The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge

by Stewart, Mariah

  Traffic on the highway had built up and the stop and go was annoying her, so she turned off the main road and followed the backstreets. He was still behind her, so she meandered down toward the river side of town, not wanting to end the drive. Once the drive ended, once they were back on Cherry Street, they’d be saying good-bye, and she could barely stand how awkward it was going to be. He’d be saying something like, “Well, I’ll call you,” or maybe, “Hey, the next time I’m in St. Dennis …” but only because he’d feel obligated to. Most one-night stands didn’t run well into the next day the way this one had.

  As for his claim that he “didn’t do one-night stands” …

  “Bull,” she said aloud. “Guys live for the one-night stand. It’s in their DNA.”

  And it isn’t like I won’t have anything to think about after he leaves, she reminded herself. There was her trashed shop, for one thing. Her home, which apparently was no longer her castle, since someone had found a way in, uninvited and intending her harm, for another.

  Oh, and let’s not forget Maggie.

  Was it Vanessa’s imagination, or did Maggie really have her sights set on Hal again?

  Dear Lord, please say it isn’t so …

  She was not going to think about Maggie. Or Grady, for that matter. Uh-uh. Not going there.

  She drove back to her home then, still not thinking about Grady.

  He slowed down when she turned into her driveway, then beeped his horn and waved when she got out of her car. Then, incredibly, he kept on going, and drove past.

  Vanessa stood on the sidewalk next to Sue’s cruiser, her mouth open. Had he just blown her off?

  She knew he had plans, but still. Damn. That was just unbelievably … unbelievable. Not even to say a real good-bye? That “Thanks, Ness” back there at the car rental place … that was it?

  Numb, Vanessa went into the house. Sue was still dusting for fingerprints, but she’d finished the back door and had moved into the kitchen.

  “Hal called a while ago,” Sue told her. “He said that he thinks you should reconsider and sleep at his place tonight.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Knowing full well she wouldn’t, Vanessa went upstairs and into her room.

  The bed was a tangle, the sheets and blanket every which way. She stared at it long and hard before pulling everything off and stuffing it all—the blanket along with the sheets and pillowcases—into a laundry basket that stood near the closet door. She took fresh linens from the closet and remade the bed, taking the blanket from the spare-room bed and exchanging the pillows from one bed to the other.

  She stood back to assess the newly pulled-together bed. The blanket wasn’t as pretty as the one in the basket, and the pillows were not the ones she preferred, but the important thing was that there was no scent of him there, no valley in the pillow where his head had lain.

  “There.”

  She took off the skirt she was wearing and hung it in the closet, and changed into her favorite jeans. She’d just slipped her feet back into her shoes when she heard the front door slam.

  “Ness?”

  And damn it, didn’t her heart flip just a little at the sound of his voice?

  “I’m up here,” she called.

  “Got my stuff from the Inn … hey, you look pretty.” He grinned as he came in the room. “Got a hot date?”

  He crossed the room and kissed her.

  He came back, was all she could think of. He came back …

  He looked down at her feet. “Do you have any other shoes?”

  She was still trying to catch up to the fact that he hadn’t left her after all.

  “You are kidding, right? Of course I have other shoes. Shoes are my life.” She walked to her closet, opened the door, and pointed to a row of shelves lined with boxes. “Shoes.”

  “I meant, any other kind. Shoes you could walk in.”

  “I walk in these.” She turned her foot to show off the pretty brown leather pumps with their four-inch heels. “I walk to work every day in shoes like this.”

  “How ’bout shoes you can comfortably walk a distance in.”

  “Oh. Well, sure. I have some really cute flats.” She pulled a box from the shelf. “Aren’t these the cutest? I just got these.”

  “Let’s rephrase.” Grady’s mouth twitched at both ends. “What would you wear if you went walking in the woods?”

  “Nikes?” She frowned.

  “You’d wear hiking boots. Where’s your computer?”

  “It’s in the kitchen.”

  “Come on. We’ll look up the closest athletic equipment store.”

  “We don’t have to look it up. Mickey Forbes has a place right outside of town.”

  “Great.” He tugged on her hand. “Let’s go.”

  “Well, God knows I’m not one to pass up on a shopping opportunity, but I thought you were leaving to go on your hike.”

  “I am. You’re coming with me.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t really think I’d leave you here, with all that’s going on?”

  “You want to take me with you?”

  “Sure. You won’t mind roughing it a little for a couple of days, would you?”

  “How rough is rough?” She frowned again.

  “Not as rough as it could be if whoever is stalking you catches up.”

  “As much as I’m sure I’d love roughing it with you—there’s no one I’d rather share a tent with—but I can’t leave St. Dennis. I have to go into Bling tomorrow and figure out what I’m missing so I can meet with the insurance company. We’re coming into our busy season. I have to get Bling open as quickly as I can, or I won’t make enough this summer to carry me through the winter.” She sat on the side of the bed and he sat next to her. “I appreciate the thought, I appreciate you offering to take me with you, but I can’t go.”

