Lily and the Lawman
Autore
Marie Ferrarella
Letto da
17,4K
Capitoli
15
Chapter One
“I hate men. I hate tall men, I hate short men, I hate old men, I hate young men. I hate men!”
Alison Quintano held the phone away from her ear for a moment. Distance hardly muted her older sister Lily’s tirade. It was as if the petite woman who had dominated a large portion of Alison’s childhood was standing right here in Hades’s lone medical clinic rather than far away, in her own trendy Seattle apartment.
“You. Men. Hate. Got it,” Alison quipped, trying to get Lily’s voice down to a level that didn’t threaten to shatter her eardrum. Lily had called her about three minutes ago and had been carrying on like this from the moment she’d answered the phone. “Now calm down and tell me what brought this on.”
Even as she said it, Alison had a sneaking suspicion she knew what the problem was. Or rather, who.
Lily steamrolled right over the question, not hearing her sister. She was just too angry and trying very, very hard not to be hurt. But the pain was there, hot and biting.
How could she have been this blind?
“I especially hate sneaky plastic surgeon men.”
Ah, now they were getting to it, Alison thought. Lily’s fiancé, Allen, was a plastic surgeon. Alison felt guilty over the sense of relief she was experiencing. But it was there nonetheless. She had never liked Allen. None of them had.
“Does this mean the wedding’s off?” Alison could just see their older brother, Kevin, doing a little jig.
Of the three of them, Kevin, who had raised them ever since their father had died, had disliked Allen the most. The artificial surgeon was the way he referred to Allen whenever he mentioned the man to the rest of them.
But, Lily being Lily, none of them had said anything to her. It would have only made her dig in her heels. Now, it looked as if her heels had been naturally dislodged.
It was hard for Alison to keep from cheering.
Feeling like a caged animal, Lily paced the length of her kitchen, a headset sitting like an appendage on her straight black hair. Normally, being around the various state-of-the-art appliances in her kitchen soothed her. But nothing was soothing her now. Short of filleting her fiancé.
Ex-fiancé, she amended with a vengeance. How could he? How could he?
“Not only is the wedding off, but I very nearly came close to taking his head off, as well.” She huffed angrily, struggling to keep the skewering feeling of betrayal at bay. “Not that he needs his head since he seems to rely very heavily on the Braille system of doing things.”
With the telephone wedged against her shoulder and her ear, Alison tallied up a bill for the burly miner who had just walked out of examining room one. It took her a second to decipher her brother Jimmy’s illegible handwriting. Even for a doctor it was awful, she thought.
“Does this come with any subtitles, Lily, or am I going to have to figure out what you’re talking about on my own?”
Alison’s words bounced off Lily’s brain like so many cascading beads. Nothing was making sense right now. Lily looked around her, searching for a way to siphon off some of the anger she was feeling.
It was as if she were a kettle with the top about to blow.
She’d never been so angry in her life. Never. She’d given that narcissistic idiot some of the best entrées of her life.
Taking a breath, she tried to begin at the beginning. “Allen kept complaining about how predictable I was, how all I ever thought about was work, that I was never spontaneous.” Lily ground her teeth together, thinking what a fool she’d been. Had this kind of thing really been going on under her nose all the time? “So I was spontaneous. I got Arthur to take over for me at Lily’s, grabbed a bottle of our finest champagne from the wine cellar, packed a picnic lunch of nothing less than my finest fare and came over to his apartment to surprise him.”
Finding herself in the living room without the slightest idea how she got there, Lily sank down onto the sofa as if all at once all the air had been let out of her body.
“I surprised him, all right. In bed with one of his former patients. The breast enhancement one.” She spat the words out. There was no comfort in the fact that the woman had looked as though she’d been wearing a flotation device.
Lily blinked. Were those tears she felt on her lashes? No, damn it, she wasn’t going to waste tears on that jerk. “He was trying to get closer to his work, no doubt.”
Handing the miner his receipt, Alison nodded as the man paid her and took his leave. Poor Lily, she thought. But thank God the so-called gift to the medical profession wasn’t going to be part of the family, after all. “I get the picture, Lil.”
