stood, her shoulder brushing his arm, and admired the lights of the valley spread out below them.
“Beautiful,” he answered. Lame as it seemed, he wasn’t only talking about the vista. In the moonlight, she seemed otherworldly, too, glowing with life.
“I don’t know how anybody could ever want to leave this place.”
She spoke almost reverently and he gave her a careful look. “You haven’t ever wanted to go anywhere?”
“Been there, done that,” she said, settling onto a slab of granite that looked as if it had been carved out of the mountainside.
“Oh?”
She was quiet for a long moment, the only sound the wind moaning in the tops of the pines and rustling the new leaves of aspen trees around them.
“After college, I lived for two years in Europe while I was in cooking school,” she finally said.
Wow. He hadn’t expected that. “What part of Europe?”
“France first and then Italy.”
She spoke with a reluctance, her tone guarded, and he had to wonder what she wasn’t saying. “You didn’t enjoy it?”
“Parts of it, I really loved. The architecture, the art, the food. I mean, how can you not love all that fabulous food?”
“But you didn’t stay.”
“I planned to, but...I finally decided it wasn’t the life for me.”
“Why not?”
She hesitated. “I missed my family too much.”
Even through his envy at all she had, he sensed that wasn’t the whole story.
“Don’t take them for granted. Your family, I mean,” he said when she didn’t seem willing to add anything else. “If you get along with them, consider yourself lucky.”
“I do. Believe me I do. You mentioned a brother. What about your parents?”
“Don’t have any. It’s just the two of us.”
“You had to have had them once. It’s kind of a biological imperative.”
“Technically, yeah. Our dad, if you want to call him that, took off back to Colombia when Nicky was only a few months old. We never heard from him again.”
“You don’t know what happened to him?”
He shrugged. “I barely remember him, if you want the truth. We didn’t miss him much after he left. I tried to find him years ago when I was stationed in that part of the world. I’m not sure why. Stupid curiosity, maybe. Or maybe just to tell him off for abandoning his kids.”
“You couldn’t find him?”
“Not a trace. The trail went cold.”
Judging by the little he knew of the man, he had probably come to some violent end while trying to screw somebody out of money or drugs, but he decided not to mention that.
“What about your mother?”
She wasn’t going to stop until she heard the whole grim truth, he sensed. He rarely talked about his parents but something about the night and the woman seemed to wrest the words out.
“She wasn’t really much of a mother. She was in the life, you know? Drugs, alcohol. The whole thing. Nicky and I were in and out of foster care from the time I was ten until I turned eighteen. Not always together, though I tried.”
“What happened when you were eighteen?”
He remembered that time, both the determination and the fear. “I found a compassionate judge who gave me custody of him.”
“How old was your brother?”
“Fifteen. The biggest smart-ass you could ever meet when he was a kid, but now he’s a hotshot attorney with a great wife and a couple kids. He just got a job in Belgium working for an international company there.”
He wasn’t sure how, but he and Nick had somehow made it work. He had done odd jobs for two years, until his brother graduated high school at seventeen, when Sam had enlisted. With his army wages, he had managed to live on nothing, saving every penny to help Nicky through school.
“You sound proud of him.”
“I am. It’s amazing that he came out of what we did and became somebody.”
“So did you.”
He shifted, uncomfortable with her words. Before he could find some way to deflect the conversation—and before he quite figured out what she intended—she leaned in and kissed him, her mouth warm and soft against his.
He sensed the kiss was completely spontaneous, that she hadn’t given it much thought ahead of time and probably wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t acted on impulse, but he wasn’t about to argue.
She was here, touching him, kissing him, and that was the only thing he cared about.
After that first delicate brush of her mouth against his, as soft and sweet as butterfly wings, she started to ease away, as if she believed he would be content with