She started walking toward the gate. "I'm not bringing in a replacement while Bear's still breathing.Keith can handle things here tomorrow, Tom. I'm going home, taking some aspirin, and going to bed. I'll be back to work on Monday."
"You need a keeper, Anna Segee."
"I can take care of myself," she said automatically, not taking offense. Tom was, after all, a man. She opened the door of her truck, got in, put the key in the ignition, then looked back at Tom. "Why did you hire Ethan Knight without talking to me first? And didn't his house burn down yesterday? It was the talk of the mill yard this morning. Someone said the Knights were moving into those old sporting camps farther up the lake."
Tom nodded.
"Then why wasn't Ethan helping his family get settled?"
"I asked him that same question," Tom said. "He told me his dad and brothers insisted he show up his first day of work here, since there wasn't anything for him to do that they couldn't do themselves." He suddenly grinned. "The older Knight boy, Alex, got himself a new wife."
"You still haven't explained why you hired Ethan without telling me."
"I was doing his father a favor." Tom looked down at the ground, then back at her with serious eyes. "Ethan didn't recognize you. Is that the real reason you got mad and fired him?"
Anna would have scowled if it wouldn't have hurt. "I'm relieved he didn't recognize me."
"Somebody's bound to put two and two together one of these days," Tom warned. "Then what are you going to do?"
"I'm not eleven anymore."
"Samuel sent you to live with your father in Quebec because he knew it was impossible for you to live here." Tom shook his head. "And nothing's changed in eighteen years, Anna. Hell, half the men in this town have a history with your mother."
Anna glared at Tom. "You've spent the last three months convincing me Samuel sent me away because he loved me, so maybe you should consider that he brought me back for the same reason."
"He never stopped loving you, Anna," Tom whispered, his eyes clouding with emotion. "You were all he talked about."
"Yeah, well," she growled, looking out the windshield of her truck. "He didn't love me enough to stay in contact. He sent a confused, heartbroken little girl to live with complete strangers, and he never once came to see me. He didn't even write or call."
"That was your father's doing," Tom countered. "André Segee insisted that if he took you, the break must be clean." He lifted a brow. "I don't recall you trying to contact Samuel, once you came of age."
Anna twisted the key in the ignition and started her truck. "I wasn't about to chase after someone who didn't want me."
Tom touched her sleeve. "Samuel loved you more than life itself, Anna. He spent eighteen lonely years living with his decision to send you away. And he didn't dare call or go see you once you grew up because he preferred to live with the hope that you could forgive him, to risk the reality that you never would."
Anna closed her eyes. "I forgave him," she whispered. She looked back at Tom, her eyes wet with tears. "I was simply too stubborn to make the first move."
"Not stubborn," Tom said, squeezing her arm. "Scared. You were just as scared as Samuel." He pulled his hand away and rocked back on his heels. "Ethan Knight was what… twelve, thirteen when you left?" He shook his head. "That boy spent the entire summer with his arm in a cast because of you. And even though you've changed a great deal, he'll recognize you eventually. Then what are you going to say to him? 'I just thanked you for rescuing me eighteen years ago by firing you'?"
"Then why did you put me in such a terrible position?" Anna snapped. "Of all the people you could have hired to work here, why Ethan Knight?"
"Because Grady Knight asked me to."
"You can't run a business hiring men for favors, Tom."
"I hired you as a favor to your dead granddaddy," he said, puffing up his chest.
"No, you hired me because I'm the best damn foreman you could ever hope to have."
Tom let his chest sink back into his belly with a sigh of defeat. "Dammit, Anna. What am I going to tell Grady Knight?"
"You tell him to keep his son away from large machinery."
"Ethan's more competent than most men. All the Knights are. Half our sawlogs come from NorthWoods Timber."
"Then what's he doing at your mill? Why isn't he seeing to his own business if he's grown into such a hotshot logger?"
Tom's gaze dropped to the ground. "Grady said Ethan wanted a change of scenery," he muttered, his voice so low Anna had to strain to hear him.
She gave Tom a hard look. "And what would you be telling Grady now, if I'd run over his precious son?"
All the color drained from Tom's face. "Hell, Anna. You saved Ethan's life."
"For all the thanks I got," she muttered, touching her jaw.
Tom's eyes grew misty again. "Thank you for being the best damn foreman I could ever hope to have," he said thickly.
Good Lord, she had to get out of here before she started bawling. She ached from head to toe, and this conversation stirred uncomfortable memories for her. "Go back to your office and shuffle some papers," she gently told him. "And call Grady Knight if it will make you feel better, and tell him to be thankful his son is alive. And tell him that I fired Ethan, not you— that it was out of your hands."
She closed the door, then rolled down the window. "Oh. And while you're at it, tell him he might want to keep his son away from their wood chipper. Ethan's liable to get eaten up."
She put the truck in gear and headed for home.
* * *
It was eight miles from Loon Cove Lumber to Fox Run Mill, and Anna spent the drive trying to figure out how this day had gone so terribly bad. Probably because it had started so badly, just ten minutes after midnight, when her ghost had returned.
