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“Would you have adopted?”

“Sure.” Still wandering around the kitchen, Marce found the pastries left from breakfast and put two on a plate. She sat at the island and took a bite, rolling her eyes in bliss. “I’ve missed this. The stove in the camp isn’t as good as the one here and I can’t bake there to save my life.” She smiled at Kate. “That biological clock ticking loud, is it?”

“Sometimes.” Kate’s answer was instant and unexpected. By Kate herself, anyway.
Sometimes?
She sat across from Marce and lifted her cup to her lips. “Not always.”

* * *

“M
ARCE
!” R
ETURNING
FROM
taking Jayson home followed by a few hours’ work at the hospital, Ben gave the innkeeper a hug that lifted her off her feet. “Are you back?”

“Just for a long weekend.” She kissed his cheek, then squinted up at him. “Are you still staying here? I should have just sold you the garage. Won’t Dylan share your mum and dad’s place with you?”

“He would, but he’d also share the cleaning of it, the mowing of its yard, and the painting of its front and back door. Mom conveniently left the paint in the laundry room. With several pages of instructions, I might add, and new brushes.” Not to mention—and he wasn’t
going
to mention it—he loved sharing premises and breakfast with Kate. Walking Lucy with her in the evening was his favorite part of most days.

Kate brought him a cup of coffee. His fingers touched and tangled with hers when he took it from her. The warmth moved up his arm, and he had to put the cup down quickly before he dropped it.

“I have the weekend off,” she said brightly. “The whole thing plus Monday and Tuesday.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What are you going to do? I’m sure there’s room for you behind the bar at McGuffey’s.”

“Nope.” She sat at the table across from him. “I’m doing something different. Mr. Hayes and Jayson are going to work on the landscaping at Bright Sky—that’s the name of Mrs. Hylton-Wise’s house—and I’m going to keep an eye on Jayson and stay there for the weekend to inventory the furnishings. Mrs. Hylton-Wise is preparing it for sale and doesn’t want to do any more of the tedious stuff than she has to. I, on the other hand, live for tedium—besides which she’s paying me a nice little amount to do it.”

She grinned at him, her golden-brown eyes sparkling, and Ben felt himself sinking. Again.

“Want a ride out there?” Wherever “there” was—he never had known the exact location of Mrs. Hylton-Wise’s house.

Kate’s eyes lit—and he continued to sink. “That’d be great. Then Debby could drive my car to work. Hers is misbehaving again.” She started toward the hallway. “I haven’t been to Bright Sky yet, but I have a sneaking suspicion this house would be out of place on Alcott Street.”

An hour later, her suspicion proved to be correct. The driveway up the side of Wish Mountain to Bright Sky was nearly as long as the town of Fionnegan was from one city limits sign to the other. “It’s in better condition, too,” Ben commented. “We haven’t fallen into a single pothole.”

The house was large and beautiful, built from logs and roofed in dark green steel. Big windows peered in every direction. A small guesthouse, a miniature of the main house, sat to one side. A pond complete with a fishing dock was visible out back, sheltered by the mountainside.

Ben parked in front of the house. “This looks like one of those celebrity houses in Stowe that you see on Sunday afternoon TV when there aren’t any sports on.” All it needed was a security gate and a maid in uniform answering the door. Of course, they hadn’t gone to the door yet—that could still happen.

Kate got out of the car and looked around. “I still wonder why she doesn’t stay here when she comes to Vermont. I know she comes out and checks on it. Then she comes back to the inn and stays in her room for the rest of the day. She’s a mystery lady.”

Ben joined her, carrying her backpack and her laptop bag. “She is, but her philanthropy is showing up here and there. Did you know Jayson has a new bicycle coming? She walked past when I was in the yard showing him how to change his tire the other day. We talked for a while—and Jayson explained what we were doing to her, telling her in the process that his bicycle made Ben use bad words. She went on about her business, but Len from the Chain and Sprocket called me while I was at the hospital today and said we could pick up the new bike Monday.”

