Hard Choices

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Déjà vu, she thought wearily and prayed that this would be the only incident of it.

“You scared them, Riley. They believed your threats.” She chose her words carefully. Not wanting to worsen the situation, which—when it came to family matters—was what Annie had generally done exceptionally well. “But make no mistake. They want you back home. Where you belong.”

Riley just shook her head. Her blond hair was darkening from the rain, clinging wetly to her cheeks, making her look impossibly young. Vulnerable. “Why? They’re never around, anyway. Dad’s campaigning for work and Mom’s traveling for work.” Then she pulled out of Annie’s hold and kept walking.

“Where are you going?” Panic raised Annie’s voice.

Riley’s arms lifted then fell back to her sides. She never looked back.

“She won’t go far. Diego’s not going anywhere with this weather churning up the way it is.”

She jumped, startled at the deep voice. “Where’d you come from?”

Logan smiled faintly and lifted his chin toward the building not ten feet away from where they stood in the middle of the road. “Stopped in at the sheriff’s office to say hello to Sam. Couldn’t help but notice you and Riley out here.” He opened up the black umbrella he held and lifted it over her head.

Annie’s gaze followed Riley whose posture—even at the increasing distance—screamed dejection. “I need to go after her.”

“Take the umbrella, and get inside soon. Sam said the weather service thinks there’s gonna be a bad blow. Storms usually miss Turnabout, but better to be safe.”

She hesitated for only a moment. He was there to retrieve Riley, of that she had no doubt. So why was he allowing even a moment of time before doing so?

“Go, Annie,” he said quietly. “I’ll lock up the shop for you.”

She swallowed, turned and went.

It was raining in earnest when Annie reached her house about twenty minutes later. As she let herself inside, her heart was in her throat, nearly choking her. Then she heard the shower running in the single bathroom.

Uncaring of the rainwater dripping from her onto the ceramic-tile floor, she pressed her back against the wall in the hallway and listened to the blessed sound of the bathroom shower. She was shivering. Not just from the chill caused by the rain, but from the past that seemed to loom up in her face no matter how many times she tried to push it behind her.

She slowly slid down until she was sitting on the floor and pressed her wet head back against the wall. Through it she could hear the hiss of the shower even more clearly, as well as the diminishing drum of raindrops on the roof. They grew more sporadic as she listened. Maybe the storm would pass by Turnabout, after all.

The thought was hopeful, but brief, being cut off by a long, crackling rumble of thunder.

From inside the bathroom came the squeak of pipes, the cessation of water, the metallic jangle of shower-curtain rings. By the time the door creaked open several minutes later, Annie was in the kitchen, a clean bath towel slung around her neck, her wet jumper replaced by a sweatshirt and baggy jeans. Riley finally came into the room, her expression wary as Annie pushed a chunky white mug across the breakfast bar toward her.

“What is it?” Riley’s voice was suspicious. “Not that weird tea you make out of weeds, I hope.”

Annie had quickly found that chamomile tea was not a hit with Riley. “Hot chocolate.”

“With marshmallows?”

“Is there any other way to drink it?”

Riley crossed to the bar and picked up the mug. She lifted it carefully. Annie thought she might be smelling it. She took a sip. Followed by a longer one.

“It’s good.”

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

“Mom’s hot chocolate is awful. No caffeine, no fat, no nothing.”

Annie lifted her own mug, her smile growing. Noelle was beautiful and model-thin. There’d been a time or two on Annie’s rare visits to their home when she’d heard Will admit to sneaking out for a cholesterol-laden steak and loaded baked potato behind his wife’s diet-conscious back.

Riley slipped onto one of the barstools and hunched over the breakfast bar, cradling the mug. “Mom says marshmallows are all sugar.”

“When we were kids, your dad wouldn’t drink hot chocolate unless the cup was nearly overflowing with marshmallows.”

“I’m a lot like him.” Riley made the announcement as if it were a sentence being pronounced. “Mom says that all the time. I’m just like him.” Her lips twisted as she peered into her mug.

