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“Then where did you learn what you’d need to know to restore a church?” he called after her.
“The same places I learned the plastering methods for the walls and moldings when we restored the library. I ordered books and did research on the Internet. That led me to a restorer in Montpelier, so I spent a week one spring working with her. She came out later to check what we’d done.”
Leaving him staring at her back, she headed up the shoveled steps to the back door of her house to let out her dog, then pulled open the aluminum storm door. The moment she opened the wooden one behind it, her impatient pet leaped past her in an exuberant blur of pale-gold fur, then practically slid to a stop ten feet from the porch when he noticed Jack standing a few yards away.
“It’s okay, Rudy,” she called, closing the doors to descend the stairs herself. “He’s coming with us.”
The animal instantly went from eyeing him to ignoring him. Looking like a mutt on a mission, he raced ahead to lift his leg on the side of a stump, then ran off, snow flying, to weave his way toward the distant gray building.
Clearly on a mission herself, Emmy hurried past Jack and along the packed path.
“The truck you were driving,” he said, still thinking about it. “That isn’t the same one I used to drive for your dad, is it?” It was the same make, but he’d thought that truck had been dark green, not dark blue.
He couldn’t see her face, yet there was no mistaking her hesitation in the moments before she replied.
“No, it’s not,” she said, continuing on. “That one was wrecked.”
“What happened?”
“It was in an accident. Rudy!” she called, putting a deliberate end to what he’d thought was harmless conversation. “This way, boy!”
She hurried ahead of him more quickly, glancing up as she entered the woods to cast a troubled glance through the bare tree branches.
Wondering what happened to the old truck, and even more curious about why she so obviously didn’t want to talk about it, he looked up at that darkening gray ceiling. Tiny, sporadic flakes continued to fall.
When he’d checked the weather before he’d left yesterday, the report had been for sun through the weekend. Listening to the only radio station he’d been able to get in his car, since he’d needed something to do while he’d waited, the weatherman had mentioned a large front moving in that evening.
It looked to him as if that front were on its way in now.
Wanting to be gone before anything nasty developed, he lengthened his stride. He just had a few details he wanted cleared up before he left.
He still needed Emmy’s full name so he could change the deed. There wouldn’t be time today to get his signature notarized and make a copy of the document so he could leave the original with her, but he could get what he needed and mail it later. Having learned what he had about her, he also felt obligated to find out how she was managing the responsibilities she’d inherited. Then there was the niggling need to find out what had happened after his family had left. He couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the Travers were being held responsible for something more than he’d believed when he’d arrived.
First, though, he would let her talk. From the way she’d invited him to come with her, it was clear she had something she wanted to say.
Chapter Three
“I s that the wood you’re taking in?” Emmy heard Jack ask as he pointed to the pallet of cordwood near the building’s wide end door.
She told him it was, and that she’d take it in after she stoked the fire. She also needed to check the tanks on her gas generators in case the incoming weather took out the power, she reminded herself, opening the smaller door near the sugar house’s only window. It was so much harder working in the sugar house with only oil lamps for light.
With the flip of the switch inside the door, the bright overhead bulbs illuminated the small but efficient space. The far end of the open room served as an office where she ran her invoices and made mailing labels with the computer. Nearer the door, stacked boxes of syrup waiting to be shipped and empty tins waiting to be filled obscured the rough wood wall behind the worktable where she packaged her finished product.
Aware of Jack walking in behind her, she moved past what took up the other end of the room; the four-by-twelve-foot-long stainless steel evaporating pan where she boiled down sap.
“Leave the door open for Rudy, would you?” she asked, grabbing a pair of battered leather gloves from the dwindling pile of wood beyond the pan.
Still wearing her good winter coat, she pulled the gloves on, opened the metal door of the fire arch built under the pan, and stoked the embers she’d banked last night. As she did, Jack stopped beside her with two quartered logs he’d picked up from the pile.
“Do you want me to bring in more wood while you do that?” he asked, holding the logs out to her.
Taking what he offered, she shoved them into the arch. “I’ll do it in a minute.”
“I don’t mind carrying some in.”
“That’s not necessary. Really,” she insisted, not wanting him to take the time. “I just need to get this going and fill the pan.”
Sparks flew as raw wood hit glowing embers. Heat radiated toward her face. She felt heat at the back of her neck, too, where he stared down at it.
Disconcerted by the sensation, she shoved in two more logs and closed the door with a solid clang. Leaving her gloves on an upended log, and him standing where he was, she headed for the spigot at the opposite end of the long metal pan. An inch-wide main line carried the sap from the acres of tapped trees around and above the building to the storage tank. With a turn of a knob, she watched the watery liquid from the holding tank flow into the top of the pan, and took a deep breath.
With nothing else demanding her immediate attention, she prepared to do what she should have done yesterday, and felt totally ambivalent about doing now.
The weather-grayed building wasn’t very large. Thirty feet by twenty, give or take a foot. She just hadn’t realized how small that space could be until she turned to where Jack and his rather imposing presence seemed to dominate the entire room.
