Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2)

by Barbara Bretton

  Girls of Summer

  Barbara Bretton

  Previously published in print by Berkley Books

  Acclaim for the novels of

  Barbara Bretton

  “Bretton’s characters are always real and their conflicts believable.”

  — Chicago Sun-Times

  “Soul warming... A powerful relationship drama [for] anyone who enjoys a passionate look inside the hearts and souls of the prime players.”

  — Midwest Book Review

  “[Bretton] excels in her portrayal of the sometimes sweet, sometimes stifling ties of a small community. The town’s tight network of loving, eccentric friends and family infuses the tale with a gently comic note that perfectly balances the darker dramas of the romance.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “A tender love story about two people who, when they find something special, will go to any length to keep it.”

  — Booklist

  “Honest, witty... absolutely unforgettable.”

  — Rendezvous

  “A classic adult fairy tale.”

  — Affaire de Coeur

  “Dialogue flows easily and characters spring quickly to life.”

  — Rocky Mountain News

  Publishing History

  Print edition published by Berkley Books, 2003

  Copyright 2003, 2013 by Barbara Bre tton

  Digital Edition published by Barbara Bretton at Smashwords, 2013

  Cover design by Erin Dameron-Hill

  All rights reserved. No part of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews, may be reproduced in any form by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distributing of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  More titles by Barbara Bretton

  Meet the Author

  Chapte r One

  The last time Ellen O’Brien Markowitz woke up in a man’s bed it was three weeks before her wedding and the man on the next pillow was her fiancé.

  A very temporary situation, as it turned out. She could still see Bryan propped up against the headboard, iPhone in hand, as he patiently read her the list of reasons why it would be better for both of them if they called off the wedding. She was dressed and out the door by the time he reached number eight, his cry of “But there’s more!” ringing in her ears.

  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen it coming, because she had. In fact, she often wondered if she hadn’t chosen him for those very qualities that doomed the marriage before they ever took the vows.

  That was over four years ago. One thousand six hundred and eighty-five mornings of waking up alone. Not that she was counting, mind you, but numbers like those were hard for a woman to ignore. Would one more solitary morning have tipped the heavenly balance and brought civilization crashing down around her shoulders? Would worlds collide if the Goddess of the Morning After rewound the tape back to last night, to the second before Ellen made her fatal mistake?

  There had been a moment there in Hall Talbot’s shadowy bedroom when it could have gone either way. He was a gentleman through and through. Despite the bubbly haze of champagne, he would have stopped if she had shown the slightest reluctance—but she hadn’t. Instead she had opened her arms to him and tried very hard to close her heart to hope.

  She was very good at closing her heart to hope. She had learned early that nothing was quite the way it seemed, not family and certainly not love. The drawbridge was up and the door bolted, but last night, in an unguarded moment, hope slipped in through the window just the same.

  She opened one eye and peered across the wide expanse of bed. “Oh, God,” she whispered. The sight of him, so warm and so close, made her light-headed with remembered pleasure and more than a hint of remorse.

  She hadn’t imagined him, hadn’t conjured him up from a lethal combination of too much champagne and three years’ worth of dreams. Hall Talbot, Shelter Rock Cove’s most beloved OB-GYN, her good friend and colleague, her boss, was snoring softly not two feet away from her.

  Even in postcoital repose he managed to look like your average middle-aged Adonis. His silvery-blond hair shimmered against the pale blue sheets. His muscular torso loomed gorgeous in the gathering light She remembered how he had looked last night when she slid his fine white shirt off his fine tanned shoulders and—

  Stifling a groan, she buried her face in her pillow.

  In the grand scheme of things, it really wasn’t such a terrible mistake. People slept with the wrong people every day of the week and somehow the world managed to keep on turning. She and Hall had been good friends before last night, and there was no reason to think their friendship couldn’t survive a night of passion.

  Even if he had called her by another woman’s name at a very inopportune moment.

  And this came as a big surprise, Markowitz? The first two things she had learned when she moved to Maine were her new phone number and the fact that Annie Galloway Butler was the love of his life.

  Hall blamed it on the champagne, and he had tried to make it up to her in some amazing ways, but the damage had been done. There were three of them in that bed, and Ellen already had too much experience being second-best. Everyone in Shelter Rock Cove knew that Hall Talbot had carried a torch for the former widow Galloway for more years—and through more of his own failed marriages—than even the most blunt Yankee would acknowledge. Not even Annie’s marriage to Sam Butler had seemed to dim Hall’s devotion. It had taken the birth of the Butlers’ second perfect baby girl to force him to acknowledge the fact that he had lost Annie before she ever had a chance to find him.

