She brought her hand to the front of her neck as if to loosen the words that suddenly seemed lodged there. “Why haven’t you . . . why haven’t you said anything? Why did you agree to FRED?”
“Maybe the same reason you did.”
She gave a weak smile. “Fear?”
“Yep. Or maybe because I’m an idiot,” he added. “And then, later, when I realized you wanted to leave, I didn’t want to hold you back. I wanted to ask you to stay with me and Amanda, but I can’t ask that of—”
“Yes!” she said.
“What?”
“Yes, I’ll stay!”
“But what about the island? You don’t like the island.”
“I’m finding a lot of things I love about it—the hangar is becoming a special place.”
He smiled. “I hear ya there. But what about the small-town nature and the rumors and all that island stuff you hate?”
“I’m realizing that, despite the gossiping, when push comes to shove, these islanders are here for one another. I forgot about that sweetness, but I saw it again when the meadow was in trouble—when we were in trouble. They came to help.”
“It took me by surprise, too.” He nodded. “It’s good to be reminded. What about the scorpions and raccoons and snakes?”
“All right, I’m still not used to those. But if you take the girl out of LA, maybe you can teach her. So did you really mean that? You want me to stay?”
“Absolutely. But the most important consideration is that I didn’t want to get in the way of your dreams. You need to pursue what’s important to you.”
“What’s important to me is you.”
His face softened. His arms grew tighter around her. “What about the Dorothy Silver role?”
“I’ll find another way to make my dreams happen. But my first dream, always, was you. I’ve dreamed about you since I was thirteen and saw you kiss Samantha, and wondered if I might turn into a sophisticated girl like that—someone with Veronica Lake hair and a mysterious Ingrid Bergman smile. I wanted to be that kind of woman from then on. I wanted you, Adam. I have since I was thirteen.”
He stared at her for a long minute, then reached up into her hair and cupped her cheek. Staring into her eyes, he gave her a serious look. “For the record, I’m not an Ingrid Bergman fan.” She smiled. His kiss was warm and gentle, full of love and adoration and trust and care and protection and, most of all, longevity. It was the most romantic kiss she’d ever experienced. Until something hard hit her head.
“Crap! What was that?” She brought her hand to her head and saw an apple roll into the dirt.
Adam smiled and brought his finger to his lip, glancing at the blood on his fingertip. “I think you bit me.”
“Sorry. An apple just fell on my head.” She twisted to look for the culprit.
“Paige Grant, I look forward to a long, exciting life with you.”
She kicked the apple into the grass with her high heel and touched his lip where she’d bit him. “Are you sure you want to take your chances with me?”
“Absolutely.”
“You’ve been forewarned—there will be crazy calamities.”
“I look forward to that.” He smiled and leaned down to give her a long, toe-curling, albeit slightly bloody, kiss. “Now, we have a wedding to rush to.”
He grabbed her hand and pulled her through the apple orchard.
Paige stepped into the wedding tent, still holding hands with Adam, which attracted more than one stunned glance.
Noel lifted an eyebrow and grinned at his brother. Amanda smiled smugly and nodded to Paige. Bob and Gert stared and then hugged each other. Ginger brought her hand to her mouth and smiled. And Natalie and Olivia did hyper quiet-claps under their chins.
It seemed the whole town was staring at them as they snuck down a side aisle and slipped into two vacant seats.
The wedding was elegant and very Hollywood, and everyone cried when Dorothy and Richard repeated their lines from twenty years prior. They admitted they’d known from the start that they were each other’s first and true love, and that time never changed a thing except made it stronger.
After the ceremony, the guests moved toward the reception tent, but Dorothy wanted to toss her bouquet. As she turned her back and flung her bouquet of yellow-and-white daffodils over her shoulder, Paige saw a pair of rough hands reach up and snatch the flowers out of the sky. She dropped her hands out of defeat, then came face-to-face with Adam, who stepped through the crowd—as Rosa, Kelly, and Doris shoved him good-naturedly—and he dropped the bouquet into Paige’s hands.
“That’s cheating,” she whispered.
