3. Luke
CHAPTER 3
Luke
Uncle time was one of my favorite things. My sister, Annika, had asked me to come over and hang out with her kids for a while so she could get some work done. I was more than happy to help. I stood outside in her backyard, watching my nieces and nephews run through a sprinkler, their squeals of laughter filling the air.
I could think of worse ways to spend a hot summer afternoon.
Annika and her husband Levi Bailey were at the forefront of the Haven family baby explosion. They had four kids—eleven-year-old Thomas, seven-year-old twins Emma and Juliet, and four-year-old Will.
Thomas had a sperm donor out there somewhere, and if that shithead ever showed his face in our town, he’d be facing a wall of Haven—and Bailey—brothers, ready to rearrange his face. But Levi had stepped up as a dad to Thomas from the beginning—a lot like my parents had with each other’s kids when they got married.
My dad, Paul Haven, had three boys—Josiah, Garrett, and me—and my mom, Marlene, had three—Reese, Theo, and Zachary. Then they had Annika together. If someone asked, I actually had to stop and think about who was biologically related to who. We’d all been a family for so long, no one even thought about it anymore.
Annika and Levi were like that—they were just a family. The fact that Levi wasn’t Thomas’s biological father didn’t matter. Levi was his dad.
I admired that about them. Hell, I admired that about my parents. They’d taken a shitty situation and turned us into a family. Granted, we’d driven them crazy—six little boys so close in age would do that. But we were probably a lot less screwed up than we could have been.
Okay, so I was kind of screwed up. But it could have been worse. At least I wasn’t Reese. Our oldest brother had bailed, taking off for who knows where, and no one except Mom had heard from him in years.
Jerk.
“Careful, Juliet,” Thomas said as his sister did a cartwheel through the spray of water.
“I am being careful.”
I just smiled. Thomas was the mini-dad of their family, always looking out for his younger siblings. I doubted they appreciated it, but I thought it was pretty cool.
“Who wants a popsicle?” Annika called as she opened the sliding glass door.
My hand shot into the air.
She rolled her eyes at me. “Okay, Uncle Luke, but we’ll go in reverse age order.”
“Me! Me! Me!” Will chanted, jumping up and down in his bright red swim trunks.
Annika handed him a popsicle, and he immediately tore open the wrapper and bit the entire top off. The other kids took theirs in turn, and she held up the last two. “These might both be orange, or maybe one is red.”
I grabbed the one in her left hand. “Either one is fine. Thanks, Sis. ”
She unwrapped hers. Red. “No problem. Thank you so much for coming over. I actually got some work done.”
“Happy to.” I set my wrapper on the patio table and had a taste of mine. Orange. Not bad. “They’re pretty much entertaining themselves out here anyway.”
“Nothing like a sprinkler on a hot day.” She tilted her head as she ate her popsicle. “Imagine what it will be like when the babies are all running around in a few years.”
“Chaos,” I said with a soft laugh. “Beautiful chaos.”
The babies referred to the second round of the Haven family baby explosion. Back in March, Garrett and Harper welcomed their surprise baby girl, Isla, making Garrett’s teenage son Owen a big brother. Only a couple of months later, Zachary and Marigold had their first baby, a little girl named Emily. And rounding out the baby-splosion was Josiah and Audrey’s baby girl, Abby, born just a few weeks after Emily.
I figured that was just what happened when three of your brothers got married in the same year.
It looked like the weddings-and-babies phase had died down, and everyone seemed to be enjoying a relatively uneventful summer. I didn’t want to say it was too uneventful, considering the alternative in my family seemed to be the opposite. Between Audrey’s stalker, Marigold’s abduction, and Garrett’s cold case turning deadly, we’d been through a lot in the past couple of years.
I certainly wasn’t going to wish for another bad guy to mess up our lives, but I still felt restless, even after racing the other night.
We hung out for a few more minutes while the kids finished their popsicles, then Annika ushered them inside to clean up and dry off. I went in after them, and she put me to work chopping tomatoes and cucumbers while she helped the kids get dressed and set them up in the living room with a show .
“Thanks again,” she said when she came back in the kitchen. “I probably should have invited you to stay for dinner before I gave you a job.”
“No worries. Levi must be on duty?” Her husband was a firefighter with the Tilikum Fire Department.
She nodded. “Until tomorrow morning.”
The sound of the TV carried in from the other room, and a female voice caught my attention. It was sultry, almost raspy, but feminine. My heart rate picked up, and I felt a hint of adrenaline. Not the high of a race, but a familiar buzz flowed through my body.
That was weird.
