Between Honor and Duty Read online

  Fortunately, the arrival of the mail carrier saved him from making a fool of himself.

  “Afternoon, Ms. Gainer. Another load of junk mail for your recycling pile.” The young black woman, wearing navy-blue uniform shorts and a light blue shirt, handed over a thick fold of mail. “Hope you all are doing okay these days.”

  “We’re fine, Alice. Thanks for asking.”

  “I’ve been praying for you and your children. Your husband was a hero, Ms. Gainer. The whole town says so. It’s an honor to know you.”

  Nodding, Janice looked embarrassed by the young woman’s praise. She glanced down and began to sort through the mail as the carrier went striding back down the walkway.

  “You okay?” Logan asked.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s hardest when people…she meant well enough, but a dead hero isn’t what I had in mind for a husband.”

  Logan understood that. Worse, he was the one person who knew Ray hadn’t been a hero that day. He’d been an arrogant, hard-headed fool who hadn’t listened to Logan’s warning that the roof was about to collapse.

  She lifted an envelope from the pile and ripped it open. “At last, the insurance company. This has got to be the check.” Unfolding a white sheet of stationery, she read it over, then sat down heavily on the top step of the porch. “This can’t be right,” she murmured. The color had fled her cheeks, and her trembling hand caused the letter to flutter. “It can’t be.”

  Logan squatted down beside her. “What is it?”

  “They say—” she shook her head “—they’re claiming the insurance policy lapsed more than a year ago because of lack of payment. But Ray—” She looked up at Logan with disbelief in her eyes. “Ray knew how important that money would be if something happened to him. I was supposed to pay off the mortgage with it. The children, me, that was our protection. Then the death benefit from the state would see us through for several years, till I could get a decent job. We’d talked about it. He knew we’d need the house paid off.”

  Logan slipped the letter from her hand and read it quickly. “Maybe it’s a mistake. If you can find the canceled check, they’ll have to pay you the benefits. This is a reputable company. They’ll meet their obligations.”

  “But what if Ray didn’t make the payments? What if he forgot? What will I do?” Her expression shifted, disbelief replaced by fear, deepening her eyes to a dark brown and sheening them with tears. “What in heaven’s name will I do? I’ve already got bills to pay. The funeral home. The fee for the plot. Dear God—”

  “You’re not going to panic, that’s the first thing.” He rested his hand on her shoulder, stroking lightly. The funeral service had been huge, with every member of Paseo del Real’s fire department present while neighboring towns had covered in case an emergency occurred. Representatives from half the fire departments in the state and many from across the country had shown up. Police had been out in full force, so had many members of the community. Through it all, Janice had been a chin-up trouper. Her kids, too, considering their ages. Now she was falling apart. Logan was glad he was here to catch some of the pieces. “Then you’re going to go through your bank records. Chances are good you’ll find this is all a mistake. Meanwhile, the emergency fund will tide you over with whatever you and the kids need in order to get by.”

  Her body shuddered beneath his hand. Vulnerable. Needing support. He tried not to think about how much he’d like to be the one she needed. Knowing what he did, he couldn’t be that man. Not for the long haul.

  “I’ve been trying to sort through the records, but it’s like a maze. He had a half-dozen checking accounts. Some of them are closed, the others don’t show any balance at all. And I had no idea how many credit cards we had. It’s as though someone was handing them out like candy, and Ray accepted every offer that came his way.”

  “Look, I don’t mean to butt in, but if you want me to, I’ll help you check through the records. Maybe together we can straighten this out.” Although he had the niggling feeling that whatever they found out wouldn’t be good news for Janice. Closed accounts and too many credit cards were a bad sign.

  “I’ve been such a fool.” Her voice caught. “On all those talk shows, they warn you that a wife ought to know what’s going on financially. But Ray didn’t—” She fingered a grocery store flyer that had been delivered with the letter. “He didn’t think I was the smartest fish in the pond. He said he’d take care of everything.”

