She turned to face her fate.

An intruder, she thought, would have been much easier to handle.

Did he have to see her like this? Her pajamas, which had seemed to be making such a statement about the new her—not caring about the opinions of others, eccentric, free—now made her feel vulnerable in front of the kind of man a woman did not want to see without her makeup on.

Rick Chase was six feet of utter male appeal. He was tall, broad shouldered, the perfection of an impeccably cut suit accentuating rather than disguising the sleek power of his build.

How was it possible she’d forgotten how handsome he was? Or maybe she’d just refused to think about it, about him.

Because the one thing her battle-scarred emotions did not need was a complication like the one that had just materialized at her front door.

Dear Reader,

I grew up in Calgary, and have a delightful memory of being twelve years old and taking the bus downtown with friends. Naturally, we spent our return bus fare on milk shakes at the Hudson’s Bay Company and had to walk home.

An hour or two later, at the halfway point, we made a pit stop at my friend Mary McGuire’s grandmother’s house, in Calgary’s very posh Mount Royal neighborhood, where we were fortified with cookies.

Even now, some thirty-odd years later, I can remember that house. I remember the hardwood floors and the windows, the staircase, a covered porch off one of the upstairs bedrooms, a huge yard. But most of all I remember the feeling of that house—gracious and dignified, a witness to the ebb and flow of love and of life. I have been fascinated with old houses ever since, and if I wasn’t a writer I would love to have the job Linda Starr has in this book!

I hope you enjoy reading her story as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Cara Colter

A Vow to Keep
Cara Colter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CARA COLTER

and her real-life hero, Rob, live on an acreage in British Columbia. Their cat, Hunter, graciously shares his house with them. They own seven horses, including two new “babies”—Wiener and Schnitzel, a pair of Fjord cross colts.

Cara Colter on A Vow To Keep:

“My partner, Rob, is a building contractor, and he hates old houses. The only mysteries they reveal to his pragmatic soul are walls that are out of square and wiring that needs to be redone. A proud new owner of a historic home once asked Rob what he thought the house needed, and Rob looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘A match.’ I, on the other hand, am a complete romantic and love old houses. I think they are our history, and that the walls hold songs and stories.”

You can reach Cara at www.cara-colter.com

Dedicated to the people of the city of Calgary

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

PROLOGUE

THE ringing of the phone was shrill and incessant. Rick Chase startled awake, glanced at his bedside clock. Red digits flashed 4:00 a.m.

No good ever came from a phone ringing in the darkest hours of the night.

He picked up the receiver, aware he was braced for the worst, and hoping for a drunk who had dialed the wrong number.

“Hello?”

“Uncle Rick?”

The last vestiges of sleep were gone. He sat up in bed, the blankets falling away from his naked chest. He fumbled for the light on his night table, as if being able to see would help him hear better.

“Bobbi?”

“Sorry to wake you. I wanted to talk to you before I went to class.”

Class? At four in the morning? And then he remembered. His goddaughter was taking her first year of university in Ontario, two thousand miles—and a three-hour time difference—from Calgary.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” A tremble in her voice said maybe she wasn’t.

“What’s up, Bo-Bo?” He used her childhood nickname by instinct, knowing it would make her feel safe and listened to, but then he was sorry he had, because it reminded him of her on her tricycle, pigtails flying, days gone that were never coming back. Happy days, uncomplicated.

“I’m worried about my mom,” she wailed.

A fist closed around his heart. He was amazed that his voice sounded as calm as it did when he said, “What about your mom? What about Linda?”

“Did you know she sold our house?”

He felt a little ripple of shock. Linda had sold the house? And not gone through his real estate company? His and her late husband’s company? It was half her company, and she had not used it?

“I didn’t know that, no.”

“She bought a shack, Uncle Rick, a falling down shack in Bow Water. She e-mailed me a picture of it.” She made a gagging noise, Bo-Bo still there, hiding within that oh-so-sophisticated college girl after all.

Bobbi had been raised in the lap of luxury, in a seven thousand square foot Riverdale manor house that backed onto the Elbow River. What she considered a shack and what most people considered a shack were probably two very different things. Still, Bow Water could be a rough neighborhood. Why would Linda, of all people, buy there?

“She’s moved in already,” Bobbi said, her voice strained with injury. “She didn’t even give me a chance to say goodbye to our old house, to pack a few of my own things. She sold the car, too.”

“The Mercedes?” Linda couldn’t be having financial problems. It was impossible. The company was in excellent health.

“Oh, she still has a Mercedes, but you’ll have to see it to believe it.” A dramatic sigh, and then, “Uncle Rick, she cut her hair. I think my mom is losing her mind.”

He wondered, troubled, if it was a genuine possibility. Linda Starr had survived a terrible tragedy in the loss of her husband thirteen months ago, now her only child was away at school. Could she be falling apart?

No, not Linda, always refined, always composed, always classy. Even in the middle of chaos, she had retained that almost regal refinement, as if she was untouchable, unmovable, a rock that the stormy sea washed around. Linda Starr seemed like the least likely person to be losing her mind.

“What is it you want me to do, Bobbi?”

“Go check on her!” This was said with a certain feminine impatience, as if he was supposed to know what to do.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll check on her, before work.”

From the heavy sigh, a little more was expected of him.

“You need to ask her to come back to work. She’s becoming reclusive and weird.”

He heard the reproach in her voice and knew it was at least partly deserved. “I’ve tried to talk to your mother, Bobbi. She doesn’t want to talk to me.” Let alone work with me. Besides, it had been at least fifteen years since Linda’d had any active involvement in the company.

“Give me a break! You could sell snake oil to a rattlesnake farmer, and you can’t talk my mother into getting her life back?”

He wanted to deflect the accusation by keeping it light. “Is there such a thing as a rattlesnake farmer?” he asked.

Bobbi was not about to be sidetracked. “You abandoned her after Daddy died. Everybody did.”

He wanted to say, She wanted to be abandoned, to defend himself, but suddenly his position seemed indefensible.

