Kitabı oku: «The Cliff House», sayfa 2

2

BEATRIZ

“Do you really think Dad is okay?”

Bea tried not to think about those tabloid photos or the man with the blood seeping out of his gut.

“Yes, honey. I do,” she assured her daughter. “He said so himself when he called that first night, and his manager swears he only needed a few days to process what happened before he returns to his regular activities.”

“Where do you think he might be?” In the rearview mirror, she caught Mari’s frown in the back seat of her SUV.

That one was harder to answer. “I’m not sure. Maybe with his extended relatives down in Mexico or at the island he likes off Panama. He’ll be in touch.”

“He should be answering his phone. It’s irresponsible of him not to. He has to know I’ll worry about him.”

Sometimes she thought Mari was born sounding about Stella’s age.

“You know he’ll be in touch as soon as he can, honey.”

She was annoyed all over again at Cruz for not considering the impact on his daughter of the highly publicized attack against him. How hard would it be for him to make a freaking phone call to assure their child he was okay?

Then again, he had never been particularly good at checking in with her when they were married and he was touring. Why should he change his habits for their child?

When they returned to the house she had moved into along the coast road after her divorce, the lights were on out by the pool.

“Looks like Shane is swimming!” Mari said. “Can I go out and swim, too?”

She might have guessed he would be there, probably with his sweet yellow Labrador retriever, Sally, either playing in the water with him or lounging on the side.

Her elaborate pool with its secret grotto, waterfalls and high-tech hot tub had become his favorite part of living in the guesthouse. Just a few nights earlier, he told her the pool would be the thing he missed most when the renovations to his own house were finished.

She still wasn’t sure why that had stung so much.

“He might not be there much longer. We don’t know how long he’s already been in the pool. But I don’t mind if he doesn’t. Go ahead and change into your suit.”

“I’ll hurry. I can go fast. Come on, Jojo,” she said, already racing for the door with their little dog scampering along behind her.

Mari, like everyone else in town, adored Shane. Bea had gone with him to enough restaurants or community events to see how people in town respected Shane. Everybody wanted to talk to him, to tell him about their son or nephew or grandson who was on his team, to shake his hand and tell him thanks for all he had done for the town and to wish him well on bringing home the state championship again.

After the shoulder injuries that ended his glowing NFL career, Shane could have thrown a serious pity party. Instead, he had moved home to be with his father during Bill Landry’s final two years and spent six months of that time finishing his teaching certificate to go with the biology degree he earned playing college ball.

He could have taken a position on a major university football staff and possibly worked his way up to a Division One head coach. She knew he’d had offers. Good ones. Instead, he was choosing to make his home here in this little town on the Northern California coast, teaching freshman and sophomore biology and coaching a ragtag group of kids.

Feeling restless for reasons she couldn’t identify, Bea headed to the vast master suite, which she slept in alone, to change into her swimming suit.

Since Shane had moved into the guesthouse two months earlier, something had changed between them and she wasn’t sure what it was or how to fix it.

They used to be best friends. She used to be able to talk to him about anything going on in her life: her latest art show, the problems Mari was having with a friend, how Daisy had frustrated her that day. All her hopes, dreams, worries.

He had been there when her marriage broke up and she tried to find her way as a single mom.

She, in turn, had helped him navigate the end of his NFL career and had provided emotional support during the final difficult months of his father’s life as heart disease and diabetes eventually claimed Bill Landry.

Bea had been the unofficial football team mom to his high schoolers the previous year. She took refreshments to practice; she hosted game-viewing parties in her home theater; she knew all their names and cheered on every single game, home or away.

Things had been fine until Shane decided to renovate his father’s home next door to Stella’s. The place hadn’t been updated since the sixties when it was built and needed extensive work. It had been Bea’s bright idea to offer Shane the guesthouse here while the inside of his place was gutted and redone with new electricity and plumbing.

She wished she had never opened her big, stupid mouth.

She hated this edginess that had tormented her around him over the summer. She wanted things to go back to the way they’d been before.

