by Norah Wilson
“Right.”
“Okay, then. Pick me up at seven. I’ll try to get out the door promptly.”
“Deal.”
With little to fill his time, Boyd was at the ER at six thirty.
He hadn’t intended to be there that early. In fact, he’d planned to take his time getting there, maybe stop at the liquor store he’d seen on York Street and buy a bottle of wine to have on hand, then maybe scope out the downtown restaurants for good places to eat. But as soon as he got behind the wheel of his rental, for some reason his mind went to Dave Bradley, Josh’s coworker. He remembered how uncomfortable the guy had seemed when Boyd asked to search Josh’s cubicle. Had it been because allowing an outsider that kind of access might land him in trouble? Possibly. But he’d seemed relieved when Boyd found nothing, which suggested he had something to hide.
Now there was an angle he could be investigating.
So he drove straight to the hospital and settled in the ER waiting room, where he hauled out his laptop and used his Wi-Fi stick to get connected to the Internet. Tuning out the misery of the unhappy people waiting for their turn to see the doctor, he went online and started researching “David R. Bradley, reporter.” He was in up to his eyeballs in all things Bradley when he became aware of Hayden standing beside him.
“Hey,” Boyd said, “I’m just—”
“What the hell are you doing researching Dave Bradley?”
CHAPTER 11
“Nothing.” Reflexively, he closed his laptop. “I was just poking around online.”
“Like hell.” Her normally full lips were pressed into a thin, stern line and her brows were drawn together over flashing blue eyes. “I saw the screen, Boyd. You’re researching Dave Bradley, and I want to know why.”
Damn, she had good eyesight. “Okay, you got me. That’s what I was doing.”
“I can’t believe this! What did Josh say about him?”
“Josh?” He blinked up at her. “Nothing.”
“I had it handled, Boyd. I didn’t need Josh to come to my rescue then, and I don’t need you to do it now.” She stood there, hands on hips, radiating frustration. “Okay, so it was a little annoying when he didn’t take the no-dating thing seriously at first, but he came around. I told Josh he would, and he did. Dave hasn’t bothered me in . . . God, weeks!”
Boyd stared up at her. “Hayden, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Josh never said anything about David Bradley. I don’t think Bradley’s name even passed his lips in our discussions, or not that I remember. And certainly not in the context of him trying to date you.”
She fell back a step. “Then why are you researching him?”
Boyd shrugged. “I thought he was less than truthful with me when I was there the other day. He seemed nervous about my search of Josh’s cubicle. That’s all. It had nothing to do with you.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Hayden groaned. “I’m such a loser. I’m so sorry I jumped all over you.”
He grinned. “You can jump all over me anytime.”
She blushed furiously. “Don’t be nice. That was incredibly self-absorbed of me.”
“Hey, don’t give it another thought.”
“I won’t if you won’t,” she said.
“Already forgotten.” He smiled at her reassuringly, but of course he wasn’t moving Dave Bradley off his radar. Not by a long shot.
“So, are we ready to go?” she asked.
“Totally.”
Killarney Lake, as billed, turned out to be little more than a pond. But Hayden was right—it was quick to get to, less than fifteen minutes from the hospital in light traffic. The sand was more like gravel, the small beach was crowded, and the water was probably shallow and tepid. But for all Boyd cared, the beach could have been crushed glass and the water leech infested. Because he was going to get to see Hayden in a swimsuit.
He deferred to her as to where to spread the beach blanket, the one he’d bought at the sporting goods store where he’d picked up the bathing trunks. She chose a spot on the grassy edge of the beach, beneath a tree.
He spread the blanket, dropped his new beach towel on it, then kicked off his sandals and peeled off his T-shirt. A glance at Hayden told him she was peeling down too, and she was doing it with the unselfconsciousness of a clinician who dealt with human bodies day in and day out. He didn’t look at her fully until he’d taken a seat on the blanket.
She was in the midst of twisting all that beautiful blonde hair into a knot on top of her head. Between her uplifted arms and her position above him, Boyd caught his breath. Damn, she was hot. And she was wearing a simple navy Speedo one-piece.
Boyd had dated some knockouts in his time, women who’d worn racy bandeaus or barely there bikinis at the beach. But none of them held a candle to Hayden in her modest neck-to-thigh one-piece. How was that even possible?
She sat down on the other side of the blanket, the one closest to the tree’s trunk.
“I see you picked the same side of the blanket that Josh used to.”
“Did you usually sit here under this tree?”
She nodded. “If it was available.”
“Then that’s why he always chose this side,” he said. “He was putting himself between you and the foot traffic.” He gestured to a pair of young men who’d just raced past, no doubt in a contest to see who could reach the lake’s edge first. “I’m betting he walked on the street side of the sidewalk too.”
“Yes! He always did that, now that you mention it.” She blinked. “I never knew. I mean, I didn’t realize he was protecting me.”
“He’d have done it for any woman. That’s what our dad—the one who counts—drilled into us. Gentlemanly manners and all. But I’m sure he took particular pleasure in doing it for you.”
