Nighthawk & The Return of Luke McGuire (32 page)

She looked back over her shoulder at him.

“Let him go.”

He caught up to her just as she said, “No! He’s too upset.”

The moment the words were out, a look of surprise crossed her face, as if she couldn’t quite believe she’d said them. Was it so rare for her to disagree with someone?

“I know you want to help, but going after him now will only make it worse,” he said.

“But it’s the middle of the night. He could get in trouble.”

“Right now he’s going to be looking for someplace to hide, where he can be alone, where he won’t have to talk to anyone.”

“But—”

Luke reached out and gently took her shoulders. “Trust me on this. I’ve been where he is. He needs to be alone for a while.”

She looked at him for a long, silent moment. Then, under his hands, he felt the tension seep out of her. But still she expressed concern. “What if he runs away?”

“I don’t think he’s quite ready for that yet. He’s on the edge, but he’s not ready to jump.”

She looked up at him very intently. “And if you’re wrong?”

I’ll slit my throat,
Luke thought. “If I’m wrong, I guess my reputation around here as a screw-up gets enhanced.” He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I’m probably getting credit for Davie getting off track anyway.”

She lowered her gaze, and he knew he was right. He’d figured as much, that the gossip would be that David was turning out just like his brother.

“I don’t know how they can blame you,” she said softly. “He was only seven when you left.”

“But I left him a fine, grand image to live up to, now didn’t I?”

She seemed to consider that for an inordinately long time before saying, “Do you believe in genetic memory?”

He blinked. As a non sequitur, that one would be hard to beat. “What?”

“Genetic memory. That you can have ideas or thoughts that don’t come from your own personal experience but from the common experience of your ancestors.”

“I’m sure,” he said slowly, “that there’s a reason you brought that up just now.”

She gave him a sideways look. “You said you never knew your father. But just then you sounded as Irish as they come.”

He blinked again. “I did?”

“The way you phrased that reminded me of a colleague of my father’s who visited us from Dublin once.”

The idea that he carried some innate habits that might have come directly from the father he’d never known startled him. For a moment he just stood there, toying with the idea, wondering how he felt about it. It wasn’t until Amelia shifted her feet, as if tired of standing, that he realized how long he’d been lost in that reverie.

“Sorry. I know it’s late,” he began.

She nodded. “I should go.” All of a sudden she sounded nervous again, like she did so often. He wondered what he was doing that set her so on edge.

He didn’t want her to go, he realized. He wasn’t sure why; he just knew that, unlike his brother, he didn’t want to be alone right now.

“The coffee shop here is open twenty-four-seven,” he said before she could turn away. “Would you like something? Before you go, I mean?” She hesitated. “Maybe we can think of something to do about David. And I’m sure they have decaf,” he added.

She smiled at that and finally nodded. “All right.”

When they walked into the small café, he thought the waitress looked at them rather intently, but Amelia didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. Although her mind was obviously elsewhere, because she glanced at the pay phone just inside the door and said, “We should call…David’s mother.”

“Afraid she’s worried? Don’t be,” Luke said shortly.

“No,” Amelia said, surprising him yet again. “More afraid she’s called the police by now.”

She had, he had to admit, a point. “You’d better call, then. The last thing David needs is for her to know he was with me.”

She nodded, and he waited as she made the call. It was strange to think it was his mother she was talking to, when he himself hadn’t spoken to her—except for that mocking exchange at the community center—since the day he’d walked out for the last time. Strange, but not painful; there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that his decision had been for the best. His only regret was that he hadn’t done it sooner. But he’d stayed to finish high school, more for David’s father than anything; it seemed one small way to acknowledge the man’s efforts to treat him well.

Whatever the waitress had been speculating when they’d come in, apparently she’d set it aside. In less than a minute they were seated in a booth with rather unsettling olive green vinyl cushions, had cups in front of them and the place to themselves.

And after a moment he found he couldn’t resist the urge to pick up where they’d left off, and somehow he knew that he wouldn’t have to explain who he was talking about, that she would understand.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t even know if he knows I exist. I could never get my mother to tell me if he ever knew she was pregnant. She wouldn’t discuss him at all, and all her mother ever said was that he seduced and abandoned her.”

“I think,” Amelia said softly, “that you should assume he never knew. That if he had, he would have come back.”

His mouth twisted. “That’s a kid’s fantasy.”

“Every kid should have one.”

“Did you?”

She took a sip off her coffee. “Of course.”

“What was it?”

“I’m not sure I’m ready to share that,” she said honestly.

He leaned back, the vinyl creaking. “Fair enough,” he said, knowing he wouldn’t really want to share his own, either. It would be far too pitiful to admit that all he’d ever wanted as a kid was for his mother to love him. “I wonder if David has one,” he said almost idly.

