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“KILL HIM? He’s in his early forties.” Returning to the kitchen, she glanced toward the cottage. “Although he was coughing when I ran into him.”
“Coughing?” Van picked up newspapers from the counter and put them in the recycling box. “I never heard of that as a heart attack symptom.”
She went to the fridge and took out a bottled water, which she offered her brother. He shook his head so she opened it herself. “No problem, then. I’ll call him in the morning and make an appointment to present my business plan.”
“No, you won’t. He doesn’t want his shareholders to know what’s happened until he’s ready to tell them. He doesn’t want the press telling them so I offered him the cottage.”
“Are you saying you think I’d call the papers?”
“Beth, listen to me. Don’t bother Aidan Nikolas. You are not a woman who can risk another person’s health and be okay with it later.”
Damn him. “I want to be that woman.” She leaned into the back stairs and took a deep breath, using it to make her voice seem normal. “Eli?”
“Okay, Mom—I’ll take a shower,” he promised in the snarl of a stranger. Uneasily, Beth let his temper pass.
Van gestured toward the second floor. “Is that why you’re desperate?”
“He’s not himself. He ran away to live with Campbell after the fire, and he’s smart enough to sense Campbell was glad when I brought him home.”
“You really are scared.” With both hands on her shoulders, Van steered her into the family room, switching to big-brother mode. “Tell me exactly what Jonathan Barr said today.”
Beth sat on the sofa. In front of her, on a tufted, square ottoman, a pile of towels and linens she’d washed after dinner waited. She picked up a towel, her hands actually shaking.
“I’ve told you before, you don’t have to do laundry.”
“And I’m telling you again, I don’t love housework, but Mrs. Carleton has enough to do without cleaning up after Eli and me.”
Van shook his head. “Why won’t you let anyone help you?”
“You mean you? You’ve helped me all my life. I can do this myself, if someone will just take a chance that I’ve done my projections correctly.”
“But that won’t be Jonathan Barr?”
“He said I want too much money and I’m not a good risk.”
“His reasoning?”
When he was upset, Van tended to talk to people as if he were querying computer files.
“I should have known Campbell hadn’t paid the insurance, and I can’t argue with him there. I thought the divorce decree required him to pay it.” She took out her anger on the towel, slamming it into folds. “What made me think he’d meet one responsibility?”
“Let me give you the money,” Van said. “Eli will never have to know unless you tell him.”
“No,” she said so sharply Van noticed. She couldn’t let him know what Jonathan Barr had divulged. “I can’t.”
“You won’t, and you want me to let you and Eli suffer because you’re too proud to take a loan from someone who loves you.”
She shook her head, ruefully, to prove it didn’t matter when it most definitely did. “Oh, I’m hot for a handout.” She folded another towel. “But for Eli, I have to do this the responsible way.”
“Pride won’t feed you.”
“Or clothe us, but you’re my brother, not my guardian angel.”
She almost asked him if Jonathan Barr had been right, but she stopped herself in time. Van wouldn’t tell her the truth. To him, he was still eighteen, and she was ten, and their parents had just died, leaving her his responsibility.
“I’d expect you to pay me back,” he said.
“It’s not going to happen.” Avoiding his gaze, she went for a sheet. There was Eli’s father—refusing to take part in raising his own child—and her brother—trying to help when helping might hurt him. She had to consider asking Aidan Nikolas. “What burns me is Barr, talking at me as if I were still in kindergarten. Eight years of making the lodge pay counts for nothing.”
“With him. I know you’re good for the money.”
“Then why do you care if I ask Aidan Nikolas to help?”
“I told you he’s here to rest.”
“The entrepreneur who runs small businesses with a single thought, chases new opportunities with steel will? The guy who manages to hide his personal life from twenty-first-century paparazzi?” She stood to finish the sheet. “Don’t you think he can protect himself?”
Van looked troubled. She tried to remember him before he’d taken the world on his shoulders. First, he’d had to protect her long enough for her to reach adulthood. Then his marriage had ended because of his guilt after his wife had been attacked while he’d been away on a business trip. She’d like to relieve Van of his sense of duty toward her and her son.
“I don’t intend to chase the man around his desk—just present my business plan.”
“You won’t, because it might hurt him.”
“I’m not sure I can afford to be noble.”
