Love on the Line

by Aares, Pamela

  “One could admire them for their vision.”

  “In the meantime someone could die out here without better emergency access. It’s nuts. We’re talking bake sales, Alston. Do you know how long it will take for them to raise money with that sort of effort?”

  “You never were much of a cook.”

  She ignored his attempt at humor. “They rely on the local vet for emergencies,” she added.

  “I shudder at the thought.”

  “My side, Alston. You’re supposed to be on my side.” She flipped through her notes from the community meeting. “The way the town has set things up, there’s not even a way for me to have you anonymously funnel funds to an on-call doc. It’s absurd.”

  He didn’t repeat his earlier argument that she could choose to step into her role as president of the Barrington Foundation and in a few months fund almost anything she wanted. For all his strait-laced manner, Alston was the one person who understood why she’d chosen to live a quiet life in Albion Bay.

  He was the one person besides Quinn that she’d told about her near breakdown three years before. After Laci’s body had been found in the surging surf near a remote beach resort, she’d had to talk to someone. She’d tried to talk to Quinn. He was her twin, and they shared secrets and hopes, but Quinn didn’t get how deeply Laci’s death had shaken her. And her therapist had been on vacation in a remote village in Africa; and there was no way she was going to phone some on-call therapist she didn’t know and didn’t trust.

  Alston had listened. Alston knew Laci’s family, knew that the family and Cara had tried for years to get Laci to go into rehab, had tried to help her escape the drugs and the vampires of the underbelly of the New York social scene. Twice Cara had driven Laci to a rehab center. And twice Laci had left before the first week was out.

  When Laci had run off to Barbados with a guy she’d met in a club, Alston had helped Cara track her down. But they’d found her too late. The guy had dumped Laci for another partying heiress, an heiress who put out for him. Laci, unstable and abandoned, had taken her life. For almost a month, her sweet friend’s face had been plastered across the tabloids. Every tidbit about Laci’s life was fodder for the front covers of Us Weekly and People. A jilted, beautiful, jet-setting heiress taking her own life was the perfect story for media hype.

  Cara made a decision the day the news broke. Laci’s death cemented her resolve to pry herself free and find a way to live the life she’d always dreamed of, a life where she would be appreciated for herself and not for her money. A life in a town where she could trust others because they wouldn’t have ulterior motives for being her friend.

  No one knew how much time there was to live. She wasn’t willing to bet the odds.

  But she hadn’t counted on the crushing guilt and fear that threatened to engulf her. For months she’d turned every conversation with Laci over in her mind. The if-onlys and the maybes and the what-ifs rushed at her until she could barely find the strength to dress and go to see her therapist.

  Few people understood that she’d felt caged—forced to live in a world that didn’t suit her in any way. Her close friends would smile and nod, but no one really believed that she wanted out. That she wanted to live like a normal person, away from the hype. To live in a world where what she did mattered.

  Leaving and starting over had been her road to sanity.

  Settling into Albion Bay, wrapping the routines of a simple life around her, had helped her heal, helped her find her feet. Helped her carve out a life that had meaning.

  Without Alston’s help, she never could’ve pulled it off.

  But he was right, she faced a dilemma and there was nothing simple about it. It was one thing to turn her back on the hype, the lifestyle, the preconceived expectations that came with being born into privilege and wealth, and another entirely to deny that now that she’d seen up close what the foundation’s funds could do, how the money could be put to use, that she didn’t care.

  She gripped the phone and rubbed at her throbbing temple with her other hand. Her chest tightened, constricting her breath. She’d fought for her freedom, and now the fight had turned on her. The community that had saved her, that had healed her, needed help for itself, a kind of help she could provide. But that help would come at a very dear price.

  “Cara?” Alston’s voice pulled her back from her thoughts.

  “I’m here. I was just thinking. What about submitting funding for the clinic as a discretionary grant?” She knew the idea was a dead end before the words left her mouth.

  “If you don’t accept the presidency,” he said in a level voice, “you’d have to be voted on to the board. The next round of nominations comes up in a year. But even then, discretionary grants are limited to ten thousand dollars per member.”

  “What about using capital from my personal foundation to fund the clinic?”

  “We’ve been over this, Cara. Your foundation allows you to only spend interest; there’s no way around that. And as I said, the majority of your funds are already committed.”

  “What if I sell my place in Southampton?” It was the one thing from her former life she hadn’t let go of. Too many good memories. And her brother still used it as a summer retreat.

  “That would take time. Your parents would have to sign off on their share.”

  “Theirs is a ten percent share, for goodness’ sake! I could buy them out tomorrow.”

  “If they agreed. Let’s wait on thinking about the Southampton place—see what you do.”

  “I’m not doing anything, Alston. We have to figure out a way around this.” She hated the petulant sound of her voice. But maybe petulance was always the sound made by creatures cornered by forces they couldn’t wrangle.

  “What about the money he left to me directly, the money not in the foundation? You said it’s more than a billion dollars. Couldn’t I take a loan against it?”

  “It’s not yours until you’re twenty-five.”

  “Alston, there must be something you can do.”

