Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish (4 page)

His frown deepened. Somehow that was a Lucy he could never have
imagined, nails between teeth, pounding in boards.

Though Mama had said nothing, he had suspected for some time
the house was becoming too much for her, and this confirmed it.

“You should come to Toronto with me,” he said. It was his
opening move. In his bag he had brochures of Toronto’s most upscale retirement
home.

“Toronto, schmonto. No, you should move back here. That big
city is no place for a boy like you.”

“I’m not a boy anymore, Mama.”

“You will always be my boy.”

He regarded her warmly, searching her face for any sign of
illness. She was unchanging. She had seemed old when he had first met her, and
she really had never seemed to get any older. There was a sameness about her in
a changing world that had been a touchstone.

Why hadn’t she told him she had lost her license?

She was going to be eighty years old three days before Mother’s
Day. He held open the inside door for her, and they stepped through into her
kitchen.

It, too, was showing signs of benign neglect: paint chipping
from the cabinets, a door not closing properly, the old linoleum tiles beginning
to curl. There was a towel tied tightly around a faucet, and he went and
looked.

An attempted repair of a leak.

“Lucy’s work?” he guessed.

“Yes.”

Again, the Lucy he didn’t know. “You just have to tell me these
things,” he said. “I would have paid for the plumber.”

“You pay for enough already.”

He turned to look at Mama, and without warning he was fourteen
years old again, standing in this kitchen for the first time.

Harriet Freda’s had been his fifth foster home in as many
months, and despite the fact this one had a prime lakeshore location, from the
outside the house seemed even smaller and dumpier and darker than all the other
foster homes had been.

Maybe, he had thought, already cynical, they just sent you to
worse and worse places.

The house would have seemed beyond humble in any setting, but
surrounded by the magnificent lake houses, it was painfully shacklike and out of
place on the shores of Sunshine Lake.

That morning, standing in a kitchen that cheerfully belied the
outside of the house, Mac had been fourteen and terrified. That had been his
first lesson since the death of his father: never let the terror show.

She had been introduced to him as Mama Freda, and she looked
stocky and ancient. Her hair was a bluish-white color and frizzy with a bad
perm. She had more wrinkles than a Shar-Pei. Mac thought she was way too old to
be looking after other people’s kids.

Still, she looked harmless enough, standing at her kitchen
table in a frumpy dress that showed off her chunky build, thick arms and legs,
ankles swollen above sensible shoes. She had been wearing a much-bleached apron,
once white, aged to tea-dipped, and covered with faded blotches of berry and
chocolate.

The niceties were over, the social worker was gone and he was
standing there with a paper bag containing two T-shirts, one pair of jeans and a
change of underwear. Mrs. Freda cast him a look, and there was an unmistakable
friendly twinkle in deep-set blue eyes.

Well, there was no sense her thinking they were going to be on
friendly terms.

“I killed a man,” he said, and then added, “With my bare
hands.” He thought the
with my bare hands
part was a
nice touch. It was actually a line from a song, but it warned people to stay
back from him, that he was dangerous and tough.

And if Macintyre Hudson had wanted one thing at age fourteen,
it was for people to stay back from him. He had been like a wounded animal,
unwilling to trust again.

Mama Freda glanced up from what she was doing, stretching out
an enormous piece of dough, thin and elastic, over the edges of her large, round
kitchen table. She regarded him, and he noticed the twinkle was gone from her
eyes, replaced with an immense sorrow.

“This is a terrible thing,” she said, sinking into a chair. “To
kill a man. I know. I had to do it once.”

He stared at her, his mouth open. And when she beckoned to the
chair beside hers, he abandoned his meager bag of belongings and went to it, as
if drawn to her side by a magnet.

“It was near the end of the war,” she said, looking at her
hands. “I was thirteen. A soldier, he was—” she glanced at Mac, trying to decide
how much to say “—hurting my sister. He had his back to me. I picked up a
cast-iron pan and I crept up behind him and I hit him as hard as I could over
his head. There was a terrible noise. Terrible. He fell off my sister. I think
he was already dead, but I knew if he ever got up we were all doomed, and so I
hit him again and again and again.”

Mac had never heard silence like he heard in Mama Freda’s
kitchen right then. The clock ticking sounded explosive.

“So I know what this thing is,” she said finally, “to kill a
man. I know how you carry it within you. How you think of his face, and wonder
who he was before the great evil overcame him. I wonder what his mother felt
when he never came home, and if his sisters grieve him to this day, the way I
grieve the brother who went to war and never came home.”

