He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Sorry. Sorry.”

“Jack, condoms aren’t a hundred percent. Sometimes there’s a malfunction—a little hole, a leak, a tear. And, as we’ve proven, you’re pretty potent. Are you worried you’re going to be getting more news like this?”

“Not so much that.” He sat down on the bed. “Mel, I can admit to playing it kind of loose when I was young and there was the occasional real short-term relationship…. Not as many as you might think. But either I’m getting old and losing my memory or I was only with Denny’s mom once or maybe twice. Mel, my girlfriends, such as they were, might not have always been memorable, but I don’t remember Denny’s mom at all. She looks kind of familiar, but I can’t tie her to a single date, event, conversation, anything. And yet, she told Denny all about my family! Not the kind of stuff I share with a girl I’ve been out with once or twice.”

“Denny was around over the holidays, Jack. I’m sure you talked about your family all the time.”

He shook his head. “She told him I had a little sister still in grade school. We must have been close—when I was twenty, Brie was only ten. And she took me being in the Marines real hard.”

“Maybe you were drunk,” Mel said with a shrug.

He straightened. “As a well-known fact, personally and across the board, I didn’t have much sexual success when drunk. I did, however, have blissful memory loss.”

“Maybe it’ll all come back to you. But Jack, are you sure this information is accurate? I mean, maybe the person who’s not remembering real well was Denny’s mom. Although…”

“Although…?” he prompted.

“I have to say, my experience is that women generally know who got them pregnant, unless there were multiple partners in a very tight period of time. Men seem to be more prone to blow off the average encounter while most women take these things very seriously.”

“I know this,” he said. “I know men and women look at things like sex differently and, I admit, I can’t remember the phone number of every woman I slept with, but that letter said she was in love with me. That she fell hard. It happened a time or two—that a woman’s feelings for me were stronger than mine for her, and when that happened, I had to move along before someone got hurt real bad. I have four sisters. I listened to them wail and cry over some dipshit boy who led them on then disappeared, just took what he could get and didn’t call again. I wasn’t going to do that to a girl, so I bit the bullet and broke it off. And when I had to do that it wasn’t easy and I remember every one.”

Mel pulled a face. “I have to give you credit for that, Jack. It’s rare. Most guys would rather leave the country than have an honest conversation about their feelings.”

“Don’t overpraise me. I’m not sure I did a good job of it, but I did fess up that I wouldn’t turn out to be a good boyfriend, that there was no future in me. Hell, I loved the Marines—there really wasn’t room for one other woman in my life.”

“Except your sisters,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, well I was stuck with them,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much I don’t want to tell my dad about this?” He covered his face with his hands, leaning elbows on his knees.

“Well, Jack, given the fact you don’t remember Denny’s mom or the period of time he was conceived, before you tell the whole family and the whole town, I recommend you get a little evidence more concrete than a posthumous letter. You two need to do a little blood test. Make sure you’re related.”

Jack looked devastated. “Aw, Mel, I can’t do that to the kid. Think of all he’s been through. And I’ve known him coming up on six months now and he’s a good young man. Can I really question his dying mother’s confession without hurting him?”

“If you’d gotten this letter a year after he was conceived asking for your involvement and support and didn’t remember being with the mother, wouldn’t you, in the kindest possible way, say you were completely willing, but a blood test would be in the best interest of everyone involved?”

“That would be obvious after only a year,” he said. “The man is twenty-four. He’s lived for this moment. I’ve already disappointed him for a couple of decades. I don’t want to question him even more.”

“I appreciate that and I like him very much. But, Jack, it’s not all about Denny. There’s you, too. And then there’s David and Emma….”

“David and Emma don’t care whether there’s a blood test….”

“They might if they ever need a bone marrow transplant.”

“If there’s ever a medical situation, believe me we’ll jump right on that blood work.”

“Well, this is your situation,” Mel said. “I’m just along for the ride and I have no trouble accepting Denny as your son. Honestly, I have no trouble accepting Rick as your son, though you don’t share a single chromosome—I think of him as a son, too. I was ready to adopt a baby that wouldn’t be ours biologically and I never doubted for a second that we’d love him as much as our own biological children. Jack—keep an open mind. Your relationship with Denny doesn’t have to change. Even though you didn’t bring him up it’s obvious you care about him—no blood test would change that. But it would lend evidence to the claim.” She shrugged. “Could give you both enormous peace of mind.”

Jack was quiet for a long time. Finally he said, “I’ll keep it in mind. But I know now is not the time.”

Six

Jillian knew she’d see Colin again before too long. She had been thinking about him, knew he was more than a little curious about her, just as she was intrigued by him, but she didn’t expect him to walk right in her back door at six-thirty in the morning. She was standing at the kitchen sink in her pajamas, filling egg cartons with dirt from a big bag of potting soil. She wasn’t wearing sexy pajamas but they were a bit revealing. She was braless and the curve of her br**sts was clearly visible. And she was a tiny bit glad.

“Good morning,” she said. “Don’t you knock?”

He lifted his arms—one brown paper grocery sack in each. “No free hands.”

“You could have knocked. You could have used the toe of your boot.”

