Searching for Sunshine

by Linda Seed

  “Ah, shit. No, I’m not. But what the hell am I going to do with you?”

  Jake had gotten Sam from the animal shelter in Santa Maria a few months before, thinking it would be good to have a friend to keep him company after the implosion of his marriage. Sam had been just a puppy, a big guy as far as puppies went, but not so big as to be unmanageable.

  Jake had thought, How much bigger can he get?

  The folly of that question became clear as Sam doubled his weight over the next month and continued to shoot up in size at a rate Jake would have thought lacked credibility if he hadn’t seen it for himself.

  Now, when the dog went up on his hind legs, he was only a head or so shorter than Jake.

  The thought of finding him a new home had occurred to Jake more than once, but Sam was just so damned glad to see him every day when he came home. It was impossible to reject someone who gave you that kind of unconditional love—especially when you weren’t getting it from anyone else.

  Jake didn’t especially want to go for a walk right now—particularly one that involved him nearly getting his arm pulled out of its socket—but Sam had been inside all day, and the potting soil wasn’t the only mess Jake would have to clean up if he didn’t get the dog some outdoor time.

  Jake grabbed the leash, snapped it onto Sam’s collar, and barely had time to close the door before he was yanked down the front walk and toward the street.

  He mumbled a few choice words to the dog, grumbling about inconvenience, the dog’s impatience, and his own sorry fate. But within a few minutes, both he and Sam started settling into the walk, easing into a comfortable pace that felt good. After a long day of hard work, and getting some fresh air and stretching his legs wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as Jake had led the dog to believe.

  The neighborhood didn’t hurt, either. The streets surrounding Jake’s Cambria house were peaceful and tree-lined, with a view of the Santa Lucia Mountains to the east.

  Where he’d come from, everything was standard and uniform, a sea of nearly identical stucco houses marching side by side into infinity, the streets tidy and curb-lined and indistinguishable from one another. But here, each house had a kind of rugged individualism, a scruffy determination to defy conformity and forge its own identity.

  Jake passed over pavement that disappeared into overgrown green grass and wildflowers, heading up hills and past houses that ranged from the modern to the decrepit, from upscale architecture to 1920s bungalow.

  Here and there were large patches of undeveloped earth, green with grass and ferns and pine trees, roamed by deer and quail and wild turkeys.

  The air smelled like the ocean, which was less than a mile away. There were plenty of other smells, too, and Sam busied himself investigating them as they made their way along what had become their established route.

  Ed, a guy who lived two doors down, waved at Jake as they passed, and Jake waved back. That kind of thing had never happened in the concrete-lined suburbs of Los Angeles, where he’d lived until six months ago. Down there, the only time you talked to the neighbor was when the guy’s teenagers got out of hand and left beer cans on your lawn.

  Coming up here had been a new start. Setting down roots in an unfamiliar place had its benefits, but it also had its drawbacks. He didn’t miss the suburbs, the bland tedium, the pressure to keep your lawn green and mowed and your house looking just like everyone else’s. But he got lonely sometimes since his divorce had become final and his ex had gotten the tract house.

  He didn’t care about the house—not one bit—and he was likely better off without his ex. But he did miss having someone else at home, the sensation of not being alone. The reassurance that if he fell down the stairs and broke his neck, someone would be there to call 911.

  Now, if he fell down the stairs and broke his neck, it was likely that Sam would get desperate and eat him before anyone knew he was missing.

  As the two of them walked, Jake reflected that he had to find some way to get the dog’s behavior under control. Every day when he came home from work, Jake was treated to another display of Sam’s pique at having been left alone.

  One day, it was a chewed-up pair of shoes—a situation so stereotypical that Jake just considered it the cost of doing business. Then, he’d come home to find that all of the toilet paper in the house had been shredded into a snowstorm of confetti stretching from the living room into the back bedroom.

  Today it had been the plant, and Jake had also found a conspicuous set of teeth marks on the leg of one of the dining room chairs.

  It was time to do something.

  Jake wondered about bringing Sam with him when he started work on the Delaney place on Moonstone Beach. Yeah, that was doable. The lot was fenced, and the house was so much of a mess that if the dog did any damage, people would be hard-pressed to notice.

  He kind of liked the idea of it—man and dog together, loyal companions through the hard, manly labor of the workday.

  “What do you think, Sam? You want to come to work with me?” he asked as the dog peed on a clump of weeds.

  Sam wagged his tail encouragingly.

  Jake took that as a good sign.

  * * *

  Jake had not yet met Breanna Delaney, but he knew three things about her: She was filthy rich, she had a shit ton of connections all over the state, and she was attractive as hell.

  The first, he knew because it was common knowledge—everyone in Cambria knew. The second was a natural extension of the first; you didn’t get to be filthy rich without making connections. And the third, he’d discovered when he’d Googled her and found an array of pictures of her doing all of the things she did: attending local fund-raisers, speaking at a water board meeting, riding on a float in the Pinedorado Parade.

  It wasn’t that she was beautiful—not exactly. She looked a little too weathered by life, a little too hardened, to be beautiful. But with her dark eyes, her thick dark hair, and her full lips that looked like they were made to be kissed, Jake had found himself looking at her photo much longer than he otherwise might have.

