Her Hawaiian Homecoming (Mills & Boon Superromance) (29 page)

“What are you doing to me, woman?” Dallas moaned, pressing his forehead gently against hers as he set her down on shaky legs in the shower.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she breathed, feeling deliciously spent. As they finished rinsing, the shower started to sputter.

“It’s the pressure again,” he muttered. “Hang on. I’ll try to see if there’s a quick fix. You finish rinsing.” He jumped out of the shower, hair dripping, and pulled on swim trunks as he headed from the bathroom and toward the faucet leading to the water tank. Allie stayed. She hummed to herself, happy, happier than she’d been in forever, and she realized she didn’t even care she was showering outside. Hell, if Dallas came with every shower, she thought, she’d shower in the middle of the freeway.

She finished rinsing and turned the knobs, stepping out and wrapping herself in a towel. While shaking out her hair, she heard a phone
ping
with an incoming message. She reached for the phone on the bathroom sink, thinking it was hers, before she realized she’d left her phone inside on the kitchen counter.

She didn’t intend to snoop. Until she saw the name flash on the screen.

Jennifer.

She read the message without meaning to, as it was short and right there in her face.

R u there?

She put the phone down again on the countertop, wishing she hadn’t seen it. She glanced at the door to the bathroom, but it remained solidly shut, no sign of Dallas’s return. The phone pinged two more times.

Don’t look
, she told herself. She had no right to pry, no right to read messages intended for him. And yet...why was Jennifer texting him? After all she’d done to him, why did she reach out now?

Or was this something she did all the time? Allie hadn’t seen Dallas preoccupied with his phone. If anything, he tended to forget it, as he did right at that moment. He wasn’t like Jason, who had guarded his phone with dear life. No wonder, she thought now, consider he was living a double life.

What if it’s something to do with Kayla?

She wondered if she ought to go get Dallas, let him read his messages and find out. She knew on some level that was what she
should
do, but her curiosity simply couldn’t wait. She reached out and tipped the phone toward her so she could just see the face. She promised all she wanted to do was see if Kayla was all right. The message was sitting there on the pop-up bubble of his home screen. She didn’t even have to open it.

Kayla misses you. She talks about you all the time.

And then...

Times like these make you think about what’s important. I miss you, baby. I wish you’d come home so we can be a family again.

The words burned themselves into her brain. She felt woozy for a second, as if she was about to take a long drop off the top of a tall roller coaster.

Suspicion whirled in Allie’s brain, and immediately she was right back in Jason’s living room, the feel of betrayal hot and sticky at the back of her neck. Was Dallas encouraging this somehow?

The doorknob to the bathroom turned, and Allie almost dropped Dallas’s phone in the toilet. She managed to save it at the last minute, putting it down on the sink and quickly running her fingers through her wet hair as if that was what she’d been doing all along.

“Done already?” Dallas asked, sounding a little disappointed as his eyes took in the white fluffy towel wrapped around her body.

“All done.” Her voice sounded too bright, too brittle. But there was no helping it. She watched as Dallas picked up his phone. He moved away from her, out of the bathroom, his eyes intent on the screen.

“Something wrong?” she asked him, trying to sound nonchalant, as she hurried out in just her towel.
Level with me
, she thought.
Just be honest. Don’t hide it. There’s nothing worse than hiding it.

That’s what Jason would do.

“What?” Dallas looked as if he’d woken up from some kind of dream, distracted and distant. “No. Nothing’s wrong.” He glanced at his phone again and frowned.

Allie felt her stomach sink. She knew exactly what he was reading. If he didn’t have something to hide, why wasn’t he sharing it? Part of her worried that it meant he was considering getting back together with Jennifer Thomas. Her stomach flipped, and she couldn’t help but think,
I can’t trust him, just like I couldn’t trust Jason.

* * *

D
ALLAS
F
ELT
THE
old fury rising in him at the very sight of Jennifer’s name on his phone. Jennifer was like a bad penny,
if
that penny was soaked in toxic waste and dipped in cyanide. Honestly, how could she even
ask
him to get back together?

