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His loud, booming voice startled her. She jerked around, lost her balance and came tumbling off the ladder. He rushed over and caught her in his arms before she could hit the floor. His chest tightened, and his nerves, and another part of his anatomy, kicked in the moment his hands and arms touched the body he used to know as well as his own. A body he’d introduced to passion. A body he’d—
“Put me down, Kaegan Chambray!”
He started to drop her, just for the hell of it. She was such a damn ingrate. “Next time I’ll just let you fall on your ass,” he snapped, placing her on her feet and trying not to notice how beautiful she was. Her eyes were a mix of hazel and moss green, and were adorned by long eyelashes. She had high cheekbones and shoulder-length brown curly hair. Her skin was a gorgeous honey-brown and her lips, which were curved in a frown at the moment, had always been one of her most distinct traits.
“Let go of my hand, Kaegan!”
Her sharp tone made him realize he’d been standing there staring at her. He fought to regain his senses. “What are you doing, going through my cabinets?”
She rounded on him, tossing all that beautiful hair out of her face. “I was on that ladder putting your spices back in the cabinets.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Why?”
“Because I was helping you tidy up after the party by putting things away.”
She had to be kidding. “I don’t need your help.”
“Fine! I’ll leave, then. You can take Vashti home.”
Take Vashti home? What the hell is she talking about? He was about to ask when Vashti burst into the kitchen. “What in the world is going on? I heard the two of you yelling and screaming all the way in the bathroom.”
Kaegan turned to Vashti. “What is she talking about, me taking you home? Where’s Sawyer?”
“He got a call and had to leave. I asked Bryce to drop me off at home. I also asked her to assist me in helping you straighten up before we left.”
“I don’t need help.”
Bryce rounded on him. “Why don’t you tell her what you told me? Namely, that you don’t need my help.”
He had no problem doing that. Glancing back at Vashti, he said, “I don’t need Bryce’s help. Nor do I want it.”
Bryce looked at Vashti. “I’m leaving. You either come with me now or he can take you home.”
Vashti looked from one to the other and then threw up her hands in frustration. “I’m leaving with you, Bryce. I’ll be out to the car in a minute.”
When Bryce walked out of the kitchen, Kaegan turned to Vashti. “You had no right asking her to stay here after the party to do anything, Vashti. I don’t want her here. The only reason I even invite her is because of you.”
Kaegan had seen fire in Vashti’s eyes before, but it had never been directed at him. Now it was. She crossed the room, and he had a mind to take a step back, but he didn’t. “I’m sick and tired of you acting like an ass where Bryce is concerned, Kaegan. When will you wake up and realize what you accused her of all those years ago is not true?”
He glared at her. “Oh? Is that what she told you? News flash—you weren’t there, Vashti, and I know what I saw.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. So you can believe the lie she’s telling you all you want, but I know what I saw that night.”
Vashti drew in a deep breath. “Do you? Or do you only know what you think you saw?”
Then without saying anything else, she turned and walked out of the kitchen.
CHAPTER TWO (#u87cadfe7-46c4-56eb-b6b0-905922d3c32e)
VASHTI SLID INTO the car and snapped the seat belt in place. Before starting the ignition, Bryce said, “I cherish our friendship, Vash, and I know why it’s important to you that me, you and Kaegan remain friends. After all, it was your idea that we do this,” she said, holding up her finger that bore the scar of the nick the three of them had made years and years ago. They had been in the first grade together.
“But not even this matters to me anymore. I heard what he told you after I walked out of the kitchen. He deliberately said it loud enough for me to hear. It really wasn’t anything I didn’t know already. He does not want me to come to his parties, so let me go on record as saying that tonight will be my last time attending one of Kaegan’s parties, Vash. So please don’t ask me to ever come to one again.”
Vashti didn’t say anything, and Bryce didn’t expect her to. Vashti knew her and knew when she’d reached her limit about anything. Tonight she had with Kaegan. There was no way she could stop him from coming into her parents’ café each morning as a customer, but she could continue to ignore him. And she would.
