Inherit the Sky (Lang Downs 1 ) by Ariel Tachna Read Free Book Online

remember my grandmother talking about things and what they were like between the wars and then after World War II. My grandmother had it easy in a way because she married my granddad and moved to the US that way. She had him to rely on for shelter, food, and all. Uncle Michael didn’t have any of that. He sold everything and took the ship to Australia, hoping it would lead to a better life. It did for him. I thought maybe taking a page from his book would be good for me too.”
“I hope you’re right,” Macklin said. “I really do.”
The fact that the entire station would suffer if it turned out to be the wrong choice was understood, but Caine appreciated Macklin’s tact in not saying it aloud.
    A
LONE in his hotel room after dinner, Caine took a quick shower and flopped down on the bed, brushing his hair out of his face. He’d meant to get a haircut before he left Philadelphia, but he’d run out of time. After having spent dinner trying not to stare at Macklin too hard and failing miserably, he wondered if he ought to ask about finding a barber in the morning before they left. He didn’t relish a five-hour drive back into town just to get a haircut, and he didn’t want to end up looking quite as shaggy as Macklin did. The foreman could pull it off. On Caine, it would just look silly.
    He was bone tired, but sleep proved elusive as he tried to make sense of Macklin’s odd behavior over the course of the day. Caine could understand the foreman’s concerns. If Caine had come in with an agenda or big plans for changing everything without knowing what he was doing, he could have ruined everything Uncle Michael had spent seventy years building. Caine would never be so self-involved as to do that, but Macklin had no way of knowing that. Furthermore, from the sound of it, Uncle Michael had ranked somewhere between grandfather and demigod on Macklin’s list of people to be adored, not that Caine had a problem with that, but it probably rankled that Caine had gotten everything and Macklin had gotten nothing. Or maybe not nothing, since Caine had no idea what personal bequests Uncle Michael might have left, but certainly not the station.
    “This would have been so much easier if you were still alive, Uncle Michael,” Caine said to the empty room. He didn’t get an answer, of course, but he hadn’t expected one. It made him feel better to talk through his problems, though, and he felt a little less ridiculous talking to his dead uncle than he would have felt talking to himself. “You’d welcome me properly instead of making me feel like a blow-in, and you’d take me under your wing and teach me what I need to know, and maybe you’d even explain what the hell Macklin Armstrong’s problem is.”
    He sighed and thumped his head against the pillow. “I need him to work with me, Uncle Michael. He doesn’t have to like me, although it would help if he did, but I need him to accept me and teach me. If he doesn’t, I’ve pulled up roots for nothing, and I’ll have to go slinking back home to find another dead-end job and hopefully another place to live so I don’t end up mooching off Mom and Dad for the rest of my life. It would almost be easier if he just hated me.”
    He closed his eyes and tried to put some order to his thoughts, as if he were really laying out the facts of the case to his uncle. “He was surprised to hear from me, I’m sure, when I sent him the first e-mail soon after Mom got the news about the station. I’m even surer he never expected me to move to Lang Downs. That’s fine. I get that, but I’m here now. If he hated me plain and simple, I could probably even live with that because it wouldn’t be confusing. But then he calls me pup and makes nice or funny comments, and I don’t know what to do again.”
    He flushed slightly as he remembered Macklin’s comment at dinner. “Is he gay?” he asked impulsively. “If I were at home and someone made a comment like the one he made about the