by Helen Brenna
“I would’ve guessed you didn’t come here anymore.” The deep, masculine voice came from behind her.
She spun around and found Noah sitting with his back against the lighthouse, one leg stretched in front of him. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
The sight of him now was no less upsetting than when she’d first seen him at Grandma Bennett’s house. She barely kept herself from charging over there and…and…kicking him. “Scare me? Hardly. And I haven’t been here for years.”
Why was she here now, anyway? It was bad enough Noah was back on the island, but coming here, to the place they’d first made love, what had she been thinking? She started across the rocks on her way back toward the road.
“I couldn’t sleep, either,” he said before she’d taken more than a step or two. “Too many memories.” He was wearing a stocking cap and had a heavy wool blanket wrapped around him, making it look as if he planned on camping there for the night. It might have been the beginning of summer, but on big water like Lake Superior the nights could be cold even after the hottest of days.
Curiosity got the better of her. “How long have you been out here?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Couple hours.”
Hours. Sitting at their lighthouse, remembering, reliving. When she looked into his tired eyes she understood. That didn’t mean she was any less angry. She started again toward the road.
“Sophie?” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She stopped. For what? She wanted to scream at him. For leaving me here all alone? For ruining my dreams and breaking my heart?
“About Isaac.”
Oh. Isaac. Sadness dampened the rage.
“If I’d known,” he said. “I’d have come back.”
She heard him swallow and softened for a moment. As much as she hated this man, he’d just discovered he’d lost his only sibling. “Your dad tried—”
“Not very hard, Soph. The military was always able, someway, somehow, to get urgent messages to me. He didn’t want me coming back.”
A small part of her had probably always wondered about that. “You being here wouldn’t have changed anything.”
“He was my brother. I should’ve been here to say goodbye. Regardless of the issues between all of us, I would’ve been here for you.”
Then it was probably for the best that he hadn’t been here for the funeral. There’s no telling what kind of fool she’d have made of herself in that vulnerable state. But she wasn’t vulnerable now. “Why now, Noah? Why the hell did you come back after all this time?”
He tossed a few rocks out into the water. “The truth?”
“What do you think?”
He studied her while he seemed to be deciding what, if anything, to say. “Okay,” he said. “The truth. Since losing my foot, I can’t sleep. When I do, I have constant nightmares. I can barely hold down a meal. I have a hard time concentrating. I can’t write, can’t take pictures. And I’ve got a book due in a couple months. I could lose my job, my career.” He patted his prosthetic. “And I sometimes have what’s called phantom pains that are almost worse than the pain after the actual explosion.”
“In short, you’re a basket case.”
“It could be worse. I could develop a full-blown case of post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s what my doctors are worried about. PTSD.”
“So your doctors wanted you to come here?”
He nodded.
“Why? What’s here for you? I don’t get it.”
He looked away. The only sound was that of the frigid waters of Lake Superior lapping against the rocks. “I don’t know if you can understand,” he said, sounding very tired.
“Try me.”
He sighed. “Since leaving Mirabelle, I’ve pretty much moved from one war-torn region in the world to the next. I’ve been shot at more times than I can count and actually hit a couple times. I’ve been blindfolded and taken to secret rebel camps. Nearly kidnapped twice. Spent many nights wondering if I was going to be alive in the morning. After more than a decade in places like Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq…” He paused. “Mirabelle is the only place…”
“You feel safe.” For a moment, she tried putting herself in his shoes and, in spite of every intention to the contrary, sympathy pricked her conscience.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “One full night’s sleep, Sophie. I can’t tell you what I’d do for a straight eight hours.” The moonlight cast pale light over his face, making him look almost ghostly, but the dark circles under his eyes were painfully real.
That’s when she noticed the unopened bottle of vodka next to him and wondered what he was waiting for. Maybe this end was no less than he deserved. “So am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”
“No.” He shook his head. “You don’t need to feel anything for me.”
“How long are you staying?”
“As long as it takes.”
That could be weeks. Oh, my God, months. She wasn’t sure she could handle more than a few days. What about Lauren and Kurt? What if Noah started asking questions? The possibility made her stomach churn. She started again toward the road.
“Sophie—”
“I don’t get it!” Unbidden, the words burst from her mouth. “You never called! Never wrote,” she said, needing to get this off her chest once and for all. “My dad died, and you left. You left!”
Her dad had suffered a massive heart attack and died right before she and Noah had graduated from high school. They’d been planning on heading off to college in the fall. Instead, she’d had to stay to help her mother with the inn. She’d had no choice. The Mirabelle Island Inn had been owned and operated by a Rousseau for hundreds of years, and her two sisters and Marty had been little more than teenagers at the time. Then her mother had gotten sick right after Noah had left and the decision had been all but taken out of her hands.
Overnight she’d gone from being on the cusp of seeing her dreams realized to having to run the inn and helping to take care of three younger siblings. And Noah? He’d left to make his dreams come true. Without her.
“You know I was the only one capable of helping my mom with the inn,” she said. “We plan a lifetime together and one snag comes along and you’re gone.”
