Her best friend’s flushed cheeks and bright eyes and full white ball gown reminded Claire of why she had pulled the bride into the bathroom in the first place. Laurel was getting her happily ever after. Now Claire wanted a piece of that action.
“I need to talk to Tom,” Claire said. “He and I need time and privacy to work all our crap out.”
Laurel nodded. “Yes, yes! You two can work this out, I know you can.”
Claire grabbed Laurel’s hand. “I need your help.”
“Anything.”
And then, after ten years of friendship, Claire finally asked Laurel for something.
Chapter 18
As soon as the new Mrs. Tyler James had white frosting smeared over her nose, Tom was out of there. He had a date at the pool house that he wouldn’t miss for the world.
He slipped out of the tent and had to cross the lawn to get to the stone path that would lead to his destination, but as he crossed under the rose arbor, he nearly ran over Janine, who was using the cover of the arbor to conceal a game of Candy Crush.
Janine let out a surprised cry. “God, Tom! Where are you running off to?”
“The pool house, sorry,” he said.
“Whatever for?”
Tom wasn’t a kiss-and-tell guy, so he hedged. “I, um, left something there.” It was the truth. He’d left his clothes there last night.
Janine’s expression changed subtly. “Really. And you have to get it now? During the reception?” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Or are you as bored as I am?”
“No, no,” Tom protested. “It’s a really lovely reception. It’s very…white.”
Janine rolled her eyes. “Please, you don’t have to pretend to me. It’s a typical connect-the-dots, fill-in-the-blanks wedding reception. Totally basic, thanks to Claire. Every time I suggested we do something interesting or different, she would shut it down. Everything has to be her way. Boring. I mean, even her toast was predictable.”
Well, now Tom couldn’t excuse himself. Not until he had pointed out to Janine that Claire’s toast had been personal, poignant, and pithy. But Janine wasn’t waiting for Tom’s defense of Claire. “And don’t get me started on her taking advantage and swindling Laurel out of her honeymoon.”
That stopped Tom in his tracks. It was an insane accusation. It didn’t even make sense. “What are you talking about?” He didn’t bother to hide his incredulity, but Janine stayed cool as a cucumber. She lifted her eyebrows.
“You know Claire. How manipulative she can be. Laurel and Tyler decided they were going to delay their honeymoon, so Claire got Laurel to give her the tickets.” Janine checked her game and, with the relish of someone who was enjoying spilling the beans, continued, “She’s leaving tonight.”
“Tonight?” Tom echoed, not liking the way his shoulders had suddenly gotten tight.
“Yep, right after the reception’s over. Get this: she told Laurel she had to get out of town because of some guy she had a one-night stand with and apparently doesn’t want to deal with anymore.” Janine shook her head. “See what I mean? Manipulative, basic bitch.”
The truth pressed on his chest, heavy and unavoidable. She was doing it again. Leaving after one night. Leaving him caught in a desperate web of unrequited longing. She had used him again, too cowardly or too selfish to try an honest-to-God adult relationship. Or even an adult conversation.
Tom didn’t say anything else to Janine. He had nothing to say. His mind was running in circles, his heart was racing, and, after a few seconds, his feet started moving, not in the direction of the pool house, but toward the kennels. It was the only place in Virtue Cove where he knew what to expect.
Claire waited for Tom at the pool house for nearly an hour before she started to search for him. Maybe Tom had misunderstood her. She walked along the beach path, back up to the house, and circled around to the large tents on the Virtue Cove lawns that were the reception venue. Tom was nowhere to be seen. Even though guests weren’t supposed to be inside the house, Claire went up to check her room. Maybe Tom had decided her four-poster bed was more enticing than playing naughty hotel heiress and roguish racecar driver in the pool house. Claire couldn’t blame him. She was exhausted after a full day of marital celebrations, and nothing sounded better than snuggling naked with Tom under a pile of goose down.
