ick Hennessy slipped a rubber band about a stack of cash and set it next to a pile of credit card and debit receipts. The sound of the electric coin sorter sitting on his desk filled the small office in the back of Mort’s. Everyone but Mick had gone home for the evening and he was just balancing the tills before he headed that way himself.

Owning and running bars was in Mick’s blood. Mick’s great-grandfather had made and sold cheap grain alcohol during Prohibition and opened Hennessy’s two months after the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed and the spigots once again flowed in the United States. The bar had been in his family ever since.

Mick didn’t particularly care for belligerent drunks, but he did like the flexible hours that came with being his own boss. He didn’t have to take orders or answer to anyone, and when he walked into one of his bars, he had a feeling of possession that he’d never felt with anything else in his life. His bars were loud and raucous and chaotic, but it was a chaos he controlled.

More than the hours and feeling of possession, Mick liked making money. During the summer months, he made tons of money from tourists and from the people who lived in Boise but owned cabins on the lake in Truly.

The coin sorter stopped and Mick slid stacks of coins into paper sleeves. An image of a dark-haired, red-lipped woman entered his head. He wasn’t surprised that he’d noticed Maddie Dupree within seconds of stepping behind the bar. It only would have surprised him if he hadn’t noticed her. With her beautiful smooth skin and seductive brown eyes, she was just the sort of woman who drew his attention. That small mole at the corner of her full lips had reminded him just how long it had been since he’d kissed a mouth like hers and worked his way south. Down her chin and the arch of her throat to all the soft places and sweet parts.

Since his move back to Truly two years ago, his sex life had suffered more than he liked. Which sucked. Truly was a small town where people went to church on Sundays and married young. They tended to stay married and if not, looked to remarry real quick. Mick never messed with married women or women with marriage on their minds. Never even thought twice about it.

Not that there weren’t plenty of unmarried women in Truly. Owning two bars in town, he came in contact with a lot of available women. A good share of them let him know they were interested in more than his cocktail list. Some of them he’d known all of his life. They knew the stories and gossip and thought they knew him too. They didn’t, or they would know he preferred to spend time with women who didn’t know him or the past. Who didn’t know the sordid details of his parents’ lives.

Mick shoved the money and receipts into deposit bags and zipped them closed. The clock on the wall above his desk read 2:05. Travis’s latest school photograph sat on a polished oak desk; a sprinkling of brown freckles scattered across the boy’s cheeks and nose. Mick’s nephew was seven going on fourteen and had too much Hennessy in him for his own good. The innocent smile didn’t fool Mick one bit. Travis had his ancestors’ dark hair and blue eyes and wild ways. If left unchecked, he’d inherit their fondness for fighting, booze, and women. Any one of those traits by themselves wasn’t necessarily bad in moderation, but generations of Hennessys had never cared squat about moderation, and the combination had sometimes proved lethal.

He moved across the office and set the money on the top shelf of the safe, next to the printout of that night’s transactions. He swung the heavy door shut, pushed down the steel handle, and spun the combination lock. The tick-tick of the lock filled the silence of the small office in the back of Mort’s.

Travis was giving Meg hell, that was for sure, and Mick’s sister had little understanding of boys. She just didn’t get why boys threw rocks, made weapons out of everything they touched, and punched each other for no apparent reason. It was up to Mick to be the buffer in Travis’s life and to help Meg raise him. To give the boy someone to talk to and to teach him how to be a good man. Not that Mick was an expert or a shining example of what made a good man. But he did have firsthand knowledge and some experience in what made an asshole.

He grabbed a set of keys off the desktop and headed out of the office. The heels of his boots thudded against the hardwood floor, sounding inordinately loud in the empty bar.

When he was a kid, no one had been around for him to talk to or teach him how to be a man. He’d been raised by his grandmother and sister, and he’d had to learn for himself. More often than not, he learned the hard way. He didn’t want the same for Travis.

Mick flipped the light switches off and headed out the back door. The cold morning air brushed his face and neck as he stuck a key in the deadbolt and locked it behind him. Right out of high school he’d left Truly to attend Boise State down in the capital city. But after three years of aimless pursuits and a rotten attitude, he’d enlisted in the army. At the time, seeing the world from the inside of a tank had sounded like a real smart plan.

