Bannon Brothers (13 page)

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Authors: Janet Dailey

BOOK: Bannon Brothers
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“The trick is knowing when to stop,” she said, turning to him. “If I finish it, they might ask for changes. I'm happy with it, though. Now let's see if I get the job. I really need the money.”
“You will,” Bannon said.
“What do you think?” She glanced down at the dog. “Are you an art lover, Charlie?” He wagged his tail.
Not a crazy-happy wag, because the animal was too well-trained for that. But the dog clearly felt at home.
“Guess so.” Erin laughed. “I wish I had a treat for you. But I wasn't expecting you.” She patted him again, thoroughly. Charlie was loving the attention.
“Not a problem,” Bannon hastened to assure her. “I mean, I have dog food in the trunk. Besides, does he look like he's starving?”
Erin caressed Charlie's muscular sides and gave him an affectionate thump or two. “No.” She chuckled. “I'd say he's healthy. These mixed breeds are great dogs.” There was a pause before she asked, “Is he staying with you for a while?”
“Actually, no.” Bannon took a deep breath and rubbed the back of his neck. “What happened was—well, my brother—he's special forces, don't know if I told you that—anyway, he was deployed in kind of a hurry and he dropped off Charlie late last night. But he forgot that my condo doesn't allow dogs.” He rushed the answer, maybe a little too much.
“Really.” He saw a twinkle in her eye, but forged on anyway.
“So if you don't mind my asking—”
“Not at all.” She laughed. “It seems I need protection, according to you, even though yesterday you couldn't say why, and today you happen to have this dog. What a coincidence.”
He gave her a sheepish grin. “Busted.”
“Yes, you are. Where did you get him?”
“Through my brother,” Bannon replied. “Even though he doesn't actually belong to Linc, Charlie works with his, um, team. He comes highly recommended.”
“Glad to hear it,” she said impishly. “So how big is that bag of dog food in the trunk?”
His grin widened. “Five pounds. I could go get more. He can stay with you for as long as you want.”
“Why don't you do that? I'll make us a late lunch while you're gone.”
Bannon hesitated for only a second. “Deal.”
Then he left, thinking to himself how cool it was that she didn't kick up a fuss about not knowing absolutely everything. Clearly, when Erin Randall wanted something, she went for it.
It took longer than he thought to find a jumbo bag of dog food, and he ended up backtracking to the supermarket where he'd gotten the milk. By the time he returned to the house, Charlie was sacked out in front of the wood stove on a folded blanket. Erin was kneeling in front of it, adding a split log to a pretty good little blaze.
“Hey. Welcome back. Just thought I'd take the chill off the afternoon,” she said as she got to her feet and straightened up.
“Looks like Charlie appreciates it.” Bannon laughed.
Erin glanced down at the dog, who raised his head and half opened his eyes at the sound of Bannon's voice. Then he settled down again. “We went out for a long walk. I swear he sniffed every blade of grass and molecule of air between here and the mountain. And he stayed by my side the whole time.”
“Smart dog.” Bannon was pleased. “Good. I don't want to worry about you.”
Erin tucked a wayward lock of hair behind her ear, an unconscious gesture that made him want to take her in his arms. “That's nice of you. I mean it, Bannon. Even though I think you're overreacting.”
He took a deep breath before replying, damned if he would scare her unnecessarily. “Maybe I am. But the Montgomery case has a lot of twists and turns, and I'm only at the beginning of it. I'm not sure if I'm always alone, let's put it that way. And you've been seen with me. What I'm getting at is—well, this house is a little isolated.”
“I'm fine here,” she reassured him. “But thanks for bringing Charlie out. Keeping him for a while isn't going to be a problem. We hit it off right away.”
He felt a little awkward for not telling her the entire truth, not that he could, but her sincere reply eased his mind on that score. Still, he wished he knew who had been out there yesterday. He knew Charlie could track the watcher in the woods if the dog ever picked up a scent trail on him.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I found some stuff. Mostly nibbles. Right this way.”
She reached out to him and he took her hand. Her slender fingers were warm and strong. All he wanted to do was pull her against him and start kissing her again.
Jesus, maybe it was him she wasn't safe from. He restrained himself. “Lead on.”
This time the tray was set up on an old pine table in an alcove off the kitchen area. “I didn't see this yesterday.”
“Yes, you did. But it was covered with a tablecloth and a mountain of folded laundry on top of that. I put it all away. We don't have to eat off that old trunk.”
She'd set out a bottle of wine and two glasses. On the tray were different kinds of cheese, crackers, and slices of apple in a bowl. The kind of food they could feed each other if they felt so inclined. Nibble by nibble.
The thought was irresistible. The meal was impromptu but he got the feeling she was sending a message by adding wine to it. He didn't have to be that restrained. After they ate, talked, hung out, whatever—he could allow himself to claim another kiss. No harm in that.
“I opened the bottle,” she said, letting go of his hand. “You're supposed to let it breathe, right? Whatever that means.”
Something that Bannon was having difficulty doing at the moment, and not because the fire she'd built was doing an excellent job of warming the whole house. No, it was because she'd picked up a slice of apple and bitten into it. There was a trace of slick juice on her lower lip.
“I don't actually know myself.” He wrapped a hand around the thick green glass of the bottle and picked it up, examining the label. “Hey, this is the good stuff. Am I worth it?”
“Of course you are.”
He grinned at her, but waited to pour. “How much do you want?”
Erin finished her bite of apple and inclined her head. “Half a glass is fine.”
