Storm Surge

by Celia Ashley

  Chapter 30

  “Why are you staying in the cottage, Dad? You could be here in the house.”

  Edwin shook his head. She’d gotten used to his scars in the past twenty-four hours, almost didn’t see them, only the man she was starting to remember. “I’d rather not. I was here, on and off, in hiding, which made it difficult for Liam these last few days when you were around. I saw Raleigh take you out of the house.”

  “You were in the attic?”

  Edwin nodded. “I think Raleigh suspected Liam had something of value secreted away and came looking for it the night he broke in. I wasn’t in the house at the time, fortunately. I don’t think Raleigh ever expected the thing Liam was hiding was me.”

  Paige nodded, her arms on the porch railing, hands folded as she observed the darkness lowering over the sea. “So it was you and not a ghost I saw.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’d say that. Except for the time you saw me outside The Timeless, I was very careful to avoid coming out into the open. And the night you jumped on Raleigh. I almost blew it then. I had been following him around a bit, keeping my distance, but I nearly revealed myself when I came running. Fortunately, he just took off.”

  “God, you mean you were right there? You’d think I would have sensed it or something,” Paige muttered.

  “Why?” He sounded bitter. “What kind of dad had I been that you would expect something like that?”

  She touched his arm, but said nothing. He was right, yet what kind of daughter had she been? If remembered love hadn’t been enough to make her reach out to him despite what she’d believed about the man, a need for answers should have. But she’d let it go until she thought him dead.

  “There is something in this house,” Edwin said, returning to the prior topic. “Not when you and Deb were here, but after, much later, I encountered some things I couldn’t explain. I sometimes thought it was your mother’s grandfather.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “This house used to be his. You don’t remember that? Your mom always thought her grandfather died of a broken heart when his wife drowned. I thought if that were true, maybe he was even more devastated when Deb left, and he started to haunt the place then. She was his favorite of the two sisters. Don’t ever tell your aunt I said that, though.”

  With a crooked smile, Paige promised to keep his secret. “I’ve seen a ghost on the beach, too. This place really is ‘Haunted Alcina Cove.’”

  Her father laughed.

  “I think he might have been the man Raleigh killed in front of me and Mom, but I don’t know. I guess I never really will.”

  He patted her hand where it lay on his arm. “Don’t question. Just accept. There’s so much in this world that defies explanation.”

  Paige grunted. “You remember Bea Hunt? She said something about your improper renaming of your sailboat being bad luck. She never said what you’d called it, though.”

  “Debra’s Hope. That’s what I renamed it after I learned she had cancer. Not supposed to christen a ship with a name ending in an ‘a.’ Hogwash, if you ask me. That was a sound ship and would have continued on the seas if it wasn’t for Raleigh sending it to the bottom of the ocean.”

  Paige bowed her head. “Do you think he’s dead, Dad?”

  “You’re not talking about Raleigh.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know, honey. They’ve been out all day looking for survivors. But don’t give up hope. Don’t ever give up hope.”

  He patted her hand once more and left the porch to stroll slowly in the direction of the cottage. Spooky-Shadow trotted at his side, two men growing old by the seaside. Paige released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  “Please, please don’t let him be dead.” Paige prayed in earnest, her eyes closed. She’d prayed for her mother, too, but those prayers hadn’t been answered. Or maybe they had in a way she hadn’t understood then. More than anything, Paige had wanted her mother’s suffering to end.

  Shoving her hands in her pants pockets, Paige walked down the steps to the beach. She strode in the opposite direction of the jetty and the cave beyond, picking up the occasional shell and sticking it in her pocket. Love hurt. It hurt deeply. Maybe she would have been better off without it, but it was too late now. Though she told herself over and over again he would be found, Liam’s absence left her bereft and hollow and aching.

  Night fell with remarkable softness due to the change in the atmosphere from the storm. Paige took the shells from her pocket and dumped them into the waves before turning on her heel to head back to her old home. She had no reason to stay there except lying in Liam’s bed the night before made her feel closer to him.

  A light flared on the beach ahead of her. Paige narrowed her eyes and increased her pace until she got close enough to see the hair, the beard, the outline of the coat—the absence of legs.

  Heart pounding, she continued her pursuit. The figure turned, looked back. Paige felt her knees turn to jelly. He lifted the lantern and swung it, as if urging her on. What did he want from her? She’d thought the ghost’s purpose had been to make her remember the murder on the beach. But he was still here, still beckoning.

  When Paige got within a handful of yards, the phantom dissipated, shredding like fog on a breeze. Something dark and tall moved where it once had been. Her heart leapt, first in fear and then in joy. “Oh, my God.” She ran, all physical discomfort forgotten, skidding to a halt a few steps away. “Liam, you’re not…you’re not dead, are you?”

  She heard his deep, rumbling voice over the waves. “Put your arms around me, sweetheart, and let me know.”

  She did that very thing, afraid she’d discover him an insubstantial being like the ghost who had vanished at his approach. She found him quite alive, solid and shaking and soaked to the skin. As soon as her limbs slipped around him, he collapsed against her and they dropped together to the sand.

