J.D. shrugged. “I can live with that.” He pulled his gaze away from the sway of her hips as she preceded him down the interior staircase, and focused instead on the fat, glossy brown braid that hung down her back. “I expected you to just stick me in a room somewhere.” Like in the cellar, maybe.
She spared a glance over her shoulder. “This and the ski season are our busiest times, which means we’re booked to near capacity. That means you’d be forced to move from one room to another every couple of days, which isn’t a whole lot of fun. We want you to be comfortable.”
Yeah, right. He was suspicious as hell of do-gooders. Dru’s fine, upstanding great-aunt had seen to that.
Not that he’d been perfectly content before Edwina Lawrence had barged into his fourteen-year-old life and turned it upside down. Bouncing from foster home to foster home was less than ideal for any kid, but at least there had been a pattern to his life; he’d understood the rules. And rule number one had been: don’t get too comfortable. For sooner or later—and usually it had been sooner—he’d be out on the street again.
Not getting your hopes up was the first rule of survival, but Edwina had been different, and it had sucked him in, lulled him into forgetting a lot of hard-won lessons. She’d chosen him—he hadn’t been foisted on her by an overworked social worker. And the fact that she was unlike anyone he’d ever known had been a seduction all on its own.
They’d met the day he’d tried to steal her purse. It had been one of his stupider moments, but he’d listened to his friend Butch’s pitch of easy money and had given in to the lure.
The fragile-looking little old lady had taught him that crime didn’t pay, though. Not only had she hung onto her purse, she’d gotten a good grip on him to boot. The only way to break loose would have been to hurt her. When Butch had taken off running, leaving him to face the music on his own, J.D. had heard the mental clang of barred doors slamming shut, and thought he was headed to juvie hall for sure.
But instead of turning him in to the cops, the way any right-thinking individual would have done, she’d taken him home. Then she’d made arrangements to foster him, and had offered him the run of her place.
He’d fallen in love with her that day.
She’d taught him there was an entire world far removed from the decaying streets and alleyways of the inner city, which was all he’d known up until then. But what she’d offered with one hand she’d taken away with the other, at the very moment he’d finally relaxed his guard and begun to believe he was worthy of the clean new life she offered. And where once he had idolized her, he’d begun to bitterly resent the very breath she drew.
Shit. J.D. nearly tromped on Dru’s heels as he blinked the past back where it belonged—in the past. That was twenty years ago, ace. Get over it.
Dru pushed open the outer door at the bottom of the stairs and the evergreen-laden scent of the country rushed in.
“You mentioned a ski season?” he said. “I didn’t see any lifts around here.” And although this was an alpine lake area, it wasn’t the type of terrain he associated with ski resorts.
Dru glanced at him over her shoulder, and the blue of her eyes was electric in the sunlight. “That’s because we feature cross-country skiing. See that trailhead over there?” She pointed to a hiking trail that disappeared into the woods down the side of the mountain. “That’s called Treetop, and it connects us to over a hundred kilometers of trails that can be hiked and biked in the summer or skied in the winter.”
She casually touched his forearm, and a muscle under his skin jumped as if he’d received an electric shock. Face carefully expressionless, he stepped away, slanting a quick look at her.
“Come on,” she said, clearly oblivious. “Your cabin is down this way.” She began to head toward the lake.
J.D. rubbed at the band of heat left behind by her touch. What the hell was that all about? He’d like to blame it on the fact that he wasn’t accustomed to being touched, but that didn’t explain the similar jolt he’d gotten when he’d turned around and seen her for the first time in the lobby. His initial reaction had been: want it. She’d looked so soft and round, standing there. Round eyes, round cheekbones, round breasts, round ass. He didn’t understand it—hadn’t then, didn’t now. She was pretty enough, in a subtle outdoorsy, girl-next-door sort of way. But she sure as hell wasn’t his type, so that covetous shock of awareness seemed out of place.
