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“You do beautiful work.”
As she spoke, Kelsey dropped her hand from the perfectly prepared wood. She’d had no idea all those years ago that they’d had so much in common. Years of watching and assisting her mom tend whatever had broken or malfunctioned around the diner had left her with a few eclectic skills of her own. She was probably the only student to graduate from the Boston Culinary Arts Academy who’d taken apart and reassembled a sink drain her first week of sauce class because another student’s engagement ring had been rinsed down the drain with her burned beurre blanc.
She might have told Sam that, too, had she not noticed the small white scar under the hard line of his jaw. Another peeked above the band of his T-shirt near his collarbone. The thin silvery line widened, looking slightly pink where it disappeared beneath the worn fabric.
Realizing she was staring, her glance jerked up.
He was waiting for her to move.
Her purpose for being there had her starting for the stairs. But she’d barely taken a step before his hand clamped around her arm.
“Be careful,” he told her. “The third and fifth steps are loose.”
Sam’s fingers circled her biceps. Beneath the thin fabric of her sleeve, the heat of his broad palm seeped into her flesh. The sensation unnerved her. More unnerving still was the way that heat slowly moved through the rest of her body.
Doing her best to ignore the disturbing effect, she murmured a quiet, “Okay.”
“Watch where you’re going when you get up there, too.”
Her response this time was only a nod. Yet, it satisfied him enough to let her go. Even then, the heat of his touch lingered, distracting her, making her even more aware of the feel of his eyes on her back as she started up the stairs, and carefully climbed past the boxes of nails and odd-looking metal brackets. The handrails had been removed, the steps were trailed with sawdust and most of those that weren’t loose creaked. But she was mostly conscious of the big man moving behind her—and the way he watched her when they reached the top and she stopped to glance around.
Many of the interior walls had already been removed. Piles of old lumber and sheets of knotty pine paneling were stacked everywhere. With little left to divide it, the area was mostly a series of upright studs and dangling wires.
With her back to him, Kelsey looked past a pair of sawhorses and a table saw with a long orange cord that ran to an electrical outlet beneath an open window. The glass globes had been removed from the overhead light fixtures. Bare bulbs and afternoon sunlight illuminated the varying degrees of destruction. In some places, the ceiling was missing.
The only room she was concerned with, however, was the one at the end with most if its paneling still intact. She could see into it through the row of studs that had once been the hallway wall. The wall separating it from what had been Grandma B’s sewing room was still there.
Sam lifted a board angled across what remained of a doorway. It landed with a clatter and a puff of dust on the stack behind him. “There’s not much left up here to see.”
Hugging her purse to her side, growing more uncomfortable by the second standing between him and her fantasies, she skimmed a glance past the open window. The window in Michelle’s old room was open, too.
Before he could catch her calculating, she glanced around once more.
“It feels different in here without the furniture and the walls. It’s sort of…”
“Unfinished?” he suggested.
“I was thinking more like…lonely.”
There always had been so much laughter there. Reminding herself there would be again once his little nephews moved in, she nonchalantly nodded toward the room that had been Michelle’s. In the middle of the wall jutting toward her, presumably resting on the floor, was the object she had no hope of reclaiming at the moment.
“Is that room going to stay the same size, or are you going to take out that wall, too?”
“It’s coming out.”
Her heart jerked. “Oh?”
“My sister wants more space for the kids up here.” He motioned behind her. “This will all open up to a playroom and study.”
Hoping to appear as if she were merely showing neighborly interest, she edged to where he’d left a tool belt draped over one of the sawhorses. With the hallway part of the wall already gone, she wondered if she could see between the panels. “Is that what you were working on when I interrupted?” she asked, taking another step back.
She could have sworn she felt his glance narrow on her.
“Actually I was tearing apart the door frame you’re about to back into. That whole wall is going.”
She drew herself to a halt before he could do it for her.
Still aware of the warmth on her arm where he’d grabbed her before, telling herself she was only imagining she still felt his heat, she took a more careful step toward the stairs. If she was rattled by anything, it was what she was doing. Casing a place, or whatever it was called, wasn’t exactly her area of expertise.
