If this turned out to be yet another in a long line of huge mistakes, well, Merry would just pack Alex up and hit the road. She’d done it before when she was on her own; she could do it again.
A pang hit her chest at the idea of leaving Sanctuary Island. She’d been happier here than anywhere she’d ever lived.
But her happiness was nothing compared to keeping Alex safe and giving him what he needed to grow up better than Merry had. And one of the things she hadn’t had was two loving parents.
So here she was.
“Turn here,” Ben said abruptly, pointing at a roughly carved sign tacked to a pine tree. The words ISLEAWAY FARM were etched and shaded with black lettering, charming and rustic. But that wasn’t the only sign.
As Merry slowed the car to accommodate the rocky gravel of the winding driveway, she saw at least five signs warning against trespassing on private property. “Not a big fan of company, are you?” she asked, sneaking a sideways glance at his drawn, tense face.
Looking as if the day had worn him out more than he’d like to admit, Ben tipped his head against the passenger seat’s headrest. “I don’t mind certain people’s company,” he allowed grudgingly. “But most of the world is better experienced at a distance … not on my front porch. And there are other considerations.”
“Like what?” Merry asked, to keep him talking. She didn’t want him falling asleep before she could maneuver him out of the car and onto a horizontal surface.
“You’ll see in a minute,” he replied with a drowsy, secret smile that did strange things to her insides.
In the backseat, Alex started up one of his achingly adorable nonsense conversations that mostly consisted of repeating “Ba!” over and over. Merry couldn’t wait for the day when he actually connected what he was saying to a real thought, but she knew he wasn’t quite there yet.
Ben, on the other hand, sat bolt upright in his seat and swiveled to stare into the back of the car. “Is that his first word? Stop the car! We should be recording this!”
“Relax.” Merry laughed a little, warmth tingling through her. Ben might not like most of the world, but he sure liked Alex. Not surprising, since her baby boy was practically perfect in every way. But it still made her happy. “He’s only four months old! He doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s just talking.”
Cocking his head down, Ben gave her a severe look from under his dark brows. “Maybe most four-month-old children—and in fact, most adults—talk just to hear themselves speak, but Alex is different. He’s smart. Look at him! He’s trying to communicate with us.”
Merry flicked a glance at the rearview mirror. Her smart kid was scowling fiercely, almost growling “Ba!” at his own sock-clad feet as they kicked in the car seat. His arms were outstretched, chubby fingers spread to try and catch the elusive feet waving through the air, without a lot of success.
“What do you think he’s trying to say?” she asked Ben, amused.
Ben gave her an irritated snort. “Maybe that his feet are too hot. Here, little man.” He reached over the seat back and helped Alex remove his socks. Alex, as if determined to prove Ben right, kicked gleefully and shouted “Ba!” with every evidence of real joy.
“See?” Ben shot her a triumphant look. “Sometimes a man wants his feet bare.”
Merry narrowed a mock glare in his direction. “Is this how it’s going to be? You two boys ganging up on me?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to call them back. Ben’s connection with Alex was a huge part of the reason she’d said yes to this crazy scheme—she didn’t want to do anything, ever, to shake Ben out of that.
Even if there was a tiny, dumb part of her that wished he’d look at her with the same level of intense interest, pride, and love he reserved for Alex, shining from his gray eyes.
But Ben didn’t appear to be shaken by Merry’s teasing. Instead, a slow, pleased smile creased his handsome face. “Not to worry, Mom. I don’t think there’s much chance of anyone taking your place in Alex’s heart.”
Merry, who hadn’t worried about that for an instant, smiled back. “Even if I smother him and turn him into a momma’s boy?”
Wincing, Ben squeezed his eyes shut. “Not gonna let me forget that anytime soon, are you?”
“Welcome to married life,” she told him. “Where anything you say can and will be used against you the next time we fight.”
“We won’t fight,” Ben protested, blinking owlishly. He was starting to drift again, Merry noted with concern. “That’s the advantage of spelling everything out rationally and logically before the wedding. No misconceptions or disappointments later on.”
