The Man Next Door

by Gina Wilkins

  “Looks kind of different,” Grandma Lawrence commented, studying the dish sitting among the same Thanksgiving fare that had graced their table every year for much longer than Dani had been alive. Turkey and dressing with giblet gravy and homemade yeast rolls—Gillian’s contribution—sweet potatoes with coconut and pecan topping, and fresh fruit salad—Grandma’s input—cranberry sauce—straight out of the can—Rachel’s broccoli-rice-and-cheese casserole. Mom, Grandma and Rachel always provided plenty of desserts—two or three kinds of pies and at least one cake. Dani usually brought frozen corn or green peas, heated in the microwave or boiled on the stove, since everyone knew Dani didn’t cook. “I don’t know if your brother’s going to like it.”

  “Then he can fill up on something else,” Rachel said a bit sharply, jumping to her sister’s defense. “Dani worked hard on this. And we’re going to enjoy it.”

  “Okay, don’t get all testy,” Grandma muttered, peeling plastic wrap off the fruit salad bowl. “Let’s start carrying these things into the dining room. Your mama’s already got the table set.”

  Gillian had put both leaves in her dining room table, making it big enough to hold all the food except the desserts, and to seat all seven diners. She sat at one end of the table, Grandma Lawrence at the other, with Rachel, Mark and Clay on one side and Dani and Teague on the other. They held hands before the meal while Gillian blessed the food, and then everyone dug in, piling their plates high with the special-occasion food.

  “What is this?” Clay asked suspiciously when Dani’s eggplant dish was passed to him. “We haven’t had this before, have we?”

  “Just eat it,” his mother ordered him. “Dani made it.”

  “Dani?” Clay looked suspiciously at his sister. “You made this yourself? Or bought it premade?”

  “I made it.”

  “She did,” Rachel confirmed. “She got up early this morning and started working on it.”

  “Try it, Clay,” Gillian repeated.

  Despite his skepticism, he spooned an adequate portion onto his plate, then passed the dish to Mark.

  “So, Teague.” Grandma had obviously been waiting until the formalities of the meal began before renewing her interrogation of him. “Have you ever been married?”

  “Grandma,” Dani murmured with a warning frown.

  “No, ma’am,” Teague replied without any evidence that the question had bothered him. “My career isn’t really conducive to long-term relationships. There are long hours involved, and quite a bit of travel. Some people can pull it off, but I guess I tend to get too wrapped up in the job. I work pretty much all the time, and I have a tendency to forget everything else when I’m involved in an assignment. You know, birthdays, anniversaries, dinner plans, that sort of thing. I’m gone from home a lot, and not many women are happy with that arrangement.”

  “A woman with a fulfilling life of her own wouldn’t care about those things,” Grandma proclaimed, slicing into her turkey. “Women these days don’t sit around waiting for a man to entertain them or take care of them.”

  “Mmm. That’s not been my experience,” Teague murmured, then shoveled a big forkful of sweet potatoes into his mouth.

  “You just haven’t met the right women. Take Rachel and Mark, for example. He works pretty long hours, too, with that medical practice of his, but Rachel keeps herself busy with her decorating business and her hobbies and her family. She doesn’t whine about Mark being gone so much.”

  Chewing on a bite of bread, Teague nodded, an obvious ploy to keep from answering a comment that seemed to need no response.

  Clay squinted at Teague from across the table. “So you just move from one woman to another because you don’t have time to get seriously involved with anyone? Kind of cold, isn’t it?”

  Dani sighed gustily, seeing where this subject was leading. She opened her mouth to tell everyone to stop asking Teague about his personal life, but he replied before she could speak.

  “If you’re worried about your sister, Clay, you needn’t be. Dani and I are just friends. Neighbors. There’s nothing more between us than that. I date, on the rare occasion I have some free time, but I’m not exactly the serial heartbreaker you seem to be implying that I am. I’m very honest about my career demands. And more important, Dani is fully capable of taking care of herself. I can’t think of anyone less likely to be taken in by a slick operator.”

