The Man Behind The Mask - Barbara Hannay Mills & Boon By Request

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was the truth he had been doing his best to outrun for two and a half years. It was just as Luke had said. When it really counted?

      A man was powerless.

      And there was no feeling in the world quite as bad as that one.

      Luke came back down the stairs. He looked as if he had been crying, and Brendan almost envied him those tears, the release they brought from the inner storm.

      The boy’s face was white and strained with the manful effort of trying not to let everything he was feeling show. He had Charlie tucked under his arm, an unwilling football.

      “I’m going to fix him! And I’m going to pay you back your money, too!” Luke stomped back up the stairs.

      Nora bit her lip, sent Brendan an imploring look.

      He shrugged. He wanted to be a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, but the past few days had challenged that. The aunt had something. He had felt it when she’d touched his arm.

      And Luke had something, too. That cat was acting better, even if he wasn’t actually getting better.

      Though that something that Nora and Luke had—that gift with things wounded—was not necessarily what they needed.

      Despite the shrug, he knew his indifference was pretended. Caring had crept up on him.

      Brendan recognized their lives were a web he could get tangled in.

      Was already tangled in, whether he wanted to be or not. And he didn’t want it. He’d spent a long time locked in his lonely place, avoiding entanglement.

      He walked out the door, refusing to look back at Nora. Free of the enchantment of her house, walking through the warmth of the early summer evening to his car, Brendan Grant vowed to himself he wasn’t coming back here. Not until it was time to pick up Charlie.

      Dead or alive.

      Nora loved the barn. It had taken a dozen volunteers and a hundred man-hours to make the falling-down old structure into an animal shelter, but now it was perfect. She was in the small-animal section, two rows of roomy cages facing a sparkling clean center aisle.

      After a night like last night, she needed the peace she felt working alone here. She had a rock-and-roll station blasting, music from the fifties. It was partly to keep her moving through the exhaustion after twenty-four hours of being woken every hour on the hour. It was partly a nice distraction from her whirling thoughts.

      But the animals loved music. Humming along, she reached inside the rabbit cage, picked up a droopyeared bunny she had named Valentine, and tucked him into her bosom.

      He wriggled against her, snuggling deeper.

      “You want to dance, sweetheart?”

      “Sure.”

      She whirled. Brendan was standing there, watching her. The rabbit must have taken the sudden hard beating of her heart as a warning of imminent danger, because he scrambled out of her arms, over her shoulder and down her back. He hit the floor running.

      Brendan reached behind him and closed the door to prevent bunny escape, then turned back to her.

      How unfair that he looked even better in the pure afternoon sunshine streaming through the windows high up the walls than he had looked last night.

      He must have come from work. He had on a white shirt and gray pants. A tie was loosely knotted at his throat. He looked handsome and sure of himself, a model for GQ, only more real.

      And she still had a lump the size of a baseball on her forehead, and was wearing a charming blue smock of the one-size-fits-all variety that swam around her.

      “I—I haven’t seen you for a few days,” she stammered. She hoped there was nothing in her voice that revealed how she had waited. And watched.

      And hated herself for both.

      “Busy at work,” he said.

      “What are you doing here now?”

      “Deedee insisted. Luke’s been sending her pictures, but she had to come see for herself.”

      Nora had no idea Luke had been sending on pictures of the cat. She probably would have asked him to stop, if she knew. What did they all think was going to happen?

      “Yesterday he sent a video of that old cat playing with a ball.”

      She looked closely at Brendan. “Please tell me you don’t believe that animal is going to get better?”

      He shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe, Nora. The thing is, I’m getting better. And I never believed that would happen.”

      “What do you mean, better?” she whispered.

      He rolled his shoulders. “I’ve been in total darkness. I can feel the light trying to get through. There are cracks in the wall and light is seeping in, and every time I patch one crack, another one appears.”

      It felt as if she couldn’t breathe. As if she was going to cry. It felt as if she could run to him and put her arms around him and whisper him home.

      To her.

      “But the walls have become who I am, so when they crumble, will I crumble, too?”

      “No,” she whispered. “You won’t.”

      “Uh-huh.”

      The feelings were too strong. To hide how totally vulnerable she felt, Nora got down on her hands and knees and looked under a set of cages. Valentine stared back at her.

      And then Brendan was on the floor beside her. His scent, clean and masculine, overrode every other smell in the building. It was not lightening the mood, having him so near, though he, too, seemed to want to back off from the intensity of the previous moment.

      “I think he stuck his tongue out at me,” he said.

      “Like life,” she said. “When you most want control, it will stick its tongue out at you.”

      “Oh boy,” Brendan muttered, “I can see it coming now. Ask Valentine.”

      She laughed and he smiled.

      “There he is.” He reached under the row of cages; his shoulder brushed hers; Valentine hopped away.

      Nora shot back before she did something really dumb, something she would regret forever, and crawled along the floor. “Valentine,” she crooned, “come here.”

      “I dropped Deedee off at the house. Luke said you were down here.”

      Did that mean Brendan wanted to see her? She glanced sideways at him, just as he shoved himself under the bank of cages.

      “You’re ruining your clothes,” she said.

      He ignored her. “I’m being outsmarted by a rabbit.”

      Valentine hopped from underneath and took off down the row.

      Brendan crawled out, dusted himself off, stood up. “Can’t you call him back with your energy?”

      She glanced at him, annoyed at the barb, and then saw the little smile playing across his face. He was teasing her. Something dangerous rippled down her spine.

      The awareness of him shivered more intensely around her. It was nice to be teased by him.

      For a moment, she was going to fight it. The intensity, the subtle invitation to bring him into the light.

      And then she found she couldn’t. By his own admission he had been in darkness. By his own admission he had come here to her.

      With an inner sigh of surrender, Nora decided to play. To be the one thing she never was. Totally herself. She had been so serious for so long. She could not resist the temptations of this moment.