His blue eyes were liquid beneath long black lashes. “Losing you made me realize what you mean to me. How great we are together.”
“Were,” I interjected. “Besides, I have a different life now. Even if I could put everything behind me, my place is here. Yours is in Texas.”
“I’m asking you to come back with me.”
“What?” I croaked.
“You could sell the inn for a profit, and start one in Austin,” he said. “We could pool our resources, do it together.” He pulled me closer to him, and the heady scent of his cologne wafted over me. “Just imagine what we could do,” he breathed, and I felt my knees buckle beneath me. His lips were centimeters from mine when the swinging door creaked.
I sprang back and smoothed down my sweatshirt. Candy Perkins stood at the door. She cast an appreciative eye over Benjamin, whose own eyes flicked up and down her curvy form involuntarily, lingering for a moment on her T-shirt. I didn’t think it was because of the logo.
Candy blinked her blue eyes at me. “I hope I’m not interrupting,” she said innocently. “I just wanted to know if I could watch you clean the rooms.”
“My niece is taking care of them,” I said gruffly. “If you can find her, she might let you tag along. She usually starts upstairs.”
“Oh, well, I guess I’ll go look for her then.” Candy fluttered her eyelashes at Benjamin. “I hope I’ll be seeing you around,” she said. She shot him a smoldering look, then sashayed out of the kitchen, waggling her snugly clad bottom behind her.
Benjamin watched her go, then turned to me. He reached out to touch my arm, but the moment had gone. “I’m staying for a week, Natalie. You don’t have to make any snap decisions. We can talk about it, decide what to do about the inn.”
I gently withdrew my arm, trying to avoid contact with his dangerous blue eyes.
He sighed and walked over to the table. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’d better go and unpack.” As he reached for his suitcase, Pepper emerged from the laundry room with a scratchy meow. “Who’s this little guy?”
“That’s Pepper,” I said. “I found her this morning. Her owner... died.” A lump formed in my throat as I remembered Polly’s body, crumpled in the bog.
Benjamin looked up, startled. “Died? How?” He quietly walked up beside me and put his hand on my shoulder.
Suddenly, the horror of what I’d seen came rushing back to me, and tears streaked down my face. “I found her, in the cranberry bog,” I whispered. “She was shot. There was blood, and she was just lying there... It was horrible.” The unfairness of it all—a life cut off early, violently—flooded over me, and my chest shuddered with a sob.
Benjamin gently turned my body toward him and wrapped his arms around me, rocking me back and forth. The smell of leather and cologne and his familiar musky scent was soothing, and I was tempted to sink into his chest.
Instead, I pulled away, wiping at my eyes. “I’ll ruin your jacket,” I said.
“Nonsense,” he whispered. He pulled me toward him and drew my head to his chest. “It must have been awful,” he said.
“It was. She was so pale, and the bog was so lonely...”
Benjamin stepped back and cradled my face in his hands. “What a terrible thing to find,” he said. He leaned down, and before I knew it, his warm lips were pressed against mine. I yielded to the kiss for a moment, my whole body melting. Then my brain woke up and started yammering at me. What are you doing?
I pushed him away and wiped at my mouth. I was straightening my sweatshirt when a movement at the door caught my eye.
John stood outside, hand raised, about to knock. Our eyes locked for a moment. Then he turned and walked away.
I rushed to the door, but John was already striding down the hill.
Benjamin came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders as I watched John disappear into his workshop, slamming the door behind him.
“Who’s that?” Benjamin asked.
“My neighbor.”
“Why didn’t he knock?”
“What do you think?” I shook Benjamin’s hands off of my shoulders and marched over to the counter, where I retrieved the wooden spoon and thrust it into the bowl. Some days it feels like you’re living in a badly directed B movie. Today was one of them.
“Oh, I see,” Benjamin said.
I stirred the batter in stony silence.
“He’s not just your neighbor, is he?”
