Somewhere With You (Windswept Bay Book 2) (11 page)

Shar almost laughed and started to tell the woman no but Gage took her hand in his.

“Yes, ma’am, I am. And if you would excuse us, I’ve been promised a dance by the lovely Shar.”

“Of course. I think I see Grant Ellington heading to the punch bowl. I need a photo with him. Thank you again, Shar. We leave early tomorrow but I’ll see you next year.”

“Not if I see you first,” Shar said under her breath.

Gage laughed softly in her ear as he pulled her into his arms and spun them out onto the dance floor. “You’re all tensed up. Relax,” he coaxed, and his warm breath tickled her ear.

“Thanks for rescuing me.” She looked at him.

“I couldn’t help noticing from across the way that you looked stiffer than a steel poker, so I thought I’d see if I could help.”

“I do like an observant man.”

“Anything for the pretty lady. And just so you know, I am yours.”

His soft words echoed through Shar; she faltered and stepped on his foot.

“Gage.” She looked up at him. “What are you doing? You barely know me. You’re going back to New York next week or soon after that—”

“Maybe not.”

“Well, I’m not going there. I told you, I don’t want—”

He pulled her closer against him. “You don’t want what, Shar? Love, passion, desire? Because I feel that for you. All of it. And I do know you. You can’t tell me you don’t feel it. Because I know you do.”

Shar moved automatically to the rhythm of the slow dance, but her mind was in chaos. She shook her head. “No, some people get swept off their feet. Not me. I have a life of my own, Gage.”

His heart beat with hers, as if her heart and his heart were locked together in a dance, intricately intertwined together. She tried to pull away, tried to put distance between them but his arm held her gently but firmly with him.

All the thoughts of him, the daydreams rushed at her.
They were just daydreams. Not really what she wanted. Were they?

She raised her gaze to him and he kissed her forehead. “I would never take you away from your beloved sea turtles. I see the value of your work and it is the first thing about you that I fell in love with.”

The music faded. They were at the edge of the dance floor and Gage pulled her into the shadows. Shar fought what he was saying. Tried to understand why he would be saying these things so quickly. So suddenly. “Gage, you’ve suffered the death of your last living parent. You’re overworked, torn and here to sort your life out. And to mourn. You are…” She searched for words. “You are putting emotions on me somehow. That’s it. You need time to adjust to what’s happening in your life. I’m just an escape from it. That’s it. I’m an escape. The sea turtle rescue started it. Don’t you see?”

He stared at her and said nothing.

“You know I’m right.” She felt more certain that she’d hit exactly on his problem. And the feelings she’d so suddenly and quickly felt for him were because she was drawn to rescue living things.

“You really believe that?”

She nodded, as her head buzzed with thoughts and remembrances of his touch, his kisses, his laughter. “What you think you feel for me isn’t real. You’re…you’re a ship trying to find your anchor.”

He’d just been staring at her, his jaw tight. Behind him, the ocean glistened in the moonlight. Now his brows knit and his blue gaze flashed; she saw it even in the dim light.

“I know what I feel, Shar. You’re right—I am a ship trying to find my anchor but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a clear head. I know what I want. And I want you.”

She stepped back, panicked. “I…I warned you. I told you I wasn’t looking for anything. I have my life. I need to get back to the wedding. They’ll be cutting the cake and I need to be there for Cali. They’ll be leaving soon.”

The look in his eyes cut through her and she fought not to reach for him. “I’m sorry, Gage.” Not waiting for him to say more, she spun and walked back to the wedding party. Her stomach churned like waves in an angry sea. But she put one foot in front of the other and walked on.

It was the only thing she could do right now.

Gage shoved a hand through his hair and watched Shar walk away from him.
What was wrong with him?
He suddenly felt like a number-one royal mess-up.

He could walk into a room and negotiate mega deals but where she was concerned, he couldn’t even keep his head on straight. He’d pushed too fast, too hard. And this was what it got him. Standing under the moonlight—alone.

Feeling like a royal jerk, he strode back to the reception and headed toward the parking lot. Maybe Shar was right. Not about how he felt about her, because she was dead wrong about that. He’d fallen in love with her and nothing could change that. But where his dad was concerned and his life, maybe he had been focusing on her rather than getting everything else dealt with.

He slid into his car and slammed the door. Gunning the engine, he backed out of the parking lot. The tires squealed as he turned onto the road and sped toward his rental. Not even bothering to open the garage, he parked in the drive and stalked to the front door and let himself inside.

Stopping in the dark kitchen with only the moonlight shining through the expansive windows, he headed out to the deck. It would be a long time before he’d sleep—if he did at all.

Shar had warned him. She’d told him she wasn’t on the market and he’d pushed her. He’d been the one who’d pursued her, kissed her. It had all been initiated by him and she’d warned him all along the way. Even when she hadn’t verbalized it, he’d known it was there by the look in her eyes and different signs.

And still he’d pushed. Believed what he was seeing at other times and feeling in her responses to his kisses that she was feeling what he was feeling and just denying the strength of their connection.

Had he been wrong about her feelings?

Or was she hiding from her feelings? Or maybe from something else?

It was nearly three in the morning when, with no idea where to go next with Shar, he finally pushed up out of the chair, damp from the night fog that had rolled in. When he walked into the house, he realized that it was unusually dark.
Had it been this dark before?
With no moonlight streaming in, he noticed there was no blue light coming from the electric pads of the microwave or the stove. No lights of any kind anywhere.