“And she was so good to you after you went through your divorce from Kathy. Is that seven years ago? Already?”

“Yes.”

Another memory, as tender as that of Bobbi on her trike, of her mother taking both his hands in the warmth of hers, looking into his eyes, saying, It will be all right, Rick. Maybe not today, but someday.

She had been right, too. When the pain, the humiliation of failure, had subsided, he had realized his divorce had freed him to do all the things he loved. He had bought a motorcycle first, and then, with his appetite for solitary adventures whetted, he had taken up traveling. Not the posh, resort kind of traveling his ex-wife would have enjoyed, but true exploring of a world so rich in diversity and culture he sometimes wondered if he would have time to discover and experience all the things he wanted to.

Still, he knew his contentment with his own lifestyle, combined with the wariness created by his divorce, had made him a solitary soul. Maybe, somewhere in the past seven years, he had even become a selfish, self-centered man.

What other excuse did he have for not being there for a friend? Though, when he thought of Linda, he thought their relationship might be a little more complicated than friendship.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly to her daughter.

“Her whole life was about me, and now I’m gone, too. Uncle Rick, she needs a purpose. Promise me you’ll find something at Star Chasers for her to do.”

A gauntlet laid down. It would be foolish to pick it up. What did he know about helping a woman whose dignity had been shredded and whose heart had been broken? On the other hand, he knew all about promises. Vows. He didn’t want to be that responsible for another human being’s happiness, ever again.

“She needs to be around people,” her daughter said with the absolute authority of one young enough to still believe she knew everything. “She needs to have something to do. She loves old houses. She still has pictures of some of the early ones that you and her and Dad restored together. That interest could be channeled constructively, before she sells off anything else.”

He heard himself saying, cautiously, “I can’t make your mother do anything she doesn’t want to do, Bobbi.”

“Promise me you’ll try.”

Maybe it was the hour of the morning that weakened him, or maybe it was the pleading in that tender young voice.

“Okay. I promise.”

“Thank you, Uncle Rick!” There was hope in her voice, as if she truly believed he could fix something so desperately fragile. But he already felt regret. He knew he shouldn’t get involved in this. Helping someone who was heart weary was like treading on sacred ground.

Still, he’d offer Linda a job, she’d say no and his duty would be done.

But the promise he’d just made implied more than a lackluster effort. That was the problem with promises. They required way more of a man than he was prepared to give.

Dumb to get involved, Rick thought, staring at the phone after he’d hung up, but what if Linda did need something? She would be too proud—and too angry—to ever ask him.

Anger he deserved, he reminded himself, rubbing the last of the sleep from his eyes. Anger he deserved because he had kept her husband Blair’s secrets from her.

And he kept one still.

What had he just let himself in for? He got out of bed, went to the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. One thing he knew, he was not going to face Linda Starr without a plan.

CHAPTER ONE

AT FIRST she thought he was not there.

Linda Starr laid low in the long September-gold grass and adjusted the binoculars on the reedy area of bulrushes just beyond the boundary of her picket fence–enclosed backyard.

The ground was gilded silver with frost, but she was only vaguely aware of the cold penetrating her pajamas as the morning light, cool and gray, seeped into the darkness, turned the river’s back eddy into a startling strand of light. Across the river, downtown Calgary hummed to life, headlights like strings of moving pearls joined the high-rise reflections in the still waters of this tiny, quiet inlet of the swift moving Bow River.

Unbelievable that she had seen him here, nearly in the heart of the city. It had been a gift, and she realized, resigned, it was one that might not be repeated.

She began to feel the cold and to notice the steady hum of life across the way, in stark contrast to the stillness where she lay shivering. She had turned on the coffeepot before she had come out, and now its scent drifted out her open back door, calling her back to the warmth of the tiny house she had only slept in for three nights.

She rose to her knees, groaned at the stiffness in them and then froze. She saw him, his silhouette that of a ghost taking solid form as the light deepened to rose on the river. Her breath caught in her throat as she witnessed alchemy, dawn turning white feathers to platinum. A whooping crane. Linda had read about him after her first sighting yesterday.

He was one of the rarest North American birds, and the tallest. His wingspan was seven and a half feet. Most people would never see such a bird in their lifetimes. She, startled at her own whimsy, took it as a sign that she had made the right decision to buy the tiny house behind her.

Her knees protested, and she shifted her weight ever so slightly but enough that the bird turned to her suddenly, the brilliant red of his face filling her binoculars, the yellow of his eye defiant. With a buglelike trumpet—ker-loo, ker-loo—he stretched his wings so that she could see the black-tipped undersides, witness how truly magnificent he was.

He lifted his wings, and then rose, all power and grace, into a morning sky that had turned a shade of turquoise blue that left her eyes smarting. She could hear the whoosh as he claimed the freedom of the heavens. She watched him, felt as if he were setting course for the morning star.

Whimsy, again. Where was that coming from? She had always considered herself so pragmatic. Not, she reminded herself, that a pragmatic woman would have purchased the faintly dilapidated little house behind her.

She kept the binoculars trained on him long after he was just a speck. That’s when she became aware of the miracle.

Happiness had eased into her, as sneakily as the morning light had chased away the darkness.

She contemplated the feeling for a moment, let the word roll through her mind. Only thirteen months ago her world had turned upside down, been broken to pieces as if picked up by a tornado and smashed back down. She remembered thinking on that black, black day, I will never again know joy.

Or that most dangerous of things, hope.

There was that whimsy again, because spotting the rare bird made her hope for a life where tiny surprises could delight, where cold grass could make her skin tingle with the simple awareness of what it was to be alive.

She had barely formed that thought when the hair on the back of her neck rose. She was aware, before she heard the softly cleared throat, that she was no longer alone in her backyard. Ah well, Linda chastised herself, that was a lesson about believing in happiness that she should’ve learned. It was like throwing a challenge before the gods, one they seemed all too eager to accept.

