“W hy?” She was frowning, her eyes sharp and intelligent, clear and green as glass.
He felt a wild little ripple run through him, a reprise of what he’d experienced in the kitchen this morning during his first run-in with her. There was something about the woman that got to him. Excited him. Turned him on. It wasn’t the way he wanted it, but what could he do? The only thing he knew for sure was that he couldn’t deny it.
“Why?” he croaked, angry with himself for many reasons. “Because I sure as hell am not cut out to be a farmer. I never wanted to be a farmer.” He jerked away from her and paced to the fireplace, ramming the fingers of one hand into his hair as he waved the other at the array of faces looking back at him from the mantelpiece. “Who does that leave? My sister? Okay, Ellie’s nuts about animals-she always planned to be a vet-but then she got involved with Save the Whales and Orangutan Rescue, and became a government biologist instead. She and her husband work together now. They go all over the world saving endangered wildlife-important stuff. You think she’s going to come back here to Iowa and run a farm?
“Who else? My mom’s brothers?” He snorted derisively as he touched their portraits in turn. “You’ve already ‘met’ my uncle Rhett, here, the former president of the United States. His kids…my cousin Lauren, she’s a lawyer, married to a Native American sheriff. They live on a reservation out in Arizona. My cousin Ethan’s a doctor. He’s married to Joanna Dunn-you know, the rock star, Phoenix? Can’t see either of them coming back here to take up the family business, can you?” Devon shook her head, but he wasn’t looking for an answer.
“Then there’s my cousin Caitlyn…” He paused. Small seismic tremors were rippling through him, the beginnings of something of too great a magnitude to be called an idea. More like an inspiration.
Caitlyn. Of course.
He cleared his throat and glibly continued. “She’s a social worker-works for a non-profit human rights organization of some kind. Nobody really knows exactly what Caty does…” Which was a lie. He did, actually, and was probably the only member of the family other than Caitlyn herself who did. “Except that she travels a lot. Definitely not the type to sit home on the farm.
“Her dad, my uncle Earl-better known as Wood-teaches school in Sioux City. He’s a great guy, but he abdicated years ago. After my grandparents died, both of my uncles left my mom to sink or swim here on her own-and she might have sunk, too, if my dad hadn’t come along when he did. Gwen always said it was Providence…” He stopped, because a lump had come unexpectedly to his throat.
He was trying to swallow it when a voice close behind him softly prompted, “Gwen?”
She’d startled him; he’d almost forgotten he had an audience, he’d had this discussion with himself so many times. He turned with Gwen’s portrait in his hands. Frowning at it, he said thickly, “My mom’s great-aunt, I think. She lived with us when I was growing up.” He took a deep breath and looked around the room. “This was her sitting room-Gwen’s parlor, we called it. Come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve been here since she died.”
“I’m sorry.”
It was the standard, automatic response. Eric shrugged it off. “She was over a hundred years old-I’m not sure exactly how much over, but quite a bit. Hey-it had to happen.”
“Is that her picture?” She held out a hand, and Eric, nodding, handed it over. “One of yours?” He nodded again, wondering how she knew. “She looks like a neat lady,” Devon said, making what might have been an inane comment sound as though it came straight from the heart.
Eric said nothing for a moment, gazing down at the face he’d photographed so many times…this one a favorite of his, the lovely aged face turned slightly away from him and lifted joyfully to the sun. “She had the most incredible voice,” he said, trying again to laugh. “Like music…always just a grace note away from laughter.”
“But,” said Devon thoughtfully, “her eyes seem sad.”
The observation both surprised and touched him. Looking over at her, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with him, shorter than he was though not by much, his eyes on a level with the top of her head, he felt a sudden and intense wave of longing, and had no idea what it was he was longing for.
“I always thought so,” he said gruffly. “Mom said it was because her husband was killed in the Second World War. Anyway, she never remarried.” He paused, looking around him at the room he’d never before seen without Gwen’s presence in it, hearing in his mind’s ear the music of her laughter. Regret made his voice even harsher when he added, “I didn’t make it to her funeral.”
She looked up at him, and he forced himself not to waver under the impact of that intent green gaze. Reminding himself that it had been his own idea, this sharing of the secrets of his soul. “Why not?”
He shrugged and looked away again. “I was in Africa at the time. There was a famine…”
“There’s always a famine in Africa, isn’t there?”
“Yeah,” Eric said dryly, “and that’s apparently what the whole world’s attitude was at the time, because this particular famine didn’t even make the evening news here. Just stuck away somewhere on the back pages of the international section of the newspapers. Old news.” Except to the children who were dying, he thought bitterly. “It was a story I thought needed telling.”
