The New Girl In Town

“I’d be more likely to believe that if you were where you said you’d be.”

“I am in Pinehurst,” she told him.

“You said you’d be staying with Claire.”

“Not forever.”

He sighed. “She told me you were thinking about buying a house.”

She frowned at that, wondering why her friend would have told Scott anything. But she couldn’t blame Claire because she knew, better than anyone, how charming and persuasive he could be. “And?”

“Buying a house is a major decision,” he said gently. “And you’ve had a tough year.”

“Too late.”

She heard his groan, fought back a smile.

“It was completely irrational and impulsive,” she admitted. “I saw the sign on the lawn, contacted the agent and made an offer.”

“Please tell me you at least had a home inspection done.”

Now she did smile. Reasonable, practical Scott Cowan would never understand the need deep within her heart that had compelled her to buy this house. “A home inspector would have told me it needed a lot of work,” she said, not admitting that she’d been given a copy of the report from an inspection done on the property just a few months earlier. “I already know that.”

“Christ, Zoe. Have you gone completely off the deep end?”

“That seems to be the general consensus,” she agreed.

“Let me contact my lawyers,” he said. “Maybe there’s a way to undo the transaction.”

“No,” she said quickly.

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

She sighed. “I mean, I don’t want it undone. I want this house.”

“You could be making a very big mistake,” he warned.

She knew he was right. But she’d spent the better part of her twenty-nine years doing the smart thing, the safe thing—and she’d still been unprepared for the curves that life had thrown her way. Even if buying this house turned out to be a mistake, it would be her mistake.

“Why should you care?” she challenged. “You walked out on me, remember?”

“You kicked me out.”

He was right, she had to admit. But only because she couldn’t continue to live with him the way things had been.

“Does it matter?” she asked wearily. “The end result is the same.”

“I’ll always care about you, Zoe.”

And that might have been enough to hold them together if other obstacles hadn’t got in the way. She rubbed her hand over her chest, trying to assuage an ache she wasn’t sure would ever go away. “Was that the only reason you called?”

“When’s your next appointment with Dr. Allison?”

She felt the sting of tears. If he’d been half as concerned about her twelve or even six months ago, what had been left of their relationship might not have fallen apart.

“I have to go, Scott.”

Before he could say anything else, she disconnected the call. She heard the telltale scrape of chair legs against the hardwood floor and blinked the moisture from her eyes.

She felt Mason’s hand on her shoulder, gently but firmly turning her to face him. “Zoe?”

She didn’t—couldn’t—look at him. She just needed half a minute to pull herself together, to find the cloak of feigned confidence and false courage that she’d learned to wrap around herself so no one would see how shaky and scared she was feeling inside.

“Who was that on the phone?” he asked.

She took a deep, steadying breath and prepared to dodge the question. After all, it was none of his business. She hardly knew this man; she certainly didn’t owe him any explanations.

But when she looked up at him, she realized he wasn’t trying to pry or interfere. He’d asked the question because he knew she was upset, and he was concerned. In the past eighteen months, she’d withdrawn into herself. She’d been let down by people she’d counted on, disappointed by friends who hadn’t been there for her. Except for her almost daily phone calls to Claire, she’d been on her own. She’d learned to rely on herself, to need no one else.

After only a few days in this small town, she knew that was one of the reasons she’d come here—because she didn’t want to live the rest of her life alone. She wanted—needed—friends to care about and who would care about her.

So she took what she hoped was the first step in that direction and answered his question honestly.

“That was my husband.”

Chapter Three

Husband?

Mason’s head reeled. Zoe’s announcement had caught him completely unaware. And delivered as it was, in that soft, sexy voice, the punch was even more unexpected.

It took a minute for his brain to absorb this startling bit of information that—at least for him—changed the whole equation.

Zoe was married.

He couldn’t have said why her revelation surprised him so much, or why it left him feeling oddly disappointed. He only knew that he needed to stop thinking of this woman as his sexy new neighbor and focus on the fact that she was someone’s wife.

