Home at Last--Sanctuary Island Book 6

by Lily Everett

  Except she wasn’t laughing. She didn’t laugh much, these days. Marcus tried not to notice.

  He tried not to notice anything about Quinn. Not the downward curve of her bow-shaped lips, not the fact that she’d lost enough weight in the last few weeks to make the collar of her shirt slide down over the cinnamon-speckled ivory smoothness of her shoulder. He clenched his jaw and glared down at the untapped keg of beer behind the bar before he could wonder if that meant she wasn’t wearing a bra. Those pert, perfect breasts swaying free and unfettered under the soft, thin cotton …

  Oh, he was doing a great job of not noticing her. Gold medal.

  Marcus shook his head at himself. He could only be thankful that a few more seconds and Quinn would be past him without a word, taking the stairs up to her studio apartment two at a time as if she couldn’t escape his presence fast enough.

  For the best, he reminded himself. But his stoicism was tested when Quinn didn’t rush through the bar without a word, the way she had every time their paths crossed since the night she showed up here and demanded a place to stay.

  “Hi, Marcus.”

  She sounded nervous, uncertain in a way that reminded him of the awkward little girl she’d once been, all gangly limbs, skinned knees, and carroty hair. Marcus confined himself to a grunt in reply, sternly quashing any curiosity about what prompted her to approach him after weeks of the silent treatment.

  There was a long pause. Marcus picked up Patty’s glass and focused on polishing it dry while he waited for Quinn to get frustrated with his lack of response and give up.

  He should’ve known better.

  “The new job at Windy Corners is going well,” she said abruptly. From the corner of his eye, he caught the movement of her hand propping on one cocked, rounded hip. “Thanks for asking.”

  Marcus steeled himself for their first real conversation since she accused him of being too big a coward to keep up their relationship.

  The key was to keep it short and to the point. “I didn’t ask because I don’t care.”

  “You can be a real jerk sometimes.”

  Marcus said nothing. This was not news to him.

  After a minute, Quinn turned on her heel and stalked away. It was a win, but Marcus couldn’t dredge up much triumph. Mostly he felt tired.

  Tired and angry, his default setting these days.

  He was so busy brooding over his feelings like a ridiculous teenager, it took him a full ten seconds to realize that Quinn hadn’t left the bar. Instead, she’d walked over to the wall switch by the door and flipped off the neon signs that proclaimed the Buttercup Inn open.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Marcus demanded, conveniently ignoring the fact that he’d been about to do the exact same thing before she marched in. “It’s another hour until closing time.”

  Quinn’s stubborn little chin lifted. “No one is going to show up, no matter how long you wait. You might as well close up now. We need to talk.”

  We need to talk. There wasn’t a man alive who could hear those words without an instinctive shudder. Marcus didn’t let it show on his face, though.

  “You’re right. No one is going to come in if you lock the door,” Marcus agreed sardonically, twisting to slide Patty’s now-clean glass onto the shelf behind him with the other, untouched glasses.

  “No one is going to come in here because everyone in town is mad at you.”

  Marcus jerked his head around to see Quinn staring him down, an unreadable expression on her pretty face. Used to be, he could translate every flicker of expression just by looking at her, but not these days. He’d done that to her, Marcus knew. It was because of him that sunny, open, sweet-natured Quinn Harper had finally learned to put up walls around her heart.

  “They’re mad because you broke up with me,” she pressed into the taut silence. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t ask anyone to boycott your bar.”

  There it was, the elephant in the room. Marcus ignored the way it felt like this elephant was poised to stomp all over his future, and walked over to the nearest table to start upending chairs. If he was closing up early, he might as well get started on cleaning.

  “They’ll come around,” he said, sliding the heavy wooden chair onto the tabletop. He sounded more certain than he felt, so that was a plus.

  “Or they won’t. Or it’ll take too long and you’ll end up losing all your money. Face it. You’re in a pickle.”

  He moved on to the next table and picked up a chair. “What would this town full of doting honorary aunts and uncles think if they could hear the glee in your voice when you talk about my … pickle.”

