Lonergan's Secrets: Expecting Lonergan's Baby / Strictly Lonergan's Business / Satisfying Lonergan's Honour

Dropping his duffle bag by the door, he headed for the stairs at the far end of the room. Each stair was a log, sawn in half and varnished to a high sheen. The banisters looked like petrified tree trunks, and his hand slid along the cool surface as he mounted the stairs to the bedrooms above.

His steps sounded like the slow beating of his own heart. Every move he made took him closer to memories he didn’t want to look at. Yet there was no going back. No avoiding it anymore.

At the head of the stairs he paused and glanced down the long hall. Closed doors were all that greeted him, but he knew the rooms behind those doors as well as he knew his own reflection in the mirror. He and his cousins had shared those rooms every summer for most of their lives. They’d crashed up the stairs, slid down the banisters and run wild across every acre of the family ranch.

Until that last summer.

The day when everything had changed forever.

The day they’d all grown up—and apart.

Scowling, he brushed away the memories as he would a cloud of gnats in front of his face and walked to the door at the head of the stairs. His grandfather’s room. A man he hadn’t seen in fifteen years.

Shame rippled through him and he told himself that Maggie Collins would be proud if she knew it. She was right about one thing. They shouldn’t have stayed away from the old man for so long. Should have found a way to see him despite the pain.

But they hadn’t.

Instead they’d punished themselves, and in the doing had punished an old man who hadn’t deserved it, as well.

He knocked and waited.

“Sam?”

The voice was weaker than he’d thought it would be but still so familiar. Apparently the housekeeper/bodyguard had spilled the news about his arrival. He opened the door, stepped inside and felt his heart turn over in his chest.

Jeremiah Lonergan. The strongest man Sam had ever known looked… old. Most of his hair was gone, his tanned scalp shining in the soft lamplight. A fringe of gray hair ringed his head, and the lines that had always defined his face were deeper, scored more fully into his features. He looked small in the wide bed, covered in one of the quilts his wife had made decades ago.

Sam felt the solid punch of sorrow slam him in the gut. Time had passed. Too much time. And for that one startling moment he deeply regretted all the years he’d missed with the man he’d always loved. For some reason, he hadn’t really expected that Jeremiah would be different. Despite the phone call from the old man’s doctor saying that he didn’t have much time left, Sam had thought somehow that his grandfather would be unchanged.

“Hi, Pop,” he said and forced a smile.

“Come in, come in,” his grandfather urged, weakly waving one hand. Then he patted the edge of the bed. “Sit down, boy. Let me look at you.”

Sam did and, once he was close enough, gave his grandfather a quick once-over. He was thinner, but his eyes were clear and sharp. His tan wasn’t as dark as it had been, but there was no sickly pallor to his cheeks. His hands were gnarled, but they weren’t trembling.

All good things.

“How you feeling?” Sam asked, reaching out to lay one hand on his grandfather’s forehead.

Jeremiah brushed that hand away. “Fine. I’m fine. And I’ve already got me a doctor to poke and prod. Don’t need my grandson doing it, too.”

“Sorry,” Sam said with a shrug. “Professional hazard.” As a doctor, he could respect another doctor’s territory and not want to intrude. As a grandson, he wanted to see for himself that his grandfather was all right. Apparently, though, that wouldn’t be as easy as it sounded. “I spoke to Dr. Evans after I talked to you last month. He says that your heart’s in pretty bad shape.”

Jeremiah winced. “Doctors. Don’t pay them any mind.”

Sam laughed shortly. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mean you, boy,” the old man corrected quickly. “I’m sure you’re a fine doctor. Always been real proud of you, Sam. In fact, I was telling Bert Evans that you might be just the man to buy him out.”

Sam stood up and shoved both hands in his pockets. He’d been afraid of this. Afraid that the old man would make more of this visit than there was. Afraid he’d ask Sam to stay. Expect him to stay. And Sam couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

But his grandfather either didn’t notice his discomfort or didn’t care. Because he kept talking. And with every word, guilt pinged around inside Sam just a little bit harder.

