The Sugar House Read online

“If you’re sure.”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Take as many as you want.” He needed more than fruit. “Do you want some cheese and crackers?”

  She had the feeling he was probably starving, but he told her the apples were fine. Not caring to push, she traded matches for the flashlight in the drawer, filled Rudy’s dish with kibble and grabbed clean towels and toiletries from a hall closet before leading him past the hall to the stairs.

  Jack didn’t remember much about the old farmhouse. With only two flashlight beams to illuminate it, he couldn’t tell if anything looked familiar or not as they moved up the polished maple staircase. His focus wasn’t on paintings or architecture, anyway. It was on the woman moving ahead of him, the lightness of her stocking-clad feet on the dark carpet runner, the length of her legs, and the shape of her curvy little backside.

  There were three bedrooms at the top of the landing. “Charlie stays in that room,” she told him, indicating the one to the right. She turned left. “So I’ll put you in here.

  “I usually have the toiletries in the bathroom and fresh towels already out,” she said, setting down the armful of towels on the foot of the four-poster bed. Atop them, she placed soap, shampoo and the other toiletries she’d gathered. After their third guest had come to her mom needing a razor and a toothbrush, they had started keeping them on hand—along with the toothpaste some people also forgot to pack. “I don’t open for guests until the end of June.”

  He wasn’t a guest, Jack thought. He was an intruder. As far as she was concerned, anyway. “Don’t apologize. This is light-years beyond where I stayed last night.”

  Even at first glance and lit by flashlights, the decor spoke of a homey elegance he hadn’t expected, and an attention to detail that betrayed a love of texture and form.

  A faint smile curved her mouth. “Thanks,” was all she said before she turned to a round, brocade-draped table by a tall wing chair and lit the chunky candle in the hurricane lamp. “Blow that out before you go to sleep, will you? And keep that flashlight.”

  She reached into a small closet framed with fluted molding. “There’s plenty of hot water if you want to take a shower.” Turning with a quilt that might well have been hand stitched, she set it next to the towels. “You might need this,” she told him. “It’ll get cool in here with the furnace out.”

  With a quick look around to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, she backed toward the door, stopped with her hand on the knob. “Can I get you anything else?”

  He glanced toward the bed, piled high with blankets, a comforter and more pillows than he knew what to do with.

  He told her he couldn’t think of thing.

  “Then sleep well,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

  Walking over to the bed, he tossed one of the apples onto it. He annihilated a third of the other one in one bite.

  Even as tired as felt, he doubted he’d sleep anytime soon.

  He’d been fine while he’d worked with Emmy. Trying to figure out if it was just him or if she refused to talk about her past with anyone, he’d pretty much managed to avoid thinking about what he wasn’t accomplishing being stuck where he was. But thoughts of her now only added a different edge to his restlessness.

  He swore he could still smell her soft scent, that impossible combination of clean herbal shampoo and the sweet scent of maple that should have been too wholesome to be erotic.

  It had been six months since he’d last been with a woman. His relationship with the female attorney he’d met negotiating a land sale had lasted less than a month, and he’d parted as amicably with her as he had most of the other women he’d shared dinner and a bed with. Not that there had been that many. He wasn’t into recreational sex. But he wasn’t looking for a permanent relationship, either. He’d never seen a good marriage. Certainly the cold war his parents had fought left little to recommend the institution. If he was going to do battle, he’d rather do it in a boardroom.

  He polished off the apple, and carried the toiletries Emmy had given him into the bathroom. As far as the restlessness he felt tonight, he’d get over it. It didn’t matter that the remembered feel of her skin and her shape taunted him even now. Making a move on Emmy Larkin would only add insult to injury. It wouldn’t do a thing, either, toward getting her to open up to him. And tomorrow getting her to talk to him was exactly what he planned to do. Had it not been for that goal, knowing that he wouldn’t be where he needed to be in the morning would have had him pacing a trench in her carpet.

  Chapter Five

  The power was still out the next morning. Jack’s room was cold, and the battery was dead on his cell phone. He’d also had to dress in the same clothes he’d been living in since Saturday morning. The sense of frustration he’d wakened with momentarily eased, however, when he opened the door of his room and descended the staircase.

  He smelled coffee.

  That tantalizing aroma hooked him by the nose, led him straight into the kitchen. The room he’d so briefly seen last night seemed to welcome him with its warmth and the scents of something wonderful cooking atop the woodstove across from the currently useless electric range.

  Welcome, however, wasn’t what he sensed in the woman who glanced from where she’d set a blue-checked place mat at the far end of the parson’s table. In the muted daylight filtering through the frost-cornered windows, Emmy looked decidedly cautious.

  At least the dog seemed glad to see him. Rudy rose from where he’d curled up near the stove, walked over with something made of pink plush and missing an ear stuffed in his mouth and plopped himself at his feet for a pet.

  Unable to resist the shameless bid for attention, Jack crouched down and scratched behind both floppy ears.

  “How did you sleep?” he heard Emmy ask as she arranged utensils on a cloth napkin.

  A desk and computer were tucked into a little office alcove just off the kitchen. From atop the black filing cabinet beside them came the low drone of a radio.