Life rolled on. That was one of Cruz’s songs that she had helped him write, back in the glory days of their relationship. Life rolled on. You either rolled with it or let it flatten you as it rolled by.

She changed quickly and found her daughter throwing on her flip-flops near the patio doors.

Shane was swimming laps and didn’t notice them at first, giving Bea a chance to admire the picture he made in the moonlight: muscles rippling across his wide shoulders, tapering down to slim hips in red board shorts.

She used to tease him that if he grew his sun-streaked hair out to his shoulders, he could pass for Thor before the buzz cut of the more recent movies.

She sighed. She hadn’t teased him in a long time. When she tried, her words tangled and she ended up sounding stupid and awkward.

Marisol didn’t wait for him to notice them. She jumped headlong into the deep end, just feet in front of him.

Shane paused in midstroke and lifted his head out of the water. His hair was wet, droplets clinging to his face, and Bea curled her fingers at her side against the urge to wipe them away.

Cut it out, she snapped at herself. He didn’t see her that way. To Shane, she was like a kid sister, one he’d had to bail out of one too many scrapes.

He smiled as Marisol swam toward him like the little fish she was. “Hey, Sunshine.”

Mari grinned at the nickname he always called her, a play on the sol part of Marisol, which meant “sun.”

“Hey, Shane. Guess what? We went to Aunt Stella’s birthday party tonight. She turned forty. Can you believe she’s that old?”

He sent an amused look toward Bea that made butterflies explode to life inside her. “Forty is far from old, kiddo. And anyway, your aunt Stella is the youngest forty-year-old I know.”

“I guess. Race you to the other side. I’m gonna win this time.”

“Says who?” He took off after her and the race was on.

Bea contented herself with swimming laps while the two of them were being silly, taking turns on the diving board with the most elaborate dive, then playing a hot game of one-on-one basketball with the freestanding hoop Shane had bought the previous summer.

Bea swam into the grotto and watched them play through the waterfall. Jojo and Sally, the best of friends, had climbed out some time ago and were curled up together on the outdoor carpet that marked one of the seating areas around the pool.

They loved the pool as much as their humans.

Keeping it heated year-round was sheer indulgence, but Bea didn’t care. Fortunately, Cape Sanctuary had a fairly temperate climate and the thermometer rarely dipped below freezing.

As she might have predicted, Mari started to tire after about an hour in the pool, especially as she’d already had a long day with friends earlier, then the excitement of Stella’s party.

After winning the basketball game by one layup, her daughter climbed out of the pool and started drying off, which seemed to signal to Shane it was time to do the same. After a moment Bea dived through the waterfall so she could exit, embracing the cold drops on her back.

She had left her towel on the chaise next to his and she tried not to stare at his broad, muscled chest as they both dried off, or the network of ugly scars on his shoulder that had ended up changing his life. What would he do if she pressed her lips just there, to the biggest and ugliest of the scars?

“How’s Stella doing with her big birthday?” Shane asked, obviously oblivious to her turmoil.

She swallowed, appalled at herself. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “She has been acting really strange lately. Daisy thinks she’s hiding something from us.”

“It’s not every day a person turns forty. Could be she’s taking it harder than you might have expected.”

“Maybe.”

She suspected there was more to it than simply another cycle around the sun, but Stella could sometimes be an enigma.

“She was mad at me for not taking you along to her party. Apparently, you’re as much a part of her tribe as me or Mari or Daisy.”

His mouth twisted into a smile as he pulled on a T-shirt from his NFL team and she tried not to be too disappointed as he hid all those glorious muscles.

“How was your day?” she asked abruptly.

“Good. The bedrooms are all framed and the drywall subcontractors are finally coming tomorrow.”

“That’s terrific! That will make a big difference. The place is coming along.”

“Yeah. It’s too bad we had so many delays with the plumbers’ and the electricians’ schedules. I would have liked to be out of your hair before the football season started, but we should be back on track now. Probably another month and I’ll be gone.”

She wanted to tell him he wasn’t in her hair, nor was she in a big hurry to send him on his way. She couldn’t figure out how to say either of those things without sounding weird.