  Hall and Ellen had attended Kerry Amanda Butler’s christening yesterday as honorary members of the family, and the sight of that beautiful baby, that miracle of love and fate, had turned Ellen’s heart inside out. She could only imagine what it had done to Hall. The Galloway and Butler clans descended on Shelter Rock en masse, filling Sam and Annie’s little house with food and music and laughter and enough love to make you believe happy families not only existed but flourished. They were a big, handsome, fertile lot, and Ellen would have sold her soul to be one of them, but, as always, she was on
the outside looking in.

  The only time Ellen had ever felt more like an outsider was at one of her father Cy’s infrequent family gatherings where she needed a name tag in order to be recognized as part of the clan. Family always did that to her, like a private club, the kind that didn’t want her as a member. When Hall suggested they split early, she had been almost pathetically grateful.

  “Hungry?” he asked as they walked down the Butlers’ driveway toward her car.

  “Starving.”

  She avoided Cappy’s, where they were bound to run into someone who would ask them about the christening, and, at Hall’s suggestion, drove over to the Spruce Goose, a small inn on one of the back roads between Shelter Rock Cove and Bar Harbor. Good food, better lighting, the kind of place where you could pretend to be someone you’re not and maybe get away with it for a little while.

  She should have known it was dangerous. Scratched wooden tables and paper place mats were more her speed. Linen tablecloths and soup spoons meant trouble. Colleagues grabbed a lobster roll at Cappy’s or a pizza at Frankie’s near the Yankee Shopper. Friends didn’t dine by candlelight with soft music wafting past them and the scent of possibility in the air. Not if they wanted to stay colleagues and friends.

  But loneliness had a way of playing tricks on even the smartest women. Hall had needed someone last night and she had needed to be needed by him. It was that simple.

  And it should have been enough. God knew, it was more than she had ever expected. She had enjoyed nurturing a low-grade lust for him. It had been delightful to enjoy the way his shoulders filled out his lab coat or how he somehow managed to look GQ in scrubs. If you had told her last week that she would wake up this morning in Hall Talbot’s bed, with Hall Talbot’s pricey sheets wrapped around her naked body, she would have laughed out loud and suggested therapy.

  And then she would have made an appointment for a pedicure and a bikini wax.

  As it turned out, she went to him smelling of soap, with fingernails filed short and smooth, and a hairstyle that could best be described by the more charitable observer as casual. He had invited her in for a glass of champagne to celebrate Kerry Amanda’s christening and one glass led to another and he said she couldn’t drive home after that much champagne and she said she would sleep on his sofa and suddenly they were in each other’s arms and for the first time in her life it seemed that reality was going to win out over fantasy, hands down.

  He made her feel beautiful. Nobody had ever made her feel beautiful before, not even in her dreams. When he traced the curve of her bare hip with his long, elegant fingers, she knew, at least for an instant, how it felt to be adored.

  Of course, then he had to go and ruin everything by calling her “Annie” at the moment when she wanted desperately to believe she was the only one on his mind, if not in his heart. She had tried to push past the embarrassment and sink deeper into the fantasy, but the ragged sound of his voice as he said Annie’s name was in her head and it wouldn’t go away.

  Maybe she should thank him for the mistake because only something that hideous could have brought her back to earth before she made an even bigger fool of herself.

  At least she hadn’t said anything ridiculous. Nothing that would come back to haunt her for the rest of her life and somehow end up on the front page of The Shelter Rock Cove Gazette. She had somehow managed to gather up all of her unruly emotions and hold them tightly to her. Lust was easy to explain away; emotion was almost impossible. The world looked very different when you were naked and horizontal with your body throbbing pleasantly in some unfamiliar places.

  Like your heart?

  Now, there was a thought to push as far away as possible.

  She inched the covers down and slid toward the edge of the bed, wincing at the sound of her naked limbs moving across his crisp cotton sheets. Even her heartbeat sounded too loud. How he could sleep through the racket she was making was beyond her, but his breathing remained regular and his eyes didn’t flicker open and she was old enough to know her luck wouldn’t hold forever. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He didn’t move a muscle. Moving quickly, she gathered her clothes from the floor and the wing chair in the corner of the room, fished her heels from under the armoire, then darted for the bathroom.

  * * *

  Hall Talbot opened his eyes as soon as he heard the bathroom door swing shut. The room was dim, bathed in shadow. The nest of robins outside his window was silent. He peered at the clock on his nightstand: 4:52, it read, in screaming green flashes of light that made his eyeballs ache. You were in bad shape when your clock made you feel like you were strapped to the nose cone of an Atlas rocket that was about to lift off inside your skull.

