by Eclipse Bay
“Thoughtless,” he told Winston. “But, then, what do you expect from a Harte?”
He listened to the silence upstairs for a moment before he wandered into the kitchen and started opening cupboard doors. He found the usual assortment of aging condiments and spices that tended to get left behind in a vacation cottage. Salt, pepper, sugar, a half-empty bottle of vanilla extract, and an unopened jar of maple syrup. The last item was the real thing, not caramel-colored sugar water, he noted.
He took the vanilla extract and the syrup out of the cupboard and went to check the contents of the refrigerator. The eggs and milk were fresh. The loaf of dense, rustic-style bread baked by the New Age crowd who had taken over the old bakery near the pier was a day old.
Perfect.
The bride’s gown was three sizes too big. She tried desperately to pin it into place, but it was hopeless. She knew that no matter what she did the dress would never look right. The client was in tears. The groom kept looking at his watch.
She glanced at the clock and saw that the reception was supposed to start in a few minutes. But the caterers had not yet arrived. None of the tables had been set up. The flowers were limp. She opened a case of the premium-quality champagne that she had ordered and discovered bottles of mouthwash inside. She looked around and realized that the musicians had not yet appeared
On top of everything else, there was something dreadfully wrong with the room. The reception was supposed to be in an elegant hillside mansion overlooking the city. Instead, she was standing in an empty, windowless warehouse.
The tantalizing smell of something delicious being cooked nearby distracted her from the chaos. She realized that she was very hungry, but she could not abandon the client to go get something to eat. She was a professional, after all…
Hannah came awake with a start and found herself gazing into the depths of the impenetrable fogbank that hovered outside the window. For a few disorienting seconds she thought she was still in Portland trying to hold together the unraveling threads of a disastrous wedding reception.
Then she smelled the exquisite aromas from downstairs. Reality returned, jolting her out of bed.
Rafe. He had not vanished discreetly at dawn as she had expected. He was down there making himself at home in her kitchen. She had been so sure that he would be gone by the time she awoke.
She looked at the foot of the bed. There was no sign of Winston. What had become of her faithful pal?
Now that was a really dumb question, she thought. Winston was a truly fabulous dog in many respects. But in the end, he was still a dog. If she wanted to find him, she had only to follow the smell of food.
She staggered into the bathroom, the last wisps of the familiar anxiety dream trailing after her. She’d been plagued by the wedding-reception-from-hell nightmare for months before she had made the decision to sell Weddings by Harte.
She gripped the edges of the white pedestal sink and stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair hung in lanky tangles. There was a sullen, surly look in her eyes, and the flush in her cheeks was unbecoming, to say the least. She could not face Rafe in this condition. Her only hope was a shower.
She whipped the long-sleeved nightgown off over her head and stepped beneath the hot spray. Seizing the shampoo in both hands, she went to work with near-violent determination. It had not been a good night.
When she emerged a short time later she felt infinitely better. She pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans, brushed her freshly washed hair behind her ears, and anchored it with a headband.
She took another look in the mirror just before she left the room. With dismay she realized that she still looked a little too pink. Probably because of the shower, she decided. All that heat and steam. The effect would surely fade quickly.
She squared her shoulders, opened the bedroom door, and stepped out into the hall.
By the time she got downstairs her mouth was watering. She saw Winston sitting just inside the kitchen doorway. He rose to greet her with his customary gallantry, but it was clear that he was distracted by what was going on in the vicinity of the stove.
Rafe looked just as she had known he would look in the morning. Incredibly sexy, right down to and including the shadow of a beard that gave the hard planes of his face an even more dangerous cast than usual.
It really was not fair. A gentleman would have been gone by dawn. But, then, no one had ever called Rafe Madison a gentleman.
“Right on time.” Rafe’s eyes gleamed as he surveyed her with one swift, all-encompassing look. He picked up an oven mitt. “You can pour the coffee.”
She watched as he removed a pan from the oven. The faint scent of vanilla teased her. “What is it?”
“French toast.” He put the pan on the stove and tossed the mitt onto the counter. “Baked instead of fried. Sort of a cross between a bread pudding and a soufflé.”
She gazed at it longingly. “It’s beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.”
He grinned. “Thanks.”
So the man could cook. She already knew that. It was not a sufficient reason to fall in love. Lust, maybe, but not love.
She dragged her gaze away from the golden-brown French toast and saw that Rafe was watching her with an odd expression.
“I’ll get the coffee.” She whirled around and seized the pot.
Rafe arranged the French toast on two heated plates and carried the food to the table. Hannah studied the casually elegant fashion in which the puffy, golden-brown triangles had been positioned. There were little sprigs of fresh mint on top of the toast. The syrup in the small pot in front of her was warm.
She picked up her fork. “You know, there’s a theory in some quarters that you turned to a life of crime in order to support yourself after you left Eclipse Bay.”
He nodded. “I’ve heard that theory.”
