Harlequin Superromance September 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: This Good Man\Promises Under the Peach Tree\Husband by Choice (7 page)

He pulled out the chair across from Anna, immediately making her feel crowded. This table beneath the window was tiny, sized for two who knew each other really well. His knees bumped hers, and he murmured, “Sorry.”

She shifted to give him room. He made no move to open the menu she handed him. Instead, they looked at each other.

Deeper than usual lines creased his forehead and carved crevasses between his dark slash of eyebrows.

“Something's wrong,” she said slowly.

“What?” He sounded startled.

“You look... I don't know. Disturbed.”

He stared at her. “Hasn't been the best of days,” he said finally. Now he did pick up the menu, but she sensed he was doing it as much for camouflage as anything else.

She waited until he'd apparently made a decision. Then she said, “Is it Caleb?”

The lines on his face became deeper. “Partly,” he said gruffly.

“What's the other part?”

Now both eyebrows rose. “Anybody ever tell you you're a nosy woman?”

She grinned. “I consider that a compliment. I wouldn't be any good at my job if I wasn't.”

“Speaking of...”

She raised her eyebrows, but he'd broken off at the waitress's approach. Once he'd given his order, he said abruptly, “It's the job.”

“Isn't it...well, similar to what you were doing? I gathered from the article in the newspaper that you were supervising quite a few people at your last job.”

He grimaced, more expression than he usually allowed himself. “Supervising, I'm comfortable with. On the investigations side, I'm not used to always being one step removed. I get the feeling I'll rarely be going out to a crime scene, for example. I'll be sitting behind the desk nodding while my underlings report to me.”

“You mean, you won't be doing real police work.”

“Right.” The trace of discomfiture lingered on his face. “That'll take an adjustment, but I can make it. When it comes to the support-services part of my job, though, I feel like a fish out of water. What do I know about fleet and facility maintenance, for God's sake? Did you know we have communication technicians? I've got to tell you, they talk right over my head.” He tugged his hair as if he wanted to tear it out. “Thank God Personnel and Human Resources are handled by the city.”

“You must have known you'd be heading those departments when you took the job,” she said tentatively.

His grunt was half laugh. “Sure I did. I just thought I'd be accountable for their budgets, hiring or firing heads of departments.” He shrugged. “I didn't know they'd expect me to understand what they actually
do.
”

Anna wondered if he knew how plaintive he sounded, but suspected he did and hated it.

“So, how are you handling it? Dodging phone calls?”

This rough laugh was closer to the real thing. “Something like that.”

Their orders arrived, but neither reached immediately for their forks. “Is there any reason you can't admit ignorance and say, ‘Educate me?'”

“Sure, if it was just one area. But across the board? I don't even work on my own car. Who am I to decide whether we ought to be performing the regular maintenance on the vehicles in our fleet every three thousand miles versus four thousand, or, hey, five...? And I'm competent on a computer, but do you know how fast technology is changing?”

She frowned at him. “Yes, but that's why you employ experts in every department. You
can't
know everything. Anyway...” She hesitated. This probably sounded stupidly elementary, but she decided to say it anyway. “I'll bet you're good at research. Why not look at each problem the way you would some aspect of a crime you're investigating? Haven't you become an expert, however fleetingly, on some esoteric field because it was entwined in a crime?”

She couldn't read his stare at all until he nodded slightly. “Yeah. I have. I know more about health regulations on tattoo parlors than you'd want to hear, and the handling of bodies in funeral homes. Not to mention midwifery—that one turned out to be a murder—and appropriate practices in pest control.” His eyes crinkled with a real smile. “Thank you.”

“Surely you've been going at it already with that attitude,” she said, wondering if he was humoring her.

But he shook his head. “I've been discovering how much I dislike feeling out of my comfort zone.”

“You look so—” She tried to stop herself, but that eyebrow of his insisted she finish. “I don't know. Untouchable. Invincible.” Not a word she could ever remember using before, but it seemed to fit.

