Buck's Landing (A New England Seacoast Romance) (18 page)

Elena, my love,

It’s more than fifteen years since you left me and I still wake up in the morning and look for your hair curling over the pillowcase. If heaven is the boot heel of Italy like your Mama always said, I bet you two have one hell of a garden growing. I was never much good at that, nurturing things, not without you. I miss you. I’ve missed you every day. Even the really bad ones.

So much that I lost myself, forgot to keep living, forgot to care for our beautiful daughter.

God, Ellie, I screwed up. I drank away my sorrow and I left her on her own. By the time I pulled myself together she was gone, so far so fast and I couldn’t ask her to come back. I screwed up so bad. I’ve been sober now for a while, and I’m supposed to atone, to make my apologies to the people I hurt, but it seems selfish to find her just to unburden my heart. I won’t hurt Sofia. I won’t dredge up all that pain just to polish up my halo. Instead, I’m saying I’m sorry the best I can to you.

I’m sorry.

I think about her all the time, Ellie. I think she’s older now than you were when we got married. She always looked like you. I bet she’s a beautiful woman, just like her Mom. I guess she could be married, could even have kids of her own by now. Thing is, sometimes I get angry, so angry at her for leaving me, too. But I drove her away and that’s different, and I forgive her for leaving.

I still love both my girls so much.

If I could, I’d tell our daughter to love hard, to give herself up to loving someone. Then I’d tell her to fight hard for it, not to let it walk away, not to let it die, not to let anyone or anything stand between her and real love, even if it hurts like hell, because living without love isn’t living at all. I had you. I had that love and maybe I couldn’t win against death, but I didn’t fight the demons that got between me and Sofia. I let her down, I let me down, and I’ve got half a life wasted to show for it.

Forgive me, sweetheart, and maybe someday we’ll all get another shot.

Love you forever. Jimmy

Long ago dried tears spattered the ballpoint ink, bled out the pale blue lines of her father’s notebook paper. Sofia paged through the stack of letters, all from her father to her mother, all written in the years he was sober. After the first one they became more like journal entries, full of the language of love and loss in a way Sofia had never imagined her father to think.

She lost track of how long she sat there, getting to know the man her father had become. She basked in his forgiveness, finally able to see his remorse, to believe he’d loved her despite his actions. When the letters were read, she folded the pages back into their envelope. Setting it aside, she boxed up the dress. Before she left, she would take it to the cleaners and see about having it preserved, and stored.

A knock at the door pulled her thoughts back to the present. The moving truck waited, pulled halfway up on the sidewalk outside. Dazed, she showed them the furniture and boxes destined for her storage unit. When they had gone, leaving her with a mattress to sleep on and the few things she planned to take to the Salvation Army before she left at the end of the week, she drifted through her rooms. Pared down to the essentials, she didn’t amount to much.

The letters called to her from the spot on the kitchen counter where she’d left them. “I’d tell her to fight hard for it, not to let it walk away, not to let it die, not to let anyone or anything stand between her and real love, even if it hurts like hell, because living without love isn’t living at all.”

She was moving towards the bedroom, grabbing her carefully packed suitcases before her head could stop her. She raced down the front steps and around the corner to the alley where her car was parked, dragging her luggage behind her. She was outside the Beltway and halfway to Baltimore before she allowed herself to think.

The Landing was gone; her condo was gone. Luxelle was expecting her in eight days. Silas had never said he loved her. Not in words. She’d never said she loved him, but she did. Her foot nudged the accelerator, pushing the speed limit as far as she dared. Even if he turned her away, she owed it to them both to tell him the truth.

~~~

Hampton Beach was shrouded in darkness when she pulled up outside Buck’s Landing. Sofia was quivering from exhaustion, her eyes burning from a punishing, nearly ten hour drive. She’d stopped only once for fast food, gas, and a bathroom, determined to find Silas before she lost her nerve altogether.

She opened a window and let the BMW idle. The ocean was a constant, even in the small hours of the night. The sand was bone-white under a sliver of moon, and Buck’s Landing hulked, empty and closed-off, over the mini-golf course. The Landing was dark, but a light glowed in Silas’s apartment over the Atlantis Market. Her folly washed over her. For all she knew, he had a woman up there, or he didn’t even live there anymore. Three weeks was long enough for anything to have happened.

Steeling herself, she killed the engine and opened the car door. Ocean Boulevard was deserted, save for the streetlights. Her eyes traced the chain-link fence that surrounded the putting greens, coasting over the Snack Bar window, and coming to rest on the unlocked and open gate. Her heart kicked over. What the hell?

She walked in the moonlit shadows towards the gate. Without the cheery burble of the water feature and the piped in top forty, a sinister pall fell over the landmarks. As she rounded the building onto the first green, she heard a voice.

“Goddamn it!” Footsteps on the gravel. “Get the hell over here.”

Sofia pulled her phone out of her pocket, fingers poised over the screen.

“Jesus, we’ve been through this. Not at night when everything’s all locked up.” The voice was hoarse, urgent in the darkness.

She peered around the man-made cave that separated the front nine from the back nine and nearly laughed in relief. By the light of an LED flashlight, Silas was staring up at a furry face with reflective eyes peering down from the top of the Easter Island Head on the seventeenth hole.

She couldn’t help herself. “Lost your cat?”

Silas whipped around, his face a fright-mask in the bleached-out light.

Houdini chirped and skittered down the statue, leaping from the moai’s nose and coming to rest at Sofia’s feet. Silas watched warily.

“Sofia?”

She scooped up the cat, whose entire body was vibrating with feline joy. “Hi.”

Silas pocketed his hands. “Hey. You’re a long way from home.”

“Am I?” She ran her hands through Houdini’s silky fur. The question hung weightily in the air.

“Isn’t home about to be the volcanic shores of the Greek Isle of Thera?” Silas winced at his own sharpness.

“Right now?” Sofia’s voice broke. “Home feels like an apartment over a mini-golf course.”

For a long moment Silas said nothing, his face impassive in the glow of the flashlight.

“Thank you for the print,” he said finally. “It was a wonderful goodbye gift. I didn’t deserve it.”

“You’re welcome.” Sofia set the cat down. Houdini sat back on his haunches and groomed his tail enthusiastically. “I’ve been an idiot.”

“How so?”

Sofia hoped she wasn’t imagining an echoing longing in his reply.

Her words were barely more than a whisper; her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her fingertips. “I spent so much time and energy running from my father’s ghost that I was blinded to the fact that I was repeating his mistakes. I let someone I love slip away, and I was too proud to fight to get him back.”

She saw a tiny flicker, a muscle working in his jaw. Her every cell was tuned to his reaction.

“I love you, Silas. I love you, and I’m sorry.” Someday, she thought, I will run out of tears. “I know there isn’t a place for me here anymore, but I couldn’t leave without you knowing you were right. You were so much more to me, and I was frightened and angry and—”

“Shh.” His arms came around her, his breath warm on her cheek. “Shh.”

He took her face in his hands, drying her tears with his thumbs. “I love you, Sofia. And if we love each other, there’s a place for you here.”

His mouth was warm when he kissed her. She held him, lips hungry against his. Her hands smoothed up his back, gliding over the smooth skin and muscles she remembered so well. Houdini twined through their legs, breaking the moment.

Sofia looked around at the deserted golf course. “We should go, shouldn’t we? We are trespassing.”

