Brambleberry House

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She had a wild, visceral image of his mouth on hers, of those strong muscles surrounding her, of his skin, warm and hard beneath her exploring fingertips.

  How should she answer that? He was gorgeous and stubborn and infuriating and his kiss was magic.

  “I don’t really know. He’s only been there a few days. So far everything has been...fine.”

  It was a vast understatement and she could only be grateful Sage was thousands of miles away and not watching her out of those knowing eyes of hers that missed nothing.

  “Any sign of Abigail since your wounded soldier showed up or is she giving him a wide berth?”

  “No ghostly manifestations, no. Everything has been quiet on the paranormal front.”

  “What about Conan? Does he like him?”

  “Well, he did try to attack him last night in my apartment, but other than that, they get along fine.”

  “Excuse me? He attacked him? Our fierce and mighty watchdog Conan, who would probably lick an intruder to death?”

  She sighed, wishing she’d kept her big mouth shut. Sage was far too perceptive and Anna had a sudden suspicion she would read far more into the situation.

  “He and Conan went hiking yesterday on Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain and Lieutenant Maxwell fell and was scraped up a bit. He’s already got an injury from a helicopter crash so it was hard for him to tend his wounds by himself but he’s the, uh, prickly, independent type. He wasn’t thrilled about me having to bandage his cuts. But Conan and I can both be persuasive.”

  “Okay, now things are getting interesting. Forget some stupid old trial. Now I want to know everything about the new tenant. Tell me more.”

  “There’s nothing to tell, Sage. I promise.”

  Other than that she had kissed him and made of fool of herself over him and then spent the night wrapped in feverish dreams that left her achy and restless.

  “What does he look like?”

  Anna closed her eyes and was chagrined when his image appeared, hazel eyes and dark hair and too-serious mouth.

  “He looks like he’s been in a hospital too long and is hungry for fresh air and sunlight. Conan adores him and is already extremely protective of him. That’s what last night was about. Conan didn’t want him to go up the stairs until I’d taken a look at his swollen ankle.”

  “And did you? Get a good look, I mean?”

  Better than she should have. “Sage, drop it. There’s nothing between me and Lieutenant Maxwell. I’m not interested in a relationship right now. I can’t afford to be. When would I have the time, for heaven’s sake, even if I had the energy? Besides, I obviously can’t be trusted to pick out a decent man for myself since my judgment is so abysmal.”

  “That’s why you need to let Abigail and Conan do it for you. Look how well things turned out for Julia and for me?”

  Anna laughed, feeling immeasurably better about life, as she always did after talking to Sage. “So what you’re saying is that a fictitious octogenarian spirit and a mixed-breed mutt have better taste in men than I do. Okay. Good to know. If I ever decide to date again—highly doubtful at this point in my life—I’ll bring every man home to Brambleberry House before the second date.”

  They talked a few moments longer, then she heard Chloe calling Sage’s name. “You’d better go. Thanks for calling, Sage. I promise, I’ll call you as soon as I know anything about the verdict.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me there?”

  “Absolutely positive. When you and Eben and Chloe come back to Cannon Beach at Easter, we’ll have an all-nighter and we can read the court transcripts together.”

  “Ooh, can we do parts? I’ve got the perfect voice for that weasel Grayson Fletcher.”

  She pitched her voice high and nasal, not at all like Gray’s smooth baritone, but it still made Anna laugh. “Deal. I’ll see you then.”

  She hung up the phone a few moments later, her heart much lighter as she focused on all the wonderful ways her life had changed in the last year.

  Yes, she’d had a rough few months and the trial was excruciatingly humiliating.

  But she had many more blessings than hardships. She considered Sage the very best gift Abigail had bequeathed to her after her death. Better than the house or the garden or all the antique furniture in the world.

  The two of them had always had a cool relationship while Abigail was alive, perhaps afflicted by a little subtle rivalry. Both of them had loved Abigail and perhaps had wanted her affection for themselves.

  Being forced to live together in Brambleberry House had brought them closer and they had found much common ground in their shared grief for their friend. She now considered Sage and Julia Blair her richest blessings, the two best friends she’d ever known.

  She had a beautiful home on the coast, she had close friends who loved and supported her, she had two businesses she was working to rebuild.

  The last thing she needed was a wounded soldier to complicate things and leave her aching for all she didn’t have.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FEW THINGS COULD send his blood pumping like a heavy storm roiling in off the ocean.

  Max walked along the wide sandy beach with Conan on his leash, watching the churn of black-edged clouds way out on the far horizon. Even from here, he could see the froth of the sea, a writhing mass of deep, angry green.

  It wouldn’t be here for some time yet but the air had that expectant quality to it, as if everything along the coast was just waiting. Already the wind had picked up and the gulls seemed frantic as they soared and dived through the sky, driven by an urgency to fill their stomachs and head for shelter somewhere.

  At moments like this, Max sometimes wondered if he should have picked a career in the coast guard.

