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This time, when Jack chuckled, it was heartfelt. He’d been waiting a long, long time for this. What was that old saying about revenge being a dish best served cold? That was a good way to describe the feeling nestled deep in Jack’s belly. Cold. Raw. Bitter. He was about to make up for much of what had been dumped on him in his past—and Georgia Lavender’s too. He was about to repay a debt to her that had gone far too long unsettled. Oh, yes. He’d been waiting a long time for this.
He gazed down at the letter on his blotter from Roxanne Matheny, P.L, lifting it to scan the message there once again. He’d been waiting a long time for that, too. Everything was coming together, but it was coming too soon. He wasn’t sure he could tackle both at once. Still, a man had to take his opportunities where he found them and play them for all they were worth. It was the only way Jack knew how to survive. It was what had saved his life.
Well, that and Georgia Lavender.
It was time, he thought. Time to go back to Carlisle. Time to make good on his debt to Georgia. Time to make Gregory Lavender pay for what he did to his only child.
Time for Jack to reclaim what was rightfully his.
The quickly curling waves were huge, thick and slate gray, crashing into sprays of white foam as they slammed against the beach below Georgia Lavender’s house. As she stood on her deck, her long, fiery hair buffeted wildly by the cold winter wind, she could barely distinguish the thin line of a horizon smudged a little darker gray than the shades of ocean and sky. It had been days since she had seen the sun. And that was just fine with her.
If she hadn’t already painted this scene a dozen times over the past few months, she would run into the house for her paint tubes, and would return with only black, white and perhaps a bit of green and blue. Carlisle’s coastline in the winter was awash with grays of every variety, and she had captured them all on canvas at some point. Her gallery was full of such paintings. But the tourists never seemed to tire of buying them.
The temperature hovered around forty degrees—probably below thirty with the windchill—and she felt like taking a walk. Evan wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours, and she was feeling restless for some reason. She went inside to find her golden retriever, Molly, sound asleep on the couch, but at her quick whistle, the big dog awoke and leapt down, wagging her tail furiously.
“Wanna go for a walk, girl?” Georgia asked unnecessarily.
Molly barked loudly three times, clearly ready for some exercise.
She tugged a thick, oatmeal-colored sweater on over her jeans, then wove her unruly russet tresses into a fat braid that fell down between her shoulder blades. Shrugging into her oversize, flannel-lined denim jacket, she decided not to bother with Molly’s leash, because she knew the beach would be deserted. Living year-round in what was predominantly a rental community meant that at this time of year, she and Evan were virtually the only inhabitants for miles.
The solitude didn’t bother either one of them, though. They both liked being far from society’s constraints. They had Molly to keep them company, after all, and Molly never had a mean thing to say about anybody.
As Georgia and the golden retriever clattered down the wooden stairs and wandered onto the beach, she felt as if she were the only human being left in the world. She walked for a long time, cutting a path well away from the water, taking a moment here and there to pick up a fragment of seashell for inspection. But none of the pieces she found was any different from the ones she had amassed over the past four years, so she left them for someone else to find.
When they reached the pier at the Carlisle Yacht Club, Georgia turned around to head back. The chilly air had numbed her fingers and face, and her ears ached where the wind had whipped about them. A cup of hot chocolate would really hit the spot right now, she thought as she gazed wistfully at a ramshackle building near the entrance to the pier.
It was as gray as everything else seemed to be that day, but the sign in front, proclaiming Rudy’s Local—The Place For Fish, looked cheerful despite the dingy day. Rudy himself was a very colorful fellow, she thought further with a smile, and she looked forward to whiling away an hour or so with him before heading home. With a quick whistle, she summoned Molly back to her side, and they made their way toward the restaurant.
“Rudy! It’s Georgia!” she called out as she entered the deserted building. She plopped down on a stool at the counter, and Molly stretched out on the floor behind her. It was a familiar place, a familiar position. “Rudy?” she tried again when she received no answer.
“I’m in back!” a ragged voice finally shouted in reply from somewhere beyond the kitchen. “Be out in ’bout fifteen minutes, soon as I get this freezer unit fixed. Help yourself to hot chocolate—I know that’s what you’re here for. Vandermint’s under the cash register for spiking it the way you like.”
