Now She's Back

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“And avoid the problem?” Noah asked. “Owen can’t.”

“It is like old times. You’re still taking care of your little brother.”

“I notice you are, too,” Noah said. “What’s up with that?”

“Sometimes I really hate you.”

Because despite everything, if she had feelings for a Gage brother, it was always going to be Noah. But he’d apparently be just as happy to foist her off on Owen.

* * *

“DR. GAGE, COULD YOU help us?” DeeAnn Franklin hurried up to him as he walked to his car on the evening after his dinner party with Owen and Emma. DeeAnn held her son, Peter, in her arms. “His ankle is swollen. He was climbing over that fence again.”

“Hey, Peter.” Noah took the boy from his mother’s arms and set him down on a bench just as the courthouse clock tolled five.

DeeAnn took off her son’s shoe and sock and rolled up his pant leg. Noah examined Peter’s ankle in the growing coolness as the sky darkened.

“No, don’t.” Peter pushed Noah’s hand away, tears leaking from his eyes.

“You’re fine, buddy.” Noah patted Peter’s leg. “I have a bandage in my car.” He glanced at DeeAnn. “Or the office, whichever you prefer.”

She looked doubtful. She waited tables at the pancake house out near one of the chalet lodges.

“My computer’s out.” Noah straightened. “I couldn’t bill you if I wanted to.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to pay you,” she said in a voice so sad her son looked up at her, puzzled.

Noah shook his head. “I’m the one with the problem. Why don’t we wrap this, and then I don’t know about the two of you, but I’m dying to have pancakes for dinner.”

“That I can take care of,” she said. “I happen to know a chef who’ll make you unbelievable pancakes.”

“We have a plan.” Noah scooped Peter up again and turned to find Emma climbing out of her own car in front of them at the curb.

Her face and throat were stained pink, as if seeing him made her feel self-conscious. He didn’t let himself consider why heat seemed to be crawling up his skin, too. The cool breeze blew Emma’s curls around her face, and the movement broke the invisible cord that bound them to each other across those few feet of ground.

“DeeAnn, you remember Emma?”

DeeAnn looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but there.

Emma thrust out her hand to shake. “We spoke yesterday, when Peter was at the petting zoo.”

“I didn’t recognize you then. Glad you’re home.” DeeAnn returned the shake briefly, then put her hand on her boy’s leg. “This is my son, Peter. Peter, this is Miss Emma.”

“I know her,” Peter said. “She spits almost as good as me.”

Taken aback, DeeAnn nodded. “I can’t really believe that. Your dad won’t like to hear it’s that close.”

“We had a contest. I beat her, Mom.” He pointed at Noah. “And him, too.”

“Oh, great.”

Noah found the woman’s obvious unease oddly uncomfortable. Was she thinking of the rumors about Emma and his father? From four years ago? Emma was right about one thing. No one let go of a good piece of scandal in this town. Hadn’t he spent his whole life here trying to clean his own family name?

“If there is ever a national spitting competition, Peter’s taking gold,” he said.

“To think I was hateful to Jeff for teaching him,” DeeAnn said.

“We should get this little guy taken care of. See you later, Emma.” Noah started toward his office door, and DeeAnn followed, while Emma trudged toward the library.

A little while later, Noah was seated in a pancake restaurant with DeeAnn and Peter. “Are you sure I can’t have a cast?” Peter poked Noah in the chest with a tiny finger and then peered around his shoulder. “I think a big cast would make me feel so much better. And some ice cream, Mom.”

“No ice cream. Pancakes,” DeeAnn said. “Noah, how is Emma? I heard she’d come back to renovate her grandmother’s house.”

“That’s what I hear, too.”

“She left after you all broke up, didn’t she? You were engaged.”

“That’s all in the past,” he said over Peter’s head.

“You worry about her, though. I see that on your face.”

“DeeAnn—”

“It’s none of my business. I know that.” She slid her hand through Peter’s curls. “But sometimes, when Ted’s home, I push him away because having him near makes me think how bad I’d feel if I lost him.”

“That’s not what I’m feeling.”

“I wasn’t just talking about you.”

He glanced back. Pamela Candler was reading a book over a drink and sandwiches in the shop’s screened porch. It wasn’t that big a coincidence. Pamela ate alone in a lot of the best restaurants in town.

But seeing Pamela, his thoughts went naturally to her daughter. Even if Emma and he wondered about what might have been, they both knew there was no going back. He’d made himself part of Bliss’s everyday life. He provided care, and he was learning to give without fearing he’d be slapped back because of his name. Emma was on her guard coming back, expecting the worst from everyone. She had no happiness here. She wouldn’t be staying.

* * *

“MOTHER.” EMMA TWISTED her hands in one of Nan’s hand-embroidered dish towels. Her mother waited behind the screen door, the darkness like a frame around her. “What do you want?”

“To see you. What do you think?”

“Do you need something from the house?” After the Thanksgiving debacle, Nan had changed her will. She’d passed over her own child to leave her home to Emma.

“If you’d read my emails, you might have known the house was looking run-down, but no, I didn’t come because I want my childhood back from you.” Pamela, in a beautiful red shift that set off her pale blond hair and bright red lips, looked at least ten years younger than her nearly fifty years.