Читать книгу The Complete Christmas Collection - Джанис Мейнард, Rebecca Winters - Страница 28

The last thing Rory wanted Friday morning was to be late for her meeting with Erik. Or for him to be on time.

As she turned her car into her gravel parking lot, she realized she wasn’t getting her wish on either count.

She’d also just confirmed her suspicions about the gleaming white seaplane she’d seen tied to the dock at the bottom of the rise. It was Erik’s. He was on her porch, leaning against a post.

The fact that her mentor flew his own plane meant that he hadn’t had to queue up for the ferry or get caught in traffic the way she and the rest of the mortals had crossing the sound and navigating surface streets that morning. It also meant that it had only taken him minutes to make the flight that was now a ninety-minute-each-way expedition for her to Tyler’s school.

Hating that she’d caused him to wait, she left her little car in the otherwise empty lot in front of the store rather than park it in her garage and hurried toward where he’d straightened from the post. “I’m sorry I’m late. I was the last car off the ferry,” she called, praying he hadn’t been there long. They’d agreed on eleven o’clock. It was only a few minutes after. Still... “How long have you been here?”

The ever-present breeze ruffled his dark hair as he pushed his cell phone into a front pocket of his jeans and picked up his worn briefcase.

“Long enough to figure out you weren’t going to answer the back door or the one to the mudroom. I didn’t realize you’d be gone. I was just going to call you.”

His cloud-gray eyes slid from hers as a muscle jerked in his jaw. His skin looked ruddy from the chill. In deference to the cold, he wore a leather flight jacket—open, though, as if in defiance of the need for it.

She hadn’t thought of him as defiant before. Or rebellious, or rash, or anything that might even hint at irresponsibility. He seemed too much in control of himself for that. Yet the finely honed tension surrounding him alluded to a sort of restiveness that implied far more than his impatience with her, and made her acutely aware of how restless a man with flying and sailing in his blood might be. Restless. Daring. Bold.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt anything that wasn’t tempered by the numbness that lingered deep inside her. And she’d never felt bold in her life.

What she felt most was simply the need to keep pushing forward. Especially now. Forward was good. Looking back made it too easy to fall apart.

He didn’t need to know that, though. As she crossed the porch planks, searching her crowded key ring for the unfamiliar key, she figured all he needed to know was that she would make this venture work. Exactly how she would do that was as much a mystery to her as the dawn of creation, but she figured the basics would be a good place to start. And basically, she knew she needed this man to help make it happen.

His footsteps echoed heavily as he came up beside her, his big body blocking the wind whipping at her hair. “Where’s your son?”

“At school. He only has tomorrow and next week before winter break, so we’re commuting.”

“To Seattle?”

Conscious of him frowning at the top of her head, she tried to remember if the key she’d just selected was for the store’s front door, its emergency exit, the door to the house or the side door to the garage.

“I don’t want him to miss working on the holiday projects with the other kids. He already missed the first of the week because of the move and he really wants to help decorate the school’s big tree.” He wanted a big tree, too, he’d told her. A huge one. How she’d make huge happen currently fell in the mystery category, too. “Since he won’t be going back there after Christmas, it’s about the only thing keeping his mind off the need to change schools right now.”

“How long does that take you?”

“An hour and a half, if you include queuing up for the ferry.”

“You’re spending three hours over and back in the morning, and another three hours every—”

“That’s just today,” she hurried to assure him. “I’ll usually only make the round-trip once. Kindergarten is only four hours, so I’ll run errands while he’s there.” And maybe see if she could slip into her friend Emmy’s yoga class, since seeking calm seemed more imperative by the moment. “A friend is picking him up with her son this afternoon. He’ll play at their house until I get there.”

His tone went flat. “So you came all the way back just to keep this appointment.”

“You said it was the only time you had this week.”

“You could have told me you’d be in Seattle,” he insisted. “I never would have expected you to come back here for this.”

