“No, you shouldn’t have. You were victimized. You suffered a trauma. But you should have talked to someone, LuLu.”
“In retrospect, I wish I had.”
“That’s why you don’t like to come home so much.” The obvious finally occurred to him. “Why you put so much distance between yourself and St. Dennis.”
“I have the worst nightmares when I stay at the inn. Though I have to admit, this time around, it hasn’t been too bad.”
“Maybe now that it’s out in the open … well, not exactly in the open, but at least you’ve talked about it … maybe now coming back won’t seem so terrible.”
“I hate feeling that way about my home. I hate that feeling of panic when I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if he’s come back, if he’s in the building. I hate what he did to me and I hate what it did to my life and my relationship with my family. I know it hurt my mother that I spent part of my time here in December sleeping at Steffie’s. I told my mother Stef needed help making her wedding favors.”
“Hey, you can always stay here.”
“Thanks. You’re a sport.” Her smile was faint, but still, it was the start of a smile.
“I am a sport.” He gathered her to him and rested her head against his chest. “No more slipping out in the middle of the night, okay? You need to stay with me.” Clay paused, then rephrased his statement. “I need you to stay with me. I’ve waited a long time for you.”
They sat in silence for a moment, Clay gently stroking her arm. Finally, he said, “I was in a serious relationship with a girl for three years when I was in college. We got engaged, and we almost got married.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I realized that the biggest part of the attraction was that she reminded me of you. She was about your size and she had kind of reddish hair, like yours, but she wasn’t you, and I couldn’t go through with it.” He brushed her hair back from her face. “You’re my girl, LuLu. I think I’ve always known it.”
“Clay, I’m not staying. My home and my life are back in L.A. You need to remember that.” Lucy sat up. “It’s just for the summer …”
“I understand.” He did. He tried not to think about it, but he did understand. “I’ll take whatever I can have of you. ‘Just for the summer’ is better than never.”
Still, he knew that he wanted more, wouldn’t be satisfied with less than all of her. How he’d make that happen, he didn’t know. The only thing Clay knew for sure at that moment was that he wanted always.
Chapter 19
When Lucy awoke to the sound of water running somewhere in the distance, her first thought was that rain was beating against the windows at the inn. She opened her eyes, and looked around, and remembered.
“Not in Kansas anymore,” she whispered.
She looked over her shoulder and found the other side of the bed empty, and figured the sound she heard was the shower. She tossed off the blanket she’d been wrapped in and sat on the edge of the bed.
It had been one hell of a night.
Had she really poured out the whole story to Clay?
She was pretty sure she had.
He’d been visibly upset by what she told him, but thankfully, there’d been no sign of the judgment she’d feared, no indication that he blamed her for what had happened. Her rapist had told her repeatedly that she was to blame for what happened, that she’d been blatantly “asking for it.” Lucy knew that hadn’t been true, and Clay seemed to know it, too. He never once questioned her or doubted her recounting of the event. On the contrary, he’d been angry that she’d never reported the assault, that her rapist had never been made to face the consequences for what he’d done to her, though she was pretty sure he understood why it had taken her so long to talk about it.
In retrospect, maybe she could have—should have—handled things differently, but the child she’d been had lacked the wisdom and the foresight of the woman she’d become. And truthfully, while the memory had hindered her from forming close relationships in the past, it hadn’t stopped her from forming one with Clay now, or from becoming a strong and independent woman who had been taking care of herself for years, and doing a damn fine job of it.
“You’re my girl,” Clay had said the night before. “Just for the summer is better than never …”
She wished she’d been able to offer him something more than “I’m not staying.”
“Hey, she rises.” Clay walked back into the room, dressed in only a pair of jeans, drying his hair with a towel.
He walked to the bed and kissed her on the mouth. “How ’bout breakfast?”
“As much as I’d rather stay, I think I should be getting back to the inn. My mom—Danny—everyone’s going to think I’ve been kidnapped.”
“They knew you were coming here, right?”
“I told Mom.”
“Then they know where you are.” He grinned. “And your mom is probably not too distressed about it.”
“You’re probably right. She’s always reminding me what a wonderful young man you are.”
“Of course you don’t argue with her.”
“Certainly not.” Still dressed from having gotten up to leave in the middle of the night before Clay stopped her, Lucy began to look for her shoes. “Of course, if I marched into the inn wearing the same clothes I had on when I left, I imagine tongues would wag.”
“This is St. Dennis. It’s part of the culture. Some people actually believe that tongue wagging will be the next big Olympic sport. They train for it from birth.”
She found her shoes and sat back on the bed while she slipped into them, and thought for a moment. She wasn’t ready to say good-bye just yet.
“How about we have breakfast at the inn?” she suggested.
Clay raised one eyebrow. “That will give the tongues plenty to wag about.”
“If we wait until later in the morning, I would agree. However, at this early hour on a Sunday morning, the dining room could be fairly empty.”
“I’m game if you are.”
