Strangers When We Meet

by Marisa Carroll

  “Thanks.”

  “Truce, then?”

  “Truce. I’ll confine myself to comments about the weather and the scenery until your grandfather’s potion can turn me into a prince among men.” He held out his hand. Emma braced herself for some kind of shock of awareness. The electric zing she’d felt the first time she’d touched Daryl. The current she thought she’d detected a few moments before with this man. But Blake’s hand was hard and warm, his grip firm, and withdrawn in a moment—nothing more. She’d obviously overreacted to his touch back there at the bridge. She really did have to confront Daryl and put this all behind her. The stress was getting to her.

  “Don’t you mean turn you back into a prince among men?” she teased, hoping she hit the right note. Her voice sounded slightly off pitch even to her own ears.

  He angled his head a little further toward her. “You caught that, huh?”

  “I did. I told you it could cure hangovers, not work miracles.” She had herself in hand as they walked along the edge of the village green with its big old oaks and maples and the stern-visaged statue of the ever vigilant Minuteman. “Oh, look. They’re advertising cider doughnuts at the diner,” she said, pointing to a small sign on a telephone. “I love cider doughnuts almost as much as Clint Cooper’s walnut griddle cakes.”

  “Then let me buy you one or two.” He looked at her with a grin that was as wickedly sexy as—she was back to pirate or highwayman, although she guessed Wall Street shark was more accurate. Even she, who cared little about the stock market and whose small trust fund was invested in rock solid blue chips, had heard of Braxton, Cartwright and Wheeler. Blake Weston might not be a partner in the world famous international investment firm, but he definitely didn’t work in the mail room, either. She’d bet a week’s salary on it.

  She opened her mouth, ready to take him up on the offer when a horrifying thought hit her. She couldn’t go into the diner with this man—with any man—and face Lori and Burt until she had come to terms with Daryl. “No, thanks,” she said hastily. “I couldn’t eat another bite.” She changed the direction of the conversation. “There’s my grandparents’ house. Just at the end of the block.”

  “Good. I don’t think my stomach’s up to cider doughnuts at the moment.” They’d reached the outskirts of the picturesque village, and her grandparents’ yellow Cape Cod was just ahead, its small front yard nestled behind a picket fence freshly painted to match the equally dazzling white shutters at every window.

  Her grandmother, still trim at eighty-three, was in the small front yard mulching her prize rose bushes. A stack of foam cones sat by the sidewalk, waiting to be placed over the plants to protect them from the heavy snow and icy winds of a long Berkshire winter.

  “Hello, Nana,” Emma called, quickening her step. She stopped just outside the gate of the picket fence and waved as her grandmother turned toward her.

  “Emma, sweetie. You weren’t supposed to be here until late this afternoon.” Martha Dorn propped her rake against the dark trunk of the huge redbud tree that dominated the yard and held out her arms. “It’s so good to see you. It’s been too long.”

  Emma returned her grandmother’s hug. “I was here just three weeks ago.” It had been a beautiful fall weekend, the maples and oaks in all their glory, the bed and breakfast filled to the rafters with guests. It was the weekend she’d accepted Daryl’s proposal of marriage—just days before she’d seen him with the woman in the restaurant.

  “I miss you,” Martha said, tightening her embrace. “It seems longer. Have you heard from your parents?”

  “Last Wednesday. They’re fine and they send their love.”

  Martha stepped back, her bright gaze zeroing in on Blake Weston. “I’m forgetting my manners. Introduce me to your friend, Emma.”

  Emma stopped herself from saying Blake wasn’t a friend—that would only complicate the situation even more. “Blake Weston, this is my grandmother, Martha Dorn. Blake is a guest at Twin Oaks and he’s badly in need of Granddad’s restorative.”

  Her grandmother removed her gardening glove and held out her hand. “A little under the weather, are we, Mr. Weston?” she inquired.

  Emma held her breath, hoping Blake wouldn’t squeeze Martha’s fingers too tightly and cause her pain. She should have warned him about her grandmother’s arthritis, but there hadn’t been time.

  “I’m afraid so, ma’am,” Blake said, equally polite as he folded Martha’s small, arthritis-ravaged hand gently within his own.

