It Takes a Family
Victoria Pade
FAMILY MATTERSSmall-town cop Luke Walker smelled trouble the moment Karis Pratt arrived on his doorstep, claiming the baby she held in her arms was his. Luke had been devastated once before when Karis's sister left town with the daughter she confessed his. And though his mind and his heart had every reason to be skeptical, Luke soon realized that Karis was nothing like her impetuous sister. From birth, the little girl who could be his daughter had gripped his heart in her tiny fist and wouldn't let go. Was it possible that these two females could ultimately be his…to have and to hold?
He glanced down at Amy and discovered that he’d talked her to sleep.
The sight of her there, cuddled against his chest, her long lashes resting on her chubby cheeks, cracked the wall he’d erected around his heart. And suddenly he was flooded with memories.
He clamped his eyes shut, fighting the emotions, the images of Amy at that moment, the images of them both at different intervals in the future, that horrible hope that he didn’t want to have.
She isn’t mine…. She isn’t mine…. She isn’t mine….
He took a deep breath and returned Amy to her crib, relieved that she remained asleep as he covered her.
But there was another moment when he couldn’t make himself move away from her bed. When he stood there watching her sleep.
When, just for that one moment, he couldn’t help wondering, what if?
What if she was his…?
Dear Reader,
It struck me a while ago that in a lot of families there’s someone who does most of the cleanups—and not just the ones that involve dirty dishes after holiday meals. Someone who is always there to lend a helping hand.
That started me thinking, what if? (That is always where the books come from.) And this time I began to think, what if the responsible person had some really, really big life-altering catastrophe to clean up after? What if it had managed to completely rock her own world, to the point of losing everything? And what if, with no one to turn to, she was left in such a bind that she had to turn to a stranger? A stranger who had had to do some cleanup of his own because of that very same mess-maker?
That’s where this story was born. And since my little town of Northbridge, Montana, seemed like a good place to take a life that needed starting over, that’s where we are in It Takes a Family.
I hope you’re as glad to be back as I am.
Happy reading!
Victoria Pade
It Takes a Family
Victoria Pade
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
VICTORIA PADE
is a native of Colorado, where she continues to live and work. Her passion—besides writing—is chocolate, which she indulges in frequently and in every form. She loves romance novels and romantic movies—the more lighthearted, the better—but she likes a good, juicy mystery now and then, too.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter One
“Okay, sweetheart, we made it. We’re here,” Karis Pratt said.
There was no response from the back seat and Karis glanced over her shoulder at the fifteen-month-old baby girl buckled into a child carrier behind her and to her right.
It was late for Amy to be awake and Karis wouldn’t have been surprised to find her niece asleep. But instead Amy was peering out the side window, her two middle fingers in her mouth, kicking her feet up and down the way she did when she was tired.
There was absolutely nothing about the scene that should have brought tears to Karis’s eyes, but there they were anyway. Hot and stinging.
She blinked hard and swallowed to keep them from falling.
“You don’t know how much I don’t want to do this,” she told her niece. “How much I don’t want to do either of the things I’ve come here for. If there was anything else I could do—”
Karis’s voice cracked and she paused to clear her throat, to fight for some control.
When she had a semblance of it, she sighed and said, “But there isn’t. And there’s nothing else I haven’t already done, or we wouldn’t be here.”
Here, in the middle of a snowstorm that had made visibility so slight they’d been driving for the past two hours at a snail’s crawl to the place Karis’s sister had called a “one-horse town, hick hole-in-the-wall.”
Northbridge, Montana.
It was after nine o’clock on the last Friday of October and Karis hadn’t intended to arrive so late. If she was going to show up on someone’s doorstep, she thought it should probably have happened earlier in the day or evening. But she couldn’t turn back time and she also couldn’t risk keeping Amy with her overnight. Not when she was going to have to sleep in the car. So she resigned herself to get started on what she was dreading and unbuckled her own seat belt.
“It’ll be all right,” she said, unsure whether the reassurance was for herself or her niece. “This is for the best.”
Karis got out of the compact sedan and peered through the snow at the red brick house she was parked in front of. It was a moderate-sized two-and-a-half-story structure with a covered front porch and big black numbers running vertically alongside the door, letting her know she had the right address. The address she’d used to answer the sole letter her sister had sent when Lea had lived here.
Karis was glad to see the buttery glow of light in the curtained front window. Hopefully that meant the man her sister had been married to for barely ten months was inside and she wouldn’t be taking Amy into this cold for no reason.
She pulled her own coat close around her, smoothed her chin-length auburn hair behind her ears and went around the car.
Amy raised big, trusting blue eyes to Karis the moment the door opened and Karis felt her heart clench.
How am I going to do this…?
But just then a frigid gust of wind hit her from behind and once more the thought of spending the night in the car was all the motivation she needed. She ducked inside, pulled up the hood on Amy’s coat to cover her short reddish-brown curls and to keep her tiny ears warm. Then she unfastened the seat from its moorings, and took out baby and carrier.
Karis didn’t hesitate to rush for the house then. To climb the four steps to the porch. To ring the bell.
While she waited, she bent over and kissed Amy’s forehead and again said, “It’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.”
The door opened a moment later and Karis straightened, peering through the screen at the man who stood there. Tall, broad shouldered, imposing—that was about all she could make out with the light coming from behind him.
“I’m looking for Luke Walker,” she said.
“That’s me,” he answered with curiosity in his tone.
“I know you don’t know me…”
How could he when they’d never met? But she was loath to tell him who she was. For Karis this entire trip and the two ugly errands she had to do were just added humiliations heaped on a whole pile of them that had made up the nightmare she’d found herself in the past several weeks.
But with Amy in mind, she shored up her courage and said, “I’m Karis Pratt. Lea’s sister.”
His first response was to reach for the edge of the door he’d just opened, as if he were going to slam it in her face.
But he didn’t. Instead he kept his hand on it as his head dropped enough so, even though Karis couldn’t see his eyes, she knew he’d looked down at the baby carrier she held in front of her with both hands.
He muttered an epithet under his breath that certainly wasn’t welcoming, and then pushed open the screen door.
“Come in out of the cold,” he commanded, as begrudging an invitation as she’d ever received.
But Karis was in no position to be particular about the amenities. She took Amy into the warmth of the entryway, moving far enough to the side of the door for Luke Walker to close it.
He turned to face her and Karis felt the faintest hint of relief. Her sister’s taste had sometimes leaned toward men who could be rough around the edges, and Karis knew she would never have been able to go through with what she’d come for had that been the case with Luke Walker.
But if he had rough edges, they were nowhere to be seen. The man had runway good looks, sable-brown hair cut short and neat. A ruggedly masculine bone structure made his lean face a collection of planes and angles and sharp edges, which worked together to make a masterpiece. A slightly longish but perfectly shaped nose. A mouth that was neither too big nor too small. And eyes that were vibrant and intelligent, penetrating and piercing, discerning and disarming all at once. Teal-green eyes that were remarkably thick lashed.
And all atop a body that just wouldn’t quit—shoulders and chest a mile wide, narrow waist and hips, and long, tree-trunk-mighty legs.
Karis had known he was a local police officer, which was why she’d held out hope that he might be different from Lea’s other men, but this man standing steady and strong before her exuded a kind of trustworthiness that helped ease Karis’s mind. Not much, but some. And some was something these days.
She bent over to set the baby carrier on the entryway floor, noting that wide-eyed Amy was surveying Luke Walker almost as intently as Karis had been.
Then she straightened, noting the dark blue uniform that told her he’d just gotten off duty. His face showed no signs of warmth; instead, he was glaring at her and steadfastly not looking at Amy.
“Why are you here?” he demanded, notably not suggesting they move any farther into his house. In fact, with his legs planted shoulder-width apart and his arms crossed over his chest, he was a towering wall-of-man, keeping her from even seeing into the living room behind him.
Karis saw no point in sugarcoating her answer. Obviously Luke Walker bore no tender feelings for her sister, and with good reason. So she said, “Six weeks ago, in Denver, there was an explosion that killed Lea, our father and the man Lea left here with.”
Her sister’s ex-husband offered no condolences. His only response was a slight crease that appeared between his eyebrows and a tightening of his jaw.
