by Linda Seed
“Ah, hell,” Liam said.
The she in question was Megan, Liam’s ex-girlfriend. Liam had thought he was doing okay with the breakup. That was, until she’d moved to British Columbia to be with her new guy—who also happened to be Liam’s cousin.
He should be over it by now. The breakup had happened almost a year and a half ago. That should have been enough time for Liam to get his head out of his ass and move on.
But the news that she was moving in with Drew had been a gut punch. Liam had acted like it was no big deal, like it didn’t mean anything to him. But he wasn’t feeling like himself anymore. Normally, he would have handed Kevin his ass, but right now, he couldn’t seem to care enough to do it.
Ryan had read that one like one of the damned billboards out on Highway 1.
She’s not coming back.
Liam wasn’t mad at Megan. Hell, he wasn’t even mad at Drew. He knew things hadn’t been right between himself and Megan, and he knew she was happy now. He wanted her to be happy.
But it didn’t change the fact that he’d loved her, and she loved someone else. That made a man feel a lot of things, and none of them were good.
A guy like Kevin didn’t seem to matter much amid all that.
You’re a goddamned gimp.
Well, it was true, wasn’t it?
Two summers before, Liam had been in a bad accident involving a horse and a shattered leg. He’d had surgery, and that had been a success—to a point. When the cast had come off and Liam had started walking again, his doctors had said it was normal that he didn’t have full range of motion. But here it was sixteen months after the fact, and he still walked with a noticeable limp.
Physical therapy had helped, but not enough.
He didn’t have pain anymore, and he could do all the things he used to do, so that was good. But every day as he went about his work, he was reminded that he was a broken man. His brothers didn’t get it, and neither did his dad. They thought he should be glad he was walking at all, and hell, he was glad.
But being glad was one thing. Glad or not, he still felt the loss, still mourned what once had been.
You didn’t stop mourning overnight—not if you’d lost something that mattered. Liam was still grieving over the leg just like he was still grieving over his uncle Redmond.
Redmond had been gone almost four years now, but for Liam, the pain of it was still as raw as if it had happened last week.
He didn’t understand how the rest of his family had moved on so easily—how everyone had simply adjusted and gotten on with their lives. But then, none of them had been as close to Redmond as Liam was. Redmond had been like a second father to him when his real father had been too busy with his other children to notice his middle boy.
Only one other person in the family seemed to be as affected by Redmond’s death as Liam was. Drew McCray—Redmond’s son, and the guy who’d just moved in with Liam’s girl—seemed pretty screwed up about the man’s death, and Drew had never even met Redmond.
At least Drew and Liam had something in common, other than the woman who used to love one of them and currently loved the other.
Liam knew he needed to stop feeling sorry for himself. He was alive. He was healthy. He could still walk, which hadn’t been a foregone conclusion after his accident. He was still himself. He could still work.
Liam took a moment to calm his mind, then followed Ryan out into the wet, dreary day.
Aria Howard wondered whether it made more sense to fashion the door of the yurt she was building out of discarded water bottles or used sandwich bags. The bags would be easier to work with, no question, but the bottles were so much more abundant on the beaches of California’s Central Coast.
The yurt, a ten-foot-diameter dwelling that would eventually have a bottle-cap floor and a mosaic skylight of broken glass, was to be made entirely of trash she’d scavenged from the local coastline—or the semi-local coastline, anyway. The beaches of Cambria tended to be admirably clean, so she sometimes had to venture south to Cayucos and Pismo Beach to gather materials. If that failed, then Santa Barbara was a treasure trove.
She hadn’t considered the relative tidiness of Cambria when she’d accepted Genevieve Porter’s offer of an artist’s residency. If she had considered it, she still would have accepted. But she’d have brought more of her own trash.
So far, the yurt was no more than a set of sketches and the beginnings of a basic frame. As she stood back and looked it over in the cavernous barn she was using as a studio, it wasn’t the yurt’s skylight that was causing her problems. It was the one above her in the barn.
Rain pattered on the barn’s roof, and some of that rain was coming in through the skylight, plunking down wetly onto the first pieces of her yurt.
True, most of her materials had been in the ocean or out in the elements for God knew how long and probably wouldn’t suffer much. But still.
She moved the pieces of her yurt out of the line of fire and considered the skylight. The question of why there was a skylight in this old, retired barn in the first place was a mystery. But here it was, and it did provide lovely natural light on her work space. When it wasn’t leaking.