“Okay, Bryce,” Vashti finally said when Bryce started the engine. “I honestly thought that being around each other would make you and Kaegan realize how much the two of you mean to each other.”
“It did. It made us realize just how much we dislike each other.”
“But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can tell him the truth about that night.”
Bryce didn’t say anything for a minute as she put the car in gear. “I did. Or at least, I tried to.”
“What! When? You never told me that.”
No, she hadn’t, mainly because after telling Vashti what had caused her and Kaegan’s breakup, she’d been too emotionally drained that night to tell her the other part. “What I didn’t tell you was when I got that call from Kaegan letting me know why he was breaking up with me and that he intended to block my number, I used every penny I had in my savings account and caught the bus from college, all the way from Grambling. That meant crossing four states and enduring an eighteen-hour bus ride to reach North Carolina. And because he had blocked my number there was no way for me to let him know I was coming.”
“What happened when you got there?”
“Well, for starters, I couldn’t get on the military base. But the soldier at the gate checked his log and told me that Kaegan wasn’t on base anyway. That he was on a two-day pass and chances were he would be at the Mud Hole that night.”
“The Mud Hole?”
“Yes. It’s a hangout for the marines and located close to base. I checked into a hotel, freshened up, and that night I went to the Mud Hole.”
Bryce paused a moment and then said, “More than anything, now I wish I hadn’t.”
“Why? What happened?”
Bryce tightened her hands on the steering wheel as she remembered that night. “Kaegan was there that night and he’d been drinking.”
“Kaegan? Drinking?”
Bryce knew why Vashti was surprised. Because his father had been an alcoholic, Kaegan had sworn never to touch the stuff because it turned fairly decent men into assholes.
“Yes, he was drinking and had a barely dressed woman sitting in his lap. I approached him, and when he saw me, the look in his eyes was one I’d never seen before. He proceeded to say some not-so-nice things to me in front of the woman and the friends he’d been with. I tried to get him to go outside with me so we could talk privately, but he refused to do that and said he didn’t want to hear anything I had to say. He said his father had been right about me all along. He told me to leave and that he hoped to never see me again.”
Bryce paused again, and then she said, “When I refused to leave, tried to make him listen to what I’d come all that way to say, he got mad and left...with her. That woman who all but had her hands inside his pants. He kissed her right in front of me and then they left together. I went back to my hotel room and cried the entire night.”
“Oh, Bryce, I’m so sorry you went through that.”
“I am, too. But even on the bus ride back to Grambling, I kept telling myself it wasn’t the Kaegan that I knew who’d said those awful things to me. It had to have been the liquor talking. I even convinced myself that I could forgive him for sleeping with another woman if he’d done so that night.” Bryce felt the knot in her throat when she said, “I loved him that much, Vash. I’ve always loved him. I told myself I could wait for him to come around. That he would regain his senses and would eventually call me. Days became weeks. Weeks turned into months. Months into years.”
She was quiet for a moment, then continued. “I ran into Mr. Chambray at one of the festivals a year later and he accused me of being the reason Kaegan refused to come back to Catalina Cove, even for a visit. He said that I had hurt his boy and that he was glad Kaegan found out what a slut I was.”
Vashti drew in a sharp breath. “Mr. Chambray said that to you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Bryce.”
She could hear the trembling in Vashti’s voice and didn’t want her pity. “It’s okay, Vash. That day I finally accepted that Mr. Chambray probably had the same opinion of me that Kaegan had.”
She pulled the car into Vashti and Sawyer’s driveway. When she brought the car to a stop, she turned to Vashti. It was then that Bryce felt her tears. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she’d been crying. “I’ve gotten over him, Vash—honest, I have. But it still hurts knowing he had so little trust in me after all we’d been through together. I had loved him so much, but I promised myself years ago that I would never let Kaegan hurt me again. And that’s a promise I intend to keep.”
KAEGAN MOVED AWAY from the window when Bryce’s car finally drove off. He rubbed a hand down his face, feeling frustrated. Hadn’t he made a vow when he moved back to Catalina Cove that he would not let Bryce destroy him any more than she already had? Each and every time she came to his house—the place that should have been their home—it took another bite out of him.
