“I’m impressed.”

“Well, then, I must be doing well,” Celie said. “From what I hear, impressing you isn’t easy.”

“Sounds like people have been doing way too much talking altogether,” was Jacob’s comment.

“Don’t worry. I’m a scientist. I prefer to collect data on my own.”

“Are you planning to collect data on me?” Jacob asked.

Celie glanced laughingly back over her shoulder at him. “I don’t know. Do you mind?” She reached over to shut off the lights.

Their hands landed on the switch at the same time.

It was just a touch, hand to hand, but the effects ricocheted through his system. Her eyes were shadowed as she looked back at him. He could see her profile, her generous mouth. “Time to go,” she said softly.

It might, Jacob thought uneasily, be long past time.

Dear Reader,

Well, if there were ever a month that screamed for a good love story—make that six!—February would be it. So here are our Valentine’s Day gifts to you from Silhouette Special Edition. Let’s start with The Road to Reunion by Gina Wilkins, next up in her FAMILY FOUND series. When the beautiful daughter of the couple who raised him tries to get a taciturn cowboy to come home for a family reunion, Kyle Reeves is determined to turn her down. But try getting Molly Walker to take no for an answer! In Marie Ferrarella’s Husbands and Other Strangers, a woman in a boating accident finds her head injury left her with no permanent effects—except for the fact that she can’t seem to recall her husband. In the next installment of our FAMILY BUSINESS continuity, The Boss and Miss Baxter by Wendy Warren, an unemployed single mother is offered a job—not to mention a place to live for her and her children—with the grumpy, if gorgeous, man who fired her!

“Who’s Your Daddy?” is a question that takes on new meaning when a young woman learns that a rock star is her biological father, that her mother is really in love with his brother—and that she herself can’t resist her new father’s protégé. Read all about it in It Runs in the Family by Patricia Kay, the second in her CALLIE’S CORNER CAFÉ miniseries. Vermont Valentine, the conclusion to Kristin Hardy’s HOLIDAY HEARTS miniseries, tells the story of the last single Trask brother, Jacob—he’s been alone for thirty-six years. But that’s about to change, courtesy of the beautiful scientist now doing research on his property. And in Teresa Hill’s A Little Bit Engaged, a woman who’s been a bride-to-be for five years yet never saw fit to actually set a wedding date finds true love where she least expects it—with a pastor.

So keep warm, stay romantic, and we’ll see you next month….

Gail Chasan

Senior Editor

Vermont Valentine
Kristin Hardy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

KRISTIN HARDY

has always wanted to write, starting her first novel while still in grade school. Although she became a laser engineer by training, she never gave up her dream of being an author. In 2002, her first completed manuscript, My Sexiest Mistake, debuted in Harlequin’s Blaze line; it was subsequently made into a movie by the Oxygen network. The author of twelve books to date, Kristin lives in New Hampshire with her husband and collaborator. Check out her Web site at www.kristinhardy.com.

Thanks go to Dennis Souto, Mark Twery and

Kathleen Shields, of the USDA Forest Service;

George Cook of the University of Vermont; Joe Doccola

of Arborjet Inc.; and to Doug and Barbara Bragg of the

Bragg Farm (www.braggfarm.com), the inspiration

for the Trask Family Farm.

And as always, to Stephen,

a fine ambassador for the human race.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Prologue

Vermont, November 2005

“You want me to do what?” Jacob Trask stared at Kelly Christiansen, the teenaged cashier of the Trask Family Farm gift shop.

Kelly shifted and pushed a lock of her blond hair behind her ear. “You know, help out with our fundraiser. Our cheerleading squad qualified for the national championships in February but we need money for our travel. We need your help.”

Jacob reached back for his wallet, relieved. “I think I can see my way clear to—”

“No, I’m not asking for money. It’s like…” She stood hip-shot and stared at the ceiling. “…have you ever seen that cable show where those five stylists fix up a clueless straight guy?”

“No.” And he wasn’t at all sure he was following.

“Well, we’re going to do a hometown version called Teen Eye for the Eastmont Guy. Except we put up five possible makeover victims and invite everyone to vote for the one that they’d most like to see made over by donating.”

He was beginning to get it. “And?”

“And we want to get you.”

“Clueless straight guy?” he repeated dangerously.

She turned beet-red, all the way to the roots of her pale hair. “No, um, you look great, Mr. Trask. We just need someone with…” She flapped her hands at his thick beard and black ponytail. “You know, someone who’ll look really different when we cut everything off. The town paper’s going to put the before and after of the winner on the front page.”

Just what he needed, to be the town entertainment.

Kelly’s embarrassment was fading as she warmed to her subject. “We’re going to put jars with the candidates’ pictures on them in every store in town. It runs through New Year’s Day and then we count the money and announce the winner.”

Perfect. “When’s the makeover?”

“A week later. Don’t worry, we won’t do it ourselves. We’ve got stylists all set up in Montpelier. You’ll be in good hands. It’d just be some of your time.”

Time, something that was at a premium on this, the first year he was working the maple sugar farm after the death of his father. Every hourcounted and so did every dollar. “I don’t think—”

“We really want to get to the championships,” she pleaded. “This is the only way we can think of to get the money. Won’t you help us, Mr. Trask? Please?” Kelly risked another glance. Over her shoulder, Jacob’s mother, Molly Trask, watched him from the gift shop’s café, her arms crossed.

“Can’t I just donate a hundred bucks and call it good?” Jacob asked with a tinge of desperation.

“Oh, with your help we can raise a lot more than that,” Kelly said in a tone that suggested she knew she had him beat. “We polled the local storekeepers to see who they wanted to see done over and your name came up most often. You’ll get us lots of votes.”

And he could just imagine the amusement it would stir up in the maple-sugaring community.

“I think it sounds like an excellent idea,” Molly put in briskly. “It’s been almost fifteen years since I last saw your face, Jacob. It’ll be a nice change of pace.”

He didn’t need a change of pace. Steady and predictable, that was what Jacob wanted. He didn’t need one more thing to worry about.

He liked things just the way they were.

Chapter One

Vermont, January 2006

Celie Favreau muttered an impatient curse and dragged her fingers through her short brown hair. Trees, trees and more trees: beech, ash, birch, the occasional startling green of a pine, and maples, always maples, as far as the eye could see. Sugar maples, Vermont’s state tree.

She’d always adored maples. Too bad she hadn’t come to the state in the autumn, in time to see the legendary wash of glorious color. Instead, she saw the flat brown and white of a dormant winter landscape. Of course, she knew it wasn’t really dormant at all, not in late January. Already the drumbeat of spring was beginning to pulse in the trees as the sap gathered for the rise that triggered rebirth.

And already the threat was stirring.

Celie squinted at the page of directions in her hand and checked her odometer again. When she’d fled Montreal for a career in forestry, she’d done it partly out of a desire for open space and a conspicuous absence of concrete.

She hadn’t thought about the conspicuous absence of road signs.

Of course, she should have been used to it by now. In the past four years she’d been sent to hot spots in seven different states, always moving around. Living somewhere new every few months wasn’t a hardship—generally, she enjoyed the variety, she enjoyed a chance to get out of the same old rut.

These days, though, a rut didn’t seem like such a bad thing.

The sign by the building up ahead read Ray’s Feed ’n’ Read. It made her grin. She couldn’t pass that one up without a look. With luck, she could also get directions to the Institute.

When she opened the front door, the blast of heat made her forget the winter chill outside. To the left of the door stood a checkout counter, the wall behind it decorated with a lighted Napa sign and a calendar advertising cattle cake. The smile of the balding man at the register faded as he pegged her as a stranger. He gave her a sharp nod.

“Good morning,” Celie said. Beyond him lay the swept concrete floor and pallets of goods of a standard seed and grain store. To the right, she saw an incongruously cozy book nook with a dozen shelves and a few comfortable, over-stuffed chairs. It called to her irresistibly. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

He grunted.

“Is this Eastmont?” she asked, drifting to a stop in front of a display of lurid thrillers.

“Last time I checked.”

Celie fought a smile. “Is this the part where I ask directions and you say ‘Cahn’t get theah from heah?’”

His lips twitched. “Well, if it’s Eastmont, Maine you’re asking about, that’s different. We have a translation book for Mainers,” he added.

“So I see. No translation book for Vermonters?”

“None needed. We don’t have any accent. Now you, you’re not from around these parts. What’s that I hear in your voice?”

Even after all these years, the whisper of a French accent still lingered. “Canada. I grew up in Montreal.”

“Ah. The wife and I went up there about twenty years ago for an anniversary. Nice town, especially the old part.”

“My parents own a bookstore in Vieux Montréal.”

“Do tell? I thought you looked like a book person when you walked in.”

She couldn’t tell him that she’d moved away because the bookstore had suffocated her. Instead, she picked up a thriller and headed to the counter. “So what’s more popular, the feed or the read?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised. Folks around here will pick up a book, especially in winter. Shoot, we’ve got one guy buys so many books I don’t know how he gets any sugaring done.” He passed the book over the bar-code scanner.