  “Don’t get nasty.” Quinn circled the table until she was in his line of sight, giving him a look full of injured dignity. “I’m here to help you, Marcus. Not that you deserve it.”

  Truer words. Marcus rolled the guilt right off his shoulders. “Don’t bother. I’ll get by without help. Always do.”

  “But you don’t have to.” Quinn blew out an exasperated breath that lifted strands of her red-gold hair off her forehead. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I have a proposal.”

  What, a marriage proposal? Everything inside Marcus went still and quiet. He tried to tell himself it was pure terror—the fear of giving up his freedom to hitch his life forever to someone like Quinn, who was destined to leave him in the dust one way or another—but Marcus had never been good at lying to himself.

  If she got down on one knee on the floor of this bar, he was going to say yes. Even knowing it would be the dumbest damn mistake of his life.

  Silence stretched between them and held for a long, aching moment before Quinn’s brilliant blue eyes went wide. “Oh! No, no, don’t worry. Not that kind of proposal. ‘Proposal’ was a bad word. Proposition, maybe. Or, crap, that sounds bad, too—I have a plan! That’s it. A plan.”

  Marcus refused to acknowledge the clutch of disappointment in his guts. Of course she wasn’t proposing to him. He’d ripped her heart out and thrown it away like it was garbage, and he’d done it on purpose to get her to move on with her life. Quinn might be too generous and forgiving for her own good, but she wasn’t a masochist. No way she’d ever get herself mixed up with Marcus again.

  His lack of response must have made her nervous, because she followed him to the next table with a jitter in her step. “Don’t you want to hear my plan?”

  “No.” Marcus didn’t want to hear anything. He wanted to pour himself a glass of bourbon to take upstairs and nurse all night long, in the dark, by himself. That didn’t seem like too much to ask.

  But apparently, it was.

  Quinn’s gaze narrowed and her chin went up. Marcus’s eyes caught on the slight dimple in that chin—the dimple he’d kissed. More than once.

  “Well, you’re going to hear it anyway,” she said, commanding his attention the way she always had without even trying.

  God help him, but Marcus loved strong women.

  Straightening, he picked up another chair and tried not to picture himself holding it like a lion tamer in a circus. He couldn’t afford to let Quinn get close again. “Let’s get this over with. I have plans for tonight.”

  She arched a delicate brow in the direction of his favorite bottle of bourbon—the only bottle on the bar that was half empty after a week in business—but generously decided not to call him on his bull. Instead, she looked him square in the eye and turned his life upside down with a few little words.

  “I can bring in customers for the bar—get the townspeople here to stop boycotting the Buttercup Inn. And all you have to do is pretend to be my boyfriend for the next four weeks.”

  Chapter 2

  Quinn held her breath and laced her fingers together in front of her to hide their trembling. She couldn’t wait to find out how Marcus was going to react. Although she was pretty sure he’d laugh her out of the bar, which was fine. She’d been laughed at before. She could survive that.

  But if he refused to help her … well, she’d
survive that, too. But her parents’ marriage might not.

  Panic compressed her ribs around her lungs, squeezing off her air supply. It happened every time she thought about the conversation she’d had with her parents that morning.

  When Quinn had pulled up in front of the charming, shingled cottage where she grew up at the tip of Lantern Point, the jagged edges of her heart immediately felt smoother. Smiling at the peaked roof and the tidy shutters, it had taken her a moment to notice her mother crouched in the flower bed under the front bay window. Ingrid Harper’s long, flowing skirts spread around her and a light jingle sounded from the belled anklets she wore above her rubber garden clogs.

  “Pretty morning for gardening,” Quinn had called, climbing out of her car and starting down the stone path she and her father had laid in by hand about ten years ago.

  Ingrid knelt up with a hand to the small of her back. Her other glove-covered hand went up to shade her eyes. “I’m doing what I can, but these beds are a wreck!”

  Quinn winced, guilt pricking at her skin like the thorns spiking the tangle of rosebushes. She had kind of let the flowers go while she was house-sitting. “Sorry. I didn’t inherit your green thumb, I guess.”

