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Reminding herself to go through the collection of odds and ends on the back porch to see if a can of oil lurked in their midst, she sidestepped the loose board on the porch and came to a halt at the top step.

Greg climbed from behind the wheel. Before she could even begin to imagine why he was there, the slam of his door sent birds squawking as they scattered from the trees.

He had her yellow towel with him. Seeing her framed by the posts on the porch, he headed toward her, his stride relaxed and unhurried. Without the lab coat covering his golf shirt and khakis, she could see that the sling completely encased his arm, holding it nearly as close to his body as he’d held it himself last night.

She needed to forget last night. Certain parts of it, anyway.

“I hear Charlie Moorehouse loaned you his truck,” she called, thinking the comment as good a way as any to keep things neighborly.

She watched him glance toward Charlie’s newest acquisition. The fact that the old guy had lent the doctor his pride and joy attested to how grateful he had been to Greg for getting him through his last bout of gout.

“He’s saved me a lot of hassle,” he admitted, sounding grateful himself. She’d also heard that truck was an automatic. With the use of only one arm, he couldn’t have driven anything else. “He dropped it off for me after he and his son towed my SUV into St. Johnsbury.”

“How long before you get it back?”

“Not sure,” he replied, and stopped at the foot of the steps. He hadn’t come to exchange small talk. He wanted something. She could tell from the way his deceptively casual glance slid over her frame, his mouth forming an upside down U in the moments before he held out her neatly folded towel.

He also didn’t appear totally convinced that he should be there.

“Do you have a few minutes?” he asked as she took what he offered.

“Sure.” Despite a quick sense of unease, she gave a shrug. “I was just cleaning.”

Behind her, the window sparkled. Above, cobwebs laced the corners of the porch roof.

“That ought to keep you busy for a while.”

“Until spring, I would imagine.”

The U gave way to a faint smile. “Then, I won’t keep you long. Bess is on me to hire you,” he admitted, getting straight to the point. “She said she’s sure you’ll have no trouble picking up medical terminology and our procedures. Since you appear to have considerable office experience, I wondered if you wanted to tell me why I shouldn’t offer you the job.”

The question threw her. So did the intent way he watched her as she crossed her arms over the folded yellow terry cloth and waited for her to either recover from his blunt query or invite him in and answer it.

“Because I already have one?”

Something in his eyes seemed to soften. She wasn’t sure what it was. It hinted at patience, yet looked more like weariness. The draining kind of weariness that sucked the spirit from deep inside a man.

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

Unfortunately, she did. She also knew she had several very good reasons to ignore the quick tug of empathy she felt for what she saw. For starters, if he was tired, it was probably because he hadn’t slept well with his arm throbbing or aching or whatever it was probably still doing. More important, he seemed far more perplexed by her than interested in her sympathy.

Perplexed didn’t begin to describe what Greg felt when it came to the quietly pretty woman warily eyeing him from three steps away. The more he learned about her, the more bits and pieces of her past and personality he picked up, the more mysterious she seemed. And the more interested he became.

That interest bothered him. She wasn’t his patient, so he couldn’t excuse his curiosity about her as a way to better tend her needs. Even if she had been a patient, his interest went light-years beyond the professional. Yet he wasn’t about to fully acknowledge the inexplicable pull he felt toward her. He was already involved with someone. He had been for two years. Unlike the other men in his family, he would not cheat on a woman—even if he was having serious second thoughts about the relationship.

A familiar tension started creeping through him. Colliding with that struggle were all the problems he’d acquired since his father died. Not a week had gone by in the past few months that the mail hadn’t brought a new batch of documents, receipts and queries he didn’t want to deal with. He’d gotten to where he’d hated to see Smiley coming, and had finally asked his attorney to hold on to everything until he could get to Boston to take care of whatever needed to be done. His attorney had now taken to e-mailing him, wanting to know when that would be.

He shoved down the resentment, buried it as he so often did lately. Between the estate and Elizabeth, the last thing he needed was another problem, and Jenny Baker clearly had plenty of her own, but the clinic needed a competent office manager who could double as a receptionist. That should be all he considered right now.

