“You probably shouldn’t say things like that,” Hannah said.
“Why not?”
“Because…” She faced him. “Luke, just how complicated is your life right now?”
He knew he owed her nothing less than total honesty. “Pretty complicated,” he admitted.
“Mine, too. It’s a really bad time to start something that can’t possibly go anywhere, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.” He felt strangely disappointed, despite the logic.
“I’m sorry, though.”
“Me, too,” he said. He turned and waited till her gaze met his. There it was, that simmering heat just waiting for the right spark to set it ablaze. It seemed like a damn shame to waste it, but he didn’t have the right to complicate her life, not when she’d made it plain it was chaotic enough. “Does that mean we can’t just sit here as old friends and enjoy the wine and the evening?”
He thought he could see a faint smile on her lips as she shook her head.
“No,” she said softly. “It doesn’t mean that at all.”
He supposed there were worse things than coming home and finding an old friend with whom he could share a few memories, some laughs and a quiet night like this. In fact, it was a pleasant surprise, like leaving his quarters in Iraq one day to find a wildflower determinedly sprouting through a crack in the concrete.
“In the name of friendship, do you want to tell me what’s going on in your life?” he asked. “I assume Kelsey’s pregnancy isn’t the only issue.”
“Not by a long shot,” she admitted. “How about you? You want to tell me what’s gone wrong in your life?”
He chuckled. “It could be sort of like, I’ll show you my messed-up life, if you show me yours.”
For an instant she seemed to consider the idea, then shook her head. “Nah,” she said. “It’s too nice a night to spoil it.”
“Just remember that friends can share their problems, Hannah, okay? Anytime.”
“Thanks. The same goes for you.”
“And spoil the illusion that I’m perfect?” he teased.
“Only Grandma Jenny thinks that,” she retorted. “You’ve already admitted to me that your life’s messed up.”
“Through no fault of my own,” he felt compelled to say.
“Really? You sure about that?”
He thought about what had happened, thought all the way back to the beginning when he’d made the unilateral decision to go to Iraq in the first place. That was when it had started. Had he deserved what had happened? No. He would never accept that. But had he put it all in motion by not taking into account how strongly Lisa felt about him going back into the army? No question about it.
He sighed heavily. “I’m not sure how I feel about having a friend who can cut through the crap and call me on it,” he said.
She regarded him with surprise. “Did I do that?”
“Yep, and it was damned annoying, if you must know, especially since you had no idea you were doing it.”
She grinned at him. “Just think how much help I could be if I knew what on earth we were talking about.”
“One of these days,” he promised. “I’m just not ready to rip the scabs off the wounds yet.”
She reached over to tap her glass against his. “To future revelations.”
“And to healing,” he added. Somehow he knew that Hannah had as much of that to do as he did.
“Grandma Jenny, guess what?” Kelsey called out excitedly as she ran onto the porch just before lunchtime the next day. She came to an abrupt stop and her expression faltered when she spotted Hannah standing in the yard painting the porch railing.
Hannah didn’t miss Kelsey’s suddenly guilty expression or Grandma Jenny’s expectant one. She stood there and waited to see what the two of them were up to.
“What?” Grandma Jenny asked.
“I’ve booked five reservations this morning,” Kelsey announced, avoiding Hannah’s gaze. “Every single family I contacted made a reservation the second I told them we were reopening.” She glanced at the sheet of paper she was holding. “The Van Dorns said to tell you hello, and the Johnsons said they need one more room this time because they have two new grandchildren and they want the whole family to come this year. They’re booking four rooms in all. The Marshals, the Watsons and the Gradys are confirmed, too. Everyone’s so excited to be coming back. A few of them are even canceling reservations they made at other places because they’d rather be here.”
“That’s wonderful,” Grandma Jenny said enthusiastically. “Good work, Kelsey.”
Hannah bit back the sharp comment that was on the tip of her tongue. Fighting to keep her temper in check, she asked quietly, “Why are you taking reservations, Kelsey?”
“It’s an inn,” she said matter-of-factly. “Renting rooms is what keeps us in business. People are thrilled to hear we haven’t closed for good. It’s really great, Mom. I heard so many wonderful stories this morning! People were telling me about how many years they’ve come here and how they look forward to it. You should have heard them.”
“Whose idea was it to start calling people?”
Kelsey gave her a defiant look. “Mine. Grandma said you hadn’t done anything about sending out an announcement about the reopening, so I decided to start making calls to some of the regulars.”
“Exactly when were the two of you planning to tell me about this?” she asked, not sure whether she was more furious that she’d been left out of the loop or that it was happening at all. How could they sell the place if it was filled to capacity? Or would that actually turn out to be a selling point? Maybe she was looking at this the wrong way.
“You know now,” Grandma Jenny said with a touch of defiance. “I’ve said all along I wanted to get this place reopened as soon as possible. You were the one dragging your feet.”
“Because you can’t manage this place on your own,” Hannah said, then caught the expression on Kelsey’s face. A sense of dread settled in her stomach. “Go back inside, Kelsey. I need to speak to your great-grandmother.”
