Shoreline Drive (27 page)

“Specifically, more goop.” Ben started the truck. “More bodily fluids, more screaming, and more mess of every kind.”

A pang of fear struck her chest. They were teasing each other—this was only banter, the kind of back-and-forth that marked most of her conversations with Ben. He didn’t mean anything bad by it.

Still, a little bit of defensiveness sparked in her belly. It was one thing for Merry to acknowledge how challenging it could be, at times, to live with a newborn. But somehow, it felt very different coming out of Ben’s well-shaped mouth.

She couldn’t help searching Ben’s perfect, stern profile, but she tried to keep her voice light and easy. “Is that what you’ve learned from three weeks of living with Alex?”

Ben nodded as he expertly maneuvered the truck and attached horse trailer up the driveway and out onto the main island road. “Yeah, that. And a few other things, too.”

“Like what?” Merry braced herself for another joking complaint about how loudly Alex tended to screech first thing in the morning, or something similar.

Ben paused long enough that Merry took her eyes off the dashboard and cast a curious glance at him. He pressed his lips together, appearing lost in thought, until he noticed her staring.

With a wry grimace, he said, “I can’t come up with a way to make this sound less like something you’d find in a stupid greeting card, but living with you and Alex … taught me how infinite the heart is, in its capacity to love.” He cleared his throat. “My heart, specifically. I knew I loved Alex from the first moment I held him, but I never anticipated the way that love grows, every single day. It’s almost frightening—if it’s this big now, five months in, how big will it be by the time he’s ten years old? Fifteen? Thirty?”

Heart swollen too big to allow her to catch a full breath, Merry smiled. “Don’t be afraid. I hear the love shrinks a little in the teens. That should make it more manageable.”

“Personally, I don’t hold out much hope for that,” Ben said grumpily, downshifting with a jerk of his wrist. “Alex has spit up, peed
and
pooped on me, and deliberately mashed boiled carrots in my hair, and I still love him. Hard to imagine him doing something worse than that at fifteen.”

Merry let out a shaky breath. “But even if he does, we’ll be there for him. And for each other.”

Ben stilled. He kept his eyes front, but Merry saw the tight clench of his jaw before he relaxed enough to say, “I think that’s the first time you’ve talked about a future for us, together.”

“It’s the first time, maybe in my whole life,” Merry said haltingly, “that I can see a way forward. That I know what I want my future to be.”

There went that muscle in his jaw again, but this time he clamped down on the question fighting to get out of his mouth. Merry breathed through the fragile moment, in and out.

She could be this brave, at least. Reaching out, she put her hand over his stiff, tense fingers curled around the gearshift.

“I want my future to be here on Sanctuary Island.” She dragged the words up from the bottom of her heart. “With Alex, and my mother and our new family … and most of all, with you.”

The truck took a curve that brought them out of the trees and onto the stretch of sparkling white beach that gave Shoreline Drive its name. Sunlight burst into the cab in a brilliant explosion of sparkling blue off the water.

Merry blinked, dazzled by the glare, and when it faded she saw that Ben had slowed the truck and pulled over to the side of the road. She turned to him to ask what was wrong, but the look on his face stole the breath for words right out of her lungs.

“I have to kiss you. Right now.”

Ben was always intense, but the way he stared at her now, the force of his desire turning his gray eyes to molten silver, stopped Merry’s heart.

He moved, reaching over the gear console for her, and Merry launched herself into his arms with a tiny cry.

The kiss was fierce, almost savage, as if all the passion and need Ben normally kept so tightly chained had broken free. Merry met him with biting, sucking kisses of her own, her arms wound tightly around his neck and the gearshift digging into her stomach.

Sunshine through the windshield warmed the side of her face and Merry let herself get dizzy on the cool water taste of Ben’s mouth, the strength of his arms and the heavy beat of his heart against hers.

He hauled her that extra inch closer, and she caught her breath against the jab of the gearshift. It didn’t matter, she could ignore it—but that small gasp of something other than passion was enough to make Ben pull back, concern darkening his eyes.

But Merry wasn’t done with him yet. “There are blankets in the trailer, aren’t there?” she asked, not even trying to hide the breathless want in her voice.

