Page 28 of Serenity Harbor

“I didn’t realize you were home. How long have you been here?” she asked, her voice low, with a sexy, thready note that she cleared away.

“Only a minute or two. I didn’t want to wake you, but I had a feeling you wouldn’t be very happy with me in the morning when you woke up on my sofa with a stiff neck.”

“You would be right,” she murmured, looking down at his sleeping brother. “I can’t believe I fell asleep.”

“You don’t have to tellmehow tiring Milo can be.”

She stood and stretched a little, arms stretched above her head, with probably no idea how the movement accentuated her curves and made him suddenly ache.

He should get out of here before he embarrassed both of them. “I’ll take Milo to his room. Do you mind waiting?”

He owed her an apology, one he didn’t want to have to deliver in these same hushed tones they were using so they didn’t wake up Milo.

Besides, a few moments away from her should give him a chance to regain a little control over his wayward thoughts.

She nodded. “I can wait a few minutes.”

“Thanks.” Bo carefully scooped Milo up, aware as he did of how small the boy was for his age.

As always, the boy’s small size left him feeling frustrated and guilty. Bowie should have tried harder to find Stella. If he had, he would have discovered she’d had another child and could have stepped in earlier to protect Milo from the chronic malnutrition he had suffered during his early years.

Bowie knew what hunger pangs could be like. He had always been small for his age, until he received a full-ride scholarship to MIT that included a meal plan and access to workout facilities at school.

When he wasn’t in the computer lab in college, he could usually be found in the cafeteria—and then in the gym, trying to add muscle tone. He wasn’t the scrawny nerd anymore, but no matter what he ate or how much he worked out, he still suffered from fifteen years of scrambling to have enough to eat.

That was one reason his charitable foundation’s primary focus was on eliminating child hunger.

His brother would never know hunger again. Yeah, Bowie wasn’t great at most of the whole family thing and was struggling to know how to deal with Milo’s autism. But at least he would always be able to provide well for his brother.

As Bowie set him down in the bed, Milo opened his eyes. They were bleary and unfocused, but Bowie wanted to think they lit up a little when Milo spotted him. When his brother first came to live with him, he had looked around his world with a resigned sort of insecurity, ready for his circumstances to change again at a moment’s notice.

Milo was beginning to seem more settled than he had at first. Bowie wanted to think his brother was beginning to accept that he intended to be a permanent fixture in his life. Who knew what was really going on inside his head, though?

“Good night, partner. Time to ride the rainbow to dreamland.” He spoke the words by rote, then had to stop as the echo of them sounded in his head. That was something his mother used to say to him, one of the few maternal-type memories he had.

It was good for him to remember Stella wasn’t completely terrible. She had loved him, in her way. She just had no business being responsible for another human being. Not when she wasn’t at all competent to take care of herself.

Milo gave him a sweet, sleepy smile, rolled over and closed his eyes. Bowie tucked the purple car on his pillow next to him, pulled the blanket up, then went down to face the music with Katrina.

He found her in the kitchen, putting away the dishes from the dishwasher that must have finished its cycle.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said. “The housekeeper can do it tomorrow when she comes.”

Katrina shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mrs. Nielson has osteoarthritis in her back, and sometimes it can be tough for her to reach down to the bottom rack.”

That was news to him. Mrs. Nielson hadn’t said a word to him about arthritis, and he’d never noticed any hitch in her step.

Then again, he wasn’t always the most observant of men. Just today, he had congratulated one of the team members he saw on a daily basis for having a cast removed from the guy’s broken wrist—only to be informed it had actually been off for a month.

Sometimes Bowie wondered ifhewas on the spectrum. Every once in a while the thought would poke at him like a sore tooth. Some of the signs fit, he had to admit. Since Milo had come to live with him, he had read numerous books on autism and had wondered if he would have been diagnosed as having a mild form of Asperger’s.

He had always preferred safe, reliable computers to dealing with the whims and vagaries of people. He knew he could be brusque and impatient and wasn’t always aware of the mood and underlying emotion behind a comment.

Just because he preferred to make decisions using his higher brain function and not his emotional reactions didn’t necessarily mean he had Asperger’s, he reminded himself. In his situation, his behavior was only logical. He had spent his childhood with a parent who let her emotions do all her thinking for her. If she wanted something, Stella wouldn’t let little things like reason or common sense get in the way.

And that was enough thinking about Stellaorautism for the night, Bowie decided.

“Did he stay asleep?” Katrina asked.

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