Read the book: «The Man Behind The Mask»

To my favorite animal lover, Margo Jakobsen, and her beloved, the true Prince of Pomerania, Phaut.

CHAPTER ONE

BRENDAN GRANT AWOKE with a start. At first he heard only the steady beat of rain on the roof, but then the phone rang again, shrill, jangling across his nerves. His eyes flicked to his bedside clock.

Three o’clock.

He felt his heart begin to beat a hard tattoo inside his chest. What good could ever come of a 3:00 a.m. phone call?

But then he remembered, and even though he remembered, he reached over and touched the place in the bed beside him. Two and a half years later and he still felt that ripple of shock at the emptiness. Becky was gone. The worst had already happened.

He groped through the darkness for the phone, picked it up.

“Yeah?” His voice was raspy with sleep.

“Charlie’s dying.”

And then the phone went silent in his hands.

Brendan lay there for a moment longer, holding the dead phone, not wanting to get up. He didn’t really even like Charlie. They were going to start breaking ground on the lakeside living complex, Village on the Lake, tomorrow. His design had already attracted the attention of several architectural magazines, and based on the plan, the project had been nominated for the prestigious Michael Edgar Jonathon Award.

Still, as always, before they broke ground, and even after, he struggled with a feeling of it not being what he had wanted, missing the mark in some vague way he could not quite define. He recognized the stress was beginning. He was a man who needed his sleep.

But with a resigned groan, he sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and sat there for a moment, his head in his hands, listening to the rain on the roof. He was so sick of rain. He certainly didn’t want to go out in it at three in the morning.

Then, with a sigh, Brendan reached for his jeans.

Ten minutes later, he was on Deedee’s front stoop, hammering on her door. Her house was a two-minute drive from his. Brendan turned and looked out over his neighborhood. They both enjoyed locations on “The Hill,” still Hansen’s most prestigious neighborhood, and even on such a ghastly night the views were spectacular.

Through wisps of mist, he could see the whole city, pastel-painted turn-of-the-century houses nestled under mature maples, clinging to the sides of steep hills. Beyond the houses and the cluster of downtown buildings, lights penetrated the gloomy gray and reflected in the black, restless waters of Kootenay Lake.

Brendan turned back as the door opened a crack. Deedee regarded him suspiciously, as if there was a possibility that by some mean coincidence at the very same time she had called him, a home invader—Hansen’s first—was waiting on her front stair to prey on the elderly.

Satisfied it was Brendan Grant in the flesh, she opened the door.

“Don’t you look just like the devil?” she said. “Coming out of the storm like that, all dark menace and bristling bad temper. I used to say to Becky you had to have Black Irish in you somewhere. Or pure pirate.”

Brendan stepped in and regarded his grandmotherin-law with exasperated affection. Only Deedee would see a devil or a pirate in the doer of a good deed!

“I’ll try to contain the bristling bad temper,” he said drily. The darkness he could do nothing about. It was his coloring: dark brown eyes, dark brown hair, whiskers blacker than night. It was also his heart.

Deedee was ninety-two, under five feet tall, frighteningly thin. Still, despite the fact it was 3:15 in the morning and her cat, Charlie, was dying, she was dressed in her go-to-church best. She had on a pantsuit the color of pink grapefruit. A matching ribbon was tied in a bow in her snow-white curls.

Would Becky have looked like this someday? If she had grown old? The pain was sharp, his guilt so intense it felt as if a knife had been inserted underneath his ribs. but Brendan was accustomed to it coming like this, in unexpected moments, and he held his breath, waiting, watching himself, almost bemused.

Pain, but no emotion. A man so emotionally impoverished he had not shed a single tear for his wife.

Sometimes he felt as if his heart was a tomb that a stone had been rolled in front of, sealing it away forever.

“I’ll get my coat,” Deedee said. “I’ve already got Charlie in the cat carrier.”

She turned to retrieve her coat—pink to match her outfit—from the arm of a sofa, and he saw Charlie glaring balefully at him from a homemade carrier that looked like a large and very ugly purse.

Charlie’s head poked out a round hole, his ginger fur stuck up in every direction, his whiskers kinked, his eyes slit with dislike and bad temper. He made a feeble attempt to squeeze his gargantuan self out the tiny opening, but his quick resignation to defeat, and the raspy breathing caused by the effort, made Brendan aware that tonight was the end of the road for the ancient, cranky cat.

Deedee turned back to him, carefully buttoning her coat around her. Brendan picked up the cat carrier with one hand and crooked his other elbow. Deedee threaded her arm through his, and he nudged open the door with his knee, trying not to be impatient when the rain sluiced down his neck as she handed him a huge ring of keys.

“Lock the handle and the dead bolt,” she ordered, as if they were in a high-crime area of New York City.

Both locks were sticky, and Brendan made a note to come by and give them a squirt of lubricant the next time he had a chance.

Finally they turned toward his car, inched down the steep stairs that took them from her front stoop to the road. When they reached the flat walkway, he tried to adjust his stride to Deedee’s tiny steps. He was just under six feet tall, his build lithe with a runner’s sleekness rather than a bodybuilder’s muscle, but Deedee made him feel like a giant.

A bristling pirate of a giant.

Brendan found himself wishing she would have called one of her children to accompany her on this late-night trip to the vet’s office. But for a reason he couldn’t quite decipher—it certainly wasn’t his graciousness—it was him she turned to when she needed anything, from a lightbulb changed to her supply of liquid meal replacements restocked.

Deedee was not a nice little old lady. She was querulous, demanding, bossy, ungrateful and totally selfcen-tered. It had occurred to Brendan more than once that she called him because no one else would come. But Deedee was his inheritance from his late wife. Becky and Deedee had adored each other. For that reason alone he came when she called.

Finally, he had both the cat and Deedee settled, the animal on the backseat, the woman in the front. The carrier did not look waterproof and he hoped the cat would not have an accident that would bleed through to the seat. Of course, with Charlie it might not be an accident. It might be pure spite.

Regardless, the car was brand-new, all plush leather and purring power. Had Brendan bought it hoping to fill some emptiness? If so, he had failed colossally, like putting a pebble in a hole left by a cannonball. Brendan shook off the thought, annoyed. It was the lateness of the night, the strangeness of being awake at what seemed to him to be the witching hour, that made him vulnerable to uncharacteristic introspection.

He got in the driver’s side and started the engine, glanced at Deedee and frowned. She looked quite thrilled to be having this middle of the night outing, not like an old woman making the painful final journey with her cat.

“Which vet are you using? Is he expecting us?”

“I’ll give you directions,” she snapped.

It was the tone of voice she used right before she pronounced you an idiot, so he shrugged and put the car in drive, and pulled out into the wet, abandoned streets of Hansen.

He was determined to be patient. It was one more loss for her. Putting down her precious cat. She was entitled to be crabby tonight, and he did not want her to be alone at the vet’s office as the needle went in. He did not want her to be alone when she came home without her cat.

She gave him directions, and he drove in silence, the mountains on either side of the valley making the night darker, the water hissing up under the tires. The cat’s breathing was labored.

Deedee issued shrill commands for Brendan to slow down and squinted at the signs on every crossroad. Finally, she fished in her purse, took out a piece of paper and held it very close to her face.

“If you give me the address, this new car has GPS.”

She contemplated that, deeply suspicious of technology, then reluctantly gave him the information.

He put it in his system. They were headed into the neighborhood that bordered Creighton Creek. A stone’s throw from Hansen proper, the area was rural residential, with a collection of small, neat acreages. Because of the great location, and the land, it was a sought-after area for young professionals who had a dream of children, a golden retriever and a horse or two.

All Brendan had ever wanted, growing up the only child of a single mother, was that most elusive of things—normal. And when he’d been almost there, in a blink, everything was gone. There must have been something he could have done. Anything.

He felt the pain again, of being powerless, and again felt himself watching, wondering if at some unexpected moment he would just break open. If he did, he was certain it would shatter him, that the pieces would be so small there would be no collecting them and putting it all together again.

But no, he was able to focus on the small, old houses of Creighton Creek, which were slowly but surely being replaced with bigger ones. Brendan’s firm, Grant Architects, had designed many of the newer homes, and he allowed himself, as they drove by one of his houses—one with a particularly complicated roofline—to be diverted from the painful realization of the life he was not going to have by the reality of the one he did.

The house was beautiful. The home owners loved it. Again, he had to try and shake that feeling of having missed something.

“I don’t recall a vet located out here,” he said. “In fact, didn’t I take you and Charlie to Doc Bentley recently?”

“Dr. Bentley is an idiot,” Deedee muttered. “He told me to put Charlie to sleep. That there was no hope at all. ‘He’s old. He’s got cancer. Let him go.’” She snorted. “I’m old. Are you just going to let me go? Put me to sleep, maybe?”

Brendan cast Deedee a glance. Carefully, he said, “Isn’t that what we’re doing? Taking Charlie to have him put to, er, sleep?”

