Carla Neggers - Night’s Landing

“Ah. More projection. You were on the verge of passing out.”

“I’ve never passed out.”

“Nothing happened at the Rijksmuseum. My mother didn’t see the man who approached me. She was still at The Night Watch. She’s something of an art historian-she takes forever to wander through a museum.”

“Where were she and your father today?” Nate didn’t let up on his intensity, didn’t release his hold on her. “Why did they miss their flight?”

“She ran into someone she knew. She didn’t get into details.” Sarah fought to control her emotions. Was her mother hiding something? Why? Nerves, fear, drama? “She’s the mother of a deputy marshal who’s got a long recovery ahead of him. We’re all crazed right now. This is why I didn’t want to mention the guy in the park-I knew you’d all seize on it, when I’m sure I was mistaken.”

“Do your parents often miss planes?”

She jerked back out of his grip, angrily, then saw his face pale, the pain register at the edges of his mouth. “Your arm-oh, my God, I’m so sorry.”

He waved her off, visibly absorbing the pain.

“What can I do? Tylenol? A fresh bandage? Should I call an ambulance?”

He managed a thin smile. “A shot of some kind of Tennessee bourbon would be nice.”

“That I can manage.”

She ran into the front room and found a dusty bottle, a glass that she held up to the light and decided definitely needed rinsing. She brought both into the kitchen, swirled water into the glass, added ice and splashed in the bourbon. Her emotions were all over the place. How could she have forgotten about his arm even for a split second? What was wrong with her?

She returned to the living room with the glass.

He didn’t gulp. She had a feeling Nate Winter didn’t do much that didn’t show total control. Even last night making love to her. As wild as it had been, he’d known precisely, exactly what he was doing. “Go ahead.” He waved the glass at her. “Call your brother and tell him you’ve heard from your mother.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“I deserved it.”

She dialed her brother’s room at the hospital, but Joe Collins picked up. “Is that you, Dr. Dunnemore? Your parents are safe.”

“You talked to my mother? She just called here, too.”

“I didn’t talk to her. Juliet Longstreet answered Rob’s phone.” His tone was difficult to read. “Your brother’s knocked out. I’m waiting for him to wake up. Nurse said it probably won’t be long. He was in a lot of pain this afternoon. They’re working him pretty hard.”

“I should be there.”

“You should be where you are. Nothing more out of your letter writer?”

“No, sir.”

“Quiet day?”

“We had a cottonmouth in the house, but other than that-”

“A snake? Hell, I hate snakes. What’d you do with it?”

“I caught him and released him back in the river.”

Collins chuckled, surprising her. “I don’t know why your brother worries about you. We’ll stay in touch, right, Dr. Dunnemore?”

She nodded at the phone. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

Whatever he knew-whatever her mother might have told Juliet that she hadn’t told her daughter-Joe Collins was keeping it all to himself. He hung up, and Sarah almost poured herself a glass of bourbon. “Sometimes I wonder why Rob couldn’t have become a house painter.” She sank onto the couch, aware of Nate standing in the shadows in front of the stone fireplace. “He used to paint houses in college. It was a good job. You might fall off a ladder, but usually people don’t shoot house painters.”

Nate set his glass down. “You asked your mother if a silver-haired man was with the man who’d approached you at the museum. Why? Who is he?”

“You’re relentless, aren’t you, Deputy Winter?”

He didn’t answer.

“I don’t know who he is. My mother said he was someone she knows.”

“Then you didn’t recognize him?”

“My parents know a lot of people I wouldn’t recognize.” Sarah angled a look at him. “Do you want to strap me down and shoot me up with truth serum?”

Not even a flicker of a smile.

She tried to smile, just to ease some of her own tension. “I wouldn’t want to be someone you’re interrogating.”

“That’s right. You wouldn’t.”

She quashed a flare of irritation. “You’re known for being the hard-ass of hard-asses, aren’t you? Rob didn’t tell me that. Neither did Juliet. But it’s obvious from the way people treat you. They say it’s because you’re the best at what you do, but I think they know you’re harder sometimes than you need to be.”

“Figured that out all by yourself?”

“Don’t patronize me.”

He drank more of his bourbon. “You don’t like it when the shoe’s on the other foot, do you?”

“I wasn’t patronizing you. I was just-”

She didn’t know what she was doing. Picking a fight so she didn’t have to confront her own fears and worries about her parents? What the hell was going on in Amsterdam? How could anything her parents were involved with possibly have spilled out into New York and damn near gotten her brother killed? More Dunnemore drama, embellishment, exaggeration. It had to be. But she blinked back tears and jumped to her feet, heading for the kitchen.

Do nothing. Tell no one.

Had whoever sent her that hideous letter realized she’d talked and gone after her parents? Was that why her mother was so tense?

Sarah shook off that train of thought before it could get started.

“I just had this upsetting conversation with my mother,” she shot back at Nate, “and you can’t give me five damn minutes to pull myself together.”

“Take ten. Then tell me what happened in Amsterdam.”

“Nothing happened!”

“It stuck out in your mind or you wouldn’t have remembered the man who approached you. I’ve been to museums. I’m trained to remember faces, and I doubt I’d remember anyone who stopped and chatted with me for a few seconds, especially not three weeks later.”

Sarah stormed down the hall to the kitchen. “Maybe he was good-looking. Maybe that’s why I remember him.”

She ripped open the freezer, grabbed a frozen dish marked “squash casserole” and slammed it onto the counter, swearing under her breath, her chest tight with anger and a kind of fear she’d never known-as if people were out to kill her, kill her brother, kill her parents. But that was insane.

Nate was standing in the kitchen door. She pushed past him, not even looking at him. “Help yourself. I’m not hungry.”

He didn’t stop her from walking down the hall and heading upstairs.

He didn’t say a word. Nothing.

She shut the door to her room.

Five o’clock. Hours left before she could go to bed, but she was exhausted-and feeling guilty, because she knew she’d picked a fight with him in order to keep herself from thinking about her mother and what she was hiding.

It was terribly like her mother to have secrets. The Quinlan side of the family were all big on secrets. They treated them as currency.

Sarah tore open her bedroom door and stormed back into the hall, but all the fury had gone out of her. She hung over the stair railing. “I’m going to take a bath. I’m sorry I’m not better company.”

No response.

“And I’m sorry I almost ripped your arm off.”

“My arm’s fine.”

He was behind her. She turned around so fast she almost lost her balance. Her heart was pounding-it was as if all her nerve endings were raw, exposed, responding to him in a thousand different ways. She pushed her hair back with one hand and gave a self-conscious laugh. “I think Wyatt Earp could do that, couldn’t he? Materialize out of thin air.”