Carolina Home

by Virginia Kantra

  “It’s okay. I want to help.”

  Richard stared at her broodingly. “That’s what you always say. One of these days, little girl, you’ll learn you can’t solve the whole world’s problems.”

  Allison regarded her parents with love and exasperation.

  All of her life, she’d told herself that they weren’t bad people. A little selfish, a little self-absorbed, a little controlling, maybe, but not bad.

  But for the first time, she understood them. Because when she was with Josh and Taylor, she felt the same need to intervene, to manage, to protect.

  The difference was she wasn’t a little girl anymore.

  “Joshua,” she said quietly, “take my parents’ bags to their car, will you? They have a plane to catch.”

  “You could come with us,” Marilyn said. “Just for a drink at the airport. There’s time.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’m needed here.”

  “You’re only doing this for that man,” her mother said. Josh stopped dead in the doorway. Oblivious, Marilyn continued, “When you come to your senses—”

  “I’m doing this for me,” Allison said. “I love you, Mom and Dad, but this is my life now. My choice. My home.”

  As soon as she said the words, she felt an incredible lightness, as if a burden had evaporated from her shoulders. The sudden relief made her dizzy.

  Buoyed by the rightness of her decision, she got to her feet. Kissed her parents’ cheeks. “Have a safe trip. Call me when you get to Philadelphia.”

  Marilyn wavered. “Well, really, I…”

  “Come on, Marilyn.” Richard surprised Allison with a brief, hard hug. “Allison’s right. We’ll miss our flight.”

  They left.

  Allison nodded to Josh. He went into the hall to grab her mother’s bag. She heard the front door open and close, open and close, and Josh’s footsteps returning in the hall. When he came back into the kitchen, she was almost finished bandaging Taylor’s knees.

  “Thanks, Miss Carter.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “It’s Allison,” she told them. She patted Taylor’s shoulder as she rose again to her feet and then, unable to help herself, kissed the top of her head. “Why didn’t you guys come to find me in the first place? Back at school.”

  Josh shrugged.

  “We’re not supposed to bother you,” Taylor said.

  Something lit inside Allison, a flare of indignation, a burning coal of resolve. “You are not a bother. You come get me anytime. You can call me anytime.”

  Josh nodded, unimpressed.

  “What if you’re not there?” Taylor asked.

  Allison looked at Joshua, narrowing her eyes.

  “Dad said you might be leaving,” he said, his voice flat, his face expressionless.

  The way his mother had left.

  And Taylor’s.

  Allison sucked in her breath. Her head pounded. Her tongue felt weighted. This was important; she had to get this right. She couldn’t overstep or lead them on. She had no official connection to these children other than her role as Joshua’s teacher. All she could offer them was her love. And her honesty.

  “I don’t want to leave. And I’d never go without telling you.”

  Lame, she thought. They deserved better.

  She tried again. “I’m here now. For as long as you need me.” The back door opened behind her, but in her struggle to do the right thing, to say the right words, she barely noticed. “Even if you don’t need me, I’m here.”

  Josh’s gaze flicked beyond her. His eyes widened.

  “We need you,” Matt said quietly.

  She whirled, her heart leaping into her throat.

  Matt stood in the open kitchen door, shaved and showered and holding a giant pot in foiled paper, spilling pink ruffled blooms and glossy dark leaves.

  She swallowed hard. “How much did you hear?”

  “Not enough.” He strolled forward, a warm, deep glow in his dark blue eyes. “That’s okay. I have some things I need to say to you first.”

  Josh grinned. “Come on,” he said to Taylor. “They don’t need us.”

  Matt didn’t take his eyes from Allison. “Yeah, we do. Just not at the moment. I have things to say,” he repeated.

  But when the kids were gone, he didn’t seem in any hurry to speak.

  She waited, trembling on the edge of hope. Afraid to jump.

  He set the pot on the kitchen counter.

