* * *
No one in their right minds had seven kids these days. Which said a lot about her mother and father.
The next afternoon, Allison pushed open the front door to her parents’ rambling split-level house on Barley Street and marched in without knocking. Nobody would have heard her anyway over the noise in the living room. The TV blared football between the Cowboys and the Giants while her dad and four brothers yelled at the quarterback and each other in the good-natured, competitive spirit of the Buchanon clan. Her stick-skinny younger sister Jayla was right with them, getting in her two cents about the lousy play calling by the offensive coordinator while Charity, the oldest and only married sibling, doled out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to her two kids.
“Home sweet home.” Allison stepped over a sprawled Dawson whose long legs seemed to stretch from the bottom of the couch halfway across the room.
“Hey, sis,” Dimpled Dawson, twin to Sawyer, offered an absentminded fist bump before yelling. “You missed the block, you moron!”
“I’ll do better next time,” Allison said, pretending not to understand. Dawson ignored that, too.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Somewhere.”
Brothers could be so helpful.
“Jayla?” she implored of her sister, who was scrunched on the dirt-brown sofa between Sawyer and Quinn.
Jayla, twisting the ends of her flaxen hair into tight, nervous corkscrews, never took her eyes off the game. She lifted a finger and pointed. “Backyard.”
Backyard. That figured. Mom would rather putter in her flowers, though she’d wander in and out of the huge Buchanon-built house simply to spend time with her kids.
Before Allison made the turn into the kitchen, Brady snagged her wrist. Like Dawson, he was on the floor but propped against the wall with his dog sprawled across his lap. Dawg, a shaggy mix of shepherd, lab and who-knew-what, raised a bushy eyebrow in her direction, but otherwise, like the siblings, didn’t budge.
“Aren’t you going to watch the game?”
Allison’s nerves jittered. Some things were more important than the game, although she would not share this minority opinion with any relative in the large, overcrowded living room.
“Later.”
He tilted his head to one side, a flash of curiosity in his startling cerulean eyes. Brady, her giant Celtic warrior brother who bore minimal resemblance to the rest of the Buchanons. “Everything okay, Al?”
Jake Hamilton, one hip slung low as a gunslinger, imposed on her mental viewer. “Sure.”
“Touchdown Cowboys!” someone shouted, and the room erupted in high fives and victory dances. His curiosity forgotten, Brady leaped to his feet and swirled her around in a two-step, as light on his feet as when he’d been chasing quarterbacks at Texas Tech. Allison, regardless of the worry, couldn’t help but laugh. Her brothers were crazy wonderful, her protectors and friends, the shoulders she could always cry on, except that one awful night when she hadn’t dared. Her heart swelled with love. What would she do without them? And how would they react when they learned Jake Hamilton was back in town?
Brady planted a loud smack on her cheek and turned her loose. Before he could ask any more prying questions, she high-fived her way through the elated sea of bodies and headed toward the kitchen. There she grabbed a bag of tortilla chips, one of several that yawned open on the counter next to upturned lids coated with various dips.
Allison skirted the long table for ten that centered the family kitchen-dining room to push open the patio doors and stepped out onto the round rock stepping stones installed by her brothers.
The yard was a green oasis, a retreat in the middle of a neighborhood of long time friends, of dogs that wandered and of kids that tended to do the same.
Karen Buchanon, matriarch of the rowdy Buchanon clan, looked up from repotting a sunny yellow chrysanthemum. At fifty-nine, she looked good in jean capris and a red blouse, her blond hair pulled back at the nape, her figure thicker but still shapely.
“There you are,” Mom said. “You missed the first quarter. Are you hungry?”
Allison lifted the bag of chips. “Got it covered.”
“Not very substantial.” Her mother laid aside a well-worn trowel, pushed to a stand and stripped off her green gardening gloves. “That should brighten up the backyard.”
“Mums are so pretty this time of year.”
“Why aren’t you watching the game?”
Allison crunched another salty chip. Her mother knew her too well to believe she’d abandoned a Cowboys game to talk about mums. Mom was the gardener whose skills served the Buchanon Construction Company. Allison barely knew a mum from an oak tree. Accounts payable was her area of expertise, such as it was, though Dawson often said, and she agreed, that Allison preferred all things wedding to construction.
But the family business was too important, too ingrained in her DNA to abandon in pursuit of some fantasy. Grandpa and Grandma Buchanon had built Buchanon Construction from the ground up before turning the business over to their only son—her dad. All seven Buchanon kids had known from the time they were big enough to toddle around in Dad’s hard hat that they were destined to build houses, to provide beautiful homes for families. Building was not only the Buchanon way, it was their calling.
But construction was not on her mind at the moment. Not even close. “I have something to tell you. Something important.”
Mom’s eyes narrowed in speculation. Even in shadow from the enormous old silver maple that shaded the back yard, Allison could see the wheels turning. Her mother sat down in the green-striped-canopy swing and patted the seat. “Come here. Might as well get it out. You’ve been stewing.”
“How do you always know?”
Her mom pointed. “That little muscle between your eyebrows gives you up every time.”
Allison touched the spot.
She had been stewing. Since the moment Jake turned his back and walked away, a dark worry had flown in and now hovered like a vulture over a cow carcass. She’d told Faith, of course. Except for that one shuddery secret she never spoke of, she told her best friend since first grade everything. She’d even cried on Faith’s shoulder years ago when Jake had packed a weathered old pickup and left for good.
Allison gnawed on her bottom lip. She was over him. At least, she’d told herself as much for the past few years. But she remembered, too, the terrible injustice done to a heartbroken boy.
Mom would find out anyway sooner or later. The whole family would. Then the mud would hit the fan.
She averted her gaze, watched a blue butterfly kiss a lavender aster.
“Mama,” she said. “Jake’s back in town.”
For a full minute, the only sound was the bee-buzz of hummingbirds and the faint football noise from inside the house. Down the street someone fired up a lawn mower.
Allison could feel the blood surging in her veins—hot and anxious and so terribly sorry. Not for her family. For Jake. That was the problem, as the family, especially her brothers, saw it. Allison was a traitor to the Buchanon name. Back when the pain was rawest for everyone, she’d sided with Jake. They hadn’t understood her loyalty. And if she had shared her secret, that singular defining reason for remaining loyal to Jake Hamilton, she would have caused an explosion of a different sort.
“Jake Hamilton?” her mother finally asked, voice tight.
The tone made Allison ache. “I saw him yesterday at the Hamilton house on my way to Faith’s bridal shower.”
“Why have you waited until now to tell me?”
“I stayed