Sea Glass Island (6 page)

“Were you neutral when they were pushing me and Wade together? No, you were not.”

“So this is payback,” Samantha concluded.

“It is, but only in the most loving, sisterly way.”

Samantha frowned at Gabi’s overly upbeat mood. “Bite me,” she muttered.

Gabi merely chuckled. “By the way, you might want to hop in the shower and pull yourself together. Rumor has it that Ethan is due here in about twenty minutes to give you a lift over to Castle’s. Believe me, I know how much pride you have. You definitely don’t want him to catch you looking like this.”

“Why is Ethan coming by when you’re right here?”

Gabi regarded her innocently. “Do you even have to ask?”

“You could tell him to go away.”

“I could, but I won’t be here. My assigned duties are done and I’m off to work.” She pressed a kiss to Samantha’s forehead. “Love you. We all do. Try to remember that,” she added as she left.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Samantha muttered in her wake, regretting that she couldn’t crawl beneath the covers and spend the day right where she was. Of course that would risk Ethan coming upstairs in search of her. She couldn’t allow him to find the disheveled mess she most likely was.

And that, she assured herself as she showered and washed her hair, was the only reason she wasn’t going to defy everyone’s latest attempts at meddling. Pride. Whatever impression she’d left in his head last night, she needed to imprint a totally different one today. Breezy, independent and not the least bit love-struck came to mind. Pulling off that performance was going to test her acting skills in ways no other role ever had.

* * *

Ethan still regretted answering his cell phone when it had rung at dawn. If he’d ignored it, he wouldn’t be at Cora Jane’s right now with two giant-size containers of steaming coffee, fresh blueberry muffins and a boatload of anxiety.

“Samantha’s worried she made a fool of herself last night,” Emily had told him. “You need to let her know she didn’t. Otherwise, things could be really awkward between now and the wedding.”

“I know what you’re doing,” Ethan countered.

“I’m just trying to make sure everything goes smoothly,” she’d insisted in her most innocent tone. “I can’t have the two key players in the wedding party not even able to look each other in the eye. Please, Ethan. I know I got things off to a bad start between you two with my meddling. Once you’ve settled things, I’ll stay out of it. I promise.”

“You are genetically incapable of staying out of it,” Ethan had responded.

“I’ll try. Really,” she insisted. “Please do this for me.”

Ethan knew he’d experienced a moment of temporary insanity when he’d agreed, but the truth was he wanted to see for himself if Samantha was okay after the way she’d practically crashed at his feet the night before. He wondered if she remembered what he’d said or, more importantly, what she’d said in response, that she was glad he liked her. That spontaneous exchange could be the spark that set off unwanted fireworks down the road, if they weren’t very, very careful. Delivering coffee and muffins was not being careful.

Remembering the last time he’d arrived without notice, he knocked on the kitchen door at Cora Jane’s. When no one answered, he knocked a little harder, but still got no response.

“Blast it,” he muttered, wondering if this was part of the plot. Was he supposed to panic, go running upstairs, find her asleep in her bed, then jump in with her? He wouldn’t put it past Emily to devise just such a scheme.

He opened the back door, then shouted, “Samantha! You awake?”

Only then did he hear the sound of the shower cutting off. It immediately sent his imagination into overdrive. All that slick bare skin, those long legs, the mane of thick hair clinging damply to her shoulders. He swallowed hard against the tide of pure lust that swept over him.

“Not doing this,” he muttered, dismissing the desire to take the stairs two at a time. “No way.”

He plunked himself down in a kitchen chair, opened one of the containers of coffee and took a drink, scorching his throat in the process. At least that got his mind off the naked woman upstairs. Or it should have.

“Ethan? You down there?”

“I’m here,” he hollered back, his voice choked. “There’s coffee.”

“Oh, you wonderful man!” she called back with heartfelt emotion. “Could you bring it up?”

“Upstairs? You want me to bring the coffee to you?” he asked, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. Had she joined the plot?

She laughed as if she’d read his mind. “I promise you that you’ll be safe. I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t in desperate need of caffeine.”

He picked up the coffee and headed for the stairs. “Are you decent?”

“I can see why you’d ask,” she teased. “And I suppose it’s a matter of opinion, but I am clothed if that’s what you really want to know.”

Was that the real question? he wondered. He’d kind of liked imagining her without a stitch on. Still, this was better, he assured himself as he hit the top step.

She was waiting for him halfway down the hall, wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Her feet were bare, her wet hair just starting to curl waywardly. She looked more intoxicating than the champagne she’d been drinking the night before.

