by V. K. Sykes
“Call me paranoid,” Ryan said, “but I’m going to head downstairs for a few minutes to make sure nobody gets ideas about your stuff.” Maybe they could talk about something else besides his life when he came back.
She smiled. “If it makes you feel better, go for it. They’d be crazy to try with you playing watchdog. Dude, you look more ripped every time I see you.”
Ryan flexed a bicep to make light of her comment. “Right, a regular man of steel.”
Morgan told herself that her rapidly beating pulse as she watched Ryan disappear below was simply a coincidence. Most übermasculine guys in their early thirties tended to swagger, especially around women. Ryan though . . . he moved with a quiet yet powerful grace that was a wonder to behold. His body was pretty damn wonderful too, with broad shoulders tapering to the classic six-pack and long, muscular legs. His Red Sox T-shirt hugged his brawny chest and showcased his cut biceps. That amazing body was the product of years of military training and his beloved kayaking, and it was all too easy to imagine how it would feel wrapped around her.
She breathed a tiny sigh and slumped against the back of the bench, turning her face up to the warm June sunshine. She’d spent hours rushing around Portland to pick up supplies. Normally she gave herself enough time before the boat’s departure to use the cargo service for her goods, but too many errands today and a fender bender near the parking garage had delayed her. So it was really great that, after her mad dash, Ryan had appeared to help her. The fact that he liked to rattle her chain spoke to the easy friendship that still existed between them.
Her thoughts about Ryan had often strayed from friendship into fantasy territory over the years, and their encounter at last summer’s festival dance had done nothing to change that. The two of them had ended up in a slow dance at the end of the evening, egged on by their friend Laura Vickers. A little drunk by then, Morgan had found it all too easy to melt into the dangerous shelter of Ryan’s embrace.
It had been a culmination of a stressful evening, brought on by a horrible and very public confrontation between Lily Doyle’s father and his longtime enemy, Sean Flynn. Morgan had been so rattled and worried for Lily that she’d responded by drinking more than she normally did, which had lowered her staunch defenses against her supersecret crush on Ryan. Her heart had pounded like a battering ram as he held her close—too close. His bristled jaw had rubbed gently over her cheek, and she’d thought he was going to kiss her right there on the crowded dance floor. Under the influence of alcohol and nerves—and yes, sheer lust—her smarts had evaporated in the heat of Ryan’s mysterious gaze.
At precisely the same moment, they’d both snapped out of it. By some sort of unspoken but clear mutual agreement, she and Ryan had derailed the makings of a runaway train. Even in her instinctive relief, Morgan had been shaken to realize how good it felt to be held by him. How thrilling the moment had been in its raw sexual power.
And how insanely stupid it had been to let it go that far.
While in theory she loved the idea of having hot sex with Ryan Butler, she was not going to be a one-night stand for a hard-ass soldier who flitted in and out of the island, not even stopping long enough to make a ferry pass economical. And Ryan had clearly felt the same, because they’d quickly parted ways after the dance, never speaking a word about what had happened during those few electrifying minutes.
Dammit though, one look at him today had sent her right back in the grip of an emotional—and hormonal—tsunami. Whatever that dance at the social had stirred up, she obviously hadn’t managed to bury it deep enough. Morgan knew her traitorous body would happily straddle Ryan’s lap for a hot make-out session right now, in full view of a bunch of islanders who knew them both. But surely all that told her was that it had been way, way too long since she’d had sex.
Yeah, sure, that has to be it.
Ryan came back up the stairs, taking them two at a time as the boat pulled away from the dock. He sat next to her and said, “So, tell me about Golden Sunset. How are you and Sabrina making out with the place?”
She mentally winced, hating the idea of voicing her struggles with the inn. Should she be honest with Ryan or put on the brave face she maintained for all but her closest friends? Uncertain, she gave a little shrug.
“Not too good, huh?” His gaze looked both sympathetic and concerned, and she could tell he wanted an honest answer.
