Over the Line (31 page)

"Nice car." She walked up beside the hood. "Great color," she added, running her hand along the metallic silver enamel.

"Nineteen sixty-five Mustang. A classic." He'd been surprised as hell when he'd told No about it and found out his former squad leader had one, too. Great minds and all that.

"Yours?"

He straightened, grabbed a grease rag, and wiped his hands. "And my brother's."

She was quiet as he reached up and carefully closed the hood.

"Your mom told me." Her voice was so soft, he figured she knew that she was treading on some very thin ice. "About Jeremy. How ... how he died. It must have been horrible. For all of you."

Yeah. It had been horrible. One day he'd had a big brother. The next day he didn't. Jeremy had been driving a friend's car—because the friend had been too drunk to drive.

Evidently Jeremy had been too drunk, too. He'd run off the road and headlong into a culvert on the way home from a kegger.

"Yeah. It was bad."

"How old were you when it happened?"

He glanced at her standing there. Looking small and concerned and too much like someone he wanted to confide in.

"Fifteen." Folding his arms over his chest, he settled his hip on the Mustang's fender, crossed his ankles, and stared at his boot tips. "I begged him to let me go to that party with him. But I was just a freshman. The party was for seniors. Otherwise I'd have been in that car with him."

"I told your dad. .. you know. What you told me. That you weren't drinking anymore," she said, after a long silence.

And there it was. The bone of contention between him and his father. At least one of the bones.

"That must have been a hard sell." He pushed away from the fender, opened the passenger door, and motioned for her to get in. "Check it out."

She eased into the passenger seat and he shut the door, aware of her brown eyes watching him as he walked around to the driver's side and settled in behind the wheel.

"He was relieved," she said, turning to him, the white tucked upholstery creaking when she did. "That's all. He was just relieved."

"Yeah. Well, I gave them fits all through high school. Both him and Mom were afraid I'd end up like Jeremy."

And there'd been many times when he'd thought the same thing. God, he'd been stupid. And young. So damn young. He didn't feel young anymore.

"What was he like? Was he a good big brother?"

Jase didn't think he wanted to talk about this. But he didn't not want to talk about it, either. And the fact of the matter was, no one had ever asked him.

"He was ..." He stopped, shook his head. "He was something. Great athlete. Great friend. The chicks—man, the chicks went crazy for him. Especially after he got this car."

He ran his hand along the smooth curve of the steering wheel. "I had a real case of hero worship. Wanted to be just like him when I grew up."

"And when he died, you weren't so sure you wanted to grow up," she said with the wisdom of someone who shouldn't know him nearly this well.

He turned his head. Looked at her under the light cast from a bare bulb hanging from a rafter. At that soft, silky hair, at that face he figured he'd see into the afterlife, at those eyes that had misted over. Tears. She was near tears for him.

He looked away because, damn, it would be easy to sink into all that sweet concern. Too easy to pull her into his arms and hold on to this woman who was far too intuitive, and far too tuned in to who he was.

How in the hell had that happened? And why would she even go to the trouble of figuring it out? It wasn't like she didn't have her own troubles to deal with. More trouble than she knew. He wasn't going to lay Dallas's news on her tonight, though. She needed a break.

"Maybe things won't be... you know," she said, breaking into his thoughts, "so tense between you and your dad now that he doesn't have to worry about you so much."

Way too intuitive,
Jase thought again. And suddenly he was just blurting it out.

"My father and I have what shrinks would probably call a bit of a dysfunctional relationship." He wrapped his hands around the wheel and gripped it tight. "He keeps thinking I'm going to fulfill his expectations and I keep making certain that I let him down. It's kind of an unspoken rule between us. He has hopes—I kill them."

"He loves you."

Jase closed his eyes, let his head drop back to the headrest. "I know. And I can be a real prick sometimes. It's just... I'm not Jeremy."

"I highly doubt that he wants you to be."

That much was true. "No. He'd never put that on me. He just wants me to take over the farm someday. That was the plan—with Jeremy. He was going to carry on the tradition. So that leaves me."

"Not wanting to fill that slot," she concluded accurately.

He nodded. "Pretty much sums it up, yeah."

"How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Baghdad, huh?"

He snorted. "More like, I'm not going to live and die on eight hundred acres of Iowa loam when I can see places like Baghdad. Do things like jump out of choppers."

"I'm not a farmer, Janey," he said, feeling defensive and hating himself for it. "He wants me to be. And every time I look at him, it reminds me of how badly I've let him down."

"He's disappointed maybe, but you haven't let him down. He's very proud of you."

"Why do I know that?" she asked when his curiosity got the best of him and he looked at her. "I know because they showed them to me. Yup. Drug out the dreaded family albums after dinner. Your mom got them out—but it was your dad who provided commentary."

He groaned.

"I was particularly taken with the one on the bear rug."

