by JoAnn Ross
“Three days?” He dragged his hand through his hair.
“Well, technically four. Including this one.”
It was already four in the afternoon. “Damn it, Reva—”
“You’re the one who’s been bitching about needing bookings,” she reminded Dane. “Well, now you’ve got some. Or would you rather me call the woman back and tell her that we’re full?”
Reminding himself that the difficult could be accomplished immediately, while the impossible might take a bit longer, he said, “You did good, lady.”
Another thought, beyond the necessary repairs, occurred to him. “You’d better warn Mom.” He’d taken his mother out of a forced retirement and put her back in the remodeled kitchen, where she had happily begun stocking the pantry and whipping up recipes that rivaled those of any five-star resort in the country.
“I already did,” she assured him, reminding him why he’d hired the former night manager away from the world-famous Whitfield Palace hotel chain. “Which reminds me, she told me to tell you that you’ll have to drive into town for supplies.”
“Tell her to make out a list and I’ll do it as soon as I finish with the roof.”
Dane returned to his hammering. And even as he wondered exactly how he was going to get everything done in time for the arrival of all those guests, he allowed himself to believe that things around Smugglers’ Inn were definitely beginning to look up.
2
Portland
“You were right about every motel, hotel, resort and cottage up and down the coast being booked to the rafters,” Susan reported to Amanda. “Every place with the exception of Smugglers’ Inn, which, I’ll have to admit, made me a little nervous. But the woman from the Satan’s Cove visitors’ bureau assured me that it’s listed on the historical register.”
“It is,” Amanda murmured, thinking back to that wonderful summer she’d spent at Satan’s Cove.
The memory was, as always, bittersweet—part pleasure and part pain. She’d never been happier than she’d been that summer of her first love. Nor more heartbroken than on the day she’d driven away from Smugglers’ Inn—and Dane Cutter—back to Los Angeles with her family.
He’d promised to write; and trusting him implicitly, Amanda had believed him. For the first two weeks after arriving home, she’d waited for a letter assuring her that she was not alone in her feelings—that the kisses they’d shared, along with the desperate promises, had been more than just a summer romance.
When three weeks passed without so much as a single postcard, Amanda had screwed up enough nerve to telephone Dane at the inn. But the woman working the desk informed her that he’d left Satan’s Cove to return to college. No, the woman had insisted, in a bored tone, he hadn’t left any forwarding address.
She’d thought about asking to talk to his mother, who’d been the inn’s cook. But youthful pride kept her from inquiring further. So, believing she’d simply been one more conquest for a drop-dead-gorgeous college boy who already had more than his share of girls throwing themselves at him, Amanda tried to write the intense, short-lived romance off to experience.
And mostly, she’d been successful. But there were still times, when she would least expect it, that she’d think back on that summer with a mixture of wistfulness and embarrassment.
“I’m surprised they could take us,” she said now, recalling the inn’s popularity. Her father had had to book their rooms six months in advance. “They must have had a huge cancellation.”
“According to the reservations clerk, the place has been closed for several years,” Susan revealed. “Apparently it’s recently changed hands. This is the new owner’s first season.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” Amanda muttered. Even in an industry built on ego and turf, the agency had become a nest of political intrigue and backbiting. The corporate team challenge week was going to be lough enough without them having to serve as some novice innkeeper’s shakedown summer season.
“You can always call Popular Surplus and order up the tents.”
Despite her concerns, Amanda laughed. The truth was, she really didn’t have any other choice. She could put twenty people—none of whom got along very well in the best of circumstances—into tents on the beach, eating hot dogs cooked over an open fire, or she could trust the new owner of Smugglers’ Inn to know what he or she was doing.
After all, how bad could it be? The landmark inn, located on one of the most scenic stretches of Pacific Coast, was pretty and cozy and wonderfully comfortable. She thought back on the lovely flower-sprigged wallpaper in the tower room she’d slept in that long-ago summer, remembered the dazzling sunsets from the high arched windows, recalled in vivid detail the romance of the crackling fires the staff built each evening in the stone fireplace large enough for a grown man to stand in.