“I’ll try like hell to remember that. Have you had breakfast?”

“I was just about to eat some Froot Loops.”

“Ugh,” he groaned. “Poison. I’ll make breakfast. What are you doing?”

“Making seed cups. Preacher’s been saving me his egg cartons—they’re perfect.” She brushed the dirt off her hands into the bag. “I’ll move this bag of dirt and get dressed.”

“Not on my account—you look good.” He put his grocery bags on the work island. “I’ll move the dirt to the back porch for you. How do you like your eggs?”

“Benedict?”

“Second choice?”

“Steamed. Medium. Firm whites, plenty of yellow yolk.”

He smiled at her. “You’re trying to trick me. You think I can’t deliver. I’m a pretty good cook. Breakfast is my specialty.” His eyes dropped to her br**sts and he seemed to sway slightly; he almost moaned. “Go ahead, get dressed. I’ll get busy in the kitchen.”

She was smiling as she went into the little bedroom off the kitchen and closed the door. Well, they were even now. She’d been caught glancing at his crotch and he’d taken a survey of her chest. She couldn’t miss the reaction—he had paled, and if she was not mistaken, he had subdued a shiver. Since her br**sts were completely adequate and still quite perky she assumed he liked them just fine. She never thought of them as anything special but, in the grand scheme of things, they were nicely shaped and large enough for a man’s hands.

Jillian had been thinking about Colin a lot lately because she was undeniably attracted to him. This wouldn’t have happened in her old life. She’d been too busy while employed at BSS, putting in her sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks. It had been hard to get her attention at all under all the excitement and anxiety of her high-pressure job. Probably one of the only reasons Kurt had burrowed into her romantic life was because they spent so much time working together.

But here, mostly alone, in this completely alien environment, not only did Colin appeal to her in a very basic and earthy way, the idea that they were both transients and wouldn’t be in the same town longer than a few more months was a definite upside as far as she was concerned. She was a long, long way from trusting a man again, but she had discovered, since meeting Colin, that she wasn’t all that far from wanting one.

By the time she pulled on some jeans, a bra and a T-shirt, and had combed her hair and applied a little lip gloss, she could already make out the good smells coming from the kitchen. She followed her nose and sat on one of the two stools at the kitchen island. He was busy at the stove and when he glanced over his shoulder at her, she smiled and said, “Do you suppose we could try something very old-fashioned? Like planning ahead?”

“We could try,” he said. “But if that was a rule, I wouldn’t be here now. And you’d hate that. Plates?” he asked.

She pointed to the cupboard above the stove. And then she just watched in fascination while he moved around her kitchen. She liked the way his butt filled out his jeans—his legs were awful long. So were his arms, she noticed. His hands were big, but he was surprisingly graceful. He fried bacon and sausage together, steamed the eggs, warmed the croissants, pulled a package of smoked salmon from his grocery bag along with a jar of capers and a container of cream cheese and put those in the center of the work island. He opened drawers until he found utensils; he folded paper towels for napkins. And right before sliding the eggs and meat onto plates he quickly, and thinly, sliced a red onion onto a small plate. And voilà! He was sitting down across from her.

“Not bad,” she said.

“Not bad? You are cruel! Considering what I had to work with, this is a feast! Picnic-style, but a feast!”

She laughed. “You’re right. Plus it beats the hell out of Froot Loops.”

“Do you really eat those things?”

“I love them,” she said with childlike passion, her mouth full of smoked salmon rolled around some cream cheese and capers. “You forgot the tomatoes.”

“I’m waiting for the Russian Rose,” he replied, and then he winked. “Seriously, a moment of truth, this is all I can cook well—breakfast. I make a mean omelet, too. I can turn a steak or hamburgers on the grill, but the rest? It’s a complete mystery to me.”

“If you’re going to cook one thing then why breakfast?” she asked.

“I love breakfast.”

She put down her fork. “Have you been married?”

“No. Why?”

She picked up her fork and dug into her eggs. “I just had this picture in my head of some sweet wife getting up at 4:00 a.m. to make perfect eggs before sending you off to your helicopter. And I kind of hated that vision.”

“I’ve never found a single woman in all my years of looking who would do that for me, so I did it for myself. And why would you hate that?”

She shrugged. “I always put in long hours. I really wanted a wife.”

He leaned toward her. “Jillian, honey, the whole world wants a wife. But we’re gonna have to make do. Now, what’s on your agenda today?”

“Moving all the seed cups from the porch into the greenhouses! Dan Brady—our friend from the bar—is going to come out later and show us how to install some lights. I won’t use chemical fertilizer on the seedlings, but I’m not above artificial lighting if it helps. I have a little golf cart kind of thing on order with a flatbed in the back—the kind landscapers and gardeners use—and it should be here today or tomorrow. That’ll get me between the gardens and greenhouses and this house. And, if you look closely at the front garden, you’ll see the veggies are coming up! Shoots from the carrots, leeks and scallions—little blossoms from the lettuce. There’s a lot to do.” She scooped up some sausage, egg and croissant and said, “You know, this may be your only talent, but you’re very good at it.”