by Sarah Morgan
“Thanks, but there’s nothing I need to talk about.” The last thing she wanted was for Harriet to worry about her. Fortunately hiding her feelings was easy, or it had been until last night.
She felt a prickle of annoyance.
Why had Seth come looking for her? Why hadn’t he just left her alone? If he’d guessed how upset she was, and clearly he had, then why couldn’t he have left her to deal with her emotions her own way?
Given a little more time, she would have pulled herself together and no one would have been any the wiser.
“I’ll be two minutes,” she told Charlie, and stepped into the shower. Two minutes of needle-sharp hot water helped a little. Not a lot, but enough to help her face the day.
She took Charlie and Hero out for a quick walk, and when she returned her grandmother was already seated at the table, sipping her coffee.
“You’re up early, Grams.” Fliss fed the two dogs.
“So are you. Especially given how late you were last night.”
“You’re waiting up for me? I’m a little too old for that, don’t you think?”
“You’re never too old to enjoy the fact that someone cares about you.”
“Good point.” Sunlight poured through the windows, and Fliss could hear the faint crash of surf through the open windows. The fresh air did more for her aching head than all the Tylenol on the planet. “I walked the dogs. Came across Hero on the beach so I went to investigate.” She put a slice of toast in the toaster and wandered to the fridge. “Turned out Matilda had her baby.”
“I heard. I thought it wasn’t due for another few weeks?”
“It wasn’t, but nature thought differently.” She pulled out butter and a jar of her grandmother’s homemade plum jam.
For as long as she could remember, there had always been a jar of her grandmother’s plum jam in the cupboard.
“Toast is burning,” her grandmother said casually, and Fliss sprinted across the kitchen, cursing.
“It’s toast! How can I burn toast?”
“Because you were thinking about other things.”
Fliss wasn’t about to argue with that. She’d been thinking about Seth. The baby. Matilda. The baby. Seth. The baby. Seth.
Seth, Seth, Seth.
“Damn.” She retrieved the charred toast. “Looks like something spewed from the center of a volcano.”
“Turn the temperature dial down. Start again. Cooking requires you to stay in the moment. That’s why it’s relaxing. So you drove her to the clinic?”
“No time.” Instead of throwing out the toast, she scraped away the top layer and spread the surface with butter and plum jam. “She was having the baby right there. This jam is good. You could sell it and make a fortune.” She chewed, savoring the sweetness and the flavor. The taste took her straight back to those long summers where she and Harriet had filled baskets to the brim with plums and apples. Fliss had eaten them, right there and then, with the sun beating down and the juice running down her chin.
Harriet had preferred to save hers to cook with their grandmother.
They’d spend hours preparing the fruit, stirring, testing and tasting until finally pouring the jam into jars that Harriet had labeled in her neat, careful writing.
It was typical of Harriet to want to lap up every morsel of family time and store it, like a squirrel, for the winter when they were back in New York.
Fliss had preferred to spend her time outdoors. For her, the beach had felt like freedom.
But by doing that, she’d missed out on spending time with her grandmother.
She studied her, noticing how blue her eyes were and how her hair, now white, fell in pretty waves around her face.
She’d seen enough photos of her grandmother as a young girl to know she’d been a knockout.
“Is it my imagination or is the bruising a little better?”
“It’s better.” Her grandmother finished her coffee. “If you like the jam you can take a couple of jars back to the city with you when you go. And you can take one over to Matilda. Tell me more about what happened.”
Fliss swallowed the last of her toast and gave her grandmother a vastly edited version of the previous night’s events. Which meant she included most of the facts, and left out all the emotions.
“You delivered the baby?”
“No. It delivered itself, and I caught it.” And she could still feel it in her hands. Warm flesh, vulnerability. So tiny. She pushed away the memory and shrugged. “Finally putting all that softball I played in college to good use.”
“And Chase wasn’t there?”
“No. Missed the whole thing. Isn’t that exactly like a man?”
“So did the midwife come to her?”
“Midwife and an ambulance, but Seth arrived first.” She said it casually, as if it was no big deal, and her grandmother looked at her keenly.
“Seth? But Seth still thinks you’re Harriet?”
“Not anymore. Matilda named the baby Rose Felicity.” She slid another slice of bread into the toaster and turned the dial down a notch. “Even I found it hard to talk my way out of that one. And it turns out he knew all along.” She hovered by the toaster, watching it. What sort of a person couldn’t cook toast? “Probably shouldn’t have rented a car in a shade of fierce red. Harriet would have gone for soft blue.”
“So what happens now?”
Fliss chose to deliberately misunderstand the question. “I need to make a trip to the store to buy a baby gift for Matilda. Which means I could do with some help, because buying baby gifts isn’t on my list of skills.” Sadly her attempt to take evasive action didn’t work with her grandmother.
“I meant, what happens with Seth?”
It was a question that had been playing on her mind since she woke up.
She’d come here to escape emotion and encountered more than she would in Manhattan.
