Harbor Lights

by Sherryl Woods

  One of these days, when the ground stopped shifting under him from one minute to the next, he’d have to ask her how. And then he’d have to ask what tragedy had forced her to learn that painful lesson.

  Megan was about to call it quits and walk out of the Upper East Side art gallery where she’d worked for over fifteen years. Though Phillip had always been a moody and difficult boss, today he was taking his temperamental mood swings to new heights. A shipment of expensive paintings hadn’t shown up earlier and he was acting as if she personally was responsible.

  At the conclusion of his tirade, she stood up.

  “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “For a walk.”

  “You can’t just leave here now. We have a crisis on our hands.”

  She leveled a look directly into his eyes. “I am well aware of that, and yelling at me isn’t going to change it. I’ll be back when you’ve had a chance to calm down.”

  “I insist that you stay!”

  “If I do, and you say one more word blaming any of this on me, when I walk out it will be for good,” she warned. “Is that a risk you’re willing to take?”

  For an instant he looked stunned. “You’d quit?”

  “In a heartbeat,” she responded, realizing with a sense of shock that it was true. For the first time since she’d come to work here, she no longer felt as if this job was her only option. There was Mick.

  Not that she intended to run back to her ex-husband simply for the sake of security, but Mick would be here for her if she decided she’d had enough of Phillip Margolin and his tantrums. It was a comforting thought.

  Phillip gave her a considering look. His heightened color began to fade. “Sorry,” he mumbled, which was a major concession from him. “Go, take that walk. I do know none of this is your fault, but having paintings worth a million dollars or more wandering around somewhere in Manhattan when they’re supposed to be here has made me a little crazy.”

  “Totally understandable,” she agreed. “But not my fault.”

  He gave her a rueful look. “Again, very, very sorry if I implied that it was.”

  “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” she assured him. “And we will find the paintings, Phillip. I’m going to pick up an iced mocha. Can I bring you anything? Something without caffeine, preferably.”

  He lifted a brow at that. “A decaf iced cappuccino,” he responded dutifully. “The biggest one they make.”

  Megan nodded, grabbed her purse and headed outside. She’d barely walked half a block when she bumped into someone and nearly stumbled. She looked up into Mick’s startled gaze.

  “Where’s the fire?” he inquired, steadying her. “And why weren’t you looking where you were going? That’s a good way to get mugged.”

  She scowled at his chiding tone. “I’ve lived here for more than fifteen years, Mick O’Brien. I certainly don’t need you to remind me of the dangers of not paying attention to my surroundings,” she said testily.

  He held up his hands at once. “Sorry. You’re obviously in a mood of some kind.”

  “How condescending of you to phrase it that way,” she snapped.

  Worry knit his brow. He clamped a hand on her elbow and guided her straight into the coffee shop on the corner. Since that had been her destination in the first place, she didn’t waste time arguing.

  “Sit,” he commanded. “What do you want?”

  “A little less bossiness would be nice,” she replied.

  “To drink,” he said, clearly fighting to cling to his last shred of patience.

  She told him her order and Phillip’s, then sat there and drew in several deep breaths while he went to get the drinks. She needed to calm down. It was crazy to be taking her frustration with her boss out on Mick. And what was he doing here anyway? He hadn’t mentioned coming to New York when they’d talked last night.

  He returned with their drinks and sat across from her. Waiting until she’d taken several sips of her coffee, he then regarded her with his most unrelenting gaze.

  “Mind telling me what the devil put you in this mood?”

  “Phillip’s on a tear. Over a million dollars’ worth of paintings weren’t delivered on schedule, and we can’t seem to track them. I’m sure it’s just some ridiculous snafu with the delivery service, but he’s convinced that we’re the victims of a major art heist and that I know more than I’m telling him.”

  Mick regarded her with an expression that ranged from incredulity to outrage. “He’s suggesting you’re involved in some art theft?”