“I have to be honest with you,” she quietly admitted, wanting to get her apology over with. “I’d hoped you would be gone when I got here. But I’m glad you came back. I didn’t thank you for your apology yesterday,” she explained, when his brow lowered at her admission. “After all this time, you could have easily just let the matter go.
“So thank you,” she conceded, when she really wouldn’t have minded at all if he’d been a man of lesser conscience. If he had considered everything over and done with all those years ago, she wouldn’t just have been reminded of why she’d had to decline the scholarship she’d once desperately wanted to accept, or about the old truck he’d once driven, the one her dad had died in.
“I can only imagine how hard it was for you to come back here,” she continued. “I just want you to know I appreciate the effort it must have taken. I appreciate your offer to return the land, too,” she admitted, certain that acquiring it had also taken considerable effort and expense. “I can’t accept it, but it was incredibly generous of you to offer it back.
“And your mom,” she hurried on, compelled to offer him something in return. “Please tell her I especially appreciate knowing she hadn’t felt right about what happened.” It had never occurred to her that Ruth Travers would feel any particular remorse or regret about what had transpired. Locked in her twelve-year-old world at the time, and having grown up knowing only what she’d felt and what she’d heard from others, she had thought of all the Traverses the same way—as people who had hurt her and parents. “For my mom, one of the hardest parts of all that happened back then was losing her friendship.”
Seconds ago Jack’s only thought had been to ask why she wouldn’t accept the property. His only thoughts now were of her quiet admission and of the mental image he could have sworn he’d erased.
“That was hard for my mom, too,” he admitted. “I think she cried halfway to Maine.” He had blocked the quiet sound of those tears and his father’s hard silence with his headphones cranked nearly high enough to shatter his eardrums. “I don’t know if anyone around here would believe it, but she really cared about your mom and the rest of her friends. She was pretty devastated by the way things turned out.”
It had been hard on him and his little sister, too. On Liz, two years older than Emmy, because she’d also lost her friends. The girls at school hadn’t throw accusations in her face as his peers had done, but they had excluded her, whispered behind her back, made her cry. He didn’t mention that, though. From what he’d learned since yesterday, Emmy’s life had fared far worse.
“Tell her I believe it.” Sounding far more forgiving than anyone else he’d encountered lately, she offered an equally pardoning smile. “What happened wasn’t her doing.”
“She’ll be relieved that you know that.”
He wanted that smile to be for him, too. He wanted to make sure she understood that it hadn’t been his fault, either, that there wasn’t anything he could have done to stop his father. But the moment was lost. The shadow of a smile she’d given him had already faded.
“I need to get the wood in,” she said, and walked away.
Slipping off her coat, she hung it on a peg near the door, glancing back toward him as she did.
“Do you have a thermos in your car?”
“A thermos?”
“For coffee. Or cocoa.” She nodded toward the coffeemaker at the far end of the long board that served as her desk. “I can make either and fill it for you.”
He’d just been told he was leaving. He just wasn’t sure how she’d managed it so graciously.
“Coffee,” he said, because he was dying for a cup. There hadn’t been anywhere other than the diner to buy any that morning, and he hadn’t felt desperate enough for caffeine to encounter whoever had been in there. “But I don’t have anything to put it in.”
“I’ll get you something.” Apparently unwilling to let a minor detail slow down his departure, she reached for the quilted red-and-black flannel shirt hanging on another peg.
His frown landed squarely on her back. Without the bulk of a coat, it seemed to him that there wasn’t much to her. At least not enough for what she apparently did around there. A sugaring operation was hard work. He knew. He’d worked with her father in the sugar bush thinning trees in the summer, running lines and tapping trees in the winter. He’d occasionally worked in this very room, hauling heavy buckets of hot syrup to the filter and stacking filled boxes of the finished product.
She needed to be sturdier. Heftier. She needed more muscle.
Not that there was anything wrong with her undeniably feminine shape, the purely male portion of his brain admitted. As his glance drifted over the seductive curve of her backside, then up to her raised arms, he felt the same unmistakable jolt of heat that had caught him so off guard yesterday. She’d tucked the soft-pink turtleneck she wore into the waist of slender dark-gray denims, revealing sweetly rounded breasts and a waist small enough he could almost span it with his hands.
The thought of having his hands anywhere on her sexy little body had him looking away even as she tugged on the heavy flannel shirt that practically swallowed her whole.
He was far better off thinking of her as the skinny little kid who’d barely been big enough at one time to stand at the long metal sink without a step stool. He remembered her dragging that stool around the room as she followed her dad, stepping up on it so she could watch him measure the sugar in the sap or the syrup, climbing down to lug a single piece of split wood for the fire.
An unfamiliar disquiet had him heading for the large door at the end of the room. Remembering her with the dad she’d adored, he could only imagine how hard it must have been for her to lose him. He knew how hard it had been to lose his own father, and they hadn’t agreed on much of anything for years.
