Finding You

by Carla Neggers

  “Darlin’, if you catch me in your bedroom, there won’t be any question of why I’m there.”

  She slid down the path, welcoming the cold drizzle and the smells of the wet woods, reminders of who she was and where she came from. But, in the swirling fog above her, she could hear Daniel’s low laugh, arousing her, challenging her, and she pushed through dripping, wilted ferns, getting as far away from him as quickly as she could—not, she thought, that it would do any good.

  “How bad are you hit?” J.D. asked when, a few minutes after Cozie departed into the fog, Daniel called him back.

  He knew what his friend meant. He thought about Cozie’s luminous eyes and how much he wanted to see them radiating the warmth and passion she was trying so hard to keep at bay. Grabbing hold of her in the snug, intimate loft, he had known he was damned close to sacrificing anything, even the answers to what had happened to him and J.D. over the Gulf of Mexico, just to make love to Cozie Hawthorne. But he couldn’t be that irresponsible. Not to J.D., not to himself. Not to her.

  “It’s just a flesh wound,” he lied. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Yeah, right.” J.D. was dubious. “Well, fill me in before I konk out. I’ve felt almost human again instead of like some steer being hung from a meat hook and gutted alive.”

  Daniel inhaled. “J.D.—”

  “Skip it, Danny Boy. I know you’d be in my place if you could.” He chuckled. “Though maybe I wouldn’t trade with you with that Yankee spitfire on your case.”

  “She’s protective of her brother.”

  “Right.”

  Time for a change of subject. “I haven’t had any luck locating him. I checked inns and outdoor-gear stores around town. Nothing. Nobody has hired him. Nobody knows who hired him. Trying to find a Hawthorne in Hawthorne country…” He sighed. “I’ll keep looking.”

  “Hell, if that little weasel’s guilty and we were just a goddamned bonus—”

  “I know, J.D.”

  “Rubs me the wrong way.”

  “In the course of the afternoon,” Daniel went on, “I ran into Julia Vanackern. She asked me to meet her for a drink about thirty minutes from now.”

  “You didn’t turn her down, did you?” J.D.’s voice, even his intermittent cough, was weakening.

  “Nope. I’d best make myself decent. Tell the salvage boys to do what they have to do. Spare no expense.”

  “When you’re footing the bill, Danny Boy, I never do. My advice? Cut the bullet out and disinfect the wound with alcohol. Then stay the hell away from Cozie Hawthorne.”

  It was good advice. “She can lead me to her brother.”

  “Just don’t let her lead you to anything you’ll regret. Keep your head and other vital body parts screwed on straight. I know it’s tough without me there to do it for you.”

  Daniel laughed. “Yeah, J.D., it’s real tough. I’d pay money to see you and our Ms. Cozie go toe-to-toe. Look, take care of yourself, and trust me: I’m not going to forget why I’m here.”

  Fifteen minutes later, he was in his truck cruising down Hawthorne Orchard Road, and as he passed the white clapboard farmhouse with the black shutters and orange-leafed maple trees, with the pumpkin patch and the bird feeders all barely visible in the fog and the rain, he felt Cozie’s loneliness tugging at him. She wasn’t a kid anymore, growing up on her pretty Vermont road with her brother and sister and parents, with her hard-bitten old aunt and a grandfather who’d lived into his eighties, and God only knew who else. She couldn’t be what she had been. Her life had changed.

  The parking crunch in downtown Woodstock had eased with the rain and the passing of the weekend. He found a space across from the Vermont Citizen and walked through the common, giving Alonzo Hawthorne a nod. He wondered what the old Civil War hero would think of a Texan falling for his great-great-whatever-granddaughter.

  J.D. was right. Daniel was hit bad. Dig out the bullet and pour on the alcohol and forge ahead.

  Julia Vanackern was at the bar of a dark, crowded restaurant with an eclectic Victorian decor. Daniel slid onto the stool next to her and ordered George Dickel, over ice. When he got that straightened out, he turned to Julia. Her hair shimmered in the dim light. She had on a black jumpsuit and long silver earrings and a dark red lipstick, and her eyes seemed an even deeper sapphire. She twirled a turquoise ring with the thumb of the same hand as she nursed a nearly full glass of champagne. Daniel had the feeling it wasn’t her first.

