Brambleberry House: His Second-Chance Family

She held out the boxes in her arms. “You’ve got to stay for pizza. I ordered way too much for three women and two children.”

“Don’t forget Conan,” he pointed out. “He’s crazy about pizza, even though all that cheese is lousy for him.”

“Knowing my kids, I’m sure he’ll be able to sneak far more than is good for him.”

The scent of him reached her, spicy and male and far more enticing than any pizza smells. “I still have too much. Please stay.”

He gazed at the door with a look almost of desperation in his eyes. But when he turned back, she thought he might be weakening.

“Please, Will,” she pressed.

He opened his mouth to answer but before he could, the door to Abigail’s apartment opened and Maddie peeked her head out, looking tousled and sleepy.

“Can we come out now?” she asked.

“As long as the dog’s not going to knock me down to get to the Canadian bacon.”

At Maddie’s giggle, Julia saw a spasm of pain flicker across Will’s features and knew the battle was lost.

“I really can’t stay.” He reached for the doorknob. “Thanks anyway for the invitation, but I’ve got a lot of work to do at home.”

She couldn’t push him more, not with that shadow of pain clouding his blue eyes. Surrendering to the inevitable, she simply nodded. “You still need to eat. Take some home with you.”

She could see the objections forming on his expression and decided not to take no for an answer. Will Garrett didn’t know stubborn until he came up against her.

“What’s your pleasure? Pepperoni or Hawaiian? I’d offer you the vegetarian but I think Sage has dibs on that one.”

“It’s not necessary, really.”

“It is to me,” she said firmly. “You just spent forty-five minutes helping me haul boxes up. You have to let me repay you somehow. Here, I hope you still like pepperoni and olive.”

His eyes widened that she would remember such a detail. She couldn’t have explained why—it was just one of those arcane details that stuck in her head. Several times that last summer, they’d gone to Mountain Mike’s Pizza in town with her brother and Will always had picked the same thing.

“Maddie, can you hold this for a second?”

She gave the box marked pepperoni to her daughter, then with one hand she opened it and pulled out half the pizza, which she stuck on top of the Hawaiian.

He looked as if he wanted to object, but he said nothing when she handed him the box with the remaining half a pizza in it.

“Here you go. You should have enough for dinner tonight and breakfast in the morning as well. Consider it a tiny way to say thank you for all your hard work.”

He shook his head but to her vast relief, he didn’t hand the pizza back to her.

“Mom, I can’t hold him anymore!” Simon said from behind the door. “He’s starving and so am I!”

“You’d better get everyone upstairs for pizza,” Will said.

“Right. Good night, then.”

She wanted to say more—much more—but with a rambunctious dog and two hungry children clamoring for her attention, she had to be content with that.

* * *

BLASTED STUBBORN WOMAN.

Will sat on his deck watching the lights of Cannon Beach flicker on the water as he ate his third piece of pizza.

He had to admit, even lukewarm, it tasted delicious—probably a fair sight better than the peanut butter sandwich he would have scrounged for his meal.

He didn’t order pizza very often since half of it usually went to waste before he could get to the leftovers so this was a nice change from TV dinners and fast-food hamburgers.

He really needed to shoot for a healthier diet. Sage was always after him to get more vegetables and fewer preservatives into his diet. He tried but he’d never been a big one for cooking in the first place. He could grill steaks and burgers and the occasional chicken breast but he usually fell short at coming up with something to go alongside the entree.

He fell short in a lot of areas. He sighed, listening to the low rumble of the sea. He spent a lot of his free time puttering around in his dad’s shop or sitting out here watching the waves, no matter what the weather. He just hated the emptiness inside the house.

He ought to move, he thought, as he did just about every night at this same time when the silence settled over him with like a scratchy, smothering wool blanket.

He ought to just pick up and make a new start somewhere. Especially now that Julia Hudson Blair had climbed out of the depths of his memories and taken up residence just a few hundred yards away.

She knew.

Sometime during the course of the evening, Sage or Anna must have told her about the accident. He wasn’t quite sure how he was so certain, but he had seen a deep compassion in the green of her eyes, a sorrow that hadn’t been there earlier.

He washed the pizza down with a swallow of Sam Adams—the one bottle he allowed himself each night.

He knew it shouldn’t bother him so much that she knew. Wasn’t like it was some big secret. She would find out sooner or later, he supposed.

He just hated that first shock of pity when people first found out—though he supposed when it came down to it, the familiar sadness from friends like Sage and Anna wasn’t much easier.

Somehow seeing that first spurt of pity in Julia’s eyes made it all seem more real, more raw.

Her life hadn’t been so easy. She was a widow, so she must know a thing or two about loss and loneliness. That didn’t make him any more eager to have her around—or her kids.

He shouldn’t have made a big deal out of the whole thing. He should have just sucked it up and stayed for pizza with her and Sage and Anna. Instead, his kneejerk reaction had been to flee and he had given into it, something very unlike him.

He sighed and took another swallow of beer. From here, he could see her bedroom light. A dark shape moved across the window and he eased back into the shadows of his empty house.

Why was he making such a big deal about this? Julia meant nothing to him. Less than nothing. He hadn’t thought about her in years. Yeah, years ago he had been crazy about her when he was just a stupid, starry-eyed kid. He had dreamed about her all that last summer, when she came back to Cannon Beach without her braces and with curves in all the right places.

First love could be an intensely powerful thing for a sixteen-year-old boy. When she left Cannon Beach, his dreams of a long-distance relationship were quickly dashed when she didn’t write to him as she had promised. He had tried to call the phone number she’d given him and left several messages that were never returned.

He was heartbroken for a while but he’d gotten over it. By spring, when he’d taken Robin Cramer to the prom, he had completely forgotten about Julia Hudson and her big green eyes.

Life had taught him that a tiny little nick in his heart left by a heedless fifteen-year-old girl was nothing at all to the pain of having huge, jagged chunks of his soul ripped away.

Now, sixteen years later, Julia was nothing to him. He just needed to shake this weird feeling that the careful order of the life he had painstakingly managed to piece together in the last two years had just been tossed out to sea.

He could think of no earthly reason he shouldn’t be able to treat her and her children with politeness, at least.