Serenity Harbor

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “I can’t believe I fell asleep on the job again. This is becoming a habit. I’m sorry.”

  “No apologies necessary. You don’t have to explain it to me. Milo can be exhausting. I spend an hour with him and I’m more tired than when I used to pull all-nighters in school.”

  She tried to picture a younger version of Bowie walking across a college campus with his backpack and a bunch of giggling coeds and couldn’t quite make the image stick. “What time is it?”

  “Not that late. Nine thirty or so. Later than I should be coming home, that’s for sure. I meant to be back before Milo went to bed, to at least give you a break. Despite what I said last night, you shouldn’t have to feel as if you’re on duty twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I don’t mind. It’s good training for after I adopt Gabriela, right? Moms don’t take evenings and weekends off.”

  An odd expression slid across his face like the clouds drifting across the moon. “The good ones, anyway.”

  She wondered again about his life, about the mother he and Milo shared, but didn’t have the nerve to ask about that either.

  “Did you get dinner? We had grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches. I thought about making an extra for you but figured it would be easier—and taste better—if I fixed you a fresh one when you came home.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said, his expression a little shocked. She had the feeling he wasn’t used to people taking care of him and didn’t quite know how to respond. “I sent an intern for takeout earlier. But thank you.”

  He smiled, but she didn’t miss the weary lines around the edges of his mouth. He seemed even more tired than she was.

  “Those mosquitoes you were worrying about aren’t too bad yet. This isn’t a bad place to unwind after a tough day.” She gestured to the chair beside her.

  When he didn’t immediately sit down, she pressed a little harder. “What’s the use in buying a spectacular house on a lake if you never take a moment to enjoy it?”

  He looked out at the lake, then back at the chair. She thought he was going to refuse, but after a moment, he eased into the lounger next to hers and stretched his long legs out.

  He gave a heavy exhale and then another one. Instantly, he seemed more relaxed.

  “There. What did I tell you?”

  He smiled a little, and the butterflies seemed to be doing kung fu against her insides. “This is good. You’re right. It’s nice to sit still for a moment.”

  Maybe it was a mistake to invite him to sit beside her. She was intensely aware of him, unable to shake the memory of that heated embrace.

  Little night creatures peeped and hooted as the water lapped softly at the shore, with the occasional muted splash out on the lake as a fish flopped out after a bug.

  She couldn’t exactly call herself a world traveler, but she had seen a bit more of the planet the last year than she could have said the previous summer. No matter where she traveled, she had a feeling she would still consider Lake Haven on a summer night as close to paradise as her feeble brain could imagine. These priceless evenings were made all the sweeter by the memory of how harsh and cold the winters could be around here.

  “Tell me about your day,” he said after a moment. “What was Milo’s final meltdown tally?”

  She looked back over her day, which in retrospect didn’t seem all that bad. “A few minor skirmishes, but only two big meltdowns, if you can believe that. He went with me to my friend Samantha’s boutique for my final bridesmaid dress fitting and decided it was taking too long.”

  “Can’t really blame him for that. I might have had a meltdown, too, if I had to be stuck there for longer than ten minutes,” Bowie said with a half smile that made all her girlie parts shiver.

  Yes. This was definitely a mistake, sitting alone with him here while the stars popped out one by one and the moonlight wrapped them in an intimate cocoon.

  She should jump up right now and go inside to her room. That was exactly what any smart woman would do—especially a smart woman who told herself she was done playing the game.

  Somehow Katrina couldn’t seem to make herself move.

  “A man who hates shopping,” she said instead. “How unoriginal.”

  “I don’t hate shopping,” he protested. “I could spend hours in an electronics store and be perfectly happy. But a women’s clothing store would hold about as much interest and appeal to me as it probably does to a six-year-old boy.”

  “Okay. I’ll give you that.” She smiled. “Milo actually did okay, until Sam’s mom got after him for playing around inside the dress racks. He was only exploring the different textures of fabric, but she didn’t want him to get greasy fingerprints all over the dresses. We were able to distract him by asking his help to untangle a box of hangers they had in the back. It worked pretty well.”

  “Smart. How was the rest of your day?”

  “Oh! I have news!” she exclaimed. What was wrong with her? She couldn’t believe she hadn’t told him first thing!

  “Is it about your adoption?”

  The interest in his voice warmed her, but she didn’t let it distract her. “No. Nothing has changed there, unfortunately. Still waiting to hear from the attorney working with me there. This is about Milo.”

  She paused for dramatic effect until he finally huffed out an exasperated breath. “What is it? Don’t tell me, he met another dog he loved.”

  She laughed. “No. But I’ll just remind you that therapy dogs can do amazing things for children with autism.”

  “Yeah, yeah. If not a dog, then what?”

  Suddenly, she wasn’t sure how he would feel about their progress that day, since he hadn’t sanctioned their visit with Jane McMillan, the speech-language pathologist at the elementary school, who had agreed to take a look at Milo.

