At least twice as he walks down the driveway, Lance considers turning back.
But as tempted as he is to run back to the hayloft, into Robbie’s arms—his bed—and pretend that there’s no world outside Riverside Ranch, he also knows that isn’t a reality for him.
In reality, he’s made a mess of things, and it’s a mess he has to set right before he and Robbie can possibly have their impossible chance.
So, he puts one foot ahead of the other and doesn’t turn back. Not even when, moments after he reaches the road, he sees a dark car that can only be whatever Niall rented at the airport in Omaha, going far too fast for the conditions, which results in a wild fishtail as he brakes at the sight of Lance.
When the car is stopped, haphazard in the middle of the slick road, Niall throws open the door and steps out cautiously, but his face lights up at the sight of Lance. His square white teeth flash in the steel-grey frame of his always-impeccable beard, and the corners of his eyes crinkle into those deep crow’s feet that caused Lance, early in their acquaintance, to mistake Niall for a happy person.
“Thank God you called,” he says, stirring as though he means to walk toward Lance, but the foot he’s moved slips and he clings to the car door instead, and his smile quickly contorts into a frown. “Well, get in, won’t you? I’m parked in the middle of the road.” As always, his voice is so soft that it shouldn’t carry like it does, but his every quiet word rings in Lance’s ears as clear as a shout.
Lance has had a lot of practice behaving a certain way around Niall, and people like him. Right now, though, clothing himself in the disguise he’s worn so much during his years since leaving home, where he’s a sweet, docile young man grateful for the guidance of someone older and wiser, takes more focus than it used to. He still feels like he’s out of character as he offers a sheepish smile and steps toward the passenger door. Though it hasn’t been even a week since he donned this ruse daily without a thought or a care, now it feels like it’s woven from nettles, prickly and wrong.
“My poor angel,” Niall says, scanning him with a frown as he settles into the passenger seat of the sedan. “What on Earth are you wearing?”
Lance pushes back his hair—an old habit he can’t shake, even though it’s too short now to get in his face. “All of my clothes were in the car. They didn’t let me take anything out of it.” He tries to sound subdued and repentant. “R—my friend loaned me these.”
If Niall notices his slip, and how just the suggestion of speaking Robbie’s name in Niall’s presence makes Lance freeze, he doesn’t show it. He’s probably preoccupied with navigating the road, which he’s not doing with any skill, but he’s going slowly enough that if the worst happens and they careen into the trees, they’re at least unlikely to die. Lance hastily buckles his seatbelt, though, just in case.
“Well, we’ll have to take an inventory and make sure none of the local law enforcement had sticky fingers when they were handling our property.” He glances askance. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Angel?”
Lance is still thinking bemusedly about the suggestion that someone might steal his used, wrinkled clothes. He blinks at Niall. “I’m sure they didn’t take anything.” But then he remembers that he did have a camera and a laptop in his luggage, and frowns. Not because he thinks they were stolen, but because he hates to imagine those expensive electronics subjected to freezing temperatures.
“I’m sure there’s something more important that you mean to say to me,” Niall says, his voice almost a whisper, the timbre that always makes the hair stand up on Lance’s arms. Niall takes excellent care of his hands, and they look like they could belong to a much younger man’s. Right now they’re gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles are white.
Lance swallows. “Thank you for coming all the way here.”
Niall relaxes, but not entirely. “That’s a start. Anything else?”
“Yes. I’m sorry that you had to come.”
“Nonsense, Angel,” Niall says, taking one hand briefly from the steering wheel to reach out and pet Lance’s hair. “My goodness,” he says, with a faint giggle, “but do you look a fright. I have some things you can use at the hotel to clean up.”
The urge to lean away from Niall’s touch is on the edge of irresistible. “Before my hearing? I’m not sure we have time…?”
“Oh, my love, there won’t be any hearing!” Niall scoffs. He puts both of his hands back on the wheel to keep it steady. “Didn’t you trust me when I said I’d take care of all of that?”
