The Legend of Bailey's Cove

“So we can have more.” It was a sister game they played. They’d cut a freezer pizza into sixteen slices. That way they could have more pieces if they were really hungry. They didn’t care if anyone else got the humor; they were sisters and they understood each other.

“Well, sis, I’m rooting for you.” Delainey licked her lips and took a sip of coffee. “So what’s on your to-do list?”

“No. Now we get to talk about what’s happening at Morrison and Morrison.”

Delainey snapped her gaze to her sister’s. “What? I mean, how’d you know?”

Her sister gave her a narrow-eyed chin jut. “Don’t be shocked, Deelee. Sometimes your younger sister is thinking about someone besides herself. I saw the look on your face earlier when I asked you what happened. You wanted to tell me something else, but you told me about law school. What happened to eclipse news that good?”

Delainey took another bite of pastry and then swiped at the crumbs on her chin with the napkin. “Shamus quit as of yesterday.”

Christina gave her the narrow-eyed look again. “But you were planning on being his replacement.”

“Well, not his replacement, but I thought—maybe I led myself to believe—I’d step into the role of the second attorney in the office when I finished law school.”

“You know the clients. You know the corporate culture there. You know much of what the partners, what Shamus and Harriet, know. And the size and remoteness of Bailey’s Cove won’t scare you away at first glance.”

“Morrison and Morrison will be quite a shock to an outsider.” Delainey draped her arms over the back of the couch.

“Yes, you are quite easygoing there.”

Delainey laughed. “On most days, it’s hard to tell the lawyers from the rest of the staff, and billable hours? They’re just a suggestion. Imagine coming from law school and finding out you’ve slipped back in time about a hundred years’ worth of progress.”

Christina reached out a hand. “Who in heaven’s name is going to come to Bailey’s Cove and work? We don’t even get first-run movies.”

“That’s what I told myself when I applied to law school, that I’d have a job when I got out. But they found someone.”

Christina barked a laugh and then put up a hand. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. So who is it? Somebody who couldn’t get a job anywhere else? Somebody hiding out? No, wait!” Her sister scooted to the edge of the couch. “It’s one of those guys with a fake name and credentials, who will have another wife and three kids here before anyone finds out he already has a family somewhere else.”

“I don’t know. Shamus’s picking him or her up at the airport, so whoever they are, they’re from outside the state of Maine.”

“Hey, maybe the newbie will hang in there for, say, three years, a place keeper for you.”

“That’s what I tried to tell myself, but I can’t expect someone to come here, begin to build a life and then just leave because I want their job.”

“Can you start a private practice?”

“I thought of that, but the law firms already here don’t have enough work for another attorney. I wouldn’t mind starving, but I don’t want that for my daughter.”

Christina stared at her for a long moment, assessing.

“What?” Delainey could see her sister was trying to decide whether or not to tell her something.

“I’m not doing this alone.” She swept a hand in the air, indicating the house.

“You’re right. We’ll all help you as much as we can—” Delainey paused and laughed “—or as much as you want. You’re really bossy, you know.”

“And people say you and I are nothing alike. What do they know? Anyway, Sammy is coming.”

Delainey stiffened her face muscles so they wouldn’t sag into disapproval. Sammy the heartbreaker. “Is he staying?”

“He’s giving it a try.”

“I hope things are good for the two of you this time.” Delainey hated to see her wonderful sister get her hopes up.

“We’re going to do things my way this time. We tried his and that didn’t work.”

Delainey did an inward sigh. His way. Her way. These two needed to learn to compromise.

“Do you know who you are going to have bid to do the remodeling? Are you having a contract drawn up for the contractor you chose?” She asked the questions so they didn’t have to talk about Sammy or even think about a man. All she knew on the subject of men could be contained in a two-page brochure.

She also asked because it would be like her sister to just get someone in there with no written guidelines or maybe no real plan at all.

Christina looked remorseful. “You can help me with that, can’t you?”

* * *

HUNTER MORRISON PULLED out the bulging carry-on bag blocking his briefcase in the overhead compartment and placed it on the floor of the small aircraft.