Deedee cranked her head toward him and gave him a withering look. “I am taking him to a healer.”

Brendan didn’t like the sound of that, but he carefully tried to strip any judgment from his voice. “What do you mean, a healer?”

“Her name’s Nora. She has that new pet rescue place. Babs Taylor told me she has a gift.”

“A gift,” he repeated.

“Like those old-time preachers who laid their hands on people.”

“Are you kidding me?” He began to look for a place to turn around. “You need a vet. Not a nut.”

“What I need is a miracle, and Dr. Bentley already told me he can’t give me one.” Deedee’s voice was high and squeaky. “Babs’s niece volunteers out there. She said somebody brought in a dog that was deader than a doornail. And Nora Anderson brought it back to life. With her energy.”

Brendan felt his mouth tighten in a hard line of cynicism. One thing Becky and her grandmother had had in common? They loved all things “woo-woo.” They actually believed in what they called psychics and mediums, had frowned at him when he had made disparaging remarks about fortune-tellers and gypsies.

An unfortunate mental picture of Nora was forming in his mind: dangling earrings, wildly colored head scarf, hideous makeup, dark blue eye shadow, a slash of blood-red on her lips.

“Can you keep a secret?” Deedee didn’t wait for him to respond, but lowered her voice conspiratorially, as if dozens could hear. “Clara, over at the post office, told me she thinks from the mail that she gets that Nora is Rover. You know, from the column? Ask Rover?”

He didn’t know.

“You can tell when you read it,” Deedee elaborated, still whispering. “Nora gets right inside their heads. The animals.”

“That must be helpful, so that she knows where to send the energy to,” he said, his tone deeply sarcastic. Deedee missed the sarcasm entirely, because she went on with enthusiasm.

“Exactly! I’m a great fan of Ask Rover, so I knew she was the one who could help Charlie. I don’t drive anymore,” Deedee said, as if Brendan, her favored chauffeur, didn’t know that, “and I can’t hear properly on the phone, so I wrote her a letter, and brought it right to the post office so I knew she’d get it the next day. She wrote me back right away saying she would send me—Charlie—some energy.”

Brendan felt a kind of helpless fury claw at him. Deedee nursed the worry that Hansen’s first home invader would target her. She double-locked her doors. She was suspicious of the checkout girl at the grocery counting out the wrong change! How could she fall for this?

“It worked,” Deedee whispered. “Charlie got better. But then he got worse again, and she wouldn’t answer my letters. I phoned, too, even though I can’t hear, but I got an answering machine. I hate those. No one returned my calls. Then tonight, Charlie’s breathing changed. I’m scared. I know he’s dying.”

Brendan hated it that she was scared, and hated it more that her fear had made her so vulnerable. “Did you send money?”

The silence was telling.

“Did you?”

“A little.”

His GPS system startled them both by telling him to turn right at the next crossroad. Suddenly he wanted very much to meet the person who would use an elderly woman’s fear over losing her beloved pet to bamboozle money out of her.

All the better if they rousted her from a deep sleep in the middle of the night!

He turned right; they went up a road he had never noticed before, and passed under an archway that spanned the road.

A sign hung from the archway, letters painted in fresh, primary colors. Nora’s Ark.

At any other time, he might have thought it was clever little play on words. Or maybe not. He didn’t like cute. He was an architect. He liked calculation, precision, math. He liked figuring out how large a load a beam could carry, and how to make a wall of glass that was structurally sound.

He liked the completely balanced marriage of art and science that was his work. If at the end of the project he always felt, somehow, he had missed the mark, wasn’t that part of what drove him to do even better the next time? To try again for that thing, whatever it was, that was just out of his reach?

Brendan considered himself pragmatic and practical, perhaps with a good measure of cynical thrown in. He was the man least likely to give himself over to whimsy. But given that it seemed to have been raining for forty days and forty nights, he felt a strange shiver along his spine that he was arriving at an ark of any sort.

Below the sign Nora’s Ark was a smaller one, announcing they were supported by the Hansen Community Betterment Committee.

His company was one of the charter members!

He shook off his annoyance, and drove over a wooden bridge that spanned a creek that was still raging with spring runoff, though it was the last day of June. Up ahead, carved out of the mountainous wilderness all around, a white house—almost a cottage—was illuminated in his headlights, surrounded by a picket fence and a yard where yellow climbing roses rioted.

Through the grim, pelting rain a light shone, warm and inviting, from inside, and the house seemed like a welcoming place, not the kind of place where a charlatan who cheated vulnerable old women would live.

Was someone awake? It was probably a good time for chanting and consulting cards. Though why do it if the mark wasn’t there?

Behind the house and yard, barely visible in darkness that was slowly giving way to a soggy predawn, he could see the huge silhouette of a barn.

“Oh, we’re here,” Deedee breathed happily. “It looks just the way I thought it would.”

That explained the appearance of the place. Homey. Welcoming. Like the old witch’s cottage in Hansel and Gretel.

All the better to dupe people, to lure them closer.

“You wait here,” Brendan said, and cut off Deedee’s protest with a firm slam of the car door. He walked up a path that smelled of perfume as he crushed damp fallen rose petals under his feet.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, back toward the barn, he saw a light fly up, heard the high-pitched whinny of a horse, and, straining against the sounds of the storm, he was sure he heard the startled cry of someone in trouble. A female in trouble.

CHAPTER TWO

TURNING FROM THE house, adrenaline pumping, his instincts on red alert, Brendan Grant ran toward the barn.

At first, he thought it was a pile of old rags in the churned-up mud of the paddock adjoining the barn. The pile was faintly illuminated by the fallen flashlight beside it. Then it moved. Heedless of the mud, he put one hand on the fence, leaped it, landed, raced to the still form. It looked like a child facedown in the mud.

His sense of urgency surged as he squatted down. He knew better than to try to move whoever it was without assessing the injuries.

“Are you all right?”

Movement from the heap of rags and a squeak of distressed surprise were a relief to Brendan. Then the pile of rags flipped over.

It was his turn to be shocked. It wasn’t a child, but a woman. Her hair reminded him of Charlie’s—ginger, sticking up all over the place, except where a clump of mud had flattened it to her skull. But even the mud that streaked her skin could not hide the exquisite loveliness of her pale face.

Her nose was dainty, faintly dusted with copper freckles. Her lips were plump and pink; her chin had a little jut to it that hinted at a stubborn temperament. A goose egg was rising alarmingly above her right eye.

Her eyes were amazing, wide-spaced, unusually large in the smallness of her face, a color of jade that flickered with light in the grayness of the night.

If this was Nora she was an enchantress of the kind who would have no need of makeup to weave her spell.

She was obviously very woozy, because she looked at him quizzically, and then oddly, reached up and touched his cheek, a faint smile on her face, as if she did not see a dark devil arrived on the tails of the storm, but something else entirely. Something that she recognized and welcomed.

His feeling of being enchanted—however reluctantly—increased.

Then abruptly she came to her senses. She seemed to realize she was flat on her back in the middle of the night, in the mud, with a strange man who oozed menace and bristling bad temper hovering over her.

Her eyebrows knit together in consternation and she struggled to sit up.

“Hey,” he said, his attempt at a soothing tone coming out of his mouth like rust, a hoarse croak. “Try not to move.”

She looked as if she had no intention of following his well-meaning instruction, so he laid a hand on her shoulder. It was tiny underneath a thin jacket that appeared to be soaking up rain rather than repelling it.

He could see a little bow on what could be her pajamas at the V of her jacket.

She shook off his hand, sat up, wincing from the effort. He’d been right about her chin giving a clue to her temperament. She was stubborn.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing out here, on my property, at this time of night?”

He was annoyed with himself that the tone of her voice increased the sense of enchantment weaving through this miserable night. Despite the lack of welcome in her words, her voice reminded him of maple syrup, rich and smooth and sweet.

She scanned his face, that initial reaction of trust, of welcome, completely gone. Now she looked wary and stubborn and maybe just a little frightened.

What she didn’t have was the look of a person who would be trying to dupe an old lady out of her money.

No sense putting off the moment of truth.

“Are you Nora?”

She nodded. He let that sink in. No head scarf. No dangling earrings. Certainly no blue eye shadow, or slash of red at her mouth.

Brendan was aware that in a very short time he had started to hope the woman in a vulnerable little heap in the mud was not the same woman who had written Deedee a letter promising to heal her cat. With energy. For a fee.

He looked at her fresh face, tried to imagine dangling earrings and heavy makeup and the gypsy scarf, and found his imagination didn’t quite go that far. But fresh faced or not, she’d duped Deedee. He was already disillusioned by life, so why be disturbed by the gathering of a little more evidence?

Still, for the moment she looked faintly frightened, and he felt a need to alleviate that.

“I brought a cat out,” he said. “I heard a ruckus out here, saw a light and came to investigate.”

She considered his explanation, but looked doubtful. He suspected he didn’t look much like the kind of guy who would be attached to his cat.

