Читать книгу Forbidden Love - Christine Flynn, Christine Flynn, Mary J. Forbes - Страница 8

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you this restless, Amy. Are you sure everything is all right?”

Amy Chapman ran her fingers through her short dark hair, the motion as agitated as her pacing. With a quick, distracted smile, she focused on the list in her hand. “I’m positive, Grandma. There’s just a lot to do before I can get you out of here. Now, I’ve called these contractors—”

“It’s not like you to pace.”

“Honest. I’m fine.”

“Well, you don’t seem fine,” the elderly woman insisted. “I’ve never seen you fidget as much as you have since you’ve been home. You’ve always had energy, but this is different. You’re acting…unsettled.”

“I’m not ‘unsettled,’” Amy replied, still pacing. “I just want to get this taken care of.”

“You’re tense, then.” Her grandmother’s thin, rose-red lips pinched. “Do you know what I think you need?”

“What’s that?”

“A man.”

Amy came to a dead stop at the foot of the raised nursing-home bed. Her grandmother sat propped against a crisp white pillow, her long white hair hanging in an enviably thick braid over the shoulder of her fuchsia bed jacket and her hazel eyes sharp behind her silver-rimmed bifocals.

“Well, you do,” Bea Gardner pronounced, casually eyeing the uninspired cream camp shirt her youngest granddaughter had tucked into a pair of equally understated khaki slacks. “You’re almost twenty-eight years old, and you haven’t had a serious boyfriend since you stopped seeing Scott last year. I’m sure there are plenty of nice, eligible men over there in Eau Claire. Why aren’t you going out with any of them?”

“Because no one has asked.”

“I don’t believe that for an instant. You’re a beautiful girl, Amy. You’re kind. You’re smart.”

“You’re prejudiced.”

“You’re right. But I don’t buy your reasoning. If it’s true no one has asked you out, then why don’t you find someone interesting and ask him? It’s not like when I was young, and a girl had to wait around for the man to call her. From what I hear, men nowadays like it when a woman takes the initiative. It takes the pressure off them.”

Amy’s mouth curved in a smile that looked like affection but felt more like defeat. It was truly pathetic when a woman’s eighty-two-year-old grandmother was gutsier than she was. She couldn’t begin to imagine making the first move on a guy.

“You say ‘find someone interesting’ as if all I’d have to do is put my hand in a hat and pull out the man of my dreams. It’s not that easy out there. The good men are all gone.” She gave a casual shrug. “The hat’s empty.”

“That’s nonsense. There are plenty of good men out there. It’s just a matter of giving them a chance to prove themselves.” The frown on Bea’s gracefully aged face added another row of wrinkles to her forehead. “You’re just never going to find the one who’s right for you if you keep turning down the interesting ones and turning the rest into buddies.”

“Grandma,” Amy said patiently, “I’m here to get you back into your house. Not discuss my nonexistent love life.” Prepared to move on to something more productive, she held up the list, only to lower it as her brow pinched.

“Who did I turn down that was interesting? You don’t mean Scott, do you?”

“My heavens, no,” came the gently chiding reply. “I know your parents thought he was perfect for you. And he would have fit right in at your father’s accounting firm. But frankly, dear,” she said, dropping her tone in deference to her room’s open door, “whenever I saw you together, I never had the feeling there was any passion there. A woman needs passion in her life,” she informed her, much as she might speak of the need for a good mechanic.

“She needs a man who makes her melt when he touches her and makes her feel that she’ll simply not be the same without him in her life. That is not what I sensed between you and Scott. I’m talking about that new man in your apartment building. The geologist. Didn’t you say he was attractive? And what about the new principal at your school?”

Amy glanced toward the doorway herself, though there wasn’t anyone in the bright hallway who would have been able to overhear, much less care about what they were discussing. It just disconcerted her to know that her grandmother had been aware of something like passion—or the lack thereof—in her relationship with Scott Porter.

