Castaway Cove (16 page)

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Authors: Joann Ross

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“You do realize that you’re impossible,” Annie said as they walked up the hill to where he’d left his truck, in front of Tidal Waves Books, where a fat yellow cat dozed in the window. The last time Mac had brought Emma to the bookstore, she’d badgered him for a week about why they needed a cat.

“You’re not the first person to suggest that,” he said as he opened the door of the truck for her, enjoying the flash of smooth thigh as she climbed into the high passenger seat.

“And I doubt I’ll be the last,” she said when he joined her in the pickup.

Having gotten what he’d gone to Memories on Main for, Mac wasn’t about to argue. Especially when it was true.

“Probably not,” he agreed as he started back down the hill toward Harborview, heading out to Lavender Hill Farm.

24

Madd
y Chaffee came out of her kitchen to greet Annie and Mac after they’d been seated at a prime table by the tall windows and served drinks and a basket of warm, fragrant herb bread. Coincidentally, Annie saw Sedona at the far side of the room with a man she didn’t recognize. He wasn’t nearly as sexy and handsome as Mac, but he was good-looking in a buttoned-up kind of way.

She caught her friend’s eye and waggled her fingers; Sedona did the same; then, although maybe it was a trick of the sunlight glinting off the tumbling water of the stacked stone fountain, she thought perhaps Sedona rolled her eyes.

The gardens were in full bloom and beyond the yard there was a view of sailboats skimming across sun-brightened water that almost had Annie wishing she knew how to sail. Maybe she could take lessons someday.

The house she’d bought had come with a dock at the edge of the cove. It was rickety and would probably need either repairing or replacing, but Maddy’s contractor husband, Lucas, who’d done the major work in restoring the pretty yellow Victorian to its earlier beauty, could probably take care of that.

“It’s so good to see you both,” Maddy said. “I have to admit, I’m honored that my restaurant is where the two of you decided to show up. I couldn’t
buy
advertising like this.”

“Is the fact that I called in to the radio all over town?” Annie asked.

“You know we pride ourselves in keeping up with the news here,” Maddy said mildly. “There may be some who aren’t talking about it. But they’re probably buried in Sea View cemetery.

“There hasn’t been much to get people excited since Phoebe and Kara had their babies during last winter’s ice storm. A new romance always adds spice.” She folded her arms over her black chef’s jacket and said, “And believe me, I know my spices.”

And her scandals, Annie thought. After all, a couple years back Maddy had been living the high life in New York City, when her celebrity chef husband’s sex video went viral. At least Annie’s own divorce had been fairly private, notable only among their own circle of friends.

No, not friends. Because in the high-powered world where Annie had been living, she hadn’t had friends. Not close ones like Sedona. Or even Kara Douchett and Maddy, with whom she’d also become close through Sedona’s friendship with them. Or Charity Tiernan, from whom she’d adopted Pirate.

The only people she and Owen had ever associated with were her husband’s business contacts, clients, or legislators whose votes were important to his clients. And thus to his success.

Shaking off the pall of those days that she’d left behind, Annie surrendered and laughed along with Maddy and Mac about gossip being part and parcel of the town.

Wasn’t this what she was looking for when she’d moved to Shelter Bay? This sense of community? So how could she complain about people being interested in her life?

“Speaking of spices,” Maddy said, “I just put a tequila lime marinated prawn salad on the menu today. People are saying it’s like the best of a margarita on a plate.”

“I’d been planning to go with the crab salad,” Annie said.

“Another good choice. In fact, that’s what Sedona ordered. The crab’s just off the boat this morning.”

“But you got me with the margarita comparison,” Annie decided.

“Excellent.” Maddy smiled and instead of calling over a server, took the order herself. Then she turned to Mac. “Why do I suspect you’re not here for the salad?”

“Called it. I’m one of those Neanderthal basic meat-and-potato guys, which is probably a bit of a heresy here in seafood land. I’ve been hearing great things about your Kobe beef.”

“In the interest of full disclosure, it’s not legitimate Kobe,” Maddy said. “There’s a lot of mislabeling out there, so I insist on being specific in my own place. In order to be designated true Kobe, it would have to originate from Wagyu stock and be slaughtered in the Kobe region of Japan. Which may be too much pre-lunch information for anyone but a foodie,” she admitted.

“I lived on a farm,” Annie said. “I know where my food comes from.”

