B008KQO31S EBOK (4 page)

That stung.

“But you must have become a lawyer!”

I propped my hands on my hips. “I must have become a lawyer, because that would be useful to you? Just like I was useful to you before? And the possibility that I might be
useful
is the only reason you’re here? I’m not a kitchen appliance, Nick!”

“No, Phil, you’ve got it wrong.” His voice dropped low, down to resistance-is-futile-land. “I’m here because I trust you.”

That was tempting, but he said no more and I wasn’t going to fish for the thanks that was long overdue. “I can’t help you this time, Nick. I’m not a lawyer.”

“Phil, that’s nuts. How can you not be a lawyer?”

“I’m not, and even better, it’s all your fault.”

Now, Nick looked irked, and in a way, it was a relief to see his composure slip. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Everyone in your family goes to law school.”

“But you were the one who told me to stop living other people’s dreams and follow my own.” I shrugged. “So, I took your advice.” I pushed open the door and started to follow my briefcase.

His eyes widened. “What?”

“I’m a garden designer.” I smiled. “And a damn good one.”

But if I had expected him to be annoyed by this revelation, I’d bet on the wrong horse. Nick’s frustration faded into admiration, as dizzying a sight as I had ever seen. He smiled at me, as though I’d hung the sun and the moon, then reached out to brush a fingertip across my cheek. The old magic crackled between us, and my face tingled from his touch.

“Good for you,” he whispered.

Nick has always had the most amazing eyes—a perfectly clear green that seemed to slice through your soul and ferret out your secrets. He was looking at me as though I was a new discovery, as tough he had never seen me before, as he was ready to launch a prolonged exploration of my terra incognita.

It wasn’t all bad, as sensations went. I wasn’t the only one who took a step closer.

Just between you and me, I really thought he might kiss me then. Maybe it was that sense that everything was coming up aces as of today, maybe it was the hope of that desperate sixteen-year-old speaking up once more.

And, okay, for a minute there, I let hope out of its cage.

Call it a moment of weakness.

His eyes narrowed slightly, and suddenly I wondered how much he did see. Scary thought. I turned and fumbled with the key, cursing myself for forgetting how perceptive he was, for being dumb enough to let my guard down. I felt the heat of a blush from nipples to hairline.

“Sorry, I can’t help,” I said quickly.

And I ran.

Well, not exactly ran. More like lunged (or perhaps tripped) across the threshold of my apartment, forced a smile, said goodnight and shut the door on that sharp gaze.

Then I leaned back against the door, considered the crack in the ceiling that I’d been meaning to fix, and felt like an ass.

Everything was jumbled up inside me, but at least I should have held the conviction that I had done the right thing.

I didn’t have any such thing.

I reviewed the bidding. Nick was trouble, everyone had always said so, and though

I hadn’t believed it for the longest time, he’d proven the truth of it to me in the end. It doesn’t come more cheaply than a thank-you, but he hadn’t anted up. I was old enough to know better than to trust him again, old enough to not expect anything different from him, old enough to have learned from my mistakes. I certainly shouldn’t have been charmed by the brush of a warm fingertip.

Which explained, of course, why I felt so
mean
.

I took a deep breath and crossed to the kitchen. The answering machine light was flashing. Maybe I’d been too hard on ol’ Nick. Maybe he had picked up the phone earlier in the day.

Did I just want to hear his voice again?

Not wanting to go there, I stabbed at the reply button. I rolled my eyes as a familiar, slightly slurred voice filled my kitchen.

It wasn’t Nick.

“Philippa? If you’re there, pick up.” A long pause followed, then mom took a sip and I could guess of what. “Well, I certainly hope you’re not working late again. That’s no way to find a husband, Philippa, all cooped up in that terrible office of yours. And what an area it’s in. Surely you could have found something more posh, something with affluent neighbors where you might be seen... Oh! Maybe you’re on a date tonight.”

Mom’s voice warmed in a most predictable way. I leaned against the counter and pinched the bridge of my nose. So maybe my life had two familiar theme songs, both of which grated on my nerves.