  The slightly wary look in Martha’s gray eyes vanished as she withdrew her hand. “Then you came to the right place. My husband’s restorative works wonders. I can tell you so from my own experience—many years ago, of course. I don’t drink alcohol anymore these days. Too many medications to take. The bane of growing old, Mr. Weston,” she said, gesturing toward the house, her movements graceful despite her condition. “The body can no longer keep up with the desires of the mind or the heart. At least until Viagra came along.” She tilted her head to gauge Blake’s response to her slightly risqué comment, seemed satisfied with the momentarily stunned expression on his face and continued, “Does it surprise you I’d be familiar with the drug, Mr. Weston?”

  “No, ma’am,” he replied, and wisely left it at that.

  “A response worthy of my son-in-law,” she said with the same chiming laughter that had attracted Emma’s grandfather more than half a century earlier. “He’s in the diplomatic corps, you know. Please, come inside. I’ll tell my husband we have visitors. Or more precisely that he has a patient.”

  “Granddad’s officially retired,” Emma informed Blake as they moved up the brick walkway to the recessed front door with its antique, leaded-glass fanlight. “But Cooper’s Corner is too small to have a doctor of its own, so he spends a lot of time looking in on friends and neighbors. And he’s a member of the town rescue squad, too.”

  “Then he must value his leisure time,” Blake said, hanging back a step. “I’ll survive this hangover without the restorative.”

  “Don’t be silly. Felix couldn’t be prouder if he’d invented penicillin. He loves to see that concoction work, right, Emma?”

  “Yes, Nana.” Emma hurried to open the heavy oak door for her grandmother. Blake reached out a long arm and pulled it shut behind them as they entered the small, narrow foyer with its shining pine floor and pale green walls.

  “Felix. Guess who’s here? It’s Emma Martha. And she’s brought a friend in need of your elixir.” Martha turned her smile on Blake once more as she motioned them to follow her through the doorway under the stairs into her husband’s study. The sound of a college football pregame show could be heard coming from the enormous entertainment center that dominated the far wall of the small, low-ceilinged room.

  “What?” Felix Dorn unfolded his frame from the depths of an old wing chair, the TV remote in his hand. He hit the mute button and straightened slowly to his full height. Eighty-four, white-haired and bushy-browed, her grandfather was still an inch or two over six feet. Her father was only five feet eight, and Emma had shot past him her junior year in high school. She got her height from the Dorns.

  “Grandfather, this is Blake Weston.” Emma made the introductions. The two men shook hands. “Mr. Weston had a run-in with a magnum of Dom Perignon,” Emma explained, raising her voice slightly to compensate for her grandfather’s failing hearing and his refusal to wear a hearing aid. “I brought him for a dose of your elixir.”

  “I’m sorry for the intrusion,” Blake said. His color wasn’t good, and there were deep lines carved nose to chin on each side of his mouth. “I see you were getting ready to watch the game.”

  “Kickoff isn’t for another twenty minutes, and in fifty years I haven’t seen an entire football game from beginning to end. Why should today be any different? Follow me, young man. My office, such as it is, is right th
rough that door.”

  Blake looked as though he might refuse, but he was standing next to a table with a bowl of her grandmother’s rose potpourri on it, and with each breath he took, he turned a shade paler, and a shade greener around the gills.

  “Go with Granddad. He’ll fix you up in no time flat, I promise,” Emma said in her best advice-giver tone.

  Blake’s eyes narrowed. He tilted his head, staring a little past her, as though trying to recall something he’d forgotten.

  “Yes, go with Felix, Mr. Weston,” Martha urged. “You’ll feel much better soon, I promise.”

  “Come on, man. Time waits for no one.”

  “My husband has never been known for his bedside manner,” Martha said dryly.

  “I haven’t got all day. This is just like Emma Martha,” Felix muttered under his breath, but loud enough for them all to hear. “Always bringing home strays and birds with broken wings. It’s no wonder she’s in the business she’s in. Talking to the Lord knows who on the radio about sex and what-all and more sex, just as if she’d known them all their lives.”