The electricity was out.

Fishing his phone from his pocket, he clicked on the flashlight app and went back out into the garage in search of the breaker box. He found it in the storage room behind a stack of storage boxes. Setting his phone down, he pushed the stack of boxes out of the way. But when he went to open the breaker box, he hit the top box with his arm and it crashed to the floor. “Perfect,” he muttered, studying the breaker box to see whether any of the main breakers had blown.
Nope.
He was going to have to call the electric company—the lights suddenly came on and flooded the room with light.

Great, at least that was one problem he hadn’t had to fix.

He saw that the box had been filled with books. He bent to one knee and sat the box upright and then started putting books inside. He saw a photo had slipped from one of the books and was hanging halfway out. He went to push it back into the book and stopped…it was a picture of his dad.
What was his dad’s picture doing in this house?

Chapter Thirteen

Shar held Rufus tightly in her arms and held her emotions in even tighter. She’d been numb ever since she’d walked away from Gage. She’d had to focus on Cali. It was Cali’s night and nothing in her life could interfere with making sure her sister had the perfect wedding reception and was sent off on her honeymoon with hugs and kisses and a beautiful event.

That Shar was falling apart inside was of little importance. At least then. Now, staring out her window into the dark, murky night, she was a basket case and it was all Gage’s fault.
Darn the man!

She scratched Rufus’s head and then buried her face in his scruffy neck. “Why, why, why, did I let myself get into this spot, Rufus?”

At the sound of his name, the pup barked.

She heaved a sigh and looked back up. It was nearly two and she had a busy day starting in about five hours. She had to at least try to get some sleep. And maybe things would look better in the daylight.

She’d just crawled into bed when the lights went out.

Great. Just great.

It was pitch black because the fog had set in earlier and covered up the moonlight. Rufus had been curled up at her feet. Now he moved up the covers and curled up against her chest.

“You’re right, fella. I can’t do anything about this right now either so here I shall stay, curled up with you.”

Closing her eyes, she laid there. And laid there. She opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling…or where the ceiling was supposed to be. She couldn’t see it, so she stared up at the darkness…and thought of Gage.

By the time sunrise broke the horizon, Gage had found more pictures of his dad and a woman he did not recognize. Shock and even anger had been his constant companion with each photo he found. And in some of the photos there was a boy, a toddler. And it wasn’t him.

Who were these people?

Why were they here in this house?
He had questions and he would have them answered in a few hours when he started making calls to his office and his dad’s lawyers. That was the only place he knew to start looking for answers. Larry Stewart had been his father’s friend and lawyer for years. If anyone knew who this was, it would be Larry. But another question he wanted answered was why did Kym send him here? There was no way this could be a coincidence. No way.

He stared at the photo album that lay open on the kitchen island. He’d been looking at this one for a while now. The woman was beautiful; she had blonde hair and she looked to be around her dad’s age—maybe ten years younger. That would put her in her early fifties now, maybe even late forties. She might be younger than his dad but they looked happy. His dad looked happy.

There were pictures of them on a sailboat out in the bay. Pictures of them on the beach and his dad was smiling. His dad not only looked happy—he looked happier than Gage had ever seen him.

He looked at the time on his phone and thought about waking Kym or Larry up but instead he went to the bathroom and took a much-needed shower. His thoughts went to Shar as it always did at this time of morning.

Where was she running today? What would she save today?

He wanted to find her, to tell her he’d rushed her and that he’d slow down. But instead he would give her space. And he would deal with his own business. His new business: discovering who his dad was when he hadn’t been in Manhattan.

His dad had died too young at fifty-nine. And he’d obviously had secrets.

Half an hour later, he walked downstairs, picked his phone up off the bar and strode out onto the deck and called Kym.

She answered at the first ring. “You called. At last,” she gushed. “Benjamin, if you don’t do something, the London deal is gone. They are breathing down our necks and I’m holding them off but I’m afraid if I don’t tell them something soon—”

“I don’t pay you to tell me what to do, Kym,” he snapped, and then grimaced and sighed. “Look. I’ll deal with it. But right now I want to know why I just found photos of my dad in this house you rented for me.”

Silence.

“Because…look, if you would come home for the reading of the will… Mr. Stewart has been calling too. He left a message for you to get in touch with him ASAP.”

“Why are the pictures here, Kym? You know something and I want it now.” He was firmer than he’d ever been with her. He wasn’t like that normally but this was not normal and she was obviously hiding something important from him.

“Because, it’s your house.”

Her words didn’t come as much of a surprise. He’d gone over everything about the situation that he knew and this was no coincidence. “And why do you know this and I don’t?”

“Because, once when Mrs. Davies was out sick, she had to have me take care of a rental booking. There had been some sort of problem and the rental company had a big mix-up and she couldn’t handle it because she was sick. She said that there was to be no mention of the incident to anyone. Absolutely no one, including you.”

“And why is that?” He didn’t say anything about what was in the photos. Not until he suspected whether she knew about the people in them.

“I honestly don’t know. I, well, when you needed a place to stay, to disappear, I remembered about the house and I thought it would be a good place. I…the house was used as a rental. I had no idea there were pictures there. If you come for the reading of the will, I’m sure you’ll find out everything.”

“I’ll call Larry.” He started to hang up and then stopped himself. “And I’ll get back to you on when I’ll deal with London. Let them know I’m setting up a date.”

“I’ll tell them. And, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine. I’ve got to go.”

He immediately called Larry.