Harlequin Superromance September 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: This Good ManPromises Under the Peach TreeHusband by Choice

by Janice Kay Johnson

  She hurriedly unbuckled her seat belt, grabbed her bag and both sacks containing their lunches, and got out of his Expedition so that she was waiting for him when he arrived.

  He gripped her upper arm, his fingers uncomfortably tight. “Let’s get inside.”

  “Who was that?” she asked as he hustled her up the walk.

  “My father.”

  Anna blinked in surprise. The father with whom he had no relationship? He was sitting in a vehicle across the street from Reid’s house, as if... Her mind groped for an explanation. As if he was conducting a stakeout?

  Reid’s house was no more prepossessing inside than outside. He must have brought the handsome leather sofa and recliner with him, but that was about it in the furniture department. He was currently using a wooden TV folding tray as an end table. A flat-screen television and DVD player sat atop a pile of plastic totes. Empty? Or maybe he’d lost interest in unpacking?

  After shutting and locking the front door, he surveyed the room, as if seeing his home through her eyes. “Sorry. I haven’t done much to settle in.”

  “I know when you live alone—” She gave up. She lived alone, too, but creating a real home for herself had mattered to her. It was her sanctuary. Reid’s place was a sanctuary in the way the bleak confines of a prison cell might be for a lifer. All his, but hardly cozy.

  “Have a seat,” he said. His gaze lowered to the paper sacks she clutched. “Oh, you brought those in. Thank you. I was...distracted.”

  His eyes met hers, and she saw something that might have been shame.

  “It’s okay—”

  “I wouldn’t have brought you here if I’d known he was out there.”

  “It really is okay,” she repeated. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  In the act of taking their lunch from her, Reid hesitated. Then he sighed and said, “I have bar stools in the kitchen. Why don’t we eat there?”

  She left her purse on the sofa and followed him. The kitchen was a standard rental house—adequate but unexciting. She couldn’t imagine he often bothered to cook anyway. There was a Formica breakfast bar, which was a good thing, as the dining area lacked table or chairs.

  “You didn’t bring much with you.”

  Again he glanced around, seeming disconcerted. “No, most of what I had didn’t seem worth paying to have moved. I figured I’d buy new. Just haven’t gotten around to it. I was waiting—” He stopped suddenly enough she knew he’d been about to say something he hadn’t intended to tell her.

  She automatically filled in the blanks. I was waiting to decide if I wanted to stay in Angel Butte. That had to be it.

  He set out their floats and then the fries, burgers and napkins. “I hope you feel more like eating now.”

  Weirdly, she did, maybe because he’d successfully distracted her from her grief.

  “Well, the float at least,” she said, seeing a smile flicker on his mouth.

  They sat side by side, his broad shoulder brushing hers. More distraction. She could peek down to see the way the fabric of his slacks pulled tight over impressive thigh muscles. Or sidelong to see his hands, large, strong, with long fingers and nails cut short. Hands she imagined touching her every time she saw them.

  “Caleb ran away from our father’s house,” Reid said suddenly.

  Startled, she stared at him. “But...why is your father here?”

  “He’s got it into his head that I have Caleb.” A nerve jerked beneath one of his eyes. “How else could a teenager have made a successful getaway?” He continued to eat as if the conversation was trivial.

  “They do it all the time.”

  “In his arrogance, he thinks his kid couldn’t have escaped him without help.”

  She felt a strange tightness in her chest. She could be wrong, terribly wrong, but she’d swear he sounded pleased. Because he had helped his brother escape? Or only because his father was presumably enraged?

  “Have you heard from Caleb?”

  He looked at her. “You know I have.”

  “He’s calling you.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you do know where he is.”

  “Yes.” He peeled the top off the root-beer float and stirred the ice cream within, then slurped.

  “Teenagers on the streets...”

  “He’s somewhere safe.” The tension in his voice told her the casual way he was eating his lunch was pretense. “That’s all I can tell you, Anna. Do you think I wouldn’t have made sure of that much, at least?”

