He was wondering just how long it might take for her to fix herself up again if he messed up all this perfection when Conan suddenly barked urgently and raced to the door.
A moment later, he heard the front door to the house open and children’s laughter echo through the house.
Anna pulled away from him with a startled gasp, then her face lit up with joy. If she was breathtaking before, right now with her eyes bright and a wide smile lighting her features, she was simply staggering.
“They’re back!” she exclaimed.
He couldn’t seem to make his brain work. “Who?”
“Julia and the twins! Oh, this just makes this entire day perfect. Come on, you’ve got to meet them.”
She looked a little windblown from the passion of their kiss but she linked her hand with his and opened the door. Conan rushed out first, just about tripping over his feet in his rush to greet two dark-haired children who were starting up the stairs, their arms loaded with backpacks.
“Conan!” both children shouted, dropping their bundles and hurrying back down the stairs.
The dog barked and jumped around them, licking first one and then the other while the boy and girl giggled and hugged him.
“Hey, I need a little of that love.”
“Anna Banana!”
The little boy jumped up from hugging the dog and launched himself at Anna. She gave him a tight hug then turned to gather the less rambunctious girl to her as well.
“How are you, my darlings? I know you’ve only been gone a week, but I swear you’ve grown a foot in that time! What have you been eating, Maddie? Ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner?”
The girl giggled and shook her head. “Nope. Only for breakfast and lunch. We had pizza and cheeseburgers the rest of the time.”
“You’ve been living large in Montana, haven’t you?”
“We had tons of fun, Anna! You should have come with us! We went on a horseback ride and we went sledding and skiing and then we went to Boise and visited Grandma and Grandpa for three whole days,” the boy exclaimed.
The girl—Maddie—dimpled at her. “You look superpretty, Anna. Are you going to a ball?”
Anna smiled and hugged her again. “No, sweetheart. Just to dinner at Chloe’s dad’s hotel.”
“Ooh, will you bring me a fortune cookie?” the boy asked. “I love their fortune cookies.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Anna promised, just as a slim blonde woman tromped through the door carrying a suitcase in each arm. She dropped them as soon as she walked into the foyer and saw Anna greeting the children, and Max watched while the two women embraced.
“I just heard. Sage just called me. Oh, Anna, I’m so happy about the guilty verdict. Will is, too.”
“Yeah,” Maddie said with a grin. “You should have heard him yelling in the car. My ears still hurt!”
Anna laughed and looked behind them. “Where is Will?”
“He’s getting the rest of our luggage off the roof rack. He should be here in a moment.”
The woman glanced over Anna’s shoulder at Max and though she gave him a friendly smile, he thought he saw a kind of protective wariness there. It made him wonder what Anna might have told her friends about him.
“Hi,” she said. “You must be Harry Maxwell.”
The false name scraped against his conscience like metal on metal. He didn’t know what to say, loath to perpetuate the lie any more than he already had.
Anna saved him from having to come up with a response. “I’m sorry,” she exclaimed with a distracted laugh. “I was so happy to see you all again, I forgot my manners. Max, this is Julia Blair and her children Maddie and Simon. Julia, this is Lieutenant Harry Maxwell.”
He nodded hello, then reached forward to shake Julia’s outstretched hand.
“We’re interrupting something, aren’t we?” she said. “You both look wonderful and you’re obviously on your way out.”
“We’re heading to the Sea Urchin to celebrate the verdict,” Anna said.
“We can do it another time,” Max offered. “I’m sure you two probably want to catch up.”
“No, go on. Keep your plans,” Julia said. “We can catch up later tonight over tea when the kids are in bed.”
Max said nothing, though he thought with fleeting regret of the last two nights when he had slept with her in his arms.
“I was going to shut Conan in my apartment while we’re at dinner but you’re certainly welcome to take him upstairs with you. I’m sure he’ll be so much help while you’re trying to unpack.”
“Thanks,” the other woman said dryly.
“Let me help you with your luggage,” Max said.
Julia gave a surprised glance at his omni-present sling. “You don’t have to do that.”
“You’d better let him,” Anna said with a laugh. “The man doesn’t take no for an answer.”
“Doesn’t he?” Julia murmured.
Max felt his face heat and decided he would be wise to beat a hasty retreat. He picked up one of the suitcases and carried it up and set it on the landing outside the second-floor apartment. He was just heading back down for the second suitcase, when he heard a male voice from the foyer below.
“We were only gone eight days. Why, again, did we need all these suitcases?”
Max froze on the stairway, his heart stuttering. He knew the owner of that voice.
And worse, the man knew him.
* * *
“WOW, ANNA. You look fabulous!”
Anna beamed at Will Garrett, who lived three houses down. Will was not only a gifted carpenter who had done most of the renovation work on Brambleberry House but, more importantly, he was a dear friend.
“I would say the same for you if I could see you behind all the suitcases,” she said with a laugh.