“It’s a long story that you’re probably not interested in,” she went on. “But because of things that led up to that, I—” Karis stalled, choking on the words she needed to say.
But she did need to say them, she reminded herself. She didn’t have a choice.
She swallowed hard. “I can’t keep Amy. Not right now anyway or for a—”
“She isn’t mine,” Luke Walker said bluntly. “Even though she was born while I was married to your sister, Lea made it clear when she took off that Amy belonged to—”
“I know what she told you,” Karis said, afraid that if she let him say what he wanted to before she refuted it, he might shove her out the door and never give her the chance. “I know she told you that she was leaving with Abe because Abe was really Amy’s father. But Lea told me that she wasn’t absolutely sure that was true. That she only said it to cut the ties with you so she could go back to Abe. And her addictions. She did things like that. But it is possible that you’re Amy’s father.”
“Bull.”
“I don’t know whether you think Lea was lying to me or I’m lying to you, but that is what she said. If I didn’t think there was any possibility you’re Amy’s father, I wouldn’t be here. But the fact is I do think there’s the possibility—”
“So even you’re saying there’s only a possibility.”
Karis looked him square in the eye. “Yes,” she admitted.
“And probably not a very good one.”
Karis didn’t want to acknowledge that, so instead she said, “I knew my sister. The ups and downs of her. Sometimes, if she was desperate—or determined—enough, or if she wanted to get out of something she’d gotten herself into, she’d say something that suited her purpose. But the thing is, it didn’t suit any purpose to tell me Amy might be yours.”
Okay, maybe that wasn’t strictly the case. Karis had voiced her disapproval of what Lea had done and it might have caused Lea to say what she had to to defend herself, however feebly. It was just that Luke Walker was Karis’s last resort, and even though she understood his doubts and didn’t blame him for having them, she had to hope that for once Lea might have been telling the truth, that she hadn’t known who Amy’s father was and that he might be Luke Walker.
“But apparently it suits some purpose for you, now, to believe it,” the big man guessed, making it clear he wasn’t easy to put anything past.
“Look,” Karis said. “Something Lea did cost me everything I had—and I mean everything—to keep other people, people who trusted me, from losing their business. What you see before you, the twelve dollars in my purse, the car parked in the street loaded with my clothes, and one credit card that will be maxed out after two more fill-ups of my gas tank, are all I have left in the world. I’ve borrowed from and imposed on friends as much as I can, but with no place to live, no job, and no references to give potential employers, I can’t keep Amy with me right now. And since you’re listed on her birth certificate as her father—and may be her father—you have to step up.”
The man merely stared at her, those aqua eyes like hot lasers.
Karis continued anyway. “I think that for your own sake and for Amy’s, you should have DNA tests done to find out the truth. I know that takes time and if you’ll keep her during that time so I can just have a little while to dig myself out of this hole I’m in, then we can reevaluate the situation.”
Karis had come here imagining three possible outcomes. One, of course, was that he might just flat out refuse and turn his back on Amy completely. She didn’t think that needed to be said, so she only relayed her other two scenarios.
“If Amy proves not to be yours, I wouldn’t expect or ask anything else of you, and I’ll take her. Happily. Or maybe you’ll find out she is yours but decide you don’t want her because of Lea or because you don’t want to be a single father, or whatever. Again, if I’m up and running again, I’ll gladly take her to live with me and raise her and never ask another thing of you again because no matter who her father is, I love her and I want her with me and I certainly don’t want Amy to ever be with anyone who—”
There were those damn tears again, filling her eyes, cracking her voice, reducing her to something she didn’t want to be reduced to in front of this guy.
“Forget it,” she said, not certain where that had come from. Maybe from the last shred of dignity she had left.
She bent over to retrieve the baby, glad that somehow, even in the midst of the tension hanging thick in the air, Amy had fallen asleep and wasn’t witness to this.
“Hold on,” Luke Walker said then, sounding angry, annoyed and resentful, as if his back had been pushed to the wall.
Karis stopped short of picking up the car seat and straightened a second time, managing to blink away the tears once more, before they’d fallen. She raised a stubborn chin to Luke Walker and again met him eye to eye.
He didn’t expand immediately on his order for her to hold on, though. Instead, he continued to stare at her, studying her, taking her measure, maybe considering what to do next.
Karis endured the silence and the scrutiny, but if he was waiting for her to beg, he had a long wait.
Then, after she’d seen his jaw clench and unclench repeatedly, he finally said, “I’ll have the DNA tests done so I know once and for all if she’s mine, even though I don’t think she is.”
“And you’ll keep her in the meantime?”
There was another long silence before he shook his head. “Not without you here, too.”
Karis didn’t understand the edict, but rather than question it, she said, “I’m not leaving Northbridge for a few days. I have other business here.”
“If it’s with the rest of the Pratts, I’d tread carefully,” he warned in a way that held a bit of authoritative threat to it. “But just telling me you’ll be around town and only for a few days isn’t enough. If I let you out of my sight you could do what, for all I know, you planned to do all along—disappear and stick me with a baby you know isn’t mine.”
“Amy isn’t something to stick anyone with,” Karis said angrily. “You’d be lucky to have her. Lucky if she is yours. Amy is the only right thing my sister ever did. And as for my disappearing, I’m not Lea, and leaving Amy with you in no way washes my hands of her. Even if she is yours and you keep her I have every intention of finding work and someplace to live that’s as near to here as possible so that I can—”
Luke Walker cut her off as if nothing she said carried any weight. “There’s a room with its own bath in the attic. You can use it and put Amy in her old room—the crib is still there.”
“I can’t do that. I have to get a job. If I stay here, too, it defeats the whole purpose—”
“I’m not keeping her without you being right here until I sort out who she belongs to. If she isn’t mine—”
“Fine,” Karis said before he could say more, recognizing an ultimatum when she was given one.
His eyes narrowed. “That was quick. Did I just play into your hand?”
“Are you always this suspicious of everything and everyone?” she shot back.
“Of everything and everyone who has to do with Lea,” he answered without missing a beat. “I learned it the hard way.”
Karis swallowed her own anger. She’d known she wouldn’t be going into an ideal situation. In Lea’s wake, she never did.
“My résumé is out, I’ll do follow-ups on the phone from here and try to do any interviews that way, too, if I can. I can check want ads for jobs in Billings or some of the other towns or cities I saw on the road signs I passed getting here. It isn’t what I had planned, but I’ll make it work,” she said, thinking out loud.
To give him the entire picture of why she hadn’t put up more of a fight, she said, “Am I thrilled with staying in a house with a man I don’t even know? No. But I need a place for Amy and if that’s the only way you’ll keep her, it’s the only choice I have. And if you want to know the whole truth, staying here is better than sleeping in my car, which was what I was going to do because I can’t afford a hotel room. Plus, at least if I’m here, I’ll still be with Amy. I can still watch over her and go on taking care of her, and she won’t wake up tomorrow morning in a strange place with only an unfamiliar face to greet her. If you call your invitation playing into my hand, then even though the thought of my staying here never occurred to me, yes, I guess you did. Want to change your mind?”
Again he didn’t hurry to answer, pinning her with his gaze.
Then, with resignation, he said, “No. But I’ll be watching you.” He held out his hand, palm upward. “And I’ll take your car keys so you can’t sneak out in the middle of the night.”
“How do I know you’re not some kind of maniac who’s going to keep me prisoner or something?” she said, reluctant to concede.
“You don’t. I guess we’re both having to act on some blind trust.”
“You don’t trust me at all,” Karis countered.
“No, I don’t.”
He had the advantage and he knew it. And since she’d never thought he was some kind of maniac or she wouldn’t have let him anywhere near Amy, she knew his motives really were what he’d claimed—not to allow her the opportunity to take off and stick him with a baby that might not be his.
But that didn’t mean giving him her keys wasn’t galling.
“I need things from the car and the trunk and then you can have them,” she said.
“Give me the keys and I’ll go out with you.”
Karis sighed, rolled her eyes to let him know she thought he was being ridiculous, and dropped her keys into the large hand waiting for them.
He closed his fist around them and motioned toward the door. “Ladies first.”
Karis opened the door and went outside to her car. She gave Luke Walker plenty of room to unlock the driver’s side door. She took Amy’s diaper bag and her own purse from behind the front seat, slinging both straps over her shoulder before popping the trunk with the lever beside the seat.
