Tallulah Heartbeat (Tallulah Cove Book 1)

by Casey Hagen

“She’s a fighter, Ben,” Alan said quietly. “She’s already defied the odds.”

  He laughed as tears welled in his eyes. “Yeah, she’s a Davenport, so she would be.”

  “Get some rest. I’ll call you first thing in the morning and make sure you have all the details you’ll need,” Alan said before ending the call.

  Ben tossed his cell onto the couch, leaned back, and stared up at the ceiling. His son, Chris. A good name. A strong name.

  And he didn’t want to see Ben.

  He got it. He really did. Maybe he didn’t want to meet the guy who so easily gave him up. Maybe his focus was on Sophie, where it should be. It didn’t matter.

  What mattered is that Ben would step up.

  He’d pray that he was a match.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FOUR DAYS HAD PASSED SINCE Abby’s “date” with Ben, and nothing. She didn’t know what the heck she’d expected. He didn’t have her number, her address, nothing. He didn’t know her schedule. All he did know was that she was a dental hygienist, but even then, she’d never specified if she worked on Tallulah Cove or commuted to one of the towns surrounding them.

  Idiot.

  She’d never had a man do to her what Ben managed to do to her on the beach. Ken had been a great man; she’d enjoyed their sex life, but she never knew there was this intensity, this point past pleasure that led to a sensation so incredible that she couldn’t imagine going without it ever again.

  “Abby? Did you hear me?”

  Abby snapped out of her musings to find her mother, father, sister, yeesh, even Blake staring at her.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” They had met at The Sea Orchid at the Leaping Water Inn on the southern tip of Tallulah Cove. Her parents had started a new family tradition of Sunday brunches twice a month when Kate and Abby made the move to town. Ordinarily, Abby enjoyed the time. Her parents had a new glow about them since they’d retired and moved, but today, all she could think about was when, or if, she’d see Ben again.

  “I asked you about the new dentist joining your dental office. Martha from the library said she met him last week. He’s about your age, handsome, and single.”

  Abby pulled her son’s tablet from her pocketbook and handed it to him. These brunches were the only times she allowed Blake to have electronics at the table. Mainly so he’d be so engrossed he would miss the conversation around him, a temporary measure at best.

  And now time number thirty-two, or was it number thirty-three, her mother tried to steer her toward a man?

  “Oh, umm, I don’t know. I haven’t met him yet. We’re supposed to have dinner together Wednesday night.” She pushed the fruit salad around on her plate.

  “Are you all right, dear? I would have thought you would be more excited. You two may have a lot in common.”

  She set her fork down and took a sip of her orange juice. “It’s a business dinner. He’s taking each of the employees out individually to get to know them.”

  Her mother’s perfectly made-up face lit up. The woman didn’t show her face, even to her family, without her signature pink lipstick. “All the more reason to dress yourself up, make sure you stand out.”

  Abby smirked. “I hardly think getting involved with my boss is a good career move, and I especially think his wife would take exception.” And there was no way in hell she would wear pink lipstick in her lifetime.

  Kate grinned at their mother and leaned forward. “I think Abby’s plate is quite full with… other prospects,” Kate said with a wink.

  “Kate,” Abby warned, elbowing her sister in the side.

  “Did you have…” her mother had the good grace to check on Blake before she whispered, “…a date?”

  “You could probably call it that. Look, my time is otherwise occupied for now. Let’s just leave it at that, please?” Abby said, sending a pointed look in Blake’s direction.

  “Sure, dear, we’ll discuss it another time. Maybe I’ll give you a call later.”

  Oh, well, wouldn’t that be freaking swell. And what was she supposed to tell her mother?

  Well, I propositioned him the one week and then let him go down on me the second week. At the rate I’m going, I’ll end up accidentally knocked up by August. If I ever get around to giving him my telephone number, or getting his, that is.

