Where You Least Expect It

And if a small fringe benefit was that he would have an excuse to spend more time around her, he wasn’t going to acknowledge it. Of course, he couldn’t allow himself to get involved with her. Or anyone else for that matter. Not until he could take care of some very important issues on his personal agenda.

She whispered something.

“Pardon me?” he asked.

She blinked at him, seeming horrified. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I could have sworn…” She looked utterly aghast, and he realized that whatever she’d said hadn’t been meant to be heard. He smiled. “Never mind.” He leaned back on his heels and handed her the jars one by one, while she reached up to place them on the counter. “Anyway, the holiday is only a week away and the committee is no closer to agreeing on a theme than they were three months ago. I could really use an ally.” He offered up a grin. “Someone whose vote I could count on. Besides, acting like a member of the community might be a good idea.”

Her eyes narrowed a bit as she continued taking the jars from him. “I’ve been a member of this community my entire life.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He refused to release his grip on the last jar. She held on to it even as he did. He swore he felt a strange warmth climb up his arm and down into his stomach.

“I know,” she said finally.

Aidan moved his fingers until they were covering hers. Her skin was so soft, so warm and inviting under his. He’d forgotten what it was like to touch a woman in that simple yet intimate way. Forgotten how alive it made him feel.

The bells above the door jingled, shattering the moment. He released the jar. Penelope’s flush deepened as she put it on the counter, then she rose.

“Good morning, Sheriff Parker.”

A jolt of fear shot through Aidan as he got to his feet.

He reminded himself that he had nothing to fear from Sheriff Cole Parker.

At least, not yet…

Chapter Two

If Penelope had felt restless before, Aidan’s brief touch upgraded the emotion to chaos. A heart-stopping awareness that toyed with her body temperature and cut the bottom out of her stomach, made her feel like a stranger to herself.

Oh, she’d always thought Aidan attractive. Very attractive. But she had never before linked herself to him in the same sentence, as in “Aidan and I.” She hadn’t dared.

Now her mind was going a million miles a minute doing just that.

He smiled at her as if he knew what she was thinking, and her pulse leaped.

“I just came by for some more of that tea you made for me the other day, Penelope,” Sheriff Parker was saying as he took off his hat. “I usually don’t go in for that kind of stuff, but, well, I liked it.”

It seemed to take a great deal of effort to tug her gaze away from Aidan’s face. “Sure. I’ll just put some water on to boil.”

“Sheriff.” She heard Aidan greet the other man as she plugged in her electric teapot, then eyed the tins of herbal teas on the shelf behind her. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what tea she had fixed for Cole.

“Aidan,” Cole said back.

“How’s everything across the Circle this morning? Any new crimes to report?”

A simple question. But when an answer wasn’t immediately forthcoming, Penelope looked over her shoulder to find Cole running his fingers through his hair, obviously troubled.

“Funny you should ask that. Something strange did happen last night.”

Penelope settled on green tea with a hint of ginseng and measured a few spoonfuls into a small teapot. She turned to put some prepackaged raspberry biscuits onto a plate, tuning in to an odd kind of tension emanating from Cole. He seemed to be eyeing Aidan in a curious way.

Cole finally sighed. “Old Man Smythe’s filling station was hit last night. He was robbed at gunpoint.”

Aidan was in the act of accepting a biscuit when—Penelope could have sworn—his hand hesitated. “Nobody was hurt, I hope?”

“No, no one was hurt. But Smythe did give an interesting description of the assailant. He said he looked exactly like you—” The sheriff rubbed the back of his neck, then lapsed into silence as the kettle began to whistle.

Penelope turned to pour hot water into the pot. “Actually, his exact words were ‘that schoolteacher Kendall robbed me.’“

Penelope nearly knocked over the teapot. She turned to watch the two men stare at each other.

Then, finally, Cole chuckled.

“Yeah, I figured the old man was overdue for a visit with the optometrist.”

She handed Cole his tea and offered a cup to Aidan, as well.

