Charlotte Moore
Judith Bowen
Charlotte's taken the Girlfriends' challenge: Find your first love. What's he doing? How's he doing? On a business trip to Prince Edward Island–searching for antiques and folk art–Charlotte doesn't have to look very hard to find Liam Connery. But he's not what she expected. Not at all….Instead of the pilot he wanted to be, he trains and raises dogs. He's a man living a secluded existence in a rambling country house. A man with secrets.And yet–like Jane Eyre, with Liam playing the Mr. Rochester role–Charlotte's powerfully drawn to him. Falling in love, dreaming of marriage and babies and the promise of forever. A promise Liam may not be able to make…or to keep.
GREETINGS FROM
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
Dear Lydia and Zoey,
I found him!
Tall, dark and handsome—yes, I suppose so, in a tough sort of way—but where’s the boy I remember? This Liam Connery is nothing like my sister’s friend at Dunwoody High, the one I fell in love with.
Plus, there’s something mysterious about him that just…sets me on edge. He didn’t know I existed back then, and I’d say he doesn’t really know I exist now, even though I’m staying in the same house with him and his mother, who is a sweetheart.
Just goes to show—you can’t trust memory. How are you both doing? Find your “first love” yet?
Love,
Charlotte
P.S. See you New Year’s Eve!
Dear Reader,
Most women wonder what happened to that first love, the first boy they had a crush on, the one who made them ask what love was all about.
My “first love,” the boy I first noticed in second grade and who was my “first date” in seventh grade and with whom I went to the prom at graduation, is happily married—to someone else!—and driving a taxi in a large Canadian city, last I heard. I haven’t seen him since our tenth high school reunion, over twenty years ago, although we come from the same hometown and as in all small towns, “there ain’t much to see, but what you hear sure makes up for it!”
Zoey, Charlotte and Lydia have all been on a quest to look up their “first loves” in my GIRLFRIENDS miniseries. In this story, Charlotte goes to Prince Edward Island on business and just happens to find Liam Connery, the lean, intense boy she’d lost her young, untried heart to at eleven. Of course, they’d never spoken back then, but that doesn’t mean she hadn’t suffered all the agonies of true love.
Charlotte gets a shock. Liam isn’t anything like she remembers. But she soon finds that the man he is today holds an entirely different kind of appeal….
I hope you enjoy Charlotte’s story.
Warmest regards,
Judith Bowen
P.S. I love to hear from readers. Please let me know what you think of GIRLFRIENDS. Write to me at: P.O. Box 2333, Point Roberts, WA 98281-2333, or visit me at my Web site at www.judithbowen.com.
Charlotte Moore
Judith Bowen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Delia McCrae,
longtime friend
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 THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER ONE
HARDWOODS, MOSTLY MAPLES, blazed on the hillsides, elbowing aside, if only for a few weeks, the darker tones of gnarly cedar, abundant spruce, towering white pine. At the turn of the road, poplar or birch gleamed—rags of flat gold, tatters of amber, set against the brilliance of the blue October sky.
Wood smoke from kitchen fires hung in the trees, in the dips and gullies. Every hour at least, before turning onto the highway that afternoon, Charlotte had to slow for a farmer drawing a cart loaded with firewood or turnips, sometimes late potatoes, behind his tractor.
This was the best time of year, still weeks away from the winds of winter blowing down from Labrador. It still offered picnicking weather on a good day and, a bonus, the peace and expectant quiet of a tourist area between seasons—the summer travelers, families seeking sun, sea and lobster suppers, had all gone home now, and the color “peepers,” the buses full of second-honeymooners and seniors up from Boston and New York or down from central Canada to gaze at all this autumnal glory, were only just beginning to arrive.
Charlotte loved everything about the Maritimes. She was a city girl through and through, but she always felt completely at home on her annual trips east to the Gaspe, to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, attending village auctions, winkling out estate sales, sometimes just plain exploring back roads and country lanes, as she’d done this time. She never tired of the scenery, but right now, fall colors and pastoral landscapes were far from her mind.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Liam. Liam Connery.
The first boy she’d ever had a crush on. She’d been in grade five at Snowden Elementary, and he’d been a friend of her sister’s, in grade eleven, at A.E. Dunwoody High in Toronto. He’d never even known Charlotte existed, of course, but that hadn’t stopped her young heart from going pitter-patter whenever he showed up at their house with Laurel and her gang, and happened to glance her way.
What a laugh. She hadn’t thought of him in years and years, just assumed he’d gone on and followed his dreams, as everyone tried to do after high school. As she had done. He’d talked of flying, so maybe he was Captain Connery now, piloting 747s for Air Canada, a handsome, sexy first officer married to a beautiful, sexy flight attendant.
Last spring, she’d started thinking about him again—and now, six months later, he was still on her mind. The idea of looking up first loves had arisen at last April’s reunion of the summer staff of Jasper Park Lodge. Her curiosity had been aroused by the challenge—what had happened to Liam Connery?
She’d said as much to Zoey Phillips and Lydia Lane, her best friends, whom she’d first met working at the lodge when they were all eighteen. The summer they met, they’d traveled east together in Lydia’s beat-up Toyota minivan and become partners for a few years in the now-defunct Call-a-Girl Company, the little odd-job and catering business they’d formed to earn money for college.
The three of them were still best friends. Both Zoey and Lydia were in Toronto now, but Zoey intended to head to British Columbia soon to attend a friend’s wedding—and, Charlotte suspected, to look for her first love in the wilds of the Cariboo-Chilcotin. Sure, Zoey had scoffed at the initial suggestion, but Charlotte knew her friend was as intrigued as she and Lydia had been. Zoey was the pragmatist of the group. Lydia was the world’s biggest romantic; maybe she was doing a little scouting of her own back home. Wouldn’t it be fun to find out, when she got back, that her two friends had done the same thing, looked up their first loves? Charlotte smiled at the thought. They could compare stories when they got together at New Years.
A definite doggy snore rose from the back seat of her ten-year-old Suburban and Charlotte glanced over her shoulder at Maggie, her sister’s Labrador retriever, snoozing on the back seat. Maggie. That was another piece of good fortune, the kind of luck she couldn’t help thinking was fate.
Naturally, when she’d decided to try and track down Liam Connery, she’d asked her sister. Pay dirt. Laurel, who’d always been the archetype of the annoying, superior, bossy big sister, had lit right up and told her that, yes, she knew exactly where Liam Connery was and just leave it to her, she’d make arrangements for Charlotte to meet him.
That had seemed a little…weird. Laurel had never been terribly helpful before, preoccupied as she was with her new second husband and the horses and dogs she raised at their farm north of Toronto. But Charlotte got a phone call from Laurel two weeks later, telling her that everything was arranged, she could take Maggie, one of Laurel’s three Labs, to Prince Edward Island to be bred at a retriever kennel owned by none other than the elusive Liam Connery. Charlotte’s immediate reaction had been hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!
Everything had turned out perfectly. Of course, Charlotte was making the trip, anyway, not only to replenish the antiques, folk art and other stock for her one-woman decorative arts supply business, which served a small clientele in the design and decor trade, but to carry out a very special estate appraisal on Prince Edward Island. Now, thanks to her sister, she also had an excellent excuse to meet her first love again, face-to-face—she had a dog to deliver to his kennel. He raised and trained retrievers and hunting dogs, it turned out. So much for being a pilot.
Charlotte studied the highway signs. She was on Route 104, near the exit to Pictou, where she planned to get something to eat, and Caribou, Nova Scotia, the ferry terminal. She slowed as she entered the Pictou municipal limits, watching for a fast-food outlet, preferably with a strip of grass where she could let Maggie out for a pee. She’d miss Maggie. Maggie had been wonderful company on the long drive, plus a Labrador retriever was a dog with a very large bark and, well, you never knew what could happen, a woman traveling alone…
According to Laurel’s plan she’d leave Maggie at Connery’s kennel to be bred to one of his dogs, and then, when the deed was done, Maggie would be crated and put on a plane back to Toronto. Connery would take care of all that, while Charlotte went about the rest of her business on the island.
“Nearly there, Maggie, my girl,” Charlotte murmured, slowing to inspect a seedy-looking fish-and-chip joint on Water Street. It was well past the supper hour and a gang of teens hung around the door, hooting at cars that drove by. She drove on, finally stopping for take-out at Amy’s Pizzeria in a residential area on the way out of town—a medium, all-dressed, a can of Pepsi, a tin of Altoid mints, which she was addicted to and a liter of water.
There were six cars at the dock when she arrived, an hour before the ferry sailed at ten o’clock. Charlotte got out of the Suburban and pulled on a heavy wool sweater. She flipped her hair over the collar, stretched and shivered, clasping her arms around herself. It was dark already, just after nine in the evening and past the fall equinox by two weeks, but the causeway was well-lit.
She took a deep breath. It was good to smell the sea air again, to hear the surf sucking at the shoreline. The waves were never very high in the Northumberland Strait, protected as the waterway was by the large mass of Prince Edward Island to the north, and Cape Breton to the northeast, shielding the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the wilder action of the north Atlantic. But sea air was sea air.
She ate her pizza, which was cold by now, sitting on a log that marked the edge of the parking lot, while Maggie explored. Then she snapped on Maggie’s leash for a walk down by the water—and was glad she had, when a cocker spaniel, also leashed, practically pulled his owner over trying to get near them. He began sniffing avidly at Maggie’s back end. The leash was a precaution; Maggie wasn’t supposed to come into estrus for another couple of weeks, according to Laurel, who knew about these things. Charlotte, who knew nothing about these things, didn’t want to take any chances. Laurel would kill her if Maggie ended up having the wrong dog’s puppies.
“Just trying to make friends.” The older woman who owned the spaniel apologized. She seemed a little discomfited at her dog’s determination to try again, oblivious to Maggie’s low growl. “Come here, Freddy! Stop that now!”
“Yes,” Charlotte said noncommittally, smiling. They moved away, down the rocky beach. She’d come across the comment many times. It was true; dogs were more interested in checking out each other’s rear ends than anything else, it seemed. She’d gotten over the embarrassment long ago.
