by Nora Roberts
“I meant to get some of it whacked off.”
“I like it.” Tears still trickled even as she grinned. “Very bohemian. You look wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.”
“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Oh boy.” She sniffled, shook her head. “That’s no way to get me to stop all this.” She swiped at tears. “When did you get here? I thought you were in Rome.”
“I was. I wanted to be here.”
“If you’d called, we would’ve met you.”
“I wanted to surprise you.” He walked to the car to pull the bags out for her. “Cam at the boatyard?”
“Should be. Here, I’ll get those. You need to get your things.”
“I’ll get them later. Where’s Kevin and Jake?”
She started up the walk with him, glanced at her watch as she thought about her sons. “What day is this? My mind’s still spinning.”
“Thursday.”
“Ah, Kevin has rehearsal, school play, and Jake’s got softball practice. Kevin’s got his driver’s license, God help us, and is scooping up his brother on his way home.” She unlocked the front door. “They should be along in an hour, then peace will no longer lie across the land.”
It was the same, Seth thought. It didn’t matter what color the walls were painted or if the old sofa had been replaced, if a new lamp stood on the table. It was the same because it felt the same.
The dog snaked around his legs and made a beeline for the kitchen.
“I want you to sit down.” She nodded to the kitchen table, under which Witless was sprawled, happily gnawing on a hunk of rope. “And tell me everything. You want some wine?”
“Sure, after I help you put this stuff away.” When her eyebrows shot up, he paused with a gallon of milk in his hand. “What?”
“I was just remembering the way everyone, including you, disappeared whenever it was time to put groceries away.”
“Because you always said we put things in the wrong place.”
“You always did, on purpose so I’d kick you out of the kitchen.”
“You copped to that, huh?”
“I cop to everything when it comes to my guys. Nothing gets by me, pal. Did something happen in Rome?”
“No.” He continued to unpack the bags. He knew where everything went, where everything had always gone in Anna’s kitchen. “I’m not in trouble, Anna.”
But you are troubled, she thought, and let it go for now. “I’m going to open a nice Italian white. We’ll have a glass and you can tell me all the wonderful things you’ve been doing. It seems like years since we’ve talked face-to-face.”
He shut the refrigerator and turned to her. “I’m sorry I didn’t get home for Christmas.”
“Honey, we understood. You had a showing in January. We’re all so proud of you, Seth. Cam must’ve bought a hundred copies of the issue of the Smithsonian magazine when they did the article on you. The young American artist who’s seduced Europe.”
He shrugged a shoulder, such an innately Quinn gesture, she grinned. “So sit,” she ordered.
“I’ll sit, but I’d rather you caught me up. How the hell is everyone? What’re they doing? You first.”
“All right.” She finished opening the bottle, got out two glasses. “I’m doing more administrative work these days than casework. Social work involves a lot of paperwork, but it’s not as satisfying. Between that and having two teenagers in the house, there’s no time to be bored. The boat business is thriving.”
She sat, passed Seth his glass. “Aubrey’s working there.”
“No kidding?” The thought of her, the girl who was more sister to him than any blood kin, made him smile. “How’s she doing?”
“Terrific. She’s beautiful, smart, stubborn and, according to Cam, a genius with wood. I think Grace was a little disappointed when Aubrey didn’t want to pursue dancing, but it’s hard to argue when you see your child so happy. And Grace and Ethan’s Emily followed in her mother’s toe shoes.”
“She still heading to New York end of August?”
“A chance to dance with the American Ballet Company doesn’t come along every day. She’s grabbing it, and she swears she’ll be principal before she’s twenty. Deke’s his father’s son—quiet, clever and happiest when he’s out on the water. Sweetie, do you want a snack?”
“No.” He reached out, laid a hand over hers. “Keep going.”
“Okay, then. Phillip remains the business’s marketing and promotion guru. I don’t think any of us, including Phil, ever thought he’d leave the ad firm in Baltimore, give up urban living and dig down in Saint Chris. But it’s been, what, fourteen years, so I don’t suppose we can call it a whim. Of course he and Sybill keep the apartment in New York. She’s working on a new book.”
