had lived on a ranch in his teens, and had never quite gotten over it.
Kate took a long sip of the coffee her grandmother had poured. In this land of lattes, espresso and more coffee flavors than ice cream flavors, the Crawfords stubbornly stuck to their old, everyday blend. But to Kate it was part of being home.
Her grandmother’s worry was an old refrain she’d been hearing since the day she’d come home. It was even why her grandparents had refused to have her move back into this house with them. They insisted she needed her own space and her own life.
“We don’t need a keeper yet,” Gram had said, and Kate had realized she could easily insult them if she persisted, and that was something she didn’t ever want to do.
So she had her own place a couple of miles away, a two-bedroom cottage she had leased from a retired teacher who had moved into a condominium in Seattle. The large master bedroom looked out on a garden with a small pond, while the second bedroom had already been set up as a home office, which made it even more convenient for Kate.
The house sat amid a private stand of tall fir trees and gave her a glimpse of the sound below. She’d put a porch swing in the corner where the view was best, and sat there often regardless of the weather. In fact, one of her favorite things was to be wrapped up in a warm throw in the cold air, listening to the rain on the porch roof and feeling the moisture in the air.
She’d had very little time to do that lately, however. She’d been so distracted by what was happening at Redstone that she’d rarely gotten home before dark. She spent her time trying to solve a mystery, and was missing most of what was turning out to be an incredibly summerlike fall here in the Northwest. They’d barreled through September in the mid-seventies, and October was starting out the same way. She had the feeling they were going to go straight from summer to winter, probably overnight.
She should probably be glad, she thought glumly, that she had the mess at work as a diversion. Otherwise she’d be dwelling on the mess of her life. Obsessing about how badly she’d misjudged the man she’d married. Wondering if she’d ever trust a man again.
And most of all, missing her baby girl.
“Do I smell coffee? Can I beg some?”
Kate went still at the sound of the sleepy, masculine voice behind her. But her grandmother smiled and said a cheery “Good morning, Rand,” while her grandfather gestured to the pot and said “Help yourself.”
“Thanks.”
She didn’t turn to look at him. She didn’t have to; she could see him perfectly well, reflected in the black, glassy front of the refrigerator. He stretched, expansively, the movement lifting his T-shirt to expose a strip of flat, muscular abdomen above the waistband of his jeans. He ran a hand through his tousled blond hair, yawned, then finally set off toward the coffeemaker.
Kate noticed he knew right where to go for a mug, and for some reason that bothered her. But her feeling of probably selfish perturbation evaporated when he politely brought the carafe over and, when they nodded, refilled both her grandparents’ mugs. He then gestured at her with the still half-full pot, but she shook her head and he put it back on the heating plate.
She waited for him to open the fridge for milk, just to further show how at home he’d made himself. But apparently he drank his coffee black because he came back to the table, pulled out a chair and sat. And managed to accomplish it anyway—he did look completely at home.
Not only that, but her grandfather actually put his paper down. Folded it up and set it aside, something she couldn’t remember ever seeing while there were parts still unread. She glanced at her grandmother to see how she felt about the fact that this interloper could apparently accomplish with ease what she’d been trying to do for decades. Her grandmother was smiling, so obviously it didn’t bother her. Which made it bother Kate all the more.
“Why don’t I give you a hand with that gate before I head out, Walt?” the fair-haired boy said.
“I don’t want to hold you up,” her grandfather protested.
“No problem. I’m not on a set schedule.”
“Must be nice,” Kate muttered, goaded by his easy familiarity.
“I imagine you always have a set schedule,” he said. She tried not to flush; she hadn’t really meant to say that loudly enough for him to hear.
“Yes,” she said.
“Redstone keeps you busy?”
She gave him a wary, sideways look. “Yes.”
“You hear a lot about that company,” he said. “What do you think of them?”
“I work in a very small part of Redstone,” she said. “But if you mean are they as good to work for as you’ve heard, yes, they are.”
“What exactly is it you do?”
“Distribution.”
And that was enough Q and A for her. Her grandparents may have opened their life books for this man, but she wasn’t about to.
“Don’t you have pictures to take?” she asked abruptly.
He shifted his gaze to her. He looked at her for a moment, in a steady, assessing way that gave her the awful feeling he thought she was acting like a child. As perhaps she was, jealous of the way he’d beguiled the two people she loved most in the world.
“Eventually,” he said easily. “At the moment I’m still looking around.”
“Try going out to the lighthouse,” her grandfather suggested. “Some good views from there, if you can catch a clear enough day.”
“That’s the trick,” her grandmother put in. “But a clear day here is worth ten days anywhere else, so it’s worth waiting for.”
So, everybody’s delighted with this guy except me, Kate thought as he waved a cheerful goodbye and headed out. Perhaps if she hadn’t spent so much time in big cities, she’d be more trusting.
Or gullible, she amended silently.
Not that Gram or Gramps were stupid, not by any stretch. But they were trusting, like many small-town folks. Too trusting, she thought, remembering the boarder who had listened with every evidence of genuine interest and appreciation to her grandparents’ suggestions about photos and locations.
He was too good to be real, she thought. And didn’t it just figure that the most attractive man she’d seen in ages wasn’t just far too young, he was far too charming?
What’s she hiding?
Rand had lost count of how many times that question had popped into his mind yesterday in her grandmother’s garden. And again now, as he followed Kate Crawford. There was no doubting she was hiding something. Every time the subject of her work came up while he was around, she either dodged it or changed it immediately. And she did it with that edge that always seemed to appear in her voice and manner on those occasions.
If she was involved, he thought, she needed to work on her poker face.
Maybe that was it. She just acted
