CHAPTER 10
After Gage’s brother left, Allie fought the urge to dump the lunch dishes all over her stubborn employer’s lap.
What on earth was wrong with the man?
He had a family close by—a mother and a brother, anyway—and he hadn’t even bothered to let them know he was injured and needed help. Allie couldn’t even contemplate it. From what she had overheard, it sounded as if they didn’t even know he’d taken an assignment in Utah.
It wasn’t fair. In the past year she would have given anything to have a family to lean on during her custody battle with Jaime’s parents. And here was blasted stubborn Gage McKinnon, who apparently had a family ready and willing—eager, even—to help him during his time of need and he just shoved them away.
She wanted to smack some sense into his big, stupid head.
It wasn’t her business, she reminded herself. She was just the hired help. If he wanted to keep the whole world at arm’s length, he certainly had that right.
That didn’t stop her from wanting to give him a good piece of her mind. With effort she chomped hard on her tongue to keep her words in check while she finished piling everything onto the tray, aware of Gage watching her brisk movements, his expression closed, as usual.
“I wanted to do some of my exercises,” he said just as she headed for the kitchen with the dishes. “After you’re done with those, do you think you might have a minute to help me?”
She drew in a breath and reined in her temper, knowing how much he hated to ask for anything. “Sure. The girls have finished their lunch and are going over to play at Jessica’s house for a while.”
By the time she loaded the lunch dishes into the dishwasher and returned to his room, some of her anger had faded. She couldn’t know the dynamics of his family. Maybe he had good reason for keeping them in the dark about his life.
His brother had seemed a decent enough sort, though. Very nice, with a smile she had to admit had been charming and easygoing. Wyatt must have gotten all the charm in the family.
She glanced at Gage, who had transferred to the bed in preparation for their home therapy session and was now stretched out, his long body nearly hanging off the bed. Okay, maybe Wyatt had a smile that was something spectacular, but she had to admit he certainly didn’t make her weak-kneed and jittery the way his brother did.
Whatever else might be amiss in the McKinnon family, they certainly had some fine genes to turn out two such very sexy male specimens.
She smiled a little at the thought and then felt the heat of Gage glaring at her. “What?”
“You could at least pretend you don’t enjoy these little torture sessions,” he growled.
She couldn’t help laughing at his disgruntled tone. “What’s not to enjoy? You’re so cheerful to work with.”
He made a face and she took pity on him and told him the truth. “Actually, I was thinking about something else. I’m sorry. Are you ready to start?”
He nodded and began with the range of motion exercises ordered by the physical therapist. Halfway through the first rep she stopped abruptly.
“Your brother is Wyatt McKinnon!” she said suddenly, as all the pieces clicked together.
He grunted. “So they tell me.”
“The author Wyatt McKinnon?”
“That’s the one.”
“I’ve read several of his books. They’re gripping! I’m not usually into true-crime books but a friend recommended The Hunted and after that I was completely hooked. Oh, I wish I’d had more of a chance to talk to him about his work.”
He had a strange expression on his face, one she couldn’t quite identify. Pride was there, she thought, and maybe resignation. And even a little jealousy, though she thought she must be mistaken on that one. “Yeah, the kid has done pretty well for himself.”
“And he lives here in Utah? I didn’t realize.”
“About an hour away from here. Last I knew, he bought a place near our mother’s family ranch in Ogden Valley. Little town named Liberty.”
“Why didn’t he know about your injury?”
“I guess because I didn’t tell him.”
“Or your mother. Why not?”
He was silent for so long she thought he wasn’t going to answer. When he spoke, his voice was tight and distant. “We’re not close. After our parents split up, I stayed in Las Vegas with our dad, and Wyatt moved back to Utah with our mother. We haven’t seen much of each other in the years since.”
“How old were you when your parents divorced?”
He didn’t look thrilled at her nosy barrage of questions but he still answered her. “Thirteen. Wyatt would have been ten.”
The year after their sister was kidnapped. The two events—his sister’s disappearance and his parents’ divorce—had to be connected.
Compassion for the boy he had been washed through her. He had lost not only his sister in a terrible, hideous way, but his younger brother when their family broke up.
And from what she could gather, his mother, too.
All the more reason why he should welcome the chance to reconcile with them while they were living so close.
Stay out of it, common sense warned inside her head. Mind your own business. She listened to it for a moment but finally discarded the advice. How could she heed it when she had sensed the tension in him while Wyatt had been here, when she had seen the tangle of emotions in his eyes as he looked at his younger brother.
“Why don’t you get along with your mother and brother? Besides the fact that you apparently don’t get along with anybody?” she added with a teasing smile.
A muscle flexed in his jaw. “I get along with them fine. We just live separate lives.”
“Why is that?” she persisted. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but from the way Wyatt spoke, it sounded as if your mother will be heartbroken when she finds out you were hurt and didn’t let her know you needed help.”
“Wyatt doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And neither do you.” He spoke through gritted teeth, but she wasn’t sure if that was because of the topic of conversation or because of the exercises.
