Sanctuary Island

by Everett, Lily

  As Merry explained how they’d met up with Grady on their way here from town, the sound of her bright, vivacious chatter filled the musty old house with light.

  “And when I saw them together,” Merry concluded, “I knew. There’s something there.”

  Before Jo could do more than clasp her hands in sheer delight, the front door swung open and the man in question stepped into the foyer.

  With his arms full of Ella.

  Jo shot a quick look over to Merry, who raised both brows and made a see-what-I-mean kind of face.

  Giddy at the feeling of sharing something with her younger daughter, even a potentially silly and baseless hope about what might be going on here, Jo beamed at Grady.

  Who barely noticed, what with having to contend with Ella’s squirming and loud demands that he put her down this instant.

  Grady had that expression on his face, though. Jo had seen that expression countless times after he finally picked himself up and got determined to do his physical therapy and help himself heal. She knew exactly what it meant.

  Grady Wilkes was all in.

  Hmm. This has possibilities.

  “Hush up and hold on. I’m putting you down on the sofa,” he said firmly. “Where you can’t do any more damage to yourself. God Almighty, woman, who taught you to be so stubborn?”

  “Are you all right?” Merry’s voice was sharp with concern.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” Ella said, just as Grady muttered, “Right ankle. Probably a mild sprain.”

  It took everything Jo had not to fuss over Ella, make her sit down and check her out from head to toe and possibly bundle her onto the ferry for a trip to the emergency clinic over on the mainland. But the “back off” vibes emanating from Ella were clear as day, and Jo had made a private vow that since her daughters were being generous enough to give her this chance, she would not screw it up by presuming too much or pushing too hard.

  But it wasn’t easy. She’d forgotten what it was like to have this big, consuming love pulling her in more than one direction at a time. For so long now, she’d poured all of those instincts into Harrison’s trouble magnet of a teenage daughter.

  Where is Taylor, anyway?

  As Grady leaned over to settle Ella on the couch beside her sister, the pocket door to the hallway slid open to reveal Taylor balancing a tray with a pitcher and a bunch of glasses filled with ice.

  “There you are,” Jo said, relieved. Here, at least, was someone she knew inside and out—someone whose life she hadn’t in any way screwed up. Someone who might actually count on the plus side in the balance sheet of Jo’s past. “I was worried—did you see that big hole in the front porch that Ella fell into?”

  “Uh, yeah, I saw it. Hey, anyone want some iced tea?” Taylor said, and something about the hesitation in her voice made Jo give her a sharper look. Hovering awkwardly in the doorway, Taylor appeared to take in the scene at a glance.

  “Thanks, honey, you didn’t have to do that,” Jo said, walking over to sling her arm around Taylor’s shoulders. “So you already met both my girls?”

  The thrill of saying that out loud—“my girls”—was almost enough to distract Jo from how Taylor’s neck was strung wire-taut with tension.

  “We met.” Ella huffed out a relieved breath as she sank into the couch cushions. “Taylor was the one who called Grady when I had my dumb porch incident.”

  Beside her, Taylor swallowed audibly, and Jo frowned. She had the feeling she was missing something.

  “You know what?” Taylor shrugged Jo’s arm off with a quick smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m going to take off. Y’all have a lot to catch up on, and you don’t need me for … well, for anything, I guess.”

  She shoved the tray at Jo, who grabbed it just as the pitcher wobbled. With visions of iced-tea stains splotching Aunt Dottie’s gazillion-year-old hooked rug, Jo spent precious moments getting the tray under control, and missed Taylor’s swift exit from the room.

  “It was nice to meet you,” Merry called after her, and Jo set the tray down on a white-doilied side table before her shaking hands could rattle the ice in the glasses.

  Talk about being pulled in too many directions.

  Here were her biological daughters, in the same room with her for the first time in years. She’d imagined herself happily busy laying the groundwork for rebuilding her relationships with Ella and Merry.

  Instead, she was messing up one of the few relationships in her life that she’d ever been proud of.

