The Kiss on Castle Road (A Lavender Island Novel) (9 page)

CHAPTER 8

Natalie awoke the next morning to a hangover and a general feeling of sadness she couldn’t quite identify. She slammed the alarm clock until it bounced off the nightstand, then groaned, caught the ringing cacophony, and snapped it off with more force than necessary. Rolling over, she sighed and drifted back into consciousness. Vignettes of the previous evening floated before her—laughing at Paige’s wig, winning the dart tournament, meeting a huge guy with cartoonish muscles named John-O who’d flirted with her the second half of the evening, and then . . . Dr. Sherman . . . hightailing it out of the bar, seemingly wanting to get away from her.

The source of her vague sadness was identified.

She rolled off the bed as her head throbbed in protest, and instantly wondered if she could talk Paige into taking Lily to school. Natalie definitely needed another hour of sleep, not to mention an aspirin and a few glasses of water.

But then she remembered the new leaf she was turning and forced herself into a standing position. This was her job. Lily was counting on her. And so was Olivia. Plus, she was starting her second job today. And she might get to see Dr. Sherman. And maybe she’d help him on his date tonight, if he didn’t keep running away from her.

She steadied herself against the nightstand. She’d just have to cut her nights shorter, and drink less, if she was going to do this early-rising thing. As she snatched up her clothes to head down the hall to her shower, a wave of admiration swept through her that Olivia did this every day.

The shower and some coffee did her well. By the time Lily was swinging her legs under the table and humming into her Froot Loops, Natalie felt 75 percent prepared to face the day. She even made Olivia some plain toast and coffee and brought it to her in bed, telling her not to get up this morning—she and Lily would be fine, and she’d do Lily’s hair. By ten minutes to seven, Lily had on her fireman costume and a flashlight in her backpack, and Natalie cheered up the last 25 percent.

Or maybe 23 percent.

There was still a 2 percent tug of sadness every time she thought of Dr. Sherman and the way he’d kept sliding away from her at the bar.

By nine thirty, she was taking her second, more detailed, tour of Casas del Sur, her new name tag secured to her blouse underneath her braid and her new pink “Casas” cap pulled low over her eyes.

“And this is the movie theater,” Steve Stegner said, sweeping open a heavy metal door to a dimly lit room with sixty red-velvet seats in six rows and a small aisle down the center. Like the library, dining room, computer room, and exercise room, the space was rich and luxurious, with flashes of gold in the curtain tassels and carved chair handles.

It also was not empty.

“Colonel!” Steve said. “What are you doing in here?”

A small, hunched man—not much more than five feet tall—sidestepped slowly from the front of the stage to face them. He had an ocean-blue three-piece suit on, neatly trimmed white hair along the base of his skull, and a rose stem in his hand.

“Ah, Stegner, my favorite person,” he said in a gravelly voice. “I’ll bet you graduated least likely to smile.”

“Colonel, you shouldn’t be in here when no one is—”

“Balderdash!” he barked. “I’m just setting up a little surprise for Marie. Leave me be. I’ll be out of here in a minute. And excuse my language, young lady.” He bowed at Natalie. “Stegner, you’re dismissed.” The man shuffled back toward the stage and resumed his bony-fingered arrangement of the rose with a card and envelope near the stage steps.

To Natalie’s surprise, Steve backed out of the room, motioning for Natalie to follow, and closed the door behind them.

“The Colonel is one of our tough customers,” he said. “Pretty much always gets his way.”

Natalie bit her cheek and nodded.

“Let me show you the second-floor dining room and ballroom. Then I’ll take you outside and show you the activities shuttle cart. You’ll be driving one, and John-O will be driving the other.”

“John-O?”

“John O’Donnell. He’s the other assistant activities director.”

“Big guy?” She held her hands out from her shoulders to indicate the Popeye-looking muscles she recalled from her flirter last night.

“Yes. You’ve met already?”

“I believe so. Socially. Unless there are two John-Os on Lavender Island built like tanks.”

“He’s the one.” Steve hit the elevator button. “He’ll be driving the volunteer crew today, and you’ll be driving the ladies to their harbor walk.”

The elevator doors closed as Natalie tried to remember John-O more clearly. He’d seemed nice enough. But as she frowned and tried for better recall, her mind drifted instead to Dr. Sherman, sitting with his knee up at the edge of the bar, his sexy, tanned forearms on the edge, twisting his beer bottle . . . She quickly pushed the new image out of her mind and stepped off the elevator with Steve.

The ballroom was gorgeous. Parquet flooring shone across a fifty-foot expanse, taking up almost the entire second floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the length of one side, showcasing a palm-tree-and-ocean view, with a row of round tables set all the way around. Five crystal chandeliers ran down the center, their beads reflecting the sunlight as it came through the windows.

“It’s lovely!” she said, a little breathless.

“We just finished it,” Steve said proudly. “One of the things we need help with is planning the Senior Prom for the last day of spring. It’ll be our first event here. Our last part-time activities assistant left abruptly, with many of the plans undone, as well as with half the ticket money.” Steve shook his head. “But we can recover. Our seniors are excited about it, and we have a volunteer prom-planning committee, but they need someone to help them with some of the particulars. Are you up for that?”

“Yes, sure.”

“We’ll need you to stick around.” He turned to face her. “I don’t want them to be disappointed again. Can I count on you?”

