Coming Home

by Mariah Stewart

“You could do that just as well.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. He’s a lot younger and stronger, and he’s had the benefit of a lot of training that I didn’t have.”

  “Yes, but you’ve got a gun, right?” Maggie asked. “Do you think he has a gun?”

  “Probably not,” Hal said after thinking it over. “I doubt he set out for his sister’s wedding thinking he needed to come armed.”

  “Maybe he should have a gun.”

  “Maybe he should.” Hal thought it over. Maybe he should…

  Maggie turned to Hal. “I know what you were trying to do tonight, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I know you want for Vanessa and me to get along, and I appreciate that so much.” She paused. “It didn’t go too badly, do you think?”

  “Not too,” he agreed, and signaled for the check. He’d hoped for better, but he knew it could have been much worse.

  Well, he thought as he finished the rest of his beer, it was a start. They were talking-maybe not so much friendly talk, but at least they were talking. Judging by what Maggie had told him last night, it had been a long time coming.

  He felt protective of both of them, the woman he’d once loved and the girl he’d taken into his heart and come to love as his own. Over the next few days-for however long Maggie was staying in St. Dennis-he’d do his best to help them make their peace. But in the end, he knew, it was up to them. And then there was Beck. Hal shook his head. If he thought it was rough trying to get Maggie and her daughter on the same page, the thought of getting Beck to come around to even discussing Maggie made Hal’s head hurt. Well, he reminded himself, he had almost two full weeks before he’d have to deal with that. One problem at a time, his father always told him. One problem, one solution. He smiled as he signed the credit slip for their dinners, remembering all his father’s clichés that could apply. Rome wasn’t built in a day. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. And Hal’s personal favorite: miracles take time.

  Well, maybe a miracle was what it was going to take to make this all work out right for all of them. Where to find one… now, that was another matter altogether.

  Chapter 15

  YOU’RE awfully quiet,” Vanessa observed as she and Grady walked the last block to her house.

  “I’m just trying to stay observant,” Grady replied.

  “You mean in case someone’s following us? It’s still light out. It’s tough to stalk someone in this neighborhood when all the kids are still outside playing and so many people are sitting on their porches or out for an evening stroll.”

  “Someone came into this neighborhood in broad daylight and broke into your house,” he reminded her.

  “True enough. But they weren’t following me down the street before they broke in.”

  She waved to a neighbor across the street.

  “I heard about your shop, Vanessa,” the woman called to her. “I’m shocked.”

  “So was I, Andrea,” Vanessa called back.

  They reached Vanessa’s house and she took the keys from her bag as she started up the walk.

  “Wait.” Grady took her by the arm. “I want to check around the outside first.”

  “Why?” She frowned.

  “In the unlikely event that someone’s been back while we were gone, I want to know before we go in.”

  “Oh.”

  Grady walked up the driveway and to the backyard, and Vanessa followed. He checked the plants under the windows and found none of them trampled down. Next he looked over the area around the back porch and the door that led to the stairs down to the basement, then he walked around to the other side of the house. Vanessa paused to pull a few weeds from one of the flower beds as she passed.

  “Doesn’t look as if anything’s changed since this morning when I looked, so I guess we’re okay so far,” Grady told her when he returned to the backyard.

  “Good.” She shook the dirt off the weeds. “Oh, these smell nice. I wonder if this is one of Alice Ridgeway’s herbs.” She looked up and smiled. “The previous owner grew a lot of herbs and some flesh-eating plants as well. Isn’t that an interesting combination?”

  She raised the thin stalk to her nose and sniffed. “It’s definitely something.” She passed it to Grady, who took a sniff of his own.

  “I can’t place it, but it’s nice.”

  “Well, I guess I have my work cut out for me back here,” she noted. “I should get all these beds cleaned up, but I’m afraid of pulling out the wrong things. I don’t know the herbs from the weeds from the flowers.”

  “From the man-eaters?”

  “Flesh eaters,” she corrected him. “Mostly Venus flytraps, the Realtor said.”

  Grady walked around the entire yard, pausing to take a closer look at this or that. At the back corner, he stopped.

  “Fishpond?” he turned and asked.

  Vanessa nodded. “I heard she used to have koi. As soon as I find some time, I’m going to clean that out and refill it, buy some koi and some water lilies. Maybe I’ll get one of those little stone waterfalls.” She loved the thought of having a little water garden and the sound of the water trickling over her very own falls, no matter how small they might be. She’d never appreciated how soothing the sound of water in any of its many forms could be until she lived near the Bay.

  An empty black flowerpot sat on the bottom step leading up to the porch, and she tossed the unidentified plant matter into it as she climbed the steps, her keys in her hand.

  “The new key works just fine,” she told him as she pushed open the door and went inside.

  “Give me a minute to check things out.” Grady walked through the kitchen and into the front of the house.

  She heard his footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs and the floorboards squeak overhead as he went from room to room.

  When he came downstairs, he called to her from the front hall, “Everything seems secure. No visitors. No pretty wrapped packages.”

