Chapter Twenty-One
When Hunter approached Emma’s house on Wednesday morning, the door swung open before he reached the porch. He half expected to see her on the other side, but nobody was there.
The house was letting him in, it seemed. He paused in the doorway. “Thanks?”
If someone told him he’d be talking to inanimate objects a month ago, he’d have said they were crazy. Now the rational side of his brain was telling him he was the crazy one. After all that stuff about magic Emma had shown him, he was still trying to find logical answers.
Old houses settled. He crossed the threshold. Old houses were drafty. He stepped into the foyer. Old houses—
The door shut quietly behind him.
All right, fine. This was not an ordinary old house. He shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair. It was unbelievable. None of this made sense. And yet, when Emma entered the room barefoot in a soft white sundress, he simply believed.
Her face was like sunlight. “I see the house let you in again. It keeps doing that.”
“Maybe it likes me.”
“Or maybe it just wants you to do more repairs. It’s resourceful like that.” A door shut firmly upstairs and Emma laughed.
Hunter wanted to pick her up and spin her around like a fool, but he held back. Something about her really messed with his common sense. He wasn’t used to feeling so out of control.
“What is that?” She pointed to the bundle in his hand.
He held out the five rawhide bones tied with a red ribbon. The woman at the pet store had done it when he told her it was a gift. “For Buddy. I thought he’d like it.” He suddenly felt like an idiot. When was the last time he’d given a woman something so stupid? Women wanted flowers or jewelry, not chew toys for their dogs.
Emma took the bouquet of bones and held them down for Buddy to sniff. The puppy gnawed at the ribbon, tail spinning with joy.
“They’re so perfect,” Emma said. “Thank you.” A tremulous smile stretched across her face and Hunter reached down to pat the puppy’s head, avoiding her gaze. She was so beautiful, when she looked at him like that, it did things to his sanity. If they didn’t leave soon, he was going to toss her over his shoulder and carry her up to her room.
“You ready to go?” Say no. Say you want to go upstairs instead.
“Okay.”
Fine, he’d wait. He wasn’t a panting teenage boy, dammit, even though she made him feel like one. It seemed like every time he saw her, all he could think about was getting her naked. But she deserved more. Besides, the idea of spending the afternoon with her on a picnic was almost better than the alternative. Lately, he just wanted to be near her. It didn’t even matter what they did. That was the damned mystery of it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that way about anyone, if ever.
They drove out to Siren Point, a park with a lighthouse that overlooked the north side of the island. It was a gorgeous day with not a cloud in the sky. A soothing breeze blew in off the shore and a pair of dragonflies flitted over the grass. Emma set Buddy loose to run around while she arranged a picnic basket on a blanket.
“Is that lighthouse still in use?” Hunter asked.
“No, it’s just a landmark now. They keep it locked, but Juliette and I snuck in once when we were kids. It was kind of disappointing. No hidden pirate treasure or ghosts rattling chains. Just a bunch of cobwebs and dust, and it’s empty now. But a man and his wife used to live here, or so the story goes.”
Hunter stretched out on the blanket and plucked a grape from the basket. “What’s the story?”
Emma poured them each a glass of wine, then sat cross-legged beside him. He wanted to reach out and draw her closer, but he stopped himself. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be fawning over her like a lovestruck teenager. He sipped his wine instead.
“Over a hundred years ago,” Emma began, “a young man lived in the lighthouse. He kept the ships from crashing against the rocks in the winter, when the fog rolls in so thick sometimes you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. He was a young man, having taken over the lighthouse after his father died. One day, he saw a woman on the rocks, washed in from the sea. According to the story, he rescued her and they fell in love.
“For several years, they lived happily together beside the ocean. On the seventh year, a big storm hit the island. The man woke in the middle of the night to find his wife gone, and he ran into the storm to find her. She was standing at the edge of the rocks, staring longingly out at the thrashing sea. Before he could stop her, she blew him a kiss good-bye, and dove into the waves. By the light of the full moon, he saw her come up for air several yards from shore. She dove up out of the waves and that’s when he saw her pearly, shimmering tail. She was a mermaid, and the ocean was calling her home.
“For the rest of his life, the man lived in the lighthouse, always watching the horizon, always hoping she would return. As time passed, the villagers felt sorry for him. They tried to set him up with nice women from the village, but the man could never love anyone again. He really had no choice, because he had been touched by magic. He would spend the rest of his days pining away for his impossible girl.”
“That might be the most depressing story I’ve ever heard,” Hunter said.
Emma laughed. “I guess it is, but it’s tragically romantic. A typical old island fable. They were star-crossed lovers, doomed from the start.”
