Loe raamatut: «Almost A Bride»

CHAPTER ONE

GRAYSON ZALE BIT back a curse as he ducked between the weather-beaten posts that hoisted the pier at Turtleback Beach over the clawing surf. He crouched down, pulse racing, as he pretended to reach for a shell stranded by the low tide, and waited for the guy in the backward cap and sunglasses to finish taking a panoramic shot with his cell phone. The last thing Gray needed was to have his face plastered on social media and recognized by the wrong people. Or worse yet, what if this guy wasn’t some random tourist? Not many tourists ventured this far south along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and those who did usually stayed away from the areas roped off and marked as turtle breeding grounds. Most vacationers settled on staying in towns farther north of Hatteras Island, like Duck or Kill Devil Hills, where they could have their pick of hotels, amenities, shops and attractions, like the memorial where the Wright brothers took their first flight. Granted, Turtleback and neighboring towns, like Rodanthe or Avon, did get some visitors—usually more peace-and nature-loving types. It was just that being cautious and suspicious had become a twisted, unsettling part of who he was...like a leech or parasite, unwilling to let go.

Laddie, Gray’s rough collie rescue, positioned himself stoically between Gray and the stranger. No barking or growling. That was a good sign, but getting caught in an online photo was a threat in and of itself. It was more than out of the question. It was a matter of life or death.

Sure, he was the town’s veterinarian, which meant just about everyone had come to know him in some capacity or another since he’d landed in town five years ago. He was their pet’s doc, a friend of a friend, the guy who grabbed his coffee and bear claw at the local bake shop the second it opened at six in the morning with Laddie ever at his side. He was the guy they’d wave to as he took off on a motorcycle ride down Highway 12. But as much as he’d integrated himself into the town, he’d also become adept at skirting photos, and he almost always wore his “Save the Turtles” ball cap and Oakley sunglasses when walking the beach during the busier summer season, just in case he did end up in the background of a tourist’s photograph. He took every precaution to stay under the radar and live a low-key life.

Nonetheless, it was a tiny town. Everyone knew everyone and news traveled faster than the infamous riptides could suck a person out to sea and drown them. He was surprised he’d survived the gossip and side-glances when he was abandoned at the altar by Mandi Rivers, the town’s sweetheart and former mayor’s daughter, two years ago. As privately as he lived his life, having his heart shredded so publicly had been unbearable—not because of humiliation or pride, but because she must have known that having his personal life laid out for everyone to dissect was akin to physically stabbing him in the heart and leaving him to bleed out. Yet, she’d done it. She had deliberately hurt him. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what hurt more...the pain of losing the only woman he’d ever loved and trusted, or the pain of knowing that she had cast him off like fisherman’s chum and never looked back.

He glanced across the waves toward the horizon. It hadn’t been the first time everything in his life had been cast away, but Mandi’s leaving him would probably be the one loss he’d never fully recover from. He knew this because every time she entered his mind, a spot deep in his chest, beneath bone and heart, cramped and ached with pain and longing. And what bothered him even more was that he couldn’t, in all honesty, place all the blame on her. He’d destroyed his own life. Every choice he made seemed to doom him—not that keeping that truth from her about his past had been a choice. But she had wanted more from him than he could give. Openness and honesty. And telling her that he honestly loved her clearly hadn’t been enough.

The stranger’s voice broke through the rhythmic cries of seagulls and crashing surf as he called out a name. A woman emerged from the tall grasses that flanked a narrow, sandy path leading from the road to the beach. Similar paths, some paved with weathered, wooden planks and some not, ran all along the Outer Banks. This one trailed over a short sand dune that masked the view of the road beyond. The young woman hoisted a toddler onto her hip and adjusted what looked like a baby supply bag that hung from one shoulder as she trudged through the sand toward the man, who belatedly tucked the phone camera in his back pocket and jogged over to give her a hand. He planted a kiss on her lips and took the child in his arms. Husband? Partner? Boyfriend? Whatever the relationship, one thing was clear. They were a family. Something Gray would never have again.

Laddie whimpered and began wagging his tail. He looked up pleadingly at Gray.

“Not this time. Come on.”

The calming scent of salt water filled Gray’s lungs once again. He tucked a shell in his pocket, stood and started for the lighthouse at the end of the beach. Laddie jogged alongside without complaint, distancing himself from Gray only long enough to skirt a log of driftwood strangled by seaweed. His ears perked at the sound of that toddler giggling in the distance, but he stayed on course for home.