“You said we had to go over the inventory. We have to do that here, so there was no point in mentioning it.”

The key didn’t work. Her head still down, his disapproval doing nothing for her agitation, she picked out another.

Before she could try that one in the lock, Erik reached over and snagged the wad of keys by the purple rhinestone-encrusted miniflashlight dangling below them.

“That’s to the garage.” He paused at the practical bit of bling, chose one beside it. “You want this one.”

He held a duller brass key by its blade.

“Next time something like this comes up,” he continued, biting back what sounded a lot like frustration, “mention it.”

All her rushing had left her jumpier than she’d realized. Or maybe it was the edginess in him that fed the tension she did not want to feel with this man. Taking the key, conscious of how careful he’d been not to touch her, she forced the hurry from her tone.

“My schedule is my problem, not yours. I’ll make sure it doesn’t interfere with what you need to show me here. Not any more than it has already,” she concluded, since last time he’d wound up hauling in her furniture.

Trying not to give him time to dwell on that little failure, she slid the key into the lock.

As the lock clicked, he moved behind her. Reaching past her head, he flattened his broad hand on the heavy wood door.

His heat inches from her back, the nerves in her stomach had just formed a neat little knot when he muttered, “Then let’s get to it,” and pushed the door open.

Intent on ignoring the knot, disconcerted by their less-than-auspicious start, she hurried into the store to the warning beeps of the alarm system.

With the front display windows shuttered for the winter, the only light came from what spilled in behind them. Relying on that pale shaft of daylight, she headed straight for the checkout counter and the inner door behind it, mental gears shifting on the way.

Feeling his scowl following her, she deliberately sought to shift his focus, too.

“I’m going to start the coffee. While I do that, would you look over the floor plan I came up with? It’s right here on the counter.” Fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered as she snapped switches on. Punching the security code into the pad by the inner door, the beeping stopped. “I’ll be right back.”

In less than a minute, she piled her purse, coat and scarf onto the dining table, flipped on the coffeemaker she’d already filled and grabbed the tape measure she’d left on the island.

She’d barely turned back into the store when the hard line of Erik’s profile had her freezing in the doorway.

He’d tossed his jacket over the far end of the U-shaped counter’s now-bare surface. Without it, she could see Merrick & Sullivan Yachting discreetly embroidered in sky-blue on the navy Henley hugging his broad shoulders. Ownership, she thought. He had a definite sense of it. He had it stitched on his shirt. His initials, she’d noticed before, were on the latch of his briefcase.

On the scarred beige countertop lay the file she’d left open. His frown was directed to the new floor plan she’d come up with.

“You did this?” he asked.

With a vague sinking feeling she walked around to him. She might not know anything about the little doodads in the bins and on the Peg-Boards hanging in her new store, but she was a consumer with her fair share of shopping hours under her belt. If the interior didn’t have some appeal, people might run in to buy what they needed, but they wouldn’t stick around to browse and buy more.

“The store needs updating,” she said simply, certain he could see that himself. “I thought it might make the space more interesting to have three shorter horizontal shelving units in back than that one long one down the middle. The floor space along here,” she said, pointing to the front and back walls on the drawing, “would be a little narrower, but the endcaps would allow for ninety-six more inches of display space. I could use part of the longer piece—”

“I’m not asking you to defend this,” he interrupted mildly. “I’m just asking if you drew it.”

Erik’s only interest when he’d first arrived had been in tackling the task they hadn’t even started the other day. As far as he was concerned, they were already behind schedule if she was to open in April. Not wanting to fall further behind and risk her not making a success of the business, he’d just wanted to get in, get out and get back to work until the next time he had to meet with her. It had been that ambivalent sort of annoyance eating at him when he’d realized what she’d done to accommodate him.

