Searching for Sunshine

by Linda Seed

  “It’s not what people think,” she told him on the subject of her family and her status. “I mean, people around here get it, but other places … You tell someone you’re a Delaney, and they think it’s all butlers and boarding schools and chauffeured limousines.”

  “I can’t really see you in a chauffeured limousine,” Jake commented.

  “I’ve been in one once, when my brother got married. I was crammed in there with six other people.” She shook her head and grinned. “It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.”

  He laughed. “All that money, though—it’s got to be great in some ways. And hard in others.”

  She considered that. “For me, it’s all I’ve ever known. But it’s hard for the people in my life sometimes. They tend to feel … inadequate. Or overshadowed.”

  Breanna wondered if Jake understood she was talking about her husband. But they’d agreed not to bring spouses into this, so she left it vague.

  If they made it past the first date, or the second or the third, there would be time to talk about that. But this evening wasn’t about the past. It was about right now, tonight. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about whether it would ever amount to more.

  * * *

  The thing Breanna had said about people feeling overshadowed and inadequate made Jake think—specifically, about whether he could be with a very rich woman without having those feelings himself.

  He liked to think he was confident enough in his manhood that he didn’t need to prove his worth as a provider. But, hell. He was subject to the same male bullshit as any other guy.

  How would it feel to be in a relationship with a woman who probably made more money in a week—just from the interest on her investments—than he did in a year?

  Jake had never wasted time wishing he were rich. He liked his lifestyle, simple as it was. He enjoyed his work, and he made enough to pay his bills and take an occasional vacation. He’d rarely found himself wanting or needing more than that.

  But the women he’d dated—and the one he’d married—had all been on a more or less equal level with him in terms of money. He’d never experienced a situation as lopsided as this one.

  How would he feel if this really went somewhere?

  He knew a lot of guys would jump at the chance to get involved with a woman like Breanna just for the money, regardless of whether they had feelings for her.

  But Jake wasn’t a lot of guys. He was simple at heart, and he rarely longed for anything he hadn’t earned. If he chose to pursue things with Breanna, the situation would be anything but simple.

  “Jake?” Breanna was looking at him curiously, probably wondering where he’d gone when he’d been musing about the potential complications of a life as Mr. Breanna Delaney. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, of course.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “How’s the sea bass?”

  * * *

  They ate and talked and lingered over coffee, and by the time they got up from the table, neither one of them realized that more than two hours had passed. Talking to Jake was easy, Breanna thought. So easy it was as though she’d known him much longer than she had.

  As they walked out of the restaurant, Jake’s hand resting lightly on the small of her back, she thought she might be in trouble. When he took her home and kissed her on the front porch of her family’s farmhouse, she knew it for sure.

  It wasn’t the kiss of someone intent on getting her into bed and then forgetting her. She’d had kisses like that before, and this one was different. This one was soft at first, gentle, a feather’s touch, and then more insistent as he put his hands on her face and leaned in to taste, to caress her mouth with his.

  It was the kiss of someone who liked kissing and knew how to do it.

  At the first touch of his lips to hers, she felt a surge of adrenaline, a little electric jolt of excitement. Then, as the kiss progressed, she felt her insides go soft and hot, as though her body had been waiting for him and recognized him as the thing it had always needed.

  Her mind was in a white, blank state of bliss when he pulled away, leaving her with her eyes still closed, her lips still slightly parted.

  “I guess I’d better say goodnight,” he said, his voice a little ragged.

  “Oh … right.” Breanna slowly came back to the present and to the fact that she was a responsible adult—a mother, for God’s sake—with her family just inside. “That was—”

  “Thank you for coming with me tonight,” he said. “I’d like to do it again.”

  At first she thought he meant that he would like to kiss her again, and she was acutely disappointed when she realized he’d been talking about another date. Though that, too, would be welcome.

  “I’d like that.”

  When she went inside, her mother was standing in the front room, making a production of dusting a side table that didn’t need dusting.

  “Have a good time, did you?” she asked without looking up.

  “Were you waiting for me?” Breanna asked.

  “What? Hell, no. You’re an adult, I figure. It’s not like I need to wait around for you to come home like I did when you were a teenager.” She let out an irritable grunt to indicate the absurdity of the idea.

  “You dusted that same table yesterday,” Breanna pointed out.

  Sandra scowled. “It’s not like the dust stops accumulating just because you think it should!” She scrubbed at the table with her rag one last time for emphasis.

  “I did have a good time,” Breanna said with a hint of a smile.

  “Hmph. I figure I’ve got a right to dust my own damned table.”

  Breanna went to her mother, pressed a kiss to her cheek, and gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Thanks for waiting up for me,” she said. “I’m going to go up to bed.”

  “Hmph,” Sandra said again.

  11

  The next morning when Gen asked how it went, Breanna tried to act nonchalant.

  “It was fine,” she said. The two had run into each other at Jitters, and they were chatting at the counter as Gen sipped her coffee and Breanna waited for her latte.

