First Impressions Read online

  very badly?” she asked him.

  Vance focused on her again, then released her. “I was … disillusioned.”

  “That’s the worst kind of hurt, I think.” In compassion, she laid a hand on his arm. “When someone you love or care for turns out to be dishonest, or an ideal turns to glass, it’s difficult to accept. I always set my ideals high. If they’re going to crumble, I’d just as soon take the long fall.” She smiled, slipping her hand down so it linked with his. “Let’s go for a drive.”

  His thoughts were so bound up in her words, it took him a moment to understand the suggestion. “A drive?” he repeated.

  “We’ve been cooped up for weeks,” Shane stated as she pulled him toward the stairs. “I don’t know about you, but I haven’t done anything but work until I tumbled into bed. It’s a beautiful day, maybe the last of Indian summer.” She shut the basement door behind them.

  “And I bet you haven’t had a tour of the battlefield yet. Certainly not with an expert guide.”

  “Are you,” he asked with the beginnings of a smile, “an expert guide?”

  “The best,” she said without modesty. As she had hoped, the tension went out of the fingers that were laced with hers. “There’s nothing about the battle I can’t tell you, or as some of my critics would claim, won’t tell you.”

  “As long as I don’t have to take a quiz afterward,” Vance agreed as she pulled him out the back door.

  “I’m retired,” she reminded him primly.

  “The Battle of Antietam,” Shane began as she drove down a narrow, winding road lined with monuments, “though claimed as a clear victory for neither side, resulted in the repulse of Lee’s first effort to invade the North.” Vance gave a quick grin at her faintly lecturing tone, but didn’t interrupt. “Near Antietam Creek here in Sharpsburg,” she continued, “on September 17, 1862, Lee and McClellan engaged in the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. That’s Dunker Church.” Shane pointed to a tiny white building set off the road. “Some of the heaviest fighting went on there. I have some pretty good prints for the museum.”

  Vance glanced back at the peaceful little spot as Shane drove by. “Looks quiet enough now,” he commented, and earned a mild look.

  “Lee divided his forces,” she went on, ignoring him, “sending Jackson to capture Harper’s Ferry. A Union soldier picked up a copy of Lee’s orders, giving McClellan an advantage, but he didn’t move fast enough. Even when he engaged Lee’s much smaller army in Sharpsburg, he failed to smash through the line before Jackson returned with support. Lee lost a quarter of his army and withdrew. McClellan still didn’t capitalize on his advantage. Even so, twenty-six thousand men were lost.”

  “For a retired schoolteacher, you don’t seem to have forgotten the facts,” Vance remarked.

  Shane laughed, taking a bend in the road competently. “My ancestors fought here. Gran didn’t let me forget it.”

  “For which side?”

  “Both.” She gave a small shrug. “Wasn’t that the worst of it really? The choosing sides, the disintegration of families. This is a border state. Though it went for the North, sympathies this far south leaned heavily toward the Confederacy as well. It isn’t difficult to imagine a number of people from this area cheering secretly or openly for the Stars and Bars.”

  “And with this section being caught between Virginia and West Virginia—”

  “Exactly,” she said, very much like a teacher approving of a bright student. Vance chuckled but she didn’t seem to notice. Shane pulled off the side of the road into a small parking area. “Come on, let’s walk. It’s beautiful here.”

  Around them mountains circled in the full glory of fall. A few leaves whipped by—orange, scarlet, amber—to be caught by the wind and carried off. There were rolling hills, gold in the slanting sunlight, and fields with dried, withering stalks of corn. The air was cooler now as the sun dropped toward the peaks of the western mountains. Without thinking, Vance linked his hand with hers.

  “Bloody Lane,” Shane said, bringing his attention to a long, narrow trench. “Gruesome name, but apt. They came at each other from across the fields. Rebs from the north. Yanks from the south. Artillery set up there—” she pointed “—and there. This trench is where most of them lay after it was over. Of course, there were engagements all around—at the Burnside Bridge, the Dunker Church—but this …”

  Vance shot her a curious look. “War really fascinates you, doesn’t it?”

