Safe Harbor

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Anderson tripped and fell. Sam pounced on him. Round and round they rolled, with Holly's father clearly on the run, trying to claw away from Sam and crawl up the beach. Sam wouldn't have it. He grabbed the lawyer's sodden slacks and yanked him back, back to the sea—for all intents and purposes, ready to drown him on the spot.

  "You asshole!" he shouted between grunts. "You idiot fathead asshole!" He was sitting on Anderson now, screaming in his face, trying to get through to him, oblivious to the fact that the waves were washing around them, oblivious to the fact that the man was no longer resisting.

  In horror he suddenly sat back. What am I doing? What am I doing? He rolled off Anderson and began hauling him to his feet. I'm beating up Holly's father, for pity's sake. What next? Little old ladies at bus stops?

  Sickened by the fact that he'd yielded to such an easy temptation, he said between gasps for breath, "You okay? Are you okay?" He had to support Anderson and was grudgingly impressed by the man's response.

  "I'm ... okay. I started it. I'm okay," he said, weaving in place.

  "Good. Well—good," said Sam. He let go tentatively of him.

  Anderson was able to stand on his own. "I shouldn't have said that ... about my family," he said, huffing and wheezing. He reached in his back pocket and pulled out a wet handkerchief, then held it to his face. "I think my ... ow ... nose is broken."

  Sam shook his head. He knew when and how to break a nose, and when to leave it in one piece. "You'll be fine. Maybe sore."

  "Yes. Sore. Black and blue, too."

  Yeah, you won't look any younger for her when she shows up for your money, you poor dumb cluck.

  "I never should have said that about my family," Anderson repeated as they turned and began dragging themselves back to the Bouchards' house. "They're innocent in all of this."

  "Well, gee, ya think?" Sam said scathingly. His mind was already racing ahead to part two of the sorry soirée: explaining to Holly that her father wasn't the only sucker in town. He touched a spot above his right eye: swollen. Something else to explain to her. Shit.

  They walked along in sullen silence, jeered by the hissing sea. Idiots! Both of you! Idiotsl

  The partiers who had decided to take a dip had dipped and gone—possibly scared from their lark by the sight of two men brawling a little too close to their playground for comfort. Sam prayed that they hadn't called the cops. He picked up the pace.

  "You married a long time ago, I take it?" Holly's father asked, almost shyly ...

  "Eight years. She disappeared after the first one and never came back."

  "There had to be a reason."

  "Far's I know, it was to stay one step ahead of a warrant. But if you find out there's another reason, by all means tell me. I'd be mildly curious to know."

  I love you Sam, please believe that. I'll never love anyone else. I can't stay on to explain; I wish I could. Just know that I love you.

  And then the kicker: We'll meet again.

  During the past seven years Sam had wanted that to happen for so many different reasons: love, lust, a maybe-father's longing; vengeance, curiosity, and recently, plain old-fashioned justice. But the most recent motive, the justice thing, had dropped away like the last petal of a daisy when Eric Anderson promised to make good on the Durer. Eden might have Sam's child—Sam would want that child—but there was no reason in the world for them to meet again, except possibly in court.

  Anderson was doing his best to recover from the latest plunge in the roller coaster that had become his life. "Eden never tried to get in touch with you during those seven years?"

  "Nope."

  "Don't you see? She disappeared because—well, because she didn't want to put you through the trauma of being divorced by her. She knew the marriage was a mistake—"

  I'll never love anyone else.

  "And she knew that there was no hope of your ever getting together—"

  We'll meet again.

  "And she meant to let you get used to the idea of living without her, but one year led to another—"

  "For crissake," Sam said in disgust. "Is it possible that you were once smart enough to pass a bar exam?"

  Stung, Anderson said, "Why the hell didn't you divorce her, then?"

  Now it was Sam who—despite the wet clothing that clung to him—was feeling the heat. "You want to know why?" he snapped. "Because just before she walked out, she told me she thought she was pregnant."

  "Eden has never had a baby," Anderson said flatly.

