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CHAPTER THREE

UNEASILY HOLDING A beautiful stranger in his arms and feeling that unwanted shiver of something good, Brendan Grant was aware it was what he had wanted to feel when he had purchased the car. Just a moment’s pleasure at something. Anything. With the car, he had not even come close.

He should have already learned stuff could never do it. An unwanted memory came, of standing in front of the house he now owned, with Becky at his side, thinking, This is the beginning of my every dream come true.

“Put me down!”

Nora’s hand, smacking hard against his chest, brought him gratefully back to the here and now.

“You couldn’t even stand up by yourself,” he said, unmoved by her tone. “I’ll put you down in a minute. When I get you to the house.”

Her expression was mutinous, but she winced, suddenly in pain, and conceded with ill grace.

He strode to the house. The woman in his arms was rigid with tension for a few seconds, then relaxed noticeably. He glanced down at her to make sure she hadn’t passed out.

Wide green eyes stared up at him, defiant, unblinking. If ever there were eyes that could cast a spell, it would be those ones!

Just as he got close the porch light came on, illuminating the fact that Deedee had grown tired of waiting, had exited the passenger seat of the car and was feebly trying to wrestle her cat carrier out of the back.

A boy, at that awkward stage somewhere between twelve and fifteen, who also had ginger hair like Charlie’s, exploded out the front door of the cottage, and the woman in Brendan’s arms squirmed to life.

His architect’s mind insisted on filling in pieces of the puzzle as he looked at the boy: too old to be hers.

“Put me down,” she insisted, then shook herself as if waking from a dream. “Honestly! I told you I could walk.”

The boy looked as if he had been sleeping, his hair flat against his face on one side and sticking straight up on the other. But he was now wide-awake and ready to fight.

“You heard her,” he said, “put her down. Who are you? What have you done to my aunt Nora?”

Not his mother. His aunt.

The boy dashed back into the house and came out wielding a coat rack. He held it over his shoulder, like a baseball bat he was prepared to swing. His level of menace was laughable. Brendan was careful not to show that he had rarely felt less threatened.

Still, he couldn’t help but admire a kid prepared to do battle with a full-grown man.

Brendan closed his eyes, and was suddenly aware he didn’t feel the weight of new cynicism. Instead he was acutely aware of how the sweet weight in his arms and the woman’s warmth were making his skin tingle. He was aware that the air smelled of rain and rose petals, and that those smells mingled with the clean scent of her hair and her skin.

Two and a half years ago, in the night, a phone call had changed everything forever. He’d been sleepwalking through life ever since, aware that he was missing something essential that other people had. That it was locked inside the tomb, and that even if he could have rolled the rock away, he was not sure that he would.

And now, another middle of the night phone call, leading to this moment. He was standing here in a stranger’s yard with a woman who either was trouble, or was in trouble, in his arms, an adolescent boy threatening him with a coat rack, Deedee oblivious to it all, struggling to get her dying cat out of the car.

Brendan was aware that the rock had rolled, that a crack of light had appeared in the darkness. He was aware of feeling wide-awake, as if he was a warrior waiting to see if it was a friend or foe outside.

For the first time in more than two years he felt the blood racing through his veins, the exquisite touch of raindrops on his skin. For the first time in so long, Brendan knew he was alive.

And it didn’t make him happy.

Not one little bit.

Instead, he felt deeply resentful that the prison of numbness that had become his world was being penetrated by this vibrant, demanding capricious energy called life.

“Put me down!” Nora insisted again, hoping for a nononsense tone of voice that would hide the confusion she was really feeling.

She looked up into the exquisite strength of the stranger’s face. Through the fabric of the expensive rain jacket he had wrapped around her, she could feel the iron hardness of his chest where she leaned into it. His arms, cradling her shoulders and her legs, were bands of pure steel.

She should have fought harder against being picked up and toted across the yard like a sleeping baby. Because it was crazy to feel so safe.

The stranger had a certain cool and dangerous aloofness about him. He had already made it clear he had heard some exaggerated claim about her energy that had allowed him to put her in the category of gypsies, tramps and thieves.