“Yeah, I talked to her.” He rubbed the dog’s head with his foot. “Something about the evolution of community in cyberspace. She’s something. How are the kids?”
“Insane, as any self-respecting teenager should be. Bram was madly in love with a girl named Cloe last week. That could be over by now. Fiona’s interests are torn between boys and shopping. But, well, she’s fourteen, so that’s natural.”
“Fourteen. Jesus. She hadn’t had her tenth birthday when I left for Europe. Even seeing them on and off over the last few years, it doesn’t seem . . . it doesn’t seem possible that Kevin’s driving, and Aub’s building boats. Bram’s sniffing after girls. I remember—” He cut himself off, shook his head.
“What?”
“I remember when Grace was pregnant with Emily. It was the first time I was around someone who was having a baby—well, someone who wanted to. It seems like five minutes ago, and now Emily’s going to New York. How can eighteen years go by, Anna, and you not look any older?”
“Oh, I’ve missed you.” She laughed and squeezed his hand.
“I’ve missed you, too. All of you.”
“We’ll fix that. We’ll round everybody up and have a big, noisy Quinn welcome-home on Sunday. How does that sound?”
“About as perfect as it gets.”
The dog yipped, then scrambled out from under the table to run toward the front door.
“Cameron,” Anna said. “Go on out and meet him.”
He walked through the house, as he had so often. Opened the screen door, as he had so often. And looked at the man standing on the front lawn, playing tug-of-war with the dog over a hunk of rope.
He was still tall, still built like a sprinter. There were glints of silver in his hair now. He had the sleeves of his work shirt rolled up to the elbows, and his jeans were white at the stress points. He wore sunglasses and badly beaten Nikes.
At fifty, Cameron Quinn still looked like a badass.
In lieu of greeting, Seth let the screen door slam behind him. Cameron glanced over, and the only sign of surprise was his fingers sliding off the rope.
A thousand words passed between them without a sound. A million feelings, and countless memories. Saying nothing, Seth came down the steps as Cameron crossed the lawn. Then they stood, face-to-face.
“I hope that piece of shit in the driveway’s a rental,” Cameron began.
“Yeah, it is. Best I could do on short notice. Figured I’d turn it in tomorrow, then use the ’Vette for a while.”
Cameron’s smile was sharp as a blade. “In your dreams, pal. In your wildest dreams.”
“No point in it sitting there going to waste.”
“Less of one to let some half-assed painter with delusions of grandeur behind its classic wheel.”
“Hey, you’re the one who taught me to drive.”
“Tried to. A ninety-year-old woman with a broken arm could handle a five-speed better than you.” He jerked his head toward Seth’s rental. “That embarrassment in my driveway doesn’t inspire the confidence in me that you’ve improved in that area.”
Smug now, Seth rocked back on his heels. “Test-drove a Maserati a couple of months ago.”
&
nbsp; Cam’s eyebrows winged up. “Get out of here.”
“Had her up to a hundred and ten. Scared the living shit out of me.”
Cam laughed, gave Seth an affectionate punch on the arm. Then he sighed. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch,” he said again as he dragged Seth into a fierce hug. “Why the hell didn’t you let us know you were coming home?”
“It was sort of spur-of-the-moment,” Seth began. “I wanted to be here. I just needed to be here.”
“Okay. Anna burning up the phone lines letting everybody know we’re serving fatted calf?”
“Probably. She said we’d have the calf on Sunday.”
“That’ll work. You settled in yet?”
“No. I got stuff in the car.”
“Don’t call that butt-ugly thing a car. Let’s get your gear.”
“Cam.” Seth reached out, touched Cam’s arm. “I want to come home. Not just for a few days or a couple weeks. I want to stay. Can I stay?”
Cam drew off his sunglasses, and his eyes, smoke-gray, met Seth’s. “What the hell’s the matter with you that you think you have to ask? You trying to piss me off?”
