Vickie Taylor - Keeping Caroline

She wouldn’t let him.

“Come on in,” Caroline invited, holding open the door behind her. Matt paused, evaluating her tone of voice. It fairly bubbled with levity. Too much levity.

She was up to something.

Inside, she practically skipped across the kitchen. “I’ll just check on the baby and then we’ll get started.”

Before Matt could respond, tell her this was a bad idea, her feet were pounding up the steps toward the nursery.

No way was he going to follow her up there.

Once again he cursed the storm front sweeping in from the west. For the past two days, since the run-in with Gem, he’d pretty much been able to dodge Caroline and, thank heaven, the children in her care. But the dark clouds and rumble of thunder overhead were about to end that streak.

He’d been thinking the rain would give him an excuse to take an afternoon off. Visit some old friends in town. No such luck. Caroline had asked him to help her indoors. She had ceiling fans to hang.

Ceiling fans. The two of them together on a ladder, no more than six inches apart. He’d be able to smell her lavender scent. Feel every breath she took. Watch the flecks of gold and black swirl in her sparkling irises. They’d talk, and he knew where the conversation would lead. The same place it always led.

Christ, he’d rather try to negotiate the devil out of hell than have to explain to her why he didn’t want a child while she looked at him with those furious, desperate eyes.

He closed the kitchen door behind Alf. The brass knob rattled in his hand. He’d have to fix that soon. A child could jimmy his way into the house with the back door lock dangling from its socket like a loose baby tooth.

Looking around the kitchen as if it were his own personal purgatory, his heart did a slow roll. He smelled fudge brownies. A dozen multicolored scribbles adorned the refrigerator. An army truck, complete with mounted machine gun, lay on the floor in front of the sink, perfectly placed to be tripped over. The sound of incessant banging on an electronic keyboard—the kind of noise only a kid could call music—pounded through the house from the dining room.

All of it, the sights, sounds, scents, could have belonged to any family. Even his, a few years ago.

Matt caught himself, stumbled through the kitchen on numb feet, passing Jeb and his keyboard in the dining room, and paced the living room, collecting himself.

Wondering what was taking Caroline so long, and what he was going to say to her when she returned, he paused at the bottom of the stairs. It was quiet up there.

As it was down here. The keyboard music had stopped.

“Caroline?”

No answer.

“Caroline? Is Jeb up there with you?”

Still no answer. Swearing under his breath, he headed for the dining room. It wasn’t his business. Caroline was the baby-sitter, not him. But he still had to be sure the boy was okay.

Matt found Jeb in the kitchen, with Alf. Blood pounding in his temples and a headache already well entrenched at the base of his skull, Matt swooped across the worn linoleum. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he roared.

Jeb pulled his head out of Alf’s fur, looked up with unseeing eyes. His thin arms clamped tighter around the dog’s neck. Alf thumped his tail and wheezed.

When Jeb didn’t answer, Matt unwound kid from dog. Holding Jeb by the upper arms, he lifted until the boy’s sneakers swung a foot off the floor. “I asked what you were doing.”

Jeb’s dark eyes pinched shut. His mouth gaped and pursed like a fish. But instead of an answer, the boy let out a wail that half the county would probably mistake for the tornado siren.

The hairs on the back of Matt’s neck jumped to attention. He almost dropped the kid in his hurry to save his eardrums.

The sound abated as quickly as it had begun. Jeb crouched on the cold floor, his chest heaving. His eyes rolled wildly.

Matt steadied himself with a breath, waiting for his buzzing nerves and ringing ears to quiet, then brushed his fingers across Jeb’s trembling knee. “Hey, kiddo—”

Hardly a blur he moved so fast, Jeb sprang to his feet, lashed a solid kick into Matt’s knee and squirreled under the table. Against the wall, he curled into a ball, arms locked around his knees and head buried between his elbows, and rocked himself, sobbing silently.

Matt watched him, guilt and self-loathing swelling inside him. Jesus, God, what had he done?

Bare feet slapped across the floor behind Matt. Caroline flung herself into the room in a dead run, grabbing onto the doorjamb to stop her momentum. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

Her gaze fell to the crumpled boy beneath the table. She dropped to her knees next to him. “Oh my God.” She reached out to Jeb. “Hey, little rebel. What is it? What’s wrong?”

Jeb pulled tighter into his little ball.

The fire in Caroline’s eyes scalded Matt. “What happened? What did you do to him?”

Matt tried to move. To help her. But his feet might as well have been stuck in cement. The cement might as well have been sinking in a foul river. He couldn’t breathe, either.

She gave him one heartbeat to answer. Two. Then her lips curled back in a snarl. “Get out.” Fury swam close to the surface in her voice. “Get the hell out. Now!”

He stumbled back a step. Then another. He turned. He could hear Caroline cooing and clucking behind him, childish, nonsense words. The screen door slammed shut behind him as he made it out of the house. Out onto the porch. Into the air.

But he still couldn’t breathe.

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