Something about seeing her always knocked him for a loop, though. She was fantastic, plain and simple. Full of fire. She’d come to the New Skye News from a paper in Illinois, having grown up in the Midwest. He couldn’t imagine why, or that she’d be staying long. Big talents didn’t tend to settle down in podunk towns like this.
No matter how much some of the podunk citizens would like them to stay.
Instead of daydreaming about Sam Pettit, though, he really should be tracking the candidate down, finding out what the hell could have given Sam the impression there was a personal relationship happening between Adam and Phoebe Moss. At least that interpretation was preferable to the real one. He’d managed to divert the reporter’s attention by making her mad—it was always fun to watch Sam flare up—but he really didn’t want the fact of Adam’s speech therapy broadcast to the voters. Tommy planned to keep their one liability as low key as possible, which meant keeping Adam out of sight until Labor Day. And having as little to do with Sam Pettit, Brash Girl Reporter, as possible.
He clicked his tongue and shook his head. The sacrifices he made for his best friend. Adam would do the same for him, he had no doubt.
And then they’d drink their way through the long, lonely nights. Single, miserable, but together.
THE FIRST KISS HAPPENED by accident. Phoebe would have sworn to that.
One moment, she and Adam were standing at the edge of the pasture after his session, watching Brady and Rob frolic in the hot, windy July twilight while Cristal and Marian munched their hay. In the next instant, a sharp flash of lightning bleached the night, even as a slap of thunder whipped the horses into a breakneck race from fence to fence. Then the sky ripped open, shedding a torrent of needle-sharp raindrops.
Adam grabbed Phoebe’s hand and dragged her to the nearest shelter, which was his truck. He pushed her into the passenger seat, slammed the door almost before her foot was out of the way, and sprinted to the other side, throwing himself in just as another bolt of lightning struck nearby.
“D-damn, that’s s-some st-storm.” He gazed at her across the cab, his brows drawn together, the raindrops on his face highlighted by the interior lights. “Are you okay?”
Phoebe nodded, taking off her water-spotted glasses and setting them on the dashboard. “I don’t think I’ll melt from a little rain.”
“What about the h-horses?”
“They don’t melt, either.” She grinned at him, then turned to follow his gaze through the rain-sheeted windshield. The only horse visible through the dark was a ghostly presence under the trees. “Marian’s the boss mare,” Phoebe told him. “She’s calmed down, so I think the others have, too.”
“Sh-shouldn’t we b-bring them in?”
“They’re safer in the pasture, I think. Horses are meant to be outside in all weathers—they have good instincts for danger.”
“And the d-dogs?”
The question surprised her, warmed her. “They’re in the barn, I’m sure. They know how to stay dry.”
Just then, the interior lights shut off, leaving them truly in the dark, with rain drumming on the roof, gusts of wind rocking the heavy truck, and lightning dancing across the four corners of the sky.
With a sigh, Phoebe settled into her seat. “I do love thunderstorms.”
“Wh-why?” Adam knelt in the driver’s seat and reached into the back seat, searching, rattling paper and plastic.
“I guess it’s the idea of a force we can’t contain, can’t control, despite all our technology, all our building and mechanical expertise. A storm demands that you acknowledge your own lack of power in the universal plan.”
He sat down again, with some white cloth in his hand. “That’s n-not an idea I f-find c-comforting. I bought T-shirts today. Want to dry off?”
Laughing, she took the one he offered. “You’re sacrificing your new T-shirts?”
“They’ll wash.” In only a few seconds, he had scrubbed his face and hair dry. “Not much we can do about our clothes. Unless you want me to turn on the heater.”
“Oh, no. It’s warm enough.” Phoebe sat up and pulled her braid over her shoulder, then began blotting water out of her hair from the top down. The process took a long time. And she could feel Adam watching her every movement, every moment.
“You have beautiful hair,” he said finally, quietly.
The air in the truck seemed to be getting closer, heavier. “Thank you.”
“Would it dry faster if you unbraided it?”
“Um…probably. But that’s okay.”
