Heartwishes (40 page)

“You won’t leave me out again?” Gemma asked.

“Never,” Colin said as he kissed her.

They made love, sweetly and gently, and Colin told her how the thought of losing her had nearly driven him insane. “I’ve never felt this way before,” he said. “All I can think of is that I want to talk to you, be with you. I’ve spent my life alone. Even when I’m with my family and through all the years I was with Jean, I felt that I was alone. But when I’m with you . . .”

“I know,” she whispered, her head on his bare chest. “I feel the same way. I love you, Colin. I think I have since I saw you standing in the doorway. I don’t know what I would have done if your mother hadn’t given me the job.”

“I would have gone after you.”

She raised her head to look at him. “And leave your beloved Edilean? Ha!”

He stroked her hair and looked her in the eyes. “If you don’t find a job here or you don’t like this town, I’ll go anywhere in the world you want to live.”

She put her head down, smiling. This is what she’d wanted. She needed him to love
her
before she told him of their child she was carrying. She didn’t want to go through life wondering if he was with her because he’d felt honor bound to stay with her.

“I need to tell you something,” she said as she ran her hand over his bare chest.

He kissed her fingertips. “Anything.”

“I—” She broke off because his cell phone rang, but Colin didn’t reach for it. “Shouldn’t you answer that? It might be important.”

“I’d rather hear what you have to say.”

“It’ll hold,” she said as the phone kept ringing.

Colin bent over the side of the bed and rummaged in his trousers to retrieve his cell phone. “It’s Roy.” He clicked the button to hear her, listened, and said he’d be right there.

“It’s one of the newcomers. Their fifteen-year-old daughter isn’t in her bed.”

“Go!” Gemma said, pulling the sheet around her as she sat up. “Right now. Go find the child.”

“You and I . . .”

“Can wait,” she said as she reached out and put her hand on his shoulder.

He kissed the palm. “Do you know that I love you?” he asked softly.

“I think I realized it when I saw how unhappy you were in that sandwich shop.”

He was still holding her hand. “And you?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “I do love you.”

“Me too,” he said as he bent to kiss her.

But Gemma pulled away. “We still need to talk about Tris and every other man in my life, in the future and the present. I don’t like jealousy.”

“It’s a new emotion to me. Never felt it before,” he said.

“Not even with Jean?”

“Most certainly not,” Colin said. He started to kiss her, but his phone went off again, this time with a ring that sounded like blaring trumpets.

Gemma drew back from him.

He looked at his phone. “It’s Roy again and she’s already there. I
better go.” He pulled her to him. “Gemma, I love you. You’re what I’ve wanted in a woman for as long as I can remember. Will you think I’m crazy if I say that I feel that I’ve been waiting for you?”

“No,” she whispered, so very glad to yet again be in his arms. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“I think I needed Jean to . . . to occupy myself until you showed up.” He kissed her forehead. “I wished for True Love and I found it.” Again his phone went off, this time with car horns blowing. “It’s Dad.”

“You must go,” she said. “We can talk more later.”

He kissed her with all the longing he felt. “I love you. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t,” she said, then he got into his Jeep and left.

Gemma watched him drive away, then locked the door behind her. When she was in school, she’d often stayed up all night to study. But now that she was pregnant, she seemed to need twelve hours a night. Earlier, she’d only just fallen asleep when Mrs. Frazier rang her to ask if she knew where Shamus was. Gemma had checked to make sure the boy wasn’t sleeping on her couch, then told Mrs. Frazier that she didn’t know where he was.

Gemma had tried to go back to sleep, but between the noise of the storm and worry, she couldn’t. After about an hour she gave up, got dressed, and used one of the little trucks that always seemed to be nearby and drove to the big warehouse at the back of the property. She hadn’t been surprised to see young Shamus inside, drawing the carriages his ancestors had made.

It was just minutes later that Colin showed up. So now it was hours later, and all she could think about was sleep. Ah, pregnancy, she thought as she fell across her bed and was asleep instantly.

