The Cliff House Read online

  She had left her towel on the chaise next to his and she tried not to stare at his broad, muscled chest as they both dried off, or the network of ugly scars on his shoulder that had ended up changing his life. What would he do if she pressed her lips just there, to the biggest and ugliest of the scars?

  “How’s Stella doing with her big birthday?” Shane asked, obviously oblivious to her turmoil.

  She swallowed, appalled at herself. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “She has been acting really strange lately. Daisy thinks she’s hiding something from us.”

  “It’s not every day a person turns forty. Could be she’s taking it harder than you might have expected.”

  “Maybe.”

  She suspected there was more to it than simply another cycle around the sun, but Stella could sometimes be an enigma.

  “She was mad at me for not taking you along to her party. Apparently, you’re as much a part of her tribe as me or Mari or Daisy.”

  His mouth twisted into a smile as he pulled on a T-shirt from his NFL team and she tried not to be too disappointed as he hid all those glorious muscles.

  “How was your day?” she asked abruptly.

  “Good. The bedrooms are all framed and the drywall subcontractors are finally coming tomorrow.”

  “That’s terrific! That will make a big difference. The place is coming along.”

  “Yeah. It’s too bad we had so many delays with the plumbers’ and the electricians’ schedules. I would have liked to be out of your hair before the football season started, but we should be back on track now. Probably another month and I’ll be gone.”

  She wanted to tell him he wasn’t in her hair, nor was she in a big hurry to send him on his way. She couldn’t figure out how to say either of those things without sounding weird.

  “You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” she finally said.

  “I know. And I appreciate that. But friends try to be careful not to overstay their welcome.”

  “I’m just saying. If you want to wait until the season is over and you have more time to move back, it’s fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  He held her gaze long enough that she felt flustered and reached down to put on her flip-flop. Somehow she stepped on an uneven paving stone on the pool decking and started to lose her balance.

  Shane, with the reflexes he’d always had as a wide receiver, reached in to catch her like she had been thrown by Tom Brady himself.

  The heat and strength of him enveloped her and she froze, his face inches from hers. His shirt was damp from where he’d thrown it over his wet muscles, and she wanted to stay right here forever.

  Her gaze drifted to his mouth, firm and well shaped and beautifully familiar. She wanted to kiss him. Right now, even with Mari playing with the dogs on the stretch of grass outside the pool area.

  “Shane,” she began, not at all sure what she wanted to say after that one word. Whatever she intended was lost by the dogs’ sudden barks and her daughter’s exclamation.

  “Daddy!” Mari cried.

  If Shane hadn’t been holding Bea already, she would have toppled to the ground in shock.

  Cruz. Here? She whirled around and found the man, the legend, the last person on earth she wanted to see right now walking toward them.

  Out of all the moments out of any day, Cruz would naturally pick this particular one to make an entrance.

  “Hey, Mari Mia!”

  Shane’s arms tightened around her for just a moment before he helped steady her so she could stand on her own.

  “Hola, Beatriz, my lovely wife.”

  Ex-wife, she wanted to tell him. Don’t forget those all-important two letters.

  He didn’t look any happier to see Shane than vice versa. His long-lashed dark eyes seemed to go flat, his lean features to tighten.

  “And Landry. Hey. Fancy seeing you here.”

  “Shane lives here now,” Mari piped up, so very helpfully.

  Cruz greeted that information with a scowl. She probably should have mentioned that fact to him before now, she suddenly realized, especially where she was so very diligent about vetting everyone staying with Cruz when he had visitations with Mari.

  “Temporarily,” she said, then wished she hadn’t when Shane’s mouth firmed.

  She was suddenly annoyed with both of them for this dance they always did, circling around each other like bighorn sheep, ready to bang horns at any moment.

  “He’s renovating his father’s house next door to Stella’s and it was faster to move out so he could gut it and start over, rather than working room by room, living in a construction zone. The guesthouse has been sitting there empty, so I offered it to Shane while the work is being done.”

  She didn’t owe him any explanations. It wasn’t like anything was going on with her and Shane. Even if it were, she and Cruz had been divorced for years and she didn’t doubt her ex-husband had slept with plenty of women in that time. Tabloids like the one she had picked up earlier were always posting pictures of him with some young beauty or other.

  Shane was her oldest and dearest friend. If she wanted him to move into the guesthouse here at Felicidad permanently, Cruz had no right to object.

  “Are you okay, Daddy?” Mari asked, oblivious to the tension between the two men. “We’ve been so worried about you, ever since we heard you were attacked.”

  “I’m fine, mija. Just fine.”

  “The tabloids said you got stabbed. My friend Jamie said you almost died.”

  “That’s an exaggeration. I’ve told you not to pay attention to what you read online or in magazines. I just had a scratch. A couple of stitches, that’s it.”

  He sank down onto the comfortable glider next to their loungers and Mari sat down beside him, still holding his hand. “I’m not saying it wasn’t scary,” Cruz went on. “If it hadn’t been for a friend of mine who pushed me out of the way, things could have been much worse.”

