“You think we’d miss all the drama? Please.”
Summer’s breath hitched in her chest. Across the yard, the officer flipped his notepad closed and shook Damian’s hand.
“I told you he was a keeper,” Rachael added.
“He might not be mine to keep. I saw him with Joyce Hadley last night outside Zeb’s.”
“So?” Rachael raised one brow and gave her a look full of doubt. “Obviously he’s not with Joyce now.”
“Sure, he came over here. But I asked him to look at my toilet. That doesn’t mean he wants happily ever after with me.” She looked down at her T-shirt and shorts, torn from struggling with T.J. “I’m a mess.”
Rachael stepped back and held Summer at arms’ length. “How long are you gonna do this?”
“Do what?”
“You already stood up for a public stoning last night because you were determined to tell everyone what happened with you and Gabe in that car ten years ago. Now you’re claiming responsibility for what happened to the Knights. Are you going to turn into the martyr of Whispering Pines? You think you don’t deserve any happiness because you made a mistake or two?”
Summer looked at her, stunned.
“Stop blaming yourself for everything that’s gone wrong around here. You’re not the reason T.J. took Dinah. You’re not the reason Gabe spent time in jail.”
Summer opened her mouth to answer, but Rachael didn’t even slow down. “You always said people had to come to terms with the past in order to understand the present,” she went on. “But studying the past doesn’t mean it defines the person you are forever, does it? It’s just who you were. Not who you are.”
Summer stared. All this time, Rachael had been listening. The crowd in her yard thinned. For the first time, Damian glanced up, but she couldn’t read his face.
“They’re putting together search parties to look for Dinah,” he said. “Want to help?”
Summer nodded. “Just let me change.” Then she froze. Rachael’s midnight message played inside her head. Was it possible? She stared at the house, the porch steps, the back lawn, and the windows on the third floor. One particular window on the third floor. “I think I know where she is.”
“Dinah?”
“Yes. Get the police before they leave.”
Summer couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it earlier. There was only one place in this town a scared little girl would go, if her home had been violated and she didn’t know where else to hide. Only one place safe enough to keep the bogeyman away.
And Summer knew exactly where it was.
“Up on the third floor.”
The policeman breathed onto the back of Summer’s neck as they climbed the stairs. He stopped her on the landing of the second floor with one strong hand around her wrist. “I’ll go ahead. Tell me where it is.”
But she stood her ground. “I have to go with you. She’ll be scared.” The front door opened, and Damian, Hannah and a second policeman stepped inside. Damian rushed to the staircase, but the policeman put a hand on his arm and said something she couldn’t make out. Summer looked at Hannah and then was sorry. The woman was barely holding herself together. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. In one hand, she held a wad of tissues.
Summer hoped she was right. She had to be right. “It’s the next floor up. Back bedroom.”
One more flight, and they reached the closed door. The cop put a heavy hand on Summer’s shoulder. “I want you to stay back.”
This time she listened and stayed where she was. The policeman stepped inside the bedroom while Summer held her breath and counted to ten. Twenty. When she reached twenty-two, the man stuck his head back out into the hall and said in a low voice, “Come on.”
Morning light shot the room with gold, and despite the dust everywhere, the walls glowed. She pointed, but she didn’t need to. A black seam ran along the back of the far wall. The hidden door remained open a little more than an inch. Summer’s heart nearly broke. Dinah had gotten it open but then hadn’t managed to close it again.
“Dinah Knight? Are you in there?” The policeman spoke first. His voice was kind. “It’s okay, sweetheart. My name is Officer Burdick. I’m here to make sure you’re safe.” He took a few steps toward the door, but no one answered.
“Ladybug?” Damian’s voice broke on the word. “Are you in there?”
“Dame?” Dinah burst from the secret room and came running across the floor at full tilt. She reached out for her brother. Tears wet her cheeks, and both braids had come undone from their ribbons. Her eyes darted from side to side, and she stumbled in her bare feet and called his name again.
In an instant he swept his sister into his arms. “It’s okay, ladybug. I’ve got you. It’s okay.” Clutching her to his chest, he rocked back and forth, murmuring the words into the top of her head. “It’s okay. It’s all over.”
Summer went dizzy with relief.
“Well, take a look at that,” the cop said as he stepped inside the hidden room. “Always heard about these things but never saw one before.” He pushed his hat back on his head and kneeled. “Must-a been pretty small slaves, to hide in a space like that.” He looked over his shoulder. “That’s what it was for, right?”
“Yes.” Summer thought about telling him that slaves hadn’t been that small, just desperate. People do lots of things when they’re running from evil.