“Now wouldn’t that be a wonderful surprise. Does he have money? Did he take you somewhere nice? I want to hear all the details. I certainly hope he comes from a good family, Philippa, for you do have less discrimination than any young woman I’ve ever known.”

Mom’s voice rose slightly and she settled in for a rant. The woman could fill my tape from start to finish, just ruminating through my endless potential and considerable list of shortfalls.

“Which is probably why you’re not on a date at all!” She exhaled indignantly. “You’re probably
gallivanting
around with that partner of yours.”

I’ve always wanted to know how to gallivant. It sounds like fun. My mother would not seem to be the kind of person who would really know.

She was right about Elaine, though. Elaine probably wrote the book on gallivanting. I’d have to ask for instruction.

“That Elaine is a
tart
, Philippa, the worst kind of trash and you’ll never find a decent prospect while you consort with the likes of her...”

I hit the stop button. “She’s my friend,” I firmly told the machine, which was just about as effective as telling that to my mother and a lot less stressful. I rewound the tape without listening to the rest of the lecture.

Maybe my life
was
a bit thin in the romantic department. Maybe parting badly with Nick once didn’t mean we should part badly again.

Maybe I’m the world’s heavyweight champion sucker.

But maybe I owed him something, both for the years of friendship we had shared and for giving me the courage to buck my family’s expectations. Maybe I was curious as to why he had come back, let alone thought that he needed a lawyer. And maybe I
could
help him. Osmosis, you know. I’ve picked up a lot of legal guck, albeit unwillingly, over the years.

I rubbed my fingertips over that glowing spot on my cheek. Maybe it was all just a rationalization to have my own Dream Date Ken look at me one more time as though I was the most gorgeous woman alive.

S, sue me.

I was all thumbs with the dead bolt, but finally opened the door and shouted into the night, neighbors be damned. “Five minutes and not a second more!”

He hadn’t gone far, not quite a block. The streetlight silhouetted Nick with yellow light as he turned slowly to face me. I had a sense that I surprised him—for once—and it made me cheeky.

I tapped my watch. “Get it in gear, Sullivan. I’m already counting.”

I saw his grin flash and felt a giddy rush that had nothing to do with champagne. He strode back to the door with startling speed and caught my hand in his before I could step away.

His eyes shone and I could smell the tang of his cologne. Oh, it was a good one. My toes curled in my shoes and my heart went pit-a-pat. He pressed a fleeting kiss to my knuckles like an old-fashioned courtier.

“I owe you big for this, Phil,” he murmured in that black velvet voice and I felt drunk all over again.

I
was thinking that this hadn’t been a really four-star idea, after all. Lady Luck had her limits after all—or maybe it was more accurate to say that I wasn’t too sure of mine. I put on the kettle and surreptitiously rubbed my tingling knuckles, stealing a glance at Nick through my lashes as he took off his leather jacket.

Yum.

Naturally, I couldn’t think of a single clever thing to say. If there’s a jarring little fact of life that I could do without, it’s that people from your past can send you straight back there just by crossing your field of vision. Maybe it’s worse for people like me who’ve deliberately traveled a long way away from their past, who’ve redefined themselves and their lives. Maybe not.

It is annoying, though.

And it’s the reason why I had left Rosemount with nary a backward glance. Who wants to be a plump, unpopular and uncertain teenager again? Not me. Been there, done that and burned the evidence. Encountering people from Rosemount High puts me right back in Fat Philippa’s skin. There’s a lot of it to spare, but the view doesn’t much suit me these days.

It never did really.

But it’s tough to put distance between the kid you were and the woman you want to be when every five minutes someone is commenting on how far you’ve got to go. So, I left Rosemount and I only go back when it’s absolutely necessary.

Which is a little too often.

This flashback backlash was a hundred times worse with Nick, the closest I had come to having a friend in high school. The “dynamic duo”, he used to call us, but we really were the “outsiders”. I was fat and he was short—and he was bad blood, to boot, as well as a comparative newcomer. Which of course was why I deliberately befriended him in the first place.

Once a sucker, always a sucker.

