Her mother ignored the question, clearly focused on getting her point across. “You will not inform Cedar Village,” she reiterated. “We have a strict protocol for grant approval notification—”
“Which includes you notifying the receiver of the grant in a timely manner once I’ve given you the green light,” she rebutted firmly. “You’re the one who has blatantly, inexplicably ignored the foundation’s protocol, Mother. Not I. And not only is it aggravating beyond belief, it’s cruel. I’m...ashamed of you.”
It was hard to wrap her mind around, but she was so disappointed in her—her mother, for pity’s sake, whom she loved—that it was all she could do to draw her next breath.
“Harper...”
“These people run an amazingly effective organization on a shoestring, and I doubt they can predict beyond a fiscal quarter or two at a time whether or not they’ll be able to remain in business. I’ve seen the progress they’ve made with these boys, and I honest to God do not understand why you’re messing with them this way. But it stops now, Gina.” She had never in her life addressed her mother by her given name, but for this moment she simply couldn’t acknowledge the familial connection. “Either you inform them that we’re giving them that grant or I’ll do it myself.”
“Darling, listen—”
“No. I’m so angry with you I can barely see straight. If you have a problem with the way I live my life—which, frankly, at my age I should be well beyond having to account to you about—then take it up with me. Don’t take it out on a struggling charity that’s manned by decent people knocking themselves out six ways from Sunday to keep it alive.”
“Please, Baby Girl. Let me expl—”
She sucked in a sharp breath and pretended she’d heard neither the plea, nor her mother’s pet name for her. “I have no desire to see our relationship permanently torn apart, so I really need to hang up before I say something I can’t take back. But for the love of God, Gina. Do the right thing.”
She disconnected and stood breathing heavily as she stared blindly at the wall. Then, with the power of all her unhappiness and frustration fueling her aim, she flung her cell phone at the couch so hard it bounced straight back toward her.
Lunging for it, she caught the darn thing before it crashed to the floor, then collapsed onto the couch, clutching it against her churning stomach. “Shit,” she whispered. “Shit, shit, shit!”
She and her mother had certainly had their disagreements in the past. Quite a number of them, actually. But this one felt different.
This felt dangerously as if it might be the finishing splinter. The one that planted that final wedge between them.
* * *
“HER LEGAL NAME is Harper Louisa Summerville-Hardin,” said the brusque voice of Max’s old marine buddy Kev Conley at the other end of his call. “But from everything I can tell, she only goes by Summerville. Not just for this current gig in your town, Max, but all the time. She seems to be an upright citizen—she’s never been arrested or gotten into trouble of any kind that I can see. She’s had a few speeding tickets, but those have been promptly paid.”
Okay. That’s good news. He picked up the paintbrush he’d been using to finish up the exterior trim when his phone had rung. Between one thing and another, he’d never quite gotten around to completing it when he’d stained the body of the house. Then he blew out a soft breath and asked the question that had really been gnawing at him. “Is she in a relationship?” Saynosaynosay no.
“Nope,” Kev said, and Max sagged in relief. “It doesn’t look like she’s been what you’d call serious about anyone since college.” Paper rustled through Max’s receiver. “She travels a lot and has had a shitload of temporary jobs.”
“I know about those.”
“She also draws a salary from a charitable foundation called Sunday’s Child. Several of her temp jobs seem to be related, in that they appear on the list of charities the foundation endows.”
His brush skittered off the narrow edge of the window frame he’d been painting and slopped black paint across the warm neutral color called Smoked Oyster that he and Jake had picked out for the shingles. Setting the brush down, he wiped off the glob with a rag he’d dampened earlier and tossed on the ladder’s shelf.
All the while trying to ignore the acid chewing holes in his gut. “Son of a bitch,” he said—and it had nothing to do with the small mess he’d made. “That I didn’t know.”
“Does it mean something to you?”