The woman was absolutely right, though. There never had been any spark or fire between her and the promising young accountant. Not even in the beginning of their two-year relationship. But then, there had never been any real passion in her life. Period.

She was not, however, going to get depressed about it now. Being home for the summer was enough to cope with at the moment.

“The geologist isn’t interested in a relationship. Not the kind I’m interested in, anyway,” she replied, knowing for a fact that she’d find no passion there. She preferred fidelity in a man. “He was going out with the nurse in Three B and the masseuse in One C until they found he was two-timing them. Rumor has it he’s currently working on the Rosenburg twins on the first floor. As for our principal,” she said, glancing again at the paper she held, “we play softball together, but he’s just a friend. It’s never a good idea to date someone you work with, anyway.”

From the corner of her eye Amy saw Bea peer at her over the tops of her bifocals. Before her grandmother could pursue the subject, however, Amy changed it. She simply didn’t feel like explaining that the problem probably wasn’t with the men, but with her.

“I called all the contractors on this list,” she repeated, referring to the sheet of aqua stationery covered with Bea’s surprisingly bold script. “Triple A Renovators will be there this afternoon, but they won’t give you separate bids for the wheelchair ramps and the room addition. With them, it’s all or nothing. Cedar Lake Construction will have someone out to give us an estimate Thursday morning. And Four Pines Remodel and Repair can’t take another job before September, and I’ll be gone by then.”

Bea made a faint tsking sound. “That’s too bad about Four Pines. They do such good work.” Straightening the sheet tucked at her waist, she watched Amy bend over one of the Danish Modern visitor’s chairs by the plant-lined window and stuff the paper into her oversize canvas tote bag. “There’s really no one you’re interested in?”

Amy didn’t consider herself a particularly virtuous person. Her faults were myriad and, compared to certain members of her family, her accomplishments few. If she could claim any redeeming trait at all, it would be patience. The virtue helped enormously when working with six-year-olds, which she did nine months out of the year, from September to June. But patience was an absolute necessity when it came to surviving her family.

“No, Grandma,” she replied quietly. Of all her relations, she most admired the outspoken and energetic octogenarian watching her so closely now. Her mother’s mother was her own woman. She did things her own way, whether or not convention approved, and she possessed the energy and outlook of a woman twenty years her junior. It had taken a broken hip to even slow the woman down. And then, she’d fallen while painting her kitchen cabinets fire-engine red. To add a little life to the place, she’d said.

If Amy had had the nerve, she would have loved to emulate her grandmother’s sometimes outrageous sense of style. But she had grown up to realize that she was really just a practical, beige sort of person, and whatever sense of whimsy she found herself wanting to indulge, she shared only with her first-graders.

“There really isn’t anyone I’m interested in,” Amy finally concluded.

Recognizing a dead end when she saw one, the elderly woman picked up three bottles of nail polish from the tray table straddling her bed. “Pity,” she murmured, and finally let the matter go.

“By the way, dear.” Glass clicked lightly as she tried to decide between shades of bright coral or a more subtle mauve. “I called Culhane Contracting for an estimate, too. Michael Culhane is sending his nephew over this morning so he can look at the house.”

Amy’s head snapped up. Her grandmother was studying one gnarled hand, her rose-tinted lips pursed in concentration.

“Culhane?”

“Mmm,” Bea hummed, still undecided about the color. “I heard from Mae Cutter that Nick is working for his uncle’s construction company now. He’s finishing up a medical office for her grandson and his partner over on Maple Grove. He’s doing nice work, too. From what I hear. Mae said her grandson is pleased, anyway.”

Confusion swept Amy’s expression as she watched her grandmother calmly hold the bottle of coral next to her skin, then do the same with the mauve. It made no sense that Nick Culhane would be working for a builder in such a small town, no matter who owned the company. The last she’d heard, he was an architect in New York. A very successful one, at that. It made even less sense that her grandmother would want anything to do with him.

“What’s he doing in Cedar Lake?” She shook her head, her confusion compounding by the second. “And why are you even talking to him? Have you forgotten what he did to Paige?”

