Be My Love (A Walker Island Romance Book 1) (6 page)

Though the performance was over, Hanna still kept the camera rolling. The recital had been carefully honed perfection. Everything else was real life: children running around laughing and playing while their parents tried to keep them in line, dancers congratulating each other, boyfriends holding bouquets of flowers.

Hanna noted that her little niece Charlotte was enjoying herself far more in the aftermath of the recital than she had at any point during it as the five-year-old ran away with a tutu on her head while Hanna’s sister Rachel chased after her. Meanwhile, Emily was lining up the ballerinas for a photograph, trying to arrange the girls carefully by height while they kept wriggling out of position.

Hanna was the only sister not busy trying to corral would-be dancers or sign up new students, and she considered pitching in to help Paige or Emily or Rachel, but from what she could see, they seemed to have it all under control. Besides, she was still busy capturing the joyful chaos of it all on camera.

She’d wondered more than once if this would always be her role in things: to be the one watching life happen while the others lived it?

Or was it simply that she’d learned to stay out of these things just because she was the youngest Walker sister?

After all, how many times, growing up, had the others gone out of their way to look after her? Especially after their mom died. It had been less like having four older sisters than four mothers, albeit ones who occasionally gossiped with her about cute boys at school.

Hanna swung her camera around to find the other member of their family. Michael might not actually be a Walker, but he’d spent so much time at the house that it amounted to almost the same thing. He was a good looking big brother, constantly there to help, and occasionally to annoy her. Though these days he seemed to do both with Emily more than any of them.

Currently, he was putting a band-aid on the knee of one of the ballerinas, whose mother hovered over Michael, staring at the scratch closely when he looked in her direction, but straight at Michael the rest of the time.

“Thank you for doing this,” the woman was saying as Hanna moved a little closer. “Maybe I could thank you by having you over for dinner?”

Hanna wondered how many of the other single mothers in the crowd cursed themselves in that moment for not thinking of the same ploy. Maybe not as many as might have done so if Michael hadn’t shaken his head then, politely declining the way he so often did.

Finally, at the center of it all, there was Ava, surrounded by the children she’d taught. The parents all wanted to speak with her as well regarding which class she thought would be best for their child in the next semester, and if she thought they were dancing to their full potential.

Hanna didn’t realize Emily had moved beside her until her sister asked, “Did you get all the footage you needed of the recital?”

She nodded. “I should be able to edit it tonight or tomorrow, and then the studio will have a finished piece for everyone to take home.”

“That’s great,” Emily said with a nod of approval. It reminded Hanna of the times when she’d done well at school, and Emily had always made sure to tell her how well she’d done. “They like having the photographs, but it’s the performance that they’ll really remember. We all really appreciate you taking the time to help today, Hanna.”

As they watched Charlotte spin around in Rachel’s arms, Hanna said, “Do you ever think that one day you’ll have your own?”

Emily smiled at that. “I already have four to look after, named Rachel, Paige, Morgan and Hanna. Keeping up with all of you is more than enough for the moment.”

“Hey!” She’d forgotten what it could be like, being the youngest, sometimes. Deciding to get in her own little dig, she said, “You know, Michael’s been getting a lot of attention from one of the mothers.”

Emily shrugged and said, “Good for him,” but for a moment or two, it looked like Emily might head off in Michael’s direction.

Instead, she remained with Hanna, looking over to where Ava was still chatting with parents and children, very much the center of attention. Their grandmother would kiss a cheek here, deposit some praise there. One of the mothers was reminiscing about when she’d been a student there herself, and Ava remembered every detail.

She remembers so much about the past
,
but she won’t tell me any of it,
thought Hanna.

Grams had said that she’d made a promise, but to whom? And why say that it might be time for Hanna to tell the story of what had happened in 1951 between Ava, William II and Poppy, if she wasn’t going to talk about it?

“Everybody loves Grams,” Hanna said.

“But they didn’t always,” Emily reminded her. “Everyone’s so happy now, but that’s just because we’ve come a long way from the days when half the island wanted to drive Grams out.”

Hanna should have guessed that her big sister wasn’t going to leave the topic of her documentary alone. It wasn’t just that Emily had never been the type to leave things unfinished. Emily was as fiercely protective of Ava as any of Hanna’s sisters. But what annoyed Hanna slightly was that her sister seemed to think she didn’t care about Grams just as much as the others. What if there was more to the story that no one knew about? And what if what she and Joel had learned about the past changed everything?

“There was a time,” Emily said, “when the Petersons and their supporters would probably have gotten out their pitchforks and flaming torches if they thought they could get away with it. Can you imagine what it would have been like for her?”

Actually, Hanna could imagine it all too easily. If she’d been one of the island’s residents back in 1951, and the island’s golden boy had broken off his engagement to marry a dancer from the big city, hating Ava would have been the obvious choice. Particularly once her grandfather sold the company, because it would have looked like William Walker II’s new wife had talked him into it so that she could get her hands on the money. It would have been too easy to forget the part where the majority of the money went into building the school. And when Poppy disappeared…

“It must have been awful back then,” she admitted. “But I
never heard anyone talking about Grams doing all these terrible things growing up. And none of you ever said anything to me, either, about how cruel people had been.”

“That doesn’t mean that we didn’t talk about it,” Emily said. “We just didn’t do it in front of you.”

“You didn’t have to protect me,” Hanna insisted hotly. “You
don’t
always have to protect me.”

Emily put an arm around her. “You’re our little sister. Of course we were going to protect you. And now you need to think about protecting Grams. She might have told you that what you’re doing is okay, but you know she would never deny you anything. You need to think about the difficult memories and feelings that your documentary will dredge up and what they will mean for her. Do you want people talking about her like that again?”

