Leaning forward, Trent lightly skimmed his knuckles along the hollow of her cheek. He saw some thing flare in her eyes.

Desire.

The same desire that was now throbbing insistently in his veins. For one small moment in time, he wasn’t Trent Marlowe, child psychologist. He was just Trent Marlowe, a college student who was hopelessly, head-over-heels in love with a young woman he had known since the fourth grade.

And had wanted since the beginning of time.

Tilting his head, he softly brushed his lips against hers, half expecting Laurel to pull back.

But she didn’t. She remained exactly where she was.

And kissed him back.

Marie Ferrarella has written over one hundred and fifty novels, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com.

Mistletoe and Miracles
Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To

Hermine Katarina Hirsch,

who, according to her loving daughter, Terry,

is the best mother in the world.

Chapter One

For a moment, Trent Marlowe thought he was dreaming.

When he first looked up from the latest article on selective mutism and saw her standing in the doorway of his office, he was certain he had fallen asleep.

But even though the article was dry, the last time he’d actually nodded out while sitting at a desk had been during an eight-o’clock Pol-Sci 1 class, where the lackluster professor’s monotone voice had been a first-class cure for insomnia.

He’d been a college freshman then.

And so had she.

Blinking, Trent glanced down at his appointment calendar and then up again at the sad-eyed, slender blonde. It was nine in the morning and he had a full day ahead of him, beginning with a new patient, a Cody Greer. Cody was only six years old and was brought in by his mother, Laurel Greer.

When he’d seen it on his schedule, the first name had given him a fleeting moment’s pause. It made him remember another Laurel. Someone who had been a very important part of his life. But that was years ago and if he thought of her every now and then, it was never in this setting. Never walking into his office. After all, like his stepmother, he had become a child psychologist, and Laurel Valentine was hardly a child. Even when she’d been one.

Laurel wasn’t that unusual a name. It had never occurred to him that Laurel Greer and Laurel Valentine were one and the same person.

And yet, here she was, in his doorway. Just as achingly beautiful as ever.

Maybe more so.

Trent didn’t remember rising from behind his desk. Didn’t remember opening his mouth to speak. His voice sounded almost surreal to his ear as he said her name. “Laurel?”

And then she smiled.

It was a tense, hesitant smile, but still Laurel’s smile, splashing sunshine through the entire room. That was when he knew he wasn’t dreaming, wasn’t revisiting a space in his mind reserved for things that should have been but weren’t.

Laurel remained where she was, as if she had doubts about taking this last step into his world. “Hello, Trent. How are you?”

Her voice was soft, melodic. His was stilted. “Startled.”

He’d said the first word that came to him. But this wasn’t a word association test. Trent laughed dryly to shake off the bewildered mood that closed around him.

How long had it been? Over seven years now. And, at first glance, she hadn’t changed. She still had a shyness that made him think of a fairy-tale princess in need of rescue.

Confusion wove its way through the moment. Had she come here looking for him? Or was it his professional services she needed? But he didn’t treat adults.

“I’m a child psychologist,” he heard himself telling her.

Her smile widened, so did the radiance. But that could have just been a trick of the sunshine streaming in the window behind him.

“I know,” she said. “I have a child.”

Something twisted inside of him, but he forced himself to ignore it. Trent tilted his head slightly as he looked behind her, but there didn’t seem to be anyone with Laurel, at least not close by. Trent raised an inquiring eyebrow as his eyes shifted back to her.

“He’s at home,” she explained. “With my mother.”

He looked at his watch even though three minutes ago he’d known what time it was. Right now he wasn’t sure of anything. The ground had opened up beneath him and he’d fallen down the rabbit hole.

“Shouldn’t he be in school?”

Laurel sighed before answering, as if some burden had made her incredibly tired. “These days, he doesn’t want to go anymore.” Laurel pressed her lips together and looked at him hopefully. “Can I come in?”

Idiot, Trent berated himself. But the sight of his first, no, his only love after all these years had completely thrown him for a loop, incinerating his usual poise.

He forced himself to focus. To relax. With effort, he locked away the myriad questions popping up in his brain.

“Of course. Sorry. Seeing you just now really caught me off guard.” He gestured toward the two chairs before his sleek, modern desk. “Please, take a seat.”

She moved across the room like the model she had once confided she wanted to become, gliding gracefully into one of the chairs he’d indicated. Placing her purse on the floor beside her, she crossed her ankles and folded her hands in her lap.

She seemed uncomfortable and she’d never been ill at ease around him before. But there were seven years between then and now. A lot could have happened in that time.

“I wanted to talk to you about Cody before you started working with him, but I didn’t want him to hear me.”

Did she think the boy wouldn’t understand? Or that Cody would understand all too well? “Why?”

“Cody’s practically a statue as it is. I don’t want him feeling that I’m talking about him as if he wasn’t there. I mean…” She stopped abruptly, working her lower lip the way she used to when a topic was too hard for her to put into words. Some things didn’t change. He wasn’t sure if he found comfort in that or not.

When she looked up at him, he realized that she’d bitten down on her lower lip to keep from crying. Tears shimmered in her eyes. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Anyplace that feels comfortable,” he told her gently, a well of old feelings springing forth. He smiled at her encouragingly. “Most people start at the beginning.”

No place feels comfortable, Laurel thought. She was hanging on by a thread and that thread was getting thinner and thinner. Any second now, she was going to fall into the abyss.

Clenching her hands together, she forced herself to rally. She couldn’t fall apart, she couldn’t. She had to save Cody. Or, more accurately, she had to get Trent to save Cody, because if anyone could help her son, it was Trent.

“He doesn’t talk. Not a word since…” Despite her resolve, her voice cracked and then suddenly deserted her. A wave of déjà vu washed over her.

Trent was sorely tempted to come around to her side of the desk and take her hands into his, tempted to coax her up to her feet and just hold her until her strength returned and she could talk again.

That was what he would have done once.

But they weren’t high school sweethearts anymore, weren’t freshmen at college, planning on a future together. They’d separated and gone their own ways, pulled apart by baggage that she couldn’t seem to unpack before him.

Well, she’d obviously unpacked that baggage for someone else, he thought, an unexpected shaft of bitterness pricking him. He banked it down. Laurel had gone on to marry and have a family. She wasn’t the Laurel he still sometimes dreamed about.

The Laurel he’d once asked to marry him—just before she had disappeared.

The best he could do was round the desk and sit down in the chair beside her, the very act cutting into the professional air that was supposed to exist between them. But that was all right. Now that he knew whose son Cody was, he wouldn’t take the case. He’d be too close to it.

But he could definitely help her pull her thoughts together so that he could refer the boy to either his mother or one of the two other psychologists who shared the suite with him.

“Since?” he coaxed.

Laurel squared her shoulders, as if bracing herself against the next words she was about to say. “Since his father died.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he murmured. Trent glanced down at her hand and saw that she still wore a wedding ring. “How recently?”