  He hadn’t unsanctioned it either, she rationalized.

  “This is bigger than a dog. It’s huge.”

  “A horse? A giraffe? An elephant?”

  “Okay, not literally bigger. Conceptually bigger. Drumroll, please. He said your name!”

  He jerked his head toward her abruptly, his eyes clearly reflecting shock. “Really?”

  “Well, not completely. He said ba-oo for book and then Bu-o for Bo. I didn’t try to have him tackle Bowie, but I’m sure that won’t take long.”

  “That’s incredible! How did that happen? I haven’t been able to get anything but no out of him.”

  She beamed, thrilled all over again at Milo’s accomplishment. “I knew he could say certain sounds, and I knew he was capable of far more than anyone has expected from him. Today we made a visit to a friend of mine who is also the speech-language pathologist at the elementary school.”

  “You did what?”

  She was almost positive his tone was more confused than annoyed, but it was hard to read his expression accurately in the dim light.

  “It was a casual visit only. She couldn’t do an official assessment of him, nor would I ask that of her, since you—as his legal guardian—weren’t present to give consent. But she did give me a few exercises I might hypothetically want to use if I knew of any hypothetical boys who had hypothetical speech delays.”

  “Which you do. Hypothetically.”

  “Exactly! The B sound was the only one we worked on this afternoon. It wasn’t easy and I had to offer an incentive you might not like.”

  “Dare I ask what kind of incentive?”

  She hesitated again, again not sure how he would respond. She couldn’t help thinking about Charlene and all her rules. Her mother would have been livid if someone had promised her what she had promised Milo.

  “I told him you would take him on a boat ride.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment. When he did, he sounded bemused. “You told him I would ta
ke him on a boat ride.”

  “He’s fascinated by the water but a little afraid of it. I thought it would be good for him to have the chance to go out and explore how much fun it can be.”

  “Makes sense. One problem, though. I don’t happen to have a boat.”

  “No. But we both have friends who do. I thought maybe we could even ask Ben to take us out in his Killy one evening next week, after the wedding. It’s a gorgeous wooden boat made by Kilpatrick Boatworks, back in the day. His family really knew how to craft beautiful boats.”

  “I’ve seen the Killy. It is a thing of art.”

  “If Ben is too busy, I have plenty of other friends who have boats. I knew it was nervy to offer him a ride, but it seemed to motivate him. He tried pretty hard after I suggested we could do it, though he didn’t speak until later in the evening.”

  “He really said my name?”

  “Wait until morning and I’ll see if I can get him to say it directly to you. By this time tomorrow, you just might be as sick of Bu-o as you are of no.”

  “Impossible,” he declared.

  She smiled. Oh, he was a tough man to resist. “You’re a nice man and a good brother, Bowie Callahan. Milo is very lucky.”

  He made a disbelieving sound low in his throat.

  “It’s true! You have the resources and the connections to help him reach his highest potential. If he had been sucked into the foster care system, his situation might have ended up very differently.”

  “Yeah. But he also might have ended up with a decent family—a mother and father who know what the hell to do with him. Who don’t lose their tempers when he dumps his cereal on the kitchen floor.”

  At the bleak frustration in his voice, she reached a hand out and rested her fingers on his forearm. His skin was warm, covered in crisp hair, and she had to resist caressing her hand up and down. Instead, she gave a reassuring squeeze and quickly withdrew her fingers. “You’re doing great with him. Get off your own back. Milo can sense you care about him. That might be one of the reasons he tests you so much, to make sure you’re really going to stick.”

  “I’m sticking,” he said. “But I have no idea how to reinforce that to him.”

  “Just continue loving him,” she said simply. “That’s the only thing you can do until he begins to believe it for himself.”

  Had she really once thought he was an arrogant jerk? Katrina couldn’t help thinking back to that first day in the store and her initial impression of him. Bowie was about as far from that image as she could imagine.

  She would have to tread carefully here or she might be in danger of losing her heart to Bowie as easily as she had to his little brother.

  She was living in his house, sleeping in the bed he had used until that very morning. The scent of him still clung to the room, a masculine, woodsy soap, laundry detergent and something else that seemed essential Bowie.

  While in his house, his presence seemed to surround her all day long—as if his shadow walked beside her. After their heated kiss the night before, it would be entirely too easy to surrender to the attraction along with the soft tenderness beginning to take root.

  She let out a breath and shifted the conversation to something safer than his insecurities about his brother. “While we’re speaking of boats and water, I wanted to talk to you about something else.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  She made a face. “It’s not, I promise. What do you think about swimming lessons?”

  “I think I’m too old and the little plastic floaty things won’t fit on my arms,” he said instantly.

  She couldn’t hold back her laughter. “Ha ha. For Milo,” she said, wondering if anyone else had the chance to see this lighthearted side of him. Maybe he could relax his tight control only here, amid the peace of the lake and the intimacy of the night.

