Confessions of a Small-Town Girl
Christine Flynn
Dear Diary,Sam MacInnes is back in town. He's still so gorgeous, but there's a haunted look in his eyes. People say he's a cop now–he must see some awful things on the job. I used to have the biggest crush on him! He never noticed me, but I wrote all about him in my old diary. My hair curls every time I think of someone reading it! All those dreams of passionate kisses and more… Can you imagine that getting out?Only problem is, the local rumor mill says that he's remodeling the very house where I hid the diary. I've just got to get it back before Sam finds it–what would he think of me if he discovered all my secret desires?
Sam. KS + SM. Mr. and Mrs. Sam MacInnes. Kelsey MacInnes.
Sam turned the diary toward Kelsey. “What’s all this about?”
Heat moved up Kelsey’s neck. “It’s just something teenaged girls do. It doesn’t mean a thing,” she insisted, reaching for the diary again.
He immediately lifted it away as he flipped ahead a few pages. “‘I dreamed about Sam again,’” he began aloud, only to pause, glance up, then start reading more slowly. “‘I’d give anything if he’d kiss me. Really kiss me…’”
Kelsey heard him cut himself off as he read the rest. A moment later he looked at her with a grin that would have stopped her heart had she not been so busy being horrified.
“You thought I had a great butt?”
Her cheeks had turned a telling shade of pink. But this would be nothing compared to what color they would turn after his perusal of a few more pages would reveal him to be the subject of a few more rather specific fantasies.
Very specific, actually.
Dear Reader,
Well, as promised, the dog days of summer have set in, which means one last chance at the beach reading that’s an integral part of this season (even if you do most of it on the subway, like I do!). We begin with The Beauty Queen’s Makeover by Teresa Southwick, next up in our MOST LIKELY TO…miniseries. She was the girl “most likely to” way back when, and he was the awkward geek. Now they’ve all but switched places, and the fireworks are about to begin….
In From Here to Texas, Stella Bagwell’s next MEN OF THE WEST book, a Navajo man and the girl who walked out on him years ago have to decide if they believe in second chances. And speaking of second chances (or first ones, anyway), picture this: a teenaged girl obsessed with a gorgeous college boy writes down some of her impure thoughts in her diary, and buries said diary in the walls of an old house in town. Flash forward ten-ish years, and the boy, now a man, is back in town—and about to dismantle the old house, brick by brick. Can she find her diary before he does? Find out in Christine Flynn’s finale to her GOING HOME miniseries, Confessions of a Small-Town Girl. In Everything She’s Ever Wanted by Mary J. Forbes, a traumatized woman is finally convinced to come out of hiding, thanks to the one man she can trust. In Nicole Foster’s Sawyer’s Special Delivery, a man who’s played knight-in-shining armor gets to do it again—to a woman (cum newborn baby) desperate for his help, even if she hates to admit it. And in The Last Time I Saw Venice by Vivienne Wallington, a couple traumatized by the loss of their child hopes that the beautiful city that brought them together can work its magic—one more time.
So have your fun. And next month it’s time to get serious—about reading, that is….
Enjoy!
Gail Chasan
Senior Editor
Confessions of a Small-Town Girl
Christine Flynn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHRISTINE FLYNN
admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships—especially the intense, bittersweet or even lighthearted relationships between men and women—is fascinating.
This book is dedicated to every
woman who kept a diary in high school…
with the hope that she knows where it is.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter One
Having fantasies about a man wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fantasies were normal. Fantasies were healthy. Writing them down wasn’t terribly bright, Kelsey Schaeffer conceded to herself, trying not to panic at what she was overhearing. Especially in detail. But she’d never dreamed that the subject of those wild imaginings would ever be anywhere near where she’d hidden her old diary. She’d had no idea that Sam MacInnes had even returned to Maple Mountain. She’d barely been back twelve hours herself.
“You going to flip those cakes, honey?”
Kelsey’s mother bustled into the kitchen of her busy little diner, one eye on the spatula Kelsey held, the other on her order pad. With her silvering-blond hair in its usual braided bun, her pretty features softening with age and a white bib apron tied around her ample waist, Dora Schaeffer looked much as she always had to Kelsey. Friendly. Efficient. Enduring. Like a rock that could weather any storm or challenge and remain unchanged. The only difference about her since Kelsey’s visit home last year was the white cast that ran from elbow to palm on her left arm. She had fallen from a ladder while adjusting the bunting she’d hung out front for the Fourth of July parade next Sunday.
The red, white and blue bunting now lay bundled on the storage room floor. Dauntless and headstrong to her core, her mom had pulled down the sections she’d hung rather than have them hang crooked before she’d walked down the street to the doctor’s office to get her arm set. There were no half-measures with Dora Schaeffer. Something was either done perfectly, or it wasn’t done at all.
Jerked from her alarm by her mom’s reminder, Kelsey hurriedly flipped the two orders of buttermilk pancakes turning golden on the griddle. With most of her attention on the conversation taking place on the other side of the service window, she stacked a third order onto a plate, added a side of sausage and eggs and slid the plate onto the window’s long ledge.
Amos Calder and Charlie Moorehouse, two of the community’s inherently stubborn senior citizens, sat with their elbows on the lacquered pine counter, coffee mugs in hand, waiting for their breakfast. According to what she’d just overheard of their laconic conversation, Sam’s sister had bought the old Baker place and Sam was refurbishing it for her and her boys. What had her mentally hyperventilating was Amos’s comment about Sam tearing out the upstairs bedroom walls.
Her old diary was up there. The one she’d kept in high school. It was behind a wall in the back bedroom. Her name was in glitter on the cover. Sam’s name was all over the inside.
Until a minute ago, she had nearly forgotten the thing even existed. Now, her only thought was that she would die if Sam found it.
She couldn’t remember exactly what she’d written. At that moment, all she recalled was that he had been a college senior the summer she’d turned sixteen and that he’d worked on his uncle’s farm. Big, buff, and totally out of her league, he had awakened her heart, her dreams and inspired a host of wild fantasies, the bulk of which she’d duly recorded, then ultimately hidden in the wall of the very house he was now tearing apart because her mom would have killed her had she found something so explicit in her bedroom.
Her then-best friend, Michelle Baker, in whose room she had hurriedly hidden her rather risqué writings after she’d discovered that her original hiding place in the old grist mill wasn’t safe, hadn’t had a clue what was in that diary. Since she kept a diary herself, Michelle had understood, however, how important it was for a girl to protect her private thoughts and assured her that no one would ever know the little book was there. As it was, Kelsey had never intended to leave it there permanently. But when she’d put it behind the loose wall panel Michelle had pulled out partway, it hadn’t caught on the little ledge that held her friend’s own treasures. It had slid all the way to the floor and they hadn’t been able to get it back out.
“Kelsey?” Carrying a freshly poured glass of milk, her mom backed out the swinging kitchen door. “The cakes?”
Multitasking normally came as easily as a smile to Kelsey. At the moment, however, she could barely focus on anything other than what she was overhearing. Rattled, hating it, she grabbed a white ceramic plate from the stack near the griddle and slid the pancakes on it. The meal joined the others on the service ledge as her mom placed the milk in front of the UPS man sitting at the end of the counter.
“Wonder what’s keepin’ him,” she heard Amos mutter.
“Keepin’ who?” her mom asked. Turning around, Dora absently smiled through the window at Kelsey’s suddenly frozen features, then reached one at a time for the older men’s breakfasts.
“Sam.” Scratching his balding head, Amos added a few more furrows to his weathered brow. “He’s usually here by now.”
Barely breathing, Kelsey watched the silver-haired Charlie eye his plate as her mom set it in front of him. Fork in hand, he poked at an egg yolk to make sure it was done to his liking. “Might be he drove to St. Johnsbury. Told us yesterday he’d have to make another trip into the lumberyard,” he reminded the man on the stool next to him. “I keep tellin’ him things aren’t as handy here as he’s used to in the city. Got to make lists. Pick up everything in one trip.”
Amos pressed his white stubble-covered chin toward the collar of the T-shirt shirt tucked into his coveralls. As he did, he eyed his similarly attired friend through the top of his black-rimmed trifocals.
“Doing the work he does, you think he don’t know about makin’ lists?”
Charlie, his own glasses rimmed in silver, eyed him right back. “What’s being a policeman got to do with anything?”
“He’s not a policeman. He’s a detective. You can tell by those shows on the TV that there’s a difference,” he explained, sounding as if the man being discussed hadn’t pointed out the distinctions himself. “I’d think that a man who goes around lookin’ for clues and such about crimes would be prone to keepin’ lists of what he knows and what he don’t.”
Kelsey’s mom gave the elderly men a patient smile. “I doubt he’s gone anywhere just yet,” she assured them both. “You know he wouldn’t make that long drive before fillin’ himself up. He hasn’t missed breakfast here in the two weeks since he arrived.”
“That’s ’cause he loves your cookin’, Dora,” came a gravelly voice from a table behind the men. “By the way, Kelsey, you’re doing good this mornin’, too.” A white ceramic mug was raised in her direction. “Good to see you home.”
Exposed by the window her mom had made wide so she wouldn’t miss anything while working in her kitchen, Kelsey smiled into the half-filled room. Smiley Jefferson had been the postal carrier for as long as she could remember. His front tooth had been missing for about that long, too.
“It’s good to be home, Smiley.” It had been until a few minutes ago, anyway. “I hear Drew and Kathy had another baby. Congratulations.”
“He finally got himself a grandson.” The owner of the only gas station in town grinned as he looked up from his breakfast. “Just don’t ask him to show you pictures. You get him started and the mail will never get delivered.”
There was no such thing as a private conversation at Dora’s Diner. Not when nearly everyone there knew everyone else. The quaint little establishment with its maple tables and chairs and bulletin board papered with handwritten notes of locals seeking to barter everything from farm equipment and labor to hay and eggs was as much the center of the community as the community center down the street. It was also the root of the town grapevine.
