Sanctuary Island

by Everett, Lily

  Ella lifted a brow, made a show of looking over her own shoulder. “What, this old thing? I’m so glad you like it.”

  He adored her this way, bright and laughing, the lines of tension and stress relaxed right out of her body. And what a body, slender and curved in all the right places, warm and sexy where they pressed together.

  “I love it,” he growled as heat shot through him in a throbbing wave. Pulling her even closer, until her denim-clad thighs parted around one of his legs, Grady hitched her high against his chest and stole a sun-sweet kiss from that smiling mouth.

  And, of course, he slid his hands around to get a better grip on the seat in question.

  Ella’s surprised laugh turned into a soft moan at the way their bodies slotted together.

  He wanted her with the sun beating down on them, turning her city-pale skin to gold. Keeping his arms tight around her, he executed a controlled fall that ended with him hitting the ground beneath her. The soft give of the sandy hillside cradled his back as he steadied her.

  Ella rose over him like a goddess emerging from the sea. The naked desire in her gaze fired Grady’s blood. She bent to take a kiss, and he tangled them together in the sand, wishing he could wrap her up so completely that she’d never even think of leaving him.

  Breaking away with a gasp, Ella blinked dazedly. “Really? Here?”

  “It’s just us and the horses. No one ever comes out here except me. This is one of my best spots for checking on the wild horses.”

  “It’s nice,” she said, without ever taking her eyes off him. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

  “There’s a view directly down to the watering hole,” he pointed out.

  “Mm-hm.” Ella’s gaze had drifted down to his mouth. She licked her plump bottom lip, so pink and shiny, and it was all over.

  Enough talking.

  The next time Ella raised her head to blink up at the darkening sky, it was quite a bit later. She still seemed dazed, but this time Grady felt a caveman kind of satisfaction about it.

  I did that to her.

  She lifted one languid hand to push her tangled curls over her shoulder, and he caught sight of a livid red love bite on the side of her neck where she was extra succulent.

  He grinned.

  I did that, too.

  “I really do like this place,” she said, her voice a little rough. “You’re probably getting tired of me gushing about how beautiful it is here, but I can’t help it. D.C. is nothing like this—not only the landscape and the scenery, which is obviously gorgeous. But there’s something about this island.”

  “I’ll never get tired of hearing what you have to say. Especially about the island.”

  With a wry twist to her lips, she settled back against his chest and pulled one of his arms around her shoulders like tugging a blanket up to her chin. “Mm. You’ll especially enjoy this bit. You were right. This place, Sanctuary Island … it gets under your skin.”

  Curling up in exaggerated shock, Grady made his eyes wide and joked to hide the ecstatic thump of his heart. “What? I think you’re going to need to say that again.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You were right. Okay? Don’t get sassy about it—you weren’t even the first person who said it to me, now that I think about it.”

  “Who else has been filling your head with Sanctuary propaganda?”

  “That older gentleman who sits in the guardhouse by the dock.” She propped her chin on her hand. “The one who’s a little … I don’t like to use the word ‘crazy.’ My friend Adrienne definitely would not approve.”

  Grady laughed. “You must mean old King.”

  She sat up in a rush. “Don’t tell me he’s actually the king of something!”

  “Not exactly.” Grady crossed his arms underneath his head and enjoyed the view. Ella’s shirt was still tossed over a nearby marsh elder bush. “His first name is King.”

  Ella blinked. “Why does he wear a crown?”

  “He likes it? He’s embracing his inner royalty?” Grady stretched into a shrug, loving the way Ella’s gaze dropped to track the play of muscles in his shoulders. “Why does anyone do anything?”

  “You say that like you think there aren’t reasons behind why we do what we do,” Ella argued. “But there are. If I learned anything at all during therapy, it was that.”

  “I’m not trying to talk down the work you did in therapy—but that’s not really what we’re all about here on the island.”

  A stubborn light kindled in her eyes, and Grady suppressed a smile. So much for afterglow. But he wouldn’t want her any other way.

