Emily and the Stranger (4 page)

Emily opened the refrigerator and removed the chilled bottle of Dom Perignon.

Nikki whistled. "Ah, the good stuff."

"What do you mean, we're a pair?" Emily handed Nikki the bottle, then opened a cupboard and retrieved two plastic cups.

"We've both been hiding from the pain of the past, protecting ourselves from ever being hurt again. You in your way, by living in that Victorian mausoleum with your dead husband's uncle. And by refusing to date anyone except the most nonthreatening types like Charles what's-his-name. And me by moving around all over the country and dating every eligible man in sight."

"A serious relationship really isn't an option for me." Holding the bottle over the sink, Emily uncorked the champagne. The overflow spilled down the side of the bottle and across Emily's hand. "Dating someone other than a nonthreatening type like Charles leads to romance and romance leads to sex and—"

"The right man won't care about the scars on your back," Nikki said quietly. She held out the plastic cups.

Emily poured the effervescent liquid, then set the bottle on the countertop. Nikki handed a cup to Emily.

"I didn't think you believed in the existence of Mr. Right or Prince Charming."

"I don't believe in a Mr. Right for me," Nikki said. "But for a princess like you, there's bound to be another Prince Charming just around the corner."

"I'd like to make a toast." Emily lifted her cup in a salute. "Here's to dreams coming true. To my finding a Prince Charming who won't even notice the scars on my back … and to your finding that Mr. Right you don't believe exists."

"Ah, Em, what a stupid, romantic toast." Nikki saluted with her glass, then downed the cup of champagne.

Chapter 2

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S
he picked up the telephone receiver. "The Paint Box. Emily Jordan speaking. May I help you?"

"Emily," the husky, muted voice said.

Every nerve in Emily's body froze. It was
him
again. The same man who had been calling her for the past few days. If he persisted, she'd have to call the police. Right now the phone calls were annoying, but not really threatening.

"What do you want?" Emily asked.

"To hear your voice."

"Please stop harassing me!" Emily slammed down the receiver.

"Oh,
God, it was him again, wasn't it?" Nikki rushed to Emily's side. "What did he say?"

"He said he wanted to hear my voice."

"I don't see why you don't call the police." Nikki squeezed Emily's shoulder reassuringly.

"He hasn't actually broken the law. He never threatens me." Emily sighed.

"Well, this guy may be doing nothing more than bugging you with annoying phone calls right now, but what if he does more? What if he starts stalking you?"

"I pray that doesn't happen, but if he shows his face, at least we'll know who he is."

"I say it's Charles Tolbert." Nikki's button nose crinkled when she frowned. "You said yourself that he was very upset when you told him that you two shouldn't date anymore because your relationship had no future."

"Charles isn't the type to make husky-voiced phone calls. He's a nice man. In some ways, he reminds me of Stuart." Emily's thoughts drifted back to seven years ago when she'd first fallen in love with Stuart. Happy days, filled with the promise of a perfect future. A future that died a tragic death the morning the Ocean Breeze Apartments collapsed.

"Then why stop dating Charles?"

Emily shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe because he does remind me of Stuart. And maybe because … well, to be honest, Nikki, I'm just not attracted to Charles. Not in that way." Emily gave Nikki a you-know-what-I-mean glance.

"He doesn't make your juices flow, huh? I can understand. But Charles isn't the only man interested in you. What about Rod Simmons? Talk about a hunk."

Emily laughed. "Rod Simmons is twenty-two years old! And he's one of my art students."

"So? It's obvious he has a major crush on you."

"Yes, I know. And it's the major crush he has on me that's convinced Uncle Fowler that Rod is my secret caller."

Nikki idly drummed her fingers on the countertop. "I suppose it could be Rod. But my money is on Charles. Or…"

"Or?"

"What about your new neighbor? The blond Adonis you told me about? Maybe breathy phone calls are his way of introducing himself. Hey, is that guy the reason you aren't going to see Charles again?' Have you got the hots for the 'boy' next door?'"