Van’s eyes, green like their father’s, were so serious she couldn’t look away. “Who are you? And what have you done with my sister?”
She smoothed the edges of one towel. “I’m divorced and a single mom.” She started folding another. “I own a lodge that barely qualifies as rubble, and I’m on the edge of bankruptcy. My son is acting odd, and a guy who has money to invest just landed on your doorstep.”
Van took a pillowcase off the pile of linens and started to fold it. His silence troubled her more than his warnings.
“Are you sure he’s sick? Aidan, I mean? Mr. Nikolas.” Her skin felt too warm. She stared at her hands, trying to imagine tall, dark and thriving Aidan Nikolas as an invalid.
Van stood. “It was a minor heart attack, but he’s supposed to change the way he lives.”
She added another folded towel to the tottering stack, mostly to avoid her brother’s watchful eyes. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, and she’d sensed a vulnerability that had seemed uncharacteristic in a man like Aidan.
How long had it been since a man had made her want to know anything about him other than his fishing habits? “I don’t want to cause more problems for your friend, but I need money.”
Van’s big-brother frustration covered her like a fog. “If only you’d checked on that policy,” he finally choked out—and she realized Jonathan Barr must be right about Van’s financial trouble. Van had never made her feel bad about her mistakes. She’d learned at his knee to do what she could to mend and move on.
“Deep down where it doesn’t take any effort, Campbell loves his son,” Beth said. “How could I guess he’d screw us?”
“He screwed you in every way a man could, and then he started screwing his office manager.”
She crossed her arms. She’d felt different talking to Aidan, more feminine, stronger, because someone as responsible and successful as he had been interested. Though she lived with the constant companionship of anxiety and distraction, she was still a woman. She wasn’t wrong about the way Aidan had looked at her.
But he didn’t know her son was troubled and her business needed financial CPR. Aidan Nikolas wouldn’t waste another second of his high-powered life on a woman with her problems. She’d learned that women who made bad decisions had to fight for respect when they tried to start over.
“I don’t care what Campbell did.”
“If you were a little more honest with Eli, maybe he’d stop running to Campbell and making things worse for himself.”
“Honest? I had the man arrested for nonsupport and I turned him into some sort of Robin Hood figure for our son. He thinks Campbell’s the victim. Campbell even had him convinced they could have shared that cheesy seventies superstud apartment after the fire if I hadn’t dragged him away.”
“Let him stay a few weeks and see what happens. Campbell’s too busy—” Her brother stopped as if any truth about her ex-husband could still hurt her. “He would have lived off the perks of being a high school football star his whole life if he hadn’t gotten you pregnant. He won’t want to take care of Eli.” Van added the towel that knocked over the pile, which they both restacked into two columns. “Eli’s eleven years old. He has to face the truth about his father.”
“Not if it makes him more depressed.” She stood up to fold a fitted sheet. “How serious is a minor heart attack?”
“Would Aidan let a doctor maroon him in the Virginia countryside if he had a choice?”
“Would he show up just when I need him if I wasn’t supposed to—”
“Kill him? A second attack could be massive.”
“How long is he staying?”
“You think you’re helping if you give him a few days’ rest before you send him back to the hospital?”
“I have a doctor’s appointment myself tomorrow. While I’m quizzing Brent about what might be wrong with Eli, I’ll ask him if offering Aidan Nikolas a business opportunity could kill him.”
“I’m sure Brent Jacobs is dying to consult with you on the health of every citizen in Honesty.”
She made a face only a brother deserved.
BRIGHT AND EARLY the next morning, Beth dressed and then went downstairs to pour cereal for Eli. Mrs. Carleton called while she was slicing strawberries to say her sister was sick and she’d be in D.C. for the day. Beth left the berries in a sealed container beside Eli’s bowl. Then she wrote a note, telling him she’d be back by noon and that the housekeeper wasn’t coming.
Even though she’d probably be back before he climbed out of bed.
A quick drive across rolling country lanes, a turn onto a tree-bordered bypass road, and a bridge over the dark green lake that had been part of her livelihood, and she reached town—kind of sleepy on a spring break Monday morning.
The hospital, funded by one of the universities in Washington, D.C., had built towers, like fingers above the trees around the old-town buildings. Her childhood friend, Brent Jacobs, kept an office in one of the complexes connected to the hospital by glass-covered walkways. Beth parked in a lot and hurried to make her early appointment.
