Restless. Tori Carrington

a happy cloud around the three of them that had been sorely missing.

      Gauge was glad for the change.

      Nina stopped laughing first. “God, I’m sorry. I followed the recipe to a T. I don’t have a clue what happened.”

      She picked up Kevin’s plate and forked the meat back into the serving dish.

      “Don’t touch my mashed potatoes,” he said. “I love your mashed potatoes.”

      Gauge felt suddenly like an outsider. Which was something he was getting used to when in the presence of his two friends. He could accept them being a married couple. But he still hadn’t figured out how to deal with it.

      Especially since he couldn’t seem to stop himself from wanting what Kevin had. Namely, Nina.

      “I should stick to café fare,” she said. “Soups and sandwiches I can handle.”

      “Don’t forget baking,” Kevin reminded.

      “Yeah. So long as you don’t mind living on bear claws, I suppose I’m your dream mate.” She rolled her eyes, but her warm smile belied her true feelings as she handed him back his plate. “I’m going to go order pizza. You two clear the table.”

      An hour and a half later, Gauge picked up the empty pizza boxes while Kevin went to change the CD in the player in the living room. He took the boxes into the kitchen, where Nina was opening another bottle of wine.

      “Thanks,” she said as he passed behind her on the way to the garbage bin.

      “You want some help with that?”

      She let out a long sigh. “I swear, I’ve never been any good at popping corks.”

      Before he could weigh the wisdom of the move, he curved both of his arms around her, pressing his front against her soft, hot bottom. “It’s simple. You just have to remember to keep the corkscrew in perfect line with the bottle.”

      Damn, but she smelled good. Like warm, summer sunshine. A field full of wildflowers. Like rain against a hot sidewalk.

      With his help, she popped the cork.

      “Oh!” she said, and he heard her swallow.

      It satisfied him on a level he was loath to admit that his close proximity still affected her.

      Suddenly she went stiff against him. Gauge looked up to find Kevin standing in the kitchen doorway, his fists looking like meat mallets on either side of his legs.

      “Get the hell away from my wife.”

       5

      MERELY DRIVING UP to her parents’ house filled Lizzie with memories of the past, and bittersweet thoughts of the present. Her parents had been the family’s foundation, their rock. How could they even consider getting divorced now? After thirty years of marriage? It didn’t make sense.

      Lizzie let herself in through the back door, much as she had for nearly the entire twenty-eight years of her life. The house was one of the first that her father had built after opening his own construction company before she was born. While he’d added on to it over the years to accommodate her mother’s wishes for a sunporch and her brother’s for a media room, much remained the same. Decor aside, of course. Her mother claimed that she’d been Martha Stewart before Martha even thought about making her first pinecone wreath. The house had undergone a complete makeover nearly every year, with a change in color schemes and throw rugs and artwork.

      Now the living room walls were a soft, homey green, which went well with the upholstered furniture, a cream color festooned with tiny flowers of every color. The furniture had remained the same, chosen because it went with almost everything. Photos of the family, especially the three children, dotted the walls and mantel, documenting the various stages of their lives.

      “Mom?” Lizzie called out, putting her purse on the kitchen table and shrugging out of her coat, much as she had countless times before. Only this time there was no answer.

      She hadn’t checked the garage to see if either of their cars was there. It was usually a given at this time of night that her parents would both be home. It was just after dinner and right about now they normally would have been sitting at the kitchen table enjoying coffee and dessert or in the family room watching the news or reading.

      The silence seemed to verify with deafening intensity that nothing was normal or usual anymore.

      Lizzie sighed and looked around the kitchen. When she was growing up, there had always been something to eat. It was one of the many reasons neighborhood children had liked to hang out there. If there wasn’t a pot of something on the stove to sample, there were surely sandwich fixings and a bag of chips somewhere.

      The sink was empty, the stove barren and not even the cookie jar held a crumb to lick off the pad of her finger. She opened the refrigerator. Bingo. She smiled as she popped the lid on a container of food and took out a slice of meat loaf.

      She sputtered when an overdose of salt assaulted her taste buds.

      She moved to the sink and coughed up the meat, running the water to wash it down the drain as she tripped the trash compactor.

      “Damn,” she muttered under her breath, having forgotten the phone call of the night before.

      She dumped the rest of the “poisoned” meat loaf into the garbage can and placed the container in the dishwasher.

      She should have known the situation had deteriorated to this degree, but the absence of broken glass littering the floor had convinced her that things were as they always had been.

      She opened the freezer and took out a fudge pop, visually verifying that no tampering had taken place. She hesitantly licked it, sighed with relief and then closed the freezer door. Do what you will with the meat loaf, she thought, but leave anything chocolate alone.

      Of course, her father didn’t like chocolate.

      Sucking on the sweet, she left the kitchen, walking through the hall toward the foyer. She immediately spotted her mother’s purse on the table near the door.

      Huh?

      “Dad?”

      She stepped down the connecting hall toward the guest room that had once been a den and then a guest room again and rapped lightly on the closed door. No answer. She peeked inside to see the sofa bed open, the sheets and blanket unmade, and then closed the door again.

      So her father wasn’t there. But her mother?

      A sound from the second floor.

      Maybe her mother was taking a bath with her headphones on and hadn’t heard her.

      While the Gilbreds weren’t immodest, rare were the times when a bathroom door was locked. Lizzie had spent many a time sitting on the closed commode talking to her mother while Bonnie was immersed in a tub full of bubbles.

      Of course, when those same bubbles started to dissipate, she was the first to give her mother privacy…and to spare herself from viewing something that might ruin her for life.

      She climbed the stairs, licking her frozen treat as she went. She supposed she could grab a sandwich on the way home. Or see if the Chinese place on Oak Street was still open.

      She looked first in the master bedroom to find everything perfectly in its place, the bed made, the connecting bath empty.

      Okay…

      Had her mother left her purse behind? Was she even now eating out somewhere and reaching for her wallet, only to find she’d left it at home on the foyer table? That was so unlike her mother as to be scary.

      Scarier still was the fact that both her parents constantly requested that she act as their attorney. She was grateful she wasn’t a family attorney and was only too quick to point that out whenever the topic raised its ugly head. Which was much too often for her liking.

      She