The intruder must be a murderer, she decided, just as her daughter had warned her when Linda had insisted on buying this little house, next to the bird sanctuary, in an old, old neighborhood where crumbling houses, such as hers, stood next to in-fills and add-ons and houses lovingly restored to dignity.

Mother. What are you thinking? You’ll be murdered in your sleep, Bobbi had said. As if dead bodies littered the quiet streets of one the oldest districts in Calgary. Though, of course, those scruffy young neighbors, tattooed and long haired with the pit bull and boards over their windows, had given Linda pause.

Well, she thought, with faint satisfaction, if her daughter was right about the murderer, at least Linda was not asleep. In her pajamas, though! Heart hammering, ridiculously embarrassed about the pink flannel printed with cartoon devils, she rose off her knees, stretched with what she hoped was a lack of concern—she was sure the criminal element could smell fear—and turned to face her fate.

Her heart stopped.

A murderer, she thought, would have been much easier to handle. She became aware that her pajamas were soaked nearly clean through from the frost, and she was afraid her breasts were probably doing something indecent.

From the cold. Not from him.

At least she hoped the reaction was from the cold. She folded her arms firmly over that area before he got any ideas.

Did he have to see her like this?

The pajamas, which had seemed to be making such a statement about the new her—not caring about the opinions of others, eccentric, free—when she had plucked them off the rack, now made her feel faintly ridiculous and all too vulnerable.

“Rick,” she said, hoping to load that single word with as much frost as what painted her lawn. He flinched, so she knew she had probably succeeded, and wondered why the success gave her so little satisfaction.

Rick Chase was six feet of utter male appeal. He was tall, broad-shouldered, the perfection of an impeccably cut suit, probably Armani, accentuated rather than disguised the sleek power of his build.

Gorgeous, she thought, almost clinically, a man of forty in his absolute prime. His features were masculine and clean, his chin faintly dimpled, those amazing eyes as green as the edges of still water, and just as calm. He was dressed for work—the suit charcoal-gray, the white shirt crisp, the tie silky and classy and perfectly knotted at the swell of his throat.

He was really the kind of man a woman did not want to see without her makeup and her hair done and a dress that turned heads. She reminded herself she had just been happy that she had not worn makeup in more than a month, happy with the new her.

Trust a man to wreck happiness without half trying.

She noticed for all the magazine cover perfection of his looks, his dark hair—devil’s-food-cake brown—was spiky and uncooperative, still wet from the shower. It wakened some rebel in her that wanted to press down the worst rooster tail, the Dennis-the-Menace one, with her fingertips. She noticed, surprised, there were strands of gray threaded through the rich brown.

How was it possible he was still unmarried, unattached? He had been divorced for more than seven years. And how was it possible she’d forgotten how handsome he was? Or maybe it was just that she had refused to think about it, her battle-scarred emotional self not needing a complication like the one that had just materialized in her yard. Even when he’d left message after message for the past thirteen months, she had refused to conjure the image of him. Somehow she had known it would make her ache. Make her feel as lonely and as pathetic as only a betrayed woman could be.

Betrayed by her husband, now dead thirteen months, and betrayed by this man who stood in front of her, her husband’s friend and business partner, who had known about her husband’s secrets and had never once…

Don’t go there, she ordered herself.

“Linda.”

They stood staring at each other as morning deepened around them. Across the river a horn honked and tires squealed.

She was aware of time standing still.

“You look like you’re frozen,” he finally said.

She resisted the temptation to look down at her chest to see if that’s where he was drawing his conclusion.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, not politely, either.

“I called this morning. When I didn’t get an answer I decided to drop by.”

Drop by, as if this was right on his way to work, which it wasn’t. Drop by, as if she had sent him her new address, which she hadn’t.

She was a woman who had felt the complete and humiliating sting of being too easily fooled. Now she felt she could sniff out a half-truth at five hundred yards.

“And what exactly is the reason for your sudden concern, Rick?”

Something in his eyes grew very cold, and made her shiver more than her frosty pajamas. She had known Rick for twenty years. Had she ever seen him angry? She was suddenly aware that there were facets to him that were powerful and intriguing, and it felt like a terrible weakness that she was suddenly curious…

“Don’t say that as if I haven’t been concerned all along,” he said with surprising force. “It’s you who has chosen not to return my calls. Because I respected that, does not mean I was not thinking about you.”

“Well, thank you,” she said, her tone deliberately clipped. “And you have chosen not to respect my need for space now, because—?”

He glared at her, raked a hand through the wet tangle of his hair. The Dennis-the-Menace tail popped right back up. He looked very much like he wanted to cross the ground between them, take her shoulders and shake her. But the temper died in his eyes, and he said evenly, “I need your help with something.”

Patting down that rooster tail, for one.

“You’re asking a woman who is out in her yard in her pajamas at dawn for help with something? You might want to rethink that.”

She had said it with mild sarcasm, but he chose not to be offended. Instead he grinned. Oh, she wished he would not have done that. The masculine pull of him was almost instant, more powerfully alluring than before. A smile like his—faintly reckless and unabashedly sexy—could build a bridge right over the painful history that provided such a safe and uncrossable chasm between them.

“I’ll take my chances. You never know when you might need the skills of a woman who’s handy with binoculars.”

She glanced down at the binoculars that hung around her neck.

“So, what were you doing? Spying on the neighbors?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said, fighting down the impulse to explain herself. She was done with that. She was free to watch the birds at dawn if she damn well pleased, and offer explanations to no one. It was the new—and improved—Linda Starr.

“You’re shivering.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle. Pity? The new and improved Linda Starr did not want his pity; she wanted to be insulted by it. Instead his gentle tone touched the place in her where she least wanted to be touched. The place that said, in the darkness of the night when she could not outrun it, I want someone to care about me.

“The coffee is on in the house,” she said coolly. “You can come in and tell me what you want.”

And no matter what it was, she would say no to him.

She would say no because he was part of a world she was trying desperately to leave behind, and because he made her aware that while she thought she was being independent she probably only looked wildly off balance and possibly pathetic.