  Sending Grady an agonized glance, Jo hoped he read her mind as effectively as he usually did.

  He gave her a slight nod and went after his cousin … but not without a swift look back at Ella, who was struggling to sit up straight on the edge of the overstuffed sofa cushion. Ella’s cheeks went pink—the same pink that tinged the tips of Grady’s ears as he ducked out of the room—and Jo felt that tingle of potential intensify into the beginning of a plan as she turned back to her daughters.

  In recovery, Jo had to take the tools she was handed and use them to the best of her ability. She’d learned not to let anything get in the way of doing the work and achieving her goals.

  Merry wanted to be here, Jo knew that much from the precious letters they’d exchanged. But Ella was a tougher nut to crack. Jo had been counting on the magic of Sanctuary to make her eldest daughter’s visit a success.

  But maybe Jo could find a way to help the old island magic along …

  *

  “Hold up, Tay.”

  Grady caught his cousin’s arm as she veered away from the hole in the porch and headed for the relative safety of the gap in the railing.

  She whirled to face him, red flags of emotion flying high on her pale cheekbones. “I need to get out of here.”

  “What the hell is your problem? Ella just covered for you in there, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “No one asked her to. And I don’t have a problem,” she ground out through a clenched jaw. “God. Excuse me if I’m not in the mood to sit around the parlor drinking iced tea.”

  Grady grabbed onto his patience with both hands. “Jo’s worried about you…”

  Taylor made a miserable, sarcastic sound. “Please. Jo doesn’t have time to spare worrying about me. Not now that she has her real daughters back.”

  “Taylor Elizabeth McNamara,” he chided gently. “You know Jo loves you more than life. But Ella and Merry only just arrived, and she wants to get them settled in.”

  “Right. So she can convince them to stick around even longer.” Taylor’s fingers were white-knuckled where she clutched the railing to swing herself down to the ground. “Well, thanks but no thanks. She’ll have a better chance of getting what she wants if I’m not around, anyway.”

  Grady started to protest—knew Jo would want him to stop Taylor from leaving like this—but at the same time, he didn’t think Taylor was completely wrong. In this kind of mood, his young cousin had once stolen a vacationer’s sailboat, beached it on the sandbar south of the island, and managed to set it on fire.

  Of course, she’d had an accomplice, and all of that was a couple of years in the past, but still. Taylor could wear herself out trying to convince the good people of Sanctuary that she’d grown up, matured, and mellowed since the bad old days when she and Caleb Rigby used to terrorize the town with graffiti sprees and other hijinks … but Grady had known his baby cousin her whole life.

  And as far as Grady could tell, people didn’t change. Not all the way down to the bone. Which meant that Taylor, right this minute, was an oil slick just waiting for some damn fool to drop a lit match.

  “Okay,” he said, using the calm, soothing tone he usually reserved for the wild horses. “Should I tell Jo you’ll see her at the barn tomorrow, as usual?”

  Taylor’s shoulders slumped in defeat, but defiance sparked in her voice as she muttered, “She’s not going to want me around once Ella tells her I was the one who got her hurt.”

  Grady scowled. “Ye
ah, about that. What the hell were you thinking? What if it had been Merry—a pregnant lady could be really badly hurt by a fall like that.”

  “I didn’t know the whole floor would bust open,” Taylor cried. “And I wouldn’t have let Merry come up there. Anyway, I tried to tell Ella not to.”

  Grady arched a brow. “Right. But you didn’t try all that hard, did you?”

  “I wanted … I don’t even know what I wanted.” Taylor’s pretty face was set in lines of misery. “I was so mad. I forgot how that felt, the way I used to feel like my head would explode sometimes, and before I even know it, I’m doing something bad.”

  There was pure dread in her tone, a fear and self-loathing that struck a chord deep in Grady’s gut. He knew that feeling. Curling a protective arm around Taylor’s slumping shoulders, he walked her over to her car, a much loved little two-door hatchback she kept running by tinkering with it every chance she got.

