Page 56 of Serenity Harbor

His brother looked down at the floor and refused to meet his gaze. That was nothing unusual, but there was something different in this particular evasion.

“What would he know about them?” Katrina asked, looking as if she were about to cry.

Bowie decided to go with his sudden hunch. “You’re not in trouble, Milo, but if you know where they are, you need to tell us,” he said firmly. “It’s important. She needs her shoes so she can go to her sister’s wedding. Can you help her find them?”

Milo looked down at the floor for a moment, then at Katrina in her flouncy, swirly plum dress. Bowie briefly thought maybe he had been imagining his brother’s initial reaction until Milo brushed past him through the doorway and went into his own room.

Bowie followed him and entered the room in time to see Milo pull a bundle the same color as Katrina’s dress from under the bed.

Her shoes!

That must have been what he shoved down there when Bowie came in first thing that morning.

“You knew those weren’t yours, kiddo. Go give them to Katrina.”

Milo looked reluctant, but he slowly walked over to her and held out the shoes. Katrina took them, her expression baffled but grateful. “Thank you so much, Milo.”

She grabbed the shoes from him and kissed the boy on the top of his head. “I’ll see you later tonight, okay? Promise you’ll save me a dance.”

He didn’t say anything, just headed back toward the kitchen. By tacit agreement, Bowie and Katrina both followed him and found Milo back at the table with the marshmallows and pretzels, acting as if the last few moments hadn’t happened.

“That was odd,” she said, brows furrowed as she gazed at the boy.

“Not really.” He didn’t want to tell her thatthishe understood too well, the chaos of not knowing what or who might be a constant in his life and what might be gone the next day. “This is a kid who has lost everything, who has never had a single safe, secure thing to hold on to. Stella isn’t the mother I would have chosen for him, but she was all he had, and now she’s gone, too. I would guess he wasn’t sure you were coming back. Maybe tucking your shoes under his bed was simply his way of hanging on to a piece of you.”

She gave him a careful look, and he instantly regretted saying anything. He should have kept his big mouth shut. Would she guess that Bowie also had been a pack rat when he was a kid, had cached everything from flashlight batteries to quarters to sleeves of saltine crackers, just in case he needed them?

“You should probably slip those on your feet now, Cinderella, and hurry to the ball,” he said quickly. “You don’t want to be late for your sister’s wedding.”

It was true, but he was also hoping to divert her attention. To his relief, the transparent tactic worked.

“You’re right. Wyn would kill me if I made everybody wait for me.” She looked over at Milo, who wasn’t paying them any attention. “I guess I’ll see you later, then. You’re still coming to the reception?”

“We’ll stop there, but I doubt we’ll stay long,” he said. This probably wasn’t wise either, but he couldn’t resist adding it anyway. “Save me a dance, too, would you?”

Her gaze met his, and he saw heated awareness flash in her eyes before she looked away.

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “My dance card is already pretty full, what with two older brothers and uncles and assorted preadolescent cousins vying for my hand. But I’ll see what I can do.”

Shoes dangling from one hand, she wiggled the fingers of her other hand in farewell and hurried out of the room. As soon as he heard the outside door close, he let out a breath, feeling as if she had sucked all the oxygen from the room with her.

“Kat,” Milo said. He pointed to the flat creation he was making, a smiling face with pretzels laid end to end for the face and hair, marshmallows for eyes and more stick pretzels for the mouth.

Milo never gave a full-fledged smile, but he lifted his mouth in as close an approximation as he could manage.

“Yes. Kat,” Bowie answered as worry pinched at him again. His brother adored Katrina. She had brought laughter and joy andfunto his world, and Bowie didn’t want to think about how empty and colorless it would seem when she left.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“YOU’REPOSITIVEHE’SCOMING?” Samantha kept her gaze glued to the garden gate on the side of the house that had been festooned with flowers and ribbons by McKenzie and her little squadron of decorators armed with florist wires and ribbons.

Katrina really didn’t want to talk to Sam about Bowie, but she didn’t know how to tell her friend the topic made her uncomfortable. She shifted, searching her mind for a way to change the subject, but nothing came to her. She didn’t know how to avoid answering a direct question, anyway.

The awkwardness of it was becoming overwhelming. Sam had a serious thing for Bowie, which left Katrina with a hollow feeling in her gut she wasn’t sure she wanted to examine too closely.

She hadtoldhim he should date Samantha, had extolled her friend’s many virtues to him. How would Katrina react if Bowie actually took her up on that suggestion? Would she be able to bear seeing the two of them dating?

She wasn’t sure she wanted to examine the answer to that too closely.

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