Page 59

The meal was strange, and it was easy at the same time. She caught herself thinking that she could get used to this, and then made herself stop, because she’d thought the same thing crouched next to a bronze duck, and look where that had landed her.

In bed with her boss.

Sam’s phone buzzed at ten past eight, just as they were finishing the last piece of bacon. They’d split it in two, so they could both have some.

“It’s a Boston number,” he said, and answered it. “Sam Winslow.”

Alli watched his face change.

“Mr. Powell,” he said, listening for a few long moments. “Yes, we can make the time. We have a flight later, but if this is important, we can be there in about an hour.”

Sam hung up, his brows raised in what looked like surprise.

“That was Walter Powell. He wants to talk to us. He says it’s important.”

“That wasn’t on my Boston Trip Bingo Card,” Alli replied. “Obviously, you told him yes.”

“Maybe he’ll explain why he kicked us out yesterday.”

Whatever Walter Powell wanted to say, Alli wanted to hear it.

Chapter

Seventeen

Sam needed to keep his head in the game.

He should be concentrating on what Walter Powell had called them about, but instead he was still thinking about how adorable Alli had looked this morning, with her hair all mussed and a little sheet crease on her cheek.

He could happily wake up to that every single morning, and that mere thought should have scared him half to death.

But it didn’t.

He didn’t have the time to ponder that, however, as they rang the doorbell to Powell’s home.

“Are you ready?” she asked softly.

Sam could hear footsteps on the other side of the door.

“Absolutely.”

The house looked different, of course. Without twenty people and a table of food, it was just a tall brick townhouse on a quiet street. Walter Powell answered his own door in a cardigan, unshaven, looking like he’d barely slept.

“Thank you for coming back,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“We have a flight at one,” Sam said. “But you said it was important.”

“It is, and I’ll be quick.”

He took them not to the study but to the kitchen at the back of the house, with a window over the garden, a table with four chairs, and a stack of unopened sympathy cards on one end. He poured them coffee neither of them had asked for.

“Hannah’s gone back to her own place to sleep,” he said. “She was here until midnight with her mother’s cousins. I wanted her out of the house before I called you.”

He sat down, staring at his hands and not immediately speaking. Sam stayed quiet, letting the man gather his thoughts.

“I owe you an apology,” Walter finally said. “Both of you. What I said yesterday, and how I said it. You came a very long way to pay respects to a woman you cared about, and I threw you out of my house like you were selling something.”

“You were blindsided,” Sam said. “We understand that.”