Chapter 2
Raemy had been on the road all summer.
She’d had a vague itinerary and her savings. An ending and a beginning, she’d told her sweetheart parents with great confidence. Because finally, she was moving on.
They all were.
Raemy had mourned William for years. They all had. Sometimes Raemy had felt as if she’d been buried with him, because it seemed when she looked back on it that everything had kind of stopped when he’d died.
Except, that was the thing about grief, wasn’t it? Only she had stopped. That didn’t mean the world stopped turning too.
At first, it had seemed offensive to her.
She was expected to go about her business as if everything was normal?
She was expected to get up and go teach her third graders in the same elementary school that both she and William had attended, and act as if everything was the way it always had been?
She was expected to drive to and from work, get her groceries, eat, interact with people, live...
It all seemed so pointless.
Raemy couldn’t really remember the first year or two.
It had been such a crushing weight, like the loss of William had taken all the light and color out of the world.
It was bad enough that she’d lost her baby brother, her only sibling.
But she had also had to suffer through that loss with her parents.
She’d had to witness their pain. No parent should have to live through the death of one of their children.
That wasn’t the way the world was supposed to work.
They’d formed a kind of trinity of tears, and they’d stayed there in the gray of it for a long time. And the funny part was that it wasn’t Raemy who’d spurred them to let go of that. She hadn’t been the one to suggest they try to live again.
It had been her father who had forced them all out of their rut. He had insisted that the last thing William would ever have wanted was for all of them to die with him.
That had hit Raemy uncomfortably hard, which was how she’d known it was true.
William had been a dreamer. He’d been like sunlight. He was four years younger than her and she had claimed him when he was born with all the confidence of a toddler. Her name had been his first word.
But he had known exactly what he was doing when he’d joined the Marines. He’d known what it might cost him.
He would never have wanted them to lie down and not get up again.
She had taken her father’s reminder of that like an action item, and the last couple of years had been brighter. Better. No one had ever forgotten William, or let go of him in any way. None of them would.
But when Raemy had gone to her parents to tell them that she wanted something different, something bigger than the life that she’d been able to sleepwalk through after losing William, she’d expected them to argue.
But they hadn’t. They’d told her that they wanted the same thing and hadn’t known how to tell her.
And now here they all were, off on adventures.
Her parents were taking that cruise they’d always talked about, and were months into a round-the-world trip.
Raemy had quit her job at the end of the school year and taken off in her car to see more of this massive, beautiful country than the darling little river town in Missouri where she’d been born and raised.
She’d gone to the Badlands, then Yellowstone.
She’d visited old friends in Colorado. She’d driven into the Rocky Mountains and had hiked mountains so big they made her dizzy, then had traced her way through red rock canyons, all the way to the Grand Canyon.
She’d found her way up to Montana and had stayed a while at Flathead Lake.
Then she’d made her way down, over a mountain pass into eastern Washington so she could drink wine in Walla Walla.
She’d kept going, chasing the gorgeous Columbia River all the way west, where she’d hiked on Mount Hood and had eaten outrageously good food in Portland.
Then she’d kept going to the sea. First to Astoria to relive the movies she and William had watched growing up.
Then she’d wound her way down the stunning, gloriously atmospheric Oregon coast.
And she wasn’t sure when, in all of that, she’d understood that she knew exactly where she was headed.
Right here to Wild Rose Point. To Staff Sergeant Noah Kendrick, who was one of the only things she remembered from her brother’s service.
He was the one who had stood up and spoken of William, not just as the man who had sent him on the detail that had been his last, but as someone who’d known him.
That was what still stood out to Raemy all this time later.
Unlike some of the people who knew what William had done, but not who he was, it had been clear to her that Noah Kendrick knew exactly who her brother had been.
That had felt like a lifeline, then. She’d thought of it—of him—often since.
And now that she’d worked through the kind of grief that didn’t need an audience, and had chosen to keep living this beautiful life that her brother had died for, she had decided that it was time to celebrate.
