Sandcastles

by April Hill

  “Does that mean you’ll be taking orders from me, after all?”

  “Nope. It means you’ll be falling out of bed every morning and working your pretty tail off until you’ve learned the ropes. And when you screw it up or don’t listen, or just work a little too slow to suit me, or talk back, or cuss me out too often—you’ll be getting your backside walloped ‘til you can’t sit down for supper. You’ve got no idea at all what you’re biting off, Stump, but if I agree to risk my skin and stick around, and if you don’t turn tail and run, you’re going to end up being the best damned rancher around here—maybe as good as your Grandpa. Maybe even better, if I’ve got anything to say about it.”

  Claire sighed. “That’s a lovely speech, but if Thacker chooses to, he can put a bullet in your back just as readily he did with Jesus Hernandez.”

  “Well, I’m harder to kill than most, but if that should happen, I’d be obliged if you’d bury me, say a couple of kind words over my corpse, and then get back to building that fence. If you give up on this place and let Thacker get his hands on Anxiety’s kids and grandkids, I swear I’ll come back from the grave, find me the stoutest switch between here and hell, and whale the tar out of you. If you and I can’t beat Linus Thacker while I’m alive, you’ll have to do it with me dead. You understand?”

  Claire beamed. “I understand completely, Mr. … Luke, I mean. Now, I already have thirty rolls of barbed wire behind this house, a pile of fence posts as high as the house itself, and a stack of tools that I have absolutely no idea how to use. How do we go about stringing five hundred acres of barbed wire?”

  Her grinned at her and nodded toward the house. “First, get out of that corset. The dress, too. I don’t want you passing out on me just to get out of a hard day’s work—and you already know what’ll happen if I hear any backtalk. Until you get some calluses on those dainty hands, you’ll want a pair of heavy gloves, too. Oh, and grab yourself a big hat while you’re in there. By dark, you’ll be wishing you’d never seen me, or this ranch, or a bunch of Hereford cows. Now move your rump. We’re burning daylight.”

  * * *

  As Claire walked up the battered steps and into her own house, she wasn’t thinking about barbed wire or Hereford bulls, or even about Luke Campbell. She was deep in unwelcome thoughts of John Maitland—the husband she’d left behind in Chicago. The man who’d given her a life of luxury and ease, and from whom she’d fled when the price of that luxurious life became too high to bear.

  It wasn’t John’s wealth that had originally attracted her, though. It was his powerful personality and easy charm—swept off her feet, she’d heard it called. Having been poor most of her life, Claire wasn’t accustomed to the level of determination a man like John Maitland could bring to bear on a woman when he wanted something from her. She wasn’t prepared for the endless deluge of expensive gifts and flowers, or by being courted at intimate dinners in elegant restaurants, or at the theatre and the opera. Without knowing exactly when she lost her sense of who she really was, Claire had begun to feel flattered by his attention and by his desire to have her as his own. He had finally won her not with money but with the sheer force of his own will.

  But when he had her love safely in hand, everything seemed to change. His strength turned to emotional cruelty and his determination to total domination. When she protested and tried to stand up to him, John retaliated. Before long, the emotional cruelty had turned physical, and her life had slipped gradually into a nightmarish cycle of anger and abuse. The years with John were memories Claire wanted desperately to forget, but she hadn’t yet put those years behind her. As a result, she had come to regard strong men as threatening, and the motives of all men as suspect.

  Lucas Campbell was undeniably attractive, and like John, he was strong and determined—and potentially dangerous. It wasn’t the whipping he’d just given her. Claire was no china doll. She had been raised around men of this rough sort long enough to know that what had happened today was basically benign and even well meant. It had hurt her pride more than anything else—precisely what it was meant to do. “To take her down a peg a peg or two,” was the way her grandfather had described it, and though she would never admit it to Luke Campbell, Claire was honest enough with herself to recognize her own part in what had happened. But one thing was certain about Luke Campbell. He was a man who would bear watching.