  Resisting the urge to bunch his hands into fists, Logan wrapped his arm around her. Her hair smelled of a floral scent, like wild blossoms on a spring hillside. Fresh and invigorating. Elemental. So feminine it made him ache for her.

  Damn it! She deserved better than to have been kept in the dark about the family finances. She deserved more than to be told she was dumb. She deserved somebody who would value her as the incredible woman that she was.

  “Don’t throw in the towel yet, Jan. There’s still the state benefits, and the city provides something.”

  She inhaled a shuddering breath. “I know. It’s just that—”

  From across the street, two children came running, Janice’s son Kevin in the lead with five-year-old Maddie bringing up the rear.

  “What are you doing to my mom?” Kevin demanded.

  Janice broke away from Logan as though she’d been goosed. “Kevin, you remember Logan Strong, he rode on the ladder truck with your father.”

  Kevin glared at Logan as if he’d committed some mortal sin—something that wasn’t ever going to happen, Logan reminded himself. At least not between him and Janice.

  “Hey, Kevin,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  The nine-year-old eyed him suspiciously. “My dad was a hero.”

  “Yep,” Logan agreed. “That’s what they say.”

  The chip on the boy’s shoulder was about ten feet high. “I’m gonna be a hero, too.”

  “Good for you, son. I’m sure—”

  “I’m not your son!”

  Properly chastised, Logan agreed. “You’re right. But if you were, I’d be darn proud of you.”

  The boy did a double take. “You would?”

  “Sure. You take care of your mom, and your little sister, too. That’s pretty impressive for a nine-year-old kid.”

  The youngster lifted his shoulders in a shrug that wasn’t all that uncaring. “I’ll do better when I’m grown up.”

  Logan suppressed a smile. “I’m sure you will.”

  Arriving at full speed, Maddie lunged into her mother’s lap. “Kevin cheated. He got a head start on me.”

  Automatically, Janice stroked her daughter’s crop of dark, flyaway hair. “Look what Mr. Strong did for us. He hung the screen door.”

  “My dad was gonna do that.” Curious, Kevin opened the screen. “He’s real good at stuff like this.”

  “He had some nice tools,” Logan said. “The door still needs a spring and a latch. You could help me with the rest of the job.”

  The boy glanced at his mother for guidance.

  Maddie popped to her feet. “I’ll help you.”

  Before Logan could respond, Janice said, “If you let these two minxes help, it’ll be another year before the job’s finished.”

  “It shouldn’t take too long. We just have to install a screw eye, fix the latch plate and we’ll be all set.”

  Janice looked at him skeptically. “You haven’t been around children much, have you?”

  “I’ve got a couple of nephews but they live in Merced.”

  “Well…” Smiling, she rose to her feet, the mail still in her hand. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Two hours later, Logan discovered he should have listened to Janice’s warning. The kids had argued over every step, little sister insisting she was big enough to use a drill, big brother insisting she wasn’t, and Logan scared one or the other of them would ram the drill right through his palm while he was guiding their small hands. That didn’t begin to cover his concerns about them us
ing a chisel and hammer.

  Finally he sent them both into the house to announce that the job was finished, and he put the tools away.

  Janice appeared on the other side of the screen door. She’d changed into a clean pair of shorts and it looked like she’d done something with her hair, the natural curl softer now. More touchable.

  “You must have the patience of a saint.”

  “If I do, it’s the only thing saintly about me.” Certainly his thoughts were anything but holy when it came to Janice.

  “We’re having tacos and refried beans for dinner. It’s not much in the way of a thank-you, but will you stay?”

  “I probably ought to get going,” he hedged.

  “I was hoping after dinner, when the kids are in bed and we can get a little quiet around here, you’d help me make sense of Ray’s record-keeping. But if you have something to do—”

  “No. Nothing important.” He only had an empty house to go home to, no one waiting for him on the porch that overlooked the small fishing lake in the foothills of the coastal range, an hour’s drive from Paseo del Real. His hideaway, his family called it. That wasn’t far from the truth.

