by Cara Colter
“You hate the yacht club,” she reminded him.
“I’ve always had a strange hankering for anything anybody tells me I can’t have.”
Her arms folded more tightly over her chest and her eyes looked shiny again.
“I didn’t mean you,” he said softly.
“Let’s not kid ourselves. That was part of the attraction. Romeo and Juliet. Bad boy and good girl.”
“I don’t think that was part of the attraction for me,” he said, slowly. “It was more what I said before. It was watching you come into yourself, caterpillar to butterfly.”
“Actually,” she said, and she shoved her little nose in the air, reminding him of who she had been before he’d taught her you didn’t go to hell for saying damn, “I don’t want to have this discussion. In fact, if you don’t mind, I need to get dressed.”
“I have to give this to you first. Special delivery,” he said, holding out the money to her. “What was that about rezoning?”
She ignored the envelope. “I think it had to do with the canoes. I think you’re supposed to rezone to run a business.”
But she suddenly wasn’t looking at him. He was startled. Because, scanning her face, he was sure she was being deliberately evasive. What did renting canoes have to do with finally getting rid of the young thugs next door? Though it was Claudia they were dealing with. That was a leap in logic she could probably be trusted to make.
“I can put a lawyer on it if you want.”
“I don’t need you to fix things. I already told you I’m not in the market for a hero.”
“Take your money.”
“No. Are you in my house without an invitation?” she asked, annoyed.
“Boy, I saved you from drowning and from Claudia, and your gratitude, in both instances, seems to be almost criminally short-lived.”
“Oh, well,” she said.
“Anyone could come in your house without an invitation. You should consider locking the back door at least.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what to do! This is not the big city. And don’t show up here after all these years and think you are going to play big brother. I don’t need one.”
But it was evident from what he had just seen that she needed something, someone in her court. Still, he was no more eager to play big brother to her than she was to cast him in that role.
But again, if that was what being a better man required of him, he’d suck it up. No looking at her lips, though. Or at the place her housecoat was gapping open slightly, revealing the swell of a deliciously naked breast.
“Lindstrom Beach may not be the big city,” he said, reaching out and gently pulling her housecoat closed. “But it’s not the fairy tale you want to believe in, either.”
She glanced down, slapped his hand away, and held her housecoat together tightly with her fist. “As a matter of fact, I gave up on fairy tales a long time ago.”
“You did?” he said skeptically.
“I did,” she said firmly.
He looked at her more closely, and there was that subtle anger in her again suddenly. He missed the girl who had lain on the floor, clutching her throat. He also felt the little ripple of unease intensify—the one that had started when he saw her clumsy repair job in Mama’s porch. It was true. There was something very, very different about her.
In high school she had been confident, popular, perky, smart, pretty. She’d been born with a silver spoon in her mouth and had the whole world at her feet. Her crowd, including Claudia, expected it that way.
But Claudia had always had a certain hard smoothness to her, like a rock too polished. In Lucy, he remembered a certain dewy-eyed innocence, a girl who really did believe in Prince Charming, and for some of the happiest moments of his life, had mistakenly believed it was him.
But Lucy Lindstrom no longer had the look of a woman waiting for her prince.
In fact, from behind the barrier of her newly closed housecoat, she looked stubborn and offended. So, she did not want a hero. Or a prince. Good for her. And he was not looking for a damsel in distress. Or a princess.
So they were safe.
Except, he didn’t really feel safe. He felt some danger he couldn’t identify, so heavy in the air he might be able to taste it, the same way a deer could taste a threat on the wind.
“What happened to your fiancé?” he asked.
“What fiancé?”
“Mama told me you were going to get married.”
“I changed my mind.”
“She told me that, too.”
“But she didn’t give you the details?”
“No. Why would she know the details?”
“You’re not from around these parts, are you, son?” She did a fairly good impression of a well-known TV doctor.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“My engagement breakup was front-page news after my fiancé was chased naked down a quiet residential street in Glen Oak by a gun-wielding man who just happened to be the cuckolded husband of a woman who was my friend and the barista in our bookstore coffee shop.”
It seemed Lucy Lindstrom’s fall from grace had been complete. Mac ordered himself to feel satisfied. But that wasn’t what he felt at all. He couldn’t even pretend.
“Aw, Lucy.” Her eyes had that shiny look again. He wanted to reach for her and hold her, but he knew if he did she would never forgive him.
“Don’t feel sorry for me, please.” She held up her hand. “Everything is on film these days. Someone caught the whole thing on their phone camera. It was a local sensation for a few days.”
“Aw, Lucy,” he said again, his distress for her genuine.
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I never guessed something was going on? Everyone else asks that.”
“No, I’m going to ask you if you want me to track him down and kill him.”
