by Mary Brady
She smiled and a shot of courage buzzed inside her.
The door swung open and the man who appeared in the dim light was not the slick swindler she had seen in Boston, nor the Maine backwoodsman. Nor was he the man who would show up briefly, a glittering beacon of humility according to her sister, Savanna, at the holiday parties for Hale and Blankenstock where her sister had met him exactly twice. He would stay for a few minutes, greet each employee and then leave, according to Savanna.
Everyone now knew the glittering beacon was part of a lie.
Hat in hand, the shadows made the furrow of his brows deeper and his unguarded expression more dramatic. He was handsome in his rough and outdoorsy look, and in this moment he appeared to be a man who had many troubles to deal with, many concerns for which he had to be responsible.
Under other circumstances, she might want to walk up to him, put her hands flat on his chest and brush his damp hair back off where it had fallen on his forehead. She would sweep her hand across the furrows of his brows, draw his head down and put her lips against his full and slightly drawn ones. And...
What was she thinking?
This was the enemy of the people.
Hale slowly swung his gaze in her direction as if he had expected her to be there. His features relaxed to neutral, he became a hybrid between woodsman, because of the four-or five-day growth of sandy whiskers, and slick swindler, because of years of practice.
Addy drew in a breath to sort out her thoughts.
“I wanted to speak with you,” she said into the silence. They were in his territory, and short of death by storm or felony theft of his SUV, she was stuck here. She wanted to sound nonconfrontational, perhaps professorish, someone who was just looking for facts, not trying to crucify him.
If his guard went down to anywhere near what it had been when he had opened the door, she’d get something related to the truth, or at least as much of the truth as a person like him could find in his life.
He didn’t answer, but hung his hat on a peg, turned and walked out.
Degenerate...
Running away. Or maybe it was a ploy to have her follow him and then he’d get her out of the loft and out of his hair if he ran back inside and locked the door with her on the outside.
A kid’s game, like musical chairs. She’d be left out. Too bad, so sad. But that was not going to happen.
Make herself useful. That’s what she should do.
What did men like? Couldn’t resist?
She looked at the bags of groceries on the island counter.
Food. Even swindlers had to eat.
She couldn’t cook at all—not even boil a decent pot of water, but maybe she could manage something. She grabbed the nearest bag and started poking around.
Fusilli? Other than being pasta—she knew because she could see its curly shape through the window in the box—she hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t needed to know what it was named to eat it. Nope. Just stick a fork in it.
Cans of plain tomato sauce. What the heck was she supposed to do with that?
The door across the room popped open and Hale entered with his arms bulging with firewood. He turned his back to her as he unloaded and stacked wood in the bin near the fireplace.
Then he walked out again.
A fire, of course. She was probably much better at fire-starting than cooking. Actually, she once tried to combine the two. Unfortunately, the smell of burned pizza stuck around her condo, and to be fair, the hall of her building, for a week.
She hustled over to the fireplace and searched for fire-starter logs or those cute pinecones stuffed with candle wax or something to make fires start easier.
There wasn’t so much as a fireplace match, just a book of matches with the name of the bar in town. Braven’s. She could have, should have stayed there in the bar. Too late.
She poked around for fire-starting aids and gave up.
She wasn’t any better at fire-starting than she was at cooking, so when she heard the footsteps on the stairs, she fled back to the kitchen area where she could keep the center island between them, duck behind it if she had to.
He unloaded the wood and knelt on the floor in front of the fireplace. Then he reached inside and opened the flue. Oh, she would not have remembered that. With wood chips and bits of flimsy bark, he started a small fire, feeding it twigs and shards of wood, and of course, he had used the stubby matches.
Just like now, she always managed to have someone around to start her fires and usually to cook. She wondered if he expected her to do it, to cook. Good luck with that one, buddy.
The fire grew tall and she was a bit envious. She’d have to research fire-starting when she had time.
When the fire blazed, he stood and headed in her direction.
His sandy blond brows drew together in fierce concentration. There was clearly a side of this man she knew nothing about, possibly a deeply dark and sinister side. She should be running away. She should go back to the house, push the four-poster bed up against the door and tie the sheets together to let herself out the window in case she needed to flee into the storm.
He paused and dropped his keys into a dish on the long table behind the couch.
His expression did not challenge nor welcome as he continued toward the kitchen.
Nonreactive. Ego-sheltered.
Serial killer? Chain-saw murderer? At least the two of them weren’t in a basement alone. A basement? Did the place have a basement? Yes, the lift up doors in the breezeway would lead to a cellar of some kind. Maybe that’s where she’d be buried.
She was crazy, the chatter in her head crazier.
Maybe it was he who should be afraid.
As he drew closer, he seemed to grow in size and his expression in intensity. She stiffened, searching for the best exit if she had to run.
And then she relaxed.
Yeah.
