Love on Lavender Island (A Lavender Island Novel Book 2) (3 page)

Paige had noticed the lack of electricity. At least there was still running water, but she could tell it hadn’t been run in some time.

Her mind lingered over Adam’s last comment. “
You
took care of the house all those years?”

“I just watched over it.”

“You did that for my gram?” She could hardly keep the note of incredulousness out of her voice.

Adam glanced up but chose not to answer. He seemed tired of her already.

“So when is this wedding?” he asked instead.

She straightened in her chair.
Is he considering this?
She casually took a sip of wine and hoped her voice didn’t squeak as she answered. “August 7—just like the movie.”

He nodded. “And what do you hope to have done by then?”

She tried not to look too enthusiastic as she scooted her chair back to reach into her tote. “I brought the blueprints.”

Despite trying to look cool, she managed to get her chair legs caught on the wood floor, which sent her shoulder rocking into the table. Her wine sloshed as her hand flew out to steady her glass; then she pushed her hair out of her eyes.

“Don’t get excited,” he drawled. “I’m not saying yes. I just want to know what your thoughts are.”

“Here, let me show you.” She spread the top landscaping blueprint in front of him.

He lifted his glass out of the way and looked as though he was sorry he’d asked. “Can you sum it up?”

She resisted rolling her eyes. He sure hadn’t gotten any friendlier.

She threw her hand in the air as if she were painting a scene. “Wildflowers. Gazebo. Horses grazing—”

“Wait. Wildflowers?”

“Yes, wildflowers. In the meadow between our houses.”

“It’ll be August.”

“I’m sure we can find something.”

“We’re in a drought. What do you think is going to grow in that meadow in August? It’s going to be brown and filled with weeds.”

“I’ll take care of the wildflowers, then.”

“And what gazebo are you talking about?”

“Remember in the movie? There was that beautiful white gazebo, where they shared their vows.”

“That didn’t exist, you know. It was a dummy set.”

“We could build a real one.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

She cleared her throat. “Well,
I
could build a real one . . .”

“And whose horses are you planning on using?”

“Don’t you still have horses?”

“I sold them.”

“I just saw them when I was driving down here.”

“They’re with me for three more weeks. Then a new owner is taking them.”

“Do you think you could talk the new owners into—”

“Listen.” Adam rolled the blueprints back up and pushed them across the table at her. “This sounds like a lot of trouble. I have a million things to do, and enough of my own problems, and I truly can’t help you with this. If you want to fix up your own property, I’ll help you with whatever you need, in honor of Helen, like turning back on the electricity or finding island contractors for you, but I can’t spend time or money working on extraneous things like planting wildflowers in a drought or building a gazebo in the middle of a bison ranch. I’m trying to sell my place and move on. I’m sure you understand.” Adam stood and reached for his wallet.

She stared at him, panic setting in. He couldn’t go now. She wasn’t done. Her mother would be disappointed in her. Dorothy Silver might fire them. And Dorothy would definitely not get Paige the part of playing her in the new movie. Paige had barely been able to breathe when Dorothy had first suggested it—her first serious role. If she could make enough money on that, she might be able to open a yoga studio.

“Maybe I could help you with something in return?” she sputtered. His blue eyes and sexy scent, coupled with the strangely distant intimacy of their shared history, were throwing her off her game. She finally had to look away.

“What are you going to help me with?” He frowned and gathered his jacket off the back of the chair.

She scrambled to think of something, shoving the blueprints back into her tote. “I’m sure I could help you with something. What sort of help do you need?”

“If you have any ranching skills, I could use those. Or flying skills. I have a half-manned, barely operating airport right now. The ranch is flailing. The airport is on its last leg. I’m trying to pay off my father’s debts, and it’s all I can do to keep my head above water. So if you have any help to offer with any of those things . . .” She watched him check his pockets for his keys.

His admission warmed her heart a little. Both the words and the dropped voice sounded like intimacies shared with a good friend, someone you’d known from the past, the same someone who knew your father had a gambling problem and who you could trust not to judge. But she knew better than to read too much into it—years of misjudging men’s words had done a number on her. She immediately dismissed the maybe-intimate words and focused on how to solve this. How could she help him?

“My skills lean more toward event planning,” she admitted quietly. “Or acting.” She was still a bit shy about mentioning yoga. “And maybe a little baking, cooking, or babysitting.”

He froze and glanced over at her, but then—as if she’d imagined it—he went back into motion, shrugging into his jacket.

“Wait,” she said.

He turned back toward her.

She desperately searched his face for the smallest hint at what had caused that pause.

“Did you need some baking?”

He tugged his sleeves down at the wrist. “Why would I need someone to bake for me?”

