SAM DELIBERATELY LOOKED away from her. He did not like how astute she was, how she read him so easily, how she voiced a fear he had not even articulated inside himself.
He focused on the beach. There was a beachcomber out there this morning using a metal detector to look for treasure. One person’s loss could be another person’s gain. Beyond him, the waves lapped at the shore. He made himself look at Allie.
She had obviously made a huge effort to cover up this morning. She looked like an “after” picture for a weight-loss spa. She was dressed in too-large sweatpants and a shapeless T-shirt. It looked as if she could hold open the waistband of those pants and stick three more of her in there.
But no matter what Allie did, or what she wore, he could not un-see what he had seen last night. Or un-feel what he had felt when she was pressed against him on that bed.
Add that physical awareness of her—sharp in the air between them—to her kind of spooky intuition, and you had an equation that equaled trouble.
Still, had Sam actually ever put that question into words? Though the feeling of unease had gnawed at him, there was the question, point-blank. Did Adam’s family, his brother, Bill, and his sister-in-law, Kathy, want custody?
“They haven’t said those words,” Sam admitted.
They hadn’t said those words, and he hadn’t said those words, but everyone would want what was best for Cody. And that was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? What was best for Cody? A single guy? Or a family?
One person’s loss could be another person’s gain.
He could feel her thoughtful eyes on him, scanning, picking up the things he was not saying. He felt as if she could see, or sense, the sinking in his stomach and the tightening in his heart.
“We’ll make sure there are no wrong impressions,” she promised.
We. As if they were a team.
“I’ll stay out of your way,” she promised again. “If they happen to meet me, we’ll just have to explain the mix-up over the contract. There will be no doubt in their minds that we are not involved in some casual fling. Besides, I think it would be pretty obvious to them, or anyone really, that a guy like you wouldn’t be involved with someone like me.”
Now she had his full attention. He could feel a frown pulling down his brows.
“Why would you say that?” he asked cautiously. That was certainly not what he had felt when he held her last night.
And not what he had felt at all when she had thrown her arms open to the spray of water from the garden hose, transforming her into a goddess of the night and sea.
He had felt the very real danger of some chemistry building between them.
“Oh, you know,” she said breezily, “corporate king, beach-dwelling, barely-making-it musician.”
“Corporate king?” he sputtered, vaguely insulted. “That’s a weird conclusion to arrive at. It can’t be the way I dress. You’ve seen me in shorts and sandals, and my pajamas, for Pete’s sake.”
“Ha. GQ on vacation. I bet you have a corner office, in a glass building with a stunning view. You probably built some kind of empire, from the ground up. Computer tech of some sort.”
He could feel his brows knitting closer together, and made a conscious effort to relax them. “Did you do an internet search on me?”
“Aha! I’m right, then. I might have tried to do an internet search. Just to make sure there was no abduction afoot. Do you know how many Sam Walkers there are?”
“I have no idea.”
“Thousands. No, it’s the flashy car in the driveway, legal beagles ready to defend your contracts...everything about you radiates wealth and power. You send out the unmistakable tycoon vibe—”
“Tycoon? Me? I get a picture of a bunch of people stranded on a tropical island, and the tycoon being the snotty one who won’t get his hands dirty.”
“I was thinking something more current. Like the tech wizard, Mitch Jones. He’s the guy who invented that app—”
“I know who he is,” he said drily.
“Or that guy who created the company that morphed into the big search engine—”
“Henrich Pfitzer,” he said.
“See? You know him. I knew it. Computer tech billionaires. They’re your tribe.”
“I don’t know him! They are not my tribe. I don’t have a tribe.”
“Yes, you do.”
He thought of telling her his “tribe” had shrunk quite a bit in the past eight months. Popsy and Cody. He was barely at the office anymore, running things remotely, putting good, good people in charge. But she didn’t know that, and what’s more, she didn’t need to know that.
“It’s the I have arrived tribe,” Allie told him, “whereas, I, on the other hand...”
She lifted a slender shoulder in wry self-deprecation that was somehow heart-wrenching.
Or would be if you had a heart, which he reminded himself, sternly, he no longer did.
“Anyway, it would be more than obvious to the casual observer, that you and I would be a terrible combination. Unworkable.”
He should have found that conclusion a relief. Instead he found it somewhat distressing and found himself studying her. Sam became aware some hurt practically shimmered in the air around her.
Something—or more likely someone—had stolen her confidence from her.
He hated that. But he acknowledged he would be the worst possible choice to try to fix it. He had failed spectacularly at marriage. After the demise of his marriage, Sam had embraced a play-hard lifestyle. His sister had been fond of telling him that he had the emotional depth of a one-celled organism.
And all that was before more grief and a troubled nephew and a depressed dog had turned his life and his world upside down. It shocked him that he still projected the old him: wealthy and powerful, self-assured with the world at his feet. That’s not what he was anymore.
He was a man who woke up every morning with a new sense of drowning in his own inadequacy.
You didn’t grab onto someone else when you were drowning.
He knew that from a brief stint as a lifeguard when he was a teenager. A drowning person just pulled others down, too.
And two drowning people? Catastrophe.
“I don’t see that we have a choice,” she continued when he was silent. “We’ll have to share the accommodation.”
As if it was that simple: as if there was no history. No her coming at him with Harold, and no red bathing suit.
Last night, after the house had gone quiet, he had heard a door squeak open. And then another.
He’d gotten up and looked.