“Is working at the diner what you really want to do? I’m not saying there’s a thing wrong with being a waitress,” he explained, dead certain she was in need of help herself. “But wouldn’t you rather have a job that used your skills and paid more than minimum wage and tips?”

Jenny was okay with omission. A little less comfortable with evasion. But there was no way she could look him in the eye and lie.

“I didn’t think so,” he said, when her only response was to glance away.

“Look.” The faint breeze chased a leaf across the porch. “We need an office manager. I trust Bess’s judgment, so I’m more than willing to listen to her when it comes to decisions about staffing. But you’re hiding something,” he told her, wondering if fear had driven her here, hoping for her sake that it hadn’t. “Or running from it.”

He held up his hand, cutting her off when she started to protest. “I don’t like owing anyone, Jenny. And after what I put you through last night, I owe you. Something isn’t right here.” His glance swept her face, quietly searching. “If you’re in trouble, I might be able to help.”

Jenny had no idea why he didn’t care to be obligated to anyone. She didn’t get a chance to wonder about it, though. The thought that he wanted to help caught her as unprepared as the quick pang of need she felt to let him. She had never felt as alone as she had in the past month, as alone as she had last night curled up in the dark. Unfortunately, dealing with the mess she’d made of her life was something she would have to do on her own.

Suddenly tired herself, she sank to the top step and motioned for him to help himself to a stair. Boards groaned beneath his weight as he tugged at the knees of his khakis and sat down a yard away. With his big body taking up more than his half of the space, he planted his feet wide on the step below.

The yellow dots on his brown socks were tiny ducks. Had she not felt so miserable she would have smiled at that totally unexpected bit of whimsy. The kids in the pictures in his office would have to love a guy who wore something like that.

“Thank you,” she said, genuinely moved by his offer. “But there isn’t anything you can do. Except for the job,” she conceded, almost afraid to think of how far a real salary could go. “The job really would make things easier.”

Something like regret entered his tone. He could help, but there were strings. “I can’t give you the job until I know what’s going on. I have Bess and my patients to consider.”

Her shoulders fell. “You don’t think I was mugged,” she said flatly.

“Honestly?” he asked, pinning her with his deceptively undemanding gaze. “I don’t know what to think.”

His bluntness she could handle. It was the way he had of looking at her, looking into her, that had her wanting to shy away. There was kindness in his darkly lashed eyes, but there was a lot of doubt and suspicion, too. “I wasn’t abused and I’m not hiding from anyone,” she insisted, making herself hold his glance. She was nothing if not honest. She wasn’t about to have him think otherwise. “What happened yesterday morning happened just as I told you. No one is going to follow me here and cause a problem, if that’s what you’re worried about. I promise. Bess and your patients are safe.”

The insistence faded from her voice. “I made a bad choice that led to an even worse situation. It will never, ever happen again. Can we please just let it go at that?”

The masculine lines carved in his cheeks deepened with the pinch of his mouth. Seeing nothing promising in Greg’s expression, Jenny’s glance finally faltered. She blinked at the board between her white canvas shoes. The blue paint that had once made the porch look so bright and cheerful had been weathered and worn to little more than flecks and streaks on the splintering wood. Waiting for Greg to make his decision, she felt like that herself, exposed and worn, and were she to dig too deep, fully capable of breaking into dozens of tiny pieces.

“What about the detectives. You said something about having been cleared, but you never said what you’d been charged with.”

Her focus stayed on the boards. “I was never formally charged.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I was never guilty, so there’s no…”

“Jenny.”

From the corner of her eyes, she caught the motion of his hand a moment before she felt his finger curve under her chin.

His deep voice was as gentle as the brush of his thumb along her jaw. “I keep my word,” he promised. “Anything you say to me goes no further.”

