The Sugar House
Christine Flynn
KEEP YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER?Emmy Larkin could pinpoint the minute that her life changed–when so-called family friend Ed Travers sold part of her father's sugarbush acreage as payment on an overdue loan. And when Ed's son mysteriously arrived back in town, he set tongues wagging–and her heart pounding….Successful, handsome Jack Travers wanted to make things right between his family and Emmy's. But he didn't anticipate the stir he felt when he looked at the lovely, fiercely independent woman who saw him as her adversary. Could he make her see that there was more to their history than met the eye…perhaps even a future together?
“I’ll thaw out in a minute,” Emmy said, her voice muffled. “How about you?”
“I’m fine where I am, too.”
At Jack’s quiet admission, Emmy felt the tightness in her chest loosen a little more. It seemed easier to breathe when he held her. She had no idea why that was but she wouldn’t question it now. Now, she wanted simply to…be.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
Beneath her ear she could hear the strong rhythm of his heart. Placing her palm over that steady beat, she moved closer to absorb the warmth seeping into her from his arms. “I’m going to miss you.”
The beat didn’t change, but his voice seemed to drop as he smoothed his hand the length of her ponytail.
“I guess that makes us even.”
Dear Reader,
June, the ideal month for weddings, is the perfect time to celebrate true love. And we are doing it in style here at Silhouette Special Edition as we celebrate the conclusion of several wonderful series. With For the Love of Pete, Sherryl Woods happily marries off the last of her ROSE COTTAGE SISTERS. It’s Jo’s turn this time—and she’d thought she’d gotten Pete Catlett out of her system for good. But at her childhood haven, anything can happen! Next, MONTANA MAVERICKS: GOLD RUSH GROOMS concludes with Cheryl St. John’s Million-Dollar Makeover. We finally learn the identity of the true heir to the Queen of Hearts Mine—and no one is more shocked than the owner herself, the plain-Jane town…dog walker. When she finds herself in need of financial advice, she consults devastatingly handsome Riley Douglas—but she soon finds his influence exceeds the business sphere….
And speaking of conclusions, Judy Duarte finishes off her BAYSIDE BACHELORS miniseries with The Matchmakers’ Daddy, in which a wrongly imprisoned ex-con finds all kinds of second chances with a beautiful single mother and her adorable little girls. Next up in GOING HOME, Christine Flynn’s heartwarming miniseries, is The Sugar House, in which a man who comes home to right a wrong finds himself falling for the woman who’s always seen him as her adversary. Patricia McLinn’s next book in her SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW… miniseries, Baby Blues and Wedding Bells, tells the story of a man who suddenly learns that his niece is really…his daughter. And in The Secrets Between Them by Nikki Benjamin, a divorced woman who’s falling hard for her gardener learns that he is in reality an investigator hired by her ex-father-in-law to try to prove her an unfit mother.
So enjoy all those beautiful weddings, and be sure to come back next month! Here’s hoping you catch the bouquet….
Gail Chasan
Senior Editor
The Sugar House
Christine Flynn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my lovely niece, Elizabeth Weckstein.
You are a young woman of amazing potential.
Don’t ever forget how special you are.
Much love, Auntie Chris
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.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter One
S he shouldn’t have answered the telephone, Emmy Larkin thought. She should have grabbed her parka and headed out into the glorious winter sunshine as she’d started to do, and let the thing ring. Now she knew for certain that the disturbing rumors were true.
“I tell you, I just saw him myself, Emmy. I was in front of the store helping Mary Moorehouse load her groceries when this black car with New York plates came up Main. New York is where he lives now, you know,” Agnes Waters confided over the line. “My cousin at the county recorder’s office in St. Johnsbury saw his address when she recorded the deed selling that property to him.
“Anyway,” the chatty owner of Maple Mountain’s quaint old general store continued, anxious to share her news, “you know we don’t get many strangers here this time of year, so the car had me paying particular attention. There’s no doubt in my mind it was him. I told Mary the second I realized it for sure that I had to let poor Emmy know that Jack Travers is here.”
Poor Emmy.
Emmy flinched at the label. It was the woman’s news, however, that robbed the usual smile from her voice. “I appreciate you thinking of me, Agnes.”
“Well, of course I’d think of you.” The insistence in the older woman’s tone made it sound as if she’d just planted her fist on one rather ample hip. “After what his father did to yours, I think it’s an insult to you that he’d even show his face around here. After all those fights he got himself into, I can’t imagine why he’d want to come back here at all.
“As for him buying that property,” she continued, her indignation mounting, “I tell you there’s not a member of the community council that’s going to sit by and let him build fancy condos or whatever he has in mind on those ten acres. I don’t believe for a minute that he’s just building himself a vacation house. I know Mary said that was always a possibility, but I can’t imagine why he’d think he or any member of his family would ever be welcome here.”
Stretching the long phone cord as far as it would go, Emmy tugged her heavy blue parka from its hook by her sugar house’s door. She had heard talk about Jack Travers for nearly two weeks. Every time she walked into the post office, the community center or the Waters’s store with its potbellied stove and creaky wooden floors, people would be buzzing about him buying the property or rehashing what his dad had done to hers. The instant they noticed her, though, a sympathetic and speculative silence inevitably fell.
She was twenty-seven years old and, still, no one wanted to talk in front of her about how Ed Travers had harmed her father’s ability to make a living. Or about how it might not have been an accident that a few years later her father had lost control of his car and run head-on into a tree. Or, about how her mom had never been the same after his death and simply wasted away, leaving Emmy all alone.
The acreage Jack had bought had once belonged to her father. The maple-tree-covered land had been part of the sugar bush her dad had carefully tended for its sap, and was the parcel he’d used to secure a loan from Jack’s father to buy new sugaring equipment. Her dad hadn’t been able to pay the money back when it was due, though. And Ed Travers hadn’t been willing to give his long-time friend even a few months longer to repay it. He’d filed for foreclosure on the property and ultimately sold it to an outsider for far less than it had been worth.
Jack’s father had recovered his money, but her father and his business had been devastated. Without those trees, the income from the maple sugaring operation that had helped support his family had been cut by a third.
Emmy knew the only reason Agnes had alluded to what had happened now was because she’d wanted to warn her that the man’s son was there. The silence on the other end of the line seemed to indicate that she was also waiting for her to say something that would at least vindicate the urgency she’d felt to get to the phone with her news. Or perhaps something she could share with whoever happened to walk in next to the only place for miles where a person could get everything from sporting gear to butter and eggs.
Like almost everyone in the rural and isolated community of Maple Mountain, Vermont, Agnes had a good heart. And like everyone else who lived on the outlying farms and in the rolling, wooded hills, she wasn’t terribly tolerant of anyone who tried to change their ways or their attitudes or who threatened one of their own. For all their independence, they looked out for each other. And for many, like Agnes, minding everyone’s business wasn’t regarded so much as a sport as it was a sacred duty.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what he has in mind,” Emmy finally replied, practical as always. “But I can’t imagine he’d feel welcome here, either.”
Like Agnes, she couldn’t imagine why he had bought the property adjacent to hers. The tree-dense parcel had passed from one out-of-state owner to another over the past fifteen years. Some investor or professional couple from down country would buy it with grandiose plans for its development, then figure out how impractical those plans were, leave it as it was, and put it back on the market. Invariably, the property sat for sale for a couple of years before someone else would come along and start the cycle all over again.
Jack Travers wasn’t like those other buyers, though. He’d been familiar with that land. He knew its rolling terrain. He had to know exactly what he’d bought. As a teenager he’d worked it with her father.
Trying to ignore the odd sense of apprehension the conversation brought, she pulled on her jacket while holding the phone between her shoulder and chin. As she did, Rudy, her fifty-pounds of energetic retriever mixed with mutt leaped from his bed under her desk and planted his golden-haired body by the door. He sat there vibrating, dark eyes bright.
“I’m sorry, Agnes.” Now that her parka was on, she reached for her gray fleece cap. “I’m going to have to run. I was just on my way to the house to bring something back for supper before my next batch of sap starts to boil.” She moved toward the receiver on the desk at the back of the room, pulling gloves from her jacket pocket on the way. She didn’t know when she’d have another break before darkness fell. She didn’t mind making the trip to the house in the dark. It was just easier with daylight. “Before I forget,” she hurried to say, “you mentioned that you’d helped Mary with her groceries. Did she say how Charlie is doing?”
“His gout is about the same.” If Agnes was disappointed by her lack of verbal reaction to Jack’s presence, she didn’t let on. Emmy knew she’d been concerned about Charlie, too. “He still can’t get on a boot.”
“He’s probably going stir crazy not being able to get out of the house.”
Agnes gave an unladylike snort. “Don’t know about him. But he’s sure making Mary that way.”
A faint smile entered Emmy’s voice. “I imagine he is.” As cantankerous as her old friend and part-time employee could be on a good day, he’d be like a bear with a tooth-ache on a bad one. “Thanks for calling, Agnes. I really appreciate it. You take care. Okay?”
Emmy didn’t want to be rude. But she really didn’t have long before she had to get back to work. Boiling maple sap into syrup sounded simple enough, but the chores involved would keep her there until midnight.