“Well, the Bar M, in the southern part of the state, crossbred their already fabulous Angus with a herd of Japanese Wagyu, which is why it’s called
American
Kobe. It’s beautifully marbled and so tender you can cut it with a butter knife.” She grinned. “End of lecture.”

“You almost had me opting for a steak with that butter knife line,” Mac said. “But I think I’ll go with the burger for lunch.” He smiled at Annie over the top of the menu. “Then next time we come here, you can have the crab salad, and I’ll have the steak.”

“I don’t believe I’ve agreed to a next time,” Annie pointed out.

“Yet,” he countered with a sexy-as-hell wink as he handed Maddy Chaffee his menu.

“So,” he said, taking a drink from a frosted mug of beer after Maddy returned to the kitchen with their order, “you grew up on a farm?”

“I
lived
on one. For a few months.”

“Your family move around a lot?”

“No.” Annie ran her fingernail around the rim of her glass of basil lemonade—she’d declined to order wine since she was going back to work. “I was left in a box at a hospital when I was a few weeks old, which landed me in the state foster care system, which had me moving around a lot.”

Including the farm she’d mentioned, where she’d discovered the first day that she and the other three foster kids living there had been taken in to work as unpaid hired hands.

“That sucks.”

“Not always.” She thought about the scrapbook habit that had provided comfort for so many years, eventually changing her life. “How about you? I know your father’s a doctor and your grandfather was a fisherman. What about your mother?”

He gave her a look that let her know that he knew she was changing the subject, but wasn’t going to call her on it. “She was a university librarian. Dad’s her second husband.”

“Oh, that explains the difference in last names. I thought perhaps you took Culhane as a professional name.”

“Culhane’s my birth dad’s name. He was an Air Force pilot who died in a training flight outside Tucson when I was a kid. When my mom married the guy who became my dad, he gave me the choice of taking his name or staying with my dad’s, which he thought would be a way to help me remember my roots and honor a hero.”

“That’s an incredibly generous gesture.”

“Dad’s an incredibly generous man.”

“So I’ve noticed. According to the rumor mill, he’s a very popular doctor as well.”

Mac laughed. “That’s true, though a lot of physicians would consider changing from being a world-famous pediatric cardiac surgeon to treating chicken pox and giving booster shots a demotion, he seems to be really enjoying his part-time work as a family physician. And I’ve got to say, we’ve probably got enough cakes, cookies, and casseroles in our freezer as gifts from women suffering an epidemic of mysterious symptoms to last until the end of the world. Or an earthquake or tsunami, whichever comes first.”

“It’s always handy to be prepared.” Although she wasn’t about to admit it, the blue and white tsunami evacuation road signs still made her a bit nervous. Especially since she lived right on the water, and not up on a cliff like Sax and Kara Douchett. “As for the women, they’re probably lonely, so I guess you can’t blame them for trying. “

From the way the women of Still Waters flirted with the handsome, sixtysomething silver-haired Boyd Buchanan when he came to visit his father, Annie suspected he could be one of the more eligible bachelors in town.

“It’s always worth a shot. And who knows?” Mac shrugged as he tore two pieces of bread off the loaf and handed her one. “But my money’s on him being a one-woman guy. He always said Mom was his soul mate.”

“That’s sweet.” She dipped the bread into the flavored olive oil pooled on a white rectangular plate.

“Yeah. Maybe he picked the idea up from Charlie. Or maybe it’s genetic.

“So,” he said, returning the focus of the conversation to her, which she’d hoped to avoid, “have you always lived in Oregon? And why did you move to Shelter Bay?”

“I grew up in Oregon.” Those days were not her favorite subject. Annie took a sip of lemonade. “After graduating from the University of Portland, I moved to D.C.” She smiled a bit at the naiveté of that young girl she’d once been. “I actually thought I was going to be the new Woodward. Or Bernstein.”

“I imagine that’s probably the goal of most journalism majors,” Mac said. “And you should do that more often.”

“Do what?”

“Smile.” His eyes slid down to her lips, which she hadn’t even realized had curved, and then back up to her eyes. “It’s pretty damn amazing.”

“It’s just a smile.”

“Yeah. That’s what da Vinci’s model probably said when he was painting the
Mona Lisa
.”

“Are all you radio guys born to be such smooth talkers?” she countered. “Or is it something you learn in deejay school?”