“Maybe not,” she said after a moment. “But I’m a mother and I know that if one of my girls needed me, I would crawl across a thousand miles of broken glass, bloodthirsty wild animals and enemy sniper fire to reach them, no matter what it took.”
“This is different. I’m a grown man, not some drippy-nosed little kid.”
“Do you think age matters? There are times in our lives when we all need our mothers.” She paused, then added quietly, “I only wish I still had mine to lean on sometimes.”
His expression briefly softened into one of compassion, but something about the implacable set of his jaw told her he wouldn’t budge. “This is different,” he repeated. “I don’t need my mother.”
Even though everything from the tight set of his features to his stiff body language warned her to leave the subject alone, she couldn’t let it rest. “Maybe she would like to see you. To make sure you’re really all right. Don’t you think you should call her and give her the chance?”
“Back off,” he finally snapped, wrenching his leg away. “I had enough nagging on this from Wyatt. I don’t need it from you, too.”
When would she ever learn to control this busybody streak? A fine nurturer she was. The man couldn’t have made it more clear he didn’t want to talk about his family, that it was a painful subject, but she had thoughtlessly, selfishly insisted on pushing and prodding until he snapped.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “You don’t have to say it, I’ll say it for you. I need to learn to mind my own business.”
He blew out a breath. “Whatever Wyatt says, I know the truth. My mother isn’t any more comfortable spending time with me than I am with her. We live separate lives because we both prefer it that way.”
One more thing and then she would shut up, she promised herself. “I’m sure you’re wrong,” she said gently. “You’re her son.”
“Yeah. And I’m also the one responsible for the disappearance of her daughter.”
His harsh words were spoken so low it took her a moment just to register and even longer to absorb them. He blamed himself for his sister’s kidnapping? Why? And what a terrible burden for a boy of twelve to carry!
Shock and sympathy squeezed her heart and she couldn’t think how to answer him for several long moments. He didn’t look as if he wanted her to say anything—his mobile mouth was a tight, hard line and his eyes were cool, distant.
To her surprise, instead of changing the subject, he went on in that same low voice. “When we’re together, neither of us can seem to banish the ghost of my sister. She’s always there, hovering between us. An image I can barely remember, with blond curls and freckles on her nose, riding a little pink tricycle with tassels hanging from the handlebars and a white daisy basket clipped to the front.”
His voice trailed off, and the pain in his eyes sent an answering ache through her bones. She wanted to pull his dark head to her chest and hold him close until the hurt faded away.
Knowing this was unstable ground, that one wrong turn could be disastrous, she chose her words with care. “Why do you think your mother holds you responsible for your sister’s disappearance?” she asked quietly.
“Because I was!”
“How can that be? You were only a child yourself.”
“I was tending her. Or supposed to be, anyway. My mother had to run some errands and she asked me to watch Charlotte and Wyatt for an hour. I agreed—I gave her my word. Then I proceeded to completely ignore them, just so I could talk to some friends. Paul Kaiser’s dad had just bought him a new dirt bike and he wanted me to come over to check it out. Of course I had to go, to hell with what I’d promised my mother about watching Charley and Wyatt.”
He appeared lost in thought, once more stuck in a purgatory she could only imagine. “I left them playing in the front yard while I went around the corner to Paul’s house. I was only over there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. But when I came back, Charley was gone.”
“Oh, Gage,” she whispered, wishing she had never brought up such an agonizing subject. She didn’t have a whole world of experience with twelve-year-old boys—or the men they grew into, when it came to that—but she could well imagine how one could convince himself he was responsible for such a devastating event.
“Wyatt was hysterical,” Gage went on. “Just a few moments after I left for Paul’s, he had fallen off his bike and broken his glasses for about the hundredth time that summer. He was sitting on the dried-up grass of our front yard trying to find all the pieces and jam them together when a car pulled up and someone grabbed Charlotte and shoved her inside. He couldn’t describe anything about it other than the color of the car because he was blind as a bat without his glasses. Didn’t even know if it was a man or woman. That’s the last any of us saw her.”
How devastating for everyone involved. Gage, Wyatt, his mother and father. And how tragic, that one single August afternoon could forge a man’s entire life.
She had no doubt that Gage had become an FBI agent in order to pay penance somehow for the blame he placed on himself over his sister’s disappearance. Maybe by helping other families find their own missing children—or at least helping them attain some kind of closure, if that was possible—Gage was unconsciously seeking atonement for the thoughtless actions of a twelve-year-old boy.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, shamed by the complete inadequacy of the words.
“You can’t imagine what it was like to face my mother when she returned home to find the police already swarming the neighborhood. She trusted me to take care of Wyatt and Charley and instead I ran off and ignored them. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes.”
She wanted to take his hand, to wrap her arms around him and give solace, but she had to content herself with touching his leg in a gesture of comfort. “I’m sure your mother doesn’t blame you, Gage. You were just a foolish boy. None of it was your fault.”
“If I had stuck around where I was supposed to be, I could have protected Charley. I don’t know, maybe if I had been there, I might have somehow kept her out of that car.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe the abductor would have taken you along with your sister.”