She would say no just for practice, and for all the times she had said yes when she hadn’t wanted to.

Rick Chase followed Linda toward her house thinking Bobbi really had no idea what she had asked of him. He could tell from the warriorlike pride and anger in Linda’s face when she brushed by him that she was going to say no, no matter what he asked.

So, that made his life simple, right? All he could do was try, even Bobbi couldn’t expect more than that.

Linda had taken him by complete surprise. She looked astounding, standing outside in her pink pajamas, shivering. She was different. Her hair, short now, light brown and terribly misbehaved, scattered around the dainty, defiant features of her face.

The last time he had seen her she had been in black. Her hair had been black, too, pulled into a sophisticated bun at her nape. She had looked elegant, cold and unforgiving.

“Did you know?” she had asked him, her eyes, momentarily vulnerable, pleading for him to say, no, he hadn’t known.

He had not answered, and in his lack of an answer, she had known the truth.

His own sense of shame, for being a keeper of the secret—secrets, one that she still did not know about—preventing him from being there for her. Not that he didn’t go through the motions. He called. He left messages. But when she didn’t return his calls, he did not pursue it. Was relieved not to pursue it.

Still, the difference he saw today was not just in Linda’s physical appearance. Before, she had always seemed faintly fragile, now she seemed strong. Before, she had carried herself with a certain remoteness, now she looked engaged. Before she had seemed controlled, now she seemed…was passionate too strong a word?

No.

Who was this new Linda?

He remembered how Bobbi had finished the conversation last night. “I should never have agreed to college, not this year. I better come home. Do you think I should come home?”

Of course he thought she should come home! He certainly didn’t want to be the one put in charge of the rescue of Linda Starr, especially since it was now perfectly evident to him she would resent rescue or even the insinuation one was needed.

“Not that I have a home to come home to,” Bobbi had announced, faint sulkiness in her tone. “My stuff is in boxes!”

Last night he had taken that as evidence that maybe something was wrong.

But now, standing in the brightening morning, looking at Linda’s back, her shoulders set with pride, Rick knew he’d never seen a woman who looked less in need of rescuing. Had he been talked into playing the good Samaritan—used the flimsy excuse of her daughter’s stuff in boxes—to come and see her for himself?

Linda, he calculated, was thirty-eight years old.

She had looked ten years older than that at her husband’s funeral. Now she looked ten years younger. She looked confident, defiant, madder than hell at being found so vulnerable. And she looked beautiful in a way that threatened a wall he had long ago erected around his life.

His job here was nearly done. He would make Linda an offer. She would refuse. He could report to Bobbi that her mother appeared to be fine. More than fine. On fire with some life force that he had not seen in her before, or at least not for many, many years.

Could he leave now, without making the offer? If he left like this he would be filled with the regret of a challenge only partially completed. His own self-preservation was not the issue here, though he felt the threat of the new Linda strongly.

The issue was if Linda was really okay.

She went through the back door of her house, bare feet leaving small prints in the silver grass. He followed them, directly into her kitchen.

He looked at her house with a curiosity he had no right to feel, a spy gathering info. Was it the home of a woman who was doing okay? Or was it the home of a woman secretly going to pieces?

Certainly her house from the outside had been a bit of a shock, had underscored Bobbi’s assessment of the situation. Though many of these Bow Water houses were getting million-dollar facelifts, thanks to their close proximity to downtown, Linda’s was not one of those. Evaluating houses was his specialty, and hers had no curb-appeal. It was a tiny bungalow, shingle-sided, nearly lost in the tangled vines that had long since overtaken it. It was a long, long way from the gracious manor nestled in the curve of the Elbow River that she had just sold.

Still, the interior smelled headily of coffee and spices he could not identify. Despite the fact that it needed work, it had a certain undeniable cottage charm that suited the Linda with short messy hair and funny flannel pajamas.

She motioned at a chair and poured coffee into a sturdy mug. She slapped the mug down in front of him and left the room in what seemed to be a single motion, leaving him free to inspect for signs of craziness. For Bobbi’s benefit? He was kidding himself.

It was obvious she had just moved. Boxes were stacked neatly, labeled Kitchen, waiting to be unpacked. The floor’s curling linoleum needed to be replaced and so did the cabinets, the kitchen sink and the appliances. He was willing to bet the neglect was just as obvious in the rest of the house. Still, he could see the place had potential. Possibly original hardwood floors under that badly damaged linoleum, deep windowsills, high ceilings, beautiful wood moldings with that rich, golden patina that only truly old wood had.

She came back into the kitchen. She had tugged a sweatshirt over her pajamas, gray and loose. He was accustomed to women making just a little more effort to impress him, but for some reason he liked it that she hadn’t. He liked that somewhere, under the layers of pain, they were still Rick and Linda, comfortable with each other.

The sweatshirt had the odd effect of making her seem very slight, the kind of woman a man could daydream about protecting, if he wasn’t careful. A man could remember how, for a moment, when he had told her he had a problem, the wariness had melted from her eyes, briefly replaced with trust.

She got her own coffee, but didn’t sit. Instead she stood, rear end braced against the countertop, and regarded him through the steam of her coffee.

Her eyes were brown, like melted chocolate. Once, he had thought, they were the softest eyes in the world. Now they had shades of other things in them. Sorrow. Betrayal. Maturity. But all those things just seemed to make them more expressive and mysterious, the way shadows brought depth to a painting.

Her hair was two shades lighter than her eyes. He realized, slightly shocked, that the black had probably never been her true color. It was as if, before, she had worn a mask, and now the real Linda was beginning to shine through.

“So,” she said, “say it. I can tell you’re thinking it.”

She’d always been perceptive, almost scarily so. He looked at her lips, full, moist and incredibly sensuous. What might they taste like? He hoped she wasn’t perceptive enough to gauge that renegade thought!

“Okay,” he said, as if he had not thought about the full puffiness of her lips. “It seems like a rough neighborhood.”

She cocked her head at him, as if she was politely interested in his opinion, so he rushed on.