  “You’re not bad,” Grady told her. “But you can be thoughtless, and a little too quick to believe the worst in people. And I say that as someone who’s realizing he might be that way, too—so we both need to do better. Okay?”

  She paused for a moment before lowering herself into the driver’s seat. “I’ll try. But it’s not going to be easy, with Merry and Ella around. Merry seems okay, maybe, but I don’t care if Ella didn’t snitch, she still has a stick up her ass.”

  Instantly and without warning, a vision of Ella’s behind rose up in Grady’s mind’s eye, round and pert, filling out her sensible khaki pants to perfection. Realizing a long moment had passed and Taylor was still looking at him expectantly, Grady cleared his throat. “Right. I’ll watch out for her ass. I mean, I’ll keep an eye on things here, take care of Jo.”

  Taylor made a face like a filly sticking her nose in a clump of ticklish clover. “Gross, you perv. Now I’m really leaving. But I guess I can show up for my shift at the barn tomorrow.”

  After Taylor drove off, Grady stood in the middle of the driveway for several long heartbeats and thought about the promise he’d asked of her.

  It was good advice, to think before acting and not to leap to conclusions about people. He’d met Ella with a heart full of preconceived notions, and she’d turned out to be nothing like he’d expected. He owed her another chance.

  As he remembered the shock and wonder of that scorching-hot kiss, he decided he owed it to both of them. Because maybe it hadn’t meant anything to Ella Preston, but it had been a long time since Grady had felt anything like that.

  And he wasn’t giving up on it without a fight.

  CHAPTER 9

  “I think you’ll be comfortable in here,” Jo said, so brightly that Ella could clearly hear the nerves in the older woman’s voice.

  Ella, who’d limped after Jo down a hallway to a door at the rear of the house, bit her lip as the door swung open to reveal a light, airy bedroom with an old-fashioned four-poster bed pushed awkwardly against the far wall.

  “Oh, it’s … lovely,” she said, fumbling it in her momentary confusion over the odd placement of the furniture, the solid mahogany dressers and intricately carved nightstands shoved aside to leave an empty, gaping space in the middle of the room.

  “Sorry,” Jo apologized, bustling into the room to strip the bed with quick, efficient motions.

  “This is your room,” Ella realized, dread settling over her like a fog. She glanced around at the scuffed hardwood floors, the bare walls—and found confirmation in one of the framed photographs sitting on the antique dresser.

  Picking up the one that had caught her eye, Ella stared down at … herself. And Merry, in one of those shots Merry loved to take, grinning wildly at the camera held at arm’s length. Merry’s hair had blue streaks in the picture, which was how Ella placed it.

  “My graduation?” she asked faintly.

  “Merry sent it to me. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Jo’s anxious voice scraped across the raw places in Ella’s spirit. She did mind, but what could she say? “No, of course not.”

  “I love that one.” Jo left the sheets in a pile on the bed and came over to stand at Ella’s shoulder. “Merry has a gift for capturing a moment.”

  The graduation candid was the only shot with Ella, but there were a couple more of Merry—one on the back of a motorcycle, prepregnancy, the other one in what Ella referred to as one of Merry’s arty moments. It was black-and-white, a little fuzzy around the edges, but the picture of herself reflected in a music-store window caught the essential wistfulness underlying Merry’s playful, buoyant exterior.

  “She’s very talented,” Ella agreed, carefully setting the frame down. “Not that she agrees. She hates every picture she takes; I’m kind of amazed she let you have these.”

  “It took some begging, but I was motivated.”

  Ella could feel Jo’s searching gaze like a touch to the side of her face. Heart pounding, she pretended a fascination with the other photos on the dresser. There was one of the blond teenager from earlier, Taylor, astride a massive black horse and leaning over the animal’s neck as it jumped a fallen log. And the last one was of an elderly woman in a floral-patterned housedress, her white hair impeccably set in curls and a shrewd intelligence shining from her sharp blue eyes.

  Touching the glass over the old lady’s weathered cheek, Ella was surprised to feel the lump rise in her throat. “Is that…?”

