His Wife

He stopped, returned the wave, then braced himself as Emma cartwheeled right into him. She and Eddie tried to pull him toward the house. He resisted.

“Thank you so much,” Sophie said hurriedly, peeling her children off him. “It was very kind of you not to be angry at them for ruining your evening. What do you say, Eddie?”

“That he’s The One!” Eddie replied.

She should have known better than to be nonspecific. “What do you say to Mr. Abbott?”

“You’re the—” he began.

“Eddie!”

Eddie held out his narrow hand. “Thank you,” he said dutifully.

“And…” she prompted.

“And…I’m sorry?” He turned to her questioningly.

She nodded approval.

“I think,” Eddie went on, “that it’d be really nice if we asked him to stay for dinner.”

“Well, if we had something nice to feed him,” she replied, relieved to have an excuse not to, “we’d do that, but our groceries are still at the store.”

“Maybe he isn’t fussy,” Emma said, still holding his hand. She squinted up at him. “We have egg sandwiches when we don’t have other stuff. Do you like that?”

Sophie would have countered with another excuse for why he couldn’t stay, but Sawyer mercifully handled that for her. He got down on one knee, still holding each child’s hand. “I really appreciate the invitation,” he said with apparent sincerity, “but I promised to meet my brother for dinner and I’m already a little late. I’d really like it, though, if you invited me again sometime.”

“How ’bout tomorrow?” Eddie offered quickly.

Sawyer smiled up at Sophie. “Maybe we should let your mom pick the time. She can call me when it would be convenient. Okay?”

“She won’t do it,” Emma said with a condemning glance at Sophie. “She’ll say ‘someday,’ but she’ll forget.”

Sawyer grinned at that stain on her character, then said, “Well, I’ll just count on you two to remind her, okay?”

“Okay.” Eddie shook his hand and Emma strangled him with a hug.

“Now, make sure you don’t scare your mom anymore by disappearing on her,” he said, looking at each of them solemnly. “And don’t fib about her kidnapping you, even if you think you have a good reason. Lies are never good, okay?”

They nodded in unison.

Sawyer straightened, waved at Gracie again, wished Sophie good luck and went to his car.

Sophie felt a surge of relief as he drove away, then, when he was out of sight, a strange disappointment. He was the kind of man who could make her long for one in her life again. But she had too much against her now to know how to be happy with one. Bill had finally managed to convince her that it couldn’t be done.

Gracie came to stand beside her as she stared at the empty road. It, too, could be a metaphor for her life.

“You don’t like him, do you?” Gracie asked.

Sophie didn’t even want to focus on that question sufficiently to answer it.

“He was very kind to us,” she replied. “Most people would have been angry, but he brought us home, instead.”

“He runs his family’s foundation,” Kayla said knowledgeably. “So, he kinda works for charities. He’s nice all the time.”

“Nobody’s nice all the time,” Gracie argued, turning toward the house.

Kayla patted Sophie’s arm in a very sisterly way. Sophie often wondered how much of their personal history Gracie had shared with her best friend. “Once she knows how nice he really is,” she said authoritatively, “she’ll see that even though he’s a man, he’s not the way her dad was, and she’ll get to like him, also.” Then she grinned winningly at Sophie. “So you can fall in love if you want to. It’s going to be okay.”

Chapter Three

Brian’s General Store and Boat Rental was a six-hundred-square-foot building typical of East Coast waterfront construction circa 1880. Its bright green board-and-batten front had faded to a comfortable mossy color. The natural-wood window boxes that graced the four-over-four windows were devoid of flowers at the moment. When Brian had bought the building, he’d removed the dead stalks that had been all that was left of the previous flowers, and hadn’t found time yet to replace them.

Two benches, flanked by pots of flowers, stood on the porch on either side of an old carved front door. Sawyer remembered the cigar-store Indian that had stood there, a beautiful wooden carving that had fascinated the local children and tourists. But in the interest of political correctness, he’d been donated to the museum and replaced by a wooden fisherman in full Gloucester gear.

Sawyer climbed the wide steps and let himself into the store, ignoring the Closed sign. He knew Brian had left the door open for him.

Inside, the goods were arranged on shelves as old as the building. In the middle of the floor was a potbellied stove with chairs pulled up to it. The former owner had used it to display sale merchandise, but Brian planned to use it for its intended purpose come winter.

Blue-and-white café curtains graced the windows and provided privacy for the small cubicle that served as a fitting room at the back. Near it in two old wooden wardrobes were a few items of clothing—Losthampton T-shirts and sweatshirts, a few light jackets for those who visited unprepared for the sometimes cool nights. In the open drawers at the bottom was an assortment of the usual souvenirs—spoons, mugs, pencil cases. The same blue-and-white fabric also concealed a small office-cum-stockroom at the back.

Brian walked out from behind it as Sawyer rapped on the old wooden counter, also original to the store. A yardstick was nailed against the edge on the clerk’s side from the days when yard goods were sold.

Sawyer had loved this store as a child, and couldn’t quite believe that the brother he hadn’t even known about in those days now owned it.

“Hey!” Brian greeted him, holding the curtain aside for him to join him in the back. “You get paroled?”

Brian was lean and long-legged, with the same dark blond hair and blue eyes Sawyer had, but with an angular line to chin and cheekbone that reminded Sawyer of Killian.

Sawyer knew there’d be jokes on the subject of his “scrape” with the law for some time to come. “They decided I was innocent after all. You ready?”

“Yeah. But are you sure you still feel like doing this?”

“Yes. But if you have other things to do, say so.”

Because of an ongoing feud between their families over the years, Sawyer had been conditioned to think of Brian as an enemy. His new status as brother and friend was welcome but disorienting. Brian, too, seemed wary of it sometimes.

“I don’t have anything else to do,” Brian insisted. “It’s just that it sounds like you’ve had a rough couple of hours and I don’t want you to feel obligated….”

Sawyer drew an exasperated breath. Brian was beginning to remind him of Campbell and his conviction that he didn’t belong in the Abbott family because he was from their father’s second marriage. Considering that Sawyer and Killian both loved Chloe, Campbell’s mother, and she was still very much the matriarch of their household, he had trouble figuring out where Cam’s lack of confidence in his position came from.

“I don’t feel obligated because you’re my brother,” Sawyer said with impatience, “but I do want to make up for lost time. We spent most of our lives fighting with each other, and that seems like a terrible injustice to me.”

Brian looked momentarily startled, then said gravely, “I thought you’d feel obligated because I saved your life at great risk to my own, and I didn’t want that. But if you want to feel obligated because you’re my brother and you owe me a lifetime of doing things for me, taking the blame for me, helping me with difficult tasks, that’s all right, too.”

Sawyer stared at him, just beginning to understand that Brian had what was proving to be a very Abbott sense of humor, even though their connection was on their mother’s side of the family.

“You have me confused with Killian,” Sawyer said finally. “I never did any of those things for Campbell, and I’m not doing them for you. But if you want help painting a few of the rental boats, I’m willing to do that in exchange for the fried clams you promised.”