“Strangers to you, maybe, but not to Abigail!” Anna’s temper flared with fierce suddenness. “She was our friend. Sage and I both loved her dearly and she loved us. Obviously more than she loved some nephew who never even bothered to visit her.”
He drew in a sharp breath. “It was a little tough to find time for social calls when I was in the middle of a damn war zone!”
She had hurt him, she realized. She wanted to take back her words but how could she, when her insides were being ripped apart by pain?
She loved him and he had lied to her, just like every other man she’d ever been stupid enough to trust.
She could feel hot tears burning behind her eyes and she was very much afraid she was going to break down in front of him, something she absolutely could not allow. She blinked them back, focusing on the anger.
“Let me get this straight. You came here because you thought I was some kind of scam artist? That Sage and I had schemed and manipulated our way into Abigail’s life so she would leave us the legacy that should have been yours.”
He compressed his mouth into a tight line. “Something like that.”
“And where did sleeping with me fit into that?”
Chapter Fifteen
Her words hovered between them, a harsh condemnation of his actions these last few days. In her eyes, he could see her withdrawal, the hurt and fury he fully deserved.
Why had he ever been stupid enough to think coming to Cannon Beach was a good idea? He thought of the events he had set into motion by that one crazy decision. He hated most of all knowing he had hurt her.
“Everything between us has been a lie,” she said, her voice harsh.
“Not true.” He stepped forward, knowing only that he needed some contact with her, but she took a swift step back and he fought hard to conceal the pain knifing through him.
“I never expected any of this to happen. I only intended to spend a few weeks running recon here, getting the lay of the land. I just wanted to check things out, make sure everything was aboveboard. I felt like I owed it to Abigail because…”
Because I loved her and I never had a chance to say goodbye.
“Well, my reasons don’t really matter. I swear, I tried to keep my distance but you made it impossible.”
“What did I do?”
“You invited me to breakfast,” he said simply.
You fixed up my scrapes and bruises, you listened with compassion when I rambled on about my scars, you kissed me and lifted me out of myself.
You made me fall in love with you.
The words clogged in his throat. He wanted desperately to say them but he knew she wouldn’t welcome them. He had lost any right to offer her his love.
“I figured out a long time ago that you genuinely cared about Abigail and there was nothing underhanded in you and Sage Benedetto inheriting Brambleberry House.”
“Well, that’s certainly reassuring to know. Was that before or after you slept with me?”
“Anna—”
“So tell me, Max. As soon as you figured out I wasn’t some con artist, why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
He raked a hand through his hair. “I wanted to, a hundred times. I tried, but something always stopped me. The dog. The storm. I don’t know. It just never seemed like the right time.”
He sighed, wishing she would give him even the tiniest of signals that she believed any of this. “And then after we made love, I felt like we were so entangled, I didn’t know how to tell you without hurting you.”
Her laugh was bitter and scorched his heart. “Far easier to go on letting stupid, oblivious Anna believe the fantasy.”
“You’re not stupid. Or oblivious. I deceived you. Though I might have thought I had good intentions, that I owed something to Abigail’s memory, it was completely wrong of me to let things go as far as they did.”
She said nothing and he scanned her features, looking for any softening but he saw nothing there but pain and anger. “I never meant to hurt you,” he said.
She stood in a protective stance with her shoulders stiff, and her arms wrapped tightly around her stomach, and he didn’t know how to reach her.
“Isn’t it funny how people always say that after the fact?” she said, her voice a low condemnation. “If you truly never meant to hurt me, you should have told me you were Abigail’s nephew after you kissed me for the first time.”
He had no defense against the bitter truth of her words. She was absolutely right.
He had no defense at all. He was wrong and he had known it all along.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, hating the inadequacy of the words but unable to come up with anything better. He should leave, he thought. Just go before he made things worse for her.
He headed to the door but before he opened it, he turned back and was struck again by how beautiful she was. Beautiful and strong and forever out of his reach now.
“Aunt Abigail knew exactly what she was doing when she left Brambleberry House to you,” he said, his voice low. “She would have hated to see me sell this house she loved so much and she must have known that with my career in the army, I wouldn’t have been able to give it the love and care you have. You belong here, in a way I never could.”
He closed the door softly behind him and headed slowly up the stairs, every bone in his body suddenly aching to match the pain in his heart.
That last he had said to her was a blatant lie, just one more to add to the hundreds he had told.
She belonged here, that much was truth. But he couldn’t tell her that these last few days, he had begun to think perhaps he could also find a place here in this house that had always been his childhood refuge.
The words to the poem she had quoted echoed through his memory. Every house where love abides and friendship is a guest, is surely home, and home, sweet home, for there the heart can rest.
His heart had come to rest here, with Anna. She had soothed his restless soul in ways he still didn’t quite understand. He had come here hurting and guilty over the helicopter crash and the deaths of his team members, wondering what he could have done differently to prevent the crash.