Damn.

Zoe might not be his usual type, but he found himself drawn to her regardless. There was just something about her that intrigued him—enough so that, in the brief time between their first meeting that morning and his return for their scheduled appointment, he’d found himself looking forward to spending time with her, getting to know her. And maybe, eventually, moving toward a more intimate and personal relationship with her.

Of course, that was all before he’d learned she was married.

It was his own fault for letting his fantasies get ahead of him, and he silently cursed himself for that now. His hand dropped away and he took a step back.

She gazed at him uncertainly as she folded her arms over her chest. Her cell phone was still clutched in her hand—her left hand. He noted that fact along with the absence of any rings on her fingers.

“You don’t wear a wedding band,” he noted.

Of course he knew that not everyone did. But he sensed that she was the type who would, that if she’d made a commitment to someone, she would display the evidence of that commitment. Then again, he’d been wrong about assuming she was uninvolved, so maybe he was wrong about this, too.

She shook her head and moved back to the dining room, returning to the chair she’d vacated to answer the call. “No, I don’t wear a ring. Not anymore. Not since…that is, I’m—I mean we’re—getting a divorce.”

“Oh,” he said, as he absorbed this second unexpected—but more welcome—revelation. And then he felt like a heel, because he was relieved to know that her marriage had fallen apart so that he didn’t need to feel guilty for fantasizing about a married woman.

“We’re just waiting for the final papers to come through,” she admitted.

“I’m sorry,” he said lamely.

She shrugged. “It happens.”

Yeah, he knew that it did. He also knew that a break-up was never as easy as she implied, even if it was the right choice.

“How long were you married?” he asked.

“Almost nine years.”

He stared at the woman who didn’t look like she was twenty-five. “Did you get married while you were still in high school?”

She smiled at that. “Fresh out of college.”

“How old were you when you went to college?”

“I’m twenty-nine,” she told him.

And he was thirty-seven—which meant there weren’t as many years between them as he’d originally suspected, but there was still the barrier of her marriage. And even if her divorce papers came through tomorrow, she was obviously still hung up on her husband. Her evident distress over his phone call was proof of that.

“What did your soon-to-be-ex-husband want?” he asked. “Did you take off with his coffeemaker or something like that?”

“No, nothing like that. We actually had a very civilized settlement.”

“Then why was he calling you now?”

“He heard from a friend of mine that I bought a house and wanted to tell me he thought it was a mistake.”

“Did you tell him it was none of his business?”

“Yes,” she said. “But after nine years of marriage—and not just living together, but working together, too—some habits are hard to break.”

“Is he a photographer, too?”

“No. He’s the senior fashion editor at Images.”

“Is that why you left Manhattan?”

She shook her head. “It’s a big enough city that I could have stayed, found a new apartment, a new job, and probably have never seen him again if I didn’t want to. But everything just seemed so inexplicably woven together there. I needed to get away from all of it, to make a fresh start somewhere else.”

“Well, you picked a good place for that.”

“Speaking from experience?”

His surprise must have shown, because she smiled.

“Maybe I didn’t peg you quite as quickly as you did me,” she said, “but the more I listen to you talk, the more I hear just the subtlest hint of a drawl.”

“You can take a boy out of the south, but you can’t take the south out of the boy,” he mused.

“How far south?”

“Beaufort, South Carolina.”

“What brought you up here?”

“I came north to go to college, met Nick Armstrong there, came to Pinehurst for a visit one summer and decided to stay up here to go into business with him.”

“Do you go home very often?”

“This is my home now.”

“Don’t you have any family left in Beaufort?”

He shook his head again. “There’s just me and my brother, Tyler, and he’s living up here now, too.”

“No wife or ex-wife?” she wondered.

He shuddered at the thought. “No.”

“Well, that was definite enough.”

“Not that I’m opposed to the institution of marriage. In fact, I was the best man when Nick got married.” He grinned. “Both times.”

“He was married to someone before Jessica?”

“To your real estate agent actually.”