“We’ll probably never know what makes her tick, but I’m glad she’s grown so fond of Jayson.” Kate reached into the pocket of her shorts, coming out with a slip of paper. “The code to get into the house. If I lose this, I’ll have to spend the weekend on the patio out back eating wild blackberries foraged on the mountain.”

“Nah.” He pushed the door open when the lock clicked. “You could go home with Jayson and Mr. Hayes, though you might have to ride in the back of the truck.”

“They’re not coming out until tomorrow. I could get pretty cold and hungry by then.” The interior of the house was no less elaborate than the exterior, with exposed log walls in the main living area and more bedrooms and bathrooms than there were at Kingdom Comer. Fully half of the first floor was taken up by a great room, with French doors leading from the dining area to a huge patio.

Kate set her laptop down on the kitchen island and knelt to look at the bottles of wine in the built-in rack. “I’ve spent my adult life hovering somewhere between lower middle class and abject poverty—I think it’s time to give wealthy a try.”

Ben laughed, pulling her up. “Go for it. You’ve got all weekend.” He loved how she felt against him, so he just held her there.

She relaxed. “You want to come back up and have dinner with me? Maybe steaks and something unhealthy on the side? Mrs. H-W encouraged me to take advantage of the pantry and freezer and—dare I say it?—the wine rack. She knew
that
was safe, since I can’t tell the difference between wine from a box and stuff in dusty bottles that has names I can’t pronounce.”

“You should have paid attention in French class. Or Italian. One of them.” He bent his head to hers, tunneling his hand into the soft, silky warmth that was her hair, and covered her mouth with his. The kiss tasted as warm and sunny as her hair felt between his fingers.

“I didn’t take—”

He kissed her again. “I know,” he said, drawing away. Just a hairbreadth. “You took German with Fraulein Müller, just like we all did.” This would be a great way to spend the rest of the day. He sat on one of the tall bar stools at the island, pulling her in close and fitting her body against his.

“Not for the same reasons.” She didn’t open her eyes, and her voice sounded whispery and weak. He loved it. “We girls took it so we could sound sophisticated and...you know, bilingual. You boys took it because you all had licentious thoughts about Fraulein Müller.”

“That’s not true. The only guy in school who might have had a crush on Fraulein Müller was Dylan. But he seemed pretty busy taking you out on dates.”

Kate grinned at him and drew away, moving to the refrigerator and opening it. “Hey, we went to a lot of dances while you were skiing or in college. But that was all, and you know it.” She opened the French doors of the stainless-steel appliance. “Oh, Jayson will be thrilled. Juice in boxes.”

Ben followed her around the island, peering into the refrigerator. “Juice but no wine?”

“Right.” She looked at him, her eyes suddenly serious. “And that’s the way it was running around with Dylan. We danced, went to ball games, even some parties we didn’t want to get caught at—your dad and my dad would have killed us—but our time was like juice with some carbonation added for fun.” Her arms hooked around his neck. “You and me, tall guy—that was the wine.”

Regret and a sense of shame burned deep within him. “I wish—” he began, but was silenced by her small, soft fingers against his lips.

“It’s okay. We had our time, and it was wonderful.” She rose on her toes to kiss his cheek before pushing away and going toward the staircase that rose on the other side of the dining area. “It’s okay,” she said again.

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t.

CHAPTER NINE

A
S
BIG
AS
Mrs. Hylton-Wise’s house was, it was still very much a home. The country decor included work by New England artists—Kate stood in front of an original Will Moses painting above the fireplace for a full ten minutes—but framed photographs were everywhere. The furniture was high quality, carefully chosen and comfortable. Kate was pretty sure nothing had come from garage sales.

In one of the bedrooms, a large stained-glass window—both out of place and strikingly beautiful—faced the lush mountainside. It was the only room without an exit to the second-floor balcony that crossed the back of the house. It looked odd from the outside, but the beauty of the window made up for the disproportion.