“Come on, Maggs.” Charlotte led her back to the vehicle, where she shared the last two pieces of pizza with her beside the truck. Charlotte rubbed the retriever’s ears and bent down to kiss the top of her glossy black head. “Good girl! What would I do without you?”
And she meant it.
THIS TRIP to Prince Edward Island was a lot more important than just trying to finagle a meeting with her lost first love, Charlotte mused as she gazed over the dark water the ferry ploughed through on its way across Northumberland Strait. Or doing her sister a favor. The bid she’d won—to appraise one of the country’s fabled and nearly unknown collections of Canadiana furniture and folk art—was a definite coup for Charlotte Moore FolkArt Specialties. The extra option to help oversee the dispersal sale, together with the representative from Busby’s, the Halifax auction firm in charge, was icing on the cake.
Good money and a three-or four-week job. Then she’d continue with her annual fall tour of small sales and estate auctions throughout the Maritimes and New England, during which she’d stuff the Suburban to the roof with lamps, quilts, baskets, mats and folk art treasures—spending maybe another leisurely three or four weeks. She’d enjoy the fall colors along with the tourists, and arrive back in Toronto in time for the pre-Christmas rush. Her buyers were always eager for anything she brought back, to supply decorators or to sell to the public in their own retail outlets. Charlotte’s shop, which wasn’t really a shop since she just rented warehouse space and ran her business from a home office with the occasional help of a part-time assistant, was basically closed until she returned.
As she drove off the boat at midnight, she decided taking the last ferry hadn’t been one of her better ideas. She’d seen nothing during the ninety-minute crossing in the dark, and here, at the other terminal, Wood Island, there was no hotel, no motel, no bed-and-breakfast, nothing. Which meant a drive to Montague, another half hour, where she’d have to try and find accommodations that would take both her and Maggie. After enquiring at two that didn’t allow dogs, no matter how well-behaved, she said the hell with it and checked into a rather shabby motel a few miles out of town, leaving Maggie in the Suburban overnight. She’d done it before.
By the time Charlotte drove back into Montague for breakfast the next day, deciding on a place called Mackenzie’s Lunch, it was nearly ten o’clock. The diner was typical of the sort you’d find in any small town—lino floors, a counter with eight or ten stools, and booths lining the opposite wall with several Formica-topped tables between. A motherly looking waitress with swollen ankles came over to take her order. There was only one other customer, a man wearing a Husqvarna cap at the counter, with a newspaper spread out in front of him.
“Clam rolls for breakfast?” Charlotte asked, after a quick glance at the typed, grease-spotted menu.
“Some like it,” the waitress replied. “What’ll you have, hon?”
“Two poached eggs, brown toast on the side and a glass of tomato juice.”
“Coffee?” The waitress held the pot high, over the cup.
Charlotte covered the top with an open hand. “Tea, please.”
“Comin’ up!” The waitress waddled cheerfully back to the counter and poised her pot of coffee over the other customer’s mug. “Refill, Sid?”
He nodded and glanced toward Charlotte. “Traveling through, miss?”
“Not really,” Charlotte admitted, clasping her hands in front of her. How did people know, no matter where she went, that she wasn’t a local? “I’m doing some work at the Rathbone estate at Cardigan River.”
The man whistled and exchanged a meaningful look with the waitress. “Old Man Rathbone’s dead. Couple months ago. I guess you heard?”
“Yes. Actually, I’m here to do an appraisal for the heirs. Furniture, art, that sort of thing.”
Sid whistled again. “Now, there’s a job and a half, ain’t it, Gladys?”
“I would say,” the waitress replied, pouring boiling water into a stainless steel teapot that Charlotte assumed was hers.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“The old man wasn’t in his proper mind the last couple years. They say the place is a fearful mess.”
“Oh my, yes. Old fool, wouldn’t take no help from nobody.” The waitress brought her tea. “They say when he ran out of wood he busted up good furniture to put in the stove—”
“No!” Charlotte put her hand over her mouth. “He’s supposed to have a wonderful collection. Surely he didn’t put it in—in the fire?”
The waitress set Charlotte’s breakfast in front of her. “Just firewood to him. They say the place has been cleaned up some now. There’s a grandson there, I heard, lookin’ after things. One of Bertie’s boys, ain’t he, Sid?”
The man at the counter nodded. “Nick Deacon, Bertie’s youngest.”
“Anyways. Young fella from Massachusetts or Connecticut or somewheres down there in the Boston States— You want anything else, honey, you just holler.” The waitress clumped her way back toward the kitchen.
Charlotte poured the tea before it got too strong and added milk. The Rathbone collection—most of it dating back to the turn of the twentieth century—had been assembled mainly by the father and uncle of this Old Man Rathbone, brothers who’d settled the area just north of Montague, in Cardigan River, and accumulated a fortune from shipping and mercantile interests in the first half of the century. The late owner had been a widower for many years. Charlotte knew nothing about any family, but then, that wasn’t her area. The heirs, the estate, the will—lawyers took care of things like that. Her job was to catalog and estimate a fair price for the art and furniture collection.
“Anything else, dear?” The waitress called from behind the counter. Sid put his paper to one side and swung around, too.
Charlotte took a big breath. Why not? “You know of Petty Cove Retrievers?”
“You bet. That’s out there close by the estate you’re a-goin’ to.” Sid frowned.
“You know a Mr. Connery?”
“A Mr. Connery?” Sid and the waitress looked at each other again. “Which one, that’s the question,” he continued, smiling. “Connerys is thick as fleas on a dog’s back around here. Why Gladys here’s mother was a Connery, wasn’t she, Gladys. And there’s Connerys out at Princess Point and some west of town here and plenty up north, all the way to Bay Fortune, ain’t that right, Gladys? That’s where Amos Connery is, married to your cousin, ain’t he?”
Gladys topped up Sid’s coffee again. “That’s right. Amos married Ruthie, my second cousin.”
“I suppose you’d be lookin’ for a particular Connery, miss?” Sid’s face became suspicious, as though he’d remembered he was talking to an outsider, someone From Away, not an Islander.
Charlotte nodded and picked up her windbreaker, then moved toward the cash register. “Someone my sister went to school with years ago in Toronto.”
“Oh?” Sid shot another glance at the waitress.
Charlotte handed over a ten-dollar bill and received change, with the two of them regarding her curiously the whole time. “Liam Connery. You know him?” Charlotte left a two-dollar tip and pocketed her remaining change.
“Oh, we know him, all right—don’t we, Gladys?” The waitress nodded, her cheerful face suddenly worried looking. “Ah, no, miss,” Sid added, shaking his head. “You don’t want to look up that Mr. Connery. He’s an ornery bugger. Keeps to himself and he don’t like strangers snooping around.”
“But he has the kennel, right?” Charlotte persisted.
“That he does. Over to Petty Cove, next to Cardigan River, right near where you’re headed.” Sid rattled his newspaper loudly and snapped it against the counter, as though dismissing both her and her foolishness. “You might ask at Bristol’s Store. They’ll give you directions, if you’ve got your mind made up.”
“I do. I’m delivering a dog to him, you see.”
“Oh?” Sid’s expression was skeptical. “Well, I suppose that’s all right, then.”
“Thanks for the lovely breakfast,” Charlotte said, smiling at the waitress, who beamed back. “I’ll be on my way.”
Charlotte needed gas and then she had to find a place where she and Maggie could get out and stretch. Maggie had been patient with the limited exercise she’d had over the past four days. She was due for a good run; so was Charlotte. The gas attendant at the Irving station gave her directions to a beach usually deserted at this time of year, a few miles north of town.
Maggie whined as Charlotte put the vehicle into gear and turned onto the highway. The sign mentioned Georgetown and Cardigan River, as well as Annandale, Souris and East Point farther along.
Petty Cove, where Liam Connery had his kennel, was just a speck on the road map, but the beach she’d been directed to had to be pretty close to the cove. Maybe she’d run across him accidentally. What, sunning himself on the sand? Now, there was a ridiculous idea!
Sure, the place was small and everybody knew everybody—the entire island, Canada’s smallest province, had only 130,000 people—but how likely was it that she’d meet Liam Connery before she was ready to meet him? Not very. She had two free days until Monday, when she was due to deliver Maggie, according to her sister’s arrangements, and meet Mr. Busby from the Halifax auction house. Charlotte was looking forward to spending the weekend touring around with Maggie, maybe taking a drive up north, right to the end of the Island, at East Point. Or going to the province’s capital, Charlottetown, for the day.
She was in no real hurry to meet her first-ever crush again, now that she was actually here. Besides, what had they said at the diner? That Liam Connery was an ornery bugger who didn’t take to strangers?
Of course, she wasn’t really a stranger, was she? She was a—ta-dum! Charlotte imagined thirties’ radio music—“Voice from the Past.” Not that Liam Connery would give a tinker’s damn.
And what past? she reminded herself. She was the one who’d been in love with him, the lean, intense boy with the funny accent in her sister’s class. He might remember Laurel, but he sure wasn’t going to remember Laurel’s little sister, a scrawny kid with a pixie cut and a head full of dreams.
That didn’t matter; the idea back at the lodge reunion was just to see what had happened to the boy you’d had your first crush on. It was an exercise in curiosity, pure and simple. Had he turned out the way you’d imagined he would—wonderful, sexy, sensitive? Or was he paunchy and balding with a bad golf game and half-a-dozen kids? Was he the CEO of the local duct-cleaning service? Was he married? In jail? Dead?
That was all. Liam Connery, she remembered, had dreamed of flying. Turned out he’d become a dog breeder, of all things. C’est la vie.
No one, she was sure, not even her—and Charlotte knew she was definitely a romantic—expected this little exercise to be anything more than that. They’d have a coffee together, maybe, talk over old times—not that they had many in common—and move on. Their lives might have overlapped briefly once, but they didn’t overlap now.
She had to admit, though, she was genuinely curious. “Ornery bugger” didn’t scare her. Not unless it was shotgun-slinging ornery, and she doubted that.
