The Foster Family (42 page)

Again, I expected something. Him to ask what I was doing there. Demand to know how I had the nerve to show up.

He picked me up in a soul-crushing bear hug, feet right off the floor, without saying a word. No breathy
You came!
or choked hello, or
I missed you
. Just the hug, as intense and silent as the hug good-bye at the airport had been. Like he was picking that one up where he’d been forced to drop it before and had no intention of stopping any time soon.

I felt Malcolm’s big hand at the small of my back after a moment and his hot breath near our ears. “It’s almost time for your opening speech, babe,” he whispered. “You’ll have to put him down.”

“Make me,” Charlie mumbled against my neck.

“Charlie.” There was a new, sterner note in Malcolm’s voice, but none of the kindness was hindered by that. “Let him go.”

Charlie did, after a heartbeat, set me back on my feet. “Only because Mal insisted,” he said to me as he brushed hair off my forehead and grasped my hand in his. It was as though he was afraid I’d run off or disappear if he lost contact, even for an instant.

Mal didn’t say anything to me, but he did stand on my other side and place an arm over my shoulder.

When Charlie went off to stand behind a podium and publicly thank the gallery owners for sponsoring him and the people for coming, Malcolm leaned close, and his breath brushed my ear again. “We’ll have to stand around and be polite for hours. You should have come near the end when we might have been able to escape to an office somewhere and greet you properly.”

Charlie had finished his speech and was ushering someone over. Malcolm’s hand dropped from my shoulder and brushed over my ass as he swung his arm around to shake hands with the person Charlie was introducing him to.

“This is Malcolm.” He smiled wide. “My other half.” Malcolm shook the graying man’s hand and smiled, an echo of the polite smile Charlie wore.

“And Kerry,” Charlie went on, much to my shocked surprise. “My inspiration.”

The man held out his hand to me, and after a heartbeat and a discreet tap on my ass from Malcolm, I shook it. “Hi,” I said dumbly.

The man gave me a polite smile. His grip was hard and his clear blue eyes sharp. “So you’re the one who brought our Charlie out of retirement. Well done, boy. Well done. He’s done a fine job, and we’re proud to host his first show.”

The gallery owner? Charlie had introduced me to the gallery owner? I glanced at Charlie, but he was busy blushing and glaring at his shoes. “I… think he does beautiful work,” I said lamely.

The man agreed, made more polite small talk for a few moments, allowing Charlie to pull himself together, then he took Charlie by the elbow and lead him away. I heard him tell Charlie he wanted to introduce him to some buyers.

“He’s selling these?” I asked, staring around the room.

“That is how you make money in this business, Kerry,” Malcolm said dryly.

“But this is….” I waved a hand at the pictures.

“It’s what?” Malcolm asked, turning to face me. “What, exactly, do you think it is? It’s a bunch of very nice photographs.”

I shook my head mutely. Surely he could see what I saw. Charlie’s sweat and blood and tears disguised as mere pretty photographs.

“That’s what I thought,” Malcolm said softly, and there was no mistaking the disappointment in his voice.

“This is Charlie’s night,” I whispered fiercely at him. “We’re here for him.”

“And where will you be tomorrow, Kerry?” he asked. He wasn’t looking at me but staring toward the three photos that I’d found so fascinating.

That was my opening. I glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. His hands were in his trouser pockets, and his gaze was fixed straight ahead.

I squared my shoulders and clasped my own hands behind me, so maybe he’d not notice how badly they shook. I looked straight ahead too, at that lopsided, damaged bush. It had been maimed by Charlie’s hack-and-slash attack but had been powerful enough, determined enough, to survive the assault. It had bent itself around the wounded parts, protecting tender new shoots from the ravaging, salty winds, and one day, new growth would appear, like scar tissue, over the old wounds. Because trees that eked out a living out in the open like that, exposed and vulnerable, found ways to survive the odds.

I turned to look at Malcolm and found he was watching me. I looked him in the eye and licked away the dryness making my lips stiff. “Wherever you deem it appropriate I should be,” I said at last. It was the best I knew how to do, and I dropped my gaze, because I couldn’t keep looking into his eyes and risk seeing them turn cold against me.