  She waved off his indignation. “Not seriously. You’ve met Phillip. You know how dramatic he can be. He’s just upset and I’m there.” She shrugged. “Which is why I’m here, if you can follow my point. I had to take a break or quit.”

  “I vote for quitting,” he said at once.

  She lifted a brow at the quick response. “And you don’t think you might be trying to take advantage of the situation for your own nefarious purposes?”

  “Well, of course I am,” he said without hesitation. He grinned at her. “If it’ll get you back in Chesapeake Shores, I’ll use any weapons at my disposal. You shouldn’t be working for anyone who doesn’t fully appreciate you.”

  “I was married to a man exactly like that,” she reminded him.

  Mick winced. “Okay, I deserved that, but I’m trying to make amends, aren’t I? Give me a little credit here.”

  She reached for his hand. “I do,” she told him. “I give you a lot of credit, in fact. What are you doing here, by the way?”

  “I woke up this morning with a need to see your face. Since you were working and couldn’t come to Maryland, I decided to come to you.”

  “Well, your timing was impeccable. I needed to see a friendly face.”

  He looked pleased by the comment, then gave her an earnest look. “Megan, seriously, think about moving home. You can open your own art gallery. You know the business. You have the contacts. And I have the money to back you.”

  “Which wouldn’t make it my business now, would it?” she countered. “No, Mick. It’s a generous offer, but I can’t accept it.”

  “Then marry me again, dammit, and just come home.”

  She looked into his eyes and laughed. “Now, if that isn’t the loveliest proposal a woman has ever heard,” she said, shaking her head. “It absolutely makes me want to swoon right into your arms.”

  “If you want the whole hearts and flowers thing, I’ll do it,” he vowed. “Come to dinner with me tonight, and I’ll arrange for candlelight and music and I’ll bring along the biggest rock you can wear and still lift your finger.”

  “Oh, Mick,” she said, squeezing his hand. “I don’t need a diamond ring. Truth be told, I don’t even like diamonds all that well. And I can’t marry you again, so please don’t drag out all the romantic gestures.”

  He pulled his hand away, the hurt in his eyes unmistakable. “Are you saying I’m wasting my time courting you? Have you already made up your mind that you’ll never come back to me?”

  “No,” she said, immediately regretting the way she’d phrased her response. “I haven’t decided anything.”

  “Well, you sounded pretty darn sure of yourself not a minute ago,” he groused.

  “I just meant I couldn’t marry you now, or even say yes now. We still need time, Mick. Neither of us are who we were when we met, or even when we divorced. We can’t drift back together and expect to fit together the same way.”

  “I suppose I should be relieved by what you’re saying, but all I feel is aggravated,” he admitted.

  She smiled at that. “Because patience has never been one of your virtues.”

  “True enough.” He stood up. “Well, since you won’t let me set up some fancy dinner, I suppose we should get back to that gallery of yours and find those missing paintings.”

  She regarded him with surprise. “You don’t have to help.”

  “I do if I expect to spend any time with you this even
ing,” he said. “And I didn’t come all this way just to wander around the city on my own.”

  She gave him a coy look. “With all the attractions New York has to offer, you care only about me?”

  He laughed. “Meggie, don’t you know by now that for me, you’ll always be the main attraction?”

  “There’s more of that Irish blarney I always loved,” she said as she followed him from the coffee shop.

  “It’s not blarney,” he said indignantly. “It’s the gospel truth.”

  Heaven help her, she thought. She was beginning to believe he meant it.

  Shanna didn’t see Kevin for more than a week after he’d gotten that call from his former mother-in-law. She knew what he was going through and why, but she hated that he seemed to have lost some of the forward momentum in his life. Bree had stopped by yesterday morning and mentioned that he was moping around the house again. The only positive thing he seemed to be doing was going to the required classes to get his captain’s certification.

  She’d picked up the phone half a dozen times to call him, then put it back. Friends certainly called friends, but she knew that wasn’t exactly what they were. There was too much attraction sizzling between them for the label to fit.

