Reunion on Rocky Shores Read online

In a million years, he never would have expected a hippie-chick like Sage to fall for a California businessman like Eben Spencer but somehow they seemed to fit together.

  Sage was more at peace than he’d ever known her, settled in a way he couldn’t explain.

  She was one of his closest friends and had been since she moved to town five years ago and found herself immediately drawn into Abigail’s orbit. He loved her as a little sister and he knew she deserved whatever joy she could find.

  He wanted to be happy for her—and most of the time he was—but every once in awhile, seeing the love and happiness that seemed to surround her and Eben when they were together was like a slow, relentless trickle of acid on an open wound.

  Despite knowing Julia was inside, he was relieved as hell when they reached the top of the stairs and turned into the apartment.

  “Oh, my Stickley! We bought that when I was pregnant with the twins. I know the apartment is furnished but I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Thank you so much for carrying that heavy thing all that way! That goes right here by the window so I can sit in it at night and watch the moonlight shining on the ocean.”

  He set it down, his mind on the rocking chair he had made Robin when she was pregnant with Cara. It was still sitting in the nursery along with the toddler bed he had made, gathering dust.

  He really ought to do something with the furniture. Sage would probably know somebody who could use it….

  Not today, he thought abruptly. He wasn’t ready for that yet.

  He turned on his heel and headed back down the stairs to retrieve that mysterious blanket-wrapped item. When he reached the U-Haul, he stood for a moment studying it, trying to figure out what it might be—and how best to carry it up the Brambleberry House stairs—when the enticing scent of cherry blossoms swirled around him.

  “It’s a dollhouse.” Julia spoke beside him in a low voice and he automatically squared his shoulders, though what he was bracing for, he wasn’t quite sure.

  “My father made it for me years ago. My…late husband tried to fix it up a little for Maddie but I’m afraid it’s still falling apart. I really hope it survived the trip.”

  So she was a widow. They had that in common, then. He cleared his throat. “Should we take the blanket off?”

  She shrugged, which he took for assent. He unwrapped the cord and heard a crunching kind of thud inside. Uh-oh. Not a good sign. With a careful look at her and a growing sense of trepidation, he pulled the blanket away and winced as Julia gasped.

  Despite her obvious efforts to protect the dollhouse, the piece hadn’t traveled well. The construction looked flimsy to begin with and the roof had collapsed.

  One entire support wall had come loose as well and the whole thing looked like it was ready to implode.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, though the words seemed grossly inadequate.

  “It’s not your fault. I was afraid it wouldn’t survive the trip. Oh, this is going to break Maddie’s heart. She loved that little house.”

  “So did you,” he guessed.

  She nodded. “For a lot of reasons.” She tilted her head, studying the wreckage. “You’re the carpentry expert. I don’t suppose there’s any way I can fix this, is there?”

  He gazed down at her, at the fading rays of the sun that caught gold strands in her hair, at the sorrow marring those lovely features for a lost treasure.

  He gave an inward groan. Dammit, he didn’t want to do this. But he was such a sucker for a woman in distress. How could he just walk away?

  He cleared his throat. “If you want, I could take a look at it. See what I can do.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t ask that of you.”

  “You didn’t ask,” he said gruffly.

  She sent him a swift look. “No. I didn’t.”

  “I’m kind of slammed with projects right now. It might take me awhile to get to it. And even then, I can’t make any guarantees. That’s some major damage there. You might be better just starting over.”

  She forced a smile, though he could see the sadness lingering in her eyes. Her father had made it for her, she had said. He didn’t remember much about her father from their summers in Cannon Beach, mostly that the man always seemed impatient and abrupt.

  “I can’t make any promises,” he repeated. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Oh, that would be wonderful. Thank you so much, Will.”

  Together, they gathered up the shattered pieces of the dollhouse and carried them to his truck, where he set them carefully in the back between his toolbox and ladder.