Kate inventoried two of the upstairs bedrooms, including that one, before going down to the kitchen to start dinner for Ben and herself. Assembling salad at the prep table, she reflected that she could easily get spoiled working in the kitchens here and at Kingdom Comer. The one in the back of A Day at a Time would be the size of the closet in the room she was using in Bright Sky.

She daydreamed while she cooked. She tried not to do that, but Ben’s almost daily presence in her life made that particular abstention increasingly difficult. What would it be like to be married to him and live somewhere like this, with ski slopes almost right outside the back door and bike and hiking trails everywhere she looked? There was room for a half-dozen kids along with their attendant puppies and kittens.

A cluster of photographs, all in pewter-colored frames, hung above the table where she worked. She recognized Mrs. Hylton-Wise in many of them. The two teenagers in the photos must be her children. The girl was a lawyer now, the boy the CEO of the family business, whatever that was—their mother didn’t talk about them much.

The handsome man with Paul McCartney hair and impatient eyes was undoubtedly her late husband. Kate could almost see him looking at his watch, wanting to be away from the taking of family snapshots. Her father used to do that, too, simply because he hated having his picture taken. Her mother used to tell him he’d look better in photographs if he’d stop rolling his eyes.

But it was the little blonde girl in some of the photos that grabbed Kate’s attention, made her reach to take one of them from the wall so she could see it better. The picture had been taken out back, with Wish Mountain as a glorious backdrop. The child hugged the leg of Mrs. H-W’s white pants while the woman’s hand caressed the wild halo of curls on the little girl’s head.

She was beautiful, the child was. Tiny and fairy-like. And without a doubt she had Down syndrome.

“Look at this,” she said an hour later, dragging Ben into the kitchen and handing him the picture.

He looked at it for a long time, his other hand holding hers, and she stood still beside him. She knew she didn’t have his attention—it was all focused on the picture—but she also knew he was touching her, and she didn’t want him to stop.

“She was so awful about Jayson when she first met him. She didn’t want him around her, didn’t even really want him in the inn. But look at this. That has to be her child, doesn’t it? She’s in a lot of the family pictures.

“What can it mean?”

He handed the picture back. “Whatever it means, it’s not our business.”

She sighed, knowing he was right. She went to put the picture back in its place, taking time to make sure it was straight. She smiled at the image of the little girl, fancying her bright blue eyes smiled back. “It’s beautiful here, but I think it’s probably a sad place.”

“Don’t you think there’s sadness in every house with any age to it?” He looked up at the exposed beams in the ceiling. “I imagine this house has been here since the 1960s. It’s probably seen a lot of happy
and
unhappy things.”

“Maybe.” She couldn’t seem to look away from the curly-haired sprite in the picture above the prep table. “I just can’t help wondering who she is. What her name is.
Where
she is.”

“You may never know. Mrs. H-W has mellowed, but not enough to share her personal life. Do you want me to cook the steaks?”

“Sure.” It would make it even easier to pretend, to fantasize that he was the man in her life, if he was cooking outside on the elaborate grill. “Do you want a beer?”

“No, I’m on call. You want these vegetables grilled, too? They need to go on first if you do.”

“Oops, yes. I forgot.” She fluttered her eyelashes at him. “I just get all excited when you’re in the room, Dr. McGuffey, and my mind goes every which way. Don’t you want to take my pulse?”

He pulled her to him. “Something about those eyelashes looks familiar. Didn’t I take your appendix out a couple of years ago?”

She leaned back in his hold with a theatrical gasp. “It was supposed to be my tonsils.”

“Oh, well, I’d better check.” He kissed her.

Only her hands on his shoulders allowed her to keep her balance. Physically, anyway. A small and mostly unheeded part of her mind warned her that she was opening herself to emotional injury such as she didn’t even want to contemplate.

