Moonshell Beach: A Shelter Bay Novel

by JoAnn Ross

  “And how about that Army vet Sax introduced us to last week?” Bernard continued to press his case. “You can’t say that you didn’t make a difference there.”

  When she’d heard her three grandsons were playing basketball with an Army veteran turned teacher and coach at Shelter Bay High School, she’d asked to meet Dillon Slater, so she could hopefully coax him into teaching a basketball clinic. She’d been surprised and more than a little excited when it hadn’t taken any coaxing at all. In fact, not only had he immediately agreed; he’d also offered to help get momentum going for a tutoring program for the kids.

  “There you go with your exaggerating again,” she complained without heat. “You’re making me sound like Mother Teresa.” Which she definitely was not.

  “Not Mother Teresa, but Adèle Douchett, the woman everyone in town adores. So, how can you even think about turning into a recluse?” He linked his fingers with hers and lifted their joined hands to his lips. “Shelter Bay needs you, Del.” His mouth, which after more than fifty years of marriage still possessed the power to thrill, moved up her arm, across her shoulder, and began nuzzling at her neck. “I need you.”

  Although she knew his words were meant to reassure, they inadvertently brought up another concern. Bernard Douchett was one of the strongest, most independent, hardworking men she’d ever known. And the most optimistic.

  Hadn’t he assured her, as Hurricane Audrey had wreaked devastation on their small bayou community, wiping Petit Chenier off the map, that they’d survive?

  Although she might not remember what she had for supper last night, and had failed to recognize a famous movie star earlier this evening, Adèle’s mind clung to the memories of that seemingly endless dark night as tenaciously as hanging Spanish moss had clung to the ancient oak trees surrounding their home. As stubbornly as she’d clung to the roof after the small wooden house had been washed off its piers and sent floating through the bayou.

  When she’d checked in on Lucien before going to bed that night, the weather bureau had been predicting that the storm would hit Texas. Unfortunately, as they’d discovered at one in the morning, the weather bureau had been wrong. Since there was no way to leave the island of Petit Chenier, they’d gone to the attic, hoping the additional height would provide protection.

  But then the house had washed away, and one wall had been knocked apart when it had rammed into a half-sunken fishing boat. Which was when Bernard had strapped their toddler son to his broad chest, looped a rope between his waist and Adèle, and led them onto the roof. Where they’d huddled together as the storm raged around them.

  When morning broke, Adèle had been crushed as she viewed the destruction that went as far as the eye could see. As bad as that had been, it had gotten worse over the next days as recovery efforts were undertaken to locate the nearly five hundred dead. Including Bernard’s parents, who’d lived in Grand Chenier and were among those never found.

  Tragically, the storm had not only taken the shrimp boat Bernard had saved for years to buy, but also left both of them without any family except for each other.

  Rather than sit around bemoaning their fate, her husband had gotten busy looking for work to get them out of that shelter. When he’d heard they were hiring men to catch crab up in Oregon, he’d cashed out their very small bank account, bought a used pickup to replace the one that had washed away with the house, and moved the three of them to Shelter Bay.

  Life still hadn’t been easy. They’d both worked hard, but they’d always been a team. Adèle knew she’d be lost without this man who’d won her heart so many years ago. And, she feared, as tough as he was, he’d be equally devastated if he was the one to be left alone.

  “What if the doctors are wrong?” She finally gave voice to the fear that had been bedeviling her for weeks. “What if I don’t get better?”

  “Then we’ll stay just the way we are.” He bent his head and brushed a light kiss against her quivering lips. How was it, she wondered, that he could still create a spark with a single look? Or a tender touch. Or a soft-as-sea-foam kiss. “Which, from where I’m lying right now, isn’t such a bad thing, chère.”

  His deep voice was like velvet—rough and smooth at the same time. It was also the one he’d bring out whenever he was in the mood for seduction.

  “But what if I have the Alzheimer’s?”

