Stranger in the Moonlight

  So be it, she thought. Friends is what he’d said and friends is what they were going to be. But she couldn’t help the anger that rose in her. Was there someone else in his life? Had he decided that a small town girl wasn’t good enough for him? Or was it that he just couldn’t see her as anything but a child?

  Whatever it was, she didn’t like it one little bit.

  “You mind if I make a phone call?” she asked in the sweetest voice she could muster. It looked like in her case, the old adage about a woman scorned was true.

  “No, go ahead. You want some privacy?”

  “No, it’ll just take a moment. I’m sure he’s working.”

  “He?”

  “Dave, my boyfriend.”

  Travis nearly choked on the bite he’d just taken. “Boyfriend?”

  Kim started to speak, but then Dave answered.

  “Hey, babe, what’s up?” he asked.

  Kim held the phone away from her ear so Dave’s voice could be heard. “I was wondering if you had any ideas about what to pack for this weekend. Is this B&B formal? Should I take a long dress?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave said. “You found the place, but I can tell you that I’m not taking my tux. I have to wear it too often at work. Hey! Why don’t we solve the dilemma by having dinner in bed every night?”

  Kim was smiling as she looked at Travis. His eyes were wide, as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I thought breakfast in bed was more usual.” Her voice was low, sexy—the same one she’d heard Travis use with women. Women other than her.

  “How about if we compromise and do them both in bed?” Dave’s voice was low.

  “What in the world would we do for lunch?” she asked innocently.

  “You’re the creative one, so I’ll let you figure that out. I gotta go. We’re loading the truck for a dinner party. See you Friday at two. And Kim?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t pack anything to wear at night.”

  Laughing, she hung up, put her phone away, then took a long sip of her drink.

  Travis was staring at her. He hadn’t moved a muscle since she opened her phone. “Boyfriend?” he said at last, his voice close to a whisper.

  “Yes. What’s wrong? Don’t you like your sandwich? We could get something else. You want me to call the waitress?”

  “The food is fine. Since when do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Dave and I have been together for six months now.” She smiled at him. “I think it’s serious.”

  “Serious as in how?”

  She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “The usual. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I’m just surprised is all. I didn’t realize there was someone . . . important in your life.”

  “Please tell me that you didn’t assume that since I live in a small town that I was . . . What? Waiting for some big city man to come and rescue me? Not quite.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I thought maybe the wedding going on when I arrived was yours.”

  If Kim had had any doubts that their relationship was only friendship, it vanished with that statement. He didn’t seem bothered that he’d thought she was about to get married. But why should he? They hardly knew each other, and he’d made it clear that in three weeks he was leaving. “So what about you? Anyone special in your life?”

  “I don’t know . . .” he said. It hadn’t occurred to him that Kim had a boyfriend, certainly not one that she called “serious.”

  “You don’t know if there’s a woman in your life? If there is and you two need wedding rings, I can design and make them for you. Are you ready to go?”

  “Sure,” Travis said, but he hadn’t recovered from the blow. He didn’t know what he’d imagined, but Kim talking of meals in bed with another man hadn’t been part of it.

  He put money on the table and walked out of the diner behind Kim. A pretty young woman smiled at him, but Travis paid no attention to her.

  Kim got behind the wheel of her car. “I have work to do at home,” she said, her voice cool.

  “Have I made you angry?”

  “Of course not. What would I be angry about?” She wanted to yell at him. He flirted with other women but looked at her as though she were his sister—or an eight-year-old girl.

  She took a deep breath and when she let it out, she released her anger. It wasn’t fair of her to be angry because he wasn’t attracted to her. How many times had men come on to her but she’d shot them down? At least once a week some man came into her shop and let her know that he was available. Sometimes his wife would be standing three feet away.

  You really can’t control sexual attraction, she thought. You either felt it or you didn’t. She’d thought she felt it coming from Travis, but it looked like she was wrong. He’d been very clear that he wanted and needed friendship, so that’s what she was going to give him.

