Booze could dull it for a moment but not nearly long enough. When the alcohol wore off, everything rushed back, worse than before.
He was still watching their slow, playful progress down the beach when Conan returned to the backyard. The dog barked once and gave him a look Will could only describe as peeved. He planted his haunches in front of the worktable and glared at him.
Abigail would have given him exactly the same look for treating an old friend with such rudeness.
“Yeah, I was a jerk,” he muttered. “She caught me off guard, that’s all. I wasn’t exactly prepared for a ghost from the past to show up out of the blue this afternoon.”
The dog barked again and Will wondered, not for the first time, what went on inside his furry head. Conan had a weird way of looking at everybody as if he knew exactly what they might be thinking and he managed to communicate whole diatribes with only a bark and a certain expression in his doleful eyes.
Abigail had loved the dog. For that reason alone, Will would have tolerated him since his neighbor had been one of his favorite people on earth. But Conan had also showed an uncanny knack over the last two years for knowing just when Will was at low ebb.
More than once, there had been times when he had been out on the beach wondering if it would be easier just to walk out into the icy embrace of the tide than to survive another second of this unrelenting grief.
No matter the time of day or night, Conan would somehow always show up, lean against Will’s legs until the despair eased, and then would follow him home before returning to Brambleberry House and Abigail.
He sighed now as the dog continued to wordlessly reprimand him. “What do you want me to do? Go after her?”
Conan barked and Will shook his head. “No way. Forget it.”
He should go after her, at least to apologize. He had been unforgivably rude. The hell of it was, he didn’t really know why. He wasn’t cold by nature. Through the last two years, he had tried to hold to the hard-fought philosophy that just because his insides had been ripped apart and because sometimes the grief and pain seemed to crush the life out of him, he hadn’t automatically been handed a free pass to hurt others.
Lashing out at others around him did nothing to ease his own pain so he made it a point to be polite to just about everybody.
Sure, there were random moments when his bleakness slipped through. At times, Sage and Anna and other friends had been upset at him when he pushed away their efforts to comfort him. More than a few times, truth be told. But he figured it was better to be by himself during those dark moments than to do as he’d just done, lash out simply because he didn’t know how else to cope.
He had no excuse for treating her poorly. He had just seen her there looking so lovely and bright with her energetic son and her pretty little daughter and every muscle inside him had cramped in pain.
The children set it off. He could see that now. The girl had even looked a little like Cara—same coloring, anyway, though Cara had been chubby and round where Julia’s daughter looked as if she might blow away in anything more than a two-knot wind.
It hadn’t only been the children, though. He had seen Julia standing there in a shaft of sunlight and for a moment, long-dormant feelings had stirred inside him that he wanted to stay dead and buried like the rest of his life.
No matter how screwed up he was, he had no business being rude to her and her children. Like it or not, he would have to apologize to her, especially if Anna and Sage rented her the apartment.
He lived three houses away and spent a considerable amount of time at Brambleberry House, both because he was busy with various remodeling projects and because he considered the new owners—Abigail’s heirs—his friends.
He didn’t want Julia Hudson Blair or her children here at Brambleberry House. If he were honest with himself, he could admit that he would have preferred if she had stayed a long-buried memory.
But she hadn’t. She was back in Cannon Beach with her children, looking to rent an apartment at Brambleberry House, so apparently she planned to stay at least awhile.
Chances were good he would bump into her again, so he was going to have to figure out a way to apologize.
He watched their shapes grow smaller and smaller as they walked down the beach toward town and he rubbed the ache in his chest, wondering what it would take to convince Sage and Anna to find a different tenant.
CHAPTER TWO
“WILL WE GET to see inside the pretty house this time, Mommy?”
Julia lifted her gaze from the road for only an instant to glance in the rearview mirror of her little Toyota SUV. Even from here, she could see the excitement in Maddie’s eyes and she couldn’t help but smile in return at her daughter.
“That’s the plan,” she answered, turning her attention back to the road as she drove past a spectacular hotel set away from the road. Someday when she was independently wealthy with unlimited leisure time, she wanted to stay at The Sea Urchin, one of the most exclusive boutique hotels on the coast.
“I talked to one of the owners of the house an hour ago,” Julia continued, “and she invited us to walk through and see if the apartment will work for us.”
“I hope it does,” Simon said. “I really liked that cool dog.”
“I’m not sure the dog lives there,” she answered. “He might belong to the man we talked to this morning. Will Garrett. He doesn’t live there, he was just doing some work on the house.”
“I’m glad he doesn’t live there,” Maddie said in her whisper-soft voice. “He was kind of cranky.”
Julia agreed, though she didn’t say as much to her children. Will had been terse, bordering on rude, and for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why. What had she done? She hadn’t seen him in sixteen years. It seemed ridiculous to assume he might be angry, after all these years, simply because she hadn’t written to him as she had promised.
