Authors: HelenKay Dimon
There it was. The topic that lingered and tainted everything even though Callen refused to talk about it. He took shots at her and she grimaced through them, but nothing got settled.
Usually at this point Callen’s anger battled with his still all-consuming love for the woman who raised him for as long as their father allowed. Then he’d storm off. Declan decided to short-cut that scene. “Okay, enough.”
Callen shrugged as he opened the refrigerator and grabbed a water bottle. “Fine.”
“Unless you actually want to have this out, which would be pretty damn fantastic for those of us who get stuck watching from the sidelines.” Declan glanced at his mom. “You can explain to Callen why you hid the truth about his birth mother for all these years.” When Callen took a step toward the doorway to the hall, Declan turned his attention there. “And you can listen and maybe respect the woman who is your mother in every sense of the world except blood.”
The rip of plastic against plastic rang through the quiet room as Callen tore off the cap to the bottle. “Don’t do this, Declan.”
“It would be a favor to the rest of the people in this household. To all of us who love you both and want this issue put to rest.” Declan knew he was asking a lot. Probably too much.
They grew up thinking they all shared the same father and mother. That Charlie breezed in one day and their mom let him sweep ten-year-old Callen away and into a life of crime. But it turned out Charlie wasn’t the only one with secrets. He had five wives in his lifetime, not four, and the first was Callen’s real birth mother. A woman no one but the woman standing in the middle of the family room knew about until a few weeks ago when their collective past starting blowing up.
Callen clenched his teeth together hard enough for his jaw to make a cracking sound. “Find another subject. Now.”
“Declan doesn’t have to. I will.” Mom smiled as she set the stack of books on the edge of the table with shaking hands. “I figured my grown sons needed a little privacy, so I’m giving you all some space, but not so much that you think I’m running away. Just enough to let you live your days without me being under foot all the time.”
Declan glanced at Callen. “I think that last part about running away was for your benefit.”
The days had passed in slow motion over the last two weeks as Callen and Mom played an annoying chess game. She walked into a room and he walked out. She apologized and he replied with something like “whatever,” but nothing got resolved.
Not that Declan could blame Callen. The guy had been gutted and turned inside out. Everything he thought he knew—what they all thought they knew—turned out to be wrong. Declan had his own issues with his Mom’s choices and her decision to hide the truth for all those years. But that was nothing compared to the betrayal Callen had to feel.
The guy was a runner. He stayed on the road, and before Shadow Hill, he only checked in now and then. Thanks to that, every morning Declan woke up and for the first few minutes laid there begging the universe to cut them all a break and let Callen still be in the house. If a morning came when Callen gave in and took off, Declan knew he’d blame Mom for pushing Callen away . . . and he hated that.
“With Sophie on the road with Beck and most likely to stay here with him when they get back into town, I’m going to move over to her old place. We talked about it last night on the phone and arranged everything.” His mom’s voice never wavered. She stood there, proud but with exhaustion tugging at the corners of her eyes.
Declan would feel bad about that later. For now, he had a bigger question. One that seared across his brain and demanded an answer. “You’re going to live with Tom?”
Tom Erickson, the Shadow Hill handyman. The same guy who knew their parents all those years ago when he was a teenager and they were first married. They all lived on the same street in Sweetwater before Charlie ripped the town off and left Mom behind to answer for the crimes she didn’t know about until the town’s coffers were bare.
Tom, the guy who clearly had a decidedly not-just-friendly thing for their mom.
Yeah, no fucking way.
She shot Declan the same no-nonsense look she used when she made it clear she didn’t want to hear who started what fight when they were kids. “I’ll be renting the apartment over his garage.”
Callen slowly lowered the water bottle. “Isn’t that the same thing as living with the guy?”
“I had the distinct impression you didn’t care what I did.”
Pain flashed in Callen’s eyes, but he blinked it out. “I never said that.”
Jesus, they were driving him nuts
.
“I’m two seconds away from locking you two in a room and making you fight this out.”
Mom brushed her fingertips over the cover of the top book on her pile. “I’d be fine with that.”
Silence screamed through the room. They all stood there, not moving, before Callen spoke into the quiet. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“I’m still your mother.” The words sounded harsh, as if each one had to be ripped out of her.
“Are you?”
“Yes, Callen. I am.” Petite and fast, she didn’t wait around. Not after Callen landed his usual verbal killing blow. She scooped up the books and left the room.
Declan waited until he heard her footsteps on the stairs and could see her legs disappear out of sight before turning back to Callen. “Do you have to do that?”
“Be honest?”
