With a quick thunk of the cane on the hardwood floors, Mother caught up to him. “I am perfectly capable of taking care of my own household and my children. I’ve been doing it for—how old are you?—forty years now. And I don’t need another lecture.”
Helmut rounded on her. Her head only reached his shoulders, but her stare gave her at least a foot high advantage. Or it would have, if she hadn’t been wearing a bathrobe at three o’clock in the afternoon.
“I’m not buying it. You need rest. And a housekeeper.”
She waved one hand dismissively. “It’s only a sprained ankle this time. I’ll be right as rain in a day. And I don’t need some flighty young thing poking around in my garbage. I have one of those in my house already.”
Kelsie clicked off her phone and stared, mouth agape. “Don’t drag me into this. I just got here this morning.”
Helmut crossed his arms over his chest. “My point exactly.”
She slammed her phone down on the counter and poked a finger in Helmut’s chest. “What crawled up your ass? You’ve been stalking around here all afternoon, slamming doors and complaining every time someone breathes the wrong way.”
“I’m not the one leaving trails of shoes, purses, and dirty dishes in every room of the house. Someone has to take care of this family,” Helmut thundered. Rage and frustration, hurt and sorrow boiled through him, threatening to explode.
“Mom was doing just fine before you swooped in to help.”
“Just fine? She falls down a flight of stairs and is left all by herself for twenty-four hours before help arrives, and you think she’s ‘just fine?’”
Mother rolled her eyes. “You’re overreacting, Helmut. I could have called for help at any point, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. It’s not like I was lying on the floor. And it’s just a sprain.”
“You didn’t know that.”
Helmut’s mother drew back as his voice echoed off the hard cabinets and countertops of her kitchen. Even took a step back.
Helmut looked back and forth between his mother and sister, two sets of identical eyes staring at him with identically shocked expressions.
Edna recovered first, and her voice was calm and cold, ice and steel. The voice he had always half-feared, fully revered. “Helmut David Forrester. While you are in my house, you will speak to me and to your sister with respect. I might be old. I might be injured. I might not be as physically fit as I used to be, and I might forget where I leave my reading glasses. But I am your mother. And I raised you better than that.”
The blackness that had wrapped Helmut’s mood these past four days constricted around his heart and he saw himself for the tyrant he was becoming. With a guttural growl, he turned and slammed out of the French doors into the yard.
The sultry heat of the South Florida summer closed in on him, sun scorching the dark black T-shirt and jeans he’d donned that morning. The hot air was thick with the promise of a tropical storm, humid and heavy. It reminded him of a steam room. And of Claire.
With another growl, he took off at a run, toward the stand of trees at the back of his mom’s property that led to the park. He slowed when he reached the untamed growth at the edge of the nature reserve. Branches slapped him in the face as he shoved his way through the green weeds and brush, and sweat dripped off his temples into his eyes.
He didn’t think, just let his feet lead the way. The lush landscape had grown a lot over the past twenty-some years. But then he spotted it. A towering live oak, probably several centuries old, with sprawling branches dripping in Spanish moss. Helmut stopped and laid one hand on one of the trunk-like limbs, his heart pounding.
This had been his special hideout as a kid. He’d once woven a shade of branches and moss where he could stretch out with a comic book or a paperback or just a can of soda and his own thoughts. As a teenager, he’d brought a tent and sleeping bag out here more than once. And a girl or two.
Some of the upper branches looked broken, and one large limb was cracked and leaning on the ground, leaves withered and brown. As a kid, he’d thought the giant tree majestic. Now it looked old and battered from the barrage of hurricanes and tropical storms.
Helmut rested his head on one trunk. He knew how the tree felt.
When had he grown so old?
When he lost his fiancée. His father. When he married himself to his job. When he gave up on all but the most superficial friendships, the most casual flings.
Helmut slid down and rested his back against the trunk, fighting hot tears of self-loathing and self-pity. Had he really become so full of himself that he put his own needs before everyone else’s? He didn’t like facing the reality of that question.
Even his concern for his mother, and for Claire, was completely self-centered. He, Helmut Forrester, high-rolling daredevil, wanted to protect his loved ones for his own selfish needs. He was terrified of losing them.
At the sound of crackling leaves, he looked up and saw Kelsie, carefully picking her way through the brush. She stopped in front of him.
“Hey, big brother. Mind if I join you?” Without waiting for an answer, she found a wide exposed root and brushed it off before perching on the rough bark.
He raised one eyebrow. “You always go hiking in flip flops?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t feel like checking the rest of the house for another pair of shoes. I’m going to need a pedicure after this, though.”
“Heh.” Helmut avoided her eyes, and stared at her feet instead. They were slender and groomed, and her toenails were polished with a very prim shade of pink. “What happened to purple and black?”
“I outgrew my Goth stage years ago.”
“Doesn’t seem that long to me.”