Tonight had been the last straw when he’d walked into his kitchen and had seen her on that ladder. First off, he had been concerned for her safety. But then seeing her from behind had totally unnerved him. She’d always had one hell of a figure and she still did.
Angry with himself for admiring her ass, he had snapped at her and then the confrontation had begun. Although he’d wished otherwise, Vashti had been caught in the middle. But then, she was the one who’d insisted he invite Bryce.
In the past, it had been pretty easy to ignore her. But not tonight. It might have been her outfit, a pink shorts set with white sandals, that had been to blame. He’d always liked her in pink because he’d thought she always looked ultrafeminine in that color.
He had tried not to notice her but he had. He knew every damn man who’d tried talking to her tonight, and each time one would approach her, his stomach would tighten in knots. It had been ten years, so why was he stressing over a woman who meant nothing to him? Absolutely nothing.
An hour later he’d finished breaking everything down, at least as much as he intended to do tonight. Tomorrow was Saturday and after sleeping late he would wake up and do the rest. He began stripping off his clothes for a shower and for some reason his gaze went to a certain framed portrait on the wall.
There was nothing special about the painting, but behind it was his safe, where his valuables were kept. He walked over to it and entered the combination, then opened the safe. He stared at the only thing inside. That damn little white box.
He reached inside and pulled it out, asking himself for the umpteenth time why he still had it. He should have gotten rid of it years ago, but had convinced himself he needed it as a reminder of the time in his life when he’d been young, naive and gullible, and had allowed a woman to make a fool of him.
He’d left Catalina Cove the day he’d graduated from high school. Together he and Bryce had mapped out a plan for their future. He would serve six years in the military. That would give her time to complete her last two years of high school and four years of college before they married. After she finished college they would marry. She’d been in her senior year of college and he’d come home over spring break. It had been a surprise visit with a purpose. He was going to officially ask her to marry him.
Opening the box, he gazed upon the engagement ring he had saved his paychecks for almost a year to afford. When he’d first seen it in a jewelry-store window he had immediately known it was the ring he wanted to give Bryce. That was before he’d seen her in the arms of another man.
He closed his eyes for a moment when memories of that night assailed him and ripped into him. That had been the night she’d shredded his heart. His father had been writing and telling him that he’d seen Bryce around town with Samuel Abbott whenever she came home from college. But Kaegan hadn’t believed him because his parents had never approved of his relationship with Bryce. They’d wanted him to be with a girl from the tribe.
Kaegan had known Samuel from growing up in the cove. He was the son of wealthy parents who’d owned the only pharmacy in town for years. In high school Samuel had been a star athlete in practically every sport he competed in. He was what the girls had called a superjock and they would hang around him like lovesick puppies.
Regardless of what his father had been telling him in those letters, Kaegan had trusted Bryce. He’d believed the plans they’d made for their future were solid and that some guy like Samuel wasn’t going to turn her head. He hadn’t cared they were attending Grambling together, which gave them every opportunity to be close. Bryce was his girl and that was that.
Although it was close to two in the morning when he’d arrived in the cove that night, he’d immediately gone to Bryce’s house to surprise her. He’d been anxious to ask her to marry him and to give her the ring. Since her brothers had married, she had taken over the garage apartment at the back of her parents’ home.
He had walked toward the garage when suddenly the door to the apartment opened and a man came out. She was walking him to the door and the man was Samuel Abbott. Kaegan had stopped and stared at them. Neither had detected his presence since he’d been in the shadows. In total shock, he watched Bryce lean up on tiptoes and wrap her arms around Samuel’s neck. Angry and hurt, Kaegan turned and walked away while pain had sliced through him. He left town that night without Bryce or his parents knowing he’d even been there.
It had taken a week before he’d called Bryce. He’d even refused to take her call, the one she made to him every Sunday. When he did call her, he didn’t give her a chance to say anything. He told her of his surprise visit home the week before, although he didn’t tell her why he’d specifically come home that night.