Aria dug a five-gallon bucket out of the supplies she had stacked in a corner of the barn and placed it under the skylight. Drops fell into the bucket in a rhythmic plink-plink-plink.
She stretched her neck, which was stiff after a morning of work piecing cigarette butts, drinking straws, and plastic cutlery together to form part of the yurt’s frame. Then she breathed in deeply the scents coming through the big, open doors: earth, hay, wet grass, pine trees, and the vast, churning ocean less than a half mile away.
She crossed over to where the doors opened onto the world and peered outside from her relatively dry spot under the barn’s roof. The earth was green and fragrant, and the music of the rain on the grass soothed her mind.
Accepting the residency had been a good idea. She’d needed a break from her routine, from the day-to-day demands that always seemed to call her away from her work. And it wasn’t as though she had anything to keep her close to home.
She had no family, no real friends, no man in her life. Most of the time, she managed to stave off the loneliness by throwing herself into her work. But lately, that strategy hadn’t been working as well as it used to. She’d needed a distraction.
And she could hardly imagine a more picturesque spot than the Delaney Ranch to provide it.
From where she was standing, she could see a few black and brown cows dotting the rolling green hills in the distance. Above the patter of the rain, she heard a mournful moo.
Aria was thinking about the cows and what they might or might not be saying to each other when she heard the squish of shoes on a wet path. She looked up to find Gen Porter, in a slicker and rubber boots, waddling toward the barn. A red umbrella protected her curly, copper-colored hair from the rain.
“Hey!” Gen gave Aria a friendly wave.
“I thought you’d be at the gallery,” Aria said. Gen owned an art gallery on Main Street in town, and at just before noon in the middle of the week, she should have been showing paintings and sculptures and scenic watercolors to whatever tourists were out braving the weather.
“Lunch break,” Gen said. “I’m meeting Ryan. I never get much foot traffic when it rains, anyway.” Ryan Delaney, Gen’s husband, was one of the owners of the ranch where Aria’s temporary studio space sat, as well as the guest cottage where she was staying. The barn she was using as a studio had been taken out of use some years ago when the Delaney family had built a bigger, state-of-the-art facility elsewhere on the property. Now, it was used as a work space for the artists in Gen’s residency program.
Gen came into the shelter of the barn and lowered her umbrella. “I just thought I’d pop in and see how you’re getting by.” Aria had constructed numerous long rods, roughly the size of two-by-fours, out of trash. Gen looked at the rods, which were waiting to be assembled into the skeleton of t
he yurt. “Well, that’s coming along.”
“It is,” Aria agreed. “I had to move it a little while ago. It was getting dripped on.”
Gen went to where the bucket was catching the rainwater from the skylight. She peered up at the roof, where the rain was making a rat-a-tat rhythm on plexiglass. They could see the gray of the cloudy sky beyond.
“Well, crap,” Gen said.
They stood side by side, staring up at the skylight. Gen, in the unconscious way of pregnant women everywhere, laid one hand affectionately atop the generous bump of her belly.
“I’ll see if I can get Ryan to come out here and take a look at it,” Gen said. “Though I don’t think he can go up on the roof until it dries out.”
“No, I wouldn’t expect him to,” Aria agreed. “And there’s no rush. I can work in another area until it’s fixed or until the rain stops. But I hate to, because it’s really nice light.”
Gen told her the story of the skylight and how Ryan had installed it for Gordon Kendrick, the first artist Gen had brought to the ranch for the residency.
“Ryan thought it was stupid. But he put it in anyway because he was trying to get into my pants.”
“Well, that must have worked out for him,” Aria observed.
“It really did.” Gen was due in about a month, and she fondly rubbed her large, round middle. “But that doesn’t mean he’s a genius at installing skylights. I’m pretty sure this was his first one.”
Aria looked up and considered how high the barn’s roof was. “You sure it’s okay for him to go up there? It’s a really high roof. I don’t want to be the cause of him falling on his head and leaving your baby fatherless.”
“Now that you mention it, he almost fell on his head when he put the thing in,” Gen remarked.
“Really? Jeez.”
“He got distracted because he was trying to look at my ass,” Gen said.
“Well, he’s already seen it,” Aria answered. “So that’s one less danger to think about.”
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