Page 84 of A Beach House Beginning

Most women he knew wouldn’t be thrilled at having to spend a sweaty hour or two unloading a delivery truck. He had seen that instant of frustrated discouragement when the delivery driver showed up.

But she didn’t complain, just knuckled down and got the job done with a surprisingly upbeat attitude. He found it astonishing, especially given what he knew she had to deal with at home.

It humbled him and made him realize just what a self-absorbed, self-pitying jerk he had become since the hotel fire.

“I understand Sully’s has been in your family for a few years.”

She lifted a box of canned peaches onto a dolly of her own. “My great-grandfather opened it just before World War I, mostly as a general store and gas station for those early automobiles. We’ve been running it ever since.”

“Not you, though. Hank tells me you haven’t been here long, that you left a job in some fancy clothing boutique in Texas a year or so ago to come home and give a hand after your dad died.”

She gave him a long, measuring look over the top of a stack of boxes. “Hank is just bubbling over with information, isn’t he?”

“I asked him about you,” he confessed.

“Why?” Genuine surprise flitted across her features.

He shrugged. “Something about you doesn’t quite fit Sage Flats. Your clothes, your hair. I can’t put my finger on it.”

“I was raised here and lived just a few blocks away from Sully’s until just a few weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday. And now here I am, back.”

“Where were you in between?”

She turned away. “You mean Hank didn’t fill your ears with that long, boring story, too?”

“He was a bit vague on details. He just said you took off as soon as you could.”

She rolled the hand truck down the ramp. “I can’t imagine why you would possibly be interested.”

He couldn’t have explained it to her, but he found he was very much interested in her answer. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her since he watched her drive away from the therapy center the afternoon before.

For the first time in weeks his dreams hadn’t been haunted by the cries of those he couldn’t help. Instead they had featured this woman he found intensely fascinating.

He had taken one of his own horses for a long, bracing trail ride into the mountains after he left the therapy center—the first time he had done that in weeks. As he rode, his mind had drifted over the encounter with Christa and Hope, and he had marveled all over again at the courage and tenacity in both of them.

He didn’t have a whole lot of experience when it came to mothers. His own had been a real piece of work, too drugged up to remember she even had a kid most of the time. She’d dragged him from one piece-of-crap crack house to another until his grandmother Junemarie finally tracked him down when he was eight and rescued him.

But if he could have chosen a mother, he would have wanted someone like Christa, with that same unwavering determination in her eyes to do what was best for her child.

How long had it been since a woman had genuinely intrigued him? Most of them were painfully transparent, usually buckle bunnies who were only interested in him because once upon a time he had been moderately good in the rodeo arena.

But he had the definite impression his rodeo days would actually prove an obstacle to Christa Sullivan.

“Why wouldn’t I find your life interesting?” he asked.

“I’ve seen the tabloids, Mr. McCandless. You’re a jet-setting celebrity on a first-name basis with other jet-setting celebrities. You date movie stars and appear in commercials for macho pickup trucks and sexy blue jeans. I, on the other hand, am a thirtysomething single mother who spends my days taking my daughter to doctor appointments and stocking cans of peas and corn and cream-of-chicken soup on the dusty shelves of a tiny grocery store in some backward town in Utah no one has ever heard of. I’m sure you can understand my skepticism that any portion of my scintillating life might be of interest to a man like you.”

He laughed out loud at her dry tone, even as some part of him had to wince at her indictment of his life—mostly because it was dead-on. Since his retirement, his life had seemed pretty damn meaningless, something that became starkly obvious while he was escaping for his life through the flaming, hellish hallways of a burning hotel.

He pushed the images aside, vastly preferring to focus on the woman in front of him.

“Believe me, you underestimate yourself, Ms. Sullivan.”

She leaned against a stack of boxes, looking dusty and bedraggled and immensely appealing.

“Okay. Fine,” she said after a long moment. “You want to know my life story? Here it is. I ran off a few weeks before high school graduation with a rodeo cowboy nearly ten years my senior.”

She sighed, already looking as if she regretted saying anything. “We had an exciting, passionate love affair for all of about four months before I found out I was pregnant. He, of course, wanted nothing to do with a ready-made family, so we parted ways in Texas. I was too ashamed to come home and face my parents’ disappointment. Though I reconnected with them after Hope was born, I stayed away from Sage Flats until my father died, when my mother begged me to come home and help her with the store.”

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