by Amy DeLuca
The dating pool here was certainly larger—not that she’d taken advantage of it. A few guys had asked her out, but she’d declined.
She wasn’t ready yet. Larson Overstreet had been one of them, but as nice as he was, she couldn’t look at him without thinking of Hunter, and she had to do everything possible to avoid thoughts of him.
Even speaking to Cinda had become difficult.
Kristal missed her and AJ so much, and speaking to her lifelong best friend on the phone gave her the false sensation that she could step outside and breathe in the crisp New England air, that she could drive her little car to the coast on her lunch break and listen to waves crashing against the rocks and the cries of seagulls and inhale the briny scent of the ocean.
The longing for home had only gotten worse since she’d been contacted by the Newport Art Preservation Guild’s acting director.
The woman had informed her the guild’s board had voted unanimously to attach a salary to the director position and had tried to persuade Kristal to return to Newport and take the job. The board members had all agreed Kristal was the perfect person to carry on her mother’s legacy, especially as she held a masters of fine arts degree.
Where was this three months ago? Kristal had wondered and regretfully turned down the offer.
She had a new life now, a thousand miles away from Newport. And even that distance wasn’t enough to keep her from thinking of Hunter constantly.
She simply couldn’t live in the same town with him, where they might run into each other and she’d find it impossible to avoid mentions of his name and possibly whatever flavor of the month woman he might be spending time with.
Reaching the museum, Kristal parked and stepped out into the muggy, super-heated climate typical of Georgia springs and summers.
Pulling her blouse away from her body, which was instantaneously coated in a fine sheen of sweat, she hurried across the parking lot and past giant sculptures of fruit, through the glass doors and inside to the soaring ultra-modern lobby where she said hello to Taylor at the front desk.
“Good morning,” the young receptionist said. “You had a call from a guy just a few minutes ago. I sent him to your voicemail. He sounded cute,” she added with an eyebrow waggle.
“Thanks.” Kristal headed back to her office, stopping by the small employee break room to fill her coffee cup first.
Putting down her bag and settling in at her desk, Kristal lifted the phone receiver and pressed the button to listen to her messages.
There was only one, and when she heard the recorded voice, she nearly spit out the sip of coffee she’d just taken.
“Kristal. It’s me…”
Hunter. The sound of his voice sent literal pain spiraling through her chest.
“I know you probably don’t want to hear from me,” he said. “but there’s something important going on here…”
Kristal’s heart hammered with a blend of excitement and fear.
Her first thought was that something must have happened to Cinda or one of the dwarves for Hunter to be calling her and speaking in such an ominous tone.
“Everyone’s okay, so don’t panic,” he continued, and Kristal’s pulse dropped to a more normal level.
“It’s good news, actually. Well, good news/bad news. There’s a new lead on your trust fund. You might be able to recover the money. The bad news is who the suspects are. Well… I don’t want to leave any more of this on a recording. Just call me back when you get a chance, okay?”
Kristal replayed the message once more then got up and crossed her office on shaky legs to shut the door.
Then she went back to her desk, pulled out her cell phone, and dialed the number Hunter left at the end of his message.
He answered on the first ring. “Hello? Kristal?”
For a moment she couldn’t answer. It seemed all the oxygen had evaporated from the room, and there was apparently a large moth trapped in her chest, frantic to escape.
Oh man do I miss him.
The two months apart had done exactly nothing to dull the longing she felt for Hunter.
Kristal swallowed and managed to take a breath. “Yes. It’s me. Hi Hunter.”
“Hi.” He sounded nervous too. “How are you?”
“I’m… okay. I got your message.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry to bother you. I know you’re at work, and I know the last time we talked, I wasn’t exactly my ‘best self.’”
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “It sounded like you had a good reason to call.”
Unfortunately, the reason had something to do with her trust fund instead of oh, him calling to say he loved her and desperately wanted her to come back.
Not that she’d pull up her shallow roots here, quit her new job, and high-tail it back to Newport if he asked.
Would she?
“Yeah, like I said, there’s been a development in the trust fund case. I’m not really sure how to say this, so I’m just gonna say it… it looks like it was Harry and Margot.”
“Harry and Margot what?” Kristal’s heart raced so hard it was making her head spin.
Had Harry and Margot somehow gained some new information that had broken the case?
“They did it. They were caught on video talking about draining the trust fund and splitting it.” There was a long pause. “I’m so sorry, Kristal. I know this has to hurt.”
“Hurt” wasn’t the word she would have chosen. “Hurt” was a stubbed toe or burning your ear with a straightening iron. This was more on the scale of falling face-first into lava.
Kristal felt like she was broiling all over. She stripped off the sweater she always wore at work due to the frigid air conditioning.
“Kristal? You still there? You okay?”
She nodded rapidly, then realizing Hunter couldn’t hear her, croaked, “Yes. I’m here.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’m sure you’ll be hearing from the investigator soon. He called this morning, looking for a phone number or forwarding address for you. I didn’t have an address, but I did give him your work number. Hope that’s okay.”
