A Soft Place to Fall (Shelter Rock Cove)

by Barbara Bretton

  Sam was honest, and the business disturbed him, but he had to put aside his own discomfort in favor of his siblings and their future. There was no other way – at least, none that was legal – for a college dropout to make the kind of money Sam needed to keep his family safe and secure.

  And now it was over. The kids were grown; the job was history. He was free to do anything he wanted to do, go anywhere, maybe even go back to school and get that degree he used to talk about.

  You would think the boy would be happy. Hell, just being thirty-five again would be enough to put a smile on Warren's face.

  But the feeling that he could have done more, been more, still lingered with Sam and, no matter how much it grieved Warren Bancroft, only Sam Butler could make it all come out right.

  #

  The man wasn't listening to a word Claudia said to him. He sat there, flat-eyed as a squid, shoveling in her world-class meatloaf and thinking about whatever it was rich old men thought about.

  She took a dainty sip of decaf from one of her favorite porcelain cups – the ones with the damask roses hand-painted on them – and sighed loudly.

  "Oh, put a sock in it," he grumbled good-naturedly. "I heard every word you said, old woman."

  "Hearing and comprehending are not the same thing, Warren."

  "Eileen thinks she's pregnant again, Sean's opening another store, three of the grands left last week for college, and you're belly-aching about Annie and Sam."

  Claudia shivered. "Annie and Sam! Don't say it that way. They're not a couple and –" She stopped and looked toward the window.

  "You might as well come out with it, old woman, because I know just what you're going to say."

  She wanted very much to empty the contents of the coffee pot over his head but good breeding won out over her baser instincts. "—and they never will be," she finished with a show of defiance. "If Annie is looking to date again," she said, barely suppressing the God forbid, "there are plenty of fine available men right here in Shelter Rock Cove." Oh, how she wished she still smoked but her doctors absolutely forbade it. Nothing punctuated a woman's anger better than a gesture made with a lighted cigarette.

  Warren snorted his derision. "Men who still see her as Kevin's wife." He pushed his empty plate aside and looked straight at her. "Same as you do."

  "She is Kevin's wife."

  "She's Kevin's widow." He patted her hand. "Now don't go getting all weepy on me, Claudia. Life goes on. You don't have to like it but it goes on just the same."

  She pulled her hand away from him. "I don't like it," she snapped. "I don't like it one bit. Not every widow is looking for a replacement husband, you fool. Annie is like me. Kevin was the love of her life. You can't replace the love of your life."

  "I know," said Warren Bancroft softly. "I've been trying for almost fifty years."

  Chapter Eight

  Sam was fetching a stick for Max the next morning during low tide when he heard Annie's truck rattle off down the road toward town. He fought the urge to scramble up the rocks and try to catch a glimpse of her.

  Slow down, he warned himself as he flung the stick for a reluctant Max. Let her set the pace. She was the one who had been married before. She had made the commitment to love a man forever and even now, two years after her husband's death, that commitment still had weight and meaning.

  At first he'd blamed Marie's's ill-timed phone call for everything but in his gut he knew that wasn't true. Annie had been looking for an opportunity to sprint for the exit and his sister's call had been just what she needed.

  "Don't go ripping my head off because you're in a foul mood!" Marie had snapped at him. "I don't know what's going on up there but I think I liked you better when you were a New Yorker."

  How did a man compete with a ghost? He knew how to compete with living, breathing men like the doctor who had come calling yesterday morning but how the hell did you shadowbox with a dead man. She still wore his wedding ring. Her in-laws were part of her daily life. The entire fabric of her existence was woven with threads created during her marriage, threads that grew stronger with time.

  What did he have to offer that could come close to that? The real world didn't stand a chance. He had no job and no prospects. Hell, if it weren't for Max's hyperactive bladder, he wouldn't have a reason to get up in the morning. Sooner or later he was going to have to figure out what came next but right now he wouldn't even hazard a guess.

