Free Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon by Sandra Parshall

my father? He was the one person Mother might confide in. He wouldn’t repeat those confidences to me, but surely he could give me a few scraps of information. If I dared to ask him. 
    “Are your grandparents back in Minnesota?” Luke asked.
    The question brought me up short at the edge of a gulf.
    “No,” I said after a moment. “My grandparents are dead. All of them.” People whose faces I wouldn’t recognize, couldn’t recall ever seeing. I murmured, “It’s always been just the three of us. As long as I can remember.”
    “Are your parents divorced, or—”
    “My father’s dead.” Suddenly I wanted to talk about him, speak of him smoothly and without reluctance, prove to myself that I could, even here in Mother’s house. “He died in a car accident when I was five. He was young—” I realized with a small shock that I didn’t know exactly what his age had been. I added, making a guess based on Mother’s age, “A little younger than you are now.”
    “That’s rough,” Luke said. “Your mother never remarried?”
    “No.” Mother with a husband—impossible to imagine.
    As abruptly as the urge to talk had come over me, it vanished, and I couldn’t bear to speak or hear another word about my parents. I turned to the door. “Why don’t we eat now?”
    Luke shed his jacket and helped me carry our sliced chicken salads and iced tea to the breakfast table by the sun-brightened kitchen window. Sitting three feet across from him, unable to move away or escape his gaze, I was momentarily gripped by panic. All the reasons why this was a bad idea chattered in my head.
    What on earth was I thinking when I asked him to lunch? He’d wanted to see the hawk—no, he wanted more than that, he wanted the proper beginning of something, but I hadn’t been obliged to give it. An invitation for a quick visit would have been polite but noncommittal. Now I was alone in the house with him, the afternoon stretching ahead of us, no interruptions in sight.
    But he was easy to talk to, and didn’t resist when I nudged him away from personal questions. We compared our experiences at Cornell and swapped tales about a classic absentminded professor we’d both had. As long as I avoided looking into his intense blue eyes for more than a second, I could almost persuade myself that I wasn’t actually in the middle of a first date with my boss.
    We’d been talking for half an hour when he said, as if it were just another turn in the conversation, “I want to ask you about something.”
    “Mmm?” I said, forking a bite of chicken into my mouth.
    He twisted his sweat-beaded glass round and round on its coaster. “But I’m not sure you’ll want to talk about it.”
    I looked at him, suddenly wary. His face was serious. I swallowed the meat without chewing.
    “Exactly what happened the other day,” he said, “after the basset was brought in? I can’t get it out of my mind, that expression on your face. Like you’d seen a ghost.”
    I stared at the remains of my lunch, chicken slices and sugar snap peas and carrot slivers nestled in lettuce. I’d thought he’d forgotten, but all along he’d been puzzling over my crazy behavior.
    “What was it that rattled you like that?” he said. “I’m not asking as your employer. I’m asking as your friend.” 
    I made myself meet his gaze. Warm eyes, full of honest concern. My heart lurched. What would this supremely sane man think of the turmoil inside my head? With a shrug I told him, “It reminded me of something, that’s all. An old dream.”
    He sat forward, interested. “A nightmare? About what?” He waited, patient and receptive.
    I shook my head. “It wouldn’t make any sense to you.”
    “Try me.”
    I was silent, scraping my fork back and forth across my plate until the screek screek of silver on china got through to me and I stopped. I didn’t want to offend him with a rebuff, but I had no intention of spilling out a story of dreams and strange faces