“Sure. Yes. Of course.”
Kristal’s insta-fever had cooled a little, but in its wake, a sense of numbness was rising.
“Well… thanks for letting me know. That was… nice of you. I guess I’ll let you go—”
“Wait,” Hunter interrupted. “How are you doing? How are things going there? I mean, other than the bombshell I just dropped on you.”
“Oh. Good. Yeah, everything’s good. I found a nice place. I like my job—most days. The people are nice. How are you?”
“You’d be proud of me.” He gave a snarky laugh. “I’ve been taking some time away from work, and guess what? Things run just fine without me there fourteen hours a day. Hey, I was down at Bowen’s Wharf and saw some of your photographs in the front window of the gallery. Looks like your asking price has gone way up—they must be selling well.”
“Yes. They are—thanks.” Kristal wasn’t quite sure what she was thanking him for, but now that her shock was dissipating, her nerves were coming back.
“I uh… one of my shots placed in that photography contest. I didn’t win the grand prize, but I took first in the landscape division. It did wonders to raise my profile. Toni said people have actually been coming into the shop asking for my work.”
“Wow. That’s amazing. Congratulations. You deserve it. Now that the demand is there, you should really think about setting up a website and selling your work online. I know someone who can help you with online payment processing,” Hunter quipped, obviously referring to his own company, Chipp.
“I’ll think about it. I haven’t really had any time to go out and take any new photographs lately though. Even if I did, I’m kind of at a loss for subject matter here in the city. Urban scenes aren’t my area of expertise.”
“You could come home,” Hunter said softly, then, as if catching himself, he added, “I mean… maybe when you come
home to deal with the trust fund issue you’ll get a chance to get out and take some new shots.”
“That would be nice. Yeah, I guess the investigation does give me a reason to come back and visit.”
Kristal’s heart was screaming, begging him to give her a better reason, to tell her he missed her and still loved her and still wanted her.
In spite of what she had vowed before, she found herself sorely tempted to beg him for a second chance, to take whatever scraps of time he could afford to give her and just let it be enough. Anything to be with him.
There was a prolonged silence on the line before Hunter spoke again. “I wouldn’t ask you to come back for me.”
“You wouldn’t?” she blurted, in shock that he’d actually addressed the elephant in the room head on.
“No. You’ve made a nice life for yourself there. You’re happy now, and I’m really happy for you.”
“Well…” she started to argue, but he continued.
“You deserve better than anything I could offer you. I’m sorry I kept trying to throw money and ‘things’ at you. It’s not that I was trying to buy you—I know you can’t be bought. It’s just… I knew that I didn’t deserve you. No matter what I did, what I had, what I earned, I could never deserve you. I tried so hard to prove otherwise, but I knew it. It killed me because you were always what I wanted most in life. Not just ‘want’—I needed you—too much.”
“Hunter,” she whispered, unable to say more with her throat constricted as it was.
Tears ran down her cheeks as he continued pouring his heart out.
“But I wouldn’t ask you to come back, to be with me. Because I’m no good for you. That’s the thing I never wanted you to figure out. That’s what I was hiding from you. I’m like that poisoned apple in the fairy tale that looks shiny and delicious on the outside, but inside, it’s all rotten.”
“Why would you ever say such a thing?”
“That night… after our first date… when I was out all night… I was with my brother. And my father.”
He paused to draw a ragged breath.
“Dad had gotten into a traffic accident. He was drunk. He was always drunk. Back in high school there wasn’t a day he wasn’t wasted by noon. Jack and I covered for him. We lied when his boss would call—back when he still had a job. We forged signatures on each other’s report cards. We took care of the house, the yard. Jack started driving without a license at fourteen so he could be sure I got home safely from sports practices and games. When he went off to college, I had to quit all my teams and extracurriculars so I could work. Otherwise Dad and I would have been living in a house with no heat or power. We would have literally had nothing to eat.”
“Hunter, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. How terrible for you.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m just trying to explain to you the kind of stock I come from.”
“No—that’s not true—”
“Please. Just let me finish, okay? I thought when I went away to school, I’d left him and all his issues behind. Other than paying his bills and occasionally dropping in to make sure he was eating, Jack and I basically have had nothing to do with Dad for years. But that night… I realized we can’t leave it all behind. It’s part of us. He’s in us both. Our father is a drunk and a convict. He hurt someone in that accident. We took care of the family, but the thing is, they can’t keep Dad locked up forever. He’ll get out, and he’ll do it again. It haunts me. Jack’s doing all right. But he’s different from me. He always was better at handling the whole thing. He’s not as… needy as I am.”
“Hunter, you are not needy,” Kristal argued. “You’re the most accomplished, self-starting, capable man I’ve ever met in my life.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I do know you. And your father getting into a DUI accident has nothing to do with you.”
“It wasn’t just the accident,” he said quietly. “It was what he said to me at the jail after Jack and I refused to bail him out.”
