Adam looked at Annabelle and felt a sharp stab of guilt. He’d stayed away too long.
Her eyes were closed, and he wondered whether she was fully alert. He sat on the sofa next to her very carefully, hip to hip, and she jerked. Yeah, she was alert, all right.
Scanning her body, his sharp gaze paused where her skirt bagged across her concave tummy. “Have you had anything to eat today?”
Her eyes flickered open. “A couple of aspirin,” she whispered weakly.
He had to resist the urge to shake some sense into her. “Aspirin is not part of the food pyramid, Annabelle.”
Irritation filled him. When she’d slid to the floor like she was melting, his heart had skipped more beats than it would ever make up.
A fussy priggish Annabelle he could tolerate.
A self-righteous Annabelle he could tease.
A sick Annabelle scared the daylights out of him.
Taking her wrist between his fingers, he counted her pulse. Fast, he determined, but steady.
Absently, he rubbed her hands to warm them. She still had the smallest hands of any woman he’d ever known.
Belle had changed in the past few years. For as long as he lived, he would never understand how she’d tied herself to a bonehead like Steven J. Stephens. The man was a pompous anal-retentive bore and, apparently, a bastard to boot.
Adam had wanted to find the man and rearrange his nose until it was as skewed as Stephens’s politics when he saw the Collier Bay News last night and that picture of Stephens with a woman who looked like a Barbie doll. Granted, Annabelle Simmons’s love life was none of his business, but worrying about her was an old habit, and old habits were the hardest to break.
Pressing her hand between his palms, Adam waited for her skin to grow warm.
Flustered by the feel of his palms enveloping her much smaller hand, Annabelle let her eyes remain closed, although she was wide awake now.
When she’d come to in her parlor and realized it was Adam’s hand on her brow, she’d felt something close to panic. Even semiconscious, she had recognized the traitorous heat that flowed through her limbs.
His touch was a time machine, whisking her back to the days when taking his hand had been easy and frequent.
Come walk with me, Annabelle. The leaves are turning. And he would hold out his hand.
I miss my mom. It would have been her birthday yesterday. And she’d reach for his hand.
She’d rushed home from college the minute she’d received news of her parents’ death, and Adam had been waiting for her. Lianne was home with a baby-sitter the evening of the car accident. When Annabelle arrived at the house past midnight, the sitter was gone, Lianne was in bed, and Adam was in the parlor.
He sat on the settee, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring into the fire, so deep in thought he hadn’t heard her enter the house.
The only sound in the room was the steady tick, tick of the grandfather clock against the wall. Adam rose the moment he saw her, and the surprising thing—the only part of the evening she remembered clearly at all—was that he’d been crying. His eyes were as red-rimmed as hers.
He stayed with her that night, and he was there in the morning when she and Lia woke up. There hadn’t been a moment after that, not a single one, that he hadn’t been there if she needed him. He seemed to know just how to tease her out of a blue mood and when to simply listen while she poured her heart out. He had made the strange bottomless aloneness seem less awful.
Now, lying on the sofa with her eyes closed, pretending to be insensible when in fact every sense she possessed was zinging with life, Annabelle felt a wave of bittersweet emotion well inside her. After all these years, her first impulse when she had a problem was still to lean on Adam’s shoulder and cry until she felt better.
The very thought made her heart flutter in panic. Looking back, she knew she had leaned on him too much for too long, but when you lost people you loved earlier than you should have, it changed things. It altered the way you looked at life, the way you hung on to people. And the way you let go.
“The water’s heating for tea.” Lianne rushed back into the room. “I made a tuna sandwich. We had some left over. Do you think Belle could be allergic to something, Adam? Like mercury in tuna? A girl in my biology class passed out because she ate MSG. Well, ate MSG and dissected a frog, but—”
Rising to take the tray Lia carried, Adam set it on the coffee table. “Tuna’s fine. It looks great.”
With an effort Annabelle lowered her feet to the floor and pushed herself all the way up. Immediately, Lia rushed to the couch.
“Oh, Belle, are you okay? You scared me so bad when you fainted.”
“I’m fine.” Annabelle squeezed Lia’s hand. “I got dizzy for a second, that’s all. I’m sorry I scared you, baby.” Lovingly, she reached up to smooth Lia’s bangs away from her face. “I’m so proud of you,” she whispered, her eyes misty. “Getting into Juilliard! I think I got a little overexcited, that’s all. But after I rest a bit, I’m going to start planning the biggest party this town’s ever seen.”
The sisters sat side by side on the sofa, bonded by a closeness defined in part by the struggles they had shared.
When the grandfather clock announced noon, Annabelle placed a kiss on the top of Lia’s head. “Hey—” she bumped Lia’s shoulder with her own “—don’t you have a yearbook meeting today?”
Lia glanced at the clock. “I’m not going to go.”
“What? Of course you are. You’re the senior editor.”
“I’m not going to leave you.” Lia shook her head. “Not while you’re sick.”
“I’m not sick.”
“I’ll take care of her.”
Adam and Annabelle spoke together. Lia looked from one to the other.
Stepping forward, Adam laid a hand on Lianne’s shoulder. “Go on,” he urged. “I think Annabelle will feel better if she knows you’re at your meeting.”
Lia frowned uncertainly. “You’re going to stay with her?”
Before Annabelle had a chance to protest that she didn’t require a baby-sitter, Adam nodded. “I’ll be right here.”
“Well…” Lia vacillated, chewing a thumbnail. “If I wasn’t the senior editor, I wouldn’t even think about it. Oh, Belle, are you sure you’re going to be okay? Maybe you should go to the emergency room. You should have a CAT scan.”
“I don’t need a CAT scan.”
“I think I should stay. I could—”
“Go!” Again Adam and Annabelle responded at the same time.
Firmly, Adam pulled Lia to her feet. “She’ll be all right. Go to your meeting and tell your friends the good news. And save a couple of hours for me later in the week. We’ll have dinner at The Beach House.” He named the area’s poshest establishment. “The country’s next great concert pianist should dine where she can see and be seen.” He winked.
Lianne smiled tremulously. She glanced once more to her sister. “You’ll be okay with Adam, huh, Bellie?”
Annabelle nodded.
Turning to the neighbor who had been like a big brother for as long as she could remember, Lianne instructed, “Make sure she eats the whole sandwich. She didn’t have any dinner last night.”
Eyeing Annabelle with a frown, Adam nodded. “Count on it.”
Reassured for the time being, Lianne hugged her sister, gave Adam a peck on the cheek and exited the room. A moment later they heard the front door open and close, and silence thickened the atmosphere in the small Victorian-dressed parlor.
Annabelle’s heart thumped with foolish nerves as Adam crossed to her, seating himself on the sofa and reaching for the plate Lia fixed. He held up one-half of the tuna sandwich. “You eat. I talk.”
She hesitated, and his gaze sharpened. “I will take you to the emergency room if I think there’s some-thing more than hunger and fatigue going on here.”
“Lia worries too much,” she grumbled, but she took the sandwich.
