The Workaholic Down the Hall

by Katharine Sadler

  “Hot.”

  “Very attractive man. I felt a tingle, but it's gone now and I'd like us to be the kind of friends who say what's on their mind without worrying that they've hurt the other person's feelings. I'll tell you if you cross a line.”

  Oscar smiled. “I can get behind that plan. And, since we're going to be best friends, I can ask if you're having a boy or a girl.”

  I ignored the pain his words caused. He was joking, he didn't seriously consider me his best friend, but his words still made me think of Noah, a best friend who wouldn't even talk to me. I missed him. I missed him so much I felt raw and vulnerable at the mention of the phrase best friend. Still, Oscar knew exactly how to get on my good side. “I'm having a little girl.”

  He tilted his head and gave me a smug look. “Fun clothes, fun hair, teenage drama. Name?”

  I stared at him, eyebrows high.

  He shrugged. “I have sisters and nieces, I know more than I'll ever need to know.”

  That got my attention. “You don't want to have kids?”

  Some undecipherable emotion flickered across his face. “I'd have to find a woman who felt more than a fleeting tingle for me. Doesn't seem likely.” He mock pouted, obviously joking, but there was a real sadness under the pretend sorrow.

  “Probably not,” I agreed in a haughty tone. “Might as well just give up now.”

  He laughed and his sadness faded. “So what names are you considering?”

  I gave him my list and he added to it, some of his ideas beyond ridiculous and some actually pretty cute. Then, we chatted about what we'd discovered to love in Catalpa Creek and made a plan to explore the town again later that weekend. We chatted for well over two hours and he drove me back to the cabin. I'd left the front porch light on when he'd picked me up and the place looked homey and welcoming in the middle of the dark forest. It might not be my permanent home, but Catalpa Creek was feeling more and more like the right place for me, the place I wanted to be.

  ***

  “Is she asleep?”

  “I don't know. I can't even tell if she's breathing.”

  I swam up from a deep sleep and opened my eyes. Two glowing orbs met my gaze, the rest of the face illuminated by a flashlight. It took me only seconds to assess the situation, scream at the top of my lungs and try to clamber out of bed.

  At least, that's what I would have done if a hand hadn't landed over my mouth and a strong arm hadn't held me in the bed. “It's okay,” a male voice said. “It's George. I need to talk to you for a minute. If I let go of your mouth, will you promise not to scream?”

  I shook my head, because was he serious right now? Of course, I'd scream.

  “What are you doing, George?” Nora's face popped up next to George's. “It's okay, Aubrey. We aren't going to hurt you. Do you think we could talk in the kitchen?”

  I was in crazy town. That or I'd died and gone to hell. I nodded. George released me and helped me out of bed. I followed them toward the kitchen, but stopped when I saw a lump on my couch. A human-shaped lump. “Who's that?”

  “That's what we need to talk to you about,” Nora said. “Come on, dear.”

  Another man was already in the kitchen, drinking a soda and tapping on his phone. “What's going on?” I asked. “Who's on my couch?”

  Nora sighed. “Please sit down, sweetheart. I don't think getting stressed out is good for you or the baby.”

  I looked at the clock over the stove. It was two in the morning. “If you didn't want me to get stressed out, maybe you should have left my car here and not kidnapped me. Maybe you shouldn't have woken me from a dead sleep. Maybe I'd be less stressed if there wasn't a body on the couch.”

  “He's still alive, right?” the man with the soda looked up from his phone at George.

  “Who is he?” I asked Nora.

  “He's my brother,” George said. “All you need to know is Noah is pretty drunk. He should be fine, but if he doesn't wake up in six hours, you might want to make sure he's still breathing and hasn't choked on his own vomit.”

  My breath stopped for a moment and my chest felt funny. Was I having a heart attack? “The lump on the couch is Noah? Has everyone lost their minds?”

  “It's for his own good,” Nora said. “He won't listen to reason and, if the two of you have some time together, you can figure this out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  Nora waved at my belly. “The baby. Your relationship.”

