a look at the boy sitting sullenly beside him in the passenger seat. He knew that look anywhere. Guilt. His instinct told him the boy could tell him all about that look on Holly’s face if he was approached in the right way.
“So,” Blake said, looking straight ahead at the road, “where are you coming from?” Out of the corner of his eye he caught the slight hunching of thin shoulders.
The boy hesitated, and then muttered the name of a juvenile detention facility.
“Oh, yeah,” Blake said. “I saw the inside of that one once or twice myself when I was your age.”
Startled surprise, quickly masked. “Sure.”
“No kidding.”
“What for?”
“I took motorcycles that didn’t belong to me.”
“Cool.”
Blake decided to let that pass, and he knew better than to pry about what the kid had done. He could find out later if it interested him.
“When did you get out?”
“A couple of weeks ago. I tried to find my sister. I promised.”
“Yeah. She told us.”
“I was supposed to go to a foster home when I got out, but I’ll be sixteen in a few weeks, so I figured I’d take a miss.”
Under the nonchalant expression, Blake heard the question. Am I in trouble?
“I’ll find out for you,” he said, just as if the question had been asked out loud.
The boy gave him a surprised look.
“How come my secretary looked so strange when I walked in?” There. He’d given him something, now he wanted something back.
The boy took a sudden interest in his sneakers, then his fingernails, then the scenery outside the windows.
“I dunno.” His eyes were skittering around like crazy.
A lie. Blake gave him the look that said he knew it was a lie, and the boy tried to do a turtle and pull his head inside his own jacket.
A long silence ensued, which Blake did nothing to break.
“I was really mad. And scared. And tired. It was a dumb thing to do.” The voice was coming from somewhere inside the jean jacket.
“What was a dumb thing to do?”
“Pulling the blade on her.”
Blake, who prided himself on being unshockable, on keeping his cool in any circumstance, swerved the vehicle onto the shoulder and braked to a halt so fast that the boy’s head popped out of his jacket.
“You did what?” It registered, somewhere in him, that this was not him, the unflappable Blake Fallon. But the thought of someone scaring his sweet secretary filled him with a quiet and protective rage that did not bode well for the boy sitting next to him.
Tomas shrank back against the door. His hand moved stealthily for the handle. “Don’t hit me,” he whispered.
And Blake snapped back to reality. He took a deep breath and tried not to think of Holly on the end of a knife.
“I don’t hit kids,” he said quietly. “Nobody here hits kids.” Given the paleness of the boy’s face, he decided to skip the lecture on the possible consequences of pulling a knife on someone. If it had been his old secretary, that boy would be in cuffs already, on his way back to where he’d just come from.
But instead of that making him appreciate her more, Blake suddenly felt furious with Holly for putting him in this situation. He’d asked her what was going on, and she’d lied to him. Maybe, he admitted, he felt furious with her because for a moment pure emotion ruled him.
“I didn’t see a knife when I arrived at the office,” he said, putting the vehicle back in gear and pulling back onto the highway.
“She kicked it under the desk when you came in.”
Great. He felt his ire rising again. Not only had she lied to him, she’d deliberately misled him.
“Do you have any more weapons on you?”
“No.”
“Do I have to check?”
“No.”
He glanced at Tomas, and saw truth there. He arrived at Hacienda de Alegria, Joe and Meredith Colton’s lavish ranch, and shook his head. There were kids everywhere, spilling across the lawns and out of the big sprawling house that dominated the scene.
Meredith Colton, who really should have been enjoying her retirement, was running frantically with a homemade kite, kids on all sides of her, running and laughing, their faces lifted to the sun.
Joe had a little fat pony saddled and a small girl had a death grip on the saddle horn and a huge smile on her face as Joe led her around the yard. Another dozen or so kids were hopping along on either side of them, excited to have a turn.
Blake shook his head. He’d been worried about imposing on his foster parents when they had offered to take the kids from Hopechest. But when the logistics of keeping the ranch open by bringing in water and supplying bottled water for drinking had proved impossible, he had accepted their gracious offer.
He realized now he had never seen two people look less imposed upon. The pair of them looked like they were in all their glory.
“What is this place?” Tomas asked, his eyes wide, his nose pressed to the window.
“It’s a temporary home for the kids who were displaced from the ranch.”
“No kidding?” he breathed. “I kind of imagined heaven looking like this.”
“That’s kind of how I felt when I first saw it, too,” Blake confessed. Tomas was way ahead of where Blake had been, though, if he could admit something like that. Blake, at that age, would have considered such an admission soft.
A half hour later Tomas had been reunited with his sister, and Joe, with his knack for trusting those who had never been trusted, had put Tomas in charge of pony rides.
“What’s his story?” Joe asked quietly, as he and Blake sat on comfortable cushions on the bent willow chairs in the deep shade of the porch.
“I don’t know yet,” Blake said, taking a sip of his iced tea. Just the way he liked it. Tea and lemon, no sugar. Trust Meredith to be watching the sugar intake of all these kids. “I just found out from him he pulled a knife on my secretary.”
“Really?” Joe said mildly. “Surprised he has any teeth left.”
“I don’t hit kids.”
“Well, none of them ever pulled a knife on Holly before. Meredith and I are very taken with that girl.”
Holly
