Strangers When We Meet (9 page)

The orange and gold wallpaper was peeling off in long strips, a blessing, to Emma’s way of thinking. But there was a fireplace of warm redbrick at the far end, flanked by windows that looked out over the small valley. Here the shabby linoleum had been torn away in spots, and the wide-planked wooden floor that lay beneath showed through. If the sagging ceiling were pulled down, hand-hewn beams would also come into view, Emma surmised.

She could imagine sitting in front of the blazing fireplace, a kettle of soup simmering on the stove behind her. She would watch the deer come out to feed as darkness crept across the snow-covered meadows to wrap the old house in winter solitude, sealing the family inside in a cocoon of warmth and comfort. Suddenly, it was clear to Emma what had drawn Blake to this place.

She blinked away the fantasy and focused once more on the atrocious flowered wallpaper. Blake grinned at the look on her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, grinning back. “It’s...it’s so sixties.”

“My parents would be right at home in here.”

He crossed to the chipped enamel sink and began to work the handle of an old-fashioned pump fixed to the counter. A rush of clear, cold water poured into the sink. “Go on. Take a drink. It’s safe. I had it tested.”

Emma cupped her hands under the flow and drank deeply. “It’s good.”

Blake copied her motion.

“I remember what you said about your parents. That they had stayed true to the Sixties.”

“Yep. They’re the original flower children. The last of the hippies. They met in the summer of love. They don’t care a fig about money or investments. They live close to the land, and close to the bone, and are happy doing it. But it’s a hell of a way to raise three kids. Hand-me-down clothes, goat cheese sandwiches and bean sprouts in your lunch sack when everyone else is eating burgers and fries. A dad who had a ponytail and an earring when everyone else’s old man wore a suit and tie to work, or at least jeans and boots, not bell-bottoms and sandals. It was hardest on my sister, Summer. My mom despises makeup. She still wears granny dresses and tie-dye, and she hasn’t shaved her legs...well, ever, I guess.” He stopped talking abruptly. “Sorry. I’m making it sound like some kind of nightmare.”

“No, you’re not. Flared legs and tie-dye are very chic again. But ten years ago it must have been hard on your sister.”

“My poor folks still don’t know where they went so wrong. They want nothing to do with what they still think of as the Establishment—the military-industrial complex. They raised us to be self-sufficient and at one with nature, as they call it.” He gave a rueful chuckle. “They did their damnedest to try to keep us out of the mainstream, but instead they got three workaholic overachievers.”

“Three? Another sister?”

“A brother. Ash. He’s an engineer. Summer’s a pediatrician. Or soon will be. I’m the oldest.”

“I’m an only child but I want a big family of my own someday. Three kids at least.” She didn’t know why she was telling him all this, but somehow it was making it easier to ask what she needed to know.

“And what about Daryl?” His voice had taken on a hard edge. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked out the small window above the sink.

“He comes from a big family—the youngest of five children. He says two are more than enough. And he wasn’t in any hurry to have those.”

“Wasn’t?”

“A slip of the tongue.” Daryl had said he wanted to talk tonight. To get things settled between them, to make things right. She had to focus on that. Not on the width of Blake’s shoulders or the deep timbre of his voice as he talked of his family.

She turned and walked out of the kitchen into what must have once been the living room or, more likely, the parlor of the old house. There was another fireplace, with glazed tile edging, and a mirror over the mantel that was wavy and dull where the silvering had worn away.

Emma swiveled from the mirror. She looked lost and apprehensive in its wavering reflection, so she moved to look out the smudged and dusty front window at the Berkshire Realty sign. A car came into view from around a curve and drove slowly by the house. The man inside stared at Emma for a moment through the dusty glass, then accelerated with a spurt of gravel and disappeared along the winding road. The car had the look of an airport rental, nondescript and plain. Perhaps the barely glimpsed man behind the wheel was a city dweller looking for a place to put down roots just as Blake had done. He would go back to his motel and place a call to Berkshire Realty inquiring about the dilapidated old farmhouse at the end of the gravel lane.

