Keeping Caroline

He was still wondering why when Caroline came downstairs. Immediately he understood why she had taken the time for makeup. Judging by the puffy half-moons under her eyes, she hadn’t slept any better than he had.

Did she really think he didn’t know her well enough to see through a little cream and powder?

“Good morning,” she said, a little too brightly.

“Morning.” Because he couldn’t figure out what else to do with his hands, he wiped his palms on his jeans. A lifetime ago he would have wrapped her up in a bear hug, lifted her off her feet and kissed her until the serious little hooks at the corners of her mouth turned upward and a spark of laughter lit her tired eyes. But those days were gone forever. It was best to not focus on the past.

He’d come here to get on with his life, not to look back.

“Breakfast?” Savannah asked Caroline.

Caroline shook her head. She spread her palm across Jeb’s nappy crown and shook. “Morning, little rebel.”

Jeb smiled, pancakes puffing his cheeks out like a chipmunk’s. “Mornin’, Miss Caroline.”

Matt stood. “I thought we could walk around the house today. You can show me what you want done so I can get together a list of the materials I’ll need.”

They strolled through the house, intimate strangers, discussing pulling up musty carpeting and restoring the hardwood floors beneath; replacing windows warped shut; modernizing the kitchen and enlarging the laundry room. At the staircase, he started up.

Caroline tugged on his sleeve. “No. The upstairs isn’t too bad. It’s just my living quarters, anyway, and the nursery.”

Matt stiffened instinctively. “Nursery?”

“One of my little charges is an infant, almost five months old. I moved the nursery upstairs so she’d be away from the noise and the dust when you start working.”

Nodding so that he wouldn’t have to talk around the lump in his throat, Matt followed her. God, a baby. He didn’t know how Caroline did it. It hurt him just to think about a tiny, dependent life lying up there.

Caroline led him to the worst part of the house, the old den and semi-enclosed back porch. “This will be the center of the day care. If we knock out the wall here.” She pointed to the back door. “And enclose the outside but leave lots of windows, it would be like a big solarium. A bright, sunny playroom.”

Matt pushed on one of the porch’s corner posts. Rotted wood crumbled beneath his fingers.

“Kids need sunshine,” she said hopefully. “But you know how the weather is out here, half the year it’s too hot to go outside and the other half it’s bitter cold. Can you do it?”

“This wood is in bad shape,” he said. “It would have to be completely reframed.” Then, seeing her crestfallen expression, he sighed. “But I’ll figure out something. I’m going to need to borrow your car to get some supplies from town. And I’ll need tools.”

“Everything I’ve got is outside in the shed. You can buy whatever else you’ll need. I’ll give you some money.”

He gave her a look that said not in this lifetime and headed out.

“Matt, wait.” Propped against a lopsided screen door, she chewed her lower lip. “Have I ever given you reason to think that I blamed you for…what happened?”

The slumbering beast he’d caged deep inside himself rumbled, stretched in slow awakening. “It was a long time ago. What does it matter now?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“The truth. I want to know if you thought I blamed you when Brad died.”

He shrugged and started to turn away. She stopped him, her fingers digging pits in his biceps.

“Matt?”

“Except for the years I was away in the army, I’ve looked out for you since you were twelve years old. I’ve made sure nothing ever hurt you.”

“And?”

“And when Brad was sick, sometimes you looked at me like you couldn’t understand why I wasn’t looking out for you then. Why I wasn’t protecting both of you.”

“It was leukemia, Matt. No one could have protected us from that.”

He could have contacted more doctors, Matt wanted to argue. Found one with a treatment none of the dozens of others he’d contacted knew of. He could have taken his son to another hospital. He’d flown with Brad to St. Jude’s in Tennessee—the best of the best when it came to treating children’s cancer in the U.S.—but he could have taken him to one of the research centers in Europe. He was his father. He should have been able to do something.

Matt wanted to tell Caroline she was right to hold him accountable, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak at all. His jaw had hardened to the point he thought it might shatter.

Caroline dropped her hand from his arm. “I’m sorry. I never meant to make you feel responsible.”

Without a word, he pounded down the crumbling back steps, hardly noticing the sag of weakened boards beneath his weight. Deep within his chest, the beast—the truth—clawed toward the light.

