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Hell, it wasn’t like he’d been bothered by Mom’s flatly stated warning that he’d better not expect an invitation to any of that kid’s parties anytime soon. She hadn’t been wrong. And even if she had been, aside from the subject of his father, he’d mostly blown off Angie Bradshaw’s negativity. If he’d allowed it to stop him from doing things or going after what he wanted, he would’ve been paralyzed a long time ago.
Because, face it, the woman bitched about everything, and had from the moment his dad had left them for Jake’s mom.
But coming back to Harper, well, he oughtta cut himself some slack. He’d done all right earlier today. Besides, she hadn’t been all that aloof when he’d caught her shaking her very nice butt and singing along with music only she could hear. She was also smiling and laughing with Tasha now as they carried out more salads, bread and a fruit platter and arranged them on the table. When she was like this, she radiated a friendliness, a charisma, that was electric.
“Meat’s done,” Jake said and piled steaks onto a platter.
Jenny carried out a pitcher of sangria damn near as big as she was, and Mark went around to the side of the cottage to call the kids who were setting up a croquet course there. For the next several moments pandemonium reigned as people took seats at the table.
Max sorted everyone out as the food was passed around. There were the teens Austin, Nolan and Austin’s girlfriend, Bailey, plus Nolan’s little brother. The unattached females consisted of Tasha, Harper and Sharon, the latter of whom he really didn’t know all that well since she’d married a local who had graduated a good fifteen years ahead of him. They’d divorced a couple of years ago, and she had stayed to run the housekeeping department at the inn while the local had moved to Tacoma. Then there was him, Jake and Jenny, Mark and his wife, Rebecca, and Wendy, who owned Wacka Do’s Salon on Harbor Street, and her new guy, Keith somebody or another.
The platters completed their circuit, and the laughter and chatter quieted down as everyone dug in.
A while later Tasha leaned forward to look down the table at Harper. “I saw the advertisement in the new brochures for the sunset yoga class you teach. I could use something like that. I’m not nearly bendy enough.” She appraised Harper. “You, on the other hand, look real flexible.”
Harper flashed the smile that changed her entire look. It was wide and heart-shaped and showcased not only bright teeth that looked as though someone had sunk a fortune into them, but a flash of the healthy gums in which they were anchored, as well. “You should drop in sometime,” she said. “I doubt Jenny would mind that you’re not an inn guest, since she told me you’re her bestie.”
“Oh, please.” Jenny, who was sitting next to Tasha, grinned. “Be my guest.”
Her friend gave her a friendly bump, but continued to address Harper. “You know, I’d definitely take you up on that—if it wasn’t right in the middle of my busiest time.”
“That’s right. You’re the owner of the pizza parlor in town, aren’t you?”
“Yep. Bella T’s.”
“I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I hear it’s fabulous.”
“Best pizza anywhere,” Austin’s friend Nolan said through a mouthful of corn on the cob.
Mark tousled his son’s hair but smiled at Harper. “The execution could have been more elegant, but the sentiment is dead-on.”
“Then I’ll definitely have to make the effort to get in there.” She looked at Tasha. “Let’s talk after dinner. We can probably come up with a time that’ll work for both of us.”
“What did you do before you came here?” Mark’s wife, Rebecca, inquired.
“A little of everything—much to my mother’s dismay. Since we came back to the States I’ve taken a number of temp jobs. I’ve worked at Nordstrom’s, for a little college press and a remodeling company and did a stint as a contracts coordinator for a midsized construction company—”
Max didn’t plan his interruption, but he couldn’t help himself. “Why were you out of the States?” And who is we?
She tilted her head and looked into his eyes. “Would you like the long version or the short?”
“Long,” all the women said in near perfect synchronicity.
“O-kay.” Her olive-green eyes were mostly blocked from sight behind the dense lashes that formed little crescents when she laughed. “My folks met when they were in college and married within two months. Mom is Cuban, African-American and Welsh. My daddy was the only child of an old Winston-Salem family. It was no longer the South of the Sixties in those days, but his parents still weren’t thrilled with his marriage. In fact, they went so far as to suggest he annul it.”