Kelsey plopped down in a chair next to Grandma Jenny’s. “No. This concerns me, too.”
“Why on earth do you think that?” Hannah asked, again assailed by the feeling that she wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Because I’m going to stay here and help Grandma Jenny keep the inn running,” Kelsey said flatly.
“Over my dead body,” Hannah said, her temper coming to a boil. She dropped the paint brush back into the bucket and marched up to the porch, scowling at the pair of them. Then she focused her attention on her grandmother. “What were you thinking putting such a ridiculous idea into her head? She needs to go back to Stanford, and the sooner the better.”
“That’s not what she wants to do,” Grandma Jenny replied, her tone gentle. “Listen to her, Hannah. She wants to stay here, at least until the baby is born.”
“And then what? Waste the rest of her life in this nothing little town?”
“I like Seaview Key,” Kelsey protested. “And I want to stay here, at least for now, so that’s what I’m going to do. I know you don’t like it, Mom, and I’m sorry, but it’s not your decision.”
“We had a deal,” Hannah argued, even though she knew the battle was lost. Kelsey was so strong-willed that any arguments would only solidify her resolve.
“I think our deal pretty much went up in smoke the day I found out I was pregnant,” Kelsey said.
“Plenty of young women manage to attend classes while they’re pregnant,” Hannah said.
“I could probably drag myself around to my classes and maybe even pass them,” Kelsey agreed. “But you’ve forgotten about the rest. Jeff wants to get married. He’ll be in my face every single day and it will only get worse the closer I get to my due date. I can’t deal with that kind of pressure, plus school. The one thing the doctor warned me about was stressing out. It’s not good for me or the baby.”
She stood up and looked Hanna
h in the eye. “Please, Mom, don’t fight me on this. It’s what I want, and in the end, I know it’s for the best. This will give me the time I need to make a decision that’s right for everyone—the baby, Jeff and me.”
“Kelsey, staying here isn’t the answer. You and Jeff should be working through this together.”
“We can’t,” Kelsey said simply. “I know what will happen. I’ll have a couple of bad days and he’ll be right there, ready to make everything okay and I’ll cave in because it’s easier than dealing with all this alone. That’s no way to start a marriage, not if I want it to last.”
“Listen to how wise she’s being, Hannah,” Grandma Jenny chimed in. “You should be proud of her.”
“I think you planted this idea in her head,” Hannah accused her grandmother heatedly. They’d ganged up on her and she hated it. “You know I want to sell Seaview Inn, so you’ve enlisted Kelsey to help you keep it open. You’ve been determined to fight me on this and now you’ve found the perfect way.”
“Mom, that’s not fair,” Kelsey said. “This was my decision. I came to Grandma Jenny with the idea of staying. In fact, I had to talk her into it, so don’t blame her for any of this. I’m the one who screwed up and let you down.”
Before Hannah could think of a single argument to convince Kelsey to go back to California, the girl was gone. Hannah sank into the chair Kelsey had vacated.
“This is wrong!” she said angrily. “It is so wrong.”
“Not if it’s what she wants,” her grandmother said, her tone calm and reasonable. “You heard her, Hannah. She needs time to think, and what better place to do that than here?”
“She’s barely twenty. She doesn’t know what she wants.”
“I think she does.” Jenny regarded Hannah sympathetically. “I know how hard this is for you. Don’t you think it killed your mother and me to have you announce that you wanted to move away from here and have nothing more to do with Seaview Key or the inn? But we let you go, didn’t we? And we did it with grace. Don’t you think Kelsey deserves the same consideration from you?”
Hannah eventually sat back in defeat. “Okay, you’re right, I know you are. But how can I support this decision when it’s going to ruin her life?”
“Because it’s her life to ruin, her mistake to make,” her grandmother suggested. “And who knows? She could prove you wrong. And it’s not as if she’s giving up college forever. She put a time limit on it, just until she has the baby. By then, she may hate this place as much as you do and be ready to go back to school. Or she may have found that this is where she wants to spend the rest of her life.”
“I still think this works out awfully conveniently for you,” Hannah muttered.
“Perhaps so, but I swear to you I had no part in planting the idea in her head. She was the one who came to me. Kelsey is a young woman who knows her own mind. You of all people should know that. You taught her well.”
“Right now, I’m not feeling as if that’s quite the compliment you meant it to be.”
“It’s going to work out. You’ll see. Maybe you should focus on your own life and stop worrying so much about what will happen next with Kelsey.”
“My life is just fine,” Hannah protested, uttering the lie with total conviction.
“Really?” Grandma Jenny said, her skepticism as plain as Hannah’s had been earlier. “Here’s the way I see it. I know you must have a follow-up doctor’s appointment soon and you must be scared to death. Who could blame you after the way things went with your mother? And I know you’re not nearly as happy with your job as you want everyone to believe. You’re successful, but you’re at the beck and call of too many people. You have absolutely no time to enjoy your success. And I know that deep down inside, you wonder sometimes if you’re truly living whatever time might be left to you.”