It didn’t matter whether or not Caroline blamed him for Brad’s death.

He blamed himself.

Matt hacked at the weathered boards on the back wall of the house with the claw end of his hammer, tearing out the old wood so it could be replaced with new. High clouds over the sunset gave everything around him a watery gray tone. He’d have to quit soon; there wouldn’t be enough light to continue. Maybe tomorrow he’d buy some halogen lamps at the Feed and Lumber in town. The more hours he worked, the sooner he’d be done. Free to get on with his life, such as it was.

And the harder he worked, the less time he would have to think. But busy hands didn’t necessarily mean a busy mind, he’d learned. If anything, the repetitive swing, dig, pull of the hammer allowed his consciousness to fade back from his task, let his thoughts wander where they would.

Which was right back to Caroline.

He’d spent the better part of the week ripping off the face of the old house, carefully placing new supports and joists as he worked. The plastic construction fence he’d strung around the work area kept Jeb out of his way. The roar of power tools drowned out the cries of the baby from upstairs, and his wife kept the twins pretty well corraled. But no amount of sweat or noise could contain his memories. His mind insisted on traipsing through the minefield that was his past.

He and Caroline had lived together in marriage for over a year after their son’s death, hardly talking, certainly never discussing things like blame. Yet now, practically on the eve of their divorce, the feelings and words rushed forth like water over a swollen dam. If one week here could leave him this beaten and bruised, how would he survive a month?

He’d decided the best approach would be to stay away from Caroline as much as possible. He refused to call it hiding out. It was just a…strategic withdrawal.

He felt a presence behind him. His stomach lurched and he looked over his shoulder, expecting to see Caroline. But instead of his wife’s soft caramel eyes, he met a sharp black gaze.

A teenage girl stared at him—more accurately, at his posterior—with huge, dark eyes. Her hair, just as dark, hung limply to her shoulders, brushing the straps of her clingy midriff top.

For a second she looked impossibly young, innocent. Then she hooked her thumbs into the pockets of her hip-hugger jeans, pushing the waistband well below the gold hoop piercing her navel, cocked her hips and puffed out her B-cup chest. Her gaze skimmed up the length of his legs, pausing importantly about waist level before slowly grazing over his bare chest and shoulders. By the time her eyes met his, she looked twice her age.

And Matt felt older than dirt.

He scooped his T-shirt off the ground, pulled it over his head and went back to work on the wall, sinking the hammer’s claws deep into rotten wood and ripping backward until the boards splintered satisfyingly. Behind him, he heard the girl shift closer and gritted his teeth. He’d been a cop long enough to have seen hundreds like her on the street. Every one of them was named Trouble.

“Whoever you are, go away,” he said. “I’m working.”

She sidled around him until he could see her out of the corner of his eye. Her lashes fluttered like the wings of a baby bird. “Gem Millholland,” she said. “And I’m pleased to meet you, too.”

“Fine. Now run along.” He didn’t hear footsteps. Bad sign.

“You’re Caroline’s ex, aren’t you?”

Matt tossed another rotted board onto the rubbish pile. “Not yet.” Not until he finished this damn house and she signed the papers.

Apparently Gem Millholland didn’t concern herself with legal details such as divorce documents. “Wow. That means you’re a free man.”

“More like an indentured servant,” he said, sounding more disgruntled than he meant to. “I have to earn my freedom.”

Gem clucked and sidled a step closer. Damn, he shouldn’t have encouraged her.

“Yeah, I heard she’s making you fix up the house.”

He ignored her, and to his surprise, she left. But thirty seconds later she was back, pressing something cold and wet between his shoulder blades. His back arced reflexively.

“Poor baby, working so hard. You’re hot, aren’t you? I’ll bet you could use something tall and wet.” She rolled the cold thing across his back while her other hand grazed his side and settled on his hip, holding him in place, then slipped around to the front of his jeans.

Biting back a curse, he peeled her hand from his waist and turned. Parched as he was, he backed away from the tumbler of iced tea she held, but he didn’t let go of her wrist. “No thank you.” He pinned her down with a hard stare. “On all counts.”

