An Unexpected Addition Read online

  But now, here he was again, lips working automatically to a tune somebody else had written, his sense of humor rusty with disuse but kicking in nonetheless, his brain improvising instantly in enemy territory. It felt good.

  He hadn’t even realized he’d missed it.

  “Here you go, Dad, Kate.”

  Megan stepped into the middle of the eye duel he fought with Kate, plates at the ready. Knowledge and calculation glimmered almost perceptibly behind her eyes and inside the faint smugness of the smile settling her features, he noted. Whether deliberately or not, for the first time since Gen’s death Megan had found one of the things she’d been looking for: a woman to play him against. A gender ally.

  “Pancakes, eggs, sausage patties,” she said. “Enjoy.”

  “Meg—” Hank began, but she evaded his voice and was back across the kitchen with Li, the table and the wall of vociferous boys placed neatly between them again.

  Kate eyed Megan speculatively, recognizing the transparent ploy for what it was. And not liking it.

  She’d been played against other adults by other kids in the past, but never more adroitly than it appeared she’d been played this time. It meant she might have to ally herself with Megan’s father in the crunch, and she wasn’t sure she’d want to.

  Her jaw tugged tight, eyes puckered around the thought “Cute trick,” she said.

  Hank nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed, thoughtful himself. He looked at Kate, tracking the direction of her reflections by her expressions. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “She do this with you often?”

  “Often as she can.”

  The corners of her mouth tucked a little. “Mom’s a saint in heaven, but you’re alive so you’re the bad guy?”

  He nodded. “That’s the part of it I can figure out.”

  They viewed each other again, perspective canting. Communication on a wavelength only parents can hear—in a sort of parental shorthand instinctively improvised to maintain private communication in a world filled with big-eared kids—made him eye her hard, suspicious. This was not what he’d expected—she was not what he expected: a self-righteous goody-two-shoes, perhaps, but she wasn’t blind. He might never be able to like her, but with a little judicious footwork he’d be able to work with her.

  The same rapport made Kate look at him, too, a third time, and shake loose a fallacy she’d known better than to believe but had believed anyway: he was not who Megan—or even Li—said he was. There was something more to Hank Mathison than the selfinvolved DEA cowboy, hard-nosed pain-in-the-butt paper pusher she’d been told he was.

  She consoled herself with the fact that she had no idea what “something more” was—and had no intention of finding out.

  As often happens in a house filled with preteen and adolescent boys and two mid-teenage girls, a sudden shriek cut loose. As one, Kate and Hank turned toward the source of the cry, to find Li standing at the kitchen sink with one arm outstretched, a sealed Ziploc bag dangling from her fingers as far away from her as she could get it. Next to her, Megan hid her face in her hands and shuddered.

  Hank started toward his daughter, all comforting, protective parent, then stopped short when he realized she wasn’t upset by whatever it was in Li’s hand. She was laughing so hard she could barely stand.

  It had been years since he’d seen Megan laugh for pleasure instead of to cause pain.

  “Who—left—the—stoat—in—the—sink?” Li asked, teeth locked hard together, every word glacially enunciated.

  Grisha, Ilya’s fourteen-year-old brother, started away from the table and grabbed the bag from Li. “It must thaw.”

  “Thaw?” she asked. “Thaw?”

  “To make the...” he hesitated. “The taxidermy.”

  “Thaw?” Li said again, outraged. “This was in the freezer?”

  Grisha nodded, eminently reasonable. “In the big meat freezer in the mud room. I found it last Thursday, freshly dead.” He held up the bag so the tableful of boys could admire it. “I was most careful. I made sure it is very clean and the bag is closed very tight so you can see the green line like they show on TV to be certain, then I put the bag in Tupperware in the bottom bin where nothing was and washed my hands up to my elbows with that betadine scrub Dr. Chmiel says he uses between patients and before surgery. Bele and Mike have never seen a weasel. It is for science and education I brought it home. I told them we could skin it and stuff it like a taxidermist for their 4-H group. I could not leave it out to rot waiting for today.”

  Li stared at him, speechless. “That’s...that’s gross.”

  Surprised, Grisha stared at her. “You have never dissected frogs or sheep’s eyes or worms or anything for your biology class?”

  ‘“That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “Well, for one thing they aren’t road kit!—”

  Hank glanced at Kate, looking for reaction cues.

  She shrugged. “Don’t listen,” she advised. “It’s the only way.”

  Ups pursing around a reluctant grin, Hank nodded. He’d had a feeling the way back to track would be drastic, but this...

  He glanced once more at his daughter. On the other side of Li, Megan sagged against the counter and howled. Witnessing her enjoyment, deep inside him an ember stirred and began to glow. He swallowed, leery.

  He’d been told that oftentimes grief ran in cycles, receding and returning in stages, that hope returned after the grieving process was complete, after you got through the denial and isolation, the bargaining and anger, the depression and finally the acceptance. As recently as yesterday it had still seemed that in five years he and Megan had hardly gotten through the initial round of anger, and were still a long way from hope. Today, within the space of twenty minutes and regardless of his wariness, hope kindled and a few skittish cinders took fragile flame.

