The Wonder of You

by Susan May Warren

  That didn’t sound guilty. She felt Roark sidle up behind her as Seth charged down the beach.

  “I’m driving home, and what do I see but you two cozying up like long-lost lovers. Nice, real nice, Amelia.”

  He stood in the stream of his car’s headlights, like a grizzly in a black sweatshirt, more hurt than angry, judging from his eyes. “I thought . . . I mean, I sent you flowers and told you I love you and . . . I don’t get it. What’s going on?” He stared at Roark, so much venom in his gaze that Amelia went to intercept, standing between them.

  “Nothing, Seth. Nothing’s going on.” Except the words tasted like poison. Ten more seconds and yes, she would have responded to the question in Roark’s eyes. Kiss me.

  But—really? She’d come to town to tell Roark to go home, that she’d made her decision. That she knew he didn’t belong here—and that she wasn’t leaving. It only made sense.

  Until it didn’t. Until he let her into his life, finally unlocked the door to the secrets that she’d known lurked right below the surface.

  For the first time the pieces fit. Every second Roark spent with her silenced his demons, and something about the way she depended on him—in what she thought was weakness—only made him stronger.

  Only made her stronger.

  But what would happen when he left? Because Seth was right—Roark didn’t belong here.

  And now she’d managed to put a knife into Seth’s chest.

  “I don’t know what to do, Ames. You prefer this guy? He’s just playing you.” His jaw tightened, and he took a step toward Roark. “You’re a real piece of work.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Roark seemed to encourage Seth’s rage, the way he stood there, too casual, hands in his pockets, as if Seth were an annoying child.

  She turned back to Seth, touched his arm, where his corded muscle tensed, and kept her voice low. “We were just talking.”

  Seth’s expression was incredulous. “You were holding his hand! He looked like he wanted to kiss you.” He glanced again at Roark, a muscle pulling in his cheek. “I warned you, mate, and now I’m going to have to take you apart.”

  She waited for something from Roark to match Seth’s bravado, like I’d love to see you try or You want a piece of me? But Roark just lifted a shoulder, uncaring.

  It was the dark confidence, the lurking calm in Roark’s expression that made her pause.

  This side of Roark she didn’t know, and it clung to her, reviving the memory of his mystery in Prague.

  She stepped closer to Seth, pressed a hand to his chest. “Listen, Roark and I had something. You know that. But . . . it’s over now.” More poison. Because in her heart, maybe it would never be over. Just impossible.

  She heard Roark’s quick intake of breath as the wind caught her words, speared them back to him. Clearly she had more power to wound him than Seth’s fury.

  But even with his admission, she couldn’t escape the truth. So she summoned the right words. “We were saying good-bye.”

  “We were?” This, softly, from Roark.

  Oh no.

  She turned.

  Roark now bore the same hurt expression. “That’s not—”

  “Think about it, Roark!” She didn’t care that her voice suggested she might be unraveling. “What do you think is going to happen? You make me fall in love with you again—what then? We sail away and see the world? Live on love? What do you want out of life? You have to be more than a professional student someday.”

  He flinched, and she hated herself for her words, but in the back of her mind, the question lingered—beyond his classes at Charles University, beyond his vast knowledge of wine, art, geography, and culture, the man seemed aimless . . . a fact that hadn’t unsettled her until right now.

  She lowered her voice, just in case the entire town didn’t want to be privy to their argument. “Seth is right—I have a life here, one that he and I can build together, and I told you, I’m not sure I want to leave Deep Haven.”

  She felt Seth’s hand slide onto her shoulder and shrugged it away, rounding on him. “And you—I need time. Yeah, of course I love you—I have since high school—but I’m not ready to marry you, Seth.”

  His lips pursed with her words.

  “I might be. Someday. But I need time to figure it out, and it doesn’t help to have you two fighting like a couple of apes, beating your chests and hoping to scare each other off. I can think for myself, and right now I choose . . . no one!”

  The words landed like a slap on Seth, and he recoiled. She glanced at Roark, who stared at the ground.