Charlotte slowed, peering at the narrow road that had suddenly materialized to the left. Okay. This had to be the beach road—exactly one mile from the turnoff. That was what the man had said—exactly one mile, which meant 1.2 kilometers. Distance in Canada was measured in kilometers now, not that they seemed to have noticed that little detail on Prince Edward Island.
The rutted dirt lane led across an open field studded with frozen, rotted potatoes left after harvest, and wound downward toward the beach. Charlotte bumped along slowly. And happily.
The sun was high in the sky—it was noon—and there was no one, absolutely no one, on this deserted red sand beach. The scene before her was straight out of a travel brochure, except that there were no tourists here now and probably weren’t even in the summer. This was rural, isolated P.E.I., the way it had been a century before.
Several hundred yards from the hummocks of dune grass that edged the high tide line, waves broke, a line of white foam that spun smoothly, over and over, from one distant shore to the other, between the headlands. A flock of shore birds swooped and dived high above, their cries wild and beautiful.
How peaceful. How serene.
Charlotte sighed at the silence as she shut off the ignition. What could possibly be more wonderful?
CHAPTER TWO
“MAGGIE!” Charlotte shaded her eyes and stared at the rocky headland several hundred yards in front of her.
Then she turned and gazed back down the long curve of the bay, toward where she’d left her vehicle, almost hidden in the tall grass. Each individual footprint she’d made in the cool, firm sand as she’d rounded the bay was in sharp focus. A third of the way back to the Suburban, she could see the windbreaker and sweater she’d discarded, along with her socks and shoes. She was still hot, even though clouds had scudded in from somewhere to partially block the sun and a steady breeze had sprung up.
Charlotte frowned. Maybe Maggie had backtracked behind her while she was running? They’d played at the edge of the water for a while and then shared lunch—an apple, a bag of Doritos and some beef jerky, plus kibble for Maggie, sitting on the grass beside the truck. Then Charlotte had decided to go for a run. She was in no hurry to leave, although she’d considered going on to Charlottetown that afternoon.
“Maggie!” No answering bark. Annoyed, Charlotte tried whistling—a faint, ineffective sound whipped away by the rising wind. The tide had turned when they’d arrived but was still a long way out on the shallow sandy tidal flats. Charlotte had spent a good hour tossing a stick in the surf, laughing as the retriever leaped into the rolling waves time and again, before they’d returned to the shore for their lunch.
She gazed back toward the sea. The tide had come in considerably. No sign of a dog, but that was to be expected. Maggie wouldn’t have gone out to the water by herself. Maggie never wandered—never.
But there was no big black dog now. Charlotte broke into a slow, cool-down lope. She wasn’t really worried. Ten more minutes and she’d make her goal, the rocks that marked the headland, then go back. Maggie was bound to show up by the time she reached the Suburban.
Whoa. Charlotte stopped dead. She tilted her head slightly, listening. A dog? On the land side? Toward that straggle of trees on the other side of the dunes? She remained still, aware of her heavy breathing and the pounding of her pulse. Now that she wasn’t running, she felt chilled in her loose cotton cargo pants and perspiration-soaked T-shirt.
There! A chorus of barking followed by a single, excited bark. More like a yip. Maggie?
“Maggie!” Charlotte tried the whistle again, but her lips were so stiff that no sound emerged. Her teeth chattered.
Damn that dog, anyway! So much for blue ribbons in obedience. Charlotte veered toward the dunes, which blocked her view of the land, toward the steep hill that rose from the shore. This was totally unlike Maggie! It wasn’t as though she was a terrier, following her nose after mice. Or a spaniel, snuffling around in the underbrush for birds. She was a retriever. So what was she doing in the woods, barking after squirrels or chasing rabbits?
Charlotte reached the top of the dune and peered toward the copse of trees where she’d heard the barking. “Maggie! Yoo-hoo! Come, Mag-gie, come!”
No sign of Maggie, but Charlotte heard something that alarmed her. Another dog? The deeper tones didn’t sound right. She squinted at the dark trees, eyes shaded, willing Maggie to appear. The prospect of having to go after her, to navigate clumps of saw-edged grass and broken sticks and dead sea things did not appeal.
“Ma’am?”
Charlotte shrieked and felt the goosebumps double in size all over her shivering body. “Omigosh! I didn’t hear you coming!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” A boy of thirteen or fourteen had emerged over the side of the dune from the north. He turned red as a beet. “You lookin’ for something, ma’am?”
“My dog. She’s—” Charlotte waved in the general direction of the woods “—in there somewhere.”
“Your dog?” The boy seemed puzzled. He put two fingers to his mouth and let fly a piercing whistle, one long and two short.
To Charlotte’s amazement, a dog shot out of the trees. Maggie! Oh, no—there was another black dog, right behind the first one. They ran together, occasionally turning to nip playfully and to paw each other with their front feet, then run side by side again. Neither animal headed their way.
“Y-yours?” Charlotte was befuddled.
“Liam’s.” The boy looked over his shoulder, then glanced at her again. He seemed worried. “My dad’s cousin.”
Liam Connery? No. She wasn’t ready to meet him; she wasn’t dressed properly. She hadn’t thought of what she was going to say yet. She had a definite, much-tweaked plan for their first meeting, and this wasn’t it. But it had to be him—how many Liams could there be in this tiny corner of the island?
The boy sent her another look. He was handsome, with fair skin and piercing blue eyes and a few freckles still left from childhood. “Liam’s right mad about Scout going over the side like that….”
He stared toward the two dogs, now running in a madcap manner along the line where the grass met the trees, his expression about as helpless as Charlotte felt. Then she saw him glance over his shoulder.
“Scout’s here, Liam, just like you figured,” he said. “He’s goin’ after another dog. I called him but he’s a bad old boy and he won’t come.”
To her horror, Charlotte saw a man striding toward them up the same side of the dune the boy had taken, dressed in a camouflage jacket and carrying a—a big gun! He had another dog with him, a large brown dog with a coarse-looking coat, wavy along the back.
The ominous comments she’d heard at the diner, about Liam Connery not taking to strangers, skipped through her mind.
This was Liam Connery? The man approaching didn’t resemble the boy of her memories. He was tall and powerful looking. Dark hair—that was as she remembered—dark eyes, what she could see of them. What color had his eyes been—brown? Green? She couldn’t recall. A three-day growth of beard gave him a dangerous, lawless air. Scuffed lace-up work boots, a faded plaid shirt under the open jacket. The gun slung over his shoulder. Hair in need of a trim.
He stood beside the boy—ignoring her completely—and gazed out at the dogs frolicking halfway up the side of the hill.
“Well, Goddammit. Would you look at that.”
That was all he said, in a low, forceful tone that made her skin crawl. Charlotte was shivering uncontrollably. She wished she’d tied her windbreaker around her waist instead of dropping it on the sand several hundred yards back. The brown dog sat attentively at the man’s side, ears alert, but showing no sign of joining the other two dogs.
“Your bitch, ma’am?” He finally glanced her way. The drawled query shocked her. She wasn’t used to calling Maggie a bitch, even though she knew that was the proper name for a female dog.
“Y-yes,” she managed to say. “M-my sister’s, actually.” She turned to him, but his attention was back on the hillside.
“She wouldn’t be in heat, would she?”
He looked directly at her without a trace of recognition in his eyes. They were brown—a very dark brown—shot with gold and green. She shook her head. “No—at least, I don’t think so.”
“Good,” he continued flatly. “Most people would have the sense not to let loose a bitch in heat.”
“It’s my sister’s dog,” Charlotte answered, her voice small. She decided this definitely wasn’t the time to tell him she was delivering Maggie to his kennel.
Liam frowned, put his fingers to his mouth, as the boy had, and let loose an ear-splitting whistle, gazing intently toward the hill. Then he swore again.
“I have no idea why she won’t listen. She’s usually obedient,” Charlotte said, then, irked by the man’s disdain, added proudly, “She’s a champion, after all.”
He threw her a quick glance, eyes narrowed, interested—the first time, Charlotte suspected, that her presence had actually registered with him.
“Champion?”
“Show champ. Many times over.” Maybe she ought to sing Maggie’s praises a little. The Lab had not made a good first impression by running off and not coming back when she was called. “Lots of ribbons. Obedience trophies, too.”
Liam Connery made a nasty noise in his throat, and the boy glanced at him. “You want me to go get ’em, Liam?”
“Better do that, Jamie. Scout’s got one thing on his mind right now, and it isn’t his dinner.”
He turned and stared at her finally, sizing her up—a little rudely, in Charlotte’s opinion. In the past five minutes, she’d had second thoughts about everything. First love! This man was a lout. A hunter, from the looks of the gun, even though she didn’t see any ducks or anything. But the gun had to be for something. He wasn’t even polite. He was rude, he was bossy—and she didn’t like the way he referred to Maggie as a bitch in heat, even if she was.
Charlotte was doing some serious readjusting. So much for the romantic first-crush reunion story— Zoey and Lydia would die laughing when they heard about this.
The boy began to slide down the hummock toward the dogs. She stepped forward, anxious to take some kind of action, too. “Wait! I’ll go with you.”
“Ma’am—?”
Charlotte glanced back. Liam stood silhouetted against the sky, holding out his jacket, which he’d taken off.
“Better wear this.” He hitched one shoulder toward the beach, and Charlotte automatically looked that way.
Her clothes! The tide had inched in far enough now that the water had reached her sweater and jacket. As she watched, an incoming wave slurped up the sand, smoothly covered her clothes, released them and then slipped back down the sand into the sea. Charlotte could have wept. Everything—everything!—was going wrong.
She might as well accept his offer. Her teeth were chattering. As she walked toward him, his eyes narrowed again, focusing on her face. Recognition? A hint? No way. She’d never have known him if the boy hadn’t mentioned his name, and fifteen years ago he hadn’t even been aware she existed.
He held the garment, and she slipped her arms into the sleeves. Without a word, he pulled it up on her shoulders and around her neck. She avoided his eyes. The dog by his side never missed a move, watching everything Charlotte did, every gesture. He had yellow eyes—kind of creepy.
