LITMIR.BIZ

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this terror and to the tears trickling down her cheeks. Now was not the time to press her for the truth.

      “I—I—I thought you were someone else,” she managed to stammer.

      “That’s reassuring.” He deliberately kept his voice flat and calm. “I can be grumpy, yes. But I don’t think terrifying enough to deserve a lamp over the head.”

      “I’m so sorry.”

      “I’ve certainly never had a woman react to me like that before.”

      He saw the faintest glimmer of a smile and was encouraged by it. It was like trying to win the trust of a wary deer in a meadow.

      “No, I don’t suppose you have,” she said.

      This was going from bad to worse. She was blushing delicately. She probably would have liked to lie about the fact she thought he was attractive. There was no need for him to preen. He needed to recognize the danger. His housekeeper thought he was attractive. And a good guy.

      She was obviously going to survive. He ordered himself to get up and leave.

      The stupid good guy vetoed him.

      “Who?” he asked. “Who the hell is scaring you like this?”

      His tone was all wrong, he realized, the fury at whoever it was having crept, entirely unbidden, into his voice. She seemed to shrink in on herself, as if being terrified was an indictment of her, as if somehow her being terrified was her own fault, an unforgivable weakness.

      “It was just a bad dream,” she said, her voice muffled.

      She was lying again. It had not been just a bad dream. But he let it go. He shouldn’t have pursued it in the first place. It fell strongly into the none of his business category. It was time to extricate himself from this situation.

      The good guy was not ready to go. The good guy was struggling to find words to bring her comfort. Of course the colossally self-centered guy had been in charge so long, he could find none. The analyst had long ago banished sensitivity as a weakness that could not be tolerated.

      The good guy could not fail to notice she was still trembling, that tears were still slithering out between the fingers that covered her face.

      The bad guy in him sighed with resignation and went, somewhat unwillingly, where the good guy told him to go. It was not a place of numbers. Or words. Or equations. Or analysis.

      The good guy in Jefferson Stone went to the place where his grandmother had gone when a frightened and heartbroken waif had been delivered to her.

      “Are you okay?” he asked.

      “Yes.”

      But she wasn’t. Her voice was wobbling as if she was running a jackhammer. She scrubbed furiously at her tears with the palm of one hand.

      Some instinct or memory of the little boy he had once been, some primal recognition of what goodness was and what was required of him made Jefferson slide his arms under her and tug her over onto his lap. Her hesitation—a sudden stiffening, a small resistance—did not even last a breath. And then she was snuggled into his chest, her curls tickling his chin, her tears washing through his shirt, her warm weight a puddle against him.

      “It’s okay,” he said. His voice was rusty, unaccustomed to reaching for that gentle note. “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re safe.”

      Sweetheart? Desperation to make her feel better was obviously making him crazy. What was he doing calling her sweetheart? But somehow he didn’t want to call her Brook, to invest in the obvious lie she had told him about her name.

      It added to his sense of craziness that making physical contact with his new housekeeper seemed to be becoming a regular event!

      But, at that moment, the good did shine through. Because despite the sweetness of her curves, despite her warmth pooling against him, despite her designated role in his life, despite the lie of her name between them, she felt not like the beautiful woman that she was. She felt only like a frightened child, as he had once been. And he felt only like a person reaching deeply and desperately within himself for the decency to comfort her, as his grandmother had once done.

      And so he stroked her hair and told her over and over again, in a crooning voice that he did not recognize as his own, that she was safe. He could feel the tension draining out of her, her muscles relaxing, her breathing becoming more regular, the hard pulsing of her heart slowing.

      And she must have felt safe, because she finally said, her voice low and tentative, “You know how you said I’m not a very good liar?”

      “Hmm?”

      “My name isn’t Brook.”

      He waited.

      She sighed as if she were weighing the wisdom of what she was about to do. “It’s Angelica. Angie.”

      He waited, again, to see if she would go on, if she would explain the necessity of the subterfuge to him, but she didn’t. In fact, he felt her relax totally, and then her breath came in even little puffs against his chest. Her hair had fallen forward, shielding her face, and when he tucked it back, he saw she was asleep.

      He sat there for a long time, afraid to waken her. Finally his arm felt as if it was going numb. He wondered, as he worked his way out from under the slight weight of her, if she had ever truly been awake.

      He settled her back in the bed, drew the covers over her and gazed down at her for a moment.

      Her face looked relaxed, angelic even, the perfect face for someone named Angelica. He bent and kissed her cheek, as if she was a child he had tucked in.

      And then he turned swiftly from her, embarrassed by his tenderness. “I hope,” he muttered, “neither of us remembers a thing about this by morning.”

      She had a chance of that. He did not.

      He glanced once more at the sleeping woman, then went quietly down the steps and closed the door to the turret room behind him.

      Jefferson was aware of steeling himself against whatever he had felt in that room. It was one thing to be a good man. But it was another to care about others. To care about others was to invite unspeakable pain into your life. He would use this incident to shore up rather than lessen his resolve for their relationship to be professional only. He would withdraw himself, as completely as it was possible to do while they were under one roof. Withdrawing was something he was an absolute expert at. After the blow of Hailey’s death, he’d withdrawn quite successfully from the world for the past three years.

      Though it was now late at night, he was aware he would not sleep. He went into his office and shut the door. He was in the middle of a contract to revamp the computer systems for the City of Portland. This was what he loved and this is what he could lose himself in: researching, planning and coordinating the selection and installation of the software systems that gigantic enterprises, towns and cities, corporations and businesses counted on for smooth and efficient operation.

      He sat down at his computer and sighed with satisfaction at the reassuring world devoid of emotional complexity. This was his world: analysis. Numbers and graphs and statistics appeared on the screen before him.

      “Two weeks?” he told himself. “That’s nothing.”

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      ANGIE AWOKE IN the morning, bright light embracing her. For a moment, she had no idea where she was. But the ceiling had a display of dancing light on it, the windows reflecting patterns off the nearby water. She remembered the lake. She remembered arriving at the Stone House. And finding this bedroom and surrendering to the exhaustion that had been building in her.

      And then, she remembered last night.

      She remembered the panic that had clawed at her throat as she woke

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