And Then Forever (2 page)

“My favorite time of year,” Darcy said. Especially because it was the time of year when Grace made her amazing salted caramel shortbreads, a treat reserved for Christmas. Darcy picked up the plates, and loaded them into the dishwasher. “Speaking of the season, it’s picked up a lot here the last few days.”

The season
needed no explanation. It was the time of year when the tourists began to arrive, flooding Fortune’s Island like shells washed in by a storm. They were the bread-and-butter of the local economy, giving almost every business on the island the bulk of its annual income in a three-month window. From June to September, Fortune’s Island hummed with constant visitors, which meant The Love Shack would be humming, too. Not with the rich people who kept to the north, but with everyone else who rented the small cottages that dotted the southern end of the island. Darcy counted on the season for paying her bills, and maybe putting a little aside for a winter vacation when Fortune’s Island became a ghost town. She didn’t need much—never had, probably never would—and kept her expenses low. There was money enough, she’d always figured, when she needed it most. Darcy only had one priority, and as long as she had enough for that, everything else was gravy.

“Cooter told me he’s expecting full ferry loads from here till Monday. Lots of mainlanders coming over early for the Fourth.”

“Best get to work, then.” Darcy slid off the stool, grabbed her short black apron from a hook, and tucked an order pad and handful of pens in the front pocket. She and Jillian spent the next fifteen minutes checking all the tables, making sure the salt was full and the ketchup ready, until the first customers strolled in a little after four.

Darcy loved the rhythm of her job, the constant pace of taking orders, hurrying to the kitchen to give them to Lenny, the cook, then sliding a stack of plates onto one arm and hurrying back out again to deliver. Time passed quickly when The Love Shack was busy, the air filled with the sound of laughter and whatever pop tune someone had picked on the jukebox. It was predictable and hectic, two things that matched Darcy’s constant frenzied pace. And casual enough that she could stop in the middle and dance with a customer or take a quick turn on the stage with the band.

A college kid was leaning over the jukebox, arguing with his girlfriend about who John Lennon was, which just made Darcy shake her head and wonder about the fate of humanity when it was in the hands of kids who had no idea who the Beatles were.

The kid punched in a number and a second later, a Beyonce hit boomed from the jukebox’s speakers. Jillian spun away from the hostess station. “Come on, Darcy, dance with me!”

Jillian grabbed Darcy’s free hand, and the two of them fast-stepped in a quick circle by the jukebox. Darcy kept the tray balanced above her head on the other hand, keeping her steps sure and fast, the tray straight. A second later, two of their regular customers joined in, with the usual hooting and hollering that started a night at The Love Shack. The party was underway, before sundown—exactly how Darcy liked it. She loved the wild nights at The Love Shack, the way her job felt more like a constant celebration than work.

She spun one more time with Jillian, then they broke apart, laughing, and giving each other a last hip bump before heading off to their respective tables. Just as Darcy turned toward table seven, the door to the restaurant opened, and the last bit of afternoon sun hit the floor, flooding along the wood like an instant gold river.

And Kincaid Foster walked into Darcy’s life, as easily as he’d walked out of it. Just like that.

She’d have recognized him anywhere, even though it had been seven years since she’d seen him last. Her heart stopped, and the perpetual motion that made up Darcy’s life came to a halt.

“Waitress? Hey, is that my burger? I’d like to eat today, you know.”

The voice drew Darcy back to the present. To her job. To the tray balanced on one hand. To the food getting cold while she stood here, letting Kincaid Foster have some kind of effect on her. Which he no longer did. Not at all.

She spun to the right, deposited said burger in front of a burly guy with a beard, then headed over to table seven to take their drink orders. Still, her peripheral vision kept straying to Kincaid, watching as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior, then headed across the room to the bar. He never even looked her way once.

That stung a bit, she had to admit. They’d been something once—or at least she had thought they were, until Kincaid let her go as easily as letting the wind snatch away a tissue. She’d thought he would fight for her, that she meant more than that, but…

It had taken her a year to get over him, maybe more, but she was now.

Over him. For sure.

“Uh, what did you say you wanted to order again?” she asked the middle-aged couple seated at the four-top before her. She readied a pen and her order pad, but her gaze strayed again to Kincaid. Damn, he looked good.

