GABE WAS BACK out on the deck overlooking Mirror Lake, nursing a beer while watching a sailboat skim across a skyline that had turned rose gold. Maybe Quinn and the Norwegian cook were right about him taking up sailing again while he was here. The last time he’d been on the water had been the summer of his senior year of high school when he’d built an eighteen-foot Northeaster Dory. After taking it out to make sure it was fair, he’d sold it to an orthopedic surgeon from Tacoma for tuition money.
The conversation he’d had two days earlier with Quinn kept replaying in his head. The garage of the cabin—who needed space for five cars?—could make a good shop. If he were staying here. Which he wasn’t.
His first sight of the ten-thousand-square-foot house named Eagles Watch owned by Ajay Deshpande, a Seattle tech billionaire he’d gone to UW with, was a revelation. And definitely more space than he’d bargained for when he’d taken his old fraternity brother up on the offer to use the house for the summer.
The only thing it had in common with a cabin was that both were made of logs. Still, when he’d called to ask about leasing it, Ajay had told Gabe that he was thinking of putting it up for sale because business was so ridiculously busy he never made it over to the peninsula. Plus, having hit his midforties and with no wife yet on the horizon, let alone the four kids he’d once thought he’d someday have, he had no need for the six bedrooms (three of them masters), seven baths, a home theater, gym, indoor pool with a roof that opened for the summer, a two-story library, the five-car garage and a commercial kitchen Bobby Flay would be more than happy to cook in.
And if all that wasn’t enough, eighteen-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling glass doors accordion folded open onto the three-tiered deck boasting an outdoor kitchen complete with another stove, fridge, farm sink, three gas grills and a brick pizza oven.
A smaller one-bedroom cabin had been built next door on the seven acres for the intended live-in housekeeper who would, Gabe assumed, also cook. For now, a trio of maids from The Clean Team, a local cleaning service, came in weekly.
“Hell,” his old friend had said, “feel free to stay as long as you want. Someone ought to get some use out of the place.”
The house was an embarrassment of excess, yet at the same time, the builder had somehow created the feeling of the family home it had been designed to become. It was what Gabe would have chosen, if he’d ever planned to leave New York City to return west and start a family.
Still, with private, wooded waterfront space like this being in high demand from wealthy buyers from California to Canada, it wasn’t as crazy an investment as it might seem. And unlike stocks and hedge funds, land was finite because God wasn’t making any more of it. If he bought it, then leased it out while high housing costs continued to rise, he could turn a tidy profit. And, on the occasion he did come home, he’d have a place to stay.
Although it was still over-the-top for Honeymoon Harbor, Ajay’s dark British Racing Green Range Rover in the garage was a lot less conspicuous than the Porsche 911 GT2 RS Gabe had leased last year. It wasn’t as if he’d needed the outrageously priced car. Especially since he had a driver to take him from his apartment to his office. And he’d never driven it anywhere he’d even approached the need for its seven hundred horsepower. But as Carter had taught him, in the golden city he’d entered, a closet filled with designer suits, soft-as-an-infant’s-bottom Italian shoes, a flashier new car every season and a young eager-to-please supermodel mistress in your bed were all a way of keeping score. While he’d bought into the heady financial hierarchy, Gabe had passed on the supermodels.
He’d forgotten how quiet life could be without the cacophony of city noise. The only sounds were the sigh of a salt-tinged breeze in the tops of the Douglas fir and cedar trees, the lapping of the Sound tide onto the sand beach, and the hum of bumblebees buzzing around the showy clusters of red, white and purple rhododendron blooms in the gardens surrounding the house. Last night he’d heard the hoot of an owl and the lonely howl of what could possibly have been a rare gray wolf, or more likely a coyote.
The sound of a car engine broke that silence, and since his family were the only ones he’d given the wrought iron gate code to, he stood up, walked around to the front of the house and watched the SUV with the Honeymoon Harbor Police Department seal on the door come up the drive.
“I come bearing dinners,” Aiden announced as he climbed out carrying a familiar red cooler.
“Doesn’t Mom have something better to do than cooking?”
“Live with it,” Aiden advised. “I had to when I first came back. And with school closed for the summer, even with the classes she’s taking to finish up her design degree, she’s got extra time on her hands.”
“Maybe she ought to take up knitting.”