  “You kidnapped Noah so I could tell him about the baby?”

  “Kidnapped is a strong word,” George said. “I prefer drunken repositioning.”

  “Noah came to visit earlier tonight,” Nora said. “I kept you here to make sure you wouldn't come to the inn and see him before I'd told him…But he didn't want to talk about you, kept asking about me, even though I'd explained it was all a false alarm.” She shook her head, lost in thought.

  “What was a false alarm?”

  “I convinced him to come see me by telling him I thought I might be dying.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “Why would you say that?” I pulled in a deep breath. I needed to stay calm and figure this out. “You probably scared him to death.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “I'm his mother and he wouldn't come see me, not for Sunday brunch, not to help with the inn, not when I did everything but beg him to come so I could talk to him. He just said he was too busy, if he even bothered to answer my calls. The only way I could get him here was to tell him I was dying. He deserves any pain or fear he felt.” She spoke boldly, but I could see the guilt on her face. She wouldn't quite meet my eyes and she looked genuinely saddened by Noah's avoidance.

  I could empathize with her, even if what she did was wrong. “You're going to keep him here so we can talk about the baby?”

  “Not just to talk about the baby,” Nora said. She moved toward the door. “To see how perfect you are for each other.

  “This is a matchmaking scheme?” I sat down at the table across from George's brother. He looked up and gave me a sympathetic grimace before returning to his phone. “You realize you could go to jail for this, right?”

  George followed Nora toward the front door. “I'm just the muscle,” he said. “I owed my dad a few favors and this is how he chose to cash 'em in.”

  I looked to Nora, sure she had to see reason. “If your son wanted me, he had plenty of chances to tell me so. Trapping us here together won't make him love me.” I almost choked on those words, but I managed to get them out. I'd accepted he didn't love me, couldn't love me, but I hadn't figured out how not to be sad about it.

  George's brother stood and pushed his chair in. “I don't think the problem is he doesn't love you, he said—”

  “Hush up,” Nora said. “He needs to tell her.”

  “Right,” George's brother said. “Call Nora if he doesn't wake up.”

  He joined Nora and George as they crossed the living room and left. I didn't try to follow, because I wasn't going to leave Noah. I was mostly sure they wouldn't go if he was in any real danger, but I wasn't sure enough to risk leaving him.

  I crossed the room to the couch. Noah was sleeping on his side, an impressive growth of stubble that could quite fairly be called a beard obscured his face and there were dark circles under his closed lids. Even in sleep, his forehead was creased in worry. I watched his chest rise and fall, my anxiety increasing by the second. If he'd been pissed when I'd shown up at his office, how was he going to react to being trapped here in this house with me? I laced my fingers together to stop them from shaking. I had Oscar. If Noah was cruel, if he really didn't want to be there, I'd call Oscar and he'd get Noah back to Nora's Inn.

  I watched Noah sleep until I couldn't stand the silence and the dread of anticipation. I needed to do something. I pushed to my feet and wandered the house, looking for messes to right, stuff to organize. I couldn't fix Noah, I couldn't make him care about me or our baby, but I could dust base boards and arrange the boo
kshelves in alphabetical order.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Noah

  Bright sunlight warmed my face. I forced my gritty, dry eyes open. My throat was scratchy and tight. Had I been sick? Was I hung over? I hadn't been hung over since the last family get together, which was…Oh, crap, I'd been with Mom and May and there'd been alcohol and I'd needed a lot of alcohol to get through learning Mom wasn't really dying, that she'd lied to me to get me there so she could talk about…Even thinking her name hurt. I rolled away from the sun burning my retinas and made out an unfamiliar room with familiar furniture. It looked like she-who-will-not-be-mentioned's coffee table, a teak lattice-work one she'd gotten at a flea market with me, had been dropped into a huge living room with floor-to-ceiling windows. I shut my eyes and opened them again, but the scene didn't change.

  “Noah?”

