Reunited in Walnut River

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Reunited in Walnut River Page 17

by RaeAnne Thayne


  “May I come in?” he finally asked, and she realized she must have been standing there staring at him for a full minute or more.

  “I…of course,” she managed and opened the door for him.

  Her duplex apartment had seemed small but still comfortable with her three siblings and their prospective spouses. So why did it seem to shrink immeasurably when Richard walked inside?

  She should say something. Hello. How are you? I love you.

  The words caught in her throat and she couldn’t manage to do anything but stare at him.

  He was the first to break the silence.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice was low and intense, his eyes a heartbreaking shade of blue-green today.

  “I tried,” she said. Was he still angry at her? She couldn’t read anything in those eyes.

  “No, you didn’t. Not really. You said I was misinterpreting things but you never gave me the full truth. Why didn’t you tell me you knew nothing about that memo until right before I found it?”

  She chewed her lip. She remembered how desperate she had been to get him out of her apartment after he had kissed her with stunning tenderness and then said such devastatingly cruel things.

  “You won’t like my answer.”

  “Try me. It can’t be any worse than all the possible scenarios I’ve been coming up with all morning for why you didn’t trust me enough to ask for my help.”

  She sighed. “It wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all, Richard. Of course I would have trusted you if I could. But what would you have done if I’d told you the truth and enlisted your help?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe go to the media.”

  “You would have been on extremely shaky legal ground. As I pointed out, you had no right to access internal NHC documents. That was a confidential memo that you shouldn’t have seen at all. I was afraid you would be willing to sacrifice your career by going public with what amounted to stolen information.”

  He stared at her, stunned. She had been trying to protect him? Of all the explanations he had considered, that one wouldn’t have even made the top twenty.

  “I’m the one who brought Walnut River to their attention,” she continued. “I felt like I had to handle the situation on my own. To fix my own mess. If anyone’s career was going to be destroyed, I wanted it to be mine, not yours. You could have been disbarred, Richard. I wasn’t about to let that happen.”

  “Was your career destroyed?” he asked carefully.

  He knew she had orchestrated the back-door coup but he had no idea where things stood for her with the new management.

  She managed a smile. “I wouldn’t say exactly that.”

  She paused. “The new chief executive officer at NHC just offered me his old job as vice president of mergers and acquisitions.”

  A chill swept over him and Richard thought for sure he could hear the crackle of his heart freezing solid. All the dreams he had dared let himself begin to spin turned to ice along with it.

  “Vice president.” He forced a laugh that sounded fake and hollow to his ears. Could she tell? he wondered. “That’s amazing. Wonderful news. Congratulations.”

  She looked a little taken aback, as if she expected some other reaction from him. “Right. Wonderful news.”

  “Is that why the rest of the Wilders were here? To celebrate?” He tried to inject a little more enthusiasm in his tone. “I saw them all leaving when I pulled up. They must be so proud of you. When do you start?”

  “They want me there first thing in the morning,” she said, somewhat woodenly.

  “What about Peter’s wedding Saturday?”

  “I…haven’t figured that out yet.”

  He gripped his hand into a fist at his side, doing everything he could not to betray his pain. “Make them wait,” he suggested. “If they want you badly enough, they’ll have a little patience.”

  “Will they?” she murmured.

  Did her words seem double-edged or was that simply his imagination? Richard studied her closely but her lovely features revealed nothing. He knew he was in danger of losing control in a moment so he edged closer to the door.

  “Congratulations again on the job offer. I just stopped by to tell you thank you for what you did for Walnut River General. I’m sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion before and for the things I said. I should have trusted you.”

  He turned to leave but she stopped him.

  “Richard—”

  He didn’t know what she intended to say. It didn’t matter. When he turned back, he thought he saw a misery in her eyes that matched the pain and loss tearing through him.

  He didn’t give himself time to think it through, driven only by the need to touch her one more time. He crossed the space between them in two steps and pulled her into his arms, crushing her mouth with his.

  After one stunned moment, she made a tiny kind of sobbing sound and her arms slid around him, holding him as if she never wanted to let go.

  He kissed her fiercely, pouring all his emotions into the embrace, doing his best to leave no doubt in her mind about how much he loved her. If she was going to leave him again, he damn well wasn’t going to make it easy for her.

  “Anna, don’t go.”

  She blinked at him. “Wh-What?”

  His hands were shaking, he realized with chagrin. He should just leave now before he made a bigger ass out of himself. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

  “You did, though.”

  “I did. I know I have no right to beg you to stay after the way I’ve treated you the last five days. But forget that. I’m going to beg anyway. I love you, Anna. It just about killed me when you walked away last time. I don’t think I can bear losing you again. Please stay.”

  She stared at him, saying nothing for a long, painfully drawn-out moment, then joy flared in those beautiful blue eyes and she wrapped her arms around him again and lifted her mouth to his.

  He kissed her with all the pent-up frustration and fear and longing inside him, until his insides trembled and his heart threatened to pound out of his chest.

  “I love you,” she said. “I love you so much. I have been absolutely miserable without you.”

