Nighthawk & The Return of Luke McGuire (30 page)

“I didn’t know what else to do.”

“How about calling the cops?”

The notorious Luke McGuire, suggesting she call the police? “They weren’t really doing anything.”

“How about waving around a weapon I’m pretty sure is illegal in this state?”

She didn’t understand this; this was hardly what she expected to hear from him, this championing of law and order. “I didn’t want to make things harder on David. They know he comes in here a lot.”

“Oh.” He seemed to consider that. Then, handing her the book, added, “I guess I shouldn’t argue with success. They left, after all.”

Amelia blinked. She hadn’t thought about that. It might have been a desperate ploy on her part, but it had worked. “Yes. Yes, they did.”

“And you look like you could use a stiff drink. But since it’s not even noon, how about another cup of coffee?”

“I…yes. That sounds good. But I’ll have to make fresh.”

“Don’t bother. How about next door? They have something you like? Can you take a break?”

She hesitated, although the coffee bar next to the store made a latte she was fond of. Finally she gave in; she could afford a short break, and from the right table next door she could see any customers who might arrive anyway.

Moments later she was cradling the rich drink, thankful for the warmth despite the fact that it wasn’t the slightest bit cold out.

She looked across the table at him, intending to thank him, but her breath caught in her throat. He was leaning back in his chair, out of the cover of the table’s umbrella, and his hair gleamed almost blue-black in the sun. The glint of gold she’d seen that night—and had barely noticed in their first encounter—turned out to be an earring in the shape of a tiny boat paddle, although she supposed it must have some other significance she wasn’t aware of; she couldn’t quite picture him doing anything as mundane as rowing a boat around, or paddling a canoe. She found she liked it, although her mother had always decried the trend of men wearing earrings. Amelia found it rather rakishly attractive…if the man wearing it could carry it off.

Luke could definitely carry it off.

He was dressed today in jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of what seemed to be an outdoor equipment company. But the simple clothing did little to lessen his impact, and she realized the black leather had only emphasized what was already there. No matter what he wore, this man would never look quite…tame.

He was staring down Main Street, and she was thankful that he’d left off the concealing sunglasses, so she could see where he was looking. And so that she could quickly avert her gaze when he turned his attention back to her.

“David says you moved here when your folks bought the store,” he said conversationally. It seemed odd to her, sort of anticlimactic after the high drama she’d imbued the last few minutes with, to have a normal conversation. It took her a moment to gather her wits and answer.

“Yes. My father was a university professor. He retired to write a book and ended up owning a bookstore instead.” She smiled. “Which, not coincidentally, was what my mother had always wanted.”

“So she pushed him into it?”

Amelia laughed. “No. Neither one of my parents ever pushed the other one to do anything. They never had to. All either one had to do was say they wanted something, and the other one would move mountains to make it happen. They were crazy about each other.”

Luke didn’t react for a minute, and Amelia realized he was absorbing what she’d said as if he had to translate it into a language he understood.

“That must have been…nice,” he said at last, but she could see he was floundering, unable to relate this to anything he understood. And Amelia felt a sudden, sharp tug of sympathy for him, that something so basic and normal and necessary to her was so foreign to him.

“It was,” she said softly. “And sometimes I forget how special and rare.”

“Was?”

“My mother died four years ago. My father was lost without her, and within six months he was gone, too.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and there was no floundering this time; he might not know what it was like to live with such love, but he understood grief. “That must have been tough, losing them both like that.”

“I loved them dearly, but they would have wanted to be together. And they’d had very good lives.” She took a sip of her latte. “They were a bit too protective, I suppose. I was pretty sheltered. But I think that comes with being the only child of older parents.”

“So you were a late arrival?”

“Sort of. They adopted me when they were in their forties and realized they weren’t going to be able to have a biological child.”

He blinked, setting down his own cup of simple black coffee. “You were adopted?”

She nodded. “But they were the best parents I could ever have had. The always made me feel special. Chosen. I can’t imagine a biological child feeling any more loved than I was.”

“You were lucky.” His voice was a little tight.

“Yes, I was. Whoever my birth mother was, she did the best thing for me she could ever have done.”

“Gave you to parents who could love you.”

“Yes.”

There was no denying the taut emotion in his words. It struck her suddenly that she had indeed been lucky, luckier than some children who stayed with their natural parents. She wondered if Luke had ever wished his mother had given him up, given him a chance at loving parents. And then she wondered how could he not; it would almost have to be better than living with a mother who, to judge by her speeches, blamed his existence for ruining her life.

“I think,” she said softly, “I was even luckier than I realized.”

He looked at her for a long, silent moment. He didn’t pretend not to understand what she meant. “My mother had her reasons.”

“But none of them were your fault.”

His eyes narrowed. “Just how much do you know?”

