The Return Of Antonides - Anne McAllister Mills & Boon Modern

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a punch in the gut. “Half a—? What?”

      Sera shrugged, grinning as she set the papers on his desk. “Half a boat. Can you believe it?”

      Lukas crossed the room in three long strides and snatched up the papers from the desk. There was only one woman in the world who would ask him for half a boat—Holly.

      Holly. After all these years. Lukas wasn’t bored anymore. His heart was pounding even as he stared at her signature at the bottom of a typed business letter on ivory paper.

      Holly Montgomery Halloran. Firm, spiky, no-nonsense letters—just like the woman who had written them. He exhaled sharply just looking at her name. The letter had a letterhead from St. Brendan’s School, Brooklyn, New York. Where she taught. Matt had told him that a few years back. The letter was brief, but he didn’t have a chance to read it because with it, fluttering out of the envelope, came a photograph of a sailboat.

      Lukas snatched it out of the air before it hit the floor and, staring at it, felt a mixture of pain and longing and loss as big as a rock-size gouge that there had been in the hull when he had last seen the boat in person. Someone—Matt—had repaired the hull. But the mast was still broken. Snapped right off, the way he remembered it. And there was still plenty of rotten wood. The boat needed work. A lot of work.

      Lukas felt a tingle at the back of his neck and faint buzzing inside his head. He dropped into his chair and realized he wasn’t breathing.

      “Yours?” Sera queried.

      “Half.” Lukas dragged the word up from the depth of his being. It sounded rusty, as if he hadn’t said it in years.

      Sera smiled. “Which half?”

      There was no answer to that. He shook his head.

      “I thought you must know her,” Sera said gently. “Holly?” Because, of course, Sera had read the letter.

      “Yes.”

      Sera waited, but when he didn’t say more, she nodded. “Right. Well, then,” she said more briskly. “Well, you deal with Holly and the boat. I’m off.”

      Lukas didn’t look up. He waited until he heard the door shut. Then he picked up the letter, not seeing anything but the signature. Then he shut his eyes.

      He didn’t need them to see Holly as clear as day.

      He had a kaleidoscope of memories to choose from: Holly at nine, all elbows and skinned knees and attitude; Holly at thirteen, still coltish but suddenly curvy, running down the beach; Holly at fifteen, her swingy dark hair with auburn highlights, loose and luxuriant, her breasts a handful; Holly at seventeen, blue eyes soft with love as she’d looked adoringly at Matt; Holly at eighteen, blue eyes hard, accusing Lukas when Matt had broken his leg; and then, two weeks later, Holly on the night of her senior prom—beautiful and nervy, edgy and defiant. Then gentler, softer, laughing, smiling—at him for once.

      And then Holly in the night, on his father’s boat, her eyes doubtful, then apprehensive, then wondering, and finally—

      Lukas made a strangled sound deep in his throat.

      He dropped the photo on the desk and, with unsteady fingers, picked up the letter—to read the first words he’d had from Holly Halloran in a dozen years.

       CHAPTER TWO

      WHERE THE HELL was she?

      Lukas stood on the marina dock, hands on hips, squinting as he scanned the water, trying to pick Holly out of the Saturday-morning crowd of canoes and kayaks and pedal boats that were maneuvering in a sheltered basin on the banks of the Brooklyn side of the East River.

      He should have been hanging drywall in one of the lofts above the gallery or helping set up the display cases in one of the artisans’ workshops. He should have, God save him, been reading more of the apparently endless supply of MacClintock grant applications.

      Instead, he was here.

      Because Holly was here.

      Or so the principal of St. Brendan’s School had promised him.

      Three days ago, as he’d read her stilted, determinedly impersonal letter requesting that he join her in making a gift to St. Brendan’s School of the sailboat he and Matt had intended to restore while they were in college, because she was “tying up loose ends before she left,” a tidal wave of long-suppressed memories and emotions had washed over him.

      He could, of course, keep right on suppressing them. He’d had plenty of practice. So for all of thirty-six hours he’d tried to push Holly back in the box he’d deliberately shut a dozen years ago.

      It was over, he’d told himself, which wasn’t quite the truth. The truth was, it had never really begun. And he should damned well leave it that way.

      But he couldn’t. He couldn’t just sign the deed of gift she’d attached to the letter. He couldn’t just walk away. Truth to tell, the mere thought of Holly was the first thing to really energize him since he’d come home.

      So on impulse, he had called St. Brendan’s and asked to speak to her.

      Of course it had been the middle of the school day. Holly was teaching. The secretary offered to take a message.

      Lukas said no. He could leave a message, but she wouldn’t call him back. He knew Holly. If she had wanted to talk to him, she would have given him her number in the letter. She’d have written to him on her own notepaper, not printed out an impersonal little message on a St. Brendan’s official letterhead.

      He got the message: Holly still didn’t want anything to do with him.

      But it didn’t mean she was going to get her way. He called back and spoke to the principal.

      Father Morrison was pleasant and polite and had known instantly who Lukas was. “Matt spoke very highly of you.”

      “Matt?” That was a surprise.

      “He volunteered here. He and Holly taught extracurricular kayaking and canoeing. Matt wanted to teach the kids to sail. Right before he died, he told me he had a boat they could use. After... Well, I didn’t want to mention it to Holly. But she brought it up a few days ago, said she had written to you hoping you’d agree to make it a gift to the school.” The statement had been as much question as explanation.

      “I want to talk to Holly,” Lukas said, deliberately not answering it. “I’ve just moved back from Australia. I don’t have her phone number.”

      “And I can’t give it to you. Privacy, you know,” Father Morrison said apologetically. Then he added, “But you might run into her at the marina. She still goes there most Saturday mornings to teach the kids.”

      “I might do that,” Lukas said. “Thanks, Father.”

      So here he was pacing the dock, still unable to spot her. He hadn’t seen Holly since her wedding ten years ago. Every time he’d been back since—less than half a dozen times in the whole decade—he’d seen Matt, but never Holly.

      She had been visiting her mother or at a bridal shower or taking books back to the library. Maybe it had been true. Certainly Matt seemed to think nothing of Holly’s excuses. But Matt didn’t know Holly was avoiding him.

      Now Lukas jammed his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts, annoyed that she was so hard to spot, more annoyed that he cared. His brain said there was no sense dusting things up after all this time. He probably wouldn’t even recognize her.

       He’d recognize her.

      He knew it as sure as he knew his own name.

      A day hadn’t gone by that Holly hadn’t wiggled her way into his consciousness. She had been a burr in his skin for years, an itch he had wanted to scratch since he’d barely known that such itches existed.

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