So the feeling of safety had to be attributed to the terrible knock on her head. Being in his arms made Nora achingly aware that she had been alone for a while now. Carrying the weight of her world all by herself. It was a relief to be carried for a change. A guilty pleasure, but a relief nonetheless.

Now, looking up at him, she could feel something shifting. His hands tightened marginally on her and some finely held tension played around the corners of his sinfully sensuous mouth.

The soft suede of his deep, deliciously brown eyes had not changed when he had called her a healer, his tone accusatory, but now they had hardened to icy remoteness and sparked with vague anger.

Well, he had come to her rescue and was being threatened with a coat rack. Naturally, he would react.

But now he was not the man she had awoken to, one with something so compelling in his face she had reached up and touched…

She shook that off, striving for the control she had lost when she’d accepted his arms around her, accepted being cradled against the fortress of his chest, accepted the comfort of being carried.

She could not be weak. She had to be strong. Everything was relying on her now. She was completely on her own since her fiancé had said, “Look, it’s him or it’s me.”

Surely, when her sister had appointed her guardian of then fourteen-year-old Luke she had not expected that turn of events! Karen had thought she was entrusting her son to a home, to a stable, financially secure environment that would have two parents, one her sister, Nora, affectionately known within the family as “the flake,” the other a highly respected stable person, a vet with his own practice.

But the highly predictable world Karen had envisioned for Luke didn’t happen. When everything had fallen apart between her and Vance, Nora had risked it all on a new start.

She had to be strong.

“Look,” Nora said, “you really have to put me down.”

The man ignored her, looking flintily past her to Luke.

To get his attention off her nephew, and to show she meant business, she smacked the stranger hard, against the solid wall of his chest. It felt ineffectual, as if she was being annoying, like a bug, not powerful like a lioness.

Still, when his arm slid out from under her knees, and she found herself standing, albeit a bit wobbly, on her own two feet, instead of feeling relieved she felt the oddest sense of loss.

He had carried her across her yard with incredible ease, his stride long, powerful and purposeful, his breath remaining steady and even. It was the kind of strength a person might want to rely on.

If that person hadn’t made a pact to rely totally on herself!

Get a grip, Nora ordered silently, moving away from the man. She was genuinely relieved that Luke dropped the coat rack and came to her side.

Casting a look loaded with suspicion and warning at the man who had carried her, Luke got his shoulder under her arm and helped her toward the house.

“What happened? Did he hurt you?”

“No. No. It wasn’t him. I couldn’t sleep and I went to check the animals. One of the new horses must have spooked and knocked me over.”

“Why would you go out in the corral by yourself?” Luke asked.

“My question precisely.” The man’s voice was deep and calm, steady.

“Those horses were wild when they were brought in,” Luke said accusingly. “That one took a kick at the guy unloading him.”

She didn’t like it one little bit that it felt as if the two were forming an alliance against her!

Why had she gone into the corral when the horses were so restless? Probably she hadn’t even thought about it, overly confident in her ability to calm animals.

Since she was a little girl she had found refuge from her mother and father’s constant bickering by bringing home broken things to fix. Tiny wounded birds, abandoned cats, dogs near death.

Inside, Nora was still the girl who had been seen by family and school chums as an eccentric, a kook, and she was more comfortable hiding her gifts than revealing them.

Which made her very uncomfortable with whatever this stranger thought he knew about her.

Would Karen have ever made her guardian of Luke if she knew Vance would not be in the picture? Probably not. She would have known her sister could not be trusted to control impulses like jumping into a corral full of flighty horses in the middle of the night!

Nora was solely responsible for Luke. What if he’d found her out there in the mud? Hadn’t he been traumatized enough? She was supposed to be protecting him!

Still, it was unsettling to her that what she remembered, in far more detail than her lapse of judgment before entering the corral, or the moments before being knocked over and knocked out, was the moment after.

Coming to, Nora had opened her eyes to find this man bent over her. His expression was intense, and he was breathtakingly handsome. Dark, thick hair was curling wetly around perfect features—a straight nose; whisker-roughened cheeks; a faintly cleft chin; firm, sensuous lips.