“Invincible,” Reid echoed in a strange tone. “We can try, but is achieving that possible?”

“I...don't know.” Was he saying he wanted to make himself impervious to all human failings? Or the tumult of human emotions? “It wouldn't have occurred to me to go for it.”

“No,” he said. “Not you.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

His mouth curved. “Nothing that deserves your indignation. Only that...I'm beginning to think you're always willing to care.”

“
Beginning
to think?” Now she was indignant.

He held up a hand. “Pax. I've met plenty of social workers who are just going through the motions, not throwing themselves in heart and soul.”

“Well, I'm not sure I do that.”

Reid only smiled and began to eat. After a moment, Anna did the same.

He started talking, telling her a few anecdotes that had led to his awareness of how deep and wide his ignorance was, and when he asked about her week, she told a few stories in return.

She liked listening to him, and the way his attention never wavered from her when she talked. What she didn't do was make the mistake of thinking this happenstance lunch meant their relationship was going anywhere. He'd made it clear enough he had no intention of letting that happen.

She
was
nosy, though, so she asked over coffee how things were going with his brother.

“No better.” A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I'm following your advice and hanging in there.”

“Good.” She smiled at him. “At least he's taking your calls. If he really wanted to reject you, he wouldn't.”

Something fleeting crossed his face. As usual, she was unable to interpret it.

“He...dodges me when he can,” he said. “Speaking of dodging.”

Had they been? Oh—departmental queries.

“You said you don't have any kind of relationship with your father,” she said, remembering, and then discovered how completely he could close down.

“No.”

She'd never heard a word uttered so impassively, while conveying emotions so bleak. All she could do was nod.

“How's Yancey doing in the new foster home?” Reid asked in an obvious change of subject. He hadn't so much as moved a muscle, but she somehow knew he was itching to be gone.

“Really well.” She finished her coffee and reached for her wallet from the messenger bag sitting at her feet. “Carol insists he's musically gifted and has put him in piano lessons. Apparently, he played the trombone back in fifth and sixth grades, and now he may join the middle school jazz band.”

“Ah. Clever woman.” He barely glanced at the waitress, but she veered toward the cash register.

“Carol has a gift for, well...”

“Finding out what other people's gifts are?”

“Exactly.”

The waitress presented their bills. Reid tried to take both. Anna said, “No,” and handed hers with a twenty-dollar bill back to the waitress. “I don't need change,” she said pleasantly and tucked her wallet back into her bag. When she stood, he did, too, and walked out with her. Fortunately, she'd been lucky enough to find a parking spot right in front. She used her remote to unlock before looking at him. “Thanks for your company over lunch.”

“I'm the one who owes you the thanks.” This time his voice was a little huskier than usual. “You give good advice.”

“My gift.”

“Maybe,” he said. She passed him to step off the curb, and he stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Any chance you'd like to meet about the same time here on Wednesday?”

Anna went utterly still. “So I can give you more advice?”

“Because...I like you.” He frowned a little, his hand dropping from her arm. He stepped back. “If you're not here—” and now he sounded completely indifferent “—I'll get the message. Have a good day, Anna.” And he walked away, leaving her stunned, even though
I like you
wasn't exactly the stuff of soaring romance.

After a moment, she circled her Toyota and got in.

* * *

R
EID
DECIDED
TO
make the call to the Spokane P.D. right after lunch, before he began wandering the departments under his authority.

“Sergeant Sawyer has today off,” the voice on the phone told Reid woodenly. “I can switch you to his voice mail if you want to leave a message.”

Sitting at his desk staring at a blinking red light indicating an incoming call waiting, Reid thought,
Sure. I want to leave a message on the voice mail that Dad can access from anywhere. Say, Angel Butte.
That would answer all his questions.

“No. Uh, what about Mike Reardon? Is he in?”

“He retired last year.”

Retired? Well, damn. Reid adjusted his thinking. Yeah, some of Dad's cronies had been graying even back then. Stood to reason they were getting up to retirement age now.

“What about Bob Sarringer?”

