He looked immensely relieved and she knew at that moment that he’d come there tonight with his own concerns. And again she had the sense that whatever those concerns were, they weren’t unfounded, she just didn’t know what they were founded on. Maybe that would come with getting to know him.
“Thanks,” he said then.
Marti laughed a little. “For what?”
“For accepting that it’s my baby, too.”
That increased her feeling that his fears of being shut out were connected to some event in his past. But it was too soon to probe so she merely said, “Well, thanks for owning up to the baby being yours.”
That made his smile grow into a grin. “You really did think the worst, didn’t you?”
“I kind of did,” she confessed.
“Bad experience?”
“No!” she was quick to respond in pure reflex to defend Jack.
“So it was just me you thought was a jerk?”
“I didn’t know what to think,” she admitted. “This isn’t a position I’ve ever been in before and, well, you know, you hear a lot of variations on how the father reacts. I guess I just went with the lowest expectations. It seems like one of those situations that can bring out the worst in people.”
“Or the best,” he suggested.
Once more she liked that he was taking the positive over the negative and she wondered if he always did that. She supposed she would find that out about him, too.
But not right now because they’d both finished their coffees and it had been a long twenty-four hours. Marti was feeling drained and when Noah asked if she’d like a refill she declined and told him she thought it was time for her to get going.
Noah walked her to Wyatt’s SUV and made sure he was positioned to open the unlocked driver’s side door for her.
But she didn’t get in immediately. She thanked him and stood in the lee of the open door to face him. “You don’t happen to know a man named Hector Tyson, do you?” she asked.
“Sure. He owns the lumberyard and the only thing that passes for a hardware store around here. I know him well.”
“Is there any chance that you could introduce me?” she asked.
“I’d be happy to,” he answered. “Is this about Theresa selling Hector the land she inherited from her parents when she was a girl?”
So he knew that, at least. Wyatt must have told him. Or working on the house had made it impossible for him not to overhear some of what had been going on with her grandmother. In any event, Marti saw no reason to be evasive when uncovering secrets was her goal.
“Yes, it’s about Gram,” she answered. “We have a lot of questions for this Tyson guy, but Wyatt said he’s been out of town.”
“He has been. But he’s back now.”
“I need to see him, but I hate to just ring his doorbell and pummel him with questions like a census taker.”
“No, that wouldn’t go over well. I don’t know if anybody’s told you about Hector but it’s a toss-up as to who’s more of a contrary old cuss—Hector or my grandfather. And you met my grandfather so you know what I’m talking about.”
“Not a warm and fuzzy man,” Marti understated.
“More like a human cactus. And Hector doesn’t even have the whole righteous do-gooder thing going for him. He’s just mean-spirited and greedy and pretty much all-around unpleasant.”
“I can hardly wait to meet him,” Marti said facetiously. “But I don’t have a choice. We’re trying to do whatever we can to help Gram and too many things track back to this Hector Tyson to ignore him.”
Noah nodded in understanding. “Well, I can get you in and introduce you, but I won’t be able to promise that it’ll be a lot of fun. I could buy you a pizza afterward, though…”
Marti laughed. “Are you saying that it will be so bad that there will be a need for stress eating and consoling afterward?”
Noah smiled again, that warm smile that had won him her time in Denver. “Probably,” he confirmed. “But even if there isn’t a need, I’m figuring I have to get in a full day’s work tomorrow since I skipped today. So I’ll try to persuade Hector to see us early in the evening. That way I can go home for a shower and a change of clothes. And once we’re finished with him, it’ll be dinnertime.”
Since they were now committed to getting to know each other, dinner together might as well follow—simple, practical, convenient. Yet she was suddenly looking forward to it as if it were more than just pragmatic.
She opted not to look too closely at that, though, and to merely go with the flow of things.
“Pizza it is, then,” she agreed, looking up at Noah in the light of a nearby streetlamp.
“Pizza it is,” he repeated, gazing down at her in a way that gave her a flashback to that night in Denver.
It was nothing strong or vivid or at all clear. It was just an instantaneous image of standing facing him, of their eyes meeting, of him leaning forward.
Of him kissing her…
There were only the faintest of details, but in that moment she recalled being surprised by how much she’d liked the way he kissed. She recalled thinking that it had never occurred to her that anyone else’s kisses could ever do to her what Jack’s had.
But Noah’s had.
And out of the blue came the wish that he would kiss her again, right then.
Just so she’d know what his kisses were like, she told herself. So she’d know if she was thinking that they were better than they actually were. If his mouth was as gentle and commanding. What she might—somewhere in the recesses of her brain—have a vague recollection of.
Kisses she’d liked more than she’d imagined possible. That had carried her away…
Oh great, that’s just what I need—to get carried away again. Especially just for the sake of appeasing some kind of curiosity…
No, she told herself, there was no reason to wonder how the man kissed, let alone to check it out. Whether or not Noah’s kisses were as good as Jack’s didn’t make the slightest difference. It wasn’t anything she should care about.
