Chapter Five
Claire visited her mother-in-law first because she hated lying. Unfortunately, her deal with Nate meant she had to, and not just to Ellie.
Dan and Ross couldn’t know her mission to fetch Nate was successful, either. So in typical fashion she seized the bull by the horns and got the hard part over first. She found Ellie sorting through a pile of crotchless panties.
“Claire, I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.” Dropping the lacy scraps on the shop’s counter, she came round and embraced her in a rattle of silver bangles and Red Door perfume. Up until a year and a half ago, Ellie Langford would have won a red ribbon for best preserved against any jam or jelly at the county fair.
She still looked younger than her sixty years, but Steve’s death had aged her. When her face was in repose, there was an extra droop of her eyes and mouth. “So how was your break? Who were you staying with again?”
“An old friend… You wouldn’t know him.” At least not anymore. She hadn’t told Ellie where she was going for the same reason she hadn’t told Lewis.
“Him?” Smiling, Ellie pulled away. “Honey, are you dating again?”
Claire suffered a moment’s panic that Steve’s mother might consider it time. Then she saw the dread behind the smile and breathed again. “Don’t scare me like that,” she chided. “It’s bad enough fending off inquiries from acquaintances.”
“I’m trying to be impartial about this…. Steve would want you to be happy.”
Then he shouldn’t have gone and died on me. “Let’s settle for cheerful,” Claire suggested. “We can manage cheerful…right?”
“Absolutely.” Ellie returned to sorting crotch-less panties into sizes. “What people don’t understand is how impossible it is to replace a perfect husband.”
Claire hid a smile. Steve used to say he barely recognized his father on his mom’s lips. Since his death, seven years earlier, Robert had been sainted, knighted and given a million-dollar makeover.
The reality had been very different.
Ellie had been a homemaker, perfectly content to let her workaholic husband rule the roost while she flitted between her garden, lunch with girlfriends, beauty appointments, the tennis club and volunteer work. Her comfortable life had ended abruptly with Robert’s early retirement.
He’d become a grumpy old man whose primary purpose became hunting on the internet for facts to support his view that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. A regular caller to talkback radio, he also spent many hours formulating letters to the editor and his local M.P., which his wife had to type as he refused to learn keyboard skills.
It wasn’t as if she had anything better to do.
In desperation, Ellie had accepted a part-time job in a friend’s lingerie store and discovered a previously untapped genius for retail. Supported by Steve and Claire as guarantors, she bought the business a year after Robert dropped dead of a heart attack while arguing with his insurance company that he was “perfectly healthy, goddamn it, and they shouldn’t charge him higher premiums just because he’d turned sixty-five.”
Until her only child’s death, the Merry Widow couldn’t have been happier.
Ellie finished her sorting. “I haven’t heard a peep from Lewis. When Steve was a boy staying at the Jansen farm, he rang me every day.”
Claire doubted that, but she said soothingly, “I’ll remind your grandson next time we talk.” She’d tried to protect Ellie from Lewis’s exploits—sassing teachers, egging houses, graffitiing bus stops—but being in the shop, his grandmother had heard all the gossip eventually.
And her solution—telling Lewis his father would be turning in his grave and what did he think he was doing, worrying his poor mother?—hadn’t helped. Claire adored her mother-in-law, but her constant referencing to what Steve would do or say to fix the situation—unsurprisingly filtered through Ellie’s value system—made her crazy.
More important, it made Lewis crazy.
A customer approached the counter with a bundle of lingerie and she stepped back, marveling as her mother-in-law talked the giggling middle-aged woman into adding a pair of crimson crotchless panties to her sensible double-D bras.
“Because it’s never too late to add fun to a marriage,” Ellie said. “Hang these in the new playwear section for me, Claire?” She handed her daughter-in-law two bundles of panties.
Hooking them to the railing, Claire smiled as she glimpsed naughty-nurse and French-maid costumes amidst the sheer gowns, open-bust teddies and corsets.
