The Sugar House

by Christine Flynn

  “Can you get away?”

  “I just need my coat.”

  The faint buzz of speculation joined the general chatter of conversation and laughter as they moved to the coatracks beside the front door. He would have taken her quilted black coat from her to help her slip it on had she not quickly pulled it on herself and headed for the door. She seemed as anxious as he was to escape the two hundred sets of eyes glued to their backs.

  The warmth and once-familiar scents gave way to the crisp night air. In the merging halos of lights flanking the door, he saw her look up a heartbeat before that glance shied away.

  “It really wasn’t necessary for you to drive all the way up here, Jack.”

  “I’d have been back sooner or later. What do you want to do?” he asked, skirting past that little admission. “Do you have to go back in there, or do want me to follow you home?”

  “I should go back in.” Still looking cautious, or maybe it was self-protective, she pushed her hands into her coat pockets. Her breath trailed off in a fog. “Let’s just walk.”

  Pushing his hands into his pockets, too, mostly to keep from reaching for her, he moved with her past the parked trucks and cars before they angled toward the quarter mile of snowfield separating the center from the back road that led to the old mill.

  Here, away from the lights, the thinned layer of snow glowed blue in the brightness of the nearly full sugar moon.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” he finally asked.

  “I told you on the phone. I want to sell everything.”

  “You’re not serious, are you?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

  Emmy really wished he’d listened to her and stayed in Boston. She didn’t believe for a minute that he was there for the reasons she needed him to be. Seeing him had also just neatly undone whatever negligible bit of progress she’d thought she’d made toward getting over him and moving on.

  Since moving on is what she knew she had to do, the last thing she needed was him trying to talk her out of it. And he would. She could tell from the disbelief in his voice.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” she told him, when what she truly didn’t want was to continue on as she was. She just didn’t know any other way to avoid it. “I’d always lived with the idea that I had to preserve what my parents had struggled to keep intact. I think somehow I thought I’d be letting them both down if I didn’t keep the house and carry on the sugaring business and the Larkin’s Products name. What they’d left me was all I had,” she admitted, over the quiet crunch of snow beneath their feet, “so I didn’t let myself think of wanting anything else.

  “But living alone from one season to the next isn’t how I want to spend the rest of my life,” she insisted. “Unless I want to bury myself out there forever, I need to find something more, Jack. Like you did. So, please,” she asked, would have begged if she’d had to. “Don’t try to talk me into staying.”

  In the pale moonlight, she watched him glance toward her and braced herself for his arguments. She was sure he had them. He’d had plenty when he’d tried to talk her into taking the parcel of property that now belonged to him, whether he liked the idea or not.

  “Okay, then,” he agreed, a little too easily it seemed. “But how about some options?”

  “To leaving?”

  “To selling. I really don’t think that’s something you should do,” he said, telling her exactly what she’d expected to hear. “Unless you sell it to me.”

  That, she had not anticipated.

  “Why would you want it?”

  “So I can hold it for you.” As Jack had thought about what she wanted during his four-hour drive, it had occurred to him that buying it himself was the most logical thing to do if she were truly serious. And he really hadn’t doubted that she was. As practical and sensible as he knew her to be, Emmy wasn’t a woman to make such a decision lightly. “I know you want to sell it, but I have the feeling you would eventually regret having let it go. If I buy it, then you can buy it back anytime you want. Or you can come back whenever you feel the need.”

  There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that she would miss her home. She might not miss the work, the worry or the weather that could wreak havoc on her life and her livelihood. But she would miss her house and her land. And Maple Mountain. It was too much a part of her. Just like this place was a part of him. Despite the bad memories, being back even for a while had made him appreciate the uniqueness of where he’d grown up himself. It would be good to come back to the country, to work the land. Once in a while.

  “You would live there?”

  “I’m not in a position to do that,” he told her, because he would miss the city even more. “Or, rather than sell it,” he suggested, because he’d thought about this, too, “you could keep it all and have Charlie and his wife move in while you’re gone. I know he’d like to be out of his son’s house. His wife would, too.” The old guy had confided that himself. Grumbled it somewhat wistfully, actually. “You know he would be right at home taking care of the sugar bush. He could do your sugaring for you, too. He told me his grandson will be old enough next year to help out. And I guess Mary used to work with him when they had their maple farm.”

  In the shadows, Emmy studied the lines of his noble profile. His offer to buy her land and hold it for her had been incredibly kind. Incredibly generous. But then, she knew he was a kind and generous man. He’d been proving that since the first day he’d arrived.

  She also knew that the offer he’d so easily made had been possible because of what had happened between their fathers.

  I didn’t want to have to worry about hanging on to every penny I had, he’d told her. I wanted to have enough that if a friend got himself into trouble and needed help, I could give him what he needed and not worry about whether I ever got it back.

  A friend, she thought. Even though she strongly suspected it was his sense of duty driving him, that was what he was trying to be.

  As much as she wanted that friendship and as good a friend as he would make, she ached for so much more.

  More.

  It was as if he’d taught her the word.

  “I would love to give it to Charlie and Mary.” She honestly couldn’t imagine anyone she’d rather see there. “It’s just that I need the money from the sale to start over somewhere else.”

  “Where would you go?”

  A cloud slipped across the moon, dimming its glow as they walked next to each other across the field. “I’d like to go to design school,” she told him, because confiding in him had come so easily. “Some of the best ones are in New York, but I can’t see taking Rudy there.”

  Jack couldn’t see her energetic little canine there, either. Or her, for that matter. Not straight from Maple Mountain. But it wasn’t thoughts of her alone in the city that suddenly had him dealing with a totally unfamiliar sense of uncertainty. They had just edged up to the reason he’d had to see her.

