by Sarah Morgan
That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?
No matter how much she sympathized with him, it didn’t change the fact that it would be stupid to make plans around a man who had already hurt her once.
BACK IN THE COTTAGE Brittany climbed the ladder to the attic and flicked on the light, a single bare bulb in the center of the room.
Deciding that one of the best cures for sexual frustration was hard physical labor, she hauled box after box into the center of the room. Realizing she couldn’t get them downstairs with only one hand, she sat cross-legged in the dusty attic and sorted through her grandmother’s life.
It was in the third box, buried under paintings of the seashore and a collage of pressed leaves and flowers that bore her grandmother’s signature, that she found the diaries.
There were four of them, each one sturdy and thick, bound in dark red leather and smelling slightly of dust. Opening them, she saw pages and pages of her grandmother’s even handwriting.
She found the first diary and started reading. By the end of the first page she realized two things. One, that Kathleen had been a fine writer, and two, that she was holding in her hands a chronicle of her grandmother’s life on the island from the day she first arrived.
It was a love story, and one with plenty of bumps along the way.
Brittany’s grandfather had been a lobsterman, born and raised on the island at a time when the population was less than three figures and the entire community was focused on fishing. He was one of generations of Mainers who relied on the sea for income.
Her grandmother, raised in Boston, had struggled to adapt to a place where most of the land was national park. She’d found the winters long and brutal, and wrote eloquently about the ways in which the community had helped each other.
Emotion shone through the words, bringing light and color to the descriptions of life on a rural island. There was fear, exhaustion, exhilaration and hope, but underpinning it all was love. It was clear her grandmother would have lived anywhere, learned to adapt to any lifestyle, as long as she was with her husband. It was also clear that none of it had been easy.
Brittany let the diary fall into her lap.
She’d always known her grandmother was a fighter, but she’d never known any of the detail. Her grandmother was the sort who either solved a problem or accepted it. She never complained.
But she hadn’t allowed a single hurdle to derail her relationship.
Brittany thought back to those first horrible weeks after Zach had left, when she’d alternated between pounding cliff paths in an attempt to run off her misery and lying in the bed with the covers over her head.
She remembered her grandmother stroking her hair.
Sometimes the timing just isn’t right, honey.
Tears scalded her throat and because she was on her own, she let them fall. What the hell was the matter with her? She never cried, and suddenly it was all she seemed to be doing.
She closed the book carefully so that she didn’t damage the pages, scrubbed at her face with a dusty hand and then stilled as she heard someone at the door.
Emily.
Sky had obviously called her and Brittany felt a rush of warmth because if she’d ever needed a hug from a friend, it was now.
Cradling the book under her arm, she scrambled down from the attic, guarding her arm.
Wondering why Emily hadn’t just used her key, she opened the door and was confronted by Zach.
“Oh—”
His eyes raked her face and his expression darkened. “What the hell is wrong?”
Crap.
He was the last person she’d expected to see. She hadn’t heard from him in three days, and here she was standing in her dusty sweats with windblown hair that hadn’t seen a brush or a straightener all day. “Nothing.”
“You don’t cry about nothing. If something upsets you, you’re more likely to shoot it in the butt than cry over it. So I’m asking you again—what’s happened?” He used that same firm, patient tone he used when he spoke to nervous children and frightened animals. The tone that told her he wasn’t going to give up until she answered him.
He’s a good man, Brittany, but he doesn’t even know it himself.
“Honestly, I’m fine.”
His gaze shifted to the book under her arm. “What’s that?”
“It’s one of my grandmother’s diaries. I found it when I was clearing out her things in the attic.”
“You were doing that alone? Why didn’t you call Emily or Skylar?”
“Because I was fine doing it on my own.”
“Bullshit.” Without waiting for her to respond, he nudged her gently back into the cottage and closed the door behind them. “You’re not fine. You’re feeling sad and lonely and you miss the hell out of your grandmother.”
She didn’t know whether it was his words or an overload of emotions but her vision blurred, she felt the salty sting of tears build in her eyes and the next thing she knew the diary was being gently tugged from under her arm and she was hauled against Zach’s chest and hugged tightly.
Enclosed by the tensile strength of hard male muscle, it was impossible to keep the emotion in. She closed her eyes and let herself sob.
Through the storm of emotion she felt him holding her, felt the gentle stroke of his fingers on her hair and heard the rough tone of his voice as he told her everything was fine, that she should let it out.
And she did. She buried her face against his chest and cried, her tears soaking his shirt. She breathed in the warm male smell of him, felt the secure circle of his arms and wondered how a man who claimed to feel no emotion should be so attuned to the emotions of others.
“Sorry.” The word was muffled against his shoulder. She knew she should pull away but she felt safe and warm.
“Why are you sorry? You loved her. You miss her. You don’t have to apologize for that.” He eased away slightly and dragged the backs of his fingers over her damp cheek. “She was a special woman. Kind and wise.”
“Yes, she was.” She sniffed. “She always liked you, did you know that?”