  “No.” That horrible sense of pressure inside her eased, but only a little. “No, I know you care.”

  “Maybe you think I should make him go home.”

  “No, not if your father is as awful as you implied he is.”

  “But you don’t approve of keeping quiet about where he is.”

  She turned fiercely on him. “How do you know it’s safe if it isn’t an approved foster home? Who’s monitoring to be sure nobody is hurting him there, too? Can you swear he’d tell you?”

  He’d gone very still, and she knew the answer: no. There was too much strain between Reid and his brother for him to be certain of any such thing.

  “I know these people,” he said at last, slowly.

  “Do you?” Hand shaking, she set down the cheeseburger she’d been clutching. What semblance of an appetite she’d summoned had deserted her entirely.

  “Anna, decent people take in kids all the time without supervision by the court or social workers. You know that.”

  “Is he here in Angel Butte where you can see for yourself?” God, she felt sick.

  Reid met her stormy stare with a face set in unrevealing lines. “This isn’t my secret,” he said finally.

  “Sure it is. You’re an adult. Your brother isn’t.”

  He gave a short laugh. “That as an excuse would kill any trust dead in the water.”

  “Teenagers aren’t always rational.” Or should she have said, Aren’t ever rational?

  Reid only shook his head. “You don’t know everything, Anna. Can’t you trust me to have made the best decision?”

  That stopped her. Could she? Okay, this was a hot-button issue for her, but if Reid had placed his brother temporarily with friends, was that so bad? Reason said no. The terrible fear that always lived in her said yes.

  “I know it’s not my business,” she mumbled.

  “Unfortunately, it is your business,” he said ruefully. “Why do you think I haven’t said anything? Given your profession, you were bound to make a judgment.”

  “You think I’m rigid.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. For Caleb’s sake, I don’t dare find out.”

  He didn’t trust her. Of course he didn’t. He shouldn’t, she was afraid. If she was told too much, would she be able to keep her mouth shut? Anna truly didn’t know.

  She finally took a sip of her float, discovering the ice cream had mostly melted.

  “Tell me about the girl who was killed,” he said, the tenderness in his tone bringing a lump to her throat.

  She talked about a child who’d come into the system when she was eight, after her father left her at a neighbor’s, promising to be back within the week, but never reappearing. Nobody knew anything about a mother; the little girl thought Mommy had gone away when she was a baby. Dad was never located.

  “Corinna was a little too old to appeal to people wanting to adopt, even assuming she’d have been freed for adoption. Plus, she had problems. Her father had moved them constantly, so her school attendance was spotty and she was way behind other kids her age. I think her father really loved her, though, so at least she was able to bond with people. Unfortunately, the first foster parents let her down. When they asked that she be moved, it was a huge set
back. It took time, but she really thrived in the next home. This was her junior year in high school. She was a cheerleader. Did you know that?”

  He shook his head, and she saw his compassion. For the dead girl? No, she knew, it was for her. Anna.

  “She was talking about college. She was tutoring younger kids in the foster program and had decided she wanted to be a teacher. All that hope lost because her boyfriend wanted to show off.”

  “I heard that much. He’s in critical condition, too.”

  Her first, vengeful thought had been, He deserves to be. But, of course, he was young, too. Only seventeen, swaggering the way boys his age did. If he survived, he would have to live with terrible guilt. Two tragedies for the price of one, she thought sadly.

  “Was he speeding?” she asked.

  “Yes, but under normal conditions it wouldn’t have been dangerously so. With the ice, though...” He didn’t have to finish.

  She nodded.

  “Eat,” he said gently.

  She did for a minute, not tasting what went in her mouth, but what did that matter? It was a while before she said, “I want every one of them to have a chance at a happy life. Is that so much to ask?”

  “No.” Reid set down his own burger, braced his feet on the floor and drew her to him, between his legs. “No,” he repeated huskily, rubbing his cheek on top of her head. “It’s not too much to ask.”

