Just Around the Corner

“So tell me about your family,” she said as he maneuvered slowly around the curves with their huge drop-offs only a foot away. There was no guardrail between them and those canyons.

Usually Matt liked the sense of danger he felt whenever he drove here. Today he was too aware of the woman beside him—and the baby growing inside her.

“Not much to tell,” he said eventually, shrugging, rubbing a sweaty hand along the leg of his jeans before returning it to the wheel.

“You said you had family history to give me,” she reminded him. “It’s why I’m here.”

He nodded. Took another curve. “Basically we were all healthy,” he said, trying to remember without thinking back.

“We?” she asked. She’d turned again, had drawn up one knee as she faced him. “How many of you were there?”

“Just my brother and sister and me. And my mother and father, of course.” You couldn’t forget them.

“No predisposition to any diseases that you know of? Nothing genetic we need to worry about?”

Matt froze. Nothing. At least not the kind of thing she was referring to. What she wasn’t asking and needed to know about was a different predisposition altogether—the tendency to get oneself thrown in jail that seemed to beset the male Sheffields. There were some basic values missing in the men of his family.

There was a time Matt had believed he’d been spared that particular curse. A time he’d convinced himself that if he did have it, he’d gotten the better of it, risen above it.

He’d been full of shit back then.

“My mother was anemic after she had me and my sister, but that was all.”

“Any cancer you’re aware of?”

“None.”

“Are they all still alive?”

How the hell did he answer that? Glancing over at her, Matt saw the warm interest in her intent green eyes—interest that, regardless of the magnificent scenery, was reserved for him.

It was inevitable that she’d find out. He owed her the chance to raise her kid right in spite of the strikes against him.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly.

He glanced over once more—in time to see the look of surprise that she quickly masked—and then he kept his eyes firmly on the hairpin turns in front of him. There was little traffic on the road, except for the occasional car approaching from the opposite direction.

And some motorcycles he could see in the distance behind him.

He waited for her to say something. For the questions to start. Nothing happened.

The turns kept coming. He continued, somehow, to stay on the road as he tackled them.

“My father died when I was in high school.” Murdered in prison because he’d accosted one too many of the new arrivals. He’d found one who’d managed to smuggle in a weapon.

“I’m sorry.”

She sounded so sincere he almost looked over at her again. But he knew better. Matt Sheffield needed sympathy—caring—from no one. That was his golden rule.

One that had served him well.

“Don’t be,” he said. There was no need for her to waste her sympathy. “We weren’t close.”

“You didn’t live together?”

“Off and on.”

“Your parents were divorced, then?”