He didn’t understand. “Your car quit again?”
“No.” She seemed to consider her words carefully before she spoke. “I heard that today your father took out his temper on you. Want to talk about it?”
Carter collapsed into the leather seat as though he had deflated. “Does this town know everything about us?”
“If it happens in public, yes we do.” She didn’t tell him how everyone in the restaurant had laughed about Lewis Treeborne’s attack on his son. Everyone saw Carter as a pampered, spoiled wimp. “Too afraid of his old man to stand up to him” was the consensus.
Sophie thought that was probably true, but she knew a lot about being in situations where other people had control. She knew she shouldn’t get involved, since this young man was a Treeborne, but he was also a human being, and right now he looked so sad she couldn’t leave him alone.
“On I-40 there’s a tavern. It—”
“I know the place well,” he said. “Get in.”
That was the beginning. For the first time in his life, Carter had a friendship with a woman. Over the next few months he told her about his life, about his mother, and how she’d protected him from his father. And Sophie told how she had kept her stepfather away from her sister.
This mutual bond, this sense of sharing, led to friendship, which led to sex, and they led to love. That summer was the best of Carter’s life. His father was gone most of the time, there were competent people to run the company, so he spent a lot of time with Sophie.
Her refusal to take money from him was, at first, a problem. Lisa got a job at the local Dairy Queen so Sophie could cut down from three jobs to two, but that still took up too much of her time. Carter began devising ingenious ways to get money to Sophie. Tourists came through and left twenty-dollar tips. The feed store where she worked on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons did so much business her boss gave her a substantial raise.
By the end of the summer she was doing so well that she could afford to take whole days off to spend with Carter.
That they rarely left town, but never went anyplace where Carter might be known, didn’t bother Sophie. The two of them spent their hours together in a ramshackle summerhouse hidden on the Treeborne estate. They had a boat, a lake, and a forest to walk through. They spent lazy afternoons together reading, talking, or just being quiet. They made love often, but always quietly and tenderly.
For the first time since his mother died Carter felt that someone cared for him, not his money, but for him.
The only blemish in his life that summer was that he knew he was to marry someone else. In September, he tried to talk to his father about what he saw as a life sentence. But Lewis Treeborne wouldn’t listen. “You cannot marry a local girl!” he said in anger, then his face changed to one of concern and he calmed down. “You may think you’re in love with her but that’s only because you two hide out in the woods together and eat with your fingers. How would you feel if you showed up at the opera with her? Would she fall asleep? Or would she stomp and yell like she was at a figure eight race?”
Lewis put his hand on his son’s shoulder, a rare gesture. “I’ve seen this girl and she’s a knockout, I’ll give you that, but she’s a local and that’s all she’ll ever be. Believe me, if you married a girl like that, within six months you’d be ashamed to be seen with her. And think about her! All those fancy friends of yours would make fun of her until the girl would want to slit her wrists. Do you want to do something like that to her? Is that your idea of love?”
Lewis gave his son’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze and when he turned away he was smiling. Damn! but the boy was easy to manipulate. Palmer was holding out for his druggy daughter to marry “a good, clean young man,” and Carter was going to do it no matter what had to be done. If Lewis had to, he’d make the local girl disappear.
Still smiling, he left the room.
As he’d planned, Lewis’s words planted a seed in Carter’s head and he began to watch Sophie, put her under a magnifying glass. She knew she was being scrutinized and she asked him why. His reply was that he was about to make the biggest decision of his life. Sophie, correctly thinking he was contemplating marriage, looked down to cover her blushes. She had incorrectly begun to believe that she would be the bride.
In the end, Carter had gone with his father. To stand against the man took more courage than Carter had. One night he met with Traci at a formal dinner party put on by her father. He sat across from her and couldn’t help noticing that she used a fish knife correctly. And she wore a gown that cost a normal person’s yearly wage, and diamonds sparkled on her ears and her wrists. He had a vision of Sophie and him sitting on the summerhouse floor eating barbecued spareribs, sauce all over their faces. How would Sophie do at a dinner like this one? he wondered. Would all the cutlery and glassware confuse her?
After that night he began to pull back from Sophie, but he worked to not let her see it or feel it. By the time what he knew was their last night together came, he had convinced himself that his father was right. But some part of him felt bad enough that he showed her the Treeborne cookbook. Maybe she would tell her grandchildren that she’d seen it. Maybe . . .
What Carter hadn’t foreseen after the breakup was how miserable he’d be without Sophie. After he’d spent some time alone with the woman he was to marry, all he did was compare her to Sophie.
It took only days to realize he’d made a big, big mistake. He went to Sophie’s house and was told by her stepfather that she’d left town. “Took the car and went away,” Arnie yelled. “Now how the hell am I supposed to pay for this place?”
If Carter hadn’t been in the same situation he would have told the man to get a job.
Now, after Halloween, Carter was to the point where he hated his life so much that he didn’t want to leave his bedroom. The last time he’d seen Traci she’d offered him what she called a “particularly fine line” of cocaine.
When his phone buzzed he almost didn’t answer it. But then he thought maybe it could be Sophie.
