The Cottage Next Door (6 page)

Chapter Eight

I
T WAS NEAR
midnight when Michael dropped off Diana at the cottage. Even though she was still operating on Kansas time, and should have been wrung out, she wasn’t ready for the night to end. Plus, she didn’t have to go to work in the morning. She had four more days she could sleep in as late as she wanted.

She reached for the door handle. “It’s been a great day. The best I’ve had in a long time. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I had a good time, too.”

She got out of the car and leaned down to say one last thing before going inside. “Would it be all right if I stopped by the Carmel gallery tomorrow?”

No, it was not all right
. “Friday would be better. It’s slower then.”

Obviously disappointed, she shrugged and said, “Okay.”

“Come around noon.” He could handle this. He’d give her a quick tour, and then take her to lunch. “There’s a great pub on Ocean Avenue where they—­”

“Only if you let me buy,” she insisted.

“This particular pub gives me a great discount.”

The one thing he could have said to make her rethink her decision. “Really?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “It depends on who’s working that day.”

She smiled. He was so easy. “See you tomorrow night.”

He waited until she was at the door before he backed out of the driveway. Diana waved and stepped inside, dropped her purse on the entry table, and went into the bedroom to change into jeans and a lightweight sweatshirt. She put on a pair of flip-­flops, then stepped out of them. Where she was going she didn’t need shoes.

Minutes later she opened the door and saw Michael leaning against the fender of his car, his arms folded across his chest, his lips curved into a crooked grin.

“You’re fast,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

“It seemed like a good night for a walk on the beach.”

She moved to join him. “How did you know?”

“Just a hunch.” He held out his hand. “Shall we go?”

Again with the hand-­holding. Was this something everyone did in California, or was it unique to Michael? Not that she minded. Actually, she kind of liked it. Probably because she didn’t sense he was doing it for any other reason than he liked it, too.

When they reached the wooden stairway to the beach, Michael sat down to take off his tennis shoes and put them next to a patch of maiden grass. Instead of waiting for him to get up again, Diana plopped down beside him, pulling up her legs and propping her chin on her knees.

A full moon dominated the sky, laying a silver pathway across a surprisingly still ocean. A slowly encroaching high tide nudged the shoreline, the waves playing with a piece of driftwood and washing away the remnants of a sand castle built too close to the water.

“I won’t,” she said.

“Okay . . . ” he replied slowly, doing a quick mental search to try to figure out what she was talking about. Giving up, he scooped a handful of sand and let it sift through his fingers while he waited for her to go on.

She turned to him and smiled. “I won’t ever get used to this. I don’t see how anyone could.”

“Are you talking about me personally, or ­people in general?”

“You?”

“Never gonna happen,” he said.

“I didn’t think so.” She turned to look at him.

“Cheryl said you were looking to make the move out here permanent.” There were other bookkeeping jobs Peter could help her find. She wouldn’t have to go back to Kansas, if she didn’t want to. “Of course, that was when she was deep into the sales pitch about why Peter should hire you.”

“She wasn’t misleading you. I love Kansas, but something happened that stole my sense of belonging.”

“It must have been pretty bad.”

She didn’t like putting her feelings into words. But there was something about him listening to what she would say that made them tumble out like coins from a winning slot machine. “I stopped believing in myself. I was willing to settle for whatever came my way because I was so desperate to be like all my friends. It was the only way I knew to fit in.”

“I get that. But something awful had to happen to push you off the cliff.”

“Would you be surprised if I told you it was a guy?”

“No more than you were surprised when I told you I made an ass out of myself because of a girl. We’re human. It’s the kind of thing we do.” He plucked a piece of the tall grass and pulled the seed end through his pinched fingers. “It’s not fair for me to put this off on Leslie. I should have realized what she saw as romantic for someone else didn’t necessarily translate into something she wanted for herself. She had nothing to do with what I did.”

“She must have given off some kind of signal that she was in love with you. Maybe not on-­bended-­knee-­in-­front-­of-­twenty-­thousand-­­people love, but
something
.”