Much of what Kelsey had always loved about remote and rural Maple Mountain, Vermont, was the sense of acceptance and community she’d always felt there. Many of the locals were set in their ways and independent to a fault, but they protected their own. Neighbors helped neighbors. If someone hadn’t been heard from in a while, someone else checked on them to make sure they weren’t just busy or being reclusive. They were like extended family to her. And, like family, she loved them in spite of their quirks as much as she did because of them.
The acceptance was reciprocal. No matter how long she remained away, for a year, sometimes two, she was always welcomed back.
Her attention wasn’t on that comfortable familiarity, however. All she felt as the front door opened and heads lifted to see who was joining them was a distinct sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.
Sam MacInnes hadn’t been anything more to her than a passing memory in the dozen years since she’d last seen him. Since she’d gone off the deep end for him as she had, she’d obviously thought him rather incredible back then. But she’d been a teenager at the time. Having been raised in conservative and totally unsophisticated Maple Mountain, she’d been a fairly sheltered one at that.
Years of living in cities had left her far more worldly and infinitely less impressionable than she’d once been. Still, she wasn’t quite prepared for the six feet of solid muscle and testosterone in a faded NYPD T-shirt and worn jeans that walked into the room.
He totally dominated the space.
He made no effort to draw attention to himself. If anything, it seemed to her that his manner as he returned the greetings of others with an easy, appealing familiarity seemed decidedly low-key. He was simply the sort of man other men sensed as a prime example of their own, and either envied or emulated. Women simply stopped to stare and reminded themselves to breathe.
She didn’t remember his hair being so dark. Its shade of sable looked so deep it nearly seemed black in the overhead lights. And his silver-gray eyes spoke more of a quiet, watchful intensity than whatever romantic notion she’d had about them all those summers ago. Yet what struck her most as he moved closer was the rugged maturity that carved lines of character in a face that had once merely been handsome—and gave him an aura of power and utter control that seemed downright dangerous.
He’d barely met her eyes when she jerked her glance away and slipped behind the wall to the grill.
The thought that he might have already found the diary sent her heart to her toes.
With her pulse pounding frantically in her ears, she heard coffee being poured into a mug and her mom’s cheerful, “’Mornin’, Sam. Good thing you showed up. These two were gettin’ worried about you.” The mug slid across shiny pine. “I just told ’em not a minute ago that you wouldn’t leave without havin’ breakfast first.”
The chuckle she heard sounded as deep and rich as the brew her mother had just poured. “I didn’t realize I was getting that predictable. But you’re right.” His tone grew grateful. “Thanks, Dora,” he said, apparently referring to the caffeine she’d just slid toward him.
With the clink of metal against glass, her mom slipped the carafe back onto the big double coffeemaker. “What are you pickin’ up from the lumberyard this time?”
“More two-by-fours. But I’m not going into St. Johnsbury until I get all the walls upstairs torn out and see what else I’ll need. I’ve run into more wood rot up there than I did downstairs.”
“That’s because the roof was so bad.” Amos punctuated his conclusion by stabbing a bite of pancake. “The Bakers replaced it so they could sell the place. That thing sagged like an ol’ mare. Leaked in buckets, I’d imagine.”
“They told Megan about the water damage,” Sam replied, speaking of his sister. “She didn’t care. She and the boys fell in love with the place.”
“I can see why they’d do that.” Silverware rattled as her mom put together a setting. “It’s a pretty piece of property, with that creek and all. Kelsey used to like going out there herself when the elder Mrs. Baker was still alive. She was friends with her granddaughter.
“Speaking of which…Kelsey, I mean,” she continued, her tone utterly conversational, “she got here last night. Her plane was late arrivin’ in Montpelier, so we’ve hardly had a chance to visit. Have we, Kelsey?
“Kelsey?” Puzzlement entered Dora’s voice as she turned to where her daughter had stood only moments ago. “Where did you go? I want someone to meet you.”
Kelsey didn’t respond. Protected by six feet of wall, she was too busy closing her eyes, shaking her head and wishing her mom wasn’t so impossibly social. Dora Schaeffer had never met a stranger. Any tourist who came in more than once was remembered, along with where they were from and where they were going. She also knew every resident for a radius of fifty miles. If she didn’t know them personally, she knew of them, about them and who they were related to—along with most of their business. People tended to confide in her and what they didn’t confide, she overheard or pried out on her own. It was widely rumored that between her, Agnes Waters at the general store and Claire McGraw, the mayor’s wife, there was hardly a secret in town.
The only person her mom didn’t know as well as she thought she did was her own daughter.
There were advantages to that small failing. In a matter of seconds, it became apparent that she’d never had a clue about her daughter’s wild crush on the man watching her reluctantly step back into view. Her mom didn’t even seem to think she knew who Sam was.
“Kelsey, this is Tom and Janelle Collier’s nephew, Sam. He’s taking time off to work on the old Baker place for his sister.” The arches of her pale eyebrows merged. “I told you the Bakers finally sold the place, didn’t I? After Jenny married Doctor Reid?
“Anyway,” she hurried on, sounding as if she didn’t want to sidetrack herself as she turned back to the man quietly watching her strangely silent daughter, “Kelsey is helping out through the holiday, like I told you.” Holding her casted arm protectively at her waist, she set a napkin and utensils on the counter for him. “I don’t know what I’d have done if she hadn’t been able to make it. It’s just us locals and a few lowlanders on vacation out at the lakes right now, but give it two days and that road out there will be bumper-to-bumper with folk coming to celebrate the Fourth of July. They’re all going to be hungry, too.”
He had big hands. Kelsey noticed that as he wrapped one around his mug. He had a nice smile, too. A little reserved. Kind of sexy.
He was smiling at her. Feeling an odd jolt join her panic, she jerked her attention to the older man pouring more maple syrup over the melted butter on his pancakes.
“Good thing you had her to call on, Dora,” Amos informed her mom. “You’d have been up a creek with Betsy being gone like she is. You thinkin’ to hire somebody to help her when she gets back?” He aimed his fork at her cast. “Leastwise until you get rid of that thing?”
Not by a hair did her mom’s tight bun budge as she adamantly shook her head. “Betsy will take her shifts and I’ll take mine,” she insisted, speaking of her part-time cook, and new grandmother of twins. The birth of those babies had required Betsy Parker’s presence in Burlington to help her daughter and son-in-law—right through the busiest week of summer.
“I just need to get used to this thing,” Dora muttered, frowning stubbornly at her encumbrance. “Once the crowds are gone this weekend I’ll be fine. In the meantime, I’ll have Kelsey freeze me up a bunch of pies and such in case Betsy needs more time with those babies.”
The frown melted as she glanced back at Sam. “You used to come in here when Kelsey was in high school,” she reminded him, returning to what she’d rather talk about. “When she wasn’t in the kitchen, she waited tables for me. You might remember having seen her back then.”
Kelsey knew her mom was just being her usual chatty self. As far as the older woman was concerned, her little diner was her home and her guests were treated with the same hospitality she would have offered had they been in her living room—which, technically, they were. The entire first floor of the old two-story house Kelsey had been raised in had been converted into the diner after her father passed away twenty years ago. She and her mom had lived in the rooms upstairs. Her mom still did.
Since Dora was just being her gregarious self, Kelsey ordinarily wouldn’t have thought anything of her mom’s casual comments. But having her mom prod Sam’s memory was the last thing she wanted her to do—until she realized he seemed to have no memory of her at all.
“Sure,” he said, in that vague way people did when they didn’t want to be rude and say they had little or no recollection of a person. “Your mom said that you live in Scottsdale now. You’re a chef?”
“Pastry chef,” she explained, because it was all she could think to say.
A hint of a smile tugged at his mouth again. “I’m an apple pie man myself. Will you make any of those while you’re here?”
“Probably.”
Watching her over the steam rising over the rim of his mug, he arched one dark eyebrow. “Are you any good at pancakes?”
She was having trouble maintaining eye contact with him. She couldn’t remember specifics, but she was pretty certain that many of the entries in that diary had do with his beautifully muscled body. Those muscles looked as hard as the granite mined from the quarry outside of town and radiated a fine sort of tension that made him seem more restive than relaxed.
The fact that he was making her feel the same way wasn’t lost on her, either. “I can manage.”
“He always has a full stack, four eggs over medium, wheat toast and two sides of bacon,” her mom rattled off, moving from behind the counter to wait on a couple of tourists who’d wandered in with their two offspring. “Sit anywhere you’d like,” she told them, then glanced over her shoulder at Sam. “You want buttermilk or blueberry?”
That reserved smile surfaced again. Looking at Kelsey, he said, “She can surprise me.”
Realizing she was staring at his mouth, praying he hadn’t noticed, Kelsey spun away. She used to practice kissing that beautifully carved mouth on her bedroom mirror.
With a mental groan at the memory, she snatched up a clean stainless steel bowl. With the last batch of pancake batter gone, she needed to mix another.
She couldn’t believe how totally flustered she felt. She was twenty-nine years old. Not sixteen. In the eleven years since she’d left Maple Mountain for culinary school, she’d worked her way from a line chef in Boston to master pastry chef in four-star restaurants in San Diego and Scottsdale. She had managed to survive the artistic temperaments of male executive chefs who considered themselves God’s gift to man, woman and culinary creativity, and placed in the top three of every dessert competition she’d entered in the last five years. Until two minutes ago—three minutes were she to count from the moment she’d heard Sam’s name—her biggest concern had been the terrible timing of her mom’s need for her to come home.
She had just been offered the position of executive pastry chef where she worked at the Regis-Carlton resort in Scottsdale. She had also been offered the same position with a high-end new restaurant by Doug Westland, one of the most respected and innovative restaurateurs on the West Coast, along with the opportunity to become his business—and bed—partner. She had huge issues with the latter part of that arrangement. But that wasn’t the problem at the moment. Or the point. The point was that she was highly organized, disciplined, creative in her own right and that she was not easily unsettled. Normally.
