“IS SOMETHING WRONG?” she asked again.
He gave Allie of the hallway art—and possibly his landlady—a look. This was the second time he’d gotten the unsettling feeling that she might see things about him that others didn’t. No one but his sister had ever seen past what he was prepared to show them, and he didn’t like it.
But then he saw she wasn’t even looking at him. She was looking at the dog, Popsy, lying in the wagon, one paw trailing, looking as boneless as a pile of rags.
“With the dog?” she clarified.
Sam felt huge relief that she was talking about the dog, not him.
Cody was now facing the challenge of the steps leading up to the cottage. With huge effort, he lifted the limp Popsy off the wagon. The dog reluctantly found its legs.
“Not permanently,” he said and hoped that was true. The dog was unusually attached to Cody. The two were inseparable. He did not think his sudden cosmically ordained family unit of uncle and nephew and dog could sustain another loss. And yet he didn’t feel quite ready to tell her what the vet had said.
The dog is depressed.
Who knew that dogs got depressed? Or that little kids gave up speaking when the unspeakable happened to them?
“I thought I caught a whiff of something as they went by,” she said, trying to word it delicately.
“The dog got carsick.”
“Oh, no!”
Her sympathy was so genuine that he couldn’t resist sharing the full horror. “You have no idea. At sixty-five miles per hour, with wall-to-wall traffic and not a rest stop for thirty miles. Then, when I finally could pull over, I had to unpack the suitcase to find new clothes. Not the Superman cape, though. I don’t have an extra one of those.
“And guess how long the new clothes lasted before Popsy got sick on Cody again? I may never get the smell out of my car. Sheesh. I may never get the smell out of Popsy.”
He stopped himself, embarrassed. He sounded just like those moms at the playgroup the counselor had recommended for Cody. Sam had tried to drop Cody off there several times.
Nobody warned me it was going to be this hard.
Cody, to Sam’s consternation—he was trying to do the right thing, after all—and his guilty and secret relief, had used his limited communication skills to make it known he hated the play group.
“Cody is your son and the dog is Popsy?”
“Cody is my nephew, but yeah, that’s the whole cast of characters.”
Sam really hated sympathy, which made his recounting of the horrible trip down here even more mystifying. Still, right now, that sympathy—the soft look on her face as her gaze followed Cody and Popsy as they went up the stairs—served Sam well. He was seeing a whole shift in attitude.
“You must all be exhausted. I’ll show you which rooms to take, and put out some towels. I’m sorry for the welcome I gave you earlier.”
“Not your fault,” he said gruffly.
“Well, let’s start again. I’m Alicia Cook. Welcome to Soul’s Retreat.”
She held out her hand. Maybe it was a mistake to take it, because any sense he had left of her being a child disappeared in her grip. Her touch made him look at her differently. She was extraordinarily feminine, and her hand held the unconscious sensuality of the sea in it.
She was very pretty, her bone structure exquisite, her eyes a shade of blue bordering on violet that he would not have been able to name if asked. He was aware of a scent tickling his nostrils, and realized she smelled of the sea and something else. Lemons? Whatever it was, it was faintly ordinary and faintly exotic and faintly enticing.
It occurred to him that she had welcomed them as if she planned to be their hostess. Maybe that’s why sympathy was not a workable strategy. Shared accommodations weren’t going to work, and he needed to let her know right away. It looked like when she got an idea in that head of hers it was hard to displace it!
“I hope you won’t have too much difficulty finding a place to stay,” he said, and heard the cool, no-nonsense tone he used when closing a deal for his computer systems company.
All of it—especially the enticing part—made getting rid of her seem imperative.
That tone he had just used could—and had—intimidated business tycoons with global reputations. But her mouth—plump and pink—set in a very unflattering line, and her brows lowered.
“I’m not going to find a place to stay,” she said firmly. “Your arrival has taken me completely by surprise, but I’ll accommodate you and Cody to the best of my ability tonight. Tomorrow we’ll look at options. Maybe it will be workable for you to stay. With me.”
“You want to share accommodations?” he asked her slowly. “With someone you don’t know?”
“Want to seems to be overstating it a bit. None of you looks dangerous. The dog doesn’t even look like it has the energy to bite.”
Sam felt this odd little niggle, for the second time, of wanting to be protective of her.
Just as when she said she had a weapon when it was so pathetically obvious not only that she didn’t, but that she wouldn’t use it if she did.