He didn’t look as if he even heard her. “I should have been there to protect her. I was her older brother. She was my responsibility.”
Allie was suddenly positive he had never willingly shirked a responsibility since that terrible day. “Your mother probably feels exactly the same about the choices she made. If she hadn’t gone shopping on just that afternoon, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. I’m sure she doesn’t blame you, Gage. No mother could.”
“Maybe not consciously. But I can see it in her eyes every time we’re together. Like I said, it’s easier on everyone if we just go on the way we have been, each busy with our own separate lives.”
Though she wanted to argue the point, she knew she couldn’t, not when talking about his sister was far more painful than any physical therapy exercises.
They finished the exercises in a stilted silence, each lost in thought. Allie couldn’t bring herself to make inane conversation, not now, when she was beginning to suspect her feelings for Gage McKinnon were undergoing a monumental shift.
Somehow in the course of the last few days, she had gone from being attracted to him—a woefully mild word for the heat that sizzled under her skin when she was around him—to feeling something more. Something deeper. A terrifying storm surge of emotions lurked inside her, just waiting until she could find a moment of peace to sort them all out.
This was not that moment, though. Not when his skin was warm under her hands, and tension still seethed and coiled between them and he watched her out of those veiled gray eyes that saw entirely too much.
* * *
After they finished the exercises and Lisa left, Gage transferred to the wheelchair and maneuvered as close to the bedroom window as he could manage. Here he could look out on the backyard, at the masses of flowers his landlady tended so assiduously and the leaves of the big maple fluttering in the breeze and the sunshine gleaming on the grass.
The door had been left ajar, and he could hear Lisa moving around in the kitchen, no doubt busy with preparations for his dinner. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t at all hungry, to order her just to pack up her girls and her pretty little face and the compassion in her blue eyes and leave him the hell alone for a while.
He couldn’t wait for her to be gone, to be alone for the evening. He craved solitude, needed it like a man who was starving to death yearned for a mouthful of bread.
Why had he spilled his guts to her like that?
He hadn’t intended to. One minute they’d been arguing about his mother, the next all that terrible wash of guilt and shame had gushed out of him like blood from a gaping wound.
He shouldn’t have said anything. He couldn’t quite figure out why he hadn’t just told her to mind her own damn business about his family, to let the whole subject drop. He didn’t owe Lisa Connors any explanations. None whatsoever. She wasn’t his pal or his therapist or, heaven knows, his girlfriend, despite their charged kiss of the day before.
She was only his nosy neighbor, his hired baby-sitter. Nothing more.
Yet once again she had somehow managed to wring out of him words he had no intention of revealing to anyone.
Yeah, the unexpectedness of Wyatt’s visit had left him off balance and disconcerted, but that wasn’t explanation enough for why he had shared his most private thoughts with Lisa.
What was it about her that inspired such confidences? He didn’t know, but whatever it was, he’d sure like to be able to bottle it and whip it out the next time he was interrogating a suspect in a case.
Maybe it was some combination of those unfeigned emotions she made no effort to hide. When he had told her the whole grisly story about that August afternoon, he had seen compassion and empathy and a heartfelt sorrow in those blue eyes.
She was genuine. Lisa Connors had a softness about her, a sincerity that he hadn’t encountered in too many people. Unlike a lot of women he knew, she didn’t play games or try to hide what was going through her head. When she looked at him, everything she was thinking was right there out in the open for the world to see.
And she didn’t hold much back. Whether she was chasing her daughters across the grass in that backyard out there or talking to that home-care nurse, Estelle, or trying her best to comfort a cranky lawman with two bum legs, she threw her whole heart and soul into the task at hand.
He had to admit, she had taken good care of him during the time she’d worked for him. To a man used to eating out and bachelor fare, the meals she cooked were manna. He hadn’t eaten this well since before his parents split up. Beyond that, she was always careful to make sure he had everything he needed within reach.
Lisa Connors was a nurturer, clear to her bones. It was obvious in everything she did, from the frequent affectionate hugs and kisses he saw her give her daughters to the fresh flowers she cut for his room each day, to the care she took to inflict as little pain as possible whenever she had to fuss with his injured legs.
He wasn’t sure why that aspect of her personality appealed to him so much but it drew him to her. Maybe because he had lived so long in a hard, unforgiving world that being around her soft gentleness was like sitting for a few moments somewhere peaceful and quiet like that garden out there.
It would be far too easy to develop feelings for her.
The thought scared the living hell out of him. He couldn’t afford to have feelings for her. He had nothing to offer someone like Lisa, absolutely nothing soft or gentle inside of him to give back to a woman who had already lost so much.
As soon as he could get around again on his own, he would return to work and they would go their separate ways. She’d get a job at some hospital or nursing home or doctor’s office somewhere, and they probably wouldn’t even see each other again, except maybe for the occasional encounter on the way to the mailbox.
She and her sunny smile and her spring-like scent and her daughters would be out of his life, and he could go back to normal.
That’s the way he wanted it, the way things had to be. So why did he find the prospect so depressing?