Merry hoped that was true, although she couldn’t shed the conviction that no amount of logic or rationality would be enough to prevent Ben from disappointing her someday. Everyone did, eventually—it was better to be prepared.
Before she could come up with a response, the car pulled up to a closed gate stretched across the driveway with yet another NO TRESPASSING sign hung on the top rung.
“I’ll get it,” Ben said, struggling with his seat belt. Which gave Merry plenty of time to roll her eyes, put the car in park, and hop out to deal with the gate herself.
“Not exactly how I pictured this,” Ben muttered when Merry got back in the car.
Merry’s heartbeat quickened even as she gave him a casual, “No?”
She liked that he’d thought about what it would be like to bring Alex and Merry home with him for the first time.
“I didn’t think I’d be nearly blinded by a headache,” he griped, then his eyes widened. “Watch out!”
Jerking her attention back to the drive, Merry instinctively wrenched the wheel and slammed on the brakes. The car screeched to a stop, narrowly missing a shocked-looking black-and-white nanny goat.
With an irate bleat, the goat scurried and hopped off the driveway, dainty cloven hooves skittering in the gravel. The goat had only three legs.
Merry blinked. “Is that why you had the gate closed?”
“One of the reasons.” Ben sounded resigned as he rolled down his window. “Go on, Missy! She doesn’t understand about cars. Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” Merry said faintly, nudging the car back into a steady crawl across a wide, grassy yard dotted with tall pine trees. She could barely discern the outline of a house through the tree trunks. “Are there … more?”
“Missy’s the only goat,” Ben said, shifting in his seat. “But there are a few others.”
He wasn’t kidding. The drive up to the low front porch took less than five minutes, and in that time, at least seven dogs of varying breeds and mobility mobbed the car, barking their heads off. A giant calico cat with a short stub instead of a tail streaked out of sight under the porch steps, and when Merry parked the car, she was sure she caught the distinctive crow of a rooster coming from behind the house. “You have your own zoo!”
Ben stiffened, pausing in the process of getting himself unbuckled. “No cages,” he pointed out tersely.
“A free-range zoo,” Merry amended, hurrying around the car to help Ben out. He shook her off, though, and instead of arguing, Merry shrugged and bent over the backseat to grab Alex. “He’s going to love this. Do you have any sheep? Sheep are his favorite.”
There was only silence from Ben. Straightening up with Alex in her arms, Merry looked around to see Ben watching her with surprise brightening his eyes. “What?” she asked, fighting the urge to smooth her hair down. That was a lost cause, and had been for the last four months.
Ben stared hard at her, as if trying to read her thoughts. “You’re not … weirded out?”
“By what?”
“All this!” Ben flung his arms out to the sides, and had a passel of excited dogs immediately jumping and pawing at his thighs, eager and enthusiastic about greeting their master after his long absence. “It’s not exactly normal to have this many pets.”
“Not for most people, I guess.” Merry gazed
around the yard, taking it all in. “But you’re a vet. I think it would be weirder if you didn’t love animals enough to keep a lot of pets. These guys aren’t exactly pets, though, are they?”
*
Shoving the dogs down and away, Ben surreptitiously held his left hand curled into a loose fist at the right level for Cassiopeia to sniff. The small Doberman mix was the newest addition to his little pack, and she still depended heavily on rituals like the welcome-home scenting to feel comfortable at Isleaway.
“They’re not house pets, if that’s what you mean,” Ben said, deliberately evasive. “I’m gone from home for long stretches of time. It’s only practical to give them the run of the property instead of cooping them up in kennels inside.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Merry moved around to the trunk of the car, clearly intending to juggle her squirming infant and his diaper bag while unpacking the rest of their luggage.
Ben shoved her aside as gently and firmly as he could. “Go on up to the porch,” he told her. “I’ll get the rest of this stuff.”
“You’re injured!”
“I’m not an invalid,” he growled, scowling away the wooziness of leaning over to drag Merry’s duffel out of the trunk. “It was a bump on the head, not a pair of broken arms and a severed spinal column.”