It wasn’t that he was the only man she’d ever kissed—good heavens, she was thirty-seven years old!—but when she was in his arms, it felt as though he was. His lips—tasting of coffee and mint and the caramel candy that had been his guilty pleasure since elementary school days—had set a bar no one else had been able to reach.

She’d loved Tark Bridger—actually she still did; they’d become great friends after they broke up—but even when she’d been engaged to him, she’d known she wasn’t engaged enough. She’d known—once again in that part of her mind she didn’t listen to—that if Ben had walked into McGuffey’s and asked her to run away with him, she wouldn’t have even bothered getting a coat.

So had she been toting a torch for him for thirteen years? Had the relationships she’d had been mere smokescreens that hid—ineffectively as it turned out—the fact that she still had it bad for her high school boyfriend?

“Okay, that’s enough.” He let her go, and she was delighted that his breathing was seriously impaired. “I’m starving—and not just for air, though our altitudes here do sometimes compromise healthy respiration.”

“Learned that in your pomposity class, didn’t you? Wasn’t that part of the bedside manner rotation?” Kate’s breathing was a little wonky, too, but she was smart enough to hold off on talking until she could get the whole sentence out without stopping. She was even able to grin at him without her lips shaking.

“Yup.” He nodded wisely. “It was right up there with saying ‘well, you know, you’re getting older’ and patting a patient on the shoulder. My mom told me if she ever found out I said that to anyone, she’d put an ad in the newspapers telling the whole world I was a useless quack. Dylan and Patrick wanted her to go ahead and do it anyway, just for their entertainment.”

“I love your mother.” Kate handed him the cookie sheet full of olive-oil doused vegetables. “If you want to put these on, I’ll get the steaks out of the marinade.”

She set the table on the patio while he cooked. “We eat outside a lot at the inn, too, but the view is of the chrysanthemums in the yard—which Jayson tells me I don’t keep nearly neat enough—and the Wilkinsons’ garage. This is really a lot nicer.”

He brought the steaks to the table, still sizzling on the plates. “Medium rare?”

“Perfect.” She poured ice water, he said grace and they dug into the dinner. “I think I forgot to eat lunch.” Kate speared a piece of cauliflower. “Does it mean I’m getting old that I’ve learned to love vegetables?”

He shrugged. “Probably.” He touched her glass with his. “Now tell me about the business. We haven’t talked about it in a few days.”

She swallowed, considering the progress that had been made since their last conversation. “Well, the building’s up and the sidewalks have been poured.” The cement bill had been staggering. Mrs. Hylton-Wise’s request that she inventory Bright Sky had been a godsend. The payment wouldn’t cover the whole cost of the sidewalks, but it would mean Kate could look at the invoice without hyperventilating. “They cost as much as little streets of gold.”

“It looks great, like it’s always been there,” said Ben. He chuckled. “Jayson wanted to tell the contractors how to pour the cement—I had to convince him to keep riding. How’s the registry coming?”

“Really well, I think. We don’t have many professionals on it, but that wasn’t really my aim.” She grinned. “Companies who want temporary engineers or architects tend to get them out of Burlington or Montpelier, but I have plenty of babysitters, house sitters and carpool-drivers.”

“Got your insurance and bonding?”

“Yes. Thank goodness for Joann leading me around by the nose telling me what I have to do.
Liability
has become my least favorite word in the world.” She counted on her fingers. “We also have sit-and-wait-on-the-repairman people, window washers, waitstaff, and receptionists who can answer anyone’s phone intelligently. There are a few handymen, painters and people who do drywall on the side, too. We also have a drapery hanger. She used to work in New York for one of the big department stores, but moved up here to care for her mother.”

“I can sign up as a bicycle-riding coach,” Ben offered helpfully.

“Not until Jayson masters corners. That gash on his knee isn’t a very good reference for you.”

“I work cheap.” He reached to trace an index finger down her jawline. “I think that’s passion I see when you talk about A Day at a Time, short woman.”

