AFTER OWEN and Bailey left, the silence was deafening. Just as Mark opened his mouth to speak, they both heard a cry from the bedroom. Mark wheeled himself out, but before Lucas could dredge up the courage to speak, Mark was back with Mia.
“Where’s the diaper bag?” Mark said hesitantly and wrinkled his nose a little. Lucas was tempted to laugh, but he didn’t.
“Give her here.” It was a demand, and Lucas couldn’t have done shit if Mark wanted to make it difficult, but he silently wheeled her closer and Lucas picked her up. He couldn’t help the smile as the smell hit him. “I’m not surprised you handed her over,” he muttered, but Mark didn’t reply, just got the diaper bag and brought it over. Lucas needed to apologize. He needed to say a lot more than that, but he didn’t know where to start. It was like being thrown into a minefield. One wrong step….
Lucas pushed himself up a bit higher and ignored the stab at his side. It wasn’t as bad as he’d been expecting. “Come on, monster,” he said. “Let’s make you a little more human, huh?” He laid her on her back and peeled down the small tracksuit bottoms she had on. His fingers remembered what to do, but even he wanted to gag when he saw what was in her diaper.
“Good God,” Mark said, gagging a little and backing away quickly.
Lucas silently agreed. He lifted her legs free. “Pass me a wipe.”
“I don’t think one’s going to be enough.”
Lucas’s lips twitched until he remembered what they should really be saying, and he quickly used two or three to get Mia as clean as possible. Then he taped the whole mess together and silently handed it over to Mark.
Mark glared at Lucas, as if he was passing him explosives. He met Lucas’s eyes for a second but then lowered them and took the diaper, wheeled into the kitchen, and dropped it in the trash. “She really needs a bath,” Lucas said, but he put on another diaper, not wanting to risk another bomb going off when they weren’t looking. He scooted her up to sit against him and anchored her with his arm. Where is Owen? They needed a buffer, and while he knew they had to talk, he didn’t know where to start.
Talk? He needed to grovel. He needed to beg his brother’s forgiveness.
The door opened, and Lucas automatically shielded Mia from the icy blast. Bailey ran in, and Mark went to get the dog some breakfast.
“B-bee,” Mia cooed delightedly and waved her arms and legs.
Owen unwrapped himself from his many layers. “It isn’t snowing at the moment, but it looks like it’s going to.”
Mark came back in from the bathroom holding a bottle of shampoo. “This is unscented.” He gestured to the sink, and Owen nodded, walking over to Mia.
“The diaper was pure evil, but we managed to vanquish the horror,” Lucas said, looking at his brother all the time.
Owen smiled and picked her up. “Were you a horror?”
“I was thinking of declaring a state of emergency,” Mark said. “Maybe breaking out the nuclear shelter and containment suits.”
Lucas chuckled inanely. Then he fell silent. So did Mark. He wanted to say so much, and he didn’t know where to start. There could definitely be no more shouting in front of Mia. It was just plain wrong. She’d had enough upset already in her seven months, and he wouldn’t be responsible for any more. “I don’t know what to say.”
Mark shrugged. “If I had been the big brother you needed when Dad died, none of this would have happened. Hell, when Mom died, even.”
Silence. Regret. “It wasn’t your fault.” And he wanted to scream, to cry, to beg. “I should have known better,” Lucas admitted. And he should have.
“Why?” Mark said. “She was your wife. Of course you trusted her.” Mark was silent for a moment. “And I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I left you, didn’t I?”
Lucas glanced down. He hadn’t understood it at the time. His big brother, who had always been there for him, was suddenly a stranger. “Why did she lie?”
Mark sighed. “About you not being Stevie’s dad? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was just angry and hurt. Maybe she regretted it as soon as she left, but because of what happened, she never got a chance to say she was sorry. That it wasn’t true. We all have things we regret. We all have things we say in the heat of the moment that we wish we could take back.” Then he wheeled himself into the kitchen to close the subject. Lucas watched while Owen bathed Mia. To be honest, Owen was almost as wet as Mia was by the time he’d finished, and watching the little minx get clean reminded him he needed to do the same. He was sweaty and needed to pee. He probably even still had dried blood on his back and wondered if he smelled half as bad as Mia had.
Mark made some oatmeal and cut up a few small pieces of banana for her. Then he wheeled himself up to the table with her breakfast. “How about I feed the monster and you two can take the bathroom?”
Lucas met his gaze. How had he known? But then, he supposed it wasn’t rocket science.
