Come stay awhile at Brambleberry House, a place infused with acceptance, healing and heart—as only RaeAnne Thayne can imagine it.

His Second-Chance Family

Julia Blair spent many happy summers at Cannon Beach and fell hard for sweet local boy Will Garrett. Now the for-rent sign at Brambleberry House seems like a wonderful omen for widowed Julia and her young children. She craves the warmth she once felt in Brambleberry House—and in Will’s arms. But before he can embrace his first love, he’ll have to lay down the burden of the past and open his heart again.

A Soldier’s Secret

Struggling to rebuild her business and her life, Anna Galvez knows she’s fortunate to have inherited Brambleberry House as her rock-solid base. When she finds a handsome new tenant in injured army pilot Harry Maxwell, Anna thinks her luck—in love, at least—might be changing. Until the lieutenant’s story begins to unravel...

Praise for New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne

“Romance, vivid characters and a wonderful story...really, who could ask for more?”

—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author, on Blackberry Summer

“This quirky, funny, warmhearted romance will draw readers in and keep them enthralled to the last romantic page.”

—Library Journal on Christmas in Snowflake Canyon

“A sometimes heartbreaking tale of love and relationships in a small Colorado town... Poignant and sweet.”

—Publishers Weekly on Christmas in Snowflake Canyon

“Plenty of tenderness and Colorado sunshine flavor this pleasant escape.”

—Publishers Weekly on Woodrose Mountain

“Thayne, once again, delivers a heartfelt story of a caring community and a caring romance between adults who have triumphed over tragedies.”

—Booklist on Woodrose Mountain

“Thayne pens another winner... Her main characters are strong and three-dimensional, with enough heat between them to burn the pages.”

—RT Book Reviews on Currant Creek Valley

“RaeAnne has a knack for capturing those emotions that come from the heart.”

—RT Book Reviews

Brambleberry House

His Second-Chance Family

A Soldier’s Secret

RaeAnne Thayne

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Table of Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

His Second-Chance Family

Dedication

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

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A Soldier’s Secret

Dedication

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

Extract

Copyright

His Second-Chance Family

RaeAnne Thayne

For the staff and donors of The Sunshine Foundation, for five days of unimaginable joy. Sometimes wishes do come true!

CHAPTER ONE

AS SIGNS FROM heaven went, this one seemed fairly prosaic.

No choir of angels, no booming voice from above or anything like that. It was simply a hand-lettered placard shoved into the seagrass in front of the massive, ornate Victorian that had drifted through her memory for most of her life.

Apartment For Rent.

Julia stared at the sign with growing excitement. It seemed impossible, a miracle. That this house, of all places, would be available for rent just as she was looking for a temporary home seemed just the encouragement her doubting heart needed to reaffirm her decision to pack up her twins and take a new teaching job in Cannon Beach.

Not even to herself had she truly admitted how worried she was that she’d made a terrible mistake moving here, leaving everything familiar and heading into the unknown.

Seeing that sign in front of Brambleberry House seemed an answer to prayer, a confirmation that this was where she and her little family were supposed to be.

“Cool house!” Maddie exclaimed softly, gazing up in awe at the three stories of Queen Anne Victorian, with its elaborate trim, cupolas and weathered shake roof. “It looks like a gingerbread house!”

Julia squeezed her daughter’s hand, certain Maddie looked a little healthier today in the bracing sea air of the Oregon Coast.

“Cool dog!” her twin, Simon, yelled. The words were barely out of his mouth when a giant red blur leaped over the low wrought-iron fence surrounding the house and wriggled around them with glee, as if he’d been waiting years just for them to walk down the beach.

The dog licked Simon’s face and headbutted his stomach like an old friend. Julia braced herself to push him away if he got too rough with Maddie, but she needn’t have worried. As if guided by some sixth sense, the dog stopped his wild gyrations and waited docilely for Maddie to reach out a tentative hand and pet him. Maddie giggled, a sound that was priceless as all the sea glass in the world to Julia.

“I think he likes me,” she whispered.

“I think so, too, sweetheart.” Julia smiled and tucked a strand of Maddie’s fine short hair behind her ear.

“Do you really know the lady who lives here?” Maddie asked, while Simon was busy wrestling the dog in the sand.

“I used to, a long, long time ago,” Julia answered. “She was my very best friend.”

Her heart warmed as she remembered Abigail Dandridge and her unfailing kindness to a lonely little girl. Her mind filled with memories of admiring her vast doll collection, of pruning the rose hedge along the fence with her, of shared confidences and tea parties and sand dollar hunts along the beach.

“Like Jenna back home is my best friend?” Maddie asked.

“That’s right.”

Every summer of her childhood, Brambleberry House became a haven of serenity and peace for her. Her family rented the same cottage just down the beach each July. It should have been a time of rest and enjoyment, but her parents couldn’t stop fighting even on vacation.

Whenever she managed to escape to Abigail and Brambleberry House, though, Julia didn’t have to listen to their arguments, didn’t have to see her mother’s tears or her father’s obvious impatience at the enforced holiday, his wandering eye.

Her fifteenth summer was the last time she’d been here. Her parents finally divorced, much to her and her older brother Charlie’s relief, and they never returned to Cannon Beach. But over the years, she had used the image of this house, with its soaring gables and turrets, and the peace she had known here to help center her during difficult times.

Through her parents’ bitter divorce, through her own separation from Kevin and worse. Much worse.

“Is she still your best friend?” Maddie asked.

“I haven’t seen Miss Abigail for many, many years,” she said. “But you know, I don’t think I realized until just this moment how very much I’ve missed her.”

She should never have let so much time pass before coming back to Cannon Beach. She had let their friendship slip away, too busy being a confused and rebellious teenager caught in the middle of the endless drama between her parents. And then had come college and marriage and family.

Perhaps now that she was back, they could find that friendship once more. She couldn’t wait to find out.

She opened the wrought-iron gate and headed up the walkway feeling as if she were on the verge of something oddly portentous.

She rang the doorbell and heard it echo through the house. Anticipation zinged through her as she waited, wondering what she would possibly say to Abigail after all these years. Would her lovely, wrinkled features match Julia’s memory?

No one answered after several moments, even after she rang the doorbell a second time. She stood on the porch, wondering if she ought to leave a note with their hotel and her cell phone number, but it seemed impersonal, somehow, after all these years.

They would just have to check back, she decided. She headed back down the stairs and started for the gate again just as she heard the whine of a power tool from behind the house.

The dog, who looked like a mix between an Irish setter and a golden retriever, barked and headed toward the sound, pausing at the corner of the house, head cocked, as if waiting for them to come along with him.

After a wary moment, she followed, Maddie and Simon close on her heels.

The dog led them to the backyard, where Julia found a couple of sawhorses set up and a man with brown hair and broad shoulders running a circular saw through a board.

She watched for a moment, waiting for their presence to attract his attention, but he didn’t look up from his work.

“Hello,” she called out. When he still didn’t respond, she moved closer so she would be in his field of vision and waved.

“Excuse me!”

Finally, he shut off the saw and pulled his safety goggles off, setting them atop his head.

“Yeah?” he said.

She squinted and looked closer at him. He looked familiar. A hint of a memory danced across her subconscious and she was so busy trying to place him that it took her a moment to respond.

“I’m sorry to disturb you. I rang the doorbell but I guess you couldn’t hear me back here with the power tools.”

“Guess not.”

He spoke tersely, as if impatient to return to work, and Julia could feel herself growing flustered. She had braced herself to see Abigail, not some solemn-eyed construction worker in a sexy tool belt.

“I...right. Um, I’m looking for Abigail Dandridge.”

There was an awkward pause and she thought she saw something flicker in his blue eyes.

“Are you a friend of hers?” he asked, his voice not quite as abrupt as it had been before.

“I used to be, a long time ago. Can you tell me when she’ll be back? I don’t mind waiting.”

The dog barked, only with none of the exuberance he had shown a few moments ago, almost more of a whine than a bark. He plopped onto the grass and dipped his chin to his front paws, his eyes suddenly morose.

The man gazed at the dog’s curious behavior for a moment. A muscle tightened in his jaw then he looked back at Julia. “Abigail died in April. Heart attack in her sleep. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

Julia couldn’t help her instinctive cry of distress. Even through her sudden surge of grief, she sensed when Maddie stepped closer and slipped a small, frail hand in hers.

Julia drew a breath, then another. “I...see,” she mumbled.

Just one more loss in a long, unrelenting string, she thought. But this one seemed to pierce her heart like jagged driftwood.

It was silly, really, when she thought about it. Abigail hadn’t been a presence in her life for sixteen years, but suddenly the loss of her seemed overwhelming.

She swallowed hard, struggling for composure. Her friend was gone, but her house was still here, solid and reassuring, weathering this storm as it had others for generations.

Somehow it seemed more important than ever that she bring her children here.

“I see,” she repeated, more briskly now, though she thought she saw a surprising understanding in the deep blue of the man’s eyes, so disconcertingly familiar. She knew him. She knew she did.

“I suppose I should talk to you, then. The sign out front says there’s an apartment for rent. How many bedrooms does it have?”

He gave her a long look before turning away to pick up another board and carry it to the saw. “Three bedrooms, two of them on the small side. Kitchen’s been redone in the last few months and the electricity’s been upgraded but the bathroom plumbing’s still in pretty rough shape.”

“I don’t care about that, as long as everything works okay. Three bedrooms is exactly the size my children and I need. Is it still available?”

“Can’t say.”

She pursed her lips. “Why not?”

He shrugged. “I don’t own the place. I live a few houses down the beach. I’m just doing some repairs for the owners.”

Something about what he said jarred loose a flood of memories and she stared at him more closely. Suddenly everything clicked in and she gasped, stunned she hadn’t realized his identity the instant she had clapped eyes on him.

“Will? Will Garrett?”

He peered at her. “Do I know you?”

She managed a smile. “Probably not. It’s been years.”

She held out a hand, her pulse suddenly wild and erratic, as it had always been around him.

“Julia Blair. You knew me when I was Julia Hudson. My parents rented a cottage between your house and Brambleberry House every summer of my childhood until I was fifteen. I used to follow you and my older brother, Charlie, around everywhere.”

Will Garrett. She’d forgotten so much about those summers, but never him. She had wondered whether she would see him, had wondered about his life and where he might end up. She never expected to find him standing in front of her on her first full day in town.

“It’s been years!” she repeated. “I can’t believe you’re still here.”

* * *

AT HER WORDS, it took Will all of about two seconds to remember her. When he did, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it before. He had yearned for Julia Hudson that summer as only a relatively innocent sixteen-year-old boy can ache. He had dreamed of her green eyes and her dimples and her soft, burgeoning curves.

She had been his first real love and had haunted his dreams.

She had promised to keep in touch but she hadn’t called or answered any of his letters and he remembered how his teenage heart had been shattered. But by the time school started a month later, he’d been so busy with football practice and school and working for his dad’s carpentry business on Saturdays that he hadn’t really had much time to wallow in his heartbreak.

Julia looked the same—the same smile, the same auburn hair, the same appealing dimples—while he felt as if he had aged a hundred years.

He could barely remember those innocent, carefree days when he had been certain the world was his for the taking, that he could achieve anything if only he worked hard enough for it.

She was waiting for a response, he realized, still holding her hand outstretched in pleased welcome. He held up his hands in their leather work gloves as an excuse not to touch her. After an awkward moment, she dropped her arms to her side, though the smile remained fixed on her lovely features.

“I can’t believe you’re still here in Cannon Beach,” she repeated. “How wonderful that you’ve stayed all these years! I remember how you loved it here.”

He wouldn’t call it wonderful. There were days he felt like some kind of prehistoric iceman, frozen forever in place. He had wondered for some time if he ought to pick up and leave, go anywhere, just as long as it wasn’t here.

Someone with his carpentry skills and experience could find work just about any place. He had thought about it long and hard, especially at night when the memories overwhelmed him and the emptiness seemed to ring through his house but he couldn’t seem to work past the inertia to make himself leave.

“So how have you been?” Julia asked. “What about family? Are you married? Any kids?”

Okay, he wasn’t a prehistoric iceman. He was pretty certain they couldn’t bleed and bleed and bleed.

He set his jaw and picked up the oak board he was shaping for a new window frame in one of the third-floor bedrooms of Brambleberry House.

“You’ll have to talk to Sage Benedetto or Anna Galvez about the apartment,” he said tersely. “They’re the new owners. They should be back this evening.”

He didn’t quite go so far as to fire up the circular saw but it was a clear dismissal, rude as hell. He had to hope she got the message that he wasn’t interested in any merry little trips down memory lane.

She gave him a long, measuring look while the girl beside her edged closer.

After a moment, she offered a smile that was cool and polite but still managed to scorch his conscience. “I’ll do that. Thank you. It’s good to see you again, Will.”

He nodded tersely. This time, he did turn on the circular saw, though he was aware of every move she and her children made in the next few moments. He knew just when they walked around the house with Abigail’s clever Irish Setter mix Conan following on their heels.

He gave up any pretense of working when he saw them head across the lane out front, then head down the beach. She still walked with grace and poise, her chin up as if ready to take on the world, just as she had when she was fifteen years old.

And her kids. That curious boy and the fragile-looking girl with the huge, luminescent blue eyes. Remembering those eyes, he had to set down the board and press a hand to the dull ache in his chest, though he knew from two years’ experience nothing would ease it.

Booze could dull it for a moment but not nearly long enough. When the alcohol wore off, everything rushed back, worse than before.

He was still watching their slow, playful progress down the beach when Conan returned to the backyard. The dog barked once and gave him a look Will could only describe as peeved. He planted his haunches in front of the worktable and glared at him.

Abigail would have given him exactly the same look for treating an old friend with such rudeness.

“Yeah, I was a jerk,” he muttered. “She caught me off guard, that’s all. I wasn’t exactly prepared for a ghost from the past to show up out of the blue this afternoon.”

The dog barked again and Will wondered, not for the first time, what went on inside his furry head. Conan had a weird way of looking at everybody as if he knew exactly what they might be thinking and he managed to communicate whole diatribes with only a bark and a certain expression in his doleful eyes.

Abigail had loved the dog. For that reason alone, Will would have tolerated him since his neighbor had been one of his favorite people on earth. But Conan had also showed an uncanny knack over the last two years for knowing just when Will was at low ebb.

