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“A few mosquito bites won’t hurt us.”
“Okay, but it’s not only the mosquitoes. Someone’s bound to see us, and the news will be all over town before you can say West Nile virus.”
Her mouth curved in a ghost of a smile. “Gossip is the national sport around here, and I get my turn to be the star player, like everyone else. It’s never really bothered me.”
“Even if it means you’d be linked with me again?”
She shot him a look. He had a point, but she’d be damned if she admitted that the last thing she wanted was to hear her name and his in the same sentence. In any context. She’d had enough of that when she was seventeen. “It’s not as if we have much choice. People are bound to find out you’re back in town again.”
He didn’t reply, and although his expression was inscrutable, Janey didn’t get a very positive feeling about what he was thinking. Or maybe, where Noah was concerned, it was best to be pessimistic. “If you’re truly worried about Jessie, leaving now is about the worst thing you could do.”
“I didn’t leave, did I? I want to discuss this, but I don’t see why we have to be eaten alive while we’re doing it.”
“Consider it planning your part in the food chain.”
Noah did the why-me combination, heavy exhalation, eye roll, a little shake of his head. “You were always too stubborn for your own good.” He closed the distance between them and reached for her.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Worse things have happened.”
“True, but you were around then, too.”
“Does that include Jessie?”
She went still, one hand creeping up to rub at her aching chest. “I’ve never considered her a bad thing.”
He cupped her elbow and steered her up the front steps. “Just the fact that I’m her father.”
Janey would’ve told him to go to hell, but she couldn’t have dug a coherent sentence out of her brain with a bulldozer, let alone voice it. The touch of his fingers on her bare skin had scorched enough brain cells to leave her temporarily senile.
When he let go of her to open the door and her mental processes kicked back in, she realized this was about Jessie. The girl had been wondering about her father for nine years, and when she finally met him, he completely freaked out. Heaven only knew what was going through her daughter’s mind, Janey thought, because she rarely did. If Noah disappeared now, though, Jessie was bound to take it personally. Janey had firsthand experience with that.
“I can’t believe you still live here,” Noah said, as he ushered her into the big old Victorian house that had been built by her great-great-grandparents.
She slipped into the front parlor, turned on a floor lamp with a fussy, glass-fringed shade and felt instantly comforted. She loved the cheerful tinkling sound it made, how it threw prisms of light into every corner of the room, the same way it had for as long as she could remember. “Where else would I live?”
“New York, L.A., London. There are some real cities out there in the world, Janey.”
“I like it here. You’re the one who couldn’t wait to get out of Erskine.”
He went quiet for a long moment. “I had my reasons.”
“I knew you weren’t happy here, Noah, but you never wanted to talk about it.”
“It’s still never.”
She stepped back out of the parlor. “Is that why you’re standing in the hallway?”
He stared at her for a second, mouth set in a grim line, eyes dark and intense.
“The front door’s right behind you.”
She could see he was considering it, and she knew before he spoke that he’d come to the same conclusion she had only moments before. This was about Jessie.
“Where is she?” Noah asked.
“Upstairs, in the tower room.” Janey said, referring to the uppermost floor of the turreted part of the house. The room was ringed with windows and high enough to see over the other houses in this part of Erskine. Jessie seemed to find the view soothing, although all that would be visible at this time of evening was the sun setting behind the mountains. “It’s where she goes whenever something’s bothering her.”
“So did you,” Noah murmured with a half smile Janey couldn’t bear to see. The look of pleasant nostalgia on his face was too painful to believe.
“What have you told her?” he asked.
“What’s there to tell her? I had no idea where you were or what you were doing.”
“So all I am is some guy you slept with ten years ago?”
“What do you want to hear, Noah?” She straightened, coming out into the hallway to confront him, her voice as tightly controlled as her temper. “That she used to ask who her father was, and where he was, and why her mom and dad weren’t married like most of the other kids’ parents—or at least divorced and splitting weekends and holidays?”
“Those are good questions, Janey, every one of them.”
“And I had good answers for them, except she was too young to understand those answers. She doesn’t know how it feels to be in love, to trust someone so completely…” Janey clenched her fists, refusing to let him see how much it had hurt. “I lived it and I don’t even understand it.”
