Nighttime Guardian

Something flickered in his eyes, an emotion Shelby couldn’t define. “Things change.”

“Yes,” she agreed quietly. “They do.”

He paused, his gaze deep and unfathomable in the moonlight. “I’ve thought about you over the years, Shelby. Wondered where you were, how you were doing.”

The way he said her name sent a soft shiver up her spine. “I’ve thought about you, too,” she admitted.

“Have you?” He sounded surprised. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how the more things change, the more they stay the same? Look at us. For years we lived on opposite sides of the country, thousands of miles apart. And yet here we both are. Back where we started.”

“Full circle,” Shelby murmured. “Maybe it’s fate.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. But there was an edge of bitterness in his voice when he added, “Fate can play some pretty strange tricks all right.”

NATHAN CLIMBED into his Bronco and waited for the procession of police cars and the hearse to pull out so that he could fall in line behind them. From his rearview mirror, he could see Shelby standing in the yard, gazing after them. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness, but the way she lingered on the lawn, looking a little lost, reminded him of the way she’d seemed that first summer she’d come to live with her grandmother.

Mentally he calculated the years, shocked again to realize how much time had passed since he’d last seen her. And yet the moment he’d heard her name, he’d felt that old, tingling sensation along his backbone. That old awareness.

She’d been nine that first summer, and Nathan had been ten. Older, wiser, he’d naturally stepped into the role of her protector, even though they’d been about the same size—and both small for their ages at that.

Shelby was still petite. When they’d stood talking, she hadn’t even come up to his chin. And she’d seemed frail somehow, as if maybe life hadn’t been exactly kind to her. The notion made Nathan a little sad because he’d always imagined Shelby Westmoreland living a charmed life, maybe because he’d never gotten over his first impression of her.

In his mind, he could still see her sitting so prim and proper on Miss Annabel’s front porch, nibbling a strawberry ice-cream cone that was the exact color of her dress. Even in the shade of the porch, her blonde hair had shone like new money, and her eyes were wide and clear, forget-me-not blue.

Nathan had been out fishing that day. His bare feet were muddy, and his clothes reeked of the river. To this day, he remembered how daintily Shelby’s perfect little nose had turned up in displeasure as he climbed the porch steps and held up a string of catfish for Miss Annabel’s inspection.

“Nathan, this is my granddaughter, Shelby. She’s going to be staying here with me this summer. I’m very lucky to have her, but I’m afraid she might get a mite lonely, what with just the two of us out here. How about you come around every chance you get and help me keep her company?”

“Okay,” he’d mumbled, tongue-tied, having not the faintest idea how one entertained such a creature.

But to Nathan’s amazement, he and Shelby had become best friends that summer. In spite of her delicate appearance, she’d been game for almost anything. The pink dress had soon given way to shorts and shirts that had grown, under his expert tutelage, almost as ragged and disreputable as his own clothing.

He’d taught her how to dig for worms in Miss Annabel’s flower beds, how to bait a hook, where to find the best fishing holes. He’d taught her how to clean a catfish and how to cook it over a campfire. How to run a trotline. How to dive. Where the currents were safest to swim and where they weren’t. He’d shown her his hidden spot—a secret he would have guarded with his life, if necessary—for finding the highly coveted mussels. He’d taught her everything he knew about the river, and then some. All the while, he’d kept his adoration to himself—then, and as they’d grown older—because he’d always been afraid that if she’d suspected his true feelings, she would be so embarrassed and disgusted that she would never want anything to do with him again.

Starting his ignition, Nathan turned on his lights as the last police car moved in behind the hearse. But he didn’t put the Bronco in gear because he couldn’t quite tear his gaze from the rearview mirror. It came to him, as he watched Shelby in the mirror, that she had seemed like a woman who was badly frightened of something.

Of what? Surely that summer night had long since faded from her memory. There were no monsters, nothing to be afraid of here. Not for her.

But the old protective instinct rose in Nathan anyway, and he had to fight the urge to swing his truck around and go back to make sure she was safe.

He tightened his grip on the wheel. They were adults now, and Shelby was a married woman. A lot of years had passed since he’d tried to slay dragons for her. And monsters. He was out of practice, and besides, the boy who had once had such chivalric tendencies had grown up to be a man with weaknesses of his own.

A man too flawed to be anyone’s hero.

NOT UNTIL the last flash of red taillights disappeared around the bend in the road did Shelby turn and start across the yard toward the house.

Police cars. A violent death. Not exactly a desirable welcome home. Certainly not a scenario she would have chosen.

Halfway across the lawn she hesitated, glancing up at the house. Rising on stilts, the looming white structure, so charming by daylight, had always seemed a little spooky to Shelby in the darkness. It wasn’t so much the house itself that was eerie as the area beneath. Enclosed in whitewashed latticework, the spider-infested space was used to store everything from garden tools to trunks of old schoolbooks.

Once upon a time, Shelby and Nathan had commandeered the enclosure as a secret clubhouse. But after that fateful summer night, Shelby had considered that cool, smelly dankness a prime hiding place for her monster. She wouldn’t go near it.

