Carolina Girl (3 page)

By the time Meg graduated from college, she’d learned to attribute Sam’s amazing staying power to the fact that he was drunk. She’d even learned to appreciate a guy who lasted longer than ten minutes. But eighteen years ago . . .

“I didn’t think you were in any condition to notice,” she said.

Sam’s gaze darkened. His voice lowered. “I noticed, all right. Listen, about that night . . .”

To her horror, she felt her throat tighten. “Don’t apologize.”
Not again.

“I wasn’t going to.”

Right
.

She yanked on her shoulder strap. “Anyway, it was a long time ago. Lots of sex under the bridge since then. What’s past is past.”

She winced. A little heavy with the clichés there, even for someone who read a lot of ad copy in the course of her job. But seeing him again unexpectedly, on top of everything else, had rattled her.

Sam slid in beside her, his knees and shoulders taking up too much room. There wasn’t enough oxygen in here for both of them. “Not if you’re going to spit at me every time we meet.”

She stopped fussing with the seat belt. “I’m not spitting.” Much. “I just don’t see any point in rehashing the past. We’ve both moved on.”

“Yeah, I heard.” He shot her a glance as he shifted gears. “Derek, is it?”

She blinked. “Are you asking me about my boyfriend?”

“Just catching up,” Sam said. “That’s what old friends do when they haven’t seen each other in a while.”

Meg stared out the window at red clay and tall pines. They weren’t friends. They were . . . She didn’t know what they were. Right now, with her emotions raw and her carefully ordered life a mess, she didn’t feel very friendly. But admitting that felt like giving Sam an advantage in whatever emotional game he was playing.

“Derek’s fine,” she said.

Never mind their awkward leave-taking this morning. Derek supported her. He understood her. They shared the same goals, the same values.

Thinking about Derek steadied her. Sam was her past. Derek was her future.

“We’re both fine. How’s . . .” Meg searched her mind for the latest name her mother had tied to Sam’s. “Trina?”

“She’s all right. I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“On to someone new?” Meg inquired sweetly.

The creases—too masculine to be called dimples, too charming to be anything else—indented in Sam’s cheeks. “Nobody at the moment. I’m still looking.”

“For which women everywhere give thanks, I’m sure.”

The creases deepened. “Same old Meggie. You haven’t changed.”

The old nickname pulled something deep inside her. She could feel herself unraveling, her nerves fraying along with her defenses. “I’ve changed a lot. Apparently you haven’t.”

“You’d be surprised.” He took his hand off the steering wheel and gave hers a friendly pat. His hand was warm and callused. She stiffened, startled by the temperature of his skin and the leap of her own pulse.

“I’ve settled down,” he said.

She slid her hand from under his. “And yet you’re still single.”

“Better single than with the wrong person.”

“What is that, like, the voice of experience?”

He glanced at her, brows raised.

Too personal. She didn’t want to go there with him, to presume an intimacy that didn’t exist anymore. But he started it.

“You know. Because of your father,” she explained.

Before Sam turned sixteen, Carl Grady had presented him with three different stepmothers. Meg had never even met Carl’s first wife, Sam’s mother. She lived out West somewhere, Utah maybe, or Colorado.

“I’m a little old to be blaming Daddy because I haven’t found the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with,” Sam said.

He wasn’t offended.

She breathed in relief. “You’re right. What would you prefer to blame it on? Fear of intimacy? Lack of commitment?”

He slanted another look at her. “You and Derek set the date yet?”

She straightened on the soft leather seat. “Our situation is different. Derek and I have been together six years.”

“Uh-huh. What’s the matter with him?”

“Nothing. He’s perfect for me.”

“I meant, why hasn’t he manned up and asked you to marry him?”

Despite the air-conditioning blasting through the vents, warm blood surged in her cheeks. “Derek and I just bought a condo together. We don’t need a contract to validate our relationship.”

“A mortgage is a contract,” Sam observed.

Meg frowned. She wasn’t debating her life choices with Sam. “The condo is an investment.”

“It’s a gamble. Any time you buy property or get married, it’s a risk. You pay your money and you take your chances.”

“Since when did you become an expert on—”

He flashed her that sign-right-here-honey grin. “Real estate?”

