin to read. No matter how busy he had been before, he had never shut her out quite like he had today.
She watched him as he stood by the fireplace near his great-grandfather Milo. Kent was barely making a pretense to pay attention, his expression inscrutable. Didn’t anyone else think he was acting oddly? Or were the others too busy preparing for the beginning of the season to notice Kent’s distraction?
Was it only with her that he was so different? There, she thought, was the real source of her anxiety.
She remembered the sponsor party earlier in the week. He’d been distracted then, too. She’d had the distinct feeling all that evening that there was something he wanted to say, but he was waiting for the right moment. And then he hadn’t even tried to stay the night. He’d said he knew she needed rest for an early morning the next day, but had that been just an excuse?
Was Kent growing tired of her? Had she done something to push him away? Was he planning to break up with her?
It wasn’t like her to be so insecure in her relationships, but then she had never been as deeply involved with anyone as she was with Kent. Though she had fancied herself in love at least twice previously in her twenty-eight years, it had never been this intense before. This all-consuming. Even in her fantasies, even before Michael had hurt her so badly, it had been difficult for her to envision spending her entire life with either of those former boyfriends. Now she had a hard time imagining the rest of her life without Kent in it.
“Tanya?” Kent’s mother Patsy approached with a glass of iced tea in one hand. There was always a never-ending supply of iced tea at the Grosso home, year round. “You don’t have anything to drink. I just made a fresh pitcher of tea.”
Forcing a smile, Tanya accepted the offered beverage. “Thank you. It looks delicious.”
Casually comfortable as always, in a bright cotton blouse and jeans with a fashionable denim jacket, Patsy tossed her short, brown curls and smiled down at Tanya from her three-inch superior height of five feet, six inches. “Wait ’til you see all the food we’re about to set out. We’ve got enough for a good-sized army in there.”
“And how would that be different from usual?” Tanya asked, smiling.
“Not a bit,” Patsy admitted with the throaty laugh that was so typical of her. Patsy was one of the most competent, capable women Tanya had ever met. Patsy had managed to raise a family while supporting her husband’s demanding career, got along well with the elderly in-laws who now shared her home, and was even an active co-owner with Dean of a NASCAR Nationwide Series team. And she did it all with a ready smile and a generosity of spirit that Tanya had always admired.
“Where’s that son of mine, anyway?” Patsy asked, looking around. “He’s usually glued to your side. Oh, there he is, over by his granddaddy.”
Tanya felt a little pang in her chest. Even Patsy had noticed the distance between Tanya and Kent that day, though she hadn’t seemed to read that much into it. “Kent seems to be a little…preoccupied today,” she said testingly. “I suppose it’s natural, considering how busy he is getting ready for the new season.”
“Oh, heavens, yes. That’s all those guys think about this time of year—well, all year, actually. Racing.” Patsy gave a delicate snort. “I’d hoped by this time Dean would be ready to see what else life has to offer, but—” She shook her head, leaving the rest of the sentiment unspoken.
“But he still wants that championship trophy,” Tanya finished, understanding.
Patsy sighed. “More than anything else in the world, apparently.”
She shook her head again, dismissively this time, as if to banish any dark thoughts. “I’d better get back to the kitchen. We’ll be putting the food out in just a few minutes.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Not a thing, hon. We’re almost done in there. You just enjoy yourself.”
Tanya wished she could. Glancing at Kent’s set face again, she realized that she wouldn’t enjoy much of anything until she knew exactly what was going on with him.
She moved to his side, and he was so lost in his thoughts that it took him a moment to notice her. When he did, he gave her a faint smile. She noted that it didn’t reach his eyes, which were usually a bright blue like his mother’s, but seemed somehow darker today.
“Hi,” he said. “Having a good time?”
“Lovely,” she fibbed. “How about you?”
“Oh, yeah. Great,” he said with the same feigned sincerity. “I’ve been listening to some of Milo’s stories.”
She was tempted to quiz him, since she would almost bet he hadn’t heard a word his great-grandfather had said for the past ten minutes. Instead, she said merely, “I’m sure you’ve heard them all before.”
“Of course. But they’re always funny.”
Glancing quickly around, she noticed that no one was paying them any attention. She drew a deep breath. “Kent, when are you going to tell me what’s wrong? I know you aren’t telling me everything.”
His eyes darkened even more. “Tanya—”
“Please be honest with me.”
He flinched. It seemed to have been in response to the word honest. Her stomach tightened.
Before he could say anything, Juliana called out from the doorway, “The food’s ready. Everyone come fill your plates.”
She saw the relief Kent tried to hide. “We’d better go in before the hungry hordes gobble up all the food.”