  Blake stopped dead in his tracks. “Talking on the radio?” His green-gold eyes bored into her.

  “Emma’s on the radio, Mr. Weston,” Martha explained. “In New York City. Didn’t you know that?” Her grandmother gave Emma a puzzled glance. Emma shrugged. This was going to take some explaining.

  “I listen to your show in Manhattan,” Blake said, a dull red flush overlaying the pallor of his skin. “‘Night Talk with Emma Hart.’ That’s why your voice was so familiar.”

  “I should have taken a pseudonym when I started out,” Emma murmured. It was an omission she was coming to regret more frequently as ‘Night Talk’s popularity grew. She hoped she wasn’t blushing, too.

  Martha took a protective step toward Emma. “He didn’t know who you were? I thought you said he was your friend?”

  “We met this morning, Nana. At Maureen’s. I—”

  “Taking in strays,” Felix muttered louder than before. “Well, it makes no difference if you’re suffering. Took an oath fifty years ago. Not about to break it now. C’mon, young man. Before I forget what I came in here for.”

  “I—” Blake said helplessly.

  “Go on. You really will feel better in no time,” Emma said, the shocked expression on Blake’s face sending a bubble of laughter into her throat. He must be mentally reviewing each and every word he’d said to her in the last three hours. “I promise I’ll never mention this on my show. You have my word on it.”

  * * *

  BLAKE LOOKED at the foaming brown liquid in the glass and swallowed hard. He’d be damned if he’d lose the contents of his abused stomach in front of Emma’s grandfather. And from the look of unholy glee on the old man’s face, that was exactly what he was expecting him to do.

  “Go on son, drink up. Won’t do your hangover any good just staring at it that way. It’s made to work internally, you know.”

  “That’s the problem,” Blake muttered. “I’m not sure it will stay put long enough to do me any good.”

  “You can suffer for a few minutes or you can suffer the rest of the day. Makes no difference to me.” Felix Dorn folded his arms across his chest.

  Blake had the decided impression he was being tested by Emma’s grandfather. He took a tentative swallow of the contents of the glass. The concoction tasted surprisingly good. He’d expected bitter or sour, but it was sweet, almost syrupy, with a pungent aroma and aftertaste he couldn’t place.

  “Ether.” The doctor pulled a chair away from a scarred and dented metal desk and sat down. “That’s what you’re tasting. No one uses it for much anymore, but a little goes a long way to settling your stomach. Learned the secret from a Navy medic I served with in Korea.”

  “Emma didn’t mention you were in the military.”

  “Chosin Reservoir,” the old man said flatly. “Seems to me you haven’t known my granddaughter long enough to get into family history that deep.”

  Blake stiffened his spine. Chosin Reservoir was the scene of some of the US Marine Corps’s hardest fighting. Four years in the Marines had paid for Blake’s education. The pride of the Corps was at stake. He lifted the glass in salute. “Semper Fi,” he said, and downed the contents in one swallow.

  Felix narrowed his eyes. “Desert Storm?” he asked, taking a shrewd guess at Blake’s age.

  He nodded. “And Somalia.” And the World Trade Center, too, the worst of them all.

  “Some bad times there. Still, nothing to compare with a real war,” Felix said with the absolute conviction of a man who knew whereof he spoke. “But it’ll do until another one comes along.”

  Blake smiled. He was pretty sure the old doctor’s concoction was going to stay down. “Hooyah.”

  A knock sounded on the closed door. “Grandpa?” It was Emma’s distinctive voice. How could he not have recognized it? He’d listened to it for twenty-seven solid hours after the attack on the World Trade Center. She’d been calm and collected, keeping the WTKX field reporters on track and coherent. She’d helped keep him sane, too. “Nana wants to know if you’re going to keep Mr. Weston shut up in there all morning?”

  “We’ll be out in a minute, Emma Martha. Don’t want your friend vomiting all over your grandmother’s Persian carpet, now do we?”

  Blake felt color rise to the level of his chin, but he held himself in check. He wasn’t about to let the old devil dog get to him. “I’m fine,” he called to Emma. “You could make a fortune bottling this stuff.”

