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Emma shook her head. “Press charges against whom for what?”
“He’s saying you pushed him down the stairs. We know that’s not true, but he’s already managed to spread the story, and people like to talk. Now you get some rest, and maybe you’ll be able to come home tomorrow.”
With that, she was gone again, her breezy lies poisoning the air. The heart monitor at Emma’s side tapped out a hectic beat.
“She thinks she can stay with Dad after being with your father.” Emma closed her eyes as twenty-two years of family dysfunction replayed in her head. “I have to get out of this town.” She grabbed Noah’s hands. “Come with me. You can do your residency somewhere else. We can be married. I’ve waited for you so long, but I can’t breathe here anymore.”
“I can’t go.” It was the answer she expected. “My father will be more out of control than ever because of what happened today. My mother can’t protect herself, and he’ll try to punish my sister and brothers out of his sick sense of retribution. He’s a thug.” Noah shook his head. “I cannot go with you.”
“Owen is almost your age,” Emma said. “Maybe it’s his turn to protect them. And your mother should step up.” She pulled his hands to her face. “I’m begging you. I love you. You say you love me. Love me more than them, this once.”
“I do love you more than anyone. I just can’t walk away from the war zone at home.”
“It’s not your home anymore.”
“But I’m the one the others come to when they can’t stay in that house with him.”
“You’re supposed to be my place.”
“Understand, Emma.” He pressed his palms to either side of her head, his fingers tangling painfully in her hair. “I want to kill him for what he did to you, for what he’s done to all of us, but I have to find a way to help my family survive.”
“I’m leaving Bliss, Noah.”
“Stay. We can live it down.”
“If you don’t come with me, nothing will ever be right for us. Our plans will die. We’ll never be married. We won’t have children who know they’re loved. I can’t wait any longer for you to finally choose me.”
“Emma, come on. You’re not the only person who needs me. Give me a chance.”
“We don’t have a chance if we stay here. I’m getting out, with or without you, because if I don’t, I’ll be broken.”
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_a7437131-43ad-56a3-859c-406301cfb0eb)
Four Years Later
“JUST CHECK ON him.” Suzannah Gage followed Noah from the back of her SUV as he carried a sack of goat feed into the garden shed. “Owen’s failed at rehab twice already. If he’s drinking again, he could fall off Louisa Candler’s termite-ridden roof.”
“It’s Emma’s roof now, Mom, and that’s your point. You think if you can send me over there, I’ll forget she left me and beg her to start over.”
“If I’d been strong enough to throw your father down our stairs, she never would have left.”
Noah shoved the feed into a shelf tall enough to keep it out of the goats’ reach. “She didn’t push him, Mom, and you shouldn’t joke about it. Most of the people in town think she ran away out of guilt.”
“She did me a favor,” Suzannah said. He glared at her, and she waved her hands as if trying to erase her words in midair. “I mean, watching her life fall apart made me realize I needed to fix my own. I do feel responsible for your breakup, and I wouldn’t mind helping you forgive each other.”
Noah grabbed the last bag of goat feed. “You live in a dream. Emma’s been traveling the world without a word to me, and you think we can get over our split with a little chat on her collapsing porch?”
“Don’t you want her back?”
He stood there, leaves blowing around his head, hardly feeling the weight of the bag in his hands. “No.” He’d tried to stop managing his family’s emergencies, and he had a full life, running his medical practice in town. He’d even begun to organize a committee to open a clinic that would provide more extensive care than he could in a one-man office. “I have my life. I want to be here. Emma made her life elsewhere. She never believed in me anyway.”
“Never believed in you?”
“Forget it.” He put the last bag of feed on the shelf and ushered his mother back into the crisp sunlight. “I’ll go see Owen, but don’t dream up any more ideas about Emma and me. Deal?”
“Deal.” She pulled the hatch down on her vehicle. “For now, anyway. You’ll go while he’s working? Not to see Emma, honest, son, but to make sure your brother’s sober when he’s working.”
“All right, Mom, but Owen is old enough to take care of himself, and I’ve had it with being my family’s keeper.”
“I know.” Her face wrinkled with worry. “Owen thinks I have no right to worry about him because I spent so many years letting your father treat us badly.”
Noah glanced from her to the inn she’d created out of their old farmhouse. Pale yellow, surrounded with white porches and landscaping that was his mother’s pride and joy, it bore little resemblance to the tumbledown wreck of a family home it had been.
“This place is like you,” he said. “Bright and shiny and new.”
“And it’ll last, as long as I don’t let a man like your father into my life.”