“He’ll be back,” Blake said, coming up behind her. “It’s a dead-end road.” She could feel the heat of his body in the cold room, and she longed to lean into it, lean into him and be warmed by his strength.

She didn’t care about the man in the car or where he was going. “It was Daryl you found with your Heather, wasn’t it?” she asked in a voice she hardly recognized as her own.

Blake remained silent. Emma could feel her pulse beating in her throat, in her head. She counted the beats, fifteen, twenty. “Yes,” he said at last.

That had been only a few days ago. Two weeks after Emma had seen them together in the restaurant. “And she’s beautiful and sleek, with hair the color of moonlight.” Here was her proof Daryl had been lying all along. Emma braced herself for the pain she thought would come, but there was none.

“She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”

She was cold and wrapped her arms around herself, breathing in the stale air of the old house. Suddenly she wished she were outside. “What do you suppose the odds are of us meeting this way?”

“Pretty steep, I imagine. I’ve always stayed in Williamstown when I’ve come up here before. The last time I drove through town, the B and B wasn’t even open, but I liked the look of the place and decided to bring Heather here to propose and close the deal on the farm.”

“Daryl told me the deal was going sour. He said he was showing it to a couple of prospects in the next few days. Are you going to let your option lapse and walk away?”

“I don’t know. I’ve certainly had second thoughts. Cooper’s Corner’s a small place. Hard not to run into Tubb now and then.”

Daryl and Heather’s philandering had ruined more dreams than hers, Emma realized. Blake’s plans for his future were as cold and dead as the ashes in the fireplace.

“Poor Daryl. He must feel like the most unlikely guy on earth. One-in-a-million chance I’d see him with Heather. One-in-a-million chance you and I should meet.”

Blake spun her around so quickly she stumbled against him. He steadied her with his hands on her arms. “He’s a damned fool. A lying idiot. Don’t waste your sympathy on him. He betrayed you with Heather.”

“More than once, do you suppose?” she asked. As she watched, his eyes darkened with anger and hurt pride before he shuttered the emotions that lay behind them.

“Would it make a difference?”

“It might have if he’d told me the truth in the beginning. People make mistakes...they do foolish hurtful things they regret.”

“You said you were meeting him tonight. Do you think he finally plans to tell you the truth?”

She wanted to ask him why it was so important to him to know what she was going to do next. Was it because he was beginning to care for her? Was that why he’d brought her here? So that she would come to the conclusions she had? She was too unsure of her careening emotions, her reaction to him, to ask outright. “I hope so. We can’t resolve anything between us until he does.”

“Are you saying you’re willing to forgive and forget?”

“No. I’m not ready to do that, either.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

She wished he would take her in his arms and kiss her the way he had the day before. Then she would tell him she and Daryl were through. That she had already made arrangements to move out of the room Daryl had booked for them and into her grandparents’ home. But he didn’t move a muscle, didn’t make a sound. His eyes, which usually held the warmth of a green and gold summer’s day, were as bleak as the November sky overhead.

The room grew even colder as she felt his withdrawal. She was chilled to the bone and shivered, hunching her shoulders inside Maureen’s coat. “I don’t know. But whatever it is, I can’t make the decision here. Please, will you take me back to Twin Oaks?”

CHAPTER NINE

H
E
SURE
AS
HELL
had made a mess of things. He should never have given in to the impulse to bring Emma to the farm. So much for doing the honorable thing. He made a lousy knight in shining armor. He hadn’t come right out and told Emma that Daryl was sleeping around on her, but that was only a technicality. He’d dropped enough hints to make even the most trusting of women suspicious.

He wanted Emma to know the truth about the creep she’d been planning to marry, but he hadn’t had the patience or the guts to get out of the way and let her come to the right conclusions on her own. Now she was mad at him, and she had every right to be.