“You can’t get the dressing wet,” he warned. “So no shower. I’ll redo it when you come out.” And with that, he held out his arms for Mia. Bailey scooched under the table, obviously waiting for any breakfast that might fall in his direction.
“I doubt you’re gonna want oatmeal, Bailey,” Lucas observed dryly, and Owen shot him a grin. He returned the shared humor, remembering the first time Mia had thrown vegetables at the dog.
Owen walked over to him. “What can I do to help?”
The couch was low, and Lucas had no idea how the hell he’d gotten out of it yesterday. It took both of them and a lot of silent curse words before he was on his feet, but he made it and immediately felt better.
Mark only offered one suggestion. “No getting it wet.” Lucas bit down the first answer he came up with, and just nodded. He made it to the bathroom slowly, with Owen’s help.
“How about you pee while you are still vertical?”
Lucas nodded, and even though Owen hovered, he managed it himself. He lowered himself gingerly onto the stool by the sink, and Owen ran some water. He rubbed a hand ruefully over his jaw and wished he had the energy for a shave, but the small effort of getting in here had completely wiped him out.
“I can do it later for you,” Owen said, obviously noticing his movement. “But how about we just get you freshened up?”
“I can probably manage,” Lucas lied.
Owen just looked at him. “You could,” he agreed, “but I’m worried you’ll pull your wound open. Besides, there’s blood on your back. You couldn’t reach it.”
He was probably saying that so Lucas could save face. And to be honest, Lucas felt like keeling over. He regretted coming in here in the first place. He glanced at Owen. “You’d make a good nurse. You’re very diplomatic, and instead of telling me what a stubborn bastard I am, you’re trying to make me feel better.”
Owen grinned. “If we agree you’re a stubborn bastard, are you going to stay still and let me do what I want?”
Lucas clamped his lips tightly closed. The sudden urge to…. What? Join in? Tease? The urge to ask Owen exactly what he had in mind rode him hard, but that sort of comment was going in a direction he couldn’t think about now.
So Lucas closed his eyes and remained silent while Owen very gently peeled the T-shirt off him that Mark must have given him at some point. Because it wasn’t his. And as each slight movement pulled at his side, he tried to think about anything else….
“That was amazing!” Niall was waiting and high-fived him as he left the locker room. Lucas had been the last out. The coach had just wanted to check that his shoulder was okay. One more game and they were in the playoffs. It was the first time their school had gotten this far since Lucas had started there, and the coach was obsessed that they remain injury-free. At least until the end of the semester. Lucas chuckled and returned Niall’s enthusiasm.
“Fag.” A group of seniors pushed past them, and Lucas heard the coughed word as they walked by. Lucas stiffened and took a step after them, but Niall stopped him, putting a hand on his arm.
“It doesn’t matter, Lucas.”
“Yeah it does,” Lucas objected. “They can’t say shit like that.”
Niall gazed at him, the way he often did. “It isn’t a lie.”
Lucas frowned. “It doesn’t matter.”
Then he noticed the faint bruise on the side of Niall’s face. Before he could think about it, he lifted his hand to Niall’s cheek. Niall jerked back, and Lucas dropped his hand. “Sorry, did I hurt you?” He wouldn’t hurt Niall for the world.
Niall swallowed. “No, but you can’t do that here.”
He’d meant touching his face. Lucas looked around. “There’s no one here.”
“You just can’t do that,” Niall muttered.
Lucas studied his friend. He knew where the bruise had come from, and he’d tried to convince Niall to tell someone. But somehow, this didn’t seem to be about that.
“Do you want to come home for dinner?”
Niall sighed. “I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong?” He knew there was something. “There’ll be plenty of food.” And Lucas knew his dad wouldn’t mind. Niall being there would save them both from the one-word conversations that were all they seemed to have now that Mom was gone.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Niall said.
“Why?” Lucas asked, feeling completely out of his depth.
“Self-preservation,” Niall said bluntly.
All this time, Lucas had thought Niall had been worried about angering his dad. It hadn’t taken much to set him off. But for the first time, Lucas wondered if Niall had meant something else, meant someone else. Maybe that Niall’s feelings for him were stronger than his own, or maybe not stronger, but just different.
“Look up.”
Lucas blinked himself back to the present. He lifted his chin carefully, and Owen gently washed his face and neck. Then he patted that part dry and worked his way down Lucas’s chest and over his back. He dropped the cloth into the water, and Lucas opened heavy eyelids. It had felt so good.
The silence seemed to go on for a couple of beats too long. “Do you want me to leave you to do the rest?” Owen asked. Lucas glanced up at him. He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t know. Owen must have taken his silence as agreement because he turned and took a step toward the door.
