Love on Lavender Island (A Lavender Island Novel Book 2) (27 page)

“Maybe I am,” he said quietly.

“Then you should work on that,” Amanda said. “Now I’m going to get this dinner started. You go take a shower and then invite Paige over. Wear your blue shirt she likes.”

Adam was still blinking back his sudden awareness. But finally Amanda’s specific recommendation sunk in. “She likes my blue shirt?”

“Definitely.”

“How do you know?”

“Girls know these things. And invite her for a walk after dinner. And don’t wear your hat when you go outside—it covers your eyes. Plus, she likes your hair.”

“She likes my hair?”

“Absolutely. Now go get ready. I’ll make you guys a dessert.”

An hour later, Adam paced the dining room, inhaling the amazing scents of whatever Amanda had in the oven.

“Stop!” Amanda said, laughing. “Relax.”

The doorbell rang, and he lunged for the door.

When he caught sight of Paige, his heart heaved into an unrecognizable rhythm.

What the hell was the matter with him? He hadn’t been this nervous since he flew a plane for the first time. He needed to relax. He wasn’t going to ask her to marry him, for God’s sake. He just needed to find out how she felt. And be honest about how he felt.

He’d never told a woman he’d loved her. In fact, he’d never told anyone that. Except Amanda just now. And maybe his mom, he hoped. But he’d never even told Noel, never told his dad. He’d never told Bob or Gert, even though he loved them both like parents. Those were not words he knew how to say.

And he wasn’t even sure that’s what he felt with Paige. Was it? Given the way he was sweating and nervous right now, when nothing had changed except his awareness that he might have stronger feelings for her than he knew, he figured something might be up.

“Apparently Gram had a wine cellar!” Paige said, lifting a bottle. She giggled in that cute way of hers and barreled through to the kitchen. “We’ll celebrate.”

“What are we celebrating?” he asked, shutting the door behind her whirlwind personality.

“Dorothy Silver, of course. It’s perfect! I can’t thank you enough, Adam. You’ll have to tell me what happened to change your mind about the orchard. Wow, it smells amazing in here, Amanda.”

Amanda smiled and looked up from the bowl where she was stirring rice.

“So what happened with MacGregor?” Paige asked with a little squeal. “And, man, I have to tell you the nice things Dorothy said. I can’t believe . . .”

Her next phrase stalled as she looked back at the dining table, which Amanda had set with nice china and silverware. A few candles were in the center, already lit. It looked desperately romantic. Adam was instantly embarrassed he’d let Amanda do this.

“Wow. This is so nice.” Paige looked up at him with a brow raised. “Did Amanda do this, too?”

Adam nodded.

Amanda moved toward the table with the bowl of rice. “Who’s ready to eat?”

“Amanda, this is beautiful,” Paige said. “And the dinner smells delicious. Thank you.”

“No problem,” Amanda said. “Special occasion.”

“Special occasion? What’s the special occasion?”

“I’ll let Adam tell you.”

Adam rolled his eyes.
Thanks, Amanda.

“What’s the special occasion?” Paige asked him.

“Let’s eat, and you tell me all about Dorothy, and I’ll tell you about MacGregor, and then we’ll go for a walk and we can talk about special occasions.” He pulled her chair out for her.

Seeming appeased, she sat and let him and Amanda serve while he shot warning glances at his daughter from across the kitchen.

Paige’s excitement bubbled over as she chattered on about Dorothy’s perusal of the property, described every member of her entourage, and how Dorothy had been convinced Paige should have the movie role. Paige practically panted the words out. Then she stared at both of them and let out a squeal. Adam felt his salmon going dry in his mouth. She was definitely leaving.

“What about the yoga studio?” he asked.

Paige blinked at him. As he watched her, he could almost see the confusion, joy, then a return to confusion play across her face.

“I need the money,” she whispered. “This will get me there. Stepping-stones. So what happened with MacGregor?”

“The offer fell through.”

Paige’s eyes went wide, and she put her fork down. “Adam, no! I’m sorry! What happened?”

He couldn’t tell her that it was because Paige and her mom wouldn’t give up their land to him, too, so he just shrugged. “Didn’t work out.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Sell the seaplane property.”

“No! You love the seaplane property!”

“It’ll be fine.” He didn’t want to worry Amanda, so he gave her a reassuring smile across the table. “Let’s talk about something else.”

They talked more about Dorothy and moviemaking, and Paige regaled Amanda with tales of what the Hollywood Film Library was like, and the famous people who came in for research.

When dinner was over, Amanda shoved them toward the door for their walk, saying she’d have dessert baked for them by the time they got back. She all but winked as she closed the door.

“Wow, she really wanted us to go on this walk, didn’t she?” Paige asked. “Where are we going?”

“Amanda wanted us to go to the Top of the World, but we don’t have to go that far.”