“See, perfectly decent,” she said, grinning.

“Too bad,” he murmured before he could stop himself.

She blinked. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said hurriedly. “Here’s your coffee. There’s a blueberry muffin in the bag.” He held them out, keeping a safe distance between them. “I’ll be waiting downstairs.”

“It’s okay if you want to stay. I just need to dry my hair. I’m used to having men coming in and out while I get ready.”

Instantly he experienced a surge of jealousy like nothing he’d ever felt before. “Is that so? Just how casually do you take relationships?”

“We’re not talking relationships,” she said, her amusement plain. “Dressing rooms can be crowded on soaps, especially for day players who only come in to work occasionally. And backstage in the theater, people are changing everywhere you look. Modesty pretty much disappears in a hurry.”

The thought of men catching a glimpse of her half-dressed, no matter the circumstances, set his teeth on edge.

“I think I’ll wait downstairs just the same,” he said.

“Sure. Whatever makes you comfortable,” she said agreeably.

Nothing about this situation was comfortable, he thought irritably as he went back to the kitchen and finished his coffee. Heck, he saw half-naked women all the time in his line of work. That was different, too. They were patients, and he’d trained himself to be clinical and objective when treating them.

Samantha was different. She wasn’t a patient. She wasn’t even a friend, despite their determination to pretend they could pull that off. She was a potential lover. He knew it. So did she. And that turned casual glimpses of bare skin and intimate little moments into something dangerous. It hadn’t sounded to him as if she recognized that.

Was that because she didn’t feel the sizzling chemistry the way he did? Or was she only trying to ignore it, to pretend it didn’t exist?

He’d known what to do with all the meddling. It had been annoying, but too blatant to take seriously.

He’d even been able to dismiss the hints that Samantha had held a long-ago crush on him. Time faded that sort of thing, especially when they had never exchanged more than a word or two back then.

But this new twist, this need that was growing inside him? That had the potential to rip him apart.

In Afghanistan, it hadn’t been possible to hide from the dangers. They were all around and part of the job. This danger was something else, something he could avoid.

And somehow he had to find a way to ignore his suddenly raging hormones and do just that.

6

“I
went downstairs and he was gone. He just took off without a word, not ten minutes after handing me a container of coffee and a muffin,” Samantha told Emily later that morning when she’d finally managed to get a lift over to Castle’s from a neighbor who was heading that way. “Now will you please end the plotting and scheming? It’s evident that Ethan and I are not meant to be. Being pushed together constantly is just making both of us uncomfortable. If you keep trying to make something happen, one of us is likely to bail on your wedding.”

To her dismay, Emily burst into tears at the warning. “Sure, you’d like nothing better than to ruin my wedding, wouldn’t you? Go on and bail, if that’s what you want to do. Gabi can always fill in. Maybe I should have picked her to be maid of honor in the first place.”

Samantha barely resisted the desire to snap right back. Instead, she latched onto Emily’s arm and drew her outside. “Okay, let’s have this out right now. Do you even want me in your wedding?” She tried to temper her anger and added more gently, “Em, it’s okay if you don’t. Frankly, I never expected you to ask me. If you’d rather have Gabi, it would be okay.”

Emily’s tears flowed harder. “No, I want you in the wedding. And I wanted Ethan to fall for you. I thought it would make up for things.”

“What things?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. We’ve never been close.”

“We’ve had our problems, sure, but we’ve been close,” Samantha said. “We’re sisters. We’ll always have each other’s backs. Nobody knows us better than we know each other.”

“You and I don’t get along the way you and Gabi do,” Emily insisted, then added with a sniff, “Or the way you and Mom did.”

Samantha stared at her incredulously. “And Gabi and I don’t relate the same way the two of you do. That’s nothing to be jealous about. It’s just the nature of relationships. As for Mom, she absolutely adored you. You were her beautiful baby.”

“No,” Emily insisted, rejecting the idea. “I was the afterthought that kept her from having the life she really wanted.”

The bitter words that revealed years of unexpressed pain stunned Samantha. “Sweetie, you know that’s not so.”

“It is so,” Emily insisted. “I heard her once, you know. She was telling a friend that she’d applied for this dream job, but then found out she was pregnant with me. The same thing had happened before, when she and Dad were first married. She’d just started working and then she got pregnant with you, so she’d quit to be a full-time mother.”

Samantha tried to absorb this news, or rather the implication it apparently held for her sister. Though she knew she’d been a bit of a surprise to her parents, she’d never given it another thought. And she couldn’t understand why what Emily had overheard had caused this rift between her and Emily. “Okay, I knew both pregnancies were unexpected, but what does that have to do with you and me?”

