His Brother's Bride

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Laurel was still in love with Paul.

  And Scott was still a sick son of a bitch—in love with his older brother’s woman.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, FRUSTRATED and verging on terse, Scott moved with Laurel from table to table at Tubb’s Café, showing William Byrd’s picture to everyone there.

  No one had seen Byrd.

  As impossible as it seemed, the man had simply vanished. He sure as hell hoped that the fact that Owen Nevil was also absent was a complete coincidence.

  “Isn’t that Seth Castleman?” Laurel whispered, pointing to a lone figure in a booth in the back of the café.

  Scott followed the direction of her finger. Seth was only six years younger than he was, yet Scott barely recognized the man as the person he’d grown up with. Nowadays the electrician seemed afflicted with a terrible, terminal sadness. “Yep, that’s him,” he said quietly. The life might have gone out of Seth, but there was no mistaking Castleman’s muscular build, not in these parts.

  “He had the most unusual eyes,” Laurel said, walking slowly toward the booth. “Almost amber.”

  Scott wouldn’t know about that.

  He just knew he didn’t like the way Laurel seemed to gravitate to the other man. Didn’t like knowing full well that Castleman was free to pursue Laurel if he ever chose to.

  Not like Scott, who could only love her from far, too far away. Who really couldn’t love her at all.

  One kiss. If he could only have one taste of those lips...

  He was crossing a line he should not cross. One he swore he’d never cross.

  “Is he still single?” Laurel asked.

  “Yes.” Scott was no longer just verging on terseness.

  “It’s such a shame,” she said softly. “Has anyone heard anything from Wendy?”

  Wendy Monroe was one of Cooper’s Corner’s claims to fame. A skier of champion status, she’d left town to fly to Europe to participate in her first Olympics—left her fiancé, Seth Castleman, at home to watch her on national television. But she’d never made it to the television screen. At least not on the slopes. The week before the Olympics, in a practice run, she’d had an accident, hit a tree and ended up paralyzed. The doctors thought she’d have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

  Seth had flown to Europe immediately, and two weeks later he’d come back. Alone. He’d been alone ever since.

  “Bonnie was telling me a few months ago that Wendy’s walking again,” Scott said now.

  Bonnie and Seth and Wendy had all gone to school together. They’d been good friends.

  “You’re kidding!” Laurel said, stopping Scott with a hand on his forearm. She stared at him. “They said she’d never get out of that chair.”

  “Wendy’s one determined lady.”

  “Is she skiing?” Laurel asked, glancing back at Seth.

  Scott shook his head. “I don’t think so. Apparently she has quite a limp.”

  “You think he still loves her?”

  “I don’t know,” Scott answered honestly. “I hope not.”

  But he didn’t really hold out much hope. Cooper’s Corner seemed to breed lifelong love, unrequited or not.

  Look at him, still loving Laurel, and Laurel so much in love with Paul.

  Hell yeah, of course Castleman still loved Wendy Monroe. Poor fool.

  * * *

  “YEAH, I SAW HIM,” Castleman said when Scott showed him Byrd’s photo.

  With an urgency he’d been itching to feel all day, Scott handed the photo to Laurel and reached for his notebook.

  “When? Where?” Laurel asked.

  Scott didn’t have time to bother with the appreciation he recognized in the younger man’s eyes as Seth looked at Laurel. He didn’t have time. But he was bothered.

  “In here. Saturday afternoon.”

  Scott and Laurel exchanged glances.

  “He was with some woman,” Seth continued, taking a bite of his home-style meat loaf.

  “Can you describe her?” Scott asked.

  “Slender, nicely dressed, average height. Mid to late fifties.”

  Scott looked up from his notebook. “Gray hair?”

  Nodding, Seth said, “Silver. I didn’t see her up close so guess I can’t say for the record who she was,” he admitted, “but at the time I was certain she was the widow who bought the Wallace place outside of New Ashford. She’s using it for a summer home. I did some work out there shortly after she bought the place, but I only met her once. Most of my dealings were with the Realtor.”

  New Ashford was Cooper’s Corner’s neighboring village, and the Wallace place, while beautiful, was well-known only in that it had once been owned by a famous ballet dancer, and then later, an eccentric artist, neither of whom visited often. Mostly the property stood vacant.

  “You’re pretty sure it was her, though?” Scott asked.

  “Unofficially?”

  Scott nodded.

  “I’m certain it was. I don’t remember her name, though. The realty company paid my bill.”

  Taking a seat in a vacant booth, Scott pulled out his cell phone and made some calls to find out the name of the woman who’d recently purchased the Wallace place, while Laurel ordered cranberry cobbler and sodas for both of them.

  “Any luck?” she asked as he switched off his phone.

  “None. Everyone’s gone home. We’ll have to wait till morning.”

  “Should we drive out there? Take a look around?”

  Scott shook his head. “It’s not like we’d be able to see anything in the dark, and until we have an ID on the woman, I’d rather not knock on any doors. Not yet, anyway.”