  Despite her obvious appeal, he found himself predisposed against her simply because of the money. He’d met a lot of rich people in the course of his professional life, and most of them had been so full of themselves, so convinced of their basic superiority, that he’d wanted to punch them in the face.

  But the money and the connections were what had gotten him the job, so he would just have to put his natural prejudices aside for the sake of his livelihood.

  Jake had gotten the Moonstone Beach job without an interview and without having met his new client because Breanna’s brother Colin, a man with a long history of buying and developing property, had procured Jake’s services for his sister. It turned out Colin had been the money behind a project Jake had worked on a couple of years ago down in Los Angeles, and the man had been pleased with the results.

  Jake needed this job, not just because of the money but because he was still establishing himself in Cambria, and working for the Delaney family would go a long way toward building his reputation on the Central Coast.

  The morning he was to start work, he loaded Sam into his car, drove out to the job site, let himself in the front gate, and unsnapped Sam’s leash, letting the dog run with unbridled glee around the fenced property.

  Then he waited for Breanna to arrive so they could get the preliminaries out of the way and he could start rebuilding this hulking wreck of a house that, he had to admit, had good bones and could really be turned into something with a generous application of his own genius.

  Jake went into the house and started poking around, starting to get his own ideas about what should go where and why. He was upstairs looking out a dormer window when he saw the front gate open and Breanna Delaney step through, her purse slung over her shoulder and a takeout cup of coffee in her hand.

  “Jake, are you here? I’m sorry I’m late, I—”

  That was all she got out before she spotted the enormous bla
ck and white dog coming for her and her eyes widened in shock.

  “Oh, God. Sam! Sam! Down, boy!” Jake yelled through the open window. Sam had never responded to down, boy before, but Jake was an optimistic person by nature, so he gave it a shot.

  Sam, oblivious, barreled toward Breanna with a speed that seemed impossible in a creature so large, his doggy features arranged in bliss inspired by the promise of a new friend.

  From his vantage point, Jake couldn’t tell whether the takeout coffee went flying because of the impact, or because Breanna had hurled it skyward in fright.

  Either way, the beverage, Breanna, and the canine all hit the dirt—Breanna and Sam with a thud, the coffee with a wet smack.

  Jake took the stairs two at a time as he rushed down to assess the damage. He dashed out the front door and over to where the woman and the dog lay in a heap on the ground.

  “Shit. I’m sorry. Jeez. Down, Sam. Sam! Goddamn it.” Jake reached for Sam’s collar, planning to haul the dog off of Breanna by sheer brute force.

  Sam wagged his tail furiously, his huge body quivering with excitement, his giant, pink tongue all over Breanna’s face.

  Jake heard some noises coming from where Breanna was pinned beneath the dog. At first, he thought they were cries for help. Then, he wondered if maybe she was gasping for breath.

  It was only when he was right on top of them, the dog’s collar in his hands, that he realized she was laughing.

  Jake yanked the dog off of her, and Breanna sat up, her face alight with amusement. “Well, hello there,” she said to Sam. She reached out and rubbed the sides of the dog’s face with her hands, her fingers vanishing into the animal’s long fur.

  Jake had been braced for Breanna to yell at him, so this turn of events was perplexing. She rubbed the dog a little more, then Jake reached out a hand to help her up.

  “Sorry about your coffee,” he told her. “I can’t seem to make him stop doing that to people.”

  “He gave me a good scare,” Breanna said, letting Jake haul her to her feet, then brushing dirt off the seat of her jeans. “He’s huge.”

  She bent over and cooed at Sam the way people did with dogs: in a high, singsongy voice similar to the one they used with babies. “You’re a friendly guy, aren’t you?” she said. “Aren’t you? And you’re so pretty. Sooo pretty.”

  Sam’s tail swished so vigorously that it created wind.

  “I really … jeez. I’m really sorry,” Jake tried again.

  “No harm done,” Breanna said.

  “He’s been trashing my house, so I thought if I brought him to work …”

  “You’re going to be bringing him here? Every day? My boys will love him. You mind if I bring them over to meet him?” Breanna bent down to pick up her coffee cup, which had burst on impact with the ground.

  “You’re really not mad,” Jake said, more to himself than to her, as he rubbed the back of his neck.

  “I grew up on a ranch. I’ve been knocked down by animals more times than I can count. I’m not about to let an overly friendly dog rattle me. Even if he is the size of a horse.” She gave the dog a companionable scratch behind the ears.

  “Huh,” Jake said. “I guess I at least owe you a coffee, though.”

  “Yeah.” Breanna looked with regret at the puddle of coffee that was soaking into the ground. “I sprang for a caramel latte today. I’m kind of sorry to see it go.”

  All of the commotion over the dog had distracted Jake from the fact that he and Breanna had never actually met before this moment. He held out a hand to her. “Jake Travis.”

  “Breanna Delaney.” She shook his hand, amusement about the exuberance of his dog still lingering in her eyes.