  “Better than I thought I would,” he admitted, half his focus on what the announcer was saying, half on the fact that she looked like a teenager with her long auburn hair clipped at her nape and hanging against her faded gray Maple Mountain Maroons sweatshirt. He never had been able to figure out why the football team had been named for a color. “The bed’s great.”

  The compliment coaxed a faint smile. Or maybe the smile was for the dog that had just flopped over on his back for a belly rub. “Leave him alone, Rudy,” she murmured to her pet. “Breakfast will be ready in ten minutes,” she said to him.

  She was going to feed him. He could have kissed her for that.

  Pulling his glance from her mouth, frowning at himself for having let it wander there, he rubbed his fingers through the dog’s thick fur to let him know he really wasn’t being bothered by him and glanced toward the radio. “Mind if I turn that up?”

  With her attention on breakfast, she motioned for him to go ahead.

  Less than a minute later, he had heard enough and turned the volume back to a low drone.

  Half the state was without power. Highways were closed. And the weather front that had moved in yesterday was apparently stalled right over them. No clearing was expected until later tomorrow.

  The frustration he’d awakened with knotted itself in the muscles of his shoulders. The major highways would be the first to be plowed. Depending on how long that took, it could be another couple of days before they made it to a place as remote as Maple Mountain.

  Rubbing the back of his neck, feeling a headache coming on, he mentally kicked himself for not having left when he’d planned on Saturday. He wouldn’t think about how long he might be stuck. Not now. Not before he got some real food in his belly to relieve that particular edginess.

  He turned to the windows by the parson’s table. Emmy had shuttered her upstairs windows for the winter, so he hadn’t been able to see what had accumulated outside. Already aware of a wall of white beyond the wi
ndows over the sink and near the mudroom, he looked past the frost clinging to the edges of the glass. Snow came down so hard he couldn’t even see where he’d left his car.

  “Would you like coffee?”

  “Please,” he asked, would have begged if he’d had to. “And a phone, if you don’t mind. My cell is dead.”

  Emmy watched Jack step back from the window, and immediately pulled her glance from his broad back. Trying to think of him only as a guest, she lifted the blue-andwhite-speckled coffeepot she used when the power was out from the top of the woodstove. “You can’t get a signal here, anyway. It’s because of the mountains,” she explained, pouring coffee into two heavy cobalt-blue mugs.

  Remembering he took his black, she carried his mug to the table. She would overlook the fact that she never served guests in the kitchen. She had no way to heat the dining room. When she’d gone outside a while ago to fire up the generator, she’d found that the battery needed to start it was dead. “I haven’t used the phone this morning. But you’re welcome to try it.”

  The implication that the telephone might not work made him ask if he could try it now. Telling him to go ahead, she returned to add milk to her own coffee while he crossed the room in his stocking feet.

  The thought that she should ask if he wanted to wash out anything and dry it by the stove, or maybe borrow a clean pair of the socks Charlie had left there, was interrupted by the sounds of his voice rattling off the numbers on his calling card. Moments later, she heard him talking to someone about changing the time the movers were to be at his apartment.

  She had finished toasting walnuts in a frying pan and had them chopped and in a dish by a bowl of raisins by the time he was on his second call. That one sounded as if it might have been to his landlord.

  By the time she had brown sugar in another small bowl, cream in a pitcher, and eggs and sausage frying, he’d placed a call to a woman named Ruth who was apparently some sort of assistant, since he wanted her to reschedule some sort of staff meeting for him. He also asked that she book a room at the Ritz for a small reception for members of the Hilton Head project team next week, whatever that was, and to be sure the pâté was foie gras and the champagne Dom Perignon. He was now on the phone with a man he’d apparently planned to meet tomorrow morning to discuss problems with inspection approvals.

  It wasn’t like her to eavesdrop on another’s conversation. But he was right there in her space making it impossible not to overhear. And everything she overheard made her think her initial impression of him that first day had been entirely accurate.

  She had pegged him immediately for the high-powered executive type. As she listened to the deep, rumbling tones of his voice, there was no doubting the air of authority and command about him. He knew what he wanted and exactly how to go about getting it. What she hadn’t imagined was the respect he apparently elicited from those on the other end of the line. It sounded as if he was put through immediately to whomever he asked for, and that whatever he asked for was granted without any question other than what else that person might be able to do to help him out.

  It had been her experience that those accustomed to deference, the important—or self-important, anyway—were often demanding and impatient. Yet, Jack seemed neither. What she sensed in him was the same respect for those to whom he spoke that was given him, along with an amazing adaptability. He couldn’t be where he needed to be, so he had just rescheduled what he could, made sure others were ready to act in his place in situations that couldn’t be changed and, having spotted the battery backup for her computer and quickly asked if it could be used for her fax machine after learning her generator was out, arranged to have what he alone could do sent to him there.

  She didn’t want him to be decisive. She didn’t want him to sound as if he could get his life under control with just a few well-placed phone calls. And she really didn’t want him standing there watching her when she couldn’t get the tenderness she’d felt in his touch out of her head.