Bea’s weathered hand remained splayed as she patiently glanced up at her youngest grandchild. “Contrary to what your mother sometimes thinks, Amy, there’s nothing wrong with my memory. I remember exactly what he did to your sister. He walked out on her a month before their wedding. That was ten years ago. And it has nothing at all to do with getting an addition built onto my house. The more companies I get bids from, the more informed a decision I can make about who to hire. A woman should always have options.”

She glanced back at the bottles, choosing coral. “Stop scowling, dear. It causes wrinkles.” Behind the bifocals, her eyes narrowed on the hall beyond the wide doorway. “I do believe I see Nick coming now.”

Amy dutifully straightened the scowl, but her usual easy smile was conspicuously absent as she watched her grandmother push aside her polish in preparation for her company. The recalcitrant woman certainly sounded lucid to her, but she couldn’t help but think that her favorite relative’s mental acuity had finally slipped. Bea Gardner tended to disagree with half of her family and barely tolerated the rest, but she was loyal to every last member when it came to defending them to the rest of the world. Amy had inherited that unquestioned loyalty in spades. She’d barely been seventeen when Nick Culhane had told Paige he couldn’t marry her, but she could still remember how badly he’d hurt her older sister.

The sound of heavy footsteps grew closer, the rhythm steady and certain—until it went dead silent at the doorway.

“Nick,” Bea said, by way of greeting.

“Mrs. Gardner,” came the deep, rumbling reply.

“Well, do come in.” Extending her hand, the gesture faintly regal, she motioned toward the foot of her bed.

“You remember Amy, don’t you?”

Amy wasn’t in the habit of being rude. Refusing to develop the tendency now, she turned with the thought of offering a polite hello—and felt her heart catch as her breath stalled in her lungs.

He stood six feet behind her, a mountain of leanly muscled masculinity in chambray, worn denim and work boots. Maturity had carved character into a face that had already been impossibly handsome, deepening the creases bracketing his chiseled mouth, fanning the tiny lines from the corners of his eyes.

She didn’t remember him being so big. Or his eyes so blue. His dark hair was meticulously cut, his face and forearms tanned from working long hours in the summer sun. He was hard and honed, the sort of man who dominated whatever space he occupied, and Amy felt an overwhelming urge to back up as his guarded glance slowly moved over her face and slipped down her slender frame.

“Yes. I do,” he replied in that polite way people have when a memory is there, but vague. Clearly cautious, he turned his attention to the woman holding court from the bed. “Since you have company, maybe we should discuss our business later.”

“Amy isn’t company,” Bea countered, sounding every bit as businesslike as he did. “She’s family. And your business is with her. My granddaughter has kindly come from Eau Claire to rescue me from this…place…my daughter has stuck me in and is handling what I obviously can’t. She’ll take you out to the house so you can do whatever it is you need to do to figure your estimates.

“As I told you on the phone,” she continued, ignoring both Amy’s look of surprise and Nick’s sudden and definite hesitation, “I need a new bedroom built downstairs. I won’t be able to climb the stairs to my old one,” she explained, sounding more annoyed with the inability than inconvenienced by it. “And I need a wheelchair ramp so Amy can get me in and out of the house. I can’t leave here until the ramp is in, and I would really like to return to my home.”

A wistful smile touched her once-full lips. “I’ve already missed seeing my lilacs bloom, and I know my roses need tending. Would your uncle’s company be able to take on the work now, assuming we agree on a price, or would there be a wait?”

“I can’t answer that until I know exactly what you have in mind for the addition.”

Bea inclined her head at his hedge. “Well, then, there’s nothing for me to do other than leave you in Amy’s capable hands. She can explain what I need, and we’ll go from there.

“You’ll call me this afternoon?” she asked her granddaughter.

“Of course.” She could count on it.

“Good. Then, if you’ll excuse me, I want to do my nails before bridge this afternoon.” She picked up her polish again, her shrewd glance cutting to the man who’d taken a step back to let Amy pass. “Thank you for coming, Nick. I wasn’t sure you would.”