Kate thought the passion he was seeing had little to do with A Day at a Time, although that wasn’t something she was going to mention. But she loved the light stroke of his finger on her face. It made her want to not move, to sit quietly and absorb both the peacefulness and the fireworks wrought by his touch.

The steaks were a delicious memory and they were trying to talk each other into going into the house to bring out dessert when Ben’s cellphone rang, vibrating urgently against the wrought iron of the tabletop.

With a sigh, he reached for the phone, leaving a cool place on her face where his hand had been. “Hospital.”

He was gone within a few minutes, muttering “accident on Ridge Road,” and kissing her goodbye on the run. Half laughing and half rueful, she called “Be careful” after him, and watched him go. His mind had gone on ahead of him—she wasn’t sure he’d even realized who he was kissing.

She cleaned the grill, loaded the dishwasher and went upstairs. The bedroom she’d laid claim to had a whirlpool tub and she was anxious to try it out. It seemed strange to have time without demands on it. She was kind of anxious to try that, too. She loved being busy, but just occasionally it was nice just to...soak. Yes, that was it.

When she finally drew her wrinkled self out of the tub, the cellphone she’d left in the kitchen signaled that she had a voicemail. Colby Dehart’s voice was on the line. “I’m coming over to ride next weekend. Any chance we could have a real date?” His laugh sounded self-conscious. “River says I suck at dating, but if you’re willing, I’ll pay for dinner.”

Kate didn’t suck at dating. Truth was, she was pretty good at it. She enjoyed small talk, loved joking around, was
always
interested in getting to know people. Tark used to say she lost interest in him after she got to know everything about him and she always laughed and said, no, she lost interest after she found out he didn’t like old movies. How could he
not
like old movies?

Ben didn’t want children, but she was still interested in him. She didn’t want to think about that right now. Didn’t want to think about Ben as anything but her friend, which meant she should probably stop kissing him. But she didn’t want to do that, either. Not at all.

But she didn’t know if she wanted to date Colby Dehart. He was nice and she’d enjoyed the time she spent with him that weekend, but she wasn’t at all sure about seeing him again. Would she be playing an “I’ll show you” game with Ben?
See there? I don’t need you, Ben McGuffey.

Or would she be finding what Marce had—something that was different but still good? A new kind of happiness. She was tired of being single. Tired of living and sleeping alone. She wanted more than the friendship Ben offered. She wanted a full-blown partnership. Emotional, mental and physical, though not necessarily in that order.

She called Colby back.

* * *

T
HE
GIRL
,
a student at the college, would be fine. Eventually. She’d lost her baby but she’d be able to get pregnant again. Later, when she was ready. Ben hoped that was a long time.

Ben handed her a tissue and she wept into it. Quietly. “I was going to name her Layla. Remember that song? My mom loves Eric Clapton. I was looking forward to having her, once I got used to the idea. I guess that’s a girl thing—my boyfriend didn’t get attached to her at all.”

“Sometimes it takes guys longer,” Ben agreed.
And sometimes guys are just jerks and they never catch on at all.

“I tried to be careful, even though I went to classes and exercised every day. The books and the doctors on TV said I could. They said it was better for the baby if the mother stayed active. But I must have done something wrong.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” Ben leaned forward, forcing her to meet his gaze. “It’s nobody’s fault. Sometimes it just happens. In a few years, when the time is right—”
and the guy is right
“—you’ll get pregnant again—on purpose—and it’ll work. You’re young and healthy. You’ll probably end up with a basketball team in the backyard.”

She laughed, though it sounded wispy. “My dad would love that. He’d have them all in little Celtics uniforms. Only they’d all be number thirty-three because he says Larry Bird was the best there was.”

“That’s what my dad said, too. My brothers and I used to talk up Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan just to get him going.” He smiled at her. “We’re going to keep you here tonight. Your folks will be here soon. Will you be all right waiting for them or do you want me to stay with you?”