  Marie's call had been filled with questions about his apartment. She and Paul and the kids wanted to stay there while they waited to close on their house in Massapequa. Why didn't the super return calls? Where was the fuse box? Did he ever consider ripping up the carpets and going with bare wood? "The place is empty, Marie," he'd told her. "You'll be sleeping on the floor."

  Tucked in the middle of her domestic concerns was a quick observation that, no doubt, was the real reason for her call. "The rumors are flying down on the Street about the trouble at Mason, Marx and Daniels. Did you hear the SEC might be called in?" She'd paused to give him time to comment but he said nothing. "Your timing was pretty good, big brother. I wouldn't want to be around when the shit hits the fan either."

  Marie was a reporter for Newsday. She had been on the financial beat for a few years but had recently downshifted into softer news. She was married now and had a family, she had explained to him when she made the decision. She had to put her husband and children first. She said it almost apologetically, as if she didn't believe he would understand.

  He had come this close to laughing. He had been putting family first since he was nineteen years old, ahead of his dreams, his future, and his ethics.

  He was glad she was no longer on the Wall Street beat. Marie was a good reporter and a smart woman. It wouldn't take her long to put two and two together and come up with a story that involved her brother. She still retained a strong curiosity about activities on the Street but she didn't have the time to pursue them. He could have told her about information he'd had hidden away in the safety deposit box in Queens: the screen shots, the contemporaneous notes, the names and dates and numbers that didn't quite add up. The names of the people whose lives that had been turned inside out. He could have told her about the suits who came to call, the mailing address in Arlington, Virginia, the cell phone that did double duty as his electronic leash. He could have told her that unless something happened and soon, her brother might end up taking the fall.

  "What happens to the clients?" Marie had asked him in full reportorial mode, her instinct for news guiding her uncomfortably close to the real story. "We both know the big guys will land on their feet but what about the people who trusted them."

  He had no answers for her. Hell, he had no answers for himself. You did what you had to do when you needed to do it and then hoped you'd be able to live with the results.

  He didn't know if he had a week there in Shelter Rock Cove or a month or maybe a year. For all he knew the phone could ring tomorrow morning and he'd be on his way down to New York to face the music.

  For the last sixteen years, every move he'd made, every decision, every dollar spent, had been evaluated with his siblings' welfare in mind. He had made compromises in almost every area of his life – working at a job he hated just so he wouldn't have to ask them to do the same. Friends and neighbors had called him a hero, applauded the fact that he hadn't taken off and left the kids to the State to worry about. "Nobody keeps promises anymore," Mrs. Ruggiero had said. Jesus, how he'd wanted to run. The dreams he had about hitching a ride to JFK and boarding a plane for anywhere, leaving the lot of them behind. A few times he'd thought of asking Warren Bancroft for help, swallowing his pride like bad medicine and asking for the money that would make his life easier but each time he caught himself before he took that final step. No, he wasn't a hero. Heroes didn't rail against fate or look for escape hatches. Heroes did what had to be done and found a way to like it. He loved his brothers and sisters but he'd never wanted to be their parent and the fact
that he was had changed his outlook on life forever.

  No wonder he'd never married. He'd been in his share of relationships but, almost instinctively, he had found himself drawn toward women whose attitudes toward him were casual and temporary.

  Until now.

  There was nothing casual or temporary about Annie or his feelings toward her. She was lovely and grave and serious and she carried with her every bit as much baggage as he did. She had lived an entire life before he'd come into the picture and those experiences had made her the woman she was. A kitchen table and four chairs might not put him in the romance hall of fame but you wouldn't have known it by the glow on her face when she thanked him. And what about the sofa and end tables? It wasn't a dozen roses but hell, the woman owned a flower shop. Bringing Annie roses was like lugging coals to Newcastle or lobster to Maine. The gesture was well-meant but essentially meaningless. A woman without furniture couldn't ignore a sofa. A sofa said a man meant business.

  Better think again, hotshot, because she walked out on you last night.

