Carolina Mist Page 33

  Oh, he could protest as much as he wanted that the law was his love and a senior partnership his goal, but it was meaningless when taken in the context of the truth he had so recently discovered about his life.

  Abby was his life, and his life was here in Primrose.

  Once he accepted what he had so long ago suspected, he knew the only thing that lay between him and a lifetime of happiness was convincing Abby that this town, this house—and this man—were her destiny just as they, and she, were his.

  He hoped it wouldn’t take too long.

  “Are you sure there isn’t something you want to tell me, Abby?” Naomi arched her eyebrows and batted her eyes, all innocence and naivete.

  “I guess if I thought I could hide something from you, I was delusional at the time.” Abby laughed. “Where would you like me to start?”

  The two women stood in Naomi’s backyard, surrounded by the flats of herbs, vegetables, and annual flowers that Naomi had started from seed in her little greenhouse. Abby had volunteered to assist in the planting, and, with the work on her own house almost completed, she was happy to have time to help her friend.

  “A simple ‘You were right all along’ would suffice. For now, anyway.”

  “Ah, is that a smirk or a gloating grin I see on your face?”

  “Oh, perhaps a touch of both. I can’t even begin to tell you how happy I am for you both. I knew it was merely a matter of time before you realized that you were hopelessly in love and couldn’t live without each other. I knew that ten years ago. I’m just happy that you found each other at last.”

  Naomi, ever the romantic, sighed. “And now you can live happily ever after.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that part.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Alex has his law practice…”

  “Abby, he could commute if he had to, you know. It’s not like Hampton is hours away.”

  “He may not be in Hampton for all that long. He may be transferred to another office.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Alex expects to be made partner. And, from what he said, that could happen anytime. Once he makes partner, he could be given his own office to open up in another city.”

  “Then you just have to make him understand that he belongs here.”

  “I can’t do that, Naomi,” Abby said. “Alex has to decide for himself what he wants.”

  “And you would stand by and let him walk out of your life again?” Naomi’s eyes widened with horror. “Girl, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking Alex has to choose.”

  “I’m thinking you have lost your mind if you believe for one minute that either of you would ever be happy without the other. I’m thinking if you let him go, it will be the biggest mistake of your life.”

  “I’ll deal with it when it happens,” Abby told her. “It may not be an issue for a long time yet. Right now, it’s still all very new, and I’m happy, and Alex seems happy, and that’s what matters to me.”

  “Please do not bury your head in the sand for too long. I would hate to have to help you put that heart of yours back together when I know and you know and even Alex knows you belong together.”

  “Sometimes things don’t work out the way they should.” Abby concentrated on smoothing the soft dirt around the seedlings she placed in the ground.

  “Sometimes they do,” Naomi replied pointedly. “You can’t always leave things to fate, Abby.”

  “I’ll worry about it later.” Abby dismissed the matter with the wave of one hand, smiling as if to assure Naomi that she did, in fact, have everything under control. “Right now, let’s just concentrate on getting your garden in so that I have time to take a shower before dinner. Alex and I are taking Belle to the new mall out there off the interstate. Having your old wheelchair is a real blessing, Naomi. Thanks for the loan.”

  “Thanks to Drew for thinking of it.”

  There was a long pause before Abby confided, “We still haven’t heard from him, Naomi.”

  “Drew?”

  Abby nodded.

  “He’ll pop up.”

  “I guess so. He must have had a business trip this week.” Abby shrugged.

  Naomi was silent. How to tell Abby what she and Colin had learned from Alex? Or what Colin himself had determined through his law enforcement connections: that he could find no trace of the man’s existence, that Drew was not, after all, who he said he was.

  Abby glanced across the row and saw the tightness in the line of Naomi’s mouth. She watched for several minutes while some tension played in her friend’s eyes, then said, “Okay, spill it.”

  “Spill what?” Naomi did not look up.

  “I want to know whatever it is about Drew that you know.”