He knew all about real estate. The Gradys were the biggest property managers and developers on the island. “Marriage.”

He shrugged. “Like you said, I had a ringside seat to four of them. Five, counting your parents’. Enough to give me an idea of what can go wrong. And how good it can be when it’s right. Your parents got it right.”

His sincerity was unmistakable and completely unexpected. She swallowed, uncertain how to respond.

He turned his head and met her gaze. “That’s what makes what happened to your mom so unfair,” he said quietly. “I was real sorry to hear about her accident.”

His sympathy ripped at her control, plunging her back into the emotional maelstrom that had followed the call from the hospital.
Meg, it’s Matt.
Her brother’s usually calm voice had been taut with strain.
There’s been an accident
.

Shock and fear had almost swamped her. Somehow she had made the nightmare journey home, seizing on each fresh task to be done, clinging to the details of her mother’s care like a lifeline, quizzing doctors, advocating with nurses, spending nights at the hospital whenever she could bully her father into snatching a couple hours’ sleep at a nearby motel. Anything to stave off thinking, to put off feeling, to avoid accepting the possibility of a world without her mother in it.

“I . . . Thank you,” she managed.

She pulled herself together. This was so not the conversation she wanted to be having. Not with anyone, but especially not with Sam. The present was rough enough without resurrecting the Ghost of Boyfriends Past.

“She’s doing a lot better,” Meg said.
If you pretended everything was fine, then everything would be fine. Eventually.
“Two weeks in the rehab center and she can come home.”

“So you’re just here until she’s back on her feet.”

Or until I find another job
.

Meg cleared her throat. “That’s right.” She looked away, out the window, uncomfortable under his steady regard. “We haven’t talked about your family yet. How’s your sister?”

A pause, broken only by the rumble of the tires and the drumming of her blood in her ears.

“She’s good,” Sam said finally, slowly, accepting her change of subject. “You know she’s getting married.”

Diverted, Meg tore her attention from the flat green landscape outside. “Chelsea? She’s too young.”

“Twenty-one.”

Meg laughed in disbelief. “She can’t be. I was babysitting her yesterday. I tied her shoes.”

“How do you think I feel?” Sam said, a smile in his voice. “I changed her diapers.”

“Shouldn’t she still be in college?”

Sam nodded. “Chapel Hill. That’s where she met Ryan. Ryan Woodley, her fiancé.”

Meg felt a pang she didn’t want to examine too closely. It wasn’t that she was anxious to get married. Still . . .
Twenty-one
. “I hope they’ll be very happy.”

“Thanks. They’re probably going to want to talk to you.”

“Me?”

Chelsea was only five when Meg left for college. She was touched the girl even remembered her.

“They’re looking for a place for Ryan’s family to stay when they come down for the wedding,” Sam said.

So much for sentiment
. “They don’t need me,” Meg said. “Your family’s the one with all the rental properties.”

“You have an inn. Ryan doesn’t want his mom stuck with beds and meals and stuff.”

“Well, I can certainly talk with them. But I can’t promise anything. I don’t want to stick my mother with too much, either. Or Matt.”

“I thought you came home to help out.”

When she left Dare Island, she’d been determined never to play housekeeper to a bunch of strangers again. She’d come home because she had no place else to go.

“Only for a couple of weeks.”

Only for as long as it took to update her résumé. Only until Derek realized he was miserable without her. As soon as she got her life back in order, she was out of here.

“They’re getting married at Christmas,” Sam said.

“So soon?” she asked.

“They pushed up the wedding date.”

“Oh.
Oh.
”

He slanted a look at her. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

Meg flushed, caught out. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to. Everybody else has.” There was an edge to his voice that she didn’t normally associate with the King of Cool.

Ouch. Okay. Gossip was practically a recreational sport on the island, like knitting or kayaking. It was easy to imagine what people were saying about the rushed marriage; hard not to respect the family loyalty that put that bite in Sam’s tone. He might be an egotistical, womanizing jerk, but he was genuinely fond of his young half sister.

She touched his arm. “It doesn’t matter. In six months . . .”

“She’ll be gone,” Sam said. “Ryan started his medical residency at the San Diego Naval Medical Center in August. Chelsea was supposed to join him next June, after a big wedding here. She decided she didn’t want to wait that long.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Spoken like a true romantic.”

