by Donna Alward
Through it all, Nora had been caught hard by eyes that mesmerized: velvet brown suede flecked with gold, a light in them that was mostly solid strength, with just the faintest shadow of something else.
Something she of all people should know.
Woozily, she had reached out and let the palm of her hand caress his bristly cheek, to touch that common ground she recognized between them.
He had gone very still under her touch, but he did not move away from it. She had felt a lovely sense of safety, that this was someone she could rely on.
But then the wooziness was gone, just like that, and she’d remembered she was in her paddock. And that she was alone out there with a man who had no business being on her property at this time of the night.
Nora’s instincts when it came to animals were beyond good. Some people, including her ex-fiancé, Dr. Vance Height, whom she had met while working as an assistant in his veterinary practice, were spooked by what she could accomplish with sheer intuition.
But Vance was a reminder that Nora’s good instincts did not extend to men. Or much else about life. With tonight being an unsettling exception, her perception was fabulous when it came to dealing with hurt, frightened animals.
Or writing her quirky, off-beat column Ask Rover, a column she had never admitted she was behind, because she had come across Vance reading it in her early days at his office, and he had been terribly scornful of it.
The intuition was not so good at helping her stretch her modest income from the column to support both the animal shelter and Luke. Thankfully, as the shelter became more established it was starting to receive financial support from the community of Hansen.
Her intuition was also not proving the least helpful at dealing with a now fifteen-year-old nephew who seemed intent on visiting his hurt and anger over the death of his mother on the whole world.
Feeling foolish now for that vulnerable moment when she had reached up and let her hand scrape the seductive whiskery roughness of the stranger’s cheek, and more foolish for allowing herself to be carried across her yard by a perfect stranger, Nora shook off Luke’s arm. She was supposed to be protecting him, not the other way around.
She turned and faced the man, folding her arms over her chest.
She had been, she was certain, mistaken that they shared anything in common. Looking at him from this angle, she found he looked hard and cold, and she had, as was her unfortunate habit, given her trust too soon.
“Where did he come from?” Luke asked in a suspicious undertone.
For all she knew he could be an ax murderer! Anyone could say they were an architect! She ran an animal rescue center. Anyone could say they had brought a cat.
She knew he wasn’t a cat person, one likely to be ruled by the kind of sentiment that would drive him out on a night like this for the well-being of a cat.
But behind the man, she suddenly became aware of an old woman in a ghastly pink outfit. As Nora watched, the woman gave a grunt of exertion and freed a large container from the backseat of a car that was as gray as the night and sleek with sporty expense. The man turned to her, stepped back and took a large carpet bag from her.
Nora registered two things at once: how protective he seemed of that tiny, frail woman, and that there was indeed a cat! Its head was sticking out of a kind of window in the side of the carrier. One didn’t have to have any psychic ability at all to know the cat did not have now, and probably never had had, a pleasing personality.
“I’m Brendan Grant,” he said.
The name seemed Scottish to Nora, and with the rain plastering his hair to his head, running unchecked down the formidable, handsome lines of his face, it was just a little too easy to picture him as a Scottish warrior. Strong. Imperious to the weather.
Determined to get his own way.
What was his own way?
“And this is my grandmother, Deedee, and her cat, Charlie.” The faint hiss of angry energy seemed to intensify around him. His mouth had become a hard line. He was watching Nora closely for her reaction.
“I’m sorry?” she said. What on earth was he doing here at this time of the night with his grandmother and her cat?
Still, whatever it was, it did dilute some of the threat she felt. Though not an expert, she was still fairly certain architect ax murderers did not travel with an entourage that included grandmothers and cats.
His voice calm and ice-edged, he said, “Deedee has been made certain promises concerning Charlie. And she has paid in advance.”
Nora didn’t have a clue what he meant. But she did realize the threat she felt was not of the ax-murderer variety.
It was of the raindrop-falling-from-lips variety. She was aware her head hurt, but was not at all sure this feeling of being caught off balance was caused by the knock to her head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said firmly.
She became aware that something rippled through Luke. She felt more than saw his discomfort. She cast her nephew a glance out of the corner of her eye.
Uh-oh.
“Look,” the man said quietly, the commanding tone of his voice drawing her attention firmly back to him. “You may be able to pull the wool over the eyes of an old woman, but I’m here to look after her interests. And you should know that if you’ve swindled her, you can kiss the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee good-bye.”
Kiss the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee good-bye? Nora couldn’t let her panic show.
“Swindled your grandmother?” she asked instead. Below the panic, she could feel the insult of it! His caustic remarks about her energy and her being a healer were beginning to make an awful kind of sense.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the police became involved,” Brendan said, the quiet in his voice making it all the more threatening.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE POLICE? NORA felt a sense of panic, as if her world were tilting.
Still, she could not cave before him. She was about to insist that he was the one trespassing on private property, except that at the mention of the police, she realized she wasn’t the only one panicking.
