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Personally, Brendan was strongly leaning toward the conclusion her nephew had done it. How could she possibly think that not letting him accept responsibility was going to do the boy any good?

“Brendan?”

He turned to Deedee, impatient. Was she really going to insist that cat come first again? She did love to have her own way, largely oblivious to the larger picture.

“I’m not feeling well,” she said.

He scanned her face. she loved to be the center of attention. But the fear he saw was real.

“My heart’s beating too fast,” she whispered.

He crossed the room and lifted her frail wrist. Her pulse was going crazy. She searched his face, ready to panic, and he forced himself to smile.

“Let’s make it a double header,” he said. “We’ll take you to the hospital and they can check out Nora at the same time.”

He cast Nora a look.

Her protest died on her lips as she read his face and then glanced at Deedee.

“You’re right,” she said. “I think I need to go to the hospital.”

CHAPTER FIVE

AT HIS AUNT’S declaration, panic twisted the boy’s features, but only for a second. He took in the situation in the room, his gaze lingering on Deedee. Brendan saw calm come to him, almost as if he had breathed in the truth.

“What about Charlie?” Deedee half whispered, half sobbed. “I can’t leave him! Not when he’s—”

The steadiness remained in the boy’s eyes as he looked to Brendan and then his aunt. “I got the cat,” he said, and Deedee relaxed noticeably, slumped against Brendan.

Ninety-two. Deedee could die right now. She could go before the cat. Life liked to put ironic little twists in the story line.

Becky, young and healthy, gone at twenty-six. To this day, it seemed impossible.

A week before she had died, she had said to him, out of the blue, “If I die first, I’ll come back and let you know I’m all right.”

“You won’t be all right,” he’d said, uncomfortable with the conversation, pragmatic to a fault. “You’ll be dead.”

So far, she hadn’t been back to let him know anything, even how to keep on living. So he’d been right. Dead was dead.

And he’d been prepared to deal with it tonight with Charlie. Not Deedee. Not on his watch. With a sense of urgency he was trying to disguise, and feeling somewhat like the ringmaster at a three-ring circus, Brendan pulled his cell phone from his pocket and herded all his charges back out the door into the rain.

“Can you get in the back with her?” he asked in an undertone. “Kick my seat if anything changes. You know how to monitor her pulse?”

Nora nodded and climbed in the backseat of the car with Deedee. Luke and the cat got in the front with Brendan. The car smelled of new leather and luxury. It screamed a man who had arrived.

The type of man who would never see anything in the slightly eccentric owner of a struggling animal shelter.

Not that she cared who found her attractive and who didn’t! Good grief! The lady beside her could be having a heart attack. This was not the time or place!

Starting the car, Brendan never lost focus. He tucked the phone under his ear. “Hansen Emergency? It’s Brendan Grant here. I’m on my way in. I have a ninetytwo-year-old woman who has a very fast pulse. No history of heart problems. No chest pain. I also have a young woman who has had a head injury. Who’s the doctor on call tonight? I know you’re not supposed to tell me, but I want to know.”

Nora took it all in. How his name had been recognized, how the name of the on-call doctor had been surrendered to him with a token protest only.

She took in his confidence as he dialed another number. “Greg? Sorry to wake you. Becky’s grandmother is not well.”

Becky? She’d thought it was his grandmother!

“Who’s Becky?” she asked Deedee.

“My granddaughter. Brendan’s her husband.”

Married. Why would that feel the way it did? Like some kind of loss? Why didn’t he wear a ring? Nora hated married men who didn’t wear rings. They were sneaky, they were looking for—

“She died,” Deedee said tiredly.

“I’m so sorry,” Nora said, and thought of what she was sure she had seen in his eyes when he’d first leaned over her. The common ground. Now she understood it. Sorrow.

“In a car accident,” Deedee went on. She was talking too loudly, the way people who are hard of hearing did. “Brendan doesn’t talk about her. I need someone to cry with sometimes. But he never will. He didn’t even cry at the funeral.”

It was said like an accusation, and so loudly the man in the front seat could not miss it. Nora watched his face in the light coming from the dash. He didn’t even flinch. It was as if he was cast in stone.

But she had seen the pain spilling into his eyes in that first unguarded moment when he had stood over her in the paddock.

