Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella

by Jenny Holiday

  “And what am I supposed to say? ‘Hello, I like you, but I don’t want kids. Might you, too, not want kids?’ That’s a great way to approach a first date.”

  “Why not? It’s not like things are working out with your chosen demographic.”

  He tried to object, but Stacey held up a hand. “Don’t interrupt.”

  Resigned, he settled in to listen to her little speech.

  “I mean, yes, you can date older women exclusively”—she gestured at herself—“but it’s not like you’ve found one of us to ride off into the sunset with.”

  “But that’s just bad luck,” he said, though it was probably useless to argue. “That’s just life.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Anyway,” he pushed on, still knowing it was pointless, “I’m closer to forty than thirty now. The gap is shrinking.” He made a face, going for humor. “Soon I’ll be able to date women my age.”

  She was not amused. “Are you listening to yourself? Could you be any more inflexible?”

  Okay, now he was getting annoyed. What business was it of hers who he chose to date? He didn’t want kids. So he made it a priority to avoid women who were likely to want them. Women who hadn’t yet aged out of being able to have them. There was nothing wrong with that. That wasn’t inflexibility. That was honesty.

  But whatever. He wasn’t getting into it with Stacey. Arguing with a lawyer was never a good idea.

  “Or…” She drew out the word in overly dramatic fashion. “You could, you know, actually examine this whole rabid stance against having kids and stop letting it rule your life.”

  “No.” He wasn’t going to bicker fruitlessly with her, but he couldn’t let that stand.

  “You’re not your father.”

  “What the hell, Stacey?”

  “Or Cam’s father.”

  He looked at her sharply. He’d been thinking, back in his office, that Stacey knew why he pushed himself so hard, why he maintained such discipline over his affairs. But knowing about that was different from talking about it. She’d gone too far.

  And she knew it. “I’m sorry.” She laid a hand on his arm. “I’m not trying to be mean. I just sometimes think you’re too wrapped up in a certain vision of yourself. One that is…less fulfilling than it could be.”

  The phrase abandon beige popped into his head.

  “And honestly?” Stacey went on. “I know you won’t believe me, but I think you would be a great dad. I wish you would just give yourself a chance.”

  Elise wondered if Jay had a thing for older women or if it was just a coincidence that his two ex-girlfriends—or ex-crushes, or whatever—she had happened to meet were both closer to fifty than forty.

  And both stunningly beautiful.

  And self-assured.

  There had been no aspiring with either of those women.

  They probably had proper offices that didn’t also double as their living rooms.

  Their tiny living rooms.

  But whatever. She smoothed her shirt—she’d gone with a classic white blouse and a pair of jeans, given that the meeting was at her place and she didn’t want to look like she was trying super hard, even though she was, in fact, trying super, super hard—and reminded herself that it wasn’t a crime to be in the early phase of her career. Everybody started somewhere. Not that long ago, Jay and his partner had taken a risk by starting their own company, and she was doing the same thing.

  She surveyed the space. The flowers on the coffee table would just get in the way of their work, so she moved them. Then she restacked the magazines and games she stored on the bottom level of the coffee table. She wanted everything to be perfect.

  Even though she was expecting Jay, she jumped a little when the doorbell announced his presence. She lived on the third floor of a Victorian that had been converted to apartments, so she had to hoof it down to the front door to let him in.

  “Hi,” he said, and oh. It was Friday at two o’clock, and they must have casual Fridays in his office, because he was dressed in jeans and a blue polo shirt. Nothing special, yet the blue made his impossible eyes even more impossible—they looked like they were going to twinkle right out of his skull. And standing on her porch backlit by the sun, he looked like a Disney prince. He was so—

  Okay, enough. No stroking clients, Elise.

  “Come on up.” When she ushered him into her apartment, she said, “You didn’t look at my portfolio the other day, so you don’t know that I’m a new business owner. That’s why I work out of my place—I’m trying to keep the overhead low initially.”

