Half Moon Harbor

by Donna Kauffman

  “We’re still discussing those particulars, but yes, it would have to be here.”

  “Here,” she repeated, then pointed downward. “As in here, here.”

  “Aye.” He was realizing that her shock wasn’t actually one of stunned excitement. More simply stunned. He wasn’t sure exactly why, but she didn’t look very happy.

  “It will be great for your boatbuilding business as well.” She was almost talking to herself. She looked back at the plans, and even in her current state, her expression melted a little. “You’re going to build this here, too. Right here,” she added faintly.

  And then he realized where she was going with this. He’d thought about it while talking to Brooks, but so many things had happened since then, that part had gotten lost in the shuffle. “Aye.”

  “How long?” She looked from the plans, to him, to the plans. “Wouldn’t this take . . . years?”

  “No. Back during the time when they built such schooners, when the shipyard was running at full capacity, they could build this in under nine months.”

  Her gaze swung to his; she was gaping. “No way.”

  He nodded. “That won’t be the case with this ship, but once the actual building is underway, assuming I can get the right labor, I’ve got it scheduled out for fourteen months, from the laying down to the launch. Eighteen tops. It can’t start right off, as I need to do a complete renovation and reinstallation of the lumber works and ironworks in the main boathouse and”—he blew out a breath on a half laugh—“so many other things.” He touched her arm. “But no, it will not be a peaceful and serene environment here. I know you probably have this idyllic vision of this place, but you bought a building that is part of a shipyard.”

  “A shipyard I thought was defunct and abandoned.”

  “For a day. Then you found out it wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t know what you planned here. I thought it was going to be kind of like what you’re doing out on the pier boathouse. Just . . . not huge. And certainly not that.” She gestured to the plans but didn’t look at them.

  “I never dreamed I’d have the opportunity to truly bring the yard back to its former glory.”

  “Were you going to relaunch a full lumber mill and ironworks as part of your original plan?”

  “A far more limited version of it, yes. I had hoped to section off part of the building and add on more space up the hill for actual indoor construction to allow us more months of the year to work.”

  “Us. Who is us?”

  He shrugged. “Whoever I hire or bring on to work with me. I don’t want to bring all this back and have it be only about me. It can’t be. You’re talking about heritage and building something. My ancestors already did that. But I’m not going to go through all of this simply so I can personally build a few boats. I could have stayed in Ireland and done that.”

  “So . . . you dream of having a bunch of little Monaghans and seeing them take this over?”

  He looked at her quizzically, unsure of what she meant by that; it hadn’t sounded like a ringing endorsement. “I don’t know. Perhaps someone from back home will want to come over. I don’t know what my personal future holds, but my sisters have no compunction about procreating. As I said, we Monaghans are overachievers in that particular arena. My three older sisters are all married and have started families. I realize that their children don’t bear the Monaghan name, but they have Monaghan blood, and for me, that’s enough. If not a relative, then perhaps someone who comes to work here will take up the passion. Mostly I don’t want the craft of wood shipbuilding to die out. The business doesn’t have to bear the Monaghan name, but I do want what my family spent generations building to continue in some form or fashion.” He paused and took a breath, realizing he was going from passionate to defensive and that wasn’t what he wanted. “You yourself called it an art. Well, I agree. And it’s a dying one. I’m trying to resurrect it.”

  She listened, she took it all in, then she turned back to look at the plans, staying silent. He didn’t know what was going through her mind.

  “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, isn’t it?” She lifted a hand, signaling it was a rhetorical question. “I can’t even begin to imagine how excited you must be. And that is . . . well, it’s awesome in the truest meaning of the word. I am happy for you, thrilled for you.”

  But. He heard the word; she didn’t even have to say it.

  “You say eighteen months, tops, so, not forever, not much longer than it will take to get the inn built and open, and no time, really, in the bigger picture of things. Even the building phase will be a huge tourist draw, so I get that it’s good for me, too.” She was talking herself through it. “But . . . lumber mills and shipbuilding and . . .”

  “Things that aren’t peaceful and serene and quiet,” he finished gently. He turned her to him, hands on her arms. “Not the romantic, picturesque, seaside inn of your dreams, perhaps?”

  She shook her head, then surprised him by making a but, what are you going to do? face and shrugging.

  No pouting, swearing, whining, though he suspected if she were in private she’d have done all three. He knew she was quite adept at that second one, at any rate. Ultimately, though, she was simply, well . . . taking it. He wondered how often she’d had to do that. She was rather too good at it.

  “Where did the urge for this inn come from?” he asked, knowing he should be thankful she was handling the disappointment, perhaps even feeling a modicum of smug satisfaction that her dreams were being a bit tainted as his had been when she’d bought his property out from under him. But he wasn’t feeling either of those things. He wanted her to want her dream so strongly that she’d be, well, angry if it wasn’t going how she wanted. To fight for what she wanted. If she wasn’t willing to get angry and fight for this big dream of hers . . . what was to say she’d fight for their relationship? Because no way was that going to be always smooth going. “You want a foundation for future generations to be proud of, so why not your own law offices or something? Why an inn?”