She hadn’t spoken a word since they’d left the house, just stared down the gravel road that skirted the hillside and headed into town. He knew what she was thinking. She didn’t want to hike through the woods with him. She was going to take the long way back, on her own.

“It’ll be raining before you get halfway there if you go that way,” he said, pulling his hat out of his back pocket and settling it on his head to give him something to do with his hands.

She nodded. “I know,” she replied grudgingly. “Maybe someone will come along like that car a few minutes ago, and I can hitch a ride.”

Even in Cooper’s Corner it wasn’t a wise idea to accept rides with a stranger, and she knew it. “That was probably the only car that’s been down this road all day, and he was going in the wrong direction.”

Emma gave him a slanted look. “It’s not going to be a piece of cake hiking back through the woods, either. It’s already getting dark. The clouds have thickened a lot since we set out.”

“I shouldn’t have brought you so far.”

“You didn’t bring me. I agreed to come along. There’s a difference,” she said with the stubborn tilt to her chin he was coming to recognize. “There’s no use standing here arguing about it. We’d better start walking, or you’ll be late for tea.”

“I don’t give a damn about tea.”

“But I give a damn about keeping my grandparents waiting for their dinner.”

She set off across the road and into the trees, straight-backed and silent once more. Blake dropped back a step or two and let her lead the way. She entered the woods without once looking back, but stopped on the top of the ravine and peered into its shadowy depths. “It looks even steeper from this angle,” she said, biting her lip.

Blake moved past her and held out his hand. She hesitated, a frown wrinkling her forehead. “C’mon,” he said. “You can be mad at me again on the other side.”

“I’m not mad,” she insisted, then shut her mouth and concentrated on getting down the steep, rocky slope.

They crossed the narrow bottom of the ravine in a dozen steps, skirting a fallen pine tree and using its slender trunk as a base for a quick scramble up the less steep side. Blake halted at the top and put his hands on his knees to catch his breath. “Whew,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll make this hike again.”

Emma was breathing hard, too. “Next time we drive.” It was just a figure of speech, he told himself. She didn’t really mean there would be a next time.

From the direction of the road, of the farmhouse, he heard a car approach, then idle. A car door slammed. The guy they’d seen before coming back to get a closer look? Or Tubb, bringing a prospective buyer to check out his house? The sounds were faint, distorted by distance and the trees on the far side of the ravine.

Emma heard them, also. “Do you want to go back and see who it is?” she asked, still a little breathless.

“No.”

“I don’t suppose it’s anyone I’d be comfortable asking for a ride into town.”

She meant Tubb, and they both knew it. “Probably not.”

She made a little face. “I don’t want to climb down into that ravine again today, anyway.”

He scaled the big rock that blocked their path, then reached down and pulled her up beside him. The birds had quit singing. The day was over as far as they were concerned. Even the squirrels had ceased their querulous chatter. Emma’s cheeks and nose were pink with cold and exertion, but her hair was still gloriously copper-tinged even in the fading light. It framed her head like a crown and begged a man to run his fingers through the silky strands. She’d pushed it behind her ears, and the wink of tiny amethyst studs drew his attention to her earlobes. Small, curved, just the right size and shape to nibble on before stringing kisses down her throat and lower, to her breasts. In Maureen’s sage green coat with the dark orange scarf framing her face, she looked as if she belonged to the earth, to the forest, to this place.

To the farmhouse behind them. He had a sudden image of her before the kitchen fireplace, turning to greet him as he came in from the cold, her hair and eyes as softly luminous as they were now, her belly round with child.

His child? Or Daryl’s?

He tightened his grip unthinkingly, and she gave a grunt of pain, stumbling a little on the uneven surface of the rock. He pulled her close. “I’m sorry, Emma.”

“It’s all right.” She flexed her hand a little. “I wasn’t going to fall, you know.”

