“I saw him.”
“I didn’t tell him you were staying here, although I can’t pinpoint why I didn’t. It’s not as if he’s an enemy, even if he has become a bit of a nuisance.”
“Best to keep my presence between us,” Harlan said, echoing her own sentiments.
“You did tell your mother you’d gone fishing?”
“Yes. I hate lying, but I didn’t want her to worry— or to involve her.”
Beth nodded, and the thought occurred to her that he’d preferred to involve his ex-wife. Somehow that was how it should have been. “Then why hasn’t she called off Sessoms?”
“Probably miscommunication. From what I can gather, he seems a bit of a loose cannon. How does he strike you?”
Harlan seemed genuinely interested in her assessment. She told him, “Nosy, sexist, presumptuous—he probably treats your mother like a ninny and doesn’t check in with her. I don’t think it’s my place to interfere.”
“Wise choice.” Harlan stirred his concoction, the steam making his face glow. “If I call Mother, it’s likely to tip her off, and ultimately Sessoms, as to where I am. Right now, the fewer people who know, the better. We’ll have to tolerate his interference for now.”
“That reminds me.” Beth sat down at her little kitchen table and noted that her wealthy, sophisticated, southern ex-husband looked perfectly at home. “How did you get here?”
“Oh. I drove the Rover.”
“But where is it?”
“Parked in the woods, up past my tent. Four-wheel drive, you know.”
“I see.”
He gave her a sharp look. “Julian will get it back, Beth. I’m not trying to take advantage—”
“I know. I’m not worried about that. It’s just... Well, Harlan, I know damned well you haven’t told me everything.” She put up a hand, stopping his protest before he’d uttered a word. “Now don’t get defensive or start thinking up a fresh set of lies to tell me, because I don’t want to hear it. When you want to ‘fess up, you will. Until then we’ll call a truce. I wanted you to know I know.”
He had the gall not to look sheepish or even to attempt to deny a thing. “Okay.”
“Then you’re admitting you haven’t told me everything?” she asked, more sharply than she would have liked.
“I’m not arguing with you.”
“That’s pretty vague.”
“I suppose it is,” he said, leaving it at that, and proceeded to serve the chili.
Chapter Nine
The chili was hot and spicy and went well with their conversation. Beth and Harlan found themselves talking. Really talking. Not about pesky Nashville private detectives or tough New York investigative reporters or even faded bruises, but about their lives. About stables and horses and stray animals, and copper plumbing versus plastic, and gardening and work. About the Rockwood family and the Stiles family. About the economy and recycling and baseball.
Over dinner and then over beer on the porch, they filled each other in on the nine years they had spent apart. Beth told him how she’d first fled home after their divorce, hadn’t stayed, and had wandered about for a couple of years. She’d worked in Boston, Albany and Washington, returning to Mill Brook for holidays, the occasional weekend and then for good.
“The quality-housing-kit end of Mill Brook Post and Beam was taking off,” she explained, sitting on the top porch step opposite Harlan, her feet touching his. ‘‘My parents had retired, and Adam and Julian lacked any real expertise in marketing and advertising, so I jumped in. I loved it, Harlan. I still do. My brothers and I make a great team. I love being a part of a tradition that goes back well over a century, and I love the product we’re selling, and how we really care about doing right by our customers, our employees and the environment. I couldn’t go back to working for someone else.”
“Have you ever considered not working?” Harlan asked, his eyes on her, as green and as endlessly fascinating as the foothills. Periodically he glanced out at the road.
She shook her head. “I’d go nuts.”
“I suppose you would.”
“I’m very aware that I’m a woman in a male-dominated field,” she went on. “Most people expected me to marry and move away, or at best do bookkeeping part-time. It hasn’t been easy, but my brothers and I have carved out an equal relationship—and I don’t mind saying that I do feel a certain responsibility for being a role model.”
Harlan downed the last of his beer. “Adam would have chucked in the towel if Char had wanted to stay in Tennessee.”