  “What about Boston? That’s where you’d intended to go when you gave up your scholarship.”

  “I know.” She had thought about that, too. It had been her first choice, actually.

  But that’s where he was.

  Emmy hunched her shoulders against the cold air, her focus on the gleam of the moon on the snow now that the moon was back. She knew Boston was a big city. She knew the chances of running into him would be roughly equivalent to her stick-straight hair suddenly turning curly, but she’d know he was there. And then she’d never get over him.

  Her silence pushed him on.

  “If you were there, it would be easier for us to see each other.” The caution he’d sensed in her now filled him. “I’ll go wherever I have to, Emmy. But it really would be easier if we were at least in the same state.”

  Emmy came to a dead halt at the side of the road.

  Despite her best efforts, that intrepid bubble of hope had resurrected itself when he’d said he
was coming. It now jammed itself squarely in her chest.

  It also prevented her from saying a thing when he stepped in front of her and slowly scanned her face. She’d never seem him look so hesitant, or sound so certain.

  “A really wise friend said something I haven’t been able to forget,” he told her, hoping the stunned look in her eyes was a good thing. He’d once thought her reserved. Yet the woman now seemed totally artless, nearly incapable of hiding her responses. At least, around him. “He said that a man can’t be happy having nothing to do, any more than he can be happy having nothing to do but work.”

  She tipped her head, her eyes luminous in the pale light. “That sounds like Charlie.”

  “It was.”

  He threaded his fingers through his hair. He’d never laid himself on the line before. Not his heart, anyway.

  “I know you don’t want me to feel a sense of obligation toward you. Or responsibly. Or duty. But I do. Not because of our fathers,” he insisted. Doing what he’d done so many times before, he caught her cheek with his palm, turned her face back to him when she looked away. “But because those are just part of caring about someone. I know I’m not doing the best job of telling you all this. I mean, this whole thing sort of blindsided me. But I want more than my work,” he finally said, because that was the bottom line.

  She seemed to have frozen in the snow. He edged closer, traced the shape of her bottom lip with his thumb.

  “I want you, Emmy. Actually, I need you,” he admitted, because he hadn’t felt whole since he walked out her door. “I know you need more than what you have, too. And I know that what we had together was good,” he continued. “If you’re willing to give me another chance, maybe between the two of us we can figure out how to find a little balance in both of our lives.”

  He wanted evenings by the fire with Rudy curled up beside them while she studied and he waded through whatever work he’d had to bring home. He wanted coffee with her in the morning before they had to rush out the door. What he wanted more than anything was to wake up with her in his arms and to know that she was there for him, and for her to know he was there for her.

  “I think we can make this work…” he murmured, feeling relief wash through him as she stood quietly absorbing his touch “…if there’s any chance you can love me, too.”

  From somewhere beneath her heart, Emmy felt the bubble break free. Behind it, realization filled the void that had lived inside her for so long. Love him, too, he’d said.

  Her hand felt as if it were trembling as she rested her palm on his chest, felt the strong beat of his heart. She couldn’t help the smile curving her mouth.

  “I think we can make it work, too.” She hadn’t just found more. She’d found it all. “And I already do.”

  Jack finally had what he’d hoped for. Her smile. The one that seemed to make her glow from inside and radiated the warmth that touched him in a place he hadn’t known existed.

  She loved him. The thought seemed incredible as he hooked his arms around her waist and drew her slender body against his. Almost as incredible as the fact that he’d had to come home to Maple Mountain to find the part of himself he hadn’t even known was missing.

  “I love you,” he murmured, his breath warm on her cheek.

  “I love you more.”

  She whispered the words as she looped her arms around his neck, flowing into his kiss, kissing him back with the same longing she felt in him. There was wonder in that kiss, too. And promise. And hope. There was also enough heat to have her knees feeling a little weak when, long moments later, a pair of headlights illuminated them right where they stood.

  Jack lifted his head. Emmy turned hers to glance toward the SUV that had practically slowed to a stop as it passed them.

  It was Agnes.

  There wasn’t a doubt in Emmy’s mind where the talkative woman was headed, or what would happen once she got there. In less than a minute, half of the people in the community center would know for sure what half the town had already begun to suspect. Stan Larkin’s daughter had fallen hard for Ed Travers’s son.

  “This is going to be interesting,” Jack muttered when the vehicle’s lights disappeared.

  “What will?”

  “Going back in there.”

  “Actually, I don’t have to. My shift was over when you arrived.”

  He grinned. “Good,” he muttered, and pressed a quick kiss to her lips. When he lifted his head, his smile had turned to curiosity. “So,” he said, flatly. “Maybe now you’ll tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Your name. You never have told me what it is.”

  She tipped her chin, shrugged as if the matter were of no consequence at all. “It’s just Emily.”

  “No middle name?”

  “None.”

  “Just Emily. I like that,” he told her, cupping her face with his hand. “But I think I’d like Emily Larkin-Travers better.” One dark eyebrow arched. “Any chance you could get used to the sound of that someday?”

  Emmy felt as if her heart were about to burst as she met the smile in Jack’s eyes.

  He was the man who had let her dare to dream, to want, to finally put the past behind her. She couldn’t think of anything more healing to that past than the blending of their names, either. But she was thinking more of the future and all it held with him in it when she raised up to meet his kiss—and told him she’d never heard anything more wonderful in all her life.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-2488-9

  THE SUGAR HOUSE

  Copyright © 2005 by Christine Flynn

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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  *The Whitaker Brides

  †The Kendricks of Camelot

  ††Going Home