It was ridiculous how shocked she felt at seeing him, and how instinctively she’d gone back in time to when they were in high school together and she’d loathed him more than any other guy in school.

If he ever happened to catch her looking at him after one of those smart-mouthed comments, she always glared back, just to make sure he wasn’t in the slightest danger of thinking she might have a crush on him.

And now here he was in his father’s dilapidated garage, where he used to help out in his teens, hands stained with engine grease, forehead lightly sheened with grimy sweat, fixing cars for a living.

She thought she should probably feel sorry for him for being here, or maybe maliciously pleased at the contrast between his openly paraded ambitions of wealth and Hollywood stardom back in high school, and the place he’d ended up. Right back where he’d started in his dad’s garage.

And yet she didn’t feel any of that. Instead, the emotions that washed through her were curious and empathetic and wry and—

“Life’s a funny thing, huh?” Joe said quietly with a half smile, and she felt the blush heating her cheeks in reality now, not simply in her imagination. How long since she’d done that? Blushed? A hundred years?

“Um, yes. Yes, it is.” She took in a dragging breath and breathed in him, along with the air.

Jeepers, how did the man do this? Less than a minute in his company and she’d already been knocked sideways by the way he looked, and even the way he smelled, for pity’s sake.

* * *

The Cherry Sisters: Three sisters return to their childhood home in the mountains—and find the love of a lifetime!

It Began with

a Crush

Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LILIAN DARCY has written nearly eighty books for the Mills & Boon® Cherish™ and Medical Romance™ lines. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at PO Box 532, Jamison PO, Macquarie ACT 2614, Australia, or email her at lilian@liliandarcy.com.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

Excerpt

Chapter One

Mr. Capelli was not going to be happy.

Turning into the driveway of Capelli Auto, Mary Jane was already rehearsing her excuses. She knew her little blue car was overdue for a service, but it was the start of the summer season and they’d been so busy at Spruce Bay Resort. The car had been making a strange noise for a while, she would have to admit it, but the noise was definitely louder now than it had been at first, so it wasn’t as if she’d been ignoring something so blatant all this time.

Even in her own head, it all sounded feeble, and Mr. Capelli was so good at that tolerant yet reproachful look of his. The Cherry family had been bringing their vehicles to him for service and repair for as long as she could remember.

The garage, an old-fashioned and very reassuring place, was on a quiet backstreet. Art Capelli was the kind of mechanic who told you the truth and never overcharged. He didn’t deserve Mary Jane’s embarrassingly neglectful attitude toward her car. Dad was always so scrupulous about maintenance, but she...

She was the worst of sinners in that department, and she knew it.

Right now, she felt as remorseful about the noise in the engine as she would have felt about bringing the vet a mangy and half-starved kitten with a splinter in its infected paw.

She parked out front of the repair shop with its brightly painted Capelli Auto sign, leaving the car windows down and the key in the ignition. There was no one in the office but she could hear sounds coming from the workshop so she went through, needing to pause for a moment or two so her eyes could adjust to the light because it was dimmer in here.

A pair of legs clad in oil-stained dark blue overalls stuck out from beneath a red pickup truck. She addressed them tentatively. “Mr. Capelli?”

There came a grunt and an inarticulate noise that probably meant, “Give me a second.”

She awaited her moment of shame. Really, the noise had only gotten so bad these past few days, although it had been sounding on and off since... Oh, shoot, since her three-day spa vacation in Vermont, and that was back in mid-March, three months ago.

Problem was, when the noise occasionally stopped for a few days, she thought the car had—well—healed itself.

What? Cars didn’t do that?

There was another grunt, and the overall-clad legs suddenly shot toward her. A pair of sturdy tan work boots fetched up inches from her shins.

“Hi, Mr—” She stopped. It wasn’t Art Capelli, with his tanned and lined sixtysomething face, his wiry gray hair and fatherly brown eyes. It was Joe, his son.

Joe, whom she hadn’t seen in probably fourteen years. Longer.

Joe, with the sinfully gorgeous looks that began with his thick dark hair and ended with his perfect olive-skinned body, and encompassed pretty much every other desirable male attribute in between.

Cocky, egotistical Joe, who’d always known all too well how irresistible he was and had played on it for everything he was worth.

Possibly, she was blushing already.

“Hi,” he said. They looked at each other. He lifted his head from the wheeled roller-thingy that allowed him to slide easily beneath a vehicle. “Mary Jane, right?”

“Yes.”

“I saw your name in the book.” And probably wouldn’t have recognized her in a police lineup if he hadn’t.

“Where’s your dad?” she asked, and it sounded abrupt and clumsy.

He didn’t answer right away, occupied with levering his strong body up off the roller-thingy so he could stand. “I’m helping him now. Taking over, really. His health isn’t that great.”

Once he was standing, she could see him a lot more clearly. He hadn’t changed, she quickly concluded. He was every bit as good-looking as he’d been in high school. Better-looking, in fact. Her own eye for a man’s looks had matured with the years, and she liked the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, and the fine, scattered threads of silver in the short but still thick hair that framed the top half of his face.

“Right. I’m sorry to hear that,” she answered him. “I mean, that he’s not well. Not sorry you’re helping out. Obviously.”

Smooth, Mary Jane. Real smooth.

There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask. What happened to the Hollywood plan? Was Joe back here for good, or just as an interim arrangement because his dad wasn’t well? Wasn’t there someone else who could take over the garage? What had gone wrong?

It was ridiculous how shocked she felt at seeing him, and how instinctively she’d gone back in time about eighteen years to when they were in high school together and she’d loathed him more than any other guy in school.

Yes, loathed him.

Insist on that a little more, Mary Jane. Protesting too much? Never!

She’d loathed her own reaction to him even more. He’d been so cocky back then, so magnetic and sure of himself, wearing his sense of his own sparkling future like an Armani suit. No, wait a minute. Not a suit. He was rougher than that. Make it a biker jacket, black Italian leather.

She’d tried so hard not to look at him, not to notice him, and to stay immune to the charm that oozed from him, the—what were they called, pheromones or something—that made her heart beat faster if they merely passed each other in a corridor.

The ones that made her tongue turn into a flapping fish in her mouth, and made her blush and giggle if he said something arrogant and cheeky in class. Arrogant and cheeky and usually pretty dumb, because he never did the required reading. If he ever happened to catch her looking at him after one of those smart-mouth comments, she always glared back, just to make sure he wasn’t in the slightest danger of thinking she might have a crush on him.

And now here he was in his father’s dilapidated garage, where he used to help out in his teens, hands stained with engine grease, forehead lightly sheened with grimy sweat, fixing cars for a living.

While she struggled to find the right thing to say, he pulled the overalls down to his waist, laying bare a dark blue T-shirt that molded to his chest and casually showed off the toned muscles and washboard abs. He grabbed a water bottle from a benchtop and took a gulp, then took a towel and wiped it across the sweaty, grimy forehead.

She thought she should probably feel sorry for him for being here, or maybe maliciously pleased at the contrast between his openly paraded ambitions of wealth and Hollywood stardom back in high school, and the place he’d ended up. Right back where he’d started in his dad’s garage.

And yet she didn’t feel any of that. Instead, the emotions that washed through her were curious and empathetic and wry and—

“Life’s a funny thing, huh?” Joe said quietly with a half smile, and she felt the blush heating her cheeks in reality now, not simply in her imagination. How long since she’d done that? Blushed? A hundred years?

“Um, yes. Yes, it is.” She took in a dragging breath and breathed in him, along with the air—his slightly salt scent, his body heat, a hint of some tangy and irresistible male grooming product, and the faint odor of engine oil that should have been off-putting but for some reason wasn’t.

Jeepers, how did the man do this? Less than a minute in his company and she’d already been knocked sideways by the way he looked, and even the way he smelled, for pity’s sake.

She cleared her throat quickly, and there was a shift as they both pulled back onto a businesslike footing. She really was not going to ask all those questions about what he’d been doing since college and why he wasn’t by this time a Hollywood heartthrob on the level of George Clooney, Bradley Cooper or Johnny Depp, or maybe a high-powered casting agent or film director.

And if she wasn’t going to ask, then even less did he look as if he wanted to tell her.

“So, the car,” he said. “Regular service, you said, plus you’ve been having a couple of problems with it?”

“It’s making a noise.”

