been empty and neglected for a long time. Do you remember what else I said?”
“There could be rotten boards to fall through, and spiders, and snakes,” the boy finished for her. “I remembered, Mom, and I was careful. Real careful.”
“Why did you go there?” Linsey wasn’t yet pacified.
The boy lifted both shoulders in a vague response. “I dunno, ’cept I just wanted to look. It’s pretty, Mom. I could see the river and the trees, and almost to Oregon. But I won’t go again, if you don’t want me to.”
“Promise? Just until I can get around to repairing it?”
Solemnly the boy drew a sweeping cross over his chest and stomach. “Cross my heart.”
“Promise accepted.” A loving finger tapped his nose, signaling his trespass was forgiven but not forgotten. “What do you say we finish the chocolate pudding left from supper?”
“Can I have my horse, too?”
“The humongous one?”
“Yep.”
Linsey hugged him again. “We’ll see. Good enough?”
“Yep.”
“Can you say anything but yep, tiger?”
“Yep,” the boy answered gravely, then dissolved into giggles at the repartee that was obviously a long-standing game.
In a dancing step Linsey took her son to the door. Pausing there, she turned back. For a sinking moment, though he knew she couldn’t see into the dark cave of trees, Lincoln could feel her gaze strafing over him.
For too long she stood in the doorway, looking from the treeline to the stream, then toward the end of the trail. But Linsey was new to the area—she wouldn’t know this was the passage she’d heard Lincoln call the escape route. She wouldn’t know the long-abandoned trail had led a traveler back to the farm again.
Lincoln’s tension telegraphed to Diablo, the stallion whickered and tossed his head. With a soft click of his tongue and a soothing touch, Lincoln quieted him. As quickly as the small rebellion was settled, there was still the dread of being discovered skulking among the trees like a voyeur.
But Linsey didn’t hear. She didn’t see. Satisfied there was no one about, she passed through the door into the light of a house that had been too empty and too dark for too long.
When the house was quiet and only a light in the bedroom that had been Frannie Stuart’s still burned, Lincoln steered the stallion toward Belle Reve. After bedding Diablo down for the night, enduring a short command-visit with his father, and refusing the dinner Miss Corey had prepared, he drove to his small pied-à-terre on the outskirts of Belle Terre.
The small city, deeply steeped in old Southern traditions, was the hub of this part of the South Carolina lowcountry. Lincoln’s home, situated in a sleepy cul-de-sac on a little-traveled street, was uniquely antebellum, with many of its historic treasures still intact. A single, as the narrow houses with walled and private courtyard gardens were called. In these days when he divided his time between Belle Terre and Belle Reve—with considerably more at the plantation since his father’s strokes—the tiny house was all he needed.
An hour later, as he wandered the moonlit courtyard, he realized how much he’d missed the quiet, the solitude. A place that was his alone. Yet the familiar pleasure of it escaped him. His mind was too full, too chaotic. Too filled with memories of Linsey and the boy.
“The boy.” Ice clinked against an heirloom crystal glass as he took it from a wrought-iron table. Draining it, he poured another drink from a decanter he’d brought into the garden with him.
“Linsey, the boy, and Brownie.” His voice was strained even to himself, and he wondered if one drink had made him drunk. “If it hasn’t,” he muttered as he lifted the glass before the blaze of an ancient gaslight, “hopefully the next one will.”
The boy. The words slashed endlessly through his mind like a broken record he couldn’t shut off. The boy. It was always that, never more. The child’s name was Cade. Yet, for reasons he wouldn’t define, Lincoln couldn’t bring himself to call Linsey’s son by his own name.
Dropping into a chair by the table, he lifted his drink again, watching the play of flames reflected in amber liquid and delicately etched crystal. Fire, the force that changed all their lives. Fire and Oregon. Abruptly Lincoln crashed the glass down with such ferocity it should have shattered, as most of the scotch splashed over the rim.
“Who is he, Linsey? Why is his hair dark when Lucky’s was fairer than yours? Who gave him my name?” Drawing a shuddering breath, he whispered, “Why? In God’s name, why?”
Burying his head in his hands, he didn’t speak again. As darkness gathered, beyond the babble of the fountain, the tap of footsteps along the street, and the clink of glass against glass as he poured another drink, the garden was silent.
When he roused, putting away memories he kept locked in the nether regions of his mind, Lincoln didn’t know how long he’d sat in the gloom. As he nursed a rare third drink, he didn’t care.
Time didn’t matter tonight. He was too restless for it to matter. Too confused. Pain lay in his chest like an iron weight. Whatever he did, or didn’t do, emotions he didn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with tore at him. And with the better part of those three scotches in him— the most he’d had to drink since he and his brothers had given up their carousing, brawling ways—he shouldn’t, by damn, be feeling anything.
“Hell,” he grumbled, and took another sip, more melted ice than alcohol. “I’m the serious, pragmatic Cade. The logical Cade with all the cool-headed answers. Or so they tell me.
“Yeah,” he mocked in harsh sarcasm, “sure I am. Sure I do.” Fingers curled into an impotent fist. “So, why not now?”
He was the second of Caesar Augustus Cade’s four sons by four wives. The son born of a Scot. Surely she passed along some fine Gaelic practicality in her genes, even if she had died too young to instill it with her teaching. A handsome mouth quirked in a grim smile. “Yep, Gaelic practicality, that’s Lincoln Cade.”
Yep. The boy said that, he remembered.
“The boy.” The glass banged down a second time and still survived. Skidding back his chair, Lincoln rose, and from his great height stared down at the perfect haven he’d created. As the Stuart farm had been, this was his place to come when life with a father like Gus became too much. Or when the world weighed too heavily.
“Where do I go now?” he wondered aloud as memories he couldn’t exorcise and questions he couldn’t answer filled every corner of his heart and mind. When bitterness, black and ugly, joined grief and guilt, how did he deal with them?
“What about the boy?”
His whisper seemed to echo in the small space. Surrounding him, engulfing him in his own voice, asking over and over, what about the boy?…the boy?
Laughter from the street broke the illusion. Adult amusement, but in it Lincoln heard the haunting laugh of a child.
But whose child?
Turning