  He hadn’t felt like this since he was an intern pulling seventy-two-hour shifts. What the hell was going on? It wasn’t flu season. He hadn’t sustained a head injury. There was no reason for feeling like roadkill.

  Or was there?

  His skin smelled faintly of carnations and woman. He had dreamed about a woman last night, about long legs and soft skin, about losing himself in her warmth and wanting to stay lost. Was it possible he hadn’t been dreaming? His sheets were rumpled and the other side of the bed was warm beneath the flat of his hand. Bits and pieces from the night before began to swim to the surface: Kerry Amanda Butler’s christening; single-malt Scotch at the Spruce Goose; a bottle of champagne on his back porch; Ellen’s long elegant legs wrapped around his waist; the sweet taste of her mouth; the way he called out Annie Butler’s name when—

  Shit. He’d been hoping that part was nothing but one of those caught-naked-walking-down-Main-Street dreams, but the echo rang loud and clear. The funny thing was—if anything about the situation was funny—that he hadn’t been thinking about Annie at all. For the first time in years, he had been completely there with a woman, completely into the moment, and wouldn’t you know his damn champagne-fueled subconscious had to rear its head and hit Ellen right between the eyes.

  What the hell had he been thinking when he asked her in for a drink? He was old enough to know where those things usually led. He could take the easy way out and blame the single-malt, but Scotch usually made him more circumspect. She deserved better. There was no doubt about that. He had been on the wrong side of a triangle for most of his adult life, and he wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But something had been different yesterday, from the moment she swung by the hospital to pick him up for the christening. Maybe it was the way she looked in her party dress, like a summer flower, or maybe it was the soft sound of her laughter as she held Kerry Amanda in her arms.

  He had seen her face minutes after Kerry came into the world. He had seen the look of wonder, of joy, the kind of look you saw in Renaissance paintings but not in the postmodern, post-everything world.

  The rest of the crowd in Annie Butler’s garden faded away and he saw only Ellen, heard only her voice.

  He didn’t know what impulse on her part had brought her into his bed, but he had been deeply grateful for it, grateful for her warmth, and her kindness, and the way she moved beneath him. Grateful for everything that made her who she was.

  He never mixed work and pleasure, never lost sight of the importance of his vocation, or of what he owed the women who entrusted their lives and the lives of their unborn babies into his care. That was what had prompted his decision three years ago to find a partner. Young couples had been moving into Shelter Rock Cove faster than new housing could keep pace, and with them came a rapid rise in the birthrate that had tripled his workload before he knew what hit him. If he wanted to continue to give his patients the care and attention they deserved, he realized he would have to bring in a partner.

  He had interviewed candidates from every part of the state, and while they all came with impeccable qualifications, none seemed the right fit. He had seriously considered a woman from Boston, but her reluctance to commit to life in a small shore town forced him to rule her out. Just when he was about to put aside
the search for a few months, Ellen showed up and his problems were solved. Nobody was more surprised than Hall when the perfect partner turned out to be a tall, reed-slim New Yorker with curly red hair and the uncanny ability to charm even his most straitlaced Yankee patients with her dry humor and gentle hands. He had worried about the old guard’s reaction, but for the most part even the dowagers of Shelter Rock had accepted Ellen. Maybe not as one of their own but definitely as a welcome addition. Even Claudia Galloway finally broke down and stopped canceling appointments if it meant seeing his partner rather than him.

  Progress came slowly to small New England towns, but when it came in the guise of someone like Ellen, it couldn’t be denied, not even by those who could trace their lineage back three hundred years just by walking past the cemetery behind the church.

  She was part of the community. Part of the clubs and fundraisers, welcome at church barbecues even though she didn’t attend the church in question, a familiar face at parties and parades, christenings and funerals. She had earned their friendship, their trust, and their respect. No small thing in a town like Shelter Rock Cove.

  And now, with one act of supreme selfishness, he had put all of that into jeopardy.

  He had to do something or say something, but the question was what? As well as he knew her, there was much about Ellen that remained a mystery. This wasn’t your standard morning-after where you shared one of Dee Dee’s doughnuts and French roast on the back porch while the day unfolded itself before you. The moment he had uttered Annie’s name, he had seen to that.

  Would she be casual about it, as if they had shared nothing more than dinner and conversation? He doubted it. They knew each other too well to play games. Maybe they should go for a walk on the beach and he could somehow find a way to apologize to her. Apologies of that sort were tricky beasts. He’d seen too many heartfelt apologies backfire, heaping embarrassment upon the one who least deserved it. Or he could lie there pretending to be asleep while she let herself out of his house and delay the moment of accountability, but that was the coward’s way out and she deserved better.