The Beach Bachelors Boxset (Three Complete Contemporary Romance Novels in One) (The Beach Bachelors Series)

by Pamela Browning

  After a quick shuffle through her closet, she chose a classic white silk shirt paired with slim pants. When she was ready, and favoring her foot only a little, she walked to the dock to meet Chad.

  It was a beautiful day without a trace of clouds in the sky. Here and there, the path was obstructed by tree branches scattered by the storm. Chad greeted her cheerfully as she approached the boat. It was as though he had made up his mind to act as though he didn't know that she was torn with doubts.

  "You've probably guessed by now why I named the new boat as I did," he said as he helped her board.

  "It's a play of words on your actual profession—a clue, if I'd only been clever enough to figure it out."

  "It's also a tribute to you. Do you know how pretty you look this morning? I like that outfit."

  "Thank you," she replied. "You're just used to seeing me slopping around the Sea House in your old clothes. After that, anything would be an improvement."

  "You look wonderful all the time," he told her before leaning over and kissing her on the cheek. She smiled up at him, and it was almost as it had been for the last few days. Maybe there was hope. Maybe it would last.

  The trip to St. Simons didn't take long, and when they'd docked, Chad located a taxi to take them to the doctor's office. Paige had anticipated a problem in seeing the doctor because they had no appointment, but when the receptionist heard Chad's story of the snakebite and their isolation and inability to get to either doctor or hospital, she wedged them into her tight schedule.

  Chad excused himself to check his phone messages while the doctor inspected Paige's snakebite. After the examination, Dr. Nesbitt pushed his glasses back on his nose and said, "I don't mind telling you that I couldn't have done better myself." After writing Paige a prescription for an antibiotic, he told her to come back in a couple of weeks.

  Chad and Paige came out of the doctor's office to find a long black limousine parked at the curb. Paige was looking down the street for the taxi when Chad opened the limousine's door.

  She stared at him, and her mouth dropped open. "What—!" was all she could manage.

  "Go ahead, get in," he ordered with a grin. Somehow Paige sensed that he meant it.

  When she hesitated, he grasped her firmly by the arm and bundled her into the car. A driver wearing a chauffeur's cap sat staring straight ahead, the personification of dignity.

  "Chad, if this is your idea of a joke, please stop." She shot him a wild-eyed look, stared at driver, looked back at Chad. Chad sat back in the plush leather seat. He seemed to be enjoying this.

  "If you don't tell me whose car this is, Chad Smith, I'm getting out at the next stop sign. I mean it!"

  "The car belongs to W. Chadbourne Smith III. In other words, me." He grinned, watching her in amusement.

  "Be serious, Chad. I don't want jokes." She was bewildered by the smug look on Chad's face.

  "I'm more serious than I've ever been," he assured her, and suddenly she believed that he meant it. But—but this was impossible! She'd had him pegged for a drifter—how could he own a car like this?

  "W. Chadbourne Smith III," she murmured to herself, leaning back in the seat beside him and wrinkling her forehead. She had heard that name before. If only she could think of where! Right now her mind was reeling and she couldn't think of anything at all.

  "Does the name ring a bell?"

  "Sort of." She massaged her temples and hoped she wasn't getting a headache.

  "I'll let you think about it a while longer," said Chad. And then to the chauffeur, "Take us home, please, Richards."

  Paige stared out at the oak-lined streets. Clean-up crews were busy hauling away dead limbs and clumps of Spanish moss that had blown down in the heavy winds. Here in this limousine with its whisper-soft air conditioning, she felt removed from everything outside. Even the motor made little sound. Chad didn't either.

  He was watching her, still grinning. She looked out her window again. Richards had turned the car onto the causeway leading to exclusive Sea Island. Paige wondered if she were going mad. Chad had told the chauffeur to take him home, and it was impossible that he lived on posh Sea Island. The houses there were grand, expensive. But then, she reflected, if Chad really owned a chauffeured limousine, anything was possible.

  Neither of them spoke until the car turned into a concrete driveway spanned by a wrought-iron arch. A gate was set in the arch. Richards opened the limousine's electric window with the touch of a button and punched a code into a box mounted on a post, releasing the mechanism so that the gate swung slowly open by itself.

