His Brother's Bride

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Also on the nightstand, next to the cookies, was a copy of Byrd’s bestselling book on bed-and-breakfasts, an old photo of a young couple in an amorous embrace used as a bookmark.

  Scott took note of everything—both mentally and on paper—touching as little as possible. There was an overnight duffel on the floor by the nightstand. A silk nightgown hung from one of the bedposts and on the dresser was a laptop and a thirty-five-year-old birth certificate for someone called Leslie Renwick. The birth had taken place in Iowa, and the parents’ names were whited out.

  “Look at this,” Scott said.

  Clint, who’d been standing in the doorway, crossed over and glanced down at the birth certificate.

  “Who would just throw an important document like this on the top of a dresser?” he asked.

  “Someone who wasn’t intending to leave it there.”

  “Someone who left here in a hurry, you mean?” Clint asked, frowning as he gave Scott a sideways glance.

  “Possibly.” Scott looked back at the dresser. While there was no real indication that William Byrd had been kidnapped, he was getting a bad feeling about the whole thing. “You know anyone named Leslie Renwick?” he asked Clint.

  Clint shook his head. “Never heard of her.”

  “She’s not from around here,” Scott said. He’d lived in Cooper’s Corner most of his life and was only a year younger than Ms. Renwick. If she lived around here, he’d know her. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know any Renwicks in the area.”

  “I don’t, either,” Clint said. “Not now and not from back when I lived here as a kid, either.”

  “You were, what, nine, when your family moved to New York?” Scott asked. He didn’t know much about Clint, except that he was a former architect-turned-innkeeper, a widower with a twelve-year-old son.

  Clint nodded, turning slowly and studying the room. “I wonder if the name means anything to Maureen.”

  “Good question.” Scott took another look around as well. “We’ll ask her as soon as we get downstairs.”

  “You looked in the duffel?” Clint asked.

  “Yeah, nothing there but a change of clothes and the usual toiletries.”

  Clint shook his head. “Wouldn’t you think he’d have taken them if he was planning to be gone overnight?”

  Avoiding the other man’s eyes, Scott said, “Just because he didn’t plan to be gone doesn’t mean that it wasn’t his choice not to return.”

  He made a couple more notes on his pad and then slid it into the front pocket of his blue uniform shirt. “We can head back down for now,” he told Clint. “Mind if I keep the key to this room?”

  It had opened without the use of a crowbar this time.

  “Of course not.” Clint hesitated at the door. “Tell me, Officer, how much of a chance do you think there is that Nevil’s behind this somehow?”

  “Ten, maybe twenty percent.”

  Scott tried to ignore the pang of compassion he felt as the other man’s gaze reflected his worry.

  Scott had a job to do. That’s all that mattered. Ever.

  Maureen met them at the bottom of the stairs, her jade-green eyes filled with questions—and frustration. She was probably chafing to get in on the investigation herself, Scott realized.

  Like Clint, she had never heard of a Leslie Renwick, either.

  “Laurel’s waiting for you in the gathering room,” she told Scott as Clint excused himself to check on the kids in the kitchen. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll head back to my office and see if I can reach the other two families that were here, though I doubt they’ve had time to get home yet.”

  Scott nodded, forcing himself not to think back to the Laurel who had once been part of his life.

  Shoulders straight, he headed purposefully off to the gathering room to complete the interrogation. He was eager to get to his phone and call in some favors. Put an unofficial trace on Byrd’s missing rental car and on Owen Nevil. He also wanted to go back upstairs and see what he could do with that computer.

  He was hoping it would yield some clues.

  * * *

  SHE WAS STARING OUT the window. Scott stood in the opening to the gigantic living room at Twin Oaks and sucked in air.

  Heart pounding, he couldn’t move. Just stared.

  She had her back to him, but that didn’t matter. He knew her silhouette front, back and sideways. Recognized the way she held her shoulders completely straight, her neck stiff. That meant she was trying to figure something out—or to remember something.

  But even if he hadn’t paid undue attention to things that weren’t his business, he’d still have known it was her. No one else had that yellow hair, though it was shoulder length now.

  She was dressed casually in navy capris, a white blouse and white leather sandals. The outfit might have appeared ordinary on someone else, but on Laurel it was pure elegance.

  Laurel. Here. Close again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SCOTT WAS STUNNED.

  He’d dreamed Laurel London into Cooper’s Corner a million times, even as he’d fully accepted that he was never going to see her again. He could hardly believe it. The excruciating pleasure—and agony—that she instilled within his most private self lunged at him mercilessly.

  He opened his mouth to speak—to call out to her—and had nothing to say.

  How did a man calmly say hello to a woman whose heart he’d broken? Whose dreams he’d shattered with the horrible news he’d given her. How did he call out to her, remembering that she’d made it clear she wanted nothing to do with him, that seeing him was too painful to her?

  Thoughts flitted so rapidly across the page of Scott’s mental notebook, he could hardly keep up with them. Standing there close to Laurel brought the pain of Paul’s passing forcefully to the surface.