“I heard you were a healer.” He tried to strip judgment from his tone, but he must have looked even less like the kind of guy who would put any kind of faith in a healer than one who would be attached to a cat, because her doubtful expression intensified.

“Who did you hear that from?” she asked uneasily. Her eyes skittered toward the fence, as if she was going to try and make an escape.

“Deedee Ashton.”

The name did not seem to register, but then she might be struggling to remember her own name at the moment.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.

She put a hand to the goose egg above her eye.

“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “The horses might have knocked me over.”

He scanned the corral. Three horses were squeezed against the back fence, restless and white-eyed. He didn’t know much about horses, but these ones seemed in no way docile.

He told himself firmly that it was none of his business what kind of chances she took. He didn’t know her. He certainly didn’t care about her. Still, there was a certain kind of woman that could make a man feel he should be protective. That was the kind you really had to guard against, especially if you had already failed in the department of protecting the smaller and weaker and more vulnerable.

Brendan ordered himself not to comment. But, of course, his mouth disobeyed his mind.

“Given you’re about the size of a peanut, doesn’t it seem a touch foolhardy to decide to come mingle with your wild mustangs in the middle of the night?”

She glared at him. Her look clearly said don’t tell me what to do, which was fair.

“Unless, of course, you hoped your energy was going to tame them?”

Those amazing eyes narrowed. “What do you know about my energy?”

“Not as much as I plan to.”

“Why does that sound like a threat?” she asked.

He shrugged.

She tossed her head at that, but he saw a veil drop smoothly over the flash of fire in those green eyes, as if he had hurt her by being a doubter. You’d think, in her business, she would have developed a thicker skin.

But he would have to deal with all that later. She had begun to shiver from being wet, but when she tried to move, a small groan escaped her lips.

He knew he shouldn’t move her. But she was clearly freezing. Now was not the time to confront her about any claims she had made to Deedee. He shrugged out of his coat and wrapped it around her.

She looked as if she planned to protest his act of chivalry, but when he tucked his coat around her, he could clearly see the warmth seduced her. She snuggled inside it instead. She looked innocent, about as threatening as a wounded sparrow.

Stripping away any censure he felt about her claims of extraordinary power, he said, “Can you move your hands? How about your feet? Can you turn your head from side to side for me?”

“What are you? A doctor?” Despite the protest, she tested each of her body parts as he named it.

He touched the ugly-looking bump rising above her right eye. She winced.

“You’re not lucky enough to have conjured up a doctor. You’ll have to work on your conjuring a little. I’m an architect. Luckily, I have a little construction site first aid experience.”

As he had hoped, at the mention of his profession—oh, those professional men were so trustworthy—her wariness of him faded, though annoyance at his conjuring remark had turned her green eyes to slits that reminded him of Charlie.

He picked the flashlight out of the mud and shone it in her eyes, looking for pupil reaction.

“Tell me about your cat,” she said, swatting at the light.

“So you can send him energy?”

“Why are you here, if you’re so cynical?”

He felt a shiver along his spine, similar to what he had felt when he passed under the ark sign. What if he hadn’t come along when he had? Would she have lain in the mud until she had hypothermia? Would the horses have trampled her?

But he was certainly not going to let her see that for a moment he was in the sway of an idea that some power he did not understand might have drawn him here at the exact moment she needed him.

Ridiculous. If such a power existed, where had it been the night Becky had needed it?

He actually saw Nora flinch, and realized he had grimaced. It no doubt gave him the pirate look that Deedee had seen earlier.

Keeping his tone level, Brendan said, “I’m here as the result of a comedy of errors. I thought I was on my way to a legitimate practitioner of animal medicine.”

“With your cat.”

He nodded.

“You don’t really look like a cat kind of guy.”

“No? What do cat kind of guys look like?”

She studied him, the eyes narrow again. “Not like you,” she said decisively.

“So, what do I look like? A rottweiler kind of guy? Bulldog? Boxer?”

Her look was intense. If a person believed that energy crap, they would almost think she was reading his. He raised the light again, shining it in her eyes, hoping to blind her. He was not sure he liked the sensation of being seen.

“You’re not a dog kind of guy, either.”

Accurate, but not spookily so.

“In fact,” she continued, “I’d be surprised if you even had a plant.”

Okay. That was about enough of that.

“I never said it was my cat.” He turned off the light and put it in his pocket. “I don’t think your back is injured, so I’m going to pick you up and carry you to the house.”

“You are not picking me up! I’ll walk.” She tried to find her feet, and glared at him as if the fact that it was his jacket swimming around her stopped her from doing so. “If you’ll just give me your hand—”

But Brendan did not just give her a hand. It wasn’t the jacket. The small effort of trying to get up had made her turn a ghostly white, the freckles and mud standing out in stark relief. So he ignored her protests, slid his arms under her shoulders and her knees and scooped her up easily.

She was tiny, like that wounded sparrow, and despite the barrier of his jacket, he was aware of an unusual warmth oozing out of her where he held her against his chest.

Was it because it had been so long since he had touched another human being that he felt an unwelcome shiver of pleasure?

CHAPTER THREE

UNEASILY HOLDING A beautiful stranger in his arms and feeling that unwanted shiver of something good, Brendan Grant was aware it was what he had wanted to feel when he had purchased the car. Just a moment’s pleasure at something. Anything. With the car, he had not even come close.

He should have already learned stuff could never do it. An unwanted memory came, of standing in front of the house he now owned, with Becky at his side, thinking, This is the beginning of my every dream come true.

“Put me down!”

Nora’s hand, smacking hard against his chest, brought him gratefully back to the here and now.

“You couldn’t even stand up by yourself,” he said, unmoved by her tone. “I’ll put you down in a minute. When I get you to the house.”

Her expression was mutinous, but she winced, suddenly in pain, and conceded with ill grace.

He strode to the house. The woman in his arms was rigid with tension for a few seconds, then relaxed noticeably. He glanced down at her to make sure she hadn’t passed out.

Wide green eyes stared up at him, defiant, unblinking. If ever there were eyes that could cast a spell, it would be those ones!

Just as he got close the porch light came on, illuminating the fact that Deedee had grown tired of waiting, had exited the passenger seat of the car and was feebly trying to wrestle her cat carrier out of the back.

A boy, at that awkward stage somewhere between twelve and fifteen, who also had ginger hair like Charlie’s, exploded out the front door of the cottage, and the woman in Brendan’s arms squirmed to life.

His architect’s mind insisted on filling in pieces of the puzzle as he looked at the boy: too old to be hers.

“Put me down,” she insisted, then shook herself as if waking from a dream. “Honestly! I told you I could walk.”

The boy looked as if he had been sleeping, his hair flat against his face on one side and sticking straight up on the other. But he was now wide-awake and ready to fight.

“You heard her,” he said, “put her down. Who are you? What have you done to my aunt Nora?”

Not his mother. His aunt.

The boy dashed back into the house and came out wielding a coat rack. He held it over his shoulder, like a baseball bat he was prepared to swing. His level of menace was laughable. Brendan was careful not to show that he had rarely felt less threatened.

Still, he couldn’t help but admire a kid prepared to do battle with a full-grown man.

Brendan closed his eyes, and was suddenly aware he didn’t feel the weight of new cynicism. Instead he was acutely aware of how the sweet weight in his arms and the woman’s warmth were making his skin tingle. He was aware that the air smelled of rain and rose petals, and that those smells mingled with the clean scent of her hair and her skin.

Two and a half years ago, in the night, a phone call had changed everything forever. He’d been sleepwalking through life ever since, aware that he was missing something essential that other people had. That it was locked inside the tomb, and that even if he could have rolled the rock away, he was not sure that he would.

And now, another middle of the night phone call, leading to this moment. He was standing here in a stranger’s yard with a woman who either was trouble, or was in trouble, in his arms, an adolescent boy threatening him with a coat rack, Deedee oblivious to it all, struggling to get her dying cat out of the car.

Brendan was aware that the rock had rolled, that a crack of light had appeared in the darkness. He was aware of feeling wide-awake, as if he was a warrior waiting to see if it was a friend or foe outside.

For the first time in more than two years he felt the blood racing through his veins, the exquisite touch of raindrops on his skin. For the first time in so long, Brendan knew he was alive.

And it didn’t make him happy.

Not one little bit.

Instead, he felt deeply resentful that the prison of numbness that had become his world was being penetrated by this vibrant, demanding capricious energy called life.

“Put me down!” Nora insisted again, hoping for a nononsense tone of voice that would hide the confusion she was really feeling.

She looked up into the exquisite strength of the stranger’s face. Through the fabric of the expensive rain jacket he had wrapped around her, she could feel the iron hardness of his chest where she leaned into it. His arms, cradling her shoulders and her legs, were bands of pure steel.

She should have fought harder against being picked up and toted across the yard like a sleeping baby. Because it was crazy to feel so safe.

The stranger had a certain cool and dangerous aloofness about him. He had already made it clear he had heard some exaggerated claim about her energy that had allowed him to put her in the category of gypsies, tramps and thieves.

