by Kylie Brant
A phone rang somewhere nearby. Gabe was engrossed in demonstrating the lift bridge to the boy. “Would you mind getting that?”
“No problem.” She crossed to the desk that held the telephone and picked up the receiver. After a moment she handed it to Gabe. “It’s for you,” she said quietly. “She sounds upset.”
He frowned, took the phone from her. He listened for a moment, then said, “Ma, calm down.”
Meghan listened, making no attempt to disguise her interest. There was apparently no end to the details she was learning about Gabe tonight. The longer he spoke on the phone, the grimmer he looked. He resembled, she thought, the distrustful cop who’d shown up at her door that first time. And she wondered what his mother could possibly be saying that would put that look on his face.
“Where’d he get the cash?” After listening for a moment, his expression grew sterner. “Yeah, I’ll be there. No, don’t do anything. I’ll take care of it.” He cut the connection abruptly and swiped a hand over his jaw.
Meghan’s voice was tentative. “Bad news?”
“There’s something I need to take care of. I don’t know how long it will take.”
She watched him carefully, wondering at the rigid control he was exerting. But his eyes told a different story. And she was very glad she wasn’t on the receiving end of the kind of fury she saw brewing there. “We can just take a cab.”
Her question seemed to distract him. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll take you.” There was a minute of hesitation before he added, “After I take care of this.”
Gabe had been less than communicative in the car, so Danny had done most of the talking. Meghan hadn’t been sure what to expect, but she was surprised when Gabe pulled into the general hospital’s parking lot.
“Shall we wait for you here?” she asked tentatively.
He looked impatient. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. You better come in.”
As an invitation it lacked civility, but his meaning was clear enough. She and Danny trailed in his wake into the emergency waiting room. Meghan held back as an older woman launched herself at Gabe.
“Gabriel! Oh, thank God you’re here. They were talking about putting him in detox, and that would just kill Butch. You know it would.”
He stood stiffly in her embrace for an instant, before disentangling her arms from his neck. “Why don’t you let me get the information so we know what we’re dealing with here?”
“Oh, my, yes.” Joyce Reddington clasped her hands together to keep them from trembling. “You talk to them. I just can’t seem to make sense of what they’re saying.” Without another word Gabe strode away. Joyce turned to Meghan and smiled uncertainly.
“Are you with Gabriel?”
Gabriel, the archangel. The whimsical thought flitted across Meghan’s mind. Somehow she didn’t think Gabe would appreciate the comparison.
“Yes.”
Joyce spotted Danny then, and her smile faltered. Her gaze went back to Meghan. “Are you Gabriel’s wife?”
“No.” Realizing the woman was on the edge of collapse, Meghan gently steered her toward one of the chairs lining the walls. “You’d certainly know if Gabe was married.”
“Yes.” Joyce’s voice was strangely uncertain. “He would probably tell me.” But as if she remained unconvinced, her gaze kept darting to Danny, who’d discovered a magazine graced with what else—a dinosaur—and was already engrossed.
Gabe reappeared, and if possible his jaw was even tighter. Joyce bounced out of her chair. “Did you get Butch released? I can take care of him if they’d just send him home. Are they going to send him home?”
“No, they’re keeping him in detox where he belongs. And after that there’ll be a psych eval.”
“No!” Joyce clutched Gabe’s arm tightly. “Maybe they could just keep him overnight. Just until he calms down. He’s been clean a long time. One little mistake isn’t reason for him to start all over again.”
“Was it just one mistake, Ma?” Gabe peered into her eyes dispassionately, then took one of her arms in his hand and rolled up the sleeve of her sweater.
“Gabriel.” She managed to sound indignant and sad at the same time. “The last time was ‘it’ for me. I quit for good. Didn’t I promise you that?”
“You made a lot of promises.”
His voice was flat, expressionless, but his words vibrated like a plucked harp string. Joyce’s shoulders sagged. “I know I did. But this is one I’m keeping.”
