Wilde at Heart (17 page)

“No,” he said with absolutely no inflection in his voice.

“Yeah.” A small ache throbbed in the center of her chest. She resisted the urge to rub at it. “Me neither.”

They rode the last bit of their trip in silence until Reece guided the SUV into the driveway of a gorgeous brick colonial that looked like something out of a magazine.

“We’re here,” he said, shutting off the engine.

“Where?”

“The house I grew up in.”

She looked at the house again and, yes, she could so easily picture that childhood, one so far removed from her own she’d often wondered if that kind of life was even real. But she could picture Christmas lights under the eaves of the pointed roof and a wreath on the front door welcoming visitors. Could see the five Wilde boys running around in the large, sloped front yard, starting snowball wars and building forts. During the spring and summer, they probably climbed that big maple tree and swung in the tire still hanging from the lowest branch. They had probably run through that front door with all kinds of bumps and bruises and scrapes, hoping for their mother to kiss the boo-boos better. Maybe there had even been a broken arm or two and a few rushed trips to the nearest emergency room.

It was the kind of house she and Eva had dreamed about growing up in, the kind they’d seen on TV shows featuring happy families.

Shelby blinked hard, appalled that her vision had started to blur. “Why did you bring me here?”

“You didn’t believe me when I said I know how different feels.” He pushed open his door, and cold air rushed inside. “Come on.”

Like the driveway, the path to the door had been cleared of snow recently. She knew none of the brothers lived here, so they must have hired someone to plow.

No, not “they,” she realized, watching as Reece found the right key and slid it into the lock. This was all his doing. He paid for the upkeep of his empty childhood home. There was something tragic about that, and her heart melted a little.

Inside, the house wasn’t dusty, but it did smell unused. It was like a time capsule, transporting her twenty years into the past, as if the brothers couldn’t bear to change anything from the way it was the day their parents died.

Reece moved around the living room, turning on lamps, upping the temperature on the thermostat until the heat kicked on. Then he just stood there in the middle of the room, seemingly at a loss.

She wasn’t sure what he expected her to say, so she said nothing and wandered. The stairs to the second floor were positioned at the back of the living room and shared a wall with the dining room, which had a table big enough to fit the entire Wilde family—dad, mom, and all five boys. She imagined dinnertime at that table had been a loud, exasperating, and entertaining family affair.

Colorful marks on the narrow strip of wall between the stairs and the dining room caught her attention, and she moved in for a closer look. A height chart, indicating the Wilde boys’ growth from toddlers to young men. She could track Reece from the time he was a year old, all the way up to the last mark, dated several months before his parents died. He would have been thirteen at the time and looked to have hit a growth spurt, shooting up over his younger brothers, though Greer was still taller than him by quite a bit. Made sense because Greer was a huge guy. Like, intimidatingly big.

She touched that last mark, imagined the two older boys groaning and rolling their eyes as their mother corralled them for the measuring. “You were happy.”

Reece moved up behind her, close enough that the subtle scent of his cologne wrapped around her like a comforting hug. She smiled back at him. “I can tell. You were all happy here.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he also reached out, dragged his fingers along the marks. “We were.”

“I’m sorry that ended.”

“Yeah. Me too.” After another moment, he shook his head and grasped her hand, pulling her up the stairs. On the second floor, he opened the first door they came to and flipped on the light. “This was Greer’s room.”

Like the living room, it looked untouched, as if teenage Greer would be home from football practice at any moment. There were posters of sports icons, and one of Pamela Anderson from her
Baywatch
days. Several trophies and awards lined the dresser—baseball, football, wrestling. He had pictures of his friends on his desk and nightstand, including several of a pretty blonde girl who must have been his high school sweetheart.

Reece continued on down the hall and opened the next door. “This was the twins’ room.”

Fascinated, she stepped inside and immediately knew which side of the large room was Vaughn’s and which was Cam’s. Cam’s more laid-back attitude showed in every nuance of his side of the room, and he was the kind of teenager who was interested in music and pop culture. Vaughn’s side of the room had a definite counterculture vibe to it with darker colors and Goth-rock band posters decorating the walls.