The poor dog adored children, so much so that there were times when Gray could have sworn his expressive face and eyes seemed to say, “When are you going to get me some human kids of my own to look out for?” Yeah. That wasn’t happening.

His past had ceased to exist five years ago, and the only people who’d come close to being family since then were Mandi and her grandmother Nana. His throat constricted and a sudden gust of wind slapped against his chest, forcing him to exhale. As of three days ago, Nana was no longer with them, a fact that still felt surreal. Nana was gone. There would be no more waving to her during his evening jog or stopping by for an afternoon cup of coffee. There would be no more deals or compromises where Nana would insist on his coming over for a home-cooked meal and he’d agree only if she let him pick up groceries for her. She would no longer be there to comb the beach for turtle nests with him at the crack of dawn—her favorite activity and time of day. As for Mandi?

Gray muttered a curse as he passed the white, two-story beach cottage that everyone knew as Nana’s house. Raised on solid posts, like most homes here because of tropical storms and hurricanes, it stood much taller than a standard two-story and boasted just a touch of Victorian flair with gingerbread trim along the upper gable and around the small turret-style attic. That tiny space was more of a lookout and storage nook than a full room, according to Nana, who had always kept it locked. It was the window to the room just beneath it that caught his eye now. Nana had always referred to it as Mandi’s room, even if she had technically lived with her father. That room beneath the attic space had been Mandi’s spot, made cozy with an old sofa, painting easel and numerous canvases stacked against the wall. It had been her hideaway. The one place he knew he could always find her if her father had been giving her a hard time about seeing too much of Gray. Well, John Rivers got what he wanted.

Man, Gray had come so close—dangerously close—to giving up everything after Mandi had left him at the altar. His veterinary practice, his new life at Turtleback...his fake identity. Everything, just to win her back. But doing so wouldn’t have endangered only himself. It would have put anyone he cared about in danger, too...something the WITSEC—Witness Security Program—marshals had drilled into him with horrifying, gory visuals and stories about federal witness protection cases where cover had been blown—voluntarily or involuntarily. Ironic that revealing the truth had caused him to be sentenced to a life of secrets and lies. He was lucky that he’d been allowed to continue his career as a vet under a different name, but any record of his completing veterinary school through the US Army or serving as a vet with the US Navy Marine Mammal Program or even his very short time in the Department of Defense research division was essentially gone. That history didn’t belong to Grayson Zale. Nor did any chance at a truly normal life beyond outward appearances.

He took to jogging the eighth of a mile from Nana’s to the path that led to the old Turtleback Lighthouse and the adjacent one-story “ranger” cottage where he lived. Unlike other lighthouses along the Outer Banks, this one wasn’t a famous tourist destination. In fact, the powers that be made sure it was clearly marked as not open to the public. A metal sign hanging on a wooden post near the clearing welcomed wanderers with a firm warning that the landmark wasn’t structurally safe, that it was undergoing restoration and that trespassers would be prosecuted.

There were no heavy security fences around the property. That idea had been nixed by WITSEC on the grounds that it would draw more attention to him than it was worth. Hiding in plain sight was essentially a more effective plan, which meant no added security fences that would only raise eyebrows. There was an old double-wide gate with a short, open-ended fence to either side where the main road led to the property, but it was nothing more than an entrance marker. Anyone could get around it, so he had a hidden surveillance camera on the property, just in case people got too curious. The few times he’d run into intrigued hikers, he’d told them he lived there as an authorized curator and guard, and then sent them off. As for townsfolk, they believed that lack of proper funding was the reason no major restorations had happened yet, including the high cost of relocating the lighthouse to a safer spot, farther away from the shore, as had been done with the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. There would be no safer spot. At least not for him. There wouldn’t be any major restorations either, because opening up the place to tourism was out of the question.

Laddie trotted up the steps to the cottage door and nudged the brass box that held mail. He could tell when it was empty or full and he knew the scent of the mailman wasn’t a threat. Or it wasn’t supposed to be, not just because of the Postal Service’s reputation, but because, as Gray understood it when he first moved here, the delivery guy had been cleared.

He grabbed the mail, unlocked the door and waited for Laddie to follow him inside.

“Hungry?”

The dog responded with his usual half grunt, half yodel. Dog-speak. Gray chuckled as he poured kibble into the food bowl and put fresh water in the one next to it. He didn’t know what he’d do without Laddie. Having him around the past few years had made life manageable.

