Emily’s smile widened. She’d seen him use the same technique countless times with skittish animals. Move slow, talk low and have a treat ready, he used to tell her. They’ll come around.
The children considered his offering warily, glancing up at their mother for direction.
“You can take it. Mr. Abel’s a good friend.”
“You’re big. Like a tree.” Phoebe blinked her green eyes at him as she accepted her candy. Abel’s mouth crooked up in a lopsided smile that jarred half a dozen more memories loose in Emily’s mind. How could just that sideways quirk of his lips bring back so sharply the details of her Pine Valley summers? She could almost smell the odors of drying hay, fresh sliced tomatoes and green beans processing in her grandmother’s pressure canner.
“I am that,” Abel said, agreeing with her daughter. “And you’re sweet. Like a daisy.”
“She’s not sweet all the time.” Paul popped his own peppermint in his mouth and held out his hand. “I’m Paul Thomas Elliott, and it’s nice to meet you. Thanks for the candy.”
Abel shook the proffered hand. “I’m honored to meet you, sir, and you’re welcome.”
“I’m not a sir. Not yet. I’m just a kid.” Paul cocked his head on one side, and Emily could see him weighing her old friend carefully. “But when I am a grown-up, I want to be a pilot. Of an airplane. Or maybe a rocket. I haven’t decided yet.” Emily smiled. Abel must have passed inspection. Paul was her reserved child, and he didn’t share personal information easily.
“Good to know,” Abel said gravely. “I like a man with a plan.”
They nodded solemnly at each other for a couple of seconds before Abel got back to his feet. When his blue gaze returned to Emily’s, it held a lingering gentleness that made inexplicable tears prick at the back of her eyes. She blinked furiously and managed to keep them from spilling over. Good grief. She was crying over everything these days.
Abel held his hand out to her next. “I didn’t get a chance to speak to you at the funeral. I want you to know how sorry I am about Miss Sadie.”
“You of all people don’t have to tell me that.” She took the hand he offered, feeling the dry roughness of his calloused skin. She squeezed hard, looking up into his face. “Grandma’s death is just as much your loss as mine. I know that.”
“Now, see there!” the stocky man interjected jovially. “It’s always nice when folks get along. And it sure makes my job a whole lot easier.” He offered his own hand to Emily. “Jim Monroe. And you must be Miss Elliott.”
Her grandmother’s lawyer. Finally. “Yes.” She took the man’s perspiring hand briefly in her own and couldn’t help comparing its flabby softness to the hard strength of Abel’s.
“I’m late, I know. Sorry about that. I was—” the man glanced up at Abel briefly before finishing “—delayed. Whew, it’s hot as blazes out here! Why don’t we take this little reunion inside where it’s air-conditioned? The three of us have a lot to talk about.”
* * *
Inside the lawyer’s office Abel shifted his weight in the captain’s chair he’d been assigned, and it creaked irritably. He ran a fingertip along its polished arm, assessing the wood. Cherry, he thought absently, with a pretty, rosy grain to it.
Any other day he’d have offered Monroe cash for this chair and hauled it back to his cabin. He’d have taken it apart, stripped off its polish and studied the grain of the wood, looking for the secrets he could carve out of it. But not today. Today he had other things on his mind.
Abel stole a look at Emily, who was standing at the doorway of the conference room talking earnestly to her twins. She was wearing a white shirt with short, filmy sleeves and pale green slacks, and she had that bright hair of hers pulled into some sort of soft little roll at the back of her neck. She was leaning over with her slim, city-pale arms extended, her hands resting gently on her twins’ shoulders.
She reminded him of a dogwood tree just coming into blossom in the earliest days of spring, when its flowering branches looked like bits of lace tangled in the pines. Emily had always had something of the refreshing chanciness of springtime about her, and she’d always given Abel the same fluttering, uncertain feeling in his belly that the first days of March always did. That sense of waking up after the dull darkness of winter.
When she’d run up and grabbed him outside, he’d felt just like he had last fall when Miss Sadie’s ornery little bull calf butted him squarely in the stomach. But then Emily’d always had a knack for knocking him off balance, for making him feel clumsy and foolish, like he was wearing his boots on the wrong feet. Back when she spent her summers on Goosefeather Farm, he’d done his share of mooning over her.
That was what happened when you put a lonesome boy and a pretty girl in the same general vicinity, he reckoned. Of course, Emily had never looked twice in his direction, not that way, and he’d never seriously expected her to. The Whitlock and Elliott properties might butt up against each other, but the families were worlds apart in every other way. Even back then, he’d had enough sense to know that much.
All that was water under an old bridge, because once Emily heard what this lawyer had to say, Abel didn’t figure on getting another hug from her any time soon.
“You be good for Miss Marianne, now,” Emily was telling her children. “Mind your manners.”
“I always mind my manners,” the boy, Paul, answered in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s Phoebe who forgets.”
“I do not! Well...” Phoebe stuck one finger between her pink lips and hesitated. “Sometimes I forget.” In spite of the knot of nerves in his belly, Abel found himself smiling.
Emily’s twins were cute little things with bright expressions and golden hair exactly the color of wildflower honey, just like their mama’s. The boy had Trey Gordon’s brown eyes, though, and the girl had something of Trey in the set of her chin.
The memory of Trey Gordon made the smile fade from Abel’s face. The summer that Emily Elliott had fallen for Trey had been her last in Pine Valley, and the recollection of it still rankled more than he liked to admit. Still, the man was dead and gone. If Abel couldn’t bring himself to be overly sorry about that, at least with the good Lord’s help he could toss a little mercy at Trey’s memory.
Miss Sadie had taught him that much.
“The kids will be fine.” Jim Monroe sounded impatient. “Marianne loves kids, don’t you, Marianne? Take ’em down the hall to the library, and let them watch cartoons on the television in there.” Monroe dismissed his secretary with a wave and began rummaging through the files stacked on his desk. “Have a seat, Miss Elliott, and we’ll get started.”
Emily had her head stuck out into the hallway, watching her children. She glanced at the lawyer, but she lingered where she was, apparently reluctant to let her children out of her sight.
She’s a good mother, Abel realized, which was pretty remarkable considering that her own mother hadn’t exactly been cut out for parenthood. He’d only met Marlene Elliott a few times, but he remembered her as a flighty woman who always seemed to be in the middle of some kind of man-related crisis. Maybe Emily had inherited her common sense from Tom Elliott, Miss Sadie’s son. He’d passed on before Abel came into the picture, but Tom was remembered in Pine Valley as a solid, upstanding man.
“Close the door if you would, Miss Elliott.” The lawyer darted an uneasy look at Abel. “In these situations privacy is important.”
Emily hesitated another second, then eased the heavy door shut. She came over to take her place in the second chair angled across from the lawyer’s desk.
“Now, Mr. Whitlock, Miss Elliott, you’re here because you are