Safe Harbor (31 page)

Yeah, you won't look any younger for her when she shows up for your money, you poor dumb cluck.

"I never should have said that about my family,"
Anderson
repeated as they turned and began
dragging themselves
back to the Bouchards' house. "They're innocent in all of this."

"Well, gee, ya
think?"
Sam said scathingly. His mind was already racing ahead to part two of the sorry soir
é
e: explaining to Holly that her father wasn't the only sucker in town. He touched a spot above his right eye: swollen. Something else to explain to her. Shit.

They walked along in sullen silence, jeered by the hissing sea.
Idiots! Both of you! Idiotsl

The partiers who had decided to take a dip had dipped and gone—possibly scared from their lark by the sight of two men brawling a little too close to their playground for comfort. Sam prayed that they hadn't called the cops. He picked up the pace.

"You married a long time ago, I take it?" Holly's father asked, almost shyly
..
.

"Eight years. She disappeared after the first one and never came back."

"There had to be a reason."

"Far's I know, it was to stay one step ahead of a warrant. But if you find out there's another reason, by all means tell me. I'd be mildly curious to know."

I love you Sam, please believe that. I'll never love anyone else. I can't stay on to explain; I wish I could. Just know that I love you.

And then the kicker:
We'll meet again
.

During the past seven years Sam had wanted that to happen for so many different reasons: love, lust, a maybe-father's longing; vengeance, curiosity, and recently, plain old-fashioned justice. But the most recent motive, the justice thing, had dropped away like the last petal of a daisy when Eric Anderson promised to make good on the Durer.
Eden
might have Sam's child—Sam would want that child—but there was no reason in the world for them to meet again, except possibly in court.

Anderson
was doing his best to recover from the latest plunge in the roller coaster that had become his life. "
Eden
never tried to get in touch with you during those seven years?"

"Nope."

"Don't you see? She disappeared because—well, because she didn't want to put you through the trauma of being divorced by her. She knew the marriage was a mistake—"

I'll never love anyone else
.

"And she knew that there was no hope of your ever getting together—"

We'll
meet again
.

"And she meant to let you get used to the idea of living without her, but one year led to another—"

"
For crissake
," Sam said in disgust. "Is it possible that you were once smart enough to pass a bar exam?"

Stung,
Anderson
said, "Why the hell didn't you divorce
her
, then?"

Now it was Sam who—despite the wet clothing that clung to him—was feeling the heat. "You want to know why?" he snapped. "Because just before she walked out, she told me she thought she was pregnant."

"
Eden
has never had a baby,"
Anderson
said flatly.

"This, from the man who thinks
Eden
simply forgot to divorce me?"

Ignoring the crack,
Anderson
said, "I'm no Lothario, but I know when a woman's had a baby.
Eden
has no scar, no stretch marks, no stretched anything. Her body is perfect."

They were on dangerous, dangerous ground, as shifting as the sand beneath their feet. Sam did not—did
not
—want to get into a kiss 'n
tell with a man who by rights should've been a candidate for father-in-law. He gritted his teeth, and Anderson, who seemed to realize that they were a sentence away from renewing their brawl, let the matter drop.

As for Sam, he was appalled that he'd said as much as he had. He'd never mentioned
Eden
's claim about pregnancy to anyone, not even his parents—and yet here he was, spilling his guts to a man he should hate.

He couldn't quite do
that
. Sam might have been the better fighter, but he sure as hell couldn't claim to be any smarter.

"Let me ask you this," he said. "What makes a man like you walk away from a thirty-year marriage for someone like
Eden
? I don't get that."

"I've thought about that question constantly," the older man admitted. "You think it's for the sex—"

"Don't tell me what
I
think."

"I was going to say, it's not. Sex enters into it, but it's more that
Eden
is so full of life. She understands that time is short; that we have to live our lives to the fullest and that we can't hang on and drift just out of habit. She's very wise that way. She's told me that
Charlotte
will get over this if I make it quick and make it clean. So far, I haven't done a very good job of that. Of course,
Eden
admits that she's made things more complicated than they had to be, and she really feels bad about that."

Somehow, Sam didn't think so. He was very close to throttling
Anderson
all over again. How could the guy be so damned gullible?

How could Sam ever have been?

"
Eden
wants to sail around the world with me,"
Anderson
said, sounding more and more eager to present his case. "Whereas my wi—
Charlotte
—has always got seasick on the
Vixen"

"So take her on a bigger boat. The
QEII
goes around the world; so do tramp steamers."

"It's not the same,"
Anderson
argued. He sounded almost petulant as he said, "I want adventure. I want to live life stripped to its essence. I want to be scared out of my wits once in a while."

Sam thought
,
Cancer, heart disease, stroke—not scary enough for you, pal?

Shrugging, he said, "Sorry. I still don't get it."

Maybe it was because he had discovered that danger wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and because he had an aching hunger to spend the rest of his life with someone who was bedrock-solid in her loyalties. Someone who was good, not Machiavellian; generous and not greedy. Someone who liked kids and cats and, even better, who was liked by kids and cats. Someone who was oblivious to the power of her beauty, and who had deep ties to her family and couldn't bear to hurt them, and who wanted to be a mother herself, and who looked positively enchanting hopping around a room with one leg in and one leg out of her shorts.