  He could still hear the sound of the front door closing behind her. He'd hung up on his sister and walked back into the living room to find her gone. His clothes were neatly folded on the sofa and the air still smelled faintly of her perfume but, other than that, it was as if the whole thing had never happened. In her heart she was still married to a man named Kevin Galloway and Sam had no remedy for that.

  He took Max on a forced march along the shoreline then headed back to the house. The tide was rolling in and it wouldn't be long before it was lapping up against the base of the rocky cliff that divided Mother Nature's property from humanity's. Max was glad to call it a morning. The dog sprawled in the middle of the kitchen floor and panted while Sam filled his bowl with chow.

  "You're a lazy one," Sam observed as Max began to eat from a supine position. He bent down and scratched the dog behind the right ear. "Good thing I remember you when you were young and fearless."

  He used to see Max and Max's first owner heading off on weekend camping trips up in the Adirondack. He'd only known Phil to say hello to on the elevator and he'd been shocked the day the guy asked him if he knew anyone who wanted an aging yellow Lab with bad breath and a penchant for destruction.

  "I'm getting married in September," Phil had said, "and she hates dogs. It's find a home for him or have him put down."

  Out with the old. In with the new.

  Before he knew what he was doing, Sam said, "I'll take him," and Phil was handing over the leash, the water bowl, and half a box of Milk Bone.

  What the hell ever happened to sticking it out for the long haul? Dogs. Girlfriends. Jobs. Families. It was all the same. First rough patch to come along and they bailed out faster than the first-class passengers on the Titanic. Annie had said she would have been married twenty years this year. Nothing lasted twenty years any more, sure as hell not most marriages, and he found himself wondering again about the man she'd married and the life she had led. It must have been a good life or she wouldn't be holding it so close to her heart.

  He still didn't know if she had kids. He hadn't asked and she hadn't volunteered the information. It was hard to imagine being married almost twenty years and not having children. He had always wanted kids of his own. He found himself hoping she had a daughter away at college somewhere, a young woman with her smile. Or maybe a strapping son with a football scholarship, a lovable kid who wanted the best for her.

  The thought that she might be alone struck him as too unfair to even consider. Some women were meant to be surrounded by kids and cats and dogs and lots of loving commotion and Annie Galloway was one of them.

  Get real, Butler. You don't know a damn thing about her. You're making this up as you go along.

  He couldn't argue that but a man had to start somewhere. He wanted to know everything there was to know about her, the good and the bad and the painful. He wanted to see the empty places in her life where she could make room for him.

  Forty-eight hours ago he hadn't known Annie Galloway existed. Now he couldn't imagine his world without her in it.

  She thought he was a hero. All he did was put out that fire before it had a chance to do any real damage and now he could do no wrong. He had seen it in her eyes when she looked at him, something he had never seen before in a woman's eyes, and he didn't deserve it. Max was more of a hero than he was. Ask any of the clients he'd left behind, the ones whose futures were no longer quite so secure. They could tell her a thing or two about the heroic Sam Butler.

  Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that she'd put some space between them.

  He was reaching for a box of corn flakes when the phone rang somewhere in the house. Damn cell phones. He finally found it wedged between the sofa cushions.

  "Took you long enough," Warren Bancroft said. "Seven rings. I was about to hang up."

  "Are you back in town or still down in Boston?"

  "I got back last night. I have to go back to Boston tomorrow afternoon but it's good to be home."

  "Tell Nancy the pie was first rate."

  "Tell her yourself," Warren said. "She's making her famous blueberry waffles and there's enough to feed an army."

  Fifteen minutes later Sam and Max entered the kitchen where Nancy was ladling thick batter onto the waffle iron.

  "Just in time," she said, acknowledging Sam's kiss on her cheek. "Himself is digging in right now."

  Max stayed behind, just in case Nancy needed help with the bacon or a runaway waffle.

  Warren was in the sunroom that overlooked the harbor. The water was a little choppy and the frothy whitecaps made a wonderful contrast with the deep steel blue of the ocean. He leaped to his feet the second he saw Sam and clasped his hand warmly.

