“A little more during lunch.”
The clay pots of buttery yellow flowers surrounding the blanket had been John’s suggestion, as had the blue spruce, which had been a bitch to haul up the stairs. But his nephew had assured him that they could decorate it for Christmas, then plant it outside in the spring. Dan liked the idea of planting a tree with Savannah, watching it grow each year, along with their kids.
“And I did the shopping after court recessed this afternoon, before I dropped by your grandmother’s house.”
When she’d begun ringing up the mercantile’s entire stock of candles, Olivia had asked him if he was expecting a power outage. Then she’d gotten to the wine and Johnny Mathis CD. From the knowing look she’d given him while they waited for Fred to do a price check on the wine, Dan had realized that by tomorrow everyone in Coldwater Cove would know he’d been setting up a romantic tryst with Ida Lindstrom’s granddaughter.
It might have been worse, he’d thought at the time. Fortunately, he’d planned ahead and stocked up on condoms at the busy, impersonal Walgreen in Port Angeles.
“It’s wonderful for you to have gone to so much trouble.” She toed her sneakers off and sat down on the blanket. “I’m already starting to relax.”
“That’s the idea.” He hit the remote for the stereo he’d hidden behind the tree.
“All this and Johnny Mathis, too?” she asked with a smile as the seductive light baritone sounds of Mathis getting “Misty” drifted from the hidden speakers.
“Hey, my dad swears by him.” Dan decided it might blow the mood if he shared the fact that according to his mother, who should know, he’d been conceived to Mathis.
“Better we use your father’s music than mine,” she decided.
Since, from what he’d always been able to tell, Reggie Townsend screamed his lyrics rather than sing them, Dan concurred.
Using Mathis to set the mood might be a cliché, but as he’d told himself while standing in line at the mercantile, the entire picnic idea was pretty much a cliché. But maybe that’s because it worked. Because it was romantic.
The funny thing was, he considered as he went around the room lighting the candles that had seemed to so amuse Olivia Brown, he’d never been the sort of guy who went in for grand gestures. Of course, he’d never met a woman who made him want to go that extra distance. Until Savannah.
He suspected she could have cooked the chicken a lot better than the extra crispy pieces he’d picked up at the mercantile deli, but she seemed to enjoy it, which was all that mattered. The potato salad and cole slaw were pretty much standard deli fare, but this evening wasn’t about food. They both agreed that the wine, as promised, was excellent.
During dinner they talked about the additions to the house, about Henry’s surprising decision not to move out until Ida was back on her feet, about Gwen’s new independence and the fact that she was trying for early admission at Dan’s alma mater. The Stanford recruiter had been encouraging and had assured her that scholarships and work-study programs should cover her costs.
Life wasn’t perfect.
“But it’s getting better,” Savannah said. With obvious satisfaction, she glanced around the room that was lacking only furniture. “Now that Lilith’s found Martha, I’m still hoping to move in here before Thanksgiving, even though I probably won’t be able to open for business until after the first of the year.”
“Some things are worth waiting for.”
She looked into his eyes. “True.”
Dan placed a hand against the small of her back, drawing her closer. He did his best to show Savannah, with every kiss, every touch, how much he loved her. Emotions he’d never felt, never realized he possessed until recently, came pouring forth from him into her. Until Savannah, Dan hadn’t known that it was possible to feel so much, so deeply, and still want more.
He undressed her slowly, tenderly. With trembling hands she did the same to him. Then they looked at each other and found each other wonderful.
Skin dampened, hearts thundered, bodies entwined. She moved under him without inhibition, touched him in all the secret places he was touching her without hesitation.
Dan breathed in the scent of her—soft talc, the peach shampoo she’d used that morning, the floral perfume that lingered in his mind all day—all night—long.
He tasted her, the sweet, intoxicating flavor of her lips, the hot, tangy essence of her skin. She tasted like sex and sin and temptation. He could have drunk from her succulent lips forever.
He watched her, the mysterious, seductive darkening of her eyes, the way her hair spread over her bare shoulders and breasts like tongues of flame. Looking at her bathed in the flickering warm candlelight, her flesh gleaming like molten gold, Dan fully understood why ancient man had made sacrifices to pagan goddesses.
“Oh God,” she moaned on a ragged laugh as they rolled over the blanket, “I have this terrible problem.”
“Let me fix it.”
“That’s the problem.” Her mouth, wild and willful, clung to his. “I think I’ve become a sex addict.”
“So, what’s the problem?” The taste of her flooded into him, through him.
“All day long, while I was dealing with plumbers and Dottie and Doris and a thousand other people and problems, I kept thinking about how much I love the way you make me feel. How you can drive me mad.”
She rubbed her breasts against his chest in a way designed to create sparks. “And how I wanted to do the same thing to you.” She sprawled over him, her firm tanned thighs draped over his legs.
