Читать книгу The Daddy Makeover - RaeAnne Thayne - Страница 6

Chapter One

On a scale of one to ten, Sage Benedetto would probably rate the concept of jogging before sunrise every day somewhere around a negative twenty.

While she highly doubted she would ever evolve enough that she could wholly enjoy these runs, after a month, she had at least grown to tolerate the activity. Her gut didn’t automatically cramp at just the idea of throwing on her running shoes and her muscles no longer started to spasm after the first few steps.

She supposed that was a good thing.

This would probably never be her favorite thing to do, but she had promised, she reminded herself. And while she had many faults—all of which somehow seemed more glaringly obvious in the pale light of early morning—breaking her word was not among them.

Despite the random muscle aches and her inherent dislike of just about any activity that involved sending her heart rate into heavy exertion mode, she had even come to discover an ethereal beauty in these quiet early-morning runs.

The towering sea stacks offshore glowed pink in the first, hesitant rays of the sun; this wide, gorgeous stretch of Oregon beach was empty, at least for a little while longer.

Soon the beach would be crowded with treasure hunters looking for shells or colored glass or any other gift the sea surrendered during the night. But for now it was hers.

Hers and Conan’s, anyway.

A huge red beast emerged from behind a cluster of rocks and shuffled to her, scaring up a seagull.

She sighed. This was the reason she was here before sunrise, her thigh muscles burning and her breath sawing raggedly. This rangy, melancholy creature was her responsibility, her curse, her unexpected legacy.

“There you are. You can’t keep slipping off your leash or we won’t do this anymore.”

Abigail’s big mutt, rescued from the pound right around the time Abigail rescued Sage, cocked his head and gazed at Sage out of doleful eyes the murky dark green of the sea in a November storm.

Some days these jogs along the shore seemed to lift his spirits—the only reason she carried on with them when she would much rather be home in bed for another hour.

This apparently wouldn’t be one of those days.

“I know,” she murmured, rubbing his chin as she slipped the leash back on. “She loved these kind of mornings, didn’t she? With the air clear and cool and sweet and the day just waiting to explode with possibilities. Anything-can-happen days, that’s what she called them.”

Conan whined a little and lowered himself to the sand, his head sagging to his forepaws as if he were entirely too exhausted to move.

“You’ve got to snap out of it, bud. We both do.”

She tried to swallow down the lump of grief that had taken up permanent residence in her throat during the past month. Her eyes burned and she wondered when these raw moments of sorrow would stop taking her by surprise.

She blinked away the tears. “Come on, dude. I’ll race you home.”

He gave her a long, considering look, then heaved to his feet and shuffled off in the direction of Brambleberry House, still a mile down the beach. Even at his most ponderous pace, Conan could outrun her. A pretty sad state of affairs, she decided, and tried to pick up her speed.

Focusing on the sand in front of her, she had only made it a few hundred yards down the beach, when she heard a sharp bark. She turned in the direction of the sound; Conan was at the end of his long retractable leash, sitting with a small figure above the high-tide mark in the sand.

The figure was a young girl, one she wasn’t even sure was old enough to be considered a tween. A young girl who was wearing only a pale green nightgown and what looked to be seashell-pink flip-flops on her feet.

To Sage’s deep surprise, Conan’s tail wagged and he nudged at the girl’s hand in a blatant invitation to pet him. She hadn’t seen Conan greet anyone with this kind of friendly enthusiasm for the better part of a month.

Sage scanned the beach looking in vain for the girl’s companion. She checked her watch and saw it was barely 6:00 a.m. What on earth was a young girl doing out here alone on an empty stretch of beach at such an hour, and in nightclothes at that?

“Morning,” she called out.

The girl waved. “Is this your dog?” she called to Sage with a big smile. “She’s so pretty!”

Conan would just love being called pretty. When he wasn’t grieving and morose, the beast had more prickly pride than a hedgehog with an attitude. “She’s a he. And, yeah, I guess you could say he’s mine.”

Partly hers, anyway. Technically, she shared custody of the dog and ownership of Brambleberry House. But she wasn’t about to let thoughts of Anna Galvez ruin one of Abigail’s anything-can-happen days.

“His name is Conan,” she said instead. “I’m Sage.”

“Hi Conan and Sage. My name’s Chloe Elizabeth Spencer.”

The girl had short, wavy dark hair, intense green eyes and delicate elfin features. If she’d been in a more whimsical mood, Sage might have thought her a water sprite delivered by the sea.