“Maybe he’s trying to improve himself.”

He snorted. “I think Jacob would say he’s as improved as he needs to be. That’ll be $6.25,” he added, slipping the book into a plain brown bag.

Celie passed him a twenty. “I wonder if you could help me out. I’m looking for the Woodward Maple Research Institute. It’s around here, right?”

“Close enough.”

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me how close?”

He considered, making an effort to look crusty. “Oh, a couple miles as the crow flies.”

“Any chance I could get there if I weren’t a crow?” she asked, reaching out for her change.

“Oh, you’re wanting directions.”

“Assuming you can get theah from heah.”

The smile was full-fledged this time. “Well, you’ll want Bixley Road.” He rested his hands on the counter. “Turn right out of the parking lot and go until you see a sign that says Trask Farm. The second left after that is Bixley Road. You’ll know it because it heads uphill at first. You’ll pass maybe three roads and you’ll see the signs for the Institute. If you see the covered bridge, you’ll know you’ve gone too far.”

“Thank you kindly,” she said.

“You working at the Institute?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

She grinned. “Whether I find it.”

“Well, Jacob Trask, who would have thought you were such a good-looking boy under all that hair?” Muriel Anderson, the comfortable-looking clerk at Washington County Maple Supplies gave him a long look up and down. “I almost didn’t recognize you. I see those Eastmont girls took you to task.”

Those Eastmont girls had trimmed and tidied and upholstered him until he could hardly stand it. In the first stunned moments when he’d stared at his newly shorn face in the salon mirror, all he’d been able to do was calculate feverishly how long it would take to grow back. He’d been shocked at how naked being clean-shaven made him feel.

He’d grown the beard at twenty and left it on. Without it, he almost hadn’t recognized himself. In the intervening sixteen years, his face had grown more angular, the chin more stubborn, the bones pressed more tightly against the skin.

It was the face of someone else, not him. A week, he’d figured, a week to get covered up.

He hadn’t figured on noticing the mix of gray hairs among the black in the new beard as it sprouted. More, far more than he’d recalled before. There certainly weren’t any on his head. He could do without the ones down below. After all, a man was entitled to some vanity, wasn’t he? The beard, he’d decided, would stay gone.

“Hi, Jacob,” purred Eliza, Muriel’s twenty-year-old daughter, as she walked past.

Or maybe it wouldn’t, he thought uneasily, taking the fifty-pound bag of diatomaceous earth off his shoulder and setting it down on the counter. He was all for having a personal life, but the non-stop scrutiny he’d begun attracting from women felt a little weird. He liked cruising along below the radar; he had from the time he’d looked around in third grade and realized he was a head taller than any of his classmates. Cruising below the radar had gotten hard, though, all of a sudden.

“Did you hear they found some cases of maple borer over in New York?” Muriel asked as she started ringing up Jacob’s order. “They had to take down 423 trees from the heart of a sugarbush to get it all. Sixteen-inchers, most of them.”

Four-hundred-some-odd trees? Nearly ten acres, maybe more. That would be a financial hit, and one that would persist for decades. After all, sugar maples didn’t grow old enough to tap for thirty or forty years. “Are you sure they’re not exaggerating?”

“Tom Bollinger said it, and he can be trusted.” Muriel shook her head. “You should spend less time looking at books in Ray’s and more time around the stove talking to people, Jacob. You might find out something you can use.”

“I’d rather hear it from you.” He winked at her, as he had so many times over the years. And to his everlasting shock, she blushed.

“Oh, you.” She shook her head at him. “Talking isn’t nearly as hard as chopping brush.”

For Jacob talking was harder, except in the case of a handful of people, such as Muriel.

“Everything I hear tells me we’ve got something to worry about here,” Muriel continued. “Some of those Institute fellows were over at Willoughby’s sugarbush a couple of weeks ago, poking at his trees and muttering.”

Concern was immediate. Willoughby’s property adjoined his own. Like most sugar-makers, Jacob found solvency a delicate balancing act, especially now that he was the one running the farm to support his mother and himself. The prospect of losing five or ten percent of his revenue-producing trees was a sobering one. “Do they think his trees are infested?”

“They don’t know. Took some samples, said they’d get back to him.”

Jacob stuffed his change in his pocket distractedly. “If you see him, tell him I wish him luck.”

“You can tell him yourself at the county growers’ meeting tomorrow.” His noise of disgust earned a click of the tongue from Muriel. “You’ve got to show up at these things, Jacob,” she chided.

“I do show up, Muriel.”

“It’s not enough to show. You need to talk. You can’t just sit through the program. That’s not where you learn the important things.”

It was where he learned all he needed to know, Jacob thought, that and the Internet. He’d never understood people’s obsession with sitting around and yapping their fool heads off about nothing. Working he understood, and he was happy to do it. Standing around and chewing the fat in hopes he might get something more than idle speculation was a waste of time.

A couple of miles from the Feed ’n’ Read, Celie began wondering if she’d somehow missed a turn again. It wasn’t that the directions were difficult but that the term “road” was a vague one. To her, it meant pavement and a sign. To the clerk at the feed store, who knew? She’d passed several things that looked more like gravel drives. They could be part of a sugar-bush access system, assuming the maples she was driving through belonged to a sugarbush, or they could lead to someone’s house.

Or they could be her landmarks.

She was reasonably confident she’d gotten onto Bixley Road all right. She hadn’t seen a covered bridge, though, and by the directions her contact had sent her, she should have found the Institute long since. Wrong turn? Possible, but she might also have been close because she was clearly driving through tended maples, and the Institute was located in the middle of a sugarbush. More than likely, she was on the property already.

She scanned the trees automatically as she drove, a habit so established she wasn’t even aware of it.

Suddenly she saw something that had her swerving to the side of the road, pulse speeding up. It was almost too subtle to be seen, the striations of the trunk, the slight thickening at the base of the tree that set off warning bells. A closer look, she thought, hoping to God it wasn’t what it appeared to be.

Turning off the engine was barely a decision at all. This was more important than what time she arrived at the Institute. After all, she was already late enough that it wouldn’t matter one way or another.

This would.

Reaching behind the front seat of her truck, Celie pulled out her field kit.

She wore hiking boots, as was her habit. It paid to be prepared. With a job like hers, you could be tramping around a stand of trees at a moment’s notice. It was one of the things she loved about it. Oh, growing up in Montreal had been exciting, but it had been too confined, too structured. And it was too associated with the dusty, musty demands of the Cité de L’Ile, the bookstore that was her family’s legacy. Her family’s, not hers. Hers was going to be eliminating the insatiable pest that had the power to destroy the maple forests of North America.

In warmer weather, the dip she crossed to get to the trees was probably a drainage ditch. Now, it was just a running depression in the snow. Celie walked back parallel to the road. Sixteen-to eighteen-inch trunks, she estimated, moving among them. A mature, tended stand with only a handful of non-maple species. She was unfortunately going to show up at the Institute with some unwelcome news about what had every appearance of being their sugarbush.

The laughter was gone from her eyes now, replaced by focus as she knelt to inspect first one tree, then another. Up close, it was harder to identify the one that had caught her eye. She went through half a dozen before she found it and dug out her loupe. Crouched in the snow, she ignored the sound of passing vehicles on the road, ignored the cold spreading up through her toes. What mattered was the puzzle in front of her. What mattered was finding the evidence.

There were holes, though not the characteristic round holes of the maple borer but something more irregular. Were they signs of the beetle or just normal bark disturbances? Unzipping a pocket of her field kit, she pulled out a wire-thin metal spatula.

Scraping the side of the hole yielded a crumbly, dark residue. Rotted bark or the fungus that the beetle carried from tree to tree? She rubbed a bit thoughtfully between her fingers and tipped the spatula into a glass sample vial. A laboratory analysis would show.

The sudden barking of a dog made her jump and drop the vial. When she turned, shock took her breath. A man stalked toward her, looking as if he’d walked out of another century with his buckskin jacket and his coal-dark hair brushing his shoulders, a black hound at his heels. Way over six feet tall, with shoulders a couple feet wide. The bones of his face stood out strongly, as though pressed there by sheer force of personality. The dark stubble on his jaw only made him look dangerous. But it was his eyes that caught and held her attention, startlingly blue and narrowed now at her in irritation.

“You mind telling me what you’re doing in my trees?”

Jacob usually came across trespassers in the fall, when the leaf peepers were out in force. People figured that if there weren’t fences, they were free to just walk all over the place, not understanding that they compacted the soil, compressed the roots and generally compromised the health of the trees every time they walked near them.

The battered, rust-streaked mini truck he’d stopped behind boasted out-of-state plates. And the intruder crouched in front of the tree was not just looking at it but messing with it. Sightseers were damaging enough. Those, he usually chatted with and pointed toward the Trask gift shop. A kid vandalizing his trees, though, earned a different treatment. Jacob strode over with the intent of summarily tossing him off the property.

