Sandpiper Island (The Bachelors

by Donna Kauffman

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “It’s pretty steamy stuff. Especially the lobsters.” She nudged him with her elbow. “Get it, steamed? Lobsters? Diner humor. I crack myself up.”

  He let out a short laugh. “You need to get out more.”

  “You said it, sailor,” she replied, only more to herself than him.

  “You tied up the boat like you grew up on one. You’ve obviously spent some time on the water.”

  “I sailed in the summers when I was younger, school age, but that’s it, really. I mean, I know the general nature stuff we all learned in school, and what I see with my own eyes around our docks. We have those same birds hovering all over the harbor, but—” She gestured back toward the rocky shoreline, now hidden from view by the trees, and laughed. “Nothing like that.”

  “You’ve never been out here? What about the other islands in the bay?”

  She shook her head again, and shrugged. “Like I said. Busy.” She smiled. “As my Gran used to say, ‘I clean fish, I cook fish, so someone else can do the catching. Keeps us all in business that way.’ Well, that’s ditto for me.”

  “Makes sense.” Ford continued to lead the way deeper into the woods. The trail moved upward toward the higher ground that formed the central part of the heart-shaped island. The footpath was still clearly visible, but that would change once the pine needles started to carpet the forest floor, and then the snow would come and pile on top of them. That was another month or two away still. He hoped.

  They fell into a companionable silence, and his thoughts went back to the boat ride out. There had been no conversation then. His old trawler was loud and the ride had been bumpy over choppy waves. He’d manned the boat, so Delia had gone up and perched herself on the foredeck. He’d watched the wind whip her red curls into a wild mass as she turned her fair face toward the wind. She’d looked all but lost in the folds of his old green university hoodie.

  She’d looked contemplative as they’d chugged out of the inner harbor and he’d left her to her thoughts. He figured she was having second thoughts about her impulsive decision to join him. He still didn’t know what had possessed her to do that. Escape? She’d said she was stepping inside the circle, accepting that she needed a friend, needed to talk. Maybe that was all it was. A chance to get away from everything, to clear her head and get a handle on what she was going to do next.

  He, of all people, could respect the need to do that. Hell, you’ve turned it into an art form.

  It had been closer to five minutes than the two she’d promised, but when she’d come running back across the parking lot, she hadn’t looked upset. In fact, she’d been smiling. The kind of smile he hadn’t seen since their little midnight reunion in her kitchen. She’d said “Shotgun!” as she climbed into the passenger seat and pulled on her seat belt, and he hadn’t had the heart to question what the hell she was doing. When he’d asked about her getting coverage at the diner, she’d told him that Peg would call a few of the local girls who waited tables for Delia in the summer, fairly certain at least one of them would be happy to earn the extra pocket change now that the high season was over. Delia had made a call on their way to where he’d docked his boat at Blue’s and secured coverage for kitchen duty for the early morning crowd. She assumed they’d be back tomorrow and that was likely the case, but if he felt he needed to stay on Sandpiper longer, he would do that, and he’d told her so. She’d shrugged and said she’d deal with that if it happened.

  He hadn’t asked her if she was concerned that her sudden absence would create an alarming buzz among her regulars. He hadn’t asked her what would happen if Mayor Davis chose that afternoon to announce his decision while she was a forty-five-minute boat ride away. She was a grown woman who could make her own choices. That, and when they’d cleared the inner harbor and he’d opened the engines up, he’d watched the tension roll right out of her shoulders and off her back. Didn’t matter how hard the boat bottomed out after cresting the heavier rolls, or that the salty sea spray was making her hair and her hoodie damp: She grinned like a kid on holiday.

  When was the last time she’d done something as simple as take a boat ride? he’d wondered. Given their brief conversation since landing, he’d guess a very long time. That had surprised him, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Other than Tommy’s funeral, and the night that had followed, every single moment he’d spent with her in Blueberry Cove had been while she was working. Hell, he’d had to ambush her at her house in the middle of the night just to get a minute alone with her. He’d never really thought about that, assuming, he supposed, that she must take time off to do something other than run the diner, but if she did, he’d never witnessed it. But then, he’d been wrapped up in his own stuff.

