Sealed with a Kill (2 page)

“Nate, would you be a love?” Siobhan asked as she ran her hand down his arm and then motioned toward the back of the truck. There were several boxes, an easel, and what appeared to be a stack of canvases. “I’m just exhausted from my trip.”

“No problem,” he said.

Brenna and the Porters watched as he hefted a few of the boxes and headed down the trail toward the cabin. Siobhan followed behind him, carrying nothing, not even her bright green bag, which she’d left on the ground at their feet.

Brenna wondered if she thought they were going to carry it for her. She looked at Ella and Marie. They had equally put-out expressions on their faces.

“I don’t like her,” Ella said when Siobhan was out of earshot.

“You don’t like anyone,” Marie said.

“So?” Ella asked. “That doesn’t mean I’m wrong about this one. There’s something very cat chomping on a canary about her. I’m only surprised feathers don’t fly out of her mouth when she speaks.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Marie said. “What do you think of her, Brenna?”

“Nate must have a reason to be renting to her,” she said. Although, privately, she couldn’t imagine what it was, since, like Ella, she did not get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the girl.

She watched as Siobhan disappeared into her cabin with a twirl of her skirt.
Sly
, that was the word she brought to mind. Brenna couldn’t help but feel that she was the sort of person you didn’t turn your back on.

“Oh, lookie here,” Ella said from beside Nate’s truck. “Paintings, and they’re all of her.”

She had peeled back the brown paper wrapping from one of the canvases and revealed a portrait that was obviously of Siobhan. It was very Frida Kahlo, a head shot with a severe expression done in bold colors.

“Ella, get away from there,” Brenna ordered.

She glanced at the cabin to see if Nate and Siobhan were returning.

Ella leaned in close and said, “The name in the corner is Si-oh-bhan. What kind of name is that?”

“That’s her name: Siobhan,” Brenna said. She had to hide her smile at Ella’s frown. “It’s an Irish name pronounced
shiv-awn
.”

“Well, that’s just ridiculous,” Ella said. “There’s no ‘v’ in her name.”

“You’re just not as cultured as the rest of us,” Marie said. She tipped her head up in a superior look.

“Oh, please,” Ella snapped. “You didn’t know how to pronounce it, either.”

“I most certainly did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I . . .” Marie began to argue, but Brenna cut her off.

“Ladies, can we get back to the task at hand?”

Ella dropped the paper wrapping and curled her lip in distaste. “Well, it seems Miss Siobhan has a very high opinion of herself.”

“That’s not for us to say,” Brenna said. She turned back to the Jeep and pulled out a drawer from the small dresser she had found in the secondhand shop and handed it to Marie.

“I wonder where she’s from,” Marie said as she cradled the drawer and headed down the hill toward Brenna’s cabin. “She’s definitely not from around here.”

“How can you tell?” Brenna asked, handing another drawer to Ella before taking the last one herself.

“We’d know her people,” Ella said, as if it were obvious.

“You don’t know everyone,” Brenna said.

“Yes, we do,” they said together.

Brenna rolled her eyes. The twins were an information superhighway unto themselves, no doubt, but even they couldn’t know everyone in the Morse Point area.

It took the three of them to wrestle the dresser out of the back of the Jeep. They were about to heft it down the hill when Nate came sprinting up to them.

“I’ll get that,” he said.

Ella and Marie sagged in relief and dropped their end on the ground.

“You don’t have to,” Brenna said.

Nate just gave her a penetrating stare as he lifted the solid maple bureau out of her arms and made his way down the hill with it.

“So nice to have a man around,” Marie sighed.

“Indeed,” Ella agreed. “And just look at the way his back muscles bunch—why, I bet he could pick me up with one hand.”

Brenna and Marie gave her identical looks of disbelief.

“What?”

Brenna shook her head, refusing to comment. She helped the sisters pack their own treasures from the secondhand store into their Buick and waved as they headed down the dirt drive to the main road.

They departed quickly, as Marie was driving and she was well-known for being heavy footed on the accelerator. Brenna winced and cringed when Marie didn’t stop at the end of the drive but hauled that Buick carcass across two lanes and sped toward town. Thankfully, there were no other drivers on the road at the moment.

She perched herself on the open back of her Jeep and played fetch with Hank. She told herself it was because he looked lonely, but she knew better. Her eyes kept straying toward her new neighbor’s cabin, and she knew she was waiting for Nate to make an appearance. He had taken the last load of stuff to Siobhan’s after he had helped her with her dresser. Not that it was any of her business who this girl was, or why she was here; still, she had no intention of moving until she saw Nate come out of her cabin.

Hank dropped a slobber-covered ball at her feet, and she scooped it up and threw it across the meadow that stretched out behind the row of cabins on the other side of the lake. Hank took off in a flurry of fur, and Brenna headed back to her seat, only to find Nate already sitting there, watching her.

“You spoil him,” he said. “I had a perfectly well-behaved dog before you came along.”

Brenna scoffed. “Oh, please; I’m the disciplinarian. You’re the pushover.”

“Ha!” Nate said. “Who lets him eat at the table?”

“Next
to the table, not
at
it,” she corrected. “He has good table manners. And you should talk. Who lets him sleep in the bed with his head on the pillow?”

“He keeps me warm,” he argued.

As if he knew he was the object of their conversation, Hank wagged his way over, nudging his head between them, demanding love.

They both obliged, and when their hands collided in his fur, Brenna moved hers to run down his back, wondering if Nate felt the same spark of awareness she felt or if it was all in her head.

“So, a new tenant?” she asked.

“Temporarily,” he said. “She’s a friend of an old artschool buddy of mine. He e-mailed me last week and asked if she could stay here for a few weeks.”