  “How serious are you with this man?”

  Think of him as a girlfriend, Kim thought. Don’t look at him, don’t get pulled in by the smoldering good looks of him. He’s a buddy, a friend, and nothing else.

  “I think it may be permanent,” she said. “Carla giggles every time she mentions this weekend, and one of my best rings is missing from the case. A big sapphire. I can’t find the receipt and when I asked her about it she said . . . I don’t remember her excuse, but the register receipt isn’t there.”

  “You don’t seem worried that this Carla could have stolen it. I guess that means you think this guy is going to give you one of your own rings. As an engagement ring?”

  “Maybe,” Kim said.

  “What was it about a B&B?”

  “My cousin Luke’s wife, Jocelyn, has been doing the genealogy of the seven founding families of Edilean, but there’s a gap in the Aldredge family. A female ancestor of mine went to a place called Janes Creek, Maryland, in the 1890s and came back pregnant. Joce wants to try to find who the father was. But she has two little kids, so she asked me to go up there and see what I could find out.”

  “And this man is going with you?”

  “Yes,” Kim said. “Dave owns a catering company and weekends are his busiest time. He’s had to pay his employees a lot to cover for him this coming weekend.”

  “That he’s taking off and that a ring and its sales receipt are missing is what makes you think he’s going to . . . What? Ask you to marry him?”

  Kim could again feel anger rising in her, but she stamped it down. She pulled into her driveway, turned off the engine, and looked at him. “There is also the fact that Dave is mad about me. We spend every day he’s off work together. We call each other. We talk about our future together.”

  “Future? What does that mean?”

  “Travis, I really don’t like this inquisition. I agreed to help you with your mother and I will, but I’d just as soon keep my private life to myself.” She got out and went into the house.

  Travis stayed in the car, too stunned to move. Kim was about to accept a marriage proposal from some man who ran a catering company! How could he have ever been so wrong about a person? He’d thought that she was, well, interested in him!

  He flipped open his phone and punched the button to reach Penny. As soon as she answered he said, “I need to know about a man named Dave, don’t know his last name. Lives in a city around Edilean, owns a food catering company. He’s registered for this weekend at a B&B in Janes Creek, Maryland. I want to know everything about him, and I mean everything.”

  “Should I cancel the B&B?” Penny asked.

  “Yes! No. Book me a connecting room. And fill up all the other rooms. In fact, fill up all the rooms in the entire town.”

  “Any choice of guests? Leslie has been calling.”

  For a moment Travis thought of inviting her. He didn’t know whether he was angry at Kim or jealous or . . . well, hurt. Whatever he was feeling, he didn’t think Leslie’s presence would help.

  “She’d probably love Miss Aldredge’s jewelry store,” Penny sa
id into the silence. When Travis didn’t reply, she said, “Life isn’t so easy without the Maxwell name, is it?”

  Her words came too close to home for Travis’s comfort. “Just put some people in the rooms. Your relatives.” It occurred to him that he knew nothing about Penny’s personal life. “Do you . . . ?”

  “Have relatives?” she filled in for him. “Yes I do. Rather a lot of them, actually. My son is your age. I’ll e-mail you what I have,” she added and for the first time ever, she hung up first.

  Travis closed his phone and stared at it for a moment. This was a day for surprises! Kim was about to accept a marriage proposal and his faithful right-hand man, Penny, had a son Travis’s age.

  At the moment he thought of returning to New York and going back to destroying people’s lives. It played less havoc with his emotions.

  He got out of Kim’s car and wasn’t sure what to do. Go inside and talk to her? About what? Ask her to give up her boyfriend in case she and Travis felt something for each other and maybe someday he’d sort out his life and they might possibly get together? Not exactly something any female would accept. Certainly not one like Kim who’d known what she wanted since she was a kid. She was making jewelry at eight and at twenty-six she was still doing it.

