LITMIR.BIZ

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one responsibility?”

      “Let me give you the money,” Van said. “Eli will never have to know unless you tell him.”

      “No,” she said so sharply Van noticed. She couldn’t let him know what Jonathan Barr had divulged. “I can’t.”

      “You won’t, and you want me to let you and Eli suffer because you’re too proud to take a loan from someone who loves you.”

      She shook her head, ruefully, to prove it didn’t matter when it most definitely did. “Oh, I’m hot for a handout.” She folded another towel. “But for Eli, I have to do this the responsible way.”

      “Pride won’t feed you.”

      “Or clothe us, but you’re my brother, not my guardian angel.”

      She almost asked him if Jonathan Barr had been right, but she stopped herself in time. Van wouldn’t tell her the truth. To him, he was still eighteen, and she was ten, and their parents had just died, leaving her his responsibility.

      “I’d expect you to pay me back,” he said.

      “It’s not going to happen.” Avoiding his gaze, she went for a sheet. There was Eli’s father—refusing to take part in raising his own child—and her brother—trying to help when helping might hurt him. She had to consider asking Aidan Nikolas. “What burns me is Barr, talking at me as if I were still in kindergarten. Eight years of making the lodge pay counts for nothing.”

      “With him. I know you’re good for the money.”

      “Then why do you care if I ask Aidan Nikolas to help?”

      “I told you he’s here to rest.”

      “The entrepreneur who runs small businesses with a single thought, chases new opportunities with steel will? The guy who manages to hide his personal life from twenty-first-century paparazzi?” She stood to finish the sheet. “Don’t you think he can protect himself?”

      Van looked troubled. She tried to remember him before he’d taken the world on his shoulders. First, he’d had to protect her long enough for her to reach adulthood. Then his marriage had ended because of his guilt after his wife had been attacked while he’d been away on a business trip. She’d like to relieve Van of his sense of duty toward her and her son.

      “I don’t intend to chase the man around his desk—just present my business plan.”

      “You won’t, because it might hurt him.”

      “I’m not sure I can afford to be noble.”

      Van’s eyes, green like their father’s, were so serious she couldn’t look away. “Who are you? And what have you done with my sister?”

      She smoothed the edges of one towel. “I’m divorced and a single mom.” She started folding another. “I own a lodge that barely qualifies as rubble, and I’m on the edge of bankruptcy. My son is acting odd, and a guy who has money to invest just landed on your doorstep.”

      Van took a pillowcase off the pile of linens and started to fold it. His silence troubled her more than his warnings.

      “Are you sure he’s sick? Aidan, I mean? Mr. Nikolas.” Her skin felt too warm. She stared at her hands, trying to imagine tall, dark and thriving Aidan Nikolas as an invalid.

      Van stood. “It was a minor heart attack, but he’s supposed to change the way he lives.”

      She added another folded towel to the tottering stack, mostly to avoid her brother’s watchful eyes. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, and she’d sensed a vulnerability that had seemed uncharacteristic in a man like Aidan.

      How long had it been since a man had made her want to know anything about him other than his fishing habits? “I don’t want to cause more problems for your friend, but I need money.”

      Van’s big-brother frustration covered her like a fog. “If only you’d checked on that policy,” he finally choked out—and she realized Jonathan Barr must be right about Van’s financial trouble. Van had never made her feel bad about her mistakes. She’d learned at his knee to do what she could to mend and move on.

      “Deep down where it doesn’t take any effort, Campbell loves his son,” Beth said. “How could I guess he’d screw us?”

      “He screwed you in every way a man could, and then he started screwing his office manager.”

      She crossed her arms. She’d felt different talking to Aidan, more feminine, stronger, because someone as responsible and successful as he had been interested. Though she lived with the constant companionship of anxiety and distraction, she was still a woman. She wasn’t wrong about the way Aidan had looked at her.

      But he didn’t know her son was troubled and her business needed financial CPR. Aidan Nikolas wouldn’t waste another second of his high-powered life on a woman with her problems. She’d learned that women who made bad decisions had to fight for respect when they tried to start over.

      “I don’t care what Campbell did.”

      “If you were a little more honest with Eli, maybe he’d stop running to Campbell and making things worse for himself.”

      “Honest? I had the man arrested for nonsupport and I turned him into some sort of Robin Hood figure for our son. He thinks Campbell’s the victim. Campbell even had him convinced they could have shared that cheesy seventies superstud apartment after the fire if I hadn’t dragged him away.”

      “Let him stay a few weeks and see what happens. Campbell’s too busy—” Her brother stopped as if any truth about her ex-husband could still hurt her. “He would have lived off the perks of being a high school football star his whole life if he hadn’t gotten you pregnant. He won’t want to take care of Eli.” Van added the towel that knocked over the pile, which they both restacked into two columns. “Eli’s eleven years old. He has to face the truth about his father.”

      “Not if it makes him more depressed.” She stood up to fold a fitted sheet. “How serious is a minor heart attack?”

      “Would Aidan let a doctor maroon him in the Virginia countryside if he had a choice?”

      “Would he show up just when I need him if I wasn’t supposed to—”

      “Kill him? A second attack could be massive.”

      “How long is he staying?”

      “You think you’re helping if you give him a few days’ rest before you send him back to the hospital?”

      “I have a doctor’s appointment myself tomorrow. While I’m quizzing Brent about what might be wrong with Eli, I’ll ask him if offering Aidan Nikolas a business opportunity could kill him.”

      “I’m sure Brent Jacobs is dying to consult with you on the health of every citizen in Honesty.”

      She made a face only a brother deserved.

      BRIGHT AND EARLY the next morning, Beth dressed and then went downstairs to pour cereal for Eli. Mrs. Carleton called while she was slicing strawberries to say her sister was sick and she’d be in D.C. for the day. Beth left the berries in a sealed container beside Eli’s bowl. Then she wrote a note, telling him she’d be back by noon and that the housekeeper wasn’t coming.

      Even though she’d probably be back before he climbed out of bed.

      A quick drive across rolling country lanes, a turn onto a tree-bordered bypass road, and a bridge over the dark green lake that had been part of her livelihood, and she reached town—kind of sleepy on a spring break Monday morning.

      The hospital, funded by one of the universities in Washington, D.C., had built towers, like fingers above the trees around the old-town buildings. Her childhood friend, Brent Jacobs, kept an office in one of the complexes connected to the hospital by glass-covered walkways. Beth parked in a lot and hurried to make her early appointment.

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