“I’ll set it up, then,” Noah said.
It took a moment for his words to get through to her. He was saying he would set up the meeting with Hector Tyson.
And she needed to get her head back into the here and now…
“Thanks, I’d appreciate that,” Marti managed, feeling like an idiot and doing everything she could to focus. “Thanks for the coffee, too,” she added when she remembered that as well.
“You bet.”
He was still looking down into her eyes, though. Why did he keep doing that?
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he did break eye contact, glancing at a couple walking by before he said to Marti, “I’ll be at the house bright and early tomorrow so I guess I’ll see you then.”
Marti merely nodded and finally got into the SUV.
Noah closed the door for her and leaned toward the open window to say, “Drive safe.”
Marti nodded and again had the inordinate urge to poke her face upward and have him kiss her.
Then it occurred to her, had Noah been Jack, that was what she would have done and maybe that was all that was really happening here—the pull of an old habit.
But as she started the engine, put the SUV into reverse and backed away from the curb under Noah’s still watchful eye, she didn’t feel as if she were in the throes of an old habit.
She felt a genuine pull toward Noah.
Chapter Five
“Y es, I would have known you were related to Theresa Hobbs just by looking—you’re the image of her,” Hector Tyson said to Marti after motioning for her to sit on the sofa across from the wing chair in his living room on Tuesday evening.
As promised, Noah had arranged to have the eighty-four-year-old man see them. Marti and Noah had been let into his impressive house by a housekeeper and shown to the living room where the elderly gentleman had remained seated as if on a throne throughout Noah’s introduction o
f Marti.
Marti had heard through reports from Wyatt that Hector Tyson was supposed to have been quite a heartbreaker in his youth and shades of his earlier handsomeness were still in evidence now. Despite the fact that he didn’t stand, she could tell by the length of his legs and by his height in the chair that he was tall and he held himself with straight posture. His shoulders were still expansive, his body lean, and while his hair had gone completely white, it remained thick and lustrous atop a face that was deeply lined but still very attractive.
“What can I do for you?” he asked when Marti had taken the offered seat while Noah stood behind her and to one side like a bodyguard.
Hector Tyson’s attitude seemed somehow smug, although Marti couldn’t pinpoint why. He stared at her with eyes that were still clear and alert and very blue, and made her feel like a fly that had just unwittingly flown into a spider’s web. Obviously Noah hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said the man was unpleasant.
But in answer to his question about what he could do for her, she made sure she was respectful.
“There are some things I wanted to talk to you about,” she said.
“What sort of things?” he asked, mocking her.
Matter-of-factly, Marti said, “My grandmother is insisting that we get back something that was taken from her by you.”
The old man chuckled mirthlessly at that. “Yes, I’d heard that poor Theresa isn’t quite right in the head. What exactly am I to have taken from her?”
“At this point we’re working from the assumption that it was the land she inherited from her parents. The land you ended up with.”
“Check the land records…Oh, that’s right, one of you already did that, didn’t you? So you know that I ended up with that land because I bought it from Theresa—fair and square. And at her request, I might add.”
Wyatt and his new wife had checked the land records and there was nothing questionable about the sale. Except the price.
“Gram asked you to buy her out?”
“It was all her idea,” Hector said, not in the least unnerved by what they were discussing. “My late wife Gloria and I took her in when she had nowhere else to go—her mother and father had died, and her only living relative was an aunt in poor health who couldn’t have her move to Missoula immediately. But Theresa was the daughter of a friend and business associate, and my wife and I certainly couldn’t sit by and see a young girl left unconsoled in her darkest hour of grief. We offered her a home and our support. But after several months—”
“Eleven,” Marti supplied.
“After eleven months, when her aunt was well again, Theresa thought she might be happier away from Northbridge and the memories here, so she decided to go to her aunt.”
“And sell you her land for a quarter of what it was worth?” Marti asked.
“She wanted all ties with Northbridge severed—completely and as fast as possible. When I told her that I couldn’t pay her market value for the property, she said she didn’t care. That her father would have wanted me to have it in any event and so we struck a deal.”
Marti thought that Tyson might not have Noah’s grandfather’s religious righteousness, but he seemed to have no shortage of self-righteousness.
“But if my grandmother wanted to severe all ties with Northbridge why didn’t she sell the house, too?” Marti asked.
The elderly man merely shrugged. “I suppose you would have to ask her that question.”
Marti wondered if it might be time to push another button and took into consideration that Noah was there, listening to everything. They hadn’t discussed the more lurid suspicions of what might have happened between her grandmother and Hector Tyson, but when she’d spoken to Wyatt on the phone that morning he’d told her he had talked to Noah about Theresa and her past at length in hopes of garnering any morsel of information the Northbridge native might have. There was no reason for Marti to try to conceal anything from him now, she just hoped he didn’t find it embarrassing.
“My brothers and I are also wondering if there might be something else Gram is talking about when she says you took it from her. Something of a more personal and emotional value to her,” Marti said.