“I never had to try, nobody does with you. Anyway, I’ll pull my weight.”
“You always pulled your weight. And we missed seeing your ugly face around here.”
And that, Seth thought as they walked to the car, was all the welcome he needed from Cameron Quinn.
THEY’D kept his room. It had changed over the years, different paint for the walls, a new rug for the floor. But the bed was the same one he’d slept in, dreamed in, waked in.
The same bed he’d sneaked Foolish into when he’d been a child.
And the one he’d sneaked Alice Albert into when he’d thought he was a man.
He figured Cam knew about Foolish, and had often wondered if he’d known about Alice.
He tossed his suitcases carelessly on the bed and laid his battered paint kit—one Sybill had given him for his eleventh birthday—on the worktable Ethan had built.
He’d need to find studio space, he thought. Eventually. As long as the weather held, he could work outdoors. He preferred that anyway. But he’d need somewhere to store his canvases, his equipment. Maybe there was room in the old barn of a boatyard, but that wouldn’t suit on a permanent basis.
And he meant to make this permanent.
He’d had enough of traveling for now, enough of living among strangers to last him a lifetime.
He’d needed to go, to stand on his own. He’d needed to learn. And God, he’d needed to paint.
So he’d studied in Florence, and worked in Paris. He’d wandered the hills of Ireland and Scotland and had stood on the cliffs in Cornwall.
He’d lived cheap and rough most of the time. When there’d been a choice between buying a meal or paint, he’d gone hungry.
He’d been hungry before. It had done him good, he hoped, to remember what it was like not to have someone making sure you were fed and safe and warm.
It was the Quinn in him, he supposed, that made him hell-bent to beat his own path.
He laid out his sketch pad, put away his charcoal, his pencils. He would spend time getting back to basics with his work before he picked up a brush again.
The walls of his room held some of his early drawings. Cam had taught him how to make the frames on an old miter box at the boatyard. Seth took one from the wall to study it. It showed promise, he thought, in the rough, undisciplined lines.
But more, much more, it showed the promise of a life.
He’d caught them well enough, he decided. Cam, with his thumbs tucked in his pockets, stance confrontational. Then Phillip, slick, edging toward an elegance that nearly disguised the street smarts. Ethan, patient, steady as a redwood in his work clothes.
He’d drawn himself with them. Seth at ten, he thought. Thin, narrow shoulders and big feet, with a lift to his chin to mask something more painful than fear.
Something that was hope.
A life moment, Seth thought now, captured with a graphite pencil. Drawing it, he’d begun to believe, in-the-gut believe, that he was one of them.
A Quinn.
“You mess with one Quinn,” he murmured as he hung the drawing on the wall again, “you mess with them all.”
He turned, glanced at the suitcases and wondered if he could sweet-talk Anna into unpacking for him.
Not a chance.
“Hey.”
He looked toward the doorway and brightened when he saw Kevin. If he had to fiddle with clothes, as least he’d have company. “Hey, Kev.”
“So, you really hanging this time? For good?”
“Looks like.”
“Cool.” Kevin sauntered in, plopped on the bed and propped his feet on one of the suitcases. “Mom’s really jazzed about it. Around here, if Mom’s happy, everybody’s happy. She could be soft enough to let me use her car this weekend.”
“Glad I can help.” He shoved Kevin’s feet off the suitcase, then unzipped it.
He had the look of his mother, Seth thought. Dark, curling hair, big Italian eyes. Seth imagined the girls were already tumbling for him like bowling pins.
“How’s the play?”
“It rocks. Totally rocks. West Side Story. I’m Tony. When you’re a Jet, man.”
“You stay a Jet.” Seth dumped shirts haphazardly in a drawer. “You get killed, right?”
“Yeah.” Kevin clutched his heart, shuddered with his face filled with pain and rapture. Then slumped. “It’s great, and before I do the death thing, we’ve got this kick-ass fight scene. Show’s next week. You’re gonna come, right?”
“Front row center, pal.”
