Carolina Girl (2 page)

She paced the thick, mushroom-colored carpet. Her inactivity, her isolation, her helplessness drove her crazy. How could Derek do this to her? He must know she was waiting. He must have heard that she’d been . . . Her mind recoiled from the word
fired
. She’d been let go.

She didn’t get it.

She’d worked hard to get to a place where she was indispensable, on top, in control. Vice president of marketing and public relations for a Fortune 500 company. No vacationing rich kid on the island for the summer, no legacy student from Harvard, no cigar-sucking, golf-club-swinging member of the Old Boys’ Network was ever going to look down on her again. She flung herself onto the couch.

By eight o’clock, she was shaking with fear and a hot, defensive anger. Derek still wasn’t home. What if something had happened to him? Her mother, after all, had recently been the victim of a drunk driver. Didn’t he care about her feelings at all?

At nine o’clock, a key scraped in the lock.

She jumped to her feet, bubbling over with worry, relief, and resentment. “Where have you been?”

Derek stopped inside the door, his blond hair shining in the yellow light of the hall, his face shadowed. “Putting out fires.”

He sounded tired.

She crossed her arms against her chest. “With what? Scotch?”

“I had to go out with the team after work. You know how it is.” He stretched his neck, rolled his shoulders. “Christ, what a day.”

She did know. He was under stress, too, she reminded herself. “Are you all right?”

He slid out of his jacket. Shot her a look. “What do you think?”

She didn’t know what to think. He hadn’t told her anything yet. “I was worried about you.”

He nodded as he crossed to the dry bar, accepting her concern as his due.

She waited for him to reciprocate with questions. Sympathy. She didn’t expect him to coddle her. That wasn’t their way. But surely he would say something. When he didn’t, she prompted, “I suppose you heard about my day.”

He poured himself two fingers of Laphroaig. A calculated amount, suggesting restraint and appreciation at the same time. He would have had the same at the bar. Derek never did anything—even drink—without calculating its effect. “Hell, yes. That’s all anybody wanted to talk about. I had a bitch of a time getting them to focus on the significant aspects of the acquisition.”

Ice trickled down her spine. Frosted her voice. “You don’t consider my firing significant?”

The bottle cracked against the rim of his glass. “Of course it’s significant. I just meant I had a lot on my plate this afternoon.” He set the bottle down and crossed the room, cupping her jaw in his smooth, capable hands. “It was hell for me, not being able to talk to you.”

His breath was warm against her face. Meg closed her eyes. It was hell for her, too.

Derek’s familiar scent enveloped her, his starched shirt, the smokiness of Scotch, the cool, expensive tang of his cologne. “I wish you had come home,” she said, hating the admission, detesting the needy, uncertain tone of her voice.

“I wanted to,” he said. “I thought you’d appreciate some time to yourself.”

She opened her eyes. “Twelve hours?”

He released her face. “It wasn’t that long.”

She wasn’t going to argue over minutes. “You said we were partners, Derek. We’re a team. I needed you to have my back today, and you weren’t here.”

His brows twitched together in annoyance. “I have your back.”

“I just got fired!” With an effort, she modulated her voice. She was going to be reasonable if it killed her. “You’re on the transition team. You could have fought for me. You at least could have warned me.”

“You know I couldn’t do that. I can’t show any favoritism. I have to act in the best interests of the company.”

Ouch. As if keeping her around wasn’t good for the company.

“What about my interests?” she asked. “Or don’t they matter anymore?”

“Of course you matter. Have you considered that this Parnassus acquisition could be the best thing that could happen to you? To us.”

Meg gritted her teeth. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Look, there was always going to be a certain awkwardness as long as we were with the same company. Now there’s nothing holding us back. Personally or professionally.” He smiled at her, unusually charming for a finance guy, and unease moved in her bones.

“Nothing except
I’m out of a job
.”

His lips tightened. “There’s no need to raise your voice, Meg. People are losing their jobs all over. It’s this economy.”

“The economy didn’t fire me.”