“Bert’s a good doc, mind. But he’s as old as me and getting ready to fold up shop.” He smiled up at Sam and winked conspiratorially. “The town needs a doctor, and seeing as you don’t have a place of your own—”

“Pop, I’m not staying.” Sam forced himself to say it flat out. He didn’t want to hurt his grandfather, but he didn’t want the old man holding onto false hopes either. Guilt tore at him to see the gleam go out of his grandfather’s eyes. “I’m here for the summer,” he said softly, willing the old man to understand just what it had cost him to come home again. “But when it’s over, I’m leaving again.”

“I thought.” Jeremiah’s voice trailed away as he sagged back into his pillows. “I thought that once I got you back here, you’d see it’s where you belong. Where all of you belong.”

Pain rippled through Sam in tiny waves, one after the other. There was a time once, when he was a kid, that he would have done anything to live here forever. To be a part of the little town that had once seemed so perfect to him. To know that this house would always be his.

But those dreams died one bright summer day fifteen years ago.

Now he didn’t belong anywhere.

“I’m sorry, Pop,” he said, knowing it wasn’t enough but that it was all he had to offer.

The old man looked at him for a long time before finally closing his eyes on a tired sigh. “It’s a long summer, boy. Anything might happen.”

“Don’t make plans for me, Jeremiah,” Sam warned, though it cost him to hurt the man again. “I won’t stay. I can’t. And you know why.”

“I know why you think that,” he said, his voice a weary sigh. “And I know you’re wrong. All of you are. But a man’s got to find his own way.” He slipped down farther beneath the quilt. “I’m feeling tired now, so why don’t you come see me tomorrow and we’ll talk some more.”

“Jeremiah…”

“Go on now,” he whispered. “Go down and get yourself something to eat. I’ll still be here in the morning.”

When his grandfather closed his eyes, effectively ending any more tries at talking, Sam had no choice. He turned and headed for the door, let himself out and quietly closed the door behind him. He’d been in the house less than fifteen minutes and already he’d upset an old man with a bad heart.

Good job.

But he couldn’t let his grandfather count on him staying. Couldn’t give Jeremiah the promise of a future when the past was so thick around Sam he could hardly see the present.

He’d long since become accustomed to living with memories that haunted him. But he’d never be able to live here again—where he’d see a ghost around every corner.

Three

Maggie sat in her living room and stared across the yard at the main ranch house. No more than twenty feet of ground separated the two buildings, but at the moment it felt like twenty miles.

In the two years she’d lived at the Lonergan ranch she’d never felt more of an outsider. Never felt as alone as she had that first day when her car had finally gasped its last and died right outside the main gate.

Tears were close. Maggie was out of money and now out of transportation. Though she had nowhere in particular to go, up until five minutes ago she’d have been able to get there.

Staring up and down the long, empty road, edged on both sides by open fields, she fought a rising tide of despair that threatened to choke her. The afternoon sun was hot and reflected back off the narrow highway until she felt as though she were standing in an oven. No trees shaded the road, and the last sign she’d passed had promised that the town of Coleville was still twenty-five miles away.

Just thinking about the long walk ahead of her made her tired. But sitting down and having a good long cry wouldn’t get her any closer to town. And feeling sorry for herself would only get her a stuffed-up nose and red eyes. Nope. Maggie Collins didn’t waste time on self-pity. Instead she kept trying. Kept searching. Knowing that someday, somewhere, she’d find the place where she belonged. Where she could plant herself and grow some roots. The kind of roots she’d always wanted as a child.

But to earn those roots she had to get off her duff. Resigned, she opened up the car door and grabbed her navy-blue backpack off the floor of the passenger seat.

“Looks like that car’s about had it.”

She hit her head on the roof of the old car as she backed out and straightened up all in one motion. The old man who’d spoken stood just a few feet from her, leaning against one of the whitewashed posts holding up a sign that proclaimed Lonergan. She hadn’t even heard him approach, which told her that either he was more spry than he looked or she was even more tired than she felt.

Probably the latter.

