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“All right. Suit yourself. I’m on my way to Nova Scotia. I’m fine.”
She grabbed the phone off his nightstand. “You left your bike and kayak.”
“Don’t need them.” She could hear the note of victory in his tone now that he’d succeeded in getting her on the line. “Place I’m going has its own bikes and kayaks.”
She noticed his bed was made, not that neatly, but he’d put in the effort. “Why sneak off?”
“I didn’t want a lot of grief from everyone.”
“Brendan—come on. You had a bullet whiz past your head yesterday. You need to be with family and friends.”
“The bullet didn’t whiz through my head. Big difference. It just grazed my forehead. A little blood, that’s it. I get banged up worse than that playing street hockey. A couple days’ kayaking and walking on the rocks in Nova Scotia, and I’ll be in good shape.”
“Did you bring your passport? You know, they don’t just let you wave on your way across the border these days—”
“Quit worrying. I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine,” Jess said. “You sound like you’re trying to sound fine.”
“What are you now, Stewart? Ex-cop, hard-ass prosecutor, or would-be girlfriend?”
She stood up straight, catching her reflection in the dresser mirror. Chestnut hair, a little frizzed up given the heat and humidity. Pale blue suit in an industrial-strength fabric that didn’t wrinkle, repelled moisture, held its shape through the long hours she put in.
Definitely a former police officer, and now a dedicated prosecutor.
How on earth had she become Brendan O’Malley’s would-be girlfriend?
“Don’t flatter yourself, Detective. Just because we’ve seen each other a few times doesn’t mean I’m mooning over you—”
He laughed. “Sure you are.”
“I’ve known you forever.”
“You haven’t been sleeping with me forever.”
True. She’d slept with him that one time, two weeks ago. Since then, he’d been acting as if it had been a fast way to ruin a perfectly good friendship. Maybe she had, too. They’d known each other since her days at the police academy, when O’Malley had assisted with firearms training. He was only two years out of the academy himself, but even then everyone knew he was born to be a detective. She’d been attracted to him. What woman wasn’t? They’d become friends, stayed friends when she went to law school nights and then took her job as a prosecutor. She’d never even considered dating him—never mind sleeping with him—until two months ago.
She could feel the first twinges of a headache. “Some crazy fairy with a sick sense of humor must have whacked me with her magic fairy wand to make me want to date you.”
“Honey, we haven’t just dated—”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Best night of your life.”
He was kidding, but she knew what had happened that night. Brendan O’Malley, stud of studs, had gone too far. He’d been tender and sexy and intimate in a way that had scared the hell out of him. Now he was backpedaling. Pretending it was her chasing him and it was all a game.
“O’Malley—Brendan—”
“I’m losing the connection. I’m up here somewhere in moose country. Quit worrying, okay? I’ll call you when I get back.”
“I might never make it out of this damn apartment of yours. I’ll need a compass to navigate through all your stuff.”
But he wasn’t making up the bad connection, and his cell phone suddenly blanked out altogether, leaving Jess standing there in his bedroom, his phone dead in her hand.
She cradled it with more force than was necessary.
Bravado. That was all this was about.
O’Malley was shaken by yesterday’s close call. He and his partner had entered a seedy hotel to question a possible witness in a murder, only to have the guy throw down his backpack, turn and run. An ancient .38 fell out of the backpack, hit the floor and went off.
The bullet just barely grazed O’Malley’s forehead.
It could have killed him. It could have killed anyone in the vicinity.
O’Malley was treated on the scene. He wasn’t admitted or even transported to the hospital. As he’d said, he was fine.
Physically.
It was his third close call that year. The sheer randomness of this latest one had gotten to him. He wasn’t a target. The witness wasn’t a suspect in the murder, wasn’t trying to kill him or anyone else, said he had the .38 for his own protection—never mind that he was now charged with carrying a concealed weapon, possession of a weapon in violation of his probation, and assault with a deadly weapon.
Over dinner with Jess last night, after he’d been debriefed, Brendan had admitted he didn’t think he’d get this one out of his mind that easily. He kept seeing the gun fall out of the backpack. He kept feeling himself yell, “Gun!” and jump back, an act that had saved his life. The heat of the bullet, the reaction of his partner, the paramedics—he remembered everything, and it played like a movie in his head, over and over.
“In the blink of an eye,” he said, “that would have been all she wrote on the life of Brendan O’Malley.”
He’d wanted to be alone that night.
