“Sorry I’m late,” he said to the receptionist as he passed by my chair and approached the desk.
He was casually dressed in jeans and a golf shirt. His dark hair appeared windblown. He had to be at least six-foot-two and was lean and fit like an athlete. He was likely in his late thirties. Perhaps forty—but, if so, a very young and fit-looking forty.
The receptionist paused her work and smiled up at him. “No trouble, Aaron. But Ms. Roberts is here, when you’re ready.”
He turned around and faced me, our eyes locked and held, and the whole world seemed to fall away beneath my feet.
It took me a moment to gather my composure as I rose.
“Hi there,” he said, blue eyes glimmering with an infectious warmth and that arrestingly familiar quality I couldn’t put my finger on, which made me feel almost dizzy with rapture. He approached me and held out his hand. “I’m Aaron. You must be Katelyn.”
I placed my hand in his. “That’s right.” I felt an odd shudder in my chest, originating from the grip of his hand. It was as if all the cells in my body had awakened to the physical connection. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”
“My pleasure,” he easily replied. “I had to come back to the office anyway. It worked out perfectly.” He turned and opened a door in the back corner which I assumed led to his office. “Come on in.”
In an effort to collect myself, I cleared my throat and took a deep breath before I followed him through the door into a massive open space with maple floors, white walls and enormous floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the harbor. There were a few large drafting tables in the center of the room and a whiteboard on one wall, and bean bag chairs in one corner. The side wall housed a large glass cabinet full of books and rolled documents.
“This is our design studio,” he said, gesturing with a hand as he led me to another door at the side which took us into a smaller, carpeted office with filing cabinets and more large windows. There was an antique mahogany desk similar to the one out front.
“Have a seat,” Aaron said, gesturing to one of the leather chairs facing the desk while he sat behind it.
Then we stared at each other for several seconds and I felt completely dumbstruck. He ran his fingers through his thick dark hair.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his forehead crinkling with dismay. “You look very familiar to me. Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, deriving immense pleasure from the question as I crossed one leg over the other and tugged my skirt a bit lower to cover my bare knee. “But you look familiar to me, too.” We continued to regard each other wordlessly in the bright light streaming through the windows.
Feeling awkward, I resumed some light conversation. “This is quite a place you have here.”
He seemed to shake himself out of his reverie before he spoke. “Obviously this isn’t where we build the boats. The factory is outside the downtown core. But this is a good space to be creative.”
“Creative…” I dug into my purse for my notepad and pen. “Do you mind if I take a few notes?”
“Not at all.”
I launched into a series of questions about how he got into the business and how many boats he had built. He explained that he started racing dinghies during summers when he was a kid, and by the time he was sixteen, he began to purchase beat-up boats to repair and restore, then resold them for a profit. In his early twenties, he traveled to Europe to work in a number of international boatyards where he completed some apprenticeships.
When he returned home, he joined a boatbuilding firm in Connecticut and was quickly promoted from shipwright to head foreman. Then he took out a bank loan to start his own company and built his first racing skiff. The boat did well in competitions, and soon he had contracts to build others, and the company grew from there—one boat at a time.
“How many employees do you have?”
“Here in Portland,” he replied, “twenty. But our Southampton facility employs forty-seven, and our factory in Norway employs…” He paused. “Sixty-two, I think.”
I looked up. “You have facilities in the UK and Norway?”
He nodded.
“How many boats have you built?”
He sat back and thought about it. “I used to be able to keep track, but now everything moves so quickly. I’d have to check the files and do a count, but I would estimate around six hundred and fifty.”
I wrote furiously, trying to get everything down. Meanwhile I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do with this information, since I was a television reporter and I hadn’t arrived with a cameraman. I was out of my wheelhouse, so to speak. Perhaps this could work out as a freelance magazine article.
“That’s impressive.” I looked up to find him staring at me again, with intensity and fascination.
My cheeks flushed with heat. Lowering my gaze, I set my pen down and swallowed hard.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t stop staring at you. I’m sure I must know you from somewhere. Even your voice sounds familiar.”
I wet my lips and chose my words carefully. “Maybe we knew each other in a past life.”
He chuckled softly and nodded. I lowered my gaze again, shy all of a sudden, my heartbeat quickening. He truly was an impossibly attractive man by any standards, whether we knew each other in a former life, or not.
I knew he was divorced, but he couldn’t possibly be single. Surely some woman had swooped in and snapped him up by now.
Picking up my pen again, I asked him a few more questions about his company and the success of his boats in the racing circuit. He gave me a quick rundown and promised to email me a document that showed the racing stats of all the boats he’d ever built.
Then I heard the receptionist’s heels clicking across the hardwood floor in the design studio. She knocked lightly on Aaron’s open door before she peeked in. “Sorry to disturb you, but it’s after five,” she said. “Do you need me for anything else before I go?”
“No, Martha. Go on home. I’ll lock up.”
She smiled at him. “Great. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I waited until the sound of her heels disappeared into the carpeted reception area, then I met Aaron’s gaze again.
