Finding Their Son by Debra Salonen

enforcement.
    “Can you take me back to the main road? If not, I canwalk there.” Liar. He’d probably fall flat on his face if he made it a block.
    She didn’t answer right away but a few seconds later he heard her sigh. “Okay. I said I’d take you to Sturgis and I will.”
    As she walked past the front of the car, Eli caught a glimpse of her profile and a shiver of recognition traveled from the nucleus of his brain to the tips of his boots. “Boobs Jones makes my Johnson hard” someone had scribbled on the door of the boys’ can. He might have had a wet dream or two at her expense himself. He couldn’t say for sure, but there was always plenty of speculation over the exact size and shape of the breasts freshman Charlene Jones kept hidden under her bulky sweatshirts.
    Which, he told himself, was the main argument against her story being true. If he’d had a chance to see and/or touch Char Jones’s nubile breasts, the image would have been seared into his brain—even if he was on a gurney in her aunt’s kitchen with a possible concussion.
    “Why would I blank out something like that?” he asked as they backtracked through town. A few of the landmarks, like the stupid little dinosaur next to the Civic Center, looked familiar thanks to the television show he’d caught a couple of time with his daughters. But at the moment he didn’t gave a rat’s ass about seeing it.
    “How would I know?”
    “Were you on top? Or was I?”
    The passenger-side tire dropped into a rut on the shoulder of the road. It took her a few heart-stopping seconds to recover. Enough to make Eli’s knuckles turn white from clenching his fists. “Forget I asked. Dumb question.”
    “You’d been in a fight. For all I knew you were suffering from a concussion. I did my best to keep you calm and stable until my aunt came.”
    “By jumping my bones?” he asked, reserving the right to use blunter terms later on.
    “Not at first.” He looked at her and saw how pink her cheeks had become. A pretty color that made her look a good twenty years younger than he felt. “I was treating your cut when my aunt called to say there was an accident on the bridge and she wouldn’t be home for several hours. She wanted me to know my mother wasn’t involved.”
    He frowned, confused.
    Char took her hand off the wheel and made a wobbly motion. “Aunt Pam had a police scanner, and on the nights my mom was late coming home, Pam knew I’d sit in the kitchen listening. Mom partied a lot.”
    He understood. His father had lost his license twice that Eli knew of. “Did you tell your aunt I was there?”
    She shook her head. “I’m not a doctor, but even I could tell that cut above your eye wasn’t life threatening. I managed to close it with two little sutures and a bandage. My only real concern was whether or not you had a concussion. I figured the best thing I could do was try to keep you awake.”
    “And you figured the best way to do that was by having sex?”
    His cynical tone made her scrunch up her face and sort of duck her head. The car wove slightly between the two lanes. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”
    He searched his memory again, trying to pull some image to mind that might back up her story. What did the place look like? Nothing. Was the treatment room herkitchen? He didn’t think so but he couldn’t say why. Was he on a gurney? He’d seen all kinds on the job. If the one he’d been on had wheels…he couldn’t picture making love on the move.
    “Where’d we do it?”
    She shook her head, as if she’d been expecting the question. “Pam saw patients in a small room off the kitchen. It was a screened porch when my grandparents lived there. She bought a used examination table from an old clinic. The back was raised about like this.” She held her hand horizontally between them then made the fingers tilt upward to a sixty-degree angle. “I thought it would be better to keep your head elevated.”
    He could have said