They follow a curve in the road, and Lance tries not to hold his breath as the car skates sideways. Niall curses. But then their course straightens out and assumes a slight decline for the rest of the distance to the pavement, where the salted and plowed surface will be much easier to navigate. Lance exhales in relief, then tenses again as he reconsiders Niall’s last words.
“Of course I trust you,” he says carefully, “but I didn’t think you could get it handled so fast.”
“Oh yes. It was no trouble at all. I spoke to the prosecutor on Monday, just before I booked my flight.”
Lance feels a flare of anger; nothing new, but this time, it takes him a few seconds to quell. When he trusts himself to speak, his voice is still tight. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Niall smiles at him with such fond patronization that Lance wants to scream. They hit the pavement, and now that the car isn’t drifting on the ice, Niall takes his right hand off the wheel again, puts it on Lance’s knee, and squeezes.
“Don’t ask silly questions. If I’d told you, you might have gotten stubborn. You can be so dramatic.” He chuckles. “Everyone says I’m insane to put up with your moods, but what we have is so much more special than they realize. I admire your passion, even if it can be vexing when you get carried away.”
Lance forces a smile, but because he isn’t completely sure what it looks like, he aims his stare out the window to be safe. He hopes the averted look can pass as embarrassment or shyness, and that Niall won’t feel the tension that’s filling Lance through the hand on his leg. He doesn’t think Niall will. Niall has had his hands all over Lance when Lance’s body was rigid with discomfort of various kinds, and it’s never seemed to faze him.
“I still don’t understand, though,” Lance says as evenly as he can manage. “No one told me I don’t have to come to court. Should we still go to my hearing, just in case?”
Niall snatches his hand back from Lance’s leg, his voice laced with frustration when he answers, “Haven’t you been listening? I told you it’s taken care of.”
“But, how—?”
“I added your name to the title a few months ago. It’s something Lindsay suggested, for tax reasons. All I had to do was send them the documents and they no longer had a case, you see.”
Lance’s skin is crawling. There have been worse moments than this, he knows. Much worse. But the contrast of how he feels right now, so small and twisted, compared to how he felt at this time yesterday, makes the familiar feeling even harder to bear.
But he bears it anyway. Summoning all of his composure derived from years of practice and grim determination, he swallows and turns from the window to Niall with the most earnest face he can put on, and looks up at him through his lashes, reaching slowly for his hand.
“Thank you, Niall.”
Niall’s stormy expression clears at once, and his benevolent smile is back in place. He takes Lance’s outstretched hand and laces their fingers together.
“You’re welcome, Angel,” he says approvingly, and kisses Lance’s knuckles. His carefully conditioned beard is objectively softer than Robbie’s, and yet it feels like thorns raking Lance’s skin. “Now, we’ll go pick up the car, and then you can follow me back to the hotel, and we’ll have a long talk.” He squeezes Lance’s hand and lets go of it, voice lowering again. “I may have forgiven you, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few things I expect you to learn from this experience.”
“Yes, Niall,” Lance says, with a faint smile that he hopes looks abashed instead of nauseated. He should be relieved that everything has been dealt with, but he can’t help feeling the strange depression of an anticlimax, instead. He’d thought he would untangle the mess Niall had gotten him into through his wits and ingenuity; instead, Niall made it go away as easily as he created it.
Or did he? Niall has a bad habit of overestimating his own understanding of a situation—a symptom of his arrogance. Lance worries the inside of his lip, which is a mostly invisible tic when he’s nervous, and then swallows and dares to ask, “Did they give you any papers that I should have? About the case being dismissed?”
He braces himself for Niall’s temper, but just gets another pat on the knee, and then Niall points to the dashboard, where a yellow mailing envelope rests. Lance doesn’t let himself snatch it; he takes it calmly, shooting Niall a sidelong, rueful smile, and shakes out the contents into his lap.
The life-changing declaration is just one page of straightforward black-and-white with the prosecutor’s and judge’s signatures at the bottom. Lance looks at it for a long time. A part of him wants to give Niall a piece of his mind, jump out of the car, and walk the six-or-so miles back to Robbie’s driveway. But he still needs the car. Not because he cares about the car at all, though it’ll be convenient to have. But because he desperately needs a particular item from his luggage in the trunk.