  Like many celebrities, Cruz had plenty of acolytes and hangers-on, but she couldn’t imagine any of them risking their lives for him.

  “We tried to call you and left like a hundred messages.” Mari didn’t bother to hide her frustration with her father. A frustration Bea certainly shared.

  “I’m sorry, mija. Things have been crazy with all the press calling for comments, so I ended up turning off my phone and going silent. Lenny said he called you regularly with updates.”

  “He did,” Bea said. But hearing from a third party wasn’t enough when a girl was worried about her dad.

  She was familiar with that from firsthand experience and it made her heart ache that she and her daughter both knew what it was to suffer from parental neglect. Bea’s own father had been a piece of work. Unlike Daisy, Bea at least knew who her father was, but their relationship had been minimal.

  Her stepmother had disliked her intensely and made sure Steve Hidalgo devoted his time and energy to the children they shared and had as little to do with his love child as possible.

  That was the main reason she did all she could to keep Cruz in their lives. Girls needed their fathers, if at all possible. Without their influence, the scars from that neglect could lead them to do crazy things, like get pregnant when they were seventeen and marry their rocker boyfriends.

  Not that she knew anything about that.

  “Next time you’re stabbed, do a better job of updating those who are worried about you, okay?” Bea said.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “I’m here now, right?”

  “I guess.” Mari hugged him, always quick to forgive.

  “The good news is, I’ll be around for a while. I’m taking an extended break here at Casa Del Mar.”

  As usual, her desire for her daughter to have as healthy a relationship as possible with her father warred with Bea’s desire to live outside
the shadow of Cruz’s notoriety.

  “How long are you staying?” She had to ask. Forewarned was forearmed, right?

  He beamed at her and at Mari. “At least a month. Maybe longer. Won’t that be great?”

  Bea did her best not to gulp. “That long? Aren’t you in the middle of a concert tour?”

  “We have two weeks left for the new album. I postponed them and will make up the dates in the fall. My fans understand. After what happened in Dallas, I need a few weeks to recover.”

  Why did he have to recover here?

  She knew she hadn’t spoken aloud but he answered as if he read her mind. “I couldn’t imagine anywhere better to recharge my batteries than here in Cape Sanctuary, with my two favorite girls.”

  Shane made a sound that could have been a scoff or a laugh, she couldn’t quite tell. He wrapped the towel around his neck and reached a hand out to Cruz.

  “It’s good to see you, but I should go,” Shane said. “We’re working on some new plays for the season. I’m glad you weren’t seriously hurt.”

  “Any knife wound is serious. That’s what the doc says. The risk of infection is huge.”

  “Right. Well, let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Thanks for the game of hoops, Sunshine. You get better every time we play.”

  Mari beamed at him. “Night, Shane. I won’t rub it in your face that you lost, I promise.”

  “Thanks for sparing my feelings,” he said with a grin. He kissed the top of her head then leaned over to give Bea their usual hug.

  She could smell him, chlorine and shampoo and delicious male. To her surprise, he didn’t stop with a hug but kissed her cheek, and she fought a powerful urge to lift her mouth to his.

  Where on earth were all these strange impulses coming from?

  “Good night,” she murmured.

  “Night. Come on, Sal.”

  He waved to them all, then headed to the guesthouse on the edge of her property with his yellow Lab following after him.

  The place wasn’t huge, a one-bedroom with a separate combined kitchen and living room and a decent-size bathroom, but it was plenty big enough for one man and a dog, especially for only a few months.

  It had seemed a great idea a few months ago, the perfect solution when he needed somewhere to live during the renovation. In retrospect, she wished she’d never invited him to stay here at Felicidad. She wanted their friendship back.

  “I wish you’d told me he was living here,” Cruz said when Shane went inside the guesthouse and they, in turn, headed inside the main house.

  She sighed. “He’s not living with me. He’s living in the guesthouse, as you can clearly see. Farther away than when he lived next door to Three Oaks.”

  Even if Shane were living inside the main house, in one of the six bedrooms, she had more than enough room.

  It was too much house for only her and Mari. She knew that and some part of her wished she’d chosen differently when she was shopping for properties. But Daisy had advised her this was a good investment and she did love her studio that overlooked the ocean and had all the natural light she could ever want.

  As usual, though, she had been weak and let other people determine her destiny.

  “I’m going to change out of my swimming suit. I’ll be right back,” Mari said, hurrying off to her bedroom at the end of the hall, the one with the loft bed Shane had helped Bea build.

  “I bet Landry jumped at the chance to move here,” Cruz said when she was gone.

  She frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means. Shane has always had a thing for you.”

  What did Cruz see that she didn’t? Those strange butterflies seemed to flutter around again.

  “You’re crazy. He has not. We’re friends. Best friends. We have been since fifth grade.”

  Cruz scoffed. “Shane Landry wants more than friendship from you. You’re the only one who doesn’t see it.”