Kristal’s heart sank, imagining what kind of toxins the angry alcoholic might have spewed at his son as they stood there in the middle of the night separated by iron bars.
“He said…”
Hunter’s voice failed, and Kristal almost said something but then he spoke again. His tone was flat now, devoid of any emotion.
“He called me a needy little parasite, a tapeworm, a bedbug. Said I always had been, that when my mom was weak from cancer, I was always hanging around, wanting her attention, asking her to read me a story, color with me, to look at something I’d made… to give me what I needed. He said I exhausted her when she should have been saving her energy to fight the disease.”
Kristal’s breath caught at the mean-spirited lies.
It sounded to her like Hunter had been a normal child, terrified to see his mother growing frailer by the day and slipping away from him, devastated to lose her love in his young life.
Of course he’d needed her—he’d been an eight-year-old boy. Children were supposed to need their parents—not be vilified for it.
His father, in his own grief over his wife’s death, had lashed out at his heartbroken child. Kristal had never heard of a worse parent.
“Hunter, that was a horrible thing for him to say, and it’s not true. Do you hear me? It’s not. Your mom would have wanted to spend time with you and Jack when she knew she was running short on it. That’s how mothers are. It’s how mine was. And I see it with Cinda—nothing is more important to her than AJ. I’m sure your mother felt the same. And you can’t kill someone by needing them. Cancer killed your mother. Not you. Not your love.”
“You weren’t there,” he said in that dead-sounding voice.
“And you shouldn’t be in my life now. I’ve loved you as long as I can remember, and I always will… but I won’t do the same thing to you. Anyway, I didn’t mean to dump all over you. I just wanted you to understand. It’s not that I wanted to keep things from you. I just… I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know what I’m really like. I wanted you to like me. I wanted to be with you. But now I see it’s impossible.”
The pace of his words increased, coming out rapid-fire.
“Anyway, I’m glad you’re doing well there—I really am. Good luck with the trust fund thing. I hope that works out too. Okay well, I have to get off the phone. Take care.”
And the line went dead.
Kristal sat in place, phone in hand, for a long time as she grappled with shock and empathy and heartbreak. She would not be winning any productivity awards at work that day for sure.
Hunter had finally given her what she’d wanted. He’d opened up and showed her his truth, his badly damaged heart, his real self.
She was stricken by the bare-bones vulnerability—and the utter wrongness of the beliefs he held about himself.
She was also stricken by a new realization about herself.
Though she hadn’t been utilizing her degree and hadn’t had a real “career” back in Rhode Island, she’d been happier there as a picture-taking waitress than she was here in Atlanta as an associate curator with an office and a secretary.
She loved her hometown—and especially the people in it. She missed it—and them—to a painful degree, and that wasn’t something that was going to get better with time.
Yes, she’d created a new life here, but it wasn’t anything that couldn’t be undone. There had been a great deal of competition for this job. If she left it, the museum director could likely fill the opening within days.
Her co-workers and neighbors here were nice, but she wasn’t an important part of their lives.
For Kristal, Atlanta was just a place. Newport… was home.
Her heart began to flutter with anticipation as her mind continued down this new path she’d inadvertently turned onto.
Maybe Bonnie’s sister Rachel and all the guys wouldn’t mind her rooming in at the billionaire bachelor house again.
Or if that wasn’t a possibil
ity, she’d find a little one-bedroom apartment somewhere in town.
If her photographs continued to sell—or the trust fund thing panned out—perhaps she’d do as Cinda had done and buy a small cottage.
Or not. It didn’t really matter. The luxury of the place she went home to at night meant nothing compared to who she shared her life with on a daily basis.
And Kristal knew exactly who she wanted that to be.
Hunter had thought he was scaring her away by telling her how much he needed her. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
She wanted to be needed by him. She wanted him—and whatever baggage might come along with the package.
It would likely take some work to convince him of that, but she’d gotten used to hard work. And Hunter was worth it.
There was only one problem. He was in Newport, and she was in Atlanta.
Stepping around her desk, Kristal headed for her office door and then down the hallway to the director’s office.
She knocked and, at her boss’s invitation, stepped inside.
“Hi. Could we talk for a minute? I have some news.”
Twenty-Nine
Favorite Season
Hunter stared out the window of Castle Hill Inn’s small dining room at the sun setting behind the Pell Bridge.
The food had been phenomenal as usual, and now that it was spring, the view of the lush green lawn and the deep blue ocean beyond it truly couldn’t be beat.
But he was ready to leave. He hadn’t been here since Kristal had left town, and he was considering never coming back again. This place was now inextricably tied to memories of her—and those were something he was better off avoiding.
Right, like that’s even possible.
The entire city was one big parade of Kristal-memories. Maybe he’d buy a penthouse apartment in Providence like Reid and just leave Newport behind completely.
Speaking to her on the phone a month ago had reopened wounds that had barely even begun to heal. Now Hunter walked around nearly anemic from the internal emotional bleeding.
