Lost Cause

The doctor had talked about him doing physical therapy on his leg, but Gary was thinking he’d find out what he had to do and carry it out on his own

He did most things on his own. He didn’t feel any need for a cheerleader.

Besides, he’d been considering a trip. What better time? While convalescing, he’d discovered he was curious about these sisters it seemed he had. One who was apparently heartbroken because he hadn’t been excited about some kind of reunion, and the other who’d wanted to chew a strip off him because he wanted to be left alone.

Funny thing, since he’d gotten first the call from the P.I. and then the one from the sister, he’d found he did remember them. Or at least he thought he did. His memories from before he went to live with the Lindstroms in Bakersfield had a hazy, dreamlike quality.

He wasn’t 100 percent sure which people were the family he’d lost and which were foster families. But chasing memories that refused to be caught was getting old.

So he figured he’d take a ride across country to Washington state, maybe stay a couple of weeks, talk to this Carrie and Suzanne a few times, hear the real story.

Then decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life…

Dear Reader,

Once in a while, a character just takes over a story. We writers like to think we’re in control, so it’s a little disconcerting to have a hero or heroine become someone we didn’t plan for at all. This is one of those books.

I knew Gary Lindstrom had had a terrible childhood. (After all, I planned it that way!) What I’d forgotten was that he’d had three happy years in a loving family before his parents died. That part of him reawakens when he falls in love as an adult and does battle with the cynicism and deep distrust of fellow humans he thinks is his basic nature.

This wasn’t an easy book to write. I kept complaining to everyone who would listen that I had no plot. I began to wish for a car chase or a gun battle! The more subtle, internal change is always a greater challenge. But by the time I finished Lost Cause, I realized it had become a favorite of my own books. Gary came to life for me in a way fictional characters rarely do. In many ways, he told his own story, and I found myself hurting for his loneliness and touched by the man he proved to be.

I’m eager to hear from readers and to talk to some of you at book signings.

Janice Kay Johnson

Lost Cause

Janice Kay Johnson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

A SINGLE MOMENT, an unbidden thought, is all it takes to change a man’s life. Or at least motivate him to change it.

Gary Lindstrom became conscious and, without even opening his eyes, knew he was in the hospital. The smell, the quality of the air, the beep beep of a monitor were familiar.

His leg hurt like hell, he had the mother of all headaches, and when he flexed experimentally, every muscle in his body screamed.

He opened his eyes a slit, confirmed by the sight of the white bedding, a larger than expected mound over his legs and the curtain pulled around the bed that, yep, he was indeed in the hospital, and closed them again.

Damn it. The last thing he remembered was… Oh, crap, yeah. He’d been riding the winding canyon road, nothing but the night around him, occasional cars passing in the other direction. He’d taken each curve faster than the one before, until oncoming headlights had momentarily blinded him and he’d gone wide enough to catch some gravel under the tires. He’d felt the bike skidding, the spurt of fear and adrenaline as the guardrail rushed toward him. He recalled knowing he’d lost it, his leg scraping pavement. Then…nothing.

Footsteps, then the rattle of the curtain rings, coaxed his eyes open again. A young Hispanic nurse smiled at him.

“Mr. Lindstrom. You’re awake. How are you feeling?” She checked the bag hanging on the IV pole beside the bed.

“Hurt.” His voice came out rusty. “Accident?”

“Yes. Don’t you remember? You were very fortunate that you wore a helmet.”

“Leg?” he croaked.

“You had a nasty fracture.” She patted him. “No more questions. I’ll have the doctor come in and talk to you.”

Five minutes later, the doctor, an older man, arrived to recite a laundry list of bruises and contusions as well as cracked ribs, a leg fractured in three places, and a concussion.

“My bike?”

“From what I hear, a mangled mess.”

Regret speared Gary. Damn it, he’d worked hard to restore the 1950 FLE model Panhead. He’d intended to sell it when something else came along that interested him. He supposed insurance would cover the more than $20,000 he was out, but the accident wouldn’t be good for his rates.