  She was cueing up a rehearsed speech for when he asked what she had done before she struck out on her own, but he just said, “That’s smart.”

  Then, looking around, he said, “This place is amazing.”

  She smiled. It was pretty amazing. She’d worked hard to make it so. Elise would admit to being a bit of a perfectionist. Her friends were always needling her about it like it was a bad thing, but she didn’t see anything wrong with having a vision and sticking to it. That was how you ended up with results like this. Ironically, though, this was not how she would have designed a public-facing office. Her apartment was all exuberance and color, whereas in a place where she’d meet with clients, she would probably have leaned more classic.

  But she was stupidly gratified by his praise. It felt like he’d seen a glimpse of the real her, and he approved.

  He walked farther in and stopped in front of the sofa. “Hold on, though. Is this a beige sofa?” The appearance of those crow’s-feet said he was teasing.

  She bit back a smirk and picked up one of the brightly colored pillows from the sofa. “The judicious use of beige has its place. You couldn’t have all these crazy pillows on top of a sofa that was already a bonkers color.”

  “I don’t know,” he teased. “I thought I signed up for Operation: Abandon Beige, and now I find out that the largest piece of furniture in my designer’s house is actually…” He made a show of sitting down on the sofa and sort of comically manspreading over it. “Beige?”

  She threw the pillow at him.

  And immediately regretted it. In addition to stroking clients, throwing things at them was not a great idea.

  But it was okay, because he cracked up and threw it back at her.

  She caught it, suddenly breathless like she was catching some kind of…sports thing instead of a pillow. She wasn’t sporty enough to finish that metaphor properly. “You want something, some water before we get started? Or coffee?”

  “Nah, I’m done for the day—done for the week. I decided to make you my last meeting.”

  She wasn’t sure what that had to do with declining coffee. “Wine?” She jokingly looked at her watch. “It is after noon.”

  He looked at her for what felt like a beat too long—yet also not long enough—before saying, “I’d love a glass of wine.”

  There was no reason for Jay to still be at Elise’s house three hours later. He’d loved everything she’d shown him and had approved it all. She clearly had enough creativity and talent in her little finger to create the best damn lobby in Toronto. If this had been any other designer, he would have given her carte blanche to do what she wanted. And that would have been a big item off his to-do list. Would have let him get back to his job. To micromanaging things he was actually qualified to micromanage.

  But damn, he wasn’t going to do that. Because watching Elise Maxwell work was such an enormous turn-on, it was ridiculous. She was clearly passionate about design. She had a vision for his office, and she was willing to fight for it. He liked that. A lot.

  So he kept asking questions. Sometimes he took issue with some detail, just so he could watch her defend said detail even as she quite sincerely took what he was saying into account.

  “I’m going to have to veto that one.” He sipped his third glass of wine as she showed him a wallpaper sample she was suggesting for the small lavatory inside his office. “Way too crazy.”

  He was lying. It wa
s not too crazy. The pattern of dark-green horizontal stripes was, in reality, just the right amount of crazy. She’d somehow picked up on his penchant for green without his having said anything.

  Her brow furrowed slightly as she tilted her head and stared at the sample like she was seeing it for the first time. There was something about the wrinkling of the usually smooth skin on her forehead that made him shift in his seat.

  “This”—she pulled out another sample, this one covered with tiny palm trees—“is too crazy. The stripes, by contrast, are classic with a little twist. Masculine yet fun.”

  “Masculine isn’t usually fun?” he teased. But damn, he needed to cut this shit out. He’d hired her to do a job. He couldn’t be getting all suggestive. He was not that kind of man.

  He suddenly had a flash of his brother Cameron’s dad “flirting” with the receptionist at the used car dealership he’d worked at. That’s what Angus had called it—flirting. Even though Jay had only been nine or ten at the time, he had been pretty sure the receptionist, who always responded to Angus’s overtures with pained, tight-lipped smiles, wouldn’t have called it that. And he knew his mother wouldn’t have, either, based on the fights he’d overheard over the years.