He couldn’t come right out and tell her about his vision. He had no right to say such intimate things to her. He’d told Daryl he’d give him one more chance to tell her the truth, and evidently he’d taken it. Until she’d heard him out tonight, she was as off-limits as if she were wearing his ring. “I thought I felt you slip,” Blake lied.

She looked at him for a long moment, and a little furrow appeared between her softly arched eyebrows. He could feel her sizing him up, trying to read his thoughts. “That’s not it at all. Something’s bothering you. It has been all afternoon. And I’m not leaving this rock until you tell me what it is. Did seeing the farmhouse upset you that much? Were there memories of Heather there that put you in such a bad mood?”

“I told you, I’m over Heather. And even if I wasn’t, she only saw the place once. She never got five feet past the front door. A bat came down the stairway and scared the bejeezus out of her.” His tone was too harsh, his words little more than a growl. Her frown deepened.

“Then it has to do with Daryl.”

“You’re good, Emma.” She didn’t give up easily, and her instincts were dead on. That’s what made her so successful at what she did. He could almost be enjoying this if he wasn’t aware, deep inside himself, that his whole future hinged on her meeting with Daryl Tubb in just a few hours. He was tired of dancing around the truth. He was tired of guerrilla tactics. Sometimes a straight-on frontal assault worked best. “I brought you here with the express purpose of getting you to ask me if Tubb was the guy I caught screwing around with Heather. I couldn’t take the chance you’d make the connection yourself.”

“You don’t pull your punches, do you.”

“Not when it’s important.”

“I knew it was Daryl you caught with Heather that night,” she said quietly. “I’ve known in my heart for a while now.” The whole woods seemed to have gone silent around them except for the wind sighing high in the tree branches and the idling car engine that lingered at the edge of his senses and reminded him they weren’t the only two people left on earth.

“I figured as much, but I couldn’t leave it to chance. I couldn’t keep my nose out of your business. And that makes me as big a jerk as Tubb.”

She watched him closely, not blinking, the wind lifting tendrils of her glorious hair to curl them around her cheek. “Why?”

He couldn’t just blurt it out. What sane, intelligent woman would believe he’d fallen in love with her in forty-eight hours? Especially when he’d met her hungover from mourning a broken love affair? It was insanity to even admit it.

“I didn’t want you to make a mistake that would haunt you the rest of your life,” he said, sounding pompous and hating it.

“How noble.” He deserved the sarcasm he caught in her tone. Her eyes were locked on his face, the tiny frown still in place on her forehead.

“Yeah, real noble. In a pig’s eye. I feel like some kind of low life, sneaking around in the back yard waiting for Tubb to leave the house so I can steal the silver.”

“Considering I’m the silver in that metaphor, I think I should remind you that I’m no man’s property.”

He pulled off his red ball cap and raked his hand through his hair. “Oh, hell, Emma. You know what I mean. I feel like a jackass. Don’t make me worry about being PC, too.” There was too much at stake. He wanted desperately to know if she felt the same way. But he couldn’t push her any further. This wasn’t war. She wasn’t a hill to be taken at any cost. Hell, this wasn’t even Wall Street, where he’d wine and dine a client and agree with him on everything from politics to penne to close a deal. This was his future standing before him, and she was still promised to another man.

She lifted her hands and rested them on his chest. Her touch was light, but the heat of it burned through his shirt like fire. “I want the truth, Blake. I’m tired of evasions and lies from the men in my life.”

“I didn’t just bring you up here so you’d realize Tubb was the two-timing bastard he is. I wanted there to be no doubt in your mind he was a worthless SOB. I wanted to make sure you’d send him packing tonight.”

“How did you intend to convince me of that?”

He didn’t know if it was an invitation or a challenge. He didn’t care much which it was, but he was damned certain he wasn’t going to answer it with words. “Like this.” He pulled her close and covered her mouth with his.