“And the house seems, um, like a lot of work for a woman on her own. Why did you sell your Riverdale house for this?”

She took a sip of her coffee, as if debating whether to talk to him at all. Then she sighed. “That house never felt like mine. It was Blair’s, his love of status in every cold stone and brick. I hated that house. I especially hated it after the renovation. A glass wall thirty feet high is monstrous. Besides, it was a ridiculous place for a woman alone to live.”

Rick hadn’t much liked the house after Blair’s renovation, either. It had lost its original charm and become pretentious. Still, he had always assumed Blair was solely responsible for the problems between he and his wife. Suddenly it was evident that they had been very different people, their values on a collision course. Linda, more down to earth, wholesome, uncomfortable with Blair’s aspirations, his runaway ambition, his defining of success in strictly monetary terms.

Rick didn’t want to be exploring the complications of the relationship between Linda and Blair. But he had always known a simple truth: Linda was too deep for his friend. Too good for him. He did not want to be here, in her house, with those thoughts running through his mind.

“Great coffee,” he said, wishing he could deflect this awkward moment with a discussion about rich flavor. “What kind is it?”

“I grind my own—several different combinations of beans.” Like her daughter, she was not easily deflected. Her eyes asked what she was too polite to, Why are you here?

One more question, and still not the one he had come here to ask. “Why didn’t you list your house with us? It is your company. Half of it.”

Her eyes became shuttered. “I think I’ve provided quite enough fuel for gossip and speculation at Star Chasers, Rick. I don’t want one more single fact about my life to be the conversation at morning coffee, ever.”

He wanted to deny that. But he couldn’t. Every agent, secretary and file clerk had discussed the scandal surrounding Blair’s death incessantly. Each of them had slid Linda slanted looks loaded with sympathy and knowing on those rare occasions when business had forced her to come to the office.

He did not know how she had made it through the funeral with such dignity and grace. He did know he did not deserve her forgiveness for his part in the scandal. He did not deserve it because he guarded one of Blair’s secrets, still. He felt guilty just standing here with those clear eyes regarding him so strippingly.

Do what you came to do and leave, he ordered himself. Instead he studied the little devils on her pajamas and found himself wanting to know more about the Linda Starr who would wear pajamas like that, outside in her yard at dawn.

“You said you had a problem,” she reminded him, still polite.

He tried to think of a problem, but none—aside from the brown of her eyes—came to mind. Thankfully he had made a plan. That’s why men made plans, for moments just like this one, when their wits fled them.

He had known he couldn’t exactly offer her a job. It would have been unbelievably condescending. She owned half the company. What could he say? Come and be senior vice president?

“I’m having problems with a house,” he said.

Ah. He saw the flicker of interest in her eyes, and knew, somehow, he had stumbled on just the right way to get to Linda. She loved old houses. The one they were standing in was evidence of that!

“It’s an Edwardian, 1912, Mount Royal.”

She could barely contain a sigh.

“It’s a nightmare.” He told her about the water damage, the bad renovations it had suffered over the years, and especially about the daughter of the previous owner who kept coming over, wringing her hands and crying. “She’s seventy years old and she laid down in front of the bulldozer when we tried to rip off an add-on porch. Now she has the neighbors signing petitions about everything. I’ve had two project managers quit.”

He had not expected this: that it felt so good to unburden himself.

“And what do you want me to do?”

“Take it over. Be my project manager.”

Her mouth fell open. “I can’t do that.”

“Bail me out, Linda. I made a mistake,” he admitted. “I fell in love with the place. I bought it on pure emotion, never a good thing to do.”

Pure emotion, he reminded himself, was always a bad thing. Always. Which is why he had to be very careful around Linda. He felt things he didn’t want to feel, even after just being with her for a few minutes.

She turned away from him, and dumped her coffee in the sink, but not before he’d seen the look in her eyes.

Memories.

This was the problem with having come to see her. Their lives intersected and crossed, drifted apart and then intersected again. In her eyes he had seen the memory as clearly as if it had flashed across a video screen.

Him and her and Blair, so young, at the very beginning, buying those horrible old houses, slapping on paint, filling flower boxes, making cosmetic changes and then keeping their fingers crossed when the For Sale sign went up.

“Flip-flop,” he remembered out loud. That was what she had called it. Blair had wanted a more sophisticated name for the company, the one they had gotten from combining both their surnames.

She turned from the sink and smiled weakly. In her eyes, he saw yearning. For the way things had once been? For the laughter and excitement of those first few sales? Of those early years?

Bobbi had asked him to help her. More than asked. She had begged him. And Linda still loved these old houses, as much as he did, maybe more. He wanted to walk away from her, for his own self-preservation. But he did not think a man who would walk away from a woman who needed something just to protect himself was a man he wanted to be.

“Will you come?” he asked. “At least have a look at the house I’ve invested your daughter’s college fund in?”

What he saw in her eyes was way more powerful than that.

“I don’t think I should.”

It wasn’t the out-and-out no that he’d expected to hear.

“You do still own half the company,” he reminded her.

“No, really.” She pointed at the unpacked boxes. “I’ve got a ton of stuff to do. Really.”

It was the fact that she said really twice that made him know what she really wanted.

“Come,” he said softly, foolishly. “Just help me talk to this woman. Look at the house. See if you get a feel for it.” He knew if he got Linda over to that house the rest would be a done deal.

“You don’t need me,” she said.

She was not the only perceptive one. Because in those words he heard how she longed to be needed, how the death of her husband and the departure of her daughter had set her adrift.

Bobbi had been right. He had abandoned Linda when she most needed a friend. It did not make him think highly of himself.

“No,” he said. “I don’t need you.” He wagged his eyebrows devilishly at her. “But I want you.”

She laughed, just as he had hoped she would. It was a good sound and a bad one both. It was the kind of sound a man could get addicted to, that could stop him in his tracks when he was way too sure he was doing the right thing.

She threw up her hands in surrender. “Okay,” she said, and he could tell the answer shocked and surprised and frightened her nearly as much as it shocked and surprised and frightened him.

