Night’s Landing

Twenty-Five

Sarah couldn’t remember ever hearing her mother sound so close to losing all control. She was hanging by threads, but, of course, she wouldn’t admit it. “We’re all right,” she said. “We had an unexpected delay-we couldn’t get hold of anyone. I was afraid you’d all be frantic. I’m so sorry.”

“What happened?” Sarah asked.

“I ran into someone I know. It’s a long story. I’ll explain when we get to New York. We’re scheduled for an early-morning flight. Right now, I just want to go to bed. Your dad’s exhausted, too.”

“I understand, but-”

“I tried to call Rob,” her mother cut in, obviously reluctant to go into more detail. “He was asleep. I’ll try again in a minute, but if I don’t reach him, will you call him later on and let him know we talked?”

“Of course.” Sarah hesitated, glancing at Nate down on the dock. Not one inch of him looked relaxed. “But there’s something I need to ask you. It can’t wait.”

Her mother inhaled. “All right.”

“When we were all at the Rijksmuseum together in April, a man spoke to me. Dark hair, angular features. He had just a slight accent. French, I think. He approached me while you were at The Night Watch. Did you happen to see him?”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

Sarah sighed. “I thought not. You were talking with another man. I thought they might be together. The man you were with had silver hair-”

“I know. He’s-” Her mother broke off, sounding ragged, even afraid. “He’s someone I used to know in college. It’s a long story. What about this man you were with? Why are you asking about him now?”

“I might have seen him in Central Park the other day. I’m not sure.”

Her mother didn’t respond.

“The FBI and the marshals are looking into it,” Sarah added.

“Dear God.” Her mother seemed ready to crack with tension. “The marshal who was shot with Rob-Nate Winter. He’s staying in Night’s Landing with you?”

“Yes, but-”

“Then you’re out of harm’s way. Whatever’s going on, you and Rob are safe.” She gave a fake little laugh. “All this drama. We’re all tired and freaked out by this senseless shooting. Let’s just stay cool. We’ll get everything sorted out when we get to New York tomorrow.”

“Mother, was the silver-haired man with the guy who approached me?”

“I don’t know. Sarah, please. I’m exhausted. Stay safe, okay? I love you very much.”

She said good-night and hung up.

Sarah cradled the phone and got to her feet, feeling unsteady, shaken.

Nate appeared on the porch steps. He glanced up at her, his expression more law enforcement officer than friend or lover. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“The kitchen. I think there’s another casserole in the freezer. Whatever it is, we can have it for dinner.”

But he mounted the steps and caught her by the elbow, turning her to him, not ungently. She felt how rigid she was, not awkward so much as incredibly aware that her mother hadn’t wanted to talk about the silver-haired man-that she was hiding something and intended to for as long as she could.

And that Nate wanted whoever had shot him and Rob more than anything else.

It was why he was in Night’s Landing. That they’d made love last night was an accident of timing and a product of chemistry. Even if he was genuinely attracted to her, it didn’t mean he’d let his feelings interfere with his duties as a marshal and his determination to find out what had happened in Central Park.

She wouldn’t expect him to.

“What all happened in the Rijksmuseum?” he asked.

“I thought you weren’t listening in.”

“I didn’t hear everything. You looked like you were going to pass out. I was coming to your rescue.”

“Ah. More projection. You were on the verge of passing out.”

“I’ve never passed out.”

“Nothing happened at the Rijksmuseum. My mother didn’t see the man who approached me. She was still at The Night Watch. She’s something of an art historian-she takes forever to wander through a museum.”

“Where were she and your father today?” Nate didn’t let up on his intensity, didn’t release his hold on her. “Why did they miss their flight?”

“She ran into someone she knew. She didn’t get into details.” Sarah fought to control her emotions. Was her mother hiding something? Why? Nerves, fear, drama? “She’s the mother of a deputy marshal who’s got a long recovery ahead of him. We’re all crazed right now. This is why I didn’t want to mention the guy in the park-I knew you’d all seize on it, when I’m sure I was mistaken.”