So the feeling of safety had to be attributed to the terrible knock on her head. Being in his arms made Nora achingly aware that she had been alone for a while now. Carrying the weight of her world all by herself. It was a relief to be carried for a change. A guilty pleasure, but a relief nonetheless.

Now, looking up at him, she could feel something shifting. His hands tightened marginally on her and some finely held tension played around the corners of his sinfully sensuous mouth.

The soft suede of his deep, deliciously brown eyes had not changed when he had called her a healer, his tone accusatory, but now they had hardened to icy remoteness and sparked with vague anger.

Well, he had come to her rescue and was being threatened with a coat rack. Naturally, he would react.

But now he was not the man she had awoken to, one with something so compelling in his face she had reached up and touched…

She shook that off, striving for the control she had lost when she’d accepted his arms around her, accepted being cradled against the fortress of his chest, accepted the comfort of being carried.

She could not be weak. She had to be strong. Everything was relying on her now. She was completely on her own since her fiancé had said, “Look, it’s him or it’s me.”

Surely, when her sister had appointed her guardian of then fourteen-year-old Luke she had not expected that turn of events! Karen had thought she was entrusting her son to a home, to a stable, financially secure environment that would have two parents, one her sister, Nora, affectionately known within the family as “the flake,” the other a highly respected stable person, a vet with his own practice.

But the highly predictable world Karen had envisioned for Luke didn’t happen. When everything had fallen apart between her and Vance, Nora had risked it all on a new start.

She had to be strong.

“Look,” Nora said, “you really have to put me down.”

The man ignored her, looking flintily past her to Luke.

To get his attention off her nephew, and to show she meant business, she smacked the stranger hard, against the solid wall of his chest. It felt ineffectual, as if she was being annoying, like a bug, not powerful like a lioness.

Still, when his arm slid out from under her knees, and she found herself standing, albeit a bit wobbly, on her own two feet, instead of feeling relieved she felt the oddest sense of loss.

He had carried her across her yard with incredible ease, his stride long, powerful and purposeful, his breath remaining steady and even. It was the kind of strength a person might want to rely on.

If that person hadn’t made a pact to rely totally on herself!

Get a grip, Nora ordered silently, moving away from the man. She was genuinely relieved that Luke dropped the coat rack and came to her side.

Casting a look loaded with suspicion and warning at the man who had carried her, Luke got his shoulder under her arm and helped her toward the house.

“What happened? Did he hurt you?”

“No. No. It wasn’t him. I couldn’t sleep and I went to check the animals. One of the new horses must have spooked and knocked me over.”

“Why would you go out in the corral by yourself?” Luke asked.

“My question precisely.” The man’s voice was deep and calm, steady.

“Those horses were wild when they were brought in,” Luke said accusingly. “That one took a kick at the guy unloading him.”

She didn’t like it one little bit that it felt as if the two were forming an alliance against her!

Why had she gone into the corral when the horses were so restless? Probably she hadn’t even thought about it, overly confident in her ability to calm animals.

Since she was a little girl she had found refuge from her mother and father’s constant bickering by bringing home broken things to fix. Tiny wounded birds, abandoned cats, dogs near death.

Inside, Nora was still the girl who had been seen by family and school chums as an eccentric, a kook, and she was more comfortable hiding her gifts than revealing them.

Which made her very uncomfortable with whatever this stranger thought he knew about her.

Would Karen have ever made her guardian of Luke if she knew Vance would not be in the picture? Probably not. She would have known her sister could not be trusted to control impulses like jumping into a corral full of flighty horses in the middle of the night!

Nora was solely responsible for Luke. What if he’d found her out there in the mud? Hadn’t he been traumatized enough? She was supposed to be protecting him!

Still, it was unsettling to her that what she remembered, in far more detail than her lapse of judgment before entering the corral, or the moments before being knocked over and knocked out, was the moment after.

Coming to, Nora had opened her eyes to find this man bent over her. His expression was intense, and he was breathtakingly handsome. Dark, thick hair was curling wetly around perfect features—a straight nose; whisker-roughened cheeks; a faintly cleft chin; firm, sensuous lips.

A raindrop had slid with exquisite slowness down his temple, over the high ridge of his cheekbone, onto his lip.

And then, in slow motion, it had fallen from his lip to hers.

Perhaps it was the knock on the head that had made the moment feel suspended, made the raindrop feel as if it sizzled in the chill of the night. Made her reach out with the tip of her tongue and taste that tiny pearl of water.

Perhaps it was the knock on the head that made her feel like a princess coming awake to find the prince leaning over her.

Through it all, Nora had been caught hard by eyes that mesmerized: velvet brown suede flecked with gold, a light in them that was mostly solid strength, with just the faintest shadow of something else.

Something she of all people should know.

Woozily, she had reached out and let the palm of her hand caress his bristly cheek, to touch that common ground she recognized between them.

He had gone very still under her touch, but he did not move away from it. She had felt a lovely sense of safety, that this was someone she could rely on.

But then the wooziness was gone, just like that, and she’d remembered she was in her paddock. And that she was alone out there with a man who had no business being on her property at this time of the night.

Nora’s instincts when it came to animals were beyond good. Some people, including her ex-fiancé, Dr. Vance Height, whom she had met while working as an assistant in his veterinary practice, were spooked by what she could accomplish with sheer intuition.

But Vance was a reminder that Nora’s good instincts did not extend to men. Or much else about life. With tonight being an unsettling exception, her perception was fabulous when it came to dealing with hurt, frightened animals.

Or writing her quirky, off-beat column Ask Rover, a column she had never admitted she was behind, because she had come across Vance reading it in her early days at his office, and he had been terribly scornful of it.

The intuition was not so good at helping her stretch her modest income from the column to support both the animal shelter and Luke. Thankfully, as the shelter became more established it was starting to receive financial support from the community of Hansen.

Her intuition was also not proving the least helpful at dealing with a now fifteen-year-old nephew who seemed intent on visiting his hurt and anger over the death of his mother on the whole world.

Feeling foolish now for that vulnerable moment when she had reached up and let her hand scrape the seductive whiskery roughness of the stranger’s cheek, and more foolish for allowing herself to be carried across her yard by a perfect stranger, Nora shook off Luke’s arm. She was supposed to be protecting him, not the other way around.

She turned and faced the man, folding her arms over her chest.

She had been, she was certain, mistaken that they shared anything in common. Looking at him from this angle, she found he looked hard and cold, and she had, as was her unfortunate habit, given her trust too soon.

“Where did he come from?” Luke asked in a suspicious undertone.

For all she knew he could be an ax murderer! Anyone could say they were an architect! She ran an animal rescue center. Anyone could say they had brought a cat.

She knew he wasn’t a cat person, one likely to be ruled by the kind of sentiment that would drive him out on a night like this for the well-being of a cat.

But behind the man, she suddenly became aware of an old woman in a ghastly pink outfit. As Nora watched, the woman gave a grunt of exertion and freed a large container from the backseat of a car that was as gray as the night and sleek with sporty expense. The man turned to her, stepped back and took a large carpet bag from her.

Nora registered two things at once: how protective he seemed of that tiny, frail woman, and that there was indeed a cat! Its head was sticking out of a kind of window in the side of the carrier. One didn’t have to have any psychic ability at all to know the cat did not have now, and probably never had had, a pleasing personality.

“I’m Brendan Grant,” he said.

The name seemed Scottish to Nora, and with the rain plastering his hair to his head, running unchecked down the formidable, handsome lines of his face, it was just a little too easy to picture him as a Scottish warrior. Strong. Imperious to the weather.

Determined to get his own way.

What was his own way?

“And this is my grandmother, Deedee, and her cat, Charlie.” The faint hiss of angry energy seemed to intensify around him. His mouth had become a hard line. He was watching Nora closely for her reaction.

“I’m sorry?” she said. What on earth was he doing here at this time of the night with his grandmother and her cat?

Still, whatever it was, it did dilute some of the threat she felt. Though not an expert, she was still fairly certain architect ax murderers did not travel with an entourage that included grandmothers and cats.

His voice calm and ice-edged, he said, “Deedee has been made certain promises concerning Charlie. And she has paid in advance.”

Nora didn’t have a clue what he meant. But she did realize the threat she felt was not of the ax-murderer variety.

It was of the raindrop-falling-from-lips variety. She was aware her head hurt, but was not at all sure this feeling of being caught off balance was caused by the knock to her head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said firmly.

She became aware that something rippled through Luke. She felt more than saw his discomfort. She cast her nephew a glance out of the corner of her eye.

Uh-oh.

“Look,” the man said quietly, the commanding tone of his voice drawing her attention firmly back to him. “You may be able to pull the wool over the eyes of an old woman, but I’m here to look after her interests. And you should know that if you’ve swindled her, you can kiss the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee good-bye.”

Kiss the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee good-bye? Nora couldn’t let her panic show.