Lucy found and used the bathroom at the end of the hall while Clay finished getting dressed. As they were leaving, each in their own car, Lucy rolled down her window, pointed to the BMW parked near the garage, and asked, “Did Brooke get a new car?”
“That’s Jesse’s. I guess Logan ended up staying over at Dallas’s with Cody last night, and Brooke decided to take advantage of being child-free by having Jesse stay. He doesn’t sleep over when Logan is there. Brooke’s not comfortable with it and Jess wants to ease into their lives rather than move too quickly so that Logan can get used to him, develop a relationship of his own.” Clay began to roll his window back up, then paused. “Before I forget, the party to celebrate Jesse’s grandfather turning over the family law practice to him is next Saturday night. Want to be my date?”
“Sure. I’d love to go. It’ll be my last night here before I have to go back.”
Clay signaled for her to go first down the drive, so she turned the car around and headed off to the inn.
The sky threatened rain and the streets were almost empty of traffic, though Lucy suspected the churches’ parking lots were filled or would be before too much longer. The inn’s lot, too, was filled, and Lucy and Clay both had to park back by the cabins and walk up to the back door.
Lucy had been right: there were plenty of empty tables in the dining room, and they took one overlooking the Bay. Lucy had grabbed menus on their way into the room, and once they made their selections, she went into the kitchen to place their order. Moments later, a waitress delivered coffee to them.
“Shall I leave the pot?” the waitress asked after she’d poured for them.
“Please,” both Clay and Lucy replied at the same time.
“Great view from here,” Clay said as he sampled his coffee.
“It’s too bad it’s so cloudy this morning. The inn has great views from every side,” Lucy told him. “The back and one side have views of the Bay, the front
and the other side look out to Cannonball Island and the sound. My I-forget-how-many-greats grandfather who designed the inn sited it so that they would have water views whichever window they looked out of. His wife was from England, and she liked to think of her family being on the other side of the water. Which, of course, they weren’t because the Bay isn’t the Atlantic, but I suppose she may have been thinking about the Bay flowing into the ocean.”
“How do you know that? That that’s what she thought about?” he asked.
“Besides being a well-known and, may I say, a respected travel writer of her day, Cordelia Sinclair kept personal journals. One every year. They’re all in the library here.”
“You read them all?”
“Her travel books were wonderful, but her journals were fascinating. She was a terrific storyteller. She wrote about how she met the first Daniel Sinclair and how they fell in love. How she came to live here, the fun she had buying the furnishings—many of which are still here, by the way, though most of the best pieces are upstairs in our family quarters. How she’d had to adapt to living in America, how she missed her family. All about their children and their grandchildren. I still take down a volume every now and then.”
“This is the woman in the portrait in the lobby?”
“Yes. She was quite something, in more ways than one.” Lucy’s phone began to vibrate in her pocket. She took it out and checked the caller ID. “Clay, would you mind if I took this? It’s Corrine.”
“Go right ahead.”
Lucy went into the lobby and paced while Corrine gave her a rundown of the event she’d covered for Bonnie from the night before. Other than a few “uh-huhs,” Lucy hadn’t had to say much because apparently, everything had gone off without a hitch. Corrine obviously had proven to be a more than adequate substitute for Bonnie, and Lucy made sure she heaped on the praise before she hung up.
“Is everything okay?” Clay asked when Lucy returned to the table.
“Better than okay. It seems that our newest hire may be a superstar.” She gave him an abbreviated summary. “Which is very reassuring, since I’m not sure when Bonnie will be back.”
“You look a little anxious about that.”
“I am anxious,” she confessed. “I know she wants to be with Bob, especially now when he needs help, but the business isn’t set up for anyone to be absent for too long a time.”
“Even you?”
“Especially me.” The more she thought about it, the more anxious she became. “When I agreed to do this June wedding, I assumed that Bonnie would be there to pick up the slack for me. The thought of going into the wedding season with her not there makes me extremely nervous.”
“But you have good people working for you, right?”
Lucy nodded. “We do. But there’s only so much one person can do. If we have two big events scheduled for the same day, we need two people to cover each one.”
“So when’s wedding season?”
“Starts in May, goes right into the fall. But May through the end of June is the peak. We’re booked solid for eight weeks, both days. Some days, there’s more than one wedding.” She frowned. “Bonnie and I are going to have to have a talk. I know she’s doing a lot by phone and email, but there are times when she’s going to have to be on-site.”
“I think before you get too worried, you should have that talk.”
“As soon as we can sit down face-to-face. There are some things you shouldn’t do by phone or email.”
Their breakfasts were served, and Lucy fell silent as she began to eat.
“Are you that hungry or that worried?” Clay finally asked.
She looked up and smiled. “A little of both. I’m thinking now about the Magellan wedding and everything that has to be done this week.”
“I’m betting you’ve got a game plan.”
Lucy laughed. “Oh, do I. My lists have lists. Every day broken down by who I need to speak with directly, who I need to email, and who I need to text.”
“What’s on the list for today?”