Now that came as a surprise to Zoe.

“I don’t know Jessica very well, obviously,” she said. “But the way she talked about Nick, I got the impression they’d been together forever.”

“They’ve been in love forever,” he agreed. “Had a brief romance when they were younger, then went their separate ways and found each other again only last year.”

“Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

“It’s a small town,” he reminded her. “And Nick’s ex was remarried long before Jess ever came back to town.”

Zoe thought about the possibility of Scott marrying again, and wondered if she could ever bring herself to be friends with her ex-husband’s new wife. Then she decided it was a moot point. He was out of her life; she’d moved away; they’d both moved on.

She felt the familiar ache of loss, but it wasn’t as sharp or as strong as it once had been. She’d finally accepted that he couldn’t be what she’d needed him to be any more than she could be what he’d wanted. And while her body would always carry the scars of what had finally broken their marriage, she realized that her heart was finally starting to heal.

Mason didn’t know anything about babies, but he couldn’t deny that the pink bundle in Jessica’s arms was kind of cute. Elizabeth Theresa Armstrong had soft blond fuzz on her head, tiny ears and an even tinier nose. She yawned, revealing toothless gums, then blinked and looked at her mother through the biggest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen.

“She’s a beauty, Jess.”

The new mother beamed. “She really is, isn’t she?”

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “Just like her mother.”

Jess chuckled. “Actually, she looks exactly like Nick’s baby pictures.”

“No kidding?” He glanced at the proud father standing by the window. “Let’s hope she has better luck as she grows up.”

His partner chose to ignore the comment, asking instead, “How was your appointment with Ms. Kozlowski?”

“It was…interesting,” he said, unconsciously echoing Zoe’s description of their initial meeting. He carried the vase of flowers he’d brought for Jessica over to the windowsill to join the other arrangements that were already there. “The house needs a lot of work.”

“What did you think of the owner?” Jess asked.

“I think she needs her head examined,” he said. “And so do you, for not trying to talk her out of buying that place.”

“No one could have talked her out of it.”

Mason had caught only a glimpse of Zoe’s steely determination and guessed Jess was probably right.

“You still should have tried,” he said, setting the pint of promised ice cream and a plastic spoon on the table beside her bed.

“If she hadn’t bought it, we wouldn’t have got the referral,” Nick pointed out. “And it would’ve killed you to watch another architect put his hands all over that house.”

“So long as you keep your hands on the house,” Jess said.

Nick lifted an eyebrow in silent question.

Mason shook his head. “She’s not my type.”

“Is she female?” his friend asked dryly.

“A very attractive female,” Jess interjected. “Who’s new in town and doesn’t need to be hit on by the first guy she meets.”

“I was the consummate professional,” Mason assured her, and it was true—even if he’d had some very personal and inappropriate thoughts about her.

The baby squirmed, and when Jess started to shift her to the other arm, Nick swooped in and picked her up.

“Do you want to hold her?” he asked his friend.

Mason took an instinctive step in retreat. “No, um, thanks, but, um…”

Jess took advantage of having her hands free to reach for the container of ice cream. As she pried open the lid, she commented, “I’ve never seen you back away from a woman before, Mason.”

“My experience is with babes, not babies.” He felt a quick spurt of panic as his friend deposited the infant in his arms and stepped away, leaving the tiny fragile bundle in his awkward grasp. Then he gazed at the angelic face again and his heart simply melted.

He reminded himself that he didn’t want what his friends had. Marriage, children, family—they were the kind of ties he didn’t dare risk. Yet somehow, these friends had become his extended family.

He’d had a family once, a long time ago. Parents who had loved one another and doted on their two sons. He’d been fourteen years old when his mother got sick; Tyler had been only ten. Elaine Sullivan had valiantly fought the disease for almost two years, but everyone had known it was only a matter of time. The ravages of the illness had been obvious in her sunken cheeks, dull eyes and pasty skin.