  3

  They went inside and talked about the project, about his plans for tackling it, and about her vision for the property. She’d e-mailed him the architect’s drawings months ago when she’d first booked him for the job, so he was already familiar with what needed to be done.

  He’d dealt with rich clients before, and they usually didn’t have much interest in the details of how Jake went about his work. They just wanted it done. More often than not, he didn’t even deal with them directly—he dealt with an assistant or some other underling hired to handle the details so the client wouldn’t have to dirty his or her designer shoes by stepping onto a work site.

  But Breanna didn’t have designer shoes—she wore a battered pair of discount sneakers that looked like they were due for retirement.

  As they walked through the house together, going over what would be done to what and how, she asked good questions and seemed to listen carefully to his responses.

  “Okay, so …” He gestured toward a wall in the front parlor. “The plans say to take out this wall for a more open floor plan. But it’s a load-bearing wall, so that means I’m going to have to install a beam to create the support you’re going to need along the line of the ceiling.” He pointed with one finger toward the spot on the ceiling where the beam would go. “Unless …”

  “Unless what?” she asked.

  “Unless you’re open to another idea. I could put in an arch from about here”—he pointed—“to here, so you can get a more open feeling without undermining the structural integrity of the wall.”

  “An arch,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know open floor plans are the big thing right now”—he put air quotes around the big thing—“but I’m thinking you’ll want to maintain a feeling for the history of the house. You tear out that wall, and the downstairs is going to look like just another tract house—the kind they put up by the thousands all over Southern California, which, along with the strip malls and the fast-food places and the mattress superstores, have turned the entire southern half of the state into a soul-sucking purgatory.”

  “A soul-sucking purgatory,” she repeated.

  “Well … yeah.”

  He hadn’t meant to make a speech, but once it was out, he realized how right he was. This house—mess that it was—had been something beautiful in its glory days, a stalwart but graceful matriarch overlooking her domain on the rugged coastline. Changing her character, forcing her to be something she wasn’t, would be so disrespectful to the essence of this place that if Breanna couldn’t see it, then she didn’t deserve the house in the first place.

  Breanna walked to the wall where the arch would be and looked at it for a while. Then she went into the adjoining room where the arch would lead, and looked at that. Jake followed her, becoming more and more determined to convince her of the error of her blasphemous open floor plan.

  “Hmm.” Breanna came back out into the parlor, where they’d started the discussion.

  Sam came into the house, having finished investigating some smells in the yard, and sat down next to Breanna, leaning his heavy body into her left leg. She reached down and scratched his head, still looking intently at the wall.

  “Look. If you want something contemporary, there are a thousand beachfront houses that will do the job much better than this one,” Jake said. “But this town isn’t about contemporary. It’s about history, and the land, and preserving the sensibilities of the people who came before. It’s—”

  “You’re mansplaining.” Breanna shifted her gaze from the wall to Jake.

  “I … What?”

  “Jake, my family has lived in Cambria for more than 150 years. But I’d love to hear more about what this town is about.” She raised her eyebrows and waited.

  Had he been mansplaining? Embarrassed, he realized he had.

  “I’m an ass,” he said.

  “Well …”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to claim that I know more about this area than you do. It’s just that this house is a beauty. I mean, it’s a disaster at the moment, but …” Stop talking, Jake, he told himself. Just shut your damned face hole.

  When he looked at her, he expected to see scorn and irritation. Instead, she was smiling.

  “You think the house is beautiful,” she
said.

  He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, confused about whether his ass was still in the doghouse or not. Strangely, it seemed not, though he wasn’t sure why.

  “The house? Oh, hell yeah. Look at these ceilings. Look at the woodwork. The lines—classic but with character. This place was really something back in the day. And it will be again, once I’m done with it.”

  She looked at him appraisingly, a half grin on her face.

  “What?” he asked her.

  “When most people see this place, they think I was crazy for buying it and try to convince me to tear it down.”

  “Tear it down?” Jake was appalled. “Of all the dumbass, short-sighted—”

  “That’s how I felt.” Breanna bent down and rubbed Sam’s side with gusto. “Let’s go with the arch,” she told Jake.

  They continued to tour the property, and when they came to the detached two-bedroom cottage toward the back of the lot, Jake asked, “So … what are you going to do with the guest house? It’d make a nice rental.”

  “I don’t know yet.” She couldn’t quite see herself as a landlady, but at the same time, it would be a shame for the cottage to sit empty.

  It was something to think about.

  * * *

  Breanna’s meeting with Jake had her emotions going in several directions at once. First came the initial terror of being thrown to the ground by the biggest dog she’d ever seen—before she’d realized Sam’s harmless intentions. Then came the combination of thrill and discomfort when she’d found that Jake was startlingly attractive, with his deep blue eyes, his unruly dark hair, and the big lumberjack thing he had going on—he was at least six-foot-three and had to be twice Breanna’s weight, all of it solid man.

  Next, she’d felt irritation when he had tried to explain the spirit of Cambria to her, a lifelong native with roots in the town that went back generations. And finally, there was the warm, dopey, over-the-moon feeling that came with knowing he saw the house the same way she did.