“If you don’t want me to worry about you, fine. I won’t.”

Her eyes narrowed. “But Seth is part of both our lives, and if you think that child isn’t picking up on how overworked and exhausted and stressed you are, you’d better think again.”

“Okay, I’ll admit I’m going through a rough patch right now, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“Then you’d better tell that to Seth.”

She laid her hand on his arm. Joe frowned down at her fingers and told himself it was just a trick of his imagination that a single light touch could make him that hot, that fast.

Everybody’s Hero
Karen Templeton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

KAREN TEMPLETON,

a Waldenbooks bestselling author and RITA® Award nominee, is the mother of five sons and living proof that romance and dirty diapers are not mutually exclusive terms. An Easterner transplanted to Albuquerque, New Mexico, she spends far too much time trying to coax her garden to yield roses and produce something resembling a lawn, all the while fantasizing about a weekend alone with her husband. Or at least an uninterrupted conversation.

She loves to hear from readers, who may reach her by writing c/o Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10279, or online at www.karentempleton.com.

Author’s Note

Children with Down syndrome display an enormous range of ability, interests and mental acuity; therefore, the character of Kristen Salazar is in no way meant to represent all children with DS, but merely one child; nor are her limitations meant to infer that other children and young adults with DS might face the same limitations.

I’d like to thank the many posters on the message boards at the National Down Syndrome Association for their help and guidance during the early stages of writing this book, especially those of you who took the time to write to me privately to share your stories. The children in your care are truly blessed by your love.

Karen Templeton

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 1

The child’s cry knifed straight to her soul.

Although how in heaven’s name Taylor heard it over the din of little banshees currently running amok in the Sunday school room, she had no idea. Frowning, she scanned the swarm of Frazier and Logan kids streaking across the room, but nope—everybody certainly seemed fine in here….

Seven-year-old Noah Logan bounced off her thighs, knocking her off balance.

“Sorry, Miz Taylor,” he mumbled breathlessly, taking off again as she grabbed the window sill to right herself…and saw the man standing outside by the mud-splattered SUV, the sobbing child clinging to him as though he’d fall off a cliff if he let go.

“Keep an eye on things, Blair, would you?” she said to the auburn-haired teenager a few feet away and then scooted outside, her retinas cowering in the blazing June sunlight. Barely eight in the morning and heat already oozed off the parking lot black-top, welding her feet to her running shoes and promising to be one of those just-wanna-take-off-your-skin days. Then a dollop of shade bumped the sun from her eyes and heat took on a whole ’nother definition. Even without being able to fully see the man’s face.

Strong, broad back underneath a khaki workshirt. Broken-in jeans smoothed over a butt that was truly the stuff of fantasies. Bourbon highlights etched in short, dark, finger-tingling wavy hair. Tall enough to definitely get a girl’s attention.

And send that girl’s libido streaking like an overfriendly pup through the door of her common sense.

With a sigh, Taylor grabbed her libido by the scruff of the neck and yanked it back inside, slamming shut the door, thinking, Joe Salazar, I presume. The man Didi had told her about yesterday, who was here for the summer—and only the summer—to oversee the remodel of the Double Arrow, Hank Logan’s guest lodge. Only, judging from the obviously unhappy child currently sobbing his heart out in Joe’s arms, right now the dude had more on his plate than the renovation of an old motel.

Maybe around eight or so and the picture of misery, the little boy noticed her still standing several feet away. Pure terror widened deep brown eyes, which vanished into the man’s neck as he wailed, “Don’t l-leave me, Joe, please don’t leave me!”

“Hey, buddy…we went all over this, remember?” Tanned—and no doubt competent—fingers rubbed the space between the boy’s shoulder blades, belying the frustration lurking at the edges of the low, country drawl not uncommon to Latinos born and bred in this part of the world. “There’s lots of other kids here—”

“But I d-don’t know any of them! What if they’re m-mean? Or they don’t like m-me?”

“I know, I know, this is all real scary. And believe me, I don’t want to leave you, either—”

“Then why are you?”

Taylor saw Joe gently set the boy on his feet, then stoop to look him in the eye. “I don’t have any choice, Seth,” he said softly, massaging one frail-looking shoulder. “You know that. I’ve got work I can’t put off anymore. Lots of people are depending on me to do my job, which I can’t do if I’m worried you might get hurt. It’s not safe, letting you hang around a construction site, you know? Besides, you’ll be bored out of your mind—”

“I don’t care! And I won’t get hurt, I promise! I’m big enough to take care of myself! I used to stay home alone all the time!”

Taylor’s stomach clenched at the child’s admission as Joe stood, his body language reeking of displeasure. “Maybe so. But things are different now. And I could get in a lot of trouble if I didn’t make sure you were looked after properly while I was at work. So let’s go—”

But the boy saw Taylor again and backed away, shaking his head and whimpering. Joe turned and saw her, too, the help me expression on his face undeniable.

And undeniably dangerous for someone whose sorry libido piddled on the carpet at the mere sight of wide shoulders and a nice butt. However, the guy was obviously in a bind, and Taylor was obviously going to help him because that’s what she did. Either that, or the heat was already getting to her.

“Let me guess,” she said with a smile, slipping her hands into the back pockets of her white denim shorts. “Somebody’s not exactly hot on the idea of day camp.”

She caught a flash of annoyance in eyes even darker than the boy’s, the tensing of a jaw already hard enough to break something over, both of which seemed at odds with the tenderness he’d shown the child just seconds before. And an immediate, second flash of what she guessed was guilt. “We came by yesterday, talked to the pastor’s wife,” he said. “I’m Joe Salazar. And this—” he touched the boy’s curly hair “—is Seth.”

“Yes, I know,” Taylor said softly, tearing her gaze from those treacherous, conflicted eyes and back to the child’s wary, wet ones. Lord, it was killing her not to gather the little guy into her arms and hug him to pieces. But even if doing so wouldn’t spook the poor kid, she had a real strong feeling it would take a lot more than a hug or two to ease the deep, deep sadness weighing down his small shoulders. She glanced back at Joe long enough to catch his puzzled expression. “Didi told me about you, said you’d probably be bringing Seth this morning.”

The child shifted closer to Joe, his long, spiked eyelashes canopying blatant distrust before he scrubbed away his tears with the hem of his T-shirt. That got another borderline anxious glance from his father, although Taylor gave him megapoints for not fussing at the boy or telling him to stop being a sissy, that big boys weren’t supposed to cry, like a lot of the men around here were inclined to do with their sons. And maybe because of that, or the humidity, or because her libido had nosed open the door and slipped out again, she picked up a whiff of aftershave-soaked male pheromones that damn near shorted out her brain.

Joe looked back at her, sunlight slashing across prominent cheekbones to create some very interesting shadows on his face, sharply defining a mouth straight out of an Eddie Bauer catalog. “We might have a problem here,” he said.

You have no idea, Taylor thought, only she said, “I can see that,” because she imagined the man had more pressing things on his mind than her wayward hormones. And God knows, she did. So she thrust out her hand, hoping like heck the man’s would be clammy and limp when she shook it.

As if. Still, she smiled and said, “I’m Taylor McIntyre. I run the day camp with Didi.” Then she let go of the not-clammy, not-limp, extremely male hand and smiled down at the little boy, who wore the cautious expression of someone on the lookout for fangs. “How old are you, Seth?”

Long pause. Then: “Eight.”

She squatted in front of him, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. A gust of hot, humid wind yanked a strand of curly hair out of her ponytail, tangling it in her eyelashes. “I know how scary new situations are,” she said gently, “but it sounds to me like your daddy’s got a lot of work to do—”

“Joe’s my brother,” the boy said. “Not my dad.”

Taylor’s eyes shot to Joe’s, only to meet with a guarded expression. Seth’s brother? He looked to be around Taylor’s age—in his early thirties at least—which would make the child more than twenty years younger. However, she could tell from the look on Joe’s face that whatever questions she might have would have to wait. If he would ever be inclined to answer them at all. Not that Taylor was any expert on the male thought process, God knew, but in her experience, men with stony expressions like Joe Salazar’s didn’t tend to be the most forthcoming souls in the world.

Then again, the frustrated-hand-through-the-hair gesture said plenty. “I’m sorry,” he said with what Taylor was going to accept as genuine regret, “but I’ve got a crew waiting for me, I really need—”

“Got it.” She smiled at Seth, steeling herself against the wobbly lower lip. “Okay, sweetie, let’s go inside—”

“No!”

But Joe swung the kid up into his arms and started for the building, his cowboy boots pounding the sun-baked earth. Over the standard “It’s gonna be okay, buddy” noises, a veritable swarm of pheromones drifted back to Taylor on the warm, muggy breeze.

She mentally stood aside and let them play on through, then followed Joe and Seth inside.

The place was crawling with kids.

No, seething, Joe silently amended. Like ants on a melting Popsicle. Sweat trickling down his back, he watched, vaguely horrified, as many, many short people pinballed around the dozen or so tables dotting the large, bright room’s flecked industrial carpeting. They were laughing and shrieking their heads off, acting like normal kids, making him uncomfortably aware of just how unused he was to being around kids anymore.

Just as he was uncomfortably aware of the fresh-faced, soap-scented, round-hipped redhead beside him.

“Is it always like this?” he asked.

“Actually, no,” she said, although she had to raise her voice to be heard. And step closer. Closer was not good. A paper airplane soared over their heads; a half dozen little boys swerved around them to retrieve it. Seth huddled closer to Joe’s hip, vibrating like a plucked guitar string. “Once we officially start at nine,” she said, “things calm down quite a bit.”

Joe could feel a scowl burrow into his forehead. “I don’t see a lot of adults.”

Taylor turned, her entire face lighting up into a smile that easily made it into Joe’s top ten female smiles. Maybe even the top five. “That’s probably because the kids’ve tied them up outside.”

The scowl burrowed deeper. Because it was killing him to leave Seth when he knew the kid wasn’t ready to be left yet, because the trio of lazy overhead fans weren’t doing squat to stir the hot, sullen air, because this woman and her damned top-five smile reminded him how long it had been since there’d been a woman in his life for more than ten minutes and because his body apparently had no qualms about bringing that lamentable fact to his attention.

“Just kidding,” she murmured. Dammit, she wasn’t even all that pretty, really, with her spice-colored hair yanked back into that ponytail and her pointy little nose and wide mouth and not a speck of makeup that Joe could see. But the way she looked at Seth, like it was everything she could do not to wrap her arms around him, was seriously messing with his head. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, then she glanced up at Joe, and he saw something in copper-fringed eyes that couldn’t decide if they were green or gold or gray that made him suspect she might be thinking about wanting to hug him, too. And, well—he looked away—it made him mad. At life in general and his life in particular. But most of all at himself, for half thinking he wouldn’t mind being hugged right now. Especially by a pretty—okay, fine, he’d been kidding himself about that part—lady who looked soft and smelled sweet and whose smile, it pained him to notice, edged damn close to number one every time she looked at his baby brother, as if she could see straight through to his battered soul.