He gave a short laugh. “Then maybe she wasn’t as wise as I thought.” He smoothed her tangled hair back from her damp face with gentle hands. “You need coffee.”
“I can’t be bothered to make it.”
“I’ll make it.” He urged her into the kitchen and pulled out a chair. Then he fetched a box of tissues from the shelf and placed them next to her. “Sit there and don’t move.”
She wondered what he was doing at her door.
She was about to ask him when her eyes strayed to the photo of her grandmother, taken on a windy day on the beach.
She’d thought she’d cried herself out, but her eyes filled again and she shook her head, embarrassed. “What the hell is wrong with me? I need a plumber.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.” Zach reached into the cupboard and pulled out two mugs. “You’re grieving, that’s all. It’s natural.”
“It’s been three years.”
“I don’t think there’s a time limit on these things and anyway, I bet you kept yourself so busy you barely had time to stop and breathe.”
“Maybe.” She blew her nose. “I was in Greece. I’d been home just the month before and she was fine. Then I had a call from Agnes Cooper in the middle of the night.” Her eyes filled again. “I wasn’t even here.”
He put the mugs down and sat down next to her. “You were living your life. That’s what she wanted.” He took her hand between his and she looked down, noticing the contrast between her slim fingers and his rough, calloused palm.
“You don’t think I’m going crazy?”
“What I think,” he said slowly, rubbing her palm with his thumb, “is that you loved a person enough that losing them left a big hole in your life. That’s going to hurt.”
“It does. I miss her so damn much.” She tugged her hand away from his, grabbed another tissue and blew her nose. “Sorry. Wow. This is attrac
tive. Hysterical woman drenches you. Great way to start your day.”
“I’ve known worse ways to start a day.” He stood up and made the coffee. “You shouldn’t have cleared the attic on your own.”
“That’s what Sky said.”
“So why did you?”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I guess I was being stubborn and pigheaded.”
He smiled and poured the coffee into the mugs with the same smooth economy of movement he showed in everything he did. Then he placed one on the table in front of her. “Drink.”
“Do you think I was wrong to read her diaries? I felt like an intruder. I keep thinking that if she’d wanted me to read them, she would have given them to me when she was alive.”
“Or maybe she wrote them, put them in the attic and forgot about them. When was the last entry?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t look.” She sipped the coffee gratefully. “I wish I’d asked her more about her past. It wasn’t really something we talked about. I never realized how hard she found it when she first came here. It was my grandfather who wanted to make a life here and she loved him so much, she agreed. From what I’ve read so far, it seemed as if all that mattered to her to begin with was being with him. She thought the rest would figure itself out. And then she fell in love.”
“She wasn’t in love when she married him?”
“I meant, she fell in love with the island. This place.” She warmed her hands on the mug and looked across the kitchen to the sun-filled garden. “They bought this place together.”
Zach stared at her for a long moment and then stood up. “Go and fetch a sweater.”
“Why? I’m not cold.”
“Not here, but you might be where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m taking you flying.”
“Flying?” Her head ached from crying and her heart felt like a lead weight in her chest. She hadn’t heard from him in days and she still hadn’t asked why he was here. “Why?”
“Because the weather is perfect and that’s as good a reason to be up in the air as any I can think of. Because you asked me what I love about flying and the simplest way to explain that is to show you. Better than sitting here digging yourself deeper into misery.”
Even though she knew it was dangerous to read anything into it, her spirits lifted. “Give me five minutes to wash off the dust.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER they were at the airstrip.
“Do I sit up front with you?”
“As long as you promise not to touch anything.”
Brittany’s tears had dried and she couldn’t resist teasing him. “I can’t touch anything? Nothing?”
His gaze settled on her mouth. “Not unless you want me to crash.”
She sat next to him and took the headset he handed her. “Can I talk to air traffic control? Blue Bird, this is Johnny Boy, come in please.”
Zach reached for the controls, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “For the record, this plane is not Johnny Boy. It’s female.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how I think of her.”
“If you’re about to say it’s because she’s temperamental and needs careful handling, think twice. I can do a lot of damage with this cast.” She watched as he flicked a switch on the instrument panel. This was his territory. His area of expertise. “So this is an amphibious plane? You can land anywhere?”
“Anywhere from a grass runway in the Vineyard to a frozen lake in Alaska.”
She blinked at the array of lights, dials and switches on the instrument panel. “It’s pretty. And complicated.”
“Not really. Everything has a purpose and it’s an easy plane to fly. It helps having the engine instruments on the MFD.”
“The MFD?”
“Multifunction display. Shows real-time flight-critical data, including traffic, digital attitude, heading, engine, airframe indication and CrewAlert. You’ve got three 10.4-inch LCDs, backup instruments, switches and the flight guidance panel.” He showed her. “The layout is clean and logical.”
It didn’t look logical to her. It looked complex and perplexing, but although she didn’t understand the mechanics of flight, she understood how it felt to have a passion for something.