  “I know lots of people think there’s something shameful about therapy.” Ella shook her head. “As if admitting you’ve seen a mental health professional means you need to be fitted for a straitjacket immediately. But I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone, in my whole life, who was so well adjusted that they couldn’t benefit from a calm, supportive, impartial ear.”

  This conversation called for pants. Hitching up his jeans, Grady arched his back and did up the buttons while he talked. “I’m not arguing that. I know it works for lots of people—but it didn’t work for me, after the accident. The therapist the hospital assigned was nice and everything, but those sessions were torture. Sitting around, talking about my feelings while I knew the guys from my team were out there, risking their lives, doing real work, helping people?”

  Even the memory of Dr. Lipshultz’s bland, round-cheeked patience set up a feeling like fire ants crawling under his skin, itching and painful and just plain wrong.

  Ella nodded slowly. “That makes sense. Talk therapy isn’t for everyone. You’re an action guy, used to working with your hands, to moving around.”

  Grady sat up and propped his arms on his raised knees. He wasn’t a big one for talking, but it was important to make her understand. “Everything changed for me when I started working with your mom’s horses.”

  Ella moved in the direction of covering herself up. Grady was sad about it, but he could see where she might rather have a shirt on now that the conversation had paddled into more treacherous waters.

  “Before this morning, I wouldn’t have understood what you meant.” Her face was contemplative as she buttoned up her blouse. “But there was something about the exercise that cut through all the usual noise in my head and forced me to focus. To be present in the moment. And now, thinking back on it, I can see some interesting patterns emerging about the way I approached the problem.”

  This, right here, was why Grady would never disparage Ella for having gone to therapy. She was so smart, so willing to examine her own behavior and learn from it. Which he knew, from his own experience, was a lot harder than most people wanted to admit. He helped out by prodding her forward. “What do you mean?”

  She pressed her lips together and attempted to restore order to her tumbled, sand-speckled hair. “When Peony didn’t want to move, the first thing I thought of was to try and force her. I’m not sure I like what that says about me.”

  At the mention of her name, the little bay mare left off her desultory grazing and paced over to Ella, nosing at her hand in a search for stray sugar cubes or her favorite treat of all, peppermints.

  The awed, gentle smile that spread across Ella’s face as she turned her palm up to Peony’s snuffling nose filled Grady with quiet joy.

  “What’s that thing TV shrinks are always saying?” He put his hands on his hips. “Acknowledging the issue is the first step toward change.”

  “I’ll try if you will,” Ella said, slanting him a look.

  Grady’s hands dropped to swing at his sides. “Meaning…”

  Ella answered his question with a question—an annoying trick she’d probably picked up from her shrink. “What did the obstacle-course exercise tell you, when you first did it?”

  He relaxed a little. “That I missed working as part of a team, that I was still good at it, even if it didn’t feel that way.”

  She concentrat
ed on rubbing Peony’s whiskery muzzle as if the mare’s flared nostrils held the secrets of the universe. “So … nothing about forgiving yourself for what happened after the explosion? Or about maybe leaving the island someday?”

  The uneven ground shifted under his bare feet. He stumbled, and that’s how he knew he’d taken an instinctive step backward. Setting his jaw and bracing his stance, Grady pulled it together. “I’m not wearing a hair shirt and lashing myself nightly, or anything. I’m fine about what happened, it’s just not my favorite memory.”

  “And the island?” Ella turned those soft blue eyes on him, a wealth of compassion turning her voice scratchy like raw silk. “You can’t really intend to never leave Sanctuary again. Jo says everyone here makes weekly or at least monthly trips to the mainland for groceries, doctor’s visits, to go to the movies or a restaurant that isn’t the Firefly Café.”

  Unwilling to face the plea on her face, Grady turned in a circle, throwing his arms wide to the sky and the ocean. “Why would I leave? I’ve got everything I need right here.”