“Smugglers’ Inn will be perfect,” she said firmly, as if saying the words out loud could make them true. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place.”
“Probably because you’ve had a few other things on your mind,” Susan said, proving herself to be a master of understatement. “And although I have no doubt you can pull this thing off, I’m glad I’ll be holding down the fort here while you lead the troops in their wilderness experience.”
That said, she left Amanda to worry that this time she’d actually bitten off more than she could chew.
Never having been one to limit herself to a normal, eighthour work schedule, Amanda remained at her desk long into the night, fine-tuning all the minuscule details that would ensure the challenge week would be a success.
But as hard as she tried to keep her mind on business, she could not keep her unruly thoughts from drifting back to the summer of her fifteenth year.
She’d fallen in love with Dane the first time she’d seen him. And although her parents had tried to convince her otherwise, she knew now, as she’d known then, that her feelings had been more than mere puppy love.
It had, admittedly, taken Dane time to realize they were a perfect match. But Amanda had steadfastly refused to give up her quest. She pursued him incessantly, with all the fervor of a teenager in the throes of a first grand love.
Everywhere Dane went, Amanda went there as well, smiling up at him with a coy Lolita smile overbrimming with sensual invitation. After discovering that one of his duties was teaching a class in kayaking, despite her distaste for early-morning awakenings, she showed up on the beach at six-thirty for lessons. Although the rest of the class was sensibly attired for the foggy sea air in jeans and sweatshirts, she’d chosen to wear a hot-pink bikini that barely covered the essentials.
And that was just the beginning. During Dane’s lifeguarding stint each afternoon, she lounged poolside, wearing another impossibly scant bikini, her golden skin glowing with fragrant coconut oil. Grateful for childhood diving lessons, she would occasionally lithely rise from the lounge to treat him to swan dives designed to show off her budding female figure.
She tormented him endlessly, pretending to need his assistance on everything from a flat bicycle tire to fastening her life jacket before going out on a sight-seeing boat excursion.
Adding local color to the inn’s reputation had been the legend—invented by a former owner—that it was haunted by a woman who’d thrown herself off the widow’s walk after her fiancé’s ship was sunk by pirates off the rocky shoals. One night, Amanda showed up at Dane’s room, insisting that she’d seen the ghost.
It would have taken a male with inhuman strength to resist her continual seduction attempts. And, as Dane later confessed, he was, after all, only human.
Which was why, seven days after Amanda Stockenberg’s arrival at Smugglers’ Inn, Dane Cutter succumbed to the inevitable. However, even as they spent the star-spangled nights driving each other insane, Dane had steadfastly refused to make love to her.
“I may be too damn weak where you’re concerned, princess,” he’d groaned during one excruciatingly long petting session, “but
I’m not reckless enough to have sex with a minor girl.”
She’d sworn that no one would ever know, promised that she’d never—ever—do anything to get him in trouble. But on this point, Dane had proved frustratingly intractable.
And although, as the years passed, Amanda begrudgingly admitted that he’d done the right and noble thing, there were still times, such as tonight, when she was sitting all alone in the dark, that she’d think back over the bliss she’d experienced in Dane Cutter’s strong young arms and wish, with all her heart, that he hadn’t proved so strong.
Satan’s Cove
The day before the group was due to arrive at Smugglers’ Inn, Dane was beginning to think they just might make it.
The roof was now rainproof, the windows sparkled like, diamonds, and every room in the place—with the exception of the tower room, which he’d written off as impossible to prepare in such short time—was white-glove clean. And although the aroma of fresh paint lingered, leaving the windows open another twenty-four hours should take care of that little problem.