  “That’s beautiful,” she said to fill the silence. “For your mother?”

  “It’s a camellia. For you.”

  She melted. “Oh.”

  “I didn’t want to give you cut flowers.” He raked his fingers through his hair. Shoved both hands in his pockets. “Because of the poem.”

  It was so not what she was expecting him to say that she gaped. “What poem?”

  “The tattoo one. I looked it up online.”

  The sunlight slanting through the kitchen windows fired the yellow hearts of the flowers to flame. Understanding unfurled in her heart. Not flowers that had been picked, but living blooms.

  Tough, terse, taciturn fisherman Matt Fletcher had bought her a plant. Was Googling poetry. Because of her.

  She beamed. “That is quite possibly the most romantic thing I ever heard.”

  “I can do better. I want to do better. For you.” He cleared his throat. “In the poem, that guy’s up on the hill alone. But at the end of the day, he looks down and sees the lights go on.”

  She trembled, overcome that he’d read and remembered. “Matt…”

  “He sees the light,” Matt repeated, looking directly into her eyes. “And that’s how he finds his way home. You are my light, Allison. My reason to come off the mountain. My home.”

  A flood of joy rose inside her, lifting her to the summit. She couldn’t speak or breathe.

  He took her hands between both of his. Strong, steady hands. Working man’s hands. “I gave you the plant to…hell, to ask you to put down roots, I guess. To stay with us. To grow with me.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Matt drew back to study her face. “Yes?”

  “Yes, I love you. Yes, I’ll marry you.” She closed her eyes. “Please tell me that’s what you were asking.”

  His laughter shook them both. He swept her into his arms, his mouth finding and taking hers. “Yes. Marry me, Allison.”

  They kissed a long time.

  “I can’t leave Dare Island,” he told her eventually. “Not now, maybe not for a couple of years. I have responsibilities here, the kids, my parents. I don’t know if it’s fair to ask you to wait that long, to take me on, to take all of us on. But God knows I love you. I need you. As long as I’ve got you, we can work everything else out.”

  Her life was changing around her, full of light and life and joy. Her future stretched before her, bright and limitless as the sea.

  “I want to stay,” she said honestly. “I love my job, I love the island. I love you, Matt. I want to make my home with you, wherever you are.”

  He looked back at her, his lazy smile lighting his eyes with love. “You are my home,” he said. “My parents taught me that. Everything else is just a house.”

  Turn the page for a special preview of

  Carolina Girl

  Meg Fletcher returns to Dare Island

  and faces her past—as well as her future.

  Coming in 2013 from Berkley Sensation

  AT THIRTY-FOUR, MEGAN Fletcher was determined not to turn into her mother.

  She settled behind her desk on the forty-seventh floor, stowing her Louis Vuitton bag away in the bottom right-hand drawer. Aside from her piled inbox, the gleaming surface was almost bare, every file in order, every pen in place. She rubbed absently at a fingerprint. Maybe she had inherited Tess Fletcher’s compulsive tidiness, Meg admitted to herself. But image was important. An uncluttered workspace was a sign of an organized mind.

  She set her BlackBerry within reach. S
he’d deliberately kept her schedule free to deal with the long to-do list that had accumulated in her absence.

  Her mother made lists, too, stuck on the refrigerator or scrawled by the phone. But while her mother spent her days making beds and baking cookies, readying guest rooms and running errands, Meg oversaw a department of thirty people and an advertising budget of seventy-four million dollars.

  Meg slipped off her Vera Wang snakeskin pumps, surreptitiously wiggling her toes under her desk.

  It was good to be back.

  She surveyed her domain with satisfaction: the tasteful artwork chosen by a design firm, the waxy green plants watered and replaced as needed by a plant service, the sliver of Manhattan skyline visible through her window. Her private conference room, accessible through glass pocket doors.

  Back in charge. Back in control.

  Four weeks ago, her brother had called with the devastating news that their mother had been badly injured in a car accident.