“You’re not a pretty sight,” the doctor added, scanning Gary’s face with interest. “But you’d be a dead man if you hadn’t worn a helmet.”

Funny thing. He almost hadn’t. He’d slung his leg over his Harley, picked up the helmet, hesitated, then shrugged and put it on. He wore it most of the time, but he’d been in the mood to toss it aside.

Lucky I didn’t, Gary thought, as the doctor left the room. Or maybe not.

Shock punched through the pain.

Goddamn. Had he been trying to kill himself?

He closed his eyes and saw again the road, unwinding before the narrow beam of his headlight. As always, he’d exulted in the power of the Harley between his legs, but it alone hadn’t been enough. He’d sought out this road, perhaps because it was carved from the face of a cliff. Sometimes, he just plain needed to be reckless, to toy with oblivion. Tonight had been one of those times.

Or had it been last night? He realized he had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. Hours? Days? With indifference, he dismissed his speculation and returned to his main preoccupation.

Speeding down the canyon road, he’d felt the pull of the darkness beyond the white strip of guardrail. He’d known it before; who didn’t have those fleeting thoughts: What would it feel like if I sailed off the road? Maybe fantasies like that were a brief surfacing of the subconscious awareness of danger.

But tonight… Tonight, it had been stronger than that. He’d wanted danger. Maybe he’d wanted to die.

Bleakly, he examined the possibility. Could you be suicidal without realizing it?

Yeah, he decided; you could. But he didn’t think he’d gone that far. Flirting with death was one thing, marrying her another. He didn’t feel ready to cash it in. But he also had a little trouble pinpointing what appeal living held.

Maybe his attitude wasn’t so good. He’d been calling his despair cynicism. Loneliness was his choice.

A choice that meant darkness, the seductress, called to him. Or was it ignoring him, and he was the one sidling closer?

Either way, lying in that hospital bed, he saw he did have a choice now. Let himself keep sidling, or figure out how other people made themselves happy and try some of it on for size.

He shifted in bed and had to go still until the pain eased back on the throttle. One leg hadn’t shifted at all, weighted down as it was with plaster.

Okay, he thought, with a flicker of humor: he wouldn’t be trying anything on for size for a while.

But once the cast was cut off and he could throw away the crutches he predicted in his future, he had to find a way to give his life some meaning, or another time he would toss aside that helmet.

The nurse came in and showed him how to give himself minishots of morphine, then went. Gary punched the button and felt a wave of relief that clouded his mind and made his eyes heavy.

As he drifted, he heard himself saying, Was that my name? Chauvin?

That’s right, someone said. Lucien Chauvin.

He’d always known that he’d once been Lucien, not Gary. When he was younger, he hadn’t understood how that could be or who the people he remembered were, but later he was told about the adoption.

Your sister, Suzanne Chauvin, hired me to find you, the other man said.

He heard himself again. This sister looking for me? Too little, too late. Don’t need her, don’t want a sister.

As the comfort of sleep rolled over him, Gary’s last sensation was surprise.

He’d lied.

THE VOICE ON THE PHONE was light and pleasant. “Ms. Chauvin, I’m calling from The Complete Family Adoption Agency. My name is Rebecca Wilson, and I’ve been given your file. I’d like to set up a home visit.”

Suzanne’s heartbeat did a hop, skip and jump. “Wow, that was fast!”

“Having second thoughts?”

“Not a one! I was just afraid months would go by. I’d love to have you come over.” But she’d need time to clean house first.

They settled on a day almost three weeks away. Plenty of time to organize every closet and cupboard the social worker wouldn’t look into anyway. Suzanne wasn’t that bad a housekeeper, but she wanted the house to shine when Rebecca Wilson came. If she didn’t impress her, the agency wouldn’t give her a child. She had to impress her! She just had to.

She’d start today. The sun had peeped out after a rainy week, so she would rake up the soggy, fallen leaves and then consider loading her temperamental lawn mower into the trunk of her car and taking it to the shop. Once again it had refused to start Sunday when she’d tried. Maybe, if she were really lucky, she’d get it back soon enough to mow one more time before the ground got too wet—and before the home visit.