She didn’t open to him, not right away. She stiffened a little and he gentled his touch. He didn’t want this to be the hurried, furtive coupling it had been in the pile of leaves. He wanted this to be a kiss that she would never forget, a branding, a claiming. Pulling back slightly so their lips barely met, he lifted his hands to her face, twining his fingers through her hair to hold her still. Before returning his quest to her mouth, he brushed his lips across her cheek, her eyelids, the curve of her earlobe, which had so intrigued him earlier. At last he touched his lips to hers once more, lightly, testing.

She opened slightly to his touch, tasted his bottom lip with the tip of her tongue. Blake felt control begin to slip out of his grasp and clamped down on it with an iron hand. He slanted his mouth across hers, sliding his tongue between her teeth, drinking deeply of the silky moistness within. She tasted of cinnamon and spice and the sweet heat of desire. Her hands clenched handfuls of his shirt as she strained toward him, letting her tongue duel with his. She wanted him. He knew that as well as he knew his own name and exulted in the certainty. She didn’t have to tell him with words that she was through with Tubb. He could sense it in her response to him. Emma Hart was not the kind of woman to play one man against another.

But God help him, he wanted to hear her say the words. To tell him aloud that she was free of her obligation to Tubb. Free to love again, completely and until the end of time.

His heart beat like a drum in his chest. His blood pounded in his ears. But it was no longer from the intoxication of physical desire. Something wasn’t right. The atmosphere around them had changed subtly, ominously. He could feel it in his gut, in the primitive brain at the base of his skull. Responses embedded in his bones and psyche by the unrelenting taskmasters at Parris Island many years before, and honed to a fine edge by Desert Storm and the street fighting of Somalia, kicked into high gear.

He lifted his mouth from hers and scanned the darkening woods beyond the ravine.

Emma stood rooted to the spot, her eyes closed, her mouth still open slightly as though waiting for another kiss. “Don’t stop,” she whispered, and lifted herself on the tips of her toes to bring his mouth to hers. “Not yet.”

“Emma, we’re not alone.” The hardness in his voice got through to her.

Her eyes flew open, the dreamy desire that had darkened them to burned sugar giving way to unease. “What do you mean? Is someone watching us?”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right,” he said as she spun to follow his gaze, peering into the gathering darkness of a short November twilight.

“I don’t see anything.”

Neither did he. Not that he could pinpoint. But the prickling at the base of his skull wouldn’t go away. And once again he noticed the silence of the creatures who called these woods home. There should be a grouse drumming for his mate off in the distance. A squirrel or two scolding the human intruders away from their treetop nests. Crows noisily settling in for the night. But he heard none of those things. Nothing but the wind in the trees. He couldn’t even hear the car idling out on the road anymore.

He’d been more than a little preoccupied with kissing Emma, but he couldn’t remember hearing it drive away.

The short hair at the back of his neck stood on end.

“Time to go, Emma,” he said gruffly. A flicker of movement through the trees on the far side of the ravine added a harsh urgency to his words.

Emma gave him a narrow look over her shoulder. “I still don’t see anyone,” she said in the tone of voice he already knew presaged an argument.

He wasn’t about to stand on top of a six-foot-high granite rock and discuss the finer points of Marine survival training with her. He wanted to get low and keep moving. The farther into the trees they went, the less of a target they presented. He reached out and grabbed her hand, spinning her around as the unmistakable sound of a shotgun shell being loaded into the chamber broke the unearthly silence. Dragging Emma along with him, he launched himself off the rock. It was a split second too late.

He never heard the shot that caught him low on his left side.

There was a jumbled confusion of sound and sensation. He would recall until the moment he died the swirl of green and red-orange as the skirt of Maureen’s coat billowed around Emma’s slender form, the look of disbelief on her face as the force of the slug tearing through the fabric and into his flesh threw them backward off the rock.

They landed hard, knocking the air out of both of them. His mind eddied with darkness and white hot pain, a nauseating combination that kept him on his knees for too many precious seconds. They had to get moving, away from the shooter in the trees.