  And why hadn’t she run into him? She had gone to the Little Laguna two more times, just in case. She’d asked the bartender, but he hadn’t seen Ben at all. If she kept it up, people would think she was some bar whore.

  Her dating skills could use some work.

  “Sounds good,” Abby muttered dreading the call her mother would be sure to make. She’d rather have a root canal. She turned to Kate and gave her a pointed look because, hey, why should she be the only one on the spot? “In the meantime, Kate, anything going on in your love life Mom and Dad should know about?”

  Kate twirled her glass in her hand and smirked.

  Oh, shit. Here it comes...

  “I’m seeing a new guy. He’s a little on the pink side. Five different speeds,” Kate said, setting her glass down and picking up her bagel.

  Abby choked on her orange juice, the burning liquid getting into her sinuses, making her eyes water.

  “Watch your mouth, young lady. There are some things your parents don’t need to know,” her father said in that rigid tone of his from when they were kids, the one that said he expected no lip.

  “Hey, that’s all I’ve got. I’m swearing off men. Burying them has become a tedious business,” Kate said, examining her nails.

  That right there was how Abby knew it was time for a change of subject.

  Despite Kate’s confident, balls-to-the-wall attitude, losing two men she’d loved completely had left a few scars. Most days she handled it well. Sometimes, it was just a little too close to the surface.

  “So, Mom, Dad, how’s the construction going?”

  “Oh, the house! It’s almost finished. It’s gone splendidly. Only one little mistake. We happened to be there looking over the house with Ben, he’s the owner of Sequoia Homes. Anyway, he happened to be there when the wrong granite arrived. He called the granite company, and by that afternoon they had the right pieces delivered. He’s very efficient.”

  “Ben?” Kate said.

  “I know a Ben,” Blake said, never taking his eyes from the screen. Of course, that meant he likely had picked up everything they'd said. The days of hiding adult conversations from her little man were coming to an end.

  Wait…Abby never told her sister Ben’s name. Must be a coincidence. It’s not like Ben was a rare name or anything.

  “My Ben helps me build sand castles on the beach.”

  “Kate?” Abby said, wondering what the hell was going on at the beach.

  Kate waved away her concern. “Oh, he’s just a guy who jogs on the beach in the afternoons. I watch them closely. Don’t worry.”

  “Maybe it’s the same Ben from Sequoia Homes,” their mother offered.

  “Probably not,” Kate said with a shake of her head. “This guy is around in the early, mid-afternoons. If he owned a building company, he would not be running around on a beach just after midday, building sand castles with a little boy.”

  But her Ben might be from Sequoia Homes. They’d never talked about it, where he worked that is. She had let the man do the things he did to her on the beach, and she didn’t even know where he worked.

  She’d definitely lost it.

  Note to self: Before sleeping with him, at least find out what he does for a living.

  And get his freaking phone number.

  Ben paced his office in the construction trailer Monday morning. He hadn’t heard a word about the results of his test yet, and the waiting was killing him.

  He’d also not stopped at Tallulah Cove Dental to find Abby yet, either, which made him a first-rate asshole. She might have just assumed they would find each other at the Little Laguna—well, after what he’d done to her on the beach, she mi
ght expect something more than the weekly meet-up they’d engaged in so far.

  Way off his game, he grabbed another cup of coffee…the only thing keeping him awake, since he’d taken to only sleeping a couple hours a night since he’d found out about his son and granddaughter.

  He had been better off not knowing about them. At least then he only carried his own worry over his mistakes. Now his son had a name, and despite not knowing him personally, Ben could imagine his life. At least to an extent.

  Chris had a little girl that he had kept. He’d held her at night when she cried. He’d changed her diaper. He’d watched her learn to crawl and to walk. He held her hand. He ran around with her at a park. He’d caught her at the bottom of a slide.

  He’d done all the things with Sophie that Ben wished he had been able to do with Chris.

  A quick flash of jealousy moved through him. He knew it wasn’t right to feel that way. Chris obviously had been older when Sophie was born than Ben had been when Chris was born. He probably had an education, a wife, and a career.

