She lifted them triumphantly, was dancing her way back to the door, feeling pretty damn accomplished, when a car pulled around the corner of the building, what looked like a window hanging out of the trunk.
Not just any car.
Her
car. Purring like a contented cat. She almost couldn't believe it was the same car that had sputtered its way across the country.
She waited until River parked, then ran toward him.
“Perfect timing,” she exclaimed, yanking open the passenger door before she realized Mack was in the seat.
“Ma'am,” he said as she backed away. “Your grandfather wants me to fix the window.” His gaze dropped to her hand. “You okay?”
“Just a little cut,” she responded, even though blood was already seeping through the layers of gauze.
“Looks like more than a little one to me.” He strode to the back of the car, lifted the window out of the trunk. “Got the keys from Byron. You go on and get that hand looked at. I'll take care of things here.”
“The kitchen is a mess. I had a fight with some fudge andâ”
“Brenna,” River cut in, “Mack has seen worse than whatever you left in the kitchen.”
“I know, butâ”
He got out of the Chrysler, walked around, and lifted her gauze-wrapped hand. “Mind if I take a look?”
“Knock yourself out.”
* * *
River unwrapped the gauze.
She'd done a hell of a job on herself. Three fingers had been cut. At least one deeply enough to require stitches. He wasn't sure about the others.
“I'd ask you how you did this, but that would waste time you could be spending getting it stitched up. I'll give you a ride over.”
“That's not necessary. I can drive myself.”
“Why would you?”
“Because I've been doing things for myself for a long time? I drove myself to the ER when I busted my left ankle three years ago. I walked to the hospital last year when I had a reaction to an antibiotic. Six months ago, I sprained my wrist when I tripped over a curb, and Iâ”
“Let me guess,” he muttered, rewrapping her hand and nudging her into the car. “You walked to the ER? Drove yourself to a clinic? Took the metro to the nearest medical facility?”
She laughed. “I hailed a cab and paid someone to drive me.”
“Where was your fiancé during all of this?”
Must have been the wrong question to ask. The laughter died, all the amusement seeping out of her face. “Working.”
“That sounds like an easy excuse for him to make.” He pulled out of the parking lot, turning onto Main Street and heading toward the edge of town. There was a small medical clinic there. Serious injuries or trauma required transportation to a hospital in Spokane, but cut fingers, broken bones, colds, flus, and other everyday medical issues could be dealt with there.
“I guess it was,” she responded, pulling her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around them. “I guess it also was an easy excuse for me to accept.”
“Did it bother you?”
“It should have.”
“So . . . no?”
“I realized after we broke up that the relationship had become more of a habit than anything else.”
“I went there one time,” he admitted. “Spent a lot of time with a woman who should have been perfect for me. Turns out, she wasn't. We liked each other enough, got along well enough, but we both realized enough wasn't what either of us wanted.”
“You broke up?”
“More like we just sat down and discussed things and realized we weren't going to miss what we had. Then we went our separate ways. She got engaged six months later. They invited me to the wedding.”
“Did you go?”
“Why wouldn't I? We were still friends, and I knew he made her happy in a way I never could have.”
“That seems . . . sad.”
“It isn't. The way I see it, better to let her go off and be happy with someone else than cling to something that really wasn't working for either of us.”
She sighed. “Wish I'd realized that before Dan and I got engaged. Actually, I wish I'd realized it before we started dating.”
“Kind of difficult to see the truth about something before you're actually doing it.”
“Not really. Dan was smart and charming. He knew exactly what to say to make a person feel special. I knew that from the beginning. It should have been enough to send me running.”
“There had to be a reason why it wasn't.”
“Truth?” she asked, and he could feel her steady gaze, knew she was watching him intently. “I didn't want to settle. I wanted the most romantic story ever told. The kind of love that was just meant to be. No questions. No explanations. No rhyme or reason to it.”
“That kind of love doesn't just happen, red,” he said as he pulled into the clinic parking lot. “It takes work. It takes remembering every day that the person you're with is the person you're meant to be with.”
“Maybe,” she admitted, opening the door and getting out of the car. The sun had just drifted below distant mountains, the pink gold sky and dusky light shimmering behind her and turning her hair to burnished fire. She had the lean, hungry look of her trade, a body that somehow made jeans and a chocolate-flecked T-shirt look avant-garde. No earrings. No jewelry. No oversized sunglasses or huge handbag, but River could still picture her walking the runway or standing in a garden or stirring chocolate at the Chocolate Haven stove.