"Oh, God. She didn't."

"She did. And your dad showed me your jock stuff. Lots of track ribbons and medals and wrestling trophies. What the hell is a punt, pass, and kick trophy for anyway?"

He could only shake his head. And smile. Somehow, she'd turned a bitch of a day into something—well— something he hadn't expected it would be.

"It's okay that your dad is disappointed," she said when the silence settled again. "We all have disappointments in life. That doesn't mean you need to feel guilty about your dad's. And it doesn't mean he expects you to."

Yeah. Well. He'd need to think about that. He'd need to think about it a lot.

Just like he'd been thinking about why it had been such a struggle to find his niche after the Rangers. Being rejected by every police department because of his hearing loss—well, it had been tough to take. So he'd floundered and brawled until he'd wised up and joined E.D.E.N. He'd needed to prove that he was still vital... still whole... still capable for God's sake, despite the hearing problem.

And deep down, he finally realized that a big part of his problem was that he wanted to be the perfect son for his father. And it hurt like hell that he couldn't be.

Friday morning, July 21st

Baby Blue smiled when Janey handed him the Thermos of ice water. "Thanks."

He downed a long, thirst-quenching swallow, then whipped a red bandana out of the hip pocket of his jeans and wiped the sweat and hay chaff off his face and neck.

"So this is what they call making hay while the sun shines," Janey said as they sat side by side on the hayrack, legs swinging, as the July sun beat down the next morning. A muggy breeze stirred the hair at her nape. "It's hard work."

"I don't mind the work. Nothing wrong with sweating for a living. It's in his blood." He nodded toward Bruce Wilson, who was driving a tractor pulling a full hayrack toward the barn, where they'd later heave the bales onto a conveyor and stack them in the mow.

"I can see that." Janey was mesmerized by Baby Blue's strong, clean profile. She'd never seen a man so sweaty and dirty look so good.

"For Dad's sake, I wish it was in mine." He glanced at her, then looked away, a grim expression on his face.

"You can only live your life for yourself," she said, watching the muscles in his neck and throat work as he downed another deep swallow of water.

"Is that what you're doing?" He handed the Thermos back to her.

"Yeah. I am. It's all I've ever wanted to do. Sing," she clarified. "Most of the rest of it—the glitz, the travel, the grind—I could do without. But I've always wanted to sing."

"And what would you do if you weren't traveling?"

His interest both surprised and pleased her. Surprised because to date, she'd been the only one who'd initiated any personal questions. Pleased because a part of her wanted to believe it was more than idle conversation prompting his questions now.

"We moved around a lot when I was little," she said. "I've always wanted someplace to call home."

"Malibu isn't someplace?"

She lifted a shoulder, watched a yellow butterfly flit along the rows of neatly raked hay ready to be baled. "Malibu is a base of operations. Takes more than an address to make a home."

He reached up, surprising her again, and plucked a piece of hay off the shoulder of the T-shirt she'd borrowed from his mother. The jeans she was wearing were Bev Wilson's, too. A little big, but not much, and covering up, Janey had learned, was a necessary part of making hay.

Not that she'd actually done that much work. She had driven the tractor, though, scared half to death of doing something wrong and proud as hell when she'd actually mastered shifting.

"So how come you haven't hooked up with someone?"

She glanced at him sideways. Intrigued. Well now. A
personal
personal question. She wondered what he'd think if she gave him a
personal
personal answer and decided, what the hell, she'd go for it.

"I did hook up. Once," she confided. "Didn't last, though."

"What happened?"

"Turned out Kevin—Kevin Larson, he's a rocker," she elaborated.

"I know who he is," Baby Blue said, looking a bit disgusted, which was also intriguing, because it was a "what were you doing with a bum like him" kind of disgust.

Looking back, she had the same question. "Turned out he loved his own image more than he loved me. And when my albums started outselling his, it seemed he didn't love me quite so much after all.

"Would have been nice, though," she added on a deep breath, "if I hadn't caught him cheating with someone I thought was a friend. Guess it was his way of saying I wasn't so hot and her way of saying she could have anything she wanted—including something that belonged to me."

When he didn't say anything, she turned to look at him. Saw the muscle in his jaw working and a dark scowl on his face.

"Seems to me you have more than your share of creeps in your life."

She knew he was thinking of Grimm. Maybe even of Neal Sanders. She'd figured out early on that Baby Blue didn't think much of Neal. "Yeah, well, some of us just get lucky."

He grunted, jumped down off the hayrack. He was a sight, this bodyguard of hers. He'd wrapped a blue bandana around his brow do-rag style to absorb the sweat. His white T-shirt was dusty and soaked through. His jeans were as worn as his lace-up leather boots.

And he was gorgeous.

"What about you?" she asked as he headed for the tractor, their break evidently over. "You ever hook up with anyone?"