“However it needs to happen,” he whispered back into her ear.
The guests moved again toward the tent, and Adam smiled and pulled her through the maze of hydrangeas, past the rows of wooden chairs, alongside the gazebo, and straight through the meadow.
“Adam,” Paige said, laughing, while he undid his tie, “everyone’s going to wonder where we went.”
“I think they know where we went,” he said, tugging her up his back steps, past the kitchen, and into his bedroom. His shirt was coming out of his waistband faster than she could get her breath.
“But don’t we need to talk to everyone—tell Amanda and my mom and Noel and my sisters that we’re changing our plans?”
“We’ll tell them later,” he said, kicking the bedroom door closed.
“But, Adam, don’t you think—”
“Paige,” he said, exasperated. He reached up to push his hands into her hair. “Trust me.”
She let him undo the fabric tie and button at the side of her silky dress; let him hold her, naked, in the middle of the floor while he kissed her so deeply her knees began to tremble; and, finally, let him pull her carefully into the cocoon of the bed.
And, for the first time of many to follow, she completely did.
EPILOGUE
The day had finally come.
The Mason Apple Fest had a brightly colored banner hanging over the new ranch entrance, decorated with hand-drawn apples and vibrant fall leaves—and a prediction of hundreds of excited Lavender Island guests over the two-day event.
Paige stood with her hands on her hips, the crisp November breeze swirling her hair around her shoulders, and surveyed their work: Kelly and Joseph were donating horse rides for the kids at the corral; Rosa’s Cantina was donating enchiladas, tacos, and cervezas; Antonio and Tanya were running the game aisle for the kids; Little was manning the karaoke booth; Gabe, Gordon, and Garrett were handling the bobbing-for-apples booth; and Gert and Amanda had been baking pies all week for the famous pie booth.
The booths were set up throughout the meadow, which had been covered with straw for the event and had colorful pots of mums and hay bales sitting throughout. The gazebo still stood sentinel, now with autumn-orange, magenta, and yellow mums around the base, with large haystacks topped with pumpkins at the step-up entrance. The heart-shaped weather vane still spun on top, reminding the residents of the recent wedding that had been such a wonderful, coming-together moment for Lavender Island.
Dorothy Silver had, indeed, purchased Helen Grant’s property, despite the fire. Or maybe because of it—her film crew took full responsibility for the electrical short in the orchard and paid top dollar to nurture what remained back to health, as well as paying the asking price for the house. Dorothy planned to use the property as a quarterly escape from her regular home in Beverly Hills, but she didn’t mind at all if her new neighbors, Adam and Paige, used the meadow or the gazebo whenever they wanted, and she was adamant about using whatever they needed for the Mason Apple Fest.
Dorothy had been disappointed that Paige didn’t want to try out for the movie part, but she finally pulled Paige aside and whispered that she understood.
“Acting is a hard life,” she’d said, looping her arm through Paige’s as they’d strolled across the meadow one afternoon. “It doesn’t bode well for love. If you find love first, take that.
And I see that you have.” She’d nodded toward Adam out across the pasture, who’d been riding toward the corral with the bison. Dorothy followed up her smile with a wink.
Paige still couldn’t believe her sexy bison wrangler was in her life every day. She’d moved into his house after much begging on his part. As soon as she’d acquiesced, he’d asked if there was anything she wanted to change—that it was her home now, too. He’d said she could change anything—he really had no love lost for any of it. The only thing he wanted to keep was the direct entry to the resort lobby and one lamp that reminded him of his mother.
So Paige and Amanda got to work. Paige also enlisted Natalie’s help, and Amanda enjoyed getting to know Nat, too. Natalie was still doing event planning for the senior apartments in Carmelita, but she was expanding into interior design, as well, and Paige thought her design skill was second to none. The three women drew up plans and ideas over the course of several weekends. Amanda designed her own room. Paige got rid of the weird old kitchen cabinetry. And they divested the family room of the scary white sheets in favor of a fresh, cozy modern design that looked like a page right out of a Pottery Barn catalog. Paige framed a bunch of pictures for Adam that he’d found in the box his dad left him, and they added new canvas prints along one whole wall of Adam with Amanda and Noel, as well as Adam and Paige. Adam’s eyes grew misty when he saw them.
