“How is she?” Mike asked his cousin.
“Fine,” Blair answered. “She’s strong and healthy, and there was no real damage done. She’ll be fine in a day or two, a sore throat but nothing else.” Snapping her medical bag closed, she looked up at him. “Mike, it’s none of my business, but—”
“Are you going to start asking me what she is to me? That sort of thing? I can honestly say that I don’t know.”
“I had no intention of asking you anything about your personal life,” she snapped, making Mike grin. “Doesn’t it seem odd to you that Samantha isn’t crying? If someone had tried to kill me, I’d be bawling buckets full. You don’t think she’s in shock, do you?”
Mike didn’t know what to say, but now that he thought of it, maybe it was a little odd that she wasn’t crying. His sisters seemed to cry over everything in the world. “I don’t know. Maybe she cries in private.”
“Maybe,” Blair said. “But keep an eye on her. If she doesn’t react to this tomorrow, call me. You may want to get her to see someone.”
“A shrink?”
“Yes,” Blair answered. Then, as Mike thanked her for coming over in the middle of the night, she said, “Let me look at your head. I’ll take the stitches out next week.” As she looked at his wound in the bright hall light, she said, “You seem to have had a great many accidents in the last few days. First someone creams you with a rock, and now someone tries to kill the young lady who lives in your house. You d
on’t think the two are related, do you?”
“No, of course not,” Mike said. But even Blair heard the false note in his voice.
“Mmmmm,” she said as she kissed his cheek, then left the town house.
The frown left Mike’s face when he went back to his bedroom and saw Sam curled in his bedclothes. Dreamily, she looked up at him, and he went to sit on the edge of the bed and picked up her hand. She was still wearing the engagement ring he had put on her finger.
“The man…”
“Ssssh, don’t talk.”
She smiled when Mike kissed the palm of her hand. “He said, ‘Where is Half Hand’s money?’ ”
It was a good thing her eyes were closed or she would have seen the terror on Mike’s face; she would have seen the fear that came into his eyes.
14
“Good morning,” Mike said brightly as he put the white wicker tray across Samantha’s lap.
Sleepily, with the dull-brained feeling one has after taking sleeping pills the night before, she sat up in bed, wincing when she tried to swallow.
“I have vanilla yogurt, crushed strawberries, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. There are croissants too if your throat is up to it.”
She frowned at him. He seemed awfully cheerful this morning after someone had tried to kill her last night.
She lifted a spoonful of yogurt to her lips and then frowned more at the pain in her throat when she tried to swallow, but Mike didn’t seem to notice. He sat down on the edge of the bed—the way they often seemed to share meals—and ate a couple of strawberries.
“You know, Sam, I was thinking.”
She opened her mouth to make a wisecrack, but it hurt too much to talk.
“I was thinking that you’re right, that I’ve not taken into consideration what you want and what you’ve been through. Your father died recently, and a divorce must be an awful thing. On top of all that your father writes that will that makes you have to move to a city you hate and do something you don’t want to do. It must have been terrible for you.”
Samantha was watching him, and every cynical thought she’d ever had came into her mind. In her experience, when a man started projecting himself into a woman’s feelings, he wanted something. She gave Mike an encouraging smile that she hoped looked full of self-pity.
“Yes, well, I was thinking that you need a vacation, a real vacation. Somewhere cool, away from the heat of New York. Somewhere by the ocean maybe. So, last night I talked to Raine—you remember him, don’t you? My cousin you seemed so taken with? Anyway, Raine is going up to Warbrooke, that’s a town in Maine. It’s on the end of a peninsula and absolutely beautiful. Raine will be there with his whole family, and they have a guesthouse that’s a wonderful place. You can rest and read and go out on boats and catch things out of the water and do whatever you want. You can spend the whole summer there if you want. I was so sure that you’d like this idea that Raine is coming by this afternoon to pick you up to drive you to Warbrooke. Doesn’t this all sound great?”
While he was talking, Samantha was looking at him. His eyes were red-rimmed, as though he hadn’t slept all night and, too, there was something in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. Why was he so intent on getting her out of the city? Why was he sending her away with a man who a few days ago he had been jealous of?
He was sending her to a tiny remote town on the edge of a peninsula, a place where his relatives could look out for her and could take over the care of her. She didn’t for a minute believe that Mike was sending her away because he believed she needed a rest. A few days ago he seemed to think that what she needed was the opposite of rest.
Thinking about last night, she tried to remember everything she could about what had happened. Mike kept talking, telling her about a town he had previously described as nothing but a lot of water. Now he was telling her it was paradise, and that his Montgomery relatives were the kindest, sweetest people on earth. It was his repeated use of the phrase “they’ll take care of you” that made her suspicious.