Firefly Glen: Winter Baby (Harlequin Signature Select) (14 page)

Emma, flanked by support, seemed to gather strength. She gave a squeeze to her two hand-holders, then extricated herself and took a swig of white wine. “Okay, ladies. This self-pity party is officially over. I don't want to talk about me. I want to talk about Sarah and Parker.”

Sarah froze, her water glass halfway to her mouth.

Emma grinned. “Yes, my friend, the rumors are flying, but I don't know which ones to believe. Some people say you and Parker spent the night in the barn when you returned the horse to the Autumn House. Others say you just parked the sleigh in front of the Spring House for a couple of hours and did some heavy duty getting acquainted.”

Sarah sighed. But Emma wasn't finished.

She wiggled her eyebrows. “Another rumor says you won five hundred dollars at Lucky's lap-dancing with the loggers before Parker got jealous and beat a bunch of them up.” She turned to Heather. “I don't believe that one, do you? Parker would get jealous long before that.”

Sarah covered her eyes with her hand. “This is crazy,” she said. “One date. Just one innocent date. How can people read so much into so little?”

“It comes from living in the frozen North,” Heather put in wryly. “All those long winters with nothing to do, no one to talk to, nothing to think
about. Survival favors people with overactive imaginations.”

“Well, that's what's happening here,” Sarah said emphatically. “We had one date. It was very nice, but it was nothing worth gossiping about. We're friends, that's all. Chances are we won't even go out together again.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” Emma said. “Parker is already talking about it. Although I have to warn you, it doesn't sound that great. He was pumping me for ideas, and he wanted to know what some of my very worst-ever dates had been.”

Theo arrived with the food, and Sarah busied herself tossing her chicken-breast salad carefully, cutting up her meat into tiny chunks. She hoped Emma would be distracted by her own high-calorie feast, which, Sarah had to admit, looked fabulous.

But of course she couldn't be that lucky. Emma went right back to the conversation, like a homing pigeon.

“So I said to him, are you sure you wouldn't rather hear about my
best
dates? But he said, no, he was putting together the all-time most terrible date.”

Heather was scowling at the greasy food, so Emma stuffed a huge French fry into her mouth defiantly. She wrinkled her nose at Heather before turning back to Sarah. “The worst date ever? What gives with that?”

“He's just pulling your leg,” Sarah said. “It's just this…this dumb joke.”

“Well, I figured maybe he was kind of testing you
a little. Or maybe testing his own feelings. You know what I mean? I told you how hung up he is on finding the perfect woman. Well, maybe he's trying to be sure he's not reacting to the date itself, you know? Trying to be sure you're the perfect woman even if all the other conditions are awful.”

Heather made a scoffing sound. “Of all the convoluted ideas you've ever come up with, Em, that may be the weirdest.”

But Sarah was amazed at how close to the truth Emma had actually come. She put down her fork.

“If that is what he's doing,” she said, “I could save him some time. I'm
not
the perfect woman. The perfect woman doesn't live a thousand miles away, for one thing. The perfect woman doesn't come with a lot of baggage, like an ugly engagement ended only weeks ago. The perfect woman doesn't come with…”

She caught Heather's eye across the table. But Heather had on her most professional face, and Sarah couldn't extract any guidance from her expression. She let her sentence disappear into a swallow of water.

Emma looked thoughtful. “I don't know about all that,” she said. “The perfect man wouldn't be, as Heather so vividly put it, a bullheaded mule. The perfect man wouldn't be trying to steal your brother's job. The perfect man wouldn't pack his bags and move to a motel when the going gets rough. And yet Harry is definitely the perfect mule—I mean
man
—for me.”

Sarah stared at her friend. “This is different,” she said helplessly.

“Maybe.” Emma smiled. “But Parker doesn't think so.”

 

P
ARKER PULLED HIS
Jeep off the road, put the gear in neutral, yanked on the emergency brake and killed the engine.

“Here we are,” he said, turning to Sarah with a poker face. “I hope you are good with a wheelbarrow.”

Sarah wasn't quite sure how to react. The empty lot in front of them looked like the ruins of a bombed-out building. Several heavily bundled people were walking back and forth, doing something that looked a lot like dismantling the edifice.