A red Dodge Ram was parked next to the Dumpster and he climbed inside. He’d certainly seen the world. Sometimes more of it than he cared to remember, but not from the inside of a tank. Instead he’d viewed it from thousands of feet in the air within the cockpits of Apache helicopters. He’d flown birds for the U.S government before getting out and moving back to Truly. The army had given him more than a kick-ass career and a chance to live a good life. It had taught him how to be a man in a way that living in a house of women had not. When to stand up and when to shut the hell up. When to fight and when to walk away. What mattered and what wasn’t worth his time.

Mick started the truck and waited a few moments for the vehicle to warm up. He owned two bars, and he figured it was a very good thing that he’d learned to deal with belligerent drunks and assorted dipshits in a way that didn’t require throwing fists and cracking heads. Otherwise, he’d get little else done. He’d be in one fight after another, walking around with a black eye and busted lip like he had growing up. Back then he hadn’t known how to handle the dipshits of the world. Back then he’d been forced to live with the scandal his parents had created. He’d had to live with the whispers when he walked into a room. The sideways glances at church or the Valley Grocery Store. The taunts from other children at school or, worse, the birthday parties he and Meg had not been invited to. Back then, he’d handled every slight with his fists. Meg had retreated within herself.

Mick flipped on the headlights and shoved the truck into reverse. The Ram’s taillights lit up the alley as he looked over his shoulder and backed out of the parking space. In a larger town, the salacious lives of Loch and Rose Hennessy would have been forgotten within a few weeks. Front-page news for a day or two, then eclipsed by something more shocking. Something bigger to talk about over morning coffee. But in a town the size of Truly, where the juiciest scandal usually involved such nefarious deeds as a stolen bicycle or Sid Grimes poaching out of season, the sordidness of Loch and Rose Hennessy had kept the town talking for years. Speculating and rehashing every tragic detail had become a favorite pastime. Right up there with holiday parades, the ice-sculpting contest, and raising money for the town’s various causes. But unlike decorating floats and instituting after-school just-say-no-to-drugs programs, what everyone seemed to forget, or perhaps didn’t care about, was that within the wreckage that Rose and Loch had created, there had been two innocent children just trying to live it all down.

He shoved the truck into drive and rolled out of the alley and onto a dimly lit street. A lot of his childhood memories were old and faded and thankfully forgotten. Others were so crystal clear he could recall every detail. Like the night he and Meg had been woken up by a county sheriff, told to grab a few things, and taken to their grandmother Loraine’s house. He remembered sitting in the back of the squad car in his T-shirt, underwear, and sneakers, holding his Tonka truck, while Meg sat next to him, crying as if their world had just ended. And it had. He remembered all the squawk and adrenaline-laced voices on the police radio, and he remembered something about someone checking up on the other little girl.

Leaving the few city lights behind, Mick drove through the pitch-darkness for two miles before turning onto his dirt street. He drove past the house where he and Meg had been raised after the death of their parents. His grandmother Loraine Hennessy had been affectionate and loving in her own way. She’d made sure he and Meg had things like winter boots and gloves and were always filled with comfort food. But she’d completely neglected what they’d really needed. The most normal life possible.

She’d refused to sell the old farmhouse where he and Meg had lived with their parents. For years it sat abandoned on the outskirts of town, becoming a haven for mice and a constant reminder of the family that had once lived there. A person couldn’t enter town without seeing it. Without seeing the overgrown weeds, the peeling white paint, and the sagging clothesline.

And Monday through Friday, for nine months out of every year, Mick and Meg had been forced to pass it on their way to school. While the other children on the bus chatted about the latest episode of The Dukes Of Hazzard or checked out the contents of their lunch boxes, he and Meg turned their heads away from the window. Their stomachs got heavy and they held their breath, praying to God no one noticed their old house. God hadn’t always answered and the bus would fill with the latest gossip the kids had overheard about Mick’s parents.

The bus trip to school had been a daily hell. A routine torture—until a cold October night in 1986 when the farmhouse erupted in a huge orange fireball and burned completely to the ground. Arson had been determined as the cause of the fire, and there’d been a big investigation. Almost everyone in town had been questioned, but the person responsible for dousing the place with kerosene had never been caught. Everyone in town thought they knew who’d done it, but no one had known for sure.

