by Lucy Kevin
For the past several years, she had defined herself as “responsible,” “safety conscious” and “a super protective mom.” And she knew these were the same terms anyone else would use to describe her. But hadn't she known all along that there was more to her than those descriptors? Even if, for the past few years, she had been living a life that was the polar opposite of being a cliff-climbing adventurer.
“What about this place?” Nicholas asked, gesturing to a small café close to the waterfront. “Is this how the locals do breakfast?”
Rachel hadn’t been in this café in years. It looked just the same as it had when she was a teenager and used to stay out until the sun was starting to rise, or when she’d wanted to grab a quick breakfast on the way to the beach.
“Yes,” she said, “this place is really good.”
Everything was as Rachel remembered it, from the checkered tablecloths to the aging coffee machine. Even the girl behind the counter looked familiar, and Rachel guessed she was the daughter of the woman who had owned the café when she was a kid.
“What do you recommend?” Nicholas asked.
“Honestly, it's all really good. I think I’m going to have the pancakes and bacon.”
Just then, everything felt right. Even the weather was perfect, one of the beautiful, sunny, but not too hot, mornings that Walker Island was famous for. And the pancakes and bacon were as good as she remembered.
“How about later, after you get back from work and Charlotte is done with school, the three of us go down to the beach and I'll show you both how to surf?”
Rachel thought back to her daughter trying to “surf” on the ironing board, and her stomach clenched tight. “Isn't she too young?”
“I was a lot younger when I first got on a board,” Nicholas pointed out. “But I wouldn't want you to feel uncomfortable about her safety, so if you'd rather learn first, then after you've got it down, both of us could teach—”
Rachel's chest had clenched even tighter by the time she raised a hand to stop him from saying anything more. “Can we not do this?”
“Not do what?”
“Not make plans like this.”
“I thought you liked making plans. I mean, I’m usually happy to go with the flow and just see what happens, because things always end up working out, but—”
“Sometimes they don't work out!” Rachel hated the way their perfect morning had turned so quickly. “You keep talking about all the things that we’re going to do next, but I know exactly what’s happening next. You’re leaving. You’ve finished your shooting for the pilot and we can’t pretend that you’ll be able to stay in one place, even if you had a reason to stay.”
“I do have a reason to stay,” Nicholas insisted, reaching for her hand. “Two wonderful reasons. Even more, actually, when we count your family. I want this, Rachel. I want you.”
Rachel pulled back, not because she didn’t want the touch of his skin against hers, but because she wanted it far too much. “You have too much going on in your life to stay here. You have your new TV show. You have your surfing competitions around the world. Because I don’t think they’re planning on holding all the major surfing championships around Walker Island this year, are they?”
“It probably wouldn’t make for particularly great waves,” Nicholas said with one of his gentle smiles. “But that doesn’t mean we have to just pull back like nothing happened last night or pretend we can’t still feel the sparks between us.”
“Last night was wonderful, but I knew going into it that it was only going to be the one night we had together. I knew that you were leaving, and I—” She took a deep breath, one that shook inside her chest. “I didn’t want to regret never taking that chance to be with you.”
“And do you regret it?” Nicholas asked, his hand finding hers and holding on tight.
“No. How could I? It was beautiful. So, so beautiful.” Rachel could feel the tears coming now and knew she needed to finish this conversation soon, before they spilled out in front of Nicholas. “I know I can’t stop you from leaving, and I wouldn’t want to. Your life’s one that should be lived throughout the world, away from this island. All I wanted was to be part of it, even if just for a short time.”
“We could build so many other memories together,” Nicholas insisted. “We don’t have to call an end to this. To us.”
“Even if you stayed for a few more days, it wouldn’t make things better. Because you’d still have to leave in the end.” The tears came even closer as she told him, “That's why I think it would be easier for both of us—and for Charlotte, so that she doesn't get any more attached to you—if you leave today.”
“Come with me.”
She blinked at him in shock for several moments, before finally echoing, “Come with you?”
“Yes. Come with me,” he said again, as if it were the most obvious idea in the world. “I’ve seen the way you come to life when you’re having fun on our adventures. And I see the way Charlotte longs for adventure, too. Why not get on a plane with me and see the world?”
Rachel continued to stare at him in disbelief. He had to be joking, didn't he?
But no. It looked like Nicholas was deadly serious.
“That's crazy.”
“What’s crazy about it?” Nicholas countered.
“Everything! I know what your schedule is like, what's going to be next. Australia. Japan. Thailand. You’re talking like I can just get up and walk away from my life here. Like I don’t have responsibilities. But I have a little girl and a job that I need so that I can keep a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs. You can't be serious about dragging Charlotte around the world like that!”
