“That solved nothing.”
“Didn’t expect it to.” He didn’t know what to do with his hands. Now that he wasn’t touching her, they felt empty.
“So what was the point?”
“Jesus, does there have to be a point?”
“Usually.”
“Well, not this time.”
She continued as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “Because if you’re trying to soften me up, confuse me with some lame-ass kiss designed to remind me of happier days—”
“You think I planned to do that?”
“Please.” She snorted. “You always had a plan.”
“Oh, that’s good. Coming from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He stared at her. “Aren’t you the one who once told me we’d have five children and then listed their names and where they’d go to school?”
She flushed. “That was different.”
“Oh, your plans are okay?”
“You are so far off the subject here.”
“What exactly is the subject?”
“Emma.”
Worry stirred inside him. “We’ll work something out.”
“Damn straight.”
“Never give an inch.”
“You got that right.”
In a weird sort of way, he almost admired that. He must be a masochist.
“There’s something else.”
“What?” Wary, Jeff waited.
“I want Emma this weekend.”
“I don’t—”
“You’ve had her for eight years, Jeff. I want time with her. I need time with her.”
He heard the desperation in her voice. Read it in her eyes. Felt it pulsing off her in thick, emotionally charged waves that wrapped around him and drew him close. He could fight her on it. He could hurt her and make Emma miserable. Or he could be a good guy.
Dammit, he hated being the good one.
“All right.”
Sam was already beginning to argue when she realized that he’d agreed. It threw her off stride, but not for long. She smiled, flashing the grin that he remembered so clearly. The one he’d never been able to forget.
“Thanks.”
He nodded, but even while she was still smiling, he wanted to make one thing clear. “This doesn’t mean anything’s settled.”
“I know.”
He wouldn’t give up his daughter and Sam was just as determined. And in a vicious game of tug-of-war, didn’t the rope sometimes snap?
Emma.
In the middle of a battleground and oblivious to the warring sides.
“Make no mistakes, here, Sam. I’m sorry if you’re regretting giving our daughter up. And I’m sure as hell sorry that my mother was the architect of all this misery.” He pulled her close again and loomed over her until her head fell back, but her gaze was still fixed on his. “And I’m willing to let you and Emma get to know each other. Spend time together. But I’m not going to relinquish full custody of my daughter without a fight.”
She pulled free of him and rubbed her upper arms, where a clear, red imprint of his fingers was staining her skin. Nodding, she met his gaze. “Okay, then. Buckle your seat belt, Jeff. ’Cause this ride’s about to get real bumpy.”
The weekend was starting off great.
Thanks to Sam, Emma was soaking wet, smelled like a dirty dog, and had a brand-new scrape on her knee.
The harbor was filled with boats. Small skiffs with colorful sails bumped up against rich men’s toys, and farther down the dock, as though they were living on the poor side of town, were the fishing boats. Like ugly stepsisters of the sleek yachts aboard which weekend sailors partied, the commercial ships were battered and worn. Rust spots stained their hulls and the smell of fish was never completely washed off, no matter how hard the deckhands scrubbed.
Yet Sam preferred the commercial fishing boats. At least they were hardworking and honest. The pleasure boats were pretty and stylish, but they’d never withstood heavy storm surf and daily wear and tear like the workingmen’s boats. Just like people, she thought, as she watched Emma run along the boardwalk in front of her. Give me a good peasant over an aristocrat anytime. At least you know where you stand with them.
Unlike dealing with the movers and shakers. With Jeff. Dammit. He kept popping into her head. As she acknowledged that truth, she felt a slow hum and burn sizzling inside her. Ruthlessly, she stomped it out, mentally jumping up and down on the embers with both feet.
Jeff wasn’t important now. Emma was. Only Emma.
Her daughter was happy. Healthy. And currently chasing an ugly little dog with one missing ear, a sloppy grin, and the smell of fish embedded in his fur. Homer was short on looks but long on personality, and he’d never met a kid he didn’t like.
