Night's Landing

by Carla Neggers

Nate dried off one hand and picked up the kitchen extension. “Dunnemore residence. Yes, sir, she’s right here.” He handed the phone to Sarah, his blue eyes piercing, unyielding, no hint of a smile now. “It’s President Poe.”

  Sarah took the phone, delighted—relieved—that it was a friend. “How are you? Thank you for calling.”

  “I’m well. How are you? And who was that who answered?”

  “That was Nate Winter, the other deputy who was shot with Rob. He flew down here this morning.”

  “So I heard. I should have said something to him. Please give him my best, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I was told about the note, Sarah,” Wes Poe said, his tone serious now, not just that of a family friend checking on her. “I’m worried about you. I’d put a Secret Service detail on you—”

  “No, please, don’t.”

  She could sense his smile. “I knew that’s what you’d say. At least Deputy Winter is there with you. They say he’s one of the best. Rock solid.”

  “He’s not really here in an official capacity. He’s just—” She glanced at him watching her. “Here.”

  “Well, it’s reassuring that he is there. I understand your parents are heading to New York sometime tomorrow. That’ll do you and Rob good. I know you’re both grown and tough as nails, but, still, it’s always nice to see your folks. Ev and I can’t wait to see you ourselves.”

  “Same here.”

  He was a natural politician in the best sense, genuine, able to make people feel at ease in his presence but still aware that he was president—and he was straightforward. Nonetheless, he had a gift for embellishment, a flare for story, that sometimes made Sarah wonder if it were more a Night’s Landing trait than just a Dunnemore trait. He didn’t employ it in policy decisions, only in playing the political game. But who could blame him? He was the self-made man who was found on a doorstep as a baby and raised by two maiden sisters. He wasn’t without fault. He’d fight for what he believed in.

  “I’ve got to go. Good night, Sarah. Ev and I love you dearly.”

  “I love you both, too. Give her my best.”

  After she hung up, Nate grunted. “I didn’t expect him to dial his own damn phone.”

  “He said he’s heard you’re rock solid.”

  Nate didn’t look thrilled. “I didn’t necessarily want to pop up on the president’s radar screen. He must be hoping this situation doesn’t end up biting him in the ass.”

  “At this point I don’t think he cares. He’s as worried about Rob as any of us.”

  “He offered to put a Secret Service detail on you?”

  “I turned him down.” She smiled. “I’ve got you.”

  She didn’t know why she said it, why she said it the way she did, so quietly, with her eyes on him. Before he could react, she tore open her box of dried apricots.

  Dump them into a pan, add a little water, cook them until soft.

  Then mash them.

  Add spices.

  Which spices? Cinnamon. For sure, cinnamon.

  I can’t think…

  She grabbed her apron, realized her hands were shaking.

  Nate slipped in behind her and took the apron from her hands, setting it on the counter, then catching her fingers into his and pulling her toward him. “If I’m complicating your life…”

  “You are. But I don’t mind.” She smiled, relishing the feel of his hands in hers. “I can’t be doing a whole lot for your life.”

  “More than you know. I thought your brother was dead the other day. I’d never met you. I’d never seen you cry. If I’d imagined you here when he called you, I don’t know if I’d have made it through that day.”

  “You would have. You did your job.”

  “I’m not doing it now.” He scooped one hand up her bare arm. “I’m breaking all the rules.”

  “But you’re not here officially. You’re recuperating.”

  He gave her a dubious smile. “Recuperating. Right.”

  She didn’t want to hear more and placed her hands on his shoulders. He was tall, and she almost had to stand on her tiptoes to reach him. Stretching upward, she found his mouth with hers, felt his instant response—she hadn’t surprised him as much as she might have thought. She wondered if he could see into her and recognize her desire for what it was, a physical yearning, an unresolved tension, a need she’d felt building from the moment she’d spotted him in the hospital, maybe even from the moment he’d picked up Rob’s cell phone after he’d collapsed, after they’d both been shot.