“Do your parents often miss planes?”

She jerked back out of his grip, angrily, then saw his face pale, the pain register at the edges of his mouth. “Your arm-oh, my God, I’m so sorry.”

He waved her off, visibly absorbing the pain.

“What can I do? Tylenol? A fresh bandage? Should I call an ambulance?”

He managed a thin smile. “A shot of some kind of Tennessee bourbon would be nice.”

“That I can manage.”

She ran into the front room and found a dusty bottle, a glass that she held up to the light and decided definitely needed rinsing. She brought both into the kitchen, swirled water into the glass, added ice and splashed in the bourbon. Her emotions were all over the place. How could she have forgotten about his arm even for a split second? What was wrong with her?

She returned to the living room with the glass.

He didn’t gulp. She had a feeling Nate Winter didn’t do much that didn’t show total control. Even last night making love to her. As wild as it had been, he’d known precisely, exactly what he was doing. “Go ahead.” He waved the glass at her. “Call your brother and tell him you’ve heard from your mother.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“I deserved it.”

She dialed her brother’s room at the hospital, but Joe Collins picked up. “Is that you, Dr. Dunnemore? Your parents are safe.”

“You talked to my mother? She just called here, too.”

“I didn’t talk to her. Juliet Longstreet answered Rob’s phone.” His tone was difficult to read. “Your brother’s knocked out. I’m waiting for him to wake up. Nurse said it probably won’t be long. He was in a lot of pain this afternoon. They’re working him pretty hard.”

“I should be there.”

“You should be where you are. Nothing more out of your letter writer?”

“No, sir.”

“Quiet day?”

“We had a cottonmouth in the house, but other than that-”

“A snake? Hell, I hate snakes. What’d you do with it?”

“I caught him and released him back in the river.”

Collins chuckled, surprising her. “I don’t know why your brother worries about you. We’ll stay in touch, right, Dr. Dunnemore?”

She nodded at the phone. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

Whatever he knew-whatever her mother might have told Juliet that she hadn’t told her daughter-Joe Collins was keeping it all to himself. He hung up, and Sarah almost poured herself a glass of bourbon. “Sometimes I wonder why Rob couldn’t have become a house painter.” She sank onto the couch, aware of Nate standing in the shadows in front of the stone fireplace. “He used to paint houses in college. It was a good job. You might fall off a ladder, but usually people don’t shoot house painters.”

Nate set his glass down. “You asked your mother if a silver-haired man was with the man who’d approached you at the museum. Why? Who is he?”

“You’re relentless, aren’t you, Deputy Winter?”

He didn’t answer.

“I don’t know who he is. My mother said he was someone she knows.”

“Then you didn’t recognize him?”

“My parents know a lot of people I wouldn’t recognize.” Sarah angled a look at him. “Do you want to strap me down and shoot me up with truth serum?”

Not even a flicker of a smile.

She tried to smile, just to ease some of her own tension. “I wouldn’t want to be someone you’re interrogating.”

“That’s right. You wouldn’t.”

She quashed a flare of irritation. “You’re known for being the hard-ass of hard-asses, aren’t you? Rob didn’t tell me that. Neither did Juliet. But it’s obvious from the way people treat you. They say it’s because you’re the best at what you do, but I think they know you’re harder sometimes than you need to be.”

“Figured that out all by yourself?”

“Don’t patronize me.”

He drank more of his bourbon. “You don’t like it when the shoe’s on the other foot, do you?”

“I wasn’t patronizing you. I was just-”

She didn’t know what she was doing. Picking a fight so she didn’t have to confront her own fears and worries about her parents? What the hell was going on in Amsterdam? How could anything her parents were involved with possibly have spilled out into New York and damn near gotten her brother killed? More Dunnemore drama, embellishment, exaggeration. It had to be. But she blinked back tears and jumped to her feet, heading for the kitchen.

Do nothing. Tell no one.

Had whoever sent her that hideous letter realized she’d talked and gone after her parents? Was that why her mother was so tense?