A raindrop had slid with exquisite slowness down his temple, over the high ridge of his cheekbone, onto his lip.

And then, in slow motion, it had fallen from his lip to hers.

Perhaps it was the knock on the head that had made the moment feel suspended, made the raindrop feel as if it sizzled in the chill of the night. Made her reach out with the tip of her tongue and taste that tiny pearl of water.

Perhaps it was the knock on the head that made her feel like a princess coming awake to find the prince leaning over her.

Through it all, Nora had been caught hard by eyes that mesmerized: velvet brown suede flecked with gold, a light in them that was mostly solid strength, with just the faintest shadow of something else.

Something she of all people should know.

Woozily, she had reached out and let the palm of her hand caress his bristly cheek, to touch that common ground she recognized between them.

He had gone very still under her touch, but he did not move away from it. She had felt a lovely sense of safety, that this was someone she could rely on.

But then the wooziness was gone, just like that, and she’d remembered she was in her paddock. And that she was alone out there with a man who had no business being on her property at this time of the night.

Nora’s instincts when it came to animals were beyond good. Some people, including her ex-fiancé, Dr. Vance Height, whom she had met while working as an assistant in his veterinary practice, were spooked by what she could accomplish with sheer intuition.

But Vance was a reminder that Nora’s good instincts did not extend to men. Or much else about life. With tonight being an unsettling exception, her perception was fabulous when it came to dealing with hurt, frightened animals.

Or writing her quirky, off-beat column Ask Rover, a column she had never admitted she was behind, because she had come across Vance reading it in her early days at his office, and he had been terribly scornful of it.

The intuition was not so good at helping her stretch her modest income from the column to support both the animal shelter and Luke. Thankfully, as the shelter became more established it was starting to receive financial support from the community of Hansen.

Her intuition was also not proving the least helpful at dealing with a now fifteen-year-old nephew who seemed intent on visiting his hurt and anger over the death of his mother on the whole world.

Feeling foolish now for that vulnerable moment when she had reached up and let her hand scrape the seductive whiskery roughness of the stranger’s cheek, and more foolish for allowing herself to be carried across her yard by a perfect stranger, Nora shook off Luke’s arm. She was supposed to be protecting him, not the other way around.

She turned and faced the man, folding her arms over her chest.

She had been, she was certain, mistaken that they shared anything in common. Looking at him from this angle, she found he looked hard and cold, and she had, as was her unfortunate habit, given her trust too soon.

“Where did he come from?” Luke asked in a suspicious undertone.

For all she knew he could be an ax murderer! Anyone could say they were an architect! She ran an animal rescue center. Anyone could say they had brought a cat.

She knew he wasn’t a cat person, one likely to be ruled by the kind of sentiment that would drive him out on a night like this for the well-being of a cat.

But behind the man, she suddenly became aware of an old woman in a ghastly pink outfit. As Nora watched, the woman gave a grunt of exertion and freed a large container from the backseat of a car that was as gray as the night and sleek with sporty expense. The man turned to her, stepped back and took a large carpet bag from her.

Nora registered two things at once: how protective he seemed of that tiny, frail woman, and that there was indeed a cat! Its head was sticking out of a kind of window in the side of the carrier. One didn’t have to have any psychic ability at all to know the cat did not have now, and probably never had had, a pleasing personality.

“I’m Brendan Grant,” he said.

The name seemed Scottish to Nora, and with the rain plastering his hair to his head, running unchecked down the formidable, handsome lines of his face, it was just a little too easy to picture him as a Scottish warrior. Strong. Imperious to the weather.

Determined to get his own way.

What was his own way?

“And this is my grandmother, Deedee, and her cat, Charlie.” The faint hiss of angry energy seemed to intensify around him. His mouth had become a hard line. He was watching Nora closely for her reaction.

“I’m sorry?” she said. What on earth was he doing here at this time of the night with his grandmother and her cat?

Still, whatever it was, it did dilute some of the threat she felt. Though not an expert, she was still fairly certain architect ax murderers did not travel with an entourage that included grandmothers and cats.

