he’d held Tansy in his lap on the drive over and remembered how she smelled. How she tasted.
How she felt wrapped around him. Needing him. Loving him.
Oh, yes. He knew about those things. And the memory burned in his lungs. Fighting for strength, for sanity, he turned away from temptation.
And heard Tansy scream.
Chapter Three
“Dale! Dale, get up here! Hurry!” The terror in her voice kicked him up the stairs at a dead run. He’d never heard Tansy scream before. Ever.
Moving fast, he shouldered open the door and slid to a halt at the sight of her perfect, round derriere. She was leaning out the bathroom window, dripping on the floor.
“Tans?” He plunged into the small, steamy room, slapped the shower off and heard rustling thumps down below.
There was someone outside.
“Dale!” She turned, clutching a towel to her chest. “There was a man looking in the window. He was watching me! What the hell is going on here?”
The tree.
“Damn it!” He brushed her aside and threw a leg out the window. It had been fifteen years since the last time he’d snuck away from Trask and broken into his old house, but the tree still stood outside the bathroom window. And the sounds of running footsteps below told him it was still strong enough for climbing.
“Omigod, what are you doing?” Her voice bordered on shrill, but he didn’t pause.
He grabbed the gutter and swung a leg over to the thickest limb. The motions came back easily, and within seconds he was halfway down the tree. A shadow of movement from the garden gate caught his eye. “Stay put,” he yelled to her. “I’ll be right back.” He dropped to the ground and sprinted for the lane that ran behind his mother’s overgrown garden.
There were two sets of footsteps and a frantic shout of, “Hurry! Jeez, here he comes!” from the running shadows.
Dale chose the one on the left and made a leaping tackle. He and his quarry went down in the lane amidst a flurry of arms and legs. A pointy elbow cracked Dale under the chin and he swore, realizing he’d landed on maybe fifty pounds of skinny kid.
“Quit!” he barked, and the squirming subsided. A nearby rustle told him the other boy hadn’t gone far, so he rolled off his captive. Sitting in the dirt, Dale shook his head. “What do you think you’re doing, looking in while a lady’s showering? Does your ma know about this?”
Blue eyes widened beneath tousled white-blond hair. Moonlight washed the kid to ghost-pale. “You’re not going to tell her, are you, mister? I swear we didn’t mean nothing by it. We climb up that old tree sometimes and peek in the window of the haunted house. We didn’t think there was anyone in there, honest!”
“And the lights didn’t give you a clue?” Dale asked sternly, wondering when his boyhood home had gained a ghost.
The blond head shook vigorously. “It’s haunted. I told you. Sometimes there are lights in there but nobody’s home. We thought it was the ghosts, and I dared Eddie to go look and he dared me right back, and…” He trailed off and finally shrugged. “We thought the lady might be a ghost. Then she screamed and you came running… Hey, what’re you doing in there, anyway? That house belongs to my daddy’s cousin!”
Mickey. Dale’s throat closed. Mick’s infrequent letters had mentioned his sons, but the boys hadn’t seemed real when Dale had been sitting in his cubbyhole office in Boston General, reading the piles of mail that gathered dust while he was on assignment. But this boy was so much more than words on a piece of paper. He was a little person who looked like Mickey.
At a second furtive rustle, Dale said, “You can come on out. I might not even tell your ma.”
The second boy, a smaller version of the first, crept from a shadowy beach plum and crouched at his brother’s side. “Sorry, mister. We didn’t mean to scare the lady. DJ thought she was a ghost.”
DJ. The elder of the two was named Dale John. Mickey had mentioned it in passing, but Dale hadn’t given it much thought.
Now, he sat stunned. He had family. How had he forgotten that? Or had he known it all along and not wanted to deal with the responsibilities that went with it? Trask had taught him that connections meant loss. Hurt. Anger.
Life in Boston was easier without all of those things.
A loud rustle and a series of thumps startled the boys, who squeaked in alarm and backpedaled on their skinny butts. A circle of yellow light slipped through the garden gate, followed by the shape of a woman.
“Dale?”
“Over here, Tans,” he called. “I caught your Peeping Toms.”
“Toms?” The flashlight beam bounced toward them. “As in, more than one?”
Dale stood and hauled the boys to their feet, feeling the adrenaline level out, leaving confusion behind. “Yeah. But they didn’t mean any harm. They thought you were a ghost.”
She’d changed into jeans and a hand-knit sweater like the one he was wearing. Dale felt the boys relax at his side when she flicked the beam of light to her own face. “Nope,” she said, “no ghost, though they did almost scare me to death.” She leaned down and offered a hand. “I’m Tansy.”
In the yellow light, the boys’ hair shone brighter, their eyes seemed bluer. The younger one shook Tansy’s hand. “I’m Eddie and my stomach feels funny.”
The older boy frowned. “I’m DJ, and don’t listen to him, his stomach always feels funny.” Then he scuffed the dirt with his toe. “Sorry we scared you, lady. We didn’t think there was anyone in the house, honest. Don’t tell Ma, okay?”
Dale had often heard similar words from Mickey when they’d been caught committing some boyhood crime or another.
He swallowed. “Run on home now, boys. Miss Tansy and I have work to do.” His voice cracked but he didn’t care. “I’ll be by to talk to your pa later, but don’t worry. This’ll be our secret.”
When they were gone, Tansy clicked off the flashlight. They stood awkwardly in the darkness until she finally said the words he’d been dreading. “I thought you were a rich kid from Boston.”
He’d known it would hurt her to learn he was a fraud. He’d imagined how the disappointment would cross her face, and how she would rally quickly and try to pretend his past didn’t matter when they both knew it did. He’d known all that.
What he hadn’t known was how hard it would be to admit that it had all been a lie.
He sighed and tried to make the first cut a clean, lethal one. “That’s what you were supposed to think, Tansy. That’s what everyone thought.” When she didn’t answer, he took the flashlight, clicked it on and gestured back to the house. “Let’s go inside.”
But as they walked in silence, Dale realized he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t know what to say. They entered the kitchen and Tansy returned the flashlight