“No, he wouldn’t have. He might have offered, but Char never would have accepted. She knows what the mill means to him, more than it does to either Julian or to me. That doesn’t make it more his, it’s the way it is. If Char hadn’t realized she’s as much a part of this town as he is, they’d have worked out some way of being together that didn’t involve sacrificing who they were.”
Harlan leaned back, his knees close to his chest. The sun was dipping beyond the hills, the temperature still warm and the air refreshingly dry. ‘The mill’s not just a job for you, it’s a way of life.”
“It sounds selfish.”
“No, it doesn’t. It sounds honest. It’s easy not to be honest, when you’re just out of your teens and have your life before you. Much more difficult, when there’s less time to keep fooling yourself.”
Beth finished off her beer. “I’m not married to the mill. It’s where I want to be. Things change. I know that. Adam’s as single-minded as ever, but even he’s pulled back some, now that he’s put Mel’s death behind him and married Char. Julian’s branching out, doing his own thing. It wouldn’t be so awful if I changed my routine, too, redefined my commitment. I don’t want people to—well, I guess this sounds crazy, but if I do move on, I want people to realize it’s because of me—not because I’m a woman, and because women do the accommodating.”
“I see your point,” he said thoughtfully, and she believed he did. “It’s playing against a different set of expectations, but one no less limiting than being the oldest son who’s compelled to conform to family tradition.”
“Or the only son,” she said, gazing at him with a frankness and ease she hadn’t felt in years.
He smiled. ‘The truth is, we wanted to make our own choices about what we did with our lives, not have them determined for us by an accident of birth.”
“True. But in a way I wonder if we haven’t toed the family line, after all. You as a Rockwood, me as a Stiles—woman or not.”
“If we have, it’s because it’s what we want, but you have your house down here in the valley, I have my horses. The Rockwood clan approves, but it wouldn’t matter if they didn’t. My stables have been my doing.’’
Her house definitely had been her own doing. “What you’re saying is, we’re stubborn.”
He laughed. “I guess we are.”
“Tell me, Harlan, what would the Rockwoods say if they knew you were skulking about the countryside, snitching to the Manhattan Chronicle?”
Grinning broadly, he suddenly looked so rakish and unrepentant—so much like the rebel she’d fallen in love with so long ago—that Beth lost her breath. He said, “They wouldn’t be pleased, I can tell you. Since when do you give a damn what anyone thinks?”
She was taken aback. “I’ve always cared about what other people think—you have to be in a civilized society. It’s a question of degree. I never cared what your family thought of my car or my decision to keep the Stiles name. Elizabeth Rockwood sounded too much like Eleanor Rockwood.”
“Not that that had anything to do with your reasoning. No one would ever have confused the two of you, which is to take nothing from either of you. You’re both remarkable women, in your own peculiar ways. And Mother’s changed in the past ten years, too. I don’t think it’d matter so much to her now what you called yourself. Shell always be Mrs. Taylor Rockwood, regardless of what we do.”
“That’s her choice. What about you?”
He was teasing, and Beth nudged him with her toe. “I’m not talking about your name. Did it ever matter to you that I didn’t change my name to Rockwood? You said it didn’t at the time, but I’ve always wondered.”
“It didn’t matter to me what you called yourself, it doesn’t and it never would. What’s nice for you, darlin’, is that you have a choice whether to be a Stiles or not.”
“I never looked at it that way. As attached to the Stiles name as I am, I realize it’s just a name. So’s Rockwood. Not changing my name didn’t stop me from feeling I was losing my identity in your family. Maybe having changed it would have hastened the process. I doubt it. I did love you, you know. The name business had nothing whatever to do with you.”
“I know that. So did my mother, in her own way. She took it more as a personal criticism, because she’s so bound by social traditions.”
“I wasn’t criticizing her!”
“Of course not. At any rate, the name business she could have gotten around by telling her friends you were a professional woman and young and independent. But your car, Beth, that, you have to admit, was a direct, deliberate assault on Rockwood sensibilities.”
