Chapter Four

BLAKE walked into Enoteca a few minutes before five. The bartender waved at him as he took a seat at the table he and Heidi always used if it was free. “Hi, Blake. What’cha drinking tonight?”

“Let me have a Fig 46,” Blake said, referring to his favorite cocktail—a mix of bourbon, bitters, and walnut liqueur.

“Heidi’s going to give you crap for being predictable again,” Darian, the bartender, replied.

“She’s going to give me crap even if I order something else, so I may as well enjoy my drink while she does it.”

Darian laughed. “That’s true. Maybe you’ll get lucky and Brent and Nav will come in after work. They’re always good for a distraction.”

Blake smiled as Darian had intended, but he almost hoped the other regulars Darian mentioned didn’t come in. He liked them, but tonight he needed to talk to Heidi, even if she teased him about it. He hadn’t been able to put Thane Dalton out of his head, and she was the only one who could even begin to understand. After all, she’d been sitting right next to him when he’d had his epiphany.

Darian had just set his drink down when the door opened and Heidi breezed in. Her hair was shorter than it had been in high school, but other than that, she hadn’t changed a bit from the first time he’d seen her, the day he’d enrolled at Tates Creek. He’d been assigned to work with her on a lab in Mr. Schweitzer’s biology class. She’d taken one look at him, told him she wasn’t going to do his half of the work, and gotten busy on her part. He’d fallen a little bit in love with her right then. She was still the closest thing to a sister he had.

“Let me guess,” she said as she sat down across from him and unwrapped the scarf from around her neck. “A Fig 46.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Blake replied.

She picked up his drink, sniffed it, and set it back down with a twist of her mouth. “Because only you would think that smells appetizing.”

“Better than that sugary concoction you call a drink,” he teased back. He’d tasted it once after she’d rhapsodized over it, but it had tasted like syrupy Kool-Aid to him. Not at all what he wanted to drink.

“Speaking of sugary concoctions,” Darian said as he set Heidi’s drink down in front of her. “I took the liberty of making one for you when Blake came in.”

Heidi leaned over and kissed Darian’s cheek. “You’re the best.”

He smiled and left them alone. “How was your week?”

“Busy,” she replied. “We have a new client who’s being very demanding. I understand he wants to launch the new website as soon as possible, but I can only work so many hours at a time before I start making mistakes. Then I have to waste time fixing them instead of going on to the next piece of the puzzle.”

“Your mind is a scary, scary place. He needs to let you do your job so he doesn’t get a piece of it at some point,” Blake said with a shake of his head. Heidi had tried to explain to him more than once what went into building a new website platform, but while he understood the basics, the technical details quickly went way over his head. Of course, she said the same when he started talking about the psychological theories he used in working with his students.

“He’ll figure it out soon enough or Eric will explain things to him, and you haven’t gotten a piece of someone’s mind until he’s let loose on you. I take great pleasure in watching him put people in their place when they overstep.”

Blake could never decide if Eric was Heidi’s boss or her partner. Eric seemed to do most of the business stuff while Heidi did most of the actual programming. Either way, they had turned their web-design company into the most sought-after company in town.

He lifted his glass and clinked it against hers. “Here’s to another successful website launch.”

She took a sip, leaned back against her chair, and eyed him critically. “What’s got you all worked up?”

Blake sighed. “What gave me away this time?”

“The fact that you can’t have been here more than ten minutes and your glass is already half-empty. You only drink that fast when something is wrong.”

“I don’t know if anything is wrong, exactly. I had an unexpected encounter today with someone I thought I’d never see again.”

“Now you have me curious. Who was it?”

“You won’t believe me if I tell you.” He couldn’t put off the inevitable forever, but he could already hear her cackling when he told her.

“Now you have to tell me.”

“Thane Dalton.”

“Thane Dalton, like, Tates Creek’s baddest bad boy? Like the Thane Dalton I listened to you sigh over for six months before he finally graduated? That Thane Dalton?”

“That Thane Dalton.”

Her cackle was even more evilly delighted than he’d expected. “Where in the world did you run into him? You had to work today.”

“We’re getting into the realm of suspension of disbelief here,” he warned. She rolled her eyes at him and gestured for him to continue. “He has guardianship of his two nephews, who enrolled at Henry Clay about a month ago. They were in school in Louisville before that. Those two nephews have had a hard adjustment, and we had a parent conference today.”

Heidi stared at him for a moment before she burst out laughing. “Oh, you had me going there for a moment. The suspension of disbelief line was a good one.”

“I’m not kidding, Heidi. I’d show you, except the records are confidential. The boys are being bullied, and I’m trying to help them before they get in trouble they can’t get out of.”

She sobered and studied his face intently. “Wow, I never saw him as the parental kind.”

