The One Who Changed Everything (The Cherry Sisters)

by Darcy, Lilian

  “I cannot believe you’re doing this, Tucker. My incredibly brave, beautiful girl is pretending she wants it, too, but I’m not fooled. This is coming from you. Maybe she doesn’t even know that. Maybe she genuinely thinks this is a mutual decision, but I’ve seen you withdrawing over the past few weeks. You’ve frozen her out until she thinks it’s coming from her, as well. I know what a man looks like when he’s truly in love with the woman he’s going to marry. You haven’t looked that way, and if it’s because my girl is disfigured after the—”

  “Marshall, she’s not—” He hadn’t been able to say it. Disfigured. He’d never said that in his head, never felt that way.

  “You don’t want that word? It’s too blunt for you?” Marshall had used it as a punishment and an accusation. “You don’t like facing the truth about your own motivations?”

  It hadn’t been a pleasant conversation, and Tucker had come dangerously close to saying Daisy’s name but he’d managed to stop himself, and if that meant that Marshall went on thinking that it was Lee’s accident at the heart of the problem, then this was collateral damage that he couldn’t avoid.

  He didn’t want Daisy dragged into this. He didn’t want any additional hurt to Lee, or a mess worse than the mess they had already.

  He would wait, he had decided. He would just lay low and do nothing, and in a few months when things had died down and when he had some perspective, he would take action, seek Daisy out, see if he still felt...and if she felt...and if there was any way they could possibly...

  Hadn’t happened.

  He drove out of the lot, remembering the shock he’d felt when he’d run into a very bubbly Daisy at a local convenience store just a few days after the canceled wedding. Hiding his pleasure behind dark sunglasses, he’d drawled, “You’re looking happy today.”

  She’d told him, “Happy and really thrilled. I’m flying out to California tomorrow to start an internship with an amazing pastry chef. The opportunity came up so fast, I haven’t had time to breathe! Someone else canceled, and it turned out I was second on the list. I can’t believe it! Um...it’s good to see you, Tucker, but I have to run.”

  And that was that.

  Gone.

  He’d never pursued it. Why would he trust in signs that pointed in two different directions at once, when he didn’t believe in signs in the first place? Why would he chase after something his head didn’t even want? Something that might only ever have been a symptom of the deeper problem between himself and Lee? Something nobody in either family would want? Something that fate had chosen to take out of his hands?

  “Ten years later...” he muttered to himself as he drove.

  Ten years later, incredibly, he’d felt exactly the same. Thunderclap. Across a crowded landscape display. Changing everything.

  Magic.

  Chemistry.

  Whatever you wanted to call it.

  It was just as strong, and he distrusted it just as much. He’d hidden it manfully during their brief meeting today, and he didn’t think she’d guessed. He hoped she hadn’t, because his beliefs and his morals were still the same, and this feeling about Daisy wasn’t something he believed in or wanted to pursue.

  Not with his legacy of experience, and not with his current situation the way it was.

  You see, there was a little thing called a marriage certificate, and call him old-fashioned, but, no matter what the circumstances, he didn’t think a man should go after one woman when he was already legally wed to someone else.

  Chapter Four

  “So I saw your half brother today,” Tucker’s mother, Nancy, told him that night.

  She’d called him to see if he could come over and fix a leak in the U-bend pipe beneath the kitchen sink and change the lightbulb at the top of the stairs. At sixty-one years old, she was pretty good about most of that stuff.

  He was proud of her, actually. She mowed her own lawn, changed all the lightbulbs she could reach, paid her bills on time. He’d in fact forbidden her to change the one at the top of the stairs, since it involved climbing onto a chair and leaning precariously into space.

  With a trim, energetic figure and hair she’d allowed to remain its natural silvery gray, she could have married again if she’d wanted to, Tucker was certain, and yet to his knowledge she’d never come close. A couple times he’d almost asked her about it—“Did you love Dad that much?” Or maybe, “Did Dad scar you that badly?” But in the end he’d stayed silent.

  “Oh, you did?” he said to her carefully now, about Jonah.

  “He’s working at Third Central, the branch on the corner of Maple and Twenty-second Street, and I had checks to deposit,” Mom explained. “I don’t usually go to that branch, but I had a delivery down that way.” She had her own business as a florist now, having started in that field as a sales assistant after his dad became ill. “He’s looking so grown-up, I guess he’d be twenty-one by now.”

  “About that, I think.”

  “He didn’t recognize me.” She added, “Or if he did, he was pretending, the same way I was.”

  There wasn’t much else to say. Jonah had been three years old at their dad’s funeral, a difficult imp of a kid who didn’t understand what was happening. Tucker’s mom had been horrified that Andrea would bring him. How could she do this? she’d said over and over. How could she do this?

  She’d been devastated at Andrea’s presence, exhausted by the effort of dealing with it. Jonah crying and struggling in his mother’s arms had been the last straw on top of more previous last straws than Tucker could count.

  His mom had found out about his dad’s affair three months after she’d learned about his cancer. Three months after that, she’d found out that the woman involved was eight months pregnant with Dad’s child.