She shook her head, a small, reminiscent smile curving up her lips. “You’d have to have known my dad to appreciate what a mistake that was. Grandma and Grandpa did know better, but I guess they panicked, probably worried about what their friends would say.” She made a wry face. “Anyhow, Dad’s response was to pack his newly minted civil engineering degree and move Mom to Europe. We lived all over the world. I was born in Amsterdam and my brother, Kai, in Dubai.”
“Wasn’t that hard?” Jenny asked. “Constantly having to pick up and go?”
“No, it really wasn’t. I was not only a daddy’s girl but a chip off the old block. He and I loved getting to see new places and meet new people. Kai and Mom weren’t as thrilled with the constant upheavals.” A faint shadow flitted across her eyes. “I think that’s why my mother’s having trouble with the fact that I continue to travel. She and my brother were beyond happy to settle down after we moved back to the U.S. It bothers her that I haven’t done the same.”
Tasha planted her chin in her hand. “Did your folks ever reconcile with your grandparents?”
“Yes. Quite early on, actually. I don’t personally remember the rift, just the stories about it. By my first memory, they’d come to love Mom almost as much as Dad did. And they were the greatest grandparents.” Her smile lit up the room and made something in Max’s chest ache.
Jake, who traveled extensively for his magazine, asked Harper about some of the places she’d been, and they compared their impressions from locations they’d both visited. Max sat silently listening...and working overtime not to give in to jealousy. God knew he’d spent far too many years doing exactly that—being resentful of his half brother—already.
But the sophistication of Harper’s upbringing dredged up old insecurities. It was a universe removed from the way he’d been raised, and chewing over the contrasts between their worlds, watching the ease with which Jake conversed with her, it was hard not to regress to feelings he’d thought safely in his rearview. He could feel them crowding in, however, demanding attention. He pushed them back, because damned if he’d allow the same tangled morass of twisted emotions he’d once had for his half brother to regain the purchase they’d claimed when he was a kid. He wasn’t giving way to them now that he and Jake were finally in a good place.
Their mutual father had left Max and his mother when Max was just a toddler. If Charlie Bradshaw had simply left town as he had when he ultimately deserted Jake and his mother, as well, things might have been different. Or if Max had had a different kind of mother...
He gave an impatient twitch of his shoulders. Because neither of those things had happened. Charlie was one of those men who was all about the current family. In Max’s case that had meant Jake and the second Mrs. Bradshaw. He’d seen the old man with them around town sometimes. It had been damn hard to miss, given the size of Razor Bay. So he’d witnessed Charlie acting the way Max assumed a dad should toward Jake, while he might as well have been the incredible Invisible Boy, so concealed had he appeared to be from his father’s sight.
Even with his mind mired in the past, he was aware of Harper across the table, and he tracked her movements as she reached for the pitcher of sangria. The container was still fairly full, the distance wasn’t optimum for her reach and he watched its weight immediately tip forward as she picked it up. Surging to his feet, he leaned across the table to steady the pitcher and slapped his free hand over hers on the handle to correct the forward momentum.
It was as if he’d grabbed the business end of a live wire. Heat streaked like lightning through his veins, and it wouldn’t have surprised him in the least if someone started slapping at his head and yelling that his hair was smoking. He wondered if she felt it, too, or if this began and ended with him. She’d gone very still, and those big eyes were locked on him and rounded in the same O as her lips. But, hell, that could very well be due to the sheer speed of the events from her reach for the pitcher, to its tipping, to him leaping to the rescue like a tattooed, beefed up version of Dudley Do-Right.
The instant the pitcher touched the tabletop again—this time nearer her where its entire weight wouldn’t be dangling from her hand with no arm muscle behind it for support—he yanked his hands clear. Thumped back into his chair.
He did his best to ignore the residual electricity zinging through him from the feel of her skin. Making a point of not looking at her again, he deliberately forced his thoughts back to the relative safety of his old animosity toward Jake.