“Hell, Sophie,” he said, sounding weary. “Back then every day on this island felt like an eternity to me. I had a college scholarship that was going to disappear if I didn’t show up on campus that fall. I was eighteen. An impatient, stupid kid. If I could do it over again…” He paused. “I couldn’t stay. You couldn’t leave,” he whispered. “No matter how much we want things to work out, Sophie, some things aren’t meant to be.”
“That’s what you’ve told yourself all these years, isn’t it, Noah. To clear your conscience.”
“No, Sophie.” He picked up a rock and angrily whipped it out into the water. “You marrying Isaac only a few months after I left took care of my conscience just fine.”
Maybe she should’ve told him the truth back then. Maybe—No! Her spine stiffened. He’s the one who left. He made his choice when he walked off this island and never looked back. “Well, at least I found out what you were made of before it was too late.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“That I obviously married the more dependable of the Bennett boys.”
“Boy, you got that right,” he bit back at her. “Now that we understand each other, I’ll do my best to stay out of your way.”
“You do that.” As she stalked away the unmistakable sound of a cap opening on a bottle followed her. Maybe he’d drink that vodka, suffer hypothermia and die out here.
She should be so lucky.
CHAPTER FOUR
A WHITE-TAILED DEER BOLTED twenty feet in front of Sophie as she came close to finishing her usual five-mile morning run that twisted and turned through Mirabelle’s undeveloped state land, continued with a jaunt straight through the Rousseau forest and ended back at the inn. A p
air of gray squirrels scurried across the damp, leafy carpet and a woodpecker hammered after breakfast on a dying, if not already dead, pine tree that had been struck by lightning the previous summer.
She’d learned years ago to take the quiet morning hours for herself. Sometimes the kids or work took priority. More often than not, she reserved this precious time for walking or running through the forest, her wild sanctuary.
It was also the place that helped ground her in her ancestry. On windy days her father’s quiet, but authoritative voice seemed to whisper through the treetops. You’re a part of this island, chérie…You more than anyone have to keep the Rousseau traditions alive. And so she had, from the menu at the Fourth of July corn boil to the handmade Christmas decorations to the brand of New Year’s champagne. She felt his approval every time she ran this path.
This morning, though, her run didn’t have its usual calming effect. She couldn’t seem to slow herself down and maintain a steady pace. Images of Noah, one legged, standing at Grandma Bennett’s door and sitting, wrapped in that blanket at the lighthouse, kept popping into her mind, driving her on, faster and faster.
She burst through the tree line and onto the inn grounds, slowed to a walk and glanced at her watch. Normally, she ran her five-mile track around the island in an hour, but this morning she’d finished in record time.
While stretching her arms and neck, she looked up the hillside and strained to see through the trees. Was Noah awake? Probably not. It was early. The sun was only now rising over Lake Superior. Curls of fog clung to the water’s calm surface like a fuzzy blanket, and she couldn’t help imagining him sleeping, couldn’t help wondering if he still slept naked. That was a dangerous thought and a useless one at that.
She drew in a breath of the cool morning air before quietly entering her living quarters by the back door of the inn and peeking in on Kurt and Lauren. They were both snoozing away in their respective bedrooms, and what else should they be doing on their first day of summer break?
After showering and dressing, Sophie left a note on the kitchen table for the kids to check in at her office after they’d had breakfast, and then she entered the inn through the passageway into the kitchen.
Josie was busy at the stove, her thick black hair streaked with coarse gray strands drawn back in a large clip. Her white bib apron, fresh that morning and tied over a red T-shirt and khaki pants, had yet to become the least bit soiled.
“Morning, Josie.”
“Good morning, Sophie. Your coffee’s ready. Made an egg bake for Marty and his fiancée, or would you rather have your usual?”
She shrugged. “Whatever you’ve already cooked up will be perfect. If you’ve got extras.” She could live without oatmeal and fresh fruit for one morning.
Jim Bennett, Sophie’s father-in-law, sat at the wide metal counter, sipping coffee. Every morning, provided there was time after his usual early morning fishing jaunt, he could be found in that exact location.
Jim and Josie were discreet about their relationship, but on an island this small nothing stayed secret for long. Jim had been divorced for decades, since Gloria had left, and Josie’s husband had died several years ago. Why they didn’t get married or move in together was anyone’s guess.
Jim looked up from the Bayfield newspaper. “You’re looking very relaxed today, Sophie.”
And looks could be deceiving. She planted a kiss on his forehead and poured herself a cup of coffee. “I hate to say it, but you look tired.”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
His jacket smelled like sweet pipe tobacco and Sophie got a bit sentimental thinking about all this man had done for her through the years. She rubbed his shoulders. “Tense, too. I’m going to guess you’ve seen Noah.”
Was it her imagination or had his shoulders tightened even more. “Yep,” he murmured.
“You know, you could’ve warned me he was coming.”
“I would have. If I’d known. The first I heard about it was from Lynn. Arlo told her after dropping Marty off and then she called the station.”