  “And I haven’t decided—” he said aloud, but he didn’t want to finish that statement. He saw that Kim had turned the lights on in her garage, which meant that she was working. He didn’t like to be disturbed when he was working, so maybe she didn’t either. Besides, he didn’t know what to say to her.

  He walked around the house to get to the guesthouse and went to bed.

  Seven

  Travis had a sleepless night, and when he awoke the next morning, Kim had already gone to work. His car, the old BMW Penny had bought for him, was in the driveway. He wanted to see Kim. But if he did see her, he didn’t know what he’d say. His system was still shocked at the news that she had a boyfriend. A “serious” boyfriend.

  Without thinking what he was doing, Travis got into his car and started driving. His first impulse was to do something physical. That’s what he did when his father demanded too much of him. Climb, run, drive, ski, surf, skate. It didn’t matter what he did as long as it left him too tired to think.

  But he didn’t drive into the preserve, didn’t seek out a lake or a cliff. Instead, he found himself pulling into the parking lot of Joe Layton’s hardware store.

  He sat in the car, looking at the brick front and wondering what the hell he was doing there. When someone opened the car door, he wasn’t surprised to see Joe.

  “You’re just in time. I need to check inventory. You open the boxes, pull the stuff out, and I’ll mark it off on the papers.”

  “I need to . . .” Travis couldn’t think of anyplace he needed to be. “Sure. But I warn you that I don’t know a saw from a hammer.”

  “I do, so we’ll be fine.” Joe held the door open while Travis got his long body out. “Yesterday you looked happy. Now you look like the world came crashing down on you. Kim throw you out?”

  Travis wasn’t used to revealing his thoughts and certainly not his feelings to people, and he had no intention of starting. But maybe unloading boxes of tools would help him release some energy.

  “So she dumps it on me that she’s got a boyfriend,” Travis said. It was four hours later and he was covered in sweat, grime, and those plastic foam packing beans that someone was going to hell for inventing. Travis had told Joe the story of how he and Kim had met as children, and one thing had led to another until he was telling much more than he’d intended to.

  While he talked he had single-handedly unloaded what seemed to be hundreds of cartons and crates of tools and supplies. That there were no shelves to put them on didn’t seem to bother Joe Layton in the least. But then he just sat in a big leather chair with a clipboard and checked off whatever Travis opened. Joe had let his disgust be known when Travis didn’t know a Phillips screwdriver from a flat head.

  “My daughter knows—” Joe started again. According to him, his daughter could run the world.

  “Yeah, well I know how to hire a mechanic to keep the machines running,” Travis had at last snapped. That seemed to release something inside him and in the next minute he was talking about Kim.

  “I don’t get it,” he said as he pulled some electrical tool out of a box. It looked like a plastic wombat.

  “Router,” Joe said. “Look in there for the bits.”

  Travis bent over into the box, foam beans sticking in his hair and wiggling their way down into his T-shirt. He couldn’t help thinking of the Frankenstein movie. “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

  “What don’t you get?” Joe asked.

  “I came to this town to see Kim. We were great together as kids. I mean, she was just a little girl and I was close to puberty, but still . . . I helped her with her jewelry. I wonder if she’d have that shop of hers now if I hadn’t—”

  “Liar!” Joe said loudly.

  Travis pulled his head out of the carton. Packing beans stuck out all over him. “I beg your pardon.”

  “You came here to see your mother about me.”

  Travis’s mouth opened, but no words came out as he stared at Joe.

  “Don’t look so surprised. You look like my Lucy, talk like her. Did you two think I was so stupid that I wouldn’t see the resemblance?”

  “I . . . We . . .”

  “You want to check me out,” Joe said. “It’s what a good son would do. Lucy is a prize worth protecting. But I warn you, boy, if you tell her that I know who you are I’ll show you what a chain saw can do.”

