Sunshine Beach (35 page)

“Fit as a fiddle,” Nikki said as Maddie sat down on the cooler.

“I'm glad.” Maddie's smile was tinged with relief, which made Nikki wonder just what Maddie thought she'd been up to. “Are you sure?”

“I think I'll survive,” she said wearily before turning back to Avery. “What gives? Something crawl up your ass and die?”

“Maybe I'm wondering what makes you think you can just take off and disappear without telling anyone where you were going or when you'd be back.”

“And maybe I don't remember signing articles of indenture. Or being put under house arrest.” Though God knew if Joe Giraldi had his way she'd probably be sharing a cell with her brother right now.

“You agreed to help,” Avery persisted.

“And I have. But I had something I had to take care of. Now I'm back. I don't really need to take your shit,” Nikki said, her store of anger having apparently replenished itself. “Why don't you just tell me what I missed?”

Maddie grimaced but didn't intervene. Kyra sipped on a frothy red drink, but looked miles away. Which was beginning to look like an enviable location.

“Let me give you the short version,” Avery said. “We dug up a skeleton underneath one of the patios. It was Annelise's mother. Annelise and Renée have decided to bulldoze the hotel. We will not be renovating.” She waved her half-empty glass for emphasis as she spoke. “And the network lawyers have informed us that we're in breach of contract and that unless we come back and do the show the way they want it for the pittance we originally agreed to, they're going to sue.”

“You're joking,” Nikki said.

“Afraid not.” Avery drained the remainder of her drink.

“Here.” Kyra refilled Avery's glass, then poured one for Nikki. “Strawberry margaritas,” she said as she placed the glass in Nikki's hand. “I suggest you drink it quickly. You're behind. But there's another pitcher where that came from.”

Nikki looked down at the icy red mixture. Her mouth actually watered. “Thanks,” she said, reluctantly handing it back. “I can't.”

“Now who's joking?” Avery asked.

Nikki shifted in the chair trying to get comfortable. Her waistband was too tight and her bra no longer fit. She was in desperate need of a shower and possibly a new life. “Not me. Is there a bottled water in that cooler?”

“Since when?” Avery demanded, apparently seeing this as a personal affront.

“Nikki can't drink alcohol right now,” Maddie said.

“Why not?” Avery's tone was indignant; Kyra's curious.

“Because I'm pregnant.”

Nikki's admission was met with silence. Avery was the
first to recover. For some reason she looked to Maddie for confirmation. “Is she serious?”

Maddie nodded. Her face broke into a smile. When Nikki didn't object she said, “Nikki and Joe are having twins!”

“Correction.
I'm
having twins.
Joe
wants to take a paternity test.”

“I don't believe that,” Maddie said.

“Believe it. He found out by accident.” She did not have the strength to explain the whole Malcolm fiasco and was still too angry to admit that Joe had had her under surveillance. “And he can't seem to forgive me for not telling him.” She felt tears forming and swiped at them with the back of her hand. “He thinks the only reason I'd have is that they're not his.”

“Good grief,” Maddie said.

“How far along are you?” Kyra asked.

“About thirteen weeks.”

“Wow. You were already through your first trimester and didn't tell him?” She took a sip of the margarita. Nikki would have liked to rip it out of her hands and down it herself. “I can kind of see why he might be upset,” Kyra continued. “I tried to tell Daniel right away and we weren't, well, you know. In the same kind of relationship as you and Joe.”

“Why didn't you tell him?” Avery asked, clearly curious. “If they're his and everything?”

“I don't know!” Once again it seemed easier to argue than attempt to dissect or explain her muddled emotions. “I just . . . I can hardly believe it myself.”

“Well, at least you have something to look forward to.” Avery finished the margarita. “But I get the disbelief thing. That's how I feel about the hotel reno. I can't quite absorb how wrong everything went. I keep fantasizing about sneaking onto the property and disabling the bulldozers. Or staging some sort of protest. It's driving me crazy. I can't quit right in the middle.” She blew a bang out of her eye. “And then there's the network.”