Still, he was watching me with those intense blue eyes that caused a ruckus of exhilaration in my core. Honestly, I felt as if this were the most thrilling experience of my life, as if my whole body was coming alive with sensation and awareness.
“I missed lunch,” he said. “Are you hungry? Maybe we could grab a bite while we continue with this. Unless you already have all you need.”
Feeling flustered and goosebumpy all over, I closed my notepad. “Hardly. And yes, I’m starving.”
The lines on either side of his mouth deepened as he smiled. “Good. There’s a decent restaurant within walking distance of here, if that sounds all right to you?”
“Sounds great.”
He stood up and grabbed his jacket.
o0o
I texted Bailey from the restaurant to tell her I wouldn’t be home for a while, and managed to enjoy my dinner with Aaron without falling into an internal debate with myself about whether or not we had been formerly married, each reincarnated from an earlier century—which still seemed implausible and fantastical to me, despite all the coincidences.
We ordered a bottle of wine and talked about all sorts of normal things, mostly to do with his company as I continued to conduct my interview. Soon, we progressed smoothly and naturally into more personal subjects, and he asked about my life in Seattle.
“I see that you’re not wearing a ring,” he said. “You’re not married?”
The question left me feeling positively overjoyed—to the point where I found it difficult to sit still—because I was flattered and thrilled that he was taking an interest in my personal circumstances.
I wiped the corner of my mouth with my napkin and set it back down on my lap. “I was, for seven years, but now I’m divo
rced.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said. “Any kids?”
“Sadly, no—which was part of the problem,” I explained. “I was ready to start a family and I wanted a child, very much, but Mark wasn’t interested. It caused some tension in our relationship, which I guess is what drove him away, straight into the arms of a younger version of me. A woman who wasn’t pushing him to slow down and have kids. She was only twenty-one. And he married her last year.”
Aaron shook his head. “If he wasn’t ready to have a child with you after seven years, he probably won’t ever be.”
I agreed. “What about you? Are you married?”
I didn’t want to mention that I already knew the answer to that question because I’d brazenly asked his parents a few hours earlier.
Aaron finished his meal and set down his fork. “I’m divorced as well. The simple explanation for that is that we got married too young. We really rushed into it. But nothing’s ever simple when it comes to a breakup.”
“That’s true. Any children?” I asked, taking a sip of my wine.
“Two girls.” He reached into his pocket for his cell phone and searched for some pictures. “Elisa is fifteen and Mary is sixteen.” He held his phone out to show me a number of photos. “They’re terrific sailors.”
“I can see that,” I replied, looking at all the action shots of the girls in brightly colored team uniforms on racing boats.
Aaron put his phone away. “It was rough at first,” he explained, “when I first realized it was over, because the girls were very young. But so were we. We were only twenty-two when we tied the knot and we had Mary right away.”
“What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Aaron leaned forward. I looked down at his strong, sun-bronzed hands on the table and wanted overwhelmingly to reach out and touch them. To hold on to them. As if, by touching him, I could learn, through some sort of soulful transference, everything there was to know about him. About the life he had lived which I had not been a part of. I wanted to know everything.
“Remember when I told you I spent time in Europe, working at different boatyards?” he asked. “Well, Eve and the girls came with me. Elisa was barely eighteen months, but Eve hated it over there and she wanted to come home and live closer to her mother. I asked her to stick it out for one more year so I could finish my apprenticeship, but she was impatient and we were arguing all the time. We weren’t on the same page about anything. She was miserable, so she packed up and left on her own. Took the girls with her. Looking back on it, I probably should have put her and the girls first and given up the apprenticeship, but I honestly thought she’d just go home and wait for me. But she found someone else—who happened to be her first love and high school sweetheart. They’re married now.”
“That must have been very difficult,” I said, my eyebrows pulling together with compassion.
“It was,” he continued, “because she broke our marriage vows and I saw it as a betrayal. I remember thinking…” He paused. “Why can’t people just resist the desire to stray? Wait for the urge to pass. Love the one they’re with.”
I felt a shock of response and absolute understanding in my heart, for I’d been through the same thing with Mark—and Sebastian—and still felt the wounds of those betrayals. “I felt the exact same way when Mark cheated on me.”
Aaron nodded. “I didn’t know how I would ever trust anyone again,” he continued. “I haven’t yet. Not really.” He tried to shrug it off. “But enough years have passed and I’ve accepted that Eve was always meant to be with Corey, and she and I were never really in tune with each other. I think when we married each other, we were searching for something we could never find in each other. But things are good now. I’ve moved on and we’re friends. There are no hard feelings anymore. I put that away because of the girls. Now I see them whenever I want and it’s easy. I get along great with Corey. He’s a good guy.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “You’re lucky to have that.”
Aaron reached for his wine. “I am, but this isn’t exactly the life I imagined for myself.”
“In what way?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I love my work. That’s what keeps me going every day, but I always thought I’d be coming home to a wife and a house full of kids by now. Lots of kids.”