  “Liam!”

  Paige pressed her fingertips to his throat, seeking his pulse. Locating a strong, steady beat, she shifted her position and tightened her grip around him. She kissed his forehead, his eyes, his mouth, tasting salt water on her lips.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded. Everywhere her body touched his, warmth returned to his flesh, but those places exposed to the air remained icy cold. She rubbed her hands up and down his arms in an attempt to dispel the chill. He leaned his head against hers.

  “I was trapped in that blasted cave. The storm surge threw me up into a crevice and knocked me out cold. Paige, I’m sorry about all of this.”

  “Stop. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does. Because I lied to you. All I ever wanted to do was make Raleigh pay. For the loss of my crew members. For the fact I wasn’t with Alice when she died. I had a plan…we had a plan—me, your father, the police, the Maine patrol. Even the frigging FBI. But none of us ever counted on you showing up.”

  “I bet you didn’t.” Paige chafed his hands between her own, uttering a silent prayer of thankfulness that he had survived. She released his fingers and pulled on his arm. “Must have been quite a shock when I appeared on the beach that first night. You probably crapped your pants. Now get up. We need to get you to a doctor. Now.”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Just give me a minute.”

  She struggled onto her knees, trying to drag him up with her. “A minute? I’ll give you the rest of my fucking life if you’ll have me.”

  He laughed, the low, thunderous chortle she’d come to adore. “Your mouth, Paige…”

  She grinned at him. “You love my mouth.”

  “Yes, I do, because it’s attached to the rest of you.”

  She tugged him, hard, by the shirt and elbow, knowing she at least had to get him some place warmer and out of his wet clothes. “So my admittedly foul mouth’s not a deal breaker?”

  He managed to gain his feet again and wrapped an arm around her shoul
der, leaning his weight precariously in her direction. “I love you, Paige Waters. I think I did from the first expletive you uttered in the dark. I’ll take the rest of your life, sweetheart, if you’ll take mine.”

  She pulled him close and kissed him soundly, his temperature flaring beneath her fingertips. After the doctor declared him sound, she’d make sure the rest of his body received the same treatment.

  “Deal,” she whispered against his lips. Together, they climbed up the slope toward the house. The lights shining through the windows beckoned her back to the home where she’d always belonged.

  Meet the Author

  Celia Ashley lives in rural Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, an area rich in history and beauty and from which she has drawn inspiration for many of her tales. She is the mother of three grown sons and their significant others, as well as the companion of five cats. When not writing, she is a garden enthusiast (not an expert, by any means, but growing things makes her smile) and spends time painting in a variety of mediums. Published in historical romance under the pen names Alyssa Deane and Robin Maderich, she has most recently taken to writing spicy contemporary paranormal romance as Celia Ashley, for which she has received enthusiastic reviews. Ms. Ashley is a member of the Penn Jersey Women’s Writers Guild and credits many of her fellow authors in that group for inspiration.

  Be sure to read the first book in the series, Dark Tides. Each gripping tale is set in the fictional coastal town of Alcina Cove and is a standalone novel.

  Dark Tides

  The depths of the ocean hide more secrets than one…

  When a man without a memory washes up outside her lonely seaside cottage, Meg can’t explain the connection she feels to him. She should be afraid, suspicious, even angry that he would disturb her hard-won peace. But something about Caleb Hunter calls to her. On instinct, Meg asks this stranger into her home, her life—into the place left vacant by her dead husband, who drowned at sea a year to the day before Caleb appeared.

  But something isn’t right. Half-buried memories begin to haunt Meg’s dreams, Caleb seems to know things he can’t possibly know, and there are signs that someone else is watching them, someone with a heart as cold as the sea…

  Chapter 1

  Swiping a handful of sodden hair from his eyes, Caleb Hunter scrambled upright, stepping away from the water purling around his bare feet. An expanse of sand stretched as far as he could see into a soaking fog, although beyond the crest of dune in front of him, a slate-roofed, decrepit white Victorian rose out of the shimmering haze. The house didn’t look at all familiar. Neither did the beach. Nothing did, no matter what direction he turned.

  With a deep, painful breath, Caleb considered what he did know. His name, for one. Good. He thought he might be thirty-five or thirty-six years old. Somehow, he knew he stood six-foot-one, he had brown eyes, and his nearly black hair badly needed trimming. At this point, it needed a great deal more than that, plastered with salt and sand and a bit of debris hanging in front of his eyes. Yanking a piece of seaweed from above his brow, he tossed the vegetation down, tracking its descent past the length of his naked body. He pivoted in a slow, searching circle. Not a stitch of clothing lay in the sand.

  After a moment, he lifted his hands, turning them palm up and finding them well-formed, calloused across the pad of flesh below his fingers. The skin of his fingertips had wrinkled from long immersion, and fine sand had embedded in the bend of each joint. Salt and sand encrusted the hair on his chafed arms. A black, ugly bruise throbbed on his right forearm. When he flexed his hand, the injury burned deep into the muscle. More sand coated his torso and his groin, clumped in the hair on his legs, and grated in places more private. He planted his feet apart and bent to brush the sand away, discovering this only made the situation worse.

