Finding You Page 3

  Except, she had to admit, she relished feeling like a wild-haired lunatic mountainwoman.

  Back out on the main road, she looked down the wooded hill and caught sight of the big Texan setting another log on the chopping block. Without so much as a backward glance, he whacked it in two as easily as he had the first.

  Cozie settled back. She wouldn’t, she decided, want to get between Daniel Forrest and something he was after.

  Daniel swung the heavy splitting maul until his shoulders and arms and even his legs ached, until his lungs burned and he could feel the sweat pouring down his back.

  There was no getting around it. Seth Hawthorne didn’t look like a man who would sabotage a helicopter and risk killing three people just to get back at a woman who’d spurned him.

  Another log split cleanly in two.

  But better to sneak off to Vermont looking for a scapegoat than to blame himself, than to be there with J.D. when the doctors came for his leg.

  He stopped. He’d stripped off his shirt and was breathing hard. Sweat burned in his eyes—or maybe it was just his own guilt. He set the splitter against an orange-leafed maple and gathered up the scattered chunks of wood. He kept a woodpile at his ranch outside Houston. He should be chopping wood there, in the warm morning sun, not up north in Vermont.

  He headed to the edge of the mill pond. In the brook’s endless, unthinking rush over the old stone dam, in the quiet stir of leaves in the autumn breeze, he tried to sense a peace he didn’t feel.

  In his gut he knew Seth Hawthorne had recognized him. Somehow the kid knew his name wasn’t Forrest but Foxworth. Daniel Austin Foxworth. Black sheep son of Texas oilmen and generals. Up-and-coming fighter of petroleum product fires anywhere in the world.

  At least until his helicopter went down in the Gulf of Mexico. Now no one in the small world of oil fire fighting would dare trust him. He didn’t trust himself. And in that world, trust was everything.

  He kicked off his boots and stripped off his jeans and plunged into the small pond.

  “Damn!”

  The water was so cold it knocked the breath out of him. But he forced himself to dive once more, and when he came up for air, the water was streaming down his face like the tears of an uncontrolled grief.

  “God,” he breathed as he swam toward a huge flat rock on the opposite bank, “what am I doing here?”

  He was out of his element among the people and hills of northern New England. He didn’t know what in hell he expected to accomplish. Heaving himself onto the sun-warmed rock, he saw that after less than ten minutes in the water his skin was splotched with blue and purple from the cold.

  Did his landlady ever go skinny-dipping in her icy mill pond?

  He pictured her and her rawboned brother as kids, jumping in on a hot summer day. They were a flinty pair of Yankees, Cozie and Seth Hawthorne.

  Sliding back into the water, Daniel did a fast breaststroke to the other side, glad for the short distance. He climbed out, grabbed up his jeans and boots, and stole back inside before his landlady came hunting her splitting maul or some tourist up on the road stopped and took his picture.

  He dried off and put on fresh clothes, figuring he’d get back to his woodpile, but his eyes drifted to his second copy of Mountain Views. J.D. had decided to hang onto the first. Cozie Hawthorne’s wry, practical, witty commentaries went with her slouchy clothes, her unlaced mud shoes, her mass of reddish blond curls snarled and beaten down by the stiff Vermont wind.

  But her eyes were even more alive, more compelling in person than in her picture. Huge, warm, intelligent, they’d changed from green to blue and back again, it seemed, in the short time she’d helped her brother with the wood. They were eyes that said she was an optimist and a survivor, a woman who wouldn’t take to having someone lie to her.

  Daniel abruptly returned to his wood. He needed to remember that he hadn’t come to Woodstock to contemplate his pretty Yankee landlady’s eyes—and he’d already committed himself to his lies.

  Chapter

  3

  “The people of Woodstock,” the old saying went, “have less of a reason than most to yearn for heaven.”

