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“So are you saying I’m better or worse than your ex-fiancé?” Larry asked.
“Worse, from a woman’s perspective. I bet every woman who’s dated you thought she might be the one who makes you fall in love,” she said. “You are the worst sort of man. A challenge with just enough charm to make women not hate you.”
“You know me so well,” he said, and she couldn’t be certain whether he was being sarcastic or not. “And not every one was trying to marry me,” he said slowly, as if he were tallying them all up in his head.
Kat let out a snort. “Someday, it’ll happen to you. You’ll fall in love, and then you’ll find out what it feels like to be me and all the other women who were dumb enough to fall in love.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you saying you’re in love with me?”
“You are hopeless,” she said blandly. “I wouldn’t fall in love with you if you were the last man on earth.” She meant every word.
“All the more reason to sleep with me,” he said.
Also by Jane Blackwood from Zebra Books
THE SEXIEST DEAD MAN ALIVE
A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND
You Had Me At Goodbye
Jane Blackwood
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 1
Kat Taylor always stood at the bow of the Martha’s Vineyard ferry, no matter what the sea was doing that day. She loved the sea air, the way it felt against her face, the way it made her hair move in a wild way—as if she were wild, as if she could still fly off and be…something. She was a girl from New Hampshire who only made it to the seaside maybe twice a summer, so she’d come to appreciate that buffeting wind. It was cleansing, somehow, and God knew, she needed to be cleansed.
It was a brilliantly sunny day, and the Atlantic between Woods Hole and Oak Bluffs was unusually calm. Kat wished it was raining, storming, gusts lashing at her, stinging her skin. Instead, a seagull followed the ferry on the gentle breeze as if somehow suspended from the sky on an invisible string. She could take that, too. Kat knew she could take anything but what she had left behind her in Keene. Heck, she supposed she could even take that, too.
Just not right now.
She squeezed her dark brown eyes shut and pictured the house in Oak Bluffs that she hoped was her savior. The house was built in 1880, complete with the ornate gingerbread details that made Oak Bluffs such a unique New England town. A huge wraparound porch hugged the white house: two large rockers, also white, always sat on the porch’s wide-planked floor. At the top of a roof filled with peaks and dormers was a widow’s walk that had one of the most spectacular views of the island. Like many homes on the island, it had a name—Sunrise—because it faced the east and the rising sun. Kat figured it wasn’t the most original name, but it fit the romantic nature of the home and the island. The story was that a sea captain built the house, but then again, most people who owned old Victorians on the waterfront claimed that a sea captain built their house. Kat could believe it though, because the house had a tower and widow’s walk and because she wanted with all her heart to believe in something.
The house was hers for the summer, a respite from a life that had somehow taken a wrong turn when she was about ten and her mother finally told her the identity of her father. Her mother had never married, but that certainly hadn’t meant she’d been lonely. “Cal, your father, was a good man. Good in bed, anyway.” Betty Taylor had laughed because nothing was so serious that you couldn’t laugh about it. And that’s how Kat found out her father was Cal the water meter reader. Good in bed. Gotcha, Mom.
The ferry plowed through the wake of a cruise ship heading to New York, and a bit of sea spray splashed on the group of ferry passengers who liked the bite of the Atlantic as much as she did. She licked her lips and tasted the salt and smiled for the first time in weeks. God, she needed this holiday. She’d have to call her Aunt Lila and tell her again how she’d saved her niece’s sanity. Two months in Sunrise. Two months with nothing to do but sit on that huge wraparound front porch and sip cheap wine, pretending it was something fancy and French, and gaze out at the cold Atlantic.
Long before the ferry docked, she could see the house, looking lost and forlorn. Kat had a terrible and dangerous habit of putting human emotions to inanimate objects, particularly houses. She loved houses, loved to imagine what they looked like inside. She wondered who lived there, who had died there. When they were filled with kids, they were happy or at least content in their mission. And when they were left empty like Sunrise had been this season, they were tragic. A house left empty always seemed so sad to Kat.
“I’m coming, girl,” she said softly and found her smile again.
Twenty minutes later, Kat stood in front of the house, two huge rolling suitcases beside her. She felt a sudden pang for Carl, Lila’s late husband. If it hadn’t been for his generosity, she never would have known how wonderful the Vineyard was. She certainly could never have afforded a month-long vacation on the island, never mind in a waterfront house.
Of all her aunts—Kat had six of them—she loved Lila best. She was more like a sister than an aunt because they were so close in age. Lila had a heart as big as her double-D breasts, and she had a particular soft spot for older men. Much older, rich men. Kat’s mother claimed because their father was so old when Lila was born, Lila had simply been looking for a replacement ever since. Lila was a miracle baby, born when her mother was forty-eight and her closest sister was already in her twenties. She had been her father’s particular favorite, and the two of them were inseparable. But Tony was sixty-five when Lila was born, and even though he lived to the ripe old age of eighty-three, their time together was far too short.
Lila’s first husband, who she married when she was twenty, was seventy-two years old. She loved him until his death two years later. When she was twenty-five, she married Harold. He was eighty. He died six months after their wedding. Lila was alone for two years before she met and married Carl, whom she claimed was the love of her life. Unfortunately, he was seventy-six. Still, they had five wonderful years together before he died, leaving Lila heartbroken once again.
No one ever suggested to Lila that perhaps she ought to look for someone younger, maybe a man in his sixties, for Lila truly loved older men. “They’re so appreciative of everything I do,” she said. “They make me feel like a queen. Queen Lila.”
No one was more different from Lila than Kat, but somehow they