Summer on Mirror Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  Despite having failed with Grinch Mannion, having already gotten his sister, brother-in-law, parents and uncle on board, she decided to drop into the pub and try one more victim. Candidate.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to show up,” Quinn said before she’d had an opportunity to pitch her idea of the brewery tours.

  “Did Gabriel call you?” Damn. Just saying the man’s name caused heat to rise in her cheeks. Chelsea hoped that the light was dim enough in the pub for him not to notice.

  “No. Was he supposed to?”

  “No. I just thought, since I was at the boat shop before I came here, he might...” She stopped and corralled her whirling, rebellious mind, which, for the first time, had her fully understanding the term herding cats. “I thought he might have warned you,” she said, punctuating her words with a smile to assure Quinn that all was hunky-dory and she had the situation well in hand.

  “You’ve become one of the main topics of conversation in here over the past few weeks,” he said.

  “I have?”

  “Yep. Would you like something to drink?”

  “I’ll take a glass of wine,” she decided. If nothing else, it might soothe nerves still rattled from her encounter with his brother at the boathouse. “Anything dry and white will be fine.”

  “You’ve got it.” He pulled a bottle from a fridge beneath the counter, and poured the wine into a glass which he put on a green coaster with Mannion’s printed in white script in front of her.

  She took a sip of the crisp, pale gold Washington State sauvignon blanc and allowed herself a moment of relaxation. “I like it,” she said. “So,” she forged on. “Please tell me that the conversation is mostly good.”

  “All good,” he assured her. “Want something to eat with that?”

  “An order of wings sounds great,” she decided, remembering she’d been so busy today, she’d forgotten to eat lunch. And Quinn Mannion was known all over the peninsula not just for his beer, but his wings. “The chili lime ones. With sweet potato fries.” A former Olympic athlete from the University of Oregon had opened Honeymoon Harbor’s first fitness center in February, and Chelsea vowed to do an extra twenty minutes on the damn stair stepper before work tomorrow morning. That exercise wouldn’t make up for the calories, but at least she’d feel a bit more virtuous.

  As soon as he put the order in the window behind him to the kitchen, Jarle pulled it off its clip. Which, now that she’d lost the possibility of the ship, had her rethinking her idea to ask the cook if he’d share some Norse tales. But the pub was beginning to fill up with the dinner crowd, and not wanting to interrupt service, she opted to wait.

  “Let me guess,” Quinn said. “You want me to give your library kids a tour of the brewery and explain the process.”

  “Only the older kids,” she assured him.

  “Okay.”

  “That’s it?”

  He flashed a devastatingly male grin that didn’t affect her nearly as much as his brother’s near glower. Having lived through enough drama in her early years, Chelsea had always been attracted to safe, easygoing men. Nice men. Men like Quinn Mannion. His brother Gabriel, she sensed, was not. Yet that hadn’t prevented a physical reaction so strong that at first she thought the town might have been experiencing an earthquake. Which, along with volcanic eruptions and tidal surges, was one of the risks of living on the Ring of Fire. At the time she felt as if she’d been simultaneously hit by all three, which had her considering yet again that she may have overdosed on the Brontë sisters.

  “That’s the plan... You’re a lot easier than your brother. He turned me down flat.”

  His answering laugh was rich and warm and drew the glances of a trio of women who appeared to be a mother, daughter and granddaughter, demonstrating his multigenerational appeal. Easygoing he might be. But like all the Mannion men, he should be required to wear a warning label. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

  “I meant it as one,” she assured him. “Though I haven’t given up on your brother. I’m hoping, once he learns that you’ve signed on, he might allow the kids to at least look at the faering. From a safe distance.”

  “Could happen.” His tone was mild, but she saw the skepticism in his blue eyes. “Even without the Viking boat, it sounds like you’re going to have a dynamite program.”

  “I’m trying my best to make it both fun and informative.”