His voice calm and ice-edged, he said, “Deedee has been made certain promises concerning Charlie. And she has paid in advance.”

Nora didn’t have a clue what he meant. But she did realize the threat she felt was not of the ax-murderer variety.

It was of the raindrop-falling-from-lips variety. She was aware her head hurt, but was not at all sure this feeling of being caught off balance was caused by the knock to her head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said firmly.

She became aware that something rippled through Luke. She felt more than saw his discomfort. She cast her nephew a glance out of the corner of her eye.

Uh-oh.

“Look,” the man said quietly, the commanding tone of his voice drawing her attention firmly back to him. “You may be able to pull the wool over the eyes of an old woman, but I’m here to look after her interests. And you should know that if you’ve swindled her, you can kiss the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee good-bye.”

Kiss the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee good-bye? Nora couldn’t let her panic show.

“Swindled your grandmother?” she asked instead. Below the panic, she could feel the insult of it! His caustic remarks about her energy and her being a healer were beginning to make an awful kind of sense.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the police became involved,” Brendan said, the quiet in his voice making it all the more threatening.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE POLICE? NORA felt a sense of panic, as if her world were tilting.

Still, she could not cave before him. She was about to insist that he was the one trespassing on private property, except that at the mention of the police, she realized she wasn’t the only one panicking.

Nora saw Luke go rigid.

There’d been an unfortunate incident at school involving the police way too recently.

Luke claimed to have borrowed a bicycle. Apparently without the full understanding of the bicycle’s owner, which was why the police had become involved. Luke had talked to the other boy, and the whole thing, thankfully, had blown over.

Now her nephew met her eyes, pleading, and then ducked his head, drawing a pattern in the wet ground with his bare toe.

Nora glanced back at Brendan Grant and saw he had not missed a thing. He was watching Luke narrowly, and her sense of him being a warrior intensified. His look did not bode well for her nephew.

What had Luke done now? She was acutely aware of having failed in her responsibility to her nephew by going into the corral by herself tonight. Now every protective instinct rose in her.

“Nobody swindled me,” Deedee said plaintively. “She sent me energy for Charlie.”

“For a price,” Brendan added softly.

Nora knew she had not sent anyone any energy. And certainly not for a price! But Luke was squirming so uncomfortably she wanted to hit him with her elbow to make him stop drawing attention to himself.

Because no matter what he had done, Luke was no match for Brendan Grant. Not in any way. Not physically, nor could her poor orphaned nephew bear up under the anger that sparked in the man’s eyes.

Taking a deep breath, she said brightly. “Oh, I remember now. Charlie.”

Luke cast her a glance loaded with gratitude and relief, and she might have allowed herself to relish that, especially coupled with the fact he had taken up a coat rack in her defense. Moments when her nephew actually seemed to like her were rare, after all.

But Brendan Grant looked hard and skeptical, and she needed to stay focused on the immediate threat of that.

She put together the few clues she had. One of her gifts was an acute ability to focus on detail. Brendan and Deedee had arrived in the middle of the night. From what she could see of the cat, he was ill, the lateness of the hour suggested desperately so.

“Charlie’s been sick, right?” she said.

“That’s right!” Deedee said eagerly.

Brendan’s expression just became more grim.

“You said you’d send him energy,” Deedee reminded her. “You said to send money. I sent fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars?” Brendan snapped. “Deedee! You said you sent a little money.”

“In terms of what my cat is worth to me, that is a small amount.” The woman gave him a look that was equal parts sulk and steel.

“So there you have it,” Brendan said to Nora, exasperated. “If you play your cards right, she’ll sign over her house to you. You won’t need the support of the Hansen Community Betterment Committee. Is that how this operation of yours works?”

“Of course not!” Nora said, feeling the heat rising in her cheeks. “I’m sure it was just a mistake. I must have thought the money was a donation.”

She tried to keep her voice steady, but was not sure she succeeded.

“Uh-huh.” He sounded cynical, and rightfully so.

Nora wanted to whirl on Luke and shake him. She had never even raised her voice to him, but their whole future was at stake here. And worse, if he had sent that letter, and taken that money—and who else could it possibly be?—he had stolen from a vulnerable old woman. How could he? Who was he becoming? And why couldn’t she stop it?