So she was capable of understanding his position. He wouldn’t go back to a woman who’d made him feel like he was never enough. He’d been torn between his family’s real need and Emma’s emotional insecurity about their relationship. He’d loved her, but never enough to suit her hunger.
Besides, everyone knew she was only staying long enough to repair termite damage to her grandmother’s house.
Bliss had never made Emma Candler happy either.
* * *
THE SCENT OF sawdust and new wood treated to discourage termites filled the house. Emma leaned her forehead into the screen on one of the wide, open windows, to watch her contractor, Owen Gage, on the lawn sawing lengths of wood to repair her wraparound porch. Down below, in town, the courthouse bell tower spiked above wispy clouds.
The clock bonged out three echoing chimes, and Emma turned back to her work. The house her grandmother left her had been empty for thirteen months. Dust that would have upset Nan covered everything. Emma had spent her first two weeks back home digging into the grime and neglect, eradicating loneliness that made her ache for Nan’s comforting, sensible company.
With every dish and each neatly folded linen, slightly musty from disuse, she heard her grandmother whisper, “Come home. Take your place. Grow up, girl.”
And every time she felt tempted, she remembered that Bliss had always felt like a suit of clothes that didn’t fit. She had no place here, and she’d finally grown enough to know her life was elsewhere.
Besides, Noah lived here. Each time she left the house, she risked running into him. She didn’t want to renew their unhappy relationship, but she still wondered why she’d never been enough for him. Why he’d never chosen her first.
It couldn’t matter anymore. She wouldn’t allow it. When a woman couldn’t find answers to such a simple question, her only peace would come from burying the question forever.
She carried the last tray of china cups from one of the cherry cabinets to the kitchen island. She surveyed stacks of Limoges Haviland China, and the jewel tones of Nan’s everyday Fiestaware.
Which stack to wash first? The last time she’d emptied the kitchen cupboards to clean the shelves, she’d been eight years old, and she’d stood on a red stepstool to pass crockery and china to Nan. The memory filled her with longing so keen she closed her eyes and felt the metal stool’s steps cutting into her bare feet.
Lift your face and look to the sky to keep from crying.
That was what Nan had always said.
Emma looked up at the plaster ceiling. An iron chandelier hung from a rose medallion in the center. Both were blurred by her tears. She hadn’t yet come to terms with the death of the one person who’d made her believe unconditional love existed.
She could almost see Louisa Dane, in a pale green housedress, her hair in tight, black curls, her movements swift and economical.
“Careful,” she’d said that long-ago afternoon when thunder had rumbled on the mountain, and wind had blown gusts of raindrops through the open windows. “I’ll be leaving these dishes to you, and you’ll pass them on to your daughter. You don’t know it now, but one day you’ll have some chicken or ham, a sweet potato or some coleslaw from these plates, and you’ll remember helping me with my spring cleaning.”
“But will I be glad?” Emma had asked, eager to get to the attic for a rendezvous with Nancy Drew or Judy Bolton, girl detectives whose books Nan’s mother had collected.
“More than you can imagine. This is a memory you need to press in your heart. I know because I loved my grandma, too.”
Emma picked up a rose-painted plate and held it to her chest as if she were hugging her grandmother. As if she still could.
The sound of sawing stopped, abruptly dragging her back to the present. Owen had no helper, so when he needed an extra set of hands he put hers to work.
“Why are you here, Noah?” she heard him ask.
She straightened, then set the plate carefully back on its stack.
The men’s voices continued, one filled with righteous anger, the other low and rich, bringing back hurtful memories.
“Cut the drama.” Noah’s voice rose above his brother’s.
“Well, what are you doing here?” Owen asked. “Can I offer you a beer?”
Emma’s stomach tightened, reminding her of every argument she’d witnessed in her own home and at Noah’s. Wife against husband. Brother against brother. Father against children. Her newly clean, white kitchen dimmed as she took a step toward the hallway.
“Beer jokes aren’t funny when I’ve picked you up staggering drunk so many times. I came because Mom asked me to make sure you’re sober enough to work on this house.”
As Emma left the kitchen and looked down the long hall to the front door, Noah stepped in front of the screen, his back to it. In his navy suit, he was out of place. His dark brown hair was shorter, curling tightly against his head, cut close above his ears. His back looked broader, his shoulders tense.
“I’m not drinking,” Owen said, with the futile air of a man no one believed.
Noah’s stillness was hard to read from behind.
“Even if you aren’t,” he said, “this isn’t a one-man job.”