But then the kid looked up and Jacob realized the him was a her, a bright-eyed pixie of a her with a cap of curly dark hair.

Murphy barked his way up in his usual fearsome guard-dog act. It was just an act—the minute she began talking to him and rubbing his ears, he began wagging his tail, the traitor.

Of course, if she petted Jacob the way she was currently stroking Murphy, his tail might start wagging, too. “Hi, sweetie,” she crooned. “Aren’t you gorgeous? And you like that, don’t you?” She scratched Murphy’s chest until he sank down on the snow and rolled over for her to rub his belly. No dignity at all.

She offered Jacob a disarming smile. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to trespass. I thought this was Institute property. Your forestry techniques are top, really top. That’s why I thought I was on Institute land,” she chattered. And the whole while she was swiftly putting her tools away and zipping up her field kit.

A very professional-looking field kit, he realized with a frown.

“That’s why I got confused,” she continued. “I wasn’t expecting a private grower to be doing such a good job and I—”

“Who are you?” he interrupted. “What were you doing?”

“Just looking at trees. It was an honest mistake.” She stood. Propping one fist on her hip, she stared up at him. “Well, you are a big one, aren’t you?”

His impression of a pixie had been accurate, Jacob thought—she was easily a foot shorter than he was, and tiny, even wearing her bulky parka. The cold had reddened her cheeks. The humor dancing now in her sherry-brown eyes didn’t entirely hide the sharp intelligence—or purpose—that lurked there. Mostly, though, in her red jacket, she was a welcome flash of color in the drab winter backdrop, sloe-eyed, lush-mouthed and far too tempting for the middle of a work day.

She leaned down to give Murphy a last pat. “Anyway, I apologize. I didn’t intend to trespass.” Nimbly, she stepped around him and walked across the drainage ditch toward the battered red truck. “I tend to get excited about trees and sometimes I don’t think, I just stop and take a look. But I’ll get out of your way now.” She was opening the door and inside almost before he realized she was really going.

And then she was gone and only small footprints in the snow gave any evidence that she’d ever been there at all.

How was someone that beautiful allowed to just walk around in the woods sneaking up on women? Celie wondered feverishly as she drove away. Good lord, the man made her palms sweat. Not to mention the fact that he’d come across her on his land without permission. Strictly against the policy and procedure manual her boss loved to wave in front of her face. You were required to get permission from property owners before venturing in, and mistakes—however well-intentioned—weren’t allowed. Oh yes, Gavin Masterson would have a field day with the incident. Shoot, it would give him fodder for a whole week of lectures.

Assuming he found out.

She breathed a silent prayer that the hunk of a property owner—the very large hunk of a property owner—would just let the incident go. Then again, there wasn’t much she could do about it if he didn’t. He’d do what he was going to do. All she could do in return was roll with the changes, something she’d always been good at.

“Thank God,” she muttered at the sight of the Woodward Institute sign at the side of the road. At least something was finally going right.

The Institute occupied an unprepossessing two-story building faced with biscuit-colored vinyl siding and roofed in pale brown. Rising behind it she saw the high venting peak of a sugarhouse. In all directions stretched different varieties of maples.

The inhabitants of the facility didn’t stand on ceremony. When she walked through the doors, she stepped into an empty reception area separated from the central room beyond by a waist-high wooden barrier fitted with a gate and a bell. To get someone’s attention, presumably, you rang, although she supposed yelling was always an option. The central area held a few cubicles inside the perimeter of offices. A number of the doors were open, letting winter sunlight stream through.

A bearded man in a flannel shirt and jeans stood in front of a copy machine. He glanced up at her, the light glinting off his gold-rimmed glasses. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Bob Ford.”

“You’ve found him.” He collected his copies and took the original off the glass plate. “Are you Celie?”

She nodded. “Sorry I’m late. I had some adventures finding the place.”

“I’m not surprised. We really need to sit down and redo our directions. Come on in.” He waved her through the barrier and put his hand out to shake. “Pleasure to meet you. Come on, my office is over here.”

She followed him along the aisle to where he turned in a door. “Wow.” She stopped short, staring through the wide band of windows at the sugarbush beyond. “Quite a view you’ve got here.”

“A corner office.” His teeth gleamed against his neatly trimmed silver beard. “The perks of command.”

At his gesture, she sat in the client chair. “It’s gorgeous up here.”

“We like to think so. It won’t be for long if your bug gets loose, though.”

Her bug. Celie had studied the scarlet-horned maple borer since undergraduate school, shocked by the toll it had exacted in Asia. Finding a way to destroy it became a personal mission, not just the subject of her doctorate. When the beetle had emerged as a threat to the northern forests of the United States, she and her advisor, Jack Benchley, had been recruited for the science advisory panel that determined a plan of action. From there, it had been only a short step to taking the job heading up the eradication program.

And there she’d been ever since, her name synonymous with a predator of increasing destructiveness.

“Do you think you’ve got things under control in New York?”

That was the question, wasn’t it. She moved her shoulders. “We took down a lot of trees. Will it help? I don’t know. I suppose in our own way we’re just as bad as the borer.”

“You don’t destroy trees for the sake of destruction,” Ford said quietly.

“Neither do they. They’re just going about the business of life.” But they were relentless, implacable, and every time she had to take out an acre of century-old trees it made her soul sick. “Do the sugar-makers around here know that you’ve discovered evidence of the borer?”

“We’ve done some inspections but I haven’t said anything. I thought you ought to get a look around. There’s a county growers’ meeting tomorrow night. You can fill them in on the details then, let them know what to expect.”

“When I figure that out, I’ll let you know.” Through the open door, she heard the sudden sound of voices as a group of people came in from outside.

Ford glanced out toward the central room and his jaw set a fraction. “You should be aware, we’ve also got an…official from the Vermont Division of Forestry to oversee the project.”

Hairs prickled on the back of her neck. “To oversee the project? This is a federal program. I’m running it.”

“Not in my state,” said a voice from the door.

Without turning, Celie knew who it was. Dick Rumson, the old guard head of forest resource protection for the state. Undereducated and overprotected, he was a political appointee who ran roughshod over far-more-qualified people by virtue of his connections. He’d wangled a spot on the science advisory panel for the maple borer and obdurately contested the findings put forth by Celie and Benchley. Fortunately, they’d had the data to back up every assertion, whereas he’d had only bluster. Ultimately, she and Benchley had carried all the votes, with Rumson as the lone holdout. That he still bitterly resented being shown up was obvious by the set of his beaky mouth.

“Dick,” she said smoothly, rising to put out her hand. “Good to see you again.”

“We can handle this ourselves,” Rumson said brusquely, ignoring Celie to aim a stare at Bob Ford. “We don’t need federal folks in here.”

“I think it’s too early to assume that,” Celie countered, jamming her hands in her pockets. “The staff here has reason to suspect an infestation, and I think they might be right.” Calm, she reminded herself. Calmness was the best way to get to him. He wasn’t a threat, only an irritant. Everything would be twice as hard and take twice as long with him around, but it would get done. “I’ll know more about the situation after I’ve had a chance to do some inspections.” She toyed with the items in her pocket: a coin, a paperclip, a hard cylinder she didn’t remember putting in there.

“We’ve already inspected and we haven’t found anything. You might as well save your time.”

“Now, Dick,” Ford began, “you know we’ve found—”

“You university types jump to conclusions,” Rumson said contemptuously. “I’ve got a staff of experienced forestry specialists and we haven’t found anything.”

Celie touched the hard cylinder again. The sample vial, she realized. “Really?” She brought it out. “You want to tell me what this is, then?”

Rumson squinted over at it. “What’s that?”

“A sample from a bore hole.”

Rumson gave a contemptuous snort. “That’s bark.”

“Look closer,” she invited. “That greenish powder on the top might be maple-borer fungi.”

“Or it could just be bark dust.”

“You want to come into the lab with me and find out?”

“I don’t have time for this load of time-wasting horse hockey,” he barked, a sure sign he was feeling on unsteady ground.

“I’ll be happy to call you with the results,” Celie said silkily. “I’m not doing this for entertainment, Dick. If the maple borer is in your woods, we’ve got to find it and act quickly. Unless you want to lose your entire maple syrup industry and all those tourist dollars the leaf peepers bring in the fall. How many billion dollars does that add up to again?”

Rumson’s face turned a dull red. “Now just a minute here. Don’t you think you can come in and just start clearing acres. How do I know you didn’t bring that in?”

“Careful, Dick.” Somehow, Ford’s voice managed to be both mild and steely with warning.

Rumson worked his jaw a moment in silence. “I want to talk with your supervisor.”

“I’ll be happy to give you his number. We need to work together on this.”

“I saw how you cooperated at the advisory panel meeting,” he said, his expression sullen. “I want my team overseeing everything you do.”