  After three and a half years of mourning his older brother, he’d become pretty adept at keeping that ache locked away.

  Right along with the shame of having been so desperately in love with Laurel himself. This woman had been his brother’s fiancée—left at the altar when Paul’s life had been cruelly snatched away the morning of their wedding.

  Images of his brother’s mangled body, thrown from the car when his seat belt ripped from its casing, flashed across the mental page. He’d known Paul was dead the moment he climbed from the wreckage and stumbled over to the grassy embankment where his brother’s body had landed. Paul’s head had been bent at such an unnatural angle. And the blood trickling out of his mouth and down his chin would have choked him had he been breathing....

  Scott hadn’t even had a scratch that bled. Not one goddamned scratch. Yet he was the one who should have been lying in a heap with a broken neck.

  The sedan they’d been in that morning had been Scott’s. He was supposed to have been driving his brother from Boston, where Paul had his new law practice, back home to Cooper’s Corner for Paul’s wedding. He was the one trained to deal with the icy weather conditions.

  And he would have been the one in the driver’s seat, wearing the seat belt that had broken when they hit the patch of ice and flipped, but he’d been so damned hungover he’d practically seen double.

  He’d put away so much eighty proof the night before at Paul’s bachelor party that they could have sterilized medical instruments with his blood. And all because of this woman.

  He’d drunk himself into a stupor to forget the fact that the following day his beloved older brother was marrying the only woman Scott was ever going to love.

  Laurel turned and found him staring at her.

  “Scott?” The word was both a whisper and a cry.

  He nodded, needing to hold out his arms to her, to crush her to him and promise her that somehow he’d make amends, make things right for her.

&nbs
p; But he couldn’t.

  There were some things a man just couldn’t do, no matter how determined he was.

  How in hell could he dare to offer solace when he was the reason she was suffering in the first place? When he hadn’t even been man enough to tell her that he was responsible for her fiancé’s death?

  If she’d read any of the reports, she’d know Paul had been driving that morning, but she’d been in such shock, run out so immediately, chances were she’d never seen a write-up of the accident. And even if she had, the underlying facts, the heavy ones that Scott’s conscience carried around every single day, the ones that crucified him were nothing that would show up in a report.

  Only Scott’s father had known those. And now he, too, was gone.

  She ran over and threw her arms around his neck, embracing him completely. Silently, he wrapped his arms around her, holding her to him as he fought back the needy shudder that passed through him.

  In the next second she was crying, sobs racking her body. Tears burned the back of his eyes as they shared a pain too deep to put into any kind of words. No matter what else had come between them, what wrongs he’d been guilty of, they’d both loved Paul fiercely.

  Scott’s older brother had been the kind of man who instilled such love in those he cared about. And loyalty, too... For both of them, the loss of Paul meant that life would never be the same again.

  After long moments consumed by grief, Laurel pulled back from Scott, her dove-gray eyes limpid with tears. Gently, unable to help himself, he pushed the strands of tear-dampened hair away from her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” she said almost awkwardly, her arms falling to her sides as she put more distance between them. “I guess this weekend’s been harder than I thought.”

  “You’ve been in town all weekend?”

  He didn’t know why that thought was just striking him now. Or why the fact that she hadn’t contacted him was so painful.

  She’d had no reason to contact him. And every reason not to.

  “I came to say goodbye,” she said softly. “I need to get on with my life.”

  The words struck a chord of irrational fear in Scott’s chest, as though Laurel had found a peace he’d been denied.

  He couldn’t say goodbye. He had no life to get on with. There was just existence left. And work.

  He didn’t deserve anything else.

  She’d never given him a hint of encouragement, yet he’d allowed his love for her to cloud everything around him and lead him to a foolishness that had cost his brother his life. Yet even as he’d been telling Laurel the terrible news about Paul’s death just hours after it had happened, he’d been in love with her. He’d wanted to run away with her, lose himself—his grief—in her arms.

  And now, more than three years and a whole load of guilt later, he had a very strong suspicion that he loved her still.

  * * *

  LAUREL COULDN’T STOP TREMBLING.

  Coming back to Cooper’s Corner had been like rubbing salt in wounds not quite healed enough to withstand the onslaught. Seeing Scott ripped those wounds wide open again, as though in three and a half years there’d been not one fraction of healing.

  He looked incredibly good, so tall and strong and solid. Seeing him in his dark blue uniform, one could be tricked into believing that he could really right wrongs. Save the needy. Make the world a better place.

  His dark hair was exactly as she remembered, and those striking blue eyes...

  “I thought I was ready,” she said, when a fresh spate of tears struck.

  “You didn’t expect to see me.” He stood, hands in his pockets, just inches away.

  “I thought you’d moved to Boston. You’d just taken that detective position.”

  “After...the accident...I applied with the state police instead....”

