Speechless (13 page)

You will.

Eva let go of her mental berating of herself, allowed the
soul-to-soul embrace Stone offered and relaxed into the safety he offered. A
moment later she was asleep.

Stone lay awake and watched Eva sleeping, wishing he could
offer her the normalcy she wanted, even needed. But the chances of that were
slim—even if Smith and Cronen were convicted and put away for life, they would
still have a long reach outside of prison, through old connections and new ones.
He had to backpedal, prepare himself for the day she decided that she didn’t
love him enough for a life of constant alertness and frequent relocations. He
slowly pulled his mental and physical arms back, loosening his holds on her.
She muttered and shifted in her sleep, then settled again and Stone turned onto
his side, his back to her and tried to sleep.

He had no illusions that he really could back off any more
than he’d been able to before, when the stakes had seemed so much higher. If he
hadn’t been able to stay away from her when their lives were at risk, what made
him think he could do it when it was his heart he had to worry about?

He woke early, despite the excitement of the night before.
He’d slept in his jeans and he padded quietly downstairs to retrieve the rest
of his clothes. David, in Stone’s place on the couch, muttered a morning
greeting as Stone bent to pick up his bag. Stone answered with a quiet “good
morning” and turned to go back up to the bedroom.

David’s voice, still gruff from sleep, stopped him at the
bottom of the stairs.

“Tell me the truth, Jacob. Why are you here and who is she
really?”

Stone turned around to see his brother sitting up and
looking over the back of the couch at him. “I’m here because certain people
want me dead and this is the last place they’ll look for me. Eva is a botany
professor from Boston who fell into the middle of this by pure chance.”

“Is she really your girlfriend?”

Stone nodded, then realized that in the dimness, David might
not have seen the motion. “Girlfriend. Lover. The only woman who’s ever made me
feel anything good.” He took a few steps back toward the couch, knowing David
wasn’t finished grilling him. He’d done the same thing when they were boys. His
older brother was always the good son, trying to keep the younger Jacob from
hurting anyone through his own lack of caring.

“Are you the good guy or the bad guy?” David asked.

It was a question from their childhood, the question their
mother always told them to ask themselves when deciding whether to do
something. “Would you be the good guy or the bad guy?” Stone sat down in an
armchair, leaned forward and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know anymore,
David. Even when I think I’m being the good guy people get hurt.”

“Like Eva?” David sat very still and Stone was grateful he
didn’t try to make eye contact. If his brother put on that righteous expression
he remembered, he didn’t think he could stay in the room.

“Among others.”

“At least you care now. You never used to care whether you
were the good guy or the bad guy. What about the people who are looking for
you? Are they good guys or bad guys?”

“Definitely bad guys.”

“That’s all I need to know, then. If they show up here, you
can count on me, Jacob. I might not be able to handle a pistol like you, but
I’m still a good shot with a rifle.”

Stone looked up and the two men locked gazes, brothers again
after decades of estrangement. Stone felt more of that pain that had first
surfaced when he’d given in to his attraction for Eva, the pain that came with
exercising long-unused emotions. “Thank you, David. I didn’t know what kind of
reception I would get here, but never in my most optimistic moments did I dare
to hope for your support.”

“I never expected to offer it. There’s something different
about you—I saw it last night in how you were with Eva. You’ve never been so
attentive to anyone as you are to her.”

“She’s the difference.”

David laughed long and hard. It burst out of him in a flood
of mirth. Stone just stared at his brother, eyebrows arched, bewildered.
Finally David’s laughter trailed off into chuckles.

“Sorry, little brother. It’s just that you’ve always been so
determined to use and manipulate women, to never let them affect you. And here
you are more content than I’ve ever seen you, making yourself vulnerable
because of a woman. It’s the perfect irony for your life.”

“I don’t see the humor in it,” Stone said, but he felt a
smile stretch his mouth anyway. He picked up his bag again and resumed his
course upstairs to get dressed. “I’ll be down in a few minutes. We can get a
head start on the chores.”

