Chapter 4
“I ’m telling you, he was like some mythical god emerging from the woods to rescue Jesse,” Delilah told Roxanne later that evening when the kids had been fed and bathed and were watching TV before bed. “If it weren’t for the scratches on Jesse’s knees, I would think I imagined the whole thing.”
“So, he gave you his card? Are you going to call him?” Roxanne asked.
“Well, maybe to lead a hike for us, since we obviously can’t be trusted to go on our own. But I’m not going to call him , call him.”
“Was he wearing a ring?”
“No.”
“Were you?”
Delilah hesitated. “No. I finally put it in my drawer a few weeks ago.”
“Okay, then. How do you know he didn’t give you his card because he wants to go out with you? How do you know it was just business?”
Delilah barked out a bitter laugh. “You didn’t see him. There’s no way that man gave me his card because he wants to go out with me.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because he was so hot it was absurd. I mean really ridiculous. He probably dates underwear models. You know, ones who are working on their advanced degrees in astrophysics in their spare time. What would he want with me?”
Roxanne was quiet for a moment, and Delilah felt the lecture coming before she even started to speak.
“Mitch did this to you,” she said.
“Roxanne …”
“He did. He convinced you that weren’t beautiful enough, that you weren’t smart enough or sophisticated enough or … just enough of anything for him. But you are all those things. He was the one who failed the relationship, not you.”
And, damn it, Delilah felt tears spring to her eyes, felt the heat and the pressure of it. She rubbed her eyes with her fingers and took in a shaky breath. “Yeah, well. I don’t want to date anyone, anyway. I’m just … I can’t imagine putting myself through that again.”
“I’m not saying you should marry the guy. Just maybe call him and see what happens.”
“No, thank you.”
“Well.”
“I can’t think about men when I’m still so fucking mad at Mitch. You know? What he did to me is one thing, but abandoning the boys? You should have seen the way they looked at the guy on the trail. Like he was some kind of miracle. They’re so starved for a father—or at least for some strong male figure—that it makes me want to scream or cry or throw something. Jesse can’t stop talking about him.”
“Aww. Poor kid.”
“He keeps saying we should invite this guy over because he did us a favor, and that’s what you do when someone does you a favor. You invite them over. The neighbor brought us some muffins, so I invited her over for tea, and now Jesse’s fixated on it.”
“ Hmm ,” Roxanne said. “How hot did you say he is?”
“Like Chris Hemsworth if Chris Hemsworth were maybe ten percent hotter.”
“Maybe inviting him over isn’t the worst idea in the world. But maybe wait long enough for me to fly out there first.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“Who says I’m joking?”
“I’m hanging up now.”
She did, but she felt a little better than she had before she’d called. A little lighter. Talking to her sister always helped.
She set her phone aside and went into the living room to herd her sons to bed.
Quinn spent the rest of the day alone in his house, working.
Cambria—like any other coastal California town—was an expensive place to live. That meant he couldn’t make a living just from guiding tourists on wilderness adventures. He refused to work a nine-to-five job, though—he’d done it before, and he’d hated it with the fiery intensity of a nuclear explosion. Instead, he’d cobbled together multiple freelance gigs to support himself.
He wrote articles for outdoors magazines when he could get the work. The rest of the time, he built websites for a wide range of clients including small businesses, restaurants, even authors and artists.
After rescuing the kid, he’d come home, showered, and started working on a review of backpacking equipment: “ten things to leave out of your pack, and ten things you shouldn’t leave home without.” Everything was lists these days. Or, when he was writing copy for a website, those damned slide shows. Slide shows were the bane of his existence.
When he’d gotten a good start on that, he set it aside and put in some time on a website for a local furniture store. They already had a site, but it was crap. They needed it to be more functional, more intuitive for the user. And, of course, they needed it not to look like hell.
He sat at his desk in front of his computer nursing a beer, his shirt off, his music up loud. He liked something low-key while he was writing—acoustic indie, maybe, or some soft R&B—and something high-presence for website work. Right now, he was blasting Green Day and formatting the Sofas and Sectionals page.
He lived in a two-bedroom cottage on Lodge Hill with only one neighbor in his immediate vicinity—a woman in her seventies whose husband had died the year before. He had an agreement with her that he would play his music as loud as he wanted between the hours of ten a.m. and six p.m., then he would cut the volume by half or use his earbuds the rest of the time.
He checked the clock and saw that he only had a few minutes left. Of course, that would be moot if she wasn’t home. He peeked out the window to see if her car was in the driveway, and he saw that she’d just arrived and was struggling to get a large bag of groceries out of the back of her car.
Quinn went outside, trotted down the street to Mrs. Foster’s house, and called out to her. “You need some help with that?”
“Oh, Quinn. Yes, please. How nice of you.”
