“And you think we’re going to settle things with a quick chat on the deck?” Boone inquired skeptically. “Assuming we don’t fall through the damaged boards, that is?”
“Probably not,” Cora Jane admitted. “But you have to start sometime. It might as well be now. Gabi, Samantha and I will get started in here. B.J. can help by washing up these dishes. You don’t need to worry about him getting into mischief or in the way.”
Boone gave her a resigned look, but he did head for the deck.
Cora Jane turned to see both of her other granddaughters grinning.
“Nicely done,” Samantha said. “Do you have any other missions for these next couple of weeks we should know about?”
Cora Jane chuckled at the girl’s impudence. Samantha might be thirty-five, but she’d always be a girl in Cora Jane’s eyes.
“Guess you’ll just have to wait and see,” she replied. “And in case you’re wondering, while I might feel I have a halfway decent relationship with Our Lord, not even I can call up a hurricane. That was His plan.”
And in her view it was definitely starting to look as if it had been a blessing in disguise.
* * *
Emily was crying. Boone could tell by the dejected set of her shoulders and the soft sniffs she tried hard to disguise when she heard the door to the deck open and close.
“Go away,” she muttered.
“Sorry. I’m under orders.”
Her head snapped around at that. “You!”
“Who’d you think it was?”
“Samantha, Gabi, maybe even Grandmother.”
He laughed. “Yeah, those would have been my first choices, too.”
Surprise, then resignation registered on her face. “Of course Grandmother sent you.”
Boone leaned on the railing next to her and stared at the ocean across the road. It was hard to believe that just a couple of days earlier it had been washing over the road with giant, angry, destructive waves. Today the sky was a brilliant blue, the waves were lapping gently against sand littered with boards, house siding and roof shingles.
“Cora Jane seems to think we should settle things,” he explained.
“What things?”
“You and me, I’m guessing. We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms. That weighs on her.”
“True, but we both moved on. That’s in the past,” she said, a hopeful note in her voice. “Right?”
“I’d have said so until you walked in the door this morning,” he said candidly. “You came in with complication written all over you.”
She glanced over at him, then sighed. “That was pretty much my reaction, too, if you must know.”
Boone chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“I didn’t expect you to admit it.”
“I’ve never been a liar, Boone. That was you.”
Boone frowned at the accusation. “Me? When did I lie?”
“You said you loved me. Next thing I knew you’d married Jenny.”
He was startled by the level of pain he thought he heard in her voice. Had she been rewriting history? “You made it pretty clear you weren’t ever coming back. What was I supposed to do? Pine for you?”
“You could have given me some time to work through things,” she accused. “That’s all I really asked of you.”
He regarded her with surprise. “When did you ask for time? If you’d asked for it, maybe I would have. Instead, you said we were over. You made it sound pretty final.” He studied her face. “Or was that the lie you had to tell yourself so you could leave town and not look back?”
She seemed to take the question to heart and actually mull it over. “Something like that,” she conceded eventually. “Okay, we both made mistakes. I wasn’t clear enough. You jumped to conclusions. I can admit to that much. Can you?”
He hesitated, then said, “I suppose.”
“Such a heartfelt concession,” she murmured dryly, then met his gaze. “But it doesn’t change anything, Boone. Not really. My life still isn’t here.”
“Believe me, I’m well aware of that. What Cora Jane hasn’t told me, B.J. has. He’s very impressed with you and Samantha. You’re the first real celebrities he’s ever met.”
Emily had the grace to chuckle at that, the tension easing slightly. “Samantha can lay claim to being a celebrity, but I just work for a few. Most of my clients aren’t that famous.”
“Just rich?” he queried.
“Is there something wrong with being rich? Your family wasn’t exactly poor. Your father was a high-powered lawyer, and your mother married a guy who made millions on widgets or something.”
He smiled at her dismissive assessment of his stepfather, who’d owned a multinational manufacturing company. “That has very little to do with me. I started from scratch and earned what I have.” He gave her a lingering look. “And I wasn’t making judgments. I just meant that having money calls for a certain kind of lifestyle, keeping up appearances, that sort of thing.”
“No question about that.” Her gaze narrowed. “Are you making a point?”
He gave her a thorough survey that put patches of bright color in her cheeks. “I just wonder what those clients of yours would make of it if they saw you in shorts and a tank top with a discount store tag hanging out the back?” He winked at her as he snapped off the tag, allowing his fingers to linger just a little too long against her bare skin before adding, “Me, I just think you look incredibly sexy.”
Her breath caught, and there was no mistaking the struggle she had to keep her gaze steady.
“Let’s not go there, okay?” she pleaded. “Obviously we have to find some way to get along with each other for the next couple of weeks for my grandmother’s sake, but then we’ll go our separate ways again. Acting crazy will only make that harder to do.”
Well, that was a clear enough warning, he thought. “No craziness,” Boone said. “Got it, though it might help if you defined this craziness you think we should avoid.”
“No fighting,” she said at once. Color climbed into her cheeks. “No touching or kissing. You know exactly what I