“Yeah,” Kyra said, explaining the document she'd received. “We can't go back to them. But what do we do about the lawsuit? It takes money to hire attorneys.”

“What does Troy say?” Nikki asked, glad not to be the topic of conversation. The knot of worry tightened. If she was going to be a mother, especially a single one, she needed financial security. She needed this show to work.

“I haven't heard from him and he's not answering my calls or texts,” Kyra said.

“Yeah, you're not the only one who disappeared on us,” Avery observed.

“At least Nikki came back,” Kyra said. “I think he's gone for good. And I have a bad feeling he's sold us out. Maybe he was just here to spy on us and report back so that they'd know what we were doing.”

“This is depressing as shit,” Nikki said. Yet in spite of the devastating news, she felt slightly better for having her secret out.

“Yeah. Don't even think about asking us to come up with one good thing, Maddie Singer,” Avery said with a slight slurring of her words. “Because all this shit really sucks.”

“There's a ton of suckage going on,” Kyra agreed.

The first smile in recent memory tugged at Nikki's lips. “It is downright suckalicious.”

“Yeah,” Maddie said, surprising them. “You know it's bad when you have to invent new words to describe it.” She raised her glass in toast. “But the good thing is we now have a whole new collection of adjectives at our disposal.”

There was laughter. It began with a few tentative giggles that turned into shotgun bursts as they tried out their new vocabulary and culminated in hearty snorts that had nothing to do with alcohol, the sunset they'd forgotten to watch, or anything but their relief in being together. Nikki gave in to it, too, and as her hands rested on her jiggling stomach, she wondered if the babies growing inside her could feel the merriment
that had at least briefly replaced the anger and panic that had been churning inside her.

They laughed for some time, not at all concerned with the odd looks from passersby or the curtain of darkness that finally fell around them. They were still chortling and trying out their new vocabulary words as they carried the chairs and cooler back up the path to Bella Flora. Nikki knew they all feared that if they didn't find a way to save
Do Over
and subdue the suckage, this might be their last laugh together. A thought too horrible to be borne.

The clatter of pots and pans carried up the back stairs from the kitchen. Kyra turned on her side and reached blindly for a pillow, intent on burying her head beneath it. The hearty curse that accompanied a loud bang eliminated any chance of slipping back into sleep. Her eyes opened to the early morning light, then slid to Dustin's empty bed. She missed him, missed waking to find his sturdy little body snuggled up against hers, missed his stress-busting sunny smile and his arms looped around her neck. FaceTime chats, even on an almost daily basis, were poor substitutes for the real thing. In just a few days Daniel would bring her baby home.
Daniel
. Who had given them Bella Flora. And who was catnip to women.

She flipped onto her back and stared up into the ceiling not wanting to hear the noise coming from below; to acknowledge it was to be forced to deal with it. Her thoughts flitted randomly through her head. Her childish naïveté about Daniel's feelings for her, her certainty that he'd want to marry her when she'd found herself pregnant. Her mother's “glass half full” philosophy coupled with just how hard she would work to fill that glass.

The whir of a blender turned jagged as if metal were being pulverized. The sound was replaced with a heartfelt “Damn!”

They had lost the hotel, and their former network didn't consider itself “former” and had threatened to sue them. Her thoughts turned to a life without
Do Over
. She had a toddler. Freelance video work required travel. Feature film work was even more demanding. Unless you were a major movie star with a traveling nanny and a boatload of money, movie making and motherhood did not go well together. If she wanted to do what she was trained for, she had to find a way to control the work.
Do Over
without a bully of a network would have been perfect. But without the funds to renovate and produce, there could be no
Do Over
. Nor could they hire attorneys to free them from the network.

“Crap!” Her father's voice rose again. “Shit!”