“Wait,” Lucas blurted out without even realizing it. “Please.”
Owen turned back, but he didn’t say anything.
“I started dating Tory in college. I never had a girlfriend at school. I’d hooked up a few times but nothing serious. Niall was the closest I got to having someone in my life.”
Owen leaned back on the door. “As a brother? Or something else?”
“Something else,” Lucas admitted. Owen didn’t respond. Lucas tried to rearrange his thoughts, to slot Niall into the place in his life where he should have been in the beginning. “My mom always called me a homebody. All I ever wanted to do was stay around here. I enjoy living in Summerton. I like that everyone knows everyone else. I like not worrying about locking my doors or ever having to wait for an invitation before I visit someone.”
Owen nodded, but he still didn’t speak.
“Niall died, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” Owen’s voice was very quiet. Gentle.
“I think….” Lucas swallowed. “I think if he hadn’t, we would have ended up together.”
“You loved him?”
Lucas nodded. “I was very immature. Things in my world were black and white. I dated some girls because it seemed that was what you did, and I never questioned it. I was too slow for Niall.” In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realized Niall had wanted more from him, as well. “Mom’s death threw everything out of whack. At sixteen, instead of experimenting with my sexuality, I was trying to get my security back. And that meant what I had been brought up with—a mom and a dad. A girl and a boy. I think Niall knew that.”
“Tell me about Tory,” Owen said. It seemed like an odd request, but Lucas couldn’t help the smile that curved his lips.
“She was a force of nature. She sang. She was in the drama club at college.” He bit his lip. “She wanted to move to one of the big cities, like Hollywood,” he added ruefully. “But she got pregnant a month before we graduated, so we got married.”
“Did you want to get married?” Owen asked.
Lucas nodded. It had seemed perfect to him. “Her mom and dad were very strict Catholics, and she was close to them. An abortion would have been out of the question.” He shrugged. “So we got married quickly and quietly. I got left the house and became a probie in Loveland.”
Owen frowned. “But I thought Stevie—”
“No, she wasn’t carrying Stevie. She lost this baby at five months. She blamed herself because she had been away for the weekend at a bachelorette party. She hadn’t been drinking or doing anything that might hurt the child, though. We found out later the baby had a heart defect. It had been a little boy, but he had died possibly up to ten hours before she had started bleeding. She’d resented the baby at first. Felt trapped. I even promised to move to California, if that was what she wanted, once I was out of probation.” Lucas sighed. “She ended up on antidepressants. We struggled for a long time when she didn’t seem interested in anything. We fought over insane things, and she even moved back with her parents for a short while. Then all of a sudden, she got a job.”
“Which was probably a good thing?”
“It was great. She worked for one of the local papers on the weekend section—family stuff, entertainment.” He frowned. “I think they were even talking about a dating app. It was like having the Tory I fell in love with back.” And he smiled. He had loved her. Whatever their circumstances, he had forgotten all the good times they had. It was easy to forget, and it shouldn’t have been. “Then she told me she was pregnant with Stevie, and she came back home.” He swallowed.
“And you had no inkling anything was wrong?”
Lucas shook his head. “We tended to fight over ridiculous things that I thought most couples did. I thought we were just going through a bad patch. She resented me working overtime, and I said she didn’t complain at the extra cash it brought in.”
And he didn’t care if she had been seeing someone else now, or if it had been bitterness that had made her lie. She had been forced into a life she hadn’t wanted. And everyone said things in the heat of anger. That the other man hadn’t been Mark was all that really mattered. It was time to let it go. “I made so many mistakes. First with Niall—”
Lucas’s throat closed. It had been there, right in front of him, all the time. Exactly the future he had always wanted. Niall must have thought he wasn’t interested. “He must have gotten so frustrated, thinking I didn’t care.”
He opened his eyes at the touch on his arm, not having realized he had closed them. Owen was kneeling in front of him, both of his hands wrapped around Lucas’s wrists. “He knew,” Owen said implacably. “But he also knew you weren’t ready. He would have waited for you.”
“How do you know?” Lucas blinked against the sting in his eyes.
Owen gazed up at Lucas. “Because I would have.” Then, very slowly, very carefully, so Lucas knew exactly what was going to happen before it did, Owen’s lips gently brushed his own. For a second, they were even breathing the same air. Owen moved back, letting go of Lucas’s wrists, but Lucas’s hand caught his arm.
“Don’t go.”
Owen waited. Lucas was suddenly scared.
“You should be sending me far away.”
