Love on Lavender Island (A Lavender Island Novel Book 2) (5 page)

“Amanda, where’s Mendelson?” Adam asked.

“Not in yet.”

Adam frowned and made a frustrated sound. It made Paige feel better that, for once, neither she nor her family was responsible for a Mason scowl.

Amanda looked Paige up and down as she licked some kind of potato-chip dust off her fingers.

“Can you get Ms. Grant here set up in a room, then?” Adam asked in his deep voice, avoiding Amanda’s eyes.

Amanda glanced between Adam and Paige a few times—as if trying to assess the situation—but finally pulled out a keyboard from under the check-in computer.

“Which room do you want her in?” she asked.

“Eight-A.”

She nodded as if that meant something to her. Paige wondered if that was the farthest room in the wing, as far away from Adam as possible.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, turning toward Paige abruptly. “That cheese and those grapes couldn’t be your dinner.”

His voice sounded more irritated than truly concerned. That indifference was what Paige needed to remember.
Her
hormones might be going into overdrive at the sight of him, but he’d been treating her like a veritable stranger the whole day. A pain-in-the-ass stranger, in fact. She’d do well to follow his lead.

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’m mostly tired.”

He gave a curt nod, then strode through the door that led to his own residence.

“It’s on us,” he told Amanda over his shoulder.

Amanda frowned at his retreating back as if confused, then focused her eyes back on the screen.

“Nonsmoking okay?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“One queen okay?”

“Yes.”

Amanda went into efficiency mode, printing a confirmation, getting a key, folding it into a map.

The girl leaned across the counter and pointed with her pen. “We’re here. Your room is straight down that way.” Her voice fell into the rhythm of boredom that was the hallmark of teenagers everywhere. “Jacuzzi is open until . . . well, it’s closed now, but it’s normally open until ten. There’s a light continental breakfast from—oh wait, tomorrow might be the last day for that. It’s eight to eleven, but we probably won’t have it after tomorrow. If you’d like riding lessons or maps to get down to the harbor, come see me in the morning. I assume you just flew in?”

Paige glanced up. She didn’t really feel like telling her the whole story. Not only that, but her mind kept dragging over how young this girl looked to be working in a hotel this late. Was she thirteen? Fifteen? Sixteen? The heavy eye makeup and dyed blue tips were throwing Paige off. “Something like that,” she said.

The girl’s scrutiny swept across Paige’s clothes, yoga mat, and backpack, then seemed to drag over Paige’s ring finger. She clicked her pen several times. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Paige hesitated. She sort of wanted to ask some questions—like why were they closing the resort, and who normally worked this desk, and whose kitten was Click, and how old was this girl, and where did she live—but the weights on her shoulders reminded her that a good night’s sleep was in order first. “No,” she said.

The girl’s bored nod, Adam’s quick dismissal, the hauntingly quiet resort, and the looming flagstone fireplace all made Paige feel insignificant as she dragged herself toward the room she’d been assigned.

She put a few of her things away in the drawers, then flopped onto the bed and closed her eyes. It had been a long, outrageous day. She should fall asleep now and get ready to wake up early and get back to work on Gram’s place.

This was going to be a strange week.

And Adam was definitely looking like he remembered things.

And Paige didn’t know how he was going to feel about that when he put all the pieces together.

At half past midnight, weary and exhausted from his toes to his scalp, Adam pushed back from his desk. His eyes lit on the remains of the cold enchiladas, still sitting in the tinfoil container from Rosa’s Cantina. He picked it up and scraped at the bottom with a plastic fork, wondering if Paige had eaten hers. At least he’d ordered something for her. Damned if he was going to be responsible for her collapsing from hunger as well as possibly getting attacked by an intruder in the house he was supposed to be watching.

He couldn’t believe he’d let Helen’s house get invaded again, and this time with an innocent occupant inside. He was off his game. He’d always yelled at his father and brother and ranch hands for even one moment’s slip into irresponsibility—you had to be constantly alert on a ranch this big—but now here he was, doing the same thing. He needed to concentrate.

Of course, it was harder these days with everything going on. Deaths. Wills. Memories. Ghosts from the past . . .