“People all grieve in their own way,” Nora said, and saw him cast her a quick glance in the rearview mirror before he reached for his phone again. “And it seems to me maybe he’s there for you in other ways that are just as important.”

Not everyone would be chauffeuring an elderly woman and her sick cat around the country in the middle of the night!

“Of course, you’re right,” Deedee murmured, and leaned her head on Nora’s shoulder. Nora had her hand on the woman’s wrist and noticed, gratefully, the pulse was slowing to normal.

She listened to the deep gravel of Brendan’s voice as he spoke on the phone.

“And I have a head injury, too. I think mild concussion, but a confirmation would be good. See you there. We’re five minutes out.”

He clicked the phone shut and stepped on the gas. The night was wet and the roads had to be slippery, but he oozed calm confidence as he navigated the twisty, mist-shrouded road into Hansen. The powerful car responded as if it were a living thing.

The way a man handled a powerful car told you a lot about him. The way a man handled an emergency told you a lot as well. Not that they were tests, but had they been, Brendan Grant would have passed with flying colors.

His calm never flagged. Not on the wet roads, not as they pulled into Emergency, not as he helped his grandmother out of the back of the car. There were obviously benefits to being emotionally shut down.

“What about Charlie?” Deedee wailed again.

“I’ll stay with him,” Luke said. “Out here. I’m not going in there.”

Nora doubted that he was ever going to get over the thing he had about hospitals. He’d spent too much time in one while his mother was sick. He hated them now.

Brendan didn’t question why, just flipped a set of keys at Luke. “Her house is three blocks that way. The address is on the chain. I presume you have your cell phone with you and that your aunt has the number?”

“Why can’t I stay here?”

“Because if that cat pees in my car,” he said in a low tone that Deedee didn’t hear, “it really isn’t going to survive the night.”

Nora was appalled, but it was a guy thing, because Luke chuckled. Then he sobered. “You’re trusting me to go into her house?”

Brendan’s eyes locked on his. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

Luke ducked his head and didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know how long we’ll be here. Get some rest. Let the cat out of that purse, near his litter box if you can locate it. If your aunt is released, you’re going to have to look after her for the rest of the night.”

Luke glanced at the address on the key chain. “I hope none of my friends see me with this dorky thing,” he muttered, but Nora did not miss the fact that he looked pleased—if somewhat guilty—about Brendan’s trust.

“I could drive him,” she said tentatively, “and come back. I really don’t need—”

Brendan gave her a look that was so don’tmess-with-me it made her stomach feel as if it was doing a free fall from ten thousand feet. She just didn’t have the energy to take him on.

In the hospital, she had that same sense that you could tell a lot about a man by the way he handled an emergency. Again he passed. He handled the nurse with confidence that was palatable, not the least intimidated by her officiousness. In fact, the exact opposite might have been true. He was obviously well-known in the community, and respected. The nurse treated Brendan as if he was part of that inner circle of the emergency ward.

Interestingly, Vance had been terrible at emergencies. He became so flustered if a badly injured animal was brought in that he could not inspire confidence in anyone. You would have thought with practice he would have gotten better, but he never did. He liked catering to the pudgy poodle set, doing routine checkups and giving shots, neutering, and cleaning teeth.

In fact, he’d opted for regular hours only and hired a young vet to handle the nighttime emergencies, and finally any emergency at all.

A few weeks ago, Nora had heard he was engaged to that young vet. Up until then she had nursed a secret fantasy that he was going to show up on her doorstep, confess the error of his ways and beg her to take him back.

She shook it off. For whatever the reason—she suspected because Brendan Grant made things happen—she found herself ushered into an examination room in record time.

In short order, a young doctor was in, a nurse at his side.

“How’s Mrs. Ashton?” Nora asked.

“Old,” he said with a resigned smile. “We’re going to keep her for observation. So, Brendan says a bump on the head? Maybe knocked out?”

“Maybe,” Nora admitted.

“How do you know Brendan?” he asked.

“It’s a long story.”

The doctor laughed. “That’s what he said. He designed our house and supervised the build. He’s an amazing architect.”

Great! In her weakened state, Nora just had to know Brendan Grant was an all-around phenomenal guy.