  But the order she’d found out about it wasn’t the order in which it had all happened. Dad had known he was ill months before he’d told his family, and he’d started the affair almost immediately “as a reaction.” The justification he’d used still made Tucker queasy with anger. I had to follow my guiding star. I had to go with how I felt. Me, not anyone else. I had to live life to the full, while I still had the chance.

  That’s not how you react, Dad. Cancer is supposed to bring you closer to the people who love you, not send you off on a self-absorbed wild-goose chase for your lost youth.

  Yeah.

  What did you say about all that, eighteen years after Dad was gone?

  “It’s not Jonah’s fault,” Mom said, as she’d said before, and it was true.

  She’d talked a lot, at one time, about getting to know him. “He looks so much like you and Mattie when you were that age, Tucker.”

  But it was impossible. There was still too much anger and mess, no possibility of any forgiveness between Andrea Lewers and his mom. His mom blamed Andrea for the affair because she couldn’t cope with blaming his dad. Andrea blamed his mom for shutting her out and dismissing her grief because somehow she’d loved his dad, too.

  In the end, Tucker had steered his mother away from the idea of making any kind of connection with his half brother, and so they barely knew him. They knew him from a distance because Mom hadn’t been able to stop herself from keeping track of him.

  “You didn’t go to that branch because you knew he was working there, did you?” Tucker accused gently.

  She looked at him and sighed. “No, I didn’t. I’ve been so good about that these past couple years. No, it was a total coincidence. You’re right in what you’ve always said. Too much mess, and Jonah himself doesn’t need to be dumped in it.”

  “I really think that’s the only way to go.” He felt a wash of relief on realizing that he didn’t have to argue the case.

  “Speaking of mess, though...” his mom said.

  “Yeah? Are we?”

 
She took a breath, a certain very mothery kind of breath. “Emma called a couple days ago, and we had a talk.”

  “Oh, you did?” His wariness kicked in.

  When his mom brought Emma into the conversation, the result was rarely a relaxing chat. Her manner turned plaintive, and she couldn’t hold herself back. “Tucker, I don’t think she wants this divorce, and I don’t understand why the two of you haven’t tried harder.”

  He sighed. “Because that wasn’t the agreement. You know that.”

  “You can rethink the agreement. I think that’s what she wants, at heart. For you to work at it and turn it into a real marriage, instead of just letting it go.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She really doesn’t, Mom.”

  She ignored him. “You could have such a great partnership. Everyone would be so happy about it. You’ve had a broken engagement, and now a marriage that isn’t what it could be. I’m not sure what it is that you want. I don’t understand why—”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  “About the marriage, or about what Emma wants?”

  “Both. It’s not like she and I haven’t talked about this.”

  “She’s scared to say it. She needs it to come from you.”

  “No, Mom. We’ve been married three years. If there was any possibility of it turning into the real thing, it would have happened by now. There’s no chemistry and there never has been.”

  “Chemistry? You get on so well together...”

  “Because we’ve given each other plenty of space. Because we’ve been clear about the whole arrangement.”

  “Emma wants the arrangement to change,” she said firmly, then added as a signal that she wasn’t going to keep on about it. “Now, are you staying for coffee and a bite to eat? I have cake.”

  “Sure, I have time. That would be nice.”

  When he’d finished the coffee and cake that his mom had pressed on him and they’d talked about Carla and Mattie, and how well they were both doing in New York City, and how it would be nice if one or both of them moved back closer, as well as easy things like TV shows and the weather, he left with that familiar sense of having hosed down a potential emotional crisis.

  Or two of them.

  His marriage, and Jonah.

  Although this wasn’t fair, because his mom had changed the subject pretty fast both times, and when it came to action rather than talk, she’d behaved as sensibly and decently about Dad’s affair and Tucker’s own unusual marriage as she possibly could.

  And that was exactly the way he was going to behave about Daisy Cherry. Sensible and decent.

  Maybe it was good that his mom had run into Jonah today. It gave Tucker a very necessary reminder of how much he hated complicated, emotionally messy entanglements. Giving in to an attraction to his ex-fiancée’s sister while his green-card marriage was still a legal reality was quite a bit more complicated and messy than he wanted.

  Chapter Five

  Their mom and dad were driving Mary Jane down to Albany to catch her connecting flight to Newark airport first thing on Tuesday morning. Mary Jane and Daisy had a big, squeezy goodbye hug, and neither of them said a word about yesterday’s argument, Tucker Reid or the work required on the Spruce Bay grounds.

  “Have a great time in Africa!”

  “Oh, I’ll try... I will!”

  Tucker arrived for the scheduled meeting at just about the time Mary Jane would be boarding her aircraft, and since their mom and dad were stopping for lunch in Saratoga on their way home, he would be long gone by the time they got back.

  Possibly a good thing.

  Mom and Dad were bowing out of the family business and had decided on South Carolina, “so we don’t keep interfering with what you girls want to do with the place,” but they hadn’t made the move yet, and they did interfere. A lot. With profuse apologies every single time.

  Daisy didn’t want Tucker caught in the middle of family stuff. After all, he hadn’t been a part of the Cherry family for a long time.