Bursting with energy and ambition, she changed into scroungy gardening clothes and pulled up the garage door. She’d get the automatic opener replaced this week, just in case she had reason to open the door when Rebecca Wilson was here. She wouldn’t want to look as if she couldn’t afford to maintain her house, let alone take care of a child.

She stole a glance toward her neighbor’s before stepping outside with her rake and a box of plastic garbage sacks. She tried to work outdoors when Tom Stefanic wasn’t in his yard. Not that he wasn’t perfectly pleasant when they exchanged their occasional neighborly greetings, but, darn it, his lawn was smooth enough to be the 18th hole of the U.S. Open, his flower beds were edged with military precision, his driveway power-sprayed weekly. No moss grew on his roof, the leaves barely dared drop from his trees. In fact… She studied the two flowering cherries along the street in front of his house with suspicion. Neither bore a single leaf, even though her trees were still festooned with slimy dead leaves hanging like dirty, wet socks. She knew he had a blower. Did it vacuum, too? Would he have vacuumed his trees? she wondered incredulously.

But his garage door was shut, and she heard no sound from the backyard. Maybe he was gone today. Determined to put him out of her mind and pretend the contrast between their respective properties wasn’t painful, Suzanne breathed in a lungful of damp, earthy-smelling air.

She loved autumn almost as much as spring. The leaves had been spectacular, until the heavy rains the last couple of weeks had finished them off. There was something satisfying about tucking in flower beds, so to speak—trimming the dead stems of the perennials, pulling out last weeds, mulching. Partly she looked forward to a break from outside work, and partly she enjoyed anticipating the new growth that would poke from the dark earth in just a few months.

Would she have a child by then? A little boy or girl to crouch beside her as she worked? Or one old enough to actually help, even to mow?

She still wasn’t all that fixed on how old a child she preferred. Suzanne thought she’d like to adopt a girl, just because it might be easier as a single mom, but she hadn’t ruled out a boy if the agency had one who needed a home. Her sister, Carrie, had just married a man who had a six-year-old, and Suzanne would adopt Michael’s clone in a second if she could.

She worried that the agency would look with more favor on her if she’d made up her mind about what she wanted, but then sometimes she convinced herself she was more likely to be given a child sooner if she wasn’t too demanding about specifics. After all, if she were having a child the normal way, she couldn’t be, could she? When you got pregnant, you didn’t know if you would have a boy or girl, a towhead or a brunette, a child with a placid nature or one who couldn’t sit still. And you didn’t care; you just wanted a baby to love.

She’d turned thirty-two this summer, and she was beginning to think she would never have children. Of course she could have gone the route of finding donor sperm, but she didn’t feel that compelling a need to actually be pregnant. In fact, she liked the idea of adopting.

Carrie was right. Adopting a child who needed her would be Suzanne’s way of atoning for not being able to hold on to her baby sister and little brother when they were taken away after their parents’ deaths. What she couldn’t do for them, she could do for someone else.

Raking wet leaves, she smiled thinking about Carrie. She was so lucky to have found her. Okay, to have been able to afford to hire a P.I. to find her. And to have discovered that Carrie was living so near, right in Seattle! Not twenty miles from Suzanne’s home in Edmonds. They might have met by accident.

Wouldn’t that have been amazing, she marveled, not for the first time. They looked enough alike to have recognized each other if they’d come face to face.

Well, she would have known who Carrie was in a heartbeat. Carrie, who hadn’t been told by her adoptive parents that she was adopted, might have been more confused.

But they hadn’t met that way. Suzanne had gone seeking her, and found her just this past spring. With very few glitches, it seemed as if they’d known each other all their lives. Carrie had planned to live with Suzanne this year, while she went back to the University of Washington to get her teaching certificate. But in the end, she and Mark Kincaid, the P.I. who’d found her, had decided to marry in August, so she never had moved in.

