Allie’s mouth fell open, her resolve evaporated and her heart dropped. Now what?

  * * *

  Just as Allie had first suspected, when she had seen Sam glance back out that door and hold it open, Allie’s home invader had not arrived alone. No wonder, even as he spoke to her, he had been keeping a sharp eye on the front yard.

  He was now crouched beside a small boy, who was trying to unstick a red wagon that had gone off the concrete pathway, and had its two side wheels imbedded in the soft dirt of the somewhat neglected flower bed that ran beside it.

  The child was adorable: he looked to be maybe three, with a head full of tangled blond curls and the sturdy build of a tiny wrestler. Dimpled legs poked out of denim overall shorts. The chubby legs ended in tiny hiking boots. He had on a red T-shirt, and a faded superhero cape, one hem drooping, was draped over his shoulders and tied under his chin.

  The wagon contained a small suitcase and a stuffed toy of some sort. The child was determined to free it himself.

  He furiously waved off Sam, who could have freed the wagon in less than a second. Sam stood back, hands up, in the universal sign of surrender.

  Allie realized it might be just a wee bit petty to take delight in seeing the self-assured Mr. Walker taking his orders from a child.

  The little boy grunted and pulled, but the wagon did not move. But the stuffy did. It lifted its head, gazed with a combination of adoration and long-suffering at the child—an expression nearly identical to the man’s, actually—then sighed, and put its head back down. Not a stuffy, then, but a dog. It looked like a cross between a cocker spaniel and a red feather duster.

  Allie considered all of this. Finding accommodations would be hard enough in Sugar Cone in July. The complication of the dog and the child would make it impossible.

  Which meant what?

  She could harden her heart to Sam Walker. It would take effort, of course, he was one of those men who effortlessly caused softening in the region of the female heart. However, she thought she’d become rather good at hardening her heart to men, and particularly one like him, who seemed altogether too sure of himself.

  But the little boy? And that moppet of a dog?

  What was she going to say? Go sleep in your car? Go home where you came from? I don’t care about you, or your excitement about a holiday on the beach?

  For all that she had been through, had she really become that person? Was she going to allow herself to be callous and hard?

  It was a sensible approach to life, she tried to convince herself. She touched the ink-dark tips of her hair, as if to remind herself which way she needed to go if she did not want to be hurt any more.

  But an attitude of complete cynicism did not feel as if it fit her, as much as she might have wanted it to. And her grandmother would not have approved.

  Her grandmother had known this man. Possibly she had known him since he was a child. She had never mentioned a rental arrangement, but Allie had never visited her at this particular time of the summer, either.

  It occurred to Allie there might be a Mommy somewhere, but a quick glance at the curb showed no one else coming from the car that was parked there.

  She couldn’t identify the silver car, low-slung and sporty, beyond the fact that it was clearly expensive. The kind of car that a man who could afford a team of lawyers drove.

  But then she thought of what she had glimpsed in the man’s face, beyond the travel weariness, and it came to her. Not hurt, so much, and not loneliness.

  It was a subject she was something of an expert on, enough that she could spot it in others. Loss. That is what was in the sharpness of his tone when he had told her that he, of all people, knew that life could turn on a hair.

  Sam Walker knew some incredible, heartbreaking loss. That is what she had seen, naked in his eyes, before the veil had slammed down.

  Of course, she probably had it all wrong. A divorce, plain and simple. In this day and age that would hardly cause a flicker. It was probably more the norm than not: marriage broken, daddy inheriting his kid for a week or two in the summer. What better plan than to head to the beach?

  Allie sighed, and recognized it as a surrender. For tonight, anyway. She had two extra bedrooms. It was unlikely that a longtime tenant of her grandmother’s had morphed into some kind of ax murderer. And also unlikely that an ax murderer came with a child and a puppy in tow.

  Plus, there was the unhappy existence of a contract to consider.

  Maybe there was a bright spot in all this. Maybe she needed to suck it up and consider going beyond tonight. Maybe, particularly since her guitar was locked into an unfathomable silence, Allie needed to consider giving up two weeks of her precious privacy in trade for something she needed more desperately than solitude right now.

  Money.

  * * *

  Sam Walker sensed the girl had come outside behind him before he actually saw her. Awareness of her tingled along his spine, as she pressed by him, somehow not touching him, though the walkway was narrow. She paused at where the wagon was stuck.

  “Hi,” she said to Cody, who glanced at her, then ignored her.

  She ignored him, too, none of that gushing over his curls that Cody and Sam were equally allergic to. Casually, barely seeming to move at all, she tucked her toe under the wagon, and lifted the stuck wheels back onto the walk. Sam noticed there was nary a protest from Cody, who trundled by her without acknowledging her help.

  “I guess we can work something out,” she said. Her voice was reluctant, but her eyes on the child had softened with a sympathy that turned them a shade of violet that Sam felt he could look at—or get lost in—for a long, long time.

  He shook the feeling off, but still could not seem to stop looking at her. His initial reaction, in the poor light of the hallway, after he’d realized she was not a boy, had been that she was barely more than a child.

