seen it before. He had yearned for Julia Hudson that summer as only a relatively innocent sixteen-year-old boy can ache. He had dreamed of her green eyes and her dimples and her soft, burgeoning curves.
She had been his first real love and had haunted his dreams.
She had promised to keep in touch but she hadn’t called or answered any of his letters and he remembered how his teenage heart had been shattered. But by the time school started a month later, he’d been so busy with football practice and school and working for his dad’s carpentry business on Saturdays that he hadn’t really had much time to wallow in his heartbreak.
Julia looked the same—the same smile, the same auburn hair, the same appealing dimples—while he felt as if he had aged a hundred years.
He could barely remember those innocent, carefree days when he had been certain the world was his for the taking, that he could achieve anything if only he worked hard enough for it.
She was waiting for a response, he realized, still holding her hand outstretched in pleased welcome. He held up his hands in their leather work gloves as an excuse not to touch her. After an awkward moment, she dropped her arms to her side, though the smile remained fixed on her lovely features.
“I can’t believe you’re still here in Cannon Beach,” she repeated. “How wonderful that you’ve stayed all these years! I remember how you loved it here.”
He wouldn’t call it wonderful. There were days he felt like some kind of prehistoric iceman, frozen forever in place. He had wondered for some time if he ought to pick up and leave, go anywhere, just as long as it wasn’t here.
Someone with his carpentry skills and experience could find work just about any place. He had thought about it long and hard, especially at night when the memories overwhelmed him and the emptiness seemed to ring through his house but he couldn’t seem to work past the inertia to make himself leave.
“So how have you been?” Julia asked. “What about family? Are you married? Any kids?”
Okay, he wasn’t a prehistoric iceman. He was pretty certain they couldn’t bleed and bleed and bleed.
He set his jaw and picked up the oak board he was shaping for a new window frame in one of the third-floor bedrooms of Brambleberry House.
“You’ll have to talk to Sage Benedetto or Anna Galvez about the apartment,” he said tersely. “They’re the new owners. They should be back this evening.”
He didn’t quite go so far as to fire up the circular saw but it was a clear dismissal, rude as hell. He had to hope she got the message that he wasn’t interested in any merry little trips down memory lane.
She gave him a long, measuring look while the girl beside her edged closer.
After a moment, she offered a smile that was cool and polite but still managed to scorch his conscience. “I’ll do that. Thank you. It’s good to see you again, Will.”
He nodded tersely. This time, he did turn on the circular saw, though he was aware of every move she and her children made in the next few moments. He knew just when they walked around the house with Abigail’s clever Irish Setter mix Conan following on their heels.
He gave up any pretense of working when he saw them head across the lane out front, then head down the beach. She still walked with grace and poise, her chin up as if ready to take on the world, just as she had when she was fifteen years old.
And her kids. That curious boy and the fragile-looking girl with the huge, luminescent blue eyes. Remembering those eyes, he had to set down the board and press a hand to the dull ache in his chest, though he knew from two years’ experience nothing would ease it.
Booze could dull it for a moment but not nearly long enough. When the alcohol wore off, everything rushed back, worse than before.
He was still watching their slow, playful progress down the beach when Conan returned to the backyard. The dog barked once and gave him a look Will could only describe as peeved. He planted his haunches in front of the worktable and glared at him.
Abigail would have given him exactly the same look for treating an old friend with such rudeness.
“Yeah, I was a jerk,” he muttered. “She caught me off guard, that’s all. I wasn’t exactly prepared for a ghost from the past to show up out of the blue this afternoon.”
The dog barked again and Will wondered, not for the first time, what went on inside his furry head. Conan had a weird way of looking at everybody as if he knew exactly what they might be thinking and he managed to communicate whole diatribes with only a bark and a certain expression in his doleful eyes.
Abigail had loved the dog. For that reason alone, Will would have tolerated him since his neighbor had been one of his favorite people on earth. But Conan had also showed an uncanny knack over the last two years for knowing just when Will was at low ebb.
More than once, there had been times when he had been out on the beach wondering if it would be easier just to walk out into the icy embrace of the tide than to survive another second of this unrelenting grief.
No matter the time of day or night, Conan would somehow always show up, lean against Will’s legs until the despair eased, and then would follow him home before returning to Brambleberry House and Abigail.
He sighed now as the dog continued to wordlessly reprimand him. “What do you want me to do? Go after her?”
Conan barked and Will shook his head. “No way. Forget it.”
He should go after her, at least to apologize. He had been unforgivably rude. The hell of it was, he didn’t really know why. He wasn’t cold by nature. Through the last two years, he had tried to hold to the hard-fought philosophy that just because his insides had been ripped apart and because sometimes the grief and pain seemed to crush the life out of him, he hadn’t automatically been handed a free pass to hurt others.
Lashing out at others around him did nothing to ease his own pain so he made it a point to be polite to just about everybody.
Sure, there were random moments when his bleakness slipped through. At times, Sage and Anna and other friends had been upset at him when he pushed away their efforts to comfort him. More than a few times, truth be told. But he figured it was better to be by himself during those dark moments than to do as he’d just done, lash out simply because he didn’t know how else to cope.
He had no excuse for treating her poorly. He had just seen her there looking so lovely and bright with her energetic son and her pretty little daughter and every muscle inside him had cramped in pain.
The children set it off. He could see that now. The girl had even looked a little like Cara—same coloring, anyway, though Cara had been chubby and round where Julia’s daughter looked as if she might blow away in anything more than a two-knot wind.
It hadn’t only been the children, though. He had seen Julia standing there in a shaft of sunlight and for a moment, long-dormant feelings had stirred inside him that he wanted to stay dead and buried like the rest of his life.
No matter how screwed up he was, he had no business being rude to her and her children. Like it or not, he would have to apologize to her, especially if Anna and Sage rented her the apartment.
He