“Yeah, although I’m not quite sure what yet. Cedar Village, a group home for troubled boys that I give time to here, applied for a grant from Sunday’s Child.”
“Huh. Guess you’re gonna have to have a talk with the lady about why she’s there.”
“Yeah. I guess I am.”
But he didn’t rush off to do so the minute he said goodbye to Kev. Picking up the paintbrush again, he turned his attention back to the trim, determined not to let his mind wander down the path leading to all things Harper.
Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. Because, dammit, she’d been deceiving all of them since the minute she’d rolled into town. Not only him, but Jake and Jenny and Tasha and Mary-Margaret. Hell, why stop there? She’d lied to the entire fucking staff at the Village and the boys. He would have liked to have believed there was another explanation, but what else could you call it when she hadn’t told a soul about her true purpose for being there?
Nothing else, that’s what. Yeah, sure, maybe in the beginning, when they were all strangers, she’d had a valid reason for hiding her purpose for being here. But they weren’t strangers now. Hell, no, not after she’d wormed her way into all their lives, apparently without compunction. The woman was a stone liar, and she’d been fucking him in more ways than her Oscar-worthy performances in bed.
He tried with superhuman will not to let it, yet still it triggered all those old insecurities he’d struggled with as a kid of not measuring up. Of not mattering.
No, dammit. Infuriated, he took his paintbrush into the kitchen where he threw it in a produce bag, wrapped it up tight, then put it in the fridge. He washed his hands and slapped them dry on the seat of his cargo shorts.
He wasn’t a kid any longer, and he’d worked too damn hard to outgrow his troubled past to let her devalue him this way. He couldn’t change the fact that she’d been lying to him all along, but he could sure as hell let her know he was onto her. Patting down his pockets, he located his keys in the right front one and fished them out as he headed for the door.
His head was filled with too much white noise to recall what Harper had said her schedule was today, but he wasn’t exactly bowled over with surprise to find her rental parked in the lot and her cottage looking mighty damn deserted. She’d probably taken some group out to do something fun.
She was nothing, he thought bitterly, if not fun.
He found a spot in the shade to park his SUV, climbed out and strode over to check her place. As he’d thought, she wasn’t there and he returned to the parking lot. Leaning a hip against the vehicle, he drummed his fingers on its finish as he glared into the woods and tried to empty his mind.
It didn’t work worth a damn, and he hiked himself up onto the hood of his car. He’d give it another fifteen minutes, and if she hadn’t shown up by then he’d go kill some time at The Anchor. He had an uncharacteristic yen to knock back a few—maybe even more than a few. But he was on duty tonight, so he’d content himself with nursing a single bottle.
But maybe he’d treat himself to a six-pack to drink when he got home.
He heard the sound of a door closing from around the front of Harper’s cabin—or possibly the one closest to it—and slid off the hood. Inhaling and exhaling deep, controlled breaths, he attempted to shove down the anger that kept crowding out everything else. Dammit, he was a trained professional in the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department; he knew better than to let his emotions rule.
Yet they kept shoving their way to the fore
front anyhow.
When he rounded the cottage and saw that Harper’s front door was open, he stopped to get his shit together. The last thing he needed was to go all caveman on her ass. He had to be calm. Rolling his shoulders, he shook out his hands. Cracked his knuckles. Then, sucking in another breath, he held it deep in his lungs for a moment before slowly blowing it out.
“Be cool,” he coached himself under his breath as he silently climbed the steps to the little porch across the front of her cabin. “Do not lose it, dude, whatever you do.”
He spotted her as he approached the screen door; she had her back to him and was bent over the couch, pawing through a stack of folders.
Instead of going all icy and reticent as he would have done even a few short months ago, his blood began to boil through his veins, his heart to thunder in his chest.
This was a mistake; he had to get the hell out of here before he made a giant fool of himself. He stepped back.
And knocked his size thirteen shoe against one of the rocking chairs.