  “Aunt Dottie. Your great-aunt, Dorothea Selden Hollister. The room is still set up for her hospital bed—that’s why all the furniture is like this. I haven’t had a chance to move everything back. She needed around-the-clock care, at the end. I know this house is a wreck, but it’s all I have left of her.”

  Grief throbbed through Jo’s low voice, making Ella shift her weight uncomfortably.

  She’d thought it was awkward entering her estranged mother’s front parlor in the arms of the man she’d bickered with, leaned on, and soul-kissed half an hour after meeting him. But no, this was ten times worse.

  Not only did Ella feel a pang of loss for a woman she never had the chance to know, but she almost wanted to reach out and comfort Jo Ellen, who had known and loved and cared for her aunt in her final days.

  Suddenly antsy, as if her skin were a badly tailored suit that pinched and pulled, Ella jerked away from the bureau. “I can’t put you out of your own bedroom. Really, I don’t feel comfortable…”

  Jo snagged her wrist before she could get more than a few steps toward the door. “No, it’s fine! The guest rooms are all upstairs, and with that ankle, you really shouldn’t … please. Let me do this for you. I want to.”

  Ella could clearly discern the naked desperation in Jo’s voice, and the soft, weak part of her responded to it, wanting to hug and make nice and smooth over this difficult moment.

  But that was a crutch, she reminded herself. Years of therapy had taught her to deal honestly with the situation rather than doing whatever it took to cover up the truth. Facing Jo Ellen squarely, Ella forced herself not to duck the real issue.

  “I don’t want you to think that my taking this room—even for one night—means that I want anything else from you. Or that I’m going to give you anything in return.”

  Jo took a deep breath. There was pain in her eyes, but she didn’t let it crush her, and she didn’t use it to manipulate the situation. Ella met her gaze with the first inkling of respect nudging at the back of her mind.

  “I understand. And believe it or not, I appreciate your frankness. This is a nearly impossible situation, made worse by the fact that I know … God, do I know, that I brought it on myself. I’m not asking for your sympathy, and I’m willing to work for your trust. But I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t match your frankness with a little of my own.”

  She inhaled again, and panic flared behind Ella’s breastbone. “Do we really have to talk about this? Surely we’ve said everything that needs to be said.”

  “Almost.” Jo lifted her chin in an achingly famil
iar gesture. “I understand you don’t want anything from me, and I respect your feelings. But you deserve to hear this, at least. I’m sorry. I apologize for … too many things to name, but most of all for not being the mother I should have been. For not being the mother you and Merry deserved. I regret it from the bottom of my heart, and I completely acknowledge your right to whatever anger you still feel toward me.”

  Jo made it through the whole speech without a break in her voice, but her eyes were wide and shiny with tears she was too stubborn to let fall.

  Drawing in a shuddering breath, Ella hammered all her years of therapy into a plate of armor over her heart. “I’m not angry with you,” she finally said. “Anger is unproductive and pointless, and implies an unresolved issue. My issues with you have been resolved. Thank you for the apology, but it’s unnecessary. I’m fine.”

  The light in Jo’s eyes dimmed, but she nodded without arguing. “Good, then. We’ve both said what we needed to say. Let me just get a set of fresh sheets for the bed, and I’ll leave you alone. I know you must be tired.”

  Abruptly aware of exactly how exhausted she was, Ella gave up the fight over which room she should take and nodded. If Jo wanted to displace herself, she wouldn’t argue.

  But as her mother slipped out of the bedroom, Ella’s restless eyes landed on the photo of herself and Merry, in pride of place in the center of the dresser. And she couldn’t help the ache that opened up in her chest.

  *

  Ella woke to the buttery, tantalizing scent of fresh-baked biscuits and a painful crick in her neck from the flat pillow on her great-aunt’s antique four-poster bed. If she’d known last night about Jo’s neck-torturing pillow, she might’ve protested her room assignment more vigorously. Yow.

  Gently flexing her ankle, Ella waited for the twinge, but it didn’t come. Ha! She’d been right that her so-called sprained ankle was only twisted. She’d be fine, as always.