Sandpiper Island (The Bachelors

by Donna Kauffman

  She glanced upward briefly, and thought about what the top level of his tree house might look like . . . and what it would be like to spend time up there with Ford. Any hope she had of making smart, clearheaded choices would likely be gone completely if she spent the night in his arms. In his Disney tree house bedroom.

  But . . . then what? She had to go back to the Cove and sort out pretty much her entire life. He had his work out here. Sure, he had Grace also living in the Cove, but ever since her arrival, Ford’s sister had always come out to the island to see him. Delia figured that could change, but to what end? His work was on an island at the farthest reaches of the bay. Hers was in the Cove.

  Well, it always had been in the Cove, she thought. It wasn’t quite the same as Henry asking her to go to Alaska with him, and it wasn’t as if Ford had actually asked her to do anything, make any choices . . . but the fact remained her life would have to change if she wanted Ford to be part of it. She tried to see the end of her diner as some kind of sign, that maybe fate was taking away one thing in order to force her to look at what else there could be. Like when Tommy had been taken away from them, then O’Reilly’s had burned to the ground, forcing her to regroup and make a new plan.

  Except it didn’t feel like that. Ford was right. She did love feeding people, and a big part of that was because it put her directly in the midst of the energy and life that made up Blueberry Cove. Ford hadn’t asked her, but living out on Sandpiper with him, while wonderfully intimate, would eventually suck the soul from her. She needed people, and noise, and the general chaos that was day-today life in a small town, not the solitude that he craved. Sure, there were the ten weeks in the summer when the island was crawling with interns, but that left the other forty-two weeks....

  She paused in the midst of chopping up a fresh batch of vegetables to go in the omelet and looked around her again. Everything had happened so fast, she hadn’t had time to really think about what the possibilities would be for her, could be for her, in terms of starting up a new place in the Cove, but her gut was telling her one thing for certain. “I don’t know if I could live out here,” she murmured. “Not full time.”

  She forced her attention back to the food, took solace in the rhythms of chopping, sautéing, whisking. She scratched the corn bread idea and whipped up some cheddar bacon drop biscuits instead. She searched and found plates, silverware, glasses, and by the time she heard Ford coming down the ladder, she had their meal set up on the small kitchen table.

  “That smells incredible,” he said, coming straight to the kitchen.

  He’d changed into fresh jeans and another T-shirt with an open flannel shirt over it, his wire rim glasses tucked in the chest pocket. His hair was toweled, but his face still bore a bit of redness from the wind and rain. He’d shaved, too, she noticed. He looked big and warm. And happy.

  She turned back to the kitchen and retrieved the basket of biscuits, ignoring the pang in her heart.

  “How is our patient doing?” she asked, searching for a comfortable subject, wanting—needing—to calm her nerves. Just let it all go for now. Sit and eat a meal. It’s not like he asked you to run off with him.

  “She’s still nervous, but a great deal calmer overall. You’ll be happy to know she rethought her position on the herring and made quite a pig of herself. She’s back asleep.”

  Delia smiled at that, sincerely pleased. “I’m relieved. Now it’s our turn to pig out.” She pulled out a chair and he did the same. She served and they both ate in silence, with Ford making the occasional appreciative groan over the omelet and the biscuits.

  When she reached to start clearing the table, Ford surprised her by placing a hand on her wrist. She looked at him questioningly. “I can make more biscuits, but the eggs are gone.”

  “No, that’s not it. I can clear the table; you cooked.”

  “I don’t mind—” she began, but he moved her hand to the table, and then put his hand over hers. His expression was serious, she noticed, and he wasn’t paying the least bit of attention to the empty dishes and platters. His attention was focused entirely on her.

  Her body was confused. It didn’t know whether to go all fluttering hearts or knots in the stomach. So it did a little of both. For that matter, so did her thoughts. She settled in her seat. “I really don’t mind,” she said, stalling.

  “When I went to check on the puffling, it gave you time to get in your head, start to have thoughts.”

  She blinked. She was not used to being around a man who was so damn perceptive and observant. And so focused. It was impossible not to respond, but her brain was scrambling at the sudden shift to serious discussion. “Well, I just, we hadn’t really even talked about—I mean, I hadn’t given any thought to—I wasn’t expecting us to—”

  He mercifully cut off her stammering by saying, “I did some thinking, too.”

  The flutters in her chest fell silent, but the knot in her stomach pulled tight. This was why she didn’t do relationships. Too many chances for the other person to make painful choices that she’d have no control over. “Okay,” she replied, unsure what else there was to say.

  “The look on your face right now is exactly why I wanted to have this conversation.”

  The wonderful meal she’d just prepared and eaten started to make her feel not so wonderful. “What look would that be?”

  “Utter panic.”

  She immediately looked affronted. “I am not panicking. What would I panic about? I mean, I get it, we lost our heads, hormones got the better of us. Who knows, maybe we’re just triggered by storms or something. It’s not like I’m going to get all clingy and start making demands, if that’s what you’re worried about. I know you like your alone time. I’m not exactly—”

  “What I’m worried about is that you won’t. Make demands. Or want to make any kinds of plans. What I’m worried about is you’ll do exactly what you’re doing right now.”

