The Real Thing (The Bouquet Catchers Book 5) Read online

  He didn’t want Sadie getting hurt, didn’t want her bonding with another woman who was just going to leave her when her own dreams proved more important than his daughter.

  Wind whipped across the beach and both females hunched against it instinctively. Sadie’s curls were contained beneath her ubiquitous Mariners cap, but Maggie’s famous blonde locks were loose, a few tendrils blowing across her face which she couldn’t push back with her arms full of dog. Part of him wanted to tuck her hair back for her—but an even bigger part of him recoiled at the thought. He did not need to be thinking about touching Maggie Tate.

  Edgar came galloping back from his exploration of the beach and Ian’s mother stood, dusting the sand off her jeans as she wandered over to intercept the group.

  Sadie’s eyes lit when she saw him, and she broke into a run. “Dad! Can Maggie come over for dinner tonight?”

  Ian barely stopped himself from flinching. “I’m sure Maggie has other plans.”

  His mother shot him a look like she was considering disowning him as Sadie sagged dramatically. “Please?”

  Maggie shifted Cecil in her arms so she could tuck her hair behind her ear, not quite meeting his gaze. “I really should work on sorting through more of Lolly’s stuff. There’s a lot to get through.”

  “But you have to eat,” his mother insisted. “Don’t you?”

  “I...” She looked helplessly at Ian—and he realized what an unforgivable jerk he was being. Again. He couldn’t seem to stop being an ass around her.

  “Come for dinner,” he said. “We’d love to have you.”

  She opened her mouth, her gaze searching his, and he had the distinct feeling she would have said no if she could have thought of an excuse fast enough. “I guess I could…”

  “Yay!” Sadie squealed. “Do you like fish tacos? Dad makes the best fish tacos.”

  “Sure…”

  “Yes! This is gonna be the best.” Sadie pumped her fist.

  “Why don’t you check the provisions, see if we need to go to the store?” Ian suggested and Sadie saluted before darting toward the house, his mother trailing after her.

  Maggie hung back and Ian found himself lingering with her, watching his family head up to the house.

  “I don’t have to come,” she murmured when the others were out of earshot.

  “No, you should,” he said, trying to make up for his earlier lack of enthusiasm, though from the look on her face, he didn’t sound any more sincere than he had when he issued the original invitation. “I’d like it if you came.”

  She met his eyes, her own openly skeptical and he spoke before she could protest again. “Come to dinner,” he said, the words firm. “Seven o’clock. Don’t be late.”

  She pressed her lips together, but nodded. “Okay.”

  “Good,” he mumbled before turning back toward the house, hoping he hadn’t just made a mistake.

  * * * * *

  She considered skipping dinner. Coming up with some excuse. Saying she’d fallen asleep or forgotten or… something.

  She considered it as she walked back to Lolly’s place. She considered it as she set Cecil down and he padded to his favorite place tucked beneath one of Lolly’s end tables and began to snore. She considered it as she stared at the piles of Lolly’s things she’d scattered around the bedroom and living room. It was amazing to think all of it had once fit in the closet. It all seemed to have expanded since she’d opened Pandora’s box and started going through Lolly’s things.

  It was barely even noon. She still had several hours to come up with an excuse—though what Mrs. Summer had said was true. She did need to eat, and she hadn’t been doing such a good job of that since she’d been here.

  At home she had a personal chef and Mel nagging her to eat her carefully calibrated caloric allotment. Here she was on her own, and fending for herself from the cans of soup and boxes of Wheat Thins in the pantry wasn’t exactly a balanced diet—especially when she kept forgetting to eat at all.

  Maggie headed toward the pantry now, opening a package of dried apricots and popping one into her mouth, the sticky sweetness rich on her tongue.

  She’d lost track of her usual routine. How many sessions had she missed with her personal trainer? How many press engagements or calls with her agent? That whole life felt so far away here. So flimsy. As if it could blow away on the breeze.

  Carrying the bag of apricots, she wandered back into the living room. She didn’t have the energy to delve into any of the boxes that remained in the closet, but there were only a few things stored up in the loft that had once been her room. She should be able to go through that stuff quickly.

  It was dusty in the loft. Layers of dust on the floor, the boxes, and the fixtures. Lolly had evidently started using the space for storage and must not have been up there in years. It was a clutter of useless items. Lamps without shades. Chairs with broken legs or rotted cushions. An air mattress that had potential until she realized it leaked air almost as quickly as she could fill it. The standard detritus of a life. A collection of all the things Lolly had probably thought she would fix and use again someday, but never did.

  Maggie carried the items down the stairs and piled them in the living room, wondering how many trips it would take in the pink convertible to get all this stuff to the dump, since even Goodwill wasn’t likely to take the broken mishmash.

  A few items that seemed salvageable went in a second pile. Extra linens that were only slightly moth-eaten. An old-fashioned sled with a barely noticeable bend in one runner. Ski poles and cross country skis. And what seemed to be a perfectly good bicycle wheel, though she couldn’t find the bike that went with it.