Scooping a cup of the flour, baking powder and salt she’d premeasured earlier, she folded it into the eggs and buttermilk, gently so as not to make the batter heavy. She felt decidedly unsettled now.
That circumstance no doubt explained why she didn’t feel at all slighted to know that Sam apparently hadn’t even noticed her existence the summer he’d occupied her nearly every waking thought. Realizing he barely remembered her was actually a relief. A huge one. So was the thought that nothing about his manner indicated that he’d discovered her daring and imaginative writings, much less read them. To the best of her knowledge, she was the only Kelsey in Maple Mountain. With her name on the diary’s cover, it seemed that had he found it, she would have at least rated a raised eyebrow when her mom mentioned her name.
She spread two rashers of bacon on the griddle, cracked four eggs beside them. He probably needed the huge breakfast to fuel all that muscle, she supposed, only to deliberately change the direction of her thoughts. Thinking about the admittedly magnificent body that had inspired the current reason for her anxiety wasn’t getting her anywhere. Since it seemed he hadn’t found the diary, she needed to get to it before he did. She just needed to figure out how.
She was praying for inspiration when she set the three plates of food that could have comfortably fed two in the window for her mom to serve. With a smile for Amos when he gave her a surreptitious wink to let her know she’d done well, she turned to make the omelets the tourists had ordered.
Sam noticed that wink. Digging into his own meal, he might have mentioned how good his breakfast was, too, had she given him any hint that she was at all interested in anything he had to say. Instead he took another bite of heaven on a fork and frowned at himself while the two old guys next to him suggested he stop by for a game of checkers on the porch of the general store, providing he had time later that afternoon, of course.
Sam liked the two old guys. There were times when he couldn’t get a word out of either of them other than a thoughtful and considered “Yup” or “Nope.” Then, there were days when they seemed more than willing to share whatever they knew, especially if they figured they could help a person out. It seemed, too, that once they got going, they could reminisce forever about what they considered the good old days—which was pretty much any year before 1955. According to both men, not much of anything was made the way it had been before then, and neither had much use for anything that hadn’t existed by the middle of the past century.
He wasn’t much for games, except maybe the occasional hand of poker. Still, he told them he’d be glad to join them later, since he was looking for as many ways as possible to fill in his time there, and went back to his meal. He wasn’t doing anything but biding his time in Maple Mountain. Any diversion was welcome.
He still didn’t think the time off the force was necessary. He had adamantly argued the need for the leave of absence his department psychologist had insisted he take three weeks ago. He would argue it now, if given the chance. Yet, as he frowned into his coffee, he would concede that the shrink may have had one small point.
He’d suspected himself that he had lost the edge on his social skills in polite society. He just hadn’t been prepared to truly admit that loss until now. He hadn’t been able to get so much as a smile out of the attractive blonde he could see coming and going from the long window above the service counter, much less get any sort of conversation started with her.
He only vaguely remembered the delicate-looking woman Dora had mentioned a couple of days ago. Since he’d eaten only occasionally at the diner all those years ago, he knew he hadn’t seen Kelsey often. But the more he thought about her now, the more he remembered that there had been a cute, long-legged blonde he’d looked for when he had come in. He also recalled that she’d been jail bait.
She definitely hadn’t possessed the presence or style she’d acquired since then, either.
She had her mother’s pale wheat-colored hair, only hers was woven with shades of champagne and platinum and caught in a low ponytail with a black clip at her nape. The rest was covered with a short, white pleated chef’s hat that ended below her brow line and revealed the white pearl studs in her ears. Her lovely eyes were as dark as the rich coffee in his mug, her features delicate, her skin flawless and she had a mouth that made his water just thinking about how soft it might be.
Wearing the high-necked white chef’s jacket he figured she’d brought with her, since he’d never seen Dora wear anything more sophisticated than the hairnet and white bib apron she wore now, Kelsey Schaeffer looked polished, professional. She also seemed as familiar with the patrons she fed as she did the kitchen she moved through with such ease.
He just couldn’t figure out why she would smile and talk with everyone else, but barely converse with him. Drawing out people was his strong suit. Among a certain, corrupt and incorrigible element, anyway. And cons and criminals were usually an even tougher sell.
Deciding it wasn’t worth worrying about, he polished off his breakfast, had Dora bag two giant blueberry muffins from the case for later and headed for his truck and the trailer he was temporarily calling home. He had more on his mind than his apparently forgotten ability to flirt with a respectable woman. The department shrink had said he’d grown out of touch with normalcy, whatever that was supposed to mean, and that if he didn’t get back in touch with it, he could eventually lose his sense of perspective and his usefulness to the department.
The department was his home, and as much his family as those he was related to by blood. Failing it would be like failing himself. He would do what he needed to do to keep that from happening. He wouldn’t like it, but he’d do it.
It had been three weeks since he’d come off a case that had kept him undercover for over a year. The need to stay under had even caused him to miss his brother-in-law’s funeral after a road-rage incident left his sister a widow and his young nephews without a dad. He had been ordered to take three months to decompress by doing normal things. He was to reacquaint himself with his family, find creative outlets, wind down. Helping his sister by refurbishing the dilapidated old house so she could raise her sons in the country seemed as good a way as any to him to keep from going stir-crazy while he accomplished that goal. Then, after he put in his time, he could get back to the work that had become his way of life.
There was just one problem. Having spent ten years working his way down the humanity scale from neighborhood beat cop to vice detective to spending the past fourteen months living in the underbelly of New York with crack heads, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes to break a major drug ring, he wasn’t exactly sure he knew what constituted normal anymore.
He felt fairly certain, however, that “normal” wasn’t having the pretty blonde who had all but ignored him at the diner show up that afternoon with the smile he hadn’t been able to get out of her before and a freshly baked apple pie.
Chapter Two
Kelsey figured she had two options. She could try to get upstairs alone and, depending on how much wall Sam had torn out, get the diary and sneak it out in her purse. Or, she could look around to see how far he was with his demolition and go back when he wasn’t there.
The nerves in her stomach were jumping as she watched him walk toward her.
With her oversize handbag dangling from one shoulder, and carrying a pink pastry box with both hands, she left the compact sedan she’d rented at the airport and moved past the construction debris to meet him. Old cupboards, carpeting and a rusted sink formed a pile at the end of the gravel driveway that cut into the deep and wooded lot. Stacks of new lumber nearly blocked the sagging front porch, waiting to be used inside.
She’d heard that he was living in the long white trailer parked near the curve of the stream that meandered through the back of the property. According to her mom, the leveling of that trailer had been the local event of the day. Charlie and Amos said they’d helped supervise. Lorna Bagley, who took turns with her sister, Marian, waiting tables for her mom, told her she’d packed up a picnic and her kids and headed out to watch—though mostly, the single mother of two had confessed, she had watched Sam. They didn’t get many men as easy on the eyes as that one, she’d confided. Certainly, none as intriguing.
Since news and gossip were shared freely among the locals, and since nothing pleased some of the them more than to bring someone who’d been away up to date, Kelsey had also learned that Sam had been a detective for years, and divorced for nearly as long. No one seemed to know what had caused the demise of his marriage. No one knew exactly what sort of “detecting” it was that he did, either. Some thought he solved murder cases like the detectives on television. But no one knew for sure. He apparently didn’t say much about his work.
As unusual and fascinating as his occupation was to certain citizens of Maple Mountain, as far as most of them were concerned what he did in the city was no real concern of theirs. Sam was just Tom and Janelle Collier’s nephew and he’d come to help out a member of his family. Helping family and neighbors was something they were all familiar with. When there was a need, it was simply what people in Maple Mountain did.
He stopped six feet in front of her, as tall and solid as an oak. Even as he spoke, she had the unsettling feeling she’d been appraised from neck to knee without his glance ever leaving her face.
“I’d ask if you’re lost, but I figure you know your way around here a whole lot better than I do.”
It was as clear as the gray of his eyes that he remembered their meeting that morning. Specifically, that she’d barely spoken to him—which obviously would make him wonder what she was doing there now.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” she replied, hoping she hadn’t offended him too badly.
“I’m not doing anything that can’t wait.”
Desperate not to appear as anxious as she felt, she held out the box containing one of the pies she’d baked between the breakfast and lunch that morning.
“You said you like apple,” she reminded him.
Curiosity slashed the carved lines of his face as he lifted the box from her hands. “What’s this for?”
“A chance to look around?” Looking past the impressive shoulders and muscular arms she’d once fantasized about, she glanced toward the old two-story house behind him. “I heard you’re tearing out walls in there. If you don’t mind, I’d like to see the house before it changes too much.” She hesitated, trying to act only casually curious. “How far along are you? With tearing them out, I mean.”
She thought he still looked skeptical of her presence. Or, maybe, it was interest in the contents of the box she saw in his expression as he pried up the front of the pink cardboard lid.
“I still have half the upstairs to go.” Distracted, he lifted the box to his nose and sniffed. “You use cinnamon.”
“It’s just your basic apple pie.”
“I’m a basic sort of guy.”
There was that smile again.
“So.” She swallowed, wondering if he had any idea how appealing it was to a woman to see a grown man grin like a boy at her baking. “May I go look around? I used to hang out here with my girlfriend when we were in high school. This was her grandma’s house,” she explained. “We’d come out in the summer and spend nights with her. Sometimes in the winter, too, when we’d skate on the pond.
“It’s a nostalgia thing,” she justified when his only response was the faint pinch of his brow. “I never thought anything about this town would change,” she hurried to admit, because that much was true. If finding that damnable diary hadn’t been so necessary, revisiting the memories honestly would have been important to her. Some of the best times of her life had been spent in and around the buildings beyond him. “As much as this house meant to me growing up, I’d really like to see it before what I remembered doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know if you have any places like that from your childhood. Old hangouts, I mean. But this is really important to me.”