Are you crazy? You don’t invite strangers to stay with you.
But he managed to bite his tongue. He looked at the set of her jaw and felt a sudden exhaustion. It had been a horrible day. That look on her face felt as if it would take a lot more energy than he had to sort this out right now.
He needed to get Cody into the bathtub and into a bed. He had dealt with three of Cody’s legendary meltdowns today. For a kid who didn’t talk he was an absolute master at making his displeasure known to all. Sam was not up to another one any more than he was up to dealing with whatever the stubborn set of Alicia Cook’s little mouth meant.
She was right. Tomorrow, they would look at options. Tomorrow, he’d deal with it. His team of lawyers could let her know he had an ironclad contract and she could find someplace else to stay for two weeks.
He knew, despite a team of people working for him, that another place on Sugar Cone was out of the question for either himself and Cody or Mavis’s granddaughter. They’d had a devil of a time finding a condo on the busier side of the beach for Cody’s Australian auntie and uncle and their kids, arriving later in the week.
We need to know him better. He’s all we have left of Adam.
Sam had met them, of course. At the wedding, the christening, Christmas two years ago. At the funeral. Good people. Decent. Hardworking. Real, somehow, in the same category that the woman in front of him was real.
And yet, when he thought of meeting them this time, he could feel his heart sinking to the bottom of his feet.
Despite the fact he was pretty sure he was botching nearly every single thing about raising a three-year-old, just like Cody was what they had left of Adam, he was what Sam had left of his sister, Sue, too.
And Sam had a history with this little cottage. He had been coming here for a long time. He had memories of endless days of him and Sue running on that beach as children. He desperately wanted Cody to feel the kind of unfettered joy that they had felt here.
Sam’s parents had let the lease lapse when he and Sue were teenagers, but when they died, he had approached Mavis and asked about the possibility of leasing again. She, he remembered, had been delighted, almost as if she was waiting for him to come back. Since then, the cottage had always provided exactly what the sign, swinging at the gate with letters so faded you could barely read them, promised.
Soul’s Retreat. Sam Walker was counting on this place to give him something that was in very short supply in his life right now.
Serenity.
Wisdom.
Wasn’t there a prayer about those things? Not that he was a praying kind of man, though given the desperation of the decision he had come here to make, he wasn’t going to rule out the possibility of becoming one.
What he didn’t need were any further complications to a life that was seriously complicated right now.
And this woman, Alicia—Allie—with her black-tipped hair, and a tiny bit self-conscious in her wet, too-large T-shirt, and trying hard not to let it show, had complication written all over her.
He was sympathetic about her grandmother. Of course he was. But, after tonight, she couldn’t stay here with him under the same roof.
She looked like she was still the artsy type that her hallway art indicated. She’d probably love to go to Paris for two weeks. There. Problem solved. He would offer her a round-trip, all-expenses-paid to Paris so he and Cody could have the cottage to themselves.
If only all of life’s problems were so easy to solve.
His more immediate problem was this: he had a very stinky dog and a very stinky kid on his hands. Neither of them liked baths.
* * *
“You’ve eaten, right?” Alicia asked, as she watched the shocking change in her life unfold before her very eyes.
Sam Walker stood in the bedroom she had suggested for Cody. The bedroom was not large, at the best of times, but now it looked positively tiny. Sam’s shoulders seemed to be taking up all the space. He was rummaging through the small suitcase Cody had dragged up the walk on his wagon.
Cody and the dog peeked out at her from under the bed. The man and the boy had identical eyes, large, dark brown and soft as suede. There was something in them that could weave a spell around the unwary.
Which she was not.
“Yeah, we stopped at Pizza Palooza,” Sam said, his voice a growl of unconscious sensuality. “Perfect Pal Happy Deals all the way around. Did they make me happy? No. I’m pretty sure that’s what the dog threw up. I wonder if I can sue for misleading advertising?”
Allie felt a jab of sympathy for him. She reminded herself to be wary of spells, and overrode the sympathy. Much more sensible to see this as a reminder that he had a team of lawyers at his fingertips, and presumably, he was not afraid to use them.
Still, she had to venture, “I don’t think the Perfect Pal Happy Deals are dog-designated.”
“Did you hear that, Cody? The Happy Deal is not dog-designated. No more feeding Perfect Pal to Popsy. So, how about a bath, buddy?”
Sam had extracted a pair of pajamas from the suitcase. They looked as if they would fit a good-size teddy bear, and they had fire engines on them. Allie was finding this level of adorable invading her home doing very odd things to her heart, wary as it was.