He wasn’t very tall. He wore a battered hat that shaded his lined, leathery face and his watchful dark eyes. His blue jeans were faded and worn, and his boots looked as if they were older than him.

“It just die on you?” he asked with a wave of one tanned hand at the car.

“Yeah,” she said after seeing the quiet glint of kindness in his dark brown eyes. “Not surprising, really. It’s been on borrowed time for the last few hundred miles.”

He looked her up and down—not in a threatening way, she thought later, but as a man might look at a lost child while he thought about how to help her.

Finally he said, “Can’t do anything about that car of yours, but if you’d care to come up to the house, maybe we can rustle up some lunch.”

She glanced back down the road at the emptiness stretching out in either direction, then back at the man waiting quietly for her to make up her mind. Maggie’d learned at an early age to trust her instincts, and every one she had was telling her to take a chance. What did she have to lose? Besides, if he turned out to be a weirdo, she was pretty sure she could outrun him.

“I can’t pay you for the food,” she said, lifting her chin and meeting his gaze with the only thing she had left—her pride. “But I’d be happy to do some chores for you in exchange.”

One corner of his mouth lifted and his face fell into familiar laugh lines that crinkled at the edges of his eyes. “I think we can work something out.”

Maggie sighed at the memory and leaned her head back against the overstuffed cushion of the big chair. Curling her legs up beneath her, she looked around the small cottage that had been her sanctuary for the last two years. A guesthouse, Jeremiah had offered it to her that first day. By the end of the lunch she’d prepared for them, he’d given her a job and this little house to call her own. And for two years they’d done well together.

She turned her head and for the first time saw a light other than the one in Jeremiah’s bedroom burning in the darkness. And she wondered what Sam Lonergan’s arrival was going to do to her world.

The scent of coffee woke him up.

Sam rolled over in the big bed and stared blankly at the ceiling. For a minute or two he couldn’t place where he was. Nothing new for him, though. A man who traveled as much as he did got used to waking up in strange places.

Then familiarity sneaked in and twisted at his heart, his guts. The room hadn’t changed much from when he was a kid. Whitewashed oak-plank walls, dotted with posters of sports heroes and one impossibly endowed swimsuit beauty, surrounded him. A desk on the far wall still held a plastic model of the inner workings of the human body, and the twin bookcases were stuffed with paperback mysteries and thrillers sharing space alongside medical dictionaries and old textbooks.

He threw one arm across his eyes and winced at the sharp jab of pain as memories prodded and poked inside him. A part of him was listening, half expecting to hear long-silent voices. His cousins, shouting to him from their rooms along the hall. It had always been like that during the summers they spent together.

The four Lonergan boys—as close as brothers. Born during a three-year clump, they’d grown up seeing each other every summer on the Lonergan ranch. Their fathers were brothers, and though none of them felt the pull for the ranch where they’d grown up, their sons had.

This was a world apart from everyday life. Where the land rolled open for miles, inviting boys to hop on their bikes to explore. There were small-town fairs, and fireworks and baseball games. There was working in the fields, helping with the horses Jeremiah had once kept and swimming in the lake.

At that thought, everything in Sam seized up. His heart went cold and air struggled to enter his lungs. It was harder than he thought it would be, being here. Seeing everything the same and yet so different.

“Shouldn’t have come,” he muttered, his voice sounding scratchy and raw to his own ears. But then, how could he not? The old man was in bad shape and he needed his grandsons. There was simply no way to deny him that.

Fifteen years he’d been gone and this room looked as though he’d left it fifteen minutes ago. It’s a hard thing for a grown man to come into the room he’d left as a boy. Especially when he’d left that room under a black cloud of guilt and pain.

But none of this was making it any easier on him.

“Not supposed to be easy,” he muttered, tossing the quilt covering him aside so he could stand up and face the first day of what promised to be the longest summer of his life.

From downstairs came the homey sounds of pans rattling and soft footsteps against the hardwood floor. The aroma of coffee seemed thicker now, heavier, though it was probably only that he was awake enough now to really hunger for it.

Had to be the water nymph in the kitchen.

Jeremiah’s housekeeper.