“I married a genius.” Ben’s eyes glittered and she had to steal one last kiss from his luscious mouth before scrambling out of her seat belt and wrenching the passenger door open.

“Last one into the trailer has to be on the bottom,” she crowed around a mouthful of giddy laughter.

She heard Ben cursing as he wrestled with his door. Her booted feet hit the ground and she was off, running for the back of the truck. Putting out a hand to steady herself on the corner of the tall aluminum-sided trailer, Merry glanced out over the salt marsh stretching between the road and the narrow sliver of sand.

There they were. The wild horses she’d seen on her first day, fresh off the ferry and completely entranced by Sanctuary Island.

A band of six mares, shadowed closely by their young colts and fillies, grazed along the edges of the marsh, less than a dozen feet away from where Merry stood. The horses, used to the comings and goings of Sanctuary’s human residents, didn’t take much notice of her—all but one.

The stallion, larger and rangier than his brood, lifted his shaggy head and met Merry’s gaze. With two graceful steps, the big bay placed himself between the truck and the nearest dam and filly, a pair of bright golden palominos who kept right on placidly foraging for tender shoots of cordgrass among the fading autumn foliage.

Untamed wildness shone from the stallion’s dark eyes, deep and still in the brisk salt spray breezing in off the ocean. Merry stared, transfixed, heart drumming in her ears.

The moment was broken only when Ben’s large, warm hand landed on her shoulder, startling her into looking away from the horses. “Merry?”

He knelt in the open back of the trailer, a question dancing across his flushed face.

Merry gave him the smile singing in her blood and took one last deep draught of the cleanest, purest air she’d ever breathed, before climbing up into the trailer beside him.

“I won,” he reminded her hoarsely as he lowered her gently onto a pile of thick wool blankets that smelled of hay and horse. “That means I get to be on top.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Merry gasped as Ben kissed down her chest, his heat and strength covering her and enfolding her. “This feels pretty much like a win for me, too.”

After that, there was no talking, other than the broken whisper of each other’s names and the occasional moan, masked by the wind in the bare tree branches and the distant lap of waves over sand.

It was much later, as the afternoon light began to fade and dusk purpled the sky outside the trailer’s windows, that Merry finally said, “That stallion reminds me of you.”

“My work here is done.” Smug satisfaction colored Ben’s voice as he crossed his bare arms beneath his head.

Merry turned her face to hide her grin against the smooth, hot skin stretched over Ben’s ribs. “You dork. Not because of that.”

“What then?” His voice was sleepy, and beneath her lips, his heartbeat had slowed from the frantic pace of moments past.

Merry rubbed her cheek against that comforting heartbeat and murmured, “Because the horses live all over the island—the mares go where he goes.” One of Ben’s hands cradled her head, his fingers carding through the tumble of her hair.

“They know they’re safe with him,” Merry finished softly, feeling the words reverberate through Ben’s chest. “He’s their home.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

There was nothing like the relaxation of well-used muscles, Ben reflected with bone-deep satisfaction as he pulled himself back up into the truck after closing the last driveway gate behind them.

Unless, maybe, it was the relaxation that would come with finally telling Merry he loved her. The words were always on the tip of his tongue, a tickle in the back of his throat, but something was holding him back.

Mostly likely, the sure and certain knowledge that it was too soon.

Merry smiled at him as he settled back behind the wheel, her curvy form curled in the middle of the bench seat so she could lean her temple against his shoulder while he drove slowly through the stand of trees that screened his property from the road. The trusting tilt of her head squeezed Ben’s heart. He dropped a quick kiss on her dark hair and shifted the truck into gear.

Oh sure, Merry liked him fine. Enjoyed the way their bodies fit together. Cared about him, even, and was beginning to invest in the idea of a shared future together.

But love? Ben was under no delusions about that. It would take longer than the six months or so that they’d known each other to turn Merry’s initial dislike into the strong, true, abiding love Ben hoped for.

Hope. The last time he’d hoped for something, wished and prayed for it, been willing to do anything for it, he was hoping for a cure for Justine. And that had been a doomed wish right from the start, because there was no cure for a chromosomal abnormality.