He gave her his father’s look, the tolerant and reproachful one, but with an additional hint of smoke that Mr. Capelli had never worn on his face in his life. Again, it took Mary Jane right back to high school and made her furious with herself. Back then, she used to think he did it on purpose—and maybe he had—because the girls fell for it like ninepins. She’d bent over backward to make sure it never worked on her.

If it was physically possible for a pair of male eyebrows and the corners of a male mouth to give the equivalent of a seductive drawl, then that was what his were doing, then and now. But today he didn’t look as if he was doing it on purpose. It was just part of his face, an unconscious habit, something that betrayed a dry sense of humor.

“A noise,” he said patiently.

“Yes.” She tried to produce it. “Rgrk-rgrk-rgrk. Like that. Sort of.”

To her relief, he didn’t laugh, just said very plainly, “I’ll take a look, and give you a call when I know what’s going on.”

“Uh, thanks, Cap. Yes, that would be great.”

There was a silence as she realized what she’d said. Cap. Everyone had called him that in high school, but she had no idea if they did anymore.

He’d noticed the nickname, too. “Make it Joe,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Cap is... Yeah. I don’t go by that now.”

“Sorry,” she said again. And for some reason remembered something she’d learned in passing—she couldn’t remember where or when—that Joe Capelli was also the name of a character in a shoot-’em-up video game.

“No big deal,” the non-computer-generated Joe said. “Do you need a ride somewhere?”

“My sister’s picking me up. She should be here any minute.”

“I’ll call you later, then, when I know what’s going on with the engine.”

“Thanks. Um, say hi to your dad for me. Give him my best wishes.”

“Will do.”

She got herself out of the grease-smelling workshop and into the June air, just as her sister Lee pulled onto the concrete apron at the front of the garage.

Lee was engaged to be married and five and a half months pregnant, beyond the tired and queasy first trimester and not yet into the big and uncomfortable third trimester, and she looked radiantly energetic, happy and alive. Her caramel-colored hair was thick and shiny in its casual ponytail, and her skin was glowing. “So what’s the noise?” she said, after Mary Jane had slid into the front passenger seat.

“Don’t know yet. He’ll take a look at it and call to let me know.”

“He must be getting pretty old for lying around under cars.”

“It wasn’t Mr. Capelli. It was his son. Joe.”

“Joe. Wow!” Lee said. “I thought he was in Hollywood, being a movie star.”

“You remember that? You were two years behind us in school.”

“The whole school knew about Joe Capelli’s plans. I think everyone believed in them, too.”

“Really?” Mary Jane infused a watery amount of skepticism into her voice for appearance’s sake, and yet she had believed in his plans just as much as everyone else. Had believed in them utterly, to the point where she looked for his face on TV or in movies for years afterward, and even once thought she’d spotted him on screen, playing a gangster’s henchman who died under dramatic movie gunfire without speaking a line.

“Don’t you remember him in West Side Story?” Lee said. “Every girl in the audience was practically moaning out loud.”

“Not me.”

“Well, you weren’t the moaning type. I never understood why he hadn’t gotten the lead role.”

“Because he couldn’t sing in the right range,” Mary Jane answered. “He’s a baritone, not a tenor.”

“You do remember.”

“But you’re right, I wasn’t the moaning type,” Mary Jane hastened to emphasize. “I couldn’t stand him.”

“He did think he was God’s gift to womankind, I seem to remember. Bit of a joke where he’s ended up, compared to what he planned.”

“Not a joke. And not the end, either. He’s only thirty-five.”

“Now you’re defending him.”

“Because I’m sure he must know what everyone is thinking,” Mary Jane retorted. “He was a bit of a jerk, maybe, a bit arrogant and cocky, but he doesn’t deserve that. He wasn’t a bad person, just...”

“Way too much ego. Isn’t that almost the definition of jerk? You mean he doesn’t deserve people thinking that being back in his father’s garage is a far cry from what he expected?”

“From what we all expected.”

“I know what you mean. When some people say, ‘I’m gonna be a star!’ you roll your eyes, but with him...”

“We were rolling our eyes for other reasons,” Mary Jane agreed.

“The arrogance.”

“Exactly. I never doubted he’d make it big.”

Just as she’d never doubted her own future—no grand ambitions, in her case, just the usual one—the triple play of decent marriage, beautiful and welcoming home, healthy kids. Enough of a win in the lottery of life for anyone, she’d always considered.

So far, she’d scored just one out of the three.

A few minutes later, Lee turned into the driveway that led to Spruce Bay Resort and Mary Jane thought she could hardly ask for a more beautiful place to live, surrounded by pristine white snow in winter and glorious views of mountain and forest and lake in spring, summer and fall.

And yet she would have exchanged it in a heartbeat for a two-bedroom apartment over a dingy little store if it meant she got the decent marriage and healthy kids instead.

It was embarrassing. Painfully embarrassing. Way more embarrassing than Joe Capelli working in his dad’s old-fashioned garage.

Incredibly embarrassing that she wanted something so outwardly ordinary and conventional and yet still it hadn’t happened.

Embarrassing...and painful...and horrible...that she could feel the bitterness kicking in. She had to try so hard, sometimes, not to mind that both her younger sisters were now happily in love, married or engaged, with babies on the way.

She had a secret little chart tucked away in her head, and mentally awarded herself a gold star for every day she went without feeling jealous, or saying something pointed and mean, or wallowing in regret.

And even though the mental chart had quite a few gold stars on it, she hated that it existed in the first place, and no matter how much she’d disliked...well, tried to dislike...“Cap” Capelli in high school, she understood so well what he’d meant when he’d said with that wry drawl and quirked mouth, “Life’s a funny thing.”

* * *

Mary Jane Cherry was one of those women who looked way better at thirty-five than she’d looked at eighteen, Joe decided.

In high school, she’d had frequent skin breakouts and an orthodontic plate and puppy fat, and her hair had been an indifferent brownish color, worn too long. Now she had it cut to shoulder-length in bouncy layers with professional blond highlights, her skin was smooth, dewy and well cared for and the puppy fat had turned into a kind of ripeness that looked warm and inviting, along with the soft creases at the corners of her eyes and the smile lines around her mouth.

It was a little disturbing that he remembered her so well, but then, he’d made an extensive study of girls in high school. If he went to a reunion—which, to be clear, he had no intention of ever doing—it would probably turn out that he remembered them all.

Joe listened to Mary Jane’s car engine, heard “the noise” and knew she should have brought it in for a checkup about five hundred miles ago. He did some further exploration and diagnosis, and came up with at least three major repairs that the car needed right now.

Mary Jane was lucky it had held up this far, and hadn’t left her stranded somewhere with smoke billowing from the engine. He would need to order parts from the distributor, and when they arrived he’d need to pull apart the whole engine to put them in. It was Tuesday today. She wasn’t getting the car back before Friday at the earliest.

He did a grease and oil change on another car, and then a wheel alignment and a tire rotation on a third, knowing that both clients would be back soon to pick up their vehicles. The bad-news phone call to Mary Jane would have to wait.

Which was a pity, because it gave him more time to think about her.

How well she’d held up in the looks and youthfulness department. How surprised he was that she was still here. She’d been intelligent, articulate, hard-working, always earned good grades. He somehow would have expected her to have moved away, in search of wider horizons.

In high school, the girls had been divided into two groups—the ones who thought he was gorgeous and had wild crushes on him, and the ones who thought he was gorgeous and couldn’t stand him.

Naturally, Mary Jane was in the second group, and naturally, he had been all about the girls in the first.

He’d dated—hell, he couldn’t remember—at least five or six of them. The prettiest and wildest and most popular, because those were the ones you could get the farthest with, and were the ones that made the other guys look at you with envy and respect, cementing your position as the coolest kid in school.

Looking back, he could see how much he’d been riding for a fall. Sometimes, he wanted to reach back in time and slap his teenage self upside the head. Hard. He could also see that if just a few things had gone differently, the fall might never have happened.

Because he’d come so close.

Seriously close.

Even now, he might easily have been starring in some long-running TV crime show, or choosing between movie scripts that had Oscar potential written into every line. As he’d said to Mary Jane, life was a funny thing.

There had been a major series of audition callbacks where he’d ended up in the running, along with just one other guy, for the lead role in a crime drama series, and the other guy—now a household name—had gotten the gig. There had been one gorgeous female smile that he’d caught in a crowded diner and had followed up on instead of letting it slide.

Just those two events, and his whole life had gone off on a completely different track from the one he’d envisaged.