~~~

They weren’t trespassing, but how to explain that to her?

“Yeah,” Silas began, but Houdini streaked off out the gate and they gave up conversation to follow him. Silas threaded his fingers with hers, loathe to let her go even to walk to the apartment. The cat led the way past Sofia’s car, rubbing his back along the doors and tires as he passed.

“I need to move that into the parking lot,” Sofia said, voice jittery with adrenaline.

“Leave it for a minute. It’s okay,” Silas said, pulling her close again, “I don’t want to let you go just yet.”

He buried his nose in her hair, kissing his way down her neck, tasting the thin skin over her collarbone, hands roaming every inch he could reach. She was real, inexplicably there; his heart was full to the brim.

She touched his face softly, tentatively. “Silas? I know I’ve made a mess of things; there’s so much we need to talk about.”

He shushed her with a kiss. “There’s something I need to show you. Leave the car and come upstairs.”

He took her hand again, squeezing a little in reassurance, and clicked his tongue to call the cat. “Houdini!”

The cat vaulted up the back stairs, rubbing his jaw against the door jamb. Silas opened the apartment door, watching Sofia’s eyes move over the room. She took in the changes and looked up at him with eyes full of questions.

“You have my father’s chair.”

He reached for a curling lock of hair in her ponytail. “It was being loaded onto a Salvation Army truck. You have to admit, it’s better looking than the tweedy monster that was here before.”

A grin twitched at the corner of her mouth. He leaned over to press a kiss there. She turned to him, capturing his lips with hers, drawing away with a smile and a glance at the print on the wall.

“That’s exactly where I imagined it.”

“You’re exactly where I imagined you,” he countered.

Sofia looked out the window that faced the darkened sign at the Landing. “That’s good, because right now I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“That’s what I wanted to show you.” Silas pulled open the drawer underneath the patch of kitchen counter where he kept his laptop and pulled out an envelope full of papers. “You’ll always have somewhere. If you want it.”

He slid the envelope across the counter.

He watched realization and disbelief dawn on her face as she read. She blinked, half-smiling. “You?”

“I couldn’t bear to toss that poor abandoned stuffed panda out on the street.” He crossed to her, holding her hands over the paperwork. “It’s all yours if you want it back.”

~~~

The contracts were ready to be signed, turning the business and the property back to her. He’d saved it. Arrogant, high-handed, marvelous man.

Sofia grabbed the pen that lay near the drawer. Hastily she scrawled a line of text, then two long slashes. She signed the contract and initialed her changes before handing everything back to him.

She watched him read, watched his face light up.

“This is really what you want?” he asked. “A full partnership? You and me?”

“No,” she said quickly. “No. I want a lot more than that. I want the apartment to be a home again, full of laughter and my mother’s recipes. I want to save you from brown laminate counters and an old man’s cast off sofa. I want you to take me fishing on my father’s boat.” She cast an eye at Houdini, who sprawled on the battered leather chair. “I even want your damned cat.”

She took the contracts and tossed them on the coffee table. “I want a life with you. In Hampton. A full partnership and all that comes after.”

Silas’s eyes filled. He blinked to clear them, but his voice was hoarse. “You even want my cat.” He touched his lips to her hand, to her forehead, and finally her mouth. “I love you.”

She glanced at the print she’d given him, thought of her own place in Hampton Beach’s long history and just how close she had come to losing it, how close she’d come to walking away from Silas. She brought her gaze to rest on Silas’s face, on the answering shine in his eyes.

“I love you, too.”

<<<>>>

Self-described shenaniganist and unabashed romantic, Cameron writes from the Metro Boston area, where she lives with her husband, son, and two poorly behaved dogs.

In the eighth grade, she wrote her first romance novel on an antique typewriter, using a stack of pink paper. Detours between that draft and her publishing goals have included a BA in Music, a professional culinary education, and twelve years in the child-wrangling industry.