Popsy had always only been loyal to two people. Cody and Sam’s sister.
Last night, the dog had managed to open the door of Cody’s room and Sam had peered through the partially open door of Allie’s to see the dog snuggled up with her on her bed.
Both door latches were worn out.
“You needn’t worry,” she assured him brightly, as if his worry at the brief but compelling history between them was written all over his face. “At all. Even if I was your type—so obvious I’m not—I’m not in the market for a relationship. Been there, done that.”
She rolled her eyes as if her been there, done that meant nothing, but if he was not mistaken, that was a badly bruised heart she was wearing on her sleeve.
He shouldn’t ask. But he did. “How old are you?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because you seem awfully young to have given up on happily-ever-after already.”
“I’m twenty-three,” she said, as if that was plenty old to have given up on romantic dreams.
“To be frank, you look like a poster child for picket fences and baby carriages, like those are the things that would make you happy.”
“What a terribly old-fashioned thing to say.” Bright spots rose up in her cheeks that told him he had hit a nerve.
“Ah, me and Thurston Howell are like that,” he said. “Old-fashioned tycoon types.”
“So, we both have some misperceptions we have to give up. How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“And where are you at with happily-ever-after?”
He was annoyed by the question, but in fairness, he had started it.
“I gave it a try,” he admitted, reluctantly. “I was married. I’m pretty good at math, so I should have realized, statistically, a fairy-tale ending was a long shot.”
Why had he felt compelled to reveal that? For a frightening moment, he thought she was going to probe that, delve into his very private life. He could tell she was tempted. But, in the end, she didn’t.
“My point exactly,” Allie said. “I gave it a try, too. So, if we’ve dispensed with the personal part of the roommate arrangement, maybe we could move on?”
“To?”
“I can’t seem to find the actual contract that you signed with my grandmother. Do you have a copy of it?”
“Not with me. It will be at my office. I can have someone send it, if you want. Is there something in particular you need clarified?”
“I was wondering if you already paid my grandmother or if I can look forward to some funds?”
He suspected this was still about the relationship she was not planning on having with him. She wanted him to be aware of all the chasms that separated them, finances probably being the biggest one.
And she wanted it to look as if all she really cared about was the money, as if that was why she was agreeing to sharing her cottage with him. She wanted it to look as if she was capable of keeping this relationship strictly business.
“So Paris is completely off the table?”
“Completely,” she said firmly. “I can’t go anywhere else. Not right now.”
He saw it. For one second, he saw something flash through those clear eyes. For all her brave front and businesslike tone, it was apparent Allie was terrified of going out into the larger world.
“My grandmother used to say the cure for anything is salt water,” she said, though he was not sure which of them she thought needed curing, her or him.
“Salt water?” he asked, softly.
She looked at him. “It’s a quote, she found in an old Reader’s Digest from the thirties. Along with her fabric collection, my grandmother’s closets are stuffed with those. The quote is, ‘The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears or the sea.’”
It confirmed what he had glimpsed: something in her was afraid, hurt, broken. Seeking a cure, even in the brittle yellowed pages of old magazines. He should have known how deep the fear was in her when she tried to clobber him with Harold!
He didn’t know the why of it—why such a beautiful young woman was hiding out here. He didn’t actually want to know the why of it. He was shocked to find out there were enough pieces of his heart left intact to break some more. For her. Someone who was practically a stranger to him.
Suddenly, he saw the truth of it: if he insisted on her moving out, if he followed the letter of the law and enforced his contract, she was not going to see how sensible it was, how it would protect them both.
She was going to see it as more proof that the world was out of her control, that bad things could happen to her without warning, that this place where she felt safe was not safe, either.
He was not the man to fix whatever had gone wrong for her. He knew that. But he knew, as a person who had found out exactly that hard truth about the world—that there was no safe place—he could not make it any worse for her, either.
Sam took a deep breath and looked out over her shoulder again, at the perfect stretch of beach. The beachcomber had paused and was digging through the sand. He held something up to the sun, and it glittered gold.
Sam had been holding on to this place, in his mind, thinking long, summery days of sand and water could help Cody. Help them create the bond he felt was absent. Help them become a family, of sorts, or let go of that notion altogether. He had counted on this place, so special in his world, to help him know what to do.
The complication to his plan, Allie, turned and looked at the stretches of golden sand and gently lapping waves, too.
If she was prepared to keep it all business, so was he. That was his specialty, after all, business. It was apparent she needed the money.
But it was her words, not her need of money, that he was thinking of. Sweat, tears or the sea.
Her words held a promise of something. Hope.
Which, of course, was the most dangerous thing of all.
So, maybe not the wisest thing to share a space with her but, as she had pointed out, they could avoid each other.
They could use the beach as an extension of the house. Though Sam did not consider himself intuitive—at all—he had a deep sense of Cody needing the beach, that carefree place of sandcastles and kites and leaping waves.
Besides, he didn’t have any choice, really.
Life had been showing him that lately. He didn’t always have choices. He hated that. He hated feeling powerless, as if the most important things in life could be wrested from his control in an instant.
“Okay,” he heard himself saying. “I thought these days were well behind me, but let’s be roommates.”
She held out her hand to shake on it.
He hesitated, and then took it. The full danger of what he was letting himself in for was in the delicate strength and vulnerability of her touch.
And yet, somehow in that touch, too, was a sense of having, impossibly, found something gold in a vast expanse of sand.
He sighed. One more complication in a life that was already way too complicated.