Shoreline Drive (13 page)

“Not for most people, I guess.” Merry gazed around the yard, taking it all in. “But you’re a vet. I think it would be weirder if you didn’t love animals enough to keep a lot of pets. These guys aren’t exactly pets, though, are they?”

*   *   *

Shoving the dogs down and away, Ben surreptitiously held his left hand curled into a loose fist at the right level for Cassiopeia to sniff. The small Doberman mix was the newest addition to his little pack, and she still depended heavily on rituals like the welcome-home scenting to feel comfortable at Isleaway.

“They’re not house pets, if that’s what you mean,” Ben said, deliberately evasive. “I’m gone from home for long stretches of time. It’s only practical to give them the run of the property instead of cooping them up in kennels inside.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Merry moved around to the trunk of the car, clearly intending to juggle her squirming infant and his diaper bag while unpacking the rest of their luggage.

Ben shoved her aside as gently and firmly as he could. “Go on up to the porch,” he told her. “I’ll get the rest of this stuff.”

“You’re injured!”

“I’m not an invalid,” he growled, scowling away the wooziness of leaning over to drag Merry’s duffel out of the trunk. “It was a bump on the head, not a pair of broken arms and a severed spinal column.”

“Fine, be a big dumb man about it. I’m only thinking of your health and well-being.” Merry dropped the diaper bag on the ground with an exasperated hmph and hitched Alex higher on her shoulder.

Ben watched them march up to the porch, his heart lifting with every step she took. Alex tangled his little Vienna-sausage fingers in the dark brown curls waving over Merry’s shoulders, and stared around this loud, chaotic new universe with enormous eyes.

Ben slung the duffel strap across his chest, picked up the diaper bag, and waded through the swarm of furry, wriggling bodies to follow his own personal Florence Nightingale up the porch steps.

“I’m sorry,” she said, the instant he stepped foot on the sanded pine boards of the porch floor. “I don’t know what possessed me—the spirit of a shrewish, nagging wife, I guess. But I’m over it now, and it won’t happen again.”

Ben’s chest clutched like a fist. “Don’t apologize. I was a jerk, that’s not your fault. I know you were trying to be helpful.” He struggled for a moment, then forced out, “I guess I’m not used to needing help.”

Merry, who’d been holding herself rigid and stiff, softened visibly. “I know. You’re used to being the one who does the helping.”

He felt uncomfortably exposed all of a sudden, as if Merry’s low voice had the power to strip away skin, hair, everything external, and leave only raw nerves behind. Ben busied himself with unlocking the front door.

“Like with your menagerie out there,” Merry went on, soft and relentless. “When I said they weren’t pets, I meant … you didn’t buy them from a breeder or a pet shop or something, did you?”

Ben shook his head, focusing on keeping his hand from trembling and jiggling the key out of the lock.

“They’re rescues, aren’t they,” Merry murmured. “All of them.”

“If you hate the animals, too bad. It’s a package deal, they come with the house and the trust fund.”

Ben heard the roughness of his own voice and regretted it as soon as he saw the way Merry’s eyes widened. “I never said I hated them. Who could hate a bunch of rescue animals?”

“My ex-wife,” Ben said, watching Merry closely. “She said I had a tendency to bring home strays—and at first, she liked it. Thought it was sweet or something, evidence of my inner goodness. But after a while, it got old.”

As he’d hoped, Merry zeroed in on the key piece of new information. “Ex-wife? You’ve been married before?”

“Years ago,” Ben confirmed. No point keeping it a secret; it was bound to come up eventually, and it would seem odd if he’d never mentioned Ashley. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

“I’m not worried,” Merry denied, with a very worried frown wrinkling her brow. “I just … didn’t know you’d been married before. It seems like the kind of thing you should know about your fiancé.”

“That’s why I’m mentioning it.” Ben got the door open—time to oil that ancient lock again—and led Merry into the dark foyer. “Careful on the floors—I waxed the hardwood last week, and they’re still a little slippery.”

“Oh my gosh,” Merry said as she lifted her gaze to the rainbow of light pouring in through the stained-glass window. “Ben. This place is…”

“My pride and joy.” He laughed, but he was serious. “I moved to Sanctuary after the divorce, to get away from all the memories. And to escape my parents’ embarrassingly unsubtle attempts to marry me off to one of the daughters of someone else in the tennis and country club set.”

