by Anna Adams
Noah laughed. “So he doesn’t want to be on our team?”
“He does.” She wanted him to know he wasn’t in this fight alone. For once in his life, he had backup. “He tried to persuade the council after you left.”
“I wish I could let it go.” He finally took her hand. His palm slid against hers, warm and comforting and slightly unnerving as his eyes searched her face. Hungrily.
“Can’t you try?” She touched his cheek with the curved fingers of her free hand. “Can’t you just live without trying to fix the town? For a little while?”
“I can only be the man I am,” he said.
She felt him slipping away. She knew how he was when something important demanded all his focus. He could never escape the idea that he’d find a way.
“I wish you could be someone else just long enough to believe you can have a life and work, and a quirky, needy family, too.”
“Explain to me.” His hand squeezed hers. “Four years ago, if we’d had an argument like the one we had after Owen spent the night, well, the early morning, here, would you have threatened to leave me?”
“I probably would have left,” she said. “Hoping you’d follow me.”
“And I wouldn’t have followed because I couldn’t stand being manipulated by one more person.”
They were standing so close, she had to tilt her head back to look into his face. The years had chiseled at his bone structure, making a handsome man so much more handsome. Looking at him was feeding the feelings that seemed to be spiraling out of her control.
“I never realized I was manipulating you,” she said, “until I realized I wanted you to prove you loved me enough to follow me. I kept thinking I didn’t matter to you.”
“We were planning to be married. Did you think I was kidding about that? How much more could you have mattered?”
She shook her head. Her hair scratched against the material of his coat, and his breath warmed her cheeks. “There were times when I honestly wondered if you asked me to marry you just to shut me up.”
His blank look made her realize how foolish she’d been.
“I was ridiculous,” she said.
He lifted their hands, staring at their entwined fingers as if he hadn’t realized they were touching.
“I wish I could have been...different enough to understand,” she said, “but I wasn’t and I’m still not.”
He lifted his other hand, and smoothed her hair away from her forehead. “I didn’t pay enough attention. To you. I wanted to, but my family seemed to get in the way, and school was so vital for both of us.”
“Your school, you mean.”
“I wanted to provide for you. My parents fought more about money than about my father’s drinking. I didn’t intend ever to touch your money, but—”
“Good thing,” she said, laughing, “because anything I had has gone straight into this house.”
He took her other hand, then twisted their hands behind her back. They were so close they seemed to be moving, thinking, feeling as one.
“I never wanted anything from you,” he said.
“I know.”
He shook her, gently, frustratedly. “Hear me, Emma, this once. Hear me. Don’t just listen. I didn’t want your money or your family’s name behind me. I don’t want your help with the clinic, and I don’t need you to nurse Owen through hangovers and Chad through fighting with his own brother.”
“What are you saying?”
He bent his head. He breathed in. And out. His breath teased her mouth and drew her onto her tiptoes.
He’d asked her to listen, but she silently begged him to feel. To stop bracing himself for the worst and admit he still cared for her.
“I drove you away,” he said. “It wasn’t my father or your mother, or the fact that you needed a kind of love I couldn’t afford to give when every day of my life was a soul-sucking demand.”
He lowered his head at last and caught her mouth in a kiss that burned through every memory of the tentative passion of four years ago. His touch was gentle, as if she were a treasure that surprised him. His mouth comforted and cherished and drew her out of her own wary control. His hands freed hers, and his arms closed around her.
She pushed hers up his shoulders, sliding her fingers into his nape, expecting to feel the curls that had once brushed his collar. But he was no longer that boy, just into manhood, and she was no longer a terrified, lonely girl.
She was a woman falling in love again with the only man she had ever loved. She froze in Noah’s arms, the one place she’d needed to be for so achingly long. She couldn’t listen to him. She had to obey her own instincts.
She pulled her hands away from him, gently broke the kiss, staring at his mouth as she parted from him.
“This is wrong,” she said. “You’re kissing me because you’re sorry about the other night, and you feel a little desperate. I’m probably a nice diversion.”
“Don’t think for me, Emma.”
“I can’t help it. I know how you think. My father tried to help with the clinic, and that didn’t work. Your family seems to be making problems for themselves.” She caught his hand again. “But Noah, every family has problems. All the time. Every day.”
“I don’t want to talk about my family.” He pressed a finger to her lips. “You still aren’t hearing me.”
“I know you too well. We know each other.” She was feeling her way, as she had for four years, while she’d learned independence and self-reliance. And simple joy. “I don’t want to become the woman I was before, afraid and doubting, and wondering why you couldn’t love me enough. But you still face the same demands.”
She knew she’d gone too far into the past when she saw the withdrawal in his eyes. His hands fell to his sides. He nodded, a look that resembled relief washing over his stark, beloved features.
“You’re about to tell me that I could tell you over and over that I’ll put you first, and you still wouldn’t believe.”
“It’s a leap of faith I can’t take,” she said.
