The Truth About Toby

by Cheryl St. John

  He studied her moving competently around his kitchen, and didn’t know how he felt about having her there. She disturbed him in more ways than one. “I didn’t say I don’t cook. I said I don’t like to.”

  “What do you do in there all day?” she asked.

  He took a bite of the salad, and answered after he swallowed. “I debug programs for software companies. Sometimes I beta test.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Play with programs before they get on the market.”

  “You do that from here?”

  He nodded. “I get information over the modem, and they express-mail the disks to my box in Gunnison. I drive down a couple of times a week unless it’s urgent.”

  “What about during the winter? The kid who drove me up says it gets nasty.”

  “I have a four-wheel drive. And a snowmobile.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  He’d never really thought of it as fun, but he guessed he did enjoy riding it. He shrugged.

  “How do you like your steak?” she asked, peering into the broiler oven.

  Her jeans fit snugly over her curvy backside, the faded denim showing off the length and shapeliness of her legs and sparking his imagination. “Medium-rare.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Sure, you’re psychic, right?”

  The pleasure that had been evident on her face a moment before disappeared. “No. I’m nothing. At least that’s what the tests show.”

  He picked up his fork and twirled it between his fingers. “I’m not used to this.”

  She sat across from him at the small pine table, her sleek hair tucked behind one ear, and folded her hands in her lap. “Did I do something wrong?”

  He shook his head. There hadn’t been a time since he was young that he’d entered his home and smelled supper cooking. He wasn’t used to someone caring what he ate or how he preferred his steak. “I don’t do this,” he said, knowing his words were inadequate. “I don’t make polite chitchat.”

  A blush rose in her cheeks. Her gaze dropped to the napkin beside her plate and remained there.

  He didn’t know how to act around her. He wasn’t a people person. He resented having to call upon manners and polite conversation in his home. This was his sanctuary away from the entanglements of civilization, and he didn’t want to deal with any encroachment, not even hers.

  Getting up, she placed the steaks on their plates. The potato she set before him was still in its skin, but the fluffy insides had been mashed and dotted with chive.

  She sat back down and, without a word, started eating.

  Austin tasted the potato. It was delicious, as was the steak and salad. Best of all, he hadn’t had to fix it himself. She’d tried to make herself useful. She had made herself useful. Somehow he understood she wasn’t any happier with the situation than he was, but that she was just determined enough to secure his help that she’d overcome her reservations. He admired that.

  He caught himself midthought. No. Stop right there. Any thoughts of acceptance would only lead to trouble. He’d cut himself off from people for a reason, and he’d do well to remember that. He knew better than to let horniness scramble his thoughts.

  He ate, then got up to pour them each a cup of coffee. He’d opened up to someone once. And it had been the biggest mistake of his life. He wouldn’t make it again. “The way to this man’s heart is not through his stomach.”

  Her head shot up and she leveled that warm honey gaze on him. “I wasn’t trying to bribe you.”

  “Good. See that you don’t.”

  She picked up the broiler pan and placed it in the sink a little more noisily than necessary.

  “Forget that. Come sit in here.”

  Hands resting on the edge of the sink, she straightened her slender shoulders. Finally she turned and followed him into the other room, sinking onto a sofa.

  Austin built a fire. The flames caught the sticks and eventually the split log. “Tell me what you did at the institute.”

  He could tell she was thinking over her attitude. She had to answer him to get anywhere with her situation. “I stayed a month. I took a lot of tests.”

  He sat on the hearth. “You said nothing specific brought on these dreams of yours.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you remember your first dream about your nephew?”

  Pain flickered across her face as plain as the firelight. “Yes.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  She did, with tears in her voice and in her eyes.

  “Do you remember anything about the day or two before that first dream?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I went to the cemetery that morning. On the way I stopped at the store and bought pink-tipped carnations. Maggie loved carnations. I left them at her grave. And a single blue one for Toby. There’s a marker for him. There’s nothing in the plot, though. But I didn’t want Maggie alone there without him.... Somehow it seemed...I don’t know... right. Maggie never liked being alone.”

  “What else?”

  “There was a couple from Michigan at the inn that weekend. It was a Monday, and after lunch, I checked them out. Audrey took care of the room and the laundry, and I went through Maggie and Toby’s closet and drawers. Toby’s clothes and toys are still in my extra bedroom. I stored some of Maggie’s things in the garage, the things I couldn’t part with. And I took a trunk load to the Open Door Mission.”

  “They had been staying with you?”

  “She moved in with me after the divorce. I helped her take care of Toby.” Tears welled up then, and her chin trembled. She struggled to go on. “She made a lot of mistakes, but she was a good person. I loved her.”

  Austin had seen so many suffering people, it was a wonder he could still feel anything at all. But he did. He felt plenty. Her anguish. Her grief. Her confusion. Damn her. That’s why he’d come here: to get away from feeling those things. She was exactly the person he’d avoided for the last twenty years.

  To elude the dangerous wave of compassion that urged him to do something crazy like reach over and touch her and open up another whole set of complications, he turned and added another log. “Did the institute help you any?”