“What are they watching?”
“It’s a cartoon called Enchanted Hollow . They’re obsessed. I thought the girls were past their watch-the-same-thing-eight-hundred-times-in-a-row phase, but apparently not.”
The voice came again. I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying, but the laugh made it clear she was the villain. I found myself cracking a smile.
Annika was busy prepping the rest of the meal, so I didn’t resist the strange magnetism of the voice. I wandered into the living room where Juliet and Emma sat on the couch with Will wedged between them. Thomas sat in an armchair.
“What are you watching?” I asked, nodding toward the TV.
Juliet’s eyes were glued to the screen. She didn’t even blink. Will was similarly mesmerized.
Emma tore her gaze away. “ Enchanted Hollow .”
“Yeah? Is it good?”
She smiled. “It’s my favorite. There’s princesses, and they’re twins like me and Juliet.”
“And the bad lady,” Will said, pointing at the screen.
I glanced at the TV. The bad lady, as Will called her, was the character with the voice that had caught my attention. She was drawn with an otherworldly but severe beauty, full of contrast. Dark hair that was long and flowing, alongside sharp cheekbones and a prominent jawline. Big blue eyes, dark red lips, and she wore a black gown that seemed to float around her.
“Soon, they’ll see their mistake,” she said. Her mesmerizing voice wrapped around me like smoke. “They’ll pay for their disrespect.”
“She’s so scary,” Juliet whispered.
Emma’s eyes were wide as she nodded in agreement.
The character gestured with her hands, casting a spell, and mist swirled around her until she disappeared.
It was oddly disappointing.
I glanced at Thomas. “You like the show too, or do you just put up with it?”
“No, it’s good. Queen Ione turns into a dragon in one of the episodes. It’s cool.”
“Shh,” Emma said, putting a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell. Uncle Luke hasn’t seen it before.”
“That’s okay, kiddo,” I said. “I don’t mind spoilers.”
Suddenly, Thomas jumped up from his seat. “I almost forgot! Wait here.”
I sat down next to Juliet while Thomas hurried down the hall to his room. A moment later, he came out with his hands behind his back.
“We got you something,” he said. “It was supposed to be for Christmas last year, but Will was playing with them and lost them.”
“I did not,” Will protested.
Thomas raised his eyebrows at him.
Will grinned. “Oh yeah, I did. Sorry.”
“Anyway,” Thomas said with a slight roll of his eyes, “I found it the other day. Here.”
He handed me a small blue pouch that cinched with a drawstring. I opened it and emptied the contents into my hand. There was a little toy sports car—cherry-red—a pocket-sized flashlight, and a small plastic compass.
I held up the car. “Do you know what this is?”
“A cool sports car.”
“It’s a very cool sports car. This is a Lamborghini Essenza SCV12. They only make them for racing.”
“Have you driven one?”
“Afraid not. Those bad boys cost over two million dollars.”
His smile faded, and a look of seriousness passed over his features. “This didn’t cost that much.”
I laughed as I put everything in the bag and cinched it closed. “Of course not. This is awesome, buddy. Thank you.”
“There was another car in there. A black one. But, Will.” He rolled his eyes again. “If I find it, I’ll give it to you.”
“I didn’t know it was Uncle Luke’s,” Will protested.
“It’s all good, buddy,” I said. “I have my Lambo.”
I set the bag near the door so I wouldn’t forget it when I left, then went back to the kitchen to help Annika finish dinner while the kids watched their show. The evil queen came on again. It was the strangest thing, but hearing it gave me another burst of adrenaline. What was it about that voice?
Was it weird to have a crush on a cartoon character?
My curiosity was soon forgotten as we all sat down for dinner—oven-baked chicken and salad. I stayed long enough to help clean up, then spent the next twenty minutes saying goodbye and giving Emma and Juliet each “just one more” hug.
Before I pulled away from the house, I put the bag with Thomas’s gift in the glove box of the blue 1970 Chevelle I’d restored the year before. A mild sense of restlessness made me antsy. It was still early, and I thought about going to the Timberbeast Tavern for a drink, but that didn’t sound appealing.
Maybe I’d just go for a drive. It was a nice evening. A haze of smoke from wildfires deeper in the mountains had lingered for the past several weeks, but it had cleared up after a hard rain the other day, leaving the sky clear and blue.
After leaving my sister’s neighborhood, I headed through town. Summer was tourist season, and the sidewalks were alive with activity—families, visitors, kids skateboarding. I passed Lumberjack Park, where evening picnickers sat on blankets, and someone threw a ball for their dog.
