A Family Kind of Gal

  “Mrs. Santini, and her son, Stephen.”

  “Tiffany.” She shook hands with the tall man and wished her palms hadn’t begun to sweat.

  His smile seemed sincere. He swung a leg over the corner of Pearson’s mess of a desk and said, “Okay, Stephen, let’s hear it. Shoot.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  J.D.’s voice rang through the offices.

  Tiffany froze. Now what? Glancing over her shoulder, she watched as J.D., his limp hardly noticeable, made his way along the short hallway until he was standing beside her. “I’m the boy’s uncle. What’s going on here?”

  “Who invited you?” the detective asked.

  J.D.’s smile was cold, and there was a spark of challenge in his gray eyes. “I invited myself. J.D. Santini.” He thrust out his hand. “And I guess I should mention, I’m an attorney.”

  Jack eyed him warily. “A criminal attorney? The boy doesn’t need representation.”

  “Good.” J.D. stood right behind Stephen as if to shield him from an attack to his backside. “As I said, I’m Stephen’s uncle and his attorney if he needs one. So.” He rubbed his hands together and pinned both officers with his harsh gaze. “Now, what’s this all about?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “You are not a criminal attorney,” Tiffany said under her breath as J.D., in his new role of concerned uncle, escorted them outside the courthouse. A hot summer breeze blew through the streets, causing dust to swirl and rustling in the leaves of the maple trees.

  “They don’t know that,”

  “The police aren’t the enemy, J.D.” They crossed the parking lot, and she wanted to throttle him. Who was he to play the role of concerned father? “Besides, you have no right—” she stopped at her car and whirled, thrusting a finger into his chest “—no right, to come barging in there.”

  “I thought you might need a little help, and all I did was to encourage him to tell the truth without falling into any traps. Stephen did fine.” His eyes when they found hers stopped her cold. An awareness of something dangerous and primal slid through her, and she had trouble finding her tongue.

  “I think I already told you that I…we…are doing fine on our own.”

  “Are you?” He gestured to Stephen as the boy slid into the passenger seat of her car. “He looks like he just came out of a war zone, and he’s getting into more than his share of trouble.”

  “I’m working on it, Jay.”

  “Then what about Christina? I’ve heard her scream in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t think this is the time or place,” she said. The conversation was twisting in directions that she couldn’t control.

  “When?”

  “What?”

  “When would be the time and place?” he asked. “Whether you know it or not, we need to talk.”

  She shot a glance at Stephen and saw him staring at her with wary eyes. “Later.”

  “How much later?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Tonight,” he said.

  “No, the kids—”

  “They can stay alone for a couple of hours.”

  He waved to Stephen as he made his way across the parking lot to his rig. Stephen lifted his hand halfheartedly, and J.D. nodded. Without a backward glance he climbed into his Jeep and drove away, leaving Tiffany to simmer and stew. Angry and confused, she slid into the sun-baked interior of her car and quickly started it

  “What was that all about?” Stephen demanded. He fiddled with the buttons of the radio, changing from station to station.

  “Who knows?” Checking her rearview mirror, she backed out of the parking lot.

  “I don’t remember him hanging out with Dad a lot.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “So why’s he here now?” Stephen settled on a station that Tiffany didn’t recognize, then slumped in his seat and stared glumly through the window.

  “I don’t know. He’s just concerned, I guess.”

  “Is he really a lawyer?” Stephen asked, chewing on his lower lip and rubbing his elbow nervously.

  “Yes.” She felt a needle of fear prick her scalp. “Why?”

  “Just wonderin’,” Stephen said, but Tiffany read more into the question, and her heart sank.

  “Stephen,” she said softly. “Do you need an attorney?”

  “No,” he answered quickly. Too quickly.

  Careful, Tiffany, she cautioned herself. Tread lightly. “You’re sure?”