“Gem?” Caroline turned the corner of the house. Shocked at the scene she walked into, she swiveled her head back and forth between Gem and her husband. Gem stared at the ground while Matt’s flustered gaze and his grip on the girl’s wrist told Caroline all she needed to know about what had been happening.

Gem giggled. Matt let her go.

As surprise faded into displeasure, aimed at both Gem and her husband, Caroline decided to start with Gem. “You’re late again,” she admonished. “That’s twice this week.”

Gem made a Betty Boop “O” with her lips, for Matt’s benefit, Caroline was sure, and covered her mouth with her hand before she sashayed away.

Caroline turned to Matt. “And you. Go easy on her, would you? She’s had a tough time of it.”

Matt raised his hands. “Hey, I’m Mr. Easy,” he said, then muttered, “at least she seemed to think so.”

Caroline didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “So what were you going to do? Get her in a wristlock and cuff her?”

“What was I going to do? She was the one with the roaming hands. And I don’t think it was the change in my pocket she was after.”

The lecture Caroline had been about to spout vanished from her mind, blown away by a single sweep of his tormented gaze.

Taking a good look at her big, sweaty husband, she couldn’t blame Gem for putting the moves on him. The sight of him, all hard muscle and bronzed skin, was enough to stir the hormones of a nun.

Suddenly, Caroline felt the need to giggle. “I’m sorry. Gem doesn’t exactly have a grasp of appropriate adult relationships.”

“Maybe that’s because she’s not an adult,” Matt rumbled.

“She’s seventeen, and she’s going to have to grow up fast. She’s got two little ones depending on her.”

Matt shoved his fingers into his back pockets, scowling. “The twins?”

Caroline nodded.

“Their father?”

“Not in the picture.”

“She’s seventeen and they’re fourteen months?” Matt shook his head. Math had never been his strong point, but even he understood how those numbers added up. Too much, too fast, too young.

Caroline stubbed the toe of her sneaker in the dirt. “Reminds me of myself at that age.”

“You weren’t saddled with two kids.”

Caroline’s eyes burned. She told herself it was just the dry wind that had kicked up. She would never consider a child a burden. “I could have been. I was younger than she is now when I fell in love with you. I got pregnant before we were married.”

Matt’s fingers rolled up into fists in his pockets. “Not when you were fifteen you didn’t.”

“No,” she said softly. “You made sure of that, didn’t you? Running off to play soldier as soon as things started getting serious between us.”

“I came back.”

“Five years later.”

“When we were both ready to make a commitment.”

“And then I was pregnant within a month, remember?”

“It’s not something I’m likely to forget.”

“We had a child between us, right from the start,” Caroline mused. “Maybe that’s why our marriage didn’t work when he was gone. We’d never really learned to live together, just the two of us. We didn’t know how. We still don’t.”

Matt never answered her. Straight-faced, he just picked up his tools and put them away one by one. Meticulous as ever.

Damn him, she knew what he was doing. He’d been here a week and she’d barely seen him. He was burying himself back here in the rubble of the porch he was deconstructing so that he didn’t have to deal with his life.

It was funny. As a negotiator, Matt’s job was communication. But little by little, after Brad’s cancer had been diagnosed, he’d shut down. At least at home. On the job he was sharp as ever, the best in the state at what he did. In the final months before their separation, it seemed his H.T.s were the only ones Matt could talk to. There were times she’d been jealous of them. At least they had his full attention when they talked.

Sometimes he even talked back.

Kicking a loose board and wishing it had been his shin, Caroline stormed off. At the kitchen entrance she jerked the rickety screened door open and let it slam behind her.

He wouldn’t get away with ignoring her. Not this time.

He was going to face her. Face the past.

He couldn’t avoid her forever.

She wouldn’t let him.

“Come on in,” Caroline invited, holding open the door behind her. Matt paused, evaluating her tone of voice. It fairly bubbled with levity. Too much levity.

She was up to something.

Inside, she practically skipped across the kitchen. “I’ll just check on the baby and then we’ll get started.”

Before Matt could respond, tell her this was a bad idea, her feet were pounding up the steps toward the nursery.

No way was he going to follow her up there.