  “Given his fascination with the water, he should really have some basic survival skills,” she went on. “You live on a lake and you have a hot tub. It’s disaster waiting to happen—and you can’t keep him under twenty-four-hour surveillance, try as you might.”

  “I agree. It’s a great idea. I had it on my list, along with a dozen other things. Every kid should learn how to swim.”

  She again felt the sting of being the weird one out. “I wish you had been here to tell my mother that. She never let me have lessons, and it’s still one of my deepest regrets.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re right. Everybody should know how to keep themselves afloat and at least do the dog paddle. Like many things, it’s easier to pick up that skill when you’re a child. I took lessons later in life but still don’t feel like the greatest swimmer.”

  “I meant, why didn’t your mother let you have lessons.”

  With that simple question, she flashed back to summers when she was around Milo’s age, watching Wyatt and Wynona splash around with Elliot and Marshall while she was forced to sit on the bank—or, worse, in the house, where she couldn’t even feel the warm sunshine or smell the pines or listen to the laughter of her siblings.

  Oh, how she had envied them their freedom.

  “It was for my own safety,” she finally said.

  “Not learning how to swim was for your own safety?”

  Why had she opened her big mouth? She wished she had never started on the topic. Since she had opened the door, she didn’t know how to avoid telling him about the whole StupidKat thing.

  As soon as she did, everything would change. She had seen it too many times before.

  Might as well get it over with.

  She looked out at the lake, one hand clenched into a fist on her leg. “I had a seizure disorder when I was a kid. It was mostly controlled by medication and diet, but occasionally I would have a breakthrough seizure. Once when I was about five or so, it happened while I was on a boat in the middle of the lake with my uncle Mike and his wife at the time. I had a seizure out of nowhere and ended up falling overboard.”

  “Scary,” he murmured.

  She avoided his gaze. “For them, definitely. Not so much for me. I didn’t know what was happening, if you want the truth. When a seizure hit, I would check out. Apparently that particular time, I had a life jacket on but wasn’t cognizant enough to turn myself over so I could keep my face out of the water. My uncle managed to fish me out and did mouth-to-mouth until his wife could motor back to shore and call an ambulance.”

  That had been a critical moment for her family—one she didn’t even remember. Through family lore, she had always seemed to know Uncle Mike had saved her life that day and there had been a special bond between them ever since.

  After that day, Charlene’s protective gene had gone into hyperdrive. On some level, Katrina couldn’t blame her. Now that she knew a little about that maternal love, she understood the desire to protect, no matter the cost.

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” he said, his voice gruff. “Drown, I mean.”

  She finally glanced over at him, wishing she could read his features better in the gathering darkness. To her relief, she didn’t sense any shift in his voice that might indicate his perception of her had changed.

  Did he feel the awareness shivering between them, the sudden seductive tug?

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “Do you still have seizures?”

  “No. I was lucky. They started to trickle down in frequency when I was about eleven and seemed to shut off altogether a few years later. That’s not uncommon, apparently, when hormones change and nervous systems mature.”

  What a weird time that had been. For her entire childhood, her condition had completely defined her. Then, suddenly, she was someone else.

  “That couldn’t have been easy to deal with as a kid.”

  She shrugged. “Everybody has something. I try not to thr
ow too many pity parties for myself. I had a medical condition that limited my activities somewhat when I was a kid, but it’s since resolved itself, allowing me to live a normal life as an adult. Not a bad trade-off. I’m fully aware I could have been dealt a far worse hand.”

  She had been raised by two parents who had adored her. Maybe Charlene had loved her a little too much, but her intentions had been good and Katrina had never doubted she was loved.

  “Anyway. Enough about me. We were talking about swim lessons for Milo. I suspect he would do best in a one-on-one situation, without the distraction of other children. There’s a woman in Shelter Springs who teaches lessons in her home pool. I’ve heard good things. Do you mind if I give her a call and talk to her about enrolling Milo?”

  “Go ahead. It’s a good idea.”

  “If the swim teacher has room for him in her schedule, the autism specialist you’ve hired will have to continue with the lessons after I’m gone.”

  “I’ll make sure of it,” he promised. “I don’t see a problem.”

  He was the only one, then. As she sat in the dark next to Bowie, listening to his commitment to his little brother and fighting the tug of attraction seething between them with everything inside her, Katrina saw a problem so slippery and so big she didn’t know what to do with it.

  How on earth would she be able to spend the next few weeks in his house and not completely fall for this man who had opened his heart and his life to his troubled brother?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I DO HAVE one question for you,” Bowie said when Katrina didn’t immediately answer.

  “Oh?” she said, her voice sounding oddly breathless.

  “Yes.” Bowie kept his gaze on Katrina as he asked the question—or the shape of her, anyway, since he couldn’t make out the fine details of her features in the darkness. “How are we going to get along without you?”

  He didn’t even want to think about her leaving. She had been working with Milo for less than a week and she had already made incredible progress with his brother. Milo was saying words! He couldn’t quite believe it.