The Cliff House. RaeAnne Thayne

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       1

      DAISY

      A man was staring at her in the oral care aisle.

      A gorgeous, make-your-ovaries-shiver man.

      Though it taxed her considerable powers of restraint, Daisy Davenport McClure did not stare back. She wouldn’t give the stranger the courtesy of knowing he had rattled her.

      She couldn’t help feeling discombobulated, though. Dark, wavy-haired, green-eyed strangers did not stare at plain, boring her in the grocery store. Or on the street. Or in a car or on a boat or a train or anywhere else Dr. Seuss could have come up with. She simply wasn’t the sort of woman who drew that kind of male attention—and that was exactly the way she liked it.

      Why was he staring? She was almost positive she had checked her reflection in the rearview mirror when she picked up her sister outside their aunt’s house twenty minutes earlier. She didn’t remember seeing anything weird. No stray leaves from the yard work she’d been doing earlier, no smudges on her cheek, no splotched paint, no lettuce in her teeth.

      There was no reason she could think of why this man might be looking at her as if she were his salvation.

      She almost turned around to head down another aisle but despite her certainty that she didn’t have any leafy vegetable residue in her teeth, she still really needed toothpaste, which was why she was here. She drew in a breath.

      “Excuse me,” she murmured, reaching around him for her favorite brand, the one that promised to whiten, give her fresh breath and vanquish any hint of tartar or gingivitis.

      “Sorry,” he said, easing back a little. The man looked pale beneath his tan and she thought she saw white lines around his mouth.

      Probably hungover. Maybe he was a tourist who had started his vacation here on the beautifully rugged Northern California coast by doing his own Cape Sanctuary happy hour pub crawl and now was paying the price.

      He didn’t really look like a tourist, but one never knew.

      She grabbed her toothpaste, tossed it into her basket and stepped away, careful not to make eye contact.

      “Sorry. Have we met?” he asked. His voice was an appealing tenor with a slight accent she couldn’t quite place. Australian, maybe? New Zealand? It was as gorgeous as the rest of him. Naturally.

      “I’m sure we haven’t,” she answered curtly. While she considered herself eminently forgettable, she certainly would have remembered him.

      “Sorry. It’s odd. I feel as if I should know you, somehow.”

      “You don’t,” she assured him, then grabbed a box of dental floss she didn’t really need and hurried out of the aisle.

      It was the kind of interaction strangers had all the time—banal, meaningless—but somehow the encounter left her rattled. He left her rattled. When was the last time she had noticed how long a man’s eyelashes were or the strong angle of his jaw or the little indentation that hinted at a dimple?

      Longer than she could remember. That she had focused on those features of a stranger who was probably wasted did not say much for her taste or her wisdom, two things she usually took great pride in.

      Edgy and unsettled, she tried to put the guy out of her head and went instead to find her sister so they could finish their shopping and make it back to their aunt’s in time.

      As Daisy might have expected, she found Beatriz in the magazine aisle, leafing through a tabloid. Her sister might be a twenty-eight-year-old divorced mother, but she was sometimes a teenage girl at heart.

      Now, Bea was a woman that someone like the tipsy stranger in the toothpaste aisle would notice, with her dramatic dark curls, the little pierced diamond in her nose, her perfect makeup—though she wore it a little heavy to Daisy’s taste. Everything about Bea drew attention, from her clothes to her hair to her wide, generous smile.

      Bea had been boho before boho was a thing, with her own unique style and the voluptuous body and serenely classic features to pull off whatever look she wanted.

      Daisy was only a little envious of her sister’s style. They were half sisters and didn’t look much alike, except for the hazel eyes they had inherited from their mother. Daisy’s stick-straight hair was lighter, a boring chestnut color, and she wore it in a shoulder-length classic bob, using hairbands or pulling it up into an updo to keep it out of her face while she worked.

      She looked down at her own respectable three-year-old summer dress and matching sandals. She dressed for comfort and ease, not fashion, fully aware that she often looked like somebody’s boring aunt—which she supposed she was, since Bea’s daughter, Mari, was her niece.

      So why had the man with the delectable accent even noticed her, let alone stared at her like he was...hungry?

      It didn’t matter. She would likely never see him again. The tourist season on the Northern California coast never really ended but August was particularly crowded. Tourists rarely stayed long. He would probably be gone by Monday.

      She didn’t miss the fact that her sister’s arms were empty and there was no cart in sight. “You were supposed to be picking up the birthday cake and the candles!”

      She had a sinking suspicion they were going to be late.

      “Sorry. I got a little distracted by this.”

      She flipped up the magazine so Daisy could see the cover. There, in vivid color, was a picture of one of the most famous men in the country, looking tortured and sexy. Lean, tattooed, dangerous.

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