Chapter 12
Grant waited all day Friday, hoping he would hear from Stephanie, before his friend Dan Torrington clued him in.
“She’s not coming back,” Dan said.
“How do you know that?” Grant asked Dan, who was visiting for the weekend and thinking about spending the winter on the island to pen the book he’d been planning to write for years. He’d fallen in love with the island on an earlier visit.
“Grant, my friend, let me tell you something about women.”
“I can’t wait to hear this,” Grant muttered.
“They are sensitive, delicate creatures.”
Grant didn’t want to be around when Stephanie heard herself described as a sensitive, delicate creature.
“They require tremendous amounts of attention.”
“I give her tremendous amounts of attention. Hell, she has practically all my attention.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. You’re spending too much time together.”
Grant, who used to go months between visits when he was dating Abby, now couldn’t imagine a day without Stephanie in it.
He couldn’t picture his life without her front and center, irritating him and loving him.
The pain he’d carried in his breastbone since she stormed out of their house two mornings ago had intensified when he began to fear that he might’ve lost her for good this time.
“You could be right,” Grant said.
“I usually am.”
Grant rolled his eyes at his friend’s arrogance.
Dan gestured for Chelsea, the bartender at the Beachcomber, to bring them two more beers.
The pretty young bartender set down the bottles with a friendly smile for Dan.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said.
“My pleasure. I have to ask you—are you related to the Baldwin brothers?”
“Nope,” Dan said. “I get that a lot, though. People think I look like Billy Baldwin.”
“You really do.” Based on the dreamy look on her face, Chelsea was quite fond of Billy Baldwin.
Dan flashed her the dimpled grin that had made him famous. “Thanks for the beers.”
“You’re going to get sued calling women ‘sweetheart,’” Grant said when Chelsea moved on to other customers.
Dan scoffed. “Puleeze. She loved it. You heard what she said. ‘My pleasure.’ Would she have said that if she were offended? Hell, she thought I was Billy Baldwin! Maybe he can play me in your movie.”
Grant rolled his eyes. “You’re more famous than he is, not that she knows that.”
Dan brushed off the reference to his fame, as he always did. He’d made a career out of freeing prisoners who’d been wrongly convicted. Stephanie’s stepfather was the latest in a long string of successes. “Take it from me. Chicks like to be charmed. They need to be wooed.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing with Steph, and look at where it’s gotten me.”
Dan had the audacity to laugh at that. “You haven’t been wooing her. You’ve been driving her crazy with your vision of her story. So take a step back from the screenplay for a while, work out the relationship issues and see where you are.”
“What do you know about relationship issues anyway? Your idea of a relationship is dinner and a hotel room.”
“And that’s bad how, exactly? You don’t see me mooning around for two days because my girlfriend told me to screw and moved out.”
“She hasn’t moved out.” The thought that maybe she had struck another note of fear in Grant’s chest. He wondered if he might be having a heart attack.
“Yet.”
“You’re not helping.”
“Grant,” Dan said, waiting until Grant spared him a glance to continue. “She’s not coming back. If you want to fix this, you have to go to her.”
“I’m not the one who left. Why do I have to do the chasing?”
Dan released a long sigh. “I have so much to teach you, my friend.”
While Grant wanted to object to that statement, he couldn’t.
Stephanie was his second serious girlfriend, and he’d screwed up the first one rather royally.
As much as he’d cared for Abby, he truly loved Stephanie.
If he had to go beg and grovel, he would.
After two days without her, he’d discovered he had no pride where she was concerned.
He tossed a twenty on the bar and stood.
“Where’re you going?” Dan asked.
“You know where I’m going.”
Dan turned to face him, brushed a hand over Grant’s jacket and adjusted the collar, patting him on the shoulder when he was satisfied. “There. Now you can go.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Call me tomorrow. Let me know how it goes.”
Grant’s stomach hurt when he imagined the many ways this could go wrong. “I will. You’re here for a few more days, right?”
“At least. I’m due in court in LA next Friday, and then my schedule is clear until after the first of the year.”
“It’ll be nice to have you around this winter.”
“It’ll be nice to be here, if you’re not pouting the whole time.” Before Grant could respond to that, Dan gave him a gentle push. “Go get your girl, and don’t screw it up.”
