It took less than an hour for Kelly to forget about how thoroughly flustered she’d been by Michael’s kiss and Maggie’s teasing. The heat she’d expected to keep her cheeks a permanent shade of embarrassed pink finally cooled, and she began to relax. After all, this evening wasn’t really about her at all. It was about the Havilceks and the Devaneys getting to know each other.

Although Michael had clearly dreaded the entire occasion and she’d been expecting it to be awkward, they’d both evidently forgotten about the warmth exuded by his foster mother and his sister-in-law. Doris Havilcek and Maggie Devaney were like a couple of cruise ship social directors determined to see that everyone had a good time. Introductions were accompanied by anecdotes designed to provide insight and provoke good-natured laughter. Kelly was in awe of them, and more than a little envious.

So, apparently, was Michael. She turned to find him watching his foster mother with a dazed expression. Leaning close, she noted, “She’s an amazing woman, isn’t she?”

“Even more so than I realized,” he admitted. “I thought she’d feel threatened by having my brothers suddenly thrust into the middle of our lives, but she’s not. She’s simply opening that generous heart of hers and adding them to her family as if they’d just been rediscovered after a long absence. And my dad and sisters are following her lead.”

“I’m glad for you,” Kelly told him sincerely. “It would have been hard if they hadn’t gotten along. I’m sure you would have felt torn.”

Before Michael could respond, Sean moved into the vacant seat on his other side. “You really lucked out in the foster family department,” Sean told him. “The Havilceks are terrific people.”

Michael nodded. “No question about it.”

“I’ve tried to get my last foster family in here to spend some time with Ryan and Maggie, but they’re not much interested. Deanna and I go by to see them once in a while, but I always have the feeling if we stopped going they’d hardly notice. They’re good people, but they’ve moved on. I always had the feeling that they knew there would always be another foster kid waiting just around the corner, so they tried not to get too attached to any of us.”

Sean shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him, but Kelly could see that it did. And it must be even harder on Ryan, who’d never stayed with the same foster family for more than a few months at a time. There was no one from his past to whom he felt the slightest sentimental attachment.

“Well, it looks to me as if you can all count on being part of the Havilcek clan from now on,” Kelly told Sean. “Mrs. Havilcek will see to that.”

Sean grinned. “Fine by me. I’ve heard about her apple pie.”

Ryan joined them. “Did I hear somebody mention apple pie? Who’s baking?”

Michael shook his head and regarded his big brother with amusement. “You’d think that a man who owns his own pub wouldn’t have any trouble getting all the food he wants.”

“Rory is a genius when it comes to cooking up an Irish stew or anything else he learned in Dublin, but he’s yet to master an American apple pie,” Ryan said with apparent regret. “Maggie’s offered to teach him, but he’s vowed to leave the day she starts trying to take over his kitchen the way she’s taken over the rest of this place. Now, when my Caitlyn gets a little older, it’ll be another story. That daughter of mine has our Rory wound around her little finger. She could sit in the kitchen all day long, banging on his favorite pots and pans with a spoon, and he’d never complain about the noise or the scratches.”

“Speaking of Caitlyn, where is my niece tonight?” Michael asked.

“Upstairs with the baby-sitter and, with any luck, sound asleep,” Ryan said.

“As is my son,” Sean said. “Though I imagine he’s playing video games rather than sleeping. He told us he wasn’t a baby like Caitlyn, so Deanna bribed him to stay out of our hair for a few hours. I think Kevin’s destined for a top-level management career in business. He’s already a tough negotiator. Deanna and I come out on the losing end more than I’d like to admit.”

Kelly listened with fascination as the talk centering on the kids went on for several minutes. Apparently both Ryan and Sean had been able to put their own bad experiences with abandonment behind them and had taken to parenting like the proverbial ducks to water. She wondered if Michael would eventually do the same. Because he’d been younger and because he’d landed with the Havilceks right at the beginning, he seemed to have fewer issues than his older brothers had had growing up.