A cold, wet breeze blew off the Pacific and the girl shivered suddenly, drawing Sage’s attention back to her thin nightgown and her nearly bare feet. “Chloe, what are you doing out here by yourself so early?”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders with a winsome smile. “Looking for sand dollars. I found four yesterday but they were all broken so I thought if I came out early enough, the tide might leave some good ones and I could get them before anybody else. I promised my friend Henry I’d bring one back to him and I can’t break a promise. He lives in the apartment next door. He’s only seven and won’t be eight until December. I’ve been eight for two whole months.”

“Where’s your mom or dad? Do they know you left?”

“My mom’s dead.” She said the words in a matter-of-fact way that Sage was only too familiar with. “She died when I was six.”

“What about your dad, then?”

“I’m not sure. He’s probably still asleep. He got mad at me last night because I wanted to find more sand dollars so I decided to come by myself this morning.”

Sage looked around at the few isolated cottages and guesthouses on this stretch of beach. “Are you staying close by? I thought I knew all the eight-year-olds in town.”

“Every one?” With a lift of her dark eyebrow, the girl somehow managed to look skeptical and intrigued at the same time.

“I do,” Sage assured her. “The ones who live here year-round, anyway. I’m sure I don’t remember meeting you.”

Cannon Beach’s population was only a couple thousand year-round. In the summer, those numbers swelled as tourists flocked to the Oregon shore, but they were still a week or so away from the big crowds.

“We’re only here for a few days. Maybe a week. But if it’s longer, then my dad says he’ll have to send me to stay with Mrs. Strictland so he can get some work done. She’s my dad’s assistant and she hates me. I don’t like going to her house.”

Though she knew it was unfair to make snap judgments about a man she had not even met, a clear image of the girl’s father formed in Sage’s mind—a man too busy to hunt for sand dollars with his motherless child and eager to foist her on his minions so he could return to conquering the world.

She fought down her instinctive urge to take Chloe home with her and watch over her like a sandpiper guarding her nest.

“Do you remember where you’re staying, sweetheart?”

Chloe pointed vaguely north. “I think it’s that way.” She frowned and squinted in the opposite direction. “Or maybe that way. I’m not sure.”

“Are you in a hotel or a condo?”

The girl shook her head. “It’s a house, right on the beach. My dad would have liked to stay at The Sea Urchin but Mr. Wu said they were all booked. He didn’t look very happy when he said it. I think he doesn’t like my dad very much.”

No wonder she had always considered Stanley Wu an excellent judge of character. She hadn’t even met Chloe’s father and already she disliked him.

“But what I don’t get,” the girl went on, “is if he doesn’t like my dad, why is he going to sell him his hotel?”

Sage blinked at that unexpected bit of information. She hadn’t heard Stanley and Jade Wu were considering selling The Sea Urchin. They had been fixtures in Cannon Beach for decades, their elegant boutique hotel of twenty or so guest rooms consistently named among the best accommodations along the coast.

“Do you know if your rental is close to The Sea Urchin?”

Chloe screwed up her features. “Pretty close, but I think it’s on the other side. I didn’t walk past it this morning, I don’t think.”

Though she seemed remarkably unconcerned about standing on wet sand in only her nightgown and flip-flops, she shivered a little and pulled Conan closer.

Sage sighed, bidding a regretful goodbye to any hopes she might have entertained of enjoying a quiet moment for breakfast before heading to work. She couldn’t leave this girl alone here, not when she apparently didn’t have the first clue how to find her way home.

She shrugged out of her hooded sweatshirt and tucked it around Chloe’s small shoulders, immediately shivering herself as the cool ocean breeze danced over her perspiration-dampened skin.

“Come on. I’ll help you find where you’re staying. Your dad will be worried.”

Conan barked—whether in agreement with the plan or skepticism about the level of concern of Chloe’s father, she wasn’t sure. Whatever the reason, the dog led the way up the beach toward downtown with more enthusiasm than he’d shown for the ocean-side run. Chloe and Sage followed with the girl chatting the entire way.

In no time, Sage knew all about Chloe’s best friend, Henry, her favorite TV show and her distant, work-obsessed father. She had also helped Chloe find a half-dozen pristine sand dollars the gulls hadn’t picked at yet, as well as a couple of pieces of driftwood and a gorgeous piece of translucent orange agate.

