Blackthorne, Fiona - Moonstruck [Blue Moon 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (8 page)

At the corner of County Road 73 and Long Road was the edge of Blue Moon. There was the red general store, called the General Store, the Blue Moon Library, the town hall, a white clapboard church—Episcopal, she noticed—and the Double Rainbow Café. Around the corner from Long Road and 73 was the heart of Blue Moon. She had only been into town once, but what she had seen of it was charming, with shops, restaurants, and a beautiful harbor with fishing boats bobbing in the sheltered waters. She hadn’t met anyone, as she had only come in to get a few groceries at the time.

Well, no time like the present to get to know the locals. Maybe they could tell her more about Goody Barrows. A fleeting idea occurred to her to write a romance novel about puritan times in Blue Moon with Goody Barrows as the misunderstood heroine, but she shook off that fantasy, smiling to herself as she parked in front of the Double Rainbow Café. She was an academic, not a novelist.

The Double Rainbow Café was an old, wooden, one-story building with a soft-serve ice cream window for tourists in the summer and a single room dining room for the rest of the year. Ava peeked inside hesitantly. It was a quaint place, which she instantly liked. The walls were painted soft blue, and antique photos of the town’s history were everywhere. The tables were simple, square and wood. There was a counter at the back that blocked off the entrance to the kitchen, and tall windows let in lots of light.

There were a few diners in there, mostly men in heavy flannel jackets and jeans, sipping coffee and finishing off hamburgers. The men looked tall and strong, no doubt from years of hauling lobster pots.

“Hello!” a deep, masculine voice boomed across the room.

Ava looked up to see an incredibly tall, handsome man with blonde hair and hazel eyes striding toward her. Jesus, were all men in this town gorgeous?

“Welcome,” the man said, holding out his hand to shake hers. “I’m Steven, co-owner of the Double Rainbow. You must be Ava.”

“Wh–What?” she stammered, distractedly shaking hands with him.

“Small town,” said another man, coming to stand by Steven, a beautiful African-American with the smoothest skin she had ever seen and glittering black eyes. “News travels fast.”

“Oh, um, yes. Of course. Yes, I’m Ava.”

“I’m Julius,” said the other man. “My partner Steven and I have heard so much about you!”

Partner? Ohhh, “partner.” A gay couple owning a café in a coastal fishing village was the last thing she expected, but then…ohhh…the Double Rainbow made total sense now. She smiled at them. This was normal. This was cool. She could work with this.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said. “So, can a girl get some lunch here?”

“Can she get lunch, Julius?” Steven asked, winking at his partner.

“Only if it’s on the house and she sits with us,” Julius replied with a straight face.

“Oh, wow, guys, you don’t have to do that.”

“Ava Bell,” Steven said, “you need taking care of.”

“Why is that?” she asked with a laugh.

There was a fraction of a second of hesitation before he answered her.

“Because, you’re a graduate student,” he replied.

Somehow, deep in her bones, Ava felt he had been going to say something else. For the life of her, though, she couldn’t imagine what.

Five minutes later, Ava found herself draining a Diet Coke and waiting for the Double Rainbow’s Demon Burger, the house special, while sitting with Steven and Julius.

“So, how did you guys find yourselves up here?” she asked.

“Born here,” Julius replied, and Steven nodded.

“And you stayed?”

“Blue Moon is a special place,” Steven said, a strange, almost cynical smile tweaking at his lips. “It’s hard to leave.”

“I see,” she said, but she didn’t really see at all. She nodded at the photos on the wall. “You guys are local history buffs?”

“History is a living thing here,” Julius replied. “Many of the houses date back to the seventeenth century. Most of the families here have been here just as long.”

“But, that’s incredible!” What she didn’t say was the inappropriate question that popped into her head of inbreeding and the problems of a teeny-weeny genetic pool like that.

“Some families come and go,” Steven added, laughing and looking into her eyes as if he could guess her thoughts. “Keeps us fresh. But, for the most part, we’ve all got Blue Moon in our blood.”

“How about you?” Julius asked, leaning in slightly. “What’s your story?”

“Me?” Ava said. “I’m actually from Maine, too, but down south. Portland. Grew up there, got out of there, went to Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, then on to grad school.” She didn’t mention Harvard because most people either made fun of it or found it intimidating.

“Your family’s still in Portland?” Julius asked.

“No,” Ava replied. “Mom died when I was in high school, and I’m not close to my step-dad. I’m an only child, so there’s nothing to bring me back there ever.”

“What about your father?” Julius probed, but somehow, she couldn’t feel resentful of his questions. She couldn’t help but like him and Steven.

“Never knew him,” she said. “Mom never talked about him. I figured I was the product of a one-night stand. She married my step-dad when I was a baby.”

Steven and Julius exchanged a glance, and she felt a little confused.

“So, I heard an interesting story about the place I’m staying,” she said to change the subject. “About a woman named Goody Barrows?”

A fork dropped, clattering against a plate, and the room fell silent. Ava could feel every pair of eyes in the room turning to her.

“You’re staying at White Farm?” Steven asked quietly.

Ava nodded, too creeped out suddenly to say anything.

Somewhere from across the room, she heard someone whisper, “She has to be the one!”

“You guys take your legends pretty seriously around here,” she joked feebly, trying to lift the oppressive sense of fear that was crowding in on her.

“I told you,” Julius said, dead serious. “History is a living thing here in Blue Moon.”

