Within Reason: Mill Brook Trilogy, Book 2

by Carla Neggers

  Emily, still sore that her mother had gone to an amusement park without her, didn’t want to hear any more, so the subject was quickly abandoned and the under-twelve crowd vanished.

  There was an awkward silence between the two adults left standing in the entry.

  “They’re great kids,” Char commented, just to say something.

  Adam leaned against the wall, looking even taller than he had in Nashville, his eyes, dark in the shadows, on her. “They have their moments,” he said, straightening up suddenly. “Want to give me a hand in the kitchen?”

  “Sure. There isn’t a whole lot to fixing spaghetti and butterscotch pudding.”

  “True,” he said as they entered his large oak kitchen. “Unless you’d prefer to eat with them in the family room and watch TV, we’re having fresh lemon sole with salsa and new potatoes in the dining room.”

  “Adam, you didn’t have to go to all that trouble.”

  “I know.” He looked at her and smiled. “The last woman I had to dinner was my sister Beth. Let me enjoy myself.”

  “I should be buying you dinner,” Char said, remembering everything Adam had already done for her— never mind that she hadn’t asked him to do anything.

  “You’ll have your chance.”

  She nodded grudgingly. “I hate being insolvent.”

  “Insolvent? Is that lawyer talk?”

  “It doesn’t sound as harsh as broke, but it means the same thing.”

  “I know what it means,” Adam said softly. He pulled out the salad bowl and set it on the kitchen table along with the spaghetti, pot of sauce and meatballs and Italian bread already there. “Just making sure—”

  “That I’m looking reality square in the eye?” Char finished for him. “It’s impossible not to in my situation, believe me. I wake up every night in a sweat wondering how I’m going to get through the next month. I used to have a five-year financial plan. Now—hell, now I’m just worried about getting food on the table and keeping a roof over our heads.”

  “Be glad you’re young.”

  “I’m not looking for anyone to solve my problems for me, you know,” she said abruptly.

  Adam opened a bottle of salad dressing, sweetened with Vermont maple syrup, and set it beside the salad bowl. “Not waiting for a knight on a white horse to gallop up to your place and whisk you off into the sunset?”

  Char laughed. “Honey, if I start seeing white horses and knights, somebody better lock me up.”

  “Probably won’t come to that. I don’t think any red-blooded knight would mistake you for a damsel in distress.”

  “I hope not.”

  “An intelligent, smart-mouthed, occasionally grouchy, sometimes captivating woman who’s had her share of setbacks the past year or two, yes. But not a damsel in distress.”

  “Sometimes captivating?”

  “Well,” Adam said, grinning, “you’re not all that captivating when you’re sending me off on wild-goose chases or telling my kids tales about their father.”

  “You did scream—”

  ‘‘After the rollercoaster,” Adam corrected, giving her a look that turned her insides to jelly. “Not during.”

  While she tried to think of an appropriate comeback, Adam called Abby, David and Emily to dinner. No waiter, he showed the three children the plates, the silverware wrapped in napkins and the food lined up on the table. They were to load up their plates and scat.

  “There will be no dessert,” he instructed, “until the salad’s gone—and remember Jasper isn’t fond of lettuce.” Jasper was their golden lab, a big, overly friendly animal who was relegated to the back rooms of the sprawling post-and-beam house. “If you try to pawn off your salad on him and he gets sick, it’s your responsibility.”

  Char assumed Adam had based his warning on precedent and she should keep her mouth shut about discussing a sick dog before dinner, just as Adam had refrained from comment when she and Emily had discussed dinner entrees in Nashville. Hot dogs versus steak, she recalled. It seemed so damn long ago.

  Abby and David promised Jasper was off-limits. “I do, too,” Emily said, “but do I have to eat the radishes?”

  Adam glanced at Char for an answer, but Abby volunteered to eat Em’s radishes if she could get out of eating red peppers, and they were off, trading vegetables, before the adults could butt in with their opinion.

  “They must be healthy” Adam muttered. ‘They keep growing.”