They both sat down to the light meal. The first several sips of wine relaxed him. There was an easy intimacy between them. It made him think how long it had been since—
Never. There was no comparison to be made between her and any other woman he'd been with. Erin was one of a kind. Here they were on what could be defined as Date Three, and he was in . . . in something with her. It was too soon to call it love.
“By the way,” she said suddenly, putting down her cheese-topped cracker, “I found Pinky.” His confused look made her smile. “The bear you were asking about.”
That was the last thing he wanted to talk about at the moment. “Oh, right,” he said politely. “I forgot his name.”
“Her name,” she corrected. “Pinky is female.”
Bannon nodded. “I'll try to remember that.” He took another swallow of wine, a big one.
Erin got up, brushing a few crumbs from her dress, and went over to the pine shelves in the studio area that held the boxes marked
Home
. “She was in this one—whoops, no.” Cardboard flapped and squeaked a little as she investigated. “Wrong box. This one.”
She dragged out the right box and Bannon immediately rose halfway to help her before she forestalled him with a wave of her hand.
“Don't get up. It's light.”
He sat back down again and moved the tray and both wineglasses to one side. But she put the box on the floor before she sat down herself.
Erin reached in and pulled out a cloth bear that looked handmade, just as she'd said. Glancing at it snapped him out of his amorous thoughts—it seemed the same as the one in the photo of Ann Montgomery as a child, which he'd given back to Doris along with all the other visual evidence.
He had to hope she was staying one step ahead of Chief Hoebel, and wished he'd been able to check in with her that morning.
Erin gave the bear a dusting-off and a couple of affectionate little squeezes to plump it, then propped it against the wine bottle. “Sit up, Pinky.”
The bear toppled over and Bannon nudged it upright with a finger. Women sure saved a lot of odd stuff.
“And I found something else I'd been looking for.” Giving him a bemused smile, she reached down into the box of clutter again. “Plus some junk, of course.” She used both hands to show off a cracked but handpainted flowerpot broken into two pieces. “Fabulous, huh? Why did I keep this?”
He shrugged. “I have a high school bowling trophy that would go great with it. The bowling ball bit fell off, though.”
Erin tossed the pieces of flowerpot into a nearby wastebasket. “Bye-bye.” She dove into the box again and came up with an old scrapbook. “This is it. My whole childhood is in here. My mother started it. She could be a little obsessive about memories and stuff. Sometimes my dad added things. He kept all my drawings. He told me now and then that I was going to be a great artist.”
Bannon was definitely interested. “He was right.”
“Oh, I don't know about the great part,” she said softly. “I'm just happy to be doing what I love.”
Without looking at him, she opened the scrapbook, which was crammed with stiff-looking pages sheathed in clear but yellowing plastic. Erin slid a finger under the plastic of one and adjusted the crooked document inside, moving it over a duplicate beneath until the edges lined up.
“This book got a little knocked around. But here's my birth certificate. Two copies. My dad was a great one for documenting everything.” She pointed to a box in the middle of the document. “Look at those teeny-weeny footprints. Boy, things have changed. I don't think that hospital even exists anymore.”
She was lucky to have the certificate, if so. Then he noticed that it had been typed on a really old machine, probably not even electric. Letters hopped the lines here and there. A couple of number keys hadn't even hit the paper, and the exact time of birth and her weight weren't clear. But her name and her parents' names had been carefully entered above the small footprints.
Name of child: Erin Randall.
Sex: female. Born living.
Names of parents: Ernest and Ina Randall.
Suddenly he got it. “Your name is a blend of their first names.”
She seemed impressed. “That's right. Good guess. I was their one and only.”
He looked again at the footprints. It seemed wrong somehow, to ink an innocent newborn for an ID, but infants did get snatched now and then, sometimes right from a maternity ward, sometimes from a home. Not that he'd ever worked a case like that, but a buddy had.
He glanced at the embossed state seal that gleamed dull gold in the light. “So where's the official hospital picture of you as a newborn?”
“Gone. If it ever existed,” she said absently. “My mom said all my baby pictures were lost when we moved.”
“Oh. When was that?”
“I think I was about three. I don't remember anything about the first place we lived.”
An alarm went off deep in his mind. Losing baby pictures didn't fit with documenting everything and being obsessive about memories. Bannon made a mental note of the inconsistency but didn't comment on it. He watched her turn several more pages.
“Then who's that?” He pointed to a slightly blurred black-and-white photo of a baby. Not a newborn.
“My brother.”
Something she'd said the first time they'd had lunch came back to him. He should have thought of it before. “Didn't you say—”
“That I was the one and only. Well, I was, after him, that is. He died before I came along, my parents said.”
Bannon took a closer look at the photo. The baby boy was less than a year old, and he didn't resemble Erin at all.
“Can I see that?”
“Sure.”
She turned the scrapbook his way and he took the opportunity to study the whole page. There was a faint handwritten caption below the baby's photo.
Our little boy. Henry Adam Randall, age 9 months.
He turned it back toward Erin. “What happened to him? If you don't mind my asking.”
She shook her head. “They never really said. I got the idea it was some kind of illness. Not an accident or anything. But I didn't ask.”
“Not even when you were grown up?”
Erin pressed her lips together. “They didn't like talking about sad things. And by the time I turned twenty-six, they weren't around to ask.”

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