Another whisper from a different part of the room reached her.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Chapter 8

It was only Declan’s calm, easy entrance to the Double Rainbow that relaxed the tension in the air after Ava had mentioned Goody Barrows. The subject had been dropped, dropped like a lead weight tied to lead weights buried in concrete.

The Demon Burger had arrived, and she had nearly choked to death on the hot sauce. Julius had offered to make her a regular burger, and Steven had laughed, but she had insisted on finishing every last bit of it, even if it made her ears ring and eyes water. Julius and Steven made her eyes water, too, but from laughing too hard. It was difficult not to snort her food at their banter, and somehow, she felt like she was back at home in Harvard Square, verbally jousting with her friends at Bartley’s Burgers.

Declan hadn’t joined them. He had simply nodded to Ava, sending her a smile that melted her down to her toes and made her want to run over to him and throw herself into his arms. He had sat down at a table with a couple of men who talked about the forecast for the next few days and the impact it would have on dragging for scallops. A storm was coming, which meant they’d all be land-bound and lose a few precious days of dragging.

Declan’s presence had relaxed Ava, reassuring her in some wordless way that she was absolutely safe. She resented feeling safe because of someone else, though, and tried very hard to ignore him. Julius and Steven had sent her home with half a pan of homemade lasagna, declaring that grad students’ cooking skills were on par with their social skills, and if they didn’t feed her, she’d probably live on scrambled eggs and microwave pizza.

The sky was noticeably darker when she finally left the Double Rainbow, the gray clouds now sporting black bellies and hanging low above the dark pine trees. Rain was coming, and that meant no walk down to the water’s edge. As soon as she got home and shoved the lasagna in the fridge, she ran to the woodpile by the edge of the woods and carried several large, heavy loads back to the cottage. She had discovered that nothing was worse than not having dry wood for her fire. There was an electric heater for backup, but she much preferred the dry heat and warm light of the fire in her fireplace. Now, at least, she had enough wood to last her about two days through the storm. She had even moved a few armfuls into the barn to keep them dry for the day after the storm while the rest of the pile dried off.

Dumping her last load, she finally kicked off her boots and brushed the moss and bark off her parka, noticing that it was dirty now. Well, she’d wash it in a day or two, after the storm abated and she could go back and forth to the barn where the washer and dryer were without soaking her clean, dry laundry.

Fat raindrops began to slap the windows and tap dance on the roof as she settled onto the couch in front of her nice, cozy fire. She had her laptop and her wine. She had her blanket and big, warm sweater. The only thing missing was a dog snoozing on the bearskin rug. She shivered a little. It would have been nice to have one other living, breathing creature in the cottage with her. She lived alone in Boston, but this was a different kind of alone on the bleak, rockbound coast of Maine.

This was a real kind of alone. No radio or television. It was just firelight and her thoughts against the woods and the falling darkness outside. The rain grew steadily heavier, and she thought she could tell when it turned to sleet, sliding down the windowpanes in transient crystals. It wasn’t that there was no noise. There was lots of noise like the rain, the crack and snap of the fire, the rustle of the blanket against her jeans, and the tap of her fingers against the keyboard. There was no other human noise, just her breath.

Ava tried to shake off the sense of isolation, doing her best to focus on her next chapter. This is what she had wanted, quiet and time without distraction to finish her dissertation. Her thoughts chopped themselves in half, finishing sentences on the screen and wondering about the Molineaux brothers. Could gender construction have been something more than a passive labeling of women? What did Robert, Declan and Sean do for a living? Did women actively manipulate gender construction to provide themselves with a kind of escape route out of society’s constrictions? Why did everybody in the Double Rainbow freak out at the name of Goody Barrows? Did men unconsciously realize that gender role assignment as deviant allowed women more freedom, and was that why they persecuted that group? How on earth could she feel attracted to three men at the same time?

A hard knock behind her made Ava jump, her heart lurching painfully at the unexpected sound. She looked behind her at the kitchenette and dining area, swathed in shadows from the firelight. Everything looked like it was in place, chairs pushed into the table, dishes in the drying rack. It was probably a branch outside or the old cottage creaking in the wind.

Shaking her head and forcing a smile, she turned back to her laptop and studied the next paragraph. She needed a new word choice here, and that sentence wasn’t clear enough. Passive voice. Change it around to highlight the active acquiescence of women to the roles assigned to them as a point supporting their own passive-aggressive manipulation of social constructions and—

A loud, clear knock to her right set her heart pounding fiercely. Adrenaline spiked painfully through her veins, and she forced herself to breathe deeply before turning to her right and looking over at the door to the bedroom. The door was open to let the heat from the fire warm up the room, but beyond the doorframe, everything was in complete darkness.

When had night fallen? It had been light, even though it was storming, just a few moments ago. Hadn’t it?

Ava looked at the time on her computer. Four hours? That wasn’t right. How had it gone from two in the afternoon to six? She knew how long it took her to edit, and she had certainly not finished as much as she usually did in four hours. That was so weird. Unwillingly, she thought of how she had lost time in the woods, and how Robert had warned her not to go into the woods again. Well, she hadn’t. She was right here, in her cottage. The adrenaline began to ebb, and she realized she must have been staring into the fire more than she was editing, thinking about the Molineaux men and the crazy situation she was in with them. That was it. Well, now, she would focus. Two more hours, and she’d eat some of that lasagna.