by JoAnn Ross
“True.”
She tilted her head, and dammit, chewed on a fingernail, which was turquoise today and not only drew his attention to her mouth, but had him wondering if her toes had been colored the same. And if she liked them sucked. He’d never done that because Zoe was ticklish, but while he might be celibate, he wasn’t dead. He’d watched Kristen Bell getting her toes sucked on House of Lies—which, in Seth’s opinion, had been basically soft porn with enough corporate drama to make it acceptable to admit you watched—and she sure had seemed to enjoy it.
“You’re right,” she decided. “We shouldn’t be impulsive.”
Pondering her toes, and other lady parts, as well, had him thinking maybe he’d made a mistake. It also had him realizing that if she knew what he was thinking, she’d probably decide he was a sexist perv and they wouldn’t have any problem in the first place.
“Take things slow. It’s not like either of us is going anywhere,” he pointed out. He’d already gotten the notice of Brianna’s construction account from Danni Douglass down at the Timberlake Savings and Loan before she’d told him about it.
“So, at least for now, we’ll just work on the house,” she said. “And keep things safely in the friend zone.”
“Works for me.” As long as she didn’t show up barefoot. Which was unlikely.
“Okay.” She blew out a breath. “One more thing... Is it going to be a problem having me live here while you’re working?”
“I suggested it,” he reminded her. “And the only problem would be if you get tired of living in a construction zone.”
“I can deal with that.”
“Says the woman who’s never lived with nail guns blasting all day.”
She laughed, and the tension that had strung between them as tight as a wire band eased. “Oh, and speaking of lists and planners, I’m going to be gone the weekend after next,” she said.
“For Kylee and Mai’s wild weekend of debauchery at the coast before they settle down and become a boring married couple.”
“There will be no debauchery. We went over the entire plan at the Mad Hatter the day before I went to Seattle. They’re not even having some fake cop stripper show up with handcuffs.”
Damn. He wished she hadn’t mentioned handcuffs. Not that bondage had ever been his kink, but it did get a guy thinking of things that were better left in the pages of sexy romance novels or on movie screens.
“So,” she said, dragging his mind away from the plastic zip ties in his toolbox, “if we’re okay, for now, I’d like to run down to Treasures and see if I can find anything to furnish my new apartment.”
Seth watched her walk away. Not just because he enjoyed the view, but because he enjoyed her. Being with her, talking with her, planning restoring Herons Landing to its original glory. But better, in his view. The Victorian era, which always made him think of David Copperfield fleeing his evil stepfather, little Nell dying and Ebenezer Scrooge, had some positive things going for it. But overembellishment of their homes was not one of them. Which, in a way, made it ironic that he earned a good living bringing Honeymoon Harbor’s historical Victorians back to life.
Seth didn’t know what, exactly, was going to happen between Bri and him. But wasn’t that, in itself, a positive? She seemed determined to get him out of his rut. And, he couldn’t lie, the predictability that had once felt so comfortable was getting flat-out boring. It was the first time he’d kissed anyone since Zoe’s death. He’d thought it would feel terrible. And wrong. But if he were to be perfectly honest, it had felt good. Damn good. He waited for the guilt, but it didn’t come, which was both unexpected and weird. But sort of welcome, too.
He waved as she tapped the horn and drove down the tree-lined road. Then turned his mind to another problem. His father’s seeming disappearance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SETH WAS ADMITTEDLY CONCERNED. After all, Pete Harper, one of his dad’s poker playing buddies, was currently undergoing rehab therapy in the Seattle VA hospital after having suffered a stroke. His dad wasn’t getting younger, and although he’d always keep his feelings locked down tight, surely having your wife of forty years walk out on you had to trigger some stress.
He called the home he’d grown up in yet again, only for it to go to voice mail. The recording was his mom’s voice, which probably meant that his dad still expected her to come back home any day.
He tried his dad’s cell, not expecting anything, which was why Seth was surprised when he answered on the first ring.
“Where are you?”
“Why?” There was a challenge in his dad’s tone.
“Because you didn’t show up at the house we were supposed to be buttoning up.”
“It’s all done. You don’t need me to go through the last of a damn punch list. And there’s no reason for me to go over the plans with the Mannion girl, since you’ll both do whatever you want anyway.”
“You don’t want any input?”
“I’m just a laborer these days.” He could hear the shrug and dismissal in his dad’s voice. “I wouldn’t have handed the business over to you if I didn’t think you could keep it going.”
“You’re a skilled craftsman,” Seth argued the labor point. “There’s a difference.”
“Whatever.” Another shrug in the tone. “My point was you don’t need me hanging around today. Also, the mill on Water Street is still waiting for a permit from the damn zoning board. Seems a guy should be able to take a day off.”
Seth couldn’t argue with that. Then he heard a familiar sound. “Are you on a ferry?”
“Why would you think that? We have ferries coming and going all the time.”
