Gansett Island Boxed Set, Books 1-16

by Force, Marie

  “Maybe that’s the problem. You’re spending too much time together.”

  Grant, who used to go months between visits when he was dating Abby, now couldn’t imagine a day without Stephanie in it. He couldn’t picture his life without her front and center, irritating him and loving him. The pain he’d carried in his breastbone since she stormed out of their house two mornings ago had intensified when he began to fear that he might’ve lost her for good this time.

  “You could be right,” Grant said.

  “I usually am.”

  Grant rolled his eyes at his friend’s arrogance.

  Dan gestured for Chelsea, the bartender at the Beachcomber, to bring them two more beers.

  The pretty young bartender set down the bottles with a friendly smile for Dan.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said.

  “My pleasure. I have to ask you—are you related to the Baldwin brothers?”

  “Nope,” Dan said. “I get that a lot, though. People think I look like Billy Baldwin.”

  “You really do.” Based on the dreamy look on her face, Chelsea was quite fond of Billy Baldwin.

  Dan flashed her the dimpled grin that had made him famous. “Thanks for the beers.”

  “You’re going to get sued calling women ‘sweetheart,’” Grant said when Chelsea moved on to other customers.

  Dan scoffed. “Puleeze. She loved it. You heard what she said. ‘My pleasure.’ Would she have said that if she were offended? Hell, she thought I was Billy Baldwin! Maybe he can play me in your movie.”

  Grant rolled his eyes. “You’re more famous than he is, not that she knows that.”

  Dan brushed off the reference to his fame, as he always did. He’d made a career out of freeing prisoners who’d been wrongly convicted. Stephanie’s stepfather was the latest in a long string of successes. “Take it from me. Chicks like to be charmed. They need to be wooed.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing with Steph, and look at where it’s gotten me.”

  Dan had the audacity to laugh at that. “You haven’t been wooing her. You’ve been driving her crazy with your vision of her story. So take a step back from the screenplay for a while, work out the relationship issues and see where you are.”

  “What do you know about relationship issues anyway? Your idea of a relationship is dinner and a hotel room.”

  “And that’s bad how, exactly? You don’t see me mooning around for two days because my girlfriend told me to screw and moved out.”

  “She hasn’t moved out.” The thought that maybe she had struck another note of fear in Grant’s chest. He wondered if he might be having a heart attack.

  “Yet.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Grant,” he said, waiting until Grant spared him a glance to continue. “She’s not coming back. If you want to fix this, you have to go to her.”

  “I’m not the one who left. Why do I have to do the chasing?”

  Dan released a long sigh. “I have so much to teach you, my friend.”

  While Grant wanted to object to that statement, he couldn’t. Stephanie was his second serious girlfriend, and he’d screwed up the first one rather royally. As much as he’d cared for Abby, he truly loved Stephanie. If he had to go beg and grovel, he would. After two days without her, he’d discovered he had no pride where she was concerned.

  He tossed a twenty on the bar and stood.

  “Where’re you going?” Dan asked.

  “You know where I’m going.”

  Dan turned to face him, brushed a hand over Grant’s jacket and adjusted the collar, patting him on the shoulder when he was satisfied. “There. Now you can go.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Call me tomorrow. Let me know how it goes.”

  Grant’s stomach hurt when he imagined the many ways this could go wrong. “I will. You’re here for a few more days, right?”

  “At least. I’m due in court in LA next Friday, and then my schedule is clear until after the first of the year.”

  “It’ll be nice to have you around this winter.”

  “It’ll be nice to be here, if you’re not pouting the whole time.” Before Grant could respond to that, Dan gave him a gentle push. “Go get your girl, and don’t screw it up.”

  “I’ll try not to.” As Grant made his way to Mac’s motorcycle in the parking lot, he thought of the many ways it was possible to screw this up. Maybe he already had by waiting two days to go after her. His stomach started to hurt in earnest at that thought. He’d never wanted anything more than he wanted to be with her, but nothing had ever been more difficult. How that was possible?

  On the way to Charlie’s place, where he’d heard she was staying, Grant tried to remember what had caused the fight. Try as he might, he couldn’t recall the specific exchange. There had been many of them over the last couple of months, since they’d begun to collaborate on the screenplay about Charlie’s unjust incarceration and Stephanie’s relentless campaign to free him.

  When Grant pulled into the driveway, Charlie was washing his pickup truck. He stopped what he was doing and gave Grant that blank look he did so well as Grant parked the bike and walked over to him.

  “Is Stephanie around?” Grant asked, discovering in that moment he had a shred of pride left, and it was seriously dented by having to ask her stepfather where she was.

  “Yep.”

  “Could I see her?”

  “I’d say that’s up to her.” Charlie studied him for a long, uncomfortable moment.

  Grant resisted the urge to squirm under the heat of the other man’s stare.

  “I take it you never got around to asking her the question we talked about the other day?”

  Grant shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest, his left hand resting on the ring box in his coat pocket. He’d carried it with him for weeks, hoping for the right chance to ask her.