Once again he cursed the storm front sweeping in from the west. For the past two days, since the run-in with Gem, he’d pretty much been able to dodge Caroline and, thank heaven, the children in her care. But the dark clouds and rumble of thunder overhead were about to end that streak.

He’d been thinking the rain would give him an excuse to take an afternoon off. Visit some old friends in town. No such luck. Caroline had asked him to help her indoors. She had ceiling fans to hang.

Ceiling fans. The two of them together on a ladder, no more than six inches apart. He’d be able to smell her lavender scent. Feel every breath she took. Watch the flecks of gold and black swirl in her sparkling irises. They’d talk, and he knew where the conversation would lead. The same place it always led.

Christ, he’d rather try to negotiate the devil out of hell than have to explain to her why he didn’t want a child while she looked at him with those furious, desperate eyes.

He closed the kitchen door behind Alf. The brass knob rattled in his hand. He’d have to fix that soon. A child could jimmy his way into the house with the back door lock dangling from its socket like a loose baby tooth.

Looking around the kitchen as if it were his own personal purgatory, his heart did a slow roll. He smelled fudge brownies. A dozen multicolored scribbles adorned the refrigerator. An army truck, complete with mounted machine gun, lay on the floor in front of the sink, perfectly placed to be tripped over. The sound of incessant banging on an electronic keyboard—the kind of noise only a kid could call music—pounded through the house from the dining room.

All of it, the sights, sounds, scents, could have belonged to any family. Even his, a few years ago.

Matt caught himself, stumbled through the kitchen on numb feet, passing Jeb and his keyboard in the dining room, and paced the living room, collecting himself.

Wondering what was taking Caroline so long, and what he was going to say to her when she returned, he paused at the bottom of the stairs. It was quiet up there.

As it was down here. The keyboard music had stopped.

“Caroline?”

No answer.

“Caroline? Is Jeb up there with you?”

Still no answer. Swearing under his breath, he headed for the dining room. It wasn’t his business. Caroline was the baby-sitter, not him. But he still had to be sure the boy was okay.

Matt found Jeb in the kitchen, with Alf. Blood pounding in his temples and a headache already well entrenched at the base of his skull, Matt swooped across the worn linoleum. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he roared.

Jeb pulled his head out of Alf’s fur, looked up with unseeing eyes. His thin arms clamped tighter around the dog’s neck. Alf thumped his tail and wheezed.

When Jeb didn’t answer, Matt unwound kid from dog. Holding Jeb by the upper arms, he lifted until the boy’s sneakers swung a foot off the floor. “I asked what you were doing.”

Jeb’s dark eyes pinched shut. His mouth gaped and pursed like a fish. But instead of an answer, the boy let out a wail that half the county would probably mistake for the tornado siren.

The hairs on the back of Matt’s neck jumped to attention. He almost dropped the kid in his hurry to save his eardrums.

The sound abated as quickly as it had begun. Jeb crouched on the cold floor, his chest heaving. His eyes rolled wildly.

Matt steadied himself with a breath, waiting for his buzzing nerves and ringing ears to quiet, then brushed his fingers across Jeb’s trembling knee. “Hey, kiddo—”

Hardly a blur he moved so fast, Jeb sprang to his feet, lashed a solid kick into Matt’s knee and squirreled under the table. Against the wall, he curled into a ball, arms locked around his knees and head buried between his elbows, and rocked himself, sobbing silently.

Matt watched him, guilt and self-loathing swelling inside him. Jesus, God, what had he done?

Bare feet slapped across the floor behind Matt. Caroline flung herself into the room in a dead run, grabbing onto the doorjamb to stop her momentum. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

Her gaze fell to the crumpled boy beneath the table. She dropped to her knees next to him. “Oh my God.” She reached out to Jeb. “Hey, little rebel. What is it? What’s wrong?”

Jeb pulled tighter into his little ball.

The fire in Caroline’s eyes scalded Matt. “What happened? What did you do to him?”

Matt tried to move. To help her. But his feet might as well have been stuck in cement. The cement might as well have been sinking in a foul river. He couldn’t breathe, either.

She gave him one heartbeat to answer. Two. Then her lips curled back in a snarl. “Get out.” Fury swam close to the surface in her voice. “Get the hell out. Now!”