Bear, who was deaf in one ear and could barely hear with the other, had slept through the visitation, but Anna had been awakened by a noise coming from the old stables. She'd gotten out of bed and looked out her upstairs window, but hadn't been able to see a thing. She also hadn't been brave enough to venture out into the moonless night to investigate.
Instead she'd crept downstairs, made sure the house was locked up tight, and then taken Samuel's old shotgun back to bed with her. This morning she'd found nothing in the stables to account for the noise, but she could sense that someone had been in there. Things just weren't right, though it was more of a feeling than something she could put a finger on.
Then, when she'd gotten to work, the head sawyer at Loon Cove Lumber had met her with the news that the parts for the carriage that rode the logs into the saw blade were on back order, and their number two saw was going to be down for several days while they fabricated the new parts themselves. And then an idiot— who turned out to be Ethan Knight, of all people!— had stepped in front of her loader. If old Samuel Fox were alive, he'd say tree-squeaks were causing her troubles, or maybe those pesky side-hill gougers.
All through her childhood, Samuel had filled Anna's head with tales of the gremlins who lived in the forest and wreaked havoc on the loggers intruding on their domain. As a child she'd sat on his knee and listened to his tall tales— and had believed the miniature monsters existed. Which was why she still refused to venture outside at night. To this day, Anna was petrified of the dark— almost as much as she'd been afraid of seeing Ethan Knight again.
Her twelve-year-old knight in shining armor certainly had grown into a handsome man. His eyes were even more arrestingly blue than Anna remembered. And even through his bulky clothes, Ethan's masculine strength had been evident.
Anna had grown used to rugged men over the last eighteen years, hanging out and eventually working in her father's logging and mill yards in Quebec since age eleven. She had four burly half brothers, a brawny and somewhat autocratic father, and three uncles on her daddy's side. Except for a stepmother and an absentee mama who was mostly a memory, Anna had been brought up in an all-male world and had learned to look beyond gender.
Usually, she didn't even notice the brawn.
But she had today.
Ethan Knight could make a woman drool in her sleep. And Anna knew her anger had been as much at herself for noticing his looks as it had been at his stupid stunt. Her first reaction, upon seeing him step in front of her rig, was that she'd gladly ditch the loader before she'd harm one hair on his beautiful body. Why had that popped into her head?
Anna feared it was genetic, that her mother's legacy was instilled in her so deeply, her true nature had inadvertently spilled out. But she had successfully fought her hormones since puberty, so why had they surfaced today? And why with Ethan Knight of all people?
Anna refused to dwell on the reasons.
She finally stopped her truck in front of the main house of Fox Run Mill, shut off the engine, and with a sigh, rested her forehead on the steering wheel. Lord, she ached. Her jaw was throbbing so painfully, she feared several teeth might be loose. Ethan Knight sure did pack a powerful wallop.
The scratch of tiny claws on the windshield and flutter of tiny wings on the glass made Anna look up to find Charlie perched on the wiper. The tiny chickadee tapped on the windshield with his beak, and Anna smiled, only to grab her jaw with a moan. She opened the door and slid out of the truck, and Charlie landed on her head.
"I don't have any seed, little one," she told her tiny friend, who was now working his way down her hair to sit on her shoulder. "You'll have to wait until we get inside."
Several more chickadees appeared, dive-bombing her with frantic urgency. By the time Anna made it onto the porch of the old house, she was covered with birds hitching a ride to dinner. Her spirits immediately lifted.
These little sprites were the one true constant in her life lately, and appeared from the cover of the forest that surrounded Fox Run Mill whenever she stepped outside, ever present, ever playful, and always hungry.
Samuel must have tamed them. From birth to age eleven, Anna's life at Fox Run had been filled with wonder and discovery, exploring the old mill site of a long-dead empire that had been passed down for generations. She couldn't even fathom how many generations of chickadees Samuel had fed over the years.
This generation, however, had spawned a little daredevil she'd named Charlie. He was the boldest of the birds, and sometimes got into more trouble than his rapidly beating heart could handle. He was constantly wiggling into any pocket he saw, searching for seed. More than once Anna had pulled his panicked little body out of entangling clothes, then had to spend the next ten minutes calming him down.
Still, he never learned. Just last week an unsuspecting visitor— a developer from Boston hoping to talk her into selling— had found his shirt pocket frantically squirming, and had beat at his chest in horror. Charlie had spent the following two days healing in a box beside the woodstove.
"Shoo, guys," she said as she walked through the door of the house, sending a flutter of tiny black, gray, and white bodies to the curtain rods. Bear scrambled out of his bed beside the woodstove, his eyes blinking with sleep as he lumbered arthritically toward her.
"Hello, Bear. Anything exciting happen today?" she asked as she sat down in an overstuffed chair and pulled Bear's head onto her lap. He looked up at her with nearly opaque eyes and gave a wheezy woof.
"I know how you feel, pup." She scratched behind his ears. "No ghostly visits today? No resort people knocking on my door?" She tickled his chin. "No historical fanatics snooping through the outbuildings?"