CHAPTER TWO

“I’LL have to go change,” Linda said, looking down at herself. She could actually feel a blush rising in her cheeks. Her pajamas looked worse for the wear. And the sweatshirt! Why had she picked something that made her look so frumpy and frazzled?

Shock, she realized. She was in shock. That was why she had said yes, she would go look at that house with Rick when it made no sense at all to do that.

Not that her mind was making sense right now.

Rick Chase was having the oddest effect on her. Looking at him—his large frame filling the tininess of her kitchen, his scent, richly masculine and amazingly sensual, filling her senses—she felt her belly do a dizzying drop. She’d known Rick for twenty years. She’d never reacted like this to him before!

Of course, she had never been single and available before.

Available? How did she know that he was? How could he be? Why wouldn’t he have been snatched up by someone? He wasn’t remarried, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t involved. It was a different world than the one in which she had gotten married. Marriage was only one choice of many these days. She’d assumed he was alone, but she had learned, the hard way, assumptions were very bad things on which to base decisions.

Bobbi stayed in touch with him, her honorary uncle, her godfather. Would Bobbi have told her about Rick’s relationships? Or would she have considered the romantic doings of old fuddy-duddies well outside that small range of things that interested her? Would Linda have heard if Rick was with someone? Suddenly she regretted all those phone calls from people in the office not answered.

“Rick, are you—”

The words stuck in her throat when he looked at her quizzically.

It was none of her business! She didn’t care.

“Am I what?”

Don’t ask, she pleaded with herself, especially not standing there in devil-embossed pajamas and an oversize sweatshirt. Especially not with her hair going every which way and not a smidgen of makeup on!

“Are you in a, um, relationship?”

There. She’d gone and asked. This was why she had become reclusive. She knew darn well she could not trust herself. Her interest could only be interpreted one way.

“No.”

She could feel the blush deepening in her cheeks and she rushed away from him, down the hall and into the safety of her bedroom.

She closed the door and leaned against it, taking a deep, steadying breath. Bobbi had been insinuating lately that Linda was losing her mind. Was she losing her mind? Why was she having this reaction to Rick?

“Because you aren’t getting out enough,” she scolded herself. So, she would go out with him and look at the house. No doubt after half an hour or so, the hammering of her heart would slow and she would return home more normal than when she had left.

She would, of course, refuse to be project manager on restoring the old house no matter how much she loved it. Then she would make her daily phone call to her daughter, and after that she would make plans to join a club. A bird watching organization might be nice. Perhaps it was time to start thinking about a job, though money wasn’t an issue for her.

Just this morning she had felt perfectly content with the challenge of a new house and the occasional whooping crane sighting. Now she realized she needed something that would make her less susceptible the next time she was in close proximity to a good-looking, available man.

Meanwhile, she had to erase the impression the pajamas and sweatshirt had made. She did not want Rick thinking she was a pathetic eccentric who had let herself go!

She opened her closet to find very little unpacked. For the last few months she had let the wardrobe thing slide. Especially since her life now belonged to her.

No daughter to wrinkle her nose—Mom, you aren’t really going to wear that are you?—no husband who she had felt she had been perpetually trying, and failing, to win.

So, she had taken to wearing jeans and workout pants and things that did not match, like an orange T-shirt with red slacks. She had taken to wearing flannel pajamas with pictures on them and furry socks.

Today, the decision of what to wear seemed hard again. The cream-colored slacks and the purple silk blouse the color of a jewel? What was unpacked? Next to nothing? Should she wear earrings? Makeup? Was there any help for the short hair that seemed to do whatever it wanted no matter how she tried to persuade it otherwise?

She drew herself up short. What was she doing? She came to her senses and made a decision.

“Rick?” she called from her bedroom, opening the door a crack.

“Um-hmm?”

“I can’t go. Never mind. Thanks for dropping by.”

There. What a relief. She sank onto her bed and waited to hear the back door squeak open—it badly needed oil, a much better use for her time than—

There was a faint knock on the bedroom door.

She froze.

The door, still open that crack, slid open further. He stood there, his shoulder braced against the jamb, his thumb hitched through the belt loop of his slacks. His legs looked so long and strong, his shoulders so broad. She hurt for things masculine: large hands, whisker-roughened cheeks, easy strength, the sensuous gravel of a deep voice.

She had a renegade thought. She wished he would come in, push her back on the bed, take her lips with his…which was exactly why she was not going anywhere with him.

She had been putting her life back together, and quite nicely, too. It was obvious he would be a terrible disruption to that process. She looked at his lips. The bottom one was soft and sensual.

A terrible disruption.

“Why not?” he asked. She unglued her eyes from his lips and leaped up from the bed. She pulled a box out of a heap and began to randomly unpack it.

“Why not what?” she asked.

“Go look at the house?”

Oh, yes, that.

Whoops! The box she had grabbed was full of underthings! The ones she didn’t wear anymore—wisps of lace and temptation. She began to ram them back in the box as quickly as she had taken them out.

“I’m not unpacked. I have to oil the back door. I might bake cookies. A house doesn’t feel like home until you’ve baked cookies in it.”

She sounded like an idiot, babbling, but she looked over her shoulder at him and tilted her chin defiantly. Didn’t he know he was being rude? He shouldn’t be standing there in the doorway of her bedroom making her think hot thoughts about him, watching with way too much interest as she unpacked—repacked—her most intimate things.

A little smile tickled his lips.

“Go away,” she said, flustered. “I’m busy.”

“If you come look at the house, I’ll help you unpack later.”

Absurd. She did not want him helping her unpack. He was confusing her, bringing a sensation of turmoil to a life that had been without it for some time.

“Maybe not that particular box,” he said, and the smile deepened.

Okay, so it would be awfully nice to have someone who could move some of the larger pieces of furniture around. It would be awfully nice to have someone to help, period. But she could hire someone for that! And if she was so starved for things male, she could hire some twenty-something guy with bulging muscles. To look at. Nothing else. Her daughter would be disgusted to know her mother even looked!