  Waving away her apology, Quinn’s mother gave her a vague smile as she turned back to her rosebushes. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I know how busy you are with all your volunteering.”

  Congratulating herself on having held her spaced-out mother’s attention for a whole thirty seconds, Quinn stepped up onto the porch. “Is Daddy inside?”

  “In the kitchen, heating up the griddle. Tell him he can start pouring batter whenever he wants. I’m just going to wash up and I’ll be right behind you.”

  Quinn nodded and let herself into the house, breathing deeply of the mingled scents of the old books on the shelves lining the living room walls, lemony wood polish, and buttermilk pancakes.

  Home.

  That feeling returned even more strongly when she entered the kitchen to find her father standing over the stove, flicking droplets of water to sizzle on the cast-iron griddle. Quinn ducked under her father’s arm, smiling at the familiar weight across her shoulders and the swift press of a kiss to the top of her head. “Mother’s right behind me,” she told him.

  “Good. We’re all ready to go here,” Paul Harper said distractedly as he reached for the bowl and ladled out a spoonful of … something lumpy and grayish.

  “What is that?” Quinn demanded, leaning closer to sniff at the bowl of glop, which looked nothing like the pale, foamy buttermilk pancake batter of her childhood.

  “Gluten-free pancakes made with…” He paused and picked up a small plastic bag of meal the same iffy gray as the batter. “Rice bran? Don’t get your hopes up.”

  Quinn gaped. Her whole life, her mother had gone through these phases, getting obsessed with one hippy-dippy idea after another. But even when she’d made the whole family go vegan, Saturday-morning buttermilk pancakes had been sacrosanct. A frisson of alarm skittered up Quinn’s spine.

  Sighing, she opened the fridge and grabbed the pure maple syrup—no high-fructose corn syrup colored with brown dye number four in this house—from the top shelf and popped the cap to pour it into the ceramic pitcher shaped like a curly-tailed pig. It was the one they always used for the syrup, and Quinn was unreasonably fond of the ugly little thing.

  She carried it carefully to the microwave, not wanting to waste a drop of syrup. She was already planning to drown her pancakes in it. “Do you want me to do the butter? Are we allowed to have butter this week?”

  “Already on the table.” Her dad jerked his head toward the kitchen table snugged up against the far wall, where the funny-shaped, handleless pitcher she’d made at summer camp sat, steaming gently. The whole scene was so comforting. Even the pancake disappointment was strangely reassuring, in its own way, colored by nostalgia and fondness. Her parents were home from their travels and all was right with the world. Quinn sighed again, but this time it was a happy sigh.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Her father’s voice was sharp with concern. Quinn went back to the stove to curl her arm around his still-trim waist and lean her head on his shoulder. “Nothing’s the matter. I’m glad you’re done with your camper adventures for a while, that’s all. It’s nice to have everything back to normal.”

  He cleared his throat roughly, and Quinn tilted her head up to see his unhappy expression. Paul’s lips thinned into a sad line under his salt-and-pepper goatee. “About that.”

  A nameless fear shot through Quinn’s heart like an arrow. “Daddy?”

  “You’ll be glad to know I think I can save the roses.” Quinn’s mother’s happy voice preceded her into the kitchen, where she stopped dead on the threshold. Ingrid’s normally vague gaze narrowed on her husband and daughter at the stove. “Paul. How could you? I can’t believe you would tell her without me here.”

  Quinn blinked at the real hurt in her mother’s voice. All the warm fuzzy drained out of her body. “Tell me what?”

  “I didn’t say anything yet,” Paul said tersely, turning his attention stubbornly to flipping the bubbling pancakes over.

  Ingrid Harper took a slow, meditative breath as she slipped off her soiled gardening gloves. “Good. That’s … good. Does anyone else want coffee? I’ve had a cup already, so I probably shouldn’t have more unless I want to levitate to the farmer’s market this afternoon, but what the hey? You only live once, as the kids say.”

  Quinn stared back and forth between her parents, from her father’s turned back to her mother’s restless flitting around the kitchen as she poured herself a mug of coffee. Something was very wrong. All the innocent gladness Quinn had taken in being back in her childhood home with the family she loved seemed to curdle like buttermilk. “Screw coffee. Someone tell me what’s going on.”