With an expletive of her own, she got out of bed, washed her face, brushed her teeth, and pulled on shorts and a T-shirt. Downstairs she found her father standing in the middle of a totally trashed kitchen.

“Jeez, Dad. What happened?”

He held up a casserole dish with oven-mitted hands. His face was smeared with food and sweat. Coffee stains and something oily ran down his shirt. “Your mother always called these breakfast soufflés ‘never fail,' but that's not entirely true.”

She looked at the lumpy mixture that hadn't solidified or risen. Then she looked at the egg-splattered floor and the reclaimed wood countertops covered in stringy clumps of melted cheese. She was surprised Deirdre hadn't come back to haunt her father given the mess he'd made of pretty much every space she'd designed.

“Please,” she said, reaching for the casserole dish. “Please stop. You have zero aptitude for cooking. And even less for cleaning and laundry. You have to stop trying.”

“You think a man can't do this?” her father asked. “All the best chefs are male.”

“I didn't say it was chromosomal.” Kyra walked to the coffeemaker. The pot was half filled with wet grounds soaking in tepid brown liquid. “You're not a chef. You can't be a chef when you can't even make a pot of coffee.”

She dumped the remains in the sink and rinsed out the carafe. Then she set about making a fresh pot.

“Well, I'm sorry I'm not up to everyone's standards,” he huffed. “You complained that I wasn't helping. Now I'm trying to help and nothing I do is good enough.” His voice had turned whiny.

“This is not the kind of help we need!” She looked at her father, really looked at him. “Are you paying attention at all? Have you noticed what's going on? We are in deep shit. We have no project because we lost the Sunshine Hotel. We need money to renovate something so that we can produce a television series. And hire attorneys to defend us.”

She expected him to lash out but his shoulders slumped in defeat. He set the casserole dish on the stove, removed the mitts, and ran a hand through his hair. That hand must have been coated in oil or butter because his hair now stood up in uneven clumps. “I do know. I guess I've just been trying not to.”

“That does seem to be your modus operandi, doesn't it?” she snapped. “I don't think it's working particularly well for you. Or us!”

“Ah, Kyra,” he said. “I wish I had money to give you. Here I am living on your good graces and trying to show your mother that I've got it back together but . . .” He looked down at himself, the floor, the kitchen. “It's not going anywhere near as well as I'd hoped.”

“Dad. It's not
going
anywhere. You and Mom are over. And no amount of attempting to cook and shrinking people's clothes is going to get her back.” So this, she thought, was tough love. How in the world did her mother bear it? “She and Will are a couple. I don't know how it'll end up, but she's happy. You need to find a way to be happy, too.”

“That's a lot easier said than done.”

“That's for sure,” she agreed. “But the father I grew up with didn't just give up when things didn't work out. You dumped everything on Mom when you lost all our money. And now you say you want to help. But what is it you're doing?”

He hung his head. Like Dustin sometimes did when he'd done something he knew was wrong or didn't get his way. She expelled the breath she'd been holding. She drew another breath in an attempt to calm down. “Do you really want to help us?”

“Of course I do, kitten. I just don't seem to know how.”

“Then stop making excuses. And stop pretending to be something you're not. You know finance. That was always your specialty. Money is exactly what we need. And we need it fast.”

“I'm sure Daniel would help you if you asked. He
should
help you.”

“Daniel already gave us this house. And he insisted on guaranteeing demolition and payback of sponsors if we failed to complete the renovation. He's been more than generous. And this isn't just for me or for Dustin. Maybe we could, I don't know, take out a mortgage on Bella Flora? And then we could all pay it off together?”

It was her father's turn to sigh. But for once he seemed to have been listening. And thinking. “You won't qualify for a mortgage, sweetheart. You'd need a serious credit history and a steady income for that. There are ways to borrow money against an asset. You could borrow from a hard money lender. But the interest rate would be steep, and if you weren't able to pay the loan and the interest off at the end of the allotted time, they would take the asset.”