  Shane looked out over the field. “It’s the only true obscenity. The only time killing’s glorified rather than condemned. Men become statistics. I wonder if there’s anything more dehumanizing.” Her voice became more thoughtful. “Haven’t you ever found it odd that to kill one to one is considered man’s ultimate crime, but the more a man kills during war, the more he’s honored? So many of these were farm boys,” she continued before Vance could form an answer. “Children who’d never shot at anything more than a weasel in the henhouse. They put on a uniform, blue or gray, and marched into battle. I doubt if a fraction of them had any idea what it was really going to be like. I’ll tell you what fascinates me.” Shane looked back at Vance, too wrapped up in her own thoughts to note how intensely he watched her. “Who were they really? The sixteen-year-old Pennsylvania farm boy who rushed across this field to kill a sixteen-year-old boy from a Georgia plantation—did they start out looking for adventure? Were they on a quest? How many pictured themselves sitting around a camp fire like men and raising some hell away from their mothers?”

  “A great many, I imagine,” Vance murmured. Affected by the image she projected, he slipped an arm around her shoulders as he looked out over the field. “Too many.”

  “Even the ones who got back whole would never be boys again.”

  “Then why history, Shane, when its riddled with wars?”

  “For the people.” She tossed back her head to look at him. The lowering sun shining on her eyes seemed to accentuate the tiny gold flecks that he sometimes couldn’t see at all. “For the boy I can imagine who came across that field in September more than a hundred and twenty years ago. He was seventeen.” She turned back to the field as if she could indeed see him. “He’d had his first whiskey, but not his first woman. He came running across that field full of terror and glory. The bugles were blaring, the shells exploding, so that the noise was so huge, he never heard his own fear. He killed an enemy that was so obscure to him it had no face. And when the battle was over, when the war was over, he went home a man, tired and aching for his own land.”

  “What happened to him?” Vance murmured.

  “He married his childhood sweetheart, raised ten kids and told his grandchildren about his charge to Bloody Lane in 1862.”

  Vance drew her closer, not in passion, but in camaraderie. “You must have been a hell of a teacher,” he said quietly.

  That made Shane laugh. “I was a hell of a storyteller,” she corrected.

  “Why do you do that?” he demanded. “Why do you underrate yourself?”

  She shook her head. “No, I know my capabilities and my limitations. And,” she added, “I’m willing to stretch them both a bit to get what I want. It’s much smarter than thinking you’re something you’re not.” Before he could speak, she laughed, giving him a friendly hug. “No, no more philosophizing. I’ve done my share for the day. Come on, let’s go up in the tower. The view’s wonderful from there.” She was off in a sprint, pulling Vance with her. “You can see for miles,” she told him as they climbed the narrow iron steps.

  The light was dim though the sun shot through the small slits set in the sides of the stone tower. It grew brighter as they climbed, then poured through the opening at the top. “This is the part I like best,” she told him, while a few annoyed pigeons fluttered away from their roost in the roof. She leaned over the wide stone, pleased to let the wind buffet her face. “Oh, it’s beautiful, the perfect day for it. Look at those colors!” She drew Vance beside her, wanting to share. “D
o you see? That’s our mountain.”

  Our mountain. Vance smiled as he followed the direction of her hand. The way she said it, it might have belonged to the two of them exclusively. Beyond the tree-thick hills, the more distant mountains were cast in blue from the falling afternoon light. Farmhouses and barns were set here and there, with the more closely structured surrounding towns quiet in the early evening hush. Just barely, he could hear the whiz of a car on the highway. As he looked over a cornfield, he saw three enormous crows take flight. They argued, taunting each other as they glided across the sky. The air was very still after they passed, so quiet he could hear the breeze whisper in the dry stalks of corn.

  Then he saw the buck. It stood poised no more than ten yards from where Shane had parked her car. It was still as a statue, head up, ears pricked. Vance turned to Shane and pointed.