“You're beautiful. You know that?” he said, and she smiled.
“I've never been beautiful and I'm especially not beautiful with chocolate in my hair and all over my skin, my hand wrapped in layers of gauze, and a hole in my T-shirt.” She poked at a spot near her stomach. “If Janelle were here, she'd be appalled.”
“She's not,” he said simply, walking around to her side of the car. “And whoever told you that you weren't beautiful lied.”
“I'm interesting, River. Didn't anyone ever tell you that that's what runway models are? We're not the fashion magazine beauties, we're the odd ducks, the gangly, awkward misfits who kids laughed at in school.”
“Kids laughed at you?”
“Who knows? I always had my nose so deep in a book, I didn't know what anyone else was doing.”
“I remember that.”
“The wagonload of books, huh?” She smiled, a tiny little curve of the lips that changed her face, made the sharp angles softer, the edges less defined. The awkward beauty she'd so quickly described became a different thing: a unique and gorgeous twist on the girl next door, the nerdy bookworm, the girl he probably would have ignored in high school but that he'd noticed when she was a kid.
“Yes.”
“Did you ever imagine when you were watching me pull that wagon that you'd be taking me to the clinic with a cut hand?”
“I never imagined I'd come back to Benevolence once I left it.” He slipped his arm through hers and tugged her to the clinic door. “But here I am, and here you are, so . . . Why not be bringing you to the clinic with a cut on your hand?”
“Or helping me in the kitchen?”
“Or getting your help at the ranch.” He brushed a few flecks of chocolate from her hair. “Which, by the way, is a hit with Belinda. She'd forgotten all about the photos you pulled out. Angel said she took one look at them and started gushing with happiness.”
“I'm glad someone is happy with what I'm accomplishing.”
“Who isn't?”
“My family.”
“Not Byron. He's been singing your praises all over town.” He opened the clinic door and let her walk through in front of him. Could he help it if he noticed the way her faded jeans hugged her hips, the way her fitted T rode up her back, revealing just a hint of silky skin between it and her apron strings?
Probably, but he noticed anyway. Just like he noticed the strands of burgundy in her red hair, the streaks of strawberry and auburn.
“He's lying.” She signed in at the receptionist's desk, dropped into a chair, her long legs stretched out in front of her. “To protect the family name.”
“Why would he need to do that?”
“Because I can't make the damârn fudge, River. Why else? Then there's the fact that I've made a mess of his kitchen every day for the past five days.”
“It looked good this morning.”
“That was before this!” She raised her gauze-wrapped hand, brushed a few flecks of fudge off her jeans.
There was more of it on her shoulders, in her hair, speckled across her neck and collarbones.
Seeing her sitting there looking completely comfortable in her fudge-flecked skin made him smile. “You really did have a fight with that fudge, didn't you?”
“A knock-down, drag-out battle. Which I lost.”
“You'll win the war, though. That's what counts.”
“How do you know? I could spend the next two weeks trying to make that fudge and never succeeding. Byron could return from his Alaskan fishing trip to a closed shop with a
FOR SALE
sign on its front door.”
He chuckled and she scowled. “It's a serious concern of mine, River. What if I'm the one who runs Chocolate Haven into the ground? What if everything has been going just great for over a hundred years and then I walk in and wreck it? Generations of tradition taken down by one clumsy candy maker.”
“If Byron thought you couldn't handle itâ”
“Don't even go there. We both know he asked you to help out.”
“I knew. I didn't know you did.”
“It was pretty obvious. He spent thirty minutes muttering under his breath this morning, saying he needed to find someone who could help me before he left. Chase is busy with school and Adeline is busy with morning sickness, so there weren't a whole lot of options. And he had no idea we'd already made a deal, or that you were already planning to teach me your mad skills.”
He smiled at that. “Mad skills?”
“You're a wizard in the kitchen. I read it in the Portland
Times
and in the
Bay City Confidential
.”
“You've been stalking me online?” he asked, amused by the conversation and by Brenna. She might have been through hell, but she still had a sense of humor.
“Of course. It's what people do.”
“People?”
“People like me.” She grinned.