The dog and the little boy shrank back a little farther under the bed. The man shot her a look, then got on his knees, rear in the air—and a very nice rear, at that—and looked under the bed.
“Come on,” he said, his tone soothing, despite the exasperation Allie had so clearly seen on his features.
The boy scooted right out of sight. The dog made a sound that wasn’t quite a growl, more like a hum of dismay.
Allie backed out of the room to leave Sam to his challenges, which seemed substantial. She reluctantly closed the open patio door—a precaution against the possibility of a burglar in the neighborhood. She was aware she felt a little safer with Sam in the house, though this reliance on a man to feel safe made her annoyed with herself.
Allie retreated to her bedroom, taking her tablet and her guitar with her. The bedroom proved not to be any kind of retreat at all.
For one thing, the cottage, with the closed patio door, was hot, her tiny bedroom window open a tiny burglar-proof crack, was not providing much of a breeze. She would normally leave her bedroom door open, but with guests in the house, that wasn’t possible, especially since, as a defense against the suffocating heat, she stripped down to the bathing suit that was under her clothes. She appreciated its tininess, as much of her skin as possible exposed to the stingy breeze coming in her window.
She picked up her guitar and strummed it hopefully with her thumb, but it told her, with a certain sullen stubbornness, no. Which was too bad, because it might have covered the other sounds coming through the paper-thin walls of the cottage.
While she listened, the child was snared, a bath was run, the little boy splashing while his uncle made motor boat sounds.
There was something about Sam—so confident and so handsome—making motorboat sounds that made him all too human. He was a man way out of his element. And yet trying, valiantly, to do the right thing.
At some point Allie realized the little boy was not speaking, and it distressed her and made her realize she had not asked enough questions before allowing this pair, plus a dog, to share her home.
Why was she assuming Sam was doing the right thing? How did an uncle and nephew end up together on holidays? Why wasn’t the little boy speaking? Where were the mommy and daddy? Was Sam Walker really the child’s uncle? What if she had inadvertently embroiled herself in a parental kidnapping of some sort?
Though honestly, Sam didn’t look like he was enjoying the exercise in child-rearing enough to have used illegal means to experience it.
Sam Walker did not look like a kidnapper any more than he looked like a home invader. In fact, he looked the furthest thing from a man capable of any kind of subterfuge. There was something in his eyes, in the set of his mouth, in the way he carried himself—in the way he handled the child and dog—that made him seem like a man you could trust, even if you didn’t particularly like him.
Her grandmother had known him, she reminded herself. Had not just known him, but liked him enough to share an ongoing rental relationship with him for many years.
Still, Allie was aware that not only was she not sure what the type who became involved in a parental abduction would look like, but that she had an unfortunate history of placing her trust in people who had not earned it. While other people could trust their instincts, she had ample and quite recent proof that she could not.
Determined to not be naive, she put on her headphones to block out the noises coming from the bathroom and typed Sam Walker into the search engine on her tablet. Not too surprisingly, there were thousands of Sam Walkers. She changed tack and put in “recent abductions.” Also, sadly, way too many of them, though no photos of a curly-headed little boy who looked like Cody. No abducted children with dogs.
Giving up, Allie Googled the legal ramifications of rental contracts, only to find out lawyers were quite cagey about dispensing free information over the internet.
After that, she went through her grandmother’s documents, stored in a box under Allie’s bed, hoping for the rental contract, but found nothing.
Through the headphones, she heard the muffled sounds of the bath ending. She took them off and listened.
The bed in the room next to her creaked, a small creak, and then a larger one. Too easy to picture.
“Get off, Popsy, you stink. And you’re next for the bath. Don’t even think of hiding. Okay, where is Woozer, Wizzle, Wobble? Here it is.”
One bedtime story, read three times.
Again, that deep, sure voice, sliding over those silly words was all too endearing: “‘And then the witch said, woozer, wizzle, wobble and turned the toad into a donkey.’”
Ashamed to realize that she was acting like an eavesdropper and that the little scene playing out in the bedroom made her ache with that same weak longing the family on the beach had caused in her earlier, Allie put the headphones back on. She turned the music up.
She pointed her finger at her silent guitar. You are not my only source of music.
Then, she stretched out on her bed, and let the faint breeze play over her skin. Without any warning, the three nights of not sleeping suddenly caught up with her.