Freefall

Incredibly, unbelievably, hurt flashed for an instant in those wide green eyes but she shielded them quickly. “That’s not going to happen.”

“That’s easy to say now. But what about a month from now? These are children, Sophie. Not pretty little toys you can put on the shelf when you’re bored with them. They are children who have just suffered a terrible loss. Right now they need all the stability they can find until their world settles again. You really think you can give them that? You, of all people!”

Again that hurt flared in her eyes but she jutted her chin into the air in typical stubborn Sophie fashion. “What they need is love and I have more than enough of that to give them.”

“Sometimes love is not enough.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” she muttered, an edge of bitterness to her voice.

He narrowed his gaze and studied her, trying to figure out if there was hidden meaning in her words. God knows, she had no reason to be bitter over their brief relationship. No, they hadn’t had a relationship, he corrected himself. Just fledgling, unspoken emotions and one steamy encounter on the beach that could still make his heart race when he remembered it.

Then she ran away, for the first time but certainly not the last.

This time Sophie folded her arms over her chest, her chin still lifted defiantly. “I’m staying, Tom. The children need me. If you want me out of their lives, you’re going to have to pry me out with a crowbar.”

“Must I remind you, I am the executor of Peter’s estate. His will specifically names me their guardian.” He knew he sounded like a self-righteous ass but he didn’t give a damn.

“And I have a letter from Shelly dated not two months ago where she asked me to care for her children if something happened to her.”

Tom frowned, unease slithering through him like a moray eel cutting across the ocean’s floor. Shelly had written Sophie? The timing seemed odd in the extreme. Why would a young, otherwise healthy woman write such a thing only weeks before her death? Did she have some impending premonition of danger?

“You can be as arrogant and domineering as usual,” Sophie went on, heedless of the direction of his thoughts, “but that’s not going to change my mind.”

“The children are my legal responsibility,” he repeated.

“They’re as much my responsibility as yours, if not legally than at least morally. I don’t care what Peter’s will says. They are my nieces and nephew, and I love them. I’m not going to abandon them when they need me. Anyway, if I don’t stay, who’s going to care for them when you’re out playing Rescue Ranger?”

Her scorn for his career shouldn’t bother him but somehow it did. He should be used to it after ten years of fighting to live the life he wanted. Nobody understood his passion for his job. Not his father, not Peter. They had thought him crazy for turning his back on the family fortune to enlist in the military—in the plebeian Coast Guard, no less.

They didn’t understand his passion for the service, for the unrivaled satisfaction of going after someone who needed help, the controls of his bird humming under his hands and adrenaline pumping like opium through his system.

That part of his life was over, he reminded himself. Peter’s death had accomplished what his brother had never been able to do in life. “I’m putting in for a discharge,” he murmured. “I’ll be taking leave while the paperwork goes through.”

Her expressive face softened instantly with sympathy. “Oh, Thomas.”

He looked away from her pity, focusing on the rows of cans and bottles that the housekeeper kept in ruthless order inside the butler’s pantry. “It’s the best thing for everyone. The details of Peter’s estate will keep me busy for weeks. In the meantime, I’m planning to hire someone to help Mrs. Cope with the children.”

“For heaven’s sake, you don’t need to hire someone! I’m family. I love the children far more than some stranger you hire will.”

For one crazy moment, the temptation to accept her help swamped him. With Sophie caring for the children, he might even be able to consider keeping his commission, just take a few months leave to handle the mess Peter had left behind at Canfield Investments.

He discarded the idea before it could take root. This was Sophie. Sophie, who had more stamps on her passport than Peter had neckties, who had made a successful name for herself traveling around the globe capturing whatever she found in her unique photographs.

She had inherited the restless gene that seemed to have skipped over Shelly. Just like her mother, Sophie could never stand to stay in one place long enough to sprout.

And even if she did force herself to stay, he wasn’t sure he wanted her caring for the children. After she left ten years ago and the hurt had begun to fade, he had realized the Sophie he had known had been flighty and reckless, irresponsible and selfish.

