her mother.
“Fire in the hole.” This time there was an audible whoosh seconds before the three rounds shot from tubes and exploded with three loud booms. Startled, Maddie jumped back and collided with something solid. A pair of big hands grabbed her arms as green, gold, and red bursts of fire rained down toward the lake. “Sorry.” She turned her head and looked up into the shadows resting on Mick’s face.
“Not a problem.” Instead of pushing her away, he held her right where she’d landed. “Tell me something.”
“What?”
He lowered his face and spoke just above her ear. “If you’re a great catch, why haven’t you been caught?”
His warm breath touched the side of her head and slipped down her neck. “Probably for the same reason you haven’t.”
“Which is?”
“You don’t want to be caught.”
“Honey, all women want to be caught.” His hands slid to her elbows, then up again, bunching her sweatshirt. “All women want a white wedding, picket fence, and a baby maker.”
“Have you met all women?”
She thought she felt him smile. “I’ve met my share.”
“So I hear.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
“And you shouldn’t believe all women want you for their own personal baby maker.”
“You don’t want me for your own personal baby maker?”
“Shocking, isn’t it?”
He laughed. A low rumble against the side of her head. “You smell good.” Against her back, she felt him draw in a deep breath.
“German chocolate cake.”
“What?”
“I smell like chocolate cake body scrub.”
“I haven’t had chocolate cake in a long time.” She’d been mistaken about his handshake being like the best sex she’d had in years. This, his soft breath in her hair and his hands on her arms, was practically orgasmic. Which she figured made her particularly pathetic. “You’re making me hungry,” he said next to her ear.
“For cake?”
His hands slid to her shoulders, then back down to her elbows. “For starters.”
“Uncle Mick,” Travis called out as he stood. “When are the town fireworks going to start?”
Mick looked up. His hands tightened a fraction,
then dropped to his sides. “Any minute,” he answered and took a step back. As if on cue, several enormous booms shook the ground and the night sky lit up with huge bursts of color. Sofie Allegrezza pushed play on her small sound system and Jimi Hendrix’s sonic guitar wailed “The Star Spangled Banner” into the night. Forest critters scrambled for cover as around the lake fireworks exploded from the beaches, competing with the town’s pyrotechnic eruptions.
Welcome to Truly. The original shock and awe.
“Did you have fun, Travis?”
A huge yawn came from the other side of the dark truck. “Yeah. Maybe next year I can blow off bigger fireworks.”
“Maybe, if you stay out of trouble.”
“Mom said if I stay out of trouble, I can get a puppy.”
Mick turned the Ram into Meg’s driveway and pulled to a stop next to her Ford Taurus. A dog was a good idea. A boy needed a dog. “What kind of puppy?”
“I like black ones with white spots.”
Lights burned from within the house and a single bulb lit the porch. Together they climbed out of the truck and walked up the front steps. It was close to eleven-thirty and Travis’s feet were dragging. “How long do you have to be good?”
“For one month.”
The kid couldn’t stay out of trouble with his mother for one week. “Well, just watch your mouth and you might make it.” He shoved his keys into his pants pocket and opened the door for his nephew.
Meg sat on the couch in her white nightgown and pink fuzzy robe. Tears shone in her green eyes as she looked up from something she held in her hand. A forced smile curved her lips and dread settled on Mick’s shoulders. It was going to be one of those nights.
“Did you see the fireworks, Mom?” If Travis noticed, he didn’t seem bothered.
“No, honey, I didn’t go outside. But I heard them.” She stood and Travis wrapped his arms around her waist. “They were huge!”
“Did you behave yourself?” She placed her hand on her son’s head and looked over at Mick.
“Yes,” Travis answered, and Mick confirmed it with a nod.
“That’s my good boy.”
Travis looked up. “Pete said maybe I could spend the night and his mom said, ‘Some other time.’”
“We’ll see.” Like their mother, Meg was a beautiful woman, with smooth white skin and long black hair. And as with their mother, her moods were unpredictable as hell. “Go get your pajamas on and get in bed. I’ll be in to kiss you good night in a minute.”
“Okay,” Travis said through a yawn. “Good night, Uncle Mick.”
“Night, buddy.” An almost overwhelming urge to turn away pulled at Mick and he actually took a step back. Away from what he knew was to come and toward the cool night air.
Meg watched her son leave the room, then she held out her hand and opened her palm. “I found Mom’s wedding ring.”
“Meg.”
“She took it off and left it on her nightstand before she went to the bar that night. She never took it off.”
“I thought you weren’t going to go through her things anymore.”
“I wasn’t.” She closed her hand around the ring and bit her thumbnail. “It was packed away with Grandmother Loraine’s jewelry, and I found it when I was looking for her four leaf clover necklace. The one she used to wear all the time because it brought her luck. I wanted to wear it to work tomorrow.”
God, he hated when his sister got like this. He was five years younger than Meg, but he’d always felt like the older brother.
Her big green eyes looked across at him and her hand fell to her side. “Was Daddy really going to leave us?”
Hell, Mick didn’t know. No one knew but Loch, and he was long dead. Dead and gone and in the past. Why couldn’t Meg leave it alone?
Maybe because she’d just turned ten a few months before the night their mother had loaded a snub-nosed .38 and emptied five chambers into Mick’s father and a young waitress by the name of Alice Jones. Meg remembered a hell of a lot more about that night twenty-nine years ago when their mother had