“Janey—”
“Then she started asking the hard questions,” she continued, talking right over him. “Like why didn’t her dad want to spend any time with her, or at least meet her? And here’s the really hard one, Noah. What’s wrong with her? No matter how often I said it had nothing to do with her, I could tell she still thought it was her fault.”
“Jeez, Janey.” Noah ran a hand back through his hair, leaving it rumpled, a fitting counterpoint to the wild light in his eyes, eyes so like Jessie’s it was painful to look into them.
Janey bit back the rest of the angry words clawing at the back of her throat. He’d earned her anger, but making him hurt, like she and Jessie had hurt, wouldn’t solve anything. “Jessie stopped asking questions about you a long time ago. She’s accepted the fact that her parents aren’t together. It’s not unusual, even in Erskine. It’s just—” She caught her lower lip between her teeth and turned away. It didn’t help; Noah could still read her mind, it seemed.
“You’re wondering whether it’s a good thing I’m here or not.”
“Yeah, well, something about stuffing toothpaste back into the tube occurs to me.”
“So, what happens now?”
She brought her eyes back to him. “Right now that depends on you.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“And I can’t give you the words, Noah.”
He jammed his hands in his pockets, seeming more uncertain by the second.
“If you can’t do this, I’ll find some way to explain it to her.”
“What if I say the wrong thing?”
“At least it’ll be you saying it. And you can always apologize. It’s not like she thinks you’re perfect or anything.”
He held her gaze for a moment, then smiled wryly. “No, I don’t imagine she does.”
“I’ll go get her.” When Janey got to the tower room, however, she found Jessie curled up fast asleep on the old sofa that had been there forever. For the last four years her beloved stuffed bear had held a cherished place on the topmost shelf of her bedroom hutch. The fact that it was back in her arms tonight spoke volumes about the state of her heart and mind.
Janey brushed the hair from her daughter’s brow, carefully so as not to wake her, and covered her with an old knitted blanket. Better she have as many hours of peace as she could, Janey figured, easing out of the room and down the creaky staircase. Noah would have to come back tomorrow.
But when she got downstairs, he was already gone.
Chapter Two
Janey had been upstairs longer than she intended, but she’d expected Noah to hang around. Of course, he’d never had much staying power….
“I’m in here,” he called out.
And she’d become way too cynical, she realized as she followed his voice into the parlor. So he’d romanced her out of her virginity after their senior prom and then left town. All on the same night. So he’d ignored her attempts to tell him he had a child, then got angry with her when he found out by accident. Water under the bridge, all of it. She’d gotten herself through college, with the help of her parents, and even after she’d lost them, within months of each other, she’d made a life for herself and her daughter. There were times—okay, there were lots of times—when she’d wished there was a man around, not just to deal with a broken-down car or paint the porch, but because it would’ve been nice to share the emotional load once in a while. But she had friends, a whole town full of them, and she had Jessie.And if, every now and then, she woke in the night, unbelievably lonely, that was her choice, too.
There’d been opportunities over the years, but no one who’d…Hell, she might as well admit she compared every man she met to Noah. Or not to him, exactly, but to the way he’d made her feel all those years ago. Nothing since had even come close.
Until now. Noah was sitting in her father’s favorite armchair, suit jacket unbuttoned, tie loosened, his head back and his eyes closed. She’d seen her father sit just like that, countless evenings after countless days at his law office. A strong sense of rightness washed through her—which she had no trouble shaking off when their history flashed through her brain. Even if she still loved him, she’d be a fool to trust him again. And Janey Walters was nobody’s fool.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” she said.
He opened his eyes and stared at her long enough to make her antsy before he lifted a brow in inquiry.
“She’s sleeping.”