Nora saw Luke go rigid.
There’d been an unfortunate incident at school involving the police way too recently.
Luke claimed to have borrowed a bicycle. Apparently without the full understanding of the bicycle’s owner, which was why the police had become involved. Luke had talked to the other boy, and the whole thing, thankfully, had blown over.
Now her nephew met her eyes, pleading, and then ducked his head, drawing a pattern in the wet ground with his bare toe.
Nora glanced back at Brendan Grant and saw he had not missed a thing. He was watching Luke narrowly, and her sense of him being a warrior intensified. His look did not bode well for her nephew.
What had Luke done now? She was acutely aware of having failed in her responsibility to her nephew by going into the corral by herself tonight. Now every protective instinct rose in her.
“Nobody swindled me,” Deedee said plaintively. “She sent me energy for Charlie.”
“For a price,” Brendan added softly.
Nora knew she had not sent anyone any energy. And certainly not for a price! But Luke was squirming so uncomfortably she wanted to hit him with her elbow to make him stop drawing attention to himself.
Because no matter what he had done, Luke was no match for Brendan Grant. Not in any way. Not physically, nor could her poor orphaned nephew bear up under the anger that sparked in the man’s eyes.
Taking a deep breath, she said brightly. “Oh, I remember now. Charlie.”
Luke cast her a glance loaded with gratitude and relief, and she might have allowed herself to relish that, especially coupled with the fact he had taken up a coat rack in her def
ense. Moments when her nephew actually seemed to like her were rare, after all.
But Brendan Grant looked hard and skeptical, and she needed to stay focused on the immediate threat of that.
She put together the few clues she had. One of her gifts was an acute ability to focus on detail. Brendan and Deedee had arrived in the middle of the night. From what she could see of the cat, he was ill, the lateness of the hour suggested desperately so.
“Charlie’s been sick, right?” she said.
“That’s right!” Deedee said eagerly.
Brendan’s expression just became more grim.
“You said you’d send him energy,” Deedee reminded her. “You said to send money. I sent fifty dollars.”
“Fifty dollars?” Brendan snapped. “Deedee! You said you sent a little money.”
“In terms of what my cat is worth to me, that is a small amount.” The woman gave him a look that was equal parts sulk and steel.
“So there you have it,” Brendan said to Nora, exasperated. “If you play your cards right, she’ll sign over her house to you. You won’t need the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee. Is that how this operation of yours works?”
“Of course not!” Nora said, feeling the heat rising in her cheeks. “I’m sure it was just a mistake. I must have thought the money was a donation.”
She tried to keep her voice steady, but was not sure she succeeded.
“Uh-huh.” He sounded cynical, and rightfully so.
Nora wanted to whirl on Luke and shake him. She had never even raised her voice to him, but their whole future was at stake here. And worse, if he had sent that letter, and taken that money—and who else could it possibly be?—he had stolen from a vulnerable old woman. How could he? Who was he becoming? And why couldn’t she stop it?
Again she felt the weight of responsibility for her choices. Karen would have never entrusted her to raise her nephew alone. She would have been able to predict this catastrophe coming.
With great care, Nora kept herself from looking askance at her nephew.
“Let’s get in out of the rain,” she suggested, trying to keep her voice steady. Because he had given her his jacket, the rain had soaked through Brendan’s shirt, which was now practically transparent.
She was aware she didn’t really want Brendan Grant, with his bristling masculine energy and wet, clinging shirt, invading her house. She’d been here only a little while, but it had quickly become a sanctuary to her. On the other hand, she desperately needed to buy some time, to take Luke aside and figure out what he had done.
And fix it.
Yet again.
But a glance at the unyielding features of the man who had made her feel momentarily so safe told her this might not be so easy to fix.
* * *
The house was not what Brendan expected of a charlatan’s house. There were no crystals dangling in the door wells and no clusters of herbs hanging upside down from their stems. There was no cloying scent of incense.
“Lovely,” Deedee breathed with approval, standing in the doorway, taking it in.
“Disappointing,” Brendan said.
In fact, he found the house was cozy and clean. An uneasiness crawled along his neck as they passed through a living room where a pair of love seats the color of melted butter faced each other across a coffee table where some of those yellow roses from the yard floated in a clear glass bowl.
“Disappointing?” Nora asked.
“No black cat. No cauldron on the hearth.”
Nora shot him a look. She really was the cutest little thing. Again he had that feeling of coming awake. He didn’t want to notice her, but how could he not? Her hair was a mess, standing straight up, strawberry-blonde dandelion fluff. Her eyes were huge in a dainty mud-streaked face. She looked more frightened now than when he had first found her.
The scam revealed. But her shock seemed genuine, and so did her distress.
“Look,” Nora said in a defensive undertone, “I take in sick and abandoned animals. I don’t claim to be a healer.”