  Their kiss deepened, eliminating any thought she might have had that he’d want to hold back. He dropped his right arm—his uninjured arm—to her hips and lifted her onto him, pressing her against the counter, her shirt lifting. She could feel his arm hot against her bare skin.

  The lights were off in the kitchen. It was fully dark now.

  He drew back from their kiss and raised her shirt, easing it off, exposing her to the cool night air.

  “Sarah…”

  His fingertips skimmed over her breasts, her nipples hard inside her flimsy bra.

  She tried to undo the buttons on his shirt, but she didn’t get very far. Her movements were awkward, fumbling. Too much, she thought. She’d done too much today.

  He kissed one breast, lingering there as he unbuttoned his own shirt, pulling it off, casting it to the floor. She marveled at his skill even as she went breathless at the feel of his tongue.

  His chest and shoulders were muscular, his stomach flat. His arm was still bandaged, but there was no sign of blood.

  He shifted to her other breast, and she heard his belt unbuckle, his pants unzip, and her head spun with the reality of what they were about to do. But she wanted the release, had never been so desperate for sex. That was all this was, she warned herself. Sex. A physical release.

  She didn’t care.

  Somehow, he got her pants off, and she was impatient now, panting, a little shocked at her own behavior. “We can’t—are we going to make love on the kitchen floor?”

  Without answering, he lifted her off the counter, oblivious to any pain he might be feeling in his arm, and lowered her onto him. She gasped, falling back against the counter, but he didn’t let go, plunged himself deeper into her.

  She’d never in her life done anything like it.

  A half-dozen hard thrusts, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. She came in one great wave, moaning as he kept thrusting, going limp, spent, as he kept pulsing into her, until he shuddered, his body tensing, then going still.

  He remained inside her, holding her. She could feel his heart beating. They both were sweating. “Never on the kitchen floor,” he whispered, then kissed her softly and set her back down.

  He had the grace to gather up her clothes and hand them to her before scooping up his own, pulling on his pants.

  “Your arm?” she asked.

  “Throbbing.” He smiled back at her. “But it’s a good kind of throb.”

  She felt herself blushing, but tried to stop it. She was thirty-two years old, a Ph.D., a woman not completely inexperienced in relationships.

  But Nate was different, and it wasn’t just the headiness of the moment at work. He was hard-edged, impatient, no-nonsense—it was easy to find him sexy. A hard-ass federal agent. A Yankee mountainman.

  Yet she’d seen his concern, his kindness, his humor. With Rob, with his family. With her.

  Don’t fall for him. You’re in no state of mind.

  He left the kitchen without another word or a backward glance. She took it to mean he was giving her privacy, not that he wanted to go hang himself for having had sex with an injured deputy’s twin sister.

  But how did she know what he was thinking?

  She slipped into her clothes and washed her hands and face in the kitchen sink—she could hear Granny Dunnemore clucking with disapproval, nothing, of course, compared to what she’d have thought of her granddaughter screwing herself blind against the count
ers.

  Oh, God…

  Drying her hands, Sarah flipped on a light. She was exhausted. Spent. But she’d just toss and turn if she tried to go up to bed. She tore off the top of the apricots and dumped them into a saucepan. Flour—she’d need flour for the turnover-like crust. And oil for frying the pies. Brown paper sacks for letting them drain and cool.

  She and Nate could have fried apricot pies for breakfast.

  Twenty-One

  John Wesley Poe gave up on trying to get to sleep. He switched on the bedside lamp and sat up, haunted, even now, by the memory of taking fair-haired Betsy Quinlan to Night’s Landing for the first time.

  It was more than thirty years ago. Hard to believe. He’d done so much since then. Yet he still could feel his awkwardness, his sense of inadequacy, around brilliant, gentlemanly Stuart Dunnemore.