“Th-thanks,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself in the cozy flannel lining. It was an oddly intimate thing to do: give her his coat, which was huge on her and still warm from his body. A very generous gesture. She took back her first impression.
Okay. Still rude, maybe. But generous.
“You stay here. I’ll go get your stuff.”
Still bossy, too. Charlotte opened her mouth to say she’d go get her clothes herself, but he started toward the beach before she could speak. The brown dog followed him. She clamped her lips shut and stared miserably in the direction the boy had taken. Jamie reached down and grasped Scout by the scruff of the neck. He snapped on a leash and made a grab for Maggie, who danced around them both, tail high. Scout shook himself vigorously then barked, straining to get free again. Jamie hung on tightly, thank heavens.
“Maggie!” She thought she’d try again, to no effect. “Come!” Maggie didn’t even look her way.
Charlotte noticed that Liam had picked up her clothes but, instead of walking back to join her, was heading toward the boy. The wind had come up. She couldn’t hear anything they said but saw Liam dig into the pocket of her jacket and extract something shiny, which he handed over.
Her car keys!
He talked to Jamie for another minute or so, then strode toward her, while his young cousin began to drag Scout down the beach in the direction of her vehicle, with Maggie happily cavorting behind, showing off for her new boyfriend, who tugged enthusiastically at his leash. Both dogs were yipping and whining with excitement.
Charlotte felt faint. Maggie had abandoned her without even a backward glance. Where was Jamie taking them?
She was freezing, but she felt she had to make some kind of move. She took a few steps forward and nearly fell down. Her legs were stiff, her lips numb.
Liam hiked the gun he still carried higher on his shoulder and tossed something up the dune toward her. Ugh, her wet sneakers. She stuck her sandy feet in them, grimacing at the unpleasant sensation.
“This way,” he called, and veered to the north, gesturing to her to follow him. The brown dog fell into step at his left side.
She planted her feet firmly. She wasn’t going anywhere, not until she knew what was happening.
He glanced over his shoulder and with an expression of pure annoyance turned around and walked back.
“Problems?” he asked from a distance of about twenty feet, at the base of the dune.
She gazed down at him, thinking he looked like he’d stepped out of an outfitter’s catalog, with his hunting clothes, his sturdy boots, his gun, his windblown hair. “Uh, what did you do with my car keys? And where’s my dog? Where are we—?”
“You can warm up at my place.” He waved an impatient hand in the direction he’d been walking. “Ten minutes on the other side of this headland. It’s cold, and your clothes are wet,” he went on, frowning. “Okay? Jamie will drive. He knows a shortcut that—”
“Does he have a driver’s license?”
Liam sighed loudly. “He’s been driving since he was twelve. He’s taking a back lane through the fields,” he explained slowly, as though he were dealing with a simpleton. “A private road. Perfectly legal. He’ll meet us at the house. Now, are you coming?”
What choice did she have? She could have stayed where she was and—and what? She had no dog, no keys, no car, and her sopping wet windbreaker and sweater were still in his hand. What was she going to do—wrestle them away from him and run? Run where? And why? She was wearing his jacket. He was just being hospitable, offering her a place to warm up out of the wind and the cold, maybe even a cup of tea. Jamie would be there in a few minutes; it wasn’t as though she’d be alone with this rather intimidating man and…what if she was? She was twenty-eight years old, well able to take care of herself.
For pity’s sake, what did she think might happen?
“Okay. I—I’m coming,” she called out, hoping it sounded fairly ordinary, or at least as though she’d just had a cramp in her foot or a stone in her shoe or there’d been some equally good reason that had prevented her from following him immediately.
She stumbled down the dune, keeping her arms around herself to hold the jacket, which reached past her hips, against her skin. The wind had increased, whipping her hair across her face, and the clouds had darkened. A serious storm coming? She was chilled to the bone.
Liam, as expected, was no gentleman. He strode ahead, his dog at his side, obviously familiar with the lay of the dunes and, when they entered the woods, each twist and turn of the path. Only occasionally did he glance back.
She did her best to keep up. She had a sudden giddy vision of Hansel, with her as Gretel scurrying behind him, two children lost in the magical dark woods, scattering bread to mark their way, crumbs that were immediately gobbled up by the birds.
She might well be Gretel, blindly stumbling along, but the analogy stopped there: Liam Connery knew exactly where he was headed. All she had to do was follow him.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS HARD TO BELIEVE they’d walked less than ten minutes by the time the gloomy path through the sea-stunted forest gave way to a more open area of dull dry grass dotted with scrub alders and willows. Liam stopped once, to supervise her scramble over a derelict wooden fence, which she managed—gracefully, she thought—then forged ahead with her close behind him.
Charlotte heard dogs barking before she saw the house, a two-story cedar-shingled frame building with a big wraparound veranda and a darling cupola on top, complete with battered widow’s walk. The style, more commonly without the cupola, was popular along the coast. Supposedly, a seafarer’s wife could stand on the tiny balcony and gaze out to sea to spy her spouse as he sailed into harbor.
Whether that was so she could put a cake in the oven or chase the gardener out of her bed, Charlotte didn’t know, but cupolas were a charming addition to any dwelling, and she’d always wanted to sit in one, maybe take up a book to read.
Liam’s house was much grander than she’d expected it to be, even needing a coat of paint as it did and some attention to the landscaping. There were trees and bushes—a crab apple, two lilacs and several escallonias—that looked as though they’d once been productive but had been allowed to grow wild and unpruned. Everything seemed a bit run-down, a bit neglected.
“How many more dogs do you have?” she asked as she hurried to catch up to him.
“Twelve right now, not counting a new litter a month ago,” he replied, reaching for the latch that opened the wooden gate. An ancient sumac, its branches laden with candelabras of scarlet cone-shaped fruit, guarded the entrance path.
“Puppies! How lovely,” Charlotte said, trying to be conversational. Liam didn’t respond. He was a singularly uncommunicative man. Thank goodness she had Maggie with her, as a pretext for conversation once they sorted out the introductions. She could hardly imagine what she’d have come up with if she’d just located him in the phone book and called. Knowing her, she’d have blurted out something about the crush she’d had on him when she was eleven and when could they get together to discuss it.
A waist-high white picket fence surrounded the house, each post surmounted by ornamental wood-carvings in a last-century style. Charlotte noted the detail avidly. Folk art of all kinds, from architecture to furniture and the decorative arts: these were the passions she’d turned into a livelihood over the past few years.
Completing the quaint domestic picture—forest to one side, open shore and sea to the other, with the sun suddenly breaking through—wood smoke poured from a brick chimney. Of course! Liam Connery didn’t live alone. Twelve dogs. Plus puppies. What was that—another five or six? And no doubt a wife, kids, mortgage and a big feed bill. After all, if Charlotte was twenty-eight, he had to be at least thirty-three or -four by now.
A family man. What an unsettling thought. So far, Charlotte had not factored a wife and children into the mental picture she’d formed. He seemed so…remote. Detached. Self-sufficient. So—how had Sid put it?—ornery.
They entered a small linoleum-floored anteroom full of coats and boots, and smelling slightly of dog. The dog with him—she still hadn’t heard Liam call it by name—settled with a sigh into a blanket-lined wicker basket. She didn’t know whether or not to slip off her sneakers, deciding, in the end, that she’d keep them on, considering she wasn’t wearing any socks. She wiped the soles carefully on the mat beside the door, noting that she was desecrating a traditional hooked mat, faded but sturdy, that would probably bring seventy-five dollars at an auction in Toronto. Collectors snapped up mats like these.
Liam, she was relieved to see, walked to a glass-fronted cabinet that contained several guns and deposited the one he’d had slung over his shoulder, locking the door and pocketing the key.
“Why do you have the gun?” she asked, unable to resist.
“To shoot ducks,” he said. “You want to keep the coat on for now?”
He moved to the door that separated the vestibule from the rest of the house and paused, less than a yard away from her, waiting for her response.
Charlotte searched his gaze for a clue as to the situation—and saw nothing but an odd wariness. Beneath that scruffy beard, he’d grown up to be a handsome man, in his rough way. And yet he struck her as…almost scary. She decided to stay wrapped up in the jacket, if for no other reason than that she was suddenly embarrassed at the prospect of exposing herself in her damp, no doubt revealing, T-shirt. She nodded.
Modesty, thy name is Woman, she thought, mangling the half-remembered phrase.
He opened the door and gestured her forward into a kitchen. There were no lights on in the room, and it seemed a little gloomy, if delightfully warm.
Liam flipped a wall switch to turn on a light.
“Liam? That you?” came a thin voice from one corner of the room. Charlotte’s gaze settled on an elderly woman, probably in her early seventies, her hands occupied with yarn and knitting needles, and accompanied by a cat that perched on the upholstered back of her chair. The woman looked toward them but there was something unusual in her flat gaze.
“I’m home, Ma. Brought company. She got her clothes wet down at the shore and she could use a cup of tea and a warm-up.”
“Oh? Any luck?”
Liam, who’d taken off his boots, picked up a teakettle that was sitting on a gleaming modern commercial range and went to the sink. “Nope. Scout wasn’t in the mood. He had other things on his mind.” He glanced at Charlotte and she felt herself flush.
The whole kitchen was furnished in a surprisingly up-to-date fashion, with a large refrigerator, a dishwasher and double stainless steel sinks. The appliances appeared to be about ten years old. Somehow, she hadn’t expected a modern kitchen. An older woodstove was in one corner, near the woman’s chair, and was probably the source of the wood smoke she’d noticed. That suited the room.
“Stay there, Ma,” he said, although the woman had made no effort to get up. “I’ll make the tea.” He ran some water into the kettle.
“Where’s Davy’s boy?”
Liam looked toward his mother. “He’ll be along shortly. He’s got Scout.”
The woman chuckled and put her knitting aside. “That Scout is quite a rapscallion.” She shook her head, smiling. Charlotte got the impression that she was pleased to hear about Scout’s hijinks. “He sure doesn’t take after his daddy, does he? Old Jimbo. Now, there’s a dog who’s all business. Did you say you’d brought someone, Liam?”
