Hideaway Cove (A Windfall Island Novel) (4 page)

“I’m sure the girls will be ecstatic to know you’re going to hang out with us for a couple of hours. You can entertain them with all the fun stories of how you lost your innocence.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“Oh, yeah.” She tugged the door open, letting out a puff of warm air laden with the unique stew of chemicals and perfumes common to such establishments the world over.

But when Hold called her bluff by taking her elbow, she balked. No way was she walking into Gossip Central on his arm. Even worse would have been walking away, especially when he moved his hand to the small of her back and gave her no choice.

But two could play that game. “Hello, ladies,” she said brightly, “Look who the wind blew in.”

Every eye in the place turned in their direction.

Hold took an immediate step back, helped along, no doubt, by the combined weight of all those avaricious stares battering him simultaneously.

And when he backpedaled some more and it appeared he was leaving, the place broke into pandemonium. Jessi was elbowed out of way as the Clipper Snip’s patrons surrounded Hold—which was fine with her since a safe distance only made the picture that much more entertaining.

“You need a cut?” Sandy asked him, her fingers already sifting through Hold’s hair, judging the weight and texture of it.

“Uh, no.” Hold said, sidling back as far as he could manage without trampling anyone. “I’ll just, um…Jessi, can I have a word?”

She would’ve held back, made Hold sweat it out another minute, but Sandy shoved her forward. Hold took her arm and drew her back to the door. He didn’t speak.

“You wanted a word,” she reminded him, but his eyes shifted over her shoulder, and when she glanced behind her she understood why.

Women studied displays, perused magazines plucked at random from the tables by the lobby chairs, studied their manicures, all within easy earshot of the front door.

“Strange,” Hold said, “but I seem to be fresh out of words at the moment.”

“Well, here are four for you. Get lost and stay lost.”

“That’s five…Okay, four. If I cooperate with the first part of that statement, will you have supper with me?”

“Benji,” she said simply. But there was such sad resignation on his face, Jessi couldn’t help but soften. “It’s how it has to be, Hold.”

“No, it really doesn’t. But I know you believe that, so…” He pulled open the door, and although she knew he was baiting her, the question just popped out.

“So?”

He looked back at her, and this time his grinning face was bright with the fun of the contest. And edged with so much conviction that, for the first time, she felt a thin sliver of doubt. “Wait and see.”

“Don’t fall asleep on me,” Sandy Rogers, owner and operator of the Clipper Snip, warned Jessi. “You’re the only level-headed person in the place at the moment. ’Sides me, of course.”

As Sandy had her hands buried in Jessi’s conditioner-drenched hair, busily massaging Jessi’s scalp, Jessi responded with a sound that fell somewhere between a moan and a purr. But when Sandy tweaked her hair, she made the effort to form actual words. “Not sleeping. Not talking, either.”

“Because?”

“People talk back.”

“Ask questions, you mean. And who can blame them when Maggie snapped up that handsome lawyer?”

As a cover story, Dex had told everyone he practiced law when he arrived on Windfall Island, so everyone still believed him to be a lawyer. Only she, Maggie, Hold, and George Boatwright, the sheriff, knew the truth.

“And Holden Abbot,” Sandy continued, “is still available. And close, since he spends all his days out at the airport.”

“But he spends his nights at the Horizon,” Shelley Meeker sniped. “For the life of me I can’t imagine what could possibly be the attraction all the way out there.”

“First guess?” Maisie Cutshaw chirped in from under a head full of foil squares. “It’s about as far away as he can get from anyone named Meeker.”

Shelley stuck her nose in the air and simply ignored Maisie. Jessi couldn’t have agreed more. Shelley’s father, Josiah, owned and operated the island’s antique store, collected island documents, and considered his family in a class by themselves. The other Windfallers agreed wholeheartedly. Anything that separated Meeker from the rest of them was okay in their book.

Shelley had inherited her mother’s porcelain beauty, and her father’s better-than-thou attitude. She was spoiled, superior, and absolutely vicious when she didn’t get her way. She’d wanted Lance Proctor, back when they’d been in high school; she’d never forgiven Jessi for having him. “Why’s he sticking around this boring little speck of an island anyway?” Shelley wanted to know.

“I imagine you’d have to ask Holden Abbot that question,” Jessi said. She got back silence. It didn’t take her long to interpret it. “Oh, you already have. And what did he say?”

Shelley sighed. “He looked right into my eyes, and I couldn’t have cared less what came out of his mouth.”

