“You don’t know the state of my finances,” Cecilia snapped.
This was the way every discussion started with them. At first they were courteous, almost too polite, but within minutes they were arguing and everything exploded in his face. They seemed to reach that level of irrational anger so quickly these days, or at least since Allison Marie’s birth—and death. Ian sighed, feeling a sense of hopelessness. With the way things were between them now, it was hard to believe they’d ever slept together.
Ian diverted his thoughts from their once healthy and energetic love life. In bed they’d found little to disagree about, but that was before…
“We could always do as my attorney suggested.”
“And what’s that?” Ian had no intention of taking Allan Harris’s advice. The other man represented his wife’s interests, not his.
“Allan recommended we do what the judge said and take our disagreement to the Dispute Resolution Center.”
Ian remembered Judge Lockhart making some comment about that, and he remembered his own reaction at the time. “What exactly is that supposed to do?” he asked, trying to sound reasonable and conciliatory.
“Well, I can’t say for certain, but I think we’d each present our sides to an impartial third party.”
“What will that cost?”
“Does everything boil down to money with you?” Cecilia demanded.
“As a matter of fact, yes.” This divorce had already set him back plenty. He wasn’t the one who’d wanted it in the first place, he told himself stubbornly. Sure, after Allison died, they’d had a few arguments but he’d never expected it to lead to this.
Cecilia had never understood what it’d been like for him, although he’d tried to explain countless times. He hadn’t received her “family gram” until the end of the tour. His commanding officer had withheld the information about the premature birth and death of his daughter, since there was no possibility of a humanitarian airlift or any way of contacting Cecilia. When he finally reached the base, he hadn’t had a chance to absorb the reality of their loss.
His wife gave him a disgusted look. “Do you have any suggestions, then?” she asked in a superior tone of voice that set his teeth on edge. She knew he hated it when she spoke to him as though he was still in grade school.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he said, and got to his feet.
“Fine. I can’t wait to hear it.” Cecilia crossed her arms in that huffy way of hers.
“I say we simply go on with our lives.”
Cecilia frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Do you plan to remarry?”
“I—I don’t know. Maybe someday.”
As far as he was concerned, Ian was through with it. Never again would he subject himself to a woman’s volatile emotions or fickle whims. “Not me. I’ve had it with marriage, with you, with the entire mess.”
“Let me see if I understand what you’re saying.” Cecilia stood, too, and started pacing the small living room, passing directly in front of him. He caught a whiff of her perfume, and it was all he could do not to close his eyes and savor the scent. He hated that she still had the power to make him weak, to leave him wanting her….
“You can figure it out, I’m sure,” he said, purposely being sarcastic because he was angry now. He couldn’t be near Cecilia and not feel a rush of resentment. Not just at her but at himself for harboring emotions that wouldn’t go away.
She ignored his attitude. “Are you suggesting we not divorce?”
“Sort of.” He didn’t want her to assume he was seeking a reconciliation. That wouldn’t work; he already knew it. In the months after Allison’s death, they’d both tried to make the best of a painful situation, without success.
“Sort of?” she echoed, then waved her hand at him. “Tell me more. This whole concept of yours intrigues me.”
He’d just bet it did. “We could pretend we’re divorced.”
“Pretend?” Cecilia didn’t bother to hide her anger. “That is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Pretend,” she repeated, shaking her head. “You think we can ignore all our problems and pretend they don’t exist.”
He glared at her, not trusting himself to speak. Okay, maybe she was right. He didn’t want to deal with this divorce.
“You’re always looking for the easy way out,” she said scornfully.
He might be a lot of things, but irresponsible wasn’t one of them. The Navy trusted him with a multi-million-dollar nuclear submarine—didn’t that prove how dependable he was? Dammit, he’d been brought up to meet his obligations, to stand by his word.
“If I was trying to escape my responsibilities, I’d never have married you.” Ian knew the minute he uttered the words that he’d said the wrong thing.