Rudy knew her too well, she thought as she rose to move behind the counter and follow his instructions. After fixing herself a large mugful of the concoction, Georgia began to wander restlessly around the room to wait for him, humming under her breath a slow number from her teenage years, and sipping her hot chocolate carefully.
Gazing out the window, she watched as a spotless, gunmetal gray Jaguar sedan with a Washington, D.C., license plate eased to a halt in a parking space in the lot outside. She wondered what would bring a traveler to a summers-and-weekends community like Carlisle in the dead of winter and the middle of the week.
The person who emerged was tall, broad shouldered and very male, with coal black hair that the wind immediately caught and danced with. He had apparently been on the road for some time, because while she watched him, he began to stretch, flexing his arms out to his sides before curling them back in toward his exquisitely formed body.
He still had his back to her and had not put on his coat, and Georgia could almost swear she saw the muscles in his back bunch and ripple beneath his dark blue sweater every time he moved. When he leaned forward, she couldn’t help but notice how well he fit his jeans. He reached back into the car and extracted a leather bomber jacket, carelessly thrust his arms into the sleeves and turned toward the restaurant.
It was then that her breath caught in her throat and, almost involuntarily, she moved closer to the window. It wasn’t so much because the man was one of the most handsome she had, ever seen. And it wasn’t because his gaze was so utterly fixed on hers as he approached. It wasn’t even because of the way his appearance had suddenly roused feelings and sensations in her that she knew were best ignored.
It was because he seemed very familiar somehow.
She wasn’t sure, but she thought his steps faltered somewhat when he saw her watching him through the window, but he recovered quickly and kept coming. She lifted a hand to flatten her palm against the pane, her eyes never straying from the man as he neared the front door of the restaurant. The wind shoved his hair down over his forehead, preventing her from seeing his eyes clearly, but he watched her in return as he drew nearer, his expression puzzled and wary.
She lost sight of him as he entered, but she turned away from the window and spun around to find him pushing through the second set of doors that would bring him into the restaurant’s main dining room. In the dim light she could scarcely make out his face, but her heart hummed and skipped as she studied him. He looked roguish and gentle at the same time, and definitely very familiar.
The man took a few measured steps forward, bringing his tall frame out of the shadows, but leaving his face still hidden from the light. When he spoke, his words sounded as if they were filled with something almost akin to...melancholy ?
“Don’t you remember me?” he asked softly, his voice sounding thunderous in the otherwise silent room.
At first, Georgia shook her head slowly in response. Then he took one more step forward and brought his face into the light, and she saw his eyes—eyes of a dark blue color she had never quite seen anywhere else, as often as she had searched to find an adequate comparison. Expressive eyes, compelling eyes. Eyes that had once looked upon her full of laughter and a languid kind of affection.
Georgia bit her lip. Now Jack’s eyes were sad and fatigued and framed by shadows. In many ways, it seemed to her then, he was indeed a man she didn’t remember.
“Jack McCormick,” she said on a shallow breath.
As soon as she spoke his name, his eyes cleared of their troubling clouds and his lips turned up slightly at the corners, hinting at a smile she remembered only too well. Her stomach clenched into a tight fist when she realized how much she had missed him all these years.
“So you do remember,” he replied quietly, approaching her with slow, uncertain steps. His voice had deepened over the years, but was still a little rough and youthful. And, as it always had, the sound of his voice made her smile.
Jack laughed then, low and strong, and for a moment she could detect a trace of the boy she had known for a little over a year more than two decades before. Something in him relaxed, the shadows left his eyes and he looked at her with the same puzzling expression he had always seemed to reserve for her alone. For a long time they only gazed at each other silently.
Georgia studied the face above her, comparing it with the one she had known so long ago. Essentially, they were one and the same, yet there were so many differences. His tousled curls, the curls she had thought made him look so rebellions and that she had always had to force herself not to wind around her fingers, were gone. Now his hair was cut casually short. Lines fanned out at the corners of his eyes and slashed along the sides of his mouth, and his cheeks were rough from a half day’s growth of beard.
He’d barely been shaving the last time she saw him, she thought—that morning of his eighteenth birthday, just before he had slipped away from Carlisle without a care, without a plan, without a backward glance.