Catching his arm, she detained him as everyone else moved toward the kitchen. “Kent—”
He sighed and covered her hand with his. “We’ll talk,” he promised. “After we eat.”
She wanted to argue. She couldn’t imagine swallowing a bite with this cloud of doubt hanging over her. But before she could say anything, someone called out their names, urging them to join the others for the meal. Reluctantly, she let the subject drop.
“After we eat,” she repeated, making it quite clear that she would be holding him to that timeframe.
She watched his throat work with a hard swallow as he nodded.
CHAPTER TWO
THOUGH THE LIGHT-HEARTED, informal feasts at the farm usually flew by in a whirl of delicious food seasoned with conversation and laughter, the meal seemed to drag for Kent that day. It was as if he felt every moment ticking p
ast, leading inevitably toward the conversation he dreaded with Tanya. The first of several such painful conversations, he was afraid.
The weight that had been resting on his shoulders grew heavier, dulling his appetite and making it increasingly difficult for him to put on a pretense of having a good time. He kept trying to convince himself that he was making too much of a freakish e-mail. Whoever had sent him the message hadn’t asked for anything in return for silence. Hadn’t made any threats or warnings. Maybe it had just been someone who wanted to shake him up a little, but would now go away, never to surface again.
He wished he could believe that.
Regardless of the sender’s intentions, the e-mail had accomplished one thing. It had made Kent painfully aware that in this day of technology and instant information, few secrets—no matter how far in the past—remained buried.
He hoped that if they found out the truth, his parents would forgive him after their initial disappointment and anger passed. That’s what parents did, right?
He could only hope that Tanya would do the same.
He felt her watching him all through the meal. She didn’t seem to have any more appetite than he did, though she rather determinedly cleaned her plate and praised the cooks. He could sense her impatience to get him alone. Unfortunately, her intentions had nothing to do with romance.
And so, he did what any red-blooded guy would do when a confrontation with a potentially angry woman loomed. He postponed that talk as long as he possibly could.
“I ran into Justin Murphy at an electronics store yesterday,” he said rather loudly, watching his grandfather from across the table.
The reaction was all he’d expected when he’d let the name drop. Milo’s face turned red and his eyes narrowed. “I hope you didn’t waste air talking to the little punk.”
“We were coolly polite,” Kent replied with a slight shrug. “You know. ‘Hi, how’s it going? Ready for the new season?’ That sort of meaningless stuff.”
“No reason for you to be polite to a Murphy,” Milo proclaimed flatly. “You’re just as likely to find a knife in your back when you turn around.”
Sophia rolled her eyes. “Not the Hatfield and McCoy thing again. Please.”
Milo was not amused. “Don’t you be making light of this feud,” he admonished his great-granddaughter. “The Grossos weren’t the ones who started it. It was those Murphys, with their cheating on the track and lying off it.”
As much as Kent had hoped to delay the inevitable talk with Tanya, he hadn’t actually intended to get his great-grandfather started on the whole history of the Grosso-Murphy feud again. Not that Milo ever really talked about the details, which seemed to have gotten a bit blurred during the fifty years that had passed since the conflict began. He just tended to rant whenever the Murphy name was brought up.
“Anyway, don’t you be buddying up to Justin Murphy,” Milo warned, pointing a crooked finger at Kent. “You watch yourself when you’re on the track with him, you hear? He’d just as soon take you out as pass you.”
“I didn’t exactly buddy up to him,” Kent said. “We just exchanged greetings. We pretty much had to, since there were other people around and all of them were hoping for some juicy gossip about Justin and me.”
“Hmmph.” Milo seemed marginally appeased by that explanation. Keeping the family reputation clean was an obsession of his. He had waged a lifelong battle against the racing gossipmongers who loved nothing more than a scandalous rumor. The Grosso-Murphy feud had fueled quite a bit of that gossip during the past five decades—and maybe that was why he hated it so much, Kent mused.
“People are saying there’s going to be a close battle for the championship this season,” Heidi said, a bit naively. “Everyone seems to think it’ll come down to you again, Kent, or you, Dean. And if not one of you, they think it will be Justin Murphy or Rafael O’Bryan.”
Dean glanced at Kent. “It’s going to be one of us,” he vowed. “And, hate to say this, son, but I’m gonna do my best to make sure it’s me.”
“You’ll have to get by me first,” Kent warned with a laugh, knowing his father expected a challenge in return.
The truth was, of course, that Kent wanted Dean to win that NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship even more than he wanted it again for himself—and he fully intended to win a second championship soon. He suspected that if it ever came down to himself and his dad, he would be tempted to back off and let Dean win. Not that he would ever express that thought aloud, of course. Dean would not be flattered.