Charlotte stared at the older woman, shocked. Hadn’t she seen her? She glanced at Liam. He had set the kettle on the stove. He shot her a warning look that she couldn’t quite decipher.
“Yes. This is—I never did ask your name, ma’am.” He actually smiled slightly. It made a huge difference to what Charlotte had come to believe was a perpetually grim expression.
“Charlotte,” she said, stepping forward and rather foolishly holding out her hand. “Charlotte Moore. From Toronto.”
He frowned. “I’m Liam Connery—”
“I know who you are.” She desperately wanted to set the record straight. About Maggie. About Laurel. About herself.
“You do?”
“Actually, believe it or not, I was more or less on my way here, to your place. To drop off a dog—”
“That Labrador?” He was still frowning.
“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “I understand that you made some arrangements with my sister Laurel to have Maggie bred here….”
“You’re Laurel Moore’s sister?” He seemed completely taken aback.
“I am. Her younger sister. I remember you but—” she laughed nervously “—I don’t suppose you remember me.”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t. And I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” He turned toward his mother again without explaining. “This is my mother, Ada Connery.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Connery?” Charlotte said formally. “Thank you for letting me stop in to warm up.”
The older woman nodded and smiled. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you, dear. My eyes aren’t what they used to be. It must be dark in here. Come in, sit yourself down. Liam, there’s some of that date cake in the bread box. Cut a slice for our guest, Mrs. Moore—”
“Oh, I’m not married.”
“Miss Moore. Get her a cup of tea, Liam.”
“Please, call me Charlotte.” She looked helplessly at Liam. He pointed at his own eyes with both forefingers, then gave her a thumbs-down gesture, both hands. Blind?
Her dismay must have been obvious. He nodded and walked toward her. “That sweater okay to go in the dryer?” It was on the kitchen table, along with her balled-up jacket.
Charlotte remembered why she was here—to dry her clothes.
“Sure, it’s wool but it’s washable. The jacket can go in, too.”
He held her clothes in one hand but didn’t move away. “So what’s this about leaving your sister’s bitch here? Didn’t she get my message?”
“Message?”
“I left her a message, let’s see—” he ran one hand through his already dishevelled hair “—just about a week ago.”
“My sister and her husband are in Belize on holiday. A week ago?” Charlotte paused, trying to think back. So much had happened in a week!
“Whatever. Your sister called here quite a few times, tried to talk me into breeding her bitch, but I told her I wouldn’t consider it.”
“You’re joking.” Charlotte didn’t mean that at all—joking. She was shocked to her core. “Laurel said she had it all arranged!”
“She lied.” He glanced toward the stove, where the kettle had just begun to boil.
“My sister doesn’t lie,” Charlotte said stiffly. She had to defend her own sister, for heaven’s sake! But she’d been suspicious of Laurel’s sudden enthusiasm at discovering that Charlotte was not only traveling to Prince Edward Island on business, but wanted to meet Liam Connery. Had Laurel set her up?
Liam cracked a smile, which frayed Charlotte’s jittery nerves even more. “Must’ve changed, then,” he said easily, taking a step toward the stove. He put her sweater on the counter. “She sure knew how to tell a tall tale at Dunwoody High.”
“But I have to leave Maggie here. I have other things I have to—”
“Sit down.” He indicated a chair at the kitchen table, then poured water over the tea bags and put the teapot back on the stove. He deposited a thick ceramic mug unceremoniously on the table, before picking up her clothes again and disappearing into another doorway that led off the kitchen. She wondered why he hadn’t offered his mother tea. She heard the slam of a door—the dryer—and then the sound of the machine starting.
“Psst!” Startled, Charlotte looked toward the corner where Liam’s mother was gesturing. “Don’t pay him no mind. He’s awful particular about who he breeds his dogs to, the Labs and the Chessies both.”
“But—” Charlotte began, then thought better of it. The tea was starting to simmer. She got up to take it off the stove and bring it to the table. It was already black as tar. Honestly! Didn’t he even know how to make a pot of tea?
“So, in the area tourin’, are you?” Ada Connery asked in a friendly tone, resuming her knitting.
“Actually, I’m here for a few weeks. I’ll be doing some work on the Rathbone estate. I’ll need to find a place for Maggie first, though, now that there’s been a mix-up.” Now that Laurel had screwed up royally! “I understand the estate is nearby.” The tea was hot and welcome. She wrapped her cold fingers around the mug, then took some sugar from a graniteware bowl that stood on the table, and stirred it in.
“Yes, indeed. Matter-of-fact, it’s right next door, just through the woods. You can’t miss it. There’s not much around here but the post office and the store. There’s the lobster supper in summer, over at Cardigan River. That’s all closed now.”
“I see,” Charlotte murmured. She sat down gingerly on a kitchen chair. The soles of her sneakers squeaked on the linoleum floor, and the woman across the room looked up.
Ada Connery shook her head. “Old Mr. Rathbone was always quite a gentleman, you know. Until he took his turn, that is. He became fairly hard to handle then, from what I’ve been told, always skulking about, springing up on people to surprise them. Boo!” She waved one hand quickly, as though imitating her deceased neighbor. “Couldn’t be trusted with a match in the end. Dementia, they say.”
She glanced in Charlotte’s direction with her sightless eyes and pulled another strand of yarn from the wicker basket by her side. Charlotte could count at least four completed mittens from where she sat, and wondered how many were in the basket and why Ada Connery kept knitting more.
“My late husband did odd jobs over there sometimes—gardening and what not. The old gentleman was very fond of huntin’ dogs. Liam has a couple of ’em now. But I do believe the neighborhood has improved since the old fellow has passed on. He was what they called a philanderer in my day—Miss Charlotte will be working at Gerard Rathbone’s place, did you know that, Liam?”
Liam had returned from disposing of her clothes and was carrying a sweater—not hers. “No, I didn’t, Ma.” He didn’t sound that interested. “Here— If this fits, you’re welcome to it.”
“Thanks.” Charlotte took the sweater and removed his jacket. “I’m assisting with the estate appraisal for the heirs,” she explained. “Art, furniture, that sort of thing.”
He raised one eyebrow briefly as though to underline his indifference. Her damp T-shirt was stuck to her breasts and belly, as she’d suspected. She was seized with an enormous shiver, the kind you felt right down to your shins, and quickly tugged on the garment he’d handed her, a Nordic-patterned sweater in greens and blues.
He’d turned away the instant she pulled off the jacket. Her earlier fit of modesty hadn’t been necessary. This man clearly had no interest—whatsoever—in her as a female. As a shapely woman wearing a revealing garment. He hadn’t even sneaked a peek, from what she could tell.
“I believe Bertie’s boy, Nick, is taking care of things over there for the family. I saved your dinner in the oven, Liam.” It took Charlotte a few seconds to realize that the family Ada was talking about was the Rathbones.
“I’ll have it later, Ma.” Liam went to the window that overlooked the path they’d taken to the house. “Here’s Jamie now.”
“What about my dog?” Charlotte stood quickly. Poor Maggie.
“I’ll make sure she’s all right.”
Without another word, he left. Charlotte took a gulp of the sweet tea. What she’d meant, what she wished she’d said, was, Aren’t you going to take her off my hands, as my sister supposedly arranged? Surely Laurel hadn’t been so foolish as to think that if Charlotte just showed up with Maggie, she’d be able to convince this man to breed the dog to one of his prize animals….
Frankly, Charlotte didn’t give a damn. It was Laurel’s problem, not hers. What she cared about was finding a place to board Maggie until her sister and brother-in-law got back from their holiday.
“You’ll want to have a look at the puppies before you go. Liam says they’re the best litter he’s had from Bear, and that’s sayin’ something.”
“Bear is—?”
“His Chesapeake Bay retriever daddy dog. Scout’s daddy is Old Jimbo, Liam’s Labrador daddy dog. He’s gettin’ on, poor fella.”
Charlotte’s head was spinning with dog details.
“Darn that old Scout! He’s quite a scamp.” The older woman chuckled again. “Yes, my son gets near a thousand dollars for one of Bear’s pups and he won’t sell to just anyone. He’s very particular. Very particular, indeed.”
Indeed. Her sister—or perhaps Maggie—obviously had not passed the test.
“You go on out, miss. Take any one of those jackets hanging there in the mudroom.”
“You’re sure you’ll be all right? You want some tea?” That was a silly thing to say, obviously Liam’s mother did just fine on her own. She’d been alone when they arrived.
Ada Connery laughed. “Of course I’ll be all right. If I want tea, I’ll get it. I’m not crippled up or anything, you know—it’s just that my eyesight is poorly these days.”
According to Liam, his mother was stone-blind.
Charlotte went out. Her Suburban was safely parked in the driveway. The wind caught her hair in cold gusts and the sunshine that had broken through the clouds earlier had vanished. The sky was very dark.
Jamie emerged from a shed at the back of the property, where there were several barn-red outbuildings. “Want to see the new litter?”
Everyone here was pup-crazy! That was okay by Charlotte. She liked pups, too. Who didn’t? “Sure.” She made her way over to the boy. “Where’s Maggie?”
Charlotte could see several chain-link runs out behind the sheds. Four or five dogs stood at attention behind the fence, regarding her alertly. They were all shades of brown. Some were black. One barked, but the rest were silent and watchful. Labradors and Chesapeake Bay retrievers, Ada had said.
Jamie gestured toward the driveway. “Liam told me to leave her in your truck, since you’d be going soon, anyway.”
She walked beside him as he led her into the closest building.
“This here is Sammy,” the boy said proudly. “She’s one of Liam’s top bitches.” Charlotte couldn’t help wincing. She just wasn’t used to hearing that word all the time.
“Oh, wow,” she said softly, kneeling down. Five chocolate-brown pups with the bluest eyes she’d ever seen poked their noses out between the slats of their pen and sniffed at her ankles.
“Want to hold one?” Jamie held the pen door wide open and a tan-colored dog—obviously the mother—came toward them, wagging her tail. Jamie scratched her ears.