She picked up a photo of the twins from Cam’s dresser. Teenage Cam was in his usual jeans and T-shirt combo—though the jeans were baggy, more in line with the style of the mid-90s. Teenage Vaughn was dressed head-to-toe in black, wearing a lip ring, spiky black hair, and a bad attitude.

“Vaughn went through a Goth phase,” Reece said from the doorway.

“So did I.” She set down the photo and grinned over at him. “And, you know, I’m not surprised. I can see why the culture would have appealed to him. Vaughn has this natural…intensity. As a teenager, he must have been a hormonal wreck trying to get control of it.”

“He was, but he got over it when he joined the navy. Ended up funneling all that intensity, as you put it, into SEAL training. Probably the only thing that got him through.” He tilted his head to indicate the corner of the room where a pile of hockey gear sat. “But even at his angstiest in high school, he never stopped playing hockey. Both of the twins lived for the game. They were good, too. Dad always fantasized about one or both of them going pro.”

“But they both went into the military instead?”

“Greer’s orders.” He shut off the light and waited for her to join him in the hallway again. “After we lost our parents, the military was the only way we were all going to college. Jude and I both chose college first and enrolled in ROTC—NROTC for Jude since he chose the marines. Greer and the twins went directly into the military and studied for their degrees while serving.”

The next door he opened led to Jude’s old room. Typical teenage boy, the walls lined with late 90s pop culture and
Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition
covers, but there was color here, a playfulness that was lacking from his brothers’ spaces. A handful of old board games sat on a bookshelf, along with some comics and video games. He had a few trophies as well, appeared to have played football and baseball, like his oldest brother had. There were also pictures of him hiking, rock climbing, kayaking, surfing—he’d been more outdoorsy than the rest of his brothers.

“It looks like Jude,” she said and backed out of the room. “But I don’t get why you’re showing me all this.”

He motioned to the final room at the end of the hall. “My old room.” She waited for a moment, but he didn’t move, so she walked over and opened the door herself, surprised to find a set of stairs leading up to the attic.

“They kept you in the attic?” She meant it as a joke, but couldn’t quite hide the sudden horror that gripped her by the throat. Had their family not been as picture-perfect as it first appeared? Oh God. For his sake, she hoped they had been.

He gave a small snort of laughter and shook his head. “Relax. They didn’t lock me away. I chose it. More room up there.”

Curious now, she climbed the stairs. His room took up the entire attic, and he had computers everywhere, in all states of disassembly. Instead of posters of a favorite band, he had one featuring the cast of
Stargate
and pencil drawings of fantastical creatures. His shelves were stacked with books and comics. All neat and categorized, demonstrating his OCD.

It was all so different from his brothers’ rooms, she stopped short and blinked in stunned surprised.

This
was what his apartment should look like.

This
was Reece.

He had a bunch of gaming systems pulled apart, including some newer ones. While his brothers’ rooms had been frozen in time the year they each left for college or the military, Reece’s room had life.

She turned to him. “You still come here.”

“Sometimes. I do my best thinking here. It’s where I came up with the military simulations that started DMW Systems.” He walked out in front of her toward the desk, pushed aside a plastic crate of computer parts, and gathered up several of the notebooks stacked there.

“What are those?”

He rubbed at the back of his neck. “Just…something I’ve been meaning to pick up.”

Okay, he didn’t want her to know. She could live with that. He was already sharing so much more with her than she ever thought he would.

She turned in a slow circle, then walked to the other side of the attic, where his bed sat between two dormer windows.

“So this is it,” she said and sat down on the bed. He should have looked silly standing there in his expensive suit, but he appeared more at home here than he ever had in his upscale apartment. She patted the mattress next to her. “This is what you wanted to show me?”

He set his notebooks by the staircase and crossed to her in several long strides. The mattress sank with his weight, and she slid toward him. Their thighs touched, but he didn’t draw away from her, and she wasn’t about to draw his attention to it.

