Butterfly Cove Read online

  “It wasn’t an offer of marriage,” Jilly said dryly.

  Walker shrugged. “Pretty close. And as for all our so-called Hale billions, the money is so tangled up in trust funds that you’d have to be a very patient woman to want me for financial gain.”

  “So you’re not mad?” Jilly persisted, needing to hear him say the words. Otherwise she wouldn’t be free of the terrible fear that had hit her at the first symptoms of pregnancy. “I need to be completely sure, Walker. If you have any second thoughts—”

  His laughter cut her off. He gripped her hard and swung her round the room, their bodies locked tightly. “I don’t have a single second thought, honey,” he said roughly, kissing her neck and then her mouth. “In fact, I take it as a sign. This is where we’re meant to be. We’ve been so careful. If this could still happen, I think somebody way more important than we are had a hand in it.”

  Jilly smiled slowly. “You mean your old commanding officer? Or maybe your father?”

  “Not either of them, and you damn well know it. The only thing that makes me angry is your waiting to tell me. Because you thought I would be angry at the news.” He lifted her face to his. “I’m over the moon. We’ll say our vows again whenever you want. A small, official ceremony, just between you and me. We don’t even need to tell anyone. We can have our reception that we promised my family after that. That way you can delay all the planning.”

  “Technically, we’re already married. Remember?”

  “But I want to do it again, Jilly. For real, fully committed to the decision. I think you’d like your close friends to be there this time, too.”

  Jilly laughed quietly, sliding her face against his warm chest. He knew her so well. And now she knew he was holding back nothing. He really was thrilled by the idea of a child.

  She swung around, frowning. “But there’s another problem, Walker. I’ll make the world’s worst mother. I don’t have a nurturing bone in my body. I’ll mess up playdates and teach this baby bad language. I’m going to screw this all up,” she said, closing her eyes, feeling the burden of a thousand worries and insecurities.

  Wise man that he was, Walker didn’t laugh. He simply slid his hands into her hair and held her. “Whatever problems that come, we’ll tackle them together, honey. We’ll make it work. We’ll make it work amazingly well.”

  He looked down at her, frowning. “Are you sick? Any nausea—that morning thing?” He looked uncomfortable.

  Jilly snorted. “Not a bit of it. I’m eating like a horse. That was the first thing that cued me something was up. In fact, I’ve got a ravenous desire for lasagna right now.”

  “Whatever happened to pickles and ice cream?”

  “I’m thinking jalapeños and ice cream.” Jilly’s eyes brightened. “Actually, I’m thinking of a whole line of specialty items for pregnant women. Healthy food that won’t upset their stomachs. Something they can eat even if they don’t feel like it.”

  “Jalapeños?” he said dryly.

  “That’s for me, not for the public. You know how I love peppers.” Her hand opened, gently cradling the line of her slender stomach as if she could already imagine the new life growing there. “Something tells me this child is going to love chiles as much as I do. But I’m thinking low-fat recipes with high fiber and lots of taste.”

  “I’ll go heat up some lasagna for you.” Then his eyes darkened as Jilly’s fingers slid down his chest and opened the snap of his jeans. He was half-soaked, his pants wet from when he had followed her into the shower.

  And there was no mistaking the hunger in Jilly’s eyes as she slid her fingers under the wet denim and found his hard response.

  “The lasagna can wait,” she whispered. Her fingers circled and traced. “I want you right here. I want us to remember this.”

  He cut back an oath as Jilly’s fingers tightened, overwhelming his reason and control.

  The way she always did.

  They fell in a sprawl of hot, hungry skin and linked fingers, reason swept away by need. Walker tried to wait, but Jilly wouldn’t let him, pressing her body to his. Around them the old Harbor House seemed to sigh, creaking with age and memories and something that might have been peace.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  OLIVIA BARELY SAW her friends over the next week. Jilly was busy testing new recipes, and Caro was preparing for her husband’s return from Afghanistan. Grace and Noah were back in town but had barely spoken to anyone. Noah had three more days before he had to return to work in San Francisco, and it was clear they were hoarding every minute together. Grace’s friends wouldn’t have considered intruding on their privacy. Meanwhile, Olivia continued to search through her father’s boxes, papers and closets, as the last private detective had advised her.

  She had called the management office of the condominium Sawyer Sullivan had maintained in Seattle, but there had been almost nothing in the condominium when it was sold three months before his death.

  There had been no record of any storage units, bank accounts or deposit boxes in Seattle despite all her searching.

  Another dead end.

  She tried all the local banks along the coast, thinking he might have had accounts in several places.

  Again it was a dead end.

  She had checked the local post office to see if he had rented a postal box. No luck there either.

  With her options running out, she turned her focus to the house itself. There were dozens of possible hiding spaces in a big building like this one. Olivia checked each wall, searching for signs of new paint or repaired wood that might conceal a recent addition to cover a wall safe or hiding place.

  She didn’t know why she was following this train of thought, but instinct whispered that if there was any answer, it would be here, in the grand house her father had loved so much.

