Page 14 of Sweet Escape at Bayside
A knock startled him from his thoughts. He answered the door, and his heart beat like a jackhammer at the sight of Violet.
“Hey,” she said.
She wore a black zip-up sweatshirt open over a dark tank top that stopped short of her hip-hugging jeans, exposing a path of tanned, toned skin with a splash of ink. He noticed her left leg slip inward, and he had the urge to reach for her. But he’d been thinking about that morning when she’d come home just before dawn, wearing some guy’s shirt, and reminded himself that he’d spent more than two years searching for her—and she hadn’twantedto be found.
He pushed his hand into his pocket and said, “Hi.”
“Got a minute to talk?”
He bit back,About freaking time, and said, “Sure. Want to come in? Have a drink?”
She nodded and stepped inside. He grabbed two beers from the fridge, and when he returned to the living room, she was holding his sketch pad, studying the image he’d drawn. He handed her a beer and took the sketch pad.
“Was that…?”
He set it on an end table by one of the armchairs. “Just a drawing,” he lied. He’d been sketching Violet’s naked body from memory for so long, it had become his go-to outlet for his emotions. He’d started the sketch earlier that morning. He was drawing her lying on her side, the same way he’d sculpted her when they were together.
He waved to the sofa. “Have a seat.” He sat in the armchair closest to her.
She inhaled deeply as she sank into the cushion. “I know I owe you an explanation.” Her thumb moved over the label on the beer bottle, but her eyes remained trained on him. “And I’m sorry about disappearing. That wasn’t fair.”
“That’s one way to put it.” He took a long pull on his drink, wanting to say so much more, but more interested in her reasons than in telling her what she’d done to him.
She pushed to her feet and paced, fidgeting with her hands. “While we were together I got an email from Lizza telling me Desiree needed me and that it would help prolong her life if I would come to the Cape.”
He went to her, knowing how much Desiree meant to her. “Why didn’t you tell me? Is Desiree okay?”
“She’s fine. It was a trick.” She stopped pacing. “At the same time, Lizza emailed Desiree asking her to come to the Cape to help run her art gallery, and said it might prolongLizza’slife. But she wasn’t sick, at least not the kind of sick you’d think. She’d hit our vulnerabilities with the precision of a smart bomb. And then, in pure Lizza style, she took off after we showed up, leaving us with a mortgage on the property, a gallery, and a secret sex shop in the back. That’s how we ended up running the inn. This is the house I told you about, where I visited with my grandmother and Desiree when we were growing up. I’ve been here ever since.”
“Wow, Dai—Violet.That’s…” She’d told him some bizarre stories about Lizza, but to scare her own daughters like that? He shook his head, trying to understand not only why her mother would do that, but also trying to process the fact that Violet had been in the States, right under his nose the whole time.
And did she saysex shop? He couldn’t get lost in that right now. “You’ve been here? On Cape Cod?”
She nodded.
“But you knew I lived in Boston. I looked everywhere for you—outside the country, of course, because you said you’d never stayed in the States for more than a week since you were a teenager. Why didn’t you tell me before you took off? We’d been together for months. I don’t understand why you’d leave without saying goodbye. We’d just made love for the first time—”
“And you proposed!” she snapped, on the move again. “Whodoesthat?”
“Who does that?” He closed the distance between them, stopping her from wearing a path in the floor. “I did, Violet. The guy who fell so freaking in love with you, I couldn’t imagine going back to a life without you in it. Did I totally misread us? Because if I did, then the last two-plus years I’ve been torturing myself for nothing.”
“No—”
“Then what happened? Did I scare you off?”
“Yes. No!Youdidn’t scare me. What I felt for you scared me.” She was shaking as she set the beer bottle down and crossed her arms.
“Don’t you think it scared me? I’ve never felt anything like what I felt when we were together.”
“But I could never be who you needed,” she said angrily. “You were a prominent doctor living in a big city, with highbrow friends, attending black-tie dinners, and all the other crap you told me about. Things I didn’t know how to—or want to—be part of, no matter how I felt about you. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t do that. I wanted theyouI knew in Ghana. The man who put the people he helped before everything else in his life. The guy who walked miles to see families and check up on their children, the guy who sculpted and drew in his free time and enjoyed sitting under the stars with villagers and didn’t care if his shoes got dirty. Not the guy who was tied to a system that I didn’t believe in or tied to his cell phone and worried about attending the right parties or what the society pages say about him.”
He opened his mouth to defend himself, and she said, “Don’t even try to say you weren’t like that. Youtoldme you were, that it was what you had always done.”
He ground out a curse, pacing the floor. She was right. His life had been exactly that before he’d met her. “But if you’d come back with me, that would have changed.”
“You couldn’t have changed those things, and even if you could have, what would have happened when you realized I wasn’t everything you ever wanted? That I was too restless to stay put? When you found me sleeping on a hammock in the yard because your place was too confining? Or when I cursed during a fancy dinner with your doctor friends? What then?”
She paused, breathing heavily, and he read between the lines. She’d been abandoned by her father, her mother, and he knew she worried she’d never be enough for Desiree. She’d left him to avoid being left behind herself.