  “I was just curious, okay? It’s not a crime.” He stopped short at his own words, blushed and punched another button on the dash. Settling back in his seat, he chewed on a fingernail and closed his eyes as a song Tiffany recognized from one of his Nine Inch Nails CDs thrummed through the speakers.

  Leave it alone, she told herself. This isn’t the time. She drove through town and tried not to worry. Everything was going to be all right. Stephen had his share of troubles, but he wasn’t a criminal, for goodness’ sake. He was just a thirteen-year-old boy who was confused by his father’s death and his recent move. For the first time she wondered if uprooting him had been a good idea. There was a chance he would have felt more secure in Portland with his old friends.

  Now he was scared.

  And so was she.

  * * *

  J.D. couldn’t concentrate. Seated at the small table in his apartment, he shuffled the papers he’d received from the real-estate agent—information about the half-dozen properties that would work for his father’s latest idea for expansion into a new winery and vineyards, but the words blurred.

  He unscrewed the cap of his thermos and poured hours-old coffee into his cup. Frowning at the bitter taste, he added a splash of bourbon he’d bought for just that purpose.

  For all of his life, he’d never had a problem keeping his thoughts on track. In high school, despite the fact that he’d spent more time rebelling than studying, he’d breezed through his classes. College hadn’t been tough, and he’d managed to work full-time and attend law school.

  When he’d finally started working for a large firm in Seattle, he’d been able to spend hour after hour in the law library, or at his desk, poring over old cases, reviewing and researching, and generally working eighteen-hour days. He could get by on four hours’ sleep and kept in shape by running the hills of the city while honing his thoughts on whatever case he was working on at the time.

  He had chased ambulances—or, as he preferred to call it, he’d been a “personal injury” lawyer. That was where the money had been; that was where he could help individuals fight corporations, insurance companies, hospitals or whoever had wronged them.

  He’d never been one to lose sight of his goals. Never been unprepared. Never been distracted. Well, almost never. The women he’d dated, slept with, or nearly loved, hadn’t been interesting enough to deter him.

  Except for his brother’s wife.

  Tiffany Nesbitt Santini had been the exception—and, he was afraid, his undoing.

  Swearing under his breath, he took a long swallow from his cup and felt the coffee and alcohol hit his stomach in a warm, welcome flood.

  Tiffany had gotten to him from the start.

  Maybe it was because J.D. had always been competitive to the point of being considered cutthroat. Maybe it was because he’d always vied with his brother for his family’s attention. Maybe he just hadn’t liked being second-born. The fact that Philip had been a screwup made it worse.

  When Philip had dumped his first wife and kids, J.D. had been furious. He’d nearly beaten the living tar out of Philip, for all the good it had done. In J.D.’s opinion, Philip had failed his wife and kids by getting involved with another woman, and then he’d started to gamble more than he should. It was as if he’d given up all sense of responsibility and jumped feet first into a raging midlife crisis. As soon as his divorce was final, Philip had moved on from that woman and zeroed in on Tiffany, who, in J.D.’s opinion, was far too young and naive for his older brother.

/>   His family considered her a gold digger, and maybe she had been, but she’d stuck by Philip, given him another couple of kids, and, to J.D.’s knowledge, had never run around on his brother.

  And J.D. had wanted her.

  From the get-go.

  Badly.

  “Forget it,” he snorted, as he heard Stephen tuning up his guitar. Discordant music rose from the room below. Tapping the edges of his real-estate reports on the table, J.D. stuffed them into his briefcase where he spied the deed to the house. Now, there was a problem. One he couldn’t solve. His father owned most of the place. It was J.D.’s unenviable job to determine if the apartment house Tiffany ran and called home was worth the time and effort of keeping it. The old man didn’t necessarily want to cut the mother of his grandchildren out of what was rightfully hers; he just wanted to know if the property was a viable investment. It was Carlo’s contention that Tiffany and the kids could live closer to the family in a more comfortable home. As Carlo was estranged from the grandchildren from Philip’s first marriage and it didn’t seem that J.D. would ever have children, the old man was deeply interested in Stephen and Christina.

