The First Kiss

by Grace Burrowes

  Putting that into words hurt. Badly. B-flat-minor badly.

  “Then you shouldn’t mind having him represent you. James is a gentleman, and adept at keeping work and play separate when he has to. Come on.” Trent was at the door, holding it open for her. “We’ll brace him together, and if he’s uncomfortable at the thought of representing you, he’ll be honest enough to say so.”

  Vera let Trent escort her to James’s office, the door to which was open. James was on the phone, but he motioned Trent into the room, then came to his feet when Vera followed Trent.

  “Then you tell them to call me,” James said into the receiver. “I can explain it to them, their lawyers, their mamas, or their dancing pet ferrets, and when I do, they’ll either sign the contract or walk.”

  His voice held a thread of steel, one Vera hadn’t heard before. She used the moment while James concluded the call to examine him more closely.

  Around his mouth and eyes, fatigue had left faint lines. His tie was loosened, his cuffs turned back, and his suit coat hung over the back of his chair. His desk, usually tidy in the extreme, sported a half-dozen files piled on top of each other, and two fat brown books that were opened to reveal tiny dark print in two columns on each page.

  James really was a lawyer. Somehow, Vera hadn’t realized it the way she was realizing it now.

  “Vera, a pleasure, as always.” He extended his hand to her but didn’t move from behind the desk.

  Ouch. When what Vera wanted was to feel James’s arms around her, to breathe in his woodsy scent, to feel the warmth and strength of his body against hers. Ouch.

  “Vera has a problem,” Trent said, gesturing to one of James’s guest chairs. Vera took the chair, and Trent took the second guest chair. “Donal is suing her for specific performance of her contracts with a half-dozen venues, using his status as third-party beneficiary to do so. She might be within her rights to cancel the dates, but I haven’t seen the language, and this isn’t my area of legal expertise.”

  James was quiet for a moment, then he swung his gaze to Vera. “Are you asking me to represent you?”

  “Trent said you’re the best.”

  Vera felt about two inches tall, like somebody ought to hold her accountable for the consequences of her actions, Veracity Penelope Waltham. She couldn’t be bothered to talk to James about their personal problems, but here she was, willing to use his legal talent for her own benefit.

  And oh, she’d pay him, of course. What did that make her?

  “There you are.” Hannah Knightley appeared in James’s doorway, her gaze on her husband. “Vera, I didn’t know you were here. I’m sorry for interrupting. Trent, I’ll be in my office when you’re ready to go.”

  She withdrew with a little wave, and Trent glanced at the clock on the wall. James looked, if anything, irritated at the interruption.

  “Has Donal filed his complaint yet?” James asked.

  “I have it,” Trent said. “I’ll pass it along to your assistant and leave you two to discuss strategy.”

  “Vera hasn’t accepted my representation.”

  “Yes, I have,” Vera said, “and you have my thanks as well for taking the case.”

  Trent followed his wife from the office, and a silence stretched. Awkward, jagged silence, full of wrong notes and regrets.

  “You truly don’t want to go back to performing?” James asked.

  Insightful, of course. James was wickedly insightful. “You think I should?”

  A question for a question. Vera was spending too much time around lawyers.

  Or not enough.

  “You enjoy the performing, Vera, but if you do go back to it, it should be on your terms. Where is this tour?”

  Why was James the only person to ever insist on that—that the music be on her terms?

  “This tour is in Europe, a four-week hitch, six performances, some master classes, lectures in England, a recital with an Irish tenor. It would be lucrative.”

  “Would you enjoy it?”

  Blessed Saint Anthony, Vera had missed James badly. Missed the steady regard in his eyes, the way he cut to the quick of any issue and put it in perspective for her without getting his own agenda involved.

  “I don’t know, James. There’s the whole business of what to do with Twy, but the dates aren’t until next summer. I have time to figure that out.”

  James tidied up the case files and closed the law books, so his desk assumed a more orderly appearance.

  “You also have time to think about this lawsuit,” he said. “We don’t have to file an answer for a few weeks, and I can usually make room for negotiation.”

  He hadn’t tried to negotiate with Vera, not since she’d cut him loose weeks ago.

  “What sort of room?”

  James explained his thinking to her: A shorter tour, a smaller cut for Donal, an exchange of these venues for those much closer to home, all manner of variables and combinations that would avoid litigation, get Vera some concert exposure, and back Donal down, if not defeat him entirely.

  “You truly are brilliant at this,” she said when they’d spent some time parsing the possibilities. “But do you enjoy it?”

  James pursed his lips—lips Vera had kissed on not enough occasions.

  “I’m thinking about that lately. I don’t know the answer.” He settled back in his chair and regarded her from across his desk. “You doing OK, Vera?”

  No. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. Have you started a new list?

  “I’m managing. You?”

  He paced to the window, turning his back to her. “What do you want me to say, Vera? I can pretend I’m doing fine—I see now that I’ve become expert at that—but there’s an ache—” He scrubbed his hand over his nape. His hair needed a trim. “I’m managing too. Tell Twyla I said hi, and that Inskip’s cows are leaving babies all over the pasture.”