“My point is, you can find another job. This could be the opportunity we need to figure out what we really want. Where we’re going.”

“We know where we’re going. Or I thought I did.” One rung, one step at a time.
Never look down, never look back.
“I thought we were getting there together.”

“We are together. All the time. All we ever talk about is work. This is our chance to expand our horizons. Examine our priorities.”

Easy for him to say. He had a job.

“Forgive me if I don’t feel very high on your list of priorities at the moment.” She sounded bitter. Well, she felt bitter.
Twelve hours.

He examined her face. Set down his drink. “I know this is hard for you, Meg. This transition has been a strain on both of us. But I’m up to my ears right now. I can’t afford to get caught up in some personal drama. I have to keep my head in the game.”

She drew back, stung. “I’m not asking you to stick around and hold my hand all day. I’m just saying I could use a little emotional support.”

He drew in his breath, the way he did when she was being difficult. “I understand. But you can’t disappear for two weeks and then complain because I’m a little late coming home from the office.”

“My
mother
was
hit
by a
fucking drunk driver
. She was in the hospital. I had to be there.”

“Well, maybe you should think about going back to see her, then. Going home.”

She stared at him in disbelief. She
was
home. “I just left North Carolina three days ago. I need to stay in New York.”
I need to fight.
“I need to look for another job.”

“Sure,” Derek said. “But it wouldn’t hurt for you to step back and get a little perspective first.”

Her face felt stiff. She had to work to keep her voice even. “Are you saying you don’t want me around?”

“Of course not.” His breath escaped in a long-suffering sigh. “Don’t you think I could use your support right now? My job’s on the line, too, you know. You can’t get upset because I don’t have the luxury of giving you the attention you deserve.”

Her jaw ached. Probably because she was clenching her teeth so hard. “Fine.”

She would not cling. She refused to whine. Even at sixteen, she’d had too much pride to beg.

She squared her shoulders. “My mother gets out of rehab in another week. Maybe I’ll go down there for a little while to help out. That would certainly provide us with perspective,” Meg added, unable to keep the bitterness from creeping back into her voice.

She waited, her blood drumming in her ears, for him to ask her to reconsider. To plead with her to stay.

He smiled, obviously relieved. “That’s a great idea. It will do you good to get away. I know how close you are to your family.”

It went against her nature to bite her tongue. But she was no longer the impulsive, deluded adolescent she’d been in high school. She didn’t need Derek to fix her problems. She didn’t want his pity. She wanted him to . . . What?

Hold her. Want her, she supposed. Fight for her.

Which was ridiculous. Of course he wanted her. They’d just bought a condo together.

So she forced herself to nod and listen as he told her about his day. As if a recitation of his schedule could somehow fill the void inside her chest.

First thing in the morning she was buying a computer to check airfares to North Carolina.

* * *

T
HE BAGGAGE CAROUSEL
clacked in time to the headache pulsing behind Meg’s eyeballs.

Her flight from LaGuardia had been delayed forty-seven minutes, making her miss her connection, stranding her in Charlotte for almost two hours.

She stood in the Jacksonville baggage claim, watching the same damn six suitcases sidle through the rubber curtain and circle the conveyor belt.
Clack, clack, clack.

None of them was hers.

She adjusted her stance, arches aching in her three-inch heels, and dug for her new phone. With one eye on the moving belt, she checked the display screen.

Nothing.

Her stomach dropped. Maybe Matt was on his way. And maybe her brother hadn’t gotten her text explaining she was late. But then wouldn’t he be here, waiting for her? Wouldn’t he have called?

Unless he hadn’t registered the change in her phone number. Her coveted 917 number, the original cell phone code for Manhattan, was gone forever. She hadn’t confided her firing to her family yet. It was too recent. Too raw. Maybe her brother was still leaving messages on her defunct office voice mail.

She winced. If Matt didn’t turn up, if he didn’t call back soon, she’d have to rent a car to drive the hour and a half from the airport to Dare Island.