Kaegan told her about seeing her in Samuel’s arms on her doorstep at two in the morning. He’d told her he hoped to never see her again and that he would be blocking her calls. When he ended the call, he figured that would be that. She’d cheated on him and had been caught. There had been no one he could talk to about the pain he felt. Not even Vashti. She’d left town years earlier, the week after she’d graduated from high school, saying she would never return to Catalina Cove again. She had her own issues with the town and the people in it. He was left to deal with the pain of Bryce’s betrayal alone.
He certainly hadn’t expected Bryce to show up in North Carolina a week later wanting to see him and tell him her side of things. There was nothing she could tell him. It hadn’t been about what his father had told him but about what he’d seen with his own eyes. He doubted he would ever forget seeing her in Samuel’s arms as they’d been about to kiss.
Coming back to Catalina Cove to live was the last thing he’d planned to do. When he had returned home after his father’s death it was to find a seafood shipping company that was barely making ends meet. On top of that, the machinery and boats were in need of repair or replacement, and it had been weeks since the crew, shrimpers and oyster shuckers had been paid.
He had made the decision to close down the company, pay the workers out of money he had saved and move his mother with him to Maryland, where he’d settled after his military career ended. He had a pretty good job working for NASA as a program manager. The plans to return to Maryland changed the day he was approached by Reid LaCroix, the wealthiest man in the cove.
Reid had invited him to his home and had made Kaegan an offer that nobody in their right mind could refuse. Everyone knew Reid was a man who detested change. He believed family-owned businesses in the cove should stay in the family. As a result of that belief, he’d offered Kaegan a low-interest loan to do whatever was needed to bring the shipping company up to par, but only if Kaegan returned to the cove and ran things.
Sensing there had to be some catch, Kaegan had asked his attorney and friend Gregory Nelson, back in Maryland, to review the contract. Gregory indicated it was a damn good deal and he could only assume the reason Reid LaCroix had made him such an offer was the man’s doggedness to keep the family-operated companies in the cove in business so there would not be a need to bring in any new ones. Gregory saw LaCroix’s generosity as a really good strategy if LaCroix was as anti-progressive as Kaegan claimed.
Even with such a good offer, Kaegan had to decide if moving back to Catalina Cove was something he wanted to do. He’d weighed the pros and cons. Living in Maryland and working in DC meant dealing with congested traffic, which had begun wearing him down. Then there were the advantages of being his own boss, an idea that he liked.
Returning to the cove for his father’s funeral had shown him how much the people in the town had changed for the better. The old sheriff, who’d thought he ruled the town, was gone, and there was a new man in charge, a man he’d liked immediately upon meeting him—Sawyer Grisham. For the first time since leaving he could see himself making Catalina Cove his home again. The only problem he saw impeding his return was Bryce. Since there was no way the two of them could ever get back together, he figured the best way to deal with her was to ignore her very existence.
After much consideration, Kaegan had accepted Reid’s offer. With the injection of money, Kaegan was able to pay his workers their back pay, call back the men his father had laid off, buy four new boats and update every last piece of his machinery. Reid even gave Kaegan and his crew permission to farm for tilapia and catfish on a tract of land off the ocean that Reid LaCroix owned but never used. That turned out to be an added investment for them both.
With numerous restaurants in the area needing fresh seafood daily, Kaegan’s business began booming immediately. It was still doing well and in two more years he would be able to pay off his loan to Reid. Kaegan had discovered that without his father making his life miserable, he actually loved being on the water with the men. And he felt he had a dynamic office staff.
The one thing he did make clear to the townspeople was that he didn’t want to be called K-Gee any longer. He couldn’t forget it had been Bryce who’d first begun calling him that in first grade when she couldn’t pronounce his name.
Once he’d settled back in the cove, he’d done a pretty good job of keeping his distance from Bryce and vice versa. The only time they would run into each other was when he went into her parents’ café, which he tried limiting. At least he did until he and Sheriff Sawyer Grisham became good friends.
They’d bonded because they’d had a lot in common. They’d both been marines who’d served multiple tours in Afghanistan. They’d even figured they’d been in the area about the same time, although their paths never crossed. They’d enjoyed sharing war stories over beer in the evenings at Collins Bar and Grill, or in the mornings over coffee and blueberry muffins at the Witherspoon Café.