Her nephew snorted at that, and she shot him a glare that he was completely oblivious to.
Deedee, deaf anyway, hadn’t even heard.
“As for black cats and cauldrons, I certainly don’t do witchcraft!”
Her muddy, soaked clothes, and his jacket, swam around her, and he guessed she would be determined not to remove her coat and reveal the pajamas underneath.
He wasn’t sure why. The pajama bottoms, which he could see, were filthy, but underneath the mud they were plaid. Utilitarian rather than sexy.
They came to the kitchen, and Nora turned on a light to reveal old cabinets painted that same cheerful shade of yellow as her sofas and roses. The floor was old hardwood planking that gleamed with patina. He smelled fresh bread.
There was a jar full of cookies on the counter, and notes and pictures were held by magnets to the front of a vintage fridge. There was a wood-burning stove in one corner, and an old, scarred oak table covered with schoolbooks.
The uneasiness returned. He thought of those wonders of granite and steel that people wanted for their kitchens these days, that he designed, and suddenly he knew what the uneasiness was. They somehow had all missed the mark.
For all the awards that decorated the walls of his office, he had never achieved this. A feeling.
He shook it off, looked back at Nora. The caption under her high school yearbook picture had probably read “Least likely to bamboozle an old woman out of her money.”
But somebody had. The nephew? The kid practically had a neon sign over his head that flashed Guilty, but on the other hand, didn’t all kids that age look like that? Slinky and defensive and as if they had just finished committing a crime?
What surprised Brendan was that he was interested at all in who did it. And if it was her nephew, to what lengths she would go to protect him.
But that’s what happened when you came alive. Life, the interactions of people, their relationships and motivations interested you.
It was a wound waiting to happen, he warned himself.
“Put the cat there.” Nora pointed to a kitchen island, a marble top fastened to solid wooden legs, and he set the cat carrier down, surreptitiously checking the bottom for any dampness that might have transferred to the seat of his new car.
He knew it said something about the kind of person he was that he was relieved to find none.
“He’s been very sick,” Deedee said. “Just like I told you in the letter.”
“Maybe you could remind me what you wrote in your letter.”
In the light of the kitchen, Brendan could see a knob growing alarmingly on Nora’s forehead. She was wet and covered in mud.
And Brendan Grant was surprised there was a part of him that still knew the right thing to do. And was prepared to do it.
“The cat will have to wait,” he heard himself say firmly, in the tone of voice he used on the construction site when a carpenter was insisting something couldn’t be done the way he wanted it done.
And the people in the room reacted about the same way. Deedee swung her head and glared at him. Nora looked none too happy, either.
“I want to take a look at you,” he insisted. “If you don’t need a trip to the emergency ward, you certainly need a shower and a change of clothes before you check out the cat.”
“I can have a look at the cat first.”
So she wanted what he wanted. For this to be quick. Look at the cat. Tell them what they all already knew about Charlie’s prospects for a future. Of course, what they wanted parted ways at finding out who was guilty of taking money from Deedee, and what the consequences were going to be.
Still, handled properly, the whole drama could unfold and conclude in about two minutes
, in and out.
Heavy on the out part. He wanted to head home and go back to bed.
His old life—that cave that was comforting in its lack of intensity, in its palette of grays—beckoned to him. But it seemed to him that nothing was going to go quite as he wanted.
Which he hated in and of itself. Because one thing Brendan Grant wanted, in a world that had already scorned his need for it, was control.
“You first, then the cat,” he told Nora.
Deedee, in typical fashion, appeared annoyed that her agenda was being moved to the back of the line. But Nora looked annoyed, too. It told him a lot about her when she folded her arms over his coat.
Independent. Possibly newly so. No one was going to tell her what to do. Brendan wondered again what the pajamas she was so determined to hide looked like.
“You already told me you aren’t a doctor,” Nora said.
“Doctor or not, a head injury is nothing to take lightly. They can be sneaky and deadly. It will just take me a minute to look at you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Deadly?” The boy got a panicky pinched look around his eyes. “Let him look at you!”
Nora, seeing his distress, surrendered, sinking onto a kitchen chair with ill grace.
“That was quite a hit to your head. Do you think you were knocked out?” Brendan moved close, brushed her hair away from the rapidly growing bump.
Every part of her seemed to be either wet or covered with mud. How was it her hair felt like silk?
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked,” he said mildly.
“I don’t think I was knocked out.” She offered this grumpily.
“But you can’t say for sure?”
She didn’t want to admit it, but Brendan could tell she didn’t remember, which was probably not a good sign.
Nora knew what date it was, her full name and her birthday. He noted that she was twenty-six, though she looked younger. He also noted, annoyed, that he was interested in her age.
And apparently her marital status. There was no ring on her finger, no signs—large shoes, men’s magazines, messes—that would indicate there was any male besides the boy in residence.