The trip by air between the store and Seattle was nothing for him. Minutes from takeoff to touchdown, depending on head-or tailwinds and whether he left from his houseboat on Lake Union or the boatworks in Ballard. The drive and a ferry ride for her was infinitely less convenient. People commuted from the inner islands every day. But she had actually come back from Seattle just to meet with him, and would have to return later that day to pick up her son.

Even the time it would normally take her on other days seemed an enormous waste of time to him. She was right, though. How she did what she needed to do was her problem. Just as it was his problem, not hers, that he didn’t want to consider changing the store from exactly as it had been for decades.

The need to play nice so they could reach their respective goals wasn’t what had his attention at the moment, however. It was the detail in the drawing. It hadn’t been generated using a computer program. The floor plan had been drawn with pencil on graph paper. While the layout was admittedly simple, the measurements and identity of the elements were all perfectly drawn and precisely printed. It had the touch of a professional.

“Oh,” she murmured, apparently understanding. “I took a drafting class a few years ago. We’d thought about building our own home and I wanted to understand what the architect was talking about.” She gave a shrug, the motion nowhere near as casual as he suspected she intended it to be. “We never got to the blueprint stage, though. We bought instead.”

We.

The freshness of her soap or shampoo or whatever it was clinging to her skin already had him conscious of her in ways he was doing his best to ignore. He’d caught the light herbal scent of her windblown hair when she’d pointed out the walls on the drawing. He caught it again now. Whatever it was she wore seemed too subtle to define. But the elements managed to hit his gut with the impact of a charging bull.

Telling himself he didn’t need to know anything about her that didn’t apply directly to his reason for being there, he deliberately overlooked her reference to the man she’d married—along with the subtle havoc she wreaked on certain nerves—and indicated a rectangle she’d drawn by the front door.

“So what’s this?”

“That’s the armoire over there. It just needs to be moved back against that wall and down a few feet and it’ll be perfect. A couple of neighbors stopped by to welcome me yesterday. Actually, I think they came to check me out,” she admitted, because their curiosity about the “single woman who’d bought the store” had been so obvious. “But one of them mentioned that she makes organic soaps and creams. She has a friend up the road who makes candles for craft shows. I thought I’d see what else is made locally and put a gift display in it.”

He eyed her evenly. “This isn’t a boutique.”

“Are you saying it’s a bad idea?”

He wasn’t going to commit to anything yet. He was still back on her having taken a drafting class just because she’d wanted to understand her architect.

“When did you do this?”

Realizing he hadn’t shot her down, a hint of relief entered her eyes. “After Tyler went to sleep in the evening. And between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m.”

Sleepless nights, he thought. He’d once been there himself. Having one’s world turned upside down did tend to promote a certain degree of restlessness. He figured it didn’t help matters that she was trying to sleep in an unfamiliar house, in a bed she apparently wasn’t accustomed to, either. She’d said the one she was now using had been in a guest room.

The thought of her in bed, tossing, turning or otherwise, had him reaching for his old briefcase.

“Let’s get to the inventory. Once you know what you have to work with here, you’ll know what you need to order and how much shelving space you can actually use.”

“So you think this floor plan might work?”

The layout of the shelves his grandfather had built had served its purpose effectively for years. Changing anything about it hadn’t even occurred to Erik. The old-fashioned footprint of the place was simply part of the store’s personality. It always had been.

He’d thought it always would be.

He gave a mental snort, blocking his reaction to the change as irrelevant. No one knew better than he did how transient “always” could be. The store was hers now, he reminded himself yet again. She was free to do anything she wanted as long as she could turn a profit.

“It might. Probably,” he conceded, because her plan would certainly better define the grocery section from the sporting goods. Using the big armoire to promote local artisans wasn’t a bad idea, either.

Still, there was no denying the reluctance in his agreement. He could practically hear it himself. He also couldn’t help but notice the small smile Rory immediately stifled.

It pleased her to know that her first instincts and efforts toward her new business were good ones. It didn’t feel good to him, though, to know he’d deprived her of sharing that pleasure with the only person available. He was her mentor. He was supposed to be encouraging her. Showing a little enthusiasm.

