Free Sea Swept by Nora Roberts Page B

weeks, the life he had planned out, plotted meticulously, and implemented with deliberation and simple hard work had shattered.
    Now, still numb with grief for his father, he was being asked to transplant himself, to compromise those careful plans.
    He’d been thirteen when Ray and Stella Quinn took him in. Most of those years he’d spent on the street, dodging the system. He was an accomplished thief, an enthusiastic brawler who used drugs and liquor to dull the ugliness. The projects of Baltimore were his turf, and when a drive-by shooting left him bleeding on those streets, he was prepared to die. To simply end it.
    Indeed, the life he’d led up to the point when he wound up in a gutter choked with garbage ended that night. He lived, and for reasons he never understood, the Quinns wanted him. They opened a thousand fascinating doors for him. And no matter how often, how defiantly he tried to slam them shut again, they didn’t allow it.
    They gave him choices, and hope, and a family. They offered him a chance for an education that had saved his soul. He used what they’d given him to make himself into the man he was. He studied and worked, and he buried that miserable boy deep.
    His position at Innovations, the top advertising firm in the metropolitan area, was solid. No one doubted that Phillip Quinn was on the fast track to the top. And no one who knew the man who wore the elegant tailored suits, who could order a meal in perfect French and always knew the proper wine, would have believed he had once bartered his body for the price of a dime bag.
    He had pride in that, perhaps too much pride, but he considered it his testament to the Quinns.
    There was enough of that selfish, self-serving boy still inside him to rebel at the thought of giving up one inch of it. But there was too much of the man Ray and Stella had molded to consider doing otherwise.
    Somehow he had to find the compromise.
    He turned, looked back at the house. The upstairs was dark. Seth was in bed by now, Phillip mused. He didn’t have a clue how he felt about the boy. He recognized him, understood him, and he supposed resented just a bit those parts of himself he saw in young Seth DeLauter.
    Was he Ray Quinn’s son?
    There, Phillip thought as his teeth clenched—more resentment at even the possibility of it. Had the man he’d all but worshiped for more than half his life really fallen off his pedestal, succumbed to temptation, betrayed wife and family?
    And if he had, how could he have turned his back on his own blood? How could this man who had made strangers his own ignore for more than a decade a son who’d come from his own body?
    We’ve got enough problems, Phillip reminded himself. The first was to keep a promise. To keep the boy.
    He walked back, using the back porch light to guide him. Cam sat on the steps, Ethan in the rocker.
    “I’ll go back into Baltimore in the morning,” Phillip announced. “I’ll see what the lawyer can firm up. You said the social worker was named Spinelli?”
    “Yeah.” Cam nursed a cup of black coffee. “Anna Spinelli.”
    “She’d be county, probably out of Princess Anne. I’ll pass that on.” Details, he thought. He’d concentrate on the facts. “The way I see it, we’re going to have to come off as three model citizens. I already pass.” Phillip smiled thinly. “The two of you are going to have to work on your act.”
    “I told Spinelli I’d get a job.” Even the thought of it disgusted Cam.
    “I’d hold off on that a while.” This came from Ethan, who rocked quietly in the shadows. “I got an idea. I want to think on it a while more. Seems to me,” he went on, “that with Phil and me around, both of us working, you could be running the house.”
    “Oh, Jesus” was all Cam could manage.
    “It goes like this.” Ethan paused, rocked, continued. “You’d be what they’d call primary caregiver. You’re available if the school calls with a problem, if Seth gets sick or