“I’ll go you one better. Once I’ve trained them, your team can be involved in every inspection. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and very little time to do it in. We’re going to need every pair of eyeballs we can get.”

“If you think that—”

“What I think is that as head of resource protection you want what’s best for your forests, Dick. I’ve always thought that. How we work out the specifics is just details.” She gave him a friendly, open smile.

It stopped him for a long moment while he tried to work out a response. “Don’t think this is over,” he said finally, turning toward the door.

Celie resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Trust me, Dick, I know it’s only the start.”

Chapter Two

“Sorry you had to deal with that,” Ford said as Rumson slammed out. “I was going to warn you but there wasn’t time.”

Celie shrugged. “I should have expected it. Dick and I go back a ways.” And little of their history was pleasant.

Ford studied her. “Is he going to get in the way of you getting the job done?”

“I’m sure he’ll try, but he’s never managed to be more than an annoyance so far.”

“Let me see that sample.” He reached out a hand and she passed over the glass cylinder.

Ford studied it, turning it over in his hands. “You really think this is the fungus?”

“I don’t know. It’s not as green as it usually is but the trunk showed the typical thickening of the bark, and holes, although they looked like a bird had been at them. Hard to say if they were made by our boy or not.”

“Where’d you see it?”

“A sugarbush on the way here. I’m not sure where. I ran into the owner while I was out there—a big, tall guy with black hair.” And shoulders to die for but she didn’t figure he wanted to hear that.

“Jacob Trask,” Ford said. “He’s got about a hundred acres of maples adjoining the Institute.” He shook his head. “Let’s hope this is just bark in here. He lost his father last spring. That family doesn’t need any more bad news.”

He hadn’t looked like someone’s son but like some wood-master sprung out of the earth to walk the forest, with his black hair and those cheekbones and those eyes, those impossibly blue eyes. And he’d stood there staring at her until all she’d been able to do was babble like an idiot and scramble away before she just started whimpering and salivating right there in front of him.

“Well, there’s nothing for it,” Ford said, handing the sample vial back and rising. “You’ve got to do your job. Come on, I’ll show you the cube and the lab you can use.”

The cubicle was small but more than adequate for her purposes. The lab facilities were what counted. It was there that the major detective work went on, there that the test she’d developed could confirm or deny the presence of the maple borer.

Setting down her computer bag, Celie began to pull out files and hook up her computer to the network.

“About damned time you showed up to do some work,” said a voice from the doorway.

Celie whipped around to stare at the rangy blonde who leaned against the cubicle entrance. “Marce!” She jumped up and threw her arms around the newcomer. “It’s so good to see you.”

“You, too.” Marce gave her another squeeze and released her. “I thought you were coming in last night.”

“I left you a message. I got a late start yesterday so I just stopped somewhere overnight and finished up this morning.”

Marce eyed her. “Tell me it wasn’t some rest stop.”

“Why do you think I got the camper shell put on?” Celie said reasonably.

“It was one thing when we were in grad school,” Marce protested. “You’ve got a job now. You can afford to stay in a real hotel with real locks and a real bed.”

“On a government travel stipend?” Celie snorted. “Anyway, I’m going to be staying in a real bed while I’m here, aren’t I? Didn’t you tell me you got rid of your futon in the guest room?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s already a step up from my camper shell and what I’ve got back in Maryland.”

“You’re still sleeping on a futon? Celie, you’re practically thirty.”

“And I spend a day or two there a month if I’m lucky. I ought just to rent a storage unit and bunk there.”

Marce rolled her eyes. “You’re no better than you were in grad school.”

“Hey, your average storage facility is miles better than that pit we all lived in during grad school.”

“Agreed.” Marce grinned. “Anyway, it’s almost the end of the day. Why don’t we knock off early and get you settled? I made a pot of barley soup last night.”

“Still into the junk food, I see.”

“I don’t consider burgers and potato chips two of the major food groups, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well I do. So I’ve got a better idea: let’s knock off early, get me settled and scare up a pizza.”

“All right,” Marce sighed, “I can tell when I’m beat.”

“I can’t believe you. I live here for three years and I barely see anyone human. You stop in the woods to sample a tree and you stumble across a god?” Marce shook her head and bit into a slice of pepperoni pizza.

“It’s not like he was falling at my feet or anything,” Celie pointed out. “In fact, I think he was pretty pissed that I was in his trees. All I wanted to do was get out of there.”

“Before or after you decided to have his baby?”

“His baby? Maybe in a parallel universe.”

“Are you sure you didn’t see him in a parallel universe? I can’t think of anyone around here who looks like that. Trust me, I’d have remembered.”

“Bob Ford said it was someone named Jacob Trask.”

“Jacob Trask?” Marce almost dropped her pizza. “Wait a minute, the Jacob Trask I know looks like the kind of guy who trapped beaver during the Gold Rush. We can’t be talking about the same person. I mean, he’s big enough but…”

“Well, I didn’t describe him in exhaustive detail to Bob. Maybe he had it wrong.” Celie raised her beer bottle.

“Let’s hope so. Jacob Trask is not the friendliest guy around, I’ll warn you. I had to go out and help him thin his sugarbush last year. I think I got two words out of him the whole time. Of course,” she said thoughtfully, “that’s not exactly going to be a problem for you.”

Celie froze with the bottle at her lips. “Are you suggesting I talk too much?”

“Far be it from me to suggest. I mean, I do use semaphore with you when you get on a roll, but I’m sure there are times when you’re merely voluble rather than garrulous.”

“I just talk a lot when I’m nervous,” Celie protested.

“I guess you spend all your time nervous, then,” Marce replied, ducking when Celie tossed a wadded-up napkin at her.

“Serve you right if I never talk again.”

Marce snorted. “That’ll be the day.”

Jacob walked the hall of the James Woodward Elementary School, remembering the days he’d run down the tile floors to the playground at recess. He’d always hated being cooped up inside; he didn’t fit. He fitted outdoors, in the sugarbush. Going into class was something to put off until the last minute.

The passage of years had made it no different, even if he was going to a growers’ meeting now instead of a class. It still meant a room full of people and making conversation. Granted, the talk was mostly about sugaring, but still, he’d rather be at home with a book or playing guitar than standing about searching for things to say.

The auditorium echoed with the voices of sugar-makers, louder than usual. When he saw the cluster of people crowded around the coffee machine, he wondered if some kind soul had brought in free food. And then the crowd parted enough for him to see what was attracting all the attention.

Or who.

It was the pixie he’d stumbled over in his maples. She wasn’t enveloped in a parka now but stood in narrow red trousers and a shiny white blouse with a little black and white checked sweater over the top. She looked impossibly lively and bright against the muted tones of the clothing around her, seeming to take up more room than just her body would explain, as though her energy occupied physical space.

She’d stuck in his mind after he’d seen her the day before. At odd moments he’d thought of those laughing eyes, that soft, tempting mouth. And when he’d closed his own eyes and fallen into sleep, she’d drifted through his dreams, leaving him to wake feeling vaguely restless.

Now, he watched her amid the crowd, animated and quick as a butterfly. And he heard her laughter, spilling out across the room in a bubbly arpeggio that invited everyone around to join in. For a moment, he was tempted to go over. Only to find out who she was, he told himself, not to get a better look. Then again, given the fact that she’d shown up in his trees one day and at the growers’ meeting the next, it was pretty obvious she had something to do with the Institute.

And if he’d figured that out, there was no point in fighting his way through the crowd to talk with her. Not his style, first of all. Second, he had more important things to focus on than a pretty face and an inviting laugh. Like finding out the status of the situation and what, if anything, his exposure was. He’d done his Internet research, he knew the enormous risk posed by the maple borer. Now he had to find out what that meant for him, personally.

At the front of the room, Bob Ford from the Institute tapped the mike. “Okay, everybody, let’s get started.” He waited a few minutes as people drifted toward the rows of seats. “There are some contact sheets being circulated. Please fill them out and hand them in as you leave. We need to update our roster.”

Someone handed Jacob a clipboard. He pulled out a pen and bent over the form, filling out the top. When he looked at the questions, though, he frowned. Number of taps? Monoculture or mixed population forest? What the hell?

Then a scent drifted over to him, something tempting and subtle and essentially female. Something immediately distracting. He glanced up to see her sitting beside him.

And all his senses vaulted to the alert.

“Hi,” she whispered. “Is this seat taken?”

Low and quiet, with a little husk of promise beneath it. The way she might sound over drinks, in some dark, quiet bar.

Or in a bedroom, late at night.

“All yours,” he said, fighting the image.

Her smile bloomed like a summer flower.

At the podium, Ford cleared his throat. “Since I know everyone here, I’m going to skip introducing myself and get to business. As some of you may have heard, there have been scarlet-horned maple borer outbreaks in New York. It’s something we need to be concerned about here. Understand, if this thing gets a chance to spread it can take down entire forests. Entire forests, people. No maple syrup, no fall foliage, no tourist dollars, nothing.” He cleared his throat. “We’ve invited Celie Favreau of APHIS, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, to come to the Woodward Institute to take a look around the area. She’s going to tell you a little more about what we’re up against and what happens next. Celie?”