  I forced myself to a sitting position, ignoring the fuzzy feeling in my head. Aubrey walked into my line of sight. She looked worried and her belly…She was wearing a tight tank top, that showed off her stunning breasts and I should have been distracted by them, but it was her belly that took my breath away and made my heart cramp like someone had punched me in the chest. “You're pregnant?”

  “Yes.” She looked so, so sad. Was this a dream? It had to be. Or a hallucination. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, but she was still there, still pregnant, still looking incredibly sad.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked. “How did I get here?”

  She sat in an armchair next to the couch and sighed. “We're in a cabin in Catalpa Creek. Nora, she…She just wanted to explain and you wouldn't listen, so she may have had a couple guys bring you here after you passed out last night.”

  “They brought me here while I was passed out?” This wasn't a dream, it was a nightmare. “My mother would never…” I looked at Aubrey again. “You. You wanted to talk to me, so you got my mother involved and convinced her to. . .” I looked around. Why was Aubrey's furniture in Catalpa Creek? My head hurt and I felt foggy and out of it. None of this made any sense.

  “Noah, I know this has got to be overwhelming and crazy for you. If you'd just let me explain…”

  “Let you explain? After you dragged my mother into this mess and convinced her to kidnap me? What are you doing in Catalpa Creek? Have you completely lost your mind?” Okay, I admit I was talking a little crazy myself, but my mother wasn't the sort of person to be okay with kidnapping anyone. She cried at Hallmark commercials, for fuck's sake. More likely this was some scheme concocted by Aubrey and May, and focusing on that seemed a hell of a lot better than wondering who the hell had laid his hands on Aubrey and gotten her pregnant.

  Aubrey wasn't cowed by my anger or my brusque tone. In fact, she narrowed her eyes and squared her shoulders in a posture I knew meant she was well and truly pissed. “I can't talk to you until you calm down. And I won't sit here and be accused of something I didn't do.” She pushed to her feet, which would have made a much better dramatic exit if it hadn't taken her three attempts to get on her feet. I watched her struggle and I wanted to go to her, to help her, but touching her would make me forget that I was pissed at her. I needed to stay angry, until I figured out how bad this was going to hurt. She finally got to her feet and stalked out of the room. “If you want to talk, I'll be on the back porch.”

  I watched her go and all I wanted to do was get the hell out of that house and never look back. It was bad enough she'd left me, she'd turned her back on me, and now she was trapping me in a house with her when she was carrying another man's baby? When she was probably still with some other guy. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes to get rid of that image. Why was she doing this to me? What could she possibly want from me? I had nothing left to give her and I hated to see her, hated to think of her knocked up by some other guy. Some guy who'd stripped her clothes off and gripped her hips while he…I shook my head. Aubrey had been my friend once and I should be happy for her. I was happy for her. I just needed to get out of the house and be happy for her from farther away.

  I found my shoes by the front door and headed outside. The door wasn't nailed shut, so that was a good sign. I walked out onto the front porch to see trees. Trees and an empty driveway. It was the first indication that Aubrey might not be the one orchestrating this kidnapping. I didn't see a garage attached to the house, so maybe she was as stuck as I was. No. There had to be more to it than that. She probably just wanted me to think she was trapped, so that she could…I pushed that thought aside and started walking.

  I had a company to run, a company to save from bankruptcy, and I needed to find some way to get back to Atlanta. If Aubrey had something to tell me…She could tell me over the phone. Maybe if I promised to take her call once I was back in Atlanta, she'd let me go.

  I walked for a good twenty minutes down some back-country road that twisted and turned down the mountain without seeing any sign of civilization. Two cars and three trucks flew by me on their way somewhere, but I wasn't quite ready to risk my life trying to hitch hike out of there. I'd turn around and convince Aubrey to be reasonable.

  I could get back to the office, back to figuring out how to save the family company, which was my father's legacy and the future wealth for me and my siblings and their children. I didn't dwell too long on how much the idea of going back to the office sounded bleak and unpromising. It was what I had to do, it was my job to take care of the family, as it had been since I was a kid. Now, it was also my job to ensure a prosperous future for them.