She’d been romantic once. And what a disaster that had turned out to be. “You can’t tell me you think this is a good idea.”

“I think,” Sam said finally, “Chelsea’s old enough to make up her own mind.”

Meg rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. She’s twenty-one. If you ask me, she should at least finish college.”

“She’s applied to graduate in December.”

“Well, that’s good. But this guy she’s marrying, he’s, what, a lieutenant in the Navy? He must be ten years older than she is.”

“Six. He just finished med school.”

“That’s still a huge gap in age and experience,” Meg pointed out.

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Not as big as the gap between Matt and Allison.”

Meg pressed her lips together. Her brother Matt had recently gotten involved with his son’s high school English teacher, pretty, preppy Allison Carter. “Allison at least has accomplished something with her life,” Meg said. “She’s made something of herself.”

“Chelsea wants to make a life for herself, too. A family.”

“By running away from home?”

Sam glanced away from the road, his gaze dark, direct. “Why not? You did.”

“I never ran away.”

His lips curved without humor. “No, but you never came back.”

Three

T
ESS
F
LETCHER DIDN’T
take things lying down. But right now she was afraid to move despite the drugs the nurse had promised would take the edge off. Pain stalked her like a wolf, hungry for her bones. She closed her eyes, hoping to escape its attention.

You’re a rock star
, Jerome, the bald, black, very buff physical therapist had told her not twenty minutes ago. He’d eased her leg up from the plinth table, testing her range of motion.
Forty degrees. Way to go, Tess.

Tess had appreciated both his encouragement and the compliment. She liked Jerome. A good thing, since the young man had had his hands places nobody but her husband, Tom, had touched in years. But she didn’t
feel
like a rock star. Since that damn drunk driver had slammed into the front end of her car, she’d felt frighteningly frail, discouragingly old, and increasingly frustrated.

The bedside phone rang. The hospital line, Tess thought. Meg had bought both her parents prepaid phones before she went back to New York, but cell phone reception in the rooms was lousy.

Tom cursed and lurched from his recliner to grab the receiver before the noise woke Tess.

Not that she was sleeping. The hospital buzz penetrated everywhere, nurses’ voices, rolling carts, the lowered volume on patients’ TVs. The adhesive around her IV itched. The bruise in her elbow from a clumsy blood draw throbbed. She was uncomfortable everywhere, in muscles she didn’t know existed. And always, always, there was the faint, disturbing light behind her closed lids and the grinding ache of her healing bones.

“Meggie,” Tom said low to their daughter. “No, she’s fine. Just got back from PT.”

Tess opened her eyes, welcoming the distraction from her pain. With her children, at least, she could be something other than a patient. There was a part of her that would always be Mommy, the woman who had answered their questions and soothed their nightmares.

“Maybe later,” Tom said. “She’s trying to get some sleep.”

“I can talk to her,” Tess said.

His gray brows drew together over his nose. “You need to rest.”

Tess was tired of being told what she needed. The accident had robbed her of control over her schedule, her surroundings, her own body.

“I’ve done nothing but rest for two weeks,” she said more sharply than she’d intended. She softened the words with a smile. “I’ll talk to her, Tom. Better than lying here feeling sorry for myself.”

He frowned and handed over the phone.

Tess wedged the receiver against her pillow. “Hey, baby.”

“Mom. How are you?”

“Oh, you know,” Tess said. “Fine.”

“Mom.” The exasperation in Meg’s voice made her sound about fourteen.

Tess smiled. “Well, better,” she amended. “A little sore.”

“I’m coming home to help.”

The announcement pierced the haze of drugs and pain. “What? When?”

“Now. I’m on my way from the airport.”

Tess struggled to sit upright. Tom scowled at her, and she subsided against her pillows. “Sweetie, I love you, but that’s not necessary. There’s nothing for you to do here.”

“Not at the hospital,” Meg said. “I’m going to the inn.”

“You just got back to New York.” Tess tried to count back. “Four days ago.”
Five?

“And now I can come home.”

Tess felt a blip of misgiving, like the warning beep of one of the hospital machines. In twelve years, Meg had barely taken a vacation, rarely spent more than a few days on the island. Always Christmas, never New Year’s. “What does Matt say?”