  He’d turned into a man who fought and sacrificed for his own. That’s the only explanation for why he had looked for Ben but didn’t necessarily want to meet him. He’d do anything for his little girl.

  Ben respected that. Chris made him proud, although he had no right to any of the credit for the kind of man he’d become.

  “You’re going to wear a hole through the floor if you keep up this pacing,” Millie said from the doorway, her hand on her hip. She stood maybe five feet tall. Four kids had left her thicker around the middle, but the extra weight rounded out her face, making her look younger than her sixty-eight years.

  Those four kids had also trained her to not take shit and get to the heart of the matter. And her sights were set on him.

  “I’ll build a new floor then.”

  She dropped three folders onto the center of his desk. “Nonsense. What in the hell is going on with you? You were a hot mess Thursday, and as near as I can tell you’ve only gotten worse since.”

  He braced his hand on the wall and took a sip of coffee. “I’ve got some personal stuff going on. Not sure what to do about it.”

  She leaned against his desk and crossed her arms over her ample chest. “How about you lay it on me, and I’ll see if I can help you out?”

  “You have enough of your own crap to deal with.”

  “Son, we all have crap to deal with, and we all take vacations from our crap by focusing on other people’s crap. So, come on, lay it on me. Let’s see if I can be more help to you than I can to myself.”

  “I have a son I gave up for adoption who hired a P.I. to find me. When he did, he told me I have a granddaughter with leukemia who needs a bone marrow transplant. I was tested last Thursday to see if I’m a match. I’m still waiting for the results.”

  Millie gasped, her palm on her chest as she dropped onto a metal folding chair in the corner of his office. “Well, yes, that’s a whole lot of crap.”

  “And there’s a woman. She’s a year younger than my son. I’m seeing her.” He winced. “I guess I’m seeing her. I don’t know. I’ve met up with her twice. I don’t know her number or where she lives, but it’s serious. At least more serious than I’ve been in a long time. It sounds ridiculous when I say it.” He forced a hand through his hair and then scrubbed it over his face. “In a biblical sense serious. Well, maybe not, we didn’t do everything, I mean, I just—”

  “Whoa, there, son…I don’t need all the details,” she said with a hearty laugh. “I’ve got the picture. Good Lord, when you lay it all out, you really lay it out.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” he muttered.

  She waved away his apology. “No, no, it’s okay. I asked for it. Clearly, you’ve been needing to say it. Now, let’s see what I can do to help you out. Start by explaining this whole son thing, please.”

  He told her everything: about Megan, the adoption, about the years he’d spent avoiding relationships, his unwillingness to have kids, all of it.

  She looked at him like he was a blooming idiot, a scowl fixed to her face. “Well, I don’t know why you’re torturing yourself. What do you think it accomplishes by not having kids now?”

  “It’s not fair to Chris.”

  “Well, that’s just a load of crap.”

  “Huh?”

  “What if you’d gone your whole life and never met him? You’d have given up having more kids for nothing, and you’d still feel like crap in the end.” She stood and pointed a finger at him. “It’s one hell of a burden to put on Chris if he does end up wanting to meet you.”

  “Wait, what?”

  Hands on her hips, she faced off with him just a foot away. She had to crane her neck to hold his stare, but damned if that stern look of hers wasn’t enough to have him hanging his head.

  “How do you think he’s going to feel if he decides to meet you, wants to tell you about his life and it’s a good one, but then you drop the bomb on him that you’ve been sitting in purgatory for the past three decades?”

  Oh. My. God. “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit. And if you are the answer for that little girl of his, you can bet your bottom dollar that he’s going to want to meet you. You’d better get your act together, son. Now, let me ask you…you like kids?”

  He thought back to the few recent days on the beach, playing in the sand with Blake. The boy had one hell of an imagination… building armies, going to battle, saving fair maidens. Yeah, he liked kids.