Emma felt like crying as he brushed her cheek, his smile the one he reserved for friends. His touch was no more intimate than a doctor’s.
She backed toward the door.
“I don’t want to change you,” she said. “And I won’t risk slipping back into the rejection I felt, always begging you for more.”
“I can’t persuade you with words.” He dragged his hands across his own face.
She flexed her fingers, to ease the sensation of his stubble tingling against her palms.
He never looked back as he walked out of her door.
She leaned against the wall, shaking. She could have lied. She could have pretended he was capable of loving her. But didn’t she deserve more than a man who had to try so hard?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THIS TIME, SHE couldn’t pretend. She did her healing at home, trying to forget Noah’s kisses, the unexpected, unreal delight she’d allowed herself to feel as he held her.
Owen came back to work as if nothing had ever gone wrong. He kept to himself. She had plenty of her own work to do, and Owen’s presence didn’t bother her. Today, he was painting the lintel on the front porch.
Her home was all hers again, a well-built, warm haven, filled with her family history. Each object was bound up in a story of Nan’s love for her. Each corner of the house held a memory that reminded her she came from strong stock.
Emma fell into a habit of waking and turning over beneath her mountain of bedding to find resilience in the rainy, wet, almost-Thanksgiving world outside her bedroom windows. Rainy days watered her soul and gave her room to grow again.
She spent each day dusting the vases and glass ornaments and antiques Nan had loved. She knew the story of each, the chifforobe her great-great-great-grandfather had h
auled across the pre-Tennessee state of Franklin so his wife would have a place to hang the dresses she made that were too fancy for the frontier.
These things were hers now. They gave her a place here that couldn’t be touched by doubt or suspicion or even a broken heart. And yet, she knew she couldn’t stay. She couldn’t face seeing Noah, day after day.
She’d chosen not to fall into the old habit of searching for happiness with him, hands outstretched, but never quite reaching him. Pulling away from him was her only choice. It kept her from turning back into a needy woman who couldn’t escape her own loneliness, but she still wondered where he was, what he was doing. How he was handling his disappointment over the clinic.
She wasn’t safe from her own instincts the second she let herself care for him again.
From eight to five, Emma worked hard at the kitchen table, alongside her grandmother’s favorite teapot and the cup and saucer painted with a spray of wild roses that had been her own from the first day she’d had tea in this house.
After working, she went up to the attic and began to transfer her favorite childhood books to the shelves Owen had built to line the walls of one of the guest rooms. Nan had considered her mother’s original Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton collections frivolous. After Emma’s mother had told her they could be a source of extra income, Nan had kept them in the attic, where Emma had read them, one after the other, beneath the musty eaves.
When Megan’s little girl began to read, she wouldn’t have to climb those stairs to indulge her girl-detective addiction. An addiction her big sister would make sure to pass on.
On the fourth day, the sun burned through the clouds. It might be time to venture out again. She had no more books to reshelve, and she’d finished a practice run on every dish for Thanksgiving dinner.
She put on her best “who cares” face and froze it in place in case she ran into Noah. Then she packed her laptop and scooped her keys off the kitchen counter. When her cell phone rang, she didn’t even bother to see if Noah was her caller. What if he was?
“Hello?”
“Emma, I need you. Please come.”
“Megan?” Her stepmother was crying, almost hysterical. Between sobs, she gasped for air as if she were drowning.
“Now,” she said. “I need you now.”
The baby. Emma searched for her purse, which she’d dropped somewhere when she’d answered the phone. “Megan, are you hurt?”
“Worse. I think I’m in labor. Are you leaving right now?”
“Grabbing my bag.” She found it on the floor, alongside her keys.
“You didn’t hang up? Emma, are you there?”
“I won’t let you go.” Unless she couldn’t help it. “But sometimes I lose service on the road between our houses.”
“If you lose me, please call me back.”
“I will, Megan. I promise.” She clattered out the door, startling Owen so much, he nearly fell off the ladder. With a wave of her phone in his direction, she ran down the new porch stairs.
Noah. His name went off like a shot in her head, and she forgot their last, uncomfortable moments.
Had Megan called him? Would she be afraid to settle for a GP if she’d gone into labor at least six weeks early?
“Have you called...anyone?” she asked her.
“I tried. Noah didn’t answer his phone. Your father and his helicopter are in some kind of meeting in New York.”
“His helicopter? Oh, you’re joking.” Surely that was a good sign. Emma skidded on wet leaves and thumped into her car. “Hold on, Megan.” She pressed the phone to her chest. “Owen?”
He’d come down from the ladder and rushed over to her. Now he nodded. “What can I do?”
“Call Noah. Tell him Megan’s in labor. We need him. I’m going to pick her up and drive her to his office.”
“You think that’s safe? Wouldn’t she be better off delivering at home?”
Emma pressed the phone harder to her chest, hoping to muffle the sound. “Not if she’s six weeks early. And I don’t know how to deliver a baby. I think my little sister will need oxygen. Surely Noah can manage at least that at his office.”