For a moment she said nothing. She just studied the strong lines of his face while her mind absorbed his quiet assurance and her battered heart his quiet strength. In the past month she had grown reluctant to confide anything to anyone. It had come to the point where she honestly hadn’t known who she could trust anymore. Authorities who’d appeared to want only to help her had wanted only to find a way to trip her up so she would confess to a crime she had known nothing about. Friends she’d thought she could count on had turned their backs on her. She couldn’t even trust her own judgment.

Yet, this man had nothing to gain from her that wouldn’t help her, too.

His glance dropped to follow the motion of his thumb. As if he only now realized he was still touching her, he pulled a deep breath and eased his hand away.

It puzzled her that she hadn’t questioned the contact herself. What puzzled her more was what she’d felt in his touch, the quiet assurance that by trusting him, maybe things could be all right.

“I really wasn’t charged with anything. Just suspected and questioned,” she told him, still hesitating to mention exactly what she’d been suspected of doing. The words embezzlement and theft could immediately shade a person’s opinion. She’d learned the hard way that it was far easier to get a person to listen to her if he didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions.

“There is an explanation.” She hesitated. “I’m just not sure where to start.”

He rested the elbow nearest her on his thigh. With his hand dangling in the wide space between his legs, he looked as if he were prepared to give her however long she needed to take.

“Start anywhere you want.”

Chapter Four

T he evening breeze rustled the bushes at the end of the porch and nudged at the grass and weeds stretching to the road. The quiet babble of the stream that curved the property line sounded softly in the distance. Breathing in the sweet scent of the balmy air, Jenny leaned over the towel still tucked against her and picked up a twig that had jammed itself into the crack of a step.

Start anywhere you want, Greg had said. Thinking of the dream that had led her into her little mess, the only place she could think to start was at the beginning.

“Have you ever wanted something badly?” she asked, focused on the slender twig as she slowly twirled it between her fingers. “I mean so badly that it becomes almost consuming?”

“Absolutely.”

His lack of hesitation intrigued as much as it encouraged. She glanced to where he sat beside her, his broad shoulders taking up most of the space. His expression revealed nothing beyond a quiet interest.

“What was it? To become a doctor?”

“No. But we’re talking about you,” he reminded her. “What is it that you wanted?”

She looked back to her twig. She would have thought the desire to be a doctor would be a passion so great it would eclipse nearly everything else. It seemed it would have to be, for a person to get through all those years of study and training.

“To get out of here. You know how this place is,” she said, unable to imagine what else a doctor’s dream could have been. Her own had been so simple. “Once a person graduates from high school, you can either go away to college, get married or go to work for your family or someone else’s. Most of the jobs that don’t require a family connection or a degree are at the quarry or in the shops, and once you start either place that’s where you’ll be for the rest of your life.” Her family hadn’t had a business to run. Her dad had worked at the quarry, her mom had been a homemaker, and they hadn’t been able to afford college for either her or her sister. “I’d wanted more than to get married at nineteen, the way most of my friends did. Or to work at the diner for the rest of my life wondering what I’d missed.”

“That’s why you worked so hard to put yourself through school.”

Bess had mentioned that just that morning.

She gave a nod, still twirling the little piece of wood. “An associate’s degree usually only takes two years, but it took me three because I had to work full-time. As soon as I had it, I headed for Boston. My savings had just about run out when I got a job at Salomon in staff support.”

“Staff support?”

“I was a secretary,” she clarified. “They don’t call secretaries secretaries anymore. At least, not there.

“Anyway,” she continued, now shredding away a bit of bark, “four years later, I’d worked my way up to administrative assistant to one of the company’s senior VPs. Then, a month ago,” she explained, going for the condensed version of her life to that point, “I found myself in the middle of a criminal investigation.” A piece of the bark fluttered to the step. “My boyfriend worked at Salomon, too,” she said quietly. “It seems that he had been using my computer to transfer rather large sums of other people’s money into his own bank accounts.”

“That’s where the detectives came in,” Greg concluded.

“About six of them. Part of them were at the city level. Brent had apparently taken some office equipment home with him, too, so there were theft charges against him along with the federal ones for embezzlement and I can’t remember what all else.”