  Even more worrisome than her indecision about calling Kevin was the fact that she was spending so much time thinking about him in the first place. Every casual remark Bree had made about her brother when they’d chatted in front of their shops had been as welcome as rain drenching the parched flowers in a garden. Shanna recognized that it wasn’t a good sign.

  Of course, thinking about Kevin did keep her from dwelling on her former stepson. Whenever she saw children running eagerly toward the beach in the morning or families waiting in line to get ice cream at the shop around the corner, she thought of Henry and her heart sank. Today it was a toss-up which of the two worries ran deeper—Kevin or Henry.

  Since Kevin was an adult and his problems weren’t hers to solve, the next time she reached for the phone, she called the number that had once been her own. It was the nanny who answered.

  “Greta, it’s Shanna.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Hamilton, how are you?” She clucked at her mistake. “Sorry. I know it’s Ms. Carlyle now. I just can’t get used to that.”

  “Shanna is fine,” she told the woman who’d been caring for Henry since his mother had died in an accident when he was three. “How’s Henry? Is he there?”

  “Standing right here beside me,” Greta said. “As soon as he heard me say your name, he came running. I’ll put him on.”

  “First tell me if he’s okay.”

  Greta hesitated, then said unconvincingly, “Everything’s fine.”

  Hearing an off note in her voice, Shanna persisted. “No, it’s not. What’s going on?”

  “I really can’t get into that now. Here’s Henry.”

  “Mommy, is it really you?” Henry asked.

  Relieved by the familiar excitement in his voice, she put aside her fears. She saw no need to correct him for calling her Mommy, either, though Greg and his family had objected to the continued use of it after the divorce.

  “We gave him permission to call me that even before the wedding,” she’d reminded Greg. “If someone else comes into the picture, then we’ll worry about which of us he calls Mommy.” Her ex-husband had finally relented.

  For a moment now, she simply basked in knowing that her boy sounded happy. Then she asked, “Hey, buddy, how are you? Have you grown another six inches since last time we talked?”

  He giggled. “Nobody grows that fast.”

  “I think you do. I had to buy you new school clothes three times when you were in kindergarten. How about that sweater I sent you for your birthday. Have you outgrown that already?”

  “No way,” he said. “It’s awesome. I’m going to wear it forever and ever.” He paused, then said, “Guess what, Mommy?”

  “What?”

  “Daddy promised to take me to a Phillies baseball game next week, and maybe to a Baltimore Orioles game later this summer. He said someday we’d go to every ballpark in the whole country. Isn’t that the best?”

  Knowing how much Henry loved baseball, she agreed. “It’s definitely the best.” She just hoped it didn’t turn out to be one of the hundreds of promises that Greg broke. Each time it was harder and harder for Henry to bounce back from the disappointment. Each time the light in his eyes dimmed a bit more.

  “Tell me what else you’ve been doing,” she encouraged him. “Are you having a good summer vacation?”

  “Greta took me fishing at the lake,” he said, mentioning another of his favorite things. They’d gone almost daily when she’d been there. He sighed heavily. “But she didn’t like baiting the hook. I don’t think she’ll take me again.” He paused then asked, “Could you maybe come and take me?”

  “I wish I could, buddy. I’ll talk to your dad, and maybe one of these days we’ll be able to work something out. No promises, though—understood?”

  “I know. It’s because the court said so,” he said glumly. “I hate the dumb court.”

  Shanna wasn’t especially fond of it, either. The judge had been a close friend of Greg’s father; she’d never stood a chance. A more compassionate and less well-connected judge might have taken into account the bond she’d had with Henry rather than focusing solely on the legalities. These infrequent calls weren’t satisfying to either one of them. Still, they were better than being cut out of Henry’s life completely, which would have been the Hamiltons’ preference.

  “Did you open your bookstore?” Henry asked.

  “I did and it’s wonderful.”