Suzanne was rather sorry. She’d imagined them having the year together to make up for all the ones they’d missed, with her growing up with Uncle Miles and Aunt Marie and Carrie with her adoptive parents. But at least they weren’t far apart. They talked almost every day, and did the kind of things together that sisters did, like shopping and visiting art fairs. And Suzanne was glad that Carrie was marrying Mark.

As she did almost every day, Suzanne spared a thought for her little brother, although of course he wouldn’t be so little anymore. He was twenty-nine now. She hadn’t seen him since he was three years old. After Aunt Marie and Uncle Miles decided they could keep only one of the three orphaned children, a social worker had come to the house and taken Carrie—then Linette—and Lucien away. Carrie had been asleep, but Lucien… Standing in the middle of her front yard, Suzanne shuddered at the memory. Lucien had sobbed. Every time she thought of him, she saw his tear-wet face, framed in the car window as it pulled away from the curb.

And she remembered with guilt her own gratitude that she wasn’t being taken away.

When she hired him, Mark had found Lucien, too, but her brother didn’t want any contact with his sisters. Carrie had tried calling him, but he’d told her rather rudely that their overture was too little, too late.

Suzanne was trying to resign herself to the fact that she would never see him again, never be able to give him the photo album she’d prepared with pictures of their parents and of them growing up, never be able to explain how sorry she was that she couldn’t, somehow, have kept them all together, even though she’d been only six herself when their parents had died.

Suzanne knew that guilt was illogical; even if her mother had always said that, as the big sister, Suzanne should take care of her little sister and brother, she’d been far, far too young to influence even her own fate. But she couldn’t quite quell the nagging guilt anyway.

Shaking off the familiar depression, she began raking, working steadily until she’d bundled the soggy heaps into plastic bags and set them at the curb for pickup. Then she settled on a knee pad to pull weeds and toss them into a bucket she moved along with her. Finally, wishing she hadn’t put off the most hateful task till last, she dumped the weeds into her garbage can and set the bucket in her garage. Oh, boy. Time to tackle the problem of heaving the blasted mower into her trunk.

No, she could procrastinate for a second more—she’d left her trowel behind.

She was just crossing the lawn, tool in hand, when she heard the familiar sound of her neighbor’s pickup coming down the street and a hum that presaged the rising of his garage door. She turned her head to see his huge black pickup pulling into his driveway. Maybe, if she hurried, he wouldn’t notice her out here.

But she didn’t reach the cover of the garage in time.

The pickup door slammed and a moment later Tom approached across the narrow strip of lawn between their houses. Maybe a few years older than her, he was powerfully built but had a face that most would call homely. All she saw was the buzz-cut hair to match his lawn, the neat polo shirt and crisply creased slacks. Suzanne never, ever, met his eyes. Not quite. She’d discovered you could talk to someone and avoid their gaze without being obvious.

“Hi,” he said. “Putting in a day of work out here, I see.”

“I finally got the leaves raked up.”

“And you’re lucky. Today’s dry enough to mow.”

Suzanne sighed. He was the last person to whom she wanted to admit defeat. “No such luck. My nemesis won’t start. I was just going to load it up to take into the shop. For the third time this year.”

He was nice enough not to acknowledge the grimness in her tone. He rubbed his jaw. “One more mow should do it. Maybe two.”

“Yes.” Although he would probably manicure his all winter long, whenever the weather permitted.

“Tell you what,” he said. “If you can wait until Saturday, I’ll do it. That way you won’t have to worry about fixing your machine or replacing it until spring.”

She gaped at him. He was offering to mow her lawn? In the silence that stretched just a little too long, pride and desperation arm wrestled. Pride thumped to the table.

“I can’t let you… If you’d let me borrow your mower…”

He cleared his throat. “You seem to have trouble keeping engines running.”

In other words, he didn’t trust her with his gleaming, buff machine. She didn’t even blame him.

“Are you sure?”

“Nothing better to do.” When she bit her lip, he added, “Really. Happy to.”