More than once, there had been times when he had been out on the beach wondering if it would be easier just to walk out into the icy embrace of the tide than to survive another second of this unrelenting grief.

No matter the time of day or night, Conan would somehow always show up, lean against Will’s legs until the despair eased, and then would follow him home before returning to Brambleberry House and Abigail.

He sighed now as the dog continued to wordlessly reprimand him. “What do you want me to do? Go after her?”

Conan barked and Will shook his head. “No way. Forget it.”

He should go after her, at least to apologize. He had been unforgivably rude. The hell of it was, he didn’t really know why. He wasn’t cold by nature. Through the last two years, he had tried to hold to the hard-fought philosophy that just because his insides had been ripped apart and because sometimes the grief and pain seemed to crush the life out of him, he hadn’t automatically been handed a free pass to hurt others.

Lashing out at others around him did nothing to ease his own pain so he made it a point to be polite to just about everybody.

Sure, there were random moments when his bleakness slipped through. At times, Sage and Anna and other friends had been upset at him when he pushed away their efforts to comfort him. More than a few times, truth be told. But he figured it was better to be by himself during those dark moments than to do as he’d just done, lash out simply because he didn’t know how else to cope.

He had no excuse for treating her poorly. He had just seen her there looking so lovely and bright with her energetic son and her pretty little daughter and every muscle inside him had cramped in pain.

The children set it off. He could see that now. The girl had even looked a little like Cara—same coloring, anyway, though Cara had been chubby and round where Julia’s daughter looked as if she might blow away in anything more than a two-knot wind.

It hadn’t only been the children, though. He had seen Julia standing there in a shaft of sunlight and for a moment, long-dormant feelings had stirred inside him that he wanted to stay dead and buried like the rest of his life.

No matter how screwed up he was, he had no business being rude to her and her children. Like it or not, he would have to apologize to her, especially if Anna and Sage rented her the apartment.

He lived three houses away and spent a considerable amount of time at Brambleberry House, both because he was busy with various remodeling projects and because he considered the new owners—Abigail’s heirs—his friends.

He didn’t want Julia Hudson Blair or her children here at Brambleberry House. If he were honest with himself, he could admit that he would have preferred if she had stayed a long-buried memory.

But she hadn’t. She was back in Cannon Beach with her children, looking to rent an apartment at Brambleberry House, so apparently she planned to stay at least awhile.

Chances were good he would bump into her again, so he was going to have to figure out a way to apologize.

He watched their shapes grow smaller and smaller as they walked down the beach toward town and he rubbed the ache in his chest, wondering what it would take to convince Sage and Anna to find a different tenant.

CHAPTER TWO

“WILL WE GET to see inside the pretty house this time, Mommy?”

Julia lifted her gaze from the road for only an instant to glance in the rearview mirror of her little Toyota SUV. Even from here, she could see the excitement in Maddie’s eyes and she couldn’t help but smile in return at her daughter.

“That’s the plan,” she answered, turning her attention back to the road as she drove past a spectacular hotel set away from the road. Someday when she was independently wealthy with unlimited leisure time, she wanted to stay at The Sea Urchin, one of the most exclusive boutique hotels on the coast.

“I talked to one of the owners of the house an hour ago,” Julia continued, “and she invited us to walk through and see if the apartment will work for us.”

“I hope it does,” Simon said. “I really liked that cool dog.”

“I’m not sure the dog lives there,” she answered. “He might belong to the man we talked to this morning. Will Garrett. He doesn’t live there, he was just doing some work on the house.”

“I’m glad he doesn’t live there,” Maddie said in her whisper-soft voice. “He was kind of cranky.”

Julia agreed, though she didn’t say as much to her children. Will had been terse, bordering on rude, and for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why. What had she done? She hadn’t seen him in sixteen years. It seemed ridiculous to assume he might be angry, after all these years, simply because she hadn’t written to him as she had promised.

They had been friends of a sort—and more than friends for a few glorious weeks one summer. She remembered moonlight bonfires and holding hands in the movies and stealing kisses on the beach.

She would have assumed their shared past warranted at least a little politeness but apparently he didn’t agree. The Will Garrett she remembered had been far different from the surly stranger they met that afternoon. She couldn’t help wondering if he treated everyone that way or if she received special treatment.

“He was simply busy,” she said now to her children. “We interrupted his work and I think he was eager to get back to it. We grown-ups can sometimes be impatient.”

“I remember,” Simon said. “Dad was like that sometimes.”

The mention of Kevin took her by surprise. Neither twin referred to their father very often anymore. He had died more than two years ago and had been a distant presence for some time before that, and they had all walked what felt like a million miles since then.

Brambleberry House suddenly came into view, rising above the fringy pines and spruce trees. She slowed, savoring the sight of the spectacular Victorian mansion silhouetted against the salmon-colored sky, with the murky blue sea below.

That familiar sense of homecoming washed over her again as she pulled into the pebbled driveway. She wanted to live here with her children. To wake up in the morning with that view of the sea out her window and the smell of roses drifting up from the gardens and the solid comfort of those walls around her.

As she pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, she gave a silent prayer that she and the twins would click with the new owners. The one she’d spoken with earlier—Sage Benedetto—had seemed cordial when she invited Julia and her children to take a look at the apartment, but Julia was almost afraid to hope.

“Mom, look!” Simon exclaimed. “There’s the dog! Does that mean he lives here?”

As she opened her door to climb out, she saw the big shaggy red dog waiting by the wrought-iron gates, almost as if he somehow knew they were on their way.

“I don’t know. We’ll have to see.”

“Oh, I hope so.” Maddie pushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes. She looked fragile and pale. Though Julia would have liked to walk from their hotel downtown to enjoy the spectacular views of Cannon Beach at sunset, she had been afraid Maddie wouldn’t have the strength for another long hike down the beach and back.

Now she was grateful she had heeded her motherly instincts that seemed to have become superacute since Maddie’s illness.

More than anything—more than she wanted to live in this house, more than she wanted this move to work out, more than she wanted to breathe—she wanted her daughter to be healthy and strong.

“I hope we can live here,” Maddie said. “I really like that dog.”

Julia hugged her daughter and helped her out of her seat belt. Maddie slipped a hand in hers while Simon took his sister’s other hand. Together, the three of them walked through the gate, where the one-dog welcoming committee awaited them.

The dog greeted Simon with the same enthusiasm he had shown that morning, wagging his tail fiercely and nudging Simon’s hand with his head. After a moment of attention from her son, the dog turned to Maddie. Julia went on full mother-bear alert, again ready to step in if necessary, but the dog showed the same uncanny gentleness to Maddie.

He simply planted his haunches on the sidewalk in front of her, waiting as still as one of those cheap plaster dog statues for Maddie to reach out with a giggle and pet his head.

Weird, she thought, but she didn’t have time to figure it out before the front door opened. A woman wearing shorts and a brightly colored tank top stepped out onto the porch. She looked to be in her late twenties and was extraordinarily lovely in an exotic kind of way, with blonde wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail and an olive complexion that spoke of a Mediterranean heritage.

She walked toward them with a loose-hipped gait and a warm smile.

“Hi!” Her voice held an open friendliness and Julia instinctively responded to it. She could feel the tension in her shoulders relax a little as the other woman held out a hand.

“I’m Sage Benedetto. You must be the Blairs.”

She shook it. “Yes. I’m Julia and these are my children, Simon and Maddie.”

Sage dropped her hand and turned to the twins. “Hey kids. Great to meet you! How old are you? Let me guess. Sixteen?”

They both giggled. “No!” Simon exclaimed. “We’re seven.”

“Seven? Both of you?”

“We’re twins.” Maddie said in her soft voice.

“Twins? No kidding? Cool! I’ve always wanted to have a twin. You ever dress up in each others’ clothes and try to trick your mom?”

“No!” Maddie said with another giggle.

“We’re not identical twins,” Simon said with a roll of his eyes. “We’re fraternal.”

“Of course you are. Silly me. ’Cause one of you is a boy and one is a girl, right?”

Sage obviously knew her way around children, Julia thought as she listened to their exchange. That was definitely a good sign. She had observed during her career as an elementary school teacher that many adults didn’t really know how to talk to kids. They either tried too hard to be buddies or treated them with obvious condescension. Sage managed to find the perfect middle ground.

“I see you’ve met Conan,” Sage said, scratching the big dog under the chin.

“Is he your dog?” Simon asked.

She smiled at the animal with obvious affection. “I guess you could say that. Or I’m his human. Either way, we kind of look out for each other, don’t we, bud?”

Oddly, Julia could swear the dog grinned.

“Thank you again for agreeing to show the apartment to us tonight,” she said.

Sage turned her smile to Julia. “No problem. I’m sorry we weren’t here when you came by the first time. You said on the telephone that you knew Abigail.”

That pang of loss pinched at her again as she imagined Abigail out here in the garden, her big floppy straw hat and her gardening gloves and the tray of lemonade always waiting on the porch.

“Years ago,” she answered, then was compelled to elaborate.

“Every summer my family rented a house near here. The year I was ten, my brother and I were running around on the beach and I cut my foot on a broken shell. Abigail heard me crying and came down to help. She brought me back up to the house, fixed me a cookie and doctored me up. We were fast friends after that. Every year, I would run up here the minute we pulled into the driveway of our cottage. Abigail always seemed so happy to see me and we would get along as if I had never left.”

The other woman smiled, though there was an edge of sorrow to it. Julia wondered again how Sage had ended up as one of the two new owners of Brambleberry House after Abigail’s death.

“Sounds just like Abigail,” Sage said. “She made friends with everyone she met.”

“I’ve been terrible about keeping in contact with her,” Julia admitted with chagrin as they walked into the entryway of the house, with its sweeping staircase and polished honey oak trim. “I was so sorry to hear about her death—more sorry than I can say that I let so much time go by without calling her. I suppose some foolish part of me just assumed she would always be here. Like the ocean and the seastacks.”

The dog—Conan—whined a little, almost as if he understood their conversation, though Julia knew that was impossible.

“I think we all felt that way,” Sage said. “It’s been four months and it still doesn’t seem real.”

“Will said she died of a heart attack in her sleep.”

“That’s right. I find some comfort in knowing that if she could have chosen her exit scene, that’s exactly how she would have wanted to go. The doctors said she probably slept right through it.”

Sage paused and gave her a considering kind of look. “Do you know Will, then?”

Julia could feel color climb her cheekbones. How foolish could she be to blush over a teenage crush on Will Garrett, when the man he had become obviously wanted nothing to do with her?

“Knew him,” she corrected. “It all seems so long ago. The cottage we rented every year was next door to his. We socialized a little with his family and he and my older brother, Charlie, were friends. I usually tried to find a way to tag along, to their great annoyance.”

She had a sudden memory of mountain biking through the mists and primordial green of Ecola National Park, then cooling off in the frigid surf of Indian Beach, the gulls wheeling overhead and the ocean song a sweet accompaniment.

Will had kissed her for the first time there, while her brother was busy body surfing through the baby breakers and not paying them any attention. It had just been a quick, furtive brush of his lips, but she could suddenly remember with vivid clarity how it had warmed her until she forgot all about the icy swells.

“He was my first love,” she confessed.

Oh no. Had she really said that out loud? She wanted to snatch the words back but they hung between them. Sage turned around, sudden speculation sparking in her exotic, tilted eyes, and Julia could feel herself blushing harder.

“Is that right?”

“A long time ago,” she answered, though she was certain she had said those words about a million times already. So much for making a good impression. She was stuttering and blushing and acting like an idiot over a man who barely remembered her.

To her relief, Sage didn’t pursue it as they reached the second floor of the big house.

“This is the apartment we’re renting. It’s been vacant most of the time in the five years I’ve lived here. Once in a while Abigail opened it up on a short-term basis to various people in need of a comfortable place to crash for a while. Since Anna and I inherited Brambleberry House, we’ve kept Will busy fixing it up so we could rent out the space.”

Will again. Couldn’t she escape him for three seconds? “Convenient that he lives close,” she said.

“It’s more convenient because he’s the best carpenter around. With all the work that needs to be done to Brambleberry House, we could hire him as our resident carpenter. Good thing for us he likes to stay busy.”

She remembered again the pain in his eyes. She wanted to ask Sage the reason for it, but she knew that would be far too presumptuous.

Anyway, she wasn’t here to talk about Will Garrett. She was trying to find a clean, comfortable place for her children.

When Sage opened the door to the apartment, Julia felt a little thrill of anticipation.

“Ready to take a look?” Sage asked.

“Absolutely.” She walked through the door with the oddest sense of homecoming.

The apartment met all her expectations and more. Much, much more. She walked from room to room with a growing excitement. The kitchen was small but had new appliances and what looked like new cabinets stained a lovely cherry color. Each of the three bedrooms had fresh coats of paint. Though two of them were quite small, nearly every room had a breathtaking view of the ocean.

“It’s beautiful,” she exclaimed as she stood in the large living room, with its wide windows on two sides that overlooked the sea.

“Will did a good job, didn’t he?” Sage said.

Before Julia could answer, the children came into the room, followed by the dog.

“Wow. This place is so cool!” Simon exclaimed.

“I like it, too,” Maddie said. “It feels friendly.”

“How can a house feel friendly?” her brother scoffed. “It’s just walls and a roof and stuff.”

Sage didn’t seem to mind Maddie’s whimsy. Her features softened and she laid a hand on Maddie’s hair with a gentleness that warmed Julia’s heart.

“I think you’re absolutely right, Miss Maddie,” she answered. “I’ve always thought Brambleberry House was just about the friendliest house I’ve ever been lucky enough to live in.”

Maddie smiled back and Julia could see a bond forming between the two of them, just as the children already seemed to have a connection with Conan.

“When can we move in?” Simon asked.

Julia winced at her son’s bluntness. “We’ve still got some details to work out,” she said quickly, stepping in to avoid Sage feeling any sense of obligation to answer before she was completely comfortable with the idea of them as tenants. “Nothing’s settled yet. Why don’t the two of you play with Conan for a few moments while I talk with Ms. Benedetto?”

He seemed satisfied with that and headed to the window seat, followed closely by his sister and Sage’s friendly dog.

Her children were remarkably adept at entertaining themselves. Little wonder, she thought with that echo of sadness. They had spent three years developing patience during Maddie’s endless string of appointments and procedures.