He feels things more deeply than most people…and not only that, unlike most people, he also gets involved. Devon was experiencing disquieting stirrings, the awakening of new impressions and perspectives. She was surprised to identify one of those as respect.
“Were your parents upset with you for not coming home for the funeral?” she asked in a careful, gentle tone, as she would if she were interviewing a particularly fragile witness.
Eric considered a moment, then let out a breath. “No,” he admitted almost reluctantly, “they pretty much understood.”
Devon let the words lie there in the fertile silence. She watched his face as he gazed down at the portrait of the old woman in his hands, then let his eyes travel slowly across the mantelpiece, touching each photo there in turn. Finally, bringing his gaze back to her, he muttered it again, as though in awe, “They understood.”
There was silence again, and it became too hard to maintain contact with those eyes. She jerked hers back to the family photo gallery. “Well. You do have quite a family.” It sounded lame. It wasn’t what she wanted to say. She felt a new burning in her belly and identified its source with a small sense of surprise.
Envy. I envy him. You have a wonderful family, she wanted to say. Even scattered all over the world, you can feel their warmth, their love. I envy you.
“Not what you expected?” His voice had a cool and bitter edge. Jerking her eyes back to him, she saw that his smile had slipped off center, and knew what he was thinking even before he said it. “That’s what you get for prejudging people.”
She opened her mouth to protest, wanted to deny it, to explain. A soft snort forestalled her.
“You know what’s funny?” Eric said, and there was no rancor in his voice. Only wry amusement. “You’re probably still doing it. Right this minute. Right now you’re probably thinking, Wow, what a great family, right? From one extreme to the other. But you know what? The truth is generally somewhere in the middle. Hey, I love my family, but they’re not perfect.” He snatched up a photograph, a black-and-white wedding picture she thought might be his grandparents’. “It’s like this photograph. We’d call it black-and-white, but if you look closely, it’s actually a whole bunch of different shades of gray.” He thrust it at her, a little self-consciously; she thought he wasn’t comfortable on the soapbox.
Cautiously smiling, she said, “Does that mean you no longer believe I’m a complete one hundred percent ogre?”
He paused, obviously caught off guard. Then a smile flickered behind his eyes as he said somberly, “Not a hundred percent. Maybe…fifty.”
“Okay,” Devon triumphantly breathed, “we’re making progress.”
There was another pause before he answered without the smile, a wary and thoughtful, “Are we?”
And she couldn’t answer him, not the glib and confident affirmative she’d planned. Where is this going? she wondered with a stab of panic. Last night she’d set off in a blizzard, full of self-assurance, certain of her path. Today, in a warm house, safe from the storm, she felt lost, afraid to put a foot forward or say a word lest it lead her into hidden peril.
What had changed? This man, Eric Lanagan, with his gentle eyes and hollow cheeks and fierce hawk’s nose…he was still her adversary. That much hadn’t changed. What was different, she realized, was the battlefield. She was accustomed to seeing every contest in terms of…yes, black and white: me-my client-against them. But like the photograph in Eric’s hands, this landscape seemed to be all in shades of gray. She was like a lander on a new planet, picking her way over unfamiliar terrain, never knowing when or from where the dangers might come.
He was waiting for her answer, she realized, watching her with unreadable eyes and lopsided smile. She murmured something ambiguous, but even before she finished she could tell he’d stopped listening. His head tilted, and his eyes lifted toward the ceiling.
“The baby’s awake,” he announced, returning the wedding picture to the mantel and heading for the door. Halfway there he paused and gave a jerk of his head, inviting-no, ordering-her to come along.
Devon’s heart thudded; she opened her mouth, words of panicked protest already tumbling from her tongue. But he shook his head and made an imperious gesture with his hand, reminding her suddenly, remarkably, of his mother. “Come on,” he said gruffly, a masculine version of Lucy’s rusty voice, “it’s about time you met your niece.”
Mike had found Lucy sitting on Eric’s bed, holding the baby up in front of her, rather the way she’d hold a hymnal, even though she couldn’t sing a note.
“It’s the ‘Looking Over,’” she explained in response to his amused question, watching the baby’s murky blue eyes flick across her own face. “You know, like in The Jungle Book? We humans do it, too, you know. Sort of our way of saying welcome to the world…” She caught her breath in wonder as the baby’s tiny mouth suddenly popped open in a smile-a real one, she was sure of it. “I’ve been looking for Eric,” she said when her awed and tremulous breathing had gotten back to normal. She paused, and then… “Do you think she’s really our grandchild?”
Mike coughed and shifted around the way he did when he was trying to avoid answering her. Which was generally when he knew she wasn’t going to like the answer he had to give her.