“We never saw him as anything except the bad boy. He runs a construction business now, you know. He’s not the same kid we knew then.”

“Like we actually knew him,” Heidi said. “Had you ever spoken to him before today?”

“No, I never worked up the courage to even say hi in high school, as you well know, and there was no chance to since then.” Until today.

She took another sip of her drink and tapped the fingers of one hand against the tabletop. “You okay with this?”

Blake started to blow off the question, but she’d see right through him if he did. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not fourteen anymore. I outgrew my thing for bad boys a long time ago.”

“Did you really, or did you just convince yourself they were a bad bet and that you should want something else?”

“I deal with all the bad boys I can handle at school every day,” Blake said firmly.

“Not the same thing, and you know it,” Heidi insisted. “You deal with boys who are in trouble every day, but that’s not the same as the ‘bad boy’ who gets your heart pounding with that hint of danger.”

“Even if you’re right—and you’re not, but even if you were—I can’t be involved with the parent of students whose case I’m in charge of. It would be unethical, if nothing else, and right now, those boys need all the help they can get.”

Heidi’s forehead crinkled as she met his gaze implacably, but she didn’t push him further, for which he was grateful. She knew him too well sometimes.

THANE pulled the casserole dish from the oven and cursed under his breath when his thumb slipped off the pot holder and hit the hot glass. He managed to set it down without dropping it, but the glass cracked against the granite counter, one more sign of the kind of day it had been. He couldn’t decide if he should be happy he’d burned his right thumb instead of the left one, which he’d hit with a hammer that afternoon, or if he wished he’d burned his left thumb so only one hand would be messed up.

He stared down at the brown mush in the dish and wondered how his mother and grandmother had made it look so easy. He’d followed the recipe from his grandmother’s recipe box as carefully as he could, but this didn’t look anything like her squash casserole.

“I can call for pizza,” Phillip offered as he walked into the kitchen.

“We had pizza last night,” Thane replied.

“Okay, so I’ll call for Chinese. I can even go pick it up so you don’t have to go back out.”

Thane scowled at the offending dish and grabbed a spoon. Just because it looked like mush didn’t mean it would taste bad. He took a bite and promptly spit it out. “Chinese would be good. Or we could go to Ramsey’s. Kit liked the pot roast last time we were there.”

“The burger was really good too,” Phillip said. “I’ll go tell Kit we’re going out.”

“Wait, Phillip,” Thane said. “I want to talk to you for a minute without your brother.”

Phillip tensed visibly. “I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job of protecting him, sir.”

Thane looked at his nephew sadly. Phillip looked so much like his father, unlike Kit, who took almost completely after Lily. But it went deeper than appearance. Will had died in Afghanistan when Phillip was only three, but Thane could easily imagine his brother-in-law standing in front of him now instead of his nephew. “You have so much of your father in you, even if you don’t really remember him, but that isn’t what I was going to say. Are they bothering you too, or just Kit?”

“Just Kit, but Dad told me I had to look after Mom and Kit before he was deployed. His buddies reminded me of it every time they came to check on us. I can’t sit by and do nothing. I can’t.” Phillip’s lower lip trembled, making Thane regret bringing up the subject. He didn’t know what to do with tears.

“And you have done what he asked you to do,” Thane said. “They haven’t hurt Kit, unless you two aren’t telling me something.” He paused to give Phillip time to respond, searching his expression for any sign of dissimulation, but Phillip shook his head. “Then you’ve done what he asked you to do up until now, and you don’t have to be the man in the family now. I’m here for you both. You know that, right?”

“I told Mr. Barnes to call you today. Kit didn’t want to tell you, but I knew you’d want to know.”

“What do you think of Mr. Barnes?” Now that they were away from school, he hoped he’d get an honest answer.

Phillip shrugged. “He’s okay. He doesn’t yell the way a lot of teachers and principals do. I think he means it when he says he wants to help us. I don’t know if he can, but I think he wants to.”

“I don’t know if he can either,” Thane said honestly, because whatever Barnes said, lying to his boys wouldn’t solve anything. “But I don’t see anyone else at the school even trying, so I want you and Kit to do your best with what he’s suggesting, okay?”

Phillip nodded. “Kit and I talked about it on the way home. It’s building sets. We can do that. We might even learn something we could use on a site with you later. Maybe it won’t change anything with the jocks, but it’ll keep us out of trouble, and it might be fun. We’re going to give it our best shot.”

“I think that sounds like a good plan,” Thane said. “I can’t be there every day, but if I can help at some point, let me know. Jackson won’t give me too much grief if I miss an afternoon or two.”

Phillip grinned. “That’s what you say now.”

Thane laughed, as Phillip intended, but he’d have to talk to his foreman before he made any commitment beyond that.