Carolina Girl (7 page)

Sam was family at the same time he . . . wasn’t. He knew her, but he wasn’t counting on her. Her success or failure ultimately meant nothing to him.

The sense of release was enormous.

“When?” he asked.

She cleared her throat. “Monday.”

“Your first day back?” The incredulous edge to his voice was unexpectedly gratifying.

She nodded.

“Assholes.”

His anger warmed her. Steadied her. Derek, she recalled, had not been angry.

She pushed the thought away, feeling vaguely disloyal. Derek’s own career was on the line. He couldn’t afford to lose his cool on her behalf. Sam had nothing at stake, nothing to lose by taking her side. But his unquestioning championship soothed her all the same.

“It was a bad time for me to be away,” she said. “The company recently acquired one of our competitors. I should have been there to handle the PR.”

“But you were on leave, right?” Sam said. “Family emergency. Is it even legal for them to fire you like that?”

Years of protecting the company, of putting the best possible spin on things, made her face him. “We were shedding head count anyway. Mine was a redundant position.”

Sam raised his brows. “There is no ‘we,’ sugar. You’re not playing for the team anymore. You got fucked.”

Yes.

The surge of anger was thrilling. Liberating. Disturbing. Anger wouldn’t get her where she needed to go.

“They wanted someone cheaper,” she said.

“Younger,” he guessed.

She ground her teeth together. “Yes.”

“Somebody who wouldn’t take ten days off because her mother got hit by a damn drunk driver.”

Yes.
Bitterness choked her. Three strikes, and she was out. She swallowed. “I don’t know that.
Didn’t
know that. Not that it would have made any difference,” she added. “Mom needed me.”

Sam smiled.

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“That’s my girl,” he said and kissed her, a brief, hard kiss on the mouth.

She was
not
his girl. But the kiss was nice, and the warm approval in his eyes was even nicer, and she was tired for the moment of fighting.

“We should get back,” she said.

His gaze searched her face before he nodded.

She let him open her door, watching through the windshield as he walked around the truck.

He slid in beside her and started the truck. “You’ve got to tell them.”

Them. Her family.
She shuddered in rejection. “No.”

“You were there for them, they’ll be there for you.”

Of course they would be. Years of moves and deployments had taught the Fletcher siblings to stand back to back to back. But Meg hadn’t run to her brothers to defend her in twenty-five years. She stood on her own. She was the family success story, the one who’d made it.

She could not bear to be a failure in their eyes.

“Mom’s in the hospital,” she said. “Luke’s in Afghanistan. Matt’s trying to take care of the inn and Taylor on top of his charter business. They all have enough to deal with right now.”

“So by keeping quiet, you’re protecting them.”

“Yes.”

A sideways look. “Or yourself.”

She straightened her spine, resisting the pull of the soft leather seat. “I don’t want my family worrying about me.”

“Won’t they do that anyway? Sooner or later, they’re going to wonder what you’re doing here.”

“I’m here to help out,” Meg said firmly. “As long as I’m needed. As long as it takes me to find another job. Then I’ll tell them the truth. That I accepted another position.”

“What are you going to say if you have to relocate?”

“I won’t.”

I can’t.
She stared out her window at the pine needles and vines, at the headstones sprouting randomly along the road,
Nelson, Oates, Fletcher, Grady
 . . . Family names. Dare Island names. She knew every one. And they knew her, knew the girl she used to be, smart, ambitious Meggie Fletcher, Queen of the Try Hards.

There was no going back for her.

She tightened her hands in her lap. “I belong in New York. My life is there. My condo. Derek.”

“He get fired, too?”

“No.” The word hung baldly in the air. “He’s in the C-Suite,” she added to fill the silence. “CEO, CFO, COO.”

Sam slanted a look at her. “I took business classes. I know the jargon.”

“Right. Anyway, they couldn’t fire him. He’s on the transition team.”

“But he didn’t protect your job.”

“No, but . . .” She floundered, driven on the defensive. “The acquisition put Derek in a very difficult position. He’s vulnerable, too. Any indication of partiality—”

“So which is it?” Sam interrupted. “They can’t fire him, or his job’s at risk?”

She glared. “Does it matter?”

“It would to me.”

“You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about him. You can’t judge.”

“I don’t need to meet him to recognize the type,” Sam said quietly. “You’re an accessory to a guy like him. Like a Rolex, something he can show off on his arm. He doesn’t have your back, sugar. And somebody should. Deep down, you know that. That’s why you’re here.”

