Finders Keepers by Carla Neggers

Author:Carla Neggers [Neggers, Carla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Windmill Press

Holly kept her eyes pinned to the winding road, not driving recklessly, but a little too fast. She could feel Julian’s dark gaze on her. He hadn’t said a word. No arguments, no accusations, no demands. Not a sound. It was unsettling.

She wondered what she’d gotten herself into this time. Grandpa Wingate would be sighing and shaking his head, reserving comment on her big mouth, her impatience and her stubborn ways.

The Windham House was brightly lit against the sharp, clear evening sky. Holly pulled into the parking area next to Julian’s Land Rover, a dirt-spattered hulk next to the skiers’ trim BMWs and Grand Prix. The man was solid. Down-to-earth.

And playing games with her over a couple of very valuable sterling-silver goblets. Mill Brook, Vermont, she’d warned herself, was something to be survived— and Julian Stiles was a part of that picturesque, but treacherous, New England town.

She’d never been so glad for a gust of cold air as when she climbed out of her van and took a deep, refreshing breath.

“I’m not hungry after all this hullabaloo over those goblets,” she said as he came round the van and stood next to her. “It’s six o’clock. I need to check in with my answering service in Houston and do some work. Then I think I’ll just crash.”

Julian leaned back against the van, oblivious to the film of road sand and salt eating away at her paint job. New England was as hard on cars as it was on people, she thought.

‘‘You just want to get away from me,” he said in a low, gravelly voice.

She shrugged. “I could grit out dinner with you if I had to, but—”

“You’d rather dine with an alligator,” he finished for her, smiling.

“Julian Stiles, you don’t scare me a lick. I hope you know that.”

“I’m not trying to scare you.”

“But you could if you tried? You sound like the playground bully. Forget dinner, all right? And don’t read anything into my refusal. Let’s just leave it that I’m not hungry.”

“Chortling will make you lose your appetite.”

“Who’s chortling?”

“You are. You’ve been chortling since we left the mill.”

“I most certainly have not. I never made a sound!”

“Didn’t need to. Inside you’re chortling—gloating because you think you got the best of me with this latest lie of yours. Doesn’t your stomach hurt from trying to keep from laughing? That’s why you don’t want to eat.”

Her stomach had hurt for a little while, at first from repressed laughter, then from the tension of his continued silence. It felt better now that he was jousting with her again. With any other man, she would have given up on the Paul Revere goblets and accepted what Great-grandfather Zachariah had been forced to accept a hundred years ago: with the Danvers-Stiles crowd, a Wingate was doomed. Common sense told her to cut her losses, never mind the damned goblets and get out of Mill Brook. But common sense wasn’t fun or challenging. It was generally dull and safe.

“Look, Julian,” she said reasonably, “I can understand you’re probably embarrassed by what happened.

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