Why was she suddenly more aware of being pathetic than she had been since that awful day when she’d learned the truth about her husband?

“No, really, I—”

“And bake cookies,” he said. “I’ll help you bake cookies.”

She turned and faced him and put her hands on her hips. “Rick Chase, you do not know how to bake cookies!”

“You don’t know the first thing about what I know how to do.”

Now his eyes were fastened on her lips with heat. And something else. Longing. Well, that wasn’t so surprising, was it? He’d been alone even longer than she had.

But he could have any woman he wanted. She was sure of that.

Weakness flooded her. She wanted to throw herself in his arms, allow herself to be held, to accept the strength he was offering her. But that was the whole thing. She could not be weak. She could not look weak. And she would look weak if she did not go look at that stupid house now that she had said she would.

“You were the one who was a lousy cook,” he reminded her, his eyes breaking from her lips. “I bet you’d end up with door oil in your cookies.”

He was remembering a long, long time ago. Her first efforts in the kitchen, as a new wife and a young mother had been mostly disastrous. But she had applied herself to learning with a fury, and she had become competent enough to turn out items for Bobbi’s school functions: decorated cookies on Valentine’s Day, chocolate cakes for the bake sale. She had learned how to make lasagna and roast beef and chicken. Once she had even managed to single-handedly cook turkey dinner for Bobbi’s Brownie troop of forty-two girls.

But Rick knew none of that. He only knew that Blair, oblivious to her pride in her developing talents, had hired a cook as soon as he could afford one. Roast beef had become Beef Wellington served with Yorkshire pudding, the turkey was smoked and delicately sliced. Linda had dined—often alone—on braised Cornish game hens, slivered Sockeye salmon, soufflés so delicate it was like eating clouds. She felt the familiar cold squeeze in her chest that happened whenever her thoughts turned to her life with Blair. A single thought could ruin a whole day!

She reminded herself, desperately, that now her meals ran to peanut butter on toast with a side dish of quartered tomatoes and that was how she liked it. Then she realized Rick was offering her a morning’s respite from those haunting memories and she suddenly wanted to grab his offer with both hands, foolish as that might be in the long term.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

He gave her a tiny salute and shut the door.

She sank down on her bed. Here was the truth of it: She was, in some part of herself, relieved that her life was being railroaded, relieved that the unexpected was happening, astounded that she was feeling things she had not felt for a very long time. She felt annoyed to be sure, but she also felt alive, in the same glorious way she had felt alive this morning when the crane had lifted itself from the earth.

“Linda,” she told herself sourly. “Remember about happy. A challenge to the gods.”

She found him outside fifteen minutes later. She had opted for the cream slacks, and purple blouse, no makeup, not entirely by choice. She had not been able to find the box it was packed in. Her hair had decided not to cooperate no matter what she tried and was sticking up in rebellious spikes that would have made Bobbi roll her eyes.

Rick was inspecting her car.

“Cute,” he said, smiling at her.

She touched her hair self-consciously. Cute was not the look she had been trying for at all. Attractive-but-not-interested would have summed it up.

Then she realized he meant the car.

It was a Smart Car, the Mercedes Benz developed Micro Compact, another of her change-of-life purchases.

“Bobbi calls it a bean can,” she said, and couldn’t resist giving her tiny car an affectionate pat. “She can’t believe I got rid of the SL-500 for this.”

But Linda did not see it that way. She saw it as a step back toward herself, back toward the young woman she had once been who had cared so passionately about her world. She was sick to death of waste, Beef Wellington in the garbage being only one example. She now found excess exhausting. She’d had the dream—the huge house on the river, the staff, the cars, the jewels—and it had drained her energy like a vampire that sucked life blood. She wanted simplicity, she wanted to make her way back to who she genuinely was.

Was the big handsome guy looking at her car going to be a detour on that journey? He looked up, met her eyes. Or did he have the map of how to get where she was going?

“You like it?” he asked of the car, holding open the door of his Escalade for her.

“I love it.”

“Good for you.”

“And do you like this one?” she asked as he came around to the driver’s side and slid in beside her. The vehicle was obviously very nearly new and smelled of leather—and him.

He shrugged, started the vehicle, did up his shoulder belt. “I see it as a necessity, part of the business. I take clients to see properties. I want as safe and reliable and comfortable a ride for them as possible.”

She pondered that. He was so different from Blair, who had only been interested in how things looked, how to manipulate people’s impressions of him. A car like this, for Blair, would never have been about the comfort and safety of his clients.

How dangerous was it that she was comparing Rick to Blair?

“You know me, Linda—”

Did she? That’s what she had to keep reminding herself, that maybe she didn’t know Rick at all. She remembered those days after Blair’s death, when the truth had begun to come out…that feeling of not knowing anyone. Maybe most of all not herself.

“If I wasn’t in this business, I’d probably still be driving a motorcycle. I own one. Nothing fancy. I take it out on the odd weekend, head to Banff, or do the ranch country loop through Black Diamond.”

Alone? she wanted to ask. But she had already asked that, and it would have seemed way too interested to press further.

They chatted about mutual acquaintances, Rick updating her on the people she had turned her back on. Life, it seemed, had gone on. Babies had been born, couples had married and divorced, parents had died.

She liked the way he drove, with a complete lack of aggression, effortlessly handling the traffic, showing no impatience when things suddenly bottle-necked on Memorial Drive.

“There’s the problem,” he said.

A young woman stood in front of an older model import, the hood up, staring helplessly at the engine.

Rick signaled and pulled off the road in front of her. “I’ll just see if I can give her a hand,” he said.

He said it so casually, as if it would be unthinkable not to do the decent thing. A few minutes later, he was back in the car. His hands were dirty and he wiped them on a white handkerchief. He obviously didn’t regret his decision, even if it had meant getting his hands dirty.

“That was nice,” Linda said, aware she offered the compliment grudgingly. “To stop and help her.”