She capitulated. “It’s been rough. An awful lot of our regular guests came back year after year mostly because they loved Dad. You know what a big personality he had, and he really knew how to make people feel welcome and wanted.”
“Cal was a stand-up guy. One of the best.”
Morgan took a deep breath, the grief almost choking her. “Quite a few couples cancelled their summer reservations after they heard Dad had passed. I don’t know whether they didn’t want to come if he wasn’t there or they thought the place might be too depressing after we lost him.”
Hell, despite her best efforts, the inn’s atmosphere was depressing. It still seemed impossible that it should carry on without her dad.
“Maybe a little of both,” Ryan said, frowning a bit. “It’s too bad they didn’t look at it as an opportunity to keep supporting the place. And you.”
“Amen to that. Anyway, unless business somehow picks up, it looks like we could wind up in the red for the summer. And I think you remember how dead the rest of the year is for tourism in Seashell Bay.”
The B&B’s bread and butter had always been the summer vacation crowd. While most of that revenue came from tourists, a lot of island residents didn’t have room in their homes and cottages for all the family and friends that descended on them in the summer, so those folks often ended up at Golden Sunset too. That kind of business would continue at various levels all year, but only at Christmas was the inn ever close to full during the off-season. If Morgan didn’t manage to pull in some good summer business, her father’s B&B was headed for disaster.
Ryan glanced at another ferry as it passed them to starboard on its way back to Portland. At least a dozen people waved at them, as always happened when boats passed each other. She forced a little smile and waved back.
“Have you given any thought to selling?” Ryan said. “Or will you be able to ride it out?”
Oh, I think about selling every freaking day.
“I’m not sure anybody would buy the place at this point. Everything was up in the air even before Dad died. Aiden and Lily and their partners are building that new resort . . . and, well, who really knows how it’ll impact our little place?” Morgan was really happy that Aiden Flynn had returned to the island for good, but she had some worries about the effect of his upscale ecoresort on her small business.
“Most of your regulars should stay loyal,” Ryan said. “A lot of people prefer the atmosphere of smaller inns. From what I hear, Aiden’s place is going to cater to a different crowd.”
Morgan gave him a wry smile. “Yes, a crowd that likes lots of comforts and the latest in modern conveniences. Our place is short on both, I’m afraid. Heck, Dad even hemmed and hawed before finally putting in Wi-Fi last year. And our rooms are pretty . . . well, basic.”
She almost said run-down, but that felt disloyal. Facing an increasingly tight financial squeeze, her father had let things slide over the past couple of years, and now the place needed a lot of work, both structural and cosmetic. “Anyway, I have to try to make a go of it for my sister’s sake. She’d fall apart without the B&B.”
Though he’d been mostly away from the island for more than a dozen years, Ryan would know Sabrina well enough to understand. When she was a preteen, she’d been diagnosed with a learning disability. While she was a hard worker at the B&B, cooking and cleaning and doing other chores that were familiar territory for her, there was no way she could manage the operation. Most normal administrative tasks were simply beyond her, which meant they all fell on Morgan.
“So it sounds like you’re pu
tting your teaching career on hold for the foreseeable future,” Ryan said.
Whenever Morgan thought about that, it felt like someone had punched her in the gut. Though she’d told her principal that she intended to be back in her classroom in September, the low number of confirmed reservations at the inn had made that an increasingly remote possibility.
“I’ve been hoping I could get the place operating efficiently enough this summer to let me hire a part-time manager to run it with Sabrina after I leave, but that seems more like a wish at this point than a plan. So I’m just taking it one day at a time and trying to figure things out.” Morgan didn’t want to surrender to pessimism but refused to bury her head in the sand either. The stakes for both sisters were too high to engage in self-delusion.
“One day at a time is never a bad idea.” Ryan leaned back on the bench and stretched out his long legs. His feet reached all the way to the opposite bench. “I guess I’m going to be doing something like that myself for a while.”
