Love on Lavender Island (A Lavender Island Novel Book 2) (7 page)

Giggles.

It sounded like Doris and Marie, two of the islanders who lived at the Casas del Sur senior-citizen apartments in the harbor. They’d both known Paige’s grandmother and were also friends of Natalie, who now worked at Casas del Sur full-time. They would surely say something to Nat if they saw Paige there.

“Oooh, and this one’s good. This is about a rancher,” the Doris voice said.

Paige flattened herself against a display of paper towels and began sidling into the next aisle.

“Oh, speaking of ranchers,” the Marie voice said, “did you see Adam Mason down here the other day?”

Paige froze. A paper-towel roll almost toppled to the floor, and she quickly caught it and shoved it back in place.

“I did!” the Doris voice said. “I think he was looking at curling irons.”

“Curling irons?”

“I couldn’t figure out why, either. I can never figure him out. He’s such a quiet man. I was going to offer to help, but I’m never certain if he welcomes chitchat or not.”

“Probably not. You’d overwhelm him with your version of chitchat.”

Both women giggled.

“Anyway, I wondered because I hadn’t seen him around since George’s funeral, and when I thought I saw him down here, I was relieved to see him out and about,” the Marie voice said. “He’s always been so standoffish. But I wonder if he needs help up there.”

“Help with what?” Doris asked.

“Help with anything. He’s all by himself. And I heard he’s moving. I’d hate to think he’s leaving just because he’s overwhelmed by that resort. He has a whole town here who would help him. Do you think he knows that?”

“I heard he’s got a young girl up there,” a man’s voice piped in.

Paige peered around the corner.
Ugh.
Kilner Kileen. He was always a troublemaker. He was a worse gossip than anyone else in this town.

“A young girl? You mean a girlfriend?” Doris questioned. “That would be good for Adam.”

“No.
Real
young,” Kilner added. “Like yay high. Like jailbait.”

Paige resisted the urge to stomp around the corner and shove Kilner to the ground. She wanted to explain that the young girl was Adam’s
daughter
.
She hated rumors. Especially slimy, sexual ones started by creeps like Kilner. It was one of the things that made this island deplorable. She couldn’t imagine how Natalie and Elliott and Olivia and Jon could live here all the time.

“I’m just sayin’ he’s maybe got some funny business goin’ on up there,” Kilner added.

Paige bit her lip. It was hard not to whirl around and shake some sense into that idiot. But this was not her information to share. She had no idea what Adam wanted the townspeople to know. And besides, she tried to remind herself that she, too, had believed much the same about Adam’s hermit ways not too many hours ago.

“Hmmm.” Doris didn’t sound convinced.

A silence fell in which Paige imagined the two women to be looking at more paperbacks, or maybe trying to move away from Kilner.

Paige inched slowly around the paper towels and slid her sunglasses on as she heard the front doorbell. She really didn’t want anyone to see her here. Who knew the place filled up at ten a.m.? She spun away from the door and stared intently at whatever was on the shelf nearest her.
Great.
K-Y Jelly. Trojans on the next shelf. She kept sliding until she was in front of the tampons, at least.

Kilner paid for his purchases, trying to get some agreement about his conclusions regarding Adam, but Mr. Fieldstone didn’t seem interested in feeding that fire. Kilner eventually shuffled out the door. The bell on the door handle seemed to cheerfully celebrate his exit.

“Well, that doesn’t sound right,” the Doris voice said, lower now, presumably just to Marie. “Adam seems like a nice young man. Although there was that curling-iron thing . . .”

A silence went on for about a minute; then Paige heard someone sigh. “I had always hoped they’d revive that apple festival,” the Doris voice added. “I guess they never will.”

“Remember those
pies
Ellen used to make?”

The women’s voices moved toward the front counter.

“Oh yes. And remember the dunking for apples and all the fun games? So much fun.”

As they moved farther away, Paige inched toward the back. She’d find her WD-40, her granola for tomorrow, a few pieces of fresh fruit, and get out of there with her flowers. Mr. Fieldstone looked rather distracted, and wasn’t making small talk with anyone, so she’d move quickly.