“So far, you’re succeeding.” When she began to move against him, the blood surged from his brain to other, more vital organs. “Now that,” he muttered on a breath as sharp and ragged as broken glass, “is definitely overachieving.”
“Trust me, I’ve just begun.” Savannah went up onto her knees, straddling his burning body, rubbing against him like a provocative cat as her mouth blazed a hot, wet trail down his chest. “Have I mentioned how much I absolutely adore your body?”
“It’s all yours.” Somewhere Mathis was singing about a thousand violins playing. “At least until you kill me.” And that, Dan considered, would not be such a bad way to go.
Her hair draped over his thighs while her tongue swirled sensually around him, pulling him into a deep, swirling maelstrom. Like a drowning man, he struggled to fill his lungs with air.
Dan had thought he’d experienced passion. Believed he’d experienced pain. But Savannah was proving him vastly wrong on both counts.
On the brink of losing what minuscule control he still possessed, he grasped her waist, lifted her up and lowered her body onto his.
“Now,” he panted.
Her knees were pressed against his thighs, her soft, yielding body a hot sheathe for his power.
“Now,” she agreed on a breath as labored as his.
Dan surged upward. She met him thrust for thrust, hot flesh against hot flesh. All the time Dan never took his eyes from hers.
He watched them darken, then widen, as they rode up the tumultuous peak, watched her lips part in passion and stunned pleasure as they came crashing down the other side.
Their bodies were slick with perspiration. Savannah was sprawled atop his chest and Dan was still inside her, loathe to leave when the sky outside the lantern room lit up with a flare of red, white, and blue fireworks. A booming sound like cannon fire rattled the glass while Mathis declared everything wonderful, wonderful.
“Oh, my God.” He felt her laughter. “We’ll
never
be able to top this.”
“It’s Friday night. The Coldwater Cove Loggers are playing the Richland Bombers at the high school.” He rolled them over, draping one leg over her hip so he could keep her close. “Obviously the Loggers just scored.”
“They’re not the only ones.”
He chuckled at that. He dipped his head, circled the rosy tip of her breast with his tongue and felt her heart, which had begun to slow to something resembling a normal beat, quicken again. “Want to see if we can make the earth move next?”
“On one condition.” She bucked when his teeth tugged on her nipple, then trembled as his hand slipped between their bodies to cup her.
“Name it.” She was slick, hot, and his.
“Before you take me back to the house, we try for a tidal wave.”
“A hat trick,” he said approvingly as he began to move his hips in a slow, deep rhythm she immediately met. “I like it.”
“G
ood morning, Ida.” The nurse she’d come to dislike more with each passing day breezed into the hospital room. The family was already two minutes late picking her up, and Ida was already not in the best of moods. “So, today’s the big day, isn’t it, dear? I’ll bet we’re so-o-o excited to be going home.”
“
If you’re coming with me, I’ll just throw myself out of this wheelchair in front of an ambulance on the way out of this place. Dear
.” Ida answered mentally. Since she knew she wouldn’t be able to string all those words together just yet, she shot the woman her most blistering scowl instead.
Blithely ignoring it, the nurse began pushing the chair toward the door. If she could have dragged her feet to stop the forward progress, Ida would have. As it was, the most she could do was make a futile grab for the door frame with her good left hand as she was wheeled through it.
“Where?” Thanks to Kathi Montgomery, she now had a vocabulary of about twenty-five words. Unfortunately, none of them were curse words, which she could have used about now.
“Oh, it’s a surprise.” They were headed down the hall. Ida looked around, frustrated further when she saw no sight of her daughter or granddaughters.
She could understand Lilith not being there. While her daughter seemed to have become much more responsible since her marriage, Ida supposed a little backsliding was inevitable. Savannah was usually more dependable, but it was possible she’d had to drive out to the lighthouse for some reason and had gotten sidetracked with more construction problems.
But that didn’t explain why Raine wasn’t here. Her elder granddaughter was as punctual as a Swiss clock. It wasn’t like her to be late for anything. That thought had Ida’s irritation turning to fear. What if there’d been an accident? What if something had happened to them on the drive here? What if Gwen had borrowed Savannah’s little red car and skidded out of control on the rain-slick road and driven into the cove? Or perhaps Amy had fallen out of that swing Jack had hung in the tree behind the farmhouse and broken her arm? Or worse.
Perhaps that sweet child was in the ER right now, barely hanging on to life, while she was fussing because they were a few minutes late.
Ida had never been a worrier. But that was before experiencing the mental and physical equivalents of a car wreck. As a doctor, she understood that her uncharacteristic dread of the unknown was attributable to normal poststroke depression. But that medical knowledge didn’t keep her rebellious, damaged mind from spinning up the bloodiest, most unlikely scenarios, most of which starred members of her family.