Ever since he’d been caught up in a scandal in which one of the hated Murphys had framed Dean for cheating in a race, Dean had been meticulous about avoiding even a hint of dishonesty. That ugly incident had taken place nearly thirty years ago, when Dean was still a rookie, but he’d never wavered in his determination to prove his integrity. He would win fairly or not at all, he’d stated.
Patsy sighed loudly. “Do we have to talk about championships tonight? Can’t we just enjoy being together as a family?”
A little surprised by her asperity, Kent glanced his mother’s way, seeing what might have been a fleeting glimpse of bitterness in her expression before Milo responded. “This is a dinner to celebrate the new season,” the old man reminded Patsy. “It’s only natural we’re going to speculate about how it’ll end up.”
She pushed her chair away from the table. “Well, I’m going to start serving dessert. Who wants some?”
Everyone did, of course, even though they had all eaten so much already that they groaned at the prospect of more.
“I’ll help you,” Tanya said, jumping to her feet to follow Patsy to the kitchen. “You and Nana have done so much already to prepare this wonderful meal. The least I can do is help serve dessert.”
Patsy accepted the offer with a smile. She was very fond of Tanya, and had been hinting broadly to Kent lately that he should make her an official member of the family.
Tanya looked so right here, he thought, glancing at her now-empty seat at the big dining room table that was reserved for special meals. As commendably honest as Dean Grosso, himself, she fit into the family as though she’d been destined from birth to join them.
Honest. All of them so proudly honest.
Kent looked down at his empty coffee cup, his heart in his throat. How would any of them react after learning about the one cheater in their family? How would they look at him after they learned why he’d really left State University eleven years ago?
THE DESSERT WAS BARELY consumed and everything cleared away before Tanya all but dragged Kent out of the house on the pretense that she wanted him to walk with her to the creek that wound through the property. Judging from the indulgent smiles that followed them, Kent guessed that everyone else suspected they were sneaking away for a few kisses in private.
He wished they were right.
Tanya knew this property almost as well as he did by now. Though the sky was already getting darker on this late afternoon in early February, she led him unerringly to a spot where they’d spent several quiet, cozy interludes talking and laughing and sharing some of those stolen kisses he’d just been thinking about.
It was a cold afternoon, but tolerable in their winter coats, scarves and gloves. The clear creek water splashed over rocks and tree roots, greeting them cheerfully as they approached. In the summertime, this spot would be shaded by the now-bare trees towering along the sides of the creek. Turtles would sun themselves on the partially submerged logs jutting out of the water. Even now, birds chirped and fluttered in the leafless limbs above their heads.
A lovely setting. And Kent was with a woman he considered equally beautiful, despite her insistence that she was nothing more than “cute.”
So maybe she wasn’t stunning in the traditional sense; yet her fair skin, clear brown eyes, endearingly tilted nose and soft, full mouth were delightful as far as Kent was concerned. And though she fussed that at barely five feet, three inches, she was too short, and waged a
constant battle against an extra ten pounds, he found her curves simply irresistible.
Yet when she turned to him with her gaze focused intently on his face, strands of collar-length brown hair blowing in the breeze that reddened her cheeks and the tip of her nose, he was all too aware that she hadn’t brought him here for a romantic interlude.
She cleared her throat. “You almost started something when you mentioned Justin Murphy.”
Relieved that she hadn’t immediately demanded to know what was bothering him, he chuckled dryly. “I know. I thought Milo was going to come out of his seat.”
Though his sister called their great-grandfather Grandpa, Kent had gotten into the habit of using Milo’s first name while hanging around the tracks as a kid. Obsessed with not being seen as old or obsolete, Milo hadn’t liked being called Grandpa in front of his long-time professional cohorts. He was Milo to the world of NASCAR, and Dean, Kent and Steve were all still very active in the sport.
“He really takes that old feud seriously, doesn’t he?” Tanya asked, leaning against a tree trunk with her arms crossed snugly against her chest.
Getting the impression that she was just biding her time before bringing up the real reason she had brought him out here, Kent shrugged. “Milo’s one of the few from that era who’s still around. It’s been a part of his life for a long time.”
The Grosso-Murphy feud had obviously been part of Kent’s past, as well. It had begun so long ago that he wasn’t sure even Milo, himself, remembered exactly what had started it, but the tale had taken a couple of deadly turns.
Milo had worked for the FBI back in the 1930s, chasing gangsters during the week and racing cars for fun on weekends—sometimes against the very people he pursued during his working hours. After he returned from fighting in World War II, he started racing more competitively on dirt tracks, and then was a charter member of NASCAR when it formed in 1948. One of his biggest rivals was Connor Murphy, Justin’s great-uncle.