Nerves had her rambling. Realizing that, she shut herself up before she could betray just how uneasy she felt with what she’d written about him, and how totally lousy she was at being less than up-front and honest. She really had loved being in this charming old place. But the abandoned gristmill across the stream had been far more important to her. She had spent hours poking around the mill’s dim interior, wondering what life had been like for the miller who’d lived there a century ago. She’d spent even more time by its slowly moving waterwheel dreaming of her future, writing those dreams and plans in the diary she needed to find before Sam discovered just how large a part he’d played in her mental musings.
Apparently she hadn’t silenced herself soon enough. The curiosity in Sam’s expression changed to scrutiny as his eyes narrowed on hers.
Feeling exposed, not quite sure what to say, her glance fell to the ground. She figured she’d be better off to stay silent. Being a detective, he could probably spot a con at ten paces.
Sam was actually far better than that. He could spot a fraud a mile away and the woman now avoiding his eyes clearly had something more on her mind than revisiting memories of old times. She wanted into the house. Rather badly, he concluded, considering that she was willing to bribe him to get there.
Intrigued, his glance drifted from the rapid and betraying blink of her dark lashes and down her long-legged frame. Certain her motive was something other than what she’d claimed, his mind should have leapt to questions, possibilities, objectives. But a heavy dose of pure male interest had joined his more analytical instincts. Indulging it, he found himself fascinated as much by her as with discovering her purpose for being there.
Kelsey Schaeffer was the antithesis of the women he’d encountered day after day living undercover. Women who blatantly advertised what she seemed to deliberately underplay. But, then, when sex was for sale, a little advertising was simply good business. Those “ladies” wore their blouses cut to their navels, if the fabric reached that far, and their skirts or pants were inevitably spandex or leather and fit like skin. Their exotic makeup wasn’t used to enhance so much as it was to hide the ravages of drugs, poor nutrition and bruises from their pimps or their boyfriends. Then, there were the women who were so strung-out they didn’t bother to take care of themselves at all.
Sam pulled back his thoughts as his glance drifted over the sky-blue pullover Kelsey wore with her white capris. Everything about her was subtle. Her understated clothes. The natural shades of her makeup. Her quiet sensuality. She was the first woman to draw his interest in longer than he cared to remember, but he could only imagine the shape of her small breasts and the curve of her waist under her loose, boat-necked top. And those legs. Even covered to midcalf, they seemed to go on forever.
Something hot gathered low in his gut. With the scents of warm cinnamon and apples taunting an equally basic sort of hunger, he conceded that, in this particular instance, he could be bought.
“It won’t look like what you remember,” he warned her. “It’s pretty torn up in there.”
She still wore her sun-streaked hair back and clipped at her nape. Brushing at a strand that had escaped its confines, she offered a quick smile. “That’s okay.” She motioned toward the pie. “I’ll just peek inside while you put that away.”
“I’ll take you in. Like I said, there’s stuff everywhere.”
“I don’t want to keep you from what you were doing.”
“It’s not a problem.”
Kelsey opened her mouth, fully prepared to insist that she was fine on her own.
The slow arch of his eyebrow stopped her. It seemed as if he were waiting for her protest. Or, maybe, he was just waiting for her to move ahead of him. As thoughts of protest collapsed to a quiet, “An escort would be great,” she couldn’t really tell.
All she knew for certain as she headed along the walkway cutting through the weed-choked grass to the porch was that she wanted to be upstairs alone. She wanted to get in, get what she’d come for and get out. She couldn’t let Sam think it mattered one way or another if he was with her, though. Watching him set the box on the only sturdy-looking section of porch railing, she also realized she couldn’t appear to be in too much of a rush to get upstairs.
The sagging steps groaned beneath his weight. Skirting the pile of new lumber on the porch, he pulled open the screen door and motioned her ahead of him.
With a murmured, “Thanks,” she stepped past him and into an echoing and empty space. The cozy living room of cabbage rose-print wall paper, Victorian-style furniture and lace doilies was long gone. What little paper hadn’t been stripped from the walls had grayed and peeled with age. The carved wood molding that had edged the floors and ceiling lay in neat rows on the bare hardwood floor.
“Take your time.”
Kelsey swore she could feel Sam’s eyes on her back as she pulled her glance from the narrow door near the end of the room. That open door led to the stairway and the second floor.
“We used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.”
He lifted his hand to his left.
With a smile that felt fainter than she would have liked, she slipped past his scrutiny and into another room that had been stripped to its bones.
“You said this was your friend’s grandmother’s house?”
“My friend Michelle. Baker,” she expanded, wondering if he sounded skeptical or if her conscience only made her hear suspicion in his tone. “It’s Michelle Hansen now. She moved to Maine.”
“My sister said Mrs. Baker’s granddaughter married the local doctor and lives here.”
“That would be Jenny. Michelle’s younger sister. And she did. And does.”
Kelsey turned a slow circle in the middle of the room that no longer looked familiar at all. The old cabinets had all been torn out and the floor stripped of linoleum. The old-fashioned cookstove and rounded refrigerator were gone, too. The only thing that seemed familiar was the mint green paint where the cabinets had been. The rest of the room had at some point been painted a warm Tuscan yellow. From the looks of the large white spackled patches on the walls, that golden color would be painted over soon.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Sam leaning against the door frame. With his hands in the pockets of his worn jeans, his faded NYPD T-shirt stretching across his chest, he didn’t seem to be watching her so much as he seemed to be…evaluating.
Doing a little evaluating of her own, she felt a twinge of disappointment. The old woodstove was also gone.
“You said you came here often?” he asked.
“Michelle’s grandma was a widow so someone from her family was always checking up on her.” She looked into the pantry, quietly closed the door when she found the shelves missing. “I’d come by after school with Michelle sometimes. On weekends, some of us would come out to skate on the mill pond and come over to say hi.” She motioned to the empty corner and the now-covered hole in the wall that had once vented a chimney. “We used to warm our hands on the woodstove that was over there while Grandma B made us cocoa.”
“Grandma B?”
“Grandma Baker. She said we were all like granddaughters to her, so that’s what we called her. It’s like that around here,” she mused, thinking how sweet the elderly woman had been to her and her friends. “Neighbors are like family.”
She moved toward the back porch, stuck her head out the kitchen door to see what had changed out there. The door had already been replaced. So had the wood-framed windows. They were aluminum now, like the other new ones crated and waiting to replace those on the second floor. The broad steps she and her friends used to sit on were still there, but their lumber was now new.
What she’d just remembered had her turning back into the room.
“The best part about coming here was the slumber parties in the summer. Carrie Rogers and I would come out with Michelle. We’d pick berries in the woods and swim in the pond, then sit on the porch eating popcorn and talking until her grandma chased us up to bed. We wouldn’t go to sleep until the sun started to come up.”
Conquering the night they’d called it, she remembered, shaking her head at the silliness of what had seemed like such a big deal to them back then. If she stayed up all night now, it was because she was preparing for an event, wrestling with an administrative budget or personnel problem or, lately, she thought, turning away to run her hand along the new window sill, questioning the sudden developments in her career.
Propped against the door frame, Sam watched her check out his handiwork. He had no idea how something as inconsequential as a childhood memory could put such warmth in a person’s eyes, but that warmth had definitely been there in the moments before she’d turned away. It had lit her face, her eyes, curved the fullness of her mouth. He could barely recall his own childhood. It hadn’t been a bad one. He just never thought about it. Certainly he never thought about the innocence she had just so easily recalled of her own.
Swimming and skating on a mill pond sounded like something straight out of a Currier and Ives painting to him. Practical to a fault, cynical, distrustful and more hardened than he would admit out loud, he couldn’t begin to imagine something so idyllic.
He dismissed his failure as totally inconsequential. Distrust and doubt had saved his hide on more than one occasion. Doing what he did for a living, he’d come to regard the traits as skills. He wasn’t at all anxious to be rid of them.
She turned back, now studying the new plywood underlayment for the kitchen floor. “Do you mind if I go upstairs?”
Still curious about what she was up to, enjoying the distraction, he pushed himself from the door frame and idly motioned for her to proceed.
Seeing her smile in the general direction of his chin, he watched her slip past him and into the dim living room. The faint scents of cinnamon and something impossibly fresh drifted behind her. Her shampoo, maybe. Or her soap.
She headed for the door at the far end of the room, only to stop as she reached the fireplace a few feet from the stairs. Looking as if she might be remembering something about the fireplace, too, she slowly ran her hand along the carved wood mantel.
It had taken him an entire day to sand the mantel down and repair the cracked corbels. All he needed to do now was stain it the dark cherry his sister had picked out and apply a few coats of varnish.
“You’re doing all of this yourself?” she asked.
“My uncle helped me tear out the kitchen and bathroom. And he or one of his workers will help me install the new cabinets when they arrive next week. But other than that…yeah. Pretty much.”
“This feels like satin.” The tips of her fingers caressed the smooth surface, her brow knitting as if she were savoring the velvety feel of the grain. Or, maybe, marveling at it. “I thought you were a detective.”
“I am.”
She glanced toward him. “Then, how do you know how to do all this?”
He gave a dismissing shrug. “Where I grew up, nobody called a carpenter unless he was a relative. Same went for a plumber or an electrician. Dad did the repairs around the house and I watched.”
“And helped,” she concluded, stroking the wood again. “A lot.”
That was true, he thought, though he’d all but forgotten the hours he’d spent watching his dad turn wood scraps into picture frames or the little tables and chairs he gave away to his cousins and the kids in the neighborhood. Pete MacInnes was a cop, too. Nearing retirement now. But carpentry always had been his escape and he’d seemed to enjoy sharing it with his son. He had never said as much. His father had never been big on words. He still wasn’t. But he was a patient man. He’d been a good teacher. And a slap on the back was still high praise.
“Yeah,” he finally murmured, pulling his thoughts back in. He didn’t want to think about his dad. Specifically, he didn’t want to think about what his dad had said about taking more leave than had been recommended.