When they seemed happily settled petting the dog, she turned back to Sage. “I’m sorry about that. I understand that you need to check references and everything and talk to the co-owner before you make a decision. I’m definitely interested, at least through the school year.”

Sage opened her mouth to answer but before she could speak, the dog gave a sudden sharp bark, his ears on alert. He rushed for the open door to the landing and she could hear his claws scrabbling on the steps just an instant before the front door opened downstairs.

Sage didn’t even blink at the dog’s eager behavior. “Oh, good. That’s Anna Galvez. I was hoping she’d be home before you left so she could have a chance to meet you. Anna took over By-the-Wind, Abigail’s old book and giftshop in town.”

“I remember the place. I spent many wonderful rainy afternoons curled up in one of the easy chairs with a book.”

“Haven’t we all?” Sage said with a smile, then walked out to the stairs to call down to the other woman.

A moment later, a woman with dark hair and petite, lovely features walked up the stairs, her hand on Conan’s fur.

She greeted Julia with a smile slightly more reserved than Sage’s warm friendliness. “Hello.”

Her smile warmed when she greeted the curious twins. “Hey, there,” she said.

Sage performed a quick introduction. “Julia and her twins are moving to Cannon Beach from Boise. Julia’s going to be teaching fifth grade at the elementary school and she’s looking for an apartment.”

“Lovely to meet you. Welcome to Oregon!”

“Thank you,” Julia said. “I used to spend summers near here when I was a child.”

“She’s one of Abigail’s lost sheep finally come home,” Sage said with a smile that quickly turned mischievous. “Oh, you’ll be interested to know that Will was her first love.”

To Julia’s immense relief, Sage added the latter in an undertone too low for the children to hear, even if they’d been paying attention. Still, she could feel herself blush again. She really had to stop doing that every time Will Garrett’s name was mentioned.

“I was fifteen. Another lifetime ago. We barely recognized each other when I bumped into him earlier today outside. He seems...very different than he was at sixteen.”

Sage’s teasing smile turned sober. “He has his reasons,” she said softly.

She and Anna gave each other a quick look loaded with layers of subtext that completely escaped Julia.

“Thank you for showing me the apartment. I have to tell you, from what I see, it would be perfect for us. It’s exactly what I’m looking for, with room for the children to play, incredible views and within walking distance to the school. But I certainly understand that you need to check references and credit history before renting it to me. Feel free to talk to the principal of the elementary school who hired me, and any of the other references I gave you in our phone conversation. If you need anything else, you have my cell number and the number of the hotel where we’re staying.”

“Or we could always talk to Will and see what he remembers from when you were fifteen.”

Julia flashed a quick look to Sage and was relieved to find the other woman smiling again. She had no idea what Will Garrett remembered about her. Nothing pleasant, obviously, or he probably would have shown a little more warmth when she encountered him earlier.

“Will may not be the best character reference. If I remember correctly, I still owe him an ice-cream cone. He bet me I couldn’t split a geoduck without using my hands. I tried for days but the summer ended before I could pay him back.”

“Good thing you’re sticking around,” Anna said. “You can pay back your debt now. We’ve still got ice cream.”

“And geoducks,” Sage said. “Maybe you’re more agile than you used to be.”

She laughed, liking both women immensely. As she gathered the children and headed down the stairs to her car, Julia could only wish for a little more agility. Then she would cross her toes and her fingers that Sage Benedetto and Anna Galvez would let her and her twins rent their vacant apartment.

She couldn’t remember when she had wanted anything so much.

* * *

“SO WHAT DO you think?” Sage asked as she and Anna stood at the window watching the schoolteacher strap her children into the backseat of her little SUV.

She looked like she had the process down to a science, Sage thought, something she still struggled with when she drove Chloe anywhere. She could never figure out how to tighten the darn seat belt over the booster chair with her stepdaughter-to-be. She ought to have Julia give her lessons.

“No idea,” Anna replied. “I barely talked to her for five minutes. But she seems nice enough.”

“She belongs here.”

Anna snorted. “And you figured that out in one quick fifteen-minute meeting?”

“Not at all.” Sage grinned. She couldn’t help herself. “I figured it out in the first thirty seconds.”

“We still have to check her references. I’m sorry if this offends you, but I can’t go on karma alone on this one.”

“I know. But I’m sure they’ll check out.” Sage couldn’t have said how she knew, she just did. Somehow she was certain Abigail would have wanted Julia and her twins to live at Brambleberry House.

“Did you see her blush when Will’s name came up?”

Anna shook her head. “Leave it alone, Sage. You engaged women think you have to match up the entire universe.”

“Not the entire universe. Just the people I love, like Will.”

And you, she added silently. She thought of the loneliness in Anna’s eyes, the tiny shadow of sadness she was certain Anna never guessed showed on her expression.

Their neighbor wasn’t the only one who deserved to be happy, but she decided she—and Abigail—could only focus on one thing at a time. “Will has had so much pain in his life. Wouldn’t you love to see him smile again?”

“Of course. But Julia herself said she hadn’t seen him in years and they barely recognized each other. And we don’t even know the woman. She could be married.”

“Widowed. She told me that on the phone. Two years, the same as Will.”

Compassion flickered in Anna’s brown eyes. “Those poor children, to lose their father at such a young age.” She paused. “That doesn’t mean whatever scheme you’re hatching has any chance of working.”

“I know. But it’s worth a shot. Anyway, Conan likes them and that’s the important thing, isn’t it, bud?”

The dog barked, giving his uncanny grin. As far as Sage was concerned, references or not, that settled the matter.

CHAPTER THREE

SAGE AND ANNA apparently had a new tenant.

Will slowed his pickup down as he passed Brambleberry House coming from the south. He couldn’t miss the U-Haul trailer hulking in the driveway and he could see Sage heading into the house, her arms stacked high with boxes. Anna was loading her arms with a few more while Julia’s children played on the grass not far away with Conan. Even from here he could see the dog’s glee at having new playmates.

Damn. This is the price he paid for his inaction. He should have stopped by a day or two earlier and at least tried to dissuade Anna and Sage from taking her on as a tenant.

It probably wouldn’t have done any good, he acknowledged. Both of Abigail’s heirs could be as stubborn as crooked nails when they had their minds made up about something. Still, he should have at least made the attempt.

But what could he have said, really, that wouldn’t have made him sound like a raving lunatic?

Yeah, she seems nice enough and I sure was crazy about her when I was sixteen. But I don’t want her around anymore because I don’t like being reminded I’m still alive.

He sighed and turned off his truck. He wanted nothing more than to drive past the house and hide out at his place down the beach until she moved on but there was no way on earth his blasted conscience would let him leave three women and two kids to do all that heavy lifting on their own.

He climbed out of his pickup and headed to the trailer. He reached it just as the top box on Anna’s stack started to slide.

He lunged for it and plucked the wobbly top box just before it would have hit the ground, earning a surprised look from Anna over the next-highest box.

“Wow! Good catch,” she said, a smile lifting her studious features. “Lucky you were here.”

“Rule of thumb—your stack of boxes probably shouldn’t exceed your own height.”

She smiled. “Good advice. I’m afraid I can get a little impatient sometimes.”

“Is that it? I thought you just like to bite off more than you can chew.”

She made a wry face at him. “That, too. How did you know we needed help?”

He shrugged. “I was driving past and saw your leaning tower and thought you might be able to use another set of arms.”

“We’ve got plenty of arms. We just need some arms with muscle. Thanks for stopping.”

“Glad to help.” It was a blatant lie but he decided she didn’t need to know that.

She turned and headed up the stairs and he grabbed several boxes from inside the truck and followed her, trying to ignore the curious mingle of dread and anticipation in his gut.

He didn’t want to see Julia again. He had already dreamed about her the last two nights in a row. More contact would only wedge her more firmly into his head.

At the same time, part of him—maybe the part that was still sixteen years old somewhere deep inside—couldn’t help wondering how the years might have changed her.

Anna was breathing hard by the time they reached the middle floor of the house, where the door to the apartment had been propped open with a small stack of books.

“I could have taken another one of your boxes,” he said to Anna.

She made a face. “Show-off. Are you even working up a sweat?”

“I’m sweating on the inside,” he answered, which was nothing less than the truth.

The source of his trepidation spoke to Anna an instant later.

“Thanks so much,” Julia Blair said in her low, sexy voice. “Those go in Simon’s bedroom.”

Will lowered his boxes so he could see over them and found her standing in the middle of the living room directing traffic. She wore capris and a stretchy yellow T-shirt. With her hair pulled back into a ponytail, she looked fresh and beautiful and not much older than she’d been that last summer together.

He didn’t miss the shock in her eyes when she spied him behind the boxes. “Will! What are you doing here?”

He shrugged, uncomfortable at her obvious shock. Why shouldn’t he be here helping? It was the neighborly thing to do. Had he really been such a complete jerk the other day that she find his small gesture of assistance now so stunning?

“Do these go into the same room?”

She looked flustered, her cheeks slightly pink. “Um, no. Those are my things. They go in my bedroom, the big one overlooking the ocean.”

He headed in the direction she pointed, noting again no sign of a Mr. Blair. On some instinctive level, he had subconsciously picked up the fact that she wore no wedding ring when he had seen her the other day and she had spoken only of herself and her children needing an apartment. Was she widowed, divorced, or never married?

He only wondered out of mild curiosity about the road she might have traveled in the years since he had seen her. Or at least that’s what he told himself.

In her bedroom, he found stacks of boxes, some of them open and overflowing with books. The queen-size bed was already made up with a cozy-looking comforter in soft blue tones, with piles of pillows against the headboard.

An image flashed in his head of her tousled and welcoming, her auburn hair spread out on those pillows and a soft, aroused smile teasing the edges of those lovely features.

He dropped the boxes so abruptly he barely missed his toe.

Whoa. Where the hell did that come from?

He had no business thinking about her at all, forget about in some kind of sultry, welcoming pose.

When he returned to the living room, her cheeks were still flushed and she didn’t meet his gaze, as if she were embarrassed about something. It was a damn good thing she couldn’t know the inappropriate direction of his thoughts.

“I’m sorry.” She fidgeted with a stack of books in her hand. “I probably sounded terribly ungracious when you first came in. I just didn’t expect you to show up and start hauling my boxes inside.”

“No problem.”

He started to head toward the door, but she apparently wasn’t content with his short response. “Why, again, are you helping me move in?”

He shrugged. What did it matter? He was here, wasn’t he? Did they really have to analyze the reasons why? “I was heading home after a job south of here and saw your U-Haul out front. I figured you could use a hand.”

“How...neighborly of you.”

“Around here we look out for each other.” It was nothing less than the truth.

“I remember.” She smiled a little. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come back to Cannon Beach. I remembered that sense of community with great affection.”

She set the stack of books down on the coffee table, then turned a searching gaze toward him. “Forgive me, Will, but...for some reason I had the impression you weren’t exactly overjoyed to see me the other day.”

And he thought he’d been so careful at hiding his reaction. He shifted his weight, not sure how to answer. Any apology would only lead to explanations he was eager to avoid at all costs.

“You took me by surprise, that’s all,” he finally said.

“A mysterious stranger emerging from your distant past?”

“Something like that. Sixteen seems like a long, long time ago.”

She nodded solemnly but said nothing. After an awkward moment, he headed for the door again.

“Anyway, I’m sorry if I seemed less than welcoming.” It needed to be said, he decided. Apparently, she was going to be his neighbor and he disliked the idea of this uneasiness around her continuing. That didn’t make the words any easier to get out. “You caught me at a bad moment, that’s all. But I’m sorry if I gave you the impression I didn’t want you here. It was nothing personal.”

“I must say, that’s a relief to hear.”

She smiled, warm and sincere, and for just an instant he was blinded by it, remembering the surge of his blood every time he had been anywhere close to her that last summer.

Before he could make his brain work again, Sage walked up carrying one bulky box.

“What do you have in these, for Pete’s sake? Did you pack along every brick from your old place?”

Julia laughed, a light, happy sound that stirred the hair on the back of his neck.

“Not bricks, but close, I’m afraid. Books. I left a lot in storage back in Boise but I couldn’t bear to leave them all behind.”

So that hadn’t changed about her. When she was a kid, she always seemed to have her nose in a book. He and her brother used to tease her unmercifully about being a bookworm.

That last summer, he had been relentless in his efforts to drag her attention away from whatever book she was reading so she would finally notice him....

He dragged his mind away from the past and the dumb, self-absorbed jerk he’d been. He didn’t want to remember those times. What was the damn point? That stupid, eager, infatuated kid was gone, buried under the weight of the years and pain that had piled up since then.

Instead, he left Sage and Julia to talk about books and headed back down the sweeping Brambleberry House stairs. On the way, he passed Anna heading back up, carrying a suitcase in each hand. He tried to take them from her but she shook him off.

“I’ve got these. There are some bulkier things in the U-Haul you could bring up, though.”

“Sure,” he answered.

In the entryway on the ground floor, he heard music coming from inside Anna’s apartment. Through the open doorway, he caught a glimpse of her television set where a Disney DVD was just starting up.

Julia’s twins must have finished playing and come inside. He spotted Julia’s boy on the floor in front of the TV, his arm slung across Conan’s back. Both of them sensed Will’s presence and looked up. He started to greet them but the boy put a finger to his mouth and pointed to Abigail’s favorite armchair.

Will followed his gaze and found the girl—Maddie—curled up there, fast asleep.

She looked small and fragile, with her too-pale skin and thin wrists. There was something going on with her, but he was pretty sure he was better off not knowing.

He waved to the boy, then headed down the porch steps to the waiting U-Haul.

It was nearly empty now except for perhaps a half-dozen more boxes, a finely crafted Mission-style rocking chair and something way in the back, a bulky-looking item wrapped in an old blanket that had been secured with twine.

He went for the rocking chair first. Might as well get the tough stuff out of the way. It was harder to carry than he expected—wide and solid, made of solid oak—but more awkward than really heavy.

He made it without any trouble up the porch steps and was trying to squeeze it through the narrow front door without bunging up the doorframe moldings when Sage came down the stairs.

“Okay, Superman. Let me help you with that.”

“I can handle it.”

“Only because of your freakish strength, maybe.”

He felt his mouth quirk. Sage always managed to remind him he still had the ability to smile.

