Anne Winston – Born to be Wild (страница 2)

He couldn’t stick around that long. Anger continued to race through him. He could barely wait to get out of town. Today. Besides, he knew Celia too well. If he went to her now, she would try to talk him into waiting until he was calmer, into talking with his father. And if that failed, she’d pester him to take her along. The hell of it was, he wasn’t sure he had the willpower to resist her. Even if it landed him in jail if they were caught.

He’d write to her. Write her and tell her what his father had done, explain to her why he’d had to leave so abruptly. She would understand. That was the one thing he could count on. Celia always understood him. Yeah, he’d write. Ask her to come with him after her birthday…ask her to marry him.

His hands tightened on the wheel as he punched the accelerator of his sleek sports car against the floorboard. To hell with his old man. He didn’t need anyone else as long as he had Celia.

One

Thirteen years later

“Hey, Celia! Guess what I heard?”

With an abstracted smile Celia Papaleo glanced up from the paperwork on permanent moorings. Thank God it was finally October. They’d reached that time of year when Harwichport residents could begin to breathe again after the tourists overran Cape Cod for the summer, flinging money and flouting rules and generally making the South Harwich harbormaster and everyone else who worked for her crazy.

“Roma.” She raised her head and smiled at the petite woman in the bright red sweater who’d entered her office, sitting back in her chair. “What did you hear?”

Roma had been Celia’s best friend since their elementary school days. She held a tiny girl in one arm and a toddler by the hand.

Celia rose and automatically reached for the infant, ignoring the sharp sting of pain that pierced her heart as she cuddled baby Irene close. How she’d loved holding Leo this way when he was a baby. Leo… He would have been five next week—

“Ceel?” Roma snapped her fingers, waving one hand in front of Celia’s face.

Celia focused on her friend’s concerned blue eyes, knowing Roma would worry. Pushing aside the grief that inevitably welled up, she made an effort to smile again.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking how glad I am summer’s over.”

“Amen to that.” Roma’s voice held feeling although she still studied Celia too closely. “Adios, tourists.”

“Those tourists put food on our tables,” Celia felt compelled to point out.

“Yeah, but they’re still a huge pain in the—”

“All right. I get your point.” Celia chuckled. She gestured to Irene and little William, who was busy pushing a truck around the seat of one office chair with pudgy fingers. “So what’s so important that you had to drag these two down here instead of just picking up the phone?”

“Oh!” Roma perked up. “Almost forgot. You’d better sit down,” she warned darkly.

Celia’s eyebrows rose. “Why?”

“Reese Barone docked over at Saquatucket Marina last night.”

Reese Barone…Reese Barone…Reese Barone… The name echoed through her head, a blast from the past she surely could have lived the rest of her life without hearing. Her muscles tensed, her heart skipped a beat. For a single crystalline instant, the world froze. Then she forced herself to react.

“Wow.” Her voice would be calm if it killed her. “It’s been years since he was here, hasn’t it?”

Roma snorted. “You know darn well how long it’s been. He hasn’t been back since he dumped you for the pregnant deb.”

“Technically, he didn’t dump me for anyone. The last I heard, he refused to marry her and took off for good.” She handed Irene back to Roma and picked up the papers on her desk, aligning all the corners with unnecessary care. “I doubt we’ll see him here. Saquatucket caters more to the yacht crowd than we do.”

“He might look you up.”

Celia forced herself to laugh. “Roma, he probably doesn’t even remember me. We were kids.”

“Kids? I think not.” Roma cocked her head and studied Celia until she blushed.

“Okay, we weren’t kids. But we were really young. My life has changed completely since those days and I’m sure his has, too.”

“Maybe.” Roma didn’t sound as if she believed it. But then she shrugged. “I’m off to the grocery store. I just have time for a quick run before I pick Blaine up from kindergarten.”

Celia nodded, although another arrow of pain shot into her to nestle beside the first. Leo had been seven months younger than Blaine, but because of his October birthday he would have been a year behind in school. This would have been his last year at home with her. Don’t go there, Celia. You’re not an at-home mom anymore. You’re not a mom, period. Or a wife. You’re just the harbormaster now.