“Cook?”

Adam continued straightening his cuffs. “I have a cook.”

“Babysit?”

He went back to patting his pockets, looking for his car keys. But she thought she saw it: the slightest hesitation.

“Do I look like I have a baby? I don’t need anything from you, Miss Grant. Thank you.”

“Well, I hope you’ll think over my proposal and idea.” She got the blueprints back into her tote, still eyeing him to find any cracks. “Dorothy Silver’s price is unprecedented, and it will be more than worth your time. Think it over. I’m happy to bring the blueprints back. Until then, I’ll try to stay out of your way. Here’s my card.” She handed him her event-planning card. It was the first one she’d used from the box of five hundred she’d ordered online for ten bucks. She’d ordered some, too, that read, “Yoga Instructor,” but they still sat in their cellophane. “When do you think you’ll have an answer for me?”

“Thursday. By the way, the food’s good here,” he said, shoving the card into his jeans pocket without even looking at it. “Have anything you want, and tell them to put it on my tab. In honor of Helen.” He took the last swig of his scotch.

Paige toasted back with her wineglass. “In honor of Gram.”

She brought the wine to her lips and watched him go. He tilted his hat back and ambled out the door, and she stared over the rim of her glass and wondered at the bewildering pounding of her heart.

She wondered if it was due to the fact that she might have lost this round; the fact that she thought she saw a win for the next round; or the fact that she couldn’t stop staring at him, thinking, for some reason, that she’d been brought to this moment—this exact, final moment—since the very first day she’d laid eyes on him down by the Lavender Island harbor, sixteen years ago.

She sincerely hoped it was one of the first two.

CHAPTER 3

Paige slipped back out of her maxi dress in the powder room off the kitchen—glad that no one was around to see her get twisted in it and almost crash through the wall—and tugged on an old pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt. Then she got to work on Gram’s house.

She spent half an hour sweeping the rest of the kitchen floor with the old broom she found behind the double Dutch door, sending too much dust swirling into the air, only to have it settle slowly in the rays of late-afternoon light that were coming through the windows in a beautiful way.

As she swept, she thought about Adam’s reluctance to cooperate, his impatience, the suspicious looks he kept giving her . . .

She sighed.

That man always made her feel more than she wanted to.

She thought back to that night, many, many years ago, when they’d all sat around a bonfire on the beach as teenagers, and he’d leaned in toward Samantha Sweet, whispering something into her ear.

She and Adam had known each other for a few years at the time. Or, more accurately, she’d known
him
. He’d seemed unaware of her existence. But as their parents dropped each other off and picked each other up during their summer romance, Paige’s thirteen-year-old self had conjured a relationship between her and Adam as she stared surreptitiously at his teenage swagger through the living-room window of Gram’s ranch house.

Gram had two houses on Lavender Island—the little cottage down in the island’s only town, Carmelita, plus the huge ranch house up on the fifth peak of the island. Paige, Natalie, and Olivia had preferred the cottage in Carmelita, where they’d visited their grandmother every summer since Natalie was born, along with a bevy of other tourists who got off the ferries and fell upon the tiny harbor town for the glorious summer months.

Lavender Island was twenty miles long and eight miles across at its widest, but the tourists and almost the entire population spent most of their time in the three square miles of Carmelita. As grade-schoolers, Paige and her sisters loved running up to Main Street in their bathing suits and flip-flops, visiting the candy shop, ice-cream shop, and toy shop that lay between E and F Streets. As preteens, they loved snorkeling in Heart’s Cove and swimming at the public beach near the harbor. But that particular summer, the summer Paige turned thirteen, they were dragged up one of the back roads, way up one of Lavender Island’s remote, interior hills, and forced to stay in Gram’s ranch house. Without Gram. With their mom instead. All because their mother had fallen in love for the millionth time.

Paige sulked for the first few days—how were they going to get down the mountain to see Gram or go to the candy store or go snorkeling? But once Paige lifted her sulking head and glanced out the window—and laid eyes on eighteen-year-old Adam Mason riding a horse across the property—her protests died on her tongue. She didn’t know what all her swirling feelings were about, exactly. All she knew was that Olivia had a boyfriend at school, and Paige was pretty sure this boy on the horse should be
her
first boyfriend.

Twice she’d walked across the meadow to dinner at his house, along with her mom and sisters, but he hadn’t taken note of her. He might have had a second-long linger at Olivia, who was closer to his age, but mostly he kept his head down, his mop of blond, wispy hair covering his eyes as he wolfed down his food, then whisked away from the dinner table as quickly as possible. He had a younger brother named Noel, who was Paige’s age, but Noel reminded Paige of a little elf and was thoroughly annoying—constantly playing tricks on Paige and her sisters. She tried to ignore Noel as best she could. She only had eyes for the brooding, scowling, mysterious older brother who wouldn’t look her way.