Cecilia flew across the room. “I never wanted you to marry me because of Allison! We would’ve been fine….” She faltered and abruptly looked away. “I didn’t need you….”
“The hell you didn’t. You still do.” If for no other reason than the health benefits the Navy provided, his wife and daughter had needed him.
“You would never have married me if it wasn’t for the pregnancy.”
“Not true.”
She swept the hair away from her face. “I can’t believe I was so stupid.”
“You!” he burst out. Apparently Cecilia thought she was the only one with regrets. He had his own, and every one of them included her.
“Allison and I were…” She hesitated, suddenly inarticulate. “We…”
“Allison was my daughter, too, and I’ll be damned if I’ll allow you to tell me what my feelings are. Don’t go putting words in my mouth, or discount the way I felt about her. Just because I couldn’t be here when she was born doesn’t mean I didn’t care. For the love of God, I was under the polar ice cap when you went into labor. You weren’t even due until—”
“Now you’re blaming me.” She thrust her hand over her mouth as if to hold back emotion.
It didn’t do any good to talk. He’d tried, damn it to hell, he’d tried, but it never got him anywhere. He just couldn’t find any middle ground with her.
Rather than prolong the agony, he stormed out of the apartment. The door banged in his wake, and he wasn’t sure if he’d closed it or Cecilia had slammed it after him.
He left the building, fury propelling his steps, and got into his car. Feeling the way he did just then, Ian realized he shouldn’t be driving, but he wasn’t about to sit outside this apartment. Not when Cecilia might think he sat there pining for her.
He revved the engine and threw the transmission into drive. The tires squealed as he sped off, burning rubber. He hadn’t gone more than a quarter mile when he saw the red-and-blue lights of a sheriff’s car flashing behind him.
Damn it all. He eased to a stop at the curb and rolled down his window. By the time the officer reached his vehicle, Ian had removed his military driver’s license from his wallet.
“’Morning, sir,” he said, wondering how good an actor he was.
“In a bit of a hurry back there, weren’t you?” the officer asked. He was middle-aged, his posture rigid, his hair worn in a crewcut. Everything about him screamed ex-military, which meant he just might be inclined to cut Ian a little slack.
“Hurry?” Ian repeated and forced himself to relax. “Not really.”
“You were doing forty in a twenty-mile-an-hour zone.” He glanced at the license and started writing out a ticket, apparently unimpressed by Ian’s military status.
From the looks of it, Ian wasn’t going to get the opportunity to talk his way out of this one. He quickly calculated what the ticket would cost him, plus the rate hike in his insurance.
Thanks, Cecilia, he thought bitterly. The price of marriage just kept going up.
Grace Sherman and Olivia Lockhart had been best friends nearly their entire lives. They’d met in seventh grade, which was when students from both South Ridge Elementary and Mariner’s Glen entered Colche
ster Junior High. Grace had served as Olivia’s maid-of-honor when she’d married Stanley Lockhart soon after her college graduation and was godmother to her youngest son, James.
The summer following their high-school graduation, Grace had married Daniel Sherman and they quickly had two daughters. When Kelly, her youngest, turned six, Grace had gone back to school and earned her Bachelor of Library Science degree. Then she’d started working for the Cedar Cove Library, and within ten years had been promoted to head librarian.
Even while Olivia was attending a prestigious women’s college in Oregon and Grace was an at-home mother with two small children, they’d remained close. They still were. Because their lives were busy, they’d created routines to sustain their friendship. Lunch together once a month. And every Wednesday night at seven, they met for an aerobics class at the local YMCA.
Grace waited in the well-lit parking lot for her friend. She hadn’t felt good when she left the house. The sensation was all-encompassing. Physically, she was tired, her weight was up and she didn’t have her period to blame anymore. For years, she’d managed to keep within ten pounds of what she’d weighed in high school, but during the past five, she’d gained an extra fifteen pounds. It had happened despite all her efforts. Somehow the weight had crept on. She was dissatisfied with other aspects of her appearance, too. Her salt-and-pepper hair was badly in need of a cut. On second thought, perhaps she’d live dangerously and let it grow. She was in the mood for a change—although she wasn’t convinced it would make much difference.