“Like I said, depressing.” He grinned and popped another grape into his mouth.
She stretched beside him on the blanket. “Yes, but at least the man got a nice, joyful seven years with her. What if he had never loved at all? It could’ve been worse.”
“Not really. I think it’s worse to find someone you can’t live without and then lose them. Better not to have met them at all. Then you don’t know what you’re missing.”
Emma sighed. “That’s the thing about fairy tales, especially the original ones. Someone is always getting hosed.”
He laughed suddenly. It was yet another unfamiliar feeling, and he marveled at it. “You’re really different, you know that?”
“Tell me something I haven’t already heard my entire life. Imagine what it was like for me, finding out my grandmother bakes spells in the kitchen. And I have the same gift. Not exactly a typical childhood. ‘Different’ is probably one of the nicer adjectives to describe the Holloway women.”
Buddy came bouncing up and snuffled inside the picnic basket. Emma patted her lap and the little dog curled up in her skirt, then let out a sigh of contentment.
Hunter felt the same. Just being around her was like a weight lifted from his shoulders. “Was it really hard? Finding out about the whole”—he waved his hand as if searching for a word—“gifted thing?”
Emma shrugged, stroking the puppy’s soft fur. “I guess I never really knew anything different. My mother had a gypsy soul, so my youngest memories are traveling with her. So many different, exotic places. We lived in Sri Lanka and Guam. A couple of places in India and Egypt. Even Paris, for a little while.”
“That’s incredible,” Hunter said. “To have those experiences at such a young age.”
“I suppose it was, but it wasn’t always easy. Sometimes we got sick, or had to leave the places we were staying without notice. Sometimes we had money problems. My mom always found a way to keep going, though. I guess that’s just part of her gift. And she always found ways to help people wherever we went. It’s like she just knew when it was time to go, and where she’d be needed next. She used to tell me how wonderful it was, and how lucky I was to see the world. Like she was hoping really hard that I would have her same gift of wanderlust.”
“But you didn’t.”
She dropped her head, her voice getting softer. “I wanted to. I could tell she hoped I would. But by the time I was six, I couldn’t help it. I hated always moving, always saying good-bye. And my mother knew it. She didn’t want to give me up, but that year she started telling me a bedtime story. It was an old story she had learned from one of the African villages she visited, about how the sun loved the moon so much, he died every day to let her live. And when I turned seven, she brought me here to my grandmother, and let me go. I didn’t want her to leave, and she didn’t want to move on without me. But she wasn’t going to keep me from my own life’s path.”
“But she barely visited you over the years.” Hunter couldn’t help but feel angry at a woman who could abandon her child like that.
“True,” Emma said. “And when I was younger I resented her, until I really grew to understand what the Holloway gifts meant. It’s not just a preference; it’s a calling. There’s no happiness unless you learn to embrace it.”
Hunter wasn’t sure he agreed. She was an angel of forgiveness, this one. “So your grandmother raised you.”
“Yes. It was always me and her, together.” Emma stared out at the ocean. “Then a couple of years ago she was diagnosed with cancer. ‘Stage IV melanoma,’ the doctors said. She died within the year. It’s mainly why everything’s falling apart with the house and . . .” She shook her head. “I just didn’t have a lot of time to devote to shoring other things up. And then there was Rodney.”
Hunter felt a pang of jealousy. He didn’t like the man, and hated that he had caused Emma grief. “What happened with him?”
She stroked the puppy in her lap, head down. “Oh, I was naïve and believed he was right for me. Plus, I didn’t want to be alone. And he had always been around, on and off. So when he proposed, it just seemed like the right thing to do. But it was the worst mistake. He made it harder, always complaining that I spent too much time with my grandmother and didn’t have enough time with him.”
Hunter felt a stab of anger at the idiot. The man didn’t deserve her.
Emma glanced up and shrugged. “And then one day he got tired of the scene, and ran off with someone else.”
“He was a fool,” Hunter said.
“I was more the fool. I kept a large amount of cash in a special tin above my kitchen cupboards. I told him I was saving it for our future. I guess he thought that meant he had a right to it when he left.”
Hunter ground his teeth together. Rodney was not only an idiot, he was an idiot that needed a serious punch to the face.
Emma shook her head. “Well, that was a pretty maudlin story. What about you? What’s yours?”
He laid back on the blanket and stared up at the cerulean sky, his hands behind his head. “It’s not as interesting as yours. My parents divorced when I was young, and my mother raised me. I didn’t know my father well, as he wasn’t too keen on having a child in the first place. Now that I think about it, I think my mother did it just to spite him. They were always fighting. In a way, I got lucky that they divorced.”