“Didi—that’s the woman you talked to yesterday, the pastor’s wife?—is always here, plus me, plus at least one parent volunteer for every ten kids, and several teenagers as junior counselors. Didi and I are CPR-trained, and three of the teens have their Red Cross lifesaving certificates. For the aboveground pool outside. Building’s up to code, you don’t want to light a match for fear of setting off the sprinklers, and no chips, candy or soda allowed. How’s that?”

An exasperated breath left his lungs. “That’s fine,” he said, because it wasn’t as if he hadn’t given Mrs. Meyerhauser the third degree yesterday when he’d called, for one thing. And for another, it seemed everyone he talked to either had their own kids in the camp or knew somebody who did. Hank Logan’s own daughter was even one of the counselors. So he had no doubt Seth would be safe and well cared for here. It was just—

A whistle blast nearly stopped his heart as every kid in the room froze. “Okay, y’all,” Taylor’s surprisingly strong voice rang out as the whistle bounced back between her breasts. “Seems to me you should’ve burned off most of the excess energy by now. So Blair, Libby, April…why don’t you guys take your groups outside for a bit? And Blair, take mine, too, would you?”

The noise level sank considerably as the kids all scrambled over each other like puppies and out the two open doors at the back of the room.

“Impressive,” Joe said.

“Thanks,” she said, and she turned that smile on him, just for an instant. Just long enough to singe him right down to his…toes.

Seth tugged on his arm. His lashes were all stuck together in little spikes, and he still didn’t exactly look thrilled about being here, but at least there seemed to be a lull in the hysterics, for which Joe was extremely grateful.

“I gotta go.”

This much Joe had learned in the three weeks since Seth had come into his life. He looked over at Taylor. “Rest rooms?”

“Right over there. Follow me.”

After a mild tussle over whether Seth could go in by himself—which Joe won by reassuring the boy he’d never be more than a few feet away—his brother pushed through the door, while Taylor swung around the reception desk to extract a blank file card and fee schedule from a drawer.

“This’ll only take a sec,” she said, rummaging through a second drawer for a pen, which she handed to Joe with the card. “I just need his name and age, your name and where we can contact you while he’s here. Oh, and any allergies you might know about. Day camp hours are nine to three, generally, but we always have a few kids who need to stay until six or so—”

“I’d like to pick him up around four, if that’s okay,” Joe said as he filled out the card, tamping down the spurt of panic that he had no idea what the boy might be allergic to. “I promised Seth I’d be done work by then.”

“Four will be fine.”

Joe frowned at the fee schedule. “‘All fees are suggestions only?’” he read aloud, then lifted his eyes to hers. “What does that mean?”

“It means this is a small town and money is sometimes pretty tight. And Didi swore when she and Chuck came to Haven nearly thirty years ago and started up the camp, that she’d never turn anyone away who couldn’t pay.” She smiled again. Full out. Laugh lines around the eyes and everything. “And before you ask how she manages, let’s just say Didi has, um, connections.”

“One of those ‘the Lord will provide’ types?”

Taylor laughed. “No, one of those ‘the Lord helps those who help themselves’ types. Rummage sales, car washes, carnivals—you name it, Didi does it. And if that doesn’t bring in the funds, she has no qualms about shaming people into coughing up a donation.”

There went that damn smile again, more of a grin this time, actually, partnered by an open, direct gaze as ingenuous as a child’s. Only far more potent. At least, to a man who hadn’t spent a whole lot of time gazing into women’s eyes in the last little while. To his surprise, that grin and those eyes reached way deep inside him, way past the heaviness he’d begun to think would be a constant companion for the rest of his life, and tugged loose a chuckle.

“Sounds like a Hallmark TV movie, doesn’t it?” Taylor said, and Joe’s chuckle gave way to, “Just what I was thinking,” which was about the time some outlandish idea bubbled up out of his brain about how he wouldn’t mind standing here the rest of the day shooting the breeze with this woman. The bubble popped, though, as bubbles always do, and he returned his attention to filling out the card.

His mouth, however, had apparently missed the bulletin about the bubble-popping.

“I’m pretty much a city boy myself. Never spent any time to speak of in a small town.”

“Me, either, before I moved here a couple years ago.”

“Oh, yeah? Where from?”

Small talk, is all this was. Just something to fill the silence while he finished filling out this card, the kind of stuff you asked to be polite, not because you were really interested. As long as he didn’t look at her, he was safe.

“Houston,” she said, which immediately got Joe to wondering how on earth she ended up in tiny Haven, Oklahoma. Why she’d ended up here. But asking her would indicate he was really interested, which he wasn’t, so he didn’t.

Sure made him curious, though.

The card finally finished, he handed it back, running smack into the woman’s sympathetic gaze.

“And if there’s anything, um, out of the ordinary about his situation we should know about?” she said softly, and he realized he wasn’t the only curious one here. As he would be, too, in her place. Wasn’t every day a grown man came along with an eight-year-old brother in tow, he imagined. With Seth standing right beside him yesterday, Joe hadn’t felt comfortable discussing many of the particulars with the pastor’s wife. But there was nothing stopping him now.

Just as there was nothing stopping him from getting his own gaze tangled up with Taylor’s. As a rule, Joe didn’t have much use for sympathy, since sympathy had a bad habit of degenerating into pity, which he had no use for at all. But this wasn’t about Joe—it was about a little kid who right now needed all the comfort he could get. The kind of comfort Joe wasn’t sure he knew how to give.

“Seth and I didn’t even know about each other until three weeks ago,” he said quietly, seeing in her concerned expression the comfort he sought. For Seth, that is. “We met for the first time about a week after my father and Seth’s mother were killed in a car crash.”

“Ohmigod,” Taylor said on a soft exhale, her eyes darting to the men’s room door. “I figured it was something serious, but…” Her lower lip caught in her teeth; she shook her head and then looked back at Joe, her expression one big question mark.

“There was a will.” Joe’s mouth flattened. “After a fashion. For reasons known only to my father, he’d appointed me guardian in case anything happened to both him and Andrea.”

“Even though you and Seth didn’t know each other?”

Joe crossed his arms over his chest, as if that might somehow armor him against her incredulity. “Apparently, there’s nobody else,” he said, then added, “This has been real rough on the kid.”

Her steady gaze momentarily threatened the composure he’d fought like hell to hang on to from the first moment he’d laid eyes on Seth, especially when she then said, “I don’t imagine it’s been any picnic for his brother, either.”

Inside Joe’s head, a warning bell sounded. He’d never allowed sentimentality to color his feelings or decisions, and damned if he was going to start now. A humorless smile pulled at his mouth. “You play the hand that’s dealt you, you know?”

The dulled sound of a toilet flushing, followed seconds later by Seth’s reappearance, derailed whatever she’d been about to say. Even though it nearly killed him, Joe realized he had to make a clean break. Now. Before his brother’s big brown eyes sucked him back in.

Before Taylor’s soft green/gray/gold ones made him forget how crowded his life already was.

“Okay, you’re all set,” he said, cupping Seth’s head. “I’ll see you at four.”

Tears welled up again in the little boy’s eyes, but Joe ruffled the kid’s hair and strode outside, where he was free to let his emotions beat the crap out of him, even if he wasn’t exactly on a first-name basis with most of them. His gut churned as he got into his middle-aged Blazer and twisted the ignition key, that he had to go to work when he knew the kid needed him right now. But if he didn’t work, all the other people who needed Joe would be screwed.

And no way in hell was he going to let that happen.

As befitted anyone who’d lived through as many first days of school as she had, Taylor wasn’t particularly surprised that Seth’s tears dried up as soon as Joe left. That didn’t mean she was particularly relieved, however. On-the-surface acceptance was not the same as being at peace with the situation.

An observation which she imagined applied equally to the child’s big brother, she thought with a little pang of…something.

Except for the occasional tremor in his lower lip, the boy was doing a bang-up imitation of a statue, standing right where Joe had left him and staring blankly at the open door. His attachment to someone he hadn’t even known a month wasn’t all that odd, considering how desperately he probably wanted something, anything—anyone—solid and real and alive to hang on to. Not that losing a parent was easy at any age, but eight was particularly difficult: old enough to fully understand the extent of the loss, but not old enough to understand, let alone believe, that things would ever feel “right” again.

“Seth?” Taylor said gently. After a long moment, the child turned, but his gaze was shuttered, provoking a twinge in the center of her chest. Although his hair was so clean it shimmered, tears had ploughed crooked tracks down dust-filmed cheeks. He looked so vulnerable and frightened Taylor briefly entertained the idea of throttling his big brother. “I know you’re probably pretty unhappy right now, but I promise I won’t say a word about how everything’s going to be fine, because you wouldn’t believe me, anyway. Would you?”

A burst of laughter from outside bounced in through the open window; Seth’s eyes veered toward the sound for an instant, then back to Taylor. Wordlessly, he shook his head.

Her heart knocked against her ribs. At times like this, all those child psychology courses seemed about as practical as mittens in July. What on earth do you say to a child whose world had just been ripped apart? God knows, nothing anyone said to her after how own father died had made a lick of sense.

“Okay, let’s try this,” she said, squatting in front of him. “We usually do all sorts of stuff—play games, arts and crafts, go for walks, swimming…” She smiled. “Do you like to swim?”

A shrug.

“How about Slip ‘N Slide?”

Another shrug.

“Well, why don’t you just hang out today and get a feel for the place? If you want to participate in anything, fine. Go ahead and jump right in. But you don’t have to do anything you don’t feel like doing. No pressure. How’s that?”

That got a little nod, but nothing else. Not even a glimmer of relief.

“Okay, then.” Taylor stood. “You’ll be with the other seven-and eight-year-olds, which means Blair’s your counselor. I’ll introduce you when she comes back in with the other kids—”

“I can’t stay with you?”

How could one little face be so sad? “Oh, sweetie…I’d love to have you with me, but I’ve got the fives and sixes.” She made a face. “You really want to be with—” she lowered her voice “—the babies?”

Taylor could see the struggle going on underneath all those curls, but eventually, he shook his head. Amazing how early the old male pride kicked in.

“I didn’t think so,” she said as the kids began trooping back inside. “Besides, Blair’s totally cool.”

She led Seth over to Blair’s group and introduced them, whispering just enough in the teenager’s ear to clue her in, even as she caught Wade Frazier’s and Noah Logan’s intrigued perusal of their new campmate. But as she returned to her own group of eager, rambunctious little ones, the conflicting feelings slamming around inside her head stunned her silly.

Not once that she could remember had she ever felt reluctant about falling in love with a child. For good or ill, that’s just what she did, who she was. And already, little Seth Salazar was worming his way into her heart, big time. The problem was, though…this kid, she didn’t want to fall in love with. Because falling in love with the kid would mean dealing with the kid’s big, handsome, hormone-agitating brother on a regular basis.

And if that didn’t have Bad Idea written all over it, she didn’t know what did.