Rat City didn’t imbue a taste for subtle or girl-next-door, and he liked his women brassy. Big hair, big tits, clothing spray-painted on to show every curve.
Watching her stride down the trail in front of him in her shorts and Keds, J.D. tried to figure out what had caused that uncharacteristic craving. He had to admit she had a body that would probably be dynamite in tight clothing. But it didn’t take a genius to see she wasn’t the type to wear it. She was too…fresh-faced. She had that silky, swingy hair, those freckles across the bridge of her nose, those big, guileless, startlingly blue eyes. He’d bet his last buck she wasn’t a woman to hang out in bars, waiting for some stud to come along and buy her a drink, like the barflies he associated with. She looked more like one of those happily-ever-after, put-the-ring-on-my-finger types.
They rounded a curve in the trail and the lake was suddenly laid out in front of them in all its splendor. Shaped like a Christmas stocking, it was placid and blue. The sounds of kids splashing and laughing, the sprong of a diving board, and the occasional shrill blast of a lifeguard whistle cut through the silence of the woods.
“There’s a roped-off swimming area and a float around the next bend,” Dru said over her shoulder. She veered onto a short spur trail, and a moment later they emerged from the sun-dappled track into a small clearing, across which stood a cabin with half its porch roof missing. A man who looked to be in his mid-fifties sat with one hip perched on the railing, smoking a cigarette, while a little boy in a Star Wars Phantom Menace T-shirt wielded a light-saber against an imaginary foe.
The kid saw them first and his face lit up. “Mom!” he yelled and, the plastic light-saber clattering to the floor of the porch, launched himself off the steps. A second later he hung like a monkey from Dru’s front, skinny legs around her waist, grimy hands linked behind her neck as he leaned back to give her a huge, goofy grin.
“Whoa, you’re getting way too big for this.” Staggering under his weight, she nevertheless grinned back and kissed him on the nose.
It was a scene like a hundred others J.D. had observed as an outsider looking in. Crossing his arms over his chest, he watched mother and child and congratulated himself on his acumen. There you go, bud. All that’s missing here is the carpool-mobile.
It doesn’t get any further from your type than this.
2
Supporting the warm weight of her ten-year-old son by linking her hands in the small of his back, Dru looked over Tate’s head at her uncle. He was extinguishing his cigarette, and the fact that he’d been smoking in front of Tate could mean only one thing. “Aunt Soph having a menopause moment?” Her normally easygoing aunt’s moods had been erratic for the past several months, and they’d all learned to get out of her way when one was upon her.
“She’s hot-flashing, Mom,” Tate said. “And when Grandpa Ben told her she’d missed one of the cobwebs on the ceiling, she said, ‘How would you like this dust mop up your—’”
“Tate!”
“I wasn’t gonna say it, Mom.” But he clearly relished the idea.
“I got him out of there before she actually completed the sentence anyway,” Ben assured her.
“But I know what she was gonna say,” Tate said with a grin that showed his adult front teeth. “She was gonna say buttho—”
“Don’t even think you’re going to slip it by me by attributing it to someone else, bud.”
“Dang.” With another big-toothed grin, he unhooked his legs and hopped down. Turning back toward the porch, he caught sight of J.D. and stopped dead. “Hey. I’m Tate. Who’re yo
u?”
“I’m sorry, J.D.; where are my manners?” Hard as it was to credit, Dru had actually forgotten him for a moment. “This is my son, Tate. Tate, this is Mr. Carver.”
“Just J.D.,” he corrected her and thrust out a callused hand to Tate. “How’s it goin’, kid?”
“Goin’ cool.” Tate took the proffered hand and immediately began grimacing mightily, which told Dru he was doing his best to grind J.D.’s knuckles to dust. He simply loved the adultness of shaking hands, but they couldn’t seem to convince him that a firm grip was all that was necessary for a perfectly manly handshake. He understood the concept when it came to women, but just let a man stick his hand out and Tate immediately turned it into a test of his machismo.