“We’ve been seeing each other for a few months,” I said tersely.
Benjamin laughed. “Well, no wonder he took off in a hurry, then.” He walked up behind me and slid his hands around my waist, then bent down, his lips close to my ear. “Nothing serious?” he murmured.
I dropped the spoon and pried his hands off of my waist. “Why don’t I show you to your room now?”
He raised his hands in surrender and stepped away. “Whatever you say, ma’am,” he said with mock politeness. He retrieved his suitcase and followed as I led him out of the kitchen. As we climbed the stairs to his room, he kept his mouth shut and his hands to himself. But his eyes still tracked me like a pair of heat-seeking missiles.
___
By the time I got back to the kitchen, Pepper had curled up next to the heater and the chocolate had started to bubble on the stove. I rushed to turn off the burner. Then I stirred the chocolate—fortunately, it hadn’t burned—and retrieved a brick of silky Valrhona chocolate from the pantry.
As I chopped the smooth dark chocolate into sweet shards, my eyes strayed to the window. The door to John’s workshop, which often stood open on sunny days, remained shut, and I silently cursed Benjamin’s forwardness as the knife came down on the cutting board again and again.
As soon as I got the brownies into the oven, I would go and talk with him. I needed to tell him about Polly, anyway. Surely he’d understand when I explained what had happened in the kitchen with Benjamin; I was pretty sure he’d seen me push him away.
My mind floated back to Benjamin, who would hopefully remain busy upstairs, unpacking, for the rest of the afternoon.
Ours had been a torrid affair. We’d met at a cocktail party, a benefit for the Battered Women’s Shelter, and when he’d bumped into me and knocked my éclair onto my dress, a spark had arced between us as we tried in vain to clean the chocolate off the peach silk.
It had been that way the whole year we were together. After six months of courtship—evenings beneath the Congress Street Bridge, lying together on the soft green grass while the bats unfurled themselves in a long black banner, long lazy mornings in his downtown loft—he flew me to San Francisco and asked me to marry him on the Golden Gate Bridge.
I accepted immediately.
But as soon as that two-carat diamond slid onto my ring finger, things changed.
Benjamin’s hours at the venture capital firm grew longer and longer, and our weekend trips to the Hill Country and Port Aransas were replaced by business trips to Vegas and L. A. New clients, he said. They needed lots of handholding.
I found out the truth on a Tuesday evening. My face burned with humiliation even now, and I brought the knife down hard, splintering the bar of chocolate.
Benjamin had been working late, again, and a friend of mine from work had convinced me to join her at Z Tejas, a little downtown restaurant that made her favorite fish tacos. I was always up for Mexican food, and I didn’t want to spend the evening alone, so at seven o’clock we found ourselves at a small wooden table in the corner of the restaurant, enjoying the air-conditioned respite from the sultry July weather. I had just taken the first sip of my strawberry margarita and was reaching for a chip when a gorgeous woman with long, black hair walked into the restaurant, dressed in a black spandex skirt and three-inch stiletto heels.
The man behind her slid a proprietary hand arou
nd her narrow waist and guided her to a table in the middle of the room. I put down my margarita and swallowed hard.
He had gallantly pulled out her chair and was tucking her into it, his hand caressing her glossy black hair, when he saw me.
Panic flared for a moment in his blue eyes, but he mastered it quickly and replaced it with a look of pleasant surprise.
“Nat!” Benjamin strode over to the table where I sat, jaw clenched, tears threatening to spring from the corners of my eyes. “What a lovely coincidence!”
He came up behind me and kissed the top of my head lightly, like a butterfly alighting on a flower and then flitting away.
“I want you to meet a business associate of mine.” He turned and beckoned to the woman in the stiletto heels. “Zhang? This is Natalie.” He turned to me. “Zhang is consulting with us on the Trident deal. We were just meeting to discuss strategy.”