Emily laid her hand over Nikki's, silencing the repetitive tapping. "My new neighbor doesn't even know my name, let alone my unlisted phone number. Besides, I'm not sure he even knows I'm alive. Just because I've noticed him a few times doesn't mean he's noticed me."

"Well, have you ever thought of just walking over to his cottage and introducing yourself?" Nikki asked. "We both know that Mr. Big, Blond and Gorgeous has gotten your juices flowing more than once."

Emily's cheeks flushed, then she smiled sadly. "He is a very intriguing man. Very virile. And yes, I do find him attractive, but … something tells me that he's not the type who'd be interested in a woman like me."

A woman whose back and buttocks are hideously scarred.
Emily suspected her new neighbor was the type of man who wanted his women physically perfect—as physically perfect as he was.

"Ah, Em, you're going to have to get over this hang-up you have about your scars," Nikki said. "You're a beautiful woman. And any man worthy of you isn't going to be turned off by your scars."

"I'd like to believe you're right, that my scars wouldn't matter. But I—I'm afraid to run the risk. I'd die if a man I cared for turned away from me in revulsion when he saw my naked back."

Before Nikki could respond, Emily picked up a stack of envelopes off the top of the counter, handed them to Nikki and said, "You go ahead and take care of the new bills that came today and I'll keep an eye on the shop until my next art lesson."

Nikki grasped the mail, nodded agreement and headed for the storeroom that doubled as kitchen and office space. Emily took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. She knew Nikki meant well when she encouraged her to get to know her new neighbor, when Nikki assured her that the right man wouldn't care about her scars. But she just wasn't ready. Not yet. She had been living out on her own for only a few months and she and Nikki were trying to get their business off the ground. And for the past week, she'd had to deal with some whispering Romeo aggravating her with lovesick phone calls. No, most definitely, positively, no! Despite her attraction to the Viking god who'd moved into the cottage next to hers, the last thing Emily needed at this point in her life was to fall in love.

* * *

"Have you lost your freaking mind?" Zed Banning asked, his dark eyes glowering at Mitch. "You've rented a cottage next door to Emily Jordan!"

Mitch glanced around the restaurant and grimaced when he noticed several nearby patrons staring pointedly at Zed and him. "Calm down, will you? Hell, you'd have thought I just told you that I'm sleeping with her. All I did was move in next door, to sort of keep an eye on her. That's all. For now."

"For now?" Grunting in disgust, Zed shook his head. "The woman has survived for five years without any help from you. I think if she's made it this long, she's all right."

"You told me that she'd lived with her husband's uncle up until a few months ago," Mitch said. "She hasn't been living out on her own since… Dammit, all I want to do is make sure she really is all right. And if there is anything I can do to help her, to make up for… Well, you know what I mean."

"You want Emily Jordan's forgiveness." Zed lifted the cup to his lips, hesitated momentarily and looked Mitch square in the eye. "You're playing with fire here, buddy boy. You want something from the lady she might not be able to give you. What then?"

"I don't know," Mitch admitted. "I haven't thought that far ahead."

Zed finished off his coffee. "Look, you've turned your life around these past few months. You're sober. You're clean. And you've got a job. Don't screw things up now by getting involved with Emily Jordan. I have some idea how you feel about her, but—"

"You have no idea." Mitch's knuckles turned white as he gripped the table's edge with both hands. "I've spent five years being driven crazy with the memory of that woman's lifeless body thrown over a fireman's shoulder. Even when I came out of my drunkest stupors, thoughts of her were always the first thing that entered my fuzzy brain."

"You're obsessed with Emily Jordan, with redeeming yourself in her eyes. And I'm afraid you're setting yourself up for a fall. If you follow through with your plan, you're going to get hurt. And so is Emily Jordan."

"I know you think I'm nuts, but I'm not. I have to do this. I don't have any other choice."

"We always have other choices," Zed told him.