  Teague had to notice the heavily loaded silence that followed his confident assertion. Dani wished desperately that she could think of something quick and clever to say to move the conversation along, but her mind had gone stubbornly blank. Fortunately, Mark came to the rescue, for which she would be forever grateful.

  “Clay, how are your classes going? Still struggling with economics?”

  Clay scowled. “I’m not struggling. It’s just harder than my other classes.”

  Instantly on the defensive on behalf of her youngest, Gillian said, “Clay’s doing very well in all his classes. I’m so proud of the way he’s buckled down and worked so hard during the past year. He’s kept his part-time job at the campus bookstore. He’s even talked about maybe going to law school, like his friend Karyn.”

  Teague looked a bit relieved that the conversation had turned away from himself. “If you’re really interested in a future with the FBI, law school would be great preparation, Clay. They’re always looking for people trained in the law.”

  “Did you go to law school?”

  “No, my undergraduate degree was in business administration. I sort of ended up in the FBI by accident.”

  Because Dani was afraid that would lead to more personal questions aimed at him, she jumped quickly into the conversation with an amusing anecdote about one of her young piano students. Everyone laughed, and Gillian reminisced for a moment about when her three children had all taken piano lessons. Dani was the only one who’d really taken to the instrument, Rachel preferring her art and Clay his guitar. There had been some epic battles over practice time, their mother remembered with a wry shake of her head.

  “My friend Wanda has the flu,” Grandma Lawrence said out of nowhere. “Did everyone get their flu shots this year?”

  Dani was the only one who didn’t nod dutifully.

  She should have lied, she thought glumly, as both her mother and her grandmother narrowed their eyes at her. “You didn’t get your flu shot?”

  “No, Grandma, I haven’t had time this year. I’ve been pretty busy.”

  “And you giving all those children piano lessons,” her grandmother said in disapproval. “If you can’t think of your own health, shouldn’t you at least consider theirs?”

  “Maybe I should start reminding you of things like this,” Gillian fretted. “I worried about that when you moved so far away, that you would forget important things like getting your flu shots and regular dental appointments. You’ve always been so forgetful of those things. Have you been keeping up your insurance premiums?”

  “There you go spoiling her again,” Grandma muttered in disapproval. “I keep telling you the kids would learn to take care of themselves better if you’d stop trying to do everything for them. At least Clay’s finally started learning that lesson—now you’re going to have to let Dani take her own responsibilities, too.”

  Annoyed for many reasons—primary among them being made to look like a brainless idiot in front of Teague—Dani replied curtly, “I’m taking care of myself just fine, everyone. Could we talk about something else now?”

  But Grandma was nothing if not persistent. “I’m sure Mark would be happy to give you your flu shot while you’re here, wouldn’t you, dear?”

  “Um—”

  “Mark and I are leaving for Alabama first thing in the morning,” Rachel reminded her grandmother.

  “Then he’ll just have to take care of it sometime today.”

  Mark chuckled. “I don’t actually carry flu serum with me to Thanksgiving dinners, Grandma.”

  “I’ll get the shot when
I get back to Arkansas, okay?” Dani said in exasperation. “Now, would someone please pass the sweet potatoes? I’d like to have a little more. You outdid yourself on them this year, Grandma.”

  “Oh, you like them? That’s nice. I tweaked the recipe just a little this year. I didn’t know if anyone would notice.”

  In a blatant attempt to help Dani keep the conversation away from volatile personal topics, Rachel brought up a bit of celebrity gossip that had made the news earlier that week, which set Grandma off on one of her enthusiastic monologues about how scandalously those young Hollywood types behaved, and how terrible it was that the press reported on every little thing they did. Of course, her favorite pastime was reading celebrity magazines and watching the gossip shows on TV, but she completely missed the irony as she continued to defend famous people’s rights to privacy even as she dissected their personal lives in minute detail.