A couple of years later Ray Sullivan relocated to the cove to work for Kaegan. Since he was new to town and hadn’t known anyone, they extended their friendship to Ray, and the three of them would start their workday by meeting at the Witherspoon Café.
Bryce was a Realtor in town but often helped her parents out at the café with the breakfast and dinner crowd. Just like he didn’t want to have anything to do with her, she had the same attitude toward him, which he found crazy because she was the one who’d been caught cheating. He’d also discovered that although most people in the cove knew they were no longer together, no one, not even her parents and brothers, knew the reason why. He figured she’d been too ashamed to admit to anyone that she’d betrayed him and people had known not to ask him about it, so the reason remained a mystery to everyone.
Even though he saw her more often because of his daily breakfast meetings with Ray and Sawyer at her parents’ cafe, he’d made it a point to ignore her. He’d done a pretty damn good job of it until Vashti moved back to town. She was determined to reclaim her two best friends and couldn’t understand why two people who’d once been so into each other could share so much animosity.
Sighing deeply, Kaegan put the box back in the safe and drew in a deep breath. Seeing it was a reminder that long-term relationships weren’t for him and he never intended to trust another woman with his heart again.
CHAPTER THREE (#u87cadfe7-46c4-56eb-b6b0-905922d3c32e)
“GOOD MORNING, SHERIFF. Good morning, Ray. The usual?” Bryce asked the two men when they sat down at one of the booths.
“Yes, I’ll take the usual,” Ray Sullivan said, smiling up at her.
“So will I,” Sheriff Sawyer Grisham chimed in, smiling, as well.
Bryce walked off while thinking that Vashti and Ashley were two lucky women to have found two men who were such jewels. Maybe one day her luck would change. She recalled an article she’d read just last week in a popular women’s magazine. It stated women outnumbered men four to one. With so few men, she needed to get motivated and find her Mr. Right. She’d once had high hopes for Marcel, a guy she’d met at a real-estate seminar in Atlanta. They’d dated for almost eight months. When his ex-wife had reentered the picture, he’d dropped her like a hot potato. That had been four years ago, and although she dated occasionally, she hadn’t gotten seriously involved with anyone since then.
“You okay, honey?”
She glanced over at her mother and pasted on a smile. “Sure, Mom, I’m okay. Just had a busy weekend. I showed five houses on Saturday and one after church yesterday.”
“How did that go?”
“I think it went well. No buyers yet, but I think one of the couples are really interested in the Flemings’ place.”
“That’s good. Hmm, I wonder where Kaegan is this morning,” her mother said.
Bryce bit down on her lip, coming close to saying that she didn’t know, nor did she give a royal damn. Of course, she wouldn’t say that since the woman standing beside her was her mother, although she’d been mistaken for Bryce’s older sister a number of times. Her mom looked just that good for her age and her father wasn’t bad-looking for his age, either. Good genes.
Years ago when her father, Chester Witherspoon, had graduated from Catalina Cove High School, he had fled to Canada to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. It wasn’t that he’d been a coward or anything; he just didn’t feel the country needed to go to war. A few years later after the war had ended he returned with a Canadian-born wife and baby in tow. It was then that he’d decided to do his patriotic duty and enlist in the military for six years. During those years Bryce’s parents had another son, Duke. Four years after Duke they had their only daughter, Bryce. Both Ry and Duke lived in Catalina Cove and were partners with their parents in the family-owned café. Her brothers were happily married to wonderful women with two kids each.
Although no one ever said it, if anyone cared to do the math, it would be quite obvious that Debbie Witherspoon had gotten pregnant before she’d married Chester. That fact never bothered Bryce. Her mother had adopted the philosophy that if you lived in a glass house you shouldn’t throw stones. That was the main reason why, unlike a lot of the other parents in town, the Witherspoons hadn’t bashed Vashti when she’d gotten pregnant at sixteen and refused to reveal the identity of her child’s father. The Witherspoons had stood up for Vashti and had been quite outspoken in saying it wasn’t anyone’s business what Vashti decided to do and whom she told or didn’t tell.