“I had my can of spinach just an hour ago so I think I’ve got this covered. There are a few more boxes in the U-Haul. Those ought to keep you busy and out of trouble.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and he smiled at the childish gesture, with a sudden, profound gratitude for the friendship of those few people around him who had sustained him through the wrenching pain of the last two years.

“Which is it? Are you Popeye or Superman?”

“Take your pick.”

“Or just a stubborn male, like the rest of your gender?” She lifted the front end of the chair. “Even Popeye and Superman need help once in awhile. Besides, we wouldn’t want you to throw your back out. Then how would all our work get done around here?”

He knew when he was defeated. With a sigh, he picked up the other end. They had another minor tussle about who should walk backward up the stairs but he won that one simply by turning around and starting up.

She didn’t let him gloat for long. “I understand you know our new tenant.”

His gaze flashed to hers. Uh-oh. Here comes the inquisition, he thought. “Knew. Past tense. A long time ago.”

The words were becoming like a mantra since she showed up again in Cannon Beach. A long time ago. But not nearly long enough. Like a riptide, the memories just seemed to keep grabbing him out of nowhere and sucking him under.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Sage pressed as they hit the halfway mark on the stairs. “And those kids of hers are adorable. I can’t wait until Eben and Chloe finish up their trip to Europe in a few weeks. Chloe’s going to be over the moon at having two new friends.”

“How are the wedding plans?” he asked at her mention of her fiancé and his eight-year-old daughter. The question was aimed more at diverting her attention than out of much genuine interest to hear about her upcoming nuptials, but it seemed to work.

Sage made a face. “You know I’m not good at that kind of thing. If I had my way, I would happy with something simple on the beach, just Eben and me and Chloe and the preacher.”

“I guess when you marry a gazillionaire hotel magnate, sometimes you have to make sacrifices.”

“It’s still going to be small, just a few friends at the ceremony then a reception later at the Sea Urchin. I’m leaving all the details to Jade and Stanley Wu.”

“Smart woman.”

She went on about wedding plans and he listened with half an ear.

In a million years, he never would have expected a hippie-chick like Sage to fall for a California businessman like Eben Spencer but somehow they seemed to fit together.

Sage was more at peace than he’d ever known her, settled in a way he couldn’t explain.

She was one of his closest friends and had been since she moved to town five years ago and found herself immediately drawn into Abigail’s orbit. He loved her as a little sister and he knew she deserved whatever joy she could find.

He wanted to be happy for her—and most of the time he was—but every once in a while, seeing the love and happiness that seemed to surround her and Eben when they were together was like a slow, relentless trickle of acid on an open wound.

Despite knowing Julia was inside, he was relieved as hell when they reached the top of the stairs and turned into the apartment.

“Oh, my Stickley! We bought that when I was pregnant with the twins. I know the apartment is furnished but I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Thank you so much for carrying that heavy thing all that way! That goes right here by the window so I can sit in it at night and watch the moonlight shining on the ocean.”

He set it down, his mind on the rocking chair he had made Robin when she was pregnant with Cara. It was still sitting in the nursery along with the toddler bed he had made, gathering dust.

He really ought to do something with the furniture. Sage would probably know somebody who could use it....

Not today, he thought abruptly. He wasn’t ready for that yet.

He turned on his heel and headed back down the stairs to retrieve that mysterious blanket-wrapped item. When he reached the U-Haul, he stood for a moment studying it, trying to figure out what it might be—and how best to carry it up the Brambleberry House stairs—when the enticing scent of cherry blossoms swirled around him.

“It’s a dollhouse.” Julia spoke beside him in a low voice and he automatically squared his shoulders, though what he was bracing for, he wasn’t quite sure.

“My father made it for me years ago. My...late husband tried to fix it up a little for Maddie but I’m afraid it’s still falling apart. I really hope it survived the trip.”

So she was a widow. They had that in common, then. He cleared his throat. “Should we take the blanket off?”

She shrugged, which he took for assent. He unwrapped the cord and heard a crunching kind of thud inside. Uh-oh. Not a good sign. With a careful look at her and a growing sense of trepidation, he pulled the blanket away and winced as Julia gasped.

Despite her obvious efforts to protect the dollhouse, the piece hadn’t traveled well. The construction looked flimsy to begin with and the roof had collapsed.

One entire support wall had come loose as well and the whole thing looked like it was ready to implode.

“I’m sorry,” he said, though the words seemed grossly inadequate.

“It’s not your fault. I was afraid it wouldn’t survive the trip. Oh, this is going to break Maddie’s heart. She loved that little house.”

“So did you,” he guessed.

She nodded. “For a lot of reasons.” She tilted her head, studying the wreckage. “You’re the carpentry expert. I don’t suppose there’s any way I can fix this, is there?”

He gazed down at her, at the fading rays of the sun that caught gold strands in her hair, at the sorrow marring those lovely features for a lost treasure.

He gave an inward groan. Dammit, he didn’t want to do this. But he was such a sucker for a woman in distress. How could he just walk away?

He cleared his throat. “If you want, I could take a look at it. See what I can do.”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask that of you.”

“You didn’t ask,” he said gruffly.

She sent him a swift look. “No. I didn’t.”

“I’m kind of slammed with projects right now. It might take me a while to get to it. And even then, I can’t make any guarantees. That’s some major damage there. You might be better just starting over.”

She forced a smile, though he could see the sadness lingering in her eyes. Her father had made it for her, she had said. He didn’t remember much about her father from their summers in Cannon Beach, mostly that the man always seemed impatient and abrupt.

“I can’t make any promises,” he repeated. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

“Oh, that would be wonderful. Thank you so much, Will.”

Together, they gathered up the shattered pieces of the dollhouse and carried them to his truck, where he set them carefully in the back between his toolbox and ladder.

“I’m happy to pay you for your time and trouble.”

As if he would ever accept her money. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s see if I can fix it first.”

She nodded and looked as if she wanted to say something more. To his vast relief, after a moment, she closed her mouth, then returned to the U-Haul for the last few boxes.

CHAPTER FOUR

BETWEEN THE TWO of them, they were able to carry all but a few of the remaining boxes from the U-Haul up the stairs, where they found Sage and Julia pulling books out of boxes and placing them on shelves.

“You’re all so wonderful to help me,” Julia said, gratitude coursing through her as she smiled at all three of them. “I have to tell you, I never expected such a warm welcome. I thought it would be weeks before I would even know a soul in Cannon Beach besides Abigail. I haven’t even started teaching yet but I feel as if I have instant friends.”

Sage smiled. “We’re thrilled to have you and the twins here. And I think Abigail would be, too. Don’t you think, Will?”

He set down the boxes. “Sure. She always loved kids.”

“She was nothing but a big kid herself. Remember how she used to sit out on the porch swing for hours with Cara, swinging and telling stories and singing.”

“I remember,” he said, his voice rough.

Color flooded Sage’s features suddenly. “Oh, Will. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “Don’t, Sage. It’s okay. I’d better get the last load of boxes.”

He turned and headed down the stairs, leaving behind only the echo of his workboots hitting the wooden steps. Julia turned her confused gaze to Anna and Sage and found them both watching after Will with identical expressions of sadness in their eyes.

“I missed something, obviously,” she said softly.

Sage gave Anna a helpless look and the other woman shrugged.

“She’ll find out sooner or later,” Anna said. “She might as well hear it from us.”

“You’re right,” Sage said. “It just still hurts so much to talk about the whole thing.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Julia said quickly. “I’m sorry if I’ve wandered into things that are none of my business.”

Sage glanced down the stairs as if checking to see if Will was returning. When she was certain he was still outside, she turned back, her voice pitched low. “Will had a daughter. She would have been a couple years younger than your twins. Cara. That’s who I was talking about. Abigail adored her. We all did. She was the cutest little thing you’ve ever seen, just full of energy, with big blue eyes, brown curls and dimples. She was full of sugar, our Cara.”

Had a daughter. Not has. An ache blossomed in her chest and she knew she didn’t want to hear any more.

But she had learned many lessons over the last few years—one of the earliest was that information was empowering, even if the gaining of it was a process often drenched in pain.

“What happened?” she forced herself to ask.

Sage shook her head, her face inexpressibly sad. Anna squeezed her arm and picked up the rest of the story.

“Cara was killed along with Will’s wife, Robin, two years ago.” Though Anna spoke in her usual no-nonsense tone, Julia could hear the pain threading through her words.

“They were crossing the street downtown in the middle of the afternoon when they were hit by a drunk tourist in a motorhome,” she went on. “Robin died instantly but Cara hung on for two weeks. We all thought—hoped—she was going to pull through but she caught an infection in the hospital in Portland and her little body was too weak and battered to fight it.”

She wanted to cry, just sit right there in the middle of the floor and weep for him. More than that, she wanted to race down the stairs and hug her own precious darlings to her.

“Oh, poor Will. He must have been shattered.”

“We all were,” Sage said. “It was like a light went out of all of us. Will used to be so lighthearted. Like a big tease of an older brother. It’s been more than two years since Robin and Cara died and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him genuinely smile at something since then.”

The ache inside her stretched and tugged and her eyes burned with tears for the teenage boy with the mischievous eyes.

Sage touched her arm. “I’m so glad you’re here now.”

“Me? Why?”

“Well, you’ve lost someone, too. You understand, in a way the rest of us can’t. I’m sure it would help Will to talk to someone who’s experienced some of those same emotions.”

Julia barely contained her wince, feeling like the world’s biggest fraud.

“Grief is such a solitary, individual thing,” she said after an awkward moment. “No one walks the same journey.”

Sage smiled and pressed a cheek to Julia’s. “I know. But I’m still glad you’re here, and I’m sure Will is, too.”

Julia was saved from having to come up with an answer to that when she again heard his footsteps on the stairs. A moment later, he came in, muscles bulging beneath the cotton of his shirt as he carried in a trio of boxes.

He had erased any trace of emotion from his features, any sign at all that he contained any emotions at all. Finding out about his wife and daughter explained so much about him. The hardness, the cynicism. The pain in his eyes when he looked at Maddie.

She had a wild urge to take the boxes from him, slip her arms around his waist and hold him until everything was all right again.

“This is the last of it. Where do these go?”

Her words tangled in her throat and she had to clear her throat before she could speak. “The top one belongs in my bedroom. The others are Simon’s.”

With an abrupt nod, he headed first to her room and then to the one down the hall where Simon slept.

He returned to the living room just as the doorbell downstairs rang through the house.

“Hey, Mom!” Simon yelled up the stairs an instant later. “The pizza guy’s here!”

Conan started barking in accompaniment and Julia rolled her eyes at the sudden cacophony of sound. “Are you sure about this? The house was so quiet before we showed up. If you want that quiet again, you’d better speak now while I’ve still got the U-Haul.”

Sage shook her head with a laugh. “No way. I’m not lugging those books back down the stairs. You’re stuck here for a while.”

Right now, she couldn’t think of anywhere she would rather be. Julia flashed a quick smile to the other two women and Will, grabbed her purse, and headed down the stairs to pay for the pizza.

Simon stood at the door holding on to Conan’s collar as the dog wriggled with excitement, his tail wagging a mile a minute.

Her son giggled. “I think he really likes pizza, Mom.”

“I guess. Maybe you had better take him into Anna’s apartment so he doesn’t attack the pizza driver.”

With effort, he wrangled the dog through the door and closed the door behind him. Finally, Julia opened the door and found a skinny young man with his cap on backward and his arms full of pizza boxes.

She quickly paid him for the pizza—adding in a hefty tip. She closed the door behind him and backed into the entry, her arms full, and nearly collided with a solid male.

Strong arms came around her to keep her upright.

“Oh,” she exclaimed to Will. “I didn’t hear you come down the stairs.”

“You were talking to the driver,” he answered. He quickly released her—much to her regret. She knew she shouldn’t have enjoyed that brief moment of contact, but it had been so very long...

She couldn’t help noticing the boy she had known now had hard strength in his very grown-up muscles.

“I thought you said the trailer was empty,” she said with some confusion as he headed for the door.

“It is. You’re done here so I’m heading home.”

“You can’t leave!” she exclaimed.

He raised an eyebrow. “I can’t?”

She held out the boxes in her arms. “You’ve got to stay for pizza. I ordered way too much for three women and two children.”

“Don’t forget Conan,” he pointed out. “He’s crazy about pizza, even though all that cheese is lousy for him.”

“Knowing my kids, I’m sure he’ll be able to sneak far more than is good for him.”

The scent of him reached her, spicy and male and far more enticing than any pizza smells. “I still have too much. Please stay.”

He gazed at the door with a look almost of desperation in his eyes. But when he turned back, she thought he might be weakening.

“Please, Will,” she pressed.

He opened his mouth to answer but before he could, the door to Abigail’s apartment opened and Maddie peeked her head out, looking tousled and sleepy.

“Can we come out now?” she asked.

“As long as the dog’s not going to knock me down to get to the Canadian bacon.”

At Maddie’s giggle, Julia saw a spasm of pain flicker across Will’s features and knew the battle was lost.

“I really can’t stay.” He reached for the doorknob. “Thanks anyway for the invitation, but I’ve got a lot of work to do at home.”

She couldn’t push him more, not with that shadow of pain clouding his blue eyes. Surrendering to the inevitable, she simply nodded. “You still need to eat. Take some home with you.”

She could see the objections forming on his expression and decided not to take no for an answer. Will Garrett didn’t know stubborn until he came up against her.

“What’s your pleasure? Pepperoni or Hawaiian? I’d offer you the vegetarian but I think Sage has dibs on that one.”

“It’s not necessary, really.”

“It is to me,” she said firmly. “You just spent forty-five minutes helping me haul boxes up. You have to let me repay you somehow. Here, I hope you still like pepperoni and olive.”

His eyes widened that she would remember such a detail. She couldn’t have explained why—it was just one of those arcane details that stuck in her head. Several times that last summer, they’d gone to Mountain Mike’s Pizza in town with her brother and Will always had picked the same thing.

“Maddie, can you hold this for a second?”

She gave the box marked pepperoni to her daughter, then with one hand she opened it and pulled out half the pizza, which she stuck on top of the Hawaiian.

He looked as if he wanted to object, but he said nothing when she handed him the box with the remaining half a pizza in it.

“Here you go. You should have enough for dinner tonight and breakfast in the morning as well. Consider it a tiny way to say thank you for all your hard work.”