  Maybe, despite the table and the boys she’d put between them, the multitude of distractions, the woman Kate and her extensive brood, maybe out here surrounded by the magic of trees that stayed green even in the winter he and Megan could get to there from here yet.

  After breakfast Kate showed Hank around.

  It was a nervewracking job, but somebody had to do it.

  “The sheds on this side—” she pointed left “—are for the mother llamas—we call them the ‘girls’—and their crias. The ‘boys’ are on the other side of the workshop. Now over here—”

  She was pretty sure she wasn’t, but she felt as if she was babbling. She’d given this tour a thousand times to people who should have been far more daunting, but she’d never in her life felt so uncomfortable and awkward around anyone as she did around Hank Mathison.

  “The workshop started out as a way for Tai and Li to earn extra pocket money, maybe pick up a little for college. They did dried flower and herb arrangements, some simple wood stufi—crèches, birdhouses, you know. We took ’em around to some of the local farm markets and things sort of escalated from there. By the time the other kids came along, we were running—”

  It was a good thing she’d given this tour to other parents so many times before that she didn’t have to think about what she was saying. Simply walking along beside him left her skin with the prickly, irritated sensation of an allergic rash and made her feel short of breath, restless, fevered and wishing to be elsewhere. Sort of. She also sort of didn’t want to be elsewhere.

  Mostly, and for no apparent reason, she wanted to scream. And giggle hysterically. And slap herself silly, so this obnoxious fluttery-prickly-stilted-feeling idiot would get out of her psyche now, at once, immediately.

  Or sooner.

  “And we sort of inherited the alpacas from a family who was moving to New York. My brother left me a llama with Mike when he died, and well, we found we liked ‘em so much we took on a couple more and things sort of escalated from there. Now we work with a couple of the 4-H clubs, do parades, fairs, things like that, teach the kids how to train the llamas for packing or guarding sheep herd
s or whatever. We’ve just started taking a couple of the ‘boys’ around to the local nursing homes, doing a little, um, llama therapy. People who don’t respond to anything else just sort of seem to take to the llamas. The Ilamas seem to have a kind of...empathy, sympathy, with people who are hurting. Li took Harvey in to one of the homes last week. There was a hundred-and-one-year-old lady who’d been basically catatonic since her husband died. Harvey sniffed her nose and she looked up at him and started crying, latched onto his chest wool and wouldn’t let go. Harvey just took it.” She grinned. “‘Course Li paid for it later. Llamas remember things. When she took him out to put him in the van, he switched his hindquarters around, thunked her into the wheel well and gave her a look Li swears said, ‘If you ever do that to me again—’”

  She looked at Hank, watching his face—for what, she wasn’t sure. She reminded herself of Li at thirteen, when her daughter had won backstage passes to a Bush concert: thoroughly and totally adolescent. And why she felt this way as thoroughly and totally escaped her now as it had Li then.

  Fortunately, it didn’t seem to show—much. Also, fortunately, becoming everybody’s mother had taught Kate the value of laughing at herself and, for the most part, how to ignore adolescent side effects.

  She concentrated on what she was saying, instead of on things over which she apparently had no control.

  “And this is where we build the miniatures and do most of the other woodworldng.” She waved a hand at the long tables and tools set up in the heated pole barn behind the three-car garage.

  Hank nodded, head on automatic pilot; he swept the room a restless glance. “Looks great.” His impatience to move on was undisguised.

  Kate shook her head and withheld a sigh.

  It had been a long morning showing the distracted and therefore taciturn Hank around; wherever she pointed, his thoughts and gaze were elsewhere—looking, she presumed, for Megan, who’d disappeared with Li and Tai as soon as the breakfast dishes were cleared and loaded into the dishwasher. He had not, she was pretty certain, heard a word she’d said since breakfast. Or noticed anything “funny” or...or...artificial about her, either.

  Or noticed her at all.

  Dam it.

  She rolled her eyes and shuddered at that inadvertent internal comment. How old was she, anyway?

  Oh, just about that old. Or young. Or immature, as the case might be.

  Grow up, she told herself rudely. What on earth is the matter with you?

  She took a sideways peek at the almost too neatly trimmed honey-wheat hair, the time-chiseled features that flirted with a beauty not unlike that accorded the gods by sculptors, the unusual mead-colored eyes... Yep, she was right. Hank Mathison was simply too blessed pretty for her good.

  He was the first man she’d ever found so, too. Which brought into the chaos of the moment a whole set of complications she’d never even considered possible, because she’d never thought them hers to contemplate. She had, after all and once upon a time, planned to spend her life in a convent where recognizing the existence of...of...cute guys, as Li would put it, and libido, as Tai had so succinctly phrased it when he’d discovered the existence of his, was frowned upon. And she’d never found cause to change that outlook since then simply because she was no longer, as it were, “married to God.”

  So why now? she asked heaven with some exasperation. Why give me thirty-some-too-many years of no fireworks and no missin’ ’em, then suddenly dump this into my life?

  Because there’s no time like the present, heaven or her guardian angel whispered back.