“Let me.” Before she really knew what was happening, Adam had leaned forward and taken her braid out of her hands. The band slipped off and in the darkness she watched his tanned fingers weaving through her hair. The gentle tug against her scalp stopped her breath. The occasional brush of his touch against her bare arm seemed likely to stop her heart.
The braid began just at the nape of her neck. By the time Adam’s hands came so close, she had closed her eyes, trying with all her willpower not to melt, not to fling herself across the seat and devour him. Her pulse thundered in her ears, in her fingertips, deep in her belly.
This was not the behavior of a professional therapist.
“Th-there.” His voice was a whisper in the storm. He combed his spread fingers through the whole length of her hair.
Phoebe shivered. Her “Thanks” was soundless.
“Are you c-cold?” He reached back for another T-shirt. “C-cover up with this.”
She didn’t protest, because she couldn’t speak. Somehow, in the process of draping the shirt across her shoulders, their hands met, clasped. His face was close, his blue eyes the only glint of light.
Then his mouth touched hers. Lightly, tenderly, almost tentative. She could have stopped him with no trouble at all.
Had she wanted to. Had she thought about it.
But Phoebe didn’t. She thought about his taste, a hint of sugar from the ice tea she’d served, edged with lemon from the slice she’d added along with a mint sprig. Plus something much deeper, darker, richer…Adam. Parting her lips, she offered him more of herself.
After a second’s hesitation, he answered. The kiss went deep and long. Around them, the air got hot, and the sounds of their sighs, their gasps, drowned out the rain. They faced each other across the barrier of the console, mouths fused, hands holding tight.
Phoebe thought, More.
With that word though, awareness spiked her brain. Breathing hard, she pulled away. “Adam…”
He let her go immediately and dropped back into the driver’s seat. “G-God.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “I’m s-so s-sorry.”
Phoebe reached out, then drew her hand back. “N-no. D-don’t be.” In the silence, she realized the rain had slowed to a patter. “B-but we c-can’t do th-this again.” She grabbed her glasses, opened the door and dropped out of the truck, right into a puddle. “Aack!”
Adam had come around to her side. “C-could th-things g-get worse? Are your sh-shoes r-r-ruined?”
“P-probably.” She should have known better than to give in to vanity and wear her linen sandals, just because he was coming. “That’s okay.”
“I can carry you to the house.”
Didn’t that sound like a recipe for delight…and disaster? “D-don’t b-be silly. I’ll just take them off.” She suited action to words, then faced the pasture, where the horses had become visible under a clearing sky. “See, they’re all fine. They love the rain. And they love to roll in the mud,” she added, as Brady demonstrated that particular horse behavior.
The sound of many paws riffling wet grass warned of the dogs’ approach. “Watch out,” she warned. And “Stay,” she told them. But Gawain and Gally and Lance had decided never to bother The Man. They flopped on her opposite side, lolling in the wet grass.
Phoebe turned back to Adam. “So, everything and everybody is fine.” More or less. “The rain will have done the pasture a world of good. If you’ll lock the ga
te as you leave, we’ll settle in for the night.”
“S-sure.” He stared down at the ground for a long moment. “I-I’m s-sorry,” he said, when he looked up at her. “It w-won’t happen again.”
“It’s okay. But…” Fingering her glasses, she drew a deep breath. “I think perhaps I ought to transfer you to my partner, Jenna. She can meet with you at the office in the evenings, when her husband is home to care for her baby. S-seeing you out here, at m-my home, is asking f-for tr-trouble. You’re making pr-progress, I d-don’t want you to stop your therapy. Jenna’s wonderful, and—”
“N-no.” Adam held up a hand. “That won’t b-be n-nec-c-c…w-we don’t have to d-do that. I’ll m-meet you at your office d-during the d-day.”
She didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried. “Are you s-sure?”
He nodded. “I’ll c-c-call your s-secretary f-for an ap-p-pointment. ’N-night.”