The late-night silence of the office crept up around his ears—an office that had grown eerier and lonelier as time marched on. The depression that wanted to settle around his shoulders was something he instinctively kept staving off—every time the sense of loss entered his head, he shoved it out of the way. He knew he’d need to address it at some point, but for now he’d put one foot in front of the other, sell this damned place, leave this damned island, and then let reality catch up with him.

He tossed the foil container into the trash and let a new level of irritation rise that he’d thought of Paige Grant again. He’d gone almost the entire evening staying focused on other concerns. But for the last half hour, his mind kept drifting to her. He wondered if it would be weird if he went to check on her.

It would.

And he shouldn’t.

She was none of his business.

But she’d rattled him. That was the bottom line.

She felt like a strange, long-lost, hazy, shifting piece of an unfinished puzzle. And the worst part was that she wasn’t the only piece. Between her and Amanda, his world was shifting on its axis.

Not that his world was engaging to begin with, but at least he used to know where he stood. He knew his land, his animals, his ranch hands, his family history. He was like those massive old trees out in the perimeter of his ranch—bent, scarred, gnarled, and sometimes leaning, but still standing, anchored by powerful roots the size of branches.

But Paige was definitely an anomaly and felt like another lightning strike. He’d never had a very good memory for sentimental details, and he dismissed plenty of elements from his brain at the end of each day so he could concentrate on the ranch. So when he’d first seen Paige, he’d had trouble even conjuring the right era to place her in. But then, slowly, he began to remember: She was Ginger’s daughter. She’d been one of the young campers. She’d been there the night of the first fire. She’d been there when he got home from jail after the second one, too, sitting at his father’s dining table. Or maybe that was the next day. He wasn’t sure. But she’d been there that summer, with her goth eyeliner, staring at him as if she wanted him to combust. He remembered the townspeople had talked about her that summer and said she’d “saved” him from the first fire, although he’d never believed that, caught up as he was in everything that was going on with Samantha. He remembered that he and Paige had talked one night, late, in the hangar. She might have been crying. He recalled that everyone called her Calamity June. And that she’d hated him for some reason.

The rest was cloudy, like most of his teenage years. That whole summer had been a shit-storm anyway. It ended after the second fire, down by the stables, when Ginger and George had sat at his dining table and announced they were turning him in. They’d sent for Samantha’s parents. Her parents had taken her away. He’d been thrown in the Carmelita jail, where they held him on a jaywalking warrant, of all things, so they could buy some time, then ferried him over to the mainland, where he spent another week in the county jail. When they released him on lack of evidence, he came home on a late-night ferry to a scowling father, a suspicious town, no girlfriend, and what felt like a life filled with distrust.

Normally he wouldn’t care that he couldn’t remember the details of that summer. He liked life that way. Forgetting could be good.

But, for some reason, with Paige Grant here now, he felt as if he was going to remember.

Whether he wanted to or not.

And the fact that he couldn’t quite drag his eyes from the sexy woman who’d once been the thirteen-year-old girl who was nearly his stepsister was disturbing in ways he didn’t want to examine right now.

Back in his bedroom, Adam peeled off his shirt to get into bed, but he suddenly thought of a better way to relieve some of his ache and fatigue.

Within minutes, he was in a towel at the back of the resort, his bare feet thudding across the redwood deck to the Jacuzzi. With the dude group coming in a couple of days, he wouldn’t have the place to himself anymore. Might as well take advantage of it now. He snapped the lights back on, but only half—he didn’t want to wake his only resort guest—then he reset the timer behind an elderberry bush and tossed his towel on the deck. In seconds, he lowered himself into the bubbling cauldron.

Gaaaaaaaaaaaawd,
that felt good.

His head fell back against the lip of the tub, and his arms floated weightlessly to the surface. His mind was finally able to relax. No more thinking of the past. No more thinking of the present or any of his responsibilities. No more thinking of this night. No more thinking of Paige Grant.

About fifteen minutes into a very nice reverie regarding a pinup girl and a bathtub, a twig snapped. He jerked to attention and scouted the bushes, assuming he’d see a raccoon or opossum. But a human form took shape behind the shadows of the cypress trees.