“And you’ve never been married,” she said.
“God, no.”
She stopped petting the puppy in her lap and glanced up. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t believe in it.”
“I don’t, really. I don’t have any experience with a good one, and the people I do come across who are happily married, well . . . I think they’re just wired differently. Like maybe they got lucky or something. But for me, no. I don’t ever want to be like my parents.”
“So you never even came close?”
“Once, but for all the wrong reasons.”
“What happened?”
Hunter paused, uncomfortable. “It just didn’t work out.”
Emma waited patiently, and he found that he wanted to tell her. She was so easy to talk to and he didn’t feel like he had to guard himself the way he did with other people. “When Melinda and I first met, I thought we understood each other. She knew my business was important to me, and she was deeply involved in her own career as a lawyer. We were together for over two years. But she was . . .” Hunter clenched his jaw, hating the memory of what had happened between them. “She was driven. She always had a plan and never deviated from that. It’s one of the things that made it work so well in the beginning. We both wanted the same things.” He stopped, not wanting to ruin the picnic.
“So why aren’t you still together?” Emma asked quietly.
Hunter took another sip of wine, only it was more of a gulp. He might as well tell her. “She got pregnant.”
He didn’t miss the tiny gasp that escaped her. “You had a child?”
“No.” Regret flooded through him. “No, I didn’t. Melinda got pregnant, but she didn’t want the baby. She never wanted to be a mother. She just wasn’t the type.” He finished his wine in one gulp. “I didn’t even find out until it was too late. She decided to abort. She got rid of it, and I never even knew until afterward.” The old feelings of anger and betrayal came bubbling to the surface and he forced them down. “She told me a week later, like it was no big deal. Barely even worth mentioning. I was so angry. Our relationship just changed after that.”
“Did you want the baby?” Emma asked. Her huge gray eyes were filled with sadness.
“I . . .” He shifted uncomfortably. He had never told anyone about what had happened. It was unnerving to be sitting across from someone who he could be so open with. “Yes, I guess I did. Which didn’t make any sense because I never planned to be a father and certainly never wanted to be married. But the idea of a child . . . my child . . .” Even after all this time it was difficult to think about the loss. Or what could have been. “Anyway, I couldn’t help how angry I was that she kept it from me, and Melinda resented me for it. I couldn’t get over the fact that she never even discussed it with me. She asked what I would have done, had I known. I told her I would have offered to marry her, and she laughed in my face. She said we both knew what we had wasn’t really love. I was so angry. Mostly because I knew she was right. But I couldn’t be with her anymore. Not if we couldn’t be honest about the important things. The things that really mattered.”
He shook his head and took a deep breath. “So that’s it. We went our separate ways. Now she’s a senior partner at a law firm somewhere in Seattle. Engaged to the CEO, last I heard. And the weird part is, I don’t miss her at all. I’m relieved that whole part of my life is behind me. But I feel guilty about what happened. I don’t know. It’s just really messed up.”
Emma bit her lip and stared out at the waves. “I think I understand.”
For a very long time, neither of them spoke. Hunter let the sound of the ocean and the cool breeze float over him until the harsh memories faded, and all he saw was Emma sitting before him. In that moment, she was so pure and real that it made his heart constrict with yearning. The feeling was completely foreign to him. He didn’t know what it was.
“It’s all so uncertain, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Sometimes I wish life was like a book, so even though terrible things might happen, you could flip to the end to make sure everything was going to be okay.”
The sunlight glowed off her golden head and he wanted to hold her and promise her that everything was going to be okay. It was another feeling that came unexpectedly, surprising him. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt protective over anyone. “Everything is going to work out,” he found himself saying.
She grinned wistfully. “I wish that were true.”
He thought of her struggles, and all she had overcome. He thought of his investment plans, and how much he wanted to help her. In just a few days, he would be able to tell her his news. It would solve all her problems. “It is going to be okay. I know it.”
“How do you know for sure?” she asked impishly. “Did you flip to the end and peek?”
“Maybe.” He wanted to kiss the dimple near her mouth. “Come here.”
She lifted her chin, mischief dancing in her eyes. “No.”
Hunter sat up. “Yes.”
“Nope,” she laughed.
“Are you going to come here, or are you going to make me chase you?”
“There’s something else you need to know about me.” She leaned in close, her lips hovering just inches from his, and whispered, “I’m very fast.”
“I like fast women.” Hunter reached for her.
She bolted up and ran, laughing across the grass.
He sprang after her, because what else could he do? When a man was lucky enough to be touched by someone as enchanting as Emma Holloway . . . he really had no choice.