Still tall, muscular, with the kind of broad shoulders that seemed to welcome a heavy load. His dark hair was a little long, and one wave hooked over his right brow. She knew his hazel eyes, knew them as well as her own, knew the definition of his hands, the way his smile could make an entire room disappear.

“Miss? Miss?”

Darcy turned back. Again. “Um, sorry. What can I get you?”

The woman’s face filled with annoyance. “A menu? You seated us and said you’d be right back with menus. That was ten minutes ago. Can’t tell you what we want to eat until we know what you have to eat.”

“Oh, oh, right, sorry.” Darcy snagged two menus from the hostess station and brought them back to the table. Then she beelined for the kitchen, her brain as frazzled as a summer storm.

Before Darcy got more than a foot inside the door, Jillian was grabbing her arm and hauling her to the side. “Did you see who just walked in?”

Darcy scowled. Did the man wear a neon sign around his neck or something? “A whole bunch of customers waiting on food.”

“And Kincaid Foster.”

“I saw him.”

“And?”

“And he’s here.” She gave a casual shrug. “What’s the big deal?”

Jillian arched a brow. “You don’t care?”

“Of course not. He and I are in the past. The
way
past. Hell, I was barely out of high school. I hardly remember him.”

“Uh-huh. Then why are you hiding out in the kitchen?”

“I’m not hiding out. I’m waiting for an order.” She leaned against the counter and feigned impatience with the kitchen staff. “For, uh, table seven.”

Jillian grinned. “You just seated table seven. They haven’t ordered yet.”

Darcy sighed. “Okay, yes, maybe I am taking a breather in here. I just didn’t expect to see him. Ever again.”

“His family does have a house on the island.”

“That they haven’t visited in more than a decade.” Not that Darcy had been paying attention. Not one bit.

“True.” Jillian crossed her arms. “Wonder why he’s back.”

“Well, I don’t.”

Lenny put a heaping plate of buffalo wings on the warming shelf. “Order up, Darce. Table four.”

Thank God. The last thing Darcy wanted to do was stand here discussing a man who was ancient history. They were over, done. Had been for a long damned time. He was probably married to some pretty little socialite who wore twinsets and dressed their four kids in matching outfits from some designer baby offshoot.

She pushed the swinging door and headed out to the dining room. The party was ramping up as the room filled with college kids on summer break. They lingered around the jukebox in a pack, sipping at beers that dangled from their fingertips. The girls had on bikinis and sheer dresses, even though temperatures hadn’t quite hit the eighties yet. The boys hung a little behind the girls, watching their hips sway to the music.

An old Simple Plan song came on the jukebox, pounding out the lyrics to “Addicted,” with a heavy bass. For a second, Darcy was back in that summer after she graduated, that magical summer when it seemed like everything was going to be perfect.

That same summer when she’d scrawled a promise on a dollar bill, oblivious to how her life was going to change days later.

Darcy’s gaze shot to the bar, but Kincaid was sitting there, nursing a beer, his back to her. If he recognized the song on the juke, he gave no sign. She decided the song was just a coincidence, not some crazy sign.

“Hey, darlin’, fancy seeing you here.” Joey Herman, who had been a customer almost as long as Darcy had been a waitress, draped an arm over her shoulder. He was tall, had those chiseled good looks that got him a date without much more effort than a smile, and an easygoing attitude that offered as much welcome as a fresh-baked loaf of bread. He was one of Darcy’s regulars, always opting to sit at table six, where he had a good view of the bar, and a close ear to the stage for the bands that came on weekends.

“You know I don’t want to be anywhere else.” Except tonight, with Kincaid Foster lingering in her peripheral vision like a bad dream.

“Good thing for me.” Joey gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “So when are going to go out?”

She laughed. “When you quit asking me.”

Joey chuckled. He had a deep, infectious laugh, the kind that made others turn and look at them, as if they wondered what they were missing. “If I quit asking, that defeats the purpose of you realizing I’m your one true love.”

Joey was a nice guy, but also a notorious womanizer who might as well have
your one true love
printed on his business cards, given how often he used the phrase.