“Who’s there?” he barked, pushing to a sitting position, the water gently sloshing.

Silence followed, then a rustling of bushes. As Adam watched, a very shapely shape stepped out from the shadows.

He groaned inwardly.

“I couldn’t sleep,” said a familiar voice.

CHAPTER 5

Paige shoved branches aside, picked her way through the bushes in her slippers, and stumbled onto the planked wooden deck, where Adam came fully into view. She stalled right on the edge—still not certain this was a good idea. She plucked a few twigs from her hair, then gripped the elbows of her velvet hoodie and waited to get a sense of Adam’s mood.

She’d seen him enter the hot tub from her window—she’d heard the lights clank on, then peered through the thick panes to see his waist slip into the bubbling water. The angle of her room and the dim lighting allowed her a long, guilty ogle. She’d gaped at his flexing arms as he slowly lowered his body; then she’d stared at his strong chest as he took deep breaths and dropped his head back to settle in.

She’d enjoyed her view for five glorious minutes before pulling on her hoodie and scrounging up the nerve to pad across her patio and down the back path to the deck. She would just thank him for sending the dinner.

Yeah, that was it.

As she hesitated at the edge of the deck, Adam squinted at her through the darkness, the blue lights from the water dancing along his face and sending luminescent shadows across his jaw. His arms came up level with the ground, shoulders glistening under the moonlight, as he stretched his biceps along the back of the tub. Then, in a gesture that was either irritated or defeated, he let his head fall back to the edge of the tub and closed his eyes again.

“Did my staff see you walk out here?” he grumbled.

Ah, his mood. Sulky.

“I . . . I don’t know,” she said. “Who is your staff? That girl?”

“Mendelson is there now. Did he see you?”

“I came the back way. Anyway, I’m not sure why he’d care.”

“He’s supposed to be watching you.”

“
Watching
me?”

Adam shook his head. “Never mind. Come out from those bushes. There are raccoons back there.”

Paige leaped forward, then crossed her arms against a shudder. She’d never been meant for a wooded life, with creatures and insects. That was another reason she never came to the island’s interior anymore. She smoothed her velvet hoodie and stepped across the deck.

“Why is your staff supposed to be watching me?” she asked.

He gave a long, put-upon sigh and shifted slightly against the lip of the tub. “Would you believe I was worried?” he mumbled, his eyes still closed.

“No.”

A beat passed, and then he smiled.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“So
distrustful
, Paige.”

Her heartbeat picked up. She wasn’t sure if it was because of that intimate whisper in his midnight voice, or the fact she’d never heard him say her first name like that, or the idea that he’d finally paid enough attention to her to form an opinion—and a shockingly accurate one at that—but it all seemed dangerously sexy. She told herself she should leave. Or at least look away. But first she allowed herself another clandestine ogle of his glistening chest.

“Why are you out here?” he asked with his eyes still closed.

She cleared her throat. “I, um . . . wanted to thank you. For the dinner.” She tried to remember her earlier feeling of gratitude and replace it with her current irritation that he was assigning his staff watch duty over her.

“No problem. Figured you had to be hungrier than you were letting on. And I felt a little responsible for the situation you were in.”

A cacophony of crickets chirped rhythmically behind her. She padded around the side of the chaise and sat on its edge, smoothing the velvet of her pant leg. She should go now. But she didn’t want to. Adam’s presence gave her a zing that she hadn’t experienced in a long time, and it was a nice jolt. She hadn’t had that giddy rush of attraction for eons—that adolescent feeling of energy that tended to be lost once real jobs and bills and boyfriends who cheated on you entered the picture. She didn’t know if she was experiencing it with him because he was the one who made her feel that way when she
was
an adolescent, or if it was because of something about him specifically that she’d experience no matter when in life she met him. But he definitely gave off that chemistry. It was addicting.

They sat in silence, listening to the crickets’ trills. She searched for something to say. Normally she was good at small talk, but it felt weird with Adam—they were like strangers, but not really. They knew too much about each other’s families and pasts to be real strangers, so instead they were caught in an uncomfortable middle ground: arm’s-length intimacy, unfamiliar familiarity.