Luke Walker had returned to the curb, where he watched as she took her suitcase and the cardboard box that held the remainder of Amy’s things from the rear of the vehicle.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He closed the trunk’s lid and then took the box and suitcase from her, leaving her only the diaper bag and her purse as they returned to the house.
He still didn’t spare Amy so much as a glance when they got back, though. Karis picked up baby and carrier.
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
She hadn’t. But something made her not want to admit it, so she said, “I’m not hungry.”
He didn’t pursue it; he merely headed up the staircase that rose against one wall of the entry.
Following him, Karis tried not to notice that right at eye level was a pretty fantastic derriere. This was not the time or place or person for that, she lectured herself.
When they reached the top of the steps, he motioned to his left. “The nursery,” he said as if the words stuck in his throat.
He’d left it up all this time? That seemed odd, but Karis didn’t say anything. She just went into the pink-and-white nursery adorned with cuddly bunny wallpaper and borders around a white crib, bureau, changing table and rocking chair.
She set Amy on the floor again as Luke Walker did the same with the suitcase and box. Then he went about putting a crib sheet on the mattress while Karis eased the sleeping infant out of her coat.
“I’ll put your suitcase in your room,” her surly host said, leaving her to tend to the baby alone.
Amy was barely disturbed by the diaper change or by having her pajamas put on. When that was accomplished, Karis put her niece into the crib and covered her, propping Amy’s favorite toy, a stuffed elephant, in one corner of the crib so it would be within reach if the fifteen-month-old woke up and wanted it.
“Sleep tight, sweetheart,” Karis whispered after kissing the baby on the forehead. Then she silently left the room, leaving the door slightly ajar.
Luke Walker was waiting in the hallway, arms again crossed over his chest.
Without saying anything he led her up a second set of stairs to the attic. It appeared to have been the room of another young girl, because daisy paper lined the wall behind the double-size brass bed.
“Sheets and blankets are clean,” he said of the bedding at the foot of the bare mattress. “The armoire is empty if you want to put your stuff in it.”
Karis nodded again.
“Bathroom is through there—” He pointed to a door to the left of the cheval mirror. “Towels are in a cabinet—I’m sure you can find them. If you decide you’re hungry, there’s food in the fridge. The kitchen is downstairs, at the rear of the house.”
Karis nodded a third time, feeling like a new inmate being instructed by the warden. Thanking him seemed inappropriate so she didn’t do it.
“Do you need anything else?” he asked.
“No.”
And with that Luke Walker headed for the door.
“I guess I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, when he reached it and turned to look at her again.
“Unless I make a run for it,” she answered facetiously, not shying away from meeting his cold, hard expression.
He didn’t crack a smile. Instead, he said, “Don’t expect me to take care of her when she gets up.”
“You won’t have to,” Karis said, replacing her sarcasm with defensiveness.
Apparently satisfied with her response, he turned in the doorway and went out.
Before he closed the door behind him, Karis got another glimpse of that great posterior, and admiring it just came as a reflex.
A reflex she curbed the instant she realized what she was doing.
Because regardless of the man’s physical attributes, she reminded herself, they were of no interest whatsoever to her.
She’d come to Northbridge to get her life back on track and what that was going to require would not make her any friends here.
And she certainly wasn’t going to enter into any other kind of relationship.
Especially not with her sister’s wronged and scorned ex-husband.
Regardless of how drop-dead gorgeous he was.
Chapter Two
As he lay in bed early Saturday morning after a nearly sleepless night, Luke Walker was still coming to grips with the fact that his ex-wife had died.
He’d gone straight to the telephone when he’d left Karis Pratt in the attic the evening before. Placing a call to Cutty Grant—a member of Northbridge’s police force who was on duty overnight—he’d asked for the number of the Denver police department. Then Luke had called Denver, identified himself and requested confirmation of a report that a woman named Lea Pratt or Lea Walker or Lea Pratt Walker was one of three fatalities in an explosion there six weeks ago.
Within twenty minutes he’d had the confirmation— Lea really had been killed. Her sister had told the truth to that point anyway.
And Luke had been left with one more shock to deal with when it came to Lea.
He’d wished comeuppance on her when she left him, but he’d never wished her dead. What she’d done here—to him and to the Pratts—was rotten and lowdown and lousy, but not rotten, lowdown and lousy enough for a death sentence.
He just didn’t know what he was supposed to feel now. Grief? Remorse? Loss?
He’d gone through all of that when she’d taken off. All of that and so much more.
But eventually, after what had seemed like an eternity spent in an emotional pit that had felt like the deepest, darkest hallway in hell, he’d come out of it. He wasn’t sure how—he guessed time had taken care of it—but little by little he’d begun to be able to look at the whole thing as one huge mistake. A lapse in his own judgment that he’d paid for—a lot.
Little by little he’d gotten over his feelings for Lea—all of his feelings for her. The good feelings that had gotten him into trouble in the first place, and the bad feelings Lea had left him with.
Little by little, he’d come to see that although she might have shared his house, his bed, his life for a while, he hadn’t really known her at all. Who and what she actually was hadn’t been revealed to him in any way until she’d walked out on him. She’d been a complete stranger. A stranger who had put on an elaborate act. A monumental ruse. A hell of a con job. But a stranger nonetheless. And only a stranger.
Which meant that now, in a way, hearing about her death was like hearing about the death of a stranger. He wasn’t glad, he wasn’t sad. He was just sobered, he thought, by the fact that someone he’d been involved with had come to a violent end.
And that was all there was to it for him now.
So if her sister thought the news of Lea’s death was going to turn him into some kind of bleeding heart and make him an easy mark for a second attempt at passing Amy off as his, she was mistaken. No one would be more surprised than him if Amy proved to be his child. He just didn’t think that was possible.
Daylight was dawning and, after glancing at the hint of sun through the window, he decided he was never going to get any sleep, so he rolled out of bed. It was anybody’s guess what today would bring and he might as well shower, dress and be prepared.
But even as he went into the bathroom connected to his bedroom, Lea was still on his mind. Lea and Amy and the claim that Amy was his again.
Yes, once upon a time he’d believed what Lea Pratt had said. About everything.
He’d believed she wasn’t aware that she was going twenty-six miles over the speed limit and was sorry and would slow down. He’d believed she was nothing more than the local Pratts’ curious half sister who had buzzed into Northbridge to finally meet them and satisfy her curiosity. He’d believed every single thing she’d told him, including that the baby she’d delivered eight months after their whirlwind, love-at-first-sight courtship, was his premature daughter.
He’d believed it all until Lea had nearly ripped his heart out by taking away the baby he’d cared for and loved for five weeks as if she were his.
Then he and the Pratts had had their eyes opened. And faster than Lea had come into their lives, she was gone.
And so was Amy.
Luke had made it into the bathroom, but not to the shower. Lost in his thoughts, he’d stopped at the sink and was gripping the edge with both hands, elbows locked, head hanging between his shoulders as the memory of his own stupidity tormented him.
A sucker—that’s what he’d been. A sucker for a pretty face, a great body and a lot of smooth lies.
He raised his head and pushed himself from the counter, making it to the shower this time and turning on the water.
A lot of smooth lies…
And now here was Lea’s sister with a tale of her own. A tale of woe.
After Karis Pratt had made her announcement, Luke’s first thought was that Lea wasn’t dead. That she’d sent Amy with her aunt and another pack of lies to get rid of the child. That was why he’d checked up on the explosion story.
That hadn’t been a lie. Lea was dead. And so was Ted Pratt. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything else Karis Pratt had said was true.
True or false—not easy to tell, Luke thought as he stepped under the spray of the shower.
Hard-luck stories usually netted a bigger payoff. That was what Lea had used at the end on her half siblings. Maybe that was the angle Karis Pratt was working again.
Financially wiped out by something Lea had done.
Planning to sleep in her car in a snowstorm last night.
She loved Amy but couldn’t afford to keep her….
Going over the laundry list of Karis Pratt’s claims, Luke was scrubbing his head so hard it hurt.
He eased up, muttering a word his mother had washed his mouth out with soap for saying when he was eight.