“You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” she finally said.

“I know. And I appreciate that. But friends try to be careful not to overstay their welcome.”

“I’m just saying. If you want to wait until the season is over and you have more time to move back, it’s fine.”

“Thanks.”

He held her gaze long enough that she felt flustered and reached down to put on her flip-flop. Somehow she stepped on an uneven paving stone on the pool decking and started to lose her balance.

Shane, with the reflexes he’d always had as a wide receiver, reached in to catch her like she had been thrown by Tom Brady himself.

The heat and strength of him enveloped her and she froze, his face inches from hers. His shirt was damp from where he’d thrown it over his wet muscles, and she wanted to stay right here forever.

Her gaze drifted to his mouth, firm and well shaped and beautifully familiar. She wanted to kiss him. Right now, even with Mari playing with the dogs on the stretch of grass outside the pool area.

“Shane,” she began, not at all sure what she wanted to say after that one word. Whatever she intended was lost by the dogs’ sudden barks and her daughter’s exclamation.

“Daddy!” Mari cried.

If Shane hadn’t been holding Bea already, she would have toppled to the ground in shock.

Cruz. Here? She whirled around and found the man, the legend, the last person on earth she wanted to see right now walking toward them.

Out of all the moments out of any day, Cruz would naturally pick this particular one to make an entrance.

“Hey, Mari Mia!”

Shane’s arms tightened around her for just a moment before he helped steady her so she could stand on her own.

“Hola, Beatriz, my lovely wife.”

Ex-wife, she wanted to tell him. Don’t forget those all-important two letters.

He didn’t look any happier to see Shane than vice versa. His long-lashed dark eyes seemed to go flat, his lean features to tighten.

“And Landry. Hey. Fancy seeing you here.”

“Shane lives here now,” Mari piped up, so very helpfully.

Cruz greeted that information with a scowl. She probably should have mentioned that fact to him before now, she suddenly realized, especially where she was so very diligent about vetting everyone staying with Cruz when he had visitations with Mari.

“Temporarily,” she said, then wished she hadn’t when Shane’s mouth firmed.

She was suddenly annoyed with both of them for this dance they always did, circling around each other like bighorn sheep, ready to bang horns at any moment.

“He’s renovating his father’s house next door to Stella’s and it was faster to move out so he could gut it and start over, rather than working room by room, living in a construction zone. The guesthouse has been sitting there empty, so I offered it to Shane while the work is being done.”

She didn’t owe him any explanations. It wasn’t like anything was going on with her and Shane. Even if it were, she and Cruz had been divorced for years and she didn’t doubt her ex-husband had slept with plenty of women in that time. Tabloids like the one she had picked up earlier were always posting pictures of him with some young beauty or other.

Shane was her oldest and dearest friend. If she wanted him to move into the guesthouse here at Felicidad permanently, Cruz had no right to object.

“Are you okay, Daddy?” Mari asked, oblivious to the tension between the two men. “We’ve been so worried about you, ever since we heard you were attacked.”

“I’m fine, mija. Just fine.”

“The tabloids said you got stabbed. My friend Jamie said you almost died.”

“That’s an exaggeration. I’ve told you not to pay attention to what you read online or in magazines. I just had a scratch. A couple of stitches, that’s it.”

He sank down onto the comfortable glider next to their loungers and Mari sat down beside him, still holding his hand. “I’m not saying it wasn’t scary,” Cruz went on. “If it hadn’t been for a friend of mine who pushed me out of the way, things could have been much worse.”

Like many celebrities, Cruz had plenty of acolytes and hangers-on, but she couldn’t imagine any of them risking their lives for him.

“We tried to call you and left like a hundred messages.” Mari didn’t bother to hide her frustration with her father. A frustration Bea certainly shared.

“I’m sorry, mija. Things have been crazy with all the press calling for comments, so I ended up turning off my phone and going silent. Lenny said he called you regularly with updates.”

“He did,” Bea said. But hearing from a third party wasn’t enough when a girl was worried about her dad.