“Nice night,” she finally said.
Lame.

He glanced up, peeked out of one eye as if surprised she was still there, then laid his head back down without comment. He was probably tired of her already.

She kicked off her slippers and wriggled her toes against the rough planks, then tried to find something innocent to look at while she thought up more of her scintillating conversation.

Her eyes flitted over the rows of chaise lounges, a cluster of pots holding half-dying geraniums, a deck table with a newspaper still folded on top of it. She wondered who took care of all this. Did Adam do everything now? Her gaze kept being pulled, though, like a magnet, to his biceps, illuminated in the blue lights from the hot tub. Rivulets of water ran down his hairline, dampening the hair around his face and at the base of his neck. His eyes remained closed. His throat moved a few times in a visible swallow.

“You’re different than I remembered,” he said, surprising her out of the darkness.

His jaw formed a shadowed triangle underneath his chin, the late-night blond stubble creating a gentle outline. His lips were full and beautiful. They were closed now, as if he’d never spoken, and Paige was suddenly unsure he’d even spoken at all. But as it slowly dawned on her what he’d said, she felt her stomach tingle. “Different how?”

His lengthy pause made her wonder whether she should continue this conversation. This could be dangerous territory. He could piss her off. He could turn her on. He could laugh at her. He could charm her pants off. She had no idea which way this could go. She stared at the remaining live geraniums in the pot, at their ruffled leaves, at their bright-red petals.

“What exactly did you remember?” she asked as her pulse raced. She was in uncharted area now, without a compass.

The water sloshed as Adam shifted. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. “I remembered you wearing a ton of black makeup and looking like you were going to pull out a grim-reaper scythe.” The lights from the spa danced along his chest, his jaw, like an aurora borealis, throwing flashes across his skin. He was grinning now.

“That was my goth stage,” she said. “Black eyeliner was crucial.”

His grin grew wider. “How long did that stage last?”

“Too long, as far as Ginger was concerned.”

The low rumble of the spa bubbles and the crickets’ rhythmic chirps grew louder over the next minute as Ginger’s name threw a pall on their rising friendliness.
Way to ruin the mood, Paige.
She did appreciate that Adam let the Ginger comment lie, though. He probably had plenty more to say about her mother. It was part of their weird connection again—the one that kept them from being complete strangers, although that would be easier. The things they had connection over were things neither of them wanted to talk about.

Although, now, with him in a slightly relaxed mood, it might be a good time to clear the air.

“I’m, um, sorry for all that Ginger did. Back then,” she blurted.

The spa bubbles shifted as Adam repositioned for comfort. His face lost its friendly grin and went into neutral.

Paige cleared her throat and went on. “I hope our pasts—and your past with Ginger—won’t affect any decisions you make about selling this place, or possibly working with us on the Dorothy Silver wedding.”

He kept his head back and his eyes closed as he answered her through barely moving lips. “Business is business, Paige. I never let personal issues interfere.”

She nodded.
Good philosophy.
Ginger, ironically, would be proud of him for that line.

“Well, it couldn’t have been easy for you,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry for any pain my family may have caused you.”

“No need. It’s not your apology to make.”

A shot of guilt went through her. This was the hard part. Although Ginger was the one who had actually broken Adam and Samantha up—had Samantha sent away, had Adam thrown in jail—Paige had had a hand in it. But, to Adam, Paige had been invisible. And apparently even now her part in everything was invisible. It was best she just leave things that way. At least for as long as they were negotiating.

Like he said, business was business.

“So did you and your goth friends hang around the Industrial Tech building and smoke cigarettes?” he asked.

A smile escaped her lips. Maybe he wanted to move on, too. “Art building. But I didn’t smoke. I drove a fast car instead.”

“Ah. A girl with a fast car is a dangerous thing. This rebelliousness lasted awhile, then.”

“It did.” Paige stood and took a few steps toward the tub. “I loved that car. It was a bright-yellow 1970 vintage Mach 1.”

Adam gave a low whistle. “That’s a serious muscle car. Where’d you get that?”

“I inherited it from my aunt. It always pissed my mom off that Aunt Susan gave it to me.”