And stop thinking about Adam.

And Amanda.

And rumors.

She didn’t need to take all this so personally. These were not her battles to fight. Adam and Amanda were not her family to defend, and Nowhere Ranch was not her business.

She needed to keep her heart safe and out of the way, and just get business done here.

CHAPTER 7

Adam took careful note of the morning’s crosswinds and shifted his frame in the Cessna, adding a few extra knots of airspeed as he glanced at the ocean whitecaps and made his way back to his airport.

It had been a rough night. He hadn’t slept well, and he’d been up since daybreak to fly this charter. Now that his client was safely landed in LA, Adam could enjoy the flight back and take a few deep breaths.

And try to get his mind off everything.

It wasn’t easy. As if fixing the place, finding a fast buyer, and getting Amanda back to Alabama in time for the start of art school weren’t enough to worry about, he now had Paige Grant in his line of vision. And he didn’t know why she was rattling him.

At the beginning of their hot-tub conversation, all he’d been able to see was the young girl who’d caused so much trouble for him that one summer. And the one who, like him, had been blamed for those fires. Those were the rumors anyway. Half the town thought she’d done it, and half thought
he
had—Calamity June or Adam. His dad had gone with Adam. And had him thrown in jail, after Ginger threatened to report him if he didn’t. It was the beginning of the end between him and his dad, their trust forever severed since that day.

So he didn’t have great memories of that time. Or of Ginger. Or of Paige. But the more he’d talked with Paige last night, and the more she’d sauntered around the side of the tub, coming closer and closer, the more he’d started to see her as a different person.

She’d grown up. Obviously. He’d struggled to reconcile her sexiness in the velvet pantsuit—the way her curves made the color change and made him want to reach out and touch—with the young girl in the goth makeup. It had been easier to keep his eyes closed so his body didn’t betray him underwater. He needed to separate the two images of her. This new Paige was here to do business. This new Paige seemed smart and shrewd. Although she’d started out her negotiations with silly, romantic notions about wildflowers and gazebos and elaborate weddings, he could see now that she meant business and planned to get things done. And—especially interesting—this new Paige was someone he could relate to. Her stories about being a rebellious teen in Ginger’s world had made him smile. And reminded him of himself. And, frankly, of Amanda. He wondered if he and Paige Grant had met at a different time—and under different circumstances—they’d have been friends.

Although if she’d looked that good in velvet, maybe not.

He dipped his wing slightly. Out the window his island came into view, and he felt the usual peace that brought him. Though now the familiarity was tinged with an ache in the back of his throat. He hated to lose his mother’s family’s airport. He’d always felt as though he was his mother’s keeper—responsible for her and her memory—ever since he’d lost her. His dad had not cared about her family’s airport, so Adam had taken it on. His brother, Noel, had moved to Phoenix a year ago, and there was no way Adam was going to lasso him back to the island. Noel had made his escape, and Adam was happy for him.

And now, with Amanda here, he wasn’t going to tie her down, too. She wanted to leave. He understood that. Amanda had been embarking on her own dreams right before her mother died—she’d told him she’d been accepted into a prestigious art school she’d always wanted to go to in Alabama. And Adam wanted to give her a chance there. After losing her mother, he couldn’t let her dreams slip away, too. He’d be letting go of his mother’s legacy—and might never forgive himself for that—but he couldn’t screw up his new daughter’s life. Guilt and failure were warring with guilt and failure.

And guilt and failure were winning.

He dropped his wing deeper into the wind and searched for his visual cues. The recent May rains had left the Southern California island interior beautifully green, and he enjoyed the view as he tracked a herd of bison moving together through the center. There were three herds of free-roaming bison here on the island, initially brought here in 1952 for Dorothy Silver’s movie and never removed. His family had been contracted to help with herd control for many years, helping to ship bison off the island to the Dakotas, where they were allowed to roam free. But his dad had started drinking during those years, and eventually the Lavender Island Conservancy took over, implementing a new birth-control shot to manage the population in a simpler but equally humane way.

