by Adams, Anna
At the top of the first sheet of paper, she started the notes Noah wanted. Almost without noticing, she began to relax. When she worked, she was in charge of her life.
Immersed, interrupted only by the snuffles Maggie made as she slept, Tessa wasn’t prepared to hear a light tap on her door. She jumped. In a protective reflex, she glanced at her room upstairs.
David’s little girl already seemed to be taking a firm grip on her heart. Tessa crossed the living room and reached for the doorknob, but then remembered she’d promised to be careful. She backed up to peer through the faint gap in the blinds over the bay window.
Noah’s car sat behind the Worths’ on her driveway. She opened the door and he blew in with a gust of icy wind and a shower of snowflakes that dotted both his black hair and her pine floor.
“It’s snowing again?” She peered into the night, but Noah pulled her back.
“Don’t stick your head out there.” He shut the door, pushing her in front of him. “Who knows if someone’s watching the house?”
His caution made her fear look less like an over-reaction. His large hand, familiar and yet impersonal against her stomach, quickened her heartbeat.
Noah turned away from her to brush the snow out of his hair. She searched for something to say that wouldn’t expose her susceptibility to his touch.
“I don’t think anyone’s out there. We had the blinds open all day.” His sharp glance made her even more aware of the tremble in her voice. She tried again. “Are you hungry, or are you ready to work?”
He shucked off his jacket and a worn pair of leather gloves she’d given him on their first anniversary, five years ago. “Do you have any aspirin?”
She’d forgotten the migraine that would hold him in its loosening grip for a day or two. “Will aspirin do the job?”
“For now. You know how it is—headlights in your eyes—and the way the snow shines against the wet black road.” His husky tone held her still. His pained grimace reminded her how it had been to care for him. Before, she would have rubbed the tension from his neck. “I’ll get the aspirin,” she said.
He caught her elbow, his touch zinging up her arm and down into her fingers. “You don’t have to look after me. Just point me at the medicine cabinet and a glass of water.”
Without comment, she eased away and got him the water and aspirin. It was little enough to do when he’d put his life on hold to help her and Maggie.
She retook her seat at the desk. Try as she might, she couldn’t resist watching as Noah knocked back the tablets like a man gulping his favorite brand of whiskey. As a stream of water trickled down his neck, she averted her gaze.
“I’ve started a file on the computer, but I also wrote some notes longhand.”
“I’ll read it, but first tell me what it says.” Noah’s voice was muffled. He must be wiping up the spilled water.
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She swallowed. “First up is Hugh Carlson of Carlson Knitting. He hired us when he was rebuilding his textile factory after a fire. We acted as advisors, rounded up ‘the players,’ as Hugh called them, the architects, engineers, an expert on environmental code. But then the town didn’t want the factory rebuilt, so some of the powers that be raised zoning issues. Hugh complained about environmental safeguards—”
“And he wanted you and David to go around the rules.”
“I can’t say that.” She picked up the log she and David had kept during the project, records of phone calls with a brisk transcript of each conversation. Attaching those pages to the sheet of notes she ripped off her pad, she passed the thin stack to Noah. “This is everything I know.”
“Look at me.”
She did, reluctantly. He liked to think he could read minds, and with her, he’d had occasional success.
“He wanted to fire you when you wouldn’t let him bully you into breaking the law.”
She hesitated, but a terrifying memory of David’s body on his office floor decided her. “He’s a funny guy. I think he means well, but he sees himself as some big-city operator. He can be vulgar and rude, but he respects his employees. He got so tired of us hounding him about code, he said he’d close Howard & Gabriel if he had to use his last breath to do it. But then he recommended us to a friend of his who runs a fish-processing plant in Portland.”
“Is Carlson the one who wanted to date you?”
She laughed. “Hugh has a wife who’s a lot more impressed with his power than I am.”
“Tell me about the one who considers himself in love.”