In the end, she had to wait. She dove into a cooking magazine. Eli might make it out of bed before she got home after all. A lousy cook, she was trying to soak up instructions for raisin-specked, honey-drizzled bread pudding when she was called to the treatment room.
She recognized one of Brent’s colleagues in the room across from hers. And she recognized the man who said, “Come on” with a force Eli could hardly have matched. “Two more weeks? You gotta be kidding me.”
The receptionist pulled Aidan Nikolas’s door closed. “Dr. Vining always forgets to close the door after he looks over results, and heart patients rarely want to hear they have to take it easy a couple more weeks.”
Too busy silently swearing to speak, Beth only nodded. She followed the other woman inside and nodded again at instructions to take off her clothing and put on a paper gown.
She couldn’t ask a sick man to work on her behalf.
She donned the gown, and for the first time in her life, was too preoccupied to be nervous.
THE LAST PERSON Aidan wanted to see was standing outside a sporting goods shop beside the pharmacy where he had to refill his prescription for beta blockers. He stuffed the medication, bag and all, into his jeans pocket.
“Beth,” he said, involuntarily.
She turned, her face flushed, her eyes focusing anywhere but on him. She knew—somehow.
Small towns. Gossip through osmosis.
He moved to stand beside her. “Skateboarding?” he asked, as he studied the colorful boards. “I never realized they didn’t come all in one piece.” Sets of wheels gleamed as they never would after their first use.
“Me, either, until my son started skating.” Beth lifted her hand to the height of a black board, printed with a bulky, dark green cartoon character in midleap. “This part is the deck.”
“Are you buying it? You know you work too much when you don’t recognize cartoons.”
“I can’t affor—” She stopped on a deep breath. “Eli had one something like that before the fire.” She looked him up and down and stepped back. “I need to go home.”
“Let me take you to lunch.” What had she seen? Weakness? Women normally wanted to spend time with him. For once, he’d make time to linger.
“It’s barely after eight,” she said.
“Oh.” His rage at the continued restrictions returned. She followed his hand as he shoved the medicine deeper into his pocket.
“And Eli’s on spring break. I scheduled my—an appointment I had—early so I could spend the day with him.”
“Okay.”
“Come up later, though. Join us for hot dogs or something. Mrs. Carleton—she’s Van’s housekeeper—she’s off today so we’re fending for ourselves.”
There was a dare in her tone. “I might do that.” She couldn’t scare him with hot dogs and family fun. He loved the simple stuff.
The frown between her eyebrows told him he’d read her right. “You probably aren’t supposed to eat junk food,” she said.
He took his hand out of his pocket. “Van told you?”
“About the heart attack.” She pushed her finger around the loose collar of her shirt. “He mentioned you’d had a minor problem.” She made a huge production of looking at her own watch. “I need to get home. Nice to see you again. Come on up if you get the time. I always make a salad for myself when Van and Eli pig out on the bad stuff.”
A MAN—a decent man, no less—had asked her to lunch. By herself. Not because he wanted something from Van, or he taught her rowdy son Social Studies and they needed to brainstorm “solutions” to Eli’s behavior.
She’d had to say no. With her heart beating near the back of her throat, she glanced back down the sidewalk. Aidan had already gone. Good.
Thinking he might be attracted was one thing. Feeling attracted to him was exciting because she hadn’t cared for any man in—who knew how long?
She’d forgotten the thrill of a caught breath, the tingle of flushing skin, the excitement of a maybe.
But Aidan Nikolas was used to women with no ties except to their clothing bills. She’d already made enough mistakes in her life.
Falling for a handsome, successful man in town only until he felt healthy again would be par for the course for a woman who’d lost her heart and too many years to the captain of the high school football team.
Eli was her responsibility, Eli with his moods and needs and their lack of a home to call their own. So why had she invited Aidan to join them in a hot-dog fest?
She wiped her palm across her forehead. Had the temperature grown warmer today, or had she backed herself into a hot corner? Lunch would be safe, with Eli and Van to keep an eye on her. Aidan, way out of her league, would see she had other priorities.
She took her phone out of her purse and dialed Van’s home number. In a second, her son answered, but she could tell his mind was elsewhere. He must be slaying aliens.