  She let him hold her for longer than she should have. Anna wanted to trust him enough to stay in his arms forever, but she knew better than that.

  When eventually he drove her back to where she’d left her Toyota downtown, Reid’s dad followed behind them all the way in his SUV.

  Anna got into her RAV4, waved and watched as Reid started forward again, his father crowding his bumper. Trying to make him mad. Anna couldn’t help wondering whether, given their history, he would succeed. And if so...what would Reid do?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CALEB DIDN’T GIVE a shit about cars or what made them run. He wasn’t old enough to get a driver’s license, and now he wouldn’t be able to go for one until he was eighteen. He didn’t understand what made half the guys spend hours every day with their heads underneath the hood of one or another of the beaters the Hales kept around. Personally, he figured Roger messed them up as soon as someone figured out how to get one running, but Isaac said Roger and Paula gave a car or pickup to anyone who’d “graduated” from the Bear Creek Resort Home for Screwed Up Boys. They were able to drive away. Isaac said he wouldn’t take one, though. Like Caleb, he didn’t seem very interested in engines or brake linings or clutches. Since he was going to college, he said, he didn’t expect to need a car for a long time. Which was probably true; the only reason Isaac ever got off the computer or put down a book was because he was expected to do chores.

  Caleb wouldn’t mind driving away when his time came, but not in some dented piece of crap.

  Jose, Apollo and Damon had gone out to work on one of the old pickups. They’d gobbled breakfast because Roger had come home from town yesterday with the part they needed and they were excited.

  Caleb didn’t even lift his head when they went out the front door. Isaac had already taken over the computer that was in the corner. He was teaching himself some kind of programming that looked like gibberish to Caleb. Paula leaned over his shoulder as if she understood what he was doing. Who knew? Maybe she did. Roger was taking a shower. Caleb could still hear it running, which meant he’d be pissed if Diego and Trevor, who were on the schedule to clean the kitchen, turned on hot water before he got out. Caleb had had it happen—a blast of cold water. How come nobody got excited about plumbing instead of internal combustion engines? he wondered.

  Only TJ and Caleb were still at the table, neither of them looking at each other. Caleb was reaching for another piece of toast when he realized the voices outside had risen in pitch. Suddenly footsteps thundered on the steps and across the porch. Caleb turned and was vaguely aware TJ and Paula had, too. Isaac, who knew?

  Apollo burst in, the whites of his eyes showing.

  “Roger’s truck!” he burst out. “Somebody slashed the tires. All four tires.”

  Caleb felt as if he’d just been subjected to one of those blasts of cold water.

  Some instinct made him turn his head to look at TJ. There was a flash of something on his face that might have been fear, until he noticed Caleb watching and blanked his face.

  The other boys had followed Apollo in, too, and they were all babbling. Caleb tried to take it all in.

  Without Roger’s truck, nobody could go anywhere. They’d be stuck here unless Roger called a tire store and asked them to bring new tires out, and Caleb knew he didn’t like outsiders to come here. Wait. No, he could call Reid—

  Except...yesterday Paula had sat Caleb down to tell him his father really was in town and that Reid might not be out here for a while, because he couldn’t risk leading their father right to Caleb. Yeah, so that left them... He experienced that weird chill again.

  Trapped was the word whispering in Caleb’s head, even though he knew it was dumb and melodramatic, ’cuz it was daytime already and there were neighbors and cars passing occasionally on the road, so it wasn’t as if they couldn’t get help.

  He finally identified why he was so bothered. So, okay, they might not actually be trapped. But he was willing to bet that was the message the slashed tires were meant to send.

  See what I can do to you.

  * * *

  AFTER HOURS SPENT brooding and then a nearly sleepless night, Reid was still angry at himself. The anger hardened into fury when he looked out his front window Wednesday morning and saw his father’s Denali sitting there at the curb. Still.

  Or again?