He’d meant what he said earlier. The children needed structure, stability, while they tried to cope with the loss of their parents. He couldn’t risk their one safe harbor by introducing an alien species like Sophie Beaumont into the mix.

“Aunt Sophie? Uncle Tommy? Is everything okay?”

Ali’s voice sounded from the other side of the pantry door, the worry in it adding another couple bricks of guilt to his load. “Just fine, Al. We’re, uh, looking for more peanut butter.”

“There’s a whole jar out here.” Suspicion coated her voice in a thin, crackly layer.

“Don’t worry about it, Alison,” Sophie said calmly. “We’ll be out in a moment. We were just having a discussion we didn’t want the twins to overhear.”

“Are you sure?” Ali asked.

“Yeah, honey,” he answered. “We’re fine. Just go on back to the twins. We’ll be right out.”

Sophie opened the door as soon as they heard the girl walk away and he wondered if she was as uncomfortable in such close proximity as he was. “We don’t have to fight about this, Thomas. Not today. Let’s both sleep on it and give ourselves and the children a few days for things to settle down. We can talk about it again later.”

As far as he was concerned, the matter was settled. Whether she left this afternoon or a week from now, she would still leave. He had no doubt whatsoever.

The trick would be to make sure she didn’t break the children’s already fragile hearts when she went.

She could handle this, Sophie reminded herself hours later, up to her elbows in bathwater.

“Ow. That huwts, Aunt Sophie.” Zoe made a face beneath her crown of suds. “Mommy doesn’t go so hawd.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try to take it easy.” This was a little girl’s head she was scrubbing, not a potato, Sophie reminded herself. This whole bath business was much harder than it appeared. Zoe insisted on everything just so—a water level exactly right, the precise temperature, her bath toys set out just where she wanted them.

She knew how vital it was for all of the children to keep to their usual routines as closely as possible, but she couldn’t help comparing Zoe’s elaborately complicated ritual with indigenous children she had photographed around the world who were perfectly content to perform their ablutions with a dirty puddle and a handful of leaves.

Maybe this wouldn’t seem such an insurmountable challenge if she wasn’t completely running on empty. She felt as wrung out as the washcloth Zoe was using and she wanted nothing more than to climb into that comfortable guest bed down the hall and collapse for a week.

But she could do this. She was strong, far stronger than Mr. Thomas Know-it-all Canfield believed her to be.

“Ow!” Zoe exclaimed again loudly and Sophie had to force herself to relax again.

“Almost done. Time to rinse.”

“I don’t like shampoo in my eyes,” the little girl informed her matter-of-factly.

“I’ll keep that in mind, honey.”

She hoped Tom was having just as challenging a time with Zach in another of the estate’s zillion bathrooms down the hall. After helping the nurse—Maura, she said her name was—settle his father for the evening, Tom had joined her to help with the children.

She found so much domesticity—the two of them working together at something so mundane and homey as putting the children to bed—unsettling. With any other man she probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but this was Thomas. Thomas, who had kissed her and held her and treated her with such aching tenderness. Playing house with him like this was bound to unnerve her.

She jerked her attention away from that precarious road and back to Zoe. “There you go. That should do it.”

“May I play for a while?”

It was past her bedtime but Sophie didn’t have the heart to say no, not when Zoe had spent the day solemn and confused. For the first time all day she seemed like a little girl again instead of a silent, sad little waif.

“For a few moments.” She rose on bones that creaked and complained with exhaustion, then made her way to the padded vanity bench across the bathroom. It didn’t take long for the steam in the bathroom in combination with the comfortable seat to relax her stiff muscles. After a few moments she even felt her eyelids droop.

She jerked them open. She couldn’t sleep! If Thomas came in and caught her dozing while Zoe splashed around amid so many possible water hazards, he would have all the proof he needed to show she was unfit to care for the children.

Not that he seemed to need any proof. He had made up his mind and changing it was going to be as tough as riding the Infierno Canyon rapids in Chile. She had to do her best to show him she could handle this, though. She couldn’t abandon the children when they needed her.

Not the way she had abandoned Shelly.