It was just that it ticked him off to realize, as he mentally replayed what had happened in his entryway the previous evening, that there was a part of him that kept wondering if it was a scam.
But Karis Pratt had been telling the truth about Lea’s death. What if she was telling the truth about everything else, too?
Damn, but he didn’t want to be thinking that.
Only there were things about the night before that nagged at him. Things that might have only been clever special effects, but still he couldn’t quite shake the memory.
Things like coming close to tears when she’d said she loved Amy. The forget it that had made it seem as if she couldn’t go through with leaving the baby after all. The whole attitude—as if she’d been doing about the last thing in the world she wanted to do. Even the concession that, yes, Lea might have been lying to her when she’d said Amy was his.
She’d been very convincing.
Plus, there was Lea. Lea had taken him for a ride. She’d taken her half siblings for a ride. As far as Luke knew, she hadn’t had a single compunction about lying to anyone about anything at any time. Did he doubt that she was capable of lying to her full sister, too? Or doing something that would cost Karis everything she had?
No, he didn’t doubt it.
Or maybe it was easier to think that if Lea could do what she had to him and pull the wool over his eyes, she could do it to anyone.
“Or maybe you’re getting taken in by another pretty face,” he accused himself as he rinsed off shampoo and soap suds.
Another pretty face that was actually prettier than the one he’d fallen for before. Much prettier. Beautiful, in fact.
Yeah, there was no denying that even looking the worse for wear the previous evening, Karis Pratt was beautiful. More beautiful than Lea had been at her best.
Lea had had untamed good looks. Not trashy, but not girl-next-door, either. Long bleached-blond hair she’d artfully mussed to always appear tousled. Cat-shaped blue eyes. Lips so full they’d seemed enhanced. A chest the same way. A chest that she’d liked to show off.
But her sister? Karis Pratt had a more wholesome beauty. Shiny reddish-brown hair the color of a rain-soaked tile roof on an adobe house. Thick, smooth, healthy-looking hair that kept escaping the control she’d tried to put on it by slipping it behind her ears. Chin-length silk with bangs that teased the left brow of a face that was impossible to find a flaw in.
Creamy, alabaster skin. High cheekbones. A mouth that had some of Lea’s lushness without the falsely enhanced abundance. A nose that was just the right length and more narrow, more refined than Lea’s. And blue eyes that lacked the catlike shape but instead were big and round and sort of glistening, like a mountain lake at daybreak.
Karis Pratt was smaller than her sister, too. Slightly shorter—probably five foot four instead of five-five and a half. Thinner. Flatter, but still curvy enough.
Actually, as Luke turned off the shower and grabbed his towel from where it was slung over the shower door, it occurred to him that Lea had probably learned early on to overdo the makeup and hair—and even the bustline—so as not to be overshadowed by her more naturally stunning sister.
So yeah, he’d noticed Karis Pratt’s looks. How could he not have? But was that making him inclined to believe her?
Hell, he wasn’t inclined to believe her. He didn’t want to believe her. He hated even wondering if anything she’d said beyond the news of Lea’s death might be true.
But he was wondering. And if he was wondering, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to just blow off everything Karis Pratt had said. Including what she’d said about Amy, and Lea’s claim that she actually might be his after all.
The word he spit out then had cost him a mouth-washing at ten.
He was just so disgusted with himself for even entertaining the slightest possibility that Amy was his.
But as long as the question could be raised again, he knew it needed an answer. and it was why he’d agreed to have the testing done. And why, at the moment, Amy was asleep in the crib she’d slept in for the first five weeks of her life.
And the reason Karis Pratt was sleeping in the attic above his head? That wasn’t because of the way she looked, he assured himself. Or because he was buying into the rest of her sob story.
That was so she couldn’t hightail it out of Northbridge before he knew whether or not Amy was his and leave him with a baby that probably wasn’t his.
So maybe he wasn’t being conned for a second time, he told himself.
Even if the image of Karis Pratt, in all its glory, had popped into his head a hundred times during the night to remind him just how incredible looking she was.
No, this was about knowing once and for all if Amy was his own flesh and blood.
And if, in the meantime, he figured out whether the rest of Karis Pratt’s story was true or false?
He’d be interested to know. But beyond general curiosity, he was definitely not investing anything in her. Not financially and not anything of himself, either.
Lea Pratt had been the most embarrassing, costly episode of his life and it would be difficult enough if he did prove to be Amy’s father and ended up raising a child who shared her genes. He certainly wouldn’t add a sister who shared them, too, to the mix.
At least if Amy was his, half of her genes were his. If he raised her, he could teach her to be honest and aboveboard—a good, decent, honorable person. But a full-blooded sister raised by the same people in the same environment? As far as he was concerned, that could have bred the same kind of person Lea had been, through and through.
No, thanks. He wouldn’t risk it.
So while he might have to suffer Karis Pratt’s temporary presence in his house and in his life, that was as far as he was willing to go. No matter how she looked.
And if she kept creeping into his mind’s eye when he least expected it and didn’t want it?
He’d shove her out again with thoughts of Lea.
There was no repellant stronger than that.
Which meant that Luke wasn’t worried about having Karis Pratt around for the time being.
Even if she was so damn beautiful that the mental image of her made wrapping the towel around his waist impossible.
Karis made sure she was up early that morning. To shower and shampoo her hair. To put on her jeans and a beige V-neck sweater she wore over a white camisole top. To dry her hair and give it the few turns of the curling iron it required to curve under on the ends. To brush on a little blush and a little mascara.
She wanted to be ready by the time Amy woke for the day.
But Amy was still sleeping when Karis had accomplished it all and so she was left waiting. She didn’t leave the attic bedroom, because she wasn’t eager to face Luke Walker’s disdain any sooner than necessary.
As she waited, she perched on the window seat of one of two dormers that provided light and air to the slanted-ceilinged room. For the first time, she faced the second reason she’d come to Northbridge—the big, stately, brown-brick house that stood atop the hill at the end of the street.
It was two stories with a steeply pitched slate roof and a large turret that ran along one corner of both levels. A wide, covered porch wrapped the front and side of the house from the turret, shading large-paned glass windows and an oversize front door, and dropping to the sloping front yard by eight stone steps bordered by well-tended bushes.
Multiple windows lined the upper level, all of them flanked by dark shutters and fanlights above them.
It was a lovely, old house that had clearly never seen a day’s neglect. The home of her father’s original family.
And Karis’s single, solitary asset.
Looking at the house put a knot in her stomach, the same knot that had been forming there for the past few weeks whenever she thought about it or researched it. The same knot that formed every time she thought about how the house had come to be hers or what she was going to have to do to get it.
She had no right to it and she knew it. Just as her seven older half siblings would know it. And resent her for the way the house had come to be hers.
“Why did you have to put me in this position, Lea?” she whispered, as if her sister were there to hear.
But when it came to the house, in this, too, Karis didn’t have a choice. The best she could do was vow to make the situation as painless as possible for the seven people she’d never even met.
But still, she was going to have to tell them how things stood. For Amy’s sake. For her own sake. For the sake of other, innocent, trusting people who hadn’t deserved what had been done to them, either.
It just didn’t change the fact that in all of her fantasies of coming face-to-face with this part of her family, she had never imagined these circumstances.
“And now you’re all going to hate me.”
With good reason.
Amy was an even-tempered, easygoing baby. Karis always wondered if that was her nature or if it was just that she’d learned, with Lea as her mother, being demanding didn’t get her anywhere.
Regardless of the reason, the baby didn’t wake up fussy in the mornings. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t impatient to have her needs met. She merely sat in her crib and entertained herself.
Knowing that, Karis had opened the door to the attic bedroom, as soon as she was dressed, to listen for the sounds of her niece stirring. When she heard them, she abandoned her melancholy study of the Pratt family home and left her room, heading down the stairs, being careful to walk softly in case Luke Walker was still asleep.
She only made it to the third of the steps, however, before she paused in her tracks.
Luke Walker was already at Amy’s bedroom door.
He was just standing there, not venturing in, only watching from a distance.
Karis couldn’t see past him into the room but, from the sounds of Amy’s jabbering, Karis assumed the little girl hadn’t noticed him. And he didn’t notice Karis, standing stalk still.
It gave her a moment to do some observing of her own.
