Night Scents (21 page)

"Sure. Tomorrow." She pasted a phony smile on her face. "Thanks for stopping by. I really think we need to be careful of making mountains of molehills."

"Or vice versa," Andrew muttered.

"You need us," Benjamin said, "we'll be there."

That much, Piper knew, and always had known. Which didn't make life with her two big brothers any easier.

Chapter 10

Thunderstorms were moving in over Cape Cod. The air was muggy by northern standards, and Piper Macintosh was pedaling toward town like the proverbial bat out of hell. Clate slowed down alongside her. She gave him a scathing look from under her helmet and kept pedaling.

Embarrassed about last night on the beach?

No. Pissed about something. He expected it had to do with her brothers and what they tended to believe about him, what
she
should believe, maybe even wanted to believe. Falling for him had to give her pause. If she could just dismiss him, maybe next time the opportunity arose, she would resist tumbling around in the bay with him.

Clate understood how she must feel. He'd stared at his dark ceiling for much of the night, warning himself not to get involved with a woman whose life and ambitions were as different from his as Piper Macintosh's were.

She must have realized he'd ride alongside her all the way to town if he had to, because she stopped, rolled off her seat, and shot him a fierce look. Definitely pissed. Nothing embarrassed about her. She had on an oversized polo shirt that was probably about ten years old and those strategically cushioned bike shorts that always looked hot and uncomfortable to him.

His passenger window whined down. He peered over at her, resisted a grin. "You look like the Wicked Witch of the West on that bicycle."

"That was Miss Gulch."

He shrugged. "Same difference."

She straddled her bike, and he could see the sweat trickling down her temples, the humidity tough even on the water. She flipped her braid up and let it fall, as if to give her neck some air. Her breasts looked smooshed together under an exercise bra. Even so, a quick arrow of awareness found its mark.

"You want to develop Hannah's land," she told him.

He made sure he displayed no visible reaction. Whatever he did she would misinterpret. She was in that kind of mood. "What makes you think that?"

"I have my sources." She gave an airy toss of her head, which, between the helmet, the braid, and the sweat, she didn't quite pull off. She looked more troubled and irritated than disdainful. "All this stuff about privacy and just wanting to be left alone is just garbage, isn't it? It's a tactic to keep people from poking around in your business. You don't want to get to know anyone in Frye's Cove before you betray them."

She kept her tone cold and distant, but he could see that she was close to crying. She'd told him everything last night. She'd kissed him. She'd nearly made love to him in the sand. Now she was worried her brothers were right and she really was a fool when it came to men, that there wasn't one of them to be trusted.

Of course, her brothers were right.

"Your brothers," Clate said. "They heard a rumor."

"Does it matter who heard what?"

"Piper—"

Her eyes leveled on him. "Obviously I can't trust you."

"I never said you could."

She jumped back onto her bicycle, found the pedals, and launched herself back down the road.

He followed. She ignored him. He cursed under his breath, but loud enough for her to hear through the open passenger window. She ignored that, too.

Finally, he screeched ahead of her, stopped his car, and climbed out. He walked around to the trunk and leaned against it, one heel up on the bumper. She pedaled pell-mell toward him. She had several choices, none of them good. She could turn around and head home, in which case he would follow her back and they could continue their argument in her front yard. She could go around his car and continue on her way, in which case he would follow her all the way to town and they could continue their argument in front of the Macintosh Inn or somewhere equally public.

Or she could run him right up onto the roof of his car, in which case he could have her butt arrested.

She was still cooking along at top speed three yards in front of him. Daring her, he crossed his arms on his chest and didn't move.

For two cents she'd have rammed a nice tire mark up one of his legs. He could see it in her eyes.

But she stopped six inches from his toes.

"See?" He grinned at her. "I trust you."

"That had nothing to do with trust. That was pure arrogance. You made up your mind I wouldn't run you over, and you weren't going to give me the satisfaction of second-guessing yourself."

"Actually, I figured you would run me over, but if I moved, you'd plow into the back end of my car and hurt yourself."

She glared at him in disbelief. "So you were protecting me from myself?"

"We should all be lucky enough to have someone to protect us from our own worst instincts."

That only incensed her more. She leaped off her bicycle and probably would have thrown it at him if she didn't half believe he'd catch it with one hand and hurl it back. They were having that kind of fight, he thought. It was hellishly exhilarating.

"Damn it, I should have run you over!"

"No doubt."

"You arrogant S.O.B. You lying, conniving—"

"Don't forget untrustworthy."

"I haven't forgotten anything."

He dropped his foot to the road and moved toward her, and he skimmed a finger along her throat. "Nothing, eh?"

She licked her lips. "You're trying to distract me from my anger."

He grinned. "Damned right."

