Daniel's Desire - By Sherryl Woods Page 0,33

front door. The only question mark was just how bad it was going to be.

He paused at the front door, drew in a deep breath, then stepped inside, expecting to be hit with a barrage of shouted recriminations. Instead, he was greeted with total silence. All those people and no one was making a sound? It didn’t make sense. In fact, it was downright eerie.

He walked through the foyer to the living room, which they’d rarely used. It was kept spotless for company, not for use by rambunctious boys. Even after he and Patrick were older, the living room had remained off-limits, too stiffly formal to be inviting.

Now there were four men seated awkwardly on the sofa, their expressions dark and forbidding. His mother perched on the edge of an uncomfortable but prized antique chair, her hands twisting nervously in her lap. Naturally his father was nowhere in sight. He’d probably taken off at the first sign of tension.

Patrick glanced up when Daniel entered the room. “I imagine you were called in to save the day,” he said.

Daniel ignored the barb and paused to give his mother’s shoulder a squeeze before crossing the room to greet his brothers.

One by one the others stood and shook his hand. First Ryan, the oldest. Then Sean, and last of all Michael. There was no mistaking the fact that they were Devaneys. They had his father’s dark Irish looks, just as he and Patrick did. There was little of their mother in any of them, except for a slight softening around Ryan’s mouth when he smiled, which he wasn’t doing now, and in the paler blue of Michael’s eyes.

Worried about his mother’s pallor, Daniel turned back to her. “Mom, why don’t you make one of your coffee cakes?” he suggested gently.

When Ryan and Sean exchanged a glance, Daniel studied them curiously. “What?”

“We’ve talked about those pecan coffee cakes,” Ryan explained. “We both remembered how our mother always baked them on special occasions.” He said it as if she weren’t in the room, as if she’d died long ago.

Despite Ryan’s distant tone, their mother hesitated in the doorway, the first faint trace of a smile on her lips. Her eyes shone with an unmistakable wistfulness. “You remember that?”

“I went out and bought one like it the first time Ryan came to see me,” Sean said, looking vaguely uncomfortable at the hint of sentimentality. “It felt right, somehow.”

Daniel glanced at his mother, but her eyes were filled with tears, and she seemed incapable of speaking. He filled the silence. “She still bakes them for Easter and Christmas and birthday breakfasts, right, Patrick?” he said, hoping to draw his twin into the conversation.

Patrick merely shrugged as if it were no big deal that a mere coffee cake stirred memories for all of them. Daniel realized there would be no help from him. In fact, Patrick looked as if he’d rather be anyplace else at that moment.

“Are there other things you remember?” Daniel asked, looking from one brother to another, hoping to encourage more happy memories.

“Her spaghetti,” Sean supplied, though he didn’t look especially happy to be sharing that. “My wife’s boss makes sauce that’s almost as good, but there’s something missing.”

“A spoonful of sugar, I imagine,” their mother said shyly. “It’s a secret I learned from my mother.”

Daniel turned to Michael, who’d remained silent. “Is there anything you remember?”

His expression still hard, Michael looked from Daniel to his mother and back again. “Being left behind,” he said harshly.

Daniel hadn’t expected the blow to come from Michael. When they’d first met, he’d had the impression that Michael remembered the least from the past, and that his foster family, the Havilceks, had made the intervening years good ones.

Tears welled up in his mother’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her anguished gaze on Michael. “You’ll never know how sorry.”

Daniel regarded his brother angrily. “Is that what you came for, Michael? All of you? Are you only interested in hurting her? In making her and Dad pay for what they did?”

“I think we have a right to be angry,” Ryan said quietly.

“Damn straight they do,” Patrick said heatedly. “Stay out of it, Daniel.”

But he couldn’t. He saw the torment on his mother’s face, and he couldn’t allow them to continue with a barrage of accusations that would accomplish nothing. He turned back to his mother with a forced smile. If the issues between them were ever to be resolved, they had to talk without bitterness, openly and honestly. He could see