Amy could practically feel his big body stiffen, though all she saw for certain was the jump of a muscle in his jaw a moment before he spoke. To his credit, not that Amy was inclined to give him much, his deep voice betrayed no reaction at all to her grandma’s doubt.

“My uncle owns the company, Mrs. Gardner. It’s not up to me to turn down business. It’s good to see you looking so well,” he concluded, deftly refusing her a chance to unearth what he’d rather leave buried. “I’ll get back to you with an estimate as soon as I can.”

Taking another step back, he caught Amy’s eye and arched one dark eyebrow. “Shall we?”

He looked remarkably unhurried as he stood waiting for her to precede him out the door. Or so it seemed until she noticed the little knot of muscle still twitching near his ear. Uneasy herself, rather wishing she hadn’t given her grandmother carte blanche with her services, she picked up her bag and slipped the straps over her shoulder.

This was one little twist she hadn’t imagined in the scenarios that had plagued her every time she’d thought about coming home the past couple of weeks. She’d known she would run into resistance from her mom about moving Grandma Bea back into her home. And she’d known Paige would side with their mom for reasons that had nothing to do with their mother’s objections, but which would still leave Amy to deal with the task by herself. She’d just never dreamed she’d have to deal with the man who had broken her sister’s heart.

Amy knew what it was to lose a friendship because love just wasn’t there. But she couldn’t imagine a worse breach of trust than for a woman to put all her faith and hope in a man, then have him leave her for another woman.

Amy knew for a fact that was what Nick had done. She’d even heard him admit there was someone else. The night he’d broken up with Paige, they’d been arguing beneath her bedroom window.

Telling her grandmother she’d talk with her later, she moved past him and into a bright hallway that smelled strongly of disinfectant and the lilies in the open day room. From a room behind them a frail voice kept up a constant litany of indistinguishable phrases. Ahead of them, a nurse steadied an elderly gentleman out for a stroll with his chrome-plated walker. The facility was the best available in Cedar Lake. Her mom had seen to that. Still, Amy couldn’t blame her grandmother for wanting to get out of there.

“What’s wrong with her?” Nick asked, his deep voice low as he fell into step beside her.

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.” She simply could not believe her grandmother had called him.

“I mean physically,” he muttered.

Feeling a tug of chagrin, Amy protectively crossed her arms as they headed for the double doors of the exit. “She broke her hip a few months ago. That’s why she won’t be able to use stairs. I know she wants an addition built onto the house for a bedroom,” she continued, deliberately keeping her focus on her task, and the man with the walker. “But it might be faster to close in the back porch.”

“It sounds like you’re in a hurry to get out of Cedar Lake.”

“I’m in a hurry to get my grandmother settled back in her home,” she countered. “She needs to be in her own bed. She isn’t resting well here and I’m worried about her.”

And you’re right, she thought, though she wasn’t about to admit it to him. She did want to leave. Whenever she was in Cedar Lake, there was always part of her that wanted badly to get back to Eau Claire. There were things she truly loved about the charming east Wisconsin town where she’d grown up. Mostly she loved the quaint feel of it and the friendliness of people whose families remained, year after year. It was small enough that a person couldn’t walk down Main Street without running into someone she knew. But it was big enough that not everyone knew everyone else’s business.

The only reason she’d left was that she wanted to be out from under the collective thumb of her family. Except for her grandmother, they treated her as if she’d never quite grown up. As her grandmother had just pointed out, she was nearly twenty-eight years old. Would be, in fact, in less than a month. She had been on her own since she’d graduated from college at twenty-one. Yet all she had to do was come back home, and she felt all of twelve again.

“I’ll take a look at the porch and see what I can do.”

“Thank you.”

Nick reached past her, pushing open the glass door by its horizontal metal bar. As he did, she swept past him, leaving behind the scent of something light and airy and impossibly, inexplicably erotic.

The muscles in his gut tightened, the response adding yet another dimension to the other frustrations that had been clawing at him all day—every one of which had seemed to compound itself in the past five minutes.