Without even telling her goodbye.
Before she realized what she was doing, she set her hot chocolate down on the nearest table, then lifted her hand to cup his cheek, skimming her thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone as she had done the first day they’d met. She didn’t know what made her do such a thing. For some reason, it just felt right. Somehow, the years slipped away, and she felt as if she were thirteen again, seeing Jack up close for the first time.
Jack McCormick closed his eyes when Georgia Lavender touched him so tenderly. The gentle motion was nearly his undoing. It was going to be more difficult than he’d anticipated, he thought, seeing Georgia again after all this time. He wished they could go back for just one day—one hour, even—just long enough that he could tell her so many things he wished he’d said to her when he’d had the chance.
He had always regretted not telling her goodbye. It had left him feeling incomplete somehow, unfinished. All these years, he’d just never quite come to terms with the way Georgia had always made him feel. Mainly because he’d never quite understood his feelings for her.
He tilted his head into the soft caress of her fingers, and couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps now it might be too late to try. For over twenty years she had lived a life that he knew nothing about, and he himself had changed in so many ways. The Georgia of his memories was just a kid—a troubled kid, at that.
When he left Carlisle she’d been a scrawny, awkward girl of fourteen, almost fifteen, swallowed by a big pair of glasses, and generally frightened of life. He’d never once felt a stir of sexual anything where Georgia was concerned. Affection, yes. Perhaps he’d even loved her in a way. But she’d been his friend. His confidante. His sanctuary. It had never occurred to him that she might someday become something more.
He opened his eyes and studied her again. The Georgia who greeted him today, however, was a different person entirely. Her coppery hair was shot through with silver now, and her gray eyes were lined with life and laughter. She was round and soft and beautiful. She was a woman through and through. And something inside Jack responded to her in a way he never would have imagined—immediately and irrevocably.
And suddenly he wondered if it had been such a good idea to return to Carlisle after all.
Gently he wrapped his fingers around hers and pulled her hand away from his cheek, noting the hurt in her eyes as he did so. But he said nothing. He had planned to come into the restaurant for a cup of coffee to fortify himself before driving the final mile to the address he’d located in the phone book, and to prepare himself for what he would find when he located Georgia Lavender. But he’d been denied that last little moment of preparation. And he still couldn’t quite assimilate the woman of thirty-seven with the girl of fourteen. So he studied her in silence for a moment more.
Gone was the timid, mousy girl who had slouched through life, averted her eyes from everyone she encountered, and cowered at the mention of her father’s name. In her place was a beautiful, vivacious woman whose dark gray eyes were alive with a vibrant spirit. He wondered what—or who—had brought her to such life in the years that he’d been gone. And something pinched inside him at the knowledge that it hadn’t been he.
According to the listing in the phone book, her last name was still Lavender, but that didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t married. His gaze flicked down to her left hand, and when he oted no sign of a wedding ring, he relaxed a little. There was a good chance she was involved with someone, though, he reminded himself. A woman who looked like she did couldn’t possibly be wanting for dates.
Then he reminded himself that all of that was immaterial. He’d come back for Georgia because she was his friend. Because he’d left her at a time when she needed him, and he wanted to make up for that. What difference did it make if she was married, or even involved? Romance had never been on his mind where she was concerned. He just had a debt to pay to her, and a score to settle with her father, that was all.
Before he realized what he was doing, he pulled her into his arms and hugged her fiercely. He tried to tell himself it was an embrace two very good friends would naturally share after such a lengthy separation. But as he wrapped his arms around her waist and settled his chin on top of her head, his heart began to beat faster than it had for more than twenty years.
When he felt her stiffen in his arms, he immediately released her, remembering that she had never been comfortable with close physical contact. Even where he had been concerned, he recalled sadly. She had always been the first to pull away whenever one of them had needed holding.
He let her move within arm’s length of him, but no farther. For long moments they only studied each other wordlessly, lost in thought, memory and speculation.
Jack McCormick, Georgia marveled. What on earth was he doing back in Carlisle? He was quite possibly the last person she might have expected to see after all this time. But even two decades had not diminished her memory of him. He was still breathtakingly handsome, still touched by roughness and softened with gentleness.