  Nice, Amelia. Way to go from two suitors to none in one day. She blew out a breath. “Listen. I will date both of you—”

  Roark looked up, his mouth opening, and she held up her hand. “Amend that. I will go out on dates with both of you. But you have to act like gentlemen. No more ultimatums.” She looked at Seth, raised an eyebrow. Then she turned to Roark. “And we start over. Completely. Even playing field. I loved you both . . . once.”

  Roark winced.

  “But there are no guarantees about the future. You’re going to have to trust me to figure this out and, in the meantime, behave yourselves. If those terms don’t work for you, step out of the ring now.”

  To her shock, it worked. Neither man moved.

  “Super. Awesome. Smashing.” She backed away from them. “I’m going home now, and if I see either of you sporting a shiner or any other signs of altercation, you’re disqualified. Are we clear?”

  Seth narrowed his eyes, added a shrug.

  Roark stared at her without a smile, resolute. He offered a slow nod.

  “Very good. Tallyho, gentlemen.”

  WITHOUT A DOUBT, Max knew he deserved to sleep alone. After all, what kind of husband suggested divorce after two weeks of marriage?

  A lout.

  He hated every syllable of his conversation with Grace and had replayed it long into the brutal, lonely hours of the past three nights, wishing he could simply run upstairs, burst into her room, and declare to the entire family that yes, Grace Christiansen had said, “I do” and changed his world.

  Filled it with her hope, her light, her belief that they would live happily ever after, even with the dark hours ahead.

  Except he couldn’t get past the place, deep inside, that declared he was right.

  Annulment. Divorce. Whatever it took to spare Grace from the grief he knew would destroy her.

  If only he had the courage to actually go through with it. But indecision—or maybe his own pathetic need—caught him in a no-man’s-land between doubt and hope.

  Please forgive me, Grace. He glanced at her now, those words in his head, his eyes, as he watched her carry a tray of hot dogs down to the freshly built picnic table just beyond the also-new fire ring he’d crafted with her father.

  He’d thought he might be replacing a few rocks. But when John and Darek suggested rebuilding something, they meant from the ground up. Tear out the old stones, sort and clean them, dig a wider footprint, lay a new grate, pour a new foundation, and rebuild the circular stones, adding more until they fit perfectly into each other’s embrace.

  Then they’d tackled the decade-old benches, digging them free of the ground and hewing the new logs, ordered from Turnquist Lumber, in half. They’d sanded them and covered them in polyurethane, built new supports, and replaced them around the ring.

  The picnic table overhaul emerged as a wild afterthought, but even Max agreed that it fit. Freshly sanded and painted red, it added a festive north shore feel to the campfire pit.

  Tonight the Christiansens celebrated the onset of the summer season, a rebirth of the lodge they’d worked so hard to rebuild. A spring chill gathered over the rippling lake, the sun edging below the trees to the west. Max wore a sweatshirt, jeans, but Grace had donned a stocking cap and found another for Yulia, her long brown braids trailing out and making her look like a Russian princess.

  Grace bent over beside her, helping
her attach a hot dog to her roasting stick, neatly ignoring Max. Ingrid came down the path carrying a bowl of potato salad and set it next to the buns that Amelia began to open. Ivy sat on one of the benches, baby Joy on her lap, bundled to the gills in a pink snowsuit.

  Beyond the campfire pit, he spied Casper and Raina, holding hands, Layla in Casper’s arms. It lodged a bullet in Max’s throat, and he turned away just in time to see John tromping down the trail, driving a wheelbarrow with a fresh supply of chopped wood. Max had spent two hours this afternoon splitting a cord the old-fashioned way—ax and sweat. He got up and helped John unload the delivery into a neat stack nearby. He tossed one of the pine logs onto the fire, the sparks spitting into the night.

  Yulia’s eyes widened, a smile inching up her face.

  “Otlichno,” Max said, dredging up a word that Vasilley used when he netted a shot.

  She nodded, giggling.

  Grace looked at them, a tender sadness in her expression.

  Well, that was headway at least. She’d barely looked at him since that day in the kitchen when he’d uttered the D word.

