More Than Words: Stories of Strength: Close Call / Built to Last / Find the Way

Cute. Cheeky, even. Jess smiled to herself and, before she could talk herself out of it, dialed the Wild Raspberry’s number.

A woman answered.

Jess reminded herself she was a prosecutor accustomed to delicate situations. For the most part, it was best to come to the point. “Hello—a friend of mine has a reservation with you this weekend. Brendan O’Malley.”

“Right. He’s not due to arrive until tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” Jess said, hanging up.

Of course.

He was in moose country. That meant he’d gone farther north than Portland, Maine, and wasn’t taking the ferry to Nova Scotia from there. He must have decided to drive up to Mount Desert Island and catch the ferry out of Bar Harbor. He had to be booked on one of the ferries, since it would take forever for him to drive all the way up through Maine and New Brunswick.

Jess dug some more on the dining-room table and found a printout of the ferry schedule from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

Bingo.

If she hurried, she could make the overnight ferry from Portland, about two hours north of Boston, and maybe even beat O’Malley to the Wild Raspberry.

After he checked into a small, tidy motel in Bar Harbor on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, Brendan O’Malley walked over to the cheapest-looking restaurant he could find and ordered fried shrimp and beer. There was fresh raspberry pie on the dessert menu, but he passed. Once he got to Nova Scotia, he’d be staying at a place with a name like Wild Raspberry, so he figured he’d have another chance.

He touched the bandage on the left side of his forehead, just above his eyebrow.

Man. Talk about luck.

The graze didn’t hurt at all. He could take the bandage off anytime. He figured he’d let it fall off in the shower.

His brother Mike had arrived at the scene. “Brendan—damn. You are one lucky cop. How many of your nine lives have you used up now?”

“Eleven.”

Gallows humor, but Mike understood. He’d had his share of brushes with death in his work. They both counted on their training, their experience, the people who backed them up—they didn’t want to count on luck.

Luck was unpredictable. Fickle.

And it could run out.

Brendan shook off any hint of encroaching self-pity and paid for his dinner. He’d have to walk all the way to Nova Scotia to burn off the fried shrimp, but he settled for an evening stroll along Bar Harbor’s pretty streets, not overly crowded with summer tourists. He had a reservation on the morning Cat ferry, which shortened the normal six-hour trip from Bar Harbor across the Gulf of Maine to less than three hours.

Marianne Wells, the owner of the Wild Raspberry, had assured him he’d have peace and quiet at her B and B. She only had three guest rooms. One was free, one was occupied by a hiker, and then there was the room she’d reserved for him.

O’Malley had debated pitching a tent somewhere on the coast for a few days, but Jess would have regarded that as total nut behavior under the circumstances and hunted him down for sure—or, more likely, sent someone after him. There wasn’t much that could pry her away from her job as a county prosecutor. She was a worse workaholic than he was.

A disaster in the making. That was what their relationship was.

Except he couldn’t imagine not having Jess Stewart in his life. She’d been there so long—forever, it seemed.

He didn’t want to screw things up by falling for her.

Mike had said she’d looked worried when she’d talked him into giving her the key to his place. Brendan doubted it. Jess had been a cop for five years, earning her law degree part-time. She wasn’t a worrier. She just didn’t like it that he’d skipped out on her.

What the hell, he didn’t owe her anything. He didn’t even know how they’d ended up dating. He’d always thought of her as a kind of kid sister.

Mike hadn’t bought that one. “There isn’t one thing O’Malley about her. You’re in denial, brother.”

Ten years Brendan had known Stewart, and not until two months ago had he seriously thought about sleeping with her. Maybe she was right, and they’d both been struck by some crazy fairy with a weird sense of humor.

They’d gone to dinner and the movies a few times. Jess had dragged him on a tour of the Old North Church because he was from Boston and he’d never seen it, and that just couldn’t stand another minute as far as she was concerned. But she was a native Bostonian, and had she ever been to a Bruins hockey game? One time, when she was ten. It barely counted.

O’Malley found a flat stone and skipped it into the smooth, gray water of the harbor. He had to stop thinking about Attorney Stewart. Their relationship wasn’t going anywhere. They’d slept together that one time a couple weeks ago, before the shooting, but that had just been one of those things. Spontaneous, unplanned, inevitable.

He’d been such a mush, too. He couldn’t believe it.

He heaved a long sigh, feeling a headache coming on that had nothing to do with the bullet that had missed his brain pan by not very much at all.

Back at his motel, he flopped on his sagging double bed and stared at the ceiling.

Nova Scotia. He could just skip it and hang out on Mount Desert Island for a few days—except the same instinct that had prompted him to jump back a half-step yesterday, thus saving his life, told him to head east. He’d been gathering brochures on Nova Scotia for weeks, checking out the tourist sites on the Internet, poring over maps, all with some vague idea that he should go there.

Maybe it was karma or something.

With his head bandaged up last night and his brother’s talk of using up his nine lives, he’d stared at the lodging list he’d printed off the Internet, picked out a B and B that looked good and called.

Now here he was, on his way. Alone.

Jess could have a point that he shouldn’t be alone.

“Too late.”

He hit the power button on the TV remote and checked out what was going on in the world, feeling isolated and removed and suddenly really irritated with himself. But he was nothing if not stubborn, and he needed a few days to pull his head together, not just about the shooting, but about Jess.

He thought of her dark eyes and her cute butt and decided the bullet yesterday was the universe giving him a wake-up call. What did he think he was doing, falling for Jessica Stewart?

He had no intention of tucking tail and going home.

CHAPTER TWO

The overnight ferry from Portland, Maine, to Yarmouth, on Nova Scotia’s southwest shore, was surprisingly smooth—and fun. Jess hadn’t been anywhere in so long, she made an adventure of it. When she arrived back on land, she followed the directions to the Wild Raspberry B and B, which, she soon discovered, was on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, a breathtaking stretch of Canada’s eastern coastline of rocks, cliffs, narrow, sandy beaches and picturesque villages.

“Forget O’Malley,” she muttered to herself. “I want to go hiking!”

She’d at least had the presence of mind to pack trail shoes and hiking clothes on her quick stop back at her condo last night. Now it was a sunny, glorious morning, and she debated leaving Brendan to his own devices—his determined solitude—and finding another place to stay. He wouldn’t even have to know she was there.

But she continued north along what was aptly named the Lighthouse Route and kept forcing herself not to stop, kept warning herself to stay on task. Finally she came to a small cove near historic Lunenburg, named a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its pristine British colonial architecture and rich seafaring heritage, and found her way to the Wild Raspberry.

It wasn’t a renovated colonial building like those in Lunenburg, which Jess had read about on the ferry. The Wild Raspberry was, fittingly, a small Victorian house, complete with a tiny guest cottage, that perched on a knoll across from the water. A tangle of rose and raspberry vines covered a fence along one side of the gravel driveway. The house itself was painted gray and trimmed in raspberry and white, and had porches in front and back that were crammed with brightly cushioned white wicker furniture and graced with hanging baskets of fuchsias and white petunias.

Jess parked at the far end of the small parking area—so that O’Malley wouldn’t spot her the minute he pulled into the driveway. As she got her suitcase out of the back of her car, she could smell that it was low tide.