When she awoke it was 6
P.M.
She’d slept the entire day away! Groggily, she got up and picked up her phone. She had four e-mails and six text messages. Her adviser had approved her topic of women
in medicine in Virginia in 1840, and a professor knew some people at William and Mary.

“Good,” Gemma said, smiling as she went into the kitchen. She wanted to eat everything that was in it.

Four of the texts were from Colin. The missing teenager had been found with her boyfriend, and her parents were grounding her for the next twenty years. He wrote that he would be there in half an hour, but then he said that someone had spray painted the back of Ellie’s grocery and he had to see to it. See you when I can, he’d finished.

The last message was from Tristan and had been sent an hour ago. I need to see you ASAP.

As Gemma ate her second piece of toast, she frowned. Colin’s jealousy was absurd, but she didn’t see any reason to fan it into flame, so she didn’t immediately get in her car.

Is it important? she texted back.

Very came the reply. I need you at my house right away.

That didn’t sound like Tris, she thought. Maybe it was Colin’s fear, or maybe it was that Gemma now had a life growing inside her, but she was cautious.

You know what happens at seven, don’t you? she texted back.

While she waited for an answer, she noticed Shamus’s art box on the coffee table where it had been for days. She picked it up and pulled the tape off the end of it to examine the damage. The corner was broken, but the piece was there, and as she fiddled with it, she noticed paper inside. More of his secret drawings, she thought, and wondered who the boy had portrayed with pinpoint accuracy.

When her phone buzzed, she put the box down.

I’ll hold your head again was the text. Please come NOW!

There was no denying that that request was from Tristan, and where better to be than with him when “morning” sickness hit?

She called Colin, but it went to voice mail, so she texted him that she was going to Tris’s house to do some research. Please meet me there, she wrote.

She grabbed a cold hard-boiled egg from the refrigerator and a bottle of fruit juice and went to her car.

As Gemma neared Tris’s driveway, she didn’t pull in. She didn’t like Colin’s jealousy, but she also didn’t want to cause him any embarrassment, and for right now, for all she knew, half of Edilean was watching. She drove past until she saw another gravel road and turned down that. To her right she could see the top of what looked to be a large white house, and she remembered Colin saying that Mrs. Wingate lived near Tris.

Gemma pulled her car off the road into a large clearing in the woods. Bushes hid the entrance so her vehicle wouldn’t be seen by anyone driving past.

If her sense of direction was right—and it usually was—then Tris’s house was directly in front of her. She sent another text to Colin to let him know where she was, but the message didn’t go through. The trees were blocking the signal.

It was because she was in the woods and not on the road that she saw Jean’s silver Mercedes hidden under the trees. The second she saw it, she knew she should leave. She should run, not walk, back to her car and get out of there.

But she knew that the text message had been from Tris. Only he knew about her 7
P.M.
nausea, and he needed her.

Quietly, she went to Jean’s car. It was empty, but the fact that it was hidden furthered her belief that something was wrong. It had always been her guess that whatever was going on had to do with the Heartwishes Stone. If Jean’s uncle was an international thief, wouldn’t he want to steal something that was believed to be magic?

Gemma tried to send another text to Colin and an e-mail to Joce. She wrote,

Please send help to Tris’s house. Send police with guns.

If there was nothing wrong, she’d look like a fool, but better that than anything bad happening to Tris.

She went through the woods quickly, stopping where she could see Tris’s house. It had been designed to look out the front at the lake, so the back of it had few windows. On the right was the big conservatory, and she could see the orchids inside. On the left were three tiny windows for a powder room and the laundry. Smack in the middle were two glass doors that led to the big room that had been added on to the house.

If Gemma walked straight up to it, she’d be seen.

It took her a few minutes, but she went to the side of the doors and plastered herself against the wall. After a few moments she quickly bent to look inside.

What she saw made her breath catch. There were two people in the room, Jean and an older man, who Gemma assumed was the uncle. What was astonishing was that the man was seated in a straight-backed wooden chair in the middle of the room and his hands were tied behind his back. Jean was a few feet away, her back to the man as she was typing out a message on her phone. There was a gun on the table beside her.