“Wish me luck,” Celie murmured, squaring her shoulders and rising to walk to the front of the room. From a distance, she looked even smaller than she had in the woods. She didn’t stand behind the podium but leaned against the table next to it, microphone in hand.

“Good evening. I’m Celie Favreau with APHIS. I head up the program to eradicate the scarlet-horned maple borer. How many know something about the beetle?” Only a sprinkling of hands went up, including Jacob’s, and she nodded. “All right, let me give you a quick rundown. The scarlet-horned maple borer is a nasty customer. It’s about half an inch long and is often mistaken for a benign bark beetle unless you look closely at the horns. Unlike the bark beetle, though, the maple borer targets live wood, not dead. And it’s particularly fond of maples.

“It bores through the bark down near the root collar and lays its eggs at the cambium, where the bark and wood interface. Over the course of a few weeks, a fertilized female can lay several dozen eggs in galleries in the first few rings of wood. When the eggs hatch, the larvae live on the cambium. I don’t need to tell any of you what that means.”

No indeed. A few dozen larvae merrily eating their way into maturity could easily girdle a tree. No fluids could travel from root to leaf. Presto, instant death. Jacob could hear the rustling around him as his fellow sugar-makers took it all in. It wasn’t news to him but he still felt the hot press of anxiety.

“Of course,” Celie continued, “there’s a bigger problem than just girdling. The maple borer carries a fungus that’s deadly to maples. Each time a borer works its way into the tree, the fungus spores rub off on the sides of the hole. At that point, the tree is both infected and infested and it’s just a matter of time. Our trap tests have shown that the mature beetle will range up to a hundred yards in search of a suitable host tree.”

There was some shifting and muttering at this. Celie scanned the room, making eye contact with each of them in turn. “So you see what we’re up against. We can’t take chances with this one. If one adult gets loose, population growth is exponential. And that means if we find any infestations, we have to take radical action to control them.”

In the audience, a craggy-faced man with a lantern jaw raised a hand. “Just how radical do you mean?”

“It’s pointless to talk about action until we’ve investigated the scope of the problem. I’ll be teaming up with forestry specialists from the Institute and the state to cover as much territory as possible before the days warm up. We can’t afford to play wait and see. The maple borer hatches early, so we’ve got to find any infestation pronto and take measures.”

“And they are?” the sugar-maker persisted.

Celie took a breath. “We have to take down any infested trees we find, plus a buffer circle of at least a hundred and fifty yards in radius around that host tree. The felled trees have to be cut up, chipped and burned immediately, and the stumps ground down to eight inches below ground level.”

An angry buzz erupted in the room. The men who’d been charmed by her weren’t charmed any more. “You’re talking about clearing acres,” a burly redhead protested.

“Let’s not get ahead of things,” she said calmly. “We don’t even know what we’re dealing with, yet. In Michigan, they called me in and I didn’t find a sign of infestation.”

“And in New York, you cut down half the state,” the craggy-faced man retorted.

For an instant, Jacob thought, she looked like she didn’t know whether to sigh or laugh. Instead, she merely shook her head. “We took out a total of twelve hundred trees, spread across three different sugarbushes and a town common. I don’t take felling trees lightly.” She looked around the room. “But I’ve seen what the maple borer can do and I’m ready to do everything in my power to stop it. If there’s infestation here, all of your trees are at risk. All of them. I hope you’ll cooperate with me to stop it.”

“You’re not here for your health. You’re here because you know there’s a problem,” the redhead accused.

She hesitated and locked eyes with Jacob. She’d been crouched at the foot of his tree, he remembered, and felt the clutch of foreboding in his gut. “I’ve seen early signs that might be cause for concern. If we take care of things quickly, before the weather warms up, we can get a handle on it. If anything slows that down, well, this time next year your sugar-bushes are going to look very different.” She let out a breath. “Next question?”

The session dragged on nearly an hour before Celie finally passed around handouts on the maple borer. Jacob waited impatiently for the meeting to end. He didn’t need handouts. He didn’t need to hear any more questions. What he needed was to talk to Celie Favreau.

Alone.

The knot around her was as thick as it had been before the meeting. But Jacob was nothing if not patient. One by one, the sugar-makers drifted off, and finally she stood on the low stage, stacking up the last of the literature she’d brought along.

“I thought it went well,” Bob Ford was saying as Jacob walked up.

“We got the information out there, anyway. What happens now will depend on what we find.”

“And how the lab tests turn out.”

Lab tests? Jacob’s eyes narrowed. He stepped forward to stop just below the steps. “May I speak with you a moment?”

Celie glanced over at him, then at Bob Ford. “Why don’t you go on ahead, Bob? I’ll take care of this.”

“You want me to take that back to the Institute?” He nodded at the box of remaining leaflets and flyers.

“I’ll do it,” Celie said.

He nodded “I’ll lock the doors on my way out. Just make sure the lights are off and things are shut up when you leave.” He shook hands with them both and headed up the aisle.

Jacob looked at Celie. For the first time, they were eye to eye. Her gaze was speculative. She studied him, in fact, as though he were a puzzle that interested her.

Jacob shifted and nodded at the box of literature. “I can get that for you.” Action always came more easily to him than standing around. Or speaking.

“Thanks.” Celie watched him climb onto the low stage and pick up the heavy box. “So what do you think?”

“Of the talk?” Or of her? There was something about her, he thought, something appealing, maybe irresistible.

But that wasn’t why he was here.

“You were in my trees yesterday,” he said abruptly, knowing no other way than to be direct. “Were you inspecting them?”

The glint of humor in her eyes disappeared. “Not officially, no. I thought I was on Institute property. Something just caught my eye and I wanted a better look.”

“At what?”

Her pause was too deliberate. It made him uneasy. “Something interesting about the trunk.”

He felt the flare of impatience. “Don’t dance around the question. You were bent over one of my maples with a field kit when I walked up. What was that about?”

“Maybe nothing. I noticed the tree as I was driving by. Some things that are characteristic of an infested tree,” she elaborated. “I just wanted to take a closer look, but I didn’t realize it was your land.”

“I don’t give a damn about trespassing. I want to know what you saw.”

“I’m not sure.” She looked at him, her eyes troubled. “The bore holes were the right size but the wrong shape. I thought the sample I got out of the hole contained fungus but the test I did showed up negative.”

“Negative?” Relief made him lightheaded. “So it’s clear?”

“I’ll do a more comprehensive test tomorrow, once I get my lab set up. Of course, your dog knocked my vial into the snow before I got the top on, so the results aren’t iron-clad.”

“Murph can be a little overenthusiastic sometimes.”

“I’ll say. What is he, the love child of a lab and a Shetland pony?”

Jacob grinned. “Lab, great Dane and a little bloodhound thrown in for good measure, or so the vet tells me.”

“An interesting background beats a pedigree any time.”

“We’re nothing if not interesting around here.”

“I bet you are.” Killer smile, Celie thought as they stepped off the stage. A mouth that begged to be nibbled on and she was just the nibbler to do it. But it was the smile that lightened up that sober face, that made him approachable. His nose looked as though it had lost a battle once with something bigger or harder, but the resultant bump only made him look more interestingly rugged.

There was a strength to him, not just height and width of shoulder but some quality she couldn’t name. Certainty of self, perhaps. It was what had driven her to seek him out when she could have wandered to a seat by any of the men she’d been chatting with. They didn’t intrigue her.

Jacob Trask did.

They started up the aisle. “Speaking of interesting,” she said, “I’ve never seen a Feed ’n’ Read before.”

“I guess you’ve been by Ray’s. One of my favorite places.”

“So he was telling me.”

“He was telling you?” Jacob watched her walk ahead of him, the red trousers shifting in some very intriguing ways.

“He mentioned you.”

“If you got Ray talking, you’re good.” Then again, she’d somehow managed to get him talking, too.

“I got the impression he likes to do nothing but.”

“Not to strangers. Ray usually barks at strangers, if he talks to them at all.

“I guess I charmed him.”

Like she was charming him, Jacob thought. “I’m impressed.”

“Well, then I must be doing well. From what I hear, impressing you isn’t easy.”

“Sounds like people have been doing way too much talking, altogether.”

“Don’t worry,” she said as they neared the open doorway. “I’m a scientist. I prefer to collect data on my own.”

“Are you planning to collect data on me?” he asked, amused.

She glanced laughingly back over her shoulder at him. “I don’t know. Do you mind?” She started out the open door and then reached back in to shut off the lights.

Their hands landed on the switch at the same time.

It was just a touch, hand to hand, but the effects ricocheted crazily through his system. Vivid awareness of her fingers, cool and soft and tangled with his. For an instant, he felt her tense in reaction, then relax. It took him a moment longer than it should have to move his hand.