Not wanting to think about that, either, he pushed on the heavy door and jammed it open against the snowbank behind it. She couldn’t object to his bringing the wood in now. He had to wait for his coffee.
Tiny snowflakes still drifted down as he gathered and carried in two large armloads. He was on his way in with a third when he turned to see her standing at the threshold holding a pair of large, worn leather gloves.
“You really don’t need to do this,” she said.
He walked past her, unloading his load on the growing stack. “You didn’t need to make me coffee, either.”
The coffee hadn’t been an act of hospitality. It had been a hint. Apparently too courteous to point that out, she held out the gloves.
“Put them on. You don’t need splinters.”
He held his hand up, palm out. “Already got one,” he said, but took the gloves anyway.
Giving him a look of resignation, or maybe it was forbearance, she pulled on her own gloves and silently went to work beside him.
Within minutes, the half cord of wood that had been outside was now inside, bits of bark and wood had been brushed from their clothes, and the big door was pulled closed.
“Thank you,” she said, leaving him to toss his gloves next to where she’d just left hers on the replenished stack.
“No problem,” he replied to her departing back and pulled at the Velcro tabs on his heavy jacket. Even with the side door still open and the inside air cool from the bigger door having been open, too, the small task had quickly warmed his muscles. From the fire inside it, the metal arch radiated heat like a large, squat furnace.
Vaguely aware of her dog barking somewhere in the distance, he looked from the crowded worktable to where she pulled a hair clip from her baggy shirt’s pocket. “You don’t do this all alone, do you?”
“Not all the time.”
He was glad to hear that. Knowing she had help relieved him. A little.
“How much of the time?” he wanted to know, thinking Rudy’s barking sounded more like excitement than warning.
As if she’d done it a thousand times before, she deftly whipped her ponytail into a knot and anchored it with the clip. “Charlie Moorehouse usually helps me.”
He knew Charlie. Of him, anyway. He was one of the old guys who’d played checkers at the general store. “I thought Charlie had his own sugaring operation.”
“He retired and sold it to the Hanleys a few years ago,” she replied, speaking of another sugaring family in the area. “He gets cranky come sugaring time if he can’t make syrup, so I asked him if he’d work for me.”
Thinking it sounded as if she’d hired Charlie as much for the old guy’s benefit as her own, he nodded toward the open door. “Is that who your dog’s barking at?”
“Charlie won’t be coming today. His gout has been acting up and his big toe is too painful to get a boot on.”
Looking curious herself about who her dog seemed to be greeting, she was already moving to the doorway.
Curiosity promptly faded to caution when she stopped and looked back toward him.
“It’s Joe,” she said, and turned to check on the progress of the coffee.
Jack stifled a groan as he brushed back the sides of his jacket and jammed his hands on his hips. He’d figured he had another ten minutes to get the answers he sought before she started hinting again that he should leave. The absolute last thing he wanted right now was to be interrupted by a deputy with a chip the size of a tree on his shoulder.
“We still have a couple things to discuss, Emmy.”
As if she knew exactly what he wanted, she sent a look of utter patience across the aged plank boards of the floor.
“I already told you, I appreciate what you offered, but I don’t want it.”
He opened his mouth, promptly closed it again. He wasn’t going to argue with her now. Not with Joe on his way. There was one thing he thought she should know, however, in case the local deputy got any grandiose ideas about running him off.
“I’m not leaving until we’ve talked.”
“We have talked.”
“You talked,” he countered. “You said what you had to say, but I never got started.”
“Other than the property, there’s nothing else to discuss.”
“Actually there’s a lot more. We haven’t even started talking about you.”
It was as clear as fresh sap that she had no idea why she should be a topic of discussion. It seemed equally apparent that she had no intention of indulging his interest, but she didn’t have time to actually tell him that before Rudy ran through the door, tongue lolling, just ahead of the man who filled most of the doorway.
Wearing his uniform, his hat dangling from one hand, Joe absently leaned down to scratch the dog behind its ear. As he performed the apparently routine gesture, he looked straight at Jack.
His bold brown eyes locked on eyes of piercing blue.
“Everything okay here, Emmy?” Joe asked.
The chill suddenly permeating the room had nothing to do with the cold outside. Emmy had never known the area’s only law officer to be anything but easygoing. As far as she was concerned, Joe was a big, congenial teddy bear who spent more time checking in on folks to make sure nothing was amiss than doing actual law enforcement. But then she’d never seen him around anyone he held a grudge against. Or who obviously held one against him.
Her glance fixed on the scar at the corner of his mouth a moment before she turned it on the man pointedly holding his stare. Joe would see that silvery reminder of Jack every morning when he shaved.
Pure challenge marked Joe Sheldon’s usually affable expression. Despite his almost casual tone, that confrontational air snapped in his eyes, stiffened his stance as he rose.
“Everything is fine,” she hurried to assure him.
“He’s not bothering you?”
It sounded almost as if Jack sighed. Or maybe what she heard was exasperation. “I told you last night I’m not going to cause her any trouble.”