“As long as one of us knows what it’s all for. Seems like a lot of dials and switches for a small plane.”
“Small plane—advanced avionics.”
Flying wasn’t something she’d ever thought about much. To her, it was a mode of transport and usually not a particularly comfortable one. She was used to being crammed into a small space with her knees bumping the seat in front.
This was different.
She watched as Zach’s hands moved over the instruments with quiet confidence. Stealing a glance, she realized how much he’d changed. He had a quiet self-belief that had been absent when she’d first known him.
He must have felt her gaze because he turned his head and raised his eyebrows. “Is this the part where you tell me you really are scared of flying?”
“Spiders, Flynn. It’s just spiders.” She licked her lips. “Is it going to put you off if I tell you you’re hot when you fly a plane?”
For a brief moment his gaze held hers and then he turned his head and focused his attention on the flight deck. “I’m not hot the rest of the time?”
“Maybe it’s to do with all the thrust and power that’s going on around here.”
“If you’re having filthy thoughts, you might want to save them until we land. That’s unless you want to ditch in the ocean.”
There was an increase in engine noise and then they were speeding along the runway and into the air.
As she watched Puffin Island recede beneath them, she realized she was holding her breath.
To the right she saw the Captain Hook leaving the harbor on its way to the mainland, the yachts moored in the Ocean Club and the rocky shoreline and inlets that formed the west coast of the island.
Then they turned and flew over the forest. Far beneath her she caught a glimpse of Heron Pond where they’d camped with the children, and then saw Shell Bay and Castaway Cottage. There were people on the beach, tiny figures with no face or form, enjoying the last days of summer. They’d be wearing sweaters, she thought. Reaching for another layer, commenting on how the weather was turning.
And then the figures vanished and there was only the rippling expanse of the ocean, yachts cutting through the white chop of the water.
They flew over Puffin Rock and then headed north over islands, some inhabited, some not, and she looked down on beaches, lighthouses and mountains. Seated in the cockpit, she had an uninterrupted view of her little corner of the world and that world was breathtaking.
I’ve never seen it like this.
The thought flew into her head and out again because now they were over Acadia National Park and far below she could see spectacular summer cottages dotted around Bar Harbor. She looked down on Frenchman’s Bay, bound by Mount Desert Island and the rocky granite shoreline of the Schoodic Peninsula. Here the shoreline was red granite, the forest dominated by pine, birch and varieties of spruce, cedar and maple.
In the summer the roads were crowded but in the winter the visitor numbers dwindled.
“It’s perfect. I understand why you love it.” She glanced from Zach’s hands to the strong, masculine lines of his face and realized that when she looked at him now, she saw him differently. The past had vanished. There was no sign of the angry boy, the loner who had been suspicious of everyone around him. In his place was a man who had built a life from the rubble of his childhood. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
For a moment she allowed herself to admire the hard lines of his jaw highlighted by the hint of masculine shadow.
Then she turned her eyes back to the view. To the right she could see a small island, one of many, with a spectacular summer house overlooking a beach and a dock.
>
When she realized he was intending to land on the water her heart bumped a little faster. “We’re landing? I thought this was a flight over the bay.”
“It’s a flight over the bay, with a scenic stopover.” He reached towards the control panel. “Gear up for water landing.”
“You’re sure about this?” As the ocean grew closer, she felt a flicker of nerves. “You know for sure the plane floats? Because I ate a bagel yesterday and I’m not at my thinnest.”
His response was simply to smile and moments later they skimmed the water and came to a halt by the dock.
Brittany breathed again. “Okay, well, that was impressive.” She knew nothing about flying but she could see the skill with which he’d handled the plane. “Landing on water must be tricky.”
“You want to keep the nose slightly high. If you try to land with zero degrees of pitch as you would when you’re cruising, the water could catch the front of your float pontoons and flip the plane.” He removed his headset and stood up. “Ready to explore?”
“I don’t even know where we are. Or are you about to tell me you’ve bought an island as well as a plane?”
“It’s owned by a guy called Frederick Richardson. He runs a hedge fund. Drags himself out of the madness of Manhattan once a month and comes here for the fishing. I’m his transport.” He walked to the back of the plane. “Aren’t you going to ask me if we’re trespassing?”
“No. You respect other people’s property.”
He reached for a cooler and a basket. “I didn’t always.”
Brittany’s heart skipped in her chest. Another revelation, but one so small he didn’t even seem to realize he’d made it. Warmed by the knowledge that he’d dropped his guard a little, she resisted the temptation to push further.
“Do you have something to drink in there?”
“And something to eat.”
“You planned this? I thought it was a spontaneous suggestion.” She took the basket from him. “I didn’t even ask you why you dropped round this morning. I opened the door, grabbed you and cried all over you. I bet that wasn’t quite the greeting you were expecting.”
“I seem to remember I was the one who grabbed you.” He carried the food down the steps. “And I came round to take you flying. And to apologize for not being in touch for the last three days. I found out Philip was due over at the mainland for some tests. I wanted to be with him.”