“Almost a year,” she whispered.

A year. Most women would have moved on by now, encouraged by their family or friends to meet life head-on. But then, Laurel had never been like most women.

Taking a breath, she appeared to regain some control over herself. The old Laurel would have gone to pieces first, then, after a while, struggled to rebuild herself. There had been changes after all, he thought, with distant admiration.

“It was a car accident.” She was squeezing her hands together so tightly her knuckles were white. “Cody was with him.”

Because he’d lost his mother at a very young age, the empathy Trent felt was immediate, opening a distant door inside him. She had died in a plane crash and it had haunted him and made attachments very difficult for him. He could only imagine how much worse it would have been to have watched life ebb away from her. “He saw his father die?”

“Yes.” Laurel’s voice was hoarse. “Cody was in the car for almost an hour while the fire department tried to get him out.” Cody and Matt had been on their way to a campsite. She’d wanted to come, but Matt had told her to stay home, that he had wanted to spend some time alone with Cody, and she had reluctantly agreed. She still couldn’t shake the feeling that if she’d been there, things might have gone differently. “When I got to the hospital, I expected Cody to be hysterical, crying, something. But there was nothing. No emotion at all. It was as if his body had remained and the rest of him had just gone away.

“At first, I thought it was shock, that it would wear off, but…” She looked up at Trent helplessly. “It hasn’t. He hasn’t said a single word.”

“Have you had him checked out physically?”

“What kind of a mother do you think I am?” A tiny spark of anger flared in her eyes and he was glad of it. Anger helped people survive situations that would have otherwise crushed them. “Of course I had him checked out. I took him to a pediatrician, then another pediatrician, then a neurologist and finally to our family doctor.” The kindly man had been her last hope. “There’s nothing physically wrong with Cody.” She took another deep breath. “Dr. Miller suggested I try a child psychologist. He gave me your name.”

He knew a Dr. Miller. The man was on the staff of Blair Memorial, but he couldn’t recall that he had ever particularly impressed the physician. “My name?” he questioned.

“Well, your office’s name,” Laurel amended with a small shrug, as if it were all one and the same. “But when I saw your name on the referral card he gave me…”

His name had jumped up at her and her heart had all but stopped. For the first time in months, she’d started to think that there was hope for Cody. She raised her eyes to Trent’s. “I remembered how kind you could be, how patient.”

“Laurel—”

He was going to turn her down, she could tell by the tone of his voice. And he had every right to, because of what she’d done. But desperation made her cut him off. She began talking more quickly. For Cody’s sake.

“Trent, he was the brightest boy. Outgoing, friendly, smart.” Her heart almost broke when she thought of the way things used to be. “He could read when he was four. I know this was a huge trauma for him. He loved his dad and this just devastated him. But you can find a way to get through to him, I know you can.”

Everything told Trent to walk away. Everything but the look in her eyes. Still, it wouldn’t be right. He tried to make her understand why he was turning her down—or trying to. “I really don’t think that I’m the right person to treat him.”

She wasn’t going to take no for an answer, she wasn’t. Trent was her son’s last hope. “Because of our past history?”

There it was in a nutshell. Trent made no attempt to deny it. “Yes.”

She refused to accept that. She had to make him understand. “But that’s exactly what makes you so right. Because I know you have this way about you, of drawing people out.” Laurel didn’t want to get into specifics, it was too painful for her. But she would if she had to. This wasn’t about her, it was about her son and she would do anything to save him, to pluck him out of the living hell he was in. “I don’t trust people very readily.”

“I remember.” It had been hard, getting her to finally open up, to tell him what haunted her. But ultimately, even knowing hadn’t helped. If anything, it had made her leave. Because he knew. It was the only excuse he could think of for her abrupt departure from his life.

“But I trust you,” she continued. The vulnerability in her voice wove its way under his skin, into his very soul. “Trent, I’ve tried everything to make him speak. I got him a special tutor to help him keep up. But his grades just kept dropping off. Kids make fun of him and I can literally see him going further and further into his shell.” She slid onto the edge of the chair, her body rigid with fear. “I don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t lose him, Trent. He’s such a special little boy and he’s so helpless.”

Laurel paused, as if debating whether or not to tell him more. Taking a breath, she made her decision and plunged in. “I caught him playing with matches the other day. He knows better than that.” Her eyes held his, pleading for his help. “I’m afraid that he’s really going to hurt himself if something doesn’t happen to pull him out of this.”

Trent watched her for a long moment. He should stick to his principles and refer her to Lucas Andrews, whose technique was similar to his, or even to his stepmother. Kate Llewellyn Marlowe could make anyone open up. She had worked wonders on all four of them when she’d come into their lives as their nanny more than twenty years ago. And along the way, she’d even changed his father, making him more human.

Everything he’d ever learned about patience and love had come from Kate, as had mending broken souls. It was for the best if Laurel took her son to either of them. But it was hard saying no to the expression in Laurel’s eyes. There was a part of him that still loved her after all this time, even though he’d made his peace and accepted the way things had turned out a long time ago.

Or so he had told himself.

He supposed it wouldn’t do any harm to ask questions, find out a few things and get them out of the way.

“What does Cody do with his time?” Trent asked. “Does he play with other children?”

Laurel shook her head. “Not anymore. Not even his best friend, Scott, who stuck by him when the other kids started to tease him. He used to be so sociable, so outgoing. To see him now…” She pressed her lips together again, shaking her head.

“Then how does he spend his time?” Trent asked. “Does he watch television all the time? Stare off into space? What does he do?”

“He plays video games,” she told him, a sad smile playing on her lips. At least that was preferable to doing nothing, she supposed. “Actually, it’s more like one video game. It involves race cars—his father got it for him.” She couldn’t bring herself to take the game away from Cody, even though watching him play worried her. “He crashes the cars over and over again. And he plays with his toy cars.” Her voice grew shaky. “He stages car crashes with them—”

“Destroying what destroyed his father,” Trent commented.

“In essence, yes.” And then she surprised him by suddenly leaning forward and taking his hand in both of hers. “Trent, please,” she begged. “Please help him.”

For a moment, logic warred with emotion. He knew what he should say, knew what he should do. But it was a short-lived battle. Because this was Laurel and she had been through so much in her life. He couldn’t be the reason she lost all hope.

“All right, I’ll see him—at least to evaluate him,” he qualified. “Bring him in.” Flipping a page, Trent glanced at his calendar. He had an opening. “Tomorrow morning at nine good for you?”

Tears rose in her eyes again, this time from gratitude. “Anytime is good for me,” Laurel told him with relief. “Oh, God.” Her voice almost gave out as she whispered, “Thank you, Trent.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Trent warned. “I haven’t done anything.”

“But you will.” There was no doubt in her mind that he would help Cody, that he would find a way to make the boy better, return him to his former self.