“Look at their blue eyes!” Charlotte said. She’d never seen pups with eyes like that before.
Jamie gave her an indulgent look. “All Chessies have blue eyes when they’re babies. Then they turn green and then finally yellow, when they grow up. Amber, Liam calls it.”
Liam, Liam, Liam. A major case of hero worship here. Where was he?
Charlotte bent to study the pups. They’d clustered around her feet, and one had its tiny teeth in her shoelace. She picked it up. The puppy had tons more skin than it needed, which gave its face a dozy, wrinkly look. Just like a little bear. Its little candy-pink tongue came out for a few seconds when it yawned. How adorable. A thousand dollars!
“So, this Sammy—the mom—is this her first litter?”
“Her fourth. Sammy’s the best. I helped train her,” he added proudly.
“I’ll bet that’s quite a job,” she said, tickling the pup under its chin.
“Not really. Liam says I’m a natural. I got a talent for it. But you don’t have to do much with these little fellas,” he said modestly. “They got the instinct. Liam trains gun dogs for other folk—Labradors, weimaraners, goldens, you name it. He’s got five boarders now, but mostly he trains his own Labs and Chessies and sells them started.”
“Started?”
“Partly trained. I’ve got a pup of my own,” Jamie went on enthusiastically, his blue eyes meeting hers. “Buster. Liam gave ’im to me. One of Old Jimbo’s pups. A brother to Scout. Liam says I can set up with my own dogs now, but my ma says I got to finish school first.”
“How old are you, Jamie?”
“Fourteen.”
“Shouldn’t you, uh—” Charlotte paused and winked “—be in school today?”
“Yeah,” he said, with a jaunty shrug. “I can catch up.” Then he sighed and stood. “Man, I hope there’s some dinner left. I’m starving, and that damn old Scout knocked our dinner into the bay.”
Charlotte walked slowly back to the house—no sign of Liam—gradually piecing together the events of the afternoon. Liam had taken out his dog and his cousin’s son for a training session. Where was the boat? Scout had caught scent of Maggie—must have, what else?—and thrown himself over the side, knocking their lunch into the water, and then struck out for shore, either to defend his territory or to make a new friend. Maybe both. Jamie had been sent to get him back. Liam had secured the boat and then followed to see what was going on, accompanied by the far more obedient Bear.
None of this was quite how she’d planned it—not dropping off Maggie as supposedly arranged by her sister, not meeting her first crush after all these years. She’d meant to be cool, collected, hair perfect, looking her best. The day was a complete mess all around.
Jamie took his meal out of the oven and sat down at the table. He seemed completely comfortable in the kitchen, as though he spent a lot of time there.
“Do you mind if I check on my clothes, Mrs. Connery?” Charlotte asked. Ada was contentedly knitting in the corner, the radio beside her turned on low.
“You go right ahead, dear.”
“Where’s Liam?” Charlotte asked nonchalantly on her way through to the room that housed the washer and dryer. She hadn’t expected him to disappear without a word.
“Probably went down to bring back the launch,” Jamie said with his mouth full. He chewed for a few seconds and forked up a lump of potato, which he held midway to his mouth. “We ditched the boat when Scout bailed, and now with this storm blowin’ up, Liam no doubt went to bring it in. Could blow away.”
No doubt. Well, it would’ve been nice to thank him in person. But then, he didn’t seem like the kind of man who would care all that much. She would’ve liked the opportunity to talk to him a little more about boarding Maggie. She’d be back in the area on Monday; maybe if she didn’t find another kennel, she could approach him then.
Her clothes were dry. She whipped off the borrowed sweater in the laundry room, folded it neatly and set it on top of the dryer, wondering whose it was. It was a youthful, Icelandic style, not the sort of garment an older woman like Ada Connery would wear. Her own sweater felt wonderfully warm. She was feeling a lot better.
“Jamie, when you see Liam, will you thank him for me?”
“Sure.” The boy continued plowing through his meal, which looked pretty complete—meat, potatoes, gravy, green beans.
“Thank you, Mrs. Connery, for letting me use your dryer. Plus the tea was very nice.”
“Oh, don’t mention it, girl! I love having company. Don’t get so much of it, now that we don’t have regular guests anymore….”
“Regular guests?” Charlotte slowly pulled on her windbreaker.
The older woman waved one hand at the ceiling—painted tongue-and-groove, Charlotte noted. “My late husband and I ran this place as a bed-and-breakfast for a short time, along with my brother, Clement. Then, well—” She frowned and bent her face toward her knitting again. “Fergus passed away and Clement died a couple of years later, and my eyes began to bother me, so Liam came home to take over. He’s got no patience for visitors, so I just let it go. You didn’t think we needed this whole big house for just the two of us, did you, Charlotte? My land, no!”
A bed-and-breakfast. That made sense. The house was definitely perfect for it, size-wise. The modernized kitchen made sense now, too. And, no, she couldn’t quite see Liam Connery in the hospitality business. The fact that Ada’s husband had died and her son had no interest would account for the generally run-down air. The house and yard, anyway, if not the dog kennels.
“Well, I’ll be on my way.”
Ada waved cheerfully but made no attempt to get up. Charlotte wondered if she wasn’t bothered by more than poor vision. Arthritis?
It had started to rain. By the time she reached the highway over the muddy, rutted red-earth road, the rain was coming down in sheets and Maggie was whining piteously. She smelled like wet dog.
“Miss Maggs, what are we going to do with you until that rotten sister of mine gets back?” Charlotte muttered, peering through the windshield when she came to the end of the lane.
Charlotte spotted a sign on the road, waving in the wind, lashed by the rain: Petty Cove Retrievers. A painted head-and-shoulders picture of two dogs, one brown, one black. Bear and Old Jimbo? And another sign, very faded, above it: Petty Cove Bed-and-Breakfast. With a crudely lettered Closed sign nailed over it. How depressing.
First things first. Find a nice, cozy place to stay for the night. Next, consider calling Laurel to give her a piece of her mind. At the Belize Hilton, if necessary.
“All arranged,” was it? Not according to Liam Connery.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dear Lydia,
P.E.I. greetings from us both! Yes, Maggie is still with me and I’m writing this from the Bluefish Inn at Souris, up in the northeast corner of the Island. It’s raining here and I’m sick of traveling. And, yes, I’ve already met the man I used to dream about in grade five and have put that particular little fantasy to rest. He’s not at all the way I remembered him—so cold, so standoffish. Scary, almost. Still handsome, though, if you like rough and rugged.
There’s worse news. Wait until I see that sister of mine! Laurel set me up. Turns out there was no arrangement to have Maggie bred at Liam Connery’s kennel, after all, so now I’m faced with having to talk that terrible man into taking her on as a boarder, at least until Laurel and Frank get back. I can’t ship her home yet and I can’t keep her with me while I’m working. Speaking of which, guess what? I’m going to the Rathbone mansion tomorrow afternoon to get started. Really looking forward to it….
Love, Charlotte
P.S. Has Zoey gone west to British Columbia yet?
P.P.S. Will send an address when I rent a room somewhere. B&Bs are mostly closed already for the winter.
THAT’S RIGHT, Charlotte thought as she rounded the corner at Poplar Point on the return trip. I’m going to have to convince that unfriendly, annoying, unpleasant man to keep Maggie for a few weeks. Simple, really. He ran a kennel. He had boarders. Five of them; Jamie had said so. Well, here was another one. She was happy to pay whatever he charged. And she’d make damn sure Laurel paid her back.
The sky was clearing—an omen?—as she drove into Cardigan River, which was a tiny knot of buildings at the narrowest part of the small bay that opened to the east, to Northumberland Strait. As Ada Connery had said, there wasn’t much to it.
Bristol’s Store, with a faded Firestone banner draped in the window and one gas pump outside on the graveled lot, looked as promising as anything. The interior was dark and cluttered and smelled of cigarette smoke and hot dogs. A four-stool lunch bar ran along one side of the L-shaped counter. A large, dull-looking man, his tongue squashed pinkly between fleshy lips, occupied a wooden chair by the cash register. He wore a name badge that read Abner. A woman with her hair tied up in a kerchief and an apron around her thin waist scrubbed the counter with a rag.
She raised her head. “Help ya?”
Charlotte took off her sunglasses. “I’m looking for a room to rent. Do you know of anything around here?”
The woman left her cloth on the counter and stood straight, staring at Charlotte. “Room to rent? What for?”
“I’ll be working at the Rathbone estate for a few weeks. I need a place to stay.”
The cloth got picked up, slopped into a sink full of soapy water, pulled out, wrung and vigorously applied again to the cracked Formica. “Uh-huh. Round here, eh? Petty Cove? Nothing much there. Cardigan River?”
“Yes.” Charlotte waited through the long silence that followed, looking around a little desperately. The boy-man hadn’t changed expression and was twirling the dials on a transistor radio near the cash register. Electronic squawks filled the air.
“You could try Clara Jenkins. She takes tourists in the summer. Don’t know if she’s got any rooms free now. Quit fiddlin’ and put down that radio, Abe, y’hear!” She turned back to Charlotte. “You want me to call?”
“That would be very kind.”
“Oh, don’t mention it. Anything else for ya?”
“Bottled water?”
“Over by the pop cooler. Bottom shelf. Should be a few left from the summer folk. We don’t get much call for bought water from the reg’lars.”
As she spoke, the woman dialed an old-fashioned rotary wall phone. “Clara? Listen here, I got somebody in the store says she wants a room—what’s that? Okay, I’ll send her up. How’s John? Uh-huh. Oh, that’s a shame. Hope he’s feelin’ better soon. ’Bye, dear.” She hung up and turned to Charlotte without missing a breath. “You find your water all right?”
“Yes, thanks.” Charlotte opened her wallet. The bell over the door jangled and two men entered—young, handsome fisherman types, with longish hair and creased ball caps pushed back from their tanned foreheads. They both paused when they saw her, and Charlotte recognized the familiar, lightning-swift male appraisal. All men did it—almost all men, she corrected, remembering Liam Connery’s indifference. Then they swung themselves up onto stools at the lunch counter.