Chapter 2

Despite his personal worries heckling Joe from the edge of his thought like those two old Muppet dudes, he could always count on the adrenaline rush from starting a new job to make him feel in control again. This one was a walk in the park in comparison with most of the projects he oversaw, but that also meant he’d only be spending the summer in this two-bit town. A fact for which he was even more grateful after his encounter with Taylor McIntyre, Joe thought grumpily as he steered down the road leading to the Double Arrow office. Not that Haven didn’t have its charms. Everyone he’d met so far certainly seemed friendly enough—although that, Joe thought with a tight grin, might have something to do with the dearth of strangers passing through—but there was that whole everybody-knowing-your business thing that rankled the living daylights out of him.

Joe never had been much on sharing his personal life with all and sundry. Not that he had anything to hide, he just didn’t think it was anybody’s business but his own, for one thing. And for another, he figured most folks only showed an interest out of politeness. Either that, or they got that oh-you-poor-thing look in their eyes that Joe detested. Especially since those eyes so often belonged to the kind of woman who was easily hurt. So the way he saw it, keeping to himself just saved everybody a lot of trouble.

And saving people trouble was what Joe did best, he mused as he pulled up alongside one of a series of dusty pickups in the small parking lot. He supposed he had a bit of a rep as somebody you could count on to follow through on his promises, which didn’t bother him one bit. Not considering how hard he’d worked to earn that rep.

His cell rang, rousing him out of his ponderings.

“Joe?” said a gruff voice. Wes Hinton, his boss. “Got a minute?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“You know that lot on the north side of town we bid on last month?”

“You mean the one we didn’t get?”

“Yep. Sale fell through, agent called today, asking if I wanted another shot at it. I said, hell, yes—you know I thought a strip mall would be perfect in that part of Tulsa. So I made another offer right on the phone, agent said it was as good as done.”

Joe frowned. “Thought you were up to your butt with that new condo development in Albuquerque. You think you can swing this?”

“No guts, no glory, son. I’ve always landed on my feet, don’t plan on changing my stripes anytime soon. But why I called is… I want you on the job.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose, after I get this one squared away—”

“No, I mean while you’re overseeing the Double Arrow. I’ve already got tenants lined up, but we’ll lose ’em if this isn’t ready to roll as soon as possible.”

“I don’t know, Wes…with the commute between here and Tulsa, that might be tricky.”

“Oh, the Double Arrow project is small potatoes and you know it. You could oversee that one blindfolded and with both hands tied behind your back.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“And there’s a real nice bonus in it for you, too. And with you now having more family responsibilities and all, I figured some extra cash probably wouldn’t hurt. I know only too well how expensive kids can be.”

Joe’s mouth stretched into a wry smile. With three teenagers, two of them in college, Wes knew all about hemorrhaging bank accounts.

“Of course,” Wes was saying, “if you don’t think you could handle it, I suppose I could always hand it to Madison.”

A robin landed in a birdbath a few feet away; Joe distractedly watched it splash around as his boss’s veiled threat reverberated inside his skull. For the past several months, Wes had been making noises about taking semiretirement at the end of the year. And about appointing Joe as his successor—a position which would not only mean a damn good income for somebody who’d been doing well to graduate from high school, but also a chance to stop bouncing from job site to job site all over the Southwest. But there was a fly in the ointment: Riley Madison, a hotshot business school grad who’d come to work for Wes a couple years ago. That Riley was also jockeying for the position was no secret, especially to Wes, who wasn’t above playing the two men against each other every chance he got.

“That wouldn’t be you blackmailing me, would it?” Joe said quietly.

“I prefer to think of it as…laying out the options. Joe,” Wes said before he could respond, “you’re my first choice. Not just for this job, but future opportunities, shall we say. But I gotta have someone I can count on, someone able to juggle several projects at one time. Riley might not know construction as well as you, but he sure as hell is eager and available. And that counts for a lot.” A pause. Then, kindly, “Don’t let me down, son. Be who I need you to be. You hear what I’m saying?”

Yeah, Joe heard, all right. When Wes was still in construction, he’d taken Joe on as a seventeen-year-old high school senior suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of a man. A kid who knew squat about building, but figured it was something he’d be good at. As Wes’s business evolved and grew, so had Joe. He’d learned from Wes’s mistakes, but he’d learned.

And he owed the man an immeasurable debt.

Joe shut his eyes and massaged his forehead for a moment, then let out a sharp breath. “Fine, I’ll do it. Somehow.”

“Glad to hear it. Knew I could count on you.”

Joe snapped shut his phone and blew out another breath. Well, hell—he’d spent most of the past fifteen years making sure everyone could count on him. Guess he had nobody to blame but himself for accomplishing his goal.

He got out of the car and walked over to the office, where Hank Logan stood outside with a mug of coffee in one huge hand and a grin spread across a face nobody in their right mind would call handsome. Joe guessed the lodge’s owner to be around forty, although you sure couldn’t tell it from the flat stomach and impressive biceps evident through the plain white T-shirt. Taller than Joe by a good two or three inches, the intimidation factor was nicely rounded out by nearly black, straight hair and a nose that looked like it was no stranger to a barroom brawl.

Joe had liked, and trusted, the ex-cop practically on sight, which was anything but his usual reaction to people. By nature, he preferred to take things slow when it came to getting to know a person. Not that fostering friendships was something he’d had much time for in the past several years, in any case. But now, seeing that grin, he let himself entertain an idea he rarely did, which was that it might be nice to put down roots someday. Have a friend or two to shoot the bull with now and then.

To have something resembling a normal life.

“Just made a pot of coffee,” Hank said. “Want some?”

“Hell, yes.”

The two men walked into the lodge’s office, which, with its tired fake wood paneling and cast-off furniture, had seen better days twenty years ago. Soon it—along with the rest of the original utilitarian motel—would be transformed into a “rustic” counterpart to the individual cabins farther up the road, nestled here and there in the woods blanketing most of the property. Hank had bought the place cheap a few years back, apparently figuring he’d fix it up and sell it. Enter Wes, who’d run across the motel and wanted to buy it. But from what Joe had been able to glean through the grapevine—one rooted firmly in Ruby’s Diner in town—the addition of a wife and daughter to the former recluse’s life had changed his mind about selling outright. Since Wes had still believed the property had a lot of potential as a small resort, he suggested he and Hank become partners in the venture.

Which is where Joe came in.

“So who all’s here?” he asked, taking a swallow of coffee strong enough to wake the dead.

“Plumbers, mostly, deciding how to get water up to the lots where the new cabins are going. And the grader got here right after you left, started leveling the lot closest to the lake.” Another grin etched deep creases in the weathered face. “Told the guy he took out so much as a sapling, there’d be hell to pay.”

Joe chuckled. He was usually wary of hands-on property owners, since more often than not they either got in the way or botched things up—if not both—which ended up costing everybody time and money. But not only were the renovations that Hank had done himself on the original cabins top-notch, Joe got the definite feeling Hank Logan was not a man who tolerated stupidity. In himself or anybody else.

Not only that, but he made coffee with serious cojones.

“The electrical contractor should be here, soon, too,” Joe said.

“He already was,” Hank said. “Since you weren’t back yet, I suggested he go on to Ruby’s for breakfast.”

Joe grimaced. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hank said, frowning into his empty mug, then going back for a refill. “Breakfast at Ruby’s has a way of mellowing a man.” He poured his coffee, then glanced over at Joe. “How’s the boy doing?”

Other than thinking I’m slime? Joe thought, then said, “He wasn’t too sure about things. But they seem like nice people over there at the camp.”

“They are that. Seth’s in good hands, believe me. Hey,” he said, apparently changing the subject. “You see my kid? Blair? Kinda tall, long red hair?”

“Maybe. For a moment. Until the other one shooed everybody outside.”

“The other one?”

“Taylor? Another redhead. Said she ran the place with Didi.”

“Yeah, that’s Taylor.” Hank took another swallow of coffee. “She teaches kindergarten up at the elementary school, went in with Didi when Bess Cassidy moved to Kansas to be with her kids two summers ago.” Nearly black eyes seemed to assess him. “From what I hear, Taylor’s got a magic touch with kids. They’re crazy about her, and she’s crazy about them. One of those women you figure would like nothing more than to have a batch of her own.”

Joe found himself staring hard at his coffee. “I suppose that’s an admirable trait in a teacher.”

“True. I don’t know her too well, myself, but Blair thinks the world of her.”

Now it was Joe’s turn for a second cup. “You have to wonder, though, how she ended up here.” At the silence following his comment, he turned to see Hank’s slightly puzzled expression. “Coming from someplace like Houston, I mean. Must be a big adjustment, living in a small town.”

“No argument there.” Hank knocked back the rest of his coffee, then twisted around to set the empty mug back beside the coffeemaker. “Guess it just depends on what you’re looking for at the time…. Well, hey, gorgeous.”

The last was directed, with a big smile, for a slender blonde dressed in shorts and a tucked-in sleeveless blouse who’d just come into the office. The woman was attractive in that way of women over forty who are unconscious of their beauty, her straight hair held back from her finely featured face with a couple of clips. Slipping a decidedly proprietary hand around her waist, Hank introduced her to Joe as his wife, Jenna, with a pride in his voice that Joe decided was due not to Jenna’s being his as much as that she’d chosen him.

He told himself the burning sensation in his gut was due to Hank’s coffee.

She welcomed him to Haven, a generous helping of crow’s feet splaying out from the corners of her eyes as a warm smile stretched across her face. While Joe was pondering her lack of Oklahoman twang, Hank asked Joe if he’d read any of his wife’s books—in her other life, she was the mystery writer Jennifer Phillips.

“For heaven’s sake, Hank,” Jenna said, swatting him lightly in the chest. “Quit putting people on the spot like that! You’re embarrassing both of us!”

Joe smiled. “I’ve heard the name, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a reader. Not anymore, at least. Not since…” He pushed aside the cloud of memory to think back. “Not really since high school.” The realization surprised him—had it really been that long since he’d indulged in the simple pleasure of reading a novel?

Fortunately, before these people managed to find out what size drawers he wore, the electrical contractor returned, giving Joe an excuse to sidestep any further discussion about his personal life and retreat once again into the safe, generally orderly world of bids, supplies and schedules, a world over which he had a fair amount of control.

As opposed to the world where he had virtually none.

On brutally hot days like this, by midafternoon not even the littlest ones were much interested in moving. So Taylor usually settled them in the grass under one of the big old cottonwoods out behind the church, reading aloud until their parents came to get them or they nodded off. She loved changing her voice to match each character, seriously getting off on the glow of delight when she’d glance up and see a batch of wide eyes and, sometimes, open mouths. And the giggles. She lived for the giggles.

And at the moment, she’d give her right arm to hear Seth Salazar giggle.

When he wasn’t checking the huge watch smothering his narrow wrist, the boy was attentive enough, sitting cross-legged a little apart from the rest of the children. Although his slender fingers absently plucked at the blades of grass in front of his ankles, his solemn gaze stayed on her the entire time she read. But when the other kids howled at Junie B. Jones’s antics, Seth would barely crack a smile. His body was there, but clearly his mind was elsewhere.