“Oooh, are we going to make out there?” Paige shot him a cute glance.

Adam chuckled. “I’m always up for that.”

“With Dorothy so happy, and my mom pleasantly surprised, I think my mom isn’t even going to mind so much that we’re spending time together.” She reached for his hand.

Adam let her take it and marveled at how sweet it felt. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d held hands with a woman—probably high school. His more recent encounters were good for getting laid, but nothing that ever led to the sweet, pure gesture of holding the hand of someone you knew and trusted. He stared at their entwined fingers for a second and realized this was what was missing in his life—a friend, a companion, a lover, a confidante. Someone you wanted to share everything with. Someone you told your seaplane-property secrets to and who trusted you with hers. Someone you wanted to help with her dreams. Someone who believed in you. Someone you loved. He was missing a Paige.

“So what’s the special occasion?” she asked.

“Amanda and I made a big decision today.”

Her face lit up, and she turned toward him, walking backward. “What?”

“We’re going to stay.”

Paige stopped abruptly, and he almost tripped into her.
“What?”

“We’re staying.”

He could almost see the wheels whirling through her head. But her smile was fading fast, and he didn’t imagine the wheels were turning his way.

“How are you going to make that work?”

“It won’t be easy. I’ll need a lot of Bob’s help to get things revved back up. The seaplane property should pay off the debts, and then everything else will go to me and Noel. As long as I can figure out how to make things profitable again, I’ll be okay. The Conservancy offered me more money if I stayed—seems they don’t have a lot of bison wranglers lined up. And I figure it’ll be a five-year struggle—it’ll be like starting my own business again—but then I’ll be back on my feet.”

“What about Amanda?”

“She wanted to stay.” He shrugged.

“What about art school?”

“I guess it was culinary arts, and she thought she could find some classes here or work with Rosa and then apply to a culinary college. She said she was starting to like it here. Bob and Gert are already becoming like grandparents to her, and the townspeople are making her feel welcome. I think she’s finding a sense of community here she never had in Alabama.”

Paige nodded. “That’s great, Adam. I mean it . . . that’s really great. Maybe I can visit you.”

He stalled. “Visit” was not what he wanted. He’d love for her to live with them. He’d love to have her in his bed every night and every morning, and kiss her forehead awake, and ride with her every week, and skinny-dip with her until they got caught, and sit out on the porch with her and Denny as the sun set behind them. But he couldn’t bring himself to say any of that. It sounded selfish. Paige needed to get on with her own life and pursue her own dreams. She hadn’t gone into FRED thinking things were going to suddenly change on her at the end.

“I’d love that,” he said.

She glanced up, looked as if she was going to say something else, then stopped.

“Hey, we don’t have to go to Top of the World,” he said. “Amanda’s probably got our dessert already baked. Let’s go back and see what she has.”

Paige paused, as though she didn’t want to give up the walk just yet, but she finally nodded and followed him back.

He wanted to get out of there. He wanted to get out of the cozy night that was reminding him of what he might have had if he’d been bold enough, and smart enough, to see what he had right before him. If he’d forgiven Ginger a long time ago. If he’d forgiven his dad. If he’d looked past his own problems and had seen the gift he’d been given.

Now it was just too late.

CHAPTER 25

Three days before the wedding—Paige couldn’t believe it had crept up so quickly—everything was in place. She’d been running around like a possessed person for the last week to make sure of it. Her mother was down in Carmelita in one of the swanky hotels. Dorothy and Richard and their dual entourages would be flying in the next day. The workers would arrive in two days. The coordinators would show up in three.

She’d even arranged for a private charter to take her back to LA right after the two p.m. wedding. She needed to be there by eight p.m. for a specially arranged dinner with Dirk and the director to discuss the movie part. She was pretty sure she already had it, based on Dorothy’s winks and encouragement, but she needed to be there anyway. Dirk was overjoyed.

Most of the other pieces for the wedding had come together smoothly. She and her mom truly were a good team.

The gazebo was the pièce de résistance, but Paige had spent a lot of time cleaning up the orchard, too. They’d established plans for where the white satin bows would go and where they would do a cute scene for the documentary, re-creating the moment Dorothy and Richard fell in love. The film crew had set up their lights, cables, and dollies and had strung miles of electrical wires.

As Paige ran back and forth every day among the workers, the wedding coordinators, the film crews, her mother, and various Dorothy Silver entourage members, she’d glanced around for Adam, but he’d vanished. He’d seemed to be avoiding her. She knew he was busy, too: various town members were coming up to visit him and help him fix the back end of his property where it led to the rocky cliff toward the seaplane ramp—a lot of tree trimming and brush clearing needed to get done for him to get it on the market. If he could clear it enough to show where a road might go, he would get top dollar. He’d seemed surprised that so many Carmelita residents would drive up to help, but they were all relieved he hadn’t sold to MacGregor. They knew he’d keep the Mason property—and the orchard and the bison ranch and the airstrip—just as it should be. They even set up a fund for him to try to pay off George’s debts themselves so he could keep the seaplane property, too, and maybe make it into a museum. He’d seemed humbled and shocked by their generosity.

