RECLAIM MY HEART(64)

His son had called him Dad twice last night. Once in the car, and once before he’d trekked off to bed. Evenas ecas fa now it was difficult to describe how hearing Zach speak that word made him feel. He’d never experienced that kind of joy. Even stepping into a courtroom for the very first time hadn’t thrilled him as much.
As idyllic as a childhood spent growing up on a peaceful Amish farm might sound, Lucas decided his current life had afforded him too many blessings to give up.
He reached for a clean pair of jeans, pulled a t-shirt from the dresser drawer. If he could change anything, he’d fix the mistakes he’d made in this life. He’d have set his anger aside. He’d have gotten in touch with Tyne, some way, somehow. He’d have been there for the woman he loved, for his son, through all those difficult years.
Walking through the living room, he heard water running in the kitchen.
“Hey,” he greeted. “You’re up early.”
Tyne’s long blond hair was tousled and sexy as hell. Her blue eyes were still heavy with sleep, her skin, pale as heavy cream. The silky t-shirt thing she wore did little to hide the outline of her rounded breasts, brown smudges of her nipples showing through the material.
“I didn’t know you were up,” she said. “I’m making coffee. It’ll just be a minute.”
He’d have been there for the woman he loved…
For the woman he loved…
The thought sang through his head, coming to him, not in the past tense but in the present. The here. The now. The woman he loved.
She tipped the filled carafe over the water chamber of the coffee maker then set the empty pot on the burner and flipped the switch. “Listen, Lucas. Thank you for last night. I know you didn’t want to go. I really appreciate it.”
He approached her, close enough to smell the warm, lemony scent of her skin, and kissed her cheek. She blinked at him, her blue eyes widening further with each lowering and raising of her eyelids. Damn but she was gorgeous.
“I didn’t mind,” he told her truthfully. “I’m going to run into town. Have coffee with Jasper. Is that okay with you?”
“Sure,” she said.
Staying right here and stripping that little top off her body sounded much more fun. But he had some things to tell his uncle, things that have needed to be said for far too long.
?     ?     ?

Light blazed from the window of Jasper’s back door and Lucas saw his uncle sitting in the first-floor studio. He rapped twice and Jasper let him inside.
“You’re working?” he asked.
Jasper nodded. “Been up since three. The hawk in my head woke me.”
“Hawk?”
The older man grinned, ushering his nephew into the brightly lit studio. “Accepted a job yesterday. Man drove in from Doylestown and brought this.” He placed the flat of his hands on either side of a great log that sat square in the center of the studio floor. “Took four of us to get it in here. It’s from an oak tree that’s been growing beside the guy’s tavern for as long as he can remember. The tree blew over in a storm, and he saved a chunk. He read my interview in Pennsylvania Magazine a couple years ago. Wants me to make him a wood carving. His tavern’s called The Hawk’s Nest.”
Jasper stared at the hunk of wood, his gaze roving up and down as if he could actually see a bird of prey hidden beneath the rough bark.
“Congratulations on the job. I can come back another time,” Lucas offered. “I don’t want to interrupt you.”
“No, no.” His uncle turned to face him. “That hawk will be flying around in my imagination for days before I pick up a chisel and mallet. I have a pot of coffee brewed.” Without another wordt ahim, Jasper headed to the far side of the studio where an automatic coffee maker sat on a countertop, its glowing red light indicating that the burner was still hot.
Lucas accepted the mug his uncle poured for him. “I came to tell you that you were right.”
Jasper’s expression remained staid, and that didn’t surprise Lucas. His uncle had never been susceptible to knee-jerk reactions.
As a child, he’d hidden things from his father; a less than stellar report card, a detention notice, a broken toy, anything that might garner his dad’s disapproval. Lucas had felt loved and cared for, but his father had been a little on the hot-tempered side. After his dad had been killed in the accident on the interstate and Jasper had become his guardian, it hadn’t taken long at all for Lucas to realize that the two men, although they’d been brothers, were as different as night and day.
Just a few months after losing his dad, he rode home from school, a teacher’s note scalding his thigh through his trouser pocket. Lucas devised several fantastic stories to explain why he wasn’t responsible for the fight he’d gotten into with Barry Sullivan. However, rather than the expected raised voice and swat on the back, Lucas experienced a very different scenario. Jasper had read the note and listened to Lucas’s side of the story, and then his uncle had asked a slew of calm, thought-provoking questions. Being forced to think about his behavior, to admit his responsibility in the situation—even if only to himself—had been more agonizing and more effective than any punishment his father had ever doled out in the past.
After that, Lucas hadn’t feared coming to his uncle in times of trouble, or when he needed to talk out some issue or other…?or, like now, when he wanted to make a confession. Years of witnessing Jasper’s unruffled manner assured Lucas that there would be no judgment. There would be no scorn. No violent reactions. Not even a single I-told-you-so.