“Swindled your grandmother?” she asked instead. Below the panic, she could feel the insult of it! His caustic remarks about her energy and her being a healer were beginning to make an awful kind of sense.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the police became involved,” Brendan said, the quiet in his voice making it all the more threatening.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE POLICE? NORA felt a sense of panic, as if her world were tilting.

Still, she could not cave before him. She was about to insist that he was the one trespassing on private property, except that at the mention of the police, she realized she wasn’t the only one panicking.

Nora saw Luke go rigid.

There’d been an unfortunate incident at school involving the police way too recently.

Luke claimed to have borrowed a bicycle. Apparently without the full understanding of the bicycle’s owner, which was why the police had become involved. Luke had talked to the other boy, and the whole thing, thankfully, had blown over.

Now her nephew met her eyes, pleading, and then ducked his head, drawing a pattern in the wet ground with his bare toe.

Nora glanced back at Brendan Grant and saw he had not missed a thing. He was watching Luke narrowly, and her sense of him being a warrior intensified. His look did not bode well for her nephew.

What had Luke done now? She was acutely aware of having failed in her responsibility to her nephew by going into the corral by herself tonight. Now every protective instinct rose in her.

“Nobody swindled me,” Deedee said plaintively. “She sent me energy for Charlie.”

“For a price,” Brendan added softly.

Nora knew she had not sent anyone any energy. And certainly not for a price! But Luke was squirming so uncomfortably she wanted to hit him with her elbow to make him stop drawing attention to himself.

Because no matter what he had done, Luke was no match for Brendan Grant. Not in any way. Not physically, nor could her poor orphaned nephew bear up under the anger that sparked in the man’s eyes.

Taking a deep breath, she said brightly. “Oh, I remember now. Charlie.”

Luke cast her a glance loaded with gratitude and relief, and she might have allowed herself to relish that, especially coupled with the fact he had taken up a coat rack in her defense. Moments when her nephew actually seemed to like her were rare, after all.

But Brendan Grant looked hard and skeptical, and she needed to stay focused on the immediate threat of that.

She put together the few clues she had. One of her gifts was an acute ability to focus on detail. Brendan and Deedee had arrived in the middle of the night. From what she could see of the cat, he was ill, the lateness of the hour suggested desperately so.

“Charlie’s been sick, right?” she said.

“That’s right!” Deedee said eagerly.

Brendan’s expression just became more grim.

“You said you’d send him energy,” Deedee reminded her. “You said to send money. I sent fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars?” Brendan snapped. “Deedee! You said you sent a little money.”

“In terms of what my cat is worth to me, that is a small amount.” The woman gave him a look that was equal parts sulk and steel.

“So there you have it,” Brendan said to Nora, exasperated. “If you play your cards right, she’ll sign over her house to you. You won’t need the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee. Is that how this operation of yours works?”

“Of course not!” Nora said, feeling the heat rising in her cheeks. “I’m sure it was just a mistake. I must have thought the money was a donation.”

She tried to keep her voice steady, but was not sure she succeeded.

“Uh-huh.” He sounded cynical, and rightfully so.

Nora wanted to whirl on Luke and shake him. She had never even raised her voice to him, but their whole future was at stake here. And worse, if he had sent that letter, and taken that money—and who else could it possibly be?—he had stolen from a vulnerable old woman. How could he? Who was he becoming? And why couldn’t she stop it?

Again she felt the weight of responsibility for her choices. Karen would have never entrusted her to raise her nephew alone. She would have been able to predict this catastrophe coming.

With great care, Nora kept herself from looking askance at her nephew.

“Let’s get in out of the rain,” she suggested, trying to keep her voice steady. Because he had given her his jacket, the rain had soaked through Brendan’s shirt, which was now practically transparent.

She was aware she didn’t really want Brendan Grant, with his bristling masculine energy and wet, clinging shirt, invading her house. She’d been here only a little while, but it had quickly become a sanctuary to her. On the other hand, she desperately needed to buy some time, to take Luke aside and figure out what he had done.

And fix it.

Yet again.

But a glance at the unyielding features of the man who had made her feel momentarily so safe told her this might not be so easy to fix.

The house was not what Brendan expected of a charlatan’s house. There were no crystals dangling in the door wells and no clusters of herbs hanging upside down from their stems. There was no cloying scent of incense.

“Lovely,” Deedee breathed with approval, standing in the doorway, taking it in.

“Disappointing,” Brendan said.

In fact, he found the house was cozy and clean. An uneasiness crawled along his neck as they passed through a living room where a pair of love seats the color of melted butter faced each other across a coffee table where some of those yellow roses from the yard floated in a clear glass bowl.

“Disappointing?” Nora asked.

“No black cat. No cauldron on the hearth.”

Nora shot him a look. She really was the cutest little thing. Again he had that feeling of coming awake. He didn’t want to notice her, but how could he not? Her hair was a mess, standing straight up, strawberry-blonde dandelion fluff. Her eyes were huge in a dainty mudstreaked face. She looked more frightened now than when he had first found her.

The scam revealed. But her shock seemed genuine, and so did her distress.

“Look,” Nora said in a defensive undertone, “I take in sick and abandoned animals. I don’t claim to be a healer.”

Her nephew snorted at that, and she shot him a glare that he was completely oblivious to.

Deedee, deaf anyway, hadn’t even heard.

“As for black cats and cauldrons, I certainly don’t do witchcraft!”

Her muddy, soaked clothes, and his jacket, swam around her, and he guessed she would be determined not to remove her coat and reveal the pajamas underneath.

He wasn’t sure why. The pajama bottoms, which he could see, were filthy, but underneath the mud they were plaid. Utilitarian rather than sexy.

They came to the kitchen, and Nora turned on a light to reveal old cabinets painted that same cheerful shade of yellow as her sofas and roses. The floor was old hardwood planking that gleamed with patina. He smelled fresh bread.

There was a jar full of cookies on the counter, and notes and pictures were held by magnets to the front of a vintage fridge. There was a wood-burning stove in one corner, and an old, scarred oak table covered with schoolbooks.

The uneasiness returned. He thought of those wonders of granite and steel that people wanted for their kitchens these days, that he designed, and suddenly he knew what the uneasiness was. They somehow had all missed the mark.

For all the awards that decorated the walls of his office, he had never achieved this. A feeling.

He shook it off, looked back at Nora. The caption under her high school yearbook picture had probably read “Least likely to bamboozle an old woman out of her money.”

But somebody had. The nephew? The kid practically had a neon sign over his head that flashed Guilty, but on the other hand, didn’t all kids that age look like that? Slinky and defensive and as if they had just finished committing a crime?

What surprised Brendan was that he was interested at all in who did it. And if it was her nephew, to what lengths she would go to protect him.

But that’s what happened when you came alive. Life, the interactions of people, their relationships and motivations interested you.

It was a wound waiting to happen, he warned himself.

“Put the cat there.” Nora pointed to a kitchen island, a marble top fastened to solid wooden legs, and he set the cat carrier down, surreptitiously checking the bottom for any dampness that might have transferred to the seat of his new car.

He knew it said something about the kind of person he was that he was relieved to find none.

“He’s been very sick,” Deedee said. “Just like I told you in the letter.”

“Maybe you could remind me what you wrote in your letter.”

In the light of the kitchen, Brendan could see a knob growing alarmingly on Nora’s forehead. She was wet and covered in mud.

And Brendan Grant was surprised there was a part of him that still knew the right thing to do. And was prepared to do it.

“The cat will have to wait,” he heard himself say firmly, in the tone of voice he used on the construction site when a carpenter was insisting something couldn’t be done the way he wanted it done.

And the people in the room reacted about the same way. Deedee swung her head and glared at him. Nora looked none too happy, either.

“I want to take a look at you,” he insisted. “If you don’t need a trip to the emergency ward, you certainly need a shower and a change of clothes before you check out the cat.”

“I can have a look at the cat first.”

So she wanted what he wanted. For this to be quick. Look at the cat. Tell them what they all already knew about Charlie’s prospects for a future. Of course, what they wanted parted ways at finding out who was guilty of taking money from Deedee, and what the consequences were going to be.

Still, handled properly, the whole drama could unfold and conclude in about two minutes, in and out.

Heavy on the out part. He wanted to head home and go back to bed.

His old life—that cave that was comforting in its lack of intensity, in its palette of grays—beckoned to him. But it seemed to him that nothing was going to go quite as he wanted.

Which he hated in and of itself. Because one thing Brendan Grant wanted, in a world that had already scorned his need for it, was control.

“You first, then the cat,” he told Nora.

Deedee, in typical fashion, appeared annoyed that her agenda was being moved to the back of the line. But Nora looked annoyed, too. It told him a lot about her when she folded her arms over his coat.

Independent. Possibly newly so. No one was going to tell her what to do. Brendan wondered again what the pajamas she was so determined to hide looked like.

“You already told me you aren’t a doctor,” Nora said.