“With your bare hands?” she asked, and though her voice was silky her eyes were shining again.
“Is he the one who made you quit believing in fairy tales?”
“No, Mac,” she said quietly. “That happened way before him.”
Her eyes lingered for just a moment on his lips, and then she licked hers, and looked away.
Mac turned from the sudden intensity, and made himself focus on the house—anything but her lips and the terrible possibility it was him who had made her stop believing in fairy tales.
“This isn’t how I remember it.”
Once, he had made the mistake of going to the front door when she was late meeting him at the dock for a canoe trip.
He’d stepped inside and it had reminded him of an old castle: dim and grim, the front room so crowded with priceless antiques that it felt hard to breathe. He found out he’d been invited inside to get a piece of her father’s mind, and that’s when he’d discovered that Lucy had been seeing him on the sly.
I forbid you to see my daughter.
After all these years Mac wasn’t sure, but the word riffraff might have come into play. Of course, being forbidden to see Lucy had only made him come up with increasingly creative ways to spend time with her.
And it had intensified the pleasure of sneaking into this very room, when her parents were asleep upstairs, and kissing her until they had both been breathless with longing.
That first meeting with her father had been nothing in comparison to the last one.
There’s been a rash of break-ins around the lake. My house is about to be broken into. The police are going to find the stolen goods next door, in your bedroom. You’ll be arrested and it will be the final straw for that rotten place. I’ve always wanted to buy it. Someday, Lucy and the man she marries will live there.
Mac had known for a long time that he had to go. That there was no future for him in Lindstro
m Beach and never would be.
He’d told her about her father’s threat and said he couldn’t stand it in this town for one more second. And that’s when she had said it.
I could never fall for a boy like you.
Had her father convinced her he was a thief? That he was behind the break-ins that had happened that summer?
Or had she just come to her senses and realized it wasn’t going to work? That a guy like him was never going to be able to give a girl like her the things she had become accustomed to?
It seemed to him that there was a lot of space between them that was too treacherous to cross. They’d caused each other pain, he was sure, but he was sure he had caused her more than she had caused him.
Maybe he had been the one who wrecked fairy tales for her.
But he’d already been a world away from fairy tales by the time he met her.
Safer to focus on the here and the now.
“There used to be a wall here,” he said. And a couch here. He decided that focusing on the here and now meant not mentioning the couch. Not even thinking about it would have been good, too, but it was too late for that.
“My mom actually opened the walls ups after my dad died.”
Which meant they were not, technically, even in the same room they had once made out in. The ghosts of their younger selves, breathless with need, were not here.
Mac somehow doubted her mother had achieved the almost tangible quality of sanctuary that the room had. Her mother, as he recalled her, had been much like Claudia. This room would have had the benefit of an interior designer, the magazine-shoot-perfect layout. It would have been designed with an eye for entertaining. And impressing.
But Lucy had created a space that was casual and inviting. It was a place where a person could read a book or stay in their housecoat all day. But there was something about it that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Mac went through to the dining-room table to set down the envelope of money. There were papers stacked neatly on it. It was not the space of someone who entertained or had large dinner parties. He put his finger on it: her space had a feeling of surprising solitude clinging to it.
Lucy? Who had been at the heart of a crowd, directing all the action, without even knowing she was? Imposing her standards on others as unconsciously as breathing?
Lucy? Who had been the most popular girl in her graduating class, not standing up for herself with the likes of Claudia Mitchell-Franks?
Lucy? Who had always been “in,” now suddenly having to beg for use of the yacht club in the town named for her grandfather?
Lucy? Who had been as conservative as her parents before her, now tentatively painting her house purple and enraging the community by running a commercial venture from her dock?
“What happened to you?” he asked softly.
And he saw more than secrets in her eyes—enormous, green, dazzling. But if he didn’t allow himself to be dazzled, he was sure he saw something he really didn’t want to see. He saw fear.
CHAPTER FIVE
FOR ONE MOMENT Lucy was almost overcome by a desire to tell him. Everything. That after he had left that summer, her whole world as she had known it had changed irrevocably and forever.
But she was not giving in to impulses—she already regretted the charade behind Claudia’s back—and especially not where Mac was concerned.
“Nothing happened to me. I grew up. That’s all.”
She didn’t want him to look too closely at the table. The charitable foundation registration was sitting there. So was the rezoning application that would allow her to turn this house into a group home for unwed mothers.
She was not getting into that. Not with him. Not now and not ever.
Still clutching her housecoat closed, she went over and inserted herself between him and her secrets.
“Is there something on that table you don’t want me to see?”
She was close enough that she could smell him, the scent of the pure lake water not quite eradicated by a faint soapy scent.
“No.”
“Unlike Claudia,” he said, “you are developing a little worry furrow right here.”