“Defeating your evil purposes is exactly my plan. Now, what do you want on your burger tonight?” As she spoke, Darcy stepped deftly to the left, grabbing some menus and slipping away from Joey in one move. She liked Joey, but refused to be his four hundredth date of the year. She knew how to flirt just enough to boost a tip, and when to pull back before someone got the wrong idea. Waitressing, she had learned early on, was a lot like dancing, with the fancy foot moves and the relationships that lasted no longer than a song.

And it was a dance Darcy liked. The kind with no commitment, no broken promises, no men in her life to screw up the very good thing she had going. She had everything figured out, or at least as close to that as she could get, and she wasn’t going to change that just because one man had arrived on Fortune’s Island.

The Simple Plan song gave way to one by Avril Lavigne, and she shifted her attention away from Kincaid, away from a past that was going to stay where it was, stuck to the wall, dusty and forgotten.

K
incaid Foster had been
in a lot of bars in his life. Most of them too fancy to leave so much as a ring of condensation lingering on a tabletop. The kind of bars with hushed conversations and top-shelf vodka and waitstaff that moved in and out of the space like ghosts.

That was not The Love Shack. And that was exactly why he was here. And exactly why pretty much every member of the Foster family would be outraged and horrified. They had been every time he’d gone to The Love Shack when he was young—and that was only counting the times he’d been caught. His presence at such a “seedy establishment” was an embarrassment to the family, of course. And when they’d found out that he had, for a while, dated Darcy Williams, who was as far from the kind of socialite his parents wanted him to pursue as the earth was from the next solar system, there had been much criticism and nashing of teeth and rules forbidding him from seeing her again. A part of him wondered if maybe that was part of what had attracted him to Darcy—the forbidden love that his parents hated, like some real life version of Romeo and Juliet, only without the crazy suicidal ending.

Maybe it had started that way, those clichéd starcrossed lovers trying to escape society’s rules, but it had turned into something else. Something more than just dating. It had been crazy and wild, and something he thought would last forever, until the day reality set him straight. All this time, he’d thought he was over her. Until tonight.

Kincaid had noticed Darcy the second he walked in. It wasn’t so much seeing her, as
sensing
her. It had always been like that whenever he was around Darcy. She had this larger-than-life personality, the kind that took over a room. The first time he’d noticed her had been in this very bar, when he was nineteen, and ditching a family dinner, sneaking into the one place on Fortune’s Island that had been forbidden. And there was Darcy, dancing on top of a table to an old Aerosmith song, in short shorts and a cutoff T-shirt that exposed a flat belly and the twinkle of a ring centered in her bellybutton. He’d been mesmerized, wanting to be a part of whatever world gave her that kind of…

Freedom.

It was the one thing Kincaid had never really known. He’d had tastes of freedom, especially that summer, but in the end, he’d returned to the very same prison he’d lived in all his life. The one built out of steel expectations.

He had a temporary reprieve from all that now, but he knew it was a limited parole. Eventually, Kincaid was going to have to return to New York City, which had become the hub of his father’s law practice a few years ago, to face his father’s wrath and what Edgar called “the consequences of his decisions.” But for now, there were other worries on Kincaid’s plate, things that ranked far above what his father wanted of him.

Just being near Darcy reminded Kincaid of all he had given up the day the ferry motored away from Fortune’s Island. She drew him in, captivated him, as easily as she had the first time he’d met her.

He pretended not to watch her now, but still his gaze strayed to Darcy every few seconds. The beer in his hands grew warm, barely touched. He heard Darcy laugh, that deep, rolling laugh of hers that slid through a man like butter, and he shifted on the stool to watch her.

She was talking over her shoulder to a customer as she walked toward the kitchen, her hips sashaying in cutoff denim shorts and scuffed cowboy boots. She had on a double layer of skinny strapped tank tops, white over hot pink, yet the satin edge of her pink bra still peeked out from beneath the criss-crossed straps. It was sexy and sassy, and something so outside the realm of the world where Kincaid traveled that it sent a hot rush of desire through his veins. He wondered if she still had the belly ring, if it would still lure him like a bee to the petals of a flower. She was all wrong for him—she always had been and always would—and maybe that was part of why he still wanted Darcy as much today as he had when he was nineteen.