He shook his head but to her vast relief, he didn’t hand the pizza back to her.

“Mom, I can’t hold him anymore!” Simon said from behind the door. “He’s starving and so am I!”

“You’d better get everyone upstairs for pizza,” Will said.

“Right. Good night, then.”

She wanted to say more—much more—but with a rambunctious dog and two hungry children clamoring for her attention, she had to be content with that.

* * *

BLASTED STUBBORN WOMAN.

Will sat on his deck watching the lights of Cannon Beach flicker on the water as he ate his third piece of pizza.

He had to admit, even lukewarm, it tasted delicious—probably a fair sight better than the peanut butter sandwich he would have scrounged for his meal.

He didn’t order pizza very often since half of it usually went to waste before he could get to the leftovers so this was a nice change from TV dinners and fast-food hamburgers.

He really needed to shoot for a healthier diet. Sage was always after him to get more vegetables and fewer preservatives into his diet. He tried but he’d never been a big one for cooking in the first place. He could grill steaks and burgers and the occasional chicken breast but he usually fell short at coming up with something to go alongside the entree.

He fell short in a lot of areas. He sighed, listening to the low rumble of the sea. He spent a lot of his free time puttering around in his dad’s shop or sitting out here watching the waves, no matter what the weather. He just hated the emptiness inside the house.

He ought to move, he thought, as he did just about every night at this same time when the silence settled over him with like a scratchy, smothering wool blanket.

He ought to just pick up and make a new start somewhere. Especially now that Julia Hudson Blair had climbed out of the depths of his memories and taken up residence just a few hundred yards away.

She knew.

Sometime during the course of the evening, Sage or Anna must have told her about the accident. He wasn’t quite sure how he was so certain, but he had seen a deep compassion in the green of her eyes, a sorrow that hadn’t been there earlier.

He washed the pizza down with a swallow of Sam Adams—the one bottle he allowed himself each night.

He knew it shouldn’t bother him so much that she knew. Wasn’t like it was some big secret. She would find out sooner or later, he supposed.

He just hated that first shock of pity when people first found out—though he supposed when it came down to it, the familiar sadness from friends like Sage and Anna wasn’t much easier.

Somehow seeing that first spurt of pity in Julia’s eyes made it all seem more real, more raw.

Her life hadn’t been so easy. She was a widow, so she must know a thing or two about loss and loneliness. That didn’t make him any more eager to have her around—or her kids.

He shouldn’t have made a big deal out of the whole thing. He should have just sucked it up and stayed for pizza with her and Sage and Anna. Instead, his kneejerk reaction had been to flee and he had given into it, something very unlike him.

He sighed and took another swallow of beer. From here, he could see her bedroom light. A dark shape moved across the window and he eased back into the shadows of his empty house.

Why was he making such a big deal about this? Julia meant nothing to him. Less than nothing. He hadn’t thought about her in years. Yeah, years ago he had been crazy about her when he was just a stupid, starry-eyed kid. He had dreamed about her all that last summer, when she came back to Cannon Beach without her braces and with curves in all the right places.

First love could be an intensely powerful thing for a sixteen-year-old boy. When she left Cannon Beach, his dreams of a long-distance relationship were quickly dashed when she didn’t write to him as she had promised. He had tried to call the phone number she’d given him and left several messages that were never returned.

He was heartbroken for a while but he’d gotten over it. By spring, when he’d taken Robin Cramer to the prom, he had completely forgotten about Julia Hudson and her big green eyes.

Life had taught him that a tiny little nick in his heart left by a heedless fifteen-year-old girl was nothing at all to the pain of having huge, jagged chunks of his soul ripped away.

Now, sixteen years later, Julia was nothing to him. He just needed to shake this weird feeling that the careful order of the life he had painstakingly managed to piece together in the last two years had just been tossed out to sea.

He could think of no earthly reason he shouldn’t be able to treat her and her children with politeness, at least.

He couldn’t avoid interacting with Julia, for a dozen reasons. Beyond the minor little fact that she lived three houses down, he was still working on renovating several of the Brambleberry House rooms. He couldn’t avoid her and he sure as hell couldn’t run away like a coward every time he saw her kids.

He looked up at Brambleberry House again and his gaze automatically went to the second-floor window. A shape moved across again and a moment later the light went out and somehow Will felt more alone than ever.

* * *

“THANK YOU BOTH again for your help today.” Julia smiled at Sage and Anna across the table in her new apartment as they finished off the pizza. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

Anna shook her head. “We only helped you with the easy part. Now you have to figure out where to put everything.”

“We have dishes in the kitchen and sheets on the beds. Beyond that, everything else can wait until the morning.”

“Looks like some of us need to find that path there sooner than others,” Sage murmured, gesturing toward Maddie.

“Not me,” Maddie instantly protested, but Julia could clearly see she was drooping tonight, with her elbow propped on the table and her head resting on her fist.

Even with her short nap, Maddie still looked tired. Julia sighed. Some days dragged harder than others on Maddie’s stamina. They had spent a busy day making all the arrangements to move into Brambleberry House. Maddie had helped carry some of her own things to her bedroom and had delighted in putting her toys and clothes away herself.

With all the craziness of moving in, Julia hadn’t been as diligent as usual about making sure Maddie didn’t overextend herself and now it looked as if she had reached the limit of her endurance.

“Time for bed, sweetie. Let’s get your meds.”

“I’m not ready for bed,” she protested, sending a pleading look to Anna and Sage, as if they could offer a reprieve. “I want to stay up and help move in.”

“I’m tuckered myself,” Julia said. “I’ll leave all the fun stuff for tomorrow when we’re all rested, okay?”

Maddie sighed with a quiet resignation that never failed to break her heart. She caught herself giving in to the sorrow and quickly shunted it away. Her daughter was still here. She was a miracle and Julia could never allow herself to forget that.

Before she brought in any other boxes, she had made sure to put Maddie’s pill regimen away in a cabinet by the kitchen sink. She poured a glass of water and handed them to her. With the ease of long, grim practice, Maddie downed the half-dozen pills in two swallows, then finished the water to flush down the pills.

Because her daughter seemed particularly tired, Julia helped her into her pajamas then did a quick set of vitals. Everything was within normal ranges for Maddie so Julia pushed away her lingering worry.

“Good night, sweetie,” she said after a quick story and kiss. “Your first sleep in the new house!”

“I like this place,” Maddie said sleepily as Julia pulled the nightgown over her thin shoulders.

“I like it, too. It feels like home, doesn’t it?”

Maddie nodded. “And the lady is nice.”

Julia smiled. “Which one? Sage or Anna? I think they’re both pretty nice.”

Maddie shook her head but her eyes drooped closed before she could answer.

Julia watched her sleep for a moment, marveling again at the lessons in courage and strength and grace her daughter had taught her these last few years.

A miracle, she thought again. As she stood watching over her, she felt the oddest sensation, almost like featherlight fingers touching her cheek.

Weird, she thought. Sage and Anna had warned her Brambleberry House was a typical drafty old house. She would have to do her best to seal up any cracks in Maddie’s room.

When she returned to the other room, she found only Simon, curled up in the one corner of the couch not covered in boxes. He had a book in one hand and was petting Conan absently with the other.

What a blessing her son loved to read. Books and his Game Boy had sustained him through many long, boring doctor appointments.

“Did Sage and Anna go downstairs?” she asked.

“I think they’re still in the kitchen,” Simon answered without looking up from his book.

She heard low, musical laughter before she reached the kitchen. For a moment, she stood in the doorway watching them as they unloaded her grandmother’s china into the built-in cabinet.

Here was another blessing. She was overflowing with them. She had come back to Cannon Beach with only a teaching position and her hope that everything would work out. Now she had this great apartment overlooking the sea and, more importantly, two unexpected new friends who were already becoming dear to her.

She didn’t think she made a sound but Sage suddenly sensed her presence. She glanced toward her, her exotic tilted eyes lighting in welcome.

“Our girl is all settled for the night?”

Julia nodded. “It was a hectic day. She wore herself out.”

“Is she all right?” Anna asked, her features tight with concern.

“Yes. She’s fine. She just doesn’t have the stamina she used to have.” She paused, deciding it was time to reveal everything. “It’s one of the long-term side effects of her bone marrow transplant.”

“Bone marrow transplant?” Anna exclaimed, her eyes wide with a shock mirrored on Sage’s features.

Julia sighed. “Yes. And a round of radiation and two rounds of chemotherapy. I probably should have told you this earlier but Maddie is in remission from acute lymphocytic leukemia.”

CHAPTER FIVE

SAYING THE WORDS aloud always left her feeling vaguely queasy, as if she were the one who had endured months of painful treatments, shots, blood draws, the works.

She found it quite a lowering realization that Maddie had faced her cancer ordeal with far more courage than Julia had been able to muster as her mother.

“Oh, Julia.” Sage stepped forward and wrapped her into a spontaneous hug. “I’m so sorry you’ve all had to go through this.”

“It’s been a pretty bumpy road,” she admitted. “But as I said, she’s in remission and she’s doing well. Much better since the bone marrow transplant. Simon was the donor. We were blessed that they were a perfect match.”

“You’ve had to go through this all on your own?” Anna’s dark eyes looked huge and sad.

She knew Anna was referring to Kevin’s death and the timing of it. She decided she wasn’t quite ready to delve into those explanations just yet so she chose to evade the question.

“I had a strong support network in Boise,” she said instead. “Good friends, my brother and his wife, my co-workers at the elementary school there. They all think I’m crazy to move away.”

“Why did you?” Anna asked.

“We were all ready for a change. A new start. Three months ago, Maddie’s oncologist took a new job at the children’s hospital in Portland. Dr. Lee had been such a support and comfort to us and when she moved, it seemed like the perfect time for us to venture back out in the world.”

She sometimes felt as if their lives had been on hold for three years. Between Maddie’s diagnosis, then Kevin’s death, she and her children had endured far too much.

They needed laughter and joy and the peace she had always found by the ocean.

She smiled at the two other women. “I have to tell you both, I was still wondering if I had made a terrible mistake leaving behind our friends and the safe cushion of support we had in Boise, until we saw the for-rent sign out front of Brambleberry House. It seemed like a miracle that we might have the chance to live in the very house I had always loved so much when I was a little girl, the house where I had always found peace. I took that sign as an omen that everything would be okay.”

“We’re so glad you found us,” Anna said.

“You belong here,” Sage added. She squeezed Julia’s fingers with one hand and reached for Anna’s hand with the other, linking them all together and Julia had to fight back tears, overwhelmed by their easy acceptance of her.

She realized she felt happier standing in this warm kitchen with these women than she could remember being in a long, long time.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you both.”

“You smell that?” Sage demanded after a moment.

Anna rolled her eyes. “Cut it out, Sage.”

“Smell what?” Julia asked.

“Freesia,” Sage answered. “You smelled it, too, didn’t you?”

“I thought it was coming from the open window.”

Sage shook her head. “Nope. As much as she loved it, Abigail could never get any freesia bulbs to survive in her garden. Our microclimate is just not conducive to them.”

“I hope you’re not squeamish about ghosts,” Anna said after a long sigh. “Sage insists Abigail is still here at Brambleberry House, that she flits through the house leaving behind the freesia perfume she always wore.”

Julia blinked, astonished. It seemed preposterous—until she remembered Maddie’s words that the lady was nice, and that soft brush against her skin when she had been standing in Maddie’s room looking over her daughter almost as if someone had touched her tenderly.

She fought back a shiver.

“You don’t buy it?” she said to Anna.

Anna laughed. “I don’t know. I usually tend to fall on the side of logic and reason. My intellect tells me it’s a complete impossibility. But then, I can’t put anything past Abigail. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if she decided to defy the rules of metaphysics and stick around in this house she loved. If it’s at all within the realm of possibility, Abigail would find a way.”

“And Conan is her familiar,” Sage added. “You probably ought to know that up front, too. I think the two of them are a team. If Abigail is the brains of the outfit, he’s the muscle.”

“Okay, now you’re obviously putting me on.”

Sage shook her head.

“Conan. The dog.”

Sage grinned. “Don’t look at me like I’m crazy. Just watch and see. The dog is spooky.”

“On that, at least, we can agree,” Anna said, setting the last majolica teacup in the cupboard. “He’s far smarter than your average dog.”

“I’ve seen that much already,” Julia admitted. “I’m sorry, but it’s a bit of a stretch for me to go from thinking he’s an uncommonly smart dog to buying the theory that he’s some kind of conduit from the netherworld.”

Sage laughed. “Put like that, it does sound rather ridiculous, doesn’t it? Just keep your eyes open. You can judge for yourself after you’ve been here awhile. I wanted to put a disclosure in the rental agreement about Abigail but Anna wouldn’t let me.”

Anna made a face. “It’s a little tough to find an attorney who will add a clause that we might have a ghost in the house.”

“There’s no might about it. You wait and see, Julia.”

A ghost and a dog/medium. She supposed there were worst things she could be dealing with in an apartment. “I hope she is still here. I can’t imagine Abigail would be anything but a benevolent spirit.”

Sage grinned at her. Anna shook her head, but she was smiling as well. “I see I’m outnumbered in the sanity department.”

“You’re just better at being a grown-up,” Sage answered. Her teasing slid away quickly, though, replaced with concern. “And on that note, is there anything special we need to worry about with Maddie? Environmental things she shouldn’t be exposed to or anything?”

Julia sighed. She would much rather ponder lighthearted theories of the supernatural than bump up against the harsh reality of her daughter’s illness and recovery.

“It’s a tough line I walk between wrapping her up in cotton wool to protect her and encouraging as normal a life as possible. Most of the time she’s fine, if a little more subdued than she once was. You probably wouldn’t know it but she used to be the spitfire of the twins. When they were toddlers, she was always the one leading Simon into trouble.”

She gave a wobbly smile and was warmed when Anna reached out and squeezed her hand.

A moment passed before she could trust her voice to continue. “Right now we need to work on trying to regain the strength she lost through the month she spent in the hospital with the bone marrow transplant. I hope by Christmas things will be better.”

Sage smiled. “Well, now you’ve got two more of us—four, counting Abigail and Conan—on your side.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, immeasurably touched at their effortless acceptance of her and her children.

