“Is that the problem?” he asked gently. “Did you want the place?”
She gave a hiccup and blew her nose again as she nodded. “And Greg wants it very much, even more than I do.”
It was as though an electrical current passed through Mike. Stefan Vandlo wanted an old farm that according to Tess was rotting to the ground? Mike took a couple of breaths to calm himself. He knew that he had to be cautious in what he said now so he wouldn’t set Sara off again.
“Rams wouldn’t sell the farm to Greg,” Sara said, sniffing.
“That’s because Ramsey promised it to Tess nearly two years ago.”
“Two years? But they weren’t even lovers then.”
“No,” Mike said slowly, cautiously, doing all he could not to further upset her. “But Tess took care of Ramsey’s life and his office, didn’t she?
“Yes, but …” Sara trailed off, seeming not to know what else to say.
From his end there was no secrecy involved in the farm, so Mike decided to be honest with her. “At the end of the third year she’d worked for him, Ramsey asked Tess what she thought would be an appropriate bonus, and she said she wanted Merlin’s Farm.”
“And he gave it to her? Just like that? He gave her a farm that’s been in his family for over two hundred years?”
“No. Tess didn’t ask that of him. She wanted him to draw up a contract that gave her a lifetime lease on it, but only after she’d managed to save twenty percent of its value as a down payment.”
Sara wiped at her teary eyes. “That sounds like Tess. And I guess she wanted the place for you.” There was bitterness in her voice.
Mike was dying to ask what the farm had to do with Vandlo, but he knew he had to hold back. “The truth is, she hopes it will entice me to retire here.”
“And what you want most in the world is a broken-down old farm?” Sara looked him up and down, at his pristine clothes. “You don’t look much like a farmer. Wouldn’t you rather have some sleek apartment in Williamsburg?”
When Sara kept looking at him in expectation, Mike knew he was going to have to tell the whole truth, which meant that he would have to reveal a great deal more about himself than he’d told anyone since he was a kid. As an adult, he’d worked hard at avoiding telling anything about his personal life, but then, secrecy was ingrained in him. But ever since he’d arrived in this town, it seemed that everything he’d tried to achieve was being knocked down. The first time someone had mentioned his grandmother to him, he’d wanted to leave.
“That’s all right,” Sara said as she started to get up. “You don’t have to tell me.”
He caught her arm and she sat back down.
As she waited for him to answer, he thought that being shot was easier than having to confess the truth. “Remember that I told you I picked Tess up when she graduated from high school?”
“Yes.”
“What I didn’t add was that Tess was underage then—but I wasn’t. Our grandmother said she’d raise a stink with the police if Tess didn’t agree to do what she wanted her to. If the old woman had reported me, I probably wouldn’t have been prosecuted, but since I was new to the force, she could have halted my career.”
“What did she want Tess to do?”
Mike leaned back against the sofa. “She wanted Tess to—somehow—obtain Merlin’s Farm.”
“But why?” Sara asked. “Did your grandmother want to be a farmer?”
Mike shook his head. “Far from it. She had our backyard covered in concrete because she didn’t like the dirt.”
“So, then, why …?”
It was difficult for Mike to keep calm. One time after he’d had too many beers, he’d made a joke that nothing in his undercover jobs frightened him because no one he’d ever met was as treacherous as the woman who’d raised him. The men he was drinking with had wanted to know more, but Mike hadn’t said a word—and he’d stopped drinking.
Sara put her hand on his arm. “Is this hard for you to talk about?”
“Naw,” he said with as much bravado as he could muster. “The old woman hated Edilean and everyone in it, but she used to say that her only good memory of it was the afternoons she spent at Merlin’s Farm with a boy named Lang.”
“Not Brewster Lang?” Sara asked, her eyes wide.
Mike grinned. “I heard he’s the crankiest man in