“I’m coming to him.” Eric seemed harmless to her, except for his unfortunate habit of popping up on her doorstep. “But I don’t think he’s a killer.”
“Most murderers hope you won’t think they’re capable of killing.” He said it gently, as if he were trying to remind her, not insult her intelligence.
She preferred his detective-size ego to his unexpected warmth. She couldn’t look at him. He might be right about his ability to read minds. He read more in a person’s eyes than most human beings could find on a printed page.
She turned back to her nice, safe list. “Next, a breach of promise. Ned Swyndle’s daughter was supposed to marry Jon Fevre. Ned changed his daughter’s mind when he walked in on Jon and his female first mate.”
“Having sex?”
David had soft-pedaled that aspect of the suit. Noah was the blunt type. She nodded. “Jon and Ned are both lobstermen, but Ned has a fleet of boats, and Jon’s just starting out. Ned withdrew both his daughter and his boats, and Jon filed for breach of promise.”
“So much for a last fling.” With a brief grin, he reached for the second stack of notes, and the tips of his fingers bumped hers.
She tried to smile back, but sharing even a sense of humor with Noah alarmed her. She’d missed him so much, living without him had been like learning to breathe again.
“You don’t have to be angry with me all the time,” he said. “We can still find the same things funny.”
Tessa drew as far back as she could from him. She’d open herself to Maggie like a flower seeking the sun, but she’d be reckless to forget Noah’s first line of defense. When he couldn’t face their lives without Keely, he’d turned from her to his job.
“I’m grateful you came to help,” she said. “But let’s not get confused about what we’re doing together.”
He twisted his head, as if his neck still ached. “I’ve had two long drives today, and they gave me time to think of the mistakes I’ve made.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wish I’d been a better friend to David. I tried to allow him to choose between us, but now I wonder why I thought he had to.” Straightening, he stared at her, his gaze holding her so she couldn’t look away. “Why did you and I make such a clean break? I don’t know how many times I thought about you. I just wanted to know you were all right, but I never picked up the phone to ask.”
“I don’t want to be that civilized,” she said. “We didn’t fight our way out of a mess. We just faded into mutual, deafening silence.” She should have said this before she left. “It’s over, and we can’t go back. After we find out who killed David, you’re going home and I’m staying here.”
Anger licked at the back of his gaze. “Don’t panic. I’m just saying you and I lost a lot more than each other in the divorce. You gave up my mom, and I lost Joanna and David.”
“What were we supposed to do?”
Impatience sharpened his nod. “I thought I couldn’t help it, either, but I’ll regret losing them for a long time, Tessa.” With lines around his eyes and creases at the corners of his mouth, he looked as tired as he had last night.
“We should get back to work,” she said.
“We have to resolve what happened between us sooner or later.”
Resolve. The pragmatic word had nothing to do with the despair and the hope and the final defeat she’d had to endure before she could leave him. “We don’t have to fix the p
ast, Noah. We’ve both moved on.”
Turning her back on him to change the subject, she printed a brief file that covered several less important complaints. “This set of notes, you can read. Minor annoyances, but you always said the most insignificant facts could change a case.”
“I’m not finished.” Despite his inflexible tone, he obviously hated continuing. “Our past isn’t over.” He shifted in his chair. “Maybe you gave up my mother and our friends without regret, but I counted on David, too. I wanted to talk to him about losing you and—”
He broke off, and she knew the name he couldn’t say. She turned toward him, trembling with resentment.
“Keely.” His inability to speak her name had denied Tessa the comfort of mourning their daughter with the one human being who’d loved her as much as she had.
He met her gaze head-on. “Keely.” With his voice in hoarse shreds, his anguish caught her by surprise and opened a well of her own remembered agony.
Her stomach clenched. Instinct told her to walk away. A smart woman who’d fought to be whole again wouldn’t offer Noah her hand.
But she reached for him, and he was a bare millimeter too far away. Until he caught the tips of her fingers and then wrapped his hand around hers, gripping her as if she were all that held him in the sane world.