David chuckled again and shook his head. “Who are you and
what have you done with my brother?” he asked, then added, “Not that I mind,
you understand.”

* * * * *

Stone was mildly surprised to find that he still knew how to
drive a tractor, but then it wasn’t so different from some of the cars he’d
driven in places like Eastern Europe and Africa. Working together, he and David
managed to get fresh hay out to the cattle before David had to get ready for
school. They met their mother coming back from the chicken coop with a bowlful
of fresh eggs.

“Hurry and wash up, boys. I’ll have breakfast ready soon.”

“What’re ya fixin’, Ma?” David asked, mimicking himself as a
boy.

“Pancakes, bacon and eggs. Get going, you, or your father
will clean your plate before you get to the table.” Their mother fell into the
old pattern as easily as David had. Stone wondered if she even realized it. He
and David grinned at each other and David jogged off to the house for a shower
before breakfast.

Eva waited for him in the kitchen, where she was helping
with breakfast by measuring and sifting the dry ingredients for the pancakes.
Good
morning,
she said, gifting him with a smile. He could tell from the angle
of her head and the expectation in her eyes that she wanted a kiss.

“Morning.” He held up his hands, dirty from the farm work.
“Let me wash up, all right?”

Her face lost some of its brightness at his words, at his
distance.
Don’t do this to me again, Stone. You said it was okay to think
about you this time.

I know. And please think about me, Love
. Clearly his
plan to pull back from her was not going to work. He’d conceived it as a way to
save himself hurt, but he could see now that it would backfire. It would hurt
her and make her even less likely to want to stay with him—both of which hurt
him. This was why he’d stopped up his emotions so long ago—cliché as it was,
they hurt.
We’ll find time to talk after breakfast, all right?

Her lips twitched sideways and Stone knew she didn’t want to
wait. She cracked a couple of the eggs his mother had collected into a bowl and
went after them with a whisk.

Eva, I’ve been doing farm chores for the last hour and a
half. I’m filthy. My entire family is standing around staring at us. I need to
be alone with you for this and I want to be able to touch you
.

After a couple of silent seconds, except for the regular
beating of the whisk against the side of the bowl, Eva nodded.

Thank you
.

By the time Stone and David got back to the kitchen, Eva was
flipping the last of the pancakes on the griddle and their mother was serving
up scrambled eggs. A plate heaped with bacon already sat in the middle of the
table. Stone’s mother beamed.

“All we need is to have Lucy here,” she said, “and we’d have
the whole family together. David, see if she wants to come to dinner tonight.”

“She always comes to dinner on Friday night, Mom, except
tonight. Don’t forget it’s homecoming. Y’all are coming in for the big game,
right?” David said, helping himself to a stack of pancakes from the plate Eva
had filled and slathering them with butter and syrup.

“Sounds good to me,” Stone’s father said. “Nathan will be
there—his boy is on the team this year—and I wanted to talk to him about a
bull. Football game’s a good place to do it.”

Stone smiled to himself. His father had always loved high
school football, but he’d always felt a need to find some other reason to go,
someone to see usually. Well, half the business in the county got done at the
Friday night football games.

Stone nodded his agreement. “Sounds like fun to me. Eva?”

She nodded and smiled, but he knew the smile was for show,
for his family’s benefit. Her real mood was still troubled and anxious.

“We’ll eat dinner at the game, then.” His mother took the
syrup bottle out of David’s hand. “Save some for the rest of the family, dear.”

The syrup, too, was familiar from Stone’s childhood. He’d
forgotten about his brother’s sweet tooth, but seeing it in action again made
Stone feel almost as if he’d never left. He studied his family over breakfast,
listened to the familiar rhythms of their speech. His father was still silent
most of the time, letting mother and son banter. Stone supposed he took after
the older man in that way, preferring to say too little rather than risk saying
too much. He’d learned to shut off his emotions from his father, as well. He
could not remember a single time John had told his sons he loved them or was
proud of them or even that he was angry with them. He’d punished them when
they’d done something wrong, like the time he’d broken into the high school to
steal the report a teacher had filed accusing him of harassing a girl in the
gym. He’d wanted the report because the accusation was false. If the report
should never have been written in the first place, then stealing it wasn’t
wrong, in his teenaged mind. No one else had seen it that way. He hadn’t been
able to sit down for a week after that particular incident.