Why don’t you give me the fifty thousand dollars you owe me, and then you can just go to hell
was what he felt like texting back to her, but instead, he just deleted her messages and hoped she’d get the meaning from his silence. For all he knew, she’d taken a financial hit during the tsunami and figured he’d be an easy mark. She could think again. He was glad Kayla was all right, and sorry that the girl missed him, but there was no way on God’s green earth he’d ever consider getting back with that woman. Not in this lifetime.

Besides, he had Allie now, and the longer he spent with her, the more smitten he got. He found himself thinking about the future in ways he never did with Jennifer, despite being engaged to her. He realized now that he’d proposed to the wrong woman. He didn’t feel this way about Jennifer; he never had. It had been a relationship always fraught with problems, and everything about it had been so damn hard. Allie was easy. She just
got
him, and he got her, and there was something really wonderful about that. He’d agonized over proposing to Jennifer. Should he? Or shouldn’t he? And in the end he had because of responsibility he felt toward Kayla. Allie was completely different. The way she’d been a seamless partner during the harvest, and frankly, how brave and tenacious she had been during the tsunami, told him she was a keeper.

This was someone he
wanted
to marry, that he wanted to share his life with. He had no doubts.

He watched Allie make her way back inside, holding the towel to her chest, and thought that the only thing stopping him from proposing that afternoon was the fact that she’d probably bolt. He knew a skittish mare when he saw one, and Allie was as easily spooked as they got. Not that he didn’t understand. Her ex had done a number on her head. It was no wonder that settling down would be the last thing on her mind. He had to hope that, just like breaking in a fearful horse, that if he gave her time and patience and lots of care, she’d come around. Too much too soon would scare her off for good. Hell, he’d almost blurted out the damn L-word a dozen times in bed only just stopping himself in the nick of time. He would have to be patient and bide his time.

The last thing she needed was to hear about some crazy, delusional ex offering up insanity via text message. Honestly, had Jennifer lost her mind? What on earth made her think he’d ever want to get back with her?

He glanced once more at his phone, shaking his head in disbelief. Jennifer would just have to leave him alone.
Learn to deal with disappointment,
he thought.
It’s about time you had your share.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A
LLIE
W
ANTED
TO
scream and shout at Dallas, but part of her was just too devastated, too brokenhearted to do it. She knew she’d have to talk to him, but part of her just didn’t want to. She wasn’t ready for the truth yet. She wasn’t ready for a sledgehammer to her heart when she found out it was all true and far worse than she’d imagined. Jason had taught her just how ugly things could get. She sneaked away from the coffee plantation that day. It was time to see her grandmother at the cemetery.

She’d knocked on Kaimana’s door and asked if she’d go with her. Kaimana obliged happily. Together, they made the long drive to the eastern side of the island. She knew her grandmother and father were buried at the Alae Cemetery near Hilo. It was where Grandma Misu’s father’s family had grown up, and where her parents were buried. The cemetery’s main feature, a huge rain tree, offered a giant canopy of green for many of the Japanese gravestones. The Pacific Ocean glinted in the distance. The cemetery on the eastern shore had been saved from damage from the tsunami, as had Hilo. Flowers bloomed here, and birds sang.

“Misu will be glad you’re here. There was so much she wanted to tell you.” Kaimana glanced over the gravestones, her eyes growing misty. “Come. I’ll take you to her.”

Allie followed Kaimana to the rain tree, stunned by the beautiful edges of it, like an enormous bonsai. The cemetery carried a unique kind of beauty and peace to it, and she had no trouble understanding why her grandmother had wanted her father buried here and why she had chosen to join him. If you had to spend eternity somewhere, might as well be under the shade of a beautiful tree only found in tropical places.

Allie carried a lovely arrangement of Hawaiian flowers: hibiscus, bird of paradise and irises, planning to leave them at her father’s and grandmother’s gravestones. When she saw that most of the stones had Japanese characters, she was suddenly glad to be following Kaimana through the neatly arranged plots. She stopped in front of a light granite gravestone that held both Japanese and English carvings.

