Love on Lavender Island (A Lavender Island Novel Book 2)

by Lauren Christopher

  Beyond the apple orchard, in a large clearing, was Mason Field, the only airstrip on the island. In front of the lone hangar were three small planes—one possibly Adam’s. The other two might belong to his brother or an island resident, since the Masons had always provided tie-downs for anyone flying in.

  On the other side of the property—several acres away—were the stables and corral, along with a few storage sheds and a large pasture where the Masons handled the island’s bison. Most of the year the bison were free to roam the island’s interior, grazing on the grass, kept in control by the island’s conservancy group, but when it was time for immunizations, the bison were rounded up and brought to the sorting pens at the Mason ranch.

  Paige glanced around at all of this in the dark. As soon as the sprawling house came into view, a flutter of butterflies went through her stomach. Her mind immediately conjured the lovely, earthy smell of summer sage outside their kitchen window; she could hear the collar of the Masons’ little puppy Denny; she could see her mother’s bright-coral summer lipstick as she looked across the table at George, right where the morning sun came streaming through the kitchen window. The Grant girls often had breakfast at the Masons’ that summer, even after the fire—or the first fire anyway—the five of them cavorting over there in the mornings across the meadow, Ginger with her three daughters, and Cathy, all in dresses. Sometimes Adam would be there, but only as a quick shadow, hustling out of the house, buttoning up a shirt, mumbling that he was going to see Samantha. After the fire, Samantha’s parents had tried to take her off the island in the middle of her summerlong counseling duties, but she’d managed to convince them to let her stay and finish out all the camp weeks. It had only given Paige more misery, as she would watch Adam tear off to meet her anytime he could.

  After Paige parked her cart in the empty lot, she followed Adam through the huge oak double doors of the resort and tried to look away from his strong legs and snug jeans as he leaned over the lobby desk and shouted for someone named Mendelson. She sighed deeply and looked for a way to divert her attention.

  The lobby, while eerily empty, was beautiful—not at all what she remembered. The update boasted a vintage aviator theme that highlighted Mason Field. There were enormous old propellers on the two-story-high walls, historical photos hanging throughout, and leather-bound logbooks lining the mantel of a massive flagstone fireplace that erupted through the center of the lobby. Sixteen rooms lined the wing off one side: eight on the first floor and eight on the second. The other side of the lobby had a door that led to the family kitchen, and behind that was the family home.

  The renovated resort felt old and new, and small and enormous, at the same time—small enough to feel cozy, but enormous in its high ceilings and oversized stones. But the dimmed lighting and silence also made it feel like a place marching toward death.

  “What’s up?” A young blonde girl—with the edges of her hair in bright blue—came around the corner in a Grateful Dead T-shirt and took her place at the check-in desk. Paige wasn’t even sure where she’d come from. A back office? The family home?

  “Amanda, where’s Mendelson?” Adam asked.

  “Not in yet.”

  Adam frowned and made a frustrated sound. It made Paige feel better that, for once, neither she nor her family was responsible for a Mason scowl.

  Amanda looked Paige up and down as she licked some kind of potato-chip dust off her fingers.

  “Can you get Ms. Grant here set up in a room, then?” Adam asked in his deep voice, avoiding Amanda’s eyes.

  Amanda glanced between Adam and Paige a few times—as if trying to assess the situation—but finally pulled out a keyboard from under the check-in computer.

  “Which room do you want her in?” she asked.

  “Eight-A.”

  She nodded as if that meant something to her. Paige wondered if that was the farthest room in the wing, as far away from Adam as possible.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, turning toward Paige abruptly. “That cheese and those grapes couldn’t be your dinner.”

  His voice sounded more irritated than truly concerned. That indifference was what Paige needed to remember. Her hormones might be going into overdrive at the sight of him, but he’d been treating her like a veritable stranger the whole day. A pain-in-the-ass stranger, in fact. She’d do well to follow his lead.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’m mostly tired.”

  He gave a curt nod, then strode through the door that led to his own residence.

  “It’s on us,” he told Amanda over his shoulder.

  Amanda frowned at his retreating back as if confused, then focused her eyes back on the screen.

  “Nonsmoking okay?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “One queen okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Amanda went into efficiency mode, printing a confirmation, getting a key, folding it into a map.

  The girl leaned across the counter and pointed with her pen. “We’re here. Your room is straight down that way.” Her voice fell into the rhythm of boredom that was the hallmark of teenagers everywhere. “Jacuzzi is open until . . . well, it’s closed now, but it’s normally open until ten. There’s a light continental breakfast from—oh wait, tomorrow might be the last day for that. It’s eight to eleven, but we probably won’t have it after tomorrow. If you’d like riding lessons or maps to get down to the harbor, come see me in the morning. I assume you just flew in?”

  Paige glanced up. She didn’t really feel like telling her the whole story. Not only that, but her mind kept dragging over how young this girl looked to be working in a hotel this late. Was she thirteen? Fifteen? Sixteen? The heavy eye makeup and dyed blue tips were throwing Paige off. “Something like that,” she said.

