by Jackie Braun
Even so, she crossed the threshold, standing just inside the room with her chin tilted up in challenge.
He smiled in response and stood. At the opened window, he glanced out and then issued a mild oath.
“They’re gone.”
She joined him at the sill even though there was no longer anything to see. “Don’t worry. They’ll be back.”
“I wonder how deer got onto the island anyway. Did they take the ferry or do the backstroke?” he mused.
Audra relaxed a bit, relieved that Seth suddenly seemed less tense and the topic of conversation had turned to something safe.
“Deer can swim, but I think I read somewhere that early settlers introduced them for game. Other deer might have crossed over on the ice during the winter,” she told him.
“That’s a few miles.”
She shrugged. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, especially when you’re being chased by coyotes.”
“Again it comes down to predators and prey.” He laughed softly.
“Deer aren’t at the top of the food chain.”
“No,” he agreed. “Man is.”
Seth was no longer looking out the window. Instead, he watched Audra with a smoky gaze that had heat shimmying up her spine.
“Is that coffee I smell?” she asked, taking a step toward the door. He smiled and she got the feeling he was well aware of the effect he was having on her.
“Want some?”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
Back in the living room, Seth motioned for her to sit.
“Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll bring it out to you. Cream and sugar, right?”
“You have a good memory.”
“When it comes to you, I remember everything.”
As he disappeared into the kitchen, she wondered why his expression had seemed so grim.
When he returned with their coffee, though, he was smiling and so she decided she’d merely imagined it. But she hadn’t imagined his panicky exit from the church on Sunday.
“I haven’t seen you in a few days. Everything okay?”
Seth had hoped she wouldn’t bring that up. He cleared his throat “Fine.”
“You left the church a little abruptly on Sunday.”
“Oh, that.” He forced a smile. “Guess I got a little spooked about stray lightning bolts myself. To say I’m a lapsed Catholic is being generous.”
“I’ve missed our walks,” she said softly.
He told himself he had only imagined the wistfulness in her tone.
“Well, I’m up for one today if you’d like to keep me company. I came across some wildflowers while I was out hiking yesterday without my camera. I thought I’d like to take a few shots today.”
“Wildflowers, hmm?” A smile lurked in her voice.
Oddly, he’d been enjoying capturing the island’s flora with his camera. “Anything wrong with that?”
“No.”
“But?”
“It’s just that I can picture you snagging a shot of the winning homer in a tied World Series game, but for some reason I have a harder time seeing you getting all pumped up about stumbling across some bog rosemary or skunk cabbage.”
“And for some reason I have a hard time believing someone who looks like you can point out either one of those plants, assuming they even grow here.”
“I can and they do. Follow me.”
She set her cup aside and got to her feet. The smile she sent Seth over her shoulder had his heart bumping around in his chest. He didn’t care for the reaction, but he comforted himself with the fact that it was merely physical. After all, Audra had always had this effect on him—and nearly the entire male population. This connection he felt was nothing more than basic chemistry. Even as they stepped into the woods, he felt on firmer footing.
“I’d like to see your work afterward, if that’s okay with you?” Audra said. “You have me intrigued.”
“Oh, you’ll see it,” he promised. “You’ll see it.”
A couple of hours later they were seated in the dining room at Saybrook’s. Audra’s plate was piled with fruit and a couple of slices of unbuttered wheat toast. In contrast, Seth had heaped his plate with scrambled eggs, hash browns and several slices of crisply fried bacon.
“You seem to have worked up an appetite,” she noted.
“Yes. All that hiking.” But his gaze veered to her mouth. After a hasty bite of potatoes, he said, “I got a lot of good shots today.”
“And only broke the law once.”
“How was I supposed to know trillium is protected by state conservation laws?” he protested, still feeling foolish that he’d actually picked her a bouquet.
“Don’t worry.” She winked. “Your secret is safe with me.”
The opening was there and so he took it.
“Same goes for your secrets. Do you want to tell me the reason your sister is giving you the evil eye?”
And Ali was. She stood across the sparsely occupied dining room with her arms crossed over her chest, glaring. Seth was surprised he couldn’t see heat wafting from the top of her head, she looked that angry.
“I hurt her.”
“So you mentioned the other night.” He didn’t press, even though he wanted to. He waited, sipping his orange juice as Audra glanced over at her glowering twin.
“Why do I find I want to tell you my life story?” she said on a weary sigh.
He shrugged. “Confession is good for the soul.”
“This from the man who couldn’t sit through Sunday services?” she said wryly. “Maybe you should be confessing to me.”
“Why don’t you go first?” he countered smoothly. “My sins can wait.”
She tore a small piece from the toast, popped it into her mouth and chewed slowly. Stalling, he decided.
Finally she said, “When I left Trillium Island, I left with her boyfriend.”
Seth whistled through his teeth. “I can see where she might take offense to that.”
He kept his tone light. Surely the sinking feeling in his gut wasn’t disappointment? Such thoughtlessness was, after all, so typical of Audra. That Audra he knew well. Much better, in fact, than the down-to-earth woman who had delighted him with her laughter and self-deprecating sense of humor while they had tramped through the woods on their morning walks.