  Their own dinner was a cinch to prepare, especially since Adam’s version of salsa merely required opening a jar. The lemon sole, he explained, was day-boat, purchased at his favorite deli and fish market in Bennington. Abby and David liked fish, but not spicy salsa—but Adam liked spaghetti. He didn’t, however, like butterscotch pudding: he and Char were splurging and having Kahlua cheesecake made by the Nuns of New Skete over the border in upstate New York.

  “Pure decadence,” Char said, uncorking the wine bottle.

  “Maybe the fish will counteract the cheesecake.”

  She shook her head. “Good never counteracts bad.”

  “Speaking of which,” Adam said as he sprinkled the piping hot new potatoes with minced fresh parsley, “did you hook up with Harlan this afternoon?”

  “That snake—no. I kept an eye out for him, but he knows my car. Probably knows I’m in town, too.” She noticed something funny about Adam’s expression. “You know something about that?”

  “I don’t want to get in the middle between you two...”

  “You already are.”

  He scowled at her. “You can be merciless, you know.”

  “You’re no saint yourself. Well?”

  Adam sighed. “I told him you were in Tennessee. He wants to talk.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet! He probably found out I’d been camping on his property and now he wants to sue me for trespassing.”

  “You could give him a chance to explain himself.”

  Char shot Adam a look, narrowing her eyes. “You know something I don’t know, don’t you?”

  He got the fish out of the oven and shook his head, pretending to be far more absorbed in his cooking than he had any right to be: about all there was left to do was switch off the broiler.

  Char wasn’t about to let him off the hook. “What did Harlan tell you when you saw him?”

  “Nothing he won’t tell you when you see him.”

  “But something I don’t already know,” she suggested.

  “Look, Char, I’m not on the witness stand here. My conversation with Harlan was private—just as my conversations with you are. I didn’t relate anything to him about your version of events, merely recommended that the two of you sit down and talk.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve tried that? The bastard keeps avoiding me.”

  “Human instinct,” Adam muttered dryly as Char stomped off into the dining room with the wine bottle.

  “I heard that.”

  “You were supposed to.”

  “Are you siding with that man?”

  “No,” he said, standing in the doorway. “I’m not siding with anyone.”

  “You just want us to talk,” she said, taken aback by her own scathing tone.

  Adam shrugged. “If you were your own lawyer, Char, what would you counsel yourself to do?”

  She scowled, hanging on to the cold neck of the wine bottle. “Talk to the swindler.” Sighing, she looked at Adam and smiled. “I do get hot under the collar whenever his name comes up, don’t 1?”

  “Better him than me,” Adam said.

  “Does Beth know he’s in town?”

  Adam cleared his throat and straightened. “Yes.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Yikes, indeed. Can you almost feel sorry for the poor bastard?”

  “Almost,” Char said, and poured the wine. “I’ll have to tell Beth everything now, won’t 1?”

  “I would before she drags it out of you,”

  “I just don’t want her to feel responsible for what happened
to me. If Harlan swindled me because I’m Beth’s friend, then so be it. That’s not her fault—it’s his. And mine. I should have known better than to do business with him in the first place.”

  “You don’t have to protect Beth,” Adam said, heading back to the kitchen. “She doesn’t approve of knights and white horses, either.”

  By silent, mutual agreement they abandoned the subjects of Harlan Rockwood and horses as they got dinner on the table. They could hear Star Trek music and the occasional whine about offensive vegetables from the family room, but Adam put on Vivaldi in the background, and it was almost as if he and Char were alone.

  Adam raised his wineglass, the sharp angles of his face softened in the candlelight. “To quiet children.”

  Char laughed, seconded his toast and they clinked glasses. Their fingers brushed, and she could feel the tension in her spine begin to ease. Adam wasn’t going to put her on the spot about Harlan or Mill Brook—or even themselves. For tonight, at least, she could put everything on hold and just relax.