Lily tossed her head and then grabbed the headset as it threatened to slide off. “Well, picture him and his cutie wearing the lobster Newburg I threw at them.”
Alison knew her sister was very capable of pitching things when she got angry. She laughed, tickled as she envisioned the sight. “Good for you. I never liked Allen anyway.”
Frowning, Lily stood up and began to pace again. To think of all the time she’d wasted on that man… “Well, you don’t have to try to like him anymore. The wedding is off.” She blew out a long breath, feeling empty and trying not to. Where had all this sadness come from suddenly? “My life is off.”
Alison knew a dramatic tirade in the making when she heard one. She tried to head her off before Lily picked up another full head of steam. “Lily.”
Standing beside her audio system, Lily flipped a switch. The song playing on the radio had memories attached to it. Bitter ones now. Lily flipped the switch off again. “I should have never thought that I could give love a try.”
Alison tried again. “—Lily.”
“Men are scum, anyway,” Lily declared like a scientist at the end of a long, carefully controlled experiment. And then she realized who she was talking to. “Your husband and our brothers excepted, of course. But in general, Aly, all men are.”
“—Lily—”
“And on the whole, I’m better off without any of them in my life. If I need any spice, I can find it waiting for me on the rack—”
“Lily!”
Her sister’s voice finally penetrating, Lily stopped in midstride. Alison’s voice echoed in her head. “What?”
Finally. Blowing out a breath, Alison made her pitch while indicating that the patient who had just entered should take a seat. “Why don’t you come up for a vacation?”
“Come up?” Taking a vacation was as rare for Lily as taking a bath was for a cat. She paused to let the idea sink in. It didn’t. It floundered. “Come up where?”
“Here.” There was no response. “Where I live. Where Jimmy lives,” Alison added for good measure. “We haven’t seen you since forever.” Or, more precisely, since her wedding to Luc. Lily had been unable to attend their brother’s marriage to April Yearling last year. Now that Lily’s wedding was off, there was no telling when they would see her again. She knew Lily had a tendency to lose herself in her work. “Maybe you need to get away.”
The idea of getting away was not completely without appeal for Lily. But people took vacations to exciting places, not places that brought to mind an abundance of ice. “To Alaska?”
“To family,” Alison told her quietly but firmly.
Lily caught her lower lip between her teeth, working it slowly as she thought. It was one of the unconscious habits she and her sister shared.
“I have Kevin.” Kevin was the only one of the family who still lived in Seattle. It seemed that Hades, Alaska, population of five hundred or so, was slowly wooing the Quintanos away from their native Seattle. Or at least the younger ones.
Alison saw no problem with that. “So bring him.”
It was always wonderful to see Kevin. With ten years between them, Kevin was like a second father to Alison and she loved him dearly. Leaving Kevin behind when she moved here was the hardest thing she had ever done. Loving Luc was the easiest.
Lily laughed shortly. She wasn’t the only workaholic in the family. Kevin’s devotion to work had begun out of necessity, to provide for her and the others. But once they were all out on their own, Kevin, who had made the decision years ago to turn his back on beginning a family of his own to provide for the one he already had, just kept on working, running his own taxi service.
“Yeah, like I could get our older brother to go anywhere. Men just don’t—”
Alison didn’t have time to listen to an encore. Mrs. Newhaven had just walked in, all eight months’ pregnant of her.
“Lily, I have to get back to work.” She heard her sister sigh. She hated to leave her hanging like this. “I can be much more sympathetic in person, really. Take a couple of weeks off and come up here. You were going to take two weeks off for your honeymoon, right?”
Lily closed her eyes, battling sorrow, regret and searching for a fresh wave of anger to hold on to. As long as she was angry she couldn’t cry. “You’re not exactly who I was planning to spend those two weeks with.”
Alison was ready for her. “I’m nicer than a two-timing weasel, right?”
Lily sighed, then laughed sadly. “Right.”
“Then it’s settled.” For once, she was going to order her sister around, not vice versa. Lily’s problem, Alison knew, was that she was a commando in high heels. Allen had been the first man she hadn’t been able to boss around, but that was probably because he’d had his own agenda and hadn’t paid attention to anything she’d said. “Make arrangements. Jimmy or I will come to the airport to pick you up and bring you to Hades.”