  “I’m happy to pay you for your time and trouble.”

  As if he would ever accept her money. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s see if I can fix it first.”

  She nodded and looked as if she wanted to say something more. To his vast relief, after a moment, she closed her mouth, then returned to the U-Haul for the last few boxes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Between the two of them, they were able to carry all but a few of the remaining boxes from the U-Haul up the stairs, where they found Sage and Julia pulling books out of boxes and placing them on shelves.

  “You’re all so wonderful to help me,” Julia said, gratitude coursing through her as she smiled at all three of them. “I have to tell you, I never expected such a warm welcome. I thought it would be weeks before I would even know a soul in Cannon Beach besides Abigail. I haven’t even started teaching yet but I feel as if I have instant friends.”

  Sage smiled. “We’re thrilled to have you and the twins here. And I think Abigail would be, too. Don’t you think, Will?”

  He set down the boxes. “Sure. She always loved kids.”

  “She was nothing but a big kid herself. Remember how she used to sit out on the porch swing for hours with Cara, swinging and telling stories and singing.”

  “I remember,” he said, his voice rough.

  Color flooded Sage’s features suddenly. “Oh, Will. I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t, Sage. It’s okay. I’d better get the last load of boxes.”

  He turned and headed down the stairs, leaving behind only the echo of his workboots hitting the wooden steps. Julia turned her confused gaze to Anna and Sage and found them both watching after Will with identical expressions of sadness in their eyes.

  “I missed something, obviously,” she said softly.

  Sage gave Anna a helpless look and the other woman shrugged.

  “She’ll find out sooner or later,” Anna said. “She might as well hear it from us.”

  “You’re right,” Sage said. “It just still hurts so much to talk about the whole thing.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” Julia said quickly. “I’m sorry if I’ve wandered into things that are none of my business.”

  Sage glanced down the stairs as if checking to see if Will was returning. When she was certain he was still outside, she turned back, her voice pitched low. “Will had a daughter. She would have been a couple years younger than your twins. Cara. That’s who I was talking about. Abigail adored her. We all did. She was the cutest little thing you’ve ever seen, just full of energy, with big blue eyes, brown curls and dimples. She was full of sugar, our Cara.”

  Had a daughter. Not has. An ache blossomed in her chest and she knew she didn’t want to hear any more.

  But she had learned many lessons over the last few years—one of the earliest was that information was empowering, even if the gaining of it was a process often drenched in pain.

  “What happened?” she forced herself to ask.

  Sage shook her head, her face inexpressibly sad. Anna squeezed her arm and picked up the rest of the story.

  “Cara was killed along with Will’s wife, Robin, two years ago.” Though Anna spoke in her usual no-nonsense tone, Julia could hear the pain threading through her words.

  “They were crossing the street downtown in the middle of the afternoon when they were hit by a drunk tourist in a motorhome,” she went on
. “Robin died instantly but Cara hung on for two weeks. We all thought—hoped—she was going to pull through but she caught an infection in the hospital in Portland and her little body was too weak and battered to fight it.”

  She wanted to cry, just sit right there in the middle of the floor and weep for him. More than that, she wanted to race down the stairs and hug her own precious darlings to her.

  “Oh, poor Will. He must have been shattered.”

  “We all were,” Sage said. “It was like a light went out of all of us. Will used to be so lighthearted. Like a big tease of an older brother. It’s been more than two years since Robin and Cara died and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him genuinely smile at something since then.”

  The ache inside her stretched and tugged and her eyes burned with tears for the teenage boy with the mischievous eyes.

  Sage touched her arm. “I’m so glad you’re here now.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Well, you’ve lost someone, too. You understand, in a way the rest of us can’t. I’m sure it would help Will to talk to someone who’s experienced some of those same emotions.”

  Julia barely contained her wince, feeling like the world’s biggest fraud.

  “Grief is such a solitary, individual thing,” she said after an awkward moment. “No one walks the same journey.”

