Cold River - Carla Neggers [1]
Without acknowledging anyone else, Bowie looked up at the basketball game on TV while he waited for his beer.
The Camerons tensed visibly at their table but didn’t move to leave.
Hannah considered quietly easing off her stool, paying for her wine and getting out of there. Her younger brothers needed her help with homework, and she had studying of her own to do. She’d turn thirty this year. Time to finish law school and get on with her legal career. She was also part-owner of a breakfast-lunch café just down Main Street from O’Rourke’s. The café closed at three o’clock—hours ago—but she kept the books and managed the staff as well as cooked and cleaned, and work could go well into the night. It probably would tonight.
Two more sips, she thought, lifting her glass and trying to stifle a rush of self-consciousness. It was a stubborn demon she thought she’d finally conquered, but with Bowie just down the bar and A.J., Elijah and Sean Cameron at their table in their canvas jackets and hiking boots, with their very blue eyes and square jaws and scars from hard work, fighting fires and fighting wars, she found herself wishing she’d stayed away and hadn’t taken this time for herself. She hadn’t bothered with makeup, and she’d pulled on a long wool skirt, sweater and boots more for comfort and warmth than style. Her blond hair, which she’d hastily tied back at dawn, had to be stringy by now.
But how would she know? She hadn’t taken a half second to check herself in the mirror before she’d set out for her hour on her own.
Her sudden self-consciousness had nothing to do with A.J., a happily married father of two young children, or Elijah, a Special Forces soldier who’d left Vermont at nineteen—all but kicked out of town by his own father. No, Hannah thought. Sean was the Cameron who could have her forget she was a top law student and a successful businesswoman.
Nothing new there.
All three were competent, good-looking men anyone would want to have as allies and rescuers and dread to have as enemies. Their sister, Rose, the youngest, one of Hannah’s closest friends, was likewise competent and attractive, but she was out of town with Ranger, her search-and-rescue dog.
Sean was considered the charmer of the three brothers, but only in contrast to A.J. and Elijah. Hannah had never been intimidated by any of them, but that didn’t mean she didn’t wish they hadn’t come to town tonight.
As she sipped the last of her wine, Sean seemed just now to see her. He smiled that devastating smile she’d first noticed back in high school Latin class, when she’d been an eager freshman—at thirteen, a year younger than most other freshmen—and he’d been a bored senior, a star athlete who’d had no interest in Latin. He’d just needed a class that fit his schedule and provided the needed credits for him to graduate. She remembered a rainy afternoon when she was the sole student who’d known that Dido and Aeneas was a Henry Purcell opera based on the tragic love affair between the queen of Carthage and a Trojan refugee. Proud of her answer, Hannah had heard laughter behind her. No idea what it was about, she’d turned around and seen Sean Cameron’s smile, those blue eyes, and realized he was laughing at her.
She hadn’t let him see how mortified she was and had redoubled her efforts to maintain an A in class—not that it was much of a victory when Sean was happy to squeak by with a D. What did he care about an A in Latin? He was on to bigger and better things.
She tipped her glass to him now and gave him a warm but reserved smile. She wasn’t thirteen anymore, and as sexy and appealing as all the Cameron men were, she’d never had any serious romantic interest in Sean or his brothers. She had plans of her own, ones that wouldn’t fit into the life of a driven, blue-eyed Cameron.
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Bowie O’Rourke raise his beer with a callused, scarred hand. He’d first learned his trade working after school and summers with Hannah’s father, Tobias Shay, who’d led his own troubled life before ramming his car into a