There was a little silence. The guy was polite enough not to ask whether this was old-home week. “Let me check.” He came back in a moment. “Lieutenant Sarringer is in.”

A familiar voice came on. “This really Reid? Dean's kid?”

“That's me.”

“You've got a nerve calling. You know what you did to him?”

A hot flash of temper seared Reid's usual composure. “I know what he did to me.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” his father's old friend blustered.

“You were around. You heard the rumors. The allegations. And you're surprised I lit out? And, what a shocker, his younger son did the same?”

“He was hard on you. That's all. He wanted you to be half as tough as him.”

“You have any idea how many broken bones I had? How many implants and bridges I have in my mouth to replace teeth he knocked out? For Lee's sake, I sure as hell hope your idea of raising 'em tough wasn't the same.”

The silence felt stricken. Reid had been friends with Lee Sarringer. He'd never had the guts to ask whether Lee's dad knocked him around, too.

“You being straight with me?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yes.” Suddenly impatient, Reid said, “I'm trying to find out if Dad's in town. I'm told he's off today.”

“He's taken some time. I think he's looking for Caleb— Wait, do you know where he is?” Suspicion had crept into Sarringer's voice.

Reid managed a natural-sounding snort. “I don't care where Caleb is, as long as he found a good bolt hole. I didn't even know I
had
a brother until recently. Dad called and threatened me. I'd just like to know if he's completely gone off his rocker and is hunting me, or whether he's actually showing up for work mornings and acting more sane than he sounded.”

“He's taken a couple of long weekends,” his father's crony finally admitted. He sounded shaken. “Like I said, he's looking for his boy. He didn't say anything about you. I didn't even know if you were still alive.”

“Oh, it turns out Dad's known where I was for years. I took a new job a couple of weeks ago, and he knew all about it. I admit, recently I've had a few moments of wondering if Daddy isn't watching me. Don't much care for that feeling of having the hair rising on my neck, if you know what I mean.”

Sarringer was a cop; he knew. But he had his loyalties, too, even if Reid had just damaged their underpinnings. He asked what Reid did for a living, and they had a reasonably civil chat.

When Reid ended the call, there it was, that prickling feeling on his nape.

The drive from Spokane to Angel Butte wasn't that long. His father could have set both fires. Maybe swooping in to recover his youngest boy and getting the Hales shut down wasn't enough for him. If he'd figured out that this was where Reid, too, had gone to ground all those years ago, he might like the idea of a punishment that, in his eyes, fit the crime. A little psychological torture might be just his style.

And if, in the end, some of the boys who lived there got torched, too, he'd figure they were getting what was coming to them.

Reid swore out loud.

* * *

C
ALEB
SWUNG
THE
ax and watched the round of pine split in half. Man, his shoulders ached. Hearing voices, he immediately positioned one of the pieces and swung again. Truong and Diego appeared around the corner of the lodge. Working in silence, they filled their arms with another load of the firewood he had split. Instead of carrying it to the woodshed, they'd been ordered to start a pile under a sheltering eave on the other side of the lodge. Not until they were out of sight around the lodge did they start talking again.

So much for Diego being his friend, Caleb thought.

He stretched and groaned. It pissed him off that Roger was driving them all so hard. It was almost spring. They wouldn't need most of this firewood until next winter. Why not let it dry, and then they could split and stack it on a warm summer day instead of a shitty day like this, when each piece fell into slush and his feet were both wet and cold? Big brother hadn't mentioned his perfect sanctuary included forced labor.

In the days since the second fire, things had gotten really lousy. Mostly, everyone was looking at
him.
TJ was second in contention, no surprise—they were the two newest, and neither of them had a roommate, which supposedly made it easier for either to sneak out whenever they wanted. As if Roger and Paula weren't listening for them. And the front door of the lodge was heavy and thudded when it closed, while the hinges on the kitchen door squealed like a girl who'd just seen her best friend after a two-hour separation. And then there was the fact that TJ and him, they heard each
other
whenever they had to get up to piss.