  Sage smiled and pressed a cheek to Julia’s. “I know. But I’m still glad you’re here, and I’m sure Will is, too.”

  Julia was saved from having to come up with an answer to that when she again heard his footsteps on the stairs. A moment later, he came in, muscles bulging beneath the cotton of his shirt as he carried in a trio of boxes.

  He had erased any trace of emotion from his features, any sign at all that he contained any emotions at all. Finding out about his wife and daughter explained so much about him. The hardness, the cynicism. The pain in his eyes when he looked at Maddie.

  She had a wild urge to take the boxes from him, slip her arms around his waist and hold him until everything was all right again.

  “This is the last of it. Where do these go?”

  Her words tangled in her throat and she had to clear her throat before she could speak. “The top one belongs in my bedroom. The others are Simon’s.”

  With an abrupt nod, he headed first to her room and then to the one down the hall where Simon slept.

  He returned to the living room just as the doorbell downstairs rang through the house.

  “Hey, Mom!” Simon yelled up the stairs an instant later. “The pizza guy’s here!”

  Conan started barking in accompaniment and Julia rolled her eyes at the sudden cacophony of sound. “Are you sure about this? The house was so quiet before we showed up. If you want that quiet again, you’d better speak now while I’ve still got the U-Haul.”

  Sage shook her head with a laugh. “No way. I’m not lugging those books back down the stairs. You’re stuck here for awhile.”

  Right now, she couldn’t think of anywhere she would rather be. Julia flashed a quick smile to the other two women and Will, grabbed her purse, and headed down the stairs to pay for the pizza.

  Simon stood at the door holding on to Conan’s collar as the dog wriggled with excitement, his tail wagging a mile a minute.

  Her son giggled. “I think he really likes pizza, Mom.”

  “I guess. Maybe you had better take him into Anna’s apartment so he doesn’t attack the pizza driver.”

  With effort, he wrangled the dog through the door and closed the door behind him. Finally, Julia opened the door and found a skinny young man with his cap on backward and his arms full of pizza boxes.

  She quickly paid him for the pizza—adding in a hefty tip. She closed the door behind him and backed into the entry, her arms full, and nearly collided with a solid male.

  Strong arms came around her to keep her upright.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed to Will. “I didn’t hear you come down the stairs.”

  “You were talking to the driver,” he answered. He quickly released her—much to her regret. She knew she shouldn’t have enjoyed that brief moment of contact, but it had been so very long…

  She couldn’t help noticing the boy she had known now had hard strength in his very grown-up muscles.

  “I thought you said the trailer was empty,” she said with some confusion as he headed for the door.

  “It is. You’re done here so I’m heading home.”

  “You can’t leave!” she exclaimed.

  He raised an eyebrow. “I can’t?”

  She held out the boxes in her arms. “You’ve got to stay for pizza. I ordered way too much for three women and two children.”

  “Don’t forget Conan,” he pointed out. “He’s crazy about pizza, even though all that cheese is lousy for him.”

  “Knowing my kids, I’m sure he’ll be able to sneak far more than is good for him.”

  The scent of him reached her, spicy and male and far more enticing than any pizza smells. “I still have too much. Please stay.”

  He gazed at the door with a look almost of desperation in his eyes. But when he turned back, she thought he might be weakening.

  “Please, Will,” she pressed.

  He opened his mouth to answer but before he could, the door to Abigail’s apartment opened and Maddie peeked her head out, looking tousled and sleepy.

  “Can we come out now?” she asked.

  “As long as the dog’s not going to knock me down to get to the Canadian bacon.”

  At Maddie’s giggle, Julia saw a spasm of pain flicker across Will’s features and knew the battle was lost.

  “I really can’t stay.” He reached for the doorknob. “Thanks anyway for the invitation, but I’ve got a lot of work to do at home.”