  “Hello, Major Foxworth.”

  “Just Daniel will be fine.”

  She smiled, flirtatious. “I like Major better. It’s sexier.”

  “Ms. Vanackern—”

  “Oh, don’t be so serious. And it’s Julia. Elegant name, isn’t it? Julia.” She curled it on her tongue. “To think, if dear Mummy had married Duncan Hawthorne after all I could have been a Cornelia. What would we be, rolled up into one? Julia and Cornelia. Juzie?”

  Daniel’s bourbon arrived. He paid the bartender and took a sip, and Julia swallowed more of her champagne. Her hand was trembling. Her eyes shone with tears. “Julia,” he said gently, “I can see you another time….”

  She seized his arm. “No. Don’t go. Please. This is fine.”

  Her grip eased, and Daniel extricated himself. If he’d met Julia Vanackern in Houston as planned, before the crash, before Cozie, would he have fallen for her—at least for a while?

  “I’m sorry.” She took a couple of deep breaths, calming herself. “It’s just that seeing you this morning, realizing who you were—it’s reminded me of so much I’m trying to forget. I had only met your partner for a short time. I never did get to meet you. It made witnessing your helicopter go down…” She fumbled for words. “Not easier. That’s not right: less personal. I could almost talk myself into believing I was watching it all on television.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Can you? Then can you understand that seeing you now, meeting you, dredges it all up, makes it all very real?”

  He looked at her. “It is real.”

  Her lower lip trembled with her feeble smile. “Yes.”

  Daniel drank more of his bourbon, waiting for Julia to go on. This was her show. The bar was uncrowded, the clientele young, out for a good time. Did Cozie ever come here? Or did she stay up on Hawthorne Orchard Road, her nose to the grindstone?

  Julia snatched up her glass and took a huge gulp of her champagne, her eyes focused straight ahead, at nothing. “You already know why I changed my mind about going up with you at the last minute.” It came out as an accusation, and she motioned for another champagne, still not looking at him. “Your partner saw me with Seth Hawthorne while you were racing around getting things ready to tackle your oil fire. He must have told you.”

  The bartender returned with a fresh glass of champagne. Daniel paid without a murmur of protest from Julia Vanackern. Cozie, he felt sure, would have been all over him for being presumptuous, a macho Texan, Lord only knew what.

  Julia held her glass by the stem and swirled the contents, studying the reaction. “J. D. Maguire…your partner…” She tipped her glass, taking another big swallow. “He nearly died, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. It was pure luck we both weren’t killed.”

  She gave him a sideways glance, her gleaming hair hiding one eye. “Your considerable skill as a pilot certainly helped,” she said with a sultry smile.

  Flattery had never worked on him; it didn’t now. “J.D. might not make a full recovery. If that’s the case, he won’t fight another oil fire. It’d be a hell of a loss. He’s damned good at it.”

  “What about you? Will you go back?”

  He shrugged.

  She gave her head a little shake, and her hair tumbled straight down her back, catching, it seemed, every bit of available light. “You have options J.D. doesn’t have.”

  It was obvious enough, so Daniel refrained from comment. He was going slow on his bourbon. A woman like Julia Vanackern required a man to keep his wits a
bout him.

  “Seth and I…” She breathed out, as if releasing the part of her that had to posture and pretend. “We had a brief fling this summer. At least I looked upon it as a fling. I know my mother told you he’s infatuated with me and I never returned his feelings, but she doesn’t know the whole story. I did. For a while I really did. Oh, I thought we had an understanding—a little fun, sex, a few laughs, friendship. But nothing more than that.”

  “Why not?”

  Bitterness swept across her pretty, delicate features. “A thousand reasons, and don’t pretend you don’t understand them all, Daniel Austin Foxworth.”

  He took another sip of bourbon, asking himself if he did understand; if he’d ever treated a woman the way Julia Vanackern said she’d treated Seth Hawthorne.