“That explains it,” he said, lifting her uninjured hand and running his thumb along the underside of her wrist, brushing away the bits of chocolate and specks of sugar that coated the silky flesh.
“Explains what?” Her voice had gone a little husky, her eyes a little dark, and if they hadn't been sitting in a waiting area in a medical clinic, he might have leaned in and answered the question with a kiss.
Hell. He might just do it anyway.
“Why I've never been stalked before. I've never had anyone like you in my life.”
“Lucky,” she said with a nervous laugh, and he brushed her lips with his, just barely a touch to capture those nerves and those sweet, velvety lips.
Better than chocolate
.
That's what he was thinking as he backed away.
“I'm not going to apologize,” he said quietly.
“I'm not going to ask you to.”
A nurse appeared, looking at a clipboard as she called Brenna's name.
“That's my cue,” she said, nearly jumping to her feet.
“Want me to come back with you?”
“No. Thanks. I'm fine.” She nearly ran to the nurse's side, didn't look back as she disappeared into the treatment area.
He should have been satisfied with that.
He'd told her he'd wait.
He'd said she could decide what she wanted and how much.
He'd told himself he had time.
They
had time.
But he still wanted to walk back with her. He still wanted to be the one sitting beside her as the doctor examined her hand. If she needed a hand to hold, he wanted it to be his.
“You've got it bad,” he muttered, and the receptionist looked up from her computer, smiled.
“Pardon me?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he replied, crossing his arms over his chest and settling in for however long the waiting would take.
Chapter Eleven
By Brenna's standards, things were going pretty well. The nurse hadn't made her put on one of those god-awful hospital gowns. The doctor hadn't questioned her intelligence when she'd explained how she'd cut her hand. Two of her fingers had only needed to be cleaned and butterfly bandaged. The other one needed stitches, but she could deal with that.
So far, she hadn't gotten a call from her mother, Byron, or either of her sisters. The fact that she'd left her cell phone at the shop might have had something to do with that, but she was celebrating the little things, so she'd celebrate that.
Yep. Things were going astoundingly well.
Until she heard sirens.
Not typical in Benevolence, so she stood up and took notice. Literally. She jumped off the exam table and looked out into the deepening night. She could see emergency lights in the distance. One set. Two. Not ambulances or fire trucks. These lights were from law enforcement vehicles. It had to be something big, then. A robbery? Assault? Murder? Those things were rare in Benevolence, but they'd happened.
She leaned closer to the glass, her forehead resting against the cool pane. The evening light made it difficult to calculate distances, but she was pretty sure the emergency was between the clinic and Main Street.
Actually, from where she was standing, it looked like the emergency was
on
Main Street. She could make out the roofline of the brownstones that housed Chocolate Haven and a few other shops. Were the police cars right in front of it?
As she watched, an ambulance sped through the clinic parking lot. She followed its progress, her stomach churning. Hopefully everyone was okay. In a town the size of Benevolence, one person's heartache was everyone's. Like the time Cramer Lister beat his wife to a pulp. She'd been rushed to Spokane for surgery on her broken jaw and shattered cheek. He'd been taken off to jail. Their six-year-old twins had been left alone in the house. Brenna's father had still been alive then, and she remembered the sirens mixing with the sound of his voice as he'd answered the phone. She'd heard the rise and fall of his voice, the emotion in it. After he'd hung up, he'd talked quietly to her mom, and then he'd left the house. An hour later, he'd returned with the twins.
They'd stayed with the Lamonts until their grandmother arrived. She'd taken them somewhere. California? Oregon? Brenna didn't remember that, but she did remember the hushed morning that had followed. She remembered how quiet her classmates had been at school, how somber the teachers had been.
It had been the same when her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, and even worse when he'd died. The hush. The silences. The helpless people working tirelessly to make something that couldn't be anything but tragic better.
In small towns people felt communal joy, communal contentment, communal grief. They had the deep, unrelenting need to connect with one another, to be part of whatever the town defined them as. In Benevolence, the town was like its name: compassionate caring. No one ever went hungry there. No one was ever left alone. Memories never died either. Nothing was ever let go of or released. A reputation made was forged forever and almost impossible to change.
Brenna had learned that young. Maybe it had been one of the reasons she'd left. She hadn't wanted to cling to her father's memory the way other people had. She hadn't wanted to grow up in the shadow of his greatness or her sisters. There'd been days when she hadn't wanted to be a Lamont, when she'd thought she'd rather be a librarian, a book seller, an author; anything other than one of the Lamonts.