She was familiar with that from firsthand experience and it made her heart ache that she and her daughter both knew what it was to suffer from parental neglect. Bea’s own father had been a piece of work. Unlike Daisy, Bea at least knew who her father was, but their relationship had been minimal.

Her stepmother had disliked her intensely and made sure Steve Hidalgo devoted his time and energy to the children they shared and had as little to do with his love child as possible.

That was the main reason she did all she could to keep Cruz in their lives. Girls needed their fathers, if at all possible. Without their influence, the scars from that neglect could lead them to do crazy things, like get pregnant when they were seventeen and marry their rocker boyfriends.

Not that she knew anything about that.

“Next time you’re stabbed, do a better job of updating those who are worried about you, okay?” Bea said.

“Sorry,” he said again. “I’m here now, right?”

“I guess.” Mari hugged him, always quick to forgive.

“The good news is, I’ll be around for a while. I’m taking an extended break here at Casa Del Mar.”

As usual, her desire for her daughter to have as healthy a relationship as possible with her father warred with Bea’s desire to live outside the shadow of Cruz’s notoriety.

“How long are you staying?” She had to ask. Forewarned was forearmed, right?

He beamed at her and at Mari. “At least a month. Maybe longer. Won’t that be great?”

Bea did her best not to gulp. “That long? Aren’t you in the middle of a concert tour?”

“We have two weeks left for the new album. I postponed them and will make up the dates in the fall. My fans understand. After what happened in Dallas, I need a few weeks to recover.”

Why did he have to recover here?

She knew she hadn’t spoken aloud but he answered as if he read her mind. “I couldn’t imagine anywhere better to recharge my batteries than here in Cape Sanctuary, with my two favorite girls.”

Shane made a sound that could have been a scoff or a laugh, she couldn’t quite tell. He wrapped the towel around his neck and reached a hand out to Cruz.

“It’s good to see you, but I should go,” Shane said. “We’re working on some new plays for the season. I’m glad you weren’t seriously hurt.”

“Any knife wound is serious. That’s what the doc says. The risk of infection is huge.”

“Right. Well, let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Thanks for the game of hoops, Sunshine. You get better every time we play.”

Mari beamed at him. “Night, Shane. I won’t rub it in your face that you lost, I promise.”

“Thanks for sparing my feelings,” he said with a grin. He kissed the top of her head then leaned over to give Bea their usual hug.

She could smell him, chlorine and shampoo and delicious male. To her surprise, he didn’t stop with a hug but kissed her cheek, and she fought a powerful urge to lift her mouth to his.

Where on earth were all these strange impulses coming from?

“Good night,” she murmured.

“Night. Come on, Sal.”

He waved to them all, then headed to the guesthouse on the edge of her property with his yellow Lab following after him.

The place wasn’t huge, a one-bedroom with a separate combined kitchen and living room and a decent-size bathroom, but it was plenty big enough for one man and a dog, especially for only a few months.

It had seemed a great idea a few months ago, the perfect solution when he needed somewhere to live during the renovation. In retrospect, she wished she’d never invited him to stay here at Felicidad. She wanted their friendship back.

“I wish you’d told me he was living here,” Cruz said when Shane went inside the guesthouse and they, in turn, headed inside the main house.

She sighed. “He’s not living with me. He’s living in the guesthouse, as you can clearly see. Farther away than when he lived next door to Three Oaks.”

Even if Shane were living inside the main house, in one of the six bedrooms, she had more than enough room.

It was too much house for only her and Mari. She knew that and some part of her wished she’d chosen differently when she was shopping for properties. But Daisy had advised her this was a good investment and she did love her studio that overlooked the ocean and had all the natural light she could ever want.

As usual, though, she had been weak and let other people determine her destiny.

“I’m going to change out of my swimming suit. I’ll be right back,” Mari said, hurrying off to her bedroom at the end of the hall, the one with the loft bed Shane had helped Bea build.

“I bet Landry jumped at the chance to move here,” Cruz said when she was gone.

She frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means. Shane has always had a thing for you.”

What did Cruz see that she didn’t? Those strange butterflies seemed to flutter around again.