Now, as Paige watched the first of the Apple Fest guests arrive in their golf carts, she straightened the pie-booth banner and winked at Amanda and Rosa. Amanda had spent every day for the past month trying to perfect her grandmother Ellen’s recipes off the recipe cards found in Adam’s box, and she was certain she’d mastered it.
“Hey, hands out of there,” Amanda said, pushing Adam out of the way and readjusting her new Apple Fest apron.
“Don’t I get a free piece?” he asked. “I was your taste-tester for a whole month. And I ran the risk of weighing four hundred pounds by now.”
Amanda smiled and handed him a plate and a fork. “Fine. But you were the one who kept insisting on eating the entire pie, Dad,” she said. “I was only asking you to taste.”
Adam chuckled and dug into another piece. “Just trying to be fair.”
“Thanks, Amanda.” Paige looped her arm through Adam’s fork-holding one and began strolling with him toward the next booth. “Should we check on the others?”
“Do we have a kissing booth somewhere? We could check that one out.”
Paige smiled. “We have bobbing for apples. Will that do?”
“I definitely want to see you try that one.”
Paige giggled. “It should be popular. Gabe, Gordon, and Garrett are running it.”
“Ah, that means my daughter will be spending time there.”
Paige gave his arm a squeeze. “Garrett’s fine. You have to get used to her dating sometime, and this is a nice boy to start with. He treats her well.”
Adam took another bite of pie and thought that over. “That’s all that matters, I guess.”
“And besides—having the Stone boys there will bring in a huge crowd, and the bobbing-for-apples booth is donating all its proceeds to our Fighters Week.” She gave his forearm another squeeze.
Adam and Paige were both excited about their new dude-ranch setup, in which one week out of every month was going to “Fighters Week” for cancer-recovery patients. They’d designed the weeks as strength builders—some physical activities, such as archery and horseback-riding and rope courses, plus Paige’s new hatha-yoga courses, and then some emotional strength building with speakers who they would bring over from the mainland. Amanda was going to help prepare healthy meals, which they would enjoy around campfires or outside around the spa under romantic twinkle lights, and Kelly offered to help out with horse and animal therapy, which the guests would love. They had their first group planned in two weeks—Ginger would be one of the first guests, along with some of her friends from her oncology offices in LA. Ginger hadn’t been able to stop marveling and praising the whole idea among her LA friends, and now Adam and Paige were booked through the summer. They couldn’t wait to keep expanding the program.
“Hey, do we have time to sit for a minute?” Adam asked, nodding toward the gazebo.
“For a few minutes. The band should be here to set up in about a half hour.”
They climbed the gazebo steps and sat in the far right side of the octagon, where they relaxed almost every evening. Denny was lying on the floor right where their feet always rested, as if waiting for them. Click hopped around Denny, looking as if she wanted to play, and Denny gave her his usual I’m-tolerating-you-because-you’re-so-cute look. If dogs could roll their eyes, Denny would have. But the two had become unlikely friends. Click finally gave up when the old dog simply laid his head down and let Click snuggle up between his paws.
“Everything came together,” Adam said, laying his empty pie plate on the gazebo bench.
“It did,” Paige said, snuggling against his flannel shirt.
“Except the mums—did you notice?”
Paige sprang upright. “Mums? What happened? Which mums?”
“The ones out here.” Adam waved his hand over the gazebo rail.
Paige jumped to her feet and peered over the side. Sure enough, the fall-colored mums only reached about three-quarters of the way around the gazebo. The whole back quarter was bare. “What happened? Didn’t Mr. Clark have enough? It looks ridiculous. Maybe we can call and have him quickly fill in with some daisies, or—”
“Paige.”
She looked back at Adam, who was sitting languidly on the bench. “It’s okay. Come over here.”
