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Rising from her chair she stared at the cups still on the table and the coffee pot Caleb hadn’t returned to the maker, and held back a sigh. Collecting them, she quickly washed them in the sink, aware of both Raeg and Falcon as they moved through the house. They checked the security system as well as the footfall alarms on the wraparound porch and cement walk.
By the time they finished, she was getting her luggage, wondering why the hell Caleb always managed to forget his manners with her. He should have carried them right to her room himself. She was going to tell their momma on him first thing. Maybe she could be distracted from being put out with Summer by getting put out with her son instead?
Doubtful. But she could hope.
“Here.” Falcon grabbed the two suitcases she was struggling to haul from the Suburban. “We loaded them, dammit, did you think we wouldn’t unload them?”
The tone was completely irate and Falcon was hardly ever irate with her.
“Now you’re gettin’ ugly with me?” she asked as she grabbed her makeup bag and headed into the house. “Just what I need, you in a bad mood too.”
It always took a while to settle in when she arrived home, Summer remembered as she led the way to her upstairs suite. The transition was always a pain in the ass.
“Summer, do you always have to travel with half a dozen bags?” he asked, more amused than irritated as her brothers or even Raeg could get. But his expression was still a little tense.
“I try to travel light.” She shrugged, wandering to the balcony doors and unlocking them before stepping outside.
And there it was.
The fog was rolling in from the swamp, steamy and thick, coming in as floating tendrils, fingers of humid moisture reaching out and creeping across the backyard.
She could hear the gators, bellowing out an eerie sound into the night. In the distance, a big cat called out—panthers or even cougars were known to wander the Okefenokee.
When she was younger, her daddy had tracked a cougar that had killed one of his calves. He’d never caught it, but he’d come back with tales of monster alligators, panthers stalking him from the tops of the trees, and a fog so thick and heavy he swore it moved him through the swamps as if it had a will of its own, for miles at a time.
Watching it now, the thick threads reaching closer to the house, she could well imagine such a thing happening.
“Now that is eerie as hell,” Falcon whispered as his arms slid around her, pulling her closer to his obviously aroused body.
Summer let her head settle against the chest behind her, her hands resting against his linked ones where they came together low on her stomach.
It took everything she had to control her breathing, to fight back the heat that rose inside her whenever he touched her like this, whenever he let her feel how much he wanted her. But it also calmed her whenever he held her. No matter how upset she was or how worried, when he pulled her against him, Summer could almost feel herself drawing on his strength and his power. Sometimes, those qualities seemed inexhaustible in Falcon.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “Soon, it will surround the house like a blanket, ghostly white, that little bit of moon giving it a glow that sends chills up the spine if you’re not used to it. And those fingers of fog will seem to be probing at the seams of the door, the windows, as though hungry to reach the inside and consume it as well.”
She was used to it, and still, she’d been known to give a little shiver.
Aunjenue would actually sit out on her balcony sometimes when it came through as though soaking up the moisture, enjoying the tendrils that wrapped around her. Summer avoided them. Not that she was scared of them, or spooked by them, but the curious-like threads of moisture always seemed far too sentient to her for comfort.
“You’ve missed being home,” he murmured. “I was seeing it in you before we took that job with Davis Allen.”
She had missed home. Learning her dearest friend in the world was in danger had been far more important though. Home was always waiting, but Alyssa might not be if she didn’t get there in time.
She’d gotten there in time, but that job had gone to hell so fast she still had trouble acclimating herself to the consequences.
“I always miss home,” she revealed, something no one but Alyssa had known before now. “When I’m away for too long, I begin to feel off balance. The person you’ve always known isn’t who I am, Falcon,” she revealed sadly. “This is where I’m me. This is where all my hopes and dreams began and where I hope to live to an old old age. This is where I took my first breath and it’s where I want to draw my last breath.”
“Think I don’t know that the woman that flits and flirts around DC isn’t really you?” he questioned her softly. “Do you think I don’t know the sweetness that exists beneath the woman you show the world?”
Perhaps he did. Falcon always saw deeper, probed at the layers of a person until he could reach the inner parts. Not because he was nosy or because he felt they were being secretive as Raeg did. He did it because he genuinely cared about people. He wanted to know who they were and what they were.
“Maybe you do,” she sighed, watching the fog come closer. “I hated leaving you though. As bad as I wanted to be home, I want you to know that. I hated walking away from you.”
And Raeg. Though she left that unsaid. Falcon would know, just as he’d known she wasn’t the person she showed the world.
“You didn’t come straight home.” He rested his chin against the top of her head, meeting her gaze in the reflection of the glass door. “Why not?”
Why hadn’t she?