Agnes took no offense at all at being rushed off the phone. Like every other local, she knew that when sugar season came, the flow of the sap dictated the course of the day for anyone with a sugaring operation. Since Agnes also knew that Emmy was working alone because Charlie, her only help, was temporarily out of commission, she was off the phone in the time it took her to tell Emmy she’d let her know if she heard anything about Jack that Emmy needed to be concerned about.
Emmy had barely replaced the receiver of the old black dial phone when Rudy started turning circles by the door, anxious to get out.
It was such a little thing, but at that moment, Emmy could have hugged him for his predictability. Had he not just started spinning, she would have. So much about her life had been unexpected. So many things had happened that she hadn’t been able to see coming. Having been blindsided so often, she’d grown to love routine, thought of change as a four-letter word, and adored anything predictable. If Rudy was anything, he was a creature of habit, and she loved him for that.
Pulling her hat over her stick-straight auburn ponytail, she smiled at the blur of circling fur and opened the door of the small weather-grayed building before he could make himself dizzy.
Cold air rushed into the warm, sweet-smelling space as Rudy bolted out. With his nose to the foot-deep snow, he ran, sniffing, to see what sort of critter had invaded his turf since he’d last patrolled his domain.
Emmy followed more slowly, taking the path through the trees that led to her yard, her snow-covered garden and her back porch. Depending on how much snow the front predicted to move in tomorrow brought, in another few weeks, she might even see bare ground. That meant mud and rain, but it also meant crocus and daffodils and buds on the trees.
Trying to think of simple, ordinary things, things she loved and looked forward to, wasn’t working.
The sense of foreboding wouldn’t go away.
She couldn’t imagine why Jack had come back. It was beyond her comprehension why any Travers would want anything at all to do with a place where the mere mention of their family name conjured tales of disloyalty, greed and poor Stan Larkin and his little family.
Poor Stan Larkin. Poor Emmy. Her poor mother.
She mentally cringed every time she heard the word that labeled them all so unfortunate and pitiable. Being the subject of talk had always made her uneasy. Being the subject of pity made her even more so. She was equally uncomfortable with the sympathetic looks and the well-intentioned comments she’d heard lately about how well she was taking “the news.” But she hadn’t dealt with the news as well as she’d let on.
Snow crunched beneath her feet as she watched Rudy eye an unsuspecting squirrel. It had taken her forever to get past the feeling that at any moment the bottom could fall out of her world. As many times as it had, she felt as if she’d spent years holding her breath, waiting for it to happen all over again.
She felt that way now, as if she were holding her breath. She’d worked hard to ignore the old feelings of helplessness and insecurity the talk resurrected. But because of Ed Travers’s son those feelings were there once more, hovering beneath the surface, threatening to rise up at any moment and resurrect the memories she had worked so hard to bury.
She wasn’t helpless. It had taken a while, but she’d learned to manage well enough on her own. She was content with what she had. And heaven knew she was busy enough. The sense-of-security part was more of a work in progress, but in the past couple of years, she’d made headway there, too.
Or so she was telling herself as the low drone of a car engine filtered through the cold March air.
Emmy froze in her tracks. From where she had just emerged from the woods, she could see the BMW with New York plates slow as it approached the white, two-story house with its wide, welcoming front porch and the Wedgwood-blue trim she’d painted last summer.
Continuing past the house toward the stable she’d converted into a garage, the car crunched to a stop beneath the skeletal branches of a sycamore tree.
A low growl came from near her knee.
Only now noticing that Rudy had stopped chasing the squirrel he’d terrorized only moments ago and planted himself at her side, she touched the top of his big head.
“It’s okay, boy,” she murmured, reassured by his loyal presence. “We’ll just see what he wants.”
Across the blanket of white, she watched a tall, dark-haired man emerge from the car. The door closed with a crack that sounded like a gunshot a moment before she saw Jack Travers glance toward the house.
She had been barely twelve years old the last time she’d seen him. The fifteen years since then had erased many of the day-to-day memories of when he and his family had lived nearby, but she remembered well enough how she’d felt about him. He’d been like a big brother to her—or how she had imagined a big brother would be, since she’d never had any siblings. At least, that was the way she’d thought of him until he’d become just like his father and turned on his friends, too.
She had never seen him lose his temper as she’d heard he’d done. Certainly not with her. But it had been Jack who had first taught her that a person really couldn’t count on anyone but family. Since she had no family left, she pretty much didn’t count on anyone but herself anymore.
With his hands on the hips of his jeans, his heavy jacket open and making his shoulders look impossibly wide, he looked from the house to the plume of smoke and steam rising from the distant sugar house. As he did, he finally noticed her standing there.
Her stomach tightened as he started toward her. She remembered him being big. As he moved closer, his breath trailing off in the brisk air, he seemed even taller than she remembered, his build more athletic, more…powerful.
She hadn’t heard what he did for a living. She wasn’t sure anyone even knew. But he had an intensity about him as he approached, an air of success and command that seemed unmistakable. She’d seen the type before. Men like him, along with their equally intense, successful and demanding wives or girlfriends had been guests of the B and B she and her mom had converted their home into after her father died.
She saw his eyes narrow on her as he drew closer, his focus never leaving her face. Trying not to look as wary as she felt, she openly studied him back. A striking maturity carved the lean, almost elegant features that were more familiar than she’d thought they would be.
His mother had once been her mother’s good friend. As he stopped in front of her, she could see a strong resemblance to Ruth Travers in the gleaming black of his short, neatly trimmed hair, his coal-dark lashes. Yet, there was nothing remotely feminine about the man. Certainly not the broad, intelligent brow, the piercing blue of his eyes or the carved lines of his mouth as it curved in a cautious smile.
She didn’t remember him being so blatantly handsome. But then, she’d been a young girl when he’d left and, being a late bloomer, handsome to her had been her horse.
As his assessing glance slowly moved from the fleece cap covering her head down her slender frame and back to her unadorned face, he seemed to recognize her, too.
“Hi, Emmy.” The deep tones of his rich, rumbling voice sounded as guarded as his expression. “It’s been a long time. I’m Jack. Travers,” he added, since she’d given no indication at all that he was familiar to her.
“I know who you are.”
He had a small cleft in his chin. She noticed it when he gave her a grim little nod of acknowledgment. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I suppose you do.” A muscle in his jaw twitched as his glance slid from her toward the smoke and steam rising above the trees from the sugar house. “Is your father around?”
“My dad?” The question wasn’t one she’d expected. “My dad died a long time ago.”
He opened his mouth. Closing it again, the dark slashes of his eyebrows jammed together like lightning bolts.
“Ed died?” Incredulity marked his tone. “I mean, I’m sorry,” he hurried to amend, clearly caught off-guard by the news. “I had no idea.” He shook his head, openly searching her face. “When?”
“Twelve years ago.”
That seemed to throw him, too.
“What about your mom?” he ventured when she offered nothing else. “Can I talk to her?”
Emmy took a step back. It was as apparent as the latent tension radiating from his big body that he had no idea of the events that had eventually destroyed both of her parents, and robbed her youth of nearly every trace of security.
That blissful ignorance almost felt like an insult, and that insult felt strangely painful. “My mother is gone, too.”
At her quiet reply, Jack felt a strange, sinking sensation in his chest. He knew how close she had been to her mom. She had absolutely worshiped her father.
“Emmy,” he said, scrambling for words as he searched the delicate lines of her face. “I’m sorry about your parents. I really am. I didn’t know about either of them,” he admitted, hating how pitifully inadequate the words and the explanation sounded. “Neither did Mom. She’ll be sorry to hear about them, too.”
He watched her glance shy from his as she took another step back.
An uncomfortable moment later, she murmured, “Thank you.”
Jack had forgotten how succinct some New Englanders could be with their responses. But he had the feeling Emmy wasn’t simply being concise. Her brevity and the way she edged from him made it abundantly clear that she had no use for either him or his presence.
He wasn’t surprised at all by how distrustful she seemed of him. What he hadn’t been prepared for, however, was how much the quiet vulnerability he’d remembered about her touched him now.
He remembered her as a small and quiet child, all skinny arms, legs and long dark red hair. She’d trailed after him like a puppy, constantly asking questions, giggling when he teased her. She had reminded him of his little sister, Liz. And, he supposed, when she’d been around, he’d watched out for her much as he had his little sister, too.
Until the day he’d so clearly let her down.
He had never forgotten the last time he’d seen her, or the haunted look in her luminous gray eyes. He’d come that day to return the spare keys for her dad’s truck, the one he had used in the sugar bush to haul dead snags for him. Emmy had stood on the porch beside her distraught father, holding his hand. As he’d given her dad the keys, he’d looked down to see Emmy looking up at him, her eyes huge as she silently begged him to do something to change everything back to the way it had been.
He didn’t remember what was said between him and Stan, if anything at all. All he remembered were the silent tears of incomprehension that had rolled down Emmy’s cheeks in the moments before he’d turned away.
He had never forgotten that look—the sadness, the bewilderment.
