Christmas in Lucky Harbor

by Jill Shalvis

  Jax slid him a look. “Tranquility? A big word for you, isn’t it?”

  “What? The bar’s been slow. I’ve been reading.”

  “You didn’t get that word out of Penthouse Forum.”

  “Hey, I read other stuff.” He paused. “Sometimes. Now get up. Jeanne’s got the afternoon off, and so do you.”

  He looked at the one person who knew his entire sordid story and didn’t seem to blame Jax for being an ass-hole. “How do you know Jeanne’s got the afternoon off?”

  Ford didn’t answer.

  “Shit,” Jax said. “She called you.”

  “A little bit,” Ford admitted. “She wanted me to give you a hug.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Figured you’d say that. Also figured you’d be needing to get out.”

  Which is how Jax ended up on the water on Ford’s thirty-two-foot Beneteau. It was late in the year for a leisurely sail. Far too late. Most sailing enthusiasts had long ago winterized their boats, but Ford being Ford, he never let a little thing like winter slow him down. He always thrived on pushing the envelope, and not just in sailing.

  They were rewarded by an unexpected cold, hard wind that took their breath and every ounce of questionable talent they owned. The swells rose to nearly eight feet, ensuring that their planned easygoing few hours turned into an all-out work-their-asses-off-fest just to stay alive, much less afloat.

  “Christ,” Ford breathed when they’d made it back to the slip. He slumped against the hull, head back. “I sailed the West Indies and nearly died three times. That was nothing compared to this. What were you thinking, letting me take us out there?”

  Jax didn’t have the energy to kick Ford’s ass, so he slid down the hull next to him and mirrored his pose, his every muscle quivering with exhaustion and overuse, even his brain. “Forgot what a drama queen you are.”

  Ford choked out a laugh. “If I could move, I’d make you eat that statement.”

  “You and what army?”

  “Fuck you,” Ford said companionably. “And when were you going to tell me about Maddie? I have to hear about some supposedly hot kiss on the pier from Jeanne, who heard it from—”

  “I know this story, thanks.” And in tune to Ford’s soft laugh, Jax thunked his head back against the hull and closed his eyes. He wondered what she was doing right now, if she was working at the inn. He knew everyone, himself included, had found Phoebe fun and free-spirited, but having met her daughters now, Jax found himself angered at how Phoebe had neglected them.

  Maddie deserved better. They all did.

  “Did you know that Anderson asked Maddie out?” Ford asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Hell, man, sailing’s supposed to relax you.”

  Jax was relaxed. He was easygoing and laid-back. It’d taken him five long years to get there. He no longer let things stack up on his shoulders until he was ready to crumple. He no longer kept secrets for a living, his clients’ or his own, secrets that had the ability to burn holes in the lining of his stomach.

  So why hadn’t he told Maddie that he’d been a lawyer?

  Because he was a dumbass.

  And a chicken, to boot.

  And because you know she’d stop looking at you like you’re a superhero…

  Oh, yeah, that.

  Maddie and her sisters spent their days going through the inn and marina, each for different reasons. Chloe was bored. Tara didn’t want to miss anything of resale value. But for Maddie, it was about sentiment and about learning how the inn could run. She’d hoped to have everything computerized by now, but she’d spent most of her time digging her way through just to see what she had to work with.

  On the second day, she headed into town with a list of errands. When she saw Lucille out in front of the art gallery, she pulled over. Lucille was thrilled for the company and after hugging Maddie hello said, “I hear you’ve been kissing our Jax on the pier.”

  “Oh. Well, I—”

  “You’ve picked the cream of the crop with that one, honey. Did you know he lent me the money to help my granddaughter stay in college? Don’t let the motorcycle, tattoos, and aloofness fool you; he’s a sweet, caring young man.”

  Maddie hadn’t found him aloof. Big and bad and intimidating, maybe. Sexy as hell, certainly. And—Wait. Tattoos? He had tattoos? Just thinking of ink on that body of his had heat slashing through hers.

  “Come in, come in,” Lucille said. “I just put up my Christmas decorations. And I have tea. And brandy.”

