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Swearing just loudly enough for her to hear it, Adam shoved his hands beneath her armpits, foisting his help on her whether she wanted it or not. When he pulled her to a sitting position, the room started to spin, and she swayed. Adam’s grip tightened.
“Hang in there,” he said, holding her steady.
“I’m fine,” she mumbled, “fine…”
“Lianne, hand me that pillow.” Tucking a small cushion carefully behind Annabelle’s back, he settled her against the arm of the sofa, then turned to the younger woman. Sensitive to the fear that was turning the girl ashen, Adam spoke gently. “Lianne, can you go into the kitchen and make your sister a cup of tea?”
Lia stood uncertainly, biting her lip and staring at the big sister who rarely had a cold, much less a fainting spell. Adam reached out and gave the girl’s forearm a gentle squeeze.
“She’ll be all right,” he reassured her. Knowing Lia would be calmer if she was occupied, he urged, “How about that tea? And something to eat.”
Lia nodded so hard her ponytail bobbed. She ran out of the room, and Adam turned back to the thin too-pale woman lying on the divan. An expletive rose to his lips. Dark smudges shadowed the area beneath Annabelle’s blue eyes. From the moment he’d walked in this morning, he had seen how tired and over-worked she appeared.
Delicate and fair, she had always given the appearance of needing someone to look after her, an impression dispelled immediately once you got to know her and realized it was Annabelle who took care of everyone else.
Even as a teenager, she had managed her parents’ house, balancing the family checkbook, clipping coupons for groceries. Her parents had been wonderful people, but they’d been artists and their left brains hadn’t been quite as fully developed as their right. Adam had loved their relaxed easygoing natures, so different from that of his own mother and father. Jack and Lilah Simmons valued individuality and the joy of living in the moment. They had taught their children to value themselves and they had taught him, too. But he could see now, with the benefit of hindsight, that their carefree attitudes had frightened their older daughter.
Adam looked at Annabelle and felt a sharp stab of guilt. He’d stayed away too long.
Her eyes were closed, and he wondered whether she was fully alert. He sat on the sofa next to her very carefully, hip to hip, and she jerked. Yeah, she was alert, all right.
Scanning her body, his sharp gaze paused where her skirt bagged across her concave tummy. “Have you had anything to eat today?”
Her eyes flickered open. “A couple of aspirin,” she whispered weakly.
He had to resist the urge to shake some sense into her. “Aspirin is not part of the food pyramid, Annabelle.”
Irritation filled him. When she’d slid to the floor like she was melting, his heart had skipped more beats than it would ever make up.
A fussy priggish Annabelle he could tolerate.
A self-righteous Annabelle he could tease.
A sick Annabelle scared the daylights out of him.
Taking her wrist between his fingers, he counted her pulse. Fast, he determined, but steady.
Absently, he rubbed her hands to warm them. She still had the smallest hands of any woman he’d ever known.
Belle had changed in the past few years. For as long as he lived, he would never understand how she’d tied herself to a bonehead like Steven J. Stephens. The man was a pompous anal-retentive bore and, apparently, a bastard to boot.
Adam had wanted to find the man and rearrange his nose until it was as skewed as Stephens’s politics when he saw the Collier Bay News last night and that picture of Stephens with a woman who looked like a Barbie doll. Granted, Annabelle Simmons’s love life was none of his business, but worrying about her was an old habit, and old habits were the hardest to break.
Pressing her hand between his palms, Adam waited for her skin to grow warm.
Flustered by the feel of his palms enveloping her much smaller hand, Annabelle let her eyes remain closed, although she was wide awake now.
When she’d come to in her parlor and realized it was Adam’s hand on her brow, she’d felt something close to panic. Even semiconscious, she had recognized the traitorous heat that flowed through her limbs.
His touch was a time machine, whisking her back to the days when taking his hand had been easy and frequent.
Come walk with me, Annabelle. The leaves are turning. And he would hold out his hand.
I miss my mom. It would have been her birthday yesterday. And she’d reach for his hand.
She’d rushed home from college the minute she’d received news of her parents’ death, and Adam had been waiting for her. Lianne was home with a baby-sitter the evening of the car accident. When Annabelle arrived at the house past midnight, the sitter was gone, Lianne was in bed, and Adam was in the parlor.
He sat on the settee, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring into the fire, so deep in thought he hadn’t heard her enter the house.
The only sound in the room was the steady tick, tick of the grandfather clock against the wall. Adam rose the moment he saw her, and the surprising thing—the only part of the evening she remembered clearly at all—was that he’d been crying. His eyes were as red-rimmed as hers.
