Adam drank his water, smiling as he set the glass on the counter. “No bears in the kitchen yet.”
“Yet,” Adrienne repeated. She handed him a colander for the dinosaurs he’d collected and returned to the terrace with him. “I never played dinosaurs as a kid. I got into paper dolls for a while, but I didn’t have much time for unstructured play. My mother had me in classes.”
He loaded the dinosaurs into the colander. “What kind of classes?”
“Dance, music, theater, gymnastics, tennis, cooking, chess. I hated dancing and chess. The others were fine. What about you?”
He thought a moment. “Piano for a year.”
“It didn’t take?”
“A year was enough.”
“And no other lessons?”
He shook his head. “I did track and field and played a little baseball.”
“You grew up with five siblings out here in the country. Did your family have a vegetable garden?”
“Always.”
“A lot of planting, weeding, hoeing and harvesting, then.”
“Many hands,” he said.
“Did you chop wood, too?”
His blue eyes held hers for an instant longer than was comfortable. “Yeah,” he said finally. “We did cordwood from our land. Still do.”
“I’m not making fun of you, you know. I’m curious, that’s all.”
“No problem.”
“I took piano lessons. I wasn’t any good at it.”
He smiled. “Something we have in common.”
She nodded toward the fields and woods behind the house. “Do you have old stone walls at your family home?”
“We do, and we have an arched stone bridge across Cider Brook, too.”
“Same kind of rock as the walls?”
“Different. Most of the stone walls out here were created when settlers cleared the woods for farmland. They’re what we call random rubble walls.”
“Sounds like my life.” Adrienne waved a hand. “Kidding. How old are these old stone walls?”
“Most were built between 1750 and 1850. There’s a lot of rock in this area.”
“I guess you don’t have to worry about a shortage.”
“Not of fieldstone. Quarried stone can get tricky. I’m trying to match some up to repair stonework in the village. I’m keeping my eye on demolitions of structures with the same stone.” He pushed back his chair. “It’s a living.”
“But it’s work you enjoy?”
“Sure. No complaints. There’s enough variety to keep my interest, and I like the work. Stonemasons don’t specialize the way they once did. I work on my own most of the time, but I hire a crew for bigger jobs.”
“Your brothers?”
He smiled. “Only if no one else is available. Not their favorite type of work.”
His comment was good-natured. She’d witnessed the banter between the brothers last winter. “I noticed the stonework was all that was left in the old cellar hole where we found the boys.”
“Most of my work will outlast me.”
“Not mine. A bottle of wine I recommend is lucky to last the evening.”
“Your guests will have good memories.”
“I hope so.”
They went inside with the colander. He set it in the sink and turned water on the muddy dinosaurs. He was a good uncle, Adrienne thought, and one steady, competent man. He spread out a dish towel and laid the wet dinosaurs on it. “The boys will know if I missed even one. They keep a tight inventory.”
“It turned into a tense, hectic afternoon.”
“You reacted well when you found Maggie. You’ll handle inn crises just fine.”
“I hope so. I hope there aren’t any, though. But thanks for the vote of confidence.” She leaned against the butcher-block island, watching as he blotted the dinosaurs with the towel. “Did you and your siblings ever take off like that?”
“Christopher and I went out our bedroom window on a sheet one night. We’d been banished to our rooms. It was just after dark. We got lost down on Cider Brook and ended up spending the night in the woods. We figure our dad knew where we were but left us out there as a lesson. He’ll never admit it. It’s probably not something he’d do nowadays.”
“How old were you?”
“I was twelve. Chris was nine. It was Fourth of July week, so it’s not like we were going to freeze.”
Adrienne was fascinated by how different his upbringing had been from her own. It never would have occurred to her to go out her bedroom window on a sheet. “I hid in a closet once. Not as dramatic as spending the night in the woods. Maybe if I’d had a sibling, I’d have been more adventurous. It was just my mother and me once she divorced my dad when I was seven.”
“Rough time?”
“Yeah. They did the best they could by me.” She didn’t want to go there, not now, maybe not ever with a Sloan, given the family’s prominence in her new town, with her new employers. “Did you and Chris slip back into your house without your parents noticing, or did you march through the front door?”
“Our folks took up the sheet so it wasn’t an option. I went through the front door. I knew it would be manned but figured Chris could sneak in through the back and claim he’d been hiding all along.”
“You sacrificed yourself for your little brother.”
“Plausible deniability.”
“Did it work?”
Adam shook his head, a smile in his eyes. “He never had a chance. It’s a big family. Our folks and older brothers had all entry points covered. And Gran. She’s old-fashioned. She was waiting for us with a switch.” He folded the dinosaurs into the towel. “Some homecoming, huh? Lost in the woods, and we were in trouble.”
“I suspect the trouble had to do with sneaking out the window on a bedsheet.”
“A hazard of having a room on the second floor. We could have slipped in and out a first-floor window with no one being the wiser.”
“Assuming you didn’t get lost,” Adrienne said. “Imagine your poor parents waking up and discovering their two youngest boys were nowhere to be found.”