Fliss ejected the toast. “I expect he’ll buy her a gift, too.” She caught her grandmother’s eye and sighed. “What do you want me to say? Nothing happens with Seth. It’s all in the past. Over. Done. History.”
“Honey, if it was all in the past you wouldn’t have run here from Manhattan and you wouldn’t have pretended to be your sister. Maybe you should stop running and talk to him.”
“Now you’re starting to sound like him.” Fliss poked the spoon into the jam. “He wanted me to go over to his place tonight for dinner.”
“And you’re going.”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Why wouldn’t you go?”
“Because I’m here to look after you.”
“I promise not to dance around the garden naked or get into trouble in any way. Don’t use me as an excuse.”
Fliss paused, the toast halfway to her mouth. “You danced naked in the garden? That actually happened?”
Her grandmother’s eyes twinkled. “Maybe. Maybe you’re not the only one who had a liking for skinny-dipping.”
Fliss took a bite of toast. “You’re a surprise. Tell me more.”
“Not unless you tell me about Seth. Trust is a two-way street. I’ll show you my secrets if you show me yours.”
Fliss sighed. “What do you want to know? Seth was a mistake. We all make them. I was young. Now tell me about skinny-dipping. Did Gramps dare you?”
“No. I dared him.” Her grandmother’s voice was brisk. “He didn’t know whether to be scandalized or impressed.”
“You and Gramps obviously had an interesting marriage.”
“Oh, we weren’t married. Not at that point. Before that night, he’d never seen me naked.”
Fliss choked with laughter. “You’re bad. How did I never know this about you?”
“You’re not the only one capable of breaking a few rules, Felicity. And anyway, rules seemed pointless back then. There was a war on. People were dying. It seemed as if the world had gone mad. None of us knew what was going to happen in the future. It seemed right to grab happiness wherever we could find it.
Nowadays people are so busy working toward the future and thinking about tomorrow, they forget how precious the present is.”
“Wow, Grams, that’s profound for seven in the morning.” Fliss poured herself another cup of coffee, readjusting her image of her grandmother.
“All I’m saying is that you should grab the opportunity to spend time with Seth.”
Living in the present and thinking only of the moment was the reason she’d wound up pregnant at eighteen. But her grandmother knew nothing about that.
“It’s complicated—”
“Love always is. Doesn’t mean you should give up on it.”
“Who said anything about love?”
“Sex, then.”
Fliss choked on her toast. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t look so shocked. How do you think your mother arrived on this earth?”
Fliss tried to delete the image from her brain. It was bad enough thinking about one’s parents having sex, without thinking about grandparents. “Um—okay, but I don’t intend to have sex with Seth either. That’s not going to happen.”
Her grandmother removed her glasses. “I’m going to ask you a question. Being you, you’ll probably dodge it, but I’m going to ask it anyway.”
Fliss squirmed, her heart sinking. “What?”
“Have you ever met a man that made you feel the way Seth did?”
It took her a moment to answer because the word seemed to be stuck in her throat. “No.”
“And that doesn’t tell you something?”
“Yes, it tells me I was a teenager with my head in the clouds, seeing things the way I wanted to see them. Artistic interpretation.”
“Maybe, or maybe it’s telling you something else.”
Fliss thought about the way it had felt when Seth had her and dismissed it.
She wasn’t going there again. Not even with an unreasonably large helping of sexual chemistry thrown into the mix.
“It tells me I’m practical about relationships. Realistic. I’m not like Harriet.”
“You think it’s unrealistic to expect to find someone who loves you and who you love back?”
“I think it’s hard to find that. Relationships are often one-sided, as you said the other day. One partner invariably feels more than the other. Mom did, and look where it got her.”
Her grandmother was silent for a long moment. Then she drew breath, as if she was about to say something.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she stood up.
Fliss realized how tired she looked and felt a pang. “Why are you up this early? You should have slept in. What can I do for you? Once I’ve walked Charlie and Hero, I thought I’d make a start on the garden. I’m going to call a tree surgeon to deal with the apple tree.”
“That would be helpful.”
“And I’ll change the sheets on your bed.”
“Thank you.”
Fliss bit her lip. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Her grandmother paused by the doorway. “You can go and have dinner with Seth. Hear what he has to say.”
“Why? What’s the point of going over old ground? There’s nothing there, Grams. It’s history.”
“Maybe, but if you don’t go, you won’t know. Go to dinner. Clear the air. Have that talk you’ve been avoiding. Tell him how you feel.”
There was no way she was going to tell him how she felt. Not after last night.
He’d already caught her at a vulnerable moment. She wasn’t going to put herself in that position again.
But if she didn’t let him have the conversation he wanted he was never going to leave her alone.
This way she could keep both her grandmother and Seth happy.
And all she had to do was listen.
She’d let him say whatever it was he wanted to say, and then she’d leave.
“All right. I’ll go to dinner.”
Dinner. Not sex. Not a relationship. Two people clearing the air. Putting the past behind them.
That was all it was.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FLISS WASN’T THE only one who had a sleepless night.
Seth did, too.