An instinctual panic began to set in at being asked to commit to a time period, but Steve’s face was full of so much entreaty. She could do this. Steve wanted to count on her. And Natalie wanted to be the type of person who could be counted on. And it was only three months.

“I promise,” she said.

Steve broke into a relieved grin that made her heart do a funny flip. It felt like something she hadn’t experienced in a long time—something along the lines of pride.

As they walked back through the ballroom between the sun’s pretty rays across the parquet, she straightened her spine and felt a lift in her chest. It was the best she’d felt in eons.

At ten thirty, just as her tour with Steve was ending and she’d seen the pool, the pool house, and one of the apartment rooms, Natalie ran into her first snafu.

“Where
is
he?” Steve asked the front desk.

“He left with the harbor-walk ladies,” the young woman there said. “Hi, I’m June Lee.” She held out her hand toward Natalie. She also wore one of the Casas del Sur name tags and collared shirts.

“Natalie Grant.”

“Natalie is the new assistant,” Steve said. “She was supposed to take the harbor-walk ladies today, not John-O.”

“It was rescheduled, and you two weren’t here, so John-O took them.”

“We can’t just have willy-nilly schedule changes like that, June.”

June glanced at Natalie with a barely suppressed eye-roll. “Well, they’re gone. Natalie can take the other cart with the volunteers for the center.”

“The center?” Natalie asked hopefully.

“The Friends of the Sea Lion,” Steve mumbled.

Natalie couldn’t help the little soaring in her chest when she heard him mention Dr. Sherman’s center—but it was followed much too quickly by a flutter of butterflies.

She couldn’t remember the last time a man made her so nervous—and it was probably from a job interview, not a date. Maybe she wanted to impress him. What was she saying? She wasn’t trying to
impress
Dr. Sherman. Her type didn’t impress brainy PhDs. Maybe she just wanted to help him—make sure he didn’t feel bad about his dates and do better on the next one. Or maybe she felt as if she had to apologize for her species—women like Caren, Alice, and Lynne shouldn’t treat shy men like Dr. Sherman that way. All he needed were a few smooth lines and a way to deliver his honesty, to show these women what a wonderful man he seemed to be.

June handed her the ignition keys, and she and Steve went out to the parking lot so he could explain the shuttle’s bells and whistles. It was called the Concierge—a six-seat, open-air, tram-style golf cart with a soft-top roof that had scalloped edges hanging down. It had larger tires than most of the other golf carts she’d seen, probably designed to handle the hills of the island. All except Castle Road, Steve said, which was too steep even for the Concierge.

Just as Steve finished and ducked his head out of the passenger-side seat, an elderly, rotund woman came down the sidewalk ramp, yoo-hooing in her blue “I’m a Friend!” shirt.

“I’m Sarah. But you can call me Sugar,” she said in a sexy Southern drawl.

“I’m Natalie.” Natalie hopped out of the shuttle to help Sugar into her seat, just as Doris and Marie came arm in arm down the ramp.

The women wriggled into the shuttle as two gentlemen made their way down the ramp—the Colonel, who she’d seen earlier with the rose and the three-piece suit, which he still had on, and another elderly man who was taller and looked to be younger—maybe eighty—who still had a shock of thick white hair and whose “I’m a Friend!” T-shirt stretched tightly across a barrel chest and belly.

“Why, hello there, young lady. Aren’t you pretty. I’m George.” He thrust out his hand.

George climbed into the back of the shuttle as the Colonel walked around front to the passenger seat. He swung himself inside in an impressively lithe move that reminded Natalie of the way he might have entered a cockpit decades ago.

“Full speed ahead,” he ground out.

The Colonel proceeded to bark directions to her the whole way there, drowning out the soft female voice of the GPS, while George flirted with Sugar in the backseat, and Doris and Marie began chattering in the middle seat about the fact that someone named Veronica Stevenson was really too young to be Senior Prom queen.

Natalie couldn’t help smiling to herself.

This was going to be an interesting three months.

Elliott stood in the back room, working up the blood samples he’d taken that morning and blinking back the dryness in the contacts he’d been forced to wear until he got his glasses fixed.

He hoped to find a correlation of some sort between how sick the sea lions got and a presence of a certain gene. Another four sea lion pups had been rescued that morning—usually they got four or five calls a month, but now they were getting four or five a day.

The three samples he was testing were from Larry, Curly, and Moe, and he hoped he’d be able to help the little dudes out. They were taking a while to recover because they were some of the youngest pups the center had seen yet, but this morning all three seemed to be on an upswing. But, as excited as Elliott was about this new work, he was surprised that his mind drifted for the fortieth time to Natalie Grant.

Heat formed around his collar at the way he’d run from her inquisitiveness at the bar, and he had to put down the culture tubes he was prepping to lean against the counter and think for a second.

He took a deep breath and told himself to concentrate. He snapped on the Bunsen burner and reached for the vials of blood Jim had helped collect.

He probably wouldn’t see her again. She might come to the center to drop off the seniors for her new job, or maybe check on Larry, Curly, and Moe, but she wouldn’t seek him out, even if she did say she wanted to help him on his dates. Surely that had been her gimlet talking.

He imagined a more likely scenario would be that she’d stay in the main periphery by the pools and wouldn’t even think of him. He was sure someone else could take her on a tour of the sea lions she’d helped rescue. He’d mention it to Doris.

He inoculated each tube with blood from a different animal and tried not to think about her anymore. Eventually, Jim banged through the door.