she said over her shoulder to his niece. Her voice could have coaxed wild birds from their nests. “You look so like your mother, Amanda. I knew her in high school. She was beautiful, and so are you.”
He realized he’d been so thrown off balance by the appearance of the new and improved Jessica Moran that he’d forgotten introductions.
Jessica’s tone was so genuine that Michelle blushed and preened despite herself.
The sad truth was that his niece was far from beautiful, especially given her fondness for too much makeup. She dyed her hair that bleak shade of black. She was too thin, and she was having an outbreak of acne.
And yet Jessica’s tone made him look at his niece again. He saw something different than he had ever seen before. The deep blue of her eyes, the sweep of her cheekbones, the slender column of her neck.
He felt his hackles rise. Was Jessica that much of a magician that she could make a man see things? Or was he just looking harder since he had obviously made such a poor judgement about Jessica herself in those awkward years of adolescence?
“This is my niece, Michelle,” he said belatedly.
“My dog’s name is O’Henry.” Michelle gave him a look that said the dog was the important one and Brian had gotten it all wrong. So, what else was new? As far as he could tell he hadn’t gotten one thing right since his niece had arrived. With the notable exception of the dog.
“After the writer?” Jessica asked.
Writer? He looked between the two females, baffled.
“Yes!” Michelle looked thrilled. So, Jessica got it right, first try.
Brian had assumed the dog was named after a brand of chocolate bar. He’d gone so far as to assume that Michelle liked them. He’d bought her one and slipped it into her lunch as a surprise. Another obvious error, since the lunch kit came back with the small gift of chocolate untouched.
“What do you like best by him?” Jessica asked. “No…let me guess. The Gift of the Magi?”
“Oh,” Michelle breathed, delighted. Something leaped in the air between his niece and Jessica, and the hackles on his neck rose again.
Back in high school they had called Jessica a witch and a weirdo. But he had known the truth, even though he had not come to her defense. She was not a witch, or a weirdo. Nor was she a magician.
She was a healer.
He had the uneasy feeling that he had not come here for the dog. In some way he did not fully understand, his request for help had brought him here.
For his niece.
And just maybe for himself.
He snorted out loud at the fanciful turn of his thoughts. He blamed it on the garden, the birds, her eyes and then shrugged the thoughts away before the unwelcome and less than pragmatic way of looking at things had a chance to attach itself to him, like a burr to the underside of a hound.
A perfectly wonderful day, ruined, Jessica thought, cupping the nearly lifeless body of the puppy in her hands as she pushed open the back door to her cottage with her shoulder.
Brian Kemp. Her very worst nightmare had now come back into her life. And how dare he be better looking than ever?
He was more somber now. The boyish recklessness had been chased from him. And he had lost all that adolescent slenderness and become the man whose promise she had seen a very long time ago. His chest was deep and powerful. His arms rippled with well-formed muscle. His legs were long and straight, the hardness of them evident even through the soft fabric of old jeans.
That dark swatch of brown hair still threatened to fall over one eye, and his eyes remained a place of mystery, as brown as melted chocolate, hinting at a depth that had not materialized when he was a boy. Jessica refused to give in to the subtle seduction of contemplating whether it had materialized later in his life.
His mouth, then, had always had a faint curve upward, as if he were ready to laugh. Now she noticed how the line of it was hard, the upward quirk missing. There were other lines in his face: squint lines around his eyes, the start of a furrow in his forehead.
And yet, if anything, he was even more handsome than he had been in youth. Something in those lines suggested great strength and character. But, of course, she had mistakenly thought she had seen those qualities before.
Jessica glanced around her kitchen and repressed a sigh. The cottage was old, and her attempts to spruce it up by painting the cabinets a delicate shade of periwinkle blue and stripping the wide oak boards of the floor and refinishing them did not hide the fact that the cupboards had gaps and the floors sagged.
Plus, this area doubled as her office and the work area for her mail-order seed and herb business. Drying plants hung upside down from the ceiling. Heaps of mint and sage crowded her countertops and kitchen table. Her mismatched chairs, one painted yellow, one bright red, had been pulled back from the scarred wooden table so she could move around it easily. The desk in the corner—an antique rolltop and the only really decent piece of furniture in the room—was almost lost under stacks of orders and paperwork.
If a person was trying to impress, this room would probably not forward their cause. But Jessica could not remember the last time she had felt the need to be anything but herself.
She had left that painful teenage world—full of angst, self-doubt and pain—so far behind her that it was easy to imagine it had never existed.
Until a six-foot-something reminder appeared in her driveway. She was pretty sure that was even the same truck.
“Why did you bring O’Henry here?” she asked the girl, keeping every hint of her resentment for Brian’s unexpected and unwelcome reappearance in her life from her voice.
The child reminded her of a bird with a broken wing, hurt and fear broadcasting past the mask she had painted on her face.
“My uncle said he had seen you do a miracle once.” Her voice was more that of a child who still believed in the impossible than a young woman who had lost so much.
A miracle? How could Brian bring this poor sweet, damaged child here with such an expectation?
Despite her irritation with him, Jessica kept her tone light. “If I had those kind of powers, I would have turned your uncle into a toad.”
The girl regarded her steadily, and then asked, deadpan, “You mean you didn’t?”
Despite the gravity of the situation, or maybe because of it, a little giggle escaped Jessica. And then Michelle. And then they were both laughing.
“Hey, I don’t find that funny.”
Which, of course, only made them laugh harder.
Brian tried to look insulted, but Jessica could tell he was relieved to hear his niece laugh. She didn’t like the small ripple of tenderness this made her feel for him.
How nice it would be if he just remained the black-hearted popular boy who had promised to call the school’s worst social misfit and then reneged.
But he seemed so much more human