  “Which she will want to come see. She misses you.” An admission, but James looked merely puzzled to hear it.

  “James, what’s going on between you and Hannah?” The question came out, no forethought, no planning. No warning to even Vera herself.

  “Hannah? She’s married to Trent. I love her, and I love her daughter. They’re family.” He looked more than puzzled now; he looked bewildered.

  “You have her favorite tea, I’ve seen her in your embrace more frequently than her own husband’s, you’re the first person she came to visit after cutting her honeymoon short, and you look at her daughter as if—”

  “You think I’d poach on my brother’s preserves? You think I’d—But then, you’ve seen my list, and you probably think I’m the Damson Valley booty call of the decade.”

  No, Vera did not. At her most doubtful and upset, she hadn’t quite been able to believe that about him.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Vera said, “but I’ve seen you with that woman in your arms on more occasions than a mere brother-in-law could easily claim, and at least once, James, she was in tears.”

  Vera didn’t tell him she’d seen Hannah’s car in his driveway. Let him volunteer an explanation for that. Please, God, let him volunteer an innocent explanation for that.

  “There’s nothing clandestine between me and Hannah, and that’s all I can tell you. I love her, she’s family, and I love Grace. But it’s not—it’s nothing I would ever be ashamed of.”

  It’s not what you think by any other name.

  Also not the reassurance Vera had been longing to hear—far from it—but not protesting too much, either.

  “There’s something, James, isn’t there?”

  Unrequited passion on his part, maybe. A crush at least?

  “Not something I can discuss. Not now.”

  “Someday?”

  How pathetic was the catch in her voice? How painful was the thought of having no someday
s with James, ever?

  James shifted the painting of porch flowers a quarter inch, so it hung absolutely plumb.

  “I can’t promise that either, Vera. All I can tell you is I’m not in love with my sister-in-law.” He gave the words particular emphasis, but still, he was holding back.

  Withholding.

  “Then I guess we’re at a standstill. A grand pause.”

  “Which is usually followed by a virtuosic cadenza.”

  He would get the musical analogy. “If the piece features a soloist,” Vera said. And apparently it did. Two soloists, who weren’t to perform together. “I’ll see myself out, James, and thanks again for taking this case.”

  He did not walk her to her truck. That was fortunate, because Vera was in tears before she crossed the parking lot.

  * * *

  James toyed with the idea of buying the home place, and even made an appointment to walk through it with a real estate agent. The previous owner had died, a sister had inherited, and the price suggested she was testing the waters more than looking to flip the place.

  The house was in good shape, but James didn’t make an offer. Mac had been right: a farm, a real working farm, was an enterprise for family, at least in western Maryland, and James could not envision starting a family with anybody but the lady who’d already lost faith him.

  So he walked his own land, and after the moon rose, he walked Inskip’s woods. The peepers were singing, the occasional owl hooted, and the deer came mincing down their trails to graze the pastures.

  His steps took him nowhere in particular until he realized he was at the tree line facing Vera’s property.

  Again.

  James found a fallen log and sat himself down on it, watching for the flickering shadows that would tell him Vera was still awake.

  She’d had doubts about James’s regard for Hannah, and if he’d known—if he’d had the least inkling of her suspicions, he might have done a better job of fielding her questions.

  No, not might have. He would have spelled the situation out for her somehow without crossing the lines he could not ethically cross. He would have done better than a dumbstruck silence Vera could construe in only the worst possible light.

  He would do better, in fact. He’d rehearsed his speech, polished it, learned it by heart, and even practiced it.

  James was considering knocking on Vera’s door when a shadow moved around the side of the house. The figure knelt, and James had to wait for the moon to come out from behind a cloud to make out what was happening.

  Somebody was pulling up the pansies, plant by plant.

  James was already on his feet when his cell phone buzzed.

  He turned his body to make sure no telltale glow gave away his position, and hit answer.

  “James?” Vera, and she was whispering.

  “I’m right here.”

  “Thank God. I’m home, Twyla’s upstairs asleep, and I swear there’s somebody outside. I didn’t want to bother you, but you’re much closer than the sheriffs, and what if it’s only a raccoon… Are you there?”

  “Vera, are the doors locked?”

  “Always, but I haven’t enabled the alarm system yet for the night.”

  “You’re safe as long as the house is locked up tight. Stay away from the windows and get upstairs. I’m on my way, and the bastard won’t know what hit him.”

  “Be careful, James.”

  “Always. Upstairs now, Vera, and away from the windows.”

  He closed the phone, slid it into a pocket, and with years of wandering in the woods and fields to his credit, made a soundless approach to the house. James was so silent, in fact, that he was able to creep right up on the intruder, knee the idiot flat to the sidewalk, and knock the breath right out of him.

  “MacKay, if it weren’t for the tenderheartedness of the woman in that house, I’d take pleasure in reading your beads until you were blind in both eyes and singing soprano. Now on your feet, and move.”

  James hauled his captive up by the scruff of the neck, kept him in a half nelson, and frog-marched him to Vera’s front door.

  “Ring the damned bell, MacKay, and start praying.”