Anna bent forward and kissed his nose. "You wouldn't know if the roof caved in on top of you, would you, old boy? Come on. I'll give you something for your aches, and then I'm taking some of your medicine myself." She slowly rubbed her jaw on his broad head. "You might not have noticed, but I kinda got beat up today."
When all she got for sympathy was another soft whine, Anna stood and walked to the kitchen. Bear's toenails sounded on the floor behind her, letting her know he was following. But before she could dole out the pain relief, Anna had to set out some sunflower seed on the shelf beside the window. The frenzy that had followed her and Bear into the kitchen finally settled into a polite meal as half a dozen chickadees descended on the shelf.
Anna noticed all the acorns had disappeared, and her gaze followed the trail of dusty squirrel tracks leading to the tiny hole cut in the outside wall, covered with a flap of leather. Samuel must have decided that if he didn't want the squirrels ruining everything in sight, he'd better feed them as well.
Anna put some water to boil on the stove, then opened the cupboard. She took down a brown bottle of pills and ran her finger over the name typed on the prescription label. Samuel Fox. Gramps, she used to call him. Anna held the bottle to her chest as she groped behind her for one of the kitchen chairs, sat down, and burst into tears.
"Oh, Gramps," she whispered. "Such a waste of eighteen years, just because we were both too stubborn to make the first move."
Bear lumbered over and settled his head on her knee with a whine. Anna blindly reached out and petted him. "I know. I know. You miss him, too," she said, soothing her old friend's broken canine heart. The kettle on the stove began to whistle into a rolling boil, and Anna gave Bear one last pat and stood up. "Maybe it's Gramps roaming the mill at night," she told him as she wiped away her tears. "Maybe he's our ghost."
Anna poured the boiling water into the teapot and left it on the stove to steep. She returned to the cupboard, put back the bottle of pills and took down the buffered aspirin, went to the fridge and got a slice of cheese, then folded one of the buffered aspirin inside it.
"Here you go, pup. This will make you feel better," she said as she fed Bear the medicinal treat. Then she popped four aspirin in her mouth and washed them down with a glass of water. If she had survived Ethan's punch, a couple extra aspirin weren't going to kill her.
She grabbed an old towel from the rack and opened the back door, scooped some snow off the porch railing into the towel, then tied it in a knot and gingerly touched it to her cheek. A little late with the ice pack maybe, but it still felt good. Back in the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of tea, then made her way into the living room, pushed several magazines off the couch, and lay down with a sigh. Her tea forgotten on the coffee table, Anna fell asleep in less time than it took to get comfortable— and dreamed of Ethan Knight charging to her rescue that long-ago summer.
Chapter Two
It was a long drive back around the lake as Ethan headed for home. He slapped the steering wheel with a curse, still unable to believe he'd been fired. And on his first day on the job! He hadn't even gotten a proper look at Loon Cove Lumber.
That's what he'd been doing when he'd stepped in front of the loader being driven by Anna, the tyrant foreman. He'd almost gotten them both killed. And if he hadn't killed her in the wreck, he'd nearly killed her with his fist. Dammit! He hadn't known she was a woman. All he'd seen was an angry body coming at him with a tire iron, and instinct had taken over.
Just as Anna had instinctively saved his life by driving the loader into the ditch.
Ethan hit the steering wheel again as he drove past the lane to his old home, which was nothing but ash now. He should have stayed and helped his family settle into the sporting camps three miles up the shoreline, but oh, no. Everyone had insisted he start his new job at Loon Cove Lumber today.
By suppertime, Ethan realized he should have just kept driving deeper into the woods instead of coming home.
"I was fired," he told his eleven-year-old niece, Delaney.
"Fired!" his father and younger brother, Paul, repeated in unison.
Ethan scowled at them. "The crazy woman fired me!"
"Woman?" Delaney asked, tugging on his sleeve to gain his attention again.
"Fired?" Paul repeated.
"Well, I did knock her flat on her ass— er— her fanny," Ethan added sheepishly.
"You hit her?" Delaney gasped.
"What!" Grady shouted.
Ethan saw his father head for the back door, pr
obably to get a pail, since Grady was in the habit of dousing his sons with cold buckets of water whenever he was mad at them.
Delaney punched him in his side. "Shame on you," she chastised.
"I didn't know she was a woman at the time," he repeated, acutely aware he'd told his story all wrong.
His sister-in-law, Sarah, shook her head, but then a little smile broke on one corner of her mouth. "There's a woman working at Loon Cove Lumber, and she's in a position to fire you?" She laughed then. "I wish I could have seen that."
Ethan held up his hand to forestall his father, who had just finished filling his bucket at the sink. "I didn't know she was a woman!" he shouted. "She was wearing a hard hat and coming toward me with a tire iron, obviously mad enough to use it." He ran a hand through his hair. "I just reacted and swung. It wasn't until she fell down and her hard hat came off that her hair came tumbling out." He looked at Sarah and Delaney beseechingly. "I just thought she was a short, wiry Frenchman."
The Stranger in Her Bed Page 2