Stanley studied him for a full minute without saying anything—an eternity, Eben thought. Finally Stanley’s mouth lifted slightly in what Eben supposed passed for a smile.
“Come to dinner tonight. Seven o’clock. Bring your daughter.”
Eben gave a mental groan. Of all the things he might have expected, that was way down at the bottom of his list. It was also the one thing he did not want to do. The way things were going, Chloe would pitch a fit and destroy any chance he had of making this deal.
This was one more hoop the Wus were making him jump through. Perhaps one too many.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Chloe’s only eight. Her manners are not exactly what you might call impeccable.”
“Bring her,” Stanley said sternly. “My father used to say, if you want to know the health of the tree, study the fruit.”
Eben had to fight to keep from banging his head on the conference table a few times as he felt his chances for buying The Sea Urchin slipping through his fingers like sand.
This was a certifiable nightmare. His entire plans—all the months of study and work—hinged on the table manners of a moody, unpredictable eight-year-old girl.
He should just tell the man to go to hell. Eben had worked harder on this deal than anything in the dozen years since he took over at the helm of Spencer Hotels. If it wasn’t enough for Stanley Wu, so be it.
Even as he opened his mouth to tell the man to forget the whole thing, something stopped him.
“Of course,” he found himself murmuring instead, at the same moment a germ of an idea sprouted.
He thought of Chloe a few nights before at dinner, how polite and patient she had been while they ate vegetarian lasagna at Brambleberry House. If he could somehow replicate that behavior, there was a tiny—miniscule—chance he might pull this off.
Sage’s presence had made all the difference. She had some uncanny moderating effect on Chloe’s misbehavior. If she could distract his daughter long enough, convince her to behave for one simple evening, perhaps all hope was not completely lost.
“Do you mind if I bring along a guest?” he asked before he gave himself time to think it through.
Stanley studied him across the conference table. “What guest is this?”
How exactly did he explain? “My daughter and I have befriended a Cannon Beach resident, Sage Benedetto. I would like to bring her along, if it would be acceptable to you and Mrs. Wu.”
This time the cool look in the other man’s eyes was replaced with the first genuine smile Eben had seen there. “Ah. Sage. Yes. A beautiful woman always improves the digestion.”
“More wisdom from your father?”
Stanley laughed. “I don’t need my father to tell me this truth. I have eyes, don’t I?”
“Uh, right.”
“So you will come for dinner and bring your daughter and our friend Abigail’s beautiful wild rose, yes?”
“Yes,” he answered.
Now he just had to convince Sage.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Now remember, what’s the most important tide-pool rule?”
“Look but don’t touch!” the six campers in her group recited as one and Sage beamed.
“Exactly right. The rocky shore ecosystem is very fragile and you never know what harm you could do even by picking up a piece of kelp. It’s much better just to take pictures and look. All right, everybody grab your disposable cameras and let’s start recording our observations.”
The kids broke off into their pre-assigned teams of two and, chattering with excitement, headed on their field assignments to record as many tide-pool creatures as they could find.
Sage watched their eager faces and had to smile. This was close to her idea of a perfect day. The sun, making a brief appearance between storms, was bright and warm on her face, the water a spectacularly beautiful shade of deep olive. She had a bright group of children soaking in knowledge like little sea sponges.
For the next half hour, she wandered through the three teams, answering questions, making observations, pointing them toward species they may have missed: tiny porcelain crabs and Hopkin’s roses.
She loved it out here. She didn’t need anything else, certainly not any sharp-eyed executives who smelled like heaven and kissed like a dream.
She pushed thoughts of Eben away—again—and focused on the tide-poolers until her stopwatch beeped, then she gathered them around to compare notes.
“Excellent job, all of you. You’re now official junior naturalists for Cannon Beach.”
“Ms. B., when can we have the crab race? You promised you’d let me whip your butt this year.”
She laughed at Ben Harder, one of Tracy’s twins. “Excuse me, but I believe I promised I would let you try to whip my butt. Big difference there, kiddo.”
“When? Can we do it now?”
She checked her watch. They had split the campers into two groups so they didn’t stress the tide-pool residents with too much attention at once. Lindsey had the other group down the beach flying kites and they weren’t due to switch places for another twenty minutes.
“Okay. Crab races it is. We need start and finish lines.”
Two of the boys found a piece of driftwood and charted a race course of about thirty feet—far too long in Sage’s book, but the children insisted they could go that far.
Her idea was for one-on-one races, but eventually everybody wanted to compete against her and it turned into a free-for-all.
It was a fight to the finish but she came in a respectable third—behind Ben Harder and Leilani Stein. At the finish line, panting and aching, she collapsed into the sand. How did she seem to forget every year until the first camp of the summer how blasted hard it was to walk backward on her hands and feet? It took her abs all summer long to relearn how to crab race.
“Good race,” she said, gasping. “But I think you got a head start.”
“No way,” Ben exclaimed. “It was totally fair!”
“Need a hand up?”
At the low, masculine voice, Sage opened her eyes and found Eben standing over her, his hand outstretched.
