Just like her.
He opened the door to a lovely, sun-splashed room and turned to face them. She didn’t turn away, having gotten control over herself and when he smiled at her, she smiled back. Not only her mouth, but her whole being smiled back. He blinked, and blinked again, seeming suddenly confused.
“I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “Have we met?”
Iris’s mouth fell open, words vanished, and her breath stalled in her throat.
Sheila stared at her. Her son stared at her and she could only open and shut her mouth, unprepared for this moment. After years of anticipating it, imagining what she would say and how it would be received, she was broadsided by the heaviness, the impact and weight of what she had to say to this man.
Oh, sweetheart, my little boy, I’m so sorry.
Sheila, God love her, stepped into the breaches of Iris’s life and made them her own.
“My lover and I would like some privacy,” she said, her voice echoing through the great outdoors.
Iris gulped back a startled laugh and Max’s mouth fell open slightly.
No one moved. They were all paralyzed, so Sheila took off her hat, revealing her bald head covered in brown-black fuzz that screamed Woman Recovering From Cancer, and held out her hand for the key.
Max gave it to her, inclined his head and left, silently.
“Well,” Iris said, watching him go, laughter chasing pain through her bloodstream. “He’ll never guess who I am now.”
“Maybe it will give you some time to figure out what to say if he does,” Sheila muttered, pulling her cap back over her head and walking into their cottage. “And, what to say when he asks why you left.”
Iris stood on the snow-filled porch, a band of sunlight across her feet, and felt on the edge of herself. Beyond this moment there was simply the unknown. Simply darkness and empty space. A new person, a new version of herself, drifted out there waiting for the chance to be born.
She closed her eyes as the cold wind fluttered around her.
Winds of change, she thought. Nothing will be the same after this moment.
The alarm on her watch beeped and Iris turned it off and dug through her coat pocket for her pills. What to say to the boys she’d left behind? How to explain why Patrick hadn’t wanted her to come back?
Maybe she’d let Sheila do it. As her doctor, Sheila understood Iris’s mental illness better than she did.
Max shook his head.
Lesbians. He nearly laughed, wondering why they’d lie about such a thing. And they were lying—it was written all over their faces. One of them, the taller of the two but somehow appearing more fragile, seemed so familiar. He searched his memory for someplace he would have met her, but nothing surfaced.
And the other woman, Sheila, she’d clearly gone through a hard battle with chemotherapy.
He took off again for the lodge. This place was supposed to be a respite from his life as a cop. Calm. Uneventful. But between those two women, the mystery of Josie and the beautiful and terrified Delia, he felt as though he was in the middle of a bad soap opera.
At least no one was in danger of being shot, he thought as he opened the door and went inside. That was a plus.
Max rubbed his hand through his long black hair and felt the tweak of curiosity, something he’d tried to quell and squash since leaving the force.
People were puzzles and once upon a time he liked figuring them out. Had this quartet of women walked into his life five years ago he would have made it his life’s work figuring out what secrets they held.
Nothing like a bullet across the neck to change your perspective.
But the curiosity was still there, as much as he tried to get rid of it.
Approaching the kitchen, he heard his brother’s and Alice’s raised voices. Arguing was foreplay to those two, which was pretty funny considering how much effort his brother spent in other aspects of his life avoiding arguments and confrontation.
About as much effort as Max had spent running toward a fight.
He opened the kitchen door to his arguing family. Alice sat in the swivel office chair pulled up tight to the chopping block stacked high with cookbooks. Gabe leaned against the block, next to her, holding a book out of her reach.
Childish—Max loved it.
“Hey,” he said, breaking into their argument. They shut up for a second to look at him. “Those two older women are here. They aren’t checked in, but I showed them to the cabin.”
“Max,” Gabe groaned. “There’s a system—”
Max waved him off. “One of them is clearly recovering from chemo and the other one looked like she was about to pass out. And since I didn’t want to have to carry her to the cabin after she dealt with your system, I figured they could check in later.”
Gabe and Alice exchanged a knowing glance.
“What?” Max barked. He didn’t like knowing glances.
“That’s more than you’ve said at one time in, like, a month,” Alice said.
Max rolled his eyes.
“It’s Delia,” Gabe said to his wife, as if Max wasn’t there. “She’s got him forgetting he’s trying to be a badass.”
“Oh, Max.” Alice looked like a snitch with some news to tell. “I did some investigating of my own. Since you’re too scared.”
“Uh-oh,” he muttered.
“Delia’s husband died. She’s alone. Which is sad, but good news for you.”
“Ah, my wife—” Gabe sighed sarcastically “—the picture of compassion.”
“I’m just saying.” Alice shrugged and then groaned. “That was awful. I’m sorry. But you could ask her out.”
Max tried to pretend the news didn’t affect him but it did. It explained Josie’s sadness, the tension between mother and daughter, the worry and grief that sometimes clouded Delia’s face. She’s a widow and that was a sad thing to be.
“No one is asking anyone out,” he said, and let the door swing shut behind him as he left.