  She and Paul had moved to Boston a few years before the accident, when Paul had been accepted at Harvard law school. She had already graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in journalism and had accepted a position at the Boston Globe, working on the local desk.

  Scott had been planning to move to Boston right after the wedding, keeping the Hunter home in Cooper’s Corner as a vacation place. He’d wanted to be closer to their ailing father, who was in an assisted living facility in Boston, but his father had died shortly after the accident. Laurel knew that. She’d sent a card....

  After the accident she’d run away from Boston almost as quickly as she’d vacated Cooper’s Corner.

  “So...you’ve been here...all these years?”

  “Yes.”

  She was warmed by the way he was looking at her.

  “I moved to New York,” she told him.

  “I know. I’ve seen you on the news a time or two when I’ve been on the road.”

  She was glad. Though when Scott’s presence had become a comfort to her rather than the sharp pain it had been the last time she’d seen him, she didn’t know.

  Maybe she had healed some.

  “They say time heals all pain, but I don’t think the ache is ever going to go away.” Private by nature, she’d never have said such a thing to anyone else, but she sensed that Scott would understand. She had a feeling he knew exactly what she meant.

  He nodded.

  “He should be here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She should be living in Cooper’s Corner. Raising Paul’s babies. They’d had it all planned.

  “I never intended to be a career woman,” Laurel confessed.

  “From what I’ve seen, you’re very good at what you do. A natural.”

  She shrugged, unusually pleased by his praise. “I love the work, the challenge, the fact that there’s always something new....”

  “Keeps your mind busy...”

  “So you don’t have too much time to think.”

  They nodded as they recognized in each other some of the suffering they’d thought they bore alone.

  And then it was too much for Laurel. She couldn’t go back to the places Scott was taking her. Couldn’t cry enough tears to ease the grief.

  Being shuffled from foster home to foster home most of her life, Laurel had never had a real family to call her own, never belonged anywhere, never knew what home felt like, until she’d met Paul. She’d been eagerly accepted into the all-male Hunter clan. There’d only been the three of them, Paul, Scott and their father, but they’d been all Laurel had ever dreamed of in a family.

  She didn’t dream anymore.

  “Speaking of jobs,” she said, distancing herself physically as she broke the emotional connection between her and Scott, “Maureen said you’re here about Mr. Byrd’s disappearance.” She crossed over to the piano that dominated one corner of the room.

  His head tilted slightly as he appeared to adjust to the changed atmosphere between them. “Yeah,” he said, straightening as he drew a small notebook from his shirt pocket and came farther into the room. “I don’t know how much time you have, so I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  “I have all the time you need.” She leaned an elbow against the piano, trying to convince herself that she was relaxed. Trying not to admit to herself how badly she needed that piece of solid furniture to hold her up. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping to be able to help.” She attempted an easy grin. “After all, investigation is a big part of what I do.”

  At first she was afraid he was going to refuse.

  “I’m not ready to leave Cooper’s Corner,” she confessed. “I don’t feel like I’ve finished doing what I came here to do.

  “Officially I’m on vacation, but I need something to do. I’ve even got my tape recorder upstairs.” She tried for a chuckle that ended up a weak smile. “I never go anywhere without it. This could prove to be a great
human interest story and I’d have the exclusive.”

  Of course, she only covered local stuff, but...

  Scott was frowning down at his notebook.

  She took his silence as a sign that he wasn’t completely averse to the idea—maybe he just needed to be convinced. “You know, the benefits of ‘keeping your mind busy.”’

  “Three and a half years ago you could hardly bear to be in my presence.”

  “I know.”

  “The police aren’t going to be officially involved—they can’t be. There’s been no crime committed.”

  “I know.”

  His gaze met and held hers for a long time.

  Laurel braced herself for any one of the myriad questions she sensed were buzzing inside his mind. Scott never had been one to hide things. To the contrary. His need to have everything out on the table had been disconcerting at times. Scott Hunter had no time for subtlety.

  To someone as private as Laurel, Scott’s openness had been incredibly unnerving, and yet comforting as well. She’d known right from the beginning, and never had cause to doubt from that time on, that she held a very important place in the Hunter family.

  Only Paul had known how much she’d coveted that position.

  “Okay.”

  “What?” Though she didn’t move from her position at the piano, Laurel’s heart rate sped up.

  “I said okay. We’ll do this one together. But if it gets dangerous, you do as I say.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then as of now, we’re a team.”

  And suddenly, as much as she’d been seeking just that response, Laurel had doubts.

  She truly wanted to do whatever she could to help find William Byrd. And though she didn’t really understand why, she felt compelled to spend this time with Scott, too.

  Was it to finally put the past to rest?

  Or because she couldn’t let go?

  It was the confusion of seeing Scott again that made her unsure, and a little afraid, of this temporary commitment.

  “So...” Scott took a seat at the thick oak game table on one side of the room, pushing out a chair for Laurel with his foot. “Let’s get started with you telling me what you know. I’ll fill you in and then we’ll go take a look at Byrd’s room again.”