  She wasn’t sure what it said about her that she was tempted. “I’m on a mission for Tara, running some errands, but thank you.”

  “Going back to the hardware store?” Lucille cocked her head. “Heard Anderson asked you out.”

  Maddie had gone yesterday to get some organizational supplies. The guy behind the counter had been wearing a Santa hat, and was extremely cute and extremely funny, but she’d left with only her supplies, gently turning down the date.

  She’d given up men.

  Or she was trying. “Does everyone know everything around here?”

  “Well, we don’t know which guy you’re going to date, Anderson or Jax. But if you could tell me, I’ll be real popular tonight at bingo,” she said hopefully.

  Maddie’s next stop was the pier for another shake, which she needed bad.

  She smiled at the familiar guy behind the counter. “Lance, right? Straight chocolate this time.”

  He smiled and nodded. He was in his early twenties, small boned, and had a voice like he was speaking through gravel.

  He told her that he had cystic fibrosis. He had family in Portland, but he lived here in Lucky Harbor with his brother, priding himself on his independence in spite of a disease that was slowly ravaging his young body.

  Listening to him, Maddie decided she had nothing, absolutely nothing, to complain about in her life. And on the way back to her car, she stared up at the looming Ferris wheel.

  Had her mother ever ridden it? From all that she’d read on Phoebe’s “recipe” cards, Maddie had to believe her mom had lived her life fast, and just a little bit recklessly.

  Chloe was a chip off the old block.

  Tara hid her wild side, but she had traveled far and wide, as well, and she had a lot of life experiences under her belt.

  Maddie… not so much. Sure, she’d lived in Los Angeles, but that was because her father had brought her there. Those adventures she’d had on movie sets were because of him, not because she’d had some deep yearning for the profession.

  She’d fallen into it. She’d fallen or been dragged into just about everything she’d ever done.

  Including the inn.

  No, she decided. This was going to be different. She was going to make this adventure her own. Nodding, she walked along, listening to the rough surf slap at the pier. The slats of wood beneath her feet had spaces between them, and in the light of day that gave her vertigo and a fear of falling through.

  “The trick is not to look at your feet when you walk.”

  Maddie turned toward the voice and found a woman busy nailing a sign to a post. Appearing to be about Maddie’s age, she was petite and pretty, with dark waves of hair falling down her back. She wore hip-hugging pin-striped trousers and a business jacket fit for her toned figure, looking cool and composed and far too professional to be standing on a pier with a hammer and nails in her manicured hands.

  “If you look straight out to the horizon,” she told Maddie, “you won’t feel like you’re going to fall.” Looking quite comfortable with the hammer in spite of her outfit, she pounded a last nail into the sign, which read:

  Lucky Harbor’s Annual Shrimp Feed

  this Saturday at 6:00

  The Biggest and Bestest in the State:

  Dinner, Dancing, and

  Kissing The Mayor—Don’t Miss it!

  “You’re new.” Smiling, the woman thrust out a hand. “I’m Sandy. Town clerk and manager. I also run the library.” She smiled.
“You know, you look like your momma.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Everyone knew her. Be sure to bring your sisters to the feed. Here.” Reaching into the bag at her feet, she pulled out a round of what looked like raffle tickets. She tore off a long strip of them and handed it over. “On the house. A welcome-to-town present.”

  “What are these for?”

  “The guessing tank. You write how many shrimp you think’ll get dragged in on the shrimp boat parade that night. Winner gets to kiss Jax when he comes in off the Jet Ski leading the boat parade.”

  Maddie blinked. “Jax? Jax Cullen?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Why does the winner get to kiss Jax?”

  “Besides the fact that he is one fine man?” Sandy grinned. “Because someone always gets to kiss the mayor. We like to torture our own here. Especially someone as popular as Jax. Before Jax, it was me, actually. I was mayor for three terms. I got lucky one year—a board member won the raffle and he was a cutie pie. Couldn’t kiss for beans, though. The other years I had to kiss frogs.”