Gord Sullivan had fallen apart when he’d realized the woman he loved was dying. Unable to deal with the ravages of her illness, he’d looked for solace in whiskey—and other women. Mason had never figured out if it was denial or some kind of coping mechanism. He only knew that his father’s abandonment had hurt his mother more than the disease that had eaten away at her body.

Four years after they’d lowered Elaine’s coffin into the ground, her husband was laid to rest beside her. The doctors blamed his death on cirrhosis of the liver. Mason knew his father had really died of a broken heart.

It was a hard but unforgettable lesson, and when he’d buried his father, Mason had promised himself he wouldn’t ever let himself love that deeply or be that vulnerable. He refused to risk that kind of loss again.

And yet, when he looked at Nick and Jess and their new baby, the obvious love they felt for one another evident in every look that passed between them, he found himself wanting to believe that happy endings were possible. He wanted to believe his friends would be luckier than his parents.

One of the drawbacks of buying the house and its contents, Zoe realized, was having to clean the house and its contents. After Beatrice Hadfield died, her grandson hadn’t removed anything from the house, which meant there was a lot of cleaning up to do before she could even begin to tackle the dust and cobwebs that had taken up residence in the vacant house over the past couple of years.

She took down all the curtains and stripped the beds, then spent half a day and a couple rolls of quarters at The Laundry Basket in town. She emptied out closets and dressers and shelves and cupboards and packed up dozens of boxes for charity. She sorted through cabinets full of china and stemware, tossing out anything that was cracked or chipped. When she was done, she still had enough pieces left to serve a five-course meal to twenty guests.

It took her three days to get through the rooms on the first two floors, then three more days to sort through everything in the attic. There were trunks of old clothes, shelves of old books and boxes and boxes of papers and photos. She was tempted to just toss everything—it would certainly be the quickest and easiest solution—but her conscience wouldn’t let her throw out anything without first knowing what it was.

She found letters and journals and lost a whole day reading through them. She felt guilty when she opened the cover of what she quickly realized was a personal journal of Beatrice Hadfield’s from some fifty years back, but the remorse was eclipsed by curiosity as the woman’s bold writing style and recitation of details quickly drew Zoe into the world in which she’d lived back then—and the passionate affair the woman had had with a writer who had rented a room in the house for several months one summer. A writer who had gone on to win several awards for plays, more than one of which Zoe had seen on Broadway.

On the morning of the seventh day in her new home, there was still cleaning to be done and she’d run out of supplies. So she grabbed her keys and purse and headed into town for what was intended as a quick stop at Anderson’s Hardware. She didn’t anticipate that being a newcomer in a town where almost everyone knew everyone else would make her a curiosity.

She’d barely managed to put the first items—a bucket and mop—in her cart when a tall, white-haired man approached.

“I’m Harry Anderson,” he said. “You must be the young lady who bought the Hadfield place.”

She nodded. “Zoe Kozlowski.”

“Welcome to Pinehurst, Zoe.” He smiled. “Is there anything I can help you find?”

“I just needed to pick up a few cleaning supplies.”

She thought she was capable of browsing and making her own selections, but Harry Anderson clearly had other ideas. Instead of leaving her to her shopping, he guided her around the store, asking questions and making suggestions along the way.

Other customers came and went, each one exchanging greetings with the store owner who, in turn, insisted on introducing her. While he was occupied with Sue Walton—“her family owns the ice-cream parlor down the street”—she steered her cart toward the checkout.

She wasn’t sure she had everything she’d need, but she had at least enough to get started and she really wanted to get back home and do just that. She was paying for her purchases when Tina Stilwell, her real estate agent, came into the store.

“I thought that was your car outside,” Tina said to Zoe, then she stood on tiptoes to kiss the cheek of the man beside her, “Hello, Uncle Harry.”

“Hello, darling.”

“Did you forget about our lunch plans?” she asked Zoe.

Zoe glanced at her watch, as surprised to see that it was almost lunchtime as she was by the other woman’s reference to plans she knew they’d never made. “I guess I did.”

“Well, you girls go on, then,” Harry said. “I don’t want to keep you any longer.”