  Kate would have sworn there was laughter in the response.

  She was glad at least someone found humor in the situation. She, herself, could see the potential for comedy, but it was the kind of comedy where tragedy lurked around the corner ready to pounce the minute it found an opening.

  Megan Mathison was a cataclysm biding its moment. Never had that been more clear to Kate than this morning. Megan was also a child who’d lost her mother at one of the most crucial stages of her life, a young woman whose emotional psyche and ego were often still only eleven in a sixteen-year-old’s body. She wanted all the things other children wanted—happiness, love, attention and a fairy-tale future—but her ability to achieve her ends by nondestructive means was seriously skewed.

  Instinct had brought her to Stone House time and again; reflex made her behave like a kid with a split personality, acting to suit the moment and her own untempered perception of it, causing her to do whatever she had to in order to snow whoever she wanted on her side at the moment. In this instance, Kate. And if Kate managed to get to know and stop...discounting or disliking or something...Hank, if she started to act like a teenage girl with her first crush, who knew what Megan’s unconsciously manipulative instincts would lead the real teen in this situation to try.

  No, Kate sighed. This was definitely not the time to wind up infatuated, for the first time in her life, simply because her suddenly confused and unreliable hormones found Hank Mathison attractive.

  “So what goes on in here?” Hank asked.

  Kate snapped out of her reverie. She had no idea how long she’d kept Hank standing in the double-width workshop doorway, and it was clear from the look on his face that he had no idea they’d already toured the place.

  She’d often thought from the way her late sister-in-law had handled her late brother—Mike’s parents—that men as men and not as brothers or fathers or platonic friends must be exasperating beasts. Now she was sure of it.

  Canting her head she looked up at him, shading her eyes against the sun haloing out behind him. The same irreverent imp that had been largely responsible for her getting asked to leave the convent reared its cockeyed sense of humor and made her gesture again at the tables, tools, the oversized supply locker along the back wall and say, “This is where we hide the bodies.”

  That brought him back from wherever he’d been. Fast. “What? What bodies?”

  Kate grinned. “I wondered what it took to get your attention.”

  Hank viewed her irritably. “You’ve had my undivided attention all morning.”

  “Yeah, right.” Kate snorted and shouldered by him, into the sunlight. “Your undivided attention. If this is an example of your ‘undivided attention’, it’s no wonder Meg feels shorted.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Stung, Hank grabbed her arm, swung her about. A mistake. Especially since he’d already spent the too-long morning trying to curtail his body’s awareness of this woman he wanted only to see as a rival for his daughter’s affections, or as a means of getting Megan back and not as a Woman.

  But Woman she was. And a hell of a lot of one, at that

  There was a spark in her he hadn’t counted on seeing, an electricity in the tourmaline eyes that leaped and crackled, potent when it struck him like a physical blow square in the chest. His lungs grabbed for air as though he were suffocating; his pulse missed first one beat, then two, then caught and charged like the leader in an ice-skating game of crack-the-whip where he was the tail hanging on for dear life so he wouldn’t fly off into a tree or a snowbank and come up full of bruises, disgracing himself.

  He let go of her arm at the same moment her hand came up to pick his fingers off. Her hands were as strong as they looked, as magnetic as he remembered. Their physical link lasted an instant longer than necessary.

  Too long.

  He swallowed and put space between them. then completed his thought. “I don’t short Meg any attention. My entire life revolves around her—”

  “Your mistake,” Kate interrupted flatly. It took everything she had in her to simply fold up the fingers that had touched his and not look to see if they were as blistered as they felt. “Not mine.”

  “So where the devil do you get off accusing me of ignoring my daughter, when you’re the one making things so stinking easy for her here she’d rather not come home?”

  “You think she comes here because life is easy? Whe
n she’s here, I expect the same things from her that I expect from my own kids and every other kid that comes through here, and let me tell you, buster, that ain’t easy.”

  “I mean,” Hank continued as though she hadn’t spoken, “the least you could do—” Damn, why couldn’t he stop smelling her, tasting the sunshine emanating from her, let go of the sensation tingling through the nerves of his hand...of the imprint of steel strength and vitality encased in the silken skin of her arm sheathed in a clean cotton T-shirt “—is make it less attractive for her to be here and—”

  “Oh, and just how do you suggest I do that?” Heat shifted and rose through her system: irritation and something else. Something sharp and clinging, tenacious and beguiling, dangerous. Sweet heaven, she wanted to get away from here, from him, from the sizzle and pop of a passion she couldn’t understand and that had little to do with the disagreement they were having. That, had everything to do with a want she’d never before experienced and didn’t wish to experience now. Not for him. Not for anyone. She found scorn and let it filter into her voice. Anything to keep whatever this was at arm’s length. “You think I ought to start beating them or something—”

  “Mom, Mom!”

  “What?” Kate snapped more sharply than she intended. Immediately guilty, she looked down at Mike and Bele who, oblivious to her tone, danced like excited puppies at her elbow. “What’s up?” The grin her two “babies” almost always provoked was a shadow in her voice this time.