The ambulance lights seemed to merge with the others, coalescing into a mass of flashing strobes.
Leaving her cell phone behind hadn't been such a good thing after all.
If she had it, she could call someone, find out exactly what was going on.
“Knock, knock,” the nurse called, rolling a cart into the room. “How's that finger? Numb enough for stitches?”
“I think so.”
“Great! The doctor is on the way. I've got everything set for him, so it shouldn't take long.”
“Any idea what's happening in town?” Brenna asked, tearing her attention away from the lights and turning to face the young woman. She looked like a teenager, her hair pulled up in a high ponytail, her makeup a little overdone for the workplace. She had Hello Kitty scrubs and enough earrings in her left ear to qualify her as a jewelry dispenser. She had a nice smile, though, and a face that made Brenna wonder if they'd known each other a decade ago.
“I wish. Dottie at reception saidâ” She paused, glanced out into the hall, and then moving close enough to whisper in Brenna's ear. “They found a body.”
“What?”
“That's what she heard.” The nurse pulled back, tugged at the end of her ponytail. Her name tag read
RAYNA
. Not a name Brenna found familiar. Maybe she knew her older sister?
“From who?”
“A guy named Andy. He's an EMT.”
“Is he at the scene?”
“No. He's off duty, but he heard it on the police scanner.”
“He actually heard them say there was a body?” she questioned, because she kept thinking about the person she'd thought she'd seen running toward the park, the brick that had gone through the window, and the emergency lights that seemed to be somewhere on Main Street. Her heart gave a sickening little thump and she swallowed down a lump of cold, hard fear.
“Who knows? Dottie likes to exaggerate. Don't we all? But she seemed pretty certain of what she was saying. There was a body, or something that made the police think there might be a body.”
“Did he say where?”
“Somewhere on Main Street. If he gave the address, Dottie didn't have it. Go ahead and sit down. Dr. Wilsonâ”
“Is right here.” The doctor stepped into the room, pulled a chair over, and got the stitch kit ready.
Seconds later, Brenna's finger was being sewn back together.
One. Two. Three. Four.
She counted each stitch impatiently.
Main Street. That's what the nurse had said. It's what Brenna had thought, and that lump of fear filled her throat again. She felt sick with it, her pulse racing frantically.
“You okay?” the doctor asked as he placed another stitch.
“Fine.”
“You look pale.”
“I'm a redhead.”
He eyed her dispassionately, then shook his head. “Can you go get her friend, Rayna? She might need some moral support.”
“I don't needâ”
Rayna had already run from the room; Brenna didn't bother finishing. Just counted the last two stitches, the sound of sirens seeming to grow louder.
“Is that an ambulance?” she asked, and the doctor nodded.
“Sounds like it.”
She wanted to ask more questions, but he seemed more interested in finishing the job than talking. She pressed her lips together, waiting impatiently while he tied off the thread.
“This looks good,” he exclaimed happily, wrapping gauze around the finger and using medical tape to hold it in place. “I used small stitches, so it shouldn't scar too badly.”
“I'm not worried about scars.”
“With your career, I thought it might matter.”
“I work in a chocolate shop,” she said dryly.
“You've come full circle, huh?”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“You were working in the shop when I was a teenager and you were about this high.” He held his hand up to his waist. “Then you went off on your big adventure and now you're back.”
“Thanks for the truncated version of my life story.”
He smiled and stood. “I'm sure I missed a lot. I didn't know you very well. I'm Porter Wilson. I graduated with your sister Willow. She and I used to hang out.”
“Porter the football player?” She did remember. He'd been a tall, loud, brash young kid who'd been absolutely nothing like Willow.
Brenna had despised him on sight.
“That was during another lifetime, Ms. Lamont,” he said with a grin. “I gave that up after I graduated high school and decided that chasing after a ball or running it into an end zone wasn't my thing.”
“And medicine was?” she asked, surprised, because his father had owned one of two private medical practices in the town and Porter had always been very verbal about his disdain for that. He'd had bigger dreams, wanted better things.
