The Inn at Eagle Point

by Sherryl Woods

  Just the way he had ten years ago.

  Trace left Abby and took out his frustration on the back roads just outside of Chesapeake Shores. Riding his Harley usually calmed him, but today his mood continued to deteriorate. When he finally got back to the bank, he stormed past Mariah without a greeting, tossed his helmet across the room where it shattered an ugly porcelain figurine of an osprey done by someone who clearly didn’t appreciate the awe-inspiring beauty of the bird of prey, then slammed his office door for good measure. None of that brought him any satisfaction. It did, however, bring Laila rushing into his office.

  “Go away,” he muttered. “And close the door behind you.”

  Ignoring him, she went over and picked up the shards of the figurine and tossed them in the trash. She did it without comment, then sat down and waited.

  Trace scowled at his sister. “Why are you still here?”

  “Because something’s obviously on your mind. Do you want to talk about it or are you planning to break everything else you can lay your hands on?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he told her sourly. “At least not about breaking more things. I do know for a fact that I don’t want to talk.”

  “Then I will,” she said cheerfully. “I know what you’re up to, big brother. By now, I imagine Dad’s figured it out, too. How furious is he that you had me do that report today?”

  “No idea what you’re talking about,” he claimed.

  “Oh, please, you’re not that clever. I can recognize a scam when I see one.”

  “If I’m so easy to read, why didn’t you call me on it when I gave you all the files yesterday?”

  “Because I was bored. And I figured it would be fun to throw Dad for a loop this morning. You should have seen his face when he realized you weren’t coming to the meeting. And Raymond actually looked a little sick to his stomach when he saw me sitting there.”

  He stared at her blankly. “Why would your presence upset Raymond?”

  Laila rolled her eyes. “You can’t be that stupid. He’s been Dad’s right-hand man since this place opened. I know he thought you’d eventually bail and that Dad would never give me a shot, so he’d be the natural successor.”

  Trace stared at her incredulously. “Raymond thought he’d be the bank’s next president?”

  “Of course he did.”

  “But Dad’s never hidden his intention to have one of us in that position.”

  “No, he’s never hidden his determination to put you into the job. I wasn’t even on his radar, except as a flunky.”

  “Well, that’s changing,” Trace told her. “Dad was really impressed with your work this morning, Laila. He said Raymond was, as well.”

  “Oh, goody. Maybe he’ll offer to make me Raymond’s assistant since I turned down being a clerk.”

  Trace met her disgusted gaze. “I think you’re going to be surprised by what Dad decides.”

  “Nothing he does surprises me anymore,” his sister claimed. “But enough about me. What did you and Abby fight about?”

  “We didn’t fight,” Trace said, his mood immediately taking another nosedive as he thought of their conversation.

  “Well, something obviously happened.”

  “I’m not discussing Abby with you.”

  She stood up. “Fine. I’ll go ask her.”

  “Stay out of it, Laila. She has too much going on in her life right now to be bothered with satisfying your curiosity.”

  She frowned. “Just tell me one thing. You’re not about to do something to ruin this again, are you?”

  He regarded her with indignation. “I’m not the one who ruined it last time.”

  “Oh, please, you got all wounded and stubborn, and the next thing I knew you were down here pining away when you should have been in New York fighting for the woman you loved.”

  “I went to New York,” he argued.

  She dismissed the reminder. “Too little, too late.”

  Trace was well aware of that. He didn’t need Laila to drag up the memory of just how badly he’d blown it then. “Go away,” he ordered. “I have things to do.”

  “Must not be bank business,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’d be trying to hand it off to me. And just so you know, I am not taking that check that Mariah says you endorsed over to me, either.”

  “Why not? You earned it.”

  “It was a week’s pay for what amounted to a few hours of work. Actually it was more entertaining than anything I’d done in the evenings with Dave the past few months.”

  “Which should tell you just how lucky you are that you broke it off with him,” Trace told her.

  “You have a point,” she said blithely, though there was no mistaking the flicker of sadness in her eyes.

  Trace pushed his own mood aside and studied his sister. “You are okay with the breakup, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am. It was my idea. It’s just going to take a little getting used to.”

  Trace sighed. He could relate to that. In ten years he’d never quite figured out how to live his life without Abby in it. Now it appeared he just might have to do it all over again.

  It had been ages since Trace had gone for a run. That evening after leaving the office in a funk, he’d changed clothes and laced up his sneakers, then headed for the shore road. The fact that he took it in the direction of Abby’s house was purely coincidental. It wasn’t as if he was likely to cross paths with her. The house was a quarter mile back off the road, tucked closer to the bay than the street. Only after it passed the house Mick O’Brien had built for his family did the road cut to the east and start edging along the shoreline and the wide expanse of the Chesapeake.