Seth glanced out at the harbor. “Not at this moment.” And not for another ten minutes since they’d gone to a spring hour schedule. Come summer, when tourism picked up, the ferries would shift to every thirty minutes.
“Fine, so I’m going to Seattle. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Of course not.” But his dad had always claimed to hate the city. He found it too crowded and too noisy, and hated the traffic. “Are you visiting Pete?”
There was a pause. Just long enough to tell Seth that whatever his father had planned, that wasn’t it. “Yeah. That’s it. I’m visiting Pete at the VA.” Another pause, during which Seth could practically hear the wheels turning in his dad’s head. “I figured he’d like some of those cinnamon rolls from Cops and Coffee, since hospital food sucks. And if the MREs I had to eat were any indication, VA hospital food probably sucks even worse.”
He’d put in enough truth, including that bit about his own service before Seth had been born. But Ben Harper had always been a rotten liar (which was why he so seldom won a hand at those poker games), and whatever he was up to, dropping in on his old poker buddy wasn’t his first destination. Hoping he wasn’t going to find out that there was more to his parents’ troubles than his mother had told him, that maybe Ben Harper had a woman on the side, Seth decided just to let it go.
“You going to be back tomorrow?”
“Yeah, sure. You know what I think about sleeping in hotel beds.”
Which confirmed what his mother had said about his refusal to travel in retirement. Maybe, Seth thought as he ended the call, telling his dad to have a good day and tell Pete hi for him, he’d gone to the city to buy a motor home.
With that positive possibility in his mind, Seth decided to take a run by the country courthouse and see if he could speed up the permit on the eighty-year-old sawmill. Although he wasn’t rolling in dough, and had donated his military survivor benefits to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, he’d put enough aside to not only pick up Herons Landing on a short sale, but also the mill, which, after a fire, had closed in the ’70s.
He’d had a lot of competition from commercial developers who saw potential profit in the building sitting on
the water that had once provided power for the saws and planers, but with some zoning changes, and federal and state grants, and given that he was a local, not some outsider sweeping in to make a quick buck selling overpriced condos, he’d won the property battle.
When repurposed into studio, one-and two-bedroom apartments, the former town eyesore would provide much-needed low-income housing for up to fifty families, depending on the configurations of the units. Working with Amanda Barrow, he planned to turn the land in front of the building into a green space, with a small, two-level parking garage where the sawdust burner—which had sparked the fire that had spread to the mill—had once stood next to the main building. While he hadn’t been all that thrilled with the idea of the garage originally, he had understood local business owners’ concerns that residential street parking could cost them customers.
So he’d brought Mike Mannion into the project to arrange with art students at the high school and community college to paint murals on the garage. Three of the drawings were left unpainted, then filled in by members of the local Down syndrome group, Down Right Perfect, started by Jim Olson of Blue House Farm a few years ago.
He might not be able to cure cancer, fight terrorism as Zoe had done in her own way or change all the world’s problems, but at least he could make his little corner of the planet a bit better. Which was worth getting up in the morning.
* * *
THE COUNSELOR’S ROOM was painted the color of what Ben figured Caroline would call something fancy, like biscuit, or cookie crumb, or cappuccino, but to him was just boring old beige. Which might be the point, he considered as a small table fountain bubbled over a bowl of small round rocks that didn’t look like any he’d ever seen in nature.
He’d chosen a female counselor because he figured she’d give him some insight into what the hell Caroline was talking about. Sure, they’d discussed travel in their early days, but he couldn’t believe that she seriously wanted to leave the comfort of the home he’d built them the first year of their marriage, added on to and updated, because that’s what women seemed to always want to do. Not that Ben wasn’t grateful, because all that updating and adding had made him a comfortable living.
And having slept on trailer beds on fishing trips, he suspected that once she slept on a cheap foam mattress, she’d miss the adjustable bed he’d laid out big bucks for just last fall. And then, there they’d be. Stuck with a damn overpriced motor home that would depreciate big-time as soon as they drove it off the lot.
So far Dr. Alicia Blake hadn’t done much talking. Just asked a few questions, nodding, made some low humming sounds and kept making notes on that legal pad she held on her lap. She was younger than his wife and him. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to even understand his situation. He should’ve gone with the old balding guy on the website. The one who looked like he’d lived long enough to have a wife go menopause crazy on him.
“How old are you?” he asked, breaking off his story of how his wife had taken up with Mannion.
“Thirty-eight,” she said.
“I’ve got a son that’s thirty-one.”
“That would be Seth. Who’s taken over Harper Construction.”
He hadn’t remembered telling her that, but once he’d started talking about that day of the play when he’d first met Caroline, and their marriage, and how they’d been partners rescuing the business his father had, truth be told, left pretty deep in debt, the words had just started flowing like a river over a busted dam.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“And you asked my age because you think because I’m closer to your son’s age than yours, I won’t understand the problem that brought you here today.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She just looked at him straight in the eye, letting him know she knew exactly what he’d been thinking, and gave him a slight smile.
