Brambleberry House

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She had pushed him, harder than he was ready to be pushed. She had backed him into a corner and he was looking for some way out.

  This was all her fault and she was going to have to figure out a way to make things right. She couldn’t let Will leave everything he cared about behind because of her.

  The doorbell rang suddenly and Conan jumped up from his spot on the floor where he had been watching them. Now he hurried to Anna’s open apartment door, his tail wagging furiously and for one wild moment her heart jumped at the thought that it might be Will.

  Foolish, she realized almost instantly. Why would he be here?

  More likely it was Becca Wilder, the teenager she had hired to corral the twins for the evening while she was busy with Sage’s shower.

  Her supposition was confirmed a moment later when Anna went to answer the door and Julia heard the voice of Jewel Wilder, Becca’s mother and one of Sage’s friends, who had offered to drop Becca off when she came to the shower herself.

  She couldn’t do anything about Will right now, she realized. Sage’s bridal shower was supposed to start any moment now and she couldn’t let the celebration be ruined by her guilt.

  * * *

  THREE HOURS LATER, as Sage said goodbye to the last of her guests, Julia began gathering discarded plates and cups, doing her best to ignore her head that throbbed and pulsed with pain.

  She knew exactly why her head was pounding—the same reason her heart ached. Because of Will and his stubborn determination to shut himself off from life and because of her own stubborn, misguided determination to prevent him.

  For Sage’s sake, she had done her best to put away her anxiety and guilt for the evening. She had laughed and played silly wedding shower games and tried to enjoy watching Sage open the gifts from her eclectic collection of friends.

  Beneath it all, the ache simmered and seethed, like a vat of bitter bile waiting to boil over.

  Will was leaving his home, his friends, his wife and daughter’s resting places. She couldn’t let him do it, not if he was leaving because of her.

  She carried the plates and dishes into the kitchen, where she found Anna wrapping up the leftover food.

  “It was a wonderful party,” Julia said.

  “I think everyone had a good time,” Anna agreed. “But listen, you don’t have to help clean up. I can handle it. Why don’t you go on upstairs with the twins?”

  “I just checked with Becca and they’re both down for the night. She’s heading home with her mom and is leaving the door open so we can hear them down here.”

  Anna stuck a plate of little sandwiches into her refrigerator, then gave Julia a placid smile.

  “That’s great. Since the twins are asleep, this would be the perfect chance for you to go and talk some sense into Will.”

  Julia stared at her, completely astounded at the suggestion. “Where did that come from?”

  Anna smiled. “My brilliantly insightful mind.”

  “Which I never realized until this moment is a little on the cracked side. Why would he listen to me?”

  “Well, somebody needs to knock some sense into him and Sage and I both decided you’re the best one for the job.”

  “Why on earth would you possibly think that? You’ve both been friends with him for a long time. I just moved back. He’ll listen to what you have to say long before he’ll listen to me.”

  Not to mention the tiny little detail that she suspected she was the reason he was leaving in the first place—and the fact that he had basically ordered her to stay away from him.

  She wasn’t about to admit that to Anna, though.

  “We’re like sisters to him,” Anna answered. “Naggy, annoying little sisters. You, on the other hand, are the woman he has feelings for.”

  She bobbled the plate she was loading into the dishwasher but managed to catch it before it shattered on the floor.

  “Wrong!” she exclaimed. “Oh, you couldn’t be more wrong. Will doesn’t have feelings for me. He...he might, if he would let himself, but he’s wrapped himself up so tightly in his pain he won’t let anyone through. Or not me, at least. No, he absolutely doesn’t have feelings for me.”

  Anna studied her for a long moment, then smiled unexpectedly. “Our mistake, then, I guess. Sage and I were quite convinced there was something between the two of you. Will’s been different ever since you came back to Cannon Beach.”

  “Different, how?” she asked warily.

  “I can’t quite put my finger on how, exactly. I wouldn’t say he’s been happier, but he’s done things he hasn’t in two years. Going for ice cream with you and your kids. Coming to the barbecue with Eben and Chloe without putting up a fight. Sage and I both thought you were slowly dragging him back to life, whether he wanted you to or not, and we were both thrilled about it. He kissed you, didn’t he?”

  Julia flushed. “Yes, but he wasn’t happy about either time.”

  Anna’s eyebrow rose. “There was more than one time?”

  She sighed. “A few weeks ago, when I helped him hang the new moldings in your living room. We had a fight afterward and I said horrible things to him, things I had no right to say. And now I find out he took a job with Eben’s company, and accepted it two weeks ago. I just can’t believe it’s a coincidence.”

  “All the more reason you should be the one to convince him to stay,” Anna said.

  “He told me to stay away from him,” Julia whispered, hurting all over again at the harshness of his words.

  “Are you going to listen to him? Go on,” Anna urged. “I’ll keep an eye on Simon and Maddie for you. There’s nothing stopping you.”

  Except maybe her guilt and her nerves and the horrible, sinking sensation in her gut that she was pushing a man away from everything that he cared about, just so he could escape from her.