But Nicholas didn’t let go of her hand. “I'm completely serious. Are you telling me that you love your job so much you couldn’t leave it? And as for Charlotte, from what I hear, homeschooling is a pretty awesome thing. I’m not asking you to abandon her. I would never want that, not for any of us. I want her to come, too. All three of us, going everywhere we want. As a family.” His eyes were intense with emotion as he told her, “You asked me the other day if I’d ever wanted a family.” He lifted her fingers to his mouth and pressed a kiss to them. “I want you and Charlotte to be my family. Can't you see what an amazing life we could have together?”
Rachel was stunned by how easily she could imagine it. Going to parts of the world she’d always wanted to visit. Traveling with Charlotte and Nicholas beside her to exotic locations her daughter would love. Teaching Charlotte from home. Not spending her days poring over insurance statistics, because instead she would be filming shows with Nicholas. And, best of all, getting to wake up in his arms every morning.
It was tempting. So incredibly tempting to reach for the beautiful dream.
But, she forcefully reminded herself, a dream was all it was. There were way too many risks. What if Nicholas changed his mind? What if he realized that being tied down with a woman and her kid wasn’t everything he’d expected? What about all the difficulties that might come with taking a little girl away from the only home she'd ever known?
“I’m sorry, Nicholas,” Rachel said. “I can’t take that kind of risk. Not when it comes to Charlotte.”
And especially not when it came to her own heart...
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
During the walk back to her grandmother’s place, Rachel kept telling herself that she’d done exactly what she’d needed to do. After all, Charlotte’s well-being came before everything. And if Nicholas couldn’t see that, then it was even more obvious that they couldn’t be together.
But that had been obvious from the moment he’d arrived, hadn't it? Yes, they'd had a connection, but it had always been a connection with an expiration date. Even last night, she’d gone into it with her eyes open, knowing that Nicholas would be leaving today. Making love with him had been about saying good-bye, not about the beginning of forever. And she’d been sure that Nicholas would eventually accept that, too, even if he ke
pt wanting to talk about the future.
When she walked into Gram’s house, she found her daughter in the kitchen, along with Paige and Grams. Charlotte jumped up when she saw her, giving her a big hug.
“What happened?” Rachel said when she saw the small bandage on her daughter's knee.
“I was dancing. Doing spins.”
“It’s nothing serious,” Paige reassured her. “Just a skinned knee. You were very brave, weren't you, Charlotte?”
“She always is,” Rachel said with a smile, one that wobbled a little. “The bravest little girl in the world.”
Paige took a closer look at her. “Are you okay, Rachel? It’s really not that bad of a scratch. I’d have called you if it had been serious.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s Nicholas.”
“What about Nicholas, Mommy?”
Rachel did her best to smile again, even though inside she was absolutely falling to pieces. She’d been hoping that if she didn’t mention Nicholas in front of Charlotte, her daughter would come to terms more quickly with the idea of him going away. Now that she'd accidentally blown it, they were probably in for some tears. From both of them...
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said as she knelt down to her daughter's level, “but Nicholas has to go away.”
“But I don’t want him to,” Charlotte insisted.
“I know you don't”—and neither do I—“but...”
When her voice started to break, Paige gently reached out to take her niece’s hand. “We need to leave for school now so that you're not late. Especially when you have finger-painting first thing today and I know how much you love it.”
Thankfully, Paige's reminder of finger-painting helped Charlotte temporarily forget about Nicholas leaving. After Rachel gave her daughter a hug and a kiss good-bye, Grams sat down at the kitchen table and gestured for Rachel to do the same.
“What’s all this about Nicholas? Did you and he have a fight?”
Rachel stared at her grandmother in disbelief. “You make it sound like we’re a couple.”
“Aren't you?”
“No,” she said, but it felt like a lie. “Well, maybe it felt like we had started to become one after we...” She paused a beat, before deciding to spill everything. “After we slept together.”
Her grandmother smiled. “I guessed that part. We would have been blind not to see the sparks between the two of you the other night at dinner.”
She should have known Grams wouldn’t be surprised, let alone shocked. After all, she’d been the one who had talked Rachel into coming back home to Walker Island after Guy left. Her grandmother had always been so good at dealing with the ever-changing love lives of her five granddaughters.
“So is that it?” Grams asked. “You slept with him and you think you made a mistake?”
Rachel shook her head. Sleeping with Nicholas couldn't ever be a mistake. Not when it had been the most beautiful night of her life.
“Then what?” Grams prompted. “You know you can share this with me, darling. Tell me what’s wrong and why you look so sad.”
“I was all prepared for him to leave, but then he told me that he wanted us to go with him.” The words couldn't come fast enough now that she was finally letting them spill out. “He had this crazy scheme in his head that I would give up my job, homeschool Charlotte, and we’d go with him to wherever the next adventure is.”
“And you’re angry at him for that?”
“He just expects that everything will work out, and it clearly always has for him. But that’s not the way the real world works. Not for me anyway.”
Grams reached out to take her hand. “You have a beautiful daughter and a family that loves you. Has it really all worked out so badly?”
