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The breakfast menu in the main restaurant at the Ocean Bluff Inn did nothing for Dylan. No doubt all those fluffy farm omelets and wild berry pancakes would taste delicious. But he’d slept poorly and awakened unsettled. The prospect of swallowing anything more substantial than a cup of coffee didn’t appeal to him.
He tried to revive himself with a shower, but while the steamy water sharpened his brain, it did nothing for his appetite. He felt drowsy and restless at the same time, yearning to crawl back into bed yet eager to head out into town and accomplish something, although he had no idea what.
He checked his phone. No messages from Andrea Simonetti. A note from his manager saying nothing. He stuffed the phone into a pocket of his jacket, then left the room. Descending to the first floor, he waved at the friendly lady behind the registration counter. She waved back, and he stepped outside into the chilly New England morning.
The veranda spanning the front of the inn was longer than the back porch on the house he hoped to buy, and it held several Adirondack chairs and a few potted plants that were clinging desperately to their last few days of life, before frost finished them off. He allowed himself a moment to imagine how he’d furnish the porch on the house he hoped to buy—maybe a rocker, maybe lounge chair wide enough for two, in case a helicopter landed in his back yard and a beautiful naked starlet climbed out.
With a chuckle, he descended the steps to the parking lot and unlocked his rental car. It was a staid Toyota Camry, a far cry from his hot little Porsche back in California. He wondered how the Porsche would handle during New England’s harsh winters. He’d probably have to buy a big, bulky four-wheel-drive vehicle to get around in the snow.
But first he had to buy the house. And so far, Andrea hadn’t reported on how the current owners had reacted to his opening bid.
The Toyota drove well and didn’t call attention to itself, so he was satisfied with it. He cruised down the inn’s driveway to Atlantic Avenue and south, not sure where he was going until he reached a quiet block of shops and boutiques. One had a sign above the door featuring two huge cookies that created the two O’s in the word “Cookie’s.” Would a store called “Cookie’s” sell coffee? He might not be hungry, but he could use some caffeine.
He parked, climbed out of the car, and entered the store. The aroma of baked goods jolted his appetite, as did the stack of date-nut bars on display in the glass-enclosed case below the counter. The woman behind the counter plucked a couple of cookies from a shelf and handed them to a wiry couple in jogging gear and wool caps. They paid, then strode out of the eatery, their oversized cookies destined to undermine whatever they’d accomplished with their morning run.
Dylan stepped up to the counter. “I’ll have one of those date bars and a large coffee,” he said.
The woman regarded him for a long minute. “You look like Captain Steele. Hey—you are Captain Steele, aren’t you?”
He’d been prepared to pay with cash rather than a credit card in order to protect his identity, but it was too late to remain incognito. The woman was already shouting over her shoulder: “Hey, Maeve, get out here! It’s Captain Steele!”
He exerted himself to be pleasant. If he did wind up living in Brogan’s Point, people around town would eventually get used to him. He’d just be Dylan, the guy who lived in that sprawling old Victorian overlooking the ocean on the north end of town. The guy who roared around town in a bright yellow Porsche Carrera and vanished for a months at a time when he was filming on location, and visited sick kids in hospitals every chance he got—usually clad in his Captain Steele costume—and occasionally appeared in some gossip column with a gorgeous actress hanging off his arm.
All right, so he wouldn’t exactly blend in. But maybe in time, people would think of him as someone other than Captain Steele.
Right now, Captain Steele was exactly how the clerk was thinking of him. She was promptly joined by a younger, prettier woman in a white apron. They babbled about the Galaxy Force movies, and the older woman recalled when Dylan had come to town years ago to film that low-budget indie, an event that occurred at a time the younger woman wasn’t living in Brogan’s Point. “I would have made a fool of myself if Captain Steele had been in my little town,” the younger woman said. “I love those movies. They’re like popcorn!”
“Junk food,” Dylan joked.
“Healthy junk food.” She grinned. “But not as healthy as my date nut bars.”
He didn’t point out that Captain Steele was in her little town now and she wasn’t really making a fool of herself. Nor did he mention that when he’d last been in Brogan’s Point, the first Galaxy Force movie was still more than a month from its release date, and at the time, no one had known what a blockbuster it would turn out to be. He’d been a hard-working unknown actor then, like all the other actors in Sea Glass, trying to create something artistic and worthwhile.
No point in going into all that. He politely posed for a selfie with the two women and then departed.
