He would probably return to Cannon Beach at some point. She could at least console herself with that. His company had dozens of other hotels around the world, but The Sea Urchin was important to him, he had made no secret of it.
Now that she knew how much he cared about the hotel, she couldn’t imagine him just buying the place for acquisition’s sake alone. While Sage doubted he would have direct involvement in the future management of the hotel, she expected he would at least have some participation in decision-making.
Even if he left tonight, she knew it was unlikely she would never see him again.
In many ways, she almost thought she would prefer that alternative—that he leave Cannon Beach now that the papers were signed and never look back. How much harder would those occasional visits be, knowing she would have to steel herself to say goodbye to him again?
The rain had eased to a light, filmy drizzle. They were almost to Brambleberry House when she knew she had to say something.
“It’s done, then?” she asked.
His brilliant, boyish smile cut through the darkness inside the Jaguar and, absurdly, made her want to weep. “It’s done. The papers are signed. We’ll need to have our attorneys go over everything in the morning but as far as I’m concerned, it’s official.”
“Congratulations.”
She thought she had done a fairly credible job of cloaking her ambivalence behind enthusiasm, but some of it must have filtered through.
Eben sent her a swift look across the vehicle. “I know The Sea Urchin is a local landmark and has great meaning for the people of Cannon Beach. I’ve told you this before, but I think it bears repeating. I promise, I don’t plan any major changes. A few coats of paint, maybe, a few modernizations here and there, but that’s it.”
“I believe you.” She smiled, a little less feigned this time. “I’m thrilled for you, Eben. Really, I am. You got exactly what you wanted.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again and she couldn’t read his expression in the dim light. “Yes. Exactly what I wanted,” he murmured.
“You said you had papers to sign tomorrow. I guess that means you’re not leaving tonight, then?”
She saw his gaze shift to the rearview mirror, where Chloe was admiring her substantial pile of fortune cookies and not paying them any attention.
“No. We’ll wait until the morning. The Wus and I will have to go through everything with the attorneys at The Sea Urchin first thing and then I’ll have my pilot meet Chloe and me at the airport in Seaside when we’re done.”
She thought of the field trip they had planned all week for their last day of camp, to visit the Cape Meares Lighthouse and Wildlife Refuge. Chloe would be so disappointed to miss it but she knew Eben no doubt had many things to do back in the Bay Area and wouldn’t delay for a little thing like a camp field trip.
As they reached Brambleberry House, some of Eben’s excitement seemed to have dimmed—or perhaps he was merely containing it better.
Sage, on the other hand, felt ridiculously close to tears. She wasn’t sure why, she only knew she couldn’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to them in the car.
Besides that, Conan would never forgive her if she let them leave without giving him one last chance to see his beloved Chloe.
She injected an enthusiasm she was far from feeling into her voice. “Do you both want to come in for a few minutes? I’ve got a frozen cheesecake Abigail made me a…a few weeks before she died. I’ve been looking for a good occasion to enjoy it with some friends.”
“I love cheesecake,” Chloe offered from the back seat.
“You love anything with sugar in it, monkey.”
She giggled at her father. “It’s true. I do.”
“It’s settled, then.” Sage smiled.
“Are you sure?” Eben asked.
“Absolutely. We need to celebrate. I’ll have to take it out of the freezer but it should only take a few moments to thaw.”
He seemed as reluctant as she for the evening to end. “Thank you, then,” he said.
He reached behind the seat for the umbrella and came around to her door to open it for her. As he reached to help her from the vehicle, her nerves tingled at the touch of his hand.
“You and Chloe take the umbrella,” he said. “You’re the ones with the fancy dresses.”
Sage found it particular bittersweet to hold Chloe’s little hand tightly in hers as the two of them raced through the drizzle to the porch.
Oh, she would miss this darling child. Again she had to swallow down the ache in her throat.
Water droplets glistened in Eben’s hair as he joined them on the porch while she unlocked the door.
“Is Conan upstairs or with Ms. Galvez?” Chloe asked when they were inside the entryway.
“He would have been lonely upstairs in my apartment by himself. I think he and Anna were watching a movie when I left.”
“Can I take him upstairs with us for cheesecake?”
“Well, we can get him but I should warn you that Conan doesn’t like cheesecake. His favorite dessert is definitely apple pie.”
Chloe giggled, as Sage had intended. She kept her hand firmly in Sage’s as they knocked on Anna’s door. For just an instant, Sage caught Eben watching her and she shivered at the glittery expression there.
Conan rushed through the door the moment Anna opened it. “Hey,” Anna exclaimed. “How was dinner?”
“You know The Sea Urchin. It couldn’t be anything other than exquisite,” Sage answered. “Sorry to bother you but we’re having an impromptu little party. I’m going to take out the frozen cheesecake Abigail made.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“We’re celebrating,” she said, forcing a smile. “Stanley and Jade agreed to sell to Spencer Hotels.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful! Congratulations.”