  He could have flown helicopters there, swift, agile little Sikorsky Jayhawks, flying daredevil rescues on the ocean while waves buffeted the belly of his bird.

  He had always loved the ocean, especially this ocean—its moods and its piques and the sheer magnificence of it.

  Conan sniffed at a clump of seaweed and Max paused to let him take his time at it. Though he didn’t want to admit it, he was grateful for the chance to rest for a moment.

  Considering his body felt as if it had been smashed against the rocks at the headland, he figured he was doing pretty well. A run had been out of the question, with his ankle still on the swollen side, but a walk had helped loosen everything up and he felt much better.

  The ocean always seemed to calm him. He used to love to race down from the house the moment Abigail returned to Brambleberry House from picking him up at the airport in Portland. She would follow after him, laughing as he would shuck off his shoes and socks for that first frigid dip of his toes in the water.

  Max couldn’t explain it, but some part of him was connected to this part of the planet, by some invisible tie binding him to this particular meshing of land and sea and sky.

  He had traveled extensively around the world during his youth as his mother moved from social scene to social scene—in the days before Meredith sent him to military school. He had served tours of duty in far-flung spots from Latin America to Germany to the gulf and had seen many gorgeous places in every corner of the planet.

  But no place else ever filled him with this deep sense of homecoming as he found here on the Oregon coast.

  He didn’t quite understand it, especially since he had spent much longer stretches of time in other locations. When people in social or professional situations asked him where he was from, as Anna had done at breakfast the other day, he always gave some vague answer about moving around a lot when he was kid.

  But in his heart, when he thought about home, he thought of Brambleberry House and Cannon Beach.

  He sighed. Ridiculous. It wasn’t his. Abigail had decided two stran
gers deserved the place more and at this point he didn’t think he could do a damn thing about it.

  If his military career was indeed over, he was going to have to consider his options. Maybe he would just buy a fishing boat and a little house near Yachats or Newport and spend his days out on the water.

  It wasn’t a bad scenario. So why couldn’t he drum up a little more enthusiasm for it, or for any of the other possibilities he’d been trying to come up with since doctors first dared suggest he might not ever regain full use of his arm?

  He flexed his shoulder as he watched the gulls struggle against the increasing wind. They ought to just give up now, he thought, before the wind made it impossible for them to fly. But they kept at it. Indeed, they seemed to revel in the challenge.

  He sighed as his ankle throbbed from being in one place too long. He felt weaker than a damn seagull in that headwind right now.

  “Come on, Conan. We’d better head back.”

  The dog made a definite face at him but gave one last sniff in the sand and followed as Max led the way back up the beach toward Brambleberry House.

  The storm clouds were edging closer and he figured they had maybe an hour before the real fun started.

  Good. Maybe a hard thunder-bumper would drive this restlessness out of him.

  He was grateful for his fleece jacket now as the temperature already seemed to have dropped a dozen degrees or more, just in the time since they set off.

  The moment he opened the beach access gate at Brambleberry House, Conan bounded inside, barking like crazy as if he had been gone for months.

  Max managed to control him enough to get the leash off and the dog jumped around with excitement.

  “You like storms, too, don’t you? I bet they remind you of Aunt Abigail, right?”

  The dog barked in that spooky way he had of acting as if he understood every word, then he took off around a corner of the house.

  As Max followed more slowly, branches twisted and danced in the swell of wind, a few scraping the windows on the upper stories of the house.

  He planned to start a fire in the fireplace, grab the thriller he had been trying to focus on and settle in for the evening with a good book and the storm.

  Yeah, it probably would sound tame to the guys in his unit but right now he could imagine few things more enjoyable.

  A quick image of kissing Anna Galvez while the storm raged around them flashed through his mind but he quickly suppressed it. Their kiss had been a one-time-only event and he needed to remember that.

  “Conan? Where’d you go, bud?” he called.

  He rounded the corner of the house after the dog, then stopped dead. His heart seemed to stutter in his chest at the sight of Anna atop a precarious-looking wooden ladder, a hammer in her hand as she stretched to fix something he couldn’t see from this angle.

  The first thought to register in his distinctly male brain was how sexy she looked with a leather tool belt low on her hips and her shirt riding up a little as she raised her arms.

  The movement bared just the tiniest inch of skin above her waistband, a smooth brown expanse that just begged for his touch.

  The second, more powerful emotion was sheer terror as he noted just how far she was reaching above the ladder—and how precarious she looked up there fifteen feet in the air.

  “Have you lost your ever-loving mind?”

  She jerked around at his words and to his dismay, the ladder moved with her, coming away at least an inch or more from the porch where it was propped.

  At the last moment, she grabbed hold of the soffit to stabilize herself and the ladder, and Max cursed his sudden temper. If she fell because he had impulsively yelled at her, he would never forgive himself.

  “I don’t believe I have,” she answered coolly. “My ever-loving mind seems fairly intact to me just now.”

