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Authors: Nora Roberts

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BOOK: Whiskey Beach
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“I saw some pictures, and the news clips. Yeah, he’s too thin. But then, that summer? He was so beautiful, so young and happy and
fun
. I flirted my butt off and that July Fourth bonfire paid the dividends. The first time he kissed me we were sitting around the fire. Music banging out, some of us dancing, some of us in the water. One thing led to another, and we walked down to the pier.”

She sighed with the memory. “Just a couple of hormonal teenagers on a warm summer night. It didn’t go any farther than it should have—though I’m sure my father would have disagreed—but it was the headiest moment of my life to that date. Seems so sweet and innocent now, but still ridiculously romantic. Surf and sea and moonlight, music from down the beach, a couple of warm, half-naked bodies just beginning to understand, really, what they were for. So . . .”

“So? So?” Leaning forward, Abra circled both hands in a hurry-up gesture. “What happened then?”

“We went back to the bonfire. I think it might have gone farther than it should have if he hadn’t taken me back to the group. I was so unprepared for what happens inside your body when someone really flips that switch. You know?”

“Oh boy, do I.”

“But he stopped, and after, he walked me home. I saw him a few more times before he went back to Boston, and we had a few more lip-locks—but nothing hit me like the first. The next time he came down, we were both dating someone. We never reconnected, not that way. He probably doesn’t even remember that July Fourth with the redhead under the Whiskey Beach pier.”

“I bet you’re selling yourself short.”

“Maybe. If we ran into each other when he’d come up to visit, we’d have a nice little chat—the way you do. Once I ran into him in the market when I was enormously pregnant with Liam. Eli carried my bags out to the car. He’s a good man. I believe that.”

“You met his wife?”

“No. I saw her once or twice but never met her. She was gorgeous, I’ll give her that. But I wouldn’t say she was the type who enjoyed those nice little chats outside the market. Word was there was no love lost between her and Hester Landon. Eli came up alone or with the rest of his family a few times after they were married. Then he just didn’t come. At least not that I know of.”

She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get home. Feed the rampaging horde.”

“Maybe you should go by and see him.”

“I think it might feel like an intrusion at this point—or like I was morbidly curious.”

“He needs friends, but you may be right. It may be too soon.”

Maureen carried her empty wineglass to the kitchen, set it down. “I know you, Abracadabra. You won’t let him wallow, not for long.” She pulled on her coat. “It’s your nature to fix things, heal things, kiss it where it hurts. Hester knew just what she was doing when she asked you to look after him and the house.”

“Then I better not let her down.” She gave Maureen a hug before she opened the back door. “Thanks for telling me. Not only a sexy story of teenage lust, but it gives me yet another perspective on him.”

“You could use a lip-lock or two.”

Abra held up her hands. “Fasting.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m just saying should the opportunity arise—he’s got great lips. See you tomorrow.”

Abra watched from the door while her friend hustled through the thick snow, and until she saw the back door light on the house next door shut off.

She’d build a fire, she decided, have a little soup, and give Eli Landon some serious thought.

Three

M
AYBE HE’D LOST SOME PROGRESS OVERALL,
E
LI ADMITTED,
but he’d stuck with the book for the best part of the day, and he’d produced there.

If he could keep his brain fired up, he’d write from the time he woke until the time he crashed. And okay, maybe that wasn’t healthy, but it would be productive.

Besides, the snow hadn’t relented until mid-afternoon. His vow to get out of the house at least once every day had to bow to two feet of snow and counting.

At one point when he simply couldn’t think clearly enough to put coherent words on the page, he continued his exploration of the house.

Tidy guest rooms, pristine baths—and to his surprise and puzzlement, the former upstairs parlor, north wing, now held a cross trainer, free weights, a massive flat-screen. He wandered the room, frowning at the yoga mats neatly rolled on a shelf, the towels tidily stacked, the large case of DVDs.

He opened that, flipped through the pages. Power yoga? His
grandmother
? Seriously? Tai chi, Pilates . . .
Getting Ripped
?

Gran?

He tried to imagine it. He had to believe he owned a damn good imagination or he’d never make a decent living writing novels. But when he tried to picture his watercoloring, pencil-sketching, garden-clubbing grandmother pumping iron, it failed him.

Yet Hester Landon never did anything without a reason. He couldn’t deny the setup and layout of the room showed careful thought and good research.

Maybe she’d decided she needed a convenient place to exercise when, like today, the weather prohibited her famous three-mile daily walks. She could have hired someone to outfit the room.

No, she never did anything without a reason—and she never did anything halfway.

And still he couldn’t imagine her sliding in a DVD with the goal of getting ripped.

Idly, he flipped through a couple more DVDs in the case, and found the sticky note.

Eli, regular exercise benefits body, mind and spirit. Now, less brooding and more sweating.