Zhang’s eyes flicked to the diamond on my hand, then to my face, fixing me with a cool, appraising look.
Benjamin nodded to my friend Janet, who sat across from me, speechless. “Won’t you join us?” He laughed heartily. “We’ll try not to talk too much shop.”
I swallowed again, but the lump that had swelled to the size of a goose egg didn’t budge from my throat.
“I imagine you won’t,” I said in a strangled voice. I stood up and retrieved my purse. I fumbled for my wallet and pulled out a twenty, then tossed it onto the table with a shaking hand.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m done.”
Then I walked out of the restaurant.
___
I shook my head to dispel the memory, and slid the chocolate off the cutting board into the bowl. I had done a little digging after leaving the restaurant that night, and soon found out that Zhang wasn’t the only “business associate” Benjamin had been seeing regularly. He had been meeting with two or three of them over the past six months. And he’d been doing a lot more than just handholding.
I set down the cutting board and sighed. Benjamin was part of the reason I had left Texas and come to Maine. I thought I had gotten over him. I was surprised to discover that he could still have this effect on me.
I measured out a half cup of glistening dried cherries and stirred them into the batter with the chocolate chunks before pouring it all into a pan. Then I slid the pan into the oven, set the timer, and squared my shoulders.
Benjamin had screwed up my life once.
I wasn’t going to let him do it a second time.
I filled my lungs with the cool October air as I marched down the hill to John’s workshop. A brisk wind rushed up from the water and ruffled my hair as I rapped on the door. John didn’t answer. Maybe he had gone home.
As I crossed the narrow space between the workshop and the converted carriage house, I glanced down toward the dock.
John’s skiff was gone again.
My chest tightened as I trudged back up to the inn. I had missed my opportunity. Well, I would have plenty of time to explain everything to John tomorrow night.
That is, if I was still invited.
___
When the timer went off forty minutes later, Pepper didn’t twitch from her spot on the radiator—she was still recovering from the trauma—but I jumped up from my chair and peeked into the oven. The surface of the batter had crinkled, and the chunks of chocolate had melted into warm droplets on the shiny brown surface. I pulled the pan out of the oven and set it on a rack to cool while I made the frosting.
As I poured cream into the double boiler, I glanced at the phone again. Charlene and I might have had a tiff this morning, but she would kill me if I didn’t give her the inside scoop on finding Polly—and on Benjamin’s arrival.
The swinging door had remained blissfully closed since I’d led Benjamin upstairs, and as I picked up the phone and dialed the store’s familiar number, I hoped both he and Candy would continue to stay out of my way, at least until I got done talking to Charlene.
The phone rang six times before Charlene picked up. “Cranberry Island Grocery Store.”
“Charlene? It’s Nat.”
“Oh. Hi.”
“I’m sorry about this morning,” I said. “I’ve got some news for you.”
“You mean Polly?”
“You heard?”
“Emmeline Hoyle told me. She lives one house up on Cranberry Road.”
“Oh,” I said. I should have called earlier.
“Is that all?” Charlene’s voice was cool.
“Actually, no,” I said. “I know who sent that cooler.”
“Who?” Her tone was bland.
“My former fiancé. He’s here, on the island.” I paused for a moment, but Charlene didn’t respond. “He’s staying at the inn, and he says he wants to marry me,” I blurted. “He kissed me in the kitchen, and John saw it.”
“Well, that certainly complicates things for you, doesn’t it?” Charlene said mildly.
I stood in silence for a moment, stirring the cream. This was not going as I had hoped it would. “I just baked a new recipe,” I said desperately. “Chocolate cherry brownies. Would you like me to bring some down for you?”
“Oh, no thanks,” she said. “I’m on a diet.”
“Right. A diet.” The phone line hummed between us for a moment, and I heard the murmur of voices in the background. “Well, then,” I said. “I’d better let you go, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
“Have a good day.”
“Thanks,” she said. And then she hung up.
Not good.