  So he could like Elise from afar—honestly, there was no way to make himself not do that—but anything more was a bad idea. He set down his wine. Time for cooler heads to prevail.

  “Oh no,” Elise said. “I misspoke. Masculine is fun.” The way she said fun, all low and sort of stretched out, suggested that maybe he wasn’t the only one having trouble keeping things strictly professional.

  But still. She was working for him, and that meant he was morally prohibited from hitting on her. End of story. So time to lean on that legendary self-discipline Stacey had been haranguing him about the other day. And discipline wasn’t discipline unless it was hard, right? Even if he was interested in breaking his rule about not dating younger women—which he wasn’t—nothing could happen with Elise until she was done with the job.

  She did that lip-scraping thing again.

  Shit. He’d been going to suggest a rousing round of Boggle after their work was done—it was visible under her glass coffee table, and he hadn’t played since he and Mrs. Compton from the trailer park used to battle it out. But that wasn’t a good idea. He had to get out of here. Now.

  “I have to go.”

  She blinked as he stood. “Okay.”

  He’d been sitting on a sofa, and she on a chair next to him. As he came around toward the front door, they ended up doing one of those stupid back-and-forth dances where they were trying to get out of each other’s way but were in fact getting right in each other’s way. She laughed. It lit up her face even as it sliced through his chest.

  She laid her hands on his forearms, jokingly, making a production of moving him to one side and keeping him there so they could get past each other.

  Her hands were freezing, like they’d been the other day in his office. Maybe it was the fact that they weren’t in his office with Stacey watching like a hawk. Or maybe it was the wine. Something made him pull her hands up so they were in a prayer position and then enclose them in his.

  “I told you I’m always cold,” she said apologetically.

  He smiled. “It’s not a character flaw.”

  Also, cold was not the word he would use for her, on balance.

  All right, though. Down, boy. He was on his way out of here.

  It was harder than it should have been to let go of her, but he did. She walked him down to the main door. He opened it to find an older man standing on the porch, hand raised like he was about to ring one of the doorbells.

  “Daddy?” Jay hadn’t been looking at Elise, but the shock was audible in her voice. “What are you doing here?”

  He could tell from the way she asked the question, from the way the bold confidence he loved—liked—about her had been replaced by hesitancy, and by the scowl on the man’s face that this was not a warm father-daughter relationship.

  “And who are you?” the man said to him. There was an edge to the question, a possessiveness, that got Jay’s hackles up.

  Elise jumped in. “Jay Smith, this is my father, Charles Maxwell. Dad, Jay is a client.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

  Whoa. Jay didn’t know what was going on here, but he knew he did not like it. He knew Charles Maxwell—or knew of him. He was one of the richest men in Canada, and the second-generation head of a boutique hedge fund company—and, by all accounts, a real asshole.

  Which meant Elise came from serious money. So it was interesting that she was living in a small apartment in this not-great part of town. And that she was working out of said apartment because she was concerned with keeping overhead low.

  Jay stuck out his hand. “Partner at Cohen & Smith.” His firm wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t nothing. Charles Maxwell would have heard of it. He made his tone completely flat so that when he said, “Pleasure to meet you, sir,” he could have been conveying the opposite sentiment. “Your daughter is extremely talented. She’s doing quite the job on our office. You must be proud.”

  When Charles Maxwell only flared his nostrils, Elise said, “Can I help you with something, Dad?”

  “Your mother insisted I drop by and give you this.” He held out a check. He wasn’t even subtle about it. It was like he was trying to embarrass her. Jay’s fingers flexed, almost of their own accord.

  She held up her hands like he was robbing her. “I don’t want your money.”

  “You wanted it six months ago when you gave me that ridiculous presentation about starting your business.”