Eben smiled, though in the better lighting of the entryway, Sage was certain he didn’t look quite as thrilled as he had earlier.
“You and Conan have to join us while we celebrate,” she said.
“May I look at the dolls first?” Chloe asked.
Anna sent a quick look at Sage and Eben. Her dark eyes danced with mischief for a moment in an expression that suddenly looked remarkably like one of Abigail’s.
“Sure,” she finally answered. “You two go ahead. Conan, Chloe and I will be up in a moment. Well, probably closer to ten or fifteen.”
She ushered the girl into her apartment and closed the door firmly before Conan could bound up the stairs, leaving Eben and Sage alone in the entryway.
Feeling awkward—and more than a little mortified by Anna’s not-so-subtle maneuvering to give her and Eben some private time—Sage led the way up the stairs and into her apartment.
Eben closed the door behind him. She wasn’t quite sure how he moved so quickly, but an instant later she was in his arms.
His kiss was firm, demanding, stealing the breath from her lungs. She wrapped her arms around him, exulting in his strength beneath her fingers, in the taste and scent of him.
For long, drugging moments, nothing else mattered but his mouth and his hands and the wild feelings inside her, fluttering to take flight.
“I’ve been dying to do that all night.” His low voice sent shivers rippling down her spine.
She shivered and pulled his mouth back to hers, wondering if he could taste the edge of desperation in the kiss. She forgot about Chloe and Anna and Conan downstairs, she forgot about The Sea Urchin, she forgot everything but the wonder of being in his arms one more time.
One last time.
“I don’t want to leave tomorrow.”
At the ragged intensity of his voice, she blinked her eyes open. The reminder of her inevitable heartbreak seemed to jar her back into her senses.
What was t
he point in putting herself through this? The more she touched him, experienced the wild joy of being in his arms, the harder she knew it would be to wrench her heart away from him and return to her quiet, safe life before he and Chloe had stumbled into it.
She swallowed. “But you have to.”
“I have to,” he agreed, reluctance sliding through his voice. “I can’t miss these Tokyo meetings.”
He pressed his forehead to hers. “But I could try to rearrange my schedule to come back in a few weeks. A month on the outside.”
She allowed herself a brief moment to imagine how it might be. Despite the heat they generated and these fragile emotions taking root in her heart, she knew she would merely be a convenience for him, never anything more than that.
She drew in a shuddering breath and slid out of his arms, desperate for space to regain her equilibrium. “I should, uh, get the cheesecake out of the freezer.”
He raised an eyebrow at her deliberate evasion but said nothing, only followed her into the kitchen. She opened the small freezer and quickly found Abigail’s foil-wrapped package.
Her hands shook a little as she pulled it out—from the embrace with Eben, but also from emotion. This was one more tie to Abigail that would be severed after tonight.
She looked at Abigail’s handwriting on the foil with the date a few weeks before her death and one simple word: Celebrate.
Eben looked at the cheesecake from over her shoulder. He seemed to instinctively know how difficult it was for her to lose one more connection to Abigail. “Are you certain you don’t want to save this a little longer, for some other occasion?”
She shook her head with determination. “I have the oddest feeling Abigail would approve. She was the one who introduced you to the Wus, after all. She never would have done that if she didn’t want you to buy The Sea Urchin. I think she would be happy her cheesecake is being put to good use. In fact, if I know Abigail, she’s probably somewhere lifting a glass of champagne to you right now.”
He tilted his head and studied her for a long moment, then smiled softly. “I have you to thank as much as Abigail.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Not true. You know it’s not. I honestly think Stanley and Jade were ready to pull out until dinner tonight, until you and Chloe both charmed them.”
He grabbed her fingers. “You reach Chloe in ways I don’t think anyone has since her mother died.”
She shifted and slid her hand away, uncomfortable with his praise. How could she tell him she understood Chloe’s pain so intimately and connected with her only because her life had so closely mirrored the little girl’s?
“What can I do to reach her that way?” Eben asked. By all appearances, he looked completely sincere. “You need to give me lessons.”
“Just trust your instincts. That’s the only lesson I can give.”
“Following my instincts hasn’t turned out well so far. Maybe if I had better success at this father business, I wouldn’t have to send her to boarding school in the fall.”
At first, she thought—hoped—she misheard him. He couldn’t possibly be serious.
“Boarding school? You’re sending her to boarding school?”
He shrugged, looking as if he wished he hadn’t said anything. “Thinking about it. I haven’t made a final decision.”
“You have. Admit it.”
She was suddenly trembling with fury. She was again eight years old, lost and alone, with no friends and a father who wanted little to do with her. “You’ve probably already signed her up and paid the first year’s tuition, haven’t you?”
Guilt flitted across his features. “A deposit, only to hold her spot. It’s a very good school outside Newport, Rhode Island. My sister went there.”
“Half a world away from you!”