Gabe’s jaw clenched. “If you really want to stay clean, the last person you should be living with is another addict.”
“Butch isn’t an addict anymore. He’s not,” Joyce said insistently when Gabe muttered a curse. “He stumbled this time, but he’ll pick himself up again. And he’ll be stronger for it, you’ll see.”
“Yeah.” It was clear from the set of Gabe’s shoulders that he was done arguing with the woman. But the emotion hadn’t been dismissed. It seethed in his eyes. With abrupt motions he jerked out his wallet. “How are you fixed for cash? Do you have a way home?”
“I got my purse. I’ll take a bus home tomorrow. I want to stay the night here, make sure Butch is okay.”
He nodded, took some bills out of his wallet and handed them to her. “The cafeteria is open until midnight, the desk nurse said. She can show you where it is, and tell you where you can wait.”
Joyce took the bills, but her gaze was on her son’s face. “All right.”
“I’ll call you here tomorrow. I’m going to want to talk to his doctor myself.”
She folded the bills nervously over and over in her hands. “Thank you, Gabriel. You’re so good to me.”
Gabe had started to turn away, but at those words he froze for a moment, every vertebra going rigid. Then he strode to where Meghan was collecting Danny. With his hand resting at the base of her spine, he ushered them away and out to his car.
“He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.” Meghan’s voice was soft as she joined Gabe in the living room.
“Asleep without his nightly bowl of ice cream? That must be a record.” Conversation was a welcome distraction from the scene that played and replayed in his mind. Endless repeats. Variations on a theme. It took only the puzzled look on her face for comprehension to register. “He doesn’t have a bowl of double-fudge ripple before going to bed at night?”
Her reaction spoke more loudly than her words. “Good heavens, no. That sounds like an open invitation to nightmares if I ever heard one.”
“Damn.” He felt a flicker of amusement. “I thought the little creep was scamming me that night, but I wasn’t sure. Guess I don’t know much about kids.”
She studied him for a moment as he prowled the area, then went to the kitchen where he could hear the sound of cupboards opening. Minutes later she came back carrying a tumbler. Offering it to him, she said simply, “Whiskey. I’m told it’s an excellent quality.”
He reached for it, took a swallow. “At this point quality is wasted on me.” The liquor seared a path down his throat and pooled warmly in his stomach. He sipped again, willing the warmth it produced to spread to his veins, melting the ice that had formed the minute he’d heard his mother’s voice on the phone.
Meghan watched him for a moment, then sat on the couch. “Who was it that your mother was so worried about?”
“Butch VanGowen. Her boyfriend.”
“Did the doctors say he was going to be all right?”
His mouth twisted. “His kind have a way of surviving. He’ll live to spread misery another day.” The last words were uttered with such loathing that he surprised even himself. But if he despised the weakness that kept his mother clinging to the man, he despised the man more. “As you might have picked up from the conversation, he has fallen off that pinnacle of abstinence he teetered on.” He brought the glass to his lips and watched her over its rim. “He’s a drug addict. Just like my mother.”
He waited for the shock on her face, and he wait
ed for the pity. When he saw neither, the vise in his gut eased just a fraction.
“She seemed sincere. When she said she’d quit for good.”
“She’s good at sincerity. Almost as good as she is at quitting. She’s done it dozens of times over the years. Hopefully this time it took.” He gave a dismissive shrug that hinted at none of the emotions crashing and churning inside him. “Maybe it has.”
Driven to move, he roamed her large living room. Her pricey apartment and high-rent neighborhood were about as far away from the squalor of his childhood as it was possible to imagine.
And yet, it wasn’t difficult to recall those times. The memories lurked in the dark corners of his mind, striking when least expected. When consciousness faded. When defenses were weakened. Then the echoes from the past would pounce, packing enough realism to leave him sweating and shaking.