“Oh, thank you,” the woman across the aisle said as she gave him a bright come-on smile. She wanted to give him more, probably anything he asked for, but he was not going there. It would be a long time before he fished in the sea of women again, if ever.

He’d seen that look on the face of a woman in Chicago, every time she managed to be in the elevator with him, sneaked up on him on the street or sat down uninvited at his table in a restaurant. The worst was while he was waiting for the arrival of a partner from the law firm where he worked in downtown Chicago.

He nabbed his briefcase and followed the woman toward the exit. The flight attendant gave him a warm smile as she wished him a good day.

He didn’t react with the snort he felt, only a reciprocal smile. He hadn’t had a good day in the past seven months and he didn’t expect this one to be any better.

As they reached the concourse, the woman ahead of him turned and gave him one more hopeful smile. He nodded toward her in acknowledgment, and lacking encouragement, she headed toward the baggage claim.

Shamus Murphy would meet him outside the Portland, Maine, airport, one of the nicer airports he’d been in. He liked all the wood. Made it seem rugged, up north, a place where one could hide an attorney before scandal engulfed his law firm.

CHAPTER TWO

AS HUNTER STEPPED outside the airport, the wind brought the smell of the ocean to him, bathed him in its cold, salty moisture. He took a deep breath of the crisp air and smiled in relief. That he liked the sea air so much had never occurred to him. That he might even have missed it? Not until this minute. It made him think of the six years and all the summers he’d spent here. And Deelee.

When his parents had yanked him away from his friends in Chicago—to be nearer to his ailing grandparents in Bailey’s Cove, they had explained—he had thought his life was over. From the moment he’d gotten there, he’d wanted to leave. Delainey Talbot had made being there bearable.

When he’d started in a sixth-grade classroom full of strangers, Deelee had been there to be his friend and she’d stayed his friend all through high school and college.

But after college they had ruined it all. He had especially. Since the day he’d driven away and left her behind, he’d managed to make his life better and worse.

He swept his gaze up and down the sidewalk, looking for a familiar skulking form of a woman so unlike Delainey. Always, he was always looking for her because when he wasn’t, she showed up.

His visual sweep caught a fashionably dressed brunette over near a taxi, and when she turned to face him, Hunter expected to need the nearest sheriff. The woman turned out to be a stranger.

Callista White couldn’t possibly be here. He had not known when and on what airline he would be traveling until a few hours before he left.

He brushed the paranoia away and searched for Shamus.

Bailey’s Cove might seem like a giant step backward. The summer after college he had returned to close down his grandmother’s estate. Since then he hadn’t been back, hadn’t needed to come back until today, but the incentives on both ends made it seem a logical choice.

“I think it would be best if you found a reason to go away for a while,” the partner in the law firm had said, but had assured Hunter he wasn’t fired. He just needed to get out from under the thumb of the media until things got resolved or faded away.

While Hunter wasn’t an official suspect in the disappearance of Callista White, he had been a person of interest for a while until his well-respected firm had stood behind him, vouched for him.

He didn’t wish the woman ill. He did wish she would return home or let someone know where she was so he could have his life back.

“Hunter, my boy,” a familiar voice called to him from down the curb. Hunter turned to see Shamus dressed in a well-fitting dark suit, with a shock of gray hair and a pleasant smiling face. They had met only once in person, but the package was memorable and included winged eyebrows and standout ears.

Morrison and Morrison had been founded by Hunter’s great-great-grandfather and great-great-uncle. The name of the firm had stood even after the practice changed hands. When Shamus had called and asked him if he was interested in helping the firm out, he’d made an offer. It seemed there would be a Morrison at the helm again.

“Shamus,” he called back as he waved and headed for the car, an old black Ford. Hunter smiled. When he had left Maine, the car had been brand-new, and it shined like a new car today.

* * *

ONCE AGAIN AT Morrison and Morrison, Delainey had sat for the past few hours trying to work on the papers on her desk. Returning had been hard. She’d had to look into the faces of each one of them and wonder if she would soon have to say goodbye forever.