But Tom wasn’t in her room, or the library, or kitchen, and when she was about to give up, she looked out the kitchen window and saw that the kennel office lights were on. Of course. How could she have not checked there already?
The grass between the house and the kennel was cool and damp, and the crisp June night had Claire rubbing her upper arms by the time she opened the door to the kennel office. “Tom?” she called out. “Are you in here?”
She poked her head in and there he was, sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, with three of Bits’ dogs snuggled up to him: Reba, Lady Anne, and Fancy. “There you are!” The dogs’ ears perked and their tails thumped at her arrival, but when Tom looked her way without a smile or a word, she asked, “Is everything okay?” Claire looked around the room quickly. Was one of the dogs hurt? Sick? Missing? “Are the puppies okay? Did anyone get out?”
Tom’s response was flat. “They’re good.”
Although that was good news, Claire didn’t feel any better. If anything, his not-so-reassuring reassurance made her feel more nervous. Something was obviously wrong. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yep.”
“Are you sick? Why did you take off your jacket?”
Tom glanced down at the three dogs currently using him as a pillow. Well, yes, she supposed that was obvious. “You’re going to have dog hair all over your pants,” she said, mostly because, well, she was running out of other things to say to him. Why was he acting like this? What was going on?
“There you go again, criticizing my clothes.”
“I’m not criticizing, I’m—” Claire broke off and stared at him. “Is this some kind of joke? I told you to meet me at the pool house.”
“It must suck when people don’t obey your every command.”
“It wasn’t a command, it was…” She couldn’t finish. This wasn’t making sense. She thought she’d suggested an assignation. A date. A sex date, in fact. But he was acting like he didn’t want a sex date. Like he didn’t want her. Like he had in college.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your bonding time with your pack.”
“Are you done?” Tom asked.
“Excuse me?”
“The sarcasm gets old.”
Claire was stunned. What in the world was going on? “Just tell me,” she said softly. “Spit it out.”
“I needed to think.”
Here it comes. She swallowed hard.
“I don’t think this is going to work out.”
Of course. She shouldn’t be surprised. This was Tom. The same Tom Harrington who had hated her. Teased her. Dismissed her. Over and over. Except when he didn’t. But that was a pattern, too, wasn’t it?
Claire nodded, trying to stay cool and calm. He wasn’t going to get the best of her. She wasn’t going to let him see how utterly devastated she was going to be, when she allowed herself to be, when she was in private, just her and three or four bottles of Syrah.
“Funny, I was going to tell you the same.”
The muscles in his jaw tightened. “I had a feeling.”
“I’m actually on my way to the airport. I don’t really see why we’d ever see each other again. I live in Manhattan; you live in”—she curled her lip—“animal hair.”
“We’re very different people.”
“To say the least,” she said, trying to infuse every syllable with as much disdain as possible. There was no way in hell Tom Horrible was going to know how he was tearing her up inside. “One of us is a caveman; the other is”—she smiled—“me.”
His only reaction was a tired sigh. “Goodbye, Claire. Have a nice life.”
In her head, she saw herself sla
p out the perfect classic movie sign-off. But as her throat was currently closing, her eyes were burning, and her stomach was threatening to expel its contents all over the floor, it was all she could do to tilt her head regally, turn on her heel, and leave Tom Horrible and his dog patients forever.
Chapter 19
Bits found him the next morning, asleep in the kennel office’s ragged La-Z-Boy, one hand around a flask, the other around her Chihuahua Fancy.
“Looks like someone had a rough night,” she drawled when he opened one eye at the intrusion of sunlight into the office.
“What are you doing here?” he mumbled. Bits was in the kennels all the time, of course, but not often wearing a pale yellow tweed suit that was going to be totally torn up by dog claws if she wasn’t careful. She came forward and scooped Fancy out of his lap. “Just checking that my babies weren’t too traumatized by last night.”
Join the club, Tom thought.