“He’s a good person,” Annie said quietly. “You could do worse than be like Will.” Far better that than to be like Annie.

“How come you don’t have kids?”

Annie lifted her hot chocolate again and managed to singe her tongue drinking too deeply. It was early afternoon, yet the kitchen was darkening. She flipped on the light. “Some people aren’t cut out to be parents,” she finally said. “Fortunately, Will and Noelle are.”

Riley’s expression closed. She turned away from the counter, bare feet stomping across the tile. A moment later, Annie heard the slam of the bedroom door.

She cursed herself for pushing too far. Sighing, she put her mug on the counter next to Riley’s. Neither one of them had finished.

The sliding glass door that led out to the small deck drew her and she moved away from the counter. Outside, the ocean beyond the narrow strip of beach looked gray and forbidding. She opened the door anyway and went out onto the deck. The rain had stopped, but the wind had picked up. Heavy, dark clouds skidded overhead.

The chaise that had seen Annie through more sleepless nights than she cared to count was wet. She pulled the towel from her neck to dry it off, then threw herself down on the seat. The wind tugged at her hair, flinging it around her shoulders. The temperature felt as if it had dropped twenty degrees since that morning. She wished she’d thought to put on socks.

“I told you to get inside.”

Her head jerked. Logan had appeared around the side of the small house. He stepped around the elevated frame of her ancient water cistern. When her heart drifted back down from her throat, she chanced speech. “Which explains why you’re sneaking around outside my house.” Once again, she found herself wishing that he’d do what he’d come to do and go. It would be painful—like the worst kind of bandage being ripped off her skin. But at least it would be quick.

He came toward her, looking even taller from her half-prone position. The wind was doing a number on his hair, too. Blowing through the short, thick strands of dark brown to reveal a few strands of silver. He was as darkly tanned as she remembered. The contrast made his blue eyes seem even brighter. Logan—in the flesh—made her feel as edgy as he ever had.

The sooner he left, the better.

“Riley is inside. You should take her now. You wouldn’t want to get stuck on the island if the weather goes even more sour.”

“In a hurry to see her go, Annie?” His expression was considering. “Having a teenager around cramping your style?”

She swung her legs off the chaise and rose. “There’s no style to cramp. She doesn’t belong here with me. She belongs at home with Will and Noelle. Nothing’s going to be solved by her remaining here. Everybody, including you, knows that.”

“Maybe she just needs a breather. Don’t you remember needing a breather when you were her age?”

“When I was her age, I’d already been at Bendlemaier for months. And the last place I wanted to be was at home with George and Lucia.”

His lips twisted. He gave her a sidelong look that tightened her stomach. “Liar.”

She stiffened. “What?”

He moved, catching her chin in his big palm, tilting it toward him. She went stock-still, her senses going way beyond alert at the close, wind-blown warmth of him.

“You heard me,” he challenged softly. “When you were Riley’s age, you wanted nothing more than to live at home, to have normal parents who cared more about you than their careers, to go to the same public high school that Will had gone to.”

“I never told you that,” she said stiffly.

His thumb gently tapped her chin. “You didn’t have to tell me everything. It was obvious, Annie. And that night at the boathouse, you said—”

“I said a lot of things.” She felt exposed with her face firmly tilted up to his gaze. “And I was drunk,” she finished flatly.

“Nearly,” he allowed. “On champagne you had no business drinking.”

“Well, you were the only one who noticed.”

“That pissed you off, too, didn’t it?”

She stepped back, deliberately lifting her chin away from his hold. “It was a long time ago and has nothing whatsoever to do with the reason you’re here.”

“Are you so certain about that?”

Her knees felt weak. She refused to sit, though she wanted to. Badly. “Yes, I’m certain.”

The corner of his lips lifted in that saturnine expression of his that visited her too often in her sleep. Ridiculous, really. And maybe it was only because she simply didn’t get involved with men—hadn’t for more years than she could count on her fingers—that she was beset with memories of this one man in particular.