He stumbled back a step. Then another. He turned. He could hear Caroline cooing and clucking behind him, childish, nonsense words. The screen door slammed shut behind him as he made it out of the house. Out onto the porch. Into the air.

But he still couldn’t breathe.

Chapter 3

“I thought you’d gone,” Caroline said, pushing open the squeaky screened door and stepping onto the front porch. Matt’s big frame was hunched over on the steps, elbows propped on his knees, head bowed. He looked so miserable that it was hard to stay mad at him. She couldn’t possibly hate him more than he hated himself right now.

“I wanted to be sure he was…okay.”

“He’s okay now.” It had taken Caroline ten minutes to talk Jeb out from beneath the table. Now, he was sitting at the table plucking out a sort of childish dirge with one finger on his electric keyboard, with a glass of extra-chocolate milk she’d put in his free hand.

She thought about sitting next to Matt. Decided to stand. “Tell me what happened.”

He straightened himself with the agility of someone twice his age. But when he was upright, he sat tall. Like an accused man before a jury. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“You didn’t hurt him,” she had to admit.

“I scared him.”

She sighed and sat on the porch swing he had fixed a few days ago, rocking the seat backward with her feet. “He gets scared easy.” She looked up at her husband. “He’s had good reason to be afraid of big, strong men.”

She saw when the truth clicked in his mind.

“Damn,” he said. “I knew it. I saw it in the way Savannah carried herself, like she was always ready to duck.”

“Her and Jeb both.” When his eyes widened again, Caroline knew he’d figured it all out.

“Jeb’s blindness?”

“His father threw him into a wall when he was ten months old.”

“Why the hell didn’t Savannah get out if she knew he was abusive?”

“She did. He found her.”

Matt went deadly still, his muscles coiled like a snake ready to strike. “I hope the bastard went to jail.”

Caroline rocked the swing back and forward again. “He got six months. He’s out now.”

She was glad Jeb was still inside, where he couldn’t hear what Matt said next. No telling where the boy would repeat that kind of language.

“What happened in there, Matt?” she asked so softly that the rumble of the storm moving in almost drowned out her words.

“I told him not to pet Alf.”

Caroline laughed mirthlessly. “This was all over a dog?”

“It isn’t safe for Jeb to play with Alf.”

“Agreed. Unsupervised.”

Matt blinked, clearly he hadn’t quite caught on to her train of thought.

“But what would it hurt for you to let him pet the dog a little with you standing by?”

“No.”

“Alf used to love to play fetch with Brad. Jeb could throw the stick.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why not? Is it Jeb you’re protecting?” She rose and put herself in front of him. “Or yourself?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lightning slashed across the sky, lighting his face. The storms that had threatened all day had finally arrived.

“You can’t even stand to look at a child. Any child.”

He didn’t deny it.

She stood, watching the lightning in the distance, and crossed her arms over her chest. “You say you want to get on with your life, look to the future, but you can’t. Because you haven’t accepted your past.”

“Because I don’t want another baby, like you?”

“In part.”

“You think another baby would make everything better? Make me forget about Brad?” He dragged a hand through the wild waves the wind kicked up in his hair. “Jesus, Caroline. Children can’t just be replaced, like puppies from the pound.”

Thunder battered the old house, and Caroline was glad for it. The shaking ground covered the tremors his words shot through her.

She’d been a fool to think a year would make a difference. A fool to leave Matt, knowing she was pregnant, without telling him about his child. She had hoped that time would heal his grief as it had healed hers, or at least diminish the pain. She hoped he’d be able to love another child.

She’d been wrong.

Matt rose and paced to the porch rail and back again. As he passed by the front door, he stopped, listening. Jeb, fully recovered now, banged randomly on his keyboard, singing the same verse from a nursery rhyme over and over and laughing.

Matt tilted back his head. “How can you stand to live with that every day.”

Her heart sinking, she understood instinctively that Matt didn’t mean Jeb’s bad singing, but the sounds of a child having fun. Of life.

The first fat drops of rain fell like blood against a crimson sunset. In the kitchen, Jeb hit a particularly discordant note. Caroline closed her own eyes and almost smiled. “How can you stand to live without it?”