  JANICE COULD BARELY remember the last time she’d served a man his dinner. Not that tacos and beans at the kitchen table qualified as anything special. But with Ray’s shift work, and then his second job, he’d been little more than a shadow member of the family, the most obvious sign he’d been home a new heap of dirty clothes in the hamper.

  How long had she been living like that, more housekeeper than wife? And why, she wondered with a pang of guilt, was her grief colored with an edge of relief that Ray was gone?

  Setting aside her troubling thoughts, she served up four plates and carried them to the table.

  “You want that beer now?” she asked.

  “I’ll have a beer,” Kevin piped up.

  She punched him affectionately on his shoulder. “Milk or lemonade, big guy?”

  “Lemonade,” he conceded.

  “Lemonade is fine by me, too,” Logan assured her, winking at her son.

  Kevin started eating right away, but Janice noticed Logan waited until she was seated and had picked up her fork. She’d let Kevin’s manners slip recently. Without Ray around, it had been easier to let things slide.

  Her throat tightened, and she laid her fork down. Whatever chance they might have had to get their marriage back on track was gone now. Forever.

  “You okay?” Logan asked from across the table.

  Lifting her head, she met his gaze. He had the most sympathetic eyes, a penetrating way of looking at her as though he understood her pain. Her loneliness.

  The guilt that she hadn’t been a better wife. Regret that she couldn’t mourn as deeply as others expected her to.

  “I’m fine.” She forked some beans into her mouth and forced herself to swallow. “Ray used to rave about your clam linguini and said you were the best cook on C-shift. I guess tacos are pretty simple fare—”

  “They’re perfect. Just what a man needs after hanging a screen door. Isn’t that right, Kevin?”

  The boy looked up, startled. “Yeah. Mom’s tacos are the best.”

  With a smile, Janice basked in her son’s compliment. Oddly, she felt like a houseplant that had been denied water for too long and at last someone had noticed. She drank in the refreshing nourishment Logan had made possible along with his praise. Then she felt foolish for making such a big deal out of something so insignificant.

  “I help my mommy make cookies sometimes,” Maddie said around a mouth full of taco.

  “I bet you’re good at it, too,” Logan responded.

  Kevin scraped the last of his beans from his plate. “Chief Gray gave Dad a Medal of Honor postumlous.”

  “Posthumously,” Janice supplied.

  “Anyway, you wanna see it? Mom lets me keep it in my room but I can’t take it to school ’cause I might lose it. I’ve got the flag they put over his casket, too. They told me it used to fly at the White House where the president lives.”

  “Logan may not be—”

  “Sure, I’d like to see it. After we finish dinner, okay?”

  Kevin beamed his pleasure, and Janice’s heart squeezed tight. Her son needed a man to show interest in him. Since Ray’s death, the boy had been more angry than sad. In a few short hours, Logan had turned Kevin’s sullen expression into one of anticipation. He’d make a wonderful father.

  Janice started at that thought. Ray had been gone only a month and she was already betraying him by comparing her husband to another man. She couldn’t do that.

  Ray’s children needed to honor their father’s memory. She needed to help them do that by being loyal to his memory, too.

  Acknowledging her attraction to another man, even to herself, would risk undermining the needs of her children. For Janice, her children had to come first. Not a fanciful relationship with a gentle giant who was only trying to be kind to her.

  Chapter Two

  Glancing around the cluttered office, Logan shook his head. After the kids had finally gone to bed, he and Janice had spent several hours going through financial records.

  “I’ve got to say, Ray wasn’t the most organized man I’ve ever seen,” Logan commented, in what had to be the world’s biggest understatement.

  Janice sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, the picture of dejection. Checkbooks and bank statements surrounded her, credit-card reports piled at her side.

  She sighed. “This is bad, isn’t it?”