  "This, from the man who thinks Eden simply forgot to divorce me?"

  Ignoring the crack, Anderson said, "I'm no Lothario, but I know when a woman's had a baby. Eden has no scar, no stretch marks, no stretched anything. Her body is perfect."

  They were on dangerous, dangerous ground, as shifting as the sand beneath their feet. Sam did not—did not—want to get into a kiss 'n tell with a man who by rights should've been a candidate for father-in-law. He gritted his teeth, and Anderson, who seemed to realize that they were a sentence away from renewing their brawl, let the matter drop.

  As for Sam, he was appalled that he'd said as much as he had. He'd never mentioned Eden's claim about pregnancy to anyone, not even his parents—and yet here he was, spilling his guts to a man he should hate.

  He couldn't quite do that. Sam might have been the better fighter, but he sure as hell couldn't claim to be any smarter.

  "Let me ask you this," he said. "What makes a man like you walk away from a thirty-year marriage for someone like Eden? I don't get that."

  "I've thought about that question constantly," the older man admitted. "You think it's for the sex—"

  "Don't tell me what I think."

  "I was going to say, it's not. Sex enters into it, but it's more that Eden is so full of life. She understands that time is short; that we have to live our lives to the fullest and that we can't hang on and drift just out of habit. She's very wise that way. She's told me that Charlotte will get over this if I make it quick and make it clean. So far, I haven't done a very good job of that. Of course, Eden admits that she's made things more complicated than they had to be, and she really feels bad about that."

  Somehow, Sam didn't think so. He was very close to throttling Anderson all over again. How could the guy be so damned gullible?

  How could Sam ever have been?

  "Eden wants to sail around the world with me," Anderson said, sounding more and more eager to present his case. "Whereas my wi—Charlotte—has always got seasick on the Vixen"

  "So take her on a bigger boat. The QEII goes around the world; so do tramp steamers."

  "It's not the same," Anderson argued. He sounded almost petulant as he said, "I want adventure. I want to live life stripped to its essence. I want to be scared out of my wits once in a while."

  Sam thought, Cancer, heart disease, stroke—not scary enough for you, pal?

  Shrugging, he said, "Sorry. I still don't get it."

  Maybe it was because he had discovered that danger wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and because he had an aching hunger to spend the rest of his life with someone who was bedrock-solid in her loyalties. Someone who was good, not Machiavellian; generous and not greedy. Someone who liked kids and cats and, even better, who was liked by kids and cats. Someone who was oblivious to the power of her beauty, and who had deep ties to her family and couldn't bear to hurt them, and who wanted to be a mother herself, and who looked positively enchanting hopping around a room with one leg in and one leg out of her shorts.

  Someone like Holly.

  A vision of her suddenly rose up before him as he plowed through the lapping seas of the incoming tide: it was of Holly in her shop, her dark hair tumbling across her cheeks as she bent over a birdhouse with her magic brushes, creating a garden where once there was none. In the vision Sam saw clearly—though he had hardly registered it at the time—a real, live black-and-white cat curled up in an upside-down straw hat on an old bureau behind her.

  How had he mis
sed the cat in the hat? What else had he missed? Suddenly he became seized by panic: there was a whole world of Holly that he didn't know. While Eric Anderson was fixating about crossing a globe covered mostly in water, Sam Steadman wanted nothing more than to explore every last inch and every last laugh of one of its inhabitants.

  Is this what love was, then—a feeling of blind panic that what you wanted most might slip through your hands and be lost forever? With Eden, Sam had felt many emotions, but she had never inspired panic in him. When he discovered that she'd taken off, he felt humiliated, depressed, rejected, angry ... but never in his worst moments had he felt panic.

  "I'm gonna have to get going," he said abruptly to Anderson, who was lost in his own set of musings.

  "What—? Oh. Sure," said Holly's father. "I'm sorry things got a little—"

  Sam never heard the rest of the sentence; he was running across the sand, headed for the Bouchards' house and his rental car parked behind it. His surge of panic had bred more panic: Don't let Eden have got there before me. Don't let her be up to new mischief.