  Words, as far as Cozie was concerned, not meant for Friday afternoons during foliage season. Downtown Woodstock was mobbed. Traffic crawled. Parking was, to say the least, a challenge. Yet everyone she saw on the picturesque, tree-lined village streets looked to be having a good time, letting the crowds add to the festive atmosphere rather than detract. All the upscale shops and restaurants and museums were open, the inns full. The Killington ski area, with its hiking trails and autumn gondola rides, was just to the west. The Connecticut River and Dartmouth College were to the east, and the Ottauquechee River flowed right through the middle of town, at one point under a covered bridge. Lots of folks, however, were just strolling about, enjoying Woodstock’s famous ellipse-shaped common and its graceful Federal period homes.

  The 1832 brick Vermont Citizen building—one of Woodstock’s most photographed—was located on the common opposite the Woodstock Inn & Resort. Despite its pristine, black-shuttered exterior, it was a creaky old place that barely passed fire inspection. Elijah Hawthorne, whose seditious broadsides in the 1770s had earned him the enmity of King George III, had put up the building the year before he died, back during the one period when the Hawthornes had actually had spare cash. Now it was owned by the Vanackerns. But so was Elijah’s paper.

  Grateful she had her own space in the Citizen’s short driveway, Cozie put on her blinker and started to turn.

  She had to slam on her brake to keep from rear-ending a black truck with Texas license plates.

  Her new tenant.

  Daniel Forrest.

  Short of honking her horn and fuming, there was nothing she could do. She backed out into the snaking traffic and had to swing around the common twice before snatching a space just given up by an elderly couple from Rhode Island. She crossed the common in a hurry and gritted her teeth as she headed into the Citizen’s center hall entrance.

  Nobody messed with her parking space.

  Her office was through a six-panel door—presently shut—to her left. The newsroom and production offices, with their Vanackern-purchased state-of-the-art equipment, were upstairs. To her right were advertising, bookkeeping, and her aunt, Ethel Hawthorne, who called her niece into the cluttered but very organized reception area.

  Tall, bony, her mostly gray hair in short, loose curls, Ethel Hawthorne was perched behind the long library table she had used as a desk since coming to work for the Citizen at age eighteen, close to fifty years ago. She’d never married, and she maintained that she’d never wanted to do anything more at her family’s paper than what she was doing, which more often than not was a little of everything. Technically she was supposed to answer the phone, sort the mail, and keep track of people, but every Thursday, when the paper came out, she would critique a copy with a red ballpoint pen and leave it on Cozie’s desk. She felt free to make suggestions, solicit advertising, and look over people’s shoulders. She had lived in the same groundfloor apartment since moving out of the Hawthorne house—the same one Cozie now owned—at twenty-one, and she walked to work every morning, regardless of the weather. She acknowledged her age to no one not involved with securing her retirement or collecting her taxes. She did not acknowledge the Vanackern ownership of the Vermont Citizen.

  “There’s a man in your office,” she told Cozie.

  “Tall, dark-haired, Texas accent?”

  “That’s him.”

  “And you just let him in.” It came out more of an accusation than Cozie had intended.

  Aunt Ethel cocked a thick eyebrow at her. “You think I’m going to argue with a man come looking for you?”

  “Very funny. He’s my new tenant.”

  “Ah. Well, he’s only been here ten minutes. I think he’s fiddling around on your computer.”

  Cozie bristled. “I’d say Daniel Forrest and I need to get a few things straight
.”

  Aunt Ethel, however, was, highly entertained. She liked to think of herself as the Last Spinster of Woodstock and resented any encroachment on her status by her unmarried, over-thirty, lately-of-no-romantic-prospects niece.

  Leaving her aunt to her chuckling, Cozie went back through the center hall and burst into her office without knocking.

  Daniel Forrest was playing solitaire on her computer in front of her window overlooking Woodstock common as if he owned the place. Her computer and computer furniture were the only notably modern pieces in the otherwise nineteenth-century room with its worn Oriental carpets, cherry floors, Vermont marble fireplace, and glass-fronted bookcases.

  Cozie flung her oversized leather tote onto the rickety Windsor chair by the door. “Good afternoon,” she said coolly. “Is there something wrong with the wood or do you need me to show you how to start a fire in the woodstove?”