Hot pressure burned the backs of her eyes. With the exception of her assistant, Kelly, no one from the office had been in touch with her since her firing. As if being laid off were a disease they could catch. Even though Meg told herself that her office friends didn’t have her new cell phone number, she couldn’t help feeling all the old insecurities of being the new kid in school. With every redeployment, it took time to establish your place, to find someone to eat lunch with, to win the liking or at least the respect of your teachers and classmates.

She’d always made good grades. It was harder to make friends.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You should tell your family. You could talk to Matt,” Sam said.

Matt had given up his own chance at college when Josh was born. She didn’t want her brother to know what a mess she’d made of her own opportunities. “No.”

“Then I will,” Sam said.

“
No
. You can’t tell him. You can’t tell anybody.” She met Sam’s eyes. Memory throbbed between them.
Don’t tell Matt.

“Meg . . .”

She didn’t really believe that Sam would betray her confidence. But Sam and Matt had been best friends since high school. She’d been the one on the outside, two years younger, sharp and skinny, driven to keep up, desperate to be noticed. “Please.”

He held her gaze a long moment before the corner of his mouth quirked up. “What’s one more secret between friends?”

Meg exhaled. “Thank you.” She risked a touch on his warm, muscled arm. “I’m grateful.”

The creases in his cheeks deepened. “How grateful?”

She should have found his cockiness annoying. But she was disarmed by the understanding in his eyes, the laughter in his voice. Sam didn’t take the question or himself too seriously. This once, maybe she shouldn’t take herself so seriously, either.

“I’ll bake you some cookies.”

“Your mom’s chocolate chip?” he asked hopefully.

She felt a moment’s unreasonable resistance, as if committing to Tess’s recipe somehow committed her to . . . What?

Flashback to fifteen-year-old Sam, hanging around her mother’s kitchen, swiping raw dough off the mixer blade.
You make the best cookies, Mrs. Fletcher.

And her mother, laughing, batting his hand away from the bowl.
Because they’re made with love, Sam.

Meg shook her head. She was not her mother, dispensing affection along with the batter. Sometimes a chocolate chip cookie was just a cookie.

“Deal,” she said.

Seven

T
HE AUGER CHUGGED
outside the kitchen windows, the grind of the drill bit punctuated by occasional pounding and the rumble of male voices. Through the glass, Meg could see the three men shirtless in the heat: her brother Matt, broad and deep-chested; Josh, still growing into his height and his hands; and Sam, long and lean-muscled, lowering a four-by-four into a post hole. His bare shoulders glistened in the sunlight. His dark hair curled damply on the back of his neck.

She could almost feel those strands, like wet silk between her fingers. Her hand clenched. Her body clenched low inside.

Meg blew out her breath. Drooling out the window at a shirtless Sam Grady was not getting her work done. She dumped the bag of chocolate chips into the bowl and turned on the mixer.

Matt and Taylor squatted beside the hole with the garden hose. Meg watched as Matt handed the nozzle to the little girl. “Four or five inches,” she heard him say. “Right there.”

Taylor aimed the water into the hole, her little face screwed in concentration.

“He’s so good with her,” Allison murmured from behind Meg. “He must get that from your father.”

“Probably. Though I can’t remember Dad ever encouraging me to pick up a hammer.” Meg flipped off the mixer. “That was for the boys.”

Allison regarded her with warm, brown, earnest eyes. “Did you mind?”

“Not really. Dad always made me feel like I could do anything I wanted.” Meg grinned. “He told the boys they had to do what he said.”

Allison smiled wistfully. “Your family is so close. You must have had a wonderful childhood.”

Meg hadn’t met Allison’s parents, a socially prominent couple from Philadelphia, during their brief stay at the inn. But from what Matt had said—and based on what he carefully didn’t say—Meg suspected the Carters had stringent expectations for their only daughter. Expectations that did not include her teaching on tiny Dare Island or falling for the fisherman father of one of her students.

“Yeah, I guess we did.” She pulled a face. “Although when I was fourteen, I never pictured myself twenty years later, still hanging around my parents’ kitchen.”

Still sneaking peeks out the window at Sam, sweating in the sun.

Josh had ripped open a bag of quick-set concrete and was shaking it into the hole under Matt’s direction. Sam braced the post, holding a level against one side.

“At least you have a nice view,” Allison said.

Meg started. “I was just admiring their . . .”

“Progress?” Allison suggested.

Meg met her gaze and smiled ruefully. “Something like that.”

“That looks delicious,” Allison said, changing the subject with the easy tact that was as much a part of her as her brown eyes or her diamond-faced watch. “Can I help?”