Before he could tell her just how good her instincts probably were, she’d crossed her arms over the glittery designer logo on her hoodie and moved on.

“Before we start the inventory,” she prefaced, “would you tell me about the customs your grandparents had here? One of the ladies I met said she hoped I’d have a farmers’ market on the porch like the Sullivans did every summer. The other one said that the Harbor Market lighted walking kayak was missed in the Chimes and Lights parade last week.”

She hadn’t realized such an object even existed until Edie Shumway, the fortysomething community volunteer and, Rory suspected, neighborhood busybody, had explained what it was. Apparently Erik’s grandfather and one of his cronies from the local lodge provided propulsion for the Christmas-light-covered kayak—which explained the two holes she’d finally noticed in the bottom of the one hanging from the ceiling in the back of the store.

“I’m going to call the lodge and see if I can get a couple of volunteers to walk it in the parade next year. I’ll provide candy for them to throw to the kids, and get elf hats like Edie said they wore. But I need to know what else your grandparents did that I should do, too.”

Erik hesitated.

“I’m not totally sure what you’re after.”

“Anything they did for holidays, or for community events. Or things they did every year that people looked forward to.”

“Like the kayak and the elf hats,” he concluded.

“Exactly. I want to belong here,” she explained, as if that need meant as much to her as financial success. “I want us to fit in. The other day, your friend implied that this place was sort of an institution around here. If there are customs your grandparents had that their neighbors and customers looked forward to, then I’ll keep them up the best I can.”

“You want to maintain my grandparents’ traditions?”

“If you’ll tell me what they were.”

Erik was not a man who impressed easily. Nor was it often that a woman caught him so off guard. Even as the businessman in him commended her approach to public relations, a certain self-protectiveness slipped into place.

Resting one hip on the counter, he crossed his arms over his chest, conscious of her honest interest as she waited for whatever he might be willing to share.

“They always gave suckers to the little kids.” A few innocent memories would cost him nothing. And possibly help her bottom line. “And ice cream bars. Locals always got a free one on their birthday.” His grandma had kept a calendar under the cash register with the regular customers’ birthdays written on it. Anniversaries were there, too.

He told her all that, ignoring an unwanted tug of nostalgia as he began to remember traditions he’d taken for granted, then forgotten. Or noticed but overlooked.

“They always opened the week of the spring sailing regatta in April, so they hung nautical flags along the porch and a life preserver by the door. For the Fourth of July they hung bunting and handed out flag stickers,” he said, memories rushing back. He’d loved the Fourth as a kid. Lying on his back in the grass to watch the fireworks over the sound. Or better, being out on the water in a boat, watching them explode overhead.

“And every fall,” he continued, thinking her little boy would probably like it, too, “the porch would be full of pumpkins and hay bales and they’d serve cups of cider.”

With her dark eyes intent on his, she seemed completely captivated by the small-town customs he hadn’t considered in years. She also appeared totally unaware of how close she’d drawn to him as he spoke. As near as she’d come, all he’d have to do was reach out and he would know for certain if her skin felt as soft as it looked.

As his glance slid to the inviting fullness of her bottom lip, he wondered at the softness he would find there, too.

Her lips parted with a quietly drawn breath.

When he looked back up, it was to see her glance skim his mouth before her focus fell to his chest and she took a step away.

“What about Thanksgiving and Christmas?” she asked, deliberately turning to the file on the counter. “Aside from the kayak.”

Forcing his attention back to her question, he stayed right where he was.

“Thanksgiving was just the fall stuff. But the day after, Gramps would string lights along all the eaves and porch posts and set up a Christmas village with a giant lighted snowman.” There had been a time when he and his dad had usually helped. That was back when Thanksgiving dinner had always been here. Christmas had been at his parents’ house, around the bend and in town a couple of miles. After the aircraft company his dad worked for had transferred him to San Diego a few years ago, he’d headed south for that particular holiday.