  The girl’s scrutiny swept across Paige’s clothes, yoga mat, and backpack, then seemed to drag over Paige’s ring finger. She clicked her pen several times. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  Paige hesitated. She sort of wanted to ask some questions—like why were they closing the resort, and who normally worked this desk, and whose kitten was Click, and how old was this girl, and where did she live—but the weights on her shoulders reminded her that a good night’s sleep was in order first. “No,” she said.

  The girl’s bored nod, Adam’s quick dismissal, the hauntingly quiet resort, and the looming flagstone fireplace all made Paige feel insignificant as she dragged herself toward the room she’d been assigned.

  She put a few of her things away in the drawers, then flopped onto the bed and closed her eyes. It had been a long, outrageous day. She should fall asleep now and get ready to wake up early and get back to work on Gram’s place.

  This was going to be a strange week.

  And Adam was definitely looking like he remembered things.

  And Paige didn’t know how he was going to feel about that when he put all the pieces together.

  At half past midnight, weary and exhausted from his toes to his scalp, Adam pushed back from his desk. His eyes lit on the remains of the cold enchiladas, still sitting in the tinfoil container from Rosa’s Cantina. He picked it up and scraped at the bottom with a plastic fork, wondering if Paige had eaten hers. At least he’d ordered something for her. Damned if he was going to be responsible for her collapsing from hunger as well as possibly getting attacked by an intruder in the house he was supposed to be watching.

  He couldn’t believe he’d let Helen’s house get invaded again, and this time with an innocent occupant inside. He was off his game. He’d always yelled at his father and brother and ranch hands for even one moment’s slip into irresponsibility—you had to be constantly alert on a ranch this big—but now here he was, doing the same thing. He needed to concentrate.

  Of course, it was harder these days with everything going on. Deaths. Wills. Memories. Ghosts from the past . . .

  The late-night silence of the office crept up around his ears—an office that had grown eerier a
nd lonelier as time marched on. The depression that wanted to settle around his shoulders was something he instinctively kept staving off—every time the sense of loss entered his head, he shoved it out of the way. He knew he’d need to address it at some point, but for now he’d put one foot in front of the other, sell this damned place, leave this damned island, and then let reality catch up with him.

  He tossed the foil container into the trash and let a new level of irritation rise that he’d thought of Paige Grant again. He’d gone almost the entire evening staying focused on other concerns. But for the last half hour, his mind kept drifting to her. He wondered if it would be weird if he went to check on her.

  It would.

  And he shouldn’t.

  She was none of his business.

  But she’d rattled him. That was the bottom line.

  She felt like a strange, long-lost, hazy, shifting piece of an unfinished puzzle. And the worst part was that she wasn’t the only piece. Between her and Amanda, his world was shifting on its axis.

  Not that his world was engaging to begin with, but at least he used to know where he stood. He knew his land, his animals, his ranch hands, his family history. He was like those massive old trees out in the perimeter of his ranch—bent, scarred, gnarled, and sometimes leaning, but still standing, anchored by powerful roots the size of branches.

  But Paige was definitely an anomaly and felt like another lightning strike. He’d never had a very good memory for sentimental details, and he dismissed plenty of elements from his brain at the end of each day so he could concentrate on the ranch. So when he’d first seen Paige, he’d had trouble even conjuring the right era to place her in. But then, slowly, he began to remember: She was Ginger’s daughter. She’d been one of the young campers. She’d been there the night of the first fire. She’d been there when he got home from jail after the second one, too, sitting at his father’s dining table. Or maybe that was the next day. He wasn’t sure. But she’d been there that summer, with her goth eyeliner, staring at him as if she wanted him to combust. He remembered the townspeople had talked about her that summer and said she’d “saved” him from the first fire, although he’d never believed that, caught up as he was in everything that was going on with Samantha. He remembered that he and Paige had talked one night, late, in the hangar. She might have been crying. He recalled that everyone called her Calamity June. And that she’d hated him for some reason.

  The rest was cloudy, like most of his teenage years. That whole summer had been a shit-storm anyway. It ended after the second fire, down by the stables, when Ginger and George had sat at his dining table and announced they were turning him in. They’d sent for Samantha’s parents. Her parents had taken her away. He’d been thrown in the Carmelita jail, where they held him on a jaywalking warrant, of all things, so they could buy some time, then ferried him over to the mainland, where he spent another week in the county jail. When they released him on lack of evidence, he came home on a late-night ferry to a scowling father, a suspicious town, no girlfriend, and what felt like a life filled with distrust.

  Normally he wouldn’t care that he couldn’t remember the details of that summer. He liked life that way. Forgetting could be good.

  But, for some reason, with Paige Grant here now, he felt as if he was going to remember.

  Whether he wanted to or not.

  And the fact that he couldn’t quite drag his eyes from the sexy woman who’d once been the thirteen-year-old girl who was nearly his stepsister was disturbing in ways he didn’t want to examine right now.

  Back in his bedroom, Adam peeled off his shirt to get into bed, but he suddenly thought of a better way to relieve some of his ache and fatigue.

