by Jill Shalvis
“Nothing.” But she was clearly biting her tongue about something.
He knew her well and braced himself, because that look meant she had something on her mind and there’d be no peace until it came out. “Just say it,” he said.
“I heard that your father called you.” Her sweet blue gaze was filled with worry. “Is it true?”
Well, shit. There was no love lost between Amelia and Mark, mostly because Amelia had always had to clean up Mark’s mess—that mess being Sam. It didn’t matter that he and his dad had lived in Seattle. She’d made the two-hour drive and claimed him whenever he’d needed her.
“Sam,” she said. “Is it true? Did Mark call you?”
“Listen, it’s late,” he said, trying to head off a discussion he didn’t want to have. “Let me walk you out—”
“It’s a simple enough question, Samuel.”
He grimaced at his full name, the one only she used. Pulling in the big guns. “Yeah, he called. I call him, too, you know that.”
Her eyes went from worried mom to very serious mom. “Honey, I need you to tell me you weren’t stupid enough to give him another penny.”
“You know, it lowers a person’s self-esteem to call them stupid,” he said with mock seriousness.
“Damn it!” Amelia stalked to the door that led to a hallway and into the small kitchen.
Against his better judgment, Sam followed, watching as she bypassed the fridge, going straight for the freezer, exclaiming wordlessly when she found it empty.
“You used to always keep vodka around,” she muttered. “Where’s the vodka?” She turned to him, hands on hips. “Sometimes a woman needs a damn vodka, Sam.”
He knew that. He also knew that sometimes a man needed a damn vodka. For a long time after Gil’s death, vodka had soothed his pain. Too much. When he’d realized that, he’d cut it off cold turkey. It’d sucked.
These days, he stuck with the occasional beer and did his best not to think too much. “I’ve got soda,” he said. “Chips. Cookies. Name your poison.”
“Vodka.”
He sighed and strode over to her, shutting the freezer, pulling her from it and enveloping her in his arms. “I’m okay. You know that, right?”
She tipped her head back to look up into his face. “Does it happen often?”
“Me being okay? Yes.”
She smacked him on the chest. “I meant your dad. Does he call you often then?”
“I call him every week,” Sam said.
Her gaze said she got the distinction, and the fact that Sam was usually the instigator didn’t make her any happier. “And do you give him money?” she asked.
“When he needs it.”
She gave a troubled sigh. “Oh, Sam.”
“Look, he’s getting older and he’s feeling his mortality,” he said. “He’s got a silly, frivolous woman, and a baby coming—”
“Which is ridiculous—”
“—And he realizes he fucked up with his first kid.”
“You think?” She cupped his face. “Sam, I don’t like this. I don’t like him taking from you. He’s done nothing but take from you, and I know damn well it affects your relationships. Because of him, you let women in your life here and there, but you don’t let yourself fully rely on anyone, ever. That isn’t healthy, Sam. Is Becca any different?”
He thought of the only woman who’d caught his eye lately. Becca. She certainly wasn’t the type of woman to rely on anyone. “I think she might be,” he said.
“But will you be able to rely on her? That’s what a woman will want, Sam. For you to do the same.”
He gave a short laugh. “You’re way ahead of yourself.”
“Well, I worry about you,” she said. “All of you.”
“Marry off all those crazy daughters of yours, and then we’ll talk,” Sam told her.
“You’re changing the subject on me.”
“Trying.” He sighed at the dark look she shot him. “Look, I don’t like that he’s getting older and feeling regrets. Or that he doesn’t have enough money to support that kid. He’s my dad. What would you have me do?”
Amelia sighed and shook her head. Then she went up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “I know better than to argue with you. I’d do better bashing my head up against the wall.”
He smiled, as this was true. “So you’ll leave me alone about it?”
“No.” She kissed his other cheek. “But I’ll give you some peace. For now.”
It was nearly midnight when she left, with one last long hug that Sam endured. When he was alone, he shut the laptop and hit the lights. Bed was the smart decision but he was far from tired. Thinking about his dad had dredged up some shit he didn’t want dredged.