He had already showered and dressed. Not in his uniform this morning, though. He had on a pair of time-aged, faded jeans. They fit him so well he had to have bought them years ago and broken them in. So well that her gaze was drawn inescapably to the back pockets that rode his rear in divine symphony with the tight glutes behind them.
She looked upward when she realized she was again staring at the man’s butt.
He had on a stark-white long-sleeved, mock-neck T-shirt that left little to the imagination. The shirt encased wide shoulders, muscular torso and hard biceps every bit as appealingly as those jeans covered his lower half.
The faint scent of his cologne wafted in the air. A clean, airy cologne with citrus undertones, the scent went right to her head and carried her away for a moment before she reminded herself that this wasn’t just any man. Luke Walker wasn’t simply a great-looking, single guy she’d happened to meet and might want to get acquainted with. This man already seemed disgusted with her merely by association. That disgust wasn’t going to be improved when he found out the second reason she’d come to Northbridge. No matter how he looked. Or smelled. She needed not to forget that.
Even so, she couldn’t help thinking that although she hadn’t considered her sister capable of good taste in men, she had to acknowledge that this particular man proved Lea did have some. Either that, or she’d been uncommonly lucky.
Karis went down the remainder of the steps, making sure her footfalls announced her presence.
When Luke Walker heard her coming, those impressive shoulders drew back slightly and he took a step out of the doorway as if he’d been caught.
“Trying to see if she looks like you?” Karis asked as she joined him.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“What do you think?”
“I think she looks like you—reddish hair, pale skin, button nose, big baby-blue eyes… Maybe she isn’t Amy at all. Maybe she’s yours and you’re trumping up this whole thing to get rid of your own kid.”
So today wasn’t going to be any better than last night, Karis thought.
“That’s definitely what I’m doing. You caught me. And here I thought you were a plain cop instead of a detective,” she said sarcastically.
She went into the nursery then, to her niece, bypassing the man at the door.
“An Kras!” Amy greeted when she saw her, using her fifteen-month-old version of Aunt Karis.
“Good morning, sweetie.”
Bringing her elephant with her, Amy stood and hung on to the crib’s rail with her free hand, giving a bit of a bounce to let Karis know she wanted out.
Karis didn’t hesitate to oblige, picking her up and settling the baby on her hip.
“Hi,” Amy said then, spotting Luke Walker.
Karis saw that he was taken aback by the baby’s acknowledgment of him.
He didn’t respond immediately, though, and Karis wondered if he was going to ignore Amy. If he did, Karis’s estimation of him would go rapidly downhill and she waited to see what he would do.
But after a moment he said, “Hi.” And then he saved himself from Karis’s blacklist by actually coming into the room.
“So…she talks?” he said, not getting too close.
“Only a few words, but she’s starting to get the hang of it.”
He pointed to the well-loved elephant. “What’s this?” he asked Amy in a much, much more gentle tone of voice than anything he’d used with Karis.
“Eddy,” Amy informed him.
“Eddy?” he repeated. “Is that your elephant’s name—Eddy? Eddy the elephant?”
“I think it’s just short for elephant and the best she can do with it for now,” Karis supplied.
“Eddy,” Amy said again, as if they were both wrong but without giving any clue as to how.
“Shall we change your diaper?” Karis asked the baby.
Amy didn’t answer. She merely continued staring at Luke Walker, who stared back.
Karis let them have their moment. She knew Luke Walker was still looking for signs of himself in the small child. While she didn’t know what exactly about him had Amy’s rapt attention, she was at least glad to see that her niece wasn’t shy the way she sometimes was around strangers.
“I wonder if she recognizes you,” Karis said, thinking out loud.
“She was five weeks old the last time she saw me. I’m sure she doesn’t remember.”
“Probably not,” Karis confirmed. “But she’s usually more standoffish with strangers.”
Luke Walker surprised her then by holding out his arms to Amy. “Will you come and see me?”
That was where Amy’s friendliness stopped. She reared back, wrapped her free arm around Karis’s neck with a vise grip, and managed to hold the elephant against her with her forearm while getting her two middle fingers to her mouth. She smacked Karis in the face with Eddy in the process.
“What did I tell you?” Luke Walker said, as if he’d proved something.
By the time Karis had found her way out from behind the elephant, he’d turned and was headed for the door again.
“Will you both eat eggs for breakfast, or does she still need baby food or something?” he asked.
Were they all going to have breakfast together?
Karis hadn’t thought about meals or him providing her food. She certainly hadn’t thought of him cooking for her. It seemed strange to accept his offer as if she were an honored guest when she was anything but.
“You don’t have to do that. I mean, for me. But yes, Amy eats table food now—what you can get her to eat—and eggs are one of the things she likes, if you want to fix her one. If you don’t, I packed some—”
“I think I can probably scramble eggs for both of you,” he said as if she were making a bigger deal out of it than was necessary.
Or was this a glimmer of hospitality or almost-congeniality that might indicate that he wasn’t going to be a bear forever?
Hoping so, Karis softened her own attitude and said, “That would be nice. Thanks.”
“They’ll be ready shortly. Unless you want to eat them cold.”
So much for hospitality or congeniality.
Still, as Karis watched him go, she realized that the idea of having breakfast with him wasn’t altogether awful, and that alarmed her slightly.
He doesn’t like me and he’s not going to like me more when he finds out the rest, she reminded herself.
Keeping that firmly in mind, she took Amy to the changing table to put the baby in a dry diaper.
And to put Luke Walker in his place as nothing but an afterthought.
Chapter Three
“So…what do you think about Amy and I going up the hill to the Pratt house this afternoon to tell them about Dad…and Lea?” Karis ventured a short time later as she, Amy and Luke were eating the eggs, bacon, toast and juice he’d prepared for them all.
“You know their house is up the street?” Luke asked.
Since Karis had brought Amy downstairs, set her on the floor and pitched in to help, he hadn’t been friendly, but he’d been marginally more amicable. Now suspicion tinged his tone again in response to her question and she was sorry to hear it.
“Lea didn’t say much, but she did tell me that Northbridge was such a small place that our half siblings’ house was just up the street from yours. And I found a couple of pictures in my father’s things that had the house in the background,” she explained. “I also know there’s no soft spot for our father with the Northbridge Pratts, but I still need to tell them that he’s passed away, don’t you think?” Among other things.
“I suppose you do,” Luke conceded. “But I wouldn’t expect to be welcomed with open arms if I were you,” he reminded her.
His warning didn’t ease Karis’s nervousness about meeting her half siblings for the first time or about having to say what she had to.
“I know that my father—”
“It isn’t only him. Yeah, you’re right—there aren’t any soft spots for him in the family he left behind. But after Lea wiggled her way in with them and then pulled what she did the day she left—”
Oh no…
“What did Lea do?” Karis asked with unconcealed dread.
Luke paused in his eating to study her again as if looking for signs of a scam.
Then he said, “She didn’t tell you?”
“I have to figure it was something bad and, no, she didn’t tell me when she did things she knew I wouldn’t approve of. All she said about leaving here was that Abe wanted her back and so she packed up, told you Amy was Abe’s instead of yours to make a clean break, and left you to go with him.”
Luke let out a humorless sort of laugh. “Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know how long she and Abe were planning it, but I had to go to a training session in Billings one day and while I was out of the way, she had Abe pack up her things, Amy’s things and everything of mine that had any value—televisions, my stereo, all the video equipment, an old coin collection—”
“They cleaned you out,” Karis said, getting the picture.
“Abe cleaned out my house and, while he did, Lea went up the hill with a story about how her poor, troubled sister Karis had been arrested for dealing drugs. Apparently Lea turned on the tears and said she was desperate for money to bail you out and retain a lawyer, and since I could only help her with part of the money, could they help, too.”
Karis closed her eyes and shook her head, wishing she wasn’t hearing what she was hearing.
“And they gave it to her,” she concluded.
“By then the Pratts had begun to see her as separate from your father and what he’d done, to think of her as one of the family. I even heard them talk about arranging a way to meet you, too, to bridge the gap between the two factions of Pratts.”
“Lea never said anything about that.”