“This isn’t a magic act, Laurel. I can’t just pass a wand over him and suddenly make him better. This might take a great deal of time.” Even as he said it, he couldn’t help wondering if he was up to it. If he was biting off more than he could chew. Which was crueler? To offer no hope or false hope? Right now he couldn’t honestly say.

“You made me better,” she recalled, then amended, “Almost.”

Many small moments flooded his mind, moments that they had shared together. Moments that had once made him believe they would always be together. But things hadn’t turned out that way.

“It’s the ‘almost’ that trips you up every time,” he commented, squelching a wave of sadness that threatened to wash over him.

And then he looked at her for a long moment. She was a beautiful woman. She always had been, right from the beginning. And, from the sound of it, she’d gone through a great deal in the last year. She’d never had it easy. She was fragile, but she was still here. That spoke well for her resilience.

“How are you doing?” he asked softly.

She seemed surprised by the question. “I’m fine,” Laurel said a bit too quickly. That same sad smile played on her lips. “Except that I’m really worried about Cody.”

“But aside from that?” he urged. There had been a time when she talked to him, as much as she had talked to anyone.

She raised her head, a curtain falling into place. “Fine. I’m fine.”

It seemed that Cody wasn’t the only one who’d withdrawn from the world. In her own way, she had, too. But that was a conversation for another time. Maybe.

“Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time.” She picked up her purse, opening it on her lap and taking out her checkbook. “So, how much do I owe you?”

Trent shook his head. “This wasn’t a session, Laurel.”

She kept her checkbook out. “But I took up your time.”

A smile curved the corners of his mouth. “Call it catching up.”

“I intend to pay for Cody’s sessions,” she insisted. Matthew had been a very rich man, even if there hadn’t been a seven-figure life-insurance policy. “I didn’t come here expecting charity.”

“We’ll discuss the fee schedule when and if the time comes,” he qualified. “Rita can give you a copy. But today wasn’t a session. It was a conversation. I don’t charge for conversations.”

She inclined her head, accepting the explanation for now. Maybe she was being too touchy. Ever since her world had been upended, she’d had trouble keeping her emotions in check. “Rita?”

He was about to refer to the woman as his secretary but paused, hunting for a more politically correct term. “The administrative assistant sitting out in the reception area.”

She nodded. “The one who frowned at me because I came in without Cody.”

That sounded like Rita. “Rita likes to run a tight ship. She takes care of us.”

“Us?”

“The other psychologists here and me.”

Laurel rose to her feet, as did he. For a moment, she looked as if she were going to breach the space between them and hug him, but then at the last moment apparently she changed her mind and merely extended her hand.

“Thank you again, Trent. This means a great deal to me.”

“I’m not making any promises. About anything.” He knew she thought he was going to start seeing the boy, but he hadn’t committed to anything more than an initial visit. “We’ll take it one step at a time,” he told her.

Laurel nodded. It was enough for her.

Her perfume, the same scent she’d worn when they’d been together, lingered in the room long after she’d left.

Chapter Two

A few minutes later, Trent crossed the common area where Rita held court from the center of a round desk. Her position allowed her, at a moment’s notice, to turn her chair three hundred and sixty degrees to train her hawklike gaze on any of the four psychologists.

Looking in his direction, the small, dark-haired woman, whose short, sleek hair was just a wee bit too black to be real, obviously expected to have questions thrown her way. Ready for him, she opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again without uttering a word. An almost imperceptible hiss escaped through the slight gap in her front teeth.

Trent walked right by her.

It wasn’t Rita he wanted to talk to. Instead, he knocked on the door directly opposite his on the other side of the waiting area. Since the small red light, signifying a patient inside, wasn’t on, Trent didn’t wait for an invitation. He followed up his knock by opening the door.

Still holding on to the polished bronze doorknob, he stuck in his head and asked the room’s single occupant, “Got a minute?”

Kate Marlowe stopped making notes and looked up. Laying down her pen, she smiled, then gestured for him to come in.

“For you? Always.” As her stepson walked in and closed the door behind him, Kate pressed the intercom on her telephone. “Hold all my calls for a few minutes, Rita.”

In response, there was a rather audible sigh on the other end of the line. “All right, if that’s what you want.”

Kate laughed softly. She was positive that somewhere someone had coined the word crusty to describe Rita. The woman rarely, if ever, smiled and no one knew how old she was. Kate had inherited her from the man whose practice she’d taken over years ago. According to him, Rita had come with the building. Kate had no reason to doubt him. The woman was resourceful, loyal and utterly opinionated. And despite prodding on Kate’s part, completely devoid of a personal history. Kate felt a great deal of affection for her. It had something to do with her protective streak.

“Don’t pretend that putting people on hold isn’t one of your favorite pastimes, Rita. Don’t forget, we go back a long way.”

“If you say so, doctor,” Rita murmured. The line went dead. Kate expected nothing less. Rita wasn’t given to wasting words.

Taking her finger off the intercom, Kate glanced up at Trent. She didn’t need a degree in psychology to see that he was tense, that something was bothering him even though he tried to appear nonchalant.

Tall, with sandy-blond hair and sharp blue eyes, Trent had grown up into a handsome young man, just like his brothers.

Exactly like two of his brothers, she thought, suppressing a fond smile. Trent was one of triplets and to the untrained eye, each of them, Trent, Trevor and Travis, appeared to be carbon copies. It was only by paying strict attention that the subtle differences began to emerge. One’s smile was brighter, another held his head a certain way when he was making a point, a third’s eyes were just a wee bit bluer than his brothers’ when he became impassioned about a subject.

What all three shared—along with their older brother, Mike—was a huge capacity for love and empathy. Although she had come into their young lives at a crucial point, she didn’t pretend to take credit for the way they’d turned out. Their better traits had been there all along, she maintained. All she had done was to enable them to raise those traits to the surface.

She couldn’t love Trent and his brothers any more than if they had been products of her own gene pool instead of Bryan and his first wife’s. If pressed, in a moment of weakness she might have admitted to having a tiny, softer spot in her heart for Trent because he’d opted to follow her in her chosen profession.

“Does this have anything to do with Laurel?” she asked once Rita’s voice had faded from the room and he still hadn’t said anything.

Trent’s eyes widened, and then he laughed. “You know.” For some reason, he’d just assumed that Laurel had come and gone without anyone noticing—except for Rita, who made everything her business. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“I’m a mother,” Kate replied simply. “Mothers are supposed to know everything.” Her smile broadened. “You know that.”

He could remember, as a boy, taking shelter in that smile. She made the hurt go away.

“You know,” Trent said, some of the tension ebbing away from him as he made himself comfortable on the tan sofa, “when you first came to take care of us, I was pretty sure you had eyes in the back of your head.” He flashed a grin. “Over the years, I became convinced of it.”

“An extra set would have certainly helped, having the four of you to keep track of.” There had been incidents with falling department-store mannequins and abruptly-halted escalators that she would just as soon put out of her mind. “But this time it was the eyes in the front of my head that made the connection. I saw Laurel leaving your office and heading toward the elevator.”