Her hand crept out from under her apron and she laid it, palm
up, on the table. An invitation. And Mac surprised himself by not being able to
refuse that invitation. He put his hand on the table, too. Her hand closed
around his, surprisingly strong for such an old lady.

“Look at me,” she said.

And he did.

She did not say a word. She didn’t have to. He looked deep into
her eyes, and for the first time in a long, long time, he felt he was not
alone.

That someone else knew what it was to suffer.

Later they ate the
apfelstrudel
she
had finished rolling out on her kitchen table, and it felt as if his taste buds
had come awake, as if he could taste for the first time in a long, long time,
too, as if he had never tasted food quite so wondrous.

He started, in that moment, with warm strudel melting in his
mouth, to do what he had sworn he would never do again. But he was careful never
to call it that, and never to utter the words that would solidify it and make it
real. For him, the admission of love was the holding of a samurai’s sword that
you would eventually plunge into your own heart.

But he had never altered the story he had told her that day,
not even when she had said to him once, “I know,
schatz,
there is nothing in you that could kill another person. Or
anything. Not even a baby robin that fell from its nest. I have watched you
carry bugs outside rather than swat them.”

But he had never doubted that she really had killed that
soldier, and she, too, carried bugs outside rather than swatting them.

Mama, with her enormous capacity to care for all things, had
saved him.

And he owed it to her to be there for her if she needed him. It
was evident from the state of her house that he hadn’t been there in the ways
she needed. And that Lucy, the one he had called the spoiled brat, had been. He
felt the faintest shiver of something.

Guilt?

“Go shower,” Mama said, and he drew himself back to the present
with a shake of his head. “Nice and hot.”

She was already reaching up high into her cabinet and Mac
shuddered when the ancient brown bottle of elixir came down, and he hightailed
it for the tiny bathroom at the top of the stairs.

When he came down, in dry clothes, she had a tumbler of the
clear liquid poured.

“Drink. It will ward off the cold.”

“I’m not cold.”

“The cold you will get if you don’t drink it!” She had that
look on her face, her arms folded over her ample bosom.

There was no sense explaining to Mama you didn’t get colds from
being cold, that you got them from coming in contact with one of hundreds of
viruses, none of which were very likely to be living in the freezing-cold water
of Sunshine Lake.

He took the tumbler, plugged his nose and put it back. It
burned to his belly and he felt his toes curl.

He set the glass down, and wiped his watering eyes. “For
heaven’s sakes, its schnapps!”

“Obstler,”
she said happily. “Not
peppermint sugar like they drink here. Ugh. Mine is made with apples.
Herbs.”

She was right, though—if there was any sneaky virus in him, no
matter what the source, it would be gone now.

“Homemade, from my great-grandmother’s recipe. Now, take some
to Lucy. I have it ready.” She passed him an unlabeled brown bottle of her
secret elixir.

“I’m not taking it to Lucy.” After that encounter on the dock,
the less he had to do with Lucy the better.

He’d wanted to believe, after all this time, that Lucy, the
girl who had not thought he was good enough, would have no power over him. He
had seen the world. He’d succeeded. He’d expected Lucy and this town to be
nothing more than a speck of dust from the past.

What he hadn’t expected was the rush of feeling when he had
seen her. Even dripping wet, near frozen, seeing Lucy on the dock calling to
him, he had felt a pull so strong it felt as if his heart was coming from his
chest. He’d been vulnerable, caught off guard, but still, there had always been
something about her.

She still had that face, impish, unconventionally beautiful,
that inspired warmth and trust, that took a man’s guard right down, and left him
in a place where he could be shoved into a lake by someone who weighed sixty
pounds less than he did.

An old hurt surfaced, its edges knife-sharp.

I could never fall for a boy like
you.

That was the problem with coming back to a place you had left
behind, Mac thought. Old hurts didn’t die. They waited. And those words, coming
from Lucy, the one he had trusted with his ever-so-bruised heart...

“She needs the elixir! She’ll catch her death.”

Since he didn’t want to tell Mama why he didn’t want to see
Lucy—because he had fully expected to be indifferent and had been anything
but—now might be a good time to explain viruses. But his explanation, he knew,
would fall on deaf ears.

“She’s a doctor’s daughter. I’m sure she knows what she
needs.”

Mama looked stubborn.

“Mama, it’s probably illegal to make this stuff, let alone
dispense it.”

She regarded him, her eyes narrow, and then without warning,
“Are you speaking to your mother yet,
schatz?
”

He glared at her stonily.

“Nearly Mother’s Day. Just two weeks away. She must be lonely
for you.”