He couldn’t let himself think about it, because on the one hand, he’d fallen so far short, but on the other, there were two things about his life now that were so incredibly precious he couldn’t imagine himself without them.

The owners of the other cars showed up both at the same time, and he took their money and returned their keys and remembered he still hadn’t called Mary Jane Cherry, even though it was nearly four o’clock. He was just about to pick up the phone when his father came in, towing two identical seven-year-old girls and looking pretty tired.

The girls, of course, were Joe’s two precious things.

“You’re going to tell me it’s easier fixing cars than taking care of these two,” he told his dad.

“Nah, we had a great day.” But a tiring one. Dad couldn’t gloss over that.

“What did you do?”

“Played on the beach at the lake. Did a round of mini golf up at that place with all the waterfalls. Had ice cream.”

Dad couldn’t keep up this pace all summer. He had prostate cancer, and the only good thing about this was the doctor’s promise that it would kill him so slowly he’d likely die of something else first, fifteen years from now.

Joe was starting not to believe the doctor, but maybe it was the sheer energy of two little girls that had Dad looking so tired today. “I’ll get them into a vacation program,” he promised his father. “Day camp, or something.”

“Horseback riding camp?” said both girls together, in identical and intensely hopeful voices.

Joe sighed. “Maybe horse-riding camp. We’ll look into it.”

He didn’t know where this horsey thing was coming from, but it was rabid. The girls had a shared subscription to a pony magazine, and the walls of their room were covered in horsey pictures. They had a whole shelf of horsey books. Not just stories, but books on how to ride and groom and look after your pony. They had a plastic pony play-set, and plush ponies that they slept with every night, and unicorn socks—apparently unicorns counted as ponies—as well as horseshoe bracelets and pony T-shirts and pony pajamas.

Now that he and the girls had left California and come back east, it might actually be possible for them to meet a pony or two, face-to-face.

“You don’t have to shove ’em into some day-camp program just because of me,” Dad said.

“Pony camp! Pony camp!” said the girls.

“Well, I won’t, not unless it’s one they enjoy,” Joe promised, but he knew he might be stretching the truth.

They might be forced to enjoy it whether they wanted to or not, because Dad really could not look after the girls all summer, five and a half days a week. The whole idea of Joe being here in the garage was to give Dad a break until they decided whether to sell the place or close it down. His taking care of the girls was a stopgap measure until the three of them got settled, because they’d only moved from California two weeks ago and still weren’t fully unpacked.

Holly and Maddie had spent half their lives in day care and day camp in the four years since Joe had had full custody, because he’d had no other choice in the matter. Even so, all the child care was still way better than what they’d had before they’d come to him. He’d spared Dad most of the details on that, and it was cute...and warming, somehow...that Dad, in his innocence, viewed professional child care as such a poor option.

He would try to get a little more of the unpacking done tonight after Dad and the girls had gone to bed, he promised himself, so that at least his father didn’t have to deal with the mess. Joe didn’t really have time to devote a whole precious evening to going through cardboard boxes. He had studying to do. But if he didn’t take care of Dad...

“Ready to close up shop?” Dad asked now, betraying his eagerness to get home and take it easy.

“Not quite. I have a phone call to make, and she’s probably going to want the loaner car, so I’ll have to arrange that. Why don’t you take them home and put them in front of TV, while you get a break? If they’ve had ice cream, they won’t be hungry.”

Wrong.

“Yes, we are!” Again, Holly and Maddie spoke in unison.

They did this all the time quite unselfconsciously, and Joe was used to it. Didn’t even hear it, half the time. Grandmotherly women thought it was “adorable,” but when it came to things like begging for riding lessons, it just doubled their pester power. In his darker moments, Joe considered identical twins to be a whole lot less cute than they were cracked up to be...and still he loved these two with every particle in his soul.

“Okay, they are hungry,” he said. “There’s a bag of potato smiles in the freezer. Put half of them in the toaster oven. Girls, if Grandad doesn’t hear the oven timer when it goes off, you tell him, okay? Don’t try to get them out of the hot oven yourselves.”

He knew they would, if he didn’t specifically forbid it. They were incredibly ambitious when it came to attempting practical tasks that they weren’t ready for yet. He’d caught them trying to fry their own eggs when they were two.

Dad, Holly and Maddie left again, and Joe found himself wondering just how quickly he could arrange to get the loaner car to Mary Jane, assuming she wanted it, because he really didn’t want to leave Dad on his own with the girls for much longer.

Chapter Two

“A loaner car?” Mary Jane said blankly.

She was still digesting the news that her mangy, neglected kitten of a car had a lot more wrong with it than just a splinter in its paw, and wouldn’t be ready until Friday.

“Yes, Dad has a nice little compact, very similar to yours, that he lends to long-term clients if their car is going to be in the shop for a while,” Joe Capelli said, in the voice that had been too deep and gruff and husky for singing “Mari-i-i-aa!” in West Side Story.

“Well, yes. I do need it.” It was impossible to manage the resort in summer without a car. She was constantly running small errands such as picking up new pool chemicals or buying fresh groceries for the restaurant if their regular delivery orders had fallen short. Last week, she’d had to drive a guest to the hospital emergency room.

“Can I drop it over to you in twenty minutes or so, then,” Joe said, “and you can drop me back home? Is that possible? It works out really well for me if you can.”

“You’re still living over on North Street?” She had no idea where she’d dredged up this detail from the past, but somehow it was there.

If he was surprised, it didn’t show. “That’s right, with my dad.”

“No problem, then.” She was mentally sorting through the staffing implications as she spoke. If Lee hadn’t already left to drive up to Jay, where she and her fiancé, Mac, were renting a house, Lee might have stayed on until Mary Jane was back with the loaner car, but her absence wasn’t a major issue. Nickie could staff the office, and Piri would be happy to put in another hour or two in the restaurant kitchen, as she wanted all the work she could get. “So twenty minutes, you said?”

“Give or take.”

“Great! You know where we are?”

She began to give directions, but he cut in with a quick, “No, it’s fine, I know it,” and then he was as good as his word, shooting into a parking space in front of the resort office about nineteen minutes after they’d ended the call. The little red car looked way too small for him, as he uncurled himself from the driver’s seat, but it would be perfect for Mary Jane. Small, zippy, fuel-efficient.

Nickie was already on the phone in the office, answering a guest’s question about extra towels, so Mary Jane hurried out and Joe handed her the keys. He’d taken off the grease-stained overalls and was wearing a pair of well-worn jeans and a T-shirt almost the same as the other one, except a paler blue in color.

And cleaner.

Definitely cleaner.

More worn, too, maybe. Through the fabric, she could glimpse the darker patch where he had hair on his chest.

He’d scrubbed his hands and arms and neck and face, she could tell, because his hairline still looked a little damp and she could smell the clean, floral scent of soap. There was even a streak of it on his neck, just below his ear. She had a ridiculous urge to grab a tissue and wipe it off.

“Oh, you can drive till we get to your place, if you want,” she said to him. She tried to hand the keys back, but he wouldn’t take them.

“Best if you get some practice while I’m still with you, in case it drives a little different than yours.”

“Okay, that makes sense, but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

Famous last words.

On the passenger side, he seemed even more crowded than he’d been at the wheel, and he had the seat pushed right back. She was distracted by his beautifully sculpted bulk, by the fact that he didn’t bother with small talk and by the mental shopping list she was currently creating because the fridge in her apartment above the office didn’t have much in it right now. She just hadn’t had time to think about grocery shopping the past few days.

Lee was down here working at Spruce Bay only four days a week, which was already too many hours for a pregnant fiancée to be apart from her husband-to-be. Lee and Mac had a small wedding planned for late July, then she would be finishing up at the end of the Labor Day weekend in early September, ready for the birth. Mary Jane was thinking of suggesting that she stop before then.

I could hire on someone who wants six or seven days a week.

As a couple, Lee and Mac seemed incredibly happy together, but their relationship had gone from zero to sixty in about fourteen seconds, if you wanted to stick to the automotive theme. She’d gotten pregnant so early into their involvement, they’d had a lot to deal with and sort out in the months since, and they still had decisions to make about where they would settle, long-term. Mary Jane had berated herself more than once for feeling impatient about it.

Decide, already, so I know where I stand with running the resort.

Okay, no, it’s not fair of me to think that way. It’s not about me. It’s about them.

But sometimes she had the unhappy feeling that nothing was ever about her...

“Here,” Joe Capelli suddenly said.