Outside, he strolled down the street, munching on the bar—which tasted so good, he decided he must have been hungry, after all. By the time he’d reached the corner, he’d devoured the entire thing—and he knew why he had driven to this block. There, just across the street, was the Attic.
Six years ago, when he’d last been in Brogan’s Point, pretty much everyone involved in Sea Glass had visited the Attic at least once. Its merchandise was eclectic—knickknacks, art objects, vintage apparel, accessories, stuff that looked antique but wasn’t. There were snow globes, real globes, chess sets with pieces that resembled the British Redcoats and the Colonists during the Revolutionary War. There were boxes of notecards featuring paintings of the ocean. There were long, narrow implements the shop’s owner had identified as clam shovels, for digging clams out of the sand. There were hair ornaments and tooled belts, candles and kerosene lamps, coffee mugs and collectable teaspoons, a complete mishmash of merchandise, all of which seemed to define the culture of a seaside New England town.
“It’s called the Attic,” the pretty young saleswoman had explained when he’d come to the store with the director and the production designer in search of items to dress the film’s set and accessorize the actors, “because it’s filled with the kinds of things you’d find in someone’s attic. If you don’t find what you like today, come back tomorrow. Our inventory changes every day.”
The saleswoman had been Gwen.
He wondered if she still worked there. He wondered why he’d driven to this street, to the store where he’d first met her. Some strange instinct? Some compulsion to see her again?
He reminded himself that what had happened six years ago had been a blink of time, and that when he’d seen Gwen last night, she’d been with a man. She was probably married.
Still, saying hello to her shouldn’t cause any problems. Besides, he might find something he wanted to buy in the store. If the displays in its front windows were anything to go by, it still offered an intriguing variety of items for sale. Once he owned a house here in town, he’d get one of those Revolutionary War chess sets for the den.
He surveyed the displays in the windows while he sipped his coffee. When his cup was empty, he entered the store.
It looked larger than he remembered. It was larger, having expanded to occupy the adjacent store. Business must be good.
A few other customers roamed around the store. Shelves and tables stood at interesting angles, forcing shoppers to meander rather than simply march up one aisle and down another. A nook in the back corner was filled with children’s books. A sloping rack displayed an assortment of dresses that might have been in style during the Roaring Twenties. A shelf along one wall held decorative boxes, their lids inlaid with stained-wood mosaics, depicting images of the sea. An umbrella stand was filled with wooden walking sticks, their handles carved into animal faces: a hawk, a panther, a spaniel with floppy ears.
The attic in the Dylan’s childhood home had contained some boxes filled with tax records, some clear plastic cases containing old blankets that smelled of camphor, and cartons of discarded pots and pans that his mother had saved for when Dylan and his two sisters set up their own homes. By the time Dylan and his sisters were adults, moving out into the world, they’d preferred to buy their own pots and pans. For all he knew, those cartons of cookware were still collecting dust in his parents’ attic.
If the house he’d grown up in had had an attic like this store, he probably would have never gone outside to play. He would have spent all his free hours upstairs under the eaves, exploring.
A clerk wandered over to him. “Can I help you find something?” she asked.
“No, I’m just browsing,” he said, then hesitated. “Does Gwen still work here?”
“Gwen? Sure, she’s in the back. I’ll go get her.”
Dylan wasn’t sure he was ready to see Gwen yet. No one had given him a script to memorize, so he didn’t know what he would say once they were face to face. But the clerk was being much too helpful, bounding through the store before he could stop her and vanishing through a door near the children’s books.
He ran a hand through his hair, wondering whether he should have worn his baseball cap. Or his sunglasses. Not that he could conceal his identity from Gwen. After they’d shared that song in the bar yesterday—if you could call staring at each other across a crowded room sharing—she’d recognize him.
He distracted himself by studying a collection of scrimshaw pieces displayed on a shelf to his right. Each piece was unique—delicate seascapes painted in thin black lines on polished bone. His parents might like one of these. Scrimshaw wasn’t exactly ubiquitous in Nebraska. They’d be the only folks in town to own a painted whalebone.
He lifted one of the pieces and studied it more closely. The whaling ship depicted on the smooth white surface could have belonged to Ahab. Dylan had read Moby-Dick in college and hadn’t liked it much, but he’d loved the idea of living on the ocean. He still loved the idea.
“Dylan.”
He hadn’t heard her approach, but her voice reached him, velvet-soft. He didn’t remember her voice being so muted. She’d been pretty loud in bed. When she’d come...
Don’t think about that. He placed the scrimshaw piece back on the shelf and turned.
