Within Reason: Mill Brook Trilogy, Book 2 Read online

  Within Reason

  Mill Brook Trilogy, Book 2

  Carla Neggers

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Excerpt: That Stubborn Yankee

  Books by Carla Neggers

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2019 by Carla Neggers

  2nd Edition

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Chapter One

  “ONLY YOU, CHAR.”

  Adam Stiles could hear the lack of affection—not to mention patience—in his voice as he sat behind the wheel of his rented car. It was early autumn in Nashville, the weather hot and steamy. He had switched off the air-conditioning and rolled down the window to get a better look at the Belle Meade Mansion. He’d parked in the visitors’ lot and left the engine running, a sign, he supposed, of just how much he didn’t want to do what he was doing.

  Squinting, he looked across the oak-shaded lawn at the antebellum mansion with its clean Greek Revival lines. The quiet day should have had a calming effect on his nerves. It didn’t. Nothing Charity Winnifred Bradford did had ever had a calming effect on his nerves. And she was directly responsible for his sweating to death in a rented car, wondering what Char was up to this time.

  He snatched the photograph she had sent home off the passenger seat. He didn’t need another look, but he took one, anyway. The house across the lawn and the house in the photo were the same.

  He flipped it over and read the address neatly printed on the back: 110 Leake Avenue, seven miles southwest of downtown Nashville. In her more normal scrawl, Char had added, Come see me.

  She hadn’t meant him. That much Adam knew. Whatever he and Char were, they couldn’t be called friends. For as long as he could remember they had argued about the merits of life in the hills of southern Vermont. He saw many positives; Char saw none, or to be totally accurate one: the area was, she had to allow, pretty. But she would add, perverse woman that she was, how much scenic beauty can a person stand? She was training and breeding horses in Tennessee these days, she’d told everyone in her hometown of Mill Brook. Not just regular old horses, either. Thoroughbreds. Winners. One had Triple Crown written all over him.

  Charity Winnifred Bradford had always been a levelheaded woman not prone to exaggeration. Irascible, direct and often irritating, she had, nevertheless, a good head on her shoulders. She just didn’t do crazy things. But who knew what horse fever did to people?

  Not that it was any of Adam’s business, as Char would be the first to tell him. If she wanted to live in a beautiful Southern mansion and raise horses, that was her affair.

  Still, here he was.

  Seldom at a loss for action, Adam didn’t know what to do next. Char had been impossible as long as anyone in Mill Brook could remember. Apparently a year in the mid-South hadn’t changed her—not that anything would. She was argumentative, stubborn, independent, resourceful and blunt. And smart. He had to give her that.

  She was also his sister Beth’s best friend from way back, and Adam had promised he’d look in on her while he was in Nashville on business. He hadn’t understood why Beth was worried. For one thing, Char had to be doing all right if she lived in that big mansion in the photograph she had sent Beth. For another, if there was anyone in this world who could damn well take care of herself, it was Charity Bradford.

  Beth being Beth, she had persisted, and Adam had finally given in. His business in Nashville on behalf of Mill Brook Post and Beam, the sawmill and manufacturers of high-quality housing kits owned by the Stiles family, wasn’t all-consuming. And, like most people in Mill Brook, he owed Charity Bradford, no matter how much she bugged him or how much she would scoff at the idea. For the past five years she had been one of Mill Brook’s very few lawyers and its very best. She was known in her practice for being closemouthed, tenacious and absolutely convincing. People—Adam included—had assumed she had come home to stay.

  People had been wrong. So had he.

  He set down the photograph of the picturesque Greek Revival house, put the car in park and switched off the ignition. He opened the door on the driver’s side with the hook that was now his left hand—when he chose to wear it. Often he didn’t, having found he could get along just fine without it. As his attorney, Char had helped him sort through the legal and insurance nightmares in the aftermath of his wife’s death and his own crippling accident, coming so quickly on the heels of each other. Char had been briskly professional and efficient, he recalled, if not particularly sensitive. “Losing a hand’s pretty bad,” she’d told him, “but you’d get more for a foot.”