  He pushed back her ergonomically correct chair and swiveled around, regarding her with a nonchalance that surely would have been beyond anyone else similarly caught. “No, I can manage my own fires.” He gave her a long look. “So. This where you think up your smart-aleck columns?”

  With some effort, she maintained her deliberately cool demeanor. “It is.”

  “Quaint. Most of the furniture for show?”

  “None of it.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Couple of those chairs look pretty old.”

  “A number of pieces date from the construction of the building in 1832.” Her tone was starchy, one way of telling him she didn’t plan to humor him for long. “I use them all as needed.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” It seemed to her he was deliberately laying on the Texas accent, but maybe not. She hadn’t had much to do with Texans. He glanced up at the portrait above the fireplace. “That one of your Yankee kinfolk?”

  “That’s Elijah Hawthorne,” she said of her stern-faced, green-eyed ancestor. “He founded the Citizen back during the Revolution.”

  “Which one?”

  “The American Revolution.” She judiciously kept all sarcasm from her tone. He was just trying to goad her; he knew damned well which revolution. “He settled the land up on Hawthorne Brook and built my family’s house, then this building toward the end of his life.”

  “Kind of dour-looking, isn’t he?”

  “He was seventy-five when that portrait was painted. That was the style in the early nineteenth century.”

  “One would hope.” He squinted at her, then back up at the portrait. “I think you have his eyes.”

  Cozie refused to react: she had no idea what this man was up to. “My aunt says you’ve been here only a few minutes.”

  “Yep. Three hundred in the hole and I was out of here.”

  She glanced at her computer screen. “You’re close to that now.”

  “I’ve never trusted a computer not to cheat.”

  He leaned back, looking very much at ease and more than a tad full of himself. In the enclosed space of her office, his well-muscled legs seemed even longer than they had outside at her sawmill. He’d changed into a short-sleeved polo shirt, in a cobalt blue that set off the gray of his eyes. Unlike his shirt that morning, it revealed a thick red scar just below his right elbow. Although reasonably healed, the injury appeared recent.

  His gray eyes didn’t leave her. Since their earlier meeting, Cozie had showered and changed into a squash-colored sweater and black jeans, and she had her hair pulled back neatly with a handmade wooden barrette. Her loafers were a little scuffed and her socks were a print of bright yellow and orange leaves, in honor of the season, but, mercifully, she no longer smelled like rotten apples.

  “Well,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

  “Just figured you could tell me where your brother lives. I ought to pay him for the wood.”

  “Aunt Ethel could have told you.”

  “Didn’t know she was your aunt.”

  Cozie warned herself to think before she spoke—not her long suit. She didn’t know why she felt so violated. It wasn’t as if she’d never had to deal with a surprise visitor. Of course, Daniel Forrest wasn’t just a visitor. He was her tenant, and she wasn’t sure how she should treat a tenant, especially when questioning his behavior. Should she throw him out and tell him not to bother her at work? Inform him in no uncertain terms that just because he’d rented her sawmill didn’t mean he could steal her parking space and barge into her office?

  An unnatural caution won out. “Seth has a place on a dirt road up past the sawmill; it’s your first left. His house is the red one about a mile up on the right. The only other house on the road is further up. It belongs to the Vanackern family. I don’t know how much you’ve had a chance to look around…”

  “I know the road.”

  “I doubt he’s there. It’s too nice a day. He might be working out at the Vanackern place. You could leave me with the money, but I don’t know how much he’s charging you.”

  “It’s okay. He’s your baby brother?”

  “He’s a few years younger than I am, yes.”

  “What’s he do for a living?”

  “Property management and forestry work, and he serves as a guide for canoeing and hiking trips whenever he gets the chance.”

  “Doesn’t work on the family paper?”

  “It’s not the family paper anymore. My father sold it to Vanackern Media before his death two years ago. Mr. Forrest, I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, and I have things I need to do. If I see Seth, I’ll tell him you stopped by—but he’s not one to forget someone owes him money.”