“As hard as it is for everyone around here to believe, yes.” He washed his hands, glanced at his watch. “Strange how life works, right? I used to think I'd be some national football star making millions of dollars in the NFL. Instead, I followed in my old man's footsteps. Now I'm a small-town doctor in a tiny little clinic.”
“If you don't like it, I'm sure there are plenty of other opportunities for physicians in bigger towns than this one.”
“You're right. I got offers from hospitals in Seattle, Portland, and San Jose. I decided to come back home.” He jotted something on her chart. “Oddly enough, sometimes the things we think we'll never miss end up being the things we long for most. Besides, it makes me happy to see my parents happy. I was a cocky little pain in the ass when I was a teen, and they probably thought I'd never amount to anything. Now we eat dinner together every Sunday night and they tell me how good it is to have me home.”
“That's really nice, Porter,” she said, and meant it.
“You know what would be even nicer?” he asked as he tucked a pen into the pocket of his lab coat. “Spending next Friday having dinner with you.”
It was a completely inappropriate invitation. He knew it. She could see the gleam in his eyes: amusement mixed with a healthy dose of self-deprecation.
“I have a feeling,” she said, “that you won't have any trouble finding someone else to have dinner with.”
“Is that a no?”
“It's a hell no,” River growled as he walked into the room, the nurse scurrying along behind him.
“River Maynard,” Porter responded, giving River a once-over that probably didn't make him happy. “You haven't changed a whole lot, brother.”
“I'm not your brother.”
“We used to call each other that,” Porter said mildly.
“That was a long time and a lot of shit ago,” River growled. “I'm surprised you're working here. I'd have thought they would have kept someone like you far away from a place like this.”
That was an odd thing to say, and Brenna wondered if there was something between the two men, some past drama or trauma that she didn't know about.
“People change,” Porter replied, shoving his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “When they do, they deserve to be given second chances. You, more than anyone else, should know that.”
“What I know is that I'd have been happier if I hadn't run into you tonight.”
Porter shrugged. “Your happiness or unhappiness doesn't matter to me. I'm here to do a job. You're obviously here to make sure your girlfriend is well taken care of. Let's just agree to be pleasant to each other until we've both accomplished our goals.”
“I'm not his girlfriend,” she said, but the words were drowned out by a flurry of activity in the hall.
“We expecting a trauma patient?” Porter asked, frowning as the sound of a woman's sobs drifted into the room.
“Not that I know of,” Rayna answered. “Want me to go see what's going on?”
“Let's just finish up here. Whatever it is, they'll come find me if they need me.”
“I thought you were done.” Brenna eyed the thick gauze he'd wrapped her finger in.
“I'm just writing up your after-care instructions.” Porter pulled the pen from his pocket, scribbled something on her chart. “Are you allergic toâ”
“She's dead,” a woman wailed, the voice so familiar, Brenna froze.
Janelle?
That's who it sounded like, but it couldn't be.
Could. Not. Be.
Because if it was, the evening that had been going pretty well had suddenly taken a very sharp turn for the worse.
“Are you allergic to anything?” Porter continued, apparently determined to ignore the chaos that was happening in the hall.
“No.”
“I'll write you a prescription for some pain medicine. I'm also giving you a topical antibiotic. Only use it on the cuts I didn't stitch. If youâ”
“Please!” the woman in the hall cried. “Someone tell me this is a nightmare. Tell me she's not dead!”
Porter frowned. “Maybe you'd better check on that, Rayna. It might be a mental patient. If so, we'll need to call Sacred Heart in Spokane. They're the closest facility.”
“It's okay, Mom,” a second woman said, her voice smooth and soothing and definitely one Brenna recognized.
“It's Adeline,” she said, and everything seemed to happen at once. A gurney rattled past the open door, her sister's red hair visible for about three seconds.
“Addie!” she called, but Janelle's distraught cries drowned out the word.
“Are you sure that was Adeline?” River asked as she ran out into the hall.
“Of course I'm sure, and that's my mother crying.” She sprinted to the end of the hall, took a hard left, nearly barreling into Kane Rainier's back.
“Sorry,” she gasped, and he turned, his eyes widening as he met her gaze.
“Brenna?” he sounded . . . dumbfounded and, maybe, a little relieved.
“Where's my mother?” she said, stepping past him and following the sound of Janelle's sobs. They were coming from the other side of a closed door. She didn't let it stop her, just barreled into the exam room, River and Kane right behind her.