“The store was closed for the season by then, so I don’t think they gave anything out. At least, not the past several years.” He hadn’t been around to know for sure. Seattle was only twelve miles as the crow flew, but he lived his life what felt like a world away. Unless his grandparents had needed something before they’d moved south, too, he’d given this place and the areas around it as little thought as possible. And he’d never given it as much thought as he had just now. “But a lot of people drove by to see the light display.”

Whatever self-consciousness she’d felt vanished as she glanced back to him. “Where are the lights now?”

“They were sold.”

“The snowman, too?”

“Everything. They had a garage sale before they moved.”

For reasons he couldn’t begin to explain, he wasn’t at all surprised by her disappointment. What did surprise him was that he actually felt a twinge of it himself.

“Tyler would have loved to have a big snowman out there,” she said. “And the village. He gets so excited when he sees Christmas decorations.”

Threading her fingers through her hair, she gave him a rueful smile. “Unfortunately, I’d thought I was moving somewhere a lot smaller, so I sold everything for outside except a few strings of lights.”

With the lift of her shoulder, she attempted to shrug off what she could do nothing about now, anyway. “What else is there I should know?”

From the pensiveness in her voice, there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that she was still thinking about how her little boy would have loved what his grandparents had done.

“I can’t think of anything right now.” Wanting to get her mind off what she couldn’t do for her son, and his thoughts off her mouth, he rose from his perch. “But if I do, I’ll let you know.”

“One more thing,” she said as he turned to his briefcase. “Everything I’ve heard so far tells me this will be a good place to live. But what do you think about it? The community, I mean.”

Just wanting to get to work, he opened the case with the snap of its lock. “It is a good place. I grew up in town, but I was around here a lot, too. I even came back after college.” Paper rustled as he pulled out a sheaf heavy enough for a doorstop. “Pax and I first went into business about a mile down the road.” The stack landed on the counter. “You and your son should be fine here.”

Considering that Erik had apparently lived much of his life there, it seemed to Rory that the entire area had to mean a lot to him. “Why did you leave?”

He pulled another stack of paper from his scarred briefcase. For a dozen seconds, his only response was dead silence.

“Didn’t your business do well?” she prompted.

“The business did fine.”

“Then if this is a good place to live and your business was doing well, why did you go?”

The defenses Erik had attempted to ignore finally slammed into place. He knew her question was entirely reasonable. It was one he’d want answered himself were he on the other end of their agreement. Yet as valid as her query was, it bumped straight into the part of his life that had led to an entirely different existence than he’d once thought he’d be living by now.

His plans had been unremarkable, really. No different from half the guys he knew: a good marriage, build boats, a couple of kids, maybe a dog. The one out of four he did have was 90 percent of his life. It was a good life, too. The rest he’d written off completely years ago.

“It has nothing to do with here.”

“What did it have to do with, then?”

“Nothing you’d need to be concerned about.”

“How can I be sure of that if I don’t know what it is you’re not telling me? If you were getting your life established here,” she pointed out, “it’s hard for me to imagine why you’d leave. You seem too much in command of yourself and everything around you to do that if you’d really wanted to stay. That’s why your reason for leaving is important to me.” She tipped her head, tried to catch his glance. “Was this place lacking something?”

She’d stated her conclusions about him more as fact than compliment. As if she saw his influence over his surroundings as basic to him as his DNA. He’d have been flattered by her impression of him, too, had it not been for how much control he’d actually given up to save the marriage that had ultimately ended anyway. He could see where she deserved something more than he’d given her, though. After insisting his business had been fine there and that she would be, too, he did feel somewhat obligated to explain why he hadn’t stuck around himself.