They had been friends of a sort—and more than friends for a few glorious weeks one summer. She remembered moonlight bonfires and holding hands in the movies and stealing kisses on the beach.
She would have assumed their shared past warranted at least a little politeness but apparently he didn’t agree. The Will Garrett she remembered had been far different from the surly stranger they met that afternoon. She couldn’t help wondering if he treated everyone that way or if she received special treatment.
“He was simply busy,” she said now to her children. “We interrupted his work and I think he was eager to get back to it. We grown-ups can sometimes be impatient.”
“I remember,” Simon said. “Dad was like that sometimes.”
The mention of Kevin took her by surprise. Neither twin referred to their father very often anymore. He had died more than two years ago and had been a distant presence for some time before that, and they had all walked what felt like a million miles since then.
Brambleberry House suddenly came into view, rising above the fringy pines and spruce trees. She slowed, savoring the sight of the spectacular Victorian mansion silhouetted against the salmon-colored sky, with the murky blue sea below.
That familiar sense of homecoming washed over her again as she pulled into the pebbled driveway. She wanted to live here with her children. To wake up in the morning with that view of the sea out her window and the smell of roses drifting up from the gardens and the solid comfort of those walls around her.
As she pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, she gave a silent prayer that she and the twins would click with the new owners. The one she’d spoken with earlier—Sage Benedetto—had seemed cordial when she invited Julia and her children to take a look at the apartment, but Julia was almost afraid to hope.
“Mom, look!” Simon exclaimed. “There’s the dog! Does that mean he lives here?”
As she opened her door to climb ou
t, she saw the big shaggy red dog waiting by the wrought-iron gates, almost as if he somehow knew they were on their way.
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see.”
“Oh, I hope so.” Maddie pushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes. She looked fragile and pale. Though Julia would have liked to walk from their hotel downtown to enjoy the spectacular views of Cannon Beach at sunset, she had been afraid Maddie wouldn’t have the strength for another long hike down the beach and back.
Now she was grateful she had heeded her motherly instincts that seemed to have become superacute since Maddie’s illness.
More than anything—more than she wanted to live in this house, more than she wanted this move to work out, more than she wanted to breathe—she wanted her daughter to be healthy and strong.
“I hope we can live here,” Maddie said. “I really like that dog.”
Julia hugged her daughter and helped her out of her seat belt. Maddie slipped a hand in hers while Simon took his sister’s other hand. Together, the three of them walked through the gate, where the one-dog welcoming committee awaited them.
The dog greeted Simon with the same enthusiasm he had shown that morning, wagging his tail fiercely and nudging Simon’s hand with his head. After a moment of attention from her son, the dog turned to Maddie. Julia went on full mother-bear alert, again ready to step in if necessary, but the dog showed the same uncanny gentleness to Maddie.
He simply planted his haunches on the sidewalk in front of her, waiting as still as one of those cheap plaster dog statues for Maddie to reach out with a giggle and pet his head.
Weird, she thought, but she didn’t have time to figure it out before the front door opened. A woman wearing shorts and a brightly colored tank top stepped out onto the porch. She looked to be in her late twenties and was extraordinarily lovely in an exotic kind of way, with blonde wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail and an olive complexion that spoke of a Mediterranean heritage.
She walked toward them with a loose-hipped gait and a warm smile.
“Hi!” Her voice held an open friendliness and Julia instinctively responded to it. She could feel the tension in her shoulders relax a little as the other woman held out a hand.
“I’m Sage Benedetto. You must be the Blairs.”
She shook it. “Yes. I’m Julia and these are my children, Simon and Maddie.”
Sage dropped her hand and turned to the twins. “Hey kids. Great to meet you! How old are you? Let me guess. Sixteen?”
They both giggled. “No!” Simon exclaimed. “We’re seven.”
“Seven? Both of you?”
“We’re twins.” Maddie said in her soft voice.
“Twins? No kidding? Cool! I’ve always wanted to have a twin. You ever dress up in each others’ clothes and try to trick your mom?”
“No!” Maddie said with another giggle.
“We’re not identical twins,” Simon said with a roll of his eyes. “We’re fraternal.”
“Of course you are. Silly me. ’Cause one of you is a boy and one is a girl, right?”
Sage obviously knew her way around children, Julia thought as she listened to their exchange. That was definitely a good sign. She had observed during her career as an elementary school teacher that many adults didn’t really know how to talk to kids. They either tried too hard to be buddies or treated them with obvious condescension. Sage managed to find the perfect middle ground.
“I see you’ve met Conan,” Sage said, scratching the big dog under the chin.
“Is he your dog?” Simon asked.
She smiled at the animal with obvious affection. “I guess you could say that. Or I’m his human. Either way, we kind of look out for each other, don’t we, bud?”
Oddly, Julia could swear the dog grinned.
“Thank you again for agreeing to show the apartment to us tonight,” she said.
Sage turned her smile to Julia. “No problem. I’m sorry we weren’t here when you came by the first time. You said on the telephone that you knew Abigail.”