“But after dinner the other night and breakfast this morning, I think the evidence is clear that you went to a blue-ribbon culinary academy instead of jail.”
He looked up very quickly.
She paused with a bite of French toast poised in midair. “Good heavens, I was joking. Did you really take cooking classes?”
He hesitated. Then shrugged. “Yes.”
She was fascinated. “When?”
“After I got married. In the back of my mind, I think I always had this idea that when you were happily married, you ate at home most of the time. But Meredith wasn’t big on cooking, so I took over the job. The better I got at it, the more restless and unhappy Meredith became.” Rafe made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “After a while I realized that she wasn’t real big on staying at home, either.”
She gazed at him in disbelief. “Meredith left you because you’re a fantastic cook and because you like to eat at home?”
“Well, those weren’t the only reasons,” Rafe admitted. “She might have been willing to tolerate my cooking if I had agreed to go to work at Madison Commercial. But I refused, so in the end she gave up on my future prospects and left.”
Hannah savored another bite of French toast while she thought about that. “I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work out.”
“You should be. I figure it’s your fault that it bombed.”
She nearly dropped her fork. “My fault. How in the world can you blame me?”
He met her eyes across the short expanse of the table. His mouth curved slightly. “That night on the beach you told me I didn’t have to follow in my father’s and my grandfather’s footsteps when it came to marriage, remember? So a couple of years later, I figured I’d give it a try. I mean, after all, it was advice from Miss Overachiever herself. How could it be wrong?”
“Now, hold on one dang minute here.” She aimed the fork at him. “You can’t blame me just because you chose to follow my perfectly good advice and then messed it up by picking the wrong woman.”
“I’m a Madison. I was bound to pick the wrong woman.”
“That’s a cop-out excuse if I ever heard one and you
know it. You will not use it again, do you hear me?”
He halfway lowered his lashes. “Yes, ma’am.”
She subsided slightly. “It’s not like you’re the only person on the face of the earth who made a mistake when it came to selecting the right mate, you know. I didn’t do any better.”
“Yes, you did. You just got engaged. You never got married.”
She made a face and forked up another bite of toast. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. The only reason I didn’t make the mistake of actually marrying Doug was because he very kindly dumped me before we got to the altar.”
“What was he like?”
“He’s a lawyer, a partner at a very prestigious firm in Portland. We met when I did his sister’s wedding. We had lots of things in common.”
“He fit all the criteria on the Mr. Right list you gave me that night on the beach?”
She winced. “You remember that list?”
“Never forgot it. Made a profound impact on me.”
“Why?”
He picked up his coffee mug and swallowed meditatively. “Probably because I knew I’d never come anywhere near to meeting even half the requirements and specifications on it.”
His words blindsided her. “It really bothered you that you couldn’t make my Mr. Right list?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good grief, that’s crazy. You were never interested in me. To you I was just some naïve, prissy little overachiever. Miss Goody Two-Shoes, remember?”
“It wasn’t the fact that I personally couldn’t make your Mr. Right list that bugged me. It was the fact that there was such a thing as a Mr. Right list and you knew all about it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“See, I didn’t even know the damn list existed,” Rafe explained patiently. “That put me at a serious disadvantage. And when I found out that women like you had one and the kind of stuff that was on it, I knew I was in deep trouble.”
She shook her head once, dazed. “I don’t get it. What do you mean?”
He exhaled slowly. “I’ll tell you something, Miss Goody Two-Shoes. That night on the beach you were all those things you just said—naïve and prissy and all that. But I figured you were also an authority on one important thing. You knew what it took to make a good marriage.”
“Me? But I’d never been married.”
“True, but you’d been raised in a family that looked pretty damn perfect to me. Happily married parents and grandparents. No divorces. No scandals. I assumed that you knew what it took to make it all happen.”
Understanding dawned. Rafe had no firsthand knowledge of how a good marriage functioned because, unlike her, he’d never witnessed one close up. Divorce ran as strongly as green eyes in the Madison clan.
“I see. Well, if it makes you feel any better, I have concluded that my original Mr. Right list was flawed,” she said.
“Yeah? Why?”
She propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on the heels of her hands. “I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone else. I swear, if this gets out I will throttle you, Rafe Madison.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“The truth is, Doug had his own list, and I failed to meet all of his specifications and requirements.”
Rafe blinked. Then his mouth curved slowly into a grin. “The guy had a Ms. Right list?”
“Yep. He was decent enough to point out the areas in which I was deficient. He made suggestions for improvement. I got ticked.”
Rafe’s grin metamorphosed into a chuckle. The chuckle erupted into a full-throated roar of laughter.
She watched him, wondering if he was going to fall out of his chair. Winston, ears cocked, looked intrigued. Rafe’s howls filled the kitchen.
It took a while for him to pull himself together. Hannah filled the time by pouring herself another cup of coffee and feeding Winston a scrap of leftover French toast from her plate.