His palm under my chin was warm and smooth, strong as he lifted my face. His gaze was the same. “It’s Charlie’s night,” he said back to me. “If he wants you—”

“Do you?” I blurted.

His brows flashed up and his eyes got a bit wider. “Pardon?”

“Do you? Want me?”

“I thought you were here for Charlie.”

I pulled my chin free of his grip and took a step back. “It has to be both of you or it can’t be either,” I told him. “None of us are built any other way.” I looked at the photos again, at the tree, stocky and strong, partially protecting the shower and gazebo from the cool ocean breezes, and the water dripping down through the gazebo floorboards to the soil, at all the tiny details that made the three pictures one. All the tiny interwoven bits of lives that made three people into one heart. I looked back to Malcolm and drew in a breath and thought I would hold it, but Malcolm leaned close and kissed me, hard and possessive, knocking the breath from my lungs and thought from my head and leaving only room for him.

The rest of the show went off without a hitch and mostly in a daze for me, as Malcolm effectively relieved Lissa from chaperone duties by never letting go of my hand the entire night. I thought that him being as openly with Charlie as he was, that little demonstration of possessiveness over me should have raised eyebrows, but if it did, it never happened in my presence, and I was grateful for however that was possible.

There was no talk of my going back to Lissa’s that night, and she said a quiet good-bye to me while Malcolm looked on, long before the show was actually over.

“You sure?” I asked her.

She smiled and nodded. “If you are.”

I was. “Thank you for this, babe,” I told her.

Her crooked expression and small shrug were very sisterly as she turned to go. “You owe me one.”

God. I owed her a whopper.

W
E
DID
eventually make it back to the house, all a little bit tipsy from maybe one last, unneeded glass of champagne, and I made myself at home quickly, stripping off the suit jacket David had loaned me for the occasion. I had short sleeves underneath, and Malcolm immediately noticed the small round plaster sticking precariously to sweaty skin on the inside of my elbow.

He looked at it, at me, and his brows thundered down.

I covered the telltale evidence with my other hand, but Charlie was there to pry my fingers loose and demand I tell them what it was and why.

And of course I had to. I would have preferred a nice, safely ensconced night in my bed in the little room they’d given me and a deep cup of creamy-sweet coffee in the morning to tell them this, but since the genie had been let out, there was no point trying to stuff it back in.

So, I told them. I told them the first test and the three-week one had both been negative, there were no signs of any other STDs, including gonorrhea, and I reluctantly had to place some hope in the idea that Andrew had been telling the truth about the condoms. That made him human in a way that made it harder to accept the rest of how he’d treated me.

I pulled a return plane ticket out of the breast pocket of the jacket I’d removed and let them know I was going back to Seattle in three months, for my next appointment, and they accepted that news as well.

“You aren’t going to say anything?” I asked.

“Three months seems like a decent amount of time to try this out,” Malcolm said.

I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to ask what we were trying, exactly, so I just nodded.

“Was there something specific you wanted to hear?” Charlie asked.

I wanted to know I was welcome. Wanted. That I had been missed. That at least for the duration of this trial period, if that was what this was, this would be my home.

“How’s working for Lissa?” I asked him instead.

They looked at each other over my head and Malcolm sighed.

“Really?” he asked.

What was I supposed to say or do? How was I supposed to get from this awkward space between the couch and the coffee table, between them, to my room? How was I supposed to walk over there, like I’d never left, and risk opening the door to find they’d changed it back to what it had been before I’d dropped my pile of crap into their lives?

How was I supposed to watch them go, hand in hand, to their own room, and know my place was that limited? What the hell had I thought was going to happen? Maybe whatever was going to happen, I had to be the one to make a start.

I turned to face Malcolm and held out the hand he had clasped so tightly, so possessively, all night. “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed.

To my relief, he reached across the back of the couch and took hold of me. “Come to bed and sleep off the champagne,” he said. He jerked his head at Charlie, indicating my room as I stumbled around the end of the couch to join him. “Go get him a pillow.”

Charlie grinned and obeyed without comment.