“Our date is
here?
”

Parker surveyed the scene with a hint of smug satisfaction. “Right. I asked around and, working with details from several different sources, I put together a composite of the world's worst date.”

She waited. He was enjoying himself thoroughly, and she found his amusement ridiculously cute.

“Here's how it goes. First, I make you do something only
I
care about—fix me dinner, clean out my garage, carry my golf clubs while I play eighteen holes, stuff like that. In this particular edition of The Date From Hell, I've brought you to the site where we usually put the ice castle for the festival. This year, we'd just begun to build the frame when the
property owner decided to withdraw his permission to use the land.”

Oh, dear.
Her instincts told her this involved Ward. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping she was wrong. “My uncle?”

“You guessed it. Anyhow, now we have seventy-two hours to clear our mess off his land. You get to help. But that's only part of our horrible date.”

She raised her eyebrows. “There's more?”

“Yep. While you're getting bored and tired and dirty on my behalf, I spend most of my time talking to my friends, ignoring you. If I do talk to you, I talk only about myself. I drink too much and completely forget to feed you anything. Then I take you home and maul you like an animal, blindly assuming you've had as much fun as I have.”

She had to laugh. She'd had a couple of dates like that in her time. They were always first dates. And last.

“Okay,” she said. “That should definitely kill the magic.”

But it didn't.

The Date From Hell turned out to be even more fun than their first.

She loved his friends, who ranged from seventeen to seventy and who were unfailingly polite and welcoming to her. She loved hearing him talk to them, and she loved hearing him talk about himself. She learned more about Parker Tremaine in three hours out here than she had in the entire three weeks she'd been in Firefly Glen.

And she liked everything she learned. He was witty, self-effacing, hardworking and well liked. He gave credit to others, took very little for himself. He was quick, well-informed and tolerant. He didn't get annoyed when people around him messed up. He laughed off small mistakes, and he pitched in to help remedy big ones.

She couldn't have found a more striking contrast to Ed, with his petty, tyrannical perfectionism and his limitless ego.

She worked hard, but she didn't mind that. It was fun being part of a team, and everyone was eager to show her how to pull out nails safely, or how to stack broken boards so they wouldn't topple over. The hours flew by, and though she definitely got dirty, she couldn't say she ever got bored.

According to the bad-date rules, Parker couldn't feed her, but when the sun started to fall on the horizon, he quietly instructed someone else to bring her a thermos of soup and a mug of hot chocolate.

Plain food…but delicious. It was warm and salty, rich and nourishing.

She sat on a large red cooler, watching Parker over the rim of her steaming mug. He had taken off his jacket, hard work providing its own heat as he muscled a large plank of wood onto someone's truck.

He caught her watching him and, brushing his tousled hair back from his damp brow, he smiled.

Oh, that smile,
she thought with a sinking sense of doom. He didn't need romance and music and starlight, did he? He had that smile, and it warmed her
from head to toe, in spite of the snow that had just begun to fall around them.

A few minutes later, he came over and sat down on the cooler next to her, a thermos of coffee in his hand. “We're going to have to call it a day soon,” he said, gazing up into the darkening sky. “Because of the snow.”

He tugged off his work gloves with his teeth, then turned to her. “You okay?”

She sipped her chocolate to hold back a grin. “Hey. That's against the rules. You're not supposed to care.”

He shook his head helplessly, then he reached out and pulled free a strand of hair that had been caught on her cheek. “Maybe not,” he said softly, tucking the hair behind her ear. “But I'll be damned if I can stop myself.”

She opened her mouth, ready to offer a flip rejoinder, but she found herself without words. Gazing into his tired, dirty face, she realized that Parker Tremaine was a far greater threat than she had ever imagined.

Oh, she had known from the start that his sex appeal was nearly lethal. She had expected resisting him to be a challenge. Later, when they were alone, the sparks between them might flare up again, creating a fire that would be difficult to douse.

That would have been trouble enough. For a woman in her condition, falling in lust with this man, with
anyone,
would be vulgar and stupid. Unthinkable.