  She had tufts of very short blond, sun-streaked hair—really sun-streaked, not from a bottle—in a rumple around her head. While the rest of her hair looked natural, there was an odd half inch, right at the tips, that was a disconcerting shade of black, as if it had been dipped in an inkwell.

  She was wearing a too-long T-shirt, damp in the front, suggesting a swimming suit underneath it. She had very long, sun-browned legs, but otherwise was tiny, the kind of person who would be chosen for the part of Peter Pan in a play. Or maybe Tinkerbell. Despite being Cody’s guardian for nearly eight months—all of them excruciating—Sam still wasn’t really up on his children’s stories.

  Outside, the light dying, but better than it had been in the cottage, he could see she was not a child. At all. Maybe in her early twenties.

  He could see, too, that she was the antithesis of the kind of women who populated his world. They fell into two categories: the very glamorous, with perfect makeup and salon hair, with manicured fingers and toes, and everything in between manicured, too. Those women wore designer clothes with casual flair, and tossed two-thousand-dollar handbags over gym-toned shoulders.

  The other kind were his colleagues, professionals, as driven as he was, but as perfectly turned out as their glamourous counter parts, with a wardrobe of designer power suits and stylish eyeglasses.

  Sam dated—occasionally—women from both those categories. Women sophisticated enough to understand that if they were looking for picket fences and happily-ever-after, he was not their guy.

  But if they were looking for the kind of good time—travel, posh restaurants, good wine, galas, charity balls, premieres—that money could buy, they could hang out with him. For a while. As long as there were no demands and they didn’t get in the way of business.

  This woman, with her blown-in-off-the-beach look, would not fit into either of those two convenient categories. He thought he had known women who were bold, but this woman who grabbed a statue named Harold and headed toward danger, instead of away from it, could redefine that word.

  Next to any other woman he could think of she seemed, what? Distressingly real, somehow.

  Not that categories for any kind of woman existed in his life anymore, Sam reminded himself.

  No, his old life, that guy who worked hard and played harder, who was carefree and unfettered, was a distant memory, eight months behind him.

  “Is there something wrong?” Ally asked.

  On the other hand, maybe he would be getting his old life back soon. It was what he had wanted and wished for, almost on a daily basis.

  And yet now that it was a possibility...his heart did a sickening fall.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “IS SOMETHING WRONG?” she asked again.

  He gave Allie of the hallway art—and possibly his landlady—a look. This was the second time he’d gotten the unsettling feeling that she might see things about him that others didn’t. No one but his sister had ever seen past what he was prepared to show them, and he didn’t like it.

  But then he saw she wasn’t even looking at him. She was looking at the dog, Popsy, lying in the wagon, one paw trailing, looking as boneless as a pile of rags.

  “With the dog?” she clarified.

  Sam felt huge relief that she was talking about the dog, not him.

  Cody was now facing the challenge of the steps leading up to the cottage. With huge effort, he lifted the limp Popsy off the wagon. The dog reluctantly found its legs.

  “Not permanently,” he said and hoped that was true. The dog was unusually attached to Cody. The two were inseparable. He did not think his sudden cosmically ordained family unit of uncle and nephew and dog could sustain another loss. And yet he didn’t feel quite ready to tell her what the vet had said.

  The dog is depressed.

  Who knew that dogs got depressed? Or that little kids gave up speaking when the unspeakable happened to them?

  “I thought I caught a whiff of something as they went by,” she said, trying to word it delicately.

  “The dog got carsick.”

  “Oh, no!”

  Her sympathy was so genuine that he couldn’t resist sharing the full horror. “You have no idea. At sixty-five miles per hour, with wall-to-wall traffic and not a rest stop for thirty miles. Then, when I finally could pull over, I had to unpack the suitcase to find new clothes. Not the Superman cape, though. I don’t have an extra one of those.

  “And guess how long the new clothes lasted before Popsy got sick on Cody again? I may never get the smell out of my car. Sheesh. I may never get the smell out of Popsy.”

  He stopped himself, embarrassed. He sounded just like those moms at the playgroup the counselor had recommended for Cody. Sam had tried to drop Cody off there several times.

  Nobody warned me it was going to be this hard.

  Cody, to Sam’s consternation—he was trying to do the right thing, after all—and his guilty and secret relief, had used his limited communication skills to make it known he hated the play group.

  “Cody is your son and the dog is Popsy?”

  “Cody is my nephew, but yeah, that’s the whole cast of characters.”

  Sam really hated sympathy, which made his recounting of the horrible trip down here even more mystifying. Still, right now, that sympathy—the soft look on her face as her gaze followed Cody and Popsy as they went up the stairs—served Sam well. He was seeing a whole shift in attitude.

  “You must all be exhausted. I’ll show you which rooms to take, and put out some towels. I’m sorry for the welcome I gave you earlier.”

  “Not your fault,” he said gruffly.

  “Well, let’s start again. I’m Alicia Cook. Welcome to Soul’s Retreat.”

  She held out her hand. Maybe it was a mistake to take it, because any sense he had left of her being a child disappeared in her grip. Her touch made him look at her differently. She was extraordinarily feminine, and her hand held the unconscious sensuality of the sea in it.