  “What happened?” Charlie asked.

  “Damned if I know.”

  “So what’s your plan, hot shot?” This was asked with a hint of amusement that was so shocking coming from the normally stoic Charlie, that Grant was temporarily rendered speechless. “I, um, was thinking I’d apologize for whatever I did that made her so mad.”

  “Good place to start.” Charlie pointed his chin toward the path that led to the beach. “She went for a walk a little while ago. You might catch her on the way back.”

  Grant’s heart lurched in his chest at the thought of seeing her. Two days was too damned long. “Thanks.”

  “Good luck,” Charlie called after him.

  Grant waved to let the other man know he’d heard him and headed down the well-worn path. As he got closer to the bluffs, the smell of the ocean assailed him, reminding him, as it always did, of home. But now that he’d met Stephanie, fallen in love with her, lived with her. . . She was his home, and he’d be positively lost without her. “You should probably tell her that,” he grumbled to himself. “For a guy who fancies himself rather good with words, you need to find the right ones, and you need to do it soon.”

  He traveled about a half mile down the path before he found her sitting on a rock that overlooked the Atlantic. Her arms were stretched out behind her, and her face was tilted into the late afternoon sun.

  His heart contracted painfully at the sight of her. He ached for her, but was reluctant to say or do anything that would make things worse.

  She must’ve sensed him there because she turned and met his gaze. Surprise registered on her expressive face before she shuttered herself, the way she had so often lately. He hated when she did that. It left him feeling closed out and closed off from her, two places he never wanted to be where she was concerned.

  Grant walked the final thirty feet to her, feeling as if his entire life would come down to whatever transpired here. “You look like a sun goddess sitting on your stage waiting for the gods to show up to worship you.”

  “Looks like it worked,” she said with a small smile
that warmed the cold places inside him. She held out a hand. “Now come worship me.”

  Grant took her hand and joined her on the rock. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips to her sun-warmed face. “Steph, I—”

  “Shhh. Don’t say anything. Just hold me.”

  Because there was nothing he’d rather do, he did as she asked. He had no idea how long they sat there, wrapped up in each other as the sun dipped lower toward the horizon.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said, softly so as not to break the magical spell.

  “So am I.” She ran her hand over his hair and down to cup his face.

  Her touch sent a shiver of longing through him.

  “I’ve had some time to think,” she said.

  That quickly, the longing turned to dread. Something about the way she said the simple sentence terrified him. “And?”

  “This. . .” She took a moment to compose herself, which only added to his growing anxiety. “This isn’t working.”

  The words and the pain he heard in her voice as she said them hit Grant like an arrow straight to the heart. “That’s not true.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Hear me out.”

  “I don’t want to hear you say you’re leaving me. I can’t hear that.”

  “You can’t possibly be happy with the way things have been.”

  “In our worst moment, I’m happier with you than I’ve ever been before.”

  “Grant. . .” Tears rolled down her face, every one of them breaking his heart. “I love you so much. You know I do. It’s just that after the way I grew up, the constant upheaval, the fighting, the sick feeling in my stomach, always worrying when the bottom was going to fall out. . . I simply can’t live like that anymore.”

  Every one of her words hit him like poison arrows filled with pain serum. It occurred to him all at once that he’d done a terrible thing to her by letting the passion they shared in bed spill over into the other areas of their life together. She was absolutely right. After her tumultuous childhood, she needed calm stability not high drama.

  “You’re right.” Grant bit back the tidal wave of panic and focused on what he needed to do to fix this, because losing her was not an option he was willing to consider. “You’re absolutely right, and I understand that the way it’s been between us doesn’t work for you—and I get why. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make some changes to make it work better in the future.”

  She eyed him warily. “What kind of changes?”

  “For one thing, we’ll no longer work together. That’s not good for us.”

  “No,” she said with a sigh, “it really isn’t.”

  “The screenplay is my job. I bought the rights from you and Charlie, and I’m asking you to trust me to do justice to your story.”

  “No pun intended,” she said with a smile that gave him the first shred of hope that they might get through this crisis.

  “No,” he said, amused, “no pun intended.” He took her hand and linked their fingers. “Do you trust me to tell your story with dignity and grace and courage and humility and all the other words that come to mind when I think of what you went through alone for so many years?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice heavy with emotion, “of course I trust you to do it right. If I didn’t, I never would’ve given you the rights.”

  “Then you have to take a step back and let me do it.”

  She nodded, even as tears threatened again.

  He brought their joined hands to his lips. “And you, my love, need to take the money I paid you for the rights to your story and open that restaurant you’ve always dreamed of. Here or in Providence or both, if that’s what you want.”

  Her eyes went wide with surprise. “How do you know about my restaurant?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “Did Charlie tell you that? Who else would know?” She waited a heartbeat. “Why did Charlie tell you? When did he tell you?”

  “He told me the other day when I came over to see him.”

  Her mouth fell open in shock. “You came to see Charlie? By yourself? I thought you were scared of him.”

