Hard Choices

“I told you to get inside.”

Her head jerked. Logan had appeared around the side of the small house. He stepped around the elevated frame of her ancient water cistern. When her heart drifted back down from her throat, she chanced speech. “Which explains why you’re sneaking around outside my house.” Once again, she found herself wishing that he’d do what he’d come to do and go. It would be painful—like the worst kind of bandage being ripped off her skin. But at least it would be quick.

He came toward her, looking even taller from her half-prone position. The wind was doing a number on his hair, too. Blowing through the short, thick strands of dark brown to reveal a few strands of silver. He was as darkly tanned as she remembered. The contrast made his blue eyes seem even brighter. Logan—in the flesh—made her feel as edgy as he ever had.

The sooner he left, the better.

“Riley is inside. You should take her now. You wouldn’t want to get stuck on the island if the weather goes even more sour.”

“In a hurry to see her go, Annie?” His expression was considering. “Having a teenager around cramping your style?”

She swung her legs off the chaise and rose. “There’s no style to cramp. She doesn’t belong here with me. She belongs at home with Will and Noelle. Nothing’s going to be solved by her remaining here. Everybody, including you, knows that.”

“Maybe she just needs a breather. Don’t you remember needing a breather when you were her age?”

“When I was her age, I’d already been at Bendlemaier for months. And the last place I wanted to be was at home with George and Lucia.”

His lips twisted. He gave her a sidelong look that tightened her stomach. “Liar.”

She stiffened. “What?”

He moved, catching her chin in his big palm, tilting it toward him. She went stock-still, her senses going way beyond alert at the close, wind-blown warmth of him.

“You heard me,” he challenged softly. “When you were Riley’s age, you wanted nothing more than to live at home, to have normal parents who cared more about you than their careers, to go to the same public high school that Will had gone to.”

“I never told you that,” she said stiffly.

His thumb gently tapped her chin. “You didn’t have to tell me everything. It was obvious, Annie. And that night at the boathouse, you said—”

“I said a lot of things.” She felt exposed with her face firmly tilted up to his gaze. “And I was drunk,” she finished flatly.

“Nearly,” he allowed. “On champagne you had no business drinking.”

“Well, you were the only one who noticed.”

“That pissed you off, too, didn’t it?”

She stepped back, deliberately lifting her chin away from his hold. “It was a long time ago and has nothing whatsoever to do with the reason you’re here.”

“Are you so certain about that?”

Her knees felt weak. She refused to sit, though she wanted to. Badly. “Yes, I’m certain.”

The corner of his lips lifted in that saturnine expression of his that visited her too often in her sleep. Ridiculous, really. And maybe it was only because she simply didn’t get involved with men—hadn’t for more years than she could count on her fingers—that she was beset with memories of this one man in particular.

She’d humiliated herself with him at Will’s wedding reception, after all. Her youthfully inflated ego had convinced her that he must surely have had the hots for her, mostly because she hadn’t been able to look at him without feeling as if her nerve endings were on fire.

Well, he’d corrected her on that score.

He could have taken advantage of an impetuous and spoiled teenager intent on playing with fire, but he hadn’t. So, regardless of the wicked cast of his lips, Annie knew that Logan, like Will, was a straight arrow. Despite his devil-dark looks, he’d probably never even crossed the street against the light.

“Aren’t you curious, Annie?”

She snatched at the towel when a gust of wind picked it up off the chaise. She twisted the terrycloth in her hands. “About what? Riley’s real reasons for running away from home? It’s hard to believe it would just be Bendlemaier. Noelle says that Riley has made a small career out of negotiating things she wants or doesn’t want in life.”

“That’s all you’re curious about? Only Riley?” He stepped closer again.

Beyond them, a colorful beach ball hurtled over the sand, followed by a scrap of paper that hung on the wind. For some reason, the sight of them made Annie even more aware of the solitude of her house. Her nearest neighbors were more than a mile away.

She swallowed. “That’s all I can afford to be curious about.”

“Sounds awfully cautious for the Annie I knew.”

Her eyes burned. She blamed it on something in the blowing wind because she didn’t cry. Not anymore. “The Annie you knew no longer exists.” Her words were barely audible. “She learned her lessons the hard way.”

“What lessons?” He jerked his head up before his lips finished forming the question.

An awful buzzing whine had rent the air. Piercing. Loud. Annie nearly jumped out of her skin and covered her ears. “What is that?” She had to yell to be heard above the alarm, above the awful thunder that was suddenly crashing overhead, sounding as if mountains were collapsing.

His hand was on her arm, pushing her through the glass door he slid open. “That’s the emergency siren. A hangover from the Second World War. Get Riley.”

Annie had lived on Turnabout for five years. She hadn’t even known there was an emergency siren. She ran to the second bedroom and threw the door wide, calling Riley’s name.

But the room was empty.

Chapter Four

Annie’s heart stopped.

Riley wasn’t in her bedroom.

Before she thought about the idiocy of it, she darted into the room, looking under the bed when she knew perfectly well the only things that fitted under there were the shallow plastic storage boxes that contained a lifetime of photographs. She also yanked open the closet door. But all that was inside were her vacuum cleaner and clothing she never wore.

“Riley?” She stumbled around the twin-sized bed to peer out the window that overlooked the front of the house, only to jump back with a cry when a palm branch slammed against it, then screeched along the side of the house as the wind carried it.

Logan was there, arm sliding about her waist, bodily lifting her away from the shuddering windowpane. “Stay away from the glass.”

She was beyond listening, twisting away from him, nearly falling over the foot of the bed again as she ran into the hall, calling Riley’s name again, barely able to hear her own voice over the wail of the emergency siren.

Darkness seemed to have fallen in the span of minutes, broken by the hideous strobe of lightning that seemed too close and far too dangerous. “She’s not in the house.” Panic choking her, she headed toward the door, only to find Logan blocking her way. “I have to find her!”

“You don’t even have on shoes. I’ll go.” He reached for the door himself. It blew out of his grasp when he opened it, slamming back against the wall behind it before he caught it again. “Stay here. Inside. She can’t be far.”

He’d barely disappeared out the door before Annie ran into her bedroom. She shoved her feet into her tennis shoes and followed him.

Her sweatshirt was immediately soaked, her hair whipping around her head, nearly blinding her as she ran around the side of the house. The wind tore Riley’s name from her throat, and the siren wailed on and on and on, threatening to madden her.

Where was Riley?

Logan had headed up the path that passed for a road in the front of the house. Annie took the beach behind the house instead. Squinting against the sand that managed to blow despite the deluge of water pounding down on it, she ran past the black, cold fire pit, all the way down to the frothing, roiling edge of water. Peered right and left, staring hard between flashes of light, her heart beating so viciously she felt ill. “Riley!”

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