  “We’ll cope. As we have with everything else.”

  His lips skimmed up her face to linger at her temple, where, if you looked carefully, you could see the scar from the blasted fall that had stolen so much of her memory.

  “What if I forget who you are?”

  Adèle had a dear friend, Betty Jenkins, whose husband had stopped recognizing her six months ago. Even having been warned that such a day was coming, Betty had been heartbroken when Ralph Jenkins had told her that she couldn’t possibly be his wife. That his wife was young and beautiful. And Betty was old and fat. Those were, tragically, the last words he ever said to the woman he’d come home to marry after defeating the Germans in World War II.

  “Then I’ll simply have to court you every day to remind you that I’m the man who loves you to distraction,” he said easily. “Which, believe me, would be no hardship, Del.…

  “And speaking of courting.”

  He leaned her back against the snowy sheets and, with an expertise that came from more than fifty years of practice, began making slow, beautiful love to her.

  As warmth began to flow through her veins, and her limbs turned to water, putting aside her worries for now, Adèle wrapped her arms around his broad back and allowed herself to be drawn into the mists.

  18

  After another night of erotic dreams starring the wickedly hot warrior who now, inexplicably, had a name, Mary dragged herself out of bed, ordered room service, then took a shower. As she stood beneath the streaming warm water, she tried to keep her mind from imagining it was J. T. Douchett’s hands smoothing the fragrant bar of oval soap over her wet and distractingly needy body.

  Oh yes, it was going to be a very long four days. And she wasn’t certain she’d helped her case last night when she’d realized she’d pushed too fast. After he’d left the suite, she belatedly remembered that a storyteller’s innate need to dig beneath the surface, to know everything about both real people and fictional, could often be viewed by others as being intrusive.

  “You should have taken a page from Nora’s book,” she muttered as she dragged a comb through her wet hair. Hadn’t her sister taken four long weeks to draw Quinn out of his life-hardened shell? What made Mary think that she could prove equally effective in a mere day?

  Then, it had also been obvious to everyone in the family that Quinn had been attracted to Nora from the start. If J. T. Douchett was interested in her, except for his reaction to the dress she’d worn to the reception, he’d certainly done a very good job of hiding his feelings since she’d gotten off the plane. And couldn’t that flash of lust be explained away by a knee-jerk response to any woman in a short, tight, skimpy dress? Especially a woman he’d already seen nearly naked on his TV screen. Like so many men she’d met, he’d undoubtedly been attracted to her sexually free character. Not her.

  Not that she cared what the man thought of her personally.

  Liar. Whether she was being influenced by those dreams, or merely because he was the most interesting man she’d met in a very long time, Mary did care. Too much for comfort.

  She’d just snuggled into a thick, terry cloth robe with the inn’s whale logo embroidered in blue on the front when the phone on the bathroom wall rang. Since the operator had been instructed not to send calls through unless they were from someone on the committee, she assumed it was a schedule update or perhaps room service calling to confirm something with her order, and picked up the phone.

  “Finally!” the frustrated voice of the studio executive assistant said on an exasperated huff. “If I were a paranoid person, I might think you were ignoring my calls.”

&
nbsp; “I haven’t had a minute to even breathe, so I turned my phone off.” That part was true. Well, mostly.

  “Have you given any more thought to the idea?”

  “As I said last time we spoke, I’ve been busy, but I have been thinking about it, and honestly can’t see where I could fit a vampire into my story.”

  “I was thinking about that last night,” Tammi, who could make a bulldog look indecisive, said. “You already have a romantic triangle going on with your selkie queen, the scientist, and the queen’s fiancé. So—now, just go along with me, here—you could have a female vampire claim your scientist.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Well, because, for one, he’s really, really hot. And second, it sets up another conflict when the heroine has to battle the vampire for his eternal soul.”