The swinging door opened as I replaced the receiver on the hook, and Candy poked her head into the kitchen.
“Baking again?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Who was that delicious man in here earlier?”
“You mean Benjamin?” I said. I was surprised to feel a flare of jealousy erupt in my chest. “He’s my former fiancé.”
“Former?” Her arched eyebrows rose, and she adjusted the sparkling pendant that nestled in her cleavage. “How interesting. I always thought Maine was a backwater, but you’re just swimming in eligible men up here, aren’t you?”
I shrugged.
“Anyway,” she said, “I just wanted to see if there was anything else going on this afternoon.”
“Not unless you like doing laundry,” I said. “I’ll probably set up the tables for tomorrow and do some paperwork a little later on, but that’s about it.”
“Good,” she said, glancing at her jeweled watch. “I have an appointment in half an hour. I’d like to go over the daily paperwork with you sometime, though, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” I said wearily.
She smiled, her freshly lipsticked lips setting off her even, white teeth. “Toodle-oo, then.”
“Toodle-oo,” I said to the door swinging in her wake.
I returned to the stove, glad that at least Candy would be out of my way for the rest of the afternoon. As I swirled chocolate into the cream on the stove, I turned my thoughts to Polly to distract myself from Benjamin, whose presence in the inn was making my stomach churn.
I replayed my conversation with Sgt. Grimes in my head and wondered when—and if—he would be coming to talk to me. He knew where I lived; he had spent a lot of time over the summer hanging around my inn and needling me with questions. I glanced at the clock. I had left Polly almost two hours ago. Last time I found a body, Grimes was on my doorstep within an hour of his arrival on the island.
I had a bad feeling that Grimes wasn’t going to be asking any more questions about Polly’s death. An image of Polly’s face flashed into my mind, and I thought about the purple blotch I had seen. It almost looked as if she had blackened her eye. Could that have been a result of the blood settli
ng?
I would have to ask John about the autopsy results tomorrow, I thought as I stirred the frosting briskly. I dipped my little finger into the chocolate and tasted it; it needed a touch of cherry liqueur, and then it would be done.
The brownies were still too warm to frost, but it wouldn’t be long. Glancing at the laundry room door, I sighed. I was still tired from last night’s attic antics, and a shot of caffeine was in order before facing the mountains of sheets and towels. If I didn’t do something about the laundry soon, the piles might take over the first floor of the inn.
I put the kettle on and shivered, remembering the noises above my bedroom and thinking I needed to find out more about the Gray Whale Inn ghost. Unfortunately, Charlene didn’t sound as if she was going to tell me any more ghost stories right now. I could always head to the town museum and ask, but I didn’t want the whole world to know I thought the inn was haunted. Business was tough enough without the inn playing the starring role in the next issue of Gruesome Ghosts and Goblins.
Matilda Jenkins, the curator of the local museum, knew everything about the island, though; if the inn was supposed to be haunted, she would know about it. Maybe I’d tell Matilda I was researching the history of the inn, and she’d volunteer the information without any mention of strange noises in the attic.
My mind flitted back to Polly. I also needed to swing by Emmeline Hoyle’s house. Grimes might think Polly had killed herself, but I wasn’t so sure. It was a long shot, but if anyone had been down the road to visit Polly, Emmeline might know. Maybe she could tell me more about Polly’s relatives, too. I was curious to find out who was in line to inherit her house.
The kettle whistled, and I fixed a pot of English Breakfast tea. By the time I had finished my first steaming cup, the brownies were cool enough to frost, and I was in a slightly better mood as I smoothed the rich chocolate frosting over the dark brownies. I cut myself a slab and sank my teeth into it. This recipe was definitely a keeper; the tartness of the cherries melding with the dark chocolate was heaven. Charlene didn’t know what she was missing. I glanced out the window toward the dock—if John was back, I could bring him a plateful as an icebreaker—but the Little Marian still bobbed alone.
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