  “What makes you think I know anything?”

  “Naomi, you are absolutely the world’s worst liar. Look me in the eye, and tell me that you don’t know anything about Drew.”

  “I don’t know anything about Drew.” Naomi continued to stare into the dirt.

  “I said, look me in the eye, and…”

  “All right, all right,” Naomi muttered. “Alex didn’t want to say anything at all to you until we had exhausted all the possibilities.”

  “ ‘We’?”

  “Colin is trying to track him, Abby. Some prints that Colin picked up when he dusted your house didn’t match any of us, not you or me or Sunny or Belle or Alex. So Colin sent them to a friend of his in D.C. to put through the computer system, which, unfortunately, Primrose isn’t hooked into. Not yet, anyway.”

  “And nothing came back?”

  “Not as of this morning.”

  “What about the colleges where he…”

  “He doesn’t.” Naomi held up a hand to stop Abby from completing the sentence. “He doesn’t work for any company that deals with any of the colleges he told us he sold to.”

  “Well, just when was someone going to tell me?” Abby’s eyes crackled with the anger that was rapidly building inside her. “You could have told me what you were doing.” She flung a handful of deep brown soil in Alex’s direction as he approached with Colin from the driveway.

  Alex flashed an inquiring look in Naomi’s direction. Naomi merely shrugged and said, “What can I say? Abby asked me point-blank, and I could not lie. And, besides, you should have told her yourself.”

  “You are absolutely right.” Alex nodded as he eased himself onto the ground next to the row of green beans Abby was planting. “And I apologize to you for not telling you sooner. But I really wanted to clear it up before you even had to know. I know how you feel about Drew. Hell, I was even starting to like him myself.”

  “But, of course, now you can’t like him anymore because you think he somehow…” Abby struggled with her thoughts, reluctant to put words to any of them.

  “He’s a liar, Abby. He lied to all of us.” Alex’s jaw squared.

  “And I guess you feel pretty smug about that, don’t you? Go ahead and say ‘I told you so’ and get it over with.”

  “Abby, I didn’t want it to be true any more than you did. Yes, I admit that in the beginning I had reservations—I was suspicious about him showing up out of the blue the way he did. But there’s something about Drew that is very likable once you get to know him. He was kind to Gran and very sweet to Lilly, and I really do believe he cared very much for all of you.”

  “I absolutely agree.” Naomi struggled momentarily to rise, shifting her stiff leg slightly. “There is no question that he was growing close to you. There are some things you just can’t fake, Abby.”

  “So what you’re saying is that Drew was a fake but his feelings were genuine,” Abby said sarcastically.

  “Sort of. Maybe. What we’re saying is we don’t know who he really is or what he really wants.” Colin spoke up for the first time. “But we will find out who he really is, Abby. I feel pretty certain of that.”

  “Until you do, could we refrain from assumi
ng that he was a crook?” Abby stood up and dropped her trowel onto the ground. “Because that’s the implication you’re making.”

  “You have to admit that it looks pretty suspicious, Abby. At least be open-minded. Someone definitely broke into the house. And Drew—or whatever his name is—hasn’t been seen since.”

  “Do I need to remind you that Drew was with us at the same time the house was being burglarized?”

  “True. But he could have had an accomplice,” Colin said gently.

  The memory of Drew standing in the shadow of the bandstand, in a lively discussion with a woman, flashed through Abby’s inner vision.

  “Even if he had, how would they—or Drew, for that matter—have known about the tunnels? He wouldn’t have known, Naomi. He didn’t grow up here, like you did.”

  “Maybe he knows someone who did.”

  The slight glimpse Abby had gotten of the young blond woman stumbling into Abby at the town fair played again through her mind. There had been something vaguely familiar about her, but Abby had paid little attention to her at the time.

  “Well, I think we owe it to Drew to wait for an explanation from him before we all convince ourselves that he’s some slick ne’er-do-well con artist.”