  Within minutes, he was in a towel at the back of the resort, his bare feet thudding across the redwood deck to the Jacuzzi. With the dude group coming in a couple of days, he wouldn’t have the place to himself anymore. Might as well take advantage of it now. He snapped the lights back on, but only half—he didn’t want to wake his only resort guest—then he reset the timer behind an elderberry bush and tossed his towel on the deck. In seconds, he lowered himself into the bubbling cauldron.

  Gaaaaaaaaaaaawd, that felt good.

  His head fell back against the lip of the tub, and his arms floated weightlessly to the surface. His mind was finally able to relax. No more thinking of the past. No more thinking of the present or any of his responsibilities. No more thinking of this night. No more thinking of Paige Grant.

  About fifteen minutes into a very nice reverie regarding a pinup girl and a bathtub, a twig snapped. He jerked to attention and scouted the bushes, assuming he’d see a raccoon or opossum. But a human form took shape behind the shadows of the cypress trees.

  “Who’s there?” he barked, pushing to a sitting position, the water gently sloshing.

  Silence followed, then a rustling of bushes. As Adam watched, a very shapely shape stepped out from the shadows.

  He groaned inwardly.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” said a familiar voice.

  CHAPTER 5

  Paige shoved branches aside, picked her way through the bushes in her slippers, and stumbled onto the planked wooden deck, where Adam came fully into view. She stalled right on the edge—still not certain this was a good idea. She plucked a few twigs from her hair, then gripped the elbows of her velvet hoodie and waited to get a sense of Adam’s mood.

  She’d seen him enter the hot tub from her window—she’d heard the lights clank on, then peered through the thick panes to see his waist slip into the bubbling water. The angle of her room and the dim lighting allowed her a long, guilty ogle. She’d gaped at his flexing arms as he slowly lowered his body; then she’d stared at his strong chest as he took deep breaths and dropped his head back to settle in.

  She’d enjoyed her view for five glorious minutes before pulling on her hoodie and scrounging up the nerve to pad across her patio and down the back path to the deck. She would just thank him for sending the dinner.

  Yeah, that was it.

  As she hesitated at the edge of the deck, Adam squinted at her through the darkness, the blue lights from the water dancing along his face and sending luminescent shadows across his jaw. His arms came up level with the ground, shoulders glistening under the moonlight, as he stretched his biceps along the back of the tub. Then, in a gesture that was either irritated or defeated, he let his head fall back to the edge of the tub and closed his eyes again.

  “Did my staff see you walk out here?” he grumbled.

  Ah, his mood. Sulky.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “Who is your staff? That girl?”

  “Mendelson is there now. Did he see you?”

  “I came the back way. Anyway, I’m not sure why he’d care.”

  “He’s supposed to be watching you.”

  “Watching me?”

  Adam shook his head. “Never mind. Come out from those bushes. There are raccoons back there.”

  Paige leaped forward, then crossed her arms against a shudder. She’d never been meant for a wooded life, with creatures and insects. That was another reason she never came to the island’s interior anymore. She smoothed her velvet hoodie and stepped across the deck.

  “Why is your staff supposed to be watching me?” she asked.

  He gave a long, put-upon sigh and shifted slightly against the lip of the tub. “Would you believe I was worried?” he mumbled, his eyes still closed.

  “No.”

  A beat passed, and then he smiled.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “So distrustful, Paige.”

  Her heartbeat picked up. She wasn’t sure if it was because of that intimate whisper in his midnight voice, or the fact she’d never heard him say her first name like that, or the idea that he’d finally paid enough attention to her to form an opinion—and a shockingly accurate one at that—but it all seemed dangerously sexy. She told herself she should leave. Or at least look away. But first she all
owed herself another clandestine ogle of his glistening chest.

  “Why are you out here?” he asked with his eyes still closed.

  She cleared her throat. “I, um . . . wanted to thank you. For the dinner.” She tried to remember her earlier feeling of gratitude and replace it with her current irritation that he was assigning his staff watch duty over her.

  “No problem. Figured you had to be hungrier than you were letting on. And I felt a little responsible for the situation you were in.”

  A cacophony of crickets chirped rhythmically behind her. She padded around the side of the chaise and sat on its edge, smoothing the velvet of her pant leg. She should go now. But she didn’t want to. Adam’s presence gave her a zing that she hadn’t experienced in a long time, and it was a nice jolt. She hadn’t had that giddy rush of attraction for eons—that adolescent feeling of energy that tended to be lost once real jobs and bills and boyfriends who cheated on you entered the picture. She didn’t know if she was experiencing it with him because he was the one who made her feel that way when she was an adolescent, or if it was because of something about him specifically that she’d experience no matter when in life she met him. But he definitely gave off that chemistry. It was addicting.

  They sat in silence, listening to the crickets’ trills. She searched for something to say. Normally she was good at small talk, but it felt weird with Adam—they were like strangers, but not really. They knew too much about each other’s families and pasts to be real strangers, so instead they were caught in an uncomfortable middle ground: arm’s-length intimacy, unfamiliar familiarity.