All That Glitters. Mary Brady

his hands over his ears, he stood waiting to make sure the old thing continued to run, that nothing had clogged during the year or so of only being started as a test from time to time.

      Two things were “at leasts” today. At least he had gotten back from Boston in time to get the house closed up and at least the woodpile out under the tall white pines behind the house had been stacked high and straight.

      He’d have a heat and light source when the gas burned up.

      What he wouldn’t have for the day or two it took for the storm to pass was peace from a sensation seeker. Now all he had to figure out was how to keep Ms. Bonacorda in the dark, literally, when the lights went out.

      These days most reporters he came into contact with were gossip seekers who could take a corn-flake-sized bit of banal and build it into a sensational story. Worse, when a story was written with enough adjectives or read with enough enthusiasm it would be considered by the masses to be gospel. He wondered how many adjectives this woman had in her cache.

      He let his hands fall to his sides disgusted with himself. Whatever and whoever this woman was, he had gotten into the mess with Hale and Blankenstock, and he knew the world was going to demand answers from him.

      Answers were going to be tough to come by.

      Convinced the generator would continue to run, he turned to leave and spotted the note tagged to the door.

      Me and Margaret Louise are hunkered down and well taken care of. Don’t you worry about us. You come over if you want to. It was signed Owen and Margaret Louise.

      He had no choice but to smile. “Well taken care of” meant the two of them were holed up with enough food for a small regiment and plenty of scotch for the whole army. Owen knew creature comfort and he deserved them, and Margaret Louise knew how to cook, therefore the food in Zach’s freezer...

      He tugged the hood of the jacket back on over his baseball cap and stood in the doorway of the shed. He was fascinated, watching the show presented by nature. Lightning flickered in various degrees of strength for almost a minute before it abated to small flashes.

      In the near dark, he saw no light coming from the room where he’d sent the reporter. He could have gotten lucky—maybe she’d gone to sleep already.

      He doubted it as soon as he thought it.

      When he sent her away, she had looked shocked and might have left in a disappointed huff. She might even have been foolish enough to go back out in the storm to see if she could rescue her car. He could have told her that car was going nowhere until O’Reilly’s tow truck hauled it out of the ravine. She was lucky she hadn’t gone in a few yards farther up the road, as that part of the ravine ran down the steep side of the hill.

      She must have thought he was story-worthy to risk her neck and she helped shore up the old mansion without question.

      Did those things make her someone he’d be interested in knowing or someone he should lock out of the loft and hope she went away without actually damaging the old home and contents? His grandmother had loved the mansion on Sea Crest Hill and his own mother had rejected it as the shabbier side of life.

      He turned and gave the generator a last visual once-over. Satisfied, he shifted the cap so the storm had less of a chance to blast rain into his eyes and headed out.

      The wind whipped the pine trees relentlessly over his head and the rain pelted down as he fled sure-footed along the stone path to his refuge. In five minutes he’d have a fire going and a glass of finely aged red wine in his hand.

      Hopefully that reporter was tucked away in the four-poster bed, her computer in her lap, capitalizing on someone else’s misfortune.

      * * *

      WHEN ADDY HEARD the sound of boots tread on the steps to the loft above the garage, she drew herself up to her full five foot five inches and whispered encouragement to herself. There was a time when no man could make her back down, but this man had already shown signs of ignoring her and had all but thrown her over his shoulder and carried her off to his cave.

      One of his many talents, no doubt, along with the ability to talk, bully and cajole people out of their money, was to carry women off. Already he had shown her that murdering her to keep her out of his business was not plan number one. If he wanted to kill her to shut her up, he could have just left her in her car. She might have been silenced by a flying tree limb or been washed off down the hill into the ocean if he had left her to fend for herself.

      Most likely he just planned to stick her up in beguiling Millie McClure’s room full of antiques and ignore her.

      She smiled and a shot of courage buzzed inside her.

      The door swung open and the man who appeared in the dim light was not the slick swindler she had seen in Boston, nor the Maine backwoodsman. Nor was he the man who would show up briefly, a glittering beacon of humility according to her sister, Savanna, at the holiday parties for Hale and Blankenstock where her sister had met him exactly twice. He would stay for a few minutes, greet each employee and then leave, according to Savanna.

      Everyone now knew the glittering beacon was part of a lie.

      Hat in hand, the shadows made the furrow of his brows deeper and his unguarded expression more dramatic. He was handsome in his rough and outdoorsy look, and in this moment he appeared to be a man who had many troubles to deal with, many concerns for which he had to be responsible.

      Under other circumstances, she might want to walk up to him, put her hands flat on his chest and brush his damp hair back off where it had fallen on his forehead. She would sweep her hand across the furrows of his brows, draw his head down and put her lips against his full and slightly drawn ones. And...

      What was she thinking?

      This was the enemy of the people.

      Hale slowly swung his gaze in her direction as if he had expected her to be there. His features relaxed to neutral, he became a hybrid between woodsman, because of the four-or five-day growth of sandy whiskers, and slick swindler, because of years of practice.

      Addy drew in a breath to sort out her thoughts.

      “I wanted to speak with you,” she said into the silence. They were in his territory, and short of death by storm or felony theft of his SUV, she was stuck here. She wanted to sound nonconfrontational, perhaps professorish, someone who was just looking for facts, not trying to crucify him.

      If his guard went down to anywhere near what it had been when he had opened the door, she’d get something related to the truth, or at least as much of the truth as a person like him could find in his life.

      He didn’t answer, but hung his hat on a peg, turned and walked out.

      Degenerate...

      Running away. Or maybe it was a ploy to have her follow him and then he’d get her out of the loft and out of his hair if he ran back inside and locked the door with her on the outside.

      A kid’s game, like musical chairs. She’d be left out. Too bad, so sad. But that was not going to happen.

      Make herself useful. That’s what she should do.

      What did men like? Couldn’t resist?

      She looked at the bags of groceries on the island counter.

      Food. Even swindlers had to eat.

      She couldn’t cook at all—not even boil a decent pot of water, but maybe she could manage something. She grabbed the nearest bag and started poking around.

      Fusilli? Other than being pasta—she knew because she could see its curly shape through the window in the box—she hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t needed to know what it was named to eat it. Nope. Just stick a fork in it.

      Cans of plain tomato sauce. What the heck was she supposed to do with that?

      The door across the room popped open and Hale entered with his arms bulging with firewood. He turned his back