  Liking them and having them was one hell of a leap, though.

  “If he wants to meet me, I’ll just tell him I’ve never met the right woman,” Ben said with a smile. It was the perfect solution.

  “You’re going to start a relationship with the boy on a lie? Not the way I would go about it.”

  He went back to pacing. If he didn’t pace, he’d fall asleep on his feet. “Well, damn it, what would you have me do?”

  “How about you work on forgiving yourself? And none of this pseudo working on forgiving. Go see a therapist, a man of God, something, but stop twirling in this shitstorm you’ve been in all this time.”

  “Christ, woman. You’re brutal.”

  She grinned at him. Not a friendly grin, but the kind that came with a double whammy behind it. “Yeah, well, now let’s talk about this woman.”

  And there’s the whammy. “Christ. You remembered all that, huh?”

  “That you got biblical with a woman the same age as your son? Hard to miss that detail.”

  “I told her I would see her again, and then I got the letter from the P.I. I thought I would take her flowers at her work, ask her out on a real date, but now it’s been five damn days, and I think it’s too late to do it that way.”

  “I imagine she’s worked up quite the lather by now. The biblical treatment only lasts so long, even when you’re good at it, not that I think you’re anything but—”

  He cringed and raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, this talk is getting weird.”

  “Oh, please, I have four kids. Manny and I—”

  “Please, for the love of God, don’t go there.”

  She sighed. “Look, my point is, is there anything special about how you met? Maybe something that’s unique just to you two?”

  “We met at the Little Laguna on a Wednesday night, then met again the following Wednesday.”

  She raised her chin and gave one hard nod. “Well, there you go. You need to be there Wednesday night.”

  “But what if she’s not there?”

  “Oh, she’ll be there,” Millie said with a chuckle.

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s a woman, I’m a woman; it’s not rocket science. It’s only you men who have a hard time figuring us out. I’ll bet she’s going to be there, if for no other reason than to give you hell for waiting a week to see her again after getting all biblical.”

  “So… I should be ready to grovel?”

  She let out a cackle as she sailed out of his
office and back to her desk. “Oh yeah,” she said, tossing the words over her shoulder.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BEN STOOD UNDER THE SPRAY of the shower for over thirty minutes, working the sand out of all the places he probably hadn’t had sand in since his volleyball days in Pismo Beach.

  Blake had been full of it today and started a sand war, which Ben was all too happy to engage in. One rule: no hits above the chest.

  Blake had shit aim.

  Ben blinked rapidly, letting the water run into his eyes until finally he felt the last piece of sand break away. He fought the urge to rub his eyes all the way home.

  A whole new kind of misery had replaced the old.

  But still, it was worth it to see the kid’s smile.

  And Ben took some pleasure knowing that Blake was battling some sand of his own. Actually, his mother likely was. He’d apologized to Kate, but she just smiled and shook it off.

  She was a cool mom. Far more relaxed around kids than any mother he’d ever seen.

  Maybe she was on drugs.

  He frowned. His thoughts turned to Megan and what had come of her.

  It wasn’t his business.

  The water started to cool, and he switched it off, wrapped up in a towel, and grabbed a fresh pair of jeans and a maroon t-shirt. He just needed to get dressed, and he’d be ready to go to the Little Laguna to see if Abby showed.

  He hoped to hell she showed.

  If not, he’d go to every dental place within a fifty-mile radius, starting with Tallulah Cove Dental.

  He glanced at the clock. Four forty-five p.m. He could lie down for a few minutes and grab a quick power nap and still arrive by the usual time.

  The last thing he wanted to do is show up exhausted. From what Millie had said, Abby would keep him on his toes making it up to her, and he’d rather not fall face-first figuratively or literally, thanks.

  He dropped onto his bed, set the timer on his cell, and closed his eyes.

  He jolted awake and shot straight up in bed. He blinked in the unexpected darkness of his bedroom and glanced over at the clock. Six fifty-eight p.m.