Forever and a Day (Lucky Harbor) Read online

  In a perfect imitation of Anna.

  Josh looked like maybe he wanted to tear out his hair. He moved down the hall and knocked on Anna’s door.

  “Go away!” she yelled.

  Josh strode back into the living room, looking as if he needed a long vacay.

  “You okay?” Grace asked him.

  “I don’t know.” He lifted his head and pinned her with his gaze. “Tell me about last night.”

  “What about it?” she asked carefully, not wanting to fess up to anything he couldn’t remember.

  He looked at her for another long moment, during which she did her best to look innocent.

  “You could start by showing me the rest of that sexual fantasy list,” he said.

  Okay, she thought with a blush, so he did remember.

  Gaze dark, he stepped toward her, but his phone went off. Josh swore, grabbed his laptop, then strode to the door.

  Grace let out a breath, then sucked it in again when he turned back and lifted her up so that they were nose to nose.

  “Now I owe you,” he said softly, then set her down, brushed a kiss over her mouth, and vanished.

  Chapter 14

  I would give up chocolate, but I’m not a quitter.

  It was a long day. At the office, every patient Josh saw wanted to talk about Mrs. Porter. They were devastated. His staff was devastated. By the time he got home, he was more done in than he’d been last night, and that was saying something.

  He’d called ahead. Toby was asleep. Anna was heading out as soon as he got home. He could have done whatever he wanted with the evening.

  But there was only one thing he wanted to do.

  Grace.

  The lights in the guesthouse were blazing. Through the windows, he could see Grace sitting on the couch, but she wasn’t alone. She was with Mallory and Amy, talking and laughing. In front of them on the coffee table was an opened file box, and papers were scattered across the entire table, bookended by an open laptop and an adding machine.

  It was a visceral reminder that Grace had a whole other life outside of his.

  She’d taken on two more clients, which he’d heard from Dee, who’d heard it from Lucille, who’d heard it from Anderson at the hardwood store, since he was one of those clients. The other new client was the ice-cream shop on the pier and the two brothers who ran it. Lance and Tucker probably had no bookkeeping system at all, so Grace had her work cut out for her—not that it would be a problem. She seemed to have a way of getting to it all, making everything all work out. He admired that. She was just a sweet, smart, hard-working woman doing her best to find herself. No complaining, no feeling sorry for herself, doing what she had to do to get by.

  She had her hair pulled up in a ponytail, but a few pale silk strands had escaped, framing her face, brushing her throat and shoulders.

  Just looking at her had his body humming. And though she couldn’t possibly see him standing in the dark night, she went still, then turned her head, and peered outside.

  Unerringly looking right at him.

  She said something to Mallory and Amy, then rose in one fluid motion and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her.

  They met in the shadows near the shallow end of the pool.

  “Hey,” she said, looking like a vision in a loose white top that fell off one shoulder and white shorts showing a mile or two of sexy leg.

  “Hey yourself,” he said. “How did your day go?”

  “Well, I didn’t kill Tank, Toby continues to master the English language, and Anna didn’t run off today. Progress.”

  “Great, but I meant you. How are you?” She looked surprised, which he didn’t like. “You think I don’t want to hear about you too?” he asked.

  She nibbled on her lower lip.

  “Grace?”

  “This thing between us…it’s still just fun, right?”

  He studied her a moment. “How does that translate into me not caring about you?”

  She blew out a breath and looked away. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not very good at this. I don’t mix well with a guy like you.”

  “A guy like me,” he said, trying to figure out what that meant.

  “Look, it’s all me, okay? I knew going into this thing that it couldn’t possibly work, but I just kept…” She broke off and looked away. “I’m sorry.”

  “A guy like me,” he repeated again. “Grace, I’m trying like hell to follow you but…”

  She looked at him and blinked, as if she didn’t understand how he wasn’t catching the obvious. “We’re so different,” she said. “You’ve got your life in gear, all planned out. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to know but…” She trailed off and looked at him again, as if expecting him to nod in agreement.

  But he was still clueless. “If you think my life is working on some plan that I’ve set out,” he said, “you haven’t been paying attention. Nothing is how I planned it. And as for mixing well, I think we mix pretty fucking well.”

  “Yes, but isn’t that just sex?”

  “Not yet,” he said with grim amusement. “But not for lack of chemistry. And there’s no ‘just sex’ about it.”

  She stared up at him, apparently speechless. There weren’t crickets out tonight, but if there had been, they’d be chirping Beethoven about now. That’s when it came to him like a smack upside the back of the head. “Who was the guy?” he asked.

  “Guy?”

  “The one who screwed you over, the one with some big, grand plan, I’m guessing. A plan that didn’t work out in your favor. Was he a doctor?”

  Grace drew an audible breath to speak and then shook her head. “That obvious?”

  “No,” he said. “Or I’d have caught on a lot sooner. And you’d think I would have since I was once burned by a big, grand plan too.”

  She sighed. “Bryce Howard the third.”

  “Sounds like a dick already.”

  She choked out a laugh that spoke more of remembered misery than humor. “He’s a friend of the family. His parents are well-known and respected biomedical engineers, on the pioneer front of cardiovascular research.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “We always knew we’d end up together,” she said. “It was sort of expected, actually.”

  “Expected? Didn’t anyone realize it’s the twenty-first century?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” she said quietly. “I liked Bryce.”

  And then Josh really got it. Christ, he was slow on the uptake. “You loved him.”

  “Yes.” She let out a shaky breath. “I did. I loved him until the day after our engagement, when he came home and told me to pack because we were moving to England for his job, which was a six-year study grant. It was a great opportunity, but…”

  “You didn’t like being told what your life would look like for the next six years,” he guessed.

  She shook her head. “And you know what the really sad thing was? If he’d so much as asked, or even gave a thought to me and my job, I’d have junked it all to go with him.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He left the next day,” she said. “And shortly after, my job vanished when the economy dived.”

  “You could have looked him up,” he said. “Gone to him then.”

  “Thought about it,” she admitted. “But by then I was seeing someone else.”

  “Another PhD?”

  “Yes, but a bank guy this time,” she said. “Stone Cameron. He lost his job the same day I lost mine, only he’d invested in property instead of stocks. He had a house in Australia. He went there to go surf out the economy problems.”

  “He ask you to go with?”

  “Nope.” She shook her head. “This time, I wasn’t in the plans at all.”

  Josh was starting to get the whole picture now, and he didn’t like it much. “So your parents had big life plans for you. Bryce had big life plans for you. Stone just had big plans. And no one ever asked you your plans.”