  “You’re moving?” she asked, setting the small bowls of condiments around the bowl of old-fashioned oatmeal she’d just dished up for him.

  “Trying to.” His glance followed the plate of eggs and sausage she carried over for him next. “I’ve been transferred to Boston. My landlady will make sure the movers get in, pack up what I didn’t get around to and make sure everything gets on its way.”

  Thinking it no wonder he’d been anxious to use the phone, she motioned him to the table. “If you have all that that going on, why did you come here now?”

  “Because it was the only extra time I had. I don’t know when I’ll have another free weekend, so it made sense to come here now.” A faint edge entered his voice as he scraped chair legs over the floor. “Once I got the property, returning it was something I didn’t want to put off.”

  Emmy’s back stiffened ever so slightly. Having just inadvertently stumbled onto what she really didn’t want to talk about, she was fully prepared to change the subject when she turned to see him standing with his hands on the back of his chair. He wasn’t watching her as she’d suspected. He was eyeing his plate.

  It seemed it hadn’t been the subject that had put the low growl in his voice. It was hunger.

  “Where’s yours?”

  “I already ate. Please,” she said, since he was clearly waiting for her to sit down so he could do the same. “Go ahead.”

  Chair legs scraped again as she reached for her coffee. Thinking she’d leave him to his breakfast, she started toward the living room to build a fire in the fireplace. She’d reminded herself yesterday that she needed to check the backup generator for the sugar house and the bigger one for her home. Had she not been so completely sidetracked by him, and had the ice not hit when it had, she would have recharged the battery and they’d have had central heat and lights by now.

  She made it as far as the staircase before she turned back around, diverted again. She didn’t want to be curious about him. She couldn’t help it, though. He was the son of a man who’d labored in the granite quarry west of Maple Mountain. The sons of the quarrymen, along with the sons of the farmers and the sugar makers she knew, tended to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. And while they were good men, hardworking, down-to-earth, and while one occasionally did leave to go to college and find a career in a city, she’d never known one to come back driving a car like the one being buried in snow in her driveway or sounding as sophisticated and urbane as the man clearly enjoying her food at her table. He’d already liberally dosed his oatmeal with raisins and nuts, and half his sausages and eggs were gone.

  “Did you buy a house in Boston?” she asked from the doorway.

  Swallowing the last bite he’d taken, he shook his head, reached for his coffee. “A condo. I don’t have time for upkeep on a house.” His brow creased as he forked another piece of sausage. “I should call my assistant and see if she can supervise when they deliver my stuff. And the property manager so she can have the bellman let Ruth in.”

  He had a bellman? “Mind if I ask why you’re moving there?”

  The sausage was washed down with a swallow of coffee. “I’m taking over the regional office there. We build hotels, office buildings. That sort of thing.”

  We? “You have a business partner?”

  “Thousands of them. Stockholders,” he explained, and motioned to the chair at the other end of the table. “Why don’t you come sit down?”

  Clutching her mug, she gave her head a quick shake. “I have things to do,” Emmy replied, not wanting to appear any more interested than she already did. “I just wondered how you got to where you seem to be. With your work,” she clarified, because she didn’t think she wanted to know if the money his father had recovered from selling her father’s land had been used to start him on his way.

  “You get scholarships and odd jobs to put yourself through college,” Jack replied with a dismissing shrug. “Then you get lucky enough to get into the master’s program at Harvard and wo
rk your butt off for the best company you can find.”

  She had wanted to know, she realized. She also felt oddly relieved to learn he’d paid his own way. “You put yourself through school, then.”

  “Had to. My parents couldn’t afford it.”

  “And you’ve worked your way up to…?”

  Picking a forkful of eggs, he eyed his coffee again. “A vice president.”

  The man was clearly more interested in his meal than in his accomplishments. He didn’t sound at all impressed with what he did, with what he had accomplished or with how far he had come in the years since he and his family had left.

  “Your move to Boston is a promotion, then,” she concluded.

  “It’s just a step along the way.”

  “To what?”

  “To more. I wouldn’t mind being CEO. Or president.” Or both, he might have said.

  Emmy blinked in disbelief. The man was thirty-two years old, a vice president of what sounded like a major corporation, undoubtedly had a lifestyle she could only fantasize about—and he wanted more. Not just more. He wanted it all. Since she never allowed herself to mentally venture beyond what she already had anymore, she couldn’t imagine any reason for him not to be satisfied with what he already had himself.

  “Why?” Trying to wrap her mind around such a huge dream, she slowly shook her head. “Has that always been your goal?”

  Jack picked up his nearly empty mug. Watching her from the far end of the table, he saw curiosity shift through Emmy’s unmasked expression. Her interest surprised him a little. The depth of it, anyway. That she came back when she could have simply disappeared on him surprised him, too.

  He could tell her that he liked the challenges, the competition. He could tell her that business had become a game to him, and that there was nothing he enjoyed more than pushing himself to come up with a better strategy than the other guy. He loved the negotiations. He loved working with the germ of an idea and putting together the people, the land and the resources to make it happen. It would be the absolute truth. As far as it went.