“I’ve always been different from my brothers,” he said. “They’ve never understood me. Dad…” He sighed heavily. “He didn’t understand me, either. He tried, but we had nothing in common, and he didn’t know what to make of me. I can’t throw a ball to save my life, and even though I’m great on ice skates, I hurt myself every time I pick up a hockey stick.”

She smiled at the mental image—could totally picture that—and leaned her head on his shoulder, lacing their fingers together. “Did your dad ostracize you for it?”

“No. Not on purpose at least. He’d take my brothers out to hockey games, football, baseball. I just wasn’t ever interested, so I never went. He tried taking me to science fairs and things like that, but he was always bored out of his mind. Finally, when I was about ten, Mom was exasperated enough with the two of us circling each other that she signed us both up for karate lessons. And that was it. Our common ground. It was the perfect blend of physical for him and mental for me. I even continued studying after he died. I wanted to make at least second level black belt, so it’d kind of be like getting two. One for me and one for him.” His voice cracked a little on the last word, and he glanced away.

God, what would it feel like to love a parent so much that twenty years after they were gone, you still grieved?

Bittersweet, Shelby imagined, but she’d never know for sure. She’d never feel for her mother what Reece felt for his parents. If Katrina died tomorrow, the shock of it would hurt, yeah, but the loss of the possibility of a good relationship with her mother would hurt worse. And in her heart, she knew she’d be mostly…relieved.

“I wish I could have met your parents, Reece. They sound like good people.”

“They were.” He gave a small smile, a sexy uptick at the corner of his mouth. “Mom would have loved you. Dad…he wouldn’t have known what to make of you, either.”

She nudged him with her shoulder. “We’re two peas in a pod.”

He laughed. “Hardly.”

“You should laugh more often.”

“Yeah?” He glanced over at her, a mischievous glint in his eyes as he lowered his head, closing the distance between their mouths. “Does it turn you on?”

“Oh yeah,” she breathed, in the moment before his lips touched hers.

Reece took his time with the kiss, a slow caress with no sense of urgency. Just like that last kiss in the closet before Dylan interrupted them. She trembled at the sweetness behind it and fisted her hands in his jacket, intending to push him away, but instead drawing him in closer. She didn’t want this tenderness from him, though. Hard, dirty, lust-slaking sex? Yes, absolutely. But anything more than that, no matter how much she secretly yearned for it, would only end in broken hearts. It was too much.

For once, she broke the kiss first.

He drew away slightly, confusion in his eyes. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t sound very convincing, even to her own ears, so she made herself smile despite her heartbeat thundering nervously. “Yeah, everything’s fine. But we should go. It’s getting late, and I’m supposed to meet with the arson investigators tomorrow to talk about The Bean Gallery.”

The confusion morphed into concern. “Did you tell them you’re the owner?”

“Yes. They weren’t happy with me for withholding the information.”

And the concern nosedived into alarm. He stood. “They don’t think—are you a suspect?”

“No. No,” she added more firmly when he started to pace.

He stopped in front of her. “I’m going with you tomorrow. I want to tell them I was there.”

“That’s up to you, but I don’t think it’s necessary.”

“I do.” He held out a hand to help her up. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter Seventeen

O
n the way downstairs, Shelby paused and studied the framed photos hanging in the stairway. She hadn’t noticed them earlier, but now that she knew more about his family, she had to stop and look. Some candid shots, some posed, some obviously from school. She studied those first because school photos were always a riot. They appeared to have been taken the school year before their parents died—Reece was about twelve in his.

“Oh, man. You
were
a nerd!” An adorable nerd, yes, with his unruly dark hair and clunky glasses.

“What do you mean,
were
?” he said from the bottom of the stairs. “I still am.”

“You said it, not me.” She traced the frame of the photo. “Were you picked on a lot in school?” In her experience, high schoolers mercilessly teased anyone not like them. She’d certainly wanted to go all
Carrie
on more than one “cool” kid during those endless four years.