“Don’t suggest that unless you want to be lugging a suitcase of sweaters back to New York.” On top of the cooler was a red-and-white pizza box from Luca’s Kitchen. “Dad brought me pizza when I was playing hermit out at the coast house. I figured it was the least I could do for you.”
“Thanks. But shouldn’t you be home having dinner with your fiancée?”
“Jolene and her mom are hosting a bachelorette party for a client at their spa, so I decided to come eat pizza and watch baseball with you. The Mariners are playing the Yankees.”
“I may have grown up here, but I’m team Judge,” Gabe said.
“Sellout,” his brother countered. “But it’ll make things more interesting. What do you want to bet on? The score or home runs?”
“Why not both?”
“You’re on,” Aiden said, as he set the cooler on the deck and the pizza on the table. “And to make things more interesting, how about going for a trifecta and adding in RBIs?”
“Works for me. What time’s the game?”
“Seven.”
“We’ve got time for the pizza. I’ll get some plates and beer.”
“Luca threw in some paper plates and napkins. I didn’t know if you had anything that plebeian here at Versailles.”
“So it’s a bit excessive for Honeymoon Harbor.” And yeah, he had sounded defensive.
“You think?”
“Yeah. I think. Right now it’s home sweet home. Though I’m considering buying it.”
“Seriously? I thought you were going back to New York after Labor Day.”
“I am. It’d be an investment property. I happen to know the owner’s ready to get rid of it, so I could get a good deal.”
Aiden looked out over the lake, where the reflection of the mountains was turning glassy again after being crossed by a boat’s wake. “When I came back home, I was at loose ends,” he said. “While I was spending those weeks hiding out at the coast house, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life, I never, not once, imagined I’d end up police chief.”
“I doubt anyone else did, either.” Aiden had once been the Mannion family’s black sheep and Honeymoon Harbor’s bad boy. A born charmer, he’d talked his way out of more trouble than a lot of guys would’ve gotten away with until he’d made the mistake of boosting a twelve-pack from the back of a delivery truck outside Marshall’s Market. That had been the last straw that had caused the judge to throw up his hands and threaten to send Aiden to juvie.
But without attempting to use the power of his office, which John Mannion had far too much integrity to ever try, their dad deftly worked out a deal where, so long as Aiden stayed out of trouble for the last two months of high school, he could enlist in the Marines when he turned eighteen and have his juvenile crime-spree record expunged.
“Dad had it figured out. At first I thought he was crazy. But—” he shrugged “—it turned out to be exactly the right thing for me to be doing.”
“Good for you. And why do I get the feeling that there’s a message in there?”
“I was just saying. Sometimes life can take some strange twists, like me getting through deployments without a scratch, then getting shot after becoming a cop, which brought me back here, but going with the flow can also take you interesting places you might not have considered.”
Gabe got the message. Loud and clear. “Maybe coming home worked out for you and Quinn. But small-town life isn’t for me. I like the rush of my life in the city.”
“That landed you in the hospital.”
Damn. Gabe never should’ve told Aiden and Quinn about that. But Aiden must’ve been one helluva interrogator during his days working LAPD, because he’d gotten Gabe to spill the beans about what had happened to have him returning home. It had been the day after he’d landed in town, a Monday afternoon, when his two brothers had shown up at the house with thick rib-eye steaks and fishing poles.
While they’d fished off the dock, Aiden had shared a story from his time as an undercover cop in LA that had sounded a lot like a modern-day gunfight at the O.K. Corral. A shooting in which he’d been wounded, his longtime partner killed, that had brought him home, where he spent his first weeks at the family coast house, trying to drink the state dry. But now he’d sobered up, gotten himself engaged, and was pulling trout out of the water, like Sheriff Andy Taylor at the fishing pond in Mayberry.
Which was why Gabe somehow found himself telling his brothers about passing out at Carter’s funeral. Wife number four, now the widow Kensington, had chosen an open-casket viewing, and when Gabe had stood looking down at that artificially waxen face, its manic energy gone, it occurred to him that his now dead friend and mentor could have been brought to the funeral home from the Times Square Madame Tussauds.
That was when his heart started pounding against his ribs and vertigo had hit like a lightning bolt. That could have been you, a voice had pointed out over the wail and yelp of the ambulance.