“Joe!” he cried, leaping to his feet.

Like wondering when his brother would come rescue him, Taylor guessed, as the boy tore across the yard.

While the younger counselors herded the remaining kids inside for the last snack of the day, Taylor got to her feet, her knees protesting at sitting on the hard ground for so long, her brain giving her what-for for putting off the inevitable. Which would be—she turned—seeing Joe Salazar scoop his little brother up into his arms.

Strong, solid arms.

Against a strong, solid chest.

All barely hidden underneath the soft folds of a dusty blue workshirt.

Yep, it was just as bad as she thought it would be.

Taylor plastered a smile to her face and trooped over to the pair, just in time to hear Seth give Joe grief about being late.

“It was only a couple minutes, buddy,” Joe said, lowering his brother to the ground. “Besides, I didn’t want to interrupt the reading.”

“You were listening?” Taylor said, thinking, hmm…when was the last time some guy had made her stomach flutter? No, wait, she remembered: Mason. Her ex.

The fluttering might have degenerated into a vague nausea had Joe not smiled for her. Not exactly a laid-back, no-holds-barred smile, but a smile nonetheless. A smile sparkling in a face darkened by a suggestion of late-day beard shadow.

As Blair and company would say, this was so not fair.

“I was listening,” Joe said, and something in his voice or eyes or somewhere in there made Taylor suspect she wasn’t the only one here dodging a few red flags. A revelation which, aggravatingly enough, managed to flatter and annoy her at the same time. “Although I’m not sure who was having more fun—you or the kids.”

He wasn’t flirting, she was sure of it. Well, as sure as someone who hadn’t been flirted with in about a million years—except for Hootch Atkins, and he definitely did not count—could be. Then she noticed Seth’s head bopping back and forth between them, and Didi’s cocked eyebrow when she came outside and saw them standing there, and then fourteen-year-old April Gundersen tripped over a tree root because she was gawking at them instead of watching where she was going. Taylor realized she wasn’t sure of anything anymore, except that she didn’t feel much older than April, which probably wasn’t a good thing.

Then, to her horror, she heard herself going on about how she’d always been a big ham ever since she was little, how she’d set up her stuffed animals in rows—and her little sister, if she could get her to sit still long enough—and perform, making up stories as she went along and how she’d even thought about becoming an actor at one point, but had given it up when she realized all she really wanted to do was…teach…kids.

Whoa. Hot flash sneak preview. Not fun.

“Well,” Joe said, not looking a whole lot more comfortable than Taylor felt. “You’re very good.” Then he turned to Seth. “So how was your first day?” When all he got was a noncommittal shrug in reply, he added, “That good, huh?”

Another shrug.

“Guess he forgot about the worms we had for lunch,” Taylor said, which earned her startled looks from both brothers.

One day, maybe she’d start acting like a normal person. But the world probably shouldn’t hold its breath for that one. Joe muttered something about their needing to head to the store to find something for dinner, then left, Seth’s hand securely in his.

“Don’t look now,” Didi said behind Taylor, scaring her half to death, “but you look like you just saw the mother ship land in Cal Logan’s pasture.”

Taylor grunted and headed back to the Sunday school building, thinking she’d take a close encounter with a horde of little green men over one with Joe Salazar any day.

And if that didn’t make her certifiably insane, she didn’t know what did.

What the hell had just happened?

Joe yanked a grocery cart loose from the nested mass at the front of the Homeland, making Seth jerk beside him. Blessedly frigid air-conditioning soothed his heated skin, but not the dumb, pointless, totally off-the-wall fire raging inside him.

Five minutes. Five lousy minutes, he’d spent with Taylor. Five minutes of inane, completely innocent conversation. No sexual overtones whatsoever. Yet here he was, fighting to walk straight. What kind of man gets turned on by a woman reading a children’s story, for crying out loud?

The kind of man who was currently standing in a crowded supermarket with an eight-year-old beside him and thinking about breasts.

What the hell? Joe never thought about breasts, for God’s sake. At least not as often as he did when he was seventeen. Or twelve. But now, suddenly, mammary images crowded his thoughts like steak a starving man’s on a desert island. He shut his eyes to get his bearings, and saw nipples. Pink ones, on pale, translucent skin.

Like redheads had.

“So…you like spaghetti?” he barked to the child depending on him not to get distracted by things like sex and breasts—

No less than five women scowled at him.

—and a silky voice that changed like mercury as she read, making children laugh.

“Not really,” Seth said.

Joe let out a long, ragged breath and the breasts went away. Thank God. Strangling the grocery cart handle, he glowered at his little brother. “Whoever heard of a little kid who didn’t like spaghetti?”

The poor kid flinched, his brows practically meeting in the middle. “It makes me gag.”

Terrific. The one thing Joe knew how to cook with any reasonable success, and the kid didn’t like it. They’d eaten out most of the past three weeks, but that was in Oklahoma City where there were a few more restaurant choices than Ruby’s Diner or the Dairy Queen halfway between here and Claremore. Not that Ruby’s didn’t seem like a great place, but he’d lay odds Ruby Kennedy was the kind of women who had pity running in her veins. For hurting kids, for lost souls, for lonely men who couldn’t cook and who hallucinated about breasts in supermarkets because they couldn’t remember the last time they had sex worth remembering.

And anyway, if he was going to have this kid living with him for the next ten or so years—a thought which damn near stopped his breath—they couldn’t eat out every night. Which meant one of them was going to have to learn to cook.

“So what do you like?”

“Tacos?”

Okay, he could probably swing that. Joe steered the cart toward the meat section, Seth not exactly trotting along behind him. Every few feet or so, somebody would smile and nod, or say, “Hey.” Joe nodded and smiled and heyed back, but all this friendliness was beginning to get on his nerves.

If he didn’t know better, he’d say he felt trapped. In this town, in this life, by circumstances. By phantom, probably pink-tipped breasts he was pretty sure he’d never get to see.

A smile he’d never get to kiss.

“What else besides tacos?” he said, tossing a package of ground beef into the cart.

“Hamburgers. And fries.”

Yeah, the kid had put a few dozen of those away. Once he started eating again, that is. The first week had been sort of dicey, with Joe beginning to worry he’d be jailed for letting the kid starve to death. Not that Seth ate much even now, but Joe’s mother had reminded him that he’d never eaten much as a kid, either, not until he hit his late teens, at least.

Thinking about his mother brought him up short, making him realize it’d been nearly a week since he’d talked to his mom and Kristen, his sister. A dull pain tried to assert itself at the base of his skull.

“I like fried chicken, too.” Just as Joe was about to say he wasn’t sure he could handle fried chicken that didn’t come out of a box, the boy added, “But only Mama’s.”

Joe muttered a bad word under his breath, only to realize this was the first time Seth had mentioned his mother since the boy had come to live with him. The lady from social services in Oklahoma City had said Seth’s talking about his parents would help him to accept their deaths and eventually heal some of his pain, but that Joe shouldn’t worry if it took a while for that to happen. Joe knew nothing about his father’s second wife—she could have been a saint, for all he knew, even though he did know the couple hadn’t been living together at the time of their deaths—but he sure as hell knew his father. And a not-so-small, unhealed part of himself was hard put to wonder how, or why, the child would grieve Jose Salazar at all.

Except Joe certainly had, hadn’t he, all those years ago?

“Joe?”

He looked down at Seth. The boy’s forehead was a mass of wrinkles.

“You mad at me?”

“No,” Joe said on a rush of guilt. None of this was Seth’s fault. And there was no way he would’ve refused to take his brother on. Still, that didn’t mean he was a hundred percent okay with the situation, either. Full-time responsibility for an eight-year-old boy you’d never met before wasn’t something easily slotted into your life, especially one already crammed to the gills. But more than that, Seth’s sudden appearance had stirred up a whole mess of issues Joe’d thought he’d dealt with years ago and was not at all amused to discover he hadn’t. Not as much as he’d thought, at least. The social worker had suggested counseling to help Seth through this, but Joe was beginning to think maybe he was the one who needed help getting his head screwed on straight. “Just got a lot on my mind, that’s all. And it’s been a long day.”

Seth nodded, but didn’t say anything, leaving Joe wrestling with another brand of guilt—that he didn’t feel more for the kid than he did. Sure, he cared about what happened to him, and he hated seeing the boy so unhappy, but if he thought he’d feel a strong attachment right off just because they were brothers, he’d been dead wrong.

“Hey. You want some ice cream?”

After a moment of apparent contemplation, Seth said, “C’n we get chocolate chip?”

“That your favorite?”

Seth nodded.

“Huh. Mine, too. Let’s go see if they’ve got some.”

As they walked up and down the aisles until they found the frozen-food section—not only did they have chocolate-chip ice cream, they had five different kinds—it struck Joe that he’d better damn well work on forming that attachment, because right now the only thing that mattered was making this kid feel secure again. And the only way that was going to happen was by Joe’s devoting as much time and attention to him as he possibly could. No distractions allowed.

Especially distractions with red hair, a generous smile and green-gold eyes that saw deeper inside a man than this man wanted them to see.

Chapter 3

Taylor was officially in a cruddy mood. And it had nothing to do with the heat, or her hormones, or even that Oakley, her four-legged roommate, had devoured the salad she’d made for lunch today, leaving her with nothing but tuna fish. She only kept tuna fish in the house because it was easy to fix and lasted forever in the can, but truthfully, she wasn’t all that fond of it. No, her cruddy mood had something to do with Joe Salazar. She just wasn’t sure what, exactly.

From her perch on the edge of the Sunday school room’s low stage, Taylor took a bite of her tuna sandwich, but it tasted like dust. Fishy dust, at that. For heaven’s sake, she’d barely even seen the man this past week. He dropped Seth off every morning and picked him up every evening—although Taylor did notice he got later and later every day—but mostly he talked to Blair, since she was Seth’s counselor. Which was just how Taylor wanted it.

But even totally non-Joe-related events or situations would set her off. Like last night, when she got home and her house was empty. Well, duh, she lived alone; of course her house was empty. But usually she walked in and felt “Ahhh.” Last night, she walked in and felt…actually, she wasn’t sure what she felt, but it wasn’t pleasant. And why she should connect this unpleasant, undefined feeling to a man she didn’t even know made no sense whatsoever. But there it was. And there she was, in a cruddy mood.

“How’s he doing?”

A cruddy mood clearly destined to get worse.

Taylor didn’t have to ask to know who the pastor’s wife was talking about. She glanced across the room at Seth, listlessly picking at his sandwich and still doing his best to ignore the other children. Since Didi could obviously see for herself how he was doing, Taylor guessed the older woman wanted her take on things. Which unfortunately smelled to high heaven of ulterior motives.

“Maintaining. Barely.” Compunction about not letting herself get too close to the boy had been increasingly gnawing at her for several days. “Mostly he’s just hung back and watched.”