She shook her head, adamant even as she spotted the devilish twinkle in his eyes. “No way. If it had been, I’d have gotten rid of the Chevy after our divorce. You’ll notice I still have it. It’s just a car, Harlan.”
“I know that. Do you?”
“Of course.”
“So why not have gotten rid of it when it offended my parents?”
Beth sighed. “Your father, too?”
“He made several choice remarks to me about it, as I recall. He wasn’t as open in his view as my mother was.”
“Well, maybe I was a little pigheaded,” she allowed.
Harlan laughed. “Maybe I egged you on because I got such a kick out of my beautiful, stubborn Yankee wife roaring through my family’s well-to-do neighborhood in a 1965 Chevrolet Bel Air with no back seat. I suppose neither of us has much patience with hypocrisy and appearances.”
“We could have been less judgmental.”
“We could have, but we were young. If I had to take a guess, we thought people were more worked up about our little rebellions than they really were.”
“Does this mean we’d still be married, if only I’d changed my name and bought a new car?”
“No. We’d still be married, only if we’d loved each other enough.”
He sounded wistful, and Beth hoped he wasn’t, because she had loved him. Too much. She had hung on to her car and her name, not out of spite or as a misguided act of rebellion, but out of the sense that if she didn’t, there’d be nothing left of her. That didn’t mean she would change her name now or give up her car. It meant that she wouldn’t worry about losing herself.
“Could you have become a Stiles?” she asked quietly.
Harlan smiled and said in his most liquid drawl, “I wouldn’t cut it as a Yankee mountain man,”
“Only as a aristocratic southern rakehell—”
His face clouded, and he jumped to his feet. “We’ve got company.”
Beth stood up. “Duck inside. I’ll see who it is.” She recognized the Jeep coming up the road. “Relax—it’s Char.”
“I’m off to my tent. You’ll take care of her?”
“Harlan, if there’s anyone you should trust, it’s Char. She’s as closemouthed as they come.”
He seemed unconvinced. “Not a word about me, all right?”
“Oh, all right.”
He disappeared through the screen door, and Beth heard him warning off animals as he slipped out the back.
She resettled herself on the step. “Hey, there,” she called to Char when she’d parked her Jeep next to the Chevy. ‘‘What’s up?”
“You tell me,” Char said in her lawyer’s voice.
Beth knew it was going to be one of those visits. She and Char were best friends, had been since kindergarten, but that didn’t mean they always got along.
Looking innocent wasn’t Beth’s long suit. She tried, nonetheless. “Have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?”
Char eyed Beth’s beer bottle and the one Harlan had left behind. “Seems to me you’ve had enough to drink already yourself. Harlan getting to you?”
“Harlan? I have nothing to do with him.”
“Yeah, right.” Char shooed a cat off a chair and took a seat. She didn’t look as if she’d been enjoying the beautiful summer’s evening. “Where is he?”
“Who?”
“Rockwood.”
“How would I know?”
Char squinted, and Beth could see her lawyer’s mind debating her next move, figuring out exactly how she could get what she wanted from the witness. “Jimmy Sessoms is back in town.”
“I know.” Beth stretched out her legs and crossed her ankles, trying to look as comfortable as she could. “He stopped by here yesterday and again today.”
“He seems to think you know where Harlan is, and are endangering him by not saying.”
“No kidding? He’s not a very good private investigator, then, is he?”
“I don’t know. I think he has a point. He stopped by the mill to talk to Adam and Julian, then he came by my office to talk to me and tracked down Holly to talk to her. I don’t like it, Beth. I don’t like this man nosing around, and I don’t like having you play games with me. If you know something I need to know, out with it.”
Beth swallowed, not blaming Char one iota. “Jimmy Sessoms is the only one snooping around? No one else?”
“Why?”
“Just curious.”
Char scoffed. “You are the worst liar, Beth Stiles.”
“I’m not!”