The only thing his mother had ever been lonely for was her bank
account. But he wasn’t being drawn into this argument. And he could clearly see
Mama had grabbed on to it now, like a dog worrying meat off a bone.

“How many years?” she asked softly, stubbornly.

He refused to answer out loud, but inside, he did the math.

“It’s time,” she said.

On this, and only this, he had refused her from the first day
he had come here. There would be no reconciliation with his mother.

“Just a card, to start,” she said, as if they had not played
out this scene a hundred times before. “I think I have the perfect one right
here.”

It was one of Mama’s things. She always had a cupboard devoted
to greeting cards. She had one suitable for every occasion.

Except son and mother estranged for fourteen years.

Without a word he picked up the bottle of homemade schnapps and
went out the squeaking door. When he glanced back over his shoulder, Mama had
her back to him, rummaging through the card cupboard, singing with soft
satisfaction.

He noticed how hunched she was.

Frail, somehow, despite her bulk.

He noticed how badly the house needed repair, and felt guilty,
again, that he had somehow let it get this bad.

Mac was not unaware that he had been back in Lindstrom Beach
all of half an hour and all these uncomfortable feelings were rising to the
surface. He didn’t like feelings.

Lucy had been here when he had not. Well, he’d take over from
her now.

It occurred to him that this trip was probably not going to be
the quick turnaround he had hoped for. Still, a few days of intense work, and
he’d be out of here, leaving all these uneasy feelings behind him.

“Make sure she drinks some,” Mama shouted as the screen creaked
behind him. “Make sure. Don’t come back here unless she does.”

And much as he didn’t want Lucy to be right about anything, and
much as he didn’t like the unexpected feelings, he realized, reluctantly, she
had been right to insist he come back here.

Mama needed him.

And yes, the time to honor his foster mother was definitely
now. But he would leave the gala to Lucy, and honor his foster mother by making
sure her house was livable before he left again.

CHAPTER FOUR

M
AC
CROSSED
THE
familiar ground between the two houses. He noted, again, that Lucy’s property was everything Mama’s was not. Even with the lawns melting together, the properties were very different: Mama’s ringed in huge trees—that were probably hard to mow around—the Lindstrom place well-maintained, oozing the perfect taste of old money.

From the tidbits of information dropped by Mama, Mac knew Lucy had taken over the house from her mother a year or so ago. Hadn’t there been something about a broken engagement?

How did she find time to do the work that it used to take an entire team of gardeners to do?

Unless she doesn’t have a life.

Which, also from tidbits dropped by Mama, Lucy didn’t. She ran some kind of online book business. A life, yes, but not the life he had expected the most popular girl in high school would have ended up with.

I don’t care,
Mac told himself, but if he really didn’t, would he even have to say that to himself?

He debated going to the front of the house, keeping everything nice and formal, but in the end, he stayed in the back and went across the deck. He stopped and surveyed the house. The stately white paint was faded and peeling; a large patch of a sample paint color had been put up.

It was a pale shade of lavender. Several boards underneath it had samples of what he assumed would be trim color, ranging from light lilac to deep purple.

The paint color made him think he didn’t know Lucy at all.

Which, of course, he didn’t. She was no more the same girl she had been when he’d left than he was the same man. He became aware of the sound of water running inside the house, assumed Lucy was showering and was grateful for the reprieve from another encounter with her.

He wasn’t a little kid anymore. And neither was Lucy. He respected Mama, but he couldn’t take her every wish as a command.
Make sure she drinks it.
Lucy could find the bottle and make up her own mind whether to drink it.

He would take his chances. If he didn’t return for a while, Mama might not question how he had completed his assignment. And, hopefully, she would be off the topic of his mother by then, as well.

Mac set Mama’s offering at Lucy’s back door, and then strolled down to her dock to look over the canoes. They weren’t particularly good quality—different ages and makes and colors. Then he saw a sign, fairly new, nailed to a wharf post like the one that had broken at Mama’s.

Lucy’s Lakeside Rentals.
It outlined the rates and rules for renting canoes.

Lucy was renting canoes? He
really
didn’t know her anymore. In fact, it almost seemed as if their roles were reversed. He had arrived, he knew every success he had ever hoped for, and she was mowing lawns and scraping together pennies by renting canoes.

He thought he should feel at least a moment’s satisfaction over that. A little gloating from the kind of guy Lucy could never fall for might be in order. But instead, Mac felt oddly troubled. And hated it that he felt that way.

He looked at the house. He could still hear water running. He eased a canoe up with his toe. The paddles were stored underneath it.

Then Mac maneuvered the canoe off the dock and into the water, got into it and began to paddle toward the other side of the lake.