They were silent for a while.
“He loved your father, you know. Your mother too. Just because he was looking for your birth parents didn’t change that. He talked about Frank and Ella a lot.”
“Yeah?” He drew his legs up, linking his hands together in front of his knees. “What’d he tell you about them?”
“He said your mother used to be a teacher?”
“Yeah, but she quit when we came along, stayed at home with us until we started kindergarten. Then she went back to do substitute teaching.”
“Josh credited her with turning him into a reader and writer.”
“I’m not surprised. The two of them were very close.”
“You didn’t go in for that stuff.”
He shrugged. “Not a whole lot. I’d rather be out in the shop with Dad, watching him do stuff and handing him tools.”
“I hear you’re a pretty good carpenter in your own right.”
He laughed. “I can muddle my way through your average DIY project, but nobody would call me a carpenter. Now, Dad is a carpenter.”
“Josh said you do all the repairs around the house these days.”
“Under close supervision, of course.”
“Which you don’t really need, according to Josh.”
“It’s good for Dad. And good father–son time.” He swatted at a fly.
“Sorry about that. I think the flies are a little worse in the grass here. Would you prefer to be out on the sand in the full sun?”
He turned a jaundiced eye on the rocks and pebbles that comprised the so-called sand. “No, this is good.” He glanced back at her, taking in those amazing curves and the slender neck revealed by her upswept hair. Out of nowhere, it struck him how Josh must have felt, sitting here much as he was, looking at the woman he loved. A woman who was clearly oblivious of that love, or at least the nature of it. Poor bastard.
“You okay?”
Her question made him realize he was staring. “Sorry, I just spaced for a second. Must be sitting here in
the sun making me dozy.” He shook himself as though to throw it off. “So what else did he tell you?”
“Let me see . . . I know they’re both big baseball fans, and that they used to take you to Blue Jays games when you were really young.”
“God, yes. We froze our butts off at that old Exhibition Stadium with the wind coming in off of Lake Ontario and loved every minute of it.”
She smiled. “Josh felt cheated that you missed the only Major League Baseball game ever to be played with the field completely covered in snow.”
Boyd snorted. “Yeah, that was 1977. We missed that spectacle by a couple of years. We weren’t even a gleam in . . . well, somebody’s eyes at that point.”
The allusion to his unknown birth parents didn’t escape her. “And you used to go to games at the Rogers Centre.”
“It’ll always be the SkyDome to me. We were . . . I don’t know . . . ten or eleven when it opened, and we were in total awe.”
“Hockey games at the Gardens too.”
“Not as often as ball games. Too expensive.” He brushed the persistent fly from his leg. “But we both played hockey, from Mini Mites through to Midget. And Josh played college hockey.”
“He told me about your dad driving you to lots of early-morning games.”
“Yep. Now that I think about it, he would have been a lot older than I am when he started taking us to hockey. Hell, he was almost thirty-eight and Ella thirty-six when they adopted us.”
“That’s not that old,” she said. “Plenty of parents are in their thirties these days before they have their first child.”
“Maybe so. But not sure I’d want to be working long hours at a construction job and still dragging kids to the rink in the dark.”
“Did you ever feel they were too old for the job?”
“Honestly, I never thought about it. In fact, I never really thought about them as old at all until Josh died.”
She blinked rapidly. “It’s got to be a hard thing, to lose a child, no matter what age.”
He nodded, looking out over the beach.
“Do you blame him?”
His gaze shot to her face. “Blame who?”
“Josh.”
“For what?”
She shrugged. “For searching for his birth parents. For coming here. For dying.”
“I do not blame my brother for dying.” The words came out sounding gruff, almost strangled.
“But you didn’t really approve of his fixation?”
“Not my place to tell Josh what to do. He was a grown man.” He rolled his shoulders. “But it’s true that I didn’t really approve, because of the legal scrutiny our adoptive parents might have come under. It’s also true that I didn’t share his need to know. Didn’t understand why he’d turn his life upside down, leave a good job, to chase after someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
“You might change your mind about that someday.”
He glanced over at her. She’d drawn her own knees up, circling them with her arms in a subtle mirroring of his posture.
“I can’t see it.”
She looked up from her examination of her unvarnished toes. Very pretty toes.
“What about when you have children of your own? The medical history alone—”
“That’s not something that’s going to happen soon.”
He felt the curiosity in her gaze as she looked at him. “No prospects in the offing?”
“Nope. Though my mother does like to point out I’m getting a little long in the tooth. She was always after both of us to get busy and make her some grandchildren. Personally, I always figured Josh would be the one to oblige, but he always picked the wrong women.”
Her eyes shot wide. “What? He never had anything but good things to say about his past relationships.”
“Let me rephrase. Not wrong in the sense of being bad or incompatible. Just not marriage minded. The two I met were really smart, terrific women. But they were just as career focused and ambitious as he was at the time.”