  Before she could formulate further arguments, a huge shaggy beast suddenly hurried into the room, a leash in his mouth and Sage right on his heels.

  “Conan, what has gotten into you, you crazy dog?” she exclaimed. “I can put you out.”

  But the dog didn’t listen to her. He headed straight to Julia, plopped down at her feet and held the leash out in his mouth with that familiar expectant look.

  She groaned. “Not you, too?”

  Sage and Anna exchanged glances and Julia was quite certain she heard Sage snigger.

  “Looks like you’re the chosen one,” Anna said with a smile.

  “You can’t fight your destiny, Jules,” Sage piped in. “Believe me, I’ve tried. The King of Brambleberry House has declared you’re tonight’s sacrificial lamb. You can’t escape your fate.”

  She closed her eyes, aware as she did that the pain in her head seemed to have lifted while she was talking to Anna. “I suppose you’re telling me Conan wants me to talk to Will, too.”

  “That’s what it looks like to me,” Sage said.

  “Same here.”

  Julia stared at Anna—prosaic, no-nonsense Anna, who looked just as convinced as Sage.

  “You’re both crazy. He’s a dog, for heaven’s sake!”

  Sage grinned. “Watch it. If you offend him, you’ll be stuck for life giving him his evening walk.”

  “Rain or shine,” Anna added. “And around here, it’s usually rain.”

  She studied them all looking so expectantly at her and gave a sigh of resignation. “This isn’t fair, you know. The three of you ganging up on me like this.”

  In answer, Sage clipped the leash on Conan’s collar and held the end out for Julia. Anna left the room, returning a moment later with Julia’s jacket from the closet in the entryway.

  “What if Will doesn’t want to talk to me?”

  It was a purely rhetorical question. She knew perfectly well he wouldn’t want to talk to
her, just as she was grimly aware she was only trying to delay the inevitable moment when she had to gather her nerve and walk down the beach to his house.

  “You’re an elementary school teacher,” Anna said with a confident grin. “You’re good at making your students do things they don’t want to do, aren’t you?”

  Julia snorted. “I have a feeling Will Garrett might be just a tad harder to manage than my fifth-grade boys.”

  “We all have complete faith in you,” Sage said.

  Before she was quite aware of how they had managed it, they ushered her and Conan out the front door and closed it behind her. She was quite surprised when she didn’t hear the click of the door locking behind her. She wouldn’t have put anything past them at this point.

  Conan strained on his leash to be gone but she stood on the porch steps of Brambleberry House trying to gather her frayed nerves as she listened to the distant crash of the sea and the cool October breeze moaning in the tops of the pines.

  Finally she couldn’t ignore Conan’s urgency and she followed the walkway around the house to the gate that opened to the beach.

  It would probably be a quicker route to just take the road to his house but she wasn’t in a huge hurry to face him anyway.

  Conan seemed less insistent as they walked along the shoreline, after he had marked just about every single rock and tuft of grass they passed.

  It gave her time to remember her last summer on Cannon Beach. She passed the rock where she had been sitting when he kissed her for the last time—not counting more recent incidences—the night before she left Cannon Beach when she was fifteen.

  She paused and ran her finger along the uneven surface, remembering the thrill of his arms around her and how she had been so very certain she had to be in love with him.

  She’d had nothing to compare it to, but she had been quite sure at fifteen that this must be the real thing.

  And then the next day her world had shattered and she had been shuttled to Sacramento with her mother, away from everything safe and secure in her life.

  Still, even as her parents’ marriage had imploded, she had held the memory of a handsome boy close to her heart.

  At first she thought the moisture on her cheeks was just sea spray, then she realized it was tears, that she was crying for lost innocence and for the two people they had been, and for all the pain that had come after for both of them.

  She wiped at her cheeks as she knelt and hugged Conan to her. The dog licked at her cheeks and she smiled a little at his attempts to comfort her.

  “I’m being silly again, aren’t I? I’m not fifteen anymore and I’m not that dreamy-eyed girl. I’m thirty-one years old and I need to start acting like it, don’t I?”

  The dog barked as if he agreed with her.

  With renewed resolve, she squared her shoulders and stood again, gathering her courage around her.

  She had to do this. Will’s life was here in Cannon Beach. It had always been here, and she couldn’t ruin that for him.

  She swallowed her nerves and headed for the lights she could see flickering in his workshop.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HE WOULD MISS THIS.

  Will stood in his father’s workshop—his workspace now, at least for another few days—and routered the edge of a shingle while a blues station played on the stereo.

  He had always found comfort within these walls, with the air sweet with freshly cut wood shavings and sawdust motes drifting in the air, catching the light like gold flakes.

  He left the door ajar, both for ventilation and to let the cool, moist sea air inside. In the quiet intervals without the whine and hum of his power tools, he could hear the ocean’s low murmur just down the beach.

  This was his favorite spot in the world, the place where he had learned his craft, where he had forged a connection with his stern, sometimes austere father, where he had figured out many of his own strengths and his weaknesses.

