“Lady.” The truck driver’s voice, harsh with exasperation, grated into her scattered thoughts. “The road is for wheeled vehicles; the sidewalk is for pedestrians. Had I been driving my truck along the sidewalk, I could understand your ridiculous attitude...”
It was becoming more difficult by the moment to keep her mind on what he was saying. He had moved closer as he spoke, and the air was suddenly chokingly thick with the musky smell of sweat—sweat generated by hours of labor under a cruel sun. Like whiskey matured for ten years in the cask, it had an indefinable extra something—something earthy, erotic and disturbing—something that was as powerful as a punch to the solar plexus.
Laura almost hunched over with a gasp as it hit her, and only with a great effort did she manage to control herself. Her violent reaction to him, she decided, with some agitation, was due to his being different from the kind of men she was used to—rawer, tougher, sexier. That was all it was...
She drew herself to her full height of five feet one. “It would have been simpler,” she said with a scathing look, “if you had just stopped and come back here with a gracious apology.” Tilting her chin haughtily, she sidestepped him and marched with stiff steps toward his truck. “As it is, I intend to report you to the owner of your company, whoever he—”
She came to an abrupt halt as she stared up at the name emblazoned on the vehicle’s dusty cab. “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She breathed out the words wearily, and without any attempt to hide her disgust.
Diamond Ace Holdings
Nicholas Diamond-Budding Contractor Satisfaction guaranteed
As a rule, jet lag didn’t bother her. But now, suddenly, she felt the five-hour flight from Toronto begin to have its effect. Her legs began to tremble, her mouth to feel parched. She had come so far—looking for peace, looking for a place to heal her wounds—and she was at last within a stone’s throw of Sweet Briar. The only thing standing in her way was this bad-tempered, bad-mannered—
“Forget it!” She spun round again and looked up into his scowling dust-caked face. “A man like Nicholas Diamond is certainly not going to care if one of his workers is guilty of reckless driving.” She saw the driver’s strongly-marked black eyebrows shoot up, as if she’d startled him, saw him open his mouth as if to reply. But she didn’t give him a chance.
“In fact,” she went on in a withering tone, “knowing what I do of the man, he’d probably give you a bonus if he found out you were in such an all-fired hurry to get the job done.” Before stepping past him, she made sure she would have the last word. “I’ll be watching out for you, and if I ever see you driving so carelessly again, I’ll call the police. Goodbye, Mr-”
She silently uttered a vexed “Damn!” Her speech had sounded great, but it had tailed off at the end. It had had to tail off because, of course, she didn’t know the man’s name.
“Diamond,” he offered, on a soft breath. And, as she watched, his face—that tanned and sweaty and dust-caked face—twisted in a smile that sent a chill of apprehension shivering through her. “Nicholas Diamond.” He reached up and removed his sunglasses, and his eyes were winter-gray and hard as steel. “My friends ... and they are legion... call me Nick.”
Laura watched, her own lips parted in a shocked gasp, as, with tension in every line of his bearing, the man wheeled away from her and strode back to the truck. His khaki shirt pulled against the muscles of his shoulders as he went, his jeans clove besottedly to his tight buttocks and long powerful legs and his black hair gleamed with the brightness of summer sunshine on dark water. The gears clashed as he set the truck in motion, and even at that distance Laura heard him utter a harsh and heartfelt oath.
She stood there, the smell of the exhaust fumes thick in her nostrils, crowding out the heady, erotic man-scent that had so disturbed her just moments ago. And she stayed like that, without moving, her heart thumping with slow, ponderous bumps against her ribs, long after the sound of the engine had faded away into the hush of the afternoon.
Sweet Briar was exactly as Laura remembered it.
Oh, the garden was sadly overgrown, the white front door and the windowframes cried out for a coat of paint, and when she opened the picket gate one of the hinges, eaten out by rust, swung loose with a sound like a sigh.
But as she walked slowly up the uneven brick path she could almost hear Great-Aunt Charity’s voice calling out to her as it had during the days of that hot, long-ago summer.
“Hurry, darling child. I made us some ice-cream, and it’s melting in the dish! Put that skipping rope down, and go wash your hands—I’ll be out back, under the apple tree ... waiting for you.”
Charity Brown had never married, but she had been a teacher for forty-five years before she’d retired, and she’d known children. She’d liked them... and they’d liked her.
Laura had loved her.
Now, as she drank in the sight of the stuccoed cottage with its weathered shake roof, she felt a growing and very deep sense of coming home. And, as she paused to inhale the perfume drifting from a bushy yellow plant, Laura felt the tension that had been with her so long begin to slacken—though the confrontation with Nicholas Diamond had, she admitted ruefully, jarred her more than a little. Especially his parting shot.
When he’d told her who he was, when he’d looked at her the way he had—so snide, so superior, so downright nasty!—she had desperately wanted to say something that would take him down a peg or three. She grimaced as she walked on. It had been unfortunate, meeting him today, but with a bit of luck she’d never bump into him again. And, though he had ruined Juniper Ridge, Sweet Briar itself was still rooted where it had always been. Only...
She halted, frowning. Though her great-aunt’s picket fence still separated her front drive from the one next door to the west, the low hedge that had divided the back gardens had been replaced by a high wall of the same creamy stone as the mansion towering beyond it. Laura raised her eyes ... and felt them widen in dismay; the second story of the monster house had huge windows-and they all looked down into Sweet Briar’s backyard.
Swiveling, Laura glanced to the east, and breathed out a sigh of relief when she saw that the forest she remembered was still intact; no looming edifice stood there, with its windows impinging on her privacy. Spruce and hemlock, fir and pine stood straight and tall, flourishing in the mild Pacific air.
Thank heavens for that. Though the new housing complex covered almost every inch of the mountain slope around her, on this one side, at least, there still remained virgin forest-thirty acres of it, if she remembered rightly. She would be able to wander in that quiet green sanctuary, as she had so often yearned to do...
Coming to Sweet Briar Cottage was the one thing that had kept her going since Jason’s death, and today was a day she had looked forward to with a feeling that had been akin to desperation. A day of new beginnings. But so much had changed. And if the forest had been gone...
But it wasn’t. So she would still have it ... and the cottage. Everything else—all the changes—she would try to ignore.
Just as she had ignored the estate lawyer’s repeated requests to have her look at the many offers he’d had on the property since her great-aunt’s death.
“I don’t want to sell,” Laura had declared, over and over and over again. “Not now, not ever.”
“But I’ve been approached by a client who is willing to pay you ten times what the place is worth!” The lawyer’s tone had indicated that he’d thought