He let the flimsy door slam shut behind him. Through the haze of green mesh, he saw Beau staring at the television, arms across his chest, body rigid.
Daniel sighed and stood there, hands on his hips, and contemplated his sandaled feet. Here he was, denying his brother the pleasure of a ride to the damn train station. That was small of him. Really small. Maybe Jo was right. Maybe he was taking life too seriously.
He lifted his head. “On second thought,” he said through the screen, “I could use some company.”
A man transformed, his anger forgotten, Beau jumped to his feet.
“We don’t want to be late,” Daniel said, even though he knew it was useless to try to hurry his brother. As with his morning ablutions, Beau had a certain procedure he had to adhere to before leaving the house.
He checked to make sure everything was in place-his shirt tucked in, his belt through every loop of his jeans. Then he grabbed his Velcro running shoes.
Beau loved Velcro. He often lamented the fact that not every pair of shoes in the world fastened with Velcro.
One time, when Beau and Daniel were out walking through the woods and had gotten cockleburs stuck to their clothes, Daniel had shown Beau how the burs had tiny hooks all over them, just like Velcro. “That gave the guy who invented Velcro the idea,” Daniel had told him.
Beau had examined the cocklebur closely, as amazed as only someone as unjaded as Beau could be. While most people over the age of ten had lost the capacity to wonder at uniqueness, Beau had retained that perception into adulthood. Daniel often thought Beau represented the ability to embrace life-an ability most people lost as they got older.
“TV,” Daniel reminded him now.
“Oh, yeah.” Happy as a puppy, Beau jogged back, clicked off the television, then followed his younger brother to the truck.
Chapter Two
With a firm grip on Premonition’s harness, Cleo Tyler adjusted her dark glasses and grabbed the train’s metal handrail.
“Careful,” the conductor said, his strong fingers grasping her by the elbow. “There are three steps down.”
Her feet made contact with cement.
“There you go.”
Three days. It had taken three unholy days to get from Portland, Oregon, to Clear Lake, Missouri. Heat blasted her from all sides-from the murky sun above, from the cement below her feet, from the train behind.
“Station’s straight ahead.” The conductor still gripped her arm, obviously reluctant to turn her loose.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, flashing him a movie-star smile.
He released her. She heard his voice, muffled now because he turned to help the next passenger. “Watch your step. Watch your step.”
MyGod. It’s so hot. Was it always like this? she wondered. Couldn’t be. This had to be something abnormal.
Maybe she should have listened to Adrian. No, the reason she’d come to Missouri was because she’d decided Portland was too close to Seattle, too close to her brother. He’d rescued her from herself, probably saved her life, but that didn’t mean he owned her. He couldn’t seem to understand that she was okay now.
“Where are you going?” he’d asked when she’d called to tell him she was leaving. “Do you know anybody there?”
“No. That’s why I want to go. And it’s money. It’s a job.”
“Prostitution’s a job, but you’re not doing that.” There was a long silence. “Are you?”
She should have been mad. Instead she laughed. “Not yet.”
“Shit, Cleo.”
“I’m kidding. I’m not that desperate.”
“Cleo, look. Why don’t you come to Seattle? We’ll talk about this. Maybe I can get a loan so you can go back to school.”
“ Adrian, no.” He had a wife, two little kids, a second mortgage on his house, and a recording studio that was barely staying afloat. “Really, I’m okay.”
“I worry about you falling in with the wrong people.”
“Brother dear, I am the wrong people. You should know that by now. I’m the person our mother always warned us about.”
He laughed.
“I’ll call you when I get there.”
“You’d better.”
“Love you.”
“Me too.”
Adrian. He was the only person she could be herself around, but even with Adrian she knew she could only reveal so much. It would scare him and worry him if he knew everything about her.
Premonition tugged at his harness, reminding Cleo of more immediate concerns. The yellow Lab put his nose to the ground and made a beeline for the train station, hiking his leg on the corner of the building.
It wasn’t easy traveling with a dog, especially a big dog. You could put a caged cat in the baggage compartment; it would most likely be miserable and hysterical, but better off than traveling in the open. Dogs were different. Dogs were social. Whereas cats might love cramped, confined, dark places, dogs hated them. A place like that could really screw up a dog’s psyche.
That was why, in these situations, she put Premonition in his guide-dog harness and pretended she was blind.
She didn’t like the idea of exploiting a handicap and she hated the deception, but for the sake of Premonition, she was able to justify the ruse. It was simply part of the scramble called life. At the animal shelter where she’d gotten Premonition, she was told that he’d been so mistreated by his previous owner, he’d never be able to adapt to a new life, but that had made Cleo all the more determined to have him. And except for a fear of confined places, he was now a well-adjusted dog.
Done with his business, Premonition pulled her to a grassy area where he could get off the baking cement sidewalk and rest his paws in the cool grass. Behind her, the train chugged away from the station, taking with it the noise and steam, but not much of the heat.
Looking through dark glasses, Cleo saw but pretended not to see two men moving toward her, both about six feet tall, one with dark hair, the other light.
“Daniel Sinclair’s an Aries,” the police chief had warned Cleo over the phone. “With more of the sign’s undesirable traits than desirable ones.”
Aries. A fire sign. The most energetic of the fire signs. Aries used that energy to bring about change. So what undesirable traits did Daniel Sinclair harbor? Was he intolerant, a poor judge of character, impulsive, or all of the above? But then there were the positive traits. Aries individuals were the risk takers, daring and aggressive.
Neither man looked like a cop, she decided. And they both looked rather…well, unusual. The dark-haired man was extremely tidy, the light-haired man sloppy in an almost equally obsessive way. The tidy one was dressed in a striped polo shirt tucked neatly into creased jeans. On his feet were Velcro sneakers. She didn’t know anyone over four years old who wore Velcro.
As they closed the distance, she could see that the Velcro man’s face was shiny, as if someone had held him down and given him a good scrubbing. In the back of her mind she thought, There’s something a little slanted here.
While the Velcro man was soft around the edges, his friend was rough. He wore khaki-colored cargo pants, leather sandals, no socks, and a camp shirt that had probably been black at one time, but was now a soft gray. Rounding off the slacker look was a need to shave. A shock of hair that was genetically brown, but had been bleached and streaked by the sun, fell over direct eyes. Bold, Aries eyes. Eyes that held irritation. At her? Or the heat? Both?