  The silence on the other end of the phone told her more than she wanted to know.

  “Maybe Dray Bender would fund a grant for the clinic, pass it through?” Now she really was reaching.

  Alston let out a sharp breath. “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t. I suspect he’s funneling funds to people he owes favors. Besides, I have no leverage over him and neither do you, unless you’re at the helm. And if he sees the name of your town on a grant request, he’ll know where you are. It won’t take long for him to figure out your situation and play it to his advantage. And though your father has honored his promise to keep you under the radar, Bender is aware that you have high stakes in maintaining your anonymity. There’s nothing about the man to trust. He played your father, or he wouldn’t be heading the foundation.”

  Cara rubbed at her forehead. When she’d set up her home in Albion Bay, she’d never expected to hit a wall like this. Sitting on the sidelines at town council meetings, knowing full well she could help, was torture. But did she have the strength to face reentering the world she’d fought to leave behind? The world that had crashed in on Laci?

  She didn’t want to imagine how her relationships with people in town would change once word got out. People who weren’t outright angry at her deception would likely be polite—but she knew too darn well the gap that big money created. She’d faced that gap in boarding school with the scholarship girls and she’d faced it at nearly every non-profit she’d given grants to. The deference during site visits she couldn’t wriggle out of, the careful words and gestures by well-meaning staffers as they attempted to pretend that she was just like them. The people who tried to pretend there was no difference were almost worse than the ones who were awed by it. She hated it. Hated it.

  No, that wasn’t exactly right; she cut those thoughts off.

  She wasn’t going to hide behind the half-truths any longer. She’d been gone long enough, had learned enough about herself and about other p
eople, that she could face the true problem head on. What she’d really hated back then was that most people hadn’t known her. Hadn’t seen her. Even those she’d helped. They saw the family name or the foundation’s reputation. They certainly saw the dollar signs.

  But they didn’t see the woman. Just as those in school hadn’t seen the girl. The only value she’d had was because of her family connections and the family’s very great success with making money.

  She’d left her privileged world not because of what she was, but because of what she wasn’t.

  She was rich, but she had no value. And that damning reality carved a hole that yawned wide. That dark place had swallowed not only Laci but many of their friends. They hadn’t died, but every day they fought the destructive power of the drugs they used to keep from facing the truth, to keep from facing their fear, to keep from falling into the black hole that fear called home. Cara was lucky that she wasn’t into drugs, but she knew the fight, she knew the fear. If life didn’t feel meaningful, even in some small way, it was a slippery incline into the jaws of self-destruction.

  She didn’t want to be loved, or even just tolerated, for her bank balance. She wanted to be someone’s friend because her friendship was appreciated. Because she, just herself, no money or reputation, was valuable to someone else.

  She rubbed her forehead again. Why was she even thinking about those things? She had friends in Albion Bay, friends who did appreciate her. And she was supposed to be trying to find a way to help them.

  “I can’t believe my grandfather set things up this way. Two months”—she tried to regulate the exasperation in her voice—“why would he give me only two months to decide?”

  “He may have suspected your father would try to stack the board in the interim. And your grandfather liked deadlines; he thought they made a person focus on what’s important.”

  “He got that right.”

  But the part he hadn’t gotten was what she wanted. What she needed. Placing her in an impossible situation was no gift.

  Before she’d escaped her old life she could help plenty of people, but she couldn’t have friends. Now she had friends that she couldn’t help.

  “Cara, let’s talk this over when you come into town next week. I think so much better face-to-face.” He paused. “We’ll come up with something. Maybe even something that might work.”

  Cara’s warring thoughts didn’t let up as she drove her afternoon bus round. Each time she let herself imagine taking even the smallest step back into the world of privilege and big philanthropy, into the world where the force of the money itself held a power that could sweep even the most resolved person along with it, her throat squeezed shut and she felt like she couldn’t breathe. The very things that made her love her life here were the things that made her situation excruciating. She loved these people. She wanted to be able to help the community in a real way.

  And deep down, she didn’t want to hide. Not anymore.

  But stronger than all of those was her love of freedom. No amount of therapy was going to change that fact. Within weeks of finding her cabin, landing the bus-driving job and beginning to work in the garden, she’d realized that she’d been wrong about how much she craved a change. She’d thought that wrapping a life of her choosing around her would buoy her, help her push back at the dark cloud that Laci’s death had hung over her life. But living and working with the people of Albion Bay had done much more than that. Life in the town had revived her soul.

  She parked the bus in the school lot and walked to her car. Before she stepped in she looked out over the hills toward the coast. A pair of hawks sailed above her, riding the currents of the afternoon winds. Dave Jenkins waved as he strode out toward the baseball practice diamond, carrying an overstuffed equipment bag. Cara felt the familiar warmth of belonging wash through her as she waved back.