  “ ‘Fine’?” Gen asked, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “What does ‘fine’ even mean? A good dental checkup is ‘fine.’ Having my taxes done is ‘fine.’”

  “It wasn’t like having my taxes done,” Breanna said.

  “I would hope not,” Gen quipped. “My tax guy is fifty-three and bald.”

  In truth, Breanna was aching to tell somebody about the date, and about the kiss in particular. But she wanted to act like the mature woman she was and not like a lovesick seventeen-year-old.

  “It might have been better than fine,” she allowed.

  “Ooh,” Gen said. “Well, I know it ended before eleven p.m.—Sandra told me that—so there couldn’t have been sex. Or, there could have been, but—”

  “There was no sex!” Breanna said, appalled. “It was our first date!”

  “But it was good, or at least better than fine,” Gen prompted her. “So …?”

  Breanna’s latte came, and she and Gen took a small table toward the front of the coffeehouse. The place was moderately busy, with several locals and a smattering of tourists at the tables or waiting to order at the counter. A bulletin board on the wall held advertisements for local bands, pet sitters, and handymen, and the room smelled of French roast and espresso.

  “We went to a winery restaurant in Paso,” Breanna said. “The food was good. We talked a lot, about a lot of things. And then he brought me home.”

  Gen closed her eyes, tipped her head to the side, and made a loud snoring noise.

  “Gen!”

  “I’m sorry, but you’re holding back the part that was better than fine.”

  Breanna sighed and slumped down into her seat, figuring she might as well come out with it.

  “The whole thing was better than fine,” she said, looking at her coffee cup to avoid Gen’s gaze. “We talked so easily. I mean, it was like we’d known each
other a really long time. Before I even knew what happened, we’d been sitting there for hours. And the kiss—”

  “There was a kiss?” Gen perked up. “Ooh.”

  “There was a kiss,” Breanna confirmed. “On the front porch when he brought me home. Which is really old-fashioned when you think about it. And really sweet.”

  “Oh. So it was a sweet kiss.” Gen looked disappointed.

  “No. Definitely not. I said it was sweet that it happened on the front porch when he brought me home. The kiss itself was … not sweet. I melted, Gen. I mean, you hear about that kind of thing and you think it’s just a thing people say. But there I was, all … melty.”

  Gen sighed happily. “I love melty kisses.” She looked at Breanna with a mixture of curiosity and concern. “So, I’m guessing it wasn’t like that with Brian?”

  “It was nice with Brian. Really nice. We loved each other, and we had a lot of the same core beliefs.” Breanna made a face. “And now that I’m saying that, it sounds really boring.”

  “No. It sounds good,” Gen said.

  “It was. It really was. But the kiss last night with Jake … There was this chemistry …” She could have explained how her body had responded and how her panties had nearly gone up in flames. But that seemed indelicate, so she just left it there. “I feel guilty saying that. Comparing Jake with Brian that way.”

  Gen reached out and put her hand over Breanna’s on the table. “You have nothing to feel guilty for. You loved Brian, but you’ve been alone a long time now. Why shouldn’t you have someone? Why shouldn’t you melt?”

  The problem, Breanna thought, wasn’t that she’d had that moment of intense chemistry with Jake. The problem was that now she wanted to have it again, and soon. And that stirred up a lot of feelings she didn’t know what to do with.

  “I just … all I wanted was to hire somebody to fix up my house. I wasn’t looking for all of this.” She toyed with her coffee cup, turning it in her hands.

  “You weren’t looking for it, but it found you anyway,” Gen said. “Maybe that’s because you’re ready.”

  Was she? She was ready for something. Some new adventure, some exciting change.

  But she didn’t know whether she was ready for Jake Travis.

  * * *

  Breanna stayed away from the Moonstone Beach house that day. She told herself it was because she had to let Jake do his work, and she didn’t want to get in the way. But it actually had more to do with the awkwardness of seeing him after the melty kiss.

  How was she supposed to act? What was she supposed to say? She couldn’t just see him and pretend it hadn’t happened, but she didn’t want to appear needy or clingy, as though she’d shown up at the work site just to stare at him with loving puppy eyes.

  So she stayed home when she otherwise might have gone over there. There was plenty to do—the boys’ sheets needed to be washed, and the front flower beds needed weeding.

  And the very fact that she was hiding out washing sheets and weeding flower beds was almost comically pathetic.

  “I thought you’d be over at that house of yours, seeing how things are coming along,” Sandra observed around midmorning. Breanna was on her knees scrubbing the inside of the oven, her hands encased in bright yellow rubber gloves.

  “I had a lot to do here,” she said.

  “Well, I don’t suppose this oven would turn to dust if you put it off a day,” Sandra said, her hands on her hips.

  “I didn’t need to put it off a day,” Breanna said, her head most of the way inside the oven. “I was here, and I had time, so I’m doing it.”

  “Uh huh,” Sandra said doubtfully. “Well, I hope he calls before you scrub a hole in the damned thing.”

  “I am not waiting for him to call!” Breanna protested.

  “Uh huh,” her mother said again.