Again she felt the weight of responsibility for her choices. Karen would have never entrusted her to raise her nephew alone. She would have been able to predict this catastrophe coming.

With great care, Nora kept herself from looking askance at her nephew.

“Let’s get in out of the rain,” she suggested, trying to keep her voice steady. Because he had given her his jacket, the rain had soaked through Brendan’s shirt, which was now practically transparent.

She was aware she didn’t really want Brendan Grant, with his bristling masculine energy and wet, clinging shirt, invading her house. She’d been here only a little while, but it had quickly become a sanctuary to her. On the other hand, she desperately needed to buy some time, to take Luke aside and figure out what he had done.

And fix it.

Yet again.

But a glance at the unyielding features of the man who had made her feel momentarily so safe told her this might not be so easy to fix.

The house was not what Brendan expected of a charlatan’s house. There were no crystals dangling in the door wells and no clusters of herbs hanging upside down from their stems. There was no cloying scent of incense.

“Lovely,” Deedee breathed with approval, standing in the doorway, taking it in.

“Disappointing,” Brendan said.

In fact, he found the house was cozy and clean. An uneasiness crawled along his neck as they passed through a living room where a pair of love seats the color of melted butter faced each other across a coffee table where some of those yellow roses from the yard floated in a clear glass bowl.

“Disappointing?” Nora asked.

“No black cat. No cauldron on the hearth.”

Nora shot him a look. She really was the cutest little thing. Again he had that feeling of coming awake. He didn’t want to notice her, but how could he not? Her hair was a mess, standing straight up, strawberry-blonde dandelion fluff. Her eyes were huge in a dainty mudstreaked face. She looked more frightened now than when he had first found her.

The scam revealed. But her shock seemed genuine, and so did her distress.

“Look,” Nora said in a defensive undertone, “I take in sick and abandoned animals. I don’t claim to be a healer.”

Her nephew snorted at that, and she shot him a glare that he was completely oblivious to.

Deedee, deaf anyway, hadn’t even heard.

“As for black cats and cauldrons, I certainly don’t do witchcraft!”

Her muddy, soaked clothes, and his jacket, swam around her, and he guessed she would be determined not to remove her coat and reveal the pajamas underneath.

He wasn’t sure why. The pajama bottoms, which he could see, were filthy, but underneath the mud they were plaid. Utilitarian rather than sexy.

They came to the kitchen, and Nora turned on a light to reveal old cabinets painted that same cheerful shade of yellow as her sofas and roses. The floor was old hardwood planking that gleamed with patina. He smelled fresh bread.

There was a jar full of cookies on the counter, and notes and pictures were held by magnets to the front of a vintage fridge. There was a wood-burning stove in one corner, and an old, scarred oak table covered with schoolbooks.

The uneasiness returned. He thought of those wonders of granite and steel that people wanted for their kitchens these days, that he designed, and suddenly he knew what the uneasiness was. They somehow had all missed the mark.

For all the awards that decorated the walls of his office, he had never achieved this. A feeling.

He shook it off, looked back at Nora. The caption under her high school yearbook picture had probably read “Least likely to bamboozle an old woman out of her money.”

But somebody had. The nephew? The kid practically had a neon sign over his head that flashed Guilty, but on the other hand, didn’t all kids that age look like that? Slinky and defensive and as if they had just finished committing a crime?

What surprised Brendan was that he was interested at all in who did it. And if it was her nephew, to what lengths she would go to protect him.

But that’s what happened when you came alive. Life, the interactions of people, their relationships and motivations interested you.

It was a wound waiting to happen, he warned himself.

“Put the cat there.” Nora pointed to a kitchen island, a marble top fastened to solid wooden legs, and he set the cat carrier down, surreptitiously checking the bottom for any dampness that might have transferred to the seat of his new car.

He knew it said something about the kind of person he was that he was relieved to find none.

“He’s been very sick,” Deedee said. “Just like I told you in the letter.”

“Maybe you could remind me what you wrote in your letter.”