“Fine, be a big dumb man about it. I’m only thinking of your health and well-being.” Merry dropped the diaper bag on the ground with an exasperated hmph and hitched Alex higher on her shoulder.
Ben watched them march up to the porch, his heart lifting with every step she took. Alex tangled his little Vienna-sausage fingers in the dark brown curls waving over Merry’s shoulders, and stared around this loud, chaotic new universe with enormous eyes.
Ben slung the duffel strap across his chest, picked up the diaper bag, and waded through the swarm of furry, wriggling bodies to follow his own personal Florence Nightingale up the porch steps.
“I’m sorry,” she said, the instant he stepped foot on the sanded pine boards of the porch floor. “I don’t know what possessed me—the spirit of a shrewish, nagging wife, I guess. But I’m over it now, and it won’t happen again.”
Ben’s chest clutched like a fist. “Don’t apologize. I was a jerk, that’s not your fault. I know you were trying to be helpful.” He struggled for a moment, then forced out, “I guess I’m not used to needing help.”
Merry, who’d been holding herself rigid and stiff, softened visibly. “I know. You’re used to being the one who does the helping.”
He felt uncomfortably exposed all of a sudden, as if Merry’s low voice had the power to strip away skin, hair, everything external, and leave only raw nerves behind. Ben busied himself with unlocking the front door.
“Like with your menagerie out there,” Merry went on, soft and relentless. “When I said they weren’t pets, I meant … you didn’t buy them from a breeder or a pet shop or something, did you?”
Ben shook his head, focusing on keeping his hand from trembling and jiggling the key out of the lock.
“They’re rescues, aren’t they,” Merry murmured. “All of them.”
“If you hate the animals, too bad. It’s a package deal, they come with the house and the trust fund.”
Ben heard the roughness of his own voice and regretted it as soon as he saw the way Merry’s eyes widened. “I never said I hated them. Who could hate a bunch of rescue animals?”
“My ex-wife,” Ben said, watching Merry closely. “She said I had a tendency to bring home strays—and at first, she liked it. Thought it was sweet or something, evidence of my inner goodness. But after a while, it got old.”
As he’d hoped, Merry zeroed in on the key piece of new information. “Ex-wife? You’ve been married before?”
“Years ago,” Ben confirmed. No point keeping it a secret; it was bound to come up eventually, and it would seem odd if he’d never mentioned Ashley. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
“I’m not worried,” Merry denied, with a very worried frown wrinkling her brow. “I just … didn’t know you’d been married before. It seems like the kind of thing you should know about your fiancé.”
“That’s why I’m mentioning it.” Ben got the door open—time to oil that ancient lock again—and led Merry into the dark foyer. “Careful on the floors—I waxed the hardwood last week, and they’re still a little slippery.”
“Oh my gosh,” Merry said as she lifted her gaze to the rainbow of light pouring in through the stained-glass window. “Ben. This place is…”
“My pride and joy.” He laughed, but he was serious. “I moved to Sanctuary after the divorce, to get away from all the memories. And to escape my parents’ embarrassingly unsubtle attempts to marry me off to one of the daughters of someone else in the tennis and country club set.”
“I’ve never played tennis,” Merry said faintly, her gaze moving over the furniture Ben had spent happy, solitary hours picking out from local craftsmen’s shops.
“You haven’t missed anything,” Ben told her. “It’s dull. I came here because I needed a change. I wanted a different kind of life than Ashley and I had in Richmond. And Sanctuary couldn’t be more different if it were on another planet.”
“Ashley,” Merry murmured, then appeared to shake herself free of something. She turned bright, determined eyes on him, and Ben swallowed hard against the surge of joy it gave him to see her standing in his home. His private sanctuary.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he told her. It felt like the words were ripped from him against his will.
She flushed a pretty pink and tightened her hold on Alex, who seemed to have decided it would be fun to launch himself out of her arms in a backward swan dive. “Are you tired? You should lie down and rest. Alex and I will just … hang out here until it’s time to wake you up and make sure you haven’t lapsed into a coma.”