“Thanks, Penelope.” Cole blew on the liquid, then took a sip. “Ah, heaven.” He smiled at her. “You wouldn’t happen to have a package of this stuff I could buy, would you?”

“No, that’s my own personal stash,” she said, then laughed. “Of course I do. How much would you like?”

The next ten minutes or so were filled with light talk of what else was going on in town and wrapping up Cole’s purchases. Finally, Cole put his hat back on, accepted another cup of tea in a disposable cup and bid them a good day.

The tinkling of the bells seemed to echo through the shop for a long time after he left.

“Imagine, Mr. Smythe thinking you were the one who robbed him,” she said, wiping the counter.

Aidan didn’t appear to hear her. His expression was somber and thoughtful as his gaze fixed on the sheriff’s office across Lucas Circle.

“How much do I owe you for the tea?” he asked absently.

Penelope blinked. “It’s on the house, Aidan.”

He peeled off a couple of dollars and put them on the counter. “I’ll see you later.”

Penelope watched him leave, noticing that Spot followed him out with a brief glance in her direction. She felt more than a little disappointed. Had she imagined what had passed between them before Cole had come in? Dreamed that his fingers had lain on top of hers for a brief moment, making time stop?

She swallowed. Silly, really. Thinking a man like Aidan Kendall could be interested in her.

She opened the storage room door, then took Max’s leash in hand and set about her normal everyday chores, telling herself she would do well to remember the town was divided into two very distinct camps:

her…and everyone else.

And it seemed “everyone else” included Aidan Kendall.

He’d stayed in town too long.

Later that day, after seeing the summer school students off with just enough homework to make them groan, Aidan headed back to his room at Mrs. O’Malley’s.

What a difference one sentence could make in a man’s life. A few simple words said by someone with the power to make them damning.

He should never have come to Old Orchard at all. And he definitely should have left six months ago when the teacher he had temporarily replaced returned from maternity leave.

Aidan let himself into Mrs. O’Malley’s bed-and-breakfast, grateful she was in the kitchen preparing dinner and didn’t notice him come in. She usually wanted to know about his day, and he usually enjoyed watching her face light up as he shared student anecdotes, and reports on how they were all doing.

He hated to imagine what expression she would wear when she found out who he really was.

He climbed the stairs and unlocked the door to his room at the far end of the hall, then closed it behind him. Since he was a semipermanent boarder, he’d offered to look after his own things. At least, that had been his excuse. In reality, he didn’t think it was a good idea for Mrs. O’Malley to know what all was going on in here. He stood in the middle of the large room. To his left two computers were set up on the old antique desk, one running on a separate cable line and doing a continual search on news articles across the country. The other, an older system he used to compile the data he received. Next to the desk were stacks upon stacks of newspapers he subscribed to and picked up from a post office box he rented in a neighboring county.

In one year he’d come up with nothing.

In one day he’d come up with everything.

Davin had finally caught up with him…

Aidan sat down on the bed and dropped his head into his hands as if trying to hold everything in. An image of Penelope Moon’s pretty face flashed across his mind.

Penelope.

He’d been selfish. Selfish to think he’d be safe here. Selfish to make himself a part of a community that could be hurt merely by being associated with him. Selfish to want a woman who deserved so much better than what he had to offer her.

He slid open the drawer in the bedside table and took out a five-by-seven frame. The glass was dusty. He wiped it off and stared down into the faces of his wife and his three-year-old son. Two people lost to him forever. Two people who had also deserved better than him, because he’d been unable to protect them.

He slid the backing from the frame and took out the photo behind the one of his wife and son. It was a studio portrait taken some twenty-two years ago, when he was eight. A picture taken of him and his identical twin brother, Davin. A picture taken before his mother had suffered a beating that had nearly killed her and his father was sentenced to two years in prison for felonious assault. A picture taken before both his parents died in a house fire when he and Davin were fourteen.

Before everything in their lives that had already been bad had gotten even worse.

There was a brief knock at the door. “Aidan?”