Gemma leaned back against the wall. She recognized the man. He was that awful so-called professor who’d been so offensive that day in Ellie’s store. His disguise was half on, half off his face, but it was easy to see that he wasn’t as old and certainly not crippled as he’d presented himself when she’d met him.

Gemma wasn’t sure what she should do. She glanced at her phone and saw that none of her messages had gone through. It looked like Tris needed some new routers for his Internet service—or the wires had been cut.

She took a deep breath and looked back through the glass door. Jean was leaving the room, probably to find a better connection for her phone. Was she trying to contact Colin? She took the gun with her.

Gemma knew that the smartest thing for her to do was to go back to her car and leave. Let Colin handle this, she thought.

She gave one last look through the door before she left, but she stopped cold. Since the man’s back was to her, so were his hands. He was frantically working to loosen the tape Jean had used on him, and it looked like he was a few minutes away from being free.

Maybe Jean was involved in the robberies and maybe there was animosity between the two women, but Gemma knew she
had
to warn her.

Around the corner was a window that led into Tris’s exam room. She ran to it, hoping that it wouldn’t be locked. It wasn’t. She pushed the window up, swung her leg over, and went inside. To the right was the sitting room and at the end was the kitchen.

When Gemma got to the doorway, she saw Jean standing at Tris’s kitchen island, a cup on the way to her lips. Unseen by Jean, her uncle was behind her. He was holding aloft the belt to his trousers and he was about to wrap it around his niece’s neck.

Gemma didn’t give herself time to think about what she was doing. She silently ran the few feet, and yelled, “Hey Professor!”

When he turned, she did to him exactly what she’d done to Colin in the gym. She twirled around to put a spinning back kick into his stomach. When he bent in pain, she did another spin and hit him in the jaw with a punch that had all her strength behind it. Whereas Colin could take all she’d given him, the uncle couldn’t. He went down, his head hitting the corner of the stone countertop. As he slid down, he left a stream of blood along the cabinets. By the time he hit the floor, he was unconscious.

Jean was standing there, the cup still halfway to her mouth, her eyes wide.

“Where is Tris?” Gemma asked.

With her hand shaking, Jean set the cup down as she stared at her uncle’s unconscious form. The belt was still wrapped around one of his wrists. “Tris is in Miami, visiting his sister.”

“No, he’s not. He sent me a text about something only he and I know.”

“He”—she nodded to her uncle—“was watching you and Tris, following you. If he wrote something private, it’s because he saw the two of you together. Did it happen outside where he was able to see you?”

Gemma was sickened that the man had been skulking about in the dark that night, but she wasn’t convinced that Tris was safe. “Tris wouldn’t have boarded a plane without his phone.”

“Maybe he came back and that’s what threw my uncle’s plans off. That I was able to sneak up on him is not something anyone else has been able to do.”

“So where is Tristan?” Gemma demanded as she picked up the gun off the counter.

“I don’t know where Tris is,” Jean said as she sank down to the floor. “He was going to kill me,” she said, looking at her uncle.

Gemma’s main concern was Tris, but at the same time she didn’t dare leave Jean and her uncle unguarded. She reached into her pocket for her phone. Her texts had finally gone through. With joy, she saw that there were two texts to her, one from Roy saying that Colin was on his way, and another one from Joce saying the police were coming.

Jean started talking. “He heard about the paintings that had been found in Edilean, and he knew I had a connection here. He was broke, so he came here to see what he could find out, if there was something worth stealing here. If he found nothing here he probably meant to get money from me. He’s good at getting into bank accounts and emptying them. I just wanted him
gone
.”

“Would he have killed you?” Gemma asked. She was nervous and wanted to look for Tristan, but she couldn’t turn her back on those two.

Jean’s voice was quiet. “You know that little trick with his hands that Colin does?”

Gemma wasn’t sure what she meant, but then realized that Jean was talking about sex. The thought of sharing the man she loved with another woman made her hand tighten on the gun she held at her side.