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TRENT HAD his bulky work gloves on, and he’d just arranged the chain saw, pole pruner and baling cord under one arm and the old wooden paint ladder under the other, so naturally his cell phone chose that moment to ring.
He glanced back into the garage, where Zander was working on a broken hedge clipper.
The old man laughed. “Women,” he said with a snort. “They have the devil’s timing, don’t they? Want me to tell Trixie Mae Sexpot to get lost for you?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Trent wasn’t expecting any calls from females, but he stood still as Zander reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the phone. He would have let it go to voice mail, except that he was stealing these last few hours of daylight from the Double C and using them to cut back the worst dead branches on Everly’s old oaks. If the Double C had a problem, he was honor bound to deal with it.
“Trent Maxwell’s phone. Zander Hobbin speaking.” Zander listened for a few seconds, during which his teasing expression soured into one of real annoyance. “No, Maxy isn’t available. You can tell by how he didn’t answer the phone. See how that works, sugar?”
Trent felt his eyebrows draw together, and the chain saw slipped an inch under his elbow. Maxy? No one called him Maxy. Not anymore. Not since high school. And the only one who’d done it, even then, was…
“Who?” Zander cut a strange look toward Trent. “Missy Snowdon? Oh, you bet I remember you. Sure, I’ll tell him. But just between you and me, don’t hold your breath on that callback. Trent got married last week. You been gone a long time, so I’ll just assume you didn’t know, or you wouldn’t have called, right?”
Trent could hear the high, quick voice still talking on the other end as Zander snapped the phone shut. The older man glowered at Trent from under his bushy eyebrows.
“I heard that little minx was back in town, but I didn’t think she’d have the nerve to call you, just like that.” He ran his upper lip through his teeth, as if he were trying to comb the mustache that tickled down over it. “Unless…you didn’t make the first move, did you, son?”
Trent raised one eyebrow. That tone might have worked if Trent had been ten and had got caught with his hands in the wrong cookie jar, but not now. Trent wouldn’t have telephoned Missy Snowdon if she were the last woman surviving this side of Saturn, but frankly, who he called or didn’t call wasn’t Zander’s business.
“What’s wrong, Zan? She is pretty hot. You jealous?”
Zander started to bluster, but he must have noticed the tucked corner of Trent’s grin, because he ended up grunting and shaking his head.
“Jealous about Missy Snowdon? Hell, no. I wouldn’t dream of going barefoot into that particular mud puddle.” He slipped the phone back into Trent’s jacket with two fingers, as if Missy Snowdon had infected it with something disgusting. “And neither should you, my friend. Neither should you.”
“I don’t go barefoot anywhere.” Trent smiled. “Your generation might not have learned that, but ours has.”
Zander grunted again, clearly aware he wasn’t going to get anything but sardonic deflections, no matter how long he probed. Trent had mastered this technique in grade school. He could bat away Zander’s curiosity all day long.
The two men were friendly colleagues, as managers of adjacent spreads tended to be, but they weren’t confidants. Forty years stood between them, and so did Trent’s natural preference for emotional privacy.
Zander slapped his hands against his overalls, raising dust in the sunbeams that angled into the dim garage like transparent gold two-by-fours. “So go on, then. Light’s fading. Don’t you have some limbs to cut?”
He did. It was one of many chores that desperately needed doing around here. He had been spending a lot of time at Everly over the past few days, ever since Harrison’s weird warning about Peggy. He didn’t really believe Peggy could pose a threat to anyone, but still…he didn’t like the thought of Susannah here in this big old house, all alone.
Besides, the place could use an extra pair of hands, especially ones that came without a salary attached. He hadn’t noticed just how run-down the place had become since old man Everly had died.
He propped his ladder up against the first oak. This one had a couple of dead branches that, given the right amount of wind, could easily fall right on the east porch roof. As he snapped the ladder’s hinged stays into place, he noticed Eli Breslin over by the barn, slouching against the wall, staring at Trent.