Emotionally, she wasn’t feeling any better. After thirty-five years of marriage, she knew her husband as well as she did herself. Something was troubling Dan, but when she’d gently asked him about it, he’d bristled and they’d had an argument. He’d hurt her feelings and Grace had rushed away without resolving the issue.
For most of their marriage, Dan had been employed as a logger. When hard times fell on the industry, he’d taken a job with a local tree-trimming service. The work wasn’t as steady as either of them would have liked, but with her income and some inventive budgeting, they managed. There wasn’t any extra for small extravagances, but those had never mattered to Grace. She had her husband, her children, her friends and a decent roof over her head.
She watched Olivia’s dark blue sedan pull into the parking lot and saw her climb out, gym bag in hand.
Grace slid out of her vehicle. “So, how does it feel to be a celebrity?”
“Not you, too?” Olivia complained as they walked toward the building. She held open the door for Grace. “I’ve had nothing but grief over that stupid article.”
Grace smiled as color instantly flooded her friend’s cheeks.
“I let him have a piece of my mind,” Olivia muttered, as they marched past a group of youngsters headed for the swimming pool. Once inside the locker room, they placed their bags on the bench, stripped out of their sweats and changed their shoes.
One foot braced on the side of the bench, Grace tied her running shoe. “You met Griffin? When?”
“Saturday.”
Grace raised both eyebrows. She found it interesting that Olivia was skimping on the details. “Where?”
“In town.”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Up? Not one thing,” her friend said. “I just happened to run into Jack at the Safeway and we…chatted a bit.”
“Why do I have the feeling you’re not telling me something?”
Olivia slipped the sweatband around her forehead. “There’s nothing to tell, trust me.”
“Trust you?” Grace echoed, following her out of the locker room and into the aerobics area of the gym. Children and adults milled about, and Grace and Olivia had to stop several times to allow others to pass by. “Have you ever noticed that the only time people ask you to trust them is when they probably shouldn’t be trusted?”
Olivia paused, then started a few warm-up exercises on her own. “I hadn’t, but you’re right.” She propped her leg on the ballet bar and bent her forehead to her knee.
Grace leaned against the bar, envying her friend’s suppleness. Her own body was far less flexible. “Did you know people have been talking about the article all week?”
“Great.”
Disregarding her sarcasm, Grace continued, her voice deceptively mild. “Actually a lot of the talk has to do with Jack Griffin.”
Olivia raised her head. “Anything interesting?”
Grace shrugged and adjusted the waistband of her spandex shorts. “Oh, a few things.”
“Such as?”
Grace was determined not to make this easy. Olivia had never, to her recollection, shown this much interest in any man since her divorce. Grace had felt for some time that her friend should “get back into circulation,” as people called it. Appropriate comment for a librarian, she always thought. “You really want to know?”
The question seemed to require a great deal of thought. “No—forget it.” Then in the next breath, Olivia changed her mind. “All right, I’m curious. What have you heard?”
“He moved to Cedar Cove three months ago.”
“Old news,” Olivia muttered. “If that’s all you have…”
“From the Spokane area.”
This appeared to be something Olivia didn’t know. “Newspaper background, obviously?”
“Yes, from a paper with ten times the circulation of the Chronicle.” Grace wasn’t a gossip by nature, but she’d been wondering about Jack Griffin since she’d read his first Saturday column. She’d liked what he’d had to say, and it was apparent he approved of Olivia. She’d met him briefly at a Chamber of Commerce meeting shortly after he’d come to Cedar Cove but hadn’t formed an impression one way or the other.