“There was never any doubt that we were in love, at least in the beginning. She’d even jokingly proposed to me when we were in Hawaii, and everyone thought we were on our honeymoon. Hell, when her sister had a baby, Leslie started talking about what she wanted to name our firstborn. What I didn’t recognize was what was real between us and what was role-­playing. She loved the idea of being in love more than she loved me.”

“Do you still love her?”

He shook his head. “We almost made it to being friends when she met the guy she’s with now. He wasn’t comfortable having me around. So that was it.” Tossing the seeds into the air, he put his hands on the wooden plank and stood. “Let’s see what treasures the tide brought in.”

She followed him down the stairs. “I saw an old ­couple swinging a wand across the sand this morning. Is that what they were doing? Looking for treasure?”

“Mary and Harold have been combing this beach with their metal detectors for as long as my family has been coming here. They own the white house on the other side of the cove. When my brother Paul and I were kids, Harold convinced us that he and Mary made so much money with the things they found that they didn’t have to work a regular job.”

“Not true, I take it.”

“About as far away from the truth as Lance Armstrong swearing he never took drugs. I was in my high school computer science class when I came across their names as co-­inventors of one of the first microchips that increased layers without increasing size. What they did led to the microchip we have now that’s the size of a dot. I looked them up and discovered they were on the Forbes list of the country’s billionaires. Although last I heard they’d given the majority of it away.”

“I’d like to do that one day.” She stopped to pick up an almost perfectly round, flattened shell. “Of course before I can give money away, I have to figure out how to make it.”

“You don’t need a lot to give away some.”

She looked at him to see if he was serious. “You do that?”

“Yeah, of course. It’s no big deal.”

She didn’t know one person near her own age who didn’t think buying Girl Scout cookies was a major charitable contribution. “Any charity in particular?”

He seemed uncomfortable at the question, and for a minute Diana thought he was going to brush it off. “Lupus Foundation and Make a Wish,” he finally said.

When was she going to learn to keep her mouth shut and not pry into ­people’s private lives? “I’m sorry. That was none of my business.”

“Ask me whatever you want.”

“I’m assuming you’re involved in those two particular charities because it’s personal?”

It was, but he answered anyway. “I know there’s no way they’re going to come up with a cure in time for Shiloh, but I’d like to think one day there’ll be a child who doesn’t have to face what she does.”

“I don’t know anything about lupus.”

“It’s an autoimmune disease that doesn’t follow a set course. It can show up in a dozen different ways, from rashes to kidney failure to heart disease to joint pain.”

“How long have you known Jeremy and Shiloh?”

“Jeremy and I go back to my freshman year in college when Peter hired him to add another bedroom to his house. Paul, my brother, and I needed a place to stay when we were here. Jeremy and his wife had adopted Shiloh as an infant and by the time she was two, they were deep into dealing with her lupus. The next summer he hired me to do the scut work that came with rebuilding a house that had structural damage from one of our smaller earthquakes. I worked for him three summers, and to supplement the poverty wages he paid, he taught me the difference between being a craftsman who builds solid wood cabinets from scratch and one who installs factory-­made MDF laminate.”

“My great-­grandfather was a craftsman. He hand made every door and staircase and piece of furniture in the house he built for my great-­grandmother.” And now, thanks to her, it was all gone, even the furniture.

Diana stopped to pick up another shell, feeling a shiver of excitement at the idea that she was actually doing something she’d spent her childhood dreaming about. Until she’d pulled into the driveway and stepped out of her ten-­year-­old Camry, she’d never truly believed she would ever leave Kansas. And here she was—­walking on a beach with the Pacific Ocean stretching out before her like a magical blue carpet.

“It’s a sand dollar,” Michael said when she held out the shell to him. “When they’re alive they’re covered by small hairs that help them move across the ocean floor.” He held the sand dollar tilted to the moonlight to show her the pattern on the shell.

“That’s so pretty,” she said. “It’s like a flower. Would it be okay if I kept it? It’s not against the law or anything, is it?”