  He’d remarked he’d keep that in mind should any of his three remaining appendages get near a Mill Brook Post and Beam saw. Instead of having the grace to flush, Char had looked at him with those doe-brown eyes of hers and burst out laughing at her own insensitivity. “Am I jerk or what?” she’d asked rhetorically, her self-deprecation underlined with a healthy self-confidence.

  Adam had found himself laughing, too. Thinking back, he couldn’t recall why: Char wasn’t a funny woman. But he had laughed, and it had felt good. For the first time in many months he had felt wholly human again.

  He headed up the walk, wishing he had left his hook back at the hotel and worn a short-sleeved shirt. The combination of the hook apparatus, his long-sleeved work shirt and the oppressive humidity had him feeling damn uncomfortable. The prospect of barging in on sweet Charity Bradford unannounced didn’t help. If she were playing games with her family and friends about where she lived, she wouldn’t want any spies poking around, then heading back home and countering her claims. Adam felt for all her faults, he did know Char. Even at her sweetest the woman could make a rattlesnake sweat.

  A breeze stirred the humid air as he followed the signs to the gift shop adjoining the mansion. Once there, he scanned a brochure that explained Belle Meade was formerly a fifty-three-hundred-acre plantation that, in the nineteenth century, had been a world-famous Thoroughbred nursery and stud. Twenty-four acres of the original plantation remained. It was owned by the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities, not by a prickly ex-Yankee Adam had known all her thirty-three years.

  He wandered around the gift shop while debating his next move. He didn’t have his kids with him. His daughter, Abby, and son, David, were having a grand time for themselves with their Uncle Julian and new Aunt Holly. Adam had never gone in for mixing business and family vacations. Even this short side trip violated his normal operating procedure, but he consoled himself with a reminder that although stopping in to see Char might not be business, it certainly wasn’t pleasure. It was a favor to his sister. Period.

  Finally he left the gift shop and headed back into the warm Tennessee afternoon.

  Whatever pot Charity Bradford had boiling, Adam decided he wasn’t going to jump into it. Char was Beth’s friend. He’d let Beth find her.

  He walked back to his car, wishing he felt more relieved.

  JUST before five that morning Char had begun to suspect it was going to be one of those days. It was the tent this time. While she was dreaming of better days and Emily was sacked out with that peaceful I-trust-you-Mom expression that could slice
a mother’s heart in two, their tent had collapsed on them. Emily, a precocious seven, had taken the calamity in stride. Char, a cynical thirty-three, had not. She had known someone like Adam Stiles would blunder into her life before the day was out.

  Peering out from behind a marble column of the pre-Civil War house she’d recklessly claimed as her own, she watched Adam head to the visitors’ parking lot. He was every inch the strong Vermonter she knew. Taciturn, stolid, a man whose heart and soul—whose life—were dedicated to Mill Brook Post and Beam. He would never consider risking it all on a dream. A man like Adam didn’t dream. Dreams weren’t a part of his practical nature. Why should they be? He didn’t need dreams. His life was exactly what he wanted it to be.

  Then her gaze dropped to the hook that had become his left hand, and she remembered the car accident that had killed his wife, Mel. Char exhaled, suddenly feeling tired. She recalled those dark, sad, harsh days after Mel’s death, with Adam’s grief, his guilt, so palpable to everyone in Mill Brook.

  Like Char, Mel had wanted out of Mill Brook, but in a different way, for different reasons. Mel had always been an outsider in town and had refused to think of Mill Brook as home. Not so with Char. Claustrophobic, beautiful, sometimes stimulating, Mill Brook was home to her. Mel’s dream of leaving had been a woman’s dream; she’d come to Mill Brook as an adult when she married Adam Stiles. Char’s dream of leaving was wrapped up in her childhood, in the hopes and longings she’d had as a girl while listening to the pitter-patter of rain on her dormer roof. She had gotten out. Not so Mel. She had died in Mill Brook, and for a long time the man she had married had blamed himself for her unhappiness. Char wasn’t going to let that happen to the people who cared about her: she was responsible for her own happiness.