“I don’t believe for one second you think sharing a gene pool is the only thing that defines a family.” They shared a shitty father as well as a loving and decent mother, and Declan would stick by that stance no matter what a DNA test said.
Callen hesitated for a second. “No, but I’m not ready to deal with what she did and didn’t do just yet.”
“Well, you need to get there, and soon.”
“I can make my own decisions.” Callen ended his pronouncement by downing the rest of the contents of his water bottle.
“You have every right to feel gut shot.”
“Thanks for that.”
Declan ignored the attitude. “But as your brother, I’m warning you that if you don’t explode soon, have some reaction other than shutting down and flinging barbs at mom, I’m going to take you outside and beat the ever-loving shit out of you.”
Callen smiled. “Name the day.”
“If the roles were reversed you’d be all over me until I dealt with this.”
The smile disappeared behind a narrow gaze. “That’s not true.”
But it was. Callen kept his common sense and skepticism long after the rest of them did, not because he was a pessimist or negative. Because he wanted everyone safe. The end result could be annoying, but Callen came from a good place. His actions spoke to his devotion to family. He liked to pretend that side of him didn’t exist, but he showed his love for all of them every damn day.
“Believe what you want, but know this. It’s my turn to protect you.” When Callen’s frown deepened, Declan continued. “What? You think you’re the only Hanover brother with the right to get up in everyone’s business?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
Declan snorted. “Not anymore.”
Grace had been in Sweetwater for exactly two days. Her sightseeing consisted of one stop at Callen’s house and numerous trips to Rosie’s Diner, where she ate every meal. One more side of french fries and she wouldn’t fit in a booth.
The desperate battle with her waistline brought her out to Schneider’s Grocery this afternoon looking for something she could throw together for dinner back in her room. Preferably something with a vegetable. The pre-prepared offerings were limited, but the produce selection turned out to be impressive, and now she had a salad to munch on at the bench she spotted at the park just outside the main downtown area.
Of course, she had to be able to find the park again. It would not kill the town to print a map. Maybe put up a sign.
She stepped outside the store’s automatic glass doors and turned. Three spaces down sat her rental car. The two guys hovering around it were a new addition to her Sweetwater welcoming committee.
Bag in hand and keys at the ready, she walked up and joined them on the sidewalk. “Is something wrong with the car?”
Because if she had a flat, this would be the perfect trip to Hell.
The heavyset man, the one who also happened to be dressed in a police uniform with a tag that read
DARBER
, spoke up, while the other guy continued to stare at her front driver’s side tire. “You’re in a green zone.”
She glanced around for some sort of traffic warning but didn’t see one. “Excuse me?”
“This space is for loading and unloading only.” The Darber guy pointed at the fading paint on the curb.
She’d missed it before. Not that anyone could blame her. The paint job looked years old and amounted more to chips of green paint than anything else.
Still, the guy wore a badge and carried a gun, and she’d respect that until he proved to her he didn’t deserve it. She tried to ignore how his gut pushed his belt down and had his weapon riding lower than it should have been.
Seeing an out-of-shape police officer was the kind of thing that would have driven her law-and-order father mad when he was alive. These days she sympathized with a thickening waistline. “My mistake.”
“No worries. We can go with a warning this time.”
Maybe that was one of the benefits of a small town—no ticket quotas. “Thanks.”
“I’m Clay Darber, the police chief here in Sweetwater.” He put his hands on his hips, inadvertently shoving his pants even lower as he gestured toward her with a nod of his head. “You new in town?”
“Brand-new.”
She may as well be wearing a big flashing red light on the top of her head. Even now as she stood there with her plastic bag full of salad fixings—basically the most boring lunch ever—people walking on either side of the street stopped conversations and glanced over at her. No one was outwardly rude. More like interested-bordering-on-nosy, which matched what she knew about human nature.
She tried to think positively. At least she wasn’t getting a parking ticket. But the longer she stood there with the chief and some other guy who seemed content to stare and scowl at her, the more she wished she’d gone to the diner . . . again.
The otherwise silent guy piped up. “Staying?”
She guessed that meant in town; or at least that’s the question she answered. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Regardless of the duration, I’d keep away from the dark-haired one.”
She had no idea what that meant. “Excuse me?”
“Marc, don’t.”
The .chief waved a hand in the air and tried to step in front of his friend, but the guy pushed his way forward again. “She’s trouble.”