“No, of course not. I love Charlotte. I love all of you, too. You know that. But when he asked me to go with him this morning, it felt like he was trying to coax me up some cliff face with promises of what might lie ahead, even though there aren't any safety ropes to catch us if something happens. It felt like he was asking me to throw our whole lives away for the sake of some unknown adventures that might, or might not, work out.”
“Perhaps,” Grams gently suggested, “he didn’t see it like that. Maybe he thought he was offering you more. Maybe he thought he was helping to make not only his own dreams come true, but yours, too.” That stopped Rachel in her tracks for a long moment, especially when Grams asked, “Are you telling me there wasn’t a part of you that was tempted?”
Of course there had been. At least until she'd started worrying about all the things that might go wrong…
“You sound almost like you’re on his side, Grams.”
“I’m on your side. Always.” Grams reached for her hand. “When you were a little girl, you got into so many scrapes because you were utterly fearless. After your mother died, I know you often used adventure as a way to escape—and that perhaps you went a little too far sometimes—but before that, you used to climb anything, run anywhere and dive into anything just for fun. Simply because you loved the adventure of it all. More than any of the rest of us, you loved experiencing new things and testing your limits to see all the amazing things you were capable of achieving.”
“Maybe,” Rachel said slowly as she tried to let everything her grandmother was saying sink in, “that was because I didn’t know enough about the consequences back then.”
“Or maybe,” Grams countered, “it was because you knew the joy you'd feel was more than worth taking the risk?” She smiled as she remembered. “Practically every time the school called, it was the nurse saying you’d bumped your head or skinned your knees again. It’s a wonder that you still had knees by the end of it all. But when I’d arrive to collect you, you’d be sitting in the nurse’s office with a smile on your face, ready to tell me all about what you’d tried to do and how you were going to get it right next time.”
At the mention of skinned knees, Rachel thought about the fall Charlotte had taken while twirling around and around at the dance studio. When she had seen the bandage, her heart had briefly jumped into her mouth. She’d been so worried about her little girl. Yet, Charlotte had seemed perfectly happy, hadn’t she? As if she expected to fall sometimes while having fun, and that it was okay, just as long as she always got right back up and tried again.
“I know you’re worried about taking Charlotte away from the island, and obviously, I want to see as much of you both as I can, but I also want my girls to have the kind of lives they truly deserve. Charlotte is as fearless as you were, Rachel. You know that. You've always known it. Don’t you want her to grow up being confident about enjoying life to the fullest?”
“Of course I do,” Rachel said, “but I wish—” She shook her head. “I know I can't protect her from everything, especially not a broken heart, no matter how much I wish I could.”
“You know how dangerous everything is, darling, but you seem to have forgotten about how joyous and beautiful it all is, as well. You once told me when you were a teenager that it's worth risking falling to get to the top of a cliff.” Grams squeezed Rachel's hand tight. “That's just as true now as it was back then. And I can promise you that when Charlotte lands that spin she was practicing, it will be worth even more to her because she fell a few times along the way.”
“But taking a chance on leaving with Nicholas isn’t just about learning a dance move,” Rachel pointed out.
“No, it has the potential to be much more than that. And as a dancer, you can imagine I don’t say that very often. Now,” Grams said with a kiss to her forehead, “I think both of us could do with a nice, hot cup of coffee.”
Was Grams right? Had Rachel let herself become so scared of the potential consequences of life that she wouldn’t let herself enjoy the things that mattered? Of course, all she had to do was look at how much more alive she’d felt this week to know the answer. Every time Nicholas had persuaded her to take a risk, she had felt more and more like the real her.
Ye
t even so, could she really do this?
When her grandmother brought her over a mug of steaming coffee, instead of taking a sip, she said, “I want so badly to believe things will always work out, but look at what happened with Guy. And with Mom.”
“I know Guy hurt you, but once you learned exactly what he was—or rather, wasn't—made of, don't you think that both you and Charlotte were better off without him?” After Rachel nodded, Grams said, “And what happened to your mother was a terrible tragedy, but do you think for one moment that she would have wanted you to pull back and not live your life because of it? You’ve become such a strong, independent woman and a wonderful mother without Guy. Now, you just need to let yourself take a few risks so that you can learn what truly makes you happy.”
“But this isn’t just about me, it's about Charlotte, too.”
“And we both know that going off on adventures around the world would be a dream come true for her, just as I know that you will do a wonderful job of bringing her up, no matter where you are. The question is, what do you want?” Grams held her gaze. “Do you love Nicholas? Would this be a dream come true for you, too?”
Yes, it would. Rachel knew without having to look very hard that traveling around the world with Nicholas and Charlotte would be everything she’d ever wanted. She could see how it might work, but...
“I’m scared, Grams.”
“Being scared is good,” Ava said with a smile. “Stopping because you’re scared is not. When I persuaded you to come back to the island after Guy disappeared, it wasn’t so that you could hide away from the world. It was so that you could build up your strength to fly out there again. And you know that we’ll always be here to catch you and Charlotte if you should ever fall. That’s what family is for.”