She most definitely did not like the silence that greeted her comment. “I don’t mean to butt in,” Didi said at last, almost provoking a laugh, “but don’t you think you should, um, get a little more involved?”

“Blair’s doing fine.”

“Yes, she is. But Seth isn’t. Honey, this is a special case—”

“I know that.”

“Then why in tarnation are you sitting back and doing nothing?”

“I’m not sitting back and doing nothing. I’m here if Blair needs me. And it’s not as if I’m ignoring the child.”

“Taylor.” Didi hauled her petite, but ample, form up onto the stage beside her, setting short, fading blond curls all aquiver. “The poor kid follows every move you make. If anyone could help him over this, it would be you.”

“And there’s also a real danger of his becoming too attached—” she bit off another corner of her sandwich “—and then what happens when the summer is over and he has to leave?”

“You’ll heal.”

“I’m not talking about me—”

“Aren’t you?”

Oh, yeah, her mood was definitely worsening. Especially when Didi added, “And I don’t think it’s just the boy you’re afraid to get close to, either.”

With friends like this…

“No comment?” Didi said.

“Not in a million years.”

That got a chuckle. Then Didi crossed her arms and said, “Still, sometimes you gotta worry about the present and trust the future to take care of itself.” A pause. “And hiding out from life isn’t exactly trusting, now, is it?”

This was hardly the first time the pastor’s wife had hinted that she had problems with some of Taylor’s choices, most notably her moving to an itty-bitty town where there weren’t a whole lot of choices. In jobs, in housing, in prospective relationships of the man-woman variety. But it wasn’t as if Taylor hadn’t known from the start what she’d be getting into when she accepted the teaching job here. Still, after her marriage’s collapse, there was a lot to be said for being able to go to sleep every night grateful for her relatively complication-free life.

A cop-out? Maybe. But ask her if she cared. She loved her job, and her little house nestled in the woods, and she was perfectly content with her safe, calm, orderly life, one where she could face the world each morning with a smile that she didn’t have to pull out of a drawer and paste on. So how come Didi’s words weren’t rolling off her back the way they usually did?

As Taylor watched Seth’s large eyes alternate between cautiously surveying his surroundings and withdrawing into his grief, old wounds began to seep open. Wounds she’d thought had long since healed. Memory yanked her back to just past her eleventh birthday, right after her father died, when she’d been convinced she’d never be happy again.

Seth was only a little kid. All he knew was now. And somehow, she had the feeling his big brother, although he meant well, was as clueless as the kid. Conflicting instincts clashed inside her—compassion versus self-preservation, the need to help duking it out with the realization that wanting to help didn’t necessarily mean she could.

But could she live with herself if she didn’t at least try?

Taylor slurped up the rest of her bottled juice as she watched Blair sink into a small chair beside Seth, trying to engage him in conversation, as she’d been doing without much success the whole week. If anyone could get through, it was Blair. Not only did the teen adore little kids—she’d already talked to Taylor about majoring in early childhood education in college—but she, too, knew what it was to lose someone she loved. In her case, it was the uncle who, with Jenna, had adopted and raised her before anybody knew Hank was her father and who had died of cancer a few years back. But after a minute or two, the little boy shook his head and Blair got up, shooting Taylor a helpless glance before sitting down at another table where a group of little girls were having giggle fits over heaven knew what.

Never in her life had Taylor been able to see a hurting child and not try to comfort him or her. And she had about as much chance of success at trying to resist comforting this one as she did of staying away from chocolate.

“Maddie Logan’s coming in this afternoon to help. She could take over your group,” Didi said, as if reading her mind. And with that, Taylor sighed, heaved her duff off the edge of the stage and gave in to the inevitable.

Even if the distrust in Seth’s eyes as he watched her approach wasn’t exactly inspiring her with confidence. She shooed the rest of the kids outside and then sat at the table beside him. He’d brought his lunch today, a banana and cookies along with the sandwich, Taylor saw. She imagined Joe packing it for him, unable to squelch the warm feeling attendant thereto.

“Hey, honey.” She angled her head to peer into the glowering face. “That looks like a good lunch you’ve got there.”

He poked at his peanut butter sandwich and then shrugged. “I’m not hungry.”

“Well, that’s okay. It happens sometimes. So…you and your brother are staying in one of the cabins up at the Double Arrow, huh?”

A nod.

“I hear they’re very nice—”

“She made you come over here and talk to me, didn’t she?”

“Who?”

He nodded toward Didi. “Her.”

“Oh. No. She didn’t. Totally my idea.”

After a long pause, Seth said, “You wanna see a picture of my mom?”

“Sure.”

The boy reached around and yanked out a slim cloth wallet from his back pocket, opening it to a photo of a smiling young woman with dark hair and eyes.

“Oh, Seth…she was very pretty.”

“I know.” He contemplated the photo for a couple of seconds, then said, “Do you think I’ll see her again? In heaven?”

Oh, boy. “Maybe,” Taylor said. At his distressed look, she smiled. “I don’t actually know how all that works. But I’ve always thought I’d like to see my father again.”

His eyes met hers, interested. “He’s dead, too?”

“Yeah. For a long time, now.”

“You still miss him?”

“Sometimes. But I can think about him now without it hurting so much.”

Seth broke the eye contact, slapping shut the wallet and shoving it back in his pocket. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Okay.”

“What time is it?”

“About twelve-thirty.”

“How long till Joe comes to get me?”

“He said he’d be here at four.”

“He didn’t get here until five yesterday.”

“Guess he got tied up—”

“Can I go outside now?”

Taylor said, “Sure.” But she caught the boy’s sticky, warm hand as he rose. He didn’t try to get free, but he kept his gaze fixed firmly on the tabletop. “It’s all really awful, isn’t it?” she said.

For a long moment, he just stood there, his breath spurting from his nose in ragged little pants. Then, finally, his eyes shot to hers, all his sorrow and confusion upending on her like a bucket of cold, grimy water before he yanked his hand from her grasp and strode wordlessly away.

So help her, if Joe didn’t show up on time today, she was going to string him up by his…toes.

At four-fifteen, Didi informed Taylor she had a call, she could take it on the phone in the church office. Taylor locked eyes with the older woman for a moment, just long enough to get that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that always accompanied bad news. Her imagination was all set to take flight when Didi rudely yanked it back to earth with, “It’s Seth’s brother.”

Taylor frowned, not processing either the information itself or all the wherewithals behind it. “Why’s he calling me?”

“That, I couldn’t tell you. But he didn’t sound so good.”

Taylor tromped off to the office and picked up the phone, plucking at her T-shirt’s neckline. There was actually an air conditioner in here, but the secretary—who only worked three mornings a week—always turned it off when she went home, leaving the small room feeling like a recently vacated shower stall.

“This is Taylor—”

“Taylor, Joe Salazar. I’m really sorry, but I’m running behind and it looks like I’m going to be late picking up Seth tonight.”

“Again?”

A pause. “Again.”

She shut her eyes. “How late?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve got people here, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover… If I leave here by five-thirty, I’ll be back in Haven by half past six or thereabouts. I know you all don’t stay open that late—”

“Whoa, hold on—it doesn’t take an hour to get here from the Double Arrow. Where are you?”

Another pause. “Tulsa.”

“Tulsa? Why the heck are you in Tulsa?”

“For work. It’s a long story. Which I doubt you want to hear.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Then I’ll tell you sometime. Right now, though, I’ve got a whole bunch of people giving me dirty looks because I’m over here talking to you and not over there talking to them, so the upshot is…” Big sigh. “Look, I know this stinks, but is there any way somebody could watch Seth until I get back?”

Taylor shut her eyes again, praying for patience. Her prayer was not answered. “Oh, I suppose…”

“Could you do it? I mean, I know that’s asking a lot. And you probably have plans…”

“No, I don’t have plans” flew right out of her mouth before she could catch it, only then she lost her breath. “But I’m not real sure that’s such a good idea—”

“I agree. But you’re the only one he talks about. I think he likes you.”

Setting aside his “I agree” comment to examine at a later date, she said, “He sure has a funny way of showing it.”

“Taylor, please. I’m desperate. And I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”

His words set off a series of echoes in her head, reaching way back, words that had taught her the meaning of disappointment and distrust.

“Seems to me I’m not the one you need to be making anything up to.”

Silence. Then a soft, “I agree. And God knows I’ll probably get an earful from my brother when I get back. If he even talks to me at all. I know this makes me dirt in everybody’s book, but I’m really stuck.”

More echoes, this time of genuine regret.

Taylor sighed, inwardly muttered something that was anything but a prayer, and said, “You know the first road you get to after you turn off from the highway, going up to the Double Arrow?”

“Yeah?”

“Make a left, then go all the way to the end. That’s my house. I’ll take Seth there after camp closes.”

“Thank you so much—”

“And don’t mind the dog. He’s loud but harmless.”

“Got it.” Joe paused. “Can I bring dinner to pay you back?”

“No,” she said, and hung up.

“Well, this is it,” Taylor said to the stone-faced child buckled up next to her in the Chevy pickup she’d bought off Darryl Andrews last year, after the dirt road leading to her place finally did-in her old Saturn. She was about to add something about the dog, except she noticed Oakley hadn’t budged from his spot on the porch, guarding the front door. Blocking it, anyway. Oakley’s method of watch-dogging ran more along the lines of “Look who’s here, let’s party!” than “Get your good-for-nothin’ butt off my property before I rip you to shreds.” Also, nobody’d clued Oakley in to the fact that the image of the lazy bloodhound was an inaccurate stereotype. Taylor often wondered what, if anything, the dog did during the day while she was gone, since he never seemed to change position between when she left and when she returned. If it weren’t for the piles of poop that magically appeared in her absence, she’d have no proof that he actually moved.

“You got a dog?”

Taylor couldn’t quite tell if that was interest or trepidation in Seth’s voice, but at least it was a response. “After a fashion,” she said, unlatching her seat belt and opening the truck door. A breeze would be nice right about now to wick the moisture off her back and bottom from sitting on the truck’s vinyl seat. But no such luck. Even the wind chime on the end of her porch was dead silent.

“Does he bite?” Seth asked, making no move to open his own door.

Trepidation, definitely. “Honey, half the time I’m not even sure he breathes. Come on, it’s okay.”

Seth had taken the news about Joe’s lateness more calmly than Taylor might have expected, but she knew he was ticked. When she’d said they were ready to go, the boy had collected his things and walked out to the truck like a prisoner resigned to his fate. Just warmed the cockles of her heart, is what.

“Seth?” she now said. When he finally looked at her, she smiled like a goon and said, “Really, this is going to be fun.”

Somehow, she got the feeling he didn’t believe her.

Tempted to mutter things she shouldn’t, Taylor got out of the truck. Seth, however, didn’t. Not until she went around to the passenger side and opened the door for him, anyway. Then, with excruciating slowness, the child slithered down from the seat, his eyes glued to the comatose dog the entire time. When she started toward the porch, however, the kid grabbed her hand.