  “You might want to double-check that, ma’am. That wind is picking up velocity with each passing second. It won’t take much for one good gust to knock that ladder straight out from under you, then where will you be?”

  “No doubt lying bleeding and unconscious at your feet,” she answered.

  He was not going about this in the correct way, he realized. He had no right to come in here and start issuing orders like she was the greenest of recruits.

  He had no right to do anything here. He ought to just let her break her fool neck—but the thought of her, as she had so glibly put it, lying bleeding and unconscious at his feet filled him with an odd, hollow feeling in his gut that he might have called panic under other circumstances.

  “Come on down, Anna,” he cajoled. “It’s really too windy for you to be safe up there.”

  “I will. But not quite yet.”

  He wasn’t getting her down from there short of toppling the ladder himself, he realized. And with a bad ankle and only one usable arm right now—and that one questionable after the scrapes and bruises of the day before—he couldn’t even offer to take her place.

  “Can I at least hold the ladder for you?”

  “Would you?” she asked, peering down at him with delight. “I’m afraid I’m not really fond of heights.”

  She was afraid of heights? He stared at her and finally noticed the slight sheen of sweat on her upper lip and the very slightest of trembles in her knees.

  A weird softness twisted through his chest as he thought of the courage it must be taking her to stand there on that ladder, fighting down her fears.

  “And so to cure your phobia, you decided to stand fifteen feet above the ground atop a rickety wooden ladder in the face of a spring storm. Makes perfect sense to me.”

  She made a face, though she continued hammering away. “Ha ha. Not quite.”

  “Well, what’s so important it can’t wait until after the storm?”

  “Shingles. Loose ones.” She didn’t pause a moment in her hammering. “We need a new roof. The last time we had a big storm, the wind curled underneath some loose singles on the other side of the house and ended up lifting off about twenty square feet of roof. The other day I noticed some loose shingles on this side so I just want to make sure we don’t see the same thing happen.”

  “Couldn’t you find somebody else to do that for you?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Any suggestions, Lieutenant Maxwell?”

  “You could have asked me.”

  She finally stopped hammering long enough to look down at him, her gaze one of astonishment as she looked first at his arm in the blasted sling, then at his ankle.

  He waited for some caustic comment about his current physical limitations. Instead, her lovely features softened as if he’d handed her an armload of wildflowers.

  “I...thank you,” she said, her voice slightly breathless. “That’s very kind but I’m sort of in the groove now. I think I can handle it. I would appreciate your help holding the ladder while I check a couple of shingles on the porch on the east side of the house.”

  He wanted to order her off the ladder and back inside the house before she broke her blasted neck but he knew he had no right to do anything of the sort.

  The best he could do was make sure she stayed as safe as possible.

  He hated his shoulder all over again. Was he going to have to spend the rest of his life watching others do things he ought to be able to handle?

  “I’ll help you on one condition. When the wind hits twenty knots, you’ll have to stop, whether you finish or not.”

  She didn’t balk at the restriction as she climbed down from the ladder. “I suppose you’re going to tell me now you have some kind of built-in anemometer to know what the wind speed is at all times.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been a helicopter pilot for fifteen years and in that time I’ve learned a thing or two about gauging the weather. I’ve also learned not t
o mess around with Mother Nature.”

  “That’s a lesson you learn early when you live on the coast,” she answered.

  She lowered the ladder and he grabbed the front end with his left hand and followed her around the corner of the house. The house’s sturdy bulk sheltered them a little from the wind here but it was still cold, the air heavy and wet.

  “I thought you said you kept a handyman on retainer,” he said as together they propped the ladder against one corner of the porch.

  She smiled. “No, you’re the one who said I should. I do have a regular carpenter and he would fix all this in a second if he were around but he’s been doing some work for my friend Sage’s husband on one of Eben’s hotels in Montana.”

  “Your friend’s married to a hotel owner?”

  He pretended ignorance while his stomach jumped as she ascended the ladder again.

  “Yes. Eben Spencer owns Spencer Hotels. His company recently purchased a property here in town and that’s how he met Sage.”

  “She’s the other one who inherited Brambleberry House along with you, right?”

  She nodded. “She’s wonderful. You should meet her in a few weeks. She and Eben bought a house down the coast a mile or so and they come back as often as they can but they travel around quite a bit. She called me this afternoon from Patagonia, of all places!”

  She started hammering again and from his vantage point, he had an entirely too clear view of that enticing expanse of skin bared at her waist when she lifted her arms. He forced himself to look away, focusing instead on the Sitka spruce dancing wildly in the wind along the road.

  “Does she help you with the maintenance on the house?”

  “As much as she can when she’s here. And Julia helps, too. The two of us painted my living room right after Christmas.”

  “She’s the one who lives on the second floor, right? The one with the twins.”

  “Right. You’re going to love them. Simon will probably talk your leg off about what it’s like to fly a helicopter and how you hurt your shoulder and if you carry a gun. Maddie won’t have to even say a word to steal your heart in an instant. She’s a doll.”