He touched between her brows.
And she wanted, weakly, to lean into his thumb and share her burdens. She had secrets. She was worrying. It was none of his business. He was a man she had known back when he was a boy. To think she knew anything about him now, on the basis of that, would be pure folly.
Unless she remembered she couldn’t trust him.
“Seven years,” he said, peering over her shoulder. “What could possibly be on your table after seven years that you wouldn’t want me to see?” He waggled his eyebrows at her in that fiendish way that he had. “The possibility of a lingerie catalog is making me look harder.”
Enough. She snatched the money from where he had set it on the table, and looked at it with exaggerated interest. “I don’t want this.”
Mac shrugged. “Donate it to your favorite charity.”
“All right,” she said stiffly. There was an irony in that that he never had to know about. In fact, he did not need to know one more thing about her. She was all done laughing for the day. It felt like a total weakness that he coaxed that silly part from her. And the story of her broken engagement.
She didn’t like how that had changed him, some wariness easing in him as he looked at her.
“Now, I have to go get dressed, so if you’ll excuse me...”
“What is your favorite charity?”
She shook her head, felt put out that he was trying to make conversation with her instead of obediently heading for the door.
“Why? Do you want the receipt?”
He turned, and relieved, Lucy thought that she had insulted him and he was going. Instead, he went into her living room and sat down in one of her overstuffed chairs. If she was not mistaken, the only reason he was still here was that he was devilishly enjoying her discomfort.
At least he’d moved away from the rezoning documents.
He appeared totally relaxed, deeply enjoying the view out her window.
She cocked her head at him, unforthcoming. Who could outwait whom?
He picked up the book that was open on the arm, but she raced over and snatched it away—not quickly enough.
“Interesting reading material for a girl who has given up on fairy tales. To Dance with a Prince?”
She bit back an urge to defend her choice of reading material, but he had already moved on.
“I like what you’ve done to the place,” he said. “Kind of ski-lodge chic instead of Victorian manor house. I doubt that was your mom. I bet the exterior paint color wasn’t her choice, either. It’s surprisingly Bohemian for this neck of the woods.”
“The paint is barely dry and the neighbors have lost no time in letting me know they don’t appreciate me indulging my secret wild side.”
And then it was there, the danger. It sizzled in the air between them. Her secret wild side was interwoven with their history. Those heated summer nights of discovery, bodies melting together. That hunger they’d had, an almost desperate sense of not being able to get enough of each other.
She found his eyes on her lips and the memory was scalding.
She was shocked by what she wanted. To be wild. To taste him just one more time. To throw caution to the wind.
“I would have pictured you in a very different life, Lucy.”
“Really?”
“Traditional. A big house. A busy husband. A vanload of kids, girls who need to get to ballet lessons, boys who need to be persuaded not to keep their frogs in the kitchen sink.”
She was silent.
“I thought you would be living a life very similar to that of your parents, that you’d be hang
ing with all those kids you grew up with. Friday drinks with friends at the yacht club, water-skiing on weekends in the summer, trips to the ski hill in the winter.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “I’m surprised you pictured me at all.”
It was his turn to be silent. The view out the window seemed to hold his complete attention. And then he said, quietly, “A man never forgets his first love.”
Something trembled inside her. “I didn’t know I was your first love.”
“How could you not know? Those crazy weeks, Lucy. I’d wake up thinking of you. I’d go to sleep thinking of you. We spent every moment we could together. It felt as if I couldn’t breathe unless you were there to give me air.”
How well she remembered the intensity of those few weeks.
“You never said you loved me,” she whispered.
He looked at her and smiled. She distrusted that smile. It could still turn her insides to jelly. That devil-may-care smile made him the most handsome man alive, but it said that nothing mattered to him. It was the wall he put up.
“I never say I love anyone,” he said. “Not even Mama.”
“You’ve never told Mama you love her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, that just stinks.”
“Anyway, those days are a long way behind us, Lucy.”
Yes, they were and it would do nothing but harm to dredge them up. Even now, she could feel her heart beating way too quickly at his admission that he had spent night and day doing nothing but thinking of her. At the time, he certainly hadn’t let on that’s what was going on for him!
“So, what does the grown-up Lucy do for fun?”
The question took her aback. “Fun?” she asked uncomfortably.
“You were the girl at the center of the fun, as hokey and wholesome as I found it at the time. The water fight on the front lawn of the high school. The fund-raising car wash where they shut down Main Street and brought out the fire truck. The three-day bike excursion to Bartlett. The canoe trip across the lake, camping on the Point.
“I remember standing over at Mama’s one night when you had a group of kids here at your fire pit. You know what I couldn’t believe? You had them all singing! All these kids who considered themselves cooler than cool, singing Row Row Row Your Boat.”