Seduced by Love, Claimed by Passion~Summer Box Set

by Helen Conrad

  “Susan,” she murmured aloud. “Where the hell are you?”

  It was times like this, late at night, that were the worst for worrying about her sister. Every bad outcome, every scary thought, came swooping in and took over her brain.

  But then, she’d always worried about Susan, and Susan always seemed to land on her feet. It was just that this time, something in her letters and occasional emails had been increasingly desperate sounding. And though the last one she got was cheerful—even hopeful—there still was that underlying sense of doom on the horizon.

  She knew for sure Susan had planned to come here. Why hadn’t she ever arrived? If she could figure out where she’d started out from, maybe she could go back over her journey and find her that way. But she didn’t even know where she’d been living lately. Something about a hippie commune in Laurel Canyon or something. Or maybe that was last time? The vague way stations of Susan’s deterioration began to blur together.

  Maybe the truth was that she was tired of worrying about her. That she was over the old panics. That she just didn’t have any more capacity for fear and loathing of the “save Susan” variety. All they had was each other. Their parents were gone, and now Aunt Gladys. All alone. She shivered again.

  There was no way she was going to find her sister tonight. Time for bed. Again. Maybe she’d get some good sleep this time.

  “Yeah. Lots of luck.”

  ************

  When the first pair of hammering sounds came from downstairs, Kate thought it was a joke. Maybe the duck, who quacked at discrete intervals all through the night just to keep her awake, had organized a cadre of animal noise makers to start banging on her porch. Stood to reason. Why not? But when it started up with regularity, she knew someone had to be down there.

  "Well, no rest for the weary," she mumbled to herself, and sat up. With sunlight driving through the windows where yesterday afternoon it just came in limply, the house did not look nearly as foreboding. It did, however, look much dirtier.

  Kate had slept in her old room, but in a sleeping bag on top of the bed, and she was glad she did. The bed had a nice assortment of leaves, dirt, and dust all now in a vague, sleeping bag shape.

  For just a moment she forgot about the pounding sounds downstairs - all she could think was she wanted to take a shower. Her trip to the bathroom was depressing, though. The tub seemed to be in working order, but the window was blacked over by a sheet of tarpaulin and very little light came into the place at all. From what little she had, she could see and distinct filthy black ring surrounding the tub. She turned on the water, and for a moment she thought the pounding noise was coming from the plumbing. Then she remembered downstairs, and hammering.

  She quickly pulled on jeans and a shirt, and covered her unwashed hair in a baseball cap. Sheesh, she thought, back in Whispering Pines for just one day and already I'm a tomboy again.

  "Damn it!" came a shout from beyond the front door, and then some more hammering. Kate raced down the stairs, glancing for just a moment at the living room, newly lit by the sun. It was indeed just as depressing as it seemed yesterday in the dark. There was a lot of work to be done in this house, and she didn't really know if she was up to it.

  "Ow!" came the shouter again. Kate opened the door, and stopped just before walking out on the porch, which was being repeatedly struck by a hammer and shaking with every blow. It was Blake who was doing the striking, trying to knock a board of wood into place. As he hammered, the wood to which he was trying to secure the new board was breaking away or sinking in. It was all rotted.

  "I have a lot more stuff inside that's not up to snuff. If you come inside and break it, I'll let you fix that too," Kate said.

  Blake looked at her for a moment, shook his head and brought the hammer down again. There was a loud crack, and then the porch started to sag away from the rest of the house.

  "I don't think your porch is in very good shape," Blake said.

  "That is the very reason you're such a good detective, Blake Spanner, because you have such fine deductive reasoning skills."

  "Are you just going to stand there making fun of me?"

  "Yes," Kate said. She smiled down at Blake, thinking he looked exceptionally good in snug jeans and a body-hugging t-shirt, and for a moment-as though he could read her mind- he looked flustered.

  "Well... uh... good work, then," he said, and hit the porch again with a hammer. It must have been a good, solid blow, because the entire thing came unmoored from the house and started to tip to the side, breaking down. Now Kate couldn't even leave the house through the front way.

  "You know, Blake, I did ask you to come and fix the porch. Maybe I've been gone from Whispering Pines too long and there are some quirks of dialect I've forgotten, but..."

  "Yeah, yeah. Look, Kate, this is my day off, and I'm here trying to help, okay? I think it'd be really nice if you didn't spend the whole time snarking at me. Soon as I'm done, I'll be out of your hair and you won't have to think about old Blake Spanner ever again."

  "I'll do you one better. I'll make you some coffee."

  "Uh... or you could do that," he said.

  Kate closed the door, which must have been integral in some manner to the structural integrity to what remained of the porch, because the moment the door closed she heard the rest of it come crashing down. Blake cursed again, and then, just a moment later, the hammering started up again. She grinned and wondered why a little thing like a visit from an old friend could do so much to lift her spirits.

  ***

  "You cleaned the mugs out before you made the coffee, right?" Blake said. He seemed very concerned that Kate might be trying to poison him with a simple cup of coffee.

  "I ran them through a de-tox program. It’s as if nothing but the coffee has ever touched its porcelain form."