“Mommy!”
“Right behind you, honey!” She hurried, catching up just as Emma and Homer approached the battered ship that Homer’s owner called home.
The boats alongside the dock creaked and swayed with the soft rippling of the water. Seals gathered on the rocks and swimming just below the dock barked and flapped their fins for the tourists tossing baitfish at them. The combined scents of the sea and fish and deep-fried churros being sold from the cart at the end of the dock filled the air.
Summer in Chandler, and as far as Sam was concerned, the best one in a long time.
“You two walk to China or something?” Hank Marconi leaned on the railing of the ship docked on her left and grinned at Sam and Emma. His thick gray hair bristled around his head, his beard looked tidy, and his pale blue eyes sparkled with delight as he watched his granddaughter scramble up the wide plank leading to the boat deck.
“Homer wanted to,” Sam called back. “But we got tired.”
“We got lunch ready.” Hank grinned at his daughter, then turned and swung Emma up into his arms, cuddling her close to his barrel chest. God, Sam remembered what that felt like. To be held so close to Papa that you were sure nothing could ever hurt you. And she was so grateful that her own daughter was getting the chance to experience that wide, loving safety net, too.
“Lunch? Who cooked?” Sam asked as she walked up the ramp. “You or Antonio?”
“McDonald’s,” her father said with a wink. “It’s special for my girls.”
Thank God. Antonio Miletti, Papa’s oldest friend since Anthony Candellano had passed away several years ago, was a nice man. But Emeril he wasn’t.
“Look, Papa!” Emma crowed, pointing past him to the patio area of Charlie’s, the upscale seafood restaurant overlooking the harbor. “It’s my daddy! Daddy and Cynthia!”
Cynthia?
Sam turned, followed her daughter’s pointing finger, and had no trouble at all finding her soon-to-be ex-husband and his current fiancée seated at one of the small glass tables covered by snow-white tablecloths.
Instantly, Sam’s gaze locked on the woman.
She even looked like a Cynthia.
Cool. Beautiful. Her soft blond hair was expertly styled so that when the sea wind mussed it, every hair fell back into place like soldiers standing guard. Her emerald-green silk dress clung to every curve (which were pretty damned impressive even from a distance), and she was leaning in toward Jeff as if she couldn’t bear the table separating them.
Sam took a minute to look down at herself. Frayed denim shorts, battered sneakers, and a tank top stained with whatever was clinging to Homer’s fur.
Oh yeah.
No contest.
Winner and still champion, Cynthia.
Chapter Seven
Jo ran her measuring tape along the base of the wall in the soon-to-be-torn-apart library and tried to shut out the noise drifting to her from the back of the house. “One more half hour and I’d have been finished,” she muttered as she made a note on the pad she kept in the front pocket of her jeans.
When she stuffed the notebook back into her pocket, she released the stop button on the tape measure and smiled as the metallic
tape raced across the floor and back into its shell. With Sam down at the harbor with Emma, Mike off doing God knew what, she’d stopped in at Grace’s house to have a little alone time with her work.
On Monday, the crews would start tearing down the walls and pulling up the old floorboards, and a part of Jo wished she could have talked Grace out of it. There was something to be said for the old. For wood that had stood the test of time. Sure it was scarred, but refinishing would have taken care of that. But Grace was determined. She didn’t want refinishing. She wanted new.
Good steady income for Marconi Construction . . . but the artist buried deep within Jo wanted to change the older woman’s mind.
Going down on one knee, she smoothed the flat of her hand across the pale oak floorboards. Part of the original structure, this floor had been in place for more than a hundred years. And now, it would be discarded—replaced by either the parquet Grace was talking about or, for all Jo knew, linoleum. But at least Jo could save the wood. She’d store it at her place until she could find a way to use it in something beautiful.
People had lived and died and dreamed in this place. Her fingertips caressed the scarred, worn planks, as she thought now of the cattle baron, and the madam, both of whom had walked here. “What stories you could tell, huh?”