Take a little more time, son. Think about supervising. Or working internal affairs. Your mom worries about you when you’re undercover.
He knew his mom worried. But his mom worried about everything. As for moving up the chain of command, the last thing he wanted was to sit behind a desk supervising a sting. He needed to be in the heart of it.
“You do beautiful work.”
As she spoke, Kelsey dropped her hand from the perfectly prepared wood. She’d had no idea all those years ago that they’d had so much in common. Years of watching and assisting her mom tend whatever had broken or malfunctioned around the diner had left her with a few eclectic skills of her own. She was probably the only student to graduate from the Boston Culinary Arts Academy who’d taken apart and reassembled a sink drain her first week of sauce class because another student’s engagement ring had been rinsed down the drain with her burned beurre blanc.
She might have told Sam that, too, had she not noticed the small white scar under the hard line of his jaw. Another peeked above the band of his T-shirt near his collarbone. The thin silvery line widened, looking slightly pink where it disappeared beneath the worn fabric.
Realizing she was staring, her glance jerked up.
He was waiting for her to move.
Her purpose for being there had her starting for the stairs. But she’d barely taken a step before his hand clamped around her arm.
“Be careful,” he told her. “The third and fifth steps are loose.”
Sam’s fingers circled her biceps. Beneath the thin fabric of her sleeve, the heat of his broad palm seeped into her flesh. The sensation unnerved her. More unnerving still was the way that heat slowly moved through the rest of her body.
Doing her best to ignore the disturbing effect, she murmured a quiet, “Okay.”
“Watch where you’re going when you get up there, too.”
Her response this time was only a nod. Yet, it satisfied him enough to let her go. Even then, the heat of his touch lingered, distracting her, making her even more aware of the feel of his eyes on her back as she started up the stairs, and carefully climbed past the boxes of nails and odd-looking metal brackets. The handrails had been removed, the steps were trailed with sawdust and most of those that weren’t loose creaked. But she was mostly conscious of the big man moving behind her—and the way he watched her when they reached the top and she stopped to glance around.
Many of the interior walls had already been removed. Piles of old lumber and sheets of knotty pine paneling were stacked everywhere. With little left to divide it, the area was mostly a series of upright studs and dangling wires.
With her back to him, Kelsey looked past a pair of sawhorses and a table saw with a long orange cord that ran to an electrical outlet beneath an open window. The glass globes had been removed from the overhead light fixtures. Bare bulbs and afternoon sunlight illuminated the varying degrees of destruction. In some places, the ceiling was missing.
The only room she was concerned with, however, was the one at the end with most if its paneling still intact. She could see into it through the row of studs that had once been the hallway wall. The wall separating it from what had been Grandma B’s sewing room was still there.
Sam lifted a board angled across what remained of a doorway. It landed with a clatter and a puff of dust on the stack behind him. “There’s not much left up here to see.”
Hugging her purse to her side, growing more uncomfortable by the second standing between him and her fantasies, she skimmed a glance past the open window. The window in Michelle’s old room was open, too.
Before he could catch her calculating, she glanced around once more.
“It feels different in here without the furniture and the walls. It’s sort of…”
“Unfinished?” he suggested.
“I was thinking more like…lonely.”
There always had been so much laughter there. Reminding herself there would be again once his little nephews moved in, she nonchalantly nodded toward the room that had been Michelle’s. In the middle of the wall jutting toward her, presumably resting on the floor, was the object she had no hope of reclaiming at the moment.
“Is that room going to stay the same size, or are you going to take out that wall, too?”
“It’s coming out.”
Her heart jerked. “Oh?”
“My sister wants more space for the kids up here.” He motioned behind her. “This will all open up to a playroom and study.”
Hoping to appear as if she were merely showing neighborly interest, she edged to where he’d left a tool belt draped over one of the sawhorses. With the hallway part of the wall already gone, she wondered if she could see between the panels. “Is that what you were working on when I interrupted?” she asked, taking another step back.
She could have sworn she felt his glance narrow on her.
“Actually I was tearing apart the door frame you’re about to back into. That whole wall is going.”
She drew herself to a halt before he could do it for her.
Still aware of the warmth on her arm where he’d grabbed her before, telling herself she was only imagining she still felt his heat, she took a more careful step toward the stairs. If she was rattled by anything, it was what she was doing. Casing a place, or whatever it was called, wasn’t exactly her area of expertise.
“Then, I should let you get back to it,” she told him. “I need to get back myself before Mom thinks I abandoned her.” The floor creaked as she edged toward the stairwell, slowly, though what she really wanted to do was bolt. “I really appreciate you letting me look around.”
He dipped his dark head, his eyes on hers, his tone as casual as she was trying to be. “Anytime.”
“Thanks.” With the promise of escape only seconds away, she turned toward the stairs, only to turn right back. “Don’t forget your pie.”
“Not a chance.”
His claim drew a faint smile an instant before she started down the stairs. Watching her go, Sam stayed where he was and wondered at the betraying tightness he’d seen at the corners of her mouth. That strain hadn’t been there when he’d seen her smile at the diner’s regulars that morning. Or in the brief moments she’d recalled bits of her childhood.
Standing in the midst of his demolition, he heard the last step creak and the quickness of her footsteps across the living room floor. She wasn’t running, but she wasn’t wasting any time getting out of there, either.
Moments later, rusted hinges gave an arthritic groan when she pushed the screen door open.
It was only when he heard it bang shut that he headed down the stairs and to the door himself.
From the seclusion of the interior’s dim shadows, he watched her hurry along the cracked concrete path and climb into the car she’d parked under the sweeping branches of the maple tree shading the driveway.
She didn’t stop anywhere along the way, though he did see her glance toward the house before she climbed into the car and drive out to the narrow main road leading into town.
He could practically feel a frown settle between his eyebrows as he stepped onto the porch and watched her car disappear across the expanse of meadowlike front lawn. He would have bet his badge that there was something more going on with her than she was letting on. Her body language alone had practically screamed that she wasn’t being entirely up-front with him. At least, it seemed to him that it had.
Still, as he headed back inside, he couldn’t help wonder if maybe the department psychologist hadn’t been right—that he did need the break. From the way Kelsey had breezed in and out of there, it seemed she really had just wanted to look around the place—and that he’d seen intrigue where there was none at all.
Kelsey could hardly believe what she was doing. It was two o’clock in the morning, she was dressed like a cat burglar in a dark stocking cap she’d found in her old ski bag and a long-sleeved navy T-shirt and jeans, and she was climbing through a second-story window of a house that did not belong to her.
Ten minutes ago, she’d parked her car at the old mill, taken the bridge across the stream and the path through the woods, and quietly made her way to the back of the house. She’d nearly stopped breathing every time the snap of a twig beneath her feet broke through the cacophony of crickets, croaking frogs and the hammering of her heart. She felt as if she were barely breathing now.
In the light of the half moon, Sam’s darkened trailer had seemed to glow like snow on a winter’s night. His truck sat parked like a shadow near its door.
Mercifully the back corner of the house wasn’t visible from the trailer. That had made it relatively easy to get the ladder she’d seen earlier on the back porch and carry it to the window next to Michelle’s old bedroom. When she’d been there before, both windows had been open. Both were now closed, but she’d also noticed that the locking lever on the window by the table saw had been missing.
Two stories up, desperately hoping she wouldn’t do what her mom had done and slip off the ladder, she balanced on the third rung from the top and tried to lever open the window.
It didn’t want to give up without a struggle. The frame had rotted in places and layers of old paint made the wood stick. There was also no handle or lever on the outside to lift with. It was only by laying her palms flat against the glass and pressing in and up that she was able to get any leverage and move it enough to get her fingers between the frame and the sill. Once she’d managed that, she was able to work it open the rest of the way.
She’d never make it as a thief, she decided, wiping bits of old paint onto her pants while clinging to the ladder for balance. She had just left impressions of her palms on the glass, and all ten of her fingerprints.
The inside of the house was dark. Poking her head in, she raised one leg and stuck it through. Hugely relieved that she hadn’t fallen, she pulled in the other behind her and cautiously eased her feet to the floor. The moonlight penetrated only far enough for her to see the outline of the lumber she’d nearly stepped on.
She couldn’t go any farther without her flashlight.
It had taken her forever to find one. Her mom, who, thankfully, still slept like the dead, had always kept one in their tiny upstairs kitchen. She’d kept another in the utility room for the inevitable power failures that came with winter storms. The one in the kitchen had a dead battery. The one in the utility room had been replaced with something the size of her car’s headlamp. It would have lit up the entire house and drawn far too much attention to anyone who might have noticed the light moving inside. Not that there was anyone around. No one other than Sam, anyway. The nearest neighbor lived a half a mile away, and the road itself rarely saw any traffic at all past ten at night.
She’d found the eight-inch long yellow flashlight she now pulled from the waistband of her jeans in the diner’s storage room. Clicking it on, she trained the beam on the floor to see where she was going and headed for the sawhorses. That was where she’d seen Sam’s toolbox and tool belt.
Her plan was simple. She would pry away the piece of paneling concealing the diary with one of his hammers or screwdrivers, get what she’d come for, then wedge the panel back in place as best she could. She wasn’t about to risk waking Sam by nailing it. The board would be loose, but if he thought anything about it when he went to tear it out, he’d have no idea it was loose because of her.
She made it halfway across the creaking floor before she turned the beam toward the wall separating the room she was in from Michelle’s—and found the beam illuminating a spot at the end of the house.
The wall wasn’t there.
Her heart gave a sick little jerk as she swept the circle of light everywhere the wall should have been. The paneling had been ripped away. All that remained of the wall and her hiding place were the upright studs that ran ceiling to floor a foot and a half apart, and a few horizontal pieces of a two-by-four that had been hammered between them for stability. The one in the center was undoubtedly the little ledge Michelle had told her was there. The one her diary had slid straight past.