  Running hard, his feet pounding on the pavement, the humid air leaving a sheen of sweat on his skin practically before he hit the curve in the road just past downtown, he kept waiting for the exercise to push Abby out of his head. Unfortunately he couldn’t seem to outrun his dark thoughts.

  He was a mile up the road, getting closer to her house, when he spotted two little girls walking toward him, bright pink suitcases dragging behind them. Even from a distance he could see the tracks of tears on their cheeks.

  He slowed his steps as he approached them, then hunkered down so he could look directly into their eyes. “You girls going somewhere?” he asked.

  “We’re running away,” Caitlyn said sorrowfully.

  “We packed our stuff,” Carrie added with a touch of belligerence. “Even food.”

  “Does your mom know you’ve left home?”

  Caitlyn blinked at him. “It wouldn’t be running away if we told her.”

  Even as he tried to assess how long they might have been gone—five minutes, no more than ten, certainly—he scrambled to find a way to get them safely back home that would also salvage their tender pride. He decided on the guilt card, which had always worked with his folks when they’d played it with him and Laila.

  “Your mom must be really, really sad and scared,” he told them.

  “No, she isn’t,” Carrie told him.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because she’s mad at us,” Caitlyn said.

  “And she doesn’t love us anymore,” Carrie added.

  “I doubt that,” Trace said. “She might get upset about something
you’ve done, but your mom loves you more than anything in the whole world.”

  Carrie regarded him skeptically. “How do you know?”

  “Because of the way she talks about you all the time. You two are the very best things in her life.” He wanted to tell them how hard Abby was working to make sure her daughters stayed with her, but he wasn’t sure how much they knew about any impending custody dispute. It wasn’t his place to fill them in.

  He looked directly at each of them in turn. “You know, when I was just a little bit older than you, I ran away from home.”

  Caitlyn’s eyes widened. “You did?”

  “Yep.”

  “Were you scared?” she asked, her voice faltering in a way that gave away just how frightened she was herself.

  “Not until it got dark,” he told her. “Then I got scared.” He gave a dramatic shudder. “Too many shadows where monsters could be hiding.”

  “What did you do?” Carrie asked.

  “I decided maybe I wouldn’t run away till morning, so I went back home. It’s always okay to go where you know you’ll be safe. Sometimes that’s the smartest, bravest thing to do.”

  “I guess,” Carrie said doubtfully.

  “It’s true,” he assured her. “And do you know what I found when I got back home?”

  “What?” Caitlyn asked, edging closer to him as if his mention of the impending shadows of nightfall were already scaring her.

  “My mom was crying. She was sure that something really bad had happened, that I’d fallen into the bay maybe.”

  “But we’re not allowed in the bay by ourselves,” Caitlyn told him earnestly. “It’s a rule.”

  Trace bit back a grin. “And it’s a very good rule.”

  Just then his cell phone rang. He knew instinctively it would be Abby. He held it out to show the girls. “That’s your mom. I’ll bet she’s calling me to tell me you’re missing. Can I tell her you’re with me, that we’re on our way home?”

  The twins exchanged a long, resigned look, then slowly nodded.

  “Good decision,” he commended them, then answered the phone. “Hey.”

  Abby immediately started talking, but she was nearly incoherent, her words tangled up with sobs.

  “Slow down, darlin’, they’re with me. They’re fine. We’re on our way back. I’ll explain when we get there. Shouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes.”

  “You’re sure they’re okay?” she asked, her voice still shaky.

  “Here, I’ll let you ask ’em yourself.” He handed the phone to Carrie.

  “Hi, Mommy,” she said, her voice small. She listened intently, then said, “I know. Uh-huh. I know. Mr. Riley’s bringing us back.” She shoved the phone toward Caitlyn.

  “Hi,” Caitlyn said. “Don’t cry, Mommy. We’re sorry.”

  When she handed the phone back to Trace, he asked Abby, “Feel better now that you’ve heard their voices?”

  “I just want to see them.”

  “Two minutes,” he promised. “They were barely out of the driveway and onto the road.”

  “They were walking in the road?” She sounded horrified.

  “They’re okay. Concentrate on that,” he said. “We’re turning around right now. See you any minute.”

  He knew better than to expect her to wait for them at the house. They’d barely made the turn into the long driveway when he spotted Abby running toward them. Carrie and Caitlyn abandoned their little pink suitcases and flew into her arms.

  The reunion stirred a lump in his throat. He could imagine exactly how Abby had felt for those few frantic minutes when she’d believed her girls had run away from home. She must have been terrified. When he thought of all the ways this adventure could have turned out differently, it made his palms sweat. Because he didn’t want to do or say anything to reveal just how much those two little girls with their strawberry-blond curls had come to mean to him, he forced a cheery note into his voice.