The thought slithered into her mind and Sophie opened her eyes, all temptation to sleep forgotten as she bleakly watched the tendrils of steam curl through the room.

There it was. The truth she’d been hiding from all day. Not only was she compelled to stay and care for the children because she loved them and they needed her but because on some level she supposed she was trying to atone for the pain she had caused Shelly these last ten years.

She hadn’t been there for her sister, but at least she would try for her sister’s children.

Shelly never understood why Sophie had begun to freeze her out. She had never said anything, but Sophie had seen the hurt in her eyes during the few visits she’d made over the years, had heard the unasked questions in her voice every time they talked on the phone.

She should have tried to explain, damn it. About Peter and William and Thomas and that terrible night. In her frenzied rush to escape, though, she had decided it was best to stay quiet, to allow Shelly her illusions. Her sister had been happy with her new life here at Seal Point—deliriously happy, with her husband and her brand-new baby and this elegant home by the sea. How could she destroy that joyful light in Shelly’s eyes by telling her about the den of vipers she had married into?

Now it was too late to explain anything to her sister. Grief and regret washed over her in cruel, unrelenting waves.

“Can we go to Point Lobos tomorrow and watch the otters?”

Sophie wiped at her eyes and found that her industrious niece had climbed out of the tub on her own and was wrapped in a towel, drying her hair. Chagrined at her own inattention, she hurried to help.

“That sounds fun.” She cleared the remaining emotions from her voice. “We can talk about it with Ali and Zach and see what they want to do tomorrow.”

“Talk about what?” Ali, her own hair wet from her shower, joined them in the bathroom wearing a pink cotton nightgown and matching robe.

“I want to go see the otters tomorrow.”

“We just did that with Uncle Tommy two days ago.”

“I want to go again.” A stubborn light flickered in the little girl’s eyes.

“I told her we would talk about it in the morning,” Sophie said to head off the argument she sensed could easily brew.

Ali shrugged and went to work helping Zoe into her pajamas. The gesture made Sophie want to cry all over again. In just a few days without their parents, Ali had taken over mothering the twins. She was still a little girl, whose childhood had been snatched away from her abruptly and hideously.

While Sophie took over the task, she vowed a solemn oath to herself that she would do everything she could to restore that childhood.

“When will I go back to school, Aunt Sophie?”

Oh dear. She had so much to learn about being a parent. She hadn’t given a single thought to them missing school. “Do you want to go back tomorrow?”

Ali’s dimple flashed. “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

She supposed she’d lost track after six connecting flights and a dozen time zones. “How about Monday, then?”

“Okay.”

“Me, too,” Zoe insisted. “Zach and me go to kindergarten. Miss Lewis is my teacher. She’s pretty.”

The three talked quietly about school and the girls’ classes while Sophie brushed the tangles from Zoe’s curly blond hair.

“You’re all set now,” she finally said. “Cleaner than a baby kitten.”

“Will you read to us like Mommy does?” Zoe asked.

Sophie swallowed another damn lump in her throat. “Sure, honey.”

“Mommy usually reads to us in her bed since it’s bigger.”

“Okay. Why don’t you two find a book and I’ll round up Zach and we can meet you there?”

She found Thomas and Zach in a bathroom down the hall. Tom’s golf shirt was soaked and water covered the terra-cotta tile floor, she saw with amusement, but her nephew sported slicked-back hair and snazzy dinosaur pajamas.

“Whoa. Was there a tidal wave in here?”

Zach giggled. “I was showing Uncle Tommy how to dog paddle and some water splashed on the floor.”

“And on your uncle, by the looks of it.”

Tom made a wry face, which sent Zach giggling again. She had to admit, the sound was terribly sweet. “Aunt Sophie, did you know Uncle Tommy used to take a bath in this very tub when he was five? And he used to sleep in my room, too.”

The idea of Thomas as a five-year-old boy was just too difficult to fathom, especially with that soaked cotton showing every ripple of powerful, very grown-up muscles in his chest.