  “I’m being rational, calm, practical—what, were you expecting some kind of emotional—”

  He squeezed the hand he’d covered with his own. “I’m expecting you to assume the worst. And I understand, completely, why you would.”

  She opened her mouth, already prepared to refute anything he might have said. Except, perhaps, that. She snapped it shut again.

  “When I said I’d been thinking, why did you automatically assume it was something bad?” He shook his head, then picked up her hand, and wove his fingers through hers, which scrambled whatever brain cells she had left. “Because that’s where your thoughts had already gone,” he answered for her.

  “Ford,” she said, completely abashed. “It’s not what you think. I just—”

  “I understand,” he said again. “You’ve done what I’ve done. We’ve both kept certain parts of ourselves apart from everyone else.”

  From somewhere inside her panicky, jumbled thoughts, she managed a sardonic smile. “In your case, that would be all parts.”

  He smiled briefly. “True. I get that your default position is to pull back. So is mine.”

  “So you’re saying . . . what, exactly?”

  He held up their joined hands, propped his elbow on the table. “That I don’t want to do what I’ve been doing. I don’t want to pull back.”

  Her heart crawled out of her knotted stomach and started fluttering again. Only it might have been more accurately described as a kind of rapid thumping. “Meaning. . . ?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, like you said, it’s not as if we thought this through.” He tightened his fingers when she would have slipped her hand free, certain he could feel the tremble in them. “But I want to,” he said. “I think we need to. Only not while you’re in the shower and I’m out fixing generators. I think we’d do better if we thought it through together.” He grinned again, and it rocked her even harder this time, because it was even more unexpected. “I figure if we have any chance of not reverting to form, we need to be each other’s backup.” He pulled their joined hands
closer to him and leaned forward, until he could press his lips against the side of her bent fingers. It wasn’t exactly a kiss, more of a plea. “That is, unless you want to go back to keeping yourself apart.”

  “I—” She broke off, her mind spinning, heart thumping, body clamoring. It was all too much, and he was right, her first instinct had been to prepare herself for the worst, to retreat.

  “Answer me one thing,” he said, “and be brutally honest. Because that’s also what we’ll need to be, for ourselves, and for each other.”

  “O-okay.”

  “When I asked if you wanted to go back to keeping yourself apart, what was your very first gut reaction? Not what you thought after feeling it, just that immediate reaction. Was it relief? Or was it dread? Or panic? Or some other feeling like ‘Please, don’t let this be over?’ ”

  Delia was surprised by the question. Surprised to realize what the answer was. She looked at him, her eyes widening. “Please, don’t let this be over,” she said in a hushed whisper.

  His grin this time was so wide, his smoky gray eyes all but glittered with it, and she thought if there had been any chance whatsoever that she might have found a way to avoid whatever lay ahead between them, good or bad, that chance had just passed her by. Snuffed out by the all-consuming need she discovered she had to get as many of those heart-stopping grins directed her way as humanly possible. A lifetime of them would be like winning the biggest lottery ever.

  “So . . . now what do we do?” she asked, no longer panicked so much as finding herself in a place she’d never been before. A place where two people wanted each other, and were willing to figure it out. Together. Henry hadn’t done that. He’d issued ultimatums, putting his happiness above hers, above theirs. To be fair, she’d done the same. Putting her family’s needs above her own, and above those of her husbands.

  She’d been so young then, so inexperienced in how to handle herself, her fears, life in general.

  A lot of life had happened since then. So why was she still playing by rules she’d established when she’d barely been past the verge of adulthood?

  “We figure out what we want to do, about us,” he said. “Whatever that is. Then we’ll talk about what we need to do about everything else. And how we can make the two fit together.”

  “How is it you have such a clear way of looking at things? And where were you when I needed this kind of clarity four months ago? You have a way of putting things in perspective that makes it so much easier for me to figure out what’s what.”

  He pushed his chair back and stood, pulling her around to his side of the table and into his arms. “I wish I could say I learned it in doctorate school, just to make you—” He broke off, and smiled. “Give me that look,” he finished, and she stuck her tongue out at him. “Careful where you aim that,” he said.

  Delia was pretty sure that when she’d wondered what Ford would be like when the lights twinkled back on in his eyes, and inside his heart, she’d had absolutely no idea just how dangerous a combination that would be.

  “It came from my time as a ranger,” he said, surprising her, both with the serious shift, and the comfortable way he’d said it. “I learned to look at things differently, assess situations with a very different kind of clarity. Observe, understand, solve. Emphasis on the solve. There was no time to get bogged down in what-ifs, or analyzing things to death. I learned to go with my gut, to live by my gut.”

  “And what is your gut telling you?” she asked, still a bit shaky. “You asked me what my reaction was . . . what’s yours?”

  He smiled and slid his hand under her hair at the nape of her neck, and lifted her mouth to his, so naturally, so simply, that she felt her nerves smooth out, and the edge of panic skitter away.

  “My gut is telling me that these dishes will wait until morning.” He grinned against her mouth, then kissed her until she wasn’t sure which way was up. “Want to see if we can make it past the ladder this time?”