  They all nodded, all but Abby thinking that perhaps a con artist was exactly what Drew Cassidy—by any name—was.

  “I don’t want him to be a bad guy,” Abby muttered sullenly as she sat down on the edge of her bed and kicked off her once-white sneakers.

  “I know you don’t, sweetheart.” Alex stood in the doorway and tried to soothe her. “And, frankly, neither do I.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “There’s nothing we can do until we hear from him.”

  “I’m angry with him for deceiving me.”

  “You have every right to be. I’m not particularly happy about that myself.”

  Alex clenched a fist behind his back. There were things that he, too, was anxious to discuss with Drew. Starting with the abuse of Abby’s trusting heart.

  “You know, we could be blowing this way out of proportion. There could very well be a logical explanation.” Abby peeled off her socks and dropped them to the floor.

  “I guess anything is possible. Just promise me that you will let me know if and when you hear from him.”

  “I will.” She grabbed the hem of her shirt and was about to pull it over her head, when she looked up and asked, “Don’t you think you should go and keep your grandmother company while I get cleaned up?”

  “No.” He shrugged casually.

  “Don’t you think she’ll get suspicious, if both of us are up here, together, for more than ten minutes or so?”

  He closed the door behind him quietly and crossed the room with deliberate and clear intent. When he reached the place where she sat, his arms pulled her to him and surrounded her like a comforting thought.

  “I think Gran has already caught on,” he said softly, tracing a line with his tongue along the right side of her face.

  “How do you think she feels about it?” Abby tried to focus on her words as she awaited his response, knowing that if he didn’t back away in, oh, the next thirty seconds or so, she wouldn’t remember the question, so the answer wouldn’t much matter.

  “I think she is delighted.” Alex’s mouth seemed to swallow her whole, and her knees began to shake.

  Helpless to do anything else, Abby leaned back onto her bed and drew him with her. Within seconds, her world began to buzz and glow, as he led her back to that place where he alone could take her, where nothing mattered except his mouth and his skin and his body, and where the vortex of emotion and sensation swirled around her with frightening velocity and plunged them both into orbit, each with the other at the center.

  Drew’s falseness, along with Belle’s opinions and just about everything else on the face of the earth, seemed to drop into a vacuum somewhere and simply ceased to exist.

  39

  “Don’t forget,” Alex whispered in her ear just before kissing her good-bye in the wee hours of a gray and rainy Monday morning, “call me the minute you hear from Drew.”

  “I will,” Abby murmured sleepily.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said. “Every week, it seems I miss you more.”

  “Umm.”

  “I’ll be out of town most of the week,” he reminded her as he tucked the quilt around her shoulders, “but I’ll be back on Friday night. It may be late, but I’ll be here.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come downstairs and find something for you to munch on in the car?”

  “Go back to sleep.” He patted her hair and kissed the back of her neck. “I’ll stop someplace and get coffee. That will hold me until I get to the office. I’ll be fine.”

  “See you Friday,” she mumbled into her pillow. She heard him chuckle before the door closed softly.

  As tired as she was, she could not fall back to sleep. After almost a full hour of trying, she yawned mightily, then rose, groggy. A shower, she told herself. Maybe a shower would wake her up.

  Feeling as if she’d been drugged, she thrust aside the flowered curtain and stepped into the pulsing stream of water whose sharp, hot needles pricked at her skin. She stood beneath the stinging drops until she felt sufficiently invigorated to face the day. Pulling back her still damp hair with a scrunchie, she slipped into a cream-colored fleecy top with long sleeves and a pair of worn but clean blue jeans. Awake now, she stretched into the new morning with pleasure as she mentally relived the hour between five and six A.M., when Alex coaxed her from sleep with gentle kisses that banished all memory of the dream she’d been having when his lips had first fallen upon her bare shoulder. She shivered at the thought of it as she bounded down the steps.

  Mr. Coffee was just beginning to do his thing when Belle appeared in the doorway, Meri P. close behind.