  And her own misery.

  Maybe Adam’s life wasn’t perfect, but he was the kind of person who accepted whatever life threw at him with a stiff upper lip. No complaining from Adam Stiles. No grasping for impossible dreams. No, not Adam. He would never understand why Char had risked so much, not just to get out of Vermont, but to chase a childhood dream.

  All of which was beside the point. Char didn’t care if Adam dreamed or didn’t dream. Nor did she care if he thought she was nuts. The point was, she knew Adam, and the Adam Stiles she knew wasn’t going to give up on her and go back to Vermont.

  That was a dream. He might like to give up: he and Char had never had much use for each other. But in addition to being taciturn, stolid and practical, Adam Stiles was also relentless. By now he had a fair idea his sister’s best friend didn’t live at 110 Leake Avenue just southwest of downtown Nashville, Tennessee. Adam being Adam, he’d want to know exactly where Char did live.

  One thing about camping out in a tent, she wouldn’t be easy to find.

  Char waited until Adam had climbed into his car and cleared off Belle Meade property before she raced back to the gift shop where she worked part-time, thanked her friend there for covering for her, reassured her everything was fine and headed back out toward her own car, such as it was.

  She was free. Adam was gone, and he wasn’t going to find her. The crisis was over. Char found herself feeling not so much giddy at having avoided him, but oddly depressed. No, she thought, depressed was too strong. Just emotional, she decided. Ridiculously nostalgic. More than anyone else she could think of, Adam Stiles represented the life she’d given up—the life she’d deliberately rejected. Small-town New England, ice-cold winters, the claustrophobic yet beautiful mountains of Vermont, the places and smells and sounds that had been a part of her for so long. Too long. There was no going back. She’d said that a year ago, with such bravado and hope. Now she knew it to be so.

  Home…

  She blinked back tears, annoyed with herself. Home wasn’t Mill Brook, Vermont. It wasn’t even central Tennessee. She’d learned the hard way that home was, simply, wherever she and Emily were.

  “Oh, no.”

  Her words came out in a whisper, loud enough just for her to hear. Her knees stiffened and her mouth went dry, all anger and nostalgia dispersed.

  Adam Stiles was leaning against the rusting door of her car.

  He hadn’t left Belle Meade after all. The sneak had doubled back and found her car. Now he was observing her with a proprietary air that set her teeth on edge.

  Never one to reveal her feelings to an adversary, Char recovered her poise and, with a frankness that she hoped matched his, took a good, long look at this man who’d always been, if only peripherally, a part of her life. She hadn’t seen him in a year, but that made little difference: Adam Stiles just wasn’t one to change. He wore the same boots he’d worn for the past ten years, the same kind of close-fitting jeans, the same kind of soft chambray work shirt. Although he’d add a jacket and a tie as needed, even sometimes put on wool trousers and a dress shirt, Char couldn’t recall ever having seen him in a suit.

  She noticed the sunlight dancing on the silver highlights in his hair and casting shadows over his blue-green eyes, bringing out the sharp angles of his face. He was more a hard, solid man than a good-looking one. If Char were going to be objective—and she seldom was where Adam Stiles was concerned—she’d have to admit he was unconscionably sexy in an unaffected yet totally unyielding way. It wasn’t anything deliberate on his part; it was just Adam. When she was twelve and he nineteen, Char had had a mindless, ultrasecret crush on him, one of those embarrassing episodes of childhood she’d smartly kept to herself. Not even Beth had known. Adam certainly hadn’t. As far as he was concerned, Char had always had the same opinion of him she did now, which didn’t quite rise to active dislike. He was too Mill Brook, too silent, too predictable. Their attorney-client relationship had been professional, never buddy-buddy, Adam never anything more than her best friend’s older brother.