He’d been called in to operate in the early hours of the morning. A dog had been hit by a car. Summer people, driving too fast on unfamiliar roads, buoyed by good spirits, both the sort that came from spending summer at the beach and the sort that was served at the beach bar. That side of it wasn’t his business.
His responsibility was the dog and the owner, because when an animal was involved there were always two patients.
It was a reminder of the grim side of his job, but also the good parts.
He thought the animal stood a good chance.
By the time he was satisfied he’d done what he could, the sun was rising and it hardly seemed worth going home, so he sat in his office with strong coffee and tried not to think about Fliss. Instead he tackled a mountain of paperwork, reasoning that doing it now would give him the time he needed to devote his weekend to his new home.
Home.
It didn’t feel that way yet, but hopefully in time it would.
He stared at the lab report, but instead of numbers he saw Fliss’s face, streaked with tears, and felt her fingers clutching the front of his shirt. Even then she’d tried to hide her emotions, but he’d felt them, and he’d shared them.
The door opened and Nancy, one of the vet techs, stood there. “You had a busy night.”
“I did.” He stood up and stretched. “What time is it?”
“Ten minutes until clinic, and it’s going to be a busy one.”
“Thanks. All I needed was strong coffee and a little good news.”
“Hey, you’re in demand. That’s good news. And I can manage coffee if it would help.”
“Thanks, but I can make it myself.” He’d always done everything himself, a legacy from a time when people’s first response to him was to assume he was wealthy and entitled.
The wealth was a privilege, he knew that. It had also been a lens, a filter, through which people viewed him.
It was one of the reasons he’d chosen to study veterinary medicine. Here he was mostly judged on his ability to deal with animals. When a couple brought in their family pet, bleeding and broken, they didn’t give a damn who his father had been.
And, as a vet, he’d learned that what enriched a life was the many small everyday things that so many took for granted. He’d seen a child’s face crumple with emotion when given a first pet. He’d seen a millionaire broken over the loss of a dog.
For a while he’d worked with large animals, then very sick animals, and he’d ended up here, running a small animal practice. Part of the community.
It felt right.
“Rufus is looking good, Mrs. Terry.” He checked the wound he’d sutured a week earlier. “It’s clean and healing well. Can’t have been easy keeping him out of mischief this week. You’ve done a good job.”
“I’m so relieved. We’ve had him since he was weeks old. Billy found him abandoned on the side of the road. The kids have grown up with him. I don’t know what we’d do without him.”
“Fortunately I don’t think you’re going to need to worry about that today.” Seth handed the dog back to his owner.
Losing a pet was hard. He understood that. He found it hard, too. It was the part of the job he hated.
He worked his way through a busy clinic and then stopped at the store on the way home. Crusty bread, heirloom tomatoes, mushrooms—he almost cleared the shelves of produce, adding in a couple of steaks at the last minute.
The steaks earned him a curious look as Della, the store owner, bagged his items. “Either you and Lulu are eating well, or you have company tonight.”
“We always eat well, Della.” He handed her his card, hoping that would be the end of it. He didn’t mind being the subject of discussion, but he wasn’t sure Fliss would feel the same way.
“You’re a good cook, Dr. Carlyle, just like
your mama. She used to come in here and pick out everything individually. She had an eye for the best. We miss seeing her around. You send her my love when you talk to her next and tell her we’re all thinking of her.” She returned his card and Seth picked up the bags.
“I’ll do that.”
She winked at him. “Whoever you’re feeding tonight is in for a treat.”
He kept his smile polite, and left the store and Della with all her questions behind him.
Preparing and sharing meals had been an important part of his upbringing. Everyone was expected to participate, and the big family kitchen in Ocean View had been the heart of their home. Food had been fresh, healthy and colorful. Bell peppers, their skins charred from the grill, piled in colorful heaps, glistening with olive oil. Fat olives, which always reminded him of the one vacation they’d taken to Italy, exploring the family roots. Every meal was a work of art, his mother’s skills as an interior designer showing even when plating food.
The easy conversation over good food was the thing he missed most since his father had passed. Now each gathering was suffused with sadness and the undeniable fact that something was missing.
His mother had kept going, trying to fill a gap that couldn’t be filled with other things. Nothing had fitted. Seth knew that gap was always going to be there. The best they could hope for was that they would eventually adjust to it. The family was a different shape now. They had to get used to that.
He unpacked the food in his new kitchen, filling the shelves of the empty fridge. He didn’t know if Fliss was going to join him, but if she did he didn’t want to be forced to go out. He wasn’t going to run the risk of someone derailing their conversation. He knew she’d snatch whatever excuse she could not to talk, and he was determined not to hand one to her.
With the last of the food safely stowed, he grabbed a beer from the fridge.
The place was finally starting to feel lived in. It didn’t feel like home, but hopefully it would feel that way in time.
He took his beer out onto the deck, Lulu by his side.
This was privilege. Owning your own place, close to the water, with nature as your closest neighbor.
Even this close to the ocean it was still stifling, the air refusing to release any of the warmth that had built up during the day.