  “They affirmed that I wasn’t as crazy as the police thought when I kept nagging them about Toby still being alive. At first I couldn’t separate the visions of Maggie and Toby in the car—under the water—”

  She stopped. “Those were my fears, you see,” she went on. “Maggie had always buckled Toby into his car seat, but when the search team brought the car up, he wasn’t in it. Maggie’s seat belt hadn’t been fastened, either, leading the police to believe she’d attempted to free herself and Toby under water. They said maybe she got Toby out before she ran out of oxygen and was unable to get out herself. All the morbid possibilities of what could have become of his little body went around and around in my head until I thought I’d go crazy.”

  He said nothing, and kept his posture carefully guarded.

  “Now I know differently,” she went on. “The institute—Tom especially—helped me understand that my dreams were real.” She waved a hand. “But I disappointed them all with my lack of abilities in any of their test areas.”

  Finally he turned back to her.

  “I left after a month,” she said. “I couldn’t afford not to run my business, and we weren’t getting anywhere. They wanted me to do more tests, but I knew it was pointless.” She raised her glistening gaze to his. “Did you take all those tests?”

  The answer was out before he realized he was going to give it. “I spent years being tested and observed and recorded. Those researchers wait years for a find like me.”

  “And you were just a child?”

  He nodded.

  “How did you first know?” she asked. “That you had this... ability?”

  Taking time to think about his reply, he left to refill their cups, and c
arried them out, sitting on the sofa across from her. She’d been honest with him. He didn’t intend to get chummy, but she needed to know she wasn’t the only one who had experienced these things.

  “One day when I was about four or five,” he told her, “my mother showed me my grandfather’s war medals. I held one in the palm of my hand. I saw battles. I saw him in an army hospital. I saw his coffin covered with a flag, and I smelled roses. I described it all to my mother. She found a place in North Carolina to have me tested.”

  “What happened then?

  “They drilled me with ESP cards, mind-mapping games, remote viewing exercises and every imaginable test.” He ran a thumbnail along the crease of his jeans. “I had abilities in all those areas, but like I said before, my strength was in touching objects and getting pictures of the owner.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “It was pretty normal for me. I’d always done it in some way or another. Once I developed the ability, it was just my life. I didn’t know anything else.”

  She leaned forward as if listening with her whole body. He’d never talked about this with anyone before, and he didn’t know why he was telling her now, except that for some unexplainable reason he didn’t want her to feet alone. He understood loneliness.

  “I had a few dreams,” he said, and her expressive eyes widened.

  “Like mine?”

  “Similar.” A flush came to her cheeks and he knew she was relieved to hear him say these things. Her sincere reaction made him glad he’d told her. “Anyway, articles got published about the criminal cases. Once the ball was rolling, it gained more and more momentum until after a while all I did was find victims and tune in to killers. I couldn’t go to school anymore because the kids and teachers knew about my talents and connections to the police.”

  “That must have been awful.”

  “My mom moved us around. But it was the same everywhere. We couldn’t keep a low profile. My mom fancied herself an agent of sorts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’d get a call, book us a ‘gig’ and take money from people to find their loved ones.”

  “You had to live,” she said.

  “We could’ve lived like everyone else did. But she liked it that way. She took advantage of people who were hurting. I didn’t realize until I was older, exactly what she was doing.”

  Though his voice and expression were carefully controlled, her expression said she’d seen through them to his pain.

  “Sometimes,” he said,.more lightheartedly, “I’d pretend I wasn’t picking up on anything, so I could have a rest from it. Sort of a vacation.”

  She studied the flames. “You were treated like a freak,” she said softly.

  He didn’t know how he liked her easy assessment of his feelings. “I guess so.”

  “I know how that feels.”

  “You do?”

  She turned her attention back, and an expression of discovery crossed her features. “I had dreams like these before... a long time ago.”

  He studied her in silence.

  “When I was very small.” She ran a hand through her hair in a nervous gesture. “What had I done with those memories?”

  “Saved them until you could deal with them, maybe,” he replied.

  She went on. “Sometimes I didn’t even have to be asleep to have one. One time I had an awake dream about my aunt Jackie being in a car accident. I cried and told my mother.

  “A little while later, my mother answered the phone. She turned around and stared at me with this look on her face. I’ll never forget it. I found out later that my aunt was in an accident. The next time something similar happened, my mother sent me to my room and told me never to speak of those dreams again. She said they used to hang women, burn them alive for having dreams like mine.”

  “She was afraid of your sight, and made you think it was wrong,” he said softly.

  “More than wrong. She and my grandparents prayed and prayed over me. I didn’t want them to think I was wicked, and I didn’t want to be burned alive, so I let them think their prayers worked.”

  “Maybe they did.”

  “Maybe. I stopped having the dreams.”

  “You learned to tune them out.”

  “Is that what I did?”

  He nodded. “Until your sister and nephew died. Something there triggered them again.”