  “Good morning, Belle.” Abby grinned.

  “Why, yes, dear.” Belle’s eyes seemed to twinkle. “I believe in fact it is. Now where is that grandson of mine?”

  “Alex left a while ago,” Abby told her, filling the pot for Belle’s tea. “He had to be in court this morning.”

  “Drat,” Belle muttered.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I just wanted a word with him, that is all. I thought perhaps it was time for us to have a chat.” Belle took down her new favorite cup, which Abby and Susannah had bought for her in a gift shop in Nag’s Head, and set it on the counter.

  Abby’s cheeks flushed red, knowing instinctively what was on Belle’s mind.

  “You don’t need to blush, Abigail. I couldn’t be more pleased.” Belle beamed. “If the truth were to be told, all Leila and I ever wanted was for you and Alex to fall in love and marry and live happily ever after, right here in Primrose. And, my stars, it’s going to happen after all. I don’t mind telling you, Abigail, that there was a time when we—Leila and I, that is—wondered just how we were going to go about getting you two together, but it looks as if all’s well that ends well.”

  Abby tried to smile wanly.

  “What is it, dear? Oh, do forgive me, Abigail, I don’t mean to intrude into your private life. I’m just so happy that I… Abigail?” Belle peered closely at the young woman.

  “Belle, I don’t want you to set your heart on Alex and me marrying and living happily ever after.”

  “Why not, dear? You are in love, aren’t you? I mean, it’s obvious to anyone who looks at you…”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what, dear?”

  “Alex and I haven’t discussed marriage, Belle.”

  “Merely a detail.”

  “Belle, it’s more than a mere detail. Alex may be transferred to another city sometime in the near future.”

  “What?” Belle’s eyes narrowed with this latest bit of news.

  “He apparently is in consideration for an office of his own within the firm. He expects to hear anytime now.”

  “Alexander can have
his own office. Right here in Primrose.”

  “I don’t think it’s quite the same, Belle.”

  “Oh, of course, a small practice here in Primrose isn’t quite as good as a large practice in some far-off city, any fool knows that.” Belle puffed indignantly. “I don’t know what is the matter with you young folks. You simply have the oddest sense of values. Why, in my day, if you loved someone, you did what you had to do to be together. And it wasn’t always easy. I don’t even want to tell you what I went through, waiting for Granger all those years…”

  “But you knew you would be with him one day?”

  “Yes, I did. And I never gave up. And I never took off looking for fulfillment in some big-city job, either.”

  “How did you know that you would marry him?”

  “I just always knew that we belonged together. And I knew if I waited long enough, it would come to be.” Belle plunked a tea bag unceremoniously into the earthenware cup. “And it did.”

  “Well, I’d say you were either very lucky or you were psychic.”

  “Whatever it was, I never doubted for a second where I belonged. I’m sad to see that neither you nor my grandson has the same sense of who you are and where you belong.”

  “Belle, this has nothing to do with who we are or where we belong or think we might belong.”

  “Then do explain to me what this is all about. Explain to me, Abigail, what does matter in this life. Tell me what lasts, if not love.”

  “Belle, it isn’t just about love.”

  “Abigail McKenna, haven’t the past ten years of your life taught you anything? Child, when you get right down to it, love is all there is. Everything else—money, property, material possessions—can vanish in the blink of an eye. But love is always inside you, Abigail. It will always be with you. No one can steal it from you or rob you of its joys. No amount of money can buy it for you, nor can it be sold on the open market. It cannot be swept away by flood or lost to fire. It is totally portable, costs nothing, but outlasts everything else you will ever possess. There is nothing else that is yours that cannot be taken from you. Except for your memories, of course. Even death is powerless in the face of love, Abigail. And if you do not understand this most basic of truths, then I greatly fear for your future and pray for your soul.” Belle sighed heavily and, with a snap of her fingers, called Meri P. to her and left the room, her teacup in her hand and her air of indignation like a mantle about her tiny shoulders.