“Why does a man give up working for a prestigious newspaper and move across the state to a town the size of Cedar Cove?” she asked Olivia.
Her friend shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps he wanted to be closer to his son.”
“He has a son?” No one Grace had spoken to knew that.
“Eric. He lives in Seattle.”
That was interesting. But before she could comment further, their instructor, Shannon Devlin, entered the room, clapping her hands to gather her students around her.
“Trust me. There’s more to this career change than meets the eye.”
“Trust you!”
“Yeah, trust me,” Grace joked.
Olivia grinned and placed her hands on her hips as she rotated her waist, making deep bends as Shannon led the class in warm-ups. “You’ve been hanging around the mystery section of the library too long,” she whispered as they took their places in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror.
Shannon was twenty, if that. A pretty girl with pliant limbs and a body devoid of fat. Grace’s own figure had once been that slim and perfect, she reminded herself—before two children and the onset of menopause.
The music, impossibly loud, gave her a surge of energy. She had a love/hate relationship with this class. If not for Olivia, she would have dropped out a dozen times. Unfortunately she needed the benefits of all this huffing, puffing and stretching. Despite the muscle pain, she didn’t mind the mat exercises, the sit-ups and such, but she hated Shannon’s little dance routines. Step back, slide left, cross right… Olivia never seemed to have a problem with the complicated patterns; Grace, on the other hand, had trouble living up to her name.
After fifty minutes of sweating and grumbling under her breath, plus cool-down exercises, they were finished. None too soon, as far as Grace was concerned. Not until they’d showered and changed back into their sweats did Olivia mention Jack again. The fact that she wanted to continue the conversation surprised Grace.
“Did you learn anything else about Jack Griffin?”
Grace had to think. It always seemed to take a while for her brain cells to stop bouncing around after her aerobics class. “You know more about him than I do,” she finally said.
Olivia reached for her g
ym bag. “I doubt that.”
“You’re interested in him, aren’t you?”
Olivia laughed off the suggestion. “Oh, hardly. I’ve got enough worries without adding a relationship to the mix.”
“Worries?” Sure, her friend had worries, but then everyone did.
“Mom’s getting on in years and Justine—I just can’t seem to talk to her anymore, and I haven’t heard from James in two weeks.”
“I thought he was out at sea.”
“He is, but he can still e-mail me.”
“Okay, okay, we all have kid problems, and our parents are a concern, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop living.”
“You think I’ve stopped living?” Olivia asked. “Because I don’t have a man in my life?”
Grace knew the question had offended her. First Dan and now her best friend, and Grace hadn’t meant to upset either of them.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she assured her. “I just think you should leave your options open when it comes to Jack.”
“Why?”
“Because.” And that was all the answer she was willing to give, but Grace had a very strong feeling that the new editor of the Cedar Cove Chronicle was going to bring something exciting to Olivia’s life.
Three
Cecilia was working as a hostess at The Captain’s Galley the night she’d met Ian Randall, and she continued to work there five evenings a week. Her father, Bobby Merrick, was one of the bartenders and had gotten her the job.
Soon after graduating from high school, Cecilia had moved to Cedar Cove at her father’s urging. After a long estrangement, he’d contacted her with promises of making up for lost time. He’d seemed genuine, and because she’d felt cheated out of a father during her childhood, she’d readily agreed. Following her parents’ divorce when she was ten, Cecilia hardly ever saw her father and she welcomed this unexpected opportunity. Refusing to heed her mother’s warnings, she’d packed up her entire life and moved across the country, from New Hampshire to this small waterfront community in Washington. Within three months she knew she’d made a mistake. Her dreams of a college education were simply that. Dreams. Bobby’s idea of setting her up for the future was talking to his boss and getting her a job at the same restaurant where he worked. Being a hostess and cocktail waitress wasn’t how Cecilia wanted to spend the next few decades, but it was all too easy to imagine. Without intending it, she’d let her entire life get sidetracked.