  Now he was a problem. Potentially a big problem. Coming closer, she saw that the hook seemed more natural than it had a year ago, more a part of him. Once it had been a terrible reminder of his wife’s tragic death and his own tortured state in the months afterward when he’d had his first and thus far only mishap with one of the mill’s huge saws. Maybe he’s finally put the past behind him, Char speculated, mildly surprised at her interest. But she rationalized that he was Beth’s brother and someone Char herself had known forever. Her interest was just natural.

  Char suddenly wondered if Adam had started seeing women again since she’d left Mill Brook. He’d always struck her as a one-woman man, and Mel, for better or worse, had been his one woman. Knowing Adam as she did, Char didn’t expect him to rush out and repeat the experience of marriage. But she couldn’t believe he’d go on forever without some kind of female companionship, if for no other reason than there were too many single women in New England angling for his attention for him not to notice eventually. He was human, after all. Or was someone going to have to tell him that? It had been more than three years since Mel’s death, and not one rumor of Adam and another woman had ever reached Char.

  He squinted at her in the hazy sunshine. “Hello, Char.”

  She didn’t turn and run, but acknowledged without surprise that the urge was there. Adam could be one hell of an intimidating man. Instead she remained where she was and squinted right back at him, intensely aware not just of him, but of herself—her lies, her life, her appearance. For one of the few times in her life she felt self-conscious. She knew what Adam saw: a woman two months shy of thirty-four, with round brown eyes, too pert a nose for her taste, a wide mouth and bobbed brown hair. Not dramatically beautiful, but not homely, either. If he were looking—and since they’d known each other forever she doubted he’d bother— he’d see her high, well-shaped breasts and notice that her long legs, by far her best feature, were thinner than they had been a year ago. She had on the same outfit she’d had on when she d stopped by the mill to say goodbye to Beth on her way out of town: a madras skirt, white shirt and sandals. Would Adam remember?

  She managed a broad smile that she hoped radiated her
strong personality and natural self-confidence. “Welcome to Belle Meade.”

  “Going to invite me in?” he asked mildly.

  Nothing in his expression or tone indicated anything but total sincerity. Which, of course, had the effect of making his request seem that much more sarcastic. Typical Adam Stiles. Char, however, remained unruffled. Unlike most everyone else in southern Vermont, she never had found Adam particularly scary, perhaps because she so obviously bugged him. “He can barely remember the names of my other friends,” Beth used to tell her, “but you, Char—you he remembers.” It hadn’t been Adam’s idea of a compliment.

  “Sorry,” she said, straight-faced. “I can’t invite you in. I have guests.”

  He dropped his eyes slightly, taking in all of her, the sunlight catching the blue-green of his irises. His expression didn’t change. He was, Char knew, an imposing man. She stood her ground.

  His eyes fastened back on hers, and he said calmly, “Why Belle Meade?”

  Feigning innocence wasn’t her long suit, but she gave it a shot. “What do you mean?”

  “You might have gotten away with something smaller, not as well-known.” He nodded back toward the impressive mansion. “This is a bit much, Char, even for you.”

  Her innocent act hadn’t prompted even a second’s hesitation on his part. Obviously it wasn’t going to work, not with him. Char shrugged. “I always go for broke.”

  His eyes flashed, warning her he’d heard the unintended bitterness in her voice. She’d have to be more careful, especially with him, although caution wasn’t her style. College in Boston, law school in New York, her first job in Manhattan, her doomed marriage to a rising corporate lawyer, Tennessee—all were products of her compulsion to take risks, to dream. Only going back to Mill Brook for those interminable five years after her divorce had been practical and safe. She’d had stability in Vermont. A burgeoning practice, a house, a bank account, a happy child…