“How many?” I asked with a laugh.
He considered it for a moment. “I don’t know. Like…five.”
An image of the old photograph in the front hall of the Fraser House Inn flashed like an exploding light bulb in my mind. Sebastian and Evangeline had had five children. What was happening here? Was this real—the magic that the rational part of my brain continued to resist?
Feeling flustered, my cheeks aflame, I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. Then I gestured toward Aaron with my hand. “You already have two. Only three more to go.”
He chuckled softly. “Yeah. No problem. Just a little catching up to do.”
He gazed at me with unwavering intensity, and my heart began to pound at a frantic pace because he was so breathtakingly gorgeous. I almost couldn’t bear it. I was practically trembling inside. Never in my life had I felt such an intense attraction to a man, not even with Mark in the early days of our relationship.
Yet, everything about this was completely different, with more than just one layer. It was overpoweringly physical, because I couldn’t keep myself from imagining what it would feel like to be kissed by those lips and touched by those hands. But there was so much more to it than that. I wanted to know everything there was to know about each moment of Aaron’s life leading up to this one. I felt as if I’d missed out, not knowing him before now. I felt deprived and cheated out of something.
Those beautiful lips parted, as if he were about to say something important, but then he let out a breath and sat back, abruptly, in his chair. For a long moment he regarded me with something that resembled frustration, then his expression slowly revealed a hint of amusement. He dropped his gaze, chuckled to himself and shook his head.
“What is it?” I asked.
His blue eyes lifted, and he looked so vulnerable all of a sudden, and yet happy at the same time. His expression was friendly and open. I melted right there on the spot.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m finding it hard to think. My brain’s not working properly. You are just so darn pretty.”
My insides exploded with excitement, and I felt as if I were free-falling from a high place, with no fear of when or where I might land. A smile spread across my face and I held nothing back.
“Are you seeing anyone?” I asked. “Dating anyone…I mean?”
“No,” he replied. “Are you?”
“No.”
He continued to stare at me from across the table, then gave me a mischievous, knowing smile. “Then I think we need to go sailing.”
I laughed, and so did he. It felt like an inside joke.
“I know some terminology like port and starboard,” I said, “but I don’t know how to sail. I’ve always wanted to learn though.”
He spread his arms wide. “Then I must be your guy.”
I continued to smile at him, until I felt like a quivering mass of total happiness. “Yes, I think you must be.”
“Are you free tonight?” Aaron asked.
“It just so happens I am.”
“Then I should get the bill.”
He signaled to the waitress and paid the bill, while I sat wondering, with painful dread, how I was going to step on a plane in less than forty-eight hours and return to Seattle, when all I wanted to do was stay here in Portland and continue to explore what was happening with this man, who was quickly setting my heart on fire.
Chapter Forty-five
We returned to Aaron’s office, where my rental car was parked, and he told me to meet him in an hour in the parking lot at Kettle Cove in Cape Elizabeth, near his parents’ summer cottage, and to bring a warm jacket. From there, we wou
ld take a small tender out to Evangeline.
With little time to spare, I drove back to the inn and told Bailey everything about my interview with Aaron over dinner, and asked if she’d be okay alone that evening.
“Of course,” she said while I freshened up in the bathroom and changed into some warmer clothes for the moonlight sail. “And I can’t believe it. He’s single and gorgeous and taking you sailing tonight. It’s all so perfect.”
I peeked my head out. “Don’t say that. I’m afraid you’ll jinx it.”
She rolled her eyes playfully. “Of course you would be superstitious. But really, Katelyn, it’s pretty amazing.”
“I know, I know.” What else was there to say? Except that it wasn’t going to be quite so perfect when I was boarding a plane and flying back to the West Coast in less than forty-eight hours.
A short while later, Bailey drove me to the parking lot at Kettle Cove where Aaron was waiting for me. I introduced them and they shook hands, chatted for a few minutes, then Bailey made her excuses and promised to see me back at the inn later that evening.
As soon as she was gone, I faced Aaron in the twilight’s glow. He had changed into an off-white fisherman’s knit sweater and faded blue jeans with deck shoes. A large gym bag was slung over his shoulder, and he looked more muscular than I remembered at dinner. My heart fluttered at the sight of him.
“Are you ready?” he asked, and I felt as if I’d been ready for this all my life.
Yet, I couldn’t shake the instinctive urge to protect my heart, because we’d only just met and all of this was almost too overwhelming. I thought of Bailey’s warnings earlier that day: Please be careful, Katelyn. I don’t want you to get your hopes up and be devastated if it doesn’t pan out.
I didn’t want that either, so I resolved to take this slow and at least pause before I leapt in with both feet.
o0o
As soon as we climbed aboard Evangeline and left the rowboat tied at the mooring, Aaron switched on the cabin lights and gave me a tour below deck. He showed me the galley and dining area, which included cushioned benches around a saloon table. There was also a navigation area, two double cabins aft, and another cozy V-berth forward.
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