Seeing the young woman again after all this time had caught her off guard. It brought back memories of how heartbroken Trent had been when the young woman had abruptly vanished from his life with just a terse note to mark her passage. He’d tried hard to pretend that everything was all right, but she had seen through him.

Instead of firing an array of questions at him, Kate waited for Trent to pick up the thread of the conversation. After all, he had sought her out and he would tell her why in his own time.

Kate didn’t have long to wait.

She saw the tension return to his shoulders. “Laurel wants me to treat her son.”

He was doing his best to sound removed, she thought. “Do you think that’s wise?” she asked him gently.

Restless, Trent rose to his feet. “No.”

Kate knew her sons very well. Reading between the lines wasn’t hard. “But you’re going to do it anyway.”

A dry laugh escaped his lips, but the humor didn’t reach his eyes. “Maybe you should give up psychology and become a clairvoyant.”

Kate didn’t believe in clairvoyants. She did, however, believe in instincts and being close enough to someone to almost “feel” his thoughts.

“My ‘powers’ only work with my family.” She became serious, wanting him to talk it out as much as he could. “You wouldn’t be in here if you were at peace with your decision, and it was fifty-fifty—telling her no or telling her yes.” One slender shoulder beneath the powder-blue jacket lifted and fell in a careless shrug. “I’ve always been rather lucky at guessing.”

Rising from her desk, she went to stand next to him. He was close to a foot taller than she was, but he always felt she was the dominant force in the family. His father referred to her as the iron butterfly. The description fit.

Kate placed her hand on his arm. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

He shrugged, still feeling at sea about what had just transpired in his office. The surprise of seeing Laurel again after all this time had thrown him off. He assumed his stepmother was asking him about the case.

Trent shoved his hands into his pockets. “I don’t know too many of the details at this point. According to Laurel, her six-year-old son, Cody, hasn’t uttered a word in a year. Not since his father died in a car accident.”

“He was there when it happened.” It wasn’t a question.

He looked at her only mildly surprised. “How did you know?”

It was strictly textbook so far. “The boy’s behavior is a reaction to a trauma. At that age, it would most likely be a visual one.” She paused a moment, thinking. “At least, that’s the outer layer.”

Trent wasn’t sure he followed. “Outer layer?”

Kate nodded. “There has to be some other underlying cause for him to have withdrawn from the world, from the mother I’m assuming he had a decent relationship with until this occurred.” The cadence at the end of the sentence told Trent that this was a question.

“I didn’t ask, but knowing Laurel—” He stopped abruptly and smiled sheepishly, transforming into the boy he’d once been so many years ago. “I don’t know Laurel,” he amended, realizing he was making assumptions he had no basis to make. “At least, not the person she’s become.” Because the Laurel he’d known hadn’t wanted the intimacy needed in a marriage, but this Laurel had married. Married, apparently, less than six months after leaving him.

“In my experience, most people don’t change all that much,” Kate commented.

He thought about Laurel, about the way she used to be. “She did.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She got married,” he replied simply. He realized that might need some explaining. “I asked her to marry me and she took off, saying she couldn’t be in that kind of committed relationship with a man.” He’d had his own commitment issues, but for Laurel, he was willing to try to work it out. Sadly, the feeling had not been mutual. He set his mouth hard. “Apparently, she got over that.”

If Kate noted the sliver of hurt in his tone, she gave no indication. “Not necessarily.” He eyed her sharply. “She could have dared herself to take this hurdle, or been shamed into it, made to feel less than a woman if she didn’t commit. You don’t know until you have all the facts.”

It occurred to him that Laurel hadn’t given him any details about her marriage, or even indicated how her husband’s death had affected her. Her entire focus had been the boy.

“We didn’t talk that long,” he told his stepmother. “Besides—” he shrugged carelessly “—that’s all water under the bridge.”

Kate knew better. This nerve was very much alive and well. But for his sake, she made a light comment and pressed on.

“Very eloquently put, Dr. Marlowe.” A smile played on Kate’s lips and then she grew serious. “So, what are you going to do?”

He stared out the window for a moment before answering. Outside it was another perfect day in paradise. The sky was a brilliant shade of blue. As blue as Laurel’s eyes, he caught himself thinking.

Taking a breath, he looked at Kate. “I said I’d see him tomorrow morning. I guess I’ll know what I’ll do after that.”

“Sounds like a plan.” She gave him an encouraging smile. She was proud of him, proud of the men all her sons had become. “Trust your instincts, Trent. You’re a good psychologist and terrific with kids. Just because this boy is the son of someone you used to be very close to doesn’t change any of that.”

That was exactly what he was afraid of. Would his past feelings for Laurel cloud his perception or destroy his ability to assess the boy? He honestly didn’t know—and his first priority was to the patient.

“Maybe you should see him,” he suggested.

“I can do a consult, certainly,” Kate agreed. But if Laurel had wanted someone else to see her son, she would have asked. “Laurel trusts you and the way she feels transmits itself to the boy. That’s an important part of this healing process.”

He sighed. “I know.”

“Give it a shot, Trent,” she encouraged. Her eyes met his. “I’ve never known you to turn away from a challenge.”

“This is a boy, Mom,” he pointed out, “not a challenge.”

But she shook her head. “This is both,” Kate corrected.

She was right. As usual. He tried to remember the last time she wasn’t—and couldn’t. “Don’t you get tired of always being right?”

Kate pretended to think his question over. “No.” And then she grinned. “When that starts happening, you’ll be the first to know,” she promised.

Moving around quickly, getting in her own way, Laurel placed her purse next to the front door, then doubled back to pick up the lightweight jacket she’d retrieved out of the closet for Cody. She hurried him into it. It felt as if she were dressing a mannequin.

This’ll be over soon. Trent’ll find a way to bring him around, she promised herself, trying to steady her trembling hands.

“You’ll like him, Cody.” She did her best to sound upbeat and hopeful, praying that this time something in her voice would get through to him. “He’s someone I used to know before your dad. When I was in school.” Moving around to face him, she zipped up his jacket. His arms hung limply at his sides. His eyes, unfocused, didn’t see her. “The first time I met him, I guess I was just a little older than you. He’s very nice.”

All the words tumbling out of her mouth felt awkward on her tongue. That was because she felt awkward.

Awkward with her own son.

How had she come to this place? She and Cody had always had so much fun together. He’d been her saving grace when things had gotten so bad with Matt. And now, now she didn’t even know him.

Laurel supposed that was what had finally driven her to seek out help from a field she would have never thought to tap. She’d never believed in psychiatry or its cousin, psychology. They were for neurotic people with too much time and money on their hands. But now she was rethinking everything, and she was desperate.

She felt estranged from her own son. Worse than that, she felt as if she were losing him, as if he were slipping away into some netherworld that only he occupied.

She looked down into his face. It was vacant, as if there were no one there. Laurel pressed her lips together, struggling against a wave of hopelessness.