Perhaps, she thought as she cast a hopeful glance toward the bank of elevators they were racing by, once she was totally recovered, she’d try her hand at writing horror stories.
A mental image of the baby-talking nurse being eaten alive by a land shark who’d crawled out of Coldwater Cove almost made Ida smile.
“Surprise!” The cheers greeted her as she was wheeled into the solarium. Bright, helium-filled balloons hugged a ceiling draped with streamers of autumn-hued crepe paper. On the wall, next to a cardboard cutout of a turkey that had gone up a few days earlier, was a huge, hand-painted sign that read Good Luck Dr. Lindstrom. It seemed to Ida that the entire hospital staff had crowded into the room, even Dr. Burke, who’d made himself as scarce as hen’s feet lately.
Ida didn’t begrudge the neurologist his obvious discomfort with her condition. She understood professional pride; stroke patients tended to burst the little fantasy bubble of physician omnipotence. It was, after all, difficult to pretend to be God when you couldn’t heal a medical problem with either drugs or surgery. She had the feeling he would have been much happier if she’d had a brain tumor he could have carved out of her head.
“Surprise!” The way everyone was shouting didn’t help the headache Ida had awoken with, but the outpouring of goodwill more than made up for it.
She felt a rush of relief when she saw Lilith, Raine, and Savannah standing beside a table that held a sheet cake with Good Luck written in red icing. As her eyes filled, Ida decided that just maybe she’d let her baby-talking nemesis live after all.
Thanksgiving morning dawned bright and clear. Having given Gwen and Henry instructions on how to start roasting the turkey, Savannah, who’d moved into the lighthouse two days earlier, was driving to her grandmother’s house with a trio of pumpkin pies when one of her father’s songs came on the car radio.
Reggie Townsend was a rock legend. Born in Great Britain, he had attended Liverpool’s Quarry Bank High School—the very same school that had given the world Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Although the singer-songwriter had just celebrated his fifty-second birthday, his glittering star continued to rise after three decades in the music business. Savannah’s father had been described by critics and fans alike as cheeky, irreverent, outrageously sexy, irresistible, and brilliant.
Right before his sixth marriage, he’d appeared on the cover of the December
Rolling Stone
magazine, looking like a biker Peter Pan in a pair of sprayed-on black leather pants, studded vest, and silver-toed cowboy boots. It had been his wedding suit, Savannah had read.
In a masterful bit of cross-promotion, Reggie’s new bride, Britta, had had her own centerfold layout the same month in
Playboy
. She’d been dressed—or mostly undressed—in the froths of satin and lace intended for her honeymoon.
“That was
Unholy Matrimony
,” the DJ announced after the heavy-metal sound screeched to an end, “the song Townsend ended his Portland concert with last night. According to Portland police, the teens arrested during the short-lived melee have all been released into their parents’ custody and there were no serious injuries.
“One baby was reported born during the excitement; her parents, students at OSU, announced that they’ve named the little girl Regina. We’re told that Reggie dropped by the hospital after the concert disguised in scrubs, visited with the family, and had his photograph taken with his namesake.”
Savannah smiled at the idea of her father donning surgical scrubs to sneak into a hospital. A perpetual child himself, he’d always liked kids, which, she supposed, was one of the reasons his fans ranged from teenagers who admired his rebellious reputation to older baby boomers who’d grown up with him.
While she had no intention of following in her father’s marital footsteps, the one important lesson Reggie had taught Savannah was to follow her dreams, using his own brilliant career as proof that any goal could be accomplished if you only worked hard enough. Cared enough. While work might not be the first thing people thought of when they heard the name Reggie Townsend, Savannah knew he expended vast amounts of his seemingly endless trove of energy on his career.
A ticket to one of his live concerts was not inexpensive, but even his most vocal critics couldn’t say that his fans didn’t get their money’s worth.
Even though she was accustomed to sharing her larger-than-life father with his adoring fans, Savannah was not ready for the crowd that had gathered in front of her grandmother’s house.
They were uniformly clad in black Dark Dreams—The Danger Tour T-shirts. Reggie’s road crew traveled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of these shirts, which he’d throw into the crowds during performances.
She parked behind a stretch limo that looked as if it could easily house a family of ten.
The crowd, for some reason that escaped her, began screaming when she got out of her car. Savannah was never as glad to see Dan as she was when his Tahoe pulled up behind her and he and John shepherded her past the fans.
“Can you believe this?” Raine greeted her sister with a hug as Dan practically shoved her in the front door and closed and locked it behind them. “I used to wish my father would at least want to meet me. I even had a fantasy of us someday practicing law together. Whenever Reggie shows up, I remember that sometimes
not
having a father can be a good thing.”
Savannah grinned. “Dad may be a bit over the top—”
“A bit?”