Maybe he pulled her toward him. Suddenly she was kneeling beside him, vaguely aware of the cold, reaching from the pine floor through her jeans. Knowing she shouldn’t, she wrapped her arms as far as she could reach around his broad shoulders.
“I didn’t mean to be cruel,” she said.
“You weren’t. I don’t know why I can’t—” He sat stiffly aloof.
She didn’t care. In her head, his ragged voice repeated Keely’s name, and she couldn’t bear hearing it.
His grief made her honest. “I don’t know who I am to blame you. I ran, too, but I know you hurt for Keely.”
Slowly the stiffness left his body, first buckling his shoulders, then easing his hard chest against her, so that she almost felt his heart pounding in her body. “I loved Keely.” Without warning, he caught her so fiercely against himself he squeezed the breath from her.
Just this side of pain, she found solace in holding him, in letting him hold her as tightly as he needed. She swallowed her own tears, intent on easing his unhappiness. His raucous breath shook her as their bodies met from chin to hip, and he buried his face in her throat.
He shook against her, and she felt afraid. This wasn’t the Noah she’d known, and he certainly wasn’t the Noah she’d left. That man hadn’t known how to need.
But now he trembled in her arms, and she held him, stroking the silky hair he’d never worn long enough to curl around his nape before. The killing distance between them eased as they held on to each other.
Half the night might have passed before Noah leaned back. She half expected to see tears in his dark blue gaze. He looked back at her, his face oddly naked but dry-eyed.
“Thanks,” he said.
She almost laughed. Thanks was enough. She climbed to her feet and took her chair again as if nothing had happened. But all she could think was how good it had been to hold him again, to be held.
“Tessa, I have to tell you one more thing.”
She stared at him, positive he could see what she was trying to hide, that she still wanted to be in his arms.
“If you need me, for Maggie—for anything, you just have to call me, and I’ll come.”
“I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
He curved his mouth in a reluctant, Noah-like smile, and she dwelt on the curve of his lips. She remembered his kiss so well.
He braced his shoulders and slipped back inside the cover of his aloofness. “You may meet someone else and remarry someday. Until we figure out what to do then, I’ll be the friend I should have been before.” He cleared his throat. “For David’s sake and for Maggie’s. If you need me.”
David. God, how she missed him. He was the one she was supposed to talk to about her problems with Noah.
“You were going to tell me about Romeo?” he said.
She looked at him, distracted. Noah pointed at the screen.
“The guy who wanted you for his private lawyer?”
His quick change would have annoyed her before, but tonight he’d done her a favor. Maggie needed to be raised by a woman who wasn’t afraid to love, and he’d showed her she could feel again. She simply wanted the cure in safe doses.
She focused on Eric’s file. “You make it sound as if he was stalking.”
“Was he?”
“I don’t think so.” She firmed her voice. “His name is Eric Sanders. He showed up in Prodigal after a messy divorce. He’s one of the New York Sanders who fell out of politics after the Depression. But they kept their money, and they run a shipping company that all but monopolizes the East Coast. Rumor is, they exiled Eric to Maine. He never told us why, and no one else seems to know. The first thing he asked me to do was change his will.”
Noah leaned forward. “He’s a man who holds grudges?”
“Against his family, not against David.”
“How did David end up with his case?”
“Because he kept asking me to meet him for drinks and yet another will change. Nobody gets along that badly with his relatives. One day, he’d put in his aunt, but take her husband out. The next week, he’d decide to disinherit his sister. One night I made the mistake of agreeing to meet him in a restaurant. Over Cosmopolitans he grabbed my thigh.” She showed him how high with her hand. “I couldn’t make him let go, and I thought he was going to drag me out leg first.”
“David warned him off?”
She shook her head, smiling faintly. “You’d ‘warn’ him. David tried to keep it professional, but Eric insisted he’d only work with me. He refused to talk to David.”
