Putting her hands on the table, she leaned toward him. “You can tell all of them—your sister, Ramsey, Luke, everyone—that they may not like Greg but I do. He’s made me achieve things. He may be abrupt and rude at times, but at least he gives me hope for the future.”
She leaned so far forward her face was inches from his. “As for you, Mr. Newland, you can forget about trying to get information out of me, or seducing me away from Greg, or whatever you have planned, because it won’t work. Do you understand me? I’m not interested in you or any other man, so you might as well leave now.”
With that, she went down the hall to her bedroom and slammed the door.
Mike fell back against the chair in utter bewilderment. He had no idea what he’d just been accused of. “Seduce her?” He hadn’t come close to her.
Mike ran his hands over his face. His instinct was to knock on her door and try to talk to her, but as he had no idea what to say, that would be useless. Why couldn’t she have drawn a nice big gun on him? A revolver. A semiautomatic would have been a good choice. She could have said, “Get near me again and I’ll kill you.” He’d had that said to him multiple times, and he’d always handled it easily.
The timer went off for the hens, Mike got them out of the oven, then went outside to call Tess.
She answered on the second ring.
“So what do you think of her?” Tess didn’t bother with preliminaries.
“She’s stressed-out. And she knows I’m lying.”
That astonished Tess so much she could hardly speak. “But you always lie. It’s what makes you so good at your job. You lie about … about what kind of toothpaste you use, but people never know it.”
“Are you sure you’re on my side?”
Tess didn’t laugh. “I don’t understand this. Sara believes every word of a guy the whole town knows is a jerk, but she doesn’t believe you?”
“Who can understand it?” Mike’s voice conveyed his puzzlement. “I’ve treated her like I would a princess, cooked for her, cleaned up after both of us, but she still accuses me of … I don’t really know why she’s so angry at me.”
“What about the people of Edilean? Not the newcomers, but the ones who know Sara. What’s going on with them?”
Mike took his time in answering. “I talked to some of them this morning, and they’re genuinely concerned about her. They don’t want her to be hurt.”
Tess well knew what he was saying. “That town is astonishing, isn’t it? Those people actually care about one another. Of course you have to be on the inside to get that caring, but it does happen.”
“Not what we were told about this place, is it?”
> Tess gave a low laugh. “Not by a long shot. Have you talked to anyone who knew Grans?”
“No, and I don’t want to. I’d like to think that mess was buried with her.”
“Me too,” Tess said. “So, now, I want to hear what you think of Sara.”
“I think she’s …”
“She’s what?”
“Beautiful.”
“How beautiful?”
“She makes me nervous.”
“That bad, huh?”
“The strangest things make her furious at me, but it’s impossible for me to get angry back at somebody who wears clothes that look like angels made them.”
“I know. Sara wears long sleeves even on the hottest days. She orders a lot of the fabric from Ireland, then makes her own clothes. They go with that porcelain skin of hers, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said in a low, throaty way.
“What about Sara as a woman? Great, huh?”