  She couldn’t push him more, not with that shadow of pain clouding his blue eyes. Surrendering to the inevitable, she simply nodded. “You still need to eat. Take some home with you.”

  She could see the objections forming on his expression and decided not to take no for an answer. Will Garrett didn’t know stubborn until he came up against her.

  “What’s your pleasure? Pepperoni or Hawaiian? I’d offer you the vegetarian but I think Sage has dibs on that one.”

  “It’s not necessary, really.”

  “It is to me,” she said firmly. “You just spent forty-five minutes helping me haul boxes up. You have to let me repay you somehow. Here, I hope you still like pepperoni and olive.”

  His eyes widened that she would remember such a detail. She couldn’t have explained why—it was just one of those arcane details that stuck in her head. Several times that last summer, they’d gone to Mountain Mike’s Pizza in town with her brother and Will always had picked the same thing.

  “Maddie, can you hold this for a second?”

  She gave the box marked pepperoni to her daughter, then with one hand she opened it and pulled out half the pizza, which she stuck on top of the Hawaiian.

  He looked as if he wanted to object, but he said nothing when she handed him the box with the remaining half a pizza in it.

  “Here you go. You should have enough for dinner tonight and breakfast in the morning as well. Consider it a tiny way to say thank you for all your hard work.”

  He shook his head but to her vast relief, he didn’t hand the pizza back to her.

  “Mom, I can’t hold him anymore!” Simon said from behind the door. “He’s starving and so am I!”

  “You’d better get everyone upstairs for pizza,” Will said.

  “Right. Good night, then.”

  She wanted to say more—much more—but with a rambunctious dog and two hungry children clamoring for her attention, she had to be content with that.

  * * *

  Blasted stubborn woman.

  Will sat on his deck watching the lights of Cannon Beach flicker on the water as he ate his third piece of pizza.

  He had to admit, even lukewarm, it tasted delicious—probably a
fair sight better than the peanut butter sandwich he would have scrounged for his meal.

  He didn’t order pizza very often since half of it usually went to waste before he could get to the leftovers so this was a nice change from TV dinners and fast-food hamburgers.

  He really needed to shoot for a healthier diet. Sage was always after him to get more vegetables and fewer preservatives into his diet. He tried but he’d never been a big one for cooking in the first place. He could grill steaks and burgers and the occasional chicken breast but he usually fell short at coming up with something to go alongside the entree.

  He fell short in a lot of areas. He sighed, listening to the low rumble of the sea. He spent a lot of his free time puttering around in his dad’s shop or sitting out here watching the waves, no matter what the weather. He just hated the emptiness inside the house.

  He ought to move, he thought, as he did just about every night at this same time when the silence settled over him with like a scratchy, smothering wool blanket.

  He ought to just pick up and make a new start somewhere. Especially now that Julia Hudson Blair had climbed out of the depths of his memories and taken up residence just a few hundred yards away.

  She knew.

  Sometime during the course of the evening, Sage or Anna must have told her about the accident. He wasn’t quite sure how he was so certain, but he had seen a deep compassion in the green of her eyes, a sorrow that hadn’t been there earlier.

  He washed the pizza down with a swallow of Sam Adams—the one bottle he allowed himself each night.

  He knew it shouldn’t bother him so much that she knew. Wasn’t like it was some big secret. She would find out sooner or later, he supposed.

  He just hated that first shock of pity when people first found out—though he supposed when it came down to it, the familiar sadness from friends like Sage and Anna wasn’t much easier.

  Somehow seeing that first spurt of pity in Julia’s eyes made it all seem more real, more raw.

  Her life hadn’t been so easy. She was a widow, so she must know a thing or two about loss and loneliness. That didn’t make him any more eager to have her around—or her kids.

  He shouldn’t have made a big deal out of the whole thing. He should have just sucked it up and stayed for pizza with her and Sage and Anna. Instead, his kneejerk reaction had been to flee and he had given into it, something very unlike him.