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Oh, he knew exactly why his brother hated it so damned much, and why he refused to acknowledge it. So many of Raeg’s emotions were trapped inside him, buried so damned deep that now that they were trying to emerge, his brother simply had no idea what to do with them.
“What do I think you don’t know?” Falcon chuckled. “What I know, Raeg, is this. Each year since we first met her, the need you have for her has only grown. Just as mine has. It’s because of our past, our legacy, that we can’t have her, and like me, it’s eating your guts alive. But I won’t allow you to eat her alive because of it.”
“For God’s sake, could we at least keep things on the edge of reality, Falcon?” He sighed in disgust. “Just this once?”
Rather than simply telling Falcon he was right, that he ached for Summer just as desperately as his brother did, Raeg used the same line he’d been relying on for years.
She was Raeg’s greatest weakness, Falcon sometimes thought. The one woman his brother ached for yet refused to allow himself.
“Reality?” Falcon asked. “Reality is, the day is swiftly approaching that we must walk away from the only woman on this earth who completes us. When we do, it will destroy us, and you know it, just as I do.”
“You’re reaching,” Raeg snarled before slapping his glass onto the side table close to him and plowing his fingers through his hair in frustration. “Since when did you begin mistaking lust for love, Falcon?”
“Is that what I’m doing?” Falcon asked somberly, the realization at how very far his brother intended to isolate himself now sinking in. “Perhaps you’re right. I should have never tempted you to share her between us.” He nodded firmly. “I can claim her for my own while we are here. I do not require your presence to pleasure her. I proved that this morning, did I not?”
Raeg actually laughed at him. A mocking, though highly amused, laugh.
“Like hell,” he bit out furiously. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let you have her alone.”
Raeg stalked from the room and up the stairs, muttering beneath his breath, causing Falcon to smile with a bit of satisfaction.
This would see their hearts destroyed when they had to leave her, but while they were with her, the opportunity to create memories to sustain them was there. And Falcon wanted those memories. If he couldn’t keep Summer in his life, he wanted at least to ensure he kept the memory of her in his soul.
Chapter
EIGHT
Pond and bald cypress trees grew tall and plentiful, Spanish moss dripping from the conifer branches like ghostly beings as they shifted and waved in the eerie light of the predawn fog.
Four thirty in the morning wasn’t Falcon’s favored time to be out and about. He’d done far enough of that when he was younger. But Cal had a schedule, and part of his schedule was checking his gator traps before dawn.
And for the past week, he’d made a habit of inviting Falcon along on these little excursions.
Falcon had yet to see a gator trap, or watch the old man bait one. He’d seen plenty of gators though. Some a bit larger than he would have expected, all of them eyeing the flat-bottomed boat Cal either pushed through the water with an old cypress pole, or guided along the blackish waters with one of the oars stored beneath his seat at the back of the craft.
They never used the attached trolling motor either. Even in the daylight hours.
Falcon still couldn’t believe he was sitting there in the boat with the old man rather than curled around Summer in her comfortable bed. But he’d known when he woke a little before four that Summer’s father would be coming to collect him. And there was Cal on the back porch waiting, when Falcon and Raeg stepped into the kitchen.
To give him credit, Major Calhoun invited Raeg along each morning.
Raeg always refused. Riding an edge that bordered on disrespect, he’d take his coffee and just turn his back on Summer’s father as he left the kitchen.
“You know,” Cal commented quietly, surprising Falcon. “Leasa’s daddy used to pull me out of bed ’bout this time every morning. Made me madder than hell too.” He paused for a moment, pushing the pole along the bottom of the water, propelling the boat further into the swamp. “I’d bitch and rail at Leasa every morning when I came back in. I’d order her straight up to tell her daddy to leave me the hell alone. I was no swamp rat and I wasn’t about to become one.”
Falcon’s lips quirked at the amusement in the older man’s voice, as well as the acknowledgment that Cal was rather fond of the memory.
“She’d beg and plead and order her daddy to stop insistin’ I go out with him, but old man Collier, he never stopped. Then one day, we were about here”—he nodded to the area they were drifting into—“and he laughed at me, said I was sending his sweet little girl to do a man’s job to convince him to let me laze in bed rather than gettin’ out and being a man.”
Falcon just listened. When Summer’s father was silent again, he just waited. There was a reason for this little story, he knew. His own father may not have been much on instructing or teaching his son the ways of the world, but Falcon had been lucky enough to meet others who were.
“Summer hasn’t tried to convince me to let you sleep in. And she hasn’t mentioned Raeg’s refusal every morning,” Cal pointed out then.
Falcon flicked an amused look toward the older man’s shadowed outline.
“If I didn’t want to come out, sir, then you couldn’t force me out.” Falcon shrugged. “And it’s not Summer’s place to request you allow me to sleep should I decide that’s what I want to do.”
Neither he nor Raeg mentioned these early morning trips to Summer, though she was aware of them. He’d glimpsed her watching each morning as he and her father stepped into the wide, flat-bottomed craft Cal used to go into the murky depths of the swamp.
