My toes sank into the sand and a gentle breeze from the ocean cooled my cheeks against the hot summer sun.

“Was this what you had in mind?” Caine broke the silence, throwing me a small smile.

I returned that smile. “Maybe.”

True to his word, Caine had given me Sunday. All of Sunday. To be friends. To hang out. I’d chosen Good Harbor Beach in Rockport as our hangout destination. Although Caine was surprised by my choice, I think he was secretly pleased. He owned a dark blue Vanquish Volante that he only drove around the city when he didn’t need his company driver, which wasn’t often. Good Harbor was a little over an hour away, which gave him the excuse to stretch the Aston Martin’s sleek lines.

I had to admit it was fun riding shotgun.

When we’d arrived Caine had parked near the beach, oblivious of the men and women who were drooling over his car as we got out of it. He was too intent on me. I think he was trying to understand what I really wanted from him.

Standing on the beach, his shoes and socks dangling from one hand while his other arm rested lightly around my waist, he said, “Why Good Harbor?”

I shivered at the question, feeling the breeze cool my body even more as it slid across my arms. “I like it here. The only vacation I ever remember taking when it was just Mom and me was here.” I looked out at the water, pain slicing through me at the memories. It was funny, but for once I welcomed that pain over the frustrated anguish that wrecked me when I remembered my life with my mother in my adult years. “Back then my whole world revolved around her.” I glanced up at him, wondering how he’d react if I mentioned my father. Deciding today was a day for pushing all limits, I stepped into the quagmire that was our shared history. “My father visited on my birthday every year and he stayed a few days. I thought there was no one quite like him, and my mum helped create that idea. She filled my head with all these romantic notions about him. He was like a fairy-tale character, a relief from real life. My mom … well, she was the real deal. My entire happiness depended on her.

“We didn’t have a lot, but it didn’t matter because she made me feel safe and loved. We had more than we should have, though.”

“Your father?” Caine deduced.

I looked up at him, searching his face for a reaction to our conversation. He seemed contemplative, not agitated like I’d half expected him to be. “Yes. He gave my mom money.”

“And Good Harbor? Your mother lived in Connecticut. I find it more than coincidental that your only vacation with her was in Good Harbor … near your father.”

I smirked unhappily. “She grew up in Boston, so this place was familiar to her, but … yeah, my father showed up toward the end of our vacation. Before he turned up, my mom and I spent every day on the beach.” I smiled. “It was heaven. We goofed around and just hung out. My mom never spoke to me like I was a little kid, you know. She had actual conversations with me.

“Her parents died when she was a baby and her aunt raised her in Boston. She told me this story about when she was a little girl. One summer her aunt took her to Good Harbor. My mom told me that her aunt had to take her home from the beach and she refused to go back. When I asked why, she said that there was a little boy there and he kept jabbing this stick into an injured seagull. My mom got really upset and so her aunt asked the little boy why he was tormenting the bird. And he said that a seagull had swooped down and taken his last piece of fried dough the day before. He’d found this injured one and decided it just might be the offending seagull. So while it was hurt, he was exacting his little-boy vengeance. My mom said to the little boy that he should forgive and let the poor creature alone, and his answer was to jab at it even harder. My mom burst into tears and her aunt took her away. Mom refused to go back to the beach.

“I don’t even know why she told me that story … but I remember it sticking with me for a while.” I blinked back the burn of tears. “Now I can’t seem to get it out of my head.”

We walked along the shore in silence for a few seconds and then the heat of Caine’s skin met the coolness of mine as he laced our fingers together and clasped my hand in his. I didn’t say a word to acknowledge the gesture. I just held on.

“She was a sweet person,” I said. “A good person. But around my dad she changed. Our vacation at Good Harbor ended abruptly after my father showed up. Everything was okay the first day—more than okay, it was exhilarating like always. But the next day he was suddenly gone and my mom wouldn’t stop crying. She packed us up and cut the vacation short. It was kind of a theme as the years wore on.”

“Do you forgive her? For abandoning you for him?”

“I don’t know. She stopped being the mom I had when I was a kid. She put him before me.”

“She was human. She was flawed, Lexie. It doesn’t mean she didn’t love you.” He squeezed my hand. “Perhaps you should stop poking that seagull.”

My step faltered.

Caine smiled kindly. “She’s gone. It’s done. The only one you’re hurting here is you, baby.”

I blinked back more tears and squeezed his hand in return. “How did you get so wise?” I gave a halfhearted teasing laugh.

“I’ve always been very wise.” He tugged me gently back into step with him. “My mom was the same around my dad.”

It took every ounce of self-control I had not to trip in surprise at him mentioning his mother. As far as I was aware, this was a completely taboo subject. I kept utterly quiet, hoping he’d continue.

“My mom was a different person around my dad,” he admitted somberly. “It was like she was trying to be who she thought he wanted her to be.”

Tentatively I asked, “What she did … the choices that she made … did they shock you?”

“Yeah.” He stared out at the water as we walked and I studied his profile, looking for any signs that he was upset. But he seemed perfectly calm. “I was just a kid. I had no idea she was that selfish. It was just like you with your mom. You thought she was a superhero, right? Until you grew up. For me … I just happened to have the truth knocked into me a bit young.” He looked at me. “Do you want to know how I get through?”

I held my breath and nodded. I was transfixed. Awed. Gratified.

Caine was confiding in me.

“I concentrate on all the good things. Because people aren’t just one thing. Your mom wasn’t just weak and selfish and neither was mine. Your mom wasn’t unhappy all the time and neither was mine. There were times when my mother was more alive than anyone I ever met.