Straightening, she turned to squint through the screen. Then that smile of hers, the one that flashed pretty white teeth and a glimpse of pink gums and turned her eyes into upside down crescents, broke over her face. “Max! What a nice surprise—I didn’t expect to see you.”
How the hell could he feel two such disparate emotions at once? Her professed enthusiasm at seeing him made his heart warm even as it caused his temper to flare. He pulled open the screen door and stepped inside. “I had an unexpected surprise of my own a while ago.”
“Did you?” She took a step toward him. “A good one?”
“Not so much.”
“Aw, I’m sorry. What was it?”
“I got the results of the background check that I had run on you and it turns out—”
“Excuse me?” Her eyes went chilly behind suddenly narrowed lashes. “You ran a check on me?”
“I did. Wanna know what it said?”
“Since it’s my background we’re talking about, I probably know better than you what it said. And I must admit I’m still hung up on the fact that you abused your position in the sheriff’s office to—”
“Oh.” A bitter laugh escaped him. “You’re good, turning it around on me like I’m the one to break the faith. But guess what, baby? I didn’t use departmental resources. I had an old marine buddy who worked for a P.I. before he joined the few, the proud—”
“Why?” She took another step in his direction.
“Because my cop instincts said something was off with you—just wasn’t a hundred percent right. Occasionally your behavior just made me suspicious.”
“What?” She looked at him as if he were an escapee from an insane asylum, and his anger burned cold and righteous.
“You don’t think so? Well, let’s look at the facts.” He ticked up a finger for the first point on his mental list. “Hanging up every damn phone conversation you were in the middle of whenever I walked into the room—”
“I was talking to my mother!” Rushing over, she gave him a stiff-armed shove, then made a sound like steam escaping a teakettle when it didn’t even rock him back on his heels. “My mother!”
His logically laid out bullet points went up in smoke. “You were lying to everyone in town!”
“Because I’ve found, as did my father before me, that the charities I’m sent to evaluate behave differently with Harper Summerville-Hardin of the Sunday’s Child Foundation than they do with plain old Harper Summerville, and it takes longer to figure out what’s the genuine article and what’s simply part of a big old dog-and-pony show set to impress. And I hung up every time you came into the room because I approved Cedar Village for the grant the night of the baseball game with the kids, and for some reason my mother has been dragging her feet with the notification and I didn’t feel I could tell you until she gave me the go-ahead. Or argue with her about it with you in the room.”
She drilled his chest with her finger. “But you know what? If you found my behavior so darn suspicious, why didn’t you just ask me what the heck was going on? I probably would have broken the unwritten rule at Sunday’s Child and told you.”
“Probably,” he said with cynical disbelief. “Or...not.”
“You’ll never know, will you?” A laugh that was short on humor and long on animosity escaped her. “In any event, you could have saved yourself the expense of your big investigation into my oh-so-suspicious background. I had it out with my mother just this morning. I told her I would inform Mary-Margaret—and you and Jake and Jenny and Tash and anyone else who’s interested—if she didn’t get off the dime and do so herself before noon tomorrow.”
Suddenly, she stepped back. “But why am I explaining myself to you? In fact, screw you, Deputy Bradshaw. I wasn’t breaking any laws or running a big scam. I was merely doing my job in the exact same manner that I’ve assessed every other potential grant applicant. I don’t owe you an explanation.”
He rubbed at the pain in his chest, but found it a whole lot deeper than a massage could reach. “No,” he said with stiff formality. “I obviously never meant a damn thing to you, Ms. Summerville-Hardin, so I guess you don’t owe me anything at all.”
She leaned toward him. “You think...you honestly believe—?” Snapping upright, she thrust her arm out, a shaking finger pointing at the door. “Get out.”
“Gladly. But before I go—” He jerked her to him and kissed her angrily before setting her loose and taking a big step back. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips, as if that could somehow eradicate her addictive taste. “Thanks for being such a good fuck buddy.”