A silence settled over the room.
“I may have been thinking along those lines,” he admitted.
“It’s understandable and you wouldn’t be the first client to think that.” She nodded toward the beige wall. “Did you happen to notice those degrees?”
“Yeah.” He’d also noticed that they were all from fancy private Ivy League schools like the one Sarah Harper had gone off to before returning home and marrying John Mannion. That had sure as hell caused a fuss at the time, and not just because of the centuries-old Harper/Mannion feud, but because her parents had had a lot higher aspirations for her than marrying a local boy and settling down on some Christmas tree farm in Honeymoon Harbor. At least he hadn’t had that problem with Seth, who’d married himself a local girl. Well, not exactly local. But Astoria-born was close enough to Ben’s mind.
“Yeah. Those are good schools,” he allowed. “My son, Seth, gave a seminar at Columbia. On green historical restoration.”
“That’s very impressive. Not because of Columbia’s reputation for innovative thought, but because historical restoration is very important work that more people need to be taking on. Our entire planet depends on them. You must be very proud.”
“Yeah.” He was. Although a lot of the time his son’s ideas seemed like a lot of extra work for not much additional profit, and Ben admittedly didn’t understand all the technology and terms, he was impressed that Seth had made a name for himself. Even before she’d put the idea of his boy helping to save the planet in his head.
“And no doubt you’ve told him that.”
“Maybe not in so many words. But he knows I’m proud of him.”
“The same way your wife’s supposed to know that you love her.”
“Yeah.” Too late, Ben realized the trap. “You learn that trick at those fancy schools?” He folded his arms. Then unfolded them, realizing he was giving away his discomfort.
“It’s not a trick,” she said calmly. Mildly. “What I learned was how to help others see what they might not realize on their own because they’re too close to the situation. To use a timber country analogy, my job is to see the entire forest, while you and your wife might be stuck down in the trees.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Hell, he’d just come here hoping for a quick fix. Now he was beginning to think it wasn’t going to be so easy.
“I’m trained to help my clients help themselves. Which you obviously want to do or you wouldn’t be here today.”
He decided that after having gone online and looked her up, then picked up the phone and made the appointment, then come all the way over here, he might as well tell the truth. Because after reading the ultimatum in Caroline’s letter, he realized that this young woman with the citified black jacket and beige pants could see right into his head through the lenses of those black sexy librarian glasses. Not that he was thinking of her as sexy, because, Christ on a crutch, she was young enough to be his daughter.
“I came here so you’d tell me what the hell Caroline’s thinking.”
“I believe she’s already told you that,” Dr. Blake said. “I suspect several times over the years. But, having read her letter expressing her feelings and needs, and from what you’ve told me about her having always had a mind of her own, including having stood up to her parents when she married you instead of that young man from her own social circle—”
“She would never have been happy with him.” He’d met the guy when she’d taken him home to the Atlanta mansion she’d grown up in to introduce him to the family.
Her parents had thrown a welcome-home cocktail party and invited all her old friends, including the boyfriend. Ashley Somersett’s handshake had been limp and his palm as smooth as a newborn baby’s butt. Although he’d been in his early thirties, his pale blond hair was already receding. Decades later, Ben’s own hair was still thick, with only a few streaks of gray, which Caroline had assured him added dignity, not age. “She would’ve eaten him for breakfast and spit out his little bird bones.”
Dr. Blake surprised him by laughing at that. A rich, bold laugh that had him smiling back. “I like you, Ben Harper.”
“I like you, too, Doc.”
“That’s a good start,” she said, crossing her legs and sitting back in the black leather chair that reminded him of the vinyl one his parents had had in the living room when he’d been growing up. They were calling the style “midcentury” now. Which made him wonder how the hell he’d gotten so old when he hadn’t been watching. “Now let’s get down to work and figure out how you’re going to save your marriage and win your wife back.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BRIANNA WAS ON the way to Treasures to look for some furniture for her third-floor apartment when her phone buzzed.
“Hi,” she greeted Kylee, who, despite plans for the bachelorette party all worked out over tea and scones at the Mad Hatter, had kept checking in several times a day about every little detail. And Brianna had thought she was a control freak.
“If you’re calling about the party, don’t worry. I’ve got the menu planned, the grocery list made, and you and Mai are going to be taste testers for the B and B recipes Mom promises I can pull off for a crowd without any problem. With any luck I won’t poison anyone.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m calling. The party’s off.”
“Oh, no.” Brianna’s heart sank. “Don’t tell me you and Mai broke up? You’re so perfect together.”
“We are. And we haven’t. Broken up, that is. We’re going to be moms.”
“I know.” Brianna had bought three sets of onesies and a padded piano keyboard that tied to crib bars to allow a baby to kick against it and play music. “But that’s still two weeks away. What does it have to do with the party?”
“It was supposed to be two weeks,” Kylee said. “But apparently our child is going to turn out to be more like me than Mai. Because our birth mother just went into labor.”