She wanted to swear at her father’s obstinacy, at the shortsighted council.
“I’ll call him,” Owen fumbled in his pockets for his phone.
“Use the one in the house if you can’t find yours, and please keep calling if he doesn’t answer. Megan sounds terrified, and she can’t have the baby by herself.”
“I’ll hunt him down if he doesn’t answer.”
“Even better. Maybe call your mom and Chad and Celia.” Emma pressed the speaker button on her phone and tossed it into the passenger seat. “I’m on my way, Megan.”
She jumped in the car, rammed her key into the ignition and soon swirled backward through the leaves and wet gravel.
“Be careful,” Megan said. “I hear the tires on the gravel. Oh...” After that, Emma caught a mixture of breathing and crying.
“Did you tell them to drag Dad out of his meeting?”
Megan panted and sobbed for a few more long seconds. “His personal assistant hates me.”
Kelly Derning hated everyone who mattered more to Emma’s father than she did. “But you told her what was happening to you?”
“I told her I’d snatch her heart out if she didn’t interrupt his meeting and get him to me.”
“That should do the trick.” Megan, so inherently gentle, must be out of her mind with fear.
“I don’t know. She asked me how I could be sure if it was really labor.” Groaning again, Megan began her breathing exercise, but she cried less this time.
“I’m less than three minutes away.” Emma passed the lane that led to her father’s apple orchard. This morning’s sunlight had departed and left a sky blue-gray and heavy with rain or snow.
If that crazy, early snow started again, she’d be doing all the sobbing. She had to keep Megan and the baby safe.
“Thank you for not asking me if I was sure,” Megan said.
“You sound sure.”
“You sound frightened.”
“I am, but I have my phone. If we have to search for how to deliver a baby, we can do that, and I’ll deliver my sister on the road down the mountain. Don’t worry.”
“Her lungs won’t be developed enough.”
Emma’s thought exactly. “You can do baby CPR.”
“I’m glad you’re a quick thinker, but your contingency plans are scaring me even more.”
This was why a woman should never babble to hide her true fear. “Are the pains regular?”
“No, but when they’re close like right now, I’m sure I can’t make it. I tried to get in my car, but the pain was so bad, I was afraid to drive.”
“Thank goodness you didn’t drive. We’re much better off if I do that.”
“I hear you reaching the rise of the hill. I’m opening the gate on the driveway.”
“Good thing you thought of it.”
Leaves skidded up off the road as Emma bounced onto the hard pavement her father had refurbished soon after Megan discovered she was pregnant. Emma had been prepared to run straight through the wooden gates, but they spun back on their well-oiled wheels with efficiency, just in time for her to shoot inside.
At the top of the drive, the front door of her father’s discreet brick mansion opened, and Megan came out, swinging a coat and a blanket and a small floral overnight bag.
Emma kept her eyes on Megan as she eased around the curved driveway. The beautiful woman who loved her father crossed to Emma’s car, her straight dark hair flying.
Her relief breathed warmth into the car as she got in, shoving her things into the backseat. “I brought a blanket just in case.”
“I saw.” It had once deco
rated the hammock out in the gazebo. Now it might be her sister’s first swaddling cloth. “I hope you washed it?”
“It hasn’t been on the hammock in years.”
“Sorry. I’m scared, and it makes me try to be funny. Unsuccessfully.” Emma bit her lower lip, both frightened and filled with love for the little girl so eager to be born.
“Hit the gas,” Megan said. “Any word from Noah?”
“I was going to ask you. Owen said he’d find him.”
“Owen?” Megan said his name with the same doubt everyone in this town reserved for Emma’s contractor.
“He’s not drinking. He’s working on my front door today, and he promised he’d find Noah.” She paused. “You’re not yourself right now, which is natural, but Owen will not let us down, trust me.”
“I need his brother.”
“He won’t let us down either.” Emma turned onto the access road into town. “My phone is underneath you. Call him, yourself. Both Noah and Owen are in the contacts or the phone log. Call either one of them.”
“I’ll try Noah first.” Bracing one hand against the dash, Megan gritted her teeth. “In a minute,” she managed.
“How long since the last one?”
Megan glanced at the car’s clock. “Is that right?”
Emma nodded, but then realized Megan probably wasn’t watching her head. “Yes.”
“Four minutes. That’s a little longer than the time between the last few.”
“Maybe it’s stopping on its own. Your water didn’t break?”
“Not yet,” Megan said, on a wail that made Emma think curling into a ball might be a good plan.
“That’s good, then.” Emma was reassuring herself as much as Megan.
A gust of rain hit the windshield. Emma let up on the gas until she could see.
“I don’t think it lasted as long, either.” Megan sat back in the seat, checking her seatbelt. “Thank you for coming, Emma. I don’t know what to do if we don’t find Noah. Should we wait for him at his office? Would that be safer than risking the drive to Knoxville?”
“Do you really want my opinion?”
“Of course I do. You’re family.”