Who better to celebrate William with than this man who’d known him while he’d done the hardest thing he’d ever tried to accomplish?
So she really couldn’t understand why this man was looking at her the way he was now. That dark scowl on his face, talking about fault and forgiveness.
Raemy also couldn’t understand how, even in her most bereaved state back then, she had somehow failed to notice how outrageously attractive the man was.
Maybe that had been a blessing. She doubted very much that she would have been able to handle how glorious of a specimen he was back then. Well. Clearly she couldn’t—because she hadn’t registered it at all.
That wasn’t an option today.
Noah Kendrick was wearing a black t-shirt that seemed specifically designed to draw attention to how fit he was.
Those biceps—God help her, but she was just a girl.
That chest she could see beneath the fabric.
And he had facial hair now, covering what she knew was an extraordinary jawline, but somehow the close-cropped beard made it... worse.
Maybe she meant better.
Because everything about him was scowly, gruff, and mind-alteringly hot, and she didn’t think her ability to perceive his hotness had anything to do with how long she’d been driving around by herself.
He just really was that gorgeous.
Not the reason you’re here, Raemy, she told herself sternly.
“I’m not here to accuse you of anything,” she said, once she stopped laughing. “I heard about this diner, so I knew you were here, and I’ve always wanted to talk to you. Ever since you gave that beautiful speech at—”
“It was the least I could do,” Noah bit out, gruffly.
It was not really a tone that invited more conversation.
Raemy chose to ignore that. “Oh, don’t say that.
There’s always something less that you could do.
Some people live their whole lives doing as little as possible.
But you stood up and said those beautiful things about my brother.
” She smiled at him. “It meant so much to us. My parents and I have talked about it ever since.”
For some reason, that made the inconvenient Staff Sergeant smoke show Noah Kendrick look as if he was considering picking up one of the utensils on the table and stabbing himself with it.
“I appreciate you saying that,” he said, in a dark tone that did not sound in any way appreciative.
“If there’s anything I could ever do to pay the debt I owe to your family, all you have to do is ask.
” He paused, as if expecting she might ask for some kind of repayment on the spot.
When she only gazed back at him, he nodded. “Thank you for stopping by.”
Like he expected her to bolt out the door immediately.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Raemy said, laughing again. “I told you I was hungry, first of all. And this is such a cute little town. I want to stay.”
“That’s out of the question.”
He looked so serious. And so scowly. And she didn’t know why she found that... well, perhaps not delightful. But there was something in her, like a kind of itch. She couldn’t seem to stop wanting to just poke at him. There was something about how furious he looked that just made her want to—
Well. It made her want to do a lot of things, but poking would have to do.
“I wasn’t asking your permission, Sergeant Surly,” she replied, keeping it light and airy since she was calling him names.
She’d learned this particular tone with her third graders.
“I’m a grown woman who can do whatever I want, and I want to stay in the most magical little beach town I’ve ever seen.
” She reached over and made a small pageant of picking up one of the menus from their holder, and placing it before her on the table.
“What I want right now is a very large plate of delicious food to fortify me while I look for a suitably charming inn or bed and breakfast, preferably one that encourages a lot of gazing at the ocean.”
She looked up at him then and sure enough, that scowl had deepened, which shouldn’t have been physically possible. “And I really would like to talk with you about my brother.”
That did not make the scowl any better. If anything, Noah got stiffer. His dark eyes got darker. “You can ask me anything you want. I’ll answer it if I can.”
Like he was on trial.
Raemy ignored the weirdness, another thing she’d learned teaching third grade.
“I want to hear what he was like in the Marines.” When that didn’t make the man across from her do anything but stare back at her, she pushed on.
“He loved it. To tell you the truth, none of us wanted him to join, but he couldn’t be talked out of it.
William wanted to do good in the world. He didn’t think of himself as a hero, ever, but that’s what he was.
To me, I mean, even before he joined.” Her smile wasn’t dire, the way it had been for years, but it was a little shaky. “And now, I guess, always.”