Beach Reads Boxed Set

by Marie Force

  Cat didn’t dare look at him as she led his daughter to the driveway. One thing at a time.

  They walked to Morton Park in silence until Rosie looked up at her. “Why is your name Cat? That’s kind of a weird name.”

  Cat laughed at her bluntness—a woman after her own heart. “It’s short for Catherine.”

  “That’s an old lady name.”

  “Why do you think I go by Cat?”

  “My real name is Roseanne, which was my daddy’s grandmother’s name, so I guess that’s an old lady name, too.”

  “It’s a beautiful name.”

  “Do you love my daddy?”

  Resisting the urge to suck in a sharp deep breath of surprise, Cat glanced down to find Rosie’s cherubic face turned up, watching her intently. “I do. I love him a lot.”

  “That’s good, because he’s been really sad since you broke up with him.”

  “Has he?” Cat’s heart thumped with excitement and hope. For the first time in a month, she had reason to hope.

  “Uh-huh. Really sad.”

  Cat cleared the emotion from her throat. “What’s your favorite thing to do at the park?”

  “Swing.”

  “Then swing it is.” Facing the child, Cat lifted her onto the swing, but before she gave her a push, she clutched the chain with both hands. “I love your dad very much, and I want to be with him more than anything, but I’m afraid I’d make a lousy mom to you, Rosie. How do you feel about that?”

  “My real mom was kinda lousy. She didn’t want me.”

  Cat gasped. “That’s not true! Of course she did.”

  “No, she didn’t. My daddy made her have me.”

  “Rosie . . .”

  “It’s okay. I don’t care. Why would I want a mom who doesn’t want me?”

  Cat wondered how she ever could have thought this child wasn’t worth her time.

  “Could we maybe make a deal? If I’m lousy, will you tell me? Will you come right out and say, ‘That was lousy, Cat’? Whatever I did, I’ll never do it again.”

  “Okay.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise,” Rosie said solemnly.

  “Do you know what I could really use right now?”

  “Nope.”

  “A hug. Would it be okay, if, you know . . .”

  Rosie held out her arms.

  Cat scooped her up and clung to her. “I’m so sorry you thought I didn’t like you.” The sweet smell of baby shampoo and little girl filled her senses and her heart. “You deserve so much better than that.”

  Pulling back, Rosie placed her pudgy hands on Cat’s face. “My very favoritest thing to do at the park is play cloud art, but Daddy hates it because he never sees anything.”

  “Oh, I love that game! I used to play with my brother and sister all the time.”

  Rosie looked up at the puffy clouds. “Want to play?”

  “I’d love to.” Cat carried Rosie to the grassy field where they stretched out next to each other and gazed up at the sky. They studied the clouds for several quiet minutes before Cat pointed to one.

  “Elephant!” Rosie cried.

  They exchanged a high five.

  “Daddy would say—”

  “There’s no elephant up there.” Ian’s shadow covered them both. “I don’t care what you guys say.”

  Rosie rolled her eyes at Cat. “See what I mean?”

  “We’ll have to work on him.”

  Ian lowered himself to the ground next to Rosie.

  “Cat loves you, Daddy. She told me.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yep. You should tell her you love her, too, so you can stop being sad all the time.”

  With amusement and love and relief and joy dancing around inside of her, Cat watched him struggle to decide how he felt about his daughter managing his love life.

  “Not until she tells me herself,” Ian said, his fierce blue eyes issuing a dare.

  Cat met his steady gaze. “I love you, Ian.”

  “I love you, too, Catherine.”

  “That’s an old lady name,” Rosie informed him. “You can’t call her that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Can we go back to our game now?”

  Ian reached over Rosie for Cat’s hand. “Absolutely.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  On the same day Cat sealed her fate, Georgie sat alone in the apartment she had worked hard to turn into a stylish, comfortable home. After she had fallen in love with the apartment’s high ceilings, big windows, and elaborate crown molding, she had obsessed over every piece of furniture, accessory, and detail. But as she let her gaze travel from one corner of her living room to the other, she realized she had felt more at home in Nathan’s empty house than she ever had here.

  Not a day had passed in the long month since she last saw him that she hadn’t thought of him. Well, if she were being truthful, she would admit to thinking about him all day every day.

  During the lonely weeks in Atlanta, she had waited on pins and needles for the results of her blood test and had driven Tess and Cat crazy calling to ask if anything had come from the lab. She finally broke down a week ago and called the doctor’s office only to learn they hadn’t heard yet. They promised to notify her as soon as they could. Since then, her heart had raced and her stomach lurched every time the phone rang. The good news from the calls home had been how happy her friends were with Nathan’s brothers.

  It had occurred to Georgie earlier, during an endless, boring meeting at work, that she had failed to properly appreciate the lessons of her mother’s life and death. She was putting work ahead of what really mattered, and if she had learned anything from the last few months, it was that life is too short to waste on something your heart is no longer in. Her priorities needed a serious reordering, and they needed it now.