  She climbed the steep, ladder-like stairs, her skin now carrying the fine coating of dust that had been on all the items she touched, and peered into the recesses of the nearly empty loft, frowning as something grey caught her eye at the corner of the room where the ceiling slanted down to meet the floor.

  She got down on her hands and knees, crawling beneath the sharply angled roofline, and her heart began to beat faster as she realized the grey object that had been hiding behind all that junk was really a dust-covered white envelope.

  With the name Maggie written across the front in block letters.

  She slid it toward her, scooting back until she could sit upright without hitting her head on the ceiling, and curled her legs to sit tailor-style, staring at the envelope.

  There was no question about this one. It was definitely addressed to her. But it had been covered with dust. Obviously up in the loft for years. Why had Lolly written these letters? And why never send them?

  The flap wasn’t sealed and Maggie flipped it back, pulling out pages that were soft from age and looked like they had been folded and refolded several times.

  This time she didn’t hesitate to read.

  Maggie May,

  I hate that we aren’t talking.

  Maggie paused, her heart beating faster at that first sentence, evidence that this was a more recent letter. A letter from that blackout time when all she’d been able to do was wonder how her aunt felt about her. Taking a deep breath, she read on.

  I often feel that I’ve failed you. I know you think I’ve taken your father’s side, that it is us against you, and I wish I knew how to explain that I am on both of your sides. That I only want you to be able to see in each other what I see in you.

  Forgiving him isn’t excusing what he’s done. Over the years, I’ve been angrier at him over the way he has treated you than I’ve ever been at another human. Maybe I should have said that to you. Maybe you needed to hear me say that he was wrong, but I kept hoping you would see that he’s only human. Hoping that you would be able to forgive him if you could only understand. I didn’t want to feed your anger, afraid it would turn into hate, but I think in defending him I made things worse.

  The Tully side of the family didn’t know about you until you were seven, did you know that? Your father never told anyone he
’d gotten a girl pregnant while he was stationed at Fort Bliss. Or that she’d only been seventeen at the time, or how she’d struggled with drug addiction in the intervening years. I was able to get in touch with your grandparents and invited you all to come to Long Shores so the Tully side could meet you, but none of us could have predicted the circumstances. That you would have so recently lost your mother. Or that your father would refuse to come when he had leave.

  You were so small for your age. And trying so hard to be strong. I loved you the second I saw you—and I had never been angrier than I was at your father for keeping you a secret for so long. I had wanted it to be the best summer you’d ever had, but you were so sad. I don’t think you said more than two words for the first week you were here. I was so grateful to Ian for bringing you out of your shell. You trailed after him like a duckling, following wherever he led, and I just wanted to keep you here, keep you safe, but you weren’t mine to keep.

  I wish I could have done more. I still regret that I didn’t fight harder for you. I wanted your father to push for custody. I told him I would keep you while he was deployed, but he said the army life was no life for a single father, and your grandparents wanted you and you knew them, had lived with them before. I asked for you every summer and I was grateful for the ones we had—even that summer your father came to visit when it all seemed to blow up in my face.

  I know he made you think he was going to ask for you to come live with him when he married Michelle. I know it broke your heart when he sent you back with your grandparents instead. I wish I could have smacked some sense into him, but he never was reasonable where you were concerned. He’d decided at twenty that he wasn’t ready to be a father and never seemed to let the fact that he had a daughter change that, but I do believe he would love you now if you let him. If you could just bring yourself to stop hating him for the mistakes of the past he can’t change. I think he feels so guilty he can’t look at you, because all he sees is your hatred of him—and on some level he knows he deserves it. But if you could forgive him, perhaps he would forgive himself.

  I wish we could talk, Maggie May. I wish you would hear me. I miss you, my girl.

  Lolly

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Maggie sat staring at the letter in her hands for who knew how long. Only the realization that she had somewhere to be at seven finally jolted her out of her reverie and sent her down the stairs to take a shower.

  She wasn’t in the habit of thinking about the past. She’d built a life that was focused on the present and the future. Built a reputation for herself as an unabashed hedonist. She was instinctive. She lived in the moment. She indulged herself. And she didn’t dwell.

  But it seemed ever since she’d arrived in Long Shores she couldn’t stop dwelling on the past. Obsessing over the moments that had shaped her. Moments she made a point of trying not to remember.

  Like the summer she’d spent with Lolly when she was thirteen. The summer when she’d had a hopeless crush on Ian, who had seemed like the coolest boy in the world. The same summer her father had come for a week in August, bringing his soon-to-be-fiancee, and playing at being the perfect dad for seven days to convince Michelle that he was done with his bachelor ways.

  It had worked. They’d gotten married, had two perfect kids in the next three years—and never looked back at the one he already had.

  But Lolly had always been kind to her. Even when she didn’t have to be.

  Maggie shed her clothes and climbed into the shower to rinse off the dust, her thoughts circling back to that first summer. Only months after her mother ODed when her gran was struggling with the loss and she’d overheard her grandparents saying they needed a break from her. Before her father left the army and still didn’t have time for her. Before she realized that she was someone who was going to be passed around because no one really wanted her.