“I couldn’t do much. Called a tow truck for her.”

It was still nice. Decent. An old-fashioned virtue that she wondered about the existence of from time to time.

“She reminded me of Bobbi,” he said. “I’d want to know someone would stop and help Bobbi—or you—if you needed it.”

Linda considered her worst weakness to be the tenderness of her heart. She saved that side of herself now for one person and one person only, her daughter. Yet, just now, she was suddenly nearly swamped with a sense of tenderness.

Harshly she pulled herself up. He could have done the decent thing for her once, too. He could have helped her by simply telling her the truth about her husband’s affair. He had chosen not to.

That’s what she needed to remember when she was getting caught up in the heaven of his scent, in the astonishing green of his eyes, in the way his fingers looked on the steering wheel. She needed not to let those things—or even his chivalrous roadside stop—sway her into believing in the basic decency of the man.

She folded her arms over the place where her heart hurt and glared out the window.

Rick could not help but notice Linda changed abruptly, her thermostat going from just slightly above freezing to flash frozen in the blink of an eye.

What was he doing, anyway? Offering to help her unpack and bake cookies? He was negotiating to get what he wanted, he defended himself. That’s what he did for a living. That’s what he was good at.

But couldn’t he have thought of a trade that did not involve tangling with her quite so personally? He was weaving his life with hers, and that was quite a bit more than he had promised Bobbi he was going to do.

Damn it, he liked her.

He had always liked her. And he had always known, guiltily, she had married a man completely unworthy of her.

He sighed heavily. She glanced at him, and he was afraid she would see his soul, see the weight that was carried there, the burden.

Why had she asked him, earlier, if he was in a relationship? How many reasons could there be for a woman to ask a man that? It suddenly occurred to him that even though he and Linda had known each other since they were both young and foolish, this was brand-new territory for them. For the first time in their shared history, they were both without partners. And he’d offered to bake cookies with her! That was probably akin to a marriage proposal to a widow!

If there was one thing Rick was not doing again, it was marriage. When he’d signed the final divorce papers, he had buried the part of himself that could care that deeply, the part of himself that could be hurt that much.

The truth was, he liked being single. And not for any of the reasons a person might have thought. He did not like playing the field, he did not even particularly like dating. What he liked was freedom: to climb on that motorbike and go without having to answer to anyone or to be back at any given time. He liked being able to phone and book a trip to Taiwan or Bombay or Borneo on a whim. He liked backpacking through Mexico and South America with absolutely no plan, and he liked riding on buses crowded with chickens and mothers and babies and grandmothers. He liked to get up in the middle of the night and play chess on the Internet. Rick Chase liked being single!

The something that had sizzled through him back there at her house, watching her in her bedroom, could threaten all that, if he let it.

He wasn’t going to let it, plain and simple.

She was a good deed, not very unlike stopping to help that girl on the road back there. Linda would probably kill him if she knew. Or perhaps she’d kill him anyway. He slid her a look. He needn’t have worried about Linda having designs on him. Whatever he’d said or done back there after he’d pulled back into traffic had sealed his fate. She looked like she’d rather be sharing the car with Attila the Hun than with him.

They entered the Mount Royal area, located on a hill just south of downtown Calgary. Developed between 1904 and 1914, this neighborhood had been developed to be prestigious from the very beginning. The lots were huge, the houses gracious, the boulevards lined with mature, leafy trees. Despite some in-fill housing, the area still held the grace of old money. Houses here started at one and a half million dollars, and many sold for three times that.

They pulled up to the O’Brian house, typical of this area. It had covered porches on both floors, bay windows with original stained glass uppers, wide steps, an enormous yard. Despite the thrill of pleasure Rick felt when he saw the house, he could not stifle a groan. For the one other woman who thought he was Attila the Hun was sitting on the front porch of his house, rocking back and forth as if she owned the place.

“There’s Mildred,” he said. “Careful. She’s probably got a shotgun loaded with salt up there on that porch with her.”

Mildred, of course, looked like the quintessential little old lady, so Linda gave him a look that branded him an insensitive boor, and bailed out of the Cadillac as if it held a bad smell.

He sighed and got out of the vehicle. He shoved his hands in his pockets and trailed Linda down the walk. Mildred, her face set in battle lines, was coming down the stairs to meet them.

“Linda Starr,” he said reluctantly, “Mildred Housewell.” What he wanted to say, to Mildred, was get the hell off my property, but he didn’t want Linda to know just how mean he could be.

“I used to be an O’Brian,” Mildred said, laying claim to the house.

“How lovely,” Linda said, as if she meant it. She took both the old woman’s wrinkled hands in hers. “Would you be kind enough to show me the house?”

Mildred shot him a look loaded with satisfaction, as if she had finally been recognized. “I’d love to,” she said.

He unlocked the door. And then he was ignored as the two women explored the house together.

Mildred’s granddad had been the first owner of the house, which was built in 1912. Each of the rooms had a story. She knew the history of each of those additions and seemed terribly attached to the worst of the renovations, rooms divided, bathrooms upgraded.

The house was quite terrible inside—original hardwood covered under stained rugs, a distressing life collection of old stuff that no one wanted. There was extensive water damage under the kitchen sink and in one of the upstairs bedrooms, so the whole place smelled musty.

But the bones of the house—stained glass, gorgeous wood, high ceilings, architectural details that no one could afford anymore—were exquisite. Rick knew the Calgary market, and he knew that even if he invested a hundred thousand dollars in restoration costs he could make a lot of money on this house. And restore it to dignity at the same time.

He caught a glimpse of Linda’s face, and recognized what he saw there. Like him, Linda loved houses, plain and simple. Not the new cookie cutter ones, but ones like this, regal old ladies of nearly a hundred who had seen generations come and go, who had character in every line.

“Do you have pictures of the way it used to look?” Linda asked Mildred when they’d arrived back at the front door.

Mildred shot him a look that could only be called vindictive. “Hundreds of them.”

“Do you think I could see them?”

“For what purpose?” she asked Linda suspiciously.