Doomed or not, Ben had been unable to stop himself from hoping.

This time, however … Ben’s hope didn’t seem entirely pointless and self-punishing. There were signs, new indications every day, that Merry’s feelings were growing, deepening.

And even though part of him wished he could speed that process up, like a time-lapse video of a rose budding into bloom, he knew if he waited and worked at it, eventually that flower was all his. He just needed time.

The truck crested the last rise before the house came into view, and Ben frowned down at the sight that greeted them. Automatically slowing to accommodate the flock of excited animals that rushed to greet the familiar truck, he stared at the sleek black Town Car parked in the circular drive in front of the house.

“Uh oh.” Merry sat up straight, tugging nervously at the chest strap of her seat belt as if it were trying to strangle her. “They’re back.”

The Town Car’s doors opened, and his father got out of the driver’s side. No chauffeur this time, apparently. Ever the gentleman, he came around to open Mom’s door for her. But Ben’s glare narrowed on the door behind the driver’s side, and the strange man who unfolded himself from the back seat to crack his neck and stretch his shoulders.

“And they brought a friend,” Ben muttered, a bad feeling percolating in his midsection.

The bad feeling morphed into full-on dread when he glanced at Merry and found her sheet-white and shaking, her chest hitching with quick, shallow breaths.

“What’s wrong?” Voice sharp with alarm, Ben threw the truck into park and focused on Merry.

“What. What is he doing here? Ben…”

There was a complex welter of emotion throbbing through her tone, and she hadn’t taken her eyes off the stranger.

The guy wore a battered leather bomber jacket open over a white undershirt, and jeans tight enough to endanger his circulation. Ben was reminded in a flash of the rocker-chick style Merry had sported when she first hit town. Even thirty-five weeks pregnant, she’d favored shiny, pleather leggings and band T-shirts stretched over her rounded belly.

Rocker Boy was about Merry’s age, too, Ben noticed, and he had the swoopy, spiky blond hair and self-consciously gym-toned body of a wannabe model or actor. Ben pretty much despised him on sight.

But it was nothing compared to the fiery hatred that consumed him when Merry closed her eyes and said, “That’s Ivan Bushnell. Alex’s father.”

*   *   *

Merry moved through a soupy fog of numbness, only the dull roaring in her ears telling her she was still conscious.

The jarring collision of her ugly old life with her shiny, oh-so-fragile new one was enough to send anyone spinning, but Ivan’s sudden appearance also brought back a flood of memories she’d done her level best to squash down into the deepest recesses of her brain.

Ivan’s face, pale and freaked out, nearly in tears as he shouted accusations and questions.
How did this happen? You’re supposed to be on the pill. Is it even mine?

That hadn’t been the worst of it.

The truck jounced over a rut at the bottom of the drive, jolting Merry from her ugly memories. “This is crazy. I can’t believe he’s here.”

“I can. I should’ve expected something like this.” Ben glared grimly out the front windshield, his profile all sharp lines and angles. “My father would never simply retreat and accept defeat. He knew he couldn’t do anything about the marriage itself, so he struck at the weakest point in our arrangement.”

“The adoption,” Merry realized, heart turning to lead.

“It’s not finalized, and won’t be for eleven months and ten days.”

Merry blinked. But there was no time to say anything more, no time to formulate a plan or a defense or even to work out how she felt about it all, because they pulled up beside the Town Car and Ben slammed out of the truck. He stalked around the front of the car to confront his father.

Scrambling to undo her seat belt and follow him, Merry kept her eyes on Ben. She was half afraid he’d haul off and slug his father in the mouth—that was how pissed Ben looked. Even his mother took a swift, stumbling step back from the force of his anger.

“What are you trying to do here, remind me that I’m not Alex’s biological father?” Ben’s voice was low and icy, somehow all the more frightening because he wasn’t yelling or snarling. “Believe me, I’m well aware of that.”

“Don’t blame me for the fact that you failed to spot the obvious flaw in your plan to acquire a family to replace the one you lost,” his father replied, unruffled.