Strangers When We Meet

by Marisa Carroll

  “It doesn’t have to be. I know we’d have to start over from the beginning, but I love you, Emma.”

  “No, you don’t, Daryl. Don’t demean me or yourself by thinking you do. If you loved me, you wouldn’t have betrayed that love as casually as you did.”

  There was no answer to that statement, and she could see it on his face when he realized it. “I’m sorry, Emma,” he said quietly, once more taking her hands in his. “More sorry than you’ll ever know.”

  She started to say that she was sorry, too. But the sound she’d been listening for, the whoosh of the heavy automatic doors leading to the surgery and recovery suites, forestalled her. She and Daryl were alone in the waiting room. The hallways were quiet and deserted. Surely whoever was coming through those doors was coming to take her to Blake. She stood up. From the corner of her eye she saw her grandparents making their way to the waiting room. Felix was carrying a foam container and a plastic spoon. Her soup.

  The elderly couple quickened their steps, arriving in the waiting room just as a nurse in deep purple scrubs did. Martha and Felix exchanged a quick glance when they saw Daryl standing close to Emma, but like her, their attention was focused on the nurse.

  “Ms. Hart?”

  “Yes.” Emma reached for her grandmother’s hand. “How is he?”

  “He’s awake,” the paunchy middle-aged man said with a grin that was tired but infectious. “He’s asking for you. You can go in for a few minutes if you’re quiet.”

  Emma didn’t know what to do. She wanted to be with Blake so badly it was like a hunger inside her, but she could also see how tired her grandparents were. It was very late. They needed to be home, safe, in their beds. She hadn’t thought about that until this very moment. Suddenly she was torn, unable to move. She glanced helplessly from her grandparents to the nurse’s puzzled face. What should she do next?

  Martha was gray with fatigue, and her grandfather was limping, his lumbago acting up from being out in the cold and rain. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? But Blake was asking for her...

  It was Daryl who read her thoughts and came to her rescue. The Daryl she’d thought he was when she first met him months before. With a ghost of the smile she had found so charming, he brushed her cheek with his lips and gave her a little push. “Go on, Emma,” he said. “Go to him. Give me a chance to redeem myself a little. I’ll see your grandparents get back to Cooper’s Corner safe and sound.”

  * * *

  BLAKE SAT on the side of the hospital bed, head bowed, breathing heavily. He hadn’t expected it to be such a task just to shower and get dressed, even if all he was wearing was a pair of sweats and a flannel shirt that Clint had loaned him. Not much of a fashion statement, but there was no way he could get a pair of jeans on over the heavy surgical dressing on his side. He could use a pain pill, but he wasn’t going to ask for one.

  He’d spent the morning arguing with Emma and his doctor, neither of whom thought three days was long enough to be trapped in this pale blue cubicle of a room. But he’d had about all he could take of being poked and probed and prodded, and most of all, he was tired of the food.

  If he ever saw another bowl of green gelatin in his life, it would be too soon.

  So he’d called Clint Cooper at Twin Oaks and asked him to pack up his stuff. He could make it back to the city on his own if he had to. But he had other plans for transportation to New York.

  “I see you’re determined to go through with this.” It was Emma standing in the doorway of his room, raindrops sparkling in her glorious auburn hair, her nose pink from the cold November air. What was left of Indian summer had been washed away by the rain the night he’d been shot. From the little slice of sky and parking lot he could see from the arrow slit of a window in his room, winter had arrived.

  “I need to get back to the city. My parents are threatening to come up here from Florida and take care of me.” Every word of that was truth. His parents were determined he needed their help, and it had taken all his persuasive skills to keep them in Kissimmee for the time being. “A steady diet of bean sprouts and tofu ought to set my recovery back another week or ten days. And Summer has already contacted an old classmate from med school who’s practicing here to look in on me—”

  “She’s concerned about you.”

  “She’s a pediatrician. So’s this guy. He had Tasmanian Devil and Bugs Bunny on his tie. He offered me a lollipop to stick out my tongue.” When Emma laughed, smoothing out the stress line that had developed between her softly arched eyebrows, he was glad he’d made the joke. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes from lack of sleep, and that was his fault, too.

  “You’ve been acting pretty childishly this morning, signing yourself out of here when you can barely walk to the bathroom. Summer’s friend probably figured you’d respond best to the same tactics he uses on his littler patients.”

  “Very funny.” He shifted his weight a little too quickly, and the stitch of pain in his side caught him off guard. He bit back a groan. Emma was beside him in a heartbeat.

  “You’d better lie down.”

  “No. I’m not getting back in this bed. Help me over to the chair.”

  “You’re behaving worse than a sick child,” she scolded, placing her hand beneath his elbow and taking most of his weight. He made it to the chair without becoming light-headed, an accomplishment, and lowered himself cautiously onto the hard seat. “How do you expect to look after yourself in New York, especially if you won’t let your parents come up to help out?” she asked, stepping back and settling herself on the edge of the mattress. She’d barely touched him since he’d come out of the fog of anesthetic and pain pills. Before that, up on the mountain, she had been beside him every moment, and her touch had been soft and loving.

