Judd had just settled into his chair at Beth’s kitchen table when her sister Lainey walked through the back door, a cardboard box in her arms. Automatically rising, he took it from her and kissed her cheek in greeting.
“Good morning, Judd.” Lainey patted his face in return. She was a tad shorter and a tad softer-looking than Beth. The family joke had always been that Beth got the elegance and Lainey got the artist. She turned to her twin, who was already reaching for a third coffee mug from the cupboard. “Morning to you too, Beth.”
The corners of Beth’s mouth lifted briefly. “Hey, Lainey. What’s in the box?”
“Samples of the latest Whitney products from the licensing company.” She took the proffered coffee and pulled out the chair beside Judd’s. “I kept some of each and thought you might like the rest.”
Beth turned her back and refilled her own coffee cup. “Sure. Thanks.”
Judd couldn’t help but notice the new, tense set to her shoulders. He’d been hyper-aware of her every breath, move, mood since that fateful morning when he’d reinstated their coffee routine the week before. He’d visited every morning since, seeking acceptance for these feelings he had for her, seeking the answer to what he should do about them.
First and foremost, he knew he didn’t want to cause her any more hurt.
Lainey took a sip of her coffee. “I spent an hour with Angel Buchanan this morning. That’s the fourth time we’ve talked,” she said, then turned to Judd. “She said she interviewed you, as well. She still can’t get over that you choose not to speak.”
He shrugged his shoulders. They’d done well enough with paper and pen.
“Well, I’m not going to talk to her!” Beth abruptly exclaimed, whirling to face her sister. Then, looking away, she lowered her voice. “Questions, all those questions about Stephen.”
Judd hadn’t wanted to talk about the artist either. Stephen had always rubbed him wrong, no matter how hard he’d tried to pretend otherwise.
Lainey reached over to pat her sister’s arm. “You don’t have to talk to Angel. It’s up to you.” A little smile warmed her face. “But I like her, and Cooper does too. I think she likes him back.”
Beth’s mouth dropped. “Really?”
Judd rolled his eyes. You only had to see the two together to know that there was a whole lotta liking going on.
“She told me he showed her the beach access,” Lainey said, nodding. “You know what that means.”
As if stunned, Beth fumbled for a chair, pulled it from the table, sat. Lainey followed suit and they both took bolstering swallows of their coffee.
When the silence continued, Judd broke down. He grabbed up paper and pen. BEACH ACCESS? He knew of it himself, of course, but the significance of Cooper showing it to Angel escaped him.
Beth read the note, then looked over. “We used to tease him when we were teenagers about Cooper’s Secret Love Cove. We were sure he was bringing his girlfriends there to, uh, uh…”
I GET IT, Judd wrote, stifling a grin.
“Well,” she continued, “we told him we better agree on some sort of sign that would let us know if he was on the beach with a girl.” She smiled, and it was the first real, really amused smile she’d worn since Stephen had died. “We had several suggestions, remember, Lainey?”
“Oh yeah,” Lainey agreed. “Everything from cryptic chalk messages on the rocks at the entrance to the tunnel, to boxer shorts left like a signal flag on one of the pine trees.”
Beth took up the story now, falling into a rhythm with her sister. “But Cooper didn’t appreciate our teasing or our suggestions. As a matter of fact, he said it was his special, secret place, all right, but he wasn’t going to share it with any woman outside the family.”
It was Lainey who put in the last word. “Except, someday, the woman he was planning to marry!”
Apparently stunned all over again, the twins turned their heads to stare at each other. “Could it be?” they said together.
Judd had no idea, and, sympathetic to Cooper, wasn’t going to speculate. But he didn’t regret the speculation and the amusement on the sisters’ faces. It reminded of earlier times, happy times, and it gave him hope that they could all recapture the warm, relaxed sense of friendship and family that had existed before Stephen died.
Though Lainey and Beth’s worlds had revolved around the artist, the man himself had given the majority of his energy and attention to his art. He’d spent much of his time locked in his tower with his paints, leaving the rest of them to enjoy their corner of paradise without him.