Still able to make her heart race by his mere presence in the room.
It was as if something inside her that had been chained down for centuries suddenly broke free and soared toward the light. All the adolescent longing that had gone unassuaged, all the needful yearning left unfulfilled, all the tentative joy she’d never found elsewhere in her life... All of it rose to the surface in a swift, stormy rush of emotion, and she felt all over again as if she were fourteen years old and would die without Jack McCormick in her life.
His hug had been almost too much for her to bear. How many times in their youth had she been forced to push him away before he somehow discovered just how desperately in love with him she’d been? His embraces back then had resulted from his need for comfort after his foster father’s overbearing bullying. But hers had gone beyond a desire for comforting. Hers had been because she simply wanted to be as close to Jack as two people could be.
What would he say now if she told him how often she had fantasized about making love with him, even at the tender age of fourteen? What would he do if she confessed right now that she’d wanted nothing more in her young life than for him to be the man who made her a woman?
But someone else had performed that service years ago, and Georgia had always regretted not asking Jack to be the one. He would have been more gentle, more tender, more loving. The event might even have been special if Jack had been the one sharing it with her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him.
He didn’t answer right away, and Georgia felt a tingle of apprehension shimmy up her spine.
“I needed to talk to someone.”
She chuckled a little nervously. “Don’t tell me you’re so alone that you have to look up a friend from twenty years ago when you want to have a conversation.”
“It’s about my brother and sister.”
Georgia sobered immediately. She wondered if she was still the only person he’d ever confided in about his family, then decided she must be if he’d risked a time warp back to Carlisle just to have someone to reminisce with about them.
“Is there someplace we can talk?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with right here?”
He looked around, and seemed to realize for the first time that the place was empty except for the two of them. Apparently unmoved by the knowledge, however, he said, “Maybe your house would be better. I’d rather not talk about them in public.”
“But—”
Her objection was cut short, because Rudy chose that moment to appear behind the counter, and he was clearly suspicious of the scene that greeted him.
“Georgia?” he asked in an aged, anxious voice. “This guy buggin’ you?”
She almost laughed out loud. Bugging her? Jack McCormick had been bugging her since she was thirteen years old, when he had sent her pubescent hormones into a frenzy.
“No, Rudy,” she told the old man softly. “This is Jack McCormick. You might remember him. He used to live in Carlisle. But only very briefly.” Too briefly, she added to herself.
Rudy scratched his grizzled chin. “McCormick, eh? Yeah, I remember you. Got in a lot of fights, right?”
A small, irritated sound erupted from the back of Jack’s throat. “Yeah, that was me. I’ve changed quite a bit since then, though.”
“What?” Rudy asked. “Ya don’t fight no more?”
Jack glanced down at the floor, and Georgia got the feeling it wasn’t so much to avoid Rudy’s gaze as it was to avoid hers. “I didn’t say that,” he told the other man. But he didn’t elaborate further.
Rudy nodded, but still seemed wary of the no-longer juvenile delinquent. “Where’s Molly?” he asked Georgia.
At the mention of her name, the big yellow dog on the floor lifted her head from her paws and wagged her tail. She, too, had been eyeing Jack since he’d entered the restaurant, but seemed to harbor considerably less concern about his character than Rudy did.
“She’s right here,” Georgia told the old man, trying to hide a smile. “So don’t worry. Molly will protect me if Jack starts to become his old beastly self.”
Rudy nodded slowly, but added, “I’ll be here all night if ya need me. Supper crowd will be comin’ in any time now.”
Georgia smiled at him. This time of year the “supper crowd” consisted of maybe a half-dozen people, but she took comfort in Rudy’s obvious concern, and his assurance that the entire community would rush to her rescue should Jack try anything funny.
“Thanks,” she said as she lifted a hand in farewell. “Molly? You coming, girl?”
As the couple turned to leave, the big dog ambled after them. The moment the restaurant door closed behind them, the wind assailed them with bitter cold. Georgia braved a glimpse at Jack as they strode toward his car, trying to assimilate the boy of seventeen and his sloppy jalopy with the man of forty who drove something sophisticated and expensive. He’d sold his beloved, beat-up Nova just before leaving town, and although he’d never mentioned it, she knew it was because he’d needed the money. Now, however, judging by his chosen mode of transportation, money wasn’t much of a problem for him.