  For Sawyer Sullivan this house had always represented status, power and security. In her search, Olivia found a tangle of old documents that gave her clear signs her father had been failing in the last year of his life. But there was no record of any new bank accounts or any sign of the items missing from her grandmother’s estate.

  Olivia knew she couldn’t keep the sad state of her finances hidden much longer. There were taxes to pay and her car payment was due. Worst of all, her father’s banker told her that a number of people in town had approached him discreetly, indicating that Sawyer Sullivan had owed them money.

  It was all turning worse than Olivia had thought possible.

  As the days passed, she opened every box in the attic and even checked for storage spaces under the floorboards. Something told her that she needed to understand her father’s state of mind in those last months of his life. He hadn’t been clear in his mind and he might have been becoming a little paranoid.

  Olivia almost felt sorry for him; the letters no longer showed an aloof, confident businessman. In these pages Olivia saw an old man fighting to stay in control, afraid of something.

  She sank into a pool of sunlight in the dusty attic, watching the breakers roll in far out at sea, thinking about growing up on this island she had always loved.

  As she was growing up, Sawyer Sullivan had always made it clear he had wanted a son, not a daughter, and if he had to have a daughter, she should have been smarter and prettier than Olivia could ever be. And one thing was painfully clear. He had never trusted Rafe and never wanted him around Olivia.

  He had never suspected how close the two had become.

  But that was old history. Olivia shoved away the past and turned her thoughts to the present. She had begun to put her life back together with the help of a therapist that Caro had recommended. Olivia accepted that her insecurities came from losing her mother very young and having a father who was both distant and demanding.

  She refused to be a victim. She was moving on, whether she found the answers about her father or not.

  Something glinted on the floor near her feet. Frowning, she leaned down and picked up a pile of old library books, st
amped for resale. Her father must have purchased them after one of the fund-raising sales for the local library. They were a mix of Dickens, British history and modern paperback thrillers. Nothing significant there. Beside them was a stack of DVDs that he had never returned. When she shoved the DVDs aside, she saw a piece of metal caught in the molding at the bottom of the wall.

  Why was a key pushed into the wood? It couldn’t have fallen, not back in a corner.

  Her fingers shook a little as she dug at the key, which was wedged down into a crack in the molding. Olivia held it up into the light and read the number.

  Summer Island Bank. Number 192.

  A safe-deposit box?

  Her father’s banker had told Olivia that he had an account there. After the funeral, she had filled out paperwork and they had opened the box.

  All they had found were an old coin set and tax returns dating back ten years. Olivia was almost certain that the box number they had opened was different from this one. She frowned, thinking about what to do next. She needed to know if this box was current. If so, had it belonged to her father?

  She stood for a long time in the silent attic, feeling the cold outline of the key dig into her fingers. It dug in harder and harder until she gritted her teeth and felt the pain grow, but even then Olivia couldn’t relax her grip.

  Something felt wrong.

  She walked downstairs, back to the sunny kitchen and her handbag with the cell phone. She dialed.

  “Summer Island Bank. May I help you?”

  “I hope you can. I have a safe-deposit box at the bank. I wanted to check your banking hours today.”

  “Today is our late day. You can come until seven forty-five. Be sure to bring your key. If you don’t have your key, we can’t open the vault.”

  “Oh, I have my key.” Olivia hesitated. “It’s been a while, so I can’t remember your sign-in process. Do I need identification?”

  “You’ll have to sign in and show an ID. Your signature will have to match the signature card, too. This will be done in the presence of a bank representative. After that, you have as much time to access your box as you require.”

  This was bad news. Olivia knew she wasn’t a signatory, so they wouldn’t let her in to open the box. There had to be a perfectly normal reason that the account had never turned up before this. Probably her father had just forgotten. Probably the bank records were incomplete.

  But as she hung up the phone, a little voice kept whispering that banks do not make mistakes and that her father had not made a mistake either. He had meant to keep this box secret.

  For the life of her, Olivia couldn’t figure out why.

  She sat in the quiet kitchen, the key cold in her fingers. She heard the sound of her pulse and the beat of her heart. She told herself to stay calm, that there had to be a good reason her father had never mentioned this key or the box.

  Fortunately, one person might have answers for her. She dialed the number of Sawyer Sullivan’s longtime business adviser, Martin Eaglewood, an island native who had been a friend of her father’s as long as Olivia could remember.

  He answered the phone on the first ring. “Livie, how are you doing? I haven’t heard from you in weeks. I’m hoping you’re calling to take me up on that offer of lunch. It’s been too long.”

  “Lunch would be wonderful, Martin.” Olivia kept her voice calm and upbeat. “You name the date. We’re fairly busy with the final repairs on the Harbor House, but I can work around my schedule.”

  “Everything okay there? Al at the hardware store says you’ve spent a lot of money on repairs.”

  No secrets in a small town, Olivia thought. “Everything is on schedule. Actually, I was calling about my father’s financial records.”

  “Of course. What can I do to help?”

  “I just wondered if you had found any indication that he had additional accounts? Or maybe he had a safe-deposit box somewhere? Is there anything that has not shown up before now?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ve been through all our correspondence and all the documents that we found at the bank. He had one safe-deposit box at the bank, and you were there when we cleared it out. Why do you ask?”