  But he didn’t give a damn about Tiffany. He’d made that clear on more than one occasion.

  Rubbing the area of his thigh that still bothered him, J.D. decided to call it a night. It was after ten and he was beat. He gulped the last of his coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The thrum of guitar chords had stopped, and the house was quiet. He went to the window and stared through the clear panes.

  Past the leafy branches of the trees in the backyard, he spied a few stars that were bright enough to defy the lights of the town. Low in the sky was the moon, or half of it. He stretched and glanced down to the lawn where Tiffany was watering a few potted plants.

  Her gauzy white dress caught in a breeze that teased at the hem, giving him a few glimpses of her bare legs. Unaware that she was being observed, she bent over each terra-cotta container and sprinkled the showy petunias, pansies and geraniums placed strategically around the drying grass. Her slinky cat wound about her bare feet, rubbing against her calves.

  God, she was beautiful. Her black hair was wound into a knot pinned to the back of her head, but strands of hair had escaped to frame her face and nape. Thoughtfully she bit her lower lip, showing off a hint of pearly teeth as she plucked dead blossoms from the plants.

  He couldn’t resist. Knowing he was about to step over an invisible but very definite line that he might not ever be able to recross, he set his papers and coffeecup aside and grabbed the neck of a bottle of wine he’d bought earlier in the day. The cabernet was local, and J.D. had decided to check out the competition. Quickly he headed downstairs.

  The steps creaked a little, but the second level was quiet with only a night-light in the bathroom offering partial illumination. He hurried down the final staircase to the first floor. A radio was playing softly in the kitchen, but the only light was a glass-encased candle flickering on the table.

  Quietly he opened several cupboards before finding the glassware, then plucked two wineglasses from a shelf and didn’t bother to question his motives. The corkscrew was in a drawer with odds and ends of kitchen utensils.

  He slipped noiselessly through the screen door and stood on the porch for a second. Tiffany was near the carriage house, refilling her plastic sprinkler at a faucet, and he watched as she watered the planter boxes of impatiens.

  Only when she’d turned and faced him, did he step out of the shadows of the porch.

  “Oh.” She froze, then recognized him. “For the love of Pete, Jay, you scared me.” Wiping drips of water from her hands, she approached, and he tried not to notice the way her dress hugged her breasts or the slight bit of cleavage that was visible at the neckline. Nor did he concentrate on the way her hips moved beneath the thin fabric.

  He lifted up the bottle. “I brought this as a peace offering.”

  She stopped only inches from him and lifted a dark, suspicious brow. “Because—”

  “Of our disagreement.”

  She shook her head and laughed. The sound was musical and vital. “If you buy a bottle of wine every time we disagree, you’re going to go broke fast.”

  “You think?”

  “No, I know.”

  “Then,” he said, placing the glasses on the rail of the porch and beginning to slice the foil surrounding the cork with the tip of the corkscrew, “maybe we should just call a truce.”

  “You think that’s possible?”

  He skewered her with a look that made her swallow hard. “Anything’s possible, Tiffany. You know that.”

  She looked quickly away as he placed the bottle between his knees and pulled the cork.

  “It’s late.”

  “Yeah, but where’re you going?”

  “Upstairs. To bed.”

  He left that line alone and poured them each a glass. “You can spare a few minutes.”

  She looked as if she wanted to bolt but took the glass, and together they sat on a bench beneath a willow tree in the backyard.

  “How about a toast?” he asked.

  “To what?”

  “Better days?”

  She smiled sadly, and he was undone. For an unreasonable second he wanted to enfold her in his arms and tell her everything would be all right. Instead he studied the ruby-dark depths of his glass. She squared her shoulders and nodded. “Better days,” she agreed, touching the rim of her glass to his. “Lots of them.”

  “Amen.”