That pang of loss pinched at her again as she imagined Abigail out here in the garden, her big floppy straw hat and her gardening gloves and the tray of lemonade always waiting on the porch.
“Years ago,” she answered, then was compelled to elaborate.
“Every summer my family rented a house near here. The year I was ten, my brother and I were running around on the beach and I cut my foot on a broken shell. Abigail heard me crying and came down to help. She brought me back up to the house, fixed me a cookie and doctored me up. We were fast friends after that. Every year, I would run up here the minute we pulled into the driveway of our cottage. Abigail always seemed so happy to see me and we would get along as if I had never left.”
The other woman smiled, though there was an edge of sorrow to it. Julia wondered again how Sage had ended up as one of the two new owners of Brambleberry House after Abigail’s death.
“Sounds just like Abigail,” Sage said. “She made friends with everyone she met.”
“I’ve been terrible about keeping in contact with her,” Julia admitted with chagrin as they walked into the entryway of the house, with its sweeping staircase and polished honey oak trim. “I was so sorry to hear about her death—more sorry than I can say that I let so much time go by without calling her. I suppose some foolish part of me just assumed she would always be here. Like the ocean and the seastacks.”
The dog—Conan—whined a little, almost as if he understood their conversation, though Julia knew that was impossible.
“I think we all felt that way,” Sage said. “It’s been four months and it still doesn’t seem real.”
“Will said she died of a heart attack in her sleep.”
“That’s right. I find some comfort in knowing that if she could have chosen her exit scene, that’s exactly how she would have wanted to go. The doctors said she probably slept right through it.”
Sage paused and gave her a considering kind of look. “Do you know Will, then?”
Julia could feel color climb her cheekbones. How foolish could she be to blush over a teenage crush on Will Garrett, when the man he had become obviously wanted nothing to do with her?
“Knew him,” she corrected. “It all seems so long ago. The cottage we rented every year was next door to his. We socialized a little with his family and he and my older brother, Charlie, were friends. I usually tried to find a way to tag along, to their great annoyance.”
She had a sudden memory of mountain biking through the mists and primordial green of Ecola National Park, then cooling off in the frigid surf of Indian Beach, the gulls wheeling overhead and the ocean song a sweet accompaniment.
Will had kissed her for the first time there, while her brother was busy body surfing through the baby breakers and not paying them any attention. It had just been a quick, furtive brush of his lips, but she could suddenly remember with vivid clarity how it had warmed her until she forgot all about the icy swells.
“He was my first love,” she confessed.
Oh no. Had she really said that out loud? She wanted to snatch the words back but they hung between them. Sage turned around, sudden speculation sparking in her exotic, tilted eyes, and Julia could feel herself blushing harder.
“Is that right?”
“A long time ago,” she answered, though she was certain she had said those words about a million times already. So much for making a good impression. She was stuttering and blushing and acting like an idiot over a man who barely remembered her.
To her relief, Sage didn’t pursue it as they reached the second floor of the big house.
“This is the apartment we’re renting. It’s been vacant most of the time in the five years I’ve lived here. Once in a while Abigail opened it up on a short-term basis to various people in need of a comfortab
le place to crash for a while. Since Anna and I inherited Brambleberry House, we’ve kept Will busy fixing it up so we could rent out the space.”
Will again. Couldn’t she escape him for three seconds? “Convenient that he lives close,” she said.
“It’s more convenient because he’s the best carpenter around. With all the work that needs to be done to Brambleberry House, we could hire him as our resident carpenter. Good thing for us he likes to stay busy.”
She remembered again the pain in his eyes. She wanted to ask Sage the reason for it, but she knew that would be far too presumptuous.
Anyway, she wasn’t here to talk about Will Garrett. She was trying to find a clean, comfortable place for her children.
When Sage opened the door to the apartment, Julia felt a little thrill of anticipation.
“Ready to take a look?” Sage asked.
“Absolutely.” She walked through the door with the oddest sense of homecoming.
The apartment met all her expectations and more. Much, much more. She walked from room to room with a growing excitement. The kitchen was small but had new appliances and what looked like new cabinets stained a lovely cherry color. Each of the three bedrooms had fresh coats of paint. Though two of them were quite small, nearly every room had a breathtaking view of the ocean.
“It’s beautiful,” she exclaimed as she stood in the large living room, with its wide windows on two sides that overlooked the sea.
“Will did a good job, didn’t he?” Sage said.
Before Julia could answer, the children came into the room, followed by the dog.
“Wow. This place is so cool!” Simon exclaimed.
“I like it, too,” Maddie said. “It feels friendly.”
“How can a house feel friendly?” her brother scoffed. “It’s just walls and a roof and stuff.”
Sage didn’t seem to mind Maddie’s whimsy. Her features softened and she laid a hand on Maddie’s hair with a gentleness that warmed Julia’s heart.
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