So she had given herself an ultimatum. Resist him,
or tell him it's over. If she succumbed to even one of those dangerous kisses, she would end it here, tonight.

But suddenly, as if she had been running through a field that abruptly ended, just beyond the tips of her toes, in a sheer free fall down an open cliff, she saw the much greater danger.

And she knew she had to end it anyhow.

Falling in lust was the least of her worries.

She was in danger of falling in
love.

A
S
P
ARKER DROVE
toward Winter House, he wondered whether maybe he'd gone a little too far with this Date From Hell business.

Although Sarah had entered into the day with a willing tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm, for the past hour or so she had been polite but stilted, growing more and more subdued. Hell, ever since they got in the car, she'd been practically mute.

He backtracked over the afternoon, wondering when the change had hit her. Had someone offended her? Had he said something stupid?

Maybe she was just tired. She had worked too hard. She couldn't be used to that kind of bruising labor, especially at these altitudes.

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye as he steered his Jeep toward her uncle's house. She did look pale, with smudges of exhaustion under her eyes. He was reminded suddenly of how weak and vulnerable she had looked that first day, on the mountaintop, leaning up against a tree, as if she needed its strength to help her stand.

For a dreadful moment, he wondered if she might be sick. Really sick. But Ward would have told him, wouldn't he? And most of the time she was so glow
ing and sensual, he couldn't take the idea of illness very seriously.

Probably, like a fool, he had just let her wear herself out.

He pulled into the driveway of Winter House and stopped the car. Sarah looked so far away over there in her bucket seat, with the gearshift sticking up between them like some chrome-plated techno-chaperone.

Suddenly he wished he had the damn sleigh back. He clearly had been too cocky, believing he could make magic for her without any romantic bells and whistles. Sarah didn't look like a woman caught in anybody's magic spell tonight. She looked tired and remote and—just his luck—still so desirable he could hardly breathe.

He would have given every penny in his pocket for one lousy trickle of starlight.

He reached over and gently tugged a wood shaving from her hair. He ran the back of his finger along her cheek. “Tired?”

“A little,” she said quietly. “I guess I should go in.”

He wanted so much to take her in his arms. Damn these intrusive gear shifts. Who had invented them? The Society for the Protection of American Virgins?

“Sarah,” he said, letting his finger touch the corner of her mouth. “Sarah, look at me.”

“I have to go in,” she said, still in an exhausted monotone. “Maybe we should wait and talk tomorrow.”

He leaned over, ignoring the bite of the gearshift into his side. He put his finger under her chin and turned her face toward him. She did look sick, he thought suddenly. She was in some kind of trouble, some kind of pain.

“Sarah. Sweetheart. Tell me what's wrong.”

“Nothing's wrong,” she said, and for a minute she rallied. She turned the corners of her mouth up, as if she were a puppet controlled by strings. It was sweet, but it damn sure didn't feel real. He preferred no smile at all to that saccharine pretense.

“Honestly, nothing is wrong. It's just that I…” She swallowed and started over, doing a little better with the smile this time. “I had a lovely time today, Parker. I always have fun when I'm with you. But, even so, I think we should stop seeing each—”

She never finished the sentence. From the direction of Winter House, a loud, smashing noise exploded into the quiet evening air. It was the sound of glass shattering. And it was followed by the rapid pounding of someone's footsteps running across the hard snow of the estate's grounds.

“Oh, my God!”

Though Sarah looked immediately toward the house, Parker's gaze flew instinctively toward the running footsteps, just in time to see a hooded figure fleeing into the dark stand of trees.

“My uncle!” With one hand, Sarah was shoving open the car door, the other pulling frantically to release her seat belt. Parker reached over, flipped her belt open, then addressed his own.

Reluctantly he abandoned any thought of chasing the hooded figure. He couldn't let Sarah go up to the house alone, not knowing what she would find inside. What if the fleeing man hadn't been the only one here?

So the two of them raced up to the big front door alone. Parker was dialing 911 on his cell phone. Sarah already had her key out and, in spite of her obvious anxiety, her fingers didn't fumble. As the door swung open, she was already calling, “Uncle Ward! Uncle Ward! Where are you? Are you all right?”