  Gritting his teeth, he went back to his bedroom and dressed in athletic gear adequate for temperatures hovering around freezing. He finally let himself out the back door, hopped over a neighbor’s rickety fence and went for a hard run through streets still messy from a melt-and-freeze cycle that wouldn’t let up.

  He had a sudden vision: himself running on the hard-packed, wet sand at the ocean’s edge north of Malibu. The bluff to one side, the endless blue of the Pacific Ocean to the other. Seagulls dipping and wheeling and calling. The sun shining, a cooling breeze off the ocean, the crash of waves better than any music from an iPod.

  When he lived down south, he hadn’t gone out to the beach often enough. But when he wanted to, he could go. Now look at his options, and this was spring. Supposedly.

  Neither the exercise nor the satisfaction of jogging slowly back to his front door and seeing his father’s startled face at Reid’s unexpected appearance allowed him to let go of his dark mood.

  What he couldn’t let go of was the reality that, yes, he’d been caught flat-footed by his father’s presence yesterday, but that didn’t mean he’d had to tell Anna the truth. He could have kept it simple. My father wants to talk and I’m refusing. He thinks if he hangs around I’ll relent. Not happening.

  Uh-huh. And then she would have said, What does he want to talk about? You must have some idea. If he’d said no, she would have looked at him with those eyes, which held all the compassion in the world and a hell of a lot of the world’s pain, too, and told him it wouldn’t hurt to find out, would it?

  Staring at his dark ceiling last night, he’d run dozens of possible scripts, and none of them had turned out well. But wouldn’t any of them have been a better option than admitting that, yeah, sure, he had stolen his fifteen-year-old brother and was hiding him from his legal guardian?

  Did he want to spill his guts? he asked himself incredulously. Was that the explanation? Did he suddenly buy into a shining faith that confession was good for the soul?

  A snarl erupted from him and he slammed his fist against the bathroom door frame. Swearing and nursing
knuckles he suspected would be bruised, he stepped into a blisteringly hot shower and closed his eyes.

  I’m losing it, he thought with shuddering dismay. He didn’t understand what was happening to him, a man whose self-discipline had become absolute.

  Not since that first tumultuous year with the Hales had he felt his composure fray like this until there were moments he could literally hear the ripping sound as it tore. He had never, as an adult, done anything like hammer his fist into a wall.

  He’d never needed another person’s liking, approval and touch with an ache that wouldn’t leave him, either. And, damn it, this craving he understood the least. He and Anna had had lunch a few times. Spent the one day skiing with scarcely any conversation. He’d kissed her a few times. Held her.

  Looked at objectively, she wasn’t the kind of stunning beauty who could bring a man to his knees. She was prissy and judgmental. She still had secrets, and he had no idea whether she felt the same desperate compulsion to confess them to him that he apparently had to roll over and bare his unprotected belly to her.

  She made Reid feel young and vulnerable and scared, and he hated it.

  He especially hated having told her so much yesterday.

  Swearing yet again, he turned off the water and grabbed for a towel. No, she wouldn’t tell anyone what he’d said. He knew that much. But that wasn’t the frightening part. It was that he wanted to tell her everything, and he couldn’t.

  Dressed for his day, he took a few minutes to scramble some eggs and eat them with whole-wheat toast before donning his weapon and badge and going out the door. He didn’t glance toward his father. He hoped the son of a bitch had sat there all night and frozen his ass off. Too bad he hadn’t asphyxiated himself with carbon monoxide.

  When the GMC Denali fell in behind him, Reid’s fingers spasmed on the steering wheel. Anna was one thing, but Dean Sawyer was another. He wouldn’t give his father the satisfaction of knowing he’d riled him.

  A slow thought crept in. It wouldn’t be hard to make life in Angel Butte damn uncomfortable for Sergeant Dean Sawyer. No, Reid would rather his personal problems didn’t become general knowledge, but it wouldn’t take a whole lot of little jabs before his father would lose it.