Dark hair? Grace knew two people in town, neither of whom were speaking to her at the moment. She tried to remember but nothing came to her. Then a flash. Her mind zipped to the diner yesterday and Kim Hanover talking with a policeman at the counter. She didn’t remember seeing this Marc guy, but maybe. . . “Wait, you mean Mallory?”
“The Hanover clan, Mallory, all of them. Stay clear.”
Okay, the whole stalking thing was a bit creepy. Grace could only dwell on the sensation for a second, because her defensive hackles began to rise. She barely knew Mallory, and she’d met the middle Hanover brother, Declan, for all of two seconds, but Grace had long grown tired of people talking shit about Callen.
Unless it was her. She could say whatever she wanted, because he ran away from her and that gave her the right to be angry. Throw-pots-and-stomp-around furious, even.
But there was no way she letting this Marc guy think he was in charge of her decision-making. “I’ll go ahead and pick my own friends, but thanks.”
Chief Darber nodded. “Of course.”
From the flat mouth and dead eyes, no question Marc planned to take a different tack. “Don’t ignore smart advice, young lady.”
Young lady
? He’d crossed the line into full-on annoying territory. She refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her flustered. She would not lose control. “I never do.”
“Have a nice day, ma’am.” The chief looked like he’d tip a hat to her if he were wearing one.
He moved and tugged on Marc’s sleeve to join him, but the guy held his ground. “She needs to—”
The chief tugged harder. “Marc, that’s enough.”
“You’d be wise to listen to me now.” Marc called the threat-disguised-as-advice over his shoulder. “Before it’s too late.”
Grace watched the men go. They walked with their heads down and Marc’s arms flailing around, as if he were arguing about the display they’d all just survived. The scene gave her a tiny taste of the garbage Callen dealt with on a weekly basis. Took the edge off her frustration in not being able to connect with him and explain that she never set him up or worked with Walker against him.
Made her forgive Callen for leaving her alone when she needed him most . . . not entirely, but a little. She figured that amounted to progress of a sort.
Now to work on his end.
***
The shovel scraped as Callen plunged the end into the pile of dirt. After more than an hour of lifting and filling, his shoulders burned and sweat gathered on the back of his neck.
The physical exertion and bright sunshine helped keep his mind blank. Which was exactly how he wanted it. If he let his thoughts wander to a certain redhead at the motel across town he’d be in his car and on his knees. Who the hell knew if he’d ever be able to get up again.
He would not go to her. Not to drive down that dead-end road again.
Of course, having three sets of eyes focused on him now made the idea of stepping even one inch outside the Shadow Hill property line sound pretty damn good. While Callen worked, Declan leaned on the shovel he was supposed to be using to help fill in all the holes scattered throughout the side and back yards. Tom was—hell, supervising, maybe? They both wore smirks and failed to lift a damn thing.
Those two Callen could handle. Leah was the dangerous one. She stood with her hands on her hips, watching each scoop of dirt land.
When he slowed down for a fraction of a second, she pounced. “So, you have a secret girlfriend?”
“Jesus, are you kidding me?” Callen let the shovel fall to the ground with a thud as clumps of rock and mud bounced around his feet and his gaze zoomed to his big-mouthed brother.
Declan had the guts to shrug. “She asked.”
Right, because he was stupid enough to believe that. One more shrug and Callen might throw off his work gloves and work out some aggression by pounding Declan into the ground. “Out of the blue. I’m supposed to buy that she just piped up with that question?”
“To be clear, Declan said something like, ‘We came home yesterday to find a woman sitting on the porch.’” Leah waved her hands in the air and mimicked Declan’s low voice. “Then I asked about a hundred more questions.”
“So did I, but Callen didn’t cough up much in the way of detail for me.” Declan balanced his shovel against the brand-new swing set and kicked a chunk of broken cement from where they’d jackhammered the concrete underneath once they realized it made no sense their grandmother
had a brand-new swing set
.
After all her protestations about not knowing where Charlie hid the items he stole and all the investigations into her purchase of Shadow Hill late in life, turned out dear old grandma likely knew all along. The stolen items weren’t in the house buried under piles of books and stacks of paper, as everyone had expected.
No, Charlie turned out to be more clever than that. The items, at least the jewelry stolen from Sophie’s aunt and jewelry from other victims, sat in a box under the concrete pad poured for the new swing set Grandma Nanette had installed when she was sixty-something.
A massive digging across the lawn by the brothers had turned up other valuables, all of them remnants of Charlie’s scams. Their baby brother, Beck, joked that Charlie probably buried a stolen car under the front porch. Callen wouldn’t put anything past their idiot of a father. Dead or not, the man caused trouble. They had the Whac-A-Mole-looking yard to prove it.