“Hades.” Lily repeated the improbable name of the small town that had lured two-thirds of her family. “The place sounds more like heaven after what I’ve been through.”
Alison smiled, confident that Dr. Allen Ripley was undoubtedly worse for the encounter with her sister during her surprise visit. Lily’s wrath was legendary when unleashed. Not that he hadn’t deserve it.
“My point exactly. C’mon, Lily. We miss your smiling face.”
Even as she heard her sister say it, a smile began to form on Lily’s lips. She’d been incredibly busy, making Lily’s one of the trendiest places in Seattle. But even at the height of her success, there was an emptiness she tried to ignore. She had to admit she did miss her siblings. “Not to mention my cooking.”
Alison laughed. There was no denying that. No one on earth could cook like Lily.
“Not to mention your cooking,” she agreed. The door to the clinic opened again and two more patients walked in. Even though it was almost evening, it looked as if she and Jimmy were going to be here well past closing. Again. “Now, I really have to go. Promise me you’ll come.” Alison paused, waiting. “Promise.”
Lily took a deep breath, then released it. Maybe she did need to get away for a while. Really get away. Not just from the memory of the man she’d thought she was going to spend her future with, but from everything. She’d been working almost nonstop ever since she’d opened Lily’s more than five years ago. The restaurant was doing great.
The same, unfortunately, couldn’t be said for her. Maybe it was time to change that. “Okay, I’ll come.”
Alison breathed a sigh of relief. “Wonderful. I’ll call you tonight, we’ll make arrangements and get you booked on a flight up here as soon as possible.”
Her sister, as she remembered, never walked when she could run. A smile curved Lily’s mouth fondly. “Don’t waste time, do you?”
“Nope.” There was genuine affection in Alison’s voice. “I learned from the best.” She rose as she saw Mrs. Newhaven’s hand go limp. She’d just been fanning herself. The woman’s eyes started to roll up toward her head. “Gotta go. ’Bye.”
The line went dead.
Lily felt at her waist where the telephone receiver was attached. She pressed the off button. Even as she did so, a fresh wave of sadness came sweeping in, threatening to undo her.
It wasn’t that she loved Allen with her dying breath, she knew she didn’t. She’d thought they went well together and, on paper, he was all the things she’d thought she wanted in a man. Handsome, successful, intelligent. Somewhere along the line, though, she must have missed the part about being a lying cheat. So she’d cut him loose, her pride smarting somewhat.
It was just that…just that she felt alone. Again. And every so often, being alone had sharp edges to it that hurt.
Enough of this self-pity, Lily upbraided herself, annoyed. She had her restaurant, her reputation and her career. And a family who loved her. Not everyone was nearly so lucky.
Squaring her shoulders, Lily marched over to the piano and the framed photograph of Allen. He’d given it to her on her last birthday with an inscription. The Best For The Best.
Should have been a clue, Lily. Should have been a clue…
Taking the photograph in hand, Lily escorted it to the kitchen where she threw it, frame and all, into the trash. Glass shattered as it hit the side of the metal container on its way to the bottom. It was a satisfying sound.
Lily felt marginally better as she went to pack.
Max Yearling passed his hand over the rim of the tanned hat in his hand as he looked around the vast airport, trying to spot a woman he only vaguely remembered meeting once several years ago.
He wasn’t sure just how he’d gotten roped into this. As a rule, he didn’t like to fly and only did so as a last resort. If God had really meant men to fly, He would have made them with feathers instead of hair.
But April didn’t ask for much and she had asked for this, so he’d said yes.
It wasn’t as though he could hide behind the fact that he was busy. He wasn’t. Being sheriff of Hades and its surrounding territory had its busy times, but today wasn’t one of them. Most times, the job involved a great number of small tasks and duties that most people would find monotonous.
But he didn’t. Not usually. There was comfort in the familiar and he never looked down his nose at any part of his job. Not even looking under the Widow Anderson’s bed to assure her that no one had sneaked into her home, waiting to have their way with her once she was asleep.