He had been frustrated about his shoulder, worried about the future, grieving for his team and for Abigail.
But when he was with Anna, he found peace and comfort. She had helped him find faith again, faith in himself and faith in the future.
The thought of walking away from her, from this place, filled him with a deep, aching sorrow. But what choice did he have?
He couldn’t stay here. He had made that impossible. He had been stupid and selfish and he had ruined everything.
“How is it humanly possible for one woman to be such a colossal idiot when it comes to men?”
Two hours after Max walked out of her apartment, Anna sat in Julia’s kitchen. The children were in bed, exhausted from their journey, and Will had returned to his own home down the beach, the house where he and Julia would live after their marriage in June.
“That is a question we may never answer in our lifetimes.” Sage’s voice sounded tinny and hollow over the speakerphone.
“Sage!” Julia exclaimed, a frown on her lovely features.
“Kidding. I’m kidding, sweetheart. You know I’m kidding, Anna. You’re not an idiot. You’re the smartest woman I’ve ever met.”
“So why do I keep falling for complete jerks?”
Conan whined from his spot on the kitchen rug and gave her a reproving look similar to the one Julia had given the absent Sage.
“Are you sure he’s a complete jerk?” Julia’s voice was quiet. “He is Abigail’s nephew, after all, so he can’t be all bad. I’ve been wracking my memory and I think I might have met him a time or two when we stayed here during the summers when I was a girl. He always seemed very polite. Quiet, even.”
“I’m afraid I never met him so I can’t really offer an opinion either way,” Sage said on the phone. “He came to stay several years ago before he shipped ou
t to the gulf but I was on a field survey down the coast the whole time. I do know Abigail always spoke about him in glowing terms, but I figured she was a little biased.”
Anna remembered the solid assurance she had experienced several times that Abigail would have approved of Max and her growing relationship with him. It hadn’t been anything she could put her finger on, just a feeling in her heart.
Fight for him. He needs you.
She suddenly remembered those thoughts drifting through her mind earlier in the evening when she had been preparing for the celebration that hadn’t happened.
She was almost certain that had been a figment of her imagination. But was it possible Abigail had been trying to give her some kind of message?
She hated this. She couldn’t trust him and she certainly couldn’t seem to trust herself.
“He lied to me, just like Gray and just like my fiancé. With my history, how can I get past that?” she asked out loud as she set her spoon back in the bowl of uneaten ice cream.
She hadn’t had much of an appetite for it in the first place but now the cherry chocolate chunk tasted terrible with this bitterness in her mouth.
“Maybe you can’t,” Sage said.
Julia said nothing, though an expression of doubt flickered over her features.
“You don’t agree?” Anna asked.
The schoolteacher shrugged. “Do I think he should have told you he was Abigail’s nephew? Of course. Deceiving you was wrong. But maybe he just found himself in a deep hole and he didn’t know how to climb out without digging in deeper.”
“And maybe he should have just buried himself in the hole when he got down far enough,” Sage said.
Though Anna knew Sage was only trying to offer her support, she suddenly found she wanted to defend him, which was a completely ridiculous reaction, one she quickly squashed.
“I’ve been lied to so many times. I don’t know if I forgive that.”
“You’re the only one who can decide that, honey,” Julia said, squeezing her fingers. “But whatever you do, you know we’re behind you, right?”
“Ditto from the Patagonia faction,” Sage said over the phone.
Though she was quite certain it was watery and weak, Anna managed a smile. “Thank you. Thank you both. As tough as this is, I’m grateful I have you both.”
“And Conan and Abigail,” Sage declared. “Don’t forget them.”
The dog slapped his tail on the floor at the sound of his name but didn’t bother getting up.
“How can I?” she said. She and Julia were saying goodbye and preparing to hang up when Sage suddenly gasped into the phone.
“The letter! We’ve got a letter for Abigail’s nephew, remember?”
“That’s right,” Anna exclaimed. “I completely forgot it!”
“What letter?” Julia asked.
“From Abigail,” Anna explained. “She left it as part of her estate papers for her great-nephew. Her Jamie.”
“It was another of those weird conditions of her will,” Sage added. “He could only receive it if and when he arrived in person to Brambleberry House. I was all in favor of mailing it to him in care of the army but Abigail’s attorney stipulated her wishes were quite clear. We weren’t even supposed to tell him about it until he showed up here.”
“Why was she so certain he would come back to Brambleberry House after her death? Especially since she had gone to such pains to leave the house to you two, leaving him with no reason to return at all?” Julia asked with a puzzled frown.
“I don’t know. I wondered that myself,” Anna admitted.
She remembered how sad she had thought it that Abigail seemed so desperate for her nephew, who hadn’t visited her much when she was alive, to come here, even after her death.
“She was right though,” Sage said. “Just like she always was. He came back, just as she seemed to know he would.”
Anna shivered at the undeniable truth of the words.
“You have to give it to him,” Sage continued. “Do you know where it is?”