He regretted the cheap disrespect of his comment even as he stormed out the door. Winced when he heard her enraged “Pig!” because he knew he deserved it. But she’d ripped his still-beating heart right out of his chest.
So damned if he intended to go back and apologize.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“PIGPIGPIGPIGPIG!” HARPER SNATCHED one of the water socks she’d donned for her kayak tour from her foot—and for the second time that day she threw something.
As a stress reliever, flinging a little piece of rubber with less than an ounce of connected mesh fabric was a total bust. Even if it had hit Max’s hard head instead of bouncing harmlessly off the doorjamb and tumbling to the floor, it wouldn’t have done any damage. Stomping over, she bent to whisk it up and work it back onto her bare foot. She slammed the door to give herself some satisfaction. Angry, frustrated, trying hard not to scream, she slammed it a second time for good measure. Before turning back to the empty room.
He’d run a background check on her? She fumed as she began picking up the files she’d been working on when he’d arrived. Hearing him say it had been like taking a hit from a baseball bat. She’d thought he liked her—and not just for the sex. But he’d found her suspicious and had had his ex-P.I. buddy run a stinking check on her.
All right, maybe she wasn’t exactly what she’d portrayed herself to be, but she’d planned on telling him! This was just so, so wrong.
And all her mother’s fault. If only Gina had informed Mary-Margaret in a timely manner that Sunday’s Child approved their grant application, she would have told Max herself by now.
“Crap,” she whispered and slowly set the stack of files back on the couch. “Are you listening to yourself?” Okay, so she hadn’t actually verbalized anything. But she’d been thinking pretty darn loudly.
And the gist of what she hadn’t said was: it’s everyone else’s fault and none of mine.
Screw you, Deputy Bradshaw. I don’t owe you an explanation.
Oh, God, had she really said that? She’d lied to him by omission and likely had acted suspicious as all get-out every time he’d caught her on the phone with her mom. God knows she’d felt torn enough between what she wanted to do—tell him—and what she’d been trained to do—keep her mouth shut—for that to be true. Then, of course, she’d slept with the guy and clearly—given his anger—had made
him feel as if she cared about him, as well. Which, face it, she did, if this sick feeling crawling through her over the words they’d hurled at each other was anything to go by.
So, yeah. She really had told him that she didn’t owe him anything because he hadn’t taken her at face value. Her being so trustworthy and all.
Still, she hadn’t done anything truly reprehensible. And she had every right to be mad at him for that fuck-buddy crack and sick at heart to be the subject of a background check, which struck her as something one ran on a criminal—not someone you liked enough to want to sleep with.
But...
She got a pang when she thought of what was behind his anger. Because she wasn’t a stranger to him now—she knew darn good and well that he’d been disregarded far too much as a kid. And Max was clearly hurt that she might have disregarded him, as well.
So, for all her big words, she did him owe an explanation.
She might as well get it over with. She’d planned to finalize the plans for Razor Bay Days this afternoon, but she didn’t have a prayer of concentrating until she got the apology off her chest.
She located her purse beneath the folders she’d been putting together for the Labor Day weekend festivities and headed for the door.
* * *
HALF AN HOUR later, she conceded defeat. Max wasn’t home, and she hadn’t seen his SUV in the parking lot between Jake’s and Jenny’s places when she’d driven past on her way out of the inn grounds, so he obviously wasn’t visiting with his brother. She didn’t think he was on duty until this evening, but maybe she was mistaken about that.
God knew she hadn’t racked up an impressive score regarding her other assumptions.
She could go home and try to accomplish something this afternoon—except she was in the same position that had driven her out in search of Max in the first place: feeling all antsy and edgy and incapable of buckling down. So she turned toward Cedar Village.
If her mother still hadn’t contacted the director about the Village’s grant approval, then she would do so herself. And since she owed Mary-Margaret an explanation regarding her real identity as well, and it felt like yet another ax hanging over her head, she might as well get out from under it now.
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