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He pushed the swing again with his foot. “So you think I ought to let their little romance run its course?”
“Josh is almost eighteen. There’s not really much you can do about it.”
“I could lock him in his room and feed him only gruel,” he muttered.
She laughed. “He’s a teenage boy. I imagine he would figure out a way to sneak out and go for pizza.”
He was quiet for a long moment. When she glanced over to gauge his expression and try to figure out what he was thinking about, she thought she detected a hint of color on his cheekbones.
“Should I take him to buy condoms, just to be on the safe side?” he asked, without looking at her.
The temperature between them seemed to heat up a dozen degrees and she knew it was not from the barbecue just a few feet away. She cleared her throat. “Maybe that’s a conversation you ought to have with his mother.”
“I can’t discuss my nephew’s sex life with my sister while she’s in jail!”
She supposed she ought to be flattered that he felt he could discuss such a delicate subject with her, but she couldn’t get past the trembling in her stomach just thinking about “Ross” and “condoms” in the same conversation.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said. “You’re going to have to make that decision on your own. But I will say that if Josh were my son or in my care, it’s certainly a conversation I would have with him, especially if he’s becoming as serious with his girlfriend as you seem to believe.”
He didn’t look very thrilled by the prospect, but he nodded. “I guess I’ll do that. Thanks for the advice. I can see why you make a good counselor. You’re very easy to talk to.”
She smiled. “You’re welcome.”
He gazed at her and she saw that heat flare in his eyes again. The world seemed to shiver to a stop and the night and the lovely gardens and the soft wind murmuring in the treetops seemed to disappear, leaving just the two of them alone with this powerful tug of attraction between them.
He was inches from kissing her.
Ross could feel the sweet warmth of her breath, could almost taste her on his mouth. He wanted her, with a fierce hunger that seemed to drive all common sense out of his head.
He tried to hang on to all the reasons he shouldn’t kiss her. This was not supposed to be happening right now.
His life was in total chaos, he had far too many people depending on him and the last thing he needed was to find himself tangled up with someone like Julie Osterman, someone soft and generous and entirely too sweet for a man like him.
One kiss wouldn’t hurt anything, though. Only a tiny little taste. He leaned forward and heard a seductive little catch of her breath, felt the brush of her breast against his arm as she shifted slightly closer.
His mouth was just a tantalizing inch away from hers when he suddenly heard the snick of the sliding door.
“Ross?” Josh called out.
Julie jerked away as if Ross had poked her with hot coals from the grill and the glider swayed crazily with the movement.
“Over here,” Ross called.
He didn’t like the way Josh skidded to a stop, his sizefourteen sneakers thudding against the tile patio, or the way his eyebrows climbed to find them sitting together so cozily on the glider.
He also didn’t like the sudden speculative gleam in his nephew’s eyes.
“Hi, Julie. I didn’t hear you come in.”
She was breathing just a hair too quickly, Ross thought. “I only arrived a few moments ago. Your uncle and I were just…we were, um…”
“Julie was helping me with the steaks. And speaking of which, I’d better turn them before they’re charred.”
He definitely needed to get a grip on this attraction, he thought as he turned the steaks while Julie and Josh set the table out on the patio.
She was a nice woman who was doing him a huge favor by helping him figure out how to handle sudden, unexpected fatherhood. It would be a poor way to repay her by indulging his own whims when he had nothing to offer her in return.
“I think everything’s ready,” he said a few moments later.
“We’re all set here,” Julie said from the table, where she sat talking quietly with Josh about school. They had set out candles, he saw, and Frannie’s nice china. It was a nice change from the paper plates he and Josh had been using while he was here.
He went inside for the russet potatoes he had thrown in the oven earlier while they were waiting for her to arrive, and he put the tomato salad Julie had brought into a bowl.
“Wow. I’m impressed,” Julie exclaimed as he set the foil packet containing her fish on her plate and opened it for her. The smell of tarragon and lemon escaped.
“Better wait until you taste it before you say that,” he warned her.