The doctor repeated some of the questions Brendan had asked her earlier, shone a light in her eye, got her to follow the movement of his finger.

“I should keep you for observation, too.”

“I can’t!” she said. “I have animals that will need feeding in—” her eyes flew to a nearby clock “—two hours.”

The doctor sighed. “He said you’d say that. I’m going to send you home, but with strict instructions what to watch for. And what to do for the next few hours. Any dizziness, any nausea, any loss of consciousness, you come right back in. I’ll give you a handout with symptoms you need to watch for over the next few days. Sometimes even weeks later symptoms can come up.”

After having the nurse go over the sheet with her, they let her go. Brendan was in the waiting room.

“You didn’t have to wait.”

“Uh-huh. How were you going to get home? And collect your nephew?”

“Taxi, I guess.”

“And would the taxi driver be watching you for signs of concussion?” Brendan held up duplicates of the instructions the doctor had given her.

The truth was she was glad she did not have to worry about a taxi right now, or how to find Luke. She was glad this man was in charge. And she might have a concussion, so it was okay to be weak. Just this once. Just for tonight.

The animals needed to be fed in a few hours.

She felt like weeping.

Brendan was watching her closely.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said firmly.

But just as if he hadn’t heard her, he slipped his arm around her waist, and just as if she hadn’t claimed she was okay, she leaned heavily into him.

They collected Luke and, since no one had any idea when Deedee would be home, recaptured Charlie. Nora tried to stay awake and couldn’t. She awoke to find herself in Brendan Grant’s arms for the second time that night.

There was absolutely no fight left in her.

None.

Because Luke was bringing Charlie into the house instead of out to the barn. She didn’t allow any of the animals in the house. How could she? If she did, soon they would be overrun!

But she just didn’t have the energy to make a fuss about it right now. Instead, she snuggled deep into Brendan’s reassuring strength and let him carry her into her house and up the stairs to her room.

“Is she okay?” Luke asked, pointing Brendan to a room on the right of a narrow hallway. He disappeared with Charlie and the cat carrier into a doorway farther up the hall.

“She’s just done in,” Brendan assured him. He nudged open the door and hesitated on the threshold of Nora’s room.

It was confirmed she was completely, one hundred percent single. No man could be trusted with so much white: white walls, white curtains, white pillows, white bedspread. Her room reminded him of innocence. There was something alarmingly bridal about it.

And that was the last thing Brendan wanted to be thinking of as he carried Nora Anderson across the threshold!

He looked down at her and felt a wave of relief. Still wrapped in his too large jacket, mud from head to toe, she was the world’s least likely bride. In fact, her bridal vision of a room was about to be damaged by her muddy little self.

Brendan took a deep breath, stepped in, and quickly made his way to the bed, where he set her on the edge.

Luke appeared in the doorway. “Anything I can do?”

“Oh, Luke,” Nora said. “Where did he come from? You know the rules. We can’t have animals in the house.”

Brendan turned, expecting to see Luke had Charlie. Instead, he had a black-and-white kitten riding in the palm of his hand.

“This one’s different,” Luke said. “I’m calling him Ranger.”

“We don’t name them!”

Luke looked mutinous. “I’m keeping him. For my own.”

Nora chewed her lip. “We need to talk about that,” she said.

“But not tonight,” Brendan said firmly. “Luke, can you get rid of the kitten for now, and find me a flashlight?”

He disappeared and came back, with no kitten, but a flashlight.

“Shine it right in your aunt’s eyes. Do you see what it does to her pupils? That’s called dilation. It’s very important that both her pupils are dilating in the same way. I need you to try it.”

The boy grasped the flashlight without any hesitation. Brendan was going to take it as a good sign that Luke was not nearly as rebellious as his aunt was.

“Yes, her eyes are doing the same thing. The black part is getting smaller when I hold the light up.”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here!”

“Good. That’s exactly what you are looking for. You need to wake her up every hour after I leave and check her eyes. If you see a change you need to call 9-1-1.”

“There’s no need to frighten him!” Nora protested.

“I’m not frightening him. I’m asking him to step up to the plate. I’m treating him like a man.”

Luke puffed up a bit at that.

“Well, he’s not a man.”

And then deflated.

