"How's your aunt doing?"
"Fine. I just came from there. She kicked me out, in fact. She wanted to be alone. I think a night in the hospital has sobered her." Piper tilted her head back and studied him, her chestnut hair gleaming in the midday sun. "She predicted you'd come along, you know."
"Did she?" Clate was amused. "A lucky guess, although I suspect she knows I've run out of patience with her. I'm not one to grill old women, especially when they've just been released from the hospital, but I think it's time she told us the rest."
Piper made a small noise to register her disgust. "I don't know how you can stand being suspicious all the time."
"I couldn't if I weren't also right most of the time." He spoke lightly, but held his ground. "She is holding back, Piper. She has been from the beginning. Just as you are now."
"That's not fair."
"I'm right and you know it. You want a ride?"
"Not if you're going to go off and harass my aunt."
"No. If she wants to be alone, I'll hold off for now. Where you headed?"
She slid into his passenger seat with the air of someone who was doing something she really wasn't convinced she wanted to do. Nothing like daylight and an aunt fresh out of the hospital to spark clear thinking. He was a danger to her status quo, her life as she knew it, and yet no amount of rational thinking was going to stop her from wanting to make love to him again. He understood, because he was in the same damned boat. Loving Piper Macintosh wasn't an easy proposition. And loving him—well, she already had a taste of what that was like or she wouldn't be so jumpy about sitting in his car.
"I should go home," she said. "I need to spend a few hours in my office. I'm behind on a million things."
"Did you tell Hannah we dug for her treasure?"
"Not yet. I didn't have a chance before she threw me out."
He paused as he turned the car around and started back toward town. "You're sure it's not because you don't want to disappoint her?"
"Disappoint her? Clate, she won't be convinced that treasure's not out there until we've dug up the entire yard right down to the marsh. Then we'll probably have to start on the preserve."
His grip on the wheel tightened. "Piper, there's no treasure."
"There might have been eighty years ago. Someone could have moved it in the interim and Hannah just never knew. I'm going to reread everything in her shoebox, all my notes, finish the timetable I was working on yesterday at the library." She was talking to herself more than to him, planning, trying to establish control over her life. "I keep thinking there's something I've missed."
Clate acknowledged her words with a neutral nod. "If you need any help, let me know. I'll be around. I have to go to Nashville at some point, but I can put it off for a few days."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her swallow at the intrusion of his life—his real life. Nashville was another world. His business, his friends, his life there. Hell, she'd never even met his dogs. He'd planned to decide how he was going to use his place on Cape Cod, get the lay of the land, before bringing them up. Now he'd already fallen for a woman.
Which was an inadequate way to explain his relationship with Piper Macintosh. He'd more than fallen for her.
He said, "Your brothers checked up on me, just in case I'm plotting against you, your aunt, and all of Frye's Cove. If you could follow their circuitous reasoning, they had a point. Depends whether they choose to believe me or what they've been hearing about me."
"More rumors?"
He told her. She listened without interruption, and finally he said, "I have to say, I didn't think much about what the Macintosh family might be losing out on when I bought your aunt's place. I thought more about the Fryes. Here's this woman who married late into the family, selling out everything: land, house, furnishings, the silverware, tangible pieces of Frye history. She let her husband's granddaughter have any family papers she wanted, but that's it."
"That's all Sally said she wanted. She wasn't interested in the rest."
"Why not?"
"She didn't feel attached to it. She grew up in a Boston suburb. She visited her grandfather here, but that was about it until she and Paul bought the inn. Sally's always adored Hannah. I think she didn't want to interfere with whatever Hannah chose to do. Besides, the Frye house has its problems, and Sally and Paul might not have wanted to be saddled with them right now, given the money they're sinking into the inn."
"What about furnishings?"