Little bastard. He never did a lick of work around here, did he? He might as well be dipping his hand into Susannah’s wallet and lifting out the cash.
“Hey, Breslin,” Trent called. “If you’re not busy, why don’t you come cut some branches?”
Eli straightened, though the insolent look didn’t drop from his face. He shook his head, the blond curls catching the late-afternoon sunlight. “Can’t. Got to work on the shaker.”
And then, as if he’d been planning all along to do so, he sauntered toward the back drive, where the old machine had been dragged yesterday after it died in the south forty. He glanced back at Trent, then picked up a wrench and proceeded to peer under the open hood.
Well, that was at least half an hour’s work Susannah would get out of the brat today.
Trent went back to setting up his tools. Zander was right. The light was fading fast. He wouldn’t get much done today. The older man had been right about another thing, too. Trent should have waited until he could have borrowed a good extension ladder from the Double C. Though Everly probably owned about a hundred ladders, they were all in use for the thinning, which would continue right up until harvest.
This old stepladder—the only one Susannah had kept for private use—was a mess, with half-mangled feet that wouldn’t settle level on the root-braided ground.
But the branches were his excuse for hanging around Everly this afternoon, so he needed to cut a few. Susannah would have laughed out loud if he’d admitted that Harrison Archer’s comment had spooked him. She would have countered in her typical dry way that if she needed a guard dog, she’d buy one at the pound.
He looked toward the house. He could just barely make out Susannah’s silhouette at the window of the sunroom. She’d been in there for a couple of hours now, going over estate details with Richard Doyle, the arrogant twit who was the executor of her grandfather’s will.
Doyle might have been one of the reasons Trent had felt the need to stick around. Trent didn’t like him, but that didn’t mean much. Trent never liked guys like Doyle—guys who bought handkerchiefs to match their ties, which they’d bought to match their eyes, which they’d faked up with tinted contact lenses.
And he might as well be honest. He’d never liked any guy who dared to buzz around Susannah. It was habit, he supposed, but it clearly was a habit he wasn’t going to break. Not after twenty-one years, ten with her and eleven without her. He was more likely to break the habit of breathing.
He wondered if she had the same problem. He wondered, for instance, how she would react to the news that Missy Snowdon had just called him.
Not that he planned to tell her. Missy’s name was radioactive. It would burn his lips to say it and Susannah’s ears to hear it. Maybe it wasn’t fair. Missy wasn’t to blame for their troubles—the tragedy had been Trent’s fault, from beginning to end. But somehow Missy Snowdon had become more than just a trashy girl chasing another girl’s man. She’d become iconic. A symbol.
Doves meant peace, rainbows meant hope, roses meant love.
Missy Snowdon meant betrayal and death.
He hadn’t seen her in nearly a dozen years. He’d heard she was back in town, but, like Zander, Trent had assumed she’d know better than to call.
He and Susannah had little enough chance of making this marriage work without throwing Missy into the mix. You might as well dig up an old corpse, toss it onto the table, then ask everyone to enjoy their meal.
He bent over, set the choke on the chain saw. He gave the cord a yank, perhaps a little harder than necessary. Eli was watching him again, as if the boy hoped Trent would have trouble getting the tool started. But the chain saw zoomed into life, its teeth circling furiously, like a mad dog snapping, eager to chomp into something and tear it to shreds.
Trent climbed the ladder, careful not to ascend any higher than he needed to. Heights and chain saws didn’t mix. But the limb was farther up than it appeared from the ground. Mildly irritated, he put one foot on the fourth step, then reached out with the chain saw and let it sink into the brittle, sapless limb.
The wood cracked, split and tumbled to the ground before the blade sank even halfway through it. It had been ready to go, that was for sure. He needed to get all this dead wood out of here before the summer storms started, even if it meant delegating some of the paperwork at the Double C.