  “But it’s different for a man,” she went on, lightly sarcastic. “You can even marry ‘beneath’ you and get away with it. My father did. Frannie Tucker was just a pretty local girl when Dad met her. About all she knew how to do was milk cows and boil down sap into maple syrup. She considers herself lucky for having escaped that life.”

  “Did she object to your relationship with Seth?”

  “I told you: she didn’t even know about it.”

  “Because you knew she’d object.”

  “Because I knew it would never last and I might as well spare her the worry.”

  “What about your father?”

  She gave a short, bitter laugh. “I could have made love to Seth on the front lawn and Dad wouldn’t have noticed.”

  Daniel didn’t touch that one. Around them, the bar began to fill up with tourists and locals, laughing, talking among themselves. Julia seemed to draw even more into herself.

  “Seth Hawthorne works for my parents on occasion, as you well know. We built our house on his family’s land, bought his family’s paper. They’ve been struggling and scraping for two hundred years.”

  “But they’ve hung on.”

  “Thanks to us.” She drank more champagne, not as fast. “There was no other buyer for the Citizen, at least none that would have paid what we did. Maybe we should have just let it go bankrupt. I don’t know. I certainly don’t feel sorry for them. Their land is tremendously valuable. Three hundred acres in Woodstock? Give me a break. They could have sold it for a fortune when land values were so high in the eighties.”

  “Maybe making a fortune isn’t what they’re about.”

  “Being mule-headed is what they’re about. Do you think Seth needs to clear brush for a living? He could have been so much more if his father hadn’t been so stubborn—”

  “Whoa,” Daniel said, holding up a hand. “I thought he’s the one who sold the paper.”

  “He is. But he could have sold us everything—the land and the paper—and Seth wouldn’t have had to suffer. He could have gone back to school, he could have gotten out of Vermont if he’d wanted to, instead of being so tied to the land, that damned apple orchard. And his mother…You haven’t met Emily, but she’s an absolute joy. She’s suffered, too.”

  Julia seemed to sense her rising intensity and took a moment to calm herself. Daniel didn’t interrupt, just kept close watch on her reactions, the rise and fall of tears in her sapphire eyes. What was real, he wondered? What was just a show? She seemed to relish a certain level of drama in her life.

  “Seth’s a lot like his mother,” she went on quietly. “Laid-back, easy to talk to. Cozie’s more like her father: your basic rock-headed Vermonter. Meg—I don’t know her very well, but she seems to have carved out a place for herself in all that Hawthorne family history. Seth hasn’t. But they all, every one of them, suffered because Duncan Hawthorne refused to face reality: his paper was bankrupt and he couldn’t afford to sit on three hundred acres of prime Vermont land.”

  “Cozie’s success with her book must help take the edge off,” Daniel said.

  “For her. It doesn’t do a damned thing for Seth except remind him that he couldn’t save his family’s land himself.”

  “Is that so important?”

  “He cuts down trees and shows hikers around the woods, does a little of what he calls ‘property management.’ Don’t get me wrong: I’m not putting that down. But he has no future—and don’t think he doesn’t know it.”

  But was that his sister’s fault? Daniel skipped the last of his bourbon. He’d had enough. “Do you think he resents Cozie for her success?”

  She lifted her shoulders and let them fall, aware, Daniel thought, of how dramatic she was being. “I don’t know. I only know that when I realized he wanted more from me than I was willing to give—than I could give—I broke off our relationship.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “All right, I thought. Half the reason I went to Houston was to put some distance between us, psychic as well as physical distance. But I couldn’t not see him when he showed up. He just wanted to talk. I tried to be kind.”

  They were not, Daniel thought, discussing a rabid dog that had to be put down. Bottom line, Julia Vanackern shot the guy out of the saddle. She was conscious of who and what she was, and she wasn’t a woman who would have more than a “fling” with a Seth Hawthorne.

  She leaned toward him, brushing her soft shoulder against his upper arm as if by accident. “I don’t blame you for wanting to know for sure what happened to your helicopter,” she said in a half-whisper. “I saw it go down. I can understand your need to know.”