“Oh, so she’s not from around here?” Brenna asked. Nate grinned. “The Porter sisters could tell, eh?”

“Yeah,” she confirmed.

“I figured,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know much about her. I picked her up at the train depot in Milstead. She’ll be here for a bit to do some painting, I’m assuming. She seems nice enough.”

“Hmm.” Brenna said nothing more.

“So, are you up for the game tonight?” His gray eyes met hers, and as always, Brenna found it impossible to look away.

“I don’t know why you put yourself through the torture,” she said. “You know the Red Sox are going to spank your sad little Yankees right out of any hope they have to make the play-offs.”

“Spoken like a truly deluded member of Red Sox Nation,” he said. He rose and stretched his back. “Eight o’clock, my cabin, big screen. Be there.”

Brenna grinned. “I’ll bring pie. Chocolate cream okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “For chocolate cream, I’ll even let you boo my team once.”

“Twice,” she haggled.

“Once per slice,” he countered.

“Deal,” she said.

“Oh, and I invited Siobhan to join us,” he said. “Since she’s new in town and all, it seemed the neighborly thing to do.”

Brenna frowned. Nate had never been concerned with being neighborly before.

“That’s okay, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah—it’s great!” she said, forcing a smile. Big, fat lie.

She watched him walk away with Hank at his side, knowing that the ridiculous jealousy she felt meant that the crush she’d had on him for the better part of two years had not diminished one little bit. Darn it. As with the common cold, someone should really have invented a cure for this condition by now.

“I didn’t know a vein in the forehead could protrude quite like that,” Marie said to Ella. “Do you think he’s having a stroke?”

“He’s certainly red in the face,” Ella agreed. “Maybe it’s a heart attack. Should we call someone?”

Brenna Miller glanced up from her sketch pad. She was sketching a decoupage design to put on the dresser she had salvaged. It was scarred and scratched, but given that it was three drawers of solid maple for twenty-five dollars, she considered it a steal. If only she could get the gossip sisters to zip it so she could concentrate.

“Don’t you two think you should mind your own business?” she asked as she reached for her steaming latte.

The three of them were sharing a window booth at Stan’s Diner. It overlooked Main Street, which was perfect for the twins, the town busybodies, to watch the comings and goings of the residents of Morse Point.

“Brenna, this is Tenley, your best friend, who also happens to be your boss. You have a vested interest in this. In fact, you should be up here with us,” Marie said. She never took her eyes away from the window, as if she was afraid she might miss something big.

Brenna half rose from her seat and glanced over the elderly ladies’ shoulders. Sure enough, Tenley Morse was outside going nose to nose with her father. Things had been tense between Tenley and her parents ever since she’d opened her specialty paper store, Vintage Papers.

Tenley’s parents wanted her to be married to a doctor or lawyer and have 2.5 babies like her three sisters. The young-female-entrepreneur thing she had going was not working for them, so of course their response to Tenley had been to shun her.

For the past two years, although they lived in the same town—Morse Point being named for their family—they seldom crossed paths. And when they did, Tenley was the recipient of the curt nod and the air-kiss. You could feel the love, really.

That was, until today. Surprise, surprise, as they were lunching at Stan’s, Mr. Morse happened by and beckoned Tenley outside for a talk. The Porter sisters had taken up residence in the window like a pair of potted plants and had been reporting on the conversation for the past ten minutes.

As Brenna watched, she saw Tenley recoil from something her father said as if he had hit her with a physical blow. Her long blond hair covered her face as she lowered her head in what looked like defeat.

In his early sixties, Mr. Morse was handsome in an all-American-boy-grown-up sort of way. His thick silver hair, which had once been blond, made him look distinguished instead of old, and his eyes were the same striking blue as his daughter’s.

He was known about town for his strict adherence to the rules, all rules and any rules. The town code and charter said that littering was punishable by a fine of seventyfive dollars or a night in jail, and when Mr. Morse saw two twelve-year-old boys, Billy Dubbins and Sebastian Martinez, drop their candy wrappers on the sidewalk, he fully expected them to pay the money or do the time. Thankfully, Chief Barker, the head of the local police, was not quite so rigid and only made the boys do litter patrol on the town green as a consequence.

Mr. Morse turned and began to walk away, obviously thinking he had made his point. Tenley called out to him, and he turned back with a glance at his watch, which clearly indicated he had better things to do.

Tenley drew herself up to her full height, an inch or two shorter than that of her father, and tossed her hair back over her shoulders. Even from twenty feet away, Brenna could see pure blue fire shine in her eyes. Uh-oh.

“I hope his suit is flame-retardant,” Marie whispered to Ella.

“Yep, because she’s about to blast him,” Ella agreed.

They were right. Tenley sucked a huge breath into her slender frame, and her mouth started moving and didn’t stop for at least five minutes. Her father’s eyebrows rose so high on his head that they seemed to merge with his hairline. She punctuated her argument with a pointy finger to her father’s chest; then she turned on her heel and stomped toward the diner, giving Brenna and the twins just enough time to clamber out of the window before she arrived.

Brenna watched as Tenley’s father strode away, stroking the spot on his chest where she had jabbed him and shaking his head.

“I’m thirty-two years old. I will date whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want,” she muttered, and she plopped into their booth with disgust.

“Talk went well?” Brenna asked.

“Humph,” Tenley snorted.

“Hi, Tenley.” Marybeth DeFalco, Stan’s best waitress and biggest gossip, sidled up to their table. “Can I get you anything?”

“She’s fine,” Marie said, and made a shooing gesture with her hand.