The federal investigators had been the most frightening for her to deal with. The city police detectives had backed off on her once they’d realized only Brent had company property and how little of it there was. It had been over three weeks before the federal investigators had let her go, though, and then not until what had seemed like a dozen people had asked her the same hundred questions.

“I hadn’t known anything. Nothing,” she insisted. “But no one would believe me.” The strain clouding her expression slipped into her voice. “I obviously hadn’t even known the man I’d dated for over two years.” Which was just a few months shy of how long his little scheme had been going on.

She couldn’t believe how hurt, foolish and betrayed she felt. The emotions sat like a rock in her chest, making it hard to breathe at times, making every breath she took remind her of how easily she had been taken in. She’d been a kid from the backwoods, easy prey as far as a man like Brent Collier had been concerned. A trusting innocent armed with nothing more than a hunger to experience sophistication and excitement and no experience at all swimming with sharks. But what she felt more than anything else was anger at herself for the naiveté that had allowed her to be charmed by a man who’d wanted nothing but to use her.

“I’d even saved myself until I was twenty-three, waiting for the right man, and he’d just been using me in bed, too.”

She gave the stripped twig a toss. It was only when Greg reached over and handed her another one to peel that she realized she’d spoken her last thought aloud.

The admission brought color to her cheeks—and a look of sympathy from the man beside her.

He had to think her truly pathetic. Wanting badly to mask the depth of how very hurt, used and betrayed she felt, she tried to dismiss the emotional slaughter as inconsequential.

“Do you know what’s the real icing on this little cake?” she asked, able to mask everything but her agitation. “The investigators confiscated most of my possessions in case they’d been purchased with any of the illegal funds. They took my furniture, the great little paintings I’d collected at art fairs, and my television. They even took my clock radio,” she said, unable to imagine why they’d want something that had only cost $24.95 and would barely fetch five dollars at a flea market. “The only reason I still have my car is because I could prove I’d bought it before I’d met Brent. But you know what’s even worse than that? “I can’t get a job doing anything that requires references,” she fumed into Greg’s coaxing silence. “Even if I’d wanted my old job back,” which she hadn’t, considering how humiliating the whole scenario had been, “I couldn’t get it. I was fired. After the dust settled and I called my boss to change my status from having been fired to having quit, he informed me that the firing stood. He said that a person with access to privileged information should be a better judge of character than I was. If I was duped once, it could happen again.”

Not in this lifetime, she could have told him. But there had been no convincing way for her to defend his argument. “So now, in addition to being a lousy judge of men,” she concluded, “I have no references to get an office job in Boston or anywhere else.”

She couldn’t even count on character references. Her social circle had also been her professional one, and the people she’d thought were her friends at work had backed way from her as if she’d just contracted Ebola.

From beside her, Greg watched her start to pick at the new twig he’d given her. He’d halfway expected her to snap it in two when she’d mentioned her possessions having been confiscated. He’d thought she might even toss it as she had the other and start to pace when she explained what had happened to her references. Anger had clipped her tone and touched color to her cheeks. The emotion sounded more than justified, given how cavalierly her affections and reputation had been treated. But he had sensed a wealth of hurt in her, too. And that hurt robbed the energy from her agitation.

“This Brent,” he said, thinking she’d been cheated there, too. Anger could be like a protective skin. Stripped of it, there was nothing left to shield the raw and hurting nerves. “What did he do when you were implicated?”

She turned her head toward him. “What do you mean?”

She’d been a babe in the woods, he thought, seeing the injury clouding her lovely blue eyes. Clearly, totally unprepared to be manipulated and exploited by the sophistication she’d so eagerly sought.

He knew all about that soulless kind of greed. He’d grown up with it.

“Did he say you were involved, or did he tell them you didn’t know anything?”

Jenny went back to picking at bits of bark. Of everything the louse had done, he at least hadn’t tried to drag her down with him. “He told them I was clueless.” According to one of the detectives, that had been his exact word, too. Clueless.

“That didn’t make them back off sooner?”

“They thought he was protecting me.”

From the corner of her eye she saw Greg’s mouth thin.