“I suppose you’re who I need to talk to, then,” he said, swearing that look was still there. So was the quietness about her. Only, now she seemed far more reserved than timid. And she was definitely no longer a little girl.
Her unadorned mouth was lush, the color of ripe peaches against skin that look so clear and soft it practically invited a man to touch. He couldn’t tell much about her slender shape beneath her heavy parka. But with her delicate features framed by the cap covering her hair, she looked as ethereal as a Botticelli angel and as fragile as glass.
“Can we go inside?” he asked, mentally regrouping to change his approach. “I only need a few minutes.”
As if even a few more seconds was too much to ask, she immediately turned away. “I’m sorry. I don’t have time to visit.”
His hand shot out. Grabbing her arm, he stepped in front of her, blocking her retreat. There were things he had to say. He couldn’t let her go until he did. He just couldn’t remember what those things were as her cautious glance jerked to his and wariness hovered around her like a mist. Even through her jacket’s thick layer of down, he swore he felt her muscles stiffen.
With the fog of their breath mingling between them, he was close enough to see the slivers of silver and pewter in her beautiful eyes. Close enough to see the tiny creases in the fullness of her lower lip. Her skin might invite a man to touch, but her mouth fairly begged to be kissed.
The tightening low in his gut made him go still.
So did her dog’s low, feral growl.
Suddenly as aware of the canine’s teeth as he was the woman warily watching him, he let her go. He’d braced himself for a less-than-welcoming reception, but things weren’t going at all as he’d expected.
“I didn’t come just to visit, Emmy.” With another glance toward the fifty pounds of fur and snarl that had yet to move from her side, he took a step back himself. “There’s something I need to do, but I can’t if you won’t hear me out.”
“If you’re here to tell me you bought the property next door, it’s not necessary. Everyone already knows.”
He would have been surprised if everyone hadn’t. “I take it the local grapevine is still intact.”
“Word gets around.”
“Word in this case is incomplete. No one knows what I want to do with that land.”
“What you do with it is your business.” Deliberately she moved around him. “And the community council’s. They’ll try to block whatever you do.”
“The community council has nothing to say about this,” he insisted, stepping into her path again, mindful of her guard dog. “I bought it to give it back to your parents.”
Blocked in her tracks once more, she glanced back up. An uncertain frown shadowed the gray of her eyes.
“My father passed away last year,” he explained before she could decide to bolt again. “Mom never felt right about what had happened between our families. Neither did I. I want to give the property back. And to apologize.
“I hadn’t realized your parents were gone,” he told her, relieved that she was staying put. He wondered what had happened to Stan and Cara, decided now wasn’t the time to ask. “When I checked with the real estate broker I used to see if the property was available, I was told that Larkin Maple Products was still in operation. I assumed your dad was still running it, so the quitclaim deed I brought is in his name.”
He touched the jacket pocket that held that deed, thinking of what he needed to do now. “I’ll redraw it for you. It won’t take long. I just need to know your full name. I’ve always known you only as Emmy.”
His glance shot to her left hand. The way she had her cuff pulled to her palm, he couldn’t tell if she was wearing a ring. “Is it still Larkin, or are you married now?”
For a moment all Emmy could do was stare at the man blocking her path to the sugar house.
He wanted to give back the property. Of all the possible scenarios she might have imagined, this one had never occurred to her. It had apparently never occurred to anyone.
Her only thought now was that he’d made a long trip for nothing.
“My name doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. I can’t change the deed without it.”
“You don’t need to change it.”
“Emmy,” he said, suddenly sounding terribly patient. “I’m not a tax attorney and I’m not sure what estate laws are here, but it’s to your advantage to have the deed recorded in your name. That way there will be no questions. No hassles. It’ll just be yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
The dark slashes of his eyebrows merged. It seemed he wasn’t prepared for that, either.
They were even, she supposed. She wasn’t at all prepared herself. Not for his unexpected offer. And definitely not for his disquieting presence. As he towered over her, his cool blue eyes intent on her face, she could practically feel his tension snake inside her. The sensation disturbed her as much as the odd heat his scrutiny caused to radiate from her breasts to her belly.
Pulling her glance from his, she let it fall to where the hem of his comfortably worn jeans bunched over a pair of heavy and expensive hiking boots. She didn’t feel terribly trusting of him, and he unnerved her in ways she wasn’t prepared to consider, but it wasn’t like her to be unfair.
His father was responsible for what had happened to her family. And Jack had earned a reputation, too. Everyone knew he was responsible for the scar that hooked down from the corner of Joe Sheldon’s mouth. Still, he had come to apologize. For himself, apparently. And for his mother. It sounded as if the matter had weighed for a long time on Ruth Travers.
As badly as Emmy wanted the past to stay there, she couldn’t deny someone their need to try to set it right.
“I accept your apology,” she told him. She had no desire, however, to hear whatever else he might have said beyond I’m sorry. All she wanted was for him to leave. “But I have no need of anything else.
“Please excuse me.” Ducking her head again, she backed away, hoping he would just let her go. She’d lost her appetite for supper. Even if she hadn’t, she had no time to put anything together now. “I’m boiling,” she said, using the sugar-makers’ term for making syrup. “I have to get back to work.”
Wanting desperately to avoid the feelings and memories his presence elicited, she quickly retraced her path toward the sugar house, Rudy on her heels. Part of her couldn’t believe how discourteous she was being. No one ever came to her home that she didn’t take a minute to visit with them. But, then, her callers were inevitably neighbors or summer guests of her bed-and-breakfast, and she would invite them in to talk while she worked. More often than not she offered coffee or cocoa to go with their conversation. Or, in summer, when she worked in her garden, she offered lemonade or iced tea she made by setting a clear jug of water and tea bags in the sun because the tea tasted sweeter that way.
The twinge of guilt she felt leaving him standing there faded beneath an equally inherent need for self-preservation. It was probably horribly selfish of her, she admitted, watching Rudy race ahead, but she was far more interested in preserving the already shaken tranquillity she’d finally found than in being hospitable.
Emmy wasn’t running, but she wasn’t wasting any time getting away from him, either.
With that less-than-encouraging thought, Jack jammed his hands on his hips and watched Emmy motion her loping dog toward the trees and the distant sugar house.
It wasn’t often that he underestimated a situation. As driven and determined as he could be when it came to achieving an end, he’d learned to plan for contingencies, to expect the unexpected and always have a plan B. With everything else he’d been dealing with lately, however, he’d obviously forgotten to consider that it could be a Larkin other than Stan running the sugaring business.
Once he’d learned that the operation still existed, he had simply assumed Stan was still running it. He had considered that Stan and Cara could be divorced by now, but it had never occurred to him that the man would have passed away, much less that his wife would have, too.
He definitely hadn’t considered that the property would be refused.
The cold breeze carried off the fog of his frustrated breath. For the past month he’d felt as if he’d been running a marathon. Now he felt as if he’d just run himself straight into a wall. Not that a wall would stop him. He just needed to find a way over, under or around the obstruction. Given that this particular obstruction wouldn’t even talk to him at the moment, he headed back to his car.
It had been his goal to acquire and return the property ever since he and his mother had found a copy of the papers securing the money Stan had borrowed from him in his dad’s desk. They had gone through the desk the day after his father died looking for insurance papers and, for the first time in years, he and his mom had talked about what had happened in Maple Mountain.
From the time his father had moved them all to Maine to escape the ostracism that had befallen the entire family, the subject had been forbidden in their home. That meant no one could talk about the way the locals had condemned his father for foreclosing on Stan’s property. Or how his mother’s friends had backed away from her because guilt by association condemned her, too. She’d told him she hadn’t been able to tell anyone how opposed she’d been to what his father had done because he was her husband, and it hadn’t felt right to speak publicly against him.
Jack understood all too well the dilemma his mother had faced. He’d often hoped he’d misunderstood what had happened, and that there had been some greater justification for his father betraying his friendship with Stan the way he had. He’d hoped his clashes with his former friends when they’d called his father a thief and backstabber had been justified, too. At the time, he had refused to stand back and not defend his family name—though looking back now, he figured the anger he’d felt had less to do with the pushing and shoving that had come with the taunting than the fact that he’d felt so betrayed himself.
At seventeen, he had been torn between loyalty to a father he’d looked up to and feeling that what his father had done was totally wrong. But the day they’d found the papers, his mother had confirmed that he hadn’t misunderstood the basic facts at all. Stan Larkin had only borrowed five thousand dollars on property worth three times that. Granted, Stan hadn’t paid the loan when it was due, but his father hadn’t been willing to give him extra time and had sold the property for a fraction of what it had been worth. His dad’s only concern had been getting the money back without any further delay.
His mom had since shared a few details that had apparently justified the action in his father’s mind. And, taken literally, Jack could see the man’s logic. His father had worked hard for his money, and he’d been watching out for his own family. But in Jack’s mind that didn’t forgive why he hadn’t sold the property for nearer to what it was worth and given Stan the difference.
All his father had cared about was getting back his own. And he had. But it had cost him and his family dearly.
Jack passed an upright post supporting a wood oval carved with Larkin’s Maple Products and turned on to the snow-packed and winding mountain road that led the two miles into the little community. As he did, he had the disturbing feeling that what his father had done might have cost the Larkins even more.