“Doctor or not, a head injury is nothing to take lightly. They can be sneaky and deadly. It will just take me a minute to look at you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Deadly?” The boy got a panicky pinched look around his eyes. “Let him look at you!”

Nora, seeing his distress, surrendered, sinking onto a kitchen chair with ill grace.

“That was quite a hit to your head. Do you think you were knocked out?” Brendan moved close, brushed her hair away from the rapidly growing bump.

Every part of her seemed to be either wet or covered with mud. How was it her hair felt like silk?

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I asked,” he said mildly.

“I don’t think I was knocked out.” She offered this grumpily.

“But you can’t say for sure?”

She didn’t want to admit it, but Brendan could tell she didn’t remember, which was probably not a good sign.

Nora knew what date it was, her full name and her birthday. He noted that she was twenty-six, though she looked younger. He also noted, annoyed, that he was interested in her age.

And apparently her marital status. There was no ring on her finger, no signs—large shoes, men’s magazines, messes—that would indicate there was any male besides the boy in residence.

Brendan hated that he was awake enough to notice those things, to wonder at her history, what had brought her and her nephew to this remote corner of British Columbia.

Doing his best to detach, he asked more questions. She remembered what had happened right before she was knocked down and right after, though she did not remember precisely what had knocked her down. She could follow the movement of his finger with her eyes.

“You seem fine,” he finally decided, but he felt uneasy. A concussion really was nothing to fool around with.

“She is fine,” Deedee snapped. “Meanwhile, Charlie could be expiring.”

“I’ll just have a quick look at the cat,” Nora said.

“He’s lasted this long. I’m sure he can wait another five minutes. you need to go have a shower and put on something dry.”

“Are you always this bossy?”

He ignored her. “If you feel dizzy or if you vomit, or feel like you’re going to be sick, you need to tell me right away. Or Luke after I leave. You may have to get to the hospital yet tonight.”

She looked as if she was going to protest. And then she glanced down at herself, and surprised him by giving in without a fight.

“All right. Luke, come with me for a minute. You can see if you can find a shirt that will fit Mr. Grant. He’s soaked.”

That explained her easy acquiescence. She was going to go talk it over with the kid. They were going to get their stories straight and figure out who had done what.

Brendan already knew precisely what she was going to do. She had already started to set it up when she’d said the money had been taken by accident, mistaken for a donation. She was going to take the blame.

Personally, Brendan was strongly leaning toward the conclusion her nephew had done it. How could she possibly think that not letting him accept responsibility was going to do the boy any good?

“Brendan?”

He turned to Deedee, impatient. Was she really going to insist that cat come first again? She did love to have her own way, largely oblivious to the larger picture.

“I’m not feeling well,” she said.

He scanned her face. she loved to be the center of attention. But the fear he saw was real.

“My heart’s beating too fast,” she whispered.

He crossed the room and lifted her frail wrist. Her pulse was going crazy. She searched his face, ready to panic, and he forced himself to smile.

“Let’s make it a double header,” he said. “We’ll take you to the hospital and they can check out Nora at the same time.”

He cast Nora a look.

Her protest died on her lips as she read his face and then glanced at Deedee.

“You’re right,” she said. “I think I need to go to the hospital.”

CHAPTER FIVE

AT HIS AUNT’S declaration, panic twisted the boy’s features, but only for a second. He took in the situation in the room, his gaze lingering on Deedee. Brendan saw calm come to him, almost as if he had breathed in the truth.

“What about Charlie?” Deedee half whispered, half sobbed. “I can’t leave him! Not when he’s—”

The steadiness remained in the boy’s eyes as he looked to Brendan and then his aunt. “I got the cat,” he said, and Deedee relaxed noticeably, slumped against Brendan.

Ninety-two. Deedee could die right now. She could go before the cat. Life liked to put ironic little twists in the story line.

Becky, young and healthy, gone at twenty-six. To this day, it seemed impossible.

A week before she had died, she had said to him, out of the blue, “If I die first, I’ll come back and let you know I’m all right.”

“You won’t be all right,” he’d said, uncomfortable with the conversation, pragmatic to a fault. “You’ll be dead.”

So far, she hadn’t been back to let him know anything, even how to keep on living. So he’d been right. Dead was dead.

And he’d been prepared to deal with it tonight with Charlie. Not Deedee. Not on his watch. With a sense of urgency he was trying to disguise, and feeling somewhat like the ringmaster at a three-ring circus, Brendan pulled his cell phone from his pocket and herded all his charges back out the door into the rain.

“Can you get in the back with her?” he asked in an undertone. “Kick my seat if anything changes. You know how to monitor her pulse?”

Nora nodded and climbed in the backseat of the car with Deedee. Luke and the cat got in the front with Brendan. The car smelled of new leather and luxury. It screamed a man who had arrived.

The type of man who would never see anything in the slightly eccentric owner of a struggling animal shelter.

Not that she cared who found her attractive and who didn’t! Good grief! The lady beside her could be having a heart attack. This was not the time or place!

Starting the car, Brendan never lost focus. He tucked the phone under his ear. “Hansen Emergency? It’s Brendan Grant here. I’m on my way in. I have a ninetytwo-year-old woman who has a very fast pulse. No history of heart problems. No chest pain. I also have a young woman who has had a head injury. Who’s the doctor on call tonight? I know you’re not supposed to tell me, but I want to know.”

Nora took it all in. How his name had been recognized, how the name of the on-call doctor had been surrendered to him with a token protest only.

She took in his confidence as he dialed another number. “Greg? Sorry to wake you. Becky’s grandmother is not well.”

Becky? She’d thought it was his grandmother!

“Who’s Becky?” she asked Deedee.

“My granddaughter. Brendan’s her husband.”

Married. Why would that feel the way it did? Like some kind of loss? Why didn’t he wear a ring? Nora hated married men who didn’t wear rings. They were sneaky, they were looking for—

“She died,” Deedee said tiredly.

“I’m so sorry,” Nora said, and thought of what she was sure she had seen in his eyes when he’d first leaned over her. The common ground. Now she understood it. Sorrow.

“In a car accident,” Deedee went on. She was talking too loudly, the way people who are hard of hearing did. “Brendan doesn’t talk about her. I need someone to cry with sometimes. But he never will. He didn’t even cry at the funeral.”

It was said like an accusation, and so loudly the man in the front seat could not miss it. Nora watched his face in the light coming from the dash. He didn’t even flinch. It was as if he was cast in stone.

But she had seen the pain spilling into his eyes in that first unguarded moment when he had stood over her in the paddock.

“People all grieve in their own way,” Nora said, and saw him cast her a quick glance in the rearview mirror before he reached for his phone again. “And it seems to me maybe he’s there for you in other ways that are just as important.”

Not everyone would be chauffeuring an elderly woman and her sick cat around the country in the middle of the night!

“Of course, you’re right,” Deedee murmured, and leaned her head on Nora’s shoulder. Nora had her hand on the woman’s wrist and noticed, gratefully, the pulse was slowing to normal.

She listened to the deep gravel of Brendan’s voice as he spoke on the phone.

“And I have a head injury, too. I think mild concussion, but a confirmation would be good. See you there. We’re five minutes out.”

He clicked the phone shut and stepped on the gas. The night was wet and the roads had to be slippery, but he oozed calm confidence as he navigated the twisty, mist-shrouded road into Hansen. The powerful car responded as if it were a living thing.

The way a man handled a powerful car told you a lot about him. The way a man handled an emergency told you a lot as well. Not that they were tests, but had they been, Brendan Grant would have passed with flying colors.

His calm never flagged. Not on the wet roads, not as they pulled into Emergency, not as he helped his grandmother out of the back of the car. There were obviously benefits to being emotionally shut down.

“What about Charlie?” Deedee wailed again.

“I’ll stay with him,” Luke said. “Out here. I’m not going in there.”

Nora doubted that he was ever going to get over the thing he had about hospitals. He’d spent too much time in one while his mother was sick. He hated them now.

Brendan didn’t question why, just flipped a set of keys at Luke. “Her house is three blocks that way. The address is on the chain. I presume you have your cell phone with you and that your aunt has the number?”

“Why can’t I stay here?”

“Because if that cat pees in my car,” he said in a low tone that Deedee didn’t hear, “it really isn’t going to survive the night.”

Nora was appalled, but it was a guy thing, because Luke chuckled. Then he sobered. “You’re trusting me to go into her house?”

Brendan’s eyes locked on his. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

Luke ducked his head and didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know how long we’ll be here. Get some rest. Let the cat out of that purse, near his litter box if you can locate it. If your aunt is released, you’re going to have to look after her for the rest of the night.”

Luke glanced at the address on the key chain. “I hope none of my friends see me with this dorky thing,” he muttered, but Nora did not miss the fact that he looked pleased—if somewhat guilty—about Brendan’s trust.

“I could drive him,” she said tentatively, “and come back. I really don’t need—”

Brendan gave her a look that was so don’tmess-with-me it made her stomach feel as if it was doing a free fall from ten thousand feet. She just didn’t have the energy to take him on.