Since J.D. hadn’t exactly proven himself to be Mr. Congeniality, she hurriedly said, “And this is my uncle, Ben Lawrence. J.D. got in a day early, Uncle Ben.”
“I see that.” Ben walked over to join them. “Tate, quit trying to crush his hand—we’ve talked about this before. Go stick your head in the door and tell your grandma that J.D. is here.” He tousled Tate’s silky brown hair as the boy turned to do his bidding. “Be prepared to duck in case she’s still on the warpath, slick.” His gaze followed the boy until Tate swooped his light-saber up off the porch on his way to the front door; then he turned to J.D. and offered his own hand. “Welcome to Star Lake Lodge.”
Dru watched the two men as they took each other’s measure. Her uncle was older and not as fit as J.D., but he was still damn fine-looking for his age. He’d spread a little around the middle, and his shoulders weren’t as muscular as they once were. But his hair, though mostly gray now, was thick and wavy, and his brown eyes crinkled at the outside corners when he smiled, which he did often.
The same certainly couldn’t be said for J.D. He exchanged handshakes with the sober impassiveness Dru had seen since his arrival. He answered her uncle’s questions civilly enough, but didn’t volunteer so much as an extra word that might make the introductions go more smoothly. He all but bristled with no-trespassing signs, and for some reason it put her back up. Luckily, Tate and Aunt Sophie emerged from the cabin before she forgot herself and said something unforgivably snide.
The fact that she was even tempted to do so brought Dru up short. What was it about this guy that tested all the control she’d worked so hard to perfect? This knee-jerk desire to provoke a reaction out of him was not good.
“Grandma Sophie’s herself again,” Tate announced cheerfully as he pulled his great-aunt by the hand toward the group in the clearing. “I don’t think she wants to put the dust mop up Grandpa Ben’s bu—”
“Tate!”
Clearly unfazed by the exasperated warning that came from three separate throats, he gave an unrepentant shrug and pinned his honorary grandmother in place with his laser-blue eyes. “Well, you don’t, do you?”
“No,” Sophie agreed dryly. “I can safely say that impulse has passed.” She walked up to her husband and slid her arm around his waist. Patting his chest with her free hand, she murmured contritely, “I’m sorry, Ben.”
“I know you are, babe.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and hugged her to his side.
Dru was aware of J.D. next to her, still and watchful, and she tried to see her aunt and uncle as they must appear through his eyes.
She’d lived with them so long she could see them only through her own, but she was struck as always by the closeness they radiated. It was simply part of their nature to gravitate together whenever they were in the same vicinity. It wasn’t an excluding relationship, though—their natural warmth extended to everyone they cared about.
Dru’s parents had been restless souls who’d traveled the four corners of the earth. One of her earliest memories was of them parking her with her aunt and uncle so they could go off to see the world and try something new and exciting. When she’d begun school, she’d always dreaded that moment when the bus let her off at the corner. She’d never known who, if anyone, would be there to meet her. Sometimes it had been one of her parents, but more often than not, it’d been a neighbor picking up her own child, or sometimes no one at all. Long before her parents had died in a hot-air-balloon accident in the Andes when she was nine, Sophie and Ben and Star Lake Lodge had come to represent security to her.
She smiled at the familiar sight of Sophie leaning against Ben. At fifty-one, her aunt looked closer to forty, and her milkmaid voluptuousness and vivid coloring still had the ability to turn the heads of men twenty years her junior. It might have been intimidating if not for the ready warmth of her smile.
Sophie smiled now as she stepped out from under the drape of Ben’s arm and extended both hands to J.D. “Welcome,” she said, grasping his much-larger hands in her own. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to greet you when you arrived. Dru, honey, did you show him the back road so he can bring his car around to unpack?”
“No, but we can do that now if he’d like.” Dru raised an inquiring eyebrow at J.D.
His muscular shoulders hitched beneath the white T-shirt that strained to contain them. “That’s not necessary,” he said brusquely. “I’ve got everything I need right here.” He nodded at the canvas duffel bag resting on the ground a few feet away.
