The Third Mrs. Mitchell. Lynnette Kent

wasn’t Trace’s fault,” Kelsey told Kate and Mary Rose later, after they got home. “Eric Hasty made a comment in class about a wrong answer Johnny Vasques gave. They’ve been sniping at each other all year long. And when Trace and Bo and Eric went outside at the end of gym class, Johnny and his friends were waiting for them. Trace was trapped. He didn’t have a choice.”

      “You could have walked away,” Kate told her son as he sat at the kitchen table with an ice pack on the side of his face. “You didn’t have to fight.”

      “And left Bo and Eric there by themselves? I don’t think so.” Dropping the ice pack in the sink, he stalked out of the kitchen, then pounded up the stairs to the refuge of his room.

      “Men and their honor code.” Mary Rose shook her head. “Not a tradition I understand very well.”

      “It’s like something out of the Middle Ages.” Kelsey folded her arms on the table. “Eric’s sister is a year younger than him, and when he caught her talking to Johnny at lunch last fall, he threw a fit. His family doesn’t think Mexicans and Americans should mix. So there’s been this running feud going all year, and today I guess it just erupted.”

      Kate took her coffee cup to the sink. “I guess I’ll have to put Trace on restriction. Honor code or not, I can’t have him fighting in school.”

      “Oh, come on, Kate. It’s not his fault.” Kelsey got to her feet. “He was just backing up a friend. It’s not like he started the fight.”

      “The two of you should have been out front, waiting for Mary Rose to pick you up.”

      “I told you, this thing started before school got out. I went to find Trace and they were already fighting. Please, Kate. Don’t punish him like that. I know he’ll stay out of trouble from now on. I promise.”

      “How can you make a promise like that for your brother?”

      “I’ll talk to him. Make him see he has to behave. You know he listens to me.”

      “Does that include getting him to be polite when you go out with your dad tomorrow morning?”

      Kelsey swallowed hard. “Sure. We’ll be good as gold. Cross my heart.” She suited action to words.

      With a deep breath, Kate gave in. “Okay. No restriction this time. But if it happens again…”

      “No more fighting. Guaranteed.” She gave her stepmother a quick hug and started out of the kitchen. At the doorway, though, she turned. “Does that mean he can come to Gray Hamilton’s party with me tomorrow night?”

      Mary Rose’s first impulse would have been to say no. Kate hesitated. “They just live around the block, right?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “And you’ll be back by eleven-thirty?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “I suppose that will be all right, then.”

      “Thanks!”

      Alone with her sister in the kitchen, Mary Rose shook her head. “They’re a real handful, aren’t they?”

      Kate nodded. “Since they got out of elementary school, I haven’t had much practice at discipline. L.T. was always the one in control, and he made the decisions pretty much by himself. Maybe I took the easy way out, but fighting with him was just more than I could bear.” She sighed. “Now I’m making the decisions. I’m not sure things are going very well.”

      “You know what’s good for them and what’s right.” Mary Rose placed her empty cup in the dishwasher. “Trace and Kelsey will settle down as you get more practice and they get used to listening to what you have to say. Give yourself, and them, some time. Everything will work out just fine.”

      She hoped.

      SWEAT DRIPPED into Pete’s eyes as he swayed from side to side, breathing fast, dribbling the ball and looking for a way around the opponent crowding him. He feinted left; Tommy Crawford moved with him, arms spread wide, ready to steal. “Screw that,” Pete muttered, pivoting on his right foot to turn his back to Tommy.

      “Mitchell!” Twenty feet farther away from the basket, Adam DeVries held up his hands. Pete sent the ball like a bullet straight toward his teammate’s face, watched in satisfaction as Adam caught and immediately redirected it in a soaring arch over the length of the court. Swish…the ball dropped straight through the net. Two points, and the game.

      Adam came across the court. “G-good pass, Pete.”

      “No thanks to Tommy, here.” He punched Crawford in the shoulder. “I thought you were coming down my throat.”

      “Us short guys gotta be aggressive.” Tommy shook his head as Rob Warren joined them. “Sorry, man. The guy must be wearing Super Glue. I couldn’t shake the ball loose.”

      Rob gave them all his slow grin. “We have to let them win sometimes, right? Anybody else ready for breakfast?”

      Without debate they jogged off the outdoor basketball court of New Skye High School and headed across the street to the Carolina Diner. When he wasn’t working, Pete’s Saturday morning schedule never changed—two-on-two b-ball with DeVries, Crawford and Warren from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m., followed by the biggest breakfast Charlie and Abby could dish up.

      “Three scrambled, double bacon, grits, biscuits and stewed apples,” he ordered a few minutes later. “And tea.”

      “That’s a no-brainer.” Abby grinned at him. “You ever consider trying something different? Oatmeal’s good for your heart.”

      Pete let his jaw hang loose as he stared at her. “My heart is doing just fine, thanks all the same.”

      “Oh, really?” She raised an eyebrow. “Is that why you ran out of here the other night like the place was on fire? Without taking your pie?”

      He snapped his mouth closed, feeling his cheeks heat up. “I had to get to the school.”

      “It looked to me like you had to get away from Mary Rose Bowdrey. Fast.”

      Three pairs of eyes lifted from the menus to his face. “M-Mary Rose B-Bowdrey is in town?” Adam sat back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head. “Isn’t she…?”

      “Yeah, yeah.” Pete rearranged the salt and pepper shakers, started in on the sugar packets. “No big deal.”

      Rob took a swallow of coffee. “You were married…what? A month?” Having done her worst, Abby sashayed back to the kitchen.

      Pete shrugged. “Something like that.”

      “Her sister’s in the middle of a divorce.” Like the Bowdreys and Adam, Tommy was part of the Old Town crowd—the families who traced their names back for a century or more in New Skye history, who mostly lived in big, elegant houses on The Hill, and who pretty much ran the town. “I hear the kids are really messed up over it.”

      “If he ran his family the way he runs LaRue Construction, I’m not surprised the family got b-busted up. And speak of the d-devil.” Adam sat facing the door. “Here they are now.”

      Pete heard the bell jingle, but he had his back to the entrance. There was no way he could ask who had just come in, so he sat there with a rock in his stomach, certain that Mary Rose had arrived with her family for breakfast. Certain that he could not eat a single bite with her on the premises.

      But then the newcomers moved to a booth in his line of sight. He let his shoulders slump in relief. It wasn’t Mary Rose—just the kids, Kelsey and Trace, with their dad and his girlfriend.

      Rob shook his head. “That is one unhappy bunch. Does L.T. really think his kids are going to warm up to the woman he left their mother for?”

      “L. T. LaRue th-th-th-thinks he can g-g-get a-away with any damn thing he p-p-pleases.” Although usually barely noticeable,