  "Long as you cleaned it," he said, and he took a tentative sip before he went back out to work, carrying the silly mug in his hand.

  It made Kate want to laugh, partly because it seemed so different from the Blake she remembered. Sure, the sardonic distrust was always a feature of the man (and a welcome one, at that -kept him interesting) but the caution was something new. When they were kids, Blake would be the one to rush headlong into situations. He always had a concern for other folks’ safety, but Kate just figured it was because he was the older and he knew he'd get in trouble if anything happened while they were out in the woods.

  Except Kate didn't have anyone to answer to. Certainly Gladys wouldn't have cared two figs about what happened to the kids in the woods. If ever one of the girls got hurt out there, they'd have to take care of it themselves. They were mother to each other.

  Blake had gone back to work on the porch and she was sunk in thoughts of childhood. She walked out the front door without thinking and the next thing she knew, she was falling through the air.

  Blake was fast. He saw what was happening out of the corner of his eye and he was there to catch her before she hit the two by four she was aiming at.

  He grabbed her out of the air and swung her around, his hands losing track of where they were and landing in some inappropriate places on her well-toned body. He quickly pulled back and set her on her feet.

  She looked up at him, embarrassed about doing something so stupid but not about to let him know that.

  “What are you trying to do, Blakey, cop a feel?” she said with a smirk.

  “Damn it, Kate.” He stared down into her brown eyes and the room seemed to tilt. “If I want to cop a feel, you’ll know it. I won’t sneak around to do it.”

  Slowly, deliberately, his hand slid up under her shirt and cupped her breast.

  He’d never done that before!

  Kate was okay. She was good. She was ready to laugh it off and pull away and go on with her day. Except for one little thing. She forgot how to breathe.

  If she could have only taken a deep, nourishing gulp of air, she knew she would have had something smart-ass and caustic to say. But
without it, she was lost. She stared up into Blake’s starry gaze and when he kissed her, she kissed him back.

  His arms wrapped around her and she melted. Embarrassing, but true. She absolutely melted against him, as though her body was made to mold to his and she was going to let it.

  He drew back quickly enough, and pulled away from her, looking everywhere but into her eyes. She gasped for breath and tried to stop her heart from beating so darn hard. She was gob-smacked alright.

  She just stood there for a few seconds, trying to get her bearings. What the heck? Did this mean that she’d spent all these years—all this time when she’d been trying to figure out why flirty college boys annoyed her and handsome lawyers bored her and she’d almost charged that slick, rich business man who’d tried very aggressively to bed her with rape—all this time she’d been a flop at dating because she’d been secretly longing to come back and find Blake—so very secretly that she didn’t even know it herself?

  Impossible.

  Wasn’t it?

  She gulped in some air and tried to act normal. Why did she feel this strange buzzing in her head?

  He went on as though nothing had happened, first taking a deep sip of the coffee from the mug, then looking around at the work area. For just a second, his eyes seemed to widen with some sort of reaction. She stared hard, hoping to be able to read what it was.

  But just as quickly, it was gone. He wouldn’t even meet her gaze. She drooped a bit.

  "Anyway, it looks like I didn't bring enough wood,” he was saying, making it clear that was what was on his mind, not what had just happened between them. “Guess I wasn't figuring on rebuilding the whole thing from scratch."

  She cleared her throat and surprised herself by managing to talk pretty normally. "Is that what you're going to do? I could call in a carpenter."

  "Only one in town is old Zeke Meyer. You remember him?"

  Kate shook her head, and then the name Zeke registered. "I remember him! High school dropout, used to drive around in that convertible of his, mullet flapping in the breeze. Wow, I wouldn't let him near my house."

  "Yeah, well... this probably isn't a one-day job, so I guess you'd be better off using the back door until you can use the front one."

  "That would be the logical choice.”

  Finally, he looked her in the eye. “That is, if you’re not going to be heading out soon. Like today, maybe?”

  She gave him a smart-aleck look. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Sorry to disappoint you, Blakey my dear. I may even be putting down roots.”

  “Roots.” He jerked his mouth in a sarcastic twist.

  She didn’t wait to see what else he might have to say about it.

  “Let's go," she said. She pulled car keys out of her pocket and shook them.

  "Go where?" Blake asked, looking genuinely confused with that steaming mug in his hand. Kate smiled.

  "The hardware store, of course. I declare myself foreman of this construction site, Mr. Officer Spanner."

  He stared at her, waiting to be annoyed. It was getting pretty obvious she wasn’t going to leave town any time soon. But for some reason, her grin was contagious. Something in that look was giving him goose bumps. She was staying all right. And he was going to help her, wasn’t he?

  What the hell. It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do.

  ***

  The car trip over to the hardware store and the twenty minutes they spent picking up wood, brackets, along with some pretty little pieces of railing, all came out to seem like just about the longest twenty minutes in Blake's life. It wasn't that Kate wasn't charming in her acerbic way - she was. And not an unpleasant diversion for the eyes, either. But every other word was a barb or a needle or a little undercutting joke. Blake was starting to get fed up.