Even more than Mama’s embrace, the silent canoe skimming across the water filled him with what he dreaded most of all—a sense of having missed this place, a sense that even as he had tried to leave it all behind him, this was home.

An hour later, eyeing Lucy’s house for signs of life and relieved to find none, Mac put the canoe back on the dock. He felt like a thief as he crept up to her back door. The elixir was gone. He could report to Mama with a clear conscience. Still, the feeling of being a thief was not relieved by sticking twenty bucks under a rock to cover the rental of the canoe.

“Hey,” Lucy cried, “Wait!”

He turned and looked at her, put his hands into his pockets. He looked annoyed and impatient.

“What are you doing?” Lucy called.

“I took one of your canoes out. There’s rental money under the rock.” This was said sharply, as if it was obvious, and she was keeping him from something important.

“I never said you could rent my canoe.”

“I have to pass a character test?”

Below the sarcasm, incredibly, Lucy thought she detected the faintest thread of hurt. After all these years, could it still be between them?

I could never fall for a boy like you.

No, he was successful and worldly, and it was written in every line of his stance that he didn’t give a hoot what she thought of him.

“I didn’t say that. You can’t just take a canoe.”

“I didn’t just take it. I paid you for it.”

“You need to tell me where you’re going. What if you didn’t come back?”

“I’ve been paddling these waters since I was fourteen. I’ve kayaked some of the most dangerous waters in the world. I think I can be trusted with your canoe.”

Trust.
There it was again. The missing ingredient between them.

“It’s not the canoe I’m worried about. I need to give you a life jacket.”

“You’re worried about me, Lucy Lin?” Now, aggravatingly, he was pulling out the charm to try to disarm her.

“No!”

“So what’s the problem?”

“You should have asked.”

“Maybe I should have. But we both know I’m not the kind of guy who does things by the book.”

Again she thought she heard faint challenge, a hurt behind the mocking tone.

She sighed. “I don’t want your money, Mac. If you want to take a canoe, take one. But let someone know where you’re going. At least Mama, if you don’t want to talk to me.”

She was unsettled to realize now she was the one who felt hurt. Not that she had a right to be. Of course he wouldn’t want to talk to her. She’d pushed him into the lake. Though she had a feeling his aversion to her went deeper than that recent incident.

“I don’t need your charity,” he said, “I’d rather pay you.”

“Well, I don’t need your charity, either.”

“You know what? I’ll just have my own equipment sent up.”

“You do that.”

She watched him walk away, his head high, and felt regret. They needed to talk about Mama, if nothing else. But he hadn’t returned her calls, and he didn’t want to talk to her now, either.

Lucy picked up his twenty-dollar bill, stuck it in an envelope, scrawled his name across it. Not bothering to dress, she crossed the lawns between the two houses in her housecoat, but didn’t knock on the door.

She followed his lead. She put the envelope under a rock and walked away. When she got home, she inspected the canoes, saw which one he had been using, and shoved a life jacket underneath it.

* * *

“What’s this?” Mama said, handing him the envelope.

Mac looked in it and sighed with irritation. Trust Lucy. She was always going to have the last word.

Except this time she wasn’t, damn her. He folded the envelope, tucked it in his pocket and went out the back door. The last person he would ever accept charity from was Lucy. He owed her for the canoe, fair and square, and the days of her—or anyone in this town—feeling superior to him were over.

He lifted his hand to knock on her back door to return the money to her. Raised voices drifted out the open French doors and he moved away from the paint and peered into Lucy’s house.

“You’re wrecking the neighborhood!” someone said shrilly.

“It’s just a sample.” That voice was Lucy’s, low and conciliatory.

“Purple? You’re going to paint your house purple? Are you kidding me? It’s an absolute monstrosity. When Billy and I saw it from the boat the other day, I nearly fell overboard.”

Lucy had a perfect opportunity to say,
too bad you didn’t,
but instead she defended her choice.

“I thought it was funky.”

“Funky?
On Lakeshore Drive?”

No answer to that.

Mac tried the door, and it was unlocked. He pulled it open and slid in. After a moment, his eyes adjusted to being inside and he saw Lucy at her front door, still wrapped in a housecoat, her hands folded defensively over her chest, looking up at a taller woman, the other woman’s slenderness of the painful variety.

Now, there was a face from the past. Claudia Mitchell-Franks. Dressed in a trouser suit he was going to guess was linen, her makeup and hair done as if she was going to a party. Her thin face was pinched with rage.

Lucy was everything Claudia was not. Fresh-scrubbed from the shower, her short hair was towel-ruffled and did not look any more sophisticated than it had fresh out of the drink. She was nearly lost inside a white housecoat, the kind that hung on the back of the bathroom door in really good hotels.