“Such as?”
“Were you and my grandmother…involved, Mr. Tyson?” Marti asked.
“Involved?” he repeated. “Do you mean romantically?”
“You weren’t that far off in age—she was seventeen, you were twenty-six. We’ve heard that you were quite a ladies’ man and that my grandmother might have had a crush on you…” Marti said, thinking to stroke his ego and at the same time let him know that there was some basis for the suspicion that he and Theresa might have had an affair.
Hector shrugged his arrogant eyebrows this time. “Yes, I believe Theresa did have some feelings for me. But I was a married man and loyal to my wife.”
Noah cleared his throat and it earned him a scathing glance from Hector before the old man returned his gaze to Marti.
“I’m sure Noah will tell you later that I was not always faithful to my late wife, but at that time, early in the marriage, nothing went on between Theresa and me. She was a grieving young girl, I was merely someone who gave her a helping hand. And as for taking something from her—I certainly did nothing like that. I did only what she asked of me—I bought her land so that she would have the money she needed to leave town. And if, in the bargain, I ended up with a good deal, well, it suited both of our purposes.”
And yet he was getting hot under the collar, Marti noted.
Hot enough to seem unable to contain himself because without provocation he added, “And I’ve been told that your grandmother is out of her mind. Deranged. That she can’t remember what she’s eaten for breakfast by the time she has lunch. I’m sure whatever it is she’s talking about is some sort of delusion, and if what she’s saying has anything to do with me or those months she spent here, it’s nothing more than a figment of her imagination. I did a good deed—I took her in—and what do I get for my trouble? Accused of taking something from her and cheating on my wife?”
Marti refused to lose her temper with him even though his talking about her grandmother the way he was pushed buttons of her own. “For your trouble you got a lot of land for a quarter on the dollar.”
“Count the rest as her room and board!” the old man sneered. “And I’ll tell you something else, young lady,” he continued. “I know what you Graysons are up to. I know you think you’re going to bring one of your Home-Max stores to Northbridge to try to put me out of business. Well, I won’t let it happen. That holding barn you thought you had locked up? Sold to me today at five o’clock! And getting to tell you that myself is the only reason I let Noah bring you here tonight—how do you like that?”
That was why he’d seemed smug from the start.
“The seller accepted our offer on that barn. It was under contract,” Marti said, anger in her tone.
“And I outbid you by so much that the seller was willing to pay penalties to give it to me instead. You’re not fooling with some weak, failing old man here, Miss Grayson. Or with a whiny lunatic like your grandmother. I’ll stomp you people into the ground and you might as well learn it from the start.”
“Is that what you did to my grandmother all those years ago? Stomp her into the ground?” Marti countered.
“Of course not!” Hector shouted venomously, defensively. “Your grandmother got what she wanted from me—the money for her land. No matter how she’s crying about it now. Don’t come around here talking to me about what I might have taken from her. I didn’t have to take anything.”
“That’s about enough, Hector,” Noah said, stepping forward and suddenly making himself a towering presence that halted the old man’s rant.
By then Marti was too livid to know what to do or say, and she was glad Noah was there to take over.
“Is there anything else you want from him, Marti?” he asked her.
Staring daggers at the old man w
ho gave the impression that he was savoring his victory over her, Marti shook her head.
“Then let’s go,” Noah suggested.
“That’s right,” shouted Hector. “Go. Go back to Missoula or wherever it is you came from. You’ll never open a Home-Max in Northbridge, Miss Grayson—not if I can stop you.”
Marti spent some time composing herself in the restroom of the pizza place shortly after leaving Hector Tyson’s house. During the drive to the restaurant Noah had patiently listened to her tirade about the things Hector Tyson had said, but now she wanted to put the an meeting behind her. After splashing cool water on her face, she finally felt calm enough to return to Noah. But one step outside of the restroom, one glance across the small restaurant to where he sat and she stopped to watch him.
He wasn’t merely sitting waiting for her. He was standing, reaching across the table to build a pyramid of what appeared to be candy bars at her place setting.
In the midst of venting about Hector Tyson’s unmitigated gall, she’d made the comment that after an encounter like that, she needed more than pizza to counteract the stress—mounds of chocolate were required, too.
And there was Noah, building her a mound of chocolate.
And looking indescribably appealing himself, in a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and his to-die-for, jean-encased derriere right where she could feast her eyes.
The sight made her smile in spite of herself as she crossed the restaurant just as he sat down.
“Is this my appetizer?” she asked when she reached him, nodding at the pyramid comprised of at least a dozen different kinds of candy bars.
“That’s what you said you needed, that’s what I got for you. After I ordered our pizza I sneaked into the general store across the street just as they were locking up and forced them to make one more sale.”
“You already ordered the pizza, too?” Marti asked as she took her seat.
“The specialty of the house—everything but anchovies. I just thought that after Hector, I’d better pull out the big guns when it came to stress eating and consoling.”
A Baby for the Bachelor Page 5