“The fireworks Claire ordered were inspired,” Bits went on, as if she couldn’t hear the voices inside Tom’s head. “But I didn’t even think that the sweet puppies would be so scared.” She nuzzled the top of Fancy’s head. Tom scrubbed a hand over his hair, trying to remember what had happened last night. Laurel and Tyler had gotten married, of course. Then he’d had his heart broken. Then, right after Claire had left, all hell had broken loose.
The fireworks display over Virtue Cove as Tyler and Laurel had set off from the reception and into marital bliss via the Stolen Virtue had been flashy, brilliant, and vicious, just like Claire Portelli. The millisecond after the first boom, the dogs in residence at Virtue Cove went berserk. It had made Tom reach for the bottle, and before he knew it, he was passed out and dreaming of fireworks and racecars. His dream life was exciting, breathtaking. In his dreams, fireworks danced in a glittery arc across the sky. In reality, fireworks made elderly dogs lose control of their bladders and puppies whine incessantly until dawn.
Bits kissed Fancy between the ears again and snapped a flower-trimmed leash to the dog’s collar. “There. Now you’re all ready for brunch,” she told the unimpressed Chihuahua.
Brunch? “What time is it?” Tom asked.
“Nearly noon,” Bits informed him in a half-amused, half-instructional tone. “Get freshened up; you look like you need coffee.”
Tom couldn’t disagree with that assessment. Twenty minutes later, he was semi-presentable at the steps to the sun porch. He vaguely remembered someone talking about an after-wedding brunch, and he wondered when the wedding festivities were going to end. How many meals had to take place to celebrate one couple’s union? Surely this had to be the last of it, right? Then he could take all his memories of this weekend, shove them in a box, and forget about them for the next fifty to sixty years.
The sun porch had been cleared of all the boxes and assorted wedding junk that had decorated the space that day he’d come in and found Claire crying over hundreds of dead butterflies. This morning, a long table covered in white linen was set in the sunny window overlooking the Atlantic and held silver trays of pastries, dishes of eggs and bacon, and bowls of fruit. In the corner, a coffee bar was set up, and it was there that Tom made a beeline.
The young woman operating the coffee machines smiled at him with interest. “Cappuccino?” she asked.
“Whatever,” Tom grumbled. This was his last cappuccino ever. Claire’s favorite coffee had no place in his life. Just like he’d done before, he’d have to ban all clues, signs, indications of her, to force that intoxicatingly annoying woman out of his head. She was like a remora. Or maybe a barnacle. Crap. He’d need six cappuccinos to figure out a good analogy to describe how hard Claire sucked.
“Tom?” A familiar female voice came from behind him. For an instant, he thought it was Claire. But it was someone almost as familiar.
“Laurel?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Aren’t you two supposed to be locked away somewhere from all of this?” Tom gestured at the seventh buffet service he’d seen in the last four days.
The puzzled smile that Laurel had on when she came up to him dissipated quickly. “What happened? Is Claire okay?”
“Does everything have to be about Claire Portelli?” Tom scowled at the cappuccino he’d just been served. This was what he had to get away from. His coffee was about her. His conversations were about her. He needed to find a mountaintop in the Himalayas, but he had a sneaking suspicion somehow someone there would have a Nicola Stanton yak-hair coat on and it would be all about Claire Portelli again.
Tyler came up and placed a hand around Laurel’s waist. “Hey, Tom. Where’s Claire?”
“For Pete’s sake, why the hell would I know?”
Tyler and Laurel exchanged a look. “Something’s happened,” Laurel said to Tyler.
“I thought you said she wanted them.”
“She did. She said they needed to talk.” As if they were that one flesh that the reverend had talked about, both Tyler and Laurel’s heads swung around to look at Tom. “Did you and Claire talk?”
Tom shrugged and took a big gulp of coffee. “Sure. I guess.”
Laurel got that worried bunny face. “And you guys didn’t work everything out?”