  Olivia squeezed the key, hearing the loud hammer of her pulse. She felt like a traitor, but she couldn’t seem to trust her father’s executor or anyone else right now. “I always thought there were more documents somewhere. I figured I should ask you.”

  “Well, I’m glad you got that off your chest. But there are no other accounts or bank boxes. You can be very certain that if I had found anything I would have contacted you immediately.” The silence stretched out for long moments. “When you were going through the house, did you find any papers or things that your father had left for you?”

  It was such an innocent question. There was no reason for Olivia to feel wary in answering it. “No, nothing at all, Martin.”

  Her father’s adviser cleared his throat.

  “Is there something else I need to know?”

  “I’m afraid...your father owed people money. Only four. It’s nothing major, Olivia. There was a grocery account. He had a small tab running at the café downtown. He was also making payments on a boat that he was renting.”

  “A boat? He never mentioned that to me.”

  “I just heard about it this week. I was going to call you. I thought you and I might go over and have a look. Maybe—well, he might have left something there.”

  Olivia felt the cold pressure of the key in her fingers. Would Martin have really called her? Or would he have gone to check the boat himself?

  Olivia hated the way her thoughts were running, but she couldn’t stop seeing shadows. “That sounds like a good idea. If you’re free, why don’t we go there first thing tomorrow. Where is it?”

  “I’ll have my secretary email you all the information. It’s about a half hour up the coast. I’ll check and see when they open. We can meet there. Then perhaps you’ll let me take you to breakfast after that?”

  “Of course. I’ll watch for the email. I’m busy later in the day, so I’d like to do it as early as possible.”

  After he hung up, Olivia saw the email from his office and checked the location of the dock, which was about thirty miles to the north. She dialed the management office to check the hours.

  Martin had said that he would meet her there at eight-thirty, but Olivia found out that the office opened at seven-thirty. It was probably nothing, but she wanted to be there when the office first opened.

  A sudden growling in her stomach reminded Olivia that she hadn’t eaten anything all day. Though she had no real appetite, she went down to the kitchen and heated some soup in the microwave. But when the timer went off, she made no move to eat. She simply stood at the big kitchen window, looking out at the harbor.

  The house seemed too big and too quiet. Loneliness clung to every room. She looked down at the key she had found and wondered if there was some way to work around normal channels to view the contents of the box. At this point she didn’t even know if it belonged to her father. She doubted it belonged to a prior owner of the house, since her father had lived here for almost forty years. And that narrowed down the list of possibilities.

  She wanted to pick up the phone and call Grace or Caro or Jilly, laying out the new developments and asking for their advice. But they were all too busy with their own lives and problems.

  Olivia turned away, her soup forgotten. She had no appetite. She wanted to crawl into bed and pull the blankets over her head, but the worries grew and Olivia recognized the first stages of the old attacks that had crippled her since elementary school.

  The sudden cold sweats. The shaking hands.

  The looming sense of failure, impossible to escape.

  Olivia closed her eyes and locked her hands together, holding back the bad memories and the fear and all the ways that she could fail in the future. She had been plagued by panic attacks since she was fourteen. Now she was learning to understand their patte
rns and to deal with them.

  She took slow breaths, forcing out the bad memories. She repeated out loud all the things she loved in her life and all the things she had to be grateful for. She summoned up memories of her friends and pictures of the beautiful yarn shop and new café at the Harbor House. She pictured a full parking lot and happy shoppers.

  It was all going to be fine, she told herself, sinking into a chair at the kitchen table. The key fell onto the table in front of her, glinting in the sunlight, but Olivia felt stronger now, able to beat back the demons of fear.

  Sharp knocking at the back door made her jump. She glanced back to see who was there.

  A lanky figure was shadowed against the stained glass door. Olivia knew only one man who was that tall.

  And because she was so relieved to see him, because she wanted badly to discuss what she had found and ask for help, Olivia forced herself to stay right where she was. “Go away, Rafe.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THERE WAS NO sign of apology in Rafe’s eyes as he stood in the doorway, only concern. “Jilly gave me the key. She said I should swing by.”

  Olivia shrugged. “There was no need. I—I’m fine. Just busy.”

  Rafe crossed the room slowly, looking around the kitchen. “You’re sure everything is okay?”

  “Everything is fine.” Olivia shoved her hands in her pockets, praying for him to leave. “But I’m cooking.”

  “You are?”

  “That’s right.” Olivia backed away. She knew her face was pale and she could feel the sweat on her forehead as the anxiety began to return in slow, insidious waves. “I’m—okay, Rafe. But I’m busy. Cooking. I think you need to go.”

  “I don’t smell anything cooking. There’s just a single bowl of soup on the counter and I’m pretty sure that came from a can because it’s what I have every night.”

  “Stop it, Rafe. Just leave.” Olivia pressed a shaking hand to the wall, needing the support. Why wouldn’t he go away? She needed to focus before she was caught by a full-blown anxiety attack.