“She never resented you for ruining her life,” Emily said, her tone accusatory. “But she did resent me. I could hear it in her voice that day. Oh, she tried not to let it show, but I knew the truth.”

“And you twisted that around to be my fault?” Samantha said, trying to follow the logic.

“Not your fault,” Emily contradicted, looking slightly sheepish. “I know they were Mom’s feelings.”

“But you couldn’t blame her, especially after she’d died, so you started taking it out on me,” Samantha concluded. “Oh, sweetie, the last thing Mom would ever want would be for the two of us to be at odds over which of us she loved more. I wish you’d said something about this years ago. Maybe we could have put it to rest.”

“How?” Emily asked with a sniff. “It was what it was. And Mom’s not here to deny it or explain it. Not that she could.”

Grateful that the outside deck at Castle’s was deserted, Samantha started to reach for Emily’s windblown hair to smooth it back from her face, then hesitated. She doubted her sister would appreciate the gesture just now.

“I wish Mom were here now, too, but you’re going to have to listen to me, instead. Gabi was still young, but I was old enough to remember the look on Mom’s face when she told us she was expecting you. She was over the moon, Em. She really was.”

Emily still looked skeptical. “Then why did she sound so disappointed about that job?”

“I can’t say for sure, since I didn’t hear her, but I do believe if she’d been thinking about going to work, it was only because she didn’t think another pregnancy was in the cards. She wanted the distraction of a job, not the fulfillment. Grandmother told me once that Mom was cut out for motherhood and that it was lucky for us that she was, since Dad was so caught up in his work.”

Emily looked as if she was struggling to accept the truth of Samantha’s words, but it was plain she was wasn’t there yet.

“I know that doesn’t match your perceptions, but you can ask Grandmother,” Samantha told her gently. “She knew exactly how thrilled Mom was about having you.” She grinned. “In fact, if anyone should have been jealous of losing Mom’s affections, it should have been me or Gabi. Once you came along, you became the center of her universe. She doted on you.”

“She did not,” Emily denied, though she looked intrigued by the possibility.

“Did, too,” Samantha retorted. “To make up for the attention Mom was giving you, I retreated into a world of make-believe, which is probably what led me to acting. Gabi became obsessed with trying to win Dad’s attention, and we both know how that turned out.”

“Seriously?”

“Think about it. You know it’s true.”

“Why didn’t I see any of that back then?” Emily asked.

“Because you were the youngest. And you were the princess. That’s heady stuff.”

“Are you saying I was self-absorbed?” Emily asked, instantly defensive.

“No, I’m just saying that your role in the family was defined for you by Mom, just the way mine was or Gabi’s. We each had a different experience growing up, even though we were in the exact same household.”

Emily’s expression turned thoughtful. “I heard Grandmother say something like that once. She said every sibling grows up in a different family. I had no idea what she meant.”

“And now?”

“After what you’ve just said, I think maybe I do.”

“Can we put this behind us?” Samantha pleaded. “Can you accept that I am genuinely thrilled for you and Boone, that I want to be in your wedding and that nothing is going to drive me away?”

“Not even the meddling?” Emily asked, the sparkle slowly coming back to her eyes.

“Well, you might not want to push your luck with that,” Samantha warned. “I’m feeling pretty mellow and tolerant right this second, but it might not last if you decide to test it.”

Emily nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

It wasn’t the airtight commitment Samantha had been hoping for, but it was a start. And with less than two weeks until the wedding and a mountain of details to attend to, perhaps the meddling would land on the bottom of Emily’s list.

* * *

“You don’t look so hot,” Debra said when Ethan arrived at the clinic. “Late night?”

He frowned at the personal question, though he knew it wasn’t in his bubbly young receptionist’s DNA to censor herself. “Busy morning,” he countered tightly. “What’s the schedule look like here?”

“Two drop-in patients waiting, more appointments on the books and your afternoon with the kids. Greg called in. He said he’d be here before you take off.”

Ethan nodded distractedly as he glanced through his messages. “Give me five minutes and have Pam send in the first patient,” he said just as he noticed that one of the pink slips had a message from Marty Gray indicating that Cass wouldn’t be coming on this afternoon’s hike with the rest of the kids in his positive self-image group. “Hold that. I need to call Marty back. I’ll let Pam know when I’m ready for the patients.”

In his office, he dialed Marty’s number. “Got your message,” he told the harried mother, who was most likely trying to get kids off to school. “What’s up with Cass?”