All of eighty-one, the widow had a healthy imagination, he thought, smiling to himself. A little like his own grandmother’s, except that Ursula Hatcher, Hades’s postmistress for as long as anyone could remember, would probably have been delighted to have a man stashed under her bed, waiting for the lights to go out. At seventy-two, having buried three husbands and on the lookout for a fourth, his grandmother was the youngest woman he knew.
Not that there were all that many women to know in Hades, he mused, scanning faces as a fresh wave of passengers made its way into the baggage claim area. Men outnumbered women seven to one in the town he was born in. He knew that if he were to ever have that family he occasionally thought about, he was going to have to go to one of the real cities in Alaska to find a wife.
Didn’t seem likely, though. In his heart, he sincerely doubted that any woman from a city larger than a bread box would want to transplant herself to a place like Hades, where people and time seemed to move in slow motion for the most part, barring earthquakes, fires and cave-ins at the local mine, the industry that employed two-thirds of the male population.
Oh, sure, Sydney, Marta, and Alison had all come from outside the state and wound up marrying local men, but they were exceptions. And most of the home-grown women were on their way out the second they reached their eighteenth birthday. Even his own sister hadn’t been able to wait to get away. The only reason April had returned at all was that their grandmother had gotten ill and neither he nor June had been able to give her the full-time attention that April felt she needed. It had been April’s intention to stay for no more than two weeks, the time necessary to talk their grandmother into having heart surgery. Instead, she’d fallen in love and married the visiting heart surgeon, Alison’s brother, Jimmy.
Funny how things arranged themselves, Max thought, shifting from foot to foot as he waited beside Sydney Kerrigan, the wife of Hades’s first resident doctor. Sydney had been one of the women who had come from somewhere else to be here. And, like him, Sydney was happy to remain here for the rest of her life. She’d even learned to fly her husband’s plane to help bring in supplies. For a while there, Dr. Kerrigan’s plane had been the only one making trips in and out. But now there were two planes and three pilots in the immediate vicinity.
Yup, he thought, his lips curving in amusement, Hades was growing up. If not by leaps and bounds, then by hops and skips, but it was happening. Fast enough to suit him.
What wasn’t happening fast enough to suit him was Lily Quintano’s appearance.
“You see her?” he asked Sydney impatiently, glancing down at the photograph Alison had given him of her sister.
He wished Alison or Jimmy were here in his place. Both Alison, who was the only nurse in town, and Jimmy, referred to by the locals as “the doctor who had come on vacation only to remain,” were tied up in an unexpected surgery. Neither had been able to get away to pick up their sister, thus Jimmy’s call to April, who in turn had called him.
His sister was busy working against some deadline or other, snapping pictures of melting snow for some magazine and pretending it was work.
Someday, he thought, he was going to learn how to say no.
Flying out of Hades into Anchorage Airport to be the unofficial welcoming committee for a woman reputed to be a man-hating workaholic wasn’t exactly his idea of a good way to spend an afternoon.
“Someone from the family has to be there,” April had insisted when he’d challenged her as to why Sydney wasn’t sufficient to welcome Lily Quintano and bring her back to town.
“But she doesn’t know me from Adam,” he’d protested fruitlessly. As far as he could remember, he’d only caught a glimpse of her at Alison and Luc’s wedding. If not for the photograph in his hand, he wouldn’t have been able to identify her at all.
“She will as soon as she looks into those beautiful green eyes of yours, little brother,” April had assured him.
He really should have said no, he thought now, but there hadn’t been anything else more pressing to do. His investigation of Jeffords’s broken traplines was going nowhere at the moment and he’d thought, recklessly, that maybe a plane ride in the single-engine Cessna would clear his head. Besides, April, only eleven months his senior, knew how to nag better than any woman he’d ever met. When it came to April, he’d learned a long time ago that it was easier just to say yes.