  * * *

  He did call, around midafternoon. It was good that he did, because Breanna had already washed the sheets, weeded the flower bed, cleaned the oven, scrubbed the top of the refrigerator, and mopped the kitchen floor. If he’d waited any longer, she might have started resurfacing the driveway.

  “Hey,” he said when she answered her cell phone. “I didn’t see you at the site today.”

  “Well … I had a lot to do,” she told him.

  “It’s coming along,” he said.

  When she was starting to wonder whether he’d called just to give her a construction update, he said, “I had a really good time last night.”

  “Me too.” Her cheeks were starting to feel hot, and it had nothing to do with the room temperature.

  “And that kiss …”

  “It was nice. Really nice,” Breanna said.

  “So … I was thinking we could do it again.”

  “The kiss?”

  “Well, that too. But I was talking about the date.”

  “I’d like to do it again,” Breanna said.

  “The kiss or the date?” There was a gentle tease in Jake’s voice.

  “Both.”

  She definitely wanted to do both.

  * * *

  Breanna was smiling too much. Normally, that sort of thing would not have been a problem. But the smile was starting to arouse suspicion among her family members, and that was just awkward.

  “God. What is wrong with you, Mom?” Michael groused at her over breakfast the next morning.

  “What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong.” She’d made pancakes and bacon for the boys during the second wave of breakfast; the first wave had been before dawn for the men who’d be working on the ranch, and the second was for everyone who had the luxury of taking it easy on a Sunday morning.

  Michael was picking at his pancakes, a sour look on his face.

  “You’re just all … happy.” He shuddered theatrically.

  “Is it so wrong for me to be happy?” she asked.

  “No. It’s just weird.”

  “I like it when you’re happy,” Lucas, her sunny child, piped in.

  “Thank you, sweet pea.” Breanna leaned down and kissed him on top of the head.

  Breanna knew not to make too much of Michael’s comments. He was turning into an angsty teen, after all, and to him, everything that wasn’t utterly familiar was weird.

  But that was the point, wasn’t it? Breanna being happy wasn’t utterly familiar to Michael. And it should have been. Was it really that unusual for him to see her smiling and cheerful in the morning? And if so, how had she let it get that way? How had she let herself become someone who just went through the motions? Why hadn’t she demanded more for herself and for her boys?

  “You should get used to it,” she told Michael. “You’re going to see more of it.”

  She’d been in mourning too long—mourning not just for Brian, but for the life she should have had. Too much sadness, and then, when the sadness had faded, too much of just existing day to day, just getting through.

  She wanted more.

  The Moonstone Beach house was part of that, but it was just one part. It was too soon to know if Jake would be another part. But he was certainly a good start.

  * * *

  Jake was looking forward to his date with Breanna. He was looking forward to it so much, in fact, that he was distracted on the job. Considering the fact that he worked with a table saw and a nail gun—among other highly dangerous tools—he figured he’d better get his head in the game before someone got hurt.

  “You okay, boss?” one of his guys asked him after he’d sawed a two-by-four to the wrong length—twice.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jake said. “Mind your own business.”

  Even Sam knew something was up. He was sitting a few feet away from Jake, his head cocked to the side, eyeing Jake with curiosity and not a little concern.

  “And what exactly is your problem?” he asked the dog. “Go chase some squirrels or something.”

  The irritability was just a cover, and not a very good one. He actually found himself whistling while he work
ed—an alarming state of affairs, as he was a man and not one of the Seven Dwarfs.

  He felt good. Buoyant, in fact.

  And that was alarming, because if Breanna Delaney made him feel this way after just one date and the promise of another, then he was in real trouble.

  He didn’t seem to mind, though, and that was probably another bad sign.

  Jake saw one of Sam’s tennis balls on the floor, picked it up, went to the front door of the house, and hurled the ball across the yard. Sam shot after it in a blur of black fur and drool.

  The dog brought the ball back and dropped it at Jake’s feet, giving him a big, doggy smile.

  “I’ve got work to do, you know,” Jake told him. “I can’t spend all day playing with you.”

  Nonetheless, he scooped up the ball, which was damp with dog saliva, and threw it again.

  Jake could do with a little more play, now that he thought about it.

  “You sure you’re okay?” the same guy asked him again.

  “Shut up,” Jake said.

  12

  Their next date was lunch on a Tuesday. A Tuesday lunch wasn’t the most romantic of all possible dates, Jake figured, but he hadn’t wanted to wait until the following weekend, and they’d already done dinner. Throwing a little variety into the mix seemed like a good idea.

  They met at the Sandpiper, a restaurant on Moonstone Beach with a good view of the surf, and sat outside on the patio with the gulls cawing and the cool breeze smelling like saltwater.

  He ordered a steak sandwich and she ordered a Caesar salad, and it was all feeling very good and exciting, yet familiar, when Breanna got a call on her cell phone.

  She checked the screen, then looked at him apologetically. “I have to take this. It’s the boys’ school.”

  “No problem,” he told her.

  She answered, and Jake could tell by the tone of her voice that something had happened—something you didn’t want to hear about from your kid’s principal in the middle of the school day.