Her silence was almost pointed, as was the way she stared down at her coffee cup. He was just noticing that her lashes were rather amazingly long and soft looking when it hit him.

“I get it,” he said, a little harshly. “David’s fantasy was that his big brother would come back and save him, right? And I just blew that all to hell.”

“Luke—”

He cut her off with a sharp, disgusted exhalation. “I can’t win in this town. I never should have come back.”

“Yes, you should have,” Amelia said, so positively that puzzlement took the edge off his anger.

“Why?”

“Because later, when he’s calmed down, it will matter to David that you came. Even if you couldn’t do what he wanted you to do.”

“Right.” He knew he sounded surly, but he couldn’t help it.

She looked at him then. “Would it have mattered to you if your father had come back, even if he couldn’t have taken you with him?”

I’d have lived on it the rest of my life.

The words came out of nowhere in his mind, startling him. He’d never thought of himself as fixated on the father he’d never known, but apparently it was closer to the surface than he’d realized.

“Yes,” he finally managed, his voice a little tight. “It would have mattered.”

She nodded. “And someday it will be important to David that you cared enough to come.”

“You mean the older we get, the less we settle for?”

“I suppose you could put it like that. I like to think it’s more learning how to make the most of what we have instead of wasting energy and effort on things we can’t change.”

He ran a finger up and down his coffee cup, the inexpensive, thick ceramic insulating him from the heat of the beverage. “Is that the voice of experience?”

She took another sip of coffee, then set down her cup. She stared into it for a long moment, as if the answer were in there. “In a way,” she said finally. “That…that fantasy you asked about? I wanted to be Amelia Earhart. A risk-taker, a daredevil. I wanted to go faster, higher…. But I never will. I’m…not brave, not adventurous, the exact opposite in fact. I’m just me, and I’ve learned to be content with that.”

Luke stared across the table at her, a bit taken aback at her unexpected confession and oddly stung by her rather biting self-assessment. Especially coming from the woman who had diverted a knife-wielding kid named Snake with a book.

“You know, Ms. Blair,” he said at last, “I think you might be just the tiniest bit wrong about that.”

She looked up at him. “About what?”

“The risk-taking part.”

Her brows furrowed. “Hardly. The biggest risk I’ve ever taken was going to college a hundred miles from home.”

“And,” he said, gesturing at their surroundings, “sitting in a public place in the middle of the night with the scourge of Santiago Beach.”

She looked up then, sharply, and he grinned at her.

Slowly, like the dawn breaking over the rim of a canyon, a smile spread across her mouth.

“There is that,” she said.

And Luke felt like he’d worked a very small miracle.

B
y noon the next day Amelia was thinking that Luke’s joking words had been truer than she would ever have guessed. Apparently a simple cup of coffee, taken with “the scourge of Santiago Beach,” was one of the bigger risks she’d ever taken. At least, judging from the reaction.

She supposed the waitress must have recognized them; she had looked vaguely familiar. And she had apparently wasted no time in spreading the news that the respectable bookstore owner had been out with the highly unrespectable Luke McGuire, at a very suspicious hour, in a coffee shop. A
motel
coffee shop. And most of the people she’d told seemed to have decided it was their duty to stop in and ask Amelia what on earth she thought she was doing.

At first she’d reacted viscerally, wanting to defend Luke. After all, she was the one who had heard him tearing himself down to his brother, trying to destroy the heroic image the boy had built up, trying to convince David he wasn’t worth imitating, that, as a role model, he was a lousy choice. He’d been brutally, painfully honest, and she knew it hadn’t come easily. But he had done it—for his brother’s sake.

But no one here would understand that. They probably wouldn’t even believe it if she told them. They had made up their minds long ago about Luke, and she, the relative newcomer, wasn’t going to be able to change them. She had to accept that.

What she couldn’t accept was the rest. The fact that when she explained that they had been talking because they were both concerned about David, she got only looks ranging from doubt to outright disbelief. She was not used to being thought a liar, and it made her angrier than she could remember being in a very long time. And gradually she became defensive, deciding that if they wanted to believe the worst, let them.

A thought struck her then that this was what Luke must have gone through every day of his life here. That he must have constantly faced the blank wall of preconceptions, the smug certainty of minds already made up, closed and locked. No wonder he’d given up trying to change anyone’s perception of him. And she thought, not for the first time, that for all the problems it caused, her parents had had only the best intentions in keeping her in their protective shell.

Maybe, she thought after the worst of them all, Mrs. Clancy, had warned her in a very stern way that she would ruin what was so far a good reputation if she kept on, she would make up a good story. If they wanted something juicy, maybe she would just give it to them. Tell them she and Luke were plotting some nefarious crime, or that she was involved in a hot, torrid, passionate affair with him.

