Between Love and Duty

“I can’t do anything with your brothers. You’re an adult now. You don’t need me anymore.”

What was she talking about?

“I’m already packed,” she said. “I wanted to stay until you got home. To…explain.”

Explain what? He only stared.

“I’m leaving,” his mother said flatly. “Your aunt Patty is in Sacramento. She told me I could stay with her until I got on my feet. I don’t want anyone but you to know where I’ve gone.”

“You’re…leaving?” His voice cracked this time, as if he was a little kid and it was beginning to change.

“Yes. You should, too. Maybe Jed’s parents would put you up until you go in August.”

This was like an out-of-body experience. He watched himself standing in the doorway, gaping. Heard himself say, “But…Conall.”

She shrugged. “He’s not your responsibility.”

“He’s my brother.”

His mother had aged. Between the moment he walked in the house and now, she’d added ten more years. She only shook her head. “There’s nothing either of us can do for him, or Niall, either. Face it.” She rose to her feet; her voice hardened. “I have.”

“You’re just…taking off,” he said in disbelief.

“That’s right.” She walked toward him. He had to fall back to let her by. She paused briefly; he thought she kissed his cheek, although he wasn’t positive. “You’re a good boy, Duncan,” his mother murmured, so softly he might have imagined that, too. A moment later he heard the front door open and close.

Her car started. She backed out.

He hadn’t yet returned to his body. He was afraid to. The house was utterly quiet.

His father had been sentenced today to ten years in the Monroe Correctional Complex. His mother had driven away. Apparently she intended to keep going, all the way to California. She thought he should go upstairs, pack his things and leave, too, so that his brother Conall would come home to find no one.

There’s nothing either of us can do for him, or Niall, either.

But he’s twelve years old! A kid. Really, so was Niall.

Not your responsibility.

Then whose were they?

Duncan’s heart was thudding as though he’d sprinted the homestretch of a five-mile run. His breath came in great gasps, like an old-fashioned bellows. His hands had formed fists at his sides.

Not your responsibility.

Then whose? Whose? he raged silently.

Upstairs he had a packet from the university. He was still waiting for a dorm roommate assignment, but he’d already chosen his classes. He was this close to escaping. The freedom had shimmered in front of him since he started high school and understood what he had to do to attain it. Good grades, scholarships, and he was gone.

The promise was so beautiful, he stared at it with burning eyes, understanding now what his mother had seen as she sat there at the kitchen table. Not the here and now, but what could be.

If only he, too, agreed that his brothers weren’t his responsibility.

Duncan made an animal sound of pain and fell to his knees. He pressed his forehead against the door frame and hung on.

There was a reason college and escaping home and family had always shimmered before his vision. That’s what mirages did.

CHAPTER ONE

IT HAD BEEN A PISSER of a day, and Duncan MacLachlan’s mood was bleak. He had had to personally arrest one of his officers, a five-year veteran, for blackmailing a fifteen-year-old girl into performing an act of oral sex on him.

It didn’t get any worse than that. Rendahl had betrayed the public trust. He’d also been so stupid he had apparently forgotten that his squad car was equipped with a video camera and microphone that uploaded wirelessly. Duncan grunted. Stupidity was the least of Rendahl’s sins. Ugly reality was that he was a twenty-seven-year-old married man who’d blackmailed and terrorized an already frightened girl into fulfilling his sexual fantasy.

Duncan realized his teeth were grinding together and he made himself relax. The dentist was already threatening him with having to wear some damn plastic mouth guard at night. “Find another way to express your tension,” Dr. Foster had suggested.

Today, Duncan would really have liked to express it by planting his fist in that son of a bitch’s face. Hearing his nose crunch and seeing the blood spurt would have worked fine, if only as a temporary fix.

Instead, he’d gone by the book, because that’s what he did. He’d been his usual icy self. His only consolation was the way Rendahl and his attorney both had shrunk from him. They’d seen something in his eyes that he hadn’t otherwise let show by the slightest twitch of a muscle on his face.

To cap his perfect day, he’d held a press conference announcing the arrest while maintaining the girl’s privacy. He had had to ignore most of the shouted questions. How did you explain something like this when you couldn’t understand it yourself?

He’d come home and planted himself, cold beer in hand, in front of a Mariners game on TV. He’d gotten up for a couple of replacements, thought about dinner and settled for a sandwich. Purple and secretive, dusk finally crept through the windows. Duncan hadn’t turned on a light, inside or out. The game hadn’t worked any magic; he didn’t know the final score and didn’t care. At last he flicked the TV off with the remote and settled in his recliner, brooding.

How could such a lowlife have passed under his radar for five years? Gotten satisfactory ratings in annual reviews? Rendahl had fooled a lot of people. Duncan liked to think he knew the men and women who worked for him, even if there were seventy-four at last count. Knew their strengths, their weaknesses; what motivated them, what tempted them. Police Captain Duncan MacLachlan hadn’t gotten where he was by misjudging people.

Dusk became night, and still he sat there, disinclined to go to bed, uninterested in reading or finding out what might be on television. The darkness wasn’t complete, not with streetlamps, the Baileys’ front porch light across the street, occasional passing headlights. It suited his mood to feel as if he was part of the night, invisible. Anonymous.

The recliner was comfortable enough that Duncan began to nod off. Rousing himself enough to get to bed seemed like too much effort. If he woke up later, fine. He let himself relax into sleep.

The tinkle of shattering glass shot him into wakefulness, instantly alert and incredulous. Unbelievable. Somebody was breaking into his house. He immediately understood why. He hadn’t turned lights on and off the way he usually did. To somebody who hadn’t seen him pull into the garage at six o’clock, it would have looked as if nobody was home.

He might get a stress reliever after all, he thought with black humor.

Duncan didn’t lower the recliner; it might have creaked. Instead he reached for his weapon, which he’d earlier dropped on the side table along with his badge, and eased himself out of the chair. The fact that he’d kicked off his dress shoes was good. He could move far more silently in stockinged feet.

He used the light filtering in the front window to cross the living room without having to feel his way. The further tinkle of glass told him the intruder was brushing shards from the frame before climbing in. Or while climbing in. He knew it was the window in the utility room. Any second he’d hear…

Thud.

He’d left the wicker hamper of dirty clothes right in the middle of the small room. So his intruder didn’t have a flashlight, or hadn’t turned it on yet.

Duncan slipped down the hall and stationed himself to one side of the open doorway to the utility room. What he wanted to know was whether he had one trespasser, or more.

A dark shadow passed him. After a moment, he risked a look into the utility room. His vision was well-adjusted to the lack of light. Empty.

One, then.

He tracked the figure creeping down the hall then moved with a couple of long strides. Duncan slammed into the intruder and took him to the floor, where he held him down effortlessly and pressed the barrel of his gun against his neck.

“Police,” he barked. “You’re under arrest.”