That was the thing with Emily. She always managed to be so…so
reasonable,
even when she was telling you precisely how you needed to live your life. And the truth was that so much of it
was
reasonable, even if her sisters had no business hiding things from her.

“I promise that I have been thinking about all of that,” Hanna told her. And for the time being, at least, that seemed to be good enough for Emily, who walked away to help Michael.

Hanna went back to filming the aftermath of the recital, but this time she focused just on Ava. Her grandmother had found a place in the middle of Walker Island’s small community, and her importance in everyone’s lives was reflected on the adoring faces of all the people around her.

If Hanna truly believed that making this documentary would hurt her grandmother, then she’d give it up in an instant, switch to Emily’s whale migration suggestion, and hope for the best. Yet Grams had as good as
told
her to go for it: “
Maybe once you do make your documentary, it will finally be time that this story was told.”

And when Hanna thought about Poppy’s final poem...well, so many things just didn’t feel right. Besides, if she gave up the documentary, she might not see Joel again.

Could she really just walk away from everything?

Taking a deep breath, she worked to push away thoughts of her deadline for showing the documentary to her professor before the end of summer. Right now, it was far more important that she make the
right
choice, rather than a quick one.

And in the meantime, she reflected with a small smile as Charlotte started to perform a very creative dance of her own invention with the borrowed tutu still on her head, there were plenty of other wonderful things to film on the island.

CHAPTER EIGHT

After Hanna left, Joel had tried to put his thoughts about Poppy aside so that he could get back to work, but even after spending the afternoon bogged down by meetings and phone calls and emails in the office, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what else he might find in the attic. He’d gone back up and found a box with more of Poppy’s journals in it, and for the past several days whenever he could carve out free time he’d read through them.

So far, he’d been through three thick journals, a couple of smaller notebooks, and a stack of letters. Not all of it had been poetry. Poppy had included diary entries and sketches of the island, along with letters from people long dead, and scribbled random thoughts. Yet her poetry was at the heart of it all.

Strangely, though one of the notebooks was dated from just before the wedding, he couldn’t find any joyful or excited poems about her upcoming marriage. In fact, he didn’t find any mention of the engagement or wedding plans at all. He was sure he was missing something and that there must be another special volume he hadn’t yet found. But even after another exhaustive search of the boxes in the attic, he didn’t find any new journals or poems that Poppy had written.

Perhaps, he thought on Sunday, as he sat in his living room and re-read the entries from the month before the wedding was supposed to take place in 1951, if he showed the journal to Hanna, she would be able to find Poppy’s joy over her wedding.

Why hadn’t Hanna been back to demand access to the archives as per their earlier agreement? Several days had passed, but there hadn’t been so much as a phone call from her. Had she lost interest in doing the documentary?

Or in him?

Joel pushed that crazy thought aside as he closed the journal, then got out his cell phone. “Hi Hanna, it’s Joel. I’m just calling to check whether you still wanted to go to the archives. Give me a call back when you get a chance.”

Several hours later, however, he still hadn’t heard back from her. And with the tourist season heating up, it meant Joel was soon going to be impossibly in demand over the next few weeks dealing with all of his skippers and their boats. If he and Hanna didn’t go through the island’s historic archives very soon, he simply wouldn’t have the time to do it later without damaging the family business.

Last week, he would have been more than happy for the whole documentary to be forgotten. And yet, hadn’t he seen for himself during their interview with Milton that she truly didn’t intend to hurt anyone by telling this story...but also that something wasn’t quite right about the story he’d believed to be true for so long?

If anyone was going to look deeper into the Peterson–Walker rift, he was starting to think it
should
be Hanna.

Now, he thought as he tried her cell again and got her voice mail, if only she would answer her phone. Joel looked out his living room window at the increasingly gray sky as he dragged on a coat. It was going to storm soon, and as the clouds grew thicker and darker and the wind grew colder and harsher, he realized the weather matched his mood perfectly. Joel felt like he was only barely holding back a storm inside himself, both with regards to his family’s tragic past, and also to Hanna.

He desired her more than he’d ever desired another woman.

But she could never be his.
Never.

* * *

With the help of some locals who had noticed Hanna heading through town with her video camera, Joel eventually found her out on the northernmost tip of the island, where the bluffs of rock sticking out into the ocean were sometimes battered by the storms that never seemed to touch the rest of it. In good weather, however, the beach at their base was a great place to gather for a party or just to sit and watch the ever-changing ocean.

He parked his car at the top of the cliffs then trekked down one of the trails which passed the caves that had sheltered some of the island’s earliest settlers.

She was down on the stony beach by the bluffs, her camera on a tripod and pointed at a gathering set of storm clouds. In slightly faded jeans, a denim long-sleeved shirt, dark boots and her hair tied back to keep it from getting tangled in the rising wind, she looked a hundred times more amazing than any woman in an evening gown ever had.

Back in the attic, it had been all he could do to keep from pulling her against him and kissing her. She’d obviously wanted him to; yet that had just meant he’d needed to be the responsible one. The one who remembered just what a bad idea it would be for a Peterson and Walker to kiss after all these years.

But it was hard to remember the importance of being responsible as he looked at her gazing out over the ocean, looking at a storm as though it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

It wasn’t.
She
was.

Still, it was a stupid idea to even think of doing anything about it. On par with having foolish dreams about skippering boats when he’d been raised by his father to run the office.

Hanna was a Walker. Forget all those Romeo-and-Juliet fantasies of making things work out between the two families. Or better yet,
remember
what happened once their families got involved, and just how badly things had ended for everyone.

History had already proved that Petersons and Walkers just didn’t go together.