“It didn’t lack for anything,” he admitted. At least, it hadn’t as far as he’d been concerned. “I left because my ex-wife wanted to teach in the city for a few years before coming back to raise a family. Those few years led to a few more and she changed her mind. About coming back and about the family,” he admitted, making a long story as short as possible. “When we left here, the business had barely gotten off the ground. But by the time I realized we weren’t coming back, Pax and I were established in Ballard. We had a good location. We had good people working for us. So it made sense to stay there. Like I said, my leaving had nothing to do with anything around here.”

Thinking he’d covered all the bases, he added two more stacks of papers to the first.

“She was a teacher?”

“Kindergarten,” he said without looking up. “She was great with kids.”

Her voice went soft. “You wanted children?”

A folder landed on the pile. “Let’s get to this, shall we?”

He’d said as much as he was going to. He’d closed the door on all the excuses Shauna had come up with to delay having a baby, and on how he’d hung in there because he’d promised to be there for better or worse. She’d kept asking him to bear with her on the baby thing. Especially after his business took off. She’d eventually changed her mind about a baby, but only after they’d divorced and she’d remarried. He’d realized then that it wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted children. She just hadn’t wanted his. She’d had no problem, however, keeping the house and a hefty chunk of their assets.

Frowning at his thoughts, he turned the whole stack of what he’d unloaded toward Rory. The past was just that. Past. Over. Done.

Rory saw a muscle in his jaw jerk.

The demise of his marriage evidently hadn’t been his choice.

She thought that an incredibly sad thing to have in common. She’d had no choice in hers ending, either.

“I’m sorry about your wife.”

“Ex.”

“Ex-wife,” she corrected. She spoke quietly, feeling bad for having pushed, worse for what she’d discovered. He’d once had plans to build his life in the fiercely beautiful surroundings where he’d grown up, but circumstances had forced him to move away, and move on. Just as circumstances had forced her in an entirely different direction than she would have chosen, and led her to the very place she strongly suspected he truly no longer wanted to be.

“Marriage can be complicated,” she said, beginning to appreciate the roots of his restiveness. “That must be why it’s never easy no matter how it ends.”

The furnace kicked on with the rattle of the floor vent behind the counter. His head down, his hand on the printout, Erik slowly ruffled a corner of the pages with his thumb.

He’d heard understanding in her voice, suspected he’d see it in her fragile features were he to look up. She seemed to think they shared the same kind of pain.

He didn’t want that kind of sympathy. He didn’t want to poke around at what he’d finally grown so far beyond, or into what was undoubtedly fresher and more painful territory for her. And he definitely didn’t want to be as curious as he couldn’t seem to help being about her, or the man she’d married. She’d once spoken of her child’s loss. There’d been no doubt in his mind at the time that she hurt for her son. He just hadn’t considered how the boy’s pain could easily compound the depth of the loss she felt herself.

Mostly, though, he didn’t want her getting so close, or to get close to her. Emotionally, anyway. Physically would be just fine. Heaven knew he was aware of her in ways he had no business considering. But she didn’t seem anything like many of the women he knew, those looking for a good time, no commitments involved. Not that he’d been intimate with anyone in longer than he cared to remember. He didn’t want any commitments, either. Still, he’d grown tired of the games, the shallow conversations and walking away feeling little more than...empty.

He gave the top folder a nudge. “I’m sorry about yours, too,” he admitted, because he didn’t need to know the details to feel bad for her. “And you can have a good business here,” he assured, because it was his job to help her make that happen. “We just need to get to work so we can make sure of it.

“This is my grandfather’s business plan,” he said, opening the folder. “Since you’re new to all this, it’ll be your bible. We can tweak it as we go, but to get you up and running, it’ll be simpler not to deviate from it too much at first. This—” he pulled the top printout forward “—is a stock list of the groceries they kept on hand, divided by type and vendor. Dairy, produce, snacks, staples, that sort of thing.

“This printout,” he said, indicating the tallest stack of paper, “is your sporting goods department. There are certain vendors you’ll need to order from weeks or months in advance. Others can ship in twenty-four hours. You’ll want to get their new catalogs. Gramps said they’re all online, but some will mail hard copies. You’ll need to establish accounts in your name with all of them.”