Sarah shook off that train of thought before it could get started.

“I just had this upsetting conversation with my mother,” she shot back at Nate, “and you can’t give me five damn minutes to pull myself together.”

“Take ten. Then tell me what happened in Amsterdam.”

“Nothing happened!”

“It stuck out in your mind or you wouldn’t have remembered the man who approached you. I’ve been to museums. I’m trained to remember faces, and I doubt I’d remember anyone who stopped and chatted with me for a few seconds, especially not three weeks later.”

Sarah stormed down the hall to the kitchen. “Maybe he was good-looking. Maybe that’s why I remember him.”

She ripped open the freezer, grabbed a frozen dish marked “squash casserole” and slammed it onto the counter, swearing under her breath, her chest tight with anger and a kind of fear she’d never known-as if people were out to kill her, kill her brother, kill her parents. But that was insane.

Nate was standing in the kitchen door. She pushed past him, not even looking at him. “Help yourself. I’m not hungry.”

He didn’t stop her from walking down the hall and heading upstairs.

He didn’t say a word. Nothing.

She shut the door to her room.

Five o’clock. Hours left before she could go to bed, but she was exhausted-and feeling guilty, because she knew she’d picked a fight with him in order to keep herself from thinking about her mother and what she was hiding.

It was terribly like her mother to have secrets. The Quinlan side of the family were all big on secrets. They treated them as currency.

Sarah tore open her bedroom door and stormed back into the hall, but all the fury had gone out of her. She hung over the stair railing. “I’m going to take a bath. I’m sorry I’m not better company.”

No response.

“And I’m sorry I almost ripped your arm off.”

“My arm’s fine.”

He was behind her. She turned around so fast she almost lost her balance. Her heart was pounding-it was as if all her nerve endings were raw, exposed, responding to him in a thousand different ways. She pushed her hair back with one hand and gave a self-conscious laugh. “I think Wyatt Earp could do that, couldn’t he? Materialize out of thin air.”

“I think that was Captain Kirk.”

“I’ll cooperate,” she blurted. “So will my mother. You know that, don’t you? It’s just unnerving to think that we might have any connection to a shooting that almost killed Rob-you-”

“Later.”

“But if you’ve got a bee up your nose-”

He wrapped both arms around her and lifted her off the floor, kissing her, tasting of bourbon and a kind of intensity she’d never known. He carried her back into her room. “I want to feel the breeze off the river while we make love.”

“Nate-”

“You and I both have a million things to think about. Let’s think about all of them later.”

He laid her down on her bed. She could, indeed, feel the breeze off the river. “I’ve neglected this part of my life,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to anymore. Neither do I.”

“But you-”

“There’s sex,” he said, “and there’s lovemaking. I want to make love to you.”

“Why?”

He smiled. “No more questions.”

He stripped off his shirt-she could see that his arm had bled slightly through the bandage, but he didn’t seem to notice. His pants came next, and it was obvious he’d been anticipating this moment for at least a few minutes. But, instead of rushing, he said, “I want to take my time with you.” And he slid in next to her, taking her hands when she started to lift her shirt. “Allow me.”

“As you wish.”

“And you?” he asked, raising her shirt. “What do you wish?”

He touched his thumbs to her nipples through her bra, and she couldn’t answer. Slowly, without any obvious sense of urgency, he lifted her bra and exposed her breasts to the cold breeze and the wet heat of his tongue. He took his time easing off her top, smoothing his hands and tongue over her throat, between her breasts, down her abdomen. He caught his fingers in the waistband of her pants and took them and her underpants off at the same time, exposing her to the same slow, erotic play of hands, teeth and tongue.

“I wish…” She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. “I wish this could go on forever.”

With his fingers still on her, inside her, he took her hand and placed it on him. He was hot, throbbing. He thrust himself against her palm, a promise of what was to come. But she couldn’t last another second and moved under him, and he pulled back his hand, then entered her, pushing in hard and deep, his eyes locking with hers. “How long do you mean by forever?”