She threw him another curve when she added, “I didn’t actually leave with Luke Banning. I accepted a ride from him to the ferry and then I bought a bus ticket to California.”
“Luke Banning?” The name rang a bell. “The dot-comer who cleared several million by the time he was in his mid-twenties and then was smart enough to get out before things went belly-up. That Luke Banning?”
The guy was an entrepreneurial legend.
“Yes.” She smiled, looking oddly proud. “He had something to prove when he left here, too. It looks like he did.”
“Have you seen him since then?”
“No. We’ve exchanged a phone call here and there or an e-mail. He offered me some sound investment advice after my first…a few years ago. But we haven’t actually been face-to-face since that day on the ferry dock in Petoskey when we wished one another luck and Godspeed and then went our separate ways.”
“So, if all you did was accept a ride from him, why is your sister still fuming?”
Audra nibbled more toast before speaking again. “Ali and Luke were already having problems. He wanted to leave here and I was a sympathetic ear since I had restless feet as well. People were talking, telling her I was trying to seduce him. When she heard I was on the back of his Harley when he left, she drew her own conclusions. I just never bothered to correct her. Actually, I sort of enjoyed the fact that she had jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
“Why?”
“Why?” she mused. “I’ve asked myself that question a lot lately. I guess the easy answer is that I resented like hell that she thought I would try to steal her boyfriend in the first place.”
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p; “There must be more to it than that.”
She smiled and looked a little sad.
“I suppose there is. All of my life people have wanted me to be more like Ali. She’s smart, serious-minded and pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way.” Her gaze drifted to her sister and her brows tugged together. “But she really needs to do something with that hair.”
“What does her hair have to do with it?” he asked on an unexpected laugh.
“Nothing, but it kind of sums up who she is: Tidy, controlled. She never got into trouble as a kid. Other than dating Luke, who was a bit of a bad boy, she always toed the line. I was the hell-raiser in the family. Even Dane couldn’t hold a candle to me.”
“Why?” he asked again. It was the question that had been bugging him since dinner that night in his cottage.
Audra shrugged this time. “I’m not sure. The more my parents and grandparents and teachers tried to put me in the same box as Ali, the more I found ways to break out of it. We’re so different,” she murmured. “Night and day.”
“She is a little more conservative and serious-looking,” he ventured.
“She can be serious,” Audra agreed. “But sometimes I wonder if that’s because people look at her and that’s what they expect. I can be serious, too. But put me in the same straight navy skirt and starched white blouse with that silly little necktie thingy and I’d still be…well, no one would be taking me seriously.”
Seth got her point. Her body was too curvy to be made inconspicuous, no matter how boring or severe the cut of her clothes.
“I was a C-cup by the time I hit eighth grade,” she confided. “No one was taking me seriously, believe me. One of my teachers…hit on me in junior high.”
The way she said it made Seth believe something far more sinister and damaging than inappropriate flirting had gone on. The revelation had his blood running cold. “A teacher hit on you when you were in junior high school? Did you report him?”
“No…I never even told my parents. I was too embarrassed.”
She laughed softly, her gaze riveted to a wedge of cantaloupe that she was meticulously dicing into tiny pieces. Despite the passage of more than a dozen years, she was still embarrassed, he realized.
“I can’t believe I told you that. I’ve never said a word to anyone. Don’t…don’t repeat it, okay?”
It was just the kind of sensational revelation he’d hoped to include in any copy he sent Deke Welling, and yet even the thought of using it made Seth feel as sleazy as he considered the junior high teacher to be.
“You should have reported him. What he did was criminal.” And something told Seth it had altered the course of Audra’s life.
“I know that now, but at the time…” She shrugged. “After it happened he told me no one would believe me. I figured he was right. He was married, had a couple of perfect kids. He was an upstanding member of the community and I was just ‘that wild Conlan girl.’”
“Is he still teaching here?” Seth found himself wanting to pay a visit to the local junior high.
“No. He retired when I was in high school and moved away.” She took a sip of orange juice. “Anyway, back to my original point. By high school everyone had us pegged. Ali was the class president, a member of the National Honor Society and voted most likely to succeed. I was lucky to graduate with a C average. The only thing we had in common was that by the time we got our diplomas we both knew what we wanted to do with our lives. Ali wanted to run Saybrook’s and I wanted to be an actress.” She went still, as if realizing she was revealing too much, then finished. “I let my sister think the worst about Luke and me.”
“Well, that should be easy enough to rectify now,” Seth said.
“Maybe if she’d spend more than five minutes with me, but she won’t give me the chance to explain. She claims to be too busy. That’s why I moved to the resort. I decided to force my company on her, not that she’s made that easy. And that murderous look on her face today makes me wonder if this is such a good idea.”
“Ali does look seriously ticked off,” Seth agreed.