And yet, she sensed that Michael still had moments when he felt like an outsider. His failure to call the Havilceks the minute he returned to Boston was evidence of it. Though he’d made perfectly rational excuses for that, Kelly wondered if he hadn’t been just a little bit afraid of how they would perceive him now that he was no longer going to be a strong, able-bodied hero. He should have known better, but there had to be lingering insecurities from being abandoned by his own parents. How could there not be?

She snapped back to the present when she heard Ryan mention the search for the rest of the Devaneys.

“The investigator says he has a lead. It’s not a sure thing, but he’s found a Patrick Devaney up in Maine,” Ryan told them. “He thinks it could be one of the twins. The age is about right. They’d be nearly twenty-six by now.”

Sean’s expression darkened. “Is he going up there to check it out?”

“Actually, I thought maybe we should be the ones to go,” Ryan said slowly.

“Forget it!” Sean said with surprising heat. “Finding the two of you has been great, but I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. I think that’s going to be it for me.”

Ryan turned to Michael, who looked as if he might object, as well. “Do you feel the same way?” Ryan asked him.

Kelly wasn’t sure what she expected Michael to say or even what was right. This was an incredibly delicate situation, and clearly each of the brothers was coming at it from an entirely different perspective. And the twins might very well bring about a reunion between the three brothers and their biological parents.

“I need to think about it,” Michael said, his earlier good mood suddenly vanishing. He glanced worriedly toward the Havilceks, as if he feared they might overhear the conversation. When he turned back to Ryan, he said, “This is a big step. We’re getting closer to our parents. This guy’s not going anywhere, right?”

“It doesn’t sound like it,” Ryan said.

“Then let me and Sean give it some more thought and we’ll talk later, okay?”

“Sure. No problem,” Ryan said. “Trust me, I’ve got mixed feelings about this myself. Not so much about finding Patrick and Daniel. I think that would be great. But like you said, if they’re going to lead us to our folks, I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“I know exactly how I feel,” Sean said bitterly. “If they haven’t bothered to look for us in all these years, it’s their loss.”

“We don’t know they haven’t looked,” Michael suggested quietly.

Sean scowled at him. “Of course we do. If they had, they would have found us. It didn’t take Ryan all that long to track me down, and the two of us were able to find you. It’s not as if any of us had changed our names and moved to the far ends of the earth.”

“Sean, believe me, you’re not saying anything I haven’t thought myself,” Ryan responded. “But maybe none of us will really be at peace with the past until we know the truth about what happened. Maggie’s forced me to see that.” He patted Sean on the back. “But it’s up to you. You two get back to me once you’ve thought it over. I’d better get back to the bar for a bit.”

Ryan started away, then turned back to Michael. “By the way,” he began casually, “there’s a guy who comes in here once in a while who runs a fleet of charter boats. I’d like you to meet him sometime.”

Kelly watched Michael’s already stormy expression turn even darker.

“Oh? What does that have to do with me?” Michael asked.

“A guy with your background has to have an interest in boats, right? You must have been trained on every kind imaginable,” Ryan responded. “I just thought you’d have a lot in common. And he’s told me he has a hard time finding captains who know the equipment.”

“The day won’t come when I’ll steer a bunch of damned tourists around Boston Harbor,” Michael said heatedly.

Ryan shrugged as if his response were of no consequence. “It was just an idea. What would it hurt to talk to him? Add that to your list of things to think about, okay?”

He walked away without waiting for Michael’s response.

Sean gave Michael a searching look, then sighed. “I think I’ll go upstairs and check on the kids,” he said.

After his brothers had gone, Michael faced Kelly with a troubled expression. “So, what do you think about this search of Ryan’s?”

She noticed he didn’t mention the job prospect Ryan had dangled in front of him. Apparently he really had dismissed it out of hand.

“It’s really none of my business,” she said finally.

“And that’s stopped you from forming an opinion?” Michael asked skeptically.

“Hardly,” she admitted with a rueful grin.

“Tell me.”