Rafe’s shoulders eventually stopped shaking. He sprawled in the chair, one hand on his flat belly, and subsided slowly into a grin.
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry at all.
“I’m glad you find it so amusing.”
“I have to know,” Rafe said. “Where did you fall short?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because I just cooked breakfast for you.”
“Hmm.” He had a point. “I fit most of the criteria, you understand. I came from a successful family. I was well educated. I had demonstrated initiative and determination by founding my own business. I was well connected in the community. I shared a lot of Doug’s interests.”
“But?”
She made a face. “But it turned out that Doug was making long-range plans to enter the political arena. He’s a good man. I think he really has something to contribute. But he needed a wife who could handle the sort of social and personal demands that go with that kind of job.”
“Hence the list.”
“Yes. The more I realized that he was serious about a political career, the more we both came to the conclusion that I couldn’t handle being a politician’s wife.”
Rafe reached for the coffeepot. “Welcome to the select club reserved for those who fail to make the Mr. and Mrs. Right lists.”
“Gee, thanks. Is there a merit badge?”
“No. So, tell me, what did you do with your own list?”
She hesitated. “I amended it.”
He glanced at her with a strange expression. “You mean you’ve still got one?”
“Yes. But it’s a lot shorter now.”
“Huh. What’s on it?”
“I really don’t think—” She broke off at the sound of a car turning into the drive.
Winston was at the door in a flash. He gave the appropriate warning woof. Alert but not yet alarmed. On the job.
The low rumble shattered the fragile intimacy that had enveloped the kitchen. Rafe turned his head to check the drive. Hannah followed his gaze. The fog had burned off enough to allow her to see the vehicle that was approaching the house. A green Volvo.
“Anyone you know?” Rafe asked.
“I don’t recognize the car.”
“Want me to hide in a closet?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She pushed back her chair and got to her feet. “I’m sure it’s just a friend of my folks’ who found out that I’m in town and stopped to say hello.”
He looked at her. “Whoever it is, he or she will have seen my car by now. Probably recognized it.”
“The fact that you are having coffee with me is no one’s business.”
“Wasn’t just coffee,” Rafe said as she went past him into the living room. “But who’s going to argue?”
She was saved from having to respond because she was already halfway to the front door. She patted Winston, who looked like a ballet dancer, poised and ready on his paws.
“It’s okay, pal. I don’t think a burglar would arrive in a Volvo.”
She opened the door. A polished, good-looking man emerged from behind the wheel of the Volvo. He wore a navy blue polo shirt, a pair of gray trousers, and loafers. There was a designer logo stitched on the left side of the shirt. The pants appeared to have been hand-tailored, and the loafers had little tassels. She was almost certain that the hair had been styled in a salon located somewhere other than Eclipse Bay.
When her visitor spotted her waiting in the doorway, he gave her a dazzling smile that lit up the foggy morning like a lighthouse beacon.
“Looks like Perry has started bleaching his teeth,” she murmured to Winston.
Winston rumbled deep in his throat and trotted after her as she went out onto the porch.
“Hannah.” Perry Decatur jogged toward the steps.
“Heard you were in town. Great to see you again. You look fabulous.”
At the last minute she realized his intention and braced herself. He swept her into an embrace that would have been more appropriate for lovers who had bee
n separated for years by war and star-crossed fates. She felt the breath go out of her lungs as his arms closed around her.
A low growl reverberated across the porch. For one horrible moment, Hannah was not sure if the sound had come from Winston or Rafe.
“Cute dog.”
Perry released Hannah, bent down, and thumped Winston lightly on his broad, intelligent head without going through the civilized formality of allowing Winston to sniff his fingers first.
Winston’s silvery brows bristled with indignation, but he was too well behaved to make a scene. He did, however, display a discreet glimpse of fang. Could have been an accident, Hannah thought.
Perry straightened quickly. “Dogs love me.”
“No kidding.” Hannah looked at Winston. “Thank you, Winston. I can handle this. You may go back inside and finish your breakfast.”
With a last glare at Perry, Winston turned and stalked back into the house.
“Fine-looking animal,” Perry said approvingly. “Do you show him?”
“Show him what?”
“I meant, is he a show dog?”
She stared at him. “Put Winston in a ring and make him perform stunts for a bunch of judges? Are you mad? I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing. He would be mortified.”
Perry managed a forced chuckle. “I see. Well, how have you been, Hannah?”
“Fine.”
“Great. That’s just great.” He angled his chin in the general direction of Rafe’s car. “I see you’ve got a visitor.”
“We’re having coffee.”
“Coffee sounds terrific.”
She chose to ignore the unsubtle hint. “I’m a little busy, Perry.”
The bright light of his smile dimmed a bit. “Hannah, I really need to talk to you.”
“Call me this afternoon.”
“This can’t wait.” Perry paused a beat and lowered his voice. “It’s important. Not just to me but to a lot of people here in Eclipse Bay.”
She wavered. “What is it?”
“It’s too involved to explain out here.”