Two hours later the back of Max’s neck tingled. A little tingle. A troublesome eight-year-old-size tingle. He knew Josie was behind him, standing in the shadow of the big Douglas fir.
He ignored her for a long time, hoping she’d get cold and head back to the lodge, maybe find her mother. But the girl had an obscene amount of patience for a kid and she didn’t shake.
Crap, he thought, planing a ceiling joint that had been giving him trouble all morning. It was either be mean to Josie so she’d do as her mother wished, or incur the wrath of Delia. Just the thought of that, those flashing eyes and lush lips pressed thin with agitation, made his gut knot.
I do not want to get involved.
Which left him with option one.
He set down the planer and uncurled—his lower back protesting—from his position bent over the sawhorses. Turning to the girl, he fixed her with a hard stare.
“What are you doing here?”
She shrugged.
“It’s cold.”
She nodded.
“Why don’t you go inside and hang out with your mom or something.”
She toyed with her long pink scarf.
He tried not to smile. He really did. He tried to look fierce and imposing and mean. But the kid was stubborn without saying a word. He admired the tactic.
“Well.” He bit the bullet. Again. Mama Bear was going to have him for breakfast one of these days, but he couldn’t be mean to this kid, not when she was so clearly lonely and sad. “If you’re going to hang around, you’re going to have to help.”
A smile, like flash lightning in the hottest part of summer, appeared and disappeared so fast he wondered if he’d imagined it. “I don’t know how to build things,” she said.
“You won’t be building anything. You’ll be holding things. Think you can do that?”
She nodded eagerly, which spoke loud and clear to how lonely she was. She did a funny little hop and skip to meet him where he stood by the side of his shed.
“Here,�
� he said, showing her how to hold the corner of the wood he was planing. “You have to hold tight or one of us might get hurt.”
She nodded, very serious, and leaned all her weight against the two-by-four. He smiled and ducked back down to work.
“What is this?”
“Ceiling joist.”
She looked up at the roofless cabin and he nudged her with the wood. “Pay attention,” he said, and she bent back over the wood, applying her weight.
“Have you met everyone else here?” he asked, wondering if there was a way to pawn the bored girl off on someone else. “Alice is really nice.”
Her wry glance filtered through her lashes, indicating that she was on to him.
Smart and stubborn. He shook his head in sympathy for Delia and wondered if she’d been like Josie as a child. His gut said she had been. His gut said she had been worse. An image of young Delia, trouble in her eyes, racing off to some disaster of her own making, warmed his chest and as soon as his subconscious put it there he shoved it away.
He had no right to any curiosity about the woman. No right thinking he knew anything about her.
“Alice is sleeping this morning,” Josie answered. “But she said I could come up this afternoon and meet her cat.”
“Felix? He’s snobby so be careful.”
“How can a cat be snobby?” She laughed.
“All cats are snobby. It’s their nature. And he’s French. Which makes him extra snobby.”
“My grandma was French. She wasn’t snobby. She was nice. She let me drink lemonade out of a champagne glass.”
“Fancy,” he said, digesting the small tidbit of information. “Your mom’s mom?”
Josie nodded and Max rolled his eyes heavenward.
You had to make her French, too? Could you cut me a little slack?
“Have you met Cameron?” he asked. “He’s a nice guy. You could probably help him bake a cake or something.”
Josie’s wind-whipped cheeks turned a little more pink and she didn’t look up to meet his eyes.
“Great,” he muttered. She had a crush on Cameron. Gawky, tall Cameron whose greatest pride in life, besides his risotto, was the ability to belch the first verse of “Happy Birthday.”
“Gabe always needs help—”
“Your brother is nicer than you,” she said.
It wasn’t the first time, or even really the thousandth time, he’d heard that.
“Why don’t you go bother him then?” he asked, glancing at her through his lashes.
“He’s bothering Cameron.”
Max hummed in response. “Where’s your mom?”
“She’s working on the spa. She told me to sit tight.”
“I can see you follow directions real well.”
“I got bored.” She shrugged as if boredom as a rationale covered all possible sins.
“We’ll start getting guests today and tomorrow. Maybe some kids will show up.”
She looked hopeful and Max decided he’d call Daphne, their produce supplier, to see if her daughter could come to the inn for a few hours. She was about the same age.
“Do you like your brother?” Josie asked, out of the blue.
“Sure.” He blew the shavings from the notch he’d widened. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” It didn’t seem likely, but maybe one was in boarding school or something.
She shook her head. “Mom and Dad got divorced.”
He stopped sanding and watched her carefully.
They could have gotten divorced and then he died. Yes, Max reasoned, trying to keep his sudden suspicion under control. That’s it. No one is lying.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“You live with your dad?” she asked. The kid didn’t miss anything.
“Yep.”
“Is he nice?”
“Most of the time.”
“Did your mom die?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
She shrugged again. “I’m bored.”
“Nope, she’s still alive somewhere.”
“You don’t know where?”
He shook his head. “She left when my brother and I were kids.”