The woman he’d seen naked.

The woman he’d dreamed about all night.

Hell. He ought to thank her for that alone. With her in his mind, his brain had for once been too busy to torture him with images of another face. Another time.

Grabbing up his jeans, he yanked them on, then pulled on a white T-shirt and shoved his arms through the sleeves. Not bothering with shoes, he headed down the hall, pausing briefly at his grandfather’s closed bedroom door before continuing on toward the kitchen.

He needed coffee.

And maybe he needed something else, too. Another look at the mermaid?

His bare feet didn’t make a sound on the stairs, so he approached her quietly enough that she didn’t know he was watching her. Morning sunlight spilled through the shining windowpanes and lay like a golden blanket across the huge round pedestal table and the warm wood floor. Everything in the room practically glistened, and he had to admit that as a housekeeper, she seemed to be doing a hell of a job. The counters were tidy, the floor polished till it shone and even the ancient appliances looked almost new. The walls had been painted a bright, cheery yellow, and the stiffly starched white curtains at the windows nearly crackled in the breeze drifting under the partially opened sash.

But it was the woman who had Sam’s attention. Just as she had the night before. She moved around the old kitchen with a familiarity that at once pleased and irritated him.

Not exactly rational, but it was early. A part of Sam was glad his grandfather had had this woman here, looking out for him. And another completely illogical side of him resented that she was so much at home on the Lonergan ranch when he felt… on edge.

Her long dark hair was gathered into a neat braid that fell down the center of her back, ending at her shoulder blades. A bright red ribbon held the end of the braid together and made a colorful splash against the pale blue shirt she wore tucked into a pair of the most worn, faded jeans he’d ever seen. Threadbare in patches, the jeans hugged her behind and clung to her long legs like a desperate lover.

An old Stones tune poured quietly from the radio on the counter, and as Sam watched, the mermaid did a quick little dance and swiveled her hips in time to the music. His breath caught as his gaze locked on her behind and he found himself praying that one of those threadbare patches would give way, giving him another glimpse of her tanned skin.

Then she did a slow spin, caught a glimpse of him. And the smile on her face faded.

“Do you always sneak up on people or am I just special?”

Sam scrubbed one hand over his face, as if that would be enough to get his brain away from the tantalizing thoughts it had been entertaining.

“Didn’t want to interrupt the floor show,” he said tightly, hoping she wouldn’t hear the edge of hunger in his voice. He walked past her and headed straight for the coffeepot on the counter.

As the Stones song drifted into an R&B classic, he filled a heavy white mug with the coffee, took a sip, then turned around to face her. Leaning back against the counter, he crossed one bare foot over the other and asked, “You always dance in the kitchen?”

She huffed in a breath and tightened her grip on the spatula she held in her right hand. “When I’m alone.”

“Like the skinny-dipping, huh?”

Glaring at him, she said, “A gentleman wouldn’t remind me of that.”

“And a gentleman wouldn’t have looked,” he reminded her as the image of her wet, pale, honeyed skin rose up in his mind. “I did. Remember?”

“I’m not likely to forget.”

One eyebrow lifted as he swept his gaze up and down her quickly, thoroughly. “Me, neither.”

She opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again and took a deep breath. He could almost see her counting to ten to get a grip on the temper flashing in her eyes. Eyes, he noticed, that in the morning light weren’t as dark as he’d thought the night before. They were brown but not. More the color of good single-malt scotch.

He took another gulp of coffee and told himself to get a grip.

“You’re deliberately trying to pick a fight,” she said. “Why?”

He frowned into his coffee. “Because I’m not a nice man.”

“That’s not what your grandfather says.”

He looked at her. “Jeremiah’s prejudiced. And a hell of a storyteller. Don’t believe half of what he tells you.”

“He told me you’re a doctor. Is that right?”

“Yeah.” Frowning still, he took another sip of really superior coffee. “I am.”

“Did you—” she paused and waited for him to look at her “—examine him last night?”

He laughed, and that short burst of sound surprised him as much as it did her. “Me? Not a chance. Jeremiah still thinks of me as the thirteen-year-old kid who slapped a homemade plaster cast on his golden retriever.”