“Coffee, boys?” The store lady already had her hand on the coffeepot.
The cashier, Abe, took Charlotte’s money and made change slowly and accurately, counting under his breath. He wasn’t as young as she’d thought at first, with deep lines around his eyes and a little gray in his brown hair. She smiled encouragement and he smiled back, which seemed to amuse the newcomers.
“Coffee, Bonnie. And you can fill up my thermos jug, too. Say, got yourself a gal there, Abe?”
Abe shook his head. “Nope. She’s new. I don’t know her.”
“And of course you wouldn’t take a date with anybody you didn’t know, right, Abe?” The two men laughed again, but Charlotte could see it was all in good fun.
“Now, you go on up the hill and bear right at the first corner,” the woman called Bonnie said to her. “Second house on the left after you make the turn. Buff-colored, ya can’t miss it. Big lilac bush out front. Clara says she’ll be watchin’ out for you.”
“Oh!” Charlotte rapidly rearranged her plans. “I was going to go over to the kennel and then—oh, never mind, I’ll go up and see about the room.”
The two men exchanged glances. “Got a dog, have you? What kind?”
Charlotte nodded. It amazed her how perfect strangers here thought nothing of taking part in a conversation, but she was beginning to get used to it. There were no strangers on Prince Edward Island, she realized. There were only Islanders and People From Away, the “summer folk.”
“A Labrador retriever. It’s my sister’s, actually. I want to make arrangements to board her at the kennel.”
“That’d be Liam Connery’s place?” one drawled, his blue eyes interested.
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh.” He took a sip of his coffee, eyes narrowed.
The other shook his head. “Good luck to you, miss. Liam can be right tough to get along with. Especially when it comes to them fancy huntin’ dogs of his.” He smiled pleasantly.
“Thank you.” Charlotte headed back out into the sunshine.
So. Liam Connery definitely had a reputation, everywhere she mentioned his name. Ornery. Particular. Right tough.
Well, she could handle him. Begin as you mean to go on, she mused. She meant to board Maggie at Petty Cove Retrievers, which was, after all, a commercial kennel business—wasn’t it?—then get straight to work checking out the Rathbone estate. She was flexible, she was reasonable, she was sweet-tempered…and she was stubborn.
In the end, one way or another, she usually got what she wanted.
IT WAS A BIT DISAPPOINTING after all that, to discover Liam Connery wasn’t even home. Dogs barked from the direction of the kennels as she drove up, and Maggie started to whine in response.
Charlotte didn’t dare let her out of the truck.
“Yes?” Ada came to the door, her sightless eyes focusing somewhere over Charlotte’s head. “Can I help you?”
“Good morning, Ada. It’s Charlotte—remember me from last week? Charlotte Moore?”
“Surely I do! Come in, dear.” The older woman held the door open wide. “I’ll put on the kettle.”
“Thanks, but I can’t stay. I wanted to speak to Liam, if I could.”
“He’s not here. He’s, uh…” His mother had a confused look on her face, as though trying to remember just where her son was. “Let’s see, it’s Monday, isn’t it? He’s away this morning, miss.”
“I see.” Charlotte frowned. That was disappointing. “I wanted to talk to him about boarding my sister’s dog for a few weeks.”
“Oh, heavens yes, of course you can leave your puppy here. I haven’t even met her, have I? Why don’t you bring the little sweetheart in for a few minutes?”
Maggie obliged, leaping gracefully out of the Suburban and following Charlotte back to the door of the house, where she gently nosed Ada’s knee. “Oh, my. Isn’t she a dear little thing?” Liam’s mother bent to pat Maggie’s glossy black coat. At nearly seventy-five pounds and fully grown, Maggie wasn’t exactly a “little thing.”
“You bring her on into the kitchen, why don’t you. I’ll get Jamie to see to her when he comes home from school, if Liam’s delayed.”
“Are you sure?” This was a break! She couldn’t do an end run around the absent son to get what she wanted—an agreement to board Maggie—from the mother, but it was a start. Charlotte had no doubt that Ada would fall in love with Maggie once she was on the premises, and so would Liam if he gave the dog half a chance. Charlotte would come back later and discuss the details.
“Oh, yes!” Ada waved her hand in a throwaway gesture that was becoming familiar. “Don’t give it a thought. My son’s growl is worse than his bite, you know. This is a lovely dog, Charlotte. A lovely, lovely girl!” She smoothed Maggie’s broad head, and Maggie responded with that happy confident Labrador look Charlotte knew so well. “She can stay right here by the fire with me and Chip!”
Chip must be the cat. Luckily, Maggie tolerated cats well. Laurel’s horse barn was always full of them.
“If your son objects, I’ll have to make some other arrangement.” Charlotte closed her eyes in silent prayer. Please, let that not happen!
“Nonsense! This is the perfect place, next door to where you’ll be working. Why didn’t I think of it the other day? You can visit her anytime you want. Have you been over to the estate yet, dear?”
“I’m planning to do that this afternoon or maybe tomorrow,” Charlotte said, taking a step backward toward the path that led to the house. “I’ve been busy. I just found somewhere to live and—”
“Where’s that?”
“A place they mentioned at the store—”
“Not Clara Jenkins’s!”
“Yes, as a matter-of-fact.”
“Oh, that won’t be suitable, not at all. She just has bachelors staying there, folks who aren’t a bit fussy. She’s certainly no cook. Why, I hear all she puts out for breakfast is a pot of porridge and a spoon.”
Charlotte had noticed that the room she’d taken for the week was very sparsely and boringly furnished, with a worn lino floor, sagging single bed and a monstrous television in the corner, which she had no intention of using. Lucky she’d only be in Petty Cove a month, because she didn’t think she could stand the color of the walls for too long, either. They weren’t periwinkle or aqua or even last year’s seafoam but a plain all-out fifties-or-bust turquoise. She hadn’t enquired about the meals, which were included.
“I’ve taken the room for a week,” she said. “I’ll give it a try.” If worse came to worst, she could always find something in Charlottetown, although a commute of an hour everyday, both ways, didn’t appeal.
“If only I’d known,” Ada said fretfully, looking rather lost again.
Perhaps it was the empty stare of her sightless eyes, but Ada’s expression often took on a vague, bewildered look.
“I just hope you’re comfortable there, dear. And you put your foot down about the breakfast. You can always come to us if you’re not happy.”
“You mean—” Come to us?
“We’ve got all kinds of rooms upstairs,” the older woman said, brightening. “Nice rooms, too, all with their own plumbin’ and lovely sea views. It’d be like old times!”
It was rather sad, really, Charlotte thought as she drove back down the lane. Ada had obviously loved playing hostess in her own little guest house. With her sight gone and her husband dead, those days were past. And with a son who didn’t seem to care about anything but his dogs, they would most likely never return.
“I WON’T HAVE that damn dog here.” Liam poured milk over the cornflakes in his bowl, his regular evening snack, and carried it to the table. Ladling sugar onto the crisp cereal, he looked up. “You hear me, Ma?”
There was no answer from the corner, where his mother sat knitting, her needles clicking noisily. The Labrador at her feet gazed at him, sighed and put her big head down on her paws again.
“Look, will you, Liam? Even Maggie thinks you’re rude. Of course I hear you!” She leaned down and patted the Labrador’s shoulder. “There’s a sweet girl.”
Liam began eating. The sound of the spoon hitting the bowl added to the click-click of knitting needles, the tick-tick of the kitchen clock on the wall and the occasional crisp snap-snap of the wood fire in the parlor stove.
“I don’t have a good feeling about it, that’s all. Plus, that bitch is bound to come into heat while she’s here, according to Laurel Moore’s reckoning, and I’m not prepared to deal with that. It’s nothing but trouble. Her sister should’ve left her home.”
“But she’s no trouble at all. She’s beautifully trained—look at her! She hasn’t moved a muscle all afternoon, just stayed by my chair, good as gold. Liam, I want to do that poor girl a favor,” his mother said stubbornly. “Travelin’ all that way, arriving here plumb tired out, and then nowhere to leave her puppy while she works? Even Chip gets along with our visitor, don’t you, Chippy?” The cat, sleeping in a basket by the stove, didn’t move.
Liam stood and took the bowl to the sink, where he rinsed and dried it and put it back in the cupboard. He was in jeans and a plaid work shirt and stocking feet. The pendulum clock on the wall struck eight chimes.
“Damn sneaky, if you ask me, coming around this morning when I was away.”
“She has a name, you know. It’s Maggie. And the girl’s name is Charlotte. And you weren’t home. How was she to know? And besides, the sign out there on the road does say boarding kennel, doesn’t it?”
“Matter-of-fact, it doesn’t, Ma. It says, Training and Boarding.”
“Well, there you go—”
“That means the only dogs I board are dogs I’m being paid to train. This dog isn’t here to be trained.” He glanced over at the Labrador, who had raised her noble head again to give him an injured look. “She probably wouldn’t know a pheasant from a stick of firewood. Labs like this have had all the starch bred out of them. They’re show dogs!”
“Old Jimbo’s a Labrador,” his mother shot back. “And a darn fine one, too. One of the best dogs you’ve ever had—you’ve said so many times yourself.”
“Jimbo’s different. He’s a working dog. There’s not a show animal in his pedigree, not one. Folks like Laurel Moore, and there’s plenty more like her, have ruined the breed, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not having that bitch of Laurel’s around, and that’s that.” He headed toward the outer door of the kitchen.
“Davy get his boat out of the water?” Ada enquired mildly.
Liam stared at his mother. “He did. And don’t you go changing the subject, either—”
“Changing the subject! The subject is closed, that’s what. Maggie is staying right here with me. I need a companion, don’t I? Home alone all day with you here and there and people coming to the door and what not—”
“You’ve got Chippy, Ma.” Liam smiled slightly.
“Oh, pooh! Chippy’s just a cat.”
“And Bear.”
“Bear’s always with you. He’s stuck to you like a piece of lint.”
Liam signed and reached for his jacket. “You haven’t convinced me, Ma, but I guess she’s here now, like it or not. If you say you want her, I’ll keep her. When did you mention the woman was coming back?”