“See you.” Roma corralled her younger son and blew a kiss at Celia before she swept out the door.

Celia could only be grateful that her friend hadn’t perceived her pain. Leaning both elbows on her desk as she sank into her chair again, she pressed the palms of her hands hard against her eyes, refusing to shed the tears that wanted to spring free.

After two and a half years she didn’t think of them as much now, Milo and Leo. Only a few times a day as opposed to a few times a minute. The agony had faded to a dull ache—except for momentary flare-ups like this one. Often, they were triggered by Roma’s three children. She suspected her friend knew it, because Roma didn’t bring them around as much as she once had.

But Celia refused to crawl into a hole and hide for the rest of her life, which was what she’d have to do to avoid seeing children. She loved Roma’s kids and her husband, Greg. She’d lost her own family but that was no reason to cut Roma’s out of her life. Still, sometimes it was hard. Just…so hard.

She turned her mind away from the thoughts because she couldn’t stand them anymore. Lord, she couldn’t believe Roma’s news.

Reese. On the same small piece of land with her. She’d given up all hope of ever seeing him again years ago. But before that…before that, there had been a time when Reese Barone had been so much a part of her that she’d never even imagined she could have a life that didn’t include him.

Reese. Her first love, the boy with whom she’d spent a carefree long-ago summer making love and sailing every moment she wasn’t working. Looking back, it was easy to see that she would never have fit into Reese Barone’s world on a permanent basis. She had been a fisherman’s daughter, a motherless girl who knew more about where the best stripers were than she did about fashion or feminine pursuits. She’d been seventeen to his twenty-one, a local Cape girl who’d only ever been to Boston on a high school field trip, inexperienced and easily won.

They couldn’t have been more different. He was the grandson of a Sicilian immigrant whose ambition and drive had brought the Barone name both fortune and fame. Second of eight children in a large and loving family, Reese was born knowing how to make money. Well-traveled, confident, he’d had no lack of females vying for his attention. Why he’d been interested in her would always remain a mystery.

Reese. She’d heard rumors that he’d been disowned by his family years ago. He’d gotten a girl pregnant then refused to marry her. Had it been a girl like Celia, she had little doubt his prominent, wealthy family would have reacted with such ire. But the girl supposedly was a debutante whose family was close to the Barones, and his refusal to marry her had set off a Barone family explosion the reverberations of which had been heard clear up to the mid-Cape village of Harwichport where they made their summer home.

Reese. Ridiculously, it still hurt to think of him. Were his eyes still that beautiful shade of gray that could turn as silver as a dime or as stormy as a rough sea? Was his hair still long enough to blow in the ocean breezes that filled the sails?

Don’t be silly, Celia. You remember a fantasy. Maybe her memory had embellished on eyes that were really quite ordinary. Maybe the hair had silver in it now. Maybe that lean, whipcord body had softened and filled out a little too much. Maybe—

It didn’t matter. He’d sailed away without a word to her after the news of his impending fatherhood had trickled out to the Cape from Boston. She’d been left with the realization that she’d meant nothing more to him than a little convenient summer sex. The only good thing she’d had to cling to was that he hadn’t gotten her pregnant.

Although…

There was a tiny, traitorous part of her that had regretted, for a very long time, that he hadn’t. He wouldn’t have stayed, but she’d have had a little piece of him to hold on to.

That part of her had softened when she’d married Milo and had melted completely away after she’d finally gotten pregnant and had Leo. She couldn’t honestly say she’d forgotten Reese, but she hadn’t entertained any more thoughts of ever seeing him again.

Well, it was probably a moot point. She briskly straightened her papers again, then reached for the phone. She had work to do.

Thirty minutes later, one of the young men who worked for her at the marina skidded to a halt just inside her office door. “Hey, Mrs. P.! You gotta check this out! There’s an eighty-footer coming in. I swear it looks brand new!”