Someone like Holly.

A vision of her
suddenly
rose up before him as he plowed through the lapping seas of the incoming tide: it was of Holly in her shop, her dark hair tumbling across her cheeks as she bent over a birdhouse with her magic brushes, creating a garden where once there was none. In the vision Sam saw clearly—though he had hardly registered it at the time—a real, live black-and-white cat curled up in an upside-down straw hat on an old bureau behind her.

How had he missed the cat in the hat? What else had he missed? Suddenly he became seized by panic: there was a whole
world
of Holly that he didn't know. While Eric Anderson was fixating about crossing a globe covered mostly in water, Sam Steadman wanted nothing more than to explore every last inch and every last laugh of one of its inhabitants.

Is this what love was, then—a feeling of blind panic that what you wanted most might slip through your hands and be lost forever? With
Eden
, Sam had felt many emotions, but she had never inspired panic in him. When he discovered that she'd taken off, he felt humiliated, depressed, rejected, angry
... but never in his worst moments had he felt panic.

"I'm gonna have to get going," he said abruptly to Anderson, who was lost in his own set of musings.

"What—? Oh. Sure," said Holly's father. "I'm sorry things got a little—"

Sam never heard the rest of the sentence; he was running across the sand, headed for the Bouchards' house and his rental car parked behind it. His surge of panic had bred more panic:
Don't let
Eden
have got there before me. Don
't
let her be up to new mischief.

Was
Eden
on the island? Holly's father hadn't said; but if the hair standing up on the back of Sam's neck was any indication, she must be somewhere near. He drove irrationally fast, convinced that Holly was in danger, convinced that it was his fault.

By taking the
State Road
, he was able to bypass the inevitable crush of tourists and traffic in Oak Bluffs; he didn't slow down until he fetched up hard at the studio. All the lights were on and the barn door was slid open. Filled with dread, he hopped out of his car and ran inside.

"Holly?"

He went up to her workbench and touched one of the pickets on the birdhouse fence: still wet.

"Holly?"

He began a quick search of the place, checking behind the stacked-up furniture and old broken farm tools, easing his bulk into nooks that were out of the way and out of sight. With every passing second, his anxiety ratcheted higher.

She wasn't in the barn. Outside?

Holly... where are you?

"Sam?"

He swung around.

"Sam—is it really you?"

W
ho'd you think it was?" he asked, grinning with relief. He walked straight up to her and took her in his arms, kissing her as if they'd been apart for twelve years instead of twelve hours.

She tried to say something, but he kissed it away. All he wanted, all he needed, was to know that she was still willing to be held by him.

"Sam, what happened to you? You're all salty," she said, running her tongue lightly over his upper lip. "And soggy—your clothes are soaked. You're hurt!" She touched his eye lightly; it was an effort for him not to wince. "What
happened?"

"Aw, some dufus and I were arguing politics on the beach and didn't agree. Where'd you go wandering off to?" he asked, trying to get her off the subject.

"I heard a noise upstairs in your apartment and assumed you'd come back. Call me cocky, but I couldn't imagine why you wouldn't have stopped by the studio first to say hi. I was halfway up the stairs before it occurred to me that whoever it was might not be you."

Eden
? Koloman?

"Lucky for me, the place was empty when I looked around—"

"You went inside?"

"I searched inside and outside. There's no one around. It could have been the wind knocking the screen onto the floor," she said with a shrug.

The hair on the back of Sam's neck was standing again, not a good sign. "Holly, something's going on around here that I should know about. Tell me."

She hesitated, then said, "It's nothing specific, really. My sister was here earlier and we were sitting on the swing in my yard, and she—I have to say, she became really spooked. I tend to be less citified about dark places than Ivy is, so I didn't share her feeling that we were being watched. But
...
could
it have been Stefan, do you think?" she said, shivering suddenly in Sam's arms.

"If it was, he'll be out of the picture soon," Sam answered cryptically. He resolved to guard Holly around the clock until then, come hell or high water.

And in the meantime: "Look, about the engraving..." he said, but he cut off the sentence before it was formed. This wasn't about the engraving at all.

Get it done.
He took a deep breath, then corrected himself. "About
Eden
..."

Holly had drifted away to peer through a window at the darkness outside. "Yes?" she said over her shoulder as she scanned for crooks in the night. "What about
Eden
?"

Ah shit, ah shit.

"She's—back."

Holly whipped her head in his direction. Her beautiful green eyes were wide with amazement. "
Back
? When? How? Where?"

"I can't answer most of that. All I know is that
Eden
called your father this morning. Long story short, she claims it's all a misunderstanding. She's prepared to give my parents the entire proceeds of the sale of the engraving, and your father is going to pay Koloman his full commission."

Holly looked completely blank for a moment, and then she said, "Oh!"

It was the kind of "oh" you used when you were still working things through, and Sam could see that she was doing just that.