“She said she’d come to talk to you this evening. Arrange the particulars, if you were agreeable.” Ada picked up speed with her needles. “Oh, and Liam?”
He stopped, his hand on the doorknob. “What’s that, Ma?”
“Thank you, son.”
Liam sighed again and went out, closing the door quietly behind him. He started his rounds in what he and Jamie always called the Maternity Ward, where Sammy and her five pups were housed. He had another bitch ready to whelp in a couple more weeks— Sunny, a young Labrador with her second litter on the way. He’d move her in soon.
Liam handled each puppy and checked it over carefully, as he did every evening before observing them for ten or fifteen minutes. He liked to get to know each animal’s personality, keep an eye on every stage of a pup’s development. These little guys were just four weeks old but the chase-and-fetch instincts came early, and it was important to find out which pups were go-getters and which ones liked to snooze an extra five minutes if they could.
Then he went over to the kennel where Old Jimbo was housed with his pal, a neutered male called Spindle. Spindle was a mixed-breed, a weird-looking animal, the result of a Labrador mating with a weimaraner, a visitor he’d had one fall who got mixed-up with one of his best bitches when no one was looking. Spindle and Old Jimbo—who’d been called that since he was two years old—were inseparable. If they weren’t such close friends, Liam would have retired Jimbo to the house and a life of ease by the fire. The dog was getting too arthritic to go out in the boat the way he once had, but Liam knew it’d break his heart to be sent to the house. He seemed to know that house dogs weren’t real dogs—and Old Jimbo was a real dog, through and through.
If Liam hadn’t decided not to breed Jimbo any more and if he hadn’t made up his mind long ago to draw the line at breeding any kind of show animal, he’d have used Old Jimbo on Laurel’s bitch.
He had to admit Maggie was a good-looking specimen—like the woman who brought her. It was just that she was useless. An animal bred to be trotted around the ring in front of a judge. He had no interest in breeding useless dogs. There were already enough of them in the world.
Lights approached from the lane, and Liam paused on his way to the boarding kennels. The white older-model Suburban, Laurel’s sister drove, broke through the trees.
He watched her drive slowly into the yard and then jerk to a sudden stop. He shook his head. What he’d told his mother was true: he didn’t have a good feeling about this woman.
He drew in a deep breath, squared his shoulders and took a step toward the vehicle, as she opened the driver’s door. Might as well get it over with. She could thank his mother for the good news he was about to hand her. If it’d been strictly up to him, they’d both—she and the dog—be hitting the road.
CHAPTER FIVE
BY HALF PAST EIGHT, it was dark. Charlotte had already slowed, when she spotted Liam standing in the yard, in the glare of her headlights. She hit the brake hard, an automatic reaction.
Oops. She got out and zipped up her jacket. Well, never mind. Begin as you mean to go on with this man, she reminded herself. She jammed her hands deep into her jacket pockets. “Oh, hello! I didn’t see you there.”
Naturally, he said nothing. Don’t let him rattle you. “I guess you know about Maggie being here.”
He nodded.
“Is that going to be okay? I mean, can you take her as a boarder for a few weeks?” she rushed on. “Your mother says it’s all right.”
She stopped about ten feet from him. He was dressed very much as he had been the first time she’d seen him. Very casually, in working man’s clothes—jeans, boots, jacket.
“My mother doesn’t run the kennel.”
“Oh.” Charlotte knew her sudden blush wouldn’t show up in the deepening gloom. The yard lights were on, but at this time of night they made little difference. “Well, I’m sorry about that. You weren’t here when I came around or I would have spoken to you—”
He made a movement, as though to walk in the direction of one of the kennels. “I’m checking on the dogs. Maybe we can discuss this while I finish my rounds.”
Oh, definitely, Charlotte thought, hurrying toward him. Why waste time talking to a customer when you could be doing two things at once?
He held open the door to an outbuilding and waited for her to enter, then followed her in, flicking on a light as he closed the door behind him. The raucous sound of barking assaulted her eardrums. He whistled loudly, and the noise stopped.
“They don’t know you. That’s why they’re barking. It’s the Chessies, mainly. They’re natural guard dogs.”
She followed him as he walked along the length of the kennel, stopping to speak softly to each individual dog and to fondle its ears and run his hand down its sides. The dogs responded with big “grins” and wagging tails. Charlotte noted that the kennels were very clean, with raised sleeping platforms and cement runs that led to a door that opened to the outside. The scent of a mild disinfectant hung in the air. Along the wall were miniature brass harness hooks, with a collar and a lead hanging from each and a neatly printed card inset into a plastic sleeve with the animal’s name. Chester. Minnie. Kate. Scout. Sunny. Hunter. Ben. Two runs were empty.
“Are these all yours?”
“The two at the other end are young dogs I’m training, Chester and Minnie. Hunter’s mine, and so are Scout and Sunny. They’re brother and sister from two different litters. Kate’s mine. I got George and Spinner, those two Chessies over there, from next door.”
“Oh?” Charlotte noted the two light brown dogs, standing stiff-legged in one of the kennels, each on high alert, watching the humans.
“When the old man died, there was no one to look after them, so I brought them here.”
“I see. I notice they’re a different color than Bear.”
“He’s what they call a ‘dark brown.’ The breed comes in any color, as long as it’s brown,” he said. Charlotte expected a smile, but there wasn’t one. His gaze was steady on the two Rathbone dogs. “They’re what is called sedge. The color of dry grass.”
“What kind is that one?” She pointed to a spaniellike dog, quite different from the others. She was pleased to hear Liam so voluble. At least this was one subject he didn’t seem to mind talking about.
“A Clumber. A very old spaniel-type hunting dog, although the exact origin of the breed is unknown. Some think they’re French, originally. Whatever they are, they’re great gun dogs. Very calm. Belongs to a buddy of mine.”
Charlotte looked significantly at the two empty runs at the end of the building. “So, it looks like you’ve got room for Maggie, then?”
He straightened from where he’d bent to fondle Hunter’s ears and stared directly into her eyes. She felt a funny little shudder inside.
“Not really,” he said slowly. “I’ve never got room for dogs I don’t want on the place. This is a special case, I guess.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She tried to keep her tone even. Conciliatory. Friendly. After all, she was the one who needed the favor here.
“I raise and train retrievers. Working dogs. Hunters’ companions. I don’t have time for show dogs, which is what your sister raises. And I especially don’t have time for show bitches that might be going into heat. Do you understand?”
He gave her a hard look and she nodded automatically. She had to admit that was a reasonable excuse for refusing to take Laurel’s dog. “It’d only be until my sister gets home and I can ship Maggie back. A couple of weeks.”
“As it happens, my mother’s taken a fancy to your sister’s bitch so I’ll keep her while you’re in the area.” He glanced over at the runs again, then continued softly. “But it’s strictly a favor for my mother, so don’t thank me.”
“Oh, I didn’t plan to!” Charlotte retorted, stung. “I’d like to know what you’ve got against me and Maggie, anyway. You don’t even know us!”
“You?” His eyes were wary on hers, then abruptly he looked away again. “Nothing. Your big sister needs her ass kicked, but that’s hardly your fault.”
“Laurel couldn’t possibly have known anything about this mix-up!”
“She knew. She’d contacted me before on this subject. She knew very well that I wouldn’t agree to breed a show bitch. I considered it briefly, as a favor to an old friend, but in the end I decided against any exceptions to my rule.” He began to walk slowly toward the door at the other end of the building, and Charlotte fell into stride beside him.
“And why is that?” Charlotte hurried to match her pace to his.
“Because the dog world is small. Because if other breeders heard I was breeding my top gun dogs to show bitches, they’d be after me to do the same with theirs. I don’t need the aggravation.”
“Maybe Laurel didn’t realize you’d changed your mind. Maybe she thought it was still on,” Charlotte persisted. Annoyed as she was about Laurel’s duplicity—and she was quite certain Laurel had misled her—she still felt a need to defend her sister.
“She knew,” he said again. He glanced at her. “I have a feeling your sister thought you might be able to sweet-talk me into changing my mind, once you showed up here with her bitch.”
“Laurel would never do that!” Charlotte was furious with the turn this conversation had taken—after all, her sister!—but she couldn’t resist the thought: could she sweet-talk him into it? She could be pretty persuasive when she put her mind to it. Would serve him right, Mr. Know-Everything Dog Guy!
He turned to face her. “Don’t even think about it. The answer is no. You can pay me for board by the week. Eighty dollars is what I charge without any training, in advance. Take it or leave it.”
“Oh, I’ll take it. What choice do I have?” She was sure the irony was completely lost on him. “Can I go see Maggie now?”
Anything to get out of his company, since she was obviously so unwelcome! To think she’d been looking forward to meeting Liam Connery again, to seeing what had become of him. To think she’d actually dreamed about him more than once. She was annoyed with herself for the time she’d wasted, for all the tender thoughts and recollections she’d allowed herself to indulge in about her happy childhood years—especially her first feelings of attraction to a member of the opposite sex. The sappy sentimental fantasies she’d spun…. He was nothing at all like the boy she remembered.
“Maggie’s up at the house.”
Without another word, he disappeared into one of the outbuildings, and Charlotte went back to the truck to get her handbag, which contained her checkbook. With her appointment to meet Mr. Busby the next day and her need to get on with the job she’d come to do at the Rathbone estate, she didn’t have time to find anything else for Maggie. If she had the time, she’d scour the Island to avoid dealing with him.
What a man! Lucky for him he worked with dogs. Lucky for him his business didn’t depend on customer relations and people skills. He didn’t have any.
THE RATHBONE HOUSE—a mansion, really—was a large three-story building in the Second Empire style, popularized in the late 1700s in the United States. This house, built more than a hundred years later, had a mansard roof, slate in this case, and a huge wraparound veranda that didn’t really belong to the style and may have been added later. Out back, a glass conservatory was attached to one half of the south elevation, with doors leading from both the conservatory and the house to the extensive gardens, probably well over two acres and, sadly, in a state of serious neglect. Even some of the windows in the conservatory were broken.
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