left, Seth’s hand securely in his.
“Don’t look now,” Didi said behind Taylor, scaring her half to death, “but you look like you just saw the mother ship land in Cal Logan’s pasture.”
Taylor grunted and headed back to the Sunday school building, thinking she’d take a close encounter with a horde of little green men over one with Joe Salazar any day.
And if that didn’t make her certifiably insane, she didn’t know what did.
What the hell had just happened?
Joe yanked a grocery cart loose from the nested mass at the front of the Homeland, making Seth jerk beside him. Blessedly frigid air-conditioning soothed his heated skin, but not the dumb, pointless, totally off-the-wall fire raging inside him.
Five minutes. Five lousy minutes, he’d spent with Taylor. Five minutes of inane, completely innocent conversation. No sexual overtones whatsoever. Yet here he was, fighting to walk straight. What kind of man gets turned on by a woman reading a children’s story, for crying out loud?
The kind of man who was currently standing in a crowded supermarket with an eight-year-old beside him and thinking about breasts.
What the hell? Joe never thought about breasts, for God’s sake. At least not as often as he did when he was seventeen. Or twelve. But now, suddenly, mammary images crowded his thoughts like steak a starving man’s on a desert island. He shut his eyes to get his bearings, and saw nipples. Pink ones, on pale, translucent skin.
Like redheads had.
“So…you like spaghetti?” he barked to the child depending on him not to get distracted by things like sex and breasts—
No less than five women scowled at him.
—and a silky voice that changed like mercury as she read, making children laugh.
“Not really,” Seth said.
Joe let out a long, ragged breath and the breasts went away. Thank God. Strangling the grocery cart handle, he glowered at his little brother. “Whoever heard of a little kid who didn’t like spaghetti?”
The poor kid flinched, his brows practically meeting in the middle. “It makes me gag.”
Terrific. The one thing Joe knew how to cook with any reasonable success, and the kid didn’t like it. They’d eaten out most of the past three weeks, but that was in Oklahoma City where there were a few more restaurant choices than Ruby’s Diner or the Dairy Queen halfway between here and Claremore. Not that Ruby’s didn’t seem like a great place, but he’d lay odds Ruby Kennedy was the kind of women who had pity running in her veins. For hurting kids, for lost souls, for lonely men who couldn’t cook and who hallucinated about breasts in supermarkets because they couldn’t remember the last time they had sex worth remembering.
And anyway, if he was going to have this kid living with him for the next ten or so years—a thought which damn near stopped his breath—they couldn’t eat out every night. Which meant one of them was going to have to learn to cook.
“So what do you like?”
“Tacos?”
Okay, he could probably swing that. Joe steered the cart toward the meat section, Seth not exactly trotting along behind him. Every few feet or so, somebody would smile and nod, or say, “Hey.” Joe nodded and smiled and heyed back, but all this friendliness was beginning to get on his nerves.
If he didn’t know better, he’d say he felt trapped. In this town, in this life, by circumstances. By phantom, probably pink-tipped breasts he was pretty sure he’d never get to see.
A smile he’d never get to kiss.
“What else besides tacos?” he said, tossing a package of ground beef into the cart.
“Hamburgers. And fries.”
Yeah, the kid had put a few dozen of those away. Once he started eating again, that is. The first week had been sort of dicey, with Joe beginning to worry he’d be jailed for letting the kid starve to death. Not that Seth ate much even now, but Joe’s mother had reminded him that he’d never eaten much as a kid, either, not until he hit his late teens, at least.
Thinking about his mother brought him up short, making him realize it’d been nearly a week since he’d talked to his mom and Kristen, his sister. A dull pain tried to assert itself at the base of his skull.
“I like fried chicken, too.” Just as Joe was about to say he wasn’t sure he could handle fried chicken that didn’t come out of a box, the boy added, “But only Mama’s.”
Joe muttered a bad word under his breath, only to realize this was the first time Seth had mentioned his mother since the boy had come to live with him. The lady from social services in Oklahoma City had said Seth’s talking about his parents would help him to accept their deaths and eventually heal some of his pain, but that Joe shouldn’t worry if it took a while for that to happen. Joe knew nothing about his father’s second wife—she could have been a saint, for all he knew, even though he did know the couple hadn’t been living together at the time of their deaths—but he sure as hell knew his father. And a not-so-small, unhealed part of himself was hard put to wonder how, or why, the child would grieve Jose Salazar at all.
Except Joe certainly had, hadn’t he, all those years ago?
“Joe?”
He looked down at Seth. The boy’s forehead was a mass of wrinkles.
“You mad at me?”
“No,” Joe said on a rush of guilt. None of this was Seth’s fault. And there was no way he would’ve refused to take his brother on. Still, that didn’t mean he was a hundred percent okay with the situation, either. Full-time responsibility for an eight-year-old boy you’d never met before wasn’t something easily slotted into your life, especially one already crammed to the gills. But more than that, Seth’s sudden appearance had stirred up a whole mess of issues Joe’d thought he’d dealt with years ago and was not at all amused to discover he hadn’t. Not as much as he’d thought, at least. The social worker had suggested counseling to help Seth through this, but Joe was beginning to think maybe he was the one who needed help getting his head screwed on straight. “Just got a lot on my mind, that’s all. And it’s been a long day.”
Seth nodded, but didn’t say anything, leaving Joe wrestling with another brand of guilt—that he didn’t feel more for the kid than he did. Sure, he cared about what happened to him, and he hated seeing the boy so unhappy, but if he thought he’d feel a strong attachment right off just because they were brothers, he’d been dead wrong.
“Hey. You want some ice cream?”
After a moment of apparent contemplation, Seth said, “C’n we get chocolate chip?”
“That your favorite?”
Seth nodded.
“Huh. Mine, too. Let’s go see if they’ve got some.”
As they walked up and down the aisles until they found the frozen-food section—not only did they have chocolate-chip ice cream, they had five different kinds—it struck Joe that he’d better damn