“Tell me you left the black hood stripe.”

“Of course.”

“Loud?”

“Very.”

He smiled. “Ginger must have loved that. You must’ve been a handful. I didn’t have a fast car—I had a plane. But I was definitely one of the kids at the Industrial Tech building with the cigarettes.”

Paige giggled. “I’m sure George loved the smoking.”

“Yeah. When I was fifteen, he made me smoke a whole pack at the kitchen table one morning while he watched me. That kicked my habit.”

“He probably did you a favor.”

Adam made an odd sound in his throat but said nothing to that.

Paige allowed herself another long look at him. She wanted to know more about his boyhood—what drove him to be so isolated, why he’d always been so angry. But that boyhood scowl from her memory made a lot of sense when she thought about the fact he’d grown up with George. She’d never thought of that at the time. George had always scared her, too. She didn’t really blame Adam for being an introvert, or avoiding her and her family in whatever way he’d known how. It was probably a chance to escape, much in the same way her black eyeliner and Mach 1 were—a chance to feel some sense of control over a life that seemed as if it was happening against your will.

“You took me by surprise when I saw you,” Adam said suddenly. “You didn’t match my memory.” He readjusted his arms against the edge of the tub.

“Because I didn’t have my scythe?”

He chuckled. “Something like that.”

The crickets resumed their chorus as Paige wriggled her toes again. She wasn’t sure how much she wanted to tell him, or how much she wanted him to remember—she definitely didn’t want him to put the pieces together that she’d been the one to tell on him to her mom. But he was letting her in a little, and she didn’t know how to resist. He was like a drug.

“You weren’t how I remembered, either,” she found her voice saying. She almost wanted to slam her hand over her mouth.

Adam gave a low laugh and finally looked right at her. He looked as if he was going to say something to that, but the water suddenly sloshed as he lowered his arms. He shifted forward, pressing his palms along the bench, and cleared his throat. “Listen, Paige, the timer on these bubbles is going to go off in about ten seconds, and once they stop, you’re going to get a view you very well may not want, so I suggest you give me a second to get out and grab a towel.”

Paige could hardly take her eyes off the new position he was in—his glistening shoulders, the way his muscles flexed in such a testosterone-driven way. She felt like her thirteen-year-old hormones were shooting off fireworks again. But then she forced her adult brain to put together what he was saying: He was
naked
in there? She wondered how inappropriate it would sound to say she’d actually love the view. It had been a while. But instead she slowly turned her back.

She heard the water slosh again and his bare foot slap the deck as he hoisted himself out of the tub.

She tried to make small talk to keep her mind from picturing what he must look like. “Do you always come out here and enjoy your hot tub naked?”

His towel shook out. She heard it ruffle as he dried himself. The jets suddenly died with a hiss, and the deck went silent. He didn’t seem as though he was going to answer that.

“What do your guests say?” she pressed, trying to keep the nervousness out of her voice.

His footsteps slapped heavily against the wood, coming toward her around the side of the tub. “Sometimes ‘thank you,’” he said over her shoulder.

A loud clank rang into the night, and suddenly the entire deck was draped in darkness. Paige stifled a scream.

Adam mumbled a few curse words under his breath. “I’m here,” he said calmly. His touch on her elbow caused her to jump. “Sorry. I forgot the timer was set for only twenty minutes. Take four steps this way.” He tugged at her elbow, but the blackness was so disconcerting, she froze. She took one awkward step, but she couldn’t get a sense of her footing.

“Paige, it’s okay. The hot tub is right behind you, and if you move to the right, you’ll fall. I’m right here. Trust me. Move this way.”

His hand was wet and warm. She could have sworn the hot tub was the other way, but she’d twisted a bit when she’d heard the clank, so maybe she was turned around. Fear could do that. She could smell the chlorine on him, could sense heat emanating from his skin. She felt drips on her shoulder and wondered if he was standing so close that they were coming from his chin or his hair. She wanted to trust him. His palm pressed firmly into the back of her elbow, soaking her velvet jacket. The heat traversed the fabric with ease. She remembered the arms, the wrists, the strong hands she’d just been ogling, and thought about them touching her now in this darkness.