“I understand why all of you would hesitate, but I think Maggie’s right. I’m sure every one of you has wondered all these years why your parents disappeared and left you behind. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of impact that’s had on your lives.” She searched his face, trying to gauge how he was responding, but his expression was neutral. “Come on, Michael, isn’t it better to find out the truth and put it behind you, once and for all?”

“Then the answer’s pretty much black-and-white to you,” he concluded. “You think we should go and see if this Patrick is one of the twins?”

“Yes, I do.”

Michael’s expression turned thoughtful. “Think about this, though. He was barely two when everything happened. He might not even remember that he had brothers. He and Daniel and our parents might have had this tight-knit, perfectly happy family all these years. How’s he going to feel if three of us show up out of the blue and announce it was all a fraud?”

“It wasn’t a fraud,” Kelly replied. “It was simply his experience as a Devaney versus the ones each of you had.”

“But it could forever alter his trust in our parents. Do we have the right to do that?” He seemed genuinely tormented by the question.

“You know what I think? I think it’s amazing that you’re thinking of his feelings at all. That’s something a big brother would do. How can he not want to know that he has three older brothers who care deeply about him despite years and years of separation?”

Michael shook his head. “I think you’re being overly optimistic. I think he’s going to resent the hell out of us for coming in and destroying his world.”

“Then you’ll apologize and let him go on just as he has been.”

“You’re being naive, Kelly,” Michael accused her. “It doesn’t work that way. The damage will have been done.”

Kelly could see his point, but that was only one scenario. She pointed out another. “What if all these years, he has remembered having older brothers?” she asked. “What if he’s always felt as if a part of his life was missing? Are you ready to deny him the answers he needs to feel complete?”

Michael frowned at her questions. “If only we could predict which way it was going to go,” he said plaintively.

She put her hand over his and squeezed. “We can’t. We can only calculate the risks and make the best choice possible. No one should understand that better than you do. You’ve made a career out of taking calculated risks.”

“Yeah, but those are the kind of risks I understand,” he said.

“They’re life-and-death risks,” she countered.

“And this isn’t?” he asked wryly.

“Certainly not in the same way,” she insisted.

“Remind me to have this conversation with you again when your entire world’s been turned upside down,” he said.

Little did he know that it already had been…on the day he’d come back into her life.

 

Despite Kelly’s opinion that things would turn out all right, Michael was still feeling uneasy about this search for the rest of his biological family. On the one hand, it had turned out okay when Ryan and Sean had found him, but on the other, he sensed it was going to be very different with the twins.

As for finding his parents, he wasn’t even ready to go there yet. He was not as bitter toward them as Ryan and Sean obviously were. He simply didn’t care much one way or the other. That was a hornet’s nest he didn’t particularly want to disturb, but more and more it was growing inevitable that he would have to unless they called a halt to the search now. Whatever they did, they needed to be united, because all their lives were going to be affected. He honestly didn’t know which decision was the right one.

There was one person, though, whose opinion he trusted more than anyone else’s when it came to matters of family—his foster mother. Impulsively, the minute his therapy session ended and Kelly had gone, he called a cab and went over to the Havilceks. The fact that his mother would be in the midst of her Saturday baking wasn’t entirely coincidental.

It grated on him that he had to ask the cab driver to go up to the house and let his mother know to let him in through the garage, but the beaming smile on her face negated that momentary humiliation. She shivered as she waited for him just inside the garage.

“Come on in here, Michael,” she said briskly. “It’s freezing out there this morning. What brings you by? It’s too early for the pies to be out of the oven, you know.”

He regarded her slyly. “But not the cinnamon rolls, I’ll bet.”

She grinned. “With milk or coffee?”

“Milk, of course.”

She waited until he was settled at the kitchen table before sitting opposite him, her expression suddenly serious. “What’s on your mind, Michael? Did you and Kelly have a fight last night?”

Startled by the question, Michael paused with a forkful of gooey cinnamon roll halfway to his mouth. “No. Why would you think that?”