"I don't," Mitch said. "Not about this. Without Emily Jordan's forgiveness, I'll never be able to live any kind of normal life."

* * *

Emily watched the stranger. He stood alone on the porch of the beachfront cottage, his gaze riveted to the boundless horizon. He didn't look at the beauty before him, the soft glimmering sand, the Gulf waters, the clear blue sky overhead; instead his vision seemed trapped, almost spellbound by something he could not see, except in his mind's eye.

Was he remembering something he could never forget? Emily wondered. She understood, only too well, the galvanizing effect of memories.

She had watched the man for the past month, ever since he'd moved into the house on the beach next to hers. Not being naturally nosy, she hadn't deliberately set out to spy on him. But she couldn't help being curious.

The stranger came outside every morning, wearing a pair of tattered jeans and no shirt, despite the chill of the spring breeze. As usual he held a mug in his hand, occasionally taking a sip as he stared out at the bay.

Emily did not want to find the man attractive. But she did. He was brutally masculine. Big, tall and muscular. A bit heavier and even more muscular than he'd been when he'd first moved in. He was tanned and powerful in the way only a man who did manual labor could look. Pure feminine instincts told her that his hard body hadn't been perfected in an athletic club nor had his tan been acquired from spending leisure hours lying in a tanning bed.

Although Emily had seen him only from a distance, on his porch early in the morning or late at night, and once in a while walking alone on the beach, she could tell his features were sharp, chiseled perfection. High cheekbones, slanting eyes, square chin. His blond hair was golden in the sun and a bit shaggy, but not overly long. And brown stubble shadowed his face. Obviously, he didn't shave every day.

She wasn't quite sure why she was so drawn to the man. Her feelings defied reasonable explanations. As crazy as the notion was, Emily thought she could feel the man's bitter loneliness, could sense some horrible guilt that ate away at his soul, and she was actually sharing the deep aching hurt inside him.

Foolish thoughts! A lonely romantic's daydream. Nothing connected her to this man, this stranger, except the proximity of their dwellings along the beach. It's your own loneliness and pain you feel, not his, she told herself. Five years. Five long, lonely, painful years. And this was the first man since Stuart's death she had noticed—truly noticed—in that stomach-turning, breast-tightening, femininity-clenching way.

Why this man? And why now? Because she was a woman, who, more than anything, wanted to love again, to marry again, to have … to have a child again. Stuart, her college sweetheart, had been the only man in her life, and since his death, there had been no one in her heart or in her bed. Despite Uncle Fowler's hopes that their relationship would blossom into love, Emily and Charles Tolbert could never be more than friends.

But this stranger's overwhelming masculinity beckoned to her on some basic, primitive level, frightening her by the very strength of her own almost uncontrollable needs.

But he hadn't seemed to notice her—not once during the month she had been watching him. It was as if he looked right through her, as if she were invisible to him. She wondered if there was some woman in his life. Even though he lived alone and she hadn't seen a woman at his cottage, that didn't mean anything. Since he left every morning before seven and returned late in the day, always wearing jeans, cotton shirt and heavy work boots, she assumed his job to be blue collar and physical. A man like that wasn't likely to go long without a woman.

Emily had mentally devised different ways to meet him, always pretending that he would find her beautiful and desirable, that he would sweep her into his arms and make mad, passionate love to her. But that could never happen. No man would ever find her desirable. No man would ever want her. Certainly not this rugged stranger.

* * *

Mitch Hayden downed the last drops of black coffee as he stared sightlessly out at the bay. Four months. Four long months on the Gulf, working from morning till evening on the
Gulf
Shores
resort project, pushing himself to exhaustion in the hope that he could sleep without dreams. He had sworn he would never come back to
South Alabama
, had hoped he could escape the past by staying on the run. But he'd spent the past five years running, trying to find peace, forgetfulness and absolution. No matter where he'd gone or what he'd done, he had found nothing but loneliness and pain and the never-ending guilt from which he could not escape.