The women sipped their coffee again, sighed, then Lainey looked expectantly at Beth. “Aren’t you going to open the box? I’d like your opinion.”
The cardboard container was in front of Judd, so when Beth turned her gaze on him, he was forced to stand and open it for her, scoffing at his sudden sense that there was trouble inside. He wasn’t Pandora after all.
And the first item he pulled out was innocuous enough. It was a package of eight pencils, each painted a different pastel color and decorated with tiny book covers of fairy tales. He passed them to Beth.
“What do you think?” Lainey pressed.
Her sister shrugged. “I guess they’re all right.” She handed the package back to Judd. “Why don’t you keep these? You go through pens and pencils all the time.”
Judd stuck them in the back pocket of his jeans without another glance. Oh yeah, he had a use for them. He was always in need of kindling for the woodstove in his cottage.
The next item that came out of the box was one of those fancy soaps that his ex-wife used to pile up in the guest bathroom. About as big as his palm, and white, it was molded into a strange shape that appeared kind of…feathery.
He handed it to Beth. Her puzzled expression cleared almost immediately. “Oh! It’s a W, see?” She flipped it over, then held it up for Judd’s inspection. “Stephen’s W, the one he used when signing the paintings.”
Now cradling it in her palm, she stroked the surface with her fingertips. Then she lifted it to her face and sniffed. “It doesn’t smell like him, though.”
Unable to help himself, Judd leaned across the table and snatched the soap from her. Beth flashed him a startled look, but he ignored it as he shoved the soap into the box. Then, with a quick, fury-induced snap of his hand, he let it fall to the bottom.
Broken in two.
The next product would have rendered him speechless, if he wasn’t already. Trying his damn best to keep a poker face, he handed the shrink-wrapped roll of toilet paper across the table.
Beth blinked. The paper’s background was white, then printed with Whitney drawings, all of them ocean images like shells, dolphins, and California gray whales. With a wince, she looked over at her sister. “Don’t you think this might be in poor taste?”
Gee, ya think? Judd never bit back laughter, but this time he swallowed what he knew would be a snicker.
Lainey sighed. “That’s what I thought too. I hoped I was overreacting.”
“I thought you had control of the products,” Beth said.
“Yes, but Stephen had already agreed to this lot.” Lainey sighed again. “And Cooper’s telling me that with the last paintings gone and all our money invested in the licensing, I should agree to whatever is suggested. I imagine it can’t get much worse, can it?”
Beth handed the TP back to Judd with a shudder. “I don’t know. I couldn’t have imagined that.”
The twins’ shoulders sagged. Judd barely kept his from doing the same. Finances were sticky at the moment, for both women. Beth had acted as Stephen’s agent for the paintings, but with no more Whitneys, she had no more income. The income she had collected over the years—a very tidy amount, he knew—she’d thrown in with her sister and brother-in-law when they’d invested in the licensing deal.
He’d bitten his tongue at the time, wanting to scream out, Diversify! And now, damn it, he realized it was one of the few times that speaking would have been better than silence.
“You’ll like the last one, though,” Lainey assured her sister. “It’s just the kind of thing that those who love Stephen’s work will find irresistible.”
Judd obediently rummaged in the box and pulled out a tissue-wrapped parcel. He passed it to Beth and watched her slowly unwrap it. Then her breath caught.
“You’re right,” she whispered, pulling the item free of the paper. “It’s wonderful.”
It was a suncatcher, no bigger than Beth’s slender palm. In glowing shades of stained glass, it was a graceful, fairyish figure in flight.
“There’s a collection of them,” Lainey said. “One for each month—that one’s January. They’re all the same blond sprite, but in a different pose and wearing different garments.”
In a petallike dress of blues—from sapphire to almost turquoise—this one was poised on tiptoe. With her arms raised over her head and her hands together, fingers pointed, the figure appeared to have been captured midsoar.
Sometimes even Judd had to concede Whitney had talent.
Beth pushed out her chair and rose to her feet, then half-turned to hold the delicate piece toward the light coming through the window over the sink. “It reminds me of something,” she said slowly, her voice almost as thin as the glass. “I don’t quite know what.”