She could run away, go back to a world where she would cover stories for microfame and a couple of dollars.
Then she could go live under a bridge in a refrigerator box and wear newspapers on her feet and stuffed into the sleeves of her lightweight coat as she had done when she investigated and had written the series Life Without a Cause to critical acclaim only four short years ago.
Hale came around the counter and stopped a mere two feet from her. He placed one hand, deliberately it seemed, on the counter beside her, and she inhaled.
By being here in his living space, she had made her move, set out her pawn. The next move was his.
A second later he stepped around her to the freezer, from which he took two glass bowls filled with something green. He took off the lids, popped them into the microwave and covered them with a sheet of crinkly sounding paper he’d taken from a box in the drawer under the microwave.
Eat? His move was to feed her. Or maybe he was hungry and planned to eat both...in front of her...while she salivated.
Addy watched the bowls spin on the microwave’s carousel and then realized he was heating pea soup.
Food was a good move on his part. She hadn’t eaten since early this morning. If she accepted food from him, she would be in his debt.
Yeah, as if she wasn’t already—deeply.
He pulled two plates from the cupboard.
He was dreadful at portraying himself as a bad guy, or he was as “diabolically clever” as the tabloids had called him when they alluded to his making off with a few billion dollars.
If she didn’t have an absolutely reliable source, she would begin to doubt the veracity of her facts. The SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, a U.S. government agency set up to prevent investment fraud, had come down hard on Hale and Blankenstock.
More importantly, according to her younger sister, Savanna, this guy was worse than a robbe
r or a thief who stole once and disappeared into the night, Hale was heartless. He had repeatedly taken from Savanna—trusting, single mother Savanna—and many others.
He went back to the fire, hunkered down and carefully placed a pair of logs on the flaming pile. He stayed squatted, silhouetted in the soft light until the fire roared.
He looked handsome. And fit. She wondered how fit—she couldn’t help it, picturing him naked and... It was easy to see, this man lifted heavy things, not just fountain pens and martini glasses.
She shook her head at the silliness of her thoughts.
He had set out a pea soup pawn. Now she was going to have to sit down and eat with him or give up the game without trying and walk back to town beaten down by the storm and failure.
Lunch it was, and so be it.
She pulled open a drawer in the butcher-block island and found place mats and napkins that most likely had never been used. Carefully she set them on the table in strategic places. At right angles so she could better watch him when she wanted and ignore him if it seemed necessary.
She took the plates he had placed on the counter, where they would have sat side by side on the bar stools, and moved them to the table.
If she was to get a story, if she was going to find out what made this guy tick, she’d have to make nice. Pea soup with a swindler. She had done scary things before to get to the truth.
She’d do worse to get his real story if need be.
She opened another drawer where she supposed spoons would be and bingo, there was a tray of flatware. She took a soupspoon for him and a teaspoon for her. Soupspoons were too large and made her slurp soup. She preferred a teaspoon where the contents cooled faster and the spoon fit her mouth. Her former boyfriend had called her a delicate flower for demanding such things. He never did understand her.
Her former boyfriend had also deserted her when the fiction she had unwittingly written had hit the fan.
Former. Back in the part of her life when she soared, Wesley had stuck himself to her side whenever she was home in Boston. He hadn’t liked the falling-flat part, however, so he split quickly, taking with him everything from her condo she had thought was theirs.
So long and good luck.
When Hale left the fire, he came over to where she stood waiting for the microwave to finish. Reaching into the cupboard beside her head, he grabbed a bag of oyster crackers.
He smelled of wood smoke and she could feel the heat of the fire radiating from him. She inhaled and when she shivered, the quaking in her knees wasn’t just because the place was one degree warmer than freezing. She wanted to...move in on the story, grab it and not let go until she had everything she could ever want.
But she held her ground. Letting him know how eager she was would not help her bond with his deepest soul.
When he took the oyster crackers and turned away toward the table she asked, “Why are you doing this? Why are you treating me as if you don’t hate me? You must hate me.”
“You give yourself too much credit,” he responded calmly without turning around.
Good one, she thought. Attack her and keep her on edge. Maybe he didn’t want to play nice after all.
“All right.” She moved around so she could see his face. “You don’t hate me, but you know why I’m here. Is there anything you want to tell me?”
His shoulders stiffened and he drew in a breath. “You have all your facts and you’re looking for that personal touch to make your story more sensational.” Again his words were not angry.
Under his assessing gaze, she suddenly felt as if he knew exactly who and what she was. As if he had been there that day when her source in Afghanistan had been exposed as a liar.
She felt the humiliation try to submerge her again, as if he was qualified to judge her.
She gathered her wits. “You did what you did and I came here to try to make some sense of it. To try to understand.”
In Afghanistan she had been stupid and too eager. She had almost caused others to lose their lives, and that might make her as morally corrupt as he was.