Her eyes, amber in the bright sunlight filtering through trees, were suddenly very old. “Were you mad at her?”
He took a deep breath, a slight twinge in his chest telling him he was still pretty mad at her. “Sure. Are you mad at your dad?” he asked, rolling the dice on what had her so rigid and sad. Sadness in little kids often manifested as anger. He’d seen it happen enough to know it was true.
“No.” The word burst out of her with a thousand pounds of protective force. “I’d never be mad at my dad.”
Max rocked back on his heels, stunned, not so much by her answer but by her ferocity.
“It’s okay,” he said, wondering how he got put into the role of grief counselor. “It’s pretty normal to be mad at someone when they die—”
“Who died?” She blinked as snowflakes landed on her eyelashes. The sirens in his head launched a sudden wail.
“I thought your dad died,” he said carefully.
“No,” she said, confused. “He’s in Texas.”
Blood pounded in his ears. His heart thundered against his rib cage.
Delia lied.
Josie blushed bright red as if she’d said something she shouldn’t have and went back to applying all her body weight against the wood, though it was no longer necessary.
“Does he know where you are?”
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” she said. Studying the wood under her gloves. “Let’s just work.”
Rock. Hard place. Mama Bear. Secrets.
He hated this. He wanted to put down his tool and walk away. Put as much earth and air and distance as possible between himself and the tangled web that was Delia and Josie.
But he couldn’t.
This was his home. His family.
“Okay,” he finally said. “We can work.”
He handed her a piece of sandpaper from his pocket and got her to work on smoothing out the inside of the joist.
The balances inside of him, the ones that measured cost and benefit, justice and injustice, tipped heavily out of his favor.
He couldn’t ignore this anymore.
Delia was lying to them.
The man he’d been, the man he thought had died, bleeding and brokenhearted under that frog mobile, was still inside of him. Now, after two years of silence, he was saying, No more.
Max had been avoiding this confrontation for too long. He should have done this the moment things didn’t seem right with her. The moment he met her.
It was only a matter of time before Mama Bear came looking for her cub and when she did he had a few questions for Delia.
6
Delia pulled her hair out of the bun she’d had it in while organizing the supplies she and Josie had bought last night. She stepped out of the spa hallway into the dining room only to find it empty.
The sudoku puzzles they’d picked up yesterday were abandoned at the big table. The Harry Potter book they’d checked out from the library sat alone beside them.
It didn’t take a detective to figure out where Josie had gone: the one place Delia had asked her to stay away from.
Max’s clearing.
Delia shrugged into the warm coat she’d purchased and headed out to find her daughter and her new best friend—the quiet man with the soft voice, haunted eyes and the scar around his neck.
The man she wanted to talk to, be honest with. The man her gut said might be able to help her.
Is it any wonder he freaks me out? Any wonder she avoided him at all costs?
But with Josie ignoring all of Delia’s warnings to stay away, she needed to get a handle on this situation.
Snow crunched under her tennis shoes and the cold pulled and nipped at the exposed skin of her face and hands. Ordering Josie away from Max clearly wasn’t working. Delia needed a new tactic. Bribery? The only thing Josie wanted,
besides going home to her father, was a dog. Delia nearly laughed, imagining that conversation.
Sweetheart, if you stay away from Max I’ll give you your very own picture of a dog. Won’t that be great?
She started down the path and, through the brisk air, the sweet sound of her daughter’s laugh rang out like a chime. Delia nearly stopped in her tracks.
She stepped into the clearing and her breath, a smoky plume in the cold air, stopped at the sight and sound of her daughter’s joy.
Josie sat on top of a small ladder, reaching the end of a tape measure toward the top of what was going to be the roof.
“I’m going to fall!” she cried, her face alight with excitement and danger.
“No, you won’t. I told you,” Max grumbled, staring almost right into her eyes thanks to his position on the ladder.
“Don’t let go!”
“Oh, for crying out loud. If you’re not going—”
“I will!” Josie laughed, either ignoring or seeing through Max’s gruff demeanor. “Okay, okay, but don’t let go.”
Josie stood from where she was perched and reached the end of the tape to the highest part of the wooden beams. “Hurry,” she cried.
Max didn’t even look at the tape measure. “Ten feet,” he said. She let go of the metal tab and the flexible thin metal whoosed back into its case in Max’s hands.
“I did it!”
“You sure did and it only took you half the day.”
He was pretending to let her measure, Delia realized, her heart melting. He was giving Josie a job he’d probably done a million times, just so she had something to do. Just so she felt important.
How can you doubt that man? Delia thought. Scars or secrets or whatever sadness he carried, it didn’t matter. No man could be that thoughtful and not be worthy of trust. Of friendship or equal kindness.
She felt shabby for the way she’d avoided him. For the things she’d told herself in order to keep her instincts quiet. Those parts of her body that grew warm when she thought of him turned up the temperature even more.
Josie leaped from the ladder as though she’d been doing it all her life and Delia allowed herself to breathe.
Secrets of the Riverview Inn Page 8
