The kind of roots she’d always wanted as a child.
But to earn those roots she had to get off her duff. Resigned, she opened up the car door and grabbed her navy-blue backpack off the floor of the passenger seat.
“Looks like that car’s about had it.”
She hit her head on the roof of the old car as she backed out and straightened up all in one motion. The old man who’d spoken stood just a few feet from her, leaning against one of the whitewashed posts holding up a sign that proclaimed Lonergan. She hadn’t even heard him approach, which told her that either he was more spry than he looked or she was even more tired than she felt.
Probably the latter.
He wasn’t very tall. He wore a battered hat that shaded his lined, leathery face and his watchful dark eyes. His blue jeans were faded and worn, and his boots looked as if they were older than him.
“It just die on you?” he asked with a wave of one tanned hand at the car.
“Yeah,” she said after seeing the quiet glint of kindness in his dark brown eyes. “Not surprising, really. It’s been on borrowed time for the last few hundred miles.”
He looked her up and down—not in a threatening way, she thought later, but as a man might look at a lost child while he thought about how to help her.
Finally he said, “Can’t do anything about that car of yours, but if you’d care to come up to the house, maybe we can rustle up some lunch.”
She glanced back down the road at the emptiness stretching out in either direction, then back at the man waiting quietly for her to make up her mind. Maggie’d learned at an early age to trust her instincts, and every one she had was telling her to take a chance. What did she have to lose? Besides, if he turned out to be a weirdo, she was pretty sure she could outrun him.
“I can’t pay you for the food,” she said, lifting her chin and meeting his gaze with the only thing she had left—her pride. “But I’d be happy to do some chores for you in exchange.”
One corner of his mouth lifted and his face fell into familiar laugh lines that crinkled at the edges of his eyes. “I think we can work something out.”
Maggie sighed at the memory and leaned her head back against the overstuffed cushion of the big chair. Curling her legs up beneath her, she looked around the small cottage that had been her sanctuary for the last two years. A guesthouse, Jeremiah had offered it to her that first day. By the end of the lunch she’d prepared for them, he’d given her a job and this little house to call her own. And for two years they’d done well together.
She turned her head and for the first time saw a light other than the one in Jeremiah’s bedroom burning in the darkness. And she wondered what Sam Lonergan’s arrival was going to do to her world.
The scent of coffee woke him up.
Sam rolled over in the big bed and stared blankly at the ceiling. For a minute or two he couldn’t place where he was. Nothing new for him, though. A man who traveled as much as he did got used to waking up in strange places.
Then familiarity sneaked in and twisted at his heart, his guts. The room hadn’t changed much from when he was a kid. Whitewashed oak-plank walls, dotted with posters of sports heroes and one impossibly endowed swimsuit beauty, surrounded him. A desk on the far wall still held a plastic model of the inner workings of the human body, and the twin bookcases were stuffed with paperback mysteries and thrillers sharing space alongside medical dictionaries and old textbooks.
He threw one arm across his eyes and winced at the sharp jab of pain as memories prodded and poked inside him. A part of him was listening, half expecting to hear long-silent voices. His cousins, shouting to him from their rooms along the hall. It had always been like that during the summers they spent together.
The four Lonergan boys—as close as brothers. Born during a three-year clump, they’d grown up seeing each other every summer on the Lonergan ranch. Their fathers were brothers, and though none of them felt the pull for the ranch where they’d grown up, their sons had.
This was a world apart from everyday life. Where the land rolled open for miles, inviting boys to hop on their bikes to explore. There were small-town fairs, and fireworks and baseball games. There was working in the fields, helping with the horses Jeremiah had once kept and swimming in the lake.
At that thought, everything in Sam seized up. His heart went cold and air struggled to enter his lungs. It was harder than he thought it would be, being here. Seeing everything the same and yet so different.
“Shouldn’t have come,” he muttered, his voice sounding scratchy and raw to his own ears. But then, how could he not? The old man was in bad shape and he needed his grandsons. There was simply no way to deny him that.
Fifteen years he’d been gone and this room looked as though he’d left it fifteen minutes ago. It’s a hard thing for a grown man to come into the room he’d left as a boy. Especially when he’d left that room under a black cloud of guilt and pain.
But none of this was making it any easier on him.
“Not supposed to be easy,” he muttered, tossing the quilt covering him aside so he could stand up and face the first day of what promised to be the longest summer of his life.
From downstairs came the homey sounds of pans rattling and soft footsteps against the hardwood floor. The aroma of coffee seemed thicker now, heavier, though it was probably only that he was awake enough now to really hunger for it.
Had to be the water nymph in the kitchen.
Jeremiah’s housekeeper.
The woman he’d seen naked.
The woman he’d dreamed about all night.
Hell. He ought to thank her for that alone. With her in his mind, his brain had for once been too busy to torture him with images of another face. Another time.
Grabbing up his jeans, he yanked them on, then pulled on a white T-shirt and shoved his arms through the sleeves. Not bothering with shoes, he headed down the hall, pausing briefly at his grandfather’s closed bedroom door before continuing on toward the kitchen.
He needed coffee.
And maybe he needed something else, too. Another look at the mermaid?
His bare feet didn’t make a sound on the stairs, so he approached her quietly enough that she didn’t know he was watching her. Morning sunlight spilled through the shining windowpanes and lay like a golden blanket across the huge round pedestal table and the warm wood floor. Everything in the room practically glistened, and he had to admit that as a housekeeper, she seemed to be doing a hell of a job. The counters were tidy, the floor polished till it shone and even the ancient appliances looked almost new. The walls had been painted a bright, cheery yellow, and the stiffly starched white curtains at the windows nearly crackled in the breeze drifting under the partially opened sash.
But it was the woman who had Sam’s attention. Just as she had the night before. She moved around the old kitchen with a familiarity that at once pleased and irritated