“Talking to wood is the first sign.”
A deep voice spoke up from behind her and Jo grimaced tightly. Dammit.
Slowly, she stood up, refusing to be embarrassed for being caught indulging her romantic side. Turning around, she looked right at the man standing in the open doorway, watching her. “First sign of what?”
Cash Hunter gave her a lazy grin and leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb. His thumbs were hooked into the front pockets of his jeans and his black T-shirt strained across a chest that was, she knew, broad and well defined. He wore dusty cowboy boots that looked as though the only thing holding them together was the memory of once being shiny new. And his face . . . rugged angles, sharp planes, high cheekbones . . . well, his face was too handsome for his own good and way too handsome for hers.
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “No way to tell without further investigation.”
Jo ignored the hot little ball of need that had burst into life at the pit of her stomach. She absolutely refused to become one of Cash’s conquests. Ridiculous that women all over central California were lining up to fall at one man’s feet.
“How do you do that?” she demanded.
One dark eyebrow lifted. Amusement glittered in his nearly black eyes. “Do what?”
That ball of need in her gut iced over in reaction to his obvious ego. “Make every statement a seduction.”
“Did I?”
“There it is again,” she countered, throwing both hands high. “Seriously, do you work on your material, or does it just come to you?”
He laughed shortly and straightened up with a loose, easy grace that gave the impression that he was a man who moved slow at all things. Jo took a deep breath and would not think about that.
“What’s wrong, Josefina? I worry you?”
She flushed. Nobody, but nobody, called her Josefina. Not even Papa. Wishing she were holding a hammer instead of a tape measure, Jo glared at him. “Not only do you not worry me,” she snapped, “I don’t think about you at all.”
“Liar.”
Her head whipped around and she blinked at him. “You are a pitifully deluded man.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Jo started past him, but stopped beside him long enough to shoot him a hard look. “Not every woman in the known universe is susceptible to the Hunter charm.”
He stared down at her and damned if Jo couldn’t feel the heat sizzling in his black eyes. The man was a walking hormone.
“So you think I’m charming.”
Walked into that one. “I think you’re dangerous.”
“Even better.”
She blew out an impatient breath. Her peaceful, quiet morning shot to hell, Jo glared at him again. “What’re you doing here?”
“Working.” He looked amused again.
Working? He wasn’t part of the crew she’d hired for the summer. In fact, Jo had made sure that he wouldn’t be around. She had a lot of female carpenters and hadn’t wanted to risk losing any of them to Cash’s weird hypnotic powers. “You’re not on my crew.”
He smiled. One brief, tantalizing smile that should have been accompanied by a loud set of warning bells. “Yeah, I know. Grace hired me.”
“To do what?” Jo demanded, already trying to figure out ways to avoid him.
He smiled as if he knew just what she was thinking. “First, I’m building a butler’s pantry in the first kitchen.”
“First?”
His smile widened and a flash of amusement sparked in his dark eyes. “After that, a cedar closet in the master bedroom.”
Which meant, Jo thought with an inner grumble, he’d be at the house all summer. “Perfect.”
“So I’m charming and perfect. Josefina, I’m touched.”
“Aaargh . . .” A growl wasn’t much of a comeback but it was all she could manage. If she stayed, she might have to kill him and that would only stain the great oak floorboards she had plans for. Besides. She had somewhere else to be. Stomping past him, she stormed out of the room and toward the construction noise still bristling outside.
She didn’t see him watch her go.
Sam sat with her back to the tres chic restaurant so she wouldn’t have to watch Jeff and Cynthia canoodle over their chardonnays.
It didn’t help much. Because she felt them there. Only thirty short feet away, they were dining in seaside elegance, while here on Antonio’s boat, Big Macs were the order of the day. Sort of underlined the differences between her and her not-as-former-as-he-should-be husband, didn’t it? He was always champagne to her beer, Jag to her truck, old money to her no-money.