  Was Eden on the island? Holly's father hadn't said; but if the hair standing up on the back of Sam's neck was any indication, she must be somewhere near. He drove irrationally fast, convinced that Holly was in danger, convinced that it was his fault.

  By taking the State Road, he was able to bypass the inevitable crush of tourists and traffic in Oak Bluffs; he didn't slow down until he fetched up hard at the studio. All the lights were on and the barn door was slid open. Filled with dread, he hopped out of his car and ran inside.

  "Holly?"

  He went up to her workbench and touched one of the pickets on the birdhouse fence: still wet.

  "Holly?"

  He began a quick search of the place, checking behind the stacked-up furniture and old broken farm tools, easing his bulk into nooks that were out of the way and out of sight. With every passing second, his anxiety ratcheted higher.

  She wasn't in the barn. Outside?

  Holly... where are you?

  "Sam?"

  He swung around.

  "Sam—is it really you?"

  Chapter 23

  Who'd you think it was?" he asked, grinning with relief. He walked straight up to her and took her in his arms, kissing her as if they'd been apart for twelve years instead of twelve hours.

  She tried to say something, but he kissed it away. All he wanted, all he needed, was to know that she was still willing to be held by him.

  "Sam, what happened to you? You're all salty," she said, running her tongue lightly over his upper lip. "And soggy—your clothes are soaked. You're hurt!" She touched his eye lightly; it was an effort for him not to wince. "What happened?"

  "Aw, some dufus and I were arguing politics on the beach and didn't agree. Where'd you go wandering off to?" he asked, trying to get her off the subject.

  "I heard a noise upstairs in your apartment and assumed you'd come back. Call me cocky, but I couldn't imagine why you wouldn't have stopped by the studio first to say hi. I was halfway up the stairs before it occurred to me that whoever it was might not be you."

  Eden? Koloman?

  "Lucky for me, the place was empty when I looked around—"

  "You went inside?"

  "I searched inside and outside. There's no one around. It could have been the wind knocking the screen onto the floor," she said with a shrug.

  The hair on the back of Sam's neck was standing again, not a good sign. "Holly, something's going on around here that I should know about. Tell me."

  She hesitated, then said, "It's nothing specific, really. My sister was here earlier and we were sitting on the swing in my yard, and she—I have to say, she became really spooked. I tend to be less citified about dark places than Ivy is, so I didn't share her feeling that we were being watched. But ... could it have been Stefan, do you think?" she said, shivering suddenly in Sam's arms.

  "If it was, he'll be out of the picture soon," Sam answered cryptically. He resolved to guard Holly around the clock until then, come hell or high water.

  And in the meantime: "Look, about the engraving..." he said, but he cut off the sentence before it was formed. This wasn't about the engraving at all.

  Get it done. He took a deep breath, then corrected himself. "About Eden..."

  Holly had drifted away to peer through a window at the darkness outside. "Yes?" she said over her shoulder as she scanned for crooks in the night. "What about Eden?"

  Ah shit, ah shit.

  "She's—back."

  Holly whipped her head in his direction. Her beautiful green eyes were wide with amazement. "Back? When? How? Where?"

  "I can't answer most of that. All I know is that Eden called your father this morning. Long story short, she claims it's all a misunderstanding. She's prepared to give my parents the entire proceeds of the sale of the engraving, and your father is going to pay Koloman his full commission."

  Holly looked completely blank for a moment, and then she said, "Oh!"

  It was the kind of "oh" you used when you were still working things through, and Sam could see that she was doing just that.

  Oddly, her first—no doubt least painful—thought was for the engraving. "So it's not on the boat, after all."

  "No, the engraving's gone."

  "That's too bad; I would have liked to have seen it," she admitted, sitting back on the narrow sill. A few heartbeats later, she added, "So he's serious about her."

  "He appears to be."

  "And she's willing to have him, of course."

  "He seems to think so."

  "Do the police know she's alive and well?"

