Small-Town Midwife. Jean Gordon C.

him to leave. “I really appreciate it.”

      “I could tell. You were looking at my coffeemaker like a man who’d just crawled his way out of a waterless week in the desert.”

      “That bad?”

      “That bad.” She handed him the key on a key chain that read I Conquered the High Peaks.

      Had she climbed all of the Adirondack High Peaks? he wondered. At Samaritan, she’d always been open to a challenge. His former roommate could attest to that. The roommate had run into Autumn and some of the other women shooting hoops at the Y one evening and, after some back and forth, had challenged them to a three-point competition. It had come down to his roommate and Autumn. She matched him shot for shot until the competition was called because the Y was closing.

      So she certainly had the tenacity to conquer the peaks. Her crossed arms and wide-legged stance stopped him from asking, though. He should get back outside, but he couldn’t seem to get his feet moving. They were going to be working together and living next door to each other. He’d like to get past the undercurrent of resentment she exuded.

      “I’ll bring the key right back.”

      “Keep it. I have another one, and you’ll need a copy anyway.”

      He pushed open the screen door and reached behind him to close the main door.

      “You can leave it open. It feels warm out already.”

      He looked up at the bright sun in the cloudless blue sky. “Yeah, it looks like a scorcher.” As the aluminum door latched shut behind him, he wondered what had made him say that. Scorcher. It sounded like something they’d say on AccuWeather. And why was he so looking forward to Autumn’s bringing him coffee?

      * * *

      Autumn carried two coffee mugs across the living room and opened the screen door with her elbow. Since the weather had warmed up, she often had her Saturday-morning coffee outside on the patio Grandpa had added to her side of the house. She scanned the front yard. Neither Jon nor the movers were outside. She walked over to Jon’s side and peered in the screen door. The living room was empty of people and furniture. The movers must have started with the upstairs furniture.

      “Hello,” she called, taking a sip of her coffee as she waited for a response.

      Jon bounded down the stairway, opened the door and took the mug from her. He drank deeply. “Thanks. I really need this.”

      “You’re welcome.”

      “I’d invite you to stay and drink your coffee with me, but I don’t have a seat to offer you.”

      “That’s okay. I was going to sit out on the patio. I don’t want to keep you from your work.”

      “The movers can handle things. I’ll join you, if you don’t mind.”

      She did mind. This morning was the only quiet time she expected to have all weekend. This afternoon, she was helping Drew at the camp. Gram and Grandpa had invited her for dinner tomorrow after church, and in the evening she was babysitting for her father and Anne so they could go out for their anniversary. She loved her family and everything that came with living close to them. But she’d hoped for a couple of hours to herself this morning.

      Oh, well. It was her choice. She wouldn’t trade living here at the lake for living anywhere else. At least not voluntarily. Autumn’s throat constricted. Once her contract with Kelly was up in the fall, she might have to go somewhere else. She had her doubts that Kelly would offer her another contract if she still wasn’t catching babies. And neither the Adirondack Medical Center nor the Ticonderoga Birthing Center had staff midwives.

      Jon looked down at her with the smile that had made half the nursing staff at Samaritan go all weak and dreamy and the other half want to mother him like a favored son. Autumn had been an exception. Rather than wowing her like everyone else, Jon’s masculine charms had irritated her. He’d been too smooth, too full of himself professionally and personally, although a few times when she’d seen him outside work, she’d thought she’d glimpsed a different Jon underneath.

      He motioned toward the walkway. “After you.”

      Autumn felt his eyes on her as she descended the porch steps. She wiped her palm on her denim shorts. She wasn’t about to succumb to his charms now. Not unless he’d changed a lot in the past two years. And from what she’d seen yesterday, he hadn’t. She glanced toward the patio. They could finish their coffee and she’d still have some time before she had to be down at the lake to help Uncle Drew.

      In two long strides, Jon was beside her on the walkway in front of her door.

      “If you need a refill, I made plenty.” Not exactly the way to discourage him from hanging around. She glanced at Jon out of the corner of her eye. But he was so right there. She’d needed to say something.

      “That’d be great.”

      “Go ahead and I’ll bring the pot out.” What had gotten into her? Now she was offering to wait on him. Did her unsettled job situation have her so off-kilter that she’d grasp at anything that made her feel useful?

      Once Jon rounded the corner of the house to the patio, Autumn yanked her door open and stomped across her living room. She poured a couple of dollops of fat-free half-and-half in her cup, picked up the coffeepot and walked out to the patio as the calm, sane person she usually was.

      Jon stood at the far edge of the patio looking up at the roof. “I didn’t notice the solar panels when the Realtor showed me the place. Photovoltaic?”

      “Yes. Dad put the system in last summer when he and Grandpa decided to divide the house into a two-family.” Autumn placed the coffeepot and her mug on the round wooden table.

      “By himself?” Jon’s voice held a note of awe.

      “More or less. It’s what he does.” Autumn sat on the circular bench and topped up her drink. While she knew her father’s limitations, growing up as the only child of a teenage single father, she’d never completely outgrown her feeling that “Daddy could do anything” and was often surprised when people commented on his work.

      Jon joined her and refilled his mug. “He owns a solar energy company or a construction company?”

      For some reason, Jon’s assumption that her father owned a company rankled. “Neither. He’s a self-employed electrician, but he does hookups for several companies throughout the Northeast. It’s Anne, my stepmother, who’s the corporate tycoon of the family. She’s the chair of the board of directors of GreenSpaces and heads the environmental studies program at the college in Ticonderoga.”

      Autumn sipped her coffee while she waited for the name of Anne’s international environmental engineering company to register with Jon and tried to figure out what she was doing. She didn’t have to prove anything to Jon just because he came from a prominent old-money family.

      He looked at her blankly over the edge of his coffee mug. “That’s the community college I passed on State Route 74?”

      Her coffee tasted bitter in her mouth. She should have brought the honey out. “Yes, North Country Community College. That’s where I got my RN degree.”

      “You didn’t go away to school? I couldn’t wait to leave.”

      “I had an academic scholarship to Trinity College in Chicago. My other grandfather was a professor there. But I just wasn’t ready to leave home yet then. I never knew my mother, and I’m not that close to him and my grandmother.” She clamped her forefinger over her mouth. He didn’t need—or, probably, want—her family history, particularly since he wasn’t sharing any of his.

      Jon ran his gaze over the weathered shake siding of the house behind her, pausing at the drooping gutter knocked loose from the windstorm the week before last.

      She glanced from the gutter to Jon and pressed her lips together. With his work getting the cabins ready for Camp Sonrise to open,