LITMIR.BIZ

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head, Harriet put one hand on the newel post. In a stage whisper to Summer, she said, “If I’m not back in ten minutes, don’t come looking for me.”

      Summer couldn’t help smiling. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

      Harriet’s twitter preceded her up the stairs.

      Kyle didn’t immediately follow her. Sunlight spilled through the bay window, turning the air golden yellow. He stood in the middle of all that sunshine, feet slightly apart, hips narrow, the slight cleft in his chin more pronounced with the light behind him. He was tall and lean and wouldn’t be very comfortable in the full-size bed in the attic apartment Madeline had recently vacated. He’d rented it sight unseen. That alone was cause for concern, for it suggested an agenda of some sort.

      If that wasn’t bad enough, he was looking at her again as if she were a puzzle he had every intention of solving. His name may have meant handsome, but he spelled trouble with a capital T.

      “Are you coming?” Harriet called from the top of the first landing.

      He glanced up the staircase and heaved a sigh. With his face turned slightly, his eyes hidden, Summer glimpsed a pallor not evident before. With his guard down, his fatigue was almost palpable.

      She wondered if he’d been ill, or if there was something else at the root of his exhaustion. There was a weight in his step as he followed the purple-clad woman up the open staircase, the quiet thud of their footsteps overhead the only sounds Summer heard over the wild beating of her heart.

      She faced the fact that Kyle Merrick wasn’t going to be someone who’d once spent a night in her inn. He wasn’t even going to be someone she’d once kissed. He would be staying in Orchard Hill for several days, and he would be sleeping right upstairs.

      He’d agreed to fill in for the groom.

      That was not what she’d wanted to hear. She could feel the vein pulsing at her throat. That favor she’d wholeheartedly granted Madeline?

      Summer had agreed to fill in for the bride.

       Chapter Four

      “You missed your bleeping flight? Are you bleep-bleep-bleeeeeeeeep?”

      Kyle held the phone slightly away from his ear to prevent permanent damage to his hearing. Grant Oberlin had a corner office on the top floor of a New York City high-rise with one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country. It had been one hell of a steep climb from the streets of south Boston where he’d grown up. Pushing sixty now, he hadn’t lost his drive, the accent or the language.

      “Where the bleep are you right now?”

      Kyle had learned to mentally block out Grant’s profanity. It was one of a handful of useful skills he’d gleaned from his father.

      “On second thought,” Grant said loudly. “I really don’t give a bleep where the bleep you are. Here’s what you’re going to do.”

      People in the business called Oberlin The Cowboy. He rolled his own cigarettes—he probably had one clamped between his lips right now—wore snakeskin cowboy boots and had a chip on his shoulder the size of Wyoming.

      “Do you know how many bleepity-bleep-bleep strings I had to pull, how many favors I had to call in to get you this bleeping gig?”

      The tirade continued. Kyle’s mind wandered.

      Harriet had opened the windows on either end of the attic before she’d gone. Kyle stood in the gentle cross breeze, his shirt unbuttoned, his feet bare.

      The attic apartment was long and narrow. With its sloped ceilings and painted wood floors, it was the kind of space his interior decorator mother would have a name for. There was a bed and dresser on one end, a kitchenette and living room on the other, and a crooked chimney dividing the two halves. Harriet had said Madeline Sullivan had lived here after college. She must have taken all her personal touches with her, because the apartment was shades of gray and splashed with yellow. Like Summer.

      “Get your bony bleep on the next plane, and I’ll call Anderson and tell him you’ll be in touch.”

      Oh. Grant was still talking.

      The cagey newspaperman had given Kyle his first break fourteen years ago. Kyle had high regard for the man. There was a part of him screaming that Grant was right, that he was making a mistake or, as Grant put it, a mother-bleeping gargantuan bleep.

      Kyle was too tired to care.

      He took the verbal beating—he owed Grant that much—but he felt far removed from it. How long had it been, he wondered, since he’d felt anything? How long since his experiences had found their way through the top layers of his skin and moved him, touched him or just plain fazed him?

      He was thirty-four years old and had become like one of those kids born without the sensor in their nerve endings that allowed them to feel pain. Without it, they didn’t understand the concept of fire or sharp objects or broken bones. It was a dangerous way to live because, without pain, joy had a lot in common with a shot of Novocain.

      “You haven’t heard a bleeping word I’ve said, have you?”

      Grant Oberlin was one of the few newsmen left willing to cut Kyle any slack. Maybe the only one. Kyle was numb to that, too.

      He’d felt Summer’s kiss, though. He conjured up the sensation from memory, her soft lips, her warm breath, her pliant body. He wasn’t dead to everything.

      “I heard you, Grant.” His voice could have been coming from anybody, anywhere. “I’m on the scent of something here.”

      “Blonde, brunette or redhead?”

      A year ago Kyle might have been able to rustle up a smile. “I have a hunch.”

      “Yeah, well, your bleeping hunches hold as much water these days as a leaky bucket.” How nice that Grant was moving from gutter slang to cliché.

      “I’m not sure I care if I fix the bucket, Grant.”

      The blasé remark sparked a long litany of bleeps. “That’s the trouble with you bleeeep kids who come into this profession already rich. You’re not hungry enough.”

      Kyle had heard it before. That no longer fazed him, either. “I’ll be in touch, Grant.” He disconnected in the middle of the lecture.

      Squeezing the phone in his fist, he almost hurled it against the wall. He yanked his shirt off, balled it up, and flung that instead. With that, the adrenaline leaked out of him like a stuck balloon.

      Oberlin was wrong. Kyle was hungry. Hungry for something out of his reach, hungry for oblivion.

      Flying day and night, night and day, living in airports and hotel rooms while hunting down people who didn’t want to be found and sniffing out stories they didn’t want to tell, sifting through lies and searching for a grain of truth, then writing an accurate account of the events only to have it slashed in half to make it fit in a column between a political cartoon and a story about a heroic cat that found its way home over the Rockies had grown wearisome.

      Who wouldn’t be tired?

      Other than an occasional fluke, he’d lost the ability to sleep more than a few hours at a time. A friend of his who liked to play at psychiatry claimed his internal clock needed an adjustment. She said he needed to wake up and go to bed in the same time zone.

      He needed to restore his reputation, too. And Kyle didn’t see that happening.

      He went to the window Harriet had opened. From here he had a bird’s-eye view of the grounds and the river. In its day, rivers like this one had been an integral part of life in the Midwest. During the timber barons’ heyday, logs were floated on the river to thriving sawmills downstream. Harriet said a riverboat used to travel from Lansing to Grand Haven and back every day, carrying

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