The intercom on her desk buzzed. “Yes, Patty?”

“They’re here.” Delainey was sure Patty’s whisper could be heard throughout the entire first floor. “You’d better get down here.”

Delainey got up from her desk and suddenly felt underdressed. If this person who was arriving had something to say about her future at the law firm, she wasn’t going to make her most professional impression in jeans and— Oh, come on. There were Christmas ducks on her sweater. She had let Brianna choose and her young daughter couldn’t quite give up the idea of Christmas.

Delainey always wondered if Brianna kept the hope alive that her father would suddenly show up or send a card or even presents. She sighed and slid the sweater off. The thin blouse she wore underneath let an instant chill set in and her nipples puckered, showing in hard points through her bra and blouse.

Not good. She slid the sweater back on and fluffed her hair a little. Maybe the new partner wouldn’t notice ducks with wreaths around their necks.

After she couldn’t procrastinate any longer, she decided she might as well go see what the future would hold. She had already survived quite a bit, and this new partner wasn’t going to take her down. She might have to practice law in Portland or Bangor or Lewiston or, heaven forbid, outside the state of Maine, but she wouldn’t give up on a good life for her daughter.

At the bottom of the steps, she stopped and took a few deep breaths. Then she pushed open the rear door and stepped just inside the spacious lobby. There were about fifty people there—the staff, the town council, some regular clients with spouses—and everyone seemed to be talking at once.

“Delainey.” Patty rushed up and handed her a glass of champagne. “About time you got here.”

Champagne. Great. To celebrate her demise, she thought...but she knew this was not about her. Shamus needed to do this now for some reason and she was going to have to do the “poor me” thing another time.

Across the room, near the front lobby window, a man stood with his back to her speaking with redheaded Shirley and fresh-faced Eddie, a paid intern at the office. The man was tall and wore his dark blond hair in a short, neat style. His suit, expensively cut, wrapped his well-built frame as if to say, “This is the man.” Shamus had hired a man, a man used to making money.

Poor thing was in for a big shock.

Some hope lay in that thought. She took a sip of champagne and let the bubbles fill her mouth with flavor. Whoever he was, she hoped he’d be interested in Morrison and Morrison for a couple years and then when he figured out his income would no longer support his expensive suits, cars, women, et cetera...

“Hunter,” Patty called from beside her.

The man turned to face them.

Her heart seemed to thud once and stop dead cold.

The grin on his face faltered the moment he spotted her—at least that was what it seemed like to Delainey before he recovered and smiled as he moved across the room toward her.

He stopped in front of her.

Hunter Morrison. His deep blue eyes touched by sienna near the irises scorched her soul as they had when she and Hunter were pals in high school and when they were lovers after college.

She gulped champagne until she’d drained the glass. The urge to flee nearly overran her good sense. Instead of giving in, she stood fast and as steady as the rocky Maine coast facing the ocean tides. She was a Maine woman, bred of hardy stock.

Then why couldn’t she seem to make her brain function or her heart beat?

He put a hand on her shoulder and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. “Hello, Deelee,” he whispered. His breath hot on the shell of her ear restarted her heart and slammed anger to the forefront inside her head.

“Hunter Morrison.” Of all people. The one man who had never wanted to stay in Bailey’s Cove was back. She should welcome him, but right now she just wanted to kick something...or someone.

* * *

HUNTER FORCED HIS smile to stay put, but smiling to placate an obnoxious client was easier than smiling at Delainey Talbot. How in the hell was it possible she was still here in Bailey’s Cove?

He had expected law school to have opened her eyes to the world, to have shown her other options. His gaze shot to her wedding-ring finger and he was disgusted with himself and almost glad she had her hand bunched up in the unseasonal sweater covering a body that had sent a college graduate to heaven. Deelee, who, when he left Bailey’s Cove behind, saw fit to kick him out of her life for good. Her marital status was none of his business.

When she suddenly reeled and hurried away as if he had threatened her, he saw Shamus Murphy watching him. His puzzled gaze shifted back and forth between the two of them.