He knew only two ways to cook fish. Either battered and fried in tons of butter—something he tried not to do too often for obvious health reasons—or grilled in a packet with olive oil, lemon juice and a mix of easy spices.
He knew he shouldn’t care so much what she thought but he still found it immensely gratifying when she closed her eyes with sheer delight at the first forkful. “Ross, this is delicious!”
He was becoming like one of the teens she worked with, desperate for her approval. “Glad you like it. How’s the steak, Josh?”
His nephew was still studying the two of them with entirely too much interest. “It’s good. Same as always.”
“Nothing like family to deflate the old ego,” Ross said with a wry smile.
“Sorry,” Josh amended. “What I meant to say is this is absolutely the best steak I have ever tasted. Every bite melts in my mouth. I think I could eat this every single day for the rest of my life. Is that better?”
Julie laughed and it warmed Ross to see Josh flash her a quick grin before he turned back to his dinner. He didn’t know what it was about her, but when she was around, Josh seemed far more relaxed. More like the kid he used to be.
“What are your plans after the summer?” she asked.
Josh shrugged. “I’m not sure right now.”
Ross looked up from dressing his potato and frowned. “What do you mean, you’re not sure? You’ve got an academic scholarship to A&M. It’s all you could talk about a few weeks ago.”
His nephew looked down at his plate. “Yeah, well, things have changed a little since a few weeks ago.”
“And in a few more weeks, this is all going to seem like a bad dream.”
“Is it?” Josh asked quietly and the patio suddenly simmered with tension.
“Yes. You’ll see. These ridiculous charges against your mom will be dropped and everything will be back to normal.”
“My dad will still be dead.”
He had no answer to that stark truth. “You’re not giving up a full-ride academic scholarship out of concern for your mother or some kind of misguided guilt over your dad’s death.”
Josh’s color rose and he set his utensils down carefully on his plate. “It’s my scholarship, Uncle Ross. If I want to give it up, nobody else can stop me. You keep forgetting I’m not a kid anymore. I’ll be eighteen in a week, remember?”
“I haven’t forgotten. But I also know that you have opportunities ahead of you and it would be a crime to waste those. I won’t let you do it.”
“Good luck trying to stop me, if that’s what I decide to do,” Josh snapped.
Ross opened his mouth to answer just as hotly but Josh’s cell phone suddenly bleated a sappy little tune he recognized as being the one Josh had programmed to alert him to Lyndsey’s endless phone calls.
He didn’t know whether to be annoyed or grateful for the interruption. He had dealt with his own stubborn younger brothers enough to know that yelling wasn’t going to accomplish anything but would make Josh dig in his heels.
“Hey,” Josh said into the phone. He shifted his body away and pitched his voice several decibels lower. “No. Not the best right now.”
Ross’s gaze met Julie’s and the memory of their conversation earlier—and all his worries—came flooding back. Was it possible Lyndsey was part of the reason Josh was considering giving up his scholarship?
Josh held the phone away from his ear. “Uncle Ross, I’m done with dinner. Do you care if I take this inside, in my room? A friend of mine needs some help with, um, trig homework. I might be a while and I wouldn’t want to bore you two with a one-sided conversation.”
He and Julie both knew that wasn’t true. He wondered if he should call Josh on the lie, but he wasn’t eager to add to the tension over college.
“Did you get enough to eat?”
Josh made a face. “Yeah, Mom.”
Ross supposed that was just what he sounded like. Not that he had much experience with maternal solicitude. “I guess you can go.”
The teen was gone before the words were even out of his mouth. Only after the sliding door closed behind him did Ross suddenly realize his nephew’s defection left him alone with Julie.
“You know, lots of parents establish a no-call zone during the dinner hour,” Julie said mildly.
He bristled for about ten seconds before he sighed. Hardly anybody had a cell phone twenty years ago, the last time he’d been responsible for a teenager. The whole internet, e-mail, cell phone thing presented entirely new challenges.
“Frannie always insisted he leave it in his room during dinner.”