Disgust and repugnance aimed at herself suddenly seemed much worse than it had ever been. It made her sick to her stomach, made her head flood with the images floating around on the internet that portrayed her to be the lowest kind of life-form.
She looked up and he was standing almost toe-to-toe with her.
“What do you think you will be trying to understand?”
His question brought her back into reality, the loft, the hurricane, the many people this man had cheated. His words had been soft as if trying to assess her again, not to challenge her.
“How—how things started. I thought you might tell me how things started.”
He stepped away but watched her warily.
With both palms pressed to the counter she continued. “Did it start out as a swindle?”
She expected him to smile at this, to pull out his charm to deflect her. Perhaps put on enough of a show to make her believe he had been wronged, to make her go sit in the four-poster room and use what she already had about him, type up a tidy article that looked just like everyone else’s.
Not to dig around inside his head for deeper motives. Maybe his mother withheld love. Maybe his father exiled him to the military academy he attended for four years and supposedly hated.
He didn’t smile at all. He looked tired. He had a right to be exhausted. She’d give him that. He had been out saving boats and rescuing women who wanted to tear his life apart. And that was exactly what she wanted to do, to tear his life apart as he had torn apart her sister’s.
She wanted to disassemble him.
Limb by limb, she thought and then asked, “At what point did you realize things were spinning out of control? That you were going to have to distance yourself from the fray so as to look innocent?”
CHAPTER FOUR
AS IF ADDY hadn’t spoken, Hale walked away and brought one bowl of soup from the microwave and placed it on a plate she had set on the table. Then he returned to the microwave for the other. She was sure he was going to put the second bowl back in the refrigerator or even pour it down the drain or, better, over her head.
He did none of the above.
He placed the second bowl on the other plate and looked over at her with a look that said, “Sit.”
She scrambled to do so—for the story, of course, and because she was really, truly, so very desperately hungry.
He sat after she did. Either there were old-school manners in this man, or perhaps, this was her last supper and he wanted to be in a position to run her down if she tried to escape. At least she wouldn’t die hungry, she thought as she instinctively slid back on the heavy wood-and-leather chair.
Hands in her lap, ’cause she had some manners, too, she sat and waited for his lead. “Behave like them and they may treat you as one of them” had been the advice of one of her instructors in college and—sometimes the magic worked. It had when she donned the clothing and the persona of an Afghani peasant woman—or it had worked for a while.
He put his napkin on his lap. She did the same.
After he took his first taste of the soup, she sipped a bit of hers. It was delicious and soon she had to slow herself down, so she floated a few small oyster crackers on top of her soup. As she savored the next mouthful it occurred to her that she was concentrating too much on the food, the conversation being nonexistent.
She snapped her gaze to Hale’s face.
He seemed to be ignoring her or if she left her ego out, he was thinking about something that troubled him. So should he be. He should be thinking about all the people’s lives that he’d ruined, all the heartache he’d caused, all the money he had gained and was going to lose.
Then why did he look so damned mouth-watering? She swiped her lips
with her napkin. His sun-highlighted hair, thick, short on the sides and not too long on the top, almost always perfectly styled and trimmed often. Today it had been finger-combed, in an endearingly youthful way. He looked vulnerable without his facade.
If he wasn’t so morally corrupt and she wasn’t so desperate to get at the truth, he might even look...enticing.
She yanked her brain away from that vein of perilous thinking and scrambled for a question to ask.
She needed something affable. Be his friend. Be someone he wanted to talk to, a houseguest with whom he’d at least speak politely. If swindlers spoke politely when they didn’t have to speak at all.
“The home.” She nodded in the direction where the big old house sat connected to the garage via the breezeway. “The antiques in the home are lovely. Tell me about some of the history over there. If you wouldn’t mind.” She added the last part with a warm smile.
The narrow-eyed look he gave her said he knew exactly what she was doing and why, but he cleared his throat and after a moment of silence said, “The home was built in the early 1800s by the man who originally established the town.”
“The Bailey of Bailey’s Cove.”
“Liam Bailey. He built the house for the woman he loved.” Hale’s words sounded as if he read them from a brochure, but at least he wasn’t declining to speak with her.
“How many generations ago did this ancestor of yours live?”
“The builder lived in the early 1800s, about eight generations back, but he isn’t my ancestor.”
She tipped her head and raised an eyebrow. “You live in his ancestral home and are the keeper of the family history. What do his descendents say?”
“No one knew until recently that he had descendents.”
“Missing descendents sounds interesting.” Juicy, better than gold in most people’s lives. She almost added, “Tell me about it,” but one could only use that phrase twice at best before an interviewee started feeling strip-mined.
He didn’t reply and Addy feared she might have worn out her welcome already.
The wind blew outside and a branch or something clattered against the roof. The raging storm had kept every other journalist away from this story and she had no intention of blowing it now.