When he snapped the switch down, it enveloped them in a darkness broken only by the hallway light coming through the open door.

Her eyes were shadowed as she looked back in at him. He could see her profile, the quick tilt of her nose, the generous mouth. “Time to go.”

It might, Jacob thought uneasily, be long past time.

Chapter Three

Painted maple leaves in a blaze of autumn colors adorned the white sign at the side of the road. “Trask Family Farm and Sugarhouse,” read the forest-green letters. The long, low clapboard building beyond was presumably the gift shop; at the far end, the shingled roof jumped up abruptly to the sugarhouse vent.

Celie turned into the parking lot, navigating the mixture of rolled gravel and snow to nose her truck against the post-and-rail perimeter fence. She’d come on a whim, driven by the impulse to see Jacob Trask again. And Celie generally went with her impulses. Granted, it was a Saturday morning, a time most people took off, but she had a feeling Jacob Trask didn’t.

She already knew he wasn’t like most people.

At the start of the gravel path that led from parking lot to gift shop stood a tall, thick post with a galvanized sap bucket hanging from it, a little peaked hood snapped in place. Smart people, the Trasks. A person could make a living from selling maple syrup purely to distributors but a business that catered to both the wholesale and retail trade benefited from higher margins and greater diversity. Little touches like the bucket gave the feel of sap collecting. People would stop out of curiosity, stop for the novelty. They’d stay around to buy.

Besides, it was charming.

She climbed the steps to the broad veranda that ran along the front of the building. Of course, the incongruous part of the setup was the idea of gruff Jacob Trask at a cash register selling maple syrup in little metal log-cabin-shaped containers. Or serving up maple ice cream, she thought with a smile as she glanced at the cone-shaped sign beside the door.

Then she stepped inside and all she could think was that it was a shame she hadn’t been in the store a few weeks before when she’d been feverishly trying to finish her Christmas shopping. Her mother would have loved the quilted potholders and matching dish towels. Her sister the gourmet would have been even happier with the jars of lemon curd. She could have given her little nephew a plush stuffed moose and her father the illustrated history of the Green Mountains. And maybe bought one of the gilded maple leaf Christmas ornaments for herself.

The shop itself was a delight with walls and shelves of pine, floors of wide-planked hardwood, polished until they gleamed. Through an archway, Celie could see a bright room furnished with picnic tables. There, presumably, the currently absent staff served up maple ice cream and other snacks.

A hollow-sounding thump had her jumping. She turned to look around the deserted shop. “Hello?” She stepped forward and glanced into the café. Nope, no one there, either. Which was strange. Granted, it was just opening time and hers was the only car in the lot, but still…

The thump sounded again, this time, closer at hand. Scanning the shop, Celie suddenly saw what looked like a closet door shake in time with another thump. Before her astounded eyes, the doorknob rattled and rotated just a bit. It was either a poltergeist or…

A very human voice spat out a succinct curse. “Where the hell is a third hand when you need one?” someone demanded.

Fighting a smile, Celie reached out for the handle.

And opened the door, only to see a stack of teetering cardboard boxes, and stairs leading down into what was, presumably, a basement. “Bless your heart,” a voice said from behind the stack and stepped forward.

The cardboard ziggurat wavered, in imminent peril of falling. Celie reached out a hand. “If you don’t stop, you’re going to lose them.” Reaching out, she took the top two cases—foam cups and paper napkins, if the labels were to be believed—and like magic, the head and shoulders of a silver-haired woman appeared from behind them. A woman with a vaguely familiar face.

“Just set them on the floor there,” she directed.

“No way. Let’s just take them in where they go. The café?”

“Good guess.”

Celie headed across the gift shop and under the arch to the cheerful café with its red-and-white-covered picnic tables. At the entrance to the ice-cream counter, she set down her load. “Here all right?”

“More than. You’re a dear.” The woman set down the boxes. “I’m Molly Trask,” she said, holding out her hand.

Of course. Celie could see the resemblance now that she looked, the high cheekbones, the arch of the eyes. Instead of black, Molly Trask’s hair was silver, a chin-length bob that curved along her jaw and made her eyes look even bluer.

“Celie Favreau, at your service.”

“More than you know. One of these days I’m going to get that door fixed. It was supposed to stay ajar.”

“It probably got sucked shut when I came in,” Celie said apologetically.

“Not your fault. I should learn to take more than one trip. I just hate taking the time.”

Celie winked. “I’m the same way. You know those plastic grocery bags with the looped handles? I’ve been known to hang five or six of them on each hand just to get everything in the house all at once.”

Molly laughed. “Separated at birth?”

“Could be.”

They grinned at each other.

“Can I help you with anything?” Molly asked.

“Actually, that was going to be my question to you. Need anything else brought up?”

“Nothing I can’t get later.”

Celie shook her head. “Separated at birth, remember?”

“Customers aren’t supposed to help out.”

“Well, here’s the thing. I’m not a customer. I actually work for the government, so I really work for you.”

“Ah, so you’re the one.”

The one? “What do you mean?”

“The one who spoke at the meeting last night. Jacob filled me in a little. He left a few things out, though,” she said, looking Celie up and down.

Celie stared at her, nonplussed. Somehow, she had a feeling Molly wasn’t talking about the maple borer. “Well, I don’t…I’d be happy to send you some information.”

“Clearly I’m missing out on all kinds of interesting information at these meetings,” Molly said, with what might just have been speculative amusement.

Before Celie could decide, the door to the sugarhouse opened abruptly and she heard Jacob’s voice. “Hey Ma, did you still want me to bring up—” He stopped short, staring at Celie.

He wore jeans and a blue plaid shirt hanging open over a gray T-shirt. His hair was tousled, as though he’d had his hands in it, his jaw dark with the previous day’s growth of beard.

Jesus, he was a gorgeous man.

Celie smiled at him. “Hello.”

Jacob didn’t like being caught flatfooted. He liked things to be predictable, consistent. So why was it that the first emotion he felt after surprise at seeing Celie was pleasure? That, and the desire to be able one of these days to look his fill at her. “What brings you here?”

Celie rummaged in her pocket. “Is that dog of yours around?”

“Murph?”

“The Shetland pony.”

Molly smothered a snort of laughter.

“He’s at my house. We don’t let him in the sugarhouse, and it’s too cold for him to be out back this time of year.”

Celie looked disappointed. “I brought him some cookies.”

“Cookies?”

“Doggy biscuits. I stopped by Ray’s this morning and he was running a special.”

“Well, you’ve just earned Murphy’s lifetime devotion,” Molly observed.

It was a small thing, a goofy thing, but Jacob found himself charmed. They always said the first way to a woman’s heart was through her children. What did it say about him that he was so ridiculously tickled at her kindness to his dog?

“Why don’t you take her back to the house so she can give them to Murphy herself?” Molly asked casually.

Jacob blinked. “What about those boxes?”

“Oh, I got the important ones. Celie helped me.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised. She had that way about her. Two seconds after ‘hello,’ she somehow seemed to become everyone’s best friend.

The front door opened and a trio of women came in, chattering and unbuttoning their coats. “Okay, out.” Molly made shooing motions. “I’ve got customers. Take Celie to see the Shetland pony. Unless you want to start giving tours,” she added.

One of the women turned to him. “Oh! You offer tours?”

“Let’s go say hi to Murph,” Jacob said hastily.

“I was wondering how you fitted into the gift-shop thing,” Celie said as they stepped out into the crisp January air.

“I don’t. That’s Ma’s territory. My job is sugar-making.”

“Selling potholders not your thing?”

Jacob slipped on his buckskin jacket. “Buddying up to anyone who walks through the door isn’t my thing.”

“Ah. Doesn’t work with your image.”

He gave her a narrow-eyed glance. “I don’t have an image.”

“Sure you do. Town curmudgeon, everybody tells me. I think you like it. Of course, you’re not very good at staying in character, it seems to me. So I’m thinking maybe it’s actually all just a put-on for the gullible.”

He glowered at her. “Maybe I should just take those biscuits myself.”

“No way.” She shoved the bag deep into her pocket. “I bought them, I get the doggy devotion. So where’s your house?”

“Oh, a half mile or so away, down that road.” He gestured toward a curving path that led through the trees. “Close enough to walk, if you don’t mind the cold.”

Celie slipped on her gloves. “I like being outside. Besides, I get to look at trees.”

“For signs of the scarlet-horned maple borer?”

“No, I just like looking at trees.”

“Do you ever stop?”

She gave him a sidelong glance. “No. Do you?”

“Got me there,” he admitted.

The dry snow squeaked under their boots as they walked. There was something timeless and calm about the columns of the trees rising around them, sugar maples, red maples, the occasional ash, birch or beech. A light dusting of snow the night before had frosted all the branches so that the whole world felt wrapped in a white muffler.

“So why do you live out on your own in the woods instead of in that big farmhouse? Does your aversion to people extend to your mother?” She gestured at the three-story white clapboard house with its curving porch and carved posts.