The carousel wheezed. Bags and machinery thumped. The passengers around her pressed forward as the first bags rattled into sight and toppled onto the belt. A young mother in jeans and flip-flops retrieved an infant seat. A Marine hoisted his duffel bag. A sleek red Tumi suitcase slid through the curtain, looking as out of place in this one-runway town as Meg felt.

At last.

Meg stooped for her bag. Only to be shouldered easily aside by a large, warm, male someone at her back.

A long arm reached around her. A strong hand—tanned, long fingered—grasped the handle of her suitcase.

She recognized his hand before she saw his face.

Knew his voice in the pit of her stomach, in the telltale leap of her stupid heart, before she registered his words.

“I’ve got this,” Sam Grady said and plucked her bag from the belt.

Two

M
EG’S PULSE KICKED.
Her nerves danced as if she were sixteen again. Not good. “Sam,” she said flatly. “What are you doing here?”

He turned, flashing that you-know-you-want-me smile, and even though Meg told herself she was inoculated against his charm, something inside her melted. The mother with the infant seat stopped strapping in her child and sighed.

That was Sam for you, Meg thought. Women had been throwing themselves at him since puberty.

She should know. She’d been one of them.

His dark hair was a little longer and his body, in jeans and a black Polo shirt, had filled out some since his glory days in high school. But his eyes were the same, green, clear, and sharp as a broken bottle, and his smile could still sell anything to any woman foolish enough to buy. Toothpaste. Unnecessary luxury items. Sex.

“I’m here to pick you up,” he said in his good ol’ boy drawl. Deeper and more resonant now, like Bourbon filtered through twilight. So different from Derek’s flat, refined, New England prep school voice.

Meg smiled coolly, ignoring the liquid pull of her hormones. “Then you need to work on your lines. This is an airport, not a bar.”

Sam’s eyes glinted. “Matt told me you needed a ride.”

Crap. It figured. Sam was her brother’s best, his oldest friend. If Matt couldn’t meet her at the airport, naturally he would call Sam. “Is he all right?”

Sam nodded. “Fine. He’s taking a couple of lawyers out after bluefin.”

Her brother Matt earned his living on the water, charter sport fishing most of the year in the sleek
Sea Lady II
, commercial fishing sometimes in winter in their grandfather’s old-fashioned, wood-hulled boat. It was not the life Meg had ever wanted, but she respected her brother’s choices. As a single dad, Matt hadn’t had an easy time providing and caring for his son. And since their mother’s accident, he’d had his hands full running his own business and keeping an eye on their parents’ inn.

“And you just happened to be free,” she said.

Of course. Sam never had to work. At anything.

Sam shrugged. “I was around. And . . .” He flashed another of those knee-weakening grins. “I always did have trouble saying no.”

For a moment the air stuck in her lungs. But she wasn’t a teenager anymore, struck breathless by his eyes, his hands, his smile. She raised her eyebrows. “I remember.”

* * *

FROSTY, SAM THOUGHT,
taking in her cool tone, the dismissive lift of her shoulders.

That was okay. He could work with frosty. Indifferent was harder to get around.

And he definitely wanted to get around Meggie.

He hadn’t seen her except in passing since his freshman year of college. Eighteen years ago. He had plenty of reasons for avoiding the island, and Meg . . . Well, she had her own reasons for avoiding him. He’d pretty much been a dick back then. He’d always hoped he’d have a chance one day to make it up to her.

Seeing her again, he
wanted
to make it up to her.

She looked good, all black and white like some movie actress from the fifties, short dark hair, smooth pale skin, black wrap jersey dress that slid over the curves and angles of her. Her toes in skinny-heeled sandals were painted fire-engine red. To match her suitcase?

He looked up and encountered her eyes, icy blue in contrast to her hot nails and warm, pink cheeks.

Okay, so he was checking her out. Not the best way to convince her that he was a reformed character.

He grinned—
busted
—and hefted the suitcase. It weighed a ton. “This it?”

“I’m waiting for another bag.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “How long are you planning on staying this time?”