He stayed with her that night, and he was there in the morning when she and Lia woke up. There hadn’t been a moment after that, not a single one, that he hadn’t been there if she needed him. He seemed to know just how to tease her out of a blue mood and when to simply listen while she poured her heart out. He had made the strange bottomless aloneness seem less awful.
Now, lying on the sofa with her eyes closed, pretending to be insensible when in fact every sense she possessed was zinging with life, Annabelle felt a wave of bittersweet emotion well inside her. After all these years, her first impulse when she had a problem was still to lean on Adam’s shoulder and cry until she felt better.
The very thought made her heart flutter in panic. Looking back, she knew she had leaned on him too much for too long, but when you lost people you loved earlier than you should have, it changed things. It altered the way you looked at life, the way you hung on to people. And the way you let go.
“The water’s heating for tea.” Lianne rushed back into the room. “I made a tuna sandwich. We had some left over. Do you think Belle could be allergic to something, Adam? Like mercury in tuna? A girl in my biology class passed out because she ate MSG. Well, ate MSG and dissected a frog, but—”
Rising to take the tray Lia carried, Adam set it on the coffee table. “Tuna’s fine. It looks great.”
With an effort Annabelle lowered her feet to the floor and pushed herself all the way up. Immediately, Lia rushed to the couch.
“Oh, Belle, are you okay? You scared me so bad when you fainted.”
“I’m fine.” Annabelle squeezed Lia’s hand. “I got dizzy for a second, that’s all. I’m sorry I scared you, baby.” Lovingly, she reached up to smooth Lia’s bangs away from her face. “I’m so proud of you,” she whispered, her eyes misty. “Getting into Juilliard! I think I got a little overexcited, that’s all. But after I rest a bit, I’m going to start planning the biggest party this town’s ever seen.”
The sisters sat side by side on the sofa, bonded by a closeness defined in part by the struggles they had shared.
When the grandfather clock announced noon, Annabelle placed a kiss on the top of Lia’s head. “Hey—” she bumped Lia’s shoulder with her own “—don’t you have a yearbook meeting today?”
Lia glanced at the clock. “I’m not going to go.”
“What? Of course you are. You’re the senior editor.”
“I’m not going to leave you.” Lia shook her head. “Not while you’re sick.”
“I’m not sick.”
“I’ll take care of her.”
Adam and Annabelle spoke together. Lia looked from one to the other.
Stepping forward, Adam laid a hand on Lianne’s shoulder. “Go on,” he urged. “I think Annabelle will feel better if she knows you’re at your meeting.”
Lia frowned uncertainly. “You’re going to stay with her?”
Before Annabelle had a chance to protest that she didn’t require a baby-sitter, Adam nodded. “I’ll be right here.”
“Well…” Lia vacillated, chewing a thumbnail. “If I wasn’t the senior editor, I wouldn’t even think about it. Oh, Belle, are you sure you’re going to be okay? Maybe you should go to the emergency room. You should have a CAT scan.”
“I don’t need a CAT scan.”
“I think I should stay. I could—”
“Go!” Again Adam and Annabelle responded at the same time.
Firmly, Adam pulled Lia to her feet. “She’ll be all right. Go to your meeting and tell your friends the good news. And save a couple of hours for me later in the week. We’ll have dinner at The Beach House.” He named the area’s poshest establishment. “The country’s next great concert pianist should dine where she can see and be seen.” He winked.
Lianne smiled tremulously. She glanced once more to her sister. “You’ll be okay with Adam, huh, Bellie?”
Annabelle nodded.
Turning to the neighbor who had been like a big brother for as long as she could remember, Lianne instructed, “Make sure she eats the whole sandwich. She didn’t have any dinner last night.”
Eyeing Annabelle with a frown, Adam nodded. “Count on it.”
Reassured for the time being, Lianne hugged her sister, gave Adam a peck on the cheek and exited the room. A moment later they heard the front door open and close, and silence thickened the atmosphere in the small Victorian-dressed parlor.
Annabelle’s heart thumped with foolish nerves as Adam crossed to her, seating himself on the sofa and reaching for the plate Lia fixed. He held up one-half of the tuna sandwich. “You eat. I talk.”
She hesitated, and his gaze sharpened. “I will take you to the emergency room if I think there’s some-thing more than hunger and fatigue going on here.”
“Lia worries too much,” she grumbled, but she took the sandwich.
“Then why give her more reason to?”
Prepared to protest heatedly that everything she did was for Lia, Annabelle opened her mouth. Adam tipped her hand, sending the sandwich home.