“That’s the Trask family house.”

“Home to millions of Trasks everywhere?”

“Enough of them,” he said shortly.

“Relax, I was only teasing.” She pushed at his shoulder a little. “I think it sounds nice.”

“It’s where I grew up but I wanted my own space. Ma’s the only one living there now.”

“So what do you have, a hermit’s cave in the woods?”

He gave her an amused look. “See? My reputation’s useful.”

“Like I said, I think your reputation is a pose. You’ve got everyone fooled into thinking you’re this crusty fellow, when all you really want is not to be bugged by boring people. Isn’t that right? Not that I blame you, of course.”

He blinked at her. “Shouldn’t I be on the couch for this, doctor?”

Celie laughed. “Sorry. I talk too much sometimes. And it’s not always what people want to hear.”

“It’s easy to tell people what they want to hear. Being straight takes something more.”

“I’m so glad you approve.” Her lips twitched. “So you don’t live in a hermit’s hut. Just where do you live?”

“There’s another place out here. My great grandfather’s brother wanted to get away from the family house, too. He built a home of his own.”

Celie stared at him. “Your great grandfather’s brother? How long have you people owned this place, anyway?”

“Since 1870. My great-great-grandfather, Hiram Trask, bought it when he came home from the Civil War.”

“What did he do, pick up a few souvenirs on his way home?”

“He went to war in the place of a mill-owner’s son from Burlington. In trade, he got a nice chunk of change. He’d planned to go to Europe on it, or maybe South America.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Little jaunts like Antietam kind of take it out of a man. Hiram came home, bought up as many acres of maples as he could and just hunkered down. I guess he figured he’d seen as much of the outside world as he needed.”

“So you come by it honestly,” she commented, straying to the edge of the road to brush her fingers over the smooth, bright trunk of a birch.

“I suppose. In every generation there’s been a Trask who keeps to himself.”

“And in every generation has there been a Trask who’s known as the town grump?”

His lips twitched. “Maybe.”

“Then I guess you fit right in. So how do you know so much about them?”

“We’ve got all their journals in the main house. I went through them the year I was sixteen.”

“Summer reading project?”

He shrugged. “I thought I should know more about where I came from.”

She could imagine them coming to life on pages covered in painstaking copperplate. Not distant ancestors but sons and brothers, fathers and uncles, real men with real desires and torments. Somehow, it didn’t seem stifling the way her family’s dusty history did. It felt warm, grounded. Maybe it was part of what made Jacob seem so sure of who he was. “So was the land already in sugar maples when Hiram bought the place?”

“Some. He bought sections of two or three different sugarbushes and tied them all together with open land that he planted himself. He kind of made a life’s work of it.”

She could imagine him, coming back from chaos and carnage to patiently build an ordered retreat from the world, a place of safety and security, a place where knowledge and planning could take the place of luck and survival.

“The trees look like they were laid out by someone who knew what he was doing.”

“Hiram had a whole journal just on maple-farming techniques. Pages of it. He read everything he could get his hands on. Sent his son, Ethan, to school for it.”

“The one who built your house?”

“No, that was his brother, Isaac, who stayed on the farm.”

“By choice or because he had to?”

“A little of both. Education wasn’t cheap back then but his journals sound like he was happiest keeping to himself. He courted a woman for years but she wound up marrying a guy from Boston. Didn’t like the idea of living out in the middle of nowhere, I guess.”

“I imagine it’s an acquired taste,” Celie agreed.

He turned to look at her and his deep-blue gaze jolted her system. “I don’t know that you can acquire the ability to be happy in yourself. You’ve either got it or you don’t.” They rounded a curve and started into a long avenue of oak trees that led to Jacob’s home.

And Celie caught her breath.

She’d expected a small clapboard farmhouse, not this three story Victorian edifice, all gables and gingerbread and carved pillars and railings. The paint job alone was a work of art, a half dozen tones of umber and green and gold that both stood out and melded with the landscape around it. “My God, he built this himself?”

Jacob nodded. “It took him eight years, working on it every minute he wasn’t in the sugarbush. He built it for the woman he hoped would be his wife. She was from Montpelier.” They started down the tree-lined drive.

Celie’s brow furrowed. “Montpelier? That was a long way to go back then. How did they meet?”

“She came to a maple-sugar-on-snow party at the farm. Isaac fell for her hard. Sarah Jane Embree. I think she was fifteen, he was twenty-four. Her father was a lawyer, big in the Montpelier social set.”

The oaks rose to either side, the bare branches curving over their heads. In summer, she thought, they would make a full canopy, leafy-green and glorious. “How could he have courted her? I’d think the father would have kept a farmer as far away from his daughter as possible.”

“Don’t forget, though, Isaac had half of a very prosperous farm coming to him. Embree hedged his bets. He told Isaac he could court Sarah Jane with the intention of marriage, but that her husband had to be able to keep her in the style she deserved as an Embree. Isaac underlined that part in his journal. The style she deserved. The best of everything.”

“Including a mansion.”

Jacob nodded. “That didn’t stop Isaac, though. He just put his head down and started building. Spent every penny he had on materials—marble sinks, crystal door knobs, Tiffany stained-glass windows. He even sold off some of his part of the sugarbush to finance it. He figured if he just worked hard enough, just persisted, he’d win her hand.”

“It didn’t work, though.”

“No. He had it just about finished by 1906—mahogany furniture, running water, even electrical power from a generator out back. She’d gotten engaged by then to her brother’s school friend. No way a house in the woods could compete with Beacon Hill. I still have the ring he bought her.”

“It must have shattered him,” Celie murmured, looking up at the house, lonely even in its splendor.

“He never got over it. Never looked at another woman.”

“She didn’t care for him at all, did she?”

Jacob shook his head. “Isaac thought they had an understanding. The Embrees were just hedging their bets. I tracked down their papers the summer I read the journals. Edwin didn’t even mention Isaac. Sarah Jane’s had a few entries, mostly about how he was always pestering her with plans for the house when all she cared about was the social scene. I don’t think she ever even saw the place.”

“It was a quest. Slay the dragon and you get the maiden.”

“Kind of like that. But when he completed his task, the maiden was gone. Not even his family knew what he was building out here. He kept it a secret.”

“He was obsessed.”

“He was in love,” Jacob said simply.

It seemed unbearably sad to her. “She wasn’t for him.”

“Didn’t matter. He really believed if he just worked hard enough, offered her enough, he could win her.”

“But a house can’t do that. Things can’t do that. All it takes is the right person, if they really love you.” She glanced at Jacob. And she felt a sudden dizziness, as though the world had tilted on its axis. Their gazes met and tangled and then his eyes were all she could see, endlessly blue, endlessly deep, like pools she might fall into, sinking forever into him.

A furious barking broke the spell. With a shake of her head, Celie turned to see Murphy barreling toward them down the aisle of trees. She fell upon him in relief, the strange moment ended. “Who’s this? Who’s this? Who’s this doggie?” she asked, ruffling his neck fur while he leapt around her deliriously.

“Down, Murph,” Jacob said and Murphy subsided, tail wagging so furiously his whole body shook with it.

“Look, Murph, it’s a cookie. I’ve brought you a cookie.” Celie brought the baggie of dog biscuits out of her pocket. “Here’s a cookie for you, here’s a cookie for this good dog.” She held it up. “Do you think if I give it to you your dad will let me look at the inside of the house?”

Murphy barked.

Celie looked at Jacob, laughter in her eyes. “I’d say that’s a yes. What do you say, daddio?”

And he, this generation’s Trask loner, merely nodded.

Isaac Trask had been far more than just a maple-sugar-maker, Celie thought in the glorious entrance hall of the house. He’d had an architect’s sense of design combined with a builder’s meticulousness. The golden oak floors gleamed, the ceilings soared a good ten feet overhead. Sunlight streamed in through the beveled glass oval that lay in the center of the front door.

“My God, this is gorgeous,” she murmured.

“Isaac went ahead and lived in it even without Sarah Jane. He died pretty young—basically drank himself to death.”

How could something so beautiful come from tragedy? “It’s incredible, like something you’d see in Newport, Rhode Island. Tell me it didn’t just stay vacant.”

“Oh, different people from the family lived in it for a few years here and there. Never for long, though.”

“Bad karma?” she asked, but it didn’t feel forbidding. It seemed like a house that would welcome life and warmth.

“It was too remote, I think, even when we tried to rent it. Hard to find people who want to be so isolated.”

“So what happened?” She trailed her fingers over the antique wallpaper and turned to him. “Did it just sit empty?”

“More or less. My dad and my grandfather did enough to keep it from falling apart, anyway. You know, replacing windows and that. When I read Isaac’s journals, it really got to me. After that, I did some stuff here and there when I got the chance. I started in earnest when I moved in.”

“When was that?”

“About seventeen years ago. My parents wouldn’t let me until I’d turned eighteen, and then I wound up spending about a year working on major structural stuff first. Some of the subflooring had rotted out, and the porch pillars. Once I got that out of the way, it just came down to a lot of interior detail work.”