“He’s not a child, either.”

The boy puffed up again.

“Either he checks you or I stay for the night.”

She blanched at that, then folded her arms over her chest with ill grace and glared at him. That settled, Brendan conducted some very simple tests on his unwilling patient while Luke watched.

“The doctor already did this.”

“Luke needs to see what to do.”

Finally, Brendan was satisfied. “Do you need anything? A drink of warm milk, maybe?”

“Oh.”

There was something kind of sweet and kind of sad about her surprise that anyone would look after her.

“That would be nice,” she said shyly.

“Luke, can you go warm some milk?”

Luke left and Brendan leaned over and pulled off her shoes. Gently, he tugged the jacket off her.

“I can do it!”

“It’s not as if you’re in a see-through negligee.”

She scowled at him, but let him free each of her limbs from the jacket.

He pretended not to notice her pajama top at all, but it was adorable. How was it a pink pajama top with kittens on it that said Purrfectly Purrfect Me could be more sexy than a negligee?

“Stand up for a minute,” he ordered. She did, and he deftly pulled back the white quilt. Surprise, surprise, pure white sheets.

He guided her under the covers. She sank into her bed, then struggled to sit up. “Set the alarm. I have to be up. I have to feed the animals in two hours.”

The clock was holding down some papers on a bedside table. He could tell now wouldn’t be the best time to relate what the doctor had told him. She had to rest. Completely. For at least twenty-four hours. She wasn’t even supposed to look at a computer screen or read. So he pretended to set the clock.

He looked back at the bed, and her eyes were already closed, her breath coming out in soft puffs.

So much for the warm milk.

He went and looked at her. He felt the oddest desire to kiss her, not passionately, but a good-night kiss, like a father might give a child. Protective. Happy she was safe.

Happy he had managed to keep at least one person safe from the perils of life.

Brendan went down the steps. The kitchen was empty; no milk was out or on the stove. Luke was stretched out on the living room couch.

The empty carrier was beside him, and Charlie, a cat who hated both animal and man equally, was stretched out over the boy’s chest. The black-and-white kitten, Ranger, was curled into Charlie’s belly. They were all fast asleep.

Brendan moved closer. Charlie didn’t even look like the same cat. He certainly didn’t sound like it. The death rattle Brendan had heard earlier was gone.

Maybe he had died. Brendan reached out uneasily and touched him. The cat’s fur was warm beneath his fingertips and the animal sighed.

He yanked his hand back. There was no such thing as a healer, he told himself, annoyed. Nora had barely glanced at the cat, anyway.

The boy’s cell phone was on the coffee table, and Brendan picked it up and checked. Sure enough, Luke had set the alarm to go off every hour on the hour. But the boy couldn’t be trusted to cook milk. Besides, he looked exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes, his face pale and taut, even in sleep.

Brendan suddenly knew he couldn’t leave them alone with this.

He could feel it. Around the boy. And around her. They’d both been carrying it for too long.

Brendan flicked through the settings on the phone, turned off the alarm and slowly climbed back up the stairs to Nora’s room.

CHAPTER SIX

OUTSIDE THE DOOR of that terrifyingly bridal bedroom, Brendan flicked open his own cell phone.

Logically, he knew he could not take this on right now. He had a deadline coming up. Village on the Lake was an amazing opportunity, and he knew the condo project would be the most prestigious of his career to date.

But once before he had chosen work when there was another choice to be made. He had been driven by his need to succeed, driven to outrun the ghosts of his own childhood, driven to be worthy of a wife who came from far different circumstances than he had.

He had needed to be something, or prove something, to have something he didn’t have, and he had made a choice that had left him with nothing at all.

That choice had left his heart trapped behind a wall, in a yawning cavern of emptiness.

Could you come to the same fork in the road again? And make a different choice? Not one that would change what had been, nor could alter what had already transpired, but one that changed who you could be?

He shook off the thoughts, finished dialing. His secretary’s voice came over the answering machine.

“You’ve reached Grant Architects. We can’t take your call right now, but we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

“Linda, I won’t be in today.” Added to all the work that Nora and her nephew undoubtedly did themselves, Deedee was in the hospital. She would need company. And word-search books and updates on Charlie. Brendan had no doubt she would be the world’s most impatient patient.