Her body cut off her thoughts with a burst of sudden heat that startled her.

A hot, torrid, passionate affair with Luke.

With a tiny sound she hated to admit could have been a moan, she pressed her hands to her face, the heat of her cheeks making her fingers feel almost icy.

The very idea was absurd. The idea of her having a hot, torrid, passionate affair with anyone was absurd; she just didn’t have it in her. But the idea of having it with Luke, well that was just—

Breathtaking. Stimulating. Titillating.

Arousing,
she said to herself, making herself face the fact inwardly, even if she couldn’t out loud.

Was that what this was, this sudden rush of heat at the mere thought? Her experience was so limited: one high school romance that had ended before it had really begun, when she’d refused to leap into bed with him; one in college that had crumbled when an ex-girlfriend had returned; and the last one shortly after her father’s death, when she’d been feeling vulnerable and had tried to find something to fill the sudden void in her life in the bed of a man who, while nice enough, hadn’t been looking to cure a member of the walking wounded.

But never had she ever experienced anything like this wave of sensation at just the
idea….

Luke McGuire…and her? Quiet, meek, timid Amelia Blair? It was impossible. Worse, it was absurd. No wonder people were going into shock.

I think you might be just the tiniest bit wrong about that….

Luke’s words came back to her then, along with the memory of the teasing glint in his bright blue eyes. And the grin he’d given her. Lord, they should make him give some kind of warning before unleashing that grin.

To distract herself, she tried calling Mrs. Hiller again. And again she got the answering machine. She had gone by the house this morning and run into the woman, dressed impeccably as usual and carrying a briefcase, and clearly heading out for the day. Amelia had breathed a sigh of relief; David must have come home. She was taken aback when Jackie had said no, there had been no sign of him, but she had no more time to sit around and wait, she had appointments to keep.

“Since you saw him last night, he’s obviously still in town. He’ll turn up when he’s ready, and then I’ll deal with him.” She had brushed past Amelia and only as an afterthought had turned and said, “Thank you for your call, by the way.”

“You’re welcome,” she’d said rather lamely, unsure of what else to say in the face of such monumental unconcern.

“However,” Jackie added in formal tones, “I do not approve at all of my son associating with Luke. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t encourage contact between them.”

For the first time in her relatively placid life, Amelia wanted to slap someone. The woman spoke as if Luke wasn’t connected to her at all, as if he were just some stranger “her son” had taken up with.

It had taken a good hour of physical work at the store to take the edge off her anger. Then, after she opened, the parade of self-appointed watchdogs had begun, and now she was fully out of sorts. Not to mention that her worry about David had returned full force; if he’d been out all night, who knew what might have happened.

She gave herself a shake, then started back into her small storeroom. She still had a couple of cartons of books to unpack and a dump to set up for the front of the store. She grabbed her box opener, and for a moment her gaze lingered on the razor-sharp blade.

Good thing I’m not one for mayhem,
she muttered to herself. But then again, she amended as she attacked the first box, maybe she could learn.

Luke awoke slowly, knowing how deeply he’d been asleep by how long it took him to surface. Even though he was used to being up late, frequently going for restless walks at night, last night had been a long one. He’d lain awake until dawn, unable to find the switch to turn off his racing mind.

He had—successfully, he’d thought—given up on guilt a long time ago. But it was making a powerful comeback at the moment; he felt as if he’d betrayed the only person who’d really cared about the kid he’d been. But he just didn’t see any way around it. What he’d told David was all true; their mother would never stand for it, and she had all the cards: biological, financial and twenty-six years of public making up for her single mistake—him. Even if he thought he could handle it, there was no way somebody with his history would be entrusted with a teenager already headed down the same path.

That would have been enough to drive away sleep, but then there had been the sizable distraction of Amelia to add into the mix.

He didn’t know what it was about the quiet, reserved woman that kept him thinking about her; he only knew it happened. And he couldn’t quite convince himself it was solely because she cared about his brother. That had brought him to her in the first place, but it hadn’t been the reason he kept going back. Or the reason he’d blurted out that invitation for coffee last night, before he even realized he was going to do it.

He’d been surprised when she’d said yes. She’d been so nervous he thought she would bolt just as David had. She always seemed that way, tense underneath that reserved exterior. Unless she was wrapped up in her concern for David. And sometimes, it seemed, even concern for him.

He sat up slowly, blinking bleary eyes as something David had told him came back to him.
She’s a little quiet. You never know what she’s thinking.

Well, he sure did. She seemed on the verge of running at some point during every contact he’d had with her. Every time he saw her, there was at least one moment when she seemed to draw back from him warily, when he had the idea she was looking for an escape route.

