Mary Brady - Silver Linings

Something indistinct and then clearly, “...Delainey.”

“She’ll be in after she talks to her daughter’s teacher,” Patty was saying to someone.

Hunter stopped cold. Daughter? Delainey had a child? Maybe she was married after all. Though her name was still Talbot, that didn’t really mean anything anymore.

“I guess she wants to bring dinosaur cookies for her birthday next week and the teacher is enforcing the sugar moratorium they agreed on for the class New Year’s resolution.”

“Well, that’s hardly fair to do to a bunch of six-year-olds.”

Hunter hadn’t gotten into a prestigious law school by being a dullard, and the math of that simple statement smacked him in the face.

Delainey had a child who would be six years old next week. Unless she was having sex with someone else at the same time she was having sex with him...his child.

How could she not tell him?

He spun around to head back toward Shamus’s office.

As he yanked open the door to the stairway, Delainey entered the building and looked at him, horrified, as if she had been caught after committing some horrible crime.

As far as he was concerned, she had.

* * *

DELAINEY FLED UP the stairs to her office. She was well aware Hunter followed her and as she turned to close her office door, he was there, his hand holding the door open, his eyes intense. “We need to talk.”

She looked at him today, whereas yesterday she could barely glance at him, afraid she’d give away too much. Today she studied him head to toe. His hair was still thick and that dark honey-blond lusciousness that she had run her fingers through. His face, cleanly shaven and smooth. She had loved to run a line of kisses from his ear, across his cheek and down his neck.

And his eyes. Navy blue. True navy, like lustrous jewels. A woman could get lost in their depths.

The strong, long-fingered hand against the door did not have a wedding band. She liked that, too, but surely she had no reason to rejoice in such a thing.

She had reveled in the happily-ever-after for those three weeks. That was gone now, forever. At twenty-two she had known she was a woman. Now she knew she wasn’t a very world-wise one.

When Hunter left her behind, he had taken all notion of happily ever after with him. She had come to understand that had been her dream and not his.

She turned and walked to her desk. Today she had decided to be herself. Though her faults were varied and many, they did not lessen her. Whatever Hunter Morrison’s problems were, they did not belong to her. She had a child to think of and being the best mother possible was, had to be, her focus.

Hunter stayed in the doorway. He wore a soft-looking dark green V-necked sweater with the unbuttoned collar of a crisp white shirt standing up underneath. The jeans he wore looked as if they had just come off the rack at a fancy department store and had never been washed, certainly never worn before today. She smiled at his first attempt to try to fit into the office’s milieu. He couldn’t give up his fancy lawyer shoes, though.

Contrived and uneven, the ensemble looked good on him. Probably most things looked good on him.

She shook her head in disgust with herself, then nodded. “Of course we need to talk, but I can’t do it now or here. You can’t do it here. We have to work with these people and I’m already late to see a client.”

“I’ll come to your house after work.” He looked fierce when he spoke, and it seemed aimed at her.

“No. No, you won’t come to my house.” What had she done to deserve that?

He drew his dark blond eyebrows together, making the frown creases visible, a reminder they were no longer twenty-two with very little life experience. “There are still few places in Bailey’s Cove where whatever we say won’t be open to public speculation.”

She searched his face, his eyes, trying to learn what she could, maybe find out what had happened to him in the intervening years. It seemed the time had robbed him of his lighthearted jock look and substituted a stern, suspicious one for the carefree college graduate.

Maybe the high school Delainey and Hunter, the prom queen and king, the pals and study partners, deserved to know what had happened to each other. “Do you have a car?”

He dropped his hand from the door. “It’s coming in two days.”

“I’ll pick you up.”

“I’m staying with the Murphys. I can borrow Shamus’s car.”

“I’ll come there and get you. We can have dinner at the diner out at the highway intersection. It’ll be nice to have a chicken wing or two for the awkward silent moments.”

“Are you sure?”

She had expected one corner of his mouth to lift, but that it did not was just as well. If he was attractive when he scowled, she knew he was devastating when he grinned. She couldn’t let that happen, not up close and personal. Not yet. Not until she was sure she had control of her reaction.

Breaking eye contact, she retrieved files from the cabinet near her desk, and holding them against her chest as a shield, she tried to brush past him.

He grabbed her arm before she could escape and she looked up into his eyes. He studied her face for a long moment. Long enough to light an unbidden, unwanted fire inside her.

And just when the feelings building in her were about to explode, he let her go.

She stayed close, as if he still held her arm. “My client is down near the harbor. I’ll be back when I’m finished. If you need anything in the meantime, I’m sure Carol or Shirley can help you.”

He nodded and she had to force herself to walk calmly away when all she wanted was to flee as fast as her feet would carry her.

She was on her way to see a client, sort of a client, a client who wouldn’t be paying anytime soon, or ever.

Christina would be waiting for her. Delainey had promised to bring over samples of contracts she could use to base her wants-and-needs list on for the renovation of the old Victorian homes. She had no doubt her sister had the seed money to begin, and Delainey wanted to make sure the cash flow was protected from the unscrupulous by black-and-white documents spelling out each party’s responsibilities.

After slowly crossing the parking lot, she climbed into her car and tossed the files on the seat next to her. When she had to drive near the building to get out of the staff lot, she could see Hunter standing in the window of her office looking bleak. He raised a hand to her in acknowledgment and she waved back.

Hunter, what happened to you? she thought.

* * *

“WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me?” Christina demanded once they were again sitting in front of the fire inside Cora’s cozy but shabby “front parlor,” as Christina had informed her when she asked what the room was called.

“Well, at first I couldn’t believe he was actually in Bailey’s Cove, and then I didn’t know what it meant. Today it seems that while I might have known the boy, I don’t know the man at all.” She chugged a few swallows of coffee and sighed.

“Did he want to fire you or something?”

“No, nothing like that—yet.” Delainey laughed. “Well, actually, I don’t know. I didn’t give him a chance to say much. For all I know, he had come to hand me a pink slip.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“He said we have to talk.”

“You got all that angst from ‘we have to talk’?”

“He’s angry at me and I don’t know why, but something besides me is bothering him. I have no idea what he’s doing here. I don’t know why Shamus called him or why he accepted. I’ve asked, but Shamus has been very vague and I didn’t feel it was right to press him.”

“Maybe Hunter wanted to come back home. He was born here, wasn’t he?”