A Crazy Kind of Love

by Maureen Child

  Paramedics were working on Justin. Lucas overheard one of the cops muttering to his partner. “Too bad. Man killing his own parents like this. A hell of a thing to have to live with.”

  Pain whipped through him, fresh and raw. It clawed at his soul and ripped at his heart and he squeezed his eyes tightly shut in an effort to hold it all in.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Justin said, and it took a minute or two for his soft voice to get through the roar of blood rushing in Lucas’s ears.

  “Bullshit.” He took a long drink of beer. “Of course it was.” Gritting his teeth, he squinted into the rising wind. “If we’re going to go through all this, at least be honest.”

  “I am.” Justin sighed, his voice weak and trembling.

  “Mom was in the front seat.”

  Lucas took another long drink of his beer and the taste was bitter. As his brother talked, he returned to that empty road and the flashing lights in the rain.

  “We were headed up the mountain. Just a mile or two from the house.”

  Lucas remembered. So close, he’d thought at the time. So close to safety. And still so far.

  “A deer jumped out in front of the car. Came out of nowhere. Just stood there.” Justin sighed and closed his eyes, as if he, too, were reliving it all one more time. “I probably could have avoided it. But Mom panicked. Grabbed the wheel and twisted it to keep me from hitting that stupid deer.”

  Lucas’s stomach fisted. That would have been so like their mother. For her to react instantly in an effort to protect an animal. She’d always been the one mom on the block who took in every stray cat or dog and even pet rats and mice that other mothers couldn’t handle. Her heart was as soft as her will was strong.

  But if that was true . . . Lucas jumped to his feet, paced to the edge of the deck, then turned around and stomped right back again. His mind churned, his heart ached, and his stomach was spinning like he was on a cheap ride at a carnival.

  “You’re saying the accident was Mom’s fault?”

  “No. It was all my fault no matter what actually happened on that road. If I hadn’t called them . . . If I hadn’t gotten arrested . . . They never would have been there. They’d have been safe. At home.”

  Back teeth clenched, Lucas muttered thickly, “And if I hadn’t turned you down—”

  “No.” Justin cut him off sternly with a slow shake of his head. “You don’t get a share in this, Luke. It’s on my head. Just like you always thought. It just happened. So fast. So damn fast, I couldn’t get us out of the spin. Mom screamed, the deer jumped clear, and then—nothing.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “I woke up in the hospital three days later and they were already buried.”

  Lucas swallowed hard. Even though he’d been furious with his brother—so sure that his recklessness had killed their parents—he’d always felt a little guilty about that. About Justin not being there for the joint funeral. But there hadn’t been a lot of choice, either. “We didn’t know. We thought you were going to die, too.”

  Justin snorted. “Should have. Would’ve been faster. And easier. On everybody. And maybe then . . .”

  Lucas cut that train of thought off quick—he wasn’t ready to detour on this little forced march down memory lane. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me about this then? When you got out of the hospital? Why did you let me blame you?”

  “Because I blamed me,” Justin said, pain ripping through his voice and wracking his body. “If I hadn’t been in trouble again, they wouldn’t have been there to get me out of it. If I’d been more like you and less like me, none of it would have happened.”

  Lucas dropped onto the chair again, as if his legs had given out. Shaking his head, he stared at the man he’d avoided so carefully for so many years and wondered what might have happened if they’d faced their own shame and guilt long ago. “Damn it, Justin, I was mad at you, but I was blaming me.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  He glanced at him, then picked at the label on the beer bottle with his fingernails. “Because you called me to come get you and I said I was busy. I wasn’t. I was with—”

  “Alice.”

  “Yeah.”

  Alice Doyle. The woman Lucas had once believed himself in love with. The woman he’d planned to marry. The woman—

  “Nothing happened between us,” Justin said.

  Lucas lifted his gaze from the neck of the beer bottle to his brother’s eyes. “I know that. But it didn’t matter. She still chose you.”