He needed to expel his pent-up energy. Usually he did this by running with Ben, a longtime friend from town. Like Sam, Ben appreciated the art of not talking much, which meant they were well suited as running partners, but Ben wasn’t sleeping alone these days, and it was too late to call. So, restless and edgy, Sam hit the beach by himself, pushing himself hard. He tried to clear his mind, but things kept popping into his head.
Love ya, son.
It drove him crazy how his dad threw around the words like they meant nothing. Love, real love, would have protected him from being taken from their home due to neglect. Real love would have forgotten the stupid get-rich-quick schemes that never came through and attempted to keep a job so they had a roof over their heads and food in their kitchen.
Sam shook off the bleak memories and kept running. The past didn’t matter. The here and now mattered. Building boats. Running the charter business. Coming through for Cole and Tanner the way they’d always come through for him.
But the past was a sneaky bitch, and for some reason, tonight he couldn’t escape her. Not even an hour later when he was back where he started, standing on the sand in front of their hut, breathing heavily.
A sliver of a moon cast the beach in a blue glow, allowing him to see the small shadow sitting on the sand a few feet away.
Becca.
Chapter 6
Sam stood still for a beat, thinking that if he was smart, he’d turn and get the hell off the beach without saying a word. Not when he was this wild on the inside, this edgy.
But apparently he wasn’t smart at all because his feet didn’t budge.
She wore an oversized sweatshirt and flannel PJ bottoms, her arms wrapped around her legs, a tiny little gold ring encircling one of her bare toes. Under her tough-girl exterior, she was soft and sweet, and had a smile that moved him.
Her body moved him, too, and again he told himself to keep going and not look back.
And again, he didn’t budge. She looked like a quiet, calm, sexy-as-hell oasis, and she was drawing him in without even trying. “Thought Lucky Harbor was just a pit stop,” he said over the sound of the surf hitting the sand. “But you’re still here.”
Becca tilted her head back and leveled him with those melting dark eyes. “Appears that way.”
“In your PJs,” he noted.
She looked down at herself. “It’s my Man-Repellent. Guaranteed to deflect a guy’s interest with a single glance.”
The PJs were baggy, but there was a breeze plastering the material to her body, which was a complete show-stopper. He laughed softly, and she narrowed her eyes. “What?” she asked.
“Let’s just say they’re not as bad as you think.”
She blinked, then lowered her gaze, taking the time to carefully brush some sand from her feet.
It occurred to him that he was making her nervous by looming over her, so he shifted back a foot or so and crouched low to make himself nonthreatening. He added a smile.
She visibly relaxed. “You probably shouldn’t flash that smile at me too often,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s . . . attractive,” she admitted. “You’re attractive. Which you damn well know.”
“But I’m wearing my woman-repellent gear,” h
e said, and she laughed. It was a really great laugh.
He’d felt the pull of their chemistry from the very beginning, and had wondered if she did as well. No need to wonder now; it was all over her, however reluctantly she felt it. He needed to walk away now, before this got any more out of hand.
Instead, he spoke. “Is there a reason you want me to be repelled?” he asked.
“You mean am I crazy, or in a relationship?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Either of those.”
“Not in a relationship.” She smiled a little thinly. “Jury’s still out on the crazy thing, though. You?”
He gave a slow shake of his head. “Negative on both.”
She dropped the eye contact first, instead taking in his body in a way that revved his engines. “Do you always run that hard?” she asked, her voice barely carrying over the sound of the surf hitting the sand.
He shrugged.
“I see you sometimes in the mornings,” she said. “And you do. You always run that hard.”
He smiled. “Peeper to the bone.”
“Can’t seem to help myself,” she admitted.
He dropped to the sand beside her and didn’t miss the fact that she stiffened up at his quick motion. To give her a minute, he stretched out his tired legs. “I worked at sea for seven years. I missed running. I promised myself when I got off the rig, I’d get back to it.”
She took her gaze off his body to look into his eyes. “What was the job?”
“I worked for a consulting firm monitoring the deep drilling rigs. We’d go out for months at a time, no land in sight.”
“We?”
“I had a crew,” he said.
“You were out at sea with a bunch of guys for months at a time?”
“There were a few women too,” he said. Three, to be exact, one of whom had neatly sliced Cole’s heart in two.