  Dismayed by his lack of recollection, as well as his lack of garments, Caleb closed his eyes and pushed both hands through his hair. Clasping his fingers behind his neck, he frowned when he located a hard knot of tender flesh at the base of his skull. Something had struck him there. He remembered that.

  No, not something. Someone. Someone had tried to kill him.

  Shit.

  That fragment of recall brought no further revelation, but his skin crawled in reaction to a danger he couldn’t fathom, and he checked again to make certain no one else occupied the stretch of beach. Shredding fog revealed a woman approaching him from a short distance. Walking with her head down, she bent every now and then to collect small items from the water’s edge. Not knowing what else to do, Caleb sat in the sand once more, pulling his knees up close to his chin and wrapping his arms around his legs. After ascertaining he’d tucked everything neatly out of view, he waited.

  She stopped little more than a dozen feet from him, bending to pluck at a polished stone to deposit with the array of minuscule treasures on her palm. The wind fluttered the length of a dark blue shawl from her shoulders, dragging the fringed edge in the sand. Tan trousers, rolled to the knee, exposed the curve of her calf and slender feet washed by the surge of the tide as she crouched. Caleb lifted his gaze again to her face. Even at that distance, he could see her eyes were quite green and staring straight into his.

  Clutching her treasure trove against her breast, the woman straightened. Her lips moved in speech, words drowned by the low growl of the tide. Caleb cleared his parched throat, uncertain what to say as the woman continued to stare at him with an unreadable expression. After a moment, she dropped the items from her fingers into a heap on the sand and backed away, placing one bare foot behind the other, gaze never leaving his face until she turned on her heel and started an awkward run across the shifting sand. The blue shawl flew from her shoulders.

  Leaping to his feet, Caleb darted forward and snatched up the garment, draping the soft wool around his waist. He tugged the folds to cover as much of his hip area as he could. Scooping the woman’s discarded treasure into his hand, he went after her, following her toward the white house. Already a good distance ahead of him, she leaped up the long flight of wooden steps from the beach two at a time, crossing a seaside garden to a porch, where she yanked open the door and disappeared inside. Caleb paused in uncertainty. He hadn’t meant to alarm her, and she appeared frightened, not merely startled. Nevertheless, if he didn’t speak to her, he had no hope of receiving any answers to his many questions.

  Girding his determination, as well as his grip on her shawl, he set his own bare feet to the first step and climbed to a brick pathway that led through the garden. At the porch, he paused again, studying the length of the covered area, the blank face of each window for any sign she peered out at him. He found only the milky reflection on glass of the fogged-in sea.

  He walked across the porch and halted in front of the door. “Hello?” he called, listening hard.

  She responded in a muffled demand through the solid wood. “Who are you?”

  “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  Silence.

  “My name is Caleb Hunter,” he said with a crazy expectation she would throw open the door and announce him welcome, perhaps apologize for not recognizing him in his present state. Instead, he heard nothing. The door remained closed.

  “I need help.” He waited. “I thought I would return your shawl to you, but…but I have a specific need of it at the moment.”

  “Keep it,” he heard her say. The fact she had spoken again gave him a glimmer of hope.

  “I don’t know where I am,” he persisted. “I don’t know who I am,” he added, frowning down at the worn boards of the porch floor. Aloud, the statement sounded ludicrous. The brief flare of fear surging through him at his own words held no humor at all.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know who you are?”

  The door creaked open. A security chain stretched taut in the space between frame and door. Her leaf-green eyes regarded him intently from behind a fringe of honey-colored bangs.

  “I don’t remember much of anything speci
fic,” he said. “I believe I was hit on the head and…and maybe I washed up onto the beach from the ocean. I’m not sure. My name is about all I do remember with any certainty. Is the name Caleb Hunter familiar to you?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  The door shut again. Scoured by the salt winds, the light blue paint had peeled away in places to show the bare, weathered wood beneath. A moment later, the door opened again, enough for her to toss something out at him. He bent and picked up a crumpled pair of pants. Light blue fabric, heavy and faded with wear. Jeans, they were called. He remembered that. They looked like they would fit him.

  Turning his back, Caleb dropped the shells, stones, and bits of sea glass onto the lacquered surface of a nearby wicker chair. He set the shawl beside them and hastened into the jeans, grimacing as sand abraded his flesh. If the woman still stood in the doorway watching him struggle with the pants, she gave no indication. He glanced over his shoulder. Through the narrow opening, he saw nothing.

  “What was that in your hand?”

  At her question, he slowly pivoted to face the door, feeling more naked now than he had in her shawl. Talking to her half-dressed, wearing nothing but a pair of borrowed blue jeans, he contemplated picking up the shawl and draping it across his shoulders. Instead, he seized it from the floor where it had fallen and placed it beside her rescued treasure. The door opened a little more and her face appeared.

  “Your things,” he said by way of explanation. “I never meant to frighten you, to make you drop what you’d been gathering.”

  She frowned at the shells and oddments he had placed on the chair before turning her gaze to meet his. Slow to speak, she studied him a moment. “Thank you.”