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  Please enjoy chapter one of Moonchild by April Hill!

  Moonchild

  Chapter One

  As I watched the old wooden ferry maneuver into its usual berth alongside the dock, I found myself waiting for the warm swell of nostalgia that people claim to experience when returning home after a long absence. Home is where the heart is, and as every prattling school child knows, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. But as I looked up toward Harbor Street at the place where I had grown up, my first thought was, “Can you believe it? They still haven’t fixed the damned potholes!”

  Which brought to mind the oft-quoted line by Thomas Wolfe: “You can’t go home again.” Personally, I’ve always thought Wolfe missed the point; it’s not that you can’t go home again. The real question for many of us is why would we want to? I was still pondering all this contradictory and melancholy wisdom as the Francine III began to reverse her clanking engines. The ferry was considerably older than I was, and once upon a time, it had belonged to my father, Max, who had opened the first ferry business on the island a few years before I was born. Now, as the Francine’s clattering propellers churned the oily water along the wharf into a pale green froth, sending two-dozen frantic gulls aloft in alarm, I stuck my fingers in my ears.

  It was what I used to do as a kid when the cries of the gulls grew loud enough to drown out the noise of the ferry’s aging engines. Seagulls are one of the most beautiful species God thought up, but He sure as hell shortchanged them in the brains department. Generations of sturdy, squat little ferryboats like this one had been chugging back and forth between the mainland and the cluster of small outlying islands for as long as anyone could remember, inevitably going through the same routine. Yet, every time they began to dock, the seagulls reacted in the same way they were behaving today— by taking to the air en masse, shedding feathers and gobs of bird poop, screaming in abject terror. I used to imagine that seagull ancestor had been inadvertently squashed by a similar ferryboat, and that the heart-wrenching tale of their patriarch’s demise had been passed down through generations of his elegant but dimwitted relations. Like me, the gulls didn’t seem capable of learning from experience.

  I smiled, remembering something Dad had said to me when I complained about the gulls’ stupidity. “I don’t know, kiddo,” he’d reproved me gently. “Can you sleep on the wind, or spot a fish the length of your finger from fifty feet up, then catch it on the first dive?”

  Okay, so maybe I’m not as smart as a seagull, after all. There’s not a lot of comfort to be had in being marginally brighter than a seagull, but at that point, I was looking for almost anything that could pass as a silver lining in the big, black cloud that had been following me around for the last few months. In the space of three months, I had managed to completely screw up my life by throwing away a promising career and a fiancé who was supposed to be my Prince Charming but turned out to be a toad. After six years in the Big Apple, I was coming home unemployed, unattached, depressed and without prospects. I was nearly broke, thirty-one years old, a spinster by all local reckoning. And to cap it all off, I was starting to find an alarming number of gray hairs on my head every morning. So there wasn’t a lot of nostalgia in this homecoming. I was slinking back to the island of my birth out of financial desperation, with my tail between my legs, or to continue the avian metaphor, with my battered head tucked beneath my broken wing. And after six years away from the nest, nothing seemed to have changed. Not even me.

  I wasn’t going to starve. Not for a while, anyway. I had close
to six hundred bucks in the bank, and my first unemployment check would arrive soon. And I had an ace in the hole: I was about to become the new proprietor of that charming but notoriously unprofitable local establishment called Four Winds, Far Corners.

  For those of you who have never visited Jewel Box Island (and that would probably include every living human being in the known world other than the island’s 1123 year-round residents and a few of their kin who can’t afford to vacation elsewhere), Four Winds is a book shoppe. (Yes, the “e” is mandatory.) There are book stores, you see, and then there are book shoppes. Four Winds is the latter and always has been. Much of its eye-appeal, truthfully, has always been its overall shabbiness. Decrepitude can usually pass for antiquity, if you don’t look too closely.