That uncomfortable thought curled like a fist in Jack’s gut.
There wasn’t much room for deviation in his schedule, but he wouldn’t leave without setting things as straight as he could. He’d planned to be home no later than midnight that night. But as long as he could be back in Manhattan by five tomorrow afternoon, he would have time to finish packing up his apartment before the movers arrived Monday morning. As soon as they left, he would head for the office he was taking over in Boston.
From the day he’d started, nine years ago, he’d systematically worked his way up the corporate ladder of the billion-dollar Atlantic Commercial Development Corporation. He’d put in practically twenty-four hours, seven days a week for the past two years for his latest promotion to regional vice president. His perks alone were worth three times his original salary. Because he wasn’t through climbing yet, and because he had major projects on the table, he didn’t want anything to interfere with his 7:00 a.m. breakfast meeting Tuesday morning with his staff.
In the meantime he needed Emmy’s legal name. He also needed a notary public to notarize his signature, and a photocopier to copy the new document. He had a blank quitclaim deed in the file in his back seat that he’d brought in case Stan had wanted his wife’s or their company’s name on the document, so redrawing it wouldn’t be a problem. Once that was done, he’d head back to the Larkin place and hope Emmy would be more receptive to accepting the property. Heaven knew he didn’t want it.
Chapter Two
M aple Mountain would never be known as a destination spot. As far as Jack was concerned, the place was lucky simply to have a spot on the map. Except for the three seasonal festivals the community sponsored to raise money for its coffers, most visitors were simply passing through.
Those who did stop for a night could find accommodation at one of the few bed-and-breakfasts in the area, though they were seldom open in winter except for Maple Sugar Days, or they could stay at the Maple Mountain Motor Inn—which stayed open mostly to accommodate the guy who ran the snow plow when the weather turned.
With no other option, Jack checked into the motor inn. The long, low building on the narrow main road consisted of eight rooms that opened on to a snow-covered parking lot and a postage-stamp-size reception area decorated with knotty pine walls and an impressive set of antlers. The sign on the front door claimed the place to have the friendliest accommodations in Vermont’s Northern Kingdom.
He didn’t know about the accommodations themselves, but their owners didn’t exactly live up to the advertising. The Mrs. part of the operation didn’t, anyway. The late-thirty-something Hanna Talbot, whose grandparents had owned the motel before they’d retired years ago, had taken one look at him when she’d answered the desk bell and her smile had died.
“What can I do for you, Jack?” she asked, sounding as if she’d heard he was around.
“I need a room for the night. Do you have anything available?”
He’d asked for the sake of polite conversation. All eight room keys hung on their hooks. The parking lot was empty. Yet, for a few rather uncomfortable seconds, he thought the woman might actually claim they were booked.
“I’ll need your driver’s license,” she said instead.
He reached for his wallet, only feeling slightly relieved. He didn’t remember much about the curly-haired brunette other than that she was a few years older than he was and that her family had always owned the place. She clearly remembered him, though. Or, at least, judging from the chill that was definitely more censure than natural reserve, she remembered his family.
Cooking smells, the low drone of a television and children’s voices drifted in from the open door behind her.
“New York,” she said, writing down his address. “I thought your family moved to Maine.”
“They did.” He handed over a credit card, wondering at the length of some people’s memories. “I’m the only one in New York.”
Looking as if she couldn’t imagine why he would have wanted to come back, she pushed his license across the shiny wood surface. “Long drive.”
It had been a long drive, he thought. A little over six hours, actually. Three of those on snow-packed roads. But driving made more sense than flying or taking the train. There were no direct flights from JFK or LaGuardia to the nearest airport in Montpelier, so it took as much time to drive as it did to fly. At least behind the wheel of his car, he felt as if he were constantly making progress.
There wasn’t much that frustrated him more than hanging around airports accomplishing nothing. Except, possibly, accomplishing nothing while being stuck overnight in a place he didn’t want to be.
Feeling that the less he said the better, Jack’s only response was a faint, acknowledging smile as the woman handed his card back.
The proprietress of the little mom-and-pop motel didn’t seem to expect a comment, anyway.
“There’s a potluck at the community center tonight, so Dora’s is closed,” she informed him, speaking of the diner down the road. “My family’s headin’ over there now. Since there’s nowhere else to get a meal, I suppose I can bring you somethin’ for supper from there.”
She seemed to know that he wouldn’t want to eat at a community dinner himself. Or maybe she was thinking more that he wouldn’t be welcome there. From Emmy’s flat tone when she’d said everyone knew he’d bought the acreage next to hers, he’d be willing to bet everyone at that dinner would have an opinion about that acquisition, too. No Travers had been able to do anything right by the time they’d moved. He was getting the distinct feeling from this woman that no Travers could do anything right now, either.
What bothered him even more was the surprising depth of her apparent disapproval of him. He’d barely known the woman. Yet, her censure felt as fresh as what he’d felt from others when his family had left.
“I appreciate the offer, but I’ll get something on my own.” The burger he’d grabbed at a drive-through five hours ago had long since worn off, but he wasn’t about to put her out. “What about the burger place?” A little repetition wouldn’t kill him. “Is it still here?”
“Closed for the winter. Most everything around here is.”
Hunger seemed to increase in direction proportion to his diminishing culinary options. “How about the general store?” He’d seen the lights on inside when he’d driven past it a few minutes ago. “How late is it open?”
A child’s voice grew louder. Another matched it, insisting on the return of the video game controls. After aiming a weary glance toward the doorway, she shifted it to the old-fashioned cuckoo clock near the antlers. “’Bout another five minutes.”
“One last thing.” Not wanting to keep her any longer, he picked up the room key she’d set on the counter, stuffed it into his coat pocket. “Do you know Emmy Larkin?”
Quick curiosity narrowed the woman’s eyes. “Of course I do.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know her full name, would you?”
With a Travers asking after a Larkin, curiosity turned to distrust.
“Why would you want to know that?”
“There’s something I need to take her.”
“Then, I suppose you can ask her yourself when you see her.”
Faced with that protective and practical New England logic, Jack picked up his receipt, slid it into his pocket. With a resigned nod, he lifted his hand as he backed toward the door. He wouldn’t be getting any information here. “I suppose I can. Thanks for the room.”
“She’ll be sugarin’, so I wouldn’t think she’d have time for you tonight.”
“I’m not going until morning.”
“She won’t be there then. Tomorrow’s Sunday. Services don’t get out until eleven.”
He couldn’t tell if the woman was trying to discourage him or be helpful. “Thanks,” he said again, leaning heavily toward the former.
“Checkout’s at noon.”
“Got it,” he replied, and escaped into the cold before he had to deal with any more of her “friendliness.”
The gray of dusk was rapidly giving way to the darkness of night. There were no streetlights in Maple Mountain to illuminate the narrow two-lane road that served as its only thoroughfare. Rather unoriginally called Main, the road curved on its way through the sleepy little community, a ribbon of white lined by four-foot banks of snow left behind by a plow.
It was barely six o’clock on a Saturday night, yet the dozen businesses and buildings that comprised the core of the community were closed and as dark as the hills above them. The only lights came from the general store down near the curve of the road and the headlamps of two cars that turned onto the short street that ended at the white clapboard community center.
Hunching his shoulders against the evening’s deepening chill, he crossed the packed snow of the motel’s parking lot and headed to the store. He could grab something there to take back to his room for dinner and breakfast. With any luck, he could also get Emmy’s full name. He would have asked at the post office, had it not been closed.
When he finally stepped inside the store, he could see that the place had hardly changed. It smelled as it always had, faintly of must and burning wood from the potbellied stove in the middle of the room. A wooden pickle barrel topped by a checkerboard sat a comfortable distance from that radiating warmth.
The dairy cooler still occupied the back wall. Rows of groceries filled the four short aisles to his left. The walls themselves still held the same eclectic mix of sundries. Snowshoes competed for space with frying pans. Spark-plugs were stacked above empty gas cans and saw blades.
The only staple missing from his memories of the place were the old men who’d routinely congregated around the game board to discuss local politics, play checkers and lie to each other about the size of the fish they caught in their fishing shacks on the frozen lake. Either they’d all died or they’d gone home to supper.
The short, squat owner hadn’t changed much, either. Agnes Waters’s short brown curls were now half-silver, and the laugh lines around her eyes looked deeper than they’d been when he’d played high school sports with her youngest son. But her hazel eyes looked as sharp as ever and, even now, her memory rivaled an elephant’s. Seeing who her customer was her expression registered clear disapproval.
Jack could practically feel his back rise at the suspicious way she looked him over. He hadn’t counted on the defensiveness he would feel in this place. But then, he’d been so focused on his promotion, moving and acquiring the property to give back to the Larkins that he hadn’t thought about how resentful of other’s attitudes he’d become by the time his family had left there.
The feeling, however, had wasted no time coming back. “Mrs. Waters,” he said, forcing an intentionally civil nod.
Geese in flight were silk-screened across the front of her heavy green sweatshirt. Obliterating half the flock as she crossed her arms, she gave him a tight little nod. “Hello, Jack. Been a while.”