A few years ago, however, they’d come back and asked if Adam could take it over. He’d proven to be a great bison wrangler in his early twenties, and the company didn’t have anyone to match him. Adam contracted with them, much to his father’s dismay—George had always thought he’d gotten screwed over by the Conservancy. Adam had rebuilt the sorting pens and working chutes on his dad’s property, then took on one herd, then two, then all three, and eventually made it into his own business. His dad kept running the resort. Noel ran the airport. Then, last year, when his father died, everything fell apart. Adam struggled to keep three businesses afloat by himself. But it was too much now.

His family’s tiny airport slowly came into view, and he pushed his shirtsleeves up and tightened his seat belt. He dropped his other wing just enough and added a little uphill rudder, eventually crabbing toward the gravel runway.

The island airport was tricky for most pilots because it looked deceptively flat, although in reality it was a slight hill and needed to be approached as if you were coming out of a ditch. But he’d been flying this since he was fourteen and could do it with his eyes closed. After one glance at the family’s tattered wind sock, and four or five more dips of his wing, he let his wheels descend and finally crunch on the ground.

The impact rose through his soles in that warm, familiar sense of landing home. The steering mechanism vibrated under his hands. Leaning back, he pulled the sixteen hundred pounds of steel to a bouncing, wheel-popping, teasing-the-air, exhilarating stop.

Dust swirled. Silence welled. He closed his eyes while sounds of regular life—birds chirping, the sound of Denny barking across the gravel—all dragged him gradually back, as they always did.

Slowly, he crawled out of the plane.

“Glad to see me, Den?” he asked, scratching his old border collie behind the ears. “You might be the only one today.” Adam shifted his backpack onto his shoulder and tucked his sunglasses into his shirtfront, then strode across the dirt expanse, past the cactus garden, across the meadow, and up his wooden steps.

At the faded back door, he ran through his usual routine: he stamped the dust off, let Denny in, grabbed yesterday’s mail off the kitchen counter, checked on Amanda, saw she was still sleeping, then flipped through envelopes as he continued his trajectory through the wooden house and into the resort lobby.

“Hey, Kell,” he said to his receptionist, pretending to gaze at an invoice that had just arrived.

“Hi, Adam. Thanks for coming back so fast.”

He glanced up to see her balancing on top of a swivel stool to reach a shelf above the mailboxes, giving him a clear view under her skirt. He quickly looked away, as he always did with Kelly. Although she flirted with him relentlessly, she was much too young for him. Plus, he was in no position to be thinking about women these days anyway.

“You, uh—” He ran his hand along the back of his neck and kept his eyes down. “You need a hand with something?”

“I need this container with some of our old receipts.” Her voice strained as she reached for a willow-colored box on the top shelf.

“Let me get it.”

He waited until she got down, then crawled up onto the stool and retrieved the box she was reaching for.

“So you brought in a new guest last night?” she asked from below.

At the mention of Paige, the nervous feeling that had started in his gut began gnawing upward, pressing against his lungs.

“Yes,” he said.

“I thought you weren’t bringing in any more guests? Isn’t this dude group going to be the last?”

“This was an exception.”

Kelly didn’t respond to that but instead reached for the leather-bound hotel registry on the opposite end of the desk and dragged it, like a boulder, toward her. The monstrosity had belonged to Adam’s father. Although Adam had finally convinced him to put everything on the computer, the thick registry still remained, filled out in Kelly’s loopy scroll.

“Amanda didn’t register the new guest in here,” Kelly said, running her hot-pink, gnawed-off fingernail down the ledger. She wasn’t getting along very well with Amanda and seemed to like pointing out her faults.

“It doesn’t matter anymore, Kell,” he said softly.

He didn’t mean to meet her eyes. But when he did, he saw tears start to well there, and he had to look away.

“Why don’t you take a break?” he asked gruffly, moving some things along the counter so he didn’t have to look at her. “I have some bookkeeping to do.”

“I’m fine. Take your bookkeeping to the back,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”

He headed for the cramped office he’d built between the lobby and the kitchen. It was about the size of a closet—really just part of the hallway—but it served their needs and kept a buffer between the house and work. And now between him and Kelly. And tears. And the inevitability of their futures.