His mother had definitely gone all out in the kitchen. The huge commercial refrigerator was stuffed with food and every shelf in the pantry was full. Kettles had been bubbling away on the new eight-burner stove nearly around the clock for the past two and a half days, creating mouthwatering scents.
Using the hefty deposit Reva had insisted upon, he’d hired additional staff and although the kids were as green as spring grass, they were bright, seemingly hardworking and unrelentingly cheerful.
He was passing the antique registration desk on his way to the parlor, planning to clean the oversize chandelier, when the sound of a stressed-out voice garnered his instant attention.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Mindy Taylor, the nineteen-year-old cheerleader, premed student and local beauty queen he’d hired, said in an obviously frustrated voice. “But—”
She sighed and held the receiver a little away from her ear, indicating that it was not the first time she’d heard the argument being offered on the other end of the line.
“Yes, I can appreciate that,” Mindy agreed, rolling her expressive eyes toward the knotty-pine ceiling. “But I’m afraid it’s impossible. No, it’s not booked, but—”
Dane heard the renewed argument, although he couldn’t make out the words.
“It’s a woman from that Portland advertising agency.” Mindy covered the mouthpiece with her hand to talk to Dane. “She’s insisting on the tower room, even though I told her that it wasn’t available.”
Dane held out his hand. “Let me talk to her.”
“That’s okay.” Perfect white teeth that Dane knew had cost her parents a fortune in orthodontia flashed in the dazzling smile that had earned Mindy the Miss Satan’s Cove title two years running. As this year’s Miss Oregon, she’d be competing in the national pageant, which made her a local celebrity.
“It’ll be good practice for Atlantic City. I need to work on my patience,” she admitted. “Sometimes I think if I’m asked one more stupid question by one more judge I’m going to scream.
“I understand your feelings,” Mindy soothed into the receiver as she tried yet again. “But you see, Ms. Stockenberg, Smugglers’ Inn has been closed for the past few years, and-”
“Wait a minute,” Dane interrupted. “Did you say Stockenberg?”
The name hit him directly in the gut, reminding him of the time he’d been standing behind the plate and his cousin Danny had accidentally slammed a baseball bat into his solar plexus.
“Excuse me, but could you hold a moment, please?” Mindy put her hand over the mouthpiece again and nodded. “That’s right.”
“Not Amanda Stockenberg?” It couldn’t be, Dane told himself, even as a nagging intuition told him it was true.
“That’s her.” Mindy appeared surprised Dane knew the name. “The guest list the agency sent along with their deposit lists her as an assistant creative director.
“I put her in the cliff room, but she’s insisting on being moved to the tower. Something about it having sentimental meaning. I explained that it was impossible, but—”
“Let her have it.”
“What?” Eyes the color of a sun-brightened sea widened to the size of sand dollars.
“I said, book Ms. Stockenberg into the tower room.” His tone was uncharacteristically sharp and impatient.
Mindy was not easily cowed. Especially by a man she’d been able to talk into playing Barbie dolls back in his teenage baby-sitting days, when their mothers had worked together at this very same inn. “But, Dane, it’s a terrible mess.”
She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. “Don’t worry,” he said, softening his voice and his expression. “I’ll take care of it.”
Mindy eyed him with overt curiosity. Then, as the voice on the other end of the phone began talking again, she returned her attention to the conversation.
“It seems I was mistaken, Ms. Stockenberg,” she said cheerfully, switching gears with a dexterity that had Dane thinking she’d ace her Miss America interview. “As it happens, the tower room is available after all. Yes, that is fortunate, isn’t it?”
She turned to the computer Dane was still paying for. Her rosy fingernails tapped on the keys, changing Amanda Stockenberg from the cliff room to the tower suite.
“It’s all taken care of,” she assured Dane after she’d hung up. Her expressive eyes held little seeds of worry. “It’s none of my business, but I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”
“If I knew what I was doing, I wouldn’t have bought the inn in the first place.” His crooked grin belied his complaint. After years of traveling the world for the Whitfield Palace hotel chain, there was no place he’d rather be. And nothing he’d rather be doing. “If you see Reva, tell her I had to run into town for some wallpaper.”