  “I know this island is your refuge, the first place you felt safe enough to slow down after the accident. I can understand why it would be difficult to leave it, or to ever see it change.”

  “Then why are you pushing this?” Feeling hunted, Grady paced to the small stand of sea myrtle that screened his lookout spot from the rest of the marsh.

  “Because I’m leaving in three days,” Ella cried brokenly, “and I don’t want to never see you again!”

  Heart racing, Grady whirled to face her. Tousled and mussed, cheeks red and a little blotchy with the force of her emotions, eyes brimming with tears she was too stubborn to let fall—he’d never seen anything so gorgeous.

  He crossed the few feet of sand between them in two long strides and gathered her into his arms. It was all he could do not to squeeze the life out of her, to press her so close that she’d meld with his ribs, his heart, and never be able to separate herself.

  “I don’t want that, either,” he said into her soft, salt-sprayed hair. The wish he’d held on to for so long, kept secret and safe in his head, burst out of him in a rush of honesty. “We’ve just gotten started—I can’t lose you yet. Don’t leave. Stay here with me.”

  *

  Ella pressed her face to the hot, smooth skin of Grady’s bare chest and breathed in his complicated scent of leather and salt.

  She wanted to ask if he meant it, but she didn’t need to. He meant every word. She could feel it in the slam of his heart against hers, the corded strength of his arms around her.

  It wasn’t a real plan. Not in a long-term sort of way. The situation hadn’t changed—he refused to leave this island, and her whole life was back in D.C.

  As long as she ignored the fact that the bits of her life she really cared about, like her sister, the mother she was only beginning to understand, this new thing with Grady, and her burgeoning interest in and excitement about the renovation of Windy Corner, were all here on Sanctuary Island.

  The desire to throw rationality to the wind and recklessly agree to stay was like a hook behind her belly button, tugging at her. But a lifetime of ingrained caution wouldn’t let her. And as much as she’d come to appreciate Sanctuary, she didn’t truly want to shrink her horizons to the edge of the island and never experience anything outside of it.

  Although …

  “I guess I don’t have to go back to D.C. at the end of the week,” she said, muffling the words against the wings of his collarbone.

  She felt him draw in a breath. “But … your job. Do you have enough vacation days saved up to stay longer?”

  Squirming slightly, Ella nudged his clavicle with her forehead and studied her own sandy toes. “Well. As it happens, I’m not actually on vacation, per se.”

  His fingers tightened, individual points of pressure on her back. “Tell me what that means.”

  Sighing out a breath, Ella turned her cheek to nuzzle into his chest and let her arms steal around his trim, hard waist. “I may have had a bit of a burnout issue. According to my boss. Who mandated that I take a leave of absence, which happened to coincide with Merry’s decision to come down here for a visit.”

  “That’s why you accepted the leave of absence,” Grady guessed, with startling accuracy.

  “I didn’t want to admit that he was right, that the way I was going, I was heading for a nervous breakdown.”

  Grady ran a hand down her spine as if he were soothing a nervous cat, and Ella had to smile. “But now that you’ve had some time to take a break and catch your breath, you can see how stressed out you were back in the city.”

  “Right.” Ella laughed. “Because reconnecting with my estranged mother, fighting with my sister, and starting a new relationship has been so relaxing!”

  As soon as the words left her mouth, she cringed. She’d never been with a guy who wasn’t, on some level, surprised to find out they were in a relationship, no matter how many dates they’d been on or how many times he’d slept over at her apartment.

  Grady’s hand never stopped in its slow, rhythmic stroking of her back, though, and after a long moment, Ella felt herself relax against him.

  “I guess that’s true.” His voice was a deep rumble she felt through her whole body. “You’ve been through some rough stuff in the last couple of weeks. But hopefully a few good things have happened, too.”

  “More than a few,” she managed through a throat gone suddenly tight. “Even the hard things. I wouldn’t change any of it now if I could.”

  “So you’ll stay.” A wealth of satisfaction wrapped around his tone, like vines around a tree.