A server had stopped at their table to refill Seth’s coffee. “Miss Conlan’s not mad,” the young woman corrected. “She’s just upset. We all are. The owners officially put the resort up for sale.”
“Saybrook’s is for sale?”
“As of today, yes.”
After she’d gone, Seth said to Audra, “Well, it should make you feel a little better to know you’re not the cause of her bad mood.”
“Actually, it makes me feel great.” She pushed back from the table as she said it. “I’m sorry to run, Seth, but there’s something I have to do and it can’t wait.”
She was out the door, blowing a kiss to her tight-lipped twin, before he could even call out, “See you around.”
For the next several days, Audra was kept incredibly busy putting into motion a plan so bold and so far beyond her wildest dreams that she could only lay awake at night wondering if she’d lost her mind.
Dane thought she might have, but, bless her big brother’s heart, he signed on as a partner anyway. The main test would come that evening when they met with Ali to discuss the formation of the Conlan Development Corporation and the plan to not only purchase Saybrook’s and restore it to its former glory, but to expand its reach on the island.
Audra had the capital to buy the resort outright. She was, after all, a very wealthy woman. But Ali’s comment about how Audra had accumulated her money still rankled, perhaps because the new Audra could admit there was some truth to it.
So she did what many people would consider her crazy for doing once it became public knowledge, and Audra had little doubt it would be splashed across the headlines. She rolled the bulk of her late husband’s assets into a trust fund for his grandchildren, with enough left over for a sizable endowment for his alma mater, the Harvard School of Business. The deed to the Brentwood estate was being transferred to Nigel, with comfortable annual stipends for her late husband’s other loyal staff.
As for Henry the Fourth, she couldn’t let him off the hook entirely. He had tried to kill her. But since Audra refused to testify against him, her attorney had managed to get the charges dismissed with the understanding that the man would attend anger management classes and make a sizable donation to the charity of Audra’s choice. She picked the American Heart Association in honor of her late husband, who had died unexpectedly from coronary arrest.
Of course, even without the money and assets bequeathed to her upon Henry’s death, Audra was still a multimillionaire in her own right thanks to the settlements from marriages one and two and a savvy bit of investing that was all her own doing. She didn’t plan to give all of her money away, but what she kept Audra planned to put to good use. Starting with the resort.
She’d been so busy working with Dane and teleconferencing with her lawyer and accountant in California that the only times she’d seen Seth was in the mornings when they met outside their cottages at half past eight and walked to the water’s edge and back through the woods to the resort for breakfast.
It no longer bothered her that he always brought his camera along or that he took pictures of her—often. Because during those walks he also took dozens of photographs of the wildflowers they came across.
In addition to trillium, skunk cabbage and bog rosemary, they encountered Dutchman’s breeches, common blue violets, bunchberry and bloodroot. She pointed them all out, as surprised as Seth that she remembered the names, which she’d learned from her maternal grandmother when she was just a girl.
“We’ll just call you Audra Audubon,” he had teased the day before.
“Please. The last thing I need is another last name.”
He’d regarded her curiously and yet he hadn’t asked for an explanation, which was perhaps why she had been so tempted to give him one.
Something was happening between them, as much as she tried to deny it, and despite her vow to steer clear of men. For the first time in her lif
e, she’d met someone who appeared to be as interested in what she had to say as the way she filled out a sweater. Just as amazing, though, was that for the first time in her life, Audra had more on her mind than snagging or pleasing a man. In fact, she almost regretted the growing attraction she felt for Seth. She wanted to stand on her own two feet this time around, but his broad shoulders and muscled chest made it so tempting to lean.
When she pulled to a stop outside her cottage late one afternoon, there he was, sitting in the waning sunshine on the bottom step of his unit with a magazine in one hand and a longneck bottle of beer in the other.
“New car?” Seth called, flipping the magazine closed and setting both it and the beer aside.
“Yes. I got tired of driving a rental.”
He stood and closed the distance between them while Audra popped the small trunk and gathered up the two bags of groceries she’d purchased after leaving a meeting with the resort’s representatives and Dane. It had been a day for big-ticket purchases, she thought, suppressing a grin as she recalled the bid Conlan Development had made for Saybrook’s.
“Is it a stick shift?” he asked, cupping his hands around his eyes so he could see through the driver’s side window of the sporty little coupe.
Audra shook her head. “Nope. Automatic. As it is, I’m probably going to regret not having something with four-wheel drive next winter.”
He glanced up sharply. “You’re still planning to be here next winter?”
“Yes. I’m home for good.”
Audra smiled, but for some reason tears threatened. It wasn’t that she was sad, even though she had plenty of regrets. No, she was grateful. How many people got the chance to start over at thirty? That’s what she was doing.
“Let me help you.”
“Help me?”
It took her a moment to realize that Seth meant with the grocery bags. She laughed softly. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
And she was, or at least she was heading in that direction.
Before she could second-guess the invitation, she issued it. “Want to have dinner with me tonight?”
Seth glanced at the bags and apparently noted the bundle of fresh asparagus spearing out of the top of one. “What exactly are you planning to cook?”