She wished she hadn’t said it; the way he was looking at her, it was all she could do not to dodge his gaze. “I’ve heard your mother speak about the disaster teenage pregnancy can make of a life. I’ve seen you both, close enough to guess at ages. And—” she took a breath before finishing “—I can do math.”

He sat back. His mouth twisted up at one corner, and the opposite dark brow rose. “Clever girl.”

She bit her lip; she
knew
she should have kept quiet. She’d meant to express compassion and had only antagonized him.

“I only meant that…she’s wrong to blame you. It’s not like you had a choice.”

“When I’d been away long enough, I realized she probably didn’t have much choice, either.”

“But she could have given you up to someone—” She stopped as he lifted a hand.

“She couldn’t. Her mother wouldn’t allow it.”

“Your grandmother?”

He laughed. “Not if you asked her. She died when I was thirteen, and she never once acknowledged I was connected to her in any way. I wasn’t her grandson, I was her daughter’s punishment.”

There hadn’t been a trace of anger, self-pity, or even regret in his tone. He had clearly dealt with all this long ago. But it made Amelia shiver. “My God. How did you stand it?”

“I didn’t. Not very well, anyway. I went a little crazy. But then, you know that.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know why you didn’t burn the entire town to the ground.”

He stared at her for a moment, then gave a sharp shake of his head. “What I don’t know,” he said, sounding surprised and more than a little rueful, “is why I told you all that.”

He drained his coffee, got up and tossed his cup in the recycle bin left out for the purpose. The conversation, it seemed, was over. She got to her feet, a little surprised that she was fairly steady; being with Luke was, in its own way, as unsettling as her encounter with David’s friends.

When he walked her back to the store, she was surprised to see half an hour had passed; it had seemed only minutes. Then he turned to face her and put his hands on her shoulders as he looked at her seriously.

“Are you all right now? You were pretty shaky.”

So he’d seen, Amelia thought with a smothered sigh. She should have known he would. She supposed fear like hers wasn’t easily hidden. “I’m fine.”

“Next time Snake comes in waving that knife, call the police.”

Something about the proprietary way he said it stayed with her long after he’d gone. It warmed her, in a strange, unfamiliar way.

But that feeling soon vanished with the realization that she had actually carried on a conversation, twice, with the notorious Luke McGuire. And even more shocking, she had
enjoyed
it, right down to the nervous hammering of her heart. It had been…exhilarating. Liberating, somehow. And frightening.

She just wasn’t sure what she was frightened about: his presence, or her own reactions.

And she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

L
uke stood outside the community center, pondering. He’d already gone up to the bulletin board and read the notice, so he knew today was one of the days his mother was giving her fire-and-brimstone sermon.

He walked toward the small meeting room. It only held about fifty people, and if he remembered right, there were windows on either side of the main doorway, allowing a view of the back few rows of seats. And if he was guessing right, in the back would be where David was, no doubt sulking at being forced to sit though this yet again, just so his mother could be sure he wasn’t out doing evil with his no-good half brother.

He went to one of the windows and looked in. No sign of David. He went to the other side and tried it from that angle. He could just see the top of someone’s head in the last row. The hair was bleached and long on top, shorter below.

Bingo,
he thought.

He stood outside the door for a moment, pondering if he wanted to do this. It didn’t take him long to decide.

She expects the worst, doesn’t she? Don’t want to disappoint her….

He slipped on the black leather jacket he’d been carrying because it was really too warm to wear it. But it was effect he was after now, and he knew the jacket completed the picture the black jeans and motorcycle boots began. He reached up to the hair he was now glad he hadn’t gotten cut and pulled a couple of the strands he was always pushing out of the way down in front of his face. She’d always hated that.

He yanked open the door and strode in.

“—all over the county. Children barely old enough to take care of themselves having children of their own.”

His mother’s voice rang out strongly. It was a message kids needed to hear, he admitted. He just didn’t like being this close to her particular message. She looked…polished, a carefully burnished version of the woman he remembered, smoother, more studiedly elegant; she’d finally reached the perfection she’d always wanted.

“The tragedy of teenage pregnancy, the ruination of young lives, you have no idea what it’s like until it’s too late, until it’s happened to you, until you have an unwanted child weighing you down, crippling you—”

She’d spotted him. For the first time in his life, he saw his mother looking too shocked to speak. She stood there with her mouth open; she would have a fit if she realized she looked like a goldfish, he thought.

David spotted him then and leapt to his feet, a huge grin on his face. The rest of the attendees were starting to turn now, to see what she was gaping at. They’d probably never seen the polished Jackie Hiller rattled, and he took a perhaps petty satisfaction in being the one to have done it.

“Hi,” he said cheerily to the room at large. “I’m the visual aid.”