It was his father calling to tell him to get twenty-five grand out of the office safe and give it to a man who’d be there in thirty minutes. “Can you get off your rear long enough to do this?” Lewis sneered into the phone. He was disgusted with his son’s depression, something Lewis had never come close to feeling.
Carter clicked off the phone, tiredly got up, and went to his father’s office. The last time he’d been in the safe was with Sophie when he’d shown her the old cookbook. Tears blurred his vision as he spun the dial with the combination.
He counted out the money, put it in an envelope, and sealed it. It was when he looked back at the safe that he realized the yellow envelope wasn’t there.
He tossed the cash his father kept in the safe onto the desk, then all the papers. The envelope, the family cookbook, was not there.
With his fingertips on his temples, Carter tried to think of when and where. Maybe his father had taken it. Maybe—
Carter knew that only one person would have removed the cookbook from the safe where it had been for decades. That day, that very last day, he and Sophie had made love on the floor of his father’s office. Such a violation of Lewis Treeborne’s private space had driven Carter to new heights of pleasure. It was as though he was at last defying the man.
Afterward, Carter had carried Sophie to his bedroom and . . .
He put his hands over his face. He’d carried Sophie out and left the safe standing open. She must have returned to the house after he’d shoved her out the front door. He hadn’t meant to be so rough, but he was afraid his father would return and see her. He didn’t want her on the receiving end of the man’s temper.
Carter flopped down in his father’s big leather chair. If that cookbook were lost—if the secrets it contained were made public—it could bring down the Treeborne Foods empire.
He stood up, hastily shoved the money back into the safe, and shut the iron door. Right now there was only one thing he knew for sure in life
: he had to find Sophie Kincaid before his father found out the cookbook was missing.
Fifteen
“Hi,” Reede said from the doorway of the sandwich shop.
Sophie, her back to him, was going up and down a step stool as she put away the things she and Roan had bought. At the sound of Reede’s oh-so-familiar voice, she smiled, but then she remembered everything and it went away. Before she turned around, she had her face composed to be expressionless.
For all that she’d seen him without a mask, he’d been asleep then and she wasn’t prepared for the intensity of his eyes. They were deep blue under thick lashes. They would have been considered pretty if not for the depth of them. Hawks could learn a thing or two from him. Her first thought was that she understood why everyone in town was afraid of him. Her second thought was her memory of being in bed with him, his lips, his hands caressing her, touching her . . .
She turned away before he could read her thoughts. “We’re not open for business yet so there’s no food.”
“Could we talk?”
She took a breath and turned back to face him. “Sure. What do you have to say?”
“Will any apology work?”
“No,” she said honestly. “But tell me, did you win? You made a fool of the woman who poured beer over you, so does that make you the champion?”
Reede stared at her in shock. “Is that what you think of me? That I’d do something like that?”
Sophie glared at him. “Then why? What other reason did you have for concealing your identity from me?”
“I liked you,” he said softly.
“You liked that I cleaned your apartment and cooked for you.”
“No, I like that you care, that you listen, that you make me laugh, that you . . . ” He trailed off for a moment. “In that first call I didn’t know who you were and I confided things in you that I’ve never told anyone else. I’m sorry about my driving. I’ll never again take my eyes off the road. I . . . ” He reached into his trousers pocket and withdrew a new cell phone and put it on the counter. It was an unseasonably warm day, and he had on a T-shirt and jeans that hugged his body. “I owe you this.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” she said.
The hostility in her voice seemed to startle him, and for a moment she thought he was going to leave, but he didn’t. He looked around at the little restaurant. She hadn’t yet had time to do much with it.
Last night when she and Roan had returned from shopping, he’d insisted on going inside with her, even to walking her upstairs, and she soon saw why. While they were out, the little apartment had been transformed with gently used furniture, even some rugs. There was a pretty mahogany bed in the back, complete with blue and white sheets and lots of pillows.
“Guilt offerings,” Roan had said.
But whatever the reason, the kindness of the people of Edilean made Sophie smile.
When she looked back at Reede, he was staring at her.
“Do you want to open a restaurant?” he asked.
She wasn’t going to lie. “No, not really, but it’s just temporary. I’m staying here for the Christmas season and New Year’s.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “My life seems to just happen to me. I have work to do, so you need to leave.”
Reede stood where he was for a moment, then walked behind the counter to stand near her.
Sophie drew in her breath. It was so strange that this man was so familiar but at the same time she felt that she’d never seen him before. She’d thought his eyes were beautiful behind the mask, but seeing them now made her skin grow warm. “I don’t think . . . ” she began, but he stepped past her as though she hadn’t spoken.
“I’ll help you,” he said and motioned to the ladder.
Sophie frowned as he picked up a tall stockpot and held it out to her.
She thought she should tell him to get out and that she never wanted to see him again, but she couldn’t make herself do it. She stepped up on the short ladder and took the big pot.
“I sent the Treeborne cookbook off to a friend of mine who likes to break codes.”
“You did what?”