“What I remember most about my childhood was the smell.” Poverty had an aroma all its own. Rotting garbage. Stale beer. Human waste. “Sometimes when I have a call on the west side I’ll walk into a tenement and I’ll catch that scent…” He shook his head, as if to dislodge the images that clung despite his efforts to carve them out of his mind. And then he sipped from the cut-crystal tumbler in his hand, enjoyed the bite of fine whiskey and tried to remember how far away he was from those years.
“For me it’s Chanel Number Five.”
His attention jerked to Meghan and she gave a half smile.
“Both my mother and grandmother used it. When one or both of them would call me on the carpet, which was fairly often, I’d stand there waiting for the lecture to be over and smell that perfume. To this day whenever I encounter that fragrance I’m filled with an overwhelming urge to flee.”
“I can’t imagine that you were too troublesome as a kid.”
“Well, it didn’t take much to disappoint the Tremaynes.” Her voice was casual as if the thoughts no longer mattered.
“It occurred much more frequently than you think. But you were troublesome, weren’t you? You told me once that you were a delinquent.”
“Where I lived it was a way of life. I joined a gang when I was twelve.” He managed, finally, to shock her. He saw it in her widened gaze, her fixed expression. “My mother spent whatever money she earned on drugs and stayed pretty strung-out most of the time. By the time I was thirteen we were homeless and lived under a bridge for the summer.” He lifted a shoulder. “By that time I was living in the streets anyway.”
There’d been promises back then, so many promises. That she’d get a real job. That she’d stop using. That they’d get a real house. Promises as empty as the air they were uttered in.
“How did you end up in the system?” When he merely looked at her she elaborated. “You mentioned foster parents. I assume Social Services stepped in at some time.”
“I took four bullets to the chest the fall I turned fourteen.” Pumped out of a .35 caliber midnight special blasting out of a window of a stolen hatchback. A rival gang had been looking for notches and they’d found one. He’d nearly bled to death in a filthy gutter filled with crack vials and broken bottles. It was a long time before he’d been glad he survived.
“It woke my mother up.” He gave a humorless smile.
“At least to what the life was doing to me. The cop assigned to my case told her I’d be in jail before I was eighteen. She begged him to take me home instead.” The fact that Joseph Maine had, in fact, done just that, still had the power to amaze him. He’d stayed at first because the small house in the suburbs had been preferable to juvie. But at the end he’d stayed because he’d wanted to. Joseph and Dora had slowly won his trust and then his respect and finally a fierce devotion that remained strong to this day. He didn’t understand people like them, who had the patience and desire to take in a half-wild street punk. But he knew where he’d be today without them.
“It sounds like your mother made the right decision.”
“It was the best thing she ever did for me.” He went over to the wall and examined the bright splash of colors on the canvas adorning it. “She spent the next four years trying to undo it.”
Her visits at first, he remembered, had been full of familiar promises and empty vows. Maybe she’d sensed when his reluctance to stay with the Maines had dissipated, to be replaced by an appreciation for the modest comforts his new life provided. Hell, maybe she’d been jealous. But for whatever reason, before the first year was up, the focus of the visits had undergone a drastic change.
“She began to argue with the Maines, threaten them if they didn’t let me go back with her. They had the system on their side by then, of course. There was no way I would have been allowed to return as long as she continued her lifestyle. But somehow she twisted all of it, made it seem like it was Joseph who had stolen me from her. And she certainly held him and Dora responsible for my reluctance to leave.”
“How long did that go on?”
“On and off for years.” Slowly his ambivalence about life had changed to a new appreciation for it. But whenever he would start to get comfortable, she’d show up again, spouting threats and worthless promises. “The last time was when I was seventeen. She’d sworn to me that she was off drugs for good, and I was starting to believe her.” He hadn’t particularly wanted to think about leaving his foster family by that time, but he’d have done it, out of loyalty if not love.
“She disappeared for a few months. Said she was getting a new life together for us. When she turned up again she was stoned out of her mind and about seven months pregnant.”