But that was the last day Paige had seen him. Otherwise, he’d been like a ghost.

At first she thought it was a matter of circumstances, but then she started to wonder if he was avoiding her on purpose. Maybe he was done with FRED. Maybe he was done with her. She tried not to be hurt by that, because that would make her mother right. And she tried to remember that she’d always known this was short-term, and that she’d had fun with him while it lasted, and she was the one leaving—she’d laid out the rules. He hadn’t broken any promises or any trust, and she needed to accept that and move on.

At least that’s what she told herself.

Her heart, however, was apparently not listening. Late one afternoon, while tying her three-hundredth bow around a tiny pot of wedding almonds—a 1950s Dorothy-Richard first-wedding throwback, to be sure—four huge teardrops escaped her eyes and wet the wooden dining table.
What the heck?

Paige swiped at her cheeks with her fingertips and quickly moved the rest of the almonds aside so she didn’t have a pastel-candy mess on her hands in a moment.
Dang.
She didn’t want to be this way. She didn’t want to feel hurt. She wanted to be in control of her emotions. She wasn’t supposed to let her heart get in the way.

And yet the tears kept coming.

She wiped at her cheeks a few more times just as she heard the back door open.

“Yoo-hoo,” her mother said.

Paige snagged an empty netting circle and patted her eyes. “Hey, Mom.”

The netting was completely ineffective. Paige went for her sleeve instead.

Her mom circled her for a moment, then set the bags she’d brought on the kitchen counter next to Paige’s VHS copy of
Last Road to Nowhere
.

“What’s this?” Ginger asked.

“Oh, I ordered that for Amanda. She wanted to see it.”

Ginger nodded and glanced back at Paige. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I . . .” Paige didn’t know how to finish the sentence. She dabbed one more time at her cheeks with her sleeve and turned away. She didn’t want to get into this with her mom.

“Where’s your knight in shining armor?” Ginger asked from the kitchen. She started unloading wedding-morning marmalades, made fresh on Lavender Island, lining them across the counter.

“What?”

“Adam. You haven’t been around him much lately.”

Paige stood and began a trajectory toward the coffeemaker. “I think our summer fling is over.”

Ginger watched Paige fumble with the old machine, then fluttered her away. “I’ll do it.”

Paige returned to the dining table and plopped down.

“So is this one of those moments where you want my opinion or don’t want it?” Ginger carefully measured the coffee and arranged two cups.

“I guess I want your opinion if it’s positive.”

Ginger laughed. “That sounds about right. Well, if you want mine on this, I think you might be letting a good thing slip away.”

Paige was sick at the flurry of emotions skittering through her—chief among them were sadness, doubt, and fear. And now, after her mother’s admission, shock. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“I can admit when I’m wrong.”

“Since when?”

Ginger smiled and waited for the coffee.

Paige stared at the blue delft vase and sighed. “I don’t know, Mom. There are a lot of things I still need to tell him.”

“He came to talk to me.”

“What?”

Ginger poked at the coffeemaker as if to make it work faster, or maybe to avoid Paige’s eyes. “Yes, he came to apologize. He introduced me to Amanda.”

Paige’s jaw felt as though it had dropped to the table. “
What? When?
Tell me what happened.”

Ginger made her wait through a little more fussing with the appliance, which Paige recognized as one of her mother’s delay tactics. Finally, Ginger turned and leaned against the counter.

“Yesterday. He came to apologize to me—for blaming me all those years about his severed relationship with his father when it wasn’t me.”

Paige held her breath. “Did he know it was me?” she whispered.

“No. He said it was him. He said he and his father both had trouble expressing their feelings and their trust in people, and that if either of them had been able to bridge that gap back then, things might have been different.”

Paige let out another breath. That sounded like her and Adam, too. Apparently, they were both having trouble trusting and, therefore, expressing their feelings. But she didn’t want things to be too late for them, too.

“What else did he say?”

“He introduced me to Amanda and said what a wonderful girl she was and that he wanted me to meet her. She is a cute girl. And he said he knew he’d made some bad impressions on me back then but wanted me to know he’d changed and wasn’t the clueless boy he’d been. He wanted me to know what a fabulous job you did here and how hard you worked, and he hoped I’d give you all the credit. Paige, I admit I was wrong about him. He looks just like his father and has all the charm and appeal, but he’s a different kind of man. He really does care about you, honey. And if you care about him as much as I think you always have, I think you should tell him so. You made a good choice in him, even when you were thirteen years old.”

“You knew I had a crush on him then?”

“Everyone did, dear.” She turned to pour the coffee for both of them.