Lynn was Arlo’s wife. She ran Duffy’s Pub and Arlo ran the stables and carriage business. Very little happened on this island without those two knowing about it.
Josie set a plate heaping with a baked mixture of scrambled eggs, sausage, cheese and veggies on the table in front of him and another plate with much smaller portions in front of Sophie. “You two eat before it gets cold.”
“Thanks, Josie.” She took a bite, but the food lodged in her throat. “Did you know about his accident?”
“That was no accident.”
“But you knew?”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jim pursed his lips, considering. “I didn’t want you feeling sorry for him.”
That wasn’t likely to happen any time soon. She glanced at Josie. “You knew, too, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“That means the whole island knows. Everyone except me. I can’t believe neither one of you told me.”
Jim ate a few forkfuls, but there was clearly something bothering him. He dropped his fork onto his plate. It clanged in the large open space of the industrial-sized kitchen. “Goddammit! I told him it would happen someday,” Jim blurted out. “You can’t flirt with disaster the way he has for years and not get burned.”
“There’s no point getting into this now,” Josie said softly.
“Did you know, too, that his doctors are worried he might develop post-traumatic stress disorder?”
Jim shook his head. “When did you talk to him?”
“Last night. I went for a walk and ran into him.”
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for him, you hear me?” Jim pushed away his plate of food, stood and pulled on his jacket. “For your own good, stay away from Noah. He’ll run again. Just like his mother.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she yelled. “You think I’ve forgotten how I felt when he left?”
The day she’d woken up alone in that Bayfield hotel room she’d promised herself she would never again love any man the way she’d loved Noah Bennett. Completely, recklessly, passionately. “Never again, Jim. Never.”
NOAH SAT ON THE FRONT PORCH swing holding a steaming cup of coffee in his hands, but after finishing off the better part of that bottle of vodka last night he wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold anything down. Scraping and priming the house? Not in this lifetime. He could only stare at the paint peeling off the railing.
A screen door slammed from the vicinity of the inn and he wondered if Sophie was out and about. Seeing her at the lighthouse—their lighthouse—last night had about killed him. There were few places on this island not fraught with memories of their childhood, their friendship, their love, though the lighthouse—the place they’d first made love—was the most poignant of all. But he couldn’t let himself remember what it’d felt like to hold her, make love to her. He’d been down that road before and all it had led to was physical and emotional agony.
Kids’ voices coming up the hill sidetracked him, and he craned his neck to look over the porch rail. A boy and a girl. Sophie and Isaac’s kids, no doubt.
A couple years after he’d left the island, his dad had told him they’d had children and that’d changed everything for Noah. Overnight, the desire to get as far away from Mirabelle, Sophie and Isaac as he could manage burned in his gut. He’d ended up taking an overseas journalism internship and from there traveled the world.
To hell with Sophie and Isaac, but the kids? Several times, he’d thought about sending Christmas presents or tokens of his travels to Kurt and Lauren, but in the end it had been too painful to make contact with his niece and nephew. He’d had to shut out the whole lot of them.
Sophie and Isaac. Married. Sharing their life together. Making love. Making babies. It hadn’t made sense, then or now. Isaac had always wanted to have kids, but how could he have had sex with Sophie? How could she have had sex with his brother? It had
all been too painful, and seeing the kids suddenly made it all too real.
“I’m going to Kally’s. Where are you going?”
“Ben’s. Then to Zach’s.”
“You have to be home for supper. It’s your turn to do the dishes tonight.”
“I washed ’em yesterday.”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Then what did we have for dinner? Huh? Huh?”
They looked like teenagers, but that couldn’t be right. Mentally, he calculated back to when his dad had told him about the twins. They couldn’t be older than eleven, maybe twelve.
What hit Noah first was how much Lauren’s face reminded him of Sophie as a young girl. Darken the young girl’s hair, put in some waves, and bam, young Sophie, ready to skip stones at the lighthouse, or kayak to one of the other Apostle Islands to explore the caves. Kurt, with his startling blue eyes, favored Isaac.
Dammit, Isaac. Why did you have to take Sophie? You had everything else.
Yeah, but you left her, you idiot.
Doesn’t matter. She belonged to me.
You left. She stayed. She chose.
The twins walked across his grandmother’s yard, apparently on the way to friends’ houses, and came to a quick stop on seeing him sitting on the porch. Staring back at Noah, they seemed intensely curious, making him wonder what, if anything, Sophie had told them about him.
“Hey there,” he said. “You must be Sophie’s kids.”
His niece and nephew. Damn. He was an uncle. Of sorts.
The girl nodded.
“You Noah?” the boy asked. His young voice, on the cusp of puberty, fluctuated from high to low and back again, as if unable to make up its mind. Grow up, or stay young?
Like a punch in his gut, Noah realized he’d been younger than Kurt when his mother had left. Noah had come home from school one afternoon to find his dad and Isaac sitting at the kitchen table. His dad had looked up at Noah and said, “Your mother left this morning, and, this time, she won’t be coming back. What do you want for supper?” and that had been the extent of their conversation.