LITMIR.BIZ

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“Did you ever think that mom might prefer you not to talk like Archie Bunker?”

      “I liked Archie,” Ben shot back. “It was good to see a regular guy on TV. So? Is she involved with Mannion?”

      “I don’t have any idea. All I know for sure is that she’s taking classes from him in art.” And how weird did it feel playing this stupid high school game of “does she like me or him best” with his dad? “Which, by the way, she’s really good at.”

      “He’s probably just leading her on by telling her that.”

      “She gave me a watercolor. Believe me, she’s good.”

      “If she’d wanted to paint, I wouldn’t have stopped her. Hell, she could’ve helped out on the houses instead of just doing the business’s books. And those drawings of the houses.”

      Seth opted against mentioning that creating an actual piece of art wasn’t anywhere the same as painting a wall. But then wondered if, just possibly, she’d like to try a mural. With Kylee and Mai both being visual types, a mural of the harbor, or snowcapped mountains, might make a nice feature wall.

      “That wasn’t my point. Whatever their relationship, Mike Mannion’s not the only guy in town. Did you ever think that the longer she stays away, the more comfortable she might be with the new normal of single life?”

      Ben shot a look over his shoulder. “She’s my wife.”

      “For the moment, though I feel the need to point out that you are legally separated.” Seth had been surprised when she’d gone all legal-ass on his dad, having those separation papers served on him. “But, just in case you missed the memo, the days of women being chattel are long gone. You don’t own her.”

      Great. Now not only was he eating veggie meatloaf, he was paraphrasing Beyoncé.

      “Never said I thought I did.” Ben’s scowl deepened. “Your mother’s always had a mind of her own. I used to call her my steel magnolia.”

      There was just a tinge of something that sounded like pride in Ben’s tone. Which made sense because only a strong woman would’ve stuck around past the first anniversary. It wasn’t that his father was a bad guy. But he was from another era, a hardworking, blue-collar guy who wasn’t all that happy about a world that seemed to be moving too fast to keep up. And whereas some people might see the glass half-filled, Ben Harper always seemed afraid someone was going to steal his.

      “Used to being the definitive phrase,” Seth pointed out, wondering yet again how he got into this damn situation. “Do you want her back?”

      That question had his father spinning around so fast Seth feared he might fall off the ladder and break his stiff neck. “What the hell do you think?”

      “I’ve no idea. You damn well should,” he said. “Not only is she smart, kind, loving and an all-around great woman, the one thing you and I have in common, along with the love of fixing up old homes, is that we both married above ourselves. Besides, living alone is the frigging pits.”

      Not that the way he spent his days was fully living. The truth was he was fucking tired of being lonely. If he hadn’t been able to lose himself in his work, he probably would’ve just taken his boat out the strait into the Pacific and jumped into the icy ocean where Coast Guard PSAs were always reminding boaters to wear their life jackets because a fit person could swim only fifty yards in fifty-degree water, which just happened to be the summer temperature.

      Another grunt. “You should know, given that you’ve turned into a hermit monk,” his father said. “Hell, even I’ve played poker once a week for the last twenty or so years.”

      Which had always taken place at the Harper house, and which, Seth could have argued, wasn’t exactly getting out.

      “It’s not the same thing,” he insisted. “My wife died.”

      Zoe had been more than Seth’s wife. She’d been his soul mate for over half his life. He’d lived for her weekend visits home while she’d been away at college, and it never would’ve occurred to him to so much as look at another woman while she’d been deployed, assuring him that she was in a well-guarded hospital and would be returning home to make a lot of babies, so he’d better be prepared to man up and do his part. Which had totally worked for him.

      “That was two years ago,” Ben said.

      Two years, one month, two weeks and three days. But hell, who was counting?

      He was.

      “We were talking about you and Mom.” Seth felt the damn plaster walls closing in on him. Inside his head, bombs were exploding. “And what you’re going to do to win her back.”

      “She’ll be back. Once she gets over this crazy hippy streak.” He went back to working on the wall. “Town used to be made up of regular folks. Loggers, fishermen, boat builders. People who made this place. Now it’s being overrun with all sorts of writers, musicians, artists and such. Who wouldn’t even know how to bait a hook, fell a tree or hammer a nail into a wall.”

      Like most Harpers, Ben had a strong streak of mule in him. While his mother, despite what Mike had referred to as her Southern belle breeding, was, indeed, the steel magnolia his dad claimed she was to the core. Once the former Caroline Lockwood Harper made her mind up about something, she wasn’t one to back down.

      Reminding himself that his parents were adults who didn’t need their only son to play marriage counselor, Seth went down the hall into what was going to be the en suite for a new master bedroom. Where he vented his frustration with a crowbar, attacking the crappy ’70s lime-green and yellow-daisy ceramic tile in the shower.

       CHAPTER SIX

      ONE WEEK AFTER quitting her job, Brianna was standing at the railing of a Washington State ferry slowly chugging its way across Puget Sound. Although spring in the Pacific Northwest could be chilly, and she’d be warmer indoors, she enjoyed the briskness of the salt-tinged breeze ruffling her hair, which was no longer pulled back into its tight, tidy, professional chignon that had always given her a headache.

      She’d lived life on a wildly spinning hamster wheel for so many years since leaving home, it took her a while to recognize the heady feeling that rushed through her as she drank in the sight of the shaggy Douglas firs spearing into the sky, the rugged white peaks of the Olympic mountains in the distance and seagulls noisily diving for fish in the water churned up by the gleaming white boat.

      As she sipped from a cardboard cup of coffee, the drink that famously kept the Pacific Northwest humming, a brown pelican flew by, the ungainly, awkward-looking bird surprisingly graceful in flight. More pelicans perched on wooden pilings.

      Freedom. For the first time since she’d left her family Christmas tree farm to go off to college, she had no demands from any calendars, clocks, hotel guests, and no one to answer to but herself.

      The idea was both thrilling and a little daunting at the same time. After all, ever since graduating from college, she’d always moved on from town to city, hotel to hotel, place to place, never looking back. Her life had been like that old country video where the heroine had ripped the rearview mirror off the side of her car and headed, hell-bent for leather, out of Dodge.

      And now here she was, on a ferry getting closer and closer to land, drinking in the familiar sounds, the smells and pretty sights, and hoping that Thomas Wolfe had been wrong about never being able to go home again. This was a new chapter in her life. A new beginning, and despite the butterflies that had begun fluttering their wings in her stomach, she would make it work.

      Reminding herself that she’d always been a self-starter with strong organizational and people skills, instead of worrying about any possible pitfalls in her plan, she concentrated on the vision of what she’d always thought of as her house turned into a warm and inviting bed-and-breakfast. The type of place she

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