“About two dozen phone calls, including the one to the woman whose anniversary is being celebrated here at the inn in July. The one who blackmailed Danny into having me plan their event.” She poked at her eggs Benedict with her fork. “She threatened to sue the inn for breach of contract if I didn’t agree.”
“She’s the woman who was bumped from June for the Magellan wedding?”
She nodded. “It’s not just her, it’s her entire family. Dan said they’ve been loyal patrons of the inn forever. In all fairness, longtime guests do deserve special consideration, which is why Danny is comping a few days for the people whose reservations had to be changed. I just don’t like that she threatened him. I’ll be happy when that event is over. Usually I enjoy the parties I’ve put together, but I’m going into this one not loving the client.”
“It’s only one day, right?”
“Right. And it’s a pretty small event, so I shouldn’t have to have too much contact with her directly once the nuts and bolts are figured out. She’s already emailed me a list of what she has in mind. I can make it happen without her being too involved from this point.”
“Isn’t that the idea of having someone else plan your event? So that someone else does all the work?”
“One would think,” she said, “but you’d be surprised at how many people hire someone to plan the event but want to have their fingers in every stage of the planning.”
“Like the future Mrs. Magellan?”
“Yes and no. Susanna knows what she wants and is capable of putting this thing together on her own. She’s highly organized, and if she wasn’t so involved in her husband’s foundation, she could do this. But she doesn’t have the time, and she doesn’t have the contacts. Besides, she’s so nice and she’s so happy to be marrying her love, I don’t mind her being all over this. She’s waited a long time for Robert.”
“I know how she feels.”
She could have said, I think maybe I’ve been waiting for you, too. Instead, she merely reached across the table and touched her fingers to his hand.
After breakfast, they walked outside so that Lucy could point out the changes that were in the works for the big June wedding. The air was still cool and the clouds darker and lower in the sky.
“New gazebo here, garden beds there and there, and one big tent over there.” She paused, thinking about the tent. “No, maybe two tents. We could have the cocktail hour in one while dinner is being set up in the other, then have the band and the dance floor in the tent where we served cocktails.”
In her mind she could already see it. There’d be white furniture—sofas and love seats and some big ottomans—in one part of the cocktail/dancing tent. The bandstand would be used by the string quartet during the cocktail hour. It would be perfect, assuming that Susanna liked it. Timing, of course, would be everything, but …
“Lucy.” Clay waved a hand in front of her face.
“What? Oh, sorry. I just had the best idea.”
“I know. Two tents.” Clay looked amused. “I’m guessing you just added one more name to that list of people to call this week.”
“I’m sorry. The thought just sort of caught me by surprise.”
He stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her.
“Look to your left. There’s a bald eagle,” he said.
“I see it. It’s so dramatic, sweeping right over those whitecaps on those big wings, against that dark gray sky that you know is going to let loose any minute now. I always forget how big eagles are until I see one. I wonder where it’s going.”
“They’ve been nesting out on Goat Island for the last five or six years,” Clay told her.
“Anyone ever figure out why it’s called Goat Island?”
“Not as far as I know.”
They stood close together, taking in the morning and watching the boats heading out into the Bay as the very first of the raindrops began to fall.
“One day wh
ile you’re here, we’re going to go crabbing,” he told her.
She smiled, remembering all the times they’d crabbed together as kids. Those were happy times, and the thought of reliving them cheered her. “It’s a date.”
Clay’s phone began to ring.
“Damn cell phone. I should toss it,” he muttered, but took it out of his pocket and answered it in spite of himself. “Okay, buddy. Sure. No, I didn’t forget. As long as it’s all right with Cody’s mom, it’s okay with me. I’ll pick you up in …” He peered around Lucy to look at his watch. “I guess that would be now. Ten minutes. But you have to be ready, okay?”
He returned the phone to his pocket.
“That was Logan wanting to know if I would pick him up at Cody’s house now because I’d promised him lunch out and a movie today if he got an A on his science test this week, which he did.”
“Isn’t it a little early for lunch?”
“Yes, but he just spilled grape juice on his pants, so he has to go home first to change, and the show we’re going to starts at twelve-thirty in Ballard, and he’s afraid it will start without him.”
“You’re a good uncle, Clay.”
“He’s a good kid.”
“I’ll walk to the car with you.”
The rain began to fall faster and they hastened their steps to the parking lot. Clay left Lucy at the back door rather than have her run with him through the rain to his car.
“We can say good-bye right here,” he said as they ducked under the inn’s overhang.
“I’ll talk to you soon.” She reached up and kissed him on the lips. “Have fun with Logan.”
“I will.” Clay took off across the lot. His quick step turned into a jog just as the downpour began.
Lucy stood near the door, her arms folded over her chest as if to ward off the chill, and watched the Jeep as it emerged from the back of the lot and swung past the porch. Clay raised his hand in a wave and soon disappeared behind the trees that grew along the drive. She missed him the minute he was gone, and the realization startled her.
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 Page 146