* * *

AFTER SIMON WAS finally settled in bed, Julia stood in her darkened bedroom gazing out at the ripples of the sea gleaming in the moonlight. Though she had a million things to do—finding bowls they could use for cereal in the morning hovered near the top of her list—she decided she needed this moment to herself to think, without rushing to take care of detail after detail.

Offshore some distance, she could see the moving lights of a sea vessel cutting through the night. She watched it for a moment, then her gaze inexorably shifted to the houses along the shore.

There was the cottage where her family had always stayed, sitting silent and dark. Beyond that was Will Garrett’s house. A light burned inside a square cedar building set away from the house. His father’s workshop, she remembered. Now it would be Will’s.

She glanced at her watch and saw it was nearly midnight. What was he working on so late? And did he spend his time out in his workshop to avoid the emptiness inside his house?

She pressed a hand to her chest at the ache there. How did he bear the pain of losing his wife and his child? She remembered the vast sorrow in his gaze when he had looked at Maddie and she wanted so much to be able to offer some kind of comfort to him.

She sensed he wouldn’t want her to try. Despite his friendship with Sage and Anna, Will seemed to hold himself apart, as if he had used his carpentry skills to carefully hammer out a wall between himself and the rest of the world.

She ached for him, but she knew there was likely very little she could do to breach those walls.

She could try.

The thought whispered through her head with soft subtlety. She shook her head at her own subconscious. No. She had enough on her plate right now, moving to a new place, taking on a new job, dealing with twins on her own, one of whom still struggled with illness.

She didn’t have the emotional reserves to take on anyone else’s pain. She knew it, but as the peace of the house settled around her, she had the quiet conviction that she could at least offer him her friendship.

As if in confirmation, the sweet, summery scent of freesia drifted through the room. She smiled.

“Abigail, if you are still here,” she whispered, “thank you. For this place, for Anna and Sage. For everything.”

For just an instant, she thought she felt again the gentle brush of fingers against her cheek.

* * *

WILL MANAGED TO avoid his new neighbors for several days, mostly because he was swamped with work. He was contracted to do the carpentry work on a rehab project in Manzanita. The job was behind schedule because of other subcontractors’ delays and the developer wanted the carpentry work done yesterday.

Will was pouring every waking moment into it, leaving his house before the sun was up and returning close to midnight every night.

He didn’t mind working hard. Having too much work to do was a damn sight better than having too little. Building something with his hands helped fill the yawning chasm of his life.

But his luck where his neighbors were concerned ran out a week after he had helped carry boxes up to the second-floor apartment of Brambleberry House.

By Friday, most of the basic work on the construction job was done and the only thing left was for him to install the custom floor and ceiling moldings the developer had ordered from a mill in Washington State. They hadn’t been delivered yet and until they arrived, he had nothing to do.

Finally he returned to Cannon Beach, to his empty house and his empty life.

After showering off the sawdust and sweat from a hard day’s work, he was grilling a steak on the deck—his nightly beer in hand—watching tourists fly kites and play in the sand in the pleasant early evening breeze when he suddenly heard excited barking.

A moment later, a big red mutt bounded into view, trailing the handle of his retractable leash.

As soon as he spied Will, he switched directions and bounded up the deck steps, his tongue lolling as he panted heavily.

“You look like a dog on the lam.”

Conan did that weird grin thing of his and Will glanced down the beach to see who might have been on the other end of the leash. He couldn’t see anyone—not really surprising. Though he seemed pondeorus most of the time, Conan could pour on the juice when he wanted to escape his dreaded leash and be several hundred yards down the beach before you could blink.

When he turned back to the dog, he found him sniffing with enthusiasm around the barbecue.

“No way,” Will muttered. “Get your own steak. I’m not sharing.”

Conan whined and plopped down at his feet with such an obviously feigned morose expression that Will had to smile. “You’re quite the actor, aren’t you? No steak for you tonight but I will get you a drink. You look like you could use it.”

He found the bowl he usually used for Conan and filled it from the sink. When he walked back through the sliding doors, he heard a chorus of voices calling the dog’s name.

Somehow, he supposed he wasn’t really surprised a moment later when Julia Blair and her twins came into view from the direction of Brambleberry House.

Conan barked a greeting, his head hanging over the deck railing. Three heads swiveled in their direction and even from here, he could see the relief in Julia’s green eyes when she spotted the dog.

“There you are, you rascal,” she exclaimed.

With her hair held back from her face in a ponytail, she looked young and lovely in the slanted early evening light. Though he knew it was unwise, part of him wanted to just sit and savor the sight of her, a little guilty reward for putting in a hard day’s work.

Shocked at the impulse, he set down Conan’s bowl so hard some water slopped over the side.

“I’m so sorry,” Julia called up. Though he wanted to keep them off the steps like he was some kind of medieval knight defending his castle from assault, he stood mutely by as she and her twins walked up the stairs to the deck.

“We were taking him for a walk on the beach,” Julia went on, “but we apparently weren’t moving quickly enough for him.”

“It’s my fault,” the boy—Simon—said, his voice morose. “Mom said I had to hold his leash tight and I tried, I really did, but I guess I wasn’t strong enough.”

“I’m sure it’s not your fault,” Will said through a throat that suddenly felt tight. “Conan can be pretty determined when he sets his mind to something.”

Simon grinned at him with a new warmth. “I guess he had his mind set on running away.”

“We were going to get an ice cream,” the girl said in her whispery voice. He had no choice but to look at her, with her dark curls and blue eyes. A sense of frailty clung to her, as if the slightest breeze would pick her up and carry her out to sea.

He didn’t know how to talk to her—didn’t know if he could. But he had made a pledge not to hurt others simply because he was in pain. He supposed that included little dark-haired sea sprites.

“That sounds like fun. A great thing to do on a pretty summer night like tonight.”

“My favorite ice cream is strawberry cheesecake,” she announced. “I really hope they have some.”

“Not me,” Simon announced. “I like bubblegum. Especially when it’s blue bubblegum.”

To his dismay, Julia’s daughter crossed the deck until she was only a few feet away. She looked up at him out of serious eyes. “What about you, Mr. Garrett?” Maddie asked. “Do you like ice cream?”

Surface similarities aside, she was not at all like his roly-poly little Cara, he reminded himself. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”

“What kind is your favorite?”

“Hmmm. Good question. I hate to be boring but I really like plain old vanilla.”

Simon hooted. “That’s what my mom’s favorite flavor is, too. With all the good flavors out there—licorice or coconut or chocolate chunk—why would you ever want plain vanilla? That’s just weird.”

“Simon!” Julia’s cheeks flushed and he thought again how extraordinarily lovely she was—not much different from the girl he’d been so crazy about nearly two decades ago.

“Well, it is,” Simon insisted.

“You don’t tell someone they’re weird,” Julia said.

“I didn’t say he was weird. Just that eating only vanilla ice cream is weird.”

Will found himself fighting a smile, which startled him all over again. “Okay, I’ll admit I also like praline ice cream and sometimes even chocolate chip on occasion. Is that better?”

Simon snickered. “I guess so.”

He felt the slightest brush of air and realized it was Maddie touching his arm with her small, pale hand. Suddenly he couldn’t seem to catch his breath, aching inside.

“Would you like to come with us to get an ice-cream cone, Mr. Garrett?” she asked in her breathy voice. “I bet if you were holding Conan’s leash, he couldn’t get away.”

He glanced at her sweet little features then at Julia. The color had climbed even higher on her cheekbones and she gave him an apologetic look before turning back to her daughter.

“Honey, I’m sure Mr. Garrett is busy. It smells like he’s cooking a steak for his dinner.”

“Which I’d better check on. Hang on.”

He lifted the grill and found his porterhouse a little on the well-done side, but still edible. He shut off the flame, using the time to consider how to answer the girl.

He shouldn’t be so tempted to go with them. It was an impulse that shocked the hell out of him.

He had spent two years avoiding social situations except with his close friends. But suddenly the idea of sitting here alone eating his dinner and watching others enjoy life seemed unbearable.

How could he possibly go with them, though? He wasn’t sure he trusted himself to be decent for an hour or so, the time it would take to walk to the ice-cream place, enjoy their cones, then walk home.

What if something set him off and brought back that bleak darkness that always seemed to hover around the edges of his psyche? The last thing he wanted to do was hurt these innocent kids.

“Thanks for the invitation,” he said, “but I’d better stay here and finish my dinner.”

Conan whined and butted his head against Will’s leg, almost as if urging Will to reconsider.

“We can wait for you to eat,” Simon said promptly. “We don’t mind, do we, Mom?”

“Simon, Mr. Garrett is busy. We don’t want to badger him.” She met his gaze, her green eyes soft with an expression he couldn’t identify. “Though we would love to have you come along. All of us.”

“I don’t want you to have to wait for me to eat when you’ve got strawberry cheesecake and bubblegum ice-cream cones calling your name.”

Julia nodded rather sadly, as if she had expected his answer. “Come on, kids. We’d better be on our way.”

Conan whined again. Will gazed from the dog to Julia and her family, then he shook his head. “Then again, I guess there’s no reason I can’t warm my steak up again when we get back from the ice-cream parlor. I’m not that hungry right now anyway.”

His statement was met with a variety of reactions. Conan barked sharply, Julia’s eyes opened wide with surprise, Simon gave a happy shout and Maddie clapped her hands with delight.

It had been a long time since anyone had seemed so thrilled about his company, he thought as he carried his steak inside to cover it with foil and slide it in the refrigerator.

He didn’t know what impulse had prompted him to agree to go along with them. He only knew it had been a long while since he had allowed himself to enjoy the quiet peace of an August evening on the shore.

Maybe it was time.

CHAPTER SIX

THIS WAS A mistake of epic proportions.

Will walked alongside Julia while her twins moved ahead with Conan. Simon raced along with the dog, holding tightly to his leash as the two of them scared up a shorebird here and there and danced just out of reach of the waves. Maddie seemed content to walk sedately toward the ice-cream stand in town, stopping only now and again to pick something up from the sand, study it with a serious look, then plop it in her pocket.

Will was painfully conscious of the woman beside him. Her hair shimmered in the dying sunlight, her cheeks were pinkened from the wind, and the soft, alluring scent of cherry blossoms clung to her, feminine and sweet.

He couldn’t come up with a damn thing to say and he felt like he was an awkward sixteen-year-old again.

Accompanying her little family to town was just about the craziest idea he had come up with in a long, long time.

She didn’t seem to mind the silence but he finally decided good manners compelled him to at least make a stab at conversation.

“How are you settling in?” he asked.

She smiled softly. “It’s been lovely. Perfect. You know, I wasn’t sure I was making the right choice to move here but everything has turned out far better than I ever dreamed.”

“The apartment working out for you, then?”

“It’s wonderful. We love it at Brambleberry House. Anna and Sage have become good friends and the children love being so close to the ocean. It’s been a wonderful adventure for us all so far.”

He envied her that, he realized. The sense of adventure, the willingness to charge headlong into the unknown. He had always been content to stay in the house where he had been raised. He loved living on the coast—waking up to the sound of scoters and grebes, sleeping to the murmuring song of the sea—but lately he sometimes felt as if he were suffocating here. It was impossible to miss the way everyone in town guarded their words around him and worse, watched him out of sad, careful eyes.

Maybe it was time to move on. It wasn’t a new thought but as he walked beside Julia toward the lights of town, he thought perhaps he ought to do just as she had—start over somewhere new.

She was looking at him in expectation, as if she had said something and was waiting for him to respond. He couldn’t think what he might have missed and he hesitated to ask her to repeat herself. Instead, he decided to pick a relatively safe topic.

“School starts in a few weeks, right?” he asked.

“A week from Tuesday,” she said after a small pause. “I plan to go in and start setting up my classroom tomorrow.”

“Does it take you a whole week to set up?”

“Oh, at least a week!” Animation brightened her features even more. “I’m way behind. I’ve got bulletin boards to decorate, class curriculum to plan, students’ pictures and names to memorize. Everything.”

Her voice vibrated with excitement and despite his discomfort, he almost smiled. “You can’t wait, can you?”

She flashed him a quick look. “Is it that obvious?”

“I’m glad you’ve found something you enjoy. I’ll admit, back in the day, I wouldn’t have pegged you for a schoolteacher.”

She laughed. “I guess my plans to be a rich and famous diva someday kind of fell by the wayside. Teaching thirty active fifth-graders isn’t quite as exciting as going on tour and recording a platinum-selling record.”

“I bet you’re good at it, though.”

She blinked in surprise, then gave him a smile of such pure, genuine pleasure that he felt his chest tighten.

“Thank you, Will. That means a lot to me.”

Their gazes met and though it had been a long, long time, he knew he didn’t mistake the currents zinging between them.

A gargantuan mistake.

He was almost relieved when they caught up with Maddie, who had slowed her steps considerably.

“You doing okay, cupcake?” Julia asked.

“I’m fine, Mommy,” she assured her, though her features were pale and her mouth hung down a little at the edges.

He wondered again what the story was here—why Julia watched her so carefully, why Maddie seemed so frail—but now didn’t seem the appropriate time to ask.

“Do you need a piggyback ride the rest of the way to the ice-cream stand?” Julia asked.

Maddie shook her head with more firmness than before, as if that brief rest had been enough for her. “I can make it, I promise. We’re almost there, aren’t we?”

“Yep. See, there’s the sign with the ice-cream cone on it.”

Somehow Maddie slipped between them and folded her hand in her mother’s. She smiled up at Will and his chest ached all over again.

“I love this place,” Maddie announced when they drew closer to Murphy’s Ice Cream.

“I do, too,” Will told her. “I’ve been coming here for ice cream my whole life.”

She looked intrigued. “Really? My mom said she used to come here, too, when she was little.” She paused to take a breath before continuing. “Did you ever see her here?”

He glanced at Julia and saw her cheeks had turned pink and he wondered if she was remembering holding hands under one of the picnic tables that overlooked the beach and stealing kisses whenever her brother wasn’t looking.

“I did,” he said gruffly, wishing those particular memories had stayed buried.

Maddie looked as if she wanted to pursue the matter but by now they had reached Murphy’s.

He hadn’t thought this whole thing through, he realized as they approached the walk-up window. Rats. Inside, he could see Lacy Murphy Walker, who went to high school with him and whose family had owned and operated the ice-cream parlor forever.