  Dani glanced at Teague, wondering what he was making of all of this. The glitter of barely concealed amusement in his eyes almost made her laugh with him. She restrained herself to a quick smile, then ducked her head to doggedly finish her meal. When he reached over beneath the table to pat her knee, she nearly choked on a bite of dressing.

  She was sure he’d meant the gesture merely to express sympathy, but since she had an unfortunately visceral reaction every time he touched her, it would be better for her sake if he didn’t do so again. Not that she was sure how she was going to stop him without letting him know that much of her impassiveness when it came to him was pure bluff.

  “So, let me get this straight. Your grandmother accuses you of being spoiled. Your mother thinks you’re scatterbrained. Your little brother is under the impression that you need protection from men with nefarious purposes in mind. Your sister is in the habit of stepping in to help you solve problems, and your brother-in-law very carefully stays out of any family squabbles. Have I got it about right?”

  Sitting beside Teague on a lawn swing in Gillian’s overly decorated backyard, Dani sighed heavily. “I’m afraid you’ve got it almost exactly right. You must be a very good agent.”

  “I am,” he said with a quick grin. “But it didn’t take special training to figure any of that out.”

  “I told you once that I was trying to change the way my family viewed me, remember?”

  “I remember everything you’ve ever told me. I just didn’t quite understand what you meant at the time.”

  Having been relegated to “entertain their guest” while the other women cleaned the kitchen and Mark, at his mother-in-law’s request, helped Clay fix a leaky pipe in the upstairs bathroom, Dani had brought Teague outside on the pretense of admiring her mother’s camellias. The garden gnomes and small animal sculptures and fairy water fountain and assorted bird feeders and wind chimes that surrounded them were further evidence of what Rachel called Gillian’s “oh-it’s-so-cute” decorating style.

  It was a clear, breezy day, comfortable enough for them in their light jackets. Teague lazily pushed the swing with one foot planted on the ground, the other crossed at his knee. He’d worn a thin steel-blue sweater with gray chinos for the holiday meal. The sweater almost exactly matched his eyes, making Dani wonder if some woman had bought it for him. It didn’t seem like the sort of choice a man would make for himself.

  Her own outfit had been carefully selected to please her family. A deep-orange blouse with brown tweed slacks and brown boots—tasteful, modest, not expensive enough to make them worry that she was spending too much money on clothes, but not cheap enough to make them concerned that she was barely getting by without their help. She knew the orange color looked good with her dark hair and dark blue eyes, but she didn’t obsess about her looks these days the way she had when she was younger.

  “Yes, well, I’ve changed a lot in the past year or so,” she murmured, staring fiercely at a smug-looking concrete squirrel.

  Teague shrugged. “Everyone changes in their twenties. It’s part of growing up.”

  “Why do I get the feeling it didn’t take you as long as it did me?”

  “I didn’t have a family to keep treating me like a kid,” he reminded her. “My dad died when I was just a freshman in college, and after that I was pretty much on my own to figure out the hard way how to get by.”

  While he said that as if it were a good thing, Dani’s heart twisted a little at the thought of having no family at all. As exasperating as her own could be, she couldn’t bear the thought of losing any of them.

  “And now you look sorry for me,” Teague commented, sounding wryly amused. “That wasn’t my intent.”

  “I know. I was just thinking how much I love my family, despite the fact that they drive me crazy.”

  “That’s obvious enough,” he assured her with a smile.

  Now she wondered if that had been his intention all along—to make her appreciate having her family. Or maybe she was just trying too hard to read between the lines when he hadn’t meant any hidden meaning at all to his words.

  Maybe it would be better if they just talked about something else. “Have I told you yet about Mark finding his biological family about a year and a half ago? It was about the time he and Rachel started dating.”

  Still gently pushing the swing, Teague shook his head. “I didn’t know Mark had been adopted.”

  “He wasn’t. He was kidnapped from his family when he was just a toddler.”

  That made the swing come to an abrupt halt. “Mark was kidnapped?”