  They both took a sip, and the night seemed to hold them closer. Faint light fell from the windows of the nook where the candle burned, and somewhere down the street a dog gave a soft “Woof.” Crickets chirped from hidden crevices, and the rumble of traffic, slow-moving and sparse, was barely audible.

  “So,” she finally said as if the silence between them was unbearable. “How did you just happen to show up at the police station today?”

  “When I got back here, I heard what was going on from Mrs. Ellingsworth.”

  “Ah,” she said, taking a swallow. He tried not to watch the motion of her throat, but it was impossible. “Discretion isn’t one of Ellie’s strong points.”

  “No?”

  She frowned at her glass. “No. But she’s honest, kind, loving, fun, and she adores my children.” With a half smile, she added, “I guess I can live with her need to gossip.”

  “She’s just lonely. Wants someone to talk to.”

  Tiffany nodded and twisted the stem of her glass between her fingers. “So how’s the search coming?” she asked. “Have you found a place for the winery?”

  “I’m narrowing it down.”

  “To—?”

  “A couple of places. One of which is the Wells ranch.”

  Tiffany sighed. “It seems we never can get away from that place, can we?”

  “I told you I’d help,” he said.

  “And I told you I don’t need any.” She took another long swallow from her glass, and he drained his.

  “You’re a lousy liar, Tiffany.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. You need a lot of help. You’ve got a house that’s falling down around you and a job that takes a lot of your time. On top of that you’re worried about your son, and I don’t blame you. Right now Stephen’s rebelling all over the place. Maybe it has to do with Philip’s death, but maybe it runs deeper. No one knows, but the simple fact is that he looks like he’s been in a prison fight, and he’s probably still in some trouble with the police. Whether you admit it or not, you’re afraid that he’s somehow connected with Isaac Wells’s disappearance.”

  “He’s just a boy!” she protested.

  “A boy who might know too much. He’s running with a rough crowd, getting into fights, and you don’t know how much else, but the fact of the matter is he ended up with Isaac Wells’s keys.”

  “It was a dare.”

  “One he shouldn’t have taken,” J.D. said, seeing he
r face whiten in the night.

  “Then there’s your daughter.”

  She gasped. “Christina’s fine.”

  “Is she? Why the nightmares every night?”

  Tiffany bristled and set her drink on the ground. What was J.D.’s game? What did he want? “What do you expect, Jay? She was barely three when she watched her father die, for God’s sake. Of course that’s going to cause some trauma. But it’s normal. She’s been to a child psychologist.” Tiffany crossed her arms under her breasts and glared at him. What did he know about raising kids? About becoming a single parent? About dealing with a truckload of guilt because your husband died in an automobile accident while you survived? About facing yourself every morning knowing that you were at the wheel of the car when it slid out of control? Her stomach twisted into painful knots, and she cleared her throat.

  “I’m just concerned,” he said so quietly that for a split second, she believed him.

  “Why all of a sudden? Most of Stephen’s life you haven’t been around.”

  “I had my reasons,” he said.

  “Which were?”

  He leveled her with a gaze that caused her heart to knock. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Of course I do.”

  He lowered his glass to the ground and grabbed her bare shoulders in his big, callused hands. She started to shrink from him, but held her ground and inched her chin up a notch. “If you want to know the truth—”

  “I do.” Or did she?

  “Most of my reasons for staying away had to do with you, Tiffany.”

  “With me?” she whispered, then stared into his eyes. Dark with the night they made promises of slow seduction, of a forbidden desire that no amount of time could erase. Memories cascaded through her mind, erotic images that tumbled, one after another, of the one night, just after Philip’s death, when she’d given in to him, of the few desperate hours when she’d clung to him in her tormented and anguished grief. “You’re right,” she said, swallowing hard and trying with all her heart to forget those painful-yet-bittersweet memories. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Too late.” His fingers tightened, he lowered his head, and his mouth slanted over hers as familiarly as if they’d been lovers just last night.