He slid the photographs into place, then put the frame back and closed the drawer. Within moments, he stood looking at Mrs. O’Malley from the open doorway.

She smiled at him. “I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs. Why didn’t you come into the kitchen to say hello?”

In the corner the computer made a small beep indicating the search had found something. They both looked at it.

“Always working,” Mrs. O’Malley said.

At one time Edith O’Malley herself had been a ninth grade English teacher. She’d retired ten years ago following the death of her husband, then transformed their family home into a bed-and-breakfast long after her five children had left Old Orchard for busier concrete pastures. Once Mrs. O’Malley had learned that Aidan was certified as a schoolteacher, she had secured the job for him at St. Joseph’s with nary a background check. Mrs. O’Malley trusted him completely, based on instinct, as she didn’t understand computers and never invaded his privacy.

Mrs. O’Malley’s smile slowly faded as she looked into his face now.

“Is everything all right, Aidan? You don’t look well.”

He cleared his throat. “Actually, I am feeling a bit tired, Mrs. O’Malley. Sorry I didn’t say hello, but I had my hands full of class materials and wanted to bring them up here first.”

The smile made a return. “You’ll come down for dinner, though, won’t you? Tonight’s meat loaf night.”

He foraged around for a smile to offer in return. “I wouldn’t dream of missing meat loaf night.”

“Good,” she said, nodding, leaning on her cane to turn around in the hall. A cane she used only now and again when, as she said, her new hip went to war with her old one. “I’ll see you in twenty minutes, then.”

“Twenty minutes.”

He watched her carefully navigate the steps, thinking that if he knew what was good for them all, he would be long gone in ten.

Penelope closed the wood gate, its white paint worn off by time and weather, and released Maximus’s lead. Of course, the moment he was free, he plopped down at her feet, his tongue forever lolling as he gazed up at her.

She patted his head. “A Gemini. Definitely a Gemini.”

She heard pounding coming from inside the one-story house with the wide, slanting front porch and headed for the steps. She and her grandmother Mavis Moon had lived there alone since Penelope’s mother died when she was five. And seeing as neither one of them had much skill when it came to repairs, the house and surrounding yard needed a lot of them.

“Gram? I’m home,” she called out as the old screen door squeaked, then slapped shut behind her.

She heard mumbling coming from the dining room, then, “Of course you’re home. Where else would you be at this time of day? It’s five-thirty and you’re home. Shocker.”

Penelope put her bag of leftover raspberry biscuits in the kitchen and headed for the doorway to the dining room, puzzled by Mavis’s comments. “Did you say something?”

Her grandmother waved her away with the hammer she held. Slender, she looked almost too weak to wield such a heavy object. Especially given the flowing purple tunic that billowed around her petite frame like a circus tent.

Penelope slowly entered the room, her gaze riveted to the pictures of her mother Mavis had framed and positioned willy-nilly.

“What do you think?” Mavis asked, seeming to challenge her with her dark eyes.

“Um, it’s nice,” Penelope said though she was overwhelmed with images of her mother staring back at her from dozens of angles.

She stepped forward to straighten a crooked frame.

“Don’t touch that,” her grandmother said, seeming to threaten injury with the hammer if Penelope moved another inch. “Everything is exactly where I want it.”

“Okay,” Penelope said carefully. “I’ll, um, just go in and start dinner.”

Had the whole world gone nuts while she wasn’t looking? First Aidan had come into her shop looking at her like she was a desirable woman. Then Sheriff Parker had said Mr. Smythe had identified Aidan as the man who had robbed him. Then she’d returned home to find her normally tranquil grandmother pounding the heck out of the dining room wall, instead of relaxing in a yoga stance.

She looked around on the sparkling clean countertops of the kitchen, inside the empty oven, then in the refrigerator. Aside from a half-empty pitcher of lemonade, there wasn’t a crumb to be found.

Where was the ground turkey she had taken out of the freezer and put in the refrigerator to defrost this morning? The fresh salad fixings? Even her homemade yogurt was missing.