Watching the truck’s taillights diminish in the darkness, Phoebe understood his abrupt departure. His control was almost gone. Hers wasn’t much better. They needed to separate, to reflect and recover.
To regret.
“N-NOTHING,” ADAM SAID at dinner the next night at the diner. “N-nothing at all b-between Ph-Phoebe and m-me. Except…you know.”
Tommy nodded. “I believe you. But Sam Pettit must have some reason for thinking you two have a thing going.”
Across the table, Adam stirred butter into his mashed potatoes. “D-don’t know what. I n-never s-see her except for s-s-sessions.”
“She could put two and two together, if she saw you going into the office.”
Adam shook his head. “I’ve b-been g-going to Phoebe’s house.”
“Her house?” Tommy leaned back against the booth. “That’s cozy, isn’t it?”
Staring out the window, his friend misunderstood the implication—deliberately, Tommy thought. “It’s a n-nice p-p-place. But,” Adam said, bringing his gaze back to the table, “I’ll be g-going to the office from n-now on.”
There was clearly more to that story than met the eye and ear—maybe Sam was right. “You need to tell me, DeVries, if there’s something I should know. I can’t be ambushed by anything in this campaign. You know how hard surprises are to deal with after the fact.”
“I do know. Th-there w-won’t b-be any s-surprises.” He grinned and offered his hand. “D-double t-trouble p-promise,” he said, using the words and the shake they’d created as kids twenty-five years ago.
“Must be serious,” Abby said, arriving at their table with two servings of red velvet cake. “I haven’t seen you guys use that sign for years and years.” She set down the plates and blew a breath off her lower lip that lifted her brown bangs. “Lord, wouldn’t you like to be that young again?”
Tommy pulled over a piece of cake, then looked at his friend. “I don’t know—I kinda like being over the legal drinking age. And the women are easier to get when they’re older than twenty-one. What do you think? Would you be a kid again?”
Adam shook his head. “N-not on your l-l-life.”
“YOU’VE MADE REMARKABLE progress,” Phoebe said on a Friday at the end of August, as they sat together in her office. “Your blocks are way down, your repetitions significantly reduced. And your speed continues to improve.” She showed Adam the charts from the recording and analyzing machines in her office. “I’m very impressed.”
Adam pretended to study the papers. “That’s g-good.” She was happy to be doing her job well. He was happy to be making headway against the stutter. His mother called at least twice a day, trying to argue him out of the campaign. Two out of three wasn’t bad.
“Has there been much of a problem at work?” She took back the file, then walked around to sit in her chair behind the desk, as if she needed a huge piece of cherry wood to keep him a bay. “Losing an hour three mornings a week must make a difference.”
“It’s n-not as if I’m indi-di-disp…” He shrugged. “I’ve g-got g-good foremen.”
Phoebe nodded, still in professional mode. “I’m glad to hear you’re relaxing about work. And your kickoff rally takes place next weekend, right?” She tucked a small curl behind her ear and smoothed it down.
Every time he’d seen her since that stormy night, she’d worn her hair pulled back tight in a knot on the crown of her head with hardly a wisp escaping. He supposed she thought the repressed hair made her unattractive, cooled his urge to seduce her.
What he felt, though, was a desire to take her by the shoulders and shake her until all the pins holding that knot fell out, and then kiss her until neither of them was thinking a single coherent word, much less saying one.
Of course, that wasn’t why he came to see her, was it? “Yes. The c-c-campaign starts Labor D-Day.”
“So now’s the time to write your speech. When you come next Tuesday, bring the rough draft with you. We’ll start practicing. Don’t write with half a mind on whether you can say that word, or this one. Write what you want to tell the people who are listening. We’ll work on getting the writing into spoken words.”
“S-sounds g-good.” He winced at the stutter, felt his fingers start to curl into a fist and deliberately relaxed them.
Phoebe stood up. “Excellent. You remembered to ease up. It’ll become natural soon enough.” She gave him that distant “time’s up” therapist’s smile. “See you Tuesday.”
Adam still wanted to shake her. Instead, he nodded, without a smile. “Tuesday.”