He took her to the precipice, then fell back again, over and over, until she couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, could only feel her own blinding need for release. When it came, he stayed with her, spun into a freefall with her, tumbling, picking up speed, but she kept pace with him until his own release overcame him. Afterward, completely spent, she wrapped herself around him so that she could feel the entire length of his body, the taut muscles, the hot skin as the chilly wind blew across them. He was real. So very real. She hadn’t imagined one second of what had just happened.

“A Yankee marshal,” she whispered, not sure if he could hear her, and smiled. “Dear God.”

She could easily fall in love with him.

She might have already.

And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it, any more than she could stop the river outside her doors from flowing-not that she would if she could.

Finally he stirred. “What’s in squash casserole?”

“Summer squash, Ritz crackers, onions, cheese and butter.” She sat up, untangling her hair with her fingers. “Lots of butter.”

He threw his legs over the edge of her bed. “Another of Granny Dunnemore’s recipes?”

Sarah nodded. “One of my favorites.”

He grinned at her. “They’re all your favorites.”

He pulled on his pants and stood up, and when he turned to her, he winced and gave a mock shudder. “I wish I’d seen that before I carried you in here.”

She followed his gaze and realized that it was fixed on the picture of her and John Wesley Poe at her college graduation, in front of a table of strawberries and champagne. “He was running for governor then. My parents were out of the country-my father was serving as a special envoy to Indonesia during hard times.”

“There are always hard times somewhere.”

“I told them it was okay for them not to come.”

“You had Wes Poe,” Nate said.

“Yes.” She pretended not to hear the note of criticism in his voice. “And Rob. He came, too.”

“Did your parents make it to his graduation?”

She shook her head. “We had a grand party afterward here at Night’s Landing. We’ve learned to seize the moment, make up for lost time when we’re together.” She collected her clothes and held them close to her. “Why don’t I get dressed and make us some homemade biscuits to go with the squash casserole?”

He pulled on his shirt. “I thought you weren’t hungry.”

She threw a pillow at him and remembered his injured arm too damn late again, but he caught the pillow with his right hand and tossed it back at her. And in another minute, they were making love again, all thought of biscuits and squash casserole, of loving but neglectful parents-of the family friend who was now in the White House-vanished, which was, Sarah thought, just what Nate had intended.

“Leola and Violet used to tell a story about a Huck-Finn-type boy who lived on the river,” Sarah said as she led the way to the Poe house, the river on one side of the narrow trail, the thick woods on the other. It was after dinner, the sun low in the sky, but she had a restless energy that Nate, as tired as he was, understood. “They said he camped in the caves. I’m not sure when it was. I never asked. It’s one of a thousand questions I wish I could go back and ask them.”

They were on a section of trail that wound over the top of a near-vertical limestone bluff. One wrong step, and he’d be in the water. The river was quiet, no waves, no boats. “What’d he do, live off the land?”

“They claimed he’d fish, catch frogs and snakes. They liked frog’s legs themselves. I think Wes did, too.” Sarah paused atop the bluff and caught her breath. “I never developed a taste for them.”

Nate smiled next to her. “I’ve never eaten frog and have no plans to start. What about snake?”

“Oh, no. I’m not eating snake. Leola and Violet claimed they tried it once, when they were little girls.” She breathed out. “Hard to believe that was before World War One.”

Nate saw that talking about the Poe sisters and her friendship with the president relaxed her. He regretted having pushed hard earlier with his questions, but he’d never been a patient man. A patient lover, sometimes. This afternoon. His doctor probably wouldn’t be pleased with him, but, on the other hand, he felt fine. “Isn’t there a story about the president and a snake? I don’t remember the details. It came out during the campaign.”

She shuddered. “I don’t know how anyone stands a political campaign. I really don’t.”

“Do you know the story?”

She glanced at him, her eyes cool, their color matching the churning gray sky. “I was there.”

In spite of her seriousness, he smiled. “After this morning, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You and your snakes.”