“Ms. Stockenberg mentioned little blue flowers,” Mindy said helpfully.
“I remember.”
And damn it, that was precisely the problem, Dane told himself two hours later as he drove back to Smugglers’ Inn from the hardware store in Satan’s Cove with the newly purchased wallpaper. He remembered too much about Amanda Stockenberg’s long-ago visit to Satan’s Cove.
The only daughter of a wealthy Los Angeles attorney and his socialite wife, Amanda had come to the Oregon coast with her family for a month-long vacation.
Pampered and amazingly sheltered for a teenager growing up in the 1980s, she’d obviously never met anyone like him. Unfortunately, during his years working at Smugglers’ Inn—part-time while in high school, then summers and vacations to put himself through college—Dane had run across too many rich girls who considered him along the same lines as a summer trophy.
Dane’s own father, scion of a famous Southern department-store family, had been a masculine version of those girls. Rich and spoiled, he’d had no qualms about taking what he wanted, then moving on after the annual Labor Day clambake, leaving behind a young, pregnant waitress.
Although Mary Cutter—a quiet, gentle woman who’d gone on to be a cook at the inn—had brought Dane up not to be bitter about his father’s abandonment, he’d decided early on that it was better to stick with your own kind.
Which was why he’d always avoided the temptation of shiny blond hair and long, tanned legs. Until Amanda Stockenberg arrived on the scene.
She pursued him endlessly, with the single-mindedness of a rich, pretty girl accustomed to getting her own way. She was part siren, part innocent; he found both fascinating.
When she showed up at his door in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm, swearing she’d seen the ghost reputed to haunt the inn, Dane took one look at her—backlit by flashes of lightning, clad in a shorty nightgown—and all his intentions to resist temptation flew right out the window.
Being male and all too human, he allowed her into his room.
“That was your first mistake,” he muttered now, at the memory of the sweet lips that had kissed him sensel
ess. His second mistake, and the one that had cost him dearly, had been letting Amanda Stockenberg into his heart.
They did not make love—she was, after all, too young. And even if he’d wanted to—which, Lord help him, he did—he knew that by legal standards Amanda was jailbait. And from the no-holds-barred conversation Stockenberg had with Dane when even he could no longer ignore his daughter’s outrageously flirtatious behavior, Dane knew the attorney would not be averse to filing statutory rape charges on any boy who dared take Amanda to bed.
Dane’s mother, remembering her own youthful summer romance, had worried about his succumbing to his raging hormones and blowing his chances at finishing college.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” he’d assured her with the cocky grin that had coaxed more than one local beauty into intimacy. “I won’t risk prison for a roll in the hay with a summer girl.”
With that intent firmly stated, he’d managed to resist Amanda’s pleas to consummate their young love. But drawn to her in ways he could not understand, Dane had spent the next three weeks sneaking off to clandestine trysts.
Dane and Amanda exchanged long slow kisses in the cave on the beach, forbidden caresses in the boathouse, passionate promises in the woods at the top of the cliff overlooking the sea, and on one memorable, thrilling, and terrifying occasion, while her parents slept in the room below them, they’d made out in Amanda’s beloved tower room with its canopied bed and flower-sprigged walls.
Although he’d tried like hell to forget her, on more than one occasion over the past years, Dane had been annoyed to discover that her image had remained emblazoned on his mind, as bright and vivid—and, damn it, as seductive—as it had been a decade ago.
“It’s been ten years,” he reminded himself gruffly as he carried the rolls of paper and buckets of paste up the narrow, curving staircase to the tower room.
And, damn it, he’d dreamed about her over each of those ten years. More times than he could count, more than he’d admit. Even to himself.
“Hell, she’s probably married.”