  “But mayor?” Maddie shook her head. “Jax is a contractor. He restores things.”

  “He’s a man of many talents.” Sandy said this with a secret little smile, and Maddie knew a moment of horror.

  Oh, God. “He’s your boyfriend.” She’d kissed another woman’s boyfriend.

  “No,” Sandy said with a sigh. “Much to my utter dismay—and not for lack of trying—Jax and I are just friends.” She dropped her hammer into her bag and smiled. “See you at the feed. Oh, and are you going to hand out coupons for the inn? Phoebe did that last year, and it was a big success.”

  “It was?” How was that even possible? The place was a complete wreck.

  Seeing Maddie’s expression, Sandy smiled. “Yeah, probably she didn’t charge them, but the point is, she could have. She was a wonderful lady, your momma, but not much for business. Maybe she didn’t mention that.”

  No, Phoebe hadn’t mentioned that. Phoebe hadn’t mentioned much of anything. “I’ll talk to my sisters about it, but the inn won’t be reopened until…” Well, maybe never, but since she was done with negativity, she said, “Hopefully right after the new year.”

  Sandy nodded. “Can’t wait to see what you do in the way of updating and modernizing. The whole town is buzzing about it.”

  “How does anyone even know we’re doing anything?”

  “Well, you’ve asked Jax for a bid. Jeanne had lunch with Tracy, her best friend, who told Carla, my sister-in-law, who’s the local newspaper reporter. Lucky Harbor prides itself on keeping up with the news, and you three are big news.”

  Maddie tried to wrap her mind around the thought that she was news. Maddie Moore, assistant to the assistant, was news. “We’re not really that interesting.”

  “Are you kidding? Three new women in town, running the inn? It’s the biggest news this month. Well, maybe not quite as big as the upcoming shrimp feed, or watching Jax freeze his most excellent butt off leading the parade, but big enough.” She smiled. “Okay, I’m off to hang more signs. See you!”

  “See you,” Maddie said softly and sipped her shake. She wanted to think about all Sandy had mentioned. She needed to wrap her head around the Lucky Harbor grapevine, the possibility that people were excited to have her in town, and the inn, but her brain kept stuttering on one thing.

  Jax—the mayor!—and his most excellent butt.

  Chapter 11

  “A sister is a forever friend.”

  PHOEBE TRAEGER

  That’s not a quote about men or sex,” Chloe said, scooping up another piece of pizza. She was wearing a snug black hoodie, zipped to just between her breasts. There was a single bright white word emblazed across the front—NAUGHTY.

  They were on the counter at the cottage having dinner, where they’d taken to pulling out a random Phoebe quote from the recipe box because otherwise they argued. They argued about the inn, about the sole bed in the cottage, about the cottage kitchen—mostly because only Tara could cook, but she refused, saying she was on vacation. They argued about Phoebe’s wishes, clothes… there was no sacred ground.

  Tara and Chloe were going back to their lives in a matter of days. Maddie was staying.

  So the cards were just about the only safe subject. Most of the cards were outrageous. Some were downright absurd.

  But once in a while there was a treasure, something so real, it caught Maddie like a one–two punch. A sister is a forever friend was one of them. “I like that one,” she said quietly. “I like it a lot.”

  Tara tapped her perfectly manicured nails a moment, clearly uncomfortable with Maddie’s obvious emotion. Finally, she blew out a breath and spoke with more emotion than Maddie had ever heard from her. “I agree, it’s a keeper.”

  “Aw, look at you.” Chloe nudged shoulders with her. “Going all Ya-Ya Sisterhood on us.”

  When Maddie and Tara both gave her the stink eye, she rolled her eyes. “Jeez, just lightening up the moment so we’re not reenacting a Lifetime movie.”

  Maddie sighed, then carefully put the card back in the box, hoping the quote proved to be true.

  The next evening, Jax stood behind the bar drying glasses, waiting for Ford to finish his shift so that they could go grab a late dinner. Jax had spent the day finishing up a mahogany dining room set for a client, and though he’d showered, he still smelled like wood shavings. He had two splinters in his right hand that he hadn’t been able to remove himself, and a pounding headache that he suspected was directly due to the scathing email his father had sent him earlier regarding his last visit.