Her shoulders slumped. “Thank you. I really want the yard to look nice.”

“Something special coming up?”

This was far and away the most personal conversation they’d had in five years of being next-door neighbors. She hesitated, but wasn’t sure why. He’d notice sooner or later if a little girl or boy was riding a bike down the sidewalk and going in and out of her house holding her hand.

“I’m trying to adopt.”

She felt him stare at her.

“A child,” she elaborated. “Not a baby. Maybe a six- or eight-year-old. The social worker from the agency is coming to do a home study. That’s why I need the house to look its best.”

“You don’t expect to remarry?”

Too personal. She took a step back. Way, wa-ay, too personal, given what he knew about her.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She inched back some more. “I can’t predict the future. But I hope you won’t mind having a child next door.”

She half expected him to say, Not if you keep the kid on your side of the property line.

Instead he shook his head. “Of course not.” He started to turn away, pausing. “I’ll be over Saturday to mow. The backyard, too?”

“If you don’t mind,” Suzanne said meekly.

“Not at all. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.” He nodded and walked away, disappearing into his garage. A moment later, the door rolled down.

Bemused and grateful—and she did hate the grateful part—Suzanne put away her trowel and closed her own garage door.

GARY WATCHED the saw buzz through the dirty plaster of his cast. The leg that emerged was fish-belly white except for the angry red rash that had caused godawful itching. He leaned over and ran a hand down his shin.

“Well, it’s still there.”

The nurse or technician or whatever he was glanced up with a grin. “Seeing your toes didn’t convince you? What about the itch?”

“Could have been a phantom itch.” Gary flexed his foot and grimaced at the weakness in muscles he’d taken for granted. “Damn, I’m glad to get rid of that.”

“I haven’t seen a patient yet mourn the loss of a cast. Except for the teenagers who want to take it home because all their friends wrote on it.”

They both looked at Gary’s cast. Nobody had written on it.

“You’re welcome to chuck mine in the Dumpster.” He bent to put on the sock and boot he’d brought and then stood up, the slit leg of his jeans flapping. “Thanks,” he said with a nod, and walked out, trying not to limp.

Well, that had been a long three months. He’d been able to ride his bike, but he’d felt clumsy with the crutches, and the walking cast hadn’t been much better. At least the bruises that had decorated his body and face had finished blooming as colorfully as the desert after a rare cloudburst and finally faded from puce to yellow to skin color. His leather pants and jacket had protected him from being skinned alive, although they’d had to cut those off him and throw them away, another loss. Heck, he could even take a deep breath now without wanting to puke.

The doctor had talked about him going to physical therapy for several months, but Gary was thinking he’d find out what he had to do and carry it out on his own. He did most things on his own. He didn’t feel any need for a cheerleader.

Besides, he’d been considering a trip. What better time? While convalescing, he’d discovered he was curious about these sisters it seemed he had. One who was apparently going to be heartbroken because he hadn’t been real excited about some kind of reunion, and the other who’d wanted to chew a strip off him because he was being selfish enough to tell them to leave him alone.

Funny thing, since he’d gotten first the call from the P.I. and then the one from the sister—Carrie, he thought her name was—he’d found he did remember them. Or at least he thought he did. His memories from before he went to live with the Lindstroms in Bakersfield had a hazy, dreamlike quality.

He supposed he’d lived in a foster home, too; maybe a couple, for all he knew. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure which people were the family he’d lost and which were foster families. But sometimes he saw this woman, pretty and dark-haired, smiling as she bent to swoop him up. There’d been a girl, too, dark-haired and skinny. And a baby. He had this memory of crying in terror when someone tried to get him to go to bed in a room by himself. He wanted to stay with… He didn’t know. The baby sister? Well, that made sense. From what the P.I. and this Carrie had said, the two of them had been taken away and then adopted out, and the big sister got to stay with family.

And he was supposed to worry about hurting her. Gary grunted and shook his head.

But he guessed the fact that she’d gotten the breaks wasn’t her fault. And chasing memories that refused to be caught was getting old.