  Teague had switched in an instant from a polite guest to a stern FBI agent, making Dani remember belatedly that kidnapping fell under federal jurisdiction, especially when it involved crossing state lines, as Mark’s kidnapper had done. She nodded, hurrying with the explanation.

  “Yes. He was taken by the family nanny. She’s dead now, has been for years, but she raised Mark, so he thought he was her son. She made it look to his family as though both she and Mark had died in a flood when he was almost two. It’s a long, convoluted story with some sort of spooky elements that you probably wouldn’t even believe—but anyway, his older brother, Ethan, found him a year and a half ago and told him what had really happened. Mark thought he was an orphan with no family after the woman who raised him died, and it turned out he really had two living parents, two brothers, some aunts, uncles and cousins that he’d never known about. That’s who he and Rachel are going to visit over the weekend.”

  “Wow.” Teague looked suitably stunned, his attention obviously drawn fully away from Dani’s personal problems now. “That’s an incredible story. Did it make the news?”

  “They were pretty careful to keep the details quiet, because none of them wanted a media circus over it, but it’s general knowledge that he was returned to the family after years of being thought dead. He took the Brannon family name, so he had to do a lot of legal paperwork to manage that, but not much more than Rachel did to legally change her name to Brannon when she married him. He kept the first name he’d grown up with, though he’d been named Kyle at birth. He said he was too used to Mark to start answering to anything else.”

  “I can’t imagine suddenly having a lot of family show up at this point in my life. How does Mark feel about them? He didn’t remember them at all?”

  “No. He was little more than a baby when he was taken from them and he honestly had no idea they existed. As you can imagine, he was pretty freaked out at first, but he’s grown pretty close to them since. He thinks of them as his family now, I think. He seems to have grown especially close to his mother and his oldest brother, Ethan, even though he seems to genuinely like his dad and his other brother, too.”

  “I gotta tell you, this is one of the stranger stories I’ve heard, and I’ve personally been involved with some doozies. It’s rare enough for a kidnapped child to be returned to the family at all, after more than a few weeks have passed, but to be returned this many years later…and that he turned out so, you know, average and normal. A doctor, even.”

  “
He told us he had a relatively happy childhood, though a bit lonely. The woman he thought was his mother was very shy and reclusive—he understands why, now—but still involved in his life and determined to give him as normal an upbringing as possible. He said she went to PTA meetings and teacher conferences and ball games and everything, though she always sat in the back and had little to say to anyone but him. I think he loved her, really—the way a kid loves his real mother—and I think that causes him problems sometimes now, knowing what she did.”

  “No kidding. Something like this could really mess with a guy’s mind. Make him question everything about himself.”

  “That’s exactly the way he described it. Fortunately, he had Rachel to help him adjust to it all. She’s crazy about all the Brannons—and vice versa—so they’ve all gotten pretty chummy.”

  “Well, you just get more and more interesting, don’t you, Dani Madison?”

  She was annoyed to feel her cheeks warm. “I don’t know why Mark’s unusual circumstances would make me interesting.”

  “It’s just another little tidbit that surprises me about you. And I don’t get surprised very often these days.”

  “Well, yeah, now you know just about everything there is to find out.”

  He took her off guard by reaching up to brush a strand of hair away from her cheek. His fingers lingered a bit longer than necessary as he murmured, “Somehow I doubt that.”

  Holding her breath, she looked at him, silently asking him not to do this to her. For some reason she seemed to be particularly vulnerable to him today. Maybe it was the holiday, the warm and cozy atmosphere with family, watching Rachel and Mark so happily in love, or just spending this much time in close proximity. Or, even more disturbing, maybe coming back home was sending her back into some of her old habits—like needing some man to look at her just this way to make her feel valuable.

  That thought gave her the impetus she needed to leap to her feet. “We should probably go back inside before Mom and Grandma come out looking for us. They’re going to want to play Uno or Yahtzee or something. They always pull out the games after lunch on Thanksgiving, even though Clay always tries to duck out. Sometimes he gets away with it, other times, they guilt him into playing. Hope you don’t hate games.”