  Their dad had retired from the Marines twenty years ago, but in a crisis, the Fletchers still functioned as a military family. Back to back to back.

  Despite Franklin Life’s recent acquisition of Parnassus Insurance—making this absolutely the worst time for Meg to be away, Derek had pointed out—Meg had dropped everything to rush home to North Carolina. She’d thrown herself into the details of her mother’s care, quizzing doctors, advocating with nurses, spending nights at the hospital so their father could snatch a few hours’ sleep at a nearby motel.

  Thank God for Derek. Derek Chapman, the company’s tall, blond, ambitious chief financial officer, had kept Meg in the loop. He wasn’t only a member of the transition team; he was the man Meg loved. She believed him when he told her this acquisition was good for the company and good for them. A larger organization meant more responsibilities, more opportunities, and more money.

  But even from six hundred miles away, Meg had felt the tremors of the merger move through the company like aftershocks. From her mother’s hospital room, with its lousy cell phone coverage and crappy internet connection, she’d done her best to cope with press inquiries and her staff’s jitters.

  Now that she was back, it was her job to handle the necessary layoffs as humanely and discreetly as possible, out of view of the media.

  Friday afternoon, she thought, docking her laptop. Any announcements of future personnel cuts should go out at the end of the week, the end of the news cycle.

  She powered up her Keurig and her laptop at the same time, intending to review the latest joint press release from her counterpart at Parnassus while her coffee brewed. But when she attempted to log on to the company network, an error message popped onscreen. Incorrect password.

  Irritation flickered. Her password had worked fine all weekend. And this morning.

  Frowning, she tried again. Same result. It just figured that on her first day back the system would go wonky.

  She picked up her phone. Dead.

  Dammit. She didn’t have time for this crap.

  Barefoot, she padded across her office and stuck her head out the door. “Tracy, can you please give IS a call? My computer and my phone are all screwed up.”

  “Will do,” her assistant said cheerfully. “And Stan just called. He wants to see you.”

  Stanley Parks, the chief operating officer. Meg’s boss. “What time?” she asked.

  “As soon as you’re free, he said. He’s in the conference room now. He sounded really stressed out.”

  Meg’s adrenaline surged. Another crisis brewing. Another opportunity to shine. This is what she did, what she lived for.

  She slipped on her pumps and strode down the hall like a batter approaching the plate, muscles loose, brain focused. It felt good to be back in the game.

  FIRED.

  Meg stared blindly out the cab window at the gray blur of Manhattan rumbling by, her personal possessions in a cardboard box on the seat beside her.

  “Forced to let you go,” Stan had said, not quite meeting her eyes. The familiar, falsely reassuring phrases thumped into her like stones.

  Until an hour ago, when she’d still held the power of hiring and firing, before she’d been escorted to the street and deposited on the curb like so much garbage, she’d been the one to use those same words herself. “Eliminating redundant positions across the board,” she’d written in press releases. “Human Resources will assist you with the transition process,” she’d said kindly, passing the tissue box across her desk.

  She had always prided herself on handling such situations compassionately and professionally. “I understand you feel that way,” she had murmured, secure in her job, her record, her stringent standards of performance.

  Betrayal seared her throat like bile. She hadn’t understood at all.

  The words didn’t matter. The tone didn’t change a thing.

  She’d been dumped. Sacked. Axed.

  She wanted to throw up.

  Tomorrow she would make a list. Make a plan. But now she wanted to crawl off like a wounded animal, to curl into a fetal ball in the closet and suck her kneecaps. Maybe huddled in the dark beside her untouched golf clubs and unused tennis racket, she could begin to sort through the hot mess of her emotions. The ruins of her career.

  She had worked for Franklin Insurance since her graduation from Harvard, earning her MBA from Columbia at night, steadily rising through the ranks, every grade, every performance review, every promotion another rung on her personal ladder of success. Never look down, never look back.