Her feet were bare, and absurdly that struck him as far sexier than her visitor’s stiletto sandals.

“And don’t even think you’re renting canoes this year! Last summer it increased traffic in this area to an unreasonable level, and you don’t have any parking. The street above your place was clogged. And I had riffraff paddling by my beach.”

“There’s no law against renting canoes,” Lucy said, but without much force.

This was the same Lucy who had just pushed him into the water? Why wasn’t she telling old Claudia to take a hike?

“I had one couple stop and set up a picnic on my front lawn!” Claudia snapped.

“Horrors,” Lucy said dryly. He found himself rooting for her.
Come on, Lucy, you can do better than that.

“I am not spending another summer explaining to people it’s a private beach,” Claudia said.

Shrilly, too,
he was willing to bet.

“It isn’t,” Lucy said calmly. “You only own to the high-water mark, which in your case is about three feet from your gazebo. Those people have a perfect right to picnic there if they want to.”

Mac felt a little unwilling pride in her. That was information he’d given her all those years ago when he’d thumbed his nose at all those people trying to claim they owned the beaches.

“I hope you don’t tell
them
that,” Claudia said.

“I have it printed on the brochure I give out at rental time,” she said, but then backtracked. “Of course I don’t. But can’t we share the lake with others?”

The perfectly coiffed Claudia looked as if she was going to have apoplexy at the idea of sharing the lake. Mac was pretty sure Claudia was one of the girls who used to sit on that deck painting her toenails while the “riffraff” slaved in the yard.

“Well, you won’t be giving out any brochures this year, no, you won’t! You’ll need a permit to run your little business. And you’re not getting one. And you know what else? You can forget the yacht club for your fund-raiser.”

“I’ve already paid my deposit,” Lucy said, clearly rattled.

“I’ll see that it’s returned to you.”

“But I have a hundred confirmed guests coming. The gala is only two weeks away!” There was a pleading note in her voice.

“This is what you’ll be up against if you even try rezoning. This is a residential neighborhood. It always has been and it always will be.”

“That’s what this is really about, isn’t it?”

“We finally no longer have to put up with the endless parade of young thugs next door to this house, and you do this?”

He’d heard enough. He stepped across the floor.

“Lucy, everything okay here?”

Lucy turned and looked at him. He could see her eyes were shiny, and he hoped he was the only person in the room who knew that meant she was close to tears.

He thought she might be angry that he had barged into her house, but instead he saw relief on her delicate features as he approached her. Despite the brave front, he could tell that for some reason she felt as if she was in over her head. Maybe because this attack was coming from someone who used to be her friend?

“You remember Claudia,” she said.

He would have much rather Lucy told Claudia to get the hell out of her house instead of politely making introductions.

Claudia was staring at him meanly. Oh, boy, did he ever remember that look! The first time he’d taken Lucy out publicly, for an ice cream cone on Main Street, they had run into her, and she’d had that same look on her skinny, malicious face.

“I know you,” she said tapping a hard, bloodred-lacquered fingernail against a lip that matched.

He waited for her to recognize him, for the mean look to deepen.

Instead, when recognition dawned in her eyes, her whole countenance changed. She smiled and rushed at him, blinked and put her claw on his arm, dug her talon in, just a little bit.

“Why, Macintyre Hudson.” She beamed up at him. “Aren’t you the small-town boy who has done well for himself?”

He told himself he should find this moment exceedingly satisfactory, especially since it had happened in front of Lucy. Instead, he felt a sensation of discomfort—which Lucy quickly dispelled.

Because behind Claudia, Lucy crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. Then she caught his eye and pantomimed gagging.

He didn’t want to be charmed by Lucy, but he couldn’t help but smile. Claudia actually thought it was for her. He didn’t let the impression last. He slid out from under her fingertips.

“I seem to remember being one of the young thugs from next door.
And
the riffraff who had the nerve to paddle by your dock. I might even have had the audacity to eat my lunch on your beach now and again.”

She hee-hawed with enthusiasm. “Oh, Mac, such a sense of humor! I’ve always
adored
you. My kids—I have two boys now—won’t wear anything but Wild Side. If it doesn’t have that little orangey kayak symbol on it, they won’t put it on.”

He tried not to show how appalled he was that his brand was the choice of the elite little monkeys who lived around the lake.

“What brings you home?” Claudia purred.

Over Claudia’s bony shoulder, he saw Lucy now had her hands around her own neck, the internationally recognized symbol for choking. He tried to control the twitching of his lips.