“Here. How’s that?” He set down the luggage and pulled her into a close hug. She hugged him back, her heart lifting at the smile he gave her. Every time she saw Will, she marveled at the changes in him these last six months since he and Julia had fallen in love again.
Before Julia and her twins came to Brambleberry House, Will had been a far different man. He had been lost in grief for his wife and daughter who had been killed in a car accident three years ago.
Anna had grieved with him for Robin and Cara. She and Sage—and Abigail, before her death—had worried for him as he pulled away from their close circle of friends, drawing inside himself in the midst of his terrible pain.
They had all rejoiced when Julia moved in upstairs and they learned she had been his first love, when they were just teenagers.
The two of them had rediscovered that love and together, Julia and her twins had helped Will begin to heal.
“I heard the good news about that idiot Fletcher,” Will said, too low for the children to overhear. “I couldn’t be happier that he’s finally getting what’s coming to him. Maybe now you can put the whole thing behind you and move forward.”
She thought of the progress she had made, how she had brooded far too long about everything. Her perspective had changed these last few days, she realized, thanks in large part to Max.
She was ready to move forward, to refocus her efforts on saving both stores. Through hard work, she had built something good and worthwhile. She couldn’t just give up all that because of a setback like Gray Fletcher.
She looked up and saw Max standing motionless on the stairs. She smiled up at him, awash in gratitude for these last few days and the confidence he had helped her find again.
“I need to introduce you to our new tenant. Will, this is—”
He followed her gaze and suddenly his eyes lit up. “Max! What are you doing here?”
Max walked slowly down the stairs and Anna frowned when Will gave hi
m that shoulder tap thing men did that seemed the equivalent to the hug of greeting she and Julia had shared.
“Why didn’t anybody tell me you were living upstairs? This is wonderful news. Abigail would have been thrilled that you’ve finally come home.”
Anna stared between the two men. Will looked delighted, while Max’s expression had reverted to that stony, stoic look he had worn so often when he first arrived at the house.
Her pulse seemed unnaturally loud in her ears as she tried to make sense of this new turn of events. “I don’t understand,” she finally said. “You two know each other?”
“Know each other? Of course!” Will exclaimed. “We hung out all the time, whenever he would visit his aunt. A couple weeks every summer.”
“His...aunt?”
Will gave her an odd look. “Abigail! This is her nephew. The long-lost soldier, Max Harrison.”
Anna drew in a sharp breath, her solar plexus contracting as if someone had socked her in the gut. She stared at Max, who swallowed hard but didn’t say anything.
“That’s impossible,” she exclaimed. “Abigail’s nephew’s name was Jamie. Not Harry or Max. Her Jamie. That’s what she always called him.”
“My full name is Maxwell James Harrison. Abigail was the only one who called me Jamie.”
She was going to hyperventilate for the first time in her life. She could feel the breath being slowly squeezed from her lungs. “Max Harrison—Harry Maxwell. I’m such an idiot. Why didn’t I figure it out?”
“I can explain if you’ll let me.”
Lies. Everything they shared was lies. She had kissed him, held him, slept with him, for heaven’s sake. And it had all been a lie.
She pressed a hand to her stomach, to the nausea curling there. First Grayson and now Max. Did she wear some invisible sign on her forehead that said Gullible Fool Here?
All her joy in the day, the triumph of the guilty verdict, the fledgling hope that she could now regain her life seemed to crumble away like leaves underfoot.
Julia, with her usual perception, must have sensed some of what was racing through Anna’s head. She quickly stepped in to take control of the situation.
“Will, kids, let’s get these suitcases out of the entryway and upstairs to the apartment. Come on.”
The children grumbled but they grabbed their backpacks and trudged up the stairs, Conan racing ahead of them in his excitement at having them all back.
In moments, the chaos and bustle of their homecoming was reduced to a tense and ugly silence as she gazed at the man she thought she had fallen in love with.
Most people call me Max. She remembered his words, which very well might have been the only honest thing he had said to her since he moved in.
She moved numbly back into her apartment, only vaguely aware that he had followed her inside.
A hundred thoughts raced through her head but she could only focus on one.
“You lied to me.”
“Yes,” he answered. Just that, nothing else.
“What am I missing here?” she asked. “Why would you possibly feel like you had to lie about your relationship with Abigail and use a false name?”
He rubbed a hand at the base of his neck. “It was a stupid idea. Monumentally stupid. All I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“That tells me nothing! Who wakes up in the morning and says, ‘gosh, I think I’ll create a false identity today, just for kicks’?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then explain it to me!”
Her hands were shaking, she realized. This felt worse than the slick, greasy feeling in her stomach when her accountant had discovered the first hint of wrongdoing at the store. She was very much afraid she was going to be sick and she did her best to fight down the nausea.
“I was stationed in Fallujah when Abigail died. I didn’t even know she died until several months later.”