“Which you excel at,” she murmured, trailing her fingers over the gleaming moldings around the French doors leading to the living room. “May I?” she asked, tipping her head.

“Sure.”

The carpet was Persian and swirled in a complicated pattern of geometric wines and blues. An ornate plaster ceiling medallion surrounded the chain that held up the bronze-and-crystal light fixture. And the walls were almost entirely lined in bookshelves, bookshelves groaning with books. Some were leather-bound and perhaps dated back to Isaac’s time; mostly, the shelves were filled with the splashy color of paperbacks. She’d understood from Ray that Jacob read; she’d had no idea how much.

“Were the bookshelves Isaac’s idea?”

Jacob shifted his feet a little. “No, those were mine.”

“A house like this ought to have a library.”

“Yeah, but I like my books close at hand.”

Actually, the room felt like a library with its shelves and green lamps and its leather couches and chairs. And then she was surprised again, because next to the chair that faced the fireplace and sat under a brass floor lamp, the chair that was obviously Jacob’s favorite sat…

“You play guitar?” She sat down to admire the satiny wood of the well-worn and perfectly cared for acoustic.

He looked suddenly trapped. “Yeah, some.”

“How long have you played?”

“Oh, I don’t know, since I was about eleven, I think.”

She looked at him in amusement. “A little, he says? Twenty-five years? What do you play?”

“Oh, different stuff,” he said, drifting toward the door. “Old Creedence, roots music, some classical, some blues.”

He was uncomfortable, she realized. Solid, certain Jacob Trask was embarrassed. There was something about it that tugged at her heart. “Well, don’t walk away, play something for me.”

He stopped and stared at her. “I don’t play for people.”

“You must have played for your family, at least.”

He shifted uneasily. “It’s mostly just for me.”

“So Murph’s the only one who’s gotten a concert?”

Hearing his name, Murphy raised his head and rose from his cushion in the corner.

Jacob played with the dog’s ears absently. “Playing for other people turns it into something else. It’s not about impressing people for me. It’s just something I like to do.”

“How about if I promise not to be impressed?” Celie offered.

That had him fighting a smile. “Later,” he said, walking to the door.

“Is there going to be a later?”

His glance brought warmth to her cheeks. “We’ll see.”

The light was fading to dusk. The living room was empty but for Jacob and Murphy. The soft and somehow plaintive strains of an Appalachian finger-picking piece he’d found sounded through the room. He stopped and frowned. Play for me, she’d said. It was absurd for him to feel bashful at the idea. He’d probably sounded more than a little eccentric when he’d told her he hadn’t even played for his family. Not that he should care what Celie Favreau thought of him.

But he was lying to himself if he tried to pretend he didn’t.

Only two days had passed since he’d found her crouched at the base of one of his maples. Only two days that she’d been lurking in his mind, dancing through his thoughts. Somehow it felt as though it had been much longer. It wasn’t as though he’d never been with a woman. He knew what it was to want, he knew what it was to bury himself in the warmth and softness of a woman he cared about.

And he knew what it was to watch them leave. There was little to keep a woman in Eastmont. Most of them wanted more, most of them wanted more of him than he was willing to give. Somehow, he was never ready, perhaps because he always saw them walking away, just as Sarah Jane had walked away from Isaac.

Idly, he began playing a slow blues riff.

It was the tag end of January and the pace of his life was beginning to pick up. Winter might be the dormant season for most, but for a sugar-maker, it was when things got exciting. Suddenly, there was more work to be done than hours to do it. He didn’t have time for a bright-eyed woman with a disconcerting tendency to get him talking. So what if she made him laugh? So what if she crept into his dreams?

He knew how it went, get involved, see a woman a few times and suddenly there were obligations. Suddenly he’d find himself defending the way he lived, defending who he was. Living with Murph, he didn’t have that problem. Alone was the way he was comfortable. Alone was the way he wanted to be.

Especially this year, of all years, when it felt as if everything was piled high on his shoulders. He’d always figured he was strong enough to take on anything that came along, but he was beginning to wonder. There was so much at stake, so much to lose if he screwed up. And now with this maple borer thing, who knew what the future might look like?

Without realizing it, he slipped into a slow, mournful gospel song. When the phone rang, he let it. The answering machine clicked and he heard himself. “It’s me. Leave a message.”

“It’s Gabe. Pick up the phone.” He heard his youngest brother’s voice. “Don’t think I don’t know you’re there. Hey Murph, you there?” Murphy gave a low whine. “Pick up the phone, will ya?”

Murphy barked and with a grin, Jacob reached out for the receiver. “What do you want?”

“I knew you were there.”

“So why are you bugging me?”

“I didn’t have anything better to do.”

“You get in a fight with Hadley?”

“Naw, she adores me. Can’t stop hanging all over me an—ow,” he complained to someone in the background. “That hurt.”

“Sounds like some pretty energetic hanging,” Jacob observed.

“Don’t let it fool you, she’s crazy about me,” Gabe confided. “So what’s going on out there? You left a message?”

Jacob’s grin faded. “Some things you ought to know about. We might have trouble.”

“Trouble how?” Gabe asked sharply.

“Some USDA plant health people are poking around looking for a bug that targets maple trees.”

“Targets as in kills them?”

“Yep. Hides in the bark, girdles them and transmits a fungus so that if the chewing doesn’t kill them, the fungus will. Reproduces quickly.”

“Sounds like a nasty customer.”

Jacob reached for his coffee. “It is.”

“Has it got any of ours?”

“They don’t know. They’ll be looking.” And Celie popped immediately to mind. He frowned. “If they find it, they could wind up taking down a lot of trees.”

“How many, a lot?”

“Like acres.”

Gabe digested this for a moment. “That would suck. What would that do to your income?”

“Do the math. We’ve got a hundred acres right now, forty-five-hundred-some-odd taps. Knock that down by ten percent, it’s going to hurt.”

“Will you and Ma still be okay?”

“I assume so.” Though the uncertainty had been a constant, nagging worry ever since the maple borer situation had turned serious. “It’ll cut the shares for you and Nick, though.”

Gabe snorted. “Like we care. I’ve got a job, Jacob, and so does Nick. You’re the one working your ass off on the farm. You’re the one who should get any money, you and Ma.”

“But it’s your land, too.” And he felt the responsibility every single day.

“As long as I can come and go to the farm as I please, I’ve got what I want. So with this bug thing, you worried?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what to think yet.”

There was a pause. “You feeling all right?”

“Yeah, fine. Why?”

“Because you’ve never in your life been short of an opinion. I thought maybe you were sick or something.”

“You’re a regular laugh riot, you know that?”

“Yeah,” Gabe said modestly. “Seriously, though, what’s up?”

“Don’t know yet. Celie’s coming out on Monday with her team to look the place over. I assume we’ll know more once we see what they find.”

“And then you’ll know if you’re going to lose trees?”

“I’ll know if we’re going to lose trees. They belong to all of us, Gabe. I don’t forget that.”

“And we appreciate it,” Gabe said. “So how’s Ma taking all this?”

“She seems okay. I haven’t gone into huge detail just because we don’t know enough yet and I don’t see the point in getting panicked. Anyway, I think she’s distracted right now.”

“Yeah,” Gabe said quietly. “We’re getting close to a year.”

“Month after next.” This time a year before, Adam Trask had still been around, striding through the maples with his rogue’s grin. This time a year before, Jacob had still had a father and business partner, and Molly had had a husband. And then one morning, out in the sugarbush, everything had changed….

“How’s she doing?”

“A little rocky, when she thinks no one’s looking.” He stared moodily at his coffee. “I caught her crying one day.”

“Crying?” Gabe echoed uneasily.

“Yeah.” Easily one of the most unsettling experiences of his life. “You know Ma, she was fine two minutes later but things are hard for her right now.”

“She needs us around,” Gabe said, in answer to his brother’s unspoken comment.

“Yeah.”

“Listen, I’ve got business in Montpelier next week. I figured I’d drop in at the end of the day, maybe for dinner.”

Trust Gabe to come through. “I think she’d like that. Bring Hadley, if you can.”

“She won’t be around. She’s got to go to New York for the week to close on some corporate business and see about her condo.”

“Oh yeah? She selling?”

“The place in New York, anyway. She’s got a flat out here in the manager’s house at the hotel.”

“The same manager’s house you live in?” Jacob asked innocently.

“Might be.”

“So what’s hotel ownership going to say to the two of you shacking up together?”

“Considering she’s hotel ownership, not a whole lot. Besides, we’re not shacking up.”

“No?”

“Nope. She’s still got her flat, I’ve still got mine.”

Jacob stretched, amused. “You losing your moves, little brother?”

“I’ve learned to be patient. When it’s right, we’ll know.”

“Good luck on that.”

“Yeah.” Gabe paused a moment. “So who’s this Celie?”

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