  She was very pretty, her bone structure exquisite, her eyes a shade of blue bordering on violet that he would not have been able to name if asked. He was aware of a scent tickling his nostrils, and realized she smelled of the sea and something else. Lemons? Whatever it was, it was faintly ordinary and faintly exotic and faintly enticing.

  It occurred to him that she had welcomed them as if she planned to be their hostess. Maybe that’s why sympathy was not a workable strategy. Shared accommodations weren’t going to work, and he needed to let her know right away. It looked like when she got an idea in that head of hers it was hard to displace it!

  “I hope you won’t have too much difficulty finding a place to stay,” he said, and heard the cool, no-nonsense tone he used when closing a deal for his computer systems company.

  All of it—especially the enticing part—made getting rid of her seem imperative.

  That tone he had just used could—and had—intimidated business tycoons with global reputations. But her mouth—plump and pink—set in a very unflattering line, and her brows lowered.

  “I’m not going to find a place to stay,” she said firmly. “Your arrival has taken me completely by surprise, but I’ll accommodate you and Cody to the best of my ability tonight. Tomorrow we’ll look at options. Maybe it will be workable for you to stay. With me.”

  “You want to share accommodations?” he asked her slowly. “With someone you don’t know?”

  “Want to seems to be overstating it a bit. None of you looks dangerous. The dog doesn’t even look like it has the energy to bite.”

  Sam felt this odd little niggle, for the second time, of wanting to be protective of her.

  Just as when she said she had a weapon when it was so pathetically obvious not only that she didn’t, but that she wouldn’t use it if she did.

  Are you crazy? You don’t invite strangers to stay with you.

  But he managed to bite his tongue. He looked at the set of her jaw and felt a sudden exhaustion. It had been a horrible day. That look on her face felt as if it would take a lot more energy than he had to sort this out right now.

  He needed to get Cody into the bathtub and into a bed. He had dealt with three of Cody’s legendary meltdowns today. For a kid who didn’t talk he was an absolute master at making his displeasure known to all. Sam was not up to another one any more than he was up to dealing with whatever the stubborn set of Alicia Cook’s little mouth meant.

  She was right. Tomorrow, they would look at options. Tomorrow, he’d deal with it. His team of lawyers could let her know he had an ironclad contract and she could find someplace else to stay for two weeks.

  He knew, despite a team of people working for him, that another place on Sugar Cone was out of the question for either himself and Cody or Mavis’s granddaughter. They’d had a devil of a time finding a condo on the busier side of the beach for Cody’s Australian auntie and uncle and their kids, arriving later in the week.

  We need to know him better. He’s all we have left of Adam.

  Sam had met them, of course. At the wedding, the christening, Christmas two years ago. At the funeral. Good people. Decent. Hardworking. Real, somehow, in the same category that the woman in front of him was real.

  And yet, when he thought of meeting them this time, he could feel his heart sinking to the bottom of his feet.

  Despite the fact he was pretty sure he was botching nearly every single thing about raising a three-year-old, just like Cody was what they had left of Adam, he was what Sam had left of his sister, Sue, too.

  And Sam had a history with this little cottage. He had been coming here for a long time. He had memories of endless days of him and Sue running on that beach as children. He desperately wanted Cody to feel the kind of unfettered joy that they had felt here.

  Sam’s parents had let the lease lapse when he and Sue were teenagers, but when they died, he had approached Mavis and asked about the possibility of leasing again. She, he remembered, had been delighted, almost as if she was waiting for him to come back. Since then, the cottage had always provided exactly what the sign, swinging at the gate with letters so faded you could barely read them, promised.

  Soul’s Retreat. Sam Walker was counting on this place to give him something that was in very short supply in his life right now.

  Serenity.

  Wisdom.

  Wasn’t there a prayer about those things? Not that he was a praying kind of man, though given the desperation of the decision he had come here to make, he wasn’t going to rule out the possibility of becoming one.

  What he didn’t need were any further complications to a life that was seriously complicated right now.

  And this woman, Alicia—Allie—with her black-tipped hair, and a tiny bit self-conscious in her wet, too-large T-shirt, and trying hard not to let it show, had complication written all over her.

  He was sympathetic about her grandmother. Of course he was. But, after tonight, she couldn’t stay here with him under the same roof.

  She looked like she was still the artsy type that her hallway art indicated. She’d probably love to go to Paris for two weeks. There. Problem solved. He would offer her a round-trip, all-expenses-paid to Paris so he and Cody could have the cottage to themselves.

  If only all of life’s problems were so easy to solve.

  His more immediate problem was this: he had a very stinky dog and a very stinky kid on his hands. Neither of them liked baths.

  * * *

  “You’ve eaten, right?” Alicia asked, as she watched the shocking change in her life unfold before her very eyes.

  Sam Walker stood in the bedroom she had suggested for Cody. The bedroom was not large, at the best of times, but now it looked positively tiny. Sam’s shoulders seemed to be taking up all the space. He was rummaging through the small suitcase Cody had dragged up the walk on his wagon.

 

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