These days, Cody didn’t even look at her when she talked to him. He didn’t disobey her, didn’t throw tantrums, didn’t show any emotion at all. It ripped her heart out that he behaved as if she weren’t even in the room. She supposed it could have been worse. He did go where she told him to go, ate what she set in front of him and went to bed when she told him. But she missed him terribly. It was like having a windup toy, a clone of her son. He looked like Cody in every way except that there was no personality, no sign of the laughing, bright-eyed, intelligent boy he’d been a year ago.

More than anything else in the world, she wanted him back.

Laurel went to the door and picked up her purse, sliding it onto her shoulder. For the thousandth time, she cursed her cowardliness for not standing her ground that day. The last day of Matt’s life. She didn’t believe in omens, but she’d had an eerie feeling all morning, a feeling that something would go wrong. Some unnamed instinct had told her to keep Cody close, to either keep him home or go with him. She’d chalked it up to her general uneasiness at the time. Matt had dropped his bomb on her only the night before.

Divorce was an ugly word and it had sent tremors through her world.

When she’d tried to tell Matt about her premonition, for lack of a better word, he’d called her manipulative and vetoed both of her ideas. Cody wasn’t staying home with her and she wasn’t going with them. He was breaking Cody in on the life of a time-shared child.

Nerves had danced through her like lightning bolts during an electrical storm as she’d watched them drive away.

Watched Matt drive away for the last time.

“He’s very nice,” she repeated to Cody.

Tears came to her eyes. They seemed to come so easily these days. She’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t allow Cody to see her cry, but since he hardly ever looked at her, it seemed like a needless vow.

“Oh, Cody, come out, please come out,” she pleaded. “Talk to me. Say something. Anything.”

Her entreaty didn’t seem to penetrate the invisible wall that surrounded the boy.

With a sigh, she pulled herself together. “It’s time to go, Cody.”

As if she’d turned on a switch, the boy walked toward the door. She opened it and he walked outside in measured steps.

“Maybe Trent will have better luck,” she murmured under her breath, silently adding, Please, God, let him have better luck. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

“Trent, this is my son, Cody.”

Framed in the doorway of his office the way she had been yesterday, Laurel stood behind the boy. She rested her hands lightly on her son’s shoulders, as if she were afraid that withdrawing them would make Cody disappear.

Trent immediately rose to his feet. He’d been in the office a full forty-five minutes before this first appointment of his day, preparing. Preparing what, he wasn’t certain.

He’d never felt anxious about meeting a new patient before. Oh, there’d always been that minor shot of adrenaline to begin with, but that was to be expected. He’d never been anxious before. First sessions were about ground rules, about getting to know the face that was turned to the world. Even children had their secrets and it was his job to unlock them so that his small, troubled patients could go on to have happy, well-adjusted lives.

But how did you prepare for a child who wouldn’t talk? Who perhaps couldn’t talk despite not having anything physically wrong with him. He knew firsthand that the bars a mind could impose were stronger than any steel found in a prison cell.

As he watched Cody now, it startled him how much the boy resembled Laurel. Neatly dressed, Cody’s silken blond hair was a bit longer than stylish. A testimony to the free spirit that Laurel had so desperately strived to be, Trent recalled. If Cody’s hair had been longer, he would have been the spitting image of Laurel at eight.

The Laurel, he thought, who had captured his heart the first moment he’d seen her. Was eight too young to fall in love? He would have said an emphatic yes if he hadn’t been there himself.

Approaching the boy, Trent held out his hand. “Hello, Cody, my name’s Trent,” he said in his warmest voice.

Trent didn’t believe in standing on formalities or drawing a sharp line in the sand to separate children from adults. Every adult had a child within him and every child harbored the makings of the adult he was to be. Trent focused on uniting them rather than keeping them apart.

Cody stared past his shoulder as if he hadn’t spoken. As if there were no one else in the room but him.

Trent dropped his hand to his side. It was at that moment that he stopped thinking about himself and about Laurel. All that mattered was the boy in the prison of his own making.

Chapter Three

It was time to get started. Trent shifted his eyes toward Laurel, who was about to sit down on the sofa.

“Laurel, would you mind taking a seat outside in the reception area?” Laurel stopped and eyed him quizzically. “Rita looks formidable, but we have it on good authority that she doesn’t bite. At least, we’ve never seen her do it,” he deadpanned.

He tried to use humor to ease her out of the room, but it didn’t work. The concern on her face intensified.

She glanced toward Cody uncertainly. The boy remained oblivious.

“I can’t stay?” It wasn’t a question as much as a request.

Unless he specifically called for a group family session, he found that parents, however unwittingly, tended to interfere with their child’s progress far more than they helped.

“It’s usually better if patients don’t feel someone is looking over their shoulder during a session.” Trent lowered his voice. “They tend to open up more.”

Distress entered her eyes. “But I’m his mother. I only want to help him.” Realizing that her voice was close to cracking, Laurel stopped for a second to collect herself. Even so, there was a plea in her voice as she said to Trent, “I want to understand what’s wrong.”

He sympathized with her, he really did. But it was far too early to bend the rules. He needed to see what he was up against and how deeply entrenched Cody was in this silent world. For all he knew, the boy might be reacting to his mother. He needed time alone with the boy to assess a few things for himself.

Very gently, Trent took her arm and steered her toward the door.

The brief, almost sterile contact awoke distant memories of other times, happier times. Times when he had believed that the world was at their feet. Before he’d learned differently.

But that was then and this was now, Trent reminded himself. And she had sought him out in a professional capacity. As a licensed clinical psychologist, he had both an oath and a duty to live up to and they both revolved around doing the best for his patient. In this case, her son.

“So do I,” he told Laurel quietly. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Cody. Usually, when an adult’s voice dropped, a child did his or her best to listen more closely. Cody didn’t appear to have even noticed that anyone was speaking. “And so does Cody.” He saw hope flicker in her eyes. “Progress in cases like this is very slow and I need to do everything possible to make Cody feel more comfortable.”

Whatever that might be, he added silently.

“He’s not comfortable with me?” It was one thing to feel it, another to hear it said out loud. She felt as if her heart were being squeezed in half.

“He’s not comfortable with himself,” Trent told her.

The revelation took her aback. She searched for something to cling to, however small.

“You’ve had cases like this?” she asked, recalling what he’d just said.

If Trent had had cases like this, then maybe he really could cure Cody. A shaft of hope shot through her. She knew she’d been right in coming to him, even though she’d been hesitant at first, afraid of the ghosts that might crop up between them. The ghosts of things that hadn’t been and the things that had. She felt far too vulnerable to cross that terrain again.

And far too guilty.

“Not personally, no,” Trent admitted. He hadn’t been practicing long enough to have encountered a wide sampling of the afflictions that affected a child’s behavior. He saw Laurel’s face fall. “But I read a lot,” he said, offering her an encouraging smile.