Paige’s school friend Cathy took the ferry over to visit a week later, and the two girls would sit on the ranch rails and watch Adam ride his horses in the distance. Cathy verified that he was a fine specimen to watch. In rapid order, they begged Paige’s mom to let them go to the weeklong beach camp down in Heart’s Cove, where they’d learned that Adam was a counselor and the horse-riding instructor. Paige’s mom was completely distracted with George and said yes immediately.

During the first few days of camp, Paige and Cathy memorized Adam’s every move, his every voice inflection, his every head snap to get his sun-bleached bangs out of his eyes, and his every uttered word. She and Cathy would go back to their shared beach tent and titter together in the darkness, writing everything down in their diaries with colorful gel pens and Lisa Frank stickers and giggling over whether he’d even looked their way or not. (Usually not.)

But that night, the night of the bonfire, she stared at him with a new feeling. As she watched him with Samantha Sweet, another counselor his age, she had her first real pangs of jealousy and longing. She felt them painfully, all the way into her belly, but couldn’t make enough sense of the emotions to express them to Cathy. Instead, she was compelled to sneak away while Cathy was learning to play the ukulele—to spy on Adam and Samantha still sitting alone by the bonfire. As Paige peered around a tree at them, Adam nuzzled Samantha’s neck and sent her giggling up into the woods. He grabbed a lantern and followed the pretty camp counselor while she crooked a finger at him. And Paige grabbed another lantern and followed.

They ran, laughing, up the hill. Paige had a hard time keeping up, her lantern shorting out every ten feet or so, emitting frightening electric sparks for a second. But she managed to track them to the old boathouse that sat high on the hill. She peeked around a pine tree as Adam set his lantern down and put both hands against the wood on either side of Samantha, smiling at her in a playful way. He said something to her, low, out of Paige’s earshot, but the way Samantha melted against the building made Paige die with curiosity. She wanted that for herself. She didn’t even know what, exactly, she wanted, but she knew she wanted Adam to look at her in just that way: that admiring, adoring, fascinated way. She wanted to make him smile like that. She wanted to make him follow her like that. She wanted to make him stare, wide-eyed, and lean in, and nuzzle, and kiss, and laugh—just like that.

Once the kissing began in earnest, Paige studied Samantha’s movements carefully. Samantha grabbed at Adam—at his shirt, at his belt buckle—and started tugging him inside the boathouse. He took one quick look around and followed her in. Within minutes the lantern went off, and Paige saw a soft glow coming from the high boathouse windows, bouncing shadows off the walls. The glow looked romantic and intimate, like candlelight. Just like in the movies.

Paige sighed. Blinking against the darkness and suddenly coming to her senses about how long she’d been gone and how obsessive she was becoming about Adam Mason, she turned to find her way back down the hill. A twig snapped behind her. She sucked in her breath.
What was that?
A second snapping sound followed and sent her tearing out of her spot, fleeing down the mountain, lantern abandoned, tripping through the wild grasses and over gnarled tree limbs and tangled vines she hadn’t even noticed on her way up.

At the base of the hill, as soon as she saw the campers’ lights, she sighed a relieved breath and joined the rest of the group in another campfire song by the cabin, her voice shaky and uncertain, her memory not able to let go of Adam’s sly smile or the scary twig snap or what Adam and Samantha might be doing in that cabin.

But within twenty minutes, life changed.

Because within twenty minutes, the hillside was ablaze.

Chaos erupted. People ran everywhere, counselors shouted, someone called the fire department, sirens roared. Paige stood like a statue in the center of it all, feeling the heat coming down the hill, watching orange-and-black shadows play across panicked faces. As fire trucks screeched up the roads and heavily equipped men poured out of the cabs and into the woods, Paige raced to the nearest firefighter. “There are two kids up there!” she shouted.

The fireman couldn’t hear her as the cacophony of the night continued around them. He shuffled her toward one of the counselors, down by where the orange firelight was reflecting in the navy ocean, and kept his sights on the hillside amid shouts and still-arriving sirens.

“Wait!” she shouted again in desperation. She raced around until she found Adam’s boss and grabbed his arm. “Adam is up there!”

A shadow of disbelief, shock, then anger passed across his face before he turned and began waving his arms, yelling the information to others.

Paige was escorted farther down the harbor with the other kids, away from the blazing hill, and their parents were called.