“Then, I should let you get back to it,” she told him. “I need to get back myself before Mom thinks I abandoned her.” The floor creaked as she edged toward the stairwell, slowly, though what she really wanted to do was bolt. “I really appreciate you letting me look around.”
He dipped his dark head, his eyes on hers, his tone as casual as she was trying to be. “Anytime.”
“Thanks.” With the promise of escape only seconds away, she turned toward the stairs, only to turn right back. “Don’t forget your pie.”
“Not a chance.”
His claim drew a faint smile an instant before she started down the stairs. Watching her go, Sam stayed where he was and wondered at the betraying tightness he’d seen at the corners of her mouth. That strain hadn’t been there when he’d seen her smile at the diner’s regulars that morning. Or in the brief moments she’d recalled bits of her childhood.
Standing in the midst of his demolition, he heard the last step creak and the quickness of her footsteps across the living room floor. She wasn’t running, but she wasn’t wasting any time getting out of there, either.
Moments later, rusted hinges gave an arthritic groan when she pushed the screen door open.
It was only when he heard it bang shut that he headed down the stairs and to the door himself.
From the seclusion of the interior’s dim shadows, he watched her hurry along the cracked concrete path and climb into the car she’d parked under the sweeping branches of the maple tree shading the driveway.
She didn’t stop anywhere along the way, though he did see her glance toward the house before she climbed into the car and drive out to the narrow main road leading into town.
He could practically feel a frown settle between his eyebrows as he stepped onto the porch and watched her car disappear across the expanse of meadowlike front lawn. He would have bet his badge that there was something more going on with her than she was letting on. Her body language alone had practically screamed that she wasn’t being entirely up-front with him. At least, it seemed to him that it had.
Still, as he headed back inside, he couldn’t help wonder if maybe the department psychologist hadn’t been right—that he did need the break. From the way Kelsey had breezed in and out of there, it seemed she really had just wanted to look around the place—and that he’d seen intrigue where there was none at all.
Kelsey could hardly believe what she was doing. It was two o’clock in the morning, she was dressed like a cat burglar in a dark stocking cap she’d found in her old ski bag and a long-sleeved navy T-shirt and jeans, and she was climbing through a second-story window of a house that did not belong to her.
Ten minutes ago, she’d parked her car at the old mill, taken the bridge across the stream and the path through the woods, and quietly made her way to the back of the house. She’d nearly stopped breathing every time the snap of a twig beneath her feet broke through the cacophony of crickets, croaking frogs and the hammering of her heart. She felt as if she were barely breathing now.
In the light of the half moon, Sam’s darkened trailer had seemed to glow like snow on a winter’s night. His truck sat parked like a shadow near its door.
Mercifully the back corner of the house wasn’t visible from the trailer. That had made it relatively easy to get the ladder she’d seen earlier on the back porch and carry it to the window next to Michelle’s old bedroom. When she’d been there before, both windows had been open. Both were now closed, but she’d also noticed that the locking lever on the window by the table saw had been missing.
Two stories up, desperately hoping she wouldn’t do what her mom had done and slip off the ladder, she balanced on the third rung from the top and tried to lever open the window.
It didn’t want to give up without a struggle. The frame had rotted in places and layers of old paint made the wood stick. There was also no handle or lever on the outside to lift with. It was only by laying her palms flat against the glass and pressing in and up that she was able to get any leverage and move it enough to get her fingers between the frame and the sill. Once she’d managed that, she was able to work it open the rest of the way.
She’d never make it as a thief, she decided, wiping bits of old paint onto her pants while clinging to the ladder for balance. She had just left impressions of her palms on the glass, and all ten of her fingerprints.
The inside of the house was dark. Poking her head in, she raised one leg and stuck it through. Hugely relieved that she hadn’t fallen, she pulled in the other behind her and cautiously eased her feet to the floor. The moonlight penetrated only far enough for her to see the outline of the lumber she’d nearly stepped on.