  Although no one had said it to her face, Chelsea knew that there were those in town who, after she’d spent a year on the job, were still waiting to see if she was living up to Lillian Henderson’s decades-long tenure as head librarian. Despite the town having been renamed in the early 1900s to honor European royals who were visiting the peninsula on their honeymoon trip across America, there were many residents, like the annoyingly negative Janet, who steadfastly balked at any idea of change.

  Well, Chelsea decided as Jarle came out of the kitchen and placed her wings and crispy browned orange fries in front of her, she was just going to have to drag any resisters along with her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GABE WAS STILL thinking about Honeymoon Harbor’s librarian as he sat back out on his deck overlooking Mirror Lake, as he’d taken to doing after working at the shop. It was a perfect summer evening on the peninsula. The bright blue sky was dotted with just enough puffy white cumulus clouds to keep the temperature in the low eighties, which had brought more people out. A white sailboat with a diagonal rainbow-striped sail skimmed along the water, while two energetic kayakers paddled closer to the eleven-mile shore. Farther out, The Sea Wolf, a forty-foot commuter harkening back to the pre-WWII golden age of wooden boats, took passengers on a dinner cruise, leaving ripples in the crystal blue surface as it cut across the lake.

  It crossed Gabe’s mind that perhaps Brianna had been trying to set him up with the cute, girl-next-door librarian. He might have missed his sister and Seth Harper’s engagement party, which caused a tinge of guilt now that he was back home with the family, but falling in love appeared to have her wanting the same thing for everyone else. Brianna had always been a fixer. She’d always wanted to make things better. Although he’d told only Aiden and Quinn about the episode at the funeral, Gabe was aware that he wasn’t fooling anyone, that they knew something had happened, but being family, they had decided to let him tell his story in his own time.

  He’d been home only a month, but in that time, he’d discovered that he’d lost the art of conversation. Oh, he’d been great at tapping into his inner Irishman and talking a blue streak while buying and selling to make money. Expenses for a driver were one of the perks at his level of success, and he’d remind himself to ask Leo, his long-time driver, how his day was going and offer appropriate comments in response to news of high school graduations of kids he’d never meet, and new grandchildren, who were apparently the most beautiful, smartest children on the planet.

  He could go out at night to a bar and talk about the markets until closing with other traders, and if he were in the mood, he could toss out pickup lines that would have like-minded women take him home for no-strings-attached sex. But the pitiful truth was that the give and take of the type people casually and easily exchanged on a daily basis seemed to have evaporated.

  He suspected Chelsea Prescott had left the shop thinking him curt. Rude. Which he’d admittedly been. Not that she hadn’t been capable of filling any conversational gaps herself. If Gabe had made a list of the top things he was looking to do this summer, playing host and teacher to a bunch of kids definitely wouldn’t have made the top ten list. Probably not even the top one hundred.

  Fortunately, it was unlikely they’d run into each other all that often. Despite what she’d said about the town being small, the boat school and shop was located on the far end of the peninsula, the library at the other side of town. Plus, the only places he went, other than this rented cabin, were his brother’s pu
b, Cops and Coffee, his family’s farm and the shop. “So, no problem.”

  As he took a pull on the beer he’d brought out with him, it occurred to Gabe that the stock market had been closed for hours. This was the first day that he hadn’t felt that inner bell announcing the end of the day’s trading. Despite that, he still checked in at least once a day—he was, after all, only human, and it wasn’t his money he was playing with—but not every ten minutes like he had his first three weeks back.

  That his brother appeared to have been right about the boat-building idea proved a little annoying given that Quinn, being the eldest, had always been the perfect one. He’d been head altar boy, Eagle Scout with the badges to prove it, valedictorian his senior year, and after a stellar career at one of the Pacific Northwest’s best law firms, he was now making a beer that deserved all the awards he was winning.

