“See you,” Lucy said without making any eye contact, and Jeremiah knew, he totally understood, that he was the biggest asshole in the world. Yelling at kids, yelling at women who were just trying to help.
The front door shut, and in the silence Casey looked at him, his big five-year-old eyes damning him.
“Hey.” Aaron came back into the room, reeking of that deodorant all the preteen boys wore, convinced the smell made them irresistible to girls. “Where’s Lucy?”
“Jeremiah scared her away,” Casey said.
“Uncle J,” Aaron sighed, and then walked into the kitchen for something to eat.
“I was a jerk, wasn’t I?” he asked Casey, who nodded.
“I should apologize, shouldn’t I?” Casey nodded again.
Swearing under his breath Jeremiah grabbed Reese’s keys from the coffee table and headed outside to apologize to Lucy.
Mia wasn’t picking up her phone. Probably because she and Jack were having wild monkey sex while Lucy stood here getting barked at by a man she’d almost had sex with just a few short hours ago.
She ended the call and looked up at the sky, wishing there was some kind of prayer for teleportation. Mom hadn’t shared that one with her.
“Lucy?”
She spun at the sound of Jeremiah’s voice. He stepped down the steps to the asphalt and she lifted her phone and quickly pressed Redial.
“Look, Jeremiah, I get it things are tough for you, but frankly, my life is no picnic right now. So why don’t you just go deal with your mess and I’ll deal with mine?”
He ignored that, stopping a foot from her. “I’m sorry, Lucy.”
Mia’s voice mail came on and Lucy hung up again.
“Your sister’s not around?”
“No.”
His smile was a variation of his million-dollar grin, more devastating because it was tarnished at the corners, its wattage dimmed right down. “I can take you home.”
Past caring about his feelings, she looked him right in the eye and didn’t bother mincing words. “I think you have bigger problems to deal with.”
She watched him bristle, his blue eyes darken.
“Where’s Ben?” she asked.
“Probably in the barn.”
“He do that a lot? Run away.”
“Enough that I know he’s in the barn.”
“Are you—”
“I’m giving him and me a chance to cool down,” he interrupted. “I appreciate your concern, but I’ve been doing this for a year, Lucy. You met these boys five minutes ago.” He held up Reese’s keys. “Take Reese’s car. He’ll come and get it when he gets off the couch.”
There was more she wanted to say. Plenty more. But what was the point, really? She grabbed the keys. “Thanks.”
“See you.”
“Yeah,” she snapped, remembering the way the touch of his hands had turned her inside out, the way he’d kissed her like she was the best thing he’d tasted in years. She felt duped by that man in the moonlight last night. “See you.”
She got back in Reese’s car and peeled out of the driveway, leaving Jeremiah Stone in her dust.
Good riddance, she thought.
4
Jeremiah waited until he could no longer see the dust plume behind Lucy’s car.
Not your finest showing, Stone. Not at all.
If his sister were alive she’d take him by his ear and give him a good shaking.
But the truth was, he’d suffered through months of women with the best intentions coming through this house with their casseroles and sympathy, and he’d watched the boys run roughshod all over them. Using that well-meaning sympathy to their advantage.
Eating pie for dinner, sleeping all together in Aaron’s room, playing video games for hours at a time, not doing their homework. The last babysitter he’d hired had let Casey walk around with Annie’s favorite green towel, like it was a baby blanket. And Ben…Christ, that kid’s temper had grown out of control the last few months. He was like a lit fuse and Jeremiah never knew when the bomb was going to go off.
It wasn’t that he didn’t think the boys needed sympathy, but they also needed rules. He needed rules. He needed some boundaries and Ben needed to know that he couldn’t just run off to the barn every time he felt like Jeremiah was being unfair.
Jeremiah mentally braced himself and headed into the barn. Usually Ben sat in the empty stall at the back, burying himself in the clean hay. But he wasn’t there.
“Ben?” he yelled and then listened for a rustle or a creaking board. Nothing. He climbed up into the hayloft and found only the cats snoozing in the sunlight.
The nine-year-old wasn’t in the arena or feeding any of the horses in the paddocks.
He tried, he really did, not to jump to the worst possible conclusion. But the worst possible conclusion was the kind of thing that had happened to this family, time and time again. And he couldn’t stop himself from imagining Ben running off along the fence line toward the creek and the high pastures and all kinds of trouble. His heart, feeding on worry and anger, pounded in his neck as he stomped back to the house.