“In the safe in my office,” she answered promptly. “I kept it there with all the other estate documents.”
“I’d give anything to know what’s in that letter. What do you think Abigail had to say to him?” Sage asked.
Anna wondered the same thing after she and Julia had said goodbye to Sage and she had returned downstairs to her own apartment and retrieved the letter from her safe.
She sat looking at the envelope for a long time, at Abigail’s familiar elegant handwriting and those two words. My Jamie.
For the first time, she allowed herself to look at this from Max’s perspective. He said he had loved his aunt and she knew she had hurt him tonight when she said Abigail must not have loved him enough to leave the house to him.
It had been a cruel thing to say, especially since she knew from the way Abigail talked about her nephew that she had adored him.
What would Anna have done if a beloved elderly relative had left a valuable legacy to two strangers? She probably would have been suspicious as well. Of course, she would have wanted to find out the circumstances. But would she have lied about her identity to investigate?
She couldn’t answer that. She only knew that some of her anger seemed to be subsiding, drawing away from her like low tide.
She gazed at the letter. My Jamie. She was going to have to give it to him, but she knew she couldn’t go knocking on his apartment door. She wasn’t ready to face him again. Not yet. Maybe in the morning, she would be more in control of her emotions.
Still, some instinct told her she needed to deliver this tonight, whether she faced him or not. Praying she wouldn’t encounter him wandering around in the dark, she moved quietly up the stairs and slipped the letter through the narrow crack under the door.
There you go, Abigail, she thought, and was almost certain she felt a brush of air against her cheek.
The task done, she stood for a long moment on the landing outside his apartment, her emotions a tangled mess and her heart a heavy weight in her chest.
Max backed his SUV out of the Brambleberry House driveway just as the sun crested the coast range. His duffel and single suitcase were in the backseat and the letter that had been slipped under his apartment door was on the seat beside him.
He knew the letter was from Abigail. Who else? Even if he hadn’t recognized her distinctive curlicue handwriting, he would have known from only the name on the outside.
My Jamie.
He had stared at that envelope, his heart aching with loss and regret. It even smelled like her, some soft, flowery scent that made him think of tight hugs and kisses on the cheek and summer evening spent in the garden with her.
Finally he had stuck it in the pocket of his jacket and walked down the stairs of Brambleberry House for the last time.
He knew of only one place he wanted to be when he read her final words to him. It seemed fitting and right that he drive to the cemetery to pay his last respects before he left Cannon Beach. He had been putting it off, this final evidence that Abigail was really gone, but he knew he couldn’t avoid the inevitable any longer.
He found the cemetery and drove through the massive iron gates under winter-bare branches. Only when he was inside looking at the rows of gravestones, surrounded by tendrils of misty morning fog, did he realize he had no idea where to find his aunt’s plot amid the graves.
At random, he picked a lane and parked his SUV halfway down it then started walking. He had only gone twenty feet before he saw it, a tasteful headstone in pale amber marble under a small statue of an angel, with her name.
Abigail Elizabeth Dandridge
Someone had angled an intricate wrought-iron bench there to look over the grave and the ocean beyond it. Anna? he wondered. Somehow it wouldn’t have surprised him. It seemed the sort of gesture she would make, practical and softhearted at the same time.
He sat at the bench for a long time, until the damp grass began to seep thro
ugh his boots and the wrought-iron pressed into the back of his thighs. He wasn’t quite sure why he was so apprehensive to read Abigail’s final words to him.
Maybe because of that—because it seemed so very final. Silly as it seemed, he hated that this was the last time anyone would call him the nickname only she had used.
Finally he opened the envelope. A tiny key fell out, along with several pieces of cream vellum. He frowned and pocketed the key then unfolded the letter, his insides twisting.
My dear Jamie,
I suppose since you’re reading this, it means you have come home to Brambleberry House at last. I say home, my dear, because this is where you have always belonged. During the rough years of your childhood, while you were off at military school, even when you were off serving your country with honor and courage, this was your home. You have always had a home here and I hope with all my heart that you have known that.
By now you must be thinking I’m a crazy old bat. I’m not so sure you would be wrong. I want you to know I’m a crazy old bat who has loved you dearly. You have been my joy every day of your life.
So why didn’t I leave you the house? I’m sure you’re asking. If you’re not, you should be. I nearly did, you know. Since the day you were born, I planned that you would inherit Brambleberry House when I left this earth. Then a few years ago, something happened to change my mind.
I began to want something more for you than just a house. You see, houses get dry rot or are bent and broken by the wind or can even crumble into the ocean.
Love, though. Love endures.
I knew love when I was a girl, a love that stayed with me my entire life. Even though the man I loved died young, I have carried the memory of him inside me all these years. It has sustained me and lifted me throughout my life’s journey.
I wanted the same for you, my Jamie. For you to know the connection of two hearts linked as one. So I began to scheme and to plot. You needed a special woman, someone smart and courageous, with a strong, loving heart.
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