But she couldn’t explain to him, because she didn’t understand it herself, that somehow she did feel hurt. A small, sharp pain like a bruise had lodged itself in her chest ever since Spencer had told her that her great-aunt was dead.
“How did you get to be so wise at twenty-four?”
“Hey, everyone knows that bartenders are the world’s cheapest psychologists. Besides, I’ve always been smarter than you. Mom still thinks you’re the one who broke her Belleek vase.”
“Christopher Robin…” she warned. She was still ticked about that.
He winced. “Jeez, Addy, don’t say that where people can hear you, will ya?”
Her brother’s given name was a standing joke in the family. Claiming delirium from the pain of giving birth to a boy with such a big, fat head, their mother had years ago absolved herself of all responsibility. Outside the home, he introduced himself by his last name, and all the world knew him as Tyler.
Addy and her sisters were forbidden, on pain of severe sibling torture methods, to mention Christopher Robin Tyler’s given name in public.
“It’s written in the bylaws of sisterhood, baby brother,” she teased. “Thou shalt torture thy brother at any opportunity.” She stood up on tiptoe and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I get busted out of the union if I let you slide.”
His hands on her shoulders were gentle as he gave her a little shake.
“Just think about it,” he said and walked her back over to the window to keep an eye on the running truck.
“I will,” she promised.
After saying her goodbyes and collecting the copy of Pride and Prejudice Sarah had pulled off their mother’s shelves with a smile at Addy’s hesitant request, she stepped carefully down the slippery walk to her truck, heading for the short but chilly drive home.
When the snowball that exploded against the back of her head turned out not to contain rocks, she realized her baby brother really was grown up after all.
She had deliberately stayed late at her mother’s house, but the temptation to drive by Francesca’s and try to see in the plate-glass window front was nearly irresistible. At the intersection of the street that would let her perform a casual drive-by peek, she pulled over to the curb and sat through three changes of the light.
Had she been able to banish his voice from her head, she might have given in to the temptation to stop and see if he was still waiting for her.
But she couldn’t get him out of her head. So she drove home.
Back in her one-bedroom apartment, she slid naked between the flannel sheets of her bed and pulled the down comforter up to her chin. By the light of a bedside lamp, she opened the covers of the book and tried to still all the noise in her head with the elegant words of another time and place.
She fell asleep in a confusing swirl of clipped British commentary on marriage, money and misunderstandings, with some smart-aleck Chicago commentary on the side. The opening sentence of Jane Austen’s novel trotted on light feet in circles through her mind: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
In her last conscious thoughts before the dreams overwhelmed her, she wondered if, as a woman in possession of a good fortune, she’d have to watch out for rapacious wife hunters. And realized that she’d decided to find out more about Great-Aunt Adeline’s bequest.
Racing out of her apartment building front door at five o’clock the next morning, already running late for a breakfast meeting, she came within inches of flattening the FedEx man.
After catching him and then listening to him crab about early morning deliveries, she signed where he pointed, her handwriting illegible with cold fingers in thick mittens, grabbed the package without examining it and ran for her truck.
Scraping the accumulated snow off her truck warmed her up a little, although the icy vinyl bench seat sucked the heat right back out of her bones when she slid her butt across it.
Hidden patches of black ice and a need to drive defensively amidst skidding semi tractor-trailers necessitated a strict eyes-on-the-road policy. Not until she made the slow turn into her company’s parking lot, rear wheels fishtailing a little bit even at a crawl, did Addy have a safe moment to glance at the return address on the FedEx envelope.
“Damn it!”
Shooting pain lanced up her leg as she rapped her knee sharply against the dash, sliding out of the truck while glaring at the blue-and-white envelope. She hobbled into the building, smacked the offending object onto the middle of her desk and limped off to dig up some much-needed coffee.
Voices echoing from the conference room reminded her that their video teleconferencing call with the client from Japan was about to begin.
She just needed one minute.
Ripping off the cardboard strip labeled Tear Here, she yanked out the pages, and knew that if someone were to see her and ask why she was snarling, she’d be unable to give a good answer.
But just seeing that man’s name on a return address made her want to heave a rock through a plate-glass window.
Preferably his.
A handwritten note was paper-clipped to the top page.
A representative of the firm will be waiting at the following address this evening between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. if you would like to view the property mentioned in your great-aunt’s last will and testament. I hope you will not allow any previous misunderstanding to scare you off.
Spencer Reed
P.S. The tiramisu was indeed excellent.
Fourteen hours later, Addy was still fuming.
Scare her off? Scare her off?
Her entire day had proved to be one disaster after another, made worse by the fact that she couldn’t keep her mind on her work. Not that she was surprised. How could she concentrate when the strangulation fantasies were running through her head with such startling visual clarity?
Now, spotting an open parking space in the vicinity of the north-side address, she slewed her truck into the gap, grabbed her backpack, jumped out and marched up the block.
Fifty yards ahead of her, silhouetted by the glow of a streetlight, a tall figure leaned casually against a wrought-iron fence.
She didn’t need the benefit of light to know who it was.
Two
Addy skidded to a halt on a patch of ice in front of the gate. He reached out a hand to steady her. She shrugged it off, glared up at his shadowed face and wished she were taller.
“What the hell are you doing here, Reed?”
“Good evening to you, too, Ms. Tyler.”
“There’s nothing good about it,” she snapped, the words exploding in cloudy puffs of her breath in the icy air. “What are you doing here?”
His tone was carefully modulated to soothe. She felt as if she was being handled, and resented it.
“My note said—”
“Your note,” she interrupted, “said a ‘representative’ of the firm would be here. Not you.” A sharp poke at his shoulder emphasized her final word.
Addy had a split second to note that she might as well have poked a brick wall, for all he moved, before the recoil of her own rude gesture threw her off balance again, her low-heeled boots skating out from beneath her.
Spencer yanked her up against his body, one arm wrapped around