Morgan welcomed the shift in conversation. “So, what are you going to do with yourself on the island? Kayak all over the place and drink beer? Or will your dad need a sternman this summer?” Like a lot of people on the island, Ryan’s dad was a lobster fisherman.
“Actually, I was thinking that, if I end up spending the whole season here, I’d try to kayak to every one of the Calendar Islands. Give myself a little challenge to pass the time.”
The islands of Casco Bay were sometimes called the Calendar Islands, a reference to the fact that there were supposedly 365 of them. Some, however, were barely big enough to stand on.
“Well, that’ll be a heck of a workout.” Morgan’s brain, which refused to behave itself, easily conjured up the image of Ryan’s half-naked, ripped form gleaming in the sun as he paddled through the chop of the bay.
“Just a walk in the park if I stick around for a couple of months. As for helping Dad out, yeah, if he needs me to sub while his sternman takes some time off, I’ll be on the boat.”
“That’s nice of you since you hate lobster fishing,” she said, scrunching her nose in sympathy. Like Ryan, many of Seashell Bay’s younger generation had no desire to follow in their fathers’ footsteps when it came to the hard slog of hauling traps from sunrise to sunset.
Ryan shrugged. “I don’t much like a lot of things I have to do. Doesn’t mean I won’t answer the call.”
She smiled at the typically cryptic Ryan Butler statement. “Your parents will be happy to finally have you at home for more than a few days.”
“Yeah, but I’m not going to stay with them. I want a place of my own, a place to . . .” He paused for a couple of moments, his gaze distracted. “Anyway, I’m going to rent a cottage or a house, hopefully one on the water.”
Morgan raised an eyebrow. “Renting isn’t going to be easy. Almost everything is booked by this time of the season.”
“I know, but it can’t be helped. I only made the decision to do this a few days ago. I figure there should be something available, even if it’s a bit of a dump. I don’t need anything fancy. As long as it’s got indoor plumbing, I’m good to go.”
Dump. On some of her worst days, Morgan had silently used that harsh word to describe the current state of the B&B. But on his lips, the word had sparked a pretty interesting, though kind of crazy, idea. She toyed with it for a few moments, testing it out in her head. Sure it might be dangerous, at least for her, but it seemed worth a try.
As the ferry cut through the deep blue water of Hussey Sound, Morgan mentally put on her big-girl panties and got ready to proposition the sexiest man to ever come out of Seashell Bay.
Chapter 2
Ryan spotted his mother on the landing when the ferry was still a quarter mile out from Seashell Bay. She wore a red-and-black plaid shirt, one of a half dozen or so she’d lovingly preserved since her college days in the seventies. They must have cost about five bucks each back then, so he had to give them credit for their staying power.
His mom had never yet failed to be waiting for him on the landing when he came home. Not once in thirteen years. And in muggy heat and bitter cold, in pelting rain and blinding snow, she wore those same plaid shirts that barely retained a fraction of their original vibrant color. Sundays and religious holidays provided the only exception to her hilariously rigid clothing routine, since she wouldn’t be caught dead at Saint Anne’s morning Mass in anything other than a dress. Julia Butler might be a bit eccentric, but everyone loved both her and his dad. They were hardworking, God-fearing folk who would do anything to help a neighbor or anyone else in need.
“I’ll bet that red speck on the dock is your mom,” Morgan said. She moved closer to him as she leaned against the rail and didn’t flinch when he automatically laid a casual, friendly arm across her slender shoulders. The ocean breeze whipped her hair into a tangle of shimmering gold and made her dangly earrings do a little dance.
“She never misses,” he said.
“It’s pretty great to have someone waiting for your boat, isn’t it?”
Ryan caught the wistful note in her voice, which said all there was to say about her recent loss. Had Cal met his eldest daughter every time? He knew Morgan came home a lot and always spent most of her summer on the island helping her dad and hanging out with her girlfriends.
Not wanting to make her feel uncomfortable, he reluctantly pulled his arm away. But, man, he had to resist the urge to keep touching her. “Is Sabrina picking you up?”