“Spare me.” The tabby tried to sidle onto her lap. Char shoved him unceremoniously back onto the floor. “Remember when Sessoms first asked Adam and Julian about Harlan? He said Harlan had been beaten up. Well, when Sessoms tracked me down this afternoon, I asked him how he knew. I mean, if Harlan’s missing, how did Sessoms find out he’d been beaten up? You know what he told me?”
Beth shook her head, not wanting to admit Char had sparked her own curiosity.
“He told me he’d had word—he wouldn’t go into detail—that Harlan was shaking the wrong tree this time, that the man was going after people who were bigger, meaner and richer than he is. The bit about his getting beaten up was an educated guess on his part, because if Harlan hasn’t had the hell knocked out of him, he soon will. If these guys don’t just go ahead and kill him.” Char took a breath, got herself under control. “Beth, the man has a white-knight complex. He’s in over his head, and so are you.”
“Thanks for your concern. I’m having a quiet evening out here in the country.”
“There’s more.” Char got to her feet and paced, the tabby at her heels. “I did some digging, and if I put this and that together, I keep coming up with the name Lord Arthur Penmountain.”
“Who?”
“He’s English—stinking rich, and the perfect stereotype of the upper-class nobleman. He’s the one who bought the ringer from Harlan’s crooked trainer. You know—the swindle that practically ruined me last year. I figure Harlan found out Lord Penmountain was responsible for the whole fiasco and had put the trainer up to it.”
“What’s this guy’s reputation?”
“Pristine, which worries me. Nobody’s that pure, not in the horse or any other business, if only because even well-intentioned, good people make mistakes.” Char crossed her arms over her chest. “Penmountain’s one hell of a windmill to take on. He’s connected. If he’s dirty, there’s no fighting him alone, and I don’t care if you are Harlan Rockwood.”
“Char...”
She shook her head and swooped down all at once, picking up Harlan’s beer bottle. “You’ve never drunk more than one beer at a time in your life, especially when you’re alone.
Tell Harlan to take care of himself, cool his heels, and if anything happens to you on his account, he’ll have me and two irate mountain-men to answer to.”
Beth was losing patience. “What happens to me is my responsibility, not his or anyone else’s.”
“Oh, Lord,” Char groaned at the sky, then fastened her dark eyes on Beth. “You are in love with him again. Beth, I’m happy for you, and I know he probably loves you, too. You are out of your mind if you get involved with him now. Penmountain’s one nasty and powerful opponent. Let Harlan—”
“I don’t ‘let’ Harlan,” Beth interrupted. “We are who we are. You know, if it weren’t Penmountain, it’d be someone or something else. Last year it was you. The man doesn’t lead a dull life.”
“This isn’t winning the Kentucky Derby or tracking down a crooked trainer. Sessoms may not be the most ethical P.I. I’ve ever known, but I think he’s on target when he says Harlan’s shaking the wrong tree this time. You watch yourself.”
“Char, I told you—”
She shook her head again. “No, Beth, no more lies. Don’t tell me the truth, if you can’t. Please spare me the lies.”
She sprinted down the stairs, and Beth watched her leave. She didn’t like any of this—Jimmy Sessoms pestering her family and friends, Harlan Rockwood hiding out in Mill Brook, this Lord Arthur Penmountain. The whole mess was getting more and more dangerous.
It rankled that Char knew more about what was going on than Beth did, even if most of her “facts” came from guesswork and her own connections in the thoroughbred-horse world.
“I can see what makes her a good lawyer.” Beth muttered.
What are you? she asked herself.
A woman who’d turned to mush under Harlan’s spell. Who was letting him keep her in the dark because it suited him.
She snatched up the two beer bottles and went inside. She cleaned up the dishes and looked out at the sunset. Nothing she did worked to settle her nerves. She was edgy, restless and frustrated at having to remain ignorant of the full dimensions of the mess Harlan was mired in.
There was only one thing to do—find Harlan’s tent and tell him she wasn’t going to play by his rules any longer. If he insisted, then off he went, out of her life for good. There was only so much she could take.
That Stubborn Yankee Page 13