  Perhaps he hadn’t told her he loved her up there on the mountain, after all. Perhaps that had been as much of a dream as the nightmares that had haunted him since he’d been here. Dark figures with guns. Blazing, hate-filled eyes taking aim at his head. Old dreams of old enemies from ten years and half a world away, reinforced by the terror of that never-to-be-forgotten September morning in New York when the World Trade Center had come hurtling down around him.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like your granddad.”

  “I—” That one scored a hit. She shut her mouth with a snap.

  “I was hoping you’d offer me a ride back into the city.”

  Shock widened her eyes. “How did you know I was leaving Cooper’s Corner early?”

  “Your grandfather told me when he stopped by last evening.” She hadn’t wanted Blake to know she was going. He could see it in her face.

  “I’m already packed and ready to go. It will mean over an hour delay to go to Cooper’s Corner for your things.”

  “Clint’s on his way with my stuff.”

  “Oh.” She had hoped to put a wrench in his plans with that objection. She frowned a bit harder but seemed unable to think of any more excuses. “I suppose I can drop you at your building,” she agreed reluctantly.

  “Thanks.” Step one of his objective had been successfully completed. On to step two. He had thought they could spend a day or two at Twin Oaks, but had changed his mind even before her grandfather had let slip that she’d checked out of the B and B the afternoon he’d been shot. Twin Oaks was where she’d come with Tubb, where they’d made love—possibly in the room he was renting. He didn’t want her to be thinking of that. Someday they’d come back, when those memories had been replaced by ones they made together. They were better off in New York. On the drive they’d be alone together in her car. He’d have a clear head. He’d find out what was bothering her and make it right.

  Her touch had been gentle and her voice soft and comforting those first hazy hours af
ter his surgery, but then she’d withdrawn. She was still there every day, and sometimes in the night when he awoke, sweating and caught in the dream, but there’d been no passion, no fire in her touch. She might as well have been Summer looking after him. He hadn’t had the strength or the clarity of mind to figure out why she’d withdrawn. He still wasn’t sure what had happened, but he had a couple of theories, none of them comforting.

  Had she thought twice about breaking her engagement? Had the Realtor Lothario managed to work his way out of the hole he’d dug himself into with his tomcat ways? Had she taken him back?

  That was the first thing he intended to find out. And if she had, it was the first thing he intended to change.

  “How will you get your truck back to the city?” she asked.

  A knock sounded on the door frame before he could answer that Clint had business in the city the next week and had offered Blake a ride to Cooper’s Corner when he returned home so he could repossess his truck. The man himself was standing in the hallway with Blake’s carryall slung over his shoulder. At his side was a Massachusetts highway patrol lieutenant.

  “Clint. Lieutenant Hunter.” Emma smiled at them, but there were questions in her eyes.

  “Hi, Emma.”

  “Hello, Ms. Hart.”

  “Blake, do you remember Lieutenant Hunter?”

  “I think I do. You stopped by the morning after my surgery.”

  “That’s right.” He stepped into the room and handed Blake a hat. It was his old red baseball cap emblazoned with the Corps emblem. The one he’d been wearing when he was shot. Ash had bought it for him with his allowance money a dozen years ago when Blake went off to Saudi. He’d figured he would never see it again. “My men found it in the woods opposite the old McGillicuddy place. Were you wearing it that day?”

  Blake gave a short nod. “It would have been pretty hard for the shooter to mistake me for a deer,” he said. Or Emma, with the ends of Maureen’s orange scarf trailing in the wind.

  Hunter returned the nod. “We’re going on a theory that it was a poacher. Doc says it was a clean wound, T&T, but it definitely came from a deer slug. Probably a twenty-gauge shotgun. The rain and snow pretty much took care of any physical evidence the shooter might have left behind. But there might be something you can tell us today that you weren’t up to talking about before.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t more help that night.” His memories of the shooting and the day after were only bits and pieces of thoughts and sensations stuffed in the pockets of his mind like reminders written on scraps of paper.

  “Do you feel like answering a few questions now?”

  “I’ll do my best. You caught me just in time. Emma’s driving me back into the city this afternoon.” She opened her mouth as if to make one more protest, then evidently decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

  Hunter’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch but he didn’t make any comment on Blake’s leaving the hospital or the state. “Mr. Weston, can you give me any new details about the shooting? Emma’s already told me what she remembers.”

  “I wish I could have been more help,” she interrupted, leaning forward, both hands planted on the hard mattress. “I didn’t see anything, really. The shooter was behind me. If Blake hadn’t seen—”

  “What did you see, Mr. Weston?”

  “Not much.” Blake turned his thoughts inward. “A shape, a glint of light on a gun barrel.” Then his instincts had taken over. Instincts that were just rusty enough to make him a split second too slow. But at least Emma hadn’t been hurt. Her grandfather had told him the hole in Maureen’s coat had been close to the heart. As a matter of fact, the old man had ruminated, if you considered the slight difference in the size of the two women, the shot probably would have hit Maureen.

  “The man in the car that passed the farm had a dark cap.” Emma interrupted once more. “I couldn’t see his face. The car windows were tinted. I know it might have been someone else altogether who shot at us, but he’s the only person we saw up there.”