Frustrated, Alex chose that moment to open his mouth and loose an earsplitting wail. Despite himself, Ben raised his brows in shock.
“That’s some impressive lung capacity, right there.”
Merry gave a rueful laugh. “Yeah, I think he’s got a future as an opera singer, if he wants it. Alex, baby, come on. You’re fine.” She made a face in Ben’s direction. “I’m sorry, it’s been a couple of hours since he ate, he’s probably hungry.”
The crying continued unabated, Merry’s cheeks going redder and redder. And Ben realized with a start that Alex must still be breast-feeding. Merry probably wanted privacy to feed her child.
“Oh! Let me give you the fifty-cent tour,” he rapped out, striding off down the hall. He waved to his left. “Kitchen! On the right, dining room. And down here,” he continued as he opened the last door on the left, “are the bedrooms.”
He put her duffel and the bulging diaper bag at the end of the queen-sized guest-room bed. Giving the room a cursory inspection, Ben wondered if she could tell she was the first person who’d ever stayed in it.
“It’s beautiful,” Merry said, sounding as enchanted as anyone could with an armful of screaming infant. “Who decorated this place for you?”
Now it was Ben’s turn to feel his cheeks burn. “No one.”
Pausing in the act of reaching to finger the velvety nap of the wine-colored throw blanket folded over the foot of the bed, Merry shot him a surprised glance. “You did this yourself?”
He shrugged. “I like to support local artisans. There’s a lady who weaves her own cloth up on Honeysuckle Ridge, and the guy who made all the furniture in here lives just down the road in one of the seaside cottages.”
Merry stared at him over the head of her baby, who was snuffling into her neck like he might find a hidden nipple behind her ear. “I’ve known you for half a year. You’ve been on this island for, what? Seven years. But no one here knows you at all, do they? Least of all me.”
Chapter Ten
As always, the act of feeding Alex did at least as much to calm her as it did to stop his tears.
The intense
feeling of closeness, the private, intimate connection nourished something deep in Merry’s soul as surely as it fed Alex his dinner. She loved the way he’d close his dimpled fist around the bunched-up cotton of her T-shirt, and the way his cloudy blue eyes would flutter shut in sleepy ecstasy. There was nothing on the planet softer than the fine-grained silk of Alex’s rosy cheeks, or the wisp of black hair on his head.
Merry absently combed that hair into a messy fauxhawk feathering up from the center of his scalp and thought about what she’d gotten them into.
On paper, Ben Fairfax was quite the catch. Well educated, successful, rich, good with kids and animals, inconveniently hot, and also, apparently, a talented interior decorator.
So why was she having second thoughts?
This whole idea had felt so much safer and easier when she could think of Ben as that cranky, grumpy misanthrope who uncharacteristically adored her son. Now that she was at his home—which would be their home if she went through with this, a thought that made her shiver hard enough to nearly dislodge Alex from his lazy sucking—Ben was acquiring layers. Nuance.
And Merry couldn’t help but be intrigued.
Which was a bad sign. If her past with men was any indication, Merry being intrigued by Ben equaled Ben hiding some hideous secret, like a pierced penis, a current girlfriend, or the fact that he lived with his mother.
Merry knew herself well enough to know that she could not pick ’em. But Ben was supposed to be different. He was supposed to be the smart choice. Rational. Safe.
But how safe could he be when Merry’s stupid, stupid body went up in flames whenever he was nearby?
As if Ben could sense the coldness of Merry’s feet, a sudden knock sounded on the guest room door.
“Figured Alex wasn’t the only one who might be hungry, so I heated up some soup. You want?”
Merry glanced down to check on Alex’s progress with lunch, and found his head lolling back on his little neck, his pink mouth pursed in slumber. Moving carefully to keep from waking him, Merry stood up from the all-too-comfortable rocking chair in the corner and cracked the door enough to peer out.
Shoreline Drive (Sanctuary Island) Page 10