I kept going, passing the turn that would have taken me to my house, and headed toward the highway. As I came around a bend, a car drove right out in front of me.
Adrenaline surged through me, and my instincts kicked in as I hit the brakes. I swerved enough to miss the other car without losing control and winding up in the ditch.
Whoever was driving the second car overcorrected, tires squealing on the asphalt. I caught a quick glimpse of a woman with a dark ponytail as she spun and wound up facing the other direction.
Instead of driving off, I pulled over. I wasn’t mad. Not really. I wasn’t about to admit—not even to myself—how much I liked the surge of adrenaline. How much more alive I felt after that near miss. And even though she’d obviously pulled out in front of me without looking, she hadn’t hit me. But she’d stopped in the middle of the road and hadn’t moved. I just wanted to make sure she was all right.
My car faced her passenger side. I got out and hesitated. Was she going to get out? Drive away?
Her door opened, and she got out, hurrying around the front of her car.
And giving me another hit of adrenaline, potent and intoxicating. My eyes widened, my heart thumped hard in my chest, and it almost felt like someone had kicked the air out of my lungs.
Melanie Andolini .
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.” She stopped dead in her tracks, right in the middle of the road. “Luke?”
I couldn’t keep the shock out of my voice. “Melanie?”
We stared at each other for a second or two. Although I saw her family around—small-town life—I hadn’t seen her in years. Especially this close.
The fact that she was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever known could have swept through me like a late summer breeze, stirring pleasant nostalgia. Even latent attraction.
Maybe if she had been anyone else, it would have.
But she was Melanie Andolini, my high school girlfriend and first love. And if there was anything she was good at, it was pissing me off. Even after all those years.
“What the hell?” I snapped. “You almost ran into me.”
Her expression shifted from surprise to defiance. “What? No. You almost hit me .”
“Mel, you pulled out in front of me without looking.”
“How do you know where I was looking?”
“Obviously not where you were going. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have pulled out like that.”
“You came out of nowhere.” She gestured emphatically to the road. “How fast were you going?”
I ran my tongue over my teeth. Probably too fast, but that wasn’t the point. “I wasn’t going light speed. If you’d have looked, you would have seen me.”
“I did look. You were speeding.”
The truth was, we were probably both in the wrong. And no harm had been done. I could have pointed that out. De-escalated the situation and had us both going calmly on our way.
But I didn’t.
“If we’d been in an accident, you’d be getting the ticket,” I said, not bothering to keep the smugness out of my tone. Because I was right, damn it.
“Well, we didn’t get in an accident, did we? ”
“Because I prevented it.”
“Aren’t you the big hero.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.
It figured that the first time we saw each other in forever, we’d start fighting. “You haven’t changed at all, have you? Still a pain in my ass.”
Her eyebrows lifted, and she planted her hands on her hips. “Oh yes, I’m definitely the unreasonable one.”
“I didn’t say you were unreasonable. I said you were a pain.”
“What’s the difference?”
Tension rippled through my shoulders and back. She was so aggravating.
My eyes flicked to her mouth, and I was suddenly filled with the memory of what those lips tasted like.
Fuck.
Anger surged through me like a hot wave. I opened my mouth to go off on her, but a car pulled up on the other side of hers and stopped.
“You’re blocking the road,” I snapped.
“Thanks, I couldn’t see that.” She spun around, whipping her ponytail, and stomped back to her car.
So dramatic.
I stepped back so I wasn’t on the road while she got in her car and backed up enough that the other guy could get around her. I gave him an apologetic wave, and he nodded as he drove by.
Melanie backed up a little farther, then seemed to change her mind about which direction she wanted to go. She cranked the steering wheel in one direction, pulled forward a couple of feet, then hit the brakes.
Her scowl of frustration as she tried to correct made me chuckle. Served her right.
For what, I didn’t know, but that wasn’t the point. She just pissed me off .
Crossing my arms, I watched her go. She shot me a glare as she passed, as if the whole thing was my fault.
“Great to see you again, Mel,” I called out.
She flipped me off through the window.
That made me laugh. Fucking Melanie.
Her car was out of sight, but the heady buzz of adrenaline hadn’t abated. I still felt the tingle in my limbs, and my heart thumped in my chest. I wasn’t sure what that was about. A close call on a side street wasn’t a big deal.
Seeing her wasn’t a big deal either. She was probably in town visiting. Last I’d heard, she lived in Seattle and was married to some lawyer guy.
She’d go back to her life, and I’d go back to mine. I wouldn’t think about her again.
And when I got in my car, I actually believed that was true.