She had been one of Robin’s best friends—and as much as he loved her, he was grimly aware that Lacy also happened to be one of the biggest gossips in town.

“Hi, Will.” She beamed with some surprise. “Haven’t seen you in here in an age.”

He had no idea how to answer that so he opted to stick with a polite smile.

“We’re sure loving the new cabinets in the back,” she went on. “You did a heck of a job on them. I was saying the other day how much more storage space we have now.”

“Thanks, Lace.”

Inside, he could see the usual assortment of tourists but more than a few local faces he recognized. The scene was much the same on the picnic tables outside.

His neck suddenly itched from the speculative glances he was getting from those within sight—and especially from Lacy.

She hadn’t stopped staring at him and at Julia and her twins since he walked up to the counter.

“You folks ready to order?”

He hadn’t been lumped into a folks in a long time and it took him a moment to adjust.

Sometimes he thought that was one of the things he had missed the most the last two years, being part of a unit, something bigger and better than himself.

“Hang on,” he said, turning back to Julia and her twins. “Have you decided?” he asked, in a voice more terse than he intended.

“Bubblegum!” Simon exclaimed. “In a sugar cone.”

Lacy wrote it down with a smile. “And for the young lady?”

Maddie gifted Lacy with a particularly sweet smile. “Strawberry cheesecake, please,” she whispered. “I would like a sugar cone, too.”

“Got it.” Again Lacy turned her speculative gaze at him and Julia, standing together at the counter. “And for the two of you?”

The two of you. He wanted to tell her there was no two of you. They absolutely were not a couple, just two completely separate individuals who happened to walk down the beach together for ice cream.

“Two scoops of vanilla in a sugar cone,” he said.

“Make that two of those.” Julia smiled at Lacy and he felt a little light-headed. It was only because he hadn’t eaten, he told himself. Surely his reaction had nothing to do with the cherry blossom scent of her that smelled sweeter than anything coming out of the ice cream shop.

Lacy gave them the total and Will pulled out his wallet.

“My treat,” he said, sliding a bill to Lacy.

She reached for it at the same time Julia did.

“It is not!” Julia exclaimed. “You weren’t even planning to come along until we hounded you into it. Forget it, I’m paying.”

Even more speculative glances were shooting their way. He could see a couple of his mother’s friends inside and was afraid they would be on the phone to her at her retirement village in San Diego before Lacy even scooped their cones.

Above all, he wanted to avoid attention and just win this battle so they could find a place to sit, preferably one out of view of everyone inside.

“Nobody hounded anybody. I wanted to come.” For one brief second of insanity, he thought, but didn’t add. “I’m paying this time. You can pick it up next time.”

The minute the words escaped his mouth, he saw Lacy’s eyes widen. Next time, he had said. Rats. He could just picture the conversation that would be buzzing around town within minutes.

You hear about Will Garrett? He’s finally dating again, the new teacher living in Abigail’s house. The pretty widow with those twins. Remember, her family used to rent the old Turner place every summer.

He grimaced to himself, knowing there wasn’t a darn thing he could do about it. When a person lived in the same town his whole life, everybody seemed to think they had a stake in his business.

“Are you sure?” Julia still looked obstinate.

He nodded. “Take it, Lace,” he said.

To his vast relief, she ended the matter by stuffing the bill into the cash register and handing him his change.

“It should just be a minute,” she said in a chirpy kind of voice. She disappeared from the counter, probably to go looking for her cell phone so she could start spreading the word.

“Thank you,” Julia said, though she still looked uncomfortable about letting him treat.

“No problem.”

“It really doesn’t seem fair. You didn’t even want to come with us.”

“I’m here, aren’t I? It’s fine.”

She looked as if she had something more to say but after a moment she closed her mouth and let the matter rest when Lacy returned with the twins’ cones.

“Here you go. The other two are coming right up.”

“Great service as always, Lacy,” he said when she handed him and Julia their cones. “Thanks.”

“Oh, no problem, Will.” She smiled brightly. “And let me just say for the record that it’s so great to see you out enjoying...ice cream again.”

Heat soaked his face and he could only hope he wasn’t blushing. He hadn’t blushed in about two decades and he sure as hell didn’t want to start now.

“Right,” he mumbled, and was relieved when Simon spoke up.

“Hey, Mom, our favorite table is empty. Can we sit out there and watch for whales?”

Julia smiled and shook her head ruefully. “We’ve been here twice and sat at the same picnic table both times. I guess that makes it our favorite.”

She studied Will. “Are you in a hurry to get back or do you mind eating our cones here?”

He would rather just take a dip in the cold waters of the Pacific right about now, if only to avoid the watching eyes of everyone in town. Instead, he forced a smile.

“No big rush. Let’s sit down.”

He made the mistake of glancing inside the ice-cream parlor one time as he was sliding into the picnic table across from her—just long enough to see several heads swivel quickly away from him.

With a sigh, he resigned himself to the rumors. Nothing he could do about them now anyway.

* * *

SHE WAS QUITE certain Conan was a canine but just now he was looking remarkably like the proverbial cat with its mouth stuffed full of canary feathers.

Julia frowned at the dog, who settled beside the picnic table with what looked suspiciously like a grin. Sage and Anna said he had an uncanny intelligence and some hidden agenda but she still wasn’t sure she completely bought it.

More likely, he was simply anticipating a furtive taste of one of the twins’ cones.

If Conan practically hummed with satisfaction, Will resembled the plucked canary. He ate his cone with a stoicism that made it obvious he wasn’t enjoying the treat—or the company—in the slightest.

She might have been hurt if she didn’t find it so terribly sad.

She grieved for him, for the boy she had known with the teasing smile and the big, generous heart. His loss was staggering, as huge as the Pacific, and she wanted so desperately to ease it for him.

What power did she have, though? Precious little, especially when he would only talk in surface generalities about mundane topics like the tide schedule and the weather.

She tried to probe about the project he was working on, an intriguing rehabilitation effort down the coast, but he seemed to turn every question back to her and she was tired of talking about herself.

She was also tired of the curious eyes inside. Good heavens, couldn’t the poor man go out for ice cream without inciting a tsunami of attention? If he wasn’t being so unapproachable, she would have loved to give their tongues something to wag about.

How would Will react if she just grabbed the cone out of his hand, tossed it over her shoulder into the sand, and planted a big smacking kiss on his mouth, just for the sheer wicked thrill of watching how aghast their audience might turn?

It was an impulse from her youth, when she had been full of silly dreams and impetuous behavior. She wouldn’t do it now, of course. Not only would a kiss horrify Will but her children were sitting at the table and they wouldn’t understand the subtleties of social tit-for-tat.

The idea was tempting, though. And not just to give the gossips something to talk about.

She sighed. It would be best all the way around if she just put those kind of thoughts right out of her head. She had been alone for two years and though she might have longed for a man’s touch, she wasn’t about to jump into anything with someone still deep in the grieving process.

“What project are you working on next at Brambleberry House?” she asked him.

“New ceiling and floor moldings in Abigail’s old apartment, where Anna lives now,” he answered. “On the project I’m working on in Manzanita, the developer ordered some custom patterns. I liked them and showed them to Anna and she thought they would be perfect for Brambleberry House so we ordered extra.”

“What was wrong with the old ones?”

“They were cracking and warped in places from water damage a long time ago. We tried to repair them but it was becoming an endless process. And then when she decided to take down a few walls, the moldings in the different rooms didn’t match so we decided to replace them all with something historically accurate.”

He started to add more, but Maddie slid over to him and held out her cone.

“Mr. Garrett, would you like to try some of my strawberry cheesecake ice cream? It’s really good.”

A slight edge of panic appeared around the edges of his gaze. “Uh, no thanks. Think I’ll stick with my vanilla.”

She accepted his answer with equanimity. “You might change your mind, though,” she said, with her innate generosity. “How about if I eat it super slow? That way if decide you want some after all, I’ll still have some left for you to try later, okay?”

He blinked and she saw the nerves give way to astonishment. “Uh, thanks,” he said, looking so touched at the small gesture that her heart broke for him all over again.

Maddie smiled her most endearing smile, the particularly charming one she had perfected on doctors over the years. “You’re welcome. Just let me know if you want a taste. I don’t mind sharing, I promise.”

He looked like a man who had just been stabbed in the heart and Julia suddenly couldn’t bear his pain. In desperation, she sought a way to distract him.

“What will you do on Brambleberry House after you finish the moldings?” she finally asked.

He looked grateful for the diversion. “Uh, your apartment is mostly done but the third-floor rooms still need some work. Little stuff, mostly, but inconvenient to try to live around. I figured I would wait to start until after Sage is married and living part-time in the Bay Area with Eben and Chloe.”

“I understand they’re coming back soon from an extended trip overseas. We’ve heard a great deal about them from Sage and Anna. The twins can’t wait to meet Chloe.”

“She’s a good kid. And Eben is good for Sage. That’s the important thing.”

He was a man who loved his friends, she realized. That, at least, hadn’t changed over the years.

He seemed embarrassed by his statement and quickly returned to talking about the repairs planned for Brambleberry House. She listened to his deep voice as she savored the last of her cone, thinking it was a perfect summer evening.

The children finished their treats—Maddie’s promise to Will notwithstanding—and were romping with Conan in the sand. Their laugher drifted on the breeze above the sound of the ocean.

For just an instant, she was transported back in time, sitting with Will atop a splintery picnic table, eating ice-cream cones and laughing at nothing and talking about their dreams.

By unspoken agreement, they stood, cones finished, and started walking back down the beach while Conan herded the twins along ahead of them.

“I’m boring you to tears,” Will said after some time. “I’m sorry. I, uh, don’t usually go on and on like that about my work.”

She shook her head. “You’re not boring me. On the contrary. I enjoy hearing about what you do. You love it, don’t you?”

“It’s just a job. Not something vitally important to the future of the world like educating young minds.”

She made a face. “My, you have a rosy view of educators, don’t you?”

“I always had good teachers when I was going to school.”

“Good teachers wouldn’t have anywhere to teach those young minds if not for great carpenters like you,” she pointed out. “The work you’ve done on Brambleberry House is lovely. The kitchen cupboards are as smooth as a satin dress. Anna told me you made them all by hand.”

“It’s a great old house. I’m trying my best to do it justice.”

They walked in silence for a time and Julia couldn’t escape the grim realization that she was every bit as attracted to him now as she had been all those years ago.

Not true, she admitted ruefully. Technically, anyway. She was far more aware of him now, as a full-grown woman—with a woman’s knowledge and a woman’s needs—than she ever would have been as a naive, idealistic fifteen-year-old girl.

He was bigger than he had been then, several inches taller and much more muscled. His hair was cut slightly shorter than it had been when he was a teenager and he had a few laugh lines around his mouth and his eyes, though she had a feeling those had been etched some time ago.

She was particularly aware of his hands, square-tipped and strong, with the inevitable battle scars of a man who used them in creative and constructive ways.

She didn’t want to notice anything about him and she certainly wasn’t at all thrilled to find herself attracted to him again. She couldn’t afford it. Not when she and her children were just finding their way again.

Hadn’t she suffered enough from emotionally unavailable men?

“Look what I found, Mom!” Maddie uncurled her fingers to reveal a small gnarled object. “What is it?”

As she studied the object, Julia held her daughter’s hand, trying not to notice how thin her fingers seemed. It appeared to be an agate but was an odd color, greenish gray with red streaks in it.

“We forgot to bring our rocky coast field book, didn’t we? We’ll have to look it up when we get back to the house.”

“Do you know, Mr. Garrett?” Maddie presented the object for Will’s inspection.

“I’m afraid I’m not much of a naturalist,” he said, rather curtly. “Sage is your expert in that department. She can tell you in a second.”

“Oh. Okay.” Maddie’s shoulders slumped, more from fatigue than disappointment, Julia thought, but Will didn’t pick up on it. Guilt flickered in his expression.

“I can look at it,” he said after a moment. “Let’s see.”

Will reached for her hand and he examined the contents carefully. “Wow. This is quite a find. It’s a bloodstone agate.”

“I want to see,” Simon said.

“It’s pretty rare,” Will said. He talked to them about some of the other treasures they could find beachcombing on the coast until they reached his house.

“I guess this is your stop,” Julia said as they stood at the steps of his deck.

He glanced up the steps, as if eager to escape, then looked back at them. “I’ll walk you the rest of the way to Brambleberry House. It’s nearly dark. I wouldn’t want you walking on your own.”

It was only three houses, she almost said, but he looked so determined to stick it out that she couldn’t bring herself to argue.

“Thank you,” she said, then gave Maddie a careful look. Her daughter hadn’t said much for some time, since finding the bloodstone.

“Is it piggyback time?” Julia asked quietly.

Maddie shrugged, her features dispirited. “I guess so. I really wanted to make it the whole way on my own this time.”

“You made it farther this time than last time. And farther still than the time before. Come on, pumpkin. Your chariot awaits.” Julia crouched down and her daughter climbed aboard.

“I can carry her,” Will said, though he looked as if he would rather stick a nail gun to his hand and pull the switch.

“I’ve got her,” she answered, aching for him all over again. “But you can make sure Simon and Conan stay away from the surf.”

They crossed the last hundred yards to Brambleberry House in silence. When they reached the back gate, Will held it open for them and they walked inside where the smells of Abigail’s lush late-summer flowers surrounded them in warm welcome.

She eased Maddie off her back. “You two take Conan inside to get a drink from Anna while I talk to Mr. Garrett, okay?”

“Okay,” Simon said, and headed up the steps. Maddie followed more slowly but a moment later Julia and Will were alone with only the sound of the wind sighing in the tops of the pine trees.

“What’s wrong with Maddie?”

His quiet voice cut through the peace of the night and she instinctively bristled, wanting to protest that nothing was wrong with her child. Absolutely nothing. Maddie was perfect in every way.

The words tangled in her throat. “She’s recovering from a bone marrow transplant,” she answered in a low voice to match his. It wasn’t any grand secret and he certainly deserved to know, though she didn’t want to go through more explanations.

“It’s been four months but she hasn’t quite regained her strength. She’s been a fighter through everything life has thrown at her the last two and a half years, though—two rounds of chemo and a round of radiation—so I know it’s only a matter of time before she’ll be back to her old self.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

HE HEARD HER words as if she whispered them on the wind from a long distance away.

Bone marrow transplant. Chemotherapy. Radiation.