  He went over to Yulia. “Moshna ya pomoch?” Probably he was massacring the language, but he thought he’d asked to help.

  She grinned and he took that as a yes, leading her to the fire pit. Then, sitting on the bench, he reached around her and guided her hot dog into the flame, finding the coals. She leaned back against him, letting him help her.

  Grace rested her hand on his shoulder. He didn’t move, fearing she might take it away.

  “Hey, Uncle Max! I want a hot dog!” Tiger, Darek’s son, came bounding down the path.

  “I’ll fix you up,” Ingrid said as Tiger climbed onto the seat of the picnic table. Max rotated Yulia’s hot dog, the skin prickling, sizzling, the aroma nourishing the clear-skied night.

  Tiger came over and stood next to Max, wielding a hot dog on a stick.

  “Okay, pal, aim for those red coals along the edge. If you stick it right into the flame, it’s going to turn black but still be cold on the inside.”

  Tiger sat on the bench next to him, worked his hot dog into the space under a leaning log. The fire flickered, sparking as Darek sat opposite him, roasting his own dog. “Let a pro show you how it’s done,” he said, winking.

  Max rolled his eyes.

  Grace left, to his great disappointment, but Casper sat down in the ring, two hot dogs on his roasting prongs. “Actually, the mark of a real chef is two dogs at once.” He grinned, glancing at Raina, who gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Seriously. Does everything have to be a competition in this family?” Ivy said.

  Amelia, unusually quiet, sat down with a plate of potato salad.

  “I guess now is as good a time as any.” Casper stared at the fire. Sighed. “I’m leaving on Monday to find Owen.”

  Max glanced at Grace to gauge her response. She stood at the picnic table, slowly setting down her plate.

  “It’s time. The Wild Harbor is ready for summer, and Ned has hired staff to replace me. I figure I’ll head out to Montana, look for Darek’s old hotshot outfit, see if Owen has hooked up with them again.”

  “And if he’s not there?” This from John.

  “Then I’ll keep looking. I’m a pretty good sleuth,” Casper said, pulling his hot dogs out, blowing on them to cool them. He put the stick back into the fire. Said to no one, or all of them, “I’ll find him. I promise.”

  He looked again at Raina, a smile of reassurance on his face. And in that moment, Max hated him. Hated that Casper had a life to look forward to, a family waiting for him, with the promise of the happy ending he deserved.

  He gritted his teeth, trying to shake away the burn inside. “I think it’s ready,” he said to Yulia, pulling the hot dog from the fire. She startled but looked at him, and he offered the best smile he could. “Gatov,” he said, repeating more of his sloppy Russian.

  As he got up to doctor her hot dog, the conversation continued around him with suggestions of where Casper could look—favorite places Owen would visit or things he once mentioned wanting to accomplish. But there was no knowing where anger might take a man when his life was ripped out from beneath him. No accounting for the words he might say or the desperate acts he might find himself doing.

  Max blinked, hating the crazy, blinding rush of heat building in his throat. Clearly marriage made him weak. Emotional.

  He hadn’t seen that coming.

  “I hope you find him soon,” Ingrid said. “Layla is growing so fast, I hate for you to miss any of it.” Behind her words lingered the suggestion that Owen, Layla’s biological father, might be missing it too.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him,” Raina said, sitting down beside Casper and settling Layla, dressed in a sweater and boots, a bunny hat, on her lap. “He’s so good with her. She’ll be crying and angry, but I give her to Casper and suddenly she’s giggling. Betrayed by my own daughter.”

  Amid the laughter, Yulia came over and sat next to Max at the picnic table, nibbling on her hot dog.

  “Looks like Casper’s not the only one good with kids. I think she likes you, Max,” Ivy said.

  “You’re going to make a great dad,” Raina said.

  Max tried for a smile—being the newest in the family, clearly Raina didn’t know that . . .

  “We’re not having kids,” Grace said quietly. “Max doesn’t want them.”

  So that’s what it felt like to be thrown under a bus. Probably he deserved that.