“I’ve never played tennis,” Merry said faintly, her gaze moving over the furniture Ben had spent happy, solitary hours picking out from local craftsmen’s shops.

“You haven’t missed anything,” Ben told her. “It’s dull. I came here because I needed a change. I wanted a different kind of life than Ashley and I had in Richmond. And Sanctuary couldn’t be more different if it were on another planet.”

“Ashley,” Merry murmured, then appeared to shake herself free of something. She turned bright, determined eyes on him, and Ben swallowed hard against the surge of joy it gave him to see her standing in his home. His private sanctuary.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he told her. It felt like the words were ripped from him against his will.

She flushed a pretty pink and tightened her hold on Alex, who seemed to have decided it would be fun to launch himself out of her arms in a backward swan dive. “Are you tired? You should lie down and rest. Alex and I will just … hang out here until it’s time to wake you up and make sure you haven’t lapsed into a coma.”

Frustrated, Alex chose that moment to open his mouth and loose an earsplitting wail. Despite himself, Ben raised his brows in shock.

“That’s some impressive lung capacity, right there.”

Merry gave a rueful laugh. “Yeah, I think he’s got a future as an opera singer, if he wants it. Alex, baby, come on. You’re fine.” She made a face in Ben’s direction. “I’m sorry, it’s been a couple of hours since he ate, he’s probably hungry.”

The crying continued unabated, Merry’s cheeks going redder and redder. And Ben realized with a start that Alex must still be breast-feeding. Merry probably wanted privacy to feed her child.

“Oh! Let me give you the fifty-cent tour,” he rapped out, striding off down the hall. He waved to his left. “Kitchen! On the right, dining room. And down here,” he continued as he opened the last door on the left, “are the bedrooms.”

He put her duffel and the bulging diaper bag at the end of the queen-sized guest-room bed. Giving the room a cursory inspection, Ben wondered if she could tell she was the first person who’d ever stayed in it.

“It’s beautiful,” Merry said, sounding as enchanted as anyone could with an armful of screaming infant. “Who decorated this place for you?”

Now it was Ben’s turn to feel his cheeks burn. “No one.”

Pausing in the act of reaching to finger the velvety nap of the wine-colored throw blanket folded over the foot of the bed, Merry shot him a surprised glance. “You did this yourself?”

He shrugged. “I like to support local artisans. There’s a lady who weaves her own cloth up on Honeysuckle Ridge, and the guy who made all the furniture in here lives just down the road in one of the seaside cottages.”

Merry stared at him over the head of her baby, who was snuffling into her neck like he might find a hidden nipple behind her ear. “I’ve known you for half a year. You’ve been on this island for, what? Seven years. But no one here knows you at all, do they? Least of all me.”

Chapter Ten

As always, the act of feeding Alex did at least as much to calm her as it did to stop his tears.

The intense feeling of closeness, the private, intimate connection nourished something deep in Merry’s soul as surely as it fed Alex his dinner. She loved the way he’d close his dimpled fist around the bunched-up cotton of her T-shirt, and the way his cloudy blue eyes would flutter shut in sleepy ecstasy. There was nothing on the planet softer than the fine-grained silk of Alex’s rosy cheeks, or the wisp of black hair on his head.

Merry absently combed that hair into a messy fauxhawk feathering up from the center of his scalp and thought about what she’d gotten them into.

On paper, Ben Fairfax was quite the catch. Well educated, successful, rich, good with kids and animals, inconveniently hot, and also, apparently, a talented interior decorator.

So why was she having second thoughts?

This whole idea had felt so much safer and easier when she could think of Ben as that cranky, grumpy misanthrope who uncharacteristically adored her son. Now that she was at his home—which would be their home if she went through with this, a thought that made her shiver hard enough to nearly dislodge Alex from his lazy sucking—Ben was acquiring layers. Nuance.

And Merry couldn’t help but be intrigued.

Which was a bad sign. If her past with men was any indication, Merry being intrigued by Ben equaled Ben hiding some hideous secret, like a pierced penis, a current girlfriend, or the fact that he lived with his mother.

