Brambleberry House: His Second-Chance Family. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ favorite flavor is, too. With all the good flavors out there—licorice or coconut or chocolate chunk—why would you ever want plain vanilla? That’s just weird.”

      “Simon!” Julia’s cheeks flushed and he thought again how extraordinarily lovely she was—not much different from the girl he’d been so crazy about nearly two decades ago.

      “Well, it is,” Simon insisted.

      “You don’t tell someone they’re weird,” Julia said.

      “I didn’t say he was weird. Just that eating only vanilla ice cream is weird.”

      Will found himself fighting a smile, which startled him all over again. “Okay, I’ll admit I also like praline ice cream and sometimes even chocolate chip on occasion. Is that better?”

      Simon snickered. “I guess so.”

      He felt the slightest brush of air and realized it was Maddie touching his arm with her small, pale hand. Suddenly he couldn’t seem to catch his breath, aching inside.

      “Would you like to come with us to get an ice-cream cone, Mr. Garrett?” she asked in her breathy voice. “I bet if you were holding Conan’s leash, he couldn’t get away.”

      He glanced at her sweet little features then at Julia. The color had climbed even higher on her cheekbones and she gave him an apologetic look before turning back to her daughter.

      “Honey, I’m sure Mr. Garrett is busy. It smells like he’s cooking a steak for his dinner.”

      “Which I’d better check on. Hang on.”

      He lifted the grill and found his porterhouse a little on the well-done side, but still edible. He shut off the flame, using the time to consider how to answer the girl.

      He shouldn’t be so tempted to go with them. It was an impulse that shocked the hell out of him.

      He had spent two years avoiding social situations except with his close friends. But suddenly the idea of sitting here alone eating his dinner and watching others enjoy life seemed unbearable.

      How could he possibly go with them, though? He wasn’t sure he trusted himself to be decent for an hour or so, the time it would take to walk to the ice-cream place, enjoy their cones, then walk home.

      What if something set him off and brought back that bleak darkness that always seemed to hover around the edges of his psyche? The last thing he wanted to do was hurt these innocent kids.

      “Thanks for the invitation,” he said, “but I’d better stay here and finish my dinner.”

      Conan whined and butted his head against Will’s leg, almost as if urging Will to reconsider.

      “We can wait for you to eat,” Simon said promptly. “We don’t mind, do we, Mom?”

      “Simon, Mr. Garrett is busy. We don’t want to badger him.” She met his gaze, her green eyes soft with an expression he couldn’t identify. “Though we would love to have you come along. All of us.”

      “I don’t want you to have to wait for me to eat when you’ve got strawberry cheesecake and bubblegum ice-cream cones calling your name.”

      Julia nodded rather sadly, as if she had expected his answer. “Come on, kids. We’d better be on our way.”

      Conan whined again. Will gazed from the dog to Julia and her family, then he shook his head. “Then again, I guess there’s no reason I can’t warm my steak up again when we get back from the ice-cream parlor. I’m not that hungry right now anyway.”

      His statement was met with a variety of reactions. Conan barked sharply, Julia’s eyes opened wide with surprise, Simon gave a happy shout and Maddie clapped her hands with delight.

      It had been a long time since anyone had seemed so thrilled about his company, he thought as he carried his steak inside to cover it with foil and slide it in the refrigerator.

      He didn’t know what impulse had prompted him to agree to go along with them. He only knew it had been a long while since he had allowed himself to enjoy the quiet peace of an August evening on the shore.

      Maybe it was time.

       CHAPTER SIX

      THIS WAS A mistake of epic proportions.

      Will walked alongside Julia while her twins moved ahead with Conan. Simon raced along with the dog, holding tightly to his leash as the two of them scared up a shorebird here and there and danced just out of reach of the waves. Maddie seemed content to walk sedately toward the ice-cream stand in town, stopping only now and again to pick something up from the sand, study it with a serious look, then plop it in her pocket.

      Will was painfully conscious of the woman beside him. Her hair shimmered in the dying sunlight, her cheeks were pinkened from the wind, and the soft, alluring scent of cherry blossoms clung to her, feminine and sweet.

      He couldn’t come up with a damn thing to say and he felt like he was an awkward sixteen-year-old again.

      Accompanying her little family to town was just about the craziest idea he had come up with in a long, long time.

      She didn’t seem to mind the silence but he finally decided good manners compelled him to at least make a stab at conversation.

      “How are you settling in?” he asked.

      She smiled softly. “It’s been lovely. Perfect. You know, I wasn’t sure I was making the right choice to move here but everything has turned out far better than I ever dreamed.”

      “The apartment working out for you, then?”

      “It’s wonderful. We love it at Brambleberry House. Anna and Sage have become good friends and the children love being so close to the ocean. It’s been a wonderful adventure for us all so far.”

      He envied her that, he realized. The sense of adventure, the willingness to charge headlong into the unknown. He had always been content to stay in the house where he had been raised. He loved living on the coast—waking up to the sound of scoters and grebes, sleeping to the murmuring song of the sea—but lately he sometimes felt as if he were suffocating here. It was impossible to miss the way everyone in town guarded their words around him and worse, watched him out of sad, careful eyes.

      Maybe it was time to move on. It wasn’t a new thought but as he walked beside Julia toward the lights of town, he thought perhaps he ought to do just as she had—start over somewhere new.

      She was looking at him in expectation, as if she had said something and was waiting for him to respond. He couldn’t think what he might have missed and he hesitated to ask her to repeat herself. Instead, he decided to pick a relatively safe topic.

      “School starts in a few weeks, right?” he asked.

      “A week from Tuesday,” she said after a small pause. “I plan to go in and start setting up my classroom tomorrow.”

      “Does it take СКАЧАТЬ