She sneaked a look at him under her lashes and couldn’t help a quick intake of breath when she met his gaze, his blue eyes glittering with some expression she couldn’t immediately identify.

“No, I didn’t know that. Aren’t you lucky that he lets you use it now?” Her voice came out breathless as she answered Zach.

Just tired, she assured herself. Surely she wasn’t still foolish enough to be attracted to the man. Not when she knew exactly how little Thomas Canfield thought of her.

“The girls and I are going to read a story before bed.” She ignored the fresh surge of melancholy. “Are you interested?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, cowboy. We’re reading in your parents’ room.”

The fleeting animation on Zach’s pointy little features slid away and he instantly sobered. Oh, sweetheart. Her heart ached all over again for the crushing loss these poor children had endured and she pulled him into her arms for a quick, comforting hug.

Unlike his sisters, Zach wasn’t big on hugs, she was discovering. He pulled away after a moment and headed down the hall in search of Ali and Zoe. She watched his rounded shoulders for a moment, then turned back to find Thomas studying her again, his eyes gleaming in the bright fluorescent light of the bathroom.

“How are the girls?” he asked.

“About the same as Zach. Fine one minute, on the verge of tears the next. It’s going to take them a while to adjust to life without their parents.”

“I think we’re all going to need time to adjust.”

She thought of the sudden, radical changes in his life from bachelor military pilot to father-figure businessman overnight. He must be close to overwhelmed but he seemed to be adjusting in typical competent Thomas fashion.

“Look, I can handle storytime so you can sleep,” he began.

She shook her head. “I don’t mind. I’m sure you have things to do.”

“Only one or two million.”

“Go on, then.”

“Are you sure? You look exhausted.”

She didn’t know whether to be warmed by his concern or offended by the implication that she looked like hell. “I’ll be fine. Once we’re done reading, I’m sure I’ll drop like a rock.”

They stood for a moment in awkward silence, two people who were all but strangers, linked only by a brief, sketchy past and by their shared love for the three children. Still, they had made it through the first evening together without coming to blows, she thought. Maybe they could somehow figure out a way to make this complicated arrangement work.

She gave him a tentative smile, then turned and followed Zach down the hall.

Chapter 3

Some odd, discordant sound wrenched her from sleep. She blinked back to consciousness, to that first shocky awareness of her surroundings. It never took her long, probably because she’d spent her whole life waking up in different beds.

Narrow, lumpy cots in a seedy Russian hotel, grand ornately carved beds in a haunted Irish castle, communal woven mats on the floor of a grass hut in Samoa. She’d slept in them all and many, many more.

This time she was in a big, comfortable four-poster, the bed Shelly had shared with her husband.

She listened to try to determine what had awakened her but heard only soft, childish breathing. She was surrounded by warm shapes snuggled against her like puppies in a cardboard box, she realized.

How had that happened? She and the children had been reading, she remembered, some sweet, silly book about a kindergartner and her wild adventures.

Ali had taken a turn reading slowly and carefully, her brow wrinkled in concentration like Shelly’s used to do.

Her sister would be so proud of her daughter. It was the last thought Sophie remembered.

Had she nodded off right in the middle of the story? She didn’t doubt it, she’d been so exhausted. They all must have fallen asleep, exhausted by the ordeal of the day.

There were worse things in life than snuggling with three sleeping children. She smiled in the darkness and wiggled her toes.

Someone had covered them with a quilt, she discovered. Ali? she wondered, with a pang of regret for a child who carried the weight of too many responsibilities on her narrow shoulders.

It must have been. Who else?

She suddenly knew the answer. Not Ali. Tom. Somehow she knew without a doubt he was the one who had covered them.

Heat thrummed through her at the thought of Tom coming to look for the children and discovering them all nestled together. Of him standing by the bed, kissed by moonlight as he watched her sleep when she was vulnerable and exposed.

She shouldn’t have this reaction to him, this trembling in her stomach, this slow surge of blood through her veins. He was just so damn beautiful, lean and dark and predatory like a panther she’d once been lucky enough to photograph in Punjab.