“What was your job out there?” Becca asked.
“OIM. Offshore installation manager.” He shrugged again. “Basically just a fancy title for babysitting the operation.”
“All of it?”
“I handled the business side of things,” he said, “the shifts, the tasks, everything.”
“Sam knows everything,” she said softly. “That’s what people keep telling me.”
He didn’t know everything. He didn’t know, for example, why he was so drawn to her. Or what made her so wary.
“Must have been a tough job,” she said.
“The job was hard as hell,” he agreed. He had few good memories of those years, working his way up from grunt worker to manager. After they’d lost Gil, he and Tanner had come back to Lucky Harbor with Cole, who’d wanted to be here to take care of his mom and three sisters. Tanner had needed recovery time. And it’d been as good a place as any to start their charter company.
“So you retired from the rigs and now you run, surf, take people out on charters, and handcraft boats,” she said.
He slid her a look.
“Peeper, remember?” she said. She bit her lip but a sweet, low laugh escaped. “Plus, I looked you up.”
Now it was his turn to narrow his eyes. “Why?”
She squirmed a little, which he found fascinating. Actually he found her fascinating. “I’ve spent the past three mornings at the diner for the free WiFi,” she said. “I’ve been . . . researching.”
“Me?”
“Not just you. But I was curious,” she admitted.
“Yeah? You didn’t get enough information from watching me out the window?”
“Hey,” she said on another laugh. “I can’t help it that you’re pretty to look at.”
At this, he went brows-up. “You said attractive. You didn’t say pretty.”
“Pretty,” she repeated, still smiling.
He loved her smile. “I’m not pretty.” But he was smiling now, too.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re right. Pretty is far too girlie a word for what you are.”
They looked at each other. The air seemed to get all used up then, and his heart beat in tune to the pulsing waves. “What else did you learn about me, in your . . . research?” he asked softly.
Her gaze dropped to his mouth. “That you guys take people deep-sea fishing, scuba diving, that sort of thing. Also, your charter company’s got four and a half stars on Yelp—although I’m pretty sure some of those reviews were written by women who want to date you because there’s lots of mentions of the three hot guys who run the company.”
He winced, making her laugh again.
“Might as well own it,” she said. “Also, did you know that the town of Lucky Harbor has a Pinterest account? The woman who updates it has a board there for her favorite things.”
“Lucille,” he muttered.
“And one of her favorite things,” Becca said, “is you.”
He grimaced. “Lucille’s a nut.”
“She seems very sincere.”
“Okay, so she’s a nice nut,” he said. “A nut’s a nut.”
“People around here seem to look to you as a leader, as someone to turn to,” she said. “If there’s a question, people say Sam’ll know, but I’ve noticed something.” She waited until he met her gaze. “No one seems to really know you except for maybe Cole and Tanner.”
That was just close enough to the dead truth to make him uncomfortable.
“I think it’s because you come off as a lone wolf,” she said, head cocked as she studied him. “And then there’s your approach-at-your-own-risk vibe.”
Hard to deny the truth, so he didn’t bother.
“I mean you’re really good on the fly,” she said quietly, as if talking to herself, trying to figure him out. “And you’re good at helping people, but you’re not readily available to get to know.”
It was a shockingly accurate insight, but he went with humor. “Not seeing the problem,” he said.
“Well, it’s interesting, is all.”
“Interesting?”
“Yeah.” Again she looked at his mouth. “Because your distance is perversely making me curious to know more. And I haven’t been . . . curious in a long time.”
There was another surge of that something between them. Heat. Hunger. At least on his part. Testing, he shifted a little closer, moving slowly because he was learning that fast tripped a switch for her, and not in a good way. As he came in, she dragged her teeth over her lower lip and her eyes went heavy-lidded in invite. Their mouths nearly touched before she suddenly pulled back, jerking to her feet. “Sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I thought I heard something.”
They both listened. Nothing but the waves hitting the rocky sand, and her accelerated breathing.
She grimaced. “I guess not.”
He stood as well and kept things light by giving her some space. “You didn’t keep the waitressing job.”
“Turns out I’m not much of a waitress.”