“I’m sure. Anyway, the Pratts here are good people. They jumped in to help when Lea went to them. Each of them—and there are seven, in case you’d lost count—put in five hundred dollars. They wrote her checks that she took straight to the bank to cash. Then, while she was there, she emptied my accounts—”
“Oh, no…” This time the words actually came out.
“Oh, yes. The folks at the bank were a little uneasy with it, but she gave them the same story she’d told your half brothers and sisters. And when the bank manager tried to reach me to make sure it was okay, I was conveniently in the middle of training where no cell phones were allowed. Since I’d added Lea’s name to my accounts when we got married, she had as much right as I did to access them, so the bank couldn’t stop her from draining them. Then she and Abe hightailed it out of town, leaving me a note on the kitchen table that said Amy wasn’t mine, that they’d left with the man who had fathered her. They were long gone by the time I learned how she’d spent the day. I guess she gets merits for organization and quick work.”
“I’m sorry,” Karis said feebly.
Luke Walker didn’t respond.
“And I’ve never had anything to do with drugs or been arrested or—”
“I know. When I realized what she’d done I did some checking that I regretted not doing earlier. On you both. I saw that you didn’t have any arrests or charges against you. But Lea had an extensive record—drug possession, selling drugs, petty theft, burglary—”
“She had a lot of problems,” Karis said, glancing in Amy’s direction.
The baby was sitting in a high chair that Luke had brought up from the basement and set at the round kitchen table. She was picking up pieces of scrambled egg with her chubby fingers and feeding herself directly from the tray.
Of course she was oblivious to what was being said about her mother, but Karis was uncomfortable getting into too much detail about Lea with Amy in earshot. Irrational though it might have been, it just didn’t seem right.
She tried to make sure the tiny child was distracted by breaking up a slice of toast into small bites and adding that to the eggs before looking at Luke again.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I really am.”
“Did you have something to do with it?”
“No! I’m just sorry that Lea did what she did. To you. To them. To everyone.”
Those blue-green eyes of his were still focused on her and Karis felt like a bug under a microscope. But she opted to ignore it and deal with the other matters at hand.
“I can see why the real Pratts aren’t going to be happy to have me show up after that,” she said. They would likely see her having ownership of their house in an even worse light, if that were possible.
The thought made her all the more loath to go through with her second errand in Northbridge and she realized that, at the very least, she wasn’t going to be able to rush anything to do with the house. She was going to have to find the most diplomatic way of handling it.
But in the meantime she also knew she still had to tell them about their father’s death.
“I really don’t want to go up there now,” she said quietly.
Luke didn’t say anything for a while. He just went on scrutinizing her.
Then, as if his better nature had to prevail whether he liked it or not, he said, “Do you want me to go with you?”
The offer surprised her.
“Would you do that?”
Not happily—if the somber expression on his handsome face was any indication.
But after another moment, he said, “Yeah, I’d do that.”
“It would really help not to have to go alone,” she said, meaning it and appreciating any support when she was feeling so unsure of herself.
“I’ll call first. Not all of them live in the house anymore, but I’ll make sure they get everyone to be there for this.”
“Thank you,” Karis said with a full measure of her gratitude in her voice.
And while the other Pratts might not have a soft spot for their father, and certainly couldn’t have one for Lea, either, a soft spot in Karis’s heart began to open up at that moment.
For LukeWalker, for the kindness he was showing her.
Even if that kindness was reluctant.
It was late that afternoon before all the Pratts could gather at the house up the street to see Karis.
The snow had stopped falling before dawn and the sun had remained shining through the day, melting what had accumulated on the streets and sidewalks but leaving a white blanket on the grassy areas. The temperature was comfortable, so Karis bundled up Amy and carried the baby with her as she and Luke walked to meet with her half siblings.
Karis didn’t say anything along the way. She was too nervous. But she was still glad to have the big man by her side.
He rang the doorbell when they reached the house and held the screen for her when the door was answered by a large man who was dressed in the same police uniform Luke had had on the night before.
“Hey, Cam,” Luke greeted him.
“Luke,” the other man responded, stepping aside for Karis and Luke to come in but never taking his eyes off Karis. Eyes that were every bit as suspicious of her as Luke’s had been, and no more welcoming.
“This is Karis. Karis, this is Cam.”
“Hi,” Karis said, thinking that in all of the awkward situations she’d found herself in recently, this had to be the worst.
“And is this Amy?” Cam Pratt asked.
Karis hadn’t thought about the fact that this man and the rest of her half siblings already knew Amy from the five weeks after her birth, but that question and the familiarity in his voice brought it home for her.
“That’s Amy,” Luke confirmed when Karis was slow in answering.
Cam nodded, taking a concentrated look at the infant but not making any overtures toward her.
“We’re all in the living room,” he said, leading the way from the vast Victorian-style entry that boasted a pedestal table in the center and a wide staircase rising from just beyond it to curve to the second level.
Luke waited for Karis to follow Cam, bringing up the rear.
The living room was large and, because it was furnished in a country motif, it lacked the formality of the entry. It was warm and welcoming, unlike the faces of the other people in the room.
“Hi,” Karis said quietly to everyone.
“Sit down,” one of the two women invited, pointing to the vacant love seat at a right angle to the couch.
Karis did, sitting only on the edge of the cushion and placing Amy on her lap.
It didn’t seem that she should take Amy’s coat completely off as if they were going to stay for a leisurely visit, but it was too warm to keep the baby bundled up. So Karis smoothed the hood back, fluffed Amy’s reddish-brown cap of curls and unzipped the coat, leaving it open but on.
“Is this Amy?” the other woman on the couch asked, echoing her brother’s question.
“It is.” Karis answered without hesitation this time.
She had the sense that had this been fourteen months ago the woman would have tried to hold Amy or play with her. But as it was, everyone kept their distance.
Luke had remained standing beside the love seat rather than sit with Karis and Amy so he made the introductions from there.
“You met Cam at the door,” he began, addressing Karis. “That’s Mara, Neily and Scott on the sofa—”
“I’m Mara,” said the woman who had asked about Amy. “This is Neily,” she added with a glance at the woman who had invited Karis to sit.
Karis said another, “Hi.”
“Boone and Jon are by the fireplace,” Luke continued. “Taylor is in the chair. Boone, Taylor and Jon are the triplets—in case you didn’t notice that they look almost exactly alike.”
Karis nodded.
“And this is Karis,” Luke finished unnecessarily.
No one seemed to know what to say, and Karis wasn’t sure whether to merely blurt out what she’d come to tell them or try to find some way to ease into it.
It was Cam who broke the silence before she’d decided. “What can we do for you?”
Clearly they were all leery of her and her motives for being there, so Karis opted for getting to the point.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
As she said that, she wondered for the first time if they would consider the news bad. Maybe they wouldn’t.
“I needed to tell you all that Dad…”
She stalled. Somehow referring to him like that seemed proprietary and she was afraid his first family would take offense.
“That your dad…”
But he was her father, too, so that was weird.
“Well, your dad and mine…”
No, that wasn’t good, either…
“It’s okay,” Luke said in a calming voice. “Just tell them.”
Grateful to him once more—this time for the steadying influence—Karis swallowed and took his advice. “There was an explosion in Denver six weeks ago. Dad…and Lea…were killed.”
The response of the other Pratts varied, but none were too overt. Some eyebrows rose. Some mouths gaped slightly. Some faces paled. No one appeared unaffected or as if they were glad to hear it, but there weren’t any tears, either.
Again, after a few moments of silent shock, it was Cam who spoke. “What happened?”
Karis took a measured breath and said, “Lea had done something that caused a lot of problems for a lot of people—”
“Isn’t that hard to believe,” Boone, one of the triplets, said sarcastically under his breath.
His tone made Karis even more uncomfortable, but she didn’t show it. She recognized that he had a right to think badly of Lea and thought that maybe she should let them know she was aware of her sister’s misdeeds.
“Luke told me this morning what Lea did the day she left here, so I know none of you think much of her—”
Once more, Karis paused to consider what she was going to say. She didn’t want any of the people in the room to think worse of her sister than they already did. In fact, it suddenly seemed important for them to understand Lea, if only a little.