His mom sure as hell hadn’t helped the situation. Not that he’d seen that at the time; it wasn’t until he was old enough and distanced enough to view the situation with an adult’s perspective that he’d realized if Angie Bradshaw had been a different kind of woman, he probably wouldn’t have suffered much damage from the desertion. Hell, he’d barely been two years old when Charlie had moved out. Most of the memories of actual time spent with his father had come through the home movies Charlie had left behind.
His mother, however, wasn’t a big believer in letting things go. Rarely had a day gone by that she hadn’t reminded him of what they’d lost. All he’d ever heard were acid-etched stories of the slut who’d stolen his father away, and of his little shit of a half brother who had gotten everything that should have been his.
It hadn’t helped that in school his half bro had been a serious student and run with the kids of Razor Bay’s movers and shakers, while he had pulled average grades, run with a wilder crowd and frequently gotten into trouble.
No wonder he was so fucked up when it came to the silver-spoon girls. They were simply the female version of Jake.
“Max?”
The sound of Harper’s voice snatched him from his stroll down memory lane, and as his awareness raced to catch up with his inner musings, he realized his name hadn’t been the first word she’d directed at him. Looking at her across the table, he felt the same crazy-ass clench of his heart he experienced every damn time he laid eyes on her.
And clearing his throat, he lied without compunction. “Sorry. I was thinking about work for a minute there. What did you say?”
“I was just asking what you did with the rest of your day off after I saw you.”
Okay, this was something he actually liked talking about. “I went out to Cedar Village.” He was surprised to see startled recognition in her eyes and raised his brows. “You’re familiar with it?”
“I’ve heard it mentioned, although I can’t remember where. It’s a...boys’ camp?”
Jake snorted, and Max gave her a one-sided smile. “Don’t mind him, he thinks it’s more like a reformatory. It’s actually a group home for troubled kids—boys. And, yeah, most of them have been in trouble. But, so was I at their age and—”
“Look how well that turned out,” Jake deadpanned.
He grinned at the sarcasm in his broth—half brother’s voice. “I know, damn good, right? For instance, unlike Mr. Shutterbug here, instead of playing with cameras, I have a real job.”
Harper was staring at him, and his smile faded, his self-consciousness resurfacing. But damned if he’d allow it to short-shrift his responsibility to the Cedar boys. He rolled his shoulders. “Anyhow, a lot of these kids come from dicked-up backgrounds—broken homes, substance-abusing mother or father or sometimes both. None of our boys’ parents are physically abusive, but some are purposefully neglectful, while others simply have to work killer hours just to put food on the table or hang on to their house. A few of the boys actually come from warm, involved families—they just lost their way for a while or fell in with the wrong crowd. In every case, they need the attention, the stability that the counselors out there provide.”
“Is that what you are—a counselor, as well as a deputy?”
“Me?” That startled another one-sided quirk of his lips from him. He shook his head. “Nah. I’m on the board of directors, but mostly I just hang out with the boys. But, speaking of my board position...”
Everyone except Mark’s youngest son and the woman named Sharon groaned, and Max laughed outright. “That’s right, boys and girls. It’s put-up-or-shut-up time. Our pancake breakfast fund-raiser is next Sunday. I know most of you have already bought tickets, but we also need volunteers to help man it. I just happen to have a sign-up sheet in my car.”
“Can we be excused, Jenny?” Austin asked, hastily pushing back from the table. His friends Nolan and Bailey followed suit. “We have to finish setting up the croquet stuff.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Max said. “You guys wanna be waitstaff or work in the kitchen?”
“Aw, man! Do we hafta?”
“We have several boys from the Village who’ll be working the event, but we could really use more help.” He looked his nephew in the eye. “These kids haven’t had the advantages you’ve had. It’s for a good cause.”
Austin sighed but nodded. So did his sidekicks. Max turned his attention to the adults.
“Don’t look at me,” said Sharon. “Those boys scare the crap out of me.”
