Serenity Harbor. RaeAnne Thayne

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      Milo clung to the leash handle as if his life depended on it and trotted after the retriever with Lizzie bringing up the rear.

      Bowie watched them go, aware of the familiar tangle of his emotions. He was in so far over his head with Milo, all he could see above him was darkness and uncertainty. If this autism specialist didn’t work, he wasn’t sure what he would do. He hated the idea of putting Milo in some kind of facility somewhere—avoiding that had been the entire reason he had agreed to become his guardian—but he couldn’t completely rule out that might be the best option, down the road.

      He didn’t have to worry about that right now, though, when he had people waiting for him. He tried to shift focus from Milo-worry to work-worry, aware the next few weeks were crucial for several of the projects he was spearheading at Caine Tech.

      This conference call with one of their major vendors in Asia was vital. If they didn’t iron out some of the problems now, the ripple effect would completely screw their production schedule.

      Thanks to the chaos with Milo, it felt like weeks since he had been able to fully focus on work—not a good situation when he was only just finding his way with his team at the new Haven Point facility.

      He knew just whom to blame for this frustration. His mother.

      An image of Stella the last time he had seen her flashed across his mind. He had been fifteen, almost the same age she had been when she gave birth to him. A child raising a child. The problem was, he eventually grew up. His mother had not.

      Growing up with Stella had been tumultuous at best, a nightmare much of the time.

      Guilt dug under his skin at the thought. He didn’t hate his mother. He never had, even after he had escaped the chaos. Yeah, she had been flighty and irresponsible, self-absorbed, emotional and totally without willpower.

      Alcohol, drugs, men. She used all of them with regularity.

      Milo’s early years apparently hadn’t been much different from his own. The social worker who had contacted him about Milo had pieced together enough information on his brother’s history to reveal that Stella had never really changed her ways. At the time of her death, she had been destitute, living on the streets of Portland with Milo, begging at street corners and high most of the time. Why his brother hadn’t been taken away from her years ago seemed to be a mystery to everybody in the system.

      Bo slid into his office chair, catching a view out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the lake in the distance and the soaring mountains beyond.

      He thought he had come so far in his own psyche. He hadn’t given much thought to his mother in several years, not since the private investigator he sent to find her came back empty-handed years ago.

      He should have kept looking.

      Again, guilt pinched at him—the familiar guilt of a son who loved his mother despite her failings and wanted more for her than the hardscrabble, free-living, moment-to-moment existence she insisted on.

      He had no choice but to think about her now.

      Milo—the troubled, silent, needy son she had given birth to more than twenty-five years after she had Bowie—was a constant reminder. The boy had his mother’s eyes. Their mother’s eyes. Mysterious, deep, dreamy.

      With one last sigh, he shoved away the memories and forced himself to focus on the man he had become, someone far more comfortable in the safe, predictable world of technology than with the murky morass of his past.

      * * *

      “THAT WENT WELL, don’t you think?”

      Bowie nodded at his personal assistant, the only person still linked into the video conference call. “Excellent. Sounds like with the information we gave them, they can iron out the supplier problems and be set to move into production by next quarter.”

      Peggy Luchino shifted in her chair. She was plump and pretty, with long curly hair and eyes that always seemed to smile. In the two months since he had come to the Haven Point facility, she had taken him under wing—somewhat like the older sister he never had.

      “Good work, Peggy. We never would have made so much progress if you hadn’t been there to keep us on track.”

      “Thanks.” She gave a rueful smile. “Even so, it went longer than we anticipated. Sorry about that.”

      He looked up at the clock above his desk and was shocked to realize he had been on the conference call for two solid hours. Amazing, how fast time went when he was solving a problem, making progress toward a goal. It had always been that way, since his first hacking attempts on a cobbled-together secondhand computer when he was eleven years old.

      “Not your fault.”

      “I’ll write up the transcript from the call and send you all salient info by first thing tomorrow.”

      “Thanks. Talk to you later.”

      When her image disappeared from the screen in front of him, Bowie stood, feeling a crick in his neck for the first time from being in one position too long. His stomach rumbled, too. He supposed he ought to grab some lunch before he dived in again.

      As Bowie tilted his head from side to side to ease some of the tension in his muscles and ligaments, the gleam of sunlight on water caught his gaze, and he looked out the window at the lake rippling in a summer afternoon.

      A quick walk out to the terrace would be just the thing to clear some of this murkiness out of his head, he decided.

      It was only after he headed out into the hallway that the reminder of his responsibilities suddenly crashed over him.

      Milo!

      He had told the neighbor girl he would be on the conference call for only thirty minutes or so and it was now more than double that. Shit! He was the worst guardian on the planet. Every time he thought he was starting to figure out this whole being-responsible-for-a-child thing, something like this happened to remind him of his inadequacies.

      Where were they? He rushed through the house, straining to hear any sound that might pinpoint their location, but heard only silence.

      Nothing new there. That was one of the toughest things about having a brother who didn’t speak. On the numerous occasions when Milo had slipped away, Bowie had discovered it was tough to find him.

      After a quick scan of the house didn’t reveal Milo or Lizzie, he remembered she had planned to take him for a walk on the shoreline trail. Was it possible something had happened to Milo? He had an odd fascination with the water, which scared the hell out of Bowie.

      Surely he would have heard from Lizzie if his brother fell in. Someone would have contacted him, right? Unless Lizzie hadn’t been able to call for help because she had somehow gone into the water, too...

      His mind racing with grim possibilities, he rushed out to the terrace, the last place he had seen them. Relief flooded through him when he spotted Milo at the water’s edge, poised to throw a small rock into the water.

      Close on its heels was more concern when Bowie realized his brother appeared to be alone, with no sign of Lizzie or Jerry Lewis.

      Bowie СКАЧАТЬ