Paige found Cathy crying against a set of harbor chains and threw her arms around her. Soon Ginger and George came screeching up in their golf cart. “Where’s Adam?” George barked. He had always scared her. She pointed tentatively up the hill, and George’s characteristically angry face suddenly had a moment of worry and shock before contorting into rage again. Ginger clutched Paige and Cathy to her side and pulled them away from the crowd, checked with their counselor, and took the girls home. Up at the ranch, it was a long night of worry and staring out windows for Ginger, while Cathy and Paige finally fell asleep around two.

In the morning, Ginger told them the ending: Adam had been found, with a girl, Samantha Sweet. Both teens had been questioned. The girl’s parents had been called from the mainland. The reason for the fire was still unclear.

Paige had torn a paper napkin into shreds, listening.

Natalie—Paige’s younger sister by a year—came bounding into the kitchen, breaking the tension and worry by demanding some cereal. She asked if she could follow Cathy and Paige to the harbor.

“I don’t know if we’re going today.” Paige tried to tamp down her sadness. She couldn’t believe Adam had been questioned by the police. At least he was safe from the fire. Although, clearly, he had another firestorm to deal with.

“We should go,” Cathy said. “It’ll keep our minds off of everything.”

She wanted Cathy to have a good time. Paige didn’t particularly appreciate that Natalie always wanted to tag along with her friends, but she acquiesced to let Natalie come. The three of them spent that day in the harbor. And Paige had never stopped thinking about Adam.

Paige snapped herself back into the present and stared at the table where she and Cathy and her mom had sat that morning long ago. She took a deep breath and continued sweeping, wondering if she should do a quick mop to make it even cleaner. But then she glanced again at the falling light and remembered Adam’s comment about the raccoons.
Egads.
She’d have to investigate that before it got dark.

She tiptoed up the staircase with the broom. The ranch house was small by ranch standards, but it was still a sprawling two-story spread—larger than anything Paige had ever lived in while in LA. Moving slowly along the dusty wood hallway, she glanced inside each bedroom and felt completely overwhelmed. Nine years was a long time to leave a house vacant. The only way to tackle this would be to focus on one room at a time. And for now, first things first.

She flung each closet door open, broom in front of her, stifling a scream, and let another shiver run through her. As the light fell, her uneasiness grew. Some of the closets felt stuck, and others were so filled with clutter—decaying boxes, old suitcases, stacks of paperback novels—that she couldn’t open them all the way. She poked the broom inside each one to see if she detected any movement. The idea that critters could be living in there, or might crawl back at night, had shivers racking her shoulders.

Maybe she should stay with Olivia or Natalie down in Carmelita.

She glanced out the window—it was probably only seven thirty. She could make it down the mountain in an hour and drop in on either of her sisters—Olivia; her husband, Jon; Paige’s niece, Lily; and brand-new nephew, Aaron, who now lived in Gram’s old cottage on C Street. Or she could show up at the door of Natalie and Elliott, who’d moved in together in Dr. Johnson’s old place, much to Paige’s surprise. As much as all three girls had loved Lavender Island as kids, Natalie and Paige had agreed, early into their teen years, that it wasn’t a fun place for anyone over the age of fifteen and under the age of eighty. But Natalie had come to visit last spring and had fallen in love with a visiting scientist. The idea that her younger sister had fallen in love before she had, and had fallen in love enough to stay on this old-people island forever, had left Paige a little shocked.

Paige shrugged off the idea of calling either of her sisters, though. She hadn’t wanted them to know she was here. Not yet anyway. She’d tell them once she got things ironed out with Adam Mason.

She made timid sweeps with her broom at the last closet just as the light began falling into a dusky purple. A mouse ricocheted out, and Paige screamed. She coughed at the swirl of dust that flew out behind the mouse and broom. But no big critters, at least. Despite Adam’s warning, they didn’t seem to have made homes here. Maybe she could stay, after all. There
was
running water, and she’d brought a lantern. She could set up her sleeping bag downstairs. It would be like camping, only with a roof over her head. Not that she’d been camping since she was thirteen.

She headed outside to retrieve the lantern, sleeping bag, her yoga mat, and bottled water out of the golf cart before night fell completely, bouncing them against her hip on the way back in. As she approached the back steps—damn, they were rotting out, too—the same tiny kitten wove its way through her legs.

“Hey, pretty girl.” Paige set her lantern down to pet her, trying to remember her name. Did Adam say Click? “What are you doing back here?”

She lifted Click and glanced over her shoulder—hoping she’d get the same visitor who followed last time. But . . .
no
. She couldn’t wish that. She couldn’t go there again. She just needed to make this deal with Adam, and then mind her own business and stop thinking about him. He’d already made her childhood angsty—she didn’t need him to mess with her adult years, too.