Page 18 of Sheltering Lawson
That set the tone for the rest of the afternoon. When we got down to the creek, my sister was in Boone’s lap, my niece, Nola, one of the twins was in a playpen and Henry and Duel were in the water. After I set down the lemonade and introduced everyone, including my daddy who was sitting on the swing with my nephew Morgan in his lap, Lawson was still staring at Boone.
“They’re twins?”
“No,” Boone said with a twinkle in his eyes. “We’re triplets. My brother Booker lives in New Orleans with his wife Aubree. She’s studying to become a doctor.”
“Three of you?” she asked, looking from him to me.
“Yes, but Brax is the only jackass.”
“Boone,” Verity said with a slap on the shoulder.
“Well, he is,” he said, dumping my sister into the chair and rising up to snag a glass of lemonade for Verity then himself.
“Hope you brought a bathing suit,” Boone said to Lawson with a grin, reaching down and bringing out some water guns. “It’s going to get wet and wild around here.”
The whole party dissolved into a spray fest after Lawson and I changed our clothes. We splashed and took our share of streams of water bullets to the face. I hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time.
I watched her interacting with my niece and nephews as she helped them with small things, like wiping their faces or getting them some more lemonade. I was envious of what my sister and Boone had. They were so in tune, so happy with their growing family and their love for each other. Nothing would ever come between these two again. After that thought, Lawson caught me with a stream of water, and I retaliated by grabbing her around the waist and chucking her into the creek. Her slight, lithe body felt good in my arms, and I thought one day I wanted a family like Verity’s.
Dinner was more sedate, with us finding out Aubree was graduating from college and there would be a blowout party for her homecoming next week. She and Booker were staying in New Orleans, and she’d spend the next few years at Tulane as a med student, then finally her residency and taking over Doc Rust’s practice in Suttontowne. She’d made the announcement in January that she was pregnant. She was on to the next step in her career with a baby due in July.
Boone distracted me from my thoughts when he insisted on getting everyone singing in staggering lyrics, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The way my sister looked at him made my heart ache.
But, Aubree’s good news also made me think again about where I was going. What I wanted to do, especially when my daddy cornered me before I left and asked me once again about the seminary. I put him off again which didn’t make him happy, but I just wasn’t sure what my next steps were. A big part of me didn’t want to disappoint him, but a larger part of me wanted to be my own man, decide for myself what was important to me and not follow in someone else’s footsteps, but make some of my own.
Chapter 7
LAWSON
“Boone is completely different from Braxton. He’s hilarious,” I said as we drove through more lush greenery, the homey gathering and laughter still resonating in me. I’d never experienced anything like that. My life had been so…controlled. Water guns? Not likely. Swimming in a creek instead of a perfectly crystal clear swimming pool? Never. I chaffed at my cloistered and sheltered life.
“He’s something else. All of them have a great sense of humor, but Booker is more cerebral, and Brax is more sarcastic.”
“He’s been very good to me,” I murmured. “You’ve been very good to me.” I turned to look out the window, the thought brought a sheen of tears to my eyes. I was so tired—physically tired, emotionally exhausted, weary of feeling lost and alone.
“It’s our downhome Southern hospitality, darlin’.” I squeezed my eyes closed at the soft way he said, “darlin’” and held back the tears, blinking rapidly to clear them. I came from a world of privilege and opulence filled with so much emptiness. I never wanted to go back. I might have been the sweetheart of Atlantean society, but it had been nothing but a hollow, abusive prison with me on puppet strings. I was heartily sick of it and the last year I’d spent on the run felt more free than all my years combined.
“And, it was easy to be good to you,” he said, his voice husky. I turned to look at him in the cab, the light from the warm sun illuminating his handsome features. But the physical part of Ethan Fairchild was only window dressing to the heart of the beauty that was within. The guilt washed over me as I continued to keep my life, who I was, hidden. My past wasn’t something I could talk about and my future was uncertain. Ethan belonged in this wonderful little town with these wonderful people around him. I didn’t have the decency to explain anything or why I needed to go.
But, the men who were after me were single-minded in what they wanted, and I had no intention of ever staying in one place long enough for them to find me. It didn’t matter how often I had to run. But there was something so peaceful, so beckoning about Suttontowne, the bayou so lush and exotic. Then there was Ethan. As I looked at him, I wanted…oh God, I wanted. But toying with his emotions was way down on my list of things I would ever want to do to him. Besides, getting tangled up with him would set him squarely in my narrative. Involve him in my problems, and he didn’t deserve that.
Resigned to keeping my past secret, I saw we were on a smooth paved road, the afternoon alive just beyond the air-conditioned truck. Sultry and silky green as velvet. It felt…wild out here, untamed after moving from city to city, getting lost in the anonymous humanity. But here, life was unfettered.
We passed an open clearing and the bright light lit rotting skeletons of houses that looked like a giant foot had come down and smashed them into broken and splintered ghosts of a once thriving community, covered in moss and tangled creepers.
“Ethan was that a village?”
“Yes, it once was. There’s a story behind it.”
“Ooh, a ghost story?”
“Not exactly. A voodoo priestess.”
I turned to look at him, but he kept a straight face. A shiver traveled through me. I looked around and realized that there were unexplained occurrences in the world. “Tell me.”
“It’s rumored that Imogene—she once owned Samantha’s restaurant—brought down a curse on the head of the fishermen who raped her daughter AnnClaire. Destroyed them with a hurricane so devastating, nothing in the village was intact. Everyone perished. She was hanged for it. They say that Imogene’s is haunted.”
“No kidding? By Imogene?”