“Yeah,” Tom said with a snort. “I think it’s safe to say that Claire and I won’t be making any more colossally bad decisions. Ever.”
“Oh, Tom.” Laurel sighed.
“Sucks, man,” Tyler said. “And I really thought you would like Lesley Island.”
Tom nodded and swallowed another quarter of his coffee before he realized that what Tyler had said made absolutely no sense. “What does that mean?” Tom asked Tyler, even though Tyler had been pulled into conversation with his uncle about something.
Tyler looked back at Tom and then back at Laurel. “He doesn’t know,” he told Laurel.
“He doesn’t know what?”
“Lesley Island,” said Tyler.
“What the hell is Lesley Island?” Tom asked. Laurel’s mouth formed into a little oval. Two minutes later, Tyler and Laurel had him cornered outside against the wall of the house.
Tom repeated his question and added another. “What is going on?”
Laurel began to explain that the James family owned an island off the coast of South Carolina. “It’s private,” Laurel said.
“Isolated,” Tyler added. “No cell service.”
“Satellite TV that only works when the clouds aren’t low,” Laurel added. “But the house is great. Really romantic.”
“So?” Tom prompted them. Laurel recounted how Tyler’s aunt had arranged their honeymoon on Lesley Island but that Laurel and Tyler had changed their minds.
“I just want to go home,” Laurel said with a sigh, “to our house. Our bed.” She and Tyler gazed into each other’s eyes lovingly, and Tom almost threw up a little. Yet another thing he’d have to avoid for a while in his Claire Portelli Rehab Phase: any and all happily married friends of Claire Portelli.
“Claire didn’t mention any of this to you?” Laurel asked Tom, and he had to answer in the negative because it wasn’t Claire who had talked about Laurel and Tyler’s honeymoon destination. It had been Janine. The light finally clicked on in Tom’s head. Thank God for caffeine.
“She got you to give her a vacation at Lesley Island so she could escape the clutches of her wedding fling,” Tom said bitterly.
Laurel shook her head slowly. “She asked for it so that she could go with you.”
“Me?”
“Unless there’s some other guy she’s been in love with since freshman year.”
“In…in…in lo…love?”
“Sausage pizza! Cappuccino! Best in Show!” Laurel threw up her hands. “I can’t with you two.”
But Tom was still stuck. “She wanted to go with me? To Lesley Island.”
“You guys needed time alone to work things out. I thought it was a great idea.”
It would hav
e been. If Claire hadn’t…
What had Claire done?
She had invited him to the pool house. She had found him in the kennel office. She had lashed out after he had been cool and distant.
And she’d made that comment about dog hair on his pants, but it was hardly an evil comment.
Tom went through the night before in his head and finally rubbed his eyes roughly. Janine had put those pernicious, sneaky thoughts in his head—that Claire would leave him again, stranded. So he had rejected her before she could reject him.
“I might have screwed up,” Tom said finally.
“How bad?” Tyler asked.
Claire had left him after he’d broken things off with her. His heart clenched at the thought. “Pretty bad.”
“I can get a plane for you from Bangor in an hour,” Laurel promised.
“So I can chase after her?”
“Yes!” Laurel bounced up and down. “This is so romantic. You have to go to her and tell her you love her.”
“I can’t just leave for South Carolina today. I have patients and appointments and events.”
Laurel grabbed his hand and squeezed. “And that’s why I’m lucky to have the most organized and well-prepared woman on the continent as my best friend. She got you a sub!”
“A what?”
“A substitute! She already talked to Mom, and Mom called a clinic in Bangor, and they happen to have a new vet who was looking for some extra cash, so that doctor agreed to step into your shoes for however long you want to be in South Carolina.”
Tom was going to need a second cappuccino. “Let me get this straight. Claire asked you if we could go to this romantic island getaway in South Carolina, arranged for a plane to fly us and someone to take over my office—”
“Because she loves you.”
“She wants you there, man,” Tyler added. “So why didn’t you go?”
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