“Just as well they were onto us early, I guess. Heather tried the bedsheet route when she got older, but her room was in the attic, so her sheet didn’t reach far enough. She had to jump a ways and damn near broke an ankle. I heard her yell. She didn’t get far before we caught up with her. Still calls us the posse.”
“Well deserved, no doubt.”
“Don’t think she’s not one of us because she’s the only sister.”
Having worked closely with Heather on Vic’s house renovations, Adrienne wasn’t under that impression. Heather was all Sloan.
Adam got two clean towels from a drawer and divided the dinosaurs into them. “Can you identify any of them?”
“A few from movies. You?”
“I think I’ve got them all down except this guy.” He held up a fierce-looking dinosaur figure with horns. “The boys can tell me.”
“Amazing what sticks from when you were eight.”
“Wish multiplication had stuck.”
Adrienne had no doubt multiplication had stuck just fine with Adam.
He tied the towels around the dinosaurs. “Chris went deep with his dinosaurs. He read every book he could find on them in the library. Justin and Eric never cared about dinosaurs one way or the other. Heather pretended to care but she didn’t.”
Adrienne pointed at a fat green-painted dinosaur whose nose peeked out from the towel. “His name?”
“Fred.”
“Ha.”
He grinned at her. “You didn’t care about dinosaurs at eight and you don’t care now.”
She laughed. “I can’t disagree.”
He picked up the towels. “Anything else I can do?”
Her mout
h went dry with awareness. Had to be the adrenaline from finding Maggie and searching for the boys. He was sexy, but she’d known that. He’d been sexy last winter. She felt heat rising into her face and quickly shook her head. “All set. Thanks.”
“Okay, then.” He started for the front door. “See you soon, Innkeeper Adrienne.”
Four
Adam shut the front door behind him—dinosaurs and all—and walked to his van with such control that Adrienne only found herself feeling hotter. She sank against the freestanding island with such force it slid halfway to the sink. She stood straight, pushed the island back in place, ran a hand through her hair and listened to the birds twittering outside as a breeze floated through the open windows. Adrenaline. That really did explain everything, didn’t it?
She had an inn to keep. She didn’t need to be lusting after Adam Sloan. She was here to do a job and spend time with Vic, get to know him better now that the shock of discovering he was her father had worn off for both of them. Knights Bridge was his home. The last thing she wanted to do was to mess things up for him here.
The quiet Sloan.
That was what everyone said about Adam.
Quiet, maybe, but she’d seen him in action today.
She finished cleaning up the kitchen. Olivia and Maggie had put their trust in her. She wasn’t going to complicate her relationship with them by letting this unsettling attraction get out of hand.
She went out to the terrace. It was quiet now, gray with the clouds and approaching dusk. A butterfly zigzagged among yellow flowers whose name she couldn’t place. She didn’t know what kind of butterfly it was, either. So much to learn out here, and she looked forward to every bit of it—however long she stayed in Knights Bridge.
She walked on a soft, bark-mulched path to the spot where Maggie had fallen. Spots of blood had dried on a rock. Would it draw animals to the yard? Adrienne shuddered at the prospect but decided such a scenario wasn’t worth thinking about. Nothing she could do about it at this point, anyway.
Just as well the inn didn’t have anything on the schedule through the weekend. She was restless, not sure what to do with herself despite having a long list of tasks she needed to get to sooner rather than later.
She returned to the kitchen and filled a pitcher with water, brought it out to the garden and poured it on the bloodstains. Maybe diluting them wouldn’t help much in terms of animals but at least Maggie and the boys—and Brandon—wouldn’t have to see her blood when they came out here.
Of course, it was supposed to rain tonight.
Adrienne sighed and took the pitcher back to the kitchen. She felt agitated and on edge, but it wasn’t just the aftereffects of finding Maggie and discovering the boys were missing. It was the sense that she was about to spin out of control. It’d happened last winter. She’d all but stalked Vic, knowing he was her father—keeping it to herself even after she’d realized he had no idea. She hadn’t been straight with him from the start.
And she’d always been restless and impulsive.
She liked to see herself as flexible, spontaneous, creative—someone who could seize the moment and make things work. Her interest in wine. Her blog. Her travels. Her consulting.
She had lots of friends. She’d done so much considering she was barely thirty.
How had she ended up at a small inn on a dead-end road in Knights Bridge, Massachusetts?
Then there was Adam Sloan. Her reaction to him.
How close had they been to falling into each other’s arms after the adrenaline-fueled hunt for the missing boys?
Had she wanted that?
Adrienne left the question unanswered. She emptied the dishwasher and put away the dishes she’d washed by hand. She took the wet towel Adam had used to dry the dinosaurs to the laundry in the mudroom. Olivia had bought the antique house when she’d still been working in Boston as a graphic designer. She’d quit her job and moved back to her hometown a year and a half ago, expecting to live here herself as an innkeeper, freelancing as a designer to help make ends meet as she got the inn on a solid financial footing. Then Dylan had entered her life, and they’d married here at Carriage Hill on Christmas Eve. Now they were expecting their first child.