  But the shop is charming. Relentlessly charming. Leaded glass windows and mock-thatched-roof charming. Snow White would have looked right at home tending the cunning little flowerboxes that grace the low front windows that sit tucked beneath the eaves. You can call the shoppe either Four Winds or Far Corners, by the way. It answers to either one. On her less profitable days, Mom often referred to it simply as the “effing store.” A store, she explained dryly, is a place where one stores books, as opposed to selling them. This was the business I had come home to operate and from which I needed to eke out some sort of living.

  A few years ago, after Dad died, Mom couldn’t handle the memories and the quiet, so she moved away to Boston, leaving the Four Winds, Far Corners closed and shuttered and waiting for me to bring it back to life, presumably. She remarried a couple of years after that. The first time, she had fallen in love with a poor but rugged man of the sea—a ferryboat captain, to be precise. This time, she’d chosen an orthodontist—who actually made a handsome living.

  Mom had written me that she’d left her old red bicycle in its usual place at the ferry office, so I knocked at the back door, identified myself to the guy who answered and collected the bike from the storage room. It had been collecting dust—and rust—for years. The front tire was flat, and there was a lot more rust on the fenders than when I saw it last, but my transportation options were limited, at best. I asked the guy to hold most of my luggage until the next day and walked the two blocks into the village, pushing the bike and dragging my smaller suitcase along on its three wobbly wheels.

  There’s only one stop sign on Jewel Box Island, right on the corner of Harbor Street and Cove Road, which are the only two thoroughfares that anyone has ever bothered naming. It’s not an official stop sign, but it’s the closest thing to an intersection we’ve ever had. Ed Guthrie made it back in 1983 from a section of warped plywood left over from the new potting shed he was building in his back yard. Ed’s wife, Thelma had been driving into the village in their old Dodge Dart when she collided with another car, and nobody could figure out whose fault it was or who got to sue whom. Four Winds, Far Corners is just up the hill from “The Stop Sign”—which is what everyone calls the corner of Harbor and Cove, as in “Pick me up at The Stop Sign at four o’clock,” or “I saw Dora down by The Stop Sign this morning, in that same awful slouch hat she always wears.”

  The only thing that had changed between the wharf and Harbor Street was Roscoe’s Pool Hall. The sign was still up, but Mom had written me that Roscoe had sold out and moved away three years ago. Roscoe had opened the place with three tables, which turned out to be two more than necessary. In a lot of smaller New England towns, pool halls and/or billiard parlors are still thought of as playgrounds for idle loafers and those inclined to wickedness.

  But Roscoe’s appeared to be open again under new ownership. A very tall, very attractive man I didn’t recognize was painting the front of the building. He was wearing a pair of ripped jeans and an undershirt and didn’t look familiar, which was odd, because the island has never attracted a lot of new residents—or businesses. The guy wasn’t what you’d expect either, since he appeared at first glance to still have all his teeth and hair. I guessed his age at around thirty-five, possibly a couple of years more. He was at least six-four—something I can always gauge because I’m exactly five feet tall in my stocking feet. Everyone I meet is taller than I am. I couldn’t be sure, but I think he gave me the once-over as I walked by. (Oh, another thing I noticed. His eyes were a deep, clear blue. Sort of a summer-sky blue. Not important, probably. I just thought I’d mention it.)

  “You need some help, there?” he asked. “Directions to where you’re going?” The offer was polite enough, but I wasn’t about to ask for help, especially from some guy I might have gone to school with. I was slinking back to Jewel Box Island broke and defeated, and I sure as hell didn’t without want the news spread around the village before I could devise a few believable lies about what I’d been doing since I left. What I wanted at this moment was a shower, a nap and some time to regroup.

  “No, thanks,” I lied, trying to sound cheerful. “I’m just going to the top of the hill.”

  He glanced up the steep incline that led to the shop, and motioned toward the decrepit bike. “Have you ever heard the expression, get a horse?”

  I gave the bike’s rear fender an affectionate but cautious pat. “I know it doesn’t look healthy,” I conceded, flushing with embarrassment, “but it’ll get me where I’m going. It’s lived its whole life on this island and knows all the ruts. My mom used to tell me that this vehicle was a Wright Brothers original.”