“How do you know so much about shells and birds and stuff?” Chloe asked after Sage pointed out a surf scoter and a grebe.

She smiled at Chloe’s obvious awe. “It’s my job to know it. I’m a naturalist. Do you know what that is?”

“Somebody who studies nature?”

“Excellent! That’s exactly what I do. I work for an organization that teaches people more about the world around them. When I’m not working on research, I get to show people the plants and animals that live here on the Oregon Coast. I even teach classes to kids. In fact, our first nature camp of the summer starts today. That’s how I know so many of the local children, because most of them have been my campers at some time or another.”

“Really? That’s so cool!”

She smiled back, charmed by the funny little creature. “Yeah, I think so, too.”

“Can I come to your camp?” The girl didn’t wait for an answer. “My dad has another hotel in Carmel. That’s in California, too, like San Francisco where we live. Once I went with him there and my nanny took me to see the tide pools. We saw starfish and anemones and everything. It was supercool.”

Her nanny, again. Did the girl’s father even acknowledge she existed?

“Did you at least tell your nanny where you were going this morning?” she asked.

Chloe stopped to pick up a chipped shell to add to the burgeoning collection in her nightgown pockets. “Don’t have one. Señora Marcos quit two days ago. That’s why my dad had to bring me here, too, to Cannon Beach, because he didn’t know what else to do with me and it was too late for him to cancel his trip. But Señora Marcos wasn’t the nanny that who took me to see the tide pools anyway. That was Jamie. She quit, too. And the one after that was Ms. Ludwig. She had bad breath and eyes like a mean pig. You know what? I was glad when she said she couldn’t stand another minute of me. I didn’t like her, either.”

She said this with such nonchalance the words nearly broke Sage’s heart. It sounded like a very lonely existence—a self-involved father and a string of humorless nannies unwilling to exert any effort to reach one energetic little girl.

The story had a bitterly familiar ring to it, one that left her with sick anger balled up in her stomach.

None of her business, she reminded herself. She was a stranger and didn’t know the dynamics between Chloe and her father. Her own experience was apropos of nothing.

“Does any of this look familiar?” she asked. “Do you think your beach house is close by?”

The girl frowned. “I’m not sure. It’s a brown house made out of wood. I remember that.”

Sage sighed. Brown and made of wood might be helpful information if it didn’t describe most of the houses in Cannon Beach. The town had strict zoning laws dictating the style and aesthetics of all construction, ensuring the beachside charm remained.

They walked a little farther, past weathered cedar houses and shops. Sage was beginning to wonder if perhaps she ought to call in Bill Rich, the local police chief, when Chloe suddenly squealed with excitement, which prompted Conan to answer with a bark.

“There it is! Right there.” Chloe pointed to a house with an unobstructed view of the ocean and the sea stacks. Sage had always loved the place, with its quaint widow’s walk and steep gables.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

Chloe nodded. “I remember the fish windchimes. I heard them when I was going to sleep and it sounded like angels singing. And I remember the house next door had those big balls that look like ginormous Christmas ornaments.”

Sage shifted her gaze to take in the collection of Japanese glass fishing floats that adorned Blair and Kristine Saunders’ landscape.

“Do you have a key?” she asked the girl.

Chloe held tight to Conan’s collar. “No. My dad didn’t give me one. But I climbed out the window of my room. I can just go back that way.”

Sage was tempted to let her. A quick glance at her watch told her it was now twenty minutes to seven and she had exactly forty minutes to change and make it in to work. Her life would certainly be easier if she let Chloe sneak into her rental house, but it wouldn’t be right, she knew. She needed to make sure the girl’s father knew what Chloe had been up to.

“We’d better make sure your dad knows you’re safe.”

“I bet he didn’t even know I was gone,” Chloe muttered. “He’s going to be mad when he finds out.”

“You can’t just sneak out on your own, Chloe. It’s not safe. Anything could have happened to you out on the beach by yourself. I have to tell your dad. I’m sorry.”

She rang the doorbell, then felt like the worst sort of weasel when Chloe glared at her.

Before she could defend her action, the door opened and she forgot everything she intended to say—as well as her own name and how to put two words together.

Chloe neglected to mention the little fact that her father was gorgeous. Sage swallowed hard. The odd trembling in her thighs had nothing to do with her earlier run.

He had rugged, commanding features, with high cheekbones, a square, firm jaw and green eyes a shade darker than his daughter’s. It was obvious he’d just stepped out of the shower. His hair was wet, his chest bare and he wore only a pair of gray trousers and an unbuttoned blue dress shirt.