How were they ever going to make this work? In the darkness, all her doubts rushed back to pinch and poke at her. They both wanted custody of the children.

He would never let her take them away from here and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to stay here on the peninsula and deal with him day after day.

She sighed softly into the darkness and listened to the big house settle and creak around her. Shelly’s house. Her sister had adored this huge, elegant villa with its dozen bedrooms and immaculate gardens. It wasn’t the grandeur of the house that mattered. Shelly had never been like that—her twin would have been happy in a two-room trailer as long as she could stay in one place with the family she loved.

Their mother’s wanderlust had always been much harder on Shelly than Sophie. Shelly wanted nothing more than to live in one place long enough to make friends, to put her name on the mailbox, to plant tulip bulbs and be there to see them break through the earth in the spring.

While Sharon worked as a cocktail waitress at some sleazy bar or other, Sophie and her sister had talked long into the night, spinning dreams about their futures.

Hers had been about finding fame and fortune, about saving the rain forest and seeing more of the world than just about every armpit of a town between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

All Shelly had ever wanted out of life was a man to love her, children to nurture, a home with a garden. She wanted to think her sister had found far more than she’d ever dared dream, here in this elegant, graceful home by the sea.

Too bad she had to take Peter Canfield as part of the package.

Her sister had been happy, though. She comforted herself with that knowledge. She had pressed—and pressed hard—to make sure Shelly was being treated right. Either her sister was a far better actress than she gave her credit for, or Shelly had never been unlucky enough to see the darker side of the man she married.

The side Sophie had seen.

A low, mournful wail cut through the night, jerking her out of her thoughts. The sound scraped along her nerves, raised gooseflesh on her arms. That’s what had awakened her, she realized now. It was raw, unearthly, a supernatural kind of keening.

She rolled her eyes at herself. You, who have slept with villagers telling tales of the chupacabra of Puerto Rico and the giant bat of Cameroon ought to know better than to let a little wind bother you.

Still, her heart pounded an uneasy rhythm as she carefully picked her way through the maze of sleeping little bodies and padded to the sliding door that led to a small balcony overlooking the sea.

She unlocked it, disengaged the security system with the code Thomas had given her, and walked outside.

The night was cloudy and cool with a thick, ghostly mist curling up the cliffs through the coastal pine and cyprus. She leaned against the railing and peered into the darkness. All she could hear now was the crash and throb of the sea fifty feet below.

She heard nothing but the surf and her own breathing for several moments. Had she imagined it, then? She was about to chide herself for her overactive imagination and go inside to the children again when she heard it again, almost like a howl of pain.

Sophie peered into the darkness. Beyond the pool and back gardens, a long flight of wooden steps led down the steep slope to a small private beach. The sound seemed to have come from there. Clouds obscured the half moon but she thought she could just make out something huddled on the steps. A crouched silhouette.

The clouds shifted slightly and her gaze sharpened. It was a man out there wearing blue-striped pajamas, his shock of silver hair gleaming a pale, spectral white in the moonlight.

William! He must have wandered out of his apartment! Fear spurted through her. He could easily tumble down the steps, disoriented in the darkness. She paused for just an instant, then without another thought she hurried down the spiral ironwork stairs of the terrace and rushed across the wet grass, heedless of her bare feet.

When she reached him, William looked at her out of dazed eyes the same silver-blue as his son. The agonized grief on his face filled her with pity. The bitterness she had nurtured for so many years against this poor shell of a man seemed foolish now, so much wasted energy.

“I saw him,” he mumbled. “Peter came to my room. Where’s my son?”

He clutched at her T-shirt. “Shelly, where’s my boy? They said he was dead but I know he’s not.”

Despite the shiver down her spine, she managed to gently disengage his hands. The poor man was delusional. He had mistaken her for Shelly—not so unusual since they were identical twins. “It’s cold out here, Mr. Canfield. Let’s get you back to bed.”

After a moment he let her take his hand and lead him back to the house like a child. Just as they reached the door, Thomas burst through it, his hair messy and wild panic blazing in his eyes. He jerked to a stop when he saw them.