Steve would have liked this section, she thought, and tears prickled her eyes. Their wedding anniversary would have been in a couple of months. Just twenty and twenty-one when they got married, they’d conceived Lewis on the honeymoon.
She fingered the lace, satin and bows as wistfully as an old woman with all her sensual years behind her. You’re only thirty-four, she reminded herself. Steve had been her one and only. What would it even be like to sleep with another man? Damn you, Steve Langford, for leaving me in the position of having to think about it.
“Claire, honey, you want to come to dinner tonight?”
She turned, smiling. “I’m heading to the bach for the rest of the week to assess what needs doing for a move. Because it looks like I have a buyer for the house. Touch wood, we’ll finalize a sale this week.”
“That’s great,” said Ellie, but her tone held dismay. Fortunately, Steve—channeled through his mother—thought a transfer to Willingham School was an excellent idea, even though it involved a permanent move to Stingray Bay when the Whangarei house sold, to avoid a ninety-minute commute.
But approving the move and having it happen were two different things.
“It’s only forty-five minutes away,” Claire reminded her. “We’ll still see plenty of each other.”
“It’s just, you and Steve built that place.”
“And it’s another link broken.” Claire picked up Ellie’s hand and squeezed it. “But this is the one that matters.”
The older woman’s eyes filled. “Oh, honey.”
“We’re not crying,” Claire warned. “Think about how much you hated the window frames instead.”
Her mother-in-law rallied. “Mustard. What were you two thinking?”
“It’s not mustard, it’s Golden Dream and it looks wonderful against the silvered wood.”
“Personally, I always thought you should have painted the clapboard instead of letting it weather.”
Claire widened her eyes. “No! Really?”
Ellie laughed. Her bangles rattled as she pushed Claire toward the door. “Get out of here! I’ve got lingerie to sell.”
Unfortunately Claire’s phone conversation with Dan was harder. “You’re kidding me,” he said when she told him Nate hadn’t returned with her. “I can’t believe he turned you down.”
“Only because it wasn’t necessary,” she replied hastily, parking the pink Caddy in the garage of her Whangarei home. Was lying as bad when you crossed your fingers behind your back? “He gave me all the authorizations I need to sell the house and dissolve the trust.”
“I thought doing it remotely would take weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with documents?”
Collecting her belongings, she nudged the door shut with her butt, dumping some of them into the five-year-old BMW station wagon that was her usual transport.
“Nate has a smart lawyer…. I’m unsure of the exact details, but he’s assured us he can work something out quickly and in the meantime I can progress the sale with documents he signed while I was there.”
“It would have been easier if he’d come home though, wouldn’t it?”
She started to sweat. “His boss wasn’t happy about him taking time off.”
“Claire, you don’t need to make excuses for him. I’ve known for a while he doesn’t want us in his life anymore. But I thought you’d break through.”
The house was musty from being closed up for three days and she opened windows. “Because I’m the poor widow, you mean,” she said lightly, hearing in his voice the pity she so hated.
“Partly,” he returned. Bless Dan and his new honesty. His bride Jo’s influence. “But also because he always dropped his guard with you.”
“There are still vestiges of the old Nate,” she said, heading straight to her bedroom to repack. “He’s doing some volunteer work for a women’s shelter on his day off. Providing a security escort if the women need one when they do a school drop-off or pick-up…attending court.” She’d overheard him arranging a replacement. “Don’t give up on him, Dan.” The way Claire had—at least until she’d seen him waking from a nightmare. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. He needed his friends, people who understood the hell he’d been through.
“I never give up on family,” he said. “And Nate’s like a brother. But I’m through with this touchy-feely hands-off approach—and yeah, I appreciate the contradiction. Soon as we’re done docking lambs, I’m heading over there with Ross to deal with this once and for all.”
Oh, Lord. Gathering a pile of laundry, she tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “He’ll be on tour with Zander.”