“Wes-President Poe-came to Night’s Landing not long after he and his wife had lost their fourth and last baby. A little girl, stillborn. They knew there wouldn’t be more. I was still in high school. Almost seventeen.”

Nate tried to picture her at almost seventeen. Pretty, intense, dragging her video camera down the river to interview her two elderly neighbors. And direct. She’d have been direct, too.

“I was walking back from the Poe house along this same path, not that far from here. It was a sticky summer day, oppressively hot.” Her accent seemed more pronounced. “Wes was standing below me on a narrow, treacherous ledge that leads to a cave just above the water.”

“He was there alone?”

“Ev stayed in Nashville. She was out of the hospital-her mother was with her. I’ve always thought Wes just needed some time to himself. He was grief-stricken-”

“Do you think he meant to jump that day?”

She shook her head but didn’t seem shocked by the question. “It was just such a hard time. Wes prides himself on getting things done, making things happen. But some things you just can’t control. I just think he wanted to be here, on the river.”

“Who saw the snake first?”

“He did. It must have come from the cave. I’ve seen them out on the ledge, sunning themselves.”

“Water moccasins?”

“Oh, yes.”

Nate remembered some of the story now. “He saved someone’s life, didn’t he? Yours? Isn’t that the story?”

“That’s the story.”

She continued along the trail. When they reached the Poe house, she led the way through the tall grass to the road, then down to the fishing camp and the cabin Conroy Fontaine had rented.

He was sitting out on a rusted lawn chair, chatting with an old man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and he squinted up at Sarah, then at Nate. “Evening. Sarah, your prune cake was fantastic. I almost sneaked into your house in the middle of the night to steal me another piece, but then I decided that probably wasn’t such a good idea.” He grinned lazily. “You did your granny proud.”

“Thanks. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“Let me introduce you to my friend Hiram Jones. Hiram, this here is Sarah Dunnemore and her friend, Deputy U.S. Marshal Nate Winter.”

Sarah mumbled something about being pleased to meet him. Nate just nodded, and the old guy rolled back in his lawn chair and blew out a lungful of smoke. “I knew Leola and Violet back in the war. Used to come out here to fish. They was real ladies.”

Conroy gave Sarah a pointed look. “Hiram was here not long after they found President Poe on the doorstep.”

“He wasn’t president then,” Sarah said, a little sharply. “He was just a baby.”

“Cute little fella,” the old man said.

Sarah sighed. “You don’t let up, do you, Conroy?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t give up, either. Anything I can do for you? How’s your brother today?”

“He’s doing well, thanks. I wanted you to know I spoke to Ethan, and he apologizes. He said he stopped by earlier to apologize to you in person, but you weren’t around.”

“Out for my run, probably. Water over the dam.” He laid on the charm. “Tell him apology accepted.”

Sarah thanked him, but he didn’t invite her in-and she didn’t invite him back to her place to eat the last of the fried apricot pies. The old man puffed on his cigarette.

“It’s not a serious interview,” Sarah said to Nate on the way back out to the road. “Conroy doesn’t have a notepad or a tape recorder.”

Nate made a face. “I think you’d have to be a serious journalist to have a serious interview.”

“At least he’s pleasant.”

“Too bad he didn’t invite you in for a little nip of something. I’d love to see his notes for his book.”

She cut a look at him. “You don’t think he’s legitimate?”

“I don’t think anything one way or the other.”

“My opinion? Ethan’s right. Much as I hate to say it, Conroy’s a bottom-feeder, positioning himself to be in the right place at the right time for a bombshell.” She squared her shoulders and picked up her pace. “But my family doesn’t have anything to hide, about ourselves or anyone else.”

Nate hung back, watching her walk down the road with sudden energy. Caves, snakes, frogs, a baby on a doorstep, an historic house, an old fishing camp, a well-respected diplomat, the president of the United States-if he wanted secrets and lies to drop into his lap, Nate thought, he’d park himself in Night’s Landing, just as Conroy Fontaine had done.