miles from town, a two-story brick house set on a hillside, with a curved deck and a sculpted sloping lawn. It loomed in the moonlight like a gothic castle. He used his old house key, let himself in the kitchen entrance and immediately stepped out of his shoes, not wanting to wake his parents or any of the household staff.
It struck his ironic sense of humor that he used to tiptoe just like this when he was a teenager sneaking late into the house. One step into the living room and his big toe crashed into a chair leg. That was a déjà vu, too.
Moonlight flooded in the windows, so that once his eyes adjusted he realized his mother had redecorated again. The decor this time seemed to be some French period. Lots of gilt and tassels. Lots of mean furniture legs. Very elegant, if you went for that sort of thing. Garrett didn’t, and his toe was stinging like a banshee.
“Garrett!” His father switched on the light from the paneled doors at the stairway.
“Dad.” He offered the hug, knowing his father wouldn’t think to. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t.” Merritt wore pajamas, but his iron-gray hair was brushed, his eyes tired but alert. “Your mother and I are both up. Waiting for you. Hoping you’d gotten something out of Caroline that we didn’t.”
Upstairs, his parents had a mini living room off their sleeping quarters. Whiskey was poured, neat. His mother pecked his cheek, then curled on the couch in the window seat by the bay windows. “I hope you talked to her,” Barbara said immediately.
Garrett plunked down on an oversize footstool. He wasn’t about to replay his sister’s words. “I stayed for a few hours, but she was sleeping deeply.”
“I just don’t understand why she’d do this to us!”
Garrett didn’t expect either parent to ask how he was, how his life was going. The conversation was immediately about them. “Caroline didn’t do anything to you. She did it to herself.”
His mother rubbed her temples as if she were at the end of her rope. “That’s the point. That’s the exact point. Everyone will talk. Especially with all this scandal about Bunny’s death and those diaries…Now there’s just more fuel to the gossip fire. People could think we did something, when you know we gave that girl every advantage a daughter could possibly have. I swear, Caroline was selfish from the day she was born—”
“Mom. She’s troubled. She has to be in major despair over something or she’d never have done this.”
“Oh, pfft.” Barbara stood up, waving her glass. “She’s spoiled and wants attention. Like always. She doesn’t think of me or your father. Or our reputation in the community. She has everything she ever wanted in this life, but does she ever think of us?”
Okay. He’d been in his parents’ house all of ten minutes and already he wanted to smash a wall. That fast, he remembered why he’d left Eastwick and never looked back.
Later, though, when he lay in bed in the spare room, he recalled how hard it had been to leave his younger sister alone back then. And more than that, how painful it had been to leave Emma.
Right now it just didn’t matter if his parents drove him as crazy as they always had. He couldn’t leave his sister to the wolves. Until her husband came home from China—and until Garrett was certain she was going to be all right—he was staying here. Which meant he had to find a way to make his business work here for an indefinite period of time.
Before drifting off to sleep, Emma’s face whisked into his mind again. Her thick, glossy hair used to swish all the way down her back. Now she wore it shoulder length, but it was still like moonlight on black silk. So raven-dark, so rich, yet with light in every strand. Her soft mouth was as evocative as it had always been. So were those unforgettable eyes, so deep blue they were almost purple. Eyes a guy could get lost in.
God knows he had.
It still puzzled him that she hadn’t looked at him like an engaged woman.
And that her classy clothes showed off a successful, poised woman…yet that wasn’t how she’d looked at him either.
From the first second their eyes met, he’d suddenly remembered rolling in the grass with her. Stealing kisses after football games. Pressing her up against the locker after school, feeling her breasts against his chest, pretending to be talking about homework. She’d blush and flush and fluster, but then she’d look at him from under those thick black eyelashes. Teasing him. Emma had loved turning him on, loved the power of it, the fun of it, the joy of it. They’d tempted wicked every which way from Sunday. She’d made him hotter than fire—and far more frustrated.
She’d been shy back then, but there’d been no guile to her, no ability to hold back. For sure there’d been no distance. There’d just been all that honest, helpless young-woman heat in her eyes. The dare-you-to-melt-my-bones look. She’d turned him into putty.
And he’d loved dying from all those hard-ons with no release.
But hell and damnation, if she was engaged, how come she’d still looked at him that way? Unguarded, winsome…as if she were dying to feel those feelings again. With a man. With him.
You’re imagining all this, he told himself—and knew it was true. He was soul-tired, beyond the ability to think clearly. He needed a good night’s sleep—and then he needed to concentrate on his sister.
Not on a woman who was already claimed by someone else.
Three
A few mornings later, Emma stood outside Color with a contractor. She’d been running nonstop, organizing her traditional art show in July, when she’d run into a major maintenance problem.
The contractor hiked up his jeans. “Actually, ma’am, the house didn’t suddenly start to sink on that side. The problem was likely developing over a long period of time.”
“Well, no one noticed it before.” Emma wanted to tear out her hair. A maintenance problem certainly wasn’t news. Two-hundred-year-old houses regularly developed ghastly ailments. If it wasn’t dry rot one year, it was corroded wiring or termites the next. “I just can’t have a big mess right now! Can we put off the work until October?”
“Well, I wouldn’t, ma’am.”
“You call me ma’am one more time and you won’t see October, either,” she said crossly, and sighed. “Okay. Let’s hear the plan.”
“Yeah, well, we’re gonna put up new house jacks. Take down your old porch pillars. Reframe pillars around the new house jacks, but hinged, like, so they’re accessible. That way we could do this slow, push up that second story a smidgeon at a time. Don’t want to crack this pretty foundation, now, do we?”
Emma’s eyes narrowed. He was so twinkly. “But why did the house decide to sink now?”
“Taking a wild guess now…but probably because the house is older than the hills and then some?”
“Easy for you to joke. You’re going to charge me, what, five figures?”
“Yup, in that general ballpark,” he confirmed.
And there was the real rotten apple. Her