  Another price of their battle. After their parents’ deaths, Lucas had shut himself off from Justin. Didn’t speak to him, wouldn’t take his calls. Alice, though, couldn’t stand the breach between the twins. She’d wanted him to make peace with his brother.

  She called Justin on her own, told Lucas she was going to visit her mother for a few days, and instead flew to San Diego to see Justin.

  “She told me you sent her,” Justin said now, smiling in spite of the tremble in his hands and the pain flickering in his faded eyes. “I was glad. Took her out to dinner. Showed her around town. Tried to score a few points with my brother’s girlfriend. Hoped she’d help fix things between us. Instead—”

  “A few days with Mr. Charm convinced her that she didn’t really love me after all,” Lucas finished for him.

  Alice had come home from San Diego and everything was different. She told him that she’d seen Justin. That she’d felt something for him. That she knew now that she didn’t love Lucas enough to marry him.

  Hell, if he tried . . . which he wasn’t about to do, he could almost hear her saying, “We’re lucky this happened now, Lucas. Better to find out before we married. Before we had children.”

  Oh yeah.

  Better.

  Justin winced. “Nothing happened. I wouldn’t have done that to you.”

  “Hell, I know that. I even knew it then.” He took another pull of his beer. “But when I lost Alice, I blamed you again. It was easier than admitting that I’d been wrong about her. I thought she loved me. She didn’t.”

  Justin laughed briefly and leaned over, feebly reaching for the beer.

  Lucas grabbed it and handed it to him carefully.

  After a long drink, his brother said, “She wasn’t good enough for you.”

  “I wanted her,” Lucas said simply. “And she wanted you.”

  “She wanted me because she didn’t have me. That’s all.”

  “The hell of it is,” Lucas added wryly, “once she was gone, I didn’t miss her. Then being mad at you became more about wounded pride than anything else.”

  “Hey,” Justin pointed out, “sometimes pride’s all we’ve got left.”

  This honesty thing was getting easier. Lucas’s soul felt as if it had been drained of the black, oily spill he’d been carrying around for so many years. His heart felt lighter, his soul a little less chilled.

  He wasn’t healed. He wasn’t willing to go that far. But talking to Justin had not only opened old wounds, it had aired them out enough that the chance for healing was finally there.

  But with Justin dying, all of this was coming too late. Regret rocked him to his bones as he thought of all the years lost. His own damn fault. He’d let Justin take the full blame for everything that had gone wrong between them because that had left him off the hook. It had relieved Lucas of carrying a shared burden.

  But in avoiding guilt, he’d lost his brother.

  And it was time he’d never get back.

  Looking at his twin, the other half of himself, Lucas saw him not as he was now, frail and slipping away daily, but as he once was. Tall and strong and laughing. That was the memory he’d hold on to in the coming years. That was the Justin he knew. The man who faced every trial with a joke. The man who sucked as much fun out of life as he possibly could and then went running back for more.

  God, he’d missed so much, cutting himself off from Justin.

  How much they’d both missed.

  “Hell,” Lucas finally s
aid, a reluctant half-smile on his lips as he buried the regret, knowing Justin wouldn’t want it. “Women always liked you best. That charm of yours won ’em over every time.”

  “Yeah, I got the charm, you got the brains.”

  Lucas smiled sadly at the old joke.

  The ducks on the lake swam in lazy circles, as if pushed by the wind still rippling the surface of the water. The trees whispered to each other and storm clouds chased each other across the sky.

  “Bree loves you.” He blurted it out, not sure why, but sure that he had to say something. Bree didn’t want Justin to know about the baby, so he wouldn’t tell him. But he had to try something. For Justin’s child’s sake.

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “She does.”

  “Marry her, you idiot.”

  “Idiot? Is that any way to talk to a dying man?”

  Lucas snorted. “Gonna ride that one down to the ground, aren’t you?”

  “Use what works,” Justin said with a tired shrug.

