words slashed endlessly through his mind like a broken record he couldn’t shut off. The boy. It was always that, never more. The child’s name was Cade. Yet, for reasons he wouldn’t define, Lincoln couldn’t bring himself to call Linsey’s son by his own name.
Dropping into a chair by the table, he lifted his drink again, watching the play of flames reflected in amber liquid and delicately etched crystal. Fire, the force that changed all their lives. Fire and Oregon. Abruptly Lincoln crashed the glass down with such ferocity it should have shattered, as most of the scotch splashed over the rim.
“Who is he, Linsey? Why is his hair dark when Lucky’s was fairer than yours? Who gave him my name?” Drawing a shuddering breath, he whispered, “Why? In God’s name, why?”
Burying his head in his hands, he didn’t speak again. As darkness gathered, beyond the babble of the fountain, the tap of footsteps along the street, and the clink of glass against glass as he poured another drink, the garden was silent.
When he roused, putting away memories he kept locked in the nether regions of his mind, Lincoln didn’t know how long he’d sat in the gloom. As he nursed a rare third drink, he didn’t care.
Time didn’t matter tonight. He was too restless for it to matter. Too confused. Pain lay in his chest like an iron weight. Whatever he did, or didn’t do, emotions he didn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with tore at him. And with the better part of those three scotches in him— the most he’d had to drink since he and his brothers had given up their carousing, brawling ways—he shouldn’t, by damn, be feeling anything.
“Hell,” he grumbled, and took another sip, more melted ice than alcohol. “I’m the serious, pragmatic Cade. The logical Cade with all the cool-headed answers. Or so they tell me.
“Yeah,” he mocked in harsh sarcasm, “sure I am. Sure I do.” Fingers curled into an impotent fist. “So, why not now?”
He was the second of Caesar Augustus Cade’s four sons by four wives. The son born of a Scot. Surely she passed along some fine Gaelic practicality in her genes, even if she had died too young to instill it with her teaching. A handsome mouth quirked in a grim smile. “Yep, Gaelic practicality, that’s Lincoln Cade.”
Yep. The boy said that, he remembered.
“The boy.” The glass banged down a second time and still survived. Skidding back his chair, Lincoln rose, and from his great height stared down at the perfect haven he’d created. As the Stuart farm had been, this was his place to come when life with a father like Gus became too much. Or when the world weighed too heavily.
“Where do I go now?” he wondered aloud as memories he couldn’t exorcise and questions he couldn’t answer filled every corner of his heart and mind. When bitterness, black and ugly, joined grief and guilt, how did he deal with them?
“What about the boy?”
His whisper seemed to echo in the small space. Surrounding him, engulfing him in his own voice, asking over and over, what about the boy?…the boy?
Laughter from the street broke the illusion. Adult amusement, but in it Lincoln heard the haunting laugh of a child.
But whose child?
Turning to the house, forsaking the garden and his search for peace he knew would elude him for a long time to come, Lincoln knew what he must do. He knew what he would do.
For Lucky, for Linsey, for himself.
For the boy.
Three
“Look, Mom. Look.”
Chuckling, as she made another entry on her growing list of things to do, Linsey wondered what new marvel Cade had discovered. She’d spent the morning taking inventory of needed repairs in the house and barn. Prioritizing each, she balanced their importance against her limited budget while her son resumed an exploration cut short the night before by dinner and bedtime.
Clipping her pen to the small tablet, she smiled again. Recalling that, as he’d drifted off to sleep each of the three nights they’d spent in the old house, Cade had declared the Stuart farm “the bestest place ever,” Linsey went to see what new bounty had been added to the exuberant child’s list of “bestest” things.
“What is it, Cade?” Blinded by a flood of light, she stepped from the barn. “What have you discovered now?”
Grubby fingers pointed toward the stream. “Company.”
Shading her eyes with a hand at her forehead, Linsey stared at a truck fording the shallow part of the stream as if it weren’t there. Who would come calling so soon? she wondered. Only the utility companies knew Lucky Stuart’s widow and her son had taken up residence in the old Stuart farm. Even if the linemen were gossips, it was unlikely word could spread so fast. She hadn’t even stopped in Belle Terre for groceries.
Cade moved a step toward the house and the truck, eager for the adventure of meeting someone new. “No, Cade.” Linsey’s fingertips settled on his shoulder. “Wait.”
“Who is it?” A friendly, fearless child…only her touch kept him from running to greet the visitor. “Do you know?”
“No, and I can’t think of any reason we might have a caller so soon,” she said. “Unless…” Speculation died on her lips as she remembered the horse and rider she’d dismissed as a creation of Cade’s vivid imagination. As the truck drew nearer, with a fleeting glimpse and a sense of the inevitable, she recognized the one man she’d hoped to avoid.
At least for a little time. Until she had mind, body, and heart settled and steeped in Lucky’s past and in his home.
“Unless what, Mom?” Cade glanced curiously at her.
Linsey had no ready response. But she was saved the effort as the truck halted before the front steps, its door swung open, and a tall, dark man emerged. With a sinking heart, she waited, held motionless by the man, by his magnetism. By memories.
He was tall. Taller than most men, and slender. But when he reached into the truck for a pair of gloves, the startling width of his shoulders strained against the seams of his shirt. His legs were long and provocatively molded by sensible jeans riding low at his waist. Equally sensible low-heeled boots added an unneeded inch or so to his already considerable height. His hair, barely visible beneath the broad brim of his Western hat, was dark and cut short. Yet it grew in an all-too-familiar defiant swirl over the back of his neck.
When he turned from the truck, his solemn gaze found her as he drew on the supple gloves. Refusing to flinch beneath his wintry stare, even as countless questions raced through her mind, Linsey realized he was as handsome as ever. And, a glance at Cade proved, as singularly charismatic. As fascinating.
Don’t, she wanted to cry out. Don’t like him too much. Don’t admire him too much. Don’t love him, or he’ll break your young heart, too, she wanted to warn her son. But with all that had gone before in her son’s young life, she knew it was too late. It had been too late from the moment this stalwart, cold-eyed modern-day knight errant emerged from his gleaming metal steed.
Cade had been taught to love and adore the mystique of this man all his short life. Now, with his simple act of walking toward them—gloved, booted, bigger than life with a tilted Stetson that seemed to touch the sky—Linsey knew her son would love and adore the flesh-and-blood Lincoln Cade even more than the image Lucky Stuart had deliberately created.
“Linsey.” Her name spoken in his quiet voice and a touch at the brim of his hat was Lincoln’s only greeting as he halted before her. Eyes dispassionate and as gray as a rain-washed sky settled on her face, seeking out every nuance of change. With no altering of his expression, his study moved on, lingering on hastily banded hair the color of sunshine, a shirt worn precariously thin, and jeans faded and more white than blue. Then finally her boots, whose best days had passed miles before.
His silent perusal complete, his attention flicked down to