“There is a possibility—” horrible as it was, he recognized it was a real possibility “—that I might not be in this week. Send—” he named a junior architect “—to supervise the Village.”

And then he closed his cell phone and contemplated the magnitude of what he had just done. He didn’t miss work. Not ever.

And then, anticipating it would start ringing right at seven—with fires to be put out, clients, construction site foremen, Linda protesting time off was impossible—he shut it completely off.

He knew there were going to be a lot of questions about his absence. Saying it was uncharacteristic was an understatement.

There were going to be a lot of questions.

And he was not at all sure he had any answers. Because niggling at the back of his mind was the thought that he didn’t want to be there when they broke ground on Village on the Lake. He didn’t want to be there as his plan took on life. He already knew that his feeling of dissatisfaction would grow in proportion to the buildings taking shape, becoming more and more real.

He slid through the door of the bedroom. There was a chair—white, of course—beside her bed and he took it, a bit guiltily, because his clothes were a little the worse for wear also. He was tempted to put his cell phone back on to use the alarm, just as Luke had intended to do.

And then Brendan was annoyed with himself that he had lasted less than a minute without wanting to rely on his cell phone, so stubbornly didn’t turn it back on.

It was part of that relentless busyness that had helped him survive. Just like putting even more ungodly hours in at work than he had before the accident.

Something in him wanted to stop. That astounded him. Something in him wanted to rest, and be introspective.

Was part of him ready to heal, to crawl back into the light, shielding his eyes from the brilliance? And maybe, just maybe, was this a place where things like that happened? Where something that was dead in a man could be resurrected?

Maybe it was. Look at that cat down there.

Honestly, Brendan could not believe he was entertaining such thoughts—totally unfounded in any kind of science, totally whimsical, the magical thinking of a little boy.

Mommy, I’m going to buy you a castle someday. I promise.

The memory of those words shook him, and he shivered as though someone had walked across his grave. Hadn’t he known from the minute he had driven under that sign that things were about to go sideways?

Annoyed with himself, he sought refuge in the way he always had, but on a point of pride would not turn on his phone to check the weather or the stock report. He prowled restlessly. Starting with the virginal whiteness, the room told him things about her that she might have preferred he didn’t know.

There was a picture of her and Luke on her dresser. But none of a man. There was a stack of bills there, too. Why would she have those in her room, unless she wanted to worry over them in private, protect the boy from anxiety?

There was a laundry basket on the floor, full of neatly folded items. She would have been devastated that her underwear was on top. It reminded him of her pajamas, utilitarian, not sexy. There was no jewelry on the dresser, no nod to that feminine longing for the pretty and the frivolous.

If he was a man who felt things, he might have felt a little sad for her and what the room told him about her. Snowed under with responsibility, alone, and sworn off the small pleasure of celebrating her own prettiness.

And then his eyes went to the papers stuck under the alarm clock. They looked like letters, and he shifted over and cut his eyes to them. He wasn’t going to read personal mail.

Only they didn’t look personal. In fact, the letter on top began “Dear Rover.”

Intrigued, remembering Deedee had said something about Nora being Ask Rover, he picked up the letter.

“Dear Rover,” he read, “I have a new boyfriend. He is everything I ever dreamed of. Handsome. Funny. He has a good job. There is only one problem. I have a thirteen-year-old malamute cross named Sigh. They hate each other. What should I do?” It was signed “Confused.”

The handwriting changed. Though still feminine, it was Rover’s—make that Nora’s—response, Brendan realized. Further intrigued, he saw she had answered and then crossed it all out. He took the chair next to the bed and squinted to read through the scribbles.

Dear Confused,

Though dogs are capable of such emotions as jealousy, quite often they are better judges of character than human beings. What effort has your prince made to win over your dog? Has your new love been sensitive to the fact your dog is aging, and you might have to soon say good-bye? Has he done one single thing to make that moment easier for you? I’m afraid, from a dog’s point of view, he sounds like a jerk. I think you would be better off without him. I am not sure I could be trusted not to bite him, possibly in a place that would make it difficult for him to reproduce. Thank you for your question, though really questions where the answers are of such a life-altering nature might be better answered by your best friend, your mother or your priest. Best barks, Rover.