Sage swallowed again. Why did she have to meet a man like him today when she smelled like wet dog and four miles of sweat? And she already disliked him, she reminded herself.

“Can I help you?” he asked. She didn’t mistake the shadow of irritation on those rugged features.

She blinked and tugged Chloe forward.

“Chloe?” he stared at his daughter, baffled concern replacing annoyance. “What’s going on? I thought you were still sound asleep in your bed. What are you doing out here in your nightgown?”

She didn’t answer for a moment then she shrugged. “Nothing. I just went for a walk to get some more sand dollars. I found a ton. Well, Sage helped me. Look.” She thrust her armload at her father.

He didn’t take them, gazing at his daughter’s hard-won treasure with little visible reaction. Or so Sage thought, until she happened to catch the storm clouds scudding across his green eyes like a winter squall stirring up seafoam.

“What do you mean, you went for a walk? It’s barely six-thirty in the morning!”

Chloe shrugged. “I woke up early but you were still sleeping and I didn’t want to wake you up. I was just going to be gone for a minute, but…then I couldn’t remember how to get back.”

“You are in serious trouble, young lady.”

His voice was suddenly as hard as a sea stack and Sage was automatically seven years old again, trying desperately to understand how her world could change with such sudden cruelty.

“I am?” Chloe’s fingers seemed to tighten on Conan’s collar but the dog didn’t so much as whimper.

“You know you’re not supposed to leave the house alone. You know that. Any house, whether our own or a temporary one.”

“But Daddy—

“You promised me, Chloe. Do you remember that? I knew bringing you along on this trip would be a huge mistake but you promised you would behave yourself, for once. Do you call running off down the beach by yourself behaving?”

He didn’t raise his voice one single decibel but muscles inside Sage’s stomach clenched and she hated it, hated it. The terrible thing was, she couldn’t blame the man. Not really. She could imagine any parent would be upset to discover a child had wandered away in an unknown setting.

She knew it was a normal reaction, but still this particular situation had an entirely too-familiar ring to it.

“But I wasn’t alone for very long,” Chloe insisted. “I made two new friends, Daddy. This is Sage and her dog’s name is Conan. She lives here and she knows all kinds of things about birds and shells and fish. She’s a naturist.”

“Naturalist,” Sage corrected.

“Right. A naturalist. She teaches summer camp and tells kids about shells and birds and stuff like that.”

For the first time since she rang the doorbell, the man shifted his gaze to her.

“I’m Sage Benedetto,” she said, hoping her cool voice masked the nerves still jumping in her stomach. Though she wanted to yell and scream and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing trying to quash this sweet little girl’s spirit, the words tangled in her throat.

“I live down the coast about a half mile in the big Victorian,” she said instead.

He stared at her for a long second, an odd, arrested look in his eyes. She didn’t know how long he might have stared at her if Conan hadn’t barked. The man blinked a little then closed his fingers around hers.

She was quite certain she imagined the odd little sizzle when their fingers touched. She didn’t imagine the slightly disconcerted expression that crossed his features.

“Eben Spencer. Thank you for taking the time to bring my daughter home.”

“You’re welcome,” she said in that same cool voice. “You might want to keep a closer eye on her.”

“Easier said than done, Ms. Benedetto. But thank you for the advice.”

“No problem.”

She forced a tight smile for him, then a more genuine one for his daughter. “Bye, Chloe. You need to rinse those sand dollars in fresh water until the water runs clear, then soak them in bleach and water for five or ten minutes. That way they’ll be hard enough for you to take them home without breaking. Remember, Henry’s counting on you.”

The girl giggled as Sage called to Conan, who barked at her, nuzzled Chloe, then bounded off ahead as they headed back toward Brambleberry House.

He watched her jog down the beach, the strange woman with the wild mane of honey-colored hair and thinly veiled disdain in her haunting amber-flecked brown eyes.

She didn’t like him. That much was obvious. He hadn’t missed the coldness in her expression nor the way she clipped off the ends of her words when she spoke to him.

He wasn’t sure why that bothered him so much. Plenty of people disliked him. Constantly striving to win approval from others simply for the sake of their approval wasn’t in his nature and he had long ago learned some measure of unpopularity was one of the prices one paid for success.