His hand still on her arm, he opened the door and looked out into the reception area. Rita’s small brown eyes darted in their direction the second the door was opened. It was, he thought, as if her eyes were magnetically predisposed toward movement, no matter how quietly executed.

Gently, he ushered Laurel out of the room. “Rita, would you please get Mrs. Greer some coffee?”

Laurel shook her head, declining. “No, I’m not thirsty.” At the moment, with her stomach knotting, coffee would only make her nauseous.

“Good,” Rita pronounced. Her tiny, marblelike eyes slid up and down like the needle on a scale. With a minute jerk of her head, she indicated the leather chair against the wall. “You can take a seat over there.” It was more a royal command than a suggestion.

Laurel nodded, then looked at Trent. A shaky breath preceded her words. “If you need me—”

He gave her his most reassuring look, even as he tried not to recognize that her mere presence slowly unraveled something within him, something that had been neatly stowed almost seven years ago. He’d thought it would never see the light of day again.

Wrong.

“I know where to find you,” he responded, his mouth curved in a kind smile.

Walking back into his office, he noted that Cody still stood stiffly. Trent closed the door and focused on his challenge.

“You can sit down if you like, Cody,” he said in an easy, affable tone. “The sofa’s pretty comfortable if you’d like to try that out.”

Rather than sit down on the sofa, Cody sank down on the floor right in front of it, his back against the leather, his legs crossed before him as if he were assuming a basic yoga position.

Or preparing to play a video game seated in front of a television set, Trent realized. He made a mental note to explore a few video games that he might substitute later for the ones that dominated Cody’s attention.

If he continued with the case.

“Floor’s not bad, either,” Trent allowed, never skipping a beat as the boy sank down. “Mind if I join you?” he asked.

He’d found that keeping a desk between himself and his small patients only served to delineate territory, making him out to be an unapproachable father figure. He liked being close to his patients physically to help breach the mental chasm that could exist—as it obviously did in this case.

Cody made no indication that he had heard the question. His expression remained immobile as he stared off into space.

The boy’s line of vision seemed to be the middle shelves of his bookcase, the ones that contained children’s books he sometimes found useful, but Trent decided not to comment on that at this time.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Trent said, lowering himself down beside the boy, careful to leave Cody enough personal space to not feel threatened. He looked around and smiled. “Looks like a pretty big office from down here,” he commented amiably, then glanced down where he was sitting. “Also looks like the rug might stand to have a cleaning.”

Neither comment, meant to begin to create a sense of camaraderie, drew any reaction from Cody. It was as if his voice, his presence, were as invisible to him as the air.

“You know,” Trent continued in the same tone, “your mom’s pretty worried about you.” He noticed just the slightest tensing of Cody’s shoulders when he mentioned Laurel. It heartened him that there might be a crack, however minute, in the six-year-old’s armor plating.

Trent turned his attention to the elephant in the room, watching Cody intently beneath hooded lids. “She told me that you lost your father a year ago.”

Still not acknowledging Trent’s presence, Cody abruptly rose to his feet and walked over to the large window. Tilting his head down ever so slightly, he appeared to look down at the parking lot four stories below.

For the moment, Trent remained where he was, talking to the boy’s back. “It must have been hard, losing him at such a young age. You know, I lost my mom when I was five. Leaves a big hole in your heart, something like that,” he continued conversationally. “It also makes you afraid. Afraid that everyone’s going to leave you, even though they say they won’t.”

Knowing Laurel, he was certain she had tried to do everything she could to reassure her son that he was loved and that she would always be there for him. She’d mentioned her mother, so there was more family than just Laurel. Her late husband could have come from a large, close-knit family and there might be a lot of people in Cody’s world, but that didn’t change the fact that he might still feel alone, still feel isolated. Fear didn’t take things like logic into account.

Trent considered the most likely causes behind Cody’s silence. It could be as simple as what had plagued him all those years ago when he’d lost his mother, except that Cody had taken it to the nth degree, locking down rather than dealing with the fear on a daily, lucid basis.

Not that he had, either, at first.

“And sometimes,” Trent went on as if this were a twoway conversation instead of only the sound of his own voice echoing within the room, “you wind up being afraid of being afraid. You know, the big wave of fear is gone and you think maybe everything’ll be okay, but you’re afraid that maybe those feelings will come back. I know that’s how I felt for a really long time.”

Trent shifted on the floor, trying to get comfortable. He envied the flexibility of the very young.

“The funny thing was, my brothers felt the exact same way I did. Except that I didn’t know because we didn’t talk about it. I thought there was something wrong with me because I felt like that.”

Trent crossed his fingers and hoped that the boy was listening.

“That’s the real scary part, not realizing that there are other people who feel just the way you do. That you’re not alone,” he emphasized, and then he sighed. “I guess if I’d talked about my feelings to my brothers, I would have found that out and I wouldn’t have been so unhappy. It took my stepmom to make me realize that I wasn’t alone and that what I was feeling—lost, scared—was okay.” He ventured out a little further. “I felt angry, too.”

As he spoke, Trent continued to watch Cody’s back for some infinitesimal indication that he’d heard him, some change in posture to signify that his words had struck a chord with the boy. That he was getting through, however distantly, to Cody.

When he mentioned anger as another reaction he’d experienced, Trent noted that Cody’s shoulders stiffened just the tiniest bit.

Anger. Of course.

Why hadn’t he assumed that to begin with? he upbraided himself. Laurel said that Cody engaged in video games that exclusively involved cars. If he focused on crashing them, that was an act of hostility.

Trent wondered how much anger smoldered beneath Cody’s subdued surface. A measure of anger was a healthy response. Too much indicated a problem up ahead.

Something they needed to prepare for.

He continued talking in an easy, conversational cadence, trying to ever so lightly touch the nerve, to elicit more of a response, however veiled it might be. These things couldn’t be pushed, but children were resilient. The sooner they could peel away the layers, the better Cody’s chances were of going back to lead a normal life, free of whatever angst held him prisoner.

“I was angry at my mother for being gone, angry at the plane for crashing. Angry at my father for letting her go by herself, although there wasn’t anything he could have done if he’d gone with her. He certainly couldn’t have stopped the plane crash, even though I thought of him as kind of a superhero. I probably would have wound up being an orphan,” he confessed. “But that’s the problem with hurting, Cody. You don’t always think logically. You just want the hurt to stop.

“You just want your dad to come back even though you know he can’t.” He’d deliberately switched the focus from himself to the boy, watching to see if it had any effect.

He stopped talking and held his breath as silence slipped in.

Surprised by the silence, or perhaps by the fact that the hot feelings inside of him had a name, Cody turned from the window and actually looked at Trent for a moment before dropping his gaze to the floor again.

Yes! Score one for the home team, Trent thought, elated.

Given Cody’s demeanor, he’d estimated that it might take at least several sessions before the boy had this kind of reaction. In this branch of treatment, at times it was two steps forward, one step back, but for the moment, Trent savored what he had.