“What? Oh, sorry.” She’d been barreling down North Street, forgetting that she should be slowing down for him to point out his house. Now she had to brake too hard, and with a garage mechanic sitting beside her, she was self-conscious about her less-than-exemplary driving. “Which one?”

“This one, on the right.”

“Oh, wow, it’s beautiful!”

“Thanks,” he drawled, and she realized that her frankly expressed surprise hadn’t been especially complimentary.

She’d driven past this house numerous times before, but hadn’t known it was the Capelli family’s place. It was a classic white two-story clapboard with dark green shutters, modest in size but impeccably maintained, with a wraparound veranda floored in hardwood, and a shady, grassy garden all around it. At this time of year, the flower beds were full of color and the trees were beautifully green. It was gorgeous.

Now she managed to slow just in time to turn into the driveway, which consisted of two long strips of brick paving with grass in between and on either side. Because she’d turned just a fraction too late and too crooked, Mary Jane missed the strips and drove onto the grass instead, and unfortunately the brick was at a slightly higher level, so when she tried to steer the wheels back onto the harder strips, she could hear the tires scraping before they bumped into place.

She was sweating at this point. Driving badly, after neglecting her own car. Making transparently snobbish assumptions about what his house would be like, when, if he remembered her from high school at all, he would have remembered that she’d never spoken to him or smiled at him and had glared at him or looked the other way with a frozen expression on her face whenever they chanced to meet. He would be in no doubt about what she’d thought of him then, and what she thought of him now.

“Thanks so much for the loan of the car,” she said. “Sorry I’m driving it so badly.”

“You’re doing fine.” More famous last words. “I’ll let you know when yours is ready. Here’s my card, though, in case you want to call and check on how it’s going.”

He didn’t seem keen to linger. Well, why would he be? A quick, “See you, then,” and he was out of the car and striding toward the house, his legs looking lean and fit and strong in those faded old jeans, and his butt lovingly sculpted by the soft weave of the—

Stop it, Mary Jane!

Before he reached the front porch, she reversed back down the drive and turned into the street, hoping he hadn’t noticed that she’d bumped one wheel down off the curb.

Or that she’d been looking at his backside.

Supermarket. What was that list, again? Butter, milk, bread, eggs, cheese, salad, maybe some pasta and a jar of sauce, or steak and vegetables for an Asian stir-fry. Did she have any rice? And Daisy had given her a list for the restaurant, too. She tried to remember the conversation.

“We’re out of...” Blank.

Think, Mary Jane! She hit the highway and sped up. Joe had been right. This car was so similar to hers, she really didn’t have to think too much about it.

So she thought about Daisy’s list instead, about Daisy ticking things off on her fingers. But the memory wouldn’t come. Cream and— There were two more things. Two items probably with a short shelf life, because they sometimes did tend to run out of those between regular deliveries from their suppliers. Cream and—

Not cheese. Not milk.

She took the exit and there was a red light ahead. It turned green and she thought, “Good, don’t have to stop,” but the car that was already stopped at the light took longer to get going than she expected. The driver was on his phone and hadn’t seen that the light was green, and when he did, he tried to shoot off too fast and stalled. The light turned orange, the driver gave up trying to get through and sat there. Before Mary Jane knew what was happening...

Crash! There came the sickening metallic crunching sound of Capelli Auto’s loaner car rear-ending the car in front so that it pushed several feet into the intersection. The light turned red, leaving both of them stranded, with horns sounding and drivers steering around them. Mary Jane was shaking like a leaf when she climbed out of the vehicle.

The whole front was badly crumpled. The man in the other car was furious, even though his vehicle appeared to have much less damage. Thank heaven neither of them seemed to be hurt. He wanted her contact details for the insurance, and in a shaky hand she wrote them down on a piece of paper in her purse that, if she’d been more organized today, could have had a shopping list on it and she might have avoided all this.

Because she knew it was totally her own fault.

She was distracted, and she was driving a car that might have been very similar to her own, but wasn’t exactly the same. She should have been more careful and alert. The brake pedal took a little longer to grab than it did on her own vehicle, and she should already have known that because she’d slammed her foot on it in front of Joe’s house.

People had stopped to help, and someone must have called the traffic police because she saw a vehicle with flashing lights pull up. The whole process seemed to take quite a long time, and when the officers directed her to move the car off the road, she couldn’t get it to start. They had to push it onto the verge.

“You’ll have to get it towed, and have someone come pick you up. Is there someone you can call?” an officer said.

“Yes, there is.”

Unfortunately.

* * *

The girls were in the bath when the phone rang. Joe left them alone long enough to grab it, heading back with it toward the bathroom before he’d even figured out who was calling. Even now that they were seven, he never liked leaving them in the bath too long without supervision, and usually found a task to do in his adjacent bedroom while they were in there—laundry folding or internet banking on his laptop.

“Joe?” The voice was female and very wobbly, the reception not that clear, and for one horrible moment he thought it was the girls’ mother. That was the only way he ever thought of her, now. Factual. Practical. The woman who’d given them life, but nothing more. Nothing good, anyhow.

It wasn’t her.

“Joe, it’s Mary Jane Cherry.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve— Something terrible has happened. I’m so sorry. I’ve crashed the car.”

“You’ve—”

“Rear-ended someone. It’s all crumpled in front and it won’t start, and it’s going to be towed, and I thought you might want it towed back to the garage, and that you might have a towing company you could recommend.” She sounded very, very shaken, and undeserving of his immediate inner rage.

You are kidding me! This is the last thing I need.

“Wait, are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine. I think. Shaken. The police have cited me and I know it was my fault.”

“Don’t worry. It’s insured.”

“Yes, I was sure it would be, but still, I am so, so sorry. I’ll cover your deductible, obviously.”

“Don’t worry about that now.” He swallowed his anger, told himself that this was going to be way more of a pain in the butt for her than for him, and that these things happened to the best of people on a bad day. “Let me give you the name of a towing company, and yes, have them bring it back to the garage. Do you have a ride home?”

“N-no, I don’t.” Now she sounded close to tears, but two seconds later she’d brisked herself up, with an effort he could hear over the phone line. “But I’ll get a cab, so that’s fine.”

“I’ll come pick you up.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to see the car.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Tell me where you are.”

She told him and he didn’t need to write it down. Pretty easy. He used that supermarket all the time, and knew the traffic lights you went through off of the interstate, just before you got there.

“Five minutes,” he promised.

“Thank you so much!”

“Girls, time to get out,” he said, when he’d ended the call.

They protested, of course. They were swimming their plastic ponies in there. Apparently there were these newly invented magical creatures called water ponies that could jump like flying fish. As a result, an astonishingly large percentage of the bathwater was now pooling on the bathroom floor.

“No, you really have to come out,” he insisted, using the voice they knew meant business. “This minute.”

Dad was snoozing on the couch downstairs, and Joe wasn’t going to disturb him to ask him to supervise a bath that had already gone on quite long enough. The girls had wrinkled fingers and toes, and the water was tepid at best.

He wrapped Holly and Maddie in their towels and sent them off to their room to put on their pj’s while he let the water out and attempted to use a towel to soak up the spills. He might have done better with a mop and a bucket. In their doorway, he told them, “I have to go rescue someone from a fender bender.”

“What’s a fender bender?” they wanted to know at once.

“A car crash where the cars are damaged but no one’s hurt. But she’s a little upset, so I can’t keep her waiting. You had those potato smiles so you can’t be hungry—”

“We are!”

“Well, you can wait, anyhow. I’ll be as quick as I can. You play in here and don’t disturb Grandad, okay? Unless it’s an emergency.”

“What kind of emergency?”

“Fire or bleeding. And don’t you dare do anything to make either of those things happen!”

Shoot, should he wake Dad up? He was spooky and overprotective about this stuff and he knew it—knew the reasons for it, too. He was trying to let go a little, trying to tell himself that they didn’t get themselves into trouble nearly as often as it seemed. They were seven, and bright, and good, mostly...and in no danger. The impulsiveness and lack of any sense of risk had gotten a lot better, the past year or so. And if they screamed for any reason, Dad would wake up. He was sixty-five, not eighty-five, and he was just a little tired.

“Tell Grandad where I’ve gone, okay, and that I’ll be back soon.”

“But you said not to wake him up.”

“Tell him if he wakes up.”

Why did these simple conversations always take so long, and involve all these left-field questions he hadn’t expected? After a little more back and forth, he got himself out of the house and across to the old-fashioned detached wooden garage, with its wooden doors.