“It reminds me of why I married Stephen.” Lainey closed her eyes. “That’s how he made me feel, from the first time we kissed. As if I could fly.”
“Yes,” her twin murmured. “Just like that.”
At the dreamy tone, Judd’s heart dropped like an anchor. He watched as Beth, obviously mesmerized by the sparkling fairy, drew closer to the window.
Lainey released a small, sentimental laugh, her eyes still closed as if she were replaying memories in her mind. “We would meet at the cove, you know. I never told anyone, not even you, but when you and I were still in high school it became Stephen’s and my special, private place.”
Beth froze, her spine rigid, her expression set.
“He used to tease me, saying he was afraid he’d go to the beach someday and you’d be there instead of me. He was afraid he might mistake us for each other and kiss you, giving our romance away.” She laughed softly, as if her husband kissing her sister were the silliest of ideas.
“But of course that was just a joke. He always knew which one of us was which, even when we used to dress alike. As an artist, he would never make that kind of mistake.”
At that, Beth jerked, the glass fairy in her hand falling, then shattering against the porcelain sink.
Judd leaped to prevent her from picking up the glass with her bare hands, but she was just staring at the mess.
It looked like a rainbow of tiny teardrops.
“I broke it,” Beth said hoarsely.
Unmoving, he watched her, though he wanted to comfort her. He wanted to say that the damage had already been done.
He also wanted to shove his fist through the wall. His world kept getting worse. Whether he burned those pencils, or busted that soap, or wiped his ass with Stephen’s toilet paper, what Judd couldn’t do was break Beth’s ties to the artist.
He forced himself to breathe slowly in and out of his nose, struggling to achieve the peace he’d come to the Sur to find. All his reading and all his hours of meditation had helped him learn to see and accept the true nature of things, hadn’t they? But damn him, at the moment deep breathing and deep study weren’t worth shit.
Accepting his feelings for Beth—that had seemed doable. But he’d never be able to accept what he had to face now.
Not when he knew there was no place, absolutely none, for him to go with what he felt for her.
Not when it was obvious that Beth was in love with her brother-in-law.
There was even a punch line to the cosmic joke. The situation meant that Judd didn’t have to worry anymore about hurting her—he couldn’t break Beth’s heart.
Stephen had already done that.
In the vicinity of the tiny hamlet of Big Sur, at a local watering hole known as The Well, Angel stood in the narrow hallway leading to the restrooms, tethered to the pay phone by a silver snake cord. Waiting for her intern’s voice-mail greeting to complete, she tapped her toe and peered around a doorway to the tiny, table-ringed dance floor and scarred bar beyond.
She’d placed an order for the Well Special, a half-pound hamburger with the works, and she wanted to be there the instant the juicy patty and crispy side of fries were served. The decent meal was her reward for ten days of sticking to the story and sticking to her objectivity too. Yes, indeed, tonight she was celebrating the triumph of her reporter’s skills.
At the tone, Angel leaned her shoulder against the scratchy, resawn wood-paneled wall. “It’s Angel. At the editorial meeting in the morning, please report to Jane that I’ll wrap up my interviews in the next couple of days.” She’d spent several hours speaking with Lainey Whitney, less time with Cooper and Judd, and then she’d gone farther afield to talk with the locals who’d been Stephen Whitney’s longtime neighbors.
“I’d still like to have a conversation with the widow’s twin sister,” Angel said into the phone. “And Katie, Stephen Whitney’s daughter. But tell Jane everything is going fine. Just fine.”
Fine covered it, she thought, hanging up the receiver. It was fine that following her first interview with the widow, Angel had managed to recoup her journalistic detachment. It was fine that she’d breezed through the last ten days, working up a comprehensive profile of the painter, all the while successfully separating herself from the fact that the painter was her father. And it was just fine that Angel hadn’t uncovered a single thing in the last twenty-three years that spoiled the family-first, Windex-clean image of the “Artist of the Heart.”
It seemed that the only person he’d ever failed was her.
She shook her head, refusing to let the thought take root. She was a journalist, Stephen Whitney was the subject of a story. Nothing more. Hadn’t she proved that over the last ten days, not to mention during the last hour? It took a wealth of professional detachment to calmly sit through a graphic blow-by-blow from the first person to arrive on scene at the accident that had killed the painter.
