CHAPTER 4
Hudson slowly made his way downstairs, struggling to hide a yawn. “Morning,” he called out before turning the corner and heading toward the kitchen. It was late for him—eight o’clock, when he was usually up by six—but he still felt wiped out.
He sighed, shuffling toward the smell of coffee like a zombie.
“Morning,” his mother sang back. Her gray hair was pulled up in a high ponytail, and she wore a sunshine-yellow tank top, paired with jeans. She was making omelets at the stove, with veggies from the garden and plenty of cheese. His stomach rumbled. She turned. “What kind of toast—”
Then she got a good look at him, and her eyes widened.
“Sweetie, what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
His father sat at the kitchen table, eating an omelet and looking at his tablet, probably checking the Mariners’ score from the game last night. Noodle sat at his feet, looking up hopefully. His father shot Hudson a glance, then quirked an eyebrow at him. “She means you look like shit. You getting sick or something?”
“You were out in the rain, under Mrs. Tennyson’s house,” his mother fussed.
He headed for coffee like it was a life preserver. “I didn’t get that ... agh ,” he grunted as she tried to pull the quintessential mom move, pressing her hand against his forehead despite being shorter than him. He dodged. “I’m fine .”
She rolled her eyes. “Grumpy. Dad’s right, though. You look awful.”
“Didn’t get much sleep,” he admitted, finally getting a nice big ceramic mug of coffee and dumping in some sugar and creamer.
“Me either!” chimed in his daughter, Kimber, as she entered from the back door with a grin and a wink. “Seems like I had a lot more fun than you, though.”
“Don’t want to hear it.” He glared at her, but without much heat. After she’d gotten her agricultural degree at UW, she’d pretty much had a bustling social life despite moving home to work with his mother on “expanding” the family hobby farm. “It’s your fault I had to go get Noodle when he escaped last night. In the rain. At midnight. After fixing Mrs. Tennyson’s clogged pipe.”
“I am sorry,” Kimber said, and to her credit, she did sound it. “I was still in Seattle, on my date.”
“Date. Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Hudson’s father muttered under his breath, but fell silent when Hudson’s mother then glared at him. Kimber and Hudson sat at the table, and she slid omelets in front of them.
“Thanks, Mom.” Hudson took a long sip from his mug, feeling the healing power of caffeine kick-start his system. Thank God. He cut into the omelet. “Kimber, as long as you’re safe and you were able to take care of those demon spawn—”
“The goats are adorable, and you know it!” Kimber yelped.
He ignored her. “—and didn’t make your grandmother get up early to do your chores, you know I don’t judge where you spend your nights.”
“Of course I didn’t make Gram take care of them.” Kimber looked offended. “I always take care of the animals! I already got a start on the garden stuff too. I’m going to be picking blackberries for jam later.”
“You’re going to help me make soap, too, right?” his mom prodded her.
Kimber nodded, and the two of them chatted as Hudson got down to eating his breakfast.
A lot of people didn’t understand how he could still live here this way at his age. They thought he was “trapped” with two parents in their sixties (not that he technically lived with them ... they lived in the cabin on the far side of the property) and his grown twenty-three-year-old daughter. The only one of his immediate family missing was Jeremy, who had moved to Seattle. He still came back plenty often, though, for food and to do laundry, and his room was always waiting for him in case he changed his mind.
The thing was, the Clark family had been a unit for so long, sometimes Hudson wondered if he’d know how to exist any other way. It felt like perfectly broken-in work boots: functional, comfortable. Maybe not the most stylish thing in the world, but it got the job done, so who gave a fuck?
Kimber looked thoughtful, drinking some yerba maté—a beverage that made Hudson shudder in disgust. “You’re usually a good sleeper. If you keep having trouble, I’ve got some fresh lavender oil. You know how that knocks you out.”
“Oh! Or I’ve got melatonin,” his mother added, sitting down with her own plate.
“I’ve got scotch down at the cabin,” his father stage-whispered with a wry grin.
“Thank you, everybody,” Hudson said, shaking his head and smiling. “But don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Are you worried about the bid this morning?” his mother asked.
Now, all three sets of eyes studied him intently. He never should’ve told them, but he knew they’d be asking, especially since he was in relatively dressy clothes—meaning a clean, new polo and his best jeans and work boots.
“Actually, no,” he said, although ... well, he was a little nervous. Not enough to lose sleep over it, but enough to have some tension.
“Nobody could restore that Victorian better than you,” Kimber said, and her unshakable faith in him made his chest warm. “Any bid he gets from someone off island is going to cost four times as much, and they’re going to take at least twice as long. And they’ll probably suck too!”
“Trust me, I’m going to be pushing that,” Hudson said.
“Also, nobody loves old stuff more than you do,” Kimber tacked on.
Hudson grinned. “Because I’m old? Thanks.”