  Before Robin and Cara died, he used to come out here so he could have a quiet place to think. Sage probably would have given it some hippy new age name like a transcendental meditation room or something.

  He just always considered it the one place where his thoughts seemed more clear and cohesive.

  He didn’t so much need a place to think these days as he needed an escape on the nights when the house seemed too full of ghosts to hold anyone still breathing.

  In a few days when he started working for Eben Spencer’s company, everything would be different. He expected his workspaces for the next few months would be any spare corner he could find in whatever hotel around the globe where Eben sent him to work.

  Who would have ever expected him to become an itinerant carpenter? Have tools, will travel.

  His first job was outside of Boston but Eben wanted to send him to Madrid next and then on to Portofino, Italy before he headed to the Pacific Rim. And that was only the first month.

  Will shook his head. Italy and Spain and Singapore. What the hell was he going to do in a foreign country where he didn’t know a soul and didn’t speak the language?

  It all seemed wildly exotic for a guy who rarely left his coastal hometown, who only possessed a current passport because he and Robin had gone on a cruise to Mexico the year before Cara came along.

  The work would be the same. That was the important thing. He would still be doing the one thing he was good at, the one thing that filled him with satisfaction, whether he was in Portofino or Madrid or wherever else Eben sent him.

  Maybe those ghosts might even have a chance to rest if he wasn’t here dredging them up every minute.

  He sure hoped he was making the right choice.

  He set down the finished shingle and picked up another one from the dwindling pile next to him. Only a few more and then he only had to nail them to the roof to be finished. A few more hours of work ought to do it.

  Against his will, he shot another glance out the window at the big house on the hill, solid and graceful against the moonlit sky.

  The lights were out on the second floor, he noted immediately, then chided himself for even noticing.

  He was almost certain he wasn’t really trying to outrun any ghosts by taking the job with Spencer Hotels. But he knew he couldn’t say the same for the living woman who haunted him.

  He sighed as his thoughts inevitably slid back to Julia, as they had done so often the last two weeks. Tonight was Sage’s bridal shower, he knew. He had seen cars coming and going all night.

  Julia was probably right in the middle of it all, with her sweet smile and the sunshine she seemed to carry with her into every room.

  For a man who wanted to push her away, he sure spent a hell of a lot of time thinking about her. He sighed again, and could almost swear he smelled the cherry blossom scent of her on the wind.

  But a moment later, when the router was silent as he picked up another shingle, he thought he heard a snuffling kind of noise outside the door, then a dark red nose poked through.

  An instant later, Conan was barking a greeting at him and Julia was walking through the doorway behind him.

  Will yanked up his safety glasses and could do nothing but stare at her, wondering how his thoughts had possibly conjured her up.

  Her cheeks were flushed, her hair tousled a little by the wind, but she was definitely flesh and blood.

  “Hi,” she murmured, and he was certain her color climbed a little higher on her cheeks.

  She looked fragile and lovely and highly uncomfortable. No wonder, after the things he had said to her the last time they had spoken.

  “I’m sorry to bother you... I...we...” Her voice trailed off.

  “Wasn’t tonight Sage’s big bridal shower?”

  “It was. But it’s over now and everyone’s gone. After the show
er, Conan needed a walk and he picked me to take him and Sage and Anna made me come down here to talk to you.”

  She finished in a rush, without meeting his gaze.

  “They made you?”

  Her gaze finally flashed to his and he saw a combination of chagrin and rueful acceptance. “You know what they’re like. I have a tough enough time saying no to them individually. When they combine forces, I’m pretty much helpless to resist.”

  “Why did they want you to talk to me?” he asked, though he had a pretty strong inkling.

  She didn’t answer him, though, only moved past him into the workshop, her attention suddenly caught by the project he was working on.

  Damn it.

  He could feel his own cheeks start to flush and wished, more than anything, that he had had the foresight to grab a tarp to cover the thing the minute she walked in.

  “Will,” she exclaimed. “It’s gorgeous!”

  He scratched the back of his neck, doing his best to ignore how the breathy excitement in her voice sent a shiver rippling down his spine. “It’s not finished. I’m working on the shingles tonight, then I should be ready to take it back up to Brambleberry House.”

  She moved forward for a closer look and he couldn’t seem to wrench his gaze away from her starry-eyed delight at the repaired dollhouse he had agreed to work on the day she moved in.

  “It’s absolutely stunning!”

  She drew her finger along the curve of one of the cupola’s with tender care. Will could only watch, grimly aware that he shouldn’t have such an instant reaction just from the sight of her soft, delicate hands on his work.

  “You fixed it! No, you didn’t just fix it. This is beyond a simple repair. It was such a mess, just a pile of broken sticks, when you started! And from that, you’ve created a work of art!”

  “I don’t know that I’d go quite that far.”

  “I would! Oh, Will, it’s beautiful. Better than it ever was, even when it was new from my father.”

  To his horror, tears started to well up in her eyes.