No remote-control opener for this old friend. It contained his minivan, still warm from a day spent sitting in the sun in parking lots at the lake, mini golf and the ice cream parlor, while Dad’s pickup was parked in the yard, relegated to the open air. Dad had insisted on that, claiming that the minivan was the more important vehicle, since it was the one that mostly transported the girls. Joe wasn’t going to argue with that.

He pushed the creaky old garage doors open, reversed the minivan out and climbed out of it again to go shut the doors because Dad had tools in there that were older than the Declaration of Independence and more precious to him than gold, so they couldn’t be left unprotected.

He’d already taken quite a bit longer than five minutes before he even got on the road.

Chapter Three

What if he didn’t come?

Joe had said, “Five minutes,” and because he’d been so accurate in his time estimate when he’d picked her up at Spruce Bay, Mary Jane had pinned herself completely on that five minutes and was getting very jittery about the fact that he wasn’t yet here.

It had been fifteen minutes at least since she’d spoken to him. The tow truck had come, loaded up the Capelli Auto car and gone again. The helpful witnesses had been interviewed and had left. The driver she’d crashed into, whose car had started on the first try, was long gone, and even the police officers had driven off now.

At least this was June, so it was still broad daylight even though it was now past six o’clock in the evening. But the sky had clouded over and there was a breeze, so it wasn’t that warm anymore. Goose bumps had risen on her bare arms and she was starting to shiver—whether it was just from cold or from delayed shock, as well, she wasn’t sure.

She felt like an abandoned waif, standing here on the verge while cars drove back and forth through the unlucky intersection, ignoring her. She had begun to think about calling a taxi after all—thank goodness she’d remembered to retrieve her purse from the car before it was towed, so she had money and her phone—when at last she saw a minivan slowing down as it came toward her, and when she peered at the driver she saw it was Joe.

Hang on, was it?

Yes, it really was—Joe Capelli, driving a maroon minivan, and a rather elderly looking one, at that. “Hop in, stranger,” he drawled at her, leaning across to open the passenger door. “Sorry I took longer than I said.”

“It’s f-fine. I couldn’t expect you just to drop everything.”

“Well, I did, but dropping everything can still take a while, at my place.”

“Oh, o-k-kay.” She should probably ask him what he meant by that, but she was struggling so hard not to show that she was shaking. Her head felt as if it had an iron band of pain around it, she hadn’t eaten since a pear and a banana for lunch at around noon and her empty stomach felt queasy from shock and cold and sheer misery.

“You’re freezing.” He quickly reached to switch the air-conditioning off and turn the heating on instead, while all she could do was nod. “I’m sorry, I should have thought of that. The car was warm from the sun, and I was warm from the house. Didn’t realize it had gotten so chilly out.”

“I’ll soon warm up.”

He didn’t mention dropping her home, and from the route he took, she realized he was going directly to the garage. Maybe she could grab a glass of water there, so she could swallow a couple of the painkillers she had in her purse. When this kind of a tension headache started, Mary Jane knew from experience that it would end badly if she couldn’t get those painkillers down pretty soon.

The tow truck was parked out front, the driver in the process of unloading the car. It looked terrible. Who would have thought a low-speed collision at a traffic light could have done so much damage?

“I’m so sorry,” Mary Jane said again, the headache making her queasier by the minute.

“The car’s at least eight years old. Please don’t worry about it.”

“Is there somewhere I can get a drink of water?”

“Watercooler in the office. You have a headache,” he correctly guessed.

“Yes.”

“Got pills?”

“Just need the water.”

“I’ll get it for you. Stay put.” He hopped out of the minivan and went to talk to the tow-truck driver, and she was feeling so bad by this time that she didn’t even look, just bent forward, then kept very still and tried to breathe slow and even—in through her nose, out through her mouth—focusing on a single object.

In this case, a pink plastic pony on the minivan’s gray-carpeted floor.

Joe Capelli was a family man.

Even in her shaken and fuzzy state, Mary Jane could work that out.

She felt even worse about what had happened, thinking of him arriving back late for his home-cooked meal after this unwanted errand, and disappointing his apron-clad wife and their no doubt adorable brood of brown-eyed children.

Not actually quite sure where the apron was coming from. She couldn’t imagine any wife of “Cap” Capelli’s ever wearing such a thing.

He came back with a plastic cup of water and she moved carefully to get the pills out of her purse. “Are you sure it’s not whiplash?” he said, after she’d swallowed the pills and the water.

“Tension headache,” she said. “I get them...when I’m tense.”

“Right.” He climbed back into the vehicle and she heard the tow truck pulling out into the street.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“For today. Listen, do you have someone to take care of you when you get home?”

She didn’t answer right away, looking for the best way to admit that she would be spending the evening on her own, either in the office itself or for brief intervals upstairs in a largely food-free apartment, listening for the bell or the phone down in the office, until she closed it up at nine-thirty.

Daisy and her staff would be too busy in the restaurant to take care of anyone but the dinner crowd, and Nickie would leave as soon as Mary Jane was back. Nickie was eighteen years old, bright and perky, efficient enough in her various tasks around the resort but not exactly a nurturing personality.

“Not really,” seemed to sum all of this up pretty well.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“I think that’s part of what’s making this headache so bad,” she admitted.

“Let me bring you back to my place and feed you, and by then hopefully your head will be better and we can work out what we’re going to do about transport for you till Friday.”

“It’s not your problem, Joe. Surely I’ve already given you enough grief.”

“We’ll work something out,” he said, quiet but firm, and she couldn’t find the words to argue any more. “Toss that cup in the back, if you want,” he added. “It’s messy enough in there already.”

But she couldn’t bring herself to do something that untidy when he was being so good, so she held on to it.

North Street was only a few minutes away. She closed her eyes for the drive, and didn’t open them until she felt him turn onto those brick strips she’d missed before. He parked in front of a detached garage, then turned to look at her. “Any better?”

“Not yet.”

“My girls might be a little noisy for you in the house. Do you want to just sit here in the minivan until the pills kick in? Come in when you’re ready. And if there’s something you’d like me to bring out to you now, just say.”

“No, it’s fine. But I will stay in the car. Thanks.”

“Juice box? Snack pack of crackers?”

“No, really.”

“Okay, then. Front door’ll be open, when you’re ready. Don’t knock, or anything. Just come in.” He closed the minivan door almost silently, and she appreciated his concern for her pounding head.

Seconds later, he’d headed for the house and she was on her own, in his minivan, in front of his garage.

The girls, he’d said. Two or more. Could be teenagers or three-year-olds, although the plastic pony did suggest the lower end of the age spectrum.

Well, she’d find out soon.

She sat, doing more of the careful breathing, trying to relax her shoulders and neck, and wondering if he could be right about the whiplash. She very much hoped not. After twenty minutes, she felt the pain letting go and the nausea subsiding, and knew it was time to go inside.

* * *

“Do you want creamy sauce, or red sauce?” Joe asked the girls.

They did their silent exchange of opinion, seeming to know from just looking at each other what they were going to choose and then announcing it in unison as usual, “Creamy!”

He hoped Mary Jane would approve. He’d thrown a couple of loaves of foil-wrapped store-bought garlic bread into the oven, grabbed a bag of cheese ravioli from the freezer, and dumped premixed and prewashed salad greens into a bowl. The girls loved cheese ravioli, and would happily have eaten it three times a week.

Well, sometimes they did.

It was an easy dinner choice for a busy man, when paired with a container of pasta sauce from the supermarket deli section, and he told himself it was a pretty healthy meal if he made a salad on the side. He just hoped there would be enough of it tonight to feed himself, Dad, the girls and Mary Jane.

Here she was.

She came quietly into the kitchen, still looking pretty washed out but a lot better than before. She had beautiful skin, fair and fine-pored. He’d noticed it before, at the garage, and it was even more obvious under the kitchen lights. She’d looked like a ghost when she was in the grip of the headache, but now there was a faint blush of pretty pink color, and her lips looked lush instead of dry. She was pretty. Not beautiful, but sweet and nice-looking in a girl-next-door way. He wouldn’t have valued looks like hers ten years ago, but now he knew better.

Woman-next-door, though, he revised. She was his own age, thirty-five.

“Pills worked?” he asked.

“Starting to.”

He shook some crackers from a packet onto a plate and said, “Maybe those’ll help, till dinner’s ready. Want a glass of juice, as well?”