  "You're too skinny," he said by way of hello. "Nancy!" he bellowed. "Double up on the order. We need to put some meat on his bones."

  "I'm one step ahead of you!" Nancy bellowed back.

  "What is it with you people?" Sam asked as he took the seat opposite Warren. "You're always trying to fatten me up."

  "Wait until you've been through a Maine winter," Warren said, reaching for the heated pitcher of real maple syrup. "Then you'll know."

  They ate in companionable silence for a while, making short work of two batches of blueberry waffles.

  Finally Warren pushed his chair back from the table and loosened his belt. "So how did Annie like the furniture?"

  "She loved it," Sam said, as he bit into a piece of perfectly fried bacon. "Once she heard it was Ellie's, she seemed pretty happy with it."

  Warren lit up a cigarette, took one drag, then stubbed it out in a small ashtray next to his plate. "Bet she made you sign a receipt of some kind."

  "Right down to the embroidered pillow on the sofa. What's with that anyway?"

  "That's our Annie. Scrupulously honest, right down to the penny." He watched Sam with open interest. "Anything else to tell me?"

  Sam directed his attention to his cup of coffee. "Nope."

  "Good," said Warren. "None of my business anyway."

  #

  Annie delivered the bridal flowers to a calm Karen Sorenson at nine a.m. and the boutonnieres to a slightly frantic Frankie Machado at nine-thirty. The day promised to be a long one and in a way she was glad. She needed some distance from the surprising events of the night before and maybe a little distance from Sam as well.

  Last night she'd met a woman she'd never known existed. A passionate woman ready to throw caution to the four winds, a woman half-crazed with desire.

  The insides of her thighs were still faintly red from the stubble on his cheeks and chin and the memory of how the marks had come to be there was almost enough to send her flying back into his arms.

  Not that she imagined he would have her. Last night he had been everything a lover should be. He had protected her when she needed protection. He had made love to her with his hands and mouth in ways that shattered her very core, made her climax again and again until she thought she
had fallen off the edge of the earth, and she had responded by sneaking out of his house while he was on the telephone and running back home like the coward she was.

  She was half-surprised he hadn't egged her house and let the air out of her tires.

  She had wanted to make love to him. She had burned to memorize every muscle of his lean, hard body with her tongue. Her sexual experiences might be limited to one man but she wasn't an innocent. She knew how to give pleasure as well as how to take.

  If only she hadn't noticed the way her hand looked as it rested against his tanned chest.

  If only she hadn't noticed her wedding band.

  Memory after memory of Kevin pushed in on her: their first kiss behind the marina, the senior prom when he gave her the failing gardenia, the day he proposed to her on the steps of the library at Bowdoin, their wedding day when it rained so hard they gave up on the umbrellas and just let it fall on them because how could a little rain hurt you when you held a world of happiness in your arms? And then there were the memories of sleepless nights waiting for him to come home, the strangers knocking on the door, the phone calls from men with deep voices who left messages she didn't want to understand, the night when it all ended in the middle of their brass bed as Annie kept whispering no no no no . . . .

  For two years she had struggled to make peace with his death but it wasn't until last night in the arms of another man that she finally realized that she was alive, fully and completely alive, and that she was free to build a new life on the foundation of the old. She had been marking time for too long, measuring her days by bills paid and disasters averted.

  She liked the Annie Galloway she had discovered last night: the passionate woman who wasn't looking over her shoulder all the time, wondering when life would deliver the next right hook. Sam Butler seemed to like her too; or at least he had before she gathered up her clothes and slipped out the door on him without so much as a thank you it's been swell. Of course, maybe she was making too much of the whole interlude. What had been a turning point of Olympic proportions to Annie might have been an hour's pleasurable pursuit to Sam and nothing more. Her face reddened as she remembered her deep satisfaction and what she assumed was his own deep discomfort at being left unfulfilled. Just how pleasurable the pursuit had been for him might be open for debate.