Brambleberry Shores: The Daddy Makeover / His Second-Chance Family

“Is that the kind of childhood you had? Regimented, toe-the-line. Military school, right?”

He laughed, though he heard the harsh note in it and wondered if she did as well. “Not quite. I would have given my entire baseball card collection for a little structure and discipline. My parents were of the if-it-feels-good-just-do-it school of thought. It destroyed them both and they nearly took me and my sister along with them. I can’t do that to Chloe.”

Her hands paused in the sink and her eyes widened with sympathy. He shifted, uncomfortable. Where the hell had that come from? He didn’t share these pieces of his life with anyone. He wasn’t sure he’d ever even articulated that to Brooke. If he had, maybe she wouldn’t have expected so many things from him he wasn’t at all sure he had been capable of offering.

He certainly had no business sharing them with Sage. She was quiet for a long moment, watching him out of intense brown eyes. The only sound was the rain clicking against the window and the soft sound of their mingled breathing.

“I’m sorry,” she finally murmured.

He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I just don’t want to make the same mistakes with Chloe.”

“But you can go too far in the other direction, can’t you?”

“I’m doing my best. That’s all I can do.”

He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. With her so close, he was having a tough time hanging on to any coherent thought anyway. All he could think about was kissing her again.

But he couldn’t.

The thought had no sooner entered his head than he could swear he felt a soft hand in the small of his back from out of nowhere pushing him toward her.

She gave him a quick startled look then her gaze seemed to fasten on his mouth.

What other choice did he have but to kiss her?

Chapter 7

She sighed as if she’d been waiting for his kiss and she tasted heady and sweet from the wine and the strawberries.

Having her in his arms felt right, in a way he couldn’t explain. On an intellectual level, it made absolutely no sense and every voice in his head was clamoring to tell him why kissing her again was a colossal mistake.

He shut them all out and focused only on the silky smoothness of her hair, her soft curves against him.

Her hands were warm, wet from the dishwater. He could feel the palm prints she left against his shirt, a temporary brand.

He had been thinking of their earlier kiss all day. As he drove to Portland and back, as he listened to his attorneys ramble on and on. Like the low murmur of the sea outside, she had been a constant presence in his mind. Their kiss that morning had been heated and intense, more so because it had been so unexpected.

This, though, was different. Eben closed his eyes at the astonishing gentleness of it, the quiet peace that seemed to swirl around them, wrapping them together with silken threads.

He still wanted her fiercely and the hunger thrumming inside him urged him to deepen the kiss but he kept it slow and easy, reluctant to destroy the fragile beauty of the moment.

“All day long, I’ve been telling myself a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t do that again,” he murmured after a long, drugging moment.

He could see a pulse flutter in her throat, feel her chest rise and fall with her accelerated breathing. She dropped her hands from his shirt, but not before he was certain he felt their slight tremble.

“I can probably give you a couple thousand more why I shouldn’t have let you.”

“Yet here we are.”

She sighed and he heard turmoil and regret in the sound. “Right. Here we are.”

She stepped away from him and immersed her hands in the dishwater, a slight brush of color on her cheeks as she started scrubbing a pan with fierce concentration.

He sighed, compelled to honesty. “I’m not looking for anything. You need to know that. This just sort of… happened.”

The temperature in the room suddenly seemed to dip a dozen degrees and he could swear the rain lashed the windows with much more force than before.

When she spoke, her voice was as cool as the rain. “That makes two of us, then.”

“Right.”

He was digging himself in deeper but he had to attempt an explanation. “We just have this…thing between us. I have to tell you, I don’t quite understand it.”

“Don’t you?” Her voice was positively icy now and he realized how his words could be construed.

He sighed again, hating this awkward discomfort. “You’re a beautiful woman, Sage. You have to know that. Any man would be crazy not to find you attractive. But I swear, until this morning I have never in my life kissed a woman I haven’t at least taken on two or three dates. I’ve never known anything like this. You just do something to me. I can’t explain it. To be honest, I’m not sure I like it.”

The ice in her eyes had thawed a little, he saw, though he wasn’t sure he was thrilled with the shadow of amusement that replaced it.

“I’m sure you don’t.”

“I haven’t dated in a decade,” he confessed. “My wife and I were married for seven years and Brooke has been gone for two years now. I’m afraid I’m out of practice at this whole man–woman thing.”

She sent him a sidelong look he couldn’t read. “I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

Oddly, he could swear he heard a ripple of low laughter coming from the other room. He shifted his gaze to the doorway into her living room and saw Sage do the same, almost as if she could hear it, too.

No one was there, he could tell in an instant, but his attention was suddenly caught by a picture he hadn’t noticed before hanging on the wall of the kitchen.

He stared at the image of two women on what looked like a sea cliff, their cheeks pressed together as they embraced, deep affection in their eyes.

One was Sage, a lighthearted joy in her expression he hadn’t seen before. But his shock of recognition was for the other person, the one with the wrinkled features and mischievous eyes…. He moved closer for a better look.

“I know this woman!”

Sage blinked a little at his abrupt change of topic. “Abigail? You know Abigail?”

“Yes! Abigail, that’s her name!”

“Abigail Dandridge. She’s the one who left me this house. She was my best friend in the world.”

“I never knew her last name. She’s dead, then.” An obvious statement, but he couldn’t for the world think of what else to say.

She nodded, her eyes suddenly dark with emotion. “It’s been almost five weeks now. Her heart just stopped in her sleep one night. No warning signs at all. I know she would have wanted to go that way, but…I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye—you know?—and everything feels so unfinished. I still feel her here, in the house. At random moments I think I smell her favorite scent or feel the touch of her hand in my hair. It’s a cliché, but I still keep thinking I’ll hear her voice any minute now, calling me down the stairs to share some gossip over tea.”

He suddenly understood the sorrow he glimpsed every once in a while in Sage’s eyes. He wanted to comfort her but couldn’t find the words, not through his own shock and sadness.

She looked at him with puzzlement in her eyes. “I’m sorry. How did you say you knew her?”