In the hospital, she had that same sense that you could tell a lot about a man by the way he handled an emergency. Again he passed. He handled the nurse with confidence that was palatable, not the least intimidated by her officiousness. In fact, the exact opposite might have been true. He was obviously well-known in the community, and respected. The nurse treated Brendan as if he was part of that inner circle of the emergency ward.

Interestingly, Vance had been terrible at emergencies. He became so flustered if a badly injured animal was brought in that he could not inspire confidence in anyone. You would have thought with practice he would have gotten better, but he never did. He liked catering to the pudgy poodle set, doing routine checkups and giving shots, neutering, and cleaning teeth.

In fact, he’d opted for regular hours only and hired a young vet to handle the nighttime emergencies, and finally any emergency at all.

A few weeks ago, Nora had heard he was engaged to that young vet. Up until then she had nursed a secret fantasy that he was going to show up on her doorstep, confess the error of his ways and beg her to take him back.

She shook it off. For whatever the reason—she suspected because Brendan Grant made things happen—she found herself ushered into an examination room in record time.

In short order, a young doctor was in, a nurse at his side.

“How’s Mrs. Ashton?” Nora asked.

“Old,” he said with a resigned smile. “We’re going to keep her for observation. So, Brendan says a bump on the head? Maybe knocked out?”

“Maybe,” Nora admitted.

“How do you know Brendan?” he asked.

“It’s a long story.”

The doctor laughed. “That’s what he said. He designed our house and supervised the build. He’s an amazing architect.”

Great! In her weakened state, Nora just had to know Brendan Grant was an all-around phenomenal guy.

The doctor repeated some of the questions Brendan had asked her earlier, shone a light in her eye, got her to follow the movement of his finger.

“I should keep you for observation, too.”

“I can’t!” she said. “I have animals that will need feeding in—” her eyes flew to a nearby clock “—two hours.”

The doctor sighed. “He said you’d say that. I’m going to send you home, but with strict instructions what to watch for. And what to do for the next few hours. Any dizziness, any nausea, any loss of consciousness, you come right back in. I’ll give you a handout with symptoms you need to watch for over the next few days. Sometimes even weeks later symptoms can come up.”

After having the nurse go over the sheet with her, they let her go. Brendan was in the waiting room.

“You didn’t have to wait.”

“Uh-huh. How were you going to get home? And collect your nephew?”

“Taxi, I guess.”

“And would the taxi driver be watching you for signs of concussion?” Brendan held up duplicates of the instructions the doctor had given her.

The truth was she was glad she did not have to worry about a taxi right now, or how to find Luke. She was glad this man was in charge. And she might have a concussion, so it was okay to be weak. Just this once. Just for tonight.

The animals needed to be fed in a few hours.

She felt like weeping.

Brendan was watching her closely.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said firmly.

But just as if he hadn’t heard her, he slipped his arm around her waist, and just as if she hadn’t claimed she was okay, she leaned heavily into him.

They collected Luke and, since no one had any idea when Deedee would be home, recaptured Charlie. Nora tried to stay awake and couldn’t. She awoke to find herself in Brendan Grant’s arms for the second time that night.

There was absolutely no fight left in her.

None.

Because Luke was bringing Charlie into the house instead of out to the barn. She didn’t allow any of the animals in the house. How could she? If she did, soon they would be overrun!

But she just didn’t have the energy to make a fuss about it right now. Instead, she snuggled deep into Brendan’s reassuring strength and let him carry her into her house and up the stairs to her room.

“Is she okay?” Luke asked, pointing Brendan to a room on the right of a narrow hallway. He disappeared with Charlie and the cat carrier into a doorway farther up the hall.

“She’s just done in,” Brendan assured him. He nudged open the door and hesitated on the threshold of Nora’s room.

It was confirmed she was completely, one hundred percent single. No man could be trusted with so much white: white walls, white curtains, white pillows, white bedspread. Her room reminded him of innocence. There was something alarmingly bridal about it.

And that was the last thing Brendan wanted to be thinking of as he carried Nora Anderson across the threshold!

He looked down at her and felt a wave of relief. Still wrapped in his too large jacket, mud from head to toe, she was the world’s least likely bride. In fact, her bridal vision of a room was about to be damaged by her muddy little self.

Brendan took a deep breath, stepped in, and quickly made his way to the bed, where he set her on the edge.

Luke appeared in the doorway. “Anything I can do?”

“Oh, Luke,” Nora said. “Where did he come from? You know the rules. We can’t have animals in the house.”

Brendan turned, expecting to see Luke had Charlie. Instead, he had a black-and-white kitten riding in the palm of his hand.

“This one’s different,” Luke said. “I’m calling him Ranger.”

“We don’t name them!”

Luke looked mutinous. “I’m keeping him. For my own.”

Nora chewed her lip. “We need to talk about that,” she said.

“But not tonight,” Brendan said firmly. “Luke, can you get rid of the kitten for now, and find me a flashlight?”

He disappeared and came back, with no kitten, but a flashlight.

“Shine it right in your aunt’s eyes. Do you see what it does to her pupils? That’s called dilation. It’s very important that both her pupils are dilating in the same way. I need you to try it.”

The boy grasped the flashlight without any hesitation. Brendan was going to take it as a good sign that Luke was not nearly as rebellious as his aunt was.

“Yes, her eyes are doing the same thing. The black part is getting smaller when I hold the light up.”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here!”

“Good. That’s exactly what you are looking for. You need to wake her up every hour after I leave and check her eyes. If you see a change you need to call 9-1-1.”

“There’s no need to frighten him!” Nora protested.

“I’m not frightening him. I’m asking him to step up to the plate. I’m treating him like a man.”

Luke puffed up a bit at that.

“Well, he’s not a man.”

And then deflated.

“He’s not a child, either.”

The boy puffed up again.

“Either he checks you or I stay for the night.”

She blanched at that, then folded her arms over her chest with ill grace and glared at him. That settled, Brendan conducted some very simple tests on his unwilling patient while Luke watched.

“The doctor already did this.”

“Luke needs to see what to do.”

Finally, Brendan was satisfied. “Do you need anything? A drink of warm milk, maybe?”

“Oh.”

There was something kind of sweet and kind of sad about her surprise that anyone would look after her.

“That would be nice,” she said shyly.

“Luke, can you go warm some milk?”

Luke left and Brendan leaned over and pulled off her shoes. Gently, he tugged the jacket off her.

“I can do it!”

“It’s not as if you’re in a see-through negligee.”

She scowled at him, but let him free each of her limbs from the jacket.

He pretended not to notice her pajama top at all, but it was adorable. How was it a pink pajama top with kittens on it that said Purrfectly Purrfect Me could be more sexy than a negligee?

“Stand up for a minute,” he ordered. She did, and he deftly pulled back the white quilt. Surprise, surprise, pure white sheets.

He guided her under the covers. She sank into her bed, then struggled to sit up. “Set the alarm. I have to be up. I have to feed the animals in two hours.”

The clock was holding down some papers on a bedside table. He could tell now wouldn’t be the best time to relate what the doctor had told him. She had to rest. Completely. For at least twenty-four hours. She wasn’t even supposed to look at a computer screen or read. So he pretended to set the clock.

He looked back at the bed, and her eyes were already closed, her breath coming out in soft puffs.

So much for the warm milk.

He went and looked at her. He felt the oddest desire to kiss her, not passionately, but a good-night kiss, like a father might give a child. Protective. Happy she was safe.

Happy he had managed to keep at least one person safe from the perils of life.

Brendan went down the steps. The kitchen was empty; no milk was out or on the stove. Luke was stretched out on the living room couch.

The empty carrier was beside him, and Charlie, a cat who hated both animal and man equally, was stretched out over the boy’s chest. The black-and-white kitten, Ranger, was curled into Charlie’s belly. They were all fast asleep.

Brendan moved closer. Charlie didn’t even look like the same cat. He certainly didn’t sound like it. The death rattle Brendan had heard earlier was gone.

Maybe he had died. Brendan reached out uneasily and touched him. The cat’s fur was warm beneath his fingertips and the animal sighed.

He yanked his hand back. There was no such thing as a healer, he told himself, annoyed. Nora had barely glanced at the cat, anyway.

The boy’s cell phone was on the coffee table, and Brendan picked it up and checked. Sure enough, Luke had set the alarm to go off every hour on the hour. But the boy couldn’t be trusted to cook milk. Besides, he looked exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes, his face pale and taut, even in sleep.

Brendan suddenly knew he couldn’t leave them alone with this.

He could feel it. Around the boy. And around her. They’d both been carrying it for too long.

Brendan flicked through the settings on the phone, turned off the alarm and slowly climbed back up the stairs to Nora’s room.

CHAPTER SIX

OUTSIDE THE DOOR of that terrifyingly bridal bedroom, Brendan flicked open his own cell phone.