  And he could see the look in Betsy’s eyes when Stuart stood up to greet her on the front porch of the log house. He was a widower, no longer sad but so alone. He’d gone back to Washington by then but would come home for holidays, the occasional weekend. And he’d tend the family graves. His grandparents, his father, his brother, his wife. Granny—she wasn’t an actual grandmother until the twins were born but people called her Granny, anyway—hated going to the cemetery. She’d tap the side of her head and tell Wes that the people she’d lost were there, not buried deep in the earth.

  Wes had lost his virginity to Betsy Quinlan. She’d lost hers to him. Their college romance had been brief, not that well-known even among their friends. It was before Stuart, and nothing like the kind of love he and Betsy had for each other, the kind of love Wes had eventually found with Ev. Devastated when he and Betsy drifted apart, he had kept his pain to himself, but Leola and Violet had seen it—and they’d told him, these two elderly sisters who’d never married, that there was someone out there for him.

  That he and the Dunnemores had remained steadfast friends all these years was as much an accident of geography as anything else—they were neighbors. They had Night’s Landing in common.

  And Stuart, Wes thought. He owed so much to his longtime friend and neighbor. They’d sit on the porch late into the evening and listen to the crickets, talk about politics and international affairs, the economy, social justice, personal and public accountability, terrorism—and fishing, varieties of tomato plants, the weather. Wes remembered when the twins were born, how shocked and happy Stuart was to be a father at last, and Wes had known that Betsy had married the better man.

  Evelyn slipped into bed. She often stayed up late reading. She was a small, shy, attractive woman, more up to her role as First Lady than anyone had anticipated. People empathized with her awkwardness, the losses she’d endured.

  “You can’t sleep?” she asked.

  Wes shook his head. “No.”

  “I keep thinking about poor Sarah and Rob. What a nightmare this must be for them. To have had that wonderful visit together in Amsterdam, and just a few weeks later—” She shuddered. “It’s hard to think about Rob suffering. And Sarah’s only just home from Scotland. Don’t you just hate to think about what they’re both going through?”

  “Sarah’s back in Night’s Landing.”

  Ev shuddered. She’d always been ambivalent about Night’s Landing. She’d never been a part of his life there or had any interest in making the Poe house her own. She appreciated Wes’s devotion to Leola and Violet, but to Evelyn, the sisters were remote, quaint, a little unreal. She was from an upper-crust Belle Meade family—she ran in loftier circles than the Quinlans. Her connections had helped propel him to the governor’s mansion, not that it mattered. Wes had fallen hopelessly in love with her in his late twenties, years after Betsy Quinlan had married Stuart Dunnemore and had born twins.

  But Evelyn was no longer secure in his love for her—he didn’t know if she ever would be, if he ever could make her believe that she hadn’t let him down by not being able to bear children.

  “Wes.”

  “What is it, Ev?”

  “If you had it to do all over again, would you still marry me?”

  “Of course! Oh, Ev. Don’t think like that.”

  “I love Sarah and Rob as if they were our own, but I know they’re not. I’ve never discouraged you from being a part of their lives. The Dunnemores are almost as much your family as Leola and Violet were. But you can’t let your affection for them cloud your judgment.”

  “There’s no judgment to cloud. I’m on the sidelines.”

  She looked at him as only she could, with a frank honesty he’d come to expect and appreciate—to need in his life. “Do you really think so?”

  He didn’t answer, knew he couldn’t convince her.

  “You’d do anything for Sarah and Rob. Anything. I’m not the only one who knows it.”

  “Ev…”

  “Our love for them makes us both vulnerable, but especially you. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

  Wes sighed. She was the worrier, the conspiracy theorist, in many ways, more tough-minded than he was. He could lead and inspire, but he was the last to recognize an enemy. “I promise.”

  She rolled over, her back to him. Wes turned out the light. He listened to his wife take in sharp, fearful breaths, and he could almost feel her mind racing ahead, imagining terrible scenarios, working herself up into an anxious frenzy. So often, her instincts were on target.

  But not this time, Wes told himself. This time, she was worrying over nothing.

  Some thug in Central Park had tried to take out two federal agents.

  That was it. There was nothing more.