“Something changed during the evening. You were so clearly happy when you came in, but when you left, you both looked…” She hesitated, then said, “Serious, I guess. I thought something might have happened.”

He let the cinnamon roll practically dissolve on his tongue as he studied his mother. “You like her, don’t you? It would really bother you if we’d fought.”

“Well, of course I like her. The two of you seem good together, but it’s your feelings that count.”

He ought to be pleased by the assessment, but instead it made him uneasy. “We’re not dating, you know. She’s my therapist.”

His mother grinned. “If you say so, dear.”

Michael frowned. “I do.”

“Then you might consider not kissing her quite so enthusiastically,” she teased. “It could give people, including Kelly, the wrong impression.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” he said wryly.

His mother studied him intently. “Okay, then, if you didn’t come to talk about Kelly, why are you here?”

“You and the cinnamon rolls aren’t excuse enough?”

“We certainly could be, and I’d be flattered if we were, but I have my doubts.”

“Do you realize how disconcerting it is to have a mother who can virtually read your mind?”

“I can be vague if you’d prefer it,” she offered.

“Hardly. Okay, here it is. Ryan thinks he may have found one of our younger brothers in Maine. He wants all of us to go up and check it out.”

She nodded slowly. “I see. And you don’t want to go?”

“It’s not that. I just keep trying to put myself in Patrick’s place. He was little more than a baby when the family split up. For all we know, he’s lived happily ever after, and now here we come barging in to tell him that his idyllic situation cost the rest of us a family.”

She regarded him knowingly. “Are you so sure it’s Patrick you’re worried about?”

“Of course.”

“Michael,” she chided in the tone she used when she thought one of her children wasn’t being entirely forthright.

He frowned at the unspoken accusation. “Okay, maybe I’m the one with the problem. I lucked out. I wound up with the best family a boy could ask for, but a tiny part of me resents the fact that the twins got to keep our biological parents and the rest of us were sent away. I don’t think I even realized how much I resented it until last night when Ryan said his investigator had a lead on Patrick.”

“You know that none of this was Patrick’s fault,” his mother said. “Any more than it was yours or Ryan’s or Sean’s.”

“Yes, but…” He sighed. “You know what I really don’t get is why Ryan’s suddenly so anxious to find the twins and our parents. He should be the angriest of all, and, deep down, I think he is. It’s Maggie who’s convinced him to do this.”

“Maybe he’s simply wise enough to realize he’ll never let go of that anger until he has the whole story.”

“Then you think we should go,” he concluded, knowing that was exactly what he’d expected her to say when he’d come here. Maybe he’d wanted her blessing even more than he’d wanted her advice.

She rested her hand against his cheek. “Michael, I love you as much as if you were one of my own,” she said quietly. “But this is not my decision. You need to listen to your heart.”

That was going to be hard to do for a man who’d grown used to ignoring anything his heart had to say, especially if it happened to be the least bit inconvenient. He’d always thought of himself as a man of cool actions, not emotion.

“And while you’re at it,” she added slyly, “you might see what your heart has to say about Kelly. You could be surprised.”

“Careful,” he teased. “Some men might find your meddling annoying.”

“Not the smart ones,” she retorted. “Now, shall I turn off the oven and give you a lift home? Or can you stay for dinner?”

“Not tonight. I have some thinking to do. And don’t worry about the lift. I’ll call a cab.”

“Let me do it,” she said, already moving toward the phone.

Michael shrugged into his jacket and jockeyed the wheelchair into the garage.

“I’m not opening that door yet,” his mother warned. “The cab company said it would be at least ten minutes. I wish you’d just let me take you.”

“This is fine, Mom.”

“One of these days you’ll be driving yourself places again,” she said with confidence. It was the first time she’d ventured any sort of comment about his future.

“I hope so.”

“I know so,” she said emphatically. “Now give me a kiss.” She bent down and accepted his kiss. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

She regarded him intently. “Finding your biological parents won’t diminish that.”

He smiled. “I know that.”

“Just thought I’d mention it, in case it was on your mind.”