He handed her a CD. “It’s all on here for ordering and bookkeeping purposes. Look through it, list your questions and we’ll go over them later. I want to get you started on the physical inventory. You need to know what you have on hand, so it’s as good a way as any to get your feet wet.”

The change of subject was as subtle to Rory as the slam of a door. He would share anything that would help her make a success of the business. But his personal life was now off-limits. Despite how deftly he’d closed off his past, however, he’d revealed wounds that might well have taken years to heal. Family mattered to him. His dreams had mattered. Once.

She’d give anything to know how he’d survived knowing that the woman he’d married had no longer loved him. For her, even harder than Curt’s death was the knowledge that he might not have ever loved her at all.

The deep tones of Erik’s voice somehow overrode the sick sensation that inevitably came with the thought. Or maybe it was simply his no-nonsense presence that managed to keep that awful feeling at bay.

“We can start with things you can probably identify even if you’ve never used them. Camp stoves, lanterns, backpacking gear,” he said. “Or go with something that might be more of a challenge. Your choice.”

He was there to teach her what she needed to know to reopen the store, not about how to live with questions that could now never be answered. From his deliberate allusion to her lack of knowledge about certain outdoor activities, she had the feeling, too, that he intended his baiting to pull her out of her thoughts. If not for her sake, definitely for his own.

Since he had far more experience with both the store and self-survival, the least she could do was follow his lead.

“More of a challenge.”

He said he wasn’t surprised.

First, though, she brought them each a cup of coffee, his black, hers with milk, which they took with a section of the printouts and a notepad to the back of the store. It was there that he told her he needed to leave by two o’clock, which, thankfully, was a few minutes before she needed to leave to catch the ferry to pick up Tyler. So for the next hour, she learned to identify lures, hooks, rods, reels, creels, the difference between a bobber and a sinker and the different weights of leader—which would be important to know, he told her, if a customer came in asking for twenty-pound test. At least now she’d know they were asking for fishing line.

“If someone wants fish, wouldn’t it be a whole lot more convenient to buy it from a grocery store?”

Towering beside her, he remained focused on a column of item numbers. “Might be convenient, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.”

“I take it you’ve never been to Pike Place Fish Market.” She focused on a page of her own. “You pick out the fish you want and the guys behind the cases toss it down the line to the scale. You get it wrapped, packed, you don’t have to gut it and the show is free. That’s fun enough for me.”

With that even-eyed way he had of looking at her, he slanted her a tolerant glance. “You’re missing the point.”

“The point being?”

“Being in the great outdoors. The thrill of landing a thirty-pound salmon, or pulling an eight-pound rainbow trout from a freshwater stream.”

“The guilt of taking Nemo from his mother,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Never mind. I doubt that you know him.”

“Please tell me that’s not the approach you’re going to take with your customers,” he muttered back, just before his glance dropped to her mouth—which had the odd effect of shutting her up and getting her back to verifying counts.

They didn’t have time to move on to the modest sections of hiking, camping or boating equipment before she noticed the time. Since she had to drive right past the marina at the end of the street, and he’d tied his floatplane there, she asked if she could give him a ride and save him the two-block walk in the misty rain.

Conscious of the time himself, he told her that would be great. She could go over the rest of the inventory on her own and call him with any questions. They’d meet again next week after she’d gone over the business plan. He also asked if he could take the drawing of her new floor plan with him.

Thinking he intended to give the layout she wanted some thought, she handed it over, along with a travel mug of coffee since he seemed to like hers. Minutes later, he’d just tossed his briefcase into the back of her fuel-efficient little car and folded his big frame into the passenger seat when her cell phone chimed.

One glance at the caller ID had her bracing herself an instant before she dropped the phone back into her bag, started the engine and backed up. The phone continued to chime as she pulled onto the wet two-lane road and headed down the rise.