Michael laughed. “The first kid who finds it in the morning will step on it just to hear the crunch. It’s almost as satisfying as popping seaweed pods.”

“Or bubble wrap?”

“Oh, no—­you’re not one of those,” he said with teasing distain.

“Compulsively so.”

He found another sand dollar and handed it to her. “For your collection.”

She tucked them in her sweatshirt pocket and paused a minute to watch Michael as he searched the shoreline for more shells. When he stopped to see why she wasn’t following, he flashed a smile that almost made her gasp. Smiles from men who looked like Michael were supposed to be slightly surly, a bad-­boy kind of thing, like the one James Dean had in the poster her sister put up when she was ten and didn’t take down until the day she married a guy who was more Logan Lerman than James Dean.

“I’m coming,” she said. She spotted a wave that was headed straight toward her, its force stronger than any of the others she’d already dodged. Instead of backing up, she went toward it, letting the edge of the wave wash over her feet and climb her ankles.

“Holy crap,” she said loud enough to disturb the seagulls halfway to the cliff. “I thought it was going to be warm.” Still, she didn’t move. How could she? This, too, was part of her dream.

Michael held out his hand. “Come up here where it’s still warm and dig your feet into the sand.”

She took his hand and let him lead her to the remnant of what must have been a magnificent tree a long, long time ago. The trunk, a weathered gray, lay on the ground, the top and sides as smooth as if it had been sanded and polished.

“This is what passes for a bench on our little beach,” he said. “It’s a great place to come when you have to work something out or when you just want to be alone.”

She sat on the end where there were still cut marks from a logger’s saw. Putting her legs out in front of her and crossing her ankles, she adjusted her sweatshirt to protect her shells. “How did it get here?”

Instead of sitting next to Diana, Michael settled on the sand and used the log for a backrest. “It was brought in during a storm back in the seventies. A log this size is fairly rare this far south, but common in Oregon. The ­people who were here when the storm came through say the surges were so powerful, they stripped half the sand from the cove and hauled it out to sea. It took more than two years, and help from the state, for the sand to return. By then another storm had pushed up the log even higher. For years a group of homeowners tried to get the state to use one of their bulldozers to push the log higher still, but it never happened.” He spread both arms along the length of the log, put his head back and grinned.

“And then along came Tony Gallardo and his buddies.”

She recognized the name but it took several seconds for it to register. “The movie star Tony Gallardo?”

Michael nodded. “He was filming a movie in Watsonville. By the time he and his buddies got off work, the beach was filled with ­people and there wasn’t any place to set up a volleyball net. Then one night, without thinking anyone could or would be upset, they moved the log to clear a space. Luckily they moved the log up the beach, and not down.”

She stared at the waves as she listened to Michael, counting them to see if every seventh one really was bigger than the rest. She was disappointed when it wasn’t and started to turn away, when what looked like an innocent gentle wave hit with a force that carried it twice as far as any that had gone before. “I’m going to like it here.”

“What brought that on?”

“Some things you just know.”

“What if I told you that Tony doesn’t live here anymore? He sold the house on the cliff he used to own to Chris Sadler.”

She laughed. “Well, that changes everything. Looks like I’ll be headed back to corn country as soon as you can find someone to take my place at the galleries.” She focused on what he’d just told her. “Wait a minute. Are you talking about the Chris Sadler who just won an Oscar?”

“That’s him.”

“Damn—­looks like I’m going to have to reconsider leaving.”

“Whatever it takes to keep you here.” One way or another he was going to find a way to make this work.

“What about Peter—­and your mom. Don’t they get a vote?”

“Minor details.” He picked up a broken shell and tossed it toward the ocean. She needed as much honesty as he could give her. “You have the personality and enthusiasm we need at the galleries right now. This has been a difficult year for Hester. She’s had a hard time holding it together for the past ­couple of years. Sometimes it comes out in her dealings with the customers, but most often it’s our vendors that bear the brunt.”