“I got rid of it all,” Mavis said, dropping the hammer onto the counter with a loud thud. “All of it. It was messing with my biorhythms.”

“What did you do with it?” Penelope asked.

“Threw it away, of course. All of it.”

Penelope caught herself absently rubbing her stomach where it growled. Biscuits aside, she hadn’t had a thing to eat all day and her body was letting her know about it.

Out of the corner of her eye she watched her grandmother approach the counter where she’d put the biscuits.

“Don’t you dare!” she said, taking the bag from the older woman. She rolled the top of the bag back up, put it on the table closer to her and propped her hand on her hip. “Did you stop taking your medication again?”

Her grandmother waved a bony hand. “Medication, shmedication. I threw it all out with the rest of it.”

Dread drifted through Penelope as she headed to check the rest of the house. As an afterthought, she returned to the table and snatched up the bag of biscuits, her dinner if she didn’t go out and pick anything else up.

Ten minutes later she’d verified her suspicions: Mavis had thrown away everything in the medicine cabinets, including her doctor-prescribed medications and toothpaste, as well as all the cleaners and detergents under the sink and in the broom closet.

Penelope stood dumbfounded, unable to make heads or tails out of the situation.

Well, at least she’d left the garden out back alone. The crooked rows of young vegetable plants were coming along nicely. In fact, it appeared Mavis had even weeded and watered them.

She made her way back into the dining room, where her grandmother was starting on the second wall.

“Have you eaten anything at all today?” she asked.

Mavis waved her hand. “Who needs food?”

“Last I checked? I don’t know. Maybe you?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Then, maybe I should call the hospital and ask them to hold a room for you, because that’s where you’ll be heading if you don’t eat something.” She glanced toward the living room. “Unless, of course, you’ve thrown the telephone out too?”

Mavis stared at her.

Penelope swallowed hard. “No, I’m not talking about the psychiatric ward.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Mavis climbed down off the stepladder and turned toward her. “Don’t you ever get sick of it all, Popi?”

It had been a long time since her grandmother had called her the pet name. Her doing so now opened up a soft spot inside Penelope. When she was young, she’d thought it meant something pope-like. Important. She’d found out later that it was merely a Greek shortening of her name.

“I mean, the sameness of everything? We get up at the same time every morning—”

“So, sleep in.”

“We eat dinner at the same time every night—”

“So, we’ll eat later.”

“We talk to the same people, do the same things—”

“So, we’ll go out and meet new people, do different things.”

Mavis looked a breath away from hitting her with the hammer again. “Can’t I even have a nervous breakdown without you being so damn calm about everything?”

Penelope smiled. “No.”

Her grandmother hit the wall with the hammer and Penelope jumped.

Mavis examined her handiwork. “I like it.”

Penelope rolled her eyes, wondering how much work she would have to do when her grandmother’s mood ended this time.

This wasn’t the first time Mavis Moon had done something extreme, even by Penelope’s own generous definition of the word. About once a year Penelope would come home to find her grandmother acting strangely. The last time Mavis had planted a crop of marijuana in with the corn out back, determined to do for terminally ill patients what the health care system wouldn’t.

It was all Penelope could do to stop her from being charged. She had, however, been arrested.

She let out a long breath. “I’m going to the store. Do you want anything?”

“A man.”

Penelope stared at her grandmother’s back.

“I can feel you looking at me, girl. Stop it right now.”

“Where would you have me look?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe at yourself in the mirror.” She gave the wall another smack, creating another ugly dent. She gestured with the hammer. “You and me…we’re not getting any younger, you know. This morning I swore I could hear time passing.”

“It was probably your pacemaker.”

Mavis glared at her.

“Do you want anything from the market?”

“I told you what I want.”

“And short of dragging Old Man Jake home with me, it’s not going to happen.”

A thoughtful expression came over her grandmother’s face. Penelope turned on her heel, collected Max’s leash and went out the front door.

She only hoped that there would be a house to return to.