He glanced at the tractor, just beyond the tree’s branches. Eli was gone, the little slacker. Trent scanned the yard, his gaze ending at the back porch. He was surprised to see a man standing there. Would Eli really dare to—
But it wasn’t Eli. It was Doyle. Dapper as ever, the lawyer posed like a GQ model, one foot cocked up against the white scrolled balustrade. His gold silk tie and handkerchief matched his hair.
Somebody should tell the fool that women didn’t like their men to be prettier than they were.
Richard held a cocktail in his hand, a signal that the business part of his visit was over. Though Susannah must have provided the drink, she was nowhere in sight.
The porch was about twenty yards away, so it was hard to be sure, but the lawyer seemed to be staring up at the tree where Trent was working. And his handsome face seemed hard, set with hostile intensity that almost exactly replicated the anger Trent had glimpsed on Eli’s face earlier.
Trent sighed. This could get old.
None of the men in Susannah’s life trusted him. And they were jealous as hell. Okay, fair enough. He got that. The green-eyed monster wasn’t exactly a stranger to him, either.
But too bad. Trent was her husband, at least for the next year, and all the wannabes, the sycophants and the stuffed shirts she’d passed over when making her choice would just have to deal with it.
Suddenly, Doyle raised his drink in a stiff salute.
“Afternoon, Maxwell,” he called. He sipped the drink, then smiled. “Better watch your step up there.”
“Yeah.” Trent nodded. “Thanks.” But he felt irrationally irritated. Naturally, Doyle thought cutting trees was dangerous. It was real physical labor, as foreign to the pencil pusher as scaling the craters of the moon.
Or was Trent just regressing again? Resenting the rich boys who never smelled like wood chips…or sweat?
Get over it, Maxwell, he told himself. That chip on his shoulder was every bit as pointless as Doyle’s gold silk pocket square.
He held the chain saw above the next limb, then let it fall slowly, the blade slicing into the wood, sending off chips like sparks from a diamond cutter’s wheel. But this branch wasn’t completely dead. It resisted, and Trent had to put muscle behind it. He leaned over, adding his other foot to the fourth step for balance.
And suddenly, without any warning he could hear over the roar of the chain saw, the step gave way, the old bolt pulled away from the frame and the plank jackknifed right under his feet.
As he felt himself go, he somehow had the presence of mind to release the chain saw. It died immediately and dropped, whining, like a missile to the ground.
The millisecond after, Trent’s whole body did the same.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS TWO IN THE MORNING. After a long evening poring through payroll records, Susannah yawned while she roamed the first floor, checking dead bolts and turning off lights.
As she passed the staircase that led down to the wine cellar, she heard a strange scrabbling noise deep in its shadows.
For a moment, she felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. The wine cellar had been her grandfather’s last folly, a ridiculous expenditure better suited to the millionaire rancher he’d once been than the struggling, debt-ridden peach farmer he’d become.
She used the front part of the cellar now for preserves, and the occasional bottle of peach wine. The back half, beyond the wrought-iron wine door, had become a mess of storage and clutter. Boxes of sentimental junk, yard games, canopies and chairs that came out only for parties, furniture too broken to sit in but too fine for the dump.
Her grandfather’s ghost would be appalled.
Luckily, she didn’t believe in ghosts.
But she heard the noise again, so it hadn’t been her imagination, either. It must be Trent down there, rooting around in the dark. She wondered why, then remembered that she’d mentioned she needed to dig out the tents and get them cleaned for the peach party.
She hadn’t been hinting for him to do it. Had he thought she was? It wouldn’t have crossed her mind to ask him to lug anything so heavy, not after taking that hard fall this afternoon.
She felt a nip, like a small bee sting of guilt, deep in her conscience. She hadn’t even properly thanked him for his work on the trees, much less offered any TLC for his injury. Pitching in on odd jobs at Everly was above and beyond anything their “agreement” required of him. And things were such a mess around here that she was deeply grateful for any extra help from anyone.
She just hadn’t known how to show it without feeling vulnerable. Only anger felt truly safe, and she hadn’t had the courage to retreat from it, even when he clearly deserved better treatment.