“So, how did he do it?”

By wining and dining me, she thought.

“I had to work late at least one night a week,” she told him. “Usually, I stayed to put together folders and charts for a client presentation and set up the conference room for an early meeting. Brent would come in to wait for me before we went to dinner and he’d play solitaire on my computer. At least, that’s all I’d thought he was doing.”

Absently rubbing his injured shoulder, Greg gave her a considering glance.

“I can see where you felt you had nothing to suspect,” he conceded. “The average person wouldn’t think someone who supposedly cares is actually conning them.”

He eased his hand down.

“So, you came home planning to work at the diner,” he concluded, still watching her.

She blinked at his easy acceptance of how completely she’d been taken in.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“For what?”

“For not making it sound as if I lacked basic intelligence because I didn’t question what Brent was doing. Everyone else insisted that I must have been at least a little suspicious of his timing. Every night I worked late, he always showed up to take me to dinner.”

“What did you think of that?”

“I just thought he was being thoughtful.”

Her response didn’t surprise him. “And the rest of your plans?

“My only plans now are to work. I have to pay off my attorney,” she replied, mentally cringing at the size of the bill hanging over her head. Ten thousand dollars Brent had cost her. “I won’t be able to save a penny before then. Dora could only hire me part-time. Dinner shift Thursday through Sunday. The diner closes at eight, so I thought after work there, I’d see if I can pick up weekend shifts out at The Dig Inn.”

The Dig, as everyone knew it, was a tavern near the stone quarry twenty minutes west of Maple Mountain. The idea of working there had occurred to her on her drive home from Greg’s office and seemed as good a way as any to add to her meager coffers.

“Once I’m out of debt, I’ll probably leave again. With my family moved away, there really isn’t anything for me here.”

The energy had leaked from her tone. Feeling as if it had just seeped out of her body, too, she offered an apologetic smile.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump all of that on you.”

Especially the part about having given up her prized virginity to the louse, she thought. Once she’d started, though, the pressure of all she’d held in had simply given way. The man whose presence seemed as supportive as it did compelling had allowed a crack in the dam and everything had flooded out. But then, he was a doctor. It was his job to get people to open up and tell him where it hurt.

The golden glow of early evening had left the air. With the sun no longer burnishing the tree tops on the hill, the light had turned the pale gray of dusk that muted their surroundings and had critters rustling leaves as they settled in for the evening.

In that pale light, Jenny saw a vehicle coming around the curve in the road. She’d actually heard it first and glanced up as the tan Jeep with the big push-bar in front and police lights on top sailed by on its way into town.

It was Joe. Seeing them sitting on the porch step, he stuck his arm out his open window and waved.

Jenny and Greg both waved back.

“Anyway,” she murmured, thinking she should probably just shut up about her past now. “Things can only go uphill from here. I’m having better luck already.”

Pure skepticism slashed Greg’s brow. “How do you figure?”

“By living in my grandma’s old house, I don’t have to pay rent.”

The way he glanced toward the house made her think he questioned her definition of better. “What about your family? What do they think of you living without electricity or a phone? Or decent plumbing.”

“The plumbing works well enough.” She could even take baths, now that she’d scrubbed out the old claw-foot tub in the bathroom. All she had to do was boil water on the woodstove, add it to the cold water she’d drawn and save out enough warm water to rinse her hair. The process had worked just fine last night. Even if it had taken forever.

“I’ll get to the rest. Eventually,” she qualified. “Mom’s happy I’m fixing up the place.” Which was something she would eventually do, too. “I didn’t tell her what happened. All I said was that I was moving back because things didn’t work out.”

Her mom had been relieved by that. Audibly so. She had never liked the idea of Jenny living alone in the city.

“My sister and her family have problems of their own,” she confided, explaining why turning to them had not been an option. Their home and their lives had been crowded even before her mom had moved in with them. “I got myself into this mess. I’ll get myself out of it.”

The breeze ruffled her hair as she tipped back her head and took a long deep breath.

Greg promptly dragged his glance from the curve of her dark lashes against her cheek and the soft-looking line of her throat.