“No, because you love antiques,” Kimber said with a patented eye roll. “I can only imagine what the inside of that house is like. You’d be in antique-geek heaven. They probably have all that funky, you know ...” She made a weird wiggly motion with her hand.
“Scrolls? Ornamentation? Carvings?” he offered.
“That stuff.”
He shrugged. “Well, the Bauers weren’t exactly party people, so it’s not like we got to see the inside often. I guess I’ll find out today.”
Kimber’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a sec. I thought you grabbed Noodle from there last night?”
“Um ... no.” He suddenly started shoveling in eggs, avoiding their gazes. “Noodle had run away over to Ms. Caroline’s.”
“I thought it was still empty!” his mother said. “But it couldn’t have been, if somebody called Jeremy. Was it one of those Airbnb renters?” The sourness in her voice said exactly what she thought about them .
“Actually, I met the new owner.” He finished his breakfast and put his fork down. “She’s related. Her niece. Grandniece? Great-grandniece? Something like that.”
“I wonder if I’ve met her,” his mother mused. “What does she look like?”
He acted like he had to think about it, when in reality, he didn’t have any trouble at all picturing her. Probably because he hadn’t stopped thinking of her, it seemed, since he’d stepped out of her house. He’d spent most of the night thinking of her, in fact. She was the reason why he hadn’t been able to sleep.
“She’s short,” he finally said, smiling at the memory of her standing in the foyer with her sweatpants and large T-shirt, bare feet with high arches. “Small ... well, compared to me. Black hair. Asian, I think. At least part.”
“Asian?” his mother noted absently. Caroline had been some kind of eastern European originally, with crepe-thin wrinkled white skin and soft silver curls. He remembered his mother talking about it with the older woman, since the Clarks were also eastern European, as well as Italian, Irish, and possibly Brazilian. “I don’t think I’ve ever met her, then. But Caroline only lived here in the past ten, fifteen years or so. Did this niece look young, then?”
Her voice was deceptively casual.
“Was she pretty ?” Kimber translated, with a note of mocking as she glanced at her grandmother.
Hudson thought again of the woman in the house.
Her shoulder-length ink-black hair was cut in a style so razor-straight he could’ve cut himself on it. She hadn’t been wearing makeup, he was pretty sure, which, considering she was ready for bed, made sense. She had big brown eyes with long black lashes, arched eyebrows. A round face that would be friendly when she smiled, probably hiding dimples. The fullest lips he’d seen, possibly ever, so deeply pink they looked cherry stained.
But there was something else that he couldn’t quite shake. A feeling he’d had before.
He’d been six years old when his grandfather had shown him his first antique clock, an Atkins mantel version in walnut with brass details. It didn’t work, so Hudson hadn’t seen what the big deal was, and said as much.
“Yeah? Check this out,” his grandfather had said, and then opened the case.
Hudson’s jaw had dropped. The clockworks were like something out of a dream or a cartoon or something, all gears and wires and tiny little hammers. His grandfather had then pulled out some impossibly small screwdrivers from a special case in his workshop and done a few adjustments, and the clock had slowly ticked to life.
From then on, Hudson had been fascinated by clocks—by the complexity that hid under a simple, clean, luxurious design.
Something about Willa hit him like that. Even mussed and messy from Noodle-wrestling, there was something classy about her. Something complex, hidden under the surface. Maybe it was in her eyes, or her manner, or her quiet voice. Whatever it was, it was like that first moment he’d seen the inside of a clock and his world had opened up.
“You really are asleep,” his mother repeated, but it was almost a question. There was a note of worry there.
“Sorry,” he quickly said, then finished the coffee and got up for more. “She’s maybe my age, I guess? It was hard to tell, and it was late. I didn’t really talk to her much or anything.”
“You found out that Ms. Caroline was her whatever-aunt,” Kimber pressed, eyes bright.
His daughter was too smart sometimes. Took after her mother, he thought, and he meant that in a good way. “We did talk. I told her she should stop by the farm, that we’d been friends with Ms. Caroline. She seemed nice.”
Now they all exchanged glances, seconds before Kimber started laughing. “You like her!”
“What? I literally talked to her for less than five minutes,” he protested. His mother was shaking her head, grinning smugly. On the other hand, his father was rolling his eyes.
“Like I always say,” his father tacked on gruffly, “don’t shit where you eat. If you’re going to get mixed up with a woman on the island, you’d better be serious.”
His mother playfully smacked his father’s shoulder. “I, on the other hand,” she said over Kimber’s quieting chuckles, “have said it’s past time for you to have another relationship. Would you say she’s in her forties ... or thirties?”
He tensed, his jaw clenching. “No, Mom.” The words weren’t harsh, but they were firm.
She sighed softly. “You can’t blame me for asking.”
“You’ve got two grandkids already. Don’t be greedy.” He paused. “Although ... I was thinking of stopping by, to make sure she’s settling in okay.”