They found him in the library, which was growing very cold as the evening wind blew snow in through the large, star-shaped hole in the beautiful stained-glass window. A small white layer of powder already dusted the dark green leather top of the library table.

Parker scanned the scene quickly. Ward lay in a tangle on the carpet, pieces of gold and red glass rayed out around him. A deep, ugly cut on his forehead was oozing blood that had reached the floor and was mingling with the intricate flowers of the Oriental rug.

Frosty sat by his shoulder, obeying his guard dog instincts, but the frightened puppy in him was whimpering softly and shaking all over.

When he saw Sarah, Frosty ran to her, ears flopping. She scooped him up, murmuring comfort, and held him tightly as she rushed to her uncle's side.

It didn't take long for Parker to size up what had happened. Just beyond Ward's head, a large rock lay near the carved leg of the table. It had clods of frozen
dirt stuck to it, obviously having been dug recently, probably from the Winter House grounds. It was roughly the size and shape of a football, though distorted with sharp, jagged edges. A piece of paper had been tied around the rock with a rubber band, and big black letters had been scrawled on the paper.

“Butt out, Grinch. Leave our festival alone,” it said.

Parker wasn't surprised. He had been afraid something like this might happen if Ward persisted in his sabotage of the festival.

It probably hadn't been intended as a physical attack, but with horrible, blind accuracy, and the world's worst luck, whoever had lobbed this rock through the stained-glass window had hit Ward Winters on the head, hit him hard enough to knock him from the chair where he'd been reading.

Parker bent over Ward, checking his pulse.
Thank God.
It was faint but steady. Sarah had set Frosty down and was kneeling on the other side of her uncle, brushing away enough blood to get a good look at the size of the cut. Parker heard her abrupt inhale, and he knew it must be deep.

She cradled her uncle's head in her lap, elevating it to slow the bleeding. She turned dark eyes toward Parker. “Can you get me a clean cloth from the kitchen? Something I can hold against this? Please. I don't want to leave him.”

Parker was on his feet before she finished her question. “I'll be right back,” he said. “I've already
called the medics, so if you hear someone at the door, don't worry. I'll let them in.”

He was almost certain no one else was in the house. The hole in the window was too jagged and awkwardly placed for anyone to have entered there, and all other points of entry seemed secure. Plus, his instincts told him this was merely a threat. It was a coward's trick, that nasty little note wrapped around an anonymous missile. The imbecile who had thrown it was undoubtedly the same punk Parker had seen scuttling into the woods.

Still he quickly checked rooms as he passed on the way to the kitchen. Everything looked normal.

By the time he got back with the cloth, he heard two very welcome sounds—the crunch of the ambulance pulling up the driveway, and the loud, fussy rumble of Ward's voice complaining that he was perfectly fine, leave him alone, for God's sake.

Parker pulled open the door, motioning the medics to come in, and then he led the way to the library, where Ward was now sitting up in the upholstered armchair nearest to the table. Blood was dripping down over his eye, but that didn't keep him from looking as energetically bad tempered as usual.

He glared at Parker and the medical technicians as they entered the library.

“Damn it, it's just a little nick. Who the hell called in the army?”

Sarah put her hand on her uncle's shoulder. “Uncle Ward, calm down. They're just going to take you to the hospital—”

“The hell they are!” Ward lunged forward, but was held in place by Sarah's restraining hand and, probably, his own discomfort. “I'm not going anywhere.”

Parker handed the clean cloth to the older man.

“You know, Ward,” he observed placidly. “I think your brains may have fallen out of that gash on your head. You're talking like an idiot.”

Ward chuckled, then grimaced as the motion clearly caused pain. “Insult me all you like, Sheriff. This is my home, and I'm not going to be driven out of it by any rock-tossing jackass.”

The arguments took forever. The debate was far from balanced, with Parker, Sarah and the two medics on one side, and Ward alone on the other. But in the end they compromised—as Parker could have predicted they would—by letting Ward win. He would not be going to the hospital.