When Jess called to check on him in the morning, he blamed his moroseness the evening before on the shrinks and too much wine and said he was heading off on his own for the weekend.
She’d talked to a few people, who all agreed it might not be a good idea for him to be alone right now. He needed his support network. Family and friends. Time to process what was, after all, a scary incident, no matter that it had a happy ending.
Not that Detective O’Malley would listen to her or anyone else.
Jess wandered back out to the dining room and flipped through the brochures and guidebooks on Nova Scotia. She’d never been to the Canadian Maritime Provinces—she’d only been to Canada a few times, including the usual high-school French-class trip to Montreal in Quebec.
The brochures were inviting. The pictures of the rocky coastline, the ocean, cliffs, beaches, kayakers, fishing boats, harbors, quaint inns and restaurants. The Lighthouse Route. Cape Breton Island. The Evangeline Trail.
So many possibilities.
How would she ever find him?
No one had shot at her lately, but Jess could feel the effects of her months of nonstop work. She’d just finished a major trial and could afford to take a few days off. She knew better than to get in too deep with O’Malley, but she had to admit she’d fantasized about going somewhere with him. She kept telling herself that she was well aware he wasn’t the type for long-term commitments—she had her eyes wide-open. She didn’t mind if they just had some fun together.
He’d mentioned getting out of town together for a few days. Casually, not with anything specific in mind, but it at least suggested that the only reason he hadn’t invited her to go with him to Nova Scotia was the shooting. It had only been a day. He wouldn’t want to inflict himself on her.
She noticed that he’d circled a bed-and-breakfast listed on a Web site printout.
The Wild Raspberry B and B.
Cute. Cheeky, even. Jess smiled to herself and, before she could talk herself out of it, dialed the Wild Raspberry’s number.
A woman answered.
Jess reminded herself she was a prosecutor accustomed to delicate situations. For the most part, it was best to come to the point. “Hello—a friend of mine has a reservation with you this weekend. Brendan O’Malley.”
“Right. He’s not due to arrive until tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” Jess said, hanging up.
Of course.
He was in moose country. That meant he’d gone farther north than Portland, Maine, and wasn’t taking the ferry to Nova Scotia from there. He must have decided to drive up to Mount Desert Island and catch the ferry out of Bar Harbor. He had to be booked on one of the ferries, since it would take forever for him to drive all the way up through Maine and New Brunswick.
Jess dug some more on the dining-room table and found a printout of the ferry schedule from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
Bingo.
If she hurried, she could make the overnight ferry from Portland, about two hours north of Boston, and maybe even beat O’Malley to the Wild Raspberry.
After he checked into a small, tidy motel in Bar Harbor on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, Brendan O’Malley walked over to the cheapest-looking restaurant he could find and ordered fried shrimp and beer. There was fresh raspberry pie on the dessert menu, but he passed. Once he got to Nova Scotia, he’d be staying at a place with a name like Wild Raspberry, so he figured he’d have another chance.
He touched the bandage on the left side of his forehead, just above his eyebrow.
Man. Talk about luck.
The graze didn’t hurt at all. He could take the bandage off anytime. He figured he’d let it fall off in the shower.
His brother Mike had arrived at the scene. “Brendan—damn. You are one lucky cop. How many of your nine lives have you used up now?”
“Eleven.”
Gallows humor, but Mike understood. He’d had his share of brushes with death in his work. They both counted on their training, their experience, the people who backed them up—they didn’t want to count on luck.
Luck was unpredictable. Fickle.
And it could run out.
Brendan shook off any hint of encroaching self-pity and paid for his dinner. He’d have to walk all the way to Nova Scotia to burn off the fried shrimp, but he settled for an evening stroll along Bar Harbor’s pretty streets, not overly crowded with summer tourists. He had a reservation on the morning Cat ferry, which shortened the normal six-hour trip from Bar Harbor across the Gulf of Maine to less than three hours.
Marianne Wells, the owner of the Wild Raspberry, had assured him he’d have peace and quiet at her B and B. She only had three guest rooms. One was free, one was occupied by a hiker, and then there was the room she’d reserved for him.
O’Malley had debated pitching a tent somewhere on the coast for a few days, but Jess would have regarded that as total nut behavior under the circumstances and hunted him down for sure—or, more likely, sent someone after him. There wasn’t much that could pry her away from her job as a county prosecutor. She was a worse workaholic than he was.
A disaster in the making. That was what their relationship was.