So rather than rushing into telling them more about the explosion that had taken lives, she said, “I’m sorry for what Lea did to you. I know that probably doesn’t mean much but if you really knew Lea, you’d know how truly messed up she was. She had drug problems from the time she was a teenager. She’d clean up her act for a while and be great—personable and sweet and fun and kind and…”
Karis’s eyes welled up at the memory of her sister. She didn’t want to break down, though, so she fought not to and went on.
“I think that was the Lea you all met. And knew while she was here. While she was pregnant. The clean and sober Lea. The Lea I always hoped would prevail. The trouble was, that just never seemed to happen. She couldn’t stay off the drugs and when she was doing them…” Karis shrugged helplessly. “Well, she wasn’t that same person.”
Karis could see in the expressions of her half siblings that there still wasn’t much sympathy for her sister, so she gave up trying to elicit any and forged ahead.
“Abe—the man Lea left Luke for—” Karis gave Luke an apologetic glance over her shoulder before focusing on everyone else again. “Abe had his own drug problems, but when they got back to Denver they both swore they were staying clean. For Amy’s sake. I believed them and, from everything I saw, they actually were sober until about a month before the explosion. I’d gotten Lea a job and she had been coming to work every day, not doing anything that alarmed me.” Although Karis knew now that she’d been naive. “But that month before, Abe lost his job,” she said. “And that must have been when things started to break down again.”
Karis didn’t want to get into much about how the general breakdown had affected her own situation, so she cut to the chase.
“Like I said, Lea had done something that affected a lot of people and Dad went looking for her. I say looking for her because when he went to where she and Abe had been living, he found out they’d been evicted a week earlier—which I didn’t know, either, but it made sense because Lea had asked if Amy could stay with me for a few days right around the same time. Luckily Amy was still with me when Dad found Lea and Abe.”
Karis hadn’t realized it, but she’d been hugging Amy and apparently her grip on the baby was too tight, because Amy began to squirm.
Karis loosened her hold and kissed the crown of Amy’s head as compensation.
Then she went on. “Dad found Lea and Abe living in a mobile home out in the middle of nowhere. Lea, Abe and another man. But they weren’t only living in the trailer, they were also making methamphetamine there, to use themselves and to sell on the street. When Dad showed up, the other man went outside rather than be in the middle of a family fight. He could hear and see what was going on inside, though, and according to him, Dad and Lea argued and then Abe got into it, too. It became physical—”
Amy was getting antsy and Karis took a cracker from a sandwich bag she had in her pocket and gave it to the baby.
She took a deep breath and continued. “I don’t know anything about the setup of a meth lab, but apparently it’s volatile and dangerous. In the struggle between Dad and Abe, something happened that caused the explosion. The man outside was thrown and hurt, but he lived to tell what happened. Dad, Lea and Abe were all killed.”
Another moment’s silence fell and Karis let her final statement stand alone.
Then, as if he were doing an interrogation, Cam said, “And you say this all happened six weeks ago?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re just now getting around to letting us know?” Cam said.
“There were so many complications and problems that I was left with,” Karis said, still not wanting to get into everything at the moment. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t think you should be told over the telephone by someone you’d never even met. I thought you all deserved to hear it in person, but this is the first I could get away.”
“Was there a funeral?” Mara asked quietly but also with a note of insult that there might have been and they hadn’t been invited.
“No,” Karis was quick to tell her. “This isn’t pretty and I’m sorry to have to say it, but the explosion caused an inferno in the trailer. There were no remains—”
“That’s a little convenient,” Cam said under his breath.
Obviously he thought she was trying to pull something.
But before Karis could respond, Luke said, “I called the Denver police for verification. She’s telling the truth about the explosion and about the aftermath. Because the trailer was far from any fire station—or anything else for that matter—by the time the explosion and fire were called in and firefighters arrived, there was nothing but ash and the injured man to tell the story. Forensics sifted through the rubble and found enough in the way of gold tooth fillings, some other dental work, and a few bone fragments, to confirm that your father and Lea were killed.”
“So there wasn’t anything to bury,” Neily concluded with a grimace.
“And I couldn’t arrange a memorial service,” Karis said. “There just wasn’t…a way,” she finished, faltering to keep from saying there hadn’t been money for any kind of service, along with the fact that she’d been left in such a predicament that she hadn’t been able to do anything but try to dig out of it.
Then, again thinking of their feelings, she said, “Of course, if you want to have something—”
“Is that why you’re here?” Cam asked, cutting her off. “So we’ll do something or give you the money to do something?”
He definitely thought she had an angle.
“No,” Karis said. “I only meant that if it would make you all feel better to have some sort of service—”
“It’s tough to mourn somebody you didn’t know,” another of the triplets—Taylor—said.
Karis nodded again. “I didn’t really think you’d want to have any kind of memorial or anything. I just thought you all should know what had happened.”
“That’s the only thing you came for?” Cam asked. “Just to tell us?”
Karis didn’t want to lie to them and then, in a day or two, let them know that wasn’t the only thing she’d come for, that she also owned their house and needed to use it to get herself the rest of the way out of the trouble Lea had left her in. But she also knew this was not the time to get into the other reason she’d come to Northbridge. So rather than give a direct answer, she decided it was best to get in and get out. She’d gotten in, told them the first half of what she’d come to tell them, and now it was time to get out before she actually did say anything more.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” she said, letting no answer be her answer as she pulled Amy’s hood up and rezipped the baby’s coat. “And after what Lea did here, I don’t blame you for being suspicious. But now that you know what happened, I’ll leave you to…digest it, I guess. Again, I’m sorry,” she added as she stood.
She was going to have that be the end of it. Then it struck her that she didn’t want to leave them thinking what they—particularly Cam—seemed to think of her.
She paused and said, “I know you all probably won’t believe this, but Lea and I were always different. Very different. Not that I didn’t love her, because I did. Even when I hated what she was doing, I still loved her and the person she was when she wasn’t on drugs. But among people who knew us both, no one would ever put me in the same category as my sister, and I’d really appreciate it if you could find a way to separate us in your minds, too. To maybe reserve judgment a little.”
No one said anything and Karis decided her exit was going to be just as awkward as the rest of the visit, and nothing would change that. She turned to go.
As she did, a cheery Amy swiveled in her arms to look over her shoulder and call, “Bye-see-ya-guys.”
A small ripple of involuntary laughter came in response.
Even Karis couldn’t help smiling.
But since none of the other Pratts said anything to halt their retreat, Karis took Amy back into the entryway and out the front door.
Bolstered more than he could know by the fact that Luke Walker had come with her.
Chapter Four
“Going somewhere?”
Karis considered it just her luck for Luke to drive up at the very minute she was attempting to break into her own car.
“I was hoping I’d left a door unlocked so I could pop the trunk from the inside,” she said truthfully.
His only response was to roll up his window and go the rest of the way to the driveway.
He’d been called into work for an impromptu meeting when they’d arrived back at his house after visiting the Pratts that afternoon. He’d left Karis alone with Amy and with no clue when he’d return.
Not only had he scrambled eggs for their breakfast, he’d also made sandwiches for them all for lunch—again with Karis making it clear that he didn’t need to provide her meals and him ignoring it. But the dinner hour had come and gone, and since she didn’t feel comfortable raiding his cupboards or refrigerator, she’d dug into the food supplies she’d packed with Amy’s things and fixed the baby an individual serving of macaroni and cheese and opened a toddler-size jar of plums.
Karis hadn’t eaten anything then, but that had been over two hours ago and as it drew near eight o’clock she was hungry herself. And, in response to the stress of the day, she was also craving chocolate like crazy. Which was why she’d decided to see if she could get into her own stockpile of foodstuff in the trunk.
Once he’d parked, Luke got out of his SUV and joined her where she waited on the sidewalk beside her car.
“You need something out of the trunk?” he said.
“Food.”
“You have food in the trunk?”
“Some canned goods, some crackers and peanut butter, some stuff I could microwave at a convenience store.” And chocolate.
“Field rations for living in your car?”
“Yes.”
He held up a fast-food bag she hadn’t noticed. “How about burgers instead?”
“How about burgers first and then a chocolate bar?” she countered enticingly, nodding toward the sedan.
“You only have twelve dollars to your name, you were going to sleep in your car and eat out of your trunk, but you brought chocolate?”
“That’s my addiction,” she confessed.
He shook his head as if the idea was lost on him. But he reached into his jean pocket, produced her keys and opened the trunk.