The boy was reachable, that was all that counted. It was just going to take a huge amount of patience.

Laurel glanced uneasily toward the closed door.

What were they doing in there? Had Trent managed to crack the wall around Cody? Even a little? Had her son said a word, made a sound? Something? Anything at all. Oh God, she hoped so.

The waiting was killing her.

Cody had been talking since he was ten months old. Sentences had begun coming not all that long after that. His pediatrician had told her that Cody was “gifted.” Matt had called him a little chatterbox. Cody could fill the hours with nonstop talk. So much so there had been times she longed for silence just to be able to hear herself think.

Remembering, she flushed with guilt. She would give anything to hear him talk again. These days, she tried to fill the void by keeping on a television set. And when that was off, radio chased away the quiet. Anything to keep the oppressive silence at bay.

Laurel looked away from the door. Staring at it wouldn’t make it open. There was a magazine on her lap. It had been open to the same page now for the last thirty minutes, ever since she’d reached for it and pretended to thumb through the pages for the first two minutes. The articles hadn’t kept her attention and although her eyes had skimmed the page, not a single word had managed to penetrate.

Just as her words didn’t seem to penetrate Cody, she thought ruefully.

Trent had to fix him, he had to.

She had her strengths and she had learned to endure a great many things, but seeing Cody like this wasn’t one of them. The idea of her baby being trapped in this silent world for the rest of his life simply devastated her. It was all she could do not to fall to pieces at the mere suggestion that Cody would never get better.

Fidgeting, Laurel caught herself looking at the closed door to Trent’s office for what had to be the tenth time. It was a struggle not to let another sigh escape her lips.

She could feel the receptionist—Rita, was it?—looking at her.

Clearing her throat, her fingers absently moving the magazine pages back and forth between them, Laurel asked, “Has he been in practice long? Trent, um, Dr. Marlowe, I mean.”

Rita took her time in responding. “Depends on your definition of long.”

Laurel shrugged helplessly. She had no definition for long. She was only trying to make conversation to pass the time.

“Five years?” she finally said.

Rita moved her head from side to side. The short, black bob moved with her. Her eyes remained on the woman sitting so stiffly in the chair.

“Not that long. The other Dr. Marlowe has been in practice fifteen years,” Rita told her. “Ever since she took it over from Dr. Riemann.”

“Oh,” was all Laurel said. The single word throbbed with preoccupation. Her mind raced with thoughts she was afraid to examine.

Rita began to rise from her desk, as if to see to a task. But then she shrugged and sat down again. “Five minutes,” she said to the boy’s mother.

Laurel’s head jerked up. The receptionist had said something to her but she hadn’t heard the words. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve got five minutes,” Rita told her, enunciating each word as if she were talking to someone who had to read lips. “The session, it’s fifty minutes,” she explained. “You’ve got five more minutes to wait.”

“Oh.” The light dawned on her. Laurel forced a smile to her lips and inclined her head. “Thank you.”

Rita said crisply, “It’s customary to pay up front and then I’ll give you the paperwork so that you can mail it in to your insurance company.”

She didn’t work. Matt hadn’t wanted her to. Hadn’t even wanted her to finish college, saying, at the time, she was “fine” the way she was. She realized later it was all meant to control her. Matt liked being in control of everything and everyone.

Shaking her head, she informed Rita, “There is no insurance company.”

Squaring her shoulders, Rita informed her with feeling, “Then payment is definitely up front.”

“We can make arrangements later,” Trent told Rita as he walked out of his office, catching the tail end of the conversation.

Laurel popped to her feet as if she’d been sitting on a spring that catapulted her into an upright position. Startled, she pressed her hand to her chest as she swung around. “I didn’t hear you.”

“It’s the carpet,” he told her with a smile. “It muffles everything.”

Laurel wasn’t listening. She was looking at her son, aware that she’d been holding her breath.

“Leave Mrs. Greer’s account to me,” Trent told Rita.

It was obvious that this wasn’t what the older woman wanted to hear. Accounts and the billing were her domain. She frowned. “I take care of all the accounts, Dr. Marlowe.”

After several years, Trent had gotten used to Rita and her rather unique ways. At bottom, as Kate had pointed out more than once, the woman was a huge asset. He smiled at Rita. “Change is a good thing, Rita. You should learn to embrace it.”

Rita made a noise under her breath and went to get the copy paper.

“I can pay my bills, Trent,” Laurel informed him. And then she glanced at her son. Cody seemed just as withdrawn into his own world as ever. She knew it was too soon for a miracle to take hold, but that was what made them miracles. Facing Trent, her heart rate sped up just a little as she asked, “Well?”

“Not yet, but he will be,” Trent promised.

Chapter Four

Kelsey Marlowe didn’t hear the knock on her door at first. Lost in her studies—why did it seem like there was always another big exam looming on the horizon?—she didn’t become aware of the noise until a louder rap echoed against the wood, startling her.

The next second, the door opened and one of the triplets peered in. Even after all these years, a first glance always made her mentally scramble for a clue to which one it was.

Kelsey realized that it was Trent invading her space about half a beat before he spoke.

“Hi, Kel.” He flashed a smile that was just this side of serious. “Got a minute?”

Uncrossing her legs, she said the first thing that came to her mind. “No.”

Open textbooks, not to mention her laptop, littered her comforter. Two of the books slid onto the floor with a grating thud. The pages she had them opened to disappeared.

Stress and surprise ate away at Kelsey’s usual good humor. “You know, there’s a reason the door was closed.” She exhaled a huff that was filled with frustrated anger. “Does the word privacy mean anything to you? I could have been naked.”

If she had been, he knew the door would have been not just closed but locked. Trent walked into the sunny bedroom. The only one of them still living at home, Kelsey had gotten the room with the best exposure. It used to be his.

He grinned. “This from the kid Mom had to chase after because you liked running around the house naked.”

Embarrassment threatened to change the color of her cheeks. Kelsey struggled to suppress it, not wanting to give Trent the satisfaction.

“I was two,” she reminded him indignantly. Were her brothers ever going to forget about that? She’d gone on to get straight As in every subject in school. Why couldn’t they refer to that instead of the period of her life when her social values and awareness hadn’t kicked in yet?

Trent shrugged good-naturedly. “Still, all the body parts were there.” His grin widened. “And I’ve got a great memory.”

She frowned at him as she tossed her head, her long, straight blond hair flying over her shoulder. “Obviously all long term. Your short-term memory appears to be shot.”

Curious, he bent down to pick up the textbook that had dropped on the side of the bed closest to the door and handed it to Kelsey. “What did I forget?”

She took the book from him. The answer was right there in his hand and he still missed it. Men were hopeless, she thought. “That I have midterms coming up. I’m on quarters, not semesters, remember?” There was no sign of anything dawning on her brother. It figured. “I mentioned it at dinner Sunday. A dinner I had to move things around in order to make,” she added with a touch of exasperation.