  Her lame attempt at humor didn’t draw a smile from her tenant. “I’ll bet not.” As he rose, she noticed the rock-hard muscles in his upper arms and another recent scar above his left ear and wondered, again, what he did for a living. She’d have to give Sal a call. “I’ll let you get to work, Ms. Hawthorne. Thanks.”

  “You can call me Cozie, you know. Everyone around here does.”

  Still no smile. His slate eyes, however, drifted to hers. “Okay, Cozie. Make it Daniel for me.”

  A car outside her window drew her eye: a familiar champagne-colored Mercedes with Connecticut license plates. It was double-parked because the driver would be convinced no one would ever dare ticket a Vanackern car. Cozie felt herself tense up.

  Tall, leanly built, aristocratic Thaddeus Wythering Vanackern slid from behind the wheel, shut the door, and hesitated a moment before squaring his shoulders and proceeding onto the sidewalk in front of the Vermont Citizen building.

  “Looks like he’s about to confront the Medusa,” Daniel commented.

  Cozie scowled. “He’s here to see me. He’s one of your neighbors: Thad Vanackern.”

  “Your boss?”

  “Not to the degree he thinks,” she muttered under her breath.

  But Daniel heard her and grinned, and the results were so unexpectedly sexy, so earthy and frankly sensual, that Cozie found her throat going tight and dry with an awareness of him that was very physical and very much out of order. She needed to get this man out of her office before she faced Thad Vanackern.

  “If you’ll excuse me…”

  But the chairman of Vanackern Media, already in the center hall entrance, strode in without waiting for an invitation or even speaking to Aunt Ethel, which wouldn’t sit well with her. “Cozie—so good to see you,” he said, taking both her hands into his and kissing her on the cheek.

  Daniel Forrest made no move to leave.

  “Hello, Thad.”

  She’d never been good at phony charm. Thad Vanackern hadn’t approved of her since the day, at ten years old, she’d wandered onto his property in her fruitless search for a yellow lady’s slipper. He’d refused to believe she knew her way back and insisted on calling her father to come fetch her.

  Thad was, at sixty-five, a fair, square-jawed, handsome man who looked as rich and educated as he was. He had on his weekend-in-the-country clothes: expensive charcoal wool trousers, a cabled
burgundy cotton sweater over a matching turtleneck, light hikers. He lived, he often said, for his favorite pastimes of golf, tennis, running, and fly-fishing. Business had never gripped his soul the way it had those of previous Vanackerns or he never would have urged Vanackern Media to purchase the Hawthornes’ little paper, an act, he argued proudly, of historical preservation, not of true capitalism.

  “You look wonderful,” he said. “I understand you got in late last night?”

  She nodded. “It’s good to be home. I don’t think I’ll ever be much on flying. Gives me chapped lips and makes my feet swell—and I inevitably have the ugliest suitcase at baggage claim.”

  “You’re not still using your Grandpa Willard’s old suitcase, are you?”

  “It’s still got a lot of wear left in it.”

  Thad shook his head as if there were no reforming her. “You sound just like him. You could afford to buy a new one, you know.”

  She knew. A year ago she’d had to scramble to make ends meet, but the success of Mountain Views had changed all that. Still, her old clunker of a suitcase had been a peculiar source of comfort to her on the road. She remembered dragging it out of the back of a closet at eighteen, cleaning it up, packing her things for the university up in Burlington. Her big adventure.

  Thad glanced around at Daniel Forrest, who was watching and listening with apparent interest. The man did have his nerve. Why couldn’t Sal have found a retired banker to rent the sawmill?

  Cozie sighed. In her best diplomatic voice, she said, “Thad, I’d like you to meet Daniel Forrest. He’s moved into the sawmill. Daniel, Thad Vanackern.”

  Thad extended his hand. “Well, then, we’re neighbors. Welcome to Woodstock, Mr. Forrest.”

  “Thank you.”

  She thought that was plenty enough hint to get moving, but Forrest shook hands with his neighbor and continued to stand there as if he had every right to horn in on his landlady’s conversation with her “boss.”

  Short of being rude, which he would never deliberately be, Thad had little choice but to resume. He turned back to Cozie. “I understand you were in New York yesterday. I wish you had come by.”