Okay, her insides might have wobbled a time or two, but she’d overcome the weakness by mentally repeating a short, soothing mantra. It only went to show that she had a cool reporter’s mind—not to mention an iron stomach, she added—hurrying toward the bar as she saw the matronly bartender slide a thick white plate at her place. Her side of fries!
Sliding onto her stool, Angel breathed deep. The delicious, decadent smell of greasy potatoes sent a shiver of ecstasy down her spine. She pinched one french fry between her thumb and forefinger, moaning a little when she found it gritty with salt and almost too hot to handle.
Perfect, she thought, wiggling against the vinyl cushion in anticipation. Closing her eyes, she lifted it to her mouth.
“Did I tell you about the carnage in ’52?”
Angel opened one eye. The man she’d come to The Well to interview, Dale Michaelson, had wandered away after her questions and the two mugs of beer she’d bought him had run dry. But now he was back, stroking his palm down his grizzled, foot-long beard.
“Carnage?” Angel echoed, still holding on to her fry. “Exactly what kind of carnage?”
“Flock of gulls,” Mr. Michaelson replied. He reached for one of the hand-rolled cigarettes tucked behind his ear. “I’m an explosives expert, you know, came to the Sur as a young man to work on the highway.”
Well, then. Angel bit into her fry—nirvana—and made some fast calculations. Highway 1 had been built with prison labor and completed in 1937. If Mr. Michaelson was speaking the truth, he was well into his eighties and a former convict to boot.
“What exactly does it take to be an explosives expert?” she asked, reaching for another fry.
In blatant disregard for California’s no-smoking laws, Mr. Michaelson pulled out some matches and lit up. “Can’t be afraid of fire, young lady,” he said around his cigarette, then drew deeply on it.
Angel glanced over, then stared as bits of flaming tobacco and cigarette paper fell, catching on his beard. The grizzled hair started to smolder.
“Uh…” She gestured toward the smoke.
He cackled and casually batted at the tiny blaze. “See what I mean? You can’t be afraid of fire.”
Someone slid onto the empty stool on Angel’s other side. “Are you trying to impress the women again, Dale?”
Cooper. At the sound of his voice, Angel’s breath caught. Determined to hide her reaction, she gave him a mere glance. But that’s all it took for something—okay, lust—to hit her bloodstream like a jolt of adrenaline. The rush made her light-headed, but she couldn’t look away.
She was accustomed to seeing him in the usual Sur-wear—jeans or baggy shorts, T-shirt, heavy boots. But this evening he was dressed city-slick, in a pair of black slacks and a form-fitting pullover that was summer-blue and just had to be out of a silk Italian knit. Post-heart-attack clothes, was her first thought, because they fit him to a T.
Her second thought was that he had a date.
Dale Michaelson leaned around Angel to talk to Cooper. “Is this your woman, then, Cooper? You scared of a little competition?”
Angel frowned, turning away from Cooper to draw her plate of fries closer. “I’m my own woman, Mr. Michaelson.”
The old man cackled again. “There. She told you, Coop. But me, I was telling her about that flock of seagulls we accidentally bar-bee-cued in ’52. They started one of our big wildfires too—not as big as that one just twenty years back, but almost. But boy-howdy, did those birds smell good when we cooked ’em.”
He broke off and pointed with his cigarette at the bartender, who once more pushed through the door from the kitchen, Angel’s burger in her hand. “Better than Maggie’s Fourth of July chicken special,” he said.
Eww. Angel allowed herself a small shudder, but then drummed up her reporter’s objectivity and forced the image out of her mind as the fat, juicy burger was set in front of her. Stacked with lettuce, tomato, pickles, and onions, then cut in half, the burger’s meat steamed with fragrant, flagrant temptation. Angel lifted the top bun to add a helping of ketchup and mustard.
“That’ll kill you, you know,” Cooper said, leaning close to her ear.
The skin on the side of her neck goosebumped. “But whatta way to go,” she retorted, without lifting her gaze from her food. No sense in giving herself another chance to stare at him, or Cooper another chance to see how he could so easily capture her.