Chapter Three

What could have been minutes or hours later, Penelope stood on the old wooden bridge about a half-mile away, down the road that spanned the Old Valley River. She stared at the water rushing by below and pondered why every now and again life didn’t make any sense at all. Even Max seemed to contemplate the question, lying on the old planks under their feet that shuddered whenever a car drove over. Which, thankfully, wasn’t often.

Penelope had studied the stars last night, trying to map out the future, catch a clue on where things might be heading. The same way she did every other night when there was no significant cloud cover. Only nothing had prepared her for today. She’d seen no hint of Mavis’ latest mood. No sign that she would look into Aidan’s eyes that morning and feel a tingling awareness that she hadn’t been able to shake ever since. No trace that she would be standing at the bridge now, staring down at the river wondering if things would have been different if her mother hadn’t committed suicide by jumping off the other side of this same bridge and landing on the outcropping of rocks there.

The early evening sunlight hit her full on the back and seemed to outline her reflection in the water. She couldn’t make out her own features. The blurry image resembled what little she could remember about her mother’s features beyond those she saw in the countless photos Mavis had of her.

After Heather Moon died, no more photographs were brought into the house. Penelope couldn’t even remember seeing the old camera her mother had once owned. Maybe Mavis had buried it with her.

She recalled the way Mavis had mapped out the old photographs on the wall like some sort of puzzle missing half its pieces, or like a map leading to nowhere. She shivered.

“Cold?”

She looked up, startled to find she was no longer alone.

Aidan stood on the bridge next to her. He had probably been there for a while, given his relaxed stance next to her. He too was staring into the water.

“No, I, um…”

Her voice drifted off as she realized the question was probably rhetorical. She smiled. “I think you’re about the last person I expected to see way out here.”

Aidan shrugged, his forearms leaning against the broad wood railing, his strong, masculine hands clasped tightly together. She couldn’t be sure, but given the grooves on either side of his mouth, he had been thinking heavy thoughts too.

She squinted at him, remembering the first time she saw him ten months or so ago. He’d been walking down the street outside her shop, much as he did every morning. But back then he had looked more anxious somehow. Terribly alone. And his brown eyes had held a sadness that seemed to reach out and clutch her heart.

She remembered it so clearly because she was seeing the same expression now.

“I went out for a walk after dinner and lost track of time,” he said by way of explanation.

Look at me, Penelope silently found herself saying.

“Did you say something?”

He finally looked at her, and the full impact of the soulless shadow in his eyes nearly took her breath away.

Max barked, startling them both, then laid his head back down on top of his paws.

“No,” Penelope said quietly. “I didn’t say anything.”

Although, it was the second time that day that he had appeared to hear her thoughts.

The first time she had silently willed him to kiss her.

She felt her face go hot, then she turned back toward the water and tucked her hair behind her ear. “You know, my mother used to say that there are only a few people in the world who are capable of hearing another’s thoughts.” Actually, her mother had told her that there would be one other person capable of hearing her thoughts, and that one person would be the one she was meant to spend her life with. But she wasn’t going to say that to Aidan for fear that he would think her strange. Most of the townspeople already thought that. She couldn’t bear it if he believed the same.

“My… There was another woman who told me that once.” Aidan said it so quietly that the light breeze that had kicked up nearly stole the words before they reached her ears.

Penelope shivered again, but this time it had nothing to do with a chill, but rather a burst of heat.

She pushed from the railing and looked down at her watch. It was already after seven. “I didn’t realize it was getting so late.”

“Do you have a date?”

Penelope laughed, then stopped when she realized he was serious. “No. I don’t have a date. I, um, was just heading to the market to pick up a few things.” And a man for my grandmother, she reminded herself.

Maximus lumbered to his feet, nudging his cold, slimy nose into her hand. She absently patted him, then picked up his leash.

“I’ll walk back with you,” Aidan said.

“Okay.”

They’d gone a ways, Max keeping pace between them, when suddenly the tree-lined route curved into a two-lane street and the trees morphed into buildings.