Part 46 (1/2)

”You can open them.”

She peeled her hands away from her eyes. Abashed.

A man stood between her and the glare of the lowering sun, which was giving him something of a red halo.

Good G.o.d, he was tall. Suddenly she fully understood the meaning of the word ”rangy.”

He was holding her phone out to her.

”I saw something leap into the road. Is this yours? I managed not to crush it.”

The voice was amused. Solicitous. Baritone with a lovely scorched velvet edge. She'd once dated a guy who was perpetually hoa.r.s.e from smoking and enthusiastically shouting ”WOOOO!” at rock concerts. This was entirely different. This was something she could imagine whispering in her ear in the dark from the pillow next to hers.

Though of course that lovely rasp could be because he'd sucked in one too many insects while riding his motorcycle.

She saw it leaning on its kickstand behind him. A beautiful machine, somehow both sculptural and savage. A vintage Triumph.

He sounded refined and very English, an odd contrast to his helmet-smashed dark curls, the faint mauve circles of weariness under his eyes, the shadow of a beard, the battered leather jacket that hung gracefully from shoulders that went on for kilometers. He had a sort craggy, Tolkien-hero-on-a-quest face. Not pretty. Quite masculine. Compelling, in that she couldn't look away from it. Especially his eyes, deep set and very dark, and at the moment, not blinking She just nodded mutely. Like a ”looby,” a word she'd learned from Olivia's diary.

”Were you aware your phone was suicidal?” he asked gravely. On a hush. When it seemed she would never speak.

She found her voice. ”It was an accident. At least that's what I'll tell the police.”

He laughed. Thankfully.

Because that had been awfully black humor.

He glanced down at the phone and squinted at the little crystals.

”Isabel . . . Redmond?”

When he lifted his face again it was slowly, wonderingly.

Speculation written all over his features.

It was her first taste of being known.

MALCOLM HAD SLOWED when he saw something fly toward him into the road, but he was only mildly curious. It wouldn't be the first time something had been chucked at him. Back in his university days he used to rev his motorcycle just before dawn, which was when he left for cla.s.ses. Until the day his elderly neighbor Mrs. Gilly burst out her door in her bathrobe and hurled what turned out to be one of her prize hyacinth bulbs at him. It must have been the nearest projectile to hand. ”I've 'ad enough of that bleeding racket ye bleeding useless git!”

It bounced off his helmet.

And he'd hadn't a clue he was being so obnoxious. But then it almost seemed the job of men that age to be oblivious and self-absorbed, which is why he now spent a good portion of his time setting the bones and st.i.tching the wounds of men that age. Learning the hard way to be other than obnoxious was what built character.

So a tree-fondling woman hurling things at him was scarcely a blip on the radar of Malcolm's life, when one considered war, medical school, births, deaths, triumphs, failures, women (who counted as triumphs and failures), existential torment, and the granddaughter of a duke, who was expecting him for dinner, and would flay him with scathingly elegant irony if he was late again.

She was worth it, Jemima was.

Most of the time.

He managed not to run over whatever it was that had flown at him and would have been on his way.

But he glanced over his shoulder and saw a pet.i.te blonde woman next to the trees.

Her shoulders were hunched.

And she'd covered her eyes with her hands as if her heart had just been broken.

Oh, G.o.d.

And so he had to go back.

”The trouble with you, Coburn,” his friend Geoff Hawthorne once said, ”is that you always go toward the trouble, instead of away from it.”

If Malcolm had a coat of arms, this is what it would say. In Latin.

Now, however, he was beginning to feel foolish holding out the phone to a strange silent woman.

She at last met his gaze head on.

His breathing hitched as though he'd literally been pierced with a needle.

He frowned, and surely this was unchivalrous, so he arranged his face in carefully neutral planes.

He just hadn't expected to have his equilibrium roughly jostled by a pair of blue eyes this evening.

He couldn't remember ever seeing eyes quite that color before. So achingly lovely they made him restless. He felt oddly as though he needed to do something about them.

He got his breath going again. He was hardly callow. He could cope with this.

She had fair hair but her eyelashes were black and she had a disconcertingly direct gaze. Some might say a challenging gaze. She had a compact little body, eloquently curved. Her posture was perhaps too straight. As though she'd spent a lifetime braced for the next stiff wind. She looked, as a matter of fact, like a walking dare.

But the rest of her-the spirals of hair slipping from her chignon, the pale pink curve of her lower lip, the heart-shaped face, were straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting. Soft. Even dreamy. A pair of earrings in the purest dewdrop shape glittered in her ears and reflected him in miniature.

Finally her hand crept out, like a creature coaxed from a burrow, and she took the phone.

”Forgive me if this is presumptuous, but are you perhaps one of the Redmonds? Of the Redmonds of Pennyroyal Green? And so many other places now?” he asked.

Her face went slowly luminous. He watched, his breathing hitched again.

Then, like someone in command of a switch, she shut that light off.

Interesting.

”Oh, do you know the Redmonds?” Her accent was American and her casualness was studied. He suspected his answer meant a very good deal to her.

He smiled faintly. ”Everyone knows them. They're legends. You've met the trees.” He gestured. ”And felt the trees.”

She blushed.

He was immediately sorry he'd said that. He suspected she was the sort who would very much mind blus.h.i.+ng.