Noah felt every muscle in his body relax—well, not every muscle. He should be taking this unexpected reprieve as an opportunity to get his thoughts in order, but how could he with Janey prowling the room like that? He could understand the nerves that kept her on her feet, but when she reached up to straighten a picture, all he could think about was how incredible she was. Beautiful. Her face was more angular than he remembered, pared down by time and maturity so that her inner strength showed through. He’d always been a sucker for strong, self-sufficient women, and there was something about Janey, taking charge of her life in that ratty old bandanna and T-shirt. And the jeans…
He closed his eyes, hoping that if the denim was gone from his sight, he’d forget how it hugged her bottom and skimmed the swell of her hips. It didn’t work. Closing his eyes was like giving his imagination a blank canvas, and Janey Walters was a model who would’ve done any of the old masters proud. One look at her and he felt as if a freight train had slammed into his chest.
Or maybe that had more to do with finding out he had a daughter.
He opened his eyes again, caught her watching him, and nodded toward the chair across from his.
“I have paint all over me,” Janey said.
“It’s probably dry.”
She said a word under her breath that sounded suspiciously like damn, which, in light of what followed, made perfect sense. She started for the door, saying, “I left the paint open and the paintbrush is probably rock-hard by now.”
“It’s just a paintbrush, Janey.”
“It’s not just a paintbrush when—” She broke off, shook her head.
That hesitation was unlike Janey, at least the Janey he used to know. She’d always been so in-your-face, so unafraid to put her opinions and feelings out there and dare anybody to take issue with them. In Erskine that went beyond courage.
But she had someone else to think of now. What she said and did would reflect directly on Jessie, and if he knew Janey, she’d go well out of her way to avoid causing her daughter any unhappiness. Not that the old Janey wasn’t still in there somewhere. She might be more tightly controlled now, more guarded, but one look into his daughter’s eyes, and there was no question where she’d gotten that straightforward approach to life. Janey had raised her alone—and done a hell of a job. But then, Noah had never doubted Janey would be a great mom. She’d always known what she wanted. And he’d always been afraid he couldn’t give it to her. In the end, he hadn’t. He’d let her down just like everyone had expected him to—worse than they’d expected.
But she’d hadn’t exactly given him a chance to redeem himself.
“So, how much does Jessie know about me?” he asked.
“Not much.” Janey sank into a chair after all. “If anyone in this town heard from you in the last ten years, they didn’t mention it to me, and they wouldn’t bring it up to Jessie.”
“It’s no surprise that everyone rallied around you, Janey. This was always more your place than mine.”
“You cut the ties, Noah.”
“Dad was still alive and living here, then.”
“And you didn’t want anything to do with him, either. I get that. So do us both a favor and don’t try to make this whole thing my fault. Maybe I could’ve found a way to tell you sooner. If you’d bothered to call me ten years ago.”
He rested his head against the chair again and reminded himself that she was right: holding on to his anger over the past would only make the present situation more difficult. He’d learned that the hard way, not coming back for his father’s funeral because the man had never made room in his life for anyone but himself. Funny, Noah thought, how petty that kind of retribution felt after a decade had passed. Funny how you didn’t want it to happen again. “So tell me about her.”
“Her name is Jessica Marie Walters.”
That brought his attention back to Janey. “Walters?”
“Walters.”
It took him a minute, but he swallowed that, too. “What else?”
“If you call her Jessica, she won’t answer you. The rest I think you should find out on your own.”
“Come on, Janey, give me a break.”
“If I tell you everything, the two of you won’t have anything to talk about, and you were concerned about that.”
“Okay.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “Okay.”
“You should go.”
“Yeah.” Noah stood and rolled his shoulders, looking around the room as if the walls were hiding the answer to the strange way he was feeling. He tucked a hand in his pocket and jingled his car keys.
“I’ll call you tomorrow night. Where are you staying?”
“The Erskine Hotel, I guess.”
“The hotel is being fumigated. Termites.”
Not surprising for a town built almost entirely of wood that hadn’t seen the inside of a tree for a couple centuries. What surprised him was that any of the decrepit old buildings were still standing. But that wasn’t really the point.
The Tambour clock on the mantel chimed once for eight-thirty. Past closing time for a community that started its day before 6:00 a.m. The hotel was the only place in town that stayed open pretty much around the clock, and even then the dining room shut down by ten. “I’ll have to drive to Plains City before I can find a place to stay. That’s fifty miles.”
“Then maybe you’d better get started.”
“Can’t. I was almost out of gas when I saw you and decided to stop. I probably won’t make it twenty miles.”
