“You’re not going to fall apart.”
“How can you be so sure?”
He grinned again. “You’ve got a bestseller to write.”
She thought about the ruined, blistered laptop. “Uh-huh. Here’s the thing, Rourke. The project I’ve been working on…it wasn’t on a hard drive. It was all there.” She indicated the blackened skeleton of the house, now a smoldering ruin. She felt physically sick when she thought of the box of her grandmother’s recipes and writings, which Jenny had so carelessly left on the kitchen table. Now those one-of-a-kind papers were lost forever, along with photographs and mementos of her grandparents’ lives. “I might as well give up,” she said.
“Nope,” said Rourke. “If you quit writing because of a fire, then it probably wasn’t something you wanted that bad in the first place.” He took a step closer to her. He smelled of shaving soap and cold air. He was careful not to touch her here in broad daylight with people swarming everywhere. Yet the probing way he regarded her felt like an intimate caress. He was probably still mortified by the picture on the front page of the paper. She was not exactly lingerie model material.
Then he did touch her, though not to pull her into his embrace. Instead, he took her by the shoulders and turned her to look at the burned-out house. “Look, the stories you need to write aren’t there,” he said. “They never were. You’ve already got them in your head. You just need to write them down, the way you’ve always done.”
She nodded, trying her best to believe him, but the effort exhausted her. Everything exhausted her. She had a pounding headache that felt as though her brain was about to explode. “You weren’t kidding,” she said to Rourke, “about this being a busy day.”
“You doing all right?” he asked her. “Still a five?”
She was surprised he remembered that. “I’m too confused to feel anxious.”
“The good news is, everyone’s breaking for lunch.”
“Thank God.”
They got in the car and he said, “Where to? The bakery? Back home to rest?”
Home, she thought ruefully. “I’m homeless, remember?”
“No, you’re not. You’re staying with me, for as long as it takes.”
“Oh, that’ll look good. The chief of police shacking up with a homeless woman.”
He grinned and started the car. “I’ve heard worse gossip than that in this town.”
“I’m calling Nina. I can stay with her.”
“She’s out of town at that mayors’ seminar, remember?”
“I’ll call Laura.”
“Her place is the size of a postage stamp.”
He was right. Laura was content in a tiny apartment by the river, and Jenny didn’t relish the thought of squeezing in there. “Then I’ll use this debit card at a B&B—”
“Hey, will you cut it out? It’s not like I’m Norman Bates. You’re staying with me, end of story.”
She shifted in her seat to stare at him, amazed by his ease with the situation.
“What?” he asked, glancing down at his crisp shirt and conservative blue tie. “Did I spill coffee on myself?”
She clicked her seat belt in place. “I was just thinking. One way or another, you’ve been rescuing me ever since we were kids.”
“Yeah? Then you’d think I’d be better at it.” He dialed the steering wheel one-handed, heading down the hill toward town. He put on a pair of G-man shades and adjusted the rearview mirror. “Either that, or your dragons are getting a lot harder to slay.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Daisy Bellamy stood on the freshly shoveled sidewalk in front of Avalon High School. She gazed up at the concrete edifice of her new school while her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest. Her new school. It was one of those brick Gothic buildings so common in old-fashioned small towns.
She couldn’t believe it. Once a girl from the Upper East Side, she was now, in her last semester of school, a resident of Avalon, here in the heart of nowhere.
I really screwed up this time, she thought, feeling sick to her stomach.
Was it only two weeks ago that she’d been a senior at an exclusive prep school in New York City? That was a lifetime ago. Since then, she’d left school in disgrace and now this. Now her dad had forced her to move to Sleepy Hollow, and she had to finish her senior year here with the Archie Gang, at a public high school.
Of course, everyone said, in the most caring fashion, moving here and changing schools came about because of a bad choice Daisy made. Bad choice. What a riot.
So now she stood in the middle of the frozen tundra surrounding her, and she felt completely detached from the scene. It was like an out-of-body experience, where she was hovering unseen somewhere, gazing down at herself, a lone figure in the snow, with a kaleidoscope of babbling strangers circling around her, oblivious to her presence.
No. That wasn’t right. Not everyone was oblivious. A pair of girls spotted her, then put their heads together and immediately started whispering. A moment later, a pack of guys tossing a football back and forth checked her out with measuring glances. Their low whistles and apelike sounds rolled right over her like a bitter wind.
Let them whisper. Let them jeer. What the hell did she care about any of this?
She brought her attitude with her into the main office of the school. A blast of damp heat filled the room, redolent of wet wool and whatever else a public high school smelled like. Daisy undid her Burberry muffler and pulled off her Portolano gloves. People on the other side of the scarred wooden counter were busy on the phone, staring at computer monitors or sliding messages into a row of mailboxes.
A tired-looking woman at a desk marked Attendance Clerk glanced up at her. “May I help you?”
Daisy unbuttoned her faux fur-trimmed suede jacket. “I’m Daisy Bellamy. Today’s my first day.”
The clerk sorted through the stacking trays on her desk. Then she picked up a file folder and came over to the counter,