  “You’ve got a woman who actually wants to marry you and you’ll tell her no?”

  Justin shot him a look. “Why would I let her marry me now? Like this?”

  Lucas met that look. “When the hell else will she get to marry you?” He swallowed hard. “Now is all you’ve got.”

  He shook his head slowly and rested the bottom of the beer bottle on his chest. “Not fair to her.”

  “Not fair to love her and not marry her.”

  “I don’t want to hurt her.”

  Lucas leaned forward and lowered his voice as he met Justin’s gaze. “You’re hurting her by refusing.”

  “Maybe.” Sighing, Justin said softly, “I wish there was more time.”

  Reaching out, Lucas laid one hand on his brother’s arm. “So do I.”

  • • •

  Late that night, Mike stretched on Lucas’s big bed and grinned into the darkness. “Rocket Man, you’ve got some great moves.”

  He smiled against her skin and slid down the length of her body, skimming his lips and teeth over her flesh. “I feel . . .”

  “How?” she asked, propping herself up on her elbows to look down at him. Lifting one hand, she smoothed his hair back from his forehead and looked into his dark eyes, glimmering with too many emotions to identify.

  He’d been . . . different since the moment she and Bree returned from town. Whatever had passed between him and Justin had done more than clear the air. It had opened something inside Lucas that had been closed for too long.

  As soon as they were alone in his room, he’d told her everything, and she finally understood where the pain that had haunted him had come from. He’d spared himself nothing, at last accepting at least part of the blame for the years lost between brothers. And in the telling, Mike was sure Lucas had found something he hadn’t known in a long time. The very thing he’d come to Chandler looking for.

  Peace.

  “How do you feel?” she whispered, fingers threading through his thick, silky hair.

  He kissed her abdomen, right below the diamond-topped gold bar in her navel, then looked up at her and smiled. “Alive,” he said. “I feel alive.”

  Tears burned her eyes, but she blinked them back. This wasn’t a time for crying. This was the time for celebrating the fact that he’d found his brother before Justin was lost to him forever.

  So she grinned again and gave him a wink. “Well, then, let’s see just how alive you can get, shall we?”

  “Right there with you,” he murmured and dipped his head to trail the tip of his tongue in lazy circles on her skin.

  She hissed in a breath and let it slide free again on a lovely sigh. Her body was still humming. Her blood still pumping. And at her core, she was needy again. Needing him again.

  “You know something?”

  “Hmm?” Mike wiggled beneath him, trying to get his enormous brain focused on the task at hand again.

  “I just noticed something about your scars.”

  She froze up and caught herself stiffening. “That they’re not exactly gorgeous? Whoa. News flash.”

  “No.” He went up on one elbow and studied the silvery pattern of lines streaking across her flesh, following them with the tips of his fingers. “They look like—”

  “Lucas—” God. Didn’t he understand that she was just a little self-conscious about the faint webbing of lines marking her body? Ever since their first night together, he hadn’t mentioned them. Why now? Why tonight?

  “—Pleiades,” he said, a tone of wonder in his voice.

  “Huh?” She lifted her head again to stare at him.

  He looked . . . excited. As if he’d just made a rare and startling discovery.

  “Pleiades,” he said again, then tried to explain. He slid to one side, stretched out one arm and grabbed his glasses off the nightstand. Shoving them on, he looked at her again, then bent to examine her scars more closely. “The Seven Sisters.”

  “Still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s a star cluster,” he said, and excitement charged his voice as he glanced up at her. “In Taurus. It’s the best known of all the star clusters . . .”

  “Well, sure.”

  He heard the sarcasm and shrugged it off. “I know you don’t know it, but it really is an amazing likeness.”

  “Good to know.”

  “And,” he whispered, dipping to plant another kiss on her abdomen. “It’s beautiful. In the sky and here. On you.”

  Her heart turned over.

  Oh boy.

  He smiled at her and used the tip of one finger to push his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose, and just like that—

  She fell in love.

  It was all so easy.