“Okay. He’s Rock’s Bad Boy. But he can be a lot of fun. In small doses.”
She recalled a wonderful trip to New York when she’d been twelve. He’d taken her to a grown-up lunch at the Plaza’s Pool Room, a matinee of
Cats
, and afterwards a Knicks game. Savannah wasn’t much of a basketball fan, but she had been excited about being with her father, even if they were constantly interrupted by autograph seekers. And to top off a perfect day, the Knicks had won in overtime.
Of course, afterwards, while she’d been upstairs sleeping in their gilded suite, Reggie had gotten busted by security for frolicking in the Pulitzer fountain outside the hotel with two of the Knicks cheerleaders.
“Is that my luv?” the signature deep, gravelly voice called out from the living room. “Come in here and give your old man a kiss.”
She hugged the man dressed in black jeans and a ribbed black shirt that hugged a washboard stomach she knew came from working out on the tour bus. “What a surprise.”
“We just did a gig in Portland last night, and since we were so close, we wanted to come see how Ida’s doing.”
Savannah could remember a lot of things Reggie had said about Ida over the years, none of them flattering.
He laughed at her openly skeptical look. “I know I wasn’t exactly head of your grandmother’s fan club. But I’ve always admired her spunk. Besides, it’s time you met your new stepmother. She was a little nervous about crashing a family party, but I told her that it wasn’t right for her to be eating her first American Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant. Not when the best chef in the country, who just happens to be my own daughter, is doing the cooking.”
As he introduced the tall blond woman towering over him, Savannah fully understood the term
supermodel
. Britta Townsend was a good six inches taller than her husband, even before you added the platform sneakers. The canary yellow diamond ring on her left hand was Texas size. Having never quite gotten over the poverty of his youth, Reggie liked surrounding himself with the trappings of wealth.
They definitely had a full house. Not only had the entire family gathered for the holiday dinner, along with Henry and Martha, but as soon as Lilith had discovered that Kathi Montgomery was going to spend Thanksgiving alone, she’d insisted Ida’s speech therapist join them as well.
Amy was sitting on the living room floor beside Ida’s wheelchair. They were watching the Macy’s parade—a departure from
Sesame Street
, which Savannah’s grandmother watched every morning, afternoon, and evening. Kathi had explained that since the stroke had wiped out the part of Ida’s brain that knew how to turn letters into words, she’d have to relearn her alphabet. With that end in mind, Kathi had recorded hours of the PBS program.
The parade segued to a football game, which had Savannah wishing for Big Bird. There was a bit of muttering when she turned the television off during the third quarter for dinner, but she ignored it and soon everyone had squeezed into the dining room, which John had decorated with copper and gold mums and garlands of autumn leaves.
Conversation flowed easily. Savannah was a little surprised by Reggie’s new wife. She may be young enough to be his daughter, yet she seemed far more self-possessed than most people of her years, which Savannah thought may be due to the fact that she’d gotten her first modeling job—for a disposable diaper company—when she’d been six months old.
“I fell in love with Britta when she showed up at the studio to star in one of my videos,” Reggie announced with a cocky grin toward the blond who, even seated, towered over him. “Asked her to marry me that first day.”
“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” Lilith murmured.
“I’ve always been impulsive,” he agreed easily. “But this is different. Britta keeps me in line.”
“Really?” Lilith skimmed her gaze over the tight jeans and sweater. “Where on earth do you hide your whip and your chair in that outfit, dear?”
Britta looked a bit confused by the question, but Reggie just laughed. “She has her own ways of persuasion, luv. My darlin’ wife’s into positive reinforcement.”
“Well, I’m truly happy for you,” Lilith said, sounding as if she meant it.
“I’m happy for me, too. I’m even happy for you, Lilith, luv.” Reggie grinned over at Cooper. “You’ve got yourself a fine woman, Coop, old man. Just practice your ducking skills. Lilith has lethal aim with the Waterford.”
“Cooper doesn’t give me any reason to throw vases at him,” Lilith said with a toss of her head.
“Good for him. Man must have the patience of Job, since you’re not exactly the easiest of women to get along with, luv.”
“I’ve been thinking about something,” Savannah said quickly as temper flared in Lilith’s eyes.
“What’s that?” Raine asked just as quickly, obviously appreciating her sister’s sidetracking what could well be the beginning of World War III.
“You know how difficult it was, running back and forth between the hospital and work—not that we minded, of course, Gram.”
Ida, sitting at the end of the long table in her wheelchair, just waved Savannah’s words away with an impatient hand. “Go on,” she said.
Savannah was suddenly a little nervous at the way everyone at the table was looking at her so expectantly, waiting to hear what had seemed like a good idea while she was driving back to the lighthouse last night after stopping by the house to have supper with her grandmother and watch a tribute to the letter
E
.