She reluctantly left her inspection of the unfinished flowers and plopped down beside him. His shirt smelled like woodland and apples, and she cozied up to him once again, stringing her fingers through his and looking out at the festival booths, which she could be proud of, even if the dumb flowers were unfinished.
“I did it on purpose,” he said.
She twisted her neck to see him. “What?”
“The flowers—I had Mr. Clark only finish them partway.”
She sat up and stared at him. “Why would you do that?”
“You said the other day that Elliott—I really like him, by the way, we went out for beers the other night. Anyway, you said he bought flowers for Natalie every month and had almost filled the entire perimeter of his house, and that she’d agreed to marry him when that was done.”
Paige nodded. “I’d say two more months, tops.” She smiled at the image. “But what does that—” Before she could form the question, Adam was grinning.
“I know you’re a little skittish about how fast I’ve been moving things along,” he said, “but I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you, Paige. I can’t wait to ask you to be my wife. But I want to respect your comfort level. I wondered if you’d be up for the same plan as Elliott and Natalie? But I can’t wait long enough to fill the perimeter of our whole house—I was thinking our gazebo.”
“But . . . wait, what?” Paige glanced over the rail at the almost-filled octagon.
She had been a little nervous at Adam’s speed, but he’d continually told her that marriage was his plan. And, frankly, she couldn’t remember any longer what she was waiting for. She loved this man. He clearly loved her. She loved his daughter and his dreams and this life they were building together.
“I think,” she began, “yes.”
Adam snapped out of his languid pose. “Yes?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, when I get this planter filled, I can ask you to marry me?”
“I’m thinking yes.”
The smile that spread across his face was everything Paige needed.
The band suddenly appeared in the meadow, hauling their gear toward the gazebo, and Adam and Paige cleared out of the way with Click and Denny, heading toward the ranch entrance where they’d start greeting guests. Adam kept getting out his phone, in between a few last-minute or
ders to the ranch hands who were helping out at the barbecue. Finally, they arrived at the entrance to their property.
There, right beneath the freshly painted sign that proudly proclaimed the new name, Hope Ranch, Paige saw Olivia puttering up the hillside in her golf cart with Lily in the passenger seat. Behind her were carts Paige recognized as Doris’s and Marie’s. Marie shared her cart with her ninety-five-year-old beau, the Colonel, from Casas Del Sur, and Doris was riding with a woman named Sugar. Behind them, it looked as though Mr. Fieldstone was coming, along with Mr. Clark and then Elliott and Natalie. Bob and Gert came from the other direction, right on cue.
As each of the arrivals parked in the makeshift gravel parking lot, they piled out. All seemed to have their arms loaded up.
With mums.
Paige turned toward Adam quizzically.
He gave her a sheepish grin. “Just neighbors helping neighbors out.”
Paige blinked at the long rows of people holding the potted plants. “They know already?”
“I told them it was my plan, but we didn’t know if you’d agree yet. Once you did, I put the word out. I think they’re on my side.”
They all came forward, smiling and handing their potted mums to Adam and Paige, clapping Adam on the shoulder, and offering congratulations to Paige.
“I’ll bet this isn’t quite what you had in mind when you saw my butt in that window?” Paige asked, leaning up on her tiptoes and giving Adam a kiss.
“No, I must say my thoughts may not have been that noble in that exact moment.” His arms reached around her, and he smiled. “But I’m glad I did, Calamity June.”
And Paige stretched up farther to kiss him again and tighten her arms around his neck. She planned to never let go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Love on Lavender Island has had a long life. In its original form, it was the manuscript (then called “Earning Wings”) that won me a finalist spot in RWA’s Golden Heart awards for unpublished authors. But it wasn’t quite right. It needed finessing. I loved the hero and the setting, but everything else needed to be readdressed. So when it came time to write Paige’s story, I thought, What if I gave her Adam Mason? and my wheels started spinning. I got rid of the old heroine, threw Paige into the story, kept finessing it, added Amanda, added Ginger, added the Grant sisters, and finally came up with this newer version, which I love. I hope you all love it, too!
Love on Lavender Island (A Lavender Island Novel Book 2) Page 32