Logically, he knew he could not take this on right now. He had a deadline coming up. Village on the Lake was an amazing opportunity, and he knew the condo project would be the most prestigious of his career to date.

But once before he had chosen work when there was another choice to be made. He had been driven by his need to succeed, driven to outrun the ghosts of his own childhood, driven to be worthy of a wife who came from far different circumstances than he had.

He had needed to be something, or prove something, to have something he didn’t have, and he had made a choice that had left him with nothing at all.

That choice had left his heart trapped behind a wall, in a yawning cavern of emptiness.

Could you come to the same fork in the road again? And make a different choice? Not one that would change what had been, nor could alter what had already transpired, but one that changed who you could be?

He shook off the thoughts, finished dialing. His secretary’s voice came over the answering machine.

“You’ve reached Grant Architects. We can’t take your call right now, but we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

“Linda, I won’t be in today.” Added to all the work that Nora and her nephew undoubtedly did themselves, Deedee was in the hospital. She would need company. And word-search books and updates on Charlie. Brendan had no doubt she would be the world’s most impatient patient.

“There is a possibility—” horrible as it was, he recognized it was a real possibility “—that I might not be in this week. Send—” he named a junior architect “—to supervise the Village.”

And then he closed his cell phone and contemplated the magnitude of what he had just done. He didn’t miss work. Not ever.

And then, anticipating it would start ringing right at seven—with fires to be put out, clients, construction site foremen, Linda protesting time off was impossible—he shut it completely off.

He knew there were going to be a lot of questions about his absence. Saying it was uncharacteristic was an understatement.

There were going to be a lot of questions.

And he was not at all sure he had any answers. Because niggling at the back of his mind was the thought that he didn’t want to be there when they broke ground on Village on the Lake. He didn’t want to be there as his plan took on life. He already knew that his feeling of dissatisfaction would grow in proportion to the buildings taking shape, becoming more and more real.

He slid through the door of the bedroom. There was a chair—white, of course—beside her bed and he took it, a bit guiltily, because his clothes were a little the worse for wear also. He was tempted to put his cell phone back on to use the alarm, just as Luke had intended to do.

And then Brendan was annoyed with himself that he had lasted less than a minute without wanting to rely on his cell phone, so stubbornly didn’t turn it back on.

It was part of that relentless busyness that had helped him survive. Just like putting even more ungodly hours in at work than he had before the accident.

Something in him wanted to stop. That astounded him. Something in him wanted to rest, and be introspective.

Was part of him ready to heal, to crawl back into the light, shielding his eyes from the brilliance? And maybe, just maybe, was this a place where things like that happened? Where something that was dead in a man could be resurrected?

Maybe it was. Look at that cat down there.

Honestly, Brendan could not believe he was entertaining such thoughts—totally unfounded in any kind of science, totally whimsical, the magical thinking of a little boy.

Mommy, I’m going to buy you a castle someday. I promise.

The memory of those words shook him, and he shivered as though someone had walked across his grave. Hadn’t he known from the minute he had driven under that sign that things were about to go sideways?

Annoyed with himself, he sought refuge in the way he always had, but on a point of pride would not turn on his phone to check the weather or the stock report. He prowled restlessly. Starting with the virginal whiteness, the room told him things about her that she might have preferred he didn’t know.

There was a picture of her and Luke on her dresser. But none of a man. There was a stack of bills there, too. Why would she have those in her room, unless she wanted to worry over them in private, protect the boy from anxiety?

There was a laundry basket on the floor, full of neatly folded items. She would have been devastated that her underwear was on top. It reminded him of her pajamas, utilitarian, not sexy. There was no jewelry on the dresser, no nod to that feminine longing for the pretty and the frivolous.

If he was a man who felt things, he might have felt a little sad for her and what the room told him about her. Snowed under with responsibility, alone, and sworn off the small pleasure of celebrating her own prettiness.

And then his eyes went to the papers stuck under the alarm clock. They looked like letters, and he shifted over and cut his eyes to them. He wasn’t going to read personal mail.

Only they didn’t look personal. In fact, the letter on top began “Dear Rover.”

Intrigued, remembering Deedee had said something about Nora being Ask Rover, he picked up the letter.

“Dear Rover,” he read, “I have a new boyfriend. He is everything I ever dreamed of. Handsome. Funny. He has a good job. There is only one problem. I have a thirteen-year-old malamute cross named Sigh. They hate each other. What should I do?” It was signed “Confused.”

The handwriting changed. Though still feminine, it was Rover’s—make that Nora’s—response, Brendan realized. Further intrigued, he saw she had answered and then crossed it all out. He took the chair next to the bed and squinted to read through the scribbles.

Dear Confused,

Though dogs are capable of such emotions as jealousy, quite often they are better judges of character than human beings. What effort has your prince made to win over your dog? Has your new love been sensitive to the fact your dog is aging, and you might have to soon say good-bye? Has he done one single thing to make that moment easier for you? I’m afraid, from a dog’s point of view, he sounds like a jerk. I think you would be better off without him. I am not sure I could be trusted not to bite him, possibly in a place that would make it difficult for him to reproduce. Thank you for your question, though really questions where the answers are of such a life-altering nature might be better answered by your best friend, your mother or your priest. Best barks, Rover.

This was crossed out, but it seemed to him with a certain reluctance.

Brendan felt his lips twitching. He flipped to the next page.

Dear Confused,

Thirteen is very old for a malamute. Do you want to make such a weighty decision based on a dog who will not be with you much longer?

This, too, had been crossed out.

He flipped the page, looking for her answer, but instead found a different letter.

Dear Rover,

My dog, an English bulldog named Petunia, won’t come in the basement laundry room. She sits outside the door and howls and shakes. Do you think I have a ghost? —Haunted

Again, there were two replies. The first, with a big X through it, said:

Dear Haunted,

English bulldogs are known for many lovely traits, intelligence not being among those. Your laundry room is unlikely to be haunted so much as presenting a myriad of smells and sounds beyond poor Petunia’s ability to comprehend them. This situation is unlikely to ever get better, so you could save yourself a great deal of frustration by leaving Petunia upstairs while you go to the basement to do laundry. If you give her a chew bone before you go, there is a good chance she won’t notice you are gone until you get back.

The second response was measured, and made no comments about the intelligence of bulldogs. It explained that laundry rooms had strange sounds and smells, that Petunia needed to be introduced to the elements separately and slowly, and that dog treats would help.

Still smiling, Brendan set the papers back on the table.

It penetrated his exhaustion that something was different than when he’d arrived.

For a moment he couldn’t figure out what it was.

And then he did: it was absolutely quiet. He got up and went to the window. It wasn’t just that night was melting into daybreak. The rain had stopped. And on the horizon was something he hadn’t seen for forty days and forty nights.

He blinked like a man emerging from a cave.

Or maybe he hadn’t seen it since the night his wife and his unborn child had died.

On the horizon, the sun was coming up.

“Hey, sweetheart, what’s your name?”

Nora shook herself groggily. She stared up at the man looking at her, felt his hand on her shoulder.

“Not sweetheart,” she said, certain it was a dream and closed her eyes.

That hand on her shoulder, a light in her eyes, “what day were you born?” and then wonderful sleep claiming her again.

“Just for a second, follow my finger with your eyes.”

Nora awoke with a start. Sunshine splashed across her bed. Sunshine! The warmth of it was a delight.

All night she had had strange dreams that Brendan Grant was in her room, but now she glanced at the chair where she was sure he had sat, and could clearly see it had been but a dream. The chair was empty.

Sunshine! She looked at the clock. It was noon!

“Oh goodness! The animals!” She sat up too quickly and it made her feel dizzy. She was aware her head hurt, and other parts of her felt bruised.

How was it possible to feel so good, filled with wonderful dreams, and so bad at the same time? Physically aching, sick that she had slept through looking after her animals.

She lay back down, just for a moment.

“Hey.”

Brendan Grant was standing in her doorway. Despite the fact he was in the same shirt as last night, and it had been wet, and dried wrinkled, and his hair was rumpled and his face becoming shadowed with whiskers, he looked amazing. Handsome, oozing confidence, one of those superannoying guys who took charge.

Superannoying unless You happened to be in need of someone to take charge!

“Don’t sit up. Doctor’s orders. You have to rest. All day.”

She couldn’t let on for a single second that, in her weakened state, she found that take-charge attitude ever so slightly attractive.

“I can’t rest all day! I have to look after the animals.”

“I’ve got it covered.”

She scowled at him so he would never guess how much those words meant to her.

“You sat with me all night,” she said. She knew she should be appreciative. It came out sounding like an accusation.

“I did.”

“That’s an unexpected kindness to the stranger you think swindled your grandmother.”

“I was hoping you’d talk in your sleep.”

“Did I?” she asked, aghast.

“What are you afraid of? A confession? Don’t you remember? I asked you questions every time I woke you up.”

“Yeah, like what my name was. And my birthday.”

He slapped himself on the forehead. “Shoot. I didn’t take advantage.”