He did give Willa a grin on his way out. She was a nice lady, proud of her grandchildren and willing to talk about them with anyone who’d listen. Adam had learned to listen a long time ago. Now he had to talk.
Over the weekend, working with Tommy and on his own, he crafted his speech. He’d majored in engineering at Georgia Tech, and writing had always been easier than talking, so he knew his way around an effective paragraph.
Tuesday morning, he entered Phoebe’s office and laid the text of his speech in front of her on the desk. “Here’s m-my homework.”
She looked up with that damned professional smile. “Oh, good. Have a seat.” Her rapid scan of the pages did nothing at all for his ego. In just a minute, she offered them back to him, along with a red pen. “Now, what I want you to do is underline the words you think will give you trouble. Every single one.”
For a minute, Phoebe thought Adam would turn around and walk out of her office, never to return. He didn’t take the papers, only stared at her with his brows lowered and his blue eyes sparking like flint. She struggled to stay calm, to keep her smile and her hand steady, while her heart pounded like the engine of a freight train.
Finally, he drew the pages from between her fingers. “Sure. N-no prob-blem.”
The room temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees as Adam sat with his back to her at a nearby table, going through his speech. Phoebe attempted to work on another client’s file, but the scratch of that red pen filled the silence and her thoughts.
When he gave her back the papers, every line of every page had been neatly underlined in red. “Adam!”
He shrugged as he sat down across the desk. “You s-said underline the words I thought would g-give m-me tr-trouble. I think any and all of them could tr-trip me up.”
She slapped her hands flat against the desk. “You’re b-b-behaving like a th-th-third-grader.”
“You’re acting l-like a third g-grade teacher.”
At this moment, his stutter wasn’t as bad as hers. How crazy was that? “I am tr-trying t-to d-do what you h-hired m-me f-for.”
“You’re so afraid I’m g-going to attack you, you c-can barely l-l-look me in the eye.”
“That’s r-rid-di-c…not true.”
Adam folded his arms. “I think it is.”
“I c-can’t get involved with you. It’s uneth-thical.”
“Nobody’s asking you to.”
He might as well have punched her. Phoebe stared at the man across the desk for a silent minute. “G-get ou
t.”
“My time’s not up.” She understood his point—since that night in the storm she’d been careful not to let their sessions run over.
“Today it is.” Standing by the open door, she held his speech in her hand for him to collect as he left. “R-read through this aloud at l-l-least five t-t-times t-tonight. We’ll w-work on it again t-tomorrow.”
Adam took the pages. “I might not make it tomorrow.”
Phoebe shrugged. “It’s your political c-career.”
She heard him swear under his breath as he strode down the hallway and out the front door. Poor Willa at the reception desk didn’t even get the usual goodbye smile.
Jenna stepped out of her office. “What happened? Clients don’t often storm out of here.”
Phoebe leaned against the doorframe. “We w-weren’t m-making progress.”
Her partner’s eyes sharpened as she heard the stutter. “Are you okay?”
“I will be.” She’d been through worse—much worse—with her family. Surely she could survive this, too.
He was, after all, just a client. Right? Not someone she cared about.
And a horse, she thought, going back to her desk, is just a way to get from here to there.
TOMMY WAS SITTING IN their regular booth when Adam got to the Carolina Diner Tuesday night. “Too bad Charlie doesn’t serve anything stronger than beer. You look ragged, man.”
“Thanks.” Adam smiled at Abby as she set down his tea.
“You must have had a really bad day,” she said, flipping to a new page in her order book. “Or are you coming down with that summer cold everybody else has?” She put the back of her wrist against his forehead. “You don’t feel like you have a fever.”
“I d-d-don’t.”
“He can’t get sick,” Tommy said. “He’s got the big rally day coming up. Gotta make an impression on all those folks who show up for free food.”
“I’m not s-sick. J-just tired.” Adam rubbed his eyes. “I think I’ll have a b-burger and fries, Abby.”
“Make mine an Italian sub, warm.”
The Last Honest Man Page 7