The sick feeling of betrayal was easily recalled. “That meeting ended badly,” he said in gross understatement. “I didn’t see her again for ten years.”
“And she’s been straight ever since.”
He gave a humorless laugh. “With an addict it’s never as easy as that.” Every time he saw Joyce he couldn’t suppress the suspicion that surged, couldn’t prevent himself from silently searching for signs of drug use. As long as she remained clean, he took care of her. Found her a place to live and made sure she had clothes to wear, food to eat. He was careful with the money. Butch had a way of selling whatever he could get his hands on. A more worthless human being Gabe had rarely seen, but Joyce stuck by him with pathetic devotion. She’d exchanged, he supposed, one addiction for another.
“What happened to the baby?”
“I don’t know. She was vague with the details. I assume it went in the system, wherever she happened to be when she gave birth.” He knew too well the outlook for babies born with addictions. Had dealt with the offspring of addicted mothers for most of his career. Suddenly he was weary, clear down to his bones. Tired of thinking of it, and damned tired of talking about it. He slid a gaze to Meghan. It wasn’t like him to let all this spill in the light of day. Cal knew bits and pieces of it. No one else. He didn’t know what it was, about this woman, that had elicited his candor. Maybe because he knew something of what she’d gone through, too. Crash victims experienced similar camaraderie.
But even as he had the thought, he knew it was a lie. He didn’t feel the inclination to spill his guts to anyone else. It wasn’t the experiences they shared, it was her. And he was past the point of questioning why.
She rose and approached him. Slipping her arms around his waist, she tipped her face up to his and said, “You became a good man in spite of it all, Gabe. Decent. Honorable. And probably more empathetic than you’re entirely comfortable with.”
He wasn’t at ease with the accolades, but her proximity accomplished what no amount of whiskey ever would. The tension began to seep from his body, one small bit at a time. Sliding a hand into her hair, he lowered his mouth to hers for a kiss that held a curious tenderness. When it was over he leaned his forehead against hers and released a breath. It felt like ridding his lungs of poison.
“You know you forgot to list some of my most winning qualities, don’t you?”
Recognizing the lightening of his mood, she responded in kind.
She cocked her head, pretended to think. “Hmm…I can’t think of any.”
“You forgot charming.” When she rolled her eyes, his brows raised. “Handsome.”
“Conceited,” she offered, and was rewarded with a pinch.
“I was going to say, ‘dangerously susceptible to blue-eyed blondes with long, curly hair and tight, curvy little bodies.”’
“Lucky for me your taste is so specific.”
He set his tumbler down on a nearby table and toyed with the top button of her blouse. “Honey, my taste grew more specific the moment I met you.” The kiss she rewarded him with started out with a laugh and quickly turned into more. His mouth angled against hers and feasted, drawing in her flavor like a starving man devoured a meal.
It was a kind of healing. The sweetness of her mouth, the catch of her breath. And then the evidence of her rising passion, as her mouth twisted under his and her arms tightened. The taste of her was a balm to old wounds and just that easily she stripped his mind clean. He took the kiss deeper and thought of nothing but her.
Meghan felt herself go boneless. The dizzying speed of it arced through her senses. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for the way one touch from him could rocket her system. He tasted of warm whiskey and primal male hunger. It was an irresistible combination.
His hand moved between them, and moments later cool air kissed her bare skin. Her teeth closed over his lip, and as his hand covered her breast she gave a satisfied sigh. He pushed her blouse down her arms, released the catch of her bra. Bending his head, he took the tip of one breast between his lips. The fleeting satisfaction shattered, transformed into a sudden, vicious ache.
The scent of her lingered in provocative traces between her breasts, in the delicate hollow at the base of her throat. He filled his senses with her and used teeth, tongue and lips to feast on her satiny flesh. He could feel her heartbeat stumble as she arched closer to him, and he responded to the demand by taking her deeper.