"If you were in my position, you'd be angry, too."

"Pissed as hell, probably. If what you heard were true."

"Isn't it?"

He shook his head.

"Why should I believe you?"

Using both hands, he straightened her helmet. "You shouldn't."

Without another word of explanation, he walked back to the front of his car, climbed in behind the wheel, and drove off, leaving her cursing in his dust. Next time, she could damned well ask him if a rumor she'd heard was true, before she jumped to conclusions and made accusations.

Except it was a hell of a lot easier to believe he was—what had she called him? A rogue, a cad, an arrogant S.O.B. Yeah. If he was a rotten bastard, it took her off the hook. It put her back on familiar ground. Piper Macintosh had crummy taste in men. Piper Macintosh couldn't trust herself to fall in love with someone who wouldn't lie to her. Piper Macintosh would end up like her eighty-seven-year-old aunt who'd married, briefly, late in life and had never had children.

Suddenly her face was in his window. He almost had a wreck. He pounded on his brake, and she came within inches of sideswiping him with her bike. He smashed the button to his automatic window, his heart pounding. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Catching up with you. I must have done a world-record sprint." Indeed, she was panting, sweating. "I wanted to tell you I'm off to Hannah's. Then later this afternoon I have an appointment in Chatham. Thought you'd want to know." She gulped in a breath. "In case you worried."

Because of the calls. Because somehow, deep down, she knew he'd passed an uneasy night, alert to every sound, every shadow. If a car had ventured down their dead-end road, he'd have pounced.

"Is this your way of apologizing?"

The muscles in her forearms tensed as she gripped the handlebars. "For what?"

"For believing rumors instead of checking with me first."

But in just a slight shift in her steady gaze, he saw that that wasn't it. The rumors about him wanting to develop his land on Cape Cod were just a convenient outlet for her volatile mood. Something else was wrong. "I've got to go," she said, sliding up onto her bicycle seat.

He kept his foot on the brake. "You went through Hannah's shoebox, didn't you?" His voice was quiet. He knew he'd landed on the real source of her dangerous mood, could imagine her sitting up late last night, poring over those decades-old letters.

She blinked back sudden tears, eased off the seat. "There was nothing—no smoking gun, no proof of treasure, no disproof. I don't even know for sure if my great-grandfather ever rescued a Russian princess. He talks about it in his letters." She swallowed, her eyes pinned straight ahead. "But it could just be a story he told her. He was so lonely, and he loved her so much. And my grandfather—his letters—" She swallowed. "He was so young when he found himself at war, then as sole guardian of his little sister."

"Maybe you can trace something through the dates of the letters."

"Maybe." She squeezed her eyes half-shut in an obvious effort to concentrate, to think beyond the emotions she'd felt as she'd gone through her aunt's ancient shoebox. "They don't say so outright, but you can tell neither my grandfather nor my greatgrandfather expected to make it home alive. They were horrified by war. Fear, longing, a sense of duty, a love of home and family." She brushed back tears with her fingertips. "They permeate every line of every letter."

"If Hannah was just seven," Clate said, gently steering Piper back on course, "someone must have read their letters to her. Maybe her father's tale of rescuing this Russian princess wasn't so secret. Someone else could have known about it eighty years ago."

"And planned to rob him when he came home?"

"It's possible."

"They were off course. Nobody could have predicted that."

"Maybe they were drawn off course. Maybe this guy just took advantage of the moment, of coincidence, and lured your great-grandparents onto a sandbar, robbed them, and left them to their fate."

She swung around at him. "And then what? Passed down the information to the next generation? Anyone old enough to have lured my great-grandparents onto that sandbar would be a hundred by now, at the youngest. I can't imagine some hundred-year-old guy making those calls to me. Besides, I know all the hundred-year-old people on Cape Cod, and none's even remotely a possibility."

"All right. Fair enough."

But she was on a roll. "If someone else knows about the treasure, it's because Hannah let something slip. If it was some secret that's been lurking around Frye's Cove for eighty years, I assure you, we'd have known about it."

"You meaning you Macintoshes."

"Yes. And I've been thinking—"

She hesitated. A hot land breeze gusted. She'd never make it to Hannah's and back before thunder and lightning struck, something Clate decided he shouldn't point out lest she think he was trying to run her life or assuming she was incapable of getting out of the rain. But Piper Macintosh had a lot on her mind. That much was clear.

Finally, her eyes as deep and dark a green as the pitch pine around her, she turned to him and said, calmly, "The threatening phone calls could have to do with you, not me. They never mentioned the treasure. My latest mission for Hannah could just be a coincidence. Other people could have heard the same rumors I did about you and land development. Maybe someone's trying to discredit you, get me to blame you for the threatening calls."