  Grant snorted with laughter. “I didn’t say I was scared of him. I said he’s intimidating and looks at me like he wants to kill me in my sleep.”

  “You also mentioned that he’d probably learned a few ways to do that while he was in prison,” she reminded him.

  “Okay, maybe I was a little scared of him, but I had something I needed to ask him, so I had to man up and come talk to him.”

  “Wow,” she said, truly amazed, “I would’ve like to have seen that. What did you have to ask him?”

  “I can’t tell you that. It’s guy stuff. You wouldn’t understand.”

  She rolled her eyes at that. “Was he nice to you?”

  “Yes.”

  She crooked the famous brow that let him know she wasn’t buying his bullshit. “Really?”

  “He warmed up as the visit unfolded.”

  That made her laugh, which filled Grant with wild, foolish hope. When it was good between them, there was nothing better. He made a silent vow to work harder to make sure it was good between them all the time going forward. Nothing was more important than her happiness, not even the damned screenplay he’d let come between them, a thought he decided he’d better share with her so she’d understand that he truly got it.

  “I thought I’d learned my lesson after what happened with Abby.”

  “What lesson is that?”

  “That nothing is more important than you are. Not the screenplay or my career or my family. Nothing.”

  “I know how important the screenplay is to you, Grant. You shouldn’t make light of that.”

  “If someone told me I’d be the most successful writer in Hollywood for the rest of my life but I couldn’t have you, I’d say thank you very much, Hollywood. It’s been a lovely ride, but I’m done now. I have something far more important in my life than any movie will ever be. I’ve got the real thing, the love story of a lifetime, and there’s nothing in this world that will ever be more important to me than she is.” He shifted his body off the rock, so he was on his knees before her, keeping a firm grip on her hands. “Stephanie, you’re the love story of my lifetime, the one I can’t live without.”

  Every emotion she possessed skirted across her expressive face as she waited breathlessly to hear what else he had to say. In all of Grant’s thinking about this moment, it had never occurred to him that she might say no to his question, but now he wasn’t so sure. He pushed that unsavory thought aside to focus on saying the right thing. Words were his business. He’d never needed them more than he did right now.

  “I know it’s been rocky at times and it’s apt to be again once in a while, but I promise I’ll do everything in my power to make you happy, to give you the family you’ve always wanted, the life you’ve always wanted and the security you’ve never had. You’ll never have to wonder where I am or who I’m with, because I’ll always want to be with you more than I want to be with anyone else. There’s nothing in this world I wouldn’t do for you, but I need you to do one thing for me first.”

  “What?” she asked, sounding breathless now, too.

  “Marry me.” He released her hands to retrieve the ring box from his pocket and opened it to reveal a simple square-cut diamond. He knew her well enough to suspect that anything flashier would’ve been wrong for her.

  She gasped, and her hand covered her mouth.

  He loved that he’d taken her completely by surprise.

  Her eyes darted from the ring to his face—possibly to gauge his sincerity—and back to the ring.

  “Stephanie Logan, I’ll love you every day for the rest of my life. Will you marry me?” Grant thought his eyes were deceiving him when he saw her nod. “Is that a yes?”

  The word “yes” got caught on a sob, but he heard it. Loud and clear. He slid the ring onto her finger and reached for her.

  She came right off the r
ock and launched herself into his arms. They landed on the sand in a clutch of arms and legs.

  “I’ve got you, baby,” Grant said, running a hand over her back as she continued to cry. He hoped they were happy tears. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded and clung to him.

  “That’ll learn you not to try to break up with me.”

  Sobs turned to laughter, which turned to passion the instant his lips met hers. “I love you,” he said when they came up for air. “Only you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “And do you promise to never try to dump me again?”

  “I may try, but I’m sure you’ll find some smooth, sweet words to talk your way out of it like you did today.”

  “Speaking as a reviewer, tell me, what did the trick?”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “As if you don’t know.”

  “I really don’t.”

  In one of her signature moves, she brushed the hair off his forehead and ran her fingers through it lovingly. “The love story of a lifetime was a pretty good line.”

  “Just pretty good?”

  “Extremely memorable. The security I’ve never had was a close second.”

  “I thought you might like that.”

  “When you marry a writer, you ought to get a proposal for the ages.”

  His eyes went wide at what surely had to be one of the finest compliments he’d ever received. “Is that what this was?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, kissing him again.

  “How about a marriage for the ages to go with it?”

  “I’m all for that. Is this what you had to talk to Charlie about?”

  Nodding, he said, “I couldn’t ask you without his blessing.”

  “And he gave it?”

  “With some assurances.”

  That made her snort with laughter. “I hope he made you work for it.”

  “Oh trust me. He did.” His lips found the tender underside of her jaw, one of his favorite places to kiss her. “Steph?”

  She tipped her head to give him better access. “Hmm?”

  The setting sun cast her skin in a warm glow. “Why didn’t you tell me about the restaurant?”

  “I don’t know. I figured I’d get around to it eventually.”