She’d barely glanced his way. He wasn’t sure if she even recognized him. Though, given the way things had ended between them, he couldn’t blame her for acting like he was a stranger. He had been the one in love back then, he realized later, because Darcy had ended their relationship as quickly and coldly as ripping off a bandage. Everything she’d said, all the promises they had made had evaporated the day he got that note telling him it was over.

Didn’t matter. He wasn’t back for her. He was back for a second chance. Not for him, but for someone else, someone who needed it far more than Kincaid.

Whit slipped onto the stool beside Kincaid and signaled to the bartender for a glass of water. Kincaid had always liked Whit, who was like a second father to pretty much every young person on Fortune’s Island. He’d known Whit most of his life, back in the years when Whit had worked part time for Kincaid’s father, then later, when Kincaid had made The Love Shack his second home over that long, hot, lazy summer.

Of all the people in the world that Kincaid had on speed dial, Whit was the only one that Kincaid knew he could ask a favor of, and Whit would say yes without hesitation, without a question and without judgment. So when Kincaid had needed help, there’d been no question who he would call.

“So, you still interested?” Whit said.

Kincaid nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”

Whit paused a moment. He stared at his crossed hands, measuring his words before he spoke them. “You sure about this?”

Kincaid grasped the beer bottle. It was hard and solid and real in his palms. “No. But that doesn’t matter.”

“Your father—“

“No longer runs my life. I’m too old for that.” Not to say his father wouldn’t do what he could to make Kincaid’s life miserable, because that was pretty much Edgar Foster’s number-one job these days. Didn’t matter. Kincaid could take it. His little sister, Abby, was not so strong, and Kincaid aimed to do what he could to protect her. Fortune’s Island wasn’t far enough from Edgar’s reach, but it was where Abby wanted to be, and right now, that was all that mattered.

Whit dropped a key on the bar. “The place is nothing fancy, but it’s clean.”

And off the radar. Not far enough off for Kincaid’s liking, but no matter how much he had argued with Abby, she had insisted that Fortune’s Island was where she wanted to be. “Thanks, Whit.”

“Anytime.”

Kincaid curled his hand around the key. “How can I repay you?”

Whit waved that off. “No need. We’re square.”

Darcy walked by just then, her hips swaying to the beat on the jukebox, her hair swinging like a golden sea along her shoulders. The cowboy boots ended just below her knees, exposing a long, creamy expanse of flesh up to her denim shorts. Kincaid’s chest tightened.

He knew what it felt like to run his hands down those legs. To have her curve into him and say his name in that low, dark whisper. To feel her tremble beneath him, like the low rumblings of a volcano, with that heavy, hot promise in the air of an explosion to remember.

Whit put a hand on Kincaid’s shoulder. “She’s still single, you know.”

That information surprised Kincaid. He’d have thought some man with an ounce of sense would scoop Darcy up and marry her. She was a handful, to be sure, but she was also one of those rare women who could stand toe-to-toe with a man and make him wish he was more.

Either way, Darcy being single didn’t impact Kincaid’s life, or what he was doing here. Not one bit.

“We dated years ago,” Kincaid said. “Just one of those summer-after-high-school flings.”

“That’s how I met my Gracie. Thirty-two years ago, and still going strong. Just sayin’, if you’re gonna be on the island, might do you well to reconnect with old…friends.” Whit gave him a grin, then headed over to the hostess stand to greet some new customers.

Kincaid didn’t have time for connecting with old friends. Especially not ones with unfinished business like himself and Darcy. He’d do well to remember that when he was mesmerized again by her smile.

She’d told him she was falling for him that summer, and together, they’d made plans, the kind that spelled a future. Then just as quickly, Darcy had ended it all with a few words scribbled on a piece of paper. He’d vowed never to let anyone get that close again.

His gaze flicked to her a second time, to her hips swaying side to side as she crossed the room. How easy would it be to fall for her once more? Too easy. Far too easy. Besides, he wasn’t here to reopen the past. No, he needed to focus on the future. Nothing else.

Kincaid fished a few dollars out of his pocket, tossed them on the bar, then scooped up the key and left.