After Loraine’s death three years ago, Mick sold the property to the Allegrezza boys and he’d thought about selling the family bar too, but in the end he decided to move back and run the place. Meg needed him. Travis needed him, and to his surprise, when he’d returned to Truly, no one really talked about the scandal anymore. Whispers no longer followed him, or if they did, he no longer heard them.

He slowed the truck and made another left, turning into his long driveway and heading up a hill seated at the base of Shaw Mountain. He’d bought the two-story house shortly after he’d moved back to Truly. It had a great view of the town and the rugged mountains surrounding the lake. He parked in the garage next to his twenty-one-foot ski boat and entered the house through the laundry room. The light in his office was on and he turned it off as he passed. He moved through the dark living room and took the stairs two at a time.

For the most part, Mick didn’t really think of the past that had been such a focus in his childhood. Truly didn’t talk about it anymore, which was ironic as hell, because he just didn’t give a shit what people said and thought about him these days. He walked into his bedroom at the far end of the hall and moved through the moonlight pouring through the open slats of his wooden blinds. Shadow and muted strips of light touched his face and chest as he reached into his back pocket. He tossed his wallet on his dresser, then grabbed two fistfuls of his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. But just because he didn’t give a shit about the past didn’t mean that Meg was over it. She had her good days and bad days. Since the death of their grandmother, her bad days were getting worse, and that was just no way for Travis to live.

Moonlight and shadow spilled across the green quilt and solid oak posts of Mick’s bed. He dropped the shirt by his feet, then walked across the room. Sometimes he felt that moving back to Truly had been a mistake. It felt as if he were standing in one place, unable to move forward, and he didn’t know why he felt that way. He’d bought a new bar and was thinking of starting a helicopter service with his friend Steve. He had money and success and he belonged in Truly with his family. The only family he had. The only family he was ever likely to have, but sometimes…sometimes he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for something.

The mattress dipped as he sat on the edge and pulled off his boots and socks. Meg thought all he needed was to meet a nice woman to make him a good wife, but he just couldn’t see himself married. Not now. He’d had a few good relationships in his life. Good right up until the moment that they weren’t. None had lasted more than a year or two. Partly because he’d been gone so much. Mostly because he didn’t want to buy a ring and walk down the aisle.

He stood and stripped to his underwear. Meg thought he was afraid of marriage because their parents’ had been so bad, but that wasn’t true. The truth was that he didn’t remember his parents all that much. Just a few watery memories of family picnics at the lake and his parents cuddling on the sofa. His mother crying at the kitchen table and an old heavy telephone thrown through the television screen.

No, the problem wasn’t the memories of his parents’ fucked-up relationship. He’d just never loved one woman enough to want to spend the rest of his life with her. Which he didn’t consider a problem at all.

He pulled back the quilt and lay between the cool sheets. For the second time that night, he thought about Maddie Dupree, and he laughed into the darkness. She’d been a smart-ass, but he’d never held that against a woman. If fact, he liked a woman who could stand up to a man. Who gave as good as she got and didn’t need a man to take care of her. Who wasn’t needy or weepy or crazy as hell. Whose moods didn’t swing like a pendulum.

Mick turned on his side and glanced at the clock on his nightstand. He’d set his alarm for ten a.m. and was ready for a full seven hours of uninterrupted shut-eye. Unfortunately, he didn’t get it.

The next morning, the ringing of the telephone brought him out of a deep sleep. He opened his eyes and squinted against the morning sun pouring across his bed. He glanced at the caller ID and reached for the cordless receiver.

“You better be spurting blood,” he said and pushed the covers down his naked chest. “I told you not to call before ten unless it’s an emergency.”

“Mom’s at work and I need some fireworks,” his nephew informed him.

“At eight-thirty in the morning?” He sat up and ran his fingers through one side of his hair. “Is your sitter there with you?”

“Yeah. Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July and I don’t got no fireworks.”

“You just realized this?” There was more to the story. With Travis, there was always more to the story. “Why didn’t your mom get you your fireworks?” There was a long pause and Mick added, “You might as well tell me the truth because I’m going to ask Meg.”