“Now, I heard that, Cooper,” Maggie-the-bartender scolded. She leaned one ample hip against the counter behind her and gave him a mock frown. “There’s no call for you to discourage business.”
He grinned. “Maybe I just want a partner in my new misery, Mag. Who was always your best customer?”
“You,” she said. “When we could pry you away from the city.”
“And that’s exactly where I found Coop,” Mr. Michaelson put in, ash drifting from his cigarette to the bartop this time. “Just like I told you, young lady. The first person I called after the sheriff was Cooper’s big-city law office.”
“What?” Cooper folded his arms on the top of the bar and squinted through the cigarette smoke at the old man. “What is it you told Angel?”
Maggie answered for Mr. Michaelson, thankfully keeping it short but sweet. “About Stephen.”
Ignoring a little clutch in her stomach, Angel clapped the top of the bun on one half of the burger, then went to work on the other.
“Told her how the truck blew him right out of his shoes,” Mr. Michaelson said. “Pair a size-eleven Nikes.”
Her stomach clutched again and she fell back on her little mantra.
subject of a story subject of a story subject of a story
Breathing deeply, steadily, Angel picked up her hamburger.
“Recognized all that blond hair of his, course,” the old man continued. “But not much else.”
Her fingers tightened on the burger, squirting ketchup out the side.
subject of a story subject of a story subject of a story
“Jesus, Dale,” Cooper muttered. He leaned closer to Angel. “You all right, honey?”
subject of a story subject of a story subject of a story
“You all right?” he asked again.
“Of course.” She jerked a shoulder, hunching it to create a barrier between them. “I’m a journalist. Details are my job.”
“Angel—”
“Don’t you dare think I can’t handle it.”
In third grade, the other boys at her new school had tortured her for months by scaring her at every opportunity. They’d said she screamed like a girl, so she’d toughened up, learned not to make a sound, not to blink, even when she found crickets in her lunch-box and snails squished between the pages of her binder.
Angel put her elbows on the bar and brought her sandwich to her mouth.
“I told her I think he must have flown forty feet.”
She closed her eyes, not sure whether the old man had actually said the words again or if she was just recalling them. It was her father who had been hit by the truck. He’d flown forty feet through the air, flown right out of his shoes. Blond hair. Her father. Blood.
Tired of the penny-ante stuff, one day the third-grade bullies had cornered her on the walk home from school. They’d grabbed her backpack, stuffed what they claimed was a dead, bloodied cat inside, then shoved it back into her arms.
Now, like then, she’d heard herself screaming, high and girlish. Now, like then, the sound was only in her head. On the outside she was calm, cool, collected, just as she’d been that day. Tough. Strong. She’d rescued herself.
“Angel?”
“What?” She knew she still held the half-hamburger a few inches from her mouth, but she couldn’t take a bite quite yet.
“Honey,” Cooper said. “You’re white as a ghost.”
“Ghost,” she echoed. Suddenly the word made her want to giggle, but Angel Buchanan was too tough to giggle. That’s right. She was as tough as she needed to be.
The “cat” had turned out to be a bundle of dirty red rags dipped in molasses, but it was one of her ghosts, a part of her past that wouldn’t quit haunting her. That “cat” and the man, the father, who had died a few miles from here. She couldn’t forget him either.
But had he ever remembered her?
Her fingers loosened and her hamburger dropped to her plate.
“Maggie.” Cooper’s hand clamped on Angel’s upper arm and he spun her toward him. “Bring tea. Hot tea with lots of sugar.”
Then he shook her arm. “Are you sick?”
“Of course not.” She stared at the middle of his chest. Right there, under that pretty-colored Italian knit, he had a scar, because Cooper was tough too, too tough to die, despite two heart attacks. “I don’t want tea. Sick of tea.”
“We’re getting out of here, then.” He hauled her to her feet, his touch not the least bit gentle. She stared down at his shiny loafers.
Nikes. Flew right out of his size-eleven Nikes, she thought.
And swayed.
