Free State Secrets by Linda Lael Miller

saucers.
    Something twisted inside Holly as she watched her nephew; despite all his friends at school, he was a lonelychild, often feeling separate from the others. Alone. While Holly’s own childhood had been far from ideal, she had had Craig. Toby had no one near his own age.
    The little boy squinted up at her, a grin forming on his face, and the toy Cessna seemed huge in his small hands. “You thinkin’ about my dad?” he asked directly.
    Holly was stunned. Lately it seemed as though she went around with all her thoughts written on her forehead, so clearly did people read them. “How did you know that?”
    Small shoulders, hidden beneath the weight of a down-filled snowsuit, moved in a shrug. “You get a sad look on your face when you think about Dad.”
    “We were very close once,” Holly admitted distractedly, having to look away for a moment because of the tears that stung her eyes.
    “Dad’s a bad man, isn’t he?” Toby probed seriously, his mittened hands working awkwardly with the airplane.
    Holly shook her head so suddenly and so hard that her neck ached—as did her heart. “No, Toby. Your dad isn’t really a bad man, though he has done some bad things. He’s sick, Toby, and pretty confused.”
    “He doesn’t want me.”
    Holly knelt in the snow, which crackled beneath the worn knees of her oldest jeans, and clasped Toby by the shoulders. “It isn’t that way at all, Toby. Your dad loves you. But when people have the kind of troubles he does, they just don’t seem to have room in their lives for other things and other people.”
    Toby’s face was scrunched up in the battle against unmanly emotion. “I liked Mr. Goddard a lot. How come he didn’t come back? Does he have problems, too, like Dad?”
    Holly closed her eyes for a moment and drew a deep breath. “No, Toby. I don’t think he has the kind of problems that your dad has. As for why he didn’t come back—”
    “He was a fool,” put in a deep, masculine voice.
    Holly and Toby looked up simultaneously, squinting against the dazzling winter sun, to see David standing over them. He wore a dark blue ski jacket and jeans, a contrite expression on his face and held his own model airplane in his hands.
    “Hi!” Toby whooped, overjoyed.
    While Holly was glad enough to see David herself, glad enough to shout, in fact, she was a little injured by Toby’s enthusiasm toward the man. It was as though a hopeless day had just been saved at the last, cliff-hanging second. And there were all her misgivings, too…
    “Truce,” he said gruffly, extending one hand to Holly, the plane tucked under his opposite elbow now. “Please?”
    Holly swallowed. It was sheer, foolhardy madness to get further involved with this man and she knew it, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to refuse what she knew he was offering. “Truce,” she croaked out, after what seemed like a long time.
    Eyes of an impossibly dark blue swept over her so swiftly that she could almost believe it hadn’t happened, and then they shifted to Toby. “Hi, slugger. Ready to fly?”
    Toby was literally beaming. Again Holly found his obvious fondness for David Goddard unsettling. What would happen when David went away? What if he did something that would hurt Craig and thus Toby, too?
    “I’m ready!” came the exuberant answer.
    David proved to be a lousy pilot, always dropping his hand-controls or sending his somewhat odd-looking model airplane plunging into bushes, but Holly was too amused to chalk this up as another reason to be suspicious of him. After all, he’d only said he owned a model plane, not that he was proficient at flying one.
    In any case, David’s ineptitude only seemed to endear him further to Toby, who patiently demonstrated again and again how to handle the craft properly. Holly stood back and watched, full of mingled dread and tender inclinations. She was glad, even relieved, when Toby offered her a turn with his airplane, for that gave her something to