Which set Kimber crowing again. “You do like her!” She got up, doing a little victory dance, wiggling her butt, which Noodle enthusiastically approved of, dancing around her as if it were some kind of precursor to his getting fed. “Don’t tell me: she batted her eyelashes at you, said she loved a big, strong handyman, and then asked if you could maybe fix her pipes?”
His parents laughed as Hudson finished off his coffee, annoyed. “This isn’t a porn,” he snapped. His father cleared his throat in warning, and he huffed out a quick, “Sorry. But no, it’s not like that.”
“Really.” His mother sounded unconvinced. “Because you take after your father. You’re a handsome, charming devil.” His father grinned, leaning over to kiss her cheek and waggle his eyebrows at her. “I think half the single women on this island under sixty would jump in your bed in a minute—and the other half would take fifteen minutes, max.”
“Some of the married ones too,” Kimber added cheerfully.
He grunted. The damned thing was, he knew, on a certain level, it was true. Not because he was some gorgeous guy or whatever. He stayed in shape because his job was really physical, and he’d always had a good metabolism. Beyond that, he was blessed with good genes. His mom was still stunning in her sixties, and his father had been a heartbreaker, from everything Hudson had heard—his mother wasn’t kidding there. Hudson had his mother’s bright-blue eyes and ability to dance, and his father’s devilish smile and lean build.
Added to that, Hudson knew he piled on charm. He liked flirting, with or without a desired outcome. He flirted with anything and anyone. More than one hook-up had told him he had a voice made of pure sex ... which tended to work out, since he liked sex.
But he hadn’t flirted with Willa.
Maybe it was because it was midnight, and maybe because he’d been exhausted and wet and punchy. But the minute she’d let him in, with Noodle dancing at his feet as she’d stood back and watched, she’d just given off this aura of ... something . Something he couldn’t put his finger on. Something that warned him she wasn’t open to flirting, harmless or not.
“Trust me, she wasn’t charmed,” he clarified.
“What, did she hate you or something?” His mother scoffed. “Because I don’t believe that for one minute.”
“Maybe she’s being a pick-me,” Kimber added.
“What the hell is a pick-me?” his father chimed in.
“You know. ‘I’m not like other girls! I won’t succumb to your charms, you handsome alpha male!’ That kind of thing,” Kimber explained. Or tried to. His father still looked confused. “Like she’s playing hard to get, showing that you’re going to have to work for it.”
“I’m not saying I’m working for anything,” Hudson protested. Then he took a deep breath. “It was ... it was almost like she was scared?”
And that was the crux of it, although it still wasn’t quite the right word, because the woman he’d met hadn’t seemed afraid. She’d stood her ground without flinching.
This was vain, but it was weird enough that she wasn’t charmed, and that she was throwing off a don’t-try-it vibe over a six-foot radius. She wasn’t just disinterested, or irritated, or judgmental. She seemed removed . Like she’d built an invisible wall.
He didn’t know what was going on there, but some part of him wanted to reassure himself that she was okay, both in general and with him.
All humor fled the kitchen. “Well, it was late, and she doesn’t know the island,” his mother said quickly. “She doesn’t know you . You wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“Who didn’t deserve it, anyway,” his father added with a fierce nod.
“I was thinking of stopping by after the bid, actually,” Hudson said, as the idea formed. “It was late and stormy last night. I can just check in and make sure she’s okay, and, you know, kind of let her know that I’m okay and not scary ...?”
“No.” Kimber’s voice was firm. “That’s stalker creepy, Dad. If she’s nervous, you stopping by isn’t going to make it better.”
“I’m not asking her out, for ...” He looked at his glaring mother, and sighed. “For pity’s sake. I just ... I don’t want her to be scared of me. Or anything.”
“Your heart’s in the right place,” his mother soothed, “but I have to go with Kimber on this one. You need to let her make that decision. If she really is scared of you, for whatever reason, you need to leave her alone until she does something. Going over there is not going to help.”
“Maybe you’ll run into her at the grocery store,” his father added. “Everybody winds up there, right?”
Which was true. A reality of island living: there was just one grocery store, and you ran into someone you knew eventually. It wasn’t great, but it was something. “Anyway, it’s no big deal,” Hudson finally said. “I’m going to get that bid.”
“Break a leg,” his father said, and his mother and Kimber both hugged him. He headed out toward his truck, his leather portfolio in tow.
They’d made great points. Besides, why should it matter if one woman didn’t like him or was nervous around him for no particular reason? Why did he care? It wasn’t an ego thing. It could’ve been, and he checked himself to make sure.
But it was a concern . She was wary, or distant, or something, and he didn’t think he’d done anything to deserve it. Which made him wonder why she was so cautious—and if there was anything he could do to help.
He hadn’t felt concern like this for anybody but family in a long time. That, combined with the fascination he’d felt toward her ...
Jesus, get a grip.
So he did. He gripped the steering wheel and headed down the street, toward the Victorian ... and toward Willa, just across the street, where he absolutely would not stop by.