“And sleep shorts,” I called, but Charlie only chuckled and Malcolm took my chin in his hand and turned my head so I was focused on him.

“You won’t need those.”

I blinked at him. God, I had to admit his hand on me like that felt more like coming home than walking into the house had, by a long shot. But the thought of lying naked beside him and Charlie made me nervous. I was so hyperaware of the needle prick in my arm, of the memory of Andrew’s pale, defeated expression. “I’m drunk,” I stated.

“I know.” He kissed me, and I felt more than heard Charlie come back in the room.

“We’re all drunk a bit,” Charlie said, wrapping his arms around both of us at once and laying his head against mine. “I’m too tired to do anything but sleep.” His words were backed up by a huge yawn.

“Things have changed, Kerry,” Malcolm said, softly pecking small, tender kisses over my face. “We’ll talk about that in the morning, over coffee. Right now, it’s late, and we all need to sleep, yes?” He leaned back as much as Charlie’s embrace allowed and looked down into my eyes. “Yes?” he asked again, though I could feel his hard cock against my stomach and Charlie’s lazily half-erect nestled against my ass.

“Yes.”

“Good boy.” He kissed the top of my head. “Charlie.” A sharp smack made Charlie jump and mumble something, but he let us go, turning me with a hand on my shoulder and leading me off to their bedroom.

“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Malcolm called after us.

I glanced over my shoulder in time to see him disappear into his study. “What’s he doing?”

Charlie shrugged. “Whatever he does most nights before he comes to bed. Meditates, I think. Not sure.”

“You never asked?”

Charlie squeezed my shoulders, then gave me a shove across the room, and I let the momentum tumble me onto the bed. It was springy and comfortable, and I stretched out onto my back, spreading my arms wide in luxury and letting my feet dangle, toes curled into the shaggy rug the bed sat on.

“Really?” Charlie tilted his head at me. “Mal declares it a no-sex zone and you do that?”

“What?” I looked up at him, confused. “What did I do?”

He shook his head, sighing, even as he crawled up over me and straddled my hips. “You’re not that clueless, are you?”

I lifted my hands, already imagining the feel of the hard muscles of his thighs under my palms, but he shook his head more emphatically. “Leave them there.”

“Leave what where?” I asked, running my hands from his knees to the tops of his thighs.

He grabbed my wrists and slammed my arms back against the mattress. “No sex,” he said firmly. “Just don’t move.”

I stared up at him, unable to look away, unable to breathe properly with my heart jumping around in my throat. “Sorry.”

“Shhh.”

His mouth was set in a firm line as he unbuttoned my shirt and spread it open, then slid his down and did the same with my trousers. Those he pulled off and hung over a chair. My shorts were tossed in the laundry hamper, and for some reason, that act of throwing my laundry in the same hamper as theirs caught my attention.

Suddenly, my hard-on and being splayed out on their bed half-naked was vastly less important than the fact he’d tossed my dirty underwear in the same place he tossed his own. The same place he tossed Malcolm’s.

“What is it?” he asked gently, and the bed dipped as he knelt, still fully clothed, on top of me. He turned my face so I was looking up at him and asked again.

I shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“You’re not going to cry again, are you?”

I blinked and blinked again and ignored the trickle of warmth and wetness that leaked into the hair at my temple. “No,” I croaked out.

“Good.” He lowered himself and gently kissed me. “Because there have been a lot of tears shed in this bed, and if there are going to be any more, I want them to be happy ones.”

I nodded.

“Now you want to tell me what’s going on?”

I shook my head.

“Too bad.” He crawled off the bed and stripped, slapped my leg lightly, and made me get up. I removed the shirt he’d opened and set it over the chair with the trousers as he pulled the blankets back. “Get in.”

It was too good and too simple, obediently following his terse order, not to let myself be led, so I crawled under the covers and scooted on the king-sized mattress until he had room to slide in beside me. I lay down on my back at first, but when he curled toward me, I found I couldn’t look him in the face, so I turned too and spooned into the hollow he created.

Being naked didn’t matter. There was nothing sexual about the arm he wrapped around my middle or the way he pulled me against his chest. There was nothing remotely seductive about the small kiss he laid on my neck.