  “Negativity!” Ingrid frowned at her daughter over the rim of her “#1 Mom” mug. “Words matter, sweetie. They’re the energy you put out into the universe.”

  “And they tell the universe what energy to send back,” Quinn finished the familiar phrase. It took some effort not to roll her eyes like a teenager. “Mother. I know. But can I just say … the ‘energy’ you and Daddy are putting out right now is making me extremely tense. I would appreciate it if one of you would clue me in on why the two of you can’t seem to even look at each other.”

  For the first time in Quinn’s life, her mother hesitated, her gaze flicking to her husband as if looking for guidance. Nothing could have scared Quinn more than to see that uncertainty on her obliviously confident mother’s face. Her father didn’t turn, though. All he did was slide his spatula under the pancakes and transfer them to a platter. He didn’t look at Quinn, or at his wife.

  Ingrid’s shoulders slumped for an instant before she shook out her long, wavy gray-streaked hair with a determined smile. She fluttered over to the table to pull out a chair. “Everything is going to be fine, sweetheart. Sit down, have some pancakes.”

  Quinn wanted to snap that she needed answers, not pancakes, but then her father brought the platter over to the table, and, well. She was hungry, even if the pancakes looked weird. Quinn sat and helped herself while her father went back to the stove to pour more batter out onto the griddle.

  Her mother perched in the chair across from her, long-fingered artist’s hands curled around her mug as if savoring the warmth. She waited for Quinn to take a bite and make the requisite face at the slightly funky tang of the gluten-free pancakes, then dropped her first bomb.

  “Your father and I are only back on Sanctuary for a few weeks. Just long enough to put the house up for sale.”

  Quinn’s vision tunneled with anxiety. Her childhood home. The place where she’d learned to ride a bike, where she’d watched her parents dance around the kitchen, where she’d fallen in love with Marcus Beckett for the first time. That last one jerked her out of her panic enough to protest.

  “You can’t sell this place! It�
�s our home!”

  Paul dropped into his chair across from Quinn’s, the same places they’d sat every night for dinner when Quinn was growing up. But all the fond indulgence and patience she was used to seeing on her father’s face had disappeared. The laugh lines fanning out from the blue eyes she’d inherited seemed to have been written over with bitterness and defeat.

  “Tell her the rest of it,” he said tonelessly.

  Quinn dropped her fork with a clatter. “There’s more?”

  Ingrid pressed her lips together, looking torn, but her husband didn’t relent.

  “Tell her about Ron,” he said, a hint of anger creeping into his voice.

  Dread filled Quinn’s heart. “Who is Ron?”

  But instead of looking guilty, as Quinn half expected and feared, her mother lit up. “Oh, Ron is wonderful! We met him out in Taos, and you know the energy in New Mexico, it’s just amazing. So good for serenity and finding balance; it’s no coincidence we found Ron there. Not that I believe in coincidence, of course, when Destiny has us all in the palm of her hand…”

  “Mother. Please. Focus.”

  A frown shadowed Ingrid’s expression briefly, like a cloud scudding across the face of the sun. “I’m getting to it! You and your father, always rushing me and acting like I’m too silly to notice.”

  Remorse curdled in Quinn’s stomach. She did think her mother was silly, sometimes, with her scarves and crystals and talk about capital-D Destiny. But Quinn hadn’t meant to hurt her. “I’m sorry, Mother. But you’ve got me pretty nervous about what else you could possibly have to say that might be worse than selling my childhood home!”

  “So dramatic,” Ingrid sighed, somewhat hypocritically, in Quinn’s opinion. “You’re not a child anymore. You need to let go of material attachments and learn to live in the now.”

  Quinn closed her eyes. “Mother. Tell me you’re not selling the house to teach me some lesson about inner peace.”

  “Not everything is about you, Quinn,” Ingrid said, sharply enough to make Quinn jump like she’d stepped on a bee. “Actually, selling the house was Ron’s idea. He says it will help free us from the anchor of the past, and enable us to ascend into the future unencumbered.”