“You,” she breathed, only the microphone on the dais enabling him to hear the furious word.

“Yep, me.” He glanced at the rest of the group. “I’m the reason for all this. You know, the tragedy, the ruination, the weight. Or, if you like it more bluntly, I’m the unwanted bastard child that started this campaign.”

Whispers started around the room, coupled with darting glances at the elegantly dressed woman at the lectern.

“Get out!” He didn’t need the microphone to hear her this time.

“Hey, Mom, just trying to help. I mean, if looking at me doesn’t scare them, what will?”

Luke heard a peep of laughter he knew had come from David. He gave his little brother a crooked grin. Then he jerked his head toward the door he’d come in. David jumped up, grabbed his backpack and started toward him.

Their mother was still yelling at them when they went out the door.

“—the time the clock tower was painted black? I just know that was him.”

“I always suspected as much. And when the entire fleet of school buses had their tires slashed that time, you know who was behind that.”

“Oh, I’m sure he was. He got away with so much.”

“Except for Marie Clancy. He’s lucky she only hit him with her rake.”

“If I were him, I’d steer clear of her. I don’t why he dared to show his face in Santiago Beach again anyway.”

Not for any reason you three would believe,
Amelia thought as she put down the cantaloupe she’d been considering and hastily pushed her cart away from them.

She’d been there a few moments before she’d realized what the two men and a woman were talking about. Once she had, she’d been oddly frozen, unable to do anything but listen. By the time she’d been able to move, she’d heard way too much.

There was no way, she thought, that one lone teenage boy could possibly have been responsible for everything they’d talked about. They talked as if he’d run a one-boy campaign to bring Santiago Beach to its knees.

But she also knew that where there was this much smoke there was generally at least a match burning. So Luke was no angel, but he was hardly the devil incarnate, either.

But still, it bothered her that she had taken so much pleasure in talking to him, that she had found being with him so exhilarating. Was there something wrong with her, that she was still so…tempted by a man like that? Her parents would have been scandalized. And Amelia had never, ever done anything remotely scandalous.

She stopped at home—the small house bought by her parents despite its dark, dreary look and turned into a light, airy cottage—to put her groceries away, then headed to the store. She usually walked, since it was only about three blocks away and she told herself she needed the exercise, and rare were the days when the weather was bad enough to keep her from it. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to live in a place that actually had weather, instead of this perpetually sunny land where most of the time the only difference between seasons was in degrees of dryness.

As the day passed she caught herself looking up eagerly every time Lt. Worf sounded a warning, then feeling a bit let down when one of her regulars walked in. She chastised herself mentally, telling herself she was acting irrationally, downright silly. But still, when Worf boomed out a another welcome, she looked.

“You know,” Jim Stavros said with a grin as he walked in, “you got me watching that show on the reruns, because of that silly door thing of yours.”

Amelia laughed. Jim was one of her best customers. He read across the board and was always willing to try a new book on her recommendation.

Jim was also a cop. Had been for twenty-five years. She usually didn’t think about that, except for the occasional reminder when he refused to read a new police procedural that had come in, saying it made him crazy to see mistakes.

Jim had been a cop, although not the sergeant he was now, in Santiago Beach when Luke had been here.

She told herself not to ask; she chattered about other things, asked him about his wife, Joann, a nurse at the local hospital, and their kids, anything to keep from having a gap in the conversation, and then, when he stood at the register, wallet in hand, it slipped out.

“Luke McGuire? Oh, yeah, I knew him. All of us knew him. Heard he was back in town.”

It seemed pointless to dissemble, so Amelia just nodded.

“Hell on wheels, that boy was. Still is, I hear. Already been stopped once on that bike of his.”

Amelia went still. “Stopped?”

Jim nodded. “For speeding, on the canyon road. Same place I used to nail him. I’m surprised he hasn’t gotten himself killed. He did crash once, back then. Lost it on that same road and flipped that old Chevy he used to drive.”

“Was he hurt?”

Jim frowned. “Yeah. Kid broke an arm and a couple of ribs. For a while they thought it was worse. Joann was working that night, and she made the call to his mother. Woman didn’t show up until late the next morning.”

“Her son was in the hospital injured, and she didn’t even come?” Amelia couldn’t say she was surprised, not after what she’d learned, but it still seemed awful.

Jim nodded. “Joann said she wasn’t surprised. She had just started at the hospital back when the kid was born, and it was the talk of the place then that the old lady, the grandmother, was one of those judgmental fanatics, ashamed of having an unwed mother as a daughter. That she ordered her to keep the baby, even though she didn’t want it.”

“As punishment?” Amelia asked, remembering Luke’s words.

“Yeah. Crazy, isn’t it? Always felt kind of sorry for the kid, in a way. I mean, it’s got to be tough to have a mother who doesn’t even care enough to give you a name.”