Mrs. Foster was a tiny woman with fluffy white hair and thick-framed glasses that dwarfed her face. She was wearing a cardigan sweater, some kind of stretch pants, and a pair of athletic shoes that looked too big for her.
He peeked into the bag. “Cake mix. You doing some baking?”
They chatted about that—her grandkids were planning a visit, and she wanted to make cupcakes—as he hefted the bag and brought it up the stairs to her house.
Inside, he put the bag down on the kitchen counter, which was as tidy as if it had been staged for a Realtor.
They talked a bit about this and that—his work, what she’d been reading lately, the gossip she’d heard at the Cookie Crock—and by the time he got out of there, he wasn’t in the mood for working anymore.
He tried to get back to it, this time with his earbuds in and the stereo speakers off, but his mind wandered away from sofas and sectionals and toward the woman he’d met earlier in the day.
Delilah. Hmm.
No way was he going there. For one thing, single mother. For another, she might be married, even if she didn’t wear a ring. And anyway, he didn’t even have her contact information.
She had his, though, which opened up an array of tantalizing possibilities.
Except that he absolutely wasn’t going to avail himself of those possibilities, even if she did happen to call him.
The idea of women and the possibilities of which he might avail himself led him to wonder who might be hanging out at Ted’s tonight, and whether anyone might be amenable to having a drink with him, or having other, more interesting things, with him.
Hell, it was worth a try.
At Otter Bluff, Jesse would not drop the topic of Quinn Monroe and whether Delilah would call him.
“Why not? He gave you his card. He said you could.”
It was just past seven a.m. the day after the hiking incident, and Delilah had barely gotten the boys set up at the dining room table with their cereal and a plate of cut fruit. She’d only had one cup of coffee, and she wasn’t in the mood for requests.
“Eat your breakfast,” she told her sons.
Jesse and Gavin were still in their pajamas, their hair mussed and their skin smelling like sleep. She wanted to clasp both of them to her, but only Gavin accepted that these days—Jesse had announced that he was too grown up for his mother’s embraces.
Impulsively, she put her arms around Gavin, gave him a squeeze, and inhaled his sweet scent.
“That’s not an answer,” Jesse said.
“No, it isn’t.” Delilah pulled her robe around her and sat down in the chair opposite them. “The answer is, I’m not going to call him because … well, because he’s probably very busy and doesn’t have time to chat with us.”
“If he didn’t want us to call him, he wouldn’t have given us his phone number,” Jesse said, not unreasonably.
“We didn’t even get to hike very far,” Gavin put in. “We had to stop when Jesse fell. And Quinn keeps people safe on hikes. He said.”
Jesse, who’d been looking at his brother, turned his gaze to Delilah in triumph. “Yeah. Plus, you said it’s polite to invite people over when they do something nice for you.”
“You said,” Gavin insisted.
“We are not inviting Quinn Monroe over. He was just being nice when he gave us his card. We might book one of his guided hikes, but I’m not promising anything. Now, that’s the last I want to hear about it. Eat.” She got up from the table and went into the kitchen to wash the cutting board she’d used for the fruit.
Delilah poured herself a second cup of coffee, added milk and sugar, and took her mug out to the back patio. She sat in an Adirondack chair and watched the waves crash into the bluffs below her. The day was foggy and overcast with a chill in the air, and she pulled her fuzzy robe tightly around her body.
Out in the distance, a pair of otters floated on their backs and twirled in the water.
She sipped her coffee and thought about the boys and their fixation with Quinn Monroe.
When he’d rescued Jesse, the poor guy had unwittingly positioned himself as everything the boys had been missing since their father left: a strong man, a benevolent male authority figure whom they could admire.
Of course they wanted more of that. They were starved for it.
She wasn’t going to call him—of course not—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find someone to fill that void in the kids’ lives. She needed to spend more time around her own father, her own brothers. If Jesse and Gavin could just get more attention from their grandfather and uncles, maybe that would go a long way toward fulfilling that need.
She sighed. Maybe she shouldn’t have run away from the East Coast when everything had happened. Maybe she should have stayed so the boys could soak up family, immerse themselves in the men who still were around in their lives.
Well, this was only temporary. Only two months, until the holidays were over. She needed to get through Thanksgiving and Christmas in a place where she wouldn’t constantly be thinking about Mitch. And she needed to do it away from her family and their constant, oppressive concern. Away from their constant, oppressive questions about what had gone wrong and what her role in it might have been.
He’d left her for another woman. It was a story so old it was probably represented in cave paintings. But that didn’t stop her family from hinting that maybe if she’d been a more attentive wife, maybe if she’d been more careful to fulfill his needs …
Now that she thought about it, her family might not be the best influences for Jesse and Gavin.
She looked out at the horizon, smelled the ocean air, and reminded herself to live in the moment, at least for a while. She was in a beautiful place, and she and her boys were safe and well.
That was all she could manage.
For now, it would just have to be enough.