  In silence, hands linked, they watched. Vance felt something move inside him, a sudden sense of belonging. He wouldn’t have been amused now if Shane had said “our mountain.” Remnants of bitterness washed from him as he realized his answer had been staring him in the face. He’d kept himself a victim, just as Shane had said, because it was easier to be angry than to let go.

  The buck moved quickly, bounding over the grassy hill, taking a low stone fence with a graceful leap before he darted out of sight. Vance felt rather than heard Shane’s long, slow sigh.

  “I never get used to it,” she murmured. “Every time I see one, I’m struck dumb.”

  Shane turned her face up to his. It seemed natural to kiss her here, with the mountains and fields around them, with the feeling of something shared still on both of them. Above their heads a pigeon cooed softly, content now that the intruders were quiet.

  Here was the tenderness Shane had sensed but had not been sure of. His mouth was firm but not demanding, his hands strong but not bruising. Her heart seemed to flutter to her throat. Everything warm and sweet poured through her until she was limp and pliant in his arms. She had been waiting for this—this final assurance of what she knew he held trapped inside him: a gentle goodness she would respect as much as his strength and confidence. Her sigh was not of surrender but of joy in knowing she could admire what she already loved.

  Vance drew her closer, changing the angle of the kiss, reluctant to break the moment. Emotions seeped into him, through the cracks in the wall he had built so long ago. He felt the soft give of her mouth, tasted its moist generosity. With care, he let his fingertips reacquaint themselves with the texture of her skin.

  Could she have been there all along, he wondered, waiting for him to stumble onto her through a curtain of bitterness and suspicion?

  Vance drew her against his chest, holding her tightly with both arms as if she might vanish. Was it too late for him to fall in love? he wondered. Or to win a woman who already knew the worst of him and had no notion of his material advantages? Closing his eyes, he rested his cheek on her hair. If it wasn’t too late, should he take the chance and tell her who and what he was? If he told her now, he might never be fully certain, if she came to him, that she came only to him. He needed that—to be taken for himself without the Riverton Banning fortune or power. He hesitated, torn and indecisive. That alone shook him. Vance was a man who ruled a multimillion-dollar company by being decisive. Now a slip of a woman whose hair curled chaotically under his cheek was changing the order of his life.

  “Shane.” Vance drew her away to kiss her brow.

  “Vance.” Laughing, she kissed him soundly, more like a friend than a lover. “You look so serious.”

  “Have dinner with me.” It came out too swiftly and he cursed himself. What had become of his finesse with women?

  Shane pushed at her windblown hair. “All right. I can fix us something at the house.”

  “No, I want to take you out.”

  “Out?” Shane frowned, thinking of the expense.

  “Nothing fancy,” he told her, thinking she was worried about her bulky sweater and jeans. “As you said, neither of us has done anything but work in weeks.” He brushed his knuckles over the back of her cheek. “Come with me.”

  She smiled, pleasing him. “I know a nice little place just over the border in West Virginia.”

  Shane chose the tiny, out-of-the-way restaurant because it was inexpensive and she had some fond memories of an abbreviated career as a waitress, there. She’d worked the summer after her high school graduation in order to earn extra money for college.

  After they had settled into a cramped booth with a sputtering candle between them, she shot him a grin. “I knew you’d love it.”

  Vance glanced around at the painted landscapes in vivid colors and plastic frames. The air smelled ever so faintly of onion. “Next time, I choose.”

  “They used to serve a great spaghetti here. It was Thursday’s special, all you can eat for—”

  “It’s not Thursday,” Vance pointed out, dubiously opening the plastic-coated menu. “Wine?”

  “I think they probably have it.” Shane smiled at him when he peered over the top of the menu. “We could go next door and get a whole bottle for two ninety-seven.”

  “Good vintage?”

  “Just last week,” she assured him.

  “We’ll take our chances here.” He decided next time he would take her somewhere he could buy her champagne.