“I didn’t ask his opinion. I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Of course I’m pleased,” Tess said automatically.
Aren’t I?
“But what about Derek? What about your job?”

“They’ll have to get along without me,” Meg said rather grimly.

Something was wrong. And her little girl wasn’t telling her.

“Is Matt with you?”

“No, I’ll see him tonight. He had a charter this afternoon.”

“Who picked you up at the airport?”

A pause, filled with the rumble of tires or the hum of Meg’s wireless connection.

“Sam Grady.”

“Sam?” Such a nice boy. A little troubled, a little hungry for affection, a little eager for approval beneath those smooth manners and easy charm. But a good man.

Meg didn’t like him.

“Real-ly,” Tess said, two bright, interested notes.

Tom took the phone. “Your mom has to go,” he said.

“Tom,” Tess protested.

“They’re coming with your tray in an hour. You need a nap.”

She listened as he said good-bye and ended the call to Meg. “I’m not a baby,” she said when he’d hung up.

His lips twitched. Tess pressed her own together. Maybe she did sound, just a little, like a cranky toddler.

But all he said was, “Nope. Jerome says you’re a rock star.”

“Not that, either,” Tess said. “Too sore and too doped up.”

He sat at her bedside and took her hands. She’d always loved his hands, workingman’s hands, tanned and callused and veined now with age. “Remember that Dead concert? Amphitheater, ’74. The whole band was doped up.” He paused. “So was the audience.”

She remembered. Their third date in as many days. She’d been waiting tables at her family’s restaurant in Chicago when Tom strolled in, a Leatherneck on leave, straight as a rifle, cocky as hell. They’d married two weeks later.

“You weren’t,” she said.

“Sure I was.” His eyes, faded denim blue, met hers. He winked. “High on you, babe.”

“Oh, Tom.”

Comforted, she squeezed his hand and drifted into sleep.

* * *

S
AM PARKED THE
truck behind the inn beside Matt’s weathered pickup and Allison’s silver Mercedes. They were all back, then, to welcome Meg home.

He watched her march up the walk ahead of him with short, determined strides, her spine straight, her hips practically twitching with irritation, and allowed himself a grin.

Maybe he shouldn’t have made that crack about her running away all those years ago. But the truth was, she had. They both had. Meg because she’d had better things to do, and Sam because he’d had something to prove.

He hauled her bags out of the back of the truck, catching up with her easily along the flagstone walk.

The Pirates’ Rest was a two-and-a-half story Craftsman jewel from the early 1900s, like an old woman beautiful in her bones, built to withstand the island’s changing tides and fortunes.

“Place is holding up all right,” Sam remarked, running a builder’s eye over the deck that spanned the length of the house. He’d spent six sweaty days on that deck one summer, digging holes and driving nails under Tom’s eagle eye. “Have you thought about how your mom’s going to manage when she gets back?”

Meg paused with one foot on the low, wide steps. “Well, obviously. That’s why I came home.”

“I meant, she’ll have a walker. She needs a ramp to get in and out of the house.”

Meg blinked, her eyes startlingly blue beneath those thick dark lashes.

Gotcha, Sam thought. He smiled at her—she looked cute, all wide-eyed and ruffled like a girl again—and said, “It’s okay. I’ll talk to Matt. We’ll work something out.”

He could almost hear Meg’s teeth grind together. “I can talk to him.”

“Sure you can,” Sam said. “But unless you’ve got a building crew packed away in this bag, it won’t do your mother any good.”

Meg shot him a narrow look and stalked into the kitchen ahead of him.

Negotiating the screen door with her two bags, Sam missed the first warm rush of welcome. He heard Allison’s pleased exclamation and Matt’s deep rumble and looked up to see the two women hugging with obvious warmth.

Sam caught himself grinning at the picture they made—Allison, tall, blond, and coolly pretty; Meg, short and dark and vibrating with energy.

The screen door sprang shut behind him. As it slammed, they all turned to look at him, Meg, Matt, and Allison, and Matt’s teenage son, Josh. A little girl sat at the kitchen table, a camo cap jammed over her dirty blond hair, Matt’s big black shepherd mix at her feet. She looked wary and hostile, like a smaller, grungier version of Meg.

Sam winked at her and she scowled.