She nudged his leg with one of those pink-tipped toes. “That’s because you only see me a couple of times a year. A lot can happen between Christmas and the Fourth of July.”
He studied her face for the first time in a really long time. Gone was the baby fat that once made her little cheeks so soft and round, and gone was her wide-eyed innocence. In their place were high, sculpted cheekbones and an intelligence that reminded him startlingly of Mother when she was younger. When he was younger.
“She didn’t send me, you know,” she said.
“Who?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Mom. I don’t think she knows everything that’s been going on.”
Helmut sighed. “And what is it that you think is going on?”
She rolled her eyes, reminding him of her teenage self. “I read the news, Helmut. I saw those photos of you and Claire Sheffield in Paris. And even Mom’s heard about the explosion, and the investigation into Benjamin Lackey. He’s one of your friends, isn’t he?”
Helmut busied himself plucking a leaf off of a tall weed before he answered. Was Ben a friend? He didn’t even know what that meant anymore.
“Claire’s the one the flowers were for, isn’t she?” Kelsie asked. “The date I interrupted in Chicago?”
Helmut felt his cheeks reddening. Good lord, he was actually blushing. He sat up and tore the leaf to shreds, and tried to cover his embarrassment with his deepest, most sincere-sounding big-brother voice. “Yes, Kelsie, Miss Sheffield and I were involved.”
She kicked him in the shin again.
“Hey, little girl, it’s a good thing those shoes are made of Styrofoam.”
“Well, quit talking to me like I’m five. I’m not, you know. I’ve been in love before, too.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “You are too young to know what love is.”
“How old were you when you met Olivia?”
“Twenty-one.”
She crossed her arms across her chest. “I’m twenty-two, Helmut. I’m not too young. Maybe the problem is you’re too old.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I saw the way Claire Sheffield looked at you at that baseball game. And at me. Until you introduced me, she thought I was your girlfriend. And let me tell you how glad I am not to have her as an enemy.”
“Claire? She’s harmless.”
Kelsie snorted. “Do you even know anything about the woman? When she ran Arachnava, the woman was ruthless. She was smart, always positioning the company exactly where it needed to be for the next big trend about to hit. And she knew when to pull out and cut their losses. They didn’t go from a garage to Fortune 500 by sheer dumb luck, you know.”
“I didn’t know you were such a fan.”
“We studied her in a women-in-business course last semester.” She gave a delicate shrug of her shoulders. Above the canopy of the tree, thunder rumbled.
Helmut contemplated Kelsie’s words. In all of the time he’d spent trying to woo Claire over the past few weeks, he really hadn’t bothered to look into her background. He knew she’d run the other business and done OK, and that she was James’ daughter. He assumed that her parentage was what got her the job, not her experience. If Kelsie was right, he had underestimated her qualifications by a huge margin. And done not only Claire, but S&F, a huge disservice.
“Guess I deserve what I got then,” he said.
“You mean getting fired, or having her dump you?” Kelsie rubbed her bare shoulders, and Helmut noticed a cool breeze blowing through.
“Both, I guess. I was a complete asshole.” And then some.
This time, she just nudged his shin with her foot instead of kicking it. “What happened with that helicopter? Was it really terrorism like they said on the news?”
“Nah. Just poor management. Ben ran over budget then started cutting corners, thinking he could rake in the glory of the project. But it backfired on him. I told that to the investigators. That story will die out soon enough.”
“Damn.”
Helmut gave her shin a little nudge. “Hey, there, little girl. You watch your language.”
She grinned at him, eyes gleaming. “Sorry. But you just cost me twenty bucks.”
Helmut laughed as the first fat rain drops spattered into the high branches above them.
“We should get out of here before we get soaked,” Kelsie said, glancing at the blackening sky.
“Yeah, we don’t need Mom mopping the floors up after us.” He hooked an arm around their shoulders as they started back to the house.
“Helmut, what are you going to do about it now?”
“I don’t know. Hide the mop?”
She elbowed him hard in the ribs as they reached the edge of the lawn, then paused to pull off her flip flops. “Not about the floors. About Claire Sheffield? How are you going to get her back?”
The rain began to fall in earnest, sweet and cool on Helmut’s face and arms. “I don’t have a plan. Do you have any advice for me, little Miss ‘Queen of Hearts’?”
Kelsie grinned. “Maybe. But you’re going to have to catch me to find out what.” She broke into a run across the green grass.
Helmut smiled as her long, slim legs tore up the space between where he stood and the glass of the patio door, remembering all of the races she’d challenged him to when she was still just a kid.
He continued slowly across the yard, remembering for a moment how life used to be, when he was in his twenties, with his first real-world job, dating a beautiful woman, and chasing his little terror of a sister around the park.
He would never get the years back, or the first love of his youth. But maybe he could find his way back to that happy feeling. One step at a time, he crossed the space back toward home.