“She was obsessed with the color yellow. Wore it nearly every day, even if it was just a ribbon in her hair. And she had a ton of yellow ribbons.” He smiled softly, his gaze reflective. “She kept them in this cheap little jewelry box I won at a school fair.

“And she made everything an event. Even Sunday morning breakfast. She had this yellow dress … like a fifties dress. Dad and I would get up in the morning and there she was, in that dress, smiling as she made baked goods for breakfast. Not eggs and bacon, none of that. It was cakes and pastries and muffins. Because me and Dad had a sweet tooth.”

I fought back the tears at the thought of Caine’s happy childhood with a mother who sounded vivacious and caring.

“Dad was always saying how beautiful she was. How I had the most beautiful mom in the world. And I’d feel proud walking down the street with her. I’d feel proud as she walked me into school, because I had the most beautiful mom in the world.

“And she loved me,” he said, his eyes now filled with pain when he looked at me. “It took me a while after it all to remember that, but she loved me. It was always all about me as a kid. But looking back, I realized she would hold parts of herself back around my dad. It was just little things. Like, she used to sing all the time when he wasn’t there, but she wouldn’t sing around him. She was quieter. She deferred to him in everything, even things I’d seen her cope with on her own, understand by herself. And it was because he needed her to be that way; he needed to feel needed.

“But when she was with me she was take-charge. She knew what we were doing, where we were going. And she wanted a lot for me. That’s what I remember the most. She would tell me nearly every day how much she wanted me to have everything. Everything she never had.” He threw me a rueful smile that caused an ache in my chest near my heart. “She named me after some guy in a romance novel. She said his name made him sound like somebody, and she wanted me to be somebody when I grew up.”

“Is that why you’ve worked so hard to be somebody?”

He didn’t answer me. Instead he said, “Maybe you need to remember the best in your mom to forgive her, to move on.”

“How do you do that?” Since we’d already walked into territory I never thought we would, I decided to continue being brave. “I mean you’re obviously still furious and unforgiving over what my family—my father, my grandfather—did to your family. But you seem at peace with what your mother did.”

He frowned. “I’m not at peace with it. You can’t be at peace with something like that, just like I won’t ever be at peace with the fact that my father took his own life knowing it would leave me with no one. But I have to consider everything that they were both going through at the time, and I have to somehow find a way to move on knowing that I wasn’t enough to save either of them from their mistakes. So I remember the good stuff and most days it gets me through it. Not every day, but most days. I don’t believe you can make a firm decision to just forgive. Sometimes forgiveness can be won back, but there’s no one left around to earn that from me. So it’s about trying every day to be okay, to let it go. It takes work. There are days when it’s impossible to do that, and one of those times was the day you walked onto that set. I was pissed because you were trying to apologize for something that a simple ‘sorry’ can’t undo. It’s fucked, but it’s true.”

I nodded, understanding. “So you want to forgive your parents?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“I really do.”

“But …” I tugged on his hand, needing to know—perhaps hoping he would have the answers to help me. “After everything they took from you. Why?”

Caine stopped and faced me. There was a hard aspect in his gaze that I didn’t like. “I want to forgive them because … I know how easy it is to fall down a path you never meant to take. I know what it’s like to have done things I’m not proud of.”

“I don’t believe that. You could never have done the shameful things they did.”

At that Caine scowled and began to walk away again, this time no longer holding my hand.

Not understanding his reaction, I hurried to catch up. “Do you think I should forgive my father and grandfather?”

“I don’t know that either,” he said quietly. “I just know that kind of bitterness can eat you up from the inside out.” He softened. “You’ve got too much going for you to let that happen.”

I smiled, feeling an overwhelming amount of emotion for him surge up inside me. “You amaze me. You know that, right?”

Apparently, somehow, in all the hard subjects we’d just touched on, that was the wrong thing to say.

An uncomfortable silence swelled between us.

And I pushed. “You don’t think you’re amazing?”

He looked at me sternly. “No. And I don’t want you to either.”

“Caine—”

“It’s not about pushing you away,” he interrupted, anger in his eyes. “It’s about making sure you don’t start seeing something in me that doesn’t exist.” He shook his head and looked away. “You wanted friendship between us? Well, the truth is you are my friend, Lexie. And I don’t like disappointing my friends. So don’t pretend I’m a man I’m not.”

What Caine didn’t realize was that he couldn’t disappoint me. We’d had a more than rocky start, a more than complicated history, but I was still standing by his side, and I wanted to keep standing by his side, because I didn’t think he even realized how good a man he was.

My whole life I’d been terrified of making the same mistake as my mother—of falling for a man who wasn’t worthy without even realizing I was wasting my heart on him. Because of that fear I’d never truly let myself fall.

But Caine Carraway was not Alistair Holland.

Caine was ambitious and hardworking. He was strong and stubborn and ruthless, but he was also this contradiction. He could be kind and compassionate and generous.

And even if I didn’t understand him sometimes, even if I didn’t agree with him on occasion, I would never, ever be disappointed in him.

However, I knew him well enough to recognize that look in his eyes. That obstinate glint. So for once I let it go.

“I’m buying you ice cream.” I held out my hand for him.

Caine gave me a dubious look.

I grinned and urged him to take my proffered hand. “You’ve never tasted ice cream like Luigi’s.”

Sighing, Caine laced his fingers through mine. “Did you ever really grow up, Lexie?”

I shot him a saucy look. “I did in all the places that matter.”

Like always, triumph rushed through me at the sound of his answering laughter.