Page 81 of A Beach House Beginning

“I’m happy I could do it,” he answered, and realized with some shock that he meant the words—and that he was actually looking forward to coming back, especially if it meant seeing her again.

Chapter Three

One hazard of working in a small grocery store in a sleepy town was that she usually had far too much time on her hands.

Christa sat at the untidy desk in her second-floor office at Sully’s, gazing out the glass window that overlooked the sales floor at the few customers moving through the aisles.

Business was slow in the typical afternoon lull, though she knew it would heat up again in an hour or so, when people started poring over the contents of their cupboards and refrigerators and recipe boxes to find something to cook for dinner.

She was supposed to be working on the time schedule for the next two weeks. But as they had far too often, her thoughts kept straying in one uncomfortable direction.

All afternoon she couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Jace McCandless. It was completely ridiculous.

She was a grown woman—a mother of a fifteen-year-old, for heaven’s sake! She was far too old for a silly crush and she had no business obsessing over him like some giddy junior high student. Next thing she knew, she would be writing his initials on the time sheets and surrounding them with cute little curlicue hearts.

She certainly knew better. In the first place—and on a completely superficial level—he was way, way out of her league. His last girlfriend had been the lead singer of a Grammy-winning country music group, and the one before that a Hollywood starlet.

Not that she read the tabloids or anything, but she worked in a grocery store, for heaven’s sake. She couldn’t exactly miss his sexy features when she was running him across the checkout scanner, usually with some equally beautiful person wrapped around him.

With the whole world to choose from, why would he possibly have any interest in a thirty-four-year-old who lived with her mother, ran her family grocery store and had a U-Haul stuffed full of emotional baggage?

Even more important than whathemight be looking for in a woman were all the reasonssheought to be running as fast as her legs would take her in the opposite direction.

He was a player, a sexy, irresponsible cowboy, and hadn’t she had enough of that particular breed of man? The last thing she needed right now in her chaotic, messed-up life was a distraction like Jace McCandless. This afternoon just proved it.

She had a hundred things to do, a thousand pressures bearing down on her, but here she sat mooning over him.

She knew all that, knew she shouldn’t be thinking about him at all. But she couldn’t deny that something inside her had been irresistibly drawn to him, to the warm light in his eyes and the broad, comforting strength in those shoulders.

She sighed, grateful when the phone on her father’s scarred old wooden desk bleated a distraction from her thoughts.

She recognized her mother’s phone number on the caller ID and picked up after the second ring. “Hi, Mom. I was going to call you in a moment. How’s everything at home?”

She and Ellen alternated days at the store so one of them could be home with Hope at all times.

Ellen was great with the employees and the customers, but she hated anything to do with ordering or inventory or payroll.

Sage Flats was five miles from the nearest town, literally five miles from any other sign of civilization except far-flung ranches. For three generations now Sully’s had served as a combination gas station, grocery store and gathering spot for not only the residents of town but also outlying ranchers who didn’t want to drive the half hour to Park City when they only needed a gallon of milk.

Her whole childhood had been tied up in this store—evenings and weekends and holidays spent mopping the floors and stocking the candy aisles and, later, checking out customers. Back then, she had hated the provincial, old-fashioned feel of it and couldn’t wait to leave.

Since she had returned after her father’s death, she was surprised to find her perspective had undergone a massive paradigm shift. Now she found amazing comfort in the familiar—in the quiet, steady rhythm of life in a small town.

“Been a good day so far. Quiet,” Ellen answered in the brisk, no-nonsense voice that had driven Christa crazy when she was a teenager. Then again,everythingabout her mother had rubbed her like metal scraping metal in those days, from her poodle perm to her unshakable faith in the goodness of people to the way she couldn’t seem to put on lipstick without leaving a little smudge on her teeth.

Fifteen years ago, when she had been a stubborn, foolish girl, she never would have believed she could come to rely so heavily on her mother, but she would have been completely lost those first days after the accident—really, the entire last five months—without Ellen’s quiet strength.

“She seems worn-out from yesterday,” her mother went on, “even though she was still talking a mile a minute about horses. The occupational therapist could barely get her to settle down and work this afternoon. She fell asleep on the way home from therapy, but she’s up now, watching TV.”

“How did school go?”

“Her teacher said she’s almost passed off a couple of her goals. She wondered if you want to schedule another IEP meeting to discuss new ones.”

Christa sighed. More decisions she didn’t feel at all qualified to make in the new reality they had been thrust into. Hope attended school only half a day, since that was all the stamina she could muster. Even then, she was in a life-skills classroom—what in Christa’s generation had been called “special education”—working on regaining basic skills in hopes that she would be close to grade level when school started again in the fall.

“Oh, I almost forgot why I called. Can you bring home some cilantro?” Ellen broke into her thoughts. “I’m making black bean soup for dinner and forgot to pick some up.”

She scribbled a message to herself on a sticky note and stuck it on her computer. “Okay. Cilantro. Anything else?”

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