voice on those recordings had poured alcohol on her open grief. “It was too painful then.” And his presence now? She didn’t know what she was feeling. “I figured hearing my voice would hurt you as much as it hurt me to hear yours.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
His deep blue eyes held hers, waiting, asking. She didn’t have the answers and her life was scary enough just dealing with Max’s surgery. She looked down at their joined hands and, holy crap, how long had they been holding each other like that?
She snatched her arms back, crossing them over her chest. “What are we doing here, Hank? Are you here to pick up where we left off after that kiss, now that Kevin’s gone? Because you have to realize that was a mistake.”
A dark eyebrow slashed upward. “If you have to ask that, you don’t know me at all. I mean what I say. I just want to be here for Kevin’s kid.”
“But you didn’t know about Max when you arrived.” And why hadn’t she thought of that until now? “What are you doing here?”
He shoved to his feet and paced in the space she’d decorated with such hope and plans, a blend of her dual roots. Then she’d met Kevin and thought, finally, she had found roots of her own, a sense of belonging.
Hank’s powerful long legs ate up the one-room apartment quickly, back and forth in front of the nursery nook before pivoting hard to face her. “Kevin wanted me to deliver a message.”
“A message?” A burn prickled along her skin until the roots of her hair tingled.
“I meant it when I said I was with him when he died.” His body went taut, his shoulders bracing, broadening. “I was right beside him until the end.”
She eased to her feet, steeling herself for whatever he had to share, for words that could haul her back into the agony she’d felt when Kevin died, when she’d given birth to their child alone. “What did he say?”
“He said he forgave us.”
Three
Gabrielle looked every bit as stunned as he’d felt when Kevin said the words to him, that he forgave them. The memory blasted through him of that hellish night at the checkpoint when they’d been ambushed, the smell of gunfire and death. Then Kevin spoke and said the unthinkable.
That he knew Hank and Gabrielle had feelings for each other.
Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, but no words came out. She pressed her palm to her lips, turning away.
He wanted to reach for her, to comfort her. Do something—since he couldn’t seem to scrounge up the right words. He wasn’t much of a warm and fuzzy guy. He was a man of action.
A squawk from behind him stopped him short.
“Max,” Gabrielle gasped, rushing past him.
She swept aside the gauzy curtain and lifted her son out. Damn, the boy was so tiny. Scary small. The enormity of that little being going under the knife stole his breath and raised every protective instinct all at once.
Cradling Max to her shoulder, she patted his back. “I need to feed and change him.”
“Yeah, okay. What do you need me to do to help? With all those nieces and nephews, I’m not totally inept.”
“Unless you’re lactating, I don’t think you can help with this.”
Lactating? Breast-feeding?
Ohhhh-kay. He grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. “I’ll wait downstairs for the delivery guy to bring supper.”
She bounced the baby gently on her shoulder, his whimpers growing louder, more insistent. “The back entrance is just at the other end of the garden alleyway. Take the keys off the tea cart on your way out.”
“Roger that. Wilco—” Will comply. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes or so.”
Pulling the door closed behind him, he stepped back into the waning Mardi Gras mayhem. The tail end of the parade blinked in the distance, the crowd following and dispersing. He scooped up a couple of strands of beads and a feathered mask that must have strayed over the gate. He wanted her out of here, somewhere safer. She had enough on her plate taking care of the little guy without worrying about someone scaling that fence one night.
He sidestepped the round iron table and chairs, decorated with a few potted plants and hanging ferns. Chick-pretty but not safe. He eyed the shadowy alleyway, not impressed with security. And he would damn well do something about it.
Reaching the back gate, he leaned against the brick wall to wait and fished out his phone. He thumbed through the directory until he landed on the name he needed. He hit Call. The youngest of his four stepbrothers worked renovations of historical landmark homes. Even a couple of foreign castles.
For right now, he would settle for something more local.
The ringing stopped.
“Hey there, stranger,” his stepbrother Jonah Landis answered from on location at heaven only knew where. Jonah’s projects spanned the globe. “Welcome home.”
“Thanks, good to be back.” Or rather it would be once he got some things straightened out. He needed to put to rest the feelings he had for Gabrielle and figure out a way out from under the guilt.
“How much longer until the base cuts you free for some vacation time?”
“Actually—” he crossed one loafer-clad foot over the other “—that’s what I’m calling you about. I’m visiting a friend in New Orleans, and I’m hoping you can hook me up with a place to stay.”
“What exactly are the parameters?”
Parameters? Privacy topped the list. His father was a retired general who’d been on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now served as a freelance military correspondent for a major cable network. His stepmom—Ginger Landis Renshaw—was a former secretary of state, now an ambassador.
He hadn’t grown up with that kind of influence. And even once his family stepped into the limelight, he’d lived a Spartan life, socking away most of his paychecks and investing well, very well. He could retire now, except that military calling to serve couldn’t be denied. Even his family didn’t know his full net worth. Only that his investments left him “comfortably” well off, enough to explain if he spent beyond a military paycheck.
Which he rarely did. But he needed something private. A place for Max to recover from his surgery, a place where Gabrielle would have help before she collapsed from trying to tackle everything on her own.
“Jonah, I seem to recall you were starting a renovation down here in New Orleans right before I deployed.”
“Right, a historic mansion in the garden district that got whacked by a hurricane. It’s an Italianate cast-iron galleried-style—”
“Right. I just need to know if it’s finished and if it has a security system.”
“Finished, security system installed last