“That would be lovely.”

“Glasses are up there.” He gestured with his chin as he grated Parmesan cheese. Yes, you could buy the stuff already grated, but he didn’t have an Italian last name for nothing. “Juice in the refrigerator.”

“Is there anything you’d like me to do to help?”

“No, we’re good. I’ll call the girls. They’re supposed to be setting the table. By the time they’re done, it’ll be ready. Cheese ravioli, with creamy chicken and mushroom sauce.”

“Sounds delicious.”

“Not homemade,” he warned her.

“Oh, I wasn’t expecting...” She trailed off. “I know you wouldn’t have time for that.”

He wondered what she was thinking, and whether he should give her any kind of explanation. He was a single dad, with no mother in the picture. Well, she would work it out. He hated explaining.

She stood awkwardly, and he racked his brain for a way to make her feel more at ease. Saving both of them, Holly and Maddie bounced into the kitchen at that moment in their pony pj’s. “Is it ready yet?” Two voices with but a single thought.

“It will be, when you’ve laid the table. Mary Jane, these are my girls, Holly and Maddie.” Making the introduction, he saw them for a moment with a stranger’s eyes—a pair of dark-haired, skinny, energetic, big-eyed and heartbreakingly cute little peas in a pod, dressed in pink. “I got them in a two-for-one sale, as you can see.”

She laughed, seeming delighted by them, as most people were. The color in her cheeks grew pinker, and she bent and rested her palms on her thighs for a moment, so she could greet them at eye level. They were small for their age. “Hi, Maddie. Hi, Holly. I bet you were a bargain!”

They hadn’t been. They’d cost him a fortune in medical and legal costs over the past seven years, and he was still paying off his debts, but of course he wasn’t going to tell her that. The girls laughed at the idea that they’d been a bargain in a two-for-one sale, and he wasn’t going to tell them the truth about what they’d cost him, either.

Not yet.

Not until they were much older.

Not unless they asked.

They did ask, occasionally—a child’s version of the question. “Tell us again, Daddy. Why don’t we have a mommy?”

“Because she couldn’t take care of you.”

“Why couldn’t she take care of us?”

“Because she just couldn’t.” Because she’s a drug-addled, unrepentant mess, and her boyfriends are all dangerous. One of them put you in the hospital for a week, Maddie, and there was no way I was ever, ever letting her have either of you back after that. “And so we decided that I would take care of you on my own.”

Well, a series of judges decided. It had taken a while.

“Where is she, our mommy?”

“Far, far away.” In La La Land, and trust me you don’t want to go there.

“Is she sick? Is that why she can’t take care of us?” One time when they’d asked, he’d told them she was sick.

“Yes, she’s sick,” he had said in answer to this question ever since, because addiction on such a self-destructive level was a kind of sickness, wasn’t it?

“Isn’t she going to get better?”

“No, my sweethearts. She doesn’t want to get better. That’s the problem. If she wanted to, things might be different.”

“How could she not want to get better?”

This one defeated him, every time.

“We’ll have to wait until you’re older before I can explain all that, okay? It’s too hard to understand when you’re seven.”

Mary Jane would understand. Mary Jane might be shocked. He wasn’t going to tell her.

In the next room, at the dining table, the girls were counting pasta plates. “One for Daddy, one for Grandad, one for the lady.” A whispered consultation. They’d forgotten her name.

“Mary Jane,” he called out.

“One for Mary Jane,” Holly said.

“One for me,” said Maddie.

“And one for me,” Holly finished.

“I’m sorry, it’s going to be very hard for me to tell which one of them is which,” Mary Jane said.

“That’s okay. It’s hard for everyone, until they know them. There’s a trick, though. Maddie has a scar right at her hairline, and it makes her parting fall a slightly different way from Holly’s.”

“I’ll try to remember that!”

The ravioli had floated to the surface in its big pot of boiling water, and the pot was bubbling fiercely, about to overflow. He turned down the gas, spooned up a piece of ravioli and held it out for Mary Jane. “Want to see if this is done?”

She smiled a little hesitantly. “Okay, sure.” She stepped up to the spoon, which he held steady and level with her mouth. She blew on it, a strand of hair falling around her face and threatening to get in the way, and he realized this wasn’t what you did when you had a near-stranger to dinner, a grown woman of thirty-five, a ripe, pretty woman who’d already drawn your eye. You did not hold out a spoon of ravioli and invite her to test it. It was something he did with the girls.

And the girls didn’t blow on the spoon with such a full, kissable-looking mouth, shaped by the blowing into such a perfect kissable shape.

He veered his thoughts away from this dangerous observation so fast that if they’d been car tires, you would have heard them screeching.

But then, with insidious intent, the thoughts crept back again, against his will. Out of an old habit that he hadn’t fallen into for a while, he found himself assessing her desirability and availability as a bed partner. It was what guys did when they were players, and he’d been a player from his mid-teens until the age of twenty-six.

On both counts, Mary Jane scored a thumbs-up. She wasn’t his usual type—if he had a usual type, these days—but, as he’d noted before, she was attractive, in a quiet kind of way. She had a very nice body, trim yet curvy. And he was pretty sure he would be able to get her into bed if he tried, despite all those glaring, frozen looks she used to give him all the time in high school. There was an innocence about her, and something in her eyes. Heat and hunger. Wistfulness.

Do. Not. Go. There.

He was not looking for a quick hookup, or even a longer-term connection. He wasn’t looking for anything. He’d be crazy to, despite his bouts of loneliness. He was way more cautious than he used to be, and way too committed to the girls and their future. He had too much on his plate right now. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, or hurt himself, or confuse the girls, or worry Dad.

No. Just no.

“Um, it seems cooked to me,” she said.

He took a firmer hold on himself. Mary Jane’s mouth rounding itself to blow gently on pasta was just a mouth, not a disaster. “Good. I’ll drain it, then. Garlic bread’s in the oven, if you want to grab a hot mitt and take it to the table.” After the spoon-blowing incident, asking her to help with ferrying the food didn’t seem like such a big deal. She’d already helped herself quite cheerfully to juice, as he’d invited her to do. “Girls, call Grandad.”

Dad was probably out of the shower and freshly dressed by now. He still showered at around this time every day, even when he wasn’t washing off a day of engine grease. Dad’s lifelong habits, and Mom’s, had driven Joe nuts when he was in his teens. All that routine had seemed so boring.

He’d vowed he would shake this place as soon as he could and head for California, but by the time he’d graduated high school, Mom had gotten ill and her heart would have broken if he’d left. He’d been pretty egotistical and self-absorbed back then, but he had enough good Italian sense of family to override the ego when it came to Mom.

So he’d stayed on. He’d gotten an associate degree in motor maintenance to please his parents, “So you’ll have something to fall back on if the acting thing doesn’t work out.” Although, of course, he’d secretly vowed never to need a fallback plan.

He’d worked with Dad in the garage until a year after Mom’s death and then he’d finally gone to make his fortune in Hollywood when he was twenty-two. Dad had still had Joe’s three older brothers reasonably close by—Danny an accountant in Albany, John a paramedic in Burlington and Frank a lawyer in New York City.

Thirteen years later, his brothers were still doing those same jobs in those same cities, each of them with a family, and Dad was still showering before dinner, but now the routines and the habits and the settled lives seemed precious and meaningful and good, compared to the seven years of chaos and fear and heartache and anger and relentless work that Joe had just lived through.

If he could build something like this for himself and the girls, he would feel as if he’d struck gold. He’d just spent six years busting his gut to get through a California law degree part-time, while working to support himself and the girls, and he was taking the reputedly grueling New York state bar exam at the end of July. Having barely studied in high school, he now spent more hours at his desk in a single night—every night, after the girls had gone to bed—than he would have in a month twenty years ago.

Life really was a funny thing.

Mary Jane reappeared in the kitchen doorway, having deposited the garlic bread on the dining table as instructed. She stood a little awkwardly, looking as if she was waiting to be given another task, but there was nothing more for her to do. The girls had transported the salad and the grated cheese. Joe had the big blue ceramic pasta bowl in his hands. “Sit,” he told his guest. “We’re ready to eat.”

* * *

The word Mommy wasn’t spoken.

Mary Jane kept waiting for it. Surely she would have to hear it eventually, and the context it came in would answer some questions. So far, nothing.

The girls were absolutely adorable, and she could see the slight difference in Maddie’s hairline that Joe had mentioned. She studied it, as well as both girls’ faces, to make sure she didn’t get them mixed up in the future.