“What do you want me to do, Sage? I’ve been at my wit’s end. You’ve seen a different child this week than the one I’ve lived with for two years. Here, Chloe has been sweet and easygoing. Things are different at home. She’s moody and angry and deceitful and nothing I do gets through to her. I told you she’s been through half a dozen nannies and four different schools since her mother died. Every one of them says she has severe behavior problems and needs more structure and order. How am I supposed to give her that with my travel schedule?”
“You’re the brilliant businessman. You don’t need me to help you figure it out. Stop traveling so much or, if you have to go, take her with you. That’s your answer, not dumping her off at some boarding school and then forgetting about her. She’s a child, Eben. She needs her father.”
“Don’t you get it? I’m not the solution, I’m the damn problem.”
As quickly as it swelled inside her, her anger trickled away at the despair in his voice. She longed, more than anything, to touch him again.
“Oh, Eben. You’re not. She’s a little girl who’s lost her mother and she’s desperate for her father’s attention. Of course she’s going to misbehave if that’s the only time she can get a reaction from you. But she doesn’t need a boarding school, she needs you.”
“How do you know it won’t help her?”
“Because I lived it! You want to know how I’m able to reach Chloe so well? Because I’m her with a few more years under my belt. I was exactly like Chloe, shunted away by my father to boarding school when I was eight simply because I no longer fit his lifestyle.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Eben stared at her. Of all the arguments he might have expected her to make, that particular one wouldn’t have even made his list.
“Sage—”
She let out a long breath. Still in her party clothes, she looked fragile and heartbreakingly beautiful.
“My mother died when I was five,” she went on. “I was seven when my father married his second wife, a lovely, extremely wealthy socialite who didn’t appreciate being reminded of his previous wife and the life they had together. I was an inconvenience to both of them.”
An inconvenience? How could anyone consider a child an inconvenience? For all his frustration with Chloe, none of it hinged on a word as cold as that one.
“I was dumped into boarding school when I was eight. The same age as Chloe. For the next decade, I saw my father about three weeks out of every year—one week during the Christmas holidays and two weeks in the summer.”
He remembered her disdain for him early in their acquaintance, the contempt he saw in her eyes that first morning on the beach, the old pain he had seen in her eyes when they argued about whether he should take Chloe with him on his trip to Tokyo.
No wonder.
She thought of him as someone like her father, someone too busy for his own child. He ached to touch her but couldn’t ignore the hands-off signals she was broadcasting around herself like a radio frequency.
“I’m so sorry, Sage.”
Her chin lifted. “I survived. Listen to me complain like it was the worst thing that could ever happen to a child. It wasn’t. I was always fed, clean, warm. I know many children endure much worse than an exclusive private boarding school in Europe. But I have to tell you, part of me has never recovered from that early sense of abandonment.”
He pictured a younger version of Sage, lost and lonely, desperate for attention. He ached to imagine it.
But she was right, wasn’t she? If he sent Chloe to boarding school, she would probably suffer some of those same emotions—perhaps for the rest of her life.
What the hell was he supposed to do?
“Boarding school doesn’t have to be as you experienced it,” he said. “My sister and I both went away for school when we were about Chloe’s age. We did very well.”
For him and, he suspected, for his sister, school had offered security and peace from the tumult and chaos of their home life. He had relished the structure and order he found there, the safety
net of rules. He had thrived there in a way he never could have at home with his parents. In his heart, he supposed he was hoping Chloe would do the same.
“You don’t have any scars at all?”
“A few.” The inevitable hazings and peer cruelty had certainly left their mark until he’d found his feet. “But I don’t know anyone who survives childhood without a scar or two.”
“She’s already lost her mother, Eben. No matter how lofty you tell yourselves your motives might be, I can promise that if you send Chloe away, she’ll feel as if she’s losing you, too.”
“She won’t be losing me. I’m not your father, Sage. I don’t plan to send her away and ignore her for months at a time.”
All his excitement at closing The Sea Urchin deal was gone now, washed away under this overwhelming tide of guilt and uncertainty.
“Besides, I told you I haven’t made a final decision yet. This week has been different. Chloe has been different and I probably have been, too. If I can recapture that when we’re back in our regular lives, there’s no reason I have to follow through and send her to boarding school.”
A small gasp sounded from the doorway. In the heat of the discussion with Sage—wrapped up in his dismay over inadvertently putting those shadows in her eyes—he had missed the sound of the door opening. Now, with a sinking heart, he turned to find Chloe standing there, her little features pale and her eyes huge and wounded.
“Chloe—”
“You’re sending me to boarding school?” she practically shrieked. “You can’t, Daddy. You can’t!”
She was hitching her breath in and out rapidly, on the brink of what he feared would be a full-blown tantrum.
Helpless and frustrated, he went to her and tried to hug her, tangentially aware as he did so of Anna Galvez and Conan standing behind her in the hallway outside Sage’s apartment.
“I didn’t say I was sending you to boarding school.”
She was prickly and resistant and immediately slid away from him. “You said you might not have to but that means you’re thinking about it, doesn’t it?”
The House on Cannon Beach Page 15