Winnie smartly wheeled her hundred-year-old grocery buggy toward the back, thinking, Ain’t love grand? over a wave of déjà vu so strong she was half inclined to stomp back to the register and smack some sense into one or both of the kids. Because nobody knew more than her where swooping and such led to.
Then she sighed and went about her business, reminding herself that not every teenage girl who indulges in a little kissy-face gets knocked up. That some were smart enough not to let things go that far. Or at least to make sure there were no consequences if they did.
“You need any help finding stuff?” the girl called out, almost like she cared. Winnie poked her head up over a shelf brimming with Old El Paso products.
“Um…dog food?”
“Back wall, to your right. Ice cream’s on special this week, too. Two half gallons for six bucks.”
“Thanks,” Winnie said, hauling a twenty-pound bag of Purina into her cart, then nudging it toward the frozen-food case, since the gal had taken such pains to steer her in that direction. Lost in a quandary between mint chocolate chip and Snickers, she barely heard the bell jingle over the door. So it took a second for the deep, Irish-accented male voice asking about a package to register.
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Black,” the girl said. “It’s right here, let me get it for you…”
After a white-hot jolt of adrenaline, Winnie ducked slightly behind a display of fishing rods to peer toward the front, too late realizing that Annabelle had sauntered back up to see if anybody needed herding, kisses, whatever. A moment later a young kid with shaggy, pale-blond hair popped into view, yanking open the case to grab one of the loose Nutty Buddies inside. At Winnie’s sucked-in breath, the kid’s head whipped around, eyes wide, and something inside her exploded.
Five minutes on the Internet, and there’d been the magazine article, complete with a photo of the reclusive Western landscape painter and his wife, a textile artist/social activist, her broad smile much more relaxed and friendly than her significantly younger husband’s. And scattered throughout the article, shots of the marvel of wood and glass—one whole side devoted to the high-cei-linged studio built especially to accommodate the “Irish Cowboy’s” massive canvases—that Aidan and June Black had built in the mountains bordering the picturesque northern New Mexican village of Tierra Rosa.
Then Winnie’s heart had stopped at the single profile image of the Blacks’ only child, a son. Adopted, although the article hadn’t mentioned that. Seven at the time of the shoot two years earlier, his hair had been almost angel-white in the sunlight.
The same color Winnie’s had been at that age—
“Yarp!”
Annabelle had reappeared to bow in front of the boy, tail wagging. Boy play with me? Please? Frowning, his thin shoulders weighted in some way she couldn’t exactly define, the kid looked from the dog to her, then back at the dog, quivering in anticipation.
“It’s okay,” Winnie said, not sure how she was breathing. “She wouldn’t hurt a bug if she stepped on it.”
Slowly, the boy got down on one knee to pat Annabelle’s head, and the dog became a blur—Boy likes me! Boy really, really likes me!—trying to lick everywhere at once. But he’d barely started giggling before he scrambled back upright, as though realizing he wasn’t supposed to be cavorting with strange dogs. Or a stranger’s dog, at least. Now the eyes focused on Winnie’s were accusatory, suspicious. Pained. And nearly the same weird blue-gray as hers, except for the flecks of gold near the iris.
“You the lady stayin’ in the Old House?”
The Old House. Like it was a name, not a description.
“Just for a little while.” He has my nose, too. For trouble, I bet. “You…saw me?”
“Yeah. Earlier.” The pointed chin came up. “Through the trees. I was on my bike.”
Bicycle tracks. Check.
“Oh. Do you, um, like to play around there?”
“Sometimes,” he said with a shrug. Not that I care.
Winnie’s mouth curved, at his beauty, his bravado. At how silly his long hair looked, nearly to his shoulders, as shiny and wavy as a girl’s. But every inch a boy, all the same, in his skater-dude outfit, the holes in his jeans’ knees. Still, she imagined the only thing keeping him from getting the crap beat out of him at school was his height, which made him look more like ten, maybe even eleven, than just-turned-nine.
Her face burning, Winnie turned back to the freezer case, grabbing—of all things—a carton of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, swallowing back the reassurance that wanted so bad to pop out of her mouth, that he could still come down and play, anytime—
“Robbie? Where’d you go—?”
They both looked up as Aidan Black—far shaggier and craggier than she remembered—materialized at the end of the aisle, nearly sending Winnie’s heart catapulting from her sternum. A second’s glance told her this was definitely not the mellow, grinning young man, his musical accent as smooth as one of Elektra’s chocolate shakes, she’d met barely two weeks before delivering the baby who’d become his son. The warm, laughing green eyes now dull and shuttered, this, she thought, was the very devil himself.
A devil who, despite how much she’d changed, too, instantly recognized her.
And wasn’t the least bit happy about it.
Her hair wasn’t punked up and jet-black as it had been then, but there was no mistaking those dusty-blue eyes, the set to her jaw, the way her long arms and legs seemed barely joined to her long-waisted torso, like a marionette.
A curse exploded underneath Aidan’s skull, just as Robbie said, “She’s the lady livin’ in the Old House,” and Aidan thought, Flo is a dead woman.
“We need to go,” he muttered, grabbing his son—his son—by the hand and practically hauling the lad up front to pay for his ice cream, hoping to hell “the lady” got the message that if she so much as opened her mouth—
He threw a couple of ones at Johnny Griego’s daughter at the register and kept going, swinging Robbie up into the truck’s cab and storming around to his side.
“Dad?” Robbie said, cautiously, once they were back on the highway. “What’s wrong?”
Where would you like me to start? Aidan thought. “Nothing, laddie,” he muttered, bracing himself as they passed a pasture where a half dozen or so horses aimlessly grazed…but not a peep from the other side of the truck. Then they crested a hill, on the other side of which lay a field chock-full of pumpkins. He glanced over, trying to decide if Robbie’s gaze was as fixed on those pumpkins as it appeared.
“We could stop, if you like,” he said carefully. When Robbie stayed quiet, Aidan added, “Shop early for the best selection?”
A second or two passed before Robbie shook his head. Aidan didn’t have to look at the lad to see the tears in his eyes.
His own stinging, as well, they kept driving, a heaping great sadness clawing at Aidan’s insides.
Aidan waited until he heard the distant boops and beeps of Robbie’s video game before confronting his housekeeper. “And it didn’t occur t’ya to tell me who Tess had let the Old House to?”
As it was, Aidan had only begrudgingly ceded to Flo’s entreaties, via her niece, to rent out the house to some woman from Texas determined to stay in Tierra Rosa and only Tierra Rosa. A normal man might have been at least curious about that. But Aidan was not a normal man, rarely concerning himself with the goings-on of the town he’d called home for more than a decade. So why would he have been even remotely interested in some woman keen