  Chapter 17

  They made it past the ladder, but it was touch and go. Mostly touch. Ford watched with barely restrained hunger as she climbed the ladder from his office loft up to his bedroom. Hunger, hell, he was starving. He wondered how long it would take before he didn’t feel the need to have her wrapped around him with every breath he took. This was when he wasn’t wondering why the hell he’d waited so long to go back to her in the first place.

  They had managed to take their hands off each other long enough to check on the still-dozing puffling. Although, come to think of it, they hadn’t actually stopped touching each other then, either. Her hand had found his and held on as he knelt and checked on the sleepy chick. He smiled at that, liked that she felt the need to stay connected to him, prayed she didn’t let go of that need once they were no longer cooped up in his tree house together.

  The puffling was happily nesting in a box tucked into the recessed foot space under his desk in the makeshift burrow he’d constructed. The storm had dwindled to a steady rain, which he hoped was more soothing to the healing puffling than alarming.

  Now it was time to take Delia up to his own nest. That would be a first for him. He’d come to Sandpiper to heal, and to be apart while he did so. The summers were a frenzy of activity and, over the years, his tree house had become frenzy central. It wasn’t something he naturally loved, but he’d come to terms with the hubbub; it was productive and he wouldn’t have to use two different office spaces. But his nest, his aerie at the top of the tree house, was his sanctuary and his alone. The very few times he’d given in to the impulse for female companionship had been while he was traveling on foundation business. And while his body might have been okay with that arrangement, his soul had always felt a little more hollow afterward. After a while, it had been easier, or at least kinder to himself, to ignore the impulse.

  It was too late to ignore what he’d gotten himself into now. Nor did he want to. Instead of leaving him feeling hollow and less of who he’d been than before, losing himself in all the wonderment and fire that was Delia O’Reilly hadn’t felt like revisiting the past in some sort of empty reach for a long-ago moment. No. It had felt like coming home. Like he was exactly where he was supposed to be, after having been lost somewhere along the way. Really lost.

  Oddly, it was Delia’s own struggle to come to terms with what she wanted—him, thank all merciful gods—and what she’d always told herself was better for her—being alone—that had clarified for him what he wanted. It felt utterly wrong to him, like a giant backward step, for her to shy away from what they had done, from where it could take them. Which meant it was equally wrong for him to do the same.

  That she was willing to try, that she was climbing the ladder upward, literally and figuratively, was no small miracle. He knew that. She might be struggling with a number of things in her life at the moment, but she was not a wishy-washy, ambivalent sort of woman. Once she decided on a track, she was strong, committed, and loyal. He realized now that was why she’d been so uncharacteristically subdued regarding her diner being in peril. She hadn’t decided on her track.

  He was smart enough, knew her well enough, to know that a simple conversation over a single meal was not going to magically change Delia into someone who would allow herself to run willingly toward something she’d been actively running away from her entire adult life.

  There was also the not-so-little matter of the rest of her life being upside down. He wasn’t sure if that was a blessing in disguise for them, if the great probability that her diner would be taken away from her would allow her to rethink everything, including the possibility of something long term with him. Or if, with everything else going on, she’d feel overwhelmed, making her that much more determined to control the things she could, namely, not dealing with him or the demands of trying to have a life together.

  Because it wasn’t going to be some kind of Disney movie fairy tale. It was going to take a lot of discussion, of being bluntly honest with each other and with themselves, abo
ut what they could and couldn’t handle. Each of them would have to make considerable adjustments in order to be together. And she was already facing the mother of all considerable adjustments with Mayor Davis’s impending decision regarding her diner. He knew she wasn’t just going to pack up and move to Sandpiper. She wasn’t a loner, and she certainly wasn’t the sit-around type. She was the antithesis of that.

  Which was where his major adjustments would come into play. Her life, as she knew it, was going to evolve into something else completely, because of the diner, because of him, but whatever that life was, a good part of it would be spent in the Cove. His life would evolve then, too, because he wanted one that included her and, he realized, included Grace, too, which meant he’d also be spending time in the Cove.

  He would have to come to terms with having someone invade his world, his space, wherever that space happened to be. That it was Delia, that he wanted her like he wanted his next breath, was a good thing. A great thing. An amazing thing. But that didn’t negate the reality that he was going to have to get used to an intrusion into his day-to-day world unlike any he’d had since moving to Maine. If he couldn’t get used to Grace popping up on his laptop screen whenever she felt like it . . . how was he going to handle being available to someone twenty-fo ur/seven?

  “Oh, Ford,” Delia gasped as she climbed up through the opening, and then stepped off the ladder, which ended a few feet up above floor level. “This is incredible.”

  He finished the climb and stepped off the other side, flipping a switch to illuminate a small lamp by the queen-size bed that dominated the room. He watched as she took in the last part of his home. He recalled her comment about him referring to his place as base camp. Maybe he’d spent too long on military outposts and in science labs and his brain was utilitarian-wired, but that’s how he’d always seen it. It wasn’t some psychological thing. At least, that had been his reaction to her comment. But seeing her standing there in his bedroom . . . he realized this was the first time he’d naturally thought of it as home.