  “I’ll have the chili,” Shane announced, bringing his thoughts back.

  “Chili?” Vance frowned at the menu again. “Is it any good?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Then why are you—” He broke off as he lowered his menu and saw Shane buried behind her own. “Shane, what—”

  “They just came in,” she hissed, turning her menu toward the entrance and peeping around the side of it.

  Curiously he glanced over. Vance spotted Cy Trainer with a trim brunette in a severely tailored tan suit and sensible pumps. His first reaction was annoyance; then, looking the woman over again and noting the way her hand rested on Cy’s arm, he turned back to Shane. She was fully hidden behind the menu.

  “Shane, I know it must upset you, but you’re bound to run into him from time to time and …” He heard a muffled sound from behind the plastic-coated cardboard. Instinctively, Vance reached for her hand. “We could go somewhere else, but we can’t leave now without his seeing you.”

  “It’s Laurie MacAfee.” She squeezed Vance’s fingers convulsively. He returned the pressure, furious that she still had feelings for the man who had hurt her.

  “Shane, you’ve got to face this and not let him see you make a fool of yourself.”

  “I know, but it’s so hard.” Cautiously, she tilted the menu to the side. With a jolt, Vance saw she was convulsed not with tears but with laughter. “As soon as he sees us,” she began confidentially “he’s going to come over and be polite.”

  “I can see that’s going to cause you a lot of pain.”

  “Oh, it is,” she agreed. “Because you’ve got to promise to kick me under the table or stomp on my foot the minute you see I’m going to laugh.”

  “My pleasure,” he assured her.

  “Laurie used to keep her dolls lined up according to height and she sewed little name tags on all their clothes,” Shane explained, taking deep breaths to prepare herself.

  “That certainly clears everything up.”

  “Okay, now I’m going to put the menu down.” She swallowed, lowering her voice a bit more. “Whatever you do, don’t look at them.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  After a final cleansing breath, Shane set the menu on the table. “Chili?” she said in a normal tone. “Yes, it’s always been good here. I believe I’ll have it too.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “Oh yes, I agree.” Smiling, she picked up her water glass. Out the corner of her eye, she spotted Cy and Laurie crossing the room toward them. To kill the first bubble of laughter, she cleared her throat violently.

  “Shane, how nice to see you.”
r />   Looking up, Shane managed to feign surprise. “Hello, Cy. Hello, Laurie. How’ve you been?”

  “Very well,” Laurie answered in her carefully modulated voice. She’s really very pretty, Shane thought. Even if her eyes are just a fraction too close together.

  “I don’t think you know Vance,” she continued. “Vance, this is Cy Trainer and Laurie MacAfee, old school friends of mine. Vance is my neighbor.”

  “Ah, of course, the old Farley place.” Cy extended his hand. Vance found it soft. The grip was correctly firm and brief. “I hear you’re fixing the place up.”

  “A bit.” Vance allowed himself to study Cy’s face. He was passable, Vance decided, considering he had a weak jaw.

  “You must be the carpenter who’s helping Shane set up her little shop,” Laurie put in. Her glance slipped over his work clothes before it shifted to Shane’s sweater. “I must say, I was surprised when Cy told me your plans.”

  Seeing Shane’s lip quiver, Vance set his foot firmly on top of hers. “Were you?” Shane said as she reached for her water again. Her eyes danced with suppressed amusement as they met Vance’s over the rim. “Well, I’ve always liked to surprise people.”

  “We couldn’t imagine you with your own business, could we, Cy?” Laurie went on without giving him a chance to answer. “Of course, we wish you the very best of luck, Shane, and you can count on both of us to buy something to help you get started.”

  The laughter was a pain in her stomach. Shane had to press a hand against it while Vance increased the pressure on her foot. “Thank you, Laurie. I can’t tell you what that means to me … I really can’t.”

  “Anything for an old friend, right, Cy? You know we wish you every success, Shane. I’ll be sure to tell everyone I know about