“Have I told you lately how incredible you are and how lucky I am to have you in my life?”

“You never had to say it,” she said, though there were tears in her eyes. “Mothers can usually see straight into their children’s hearts.”

“You can,” he told her. “I’m not so sure Kathleen Devaney could.”

“You won’t know that until you see her again.”

Michael sighed. “Will you be disappointed in me if I decide against it?”

“I could never be disappointed in you as long as you make your choice for the right reasons,” she said with conviction.

The arrival of the taxi saved him from having to think about what his mother would consider valid reasons for leaving things just as they were.

But finding Kelly waiting on his doorstep pretty much guaranteed that he wasn’t off the hook for the day, after all.

 

Michael didn’t look especially overjoyed to see her, Kelly concluded as he exited a taxi and made his way up the walk to where she waited. She wasn’t sure what had drawn her back to his place after she’d finished with her last client. Maybe it had been his distraction during their morning session. More likely, it was the uneasy conversation they’d had the night before. She’d avoided asking about the search that morning, but it had clearly been on his mind. He’d hardly said two words to her during the entire session.

“What brings you back?” he asked as he maneuvered the wheelchair past her and into the foyer. “Did you forget something?”

“No.” She’d been waiting for a half hour and in all that time she hadn’t managed to come up with a halfway plausible excuse for returning aside from wanting to see him. “If you’re busy, I can leave.”

“I’m not busy,” he said. “Are you hungry? We could order a pizza or something.”

She was surprised by the invitation. “Are you sure you don’t mind me being here?”

“To be perfectly honest, I’m glad you’re here.”

His response startled her, but she didn’t want to make too much of it. “Oh?”

“I was over at my mom’s. She gave me a lot to think about, but to be frank, I’m not looking forward to all the soul-searching required.”

“If you’re looking for a distraction, maybe I should go rent us a couple of videos, too.”

He grinned. “Perfect.”

“Action, romance or comedy?”

“What do you think?”

“One action movie for you, one chick flick for me,” she concluded. “That’s only fair.”

He nodded. “What do you want on your pizza? I’ll order while you’re gone.”

“Nothing slimy.”

Michael laughed. “Besides anchovies, what exactly does that exclude?”

“Onions and mushrooms.”

“Fine by me. I’ll get half pepperoni and half sausage.”

“You have beers or sodas?”

“Plenty of both,” he confirmed.

“Then I’ll be right back.” She started down the walk, then turned back. “When was the last time you went to the movies, just so I don’t get something you’ve already seen.”

“The last movie I saw was Lethal Weapon.”

“Which one?”

He stared at her blankly. “There was more than one? Movies weren’t something I paid any attention to once I hit my teens. I was too wrapped up in sports.”

Kelly laughed. “I can see you have a lot of catching up to do.”

It took her less than twenty minutes to pick up Lethal Weapon II, along with Die Hard and Pearl Harbor, and for her, the romantic comedy Return to Me, which she’d already seen twice before. She grabbed a package of microwave popcorn at the checkout counter while she was at it.

Back at Michael’s, she arrived at the same time as the pizza. She paid the delivery man, then juggled everything and almost dumped it on the floor twice before finally getting the door open.

She noted that Michael had already poured a beer for himself and a soft drink for her and was seated on the sofa with a basketball game on TV. He instinctively started to get up, then fell back with a muttered oath.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

Kelly merely nodded, took the pizza over to the coffee table, then held up the movie selections. “You pick first.”

He pointed to the Bruce Willis film. “Somehow testosterone goes better with pizza and beer.”

“A matter of opinion,” she noted, but she slipped it into the tape player and sat down beside him.

As requested, the movie was noisy and filled with action, so no conversation was required, but Kelly still felt as if Michael was holding something back. As soon as it was over, rather than slipping a second tape into the machine, she turned to him.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about whatever’s on your mind?”

He leveled a look at her and slowly shook his head. “I’d rather do this,” he said, reaching for her.

Kelly sighed and murmured, “Me, too,” just as his mouth covered hers.