  Twenty-Two

  Sarah woke up early and alone in bed, a mockingbird singing outside her open window and the air smelling faintly of roses. But the familiar sounds and smells did nothing to soothe her after her night of unsettling dreams and images. She slipped into jeans and a lightweight hiking top and tiptoed down to the kitchen, the fried apricot pies where she’d left them on a brown paper sack.

  When she’d gone up to bed last night, Nate was in the shower. She’d slipped into her room and crawled under the covers, listened to the water turn off, the bathroom door shut, then his door shut, and she wondered if he was furious with himself for what had happened in the kitchen. If he regretted it because they both were under such stress, because he was a law enforcement officer and she was Rob’s sister—because, basically, he should know better.

  Then again, he might not regret anything.

  She poured herself a glass of iced tea and dialed Rob’s room at the hospital.

  She pictured them as little kids running through the house, their laissez-faire parents only vaguely aware of what they were up to most of the time. They’d catch frogs and snakes and explore the limestone caves and sinks along the riverbank, and in winter, they’d wait for an ice storm so they could get out their orange plastic flying saucers and try to make it as close to the riverbank as possible—not that they ever went into the water. Once, Rob had slid off his saucer and cut his face and hands on the ice that covered every blade of grass, every exposed twig. It was the first time Sarah remembered seeing him in real pain.

  He answered his phone himself.

  “Am I calling too early?” she asked cheerfully.

  “Yes. What’re you up to?”

  “I’m about to eat a fried apricot pie for breakfast. I made them last night before bed.”

  “Where’s Nate? Is he behaving himself?”

  She sipped her tea, welcoming the jolt of sweetness. “I think he’s still in bed.”

  “Stay on your toes with him. I know you like those old fusty academic types, but the guy has a hell of a reputation with women.”

  “What old fusty academic guys?”

  “Come on. You don’t trust hard-ass guys like Nate. You figure they’re just after your body not your mind—”

  “Rob! You must be feeling better.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded relieved, as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

>   “Don’t worry about me, okay? I can take care of myself.”

  “Nate’s married to the job, but he’s got total focus—he’s the best at what he does, no matter what little tootsie he’s got on the side.”

  “Little tootsie?” Sarah made herself smile, hoping it’d reflect in her voice. “Thanks for the warning, but maybe it’s time I let a hard-ass type have his way with me.”

  “Oh, man. I don’t even want to go there. Have you talked to Mother and Dad? They’re heading to New York.” He didn’t sound enthusiastic. “They’ll be here in time to tuck me in tonight.”

  “Aren’t you lonely?” She was half kidding.

  Rob scoffed. “Not a chance. All the brass will roll out for them when they get here. Just what I need. I hate for Dad to make the trip when it’s not necessary.”

  It was more than that, Sarah knew. He hated for their father to see him in the condition he was in, seriously injured on a job both parents thought he wasn’t suited for. To them, Rob was a fun-loving charmer, an average student who excelled at languages because he liked them. They didn’t really believe he had the backbone to be a federal agent. They feared he was a throwback to the Dunnemores of old, adventurous but without their tough recklessness, their ability to truly not give a damn.

  “Dad’ll be fine,” she said. “He’ll probably live to be a hundred. Rob, you know he’s proud of what you do.”

  “He’d rather I were secretary of state.”

  She tried to laugh but hated how low he sounded. “But then you’d have to answer to Wes, and that’d never work. It’s not like getting shot proves Dad right—it was never a question about being right, anyway. It’s about his hopes for you.”

  “I know.”

  But there was something in his tone. Sarah frowned. “You’re not getting depressed on us, are you?”

  “Dreading seeing the old man with my spleen in a garbage disposal and a scar—” He broke off, and she could hear that he was in a slump. “There’s something I’m missing. I don’t know. This guy you saw in Central Park—”

  She picked at the browned edges of a fried pie. “I’m sure it’s a case of mistaken identity. I almost wish I hadn’t mentioned him.”