  Until she’d walked into that conference room and saw Judi Green from HR sitting with a stone-faced Stan, Meg had never suspected that her own job could be in jeopardy.

  That she could be considered replaceable. Dispensable.

  “This acquisition shook things up for all of us.” Stan had frowned down at the folder open in front of him. “Your absence at such a critical time for the organization was…noticed.”

  The unfairness of it hit her like a slap. Heat whipped her face. “Stan, my mother was in the hospital. I was in touch with you every day. You told me to go. You told me everything would be fine.”

  Derek had told her everything would be fine, too.

  Derek.

  The smell of the cab assaulted her nostrils. Her stomach churned.

  He must not know. He would have stopped this. Despite his position on the transition team, the other officers must have kept it from him. And if Derek wasn’t in the loop…

  She moistened her lips, sick at heart, frightened for him. What if Derek had been blindsided, too?

  For the past six years, their corporate fortunes had been hitched together. “We make a good team,” he’d said the first time he asked her out at a company retreat in Arizona.

  She’d been flattered. Derek was perfect for her new life; intelligent, ambitious, career-focused.

  After they returned to the city, it had become routine for them to spend Wednesday and Saturday nights together. With Derek, she never had to make excuses for working late or explain why she was too tired for sex. Soon she had a toothbrush at his place, closet space, a drawer. She had measured the progress of their relationship the same way she’d tracked the rise of her career. In increments.

  Two years after Derek had been named chief financial officer, three months after Meg’s promotion to vice president of marketing, Derek had suggested they buy the condo together.

  What would they do now, if they both lost their jobs?

  She needed to know that he was all right. That they were all right. Instinctively, she reached for her BlackBerry.

  It was gone.

  She stared at the empty pocket, a pit opening in the center of her chest. Her electronic lifeline had been stripped from her along with her company laptop and corporate credit card, her ID badge and office key. She clenched her empty hand into a fist.

  “Fifteen dollars and seventy cents,” the taxi driver said.

  She looked up. The cab was double-parked outside the discreet l
imestone façade of her Central Park West address.

  She fumbled for a bill—a twenty—and thrust it through the glass divider. Almost a thirty percent tip. Now that she was unemployed, she ought to curtail her expenses, she thought with the part of her brain that continued to function. Set a budget. Live within her means.

  She climbed out of the cab, dragging the box across the seat. All the years of working, of scraping, of getting by, rose like a bad smell from the gutter to haunt her.

  She took a deep breath, willing her stomach to settle.

  She was hardly destitute. Her severance package included a year’s salary and health insurance. But the down payment on the condo—an investment in her future with Derek, she’d told herself at the time—had taken most of her savings. She could be out of a job for months.

  The doorman sprang forward to take the cardboard carton from her arms.

  Meg clutched the box tighter, all she had left of twelve years with the company; her two framed diplomas and a photograph of her family, her makeup bag, an extra pair of shoes.

  No pictures of Derek. Their relationship didn’t violate company protocol. She reported to Stan, not Derek. But even though they were generally acknowledged as a couple, Derek didn’t feel it was appropriate to advertise their liaison at the office.

  “I’ve got it. Thanks, Luis.”

  The doorman frowned, a solid, graying man in his sixties, round in the middle like a whiskey barrel. Luis had been at the building longer than she had. He might have to put up with rain and rude residents, but at least he had job security. “Let me give you a hand to your apartment.”

  She forced her numb lips to curve into a smile. “No, no, I’m okay.”

  His warm brown eyes narrowed in concern. “You sure? No offense, but you don’t look so good.”

  A remark like that to another tenant could have gotten him in trouble. But Luis knew Meg, knew she had worked her way through college waiting tables and scrubbing toilets.

  “You don’t need to share all the details of your personal life with the doorman, darling,” Derek had chided.

  But Luis had a grandson, Meg had a brother, in Afghanistan. It made a bond.