  Grady nodded. “I understand. I probably should have thought of that myself. In that case”—he leaned over and kissed her—“I suppose I better go get my stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “My clothes.”

  “I thought you said you just picked them up from the Inn.”

  “I did. They’re in the car. If you can’t come with me, I’m just going to have to stay with you. So until this is over, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. Think you can handle sharing your space? Unless you’d rather stay at the Inn—”

  “What about your trip? The hike you had planned?”

  “The mountain will be there when all this is over.” He started toward the steps. “I want to make sure you are, too …”

  Chapter 13

  “Didn’t I tell you she hated me?” Maggie slumped in the front seat of Hal’s car.

  “Well, now, hate might be too strong a word.” Hal drove away from the curb, mindful of the group of teens who for unknown reasons did not seem capable of walking on a sidewalk in this town. “I think she’s got issues, Maggie, but I don’t know that she hates you.”

  “She’d rather take her chances with some crazy guy in a ski mask than have me stay with her.”

  “Let’s be fair, now.” He paused, trying to choose his words carefully. “I’d guess that she’s a little put out on Beck’s behalf. You know he wasn’t expecting to see you at the wedding, Maggie.”

  “You think I was wrong to come.”

  “I think if he—”

  “You think if he’d wanted me at his wedding he’d have invited me.”

  “That isn’t what I was going to say, but yes, I think that’s probably true.”

  He rolled to a stop sign, looked both ways to see what was what on Rayburn Road before continuing on his way.

  “So what were you going to say?”

  “I was going to say, if he’d had some time to prepare himself, if he’d had some contact with you over the past few years, he’d have taken it a little better.”

  Tears welled in Maggie’s eyes. “I’ve never done a damned thing right where that boy was concerned. I di
dn’t know how to handle him when he was a child, or when he was a teenager, or now that he’s an adult. I’ve never known how to talk to him, Hal. I think it would have been easier for all of us if you’d been there …” She swallowed hard. “That was not what I intended to say, so forget that part.”

  “Maggie, once something’s been said, it’s said.” He drove around the block to Charles Street. “You can’t take words back and pretend they weren’t spoken.” His voice softened. “Just like you can’t take the last twenty years back, and expect your children to pretend those years never happened.”

  Maggie stared out the window.

  “What should I do, Hal?”

  “You have a lot of explaining to do to both of them,” he told her. “If you want them to let you into their lives, you have to let them into yours. From what you’ve told me, you’ve made a lot of mistakes in your life.” He hastened to add, “We all have. But you have to own up to them if you’re going to move past them.”

  “What if I tell them, and they still don’t like me?”

  “Well, then, I suppose that’s a chance you have to take. The way it stands right now, they both have problems with you but they don’t understand why you acted the way you did. There is a chance that they could hear the truth and still have a problem with you. That’s the chance you take. But they’re your kids, and if you want them back in your life, you’re going to have to step up and talk to them, and tell them everything you’ve told me over the past twenty-four hours. Maybe they’ll understand and forgive, maybe they won’t. I’m seeing that as fifty-fifty. But if you don’t have those conversations with them, your chances of reconciling with your kids are zero.”

  “What if they dislike me even more?”

  “Like I said, that’s the chance you take.”

  “Where should I start? What would you do, if you were me?” she asked.

  “I guess I’d start by taking Ness out to dinner and just talking to her. Get to know her a little, find out what’s happened in her life since she’s come here.”

  “Well, I know what’s happened in her life. I know that you took her under your wing and helped her to get her business started. I know that you financed that little house of hers. I know that she thinks of you as the father she didn’t have.”

  Hal couldn’t tell if she sounded happy or annoyed.

  “You know that much, seems to me that’s a starting point.”

  He drove down Kelly’s Point and parked in the spot that was reserved for the chief of police. He never got tired of remembering that the chief was his son. He opened his car door and started to get out.

  She reached for the door handle and asked, “Do you hate me, Hal?”

  He shook his head. “No. I never hated you, Maggie.”

  “Not even when you came back from Nam and found out I was married to someone else?”

  “Maybe for a while, back then,” he admitted. “But I started thinking about how hard things must have been for you. Pregnant, not knowing if I’d come back alive, your parents pressuring you to marry this other man. After a time, I realized you did what you thought you had to do. I understood.”

  He slammed his car door and walked around to the passenger side.

  “The fact that I understood doesn’t mean that I liked it.” He fell in step with her and they walked down the road toward the Bay.

  “I was scared.”

  “Of course you were. Who wouldn’t have been?”

  “My father kept telling me that the baby and I would end up like these homeless people we had in the town where we lived.” Her step slowed. “My parents owned a restaurant, and every night, there’d be people cleaning out the Dumpster out back. My parents would leave the leftovers in these Styrofoam containers and they’d leave plastic knives and forks out there so that people wouldn’t have to eat with their hands.” She shook her head. “It sounds so crazy now. But my father used to make me watch out the window when they came. ‘See that?’ He’d hold my face to the glass. ‘That’s going to be you if you don’t marry Vic.’ ”

  She clasped her hands together in front of her as they walked, and Hal suspected that the hands were probably as shaky as the voice.