Greeting her as Deelee would have already given her the impression he had thought about her more than a few casual times in the years since he’d left Bailey’s Cove. He had thought of her often and none of his thoughts about Delainey Talbot had been casual.

Shamus intercepted her and gave her a long hug. The older man had not mentioned anything about Delainey being an attorney in the office. Shamus said something to her that made her look across the room at him and then nod with a dazed look as if she was trying to make sense of what Shamus was saying.

Her long blond hair still hung to the middle of her back. Age had defined her features and made her gray eyes bigger, her high cheekbones more pronounced. Her face was fully adult now and as alluring as the rest of the package, he was sure, that she hid under the large sweater with the ducks wearing Christmas wreaths.

No woman, no matter how hard he tried, had ever morphed into Delainey Talbot. When he’d found himself dating only blondes, he started dating anything but. He dated lots of women. He stopped seeing women altogether. Nothing helped.

Shamus led Delainey across the room until she stood next to him. When she looked up at him, her features were intentionally blank, an empty champagne glass in her hand.

Shamus filled each of their glasses and held his up until the two of them were obliged to clink their glasses together against Shamus’s.

“To Morrison and Morrison, may it live forever.”

“Hear, hear,” they chorused, and sipped.

“I had forgotten you knew each other.” Shamus smiled between them. “That’s great. The transition will be all the easier for it. Hunter, Delainey is the beating heart of this office. Harriet and I look so much smarter with her here.”

Neither he nor Delainey said anything. When they stared at each other, it was like two sides of an urgent conflict sizing up the enemy. Maybe it was just that.

Shamus gave Delainey another arm-around-the-shoulder squeeze. “I’m sorry to spring all this on you so suddenly. Things happened and I had to move quickly.”

The blank expression left Delainey’s face and now she looked defeated. That nearly tore Hunter open. Of all the things he wished for the woman who’d ruined all women for him all those years ago, defeat was not one of them.

“I’m sure you did what you needed to do, Shamus.” Her words rang a clear false, as if she was saying what Shamus needed to hear. Then she gently removed the old guy’s arm from her shoulder and ran away. She actually walked quickly, but it was not hard to see flight in her steps.

* * *

DELAINEY RACED UP the front steps, stalked down the hallway, yanked the door to her office open and once inside closed it quietly. The lock that might never have been locked before clicked sluggishly into place. Then she leaned against the door and sank to the floor.

Hunter Morrison.

She pinged a fingernail against the champagne glass she couldn’t seem to let go of. She sipped a bit and then pressed the cool of the glass against her cheek.

He had a lot of nerve showing up in Bailey’s Cove. He had left her behind. After three glorious weeks together, he’d told her he had accepted an internship in Chicago at one of the largest international law firms and he needed to focus on that, make it his priority. He’d said he had a lot to accomplish. He’d never asked her to join him; they hadn’t even discussed it.

Hunter had attended law school while she’d prepared for a child and attended paralegal training mostly on the job at Morrison and Morrison, where she had been an office assistant during the previous summer.

She remembered well the day he drove away. She’d run as fast as she could from her parents’ home to his grandmother’s old house. Then, when she missed him by seconds, she’d stood in his driveway and watched until his car disappeared down the street. She had been too late to say goodbye. She wasn’t sure he wanted to see her anyway. After being friends for ten years, they apparently had nothing much to say in the end.

They’d carried on a distant but friendly relationship after that, but she had ended even that—abruptly.

Not that any of her life was Hunter’s fault. She’d wanted to have sex with Micky—the dark, mysterious outsider. Micky’s motorcycle with the Arizona plates might have been a clue she should be at least careful if she was going to be rash.

Micky was long gone when she discovered she was pregnant. A month after he’d left, the stick had indicated her life plans had suddenly changed for the sake of what she had to admit felt more like revenge than any kind of real attraction.

She hadn’t known she had any such capabilities until Hunter told her he was finished in Bailey’s Cove. Her Bailey’s Cove, the place she had always loved, had pined for when she was in college and had always been glad to be back to in the summers.