Sophie smiled brilliantly. “Fine, then. Would you like some time alone to unpack and get settled in?”
“Yeah, that would be good.” He hesitated for a moment, then added, “Thanks.”
“We’ll leave you, then. Tate! Come along, darling.”
He came running. “Can I go swimming now? It’s almost three, and that Dean kid in two-eleven said he was gonna go swimming then.”
Dru glanced back as she followed her son and aunt and uncle down the trail. J.D. still stood where they’d left him, his hands thrust in his jeans pockets and his mouth broody. He looked a little lonely as he watched them go, almost…lost.
Suppressing a snort, she whipped around and caught up with Tate, who was slashing the air with his plastic light-saber and talking ninety miles an hour to Sophie and Ben. Yeah, right.
If that little bit of fantasy didn’t qualify for Fanciful Thought of the Day, she didn’t know what did.
J.D. tossed his duffel on the queen-sized bed and began to unpack. The cabin was compact, with its one bedroom, one bath, tiny kitchen, and combination living-and-dining room that was divided by an arch with built-in bookshelves. It had all he needed, though, and someone—Sophie Lawrence, he would guess—had even left a vase of flowers on the small table out in the dining room and another one here on the bedroom dresser. His gaze kept drifting to it. Something about that homey touch got to him.
The cabin had been built back in the days before deforestation was a household word, and he got caught up in sheer admiration for the craftsmanship that had gone into the tongue-and-groove walls, the hardwood floors, and the fir-door-and-window jambs and lintels. Then he turned his attention back to emptying the bag that sat on the faded patchwork quilt of its stack of white T-shirts, underwear, jeans, shave kit, and a few of his more cherished tools.
The canvas duffel was collapsing in on itself by the time his fingers brushed the stack of letters on the bottom. Slowly, he drew the bundle out and stared down at Edwina’s spidery handwriting on the topmost envelope.
He didn’t know why the hell he’d kept her letters all these years. He hadn’t even bothered to open them after reading the first few that had caught up with him, since he’d known good and well what they would say: that Edwina had forgiven him.
For something he hadn’t done, which had been pretty goddamn generous of her. Angered anew by the reminder of an old injustice, he threw the rubber-banded bundle into the wastepaper basket next to the nightstand and stomped out of the room.
A minute later he was back, fishing it out again. God only knew why—he’d be a much happier man if he could simply leave that part of his life in the trash bin where it belonged. But he couldn’t seem to let it go. He threw the letters back in the duffel, slung the bag
onto the shelf above the hanger rod in the closet, and shut the door.
But out of sight was not out of mind. He pulled Edwina’s father’s gold watch out of his pocket and ran his thumb over its etched cover. Pressing his thumb on the minuscule catch on its side, he snapped the cover open and stared blindly at its face, seeing only scenes from the past. Trying to shake off the unwelcome memories, he clicked the timepiece closed again and tucked it back into the watch pocket of his jeans. The first time he’d seen Edward Lawrence’s watch was the day that Edwina had taken him into her home. The watch had lain on a leather-edged blotter on an antique desk in the study off the hallway.
Unfamiliar with that style of timepiece, he’d been drawn to it over and over again. He’d thought it looked like something that would belong to a rich guy, which he’d found totally cool. More than that, though, its age and sense of history had beckoned like a Lorelei luring sailors onto the rocks—though he would have been hard-pressed to verbalize what he’d so admired about it.
Only as an adult had he realized that it had been the watch’s continuity, the fact that it had been in a single family for two generations, that he’d found so awesome. He’d been a throwaway kid who’d never known his father and whose mother had found feeding her drug habit more important than keeping custody of her son, and he was just whacked by the idea of a family not only hanging onto its kids, but saving pieces of its individual lives to pass down to them. Until he’d moved in with Edwina, he’d never possessed a single thing that was his alone, let alone something given him by an ancestor.
All Shook Up Page 2