“I sent the—”
“I heard what you said but what gave you the right to do something like that? I wanted it returned to him. You said—” She broke off when Reede’s phone buzzed.
“Sorry,” he said as he pulled it out of his pocket. “I have to take this. When?” he said into the phone. “Did you tell them not to move him? Meet me at Sophie’s new place.” He clicked off and looked up at her. “It’s Heather with an emergency and I have to go. I—” Reede blinked a few times, then reached up and put his hands on Sophie’s waist and lifted her down. “You’re going with me.”
“I can’t go with you,” she said.
“Please?” he asked. “Let me try to make you believe that whatever I did had no malice in it. If I’d shown you who I was at first you would have slammed the door in my face. You would never have gone out with me that first night. You—Damn! I have to go. It’s an emergency. Please, Sophie. Go with me.”
She was sure she shouldn’t, but his eyes were so compelling that she couldn’t resist. And she wanted so very much to go with him, to hear him out. She gave only the slightest nod and Reede took her hand, pulled her around the counter, and out the front door.
Outside, Heather was getting out of the Jeep and her eyes widened when she saw Dr. Reede holding on to Sophie with a firm grip.
Since the vehicle floor was quite high, Reede picked Sophie up at the waist and set her sideways in the driver’s seat.
She knew she should hold out and say she wasn’t going with him, but the prospect of spending the day putting things away had no appeal for her. And she already knew that when Reede was around exciting things happened. “I’m supposed to drive?”
His look made her swing her legs over the gearshift console and get into the passenger seat. Reede was right behind her.
“I’m no Frazier but you’d better buckle up.”
Sophie had no idea what that meant but she did fasten her seat belt. “Wait! I forgot to lock the door of the shop.”
Reede gave a scoff of a sound, glanced at Heather, and she nodded. He’d silently asked if his medical kit was in the back. “It’s Edilean,” he said as he put the Jeep in gear, flipped a switch, and a siren and red lights went off. When he pushed the accelerator, the vehicle leaped forward.
Sophie held on to the armrest on the door with one hand and the seat with the other. When Reede swerved around three cars, barely missing them, she couldn’t repress a squeal of fear.
“Okay?”
“Yes.” He went over a pothole and she went flying up to nearly hit the ceiling. She knew she was angry at him, and that she had every right to be, but something suddenly hit her. “So what’s the third date going to be?”
The image of her in a red corset, him on a horse that didn’t want to obey, and the two of them walking across a beam high above the floor came to him. Date number one. And this was the second. He jerked the steering wheel to miss a dog that was sauntering across the road, then laughter began to bubble up inside him. In the next second they were both laughing as they held on for the wild ride over what had turned into a dirt road.
“Who? Where?” Sophie managed to say over the sound of the Jeep hitting every hole in the road. Even as little as she knew about Edilean, she could see that they were heading out of town and into the surrounding nature preserve.
“Campsite number eight,” Reede said. “Some guy hurt himself playing with a bow and arrow. Or that’s what I think Betsy said.”
“Is it serious?”
“It depends where it went in. Hold on, as it’s about to get rough.”
“And just when I was getting comfortable,” Sophie said, making Reede smile.
But he didn’t look at her. “See? Even when the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen is smiling at me, I don’t look away from the road. Oops
! Sorry. These roads are bad. Okay?”
“I’m going to need dental work, but I’m fine. Watch that one!” She held on as Reede went onto the bank to miss a six-foot-long rut in the road.
“I’ll get the Fraziers to bring a dozer out here. Sophie, I really am sorry about nearly running you down. I saw the papers and heard your phone crunch but I didn’t see you. I would never—”
“Left!” she yelled and he jerked the wheel. “I know. But why did everyone lie to me?”
“Self-protection. I haven’t been too happy about being back here.”
“Roan says you’re a monster. Or thereabouts.”
“Roan would betray his own mother to get near you.”
“He’s been nothing but a gentleman.”
“A gentleman, yes, but did he tell you about his book yet? It’s really boring.”
“No,” Sophie said, her eyes straight ahead. “But he did give me a restaurant free for four months, and he’s going to pay my employees’ salaries for three months.” She couldn’t help how pleased she was at the look Reede cut her. Good. Let him be jealous.
Reede drove down the narrow gravel road at what seemed to be the speed of light and skidded to a halt just as another Jeep came from another direction. Out jumped a big man Sophie recognized as Colin Frazier, the town sheriff. She’d met him at the Halloween party when he’d been costumed as an Old West sheriff. Everyone had teased him that he hadn’t actually worn a costume but had come as the way everyone saw him. Colin had taken it all so good-naturedly that Sophie had liked him.
Reede grabbed his medical bag from the back, jumped out of the vehicle, and started running. Sophie didn’t at first see where he was going, but then she stared in horror. Behind a picnic table spread with food was a man pinned to a tree by an arrow going through his shoulder. Before him was a gray-haired woman, her hands on his shoulder as she stopped the blood from flowing out of his body.
As Reede ran to the man, Colin went to the back of his vehicle to get out a big toolbox. He slung huge metal cutters over his shoulder and ran toward the man and the tree.