  Shaine attempted to sip her coffee, but her hands shook, and hot coffee spilled over the side of the cup. That longforgotten, well-hidden, slip of memory had come vividly into focus, and she wondered how she could have forgotten something so momentous. She blinked back moisture she didn’t want him to see.

  Austin took the mug from her and set it on the low table; then he took her hands, one at a time, and brushed her palms dry with his callused fingers.

  She closed her eyelids against the gentleness in that touch and held her breath so she wouldn’t cry or groan or shame herself. He released her hands, and reached to take a strand of her hair and rub the tress between his fingers. She’d opened her eyes and was breathing again, but her heart forgot a couple of beats and then had to thump double-time to catch up.

  He was so close, she could see the millions of tiny dark dots along his chin and jaw where he’d recently shaved. She wondered what it would feel like if she drew her hand along his jaw. Her palm burned with the temptation.

  “First, Shaine, you have to learn to trust your instincts, your intuition.” He released her hair.

  She met his dark gaze, and without thinking about it, reached for his wrist. Her fingers wrapped around his warm flesh, the dusting of hair a pleasant sensation against her skin. “I trust the instinct that tells me Toby is alive.”

  Against his cream-colored sweater, his hair and skin were dark. His eyes closed for a brief moment, and when they opened again, they were grim. “All I can tell you is that in all the years I connected with victims, I rarely found anyone alive.”

  “But you did find some of them alive.”

  He was not a hard man by nature. Experience had driven him to protect himself. “The odds are not favorable,” he warned. “Each time you open yourself to the possibilities, you take the almost inevitable chance of seeing and feeling things you don’t want to experience. It’s an unlucky crapshoot. And anticipating what you’re about to open is almost the worst part of it.”

  His intensity would have convinced her if her reasons had been different. But this was Toby she was looking for.

  He stared at her, giving Shaine an unexpected view into the pain-dimmed depths of his eyes, and for that instant, she shared his suffering. Thinking of his pain, her chest hurt.

  Slowly his expression changed. That intense dark gaze roved over her face, touched her lips, dropped to her breasts, warming her with its eloquence.

  Her heart hammered against her ribs, and heat rose in her limbs. Beneath her fingers, his pulse quickened. His fierce expression didn’t frighten her. Her gaze dropped to his mouth, and she saw his throat move as he swallowed. She barely knew him. But she understood him in some elemental way. And she wanted to kiss him. Oh, Lord, she wanted to kiss him.

  Her entire body prepared for the experience. If he leaned forward and touched his lips to hers she would explode in a million pieces. And if he didn’t...she would die.

  His mouth came down over hers, his lips firm and warm and tasting of coffee, and the kiss seemed too beautiful and too fragile to bear. He tilted his head, aligning their mouths more perfectly, and her eager heart responded with a tumultuous pace. More than ever, the welling desire to cry rose up in her chest. Not from grief or empathy, but from the sheer joy of this man’s touch.

  He wasn’t pushy. Or demanding. The ardent kiss was slow and easy, as though he wanted it to last. As if letting her know this was what making love with him would be like, too. It gave her time to imagine lying naked with him, to imagine his hands on her skin and his body pleasuring hers. He was a thorough kisser; he would be a thorough
lover. His kiss slaked every hungering, thirsting ache she’d ever had, and she didn’t want it to ever end.

  But of course, it did.

  As if by some sort of mutual amazement, they moved fractionally apart. His breath still touched her face. Reciprocal yearning configured his expression, and she prayed it wasn’t just something she wanted to read.

  “Is that what you meant by trusting instincts?” she half whispered.

  The portal to the inner man she’d seen only a second ago disappeared, and his protective shell once again separated them. He moved back and released a pent-up breath. “Didn’t get anywhere with the food, so you’ll try a new tactic, right?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Think coming on to me will win me over? Change my mind?” His mouth curved up in a cynical smile that pierced her to the quick. “I’ll take you to bed. Bet on it. But I won’t change my mind about what I’m going to teach you.”

  As if she’d intended for that to happen! As if she’d been the one to initiate it! Shaine picked up her cup and carried it toward the kitchen. “You’re crude.”

  “No, I’m honest.” The look on her face would have been the same if he had slapped her. Austin couldn’t help watching her move around the divider. Was she a seductress or was he just a man too long without female company?

  She ran water in the sink, and for some illogical reason he went after her.

  She stopped scrubbing the pan and spun around, indignation burning in the depths of her gemstone eyes. “The thought of exchanging favors never crossed my mind, Mr. Allen. But if that’s what it took to find my nephew, you can believe I’d do it. Sleeping with you would be a small price to pay for that little boy’s welfare.”

  The anger dissipated from her body as though a force field of energy had been turned off. Suds dripped from her fingertips to the floor, and when she spoke again, her voice had lost its bravado. “If only it were that easy.”

  He didn’t have the skills it took to relate to her, to anyone. His defensiveness was unbecoming, and he knew it. Immediately sorry, Austin started to move forward, but stopped himself before he invaded her space. Getting too close to her wasn’t smart. “You’re right. I am crude. I don’t mingle with polite society much.”