Her flush deepened, but her voice remained cool. “That depends.”

He was perversely amused by that icy tone. “On . . .”

“Things.”

Unlike most women, she didn’t jump at the chance to talk about herself. Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk to
him
.

Not a problem. He was good at getting people to loosen up, to lighten up, to like him, a survival skill he’d picked up sometime around stepmother number two.

“I’m surprised they can spare you at work,” Sam remarked. “You were just down here, what, a week ago.”

Meg stiffened. Not much, but enough so he noticed. “Work isn’t everything.”

Another suitcase, hard and shiny as a candy apple, bumped onto the carousel. Hers, he bet. He reached for it.

“Not for me,” he agreed easily. “But you . . . I thought you lived for your job.”

“Family comes first.”

He slid her a look as he snagged her bag off the conveyor belt. He’d expected their first real conversation in eighteen years to be awkward. He hadn’t expected her to start spouting clichés. The Meggie he remembered spoke her mind and damned the consequences. “I always admired that about you.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“Your family. Your priorities. The way you’re there for each other.”

Meg reached for her suitcase. He resisted her attempt to reclaim her bags and headed for the exit. Frosty or not, he figured she’d follow her luggage.

She did, striding with surprising speed in those skinny-heeled shoes. “It’s because Dad was in the Marines. You move around so much, changing bases, changing schools, you learn to stick together.”

He’d never thought of it that way. He’d always accepted her family’s enviable closeness as something permanent, solid, and straightforward.

Not like his family at all.

The Fletchers had lived on Dare Island for four generations. Tom Fletcher had served twenty years in the Marines, but Sam remembered the summer Meg’s father had moved his family back into the old house falling down above the bay. Sam’s home life that year had sucked. Stepmom number two—pretty blond Julie, with her magazines and manicures—had moved out at Christmas, and before the school year was even over, Angela, broody, moody, and already pregnant, had been installed in her place. Once Sam might have been excited over the idea of a half sibling, but not then. He was fifteen, for Christ’s sake. It was embarrassing, having a father who couldn’t keep it in his pants sticking it to a woman twenty years younger.

The old man, of course, had swollen up like a bullfrog over this evidence of his mojo.
You better watch yourself, boy
, he said to Sam.
Got yourself a little brother or sister now coming up behind you. That’s half your inheritance.

It made Sam sick.

That afternoon he’d escaped on his bicycle, taking his time going home after killing a couple of hours on the beach. It wasn’t like anybody would miss him. It was lame, not having a car. The old man had promised Sam a new Jeep Wrangler when he turned sixteen, but with all the fuss over the baby coming, who knew what would happen? So Sam straddled his bike at the bottom of the drive near the rental truck, watching the new family move in: a quiet boy about his own age, with big hands and shoulders; a skinny girl maybe a couple years younger; and a happy little kid who barreled in everybody’s way.

The front screen slammed. The girl came out of the house and down the walk. Sam was making a study of breasts that summer, as many as he could see up close or get his hands on. This girl was too young and too thin to have much of his new favorite thing, but he liked the way she moved, quick and determined. Her hair was dark and short and shiny.

She caught him watching and looked straight at him instead of down and away like most girls. Her head cocked at a challenging angle. “What are you looking at?”

You.

He flushed. “Nothing.”

Her brother came up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. Sam jerked his chin in a silent
what’s-up
.

The boy gave him a cool look and a nod in reply. “Come on, Meggie. We’ve got stuff to do.”

The mother approached from the house. “Matt? Who’s this?”

She looked the way a mother was supposed to look, Sam thought, her dark hair slightly frizzy with humidity, smile lines at the corners of her eyes.

“Sam Grady, ma’am.”

The smile lines deepened, just like he knew they would. Moms—other moms, not his own—liked being called
ma’am
. “Nice to meet you, Sam Grady. I’m Tess Fletcher. There are sodas in the cooler if you’re thirsty.”

“When you’re done standing around jawing,” barked a voice from inside the orange-and-white truck, “I could use a hand with this couch.”