Erik’s glance cut from her purse to her profile.

“I’ll call her back,” she said. “It’s Audrey. My mother-in-law. She’s calling about plans for Christmas.” The woman was actually returning Rory’s call, something it had taken her three days to do. The conversation would be short, but it wasn’t one she wanted to have with Erik in the car.

“She was my mother-in-law,” she corrected. Technically, Rory was no longer related to the Linfields. Audrey had apparently pointed that out to Lillian Brinkley, the wife of the country club president, who had ever so thoughtfully shared it in the ladies’ room with two other members of the socially connected among the mourners at Curt’s funeral. Rory had been seeking a few minutes of quiet while closed in a stall at the time.

According to Audrey, via Lillian, Rory’s vows with her son had been “until death do them part.” They’d parted, however sadly. End of legal relationship.

As strained as her relationship with Curt’s parents had always been beneath the polite manners and civility, Rory hadn’t doubted the remarks at all.

“She’s really only Tyler’s grandmother now.” That was the only part that mattered, anyway.

The wipers swiped at the heavy mist on the windshield. Through the veil of gray, the little marina came into clearer view. Erik barely noticed. For a couple of hours he’d caught glimpses of a woman whose guard with him had begun to ease, a smart, savvy woman who possessed no small amount of determination, ingenuity and a remarkable willingness to step beyond her comfort zone.

What he saw now was a woman doing her level best to mask disquiet. He’d seen her do it before, for her son’s sake. Her attempts seemed to work fine on her five-year-old, but Erik recognized strain when he saw it. With her eyes on the road, he watched her take a deep breath, slowly ease it out.

Whatever was going on with Tyler’s grandmother had her hands going tight on the wheel.

The heater whirred in its struggle to produce warmth, gravel crunching beneath the tires as she pulled to a stop by the wooden stairs that led to the long floating dock. In the choppy, chill water of the sound, his white Cessna Amphibian floated and yawed where he’d secured it at the end of the pier, well away from the few sport boats moored there this time of year.

He almost always felt better flying from this place than toward it.

“Thank you for your help today,” she murmured, her hands now tucked at her waist, her shoulders hunched against the still-cold air. “I’ll come up to speed on everything as fast as I can. I promise.”

The bravado behind her smile pulled at protective instincts he’d rather ignore. He knew she wanted to belong there, in a place she’d known absolutely nothing about until last week. He knew she wanted to make a good home for her son. He suspected, too, that she could use a little reassurance on both counts.

After all, she was pretty much on her own here.

“I’ll pass that on to our benefactor,” he promised back, wanting to keep his purpose there in perspective. “And for what it’s worth, Rory, you and your son really should do well here.” He hesitated, perspective faltering. “I’d always thought it was a good place to raise a child.”

He reached for the door, cold salt air blasting in as he opened it. “I’ll call you next week. In the meantime, call me if you have questions.” He climbed out, then ducked his head back in to retrieve his case from the backseat. “Thanks for the ride.”

Rory had barely opened her mouth to tell him he was welcome before the door closed. In the space of a heartbeat she’d swallowed the words and was staring at his broad, leather-covered shoulders as he headed for the weathered stairs.

He’d made it halfway down the dock, his long stride sure and certain despite the drift and roll beneath his feet, when she finally put the car into gear. Even with the surface beneath him shifting with the unpredictable current, the man seemed as steady as a rock.

I’d always thought it was a good place to raise a child.

The admission had cost him. She felt as certain of that as she did of her gratitude for his having shared it. He knew his opinion mattered to her. She’d told him so herself. But sharing that particular thought had also demanded a hasty retreat back to the world he now lived in, back to a world so different from what he’d once wanted.

What stung, though, wasn’t how anxious he’d been to retreat to the life he’d created for himself. It was the sharp, undeniable feeling that he had quite deliberately retreated from her.