  "Security system," Chad explained unnecessarily. They rolled past a high hedge, a goldfish pond, a grape arbor. The vehicle pulled up in front of a huge and magnificent house. It was a stylized chateau much like those Paige had admired on trips through the French countryside.

  "Here we are," said Chad cheerfully. "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."

  Paige was speechless as Richards opened the door for her. Chad hurried around to take her by the elbow. He called over his shoulder, "Leave the car out, Richards. I'll want it again." He steered Paige up the steps to the impressive front entrance.

  An elderly uniformed housekeeper was waiting at the door and opened it at their approach. She greeted Chad with a wide smile and a charming French accent. "Welcome home, Mr. Smith," she said, all but curtseying. Paige's mouth dropped open again and she clamped it shut.

  "Ah, Simone," said Chad. "This is Paige Brownell. You'll be seeing a lot of her around here." And to Paige, "Simone is the one who runs things in this house. Including me." He winked at Simone, who laughed.

  "He only says that to flatter me," she told Paige.

  Chad put a proprietary arm around Paige's shoulders and led her through the marble-floored foyer with its Waterford crystal chandelier and great swooping circular staircase, past the dining room, decorated in a delicate shade of rose-petal pink, and through the living room with its pearl-gray carpet and off-white upholstery.

  When Paige found her voice, she managed to say, "You don't mean to tell me that this is where you live."

  "Didn't I mention yesterday that today you would be astonished and amazed? Didn't you believe me?"

  "I wasn't prepared for anything like this. I didn't know there were people who still lived this lavishly." She gazed around in rapt fascination.

  "Take a French heiress—my mother—and marry her to the grandson of the founder of one of this country's largest steel companies—my father—and you have the ingredients for a life of luxury."

  "Your parents live here?"

  "My father died many years ago, and my mother lives in Switzerland with her second husband, an Austrian with a title that I can never remember. So I have this place—and our homes in Vail and Pennsylvania—to myself."

  Paige turned to face him, still finding it hard to believe. "So why do you live on St. Albans? When you have your own house?"

  Chad shook his head. "After you figure out who W. Chadbourne Smith III really is, you'll understand."

  He was infuriating! she thought in dismay. If only she could recall where she'd heard his name. It seemed to her that he was someone famous, but she couldn't for the life of her think of who or why.

  Thoughts skittered around in her brain as Chad took her hand and led her to the curtains that were drawn across the window. He yanked them aside to reveal the Atlantic Ocean bordered by a white strip of beach. It was almost as lovely as the beach on St. Albans.

  He took in her stupefied look. "I own it all. Except the Atlantic Ocean, of course."

  "Chad, I don't know what to say." And she didn't. The revelation that Chad Smith was wealthy shot to ribbons her theory that he was trying to get his hands on her aunts' money. It left her wondering more than ever why her aunts had given him control of their fortune.

  "Do my aunts know who you are?" she demanded suddenly.

  "Most certainly. When I first met Aunt Biz at the Brunswick dock, I offered to work on St. Alb
ans as a handyman just so she'd invite me to live on the island. I'd never as much as hammered a nail before I arrived there. When I saw how decrepit it all looked, I tried to help them out as much as I could, even though I was all thumbs. I let them think that I enjoyed doing odd jobs. At first I didn't mean to tell them who I was, but I found that I couldn't deceive them. I told both Aunt Biz and Aunt Sophie about my billions a week or so after I moved in. I said that I was tired of being W. Chadbourne Smith III, and that I just wanted to be plain ordinary Chad Smith for a while. They accepted it, and me."

  His openness made it unlikely that he was lying. "If you told them, why didn't you ever tell me?" Paige's mind was galloping, trying to keep up, but she felt as though she were falling hopelessly behind. Things were moving much too rapidly.

  Chad turned her to face him. He looked deep into her eyes. "I couldn't tell you, Paige. I didn't want my money to become an issue until I knew how you felt about me. When women find out that I'm wealthy, all sorts of bad things start to happen. They see my money, not me. I didn't want that for us."