  “Good.” She went into the kitchen and tossed her bag onto the table. For the first time in days, she felt uncomfortable in his presence, so she found little things to do. She washed a few dishes that were in the sink, and she dried them. She heard him behind her when he came into the room and sat at the table overlooking the driveway.

  “What’s that bundle of dried stuff that’s hanging over the back door?” he asked.

  “Oh, that weedy stuff?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly. It was there when I moved in. I suspect it was some herby thing that Miss Ridgeway nailed up, probably some good-luck thing. I keep meaning to ask Miss Grace about it and I keep forgetting when I see her. I heard some things about her-that is, Miss Ridgeway-and I want to see what Miss Grace knows. She grew up right around the corner.”

  He leaned back in the chair and stretched his long legs. “What kind of things did you hear?”

  “Oh, that she put spells on people.”

  “Good spells or bad spells?”

  “I guess it depended on whether you were a friend or a foe.” Vanessa dried her hands and turned around. “I’m thinking that might be why she had so many herbs planted out back, so she could use them in her spells.”

  “My, don’t we have an active imagination.” He smiled for the first time since they left the restaurant.

  “A lot of people believe that certain herbs have certain powers.”

  “Are you one of them?”

  “Maybe.” She sat across from him at the table, trying to keep her distance. Something had changed between them over the course of the evening, and she wasn’t sure what it was. “I found some books that belonged to Miss Ridgeway in the living-room bookcase and I started to read them a few weeks ago, then we got busy with the shop and with the wedding and I had to put them aside for a while.”

  “Maybe your Miss Ridgeway was a witch.”

  “I don’t believe in witches.”

  “Where are the books now?”

  “Back on the shelf in the living room. Why? Did you want t
o see them?”

  “Yeah. Let’s take a look.”

  She turned off the kitchen lights and followed Grady into the living room. He sat on the floor in front of the sofa while she opened the glass doors in front of the bookcase and removed several volumes.

  “These look pretty old.” He picked one up and turned to the title page. “This one was copyrighted in 1921.” He opened a second book. “And this one is even older: 1894.”

  He paged through them slowly. “This is about the uses for different herbs. Medicinal uses, mostly.” He closed the book and handed it to her. “No spells.”

  “Is that what you were hoping to find? A book of spells?”

  “It could be interesting.”

  She sat on the sofa, her legs curled up under her, and he stayed on the floor. Finally, she sighed and asked point-blank, “Are you angry with me?”

  “With you?” He seemed puzzled by the question. “No. Why should I be angry with you?”

  Vanessa shrugged. “Since we left the restaurant, you’ve been… I don’t know. Quiet, I guess.”

  For a moment, she thought he was going to let that pass and not reply at all, which led her to believe he was in fact annoyed about something. She sighed. It must have been her big mouth back there on the bench, telling him what he should do about the baggage he was dragging around. He probably couldn’t care less about her opinion of his wife or on his life.

  “Was your first husband really thirty when you married him?” he asked.

  Surprised by his question, she nodded. “That was one of the dumbest things I ever did.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “I think mostly, I was just flattered that someone older, someone smoother than the boys I knew in high school, wanted to be with me. When he asked me to marry him, though, it was kind of exciting. I thought I’d look like a stupid little schoolgirl if I said no.” She looked up at him and added, “I really was hoping my mom would put her foot down. I was surprised when she didn’t.”

  “Were you really such a handful back then?”

  Vanessa nodded. “I suppose. But understand, Maggie and I have always had a somewhat fractious relationship. When I got to high school, it only got worse. Her men friends started looking at me the way they looked at her, and I guess she didn’t like that very much. I had wanted my mother to intervene and forbid me to get married, but when she didn’t, I figured she was just happy to be rid of me. Like, I’d be someone else’s responsibility and she wouldn’t have to bother anymore.”

  “I didn’t get that impression from her today.”

  “She’s looking at herself in her own rearview mirror and she’s seeing what she wants to see.” Vanessa couldn’t mask her irritation. “Maggie is finding herself alone for the first time in a long while and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’s hoping to snare Hal again so she’ll have a home and someone to take care of her.”

  “So you don’t think she’s really trying to patch things up with you?”

  “I think she thinks she’s really trying. I don’t know what I feel.” She thought for a minute, then said, “That’s what you’re angry about, then. That I didn’t tell you about Craig.”

  “I’m not angry with you, and whether or not you want to tell me something about your life, that’s your choice.” His face softened. “But I have to admit that it pisses me off that these things happened and there was no one there to stand up for you.”

  “You mean you’re not mad at me,” she said thoughtfully, “you’re mad for me?” The thought that someone might be angry on her behalf had never occurred to Vanessa.

  “Something like that, yes. And I think Hal was, too. As much as he cares about Maggie-and I think that’s a given-I could tell he wasn’t happy that she hadn’t stepped in there for you.”

