Holiday In The Hamptons

Her brother, claiming seniority and therefore the front seat, had covered their mother’s hand with his. “It’s all right, Mom.”

They all knew it wasn’t all right but were willing to believe it was, to pretend, and the more miles they put between themselves and the house, the more her mother changed.

They all did, Fliss included. She’d left her old life and her bad mood back in Manhattan, like a snake shedding its skin.

She glanced around, wondering how being here could still make her feel that way and wondering why it had taken a crisis in her life to bring her back here. Apart from brief visits to her grandmother, she hadn’t spent a significant block of time here since her teenage years.

Coffee finished, she continued on her way. This part of the island had some of the most coveted real estate in the whole of the Hamptons. She drove past curving driveways, high hedges and cedar-clad mansions topped with high gables and worn by the wind and the weather to shimmering silver gray. Some were inhabited year-round, some were rented by “summer people,” visitors who clogged the roads and the stores and drove the locals mad. Most belonged to the seriously rich.

Her grandmother’s house lacked the square footage and sophisticated security of some of its nearest neighbors, but what it lacked in grandeur, it made up for in charm. Unlike some of the newer mansions that surrounded them, Sea Breeze had been standing for decades. It had a pitched shingle roof and wide windows facing the ocean, but its real benefit was its proximity to the ocean. Developers hungry for any opportunity to exploit the most coveted piece of land in the area had offered her grandmother eye-watering sums of money to purchase the property, but her grandmother had steadfastly refused to sell.

The local community knew the story of how Fliss’s grandfather had bought the beach house for her grandmother on the day of their marriage. Her grandmother had once told her that selling it would have felt like giving away a wedding ring, or breaking a vow.

Marriage, she’d told Fliss, was forever.

Fliss felt pain in her hands and realized she was gripping the wheel so tightly she’d almost cut off the blood supply.

Her marriage hadn’t been forever.

She and Seth hadn’t even hit the three-month mark. And that was her fault, of course. She wore the guilt of that, and it made for uncomfortable clothing.

For a split second she lost concentration, and in that moment a dog shot into the road. He appeared without warning, a blur of golden brown.

Fliss slammed on the brakes, sending dust and her pulse rate flying.

“Dammit.” She sat there, fighting the shock, her heart almost bursting out of her chest. Her hands shook as she groped for the door and opened it. Had she hit it? No. She hadn’t felt a bump or heard anything, but the dog lay in the road, eyes closed. She must have hit it.

“Oh God, no–” She dashed to its side and dropped to her knees. Along with her other crimes she was now a destroyer of innocent creatures. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you. Please be okay, please be okay,” she was muttering under her breath when she heard a voice behind her.

“She’s fine. It’s a trick of hers.”

The voice punched the air from her lungs. She wanted it to be a mistake, but the recognition was visceral, and she wondered dimly how it was that a voice could be so individual, like a fingerprint. It could have belonged to only one person. She’d known that voice measured, teasing, commanding, amused. She’d known it hard with anger and soft with love. She’d been hearing that voice in her dreams for the past ten years, and she knew there was no mistake even though it made no sense.

Seth was in Manhattan. He was the reason she was here. If it hadn’t been for Seth, she wouldn’t even have been on this road at this time, and if she hadn’t been thinking about him she would have been concentrating and maybe spotted the dog before it appeared without warning from behind the sand dunes.

“Are you all right?” Now the voice was deep and calm, as if he was used to soothing the ragged edges of a person’s anxiety. “You seem pretty shaken up. I promise you the dog really is fine. She used to work in the movies and they trained her to play dead.”

Fliss closed her eyes and wondered if she should do the same thing.

She could lie down in the road, hold her breath and hope he stepped over her and moved on.

She was relieved about the dog, of course, but she wasn’t ready to talk to Seth. Not yet. And not like this. How could this have happened? After all her careful planning, how had she found herself in this situation?

There was no justice. Or maybe this was justice. Maybe this was her punishment. Being made to suffer now for all the sins of her past.

The dog opened its eyes and sprang to its feet, tail wagging. Fliss had no choice but to stand up, too. She did so slowly, reluctantly, brushing the dust from her knees, postponing the moment when she was going to come face-to-face with him.

“Maybe you should sit down.”

Maybe I should make a run for it.

She forced herself to turn.

Her gaze locked with his, and instantly she was sucked back in time. She was eighteen years old, lying on the sand naked, lazily warm and content, her limbs entwined with his, their faces so close they were almost touching. She’d always liked being physically close, as if proximity lessened the chance that she would ever lose him. Touch me, Seth, hold me.

He’d touched her, held her, and she’d lost him anyway.

And clearly he was surprised to have found her again.

Shock flickered across his face, followed by confusion. He reached out and pushed her hat back, taking a closer look at her face. “Fliss?”

She was confused, too. She’d assumed time would have diluted the effect he had on her. Neutralized her feelings. Instead it seemed as if it had concentrated everything. She hadn’t seen his face for almost ten years, and yet everything about it was painfully familiar. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the few wayward strands of hair that insisted on flopping over his forehead, those thick lashes that framed eyes as dark as a pirate’s heart. Sexual awareness punched through her with shocking force. The magnetic pull was so powerful the force of it almost jerked her forward. If she’d been in the car, the air bag would have deployed.

She was baking hot and sweaty, which made her all the more resentful that he managed to look so cool. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and khakis. He’d always been strikingly handsome, and the extra years had stripped away the last of the boy and shaped the man. He had the same athletic physique, but his shoulders were wider, his body stronger and more powerful.

Once, she’d believed that maybe happy endings really weren’t just for books and movies. Her feelings for him had filled her until there was no room for anything else, until she hadn’t known how to contain them. Fortunately all those years with her father had provided advanced training in how to hide them, which was just as well because Seth looked insanely good and she looked—

She didn’t want to think how she looked.

It was definitely karma. Punishment for her past sins, which were too many to count.

She was trapped by that gaze, and her brain and her tongue knotted at the same time. So she did what she always did when she found herself in a tight corner. She acted on impulse.

“I’m not Fliss,” she said. “I’m Harriet.”

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_dcc19f4c-0f39-50fd-80f2-65b0c628743c)

HARRIET.

Until she’d said that, he’d been about to kiss her. Right there on the road and to hell with anyone who happened to be passing. The knowledge unsettled him. Fliss had always brought out a side of him he rarely accessed, and it seemed not much had changed.

Except that this was Harriet, not Fliss. And kissing her would have brought on more than mutual embarrassment. His objective had been to douse old flames, not rekindle fires.

Vanessa was right. He was in trouble.

He stepped back, almost treading on Lulu. The dog yelped and jumped out of the way, sending him a reproachful look. Her day wasn’t going well. His wasn’t much better.

“I didn’t expect to see you here.” There was a time when the Knight twins had spent every summer with their grandmother, but that time was long past. Most of the group of kids who had hung out together during those long hot summers had gone their separate ways. The only friend he still saw from those days was Chase Adams, who had taken over the running of his father’s construction company based in Manhattan. Since his marriage, he’d been spending more time at his beach house.

“Didn’t expect to see you either.” She pulled the brim of her hat down, virtually concealing the top half of her face. “I heard you were in Manhattan. Daniel mentioned that he ran into you—” Her tone was casual, but there was something else there that he couldn’t identify. Nerves? Since when had he made Harriet nervous?

“That was temporary. I was doing a favor for a friend of mine.”

“Steven?”

“Yes. We were at college together. He was shorthanded and he asked me to help out.”

“So that’s it? You’re done? No more Manhattan?”