“You didn’t.”

He smiled to himself, remembering. “I really did. Made it out of papier-mâché. Just practicing,” he said, remembering how Jeremiah’s golden, Storm, had sat patiently, letting Sam do his worst. “Pop took it off before it had a chance to dry.”

She was smiling at him and her eyes looked. shiny. Something in him shifted, gave way, and uncomfortable, Sam straightened up and gulped at his coffee again. “Anyway, the point is, Jeremiah won’t let me touch him. I’ll talk to his doctor, though. Get what information I can.”

“Good.” She nodded and turned to stir the eggs, a golden foamy layer in the skillet on the stove. “I mean, it’s good that you can check. I’m worried. He’s been so…”

“What?”

She turned around to look at him again. “It’s not something I can put my finger on and say, There. That’s different. That’s wrong. It’s just that he’s not the same lately. He seems a little more tired. A little more… fragile somehow.”

“He’s closing in on seventy,” Sam reminded her and scowled to himself as he realized just how much time had slipped past him.

“And up until two weeks ago,” she said, “you wouldn’t have known it. Up at sunrise, doing chores, driving into town to have lunch with Dr. Evans, square dancing on Friday night.”

“Square dancing?” Another surprise and another flicker of irritation that this woman knew so much more about his grandfather than he did.

She waved one hand at him while she stirred the eggs. “He and some of his friends go to the senior center in Fresno on Fridays.” She paused and sighed. “At least, he used to.”

“Maybe it’s nothing,” he said, and wasn’t sure which of them he was trying to console.

“I hope so.”

He heard the hope in her voice and was touched that she cared so deeply. “You really love him, don’t you?”

“I really do.” She turned her back on the stove and faced him. “Look, Sam.” She said his name firmly, as if forcing herself to make a connection that she really wasn’t interested in. “You’re here to see your grandfather and I’m glad. For his sake.”

He shifted, pushing away from the counter to stand on his own two feet. “But…?”

“But…” she said, turning for the stove and the pan that was beginning to smoke, “I think that we should try to stay out of each other’s way while you’re here.”

“Is that right?” He stepped up alongside her and he felt tension ripple between them. Damn it. He didn’t need this. Didn’t want it. And he’d had every intention of steering clear of the little housekeeper. Until she’d suggested it.

Maggie stirred the scrambled eggs quickly, flipping them over and over again in the cast-iron skillet until they were a golden-brown and dry, just the way Jeremiah liked them. She tried to keep her mind on her cooking, but with Sam standing so close, it wasn’t easy.

She’d made up her mind last night that the one sure way to protect her place on this ranch was to stay out of the way this summer. She didn’t want to give any of the Lonergan cousins reason to think that their grandfather would be better off with someone other than her taking care of him.

She’d lain awake in her bed most of the night, thinking about this place and what it meant to her. About the old man who had become her family.

And if she were to be completely honest, sometime around dawn she’d thought about Sam. About the way she’d felt when he’d looked at her walking naked from the water.

About the swirl of heat that had swept through her, making the chill wind nothing more than a whisper. And she’d wondered what it would feel like to have him touch her, smooth his hands over her skin, dip his fingers into her—

“The eggs are burning.”

“What?” She blinked, stared at the pan and instinctively used her free hand to push it off the flame.

Instantly pain bristled on her palm and she dropped the spatula to cradle her left hand against her chest. Tears clouded her eyes and a whimper squeaked past her lips.

“Damn it!” Sam set his coffee cup on the stove, grabbed her left hand, looked at it, then dragged her with him across the kitchen to the sink. He turned on the cold water and held her hand beneath the icy stream. Instantly the pain subsided and she sighed.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” she said, wiggling her fingers in an effort to pull her hand free of his tight grasp. It didn’t work. “I just—”

“Doesn’t look bad,” he said, smoothing his fingers over the palm of her hand with a tenderness that touched something deep inside her. “Hold still and let me be sure.”

The doctor in him took over, she noticed, as the cranky man became suddenly all business.