“When it’s not, I put Emma to work.”
“Emma’s paying you, and you make her work on her own house?”
She hurried toward them, slowing only when Owen’s gaze veered over Noah’s shoulder, his eyes angry enough to light a fire.
“Stop,” she said. “I don’t need to be rescued, Noah, and Owen, we’re losing daylight minutes.”
She opened the screen and stepped onto the porch. Lean and controlled, Noah dropped his ice-blue gaze all the way to her bare feet and then dragged it back up her faded jeans and Doctor Who T-shirt, to her makeup-free face and pulled-back hair.
“Emma.”
She trembled as if he’d touched her, but he showed no sign that she’d ever mattered more than any homeowner who’d hired his brother.
Then he tugged at his tie, a sure sign of tension, and she released a breath. She didn’t want to be the only one pretending indifference. But the past was over. Time had swallowed it up, and she should be grateful she never had to worry about mattering to Noah again.
“Why don’t you come inside?” she asked. “Owen’s busy out here. We don’t need to disturb him.”
“Don’t bother, Emma,” Owen said. “I’m the reason he came. He’d like to breathalyze me. You don’t even figure in his plans.”
A gust of cool wind rustled through the changing leaves and brushed the mortified heat from her skin. She’d given Owen this job even though her father had suggested his drinking might turn her renovations into a disaster. When she’d left town, Owen had been a guy who liked to party. Now, he was as blunt as a hammer, with an alcohol problem that cloaked him in censure.
“One thing I don’t have to do anymore,” Emma said to both brothers, “is listen to anyone in your family argue. This is Owen’s place of business, and I can’t afford more labor hours while you two sort out your problems with each other.”
Noah nodded. “Right.” He turned to his brother. “I’ve given up being the family do-gooder. This was a onetime deal. Just drop by the inn and let Mom see you’re sober.”
His suggestion apparently lit a fuse. Owen’s work boots scraped through grit and sawdust on the porch planks as he came at his brother. Emma stepped between them.
“What do you think you’re doing, Owen?”
“I don’t need—”
“You need to calm down.” She turned her back on him, ignoring the rage shimmering around him.
Noah looked at her, his full mouth stretched thin and bracketed by deep lines.
Soon after she’d left, she realized she’d been one more needy burden to a guy who’d carried his family on his back all his life. But now he looked even more disillusioned than he had the night she’d walked away. Four years hadn’t made him any happier.
“Come inside, Noah, and I’ll give you coffee.” Talking might ease the awkwardness between them. She was tired of ducking down alleys and around corners to avoid him.
Noah nodded. He paused to put a hand on Owen’s shoulder. His fingers were splayed, long and sure.
And kind.
Emma stared at the veins beneath his skin, the ridges of flesh on his knuckles. He could say he wasn’t in the business of protecting his family anymore, but he was lying to himself.
Noah loosened his tie as he crossed the threshold. “What do we need to talk about?”
She glanced back at Owen, who was gulping coffee from his thermos lid. His eyes bore dark circles. He hadn’t shaved in the five days he’d worked for her, and his hands shook as if he’d electrocuted himself with one of his own power tools. If he was drinking the hair of some dog, she might drag him up to the roof and throw him off herself. As Owen poured another cup, she shut the door and willed herself into a state of detachment.
“We need to get some things straight,” she replied.
He was lean, but he made the foyer seem small, despite its being as large as most of the apartments she’d rented in her wanderings across Europe and Asia. He dissected her with his gaze as if she were another problem he needed to solve.
She tugged at the hem of her T-shirt. Even with the windows open and a late-October breeze whipping fresh air into the house, Emma felt uncomfortably warm, too aware of the man. She turned down the hall, hiding her face from his intense gaze. Noah could read people in seconds and decide what came next.
Hence his skill at protecting his mother and siblings from their father.
After reaching the kitchen behind her, he walked around the island and took a couple of mugs from the long cabinet over the coffee maker. Just like the old days, when they’d visited her grandmother, who’d occasionally advised, but never judged or doubted that the guy from an abusive family belonged with the daughter of the town’s most scandalous woman.
“How long are you staying?” Noah asked.
“Gossip travels these hollows as fast as the breeze. I’m surprised no one’s told you I’m only here until Thanksgiving. The house should be finished by then.”
He poured the coffee for both of them and pushed one mug toward her. He turned back to the cabinet and took down sugar, then grabbed half-and-half from the fridge.
“So we don’t need to discuss anything. You’re just a visitor here. I’m never leaving Bliss. Case closed.”