Karis wasted no time dragging the box of food to the front and retrieving the bag of miniature chocolate bars she’d hoped she could make last longer than full-size bars it would have been impossible to eat only portions of. Then it occurred to her that if she didn’t want to eat her host’s food, she needed her own and she picked up the box.
“Is the whole thing full of chocolate?” he asked.
“No, but I feel funny eating your food.”
“We’ll trade food for services, if it’ll make you feel better. Just bring your chocolate and leave your field rations.”
Services?
She didn’t know much about the man but she knew he wasn’t alluding to sexual services. So why did she have sex on the brain the minute he’d said that?
She curbed it in a hurry, replaced the box in the trunk and, as he closed it, said, “What kind of services?”
“Tomorrow we’ll hit the store, and I’ll buy some groceries. You can cook and do the cleanup. Can you cook?”
“Pretty well, actually.”
“Great. It’s not my favorite thing. And maybe vacuum or dust or something, too.”
As long as she didn’t have to clean his bathroom, that seemed like a fair trade.
“Deal,” she said, even though he was already headed for the house and hadn’t waited for her agreement.
Karis followed him, watching the play of bodacious butt behind denim and again she had to pull her thoughts into line.
What am I doing? she asked herself, wondering if her subconscious was on a quest for another kind of stress relief.
“I bought Amy a burger, too,” Luke said, as she closed the door and he took off his coat to hang on the hall tree.
Karis had to work at recalling what he was talking about.
Amy…
Burgers…
“Too late,” she answered when she’d put two and two together. “Amy ate, had a bath and is sound asleep.”
“What did you feed her—leaves and berries you foraged in the backyard?”
As they went to the kitchen, Karis explained that she’d supplied Amy with some field rations, too, and that was what the baby had eaten.
“I don’t know how you were raised,” he said when she’d finished, “but in a Walker house, food is never off-limits to anybody, whether they were invited, not invited, expected or unexpected. From now on, just help yourself, whether it’s for you or for Amy.”
It still didn’t seem quite right, but Karis thought that if she could do a chore here and there it might make her feel as if things were evened out a little.
“You can start to earn your keep by getting us a couple of sodas,” Luke said then.
Karis wasn’t sure, but there almost seemed to be an edge of humor to his tone. Was it possible that he was going to lighten up? She might even consider cleaning his bachelor bathroom to accomplish that.
She took two cans of cola out of his refrigerator and brought them to the table where he was setting out burgers and fries.
Deciding to test the water and see if they might actually be able to have a normal conversation, she said, “Was your meeting some kind of emergency?”
“No, no emergency,” he answered as they sat down to eat. “We’re in the process of opening a new investigation of an old case. The state police consented to send in a search team to help us, but they weren’t supposed to be here until Monday. For some reason they showed up this afternoon to work through the weekend. Everyone had to be briefed and updated and shown around—that kind of thing.”
He’d offered that information civilly and it encouraged Karis to ask more.
“What are you searching for?”
“The body of a man who robbed the bank in 1960.”
“He robbed the bank and died and you just started looking for him?”
Luke had taken a bite of his hamburger and, while he chewed and swallowed, he shook his head. “Two men—itinerant farm hands—robbed the bank. Until a few weeks ago we thought they’d both gotten away with it. And with the wife of the man who was our Reverend at the time—”
“Ooh, a little soap opera.”
“Afraid so. It seems the Reverend’s wife got restless and hooked up with one of these two guys, purportedly not knowing that they had any intention of pulling a bank job. But once they had, it looked as if the Reverend’s wife and the robbers had gotten away.”
“But they hadn’t?”
“The town is named for an old bridge that’s being refurbished. In the process, one of the workmen came across a duffel bag in the rafters. Inside the duffel bag were the belongings of one of the men and there were bloodstains on the outside of it, which prompted our looking into things again. When we did, we discovered that the FBI—which has jurisdiction in bank robberies—had actually caught one of the robbers, the one the Reverend’s wife was involved with. He’d claimed that the Reverend’s wife didn’t know ahead of time that they were going to pull the bank job, and the other robber had taken his share of the money and gone his separate way. But since there was never another sign of the second robber—”
“And now that you’ve found the second robber’s bloodstained duffel bag…” Karis said, to let him know she was paying attention.
“Right, and now that we’ve found the second robber’s bloodstained duffel bag, we’re thinking that the guy didn’t make it out of Northbridge, that the first robber killed him and buried him rather than split the money.”
“And then took off with the Reverend’s wife,” Karis added. She wasn’t really invested in the story, but she was so happy that Luke was in a better mood that she wanted to encourage it.
“And then took off with the Reverend’s wife,” he repeated. “But she wasn’t with the first robber when the FBI caught up with him. During questioning, he told the agent that she’d been distraught over leaving her two sons back here with her husband. She’d been upset all the time, crying, overeating—which was making her less attractive to him—and she’d just all-round become not much fun. So he snuck out in the middle of the night and left her on her own in Alaska.”
“Ouch!” Karis said with a grimace.
“The robber the FBI caught was shot to death during an escape attempt and that’s where the investigation stopped. Because of personnel changes with the feds and here in town, because there was no trail at all on the second robber, and because no one believed the Reverend’s wife had had anything to do with the robbery, the whole case got put on a back burner and eventually forgotten about. But now that it looks as if the second robber might have been killed, we’re looking for his body. If we find it, that opens a whole new can of worms.”
“Then it’s a murder case and not just a bank robbery.”
“And while the feds were content to take the robber’s word that the Reverend’s wife, Celeste Perry, wasn’t involved in the bank job, the murder of the second man before she and her boyfriend left town could put a different spin on her role in everything. She could either have been a witness to or a participant in a murder. Plus, even though she’d be of retirement age now, it’s reasonable to think she might still be alive and, since entries on the last report all agree that she was determined to get back to Northbridge at some point, this whole thing needs to be pursued.”
“Not only a soap opera but a mystery and a scandal for a preacher, too—the plot thickens,” Karis said.
“It seems to be, yeah.”
“And here I thought this was a small, quiet town like in the movies and on TV.”
“As a rule, it is,” Luke said.
“But now you get to stretch your cop muscles. Are you glad for the stimulation or sorry to have the norm disturbed?”
“Both,” he admitted. “On the one hand it’s a little exciting. On the other hand none of us are eager to stir up dirt for the Reverend and his sons and grandchildren. And there could be a lot stirred up if we find a body.”
“And the search is on.”
“Beginning tomorrow it is.”
“Will you be doing it?” Karis asked.
“Some of it. The state guys will focus only on that. There’s a lot of wooded area around the bridge where the duffel bag was found. As for the local cops, we’re such a small force we don’t have the manpower to assign anyone to work the search and only the search, so we’ll each just pitch in during our regular shifts as long as things in town stay quiet, which they usually do. We have the option of working it during our off hours, too, but I told them at the meeting today that I have my hands full with other things.”
“Me and Amy.”
“You and Amy,” he said, leveling green eyes on her.
But they didn’t seem as hard or as cold as they had before and it was such an improvement that Karis didn’t mind it this time.
Then he broke the connection and, seeing that she’d finished her burger, offered her a second one.
When she turned it down, he unwrapped it for himself. After the initial bite, he said, “Speaking of which—”
“Of me and Amy?”
“Of me and Amy,” he amended. “I’ve set up the blood draws for the DNA test. We’ll go in tomorrow.”
“On a Sunday? I didn’t think anything would be done until Monday.”
“One of my brothers is Northbridge’s doctor. He doesn’t have an office. When the town anted up for the small hospital the community needed, we did away with the doctor’s office and placed all the medical care in the hospital. Mainly out of the emergency room. Anyway, Reid will meet us there tomorrow. Getting it done on a Sunday is a perk of having a doctor in the family. Results will take at least six weeks, so I want to get the process started as soon as possible.”
Karis nodded, wondering if that meant he expected her to stay in Northbridge for six weeks.
Not that she had anywhere else to be, because she didn’t. But she doubted anyone would be too thrilled with her still being around once she revealed information about her inheritance.
But now wasn’t the time to bring that up.
When Luke had polished off his second hamburger and the rest of the fries, Karis proved she was willing to earn her keep and gathered everything to throw away.
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