Tears stung Hannah’s eyes at the assessment. She’d had no idea Grandma Jenny could read her so well. Obviously she was stronger and more astute than ever. The problem was, Hannah wasn’t ready to deal with any of it. These days her biggest accomplishment was putting one foot in front of the other and getting through each day.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“You should. Burdens are always lighter when they’re shared. Listen to me, Hannah,” she said, then waited until Hannah turned to face her. “Not dealing with your fears, not doing whatever you can to reach for the things that make you happy, those are the real mistakes we make in life. And when our time comes, whenever that is, it’s the things we didn’t do that we regret the most.”
“Do you have regrets?” she asked, because she didn’t want to focus on her own.
“Only one, that your grandfather and I didn’t find the time to take that cruise we’d been promising ourselves we’d take. We were always too busy and then it was too late.”
“I never wanted to take a cruise,” Hannah said.
“But what do you want to do that you haven’t done?”
She thought about it for several minutes, then choked back a sob. It had been so long since she’d allowed herself to dream, she didn’t even have one. How pitiful was that?
Even though she hadn’t spoken, her grandmother gave her a commiserating look. “Take a page from your daughter’s book. Use the time you’re down here to think about it. Make some lists. Set some priorities. You had dreams once. You’ll have them again, if you stop crowding them out with all the must-dos that aren’t half as important as we make them out to be.”
“You think so?” she asked, torn between hope and disbelief.
“I know so,” her grandmother said. “Now, I’m going in to fix us all some lunch. Why don’t you track down Luke and tell him it’ll be ready in a half hour?”
“Luke Stevens is not my dream,” she said, because she thought she ought to.
Grandma Jenny smiled. “He was once,” she said complacently. “Fate, karma, whatever you want to call it, has brought both of you here. Second chances don’t come along every day, Hannah. You need to seize them when they do.”
That said, she went inside and left Hannah with way too much to think about, including the fact that her grandmother was happier and more alive than ever now that her beloved inn was going to stay open.
8
After her grandmother had gone inside, Hannah stayed where she was, immobilized by the sense that her life was spinning even further out of control. Despite Grandma Jenny’s bracing talk that she could change things by making lists and prioritizing, she had a feeling she was incapable of getting any of it right. Just look at how badly she was bungling things with her daughter and her grandmother.
How had this happened to her? From the moment she’d been old enough to know her own mind, she’d set goals and met them. Heck, she’d exceeded most of them. She’d overcome every single obstacle that had been thrown in her path.
Determined to go to an out-of-state school, she’d won a scholarship that had allowed her to go to Columbia in New York City. Barely out of college and only recently married, she’d found herself pregnant. She’d had Kelsey and still stayed on her career track, though the difficulty she’d had was just one of the reasons she was so worried about what lay ahead for her daughter.
When her husband had left for the third and final time after two roller-coaster years, she’d tightened the reins on her spending and managed to stay in the co-op apartment they’d bought together. She’d taken on freelance work to get the money she needed to put Kelsey in the best private schools in the city and start her college fund. For all of those years, she’d known exactly what she needed to do and how to accomplish it.
Now, suddenly, she was at a loss. She was losing ground at work because of her absences. Her friendship with Dave and her years of hard work could only carry her for so long. She couldn’t control what was happening to her daughter. She couldn’t control what was happening inside her own body. And all of it scared the daylights out of her. Grandma Jenny was right about that.
; Admitting to the fear didn’t accomplish one darn thing as far as she could tell. She needed solutions, but not a single one came to mind.
“You’re looking gloomy,” Luke said, coming around the side of the house wearing a pair of well-worn jeans and nothing else. His broad shoulders, already starting to tan, were speckled with chips of the old white paint he’d been scraping off the inn. He looked sexy and way too appealing.
“It’s been a challenging morning,” she said. “Lunch should be ready any minute. I was supposed to let you know a little while ago.”
“And yet you didn’t,” he said, climbing the steps to take a seat beside her, his body heat radiating to encompass her. She could barely resist the urge to lean into all that masculinity and draw on his strength. “What’s going on? Is there something you want to talk about?”
Hannah had no idea where to begin. “Kelsey’s decided she wants to stay here and help Gran run the inn.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” he said.
She frowned at him. “It’s a horrible idea.”
“Why? Because it’s not what you want for her? Or what you had planned for your grandmother?”
She winced. “Okay, yes, that’s part of it. I’m afraid she’ll never go back to college and that Gran will make herself sick trying to keep up with this place.”
“Kids always do better when they know what they want and where they’re going,” he suggested. “We did.”
Hannah saw the parallel he was trying to draw. It was the same one Grandma Jenny had alluded to, that she herself had gone her own way. “Okay, you’re right, but until now Kelsey had other things planned. When she was a little kid and came to work with me, she loved sitting with the graphic designers. By the time she turned ten, she could lay out a brochure that was as good as anything the pros did.”
“That’s what she was studying? Graphic design?”
Seaview Inn Page 10