“Although it wasn’t a line and I meant what I said, as for the radio business, you can have all the training in the world, but mostly you learn stuff by doing. Which is probably pretty much the same as journalism. Or,” he said as he saw a server headed their way with lunch, “cooking.”

The conversation broke off for a moment as plates were delivered. Annie thought her salad of brilliantly colored field greens dressed with a tequila lime vinaigrette could have appeared on the cover of a cookbook. Or framed on the wall in some chichi art gallery or museum.

And Mac’s burger, which included caramelized onions and blue cheese from a nearby farm, served on a toasted roll topped with black and white sesame seeds, was definitely manly food. As were the fries and what had been described on the menu as a house-made dill pickle.

“Did you?” he asked after he’d taken a bite of the burger and declared that it lived up to its billing.

“Did I what?” The tequila-grilled prawns were heaven, the greens from Lavender Hill Farm gardens as fresh and crisp as they looked.

“Did you take Capitol Hill by storm and uncover political scandals? You’ve got to remember, I was out of the country for much of the past decade, so I could’ve missed something.”

“No.” She put down her fork and took a longer sip of lemonade, wishing it were something stronger. She kept hoping to put her past behind her. “Breaking into the political beat right out of school isn’t that easy. I’d interned at the
Post
the summer of my junior year, but so do a lot of other, way more connected students. And I didn’t want to try to break out as a blogger.”

“So?” He crunched one of the fries that had come with the burger. “What did you do?”

“I went to work on K Street for a lobbyist who represented educational interests.”

“A noble pursuit.”

“At times.” She’d learned, her first weeks on the job, that watching government in action really lived up to that old adage comparing it to sausage making. Sometimes it was better not to know what went into the final product. “Then the short story is that I married the boss. Divorced the boss. And moved back west.”

“Why didn’t the marriage work out?”

“I didn’t realize I was having lunch with Dr. Phil.”

“We’ve already shared more than most people do before a first date.” He reminded her of those late-night conversations. “We both admitted to regrets. I’ll be the first to admit that I was a lousy husband. I was running around the world, all wrapped up in my own self-importance—”

“I imagine what you were doing for the troops was a far more important thing than writing lobbyist press releases,” Annie said.

“Nothing wrong with press releases,” he replied. “And yeah, I like to think I made a difference. But somewhere along the way, it went from being about the troops to being about me. As Kayla told me more than once.”

“Kayla being your ex-wife.”

“That would be her. We’d been the golden couple. She was a former Miss San Diego who used her title to get a gig doing entertainment news on a local station. I was the morning drive-time guy on the top-ranked station in San Diego. We were living the American dream, and everything should have been perfect, but then I started thinking that there had to be more to life than making money and having fun.”

So Sedona either hadn’t known, or had neglected to mention, that he’d been married to a beauty queen. If Annie was so determined not to get involved, why did that little news flash bother her? “Which is when you joined the military?”

“Yeah. I went out for a beer with a recruiter after a gig for Wounded Warriors. He could probably make your Washington lobbyists look like amateurs. He was good at his job.”

“And you were good at yours.”

“And you know this how?”

“Because you’re good now. You connect with your callers in some personal way.” Hadn’t he gotten her to call in? “It’s as if you’re all alone, just one on one. That’s an admirable talent.”

“Thanks. Kayla was less impressed. Then again, she was the one left back home trying to keep it all together.”

“I’ve always heard that the most difficult job in the military is being a military spouse.”

“That’s probably true. It didn’t help that she’d grown up a Navy brat and had always sworn not to marry a military man.”

“So, essentially, you altered the contract.”

“Pretty much blew it up.”

As he polished off the beer, Annie’s heart went out to him, as it had that night when he’d told her, when they’d been talking alone in the dark, about regrets.

“When my marriage broke up, I blamed myself.” It was the first time she’d said those words out loud to anyone. It worried her that the person she’d chosen to tell was the one person she’d vowed not to get involved with.

But maybe that was better? Couldn’t it make him more impersonal if she could think of him more along the lines of a fellow survivor than a potential lover?

“I honestly can’t imagine anything you could do that would give a man any excuse to leave.”

“No one’s perfect. We all have flaws.”

Had it been her unrelenting hunger to have a child at all costs that had driven her husband into the arms and bed of another woman? Or would he have left anyway? She had, after all, been his third wife.

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