“You mention a lot of things,” he pointed out in selfdefense. He’d never come across anyone who could talk as much as his sister. Someday, he fully expected the muscles in her jaw to lock up. “Most of the time, you do practically all the talking at the table.” Again, he shrugged. “I filter things out sometimes.”

Sometimes? Kelsey laughed dryly. “How about all the time?”

That wasn’t true, but there was no point in going around and around about it. “I didn’t come here to spar with you.”

Sighing, Kelsey dragged her hand through a torrent of long blond hair.

“Okay, why did you come?” she asked.

Trent took a seat on the edge of her bed. “I need a favor.”

She didn’t have time for this, she thought. As it was, she was only averaging about four hours of sleep a night. “And I need to learn how to do without sleep,” she lamented.

Sympathy emerged. He wasn’t all that removed from his college years. “That bad?” he asked.

She sighed before gesturing at the books on her bed. “Pretty much.”

Trent got up, careful not to send anything else sliding. “Sorry I bothered you.”

He was leaving? Without telling her what he wanted? Her sense of curiosity wouldn’t allow it. “Hey, wait, where are you going?”

Trent stopped short of the doorway, looking at her over his shoulder. “The favor I need requires time and you obviously don’t have any.”

Kelsey caught her lower lip between her teeth. Damn him. Trent knew how to push her buttons.

She gestured for him to come back in. If that hadn’t worked, she would have hopped off the bed and physically pulled him back. But she didn’t have to. Trent returned under his own steam. “You came here to talk to me, you might as well talk.”

Trying not to smile, Trent sat down on the edge of the bed again. This time the action created an undercurrent and another textbook slid off on the other side.

Watching it, Kelsey struggled with a momentary desire to send all the textbooks to the floor with one grand, angry sweep of her arm.

Trent’s eyes held hers. Hers were a darker shade than his. His expression was completely serious. This was important and he was making a judgment call. “I need you to tutor someone for me.”

Something stirred within her. This was the first time any of her brothers had asked her to do something involving the vocation she’d finally decided on. Trent was treating her as an equal, as an adult. She’d finally lived to see the day.

For as long as she could remember—after she’d given up, at seven, the notion of being the first queen of the United States, she’d wanted to become a teacher. Not just a teacher but one who worked with children who had special needs, specifically the families who couldn’t afford special schools to help their children catch up with their peers.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked, then made a guess, choosing the most common problem. “Dyslexia?”

If only, Trent thought.

He began by giving his sister the positive side first. “Cody’s really very bright.” During an extended lunch, he’d gone to Cody’s school to talk to his teachers. The ones who had taught him before the accident. Once Trent had made the teachers comfortable with his reasons for asking—and his credentials—he had gotten what he was after. Confirmation.

If anything, Laurel had downplayed the boy’s abilities. Before his father’s death, Cody’d had read at a fourth-grade level while still in the first grade and, according to his teacher, Mrs. Bayon, he had been articulate, outgoing and happy.

“But his father died a year ago and Cody withdrew from everyone,” Trent told her. “His grades are all down. He’s on the way to failing everything but sandbox one-o-one.” He knew that would elicit pity from Kelsey and, judging from the look in her eyes, he was right.

“Why?” she asked. “Lots of kids lose a parent early in life. They don’t all respond like this. You didn’t. Trevor, Travis and Mike didn’t. Dad told me,” she added when he looked at her, mildly curious. “What makes Cody different?”

“Well, for one thing, he was with his father when he was killed in a car accident.”

“Oh.” Incredibly empathetic, Kelsey instantly thought how she would have felt if she’d been in that situation. Her heart twisted and went out to the boy she hadn’t even met. That made up her mind for her. “When would you want me to get started?”

He had known he could count on her. “As soon as possible.” And then a stab of guilt made him ask, “Can you?”

She shrugged. “I could eke out a few hours on Saturday and Sunday,” she speculated. “Maybe an hour or two during the week.”

He didn’t want to put her out, but he also knew in his gut that she was the right one for the job. “Anything would be great, really.”

He sounded so enthused. A red light went off in her head. This was, after all, her brother, the one who used to plant crickets in her bed. Was this some kind of setup?

At the very least, she needed reasons. “Why come to me?”

Trent’s answer was simple. “Because you’re good at it.”

She thought that herself. But there was a flaw in his answer. “You’ve never seen me work with kids.”

He smiled at her. He didn’t blame her for being leery. He’d done his share of teasing when it came to Kelsey. They all had. But Kelsey could hold her own with the best of them, which was why he knew he had been right to come to her.

“Call it instinct,” he answered. “I know when you do something, you don’t do it by half measures. And you’ve had experience, student teaching. You don’t get the kind of grades you do by slacking off.” Kate had told him all the effort Kelsey put into her projects with the children. Only a completely dedicated person would go those extra miles.

Kelsey looked at him for a long moment, stunned. “That is probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

He grinned, nodding. “Yeah, it probably is,” Trent agreed. “Don’t let it go to your head. By the way, I don’t expect you to do this for free. I’m going to pay you.”

“You couldn’t afford me,” she informed him. She didn’t want his money—she wanted his soul, she thought, swallowing a chuckle. “I’ll figure out some way for you to pay me back.”

“Should I be afraid?” Trent deadpanned.

Kelsey paused for a moment, pretending to think about it. And then she nodded. “Yeah.”

He had to get going. Rising from the bed, he kissed the top of her head. “You’re the best.”

“About time you noticed that,” she sniffed, pretending that the comment didn’t get to her.

“I’ll get back to you and fill you in on the details,” he promised, beginning to leave. And then he remembered that he’d left out something. “Oh, one more thing. Cody doesn’t talk.”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “Doesn’t talk?” she echoed in surprise.

Trent took a couple of steps back toward the bed. “Not a word since the accident.” He watched Kelsey for a moment. Was she going to back out? He didn’t think so, but there was always that chance.

And then she sighed as she shook her head. “You do like giving me a challenge, don’t you?”

He let go of the breath he’d been holding. “Nothing I don’t think you’re up to.”

Her mouth dropped open for a beat, and then she rallied. “Damn, two compliments in one session and me without my recorder.”

His hand on the door, Trent winked at her. “Next time.”

“Yeah, like there’s going to be one,” she murmured, getting back to her studies.

Trent closed the door behind him, grinning.

It was early evening and Laurel almost ignored the doorbell when it rang. She wasn’t expecting anyone and she didn’t like unexpected visits these days. But the doorbell rang again and she had a feeling that whoever was on the other side wasn’t about to go away until she sent them on that route.

One glance through the peephole made her quickly pull the door open.

Laurel stared wide-eyed at the man on her doorstep. What was he doing here? How did he know where she lived? And then she remembered that she’d had to fill out all those forms at his office.

Idiot. She upbraided herself for being so naive.

She didn’t bother trying to force a smile to her lips. “Did I forget something?”

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