“Wait ’til the guys at the station hear about this.” He radioed an all-clear down to his partner. “She okay?” he asked Damian. “Gotta get a statement from her, if she’s able.”
Damian nodded. Summer reached out to pat Dinah on the back, but she only brushed the wrinkled cotton shirt before Damian headed into the hallway with his sister in his arms. Once they were all back on the ground floor, Hannah swept her daughter into a hug.
“Oh, my baby...my baby. Thank you...”
Summer descended slowly. She hadn’t said a word to Damian, though she desperately wanted to. But by the time she reached the foyer, the three Knights had disappeared outside. Her fingers rested on the smooth cherry banister until she slid to the first step and sat there, hugging her knees. What on earth had happened in the last forty-eight hours? She’d kissed Damian. She’d put together the pieces of Donny’s death. She’d talked to Gabe. She’d talked to the police. She’d helped find Dinah.
So many things in her life had changed. But Summer still had one thing left to do.
Chapter Thirty-six
Damian sat on the bottom porch step with Dinah beside him.
“I was only a little scared when Dad took me away,” she was saying. “I didn’t know where we were going and why you or Mom couldn’t come too. He said if I was good and didn’t cry, we could be a family again.” She sat up and her eyes welled. “But he lied.”
“I know, ladybug.” Damian stroked the back of her hair and tried to contain his anger. “I know. The important thing is you’re back here with us now.” Even as he comforted her with one hand, he squeezed the other into a fist. What kind of father steals his child away? Then loses her in the middle of the night? The only thing keeping Damian sane was knowing that T.J. was on his way to a long prison sentence. Wish he’d shot more than just his foot.
“Summer told me about that secret room,” Dinah said. “She said it was a place where people used to hide.”
Damian hugged her. “Then it was very smart of you to go there.” His voice broke. Summer might have told T.J. where to find them, but she’d also told Dinah how to save herself. For that, he would be forever grateful.
“Ladybug, run over to Mom, okay? I’ll meet you in a minute. There’s something I have to do.”
RACHAEL STOOD INSIDE the foyer with Summer. “Look at this.” She held up her phone with the time illuminated. “Not even eight a.m. and we already captured a criminal and saved a little girl. Pretty good for a small town like Whispering Pines, huh?”
“I guess.” Summer still felt unsettled and exhausted. Of course she was gla
d T.J. had been arrested, and Dinah was safe. But—”
“Call me later,” Rachael said as she stuck her phone back into her pocket. “You’ll have to tell me what happens.”
“What are you talking about?” Then Summer saw him standing at the foot of the porch steps. Unshaven, unsmiling, with a bruise rising on his jaw, Damian Knight was still the most attractive man she had ever seen. Her heart turned over.
She took a deep breath and walked down the stairs until she stood on the step above him. Electricity jumped between them. You saved me. You risked your life. He could have stayed far from the house or left her alone to deal with the problem. But he hadn’t.
He cleared his throat. “So you’re leaving? Going back to San Francisco?” He ran both hands through uncombed hair. “I saw the news conference,” he added.
Tension stretched between them, filled with everything that had happened the last time they’d been this close, on this porch.
She couldn’t speak. Yes. That was the plan, after all. Sell the house and return to her home out west. Yet somehow, after everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, the plan seemed to have lost its appeal. In fact, it made no sense at all.
...studying the past doesn’t mean it defines the person you are forever, does it? It’s just who you were. Not who you are...
...it’s the stuff of history books and museum exhibits. It shouldn’t be the way we frame our lives. Learn from it, and then let it go. The present, and best of all, the future, well, that’s up to us...
Joe and Rachael are right, she thought suddenly. Once the past floated its way into memory, once people died, houses crumbled, kisses grew cold, no amount of wishing or years of study could bring any of it back. Or change it. It was what you did with the now that mattered.
“Were you going to say goodbye?”
Summer’s gaze moved to the Sunrise Mountain, just beyond his shoulder. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk to me. After what happened with T.J. and Dinah, and then I saw you with Joyce last night, and I thought...” She stopped, not sure how to proceed.
“You thought what?” Damian crossed his arms, and Summer thought the dimple on his left cheek popped. He wrapped his hands around her waist and pulled her down the step, so she met him toe to toe.
“Joyce is a good person,” he said. “She was there for me when I needed someone to talk to. She listened.” Damian brushed the tip of his nose to hers, and all the electricity returned, tenfold. “But I’ve been waiting for you since before I knew you, Summer Thompson. Since the day you got into town. Since the moment you tripped down those back stairs. There hasn’t been anyone else in the world for me since that day. Whatever you saw with Joyce, whatever you thought, it means nothing.”