  Laurel gave him an encouraging smile. “It’s less than twelve hours until morning....”

  She was right, of course. Still, it was another day further away from Byrd’s safe return. Crime statistics showed pretty conclusively that the longer the man was missing, the less his chances of being found unharmed.

  * * *

  SCOTT WAS FROWNING. Laurel had to stop herself from reaching over and smoothing her finger along that furrowed brow—an action she’d done to Paul hundreds of times as he’d studied or concentrated on a law brief.

  So many times in the past three and a half years she’d regretted letting Paul, her dear, conservative, conscientious lover, talk her into waiting until he passed the bar exam and become established in a firm before they got married. Having to support himself, he’d taken longer than most to get through school, and hadn’t been satisfied with just a junior position in a law firm. It wouldn’t have paid enough to support her and pay off his school loans. He’d had some sweet notion about not having her support him through school, though she’d have been very happy to do so.

  She wished now she’d insisted on it.

  She wouldn’t be sitting there seeing him in his younger brother if she had. Wouldn’t be thinking she wanted Scott, when it was really Paul she longed for.

  “How do you do it?” She probably shouldn’t ask, but spending so much time with Scott in the past two days had given her a false sense of emotional closeness.

  “Do what?” He was bent slightly over his cobbler, though he wasn’t eating the dessert with any relish.

  “Get by,” she said, setting her fork down on a plate still half-full. “Keep going.”

  He glanced up, the look in his blue eyes tired but piercing. “Who says I do?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Some days, maybe.”

  “And on those days when you don’t get by, what do you do then?”

  “Work.”

  Laurel, too. All the time. Work was her salvation. Her life. The keeper of her sanity.

  “Do you ever get mad?”

  He fr
owned, putting a bite into his mouth with deliberation and chewing slowly. “Sure.”

  “At God for taking him?”

  “Maybe. Occasionally.” He wasn’t meeting her eyes.

  “At Paul?”

  “No.”

  Laurel swallowed a lump of guilt. “Never?”

  “Never.” He glanced up then. “Do you?”

  She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t lie to him, but was ashamed to tell him the truth.

  “Sometimes.” She blinked back tears that didn’t come as readily these days as they had during that first year. “I just get so mad at him for not hanging on, for letting fate take him away, for not choosing to stay with me....”

  Scott didn’t say anything, but his gaze was warm, not disgusted.

  “Crazy, huh?” Laurel asked.

  “No.” He shook his head and took another slow bite of cobbler, almost as if it were his duty to clean his plate, not because he actually wanted the dessert. “Anger is a perfectly natural phase of grief.”

  She knew that. She’d learned it in her Life After Loss classes. “But it’s been three and a half years. That phase should have ended by now.”

  “You still get mad at him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You mad at him right now?”

  His gaze held hers, leaving Laurel feeling confused—and yet more alive than she’d felt since she’d left this town devastated and unable to cope three and a half years ago.

  “Maybe,” she said. “A little.” And then, after a long pause, “Yes. A lot.”

  Scott reached across and covered her hand where it was resting on the table. “It’s okay, you know.”

  Afraid she was going to cry, Laurel nodded.

  “Being back here, remembering, it’s natural that you’d relive it all.”

  He made her sound so normal.

  “It’s just that I’ve tried so hard,” she said. “I really thought I was ready to come home...come back here,” she corrected. Cooper’s Corner was not home to her. It couldn’t be. It was hell on earth—it represented all she’d dared to reach out for, only to have it cruelly snatched away.

  But it was certainly the most beautiful, welcoming hell she’d ever known.

  “I thought I was finally healing.”

  “So why are you so sure you aren’t?”

  “Because.” She couldn’t tell him—couldn’t tell anyone, but most of all not him.

  “Because why?” His voice was soft, coaxing, his thumb rubbing gently across the top of her hand.

  “I can’t tell you.” The words were almost a whisper.

  “You can tell me anything, Laurel. You used to. We were almost related, for God’s sake. You’re the only family I’ve got left.” He paused, and then said quietly, “After all we’ve been through, we’ve earned the right to confide in each other, haven’t we?”

  Tears swam in her eyes, blurring her vision, but Laurel couldn’t look away from him. She’d had no problem keeping everyone else in her life at bay these past three and a half years. For the past lifetime.

  What was it about the Hunter men—about Scott—that kept calling out to her?

  An affinity born of grief?

  “I’m angry because every time I look at you I feel things that I shouldn’t be feeling,” she confessed. “At least not for you.”

  His gaze took on a glint she’d never seen before. There was no danger in it, yet her heart started to beat such a furious tattoo she could feel its reverberation.

  “What things?”

  Licking lips that were uncomfortably dry, Laurel knew she shouldn’t tell him. But she couldn’t not tell him.

  “Things I should only be feeling for Paul. Things I would be feeling for Paul if he hadn’t taken the easy way out and left me here to deal with life all alone....”

  Scott didn’t say anything, but his grip on her hand tightened.