“You know, she never blamed you.” Kaimana’s voice was so low, Allie almost thought she imagined the words.

“What?”

“For your father’s accident. She never blamed you. She worried about you blaming yourself. She was so sad to lose you after she lost her son. It took her a long time to recover, and I’m not sure if she ever really did. She understood why your mother had to go, why you did, too, but she wished you would come back.”

Allie felt a zing of guilt. “We never had the money for the flight.”

“Misu knew that. It’s why...it’s why she left you the farm. She had so little when she was alive. She just loved you. She always loved you. Wanted you to be happy.”

“I...” Allie wish she’d known that.

“She never abandoned you. Not in here.” Kaimana pointed to her own heart. “They’re both here with you. Now. I’ll give you a minute.”

She nodded knowingly and shuffled off, away back through the cemetery and to the parking lot. Allie glanced down at her grandmother’s name, and next to it, her father’s gravestone. She wanted Kaimana’s words to be true. Was she really
not
alone?

“I brought this for you, Grandma and Dad,” she said, putting the flowers down, her voice feeling unnaturally loud in this peaceful place. She felt silly for talking out loud but made herself do it anyway.

“I’m working hard to make that winning crop for you, Grandma,” she said and realized she meant it. Somewhere along the way, it had become less about getting Kaimana to sign that paper and more about doing what Grandma Misu wanted. She honestly wanted to win that coffee contest. “And I’ve even made something else with the coffee we can’t use.”

Allie brought forth a small plastic container with a screw top. With some help from Teri and Minnie regarding packaging and labels, she’d made special Kona Coffee Estate spa products, which she was almost sure, if she could send any back to Chicago, her old spa would buy by the box load. She put the small white container at the grave, as if her grandmother and father could see it. She wondered how they’d feel about a spa line. Dallas had been excited by the idea. He joked they ought to open up a gift shop on the property. Maybe even start to give tours like some of the bigger farms on the island.

“I’m sorry, Grandma, for not coming to your funeral. I’m sorry for not coming back at all. I...” Tears welled in her eyes and choked the words. “I’m sorry I didn’t do more for both of you...when you were here.”

She slumped to the ground in front of the gravestones and just cried. After a few minutes, she felt better, lighter. She thought of Kaimana’s words. Just because she couldn’t see and hear her grandmother or father anymore didn’t mean that she couldn’t still love them. It didn’t mean that she couldn’t still choose to feel loved in return. They hadn’t abandoned her.

Had Dallas, though?

She cried, worried about him, worried that her heart might be broken once more.

“I don’t know if I can do this again,” she told her grandmother’s gravestone. “I don’t know if I can be knocked down one more time and get up again.”

She stared at the gravestone, wondering how her grandmother had done it, all those years hanging on to a coffee plantation and barely making ends meet.

“I don’t know if I’m strong enough.” Could she survive the worst news from Dallas? Could she survive another betrayal? She really didn’t know.

The gravestone couldn’t answer her. But as she looked at her father’s, she realized she was strong and resilient. She’d weathered a lot already in her life, and nothing had killed her yet.

She swiped at her eyes and sniffed. Whatever came, she’d face it.

* * *

T
HE
N
IGHT
OF
the luau came quickly. The whole island was abuzz about it. Locals wanted a reason to celebrate. There’d been too much tragedy and loss, and many yearned for a night when they could put the weight of that down, if only to lift up a glass of mai tai and toast what they
did
have. Dallas and Allie arrived together. Dallas wore linen shorts and a button-down floral shirt. Allie had on a simple white linen dress with a matching white flower pinned in her hair. She wore her black hair up in a messy twist, and tendrils hung down her tanned cheeks, looking breathtaking, Dallas thought.

Dallas parked the truck in the overflow parking lot near the beach, which was already crammed with cars. A huge, oversize billboard of Jennifer Thomas’s grinning face leered down at them from across the street. Her bright blond hair was like a platinum halo, her green eyes perfectly aligned and her man-made cleavage perky and gravity defying in her plunging neckline. Dallas wished someone would spray paint a mustache on her.