His tone remained even. “A while,” he agreed, refusing to let old resentments get the better of him. “I just need to pick up a few things,” he explained. “I know you’re getting ready to close, so I’ll hurry.”
“I saw you come through town earlier,” she told him, stopping him in his tracks. Ignoring any need she had to close up and go home, she checked him over from haircut to hiking boots. “You seem to have done well for yourself.” Her sharp eyes narrowed. “What is it you do?”
“Do?”
“For a living.”
“Commercial development.” By noon tomorrow everyone in the community would know what he drove and what he did to earn his keep. He’d bet his new corner office on it. “Why?”
“I was afraid it was something like that,” she claimed, managing to look displeased and vindicated at the same time.
“Excuse me?”
“Your occupation.” Looking as if she couldn’t imagine what he didn’t understand, she tightened her hold on the geese. “I had the feelin’ you were going to develop that land the minute I heard you’d bought it. I can tell you right now that you can forget about whatever it is you’re plannin’ to put on that parcel, Jack Travers. We don’t want commercial development here. The community council won’t stand for it. I know. I’m on it.”
His voice went flat. “I’m not building anything,” he assured her, and hitched his thumb toward the back wall. “I’m just going to grab what I need and get out of here. Okay?”
Pure confusion pleated the woman’s forehead as he turned toward a display of chips, grabbed a bag and headed for the back wall.
The woman was getting herself all worked up for nothing. The old bat had taken a fragment of information, thrown in a lot of supposition and dug in her heels to oppose him without a clue about what was actually going on. Unfortunately, while telling her to can the attitude would have made him feel better, it wouldn’t do a thing to help him get the information he needed.
Wanting only to get that information and get out of there, he headed back with his hastily chosen purchases and started setting them on the counter.
“Do you know where I can find a notary and a copier around here?”
“The library has a copy machine.” Ignoring his other request along with his packages, the pleats in her forehead deepened. “If you’re not building anything, why did you buy the old Larkin parcel?”
“It’s not for business,” he assured her again. He pushed a toothbrush and a disposable razor toward her. He couldn’t find shaving cream. He’d just have to use soap for his shave in the morning. “It’s personal.”
“Then you’re not putting up condos?”
“I’m not putting up anything,” he repeated, adding a package of Danish, lunch meat and a cola. Had he been home, he’d be at the little Italian place around the corner from his apartment, ordering penne with mushrooms and a glass of good wine. “The library,” he repeated, thinking the wine sounded especially good. With Agnes frowning at him, so did a shot of anything with a burn to it. “Thanks. What about Emmy Larkin’s full name? Do you know what it is?”
The woman had yet to ring up a single item. “What are you up to with Emmy?”
He bit back a sigh. “I’m not up to anything.”
“Well, you’d better not cause her any trouble. That girl’s been through enough without whatever it is you’re up to out there making her life any harder than it needs to be. She’s lost…”
“She told me about her parents,” he cut in, saving her the trouble of mentioning their deaths since it seemed she was about to. “I’m sorry to hear they’re gone.”
He wasn’t sure why, but for an oddly uncomfortable moment, he thought the older woman might say that he certainly should be, as if he, or at least one of his kin, was somehow responsible for those particular losses. It was that kind of accusation tightening her expression.
The disturbing feeling he’d had when he’d left the Larkin place—the feeling that they had lost more than just land and profits because of what his dad had done—compounded itself as Agnes finally punched in the price of the chips.
“How is she doing?” he asked, not knowing what to make of the new edge to the reproach he’d experienced all those years ago. The same censure he’d picked up from Hanna Talbot was definitely there. But with Agnes it felt almost as if his father’s transgression, along with his own, perhaps, had been more…recent.
Edging the Danish toward her, he tried to shake the odd feeling. It had been fifteen years. There was nothing “recent” about it.
“Is she able to handle the sugaring operation okay?”
“She does as well as any of the other sugar makers,” the older woman admitted, punching in the cost of the small package. “Her B and B is one of the nicest around, too. Works hard, that girl.”
Apparently deciding she wasn’t getting anything else out of him, she punched in the razor, too.
He handed over the package of sliced turkey. “She runs a bed-and-breakfast?”
“Summer and fall. She turned down a scholarship to study architecture and design when her mom took ill so she could stay and help Cara run the place. She did most of the redecorating herself.”
The cash-register drawer popped open when she rang up the last of the items and hit the total key. Over the heavy footfall on the porch that announced another customer’s approach, she said, “That’ll be $10.80.”
The unexpected information about Emmy had Jack wondering what else he could learn from the woman as he reached for his billfold. Thinking he might hang around for a minute after her customer left, he glanced toward the door. It opened with the ring of the bell, a rush of icy air and the voice of a man apologizing even before he was all the way inside.
“I know you’re getting ready to close, Agnes. But I told Amber I’d pick up baking soda on my way home and just now remembered. She’ll have my hide if I come home without it.”
A man wearing a deputy’s heavy, brown leather jacket and serge uniform pants pulled off his fur-lined hat as he shoved the door closed. Looking prepared to offer a neighborly greeting to whoever was at the counter, he stood with a broad smile on his rugged face for the two seconds it took recognition to hit.
The burly ex-high-school line-backer swore. Or maybe, Jack thought, the terse oath he heard had been inside his own head.
It seemed like some perverse quirk of fate that Joe Sheldon should now be a sheriff’s deputy. One of the last times they’d seen each other, the old deputy Joe had apparently replaced had almost arrested Jack for nearly breaking Joe’s jaw.
Lifting his hand, Joe touched the short silvery scar that curved from the left corner of his mouth. It appeared that he hadn’t forgotten the encounter, either.
The guy’s voice sounded like gravel rolling in a can. “I heard you were back, Larkin.”
“He said he’s not developing that property.” Agnes offered the pronouncement as she bagged Jack’s purchases. “But he’s asking after Emmy.”
Joe took a measured step toward him, his rough-hewn features set, his eyes assessing. He looked beefier than he had as a cocky teenager, solid in a way that told Jack he wouldn’t want to tangle with him now. Not that he wouldn’t be able to hold his own if he had to. He usually started his mornings with a five-mile run and pumped iron at the gym four days a week for no other reason than to keep his head clear. He’d always been a physical man, always felt best using the pent-up energy in his muscles. But he’d fought all those years ago only because he had felt forced to defend his family’s name. The battles he took on now were won by sheer determination, ambition and drive.
Joe’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want with her?”
Jack wanted no hassles. He also had no intention of answering to anyone but a Larkin. “That’s between Emmy and me.”
“Not if you cause her or anyone else around here any trouble.” His one-time teammate’s voice lowered with warning. “You do and you answer to me.”
Pushing bills across the counter, Jack picked up his bag, paper crackling. He had no intention of feeding an old grudge. His or Joe’s. “I didn’t come here to cause trouble,” he informed him, wondering what it was they thought he was going to do to the woman. Or anyone else, for that matter. “Not for her. Not for anyone.”
“Then, why are you here?”
“To set things right.” Steel edged his tone. That same unbending resolve glinted in his eyes as he walked past the man he could have sworn was trying to stare him down.
“How do you intend to do that?” Joe demanded over the tinkle of the bell as Jack pulled open the door.
“That’s between me and Emmy, too,” he called back, and closed the door a little harder than he probably should have.
He hadn’t forgotten how narrow and protective the small-town mentality could be. In Maple Mountain the sins of the father carried right down to his offspring. The fact that the offspring had defended the father was obviously remembered, as well. He just hadn’t thought he’d have to deal with anyone other than the Larkins.
The muscles in his jaw working, he headed through the dark and cold to his less-than-welcoming motel room. The good news when he got there was that he didn’t have to deal with anyone else—and that the only homage to the local wildlife on his room’s knotty pine walls was a painting of a moose. The bad news was that he still didn’t know Emmy’s full name.
That didn’t do much for his mood, either.
Emmy knew Jack hadn’t left Maple Mountain. Agnes had called last evening while she’d been filling tins with syrup, a task that couldn’t easily be interrupted, and left the news flash on her answering machine.
She hadn’t called Agnes back. Nor had she done anything other than thank her for her call after services that morning before excusing herself when the elderly minister’s wife, bless her, rescued her from the speculation Agnes had clearly been itching to share.
It had been Emmy’s experience that the less she let on that something was a problem, the less others treated it like one. She’d also learned that life was less complicated when the personal parts of it weren’t served up for public consumption. She tried hard not to look back, to focus her energies on the present, and allowed herself to look no farther ahead than the next season.
The only season on her mind at the moment was the current one. As she bounced her rugged and reliable old pickup truck over a berm of snow at the edge of her driveway, her only thoughts were of getting home and to her chores before she lost any more of the day. It was already one o’clock in the afternoon.
The pastor’s wife had asked a favor of her, and completely sidetracked her from her original plan to be home before noon.
Sidetracking her now was the black sedan parked by the old sycamore—and the sight of Jack standing outside the stable that now served as a garage.
He hadn’t struck her as the sort who would give up easily. Knowing he’d stayed last night, she’d pretty much expected him to come back, too. She’d just rather hoped that he would come back, find her gone and leave.