  In his rare, introspective moments, like now, Gabe often wondered if he owed some of his success to feeling the need to compete with his brother. The role of perfect eldest was already taken, Aiden had claimed the rebel role and Burke, two years younger, had been the jock. Not wanting to risk juvie like Aiden, or throw rocket passes every Friday night on the Honeymoon Harbor High School’s football field like Burke, Gabe had focused like a laser on becoming the wealthiest Mannion brother. And he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

  So what had that gotten him?

  And wasn’t that the question?

  “Just build the damn boat, donate it and get the hell back to work.”

  Despite his determination to avoid any interaction with Chelsea Prescott, that night Gabe dreamed of Vikings and a goddess of a shield maiden with hair the color of sun-burnished autumn leaves who welcomed him home after a successful raid, passionately rewarding him for the hammered-gold bracelet he’d placed on her bare arm.

  When the sun rose the next morning, Gabe woke with an erection and the vivid memory of sailing into port, the single blood-red sail of his faering billowing in the northern wind. And the long night of lovemaking beneath a midnight sun. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d experienced a sex dream. Could barely remember the last time he’d had sex.

  He vaguely remembered picking up an ER senior resident from New York Presbyterian at an Oktoberfest party at a bar, then going back to the place she shared with two other doctors, one of whom, a surgical resident—no lie—had been watching an old Dexter episode when they’d arrived at the apartment.

  Having not gone out with a woman who had a roommate since college, Gabe had initially been uncomfortable, but neither woman appeared at all fazed. The fact that he and the ER resident—Sonya? Sophia?—hadn’t exchanged numbers assured him that they were both merely looking for release, and a brief time of human connection before returning to their workaholic lives.

  As he’d left the apartment in the predawn hours, Gabe had already been thinking about the next deal, the next trade, staying ahead of all the hungry younger guys, who, like he’d once been, were racing up the ladder behind him, just waiting for him to slip and fall back into the shark tank.

  * * *

  CHELSEA WAS STILL pondering what to do about Hannah and Hailey the next Thursday as she and Lily Carpenter strolled the aisles of the waterfront farmers’ market. She’d been driving them home every afternoon and had seen no signs of problems, and according to the social worker Aiden had spoken with after a home visit, her caseworker hadn’t found any, either.

  Despite her concerns, she was enjoying the bustle and cheer of the market, the buskers playing their music, the palm reader drawing a long line of customers, the stalls with the shiny fruit and luscious-looking vegetables, the scents of fresh bread and baked goods, and the aromas from all the different restaurant booths floating over all.

  “I love this place,” Lily said as she paid for a loaf of fresh-baked bread. The cinnamon aroma had drawn them from a neighboring aisle.

  “Me, too. I was thinking of bringing Hannah and Hailey down here once school lets out.” They’d talked about the sisters on the drive to the market. Lily had also noticed them while shelving books.

  “They’d probably love it—who wouldn’t?—but, not that you asked for my advice, I’d be careful about getting too emotionally attached.”

  “I think I can manage that.” Chelsea decided to ignore the fact that one of the reasons she volunteered at Harbor Hill nursing home instead of the no-kill animal shelter Cam Montgomery had set up was that she wouldn’t be allowed to take elderly residents home. Whereas, if she worked at the shelter, she’d have an apartment filled with cats and dogs which would be problematic given that her apartment had a no-pets rule. Also, a no-children rule, which was illegal but also a moot point, considering that men were part of the baby-making equation and not only was Honeymoon Harbor’s dating pool limited, given the population of the town, she didn’t know anyone with whom she was interested in having the sex procreation entailed.

  They stopped at a fruit stand selling a variety of shiny apples, pears, peaches and Rainier cherries. “I thought I’d slice some of these with peanut butter yogurt dip,” Chelsea said as she chose a selection of Braeburn and Fuji apples.

  “You’ve been making a lot of treats lately. Before you left for that weekend conference in Portland, it was oatmeal raisin balls with mini chocolate chips. Not only do I not recall you being into baking, I haven’t seen you eating any of them.”