Except he couldn’t imagine not having Jess Stewart in his life. She’d been there so long—forever, it seemed.
He didn’t want to screw things up by falling for her.
Mike had said she’d looked worried when she’d talked him into giving her the key to his place. Brendan doubted it. Jess had been a cop for five years, earning her law degree part-time. She wasn’t a worrier. She just didn’t like it that he’d skipped out on her.
What the hell, he didn’t owe her anything. He didn’t even know how they’d ended up dating. He’d always thought of her as a kind of kid sister.
Mike hadn’t bought that one. “There isn’t one thing O’Malley about her. You’re in denial, brother.”
Ten years Brendan had known Stewart, and not until two months ago had he seriously thought about sleeping with her. Maybe she was right, and they’d both been struck by some crazy fairy with a weird sense of humor.
They’d gone to dinner and the movies a few times. Jess had dragged him on a tour of the Old North Church because he was from Boston and he’d never seen it, and that just couldn’t stand another minute as far as she was concerned. But she was a native Bostonian, and had she ever been to a Bruins hockey game? One time, when she was ten. It barely counted.
O’Malley found a flat stone and skipped it into the smooth, gray water of the harbor. He had to stop thinking about Attorney Stewart. Their relationship wasn’t going anywhere. They’d slept together that one time a couple weeks ago, before the shooting, but that had just been one of those things. Spontaneous, unplanned, inevitable.
He’d been such a mush, too. He couldn’t believe it.
He heaved a long sigh, feeling a headache coming on that had nothing to do with the bullet that had missed his brain pan by not very much at all.
Back at his motel, he flopped on his sagging double bed and stared at the ceiling.
Nova Scotia. He could just skip it and hang out on Mount Desert Island for a few days—except the same instinct that had prompted him to jump back a half-step yesterday, thus saving his life, told him to head east. He’d been gathering brochures on Nova Scotia for weeks, checking out the tourist sites on the Internet, poring over maps, all with some vague idea that he should go there.
Maybe it was karma or something.
With his head bandaged up last night and his brother’s talk of using up his nine lives, he’d stared at the lodging list he’d printed off the Internet, picked out a B and B that looked good and called.
Now here he was, on his way. Alone.
Jess could have a point that he shouldn’t be alone.
“Too late.”
He hit the power button on the TV remote and checked out what was going on in the world, feeling isolated and removed and suddenly really irritated with himself. But he was nothing if not stubborn, and he needed a few days to pull his head together, not just about the shooting, but about Jess.
He thought of her dark eyes and her cute butt and decided the bullet yesterday was the universe giving him a wake-up call. What did he think he was doing, falling for Jessica Stewart?
He had no intention of tucking tail and going home.
CHAPTER TWO
The overnight ferry from Portland, Maine, to Yarmouth, on Nova Scotia’s southwest shore, was surprisingly smooth—and fun. Jess hadn’t been anywhere in so long, she made an adventure of it. When she arrived back on land, she followed the directions to the Wild Raspberry B and B, which, she soon discovered, was on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, a breathtaking stretch of Canada’s eastern coastline of rocks, cliffs, narrow, sandy beaches and picturesque villages.
“Forget O’Malley,” she muttered to herself. “I want to go hiking!”
She’d at least had the presence of mind to pack trail shoes and hiking clothes on her quick stop back at her condo last night. Now it was a sunny, glorious morning, and she debated leaving Brendan to his own devices—his determined solitude—and finding another place to stay. He wouldn’t even have to know she was there.
But she continued north along what was aptly named the Lighthouse Route and kept forcing herself not to stop, kept warning herself to stay on task. Finally she came to a small cove near historic Lunenburg, named a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its pristine British colonial architecture and rich seafaring heritage, and found her way to the Wild Raspberry.
It wasn’t a renovated colonial building like those in Lunenburg, which Jess had read about on the ferry. The Wild Raspberry was, fittingly, a small Victorian house, complete with a tiny guest cottage, that perched on a knoll across from the water. A tangle of rose and raspberry vines covered a fence along one side of the gravel driveway. The house itself was painted gray and trimmed in raspberry and white, and had porches in front and back that were crammed with brightly cushioned white wicker furniture and graced with hanging baskets of fuchsias and white petunias.
Jess parked at the far end of the small parking area—so that O’Malley wouldn’t spot her the minute he pulled into the driveway. As she got her suitcase out of the back of her car, she could smell that it was low tide.