  “And that would have been a loan,” she said haughtily. “A loan I no longer need.”

  “That’s not what your bank account says.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  “I have friends at Scotiabank.”

  She gasped. “That was a gross invasion of privacy, not to mention illegal.”

  All right. Jay had no doubt Elise Maxwell could hold her own against her villain of a father, but he couldn’t stand here and not say anything—that wasn’t the way his mama had raised him. “Sir, I think you should leave.”

  Charles Maxwell’s eyes slid over to him and back to Elise. There was no warmth in them. His mind landed on his recent conversation with Stacey. Jesus Christ, he would make a better father than this asshole.

  Theoretically.

  Elise’s father turned and left without a word, which Jay was thankful for, because he wasn’t sure it was a good idea to get into a fight—verbal or otherwise—over his interior designer’s honor. He would have done it in a heartbeat, but he was trying to be a responsible, professional client here. That was why he was leaving in the first place. And he was pretty sure responsible, professional clients didn’t land punches on their designers’ fathers, no matter how much they deserved it.

  “Oh my God,” she said after her father had cleared the porch steps and the walkway. “I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

  Her voice was muffled. He turned to find her with her head in her hands, clearly mortified.

  “Hey.” He moved instinctively to touch her but checked the impulse. “No problem. Believe me, I know shitty fathers.”

  “Really?”

  She looked up, so apparently relieved that he kept going. “Really. In fact, I had two of them, so I’m pretty sure I’ve got you beat.”

  “Two!” Some of her spark was back. “Gay parents?”

  “Nope. There was my father, and then when he left, there was my younger half brother’s for a couple years, too. A bonus shitty dad, if you will.” But he didn’t want her to start feeling sorry for him, so he added, “Luckily, I have an amazing mother who more than made up for it.” Which was only sort of true. The amazing part was absolutely true, and she’d done her best, but Jay knew those early years with his dad, and then the time later with Cam’s dad, had fucked with him. There was no way for them n
ot to have.

  “Still. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Embarrassed? Why? I don’t know the whole story, but from where I’m standing, it sort of looks like your father doesn’t approve of you starting your design business, but you’re doing it anyway. That’s something to be proud of.”

  He wanted to ask so many more questions. Why didn’t her father approve? What about the mother who had reportedly sent him with the check? How much money was in her bank account?

  Why were her hands always so cold?

  And what could he do to warm them up?

  But no. None of those questions were anywhere near to being his business. So he smiled and said, “Have a good weekend, Elise. I’ll see you next week?”

  She nodded. She was coming to the office next Tuesday, after work, to supervise the start of the flooring installation. He was stupidly excited.

  Dangerously excited.

  Once he’d rounded the corner and was out of sight of her house, he got out his phone and glanced at the time. Five thirty. His brother, who was at home in Thunder Bay after a deployment as a reservist in the Canadian Forces, worked as a bartender. Hopefully he wouldn’t be at work yet.

  “Hey!” Cameron picked up right away.

  He wasn’t in the habit of calling his brother, so he was glad of the warm reception. Cam and Jay, though they’d been close when Cam was young, didn’t have the best relationship these days. But it sort of seemed that after a rough young adulthood, Cam was in the process of straightening himself out. He had joined the reserves. He was working a steady job while waiting for his next deployment. He had a girlfriend. Jay wasn’t a huge fan of Christie. She seemed kind of self-absorbed. But whatever. It wasn’t his place to have an opinion. He was just glad things seemed to be improving between Cam and him.

  “What’s up, Bro?” Cam asked.

  “Do you think I would be a good father?” It was out before he could think better of it, but fuck it, that was what he wanted to know, wasn’t it?

  “Oh my God, did you get someone knocked up?” Cam cracked up. “I thought that was my thing.” Cam had indeed gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant. Jay sometimes wondered about what had happened to her—and to the baby—after her parents hustled her out of town. But there was no way he could ask his brother that without totally alienating him.