If there was one person in the world he didn’t want in his head, it was his big brother. Conall was freaked by the idea that he had, unknowingly, taken Duncan as his role model and in so doing connected with a pair of wounded kids in a way he himself would never be able to manage.
Didn’t want to manage.
They’re not my responsibility.
What he’d done was no biggie, he tried to tell himself. He’d given them a little fun. Like Duncan had given him some fun, that long ago day. That hadn’t meant anything, either.
But that was a lie, he knew. It had meant something. It always did. Duncan had been more of a father to him than their biological father ever was.
Yeah, he’d wanted more from Duncan than he ever got. He cringed at the memory of himself, so hungry for affection, desperately soaking up what he did get.
In the end, though, Duncan had become his father in every meaningful sense. By then, he’d have sneered at the idea of running through the sprinkler on a hot day with his brothers. He was too tough for that, too alienated, too angry.
And so Duncan had done what a father should do: he’d forced compliance, he’d scared Conall into toeing the line. There were years Conall had been grimly focused on only one thing: getting the hell away from home. He’d been a shit, he realized in retrospect, still angry for reasons he no longer understood.
He hadn’t wanted to be a responsibility. He’d wanted to be loved.
Would he have accepted affection if Duncan offered it? Conall asked himself and knew the answer.
No.
Would Duncan have taken on the responsibility of his brothers, the burden, if he hadn’t loved them?
Maybe. Duncan was the kind of man to see life as a series of responsibilities. He’d never evade one.
Panic was curling tighter in Conall’s belly. He lay absolutely still in bed and his heart raced as if he’d just slammed through a locked door with gun drawn.
Hell, yes, Duncan had loved them.
Why had Niall been able to see it and I couldn’t?
Why did it still matter?
Especially now? Why did those two grieving boys make him feel as if he was being gutted? Why did he feel as if Lia was seeing more than anyone else ever had when she looked at him?
And why did she scare the crap out of him?
“You awake?” Henderson murmured.
“Yeah.”
“Our neighbors didn’t forget to take their trash out after all.”
Conall swung his feet over the side of the bed, intensely glad of a distraction. “They didn’t want to put it out too early.”
“Most people don’t wait until the middle of the night.”
“Most people aren’t worried about someone going through their garbage.” He stopped beside Henderson, who still had his eye to the scope. “How many cans?”
“Only one.”
He grunted. “As soon as he gets back, I’ll go take a look.”
They could both hear the pickup driving out to the paved road; pausing, then coming back. The pickup pulled into the garage without allowing a good look at the driver’s face.
“Damn it,” Henderson muttered, as the garage door came down. “You want me to go out there?”
“Nah, I’ll do it,” Conall said. And after sitting up here in this damn attic for nearly a week, he was desperate to take action—even if that action was digging through someone’s potato peelings and empty soup cans. In sudden amusement, he said, “I take it our neighbors don’t recycle. Tut, tut.”
Lia, of course, recycled religiously. Aluminum cans, paper and cardboard, plastic. She even cut the tops off her soup cans and ran them through the dishwasher so her recyclable goods were clean. As a result, she’d put out two containers: one garbage, one recycling. She was the first person he’d ever encountered who was so conscientious, and yet also willing to break the law.
He pulled on jeans and jacket, stuck his gun at the small of his back and slipped out of the house as quietly as possible. He carried a key so he could lock behind him. He didn’t like the idea of leaving the inhabitants of this house vulnerable.
When he got out to the corner, he had to poke through several cans before he found the right one. Fortunately, the other neighbors on the road thought nothing of throwing away advertising circulars and the leftovers of bill paying that had their names and addresses on them. Only one can had a few ads addressed to Current Resident but nothing more personal.