a child. At all. Maybe in her early twenties.
He could see, too, that she was the antithesis of the kind of women who populated his world. They fell into two categories: the very glamorous, with perfect makeup and salon hair, with manicured fingers and toes, and everything in between manicured, too. Those women wore designer clothes with casual flair, and tossed two-thousand-dollar handbags over gym-toned shoulders.
The other kind were his colleagues, professionals, as driven as he was, but as perfectly turned out as their glamourous counter parts, with a wardrobe of designer power suits and stylish eyeglasses.
Sam dated—occasionally—women from both those categories. Women sophisticated enough to understand that if they were looking for picket fences and happily-ever-after, he was not their guy.
But if they were looking for the kind of good time—travel, posh restaurants, good wine, galas, charity balls, premieres—that money could buy, they could hang out with him. For a while. As long as there were no demands and they didn’t get in the way of business.
This woman, with her blown-in-off-the-beach look, would not fit into either of those two convenient categories. He thought he had known women who were bold, but this woman who grabbed a statue named Harold and headed toward danger, instead of away from it, could redefine that word.
Next to any other woman he could think of she seemed, what? Distressingly real, somehow.
Not that categories for any kind of woman existed in his life anymore, Sam reminded himself.
No, his old life, that guy who worked hard and played harder, who was carefree and unfettered, was a distant memory, eight months behind him.
“Is there something wrong?” Ally asked.
On the other hand, maybe he would be getting his old life back soon. It was what he had wanted and wished for, almost on a daily basis.
And yet now that it was a possibility…his heart did a sickening fall.
“IS SOMETHING WRONG?” she asked again.
He gave Allie of the hallway art—and possibly his landlady—a look. This was the second time he’d gotten the unsettling feeling that she might see things about him that others didn’t. No one but his sister had ever seen past what he was prepared to show them, and he didn’t like it.
But then he saw she wasn’t even looking at him. She was looking at the dog, Popsy, lying in the wagon, one paw trailing, looking as boneless as a pile of rags.
“With the dog?” she clarified.
Sam felt huge relief that she was talking about the dog, not him.
Cody was now facing the challenge of the steps leading up to the cottage. With huge effort, he lifted the limp Popsy off the wagon. The dog reluctantly found its legs.
“Not permanently,” he said and hoped that was true. The dog was unusually attached to Cody. The two were inseparable. He did not think his sudden cosmically ordained family unit of uncle and nephew and dog could sustain another loss. And yet he didn’t feel quite ready to tell her what the vet had said.
The dog is depressed.
Who knew that dogs got depressed? Or that little kids gave up speaking when the unspeakable happened to them?
“I thought I caught a whiff of something as they went by,” she said, trying to word it delicately.
“The dog got carsick.”
“Oh, no!”
Her sympathy was so genuine that he couldn’t resist sharing the full horror. “You have no idea. At sixty-five miles per hour, with wall-to-wall traffic and not a rest stop for thirty miles. Then, when I finally could pull over, I had to unpack the suitcase to find new clothes. Not the Superman cape, though. I don’t have an extra one of those.
“And guess how long the new clothes lasted before Popsy got sick on Cody again? I may never get the smell out of my car. Sheesh. I may never get the smell out of Popsy.”
He stopped himself, embarrassed. He sounded just like those moms at the playgroup the counselor had recommended for Cody. Sam had tried to drop Cody off there several times.
Nobody warned me it was going to be this hard.
Cody, to Sam’s consternation—he was trying to do the right thing, after all—and his guilty and secret relief, had used his limited communication skills to make it known he hated the play group.
“Cody is your son and the dog is Popsy?”
“Cody is my nephew, but yeah, that’s the whole cast of characters.”
Sam really hated sympathy, which made his recounting of the horrible trip down here even more mystifying. Still, right now, that sympathy—the soft look on her face as her gaze followed Cody and Popsy as they went up the stairs—served Sam well. He was seeing a whole shift in attitude.
“You must all be exhausted. I’ll show you which rooms to take, and put out some towels. I’m sorry for the welcome I gave you earlier.”
“Not your fault,” he said gruffly.
“Well, let’s start again. I’m Alicia Cook. Welcome to Soul’s Retreat.”
She held out her hand. Maybe it was a mistake to take it, because any sense he had left of her being a child disappeared in her grip. Her touch made him look at her differently. She was extraordinarily feminine, and her hand held the unconscious sensuality of the sea in it.
She was very pretty, her bone structure exquisite, her eyes a shade of blue bordering on violet that he would not have been able to name if asked. He was aware of a scent tickling his nostrils, and realized she smelled of the sea and something else. Lemons? Whatever it was, it was faintly ordinary and faintly exotic and faintly enticing.
It occurred to him that she had welcomed them as if she planned to be their hostess. Maybe that’s why sympathy was not a workable strategy. Shared accommodations weren’t going to work, and he needed to let her know right away. It looked like when she got an idea in that head of hers it was hard to displace it!
“I hope you won’t have too much difficulty finding a place to stay,” he said, and heard the cool, no-nonsense tone he used when closing a deal for his computer systems company.
All of it—especially the enticing part—made getting rid of her seem imperative.
That tone he had just used could—and had—intimidated business tycoons with global reputations. But her mouth—plump and pink—set in a very unflattering line, and her brows lowered.
“I’m not going to find a place to stay,” she said firmly. “Your arrival has taken me completely by surprise, but I’ll accommodate you and Cody to the best of my ability tonight. Tomorrow we’ll look at options. Maybe it will be workable for you to stay. With me.”
“You want to share accommodations?” he asked her slowly. “With someone you don’t know?”
“Want to seems to be overstating it a bit. None of you looks dangerous. The dog doesn’t even look like it has the energy to bite.”
Sam felt this odd little niggle, for the second time, of wanting to be protective of her.
Just as when she said she had a weapon when it was so pathetically obvious not only that she didn’t, but that she wouldn’t use it if she did.
Are you crazy? You don’t invite strangers to stay with you.
But he managed to bite his tongue. He looked at the set of her jaw and felt a sudden exhaustion. It had been a horrible day. That look on her face felt as if it would take a lot more energy