Lucas was shaking his head before Owen had finished that sentence. “If this situation was normal, I’d ask you out.” Owen smiled, and Lucas caught sight of a tiny dimple just to the left of his lips. He didn’t know how he had missed it before.
“You mean, when we’re not running for our lives?”
Lucas’s hand slid to Owen’s chin, and he tilted it up a little. With the same deliberate slowness, he lowered his head, and the touch of lips was just as good as a second ago, but this time, he caught the faintest moan from Owen, and the noise settled somewhere in his gut. “I could stay here forever.”
Owen’s smile was so gentle.
“Are you going to say anything?” But what was he expecting? A declaration?
Owen tilted his head, as if considering the question. “I’m not Niall,” he said eventually.
“Meaning?” But Lucas thought he knew.
“Just make sure you’re kissing me. Not a dream. Not an expectation, or worse, trying to absolve a regret.”
Lucas smiled lazily. “I think I know the difference, but to be absolutely certain, I’m thinking we might need to do it again.” Lucas caught the widening of the pupils he was gazing at. The reaction. And his eyes slid lower to watch Owen’s tongue slide along the edge of his lower lip before he tugged it with his teeth.
“Maybe we ought to try another one. Just to be sure,” Owen agreed. The last word was almost breathed from lips that were nearly touching his, and he slid his fingers over Owen’s skin and around to the nape of his neck, bringing him closer.
Pain jabbed at his side, and he winced a little.
Owen noticed and drew back, cupping Lucas’s jaw. “Let me finish helping you clean up.” Owen eased a little farther back, and Lucas dropped his hand. The feeling of loss was immediate.
“You might have to do it for me,” Lucas said, more daring than he imagined. “I don’t think I’m strong enough.”
“What if I’m not either?” And Lucas knew, as Owen met his eyes, that they were talking about two different things.
“I would never hurt you.” He knew that.
Owen smiled a little. “No, you would never mean to. That’s completely different.”
“We keep saying we’re friends, but then we reach this point.” They pulled back—it was like a dance.
“And there’s not just me.”
Lucas smiled. “Yeah, instant family. We even got a dog.” But somehow, that must have been the wrong thing to say because Owen jerked back. Lucas snagged his wrist before he got too far away.
“What did I say?”
Owen hesitated. “We’re not exactly in a normal situation.”
“And you’re worried I’m just replacing one family with another, as if they’re interchangeable.” Lucas dropped his hand.
“A little bit,” Owen replied honestly.
And somehow Owen’s honesty calmed Lucas. He could cope, if he knew what he was fighting.
“If it was about that, I could have already found it. You wouldn’t believe how many women are in love with the idea of having their own fireman.”
“Like badge-bunnies?” Owen crinkled his eyes, but Lucas didn’t know if it was in humor or disgust.
Lucas decided to go with humor. “Yeah. Mirabelle, who occasionally works in the office, has been known to arrange her schedule to align with mine.”
Owen’s eyebrows rose. “And who’s Mirabelle?”
Lucas chuckled and decided to come clean. “She’s the sixty-four-year-old grandmother of one of our probies. She brings in the best chicken parm you’ve ever had in your entire life.”
Owen scoffed. “And why does she work when you’re there?”
“Because her grandson is in my crew. She fell out with her son a long time ago, and it’s the only way she gets to see Ricky.”
“I wish my grandma was still alive, but she died when I was around ten,” Owen said wistfully.
Lucas edged a little nearer and took Owen’s hand, lifting it to his lips and kissing the palm. Owen stilled, but then he pulled his hand away and Lucas let it go.
For now.
He glanced down. “I can wash myself, but I can’t get these pants down on my own.”
Owen seemed relieved at the change of subject. “Just tilt and I’ll ease them off.” Owen worked quickly and efficiently, and Lucas was down to his boxers in seconds. He pressed his lips closed at the stab of pain when he moved too fast. Owen frowned and pulled the waistband away so he could see the wound. Fresh blood stained the white padding. Lucas breathed through his nose.
Owen shook his head, and without a word, he had Lucas bathed in no time. And Lucas was too sore to appreciate any of it. A wave of exhaustion rolled over him and he fell silent, just trying to do what Owen asked. He honestly wasn’t sure how he made it back to the couch and had a second to appreciate the clean sheet that had been draped over it before he sank down and closed his eyes.
He knew it was Mark who changed his dressing shortly afterward, but if he pretended to be asleep, he wouldn’t have to have the conversation he dreaded, but knew was coming. Within minutes, he didn’t have to pretend anymore.