“No, c’mon. They’re just kids.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, they still scare me. I’ll buy a ticket, though.”
He knew better than to feel resentful on the kids’ behalf, but it took a little effort to say mildly, “Thanks, that’ll help. You want the eight or nine-thirty sitting?”
“I’ll take the eight.”
“You can sign me up to help,” Harper said.
Max’s head whipped around. Oh, yeah, baby. Sternly telling his libido it was out of line and to take a damn seat, he raised a brow. “Yeah?”
“Yes, sure. I have next Sunday off and it would be a good way to see the town in action. I’ll wait tables. I can get to know more people that way.”
“Excellent. Thank you.” He leaned back in his chair and looked around the table. “Now, that’s what I’m talking about, people. Harper and the kids just gave us a decent start here. So, how ’bout the rest of you?” He gestured with uncharacteristic expansiveness. “Step right up, ladies and gents. The line forms to the left.”
CHAPTER THREE
LAUGHTER, DEEP, LOUD and masculine, rolled out of the community center kitchen and across the counter where Harper had just picked up her industrial-sized platter of pancakes. She froze for an instant, and the chatter and clatter of crowded tables full of hungry pancake diners faded away as she searched the packed kitchen for the laugh’s source.
Not that there was any doubt as to whose large chest that had come out of. She’d only heard it once before, and God knew it hadn’t been directed at her. But no one who’d ever heard Max Bradshaw laugh would mistake it for anyone else’s. Even someone as new to Razor Bay as she was grasped it was a rarity. Hell, a simple grin from him at Jenny’s dinner party earlier this week had all but knocked her on her butt. His laugh was a steamroller that threatened to flatten her.
She needed to keep in mind that all this interest was one-sided. And, c’mon, how hard could it be to do so—she only had to remember Max’s assistance at Jenny’s when she’d tried to pick up the sangria pitcher from too far away and had nearly poured it all over the picnic table instead. His touch when he’d wrapped his hand around hers had all but electrified her—exactly the way it had the first time they’d met when she’d touched his bare forearm. It wasn’t possible for a man’s skin to be any hotter than anyone else’s. So why did her mind insist it was?
She gave her head a subtle shake. The answer to that hardly mattered, so there was no sense even going there. Because if she’d been electrified, he had shaken free so fast you would’ve thought she was toxic waste, and he without his hazmat suit. Charm had always come easily to her, but either her ability abandoned her around the good deputy or he was immune. Either way, her mad skills were wasted on him.
She located him now over by the gargantuan stove, standing head—and in most cases shoulders, as well—above the boys around him. He looked like a Hell’s Angel with those brown-ink tribal tattoos, his disreputably torn blue jeans and that brilliantly white, batter-splattered T-shirt that clung damply to his big shoulders and muscular chest. The faded blue bandanna tied around his dark hair only added to the image.
But his face was alight with whatever amusement had set him off, his teeth flashing a white bright enough to rival his T-shirt’s, and most of the teens gaped at him as if he were a rock star. Given the absorption with which she was staring at him herself, she could hardly blame them. If their interactions with the guy were anything like her own admittedly limited exchanges, they, too, were likely more accustomed to seeing him sober and serious.
Forcing herself to get back to the business at hand, she turned away to carry her tray over to one of the long tables in her area. “Who’s ready for more pancakes?” she demanded cheerfully.
And only glanced over her shoulder once to make sure that Max was no longer visible from this vantage point.
A largely male-voiced roar of enthusiasm from the patrons greeted her question, and she laughed and chatted up people as she dished out fresh stacks to everyone who indicated an interest.
“How’s the syrup holding up?” she inquired at one point and, being told that it was getting low, waved one of the teen volunteers over to exchange a full dispenser for the almost empty one. She summoned two other helpers as well to refill empty glasses from the pitchers of water and orange juice they manned.
“Megan, Joe, hello!” She forked pancakes onto the plates of two guests from the inn who had been in her guided kayak tour the day before. “I’m so glad you made it.”
Joe grinned. “Seriously good pancakes. We’re glad you told us about it.”