  “It’s not so much that I want future generations to be innkeepers; I think it’s more . . . making a place they can call home. A place that they’d think of, identify themselves with, think back on fondly if they move on to other paths.” She looked at him starkly. “I didn’t have that. I have—had—a condo in Alexandria, a city I wasn’t tied to except by its proximity to my job, which I took because it was a good offer. The city was okay. D.C. is certainly striking in history and architecture and all that. But the only real connection I ever felt to it, the only one that was personal to me, was the river. My time on the water.”

  “So what makes Blueberry Cove different?”

  “Ford,” she said simply. “He’s the only connection I have left to anything. If I got here and hated it, or if the situation between us made staying in the same place untenable—though I couldn’t see how it could be any worse than it was, considering it was nothing—I’d have done something else, figured out something else. But I got here . . . and I loved it. I connected immediately to the water, the coast. I knew right away that I wanted my inn to be on the water. It’s not like the river, and it’s not about sculling. But I quickly realized it’s more about my connection to the water, to the . . . I don’t know, the primal element of it. So that, plus Ford . . .” She trailed off, lifted a shoulder. “It’s not just as good a place as any. It’s a specific place that has meaning to him, and now meaning to me. Hopefully, if I’m lucky, I can create something to pass down to whoever comes next.”

  “Because you plan on makin’ a bunch of babies, do ye?” he teased, but gently.

  She took it as intended, making a quick, but cute face at him. “Or maybe Ford will. Or maybe the Maddox clan will simply die out here. But it won’t be without me at least trying to leave something meaningful behind. Meaningful to me. And that’s not a job, not even the inn. It’s just . . .”

  “Home,” he said, knowing what she meant. Intimately. Something
else twinged in his heart. “I know something of that.”

  She looked into his face, and he realized from her expression that he’d let some of the plaintive emotion home evoked in him come out in his voice. “Do you miss Ireland?” she asked more quietly. “Do you miss home, your family? Are they proud of you even if they think you should be doing what they’re doing?”

  He nodded. “I think they believe this is foolhardy and I will give up eventually and come home, but, in their own way, I think they do support me finding my own way. Much as they’d rather it be their way. But miss them? Miss Ireland? Oh, aye. That I do.”

  “Why not start a Monaghan’s Shipbuilding there?”

  “I thought about it, but this place was already here, with history that called to me, and . . . I knew I’d have a much better chance of making a go of it if they weren’t all looking over my shoulder, trying to talk me away from it with every breath. I didn’t know the place was in the shape it was, but even so . . . I wanted to make my own mark. Not in the way you do, not necessarily by making a home, but the bigger goal is the same, I think. Finding a place to belong, a place that has a bigger meaning than merely occupation or location. Something that extends beyond that, connects all of that.”

  She nodded. “Exactly.”

  “So, you know why I’m here and why boats. I know why you’re here, but why the inn?”

  Her cheeks went instantly warm and that surprised him. His quiet smile edged out wide again. “Well, well . . . do I detect something perhaps not rooted in rational planning and educated risk-taking?”

  “Oh, I educated myself about it. As much as anyone can. It was actually a fantasy, a sort of pie in the sky, if I ever won the lottery kind of dream, and that’s all it was ever supposed to be. Somewhere along the line, as my life wasn’t going as planned, or the plan wasn’t as satisfying as I’d thought it would be, the dream suddenly, somehow became a goal. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it, like what would happen if I just . . . did it. Went for it. You know? What it was suddenly wasn’t as important as what it represented—which was doing something that I wanted to do, versus what I thought I should do. It was the first thing I’ve ever really, really just . . . wanted to do.”

  He nodded in understanding. “That tells me not at all why it is that innkeeping ended up being that thing.”

  She gave him a rueful smile and nudged at him, which just made him tug her more deeply into his arms.

  “You’re going tell me?”

  “Or?” she said, the playful lightness coming back into her voice. With it came a bit of the energy, the verve she always seemed to have so naturally, so effortlessly that had winked out when she realized her dream wasn’t going to go off quite as she planned.

  “Or I carry you up to my lair and find a way to make you confess all.”

  She gave him a considering look. “I’m almost tempted to call your bluff, just to see what mad skills you think you are going to employ to make me talk.”

  He grinned. “That’s the spirit.” He back-walked her until she was pressed against the large picture window that looked out over the slope of the hill and the water just beyond his boathouse and leaned down to nip at her chin, running his hands up her sides, brushing ever so lightly over her nipples. Reveling in the way his touch made her gasp and her body go all soft and pliant, he cupped her face with both hands and tipped her head back, which arched her hips more fully into his. “Have I mentioned how much I love that you wear your hair down so often now?” he said against her lips, sinking his fingers into it and gently tugging.

  She moaned against his mouth and opened under his questing tongue. He’d thought to tease her more, but ended up as lost in the moment as she was. He finally left her mouth damp, her lips puffy for a breath of much-needed air and continued the rain of kisses along her jaw, pausing at the pulse spot just beneath her ear. She groaned, letting her head roll to the side, and he turned her, so her back was pressed to his oh so aching front. He groaned as she pressed the soft curve of her bum against the very hardest part of him. He drew her hair aside and kissed her neck, his body twitching hard as he felt the shiver of pleasure race through her in a delicate shudder. He grinned against her skin, happy to have found yet another of her pleasure triggers. He drew his hands up her hips, fingers splayed over her stomach, then inched them up higher, taking her shirt with him, exposing her soft, pale skin until he could cup the gentle swell of her breasts.