  He recalled the comments he’d overheard when he’d stopped in at the diner, about Delia and Langston deVry being an item. Grace had made a point of saying they were merely friends, but surely someone of Langston’s resources could have wooed Delia out for an afternoon sail. Or a hop across the pond for dinner in Paris, for that matter. His pockets were that deep.

  Given the sobbing heap of exhaustion she’d been in his arms in the shower, though, if deVry had gotten her to take any kind of occasional break, it hadn’t made much of a dent in her work routine. It was no wonder that Winstock’s pulling the rug out from under her diner had turned her world a bit more upside down than folks really understood. Something like that would have to make a person take stock, question what it was she wanted, reassess her life. And she’d already been taking stock, apparently. She’d alluded to that by mentioning that Grace’s coming to the Cove had been when she’d started dreaming about him.

  He nimbly sidestepped a protruding tree root at the last second, and forced his mind away from that part. Again. She’d been more carefree, more, well, more herself, when he’d come back to Maine all those years ago. He had to wonder how long she’d been so tense, so emotional, so exhausted.

  For the moment, he decided it was enough that being here on the island, away from the Cove, had lightened her up immeasurably. He knew a short boat ride wasn’t going to fix anything, but for now, it was a start.

  “What is the plan?” she asked, breaking the long silence. “For the baby puffin, I mean.”

  He lifted the cooler he carried. “Blue packed away some fresh herring for me. That’s high on their preferred diet menu. I’ll go out to the burrow and check, firsthand, see how it’s doing. I can put fish in the burrow, and then monitor to see if the chick eats. If it appears too weak for that, then I can pull it out, hand-feed, take more direct care.”

  “You can do that? I mean, it won’t screw up its instincts, or whatever, to go back to sea?”

  “I’ll release it to sea myself, when it’s ready.”

  “So, you’ve done this before.”

  “Every season there are some who simply don’t make it out past the rocks and into the sea without the tides or waves thumping them back up on the rocks, and sometimes they’re too weak to attempt it again. My interns will judge if they’re able to be saved, or if an attempt should be made, and in some cases, they have done that.”

  “Isn’t that interfering with the cycle?”

  “Yes, but puffins in particular have suffered a decline in recent years and so if the chick has made it as far as fledging, and it just needs a little nudge to get back out there, then if we can, we will. We won’t interfere beyond that though, as far as predators who may be—”

  She lifted a hand. “Let me have my Disney visual, okay? You releasing the chick into the wild, and it flapping its way to freedom and a life of happiness and herrings.”

  Ford grinned. “Well, the ones that do make it wouldn’t have otherwise. Just think of it that way.”

  She smiled up at him. “I like that way.”

  He caught himself lifting his hand to push away a stray curl that had caught on the tip of her eyelashes. The bay breezes still managed to find their way through the tall pines. It was a simple gesture, one a frie
nd would do for a friend. But the fact that he caught himself, that he’d paused, thought about it, told him more than he wanted to know about what had motivated him. He wanted to touch her. And, God help him, he was dying to taste her.

  He’d held her naked against his body not forty-eight hours earlier and had not a single recollection of what she’d felt like. The time spent under that hot shower had been fraught with a lot of things, a lot of racing thoughts, but her being naked wasn’t one of them. Now he might as well be fifteen again and a twisted mass of raging hormones. Or twenty-three, he thought darkly, bringing home the body of the battle buddy who’d died in his arms . . . then drowning his grief in the soft, willing, and oh-so-pliant body of his slain buddy’s sister. Even making himself think about it like that couldn’t taint the memory of that night. Nothing ever would. It had been mutually consented to, and mutually therapeutic. He hadn’t regretted it then, or a single day since. For a long time, he’d felt like she’d saved him that night, proving to him that beauty and kindness, passion and pleasure could indeed coexist in a world that was also harsh, brutally unfair, and deadly. Maybe he still did.