What future, though? This was one evening, not the start of something.

She couldn’t quite believe that she was sitting here like this, part of a three-generation family dinner at a cheerful table in a pretty room. She liked it too much, felt it warming the frozen, rusty parts of her heart in a way that she instinctively knew was dangerous.

Before coming into the house, she’d called Daisy to let her know what was happening, and Daisy had said to take her time and not worry about a thing. She could manage fine without the cream and raspberries and cinnamon. They were part of her breakfast plan, and she’d switch the menu around. “Relax!”

So Mary Jane was relaxing. Relaxing too much. Her headache had completely gone. The meal was delicious. Mr. Capelli...Art...was warm and fatherly and comfortable. “More pasta, Mary Jane. Go on, eat!” he’d told her, and he had been incredibly understanding about the disaster with the car, while Joe made the cutest dad.

I can’t believe I’m thinking this.

About Joe Capelli!

He teased his daughters into minding their table manners, with a look in his dark eyes that was a mix of long-suffering and wry humor. Once, after Holly had said something unconsciously funny, he exchanged a glance of shared amusement with Mary Jane across the top of two dark little heads, and she heated up all over, exactly the way she would have done in high school.

He’s gorgeous, he has these darling little girls, and he’s smiling at me!

The girls were adorable and also very chatty. Not to say exhausting. She learned their birthday, the names of the friends they’d left behind in California, the hair color of their former teacher and a whole list of their favorite foods. She discovered that they were working on a novel called Happy Horse and All His Friends. She heard that they didn’t like dolls or guns.

But they never mentioned their mother, and neither did Art or Joe, and it seemed a little strange. Halfway through the meal, when the girls paused for breath and another mouthful of ravioli, the two men asked her about Spruce Bay. They’d heard about the upgrading of the resort and wanted to know how that was going.

“Everything’s done, and we have the whole place up and running at full capacity,” she told them.

“So you’re filling up, on weekends?” Art asked, sounding hopeful about it.

“We’re filling up during the week as well, from now until Labor Day. Very pleased. Our website is really pulling people in. People can see how beautiful and fresh everything is after the remodel. The spa bath and solar heating for the pool has been a big hit. So have the new barbecue area and the expanded deck for the restaurant.”

“Hate to see a slow season, up here,” Art said. “So bad for the local economy. That’s good that the remodel has paid off. Helps all of us.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

Capelli Auto was indirectly as dependent on tourists as Spruce Bay, because if the people who ran the resorts and motels and restaurants weren’t making money, then they weren’t paying staff, and if staff weren’t getting paid then they would put off getting their cars fixed for as long as they could.

Ugh, but she didn’t like this train of thought, because it reminded her of her own slackness in ignoring the noise in her car. If she’d had it looked at sooner, she might not have needed the loaner car today, and if she hadn’t been driving the loaner car, she might not have rear-ended—

Change the subject, Mary Jane.

“Are you starting school here in September, girls?” she asked quickly.

They nodded. “But we’re not sure which school yet.”

“Bit of research to do, there,” Joe came in.

“And how about over the summer? What will you do? I bet you have all sorts of plans.”

“Pony camp,” they said in unison, at once. She couldn’t believe how often they did this—came out with the same phrase, in the same intonation, at exactly the same time.

“Pony camp! Wow, that’ll be great fun!”

“Well...” Joe came in again, sounding reluctant this time. “Pony camp is more aspiration than reality, at this stage. I don’t know if it’s practical.”

“Dadd-yyyy...!”

“I know. I get it. You’ve said. You really, really want to go to pony camp. But I don’t know what there is, around here. If there even is a pony camp. Maybe you could help me on that a little bit, Mary Jane. You probably need to answer guests’ questions on this stuff, right?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“So you’d know what’s out there. I know there are a couple of trail-riding places, but do they offer day camps?”

“There’s one that does, but in all honesty I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve sent guests there a couple of times and they’ve come back with complaints.” She paused, wondering if she should mention the idea she’d thought of. If she did, she would be creating a connection with Joe and his girls that it might be safer to stay away from. She said it all the same. “There is one place I’m thinking of that might work...”

For more than one reason, she wasn’t sure if she was doing the right thing. Penelope Beresford didn’t go in for advertising, but she still somehow managed to run an equestrian facility that was in high demand. She was British, a former Olympic rider and a highly regarded dressage and jumping coach, and had top-level riders coming to her regularly for intensive training. She also gave riding lessons to local people, and put on occasional two-week vacation day camps for children at her own convenience, seeming to fill them purely through word of mouth.

She didn’t offer accommodation for humans, just horses, so the visiting top-level riders usually stayed at the nearest vacation resort, which happened to be Spruce Bay. They were always very well looked after there.

Mary Jane had two of them staying in the resort’s biggest and best-equipped family-size housekeeping cottage right now, as it happened. They were a husband and wife team of professional eventing riders, they’d brought a whole string of their best horses to Penelope and would be here for a month. They’d also brought their two children, a six-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl and a nanny.

It was just possible that some kind of informal vacation day camp might be arranged out of all this, and it was also just possible that if Mary Jane pulled strings for Joe, on behalf of his girls, she might not feel quite so indebted to him and his father for the fact that she’d crashed their car today, while to punish her in return, they were giving her dinner.

Already, she felt drawn into their lives. Should she be holding back, instead?

“I’d have to ask a few questions before I’d have any details for you,” she said slowly. “Wouldn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Already done that, I’m afraid,” Joe mouthed at her on a drawl, because Holly and Maddie were looking at her as if stars shone out of her eyes.

Mary Jane winced, and mouthed back, “Sorry,” and they shared another look. His mouth tucked itself in at the corner, and the expression in his eyes was so complicated she couldn’t work it out at all but wanted to solve everything for him anyhow. Her self-control seemed to be lying in a melted pool at her feet, and there was no going back now.

She knew she was in serious trouble.

Serious, horrible, embarrassing trouble, in the space of a few hours.

Over “Cap” Capelli from high school, and two adorable seven-year-old girls.

Chapter Four

Joe dropped her back at Spruce Bay almost immediately after dinner. Mary Jane insisted on that. “I’m sure you have a lot to do, Joe.” He hadn’t let her help with cleaning up, and she’d had to content herself with rinsing off a few plates and putting them in the dishwasher.

He didn’t argue about dropping her home, and on the drive they talked about the car.

Cars.

Hers and the one belonging to Capelli Auto.

“I’m sorry we don’t have a second car to offer you,” he told her.

“I’m glad you don’t, because I wouldn’t take it. I’ll organize a rental. And I will cover the deductible on the insurance.”

“We’ll talk about that.”

“We’re talking about it now, and it’s decided.”

“Well, no, because it’s possible you have some bargaining power,” he said. “There might be something from you that I want, that I would be more than happy to exchange for the deductible on the insurance.”

Was he talking about—

“I mean,” he went on very quickly, “the pony camp thing.”

So, no. He wasn’t talking about her selling him her body. Just to be clear.

What is wrong with you, Mary Jane?

As if she didn’t already know.

“You gave me the impression that pony camp would be a special deal with the owner, is what I’m saying,” Joe explained. “So if you can help me organize that, put in a word, or arrange a meeting, or whatever it takes, then it’ll hugely help with the girls this summer, and you certainly won’t owe me for the car thing.”

“I’ll call Penelope tomorrow, and talk to the Richardsons about it, too.” She’d told Joe about them, and their kids and nanny.

“And call me as soon as you know if we can work something out?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry, I’m nagging you about this as much as the girls would, but at the moment Dad and I are running the garage and looking after the girls between us, and I can already see that it’s going to be too much for Dad.”

“Of course. They’re adorable, but full of energy.” It sounded inadequate. All she really knew about kids came from the ones who stayed at Spruce Bay. Some of those could be pretty obnoxious, and it was a testament to the yearning in her heart that she still wanted babies, lots of babies, even when she’d seen that they didn’t always stay cute for long.

Joe’s girls were definitely cute. What was this really about in her heart? The man or the girls? If they had a mother... If she was only away for a few days, and it was only by chance that she hadn’t come up in conversation...

Maybe this man and his family were completely out of bounds, and even if they weren’t...

I’m scaring myself, feeling like this so fast.

“He’ll be stubborn about it if I just try to send them off to some kind of commercial day care,” Joe was saying. “He doesn’t think that’s good enough. But a pony camp would be their dream come true, and after—” He stopped and muttered something under his breath. “You don’t need the detail.”