“I know just what you mean,” Maisie said. “That Dex Keegan is one prime piece of male real estate. But Holden Abbot…” She shook her fingers as if she’d burned them. “Only thing could make him better is if he were rich. Right, Jessi?”

“Why would a man like that look her way at all?” Shelley sniped.

“Who wants him to just look anyway?” Maisie shot back.

Shelley Meeker gave a really annoying bray of laughter.

Sandy wrapped a towel around Jessi’s rinsed hair, then gave her a light tap on the top of her head. “Your mother would kick your butt if she knew you let Shelley Meeker give you a hard time ’thout defending yourself.”

“I stopped listening to Shelley a long time ago.” The rest of the Windfallers, too, she thought. She’d kept her nose clean since she was sixteen, pregnant, and unmarried. But when you were the butt of town gossip, you learned fast to hold your head up and never let it show. Especially when it hurt the most. “Shelley’s nothing more than a pair of fake boobs with a big mouth.”

“I heard that.”

“And ears. But she’s harmless. Unless I let her get to me. Besides, what did she say that isn’t true?”

“Pretty much everything that comes out of her mouth is crap,” Sandy said philosophically.

“Which is why I ignore her. I’m happy with the way my life is going.” Or she had been before temptation arrived in the form of a lanky, handsome genealogist who’d made her question. And crave.

“Sure, but you know what they say, kiddo. You can’t take care of those who depend on you if you don’t take care of yourself. And that includes sex. Nothing like a good roll ’tween the sheets to work the kinks out of, well, everything,” Sandy said matter-of-factly. “Body, mood, mind, outlook.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my outlook.”

“No.” Sandy led the way to her station. “You were always an optimistic little thing.”

Jessi shrugged. “It never made sense to me to see the dark side of things.”

“Well, maybe you ought to apply that hopeful attitude toward that tasty hunk of male spending all his time out at the airport doing God knows what.”

“He’s not doing Jessi.”

“She could have him if she wanted him,” Sandy replied mildly. “Beautiful inside and out. Not that you’d understand the concept, Shelley.”

“She might be able to get him in bed,” Shelley said, “but she won’t be able to hold onto him. Just like Lance. He had to leave the island entirely to get away from her.”

The room went silent, still, dead—like all the air had been sucked out of it. And then sound and feeling and pain raced into the void. Jessi lifted a hand to her throat, trying to ease the band of sorrow and regret choking her.

Anger helped, because it didn’t just sting; it pissed her off to have Shelley Meeker, of all people, throw that in her face. “Does it still burn that Lance wouldn’t go out with you, even after you threw yourself at him?” she said to Shelley.

“At least Shelley didn’t get herself pregnant to try to hold onto a man who didn’t want her.”

And now humiliation crashed over Jessi as well. She turned, as did everyone else, to see Joyce Proctor, Lance’s mother, standing just inside the doorway.

“Jesus, Joyce, give it a rest,” Sandy said.

“I’ll give it a rest,” she bit off, “the day my son can come back to his own hometown without feeling he’ll be trapped into a situation not of his making.”

“Um, I’m pretty sure he had a part in the
making
,” Maisie Cutshaw tossed out on a hoot of laughter.

The rest of the women joined in. Jessi wanted to sink into the chair. She would have slunk out of the place if Sandy hadn’t tweaked her wet, half-cut hair again.

And sure, it was her battle—Jessi knew that—but how did she fight Benji’s grandmother? He had little enough family as it was, and Joyce was good to him, even if she had no use for the mother of her grandson.

“Nobody forced that boy to leave,” Sandy said.

“Sandy,” Jessi began, desperate to keep the peace, even if it meant swallowing Joyce’s abuse. Again.

“Hush.” Sandy steamrolled over her. “She’s been blaming you this whole time when it’s her just as much her son—”

“My son is the kind of man—”

“Man? It seems to me the difference between a man and a boy is how he reacts to the difficult and unexpected. He turned tail and ran, and that surely doesn’t make him a man.”

“So he should have stayed here,” Joyce shot back, “and married a girl who’d trap him with a baby he—”

“Didn’t want, and abandoned?” Sandy shook her head. “He should have stayed, for Benji’s sake, if nothing else.”

Joyce stuck out her chin. “Men can’t get pregnant. It’s the girl’s responsibility—”

Sandy snorted, and the rest of the room was hardly kinder. Maisie Cutshaw shouted “Bullshit!” over other comments like, “This is the twenty-first century, not the dark ages” and “Hell, let’s revive the chastity belt.”