Her mother walked into the kitchen. Given the windblown hair and the sunburnt cheeks, it appeared she'd been out for a morning walk. Frowning at the mess, she sidestepped the egg spatter on the floor, eyed the misshapen undercooked contents of the casserole, then poured herself a cup of coffee.

“I was just asking Dad if he'd take a look at whether we might be able to borrow money or take out a loan of some kind.”

She made no comment about the mess, but instead looked at Kyra's father. “That's a good idea. Could you take a look at the financial possibilities for us, Steve?”

Her father looked surprised; that surprise turned to pleasure. “I was just telling Kyra how much I want to help.” His chest puffed out slightly. “I think I'll take a walk on the beach to clear my head a bit. Then I'll see what I can come up with.”

Kyra watched him go. “Wow. That worked way better than my attempt at tough love.”

Her mother smiled. “‘Good cop, bad cop' was created for a reason.” She considered the abandoned soufflé, then began to pull things out of the refrigerator. “I think your father's forgotten who he is and what he accomplished before Malcolm Dyer stomped all over us.” She added milk and cheese to the mixture, then tossed in another stick of margarine. After a few moments staring into the refrigerator she withdrew a jar of salsa and poured it in, too. “I think even a soufflé can be saved or reimagined under the right circumstances.” She turned the oven back on. “Everyone needs a purpose, or at least a goal.”

“What's yours?” Kyra asked on her way to the utility closet to retrieve the mop.

“Hmm.” Maddie picked up the casserole dish and slipped it back into the oven. “It used to be being a good mother.”

“Check.” Kyra affixed a new wet cloth onto the mop head and went to work on the egg spatter. “You definitely got the mother thing right.”

Maddie smiled and bowed her thanks. “Then it was surviving. Keeping our heads above water.”

“Check—mostly anyway.” Kyra put some muscle into the mopping.

Avery arrived sniffing happily like a mouse on the scent of cheese. “Is that soufflé I smell?”

“Sort of.” Maddie smiled and poured a cup of coffee for Avery.

“And now?” Kyra asked. “What's your goal now?”

“I'm still thinking about that,” Maddie replied. “But I have to admit I wish there were a way to talk Annelise out of bulldozing the hotel.”

“Amen, sister.” Avery looked up from her coffee, distracted by the scent of warm, melted cheese.

“Why?” Kyra asked her mother. “I mean, I agree, but why do you say that?”

“Because I think we all need
Do Over
, or something like
Do Over
, to pour ourselves into. And because I'm totally pissed off at the network for the way they've treated us and how they've hijacked your idea and our program. I don't think it suits any of us.”

“Amen!” Kyra and Avery said together.

Nikki wandered in, her hair in disarray, her eyes still cloudy with sleep. Already Kyra thought she saw a softening of her features, a thickening around the middle. The idea of her as a mother was almost as hard to fathom as her mother having a sex life had once been. Life certainly was full of surprises, some more pleasant than others. As she watched, Nikki walked over to the coffeepot and put her nose as close to it as possible.

“What are you doing?” Avery asked.

“I may not be allowed to drink it but nobody said I couldn't inhale it. Maybe I'll be like Bill Clinton and inhale but not ingest.” She took one more whiff. “Sorry,” she said, noticing their eyes on her. “I think I interrupted something that sounded an awful lot like a prayer meeting. What were you talking about?”

Maddie laughed. “I was just saying that the biggest thing I learned when our world fell apart was to be proactive. There is no reward without risk and certainly not without hard work. If we're going to go down, I say we go down fighting.” She looked at all three of them. “What do you say?”

Kyra knew she wasn't the only one wondering how big a fight they might be talking or how great a risk they'd have to take, but in the end she'd much rather go down swinging. “I'm in,” she said.

“I'm up for a fight,” Avery said. “A little bloodletting, as long as it's not ours, might make me feel better.”

“Me, too,” Nikki added. “And may I add a final amen!”