  * * *

  How could James have gotten to her property so fast?

  Vera was halfway down the stairs before it occurred to her James might not be at her door. It could be a trap, a decoy…

  She kept the lights off and went to the bay window in the music room, where she could peer out and see James Knightley on her front porch, a shorter man standing right in front of him.

  She turned on lights and went to the foyer, keeping the chain over the top lock as she cracked the door.

  “Darren? What on earth…?”

  “Your vandal,” James said. “Or one of them. At the very least he was pulling up your flowers, and God knows what else he’s been up to.”

  Vera opened the door, feeling sucker-punched. Darren? The kid she’d struggled through quadratic equations with? The one she’d taught how to make coffee? The one who played video games with Twy and scarfed down brownies in her kitchen?

  “I do not believe this,” she muttered, leading the way to the kitchen. “I don’t want to believe it. Did your father put you up to this?”

  “It’s not like that,” Darren said. “Call off your pit bull, and I can explain.”

  James met Vera’s gaze, and only then did she realize James had Darren’s arm hiked halfway up his back.

  “He deserves a chance to explain, James.”

  “He was vandalizing your property, which is thoroughly posted against trespassers, Vera. Can we at least call his parents, so you get the same explanation they do?”

  The suggestion was reasonable, but James still had Darren in an uncomfortable grip. “Darren can call them, both of them.”

  James let the boy go.

  “Use the phone in the study, Darren,” Vera said. “Get your mom over here too.”

  The kid shuffled off, throwing a relieved look over his shoulder.

  While Vera felt abruptly weak-kneed. What if James hadn’t come, and how had he arrived so quickly, and what was she supposed to say to him now?

  “You want me to leave?” James asked.

  “No.” Vera had nearly shouted the word. “No,” she said more quietly. “I do not want you to leave.”

  “Maybe you should have Trent here,” James said. “He’s your domestic relations attorney, and this promises to be domestic as hell, if not criminal.”

  James was angry on Vera’s behalf, despite weeks of silence between them. She wanted to hug him, but didn’t dare for fear she’d start bawling like one of Inskip’s heifers.

  “Why get Trent here?” she asked.

  “I’m guessing if we compare Darren’s prints with the ones left on your computer, we’ll find he’s been here at least once before—and you gave him a key to the house, Vera. That would explain how he got in, but not why he’s been threatening you.”

  “Mom and Dad are on their way,” Darren said, hanging in the kitchen doorway. “I can explain.”

  “Call Trent,” James said, holding out his cell phone to Vera and not even looking at Darren. “Ask him to bring Hannah along.”

  Her again? Vera stared at his cell phone warily. “Why Hannah?”

  “She’s a professional mediator, and you’re about to meet up with the man who nearly put you in the hospital, while you accuse his son of delinquent acts.” James slapped the phone into her hand. “Unless you order me off the property again, all this will take place while the guy who’s madder than a wet hen on your behalf is glowering at the lot of them. Call Trent.”

  Madder than a wet hen, and a lot dearer. Vera called Trent, who agreed to collect his wife and join them directly.

  “Does that mean you’re not ordering me off your property?” James
put the question with chilling neutrality, and Vera was aware of Darren silently taking in the whole exchange.

  “I’m not ordering you off the property, though Darren’s fate is another matter.”

  “Darren can look forward to being tried as an adult,” James said, swinging around to smile evilly at the youth. “He can look forward to taking a drug test upon his arrest later tonight, and explaining the presence of any controlled dangerous substances in his underaged possession, and any alcohol.”

  “I only had one beer.”

  “That’s one too many, little man,” James assured him, “and an admission before a hostile witness. I can only hope you were also stupid enough to drive here.”

  “Don’t badger him.” When Darren’s shoulders dropped in relief, Vera regretted chiding James. “Don’t think I’m not furious, Darren MacKay, just because I don’t rant and stomp around like your father. There will be consequences to this night’s folly, and you will not like them.”

  Darren swallowed and shot a glance at James, who was lounging back against the sink like a big, twitchy-tailed feline predator.

  He stared at Darren without mercy, and Vera felt an unaccountable urge to laugh. James was so good at this posturing and strutting, such a skilled negotiator.

  Just as quickly, she had to swallow past a lump in her throat, because what next? If she got Darren sorted out… When she got Darren sorted out, she was still being sued by Darren’s father, still putting this pretty, lonely fortress up for sale, and still losing James.

  Had still lost him.

  “I’m going upstairs to check on Twyla,” she said. “You two behave, and don’t do anything that would wake my daughter up.”

  Neither one had anything to say to that, so Vera left them to glare and snort at each other while she took a little privacy for herself. Darren hadn’t apologized, and that rankled, but James had come when she’d called, no questions, no hesitation, and that comforted.

  That James had come comforted Vera immeasurably.

  * * *

  “Think of it as the condemned’s last meal.” James held out the cookie tin to Donal MacKay’s oldest child. The tin was new, because James was shamelessly hoarding the one Vera had left behind at his house, saving it for a last-ditch excuse to come over some fine day when his pride collapsed entirely and he’d rehearsed his groveling speech another hundred times.