  Chapter Ten

  CHARS INSTINCTS WERE accurate as far as they went: Adam didn’t put her on the spot during dinner. They restricted their conversation to nonthreatening topics, and Adam was amiable enough, if somewhat distant. He seemed to be holding back—information, his opinions, himself. Char wasn’t sure what. She felt as if he had constructed an invisible wall around him that she couldn’t penetrate. Whether deliberately or unconsciously, he had made himself—or at least a part of himself—unavailable to her. He wasn’t withdrawn or unpleasant... just a little distant. And she realized, with some surprise, that she didn’t want that.

  So what did she want?

  What she wanted, she had to admit, was to know what Adam Stiles was thinking, be it good or bad.

  What she wanted was a full, honest relationship with him.

  Commitment.

  A life, she thought as she waited for him in the living room, its neutral tones helping to soothe her nerves. They had already done up the dishes and sent bowls of butterscotch pudding into the family room, where Abby, David and Emily were immersed in their movie and jigsaw puzzle. Adam was pouring after-dinner brandy.

  Then off to the guest room with you and Em, Char thought, sighing. It was just as well. What she didn’t need right now was another complication.

  Was that what Adam was—a complication?

  He came into the living room and handed her a brandy snifter, then went back for his and settled into the chair catty-corner from her seat on the couch. She noticed that: he hadn’t joined her on the couch.

  What are you thinking, Adam Stiles?

  But since he wasn’t putting her on the spot, she didn’t want to put him on the spot. Fair play’s turnabout, he could tell her.

  Or, as it turned out, she could tell him.

  “Do you hear a car?” she asked, sitting forward with her brandy.

  Adam glanced at his watch. “It’s seven-thirty already?”

  “Why? Is someone supposed to be here at seven-thirty?” Not Harlan, she thought. Please not Harlan. I don’t want to deal with him right now—not in front of Adam, thank you. She narrowed her eyes at him. “Adam, what’s going on?”

  “Julian and Holly are joining us for brandy.”

  Char had always gotten along with Adam’s younger brother Julian, and she still laughed when she thought about how Holly Wingate Paynter, Texan by birth and Vermonter by heritage, had taken Mill Brook—and Julian Stiles—by storm earlier that year. A storyteller by trade and by nature, Holly could still confuse her husband about when she was telling the truth and when she wasn’t.

  “Holly has several new children’s stories she wants to try out,” Adam said. He sounded so innocuous as he climbed to his feet. “So she asked if she could take

  Abby, David and Emily back to their place. I should have mentioned it before now, but I just didn’t get around to it.”

  “She couldn’t try out her stories here?”

  “Wouldn’t work as well, I guess. Wrong atmosphere.”

  Adam’s back was to Char, so she couldn’t see his face to judge if he were stretching the truth. “And this was Holly’s idea?”

  “Julian’s actually.” Adam disappeared into the kitchen. “He knew she was itching for a tryout audience, and the light bulb went on when he found out I’d have three critics here tonight.”

  “Nice guy. Will the kids be up late? I could pick them up later.”

  “Oh, there’s no need.”

  Char’s heart began to pound. “Julian and Holly barely have enough room for themselves in that house, never mind three kids.”

  “Three spoiled kids, maybe. Sleeping bags in front of the fireplace sounds good to me.”

  It would sound good to Emily, too, after the variety of accommodations she had endured during the past year. Char leaned back and sipped her brandy, surprised at the rush of relief and warmth she felt. Adam Stiles had been plotting to get her alone, but she didn’t feel pressured. Instead she felt wanted.

  “You’ve got a generous brother and sister-in-law,” she said.

  Adam emerged from the kitchen with two empty glasses in his hand and the bottle of brandy tucked under his left arm. “After their antics last winter,” he said, “my brother and sister-in-law owe me one.”

  Julian and Holly stayed just long enough to drink a glass of brandy and not ask too many questions before whisking the three kids off. Adam told his brother he’d be by in the morning, but Julian wasn’t worried. He had plenty to keep the kids busy, including making apple cider. Abby and David were excited about getting to hear one of Holly’s new stories, and they always loved to spend the night at Uncle Julian and Aunt Holly’s small post-and-beam house out in the woods. Emily was delighted to do whatever Abby and David were doing.