“Seth, honey? I promise you, I’ve yet to hear of a bloodhound eating a child. He might slobber you to death—” she twisted her mouth at the prone mass on her porch “—if he ever wakes up, but Oakley’s as gentle as a lamb, I swear.”

Perhaps her voice finally pervaded the beast’s consciousness, because at that moment the big red dog hauled himself to his feet, his skin taking a few extra seconds to catch up, and let out a bay of joy before bounding over to them. Seth let out a scream and hid behind Taylor, shaking so hard she thought he’d break.

“Oakley! Doghouse!” she said, and the dog gave her a wounded “What did I do?” look before morosely lumbering off to his garage-sized doghouse at the side of the house. But he’d no sooner gone in than he turned right back around, sitting hunched inside the opening with a baleful expression. Taylor glanced down to see Seth staring at the dog as hard as the dog was staring at him.

“He looks like his feelings got hurt,” he said.

“Oakley loves kids,” Taylor said, continuing toward the house. “And they love him. He’s never run into one who was afraid of him before, so I guess he’s kind of confused.”

“But he’s so big.”

So’s your brother, but I’m not afraid of him, Taylor wanted to say, except then it occurred to her maybe she was a little more afraid of Joe than she wanted to admit. Or at least, afraid of her reaction to him. The man was like chocolate—even though it always gave her a headache, she couldn’t completely shake her affinity for it.

Would someone please explain to her why she was so attracted to driven, focused men, when she knew damn well that driven, focused men made lousy mates?

“Come on, let’s go inside,” she said, leading Seth into her house, a little two-bedroom bungalow with a sunroom off the living room and an eat-in kitchen. But it had been a steal, and it was all hers—or would be in twenty-nine years—and the lot was plenty big enough to justify having a bloodhound, even if she’d spent a small fortune on an invisible fence to keep the beast from following the scent of every rabbit or possum that wandered across the property.

“I’m hungry,” Seth announced from the middle of the living room, even as she noticed those big eyes taking it all in—the one whole wall filled with books, the mismatched, garage-sale furniture, the old Turkish rug from her father’s office that she’d discovered wasn’t colorfast when Oakley peed on it as a puppy.

“Yeah, me, too.” He trailed her into the kitchen—she’d replaced the ugly black-flecked floor tiles with a pretty white-and-gold linoleum, but she’d have to live with the harvest gold appliances and burnt-orange cabinets for a while yet, she imagined—where she opened the freezer. “You like Healthy Choice?”

“What’s that?”

“Frozen dinners. There’s…let’s see…lemon pepper fish, Salisbury steak and some Mexican chicken thing.”

“C’n I have the Mexican chicken?”

“Sure can.”

Outside, Oakley started baying at something. Seth wandered over to the kitchen window, which looked out over the front yard. “I think he’s lonely,” he said as Taylor put his dinner in the microwave.

“Could be. He’s used to coming inside with me when I get home.”

“Oh.” The boy turned to her. “Guess it’s not fair, huh? That he has to stay outside?”

“He’ll live. Right now, your feelings are more important than his. Okay, I’m out of milk, but I can make iced tea.”

Seth gave her a long, considering look before saying, “With lots of sugar?”

Taylor smiled. “How else?”

Oakley bayed again—Owrooowroooowrooooooo.

“Will he come if I call?” Seth asked.

“In a New York minute,” Taylor said, and the boy went to the front door and did just that, then hid behind the door when a hundred pounds of dog galumphed into the house, looking pleased as all get-out.

It was closing in on seven o’clock by the time Joe got to Taylor’s. Translation: His butt was in a major sling. As he pulled the Blazer up in front of the little white house with the gold shutters, he wondered who would be more ticked off with him—Seth or Taylor. His money was on the redhead. Shoot, the chill in her voice when he’d called had damn near given him frostbite. Then again, maybe it was nothing more than paranoia and a squirrelly connection. A guy could hope, right?

Candy and flowers in tow, he got out of the SUV, strangely disappointed at the lack of a welcoming committee. No glowering redhead with evisceration on her mind, no little boy tearing down the steps and up into his arms, not even the promised dog he shouldn’t pay any mind to. For a moment, he wondered if maybe he had the wrong house, until he heard it, just faintly— Taylor’s laughter drifting out the open window next to the front door, as soft and rich as the notes sporadically floating out from the wind chime hanging from the porch eaves.

Joe simply stood there, absorbing it, much the same way he was absorbing the almost-cool breeze sucking at his damp back. It was still hot, too hot, but the whispering of thousands of still-tender leaves, the calm whoooo…whoooo…whoooo…of a mourning dove soothed his frayed nerves, just a little. It would be another hour or more before the sun set, but the late daylight gilded the roof of the tiny house and set the masses of flowers ablaze in more containers than he could count scattered across the front of the porch and alongside the steps. There wasn’t much grass in the yard to speak of, but a great big old mulberry tree kept it shaded. Off to the side, the heady, peachy fragrance from a mimosa in full bloom mingled with the sweetness given off by the honeysuckle vine smothering the post-and-rail fence along one side of the house, arousing him in some way he couldn’t even define.

Just then, the largest dog he’d ever encountered nosed open the screen door, got Joe in his sights, and bounded down the steps, barking his head off. Before Joe could brace himself, ham-sized paws collided with Joe’s shoulders, sending him sprawling in the dirt with a loud “Oof!” And if having the wind knocked out of him wasn’t enough of an indignity, a gallon or so of dog spit now washed over his face. Then he heard Taylor yell, “Oakley! Drop it!” and he could breathe again. Move, no, but definitely breathe.

“Ohmigod, I’m so sorry…” Taylor grabbed his hand and, grunting, hauled him to a sitting position. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Joe said, cautiously testing assorted limbs to make sure he was. On her knees in the dirt beside him, Taylor was close enough for him to catch a whiff of her scent. Yes, even over the mimosa and the over achieving honeysuckle. He’d almost forgotten how good women smelled. And to make matters worse, her hair had come loose, swirling around her face and shoulders in a mass of glittery, untidy waves that looked hot to the touch.

“Gross,” Seth said, over what sure sounded like choked laughter. “You’ve got dog slime all over you!”

Joe’s gaze shot to his brother. Hearing him laugh was almost worth the sore butt and dog spit. Then his eyes swerved to Taylor’s, who sure as hell looked like she wanted to laugh, too, and for a split second, he felt the dumbest spurt of connection or something. Almost angrily, he yanked his shirttail out of his waistband and started mopping his face, only to then remember what Taylor’d said to get the dog off him. He dropped his now soggy shirttail and looked at her again. “‘Drop it’?”

“It’s one of the few commands he’ll obey,” she said, her forehead crinkled for a moment before she pulled a tissue out of her pocket, grabbed Joe’s chin and daubed at his still-wet face like he was one of her kindergartners, for Pete’s sake. The sensation of soft fingers against his skin sent awareness jolting through him, settling nicely in his groin. Terrific.

“He loves to play fetch,” Taylor went on, totally unaware of her torture. “But he has a problem with the part where he has to let…go…”

She went stock-still, her gaze fixed on his mouth. Then her hands yanked away and a little hiss of air escaped her lips, her cheeks turning practically the same color as the bright pink petunias spilling out of the whiskey barrel planter a few feet away.

Now it was Joe’s turn to barricade the laughter threatening to erupt from his gut, even as he had to tamp down the urge to plow his fingers through all that bright, glittery hair and plant a hard, fast kiss on that funny mouth of hers just because, well, he felt like it.

“Sorry,” she mumbled as Seth, bless him, got everybody back on track.

“You said six-thirty, Joe,” he said, indignant as hell. “It’s after seven.”

“I know, I know,” Joe said, collecting the slightly battered flowers and candy—which the dog had slobbered all over—and getting to his feet. “Traffic out of Tulsa was a bi…bear. Then the skies ripped open right outside Claremore and I had to pull off the road until it let up some.” He shifted everything to one hand and hugged the kid to him, his physical instincts fully operational even if the jury was still out on his emotions. “I’m really sorry. But I got you something, it’s in the car. And these—” Joe wiped the candy box on his jeans as the kid took off, and then shoved both candy and flowers at Taylor “—are for you.”

She stared at them like she wasn’t sure what to think.

Well, hell, Joe never had been much good at the keeping-women-happy stuff. He didn’t suppose it helped matters any that by now the flowers looked like something he’d filched from a neglected grave and the candy box was still slightly damp.

He blew out a breath. “It’s lame, I know, but I thought, hell, I should do something. But I didn’t have any idea what you might like. Since I don’t really know you, I mean. And the Homeland was the only thing open by the time I got here. But I figured I was probably safe with candy and flowers. I mean, don’t all women have a thing for chocolate?”

Why wouldn’t she say anything? She just stood there, staring at the flowers with a peculiar expression on her face. After what seemed like forever, she finally brought the daisies and carnations up to her nose and inhaled deeply. Daisy petals fluttered off in all directions; one carnation head plummeted to the dirt. She bent to pick it up, then lifted her eyes to his. “They’re lovely, thank you. But unfortunately chocolate gives me a headache.”

Behind him, the Blazer door slammed shut; small feet pummeled the earth as Seth returned, holding aloft his prize, a toy police car Joe’d gotten when he’d picked up the flowers and—he now realized, pointless—candy.

“This is so cool! Thanks, Joe!”

Joe’s heart turned over in his chest. It was a stupid two-buck toy, for crying out loud. But like the dumb TV commercial, the look on his brother’s face was priceless. Seth looked like a normal little boy. A happy little boy. Joe knew better than to think the worst was behind them, that this was anything more than the sun’s piercing the clouds for a moment. But it was a start.

And he’d made it happen. Okay, the toy had made it happen, but Joe had made the toy happen, right?

“You’re welcome, bro,” he said, and the boy beamed even more brightly, and Joe noticed Taylor watching him like maybe she expected him to sprout wings or something.

“I guess we’ll be getting out of your hair now,” he said, just as she said, “Have you had dinner?”

“No, ma’am,” he said after a long moment. “But I don’t want to put you out.”

She smiled. That full-out, first-place smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You won’t.”

Chapter 4

Flowers, for God’s sake.

The goofball had brought her flowers.

And candy she couldn’t eat.

Taylor eyed the Russell Stover box, sitting there so innocently on the kitchen counter.

Shouldn’t eat, anyway.

With a sigh, she climbed up on a kitchen chair to get down a cut-glass vase she’d gotten as a wedding present and couldn’t remember ever using before this. Partly because nobody—including her ex—had given her flowers since her marriage, and partly because, even though she was perfectly capable of giving herself flowers, glass anythings and bloodhounds were not a good mix. But then, she mused as she located the vase in amongst the million and one other wedding presents she had no use for but couldn’t bring herself to pitch, one could always stick flowers in a milk jug if one really wanted flowers in the house.

She thought there might be something profound in there, somewhere, but she was too tired to figure it out. Just as she was too tired to figure out what the heck had been going on outside when she’d for some reason thought wiping the dog spit off the man’s face would be a good idea and he’d gotten this look in his eyes that had clearly told her it had been anything but.