“I’ll try not to.” As Grant made his way to Mac’s motorcycle in the parking lot, he thought of the many ways it was possible to screw this up.
Maybe he already had by waiting two days to go after her.
His stomach started to hurt in earnest at that thought.
He’d never wanted anything more than he wanted to be with her, but nothing had ever been more difficult. How that was possible?
On the way to Charlie’s place, where he’d heard she was staying, Grant tried to remember what had caused the fight.
Try as he might, he couldn’t recall the specific exchange.
There had been many of them over the last couple of months, since they’d begun to collaborate on the screenplay about Charlie’s unjust incarceration and Stephanie’s relentless campaign to free him.
When Grant pulled into the driveway, Charlie was washing his pickup truck. He stopped what he was doing and gave Grant that blank look he did so well as Grant parked the bike and walked over to him.
“Is Stephanie around?” Grant asked, discovering in that moment he had a shred of pride left, and it was seriously dented by having to ask her stepfather where she was.
“Yep.”
“Could I see her?”
“I’d say that’s up to her.” Charlie studied him for a long, uncomfortable moment.
Grant resisted the urge to squirm under the heat of the other man’s stare.
“I take it you never got around to asking her the question we talked about the other day?”
Grant shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest, his left hand resting on the ring box in his coat pocket. He’d carried it with him for weeks, hoping for the right chance to ask her.
“What happened?” Charlie asked.
“Damned if I know.”
“So what’s your plan, hot shot?” This was asked with a hint of amusement that was so shocking coming from the normally stoic Charlie that Grant was temporarily rendered speechless. “I, um, was thinking I’d apologize for whatever I did that made her so mad.”
“Good place to start.” Charlie pointed his chin toward the path that led to the beach. “She went for a walk a little while ago. You might catch her on the way back.”
Grant’s heart lurched in his chest at the thought of seeing her. Two days was too damned long. “Thanks.”
“Good luck,” Charlie called after him.
Grant waved to let the other man know he’d heard him and headed down the well-worn path.
As he got closer to the bluffs, the smell of the ocean assailed him, reminding him, as it always did, of home.
But now that he’d met Stephanie, fallen in love with her, lived with her .
. . She was his home, and he’d be positively lost without her.
“You should probably tell her that,” he grumbled to himself.
“For a guy who fancies himself rather good with words, you need to find the right ones, and you need to do it soon.”
He traveled about a half mile down the path before he found her sitting on a rock that overlooked the Atlantic. Her arms were stretched out behind her, and her face was tilted into the late afternoon sun.
His heart contracted painfully at the sight of her. He ached for her, but was reluctant to say or do anything that would make things worse.
She must’ve sensed him there because she turned and met his gaze.
Surprise registered on her expressive face before she shuttered herself, the way she had so often lately.
He hated when she did that. It left him feeling closed out and closed off from her, two places he never wanted to be where she was concerned.
Grant walked the final thirty feet to her, feeling as if his entire life would come down to whatever transpired here. “You look like a sun goddess sitting on your stage waiting for the gods to show up to worship you.”
“Looks like it worked,” she said with a small smile that warmed the cold places inside him. She held out a hand. “Now come worship me.”
Grant took her hand and joined her on the rock. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips to her sun-warmed face. “Steph, I—”
“Shhh. Don’t say anything. Just hold me.”
Because there was nothing he’d rather do, he did as she asked. He had no idea how long they sat there, wrapped up in each other as the sun dipped lower toward the horizon.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said, softly so as not to break the magical spell.
“So am I.” She ran her hand over his hair and down to cup his face.
Her touch sent a shiver of longing through him.
“I’ve had some time to think,” she said.
That quickly, the longing turned to dread. Something about the way she said the simple sentence terrified him. “And?”
“This . . .” She took a moment to compose herself, which only added to his growing anxiety. “This isn’t working.”
The words and the pain he heard in her voice as she said them hit Grant like an arrow straight to the heart. “That’s not true.”
“Wait,” she said. “Hear me out.”
“I don’t want to hear you say you’re leaving me. I can’t hear that.”
“You can’t possibly be happy with the way things have been.”
“In our worst moment, I’m happier with you than I’ve ever been before.”