  “Do you remember what kind of car he was driving?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m terrible with car models or years. It wasn’t too big. Or too small.” She closed her eyes, turning her vision inward, concentrating so fiercely that her brows drew together in a straight line. “It was light colored, pale gray, I think. Like a rental car, you know. Very, very ordinary.” Emma opened her eyes and shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry, that’s all I can remember.”

  “It was a midsize. A Chevy Lumina,” Blake said. “Late model. And it was pale gray, just as Emma remembers.” He didn’t add that he hadn’t been paying attention to the driver of the car at the time, only to the woman standing so enticingly near.

  “Can you give me any better description of the man driving the car?” Scott Hunter looked first to Emma and then to Blake. He caught the frown Blake couldn’t quite keep from altering his expression. The old dream flickered behind his eyelids once more, just at the corner of his consciousness. “Mr. Weston?”

  Blake shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. Clint’s hands had balled into fists.

  “Are you sure there isn’t something else you remember? Anything at all? My sister’s life might depend on it.” Clint moved to stand in front of the trooper. His face was tight, his jaw set in a hard, straight line. “I don’t think the shooting was an accident. I think the gunman mistook Emma for Maureen. There was a man back in New York—” He broke off as though he had already said too much.

  Felix’s suggestion that Maureen might have been killed if she had been standing in Emma’s place came to mind once more, and Blake knew that Clint Cooper had made the same connection, and obviously for a reason Blake knew nothing about. But he was right. Emma and Maureen were similar in height. They both had auburn hair, and Emma had been wearing Maureen’s coat and scarf. From a distance they would be hard to tell apart, especially in the rain and gloom of a November twilight.

  He caught Clint watching him through narrowed eyes. He felt the other man’s anguish and the iron-hard determination to protect his sister from whatever it was in her past that might have followed her to Cooper’s Corner. He held Clint’s gaze for a long moment, but there was nothing he could say to relieve his anxiety.

  “I’m sorry. The whole night’s pretty hazy. Bits of sounds and pictures come and go.” He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “What I saw would never hold up in court. All the bad guys look alike to me. He might have been blond and blue-eyed. He might have been dark-haired. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”

  “Thanks, Weston. When you feel up to it, I’ll need a signed statement from you.” The trooper settled his hat on his head.

  “You’re not going to pursue this?” Clint demanded of the other man.

  “It’s an open case. We’ll follow up any leads we get,” Lieutenant Hunter answered patiently.

  “Damn it. Emma and Maureen could have been twins wearing that coat and scarf. You know damned well that was no poacher who took a potshot at Blake and Emma. I want Maureen protected, Hunter.”

  “I’m doing that. And don’t underestimate your sister. She’s one tough lady. She can take care of herself.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT WAS DARK by the time they neared the city, the short November twilight giving way to a moonless night. Blake had been silent for a long time. Emma wondered what he was thinking about. They’d discussed the circumstances of the shooting, Clint’s reaction in Blake’s hospital room, and the conversation Emma had overhead between Maureen and Lieutenant Hunter. They had come to the conclusion that neither of them knew what the devil was going on, and probably wouldn’t, unless the shooter was apprehended. Blake didn’t seem to think that would happen anytime soon, and Emma reluctantly agreed. She also realized it would be a long time before she was comfortable walking in the hills again. B
lake, however, didn’t share her alarm. “You can’t let the bad guys win, Emma,” he had said, then settled back in the seat for a nap.

  “I still can’t get used to it looking so different,” she said as the city skyline appeared before them, glittering against the dark night. “Were you here?” she asked. She didn’t know if Braxton, Cartwright and Wheeler had had offices in the doomed twin towers. It was a high-profile company and a prestigious address like the World Trade Center would have almost been a given. How many friends and associates had Blake lost in the carnage? Had he been trapped in the masses of doomed souls trying to escape the flames and terror?

  “I was there,” he said. “I thought I’d seen a lot of terrible things in Kuwait and Somalia, but I was wrong. That day was the worst.”

  “Were your company’s offices in the building?”

  He shook his head. “No. B, C and W never left Wall Street. Not in twenty-nine. Not after Pearl Harbor. Not when they built the Twin Towers. It used to be a sore spot with most of the brokers and traders, even one or two of the partners. But no more.”

  But if he had been there, as he said, it meant he had moved toward the fallen buildings, not away from them.

  “Most of our on-air personalities got caught outside the city,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road so he wouldn’t see the tears she still sometimes had trouble keeping back. “Armand and I—he’s my producer—were in the studio getting ready to head off to a remote broadcast. We stayed on the air for twenty-seven hours.”

  “I remember,” Blake said quietly. “I was at a triage center at Ground Zero. Somewhere WTKX was playing on a boom box. You did a good job.”

  “I just tried to keep it all going.” He didn’t say what he’d been doing at the triage station, and Emma didn’t ask. He would tell her someday when the time was right.

  There she was again, assuming they had a future. Repeating the same mistakes she’d made with Daryl.

  “You kept people from panicking. You got them the best information you could find. I remember.”