throbbed and her head throbbed. Worse still was the way she felt inside. Wounds, long covered, lay exposed and smarting. She felt weak and vulnerable and she hated feeling that way. “I’ll be sleeping.”
Emily refused to budge. “You won’t. You’ll be waking up early and grumpy with jet lag. We’ll fix that with coffee. I’ll drive over here just before ten.”
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“I know you’re hurting and I’m not going to let you hurt alone. For now you need sleep, but on the weekend we’re going to talk about this. Things always seem better when the three of us are together.”
Friends. They laughed with you through the good times and hugged you during the bad. They cheered your successes and bandaged the wounds from falls.
Men came and went from her life, but her friends always had her back.
It made her feel better knowing that. “Thanks for the lift and the shopping. I’ll see you at breakfast, but I’ll walk. It will do me good. Now go back to your man and your child.”
“And my dog.”
“Dog? Who are you and what have you done with my friend?”
Emily smiled. “Agnes can’t cope with Cocoa so we’ve inherited her. Lizzy is thrilled.”
“Man, child, dog and swimming.” Brittany shook her head in disbelief. “I’ve been away too long.”
ZACH STROLLED INTO the busy bar of the Ocean Club and dumped the backpack on the seat next to Ryan, who was deep in conversation with Alec Hunter.
“Can you drop that off next time you’re passing?”
“Passing where?”
“Castaway Cottage.”
Ryan raised his eyebrows. “Do I look like I work for FedEx? And since when does anyone ‘pass’ Castaway Cottage? The clue is in the name. It’s at the end of the road to nowhere.”
“You’ve been passing it often enough the last month so that you can have sex with the pretty blonde who moved in with the kid who looks like Goldilocks.”
“Has someone installed a webcam I don’t know about?”
Alec suppressed a yawn. “This is Puffin Island. The most secure place in the whole of the North America. If a caterpillar lifts its head, people can tell you how high. The reason we don’t have an island newspaper is because there is nothing anyone could write that the population don’t already know.” Pushing a beer towards Zach, he said, “Sit down. We bought you a drink in case you joined us.” After a moment’s hesitation, Zach slid into the vacant seat.
The summer after he’d turned sixteen, he hadn’t returned to Boston. Instead, Philip and Celia had taken him in with the approval of the authorities. For months, Zach had lived on a knife edge, waiting for them to tell him they’d made a mistake and that other plans had been made for him, but they never did. Instead of throwing him out, they’d given him a key to their home.
Carrying that key, he’d felt like a fake and a fraud. He knew a hundred different ways to break into a house. He didn’t need a key.
Philip had arranged for him to attend the local school and it was there he’d met Ryan.
His closest brush with happiness had been on the days he’d been sucked into Ryan’s noisy, disorganized family life.
“How’s Rachel? I saw her with Jared.”
“Who my little sister dates is her business.”
Zach eyed Ryan’s fingers, white on the bottle, and knew how hard he was struggling not to make it his business. Knowing that Ryan had all but raised his younger sister after the death of their parents, the protective streak didn’t surprise him.
“You could do her hair at the wedding.” Knowing that humor always worked better than sympathy, he went with that. “You always were good with bows and braids.”
Ryan shot him a black look. “She’s not marrying the guy.”
Alec stretched out his legs, a gleam of humor in his eyes. “So it’s just sex?”
Ryan cursed softly and ran his hand over the back of his neck. “Why do I feel this way? I’m not her father.”
“You care,” Alec said mildly, “and caring is the first step towards psychological trauma. Buckle up. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
And sometimes, Zach thought, it never got better.
Sometimes, the trauma was so great you learned how to stop caring.
Ryan drained his beer and looked at Zach. “So how did you end up with Brittany’s backpack?”
“She left it in my plane. Your blonde friend gave Brittany a lift home but they managed to leave the backpack.” And he’d stared at it for the best part of thirty minutes, weighing up his options, annoyed that he’d been so distracted by seeing her again he hadn’t noticed it. “She’s back.”
“Brittany? Yeah, I know. As you say, I’m having sex with the friend who gave her a lift whose name, by the way, is Emily. For the sake of accuracy I should tell you that her hair is more caramel than blond and we’ve never actually had sex in Castaway Cottage. Her choice, not mine.” Ryan jerked his head towards the beer. “Drink. Given that you just flew your ex-wife in, I’m guessing you’re going to need several of these. Or maybe something stronger.”
Something stronger sounded tempting, but Zach didn’t want to fight the crowd at the bar. “How do you know I flew her in?”
“Same reason you knew I was having sex with the woman living in her cottage. Nothing travels faster than gossip, especially when it’s juicy. And because I’m a man and have no tact or sensitivity, I’m going to ask the question everyone wants to ask. How hard did she punch you?”
Zach reached for the beer. “There was no physical contact.” He didn’t mention the solid thump in his gut that had come from seeing her again. “It was a civilized encounter.”
“Civilized?” Ryan’s brows rose. “That doesn’t sound like Brittany, especially since the last time she saw you was when you walked out days after your wedding.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
Knowing how protective the islanders were of Brittany and how suspicious they were of him, Zach hadn’t expected a warm welcome on his return to the island, but Ryan had immediately invited him for a drink at the Ocean Club, sending a clear message to the locals that whatever had happened in the past had no bearing on the present. “For that she didn’t black your eye? Are you sure you picked up the right passenger? Fierce brunette who once shot me in the butt with an arrow? I’ve got money on her taking a swing at you within five minutes of laying eyes on you.”
Zach gave a grim smile. “Pay up. Seems like she didn’t care enough to take a swing at me.”
But it was true he’d expected a greater response from her.
Guilt, an unfamiliar emotion, nagged at him like an old wound.
He’d broken hearts before, right along with rules and property, and it had never bothered him until Brittany.
Unlike everyone else he’d ever met in his life, she’d believed in him.
Turned out living up to someone’s expectations had been more of a pressure than living down to them. He knew he’d done her a favor by disappointing her sooner rather than later, but he should have found a less brutal way of doing it.
“Ten years is a long time,” Alec said easily. “You were both young. It’s history, long forgotten.”
Ryan finished his drink. “That’s a strange statement from someone who makes a living ensuring history isn’t forgotten.”