“You’re crazy. He has not. We’re friends. Best friends. We have been since fifth grade.”

Cruz scoffed. “Shane Landry wants more than friendship from you. You’re the only one who doesn’t see it.”

He was wrong. He had to be. She’d been divorced for years. If Shane was interested in her, why didn’t he do anything about it? Sure, he had been busy with his NFL career then the injury that had ended it, then caring for his ailing father the past few years. But he had dated other women in that time. He certainly hadn’t shown the slightest inclination that he wanted to kick their relationship to another level.

Cruz didn’t know what he was talking about. She wasn’t in the mood to argue with him, though.

“Are you really planning to spend an entire month here in Cape Sanctuary? Mari will love it, but you can’t be away from your career that long, can you?”

“My team understands that I need this. I want to spend more time with my family. My baby girl. I almost died, babe. That crazy bastard wanted me gone. When I close my eyes, I can still see him coming at me.”

She couldn’t even imagine. “It must have been terrifying.”

“That kind of thing messes with your head. I’ve had nightmares every night since it happened. I wanted to fly back here that night after they stitched me up to be with you and Mari but I didn’t feel right about leaving Gabe. That’s the guy who saved my life.”

“Was he seriously hurt?”

Cruz nodded, looking uncharacteristically grim. “It was touch and go for a while. He ended up losing part of his liver.”

“Oh, no!” She’d had no idea things had been that grave for the man who had stepped in front of a knife for Cruz.

“For a while there, the docs said he might need a transplant. I was going to offer, but we both know mine’s probably not in the best of shape.”

He grinned but she didn’t find the comment at all amusing. His drinking and his recreational drug use were partly responsible for the breakup of their marriage, helped along by his chronic infidelity. Cruz, known as one of rock’s sexiest bad boys, had a tough time resisting his legion of groupies.

He didn’t look particularly bad now, sprawled out on one of her kitchen chairs. “Turns out, they just removed the damaged part.”

“Is he okay now?” Bea asked.

“He’s out of the woods. That’s another reason I’m back. After he was released from the hospital, he needed a place to recover. I told him there was no better place on earth to recuperate than here in Cape Sanctuary. He’s back at the house.”

Along with probably a dozen groupies and other hangers-on. The king of rock had to travel with his court.

“I’d love you to meet him,” Cruz continued. “Both you and Mari.”

“Before I can let her stay, you know I’ll need to have Peter run a background check on this Gabe person and everyone else who is here with you at Casa Del Mar.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She had made it a requirement of their custody agreement, that she needed to vet all the people who surrounded her famous ex-husband before exposing her daughter to any of them. Her attorney who handled that for her was on speed dial and she would call him in the morning.

“I’ll get you the names,” Cruz said. They had been through this routine so many times that he only sounded a little annoyed. He understood by now that she was only concerned for their daughter’s safety.

The circumstances of the past few weeks reinforced that her husband lived in a precarious, larger-than-life world where strangers could attack with hunting knives and change a person’s life forever.

“Are you really okay?” Bea asked. She had loved Cruz once, as deeply and passionately as a teenage girl could. Even in her early twenties she had cared for him, until his success had changed him from the earnest, loving boy with the golden voice and poet’s soul to a man addicted to his fans and his fame.

“I’m fine physically. Like I said, just a scratch.” He paused. “Emotionally and mentally, that’s another story. Coming this close to death, knowing I could check out at a moment’s notice...that has made me reevaluate everything.”

“And what startling conclusions have you come up with?”

“That I never should have agreed to our divorce,” he said bluntly.

The words came out of nowhere and just about knocked her over. If they had still been standing by the pool, she might have toppled in.

“Of course you should have. It was your idea in the first place! We were miserable together.”

“I don’t remember being miserable. I remember being madly in love. You’ve always been the only one who gets me, babe.”

She so did not want to have this conversation. Not when Mari could come back into the room at any moment.

Once, this man had been everything to her. When she found out she was pregnant, she had been over the moon, couldn’t wait to run away with him to Los Angeles so they could get married and he could become the big star they both seemed to know was his fate.

