Sandra Marton - Reunited With The Billionaire

“I’m not trying to avoid anything. I just don’t understand the question. Who are we talking about, Philo?”

Philo looked as if he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him. He lifted the poker, reached into the fire, made a show of rearranging the burning wood, then stared at the dancing flames as if they held the answer to Seth’s question.

Finally, he looked up.

“Wendy Monroe,” he said with a swift exhalation of breath. “And if you want to tell me to mind my own business about why she’s come back to Cooper’s Corner, or how long she’s goin’ to stay, that’s okay with me.”

* * *

THE SUN WAS LOW in the sky, the wind had picked up and it had begun to snow again. Main Street was one long sheet of ice. The sanding trucks hadn’t come through yet.

Seth drove carefully and fought to keep his mind on what he was doing. It wasn’t easy. All he could think about was Wendy. She was back. She was in Cooper’s Corner. The whole town probably knew it.

Now he knew it, too.

A car pulled out from the curb, skidded delicately to the left before its tires gained purchase. Seth braked gently, then fell in behind the slow-moving automobile.

Philo had all the details, though he’d been uncomfortable providing them. She’d flown in yesterday. Alison Fairchild had picked her up at the airport in Albany and driven her to town.

Seth’s jaw knotted. He’d seen Alison just a couple of days ago, at Twin Oaks, when he’d stopped by to double-check the dimensions of the corner where Clint and Maureen wanted to put the china cabinet he was making for the dining room. On the way out, he’d bumped into Alison. Literally. He’d been trotting down the porch steps, his head full of measurements; she’d been coming up, on her way to visit Maureen, and they’d collided.

“Whoops,” she’d said with a quick smile, then apologized for having her head in the clouds. They’d had a perfectly normal conversation about how well the B and B was coming along, about the weather and the season and every damned thing in the world except the one that would have mattered to him—that Wendy was returning to Cooper’s Corner. There was no way he’d believe that Alison hadn’t known about it then.

And what about Gina? He’d kept in touch with Wendy’s mother. They spoke often. Well, not so often now, but for the first few years he’d phoned at least once a week to ask about Wendy’s recovery. To hell with her father. It was Howard’s fault Wendy had the accident. If he hadn’t been pushing her so hard…

Seth took a deep breath.

There was no sense in going through all that again. It was over. So was what he’d once felt for Wendy.

Calmer now, he understood that neither Alison nor Gina felt under any obligation to tell him Wendy was returning. In which case, why had he gotten so upset? Wendy was the past. Joanne was the future.

His hands flexed on the steering wheel. Okay. Maybe she wasn’t the future. Maybe what he felt for Jo wasn’t what it should be. Maybe it was time to tell her that, before things got any stickier. Maybe…

The tires spun. Seth felt the truck slewing toward the cars parked along the curb. He managed to recover with only a fraction of a second to spare.

Maybe, he thought grimly, he needed to get his head together before he ended up breaking his neck.

He put on his signal light and pulled into an empty parking space just ahead. Climbing out of the truck, Seth turned up the collar of his old leather jacket and trudged toward Tubb’s Caf;aae, just down the street.

The caf;aae was warm and steamy, fragrant with the aromas of coffee and freshly baked doughnuts. He slid onto a stool near the window, exchanged greetings with the college kid working the counter.

“Coffee,” he said.

The kid poured him a mugful. Seth wrapped his hands around it, letting its warmth chase the cold from his fingers. Maybe it was irrational, but it pissed him off that nobody had thought to tell him about Wendy. Hadn’t it occurred to Gina or Alison that he’d be interested? He’d loved her, once.

No. Damn it, no! He’d been infatuated, that was all. What nineteen-year-old kid who’d come out of nowhere wouldn’t be infatuated with a beautiful girl? Wendy had been the town’s darling. The guy she went with should have been a local product. The captain of the football team. A jock with varsity letters and a family that went back a hundred years. Instead, she’d fallen for him. No family, no background, no varsity letters on his jacket…

There she was.

The mug trembled in Seth’s hands. He put it down on the counter, his gaze riveted to the window. Two people had just come out of a store. A man and a woman. Howard Monroe and Wendy. She was bundled in a dark-green anorak; her fiery hair was tucked up under a knitted ski cap so that only strands of it were visible against the pale oval of her face, and her eyes were hidden behind big, dark glasses. But none of that mattered. People hurrying past didn’t recognize her, but Seth did.

He’d have known her anywhere.

His heart turned over as she began walking alongside her father. It was the first time he’d seen her on her feet. Until this moment, the damage she’d suffered had been confined to his imagination. Now he could see the reality of it. Instead of her former graceful walk, Wendy’s hip and knee were stiff. Her limping gait after all those years of rehab, was evidence of the severity of the accident.

They reached her father’s SUV. Howard held out his hand, but she shook her head and said something that looked like “I can do it.” And she did, navigating the icy sidewalk toward the curb and the truck door with studied care.

Seth’s eyes narrowed.

Why wasn’t she using a cane? Why wouldn’t she take her old man’s hand? Why was she so damned thickheaded? She could fall. She could go down in the ice and snow and…

And it was none of his business.

Except it was. Wendy had meant something to him once upon a time, even if that time was long ago.

He got off the stool, dug out a bill, tossed it on the counter and zipped up his jacket. What was the matter with people in this town? Didn’t anybody consider what it would be like for him to discover that she was back by stumbling across her?

He strode toward the door, slapped his hand against the glass. He wasn’t going to let Wendy get away with treating him as if he didn’t matter, the way she’d done nine years ago. He’d go straight up to her, grab her and shake some sense into her. Yeah, that was it. He’d march out of here, take her by the shoulders, shake her…. God, he’d pull her into his arms, tell her that it broke his heart to see her like this, her leg hurting, her dreams shattered….

“Mr. Castleman?”

He looked around. The kid who worked the counter was holding out a bunch of bills.

“You gave me a twenty,” he said. “Here’s your change.”

Seth turned toward the street again. Wendy was getting into her father’s truck. He watched Howard shut the door, then trot around to the driver’s side and get in.

“Mr. Castleman?”

Seth swallowed hard and swung around. “Yeah. Thanks.” He plucked a couple of bills from the kid’s outstretched hand, left the rest behind. “Keep it,” he said. It was the least he could do, considering that the boy had just kept him from making an ass of himself.

Wendy was back. So what? It didn’t change a thing. Seth whistled through his teeth as he got into his truck and drove along Main Street toward Sawtooth Mountain Road. Yeah, they’d had a thing going for a while there. He’d thought he loved her, thought it enough to have flown to Norway the second her mother phoned in hysterics to tell him that Wendy had fallen during a practice run and nobody knew if she was going to make it or not.