  But not the way Raina or Ivy stared at him as if he might have experienced a psychotic break. Their expressions only ignited the darkness inside, and he didn’t mean for the words to tumble out, but he couldn’t quite stop them. “No, I don’t. Not that it’s any of your business, but I can’t have kids. And . . . I shouldn’t either. Because that’s exactly what I don’t want—a family to mourn me the way I mourned my dad. So no, I’m not having kids. But Grace—she can have kids. She just can’t have them with me.”

  As Ivy’s eyes widened, as Raina looked away, as Casper’s jaw tightened, and as Darek looked like he might take him apart with a glare, Max got up, brushed past Grace, and headed back to the house.

  He might, in fact, just keep going.

  He’d made it as far as the end of the path, out of the glow of the fire, when Grace caught his arm.

  He spun, expecting anger, maybe even a slap for what he’d said.

  Instead, he found her arms wrapped around his neck, her lips against his skin. “Oh, Max, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Uh . . . but he wasn’t going to argue with his beautiful wife, not when her full-on embrace knocked him off his feet a little. He stumbled back, landing softly against a tree. “Babe, it’s okay—”

  She lifted her eyes, tears cutting down her cheeks. “No, it’s not. I shouldn’t have been so angry.”

  She caught his face in her hands and kissed him, her lips salty with her tears. She reminded him of exactly what he’d missed these past three days, pouring into him her love, that hope and sunshine that came with Grace Christiansen. He moaned a little, settled back, and pulled her closer, wrapping his arms around her, deepening his kiss.

  So familiar, so his. His wife.

  He couldn’t take another second of the world not knowing.

  She twirled the hair at the nape of his neck, a habit when she relaxed in his arms. Maybe no one would miss them if they—

  Grace leaned back, smiled.

  Yeah, maybe everything would be okay.

  “Max, of course you’re scared. I get that. I should have been more patient. Given you time.”

  He frowned, a sliver driving itself between them. “Time for—”

  “Well, to realize that it doesn’t have to end the way you see it.” She stepped away, just a little.

  But he grabbed her hand. “Don’t leave.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. That’s the point. We’re in this together. And just because you can’t father children
doesn’t mean you can’t be a father. Take a look at Yulia. The adoption coordinator called today and said that her adoptive sister is releasing her back into the system. Back to Ukraine. To an orphanage. What about us, Max? We could be her family.”

  “Grace—”

  “Just listen to me. I know that you’re going to make a fantastic dad someday.”

  “And then I’m going to die a terrible death in front of my children. Just like my dad did. You’ll be left alone.”

  “Not alone.” She grabbed his face. “Don’t you get that? Not alone. I’ll have the kids, like your mom did. She survived because of you and your brother.”

  “She’s dying inside every day watching my brother deteriorate.”

  “Yeah, well, you fixed that—we don’t have to pass on the gene. But we can be parents. Okay, maybe not to Yulia—although, Max, she needs a family. But to some other needy child.”

  He pressed the meat of his hands into his eyes. Shook his head. “Oh, Grace, that’s not what I wanted for you.” He didn’t care that his voice broke. “I wanted you to have a child with your beautiful blonde hair, your blue eyes. A child you could carry inside your body. I stole that from you.” Shoot, and now he was crying. He looked away, furious as he wiped his cheek.

  She caught his hand. “I knew what I gave up when I agreed to marry you. Don’t act like I’m stupid or didn’t understand that.”

  Her tone jolted him. He breathed out, met her eyes.

  “I love you. And in the end, if you don’t want to have children, I’ll figure out a way to keep loving you. But I’m not giving you a divorce, Max. Never. I’m a Christiansen as well as a Sharpe, so you can bet I mean what I say.”

  She kissed him again, hard, something meant to seal her words. Then she turned and walked out of his embrace.

  “Grace—” He pushed off the tree.

  To his surprise, she whirled around. “And by the way, I’m tired of sleeping in the attic. It’s time to tell my family that we’re sleeping together.”

  He wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way. His shock must have shown on his face because she smiled. Held out her hand. “Just checking to see if I can wake up my Max.”