Amy was two feet in front of him on the wide walkway. Catching her arm, he felt those frustrations merge as he pulled her to a stop.

“Hold on a minute.”

The noonday sun caught shades of amber in her short sable hair as she jerked her head toward him. Her eyes were a rich, deep chocolate, her fine features delicate, and she had a tiny dimple in her left cheek. It was there when she smiled, anyway. He’d seen it when she’d smiled at her grandmother. But she wasn’t smiling now. She was looking at him with the same caution he’d felt since Bea Gardner had called his uncle’s company yesterday and asked him to bid on a job for her.

“Who else is going to be there?” he asked.

“Where?”

Beneath his hand he felt the tensing of smooth, supple muscle. Her warmth seeped into his palm, the softness of her skin registering somewhere deep in his consciousness.

“At your grandmother’s house. I’m not up for any more surprises today.” He had enough to deal with as it was. Between a delivery problem with materials, an associate in New York who wanted his drafts yesterday and butting heads this morning with his uncle over the need for the man to slow down, his patience was precariously close to nonexistent. “I want to know who’s there. Any more of your family?”

She shook her head, feeling wary, trying not to sound it. “There’s no one.”

“Your sister isn’t waiting out there?”

“I said there’s no one.” Amy eased from his grip, fighting the urge to cover the spot where the heat of his hand still lingered. “I’m staying alone at the house.”

She thought he might look relieved by the assurance. If anything, the furrows in his brow only deepened as he stepped back. The muscle in his jaw wasn’t jerking anymore, though. It had simply gone rigid.

He must have decided he had no choice but to believe her. His guard firmly in place, he turned toward the nearly empty parking lot. “Do you have a car here?”

“It’s right over there.” Reaching into her tote for her sunglasses and her keys, she nodded toward the crayon-yellow Volkswagen sitting alone by the tree-lined curb. Her mother thought the thing looked like a windup toy. Her students loved it.

“I’ll follow you,” he muttered.

Nick could have sworn he saw relief flash in her eyes an instant before she slipped on the dark glasses and told him that would be fine. She was clearly no crazier than he was with the idea of having to make small talk if they took the same vehicle. But he didn’t want to think about his ex-fiancée’s little sister. Amy was just doing what her grandmother had asked her to do. It seemed far more prudent to consider the motives of the elderly woman inside the long, low building they’d just left.

He hadn’t seen Bea Gardner since the night before he’d left town after breaking up with her older granddaughter. That had been ten years ago. The decade had taken its toll on her, too, put more wear on a face that had probably once been quite beautiful, made her aging body that much more fragile. She wasn’t a big woman. He doubted she’d ever been taller than Amy’s five-three. But she’d always had a presence that more than made up for her diminutive size.

That presence had never been more impressive than when she’d come across him on the highway that long-ago evening and stopped to give him a ride. He’d had way too much to drink after he’d left Paige’s house, but he’d had enough sense left to walk home rather than risk plowing the first new car he’d ever owned into a pole. Somewhere out on the highway between the Twin Pine Tavern and his uncle’s house on the opposite side of town, Bea had come sailing by in the old boat of a Cadillac she’d driven since 1966.

She’d opened her window, told him he should be ashamed of himself and to get in before he wound up like the deer that crossed the highway to the lake and some sleepy trucker turned him into roadkill. Beyond that, what he remembered most was that she’d mercilessly prodded him with questions about why he’d broken up with her granddaughter—and that after he’d wound up spilling his guts to her, she had agreed that he’d had no choice but to do what he’d done, and to leave.

As uneasy as he’d felt facing the old woman again, his caution had doubled the instant he’d laid eyes on the slender young woman with the doe-soft brown eyes and the short dark hair. Amy had been the polar opposite of her bubbly blond older sister. She’d possessed a natural vitality, but it had been more innocent, more unassuming. He’d recognized her instantly, though. He just hadn’t been prepared for how truly lovely she’d become.