Sydney shook her head in response to his question. And then suddenly she caught hold of his arm, pointing. “Over there, the woman in the red leather coat next to the baggage carousel. Is that—”
Max looked to where Sydney was pointing, then glanced down at the photograph. It was hard to decide. The woman in the photograph was smiling. The woman in the red leather coat was definitely not. Even at this distance, she reeked of impatience. She was frowning as she scanned the area.
Frown or not, Max had to admit that he’d never seen a finer-looking woman.
“Only one way to find out,” he told Sydney, pocketing the photograph. “Wait here.”
Still holding his hat in his hand, Max made his way through the crowded terminal to the baggage claim area. The closer he got, the finer the dark-haired woman looked. In the absolute sense. Given his preference, he preferred women who smiled.
He noted that, unlike a lot of passengers, the woman was dressed almost formally, wearing a light gray suit beneath her open coat. She had on what appeared to be three-or four-inch heels, which gave her the appearance of height.
She was a slight woman, he realized, with fine features and the greatest set of legs he’d ever seen.
“All the better to grind men into dust,” he’d once heard from Jimmy. Her brother ought to know, Max thought.
There were a lot of men in Hades who could be led around by the nose by someone like Lily Quintano. He was going to have to watch this one—which wouldn’t be all that much of a hardship, he decided as he placed himself in front of her.
“Ms. Quintano?”
Lily spun around, all but colliding with the tall, broad-shouldered man in the sheepskin jacket. As the jacket moved, she caught sight of the badge pinned to his shirt. “Yes?”
The woman knew how to cut people down into tiny pieces, he thought, judging by the way she looked at him. “You might not remember me—”
Lily prided herself on having one hell of a memory. She remembered every single recipe she’d ever read. “Sheriff Max Yearling, April’s brother. Yes, I remember you,” she said in a crisp tone. “You were at Alison’s wedding. So was I.”
It suddenly occurred to her why the sheriff might be here in her sister’s place. Lily looked beyond his shoulder. Alison was nowhere to be seen. Neither was their brother. An uneasiness struck.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded, firing the words at him point-blank. “Has something happened to Alison and Jimmy?”
He could almost see the thoughts ricocheting in her head from one spot to another. She talked like she danced. Quickly. He recalled seeing her dancing at the wedding. At the time, she’d been on the arm of a very self-absorbed-looking male. Her fiancé, he’d been told. The only opinion he’d formed at the time was that she could have done better, but then, it hadn’t been any of his business.
“There was an emergency at the clinic and they couldn’t get away, so they asked me to come and bring you back.”
She wondered if he made it sound as though he were fetching a package on purpose, then decided that she was probably giving the man too much credit.
She took the measure of him now. Handsome. Probably used that to his advantage. She wondered how many women he was stringing along, then remembered that Hades didn’t have that many to string.
“They were afraid I’d get back on the plane?” she finally asked.
She was scrutinizing him. Was she planning on dissecting him? he wondered, half amused. “Something like that.”
The next moment, Sydney came up to join them. Sydney had never been one to stand on ceremony and her years as the doctor’s wife out here had only served to make her more gregarious. She embraced Lily warmly.
“Welcome back.”
Stunned, her arms pinned to her sides, Lily pulled her head back and looked at Sydney. The other woman made it sound as if she was returning after a long journey rather than visiting for a short while to pull the unraveling ends of her life together.
All things considered, Lily supposed that the hug was appreciated. Awkwardly, she raised her arms and hugged Sydney back, her eyes on Max.
“So, has transportation improved any since the last time I was out here?”
“We’ve replaced some parts in the plane,” Sydney told her amicably. “And since this is summer, there is a road you can use with an all-terrain vehicle. But in the winter, the road becomes impassable and there’s still no way in or out of Hades except by dogsled or plane.”
Lily nodded. She was just making conversation. She knew exactly what to expect, thanks to Alison.
“Sounds perfect,” she answered. “Right now, I could do with a little seclusion and a lot of peace and quiet.”
But even as she said the words, she wasn’t all that sure she meant them. A big-city girl all of her life, Lily was already feeling homesick for the sound of traffic—of blaring horns, impatient drivers and raised voices.
And they hadn’t even left the terminal yet.
Maybe, she thought as Max went to get her luggage, she’d made a mistake in coming here.
