Without asking, Sam brought Kane a beer in a cold mug and handed it to him. A thousand times he’d told her that she shouldn’t wait on him, but Sam had a very hard head. Setting the beer down, he got up and went to lower her into one of Mike’s fat leather chairs. She wasn’t heavy, but she was as unwieldy as a dirigible.
“Thanks,” she said, then nodded toward his beer. “Defeats the purpose of my waiting on you if you have to get up to help me, doesn’t it?”
Smiling at her, he sat down and drank half the beer in one gulp. Sometimes he wanted what his brother had so badly that it was like a flame that threatened to burn him up. He wanted a wife who loved him and his sons, wanted a home of his own; he wanted to stop living vicariously through his brother.
“Out with it,” Sam said.
“Out with what?”
“You can’t lie any better than Mike can. What’s bothering you?”
You, he wanted to say. Loving my sister-in-law, beginning to hate my brother.
“Kane,” Sam said, “stop looking at me like that and talk to me. Tell me what’s bothering you.”
He couldn’t tell her the truth, so he told her about his mother’s call.
“What are you going to do?” Sam asked.
Kane hadn’t considered accepting his mother’s invitation, but suddenly the thought of two weeks alone in the high mountain desert with four women appealed to him. If they were New York women, they’d be afraid of the open space, of the noises in the night, and they always fell in love with their cowboy guide. Show a New York woman a man in a denim shirt, tight Levi’s, and a worn pair of cowboy boots and you had her. Throw your leg over a horse and she’d probably swoon.
As he finished his beer, he smiled. It might be nice to have a woman look at him with stars in her eyes. Samantha looked at Mike as though he were an Olympic god, and his sons looked at Sam as though she were the only mother they’d ever had.
“Thinking you might go?”
“Maybe,” Kane said, getting up. “I’m going to have another beer. Can I get you anything?”
“On the countertop in the kitchen is a fax from Pat. It tells all about the four women
who are going on the trip.”
With a face filled with astonishment, Kane looked back at her, but Sam just shrugged. “She called and said she hoped you’d change your mind. Kane, one of the women is a widow. Three years ago she was in a car crash that killed her husband and made her miscarry her child.”
When he went to the kitchen, Kane picked up the fax and read it. Ruth Edwards was the widow’s name, and his mother had even found a photo of her. Even in the bad reproduction he could tell she was beautiful, as tall, as long-legged, as dark-haired as his beloved wife had been.
Quickly, Kane read about the other three women. One was a hairdresser’s assistant, another ran a metaphysical shop in the Village, and the fourth was a short, pretty blonde whose name seemed vaguely familiar.
“She writes murder mysteries,” Sam said from over his shoulder. She was standing so close her belly was touching his side, but the distance from the front of her belly to her head made her face seem nearly a yard away.
“Read any of them?”
“All of them. I buy them the minute they hit the stands.”
“Speaking of writers, how’s Mike’s book coming?”
“Our book,” she said with emphasis, knowing Kane was teasing her, “will be out in six months.” She was speaking of the biography she and Mike had written, The Surgeon by Elliot Taggert, the pen name combining her maiden name with Mike’s surname. “Well?” she said impatiently. “Are you going?”
“Will you keep the boys?”
It was a rhetorical question and they both knew it. “I’d keep them forever.”
“Which is exactly why I think I’ll go check out Mom’s ladies.”
Sam’s eyes twinkled. “Pat’s sending the family jet to pick you up at eight tomorrow morning. It’s already left Denver.”
Kane wasn’t sure whether to laugh or groan. In the end he did both, then put his arm around Sam’s shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Do I seem as lonely as you women think I am?”
More, Sam thought, but she didn’t answer him. She was glad he was going to be around people.