  “I test them at home. The oatmeal balls don’t need cooking. Neither does the peanut butter dip. I found a book of healthy after-school snacks at Rain Or Shine Books.”

  “We do work in a library.”

  “True. But I like to support local business. Besides, cooking has never been my forte, as you know, and I didn’t want to get chocolate all over one of our books.”

  “You bought that book precisely to make treats for the kids.”

  “There was a time when, whatever had happened at school, coming home to fresh-made snacks made me happy. My mother made the best lemon cream cupcakes.” That had been before the bad times. Before the snacks and the happiness went away.

  “You do realize that at least the older sister doesn’t believe your excuse that you just happened to have some left over from your lunch?”

  “I knew Hannah would never buy that. But I also knew she’d play along if it made Hailey happy.” Because that’s what big sisters did.

  “You also realize that they’re not in the type of home where cupcakes are an expected part of a happy child’s life.”

  “Believe me, I know that.” All too well.

  “I was a volunteer court-appointed special advocate for kids in family court for a time when I was in Arizona,” Lily said. “I have one more word of advice, then I’ll shut up.”

  “Okay.” From her friend’s tone, Chelsea wasn’t sure she was going to like what Lily was about to say, but being totally out of her depth, she was willing to take any advice she could get.

  “Kids in the system get moved around a lot. Having been watching you, out of curiosity, I Googled the stats last night, and the average in Washington State is over five-point-six moves in the first year. It’s good that these girls are using the library as a safe zone after school. But if you let them get too attached to you, to think of you as a surrogate parent, like your mom making you those cupcakes, you could be putting them at risk of being even more emotionally and psychologically wounded when they move on. The system’s statewide, Chelsea. The kids could end up in any other county next week. And there they’d be, suffering the loss of someone else they’d come to, if not love, depend on for kindness.”

  Chelsea hated that that made sense. But...

  “Surely you’re not suggesting I back away? Stop the snacks and putting holds on books for them?”

  “Of course not. But after you’d left for Portland, Hailey asked me if you were coming back.”

  “I assured her I was.
”

  “Given her backstory, I imagine she’s lost a lot of people in her young life, so it would be natural to worry that you wouldn’t. I’m just saying that perhaps you should make sure you’re more the library lady, the way you’ve said Mrs. Henderson was to you, than a replacement mom.”

  “Thanks. That’s good advice.” Chelsea decided not to mention that although she hadn’t realized it at the time, the now elderly librarian had not only proven a life raft in the turbulent seas of her life, she’d become the closest thing Chelsea had had to a parent during those difficult years. The one thing she didn’t want to do was make the girls’ situation worse while trying to brighten their lives a bit.

  She was relieved when the topic was dropped as they stood in a line to order a salad made with yellow and red watermelon, green grapes, pecans, feta cheese, mint and balsamic glaze on a bed of fresh greens to split along with glasses of iced tea.

  The conversation turned to the upcoming reader adventurers’ field trips and a recent meeting, where Janet had continued to rain negativity on Chelsea’s reader adventurers’ parade. “I have a brother who works in tech in the Silicon Valley, at one of those places that considers their workplace a living laboratory,” Lily said. “They’re always looking for new ways to keep team members happy. Did you know that diner booths create better work interaction than conference rooms?”

  “No.” Chelsea glanced over at the glass case of the new Cops and Coffee booth that had appeared last week and wondered how many steps she’d have to do to come close to working that glazed, lemon-filled doughnut off. “But if it’s true, perhaps I should try moving our meetings to the diner. Maybe Janet would react better to new ideas.”

  “Nothing’s ever going to get that stick out of her butt. She probably came out of the womb bitching about the light. You’d have a better chance of holding them at the pub. We could order a pitcher of pomegranate margaritas and get her sloshed.” Lily considered that as she took another drink of tea. “Though, I’d bet she’d be a mean drunk.”