Jack McCormick had changed, she realized. A lot. And she wasn’t sure whether change was something she wanted to see in him or not. With a wistful sigh, she folded herself into the car after Molly and told herself not to think about it.
Two
They drove the mile to her house in silence. Molly sat in the back seat, leaning forward between them, her heavy panting the only sound interrupting the quiet. Jack gazed with interest at his surroundings as they made their journey. He’d spent less than two years in Carlisle as a teenager, and it had been only one of a dozen locations where the state had placed him. But the small town had always been stamped indelibly at the front of his brain, never to be forgotten. Because this was where he had known Georgia Lavender.
Since his parents’ deaths when he was seven years old, Jack had been shuttled and shunted from group home to foster home to correctional home and back again. He’d been a discipline problem from day one, fighting and backtalking and being generally bad tempered. That’s what happened when a boy was ripped from his home and his family without warning or concern. But no one had ever bothered to address that fact. No one had much cared. Not until he had come to Carlisle.
The place had changed a lot, he noted. It had grown outward and upward, and looked to be quite prosperous for a small coastal community. Georgia lived in a subdivision that hadn’t existed when Jack had last been here, in an area well away from town, where the beach and ocean were too treacherous for swimming, but breathtaking to view, and made less accessible by jagged dunes.
As they drew nearer, he saw that the houses were built up on stilts, unoccupied for the most part, with signs in the front yards advertising that they were for rent. Georgia’s house, sitting alone at the end of a cul-de-sac, seemed particularly isolated, a fact that didn’t set well with him for some reason.
It, too, was perched on stilts, but where some of the other houses were looming structures of two and three stories, geometrically designed with sharp corners and slanted lines, hers was a simple ranch style with a series of stairways that started on the ground and wound about the house, ending in a square deck placed at the center of her roof.
As they emerged from his car, he heard her keys jingling, Molly barking at nothing and the wind whipping wildly about the softly moaning house. And all of a sudden he felt as if time and the rest of the world had receded into nothing.
“You’re awfully isolated out here,” he said, speaking his earlier observations aloud as they trudged up the creaking steps.
“Yes, I am,” she agreed as she shoved back a fistful of hair that the wind had tossed ferociously down on her forehead. “I love it here.”
The interior of the house reminded Jack of Georgia’s bedroom in the big house in Carlisle, where he had spent many a night as a teenager—unbeknownst to her father, of course—when he’d been too afraid to go home. Soft colors, lots of light and flowers everywhere—in paintings, on wreaths, in the fabric of the furniture, growing in pastel-colored planters. Everything was scented with the subtle fragrance of spring blossoms, made all the more poignant because it was the dead of winter and he knew he should be denied such pleasures at this time of year.
He noted a telescope angled upward in front of the windows that faced the ocean, and remembered that she had always had an interest in astronomy, something her father had insisted she turn into a degree in astrophysics or aeronautical engineering. Jack wondered how things were between her and her old man these days. Although he’d been keeping track of Gregory Lavender from a business standpoint, he knew little about the man’s personal life. Certainly, from the looks of her, Georgia seemed to be out from under his thumb, but there was no way of knowing for sure where father and daughter stood currently.
Wordlessly she closed the door behind them, went to the kitchen to fill Molly’s bowl with fresh water, returned to the living room to shrug out of her coat, and turned to face Jack fully.
“So what’s the real reason you’ve come back to Carlisle?” she asked bluntly.
He removed his own jacket and tossed it onto the same chair upon which she had discarded hers. But he remained rooted on the other side of the room opposite her, not certain exactly how to act. Georgia’s question was a simple one, he told himself. So why did he find it so impossible to answer her?
When he met her gaze, he realized she was studying him intently, much as she had been since he’d pushed through the doors of the restaurant a half hour earlier. “Have I changed that much?” he asked quietly, sidestepping her question for the time being.
She nodded. “Yes. Yes, you have.”
“So have you.”
“It’s been more than twenty years, Jack,” she said with a shrug. “That’s a long time. People can’t help but change.”