At seventeen, Cass was the oldest member of Project Pride. Two years ago, she’d lost her arm when it had been crushed in a riding mower accident. Though she managed well with her prosthesis, she was rebelling against everything these days. It was tough enough being a teen, he knew, without seeing herself as a damaged misfit. Cass and the others like her were precisely the kids he’d been hoping to help with his program. He wanted them to believe that their self-worth was not tied to any disabilities they might have. On occasion, he actually saw the irony of setting himself up as that particular messenger.

“Nothing new, really,” Marty said with frustration. “Could be the usual teen mood swing.”

“Or something happened at school,” Ethan guessed.

“Always a possibility,” Marty said. “But I have zero luck when it comes to getting her to open up. Teens can be notoriously tight-lipped, but Cass has raised the sullen silence to an art form.”

“Which is why she needs to be here this afternoon. It’s not just about going on a hike. It’s a chance for these kids to open up with other kids who’ll understand.”

“Ethan, I know that,” Marty said impatiently. “So does Cass. She says she won’t go. What am I supposed to do? Get my husband to drag her over there and leave her on your doorstep? Believe me, that holds a lot of appeal for me when she’s acting out, but it’s not up to you to deal with her moods or to fix this.”

“It may not be up to me, but I think I can help,” Ethan said. “Mind if I pick her up after school? I don’t think she’ll be able to say no if I’m right there.”

Marty hesitated. “Are you sure about this? She could be embarrassed in front of her friends. It could make things worse.”

“I can be diplomatic when I need to be,” he assured her. “I’m not going to toss her over my shoulder and haul her off, even if she behaves like a real brat.”

“I’d actually like to see you try that,” Marty said, her sense of humor kicking in. “Two stubborn wills colliding could be highly entertaining.”

Ethan thought of this dance he and Samantha were performing. Stubborn wills were playing a role in that, too, he conceded before snapping his attention back to the moment.

“So, it’s okay if I pick her up? If she refuses, I won’t cause a scene. I’ll let you know she’s heading home.”

“Thanks, Ethan. You really are a saint for putting up with Cass.”

“I’m not just ‘putting up with her.’ She’s a good kid. She just needs to remember that she still has a lot to offer the world.”

It was a lesson that had been a long time coming for him. In fact, it was one with which he still struggled from time to time, especially when it came to opening his heart. Just look at how determined he was to keep Samantha at arm’s length. It must be a hundred times harder for an insecure teen who’d just been figuring out her own identity when the accident happened.

* * *

With Debra, Pam and Greg keeping an eye on the other kids in Ethan’s program until he could get back, Ethan stood outside the high school and watched for Cass to emerge. It wasn’t hard to spot her.

While the other kids spilled out in chattering clusters, she exited alone, an angry expression on her face. Ethan suspected only he saw the desperate longing in her eyes as she surreptitiously glanced at her classmates.

When she spotted him, though, her frown deepened, but she didn’t turn away or try to avoid him.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, confronting him belligerently.

“Waiting for you,” he said, falling into step beside her.

“I’m not going hiking, so you might as well take off.”

“You know that hiking, at least the way we do it, is nothing more than going for a walk, right?”

“Which makes it a dumb way to spend the afternoon,” she retorted.

“Not if you’re one of the kids who has trouble walking at all,” he reminded her.

“But I’m not,” she countered. “My legs are perfectly fine. It’s my arm that’s gone, remember? Or do you not see what’s right in front of you?” She waved the arm with her prosthesis to emphasize her point.

“Then today maybe you could help one of the kids who’s not as lucky. It might make you feel good to do something for someone else. You could push Trevor in his wheelchair, for instance.”

“Hello!” she said sarcastically. “One arm, remember?”

“And a perfectly good prosthesis on the other,” he said without any hint of sympathy. “Or haven’t you mastered it yet?”

She scowled at the suggestion that a lack of skill was behind her refusal to join the hike. “You know I have.”

He gave her a sly glance. “Then prove it.”

Cass heaved a sigh, clearly aware that she was going to lose in the end. Or maybe even wanting to participate, as long as she could do it grudgingly, as a favor to him. “Fine. I’ll come on the stupid hike. And I’ll push Trevor’s wheelchair so fast he’ll squeal like a little girl.”

Ethan bit back a grin. “Thank you. I’m sure he’ll appreciate your daredevil tendencies.” He gestured across the street. “My car’s right over there.”

“I should probably call my mom and tell her I changed my mind,” she told him.