  At two minutes before ten, she heard the metallic slam of a heavy vehicle door and peeked out the office window to see a juggernaut of a pickup truck parked out front, with the blue-and-green Reid Landscaping logo emblazoned on the side. She neatened the sheaf of printouts and brochures she’d taken from Jackie at the landscaping office yesterday, and slid her own hand-written notes into the folder, as well.

  She liked having a folder, and notes. They were practical and impersonal and gave emphasis to the working nature of this relationship. They were a reminder of how she used to clutch a pile of menus at Niche, after her professional and personal relationship with head chef and owner Michael Drake had gone downhill.

  Shoot, she hated even thinking about it, but she couldn’t stop herself sometimes!

  She’d fallen for him hard, from almost their first meeting nearly two years ago. Working so hard to establish herself as a pastry chef, she’d rarely had time for dating, and a serious relationship was long overdue. She was ripe and ready and there he was.

  He’d charmed her, lavished her with romantic gestures. It had been the perfect relationship. She remembered calling Lee one night in Colorado and gushing to her about it. “Oh, Lee, I never knew I could feel this way. It’s like a fairy tale. They say nothing in life is perfect, but this...this really is.”

  Too perfect.

  Overwhelmingly perfect.

  Fake perfect.

  She’d quickly gone from being dazzled by the flowers, the phone calls, the smiles-just-for-her, the candlelit dinners and the public parading of their intimacy, to feeling uneasy about the reality of what lay beneath. The stars faded from her eyes and cracks appeared in the facade, revealing a massive ego, no sense of humor and a tendency to turn cold and angry for days if she didn’t froth with appreciation and gratitude at his every gesture.

  She’d fallen out of love as fast as she’d fallen into it, and felt so foolish, embarrassed and angry at herself for mistaking romantic gestures and sheer lust for the real thing. She’d broken it off, and that was what he couldn’t handle, it had turned out. In his world, Michael Drake was always the one to do the dumping.

  She’d told him it needn’t and wouldn’t make a difference to their professional relationship and he’d agreed, but the agreement was as superficial as the romance had been. In fact, he’d undermined her at the restaurant from that moment on, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, depending on how distracted he was by his latest conquest.

  She’d waited for him to lose interest in the ugly game of punishment, thinking that if she just kept her head down for long enough, she could ride it out, but he didn’t forget and he didn’t forgive, and the atmosphere in the kitchen at Niche eventually wore her down too much. She’d suspected, too, that Michael was poisoning her reputation behind her back, so that getting another job in a San Francisco restaurant at the right level would be a challenge.

  The whole debacle had made her question the meaning of her life in California. What was really important? What did she want? Where did she see herself in five years or ten? It had been a major factor in her decision to come back to Spruce Bay, and she still combed through those early days with Michael in search of signs she’d missed, and reassurance that she wouldn’t make the same mistake with a man again.

  Which brought her back full circle to the present, and Tucker Reid.

  They met in the open air, as they’d done yesterday. She came out of the office with her clutch of papers to find Tucker paused beside his pickup, surveying the scene from behind dark sunglasses. His gaze pivoted slowly from the overgrown greenery bordering the access road, to the flat semicircle of mown grass in front of the two wings of motel units, to the unshaded rectangle of the pool.

  She knew what he would think. “You’re right, it’s dated and tired,” she said so tha
t he didn’t have to say it for her.

  He turned, hair glinting darkly in the midmorning sun. He was dressed in jeans and a navy polo shirt embroidered in blue and green with his company name and logo. It wasn’t really the weather for short sleeves anymore, but he didn’t seem aware of the chill in the shade. “Hi... Sorry, was I that easy to read?” he said.

  For once, yes!

  “It’s what anyone would think,” she answered honestly. “Mom and Dad were daunted by the idea of a big remodel, so they kept putting it off. It’s way past due.”

  “Happens a lot, especially in a family business.” He leaned in through the open window of his truck, grabbed an electronic tablet and clicked it on.

  She couldn’t stop herself from sighing. “I just don’t think they even see some of it. The whole place is too familiar to them.” It was a problem Mary Jane had been battling with for some time. “I’ve done a spreadsheet of our occupancy rates for the past seven years and there’s been a perceptible dip. This past season it tailed off even more, and I don’t think that’s just down to the economy.”

  He nodded back, fingers moving over the screen. His hands were rough and strong and tanned. Callused, probably. “In fact, when people vacation at a place like this, the last thing they want is to be reminded of a downturn by outdated facilities.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Show me,” Tucker said. He looked up at last. “Show me the areas you think most need work. It’s jumping the gun to get to budget details right away, but an idea of your priorities would still help. I’m not going to bring this thing with me.” He held up the tablet. “Can I just input a few basics to start? Then I’ll leave it in the office and we’ll fill in some more after the tour. And maybe you should leave your notes behind, too?”

  He gave a quick, unsmiling glance at the overly thick wad of papers and folders, and their protective value shriveled to nothing. Daisy felt strange and awkward and almost naked in a way she didn’t understand. “If you think we won’t need them yet, then sure, yes,” she said.