She caught a quick breath and went on before he had to. “Doesn’t matter, really. If Eric says she is, that’s good enough for me.”
She turned the baby this way and that, studying the way her eyes changed in the light. “I think her eyes are going to stay blue.”
Mike cleared his throat in a relieved sort of way. “Could be green, like her mother’s.”
Lucy gave him a look. “How do you know her mother’s eyes were green?”
“Devon’s are.”
“Oh, you noticed that, did you?” She slyly teased him just so she could enjoy the fluster in his mutter of response. After a moment, though, because it had been on her mind, she said slowly, “Mike, tell me really. What do you think of her?”
“Devon?” His eyes flicked toward Lucy, then away. “She’s pretty,” he said cautiously, making her smile. “Seems smart.”
“But, what?” Lucy knew the nuances in her husband’s voice.
He came to sit beside her, tickling the baby’s cheek with one long forefinger to stall for time while he thought.
“Just…something about her,” he said, “reminds me of Chris.”
“Chris! Our Chris?”
“The first time Wood brought her here for a visit-remember? We were all sitting around the table having lunch, and Gwen remembered she’d known Chris as a child. Turned out she’d grown up around here, gone to school with Wood. She hadn’t told him.”
“Hmm…and she had good reasons not to, as it turned out.” Lucy frowned at the baby, whose eyelids were growing heavy.
“Yeah, well, the point is, you know how she always seemed so cool and calm, her face was like a beautiful porcelain mask. And all the time there was so much going on inside her…so many secrets she was hiding behind that mask.”
“And you think Devon…”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Like I said, there’s just something about her that makes me think of Chris, that’s all.”
“Well,” Lucy said darkly, “she’s sure not hiding the fact that she means to take Emily away from us-from Eric, I mean.”
“Yeah, and right at Christmastime, too.” Mike’s tone was somber, but when he looked at her Lucy could see the teasing twinkle in his eyes. “Sure doesn’t seem right, after you wished, and then it looked like you had your wish granted.”
“Sometimes Providence works in mysterious ways,” she reminded him. “You, of all people, should know that, Cage.” Lucy nudged against him and shared with him their secret smile. “Just think-all those years ago-if those hoodlums hadn’t tried to kill you, firebombing your town house-”
“And if my girlfriend hadn’t picked that night to break up with me, and I hadn’t been out walking off my grief, they’d have succeeded.”
“Right. And if you hadn’t run from them and gotten off the interstate in that thunderstorm and wound up lost and run your car into a ditch and holed up in my barn on the very same day my hired hand quit-oh, Mike…”
“I’d never have met you,” he huskily finished for her when her voice choked and he saw that her eyes were filling up.
She was glad when he slipped an arm around her, and the storm-ripples of awe and fear that always came with that terrible thought died peacefully in the sunshine of long-established love. “Anyway,” she said on a quick, restorative breath, smiling down at the now-sleeping baby, “it’s not over yet. I have a plan…”
“Shush!” And Mike silenced her with a squeeze a half second before Eric and Devon walked into the room.
They look guilty as hell, Eric thought. Like a couple of kids caught necking in the hayloft. And he almost smiled.
“How’s she doing?” Eric gave the baby a nod as he eased into the room, keeping all the awkwardness he felt inside. “I thought I heard her fussing.”
“Nope,” said his mother serenely, “not a peep. I think she wore herself out making faces at me-she dropped off a minute ago. We were just going to put her down.” She stood up with Emily in her arms, putting action to the words.
“Here-I’ll take her.” He plucked the baby from his mother’s arms more abruptly than he meant to, a fact of which he was acutely aware and instantly regretted. He was aware, too, of his father’s eyes…calm, quiet, more appraising than accusing.
Uncomfortable, he picked up the formula bottle from the nightstand and frowned at it. “She didn’t take all her bottle? She’ll probably just catnap, then wake up in a few minutes and want the rest. I can take it from here, if you, uh, if you want to…” Get lost? He stopped, frustrated. How did one tactfully dismiss one’s parents?
Which was one thing his plans for drawing Devon out of her shell hadn’t taken into account. Those plans were going to require a considerable amount of privacy, and that was a commodity it had just occurred to him might be in short supply to him, living under his parents’ roof.
“Well, all right, if you’re sure…” His mother’s eyes wavered, then slid past him to pounce on Devon, who was trying hard to look at ease and succeeding about as well as he was. “Have you had breakfast? There’s French toast and bacon in the oven-did you find everything okay?”