“I thought you had students coming over.”

“Student newspaper meeting. I thought so, too. But Nia bailed, and Thalia might not want to come over by herself.”

Meg set out the cookie trays. “Why not? You don’t strike me as particularly intimidating.”

“Thanks. I think.” Allison accepted a spoon. “She’s not avoiding
me
. It’s . . .” She broke off, digging into the cookie dough, apparently unwilling to betray her student’s confidence.

“Josh?” Meg guessed. She glanced out the window at her tall, handsome nephew, his mop of tawny hair and lazy smile, and her heart gave a little bounce of pride and anxiety. “They were dating?”

He was old enough to date, she supposed. Old enough to do all kinds of things that, as his aunt, Meg didn’t particularly want to think about. She felt a sudden burst of sympathy for Matt.

“Not dating, exactly.” Allison dropped a lump of dough onto the baking sheet. “It was more like a friends thing. At least on Josh’s side. They were working together on a sports and nutrition piece for the paper, and Thalia . . . Well, I guess she hoped it would turn into something more.”

Some of Meg’s sympathy went out to this girl, whoever she was. Unrequited high school crushes were hell. Meg’s gaze went back to Sam, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped in the sunlight. She pressed her lips together.
Some things never changed.

Twelve minutes later, the timer pinged and the cookies came out of the oven. With the last ramp post setting in concrete, the men and Taylor trooped inside.

“Something smells good,” Sam said.

“Cookies.” Josh reached for one.

“Hold on,” Meg said. “Wash your hands.”

“I did.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“In the hose. Outside.” He smiled at her, holding up his almost-clean palms in the universal sign of peace, and Meg’s heart melted like butter on a stack of pancakes. That poor high school girl never stood a chance.

She handed him a plateful of cookies. “Careful. They’re still hot.”

Sam winked. “Hot is always good. Unless you’re talking about beer.”

“There’s some in the fridge.”

Josh opened the refrigerator door.

“Milk for you,” Meg said.

He turned and saluted her with a gallon jug of milk. Smiling, she pulled a glass down from the cupboard.

“Must have been thirsty work,” Allison said to Matt. “You’re all sweaty.”

“Sorry.” Matt reached for his T-shirt, hanging from his back pocket.

She stopped him with a sly look and a touch on his wrist. “I like it.”

Matt’s rare smile broke over his face. He looked different, Meg thought. More relaxed. “Good to know,” he said, and backed her up against the sink.

Allison twined her arms around his neck and drew his head down for a kiss.

Meg looked away, oddly uncomfortable, as if she’d witnessed something more intimate than a mostly clothed kitchen embrace. This was
Matt
? Her reserved, undemonstrative brother?

“Ew,” Taylor said in a small pained voice.

Josh grabbed another cookie. “Get used to it, shorty,” he said around a mouthful of crumbs. “It’ll be worse when they get married. They’ll be sucking face all the time.”

When they get married
 . . .

Meg whirled back to her brother.
He proposed?
“You proposed? Matt!”

Matt raised his head, a faint flush staining his cheekbones. “Not in so many words.”

“It was very romantic,” Allison said over his shoulder. “He recited poetry.”

“Matt did?”

Josh snickered. “You know, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, Allison’s sweet, and—’”

“That’s enough out of you,” Matt said, finishing the poem.

“It was Edna Saint Vincent Millay,” Allison said, her face now redder than Matt’s.

“That sounds very . . . nice,” Meg said, still trying to wrap her brain around the idea of her brother reciting poetry. Her brother . . .
married again
?

“And he gave me a plant,” Allison said staunchly.

“A plant, huh?” Sam raised his eyebrows. “Smooth, Matt. Very smooth.”

“Why a plant?” Meg asked.

Matt cleared his throat. “I thought . . . Put down roots.”

Meg gaped at him, a funny catch in her chest.
To put down roots.

It was perfect.

It was Matt.

So why did she suddenly want to cry?

She wasn’t interested in putting down roots. She wanted challenge. Change. She’d embraced the bustle and rush of New York, the demanding pace and anonymity of life in the big city. Even the condo was more an investment than a home, a place to sleep and collect the mail.

But home had always been important to Matt.

Meg simply had never imagined her quiet, workingman brother would express himself in a way so deeply felt, so inherently right.

“It was a camellia,” Allison said, beaming.

“Because nothing says commitment like a camellia,” Sam put in.

“And you would know all about commitment,” Matt shot back.

“Hey, I believe in marriage. For other people.” Sam grinned and grabbed Matt in a one-armed hug. “Congratulations, you guys.” He kissed Allison on the cheek. “When’s the wedding?”