  “A real battle? He’s thinking of turning my film into a summer special effects movie for adolescent males?” Although her stories might be set in fantastic realms, Mary had always held firm about not letting the tech-crazed FX guys get their hands on her scripts.

  “Don’t worry.” Mary had heard that soothing tone before. Usually when Tammi’s boss was pushing for changes in the script. Changes that he believed would make it even more commercial. “Given the state of the economy, Aaron wants to keep the budget down, so going with big FX isn’t even being discussed.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  Mary’s relief was short-lived. “Instead, he’s considered something more basic we both feel would be even more effective than computer-generated content.”

  “And that would be?”

  “A fight scene. Between you and the vamp character over the scientist.”

  “Aaron wants to bring in the mud-wrestling audience now, too?”

  “Of course not!”

  Thank God.

  “He was thinking of using the ocean for a venue. Well, not actually the ocean, because an underwater fight scene would be more expensive to shoot. He’s thinking in the surf.”

  Sand and surf wrestling? “He wants my heroine to roll around in the surf with a female vampire?” Forget the FX; this would get those adolescent males to buy tickets.

  “Exactly!” Excitement shimmered in the other woman’s voice. “Can’t you see it, Mary? You naked, because you’ve been celebrating the summer solstice on the beach, so you’ve shed your sealskin, revealing your human form. There’s a full moon shining down—”

  “Wrong genre. Unless you and Aaron also are thinking of adding a werewolf.”

  “Aaron doesn’t find werewolves sexy. All that fur and strange shape-shifting stuff. And this would work because vampires also go out hunting for blood during full moons.” There was a pause. “Don’t they?”

  “I have no idea. Nor do I care, since I have no intention of writing a vampire into my scripts. And you know as well as I do that what Aaron’s suggesting is gratuitous sex shoved into the story solely for the titillation factor, hoping to pull in a younger male demographic—”

  “Exactly! I told Aaron that you’d understand his reasoning.”

  What? “I wasn’t saying that. Okay, maybe I do understand, all too well, what he wants to do, but what I meant was—”

  There was a knock at the door. Then someone called out “Room service!”

  Saved by the bell.

  “Look, Tammi, the festival committee has me on a killer schedule, there’s someone at the door, and I’ve got to run. Why don’t I get back to you on this?”

  “You promise you’ll call?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Because you know how Aaron is when he gets an idea into his head. He’s just not going to let go of it, so if you don’t get back to me, I’ll have to keep calling. Or fly up there myself.”

  “Oh, you needn’t do that,” Mary said quickly. “I promise, as soon as this morning’s activities are over, I’ll call.”

  “All right.” She sounded hesitant. “But I’m letting Aaron know that we can expect to hear back from you this afternoon.”

  “Absolutely,” Mary repeated. “Now I really do have to run.” She ended the call before she could be drawn deeper into an argument she was in no mood for. An argument she had no intention of losing.

  19

  On to the room service ruse that had been tried by more than one fan over the past few years, before opening the door, Mary looked through the peephole to where the object of her restless sleep was standing, holding a tray.

  “I ran into the waiter getting into the elevator,” he explained, as he walked through the door she held open, as if he had every right to be invading her privacy. Which, of course, he did.

  “And ended up costing him a tip,” she pointed out.

  “You don’t have to worry. I took care of that for you. You’ll be glad to know that you’re a very good tipper.”

  “I already know that.” Having worked at a Dublin pub while in college, she always overtipped.

  “I figured you did. Which is why I knew you’d want me to uphold your image.” He put the tray down on the coffee table. “Coffee?”

  “Oh, please, yes.” As he poured a cup from the carafe, she kept the fact that she’d have been willing to beg to herself. As yet another reminder that there weren’t any secrets in small towns, there were two cups on the tray. “And feel free to help yourself.”

  “Thanks. I will.” After handing her a cup, he poured the second. The pretty flowered cup looked tiny in his broad hand. His skimmed a look over her. “Bad night?”