Sam and the boy, Matt, jumped forward at the same time.

And when the rental truck was empty and the boxes piled in every room, Tess Fletcher had invited Sam to dinner.

For the next four years, until he and Matt went away to college, Sam had hung out at the Fletchers’ every chance he got, shooting hoops with Matt in the driveway, scraping paint off the old windowsills, making himself agreeable, making himself useful, doing anything so they would let him stay, so he could pretend to be one of them.

Until he fucked everything up.

Nobody knew. Meg never told. But his guilt and her silence had created a wall, an invisible barrier between them.

He had a chance to fix things now. He wasn’t going to blow it.

“Matt said the island was the only place that felt like home,” he said.

“Don’t confuse me with my brother,” Meg said. “I like change. I
liked
being a Marine brat.”

“No ties,” Sam said.

“No baggage. Every school year was a fresh start.”

It wasn’t much of an opening, but he would take what he could get. She wasn’t likely to give him many chances to talk to her alone. Not until they got this out of the way.

He stopped and turned, caging her between the suitcases, trapping her between his body and the side of his truck. Her blue eyes widened.

“You like fresh starts?” Sam said. “Fine. How about one with me?”

* * *

H
EAT RADIATED OFF
Sam like sun off the tarmac. His dark shirt, wilted in the heat, clung to the planes and muscles of his chest. He was broader than Meg remembered, standing close enough for her to see the darker rim circling his irises and the halo around his pupils, gold against green.

Too close.

She functioned better when Sam was at a distance. Like nine hundred miles away.

Her warm flush was followed by a trickle of cold reality. They weren’t intimate. He had no business acting as if they were. Served him right if she pretended not to know what he was talking about.

“There’s no reason we can’t be civil,” she said coolly. “We’re not in high school anymore. But we don’t see each other often enough to make a fresh start necessary.”

Or desirable
, her tone implied.

Sam continued to regard her steadily, an indefinable gleam in his eyes. “We will if you stick around.”

“Excuse me?”

He tossed her bags in the back of his truck, a big, shiny black pickup. Of course it would be black, she thought distractedly. Red was too obvious, silver too ubiquitous for Sam. Black was the choice of powerful men like politicians and gangsters.

“We’re both staying on the island,” he said. “We’re bound to run into each other.”

Not if she could help it.

“I thought you had your own business now.” There was a bold white logo emblazoned on the door of the truck. SAM
GRADY
,
BUILDER. “In Cary or something.”

“You heard about that, huh.”

The satisfaction in his voice set her teeth on edge. “Don’t flatter yourself, Slick. I can’t help it if people like to talk. Especially on the island.”

Her
mother
liked to talk. Especially about Sam. Tess had always liked Sam, proving that even her mother wasn’t an infallible judge of character.

Sam raised his brows. “I thought maybe Matt said something.”

“Contrary to what you might think, I do not spend my limited family time discussing you with my brother.”

Sam grinned. “Probably a good thing.”

A rush of warm and guilty memories crowded in on her, all mixed up with the shadows of the deserted boathouse and the scent of musty canvas and her own voice begging,
Don’t tell Matt.

Blindly, she turned away to climb into the cab.

Sam’s hand steadied her. “Watch your step.”

She jerked her arm away, her chin firming in annoyance. “My brother has a truck. I know how to get into a truck.”

“Yeah, but mine is bigger than your brother’s.”

She fought a spurt of laughter. “Very funny.” She twisted on the seat, tugging her skirt down her thighs. The cab still had that just-detailed, new truck smell. At least she didn’t have to worry about tangling her feet in fast-food wrappers. Or women’s underwear. “I’m not impressed by size.”

Sam’s eyes met hers. “I remember.”

Her breath went.
Oh, God.

Sam had been her first. Her first love, her first lover. She had been terrified of appearing ignorant, overwhelmed by the seeming impossibility of fitting—
that
—inside her.
The musty canvas, the smooth hot muscles of his back, the pinch and draw between her thighs . . .
It seemed to take him forever to come.