He rubbed at his eyes, but stopped midmotion when another thought came to him. Maybe it was the other way around? Maybe she was only rattled enough to let it show when he was around?

That made him smile. He couldn’t deny he liked the idea of shaking her out of that reserve, just on general principle. Maybe that was why he was so drawn to her.

Or maybe, more simply, he thought as he dragged himself to the shower, it was that she was one of the few people in town who didn’t remember him from before, one of the few he could talk to and not be certain they were always thinking of his rowdy past. Not that she didn’t know about it, obviously she did, but she didn’t seem to dwell on it. She hadn’t seen it firsthand, so it wasn’t emblazoned on her memory the way it seemed to be with everyone else around here.

It wasn’t until he got out of the shower and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that another possibility hit him. His gaze strayed, as it often did, to the crooked, white scar that wrapped around the right side of his rib cage. His mother had never known about that one; by the time he’d gotten that slice in a knife fight at David’s age, he’d known better than to expect any help from her, even if he was bleeding. He’d disinfected it as best he could, fighting not to make any noise at the pain and wake her up, bandaged it lopsidedly, and the next day had smuggled his bloody shirt out to throw it away in a Dumpster on the other side of town. The wound had been slow to heal, because he kept tearing it open, but eventually it had healed.

He stared at it now and wondered if Amelia was nervous around him because she was afraid of him.

Once the idea of people being afraid of him had had great appeal; at least it meant he mattered in some way.

Now… Well, now it just made him uncomfortable. Or, at least, the idea of Amelia being afraid of him did. And he hoped he was wrong.

He tossed the towel over the shower rod and walked out into the room. He was going to have to do laundry soon; he’d only brought three extra shirts and one extra pair of jeans. He pulled out the clean clothes he had left, thinking that there was a Laundromat just off Main Street. True, there was also one just down the street from the motel, but the other one was right around the corner from Blairs’ Books. He could start his clothes washing, then head over there. He doubted anybody would make off with his meager wardrobe; that kind of thing just didn’t happen in Santiago Beach.

At least, not since
he’d
left, anyway, he amended with a grin as he dressed quickly.

It wasn’t a pretend grin. Most of the time he was able to mean it when he thought of his life here. But always underneath he knew how lucky he was to have escaped as lightly as he had; he’d been headed for much worse.

Soon all his clothes were sudsing away, and he was astride his bike and on his way around the corner; his trust of crime-free Santiago Beach didn’t run to the Harley.

He’d never spent so much time in a bookstore, he thought as he set the kickstand and dismounted. He’d loved to read—which would have surprised anybody in town, including his mother, since he went out of his way to hide the fact from her, afraid she would try to stop that, too—but he hadn’t had money to spend on books. So he’d spent lots of time in the library, which had set him up for ribbing from his friends, but he’d bluffed his way out of it, saying it was the perfect place to hide out and not get hassled by anybody.

Besides, he had a perfectly legitimate reason to be here now; Amelia might have heard something about David.

She was behind the checkout counter as he neared the door, and for a moment he stopped outside, watching. He knew the door alarm—whoever it might be today—would alert her the minute he opened it, and he wanted a minute to watch her first.

She was bent over what looked like a magazine, reading intently. She had a pen in one hand, which she was tapping rhythmically against the glass countertop. The other hand came up and pushed a straying lock of hair neatly behind her ear. It was an unconscious move, she never looked up, but it was graceful and somehow extremely feminine. As was the hand that did it, and the delicate ear she tucked the strand behind.

The haircut suited her, he thought. Sort of pixieish. And, he thought as he finally reached for the door, he’d never realized before how darn sexy the nape of a neck could be.

He stopped, fingers already curled to grip the handle, as he realized what he’d just thought.

Sexy?

He looked up again; now she was biting her lip, as if deep in thought, and damn if that wasn’t sexy as hell, too.

She made a note on a pad of paper beside her, then flipped the magazine closed. Luke knew she would look up any second, and he hastily tried to shove aside his unexpected reaction. He yanked open the door a little quicker than he’d meant to and nearly jumped when the voice of the Enterprise computer welcomed him.

What is
wrong
with you?
he asked himself sharply.

And then Amelia looked up and saw him. And the shy smile that curved her mouth drove everything else out of his mind.

“Hi,” she said, in a tone that matched the smile and made his chest tighten oddly.

“Hi,” he returned. So much for witty conversation.

For a moment he just stood there in awkward silence. So did she, although he didn’t know how awkward she might feel.

“Come back for your change?” she finally asked.

“No, I had to do some laundry,” he finally said, “so I thought I’d come by while it’s washing.”

If she realized he’d gone out of his way from the motel to do it, she didn’t say so. “You weren’t expecting to stay this long, were you?”