“Yes, congratulations,” Meg echoed. She forced her lips into a smile, fighting the feeling of things moving too fast, of being somehow left behind. She was happy for her brother. She liked Allison. But they’d only known each other, what, a month? Six weeks? She and Derek had been together six
years
.

She moved jerkily forward, gave Allison a friendly squeeze and Matt a hug. There was no reason for her brother
not
to get married again, she told herself. Eventually. But . . .

“That’s up to Allison,” Matt said over her head to Sam. “I thought she should get done with the school year, make it through her first winter, before we set a date.”

“I want Christmas,” Allison said. “But I’ll settle for Easter. Six months is plenty of time to find a dress and accustom my parents to the idea that we’re getting married on the island.” She glanced at Matt. “Of course, I’d like to have the ceremony here, in the garden, but it might be too . . .”

“Soon?” Meg suggested.

“Small,” Allison said. “My parents will insist on a big wedding.”

Meg dragged her hand through her hair, trying to get a grip on the situation. “Do Mom and Dad know?”

“Not yet,” Matt said quietly, his gaze on her face. “I thought we’d tell them when Mom comes home.”

Right. Their parents weren’t here, Matt was besotted, and Allison lived in some Wonderland where anything was possible. Somebody had to inject a little reality here. “Listen, it’s none of my business, but . . .”

“I want to ask you about those rosebushes,” Sam said to Meg.

“In a minute. Have you considered how this could affect—”

“Now.” Sam gripped her arm. “Out back. Excuse us, folks.”

She let him drag her outside before she turned on him. “What is your problem?”

“Nothing. What’s yours?”

Hot blood stormed her cheeks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your brother’s getting married. Do you have to analyze everything? Can’t you just be happy for him?”

“I am,” she protested. “But it’s not like this is his first marriage.”

Sam’s face was inscrutable. “Allison isn’t anything like Kimberly.”

Kimberly, Matt’s first wife. The two had met in college, when Matt was pursuing his dream of an engineering degree and Kimberly was, well, the rich girl slumming with the blue-collar boy from rural North Carolina. Meg suspected her brother’s girlfriend had never wanted a serious relationship with Matt. Certainly she’d never expected him to knock her up. But nineteen-year-old Matt, determined as always to do the right thing, had persuaded Kimberly to marry him. Less than a year later, she’d walked out on him and their infant son. So Matt and Josh had come home to the island for good.

One more example, if Meg had needed one, that sex could seriously screw up your life. Now that Josh was older, Matt could finally begin to think about his own needs. She couldn’t bear to see him throw that all away on a Kimberly clone.

“She’s a trust fund blonde whose parents can’t stand him,” Meg said. “Are you saying you don’t see a pattern?”

“I’m saying you shouldn’t judge her before you get to know her better.”

Meg’s shoulders rose and fell. “Look, I like Allison. I do. I just don’t want to see Matt hurt again.”

“Then don’t be such a snob.”

“Me?” Her tone vibrated with genuine insult. Dare Island’s Golden Grady was calling her . . . “A snob?”

“Yep. A reverse snob. What do you think, that because Allison comes from money, she’s going to look down on you all? That she doesn’t value what your brother has to offer?”

That was exactly what Meg thought. What she feared. Sam had never had to work for anything. He didn’t know what it was like to grow up comparing yourself to others, to be ridiculed for not having the right stuff, the right clothes, the right accent. “You don’t understand.”

“Understand what? That somebody with Allison’s background could look at your family and want what you have? That kind of loyalty. That kind of love.” Sam’s voice was quiet and intense. His eyes met hers. “Matt loves Allison. And she loves him.”

She was shaken. Not only by his perspective of her family, but by this glimpse into Sam. The man she’d nicknamed
Slick
believed in
love
? She felt one more assumption turned on its head, one more yard of sand swept from under her feet.

“They haven’t known each other very long,” she said weakly.

“Not everybody takes six years to make up their minds about the person they want to spend the rest of their life with.”

Ouch.

She glared. “This isn’t about me.”

Sam’s gaze was clear and uncomfortably kind. “Isn’t it?”

“No,” she said firmly.

Maybe.
She felt her world tilting like a deck in a storm, threatening to pitch her into a cold, dark sea. She was supposed to be the one with the great career, the one in a stable relationship, the one going forward, who had everything going for her. And now she’d been fired, and her boyfriend wanted to buy her out of their condo, and her once-divorced brother had found love with the practically-perfect-in-every-way Allison.