I love you,

Gran via Abra Walsh

“Jesus.” He couldn’t decide whether to be amused or embarrassed. Just how much had his grandmother told Abra anyway? How about a little privacy?

He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked to the window facing the beach.

While the sea had calmed, it remained gray under a sky the color of a faded bruise. Waves flopped up against the snow-covered beach, slowly, gradually nibbling away at that rippled blanket of white. The white mounds of dunes rose, sea grasses poked out like needles in a pincushion. They trembled in the wind, bent to the force of its hands.

Snow buried the beach steps, lay thick and heavy on the rails.

He saw not a single footprint, yet the world outside wasn’t empty. Far out in that gray forever he saw something leap—just a blur of shape and movement, here then gone. And he watched gulls wing over the snow, over the sea. In the snow-muffled quiet, he heard them laughing.

And thought of Abra.

He glanced back, gave the cross trainer an unenthusiastic study. He’d never liked putting in miles on a machine. If he wanted to work up a sweat, he’d play some round ball.

“Don’t have a ball, a hoop,” he said to the empty house. “And I do have a couple feet of snow. I should shovel the walk maybe. Why? I’m not going anywhere.”

And that last statement, he thought, had been part of the problem for nearly a year.

“Okay, fine. But I’m not doing any freaking power yoga. God, who thinks of that stuff? Maybe ten or fifteen on that damn machine. A couple of miles.”

He’d put in some miles on the jogging path along the Charles, usually working it in a couple times a week in decent weather. He’d considered a treadmill at his gym a last resort, but he’d put in plenty of time there, too.

He could certainly handle his grandmother’s little cross trainer.

Then he could e-mail her, tell her he’d found the note, done the deed. And if she wanted to communicate with him on something, just
communicate
. No need to bring her yoga buddy into every damn thing.

He approached the cross trainer with inherent dislike, glanced at the flat-screen. No, no TV, he decided. He’d stopped watching when he’d seen his own face on the screen too often, heard the commentary, the debates on his guilt or innocence, the truly horrible rundowns of his personal life, factual and not.

Next time, if there was one, he thought as he stepped on, he’d dig out his iPod, but for now he’d just get it done and stay inside his own head.

To get a feel for it, he gripped the handles, pushed with his feet. And his grandmother’s name flashed on the display screen.

“Huh.” Curious, he studied the pad, called up her stats.

“Whoa. Go, Gran.”

According to her last entry, which he realized was the day she’d taken the fall, she’d logged three miles in forty-eight minutes, thirty-two seconds.

“Not bad. But I can whip ya.”

Intrigued now, he programmed for a second user, keyed in his name. He started slowly, giving himself a chance to warm up. Then pushed it.

Fourteen minutes and one-point-two miles later, drenched with sweat, his lungs burning, he surrendered. Gasping for breath, he staggered to the mini-fridge, grabbed a bottle of water. After guzzling, he dropped to the floor, lay flat on his back.

“Jesus Christ. Jesus, I can’t even keep up with an old lady. Pitiful. Pathetic.”

He stared up at the ceiling, struggling to get his breath back, disgusted to feel the muscles in his legs actually quivering with shock and fatigue.

He’d played basketball for goddamn Harvard. At six-three, he’d made up for his relative disadvantage in height with speed and agility—and endurance.

He’d been a fucking athlete once, and now he was weak and soft, underweight and slow.

He wanted his life back. No, no, that wasn’t accurate. Even before the nightmare of Lindsay’s murder, his life had been impossibly flawed, deeply unsatisfying.

He wanted
himself
back. And damned if he knew how to do it.

Where had he gone? He couldn’t remember what it felt like to be happy. But he knew he had been. He’d had friends, interests, ambitions. He’d had fucking
passion
.

He couldn’t even find his anger, he thought. He couldn’t even dig down and find his anger over what had been taken from him, over what he’d somehow surrendered.

He’d taken the antidepressants, he’d talked to the shrink. He didn’t want to go back there. He couldn’t.

And he couldn’t just lie there on the floor in a sweaty heap. He had to do
something
, however incidental, however ordinary. Just do the next thing, he told himself.

He pushed to his feet, limped his way to the shower.

Ignoring the voice in his head that urged him to just lie down, sleep off the rest of the day, he dressed for the cold, layering sweatshirt over insulated shirt, getting a ski cap, gloves.

Maybe he wasn’t going anywhere, but that didn’t mean the walkways, the driveway, even the terraces shouldn’t be cleared.

He’d promised to tend to Bluff House, so he’d tend to Bluff House.

It took hours, with snowblower, snow shovel. He lost count of the times he had to stop, to rest when his pulse beat pounded alarm bells in his head, or his arms shook like palsy. But he cleared the driveway, the front walk, then a decent path across the main terrace to the beach steps.