  I put together a mental list of names, people who might be interested in buying the Brantley properties, in the event the current prospective buyers fell through. Nothing was ever certain in business and I'd learned a long time ago it was smart to have at least two back-up plans. If my father had been more of a planner, maybe we wouldn't be in the situation we were in now.

  I climbed the stairs back up to the cabin. It was an impressive house, almost looked like new construction, and I wondered if Aubrey had bought the place. Maybe she and the baby's father had bought it together. I wondered what he'd think of me being stuck there with her. The thought almost made me smile.

  Aubrey wasn't in the living room, but I could see her through a back window, on the porch in a rocking chair. The sun was shining on her, but there was a chill in the air and a cold wind. I started toward the back door, to make sure she was sufficiently bundled up, but I stopped myself. She wasn't my problem. She'd made sure of that.

  While she was outside, I could search the house for a cell phone or a computer, some way out of there. My stomach grumbled with hunger, but I ignored it. I couldn't take time to eat and risk being caught by Aubrey before I'd found a way out of this mess. A niggling voice in the back of my brain reminded me that Aubrey was a kind person and one of the more reasonable people I'd ever met, but I ignored it. I stalked into the kitchen and spotted a land line phone on the counter. That was way too easy.

  I'd lunged for the phone and had started dialing Jill's number, when I spotted the note on the counter. I placed the phone back on the receiver and read the note my mother had left for Aubrey. She apologized for tricking Aubrey and promised it was for the best. My heart sank. What the hell was my mother up to? And why the hell had I been such an asshole to Aubrey? She was in the same situation I was in. I was three steps toward the back porch before I stopped myself. I needed to talk to my mother before I faced Aubrey. I needed some answers.

  Mom answered on the third ring.

  “What the hell, Mom?” I asked. “You kidnapped me?”

  “I like to think of it as an enforced vacation, Noah, dear,” she said in a sweet, innocent voice. “You work too hard. It'll be good for you to get away from it all for a while.”

  I somehow managed not to growl at my mother. She had no idea of the serious situation we were in with the family business. She didn't understand what she was pulling me away from. And I wasn't about to tell her. She had enough to worry about with the inn. “An enforced vacati
on with Aubrey? What's really going on here?”

  She was silent so long, I thought she'd hung up on me, but there was no dial tone. “You haven't talked to Aubrey, yet, have you?”

  “I'm talking to you, Mother, the one who kidnapped me.”

  “And I'm telling you to talk to Aubrey.” Her tone firmed up to that familiar steel Mother's voice. “And be nice to her. She doesn't deserve your anger.”

  That one caught me unawares and hit me right in the solar plexus. “She left me, Mother. She left with no explanation. Do you know how hard it was to find a new assistant?” I still hadn't found one who came anywhere near Aubrey's level of expertise.

  “You're determined to be hard-headed, I see. Just talk to Aubrey, listen to her, and admit the hardest part of her leaving you had nothing to do with her job.”

  I did growl that time. Aubrey was at fault here and my mother was taking her side. “I don't owe her anything,” I said, my teeth clenched. “She didn't bother to return a single one of my calls or my texts when she left. I spent three days calling every hospital and police station in town, because I was sure…” I couldn't even say the words, couldn't go back to those days when I'd been possessed by sheer terror that something horrible had happened to Aubrey, that someone had hurt her. “Just get me out of here. Aubrey and I have nothing to talk about.”

  Mom sighed. “Did you ever think, Noah, that you might not have been the only one hurting? Did you not consider that you might have hurt Aubrey when you pretended not to remember having sex with her?” Mom whispered the word sex, but she might as well have shouted it at full volume for how hard it hit my ears.

  “She told you that?” Why was it suddenly hard to breathe?

  “So, you do remember? You admit you were pretending. Didn't you consider how that might have hurt Aubrey?”