Not sure if she felt threatened by his persistence or relieved by it, she drove past him and through the open doors of the utilitarian white building.
What he had come back to do had been on her mind all evening. It had been the first thing on her mind that morning. Part of her, the part that felt unkind and uncomfortable about how she’d walked away from him yesterday, had actually considered stopping by the motel to apologize for being so insensitive. She felt awful for the way she’d treated him. After she’d had a chance to truly consider what it must have taken for him to come back, and after she’d acknowledged the courage, the integrity, and the basic sense of decency he would have to possess to even want to make amends after so long, she’d felt even worse.
She hadn’t even thanked him for his apology.
Another part of her, the more protective part, had hoped he would tire of waiting for her and be halfway to the free-way—which was probably, she figured, why she really hadn’t minded the delay getting home.
Feeling no less torn by his presence now, she climbed out of her truck and squeezed past the cherry-red snowmobile she used to haul skids of firewood from the woodshed to the sugar house, or to get into town when the snow was too deep to drive there. The sun that had shone so brightly yesterday had given way to a ceiling of pale gray. From that solid layer of clouds, a few tiny snowflakes drifted down as she headed into the open expanse between the outbuilding and her house.
They weren’t supposed to get snow until that evening, she thought, looking from the sky to the tall and totally disconcerting man closing the distance between them. He wore the same clothes he’d worn yesterday, the dark-gray jacket that made his shoulders look so wide, the darker-gray turtleneck and sweater, the worn jeans that molded his lean hips and long, powerful legs. He’d shaved, though. She could tell from the smoothness of the skin on his strong, too-attractive face, and the nick under his chin.
That tiny vulnerability made her feel guilty for his long wait. He’d shaved before he’d come to see her.
“Come to the sugar house,” she said, saving him the trouble of telling her he needed to talk to her. “I need to get the fire stoked and bring in more wood. We can talk there.”
A fleece cap in the same shade of pale pink as her turtleneck poked from the side pocket of her quilted black coat. Without the cap she’d worn yesterday, the spitting snowflakes clung to the top of her head, caught in her high, swinging ponytail. Watching her walk away, it seemed to Jack that her shining baby-fine hair seemed darker, more auburn than the deep red he remembered. Richer. Softer.
He’d heard somewhere that natural redheads tended to be rather volatile. He’d never dated one to know how much truth there was to the claim, though one particular blonde had proved explosive enough. Emmy, however, didn’t strike him at all as a woman prone to fits of temper. The sense of quiet control about her gave him the feeling she’d go as far out of her way as necessary to avoid confrontation.
Watching her ponytail bounce, he started after her. She also possessed an absolute gift for throwing curves. Rather than meeting the wall of resistance he’d expected, she hadn’t seemed all that opposed to finding him waiting.
Telling himself to be grateful, he glanced back toward her truck. Heavy tire chains wrapped the tires. Bags of sand lay in the bed for better traction. It was the vehicle itself that had first caught his attention, though. The old workhorse of a pickup looked very much like the one her father had driven fifteen years ago.
“Was everything all right this morning?” he asked, thinking the truck had to be pushing thirty years old by now.
“Everything’s fine. Why?”
“I just thought that with the sap running, you’d be in a hurry to get back and start boiling.”
Instead of heading for the sugar house, she’d angled toward her home.
“The minister’s wife asked me to do a feasibility study for the restoration of the church. We started looking around,” she said, snow crunching under their boots, “and I lost track of the time.”
She truly had. For a while. There wasn’t much that appealed to her more than the prospect of taking something old and falling apart and returning it to what it once had been. Just studying the 120-year-old building and researching its repair excited her. Or would have had she not been so aware of the man who’d just walked up beside her.
She could practically feel his frown on the side of her face.
“I thought you turned down the scholarship.”
She stopped in the snow, looking up at him as a tiny flake settled on her cheek. One clung to a strand of the dark hair falling over his wide forehead. Another drifted between them. “How do you know about that?”
“Agnes said you were going to study architecture and design, but that you turned down your scholarship to stay and help your mom.”
The corner of her mouth quirked, half in acknowledgment, half in something that looked almost as if she might have expected as much.
“I did turn it down,” she replied, but offered nothing else as she continued on.
“Then where did you learn what you’d need to know to restore a church?” he called after her.
“The same places I learned the plastering methods for the walls and moldings when we restored the library. I ordered books and did research on the Internet. That led me to a restorer in Montpelier, so I spent a week one spring working with her. She came out later to check what we’d done.”
Leaving him staring at her back, she headed up the shoveled steps to the back door of her house to let out her dog, then pulled open the aluminum storm door. The moment she opened the wooden one behind it, her impatient pet leaped past her in an exuberant blur of pale-gold fur, then practically slid to a stop ten feet from the porch when he noticed Jack standing a few yards away.
“It’s okay, Rudy,” she called, closing the doors to descend the stairs herself. “He’s coming with us.”
The animal instantly went from eyeing him to ignoring him. Looking like a mutt on a mission, he raced ahead to lift his leg on the side of a stump, then ran off, snow flying, to weave his way toward the distant gray building.
Clearly on a mission herself, Emmy hurried past Jack and along the packed path.
“The truck you were driving,” he said, still thinking about it. “That isn’t the same one I used to drive for your dad, is it?” It was the same make, but he’d thought that truck had been dark green, not dark blue.
He couldn’t see her face, yet there was no mistaking her hesitation in the moments before she replied.
“No, it’s not,” she said, continuing on. “That one was wrecked.”
“What happened?”
“It was in an accident. Rudy!” she called, putting a deliberate end to what he’d thought was harmless conversation. “This way, boy!”
She hurried ahead of him more quickly, glancing up as she entered the woods to cast a troubled glance through the bare tree branches.
Wondering what happened to the old truck, and even more curious about why she so obviously didn’t want to talk about it, he looked up at that darkening gray ceiling. Tiny, sporadic flakes continued to fall.
When he’d checked the weather before he’d left yesterday, the report had been for sun through the weekend. Listening to the only radio station he’d been able to get in his car, since he’d needed something to do while he’d waited, the weatherman had mentioned a large front moving in that evening.
It looked to him as if that front were on its way in now.
Wanting to be gone before anything nasty developed, he lengthened his stride. He just had a few details he wanted cleared up before he left.
He still needed Emmy’s full name so he could change the deed. There wouldn’t be time today to get his signature notarized and make a copy of the document so he could leave the original with her, but he could get what he needed and mail it later. Having learned what he had about her, he also felt obligated to find out how she was managing the responsibilities she’d inherited. Then there was the niggling need to find out what had happened after his family had left. He couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the Travers were being held responsible for something more than he’d believed when he’d arrived.
First, though, he would let her talk. From the way she’d invited him to come with her, it was clear she had something she wanted to say.
Chapter Three
“I s that the wood you’re taking in?” Emmy heard Jack ask as he pointed to the pallet of cordwood near the building’s wide end door.
She told him it was, and that she’d take it in after she stoked the fire. She also needed to check the tanks on her gas generators in case the incoming weather took out the power, she reminded herself, opening the smaller door near the sugar house’s only window. It was so much harder working in the sugar house with only oil lamps for light.
With the flip of the switch inside the door, the bright overhead bulbs illuminated the small but efficient space. The far end of the open room served as an office where she ran her invoices and made mailing labels with the computer. Nearer the door, stacked boxes of syrup waiting to be shipped and empty tins waiting to be filled obscured the rough wood wall behind the worktable where she packaged her finished product.
Aware of Jack walking in behind her, she moved past what took up the other end of the room; the four-by-twelve-foot-long stainless steel evaporating pan where she boiled down sap.
“Leave the door open for Rudy, would you?” she asked, grabbing a pair of battered leather gloves from the dwindling pile of wood beyond the pan.
Still wearing her good winter coat, she pulled the gloves on, opened the metal door of the fire arch built under the pan, and stoked the embers she’d banked last night. As she did, Jack stopped beside her with two quartered logs he’d picked up from the pile.
“Do you want me to bring in more wood while you do that?” he asked, holding the logs out to her.
Taking what he offered, she shoved them into the arch. “I’ll do it in a minute.”
“I don’t mind carrying some in.”
“That’s not necessary. Really,” she insisted, not wanting him to take the time. “I just need to get this going and fill the pan.”
Sparks flew as raw wood hit glowing embers. Heat radiated toward her face. She felt heat at the back of her neck, too, where he stared down at it.
Disconcerted by the sensation, she shoved in two more logs and closed the door with a solid clang. Leaving her gloves on an upended log, and him standing where he was, she headed for the spigot at the opposite end of the long metal pan. An inch-wide main line carried the sap from the acres of tapped trees around and above the building to the storage tank. With a turn of a knob, she watched the watery liquid from the holding tank flow into the top of the pan, and took a deep breath.
With nothing else demanding her immediate attention, she prepared to do what she should have done yesterday, and felt totally ambivalent about doing now.
The weather-grayed building wasn’t very large. Thirty feet by twenty, give or take a foot. She just hadn’t realized how small that space could be until she turned to where Jack and his rather imposing presence seemed to dominate the entire room.