“I can see that,” she said. “That he’d be attracted to smart, energetic women.”
Like you. It was all Boyd could do to bite back the words. She didn’t need that burden.
They sat in silence a moment. Boyd tried and failed to keep his glance from sliding over her. Damn.
“How about you?” she asked. “Ever come close to marriage?”
“Once,” he admitted. “A very pretty vet tech I met when I helped a lady get her injured dog to a veterinary hospital. I was maybe twenty-five at the time and crazy in love. We lived together, even talked about marriage, but eventually the job got in the way. I was still working patrol, and after one too many hair-raising episodes, she decided she couldn’t live with someone whose job could be so dangerous.”
She held his gaze. “Did you think about leaving police work?”
“The thought didn’t even enter my head, which she pointed out. I guess maybe I wasn’t as crazy in love as I thought.”
“I get it, though,” she said. “I’d walk away too. Being a cop was all you ever wanted to do, and no one should ask you to give it up for them. It would have been a mistake.”
“Like yours?”
“Exactly. Being a doctor and helping the poor was always what I wanted to do. The difference is I let someone use my emotions, my attachment, to drag me off course. When love gets twisted like that and used to manipulate, it stays twisted. Eventually I saw that and got the hell out.”
Two years. That’s what she’d said the bastard had cost her. If that dumb-ass hadn’t come into her life, she’d be finished with her residency and probably doing some community family practice in southwest Scarborough or north Etobicoke or some depressed area of Vancouver. “I’m glad.”
She arched her back, no doubt to ease the strain of the long day, but Boyd couldn’t miss what it did for that Speedo.
“Well, we know what direction I took after my little relationship side trip,” she said. “What about you?”
“I’ve had a few more . . . I was going to say long-term relationships, but maybe medium-term is more accurate.” The damned fly was back, and Boyd swatted at it again. “One was nine years older than me, divorced, and not interested in going that route ever again, which was okay by me. I enjoyed it while it lasted.”
“And the other?”
The memory of Carrie still made him feel like the world’s biggest failure. “She had issues from her childhood that she never could overcome. Things were good at first. I thought I could lift her sadness, you know? Bear her burdens. And I tried. But it doesn’t work that way. I eventually figured she was the only one who could fix herself.”
“What happened?”
He picked up a stick and started poking at the rocky soil. “She left, presumably looking for a guy with a stronger back.”
“I don’t know where she’d find that.”
His head came up and their glances collided. His chest felt suddenly tight. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Leaning back on his hands, he stretched his legs out. “So you guys talked about Josh’s family. Did you reciprocate?”
As a change of subject, it wasn’t very smooth, but it seemed to work.
“Yeah, I told him about my parents. My dad retired early and took my mother back to Cape Breton with him. It’s been quite an adjustment, after spending their entire married life in the Montreal area.”
“I can imagine. Siblings?”
“Nope. I always yearned for one, though. I thought I’d like to have a sister, but these past few months with Josh . . .” She lifted her shoulders and rotated her neck as though to relieve tension. “He was like the perfect big brother.”
Poor Josh would never have gotten out of that friend zone. Not that he’d be the first guy to try.
“You know, I’ve never had less time on my hands—an eighty-hour week is not unusual—but these past months, I’ve had a more active social life than I’ve had in years. And that was all Josh’s doing.”
Boyd arched an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“By the time I’d get off, usually he’d have put in his day at the paper and maybe a few hours at his personal investigation. The man had so much energy! And he got things done in a fraction of the time it takes most of us. Anyway, he’d swoop in, pick me up, stick a smoothie or a wrap or both in my hands, and announce we were going somewhere. Just cutting out the time it took to rustle up supper freed up a ton of time. Or he’d pick something up and we’d eat together in front of the TV and talk during commercials. Or he’d just run an errand for me so I could grab a catnap. He took care of me, you know?”
He swallowed. “Sounds like he did a good job of it.”
“Oh, he did. And it wasn’t all so he could monopolize my time. Yes, we did spend a lot of time together, but sometimes he’d do stuff for me just so I could get to bed earlier.”
Jesus, how could she not have known he loved her?
“Sorry, I got off track. You asked what we talked about. Your family, my family, our friends. Work, insofar as we could. Josh liked to pepper me with trivia questions.”
Boyd laughed. “Not just you. The guy was a walking encyclopedia. Talk about developing a complex.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“Yeah, we talked a lot. Endlessly, you’d probably say. But lately when we came here, he seemed more content to just be here, soaking up the sun without talking.”
Boyd snorted. “My brother? Josh? The man who talked to his cereal box if there was no one around? And who couldn’t sit still unless he had a keyboard at his fingertips or a pen and paper in his hand?”
She laughed. “Hard to believe, I know. But yeah, no mile-a-minute talking. No leaping up and dragging me off to play volleyball. He seemed very . . . I don’t know. Content? Almost peaceful.” She met his gaze. “I actually wondered if he’d given up on the search for your birth parents. Or, you know, back-burnered it.”