  Travis blinked a few times. His mother had made him swear not to tell Joe about her, and now Joe wanted Travis not to tell her that he knew.

  “You find those bits yet?” Joe growled.

  “No . . .” Travis said softly, still staring.

  “Then get busy!” Joe said. “You expect me to look for them?”

  Travis bent back into the carton, found two more boxes, and pulled them out. When he came up, he looked at Joe in speculation. Where did they go from here? he wondered.

  Joe marked off the items Travis held up. “So you came here to see if your mom had gone crazy when she said she wanted to marry some nobody that owned a hardware store.”

  Since that was pretty much the truth, Travis gave a curt nod.

  “And you thought you might as well see Kim, since you were in the same town.”

  “I saw Kim first,” Travis said, feeling defensive as he cut open another carton.

  “Only because the wedding was going on and you got sidetracked.”

  “I told you too much,” Travis muttered.

  “What was that?” Joe asked.

  Travis turned to him. “I told you too much. You know too much. You see too much.”

  Joe chuckled. “That’s because I raised two kids on my own. The things I went through with my daughter! Joey was no problem. When he started staying in the bathroom too long I handed him some condoms. I didn’t have to tell him anything. But Jecca! She fought me every inch of the way. So who’s your dad?”

  Travis caught himself before he blurted out the answer. Could he trust this man he barely knew? But there was something about Joe that engendered trust. The expression “salt of the earth” had been created just for him.

  “Randall Maxwell,” Travis said.

  For a second, Joe looked shocked, scared, impressed, horrified. But then he recovered himself. “That explains everything,” he said. “So you came here to see if the New Jersey guy was after your mom’s money.”

  “More or less. She’s still married to him.” Travis looked hard into Joe’s eyes. “The divorce is going to be brutal. You think you can handle that?”

  “If I get Lucy all to myself in the end, yeah, I can handle that.”

  Travis didn’t try to contain his smile. “I’m a lawyer and—”

  “And here I was beginning to actually like you.”

  Trav
is groaned. “Don’t start on me and no lawyer jokes. I’ve heard them all. How did we go from my problems to yours?”

  “It started with you lying to me. You came to see your mother, not Kim. You left that girl alone for all those years, then you came back here for something else, accidently saw the girl you left behind, and now you’re whining because she has a boyfriend she might marry. What did you expect? That she would stay a virgin and wait for you? You got any brothers or sisters?”

  “No to every question. What is this thing? The egg of some extinct species?”

  “Orbital sander. You didn’t expect Kim to wait for you?”

  “No I didn’t, but then I did know—” He bent back into the carton to pull out sandpaper disks.

  “Did know what?”

  “A bit about her life.”

  “You’ve been stalking her?” Joe asked, his voice full of horror.

  Travis refused to answer that. It would take too much explaining and he didn’t want to have to defend himself. “When are you going to get shelves?”

  “They’re in those big boxes over there and you’re going to put them up.”

  “No, I’m not,” Travis said. “If you need help and can’t afford it, I’ll hire—”

  “With Maxwell’s money?”

  “I have my own,” Travis said, glaring at him. “Where’d you get the money to buy all this?”

  “Thirty years of hard work—and a mortgage on my house in New Jersey. Not that it’s any of your business. If you’re so in love with Kim, why are you here with me now? Why aren’t you courting her?”

  “Should I be making her do back bends in public?” Travis asked, his eyes narrowed.

  Joe grinned. “Heard about that, did you? Lucy can pole dance. I tell you, she can—”

  “Don’t!” Travis said sternly.

  “Understood,” Joe said. “The problem seems to be that you don’t know how to court a woman.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding, old man. I’ve done things with women you’ve never even heard of. One time—”

  “Not sex, boy! The only sex that matters is if you make the woman you love happy. You can do a threesome with half a dozen gorgeous dames, but if the one you love ain’t smiling at you over breakfast, you’re a failure in the sex department.”