  She pressed her head back against his shoulder, arching as he played with her nipples through the soft white fabric, then pressing back against him as he leaned around and kissed the edge of her jaw. She moved against him, and they found their rhythm so easily. He realized it was like that for them in all ways. A match of ebb and flow, need and want, thought and process.

  He nudged her head forward, caught up in the moment with this woman—his woman—and feeling as if everything was converging for him in that one moment. “Open your eyes and look out there,” he said in a heated whisper against her damp neck. “See the slope of that land, how it runs naturally straight to the water?”

  She murmured, “Yes,” her breath coming in short gasps as she reached down and grabbed his arm, keeping it tight around her waist as she pressed back against him.

  She made him want to howl at the moon, everything was so primal with her. “See the deep curve”—he moved against her—“dipping in, then playing out way across the other side?”

  “Yes,” she gasped as he dipped her back against him and pressed his hips in.

  “That’s where they built the great schooners, the massive clippers, right there on that ground . . . and then rolled them down into the sea. We Monaghans were brilliant at finding just the right lay of the land. Did ye know that’s where the term came from?”

  She moaned softly, letting her head roll left to right in a slow shake, her eyes still open, still looking, seeing, taking it all in, even as her body was lost to his touch.

  “Now I get to build one, Grace, right on that very same spot. I have no idea what I’m doing, I know it as concept only, but och, the dream of it, the chance of it. I want to try, need to try. Do ye ken?”

  She nodded, and he felt her body catch, her throat work under his questing fingers, which curved around her collarbone as he turned her cheek to his mouth. He turned her fully in his arms and saw her eyes were shimmering and felt his belly clutch again. “No, no, I didn’t say it to make ye sad, but to show you that it’s the right thing.” He brought her mouth up to his. “As is your inn. Yer out of your depth, but it’s what ye want and ye know it. Ye see it in your mind’s eye, your heart’s eye, and ye want it to be all that ye imagined.” He pulled her close. “I know I’ll have to make compromises with my ancestors’ design for all sorts of reasons. As will you, concerning the idyllic setting you envisioned. But we’ll do it, Grace, that we will, to get to the grander goal, and it will be none the less satisfying for it. I want my dream and I want you to want yours, to fight for it. Dinnae give up on it because it’s no’ perfect.” He knew what else he was saying. Don’t give up on me, for I’m far from perfect, too.

  She nodded, and the shimmer turned to glass. “I never cry.” The words were hardly a whisper. “I do want it, Brodie. For you. For me.”

  He tipped up her chin. “For us?”

  She held his gaze, even as hers swam. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Then have it we shall, aye?”

  She searched his eyes, his face, her fingers sliding around his waist, then holding on by fistfuls of his T-shirt. “Aye.”

  He grinned, and felt, in that instant, that the world was his to claim and conquer. He took her mouth fiercely, confidently, and urged her to take the same. And that she did. But just as he thought to take her up to the loft where he’d imagined her so many times, where he’d wondered how it would be to wake up to her scent on his pillows every morning, she ducked out of his arms and stepped away.

  Drawing in breaths in deep gulps, she dipped her chin
, one hand propped on her hip, the other scooping her long hair away from the heated skin of her face.

  He knew better than to go to her, crowd her any further. There should be something he could say . . . but he’d said it all. It was up to her now—which was terrifying, really. He knew she was of like mind with him, but still wasn’t quite certain she would see it through.

  “It’s . . . a lot,” she said when she’d gotten her breath back under control, her back still to him. “And it’s good. So good. I just . . .” She finally turned to him. “I need to be better at trusting it will always be good.” She lifted a quick hand. “I don’t mean smooth, no bumps. I mean—”

  “That I won’t up and abandon you,” he said, understanding as much as he could just how deep those scars ran. He honestly couldn’t fathom the rootlessness she felt, knowing it had been caused by people making active decisions to put her in that place. She’d overcome so much of her past. On the surface, she could be considered a success. Smart, educated, good career, better head on her shoulders. Bright, funny, forward thinking. Strong. So damn strong. And yet . . . this was her soft white underbelly. And the power that her fear of abandonment had over her wasn’t to be underestimated.

  “It’s stupid,” she said.

  “On the contrary. It’s the very opposite of that. Self-protection has it all over self-destruction.”

  “Until one becomes the other,” she said quietly.

  “Och, Grace. Ye see that’s where I have faith in you. You’re too stubborn, too independent, too strong, and too damn smart to let yourself be doomed by your own fear. You might hate it, you might want to run from it . . . but in the end, you won’t.”

  “What makes you so certain of that? You’re so certain, but you don’t know me. You don’t know—”

  “Don’t I?” he countered. “Has anything I’ve just said to you shown that I don’t understand you? You’re here, aren’t you? That took courage.” He took one step closer, but that was all.