  He framed her face with his hands, the lovely serene features he had dreamed about nearly all of his life.

  “I want to marry you, Anna. I’ve wanted it for eight years. Longer, if you want the truth. Since we were kids studying for our calculus tests together. You are the only woman I have ever loved.”

  Anna closed her eyes at the sweetness of his words, at the sheer sense of rightness she found here in his arms. She had almost missed this, she thought with wonder. If she hadn’t taken the assignment to return to Walnut River, she would never have found Richard again, would never have realized how very empty her life was without him.

  “Yes, I’ll marry you!”

  “Ethan and I are a package deal. Are you sure you’re okay with that?”

  She thought of his darling son, with his cowlick and his mischievous smile. “Better than okay. I already love your son as much as I love you.”

  He kissed her again and for a long time, she forgot everything else.

  “I suppose I’ll have to start looking to join a firm in New York,” Richard said.

  She stared, shocked to her core. “But you love Walnut River.”

  “Not nearly as much as I love you.”

  The sincerity of his words humbled her. She had no idea what she had ever done to deserve a man like Richard Green but she didn’t care. She was keeping him, whether she deserved him or not.

  “My family has asked me to stay on and become chief financial officer for the new privately owned Walnut River General Hospital. I’m going to call them and tell them I’m in.”

  He looked stunned. “Are you sure? It’s a big step down from an NHC vice president.”

  “I’m positive,” she murmured. “I want to stay right here, in Walnut River and in your arms.”
r />   He kissed her again while Lilli danced around them, and Anna knew this was one merger that was destined to succeed.

  * * * * *

  When quiet librarian Julia Winston ends up caring for two young boys over the holidays, she’ll take any help she can get, even if it comes in the form of her far-too-tempting upstairs neighbor Jamie Caine…

  Read on for a sneak peek at SUGAR PINE TRAIL, the next book in

  New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne’s

  HAVEN POINT series!

  CHAPTER ONE

  THIS WAS GOING to be a disaster.

  Julia Winston stood in her front room looking out the lace curtains framing her bay window at the gleaming black SUV parked in her driveway like a sleek, predatory beast.

  Her stomach jumped with nerves, and she rubbed suddenly clammy hands down her skirt. Under what crazy moon had she ever thought this might be a good idea? She must have been temporarily out of her head.

  Those nerves jumped into overtime when a man stepped out of the vehicle and stood for a moment, looking up at her house.

  Jamie Caine.

  Tall, lean, hungry.

  Gorgeous.

  Now the nerves felt more like nausea. What had she done? The moment Eliza Caine called and asked her if her brother-in-law could rent the upstairs apartment of Winston House, she should have told her friend in no uncertain terms that the idea was preposterous. Utterly impossible.

  As usual, Julia had been weak and indecisive, and when Eliza told her it was only for six weeks—until January, when the condominium Jamie Caine was buying in a new development along the lake would be finished—she had wavered.

  He needed a place to live, and she did need the money. Anyway, it was only for six weeks. Surely she could tolerate having the man living upstairs in her apartment for six weeks—especially since he would be out of town for much of those six weeks, as part of his duties as lead pilot for the Caine Tech company jet fleet.

  The reality of it all was just beginning to sink in, though. Jamie Caine, upstairs from her, in all his sexy, masculine glory.

  She fanned herself with her hand, wondering if she was having a premature-onset hot flash or if her new furnace could be on the fritz. The temperature in here seemed suddenly off the charts.

  How would she tolerate having him here, spending her evenings knowing he was only a few steps away and that she would have to do her best to hide the absolutely ridiculous, truly humiliating crush she had on the man?

  This was such a mistake.

  Heart pounding, she watched through the frothy curtains as he pulled a long black duffel bag from the back of his SUV and slung it over his shoulder, lifted a laptop case over the other shoulder, then closed the cargo door and headed for the front steps.

  A moment later, her old-fashioned musical doorbell echoed through the house. If she hadn’t been so nervous, she might have laughed at the instant reaction of the three cats, previously lounging in various states of boredom around the room. The moment the doorbell rang, Empress and Tabitha both jumped off the sofa as if an electric current had just zipped through it while Audrey Hepburn arched her back and bushed out her tail.

  “That’s right, girls. We’ve got company. It’s a man, believe it or not, and he’s moving in upstairs. Get ready.”

  The cats sniffed at her with their usual disdainful look. Empress ran in front of her, almost tripping her on the way to answer the door—on purpose, she was quite sure.

  With her mother’s cats darting out ahead of her, Julia walked out into what used to be the foyer of the house before she had created the upstairs apartment and now served as an entryway to both residences. She opened the front door, doing her best to ignore the rapid tripping of her heartbeat.

  “Hi. You’re Julia, right?”

  As his sister-in-law was one of her dearest friends, she and Jamie had met numerous times at various events at Snow Angel Cove and elsewhere, but she didn’t bother reminding him of that. Julia knew she was eminently forgettable. Most of the time, that was just the way she liked it.

  “Yes. Hello, Mr. Caine.”