That made her an oddity. A large percentage of the young people who attended college in a city had a tendency to find jobs and lives elsewhere. Not that she blamed them. The road to advancement in life didn’t usually involve a town that struggled to grow.

In an email later, she’d told Hunter there was nothing left for them because she had someone else in her life, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him any of the details.

It hadn’t been a lie, but it had given him the impression, she was sure, that he wasn’t welcome in her life. The whole truth was she didn’t deserve him in her life. She couldn’t ask him to care for her and the child of another man.

Shame made her sink closer to the floor. It was all her fault. Both of them had been so young, so full of their own plans. If they had parted today, she liked to think they would have been able to find some center ground, some compromise. At the very least, she would amicably wish him well and maybe that way there wouldn’t be a damaged heart beating in her chest.

She couldn’t take Shamus to task, either. He had taken in a newly pregnant woman, barely a woman, twenty-two. He and his staff made her feel needed and loved, never ashamed. Knowing there were people in the world outside her family who would also embrace her made the uncertain journey easier. Made Bailey’s Cove more dear.

She wondered if Hunter knew about Brianna, if friends of his grandparents stayed in touch with him. Even as time passed, especially as time passed, she didn’t feel it particularly appropriate to inform him. What could she say? Dear Hunter, you know after you walked away and broke my heart, there was a guy I went out with for two days, and, well, he and I have a child. Best Regards, Delainey.

All during her pregnancy she wondered how this could happen to her—not how she got pregnant but how she could have such bad luck. She wasn’t some loose woman who slept around. She had slept around with exactly two men. First with Hunter and then for two confusing days with the darkly handsome older Micky.

Her parents had surprised her when she told them she was pregnant. She had expected them to be angry, but her mother had said, “It’s a baby, dear. You don’t get angry about a baby.”

Her parents and friends had loved her all the way through the process of pregnancy and childbirth. Her daughter, Brianna, lived and breathed, with her long softly curling dark hair and big, intense dark eyes, as the silver lining in all of their lives.

Not that being a single mother was easy or, in her thinking, particularly fair to the child, but the people around her had blessed the two of them with love and acceptance.

Maybe that was the small-town way. It certainly seemed to be the way most of the people in Bailey’s Cove were.

Hunter would be right if he asked about the child, though.

While pregnant, she wondered at times if the child was Hunter’s, and even hoped on some days that the baby was his, but the math said otherwise. Then when she went into labor four weeks early, she hoped again that the predictions of the date she got pregnant were wrong.

When the desperate hope consumed her in the dark of night, all sorts of guilt about not telling Hunter there was a slim chance he was going to be a father oozed in and made her doubt her ability to make any rational decisions.

Then Brianna had come into the world, a small beautiful baby with dark, dark hair and eyes. By the time her wonderful daughter learned to smile, her eyes had stayed dark brown, almost black, and her stare was intense, as if she already understood the world. There hadn’t been a dark-haired and dark-eyed relative in Delainey’s family tree that she knew of and all notion she could have been Hunter’s daughter had to be put to rest.

Delainey’s only regret was her child might never know her absent father. She had only Micky’s name. They had never gotten around to phone numbers, let alone emails. Even as she tried to remember any contact information, she had realized Micky had been very elusive. All searches, even those the private investigator had conducted, had come up empty.

When Delainey could no longer harbor the slightest hope Hunter was the father, she gratefully acknowledged her beautiful daughter could help her deal with never seeing him again, ever.

Now Hunter was here and she couldn’t even be in the same room with him.

When she had been shifting papers around for an hour, she glanced at the clock.

Three o’clock. Her mother would have picked up Brianna from school. They were probably having a snack, or Dad had taken her out sledding by now.

Delainey wondered if she should just slip out the back door, go home and never come back. Maybe if she had $150,000 for law school. Loans, grants and scholarships went only so far. She needed a job, this job, for the next three months and then as often as law school would allow. As much as she hated to admit it, she needed her parents to help care for Brianna while she went to school. She’d pay them back. She’d use her increase in pay from being an attorney to make Brianna’s life the best it could be and she’d boost her parents’ meager retirement funds.