“Wrong!” she exclaimed. “Sage notified Abigail’s family. I know she did! Not that it did any good. Not a single family member bothered to come to her funeral.”
“Sage notified my mother. Not the same thing at all. I told you my relationship with my mother is difficult at best and she never liked Abigail. The only reason she let me come here all those summers was because she thought Abigail was loaded and would eventually leave everything to me. Meredith didn’t think to mention to me that Abigail had even died until two months after the fact, and then only in passing.”
“How can I believe anything you tell me?”
He closed his eyes. “It’s true. I loved Abigail. I doubt I could have swung leave to attend a great-aunt’s funeral but I would have moved heaven and earth to try.”
“So how do we get from here to there?”
He sighed. “My mother is between husbands, which means that, as usual, she’s short on cash. She suddenly remembered Abigail had this house that was supposed to be worth a fortune and she seemed to think it should have come to me, as Abigail’s only living relative. And of course, to her by default if something happened to me in the Middle East. Imagine her dismay when she found out Abigail had left Brambleberry House to someone else. Two strangers.”
The nausea roiled in her stomach, mostly that he could speak of his own mother regarding his possible demise with such callousness. “This was about money?”
“I don’t give a damn about the money!” he said, with unmistakable vehemence. “My mother might but I don’t. This was about making sure Abigail knew what she was doing when she left the house and its contents to two complete strangers.”
“Strangers to you, maybe, but not to Abigail!” Anna’s temper flared with fierce suddenness. “She was our friend. Sage and I both loved her dearly and she loved us. Obviously more than she loved some nephew who never even bothered to visit her.”
He drew in a sharp breath. “It was a little tough to find time for social calls when I was in the middle of a damn war zone!”
She had hurt him, she realized. She wanted to take back her words but how could she, when her insides were being ripped apart by pain?
She loved him and he had lied to her, just like every other man she’d ever been stupid enough to trust.
She could feel hot tears burning behind her eyes and she was very much afraid she was going to break down in front of him, something she absolutely could not allow. She blinked them back, focusing on the anger.
“Let me get this straight. You came here because you thought I was some kind of scam artist? That Sage and I had schemed and manipulated our way into Abigail’s life so she would leave us the legacy that should have been yours.”
He compressed his mouth into a tight line. “Something like that.”
“And where did sleeping with me fit into that?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
HER WORDS HOVERED between them, a harsh condemnation of his actions these last few days. In her eyes, he could see her withdrawal, the hurt and fury he fully deserved.
Why had he ever been stupid enough to think coming to Cannon Beach was a good idea? He thought of the events he had set into motion by that one crazy decision. He hated most of all knowing he had hurt her.
“Everything between us has been a lie,” she said, her voice harsh.
“Not true.” He stepped forward, knowing only that he needed some contact with her, but she took a swift step back and he fought hard to conceal the pain knifing through him.
“I never expected any of this to happen. I only intended to spend a few weeks running recon here, getting the lay of the land. I just wanted to check things out, make sure everything was aboveboard. I felt like I owed it to Abigail because...”
Because I loved her and I never had a chance to say goodbye.
“Well, my reasons don’t really matter
. I swear, I tried to keep my distance but you made it impossible.”
“What did I do?”
“You invited me to breakfast,” he said simply.
You fixed up my scrapes and bruises, you listened with compassion when I rambled on about my scars, you kissed me and lifted me out of myself.
You made me fall in love with you.
The words clogged in his throat. He wanted desperately to say them but he knew she wouldn’t welcome them. He had lost any right to offer her his love.
“I figured out a long time ago that you genuinely cared about Abigail and there was nothing underhanded in you and Sage Benedetto inheriting Brambleberry House.”
“Well, that’s certainly reassuring to know. Was that before or after you slept with me?”
“Anna—”
“So tell me, Max. As soon as you figured out I wasn’t some con artist, why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
He raked a hand through his hair. “I wanted to, a hundred times. I tried, but something always stopped me. The dog. The storm. I don’t know. It just never seemed like the right time.”
He sighed, wishing she would give him even the tiniest of signals that she believed any of this. “And then after we made love, I felt like we were so entangled, I didn’t know how to tell you without hurting you.”
Her laugh was bitter and scorched his heart. “Far easier to go on letting stupid, oblivious Anna believe the fantasy.”
“You’re not stupid. Or oblivious. I deceived you. Though I might have thought I had good intentions, that I owed something to Abigail’s memory, it was completely wrong of me to let things go as far as they did.”
She said nothing and he scanned her features, looking for any softening but he saw nothing there but pain and anger. “I never meant to hurt you,” he said.
She stood in a protective stance with her shoulders stiff, and her arms wrapped tightly around her stomach, and he didn’t know how to reach her.
“Isn’t it funny how people always say that after the fact?” she said, her voice a low condemnation. “If you truly never meant to hurt me, you should have told me you were Abigail’s nephew after you kissed me for the first time.”
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