“She said I have a potty mouth.”

Mick stood and his feet sank into thick beige carpeting as he walked across the room toward a dresser. He was almost afraid to ask. “Why?”

“Well…she made meatloaf again. She knows I hate meatloaf.”

He didn’t blame the kid there. The Hennessy women were notorious for their shitty meatloaf. He opened the second dresser drawer and prompted, “And?”

“I said it tasted like shit. I said you thought so too.”

Mick paused in the act of pulling out a white T-shirt and glanced into his reflection above the dresser. “Did you use the real s-word?”

“Uh-huh, and she said I can’t have fireworks, but you say the s-word all the dang time.”

That was true. He hung the shirt over one shoulder and leaned forward to look into his bloodshot eyes. “We talked about words I can say and words you can say.”

“I know, but it just slipped out.”

“You need to watch what slips out of your mouth.”

Travis sighed. “I know. I said I was sorry, even though I’m not really. Just like you said I should say to girls. Even the stupid ones. Even when I’m right and they’re wrong.”

That wasn’t quite what he’d said. “You didn’t tell Meg I said that, though.” He pulled a pair of Levi’s out of the dresser and added, “Right?”

“Right.”

He couldn’t countermand his sister, but at the same time, a boy shouldn’t be punished for speaking the truth. “I can’t buy you fireworks if your mom says no, but we’ll see if we can’t work something out.”

An hour later, Mick shoved a bag of fireworks behind the driver’s seat of his truck. He’d bought a small variety pack as well as a few sparklers and snakes from the Safe and Sane stand in the parking lot of Handy Man Hardware. He hadn’t bought them for Travis. He’d bought them to take to Louie Allegrezza’s Fourth of July barbeque. If anyone asked, that was the story, but he doubted anyone would believe him. Like all other residents of the pyrotechnically obsessed town, he had a big box of illegals just waiting to be shot over the lake. Adults didn’t buy Safe and Sanes unless they had kids. Legal fireworks were kind of like training wheels.

Louie’s son Pete Allegrezza and Travis were buddies, and days ago, Meg had agreed that Travis could go to the barbeque with Mick if he stayed out of trouble. The barbeque was tomorrow, and Mick figured Travis should be able to control his behavior for one more day. Mick shut the door to his truck, and he and Travis headed across the parking lot toward the hardware store. “If you behave yourself, maybe you can hold a sparkler.”

“Man,” Travis whined. “Sparklers are for little kids.”

“With your track record, you’ll be lucky if you’re not in bed before dark.” Sunlight shone in his nephew’s short black hair and across the shoulders of his red Spider-Man T-shirt. “You’re having a hard time controlling yourself lately.” He opened the door and waved to the owner standing behind the counter. “Meg’s still pretty mad at us both, but I have a plan.” For several months, Meg had complained about a leaky pipe beneath her kitchen sink. If he and Travis fixed her S-trap so that she didn’t have to keep emptying a pan of water, maybe she’d be in a more forgiving mood. But with Meg, a person never knew. She wasn’t always the most forgiving person.

The soles of Travis’s sneakers scuffed alongside Mick’s boots as they walked to the plumbing section. The store was quiet except for a couple looking at garden hoses and Mrs. Vaughn, his first-grade teacher, rooting through a bin of assorted drawer handles. He was always amazed to see Laverne Vaughn still alive and walking around. She had to be older than dirt.

While Mick grabbed a PVC pipe and plastic washers, his nephew picked up a caulking gun and aimed it at a bird feeder at the end of the aisle as if it were a.45 Magnum.

“We don’t need that,” Mick told him as he reached for some plumber’s tape.

Travis popped off a few rounds, then tossed the gun back onto the shelf. “I’m gonna go look at the deer,” he said and disappeared around the corner of the aisle. Handy Man’s had a big selection of plastic animals that people could display in their yards. Although why you would want to do that when the real thing was likely to roam through was beyond Mick.

He stuck the pipe beneath one arm and went in search of his nephew, who didn’t usually go looking for trouble, but like most seven-year-old boys seemed to find it anyway. He moved through the store, glanced down each crammed row, and paused next to a display of mops.