  Felix made a growling sound in the back of his throat. “I could tell you I had all the money I want or need,” he said, “but that’d be lying. Not many of God’s children have the moral fiber to say no to the temptation of the world’s riches. My guess is you make your living with other people’s money.”

  “I manage an investment fund.”

  Felix nodded. “You have that Wall Street look about you.”

  Blake didn’t think the old man meant the observation as a compliment, but he didn’t respond. Age had its privileges, and besides, he was feeling better by the moment. He owed Emma’s grandfather his silence for that reason, if no other.

  “I’m too old to start a new business. I won’t sell the secret to that elixir. That’s to go to Emma. She can do with it as she pleases. Though I have a feeling that fiancé of hers wouldn’t be averse to trying his hand at making a million or two.”

  Fiancé? Emma Hart was engaged to be married? She wasn’t wearing a ring. He’d already checked. Engaged? His stomach dropped. He wondered for a moment if he was having a relapse of his hangover.

  The old man didn’t seem to notice Blake was standing in the middle of his office like a stone pillar. He opened the door. “Here we are, Mother.” The tone he used to address his wife held warmth and humor, unlike the gravelly timbre he affected in dealing with Blake. He bent and placed a kiss on her cheek.

  “I hope he didn’t browbeat you too badly, Mr. Weston.”

  “Call me Blake, please,” he said automatically, his eyes going once more to Emma’s ringless fingers.

  “You look as if you’ll survive,” Emma said.

  Engaged. Taken. Off-limits. He’d better start getting that through his head.

  “He’s Corps, Martha,” Felix informed his wife. “Emma should have told me that straight off.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “‘Course you didn’t. Barely known the man an hour.”

  Blake took that as another not so subtle warning that Emma was taken. Was she engaged to a local, or was she meeting her lover from the city for a weekend tryst like the one he’d planned with Heather? He’d have to watch his step. If she was seriously involved with another man, he was going to have to keep his distance. He’d only known her a couple of hours, and already she wa
s making an almost indelible impression on his heart. There was more wrong with him than a hangover. He must be losing his mind. He’d just ended a two-year relationship with a woman he’d thought he would make his wife, and already he was letting his imagination project a virtual stranger into her place.

  Well, maybe he wasn’t that far gone. So far he’d only imagined her in his bed. He hadn’t actually pictured Emma Martha Hart with his ring on her finger or his baby in her arms. But he was close.

  There was no such thing as love at first sight. And the sooner he got that irrefutable fact through his thick skull, the better off he’d be.

  * * *

  EMMA WAS beginning to wonder if her grandfather’s potion was as effective in curing Blake’s hangover as he’d professed it to be before they left her grandparents’ home. He’d barely said a word since they’d left the little Cape Cod house, and now they were nearly halfway to Twin Oaks. His silence was beginning to bother her. She couldn’t say exactly why, but didn’t want to delve that deeply into her feelings at this point.

  “How did you come to find Cooper’s Corner?” she asked when the silence had stretched out longer than she thought was comfortable. “It’s off the beaten track.”

  “I was driving through last spring, looking for a place to buy in the area. It caught my fancy.” Blake had been staring at his shoes as they walked. He raised his head and surveyed the picture-perfect New England village spread out before them. “It’s the kind of place you could put down roots in.”

  “That’s what my grandparents thought when they first saw it. But, of course, they were ready to retire. Slow down. This is a long, long way from Manhattan, even if more and more people from the city are buying property around here.”

  “You sound as if you know something about it.”

  “My...my friend is a real estate broker here.” She couldn’t bring herself to say “my fiancé.” She turned her thoughts inward and felt the acid of resentment and anger that had so shocked her that morning stir again.

  He stopped walking and turned to look at her. They were almost at the old bridge, where they’d met earlier. Emma stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans and kept on going. Blake didn’t reach out to halt her as he had before. Instead, he fell into step beside her and waited until she stopped and rested her hands on the stone parapet. She chanced a glance at him from beneath her lashes. The deep furrows that had bracketed his mouth had smoothed out. His chin was strong and square and his gaze direct and totally male. Her pulse kicked up a beat or two, and she turned her head away.