“We rescued each other, didn’t we boy?” He scratched Laddie behind the ear and got a dog smile in return. “I still have you. It doesn’t matter that Mandi will be here for the funeral. I can deal with it. Life’s been just fine without her.”

Funny how lying to himself had become just as natural as lying to everyone else. Or maybe repeating those words to himself had become more of a mantra. Life’s just fine without her. God knew he’d relied on that mantra during Mandi’s short and infrequent visits from up north to see Nana over the past couple of years. Most of the time, she had convinced her grandma to go visit her instead—a blatant avoidance of him.

He was guilty of steering clear of her too, though, down to not grabbing coffee at the local bakery whenever she was in town for a couple of days. He told himself he was avoiding gossip and proving to everyone in town that he’d moved on, but the fact was that one look at her and every stitch he’d tightened around the wound she’d left would unravel. He was strong and resilient, but there was only so much a man could take.

He glanced at the clock. Sheesh. Ten already? He scrubbed his hand across his face. So much for dropping by the office to make sure everything was under control. He needed to shower and change in time for the funeral. She’ll be there. You can’t avoid each other this time. Yeah. He knew that. A fact that had been gnawing at him for two days now.

As if having his life turned upside down when he’d been placed in the witness protection program, and again when Mandi had gone runaway bride on him, wasn’t enough. Now Nana was gone. Nana...the one person who’d accepted him unconditionally...who’d treated him like a son and who’d taught him about rescuing endangered sea turtles by tending to their nesting grounds along her private stretch of beach and the sands that extended beyond the town limits. Nana was gone and the one person who understood and felt the depth of that loss the way he did was Mandi. But it didn’t matter that a part of him wanted to reach out and console her or that he desperately needed to talk about Nana and share memories about her with Mandi. No way would he open his heart, even a crack, and let Mandi in. He was a survivor. Burned once and all that. Others would be at the funeral, including Mandi’s father, John Rivers, Nana’s only child. They could console her and give her support. She didn’t need Gray in her life. She’d made that clear long ago.

And he certainly didn’t need her.

* * *

MANDI RIVERS EXAMINED herself in the tarnished silver mirror that hung in Nana’s entryway above a rustic console table. Her eyes weren’t any less puffy than they had been the five previous times she’d checked during the past thirty minutes. Why did it matter? No doubt, others in town had cried, too, when they heard of Nana’s unexpected passing.

She scurried to the kitchen and chucked the cucumber slices that had proved useless into the trash bin. The fact was that she hadn’t noticed what the nine-hour drive from New York yesterday—and the dam of tears that finally let loose once she’d stepped into Nana’s home last night—had done to her face...until she had spotted Grayson down on the beach this morning. She wasn’t sure if he noticed her peering past the sheer curtains. She had ducked back the second he glanced up toward the house, but the way he took off at a run seconds later made her wonder. Maybe he had seen her.

He had looked serious and irritated and so, so good. It was criminal to look that good with his dark brown hair all messed up by the ocean breeze and his favorite old T-shirt looking more worn than she’d remembered. Even from a distance, she knew which one by the faded blue color and tear at the bottom hem. It was the one that said “Save the Sharks” on the front. Heaven help her, she had a better chance of surviving a shark attack than surviving being around Gray this afternoon.

She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her throbbing temples. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she cared enough to spy on him. She had wasted too much of her life trying to get him to open up and share things about his history. She’d gone from having a crush on him when she was twenty, right about when he had first moved to town, to dating him and even saying yes when he had finally proposed on her twenty-third birthday. She thought that day would never happen, given how withdrawn and serious he’d sometimes get. As much as she had loved him and confided in him, he had been hard to crack. He was skilled at evading questions and switching subjects so smoothly that most people didn’t notice. But she did. And it hurt that he didn’t trust her enough to open up. She had thought being engaged and eventually married would make a difference, but boy had she been naive. She’d come so close to throwing away a chance at a master’s degree and an incredible career for someone she’d never be enough for.

The last straw had been wedding jitters mixed with her father warning her that marrying Gray would be the biggest mistake of her life. The look on her dad’s face when she stood at the altar had left her hyperventilating and sweating in her wedding dress. Her controlling father had been the one person she’d rebelled against and the last man she wanted to listen to, yet when push came to shove, his disapproval had carried weight. The need for parental approval was one of those convoluted psychological things that latched itself to a person’s mind even when logic shunned it. He’d made her second-guess herself. He’d made her second-guess Gray’s love for her.