Relations between them were obviously going to remain complicated, but that didn’t absolve her from the obligation to show decent manners. She made her way down the stairs quickly. She had on only a nightshirt, but it was old and grubby, and no one could construe it as a come-on.
“Trent? Please don’t bother with the tents tonight. They weigh a ton, and you shouldn’t—”
To her surprise, he was sitting at the center tasting table, with a bottle of peach schnapps and a shot glass laid out before him on the recycled-wine-barrel surface. The recessed lighting her grandfather had installed overhead picked out blue-black diamonds in his hair, but the rest of him was mostly in shadow.
“Oh.” She stopped at the foot of the stairs. “I’m sorry. I thought you might be trying to find the tents.”
“No.” He lifted the bottle and topped off the glass. “Just stealing a little home-made painkiller. If I took the stuff Doc Marchant left, I’d be a zombie tomorrow.”
She glanced at his hand, which had a small bandage on the palm, and then his leg, which he had stretched out before him in an ever-so-slightly unnatural position. His jeans covered the cut on his calf, so she couldn’t judge how bad it was.
“Does it hurt a lot?”
“Nothing the schnapps won’t cure.” He jiggled the bottle, sending little white fairy lights scampering over the brick walls. “This stuff packs a punch.”
She knew it was true. When her grandfather had run out of money less than halfway through stocking these Malaysian mahogany racks, she’d found him down here almost every night, brooding over his laptop, researching wines he’d never buy and getting plastered on peach schnapps.
But although liquor had always made her grandfather meaner, it seemed to be mellowing Trent. His voice sounded almost warm, as if the drink famous for thawing out Alpine skiers had finally cut through the ice inside him, too.
“I heard Doc Marchant had to sew up your calf.” She cringed, imagining. “Nineteen stitches, is that right?”
Trent shook his head. “That sounds like Zander’s usual hyperbole. It was only six stitches, and only because Marchant is a worrywart. I’ve had worse cuts from sliding down rocks at Green Fern Pool.”
She would have believed him, except that she’d seen the blood.
She still wasn’t sure how it had happened. The memory had the disjointed quality of a nightmare. She’d just met Richard on the back porch when she heard the crash of something heavy and metallic slamming into the ground. And then, before she could identify the cause, she saw Trent tumble from the ladder.
Without thinking, she flew down onto the lawn, her heart racing. She called out his name. No pausing to consider her dignity. No wondering whether he’d want her help.
Pure reflex. Pure gut.
The ladder wasn’t all that high, thank God, and it was clear immediately that there was no grave danger. While she knelt in the grass beside him, trying to still her heart and catch her breath, he pulled himself to his feet and shook himself off with a smile.
Within seconds, Zander, too, came running from the other side of the yard. The two men walked off together to check out what they insisted was just a scrape.
The message had been clear. Trent hadn’t wanted her to fuss over him then, and he certainly wouldn’t want it now.
“Well, I guess I should go,” she said after an awkward pause. “I just wanted to be sure you weren’t trying to haul out those tents. I was headed—”
She hesitated, suddenly uncomfortable about mentioning bed, for fear it might sound like an invitation. But the hesitation was conspicuous, too. “Headed upstairs.”
He looked amused, though he didn’t say anything.
Argh. She leaned her head against the cool bricks and shut her eyes for a second. Did every road lead to sex?
“I wanted to tell you…I’m really sorry about the ladder,” she said, eager to change the subject. “As you can see, I’ve had to let a lot of the repairs and maintenance slide lately.”
“Don’t worry.” He smiled. “I won’t sue.”
She couldn’t help smiling back. “That’s only because you know there’s nothing to get.”
He raised one eyebrow, toying with his empty shot glass with the tips of his fingers. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. No money, maybe.”
The cellar’s extravagant, Internet-monitored thermostat and humidity control system had long ago been disabled, but suddenly the temperature in the shadowy room seemed to drop ten degrees. Susannah looked at his fingers, and something about their slow grace made her shiver.
The way he looked at her…
There was no mistaking what he meant.