“I have to be honest with you,” she quietly admitted, wanting to get her apology over with. “I’d hoped you would be gone when I got here. But I’m glad you came back. I didn’t thank you for your apology yesterday,” she explained, when his brow lowered at her admission. “After all this time, you could have easily just let the matter go.
“So thank you,” she conceded, when she really wouldn’t have minded at all if he’d been a man of lesser conscience. If he had considered everything over and done with all those years ago, she wouldn’t just have been reminded of why she’d had to decline the scholarship she’d once desperately wanted to accept, or about the old truck he’d once driven, the one her dad had died in.
“I can only imagine how hard it was for you to come back here,” she continued. “I just want you to know I appreciate the effort it must have taken. I appreciate your offer to return the land, too,” she admitted, certain that acquiring it had also taken considerable effort and expense. “I can’t accept it, but it was incredibly generous of you to offer it back.
“And your mom,” she hurried on, compelled to offer him something in return. “Please tell her I especially appreciate knowing she hadn’t felt right about what happened.” It had never occurred to her that Ruth Travers would feel any particular remorse or regret about what had transpired. Locked in her twelve-year-old world at the time, and having grown up knowing only what she’d felt and what she’d heard from others, she had thought of all the Traverses the same way—as people who had hurt her and parents. “For my mom, one of the hardest parts of all that happened back then was losing her friendship.”
Seconds ago Jack’s only thought had been to ask why she wouldn’t accept the property. His only thoughts now were of her quiet admission and of the mental image he could have sworn he’d erased.
“That was hard for my mom, too,” he admitted. “I think she cried halfway to Maine.” He had blocked the quiet sound of those tears and his father’s hard silence with his headphones cranked nearly high enough to shatter his eardrums. “I don’t know if anyone around here would believe it, but she really cared about your mom and the rest of her friends. She was pretty devastated by the way things turned out.”
It had been hard on him and his little sister, too. On Liz, two years older than Emmy, because she’d also lost her friends. The girls at school hadn’t throw accusations in her face as his peers had done, but they had excluded her, whispered behind her back, made her cry. He didn’t mention that, though. From what he’d learned since yesterday, Emmy’s life had fared far worse.
“Tell her I believe it.” Sounding far more forgiving than anyone else he’d encountered lately, she offered an equally pardoning smile. “What happened wasn’t her doing.”
“She’ll be relieved that you know that.”
He wanted that smile to be for him, too. He wanted to make sure she understood that it hadn’t been his fault, either, that there wasn’t anything he could have done to stop his father. But the moment was lost. The shadow of a smile she’d given him had already faded.
“I need to get the wood in,” she said, and walked away.
Slipping off her coat, she hung it on a peg near the door, glancing back toward him as she did.
“Do you have a thermos in your car?”
“A thermos?”
“For coffee. Or cocoa.” She nodded toward the coffeemaker at the far end of the long board that served as her desk. “I can make either and fill it for you.”
He’d just been told he was leaving. He just wasn’t sure how she’d managed it so graciously.
“Coffee,” he said, because he was dying for a cup. There hadn’t been anywhere other than the diner to buy any that morning, and he hadn’t felt desperate enough for caffeine to encounter whoever had been in there. “But I don’t have anything to put it in.”
“I’ll get you something.” Apparently unwilling to let a minor detail slow down his departure, she reached for the quilted red-and-black flannel shirt hanging on another peg.
His frown landed squarely on her back. Without the bulk of a coat, it seemed to him that there wasn’t much to her. At least not enough for what she apparently did around there. A sugaring operation was hard work. He knew. He’d worked with her father in the sugar bush thinning trees in the summer, running lines and tapping trees in the winter. He’d occasionally worked in this very room, hauling heavy buckets of hot syrup to the filter and stacking filled boxes of the finished product.
She needed to be sturdier. Heftier. She needed more muscle.
Not that there was anything wrong with her undeniably feminine shape, the purely male portion of his brain admitted. As his glance drifted over the seductive curve of her backside, then up to her raised arms, he felt the same unmistakable jolt of heat that had caught him so off guard yesterday. She’d tucked the soft-pink turtleneck she wore into the waist of slender dark-gray denims, revealing sweetly rounded breasts and a waist small enough he could almost span it with his hands.
The thought of having his hands anywhere on her sexy little body had him looking away even as she tugged on the heavy flannel shirt that practically swallowed her whole.
He was far better off thinking of her as the skinny little kid who’d barely been big enough at one time to stand at the long metal sink without a step stool. He remembered her dragging that stool around the room as she followed her dad, stepping up on it so she could watch him measure the sugar in the sap or the syrup, climbing down to lug a single piece of split wood for the fire.
An unfamiliar disquiet had him heading for the large door at the end of the room. Remembering her with the dad she’d adored, he could only imagine how hard it must have been for her to lose him. He knew how hard it had been to lose his own father, and they hadn’t agreed on much of anything for years.
Not wanting to think about that, either, he pushed on the heavy door and jammed it open against the snowbank behind it. She couldn’t object to his bringing the wood in now. He had to wait for his coffee.
Tiny snowflakes still drifted down as he gathered and carried in two large armloads. He was on his way in with a third when he turned to see her standing at the threshold holding a pair of large, worn leather gloves.
“You really don’t need to do this,” she said.
He walked past her, unloading his load on the growing stack. “You didn’t need to make me coffee, either.”
The coffee hadn’t been an act of hospitality. It had been a hint. Apparently too courteous to point that out, she held out the gloves.
“Put them on. You don’t need splinters.”
He held his hand up, palm out. “Already got one,” he said, but took the gloves anyway.
Giving him a look of resignation, or maybe it was forbearance, she pulled on her own gloves and silently went to work beside him.
Within minutes, the half cord of wood that had been outside was now inside, bits of bark and wood had been brushed from their clothes, and the big door was pulled closed.
“Thank you,” she said, leaving him to toss his gloves next to where she’d just left hers on the replenished stack.
“No problem,” he replied to her departing back and pulled at the Velcro tabs on his heavy jacket. Even with the side door still open and the inside air cool from the bigger door having been open, too, the small task had quickly warmed his muscles. From the fire inside it, the metal arch radiated heat like a large, squat furnace.
Vaguely aware of her dog barking somewhere in the distance, he looked from the crowded worktable to where she pulled a hair clip from her baggy shirt’s pocket. “You don’t do this all alone, do you?”
“Not all the time.”
He was glad to hear that. Knowing she had help relieved him. A little.
“How much of the time?” he wanted to know, thinking Rudy’s barking sounded more like excitement than warning.
As if she’d done it a thousand times before, she deftly whipped her ponytail into a knot and anchored it with the clip. “Charlie Moorehouse usually helps me.”
He knew Charlie. Of him, anyway. He was one of the old guys who’d played checkers at the general store. “I thought Charlie had his own sugaring operation.”
“He retired and sold it to the Hanleys a few years ago,” she replied, speaking of another sugaring family in the area. “He gets cranky come sugaring time if he can’t make syrup, so I asked him if he’d work for me.”
Thinking it sounded as if she’d hired Charlie as much for the old guy’s benefit as her own, he nodded toward the open door. “Is that who your dog’s barking at?”
“Charlie won’t be coming today. His gout has been acting up and his big toe is too painful to get a boot on.”
Looking curious herself about who her dog seemed to be greeting, she was already moving to the doorway.
Curiosity promptly faded to caution when she stopped and looked back toward him.
“It’s Joe,” she said, and turned to check on the progress of the coffee.
Jack stifled a groan as he brushed back the sides of his jacket and jammed his hands on his hips. He’d figured he had another ten minutes to get the answers he sought before she started hinting again that he should leave. The absolute last thing he wanted right now was to be interrupted by a deputy with a chip the size of a tree on his shoulder.
“We still have a couple things to discuss, Emmy.”
As if she knew exactly what he wanted, she sent a look of utter patience across the aged plank boards of the floor.
“I already told you, I appreciate what you offered, but I don’t want it.”
He opened his mouth, promptly closed it again. He wasn’t going to argue with her now. Not with Joe on his way. There was one thing he thought she should know, however, in case the local deputy got any grandiose ideas about running him off.
“I’m not leaving until we’ve talked.”
“We have talked.”
“You talked,” he countered. “You said what you had to say, but I never got started.”
“Other than the property, there’s nothing else to discuss.”
“Actually there’s a lot more. We haven’t even started talking about you.”
It was as clear as fresh sap that she had no idea why she should be a topic of discussion. It seemed equally apparent that she had no intention of indulging his interest, but she didn’t have time to actually tell him that before Rudy ran through the door, tongue lolling, just ahead of the man who filled most of the doorway.
Wearing his uniform, his hat dangling from one hand, Joe absently leaned down to scratch the dog behind its ear. As he performed the apparently routine gesture, he looked straight at Jack.
His bold brown eyes locked on eyes of piercing blue.
“Everything okay here, Emmy?” Joe asked.
The chill suddenly permeating the room had nothing to do with the cold outside. Emmy had never known the area’s only law officer to be anything but easygoing. As far as she was concerned, Joe was a big, congenial teddy bear who spent more time checking in on folks to make sure nothing was amiss than doing actual law enforcement. But then she’d never seen him around anyone he held a grudge against. Or who obviously held one against him.