  So incredibly right.

  And so damned inconvenient.

  Mike wanted to take a moment. To feel the rush and charge of finally being in love. But to do that, she’d have to tell him. And Rocket Man had already had a pretty full day.

  Instead, she reached up, plucked his glasses off and tossed them in the general direction of the nightstand. “You know,” she said softly as he lowered himself over her, “that was the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows, then dipped his head to nibble on her neck while he stroked one hand down her body until he could cup her center. Then he dipped one finger inside her heat and whispered, “Wait’ll I tell you about black holes.”

  “Keep talkin’, Rocket Man . . .”

  A week later, things had settled into a routine. Mike was still living at Lucas’s place, Carol and little Jack had gone home to San Francisco, Papa was at Grace’s, and Jo still had a pole the size of a redwood up her butt.

  Under cover of the kitchen table, Mike kicked her oldest sister, and when Jo gave her a look designed to singe her eyebrows, Mike jerked her head toward their father. Say something, she mouthed.

  Shut up, Jo mouthed back.

  Mike muffled a sigh by biting into a fresh bread-stick. They’d agreed to a meeting here in the family kitchen, because, hey. That’s where they held Marconi meetings. Papa was cooking, Sam was on the phone, and Jo was trying to pretend she was somewhere else. Mike kicked her again. Just for the hell of it.

  “Grace’s house is finished,” Papa said and stepped away from the stove after giving his sauce a theatrical stir with a wooden spoon. “So, now we start on Cash Hunter’s job.”

  “No hurry,” Jo said, looking up from the file folders littered across the table.

  “No, not at all,” Mike countered, grabbing another breadstick from the cobalt-blue jar in the center of the kitchen table. “Unless we want to, you know . . . eat.”

  Which, she thought with a grimace, suddenly didn’t sound like such a good idea. Mouth working around a sudden flood of saliva, she tossed her breadstick onto her plate, took a deep breath and listened up.

  “She’s got a point,” Sam said, clicking off
her cell phone and lifting a glass of Coke before taking a long drink.

  “Only on her head.” Jo blew out a breath that ruffled a stray lock of dark brown hair hanging across her forehead. “You’ve got time to take care of the Santos’s pipes,” she snapped, with a glance at Mike. “And Stevie wants the shop reroofed. I already started that last week. Wright Wood’s delivering the new shingles in a few days and—”

  “And Cash Hunter is expecting us to start work on the guesthouse,” their father said, glancing at his three daughters, gathered at the table.

  Jo’s mouth puckered as if she was sucking on a lemon. At last, though, she looked up at her father and said, “Cash is out of town for a month or so. He said there was no hurry.”

  “So you’re making the decisions now?” Papa asked.

  Jo squirmed a little and Mike scooted her chair to one side. Always better to distance yourself from the one in trouble.

  “No, Papa. All I’m saying is that Cash stopped to see me last week—”

  “He did?” Mike perked right up. Hey, Sam had a husband, Mike was having regular sex . . . it was about time Jo got something going. Either that or sign up for the convent and get to wear the cool outfit. “When?”

  “I just said, last week.”

  “You should have told me,” Papa said, wiping his hands on a dishtowel, then coming to stand right in front of the table, blue eyes pinned on Jo.

  “You were busy having a heart attack,” she said.

  “Whoops.” Sensing imminent danger, Sam pulled out her cell phone, scooted back from the table, and said, “I’ll just call Jeff. From outside.”

  “Good idea,” Mike echoed, grabbing her purse and fumbling for her own cell. Her stomach pitched a little, but she paid no attention. “I’ll, uh, be out front. Calling . . . somebody.”

  “Traitors,” Jo muttered, but kept her gaze locked on her father’s. It was the first time she’d been alone with him since he got out of the hospital and she still wasn’t ready to talk to him about this.

  “Josefina,” he said, his voice a low rumble that held a world of love and memories for her. “You don’t come to see me. You don’t want to look at me.”