  “I wish I could see it,” he said wistfully. “Maybe Grandma will bring me.”

  Shanna had her doubts about that. Loretta Hamilton had never been one of Shanna’s biggest fans. All evidence to the contrary, she’d blamed Shanna for the breakup of the marriage after only a few months. Though she was well aware of the tight bond Shanna and Henry had formed, she’d backed her husband and son a hundred percent in their efforts to keep Shanna out of Henry’s life after the divorce.

  “I need to go, but I love you, Henry,” Shanna said. “Can you put Greta back on?”

  “She went downstairs,” he told her. “I think she’s fixing lunch.”

  “Okay then,” Shanna said, hiding her disappointment at not getting to ask the nanny a few more questions. “I’ll speak to you again soon.”

  “Really soon?” he asked plaintively.

  “Really soon. Love you,” she said and waited.

  After a moment came the hard-won response, “Love you.”

  Shanna hung up, tears in her eyes. It had taken her months of repeating the phrase every time she said good-night, both before and after the wedding, to get Henry to utter those words. In a family that thought effusive emotions were a weakness, he’d rarely heard them and learned to distrust them when they were spoken.

  Sadly, when she and his dad had split up, he’d felt betrayed by the simple phrase yet again. At the age of six, when she’d left, he’d learned that love didn’t mean people stayed in his life. He’d remained stubbornly silent when she’d uttered them during their conversations. It was only in recent weeks, when he’d begun to believe that she still cared despite being separated from him, that he’d started to say the words again.

  “Oh, Henry,” she murmured, brushing at the tears dampening her cheeks. “What have we done to you?”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d asked herself the question, and she knew it wouldn’t be the last. Greg, in his own highly dysfunctional way, had gone on after the divorce. So had she, building a new life that promised to be fulfilling in ways her marriage had never been.

  But Henry, living in the midst of the chaos that was his father’s life, had no choices open to him, no defenses against the turmoil that was a daily occurrence with a man like Greg, who lost himself in an alcoholic haze more frequently than not.

  Shanna had tried so hard to m
ake all of that clear to the judge, but her word had been up against the testimony of Loretta and Harrison Hamilton, even against the word of Greg himself, who’d sobered up sufficiently to make his case to the court. Charming and intelligent when sober, Greg had given testimony about their marriage that had been impossible to refute with his powerful parents there to back him up and no one at all to support her claims. Even with a stack of exorbitant liquor store receipts as evidence, she couldn’t place those bottles in Greg’s hands. For all anyone knew, they’d been gifts to business associates or supplies for extravagant parties, as Greg’s counsel had suggested.

  She’d walked away from the brief marriage with her heart in tatters but her dignity intact. Yet the real damage had been to a then-six-year-old boy who’d been left with no one to protect and love him beyond a nanny too frightened of her boss to speak up in court when it might have counted.

  Shanna sighed. The call had been unsatisfying in so many ways, but hearing the wistful note in Henry’s voice had accomplished one thing. It had stiffened her resolve to watch over him as best she could from a distance.

  And if the time ever came when she suspected that he was being hurt—emotionally or physically—by his father, she would act in a heartbeat and damn the legal consequences.

  9

  Tired of the pitying looks he was getting from just about everyone in his family, Kevin invited Jake, Trace, Will and Mack to go fishing with him on Sunday. It would give him a chance to test his skill at handling his new boat. More important, it might reassure everyone that his life was on track.

  The other four men met him at the Harbor Lights Marina at dawn. Of all of them, only Mack was looking a little the worse for wear.

  “Late night?” Kevin inquired.

  “He was out on another one of those nondates with Susie O’Brien,” Will said. “For two people who insist they’re not even remotely into each other, they spend an awful lot of time together.”

  “We’re friends,” Mack said, giving him a sour look, then jumping on board the fishing boat to get away from them. No sooner had Kevin brought his cooler aboard than Mack popped open a beer.