  Ian had been a cocky little boy with dark eyes, daring her to jump into Black Lake, looking at her like he was sure she wouldn’t do it and something had snapped into place inside her. She’d suddenly become the girl who would never let a boy tell her there was something she couldn’t do. She’d jumped right into that lake—and even if he’d told her beforehand the damn thing was filled with leeches, she would have done it again. In part because that wild defiance had been bubbling through her blood, but in part because she would have done anything to make him like her.

  That was the secret to fame right there. You had to be willing to do whatever it took to make people like you. And Maggie had always had that. A vast, gaping hole inside her that needed to be fed attention on a regular basis or she sank into bed and never wanted to come out again.

  She stood under the shower spray, tipping her head up to the water pounding roughly on her face.

  What she needed was a crapton of therapy. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out. But she’d always been too broke, and then too scared, to go. She’d heard horror stories of celeb’s private confessions being sold anonymously to tabloids, secrets that had only been shared with so called counselors. Or even one elite Hollywood practice whose confidential files had been hacked and sold to the highest bidder.

  She couldn’t risk it.

  And it wasn’t as if she didn’t already know why she was messed up. Her baggage wasn’t exactly hard to diagnose. Mommy issues. Daddy issues. Looking for love in all the wrong places.

  Which was why she was off men.

  She had a history of dating men who made her feel like crap. Men who were using her to advance their careers, or to have the most beautiful woman on their arm. Even with Demarco, who was the nicest man on the planet, she’d always felt like she was trying to live up to the image he had of her in his head, and falling short. Playing the part of The Great Maggie Tate. Never quite herself.

  And then there was Alec, with his goddamn “fictionalized” tell-all, who’d made her feel bad when good things happened for her, who’d dumped her when she got too famous for his ego, and then only wanted her back when she’d finally found someone good in Demarco. She’d wanted to prove that she was good enough to be wanted by the man who’d rejected her—so she’d kissed Alec with Demarco’s ring on her finger. As if making out with the man who’d rejected her would somehow prove she was worthy.

  He wasn’t the first of her exes to go public after the breakup, though most of them just went to the tabloids rather than landing a book deal. Even her ex-personal assistant Kaydee had violated her non-disclosure agreement and gone to the paps.

  It didn’t even matter what was true. It only mattered what people were willing to believe. And it turned out when it came to celebrity, that was quite a lot.

  So she was done with men. Done with all of it.

  Which was why she was putting on make-up and doing her hair to go have dinner with Ian Summer and his perfect family. Ian Summer—who had always had a direct line to her heart, whom she’d always been so desperate to please.

  Because Maggie Tate was nothing if not an expert at self-sabotage.

  * * * * *

  “Do you think I could win Masterchef Junior?”

  Ian glanced at his daughter where she was dicing cilantro for the tacos. She’d been his sous chef since she was old enough to stir a spoon. The step stool he’d once pulled up to the counter so she could reach had been retired, but she still appeared like clockwork to help him with dinner on the nights when she didn’t have homework to finish.

  It seemed like she’d been a pre-schooler on that stool last week and then he’d blinked and here she was, almost into double digits, approaching the teen years so fast it was scaring the shit out of him.

  And lying about her mother.

  He was trying not to fixate on what she’d told Maggie, but the lie kept popping up in his mind. Was Maggie the only one she’d told? Or was she telling everyone that Scarlett was dead?

  Ian shoved away the thought. “You wanna take over all the cooking? To practice for your culinary future?” he offered.

&nb
sp; Sadie made a face at the generous offer of extra chores and slid aside the cilantro, starting on the cabbage. “I need to figure out what my signature dish would be. Like Beef Wellington.”

  Ian smiled. “My angel. I support you in all things and have absolute faith in your ability to win Masterchef Junior. With that said, have you ever tasted Beef Wellington, let alone tried to make it?”

  “Details. I bet I could do it.”

  “I know you could. You can do anything.”

  He’d always told her that. He just hadn’t expected one of the things she chose to do to be lying about her mother’s absence. She was getting older. Life was getting more complicated. But he’d raised her to be honest. Or he thought he had.

  Enough.

  Ian set aside the spice rub he’d been preparing for the halibut, turning toward his daughter and doing his best to keep his voice even and mild. “Sadie, did you tell Maggie your mom was dead?”

  Sadie shrugged and kept chopping. “I guess.”

  Jesus. She didn’t even deny it. Ian nodded slowly, thinking calm, soothing thoughts. “Do you tell other people that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Why? he wanted to shout, but he kept the question echoing inside his head silent.

  Her mother had left. She hadn’t been taken away from them by fate like her grandfather had. She knew that. And no matter how much he’d tried to do to show her she was loved and valued and chosen over the years, it had to suck knowing that her mother’d had a choice and she’d chosen to leave.

  It had certainly fucked Maggie up, knowing that her father had abandoned her on purpose. How could it not? He’d hoped Sadie had escaped that feeling. She’d been so young when Scarlett left. She didn’t even really remember her. And her life had been good, hadn’t it? They were a team, weren’t they?

  But he wasn’t her mother. And as she was becoming a teenager that was going to be more and more apparent. Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised by the lie. Maybe he should have been surprised she wasn’t telling it sooner.