  Char joined Adam in seeing them off, then returned inside, where she helped him get a fire going in the big granite fireplace in the living room. Neither spoke. Adam didn’t mind. He knew Char had a lot on her mind and was willing to give her space. It was okay with him that they could be together and not have to fill every second with talk.

  After the fire caught, Char flopped back onto the couch. Adam could tell something was on her mind, but he stayed in front of the fireplace, stirring the kindling with the poker.

  “Word will get around town by noon tomorrow that we’re seeing each other,” Char said finally.

  Adam shrugged and glanced back at her. ‘‘Word’s already around town.”

  “Terrific. I come here for dinner and the whole town’s talking.”

  “Town’s been talking a whole lot longer than just today. They’ve been at it ever since I headed down to Tennessee to find out what you were up to. Folks know I wouldn’t do that just for a friend of Beth— I’d make her do it. According to town gossip, I had my own personal agenda.” He stabbed at a red-hot chunk of birch. “Which is true.”

  “Well, I don’t know where people get their ideas. I’ve always considered you a friend, too.”

  Adam arched his brow. “That right?”

  “Well—”

  “Well, nothing. You and I didn’t have much good to say about each other until we ended up in the sack together. And even then.”

  Char sniffed. “I would hardly call what we did a grudge match.”

  “Neither would I,” Adam said, sighing. How the hell was he going to get through to this woman without making her feel as if he had backed her into a corner? “Anyway, that’s all just town talk. Mostly I ignore it.”

  “People should mind their own business.”

  “They should, but they don’t.”

  He dropped onto his knees and leaned back against his heels so he could grab an oak log one-handed and toss it onto the fire. Then he poked at it, making sure its weight wouldn’t smother the flames. All was well. He backed away from the fireplace and sat on the carpet with his back against the couch, inches from Char’s knees.

  She slid off the couch and sat next to him, her shi
rt riding up high on her stomach. She quickly pulled it down. “A fireplace isn’t as efficient as a wood stove, you know,” she said.

  He smiled at her, aware of the scent of her light perfume, noticing the paleness of her skin. She had had a hard day, he would guess. Probably a hard couple of days. But far be it for Charity Bradford to whine to anyone about her troubles.

  “A wood stove isn’t as romantic,” he pointed out.

  “I never figured you for someone who would take romance over efficiency. Or was the fireplace Mel’s idea?”

  “No, it was mine.” he said without awkwardness. Talking about Mel no longer bothered him. She was his children’s mother and a lost friend, but the passion and grief he had once felt for her were past now, gone. “She left everything up to me—which I should have realized was her way of telling me she didn’t want to move out here. I’m not good at reading between the lines, I guess. People have something to say to me, they’d better go on and say it.”

  Char kicked off her shoes and wiggled her toes, looking more relaxed than she had when Julian and Holly were here. Adam took that as a positive sign that she didn’t feel strange and out-of-place in his company, in his house.

  She grinned at him. “Are you saying you’re thickheaded?”

  He laughed. “Guess so.” And he stretched his legs out next to hers, resisting the urge to rub his thigh up against hers. “So what did you do this afternoon since you didn’t find Harlan and have it out with him?”

  “I went out to Aunt Mil’s place and had a look around. The new owners have already fixed it up a lot. They were very gracious to me and let me look around. They hope to open a bed-and-breakfast by next fall. Aunt Mil would have liked that, I think. She always said it was too much house for one person—her only regret about not having had children herself. She loved company.”

  “How do you feel about the changes?” Adam asked quietly, sensing the lingering grief Char felt whenever she talked about her great-aunt.

  She shrugged. ‘‘Okay—better than I had expected. I wasn’t sure at first I wanted to go out there, but Em kept bugging me. She wanted to see the old place. It was sad with Aunt Mil not there; Em cried a little. I think we both half expected we’d see Aunt Mil sitting in her porch swing or setting out mums, chasing a cat out of her herb garden. She really hated cats. I used to tell her that wasn’t very spinsterish of her, and she’d just glare at me. Anyway, the porch swing’s gone. The Eberharts are having it painted and repaired.”