Declan stared into the hole closest to him, the one that once held silver tightly wrapped and secured in plastic bags. “Your girlfriend—”
“Ex.” Since they didn’t seem ready to let the Grace subject drop, Callen figured they may as well get the semantics right.
“—comes around here, looking ready to rumble, and we’re not supposed to notice.”
Callen had been with Grace long enough to see her pissed off. Yesterday on the porch didn’t register on her pissed-off scale. Didn’t even come close to the energy vortex that engulfed her when she hit her anger stride.
He picked up the shovel again. “Her mood was fine.”
“Man, I have seen a ticked-off woman before and she teetered right on the verge.”
Nope. Not a conversation he’d get sucked into right now. No fucking way. Everything about Grace needed to stay off the conversation table. They mentioned her, he thought about her and then his carefully constructed wall of rage started to crumble.
“Let’s go back to the thing where we work so that the house doesn’t fall down around us.” So far today he was the only one shoveling. Hell, if he wanted to do all the work, he’d call Beck home to help.
Callen loved his baby brother, but he was all but useless in the physical labor department. Not because he couldn’t do the work, but because he used his big lawyer brain to sneak his way out of it.
For a few seconds the only sound came from the thunk of Callen digging the tip of the shovel into the ground and the rustle of leaves in the tall trees that separated the cleared acres from the miles of uncut property around them. The kicking in his gut eased off and he let his defenses drop, not a lot but enough so he could concentrate on not ramming the shovel into a rock, or worse his foot. They could get back to finding a work rhythm and—
“Was she hot?” Leah didn’t even let a minute of silence pass before jumping in with the question.
So much for thinking he’d wrestled back control of the conversation. Callen swore under his breath.
The impressive string of profanity did nothing to slow Declan down. “Smoking hot.”
The answer came a bit too fast for Callen’s liking.
“She’s a redhead,” Declan said as the conversation went round and round.
“Oh, really?” Leah turned on Callen. Stood right in front of him with an expression that said,
You’re busted
.
“Shit.” Callen closed his eyes and counted to ten.
“That explains all his pent-up rage aimed at me when we first met.” Leah ran her fingers through the tips of her hair. “Misdirected lust for the red hair.”
Interesting how easily she forgot the real reason. How she had carried a vendetta against the Hanovers from childhood, having gathered piles of information on their lives, and spent the first half of her relationship with Declan lying to him. Her family lost everything due to Charlie, and eventually lost Shadow Hill, which they once owned.
And if Callen was thinking of picking at that wound, he knew it was time to change the subject. He and Leah had reached a truce, and Declan forgave her. Her loving his brother turned out to be a good enough reason for Callen to tuck the entire matter away and move on. Messing up his budding brotherly relationship with Leah was not worth scoring a point.
The only answer: changing the conversation. “I really think we—”
“Grace’s is closer to auburn,” Declan said.
“I’m jealous.” Leah stared at the strands twisted in her fingers before dropping them again. “Like the name, though.”
Really, they had hit the saturation level on this topic. Much more and Callen’s already strained temper would blow. “Are you guys done?”
Declan snorted. “Not likely.”
“Maybe if you gave us more of the story, we could help.” Tom, quiet until then, gave up any pretense of being disinterested or ready to leave and joined in.
With her shoulder leaning against Declan’s arm, Leah eyed Callen. “I’m guessing he needs to fix whatever he did to tick this girlfriend off.”
“Ex.” Callen got the impression he’d have to provide that reminder a lot over the next few days . . . weeks.
Declan made a tsk-tsking sound. “He left her.”
Declan’s noise plus the way Leah’s eyes got all wide and her mouth dropped open seemed like couple overkill to Callen. “Now can we be done with this topic?”
“Nope.” Without missing a step, Declan’s comment rolled right over Callen’s. “Sounded like he snuck off in the dead of night.”
Come on.
“Let’s not get dramatic.”
“Oh, Callen. No. You didn’t.” Leah shook her head and kept right on doing it. Also mumbled something about men being idiots. “Please tell me you’re better with women than that.”
Declan curled an arm around her. “Apparently not.”
The low whistle came next. This one from Tom. “Damn, you’re lucky she didn’t kill you.”
Clearly the man had missed the shovel in Callen’s hand. . . and the name on the signature line of his paycheck for the work at the house. “What do you know about women?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?” Tom wiped a hand over his mouth as he asked the question.
“No, he doesn’t, and stay away from my mom.” Declan wasn’t joking now. He had a clenched-teeth thing going on.