“I don’t care if he’s in Paris or Pretoria…. If it takes an intervention then—” He stopped. “Hey, Lewis.” All frustration disappeared from his voice. “I’m talking to your mother…. No, we’re not discussing an intervention for you…. Sheesh, teenagers, it’s all me, me, me. I’m suggesting your uncle Nate update his Facebook page…. Yeah, okay, smart mouth, so I’m not on Facebook either, but trust me, you won’t be friended when I am.”
Claire grinned. Lewis would be loving Dan’s teasing. She loaded the washing machine, set it going.
“Here’s your son,” Dan said. “Whatever he tells you about daily beatings is a lie.”
“Mum?”
“Hey, how’re you doing?”
“Good.”
In the kitchen, she filled a jug with water. “I hear you’ve been docking lambs. Is that as gruesome as it sounds?” The herbs on the kitchen windowsill drooped forlornly, so she watered the parsley and mint.
“Not really. We put a rubber ring around their tail and that stops the blood circulation and then falls off around eight to ten days later.” He dispensed his new knowledge with a farmer’s casualness. “It makes them easier to shear, plus if you don’t then sh—poop builds up—”
“Ugh, okay, stop there.” The coriander was beyond saving; Claire dumped it in the bin.
Glee entered his voice, “…and that can lead to fly strike… That’s wool maggots, Mum.”
“And that’s too much information. Seriously you’d rather dag lambs than spend quality time with your mother?”
“This is way more fun.”
“Well, I’m glad to know where I stand.” Poor peace plant in the hall, it soaked up half a jugful. “Listen, hon, I think we’ll finalize a sale of the house this week.”
“So we can move to Dullsville even sooner.” There was a scowl in his voice. “Great.”
“It means less traveling.” Willingham was thirty minutes from Stingray Bay, and a seventy-five-minute commute from Whangarei. Since Lewis had changed schools, Claire had been making the drive until the property sold. Anything to get Lewis away from his former crowd.
“Yeah, and weekends with no one to hang out with.”
Returning to the bedroom, she started to refill her suitcase, replacing summer dresses with practical jeans, tees and sweaters.
“Invite your new friends from school.”
“Like they’ll want to hang out in Stingray Bay.”
“Hon, we’ve been over this so often—”
“And you never listen to what I want! So there’s no point talking about it.”
What could she say? You’ll thank me one day. I’m doing this for your own good. Claire sat on the bed. “We’ll make this work,” she promised.
“I have to go,” he said sullenly. “Uncle Dan’s waiting.”
Her hand tightened on the receiver. “I’ll phone tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I love you, Lewie.”
“Bye.”
Claire hung up with a sigh. When he’d been a little boy, he’d said it back. Until a few months ago, when she’d started practicing tough love, he’d say, “Me, too.” When she’d made him move schools, he’d changed it to “Bye.” Emotionally, it was a very effective punishment. But it wouldn’t make her change course.
* * *
The bach was in darkness when she pulled in, earlier than she’d expected at eight-thirty, and for a moment Claire panicked that Nate had left the moment her back was turned. Talking herself down, she got out of her station wagon, walked into the bach and switched on a light. “Nate?”
No response.
Dumping a bag of groceries in the kitchen, she wondered if he’d gone to the boat shed. Then she glimpsed him through the open curtain of the spare bedroom. He was sprawled on the bed, out cold. She glanced at the bottle of scotch on the countertop. Unopened. Exhaustion, then.
He lay uncovered, one arm flung over his face as though warding off a foe. She tiptoed into the room, grabbed a duvet off the other bed and placed it over his lower body, then stood quietly for a moment, watching him in slumber.
He’d grown his dark hair longer over the past eighteen months and a lock fell across his closed lids. Instinctively she reached out to smooth it, pulling away from the intimacy with her hand inches from his face. He wasn’t Lewis, though she felt equally protective of him in this moment.
Nate groaned in his sleep and turned over, exposing a muscular back. Tentatively, Claire touched his shoulder, the skin surprisingly warm given the chilly room. “It’s okay,” she said firmly. “Everything’s going to be okay.” His shoulder relaxed, he settled more deeply into sleep. She had an impulse to crawl onto the bed with him. Like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, with only each other for comfort.