Wasn’t it Freud who had written something to the effect that girls tended to fall for guys who were much like their fathers? God help her. Her father was a hovering, micromanaging, money-driven, controlling man who valued appearances and reputation above all else. He had made her teenage years unbearable. And then there was Gray, who had a compassionate side she couldn’t resist, yet he had to maintain control of every conversation, and his explanations for mundane things, like why he never had visitors or why he didn’t keep old baby or family photos, had frustrated her to no end. The thought of marrying someone remotely controlling like her father still made her nauseous. And there had been a part of Gray she couldn’t figure out...a part he kept locked away with the key in his pocket. Control. That fact had kept her up every night the week before the wedding. It had driven her to choose control of her own life...and to abandon a love that was just too risky.

On one hand, she often wondered if her father’s air of superiority and always having the final say in decisions had been the reason her mother had abandoned them when Mandi was still in grade school. Nana used to tell her that her parents had loved each other, but perhaps loving John Rivers had been too risky. Maybe the women in Mandi’s family were simply doomed when it came to love.

But Nana also used to say that there were two sides to every relationship and every story, so a part of Mandi also wondered if her mother had had commitment issues and Mandi had somehow inherited that curse. Perhaps her mom had suffered from the same suffocating urge to leave Turtleback and travel or experience big-city life that Mandi had. What if Mandi was just like her mother? And what if maybe, just maybe, Gray wasn’t at all like her father and Mandi had been fishing for excuses to run away. That would mean that she had thrown away the kind of love she couldn’t ever imagine feeling again.

Just stop it. She groaned and clenched her fists as she headed for the kitchen. She was doing it again—overanalyzing and spiraling through pointless reasons for what had happened to her and Gray. She hated it when she slid into this pattern. It had taken months for her to regain her focus after leaving him and starting graduate school. She was not going to let seeing him weaken her resolve. She steeled herself against the slurry of anger and sadness that pooled in her stomach. She took a glass from the cabinet by the fridge, filled it with cool water and drank half before setting it down.

No regrets. Nana’s voice swept through her mind with haunting clarity. The same words she would command Mandi to repeat like a mantra, whenever she was feeling down or torn about a decision. Regrets are like steel anchors. They’ll weigh you down and keep you from moving forward in life. Own every choice you make, and make it work for you.

Oh, she’d made her choice work for her alright. She would never regret earning her undergraduate college degree on her own terms. Studying online may not have been the same as getting a degree from a university her father could brag about, but it had saved her money. It had been the affordable option, and her master’s diploma from NYU was the one that counted now. Her father’s insistence that she study prelaw out of high school, then attend law school—all because he felt his political aspirations would have gone far beyond town mayor had he done the same—had resulted in her taking a gap year after high school. He had given her an ultimatum that he would pay for college only if she studied prelaw, which she had no inclination toward or desire to do.

That gap year had really ticked him off, but not nearly as much as her decision to put herself through a four-year advertising degree online, while working locally to support her goals. Her father had been downright furious. Turning down his money not only stole some of the power he had over her, but that gap year had also stripped him of bragging rights. His only child was the only one in her senior class whose intended college wasn’t announced at graduation. She had shamed him.

She never asked Nana for financial help either, though there was a time or two she wished her grandmother would have offered. All Nana ever told her was that she had faith in her and that Mandi could accomplish more than she knew she could. And she had. She’d accomplished something significant, but her father had yet to express any pride or approval in her degree. Had she married Gray the year she earned her diploma and found out she’d been accepted into a master’s program, she wouldn’t be on the verge of jump-starting her career right now. She took a deep breath and rolled the stiffness out of her shoulders.

Gray had not known she’d gotten accepted into NYU, yet he had made it clear that selling his vet practice and moving was out of the question. If she’d trusted his feelings for her, maybe she’d have given it all up for him or maybe she could have figured out how to make a long-distance marriage work for two years, but that hadn’t been the case. She didn’t leave him because of the master’s program. She left him because she couldn’t see a life with someone who wasn’t completely open and honest with her about everything.

You don’t regret leaving him. You’re just feeling alone because Nana’s gone.

She opened the pantry and took out another box of tissues. This was so unfair. Nana hadn’t said a word about being sick. Or had Mandi been so preoccupied with school and her career that she’d missed the signs? If she regretted anything, it was not being there for her grandmother.