Her glance fixed on the scar at the corner of his mouth a moment before she turned it on the man pointedly holding his stare. Joe would see that silvery reminder of Jack every morning when he shaved.
Pure challenge marked Joe Sheldon’s usually affable expression. Despite his almost casual tone, that confrontational air snapped in his eyes, stiffened his stance as he rose.
“Everything is fine,” she hurried to assure him.
“He’s not bothering you?”
It sounded almost as if Jack sighed. Or maybe what she heard was exasperation. “I told you last night I’m not going to cause her any trouble.”
“I know what you said,” the deputy countered flatly, “but I’d prefer to make sure for myself.” One sandy-blond eyebrow arched in her direction. “Emmy? Is he bothering you or not?”
Jack Travers definitely bothered her. Though both men were the same impressive height and Joe was probably brawnier, it was the tension in Jack’s leanly muscular body that coiled around her, making her aware of him in ways she truly didn’t want to acknowledge or consider. Especially with the little battle of testosterone taking place between him and their local deputy.
“Jack is just here to take care of some…family business,” she decided to call it. “We were just about to finish up.”
“Do you want me to stick around while you do?”
That was the last thing she needed, she thought. “Thanks, Joe. But I’m fine. Really.”
Despite her implied assurance that she wasn’t being inconvenienced or otherwise distressed, Joe still didn’t look as if he trusted Jack when he looked back to where he stood a few feet from the evaporator.
Behind Jack’s big body, steam from the pan rose like slow, simmering fury.
“The temperature’s starting to drop, Travers. That means the roads will be icing over soon. If you leave in the next ten minutes, you should be able to make it as far as St. Johnsbury before dark. With the storm moving in, I’d hate to find you off the road in a ditch.”
Challenge worked both ways, Jack thought. Dead certain the man wasn’t the least concerned with his safety, he met the warning with a flat, “I’ll keep that in mind.” He would leave when his business was finished.
The scar seemed to pucker as Joe’s mouth thinned. Apparently feeling he’d made his point, he gave Rudy a final pat.
“You call me if you need anything, Emmy.”
“I will,” she murmured. “And thanks, Joe.”
Her soft smile removed the strain from her pretty features, lit the little chips of silver in her eyes. Watching her, Jack saw that smile move to curve the lush fullness of her mouth.
The thought that the two of them had something going had barely tightened the knot in his gut when Emmy took another step forward.
“Give your wife a message for me, will you?” she asked, stopping the deputy just outside the door. “I have a dozen loaves of maple bread baked and in the freezer for the sugar-on-snow supper, but with the sap running, I’m not sure I’ll have time to bake any more.”
“A dozen loaves. Got it.”
“And tell her Dora said she’d pick up the slack for me. I know Amber and she’ll think she needs to bake my other dozen herself. Between teaching, heading up that committee and having a baby on the way, she has enough to do.”
“You’ll never convince her of that,” Joe muttered, a hint of his good-natured self showing with his rueful smile. “But I’ll tell her what you said.”
The smile faded. Glancing over her shoulder, he shot Jack a scowl that made it clear he’d love an excuse to get even for the jaw incident, slapped on his hat and headed off in the falling snow.
Old resentments were surging hard when Emmy finally closed the door.
Aware of her unease with him, hating that it was there, Jack tried to stifle the bitterness Joe’s posturing had brought.
Traces of it lingered anyway as he watched her head for the long work sink.
It seemed clear that she and Joe weren’t a couple. Not bothering to wonder why he felt relieved by that, he wondered instead if there was any man in her life at all. He had the feeling there wasn’t a boyfriend lurking in the background, though. The local deputy wouldn’t have checked up on her so quickly had there been another man around.
“Were you and Joe ever involved?” he asked, just to be sure.
“Joe and me?” His blunt question stopped her short of the gurgling coffeemaker. It also had her looking totally baffled. “What makes you ask that?”
“I just thought he seemed kind of…protective.”
“He’s just being a friend. And, no,” she said as if to end any further speculation, “we’ve never been ‘involved.’ I’ve never been involved with anyone around here.”
She had just answered the next question he would have asked. He now knew for certain that she lived alone, and that except for the occasional help of an old man, she had to handle everything pretty much on her own.
He didn’t like what that thought did to the sense of obligation that had brought him back there that morning. The fact that she was alone seemed to add another layer to that sense of responsibility, and tugged hard at a form of protectiveness toward her that didn’t feel familiar at all.
“The Amber who Joe married.” Still shaking the effects of Joe’s little visit, he wandered toward her. Even as he did, Emmy moved to the steaming evaporator. “That isn’t Amber McGraw, is it?”
“Amber’s a McGraw,” she confirmed as she checked a valve at the back of the pan. “Why?”
“Just curious.” The bubbly blond cheerleader had been the subject of half the hockey and football teams’ adolescent fantasies. Including his own. “How long have they been married?”
“Two or three years now, I think. She went to college in Montpelier, then taught there for a while before she moved back.” She glanced over to see that he’d crouched by her dog. Rudy had turned two circles on the red, cedar-stuffed cushion under her desk and plopped down to rest his chin on his paws. “I guess you would have all gone to school together.”
“She was a year behind us.” Jack held out his hand, watched Rudy lift his head to take a sniff. “But we went out for a while.”
“You dated Amber?”
Relieved that at least the dog wasn’t avoiding him, he scratched Rudy’s furry neck, received a contented sigh for his efforts. “For a few months.”
“It’s no wonder he looked like he wanted your hide,” she murmured. “You left him with a permanent reminder of how you beat him up, and you dated his wife.”
“It was high school.” His tone went as dry as dust. “She was hardly his wife at the time. And I didn’t beat him up. I only swung once.”
“And nearly broke his jaw.”
Jack felt his own jaw go tight. “He called my father a bastard.”
The quick edge in his tone made her hesitate.
“I’d heard you were looking for a fight because the coach had benched you. Joe just happened to be in the way.”
“You heard wrong. I know I was mad because I got benched. The coach only did that to spite my dad. But I just wanted out of the locker room. Joe blocked the door so I couldn’t leave, but no one seems to remember what he did or what he said. Not that it would have mattered,” he muttered darkly. “I was my father’s son. Once they’d condemned him, people wanted to believe the worst about all of us.”
Emmy hesitated. “What about the other fights?”
He frowned. “What other fights? The only punch I ever threw was at Joe.”
Emmy’s immediate reaction was to insist that wasn’t true. She didn’t want anything to challenge the conclusions she’d finally managed to put to rest over the years. But Jack had already challenged what she’d believed simply by having come there. By what he had said about his mom. By what he’d said just now, and the quick, barely bridled anger behind it.
“I’d heard there were others,” she admitted quietly.
“Well, there weren’t. I’ve only hit one person in my life. And that was your deputy.”
He had no reason to lie about such a thing. Not after all these years.
“Really?” she asked, anyway.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Really.”
She could practically feel a corner of her old convictions crack. From Jack’s knee-jerk reaction, it sounded as if he’d only been defending his father when he’d hit Joe.
She knew now that Jack hadn’t agreed at all with his father’s actions. And though she hated what his father had done, and while there was no way on God’s green earth she would change her mind how she felt about that, she understood family loyalty well enough. If Joe truly had taunted Jack in such a way, then the man she’d thought of as another victim of the Larkins’ destructive legacy might well have deserved exactly what he’d received.
Uneasy with the doubts Jack caused her to feel, she forced her thoughts to her task. Thick steam was already rising as the evaporation process began, its sweet scent filling the room. It took forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. With over two hundred gallons in the pan, she had a lot of water to boil off, and other work to do before it became syrup. She still had to pack what she’d made last night.
A thermometer hung on the frame outside the multipaned window. Checking the temperature, she frowned. Joe had said the mercury was dropping. She just hadn’t realized it had fallen far faster than she would have liked. With the temperature now below freezing, the flow of sap from the trees into the holding tank would soon stop, if it hadn’t already.
“Joe is right, you know.” She spoke as she moved to the coffeemaker that was on its final gurgle and hiss. She couldn’t deny the conclusion Jack had drawn about the town having condemned them all. In her little neck of the woods, people were judged by their kin as much as they were by their own actions. The inhabitants of Maple Mountain weren’t exactly the Hatfields and the McCoys. To the best of her knowledge no one had ever taken after a neighbor with a shotgun. But once sides were chosen and people decided who was right and who was wrong, it was easier to make a loon fly backward than to get folks to change their minds. “You don’t want to get stuck out there. It’ll just be a minute before your coffee is ready.”
With the clock ticking on his departure, Jack jammed down the irritation that had slipped past his guard. Subtle, she was not. But she had a point. Getting stuck in the middle of nowhere was not something he wanted to do with a storm coming in. He did need to get out of there. He had movers coming at eight in the morning.
“Just answer one thing for me, would you?”
Removing the lid of a small insulated container, she filled it with hot water at the sink. “What’s that?”
“What is it that we’re being blamed for, beyond taking that property?”
For a moment it seemed her motions stilled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
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