Silly.
She crept out and pulled the curtain across the door, stifling a yawn. She’d barely slept in the previous seventy-two hours, since she first chased Nate across the world. Deciding to follow his example, she dumped the perishables in the fridge, left the rest of the shopping on the counter and went to bed.
Crawling into the middle because it stopped the bed feeling so empty, she lay in the dark and mentally went over tomorrow’s tasks, until she fell asleep and dreamed of lambs gamboling across fields while she chased them with rubber bands.
Her first thought on waking was, Freud would have a field day with that one. Her second was that the house was burning down… She could smell smoke. In a panic, she fell out of bed and stumbled into the living room.
The patio slider was open onto the deck, where Nate, dressed in jeans and a navy sweater, was barbecuing. “Good morning. Breakfast is in ten minutes. We have to leave in forty if we’re going to make our first appointment in Whangarei by nine-thirty.”
Dazed, Claire checked her wrist, but her watch was still on the bedside table. “What time is it?” The aroma hit her now, the sweet sizzle of bacon and sausages. Her stomach growled.
“Seven-ten. It’s cold out, you might need a sweater.” Nate returned to the grill and something in his comment made Claire look down.
Her nipples pushed against the skimpy pajama tank. Refusing to feel self-conscious in front of an old friend, she returned to the bedroom where she pulled on a sweater and dragged her hair into a ponytail. When she came out, Nate was breaking eggs on the barbecue plate. Seeing him, a sudden blush touched her cheeks and she detoured. “I’ll make toast and coffee.”
He didn’t look up. “Good idea.”
Bless him, he’d unpacked the rest of the food she brought last night. Plugging the kettle in. Claire glanced over to the dining table and saw her business plan was open. “You’ve been up for a while?” she called.
“Since five.” Spatula in hand, he leaned against the doorjamb, keeping an eye on the barbecue. His jaw was unshaven and the morning breeze ruffled his hair. “I’ve read enough for today’s meetings.”
Claire measured three scoops of coffee into the plunger. “No need. All you’ll have to do is sign papers.”
“It was a cursory glance…. I’ve got a couple of questions.”
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. “If my brain works…” Claire poured boiling water over the grounds. “I’m not a morning person.”
“That’s why I lured you awake with bacon. I didn’t want my head snapped off.”
She saw a glint of amusement in his expression. So he’d guessed she was prickly about this. “I’m not that bad.” Nate raised a brow. “Okay,” she conceded. “On holidays I’m that bad.” When the SAS buddies were together they’d be up at dawn, clomping around the bach gathering fishing tackle and impatiently waiting for her to rise. Steve knew all the same spots, but the fish only showed when Claire was there.
She poured coffee, added cream and took him a mug. Standing alongside the barbecue, she cradled her own and instinctively checked wind direction and tide. “Did you see Heaven Sent yesterday?”
“Not yet.” Because he didn’t want to feel the pull of her, she suspected. He’d loved that boat as much as she had. She’d already told him she wouldn’t accept his half as a gift, she’d buy him out as planned. Unless… Claire took a sip of coffee, savoring the caffeine hit. Maybe after seeing Heaven Sent, he’d be open to retaining a shareholding? The boat could be an anchor to his old life.
“So you’ve already started the overhaul?” Nate asked.
“Not me. Between work and Lewis I’ve barely had time to eat.” Claire inhaled deeply and her mouth started to water. “I paid a local contractor to scrape the hull and sand her down. As soon as the house sells, I’ll order a shade canopy. And I’ve got my eye on a new engine that’s on sale.”
“I guess you already know that even with a new engine she’ll never match the modern charter boats for speed.”
She handed him a plate from the two stacked beside the barbecue. “You guessed right!”
He wasn’t deterred. “Which also boast sunken cleats, modern fittings, in-floor live-bait tanks—”
“I’m not competing with the luxury end. My prices will be midrange and I’ll target those anglers who value polished wood and history in their charter experience.”