A smile of pure male appreciation curved the corners of his mouth. Maddie Dupree stood in the middle of aisle six, a neon-yellow box in her hands. Her brown hair was in one of those claws and looked like someone had stuck a dark feather duster on the back of her head. His gaze moved down her smooth profile, past her throat and shoulder, and stopped dead on her black T-shirt. Last night, he hadn’t been able to get a good look at her. Today, the fluorescent lighting of Handy Man Hardware lit her up like a walking, talking, breathing centerfold. Like an old-school playmate before eating disorders and silicone. Desire stirred in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t even know her well enough to be feeling a thing. Didn’t know if she was married or single, had a man in her life and ten kids waiting at home. Apparently it didn’t matter, because she drew him down the aisle like a magnet.

“Looks like you got problems with some mice,” he said.

“What?” Her head snapped up and her gaze flew to his like he’d caught her doing something she shouldn’t. “Christ almighty.” Her lips parted and she sucked in a breath, drawing his attention to the mole at the corner of her mouth. “You startled me.”

“Sorry,” he said, but he really wasn’t. She looked good all wide-eyed and breathy and a little off balance. He glanced up and pointed with the PVC to the box in her hand. “Mice troubles?”

“One actually ran across my foot this morning while I was making coffee.” She crinkled her nose. “It slid under the pantry door and disappeared. It’s probably in there right now feasting on my granola bars.”

“Don’t worry.” Mick laughed. “He probably won’t eat much.”

“I don’t want him to eat anything at all. Except maybe some poison.” She turned her attention back to the box in her hand. Fine dark hairs clung to the side of her neck and Mick thought he smelled strawberries.

At the far end of the aisle, Travis turned the corner and stopped in his tracks. His mouth got a little slack as he stared at Maddie. Mick knew the feeling.

“It says here that odor problems can occur if rodents expire in inaccessible areas. I really don’t want to have to search for stinking mice.” She looked up at him out of the corners of her eyes. “I wonder if there isn’t something better I could use.”

“I wouldn’t recommend the tape.” He pointed to a box of glue boards. “Mice get stuck on it and squeak a lot.” There it was again. Strawberries, and he wondered if Handy’s had some scented feeders for hummingbirds. “You could use traps,” he suggested.

“Really? Aren’t traps kind of…violent?”

“They can snap a mouse in half,” Travis said as he came to stand beside Mick. He rocked back on his heels and grinned. “Sometimes their head pops off when they go for the cheese.”

“Good Lord, kid.” Maddie’s brows drew together as she lowered her gaze to Travis. “That’s gruesome.”

“Uh-huh.”

Mick stuck the pipe under his arm and placed his free hand on top of Travis’s head. “This gruesome guy is my nephew, Travis Hennessy. Travis, say hello to Maddie Dupree.”

Maddie stuck out her palm and shook Travis’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Travis.”

“Yeah. You too.”

“And thanks for telling me about the traps,” she continued and released him. “I’ll keep them in mind if I decide on decapitation.”

Travis’s smile grew to show off his missing front tooth. “Last year I killed tons of mice,” he boasted, employing his special brand of seven-year-old charm. “Call me.”

Mick glanced down at his nephew and wasn’t sure, but he thought Travis was puffing up his skinny chest. “The best way to get rid of mice,” he said, saving Travis from embarrassing himself further, “is to get a cat.”

Maddie shook her head and her brown eyes looked into his, all warm and soft and liquid. “Cats and I don’t get along.” His gaze slid to her mouth and he again wondered how long it had been since he’d kissed a mouth that good. “I’d rather have severed heads in my kitchen or hidden carcasses stinking up the place.”

She was talking about severed heads and stinking carcasses and he was getting turned on. Right there in Handy Man Hardware, like he was sixteen again and couldn’t control himself. He’d been with a lot of beautiful women and wasn’t a kid. He’d saved Travis from embarrassing himself, but who was going to save him?

“We’ve got some plumbing to do.” He held up the sealant and took a step back. “Good luck with those mice.”

“See you boys around.”

“Yeah,” Travis said and followed him to the checkout counter. “She was nice,” he whispered. “I like the color of her hair.”

Mick chuckled and set the PVC next to the register. The kid was only seven, but he was a Hennessy.