He did agree to let a doctor come to the house and stitch him up. Parker arranged that, and while he was out of the room, he also called Harry. He told the deputy what had happened, then gave him a few fairly simple instructions: catch the vandal, and catch him tonight.

Two hours later, the doctor finally had Ward back in one piece, though it had taken eleven stitches to do it. Ward also had several bruises, and a sprained elbow, which he'd fallen on as he tumbled from the chair. Somehow, using all her persuasive skills, Sarah had coaxed her uncle into bed, though he had ex
pressed a strong desire to storm out into the night, find the stone-throwing jerk and teach him a lesson.

But Sarah had deposited Frosty on the bedspread beside her uncle, and that had done the trick. Ward was a fool for the puppy already, and Sarah had warned Parker that Frosty probably wouldn't be moving out of Winter House any time soon. Which was fine with Parker. One puppy was enough to handle.

And anyhow, it was starting to look as if Ward might be better off with a dog in the house.

While Sarah had been tending Ward, Parker had cleaned up the broken glass. He found some large pieces of heavy cardboard and taped them over the hole in the library window. He wondered if the moron who threw that rock realized how expensive a stained-glass window like this was to replace. This wasn't like scrawling something rude on a bathroom stall, which could be erased or painted over. This was big-time vandalism, and there would be hell to pay.

“He's asleep.” Sarah's voice came from behind him. She sounded exhausted.

With a sigh, she plopped onto the library sofa. She had bloodstains on her white sweater, and blue circles under her eyes. She looked even more tired than she sounded.

“Thank you, Parker,” she said, smiling over at him with obvious effort. “I don't know what I would have done without you here.”

“I'm glad I was.” Parker set the tape down on the refectory table and came over to join her on the sofa. He unbuttoned her sweater, helped her ease it off and,
folding it up so that the bloody stains didn't show, tossed it aside.

He gathered her into his arms and held her close, rubbing his hands along her arms to keep her warm. The library was still half-freezing.

“You should go to bed now, too,” he said.

“I can't.” It was a clue as to how exhausted she was that she didn't try to pull away from his embrace. He was well aware she had decided to put an end to whatever had been developing between them. “I have to check on him every two hours. The doctor suspects a concussion.”

“You sleep. I'll do the checking,” Parker said, resting his cheek against her hair. The motion pressed her head onto his chest. She didn't resist that, either. “I'm planning to stay down here tonight, anyhow. Just in case the fool who did this gets any more dumb ideas.”

She shook her head, but there was almost no force behind it. “I can't let you do that. You've done too much already.”

“It's my job,” he said softly. “Protect and defend, all that stuff. Besides, I want to. He may be your uncle, but he's my friend, too.”

“What about Snowball? He's been alone all day.”

“No, he hasn't. While you were up with Ward, I called Emma. She's going to take him home with her. She adores him. I think she'd secretly like to steal him from me anyhow.”

He felt her lips curve up in a smile, though she didn't move a muscle. “We'll do it together, then,”
she said. “I'll stay down here, too, and we'll take turns.”

He shook his head. “It's too cold for you, with the window broken. Too uncomfortable. You'll get sick.”

“I never get sick,” she said sleepily. “It'll be fine. It'll be like camping out. I could light a fire.”

Yes, he thought, looking down at her graceful curves, folded like a butterfly up against him. She certainly could.

But he resisted the urge to follow that train of thought. He looked around the room. The sofa near the fireplace was roomy, overstuffed and covered with pillows and soft satin throws. He might be able to make it comfortable enough.

He sighed and gave up. It was too tempting to resist.

“All right. But I will take the first shift. That's not negotiable.”

She nodded, her head moving softly against his shirt. “Yes, Sheriff.”

“And you have to promise me that you'll get some sleep.”

But there was no answer to that. He felt the butterfly softness of her body go limp, relaxing against him in utter innocence.

She was already asleep.

 

S
ARAH WOKE SLOWLY
, registering where she was with her senses rather than with her mind.

The sweet-ash smell of wood burning. She was
close to a fire, so close she could see its amber shadows dancing against her eyelids. So close she could hear the hiss and simmer of the logs as tongues of fire licked them.