He didn’t know too many people who would acknowledge anything positive about her present situation. Everything she’d worked for was gone. Her sense of trust was shot. And she was alone in a house that would depress most people just to look at. After what she’d said about having to pay off her attorney, he strongly suspected she was low on funds, too. Or, at least, being very frugal with whatever she had left.

Yet, instead of sitting around feeling sorry for herself, she already had her old job back and wanted to get a part-time job to back up that one. She’d even taken a stab at brightening her surroundings. He didn’t know where she’d gotten them. From alongside the house perhaps, where he’d noticed other flowers struggling to survive through the weeds. But she’d planted two bright yellow mums in old pots and set them on either side of her front door.

He wondered if she felt an affinity for the small, stunted blooms. Over the seasons, rains had beaten them down, weeds had choked them, they’d gone other times without water and the winters had frozen them. Yet, they’d managed to survive.

She was clearly a survivor herself. He didn’t doubt that her plan for herself would somehow work out. He just didn’t like the idea of her working out at The Dig. It could get crazy out there on Saturday nights.

The odd surge of protectiveness he felt at that thought caught him off guard. He could admit to being drawn by her refusal to be defeated. He could admire her bright optimism. He could feel a sense of relief for her that her gullibility hadn’t bought her even bigger problems. But feeling protective felt a little too…personal.

He’d come to appease Bess—and his own curiosity. Since it sounded as if the worst was behind her, he needed to focus on practicalities.

He needed an office manager. She needed a better job. Knowing she had a means to fix the roof over her head would just be an added bonus.

“Okay,” he said flatly. “So you weren’t charged with embezzlement, theft and…”

“Collusion,” she supplied, now that she’d explained.

“Of course.” He gave a nod. She really had been naive, and far too trusting for her own good. Had inexperience been a crime, she’d be as guilty as sin. “So the job is yours if you want it,” he continued, thinking there was still a certain quiet innocence about her. “The clinic is funded by grants as well as the community, so the pay is a lot better than you’ll get at the diner. You won’t have to spend your weekends in a smoky tavern, either.”

Or make that drive late at night and come back to this place, he thought, only to cut off the concern in his thoughts. He’d heard of people who’d moved into similar structural nightmares simply for the experience of renovating them. Though part of him insisted she needed a keeper, a more self-protective part insisted that she would be fine.

“Being office manager of the clinic will also give you something to put on your résumé for when you do leave again.”

Some of the constant anxiety haunting Jenny eased. She desperately needed the redeeming reference the job would bring. She wanted badly to pay off her attorney so she wouldn’t have that monthly reminder of how gullible she’d been. Yet at that moment what felt even more important than the opportunity Greg offered was that he believed her.

“Thank you.” She practically sighed the word. “I’d love the job.”

The tiny lines fanning from the corners of his eyes deepened with his smile “Good.”

She smiled back, feeling better than she’d felt in a month.

What Greg felt wasn’t so easy to define. Caught by the light in her eyes, he was aware of its warmth easing through him. He liked her smile. He liked that he’d been able to cause it.

“So,” he said, reluctant to move.

“So,” she murmured back, tempted to hug him.

He needed to go. With her so close, looking so grateful, the temptation to touch her grew with each breath he drew. All he had to do was reach over and he could nudge back her hair just to see if those shining wisps felt as soft as they looked. He knew her skin felt like velvet. Her hands, anyway. He remembered the feel of them on his bare chest, his back, and the softness of her palm against his cheek.

He knew the slenderness of her waist.

The thought that he could probably span it with both hands occurred to him even as he jerked his thoughts from that unwanted place. Reaching for his sore arm as he leaned forward, he rose with a surge of lean muscle and turned to face her.

She had just started to stand herself when he held out his hand.

Setting aside the towel he’d returned, she slipped her slender fingers over his broad palm.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, pulling her up. “You’ll need to pick up all you can from Rhonda before she goes. Bess knows her stuff when it comes to medicine, but her eyes glaze over at insurance forms and computers.”