Even now, she could almost feel eyes staring at her from the darkness, and she hurried up the porch steps, resisting the impulse to glance down. Or over her shoulder at the river.

A light shone through the lace curtain at the front door, and Shelby breathed a sigh of relief. Her grandmother had said Aline Henley had been keeping an eye on the place since the accident and had come by today to tidy up and stock the refrigerator. Annabel must have cautioned Aline to leave a light on for Shelby.

Using her grandmother’s key, she opened the door and stepped inside, glancing around at the familiar surroundings. This was better, she thought. Homey. Comforting. Nothing the least bit frightening in here.

Everything was exactly the way she remembered it, although the plank flooring was a little duller, the furniture a little shabbier. But with her grandmother’s touch almost everywhere, it still felt more like home than any place Shelby had ever lived with her parents.

The living room was to her left, a long, narrow area decorated with an old-fashioned settee, velvet tufted chairs and a Tiffany-style lamp that gave off a soft, greenish glow. There were ferns everywhere, hanging at the windows that looked out on the river and in terra-cotta frogs and turtles flanking the brick fireplace. The fronds stirred gently under the ceiling fan, and the sluggish movement, coupled with the verdant lamp glow, gave the room an odd, underwater feel that Shelby had never noticed before.

Leaving the front door open, she went back out to the car to get her bags. The scent of the river followed her back inside. Setting her suitcases in the hallway, Shelby turned quickly to close and lock the door as a sense of aloneness settled over her.

She wondered if Nathan was still her nearest neighbor, and wished suddenly that she had asked him earlier if he was living in his father’s house. Knowing that Nathan was nearby had once been a great comfort to Shelby.

But he was right. Things had changed since then.

She recalled what he’d said about fate playing strange tricks. His words disturbed her, not because of the melancholia they invoked, but because of the edge of bitterness she’d heard in his voice. The hardness she’d glimpsed in his eyes. When she’d thought about Nathan Dallas over the years, she’d pictured him traveling the world, living the fascinating, adventurous life he’d always seemed destined for.

As a kid, Shelby couldn’t imagine how he could ever top diving for pearls. It had seemed like the most romantic profession in the world to her then, and she’d thought Nathan just about the bravest, most exciting person she’d ever known. She’d suffered from a bad case of hero worship that first summer, but, of course, she hadn’t let him know that. He’d been too full of himself as it was.

As Shelby had grown older and learned more about the pearling industry from her grandmother, she’d come to understand what a truly grueling occupation diving was. And dangerous, with the river’s treacherous currents and all the fishing nets and lines to contend with.

Not to mention loggerhead turtles, she thought with a smile. Those particular bottom-feeders had been Nathan’s secret terror, he’d once confided.

She’d liked knowing that even Nathan Dallas was afraid of something.

Picking up her bags, Shelby carried them upstairs and down the hallway to her old bedroom. An alcove of windows, draped with lace, looked out on the river, and almost against her will, Shelby crossed the room and stood staring out at the water.

After a moment, she started to turn away, but a movement on the water stilled her. A series of circles, undulating in the moonlight, grew wider and wider until they lapped gently at the bank.

Chapter Three

“Nathan? You got a minute?” Virgil Dallas’s booming voice carried over the usual pandemonium of the newsroom. He stood in the doorway of his office, and when Nathan glanced up from his monitor, his uncle motioned him inside.

Clearing his computer screen, Nathan smothered a groan. In the three months since his uncle had offered him a partnership in the paper, Nathan had had difficulty asserting his autonomy as editor. He’d entered the relationship on one contingency: that he be allowed complete editorial freedom. He would run the newsroom while Virgil would remain at the helm as publisher and business manager.

But Virgil couldn’t quite relinquish control. He’d managed every aspect of the paper for over thirty years, and he couldn’t help offering unsolicited advice on everything from the editorials to the obits.

His uncle’s obstinacy sometimes grated on Nathan’s nerves, but he knew he had to suck it up for one very good reason. He had nowhere else to go. He’d once been an award-winning reporter for one of the most respected newspapers in Washington, D.C., but by the age of thirty, he was finished. Unemployable. A has-been. A freelance hack for the tabloids because no reputable newspaper in the country would touch him after one of his stories had been repudiated as a fraud. He’d trusted the wrong source, and just like that, his career was over.

The partnership with his uncle was Nathan’s last chance to prove his journalistic worth, to redeem not just his career and reputation, but his self-respect.

But working at the Argus was proving to be more of a challenge than Nathan had anticipated. For one thing, he’d been astounded to learn how poorly managed the paper had been in the last few years as Virgil’s age and flagging health had taken a toll. Circulation and ad sales were at an all-time low, and the paper relied much too heavily on filler—stories picked up from news services—with no real reporting. If the trend couldn’t be reversed, the Argus was destined to go the way of so many small-town newspapers. First, they would have to cut back from a daily circulation to weekly, and then perhaps fold altogether.

Nathan couldn’t allow that to happen. He’d poured every last cent he had into the partnership, but it was more than just financial ruin he had at stake here.

He stuck his head inside his uncle’s office. “You wanted to see me?”