Armed and Devastating. Julie Miller
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this in your briefcase by mistake? Read a couple of pages?” She talked to the book as though the man who’d snuck it back into her personal belongings could hear her. “Trust me. The content of this book is tame compared to what I’ve got at home.” No mention of how good-looking his sons were, or how grateful she was to be accepted as part of his family. Just business stuff. Just things she didn’t mind sharing at work. She hoped.
Oh, Lordy. What if some of those really personal things had found their way in here? Like a page of curse words over a particularly frustrating day, or something equally embarrassing?
Thumbing through the pages, Brooke figuratively held her breath and reminisced. There was the day she’d first started in John’s office, replacing his retiring assistant. She’d been so nervous. John had seemed so commanding, so busy that morning. She half suspected he hadn’t even noticed that she’d arrived. He’d been in the middle of a task force investigation and something on the case had broken. After he’d snapped an order for her to get online and find out everything she could about Wolfe International’s accounts in London and the Cayman Islands, Brooke had slid behind her desk and gone right to work with little more than an exchange of names. He’d seemed pleased—even impressed—when she set the printouts on his table in the briefing room that afternoon. He’d called her into the office at the end of the day, apologized and informed her that he’d be taking her to breakfast the next morning—if she could stand to spend time with an old grouch like him.
Brooke rolled her eyes at the smiley face she’d drawn at the end of that entry. “I decided I liked you, after all.”
When she turned the page to read how much more smoothly day two had gone, Brooke gasped. There, in the margin, next to her own neat writing was a scrawled comment from John.
“I knew I liked you that first day, too,” it read.
He had read the journal. “Oh, please don’t tell me I wrote anything stupid in this one.”
Sitting up straight, Brooke read through the journal page by page. She found another comment about how it creeped him out at first to have this quiet stranger predict his needs—sometimes before he knew them—as well as keep him on schedule. Brooke smiled when she found the note about how crazy he thought she was to buy the old stone church. “Waste of an inheritance,” it said. “Too big a money pit for a sweet thing like you.” Then, a page later, he wrote a lengthy missive about his fascination with the history of the church after she’d given him a tour and described her plans for the conversion. He’d gotten caught up in the building’s history and how it related to the settlement of the city and how he’d love to tackle a similar restoration project when he retired. He was impressed with Brooke’s businesslike approach and her determination to maintain the integrity of the historic design when it came to the remodel. He called her a “damn lucky girl to be able to pursue a dream like that.”
Tears, both told-you-so happy and I-miss-you-so regret, filled her eyes and blurred her vision until she had to reach up beneath her glasses and wipe them away. She turned the page to discover a boxy sketch with letters that didn’t form words, and symbols that made no sense.
“This isn’t mine.” She shook her head at the curious creative expression John had drawn in her journal. “And you said I was crazy.”
The phone rang, startling Brooke from the trip down memory lane. The journal fell to the floor when she jumped. “Good grief.” Pressing a hand to her racing heart, she took a deep breath and picked up the receiver and her pen. “KCPD, Fourth Precinct, this is Major Taylor’s office.”
“Miss Hansford?”
“Yes?”
“This is the front desk downstairs. There’s a Tony Fierro here to see you. He says you’re expecting him?”
“Oh. Um…” The job interview for the handyman. Was there a problem? “Do I need to go down there to see him, or can he come upstairs?”
“It’s up to you, ma’am. I can give him a visitor’s pass.”
Just a security protocol. Nothing to worry about. She needed to end her trip down memory lane and start looking to the future again. “Then, as soon as he clears security, go ahead and send him up, please.”
“Will do, ma’am.”
Once the call ended, Brooke squatted to get her shoes. But her sleeve caught the corner of the box and pulled it down to the floor beside her, spilling its contents. “Attack of the Killer Klutz strikes again,” she muttered, shifting onto her hands and knees to right the box and retrieve papers, books and some wayward pencils. Her necklace and charm swung out like a pendulum from the front of her blouse, and she paused to catch it and tuck it back in. In the midst of crawling and tucking, something caught her eye. She squeezed the charm in her fist as she studied the image beneath her. “Is that my house?”
Hovering over the open pages, Brooke peered down at the now-sideways drawing. “What were you up to, John?”
There were dots and arrows and scribbled phrases marking the picture. Apparently, he’d thought he had a better plan as to how she should redesign the stone church’s interior. From this angle, what she’d excused as a meaningless doodle now looked like a crude architectural drawing.
No. Like a map.
But to what?
Brooke’s heart beat a little faster and new brain cells awoke.
“That is my house.” She traced the lines with her fingertip, identifying the original altar area of the church that had since been lined with windows and converted into a sun porch. “Three,” she read aloud. Had he wanted to add more rooms? “It’s a supporting exterior wall, John. You can’t budge rock like that. Three plug-ins? Three windows? Three…what?” More scribbles took shape. “B6N-NR.” An arrow pointed to an archway.
“B. 6. N. Basement? Brick? Board? North…Room?” Brooke squinted and rotated the drawing, as though better vision or a different angle would help the jumbled characters make sense. “There is no north room.”
No basement, either. Just a crawl space.
“Lose something?”
A deep, familiar voice, laced with amusement, greeted her from the doorway.
Atticus.
Brooke snapped the journal shut and jerked her head up. He leaned against the door frame, one hand behind his back, looking as perfectly at home in that tailored suit as he did wearing the gun and badge at his belt.
Meanwhile, she was shoeless, scattered and practically sprawled on the floor.
Every self-conscious cell in her body flooded her brain, blocking rational thought as words automatically popped out. “Mitch isn’t here. He’s gone to lunch.”
He chuckled, low in his throat. “Hi to you, too. I stopped by to see how you were settling in.”
The masculine pitch of his laughter danced across her eardrums and did funny things to her pulse rate, tying up her thoughts into even more of a knot.
“Sorry. Hi. Fine.” Brilliant conversation, Sherlock. Ah, yes, this was that moment of babbling stupidity that had plagued her nerves this morning. Aunt Lou had been right to worry. Breathing deeply, Brooke clutched the journal to her chest and ducked her head, buying herself a few moments to reassert control over her instinctive reactions by collecting a handful of pencils and dropping them into the box.
Black oxford shoes and charcoal slacks crossed the room until the gun and badge filled her peripheral vision. “Need some help?”
“I can get it.” But it had been a rhetorical question. She heard a clunk on her desktop just before miles of wide shoulders and charcoal jacket descended to her level.
Despite her insistence, Atticus knelt beside her to help pick up her mess. He wasn’t a man who wore cologne, but there was a clean maleness clinging to his