Nine years ago, she’d told herself the differences didn’t matter. All that mattered was what they felt.Well, she might not learn fast, but she did learn. And no stolen kiss was enough to convince her otherwise. Besides, she thought, that kiss hadn’t meant anything. Just a blip on an otherwise flat surface. There was nothing left between them. Nothing but a little girl they both loved and wanted.
The ocean breeze skipped over the surface of the water, swept across the deck, and then left again, rushing on to play over the tops of the other boats at dock. Tourists wandered the boardwalk and hung over the railings to watch the seals. A kid on a skateboard whizzed past, darting between the clumps of pedestrians, his board roaring and thundering over the worn, wooden dock. Everything was just as it should be.
Except for Jeff and Perfect Woman.
“You like the harbor, eh?” Papa asked, his gaze fixed on his granddaughter.
“It’s fun!” Emma took another bite of her Happy Meal hamburger and tossed a French fry to Homer, sitting right beside her, trying to look as pitiful as possible. Which, considering his less than American Kennel Club looks, wasn’t tough. “Mommy says we can watch the men fishing on the pier, too.”
“Pier.” Antonio scoffed and shook his head until his straggly white hair writhed in the wind like albino snakes. “You want to see fishing, I should take you out on my boat. We’ll catch a whale.”
Emma’s eyes went as big as saucers.
Antonio leaned in close to the child and grinned. “When your mama was a little girl, I took her fishing. She caught a shark.”
Emma shifted her gaze to her mother and the jaw-dropping admiration shining in her eyes warmed Sam all the way through. The fact that the shark had been a baby and only a foot long, and they’d released it immediately, really wasn’t the point, was it?
“Can I go?”
Sam grinned and shook her head. “Not today, thanks, Antonio. We’ve got plans.”
“So what’s next for you two?” Papa asked, reaching out to tug one of Emma’s pigtails as if ringing a bell.
“Mommy’s takin
g me to a castle,” Emma said, handing off another fry to the little dog wiggling beside her.
“A castle?” Papa’s gray brows lifted high on his lined, deeply tanned forehead. Years of working in the sunshine had left their mark on his features.
“Castle’s,” Sam said, laughing. It had been Mike’s idea for the three Marconi girls—four now, counting Emma—to meet up at Castle’s Day Spa. A couple of hours of buffing, polishing, and female bonding in great surroundings. In general . . . a girls’ day out. Glancing down at her less than fabulous outfit, Sam thought it had been a pretty timely suggestion. “I called Tasha last night. She said she’d make room for us.”
“You’re gonna pay somebody to paint your toes, little girl?”
Even though she was sitting beside her own daughter, Sam knew Antonio would always consider her a kid.
“You oughta come fishing with your papa and me instead.”
“Thanks,” Sam said, shaking her head. “But I think I’ll pass. I know you two,” she said. “You’d have me scrubbing the deck and washing down the bait tank.”
Papa and Antonio exchanged resigned shrugs that told her how right she was.
“I could go,” Emma said, dropping one hand to Homer’s ugly head, as if already reluctant to leave him.
“You come with us next time, mouse,” Papa said, before turning his head to look at Sam. “You be home for dinner, all right? All of you. Calzones tonight.”
“What’s calzone, Papa?” Emma asked.
“Oh! You don’t know calzones?” Hank slapped one beefy hand to his heart and staggered dramatically until the little girl’s laughter erupted like soap bubbles on the air. After a minute or two, he stopped, grinned, and tapped the tip of Emma’s nose with his forefinger. “I’ll teach you all you need to know about cooking, little mouse. You bring your mama home on time, eh?”
“We’ll be there, Papa.” Sam slid her sunglasses from the top of her head down to cover her eyes. Sunlight glanced off the water in blinding flashes. “Let’s roll, Em,” she said, holding out a hand for her daughter. “We’ve got to get back to the house and clean up before we hit Castle’s.”
And Then Came You Page 9