  She shook her head slowly to clear it. "Wouldn't that have been better than letting me go on thinking what I was thinking? That you were an unmotivated, unemployed vagrant intent on stealing from my aunts?"

  Chad threw back his head and laughed. "No, actually I rather enjoyed the role. Except for the part about stealing from your aunts. I didn't want you to think I was deficient in character. You'd never marry anyone who was a thief."

  "Marry?" she whispered, not sure she'd heard correctly.

  "Yes, my darling, marry. As in I'm madly in love with you. But more about that later. You can think it over until then." He was looking down at her with a twinkle in his eyes, and then he was pulling her along behind him as he strode up the circular staircase to the second floor.

  I think, Paige thought to herself wildly, I've just received a proposal of marriage. She felt a wild impulse to laugh. This was preposterous, all of it. Like a huge joke. And yet, most preposterous of all, it wasn't a joke.

  They reached the upstairs landing and Chad began flinging doors open, tugging her along in his wake.

  "Here's the blue bedroom," he said, showing her a huge bedchamber decorated in pale blue brocade with jonquil yellow accents, then he took her across the hall and showed her the pink bedroom, done entirely in pink moiré with a dove-gray carpet. "And here's the master suite," he said, throwing the door open upon a gigantic room tastefully decorated in pale green silk with touches of peach. The furniture was French provincial, clearly authentic, and the windows framed a magnificent view of the ocean.

  "Actually, the minute I saw your sea-green eyes, I knew you were the wife I wanted," Chad told her. "I'd never found anyone who would fit in with the decor of this room as well as you do. You do like it, don't you?" he queried, turning to her anxiously.

  "Yes, but—" she began faintly. She tried to wrap her mind around the idea of marrying him and failed. It was hard to imagine herself mistress of this house, not to mention his other homes in wherever he'd said. Vail? Right. She was sure she'd heard him correctly.

  "Of course," Chad continued as he led her through bathrooms and a sewing room and a room that he said could someday be furnished as a nursery, "of course, I'll give you carte blanche with the house. You can redecorate any way you choose." It was mind-boggling, Paige thought frantically. She couldn't imagine herself living in a place like this, couldn't believe he wanted to marry her, couldn't fully comprehend all the things he was telling her.

  They bade a hurried farewell to Simone, Paige feeling tongue-tied, and climbed back into the limousine.

  "You know where to take us, Richards," Chad said, and soon they'd left the mansion behind.

  Chad still held her hand, refusing to let it go. "So what did you think of the house?" he asked.

  "It's beautiful. I just can't make the connection between you and that way of life." She looked at him helplessly. "I can't," she repeated.

  He patted her hand. "I know, I know, it must be a shock. But brace yourself, because there's more."

  They drew up in front of a dock at a yacht club that looked highly exclusive.

  "Now what?" Paige asked apprehensively.

  "Hang in while I show you what my life has been about." They got out of the car and he led her down the length of the dock. At the end of it rose the masts of a sleek racing yacht.

  Chad pointed to the name lettered across the narrow stern. "Dreadnought," read Paige. It was a name that seemed somehow familiar, and then, in a flash, it came to her. "Dreadnought," she said again, with mounting recognition. She wheeled and stared at Chad. "Not the Dreadnought that won the America's Cup! Surely not!" Her voice had risen in amazement.

  Chad nodded proudly. "That's the one," he said. "Isn't she beautiful?"

  "But then you're—you're—" she couldn't go on.

  "W. Chadbourne Smith III," he said patiently. "I told you. You can't imagine how crushed I was that you didn't recognize the name right off. I've grown used to being famous." Chad led her to a nearby boaters' storage locker, and they sat on it. The only sounds that split the silence were calls of sea birds and water slapping against dock pilings.

  Paige stared at the face she had come to love so well, the high cheekbones, the amber-flecked eyes, the determined chin with its almost imperceptible cleft. Add a beard and a mustache and he would look exactly like—would be—the flamboyant skipper of the racing yacht that had come from behind for a mere ten-second victory over the crack challenging Norwegian yacht, Trondheim. Odds makers had given Dreadnought almost no chance to win the ocean race off Newport, Rhode Island.