  He was wrong. He had to be. She’d been divorced for years. If Shane was interested in her, why didn’t he do anything about it? Sure, he had been busy with his NFL career then the injury that had ended it, then caring for his ailing father the past few years. But he had dated other women in that time. He certainly hadn’t shown the slightest inclination that he wanted to kick their relationship to another level.

  Cruz didn’t know what he was talking about. She wasn’t in the mood to argue with him, though.

  “Are you really planning to spend an entire month here in Cape Sanctuary? Mari will love it, but you can’t be away from your career that long, can you?”

  “My team understands that I need this. I want to spend more time with my family. My baby girl. I almost died, babe. That crazy bastard wanted me gone. When I close my eyes, I can still see him coming at me.”

  She couldn’t even imagine. “It must have been terrifying.”

  “That kind of thing messes with your head. I’ve had nightmares every night since it happened. I wanted to fly back here that night after they stitched me up to be with you and Mari but I didn’t feel right about leaving Gabe. That’s the guy who saved my life.”

  “Was he seriously hurt?”

  Cruz nodded, looking uncharacteristically grim. “It was touch and go for a while. He ended up losing part of his liver.”

  “Oh, no!” She’d had no idea things had been that grave for the man who had stepped in front of a knife for Cruz.

  “For a while there, the docs said he might need a transplant. I was going to offer, but we both know mine’s probably not in the best of shape.”

  He grinned but she didn’t find the comment at all amusing. His drinking and his recreational drug use were partly responsible for the breakup of their marriage, helped along by his chronic infidelity. Cruz, known as one of rock’s sexiest bad boys, had a tough time resisting his legion of groupies.

  He didn’t look particularly bad now, sprawled out on one of her kitchen chairs. “Turns out, they just removed the damaged part.”

  “Is he okay now?” Bea asked.

  “He’s out of the woods. That’s another reason I’m back. After he was released from the hospital, he needed a place to recover. I told him there was no better place on earth to recuperate than here in Cape Sanctuary. He’s back at the house.”

  Along with probably a dozen groupies and other hangers-on. The king of rock had to travel with his court.

  “I’d love you to meet him,” Cruz continued. “Both you and Mari.”

  “Before I can let her stay, you know I’ll need to have Peter run a background check on this Gabe person and everyone else who is here with you at Casa Del Mar.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She had made it a requirement of their custody agreement, that she needed to vet all the people who surrounded her famous ex-husband before exposing her daughter to any of them. Her attorney who handled that for her was on speed dial and she would call him in the morning.

  “I’ll get you the names,” Cruz said. They had been through this routine so many times that he only sounded a little annoyed. He understood by now that she was only concerned for their daughter’s safety.

  The circumstances of the past few weeks reinforced that her husband lived in a precarious, larger-than-life world where strangers could attack with hunting knives and change a person’s life forever.

  “Are you really okay?” Bea asked. She had loved Cruz once, as deeply and passionately as a teenage girl could. Even in her early twenties she had cared for him, until his success had changed him from the earnest, loving boy with the golden voice and poet’s soul to a man addicted to his fans and his fame.

  “I’m fine physically. Like I said, just a scratch.” He paused. “Emotionally and mentally, that’s another story. Coming this close to death, knowing I could check out at a moment’s notice...that has made me reevalu
ate everything.”

  “And what startling conclusions have you come up with?”

  “That I never should have agreed to our divorce,” he said bluntly.

  The words came out of nowhere and just about knocked her over. If they had still been standing by the pool, she might have toppled in.

  “Of course you should have. It was your idea in the first place! We were miserable together.”

  “I don’t remember being miserable. I remember being madly in love. You’ve always been the only one who gets me, babe.”

  She so did not want to have this conversation. Not when Mari could come back into the room at any moment.

  Once, this man had been everything to her. When she found out she was pregnant, she had been over the moon, couldn’t wait to run away with him to Los Angeles so they could get married and he could become the big star they both seemed to know was his fate.

  She had sacrificed everything for his music career. Even while pregnant and in the months after having Mari, she had worked three jobs, checking in a supermarket in the mornings, delivering pizzas in the afternoon and waiting tables at night.

  When his momentum started to build and he found representation that believed in their vision of him, too, they thought all their dreams had come true.

  She and Cruz might have made it work. There were certainly couples that could handle juggling a family and standing in the limelight, too, when one of them had a high-powered, very public career. Beatriz and Cruz Romero hadn’t been one of those couples.

  They started to fight about his drinking and drug use, about his friends, about the other women he couldn’t seem to resist.

  They had loved each other passionately, but little by little that love had dried up, until there had been nothing left but the empty husks of what they had once been to each other.

  Now, apparently, Cruz wanted to see if they could resurrect those seeds.

  “I want you and Mari in my life again,” he said with the same earnestness he brought to his ballads that made teenage girls everywhere go weak-kneed. “Every day. The three of us against the world. I want the chance to prove to you I’ve changed. I’m a different man than the one who let you go.”