And thanked God when the light faded to dusk and made continuing with the other terraces impractical. Inside, he dumped his outdoor gear in the mudroom, walked like a zombie into the kitchen where he slapped some lunch meat and Swiss cheese between two slices of bread and called it dinner.

He washed it down with a beer, simply because it was there, eating and drinking while he stood over the sink and looked out the window.

He’d done something, he told himself. He’d gotten out of bed, always the first hurdle. He’d written. He’d humiliated himself on the cross trainer. And he’d tended to Bluff House.

All in all, a pretty decent day.

He popped four Motrin, then dragged his aching body upstairs. He stripped, crawled into bed, and slept until dawn. Dreamlessly.

It surprised and pleased Abra to find the driveway cleared at Bluff House. She’d fully expected to slog through two feet of untrampled snow.

Normally, she’d have walked from her cottage, but opted against navigating deep snow or thin ice on foot. She pulled her Chevy Volt behind Eli’s BMW, grabbed her bag.

She unlocked the front door, cocked her head to listen. When silence greeted her, she decided Eli was either still in bed or closed up somewhere in the house.

She hung her coat in the closet, changed her boots for work shoes.

She started a fire in the living room first, to cheer the room, then headed to the kitchen to make coffee.

No dishes in the sink, she noted, and opened the dishwasher.

She could track his meals since he’d arrived. The breakfast she’d made him, a couple of soup bowls, two small plates, two glasses, two coffee mugs.

She shook her head.

This wouldn’t do.

To corroborate, she checked cupboards, the refrigerator.

No, this wouldn’t do at all.

She turned the kitchen iPod on low, then gathered ingredients. Once she’d made up a bowl of pancake batter, she went upstairs to find him.

If he was still in bed, it was time he got up.

But she heard the clicking of a keyboard from Hester’s home office, smiled. That was something anyway. Moving quietly, she peeked through the open doorway to see him sitting at the wonderful old desk, an open bottle of Mountain Dew (mental note to pick up more for him) beside the keyboard.

She’d give him a little more time there, she decided, and went straight into his bedroom. She made the bed, pulled the laundry bag out of the hamper, added bath towels.

She checked other baths on the way back in case he’d used hand towels or washcloths, checked the gym.

Back downstairs, she carted the bag into the laundry room, sorted, separated and started a load. And shook out, hung up his outdoor gear.

Not a lot to tidy, she realized, and she’d given the house a thorough cleaning the day before he’d arrived. While she could always find something to do, she calculated the time. She’d make him a kind of brunch before she rolled up her sleeves and really got to work.

The next time she went upstairs, she deliberately made noise. When she reached the office, he was up and moving to the door. Probably with the intention of closing it, she thought, so she stepped in before he could.

“Good morning. It’s a gorgeous day.”

“Ah—”

“Fabulous blue skies.” With her trash bag in hand, she walked over to empty the basket under the desk. “Blue sea, sun sparkling off the snow. The gulls are fishing. I saw a whale this morning.”

“A whale.”

“Just luck. I happened to be looking out the window just as it sounded. Way out, and still spectacular. So.” She turned. “Your brunch is ready.”

“My what?”

“Brunch. It’s too late for breakfast, which you didn’t eat.”

“I had . . . coffee.”

“Now you can have food.”

“Actually, I’m . . .” He gestured to his laptop.

“And it’s annoying to be interrupted, to be hauled off to eat. But you’ll probably work better after some food. How long have you been writing today?”

“I don’t know.” It
was
annoying, he thought. The interruption, the questions, the food he didn’t want to take time for. “Since about six, I guess.”

“Well, God! It’s eleven, so definitely time for a break. I set you up in the morning room this time. The view’s so nice from there, especially today. Do you want me to do any cleaning in here while you eat—or ever?”

“No. I . . . No.” After another slight pause. “No.”

“I got that. Go ahead and eat, and I’ll do what I have to do on this level. That way if you want to go back to work, I’ll be downstairs where I won’t bother you.”

She stood between him and his laptop, smiling genially in a faded purple sweatshirt with a peace sign dead center, even more faded jeans and bright orange Crocs.

As arguing seemed time-consuming and futile, he simply walked out of the room.

He’d meant to stop and have something—maybe a bagel, whatever. He’d lost track of time. He
liked
losing track of time because it meant he was inside the book.

She was supposed to clean the house, not take on the position as his damn keeper.

He hadn’t forgotten she was coming. But his plan to stop writing when she arrived, to grab that bagel and take it with him on a walk, to call home while he was out, well, the book sucked that away.

He turned left, into the glass-walled curve of the morning room.

Abra was right. The view was worth it. He’d take that walk later if he could find a reasonable route with the snow. At least he could get to the beach steps, take some pictures with his phone, send them home.

He sat at the table with its covered plate, its short pot of coffee, crystal glass of juice. She’d even taken one of the flowers from the living room arrangement and tucked it in a bud vase.

BOOK: Whiskey Beach
13.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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