  “I have trouble sleeping in strange beds,” she said, not about to share her dream with this man. Especially since he’d played a starring role. “And then this morning I got a call from the studio.…”

  She shook her head. “Never mind.”

  “Bad news?”

  “I suppose that depends how you feel about vampires.”

  He took a drink of the coffee. Considered. “I’ve never given them any thought.”

  “Well, you and I appear to have something in common. Which may make us the only two people on the planet who don’t talk about them as if they’re real.”

  “So why are we talking about them now?”

  “Because although I conceived the selkie story as a trilogy, I recently wrote a fourth script, because, given the choice, Hollywood would rather go with a proven franchise than attempt anything new.”

  “Yet you were new once.”

  “True. But I had buzz. Which is nearly as good. Sometimes even better, since everyone’s also always after the next new thing. I received attention because I began garnering festival wins, which had me becoming the flavor of the month, and, although I don’t see it, because I’m certainly not the least bit curvaceous, males in the sought-after demographic groups apparently think I look good naked. Not that I actually was,” she felt obliged to remind him. “Naked.”

  “Yeah. You mentioned the bodysuit, which you’ve got to know doesn’t detract from the fantasy,” he said. “Besides, although guys may admittedly have a response to breasts built into our DNA, when it’s hard to tell what’s real anymore, they begin to sort of lose their appeal. You’re a lot like your heroine—sleek and built for speed.”

  Mary shouldn’t have been so pleased by that. But she was. Too much.

  “Thank you.” She picked up a strawberry from a fruit plate of berries, melon, kiwi, and mango slices, which had been arranged to resemble a flower. It was, she thought, almost too pretty to eat. And speaking of eating…

  “I could call down for something more substantial if you’d like breakfast.”

  “Thanks, but I already ate at Bon Temps before coming over here.”

  “I didn’t realize the restaurant served breakfast.”

  “It doesn’t. But I’m staying there, in the office, for the time being, so I raided Sax’s refrigerator and made up a mess of grits, red beans, and poached eggs.”

  “That’s very ambitious.” She also found it curious that he’d be camping out in his brothe
r’s office, but, after last night, didn’t want to pry. “And I’m impressed you can cook.”

  “Cooking’s pretty much a guy thing in the Cajun culture. Our dad taught us, and his dad taught him. I was never as much into it as Sax was, but months on end eating MREs bring home the importance of being able to feed yourself.”

  “Nora and Gran were always the cooks while I was growing up. During college, and now, in California, I’m afraid I’ve become a whiz at dialing for takeout.”

  “Too bad you’re not going to be hanging around longer. Maddy Chaffee, who used to be Maddy Durand, is opening up a cooking school here in town at her grandmother’s farm.”

  “Chef Madeline lives here?” Just because Mary didn’t cook didn’t mean she wasn’t addicted to the Cooking Network. “I’m a huge fan. But I thought she lived in New York.”

  “She did. But there was this scandal—”

  “I heard about that.”

  “Yeah, you and it seems everyone else on the planet. So, she dumped the cheating French chef husband and married a guy she dated when he’d spend summers here. We all hung out together growing up. She’s catering Sax’s wedding in a couple days.”

  He drained the cup and put it back on the tray. “Want to go?”

  The question, tossed out so casually, confused her. Did he mean leave the suite for the parade? Or was he actually asking her to the wedding?

  No. He had to be talking about the parade.

  She glanced down at her robe. “I realize Shelter Bay has a more casual dress code than some cities, but I doubt they’d be all that pleased for their grand marshal to show up in a robe.”

  “I was talking about the wedding.”

  Okay. That was a surprise.

  “You want me to go with you?”

  “It only makes sense. Since I’m supposed to be watching out for you. It’s not a big deal,” he assured her. “Just a few close friends and family. The only reason they’re rushing it is Kara’s mom’s a doctor with this medical relief organization, and with all the stuff happening in the world, this was the only time window she had open.”