She’d humiliated herself with him at Will’s wedding reception, after all. Her youthfully inflated ego had convinced her that he must surely have had the hots for her, mostly because she hadn’t been able to look at him without feeling as if her nerve endings were on fire.

Well, he’d corrected her on that score.

He could have taken advantage of an impetuous and spoiled teenager intent on playing with fire, but he hadn’t. So, regardless of the wicked cast of his lips, Annie knew that Logan, like Will, was a straight arrow. Despite his devil-dark looks, he’d probably never even crossed the street against the light.

“Aren’t you curious, Annie?”

She snatched at the towel when a gust of wind picked it up off the chaise. She twisted the terrycloth in her hands. “About what? Riley’s real reasons for running away from home? It’s hard to believe it would just be Bendlemaier. Noelle says that Riley has made a small career out of negotiating things she wants or doesn’t want in life.”

“That’s all you’re curious about? Only Riley?” He stepped closer again.

Beyond them, a colorful beach ball hurtled over the sand, followed by a scrap of paper that hung on the wind. For some reason, the sight of them made Annie even more aware of the solitude of her house. Her nearest neighbors were more than a mile away.

She swallowed. “That’s all I can afford to be curious about.”

“Sounds awfully cautious for the Annie I knew.”

Her eyes burned. She blamed it on something in the blowing wind because she didn’t cry. Not anymore. “The Annie you knew no longer exists.” Her words were barely audible. “She learned her lessons the hard way.”

“What lessons?” He jerked his head up before his lips finished forming the question.

An awful buzzing whine had rent the air. Piercing. Loud. Annie nearly jumped out of her skin and covered her ears. “What is that?” She had to yell to be heard above the alarm, above the awful thunder that was suddenly crashing overhead, sounding as if mountains were collapsing.

His hand was on her arm, pushing her through the glass door he slid open. “That’s the emergency siren. A hangover from the Second World War. Get Riley.”

Annie had lived on Turnabout for five years. She hadn’t even known there was an emergency siren. She ran to the second bedroom and threw the door wide, calling Riley’s name.

But the room was empty.

Chapter Four

Annie’s heart stopped.

Riley wasn’t in her bedroom.

Before she thought about the idiocy of it, she darted into the room, looking under the bed when she knew perfectly well the only things that fitted under there were the shallow plastic storage boxes that contained a lifetime of photographs. She also yanked open the closet door. But all that was inside were her vacuum cleaner and clothing she never wore.

“Riley?” She stumbled around the twin-sized bed to peer out the window that overlooked the front of the house, only to jump back with a cry when a palm branch slammed against it, then screeched along the side of the house as the wind carried it.

Logan was there, arm sliding about her waist, bodily lifting her away from the shuddering windowpane. “Stay away from the glass.”

She was beyond listening, twisting away from him, nearly falling over the foot of the bed again as she ran into the hall, calling Riley’s name again, barely able to hear her own voice over the wail of the emergency siren.

Darkness seemed to have fallen in the span of minutes, broken by the hideous strobe of lightning that seemed too close and far too dangerous. “She’s not in the house.” Panic choking her, she headed toward the door, only to find Logan blocking her way. “I have to find her!”

“You don’t even have on shoes. I’ll go.” He reached for the door himself. It blew out of his grasp when he opened it, slamming back against the wall behind it before he caught it again. “Stay here. Inside. She can’t be far.”

He’d barely disappeared out the door before Annie ran into her bedroom. She shoved her feet into her tennis shoes and followed him.

Her sweatshirt was immediately soaked, her hair whipping around her head, nearly blinding her as she ran around the side of the house. The wind tore Riley’s name from her throat, and the siren wailed on and on and on, threatening to madden her.

Where was Riley?

Logan had headed up the path that passed for a road in the front of the house. Annie took the beach behind the house instead. Squinting against the sand that managed to blow despite the deluge of water pounding down on it, she ran past the black, cold fire pit, all the way down to the frothing, roiling edge of water. Peered right and left, staring hard between flashes of light, her heart beating so viciously she felt ill. “Riley!”