But now he was in my kitchen, an incongruity if ever there had been one. Nick hung his jacket over the back of his chair, then stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankles. He was wearing jeans and suede desert boots, a teal green T-shirt that clung to his muscles and ensured I had no doubt how truly magnificent a male specimen he was.

Funny, I never realized how warm that kitchen could be. I resolved to talk to the landlord about the heating being too high. Nick practically filled the room, which suddenly looked very feminine and too small for two people.

I fussed with the teapot and remembered when he had suddenly grown taller. Really suddenly and really tall. He must have sprouted a foot and a half in a year. And whenever someone asked, he had explained, absolute deadpan: “The return policy expired, so Lucia decided to feed us after all.”

Probably half of Rosemount believed him. It was too easy to imagine that the boys’ grandmother and reluctant guardian would have declined to feed them.

According to rumor, she hadn’t, after all, been thrilled to take them in.

“Dragon Lady” Lucia was the subject of a tremendous quantity of discussion in Rosemount. In fact, if she ever moved away, gossip would completely dry up—or at least, cease to flourish as it currently did. And her neighbor, Mrs. Donnelly, would lose pre-eminent status among the gossipmongers.

Lucia was supposed to be a witch, or rumored to at least have the Evil Eye. She obviously didn’t give a damn what anyone said about her. She had been known to spin around and shout “boo” at children who boldly dared each other to follow her. That would be more funny if she hadn’t scared the living crap out of me more than once.

When there was nothing else to fiddle with, I kicked off my heels as though I was much more comfortable in Nick’s presence than I was, and chucked my suit jacket over the back of a chair. I didn’t sit down, but leaned back against the counter, supposedly waiting for the kettle to boil.

I caught him checking out my legs and was so snared in my Fat Philippa past that I was shocked at his obvious appreciation. I turned back to the kettle, well aware that he was still looking.

“You’ve changed, Phil.”

“It’s been a long time.” I had a hard time catching my breath, but tapped my watch. “Time’s a-wasting.”

“Yeah.” He drew a line on the tabletop with his thumb, giving me the sense that he was trying to hide something from me.

That would have been a first.

I opted to help, all the better to get him on his way before I forgot everything I was supposed to remember about him. “So, why did you come back?”

“Lucia invited me.”

“I thought you weren’t speaking.” Events of all those years past hovered at the periphery of our conversation but neither of us were ready to talk about that.

“We weren’t.” His lips twisted, his expression revealing his inexplicable affection for the old babe. He had always been nuts about her, though God only knew why. “Not that such details would stop Lucia from having her say.”

Then he tapped a finger on the table. “But she didn’t have a chance to tell me what she wanted, Phil.” He looked up, his gaze bright. “She was dead when I got to the house.”

Dead?

I opened my mouth and shut it again, not knowing what to say. I couldn’t imagine Lucia dead. She was vital, I had to give her that, and possessed of the strength of ten immortals.

I tried again and this time managed to croak out something. “Dead tired?”

“Murdered.”

Now there is one of those words you don’t much expect to hear in the normal course of conversation—unless, of course, your name is Hercule Poirot or Jessica Fletcher.

Mine isn’t.

For a minute, I knew I’d heard him wrong. This was my kitchen, after all, and not usually a hotbed of sordid tales. “Murdered? Are you sure?”

“No doubt about it.” He looked very grim. “I found her in the greenhouse.”

I forgot my shyness and sat down opposite him. “But Nick,
murdered
? Maybe it was an accident. She could have fallen. Or had a heart attack.”

He looked skeptical. “And jabbed a knife into her throat in the midst of it?”

I had to admit that seemed unlikely.

“She’d been stabbed with a little stiletto that I bought for her when I was in Venice.” Nick rubbed his face with his hands, as though he could scrub the memory of the sight away. “I thought she’d enjoy using it as a letter opener. It’s a nasty but ornate little thing.”

It sounded like something Lucia would like, but that still didn’t give me a clue what to say.

“Murder’s not something you get wrong, Phil. There was blood everywhere and...” His throat worked and I reached across the table to touch his hand. He closed his fingers over mine, hard, and looked away.

I had to ask.