  Some days, when she went to Grady’s to buy seeds for her garden and talked with the locals about their hopes and plans, she felt like she’d been airlifted into a Norman Rockwell painting. There was a reason screenwriters and novelists wrote about small-town life. But Albion Bay was no idealized figment of a writer’s imagination—the community had a spine to go with its heart. Democracy wasn’t easy; like any place where individuals came together, there were problems and conflicts to be solved. But in this town and, she suspected, in many others, people wanted to solve the problems facing them. They drew together and worked at creating a place where they could maintain their diversity and yet still have heart.

  She watched as Dave unloaded bats from his equipment bag and lined them up like sentinels waiting for the boys to come and bring them to life. And wished that she really was the person she was pretending to be.

  She swallowed down the anxiety tightening her throat. Deception wasn’t a tool of community or of democracy. One wrong step and her peaceful life in the town might all whoosh away.

  It hadn’t helped that a couple of her friends who were also heiresses had done those damned reality shows. They’d made heiress-watching a national sport. One tabloid picture, one suspicious reporter, and her life would change faster than she could say abracadabra. One reporter or one nasty-ass foundation president blackmailing her father. One likely to do anything in his power to bully her as well.

  Wasn’t that a twist? If she played along and didn’t rock Bender’s boat, her secret was safe. She’d just watch the guy squander the money her grandfather had given his life to make and save. Money intended to do good and now used to curry favor and maybe get kickbacks. She found herself wanting to wield the power she’d been offered and trounce the guy. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the steering wheel, and the force of her feelings surprised her. A hell of a lot was surprising her these days.

  When Cara arrived home, loud banging from her back deck told her that Adam hadn’t finished for the day. The blows of his hammer and the loud country music blaring from his radio ramped up the pounding in her head.

  She should’ve texted Ryan and canceled their date. She’d started to. Twice. But seeing him was the one positive she’d looked forward to.

  Adam cursed above the blare of the banging and the music. She wasn’t up for a long conversation with him about the sad state of her cabin. Or for finding a way to gently maneuver away from his sweet overtures. Adam was related to half the people in town, so dating him would be another disaster. She hung her jacket on a hook inside her front door and tiptoed upstairs.

  Steam rose from the tub as she sank neck deep into the balm of hot water. For the first moment since Alston’s call, she felt the muscles banded tightly around her head relax. The goat’s-milk soap that Belva had given her lathered into a bubbling froth on her washcloth. She shut her eyes and ran the cloth down her leg. Donkeys. Ryan Rea loved donkeys. Who could’ve conjured a man with his charm and excellence, a man with such body-rocking handsomeness, a man who moved to the country to make a haven for animals most people might not even consider of any value?

  She dipped the washcloth into the water, watched the bubbles disperse along the surface. Who was she kidding? It wasn’t just his charm and excellence and stunning good looks. The feelings he’d roused had driven her to agree to spend more time with him, a move she knew deep down wasn’t wise.

  She hadn’t finished dressing when she heard Ryan’s car in her drive. His early arrival kept her from fussing over what she would wear. It also kept her from texting him and telling him at the last minute not to come. Twice she’d fingered her phone, had tapped out a message, but hadn’t pressed Send.

  She dragged on her jeans and a sweater and ran down to answer the door.

  “Didn’t know you liked country music,” Ryan said. His easy grin shot heat through her like wildfire through a parched field. His biceps bulged with the weight of the massive box in his arms. A white takeout bag dangled in the crook of his elbow.

  She tried not to stare at his biceps and wished she didn’t feel the blush of heat creeping into her face. “Adam’s f
inishing up some work on my deck.” She didn’t like the waver in her voice. “But I do like it. Among other music.”

  Slanting sunlight lit his face and danced in his eyes. Magic hour, her brother called the hour before twilight. Perhaps there was magic in it. When a grin curved Ryan’s mouth, she was sure of it.

  “I’d love to discuss your taste in music, but right now I’d like to put this down someplace.” He nodded toward her living room. “Think I might come in?”

  “Oh, sorry. That looks heavy. I mean, sure.”

  Since when did the English language and her manners fail her?

  She stepped back and he set the box onto the floor, nearly spilling the contents of the bag as he did. He slid the bag from his arm and held it out.

  “Soup. From Millenia in the city. Not squash,” he said with a laugh.

  He saw her glance down at the box.

  “It’s a TV. We can watch the game.”

  Surprises used to delight her, not make her nerves fire and send bees dancing through her bloodstream.

  She took the bag from him. He smelled like vetiver and lemongrass and like something she had far more interest in than soup or watching a game. But that something would just lead to trouble and heaven knew she didn’t need to tempt the fates. Soup and a game would have to do.

  “I’ll just put this on to heat,” she said. Her hands were trembling, ever so slightly, but trembling all the same. “I don’t have cable,” she managed to stammer.

  “It’s wireless. Works off my phone.” He nodded toward her coffee table carved from a recycled redwood slab. It was one of her few indulgences. “How about I just put it over there?”

  “Sure.”

  She wheeled around and headed for the kitchen. The plastic of the bag crinkled as she pulled the soup container out and set it on the counter. She leaned her palms against the cool Formica and took a breath to calm the trembling in her belly. Never in her life had a man had such an effect on her. If she didn’t know better, she’d think she was coming down with the flu.