She laughed. The pancakes were decent but nowhere close to seriously good. But they were plentiful, and the atmosphere in the hall was loud, cheerful and fun, all of which she suspected contributed to the food tasting better.
She ran out of pancakes halfway through the next table and almost mowed down Tasha on her way back to the kitchen for another refill. “Oh, hey, sorry.” Reaching out, she steadied the other woman’s tray, which unlike her own was loaded. “I wasn’t looking where I was going—I was too busy marveling at the pancake-eating contest over there.” She indicated a table on the stage at the end of the cavernous hall.
“I know, it’s always kind of like watching jackals taking down a gazelle. You really want to look away, but find you can’t.”
“So this isn’t just an impulsive boys gone wild event? They’ve done this before?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s an annual event.” Tasha tipped her head toward the wiry little guy in the middle packing away an amazing quantity of pancakes. “Greg Larson will likely win. He almost always does. But every now and then, just often enough to keep things interesting, we have an upset.” She shrugged and looked at Harper. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m doing great. Upbeat crowds like this give me oomph.”
“Well, lucky you, Energizer Bunny.” The strawberry blonde gave her a weary smile. “I had a long shift at Bella’s last night that ran late, so I’m starting to wilt. And I’d sure like to know how the hell Jenny managed to weasel out of this detail.”
Harper shrugged. “She said there was too much to do at the inn.”
“Yeah, that’s the story she fed me, too.” Tasha raised her brows at Harper. “You buy that?”
“Not for a minute. Oh, not that the inn isn’t really busy, because it’s definitely jumping. But while I haven’t been around forever like you natives, I get the impression that Jenny thrives on the summer madness.” She looked askance at Tasha, who nodded her agreement.
Harper hitched a shoulder. “That being the case, and going by the fact that Jake’s not here, either, my guess would be that they’re sneaking some time together to make up for him being out of town.”
“Yep. That’d be my take, too.” Tasha really looked at Harper. “You know what? You and I should have a girls’ night one of these days. Jenny can join us if we can pry her away from Lover Boy, but right now she’s deep into that all-Jake-all-the-time stage, so I don’t hold my breath over that happening. What do you say? You in?”
“Absolutely.” One disadvantage to all of the traveling she’d done in her formative years was that she’d spent considerably more time with adults than people her own age. The upside, of course, was that it had resulted in far more sophisticated experiences than she likely would’ve received otherwise. But after the age of twelve she hadn’t had what most women would consider real girlfriends. Watching Tasha and Jenny together made her feel she’d been missing out.
“Good.” Tasha glanced down at her loaded tray. “I’d better pass these out while they’re still lukewarm. I’ll give you a call, okay? And this time I really mean it. I kind of let the yoga thing get away from me.”
Harper executed the particularly French shrug she’d picked up during the eighteen months she and her family had lived in Clermont-Ferrand. “Believe me, I know how that goes.”
They parted ways, Tasha plunging into the crowded room and Harper heading back to the food service counter that divided the hall from the kitchen.
She chatted up one of the boys on the other side while he refilled her tray with more pancakes. He’d just finished loading up when a horrendous crash of glass smashing to smithereens made them both jump as if someone had unexpectedly fired off a shotgun next to them. Her head swiveling in the direction of the sound, she focused in on two teenage boys standing in a quickly dissipating wreath of steam from the open door of a huge dishwasher. As she watched, one shoved the other.
“Look what you made me do, you dumb shit!” The shover gave the other, larger, teen another shot to the chest.
“Who the hell you callin’ a dumb shit, ass cap?” The bigger boy pushed back, making the first kid stumble back several paces. Following up his advantage, Big Boy dogged the retreating boy’s footsteps, thrusting his face into the other youth’s. “You’re the one who backed into me, you stupid fuc—”
“That’s enough.” Max’s deep voice cut through the obscenity, and suddenly he was just there, reaching between the boys to separate them. “Sometimes accidents are just accidents. Jeremy, grab the broom.”