Adam plopped down at his father’s oak rolltop desk and pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes against the last will and testament that sprawled before him. He’d read it at least seventy times, looking for loopholes that might let his father’s employees have something to keep.

He rubbed his forehead again and thought about the worst part of the whole thing—
was he becoming just like his father?

George Mason’s cynicism, his distrust, his paranoia, his anger—Adam was starting to see it in himself. The older he got, the more cynical he got. And the more cynical he got, the angrier he got. He didn’t want to be this way. But dealing with his father’s debts and probate was aging him and making him similarly angry and bitter. And now with Amanda . . . he just couldn’t become that kind of father. George had been volatile, verbally abusive, always blaming. Adam knew George’s heavy drinking played a big part in that—as well as George’s years of blatant irresponsibility and gambling and womanizing—but he always worried there was some gene being passed down, too.

He pressed down the horrible awareness and scanned the will again. George had stipulated that Adam could keep the furnishings in the main house, the animals, and all the items in the garage, along with the box marked “Private” in the hangar. And, of course, the planes. Everything else would go into probate.

Adam’s chest tightened. At least he hadn’t lost the planes. If he and Noel did, indeed, have to unload the land, those Cessnas would be the only thing left. One was his and the other Noel’s, and they shared a Grumman S-2T they kept prepared with fire retardant that had been used for the island for years. He was surprised that his father had given them over so freely. Flying was a source of constant discord in their family.

Adam’s mother, Ellen, had been an airwoman in the military. And, although his father had initially fallen in love with her for her streak of adventure—so the story went—George later saw it as something to resent. George had resented her wildness. He’d resented her fierce independence. And he’d resented the fact that he’d had to stay on this land to keep it in her family. Of course, he’d made the best of it. He’d created an inn-like resort around the airstrip and made a living through the income it brought. But when the boys were born with their mother’s renegade spirit—that same spirit that longed to be free and propelled them into the sky as soon as they could reach the dials—George seemed to resent them all, both before and after her death. Maybe he’d been worried they’d all be free before he was.

Adam swiveled his desk chair and reached for his cell phone.

His buddy Bob picked it up on the first ring.

“One of the Grants is here,” Adam said.

Bob had been his father’s accountant for forty years and had always been a father figure to Adam. Even when George was alive, Bob was the one who’d taught Adam to hold doors open for women, helped him get decent car insurance, and knocked him hard once on the back of the head when he saw Adam grab a girl’s ass on the boat dock and told him never, ever to do that in public again. As an old friend of George, Bob also knew George’s indiscretions, his problems, his failings as a father. And he seemed to want to make them up to Adam.

“Is it Ginger?” Bob asked.

“No. One of the daughters.”

“Is that so? Huh. Is she at the resort?”

“Yeah. I gave her a place to stay.”

“What’s her plan?” Bob asked.

Adam relaxed in his chair. “She wants to put on some crazy wedding for Dorothy Silver, and then sell to her.”

“Dorothy
Silver
?”

“Yeah, do you remember her?”

“Who wouldn’t?”

Adam smiled. Bob always had a thing for old screen legends. He still had pinups in his den of Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth, much to the amusement of his wife, Gert. “Well, the daughter, she, uh . . . she wants to use some of the land over the next couple of months and then wants me to sell to Silver, too, at the end of the summer. She says Silver is willing to pay double.”

The silence that followed confused Adam. He’d expected Bob’s normal bark of laughter, but none came.

“Bob?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking. Or maybe remembering. What did you tell her?”

“I put her off until Thursday, when MacGregor will show up.”

The lack of response made Adam more uneasy. Bob had been the family’s financial adviser for years, and Adam trusted him completely. The problems they had right now stemmed from Adam’s father ignoring Bob’s advice.

“So do you think it’s something I should consider?” Adam asked.

“I could call around and see how serious she is. But with no formal offer, no, it’s not something we should consider. I know you’re in a hurry. MacGregor is paying cash and ready to go—and probate always takes longer, so the cash will move things along. Let me think on it. Oh, hey, Gert wants to talk to you.”