“Jessi was just a girl,” Sandy said when the furor died down. “Barely sixteen when she was knocked up by a kid with nothing more than a moment’s pleasure on his mind. You might want to turn a blind eye so you can make it easier to swallow your own son’s cowardice, Joyce, but Jessi stayed here and had Benji and held her head high when folks on this island whispered and called her names.” Sandy sent Shelley Meeker a look so coldly furious Shelley hunched her shoulders and looked away.

“Jessi has raised your grandson with no help, not a dime from anyone,” she continued, stepping over to Joyce and punctuating her words with the rat-tailed comb she still held. “Least of all you and your worthless offspring. Maybe you ought to stop feeling sorry for yourself and start appreciating the blessings you have, like the most amazing grandson God ever gave an undeserving witch like you.”

“I love Benjamin,” Joyce huffed, sounding a little taken aback. “He knows that.”

“Of course he does.” Sandy returned to the chair, turning Jessi’s head back to the mirror with just a bit too much force, and snipping sharply with her scissors. Jessi felt the tug on her hair and closed her eyes.

“Benjamin is a very intelligent child,” Joyce said.

“You bet your snooty ass he is,” Sandy said. “Smart enough that it won’t be long before he sees you for what you are.”

Joyce pulled herself up. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I surely do, and so does everyone else on this island. You’ve made it clear how you feel about Jessi, and some of the comments you’ve made?” She shook her head, met Joyce’s eyes in the mirror. “One of these days, some kid is going to throw that in Benji’s face. Whose side do you think he’ll take?”

Joyce sniffed dismissively, but she didn’t look so self-righteous anymore, Jessi thought; not quite so certain. And she was definitely speechless as she turned on her heel and slammed out the door.

“Don’t you dare apologize to that woman,” Sandy snapped at Jessi. But she took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and seemed the more relaxed for it.

“Remind me never to make you mad,” Jessi said.

“You didn’t make me mad.”

“I disappointed you.”

“No.” Sandy tipped Jessi’s head down, her scissors snicking again, sounding less homicidal now. “I just want you to stand up for yourself.”

“How do I do that? It’s hard enough to face her with hard feelings between us. If there are harsh words as well…” She spread her hands. “I’ve cost her enough.”

“Cost her?” Sandy snorted rudely. “After growing up with Joyce Proctor, can you honestly say you were the one who pushed Lance away?”

“Not entirely, but I helped.”

“Maybe you provided a kick in the ass, Jess, but that kid had one foot off this island from the moment he discovered the world didn’t end at these shores. And what did Joyce get out of it? The sweetest grandson ever, that’s what. Not that she deserves Benji. Or you, for that matter.”

Jessi looked up, met Sandy’s eyes, and made sure Sandy saw how much her words, her opinion—how much
she
mattered.

Sandy sniffed, fluffed at Jessi’s hair. “What do you think?”

Jessi took a critical look in the mirror, then lifted her gaze to Sandy’s and her lips in a smile. “I think I’m lucky to have any hair left at all.”

H
ey there, Jessi.”

“Hi, Mr. MacDonald.”

“Tomatoes on sale, just came in fresh yesterday.”

Which Jessi already knew, and since Maggie had brought them in by boat, along with the rest of the market’s fresh produce, Jessi already had a bowl of beautiful, ripe tomatoes in her refrigerator.

What she didn’t have was milk and eggs, and the fun of spending a half hour walking the market’s aisles, enjoying a simple task she usually had to rush through. Her budget meant she planned each week’s meals carefully and didn’t deviate from her list. She could have a little harmless fun leafing through a cookbook, though, take the time to imagine what it would be like to make some of the fancy recipes she saw the television chefs make—after a lot of cooking lessons.

For that matter, wouldn’t it be fun to watch a program from start to finish, and not while she folded laundry or dusted shelves or helped Benji with his homework. But that time would come, she reminded herself, and soon enough.

Benji would be off to college before she knew it, she thought with equal parts pride and sadness. Once he graduated, he’d likely take a job on the mainland somewhere, like all the young people did. Not that she blamed them; Windfall just didn’t offer enough in the way of opportunity.

Benji was smart as a whip; he’d want to do more than run a shop during tourist season or, if he stayed true to his current passion and learned to fly, squiring tourists and making mail runs. One thing she knew about her son, he would look for adventure. Windfall tended to be a lot of the same.

