Sugar Daddy (Travis Family #1)(77)

"Please," I whispered, and was infinitely relieved when he pushed away from the door and stood back to let me pass.

Gage waited in the doorway a little too long as I left. It might have been my imagination, but as I reached the elevator and glanced back, he seemed bereft, as if I had just taken something from him.

It was a relief to everyone, especially Jack, when Gage was able to resume his usual

schedule. He showed up at the house on Monday morning, looking so well that Churchill happily accused him of faking his illness.

I hadn't mentioned having stayed with Gage for most of Saturday evening. It was best. I had decided, to let everyone assume I had gone out with my friends as planned. I realized Gage hadn't said anything about it either—if he had, there would have been a comment from Churchill. It made me uneasy, this small secret between Gage and me. even though nothing had happened.

But something had changed. Instead of treating me with his usual reserve. Gage went out of his way to be helpful, fixing my laptop when it froze, taking Churchill's empty breakfast tray downstairs before I could do it. And it seemed to me that he was coming to the house more frequently, dropping by at odd times, always on the pretext of checking on Churchill.

I tried to treat his visits casually, but I couldn't deny that time moved faster when Gage was around, and everything seemed a little more interesting. He wasn't a man you could fit into a neat category. The family, with typically Texan distrust of highbrow pursuits, affectionately mocked him for having more of an intellectual bent than the rest of them.

But Gage had been aptly named after his mother's family, the descendants of warlike Scotch-Irish borderers. Accordine to Gretchen. who had made a hobby of researchine the family genealogy, the Gages' dour self-reliance and toughness had made them perfect candidates to settle the Texas frontier. Isolation, hardship, danger—they had welcomed all of it. their natures practically demanded it. At times you could see the echoes of those fiercely disciplined immigrants in Gage.

Jack and Joe were far more easygoing and charming, both possessing a boyishness that was completely absent in their older brother. And then there was Haven, the daughter, whom I met when she came home on break from school. She was a slim black-haired girl with Churchill's dark eyes, possessing all the subtlety of a firecracker. She announced to her father and anyone else in earshot that she had become a second-wave feminist, she had changed her major to women's studies, and she would no longer tolerate Texas's culture of patriarchal repression. She talked so fast I had a hard time following her, especially when she pulled me aside to express sympathy for the exploitation and disenfranchisement of my people, and assured me of her passionate support for the reformation of immigration policies and guest worker programs. Before I could think of how to reply, she had bounced away and launched into an enthusiastic argument with Churchill.

"Don't mind Haven," Gage had said dryly, watching his sister with a faint smile. "She's never met a cause she didn't like. It was the biggest disappointment of her life not to be disenfranchised."

Gage was different from his siblings. He worked too hard and challenged himself compulsively, and seemed to hold nearly everyone outside his family at arm's length. But he had begun to treat me with a careful friendliness I couldn't help responding to. And there was his increasing kindness to my sister. It started in small ways. He fixed the broken chain of Carrington's pink two-wheeler, and drove her to school one morning when I was running late.

Then there was the bug project. Carrington's class had been studying insects, and every child was required to write a report on a particular bug and make a 3D model. Carrington had decided on a lightning bug. I took Carrington to Hobby Lobby, where we spent forty dollars on paint, Styrofoam. plaster of Paris, and pipe cleaners. I didn't say one word about the cost—my competitive sister was determined to make the best bug in the class, and I had resolved to do whatever was necessary to help.

We made the body of the bug and covered it with wet plaster strips, and painted it black, red, and yellow when it was dry. The entire kitchen had been turned into a disaster zone in the process. The bug was a handsome creation, but to Carrington's disappointment, the glow in the dark paint we had used for the bug's underside was not nearly as effective as we had hoped. It didn't glow hardly at all, Carrington had said glumly, and I had promised to try to find a better quality paint so we could apply another coat.

After spending an afternoon typing a chapter of Churchill's manuscript, I was surprised to discover Gage sitting with my sister in the kitchen, the table piled with tools, wires, small pieces of wood, batteries, glue, a ruler. Cradling the lightning bug model in one hand, he made deep cuts with an X-Acto knife.

"What are you doing?"

Two heads lifted, one dark, one platinum. "Just performing a little surgery," Gage said, deftly extracting a rectangular chunk of foam.

Carrington's eyes were lit with excitement. "He's putting a real light inside our bug, Liberty! We're making a 'lectrical circuit with wires and a switch, and when you flip it the lightning bug's going to flash."

"Oh." Nonplussed, I sat at the table. I always appreciated help whenever it was given. But I had never expected Gage, of all people, to get involved in our project. I didn't know whether he'd been recruited by Carrington or if he'd offered on his own, and I wasn't certain why it made me uneasy to see them working together so companionably.