She couldn’t go any farther without her flashlight.
It had taken her forever to find one. Her mom, who, thankfully, still slept like the dead, had always kept one in their tiny upstairs kitchen. She’d kept another in the utility room for the inevitable power failures that came with winter storms. The one in the kitchen had a dead battery. The one in the utility room had been replaced with something the size of her car’s headlamp. It would have lit up the entire house and drawn far too much attention to anyone who might have noticed the light moving inside. Not that there was anyone around. No one other than Sam, anyway. The nearest neighbor lived a half a mile away, and the road itself rarely saw any traffic at all past ten at night.
She’d found the eight-inch long yellow flashlight she now pulled from the waistband of her jeans in the diner’s storage room. Clicking it on, she trained the beam on the floor to see where she was going and headed for the sawhorses. That was where she’d seen Sam’s toolbox and tool belt.
Her plan was simple. She would pry away the piece of paneling concealing the diary with one of his hammers or screwdrivers, get what she’d come for, then wedge the panel back in place as best she could. She wasn’t about to risk waking Sam by nailing it. The board would be loose, but if he thought anything about it when he went to tear it out, he’d have no idea it was loose because of her.
She made it halfway across the creaking floor before she turned the beam toward the wall separating the room she was in from Michelle’s—and found the beam illuminating a spot at the end of the house.
The wall wasn’t there.
Her heart gave a sick little jerk as she swept the circle of light everywhere the wall should have been. The paneling had been ripped away. All that remained of the wall and her hiding place were the upright studs that ran ceiling to floor a foot and a half apart, and a few horizontal pieces of a two-by-four that had been hammered between them for stability. The one in the center was undoubtedly the little ledge Michelle had told her was there. The one her diary had slid straight past.
Feeling a nightmare coming on, she started toward where it would have landed, only to stop at the squeak of wood behind her. The sound stopped when she did. Infinitely more concerned with where her diary might be, she ignored what she assumed where only the creaks and groans typical of old houses settling in at night and raised the flashlight to see more clearly into the room beyond the studs.
The instant she did, the hairs at the back of her neck rose. The sensation had barely registered before something hard clamped around her wrist. A gasp caught in her chest as her cap was yanked from her head. The sting of her hair being yanked with it hadn’t even registered before she was spun like a rag doll, her back slammed into the stud behind her and her air cut off by what felt like a bar of steel across her throat.
Somewhere in that startling split second, the flashlight had been snatched from her hand. Its beam was aimed straight at her face, leaving her totally blinded—and so frightened as she struggled for oxygen that she couldn’t even scream.
Chapter Three
Sam didn’t know what had wakened him. After spending fourteen months sleeping with one ear open because he never knew when his identity would be discovered and he’d find himself seconds from being dead, it could have been anything. He still woke a dozen times a night. Every night. And when he did, his first thought was that he’d blown his cover and that someone had identified him as an undercover cop.
Logic would eventually remind him that he was no longer playing the role of a down on his luck bartender and working nights in a dive in the seediest area of the city. Members of the gang he’d sought to bust were either no longer among the living, or in jail awaiting trial and a trip to prison. He was in Maple Mountain. Quiet, peaceful, boringly uneventful Maple Mountain. Yet, the thought that he was as safe here as he could be anywhere failed to form.
Logic tonight told him someone was out there.
In the dark, trusting nothing, pure instinct took over. That instinct had him easing open a window of his trailer. The faint sound of metal bumping wood had been all he’d needed to hear before he’d jerked on his pants, shoved the gun he’d kept under his pillow into the back of his jeans and slipped as quiet as a breath into the night.
Years of living on a blade-thin edge, of knowing how desperate and vengeful people could be, allowed his mind to work only one way. He always assumed the worst. To do anything less left him open and vulnerable to whatever mayhem he might face. If a threat proved minimal, he could always back down. It was infinitely more difficult, and more dangerous, to walk into a scenario expecting minimal conflict and have to gear up under assault. It was how every cop he knew survived.