Gwen’s voice might not match his memory, but her face did. She was still pretty in a fresh, unadorned way, her features delicate, her eyes a sweet pussy-willow gray fringed with thick lashes a shade darker than her hair. She wore a burgundy sweater and beige slacks, and her hair hung tousled past her shoulders. Bed head, he thought as his body clenched with another memory of her in bed beside him, beneath him, taking him in.
He sucked in a sharp breath, then smiled. He was an actor; he could do this. “Hi, Gwen.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Shopping?”
She struggled to return his smile. “I mean in Brogan’s Point. Aren’t you supposed to be in Hollywood?”
He shrugged. “I have a few months free before we begin shooting the next Galaxy Force movie. I thought I’d...” He hesitated before saying he’d thought he’d buy a house in Brogan’s Point. Gwen seemed less than thrilled to have him standing in her store. That he was planning to buy a house in her town might send her screaming—and not in ecstasy. “Looks like the store is doing well,” he said instead. “It’s about double the size I remember.”
“It’s doing fine,” she said tersely.
Screw this. They’d gotten along beautifully the last time he’d seen her. Why was she treating him as if he were contagious? “Look. I didn’t come here to cause you problems, okay? I came because...you know. We had a good time together six years ago. That’s all.”
Her cheeks flushed a delicate pink. Evidently she remembered just how good a time they’d had together. She turned her attention to the scrimshaw, shifting the piece he’d been admiring as if he’d put it back in the wrong place. “I’m sorry. It’s just—” She fidgeted with Ahab’s whaling ship a bit more, then lifted her face to meet his gaze. “That song. Yesterday, at the Faulk Street Tavern...”
So he hadn’t imagined that the song had affected her as strangely as it had affected him. “Yeah. That was pretty weird, wasn’t it.”
“Supposedly, that jukebox is magic.”
He laughed. She allowed herself a faint smile, but apparently she wasn’t joking. “Magic?”
“Just an old wives’ tale.” She pulled her hand back from the shelf. She seemed to be struggling to add some warmth to her smile, but she wasn’t doing a good job of it. Her eyes were glassy, focused not quite on his face but on something behind him, something only she could see. “Well. I’ve got to get back to work. It was nice of you to drop by. I hope you enjoy your visit.”
He was about to tell her—to warn her, really—that this wasn’t just a visit, that he was hoping to move to town. But before he could speak, a child’s voice rang through the store, happily shrill: “Mommy! Look at the picture I drawed!”
The color drained from Gwen’s complexion. She spun away from Dylan and squatted down in time to greet a fireball of a girl racing through the maze of aisles, chased by another girl who appeared to be in her late teens. The child wore jeans, a bright pink sweatshirt with sparkly stars on it, and sneakers with more sparkly stars glittering across the toes. Her hair was a mess of chestnut curls, her eyes big and dark, her cheeks adorably round and punctuated by deep dimples. She clutched a sheet of paper in her hand.
“Look, Mommy! It’s Mr. Snuffy!” she shouted, shoving the paper at Gwen.
Gwen took the paper and studied it intently. Dylan studied the girl just as intently. She looked a lot like Marissa, his nine-year-old niece.
In fact, she looked almost exactly like Marissa when Marissa had been in kindergarten.
Five years old? Was that the age of this little girl who was calling Gwen Mommy?
“I’m sorry,” the teenage girl said, then giggled. “I tried to stop her, but she was so excited—”
“That’s a wonderful drawing,” Gwen said, her affectionate tone a sharp contrast to the ice in her voice when she’d spoken to Dylan. “It looks a lot like Mr. Snuffy.” Dylan glanced at the drawing and concluded that Mr. Snuffy, whoever he was, was exceedingly brown and misshapen, with a fat tail and uneven ears. A dog, maybe, or a fox. Possibly an obese squirrel. “But I’m with a customer right now, sweetie, so you’ll have to go back to the office. I’ll be in in a minute, okay?” Gwen ruffled her fingers through the little girl’s curls, kissed her brow, and then stood back up. She remained with her back to Dylan, watching the older girl escort the child back through the store and away.
Dylan watched them, too. He watched that little girl with her dancing curls and her dark eyes, eyes nothing like her mother’s.
Eyes like his niece’s.
Eyes like his.
Holy shit.
Before Gwen could turn back to him, he was out of the store, his heart racing, his fingers numb, his scalp tightening around his skull as if it wanted to squeeze the possibilities out of his brain. But there were only two possibilities he could think of. Either Gwen had adopted that little girl at some point after Dylan had left Brogan’s Point and moved on with his life, or...
Holy shit.
