Hugh had raised his eyebrows. “She’s busy with her dad.”
“I’ll get someone to stay with her dad,” Lachlan had said. “It will be good for her.” He arranged for Maurice to go by and play dominos with Tom Dunbar and Hugh did the asking.
To say that Fiona had been surprised when Lachlan had been the one to pick her up would have been putting it mildly. She looked stricken when he turned up on the doorstep. Then she said, relieved, “Oh, you must have come to see my dad—”
“No. I’m here for you.”
“But—”
She looked like she might protest. But in the end, she’d let herself be drawn out on to the porch and down the steps. “We’re meeting Hugh and his girl at Beaches.”
“Beaches?” Fiona’s eyes widened.
Beaches was the nicest place on the island. Not a place Hugh could afford.
“I’ll pay,” Lachlan had told him. “You want to impress this girl, don’t you?”
“Yeah. But…” Hugh had shaken his head. “Do you want to impress Fiona Dunbar?”
Lachlan hadn’t known what he wanted to do with Fiona Dunbar. Then. Later that night he’d known exactly what he wanted—
He hadn’t got it.
She’d damned near drowned him instead.
These days he wasn’t touching Fiona Dunbar with a ten-foot pole!
Other than the sympathy note he’d sent when Hugh had told him of her father’s death in March, he’d had no communication with her at all. In fact, ever since he’d moved into the Moonstone a month ago, he’d done his best to avoid her.
Of course he still noticed her. Hard not to when the island wasn’t that big and she was still the most gorgeous woman around. But he didn’t have to have anything to do with her. Pelican Cay was big enough for both of them.
Try telling Fiona Dunbar that.
Less than a week after he’d opened the Moonstone, a letter to the editor had appeared in the local paper decrying the “standard branding” of the island. Fiona Dunbar, signing herself “a concerned citizen” made it sound like he was singlehandedly trying to undermine local culture.
For God’s sake, he was trying to salvage an abandoned architectural treasure and turn it into something tasteful and profitable before time and the weather reduced it to kindling—out of which the artistic Ms. Dunbar would doubtless construct one of her bloody sculptures!
Tactfully as possible, he had attempted a letter to the editor of his own in reply.
A week later there had been another letter, this time about the local youth soccer team.
“People who are going to take advantage of local amenities,” the perennially concerned Ms. Dunbar had written, “should be willing to contribute their skills—however meager—to the betterment of the island’s children.”
Him, she meant. Teach them soccer, she meant.
“Well, it is how you made your millions,” Hugh pointed out.
“It would be such a great thing for the kids,” Carin Campbell agreed.
So did Maurice and Estelle. Their grandsons would love a soccer team with a real coach for a change.
“Or don’t you think you can?” Molly had said in that baiting little-sisterly way she could still dredge up in a pinch.
Of course he damned well could.
And so he had. For the past month Lachlan had spent hours with a rag-tag bunch of ten- to fifteen-year-old kids who called themselves the Pelicans. The Pelicans were never going to win the World Cup, but they were a lot more capable now than they had been when he’d started working with them. Marcus Cash was turning into a pretty decent striker, Tom Dunbar, Fiona’s nephew, was a good defender, and Maurice’s grandson, Lorenzo, had the makings of a born goalkeeper.
Lachlan was proud of them. He was proud of himself as their coach. He was a damned good teacher, and he’d have liked Fiona the ferret to see that—but she’d never once come to watch them play.
She never said a word to him.
She didn’t have to. Her sculpture said it all.
Lachlan shoved himself up from his chair and stalked across the room to glare once again at her message.
And as the full morning sun illuminated Fiona Dunbar’s trash masterpiece, he saw what he’d been unable to make out before—the pair of red women’s panties that flapped—like a red flag in front of a bull—from the sculpture’s outstretched arm.
THE POUNDING ON HER DOOR woke her.
Fiona groaned, then pried open an eyelid and peered at the clock: 7:22.
7:22? Who in God’s name could possibly want to talk to her at 7:22 in the morning? No one who knew her, that was for sure.
Never an early riser, Fiona preferred to start her day when the sun was high in the sky.
It was why she was a sculptor not a painter, she’d told her friend Carin Campbell more than once.
Painters needed to worry about light. Sculptors could work any old time.
Obviously whoever was banging on the door wasn’t aware that she’d been working all night long.
She’d labored until well past midnight on the pieces she sold in Carin’s shop—the metal cutouts and seashell miniatures that were her bread and butter. The paper doll silhouettes she cut and bent and the tiny exquisite sculptures made out of coquina shells, sea glass, bits of driftwood and pebbles were tourist favorites. Easy to transport and immediately evocative of Pelican Cay, they paid the bills and allowed her to keep the old story-and-a-half pink house on the quay that overlooked the harbor.
Normally she finished about two. But last night after she’d done two pelicans, a fisherman, a surfer and a week’s worth of miniature pelicans and dolphins and flying fish and the odd coconut palm or two, she had just begun.
Of course she could have gone to bed, but instead she’d gathered up the treasures she’d found on the shoreline after high tide—the driftwood spar, the sun lotion bottle, the kelp and flipflop and…other things…and set off to add them to her sculpture on the beach.
She hadn’t got home until four.
“All right, already,” she muttered as the pounding continued. She stretched and flexed aching shoulders, then hauled herself up, pulled on a pair of shorts to go with the T-shirt she slept in and padded downstairs to the door. “Hold your horses.”
If it was some befuddled tourist, hung over from a late night at the Grouper and still looking for the house he’d rented for the week, she was going to be hard-pressed to be civil.
Yanking