  “I don’t like to think back on that time,” she told him frankly. “It just makes me angry with her and angry with myself. Maybe she’s right and I would have blown off anything she might have said to try to dissuade me, but she didn’t even try, and that makes me see red every time I think about it. But I was stupid for going through with a wedding with someone I knew I wasn’t in love with-that’s all on me. I shouldn’t have had to depend on her to tell me no. I just wish that she had.”

  “How many times had Maggie been married by then?”

  “Oh, three times, maybe. But she’d had a bunch of live-ins, too.”

  “Maybe you didn’t take the whole thing-marriage-as seriously as you should have because you’d never seen it portrayed as a serious pursuit. Maybe in your house it seemed more like a more casual arrangement.”

  She smiled. “You have the funniest way of putting things.” Before he could ask what she meant, she added, “When you got married, did you think of it as a ‘serious pursuit’?”

  “Sure. Marriage is a big deal in my family. It really bothered me a lot that Missy didn’t want my family at the wedding, that she didn’t even want them to know we’d gotten married. She said it was because the fewer people who knew, the less likely the person who had threatened her would find out where she was. In retrospect, I think it was because she knew it was a sham. The only person she needed to think we were married was Brendan, and she made sure he knew.”

  “You really think she played you?”

  “It’s hard not to, when you take an honest look at the facts.”

  “Did you love her? When you married her, did you think it would last forever?”

  “Yes, and yes.”

  “Me, too. Oh, maybe not so much the first time. It didn’t take me long to figure out what Craig really liked was having a young wife he could show off to his drinking buddies. I didn’t know much, but I knew that wasn’t going to last.”

  “Were you disappointed?”

  She shook her head. “I just wanted out. Craig had become verbally abusive, and it was awhile before he let me leave. By the time I was able to go, it was with great relief because the bad stuff was escalating. So when this good-looking guy with a pretty car and a nice apartment and a good job came along and wanted to sweep me off my feet, I let him.” She looked up at Grady and fixed a stare. “I’m going to tell you something I never admitted to anyone. But you can’t ever tell anyone else.”

  “Okay.”

  “When I was a little girl, I believed in fairy tales. I believed in happy endings. I believed in romance before I ever heard the word. I believed it was all real, would be real, and if I could find the right prince, we’d live happily ever after.” She grimaced. “Fat lot I knew.”

  “And now?”

  “And now, what?”

  “Do you still believe that? That if you met the right prince, you could live happily ever after?”

  She looked at him as if he had three heads. “Are you crazy?” She snorted. “Do you still believe if you met the right ‘princess’ that you’d live happily ever after?”

  “Actually, I do.”

  “How can you say that when you just finished telling me that you think that possibly your wife only married you to protect herself from your brother?”

  “Wrong princess.” He shrugged.

  “Like I said, you are one really strange man.” She leaned back against the sofa, and he chuckled.

  It had grown dark, and the streetlights outside had turned on. They sat in the dark for a while not talking, but he reached up and took one of her feet in his hands and rubbed the arch with his thumbs for a moment.

  “I’ll give you until tomorrow morning to stop that,” she murmured.

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then you’ll have to start on the other foot.” She slipped down onto the floor next to him, then moved onto his lap. Straddling him, she took his face in her hands and kissed him, her tongue flicking the tip of his. They teased each other for a long moment, then he clasped the back of her head and filled her mouth with his probing tongue. She placed her hands on his shoulders and eased him back onto the floor and covered his body with hers. She grabb
ed a throw pillow from the sofa to slip under his head. She lowered her mouth to kiss him again and he repositioned her hips so that she could feel him hard against her. His hands slid under her shirt and tugged her bra down to release her breasts and she leaned up slightly to fill his hands with her softness. A soft moan escaped her parted lips, and she pulled her skirt up around her waist and sought his zipper, pulled it down to release him to her busy hands. When she lowered herself onto him, he groaned and pushed himself up into her to fill her. When his mouth found her breasts, she rose and fell above him, taking him along with her, on an ever-faster ride to oblivion.

  “Oh my God,” she said when she could catch her breath. “I should have pulled those shades. I hope no one’s looking through the windows.”

  “You mean, like the guy there on the front porch with the baseball cap?”

  She started to turn to look, then realized he was teasing her. “Oh, you.” She swatted at him before snuggling down against his chest to listen to his heart beat.

  “Ness?”

  “Hmmmm?”

  “We have to get up. My neck is breaking.”

  “I gave you a pillow,” she murmured sleepily.

  “It slid across the floor. I think it’s in the front hall now.”

  “All right.” She sighed and reluctantly removed herself, sitting back against the sofa to reposition her clothes.

  “Are you getting dressed?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t walk through the front hall and up the steps half naked, that’s why. And neither can you. If someone was walking by…”

  “And happened to be staring through your windows, they might see something you don’t want them to see.” He laughed, but pulled his clothes on.

  “Right.” She stood and reached a hand down to him. “Besides, we can take them off again when we get upstairs.”

  “So, I guess this makes it a two,” he said when they reached the top of the steps.

  “Two what?”

  “A two-night stand.”

  “You think you’re funny, don’t you?”

  “Well, sometimes, yes, I do.” He chuckled as they found their way across the darkened room.