Devon had been concentrating with all her might on becoming invisible. Now, brought so abruptly into the conversation, she did something she almost never did. She floundered. “I’m not-that is, I don’t normally-uh, I had some toast earlier. I’m sorry-you shouldn’t have gone to so much…” And appealing for salvation to the only person available, she threw Eric a look of desperate entreaty.
He gave his mother a pained look. “We’ll grab a bite later, Ma, okay? Quit worrying about feeding us-we’re not kids.”
It was impatient, though not at all rude, which Devon thought might be about normal for grown-up offspring when speaking to their parents. And it struck her how different it was from the way she customarily spoke to her own parents-always with polite reserve, more as she might a client or a stranger.
“Well,” said Lucy briskly, unperturbed by her son’s bluntness, “I guess you know where to find the food when you get hungry. I know I’ve got plenty of things I should be doing.” She paused to give Devon a smile. “Just let me know if you need anything, okay? Mike?”
Devon caught the look she exchanged with her husband as she bustled him out of the room. They left the door wide-open as they went, she noted with amusement. She glanced at Eric to see if he’d noticed, and saw that his expression had gone from pained to sardonic. He tilted his head toward the open door and muttered under his breath, “Jeez, you’d think I was twelve.”
Discovering that she was smiling, Devon ducked her head in an unsuccessful attempt to hide it.
“What,” Eric demanded, “you think it’s funny that they still treat me like a kid?”
“No,” she said, “but I think it’s probably normal.”
He paused in his slow, rocking pacing to look at her. “Oh, yeah? Did your parents do that when you were a teenager? Make you leave your door open when you had a boy in your room?” And there was something about the way he watched her, all of a sudden, something almost…crafty. Something that set off her lawyer’s radar.
“Oh, I’m sure they must have,” she said lightly, walking away from him to avoid his eyes.
“What do you mean, ‘they must have’? Don’t you remember?”
“No, actually, I don’t.” She said it absently as she paused, pretending to study the revolving rack of tapes and CDs on the battered wooden desktop. But she was too aware of her own heartbeat. She felt a curious sense of uneasiness, and wondered if this was what animals felt when they caught the distant odor of fire.
“You have an interesting assortment of musical tastes,” she remarked as a means of changing the subject. Though not only for that reason. It was interesting to her, what kind of music he liked. At the very least, she reasoned, it was a way to learn more about the man who was to be her adversary. A way of finding out what made him tick. CDs-rock bands and country music stars from roughly ten years ago-took up most of the space in the carousel, but there were also some older tapes, folk and gospel music, mainly. And one cluster of CDs from the Vietnam era that particularly intrigued her.
“Had, you mean.” Eric was leaning sideways to look over her shoulder. “Those are at least ten years old. And some of ’em aren’t even mine.”
She hadn’t realized how close to her he’d come with his relaxed, baby-rocking stroll. Now she inhaled his scent with every breath, and it flooded her system like high-test fuel, kicking her pulse into a new and faster rhythm. It struck her first how clean he smelled-not just freshly showered, but wholesome, without any hint of either nervous sweat or cologne, cigarette smoke or booze or artery-clogging fast foods-compared to the people who inhabited the courtrooms and law offices and jail meeting rooms she was accustomed to.
And that wasn’t all. There was something else, too, something unfamiliar to her, something warm and sweet and faintly earthy that could only be coming from the sleeping baby.
“Those are Mom’s-the gospel stuff,” Eric was saying. “And the Parish Family tapes, too-that’s Dixie’s family, you know? The folk singers?” He made a disgusted sound when Devon only looked blankly at him. “Jeez, I thought everybody knew them. Their stuff is in the Smithsonian.”
Devon muttered something vague. Her head was swimming; she couldn’t think. It had to be his nearness-something to do with his animal heat, his masculine scent, maybe even something to do with the baby in his arms. She snatched a CD from the carousel and thrust it at him. “What about these? You must not even have been born when they were popular.”
He leaned closer, brushing her arm with his. “Creedence Clearwater Revival? Those are my dad’s.”
Something in his voice made her risk a glance at him. And she wished she hadn’t. His brown eyes seemed to flare with a golden light, giving the gaunt features so close to her own a hawklike fierceness so unnerving she wished with all her heart she could tear her gaze away. But she couldn’t.
“I bought him a bunch of those Vietnam-era CDs for Christmas one year. I was really into the period-because of my grandfather, you know?-and I knew Dad had lost all his stuff in a fire, way back before he met my mom.”
“That was thoughtful.” Devon could barely hear herself. Her voice had gotten lost somewhere in the thundering pulses inside her own head. “I’ll bet he really liked it.”