“Sixty years of history, in fact.” One dish filled, Nate picked up the other.
“And the advantage of more space,” she argued. “Even with a full complement of fifteen clients on board, there’s easily five feet between anglers…. Let me go set the table.” Claire escaped inside.
He’d made a sacrifice in coming home. She’d glimpsed the measure of it on the plane, but that didn’t mean she was going to encourage the third degree.
Still, as Claire cleared the table of reports and replaced them with cutlery, she acknowledged he’d raised some good points. The magnitude of her new project was daunting, but a “one day at a time” mentality had served her well since Steve’s death. There was no reason to pull a Chicken Little now. And this day was plenty busy enough with multiple appointments with the estate agent, lawyer and bank. At least, she thought as Nate placed a laden plate in front of her, they’d be working on a full stomach.
She pulled out a chair and sat down. “This looks delicious.”
Dumping his plate, Nate picked up the marketing report from the pile of documents she’d stacked on the couch and opened it.
“Don’t let breakfast get cold,” she warned.
“You’re looking at a four-passenger minimum…. Will that cover costs?”
No prickles. Claire speared a piece of sausage and added a wedge of barbecued tomato. “Mooring fees here are minimal compared to the usual charter bases. I’ll do pick-ups from Whangarei if necessary. And I’ve got support from my former boss at the hotel.” She paused to eat, savoring the tomato-beef combination. “Mmm, this is so good…. We’ll be putting together taster packages for guests and targeting family groups.” She cut into the egg, watched the golden yolk ooze over the toast. “I’m conscious that being a female skipper will work against me with some anglers. But I’m confident I’ll find a niche within the tourist, family and female market. A lot of women game fish…. I’m one of them.”
His expression eased. “You’ve put a lot of effort into this.”
“I had a lot of sleepless nights to fill.” Claire snatched the report out of his hand. “Eat.”
Nate sat down and picked up his cutlery. “I am aware of the irony,” he said. “Showing interest after months of avoiding any involvement. But my absence didn’t mean I stopped caring about you…or Lewis.”
It was an olive branch and Claire took it. No matter what Nate thought, there were some bonds that couldn’t be broken. His concern only confirmed that.
“I know it’ll take time to build up the business,” she admitted. “For the first couple of years I’m only expecting to make enough to cover the boat’s running costs and meet basic living expenses. I’m fully prepared to dip into what’s left from the sale of the house to supplement that. Maybe I’ll have to do a little freelance marketing. Or sublease the boat to another skipper occasionally. I have a lot of options, but the most important thing is to begin.”
She glanced at her watch and started eating faster. “And that means selling the family home in Whangarei, today, if possible.”
He waved his fork. “Have you considered selling this place instead?”
“Absolutely not. It’s been in my family for four generations. It passes to Lewis and Lewis’s kids eventually.”
Nate refilled her coffee mug. “What if you rented out the Whangarei house for a year, see how it goes?”
She shook her head. “I need too much capital, Nate.”
“I could—”
“No, I’m not accepting a loan from you. If the bank won’t lend me the money, I’m hardly going to borrow from a friend.”
He’d been tucking into his breakfast, now he paused. “The bank’s against it?”
Damn. She smiled. “The only way to get the business off the ground was to quit my job. Banks have to be conservative. Without an income, I can’t apply for a loan, despite having substantial collateral.”
“Uh-huh.” He returned his attention to his breakfast. She waited for more, but he said nothing.
“What are you thinking?” It occurred to her that she hadn’t needed that question in over a year and a half.
His gaze lifted. “I’m thinking I’d like to read all those reports thoroughly.”
Her knife clattered onto the china. “I knew it. It’s too late to get involved now, Nate. I’m too far down the road.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said dryly.
Claire ended the conversation by pushing to her feet. “I’ll grab a shower, dress and we’ll go.” She threw out a lure. “We’ve got to keep to schedule if you want to be home in L.A. within a couple of days.”