He’d been locked in that mindset when he’d crept around the house to see a dark figure slip through the second-story window. In his mind, the intruder could only want one of two things. Tools to fence for drugs, or payback. He never discounted the possibility that he had been ID’d by a suspect who’d escaped a bust, and that someone he’d helped put in jail might look to get even by having a buddy nail him.
Now, primed for survival, his only thought as the intruder’s identity registered in the beam of the blinding light was that he was crushing Kelsey’s windpipe.
She looked terrified.
He was hurting her. The knowledge that he was a hair-breadth from hurting her more shot a sharp, totally unfamiliar pang of fear through his rigid, adrenaline-charged body.
He swore even as he jerked away his arm. The gun in his hand glinted dully as it passed through the beam.
He swore again, adrenaline still surging as he swung the light from her eyes.
“God Almighty, Kelsey.” His voice held fury, his words as close to a prayer as he’d been in years. He could have snapped her neck. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
Blinking to clear her vision, she sagged in relief against the post when she recognized Sam’s voice. She couldn’t see him. All she could see were spots as she lifted her shaking hand to her throat. “I’m…”
“Do you have any idea what I could have done to you?” He was nowhere near ready to hear from her just yet. Furious with her for jerking around with his adrenaline, equally upset with the thought of the force he’d used on her, he slammed the end of the flashlight down on the sawhorse beside him. As it rocked on its base, its light formed a wavering circle on the ceiling. “You should never sneak around a cop. Ever. Do you understand me? What in the hell were you thinking?”
Kelsey’s heart beat furiously against her ribs. She wished he’d stop swearing at her. She wished he’d stop yelling. Mostly she wished he’d move. He’d only backed up a couple of feet. As near as he stood, it seemed she could actually feel the tension radiating from his body. That tension roped around her, making it hard to breathe even without his arm jammed against her neck.
“I wasn’t sneaking around you.” She forced insistence into her voice, along with a bravado she truly did not feel. What she did feel was a little sick from an adrenaline rush of her own. Her knees were shaking. Locking them, her chin edged up another notch and she focused through the fading spots. “You were the one who snuck up on me.”
“You were breaking and entering—”
“I didn’t break anything! The window wasn’t locked.”
“It’s a term.” He growled the words as he jammed his hands onto his hips, his stance now even more imposing as the he glared down at her. “You’re trespassing on private property in the middle of night. You climbed through a second-story window to get in here. That’s called breaking and entering,” he informed her, clearly familiar with the technicalities. “What you haven’t said is why.”
She would rather avoid that.
Ignoring the sore place on the back of her head where it had bumped the stud now supporting her, she dropped her glance to the cleft in his chin. The night-time stubble shadowing his face made the carved angles look as inflexible as granite. His voice sounded as hard as tempered steel. “I was just looking for something that I’d left here.”
“This afternoon?”
“Before that.”
In the dim glow of the flashlight, he abruptly turned away. A few frantic heartbeats later, she saw him flip on the overhead light—a single bulb waiting for a new cover—and head back to where she remained rooted in the sawdust.
He had been easier to take without the harsher light. Then, he’d been a huge, menacing shadow with eyes that seemed to penetrate the dark. As he walked toward her now, she could clearly see the rugged, unyielding lines of his face, his broad—and naked—shoulders and chest, and the silver-white scar that slashed at an angle from his collarbone to the rippled muscles six inches below one flat male nipple.
Her glance slid down, only to dart back up when it reached the patch of dark hair that arrowed below the band of his unsnapped jeans. A quarter-size circle of puckered flesh showed faintly pink above his left biceps. The sight of all that cut, carved and scarred muscle was disturbing enough. The glimpse she’d caught of the handgun he tucked into his waistband below the small of his back was even more so. It was only then that she realized he’d had it drawn.