  He aimed his high-wattage killer smile at her. “Please. Jamie. Nobody calls me Mr. Caine.”

  Julia was grimly aware of her pulse pounding in her ears and a strange hitch in her lungs. Up close, Jamie Caine was, in a word, breathtaking. He was Mr. Darcy, Atticus Finch, Rhett Butler and Tom Cruise in Top Gun, all rolled into one glorious package.

  Dark hair, blue eyes, and that utterly charming Caine smile he shared with Aidan, Eliza’s husband, and the other Caine brothers she had met at various events.

  “You were expecting me, right?” he said, after an awkward pause. She jolted, suddenly aware she was staring and had left him standing entirely too long on her front step. She was an idiot. “Yes. Of course. Come in. I’m sorry.”

  Pull yourself together. He’s just a guy who happens to be gorgeous.

  So far she was seriously failing at Landlady 101. She sucked in a breath and summoned her most brisk keep-your-voice-down-please librarian persona.

  “As you can see, we will share the entry. Because the home is on the registry of historical buildings, I couldn’t put in an outside entrance to your apartment, as I might have preferred. The house was built in 1880, one of the earliest brick homes on Lake Haven. It was constructed by an ancestor of mine, Sir Robert Winston, who came from a wealthy British family and made his own fortune supplying timber to the railroads. He also invested in one of the first hot springs resorts in the area. The home is Victorian, specifically in the spindled Queen Anne style. It consists of seven bedrooms and four bathrooms. When those bathrooms were added in the 1920s, they provided some of the first indoor plumbing in the region.”

  “Interesting,” he said, though his expression indicated he found it anything but.

  She was rambling, she realized, as she tended to do when she was nervous.

  She cleared her throat and pointed to the doorway where the three cats were lined up like sentinels, watching him with unblinking stares. “Anyway, through those doors is my apartment and yours is upstairs. I have keys to both doors for you along with a packet of information here.”

  She glanced toward the ornate marble-top table in the entryway—that her mother claimed once graced the mansion of Leland Stanford on Nob Hill in San Francisco—where she thought she had left the information. Unfortunately, it was bare. “Oh. Where did I put that? I must have left it inside, in my living room. Just a moment.”

  The cats weren’t inclined to get out of her way, so she stepped over them, wondering if she came across as eccentric to him as she felt, a spinster librarian living with cats in a crumbling house crammed with antiques, a space much too big for one person.

  After a mad scan of the room, she finally found the two keys along with the carefully prepared file folder of instructions atop the mantel, nestled amid her collection of porcelain angels. She had no recollection of moving it there, probably due to her own nervousness at having Jamie Caine moving upstairs.

  She swooped it up and hurried back to the entry, where she found two of the cats curled around his leg while Audrey was in his arms, currently being petted by his long, square-tipped fingers.

  She stared. The cats had no time or interest in her. She only kept them around because her mother had adored them, and Julia couldn’t bring herself to give away Mariah’s adored pets. Apparently no female—human or feline—was immune to Jamie Caine. She should have expected it.

  “Nice cats.”

  Julia frowned. “Not usually. They’re standoffish and bad-tempered to most people.”

  “I guess I must have the magic touch.”

  So the Haven Point rumor mill said about him, anyway. “I guess you do,” she said. “I found your keys and information about the apartment. If you would like, I can show you around upstairs.”

  “Lead on.”

  He offered a friendly smile, and she told herself that shiver rippling down her spine was only becaus
e the entryway was cooler than her rooms.

  “This is a lovely house,” he said as he followed her up the staircase. “Have you lived here long?”

  “Thirty-two years in February. All my life, in other words.”

  Except the first few days, anyway, when she had still been in the Oregon hospital where her parents adopted her, and the three years she had spent at Boise State.

  “It’s always been in my family,” she continued. “My father was born here and his father before him.”

  She was a Winston only by adoption but claimed her parents’ family trees as her own and respected and admired their ancestors and the elegant home they had built here.

  At the second floor landing, she unlocked the apartment that had been hers until she moved down to take care of her mother after Mariah’s first stroke, two years ago. A few years after taking the job at the Haven Point library, she had redecorated the upstairs floor of the house. It had been her way of carving out her own space.

  Yes, she was an adult living with her parents. Even as she might have longed for some degree of independence, she couldn’t justify moving out when her mother so desperately needed her help with Julia’s ailing father.

  Anyway, she had always figured it wasn’t the same as most young adults who lived in their parents’ apartments. She had an entire self-contained floor to herself. If she wished, she could shop on her own, cook on her own, entertain her friends, all without bothering her parents.

  Really, it had been the best of all situations—close enough to help, yet removed enough to live her own life. Then her father died and her mother became frail herself, and Julia had felt obligated to move downstairs to be closer, in case her mother needed her.

  Now, as she looked at her once-cherished apartment, she tried to imagine how Jamie Caine would see these rooms, with the graceful reproduction furniture and the pastel wall colors and the soft carpet and curtains.

  Oddly, the feminine decorations only served to emphasize how very male Jamie Caine was, in contrast.

  She did her best to ignore that unwanted observation.

 

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