Paige laughed. “Adam didn’t.”

“Well, boys can be dense. But he’s grown-up now. And he can see exactly what’s in front of him. You are a wonderful find.”

Paige fiddled with the napkins. “Maybe I’m not.”

Her mother brought the coffees to the table. “What are you talking about, dear? You’re lovely. You are one of a kind, and any man would be lucky to have you.”

Paige smiled. “I appreciate your blind faith in me, Mom, but I haven’t been all that with Adam. I haven’t even been completely honest. I never told him I was the one to tell on him to you and George.”

Her mother quietly sipped her coffee at that, then stared into her mug and let out a lengthy sigh. “I’m sorry for all those years I made you distrust men, Paige. It was wrong of me to impose my own opinions and experiences on you. I was just choosing the wrong ones. But dishonesty begets dishonesty. The more you distrust men, the more you’ll withhold. And then you’ll completely withhold your honest self. Pretty soon you’re holding everyone at such an arm’s length, and being so quiet about who you truly are, or what you want, that you’ll never let anyone get close to you.”

“I didn’t want to tell him because I didn’t want him to hate me.”

“You didn’t want him to see the real you.”

Paige stared at her untouched coffee and realized that was the truth.

“I’d say trust him,” her mom said.

Paige lifted an eyebrow. “All these years you’ve been telling me not to trust men, and now
this
is your advice? A complete one-eighty?”

“A woman has the right to change her mind.” Her mom took a sip of coffee. “But, yes. That’s my advice. Trust him to make the right decision about a relationship with you, but you have to give him the true
you
first.”

Paige nodded again. Her mom was right—she had to give Adam the true her. She needed to tell him that she’d been the one to tell George and Ginger. He might hate her, and might never forgive her, but she had to give him that option. If he chose to forgive her, they could perhaps move on and have something truly meaningful between them. But if she never told him, they absolutely
never
could. She’d always distrusted others in relationships, but now she realized it was a two-way street.
Be completely honest to expect complete honesty in return.

She also wasn’t Katharine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall or any of the other sophisticated femme fatales she was trying to put on for him—she was just goofy, sometimes silly, find-an-adventure Paige Grant. And that would have to do. If he couldn’t love that about her, she’d simply have to accept that fact. But she couldn’t get him to fall in love with someone she was not. It was time to take her armor off. It was time to be her real self. It was time to be proud of who she was.

Paige scooted her chair back and grabbed the VHS tape off the counter. “I’ll have my coffee later, Mom. I have to go find someone.”

Paige ran across the meadow, the grasses no longer whipping at her ankles but now becoming dried and matted.

When she got to Adam’s back porch, she pushed the hair out of her eyes and stared at his back door for a long moment before taking a deep breath and knocking.

“Hey.” He opened the door in his bare feet and low-hanging blue jeans. Paige swallowed a sigh. But he had the look of a stranger now. He didn’t reach for her, didn’t grab her around the waist for another hot kiss, didn’t even smile at her in his naughty, intimate way. He just opened the door wider and ushered her in.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

“I’ve missed you, too, Paige.”

His words were uttered with politeness. Seeing his downcast eyes as she walked into the house like some distant visitor brought another threat of tears. How had she let them get to this place? Had her fear of opening up brought them to this awkward, terrible end?

Her heart thrummed at all she had to say, and what it would take to say it, and she took another deep breath. “Adam, I need to talk to you.”

Adam welcomed Paige into the kitchen, as he’d done so many times, but now his heart was encased. He wasn’t going to lay it raw anymore. He loved Paige. He knew that. But he would never hold her back. Paige was young and vibrant and free, and she needed to follow her dream, which started by taking this role in Hollywood. He tried to be happy for her. He’d been convincing himself all week.

“So did you call my guy to ferry you out right after the wedding?” he asked, heading into the kitchen to get her a drink. Adam had offered to fly her, but she’d admitted she was afraid to fly.

“Yes, everything’s set. Thank you so much.”

Maybe he could get her to visit. Maybe she’d come after she got the part, or after she played it. They were only twenty-six miles across the sea, after all. And she had her sisters here. She’d be back sometime.

“I’ve missed you,” she repeated, stepping toward him.

He nodded. Amanda was in the next room, watching
From Here to Eternity
, but he wanted to wrap his arms around Paige right now and take her to his bedroom. Or the hangar. Or the hayloft. Or maybe to the pond or the woods or her bed or the gazebo. He wanted to say good-bye properly and leave things on the warm, comfortable note they’d hit earlier in the summer. But he also needed to keep his heart hard. This was difficult enough as it was. It would be easier for everyone if they kept things simple from here.

“I ordered this from the Hollywood Film Library,” she said, thrusting a tape of
Last Road to Nowhere
at him. “I made sure to get it on a ‘vintage’ VHS for Amanda’s amusement.”