“What’s for supper?”

Jessi kept strolling, not all that surprised to hear Hold’s voice. And since it came from behind her, she found it better to keep her back turned while she absorbed the little jolt he always gave her. “It’s Tuesday. AJ is probably making meatloaf down at the Horizon.”

Hold stepped around her, plucked something from her cart. “I like SpaghettiOs.”

Right, and he was studying the can as if it had been beamed into his hand by aliens from Vulcan. “You’ve never had SpaghettiOs in your life. If your heart’s set on the SpaghettiOs”—she plucked the can out of his hand, dropped it back in her cart—“you can get your own in aisle three.”

“Where’s the famous Windfall Island hospitality?”

“It’s off season.”

“Good manners, as my mama likes to say, are never out of fashion.”

“I wonder what she’d say about you following me around all day?”

“My mama,” he said with his trademark grin, “would be hard-put to find anything objectionable about my company.”

“Oh, I doubt that. Take it from a mother with a son.” As much as she loved Benji, there were just times it was best to be away from him. For both their sakes.

“I hear he’s a champ,” Hold said, “but I could run interference, say, tonight at supper.”

She shot him a look and kept moving, pushing her cart to the lone checkout, manned in the winter by Mr. MacDonald himself.

Mr. MacDonald shot Hold a look of his own. “You buying something, son, or are you just here to bother my patrons?”

“No. To both questions.”

“Then supposing you make way for paying customers?”

Hold stepped aside and looked behind him, his gaze dropping to a head of white hair belonging to an elderly woman barely five feet tall. Her face was a maze of wrinkles, her smile as sweet and pure as a newborn’s, and her eyes were glued to his butt.

“He’s fine right where he is, Sam,” Mrs. Weingarten said to MacDonald, her gaze not shifting one bit.

“No,” Jessi said, “He’s really not.”

Mrs. Weingarten patted Jessi on the hand. “Just because you’ve taken yourself out of the game doesn’t mean you can’t admire the players.”

“She’s not out of the game completely,” Hold said, ranging himself with Mrs. Weingarten. “She’s just taking a little hiatus. I’m hoping to give her a reason to bend her rules. Or break them.”

“Well, honey, if anyone can convince her to throw caution to the winds, I’m betting on you.”

“It’s a task Hercules himself would think twice over tackling, ma’am.”

“Well, you’ve got the physique for it.” This time, when Mrs. Weingarten patted his arm, her hand stayed there.

Jessi handed Mr. MacDonald two twenties, meeting his bland expression with a slight shake of her head and an eye roll. She pocketed the change he gave back, gathered up the handles of her canvas totes, and when Hold reached for them, shifted them away.

“Mrs. Weingarten, how are you getting home?”

“Oh, I’m walking, dear, just like always.”

Jessi aimed her gaze directly at Hold. “But it’s nearly a mile.”

Hold popped up an eyebrow, smiled a little, then turned the full wattage of his grin on Mrs. Weingarten. “I’d count it a privilege if you let me carry your groceries home for you, ma’am.”

Mrs. Weingarten dimpled up at him. “Only if you allow me to make you a cup of tea.”

“He loves to hear stories about the island,” Jessi put in, and this time the look she aimed at Hold was pointed. “Mrs. Weingarten has lived here all her life. She knows just about every Windfaller, present and past.”

“Well, then,” Hold crooked his elbow, waited until Mrs. Weingarten placed her gloved hand there, then collected her single plastic sack. “So, you know everyone on the island?”

“I do, yes,” Mrs. Weingarten said, allowing Hold to squire her to the door. “But I imagine you’re particularly interested in the Randal family.”

“That may be.” And he shot Jessi a look over his shoulder as he ushered Mrs. Weingarten out the door. A look that said,
payback is hell
.

If the general upheaval of the day had dimmed her mood, Benji brightened it right back up. How could she not be happy, Jessi thought, when he came gamboling out of the little one-room schoolhouse that served all the kids on Windfall Island? Every inch of his compact little body was in motion, and when he caught sight of her instead of Dottie Hampton, his regular babysitter, his face lit, and he raced over to throw his arms around her waist, already chattering about his day.

She let all the other stresses in her life fade away, slinging an arm around his slight shoulders as they set off to walk the short distance to their little gingerbread house on the bluff overlooking Hideaway Cove.