Yep, definitely a family resemblance there.

“Sam.” Matt clapped him on the shoulder. “Appreciate your picking up Meg.”

“Happy to,” Sam said.

At a look from his dad, Josh came forward to grab the bags. Christ, the kid was as tall as Matt now.

“Hi, Aunt Meg.” He bent down to kiss her cheek. He cocked a grin at Sam. “Hey, Mr. Grady.”

“Sam,” he corrected, feeling about a hundred years old. Mr. Grady was his father. “How’s basketball going?”

Josh shrugged. “We’re still conditioning. Coach won’t let us touch a ball until November.”

“You can take those bags to Mary Read,” Allison said. All the rooms at the inn were named after pirates of the Carolina coast. She beamed at Meg. “I put you in your old room. I hope that’s all right.”

“I thought my room was booked.”

“Last weekend. It’s empty now.”

“Great.”

Only somebody who knew Meg very well would have caught that almost indefinable pause. Sam wondered if he knew her as well as he thought. Was she worried about the inn’s occupancy rate? Or miffed because her brother’s girlfriend was making room assignments? Remembering the warmth of their greeting, he figured it was probably the first. But you could never be sure with women.

“Does that mean Dad’s staying home tonight?” Josh asked. Matt and his son lived in a two-bedroom cottage behind the inn. “Or . . .” He sent a sly glance at Allison, who flushed pink.

“Matt’s been spending nights at the inn,” she explained to no one in particular. “So Taylor wouldn’t be alone.”

Sam was willing to bet his old buddy wasn’t sleeping alone, either. In his own quiet way, Matt had clearly staked his claim on the sweet-eyed schoolteacher. She was just as obviously stuck on him.

Sam felt a twinge of something like envy. Not that he was looking to get serious himself.

“We weren’t expecting you so soon,” Allison said to Meg.

She raised her eyebrows. At the change of subject? “Hardly soon. I’m three hours late.”

“I mean, you just got back to work. To New York.”

“Everything all right?” Matt asked.

“Fine,” Meg said crisply.

Yeah, something there. You didn’t grow up with multiple stepmothers without learning to spot when a woman was upset.

“How’s Derek?” Allison asked.

“He’s fine.”

The Fletcher family motto, Sam thought.

The kid hunched in her chair, her eyes tracking the adults’ conversation, one foot parked on the dog under the table. Apparently Sam wasn’t the only one picking up on the tension in the room.

“Hi.” He smiled at her. “I’m Sam.”

The dog, Fezzik, thumped its tail. The kid regarded him with suspicion, like something she’d found on the bottom of her shoe.

“My niece, Taylor,” Matt said, tapping a finger on the brim of her cap.

She tipped back her head to look up at him, the wariness melting in a smile.

“Luke’s daughter,” Meg supplied. “Hi, sweetie.”

There was no big hug like she’d given Allison, Sam noted. No kiss like she’d had from Josh.

But then, Meg had only met her niece on her last visit, a week or so ago.

Luke, the youngest Fletcher sibling, was a Marine in Afghanistan. According to the island grapevine, he hadn’t even known about the kid’s existence until her mother died a couple months ago. Sam’s stepmother Angela had filled him in on the story. The way she told it, Luke had returned home just long enough to pick up the girl and dump her on the Fletchers.

Weird to think of the skinny little kid who had tailed him and Matt around as a father. But the girl looked like Luke. She looked like a handful.

“How’s it going?” Sam said.

“Fine.” She surprised him by offering, “We’re having corn on the cob.”

“Corn and shrimp,” Allison confirmed, turning from the sink with a big pot of water. “I’m cooking.”

“You don’t cook,” Josh put in from the kitchen doorway as he returned from dumping the bags. “You boil.”

She wrinkled her nose at him, clearly unoffended. “Your turn tomorrow, Iron Chef. Let’s see what you come up with.”

“Pizza?”

“Yeah!” said the girl.

Matt shook his head. “No more carryout. Not unless Josh is paying.”

“I’ll cook,” Meg said. “Since we’re taking turns.”

Off the bench and into the game, Sam thought. He listened to the talk, amused and not a little envious of the trash talk and teasing. Even with Tess sidelined and two rookies in the mix, the Fletchers played as a team.