  He was relieved when they met up with Joe Bob Mortimer in the hardware store, and Kate could turn her attentions to apologizing to Joe Bob while Blake helped him cart down some cinder blocks and a couple bags of cement.

  Now he was leaning against the cart of their own purchased goods, trying to figure out some good way to get them all into the PT Cruiser. The 2 x 6's fit when stacked side by side between the driver and passenger seats up front, but they'd need to leave the back open.

  "Best bet is to go buy some bungee cords to keep everything from flying out the second you hit the brakes."

  "Mm. Or we could just drive real slow," Kate offered. Not being serious, of course. Sheesh.

  "I'll go back in there and get some proper supplies for the journey.”

  “Hmm,” Kate said. She’d just noticed Allison, the veterinarian, coming toward them on the street, taking one look and turning to hurry off in the opposite direction. “You do that. I’ve got to go see a man about a horse.”

  “What? Kate, what are you talking about?”

  “It’s just an expression, silly. You do what you need to do. I’ll be right back.”

  It was all coming back to her now, and luckily, she knew the streets of this town like the back of her hand. More or less. She ducked down the alley and beat Allison to the parking lot where she’d left her car.

  “Hi there,” she said to the older woman, trying to sound jovial. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Allison jumped and looked terrified.

  “I…I can’t talk. I’m in something of a hurry and…”

  “I just wanted to ask you a little more about my sister.”

  “Susan? I told you, I haven’t seen her for years.”

  Kate reached out and touched her arm. “What are you scared of Allison? Is it Joe Bob?”

  “Joe Bob?” Allison calmed down at that one. She looked a bit severe as she gazed at Kate. “No, now why would I be scared of Joe Bob?”

  Kate shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re the one who seems so jumpy.”

  Allison was frowning at her. ““Don’t go talking bad about Joe Bob. Now, I know he may eat those little animals he catches, but on the whole, Joe Bob does a lot of good in this town. He tends to sick and wounded animals all the time. I’ve seen many he’s brought back to health.”

  Kate was struck by how adamant she was, and by the fact that she knew about Joe Bob’s animal-catching habits—and knew that Kate knew, too. Was there a real connection between these two? That would be weird.

  “You’ve got to admit, he’s sort of spooky.”

  “What? Don’t say that. What gave you that idea?” She was really taking a dislike to Kate now.

  But Kate was remembering something else—that Allison had a few spooky habits of her own.

  “Wait a minute. You remember all those weird concoctions that you gave Susan in the old days?”

  Allison drew back stiffly. “What are you talking about?”

  “Those jars of stuff she used to bring home.”

  “What?”

  “Back when she was volunteering with you in your animal clinic. She always said you gave them to her. She would come home with mason jars full of….”

  Allison reached for her car door, blinking nervously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. She could have got those things anywhere.”

  “Right.” Kate was remembering more of what Susan had said about them. “They were spells, weren’t they? Potions. Magic stuff. Right?”

  “How would I know?” she cried, her voice high and trembling.

  “She was learning witchcraft from you. Wasn’t she?”

  Allison put a hand to her own cheek and laughed, but it had a frantic, hollow sound. “My land, the notions in your head, missy. I don’t know where you got them from.”

  “Witchcraft. That was it.” She remembered now. That was why Aunt Gladys had gotten so angry and forbid Susan from bringing home any of those foul concoctions or going to Allison’s anymore. But Kate knew for a fact that Susan snuck over there anyway.

  Allison had had enough. She jerked away, pulled open her door and slid into the driver’s seat. Looking out at Kate, her face was contorted with anger. />
  “You’re just a little snitch, aren’t you?” she said nastily.

  Kate’s eyes widened. “No. Actually, I don’t think I am.”

  “Hah.” And Allison pulled out of her parking space and drove away.

  Kate watched her go, shaking her head. The woman was about as unbalanced as Joe Bob, wasn’t she? Maybe that was the element that drew them together. Besides the animals, at any rate.

  But she hadn’t learned anything new, so she headed back to Main Street where Blake was getting her car loaded and tied down. She arrived just in time to see a commotion developing down the street a bit at the small grocery mart. The town wasn't large enough to attract one of the big supermarket chains.

  "It looks like... what is Mr. Peters doing?" Kate said, blocking the sun from her eyes with her hand.

  Chapter Five

  Blake saw it too - old Hank Peters, who inherited the store from his father, was charging outside like a bull, his face red and looking like he was about to explode. In his hands he held the wrists of a young girl. Blake recognized her as Mary Wolfe, daughter of local aristocrats, much as that word meant anything in rural California.

  "Stay here," Blake said, and he started down the street. Kate only hesitated a moment before following after him.

  The girl was struggling to get out of Hank's grip, and he was shouting at her. Blake could only make out a few of the words - "not in my store", "lock you up", things like that.

  "What's the problem, Mr. Peters?" Blake said.

  "Ah, Blake. Thank God you're here. I won’t have to hold this urchin any longer."

  Peters let the girl go, and though Blake thought for a moment she looked like she was going to run, she stayed put. Smart girl - people weren't likely going to forget it if they saw the daughter of the richest family in town running from the law.