In the light of the kitchen, Brendan could see a knob growing alarmingly on Nora’s forehead. She was wet and covered in mud.

And Brendan Grant was surprised there was a part of him that still knew the right thing to do. And was prepared to do it.

“The cat will have to wait,” he heard himself say firmly, in the tone of voice he used on the construction site when a carpenter was insisting something couldn’t be done the way he wanted it done.

And the people in the room reacted about the same way. Deedee swung her head and glared at him. Nora looked none too happy, either.

“I want to take a look at you,” he insisted. “If you don’t need a trip to the emergency ward, you certainly need a shower and a change of clothes before you check out the cat.”

“I can have a look at the cat first.”

So she wanted what he wanted. For this to be quick. Look at the cat. Tell them what they all already knew about Charlie’s prospects for a future. Of course, what they wanted parted ways at finding out who was guilty of taking money from Deedee, and what the consequences were going to be.

Still, handled properly, the whole drama could unfold and conclude in about two minutes, in and out.

Heavy on the out part. He wanted to head home and go back to bed.

His old life—that cave that was comforting in its lack of intensity, in its palette of grays—beckoned to him. But it seemed to him that nothing was going to go quite as he wanted.

Which he hated in and of itself. Because one thing Brendan Grant wanted, in a world that had already scorned his need for it, was control.

“You first, then the cat,” he told Nora.

Deedee, in typical fashion, appeared annoyed that her agenda was being moved to the back of the line. But Nora looked annoyed, too. It told him a lot about her when she folded her arms over his coat.

Independent. Possibly newly so. No one was going to tell her what to do. Brendan wondered again what the pajamas she was so determined to hide looked like.

“You already told me you aren’t a doctor,” Nora said.

“Doctor or not, a head injury is nothing to take lightly. They can be sneaky and deadly. It will just take me a minute to look at you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Deadly?” The boy got a panicky pinched look around his eyes. “Let him look at you!”

Nora, seeing his distress, surrendered, sinking onto a kitchen chair with ill grace.

“That was quite a hit to your head. Do you think you were knocked out?” Brendan moved close, brushed her hair away from the rapidly growing bump.

Every part of her seemed to be either wet or covered with mud. How was it her hair felt like silk?

“I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I asked,” he said mildly.

“I don’t think I was knocked out.” She offered this grumpily.

“But you can’t say for sure?”

She didn’t want to admit it, but Brendan could tell she didn’t remember, which was probably not a good sign.

Nora knew what date it was, her full name and her birthday. He noted that she was twenty-six, though she looked younger. He also noted, annoyed, that he was interested in her age.

And apparently her marital status. There was no ring on her finger, no signs—large shoes, men’s magazines, messes—that would indicate there was any male besides the boy in residence.

Brendan hated that he was awake enough to notice those things, to wonder at her history, what had brought her and her nephew to this remote corner of British Columbia.

Doing his best to detach, he asked more questions. She remembered what had happened right before she was knocked down and right after, though she did not remember precisely what had knocked her down. She could follow the movement of his finger with her eyes.

“You seem fine,” he finally decided, but he felt uneasy. A concussion really was nothing to fool around with.

“She is fine,” Deedee snapped. “Meanwhile, Charlie could be expiring.”

“I’ll just have a quick look at the cat,” Nora said.

“He’s lasted this long. I’m sure he can wait another five minutes. you need to go have a shower and put on something dry.”

“Are you always this bossy?”

He ignored her. “If you feel dizzy or if you vomit, or feel like you’re going to be sick, you need to tell me right away. Or Luke after I leave. You may have to get to the hospital yet tonight.”

She looked as if she was going to protest. And then she glanced down at herself, and surprised him by giving in without a fight.

“All right. Luke, come with me for a minute. You can see if you can find a shirt that will fit Mr. Grant. He’s soaked.”

That explained her easy acquiescence. She was going to go talk it over with the kid. They were going to get their stories straight and figure out who had done what.

Brendan already knew precisely what she was going to do. She had already started to set it up when she’d said the money had been taken by accident, mistaken for a donation. She was going to take the blame.