How fast life could change...
Maggie had become her business partner, and they’d managed without a full-time staff, hiring the occasional contractor for what they couldn’t do themselves. Finally, though, they’d realized they couldn’t do all they’d been doing—but neither could Adrienne, not with the inn’s upcoming schedule. They knew that. She needed to hire people to clean, do laundry, take care of the yard, possibly handle reservations. Olivia would eventually hire someone to deal with marketing and public relations, but Adrienne would have a role. A retail shop was on the someday/maybe list. Maggie and Olivia had their own goat’s milk soap-making business. There was talk of selling the products in a shop at the inn and maybe online, too. They were already used as guest-room amenities.
Olivia and Maggie had dived in without clear goals, figuring things out over the past eighteen months. That was something Adrienne could understand and appreciate. She was here, wasn’t she? She’d leaped at the opportunity without any specific goals in mind for herself. Do a good job. Spend time with Vic. See what happened.
Move on when the time was right.
That was her pattern, wasn’t it?
But she felt a tightness in her chest, a pang of loss and regret at the prospect of leaving.
“Give it six months. Then see how you feel.”
She set out clean dish towels. Keeping moose out of the yard and bears out of the kitchen tonight would do the trick for her in terms of goals.
And stop thinking about Adam Sloan.
“I need to swear off men while I’m in Knights Bridge.”
That was the smart move.
“Also stop talking to myself.”
She smiled, feeling more in control.
Once she was satisfied the inn was tidied and she could take a breather, she walked up the quiet road. She found Olivia sitting on the front steps of the barn she and Dylan used as a base for their fledgling adventure travel business and entrepreneurial boot camps. The barn looked as if it had been there for two hundred years, but it was brand-new, built the past year and never intended to be used as an actual barn with horses or cows or anything. Olivia and Dylan had also had a new home built up the hill a bit. The Sloans had done the construction on the house and barn, both designed by a local architect...who was married to Olivia’s younger sister...
More connections Adrienne had to keep track of, but she’d had a head start last winter and she had Vic’s cheat sheet. She had to admit she loved the challenge and all the different ways the people in the small town, whether newcomers or born and raised there, interacted with each other.
Olivia shifted her position on the steps. “I know it’ll be harder and harder to get comfortable in the coming weeks.” She sounded perfectly cheerful about that prospect. “I just wanted to sit here a few minutes before it gets dark and the rain starts. It’s so relaxing. I picked echinacea and phlox and put them in a vase in the barn kitchen. It’s impossible to go wrong with flowers this time of year. Picking flowers was a good stress reliever after today.”
“No ticks, mosquitoes, red ants, snakes, spiders?” Adrienne grinned. “I’ll stop now.”
Olivia laughed, stretching out her legs on the stone steps. “It’s hard to believe the flowers will all be gone soon.” She inhaled deeply. “I can smell fall in the air, can’t you?”
Actually, Adrienne couldn’t. “I’m starting to notice the seasonal nuances.”
“Dylan dislikes humidity and loves cooler weather. I think that’s one reason he became a hockey player. What’s not to like about San Diego weather, but he appreciates New England’s four seasons.”
“I’ve never experienced a real N
ew England fall. I didn’t mind the cold weather when I house-sat for Vic, but I figured it’d probably be my only New England winter. Little did I know.”
“Do you feel you’re starting to get the lay of the land at the inn?”
“Definitely. It’s a fantastic place, Olivia.”
She looked pleased. “We’ve made so much progress with it.”
Vic had told Adrienne how Olivia and Dylan had met, at least what he knew of it. Olivia had written to Dylan in San Diego to come clean up his eyesore of a yard up the road from her antique house, but he’d had no idea he owned a house in Knights Bridge. Turned out his father had left it to him but hadn’t had a chance to tell him before his untimely death in a fall on one of his treasure hunts. Dylan had headed east to check out his property, and he and Olivia had swooped into each other’s lives. In the process, they’d discovered that Duncan McCaffrey had bought the property from a retired high school English and Latin teacher who’d given birth to him in her late teens. His birth father, a British RAF pilot, was killed early in World War II, never to return to Grace Webster, the young woman he’d fallen in love with across the Atlantic.
According to Vic, Grace had never held her and her British lover’s baby before he was adopted.
Duncan had met his birth mother before his death and bought her house on Carriage Hill Road. Grace, in her nineties, had moved into the town’s assisted living facility and was looking forward to being a great-grandmother.
Adrienne smiled to herself. Little Knights Bridge did have its secrets.
While Dylan and Olivia were figuring out why his father had bought Grace’s house, Vic was working in New York with no idea he had a secret baby of his own.
Why her mother hadn’t told him would never make sense to Adrienne, but that was Sophia Portale. She was the type who had the answer before anyone had asked the question. Come up pregnant after a Paris fling, weeks before her marriage to another man? Pretend the fling never happened. Pretend the baby was conceived on your honeymoon. Don’t tell anyone the truth, including your daughter, even when she’s an adult—unless she corners you and you have no other choice.
Stone Bridges Page 5