“No. My truck’s at the landing, so it seems we’re both all set.”
“I’ll help you load up.”
“No need. I’ve got it covered.”
There was that girl-power pride again. Ryan thought her response was more automatic than honest, and he wasn’t about to take no for an answer. “Hey, you know my mom. She’ll kick my ass if I stand around with my hands in my pockets while you’re lugging all that stuff.”
She flashed him a wry grin. “Well, since you put it that way.”
Ryan narrowed his gaze over her shoulder and gestured to a lobster boat motoring just off Paradise Point. “Isn’t that Lily’s boat—Miss Annie?”
Morgan peered at the boat. “None other. She’s coming in early today.” She waved, but neither Lily nor her sternman looked in their direction.
“That’s a girl on the stern.” Ryan thought he should recognize the young woman but couldn’t quite nail it down.
“Erica Easton. She’s been working for Lily since Forrest Coolidge went down with a stroke last fall.” Morgan made a little grimace. “Poor Forrest. He survived the stroke, but his days on Summer Star are over. It’s such a shame because that’s about all he ever lived for. The man fished lobster for over sixty years and pretty much loved every minute of it.”
Ryan felt an odd pang in his chest. It was terrible that old Forrest had a stroke, but any man who’d been able to work at something he loved every day for more than six decades must have been a happy guy. He wished he felt the same way about his own career. He was damn good, which was why Double Shield had been only too eager to sign him up. But did he still love soldiering? Though he’d loved it when he was fighting for something he believed in, that happened less and less, especially since his shift to private security. Even in Spec Ops, his missions had sometimes been murky, and buddies had died for no reason that made sense to him. “That’s a shame about Forrest, but I’m glad Lily found a sternman.”
Morgan turned and flipped up her sunglasses, fixing a serious gaze directly on him. Ryan stared back, falling into the big eyes that were framed with thick, soft lashes. Morgan’s blue eyes, silky hair, and killer body were a potent and dangerous combination.
“Ryan, listen,” she said earnestly, “because I’m going to suggest something that you’ll probably think is batshit crazy.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he joked, trying to get her to relax a little.
She managed a hint of a smile. “I got an idea when you were telling me about tryin
g to rent a place for the summer.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, there are plenty of empty rooms at the B&B these days. So it would be no problem for you to have one as long as we’re not full up. And I wouldn’t charge you anything, of course, so you’d save the cost of renting.” Her gaze skittered away over the water. “But look, I certainly won’t be offended if you tell me it’s a nutty idea.”
Ryan tried not to show his surprise. Shock, really. Morgan’s offer was generous, but he wasn’t a B&B kind of guy. He liked peace and quiet and even solitude, because he’d gone very long periods when there was little of that in his life. It was the main reason he didn’t want to spend weeks at his parents’ house with family and friends coming and going all day long.
“Uh, that’s real sweet of you, Morgan. It’s just that I don’t—”
She looked back at him and waved a hand to cut him off. “I understand. You’d rather be on your own somewhere. I just thought it could turn out to be a good arrangement for both of us.”
As he stared into her eyes, trying to read her, her expression told him nothing. Was there something going on here? He hadn’t forgotten how their dance had almost flared into something a whole lot more last summer. Later, when he tried to analyze what had happened, he’d put Morgan’s amorous reaction down to stuff going on in her life, including seeing her best friend, Lily, falling in love. In the past, despite some strong physical signals Morgan had let slip, she’d always carefully maintained her distance from him.
“Well, it’s obvious what would be in it for me,” he said. “What about for you?”
The ferry slowed and started to make its final turn to line up with the dock. “Your mom’s waving,” Morgan said. She smiled at Mrs. Butler and started to wave back.
Ryan gave his mother a quick wave and turned back to Morgan. “Well?”
“To be honest, I was hoping for a little skilled labor,” she admitted, looking sheepish. “Sorely needed labor, I might add.”