The police station is so nondescript, they circle the block once before they see the sign on the low brick building that confirms that they’re in the right place. There’s a small, unfurnished vestibule inside, and a woman behind a plate glass window wearing red acrylic glasses. She looks up from a cell phone in a fuzzy yellow case, and then leans in to speak into a slim microphone mounted in front of her face. “Can I help you?” Her voice comes out distorted and from the wrong direction—from a cheap speaker somewhere behind Lance. He ignores the urge to look reflexively in that direction and smiles at her, about to approach her when Niall does, instead.
“We’re here to pick up a vehicle in your impound,” he explains with one of his smiles, but it doesn’t seem to have its usual effect on the woman. She pushes up her glasses and blinks at him.
“Name?”
“Lance Taylor.”
Something registers briefly in the woman’s face, and she stares at Lance over Niall’s shoulder. She must know who Lance is. For a moment, he thinks her frown has something to do with his past or his father, even though he has no idea who she is.
But then she says, flatly, “Mr. Taylor, if you could step up here?” and he realizes that she was just discomfited by Niall behaving like Lance’s personal agent—and, well, that makes two of them. He edges past Niall to the window and gives her a strained smile.
“I.D.,” she says, stretching out each letter into its own word, eye dee, “please.” To Lance’s relief, she’s back to being businesslike. He fishes his wallet out of Johnny’s pocket and shows her his driver’s license.
Then, she stamps a few things and slides a sheet of paper to him through a tiny, plastic flap that’s almost invisible between the bottom of the plate glass window and the top of the shallow, chipped counter.
“That’s an inventory of everything we found in the vehicle. If you agree with the list, sign at the bottom. If you believe there is something missing from the list, I’ll give you another form to fill out to register the dispute.”
Lance looks at the list, skimming. Two parcels of luggage, and that’s all he remembers. He has no idea if there were, in fact, twelve socks and two pairs of shoes, et cetera, inside. Then, at the bottom of the column listing clothing, he sees it—“one (1) handkerchief, flowered”—and his shoulders sag in relief, to a degree he wasn’t fully anticipating.
“It looks fine,” he murmurs, and signs his name at the bottom. She nods and picks up a landline phone to call someone to unlock the gates.
Niall, predictably surly after the uncomfortable moment, isn’t smiling when Lance turns to him. This will be delicate, Lance thinks, as he switches to worrying his lip from the outside and gives Niall an apologetic smile.
“I need to go by and see my dad,” he says in a low voice. “He’s really sick. He’s in hospice care now.”
Niall’s face is completely blank, but his soft voice sounds properly apologetic. “Oh, dear. I didn’t realize.”
Lance nods. “He’s in a care home across town. I don’t…if you don’t mind, I’m really not sure I want you to see him.” He lowers his voice, as though ashamed. It’s surprisingly easy to act ashamed of himself; he has a store of that feeling, and it’s close to the surface, even if its origin has nothing to do with worrying what Niall will think of him. “Maybe you can go back to your hotel, and I’ll meet you there, after. It’s the Holiday Inn, right?” There are only two options in Dell, and Lance already knows Niall would never choose the Midnight Motel.
Lance tries not to hold his breath while Niall considers. Niall’s face is completely still, but his eyes, an ordinary medium-brown, somehow betray the volume of his thoughts. Lance knows how Niall feels about being around elderly people, and Lance has framed it so he doesn’t even have to betray a principle by not going with Lance for emotional support. The plan should be air-tight.
Still, he’s inordinately relieved when Niall nods slowly, his smile simpering. “I’ll text you my room number.” He makes a move toward Lance, and Lance braces himself for an embrace or a kiss. But then Niall’s look slides toward the woman watching them steadily from behind the plate glass, her phone apparently forgotten for the moment, and he aborts the movement. “I’ll see you soon,” he adds—very, very quietly.