“Why didn’t both of you tell him you didn’t want his business?”
Noah’s flat gaze, a dark lake with no ripples, neither accused nor threatened revenge on the man who’d inappropriately touched his ex-wife. But Tessa recognized his iron control, and she was glad he cared if a client groped her.
“Look how small the town is. We couldn’t afford to turn away work. I was lucky David was willing to share with me.”
“Is that why you took these cases? In Boston, you only handled family law.”
“I stopped taking family cases after Keely.” Adoptions had made up most of her caseload back then, but when she’d come to Maine she couldn’t face working with children.
Awareness broke the surface of Noah’s gaze. “When did Eric last come to this house?”
She thought back. “The past two days feel like a month. Maybe two weeks ago? I left the chain on the door, but he shoved his foot inside like a villain in some B movie. I said I’d call the police if he came back, and I mentioned his dad would probably be the one changing his will if he got put away for harassing me.”
“He might be our best bet.”
“Isn’t he too obvious? Wouldn’t he have waited until he wouldn’t seem like the logical suspect?”
“Not if he’s unbalanced. He might not have been able to help himself, and sometimes a suspect looks obvious because he is.”
She didn’t argue. In the end, Eric’s single-mindedness had scared her. A thin wail from her room dragged her to her feet. “I wish I knew if she was sleeping through the night before.”
Noah didn’t answer, but she was already halfway up the stairs. Maggie, bouncing on her toes in her crib, stretched out her arms, crying for her “Da.” Spontaneous tears, still too near the surface, burned Tessa’s eyes, but she swiped them away for maybe the twentieth time that day and made herself smile at the sobbing baby.
“You’re supposed to be asleep, you know.”
Wailing, Maggie flailed her arms, and the second Tessa lifted her out, applied a full nelson. Laughing in surprise at her strength, Tessa hugged Maggie and hoped affection would ease her loss.
“Let’s get you something to drink.”
Still watery around the eyes, Maggie rammed her fist into her mouth and Tessa carried her downstairs. Noah stood, all in shadows now, away from the lamplight. Catching sight of him, Maggie jumped.
“Da,” she said again, and then wept harder than ever.
At the same time, moisture crept around the edges of her diaper. Poor little thing. Tessa had lost the hang of cradling a baby, grabbing water and laying her hands on a clean diaper and clothes, all at the same time.
She headed for Noah. He straightened, clearly seeing she was about to hand him Maggie. His wide gaze exposed curious fear. If he’d been born in the right place at the right time, he could have put Jack the Ripper away, but an infant girl struck him dumb with panic.
“Here, hold her, but you’d better watch out. She’s soaked.”
“Wait.” Yet he held out his arms, and Tessa eased Maggie into them. Immediately the baby turned to look at him and stopped crying.
As she climbed the stairs, Tessa glanced back. Maggie had snatched a handful of Noah’s lip. It must have hurt, but he didn’t move a muscle.
She was tempted to laugh until she realized he probably hadn’t held a baby since he’d taken Keely out of her crib that horrible morning.
CHAPTER FIVE
WITH HIS ARMS FULL of a baby who wasn’t Keely—could never be Keely, didn’t even remind him how he’d felt holding Keely, Noah suspected time had stopped ticking by.
His heart pounded at his rib cage so hard he was surprised his ribs didn’t crack. He had the nightmare sensation of being too sluggish to run in the face of certain danger. He was going to fall. His arms, his head, his whole body had grown too heavy to support.
He inhaled and a second passed. His legs must have turned into stanchions. They were so stiff they wouldn’t let him fall, but he couldn’t move, either.
What a night. First, he’d all but blubbered on Tessa’s shoulder because she’d challenged him to say their daughter’s name. He took another breath, ashamed to have clutched at her.
Maggie tugged on his lip, and he realized no one had clipped her nails recently. While he welcomed the physical sensation of pain, he uncurled her fingers and eased her hand open.