  Yes, the promotion had been nice. Yes, the extra money came in handy. Yes, it was gratifying to hold a prestigious position with more authority than she’d ever expected to have. But none of it satisfied her half as much as a day at the senior center had.

  That realization had made her laugh out loud in the meeting as she came to a decision she would put into motion tomorrow. Her time in Atlanta had come and gone. It was time to go home. She had followed Gus’s advice, played it out, and figured out where she belonged. Now she could only hope that she would still be welcome there.

  When the doorbell rang, she pulled on her mother’s robe and got up to answer the door.

  A delivery boy held a huge bouquet of pink roses.

  Georgie’s heart raced with excitement as she signed for them. She put them on the kitchen counter and dug out the card, expecting to read about organic farming. However, there was no mention of organics. “Heard you were back in town. Give me a call. I’ve missed you. Love, Doug.”

  Georgie laughed so hard she cried. So predictable!

  “Oh, Nathan,” she whispered. “I hope you waited for me. I really hope you did.”

  Drained after an emotional good-bye with her coworkers, Georgie took a cab home the following afternoon, since she had never gotten around to shipping her car back from Rhode Island. Carrying a box of personal items from her office, she trudged up the stairs to her second-floor apartment and came to a halt on the landing.

  Nathan.

  Sitting outside her door eating . . . a peach? Nathan was sitting outside her door eating a peach and letting the juice run down his chin like a six-year-old boy.

  “You are not here,” she said as she stepped in front of him. “You can’t really be here on the same day I quit my job and told my boss I’m moving home to Rhode Island. That only happens in really bad movies.”

  Letting his gaze wander from her stiletto heels to her pencil skirt to the tailored blouse she had left unbuttoned as low as she dared for work, he swallowed—hard—and took another bite of his peach.

  “I thought you weren’t going to come after me.”

  “I didn’t think it would t
ake you this long to come to your senses.”

  “Your mother said the same thing about your father when he took months to chase her to Utah.”

  “Clearly, I’m much smarter than him, because it only took me one month—a month too long, I might add.” He took another juicy bite of peach. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, because it’s kind of my secret shame, but chicks dig me.”

  Resisting the urge to howl with laughter and weep with joy, she kicked off her shoes and slid down the wall to sit next to him. “Is that so?”

  He offered her a peach from the bag on his lap. “It’s my burden in life.”

  She picked a fat, ripe peach and took a bite. “You carry it well.”

  “I try,” he said gravely. “Anyway, as I was saying, chicks tend to dig me. So I thought if I came down here, took a look at the place, and tried the peaches they’re so famous for in these parts, then maybe I could figure out why the only chick I dig would rather be here than with me.”

  “You did hear me say I quit my job and I’m moving home to Rhode Island, didn’t you?”

  Wiping the juice off his chin with the back of his hand, he said, “What I didn’t hear is why.”

  “You know why.”

  “No way,” he said with a chuckle. “You’re not getting off that easily, Georgie Quinn.”

  “I love you, Nathan.” Suddenly, it wasn’t hard at all to tell him what she’d always known, from the first time she saw him run by her house. “I love you so much that if I have to spend another second without you, I’m going to lose my mind.”

  “That’s good, because I love you, too, and if you don’t come home with me right now, today, I’m going to have to quit my job to move down here and start all over again as a lowly patrolman in the Atlanta Police Department. You wouldn’t do that to me, would you? You know I was born to be a detective.”

  Exasperated, she said, “Have you heard anything I’ve said?”

  “Only the parts I like, which, for once, was all of it.” He flashed that grin she loved so much. “But I had the other thing, about moving here and being a lowly patrolman, all rehearsed, so I couldn’t let it go to waste.” He reached out to caress her cheek.

  She turned her face into his palm and pressed her lips to his warm, peach-flavored skin.

  “I also wanted you to know how far I was willing to go, what I was willing to give up, to be with you, Georgie.”

  “You were supposed to stop saying those things,” she reminded him with a teasing smile.

  “Never.” He ran a finger through the groove in her cheek. “Since I’m on a roll, I may as well tell you I fell in love with your dimples first.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him.

  “Well, if you’re offering. . .” He shifted his hand from her face to the back of her neck and brought her in for a deep, soulful kiss that made her heart sing and her blood boil. God, how she had missed him!

  He tugged a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. “Tess asked me to give you this. It came to the house yesterday.”

  “What is it?” Georgie glanced down at the postcard and gasped when she saw the return address for the medical laboratory. “Oh! Oh God.” She turned the card over. The only word that registered was “negative.”

  He kissed her forehead. “I knew what I was doing when I bet on you.”

  Overcome with relief unlike anything she had ever experienced, she swiped at tears that flowed unchecked down her face. “Nathan?”

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “What’d you think of the peaches?”

  “They’re sweeter at home,” he whispered as if he was afraid he’d get run out of town if he got caught dissing Georgia’s peaches.

  “Isn’t everything?”

  Epilogue

  Georgie handed the key to Nathan. “You do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded and twisted her damp hands in her lap. As he inserted the key into the safety deposit box, she fixed her eyes on the wall of the nondescript room the bank had given them to use.