“No, it’s fine.” She would take all the detail he wanted to give her. She would listen with all her heart.

Not good. Very, very bad.

She waited to see if he would say more, and when he didn’t, her disappointment was yet another danger signal on a rapidly lengthening list. She wanted to know everything about him, and she wanted to hear it from him, in his dark, husk-and-syrup voice, and that was scary.

Crushy. Desperate. Something to beat herself up over, not to embrace.

They emerged from the tree-lined Spruce Bay entrance drive and reached the parking area in front of the office, where he halted, leaving the engine idling. “Thank you so much for everything today,” she told him, deliberately formal. “For the car, and coming to pick me up, and then dinner. If I can arrange the pony thing, it still won’t be nearly enough.”

“Fuggedaboutit,” he said, like a character in a mafia movie, and not for the first time she found herself wondering why he’d never succeeded as an actor, the way he’d once been so sure he would. He had the looks, the voice and more charisma than any woman could possibly want.

“I’ll call you about the pony thing as soon as I have some information,” she said.

“Great.”

“Right. Bye, then.”

She was so determined not to linger in the car that she scrambled out of it with embarrassing haste, and he drove off at once, with just one final wave. After he’d disappeared back into the trees, she stood there for too long, feeling dreamy and unsettled and full of longing and absolutely, completely furious with herself.

The furious part was pretty familiar, and she knew how to handle it. When your thoughts kept steering onto a track that you didn’t want, you just had to keep busy enough that they went away purely through being crowded out of existence.

She bustled through the office door and found Nickie fiddling with her manicure and talking on her phone, slouched back in the swivel chair with her knees drawn up and bumping the desk. “She wants to? Are you serious?” she was saying in teenager shriek.

So, not talking to a guest, then.

When she saw Mary Jane, she quickly ended the call and smartened up her body language, as if she thought she was about to get yelled at. It was almost more annoying than if she’d kept on talking to her friend, because it gave the impression that she considered Mary Jane to be a dragon of a boss.

“Busy?” Mary Jane asked lightly.

“Cabin 12 flooded their bathroom, and Room 4 couldn’t get their air-conditioning to turn on.”

“That’s probably because the air-conditioning couldn’t work out if it was supposed to be blowing hot air or cold,” Mary Jane drawled. The new reverse-cycle appliances installed during the re-fit could do both. Even though it was a little chilly out now, the cabins had been warmed by the sun most of the day. They should have been cozy but not too hot, and certainly not too cold.

“I know, right?” Nickie rolled her eyes and smiled, and Mary Jane didn’t feel like such a dragon anymore. “I actually had to ask them what they wanted it for, heating or cooling, because the room felt like the perfect temperature to me.”

“So you got it going?”

“We set it at seventy-five degrees and it decided to do some heating. When we get some real summer, they’ll probably want it set at sixty-two. Do you want me to clock off now?”

“Just stay for another five minutes while I run over to the restaurant and see how they’re doing over there. But unless there’s been a disaster you should be fine to go after that.”

“Thanks.” She smiled and looked at the time on her phone. “What time tomorrow?”

“Let’s say noon?”

The office phone rang at that moment and Nickie picked it up. “Spruce Bay Resort. This is Nickie speaking. How may I help you?”

Mary Jane went over to check in with Daisy, but service was winding down over there, and everything had gone smoothly. Daisy insisted she wasn’t required. With a team of staff who knew what they were doing, by this time, the restaurant ran almost independent of the rest of the resort. “Take a break, Mary Jane.”

“How about you?” Mary Jane suggested. “Don’t you want to get home to your husband? Put your feet up?”

Daisy dragged some steam-misted blond hair away from her pink cheeks. “I’m good. I’ll be out of here in half an hour.”

“Don’t know where you get your energy.”

Daisy grinned. “I’m told I should enjoy it while it lasts, because once the third trimester kicks in I’ll never ever have it again in my whole entire life.”

“Ooh, who have you been talking to?”

“A very wise woman in the waiting room at the doctor, who’s pregnant with number five.”

“Wow.” Mary Jane ignored the stupid pang of envy and regret that kicked at her stomach the way Daisy’s unborn baby would soon start kicking at hers.

That was going to be me. Expert mom; big, beautiful family; devoted and thoughtful parenting.

It wouldn’t have been every woman’s ambition or choice, but it had been hers, and it hadn’t happened.

Heading back toward the office after saying good-night to Daisy, she remembered the early days with Alex, twelve years ago, when she’d begun thinking about marriage. She’d been twenty-two years old when they got together, and twenty-three when she’d decided that he was The One.

She had thought that he would propose pretty soon—the relationship had felt serious to her, important and good and what she was looking for—and she would be married at twenty-four. Maybe wait a couple of years, then have a baby at twenty-six or twenty-seven. She would easily fit in six by the time she was in her late thirties. Six seemed like a good number, enough to fill an eight-seater minivan.

She’d seen herself as a mix of earth mother and soccer mom, the kind of mother that other women looked at with respect, with the kind of kids who were happy and well adjusted and passionate about the things they loved.

She’d thought that she would cook and bake, grow her own vegetables, make her home beautiful with hand-crafted pieces and lovingly restored antiques, take her kids to music lessons and sports, read to them every night. She’d seen wife, mother and homemaker as an important and interesting career that would absorb and fulfill and challenge her at every turn.

“I don’t know how you do it with that many!” everyone would have said. And she would have had some wise, earthy reply. “You just have to stay organized and keep your sense of humor.” Or, “I picked the right father for them. That was at least half of it.”

But of course Alex hadn’t been the right father. He hadn’t been the right anything.

He hadn’t proposed on schedule, and eventually she was the one who’d brought it up. “Alex, do you see us getting married anytime soon?”

He’d told her there was no hurry. Weren’t they happy the way they were? They had plenty of time, why not live a little before they got serious? And then he’d distracted her with shared travel plans for a trip to Cancún, which she’d interpreted as a sign of commitment.

A year later, when she’d turned twenty-six and had at one point a few years earlier thought she might already have been a mom by then, she’d tried again. What about kids? Did he want kids?

When the time was right, he’d told her. There was no hurry, was there? She had another seven or eight years before she had to start worrying about her biological clock, right? Why settle down now, when they were having so much fun?

Yes, but she would never be able to fit in six kids if she didn’t have the first of them until she was in her mid-thirties! It just wouldn’t work!

Of course she hadn’t shared this objection with Alex. She didn’t want to scare him off with talk of a big family. Maybe they didn’t need to have six, she’d decided. Four would do. Or even three, if he really felt strongly about it.

More time had passed. She was approaching thirty and they still weren’t formally engaged. Sometimes she’d wondered if he loved her at all, because he would get distant and distracted, but if she challenged him on it and they fought, he would draw her back in with a romantic gesture and an apology. Flowers, jewelry—he’d been very good at all those easy gestures.

But then a month away from her thirtieth birthday, they’d had a huge fight and before it could get to the gesture-and-apology phase, she’d hit him with a point-blank question. Were they getting married, or not?

Not.

She could still remember the words he’d used.

“Let’s be honest. It’s never really been headed in that direction, has it?” he’d said, all friendly and matter-of-fact about it, acting as if they’d always both been on the same page and she’d never thought it was a serious relationship, either. As if they’d never discussed it, or children, before. But they had! He’d fobbed her off, let her think a whole lot of things that weren’t true.

Lied to her.

She’d been so shocked. She’d told him it was over—had thrown the announcement in his face like a bucket of icy water, and then she’d waited for him to come crawling back. Waited six weeks, before she’d realized it wasn’t going to happen.

Less than a year later—and maybe this was the thing that had hurt the worst—she heard that he’d married someone else. She could so easily have gone stalkerish at that point, obsessively looking for evidence that Alex and his new bride had begun seeing each other while he was still involved with Mary Jane herself.

But she hadn’t done that, and this gave her some pride. She hadn’t done anything wrongheaded at all.

Once she’d known the relationship was really over, she’d been very firm with herself about moving on. She traveled twice every year, when Spruce Bay was closed for its off-season breaks. She kept herself fit and active, well-read and well-informed. She looked after her body and her mind. She worked to make Spruce Bay the best place it could be. She kept up her friendships, and a good relationship with her sisters and mother and father, now retired in South Carolina. She lived her life as fully as she could, even though it was totally different from the life she’d wanted and planned.

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