Feeling a nightmare coming on, she started toward where it would have landed, only to stop at the squeak of wood behind her. The sound stopped when she did. Infinitely more concerned with where her diary might be, she ignored what she assumed where only the creaks and groans typical of old houses settling in at night and raised the flashlight to see more clearly into the room beyond the studs.
The instant she did, the hairs at the back of her neck rose. The sensation had barely registered before something hard clamped around her wrist. A gasp caught in her chest as her cap was yanked from her head. The sting of her hair being yanked with it hadn’t even registered before she was spun like a rag doll, her back slammed into the stud behind her and her air cut off by what felt like a bar of steel across her throat.
Somewhere in that startling split second, the flashlight had been snatched from her hand. Its beam was aimed straight at her face, leaving her totally blinded—and so frightened as she struggled for oxygen that she couldn’t even scream.
Chapter Three
Sam didn’t know what had wakened him. After spending fourteen months sleeping with one ear open because he never knew when his identity would be discovered and he’d find himself seconds from being dead, it could have been anything. He still woke a dozen times a night. Every night. And when he did, his first thought was that he’d blown his cover and that someone had identified him as an undercover cop.
Logic would eventually remind him that he was no longer playing the role of a down on his luck bartender and working nights in a dive in the seediest area of the city. Members of the gang he’d sought to bust were either no longer among the living, or in jail awaiting trial and a trip to prison. He was in Maple Mountain. Quiet, peaceful, boringly uneventful Maple Mountain. Yet, the thought that he was as safe here as he could be anywhere failed to form.
Logic tonight told him someone was out there.
In the dark, trusting nothing, pure instinct took over. That instinct had him easing open a window of his trailer. The faint sound of metal bumping wood had been all he’d needed to hear before he’d jerked on his pants, shoved the gun he’d kept under his pillow into the back of his jeans and slipped as quiet as a breath into the night.
Years of living on a blade-thin edge, of knowing how desperate and vengeful people could be, allowed his mind to work only one way. He always assumed the worst. To do anything less left him open and vulnerable to whatever mayhem he might face. If a threat proved minimal, he could always back down. It was infinitely more difficult, and more dangerous, to walk into a scenario expecting minimal conflict and have to gear up under assault. It was how every cop he knew survived.
He’d been locked in that mindset when he’d crept around the house to see a dark figure slip through the second-story window. In his mind, the intruder could only want one of two things. Tools to fence for drugs, or payback. He never discounted the possibility that he had been ID’d by a suspect who’d escaped a bust, and that someone he’d helped put in jail might look to get even by having a buddy nail him.
Now, primed for survival, his only thought as the intruder’s identity registered in the beam of the blinding light was that he was crushing Kelsey’s windpipe.
She looked terrified.
He was hurting her. The knowledge that he was a hair-breadth from hurting her more shot a sharp, totally unfamiliar pang of fear through his rigid, adrenaline-charged body.
He swore even as he jerked away his arm. The gun in his hand glinted dully as it passed through the beam.
He swore again, adrenaline still surging as he swung the light from her eyes.
“God Almighty, Kelsey.” His voice held fury, his words as close to a prayer as he’d been in years. He could have snapped her neck. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
Blinking to clear her vision, she sagged in relief against the post when she recognized Sam’s voice. She couldn’t see him. All she could see were spots as she lifted her shaking hand to her throat. “I’m…”
“Do you have any idea what I could have done to you?” He was nowhere near ready to hear from her just yet. Furious with her for jerking around with his adrenaline, equally upset with the thought of the force he’d used on her, he slammed the end of the flashlight down on the sawhorse beside him. As it rocked on its base, its light formed a wavering circle on the ceiling. “You should never sneak around a cop. Ever. Do you understand me? What in the hell were you thinking?”
Kelsey’s heart beat furiously against her ribs. She wished he’d stop swearing at her. She wished he’d stop yelling. Mostly she wished he’d move. He’d only backed up a couple of feet. As near as he stood, it seemed she could actually feel the tension radiating from his body. That tension roped around her, making it hard to breathe even without his arm jammed against her neck.
“I wasn’t sneaking around you.” She forced insistence into her voice, along with a bravado she truly did not feel. What she did feel was a little sick from an adrenaline rush of her own. Her knees were shaking. Locking them, her chin edged up another notch and she focused through the fading spots. “You were the one who snuck up on me.”
“You were breaking and entering—”
“I didn’t break anything! The window wasn’t locked.”
“It’s a term.” He growled the words as he jammed his hands onto his hips, his stance now even more imposing as the he glared down at her. “You’re trespassing on private property in the middle of night. You climbed through a second-story window to get in here. That’s called breaking and entering,” he informed her, clearly familiar with the technicalities. “What you haven’t said is why.”
She would rather avoid that.
Ignoring the sore place on the back of her head where it had bumped the stud now supporting her, she dropped her glance to the cleft in his chin. The night-time stubble shadowing his face made the carved angles look as inflexible as granite. His voice sounded as hard as tempered steel. “I was just looking for something that I’d left here.”
“This afternoon?”
“Before that.”
In the dim glow of the flashlight, he abruptly turned away. A few frantic heartbeats later, she saw him flip on the overhead light—a single bulb waiting for a new cover—and head back to where she remained rooted in the sawdust.
He had been easier to take without the harsher light. Then, he’d been a huge, menacing shadow with eyes that seemed to penetrate the dark. As he walked toward her now, she could clearly see the rugged, unyielding lines of his face, his broad—and naked—shoulders and chest, and the silver-white scar that slashed at an angle from his collarbone to the rippled muscles six inches below one flat male nipple.
Her glance slid down, only to dart back up when it reached the patch of dark hair that arrowed below the band of his unsnapped jeans. A quarter-size circle of puckered flesh showed faintly pink above his left biceps. The sight of all that cut, carved and scarred muscle was disturbing enough. The glimpse she’d caught of the handgun he tucked into his waistband below the small of his back was even more so. It was only then that she realized he’d had it drawn.
She jerked her glance from the six-pack of muscle forming his abdomen to the disconcerting light in his eyes. It was clear he no longer regarded her as any sort of a threat. It seemed equally obvious that he was in the process of calming himself down. His fury had subsided to something more like controlled irritation, aggravation or whatever it was that had his jaw working as he jammed his hands back onto his hips.
“What is it?”
Shaken beyond belief, she shook her head. “What is…what?”
“What you left here.”
The nature of her distress abruptly changed quality. “It’s just something that’s…mine.”
“If it’s yours, what is it doing here?”
“It wasn’t always here,” she explained, the faint ache at the back of her head making her rub there, anyway. “I’d kept it at the gristmill until I heard that some of the boys from school had started hanging out there, too. I was afraid they’d find it, so Michelle let me put it in the hiding place in her room.”
She let her hand fall, brushing back her hair on the way, and crossed her arms protectively around herself. “I’d only meant to leave it there for a while. But it fell past the ledge she’d said was in there and we couldn’t get it back out.”
For a moment, Sam said nothing. He just stood with his eyes narrowed on her decidedly pale features. The knot of hair she’d wound near the top of her head had loosened when he ripped off the cap laying on the floor. Strands of that flaxen silk fell against her cheeks. One lock tumbled over her shoulder.
Not trusting himself to touch her to push it back, not sure if he wanted to ease the disquiet in her eyes or shake her, he stepped back instead. He couldn’t believe the trouble she’d gone to to retrieve something she could have simply asked him for.
Feeling as if he’d wound up in Oz, he moved to where he’d left the book he’d found that afternoon. The thing had been between the walls dividing the rooms, along with a tube of dried up lipstick and a pile of candy bar wrappers. The only reason he hadn’t tossed it along with everything else was because of the name on its pale pink cover. Kelsey had been written out in hot pink glitter. Much of the glitter was gone, but the looping outline of the name remained visible enough.
More concerned at the time with how he was going to reroute the electrical wiring in the wall, he hadn’t considered much about his little discovery. The only thought he’d given it was to mention it to the Kelsey, who’d brought him the pie that was now nearly gone, in case it belonged to her, since she’d known the Bakers, or some relative of theirs who shared her name.
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
Kelsey’s eyes widened on what he held.
“That’s it,” she confirmed, and was halfway to him when she lifted her arm to grab it from his hand.
“Not so fast.” Remaining by a pile of panels he’d salvaged, he held the diary up out of her reach. “I want to know what’s so important about this that you’d do what you did to get it.”
The nightmare Kelsey had felt coming on began to materialize.
“It’s just a diary I kept in high school,” she insisted, minimizing drastically as she tried again to reach for it.
He held it higher.
She was inches from his bare chest. Looking past the hair shadowing his armpit and the sculpted muscles along the underside of his arm, she breathed in the scents of soap and something warm, vaguely spicy and totally, undeniably disturbing. He’d showered before he’d gone to bed.
Not sure if the heat she felt radiated from him or from a purely primitive female awareness of his big body, she swallowed hard and backed away.
“It’s nothing. Really. It’s just…sentimental stuff.”
“A lie detector would be wasted on you.”
Kelsey opened her mouth, only to close it because she couldn’t decide if she should beg or just try again to snatch for what he’d just lowered. He had an easy six inches on her, and a decidedly longer reach. Even if he hadn’t been so much taller, and bigger, the thought of getting up close and personal with the rock wall of his chest definitely gave her pause. It also added a new element to the anxiety clawing at her when he stepped back, took a small piece of wire from the toolbox and deftly popped the lock guarding the pages between their faux-leather covers.
A new form of panic surged. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t believe it’s ‘nothing,’” he said simply. “There’s something in here. Since you just took ten years off my life breaking in to get it, I want to know what it is.”
“No!”
A sense of impending humiliation made her grab for the book again. He promptly stuck it back in the air. Already in motion, she raised on tiptoe, stretching her arm the length of his, getting far closer than she would have intended had she felt she had any choice. With her breasts pressed to his chest, she reached over him, her stomach flattening against abdomen and his zipper as he edged the book farther back.