  “Well, if you need anything,” he said, “like emergency first aid or oxygen, I’ll try to point you in the right direction. I’m new here, myself, but I think I’ve about got the lay of the land.”

  “I’m not new, actually,” I explained. “I’m coming back to Egdon Heath, after....” I paused, knowing how lame and pretentious that sounded. As a lifelong bookworm/wallflower, I have this really dumb habit of assuming that everyone else in the world is as crazy about books as I am, which makes my nervous little jokes come out sounding pretentious. “That’s … uh … from a book. The Return of the Native, I mean.” I sighed, realizing it just went from bad to worse. “I’m planning to reopen the village bookstore,” I finished.

  He put down the paintbrush, wiped his hands on his shirt and extended his hand. “No apology necessary. I’m a Hardy fan, myself. I’m glad to hear that shop is opening again. What’s a picturesque seaside village without a quaint bookstore? Welcome back, then, and the best of luck. I’m Robert McCaffrey, by the way—Rob.”

  I didn’t give my name in return, which was probably rude, but I did smile politely and shrug my shoulders wearily, to suggest that this sort of idle chitchat was simply out of the question on my busy schedule.

  But he kept talking. “Why did you leave the island, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I wanted to make my mark on the world, achieve fame and glory, see my name in lights, and set the world on fire.”

  He grinned. “How’s that going so far?”

  “Take a wild guess.”

  “Well, you came back at the right time. If you listen to the mayor, the island is about to become the garden spot of the Maine coast—a vacation paradise.”

  I looked around at the empty street. “Yeah, I noticed the crowds of tourists milling around.”

  “Be patient. There’s a developer in town as we speak, discussing plans for a resort hotel and a marina. Can’t you smell the money in the air?”

  I lifted my nose and sniffed a couple of times. “So that’s what it is. I thought it was just the ferry emptying its tanks.

  I should explain here why I was being so rude to a perfectly nice, unusually attractive man with a body that I was having trouble keeping my eyes off of. There was a day, pre-Bradley (the discarded fiancé) when getting the once-over from someone who looked as good as Rob McCaffrey would have made my day. Or my month.

  However, I had recently embarked upon a new policy with regard to men. Total abstention for at least a year, that was my plan, during which time I would evaluate my past romantic failures in brutally honest and exhaus
tive detail and attempt to chart a wiser course for the future. Surely, I told myself, not every man in the western hemisphere could be a moronic, insensitive clod, or a domineering, humorless fussbudget—two of the categories from which I had already chosen. I was just beginning my self-imposed abstinence, so I was a little disconcerted by how quickly I had noticed McCaffrey’s deeply-blue eyes, his tanned, muscular forearms and the thatch of dark chest hair that peeked out from beneath his shirt.

  Okay, I’ll admit it. I wasn’t just disconcerted. I’d left disconcerted behind the moment he took my hand in his to shake it. His hands were large and brown and rugged, with long, slender fingers that looked like they were used to hard work. Maybe it was the heat, or low blood sugar, or sexual deprivation, but suddenly I began imagining those strong, sure fingers moving slowly up the inside of my thighs, forcing my legs apart, slipping inside my panties … okay, you get the idea.

  I caught myself just in time—hopefully before he noticed that I had begun to pant. Putting carnal temptation behind me, I mumbled a quick, “Thank you,” and resumed my trek up the hill to the shop. The thought of a cold shower was driving me now. I was navigating the creaking bike through the ruts and dragging the wobbling blue suitcase behind me when another of its casters fell off. The handle of the same suitcase had broken off three days after I bought it home. Bradley had warned me that it was a cheap knock-off and not to buy it. I bought it anyway because I liked the color. As always, Bradley had been right. That was Bradley’s main problem—or, more accurately, it was my problem with Bradley. He was always right, and I was always wrong. (Which may have been true, but it’s the sort of thing that can get irritating, especially in bed.)