This was crossed out, but it seemed to him with a certain reluctance.

Brendan felt his lips twitching. He flipped to the next page.

Dear Confused,

Thirteen is very old for a malamute. Do you want to make such a weighty decision based on a dog who will not be with you much longer?

This, too, had been crossed out.

He flipped the page, looking for her answer, but instead found a different letter.

Dear Rover,

My dog, an English bulldog named Petunia, won’t come in the basement laundry room. She sits outside the door and howls and shakes. Do you think I have a ghost? —Haunted

Again, there were two replies. The first, with a big X through it, said:

Dear Haunted,

English bulldogs are known for many lovely traits, intelligence not being among those. Your laundry room is unlikely to be haunted so much as presenting a myriad of smells and sounds beyond poor Petunia’s ability to comprehend them. This situation is unlikely to ever get better, so you could save yourself a great deal of frustration by leaving Petunia upstairs while you go to the basement to do laundry. If you give her a chew bone before you go, there is a good chance she won’t notice you are gone until you get back.

The second response was measured, and made no comments about the intelligence of bulldogs. It explained that laundry rooms had strange sounds and smells, that Petunia needed to be introduced to the elements separately and slowly, and that dog treats would help.

Still smiling, Brendan set the papers back on the table.

It penetrated his exhaustion that something was different than when he’d arrived.

For a moment he couldn’t figure out what it was.

And then he did: it was absolutely quiet. He got up and went to the window. It wasn’t just that night was melting into daybreak. The rain had stopped. And on the horizon was something he hadn’t seen for forty days and forty nights.

He blinked like a man emerging from a cave.

Or maybe he hadn’t seen it since the night his wife and his unborn child had died.

On the horizon, the sun was coming up.

“Hey, sweetheart, what’s your name?”

Nora shook herself groggily. She stared up at the man looking at her, felt his hand on her shoulder.

“Not sweetheart,” she said, certain it was a dream and closed her eyes.

That hand on her shoulder, a light in her eyes, “what day were you born?” and then wonderful sleep claiming her again.

“Just for a second, follow my finger with your eyes.”

Nora awoke with a start. Sunshine splashed across her bed. Sunshine! The warmth of it was a delight.

All night she had had strange dreams that Brendan Grant was in her room, but now she glanced at the chair where she was sure he had sat, and could clearly see it had been but a dream. The chair was empty.

Sunshine! She looked at the clock. It was noon!

“Oh goodness! The animals!” She sat up too quickly and it made her feel dizzy. She was aware her head hurt, and other parts of her felt bruised.

How was it possible to feel so good, filled with wonderful dreams, and so bad at the same time? Physically aching, sick that she had slept through looking after her animals.

She lay back down, just for a moment.

“Hey.”

Brendan Grant was standing in her doorway. Despite the fact he was in the same shirt as last night, and it had been wet, and dried wrinkled, and his hair was rumpled and his face becoming shadowed with whiskers, he looked amazing. Handsome, oozing confidence, one of those superannoying guys who took charge.

Superannoying unless You happened to be in need of someone to take charge!

“Don’t sit up. Doctor’s orders. You have to rest. All day.”

She couldn’t let on for a single second that, in her weakened state, she found that take-charge attitude ever so slightly attractive.

“I can’t rest all day! I have to look after the animals.”

“I’ve got it covered.”

She scowled at him so he would never guess how much those words meant to her.

“You sat with me all night,” she said. She knew she should be appreciative. It came out sounding like an accusation.

“I did.”

“That’s an unexpected kindness to the stranger you think swindled your grandmother.”

“I was hoping you’d talk in your sleep.”

“Did I?” she asked, aghast.

“What are you afraid of? A confession? Don’t you remember? I asked you questions every time I woke you up.”

“Yeah, like what my name was. And my birthday.”

He slapped himself on the forehead. “Shoot. I didn’t take advantage.”

For some reason she blushed, as if he meant taking advantage in a different way. He lifted an eyebrow.

“I didn’t take advantage like that, either,” he said softly.

“I wasn’t suggesting you had,” she said primly. Feeling terribly vulnerable, she pulled her quilt up around her chin. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get dressed. I need to look after my animals.”

“They’re all looked after.”