No way, he’d shot back. Since he’d had an oxygen mask stuck on his face at the time, the argument must have been in his head, but it sure as hell had felt real.
Everyone dies, the nagging voice had said. There’s no escaping it.
I’m not ready to go yet. He was only in his thirties. He still had a lot of living to do. Not that his life entailed much beyond work right now, but one of these days he was going to travel for trips that weren’t all spent inside conference rooms. Maybe he’d even have a family. Not the crazy dysfunctional one like Carter’s had been. But a real family. Like his mom and dad’s. Not that he’d been a fully functioning member of that one for the past few years.
Despite his argument with the ER Doogie Howser, Gabe hadn’t gotten to where he was by being dumb. He knew that every body had its limits. Even iron man Burke found that out two years ago with a concussion that had benched him in the last game of the league playoffs, derailing what all the fans and oddsmakers had considered the New York Gotham Knights’ guarantee to make the Super Bowl.
But it wasn’t too late. He figured that ER doc was more like Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Future. He hadn’t revealed what would happen. Only what could. Gabe was perfectly capable of changing his fate. All he had to do was make a plan. It wasn’t all that different from analyzing financial data.
Which was why, the day after he’d arrived here, he’d started running a wooded trail along the lakeshore in the morning when the air was as still as the water. It might have been more like staggering at first, and any skinny freshman on his old high school track team would’ve lapped him, but the crisp, clean air was helping, and he was getting his stride back day by day. The thirty minutes of push-ups and crunches he’d done every morning back in Manhattan while watching the Asian markets had kept him looking fighting fit—which was more important than people might think in his profession—but apparently they hadn’t done much for his stamina.
“Maybe I will ask Seth if I can borrow his boat.” Sailing a small craft involved pulling lines, maneuvering the rudder, moving from port to starboard to adjust the sails, all which provided a good workout, and he’d always enjoyed being out on the water. It also would check off that stress-reduction box Doogie had prescribed.
Seth was so tied up with getting the remodel on his and Brianna’s carriage house completed before their August double wedding with Aiden and Jolene, he undoubtedly didn’t have a lot of extra time to go sailing. And as Quinn had pointed out, he had built his soon-to-be brother-in-law’s boat back in the day.
“He’d lend it to you in a heartbeat,” Aiden said.
That was true. Gabe considered that idea as he took another slice of pie from the box. Okay. Maybe he was eating the same way he had in Manhattan, but baby steps, right?
Besides, along with three kinds of meat, the pizza had tomato sauce and mushrooms. Which counted as vegetables. And the organic mozzarella sourced from happy cows down in Oregon took care of the dairy part of the food triangle.
“You don’t have to get crazy and start eating at Leaf,” he assured himself, so used to having only himself to converse with since returning home, he hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud.
“Why the hell would you want to do that?” Aiden asked. “I mean, the mac and cheese is surprisingly good, for vegan, and I know that doc told you to watch your cholesterol, but didn’t some Greek say something about moderation being the best in all things? Or maybe it was in the Bible.”
“Or Shakespeare.”
Aiden shrugged. “Well, someone sure as hell said it. And it makes sense.”
“Not going to get any argument from me.” Gabe took another bottle of the Good Vibrations from the six-pack he’d brought out.
One problem with this rest and relaxation plan was that he’d apparently burned out his internal governor by the end of his first month at Columbia. He’d grown up accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room. With the possible exception of Quinn, but only because, being older, his brother had had more time to absorb information. But Gabe’s first semester in business school had knocked him on his ass. Suddenly he was competing with the best and the brightest the country—hell, the whole damn world—had to offer.
Not willing to settle for second best, he’d kicked into high gear and his engine hadn’t stopped racing. Until he’d found himself on that wedding-cake-white ferry plowing through the waters of Puget Sound toward home.
So now what? Although he hated admitting that his older brother always seemed to be right, since he didn’t have anywhere to go, or anything else to do, it wouldn’t hurt to go online and check out some boat plans. One thing he’d never been able to resist was a challenge—like that damn zip line—and building a faering could be one that would fill up all those days stretching out in front of him.
Then, at the end of the summer, he could donate it to some local charity to auction off. Win-win.
And if there was one thing Gabriel Mannion had always been once he’d hit Wall Street, it was a winner.