  “I don’t blame you, Maggie. We already talked about this,” Hal reminded her.

  He’d heard it the night before, and he didn’t want to hear it all again. He understood how one thing had led to another in the past, how everything had gone downhill and why she felt powerless to stop it. He just didn’t want to hear it again now. He wanted to put it all behind him. He wasn’t sure where that would take them, but one thing he knew for certain: looking back was no way to move forward.

  Which was all well and good as far as he was concerned, he supposed, but apparently she hadn’t gotten it all out of her system yet, in which case he’d be hearing about it again and again. But if that was what Maggie needed to work it all out, that was the way it was going to have to be. The thing was, he wasn’t sure that even Maggie fully understood the choices she’d made over the years. Maybe she’d have to talk it through a little more before she did. And that was okay, because the longer she talked, the more time he’d have to look at her. It was a pleasure he thought he’d never experience again, and he wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity.

  He took her by the arm and led her down the path to One Scoop or Two.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Are you taking me for ice cream?”

  “Yes, I am,” he replied. “And while we’re here, I’m going to have a little talk with Steffie about this Candice person who was in Ness’s shop the other day. She may have noticed something that Vanessa might have missed.”

  “And after that, are you going to take me back to the Inn?”

  “Nope. After that, I’m going to take you for a cruise around the Bay on the Shady Lady.”

  “The Shady Lady?”

  “My boat.” He opened Steffie’s screen door and waited for Maggie to catch up.

  “Did you name your boat after me?”

  Hal smiled, and stepped back to allow her to pass.

  “You won’t believe who that was on the phone.” Vanessa came into the spare bedroom, where Grady was hanging his tux in the closet. He’d meant to give it to Andy to return when he took his own back, but he hadn’t been able to locate his brother before he left the Inn.

  “Let me guess. It was Candice, apologizing for having trashed your store and wondering if you could get her another one of those dresses.” He looked over at the doorway, where she stood leaning against the jamb. “Maybe one that’s in one piece.”

  “I wish. Maybe her number would show up on my caller ID so that we could track her down and sit her phony little ass in one of my brother’s cells.” She plopped down on the chair in the corner. “Maggie was on the phone. She’s with Hal, and they wanted to know if I wanted to meet them for dinner.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them I had plans.” She crossed her legs.

  “Do you?”

  “I do now.” She grinned. “Unless of course, you have plans with your family …”

  “I don’t. I did try to catch up with Andy and Connor at the Inn, but they’re either playing tennis or sightseeing, and they weren’t in their rooms.”

  He tossed his suitcase on the bed and opened it.

  “Mind if I use one of those drawers?” he asked.

  “Help yourself. They’re all empty.”

  He wondered if it felt as odd to her to see him put his clothes in her dresser as it felt for him to be doing it. He could have kept his room at the Inn, but that would have defeated the purpose of him staying in St. Dennis. He hadn’t planned on hanging around, but he could not in good conscience leave her while he still suspected that someone meant her harm. There had been one or two times in his life as an agent when he’d felt, in hindsight, that some action on his part might have prevented something from happening to someone who’d ended up a victim. For the past several years, he’d had
to live with wondering if he could have saved Melissa. If he’d been able to see Brendan for what he really was, would she still be alive?

  No way was he going to leave St. Dennis with similar regrets. Uh-uh. If something happened to Vanessa, too, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself.

  He thought about the guided hike he had scheduled for the end of the coming week. Well, if other arrangements for her safety could not be made, he’d just have to take her with him back to Montana, maybe leave her at the lodge while he took out his tour. Right then, the only thing he knew for certain was that he wasn’t going to leave her alone and vulnerable in St. Dennis.

  “Grady?” She was sitting in the chair, her knees primly together, her arms resting on her thighs. “I’m glad you came back.”

  He put the last of his things in the drawer and closed it.

  “Thank you,” she added.

  He turned around and studied her face. “Why wouldn’t I have come back?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I just thought that you weren’t going to.”

  “Didn’t I tell you that I’d be stopping at the Inn?”

  “Maybe you said something about the Inn …”

  He went to the chair and leaned down to kiss her. “Do you really think I’d have done that? That I’d have waved good-bye and never come back?”

  “I suppose I don’t have great expectations when it comes to men.”

  “Then I guess we’re going to have to raise your expectations.” He kissed her again. “What do you want to do between now and dinner?”

  She smiled and pulled him close. “Unfortunately, Sue is still here.”

  “Well then, we’ll just have to find something else to do until Sue is finished.” He thought about it for a moment, then pulled her up. “Let’s walk down to Steffie’s for ice cream. You know you’re dying to talk to her about what happened last night at the shop.”

  “Actually, yes, I admit I am. How did you know that?”

  “I have a sister.”

  They stopped in the kitchen to tell Sue they’d be gone for a while. The locksmith still hadn’t arrived, but she said he’d called and was on his way.

  “I’ll still be working on this counter, so I can let him in,” Sue told them. “There are a lot of prints here.”