  “Julia—”

  She placed a hand on his thigh, as if supporting herself to keep from falling off the stool. She looked vulnerable and, Daniel had to admit, very beautiful. “But don’t get the idea I would share my private life with just anyone, for any reason. It cost Seth a good deal of time and money to fly down to Texas. Summer and fall are his biggest moneymaking seasons. And there was no point: he saw that right away. What we had was over. Is over. He agreed, finally, and went home.”

  Daniel, however, was nothing if not persistent. “I thought you two argued.”

  “It wasn’t an easy conversation. We both lost our tempers.”

  “Did you tell him you’d changed your mind about going up with J.D. and me?”

  “No. He’d already left when I changed my mind. My parents had caught up with me, and I decided to bag flying over an oil fire with a couple of Texans. If I’d met you first…” She managed a coy smile. “I don’t know, I might have gone up anyway.”

  “Be glad you didn’t.”

  She shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  “Your parents didn’t stick around?”

  “No. They were worried about getting in the way; your people were really hustling to get equipment together. I decided to stay awhile and watch from a safe distance. I saw your helicopter go up, and I saw it spin out of control and crash into the water. I didn’t know what to do. I started screaming. I couldn’t actually see your chopper in the water—it was too far out—and I’m not sure people believed me when I said it had gone down. Here I was, some hysterical rich girl from New York, and you were Daniel Foxworth—but you’d already radioed you were in trouble?”

  Daniel nodded, remembering.

  Hell, Danny Boy. We’re goners this time. Your granddaddy’s going to be pissed. He made me promise I’d keep you alive.

  Julia slid off the tall bar stool. “I’m glad you weren’t killed. I don’t know if I’d ever have recovered. I like to think if I’d have been on board I would have come out all right, but I’ll never know.” She lifted her eyes to his. “I wish we could have met under different circumstances, Daniel Austin Foxworth.”

  He nodded, leaving it at that. “Just one more question. Did you ever feel in any danger from Seth Hawthorne?”

  “No. Never.” The tears were back, shining, damned close, this time, to spilling down her pale cheeks. “I never could. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get back for a dinner my parents are having. I’d love to invite you, but Dad…”

  “It’s okay. Another time.”

  She smiled, her
eyes sparkling. “Yes. Another time.”

  When she’d gone, Daniel asked for a menu. Dinner out, alone, sounded good to him.

  Chapter

  11

  Cozie stopped at her brother’s place on her way to the Vanackern dinner. With the rain and fog, she’d opted for plain black wool pants and an evergreen silk charmeuse blouse, but she wished she’d tossed her mud shoes into her Jeep when she had to tramp across Seth’s sodden yard. She’d decided Daniel was right about one thing: her brother had cleared out. His story about taking hikers into the mountains was bogus. She’d checked everywhere and no one had hired him as a guide. He was in trouble. And running only made him look guilty.

  She was one of the last to arrive at the small dinner party. The rain had done a job on her hair, which she’d fortuitously pulled back with a handmade barrette. Julia greeted her at the door. “I just had a drink in town with your new tenant,” she said, leading Cozie into the living room. “You’ve heard he misled us about his identity?”

  “I’d say he more than ‘misled’ us; he outright lied.”

  Julia looked amused. “Well, let’s have him drawn and quartered. Come on in.”

  “Wait a second. Julia, I know Seth went to Texas to see you.” Cozie hesitated as laughter drifted from the next room; this was hardly the time or the place for grilling Julia Vanackern. But she plunged ahead. “You two argued before you were to go aboard the helicopter with Daniel Foxworth….”

  “Seth and I saw each other just before I was due to board the helicopter,” Julia said coolly. “It was pure coincidence. If Daniel thinks Seth had anything to do with the crash, he’s dead wrong.”

  Cozie straightened. “I agree.”

  “It was just an unfortunate accident. Seth—well, you’ll have to ask him about our relationship.” Something, her tone communicated quite clearly, she considered none of Cozie’s business. “I understand he’s on a hiking job?”

  “As far as I know. Julia, about the thefts—”

  “I don’t know anything about them. Now, do come in. Mum’s delighted you decided to join us tonight. I think she wants to show you off.”