He was damn good at what he did, had taken his family’s faltering hotel business and through careful management, a shrewd business plan and attention to detail turned it into a formidable force in the luxury hotel business.

Over the years, he had bumped up against plenty of affronted egos and prickly psyches. But seeing the disdain in Sage Benedetto’s unsettling eyes annoyed him. And the very fact that he was bothered by it only irked him more.

What did he care what some wind-tousled stranger with a massive, ungainly mutt for a dog thought of him?

She stopped at a huge, cheerful yellow Victorian with incongruent lavender trim some distance down the beach. He watched her go inside and couldn’t stop thinking about that odd jolt when their hands had touched.

It was completely crazy but he could swear some kind of strange, shimmery connection had arced between them and he had almost felt as if something inside him recognized her.

Foolish. Completely unlike him. He wasn’t the sort to let his imagination run wild—nor was he the kind of man to be attracted to a woman who so clearly did not share his interest.

“She’s nice. I like her. And I love her dog. Conan is so cute,” Chloe chirped from inside the room and Eben realized with considerable dismay that he still stood at the window looking after her in the early-morning light

He jerked his attention away from thoughts of Sage Benedetto and focused on his daughter. Chloe had spread her treasures on the coffee table in their temporary living room, leaving who knew what kind of sand and grime on the polished mahogany.

He sighed, shut the door and advanced on her. “All right, young lady. Let’s hear it.”

He did his best to be firm, his tone the same one he would use with a recalcitrant employee.

These were the kind of moments that reminded him all too painfully that he didn’t have the first idea how to correctly discipline a child. God knows, he had no childhood experience to draw from. He and his sister had virtually raised each other, caught in a hellish no-man’s-land between two people who had had no business reproducing.

Between their mother’s tantrums and violent moods and their father’s shameless self-indulgence, it was a wonder either he or his sister could function as adults.

Cami had found happiness. As for him, he was doing the best he could not to repeat the mistakes of his parents.

“You know the rules about leaving the house by yourself. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Chloe shifted her gaze to the sand dollars in front of her and he hated himself when he saw the animation fade from her eyes. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I promise I won’t do it again.”

Eben sighed. “You say that every time, but then you find some other way to cause trouble.”

“I don’t mean to.” Her voice was small, sad, and he found himself wishing fiercely that he were better at this.

“I try to be good but it’s so hard.”

He had to agree with her. Nothing was as hard as trying to do the right thing all the time. Even right now, some wild part of him wanted to call up Stanley and Jade Wu and tell them to go to hell, that he didn’t want their stupid hotel if they were going to make him work this hard for it.

That same wild corner of his psyche wanted to toss Chloe onto his shoulders and run out into the surf with her in his bare feet, to feel the sand squishing between his toes and the cold water sluicing over his skin and her squeals of laughter ringing in his ears.

He tamped it down, containing it deep inside. “Try a little harder, okay?” he said sternly. “This deal is important to me, Chloe. I’ve told you that. You’ve got to be on your best behavior. I can’t afford any distractions. It’s only for a few more days, then I promise when we get back to San Francisco, we’ll find a new nanny.”

She nodded, her little mouth set in a tight line that told him clearly she was just as annoyed with him as Sage Benedetto had been.

“I’m supposed to have meetings with Mr. and Mrs. Wu most of the day so I’ve made arrangements for a caregiver through an agency here. All I’m asking is for you to behave. Can you try for a few hours?”

She looked up at him through her lashes. “When you’re done with your meeting, can we buy a kite and fly it on the beach? Sage said Cannon Beach is the perfect place to fly kites because it’s always windy and because there’s lots of room so you don’t run into people.”

“If you promise to be on your best behavior, we can talk about it after my meetings.”

She ran to him and threw her arms around his waist. “I’ll be so good, Daddy, I promise, I promise, I promise.”

He returned her embrace, his heart a heavy weight in his chest. He hated thinking of her going to boarding school at the end of the summer. But in the two years since Brooke died, Chloe had run through six nannies with her headstrong behavior. Some sort of record, he was certain. He couldn’t do this by himself and he was running out of options.

“Maybe Sage and Conan can help us fly the kite,” Chloe exclaimed. “Can they, Daddy?”

The very last thing he wanted to do was spend more time with Sage Benedetto of the judgmental eyes and the luscious mouth.

“We’ll have to see,” he said. He could only hope a day of trying to be on her best behavior would exhaust Chloe sufficiently that she would forget all about their temporary neighbor and her gargantuan canine.