Not much of a breeze whistled its way along the narrow streets of Windfall Village, and the bright sunshine kept the day from being bone-deep cold. She liked to walk, and having the day off gave her the opportunity to spend a little time, just twenty peaceful minutes, with Benji before they faced the reality of homework and meal preparation, bath and bedtime.

“—and Jeff’s mom—Mrs. Larimore—got really mad at him because he was cutting up in class,” Benji was saying when she tuned back in to his chatter. “She said
damn
in front of the whole class, and had to give herself a time out.” When his own mom did no more than squeeze his shoulder at the swear word, he peered carefully up at her. “I shouldn’t’ve said that.”

“No, but then neither should Jeff’s mother.” Although Jessi could understand the slip. Nobody could wind a mother up quite as effectively as her own child. While some of the parents would be giving Jane Larimore a piece of their mind, Jessi preferred to focus on the service she provided rather than a tiny little verbal slip the kids could have heard almost anywhere, including on television.

“I’ll bet Jeff was disrupting the whole class.”

“He was making fart noises in the back of the room. Mostly we thought he was hilarious.”

“Yes, well, I’ll bet Mrs. Larimore had a hard time teaching with Jeff playing class clown. And since it’s her job to keep order and beat some learning into your hard heads, and as it was her son causing the trouble, she lost her temper for a second.”

“You hardly ever get mad at me.”

“Oh, trust me. You’ve found buttons I didn’t even know I had.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

She ran a hand over his hat-covered head. “Don’t worry about it, Benj. You wouldn’t be a kid if you didn’t have a knack for button-pushing.”

“I could make it up to you,” he said, looking up at her with wide, earnest eyes and a tentative smile. “Like, if we had pizza for dinner tonight, then you wouldn’t have to cook, and you could take a bath and relax.”

“I’ll bet the fact that while I’m lounging in the tub you get to watch something completely inappropriate on TV has nothing to do with it.”

He shook his head a little, the shock and sincerity on his face spot-on. “I’d only watch cartoons, I promise.”

And although she had to fight off the urge to laugh, the certain knowledge that he was playing her gave her a pang. The charming smile, the effortless manipulation, so like his father…

And just because Benji had the knack for reading people and using it to his advantage, she reminded herself, it didn’t mean he couldn’t use his talent for something positive. The world needed salesmen, too.

“Well, it’s been a while, and I think we’ve both earned pizza,” she said, steering him into the warm fragrant air inside Carelli’s, the island’s one and only pizzeria. And to his great delight, she ordered a large, loaded, and cheesy bread, and arranged for it to be delivered before they faced the final walk home.

She unlocked the door and ushered Benji inside ahead of her, sighing as the snugness, the memories and the comfort they brought, wrapped around her like a warm blanket on the coldest day. Home, she thought as she flipped on lights to ward off the late afternoon gloom, and the people in it, made life worth living. This house had always been her home, and her mother’s before, all the way back to the Duncan forebear who’d built it two centuries earlier.

Subsequent generations had added on, going up rather than out, as the house sat on a rocky shingle of land that defied the easy spread of a smooth and level foundation. The result was three stories of faded Victorian charm filled with memories, from the ground floor to the cramped and crowded attic she’d been meaning to clean out. She had the vague notion it would someday serve as Benji’s room when he hit those teenage years and needed a space of his own. At the rate she was going, she’d need all of the next six—no, closer to five—years she had left before that happened.

Her mother had been gone almost two years, and she’d yet to do more than pack her things away in an attic already filled with the castoffs of many generations. Too soon still to go through them, too painful.

She crossed the room, ran a finger along the top of a silver frame sitting on a side table by the stairs. Her parents’ wedding photo always made her heart hitch and ache. Her father had died when she was too little to remember much more of him than a big, booming voice and the scent of pipe tobacco that had always clung to him. She missed what he represented more than she missed the man himself.

Her mother…her mother had left a hole too big for all the tears in the world to fill. And yet, she thought, wiping her hands under her eyes, there were always more.

Even when she’d gotten pregnant, her mother had stuck by her. And when Lance had left her high and dry, there’d been no question where she and the baby would live. Looking back now, Jessi couldn’t imagine herself anywhere else, couldn’t begin to think of a place she’d rather raise Benji than within these four walls, on this tiny speck of an island off the coast of Maine.

Some would call her provincial, small-town, but she’d learned not to care about other people’s opinions. What mattered was her own. Windfall Island suited her, and if that meant she’d spend the rest of her life alone—well, every choice came with a price tag.