Free Strangers When We Meet by Marisa Carroll Page B

It took both hands to twist the brass knob, but Emma didn’t try to do it for her. Her grandmother refused to make any more concessions to her arthritis than absolutely necessary. “Those women with the unhappy love affairs are one thing, but the ones with broken marriages who call you are truly sad cases. I don’t want that to happen to you. I’d rather you were single with no regrets than married with a lifetime of them to deal with.”
    “Others would say it was such a small thing. Not important enough to walk away from a relationship.”
    “Does your heart tell you that?”
    Emma shook her head. “My head tells me that. But my heart tells me differently. My heart tells me if he lied to me about this, he could lie to me about other things. And from now on, every time something happens, I’ll wonder and doubt his word. Trust is essential in a marriage, I believe that very strongly.”
    “I said you had a level head on your shoulders. You get that from the Dorns. But you’re also my granddaughter, and the Braintrees make decisions with their hearts as often as their heads. If you don’t trust Daryl Tubb anymore, then I trust your intuition. He may very well be leading you down the garden path. If he is, he’ll have me and your grandfather to answer to. If he isn’t, well then, this will all come out right in the end. You take as long as you need to decide to marry him. And if Lori Tubb starts to pressure you to make up your mind, you just send her over here to me. I’ll soon set her straight.”
    “What’s the matter with me, Nana? I love Daryl—” She stopped talking at the sympathetic, knowing look on her grandmother’s face. “Don’t I?”
    Martha’s touch on her arm was gentle, and so was her tone. Gentle but firm and full of conviction. “Perhaps that’s the true question you should be asking yourself.”
    * * *
    “K EEGAN , stop raking more leaves into Randi’s pile. It’s your turn to help me,” Robin fussed. “Emma’s not raking fast enough.” The twins were dressed in denim coveralls and long-sleeved T-shirts, one green, one pink, with matching ribbons in their hair. Emma thought they were the cutest little girls she’d ever seen, and felt the familiar stir of longing to have a child of her own. Sometimes she wondered if that soul-deep desire hadn’t had something to do with how quickly she’d fallen in love, or thought she’d fallen in love, with Daryl.
    “Hey, I’m raking as fast as I can,” Emma said with a groan.
    “Girls just aren’t as good at this. They don’t have the upper-arm strength us guys have. You can look it up.” Clint Cooper’s twelve-year-old son, Keegan, spoke with all the superiority of his sex. He sent a huge rakefull of leaves skimming over the grass into the pile to illustrate his point. A tall, sturdy boy with his dad’s dark chestnut hair and green eyes, he was settling into life in Cooper’s Corner with little difficulty, and Emma knew from her grandmother that it was a relief to both Clint and Maureen that he was doing so well. The first time or two Emma had met him, in the spring before the B and B was opened, she’d had the suspicion he’d like to do some matchmaking between her and Clint. But then she’d met Daryl, and Keegan had abandoned the effort.
    “Them’s fightin’ words, pardner,” Emma said. “I take that as a personal challenge to my sex.”
    “This looks like the perfect activity for a beautiful autumn afternoon,” Blake Weston called from the deck. “Sunshine, blue sky, the Patriots playing the Ravens on the radio and healthy exercise.”
    “The exercise part is starting to get to me,” Emma said, a little breathless from trying to keep up with Keegan’s energetic raking—and, she had to admit, from the sight of Blake Weston standing tall and tanned against the achingly blue New England sky.
    “Stop talking and rake,” Robin interrupted. “I want to be able to jump into a great big pile of leaves.”
    “Mine’s