His father was gray and less of the big strapping farmer
Stone remembered. His mental images of his family had been frozen when he’d
left home. His father shuffled a little now and his mother’s shoulders were
more bent than in that frozen image of her, her hair more gray than brown.

David hadn’t changed quite as much, matured certainly and
filled out a little bit from his teenage years, but he was still too skinny for
his height. Maybe marriage would change that. He apparently still had a taste
for poker, based on what he said the night before. Stone wondered what Lucy was
like, if she was a traditional type or more modern than the girls Stone had
found so unaffecting when he was a boy. He didn’t remember a girl from their
school days named Lucy. Maybe she was a newcomer. He supposed he would find out
tonight.

David checked his watch, grabbed a final slice of bacon and
rose, still eating it, thus ending breakfast with his dash out the door and
“See you tonight!” called from the doorway.

“Jacob, I want your help fixing some loose boards in the
barn this morning. Since you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful,”
his father said.

“I had plans to spend the morning with Eva, Dad. We have
some things we need to discuss.” Stone felt Eva’s eyes on him, watching to see
if he would accept this easy out from the promised conversation.

“Help your father, Jacob,” his mother put in, as she began
clearing the table. “You’ve had who knows how much time with Eva recently. How
much time have you spent with your family?”

He couldn’t argue her point. He turned to Eva. “I’m sorry.
How about we pack a lunch and take a short hike? There’s a great place for a
picnic not too far away.”

Eva nodded.
All right.
She smiled.
Mothers can be
hard to resist.

* * * * *

Not sure what to do with herself while Stone was out in the
barn with his father, Eva moved to help Marie clean up from breakfast. The
other woman chatted happily about people Eva didn’t know. There was Dorothy,
whose daughter “got herself into trouble” with a man she met on the internet
and Lois, who was having health problems. Marie had taken her some soup earlier
in the week and “that Lois just talked and talked and talked,” until Marie was
driving home in the dark.

Eva wasn’t sure whether to take the story about the pregnant
daughter as a cautionary tale, a hint at Marie’s disapproval of Eva and Stone’s
sleeping arrangements. If Marie had gone on with stories in a similar vein, she
would have known for certain. This was one of those rare times when Eva blessed
her lack of voice. It kept her from having to come up with an appropriate
response. She could just make sympathetic faces and let Marie ramble. Eva took
the post of primary dishwasher, letting Marie dry and put things away. She
found herself zoning out of the one-sided conversation more often than she
cared to admit, her mind occupied by whatever was going on with Stone this
morning. He had not seemed overly pleased at the escape his father had provided
and the offered picnic reassured her that they would still manage to talk. The
name “Jacob” in one of Marie’s stories caught her attention and she tried to
catch the thread of the tale.

“He always swore he never did anything to that girl, that
the teacher had only written the report because she didn’t like him. I could
never decide who to believe.”

Eva gave her a questioning look as she reached for a frying
pan. She wanted to ask what the teacher had said Stone had done, wanted to know
about the girl, but with wet, sudsy hands, she couldn’t write her question.

“Did I believe my son, who got into trouble on a regular
basis? Or did I believe the teacher, who’s not supposed to accuse kids of
things just because she doesn’t like them? One thing about my boy Jacob—I
suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Marie said, which Eva interpreted as
“pay close attention and take warning”. The older woman went on.

“He never actually liked any girl—not that he ever mentioned
to me. He went out with them, I suppose he parked and necked and did all the
things teenage boys do with girls, he used them for the social status having a
girlfriend gave him, but he knew better than to do anything a girl didn’t want
to do. He left a trail of broken hearts through that school. So if he kissed
that girl, it was because she wanted to be kissed.”