  "I got that impression."

  Holly nodded. "Someone should tell Stefan and get him off our backs."

  "Consider it done."

  She pushed herself off the sill and walked back over to him, then laid her cheek against his still-damp shirt and wrapped her arms around his waist. "I should be thankful that Eden's alive—but I'm not," she murmured. "She's caused so much pain around here."

  Her sigh ripped Sam in two. "More to come, I'm afraid."

  "I know," she said, and she began a long ramble. "I'm going to have to break this to my mother ... and my sister ... and who knows where Eden and my dad will want to live ... more scandal ... as if there hasn't been enough already. I hope my mother doesn't decide to move off the island ... but it's such a small place ..."

  Mute in his guilt, Sam was stroking her hair, touching her with reassurances that he could not speak. He had waited too long, for too many reasons, to tell her about his short-lived but somehow unending marriage to Eden. And now that the stakes were higher than ever, he was less able than ever to make a clean breast of it.

  "Holly ... sweet ... do you remember Percy Billings?"

  "Do I!" she said, laughing softly. "He was really cute, but not very forthright. I like honest Sam Steadman a lot more. A whole lot more."

  "Well ... good," he said, kissing the top of her head. "But getting back to Percy Billings—"

  "Hey, I just realized," she said, looking up at him. "When did you see my father, anyway?"

  "Just now. Ten minutes ago."

  She gasped and said, "He was the dufus you fought with? My father?"

  "Yeah, but don't worry about him," Sam said, brushing aside the distraction. "He's fine. Maybe a black eye, that's all. Some cuts and scrapes. Will you listen to me?"

  "But—what were you fighting about? Not politics, surely!"

  "It was my fault; he rubbed me the wrong way. Holly—"

  "No, you don't understand, Sam. My father's not the least bit violent. He's the kind of person who catches spiders in the house and sets them free. Really, he is so non-violent. It's almost a thing with him. He gives to causes against abuse and aggression. He'd never have—how did you get him to fight? What on earth did you say?"

  "I don't remember. It's not important. Holly. Will you let me get this out?"

  "Get what out? What are you talking about?"


  "Eden! What the hell are we ever talking about? Eden! God, I'm so sick of her name!" He took Holly by the shoulders and held her at arm's length, forcing himself to look her square in the eye. "Stop interrupting. Just ... for one minute listen to me, or I'll never get this out," he said in a voice thick with agony. "Eden Walker is still my wife."

  Nothing.

  Then: "Oh."

  Then: "Still?"

  Then: "Oh" again.

  And then a heartwrenching, shuddering sigh. "Did you say 'still'?"

  "Yes. We never divorced."

  Her cheeks burned red; her eyes welled with emotion. "Oh. Okay. Because somehow I must not have been listening when you told me you were married to her in the first place."

  Her irony cut him down much more effectively than any display of hysteria could. He said in a hoarse whisper, "I'm sorry, Holly. My God ... I am sorry."

  He closed his eyes, shutting out the vision of her hurt, but when he opened them again, she was still hurt. Her look was blank; her breast was lifting and falling rapidly. She reminded him of a bird that's just flown into a window and dropped to the ground. He was afraid to let her go, afraid that, wounded or not, she would fly off, just to get away from him.

  She wiggled out of his grasp just the same; but she was too wounded to fly very far.

  "Is that why you came to the island?" she asked in the faintest of whispers. "For her?"

  Sam started to shake his head in denial. But he wanted Holly's mercy, and there could be no mercy without a full confession. "That was part of it, yes. I'd be lying if—"

  "Lying? You?" she said softly.

  He felt his own cheek smart from the words so gently lashed. "I deserve that. My only defense—and it stinks—is that I didn't know you then."

  "Ah. Now I feel better: you only lie to strangers."

  "No, I only withhold information from strangers. Miss Manners says that's permissible," he said with a wan smile.

  "Does she? Then I suppose she says it's permissible to abduct a stranger into a waiting seaplane," Holly said with a lift of her chin.