  “I guess my work here is done,” he said. “I should finish my run.”

  He’d already turned to go when Abby said, “Please don’t leave.”

  He faced her with a quizzical look.

  “The girls and I want to thank you, don’t we?” she said, looking at each of them.

  “Thanks, Mr. Riley,” Caitlyn said dutifully.

  “We could have found our own way home if we got scared,” Carrie insisted, but at a sharp look from her mother, she lifted her gaze to his. “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  “If you have time to wait, I’d like to talk to you,” Abby said.

  “About?”

  Her eyes held his. “Just stay, please.”

  Trace didn’t have the willpower to resist. “How about this? I’m soaking wet from my run. I’ll go take a shower and change, while you get them settled down. Why don’t I come back in an hour?”

  She nodded. “An hour would be perfect.”

  Trace wasn’t convinced that an hour was nearly long enough for him to do what needed to be done. Oh, he could clean up, put on slacks and a shirt, maybe even shave. But what he really needed to do—steel his heart against the hold this woman, this family, had on him—couldn’t be done in days or weeks, much less the sixty minutes left to him to accomplish it.

  18

  A bby had never been more terrified in her life than when she’d gone upstairs to read a bedtime story to Carrie and Caitlyn and realized they were missing. Their suitcases, which had been sitting at the end of their beds earlier, were gone, as well.

  Racing downstairs, calling their names, she had drawn Gram out of the kitchen, dish towel in hand.

  “What on earth?” Gram asked.

  “The girls are gone.”

  “Gone? What do you mean they’re gone?” she asked, an expression of disbelief on her face. “It’s only been a couple of minutes since you sent them upstairs, so they can’t have gone far. They probably just slipped outside to chase fireflies. You know how they hate going to bed. They’re afraid they might miss something.”

  Abby knew it was more than that, suspected they’d heard her talking to Stella earlier. Though they were much too young to understand the implications of what she’d been discussing with her lawyer, she was sure they’d picked up that it had something to do with their dad.

  A search outside the house had turned up nothing. There was no sign of two barefooted little girls chasing fireflies or on the swing set Mick had installed in the yard. Thankfully, though, before she’d gone into a full-blown state of panic, something had told her to call Trace. Hearing his voice had steadied her, even before he’d told her the girls were safe with him.

  The whole terrifying incident had lasted no more than twenty minutes, maybe even less, but it had quite likely taken five years off her life.

  Now, as she walked upstairs with the twins and went through the motions of making sure they took their baths and brushed their teeth, she debated how to get into any of it with them. They were so unnaturally quiet, she knew they were still upset about whatever had sent them fleeing earlier.

  After they’d climbed into their beds, Abby sat on the floor between them.

  “Are you going to read to us?” Caitlyn asked, her expression hopeful.

  Abby shook her head.
“Not tonight. We need to talk.”

  “It’s because you’re mad at us, isn’t it?” Carrie said.

  “I’m not mad,” she told them. “But I do need you to tell me why you decided to run away. You know you can tell me anything, right?”

  The girls exchanged a telling look. Abby could see that they might as well be exchanging a vow of silence. Even at five, they were as stubborn as all of the O’Briens put together.

  “Does this have something to do with your father?” she asked.

  Again, that quick, furtive look to bolster their silence.

  Abby pressed on, determined to make her own point at least and hoping to reassure them in the process. “You know that running away is never the answer, don’t you? It doesn’t solve anything and, more important, it can be very dangerous. You could have been hurt tonight if Mr. Riley hadn’t come along when he did. You could have gotten lost. Where did you think you were going?”

  “To see Daddy,” Caitlyn said.

  “Caitlyn!” Carrie protested.

  Abby closed her eyes against the tide of dismay that washed over her.

  “Because you miss him?” she asked carefully. She knew it had to be more than that. They’d just seen Wes and they’d never gotten homesick after leaving him before.

  Carrie remained stubbornly silent, but Caitlyn shook her head.

  “Why, then?” Abby asked, focusing on Caitlyn.

  “Because—” Caitlyn began, only to have Carrie cut her off by accusing her of being a tattletale.

  This was one of the drawbacks to having twins. They mostly presented a united front. Unless she separated them and took Caitlyn off alone, it was unlikely she was going to get a straight answer out of them tonight.

  Flying blind, she said, “Okay, here’s what I think. I think you may have heard me on the phone today talking about some grown-up things going on between your dad and me. I think maybe you got scared that I wasn’t going to let you see your dad anymore, so you decided to run away to be with him.”