Merry knew herself well enough to know that she could
not
pick ’em. But Ben was supposed to be different. He was supposed to be the smart choice. Rational. Safe.

But how safe could he be when Merry’s stupid, stupid body went up in flames whenever he was nearby?

As if Ben could sense the coldness of Merry’s feet, a sudden knock sounded on the guest room door.

“Figured Alex wasn’t the only one who might be hungry, so I heated up some soup. You want?”

Merry glanced down to check on Alex’s progress with lunch, and found his head lolling back on his little neck, his pink mouth pursed in slumber. Moving carefully to keep from waking him, Merry stood up from the all-too-comfortable rocking chair in the corner and cracked the door enough to peer out.

“Yes, please,” she whispered. “Give me a second, I’ll be right out.”

“Do you want me to take him?” Ben asked. “I promise I’ll avert my eyes.”

After four months of practice, Merry was adept at juggling a sleeping baby while twisting her clothes back to decency. But the hopeful expression on Ben’s face had her twitching the door open wide enough to pass the limp bundle of Alex’s blanket-swaddled body into Ben’s waiting embrace.

Ben had his eyes closed, like the Southern gentleman he hid so well, most of the time. And Merry wondered if he’d expected her to reciprocate and not watch him, because when he felt the weight of Alex in his arms, the soft smile that curved his mouth was so private, so real. Merry was ninety-five percent sure Ben would be embarrassed if she knew he’d seen it.

But she couldn’t help but be glad as she shut the door and pulled her bra and shirt back into place. Every time she started to question her decision, Ben’s honest, loving reaction to her son shored up her resolve.

For a new mom who’d spent a good portion of the past four months feeling insecure and defensive about her mothering skills and her status as the person best able to care for her baby, Merry was surprisingly okay with letting Ben hold Alex.

She paused for a moment, arrested by the realization that on a deep level, she trusted that even if she wasn’t safe from sizzling chemistry and aching desire for her fiancé, her son
was
safe with Ben.

It was as if a weight she’d been lugging around since before Alex was even born rolled off her shoulders and disintegrated.

Taking advantage of the few minutes of privacy, Merry checked out the adorable en suite bathroom, decorated all in shades of navy and cream with a luxuriously deep bathtub and separate shower stall. She couldn’t wait to take a swim in that tub, to sink neck-deep in fragrant bubbles and relax with a juicy romance novel, and heck, while she was fantasizing, how about a box of chocolate truffles?

Merry unpacked quickly, piling clothes on top of the dresser rather than opening and poking through the drawers the way she wanted to. By the time she’d settled them in a little and taken a guilty, illicit moment to run a comb through her messy curls—why did she bother? In the face of Ben’s perfect home and good manners, and the knowledge of his high-society background, Merry knew neater hair wasn’t enough to make her fit in—it had been ten minutes since Ben knocked on the guest-room door.

She found her way back down the hallway to the kitchen, where a pot of what smelled like beef and vegetable soup steamed gently on a front burner. The stovetop was off, but the soup was still warm and there were a couple of bowls set out, waiting. But no Ben.

Not wanting to call for him and risk waking Alex, Merry wandered through the empty rooms of Ben’s beautiful home. There was no upstairs, even though it looked like a two-story house from the outside, and when she found the living room, she realized exactly why. The ceiling soared high overhead, opening the room to a view that stopped her dead in her tracks to blink and stare.

The entire back wall of Ben’s house was clear, sparking glass, a panoramic picture window that looked out onto a sweeping view of the ocean. The pine trees that crowded the front of the house and the driveway framed the window, which showed how the cabin had been perched just so, at the edge of a rise looking out over the endless expanse of blue-gray water. Afternoon sunlight sparkled on the waves, and Merry caught her breath as she imagined what a sunrise must look like from the wooden deck.

Merry fought down a spurt of panic. It couldn’t be more different from her mother’s ramshackle old family home, full of quirks and squeaky floorboards and tatty curtains. And Ben’s house was certainly nothing like the succession of small, grotty apartments Merry had shared with her string of bad boyfriends back in D.C.

This place was gorgeous. Every detail had been chosen by a loving hand. Even the plump, overstuffed pillows nestled in the corners of the brown leather couch whispered about good taste and sophisticated style.