Amelia winced. “Then who did name him? The grandmother? I’m surprised he didn’t end up as Cain or something equally pejorative.”

“I think that’s what the nurses were afraid of. So they named him. That’s why he’s Luke.”

“Why he’s—” Amelia broke off as it came to her. Of course. The hospital was St. Luke’s. “What a lovely start in life,” she said, sounding more bitter than Luke ever had.

“Yeah. Guess it’s not a surprise he ended up like he did. We kind of hoped things would change when she married Ed, but by then maybe it was too late. Ed tried, though. He was a nice guy. Too nice to have been married for his money.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “What’s all this interest in Luke McGuire?”

“I…” She scrambled for an explanation that wouldn’t make her sound like a total fool. “His brother. He comes in here a lot. So I was just…curious.”

“Well, you take my advice, don’t get tangled up with that boy. He’s pure trouble.”

“But it’s been eight years…maybe he’s changed.”

“It would have to be a heck of a change, and I’m not sure he had that kind of character.”

She wanted to defend him, to tell Jim that at least he had cared enough to come back to the place he hated—with reason, she was beginning to see—to see if his brother needed help. But she was fairly sure that would just net her an even stronger warning, and she didn’t want to hear it.

Why she didn’t want to hear it was something she didn’t dare think about.

But at least something had been explained, she thought after Jim had taken his books and gone; if Jackie had married Ed Hiller only for financial security, then it would explain the woman’s lack of empathy for her son’s raging grief.

Or it could simply be that she didn’t give a damn about either of her kids. Some people just weren’t cut out to be parents, Amelia thought. She just wished more of them knew it and eschewed the task.

What Jim had told her, and Luke’s casual, even laughing references to his mother’s coldness and his grandmother’s viciousness, ate at her all morning. Thinking of the differences between how they were raised caused her a pain that was almost physical. She tried to ease it with work, straightening shelves, checking the inventory and placing reorders. And when, just before noon, she looked up from the back of the store at the sound of the door and this time he was really there, she felt her eyes begin to brim just looking at him.

Quickly she blinked away the moisture, knowing she would never be able to explain. But apparently she wasn’t quite successful, because his first words when he reached her, accompanied by a frown, were, “You didn’t have another visit from those charmers, did you?”

“No,” she hastened to assure him.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I…nothing.” When his expression turned doubtful, she added, “Just a sad story I heard, that’s all.”

For a moment he just looked at her. “Do you cry at sappy commercials, too?” It could have been a nasty dig, had it not been said in the gentlest of tones.

“Yes,” she admitted, her chin coming up, determined not to be ashamed of it, even if her pulse was racing with trepidation.

“Soft heart,” he said.

But again, he said it so gently it was impossible to take offense. And then he reached out and brushed the backs of his fingers over the chin she’d raised to meet an expected threat. It was the merest feather of a touch, but it seared like flame, and Amelia felt her breath catch in her throat, as if her body had forgotten how to go about the process of breathing.

He pulled his hand back and looked at his fingers. He curled them into a fist, then ran his thumb over them, as if testing to see what had happened.

That his actions meant he’d felt it too didn’t register with Amelia for a moment. When it did, her breath came back in a rush that would have been a gasp if she had not been able to muffle it.

Say something, she chided herself. Don’t just stand here like some drooling fool of a woman who can’t say two words to someone just because he happens to be an attractive man. A dangerously attractive man. In more ways than one.

But the only thing she could manage was the well-worn query that made her wince even as she said it. “Can I help you?”

He looked at her oddly for a moment, then gave a half shrug and said, “I need a book.”

As reasonable as that sounded in a bookstore, Amelia was still startled. “You do?”

“Looks like I’ll be here longer than I thought, and I don’t have anything to read.”

He said it as if that were a considerable problem, as if reading was an integral part of his life. Apparently his teaching David to love reading had come from a genuine love of his own, and that hadn’t changed. She should have realized, she thought belatedly.

“What were you looking for?” she asked in her best professional manner.

He grinned. “Something violent. Got any nice, bloody mysteries?”

She didn’t know if he was serious or just teasing her about his reputation. With an effort she nodded toward the mystery rack and asked neutrally, “How bloody? Just a dead body to start, or do you prefer a string of them, complete with gore?”

His grin widened as she spoke. “You don’t get rattled, do you?”

So he had been teasing, she thought. But that didn’t change the answer to his question. “Not here,” she said simply. Books were her world, her passion, and she was at home among them as she was nowhere else.

He walked over to the mystery bay, picked up a volume and turned back to her. “Is this the latest one? I’ve lost track of what letter she’s on.”

“Yes, that’s the latest.” Curious, she asked, “You like those?”