Catching her glance, one dark eyebrow slowly arched. Something dark glittered in his quicksilver eyes.
Her breath went thin. Their bodies were molded from chest to thigh. Something liquid gathered low in her belly. Totally disconcerted by the way his heat moved into her, she lowered her heels and jerked back.
Looking totally unfazed by their contact, and her desperation, he stepped back himself to move beneath the lightbulb. Opening the paperback-size book, he flipped through the pages of small, looping script.
When Sam had found the little volume, it had simply looked like a girl-thing to him. Preoccupied with his project and the constant and nagging knowledge that he had weeks to go before he could leave, it had been of no real interest at all where he was concerned.
Aware of how uneasily Kelsey watched him, he conceded that he was definitely interested now. On a number of levels. The feel of her tempting little body arched against his had seared itself into his brain. As conscious of her effect on his long-neglected libido as he was the pages themselves, he started reading a page toward the front. The date was April 23.
The math test was awful, she’d written. I think I passed it, but I was so not ready for cosigns. Tommy M kept trying to look over my shoulder. He’s such a jerk. I helped Mom in the diner before homework. Bertie Buell came in to have another slice of mom’s coconut pie. Mom says Bertie is trying to figure out her recipe and is all bent because she won’t give it to her. I told her Mrs. Buell is always bent. I overheard Carrie’s mom say its because she’s never had sex.
Seeing nothing incriminating there, he flipped to the middle.
I’m at the mill. Carrie is grounded. She sneaked off to see Rob again. Shell has to baby-sit her sister. I wish I could live here. I could fix up the old miller’s quarters and plant flowers in the window boxes. The building seems sad sitting here with nothing to do. It’s like it’s just sleeping and waiting for someone to wake it up and put it back to work.
He’d never thought of a building being sad. And just that afternoon, she’d said the house they were in seemed lonely. He had no idea what made her think such things about inanimate objects, but other than a bent toward sentiment he couldn’t begin to relate to, nothing he read accounted for why she looked as if she were holding her breath.
Or so he was thinking when he skipped forward a few more pages.
His own name stared back at him, written in a half dozen ways.
Sam. Sam MacInnes. Samuel MacInnes. KES + S?M. Mr. and Mrs. Sam MacInnes. Kelsey MacInnes.
Frowning, he turned the diary toward her. It was out of her reach, but still close enough for her to see.
“What’s this all about?”
Heat moved up Kelsey’s neck. “It’s just something teenage girls do. It doesn’t mean a thing,” she insisted, reaching for the diary again.
He immediately lifted it away, leaving her to back off once more as he flipped ahead a few pages.
“‘I dreamed about Sam again,’” he began aloud, only to pause, glance up, then start reading more slowly. “‘It was just like on The Tame and the Torrid when Jack kissed Angela’s neck and backed her into her bedroom. My heart was pounding when I woke up and my stomach felt weird. Just like when I’m around him. I’d give anything if he’d kiss me. Really kiss me. The way Jack did Angela.’”
Thinking this was definitely getting better, he turned back a few pages to see what he’d missed, skimmed over an entry that began with I haven’t seen Sam for four days, then began again when he noticed his name once more. “‘Carrie asked what I like best about Sam,’” he read. “‘I didn’t know where to start. I like his smile and the way he twists his mouth when he seems to be thinking about something. And I like his eyes and how big his shoulders are—’”
Kelsey heard him cut himself off as he read the rest of the line to himself. A moment later, he looked at her with a grin that would have stopped her heart had she not been so busy being mortified.
“You thought I had a great butt?”
He watched her press her fingertips to her forehead, and slowly shake her head as she lowered it. Her cheeks had turned a telling shade of pink. If he had to guess, he’d bet she was burning with embarrassment from the inside out.
He should put her out of her misery, he thought, and give her back her diary. It would be the decent thing to do, given how uncomfortable she clearly was. She really did look pretty thoroughly humiliated. But he wasn’t ready yet. He honestly couldn’t have imagined anything that would have so completely diverted his focus from what he’d nearly done to her.
He also couldn’t remember the last time anything had made him genuinely feel like smiling. Especially after his perusal of a few more pages revealed him to be the subject of a few more rather specific fantasies. Very specific, actually.
“I can see why you wanted this back.”
Kelsey was dying inside. “May I have it now? Please?”
She couldn’t remember exactly what else she’d written. All she knew for certain was that whatever she’d felt toward him had been fueled by a huge romantic streak—and that whatever he was now reading must be fairly provocative. His eyebrows had risen just before his mouth formed a thoughtful upside down U and he gave what looked very much like an approving nod.
She noticed, too, that the tension had left his face, allowing his smile to reach his eyes when he finally looked to where she stood wishing she could evaporate.
“Do you still have erotic fantasies?”
“No,” she insisted, not about to give him any more insights than he already had. “That’s nothing but the imaginings of a teenager who used to watch a lot of soap operas.” And read a lot of romances, she thought. She and her girlfriends had devoured them. Sam had been every hero she’d ever fallen in love with. No doubt she’d written something about that in there, too.
“You mean you’re repressed now?” he asked, still grinning.
Her tone went heavy with forbearance. “I am not repressed.”
“Then, you do still have fantasies?”
He was having entirely too good a time at her expense. Even the rich tones of his voice held a smile. “Of course, I do. Right now, I’m fantasizing about a hole opening up under my feet. Or yours.”
“Hey, I wasn’t the one who wrote this stuff.”
“It was meant to be private.”
“I don’t mind that you shared.”
“I didn’t share. You picked the lock.”
“A technicality,” he murmured and, still grinning he finally, mercifully, held out the diary.
She practically snatched it away.
“Thank you,” she muttered, so relieved to have the incriminating little volume back in her possession that she didn’t bother wondering what else he’d read. All she wanted now was to leave. Better yet, to get on a plane back to Phoenix and forget she’d even come to Maple Mountain.
She wasn’t at all inclined to give Sam points for sensitivity. Yet, he actually seemed to take pity on her rather desperate need to escape.
The floor creaked beneath his weight as he walked over and closed the window she’d opened. “You might as well go out the door,” he said, nodding toward the stairs on his way back. “No need to risk your neck on the ladder.” He flipped on the stairwell light, turned off the one overhead.
“Thank you,” she murmured again, and was down the stairs and halfway across the living room before he stopped her.
“The back door is open. You can go that way.”
She changed direction as the beam of a light arrowed over her shoulder. “Don’t forget these.” Coming up behind her, undoubtedly still grinning, he handed her the flashlight she’d borrowed from her mom’s and the stocking cap he’d tossed to the floor.
She didn’t bother to thank him this time. Taking them, she clutched the cap in her hand with the diary and followed the flashlight’s beam through the kitchen to the back door. She’d made it across the porch and down the steps when his deep voice stopped her again.
“Where’s your car?”
From a dozen feet away, she turned to see him close the door and descend the steps. Bathed in the pale moonlight, his body gleamed like hammered bronze. Broad shouldered, bare-chested, scarred, he looked like a warrior to her. Heaven knew he’d had the training of one.
“It’s at the mill.” Not sure if she was compelled by the thought or disconcerted by it, she motioned behind her. “I walked over from there.”
“It’s dark. I’ll walk you to it.”
The offer caught her off guard, the chivalry behind it. A warrior and a gentleman. The combination held a certain lethal quality of its own. “You don’t have to do that. Really,” she insisted, backing up. “I know the way.”
For a moment, Sam said nothing. He simply watched as she kept going, glancing behind her so she wouldn’t trip over a tree root or a stray piece of lumber. She clearly wanted nothing other than escape. The thought that it was him she wanted to get away from kept him right where he was.
“Be careful then,” he finally allowed.
“I will,” she assured him, and turned, her movements as quick and silent as a deer’s as she headed for the trees.
Sam watched her disappear in the direction of the footbridge, but he stayed where he was until he heard the distant sound of her car engine when she started it up. Only then did he move the ladder from where she’d propped it beneath the window, shaking his head at the thought of her wrestling its cumbersome weight in the dark, and return, smiling, to the trailer and bed.
Kelsey buried the diary in the bottom of her travel bag the moment she slipped back into her room, locked the bag and dropped the key into her purse. Any relief she felt having it back in her possession was pretty much buried beneath the embarrassment she’d suffered listening to Sam read from it.
She didn’t know how long she lay with her head under her pillow after she’d crawled into her old twin bed trying to block the inescapable feeling. But the tenacious sensation was still there when her mom knocked on her door a little before 5:00 a.m. and started loudly humming “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” which had always been her way of telling Kelsey it was time to wake up. That awful discomfort remained, unbudging, as she threw together batches of blueberry and carrot raisin muffins, fired up the griddle and made herself smile at the morning’s first customers, all the while dreading the moment Sam would walk through the diner’s door.
From what she’d learned yesterday, he ate there every morning. Usually around seven-thirty.
The Fates apparently decided to toy with her a little more. Seven-thirty came and went, which left her feeling that much more anxious each time the door opened because each time it did, she thought it was him. There was something a tad distressing about facing a man who knew she’d once obsessed about him. Especially since he now knew that what she’d wanted was for him to get up close and very personal. But that had been a lifetime ago, back when she’d been all imagination and no action. Not that she was into action that much now. Or ever had been, actually.
She could honestly say that no man had ever consumed her thoughts the way Sam once had. She could also swear on every bible the Gideons had ever printed that she had not written down her thoughts about a man since her last entry in that diary, whatever it had been. She hadn’t looked. As rattled as she’d been, still was for that matter, she’d been in no hurry to read what else she had written and further embarrass herself.
By ten o’clock, Sam still hadn’t shown up. Desperately hoping he’d chosen to avoid her, and finding a certain humiliation in that, too, she busied herself peeling apples for pies since the breakfast rush was over while her mom scurried past to answer the ringing telephone. Within seconds of her mom picking up the dated instrument on the wall by the stainless steel fridge, Kelsey’s agitation was joined by an entirely different sort of distress.