  His thoughts were all caught up in the past as he tried to put the feelings he was having now in some kind of perspective that would make it easier to deal with her being in such close proximity. Out in the middle of nowhere. Alone. On an island. His goddamn island. So he wasn’t thinking, wasn’t aware, when he walked into the clearing below his tree house, that she’d stumbled to a stop behind him, gaping upward at his home in the sky, until she gasped.

  “That’s . . . incredible.”

  Ford stopped and looked back to where Delia stood at the edge of the clearing.

  “I mean, I knew you’d built a tree house, but I guess I thought, well, I don’t know that I thought anything, really. Not specifically.” She took slow steps forward, her face still upturned, as she spun in a circle, taking in the octagonal main structure with the pointed dome roof, the ladders and rope that provided access from deck to ground, then on to the rope and plank bridges and pierlike walkways that connected the main structure to various outbuildings built around and supported by other nearby trees. “But I definitely didn’t picture anything like this.” She finally stopped and lowered her wide-eyed gaze to his.

  Her gaze grew wider still when he put down the cooler and gear bag and said, “Wait here. I need to grab my notebook for that burrow,” and then took the fastest way up, which was hand-over-hand on the heavy knotted rope.

  He glanced down as he levered his legs onto the deck platform in time to see a grin split her pretty features. He swore he could see her eyes sparkle all the way from where he stood.

  Her expression was one of pure delight. “My God, Ford,” she called up to him. “You’re not just Cousteau-Crusoe-Dolittle, you’re freaking Tarzan!”

  Chapter 12

  Barely two minutes after he’d disappeared inside, he shimmied back down, dropping to the ground in an easy crouch once he was about five feet from it, then quickly scooped up the cooler and gear bag before turning to face her. The late summer sun speared down between the towering pines, highlighting the streaks of blond in his shaggy brown hair, the shadow of a beard on his cheeks and chin, while casting those gray eyes of his in shadow. Which was apt given he was a man made of shadows, Delia thought.

  He’d changed into old jeans that hung low on his hips and showcased his long, leanly muscled legs just like God and Levi Strauss had intended. What she’d come to think of his standard uniform of faded tee and plaid jacket emphasized his flat stomach and broad shoulders. The wire rim glasses he’d shoved in the chest pocket along with a small, dog-eared, rolled-up spiral notebook were paired with aviator sunglasses dangling on the front. Big hands gripped the cooler, stocked with food for the endangered little puffling, and the black canvas duffel, stuffed with survival gear for adults. She’d teased him about those iconic hero labels, but damn if he didn’t embody every single one of them. She could toss in Indiana Jones and MacGyver while she was at it.

  He stood there with his amazing tree fort lair, built by his own two hands, dominating the airspace over their heads, yet not diminishing his stature one iota. If anything, the whole setting only served to enhance it. He was the very embodiment of survivalist doc. All he needed was a big knife sheathed on his belt and a stethoscope hanging from around his neck. And she wasn’t too sure that both items weren’t on his person somewhere.

  Delia’s heart pounded and her palms grew damp. The enormity of the landscape that towered over them, dwarfing them, evaporated from her conscious awareness like so much sea mist, leaving only the two of them, and the pine-needle-strewn carpet that stretched between them.

  She wanted to stay in that moment, inside that fantasy bubble, where the need to have him was so keen, so sharp, it heightened every nerve ending to a crackling snap. Hell, even her pores ached for him. What made the moment so intense, so pulse-pounding, was that she could swear the expression on his face mirrored her own need. Such a wonderful fantasy bubble. Please let me keep it.