Her heart gave a sharp kick in her chest at his features silhouetted in the sunshine. He looked gorgeous in a pair of khaki slacks and a casual cotton shirt.
Of course he would. She was hot and sweaty and probably smelled like a tide-pool again. She wanted to burrow into the sand like a geoduck clam. Instead, she released a tiny sigh, reached for his hand and let him help her to her feet.
“I have to say, the kid’s right. It looked fair to me. If anybody jumped the gun, I think it was you.”
She brushed sand off her butt. “Whose side are you on?”
He grinned and she forgot to breathe. She had no idea he could look so lighthearted. It was a disturbing revelation.
“Did you need Chloe?” she asked to cover her reaction. “Her group is down the beach. See the kites down there?”
“No. I saw them first and already stopped to talk to her,” he answered. “Your assistant—Lindsey, I think is her name—told me I could find you out here.”
Note to self, she thought, remind Lindsey not to send gorgeous men out searching for me when I’m crab-walking in the sand.
She pushed wind-tossed hair out of her face. “Is there some problem with Chloe?”
“In a way.”
His temporary lightheartedness seemed to slide away again and he shifted a little, looking suddenly uncomfortable.
She had no idea what he wanted and he didn’t seem in any big hurry to enlighten her. “Do you need me to keep her after camp ends again?” she said, hazarding a guess. “It’s really no problem.”
“It’s not that.” He let out a long breath. “The truth is, I need to ask a huge favor and I’m not sure quite how to go about it.”
The kids i
n her group seemed happy enough with continuing their crab races so she led him down the sand a little. “Just ask, Eben.”
“You make it sound easy.” He paused. “All right. Will you come to dinner at The Sea Urchin tonight?”
She gave a surprised laugh. “This is your huge favor? Inviting me to dine at the finest restaurant on the northern coast? By the tone of your voice, I was expecting you to ask me to donate a kidney or something.”
“That might be less painful in the long run. The truth is, I need help with Chloe. Stanley has invited me to dinner tonight.” He paused. “No, that’s not right. There was no invitation involved. He ordered me to come to dinner tonight and to bring Chloe along. Apparently, before the man will make a final decision to trust me with his hotel, he wants to see how I interact with my daughter.”
Sage flushed, embarrassed that she had initially allowed herself to feel flattered, to imagine he might have been asking her on a date. “And how do I fit into the picture?”
“You’re so good with Chloe. With you, she’s a different girl. She’s polite and well-mannered. Happy. I need her to be on her best behavior and you seem to bring the best out in her where I seem to usually have the opposite effect.”
It was ridiculous to feel this hurt that spread out from her stomach like the paralyzing venom of a jellyfish sting.
“So you’re inviting me as your daughter’s handler in order to help you clinch the deal?”
He winced. “Put like that, it sounds pretty damn nervy, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” she clipped off the word.
“I’m asking you to help me for one night. This is important to me. You have the magic touch with Chloe. Everything seems to go more smoothly when you’re around. Please, Sage. It’s one night.”
All her instincts cried out for her to tell him to go to hell. She thought of that kick in her heart when she first saw him. How ridiculous. She was allowing herself to have feelings for a man who only viewed her as a convenient caregiver for his daughter.
With every ounce of her, she wanted to tell him no. She even started to form the word, but her mouth seemed to freeze.
She couldn’t do it.
He wanted The Sea Urchin desperately—he had made no secret of that—and she cared about him and about Chloe enough that some part of her wanted to help him reach his goal.
Four days ago she might have scoffed and told him to go back to his business meetings and his conference calls. But that was before she had come to know him.
The truth was, she had become convinced Spencer Hotels would be good for Cannon Beach and The Sea Urchin. Abigail must have thought so or she never would have suggested the idea. It seemed a betrayal of her friend to refuse to help Eben simply because some foolish part of her hoped he wanted more from her than etiquette lessons for his daughter.
“Please,” he repeated.
She was going to bleed from a thousand gashes in her heart when he and Chloe left. Helping him tonight would only accelerate that inevitable heartbreak. She knew it perfectly well, could already feel the ache, but from somewhere deep she still managed to dredge up a smile.
“What time?”
The pure delight on his face almost broke her heart right there. “Seven. Will that work for you?”
Her mind raced with the million things she would have to do between the time she finished work and seven o’clock. Foremost was the purely feminine lament that she had nothing to wear and no time to run to her favorite vintage boutique in Portland to find something.
“If Anna’s home to stay with Conan, it should be fine.”
He reached for her hands and she was certain if they weren’t standing on a public beach in broad daylight with a hundred other people, he would have kissed her right then.
“My debt to you seems to grow larger by the minute. Somehow I’ll find a way to pay you back, I swear it.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you at seven.”
“No, no, no!” Sage wailed, her breath coming in short gasps as she pedaled hard up the hill toward Brambleberry House. With one hand on the handlebars, she used the other to hold her umbrella over the dress that had just cost her an entire week’s paycheck.