“Eat.”
Once she was chewing, he stood and left the room, returning a few minutes later with a cup of hot tea. He took his place on the sofa again, and the tuna turned to dust in Annabelle’s mouth as she felt Adam study her. She forced herself to keep eating, but was acutely aware of his attention as it fastened on her loose blouse, her too-roomy skirt, then moved back up to her face.
He said nothing, but from the corner of her eye, she saw his expression tighten and turn grim. He didn’t like what he saw.
She knew she had lost weight recently, too much weight, but the stress of the past couple of weeks had been almost unbearable and food hadn’t gone down easily. She had come through so much in her life— the premature death of her parents, leaving college to care for her sister, starting a business in the home her family had left her, possessing at the time more hope than experience.
She’d made it through all that, still standing, still going strong. But this past couple of weeks…
Lowering the sandwich, Annabelle felt her last vestige of energy drain as if she were a keg and someone had pulled out the stopper. She felt tired. Tired and defeated, and so alone it scared her.
The first touch of Adam’s fingers smoothing a lock of hair behind her ear made her heart thunder and shake. Her skin felt like glass, as if at any moment she could shatter from the simple contact of his hand.
She couldn’t look at him, didn’t dare; she didn’t need to look to know his brows would be lowered intently, that the green green eyes would be filled with care. That was one thing, among all the doubts, she never had to question: Adam cared.
After her parents’ death, there had been times late at night when Lia was in bed that the silence in the house had been crazy-making. Adam had been there, glad to talk into the night or sit in utter silence, depending on the mood Annabelle was in. She had needed that. Lord, how she had needed exactly that— a friend whose devotion was unconditional.
Now for the second time in her life she felt like a house in the middle of an earthquake, the very foundation that supported her cracked and shifting, and Adam was here again.
He would offer friendship, and she would try to resist. Because he wouldn’t stay.
Like a dieter who knew from experience that one bite of chocolate would decimate her will entirely, Annabelle would resist Adam’s friendship because one bite was never enough. It might take a day, a week or a month, but he would leave, and she would have to learn all over again how to get through a day without him.
“What’s going on, Belle? You’re edgy. You’re tense. You don’t eat.” Adam’s quietly spoken concern was the opening salvo to get behind her defenses.
“I eat.”
“Aspirin,” he said dismissively. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. I’ve been very—”
“Busy. Yeah, I know.” He shook his head, impatient with her evasiveness. When he spoke again, however, his voice was gentle, even empathetic, and that made his words harder to take. “I know about Stephens.”
That was it; he said nothing else. Simply, I know…
Well, Annabelle thought, that’s swell. She hated loose ends, and now she wouldn’t have to worry about any. Her humiliation was complete.
She could try the line about her and Steven being mismatched, but why bother? In truth, that was Steven’s excuse, not hers. As far as Annabelle was concerned, she and Steven had been perfectly, almost scientifically well matched. She wouldn’t have gotten engaged, otherwise.
Annabelle had purchased a book entitled, Mate for Life, according to which she and Steven were eighty percent likely to reach their silver anniversary. Those were the kind of odds Annabelle liked.
It was so much more humiliating to be dumped by a man who was supposed to be perfect for you.
“You want to talk?”
Placing the remainder of her sandwich on the plate, Annabelle wiped her fingers. “No.”
Adam nodded. “Mind if I ask you a question, then?”
“I really don’t want to talk about—”
“Have you ever considered that your welfare matters to me? Contrary to what you apparently believe, I can’t turn friendship on and off like a spigot. Not like you can.”
“What? Me?”
“That’s right.” She turned to gape at him and he took full advantage of her attention. “We made a onenight mistake, Annabelle. One night, six years ago. That doesn’t have to spoil the entire friendship. Not if you don’t want it to.”
Spoil the friendship! As if it were a sack of oranges and that “one night” he referred to nothing more than a contagious mold.
Annabelle felt like she could no longer breathe. Emotions whirled and tangled and knotted inside her.
“I cared about your parents,” Adam continued. “They worried about you. Have you ever considered I might need to make sure you’re okay for their sake?”
Had she ever considered…? Of course she had! Six years ago she had forced herself to consider the possibility that his affection for her parents might be the only reason he needed to make sure she was okay.
She looked into his eyes and saw clearly the interest, the decency and concern. And all at once she felt it again, the heat that could fill her until she thought she might burst. The traitorous treacherous need.
Suddenly Annabelle felt like she’d been cornered by a bear. The only two words that seemed to make any sense were the ones she had told herself over and over for the past half-dozen years: never again.