  Things had just changed between them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SCOTT DIDN’T SLEEP much that night.

  After dropping Laurel off at Twin Oaks—obsessed with kissing her good-night and equally obsessed with not kissing her good-night, he’d gone home to the house he’d once shared with Paul and his father, and he could hardly stand being with himself.

  He was in love with his brother’s woman. And she’d just opened the door to the possibility of a more intimate relationship between them.

  He alternated between thinking he should have said something when she’d given him the chance, and hating a life that had taken away his right to do so. She was “feeling things” for him.

  They couldn’t be anything like the “things” he’d been feeling for her for almost half his life.

  But there could be nothing between them. Not now. Not ever. Scott was supposed to have been his brother’s keeper. Instead, he’d been his killer.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, he forced himself to go to bed. But when he finally drifted off, he got even less rest than when he’d been awake.

  Scott wasn’t a dreaming man, but that night his sleep was filled with big black dogs. He’d fight them off, performing amazing martial arts kicks and blocking vicious jaws with his arm; he’d see them lying flat in an alley. He’d move on to something else, be somewhere else, and black dogs would be there, too. Always coming at him. He could slay them again and again, but he could never be free of them.

  He awoke early the next morning to a ringing telephone. It was his friend calling to give him the name of the woman who’d bought the Wallace place. Cecilia Hamilton. His buddy didn’t know too much more about her yet, except that she was the sole buyer and had no police record. And she had a personalized license plate that read “remember.”

  With the phone still to his ear, Scott pulled a pair of slacks and a shirt from his closet. It might be earlier than he normally started his day when he was on vacation, but he was grateful to get up and escape the dreams haunting him.

  Knowing that Clint was up early to start breakfast for the guests, he rang Twin Oaks as soon as he’d shaved and showered. If Laurel was still in bed, he’d catch up with her later in the morning.

  Scott needed to get to work.

  * * *

  MS. CECILIA HAMILTON WAS not at home that morning. Or at least she wasn’t answering her phone.

  Hoping she’d gone out to breakfast and would be home soon, Scott stopped for Laurel—who’d been up early, too—and the two of them headed to New Ashford.

  “Remember the ice-cream store in New Ashford?” Laurel asked. It was the first thing she’d said since climbing into the car.

  “Seeing that I was just there last week, yeah, I remember it.”

  She turned in the seat. “It’s still there?” Scott could feel those amazing gray eyes on him.

  He didn’t want to feel them.

  Didn’t want to notice how her skintight black pants hugged her thighs, or how sexy that white T-shirt looked, pulled taut across her breasts.

  But apparently they’d both reached the same conclusion about the night before—pretend she’d never said what she did.

  “It’s not only still there,” he told her, forcing himself to think cold thoughts. “It’s exactly the same as it was when we were in high school.”

  “With the red vinyl stools and Formica counter?”

  “And the spot on the wall where you carved your and Paul’s initials.”

  “He was really mad.”

  Scott had forgotten that.

  “And you apologized,” Scott remembered the rest. That apology had made him really angry at Laurel—and at Paul.

  “Of course I did.”

  “There’s no ‘of course’ about it. You did nothing wrong. The shop put the wooden panel in just for
that purpose. Those carvings are part of its charm.”

  “But you know how Paul was,” Laurel said softly. Scott hated the jealousy that shot through him at the tenderness in her voice.

  After all, hadn’t she been telling him just last night that the “things” she was feeling were really for Paul?

  “Too uptight for his own good sometimes.” Scott couldn’t believe he was speaking ill of his dead brother. Couldn’t believe he was even thinking ill of him. Was this woman doing this to him? Making him so crazy for her that he’d betray Paul again?

  “He just walked a straight-and-narrow path,” Laurel said. There was no defensiveness in her voice, only compassion.

  Scott was pretty sure he’d have preferred defensiveness. Then maybe he could get angry. He drove silently, concentrating on not saying anything else he’d regret.

  “He might have seemed overly conservative to some people,” Laurel continued after a time. “But he was just what I needed.”

  “You were fifteen when you met him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not usually an age when a girl knows just what she needs for the rest of her life.”

  “I wasn’t your average girl.”

  Of course she wasn’t. She was an angel come to earth.

  But that wasn’t what she meant. “That’s right. You were starved for love.” Guilt seized Scott as soon as the words left his mouth. “I know you loved Paul, but you also loved being loved. Admit it.”

  He didn’t know why he was doing this. Why pushing her was so important. But after all these years of loving her, of silently swallowing the frustration, the hurt, the things that he’d needed out of love and concern to say, he could no longer keep silent. He’d never be able to love her as he needed to. His own conscience wasn’t going to allow that, even if by some miracle she suddenly woke up and found herself in love with him.

  But...

  “I loved being loved.” She was looking out her window and the words were muffled.

  “You never looked at another guy after you met Paul. And you were only fifteen,” he repeated. “How do you know there wasn’t someone out there who was even more perfect for you than Paul was? Someone who wasn’t going to curtail every spontaneous impulse you had?”