It was wrapped in plastic but she bemoaned every single raindrop that made it around the umbrella to splatter against her precious cargo. The whole dress was going to be ruined, she just knew it. Worse, her hair was drenched and would take hours to dry.
She had exactly forty-five minutes to ride the half-mile home and to shower and primp for her dinner with Eben and Chloe and the damn pouring rain wasn’t making this any easier.
She could barely see and didn’t have a spare hand to wipe the rain out of her eyes and she lived in mortal dread her tires were going to slip in the mud at the shoulder of the road and dump her and the dress.
A vehicle drove slowly past and she shifted the umbrella over the dress until it was almost vertical like a warrior’s shield, just in case the driver hit a puddle and splattered it everywhere.
Instead, the vehicle slowed even further, then she saw brakelights through the rain. She could barely make out that the truck belonged to Will Garrett until the driver’s door opened and he climbed out.
“Get in,” he called. “I’ll throw your bike in the back of the truck and drive you the rest of the way home.”
“I’m almost there.”
“Get in, Sage. It’s not safe for you to be riding your bike in these conditions. It’s slick and visibility is terrible, though I have to say, the bright pink umbrella does tend to draw the eye.”
She winced at the ridiculous picture she must make. “I bought a fancy new dress. I didn’t want it to get wet.”
Will’s eyes widened, but to her relief, he said nothing as he took the bicycle from her and effortlessly lifted it into the back while she rushed to open the passenger door. Inside the cab, she laid her dress carefully on the bench seat then climbed in behind it, closing her vivid umbrella.
Will’s heater blared full force and she relished the warmth seeping into her chilled muscles for the few moments before he joined her and pulled back onto the road toward Brambleberry House.
“Do I dare ask what’s up with the dress? It’s not your usual kind of thing, is it?”
She could feel her face flame. “I’m having dinner at the Sea Urchin tonight and it occurred to me I don’t have a lot of grown-up clothes to wear. I splurged a bit.”
She glanced at it, a sleek midnight blue dream of a dress shot through with the barest trace of iridescent rainbow thread. Splurge was a bit of an understatement. She had spent more on this one dress than she usually spent on clothes all year long. Her Visa balance would probably never recover.
It had been purely an impulse buy, too. She hadn’t really intended a whole new dress. Since she couldn’t make it to her favorite shop in Portland, she thought she would only take a quick look at some of the local stores on the off chance she might find a blouse on clearance she could wear with her usual black dress skirt.
She had just about given up on finding anything when she wandered into a new shop and saw this dress hanging in a corner.
The moment she saw it, she had fallen in love, despite the hefty price tag.
“So what do you think?” she asked Will.
He smiled ruefully. “I’m the wrong guy to ask. Afraid I’m not the best judge of that kind of thing. Robin used to throw a fit because I usually didn’t even notice when she bought something new.”
He didn’t often refer to his late wife or their life together and she could tell it still bothered him to do so because he quickly changed the subject.
“The Sea Urchin, huh? Hot date?”
If only. She burned with embarrassment again, remember her first conclusion when Eben asked her. “Not quite. I’m taking an eight-year-old. One of my day campers. Her dad is negotiatin
g with Stanley and Jade to buy the hotel and he and his daughter have been invited to dinner. Eben, in turn, invited me. They’re coming in exactly—” she glanced at her watch as they pulled into the Brambleberry House driveway “—forty minutes now.”
“You’d better hurry then. Run in and put on your fancy dress. I’ll put your bike away in the garage for you.”
On impulse, she leaned across her dress and kissed his cheek, smelling sawdust and sweat, a surprisingly pleasant combination.
“Thanks, Will. I owe you. Come for dinner next week, okay?”
“As long as there’s no tofu on the menu.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She opened her umbrella, clutched her dress to her as if it were spun gold—a fair description, really, penny for penny—and dashed out into the rain.
She reached the porch just as Anna opened the door to let Conan out. The dog barked a greeting, but to her vast relief he didn’t jump all over her in his usual away, almost as of the uncanny beast knew she didn’t have time to play.
“That looks like something fabulous,” Anna exclaimed, gazing at the dress. “Let’s see.”
Sage held it up, gratified by Anna’s moan of appreciation.
“Gorgeous!” she exclaimed. “What’s the occasion?”
“I’m having dinner at The Sea Urchin tonight with Eben and Chloe.”
Anna gave her a careful look, then smiled. “Do you have any jewelry to match?”
Ha. After buying the dress, her budget barely stretched to a new pair of pantyhose. “I’ll find something.”
“Don’t forget we have Abigail’s whole glittery collection to choose from. Go get dressed and I’ll bring her jewelry box up and see what we can dig out.”
Sage raced up the stairs two at a time. This excitement pumping through her was only adrenaline, she told herself, just a normal reaction to her urgency and the ever-ticking clock.
She hadn’t been on a date in a long time. Did this qualify, since Chloe would be along? Probably not. But she still couldn’t shake the bubbling anticipation and she took the fastest shower on record.
The House on Cannon Beach Page 13