  W. Chadbourne Smith III, the brilliant captain of Dreadnought, had dominated the news in those days, especially after the world found out that he was a wealthy, eligible bachelor. He'd been interviewed on countless television talk shows, been the subject of a segment on TV's 60 Minutes, and appeared on the cover of Newsweek. People had published pictures of him with various Hollywood starlets and hobnobbing with celebrities such as Ponce and Alix Cabrera, the famous treasure hunters. For a while Chad had been the darling of gossip blogs. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, W. Chadbourne Smith III disappeared from view. No one knew where he'd gone, and before long, no one cared.

  "I shaved off the beard and mustache," Chad explained. "I tired of the fast-paced life I was leading after Dreadnought won the America's Cup. I tried holing up in my condo in Vail and later in my house in Philadelphia to write my book, but people got wind of who I was, and they wouldn't leave me alone.

  "After I turned down a spot on Dancing with the Stars, I retreated to my house here, thinking that no one would find me, but the phone rang and rang. Reporters sneaked over the fence hoping to get interviews. When by chance I met your Aunt Biz and learned that she lived on a secluded island off the coast, unconnected by telephone to the mainland or anywhere else, I knew it was just what I needed. By that time my ambition to write my book had become an obsession, and total seclusion was the only way I'd ever be able to finish it."

  "You didn't tell anyone about the book, though. Why?"

  "If the word got out, I'd be besieged by media people who were looking for fresh copy. I couldn't take that chance. So, not knowing whether Aunt Sophie and Aunt Biz might drop a hint here and there if they knew about the book, I simply chose not to tell them about it."

  "Or me."

  "Or you. I didn't see how I could tell you without your eventually figuring out that I was the W. Chadbourne Smith III whose name had become synonymous with yacht racing all over the world. Once my cover was blown, everything would change between us." He smiled at her and slid an arm around her shoulders. The wind fluttered his hair across his forehead in that charming way that had transfixed her from the moment they met. Paige felt herself smiling back.

  "And Dreadnought? Is she always berthed here? I should think she'd be a dead giveaway."

  "She's been in dry dock, having some work done. I've had her delivered here because
my crew will arrive in a week or so and we're going to take her out for a sea trial. You're right, she's a giveaway, but now it doesn't matter anymore. I've finished the book. And some other things."

  He drew her close and kissed her once on the lips. "Bear with me a little longer," he said, lips close to her ear. "We have one more stop to make, and then we're going back to St. Albans." He stood up and walked her to the limousine, his arm around her shoulders.

  Richards drove them across the causeway and over the marshes to Brunswick. He pulled up outside the bank, and when they went inside Paige noticed how the employees snapped to attention when Chad walked by. Especially Glynis, who looked glad to see him until she realized that Chad was with Paige.

  "Chad, I have those papers ready," Glynis began, but Chad cut her off briskly.

  "Fine, Glynis, I'll get them later. Right now I want to see Jacob Hightower," and he strode around Glynis's desk and ushered Paige directly into his office.

  Jacob Hightower was talking on the telephone, but when he saw Chad he hung up immediately. He stood up, and unlike the day when Paige had visited him alone, this time his manner was plainly obsequious. "Why, Mr. Smith," he said with a deferential smile, "what can we do for you today?"

  "Please tell Ms. Brownell everything about my financial association with her aunts. Everything," and Chad pinned him with a meaningful gaze.

  Jacob Hightower looked flustered. "Is that wise?"

  "Everything," insisted Chad.

  "Ms. Brownell, Mr. Smith, please sit down," and Jacob Hightower indicated two chairs.

  "I suppose," he began, "that it all began several years ago when I became president of the bank. Kenneth Lingfelt, who had handled your aunts' money for years, retired. Biz and Sophie took his retirement rather hard, I'm afraid. After all, they were used to his way of handling things, and they had established a certain rapport that I found hard to follow. In other words, they didn't like dealing with me as much as they did with him." Jacob Hightower paused and cleared his throat.