She jerked her glance from the six-pack of muscle forming his abdomen to the disconcerting light in his eyes. It was clear he no longer regarded her as any sort of a threat. It seemed equally obvious that he was in the process of calming himself down. His fury had subsided to something more like controlled irritation, aggravation or whatever it was that had his jaw working as he jammed his hands back onto his hips.
“What is it?”
Shaken beyond belief, she shook her head. “What is…what?”
“What you left here.”
The nature of her distress abruptly changed quality. “It’s just something that’s…mine.”
“If it’s yours, what is it doing here?”
“It wasn’t always here,” she explained, the faint ache at the back of her head making her rub there, anyway. “I’d kept it at the gristmill until I heard that some of the boys from school had started hanging out there, too. I was afraid they’d find it, so Michelle let me put it in the hiding place in her room.”
She let her hand fall, brushing back her hair on the way, and crossed her arms protectively around herself. “I’d only meant to leave it there for a while. But it fell past the ledge she’d said was in there and we couldn’t get it back out.”
For a moment, Sam said nothing. He just stood with his eyes narrowed on her decidedly pale features. The knot of hair she’d wound near the top of her head had loosened when he ripped off the cap laying on the floor. Strands of that flaxen silk fell against her cheeks. One lock tumbled over her shoulder.
Not trusting himself to touch her to push it back, not sure if he wanted to ease the disquiet in her eyes or shake her, he stepped back instead. He couldn’t believe the trouble she’d gone to to retrieve something she could have simply asked him for.
Feeling as if he’d wound up in Oz, he moved to where he’d left the book he’d found that afternoon. The thing had been between the walls dividing the rooms, along with a tube of dried up lipstick and a pile of candy bar wrappers. The only reason he hadn’t tossed it along with everything else was because of the name on its pale pink cover. Kelsey had been written out in hot pink glitter. Much of the glitter was gone, but the looping outline of the name remained visible enough.
More concerned at the time with how he was going to reroute the electrical wiring in the wall, he hadn’t considered much about his little discovery. The only thought he’d given it was to mention it to the Kelsey, who’d brought him the pie that was now nearly gone, in case it belonged to her, since she’d known the Bakers, or some relative of theirs who shared her name.
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
Kelsey’s eyes widened on what he held.
“That’s it,” she confirmed, and was halfway to him when she lifted her arm to grab it from his hand.
“Not so fast.” Remaining by a pile of panels he’d salvaged, he held the diary up out of her reach. “I want to know what’s so important about this that you’d do what you did to get it.”
The nightmare Kelsey had felt coming on began to materialize.
“It’s just a diary I kept in high school,” she insisted, minimizing drastically as she tried again to reach for it.
He held it higher.
She was inches from his bare chest. Looking past the hair shadowing his armpit and the sculpted muscles along the underside of his arm, she breathed in the scents of soap and something warm, vaguely spicy and totally, undeniably disturbing. He’d showered before he’d gone to bed.
Not sure if the heat she felt radiated from him or from a purely primitive female awareness of his big body, she swallowed hard and backed away.
“It’s nothing. Really. It’s just…sentimental stuff.”
“A lie detector would be wasted on you.”
Kelsey opened her mouth, only to close it because she couldn’t decide if she should beg or just try again to snatch for what he’d just lowered. He had an easy six inches on her, and a decidedly longer reach. Even if he hadn’t been so much taller, and bigger, the thought of getting up close and personal with the rock wall of his chest definitely gave her pause. It also added a new element to the anxiety clawing at her when he stepped back, took a small piece of wire from the toolbox and deftly popped the lock guarding the pages between their faux-leather covers.
A new form of panic surged. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t believe it’s ‘nothing,’” he said simply. “There’s something in here. Since you just took ten years off my life breaking in to get it, I want to know what it is.”
“No!”
A sense of impending humiliation made her grab for the book again. He promptly stuck it back in the air. Already in motion, she raised on tiptoe, stretching her arm the length of his, getting far closer than she would have intended had she felt she had any choice. With her breasts pressed to his chest, she reached over him, her stomach flattening against abdomen and his zipper as he edged the book farther back.