She had sacrificed everything for his music career. Even while pregnant and in the months after having Mari, she had worked three jobs, checking in a supermarket in the mornings, delivering pizzas in the afternoon and waiting tables at night.

When his momentum started to build and he found representation that believed in their vision of him, too, they thought all their dreams had come true.

She and Cruz might have made it work. There were certainly couples that could handle juggling a family and standing in the limelight, too, when one of them had a high-powered, very public career. Beatriz and Cruz Romero hadn’t been one of those couples.

They started to fight about his drinking and drug use, about his friends, about the other women he couldn’t seem to resist.

They had loved each other passionately, but little by little that love had dried up, until there had been nothing left but the empty husks of what they had once been to each other.

Now, apparently, Cruz wanted to see if they could resurrect those seeds.

“I want you and Mari in my life again,” he said with the same earnestness he brought to his ballads that made teenage girls everywhere go weak-kneed. “Every day. The three of us against the world. I want the chance to prove to you I’ve changed. I’m a different man than the one who let you go.”

“Because a crazed fan came at you with a knife.”

“Because I’ve grown up. I’ve come to realize nothing else matters but you and Mari.”

He reached for her hand, wrapping both of his around it. “You were the best thing I ever had going for me, babe. I’ve always known that. I would never have come this far without you.”

She couldn’t deny there was some truth to that. She had helped shape his early career, cowriting some of his early songs and laying the groundwork for the awards, sold-out tours and multiplatinum record sales that would follow.

She had walked away from that world, had devoted the past five years here in Cape Sanctuary to giving their child a normal life and rebuilding the jagged pieces of her heart.

How could he simply stroll into her home, utter a few words and think she would be willing to jump right back into the mess?

She slipped her hand from his and moved to put a chair between them.

Cruz noted her movement with a frown. “You have that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“The Cruz-is-loco look.”

“Of course I think you’re crazy! I’m sorry, but you can’t just walk in here after we’ve been happily divorced all these years and drop a bombshell like this on me without any warning!”

“I’m laying my cards out on the table from the very start. I want another chance with you. You don’t have to make any decisions right now. I knew it wouldn’t be that easy. I betrayed your trust.”

“Again and again and again,” she pointed out.

He stuck his lower lip out, looking remarkably like Mari used to as a toddler when she wanted a toy in the store. “I know there’s a price for my bad behavior but I think I’ve been paying that all these years.”

“Have you?”

“I’ve been without you and my little girl. Isn’t that enough of a price? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life alone. I still care about you and want to see if we could rebuild something on the ashes of what we burned down.”

“Let me guess. That’s a new song you’re working on.”

“It should be, right?” He grinned, teeth gleaming, and she could feel herself weaken. She was as susceptible to that famous Cruz Romero smile as the rest of the female population of the world, she couldn’t deny.

Fortunately, she was saved from having to answer and from her own weaknesses by the appearance of their daughter, who hurried into the room and right back to her father’s side.

“Can I stay at Casa Del Mar tonight, Daddy?”

A few years ago he probably would have said yes, leaving Bea to explain to her child that there were certain steps that had to be taken first. This time, after a quick glance in her direction, he shook his head. “Not tonight. I’m sorry. But soon, I promise.”

Marisol huffed a little but accepted his words. She couldn’t seem to stop hugging her father, clearly delighted to have him in town.

Bea suspected that if it was up to their child, she and Cruz would have reunited years ago. Marisol would love nothing more than for the two of them to get back together. Whenever Cruz left after one of his infrequent visits to town or whenever she returned from staying with him somewhere on the road or at his house in Southern California, she would mope around for days.

Bea knew too well how that felt, to pine for something she couldn’t have.

Shane Landry wants more than friendship from you, Cruz had said. You’re the only one who doesn’t see it.

It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. She would have picked up on the signs earlier.

Still, the very idea that Shane might want to deepen their friendship left her ridiculously breathless. She would rather think about that than try to figure out what she was going to do about Cruz and his sudden, nonsensical desire to reunite.