“Don’t tell me you could smell those brownies all the way over at your house?” she asked.
“I am downwind of your oven,” he said. “It makes it very difficult to resist temptation.”
He sat on the steps beside her. He wore his usual jeans and a long-sleeved Henley. His thick brown hair was mussed, but his gray eyes were as intent as ever, and they swept over her as if doing inventory.
“You look better,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows at him.
“As if you’ve gotten some rest,” he clarified.
She nodded. She had, in fact, slept for fourteen hours.
“I wanted to thank you,” Nate said. He turned his head and glanced out at the lake. As Brenna studied his profile, he seemed to be considering his words.
“When Ed dug up my past, I felt most people turn away from me,” he said. “But not you.”
“I am an excellent judge of character,” Brenna said, hoping to lighten the somber tone. “I didn’t believe all of those crazy articles about wild parties and trashed hotel rooms.”
“You should have,” Nate said. His voice was full of self-recrimination. “I left New York because I was becoming a person I didn’t like. It wasn’t as bad as Ed’s story painted it, but I was a self-obsessed, self-indulgent jackass. I did berate the people unfortunate enough to be the ones looking after me. I began to loathe myself, the art world, all of it. I came here to find myself.”
They were quiet for a moment. Brenna knew exactly how he felt. She had left Boston for a similar reason. She had felt herself becoming someone she didn’t like, and she’d had to leave to find herself again.
“So have you succeeded?” she asked. “In finding yourself?”
“I think I found something better,” he said. He took her hand in his and interlaced their fingers.
Brenna felt her pulse do a skip-to-my-Lou. Okay. What did he mean and how could she ask him?
The buzzer for the brownies went off, sending Hank into a frenzy of barking. A cabin door popped open across the lake, and Twyla stepped out.
“Do I smell brownies?” she called.
Brenna gently pulled her hand out of Nate’s as she rose to her feet.
“Yep!” she called back.
“I’ve got vanilla ice cream. I’ll be right over!”
Two more cabin doors popped open, and Portia and Paul joined Twyla in her trek around the lake.
“Nice to have everything back to the way it was, isn’t it?” she asked.
His gray eyes shone silver in the coming twilight as he studied her.
“I don’t think anything is ever going to be the same again, do you?” he asked.
The oven buzzer went off again, jolting Brenna out of her daze, and she hurried inside to save her brownies before they were burned beyond recognition. And that was exactly what she was afraid of if she got tangled up with Nate or Dom. That she wouldn’t be smart enough to pull her pan out of the oven before she got burned.
Before the murder was solved, she had thought she might have to leave Morse Point for her peace of mind. But now that Phyllis was behind bars, she had no reason to leave. This was a town where nothing noteworthy had happened for fifty years. She found great comfort in that, and now she could stay, knowing that the only thing at risk was her heart. And after solving a murder, surely she could handle that.
Watch out for Lucy Lawrence’s next Decoupage Mystery . . .
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Coming soon from Berkley Prime Crime!