“Yeah, he did.” His eyes, gentle again, dropped to the baby in his arms. Released from that strange golden spell, Devon realized then that Emily had begun to squirm and scrunch her face into alarming expressions and make angry, snorting noises.
“Ah…ready for the second course, are you?” Eric was speaking again in the crooning voice that reminded Devon of a tiger’s purr. It resonated under her breastbone, and she surprised herself with a nervous sound that was horrendously close to a giggle. He shot her a look. “You want to hold her?”
“Oh-God,” she gasped, cringing away from him. “No-that’s okay, you go right ahead-”
“Come on, she’s not going to bite you.”
“Oh, but I-”
“Here-hold out your arms.”
“What? How-”
“Just hold ’em out-you know, like somebody’s trying to hand you a load of laundry. A pile of legal briefs-I don’t know. Something. Hell, anything but a baby, I guess.”
“Oh, God,” said Devon faintly. “I think I’d better sit down.” She backed up until she felt the bed come against her knees.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never held a baby before,” Eric teased as he followed her. His smile was sardonic, though his eyes held a softer gleam.
“As a matter of fact, I haven’t,” Devon bristled in her own defense, glaring at him. “I’m a lawyer, for God’s sake! I don’t think I’ve ever even touched a baby. When would I have?”
He chuckled, in a way that made her think instantly and vividly of his father. “Don’t feel bad. Neither had I, until they put Emily, here, in my arms, right after she was born. You’d be surprised how easy it is. I know I was. Pure instinct. Here-let me show you.” He bent toward her with the pink and yellow bundle in his arms.
Trembling, Devon tried to think of all the other times she’d been scared nearly out of her wits and somehow found the courage to hang on to them in spite of it-taking the bar exam, facing a judge and jury in open courtroom for the first time, interviewing a serial killer… She took a deep breath and forced herself to lift her arms.
“No, no-the other way-the left one. They like to hear your heartbeat. That’s right. Now, you kind of make a cradle…yeah, that’s it. Hold her against you…not too tight.” He looked up at her from his half crouch and smiled. “See? What’d I tell you? Like rollin’ off a log.” He straightened up and folded his arms on his chest, looking as if he’d just won a case. “Instinct,” he said smugly.
What instincts? I don’t think I have any-not the mothering kind, thought Devon wildly. She was too overwhelmed to speak. Emotions of so many different kinds and colors were careening around inside her, out of control and bumping into one another and creating unimaginable chaos and confusion.
In all that confusion she was sure of one thing: the baby in her arms wasn’t any happier about the situation than she was.
“I think you’d better take her,” she said in a choked voice, gazing in utter horror at the baby’s red, contorted face. “Here-quick! She’s going to cry.” She said that the same way she might have said, She’s going to explode.
“She just wants her bottle,” Eric said easily, reaching with one long arm to snag it from the nightstand. “Yeah…there you go.” He spoke in his ratchety croon as he popped the nipple into the baby’s already-open mouth. Instantly, the angry, alarming noises were replaced with greedy gulps, snorts and snuffles. Eyelids tipped with barely visible red-gold lashes drifted half-closed in blissful satisfaction. “What’d I tell you?” Eric said, smug again. And then added, “Here-take over.”
And somehow or other she was holding the bottle and he was beaming down at her as if he’d just created a miracle, something on the scale of the discovery of fire. All she could do was glare up at him, first in panic, then confusion. Because, in some indefinable way the smile had blurred the sharpness and softened the shadows that made his face sometimes seem so forbidding…and in that same indefinable way she felt something soften and blur inside herself. In panic she tore her gaze from that disturbing, utterly mesmerizing face and fastened it instead on the tiny pink one nestled in the crook of her arm.
“Hold her snug against you-they need the body contact while they’re nursing,” she heard Eric murmur.
I can’t do this, she thought. I can’t. Oh, how she hated feeling soft and blurred. Vulnerable. She hated the quivery awe in her chest, the peppery sting of tenderness in her nose and eyes, the ache in her breasts. And most of all she hated the sudden and terrible longing…the inexplicable wish…that Eric would come to sit beside her on the bed, that he would put his arms around her and enfold her and the baby both in the warmth and safety of his masculine protection.
Ridiculous! What was this? Hadn’t she spent her entire adult life making herself strong enough, powerful enough, and feared as any man, just so she wouldn’t ever have to feel like this-helpless, vulnerable, longing for a man’s protection? This isn’t supposed to happen!
She rose abruptly, just as Eric was saying, “Probably ought to stop and burp her-she’s a real little pig-”
“You take her,” she said in a tight, airless voice. With more deftness than she’d thought herself capable of, she thrust baby and bottle into Eric’s arms, turned and fled from the room.