“And then we go from there. But, for right now, we just keep going the way we’re going.”
Lucien glanced ahead of us, looking for Jacob. We’d lost them in the crowd, but they couldn’t have gotten far. His eyes fell back on mine, and he touched my chin with the pad of his thumb. It was a gentle caress, almost a friendly touch. But there was so much more behind it than that. I wanted to move into his arms, wanted to feel the reassuring warmth of his body despite the late winter warmth of the south Texas sun, but I reminded myself that this was just another case. I was letting myself get carried away with the fact that he was so incredibly handsome and so different from any man I’d ever known before. And his touch… Damn, I was doing it again! I was letting my mind go to where it had been last night, and that was too dangerous.
I had to focus.
“Lucien!”
Rachel was running toward us, high color on her cheeks. She grabbed his arm, pulling his hand away from my face.
“Come throw softballs with me!”
She was laughing as she dragged him away. He glanced back at me, a touch of longing in his eyes.
“Sorry,” he said, waving a hand to indicate he had no control over his life.
“She’s still such a child in so many ways,” Jacob said as he came up alongside me. “And he was always her favorite playmate.”
“It must be nice having a little sister.”
“Only child?”
I never really knew how to answer questions like that. I wasn’t always an only child. I had a little sister once. She was five years younger than me, a pest I wanted to go away, until she did. Until the night she and my mother ran to the store and never came home.
“Yeah,” I said, because I really didn’t see the point in getting into the whole story.
“Sometimes I think I might have preferred to remain an only child. And others I realize that I would have missed out on too much if my father had never met Elizabeth and Lucien.”
I’d thought about what it would be like if my father had ever gotten remarried. I knew he dated some, knew that he came close once. She was a waitress at his favorite diner downtown a block or two from his old precinct. He thought I didn’t know about it, but I did. I saw the little hand touches, the long looks. I don’t know what happened, why they broke up. I worried when I went into the Army that he would be left all alone. I still worry.
“I’m sorry about last night,” Jacob said.
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. You were just looking out for your brother.”
“I was. And that’s not what I’m apologizing for.” He tilted his head slightly as he studied me in the bright sunshine. “I’m just sorry that I went about it a little clumsily.”
“You and Lucien are pretty close.”
“Yeah.” He dragged his fingers through his short, dull brown hair. “Working together day in and day out does that.”
“Were you close before you started working at Callahan Biomedical?”
“I don’t know. Not as close as we should have been, I suppose. I went off to college almost as soon as he and Elizabeth moved into the house. Then I got married, went to graduate school. My life was elsewhere.”
“Your wife. She was your college sweetheart?”
He nodded, taking my elbow and beginning a slow walk toward the end of the boardwalk, where Rachel and Lucien were laughing as they failed to win a stuffed animal.
“We met at UT Austin and moved on to Stanford together.”
“Lucien said you separated a couple of months ago.”
“We did.”
“Can I ask what went wrong?”
Jacob was quiet for a moment. We walked a slow pace together, side by side. The crowd had lessened a little, and we were in one of those pockets of quiet that sometimes happen in a large crowd. I wasn’t sure he would answer me, but then he sighed.
“It was pretty typical, I suppose. I wanted children. She didn’t. She got tired of arguing about it, so she asked me to leave.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Like I said, pretty typical. I guess we should have had the children talk before we got married.”
I found myself watching Lucien, thinking he would make gorgeous babies someday. And then I wondered why in the hell I was thinking that. I mean, he was beautiful. That golden blond hair and those blue eyes… Shit, what was wrong with me?
“You okay?” Jacob asked, pulling my attention back to him. “You went pale there for a second.”
“Yeah. Must be the heat.”
He glanced up at the sun, squinting as he did. Then he glanced at Lucien and Rachel, smiling at the screaming curses and hoots of laughter.
“They enjoy each other too much.”
“It must be interesting, running a biomedical company.”
Jacob shrugged. He tugged me over to a bench that was a few dozen yards from where the games were situated and the worst of the crowd lingered.
“Lucien showed me around yesterday. It’s pretty impressive, some of the things you guys are doing there.”