“Christ,” Cooper said under his breath. He shifted to slide his arm around her. But he was tall and she was short and so his hand brushed against the side of her breast. “Christ.”
More prickles, hot, skittered toward her nipple, snapping Angel out of her strange reverie. She pulled free of Cooper’s hold and shoved her shoulders back. “I’m fine. I—” Turning to find her purse, her gaze landed on the abandoned, ketchup-drenched hamburger instead.
Her stomach rolled. Then, though he hadn’t said a word, she forced her gaze toward Cooper. “Don’t you dare think I can’t handle it.”
“Of course you can handle it.” His voice was soothing and he slipped his hand beneath her elbow as if he could tell her knees felt mushy.
Which they didn’t.
“Just let me help you—”
“I don’t need any help! I never need any help.” She put her hand on her forehead. “I have a headache, that’s all. Too many vegetables give me a headache.”
He had her purse. She snatched it from him, the abrupt movement nearly overbalancing her. He caught her again, pulled her toward him. “Let’s dance. Someone just put a quarter in the jukebox. It’s my favorite song.”
Angel listened for a moment. “‘Hakuna Matata’ is your favorite song?” she asked, incredulous. “‘Hakuna Matata’ from The Lion King?”
“Shh.” He pushed her head against his shoulder. “It’s our song now.”
“Our song is a duet by a rodent and a pig,” she muttered. “That’s perfect, just perfect.”
But she leaned into him because, after all, she had that headache. Not to mention that “Hakuna Matata” had an engaging beat and she didn’t remember the last time she’d been dancing, or the last time she’d smelled a delicious man’s cologne on real male skin instead of on a peel-and-sniff sample in GQ.
Holding her close, his chin against her cheek, Cooper began to hum. He was a hummer! The slight vibration of it buzzed against her temple.
It made Angel snuggle closer. She was a whistler in the dark herself, so she felt a certain kinship to hummers. Though she bolstered her bravado with a Seven Dwarves–type tune in times of trouble, hummers did their thing to express their contentment.
Angel closed her eyes. It was kind of nice to think Cooper was contented with her in his arms.
Shutting off everything else, she floated on that thought, nearly slumping in his arms, as he did all the moving for them both. In that warm haze, a sudden slap of cool, fresh air came as quite a shock. Her eyes popped open and she realized he’d hustled her outside and was now unlocking the passenger door of his SUV.
She blinked. “What are you doing? I—I have my own car.”
He took her purse from her and threw it inside. “We’ll get it tomorrow.”
“No—What the heck are you doing?” Instead of listening to her, he’d picked her up and placed her on the seat. “I have my own—” The door slammed in her face.
She was more puzzled than angry when he slid into the driver’s seat. “What’s going on?”
“When was the last time you ate?” he demanded.
“The last time I ate?” She shook her head. “I don’t know. What does that—”
“I have a wet sock that weighs more than you do,” he said, his voice tight, almost angry. “I didn’t see you in the dining room for breakfast or lunch today, and then you almost fainted back there. You were nearly comatose on the dance floor, for God’s sake. I’m taking you back to Tranquility and getting you something to eat before you fall on your face.”
She pointed back toward the tavern. “I have a meal—”
“No.”
She tried again. “My hamburger—”
His impatient gesture cut her off. “Don’t play games with me. You don’t want to eat that.”
“But—”
“For God’s sake, give a little here, Angel. Let me take care of you. If just this once.”
If just this once. Angel eyed his determined expression. If she looked at the situation objectively, she was hungry, and tired, and tired of fighting. Him. Herself. “All right.”
Letting someone else take the reins for a short while didn’t mean she would lose complete control.
Together, they raided the Tranquility kitchen. Well, Cooper raided and Angel was waited upon. It was nice, she decided, and even nicer when he was sitting across the narrow table from her, sharing eggplant lasagne leftovers. When she pushed her plate away, he did too.
Lulled by a full stomach, she smiled at him.
“We forgot something,” he said, his voice soft.
She gave him a lazy smile. “What’s that?”
He reached out with both hands, fisting them into her hair to draw her forward. Her reflexes had been lulled too, because they didn’t even protest.
“Dessert,” he said against her mouth.