“Thanks for your help, Mr. Anderson,” Zoe said.

The old man smiled at her. “It was real nice meeting you, Zoe. Good luck with that house.”

“Thanks,” she said.

Then, to Tina, as they walked out of the store, “And thank you.”

Tina smiled. “My uncle Harry is a darling man with far too much time on his hands.”

“I can’t believe I was in there an hour,” Zoe said. “I’ve never spent an hour in a hardware store in my entire life.”

“You’ve never lived in Pinehurst before. This town operates on a whole different schedule than the rest of the world.”

“I miss Manhattan already,” she muttered, unlocking the trunk of her car to deposit her purchases inside.

The other woman chuckled. “What do you miss? The crowds, the noise or the chaos?”

“All of the above.” She closed the trunk. “But I think what I miss most is the anonymity.”

“I felt the same way when I first moved here from Boston.”

Zoe smiled. “Is there anyone living in this town who actually grew up here?”

“Of course,” Tina said. “I’ll fill you in on all the local characters over lunch.”

She glanced at her watch again. “I really have a ton of things to do at the house.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No,” she admitted, belatedly realizing that she also needed to restock her dwindling food supply.

“Then let’s go,” Tina said. “Because if we don’t show up at Freda’s, Uncle Harry will know before the end of the day that I lied to him.”

And so she ended up having lunch with Tina at the popular little café. And she enjoyed it, far more than she expected to. It had been a long time since she’d shared a simple meal and easy conversation with a friend. And though she didn’t know Tina very well, she already considered her a friend—one of the first she’d made in Pinehurst.

Then she thought of Mason, and wondered whether he might be another. She’d been thinking about him a lot since their initial meeting a week earlier—probably too much—so she put those thoughts aside and dug into her spinach salad.

When Zoe finally got home after lunch and grocery shopping, she felt as though she’d already put in a full day and hadn’t even begun to tackle the dust and dirt. She shoved a bucket under the kitchen tap and turned on the water, thinking that it would have been nice to hire a cleaning service to come in and scrub the place from top to bottom. But that was a luxury she couldn’t afford—especially not when she had time on her hands and nothing else to do.

Still, it was almost nine o’clock before she decided to hang up her mop for the night. Although she was physically exhausted, her mind was unsettled, her thoughts preoccupied with everything yet to be done. She decided a nice cup of tea would help her relax and get some sleep.

After the kettle had boiled, she carried her mug out to the porch and settled into an old weathered Adirondack chair. She lifted her feet to prop them on the railing, then dropped them quickly when the wood creaked and swayed. Instead, she folded her legs beneath her on the chair and cradled her mug between her palms.

The darkness of the nights still surprised her, with no streetlights or neon signs to illuminate the blackness of night. There was only the moon, about three-quarters full tonight, and an array of stars unlike anything she’d ever seen. She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the cool, fresh air, and smiled. It was beautiful, peaceful, and exactly what she needed.

At least until she heard a thump on the porch and registered the bump against her arm half a second before she felt the shock of hot tea spilling down the front of her shirt and a disgustingly familiar wet tongue sweeping across her mouth.

She sputtered and pushed the hairy beast aside.

“Rosie, down.”

He sat, panting happily beside her chair.

Zoe resisted the urge to scream, asking instead, in a carefully controlled voice, “Where is your master?”

The beast tilted his head, as if trying to understand the question, but—of course—made no response to it.

“Maybe you’re smarter than he is,” she said. “Do you understand the word by-law?”

The beast merely cocked his head from one side to the next.

“Or dog pound?”

He barked, but then he licked her hand, clearly proving his ignorance.

“How about leash?” she asked in a deliberately friendly tone.

The beast dropped to his belly on the porch, covered his ears with his paws and whimpered.

Zoe exhaled a frustrated breath and untangled her legs. She set the now half-empty cup of tea on the arm of the chair and stood up. “Let’s go,” she said.

Rosie danced in ecstatic circles around her, nearly tripping her on the stairs.