  Logan hunkered down beside her, wishing he could find something encouraging to say. “We sure haven’t found any sign Ray paid the insurance premium in the past couple of years.”

  “If we were in such terrible financial trouble that we couldn’t afford it, why didn’t he tell me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For that matter, how did it happen? I mean, when we bought the house it was well within our budget. I’ve hardly been extravagant with my spending, and except for Ray’s convertible, neither was he.”

  While sifting through the credit-card statements, Logan had noted Ray was only paying the minimum amount each month, which meant the interest was building up. And there were a hell of a lot of charges from Las Vegas—hotels, restaurants, expensive items. Some pretty fancy meals locally, too. None of the charges looked like the bills any salesman Logan knew would run up.

  An uneasy feeling crept up his spine. He was damn curious about Ray’s sales job, assuming he actually had been moonlighting and not indulging in activities a wife wouldn’t want to hear about. Ray had been closed-mouthed, kind of standoffish. He hadn’t socialized much with the guys on their days off, which Logan had taken to mean he was busy with his family. Now he wasn’t so sure. He sure as hell hadn’t heard a hint about Ray holding down a second job.

  Dropping her head into her hands, Janice groaned, “What am I going to do?”

  “Shh, it’s going to be okay.” Tentatively, Logan stroked her hair in a gesture much like she’d used with her daughter, except he wasn’t feeling at all parental. Her husband might have screwed up, but Logan was sure the state benefits would tide her over, at least for the near term. “I want you to come down to the station tomorrow and talk to Chief Gray. He’s a good man and cares about his troops. He’ll make sure you get what’s coming to you.”

  She lifted her chin and looked him in the eye. “I didn’t want to ask for extra help. Ray wouldn’t have wanted me to—”

  “Ray would want you and the kids to be taken care of.”

  “Then why did he forget to pay—”

  “I don’t know, Jan.” He had the troubling feeling there was more to her husband’s neglect than met the eye. “At this point, it doesn’t matter. What you need to do is deal with one problem at a time. Paying the bills is the first problem. We’ll deal with the rest later.”

  Gathering herself, she leaned back against the desk leg and wrapped her arms around her midsection. “Why aren’t y
ou married?”

  Her question caught him off guard. He didn’t often mention that part of his past. “I was. Briefly. It got so that my wife hated the sound of a siren. She couldn’t stand the thought of the fire chief pulling up in our driveway in his red car to announce I’d been killed in a fire. I guess you can understand that.”

  Visibly, Janice shuddered. “A firefighter’s wife’s worst nightmare. I knew when I saw Chief Gray—” She glanced away. The pain was so visible on her face, in her every gesture, Logan knew she’d never put herself at risk like that again. Or her children.

  He didn’t blame her. Despite the fact his mother and his sister-in-law managed to survive knowing that any given day could be their husband’s last, he understood why his wife hadn’t been able to handle that reality. And he hadn’t been willing to give up the career that was a family tradition.

  Since then, he’d vowed never to subject another woman to the same possibility. Certainly not a woman who’d already lost one husband to the job. That would be the worst form of cruelty.

  Janice scooped up the bank statements and stacked them neatly. “Someone very wise once said there was no sense crying over spilled milk. The kids and I sure could have used that insurance money, but if this is the worst that happens as a result of Ray’s death, we’ll get by.”

  “I think my mother used to say things like that.”

  “Mine, too. My dad just yelled at us kids whether we spilled anything or not.” She smiled at him and started to get up.

  Instinctively Logan reached for her elbow. “You’ve got brothers and sisters?”

  “Three brothers and two sisters, all of them in Missouri. That’s where I met Ray, while he was in the air force. He convinced me to drop out of college and come west with him. Truth to tell, it didn’t take much urging. I couldn’t see much of a future for myself in the small town where I grew up.”

  “And I suppose you were in love.”

  Frowning, she picked up some more papers, sorted them and put them in a manila folder. “A man in uniform is hard for a girl to resist.”