Cancer.

He had suspected Maddie was ill, but cancer. Damn it. The thought of that sweet-faced little girl enduring that kind of nightmare plowed into him like a semitruck and completely knocked him off his pins.

“I’m sorry, Julia.”

The words seemed horrifyingly inadequate but he didn’t have the first idea what else to say in this kind of situation. Besides, hadn’t he learned after the dark abyss of the last two years that sometimes the simplest of sentiments meant the most?

The sun had finally slipped beyond the horizon and in the dusky twilight, she looked young and lovely and as fragile as her daughter.

“It’s been a long, tough journey,” she answered. “But I have great hope that we’re finally starting to climb through to the other side.”

He envied her that hope, he realized. That’s what had been missing in his world for two years—for too long there had seemed no escape to the unrelenting pain. He missed Robin, he missed Cara, he missed the man he used to be.

But this wasn’t about him, he reminded himself. One other lesson he had learned since the accident that stole his family was that very few people made it through life unscathed, without suffering or pain, and Julia had obviously seen more than her share.

“A year and a half, you said. So you must have had to cope with losing your husband in the midst of dealing with Maddie’s cancer?”

In the twilight, he saw her mouth open then close, as if she wanted to say something but changed her mind.

“Yes,” she finally answered, though he had a feeling that wasn’t what she intended to tell him. “I guess you can see why I felt like we needed a fresh start.”

“She’s okay now, you said?”

“She’s been in remission for a year. The bone marrow transplant was more a precaution because the second round of chemo destroyed her immune system. We were blessed that Simon could be the donor. But as you can imagine, we’re all pretty sick of hospitals and doctors by now.”

He released a breath, his mind tangled in the vicious thorns of remembering those last terrible two weeks when Cara had clung to life, when he had cried and prayed and begged for another chance for his broken and battered little girl.

For nothing.

His prayers hadn’t done a damn bit of good.

“It’s kind of surreal, isn’t it?” Julia said after a moment. “Who would have thought all those summers ago when we were young that one day we’d be standing here in Abigail’s garden together talking about my daughter’s cancer treatment?”

He had a sudden, savage need to pummel something—to yank the autumn roses up by the roots, to shatter the porch swing into a million pieces, to hack the limbs off Abigail’s dogwood bushes.

“Life is the cruelest bitch around,” he said, and the bitter words seemed to scrape his throat bloody and raw. “Makes you wonder what the hell the point is.”

She lifted shocked eyes to his. “Oh, Will. I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and before he realized her intentions, she reached out and touched his arm in sympathy.

For just a moment the hair on his arm lifted and he forgot his bitterness, held captive by the gentle brush of skin against skin. He ached for the tenderness of a woman’s touch—no, of Julia’s touch—at the same time it terrified him.

He forced himself to take a step back. Cool night air swirled between them and he wondered how it was possible for the temperature to dip twenty degrees in a millisecond.

“I’d better go.” His voice still sounded hoarse. “Your kids probably need you inside.”

Her color seemed higher than it had been earlier and he thought she looked slightly disconcerted. “I’m sure you’re right. Good night, then. And...thank you for the ice cream and the company. I enjoyed both.”

She paused for the barest of moments, as if waiting for him to respond. When the silence dragged on, an instant’s disappointment flickered in her eyes and she began to climb the porch steps.

“You’re welcome,” he said when she reached the top step. She turned with surprise.

“And for the record,” he went on, “I haven’t enjoyed much of anything for a long time but tonight was...nice.”

Her brilliant smile followed him as he let himself out the front gate and headed down the dark street toward his home, a journey he had made a thousand times.

He didn’t need to think about where he was going, which left his mind free to wander through dark alleys.

Cancer. That cute little girl. Hell.

Poor thing. Julia said it was in remission, that things were better except lingering fatigue. Still, he knew this was just one more reason he needed to maintain his careful distance.

His heart was a solid block of ice but if it ever started to melt, he knew he couldn’t let himself care about Julia Blair and her children. He couldn’t afford it.

He had been through enough pain and loss for a hundred lifetimes. He would have to be crazy to sign up for a situation with the potential to promise plenty more.

When he was ready to let people into his life again—if he was ever ready—it couldn’t be a medically fragile little girl, a boy with curious eyes and energy to burn, and a lovely auburn-haired widow who made him long to taste life again.

* * *

SHE DIDN’T SEE Will again for several days. With the lead-up to the start of school and then the actual chaos of adjusting to a new classroom and coming to know thirty new students, she barely had time to give him more than a passing thought.

But twice in the early hours of the morning as she graded math refresher assignments and the obligatory essays about how her students had spent the summer, she had glimpsed the telltale glimmer of lights in his workshop through the pines.

Only the walls of Abigail’s old house knew that both times she had stopped what she was doing to stand at the window for a few moments watching that light and wondering what he was working on, what he was thinking about, if he’d had a good day.

It wasn’t obsession, she told herself firmly. Only curiosity about an old friend.

Other than those few silent moments, she hadn’t allowed herself to think about him much. What would be the point?

She had seen his reaction to the news of Maddie’s cancer, a completely normal response under the circumstances. He had been shocked and saddened and she certainly couldn’t blame him for the quick way he distanced himself from her.

She understood, but it still saddened her.

Now, the Friday after school started, she pulled into the Brambleberry House driveway to find his pickup truck parked just ahead of her SUV. Before she could contain the instinctive reaction, her stomach skittered with anticipation.

“Hey, I think that’s Mr. Garrett’s truck,” Simon exclaimed. “See, it says Garrett Construction on the side.”

“I think you must be right.” She was quite proud of herself for the calm reply.

“I wonder what’s he doing here.” Simon’s voice quivered with excitement and she sighed. Her son was so desperately eager for a man in his life. She couldn’t really blame him—except for Conan, who didn’t really count, Simon was surrounded by women in every direction.

“Do you think he’s working on something for Sage and Anna? Can I help him, do you think? I could hand him tools or something. I’m really good at that. Do you think he’ll let me?”

“I don’t know the answer to any of your questions, kiddo. You’ll have to ask him. Why don’t we go check it out?”

Both children jumped out of the vehicle the moment she put it in Park. She called to them to wait for her but either they didn’t hear her or they chose to ignore her as they rushed to the backyard, where the sound of some kind of power tool hummed through the afternoon.

She caught up with them before they made it all the way.

“I don’t want you bothering Will—Mr. Garrett—if he’s too busy to answer all your many questions. He has a job to do here and we need to let him.”

The rest of what she might have said died in her throat when they turned the corner and she spotted him.

Oh mercy. He wore a pair of disreputable-looking jeans, a forest green T-shirt that bulged with muscle in all the right places, and a leather carpenter’s belt slung low like a gunfighter’s holster. The afternoon sun picked up golden streaks in his brown hair and he had just a hint of afternoon stubble that made him look dangerous and delectable at the same time.

Oh mercy.

Conan was curled under the shade nearby and his bark of greeting alerted Will’s to their presence.

The dog lunged for Simon and Maddie as if he hadn’t seen them in months instead of only a few hours and Will even gifted them with a rare smile, there only for an instant before it flickered away.

He drew off his leather gloves and shoved them in the back pocket of his jeans. “School over already? Is it that late?”

“We have early dismissal on Fridays. It’s only three o’clock,” Julia answered.

“We’ve been out for a few hours already,” Maddie informed him. “Usually we get to stay at the after-school club until Mama finishes her work in her classroom.”

“Is that right?”

“It’s really fun,” Simon answered. “Sometimes we have to stay in Mom’s room with her and do our homework if we have a lot, but most of the time we go to extracurriculars. Today we played tetherball and made up a skit and played on the playground for a long time.”

“Sounds tiring.”

“Not for me,” Simon boasted. “Maybe for Maddie.”

“I’m not tired,” Maddie protested.

His gaze met Julia’s in shared acknowledgment that Maddie’s claim was obviously a lie.

“What’s the project today?” she asked.

“Last time I was here I noticed the back steps were splintering in a few places. I had a couple of hours this afternoon so I decided to get started on replacing them before somebody gets hurt.”

Simon looked enthralled. “Can we help you fix them? I could hand you tools and stuff.”

That subtle panic sparked in his eyes, the same uneasiness she saw the day they went for ice cream, whenever she or the children had pushed him for more than he was willing to offer.

She could see him trying to figure a way out of the situation without hurting Simon and she quickly stepped in.

“We promised Sage we would pick a bushel of apples and make our famous caramel apple pie, remember? You finally get to meet Chloe in a few hours when she and her father arrive.”

Simon scowled. “But you said in the car that if Mr. Garrett said it was okay, we could help him.”

She sent a quick look of apology to Will before turning back to her son. “I know, but I could really use your help with the pies.”

“Making pies is for girls. I’d rather work with tools and stuff,” Simon muttered.

Will raised an eyebrow at this blatantly chauvinistic attitude. “Not true, kid. I know lots of girls who are great at using tools and one of my good friends is a pastry chef at a restaurant down the coast. He makes the best brambleberry pie you’ll ever eat in your life.”

“Brambleberry, like our house?” Maddie asked.

“Just like.”

“Cool!” Simon said. “I want some.”

“No brambleberries today,” Julia answered. “We’re making apple, remember? Let’s go change our clothes and get started.”

Simon’s features drooped with disappointment. “So I don’t get to help Mr. Garrett?”

“Simon—”

“I don’t mind if he stays and helps,” Will said.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded, though she could still see a shadow of reluctance in his eyes. “Positive. I’ll enjoy the company. Conan’s a good listener but not much of a conversationalist.”

She smiled at the unexpected whimsy. “Conversing is one thing Simon does exceptionally well, don’t you, kiddo?”

Simon giggled. “Yep. My dad used to say I could talk for a day and a half without needing anybody to answer back.”

“I guess that means you probably talk in your sleep, right?”

Simon giggled. “I don’t, but Maddie does sometimes. It’s really funny. One time she sang the whole alphabet song in her sleep.”

“I was only five,” Maddie exclaimed to defend herself.

“And you’re going to be fifteen before we finish this pie if we don’t hurry. We all need to change out of school clothes and into apple-picking and porch-fixing clothes.”

Simon looked resigned, then his features brightened. “Race you!” he called to Maddie and took off for the house. She followed several paces behind with Conan barking at their heels, leaving Julia alone with Will.

“I hope he doesn’t get in your way or talk your ear off.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

“Feel free to send him out to play if you need to.”

They lapsed into silence. She should go upstairs, she knew, but she had suddenly discovered she had missed him this last week, silly as that seemed after years when she hadn’t given the man a thought.

She couldn’t seem to force herself to leave. Finally she sighed, giving into the inevitable.

She took a step closer to him. “Hold still,” she murmured.

Wariness leapt into the depths of his blue eyes but he froze as if she had just cast his boots in concrete.

He smelled of leather and wood shavings, and hot, sun-warmed male, a delicious combination, and she wanted to stand there for three or four years and just enjoy it. She brushed her fingers against the blade of his cheekbone, feeling warm male skin.

At her touch, their gazes clashed and the wariness in his eyes shifted instantly to something else, something raw and wild. An answering tremble stirred inside her and for a moment she forgot what she was doing, her fingers frozen on his skin.

His quick intake of breath dragged her back to reality and she quickly dropped her hand, feeling her own face flame.

“You, um, had a little bit of sawdust on your cheek. I didn’t want it to find its way into your eye.”

“Thanks.” She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or not but his voice sounded decidedly hoarse.

She forced a smile and stepped back, though what she really wanted to do was wrap her arms fiercely around his warm, strong neck and hold on for dear life.

“You’re welcome,” she managed.

With nothing left to be said, she turned and hurried into the house.

* * *

SHE TRIED HARD to put Will out of her mind as she and Maddie plucked Granny Smith apples off Abigail’s tree. She might have found it a bit easier to forget about him if the ladder didn’t offer a perfect view of the porch steps he was fixing.

Now she paused, her arm outstretched but the apple she was reaching to grab forgotten as she watched him smile at something Simon said. She couldn’t hear them from here but so far it looked as if Simon wasn’t making too big a pest of himself.

“Is this enough, Mama?” Maddie asked from below, where she stood waiting by the bushel basket.

Julia jerked her attention back to her daughter and the task at hand. “Just a moment.” She plucked three more and added them to the glistening green pile in the basket.

“That ought to do it.”

“Do we really need that many apples?”

“Not for one pie but I thought we could make a couple of extras. What do you think?”

She thought for a moment. “Can we give one to Mr. Garrett?”

Maddie looked over at the steps where Simon was trying his hand with Will’s big hammer and Julia saw both longing and a sad kind of resignation in her daughter’s blue eyes.

Maddie could be remarkably perceptive about others. Julia thought perhaps her long months of treatment—enough to make any child grow up far too early—had sensitized her to the subtle behaviors of others toward her. The way adults tried not to stare after she lost her hair, the stilted efforts of nurses and doctors to befriend her, even Julia’s attempts to pretend their world was normal. Maddie seemed to see through them all.

Could Maddie sense the careful distance Will seemed determined to maintain between them?

Julia hoped not. Her daughter had endured enough. She didn’t need more rejection in her life right now when she was just beginning to find her way again.

“That’s a good idea,” she finally answered Maddie, hoping her smile looked more genuine than it felt. “And perhaps we can think of someone else who might need a pie.”

She lifted the bushel and started to carry it around the front of the house. She hadn’t made it far before Will stepped forward and took the bushel out of her hands.

“Here, I’ll carry that up the stairs for you.”

She almost protested that it wasn’t necessary but she could tell by the implacable set of his jaw that he wouldn’t accept any arguments from her on the matter.

“Thank you,” she said instead.

She and Maddie followed him up the stairs.

“Where do you want this?” he asked.

“The kitchen counter by the sink.”

“We have to wash every single apple and see if it has a worm,” Maddie informed him. “I hope we don’t find one. That would be gross.”

“That’s a lot of work,” he said stiffly.

“It is. But my mama’s pies are the best. Even better than brambleberry. Just wait until you try one.”

Will’s gaze flashed to Julia’s then away so quickly she wondered if she’d imagined the quick flare of heat there.

“Good luck with your pies.”

“Good luck with your stairs,” she responded. “Send Simon up if you need to.”

He nodded and headed out the door, probably completely oblivious that he was leaving two females to watch wistfully after him.

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