“It’s for you,” her mom announced, leaving the receiver dangling by its black cord. “It’s Doug Westland.”
Doug wanted a decision. Unfortunately she was no closer to making one now than she’d been when she’d left the day before yesterday. Because Sam and that damnable diary had totally occupied her, she’d thought of little else. “Tell him I’ll call him back, will you?”
Her mom’s forehead pinched as tightly as the coil of her intricate bun. “This is the second time he’s called since you’ve been here. He sounds very nice, dear. You should talk to him.”
She had talked to him. Yesterday afternoon, she’d returned the call he’d made while she’d been at the Baker place. He’d wanted to make sure she hadn’t yet accepted the offer from the Regis-Carlton so he could overnight the contract and offer they’d talked about rather than wait for her to return. She’d told her mom that. What she hadn’t mentioned was how he’d assured her again that he knew they would work well together and repeated what he’d maintained before, that they would make a great team, a great partnership.
You have no idea how passionate I can be about what I want, Kelsey. And what I want right now is you.
He’d first informed her of that in the beautifully appointed bar of his most successful restaurant to date, the restaurant he and all the critics predicted soon would be surpassed by the endeavor he’d invited her to join. It had been midmorning, the restaurant wasn’t yet open and he’d made the offer over coffee and pie-charts illustrating parts of his proposal at the long granite bar.
It had been strictly a business meeting. In her mind, anyway. Yet, the way he’d looked at her, the way he’d sounded, had made it clear that his words could be taken however she chose. There had been times in her meetings with him since then, too, when he’d subtly let her know he was interested in more than business. She would concede that she cleaned up fairly well when she bothered with heels and a skirt rather than the comfortable baggy pastry chef shirt and clogs she worked in. But the man was a hugely successful entrepreneur. He was smart. He was wealthy. He oozed charm. He had gorgeous single women on his staff and hanging around his establishments. He could easily have the pick of any one he wanted.
He was a player. She was not.
At the moment, however, all she cared about was not being pushed. When her mother’s refusal to pass on her message resulted in her having to take his call, she told him that, too. Nicely, because the professional opportunity he’d offered was incredible and it was entirely possible that her own insecurities were playing with her head. As she stood at the back of the room, holding the phone to her ear with one hand and rubbing at the little knot at the back of her head with the other, she told him she wasn’t signing anything with anyone until she returned to Arizona. She also assured him when he asked that she wasn’t stalling as a ploy for a larger salary or bigger percentage of the partnership. And that, yes, she was enjoying her visit with her mom.
It seemed like a good news/bad news sort of morning to her. The good news was that she would only be in Maple Mountain for less than a week, which meant she only had less than a week to go before she never saw Sam MacInnes again. The bad news was that at the end of that time, she really did need to make a decision about her future employment. She just didn’t know which position was the better move for her career. Or her personal life.
Listening to Doug—who sounded as if her coming on board was a done deal—and thinking of how the Regis-Carlton’s manager assumed the same about her accepting the promotion, she could feel a headache brewing. With a silent sigh, she pulled off the chef’s cap covering her hair and rubbed once more at the little knot on her skull.
From where he’d just sat down at the counter, Sam caught the pinch of Kelsey’s brow and the tentative motion of her hand.
He had arrived late on purpose. He wanted to talk to Kelsey. He just didn’t want to do it with the regulars around. He knew how nosey the locals could be. Proof of that had been evident less than two hours ago when Charlie had stopped by to see why he hadn’t been at the diner that morning. Amos had driven by two minutes later and stopped when he’d seen Charlie’s pickup.
When Amos had asked why he hadn’t shown up for breakfast, Sam had told him the same thing he’d invented on the spot for Charlie. That he just hadn’t felt all that hungry when he woke up. The explanation seemed inconsequential enough, until Charlie proceeded to confide that the last time he’d lost his appetite, he’d been coming down with a summer cold. According to him, the best remedy for that particular ailment was lemonade spiked with whiskey and honey. Heavy on the whiskey.
Amos swore by chicken soup. Homemade. Not store bought.
Sam promised to keep the prescriptions in mind simply because both men had bothered to be concerned. He’d also made sure they both understood that he really felt just fine. He knew how the grapevine worked in Maple Mountain. If he hadn’t declared himself healthy, it wouldn’t have been long before word of him being ill made it out to his aunt and she or one of her friends showed up with broth and a poultice. Concern seemed to run as deep as the granite mines in people’s veins around there.
He was feeling an uncomfortable dose of concern himself as he sat at his usual spot at the counter.
“I didn’t know if we’d be seein’ you or not this mornin’.” Sounding as friendly as always, Dora automatically filled a mug with coffee and set it in front of him. “Charlie stopped by on the way back from your place and said you might be coming down with a cold. You should get extra vitamin C,” she insisted. “How about some orange juice?”
“The juice would be great, but I’m feeling fine. Honest.” So much for preempting that little rumor. “I’m just late this morning,” he explained, sticking closer to the truth than he had earlier. “There’s nothing wrong with me that food won’t cure.”
“In that case, I’ll go start your breakfast myself.” Holding her injured arm protectively at her waist, she glanced over her shoulder into the kitchen, then back at him. “Kelsey’s on an important call. She might be a while.”
As usual, she asked if he wanted buttermilk pancakes or blueberry with his bacon and eggs, then disappeared through the swinging door before she reappeared again inside walking past the service window.
His focus, however, was on Kelsey. He could see her at the back of the kitchen, pacing as far as the six-foot phone cord would allow.
She’d been the last thing on his mind last night, and the first that morning.
He couldn’t begin to deny how it intrigued him to know that she had once fantasized about him. With the memory of her scent and the feel of her long, taut body fused into his brain, he couldn’t deny the temptation to invent a few fantasies about her of his own, either. But entertaining such thoughts, interesting as they were, would have to wait. He had slammed her pretty hard against that stud.
He had never in his career come as close as he had last night to harming an innocent person. And she was an innocent. Despite the way she’d been sneaking around, she was definitely not the hard-core type he’d grown so accustomed to dealing with.
He picked up his coffee, watching her over its rim. He’d come to make sure she was all right, but his initial assessment was that she was not. She rubbed the back of her head as if it might be sore. From what he could see of her profile, she also seemed to be struggling over something, or someone, as she hung up the phone.
She stood with her hand on the receiver, clearly lost in thought, in the moments before her mom noticed she was no longer occupied.
“Grab the eggs for me, will you?” he heard Dora call to her.
Without a word, Kelsey turned to the refrigerator beside her, yanked open the door and pulled out a large gray cardboard flat.
“Sam’s here,” Dora continued, her tone utterly conversational. “He wants his usual. That means four. Best bring more bacon, too.”
Kelsey’s preoccupation fled. Sam watched, fascinated, as she jerked her head toward where he observed her through the window. As she did, her eyes met his, her arm bumped into the door and the eggs hit the floor.
“Oh, Kelsey, no.” Dora practically moaned the words. “That’s the last of the eggs till Edna delivers more tomorrow. Are there any that didn’t break?”
Kelsey sank to her knees. “One,” she murmured, as fifteen others oozed from their shells.
“Why didn’t you just take out what we needed?”
She hadn’t taken out what they’d needed because the instant she’d heard Sam’s name her thoughts had scrambled. She was not, however, about to admit that to her mother. “I’ll run up to the store and get more.”
“I’ll do it. You clean that up.” Already working her apron loose with one hand, her mom headed for the back door. “There’s nobody else out front except Claire and her cousin from Montpelier. I just refilled their coffee so they’ll be fine until I get back. Sam has a fresh cup.”
Flustered, hating it because it made her feel so out of control, Kelsey grabbed a roll of paper towels and was back on her knees as the screen door banged shut. The sound coincided roughly with the ominous beat of rather large work boots coming through the swinging door.
Sam’s knees creaked as he crouched in front of her and reached for the towels himself.
Her glance made it from the denim stretched over his powerful thighs to the scar on the underside of his chin before it fell back to the mess on the beige linoleum. “You don’t need to help.”
“I’m the reason you dropped part of my breakfast. The least I can do is help you clean it up.”
Feeling flustered was bad enough. Knowing he knew he was the reason for that circumstance magnified her discomfort level by ten. She hadn’t behaved like her normally calm and collected self since yesterday when she’d first heard his name.
With their heads nearly bumping, she picked up a paper towel full of the slippery mess, shells and all, and dumped it on the cardboard flat between them.
Paper ripped as he separated a towel from the roll. “I wanted to talk to you anyway.”
A hint of the raw tension she’d felt in him last night surrounded her once more. Even banked as it was, there was no mistaking that quiet intensity, that edge of complete and utter control. It surrounded him like a force field, invisible, invincible and emitting a kind of restive energy that taunted every nerve in her body.
She now understood completely why that edge was there. She’d had no idea that a man his size could move so quietly or so fast. But she didn’t care to imagine what he’d dealt with that had honed his skills to such a degree, and instilled such lethal instincts. What she had encountered last night told her all she cared to know. The man did not do his work from behind a desk.
That edge lurked beneath his quiet perusal even now.
“I could have hurt you last night.” He hesitated, his deep voice dropping as he ducked his head to catch her eyes. “Are you okay?”
There was no mistaking his concern, or the guilt that tightened his jaw. Caught off guard by both, she quietly murmured, “I’m fine.”
“Then why were you rubbing the back of your head?”
“It’s just a little bump,” she conceded, taking the towel he held to take another swipe at the floor. “It’s nothing.”
“That’s what you said about the diary.”
She didn’t get a chance to tell him she wished he’d never laid eyes on the blasted thing. With her head bent, she could only see his spread knees, but she caught the motion of his hands an instant before she felt them on the sides of her head.
“Let me see,” he insisted, and skimmed his fingers toward the back of her hair.
Sam was accustomed to relying on his own assessments, making his own judgments. Thinking she might be minimizing to get him to go away, he wanted to determine the size of the bump for himself.
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