“Need any help?” she heard behind her, and the vase nearly fell out of her hands. Joe reached up and relieved her of it, setting it carefully on the counter and sending yet another life-is-so-unfair rush through Taylor.

Things were much easier when she was mad at him. Only then he had to go and do stuff like bring her battered flowers and chocolates and get that confused, helpless, I’m-really-trying-here expression on his face when he looked at Seth. Dammit, not only could she not stay mad, she invites the man to dinner.

But then, she wasn’t having visions of abandoned, uneaten chocolates in the trash, either.

However, she noticed Joe glowering at her as she got off the chair, and a small, hopeful flame of annoyance tried to rekindle itself.

“Standing on chairs isn’t safe,” he said.

The flame grew a tiny bit brighter, even though his voice was all growly soft and he was standing there with his arms crossed over his chest. By seven o’clock, his five o’clock shadow had reached the should-be-outlawed stage. So she puffed on the flame a little to make sure it didn’t go out.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been standing on chairs since I was two, haven’t broken my neck yet, so I’ll continue to live dangerously, thank you. Where’s Seth?”

“Out front, playing with the car.”

She actually considered keeping her big mouth shut, she really did. But since that was like trying to keep rain from hitting the ground, she said, “You know, distracting him with gifts will only work for so long.”

Joe’s eyes darkened, but he leaned one hand against the counter and slipped his other into his jeans pocket, as if nothing or nobody was going to ruffle his feathers, by golly. “And it might not hurt for you to cut me some slack here, Miss McIntyre. I’m doing the best I can.”

His reproof was gentle, but dead-on. Her cheeks burning, Taylor turned her back on Joe to run water into the vase, after which she grabbed the flowers from beside the sink and plopped them into the vessel. Oakley trotted into the kitchen, his nails clattering against the tiles. From outside, she heard Seth making assorted, if subdued, high-speed chase noises with the little car. She glanced up to make sure he was okay, just in time to see a robin the size of Texas scamper across the yard, tweetering his little robin heart out.

And Joe’s pheromones flooded her kitchen, flooded her, settling into every nook and cranny of her person and making her puff so hard on that damn flame she was about to hyperventilate.

“So,” she said. “Dinner. Frozen or canned?”

After a slight pause, she heard, “You don’t cook?”

“I cook. When the mood strikes. It didn’t tonight.” Or most nights, actually. Which was a shame, in a way, because she wasn’t a half-bad cook. But it was like the giving herself flowers thing—basically, she couldn’t be bothered. “Anyway,” she went on, twisting to set the flowers in the center of the table, where they actually looked very pretty, if still a bit shell-shocked, “I’ve got canned chili, some of that Chunky soup stuff, and a freezer full of frozen dinners.”

“I think I’ll take my chances with the chili.”

“Good choice.”

That got a half laugh. Then he plunked himself down at her table, looking as though he belonged there. How bizarre. “So how come you invited me to dinner if you’re still pissed at me?”

Her gaze shot to his. “I’m not—”

He chuckled. She huffed.

“Damned if I know.”

The corners of his mouth curved up. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are one strange woman.”

“So I’ve been told.”

The grin stretched out a little more. “You’re also very pretty.”

She barked out a laugh, which somewhat blotted out the uh-oh. What little makeup she’d put on this morning had long since melted off, her shirt was stained with everything imaginable (and a few things that weren’t), and her hair had that fresh-from-the-wind-tunnel look.

“Oh, man—we’d better get some food in you, quick. Hunger must be making you delusional.” She tromped over to the cupboard. “And even if it were true, that’s not going to stop me from being pissed.”

“I didn’t think it would. And I’m not delusional. Or a suck-up.”

She arched one brow at him, which tugged a sheepish grin from his mouth.

“Okay, the flowers and the candy were a suck-up.” Then his smile…changed, somehow. Seemed to be coming more from his eyes or something. “Stating a simple fact isn’t.”

Unlike Abby, her younger sister, Taylor had never been good at accepting compliments. And she wasn’t all that sure what to do with this one now. So she decided to set it aside, like a sweet, but totally impractical, present, and said instead, “Would you like crackers with your chili?”

She could feel his gaze, warm and intense on her back, making her shiver slightly. “Sounds good. And I didn’t really mean that about you being strange.”

“Yes, you did.” The can of chili duly retrieved, she yanked open the utensil drawer and found the can opener, then handed both to Joe. “I’m a firm believer in audience participation,” she said when his brows lifted. Shaking his head, he set about removing the lid; at the sound of the can opener, Oakley planted himself next to Joe, his entire face undulating as it swiveled from Joe to can to Joe.

“I don’t suppose chili’s part of the dog’s diet,” Joe said.

“Not unless you want to wear a gas mask for the rest of the night.”

“Got it. You know,” he said, frowning at the dog as he cranked the opener, “his face kinda reminds me of an unmade bed.”

“Hey. Don’t talk smack about my dog.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Unmade beds are kinda nice, if you think about it.” His mouth twitching, he handed the open can to her. “Cozy. Inviting.”

Taylor rolled her eyes—mostly to keep from staring at him bug-eyed—and he laughed. After she dumped the chili into a bowl and put it in the microwave, Joe asked, “How’d you come to have a bloodhound anyway?”

“A question I’ve asked myself many times,” she said with a sigh. “Only thing I can figure is that since I couldn’t have a pet when I was a kid—not even a hamster—when I finally got this place, I sorta went overboard.” Oakley angled his head backward to give her a reproving look. “Not that I don’t adore the big lug,” she added, “but a bloodhound isn’t exactly the most practical choice in the world. Oh, Lord…” She grabbed an old towel off a cabinet knob and beckoned to the dog. “Come here, Niagara mouth.”

“And let me guess,” Joe said as she sopped up a small lake’s worth of drool from the dog’s jowls. “You’re by nature a very practical person.”

“Let’s see,” she said, dumping the towel in the sink and washing her hands. “I teach kindergarten in a flyspeck of a town, I bought an eighty-year-old house that I swear was made by the first little pig, and last month I picked up a sequined evening dress at a garage sale just because it was pretty.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Hello? Where would I wear a sequined dress around here? To one of Didi’s potlucks?”

Joe angled his head. “Don’t tell me you never leave Haven. Not even for a night out now and again?”

She flushed. “Well…no. I mean, sure, I suppose I could. It’s just been a while since I have. God. That really sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?”

They stared at each other so long and so hard a blind person—in China—could have seen the sexual sparks leaping between them.

Joe sighed. Then chuckled, a low, warm, rough sound that did a real number on her nerve endings.

“Um…we’ve got a problem, don’t we?” she said.

“Only if we act on it.”

“Are we thinking about acting on it?”

“Don’t know about you, but I am. A helluva lot more than I’ve got any right to.” He leaned back in the chair, one wrist propped on the table. “I don’t suppose…”

“No,” she said, waving her hands in front of her. “I was just…curious. If I was imagining things.”

“You’re not. But I’m not looking for…entanglements.”

That was relief she felt, right? Sitting like a lump in the pit of her stomach? “No, of course you aren’t. Because you’re only here for the summer.”

“Right. And I’m not much for starting things I can’t finish.”

“Not to mention that you’ve got enough on your plate already. With Seth.”

A fraction of a second shuddered between them before he said, “Exactly.”

“Well,” she said. “That’s good then. That we got this out in the open.” Oh, yeah, let’s hear it for responsible adulthood.

“Just what I was thinking.” His gaze nestled up to hers and settled right in. “So nobody has to wonder. About what might happen.”

“Right.”

“Sure can’t help wondering what it would feel like to kiss you, though.”

A short laugh burst from her throat even as her eyes—the traitors—zinged right to his mouth. “Did you really mean to say that out loud?” she said, looking at his mouth.

“Just figured you for the type of woman who likes to know where things stand.”

Heaven knew how long she stood there, staring at his mouth and thinking wayward thoughts, before she finally said, “This is true.” Then she added, because it seemed like another one of those good ideas, “But it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“No. It wouldn’t.” His brow creased. “Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because if the kiss was good, I’m not sure I’d want to stop.”

His eyebrows practically shot straight up off his face.

“Did I shock you?” Taylor said.

“No. Of course not. After all, why shouldn’t a woman—”

“—be just as sexually up-front as a man? I agree.” Then she leaned forward. “My divorce was nearly four years ago. I’ve been celibate since. You do the math.”

His stare was hard and long and impossible to misread. “You’re not making this any easier.”

“Just letting you know I’m probably not the safest bet to fool around with if you’re not looking for entanglements.”

“Real dry kindling, I take it.”

“Oh, buddy, you have no idea.”

Praise the Lord, Seth chose that moment to wander into the kitchen, because if they continued this conversation any longer, she was going to pull a Meg Ryan-in-the-deli right there and then. And she wouldn’t be faking it.

“C’n Oakley come outside with me?” he asked.

Taylor smiled. “If he wants to, sure.”

Apparently the dog did, since he actually roused himself with something resembling enthusiasm and followed the boy outside. Joe got up from the table to watch them through the kitchen window. “I know this was all unplanned,” he said quietly, and the atmosphere calmed down enough for them to function like rational adults instead of bonkers bunnies, “but I think being here is doing him some good. Having something else to focus on besides his pain.”

Taylor came up beside him—but not too close—just in time to see Oakley bring the boy a stick to throw. Seth took hold of it willingly enough, but when the dog wouldn’t let go, he gave up, plopping himself back onto the ground to mess with the car.

“How can you tell?” she asked.

“He’s actually playing with the car. He wanted the dog to come out with him. Believe me, that’s an improvement. And I have to think part of it’s because he’s in a real home, even if only for a little while.” He glanced at her and then back out the window. “We can’t let that happen again.”

Confused, she looked up at the side of his face. “What?”

A muscle flinched in his jaw. “Flirt like that. Because right now, I can’t let myself get sidetracked from getting that little kid healed up.” He rubbed his chin and then slipped his hand back in his pocket, still not looking at her. “Because it’s been a long time for me, too.”

The longing in his voice wrapped itself right around her heart, a longing she suspected went way beyond sex. “Ah. Got it. Um, should I step away?”

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

So she did. Then she said, “You don’t have a real home?”

“Oh, I’ve got a place in Tulsa.” Joe walked away from the window and sank back down at the table, his legs stretched out in front of him. “An apartment I’m rarely in. So I’ve never really bothered to fix it up much. Besides, since it took me the better part of two weeks to sort out the mess my father left behind, we came straight from Oklahoma City—where I picked Seth up—to here. Kid’s been living in a motel of one kind or another for nearly a month. That can’t be helping him any.”