  “At least for a little longer,” Ella said, tilting her head back to get a look at his face.

  Even the slow smile she loved couldn’t erase all the darkness in his eyes, but Grady was happy. She could tell. And his happiness sent an answering thrill through her.

  Hard on the heels of that thrill, however, was a cold shiver of doubt. Would he still be this happy, this interested in keeping her around, when he heard her plans for Jo’s property?

  CHAPTER 26

  Jo happened to be out in front of the barn when Harrison McNamara’s big black SUV emerged from the pine copse and parked in the patch of gravel by the doors.

  Hands tightening on the back gate of her own truck, Jo did a quick head count. Merry was inside, determined to help the vet as he made his rounds, but since Dr. Ben Fairfax was no idiot, she wasn’t getting any closer to the injured stallion in stall four than the hallway. Last Jo saw, Merry was fuming at Ben’s restrictions and Ben was scowling inflexibly. It made Jo grin.

  And Ella was out in the back paddock with Grady, running through the exercises Jo showed him when he first moved to Sanctuary.

  Which was basically where she’d been for the last five days, ever since she asked if it would be possible to extend her visit—except for the time she’d spent on the phone and at her laptop, working on what Jo assumed was the revised proposal for the Windy Corner B and B.

  The last few days had been idyllic, almost perfect. She had both her girls at home, and there’d been a lot of warmth, a lot of storytelling about the history of the Hollisters on Sanctuary Island. Every hesitant smile and surprised laugh renewed Jo’s hope for a real relationship with both Ella and Merry.

  Relaxing her hands enough to work the finicky locking mechanism, Jo lowered the back gate and contemplated the stacks of fifty-pound bags of horse feed that represented the last of her budget for the month, and waited for Harrison.

  After the way they’d left things, him showing up here wasn’t likely to mean good news.

  She heard his door slam and closed her eyes briefly, trying to prepare herself for the punch of regret and longing when she looked at him.

  But nothing could prepare her for the tired set of his shoulders, the way his bearded cheeks seemed a little hollow, as if he’d skipped too many meals in favor of sitting at his desk. Her heart clenched tighter than a
fist.

  “Jo. How have you been?” His voice, though, was the same as ever—gruff and calm, steady as a rock.

  She suppressed a shiver and gave him a nod. “Good.”

  “Are your girls here? I heard they didn’t leave as planned last Friday.”

  She read nothing in his tone other than politeness, but Jo couldn’t help but stiffen a bit. Which was unfair, because she wanted to feel only easy, uncomplicated joy at the chance to deepen her connection to both her daughters—but as she stared at Harrison, she was conscious of a deep pool of sadness.

  Covering it up with a smile, she said, “You heard right. Merry’s even talking about moving here for good.”

  His brown eyes went bleak for a bare instant before his polite mask descended once more. “I’m very happy for you.”

  Jo rushed to fill the well of silence between them. “How’s Taylor? She hasn’t come by the barn in almost a week.”

  “Fine. Well, mostly. You know Taylor—she really feels her feelings.”

  “She’s still a teenager,” Jo reminded him. “That’s normal. I’ll call her tonight and make sure she knows she’s always welcome here, no matter what.”

  “That would mean a lot.” Harrison glanced at his watch, and Jo swallowed hard. Time always seemed to be slipping away from them.

  Searching around for another topic, she said, “Ella said she wanted to stay because she needs more time to research her proposal for how to turn Windy Corner into a moneymaking property.”

  Wry amusement warmed Harrison’s expression. “Based on the hearts and stars and little bluebirds twittering around my nephew’s head these days, I hope that’s not her only motivation for sticking around.”

  Jo’s smile widened, felt more real. “I’m not sure even Ella understands why she’s having such a tough time leaving Sanctuary.”

  She and Harrison shared a smirk, the threads of history and understanding that wove them together tightening into solid knots. After a moment, though, his answering smile faded, his lips thinning down until they all but disappeared behind his salt-and-pepper beard.