He stroked her cheek, and a longing wider than the heavens swept between them and knotted up her insides. Sparklers went off inside her skull, inside every pore, and she wondered if he could feel it too.
He bent and kissed her, and sparks flooded her, turned from pale yellow to brilliant orange and red until she saw a blazing rainbow of passion behind her eyelids. She clung to him and wound her fingers through his. In Damian’s touch she was safe. More than that, she was swept away, up toward the clouds and beyond, to a place she’d never imagined existed. His hands moved along her spine, down her arms, raising gooseflesh. When he finally leaned back from her to breathe, she didn’t want to let him go.
When he next spoke, his breath was a rasp of emotion. “Stay here in Whispering Pines. Please. I can’t let you go. I won’t.” His voice was guttural; his eyes roved her face, searching for the answer he needed to find. “We all love you—Dinah, and Mom, and me too.” He smiled. “I think I’m crazy in love with you. So please. Stay.” The last words whispered away, and he crushed her lips with his again.
Summer wasn’t sure if the warmth she felt on her back was the sun rising above them or the blood spinning her head around. Damian parted her lips with a tongue that needed, wanted, poured out possibility. He caressed the nape of her neck and the small of her back.
The girl of eighteen she’d once been, injured almost beyond repair, felt her heart move up to the top of her head until she thought she would explode with pleasure. Every reason she’d returned to Whispering Pines, every hope she’d nourished, lay here, in the arms of a man she’d just met. Revisiting the past didn’t mean going down old paths, then, but saying goodbye to them and forging new ones. Her mind swelled with the realization.
Don’t stop kissing me, she wanted to say. Take me upstairs, climb with me to the roof, show me the stars or the sun or the way the wind moves through the grasses on the hill. I don’t care. Just be with me.
Damian looked down at her with a kind, funny grin, and she saw in his expression the place where she wanted to stay, to make a life and grow a love. He met her mouth with his, touched tongue to tongue in a whisper of desire, and their embrace changed again, from a fire against the sky to a warm glow that bathed her in safety.
Her friends were right after all: she belonged in Whispering Pines, with a man who loved her, a little girl she adored, and a quiet woman who’d filled an ache in her life. She belonged in the place that had shaped her, and she belonged in a house where she could see and remember her brother as well.
There was just one thing left to do.
“I’ll be right back.” She dropped his hands and darted back into her bedroom. Emerging with the small silver box, she reached for his hand and led him to the oak tree out front. Summer’s hands shook as she opened the lid. Thanks for bringing me back to Whispering Pines, Dad. Her throat clogged with tears.
The morning breeze lifted her father’s ashes. They spun, then sank in a lazy circle and floated to the ground. With one arm around her waist, Damian brushed a kiss against her hair. He laid a hand on hers, and they closed the lid of the box together. For a moment, neither spoke.
He cleared his throat. “So does that mean you’re staying?”
She didn’t answer. She had no words left beyond the flood of emotion that filled her. Instead, she let her head fall against his chest, strong, certain, safe, beneath her.
It is home, she thought in the seconds before Damian lifted her into his arms and carried her inside.
I am home.
RACHAEL’S KID BROTHER Nate Hunter grows up to be one of Whispering Pine’s most eligible bachelors—until a surprise daughter and a relationship of convenience with the town librarian change everything in Autumn Allure, Book Two in the Whispering Pines Sweet Small Town Romance series.
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ALLIE BONIFACE IS THE USA Today best-selling author of over a dozen novels, including the Cocktail Cruise, Hometown Heroes, Countdown, and Whispering Pines series. Her books are set in small towns and feature emotional, sensual romance with relatable characters you'll fall in love with. Allie currently lives in a small town in the beautiful Hudson Valley of New York with her husband and their two furry felines. When she isn't teaching high school or community college English, she likes to travel, lose herself in great music, or go for a run and think about her next story. Visit her at www.allieboniface.com.
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Also by Allie Boniface
Cocktail Cruise Series
Tequila Sunrise
Sex on the Beach
Between the Sheets
Drake Isle
Because of You
Deck the Isle
Hometown Heroes
Beacon of Love
Inferno of Love
Labyrinth of Love
Miracle of Love
So
ldier of Love
Art of Love
The Promise of Paradise
After Paradise
Whispering Pines Sweet Small Town Romance
Second Chance Summer
Standalone
Setting Sail (Cocktail Cruise Prequel)
Entwined
Hometown Heroes Books 1-3
Small Town Tease
Second Chance Summer Page 20