Taylor unhooked her gaze from Joe’s and again looked out the window, at the sad little boy now sitting under a tree, absently watching one of the robins. And once again, she felt herself being sucked in by the vulnerability edging Joe’s words, by her own inability to resist wanting to help. But she didn’t want to get sucked in, dammit, by either the kid or his big brother, didn’t want to give in to impulses she knew would bring nothing but aggravation and heartache. Because there’d been a time when she had wanted entanglements, the kind of entanglements that led to waking up beside the same man for the rest of her life and potty training and training wheels and soccer games and crazed, noisy Christmas mornings. All the things she’d thought she’d have with her ex but realized weren’t going to happen. All the things that had never really happened with her own family.

All the things she could tell would never happen with the man sitting at her kitchen table.

The microwave dinged, shaking her awake enough to edge back from that emotional vortex. She got out the bowl and set it in front of Joe, handed him the box of crackers, poured him a glass of tea, sat down at the table and said, “So what were you doing in Tulsa earlier today?”

Huh. So she’d decided to go on the attack. Interesting, if a mite disconcerting, since he’d apparently hit a nerve he hadn’t meant to hit. Not this time. Yeah, when he’d told her she was pretty, he’d definitely been trying to get a rise out of her. He’d had a long day, he was stressed to the gills and for a single, stupid moment, he thought it would be amusing to rattle her chain. But this…this was different. This reaction, he couldn’t quite figure out. Except that something must be threatening her sense of control—an illusion, if ever there was one, but it wasn’t as if Joe couldn’t relate—so she became the aggressor.

What she didn’t know, however, was that if she wanted the upper hand, she’d have to fight him for it. So he scarfed down several spoonsful of chili before answering. “My boss asked me to take on another project at the last minute. I couldn’t turn it down.”

“Why?”

What she also didn’t know was that Joe’d always had a thing for women who didn’t make a man turn cartwheels trying to figure out what was going on in their heads. For some weird reason, the more direct the woman, the more turned on he got. Which, in this case, was one of those good-news, bad-news things.

“Because I need the extra cash, for one thing,” he said. “And because I need to prove to Wes—my boss—that I’m the right person to take over for him when he takes semiretirement next year.”

Taylor turned her glower on his empty tea glass, like she was trying to figure out how to be a good hostess without giving him any ideas about women serving men. Then she got up, apparently deciding the solution was to plop the pitcher in front of him so he could refill his glass any time he wanted.

“But how on earth are you going to handle two projects in two different places?”

“I have no idea. But I’ll manage.” He picked up a cracker and dunked it in his chili. “I have to.”

“You don’t sound all that happy about it.”

Happy? When had he last thought of his life in those terms? The muscles in his upper back mildly protested when he shrugged. “Just being realistic, is all.”

She snorted. “Honestly—what is it with men and their need to prove themselves? No matter what the cost?”

His gaze fixed on his food, Joe stilled and then lifted his eyes to hers. “I’m not sure how being responsible is the same as proving myself. Besides, seems to me men don’t exactly have the market cornered on ambition.”

A second passed before she pushed out a breath. “You’re right,” she said, and he thought, point to him. “It’s just that…I don’t know. Men get this whole protective thing going and…”

“And what?”

“And they can’t see that they’re accomplishing exactly the opposite of what they think they are.”

Joe leaned back in his chair, brows drawn, arms folded across his chest. “You think there’s something wrong with a man wanting to provide for his family?”

“No, of course not. Except…” He was startled to see her eyes soften with tears. “Except when he neglects his family in the process.”

He thought of all the things he could ask, wanted to ask. Wouldn’t ask. Not now, at any rate. Probably not ever, if he were smart. Because asking questions might get him answers, but it could also get him involved. And getting involved, now, with her—with anyone—wasn’t in the cards.

So he did what any sane man who didn’t want involvement would do—he turned the tables on her. Not rudely, or meanly, but with the conviction of somebody who didn’t need some female making him question his own motives, for crying out loud.

“You know,” he said quietly, “you’re cute and all, but you’ve got a real problem with judging folks when you don’t know them worth squat.”

She flinched a little, then recouped. “I’m not judging you. I’m just familiar with the signs.”

“Of what?”

Another breath. “My father was a workaholic, Joe. So was my ex-husband. And it sucks.”

The words were brittle, as if years of acid had eaten away at them. And they arrowed straight from her heart to his.

“Your father…”

“…Literally worked himself to death. When I was eleven.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said softly. “But I’m not a workaholic, Taylor.”

For several seconds, their gazes tangled like a pair of kids scrapping over a toy, until Taylor got up from the table and walked over to the kitchen window, her hands stuffed in her back pockets. “How many hours a week do you work? And that includes work you bring home.”

His eyes narrowed. “It’s the sex thing, isn’t it?”

She whirled around. “What?”

“You don’t know what to do about this attraction between us, so you’re picking a fight with me.”

“I’m not picking a fight with you. And this has nothing to do with…that. I just asked you a simple question. How many hours a week do you work?”

“And how is this any of your business—?”

“Sixty? Seventy?”

Joe’s jaw tightened. “Somewhere in there, yeah.”

She turned, brows arched. “And you don’t think you’re a workaholic?”

“No, I think I’m somebody who can’t stand the thought of letting people down who depend on me.”

“And what the hell do you think you did when you didn’t pick Seth up on time tonight?”

Though spoken barely above a whisper, her words exploded around him like buckshot. And Joe wasn’t real partial to picking buckshot out of his butt. Man, if this was what she was like when she wasn’t picking a fight, he’d sure hate to be around her when she was.

“I didn’t have a choice, Taylor. You know that.”

“There’s always a choice! And right now, that kid needs you! Not what your paycheck can buy him!”

And what he didn’t need was this woman in his face about this, a fact the chili was only too vigorously corroborating. Direct was one thing; deranged was something else entirely. Except Joe was as ornery as she was. He’d never in his life walked away from a challenge, and he wasn’t about to start now. Even if he didn’t have a clue in hell what this one was even about. His manhood, maybe. His honor, definitely. But there was more going on here than a simple disagreement about lifestyle choice.

“Maybe I do have a choice. In theory. Doesn’t always pan out that way in practice, though.”

“You’re saying it’s not about the money?”

“Hell, yes, it’s about the money. You think I’d put Seth through this if it wasn’t about the money?”

That seemed to take the wind out of her sails for a moment. But only for a moment.

“Then what?”

Joe silently uttered a word he didn’t think Taylor would appreciate. What the hell had he gotten himself into? Baby-sitting and chili, that’s all this was supposed to be about, not a hot-and-heavy game of sexual dodgeball followed by his having to defend himself about stuff that had nothing to do with her. The last thing he wanted was to talk about his personal life, but God only knew what conclusions she’d come to on her own if he didn’t. Why he should care one way or the other what she thought about him, he had no idea. That he did was no small source of worry, but it was a worry he’d have to deal with later. Because right now, his choice was to bare his own soul, at least to a certain extent, or pry hers open. That, however, was an even less palatable option than door number one, since the tiny glimpse he’d already gotten into that soul had nearly undone him. A longer, deeper look could be disastrous. And Joe had all the disasters he could handle right now, thank you very much.

“Seth’s not my only responsibility,” he said with as little expression as he could manage. “Because, when my father walked out of my life and my mother’s, fifteen years ago, he also left behind a three-week-old baby girl with Down syndrome. My sister Kristen.”

Chapter 5

Instantly, Taylor’s high horse not only threw her, but took off for parts unknown. “Oh, Joe—”

He put up a hand to stop her. “Kristen’s only moderately retarded, but my mother realized she couldn’t go back to work and still give my sister the kind of attention she needed, so she had to take an unpaid leave of absence from her teaching job. My going to work was the only way we’d’ve made it.”

Taylor frowned. “But you couldn’t have been more than, what, eighteen?”

“Seventeen. My last year of high school.”

“Don’t tell me you quit?”

The horror in her voice coaxed a smile from his lips. “Mom would’ve had five fits if I’d tried. But I had to work. We got some help from the state for Kristen’s care, but it wasn’t enough. So, since construction paid a helluva lot better than fast food, I worked as a framer during the day and finished up high school at night. Oh, for God’s sake…don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t want your sympathy, Taylor. I did what I had to do, that’s all.”

Lord, how many times had she heard those words, or variations on that theme? “And you still are, I take it?”

“Yeah. I am. Kristen’s had the best care and training available, Mom made sure of that, but she’s never going to be able to live completely on her own or earn a living wage. And she’s got a heart condition that needs constant monitoring. Even though Mom was able to go back to teaching once Kristen started school, you know what teachers’ salaries are like. And anyway, she’s not going to be able to work forever. A good chunk of my earnings goes into a trust fund for Kristen. For later.”

When their gazes locked this time, it wasn’t about sex. Taylor carted his empty bowl to the sink, wondering how admiration and aggravation could be so closely linked. But the question was, what was she aggravated about? Joe’s dadblasted insistence on shouldering so much responsibility, or her own dadblasted weakness for men with such broad shoulders?

“What are you thinking?” he asked as she smacked up the faucet to wash the bowl.

“Why does it matter what I think?” she said over the running water.

“I don’t know. It just does. So humor me.”

The water groaned off, then she twisted around, her arms linked over her middle. “I think…” She blew out a sigh. “I think I owe you an apology, for one thing. For giving you grief when I didn’t have all the facts.” She hesitated, then said, “But when I taught in Houston, I’d see kids who’d have every gadget on the market, the best clothes, every privilege imaginable, but there’d be something in their eyes, this…enormous, gaping void, that just ripped me to pieces. Nine times out of ten, I’d eventually find out their parents weren’t in the picture as much as the kids needed them to be. It kills me to see a kid being neglected. Especially when the parent has no idea that’s what he’s doing.”

“Like…your father?” he said softly.

She smiled. “I guess I’m a little hypersensitive about the issue.”

Was it her imagination, or did his eyes narrow? “S’ okay,” he said. “I understand.”

“I imagine you do,” she said, and their gazes brushed up against each other, just for a moment. Just long enough, apparently, for him to decide it was high time he got out of there.

“Well,” he said, rising, “we’ve all got to get up pretty early, so we’d better get going.”

She walked him through the living room her older sister Erika had pronounced spartan the one time she’d come to visit and out onto the porch, the screen door slamming behind them. Seth lay on his stomach in the grass underneath the mulberry tree, talking to Oakley, who frankly didn’t appear all that captivated with the conversation.

“Time to go,” Joe shouted across the yard.

The kid scrambled to his feet. “C’n I use the bathroom first?”

“We’ll be back at the Double Arrow in two minutes, can’t you hold it?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Go on, then.” After the kid trooped back inside, Joe turned to Taylor. “Well. Thanks again. I really appreciate it.”

“Any time. No, I mean that,” she said when he snorted. Oakley had dragged himself up onto the porch and flopped down at her feet with a groan. One echoed silently inside her as her heart shoved her right smack in the line of fire, all the while her head was yelling, Have you lost your mind? But apparently there were certain aspects of a person’s makeup that could not be altered, no matter how desperately you might want to. No matter how fervently Taylor might have wanted to be a practical person, in the end her heart always made her decisions for her. “I’m happy to take Seth after day camp, if you need an emergency baby-sitter.”

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