.

scream. I went into her room, and there he was. He’d tried to...” He stopped. His face was like stone. “My mother had to get a neighbor to pull me off him. After that, after she knew what had been going on, she still defended him. I was arrested, but the public defender got an earful. He spoke to my sister. My stepfather was arrested, charged, tried. My mother stood by him, the whole time. My sister was victimized by the defense attorney, after what she’d already suffered at our stepfather’s hands. She was so traumatized by the experience that she doesn’t even date.”

      She winced. One small hand went shyly to cover his clenched fist on the table. “I’m so sorry.”

      He seemed to mentally shake himself, as if he’d been locked into the past. He met her soft, concerned gaze. His big hand turned, curled around hers. “I’ve never spoken of it, until now.”

      “Maybe sometimes it’s good to share problems. Dark memories aren’t so bad when you force them into the light.”

      “Seventeen going on thirty?” he mused, smiling at her. It didn’t occur to her to wonder how he knew her age.

      She smiled. “There are always people who are in worse shape than you are. My friend Billy has an alcoholic father who beats him and his mother. The police are over there all the time, but his mother will never press charges. Sheriff Carson says the next time, he’s going to jail, even if he has to press charges himself.”

      “Good for the sheriff.”

      “What happened, after the trial?” she prodded gently.

      He curled his fingers around Michelle’s, as if he enjoyed their soft comfort. She might have been fascinated to know that he’d never shared these memories with any other woman, and that, as a rule, he hated having people touch him.

      “He went to jail for child abuse,” he said. “My mother was there every visiting day.”

      “No, what happened to you and your sister?”

      “My mother refused to have us in the house with her. We were going to be placed in foster homes. The public defender had a maiden aunt, childless, who was suicidal. Her problems weren’t so terrible, but she tended to depression and she let them take her almost over the edge. So he thought we might be able to help each other. We went to live with Aunt Maude.” He chuckled. “She was not what you think of as anybody’s maiden aunt. She drove a Jaguar, smoked like a furnace, could drink any grown man under the table, loved bingo parties and cooked like a gourmet. Oh, and she spoke about twenty languages. In her youth, she was in the army and mustered out as a sergeant.”

      “Wow,” she exclaimed. “She must have been fascinating to live with.”

      “She was. And she was rich. She spoiled us rotten. She got my sister into therapy, for a while at least, and me into the army right after I graduated.” He smiled. “She was nuts about Christmas. We had trees that bent at the ceiling, and the limbs groaned under all the decorations. She’d go out and invite every street person she could find over to eat with us.” His face sobered. “She said she’d seen foreign countries where the poor were treated better than they were here. Ironically, it was one of the same people she invited to Christmas dinner who stabbed her to death.”

      She winced. “I’m so sorry!”

      “Me, too. By that time, though, Sara and I were grown. I was in the...military,” he said, hoping she didn’t notice the involuntary pause, “and Sara had her own apartment. Maude left everything she had to the two of us and her nephew. We tried to give our share back to him, as her only blood heir, but he just laughed and said he got to keep his aunt for years longer because of us. He went into private practice and made a fortune defending drug lords, so he didn’t really need it, he told us.”

      “Defending drug lords.” She shook her head.

      “We all do what we do,” he pointed out. “Besides, I’ve known at least one so-called drug lord who was better than some upright people.”

      She just laughed.

      He studied her small hand. “If things get too rough for you over there, let me know. I’ll manage something.”

      “It’s only until graduation this spring,” she pointed out.

      “In some situations, a few months can be a lifetime,” he said quietly.

      She nodded.

      “Friends help each other.”

      She studied his face. “Are we? Friends, I mean?”

      “We must be. I haven’t told anyone else about my stepfather.”

      “You didn’t tell me the rest of it.”

      His eyes went back to her hand resting in his. “He got out on good behavior six months after his conviction and decided to make my sister pay for testifying against him. She called 911. The police shot him.”

      “Oh, my gosh.”

      “My mother blamed both of us for it. She moved back to Canada, to Alberta, where we grew up.”

      “Are you Canadian?” she asked curiously.

      He smiled. “I’m actually Texas born. We moved to Canada to stay with my mother’s people when my father was in the military and stationed overseas. Sara was born in Calgary. We lived there until just after my mother married my stepfather.”

      “Did you see your mother again, after that?” she asked gently.

      He shook his head. “Our mother never spoke to us again. She died a few years back. Her attorney tracked me down and said she left her estate, what there was of it, to the cousins in Alberta.”

      “I’m so sorry.”

      “Life is what it is. I had hoped she might one day realize what she’d done to my sister. She never did.”

      “We can’t help who we love, or what it does to mess us up.”

      He frowned. “You really are seventeen going on thirty.”

      She laughed softly. “Maybe I’m an old soul.”

      “Ah. Been reading philosophy, have we?”

      “Yes.” She paused. “You haven’t mentioned your father.”

      He smiled sadly. “He was in a paramilitary group overseas. He stepped on an antipersonnel mine.”

      She didn’t know what a paramilitary group was, so she just nodded.

      “He was from Dallas,” he continued. “He had a small ranch in Texas that he inherited from his grandfather. He and my mother met at the Calgary Stampede. He trained horses and he’d sold several to be used at the stampede. She had an uncle who owned a ranch in Alberta and also supplied livestock to the stampede.” He stared at her small hand in his. “Her people were French-Canadian. One of my grandmothers was a member of the Blackfoot Nation.”

      “Wow!”

      He smiled.

      “Then, you’re an American citizen,” she said.

      “Our parents did the whole citizenship process. In short, I now have both Canadian and American citizenship.”

      “My dad loved this Canadian television show, Due South. He had the whole DVD collection. I liked the Mountie’s dog. He was a wolf.”

      He laughed. “I’ve got the DVDs, too. I loved the show. It was hilarious.”

      She glanced at the clock on the wall. “I have to go. If you aren’t going to run over me, I’ll have to fix supper in case she comes home to eat. It’s going to be gruesome. She’ll still be furious about the stamp collection.” Her face grew hard. “She won’t find it. I’ve got a hiding place she doesn’t know about.”

      He smiled. “Devious.”

      “Not normally. But she’s not