She opened her mouth to say something but quickly closed it again and returned her attention to her plate.
“What were you going to say?” he pressed.
“Nothing.”
“You forget, I’m a trained investigator. I know when people are trying to hide things from me.”
She gave him a sidelong look, then sighed. “Fine. But feel free to tell me to mind my own business.”
“Believe me. I have no problem whatsoever telling people that.”
She gave a slight smile, but quickly grew serious. “I was only thinking that a little more consistency with the house rules he’s always known might be exactly what Josh needs right now. He’s in complete turmoil. He’s struggling with his mother’s arrest and his father’s death. Despite their uneasy relationship, Lloyd was his father and having a parent die isn’t easy for anyone. Perhaps a little more constancy in his life will help him feel not quite as fragmented.”
“So many things have been ripped from his world right now. It’s all chaos. I was just trying to cut him a little slack.”
She stood and began clearing the dishes away. “Believe it or not, a little slack might very well be the last thing he needs right now. Rules provide structure and order amid the chaos, Ross.”
He could definitely understand that. He had craved that very structure in his younger days and had found it at the Academy. Police work, with its regulations and discipline—its paperwork and routine—had given him guidance and direction at a time he desperately needed some.
Maybe she was right. Maybe Josh craved those same things.
“Here, I’ll take those,” he said to Julie when she had filled a tray with the remains of their dinner.
After he carried the tray into the kitchen, he returned to the patio to find Julie standing on the edge of the tile, gazing up at the night sky.
It was a clear night, with a bright sprawl of stars. Ross joined her, wondering if he could remember the last time he had taken a chance to stargaze.
“Pretty night,” he said, though all he could think about was the lovely woman standing beside him with her face lifted up to the moonlight.
“It is,” she murmured. “I can’t believe I sometimes get so wrapped up in my life that I forget to enjoy it.”
They were quiet for a long time, both lost in their respective thoughts while the sweet scents from Frannie’s garden swirled around them.
“Can I ask you something?” Ross finally asked.
If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he might have missed the slight wariness that crept into her expression. “Sure.”
“How do you know all this stuff? About grieving and discipline and how to help a kid who’s hurting?”
“I’m a trained youth counselor with a master’s degree in social work and child and family development.”
She was silent for a long moment, the only sound in the night the distant hoot of an owl and the wind sighing in the treetops. “Beyond that,” she finally said softly, “I know what it is to be lost and hurting. I’ve been there.”
Her words shivered through him, to the dark and quiet place he didn’t like to acknowledge, that place where he was still ten years old, scared and alone and responsible for his three younger siblings yet again after Cindy ran off with a new boyfriend for a night that turned into another and then another.
He knew lost and hurting. He had been there plenty of times before, but it didn’t make him any better at intuitively sensing what was best for Josh.
He pushed those memories aside. It was much easier to focus on the mystery of Julie Osterman than on the past he preferred to forget.
“What are your secrets?” he asked.
“You mean you haven’t run a background check on me yet, detective?”
He laughed a little at her arch tone. “I didn’t think about it until just this moment. Good idea, though.” He studied her for a long moment in the moonlight, noting the color that had crept along the delicate planes of her cheekbones. “If I did, what would I find?”
“Nothing criminal, I can assure you.”
“I don’t suppose you would have been hired at the Foundation if you had that sort of past.”
“Probably not.”
“Then what?” He paused. “You lost someone close to you, didn’t you?”
She gazed at the moon, sparkling on the swimming pool. “That’s a rather obvious guess, detective.”
“But true.”
Her sigh stirred the air between them.
“Yes. True,” she answered. “It’s a long, sad story that I’m sure would bore you senseless within minutes.”
“I have a pretty high bore quotient. I’ve been known to sit perfectly motionless on stakeouts for hours.”
She glanced at him, then away again. “A simple background check would tell you this in five seconds but I suppose I’ll go ahead and spare you the trouble. I lost my husband seven years ago. I’m a widow, detective.”
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