“Check out Lisa Maxdon, she plays Maria. Total babe. We’ve got a couple of love scenes together. We’ve been doing a lot of practicing,” he added and winked.
“Anything for art.”
“Yeah.” Kevin scooted up a little. “Okay, so tell me about all the Euro chicks. Pretty hot, huh?”
“The only way to get burned. There was this girl in Rome. Anna-Theresa.”
“A two-named girl.” Kevin shook his fingers as if he’d gotten them too close to a flame. “Two-named girls are way sexy.”
“Tell me. She worked in this little trattoria. And the way she served pasta al pomodoro was just amazing.”
“So? Did you score?”
Seth sent Kevin a pitying look. “Please, who’re you talking to here?” He dumped jeans in another drawer. “She had hair all the way down to her ass, and a very fine ass it was. Eyes like melted chocolate and a mouth that wouldn’t quit.”
“Did you draw her naked?”
“I did about a dozen figure studies. She was a natural. Totally relaxed, completely uninhibited.”
“Man, you’re killing me.”
“And she had the most amazing . . .” Seth paused, his hands up to chest level to demonstrate. “Personality,” he said, dropping his hands. “Hi, Anna.”
“Discussing art?” she said dryly. “It’s so nice of you to share some of your cultural experiences with Kevin.”
“Um. Well.” The killing smile she was aiming in his direction had always made Seth’s tongue wither. Instead of trying to use it, he fell back on an innocent grin.
“But tonight’s session on art and culture is now over. Kevin, I believe you have homework.”
“Right. I’ll get right to it.” Seeing his history assignment as an escape hatch, Kevin bolted.
Anna stepped into the room. “Do you think,” she asked Seth pleasantly, “that the young woman in question would appreciate being whittled down to a pair of breasts?”
“Ah . . . I also mentioned her eyes. They were nearly as fabulous as yours.”
Anna took a shirt out of the open drawer, folded it neatly. “Do you think that’s going to work with me?”
“No. Begging might. Please don’t hurt me. I just got home.”
She took out another shirt, folded it. “Kevin’s sixteen, and I’m perfectly aware his major in
terest at this time is naked breasts and his fervent desire to get his hands on as many as possible.”
Seth winced. “Jeez, Anna.”
“I am also aware,” she continued without breaking stride, “that this predilection—while hopefully becoming more civilized and controlled—remains deep-seated in the male species throughout its natural life.”
“Hey, you want to see some of my landscape sketches from Tuscany?”
“I am surrounded by you.” Sighing a little, she took out yet another shirt. “Outnumbered, and have been since I walked into this house. That doesn’t mean I can’t knock every one of your stupid heads together when necessary. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Show me your landscapes.”
LATER, when the house was quiet and the moon rode over the water, she found Cam on the back porch. She stepped out, and into him.
He wrapped an arm around her, rubbing her shoulder against the night’s chill. “Settle everyone down?”
“That’s what I do. Chilly tonight.” She glanced up at the sky, at the ice points of stars. “I hope it stays clear for Sunday.” Then she simply turned her face into his chest. “Oh, Cam.”
“I know.” He stroked a hand over her hair, rubbed his cheek against it.
“To see him sitting at the kitchen table. Watching him wrestling with Jake and that idiot dog. Even hearing him talking about naked women with Kevin—”
“What naked women?”
She laughed, shook back her hair as she looked at him. “No one you know. It’s so good to have him home.”
“I told you he’d come back. Quinns always come back to the roost.”
“I guess you’re right.” She kissed him, one long, warm meeting of lips. “Why don’t we go upstairs?” She slid her hands down, gave his butt a suggestive squeeze. “And I’ll settle you down, too.”
TWO
RISE AND SHINE, pal. This ain’t no flophouse.”
The voice, and the gleeful sadism behind it, had Seth groaning. He flopped onto his stomach, dragged the pillow over his head. “Go away. Go far, far away.”
“If you think you’re going to spend your days around here sleeping till the crack of noon, think again.” With relish, Cam yanked the pillow away. “Up.”