  He was starting to wish he’d snagged himself a shot of 151 instead of a beer.

  Ford was down at the other end of the bar. He turned and looked at Jax, brows up.

  Jax shook his head. He was fine.

  Fine.

  A breeze hit him as the door opened, accompanied by a sizzle of awareness that zinged straight through him.

  Maddie walked in and slid onto a barstool. He took in her jeans and soft, fuzzy, oversized sweater the exact blue of her eyes and was powerless against the smile that crossed his lips. “Hey.”

  “Hey Mr. Mayor.”

  He grimaced and served her a beer. “Discovered that, did you?”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  “It never came up.”

  “It could have,” she said. “Maybe between the ‘so glad I didn’t kill you’ and, oh, I don’t know, when we played tonsil hockey.”

  “Which time?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know what I’m saying. You’ve encouraged me to blab all about myself, but you seem to have managed to remain quiet about you.”

  Yeah, and he was good at it. He came around the end of the bar and sat next to her. “In a town this size, being mayor is more of a dubious distinction than anything else.”

  “A pretty fancy dubious title.” She sipped her beer and studied him.

  He studied her right back. It’d been two days since he’d emailed her the bid. Three days since the aforementioned tonsil hockey. He’d thought of her, a lot more than he’d meant to.

  He wondered if she’d done the same.

  “So what’s the protocol here?” she wanted to know. “Do I curtsy when I see you? Kiss your ring?”

  He felt a smile curve his mouth. “A curtsy would be nice, but you don’t look like that kind of girl. And I don’t wear a ring, but I have something else you can kiss.” He tapped a finger to his lips.

  She laughed, and he decided that was the best sound he’d heard all day.

  She handed him a file folder.

  He opened it and found she’d printed his bid. He looked at what she’d circled and signed and then into her face.

  “I got my sisters to agree.”

  There was a world of emotion in her voice, though she was trying to hide it. She’d gone up against her sisters and stood her ground. “Proud of you, Maddie.”

&
nbsp; “Thanks. And you’re hired,” she said quietly. “Assuming you still want the job.”

  The job, the woman…

  “I circled what we can afford to do right now. Some of the other stuff, like the interior painting and the hauling of any demo debris, I’m going to do myself.”

  “Yourself?”

  “My sisters aren’t staying, just me. When can you start?”

  The days of working 24/7 and cultivating as many clients as he could handle, maybe even more than he could handle, were long gone. Happily gone. These days, he took only the jobs he wanted. At the moment, all he had waiting on him was a wood-trim job in town, but his materials hadn’t come yet. He also had to finish a front door design and the final touches on the dining room set. “I can start the day after tomorrow.”

  “Fair enough.”

  There was something in her voice, something she’d held back until now, and he realized she’d been avoiding direct eye contact. Removing the beer from her fingers, he set it down, then put his hands on her hips. Gently he turned her on the stool to fully face him, waiting until she tilted her head up and met his gaze.

  Yeah, there it was. Damn. Unhappiness. “You wanted this,” he murmured quietly. “The renovation on the inn.”

  “Very much.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  She looked away. “That whole superpower mind-reading thing is getting old.”

  He let his fingers do the walking, up her arm, over her throat, giving her plenty of advance warning before he cupped her jaw. Just as slowly, he brushed her long side bangs away from her right eye.

  Her breath hitched, but she didn’t pull away. The scar there was fading, and he let his thumb brush over it lightly, hating what it represented. He wanted to know the story, wanted to know how badly she’d been hurt, and whether she’d managed to give as good as she’d gotten.

  He realized that he’d tensed, and that Maddie had stopped breathing entirely. When he purposely relaxed, she responded in kind, her eyes drifting closed, and she surprised the hell out of him by tilting her head slightly so that his hand could touch more of her. His heart squeezed up good at that, and his fingers slid into her hair, and then around to cup the nape of her neck.