Her Reason to Stay by Anna Adams Page B

his arm. Cool air swept in around his shoulder. More spring showers on the way. “Why are you saying these things? You don’t know me.”
    He shook his head and let his fingertips rest against her cheek. When she leaned against his hand, he bent down. His lips brushed hers. Need met need, sheer physical relief spun into urgency.
    Suddenly, it was as if she were a spectator. She saw Patrick, his back to the open door, and herself, lifting her hands to his face because she couldn’t stop, and then she imagined Miriam bursting out of the back or one of Patrick’s neighbors literally stumbling across them.
    She broke away, staring at him, stunned and yet eager for him to take the decision away from her, to take her in his arms again.
    “I know you,” he said. “And you know me. Isn’t it like that sometimes?”
     
    “I KNOW YOU ,” he’d said while his kiss had still burned on her mouth. But in fact, he didn’t. When he really understood the truth about her, how would he feel?
    The old Daphne would have fled, the better portion of a fifth of whiskey in her gut, and the rest of the bottle tucked safely close at hand in the glove box. The new Daphne turned the lock on the door at Bundle of Blooms, leaving Miriam to her greenhouse work.
    She still had Raina to face.
    Daphne walked quickly to her car and climbed in to lean her forehead against the steering wheel.
    She pulled Raina’s envelope from her purse and committed the chicken-scratch directions to memory. When she dropped the envelope on the seat again, she saw the return address and laughed.
    Raina’s platinum-credit-card bill. Unopened. The girl might have money, but good Lord, she needed someone to carry around her common sense and remind her to use it. Daphne tucked the bill back into her purse.
    Finding her sister’s house in the stratified neighborhoods of Honesty proved a little more difficult than Daphne had anticipated. The directions hadn’t mentioned twisting roads that changed names and then changed back.
    Old money lived in the row houses, like Patrick. She turned away from his street and ended up heading toward the line of Victorian manses on a hill that overlooked the square.
    The Abernathy estate clung to that hill among the gingerbread and brick monstrosities that acted as gargoyles repelling bad spirits from the sweet little town.
    At last she found the newly resurfaced black road that wound into the neighborhood on the hill.
    Raina’s place was in the first line of homes. An elegant A like the one on Raina’s silverware was scrawled into the wrought-iron gates. Three stories of brick and wavy-paned windows stood behind hedges and graceful trees and bulbs coming to color in the form of lilies and crocuses and blood-red tulips.
    The gates stayed closed.
    An intercom speaker was embedded in a brick stanchion close to the driver’s side of the car. Daphne opened her window and punched the button to speak. “Raina?”
    Static answered her. She listened hard for a voice, but static rattled again into the otherwise still night.
    The gate swung open.
    “Thanks,” Daphne said, rolling her eyes for a glimpse of spruce branches and darkening sky. “I’ll be right up. Don’t loose the hounds upon me.”
    “You like to make fun, don’t you?”
    “Raina, you can speak. I thought you were sending Morse code in static bursts. I’ll be there before you know it.”
    The driveway wound like a snake through formal plantings, cut back for winter but beginning to bud. Not a dot of anything untoward touched the velvet lawn. The Abernathys must have spent more than Daphne’s best annual salary on landscaping and maintenance.
    Her sister opened the big glossy black door and came onto her wide porch like Scarlett welcoming the Tarletons.
    Daphne parked and jumped out of the car. “I expected the old family retainer.”
    “Who would that be?”
    Raina’s spike-edged tone deflated Daphne’s flippancy. “I guess that would be Patrick,” she said,