  She’d known even as she’d called shotgun that impulsively getting on Ford’s boat like a borderline stowaway was the most irresponsible thing she’d done in a very long time. Maybe ever. She had no business leaving the diner. Most especially not now, with Davis’s announcement bomb ready to drop at any moment. She’d told Peg. She had to do that much. The older woman wasn’t surprised, and had taken the news in stride, which Delia supposed shouldn’t have surprised her, either. Peg was as stalwart as they came, and she’d seen the writing on the wall, too. What had surprised Delia was when Peg had pulled her in for a short, fierce hug, then gruffly told Delia to go off and do what she had to do, promising she’d hold down the fort.

  “About time you looked after yourself,” she’d said. “Past time, you ask me.”

  Two hugs in the span of ten minutes and both had rocked Delia in different ways. She’d paused at the door, and Peg had threatened to chase her out of the kitchen with a butcher knife. Delia wasn’t so certain the older woman wouldn’t have done exactly that, which was why she’d been grinning as she hotfooted it out of the back door. That didn’t mean she hadn’t spent every minute of the boat ride out worrying that she should never have put Peg in that position in the first place. She’d picked pretty much the most horrible time ever to essentially run away from home.

  The thing was . . . it felt freaking awesome. Free. Away. Solo. She could exist inside a single moment, this exquisite moment for instance, without a dozen other somethings or someones simultaneously clamoring for her attention. Standing in the woods, staring at Indiana Maddox there, was its own little ecstasy. Why in the world don’t you do this more often?

  Hell, maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be so screwed up in the head about her diner, about . . . well, about her whole life.

  “Well, if you’re planning on playing doctor’s assistant, then we need to keep moving,” he said. “The puffin burrows are on the far side.” He lifted the gear bag to indicate where the trail picked up just beyond the cleared forest floor beneath his treetop home.

  She looked to where he pointed, then back at him, and felt the bubble pop and fizzle away. Ah, well, that’s what fantasies are, after all, right? Just so much sea mist.

  “Thanks, I’d like that,” she said, half wishing the mist would return. Okay, maybe more than half. She forced her gaze away from him and back upward once more. “After we’re done, will you show me the place? I can’t believe you built this. Hell, I can’t believe you even imagined this.”

  She lowered her gaze and found him still staring at her, not all that differently than she’d imagined him looking at her during her little fantasy bubble moment. Must be a trick of the sunlight. But tell that to her pulse rate. “Of course, I’m going to have to use an alternate access route.” She lifted her arms and flexed. “I’ve got some pretty good girl arms, but that?” She pointed to the knotted rope he’d climbed like he was part marmoset. “Would be embarras
sing. I’ve managed to embarrass myself quite enough in front of you lately, so I’ll just take the long way up, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” he said, but it wasn’t the heartiest of assents. In fact, it seemed as if he’d opted to go with the polite response, meaning what he’d wanted to say was no. The inscrutable expression was back, too.

  Double yay.

  He turned and crossed to where the trail picked up, and then continued on without waiting to see if she followed. She should have been annoyed at the sudden lack of manners, but it wasn’t as if she’d been invited on this little scouting trip. So she hustled and caught up with him, but not before taking one last look back at Swiss Family Robinson Wonderland. She wouldn’t have thought he had a romantic bone in his body. And while it was true that the overall design was functional in appearance without any frou-frou design-y elements, which definitely reflected the Ford Maddox she knew, it seemed to her that a person didn’t—couldn’t—dream up a place like that unless they had a little dash of romance and a healthy dollop of wonder in their soul.

  A shame he keeps that all to himself.

  The forest ended rather abruptly and she all but burst from deep shadows to blazing sunlight. She immediately bracketed her forehead with her palm to cut the glare caused by the beams of sun bouncing off the deep blue waters of Pelican Bay. Her breath caught as she looked left, then to her right, and realized they stood on a promontory of sorts, a spit of grass and rocky ground that comprised the point of the heart-shaped island. The view was stunning. The coastline angled back on either side of them, and every bit of it as far as she could see was made up of a steep tumble of boulders and rocks, then water. No beach or sand on this side, either.