  Nathan retrieved the green passbook and closed the box.

  “How much?” Georgie asked.

  He whistled. “Thirty-seven thousand, six hundred.”

  Georgie released a deep breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Wow.”

  “That’ll pay for one hell of a wedding.”

  “Yeah.” She took the book from him and flipped through more than twenty years of deposits. “All I need now is the guy,” she joked, hoping to elevate the mood in the small, airless room.

  “That’s not funny,” he said in all seriousness.

  “Oh come on! I was kidding. You were supposed to laugh.”

  “Say something funny and I’ll laugh.”

  “I laugh at your bad jokes.”

  “Usually after you hit me.”

  “So then hit me so you can laugh.”

  “I’d rather kiss you.”

  “That’s fine, too,” she said, delighted by him. The three weeks they’d been back together had been the happiest of her life. That she had once resisted the overwhelming love she felt for him seemed so foolish now that her priorities were finally in proper order. And since she had tested negative for the altered gene and Ali was recovering well from her surgery, Georgie felt as if she could finally give herself permission to be happy.

  Leaning over to kiss the pout off his lips, she returned her attention to the passbook. “I don’t have the big white wedding dream some girls have.”

  “Apparently, your mother didn’t know that.”

  “We never talked about it, which is why the money was such a surprise to me.”

  “We can have whatever kind of wedding you want.”

  “You wouldn’t care if it was small?”

  “Whatever you want, sweetheart.”

  She flipped through the pages of the book again, noticing the earlier deposits had been five, ten, or twenty dollars, while the more recent ones had been several hundred dollars. “Sometimes I feel kind of guilty, you know?”

  “Why’s that?”

  “That my mother and sister had to go through such an ordeal and I was spared.”

  “You got lucky, Georgie. They’d never begrudge you that.”

  “I know, but what would you think if I donated half the money to breast cancer research and the other half to fund a scholarship in my mother’s name?”

  “That’s a great idea.”

  “The scholarship could go to a student who plans to study gerontology.”

  “Even better.”

  “Are you sure? It’s going to take me a while to show a profit with my consulting business. This would come in handy in the meantime.”

  “We don’t need it. I’ve got us covered.”

  “I’m not going to leech off you, Nathan.”

  “If you’re my wife, it’s not leeching.”

  Raising an eyebrow, she said, “Am I going to be your wife?”

  “Didn’t we just talk about our small wedding?”

  “That’s not the question I need to hear.”

  “Right here? Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “The atmosphere leaves something to be desired.”

  “I don’t need atmosphere. Do you?”

  He slid off his chair and dropped to his knees in front of her.

  Georgie was surprised by the gesture, even though she knew she shouldn’t have been.

  He took her hands and brought them to his lips. “Georgia Quinn, I’ve loved you since before I even knew your name. Will you marry me?”

  “Hmm.”

  His eyebrows knit with aggravation. “This is not the time for jokes.”

  “I need to consider the whole package. If I say yes, I not only get you, but Tess and Cat as my sisters-in-law, and Bernie as my mother-in-law. That’s a real perk.”

  Annoyed, he started to get up, but she stopped him.

  “Yes, Nathan,” she said, laughing, “I’ll marry you, but
on one condition.”

  He brought her down for a passionate kiss.

  “Wait!” she said, tearing her lips free of his. “You haven’t heard my condition.”

  “I didn’t hear anything after yes.”

  She smacked his shoulder.

  “All right,” he said with a long-suffering sigh. “What’s the condition?”

  “I need the water on when I brush my teeth.”

  He studied her as he considered it. “This could be a deal breaker.”

  “I need it, Nathan. I promise to recycle and conserve and reuse—I’ll even include those exact words in my vows, if you want. All I’m asking for in return is a little extra water. Marriage is about compromise.”

  Moaning, he dropped his head to her lap. “Just don’t do it in front of me.”

  Georgie celebrated her victory by clapping her hands. “Does this mean we’re engaged?”

  “No.” He withdrew a sapphire-and-diamond ring from his pants pocket and slid it onto her left hand. “This does.”

  She gasped. “Where did that come from?”

  “I’ve had it for a week, but I was afraid you’d think I was rushing you. I’ve been carrying it around just in case.”

  Resting her hands on his face, she kissed him. “It’s a beautiful ring. I love it, and I love you, so stop worrying that I’m going to change my mind. It’s not going to happen.”

  “Good,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. He kissed her again and then checked his watch. “We’ve got to get going.”

  “To where?” she asked, confused.

  “You’ll see.”

  They were almost to downtown Newport when Nathan pulled the car over. “I know you’re going to jump all over me for this, but I need to blindfold you.”

  “What? No way!”

  “No blindfold, no surprise. I’m under very strict orders.”

  “Whose orders?”

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge that information.”

  “What’s going on, Nathan?”

  He held up a black bandanna. “If you want to find out, let’s get this over with.”

  With a furious scowl, she let him tie the bandanna over her eyes.

  “Now hush up.”