Read an Excerpt
Home at Last
A Sanctuary Island Novel
By Lily Everett St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2017 Lily Everett
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8562-2
CHAPTER 1
Fourteen years later ...
Marcus Beckett passed his cloth over the top of the already gleaming surface of the zinc bar he'd carefully installed with his own hands, and wondered for the hundredth time what the hell he was doing. There was a reason he'd left Sanctuary Island in the dust all those years ago. He must've been nuts to think coming back was a good idea.
"You're going to wear a hole through that thing," observed the bird-boned, white-haired lady perched on the center bar stool.
Fist clenching, Marcus forced himself to toss the towel aside without checking the clock over the bar again. He knew what time it was. Six o'clock. Happy hour.
The saddest, most pathetic "happy hour" in the history of one-dollar beer pitchers.
He looked around his deserted bar. The paintings he'd unearthed from the attic of the building and hung on the walls. The mismatched bar stools from the flea market in Winter Harbor. The cheery blue and green plaid curtains hanging at the dark windows. The empty booths along the wall.
"I don't know what you expected." His lone customer — hell, practically his lone friend in the world — Patty Cuthbert took a dainty sip of her old-fashioned and leveled him a look over the tops of her bifocals. "You screwed and dumped Sanctuary Island's sweetheart. And this is a town that takes care of its own."
"I was born here, too," Marcus pointed out irritably. "Grew up here, graduated from Sanctuary High, the whole bit."
"But then you left. And you didn't come back, not even once, not even to visit your poor, lonely, grieving father."
Marcus's fists went white-knuckled against the edge of his bar. "Trust me. My father knew better than to expect annual visits from me."
Something flickered in Patty's bright, curious gaze, but she let it lie for the moment. "That's as may be. But not everyone in this town is as respectful of folks' privacy as yours truly. In fact, some people 'round here could be called downright gossipy. And face it, your homecoming to Sanctuary Island was one of the more exciting things to happen in these parts in quite some time. Of course people were watching to see what you'd do."
And then the first thing he'd done was to fall into bed with Quinn Harper, the literal girl next door. Ten years younger — and about ten thousand times sweeter — than anyone Marcus should even consider touching.
"I don't want to talk about Quinn," he growled.
It was unbecoming of a woman of Patty's advanced years and dignity to roll her eyes like that. Marcus frowned at her, but she didn't appear to notice.
"If you wanted to forget all about Quinn," Patty chortled, "you probably shouldn't have let her move in upstairs. Right next door to you. Again."
Frustration simmered under Marcus's skin. Patty wasn't wrong. He knew it. He just didn't seem to be able to do much about it on account of how being in the same room with Quinn Harper's sunshine smile and cute freckles made him itch to get his hands on her. So he did his best never to be in the same room with her.
Maybe it was the coward's way out to ignore the girl, but Marcus didn't give a crap. He had nothing to prove to nobody. Not anymore.
Shoving down the bitter lump of grief and regret, Marcus shrugged and waited for Patty to finish the last sip of her cocktail. He swiped the glass out of her hand, ice clinking, and nodded toward the door. "No need to stick around to keep me company. I'm going to close up early. Hit the hay."
Think about how long he was going to stubbornly keep blowing Buttercup's money on a bar with no customers.
Patty gave him a pitying look as if she'd read his mind, and Marcus gritted his teeth against the urge to snarl at her. None of this was Patty's fault. And even if Marcus was the kind of junkyard dog who snapped his teeth at kindness, he had a soft spot for steely old ladies who spoke their minds and didn't mince words.
A lady like that had changed his life, once upon a time.
"Fine, I'll go." Patty slid off her stool and gathered up her handbag. "But think about what I said. This isn't going away, boy. We have long memories here, and we know how to hold a grudge. Something is going to have to change or you're going to lose everything."
She let herself out of the bar before Marcus could come up with a nonbraggy way to explain that the situation wasn't that dire. Marcus had more money than he knew what to do with, thanks to Buttercup. Not an endless supply, but enough to keep him afloat for a while, even after the generous secret donation he'd made to the Windy Corner Therapeutic Riding Center to get Quinn her job out there.
Still. Marcus leaned his elbows on the bar and let his shoulders slump. Did he really want to gamble everything she'd left him on the chance that the people he grew up with would eventually cave and start patronizing the Buttercup Inn? Maybe he'd be better off throwing in the towel and starting over — again — someplace where no one knew him.
The thought made him scowl, determination hardening his jaw. No. He would be damned before he'd let these people run him out of town on a rail. He had as much right to be here as anyone.
An image of Quinn's pretty face, pinched with hurt, rose up in Marcus's mind's eye. Yeah, okay. He'd hurt her. But he'd done it for her own good and he had zero regrets. She was better off.
As if the thought of her had conjured her up, Quinn burst into the bar like a whirlwind made of sunshine and laughter.
Except she wasn't laughing. She didn't laugh much, these days. Marcus tried not to notice.
He tried not to notice anything about Quinn. Not the downward curve of her bow-shaped lips, not the fact that she'd lost enough weight in the last few weeks to make the collar of her shirt slide down over the cinnamon-speckled ivory smoothness of her shoulder. He clenched his jaw and glared down at the untapped keg of beer behind the bar before he could wonder if that meant she wasn't wearing a bra. Those pert, perfect breasts swaying free and unfettered under the soft, thin cotton ...
Oh, he was doing a great job of not noticing her. Gold medal.
Marcus shook his head at himself. He could only be thankful that a few more seconds and Quinn would be past him without a word, taking the stairs up to her studio apartment two at a time as if she couldn't escape his presence fast enough.
For the best, he reminded himself. But his stoicism was tested when Quinn didn't rush through the bar without a word, the way she had every time their paths crossed since the night she showed up here and demanded a place to stay.
"Hi, Marcus."
She sounded nervous, uncertain in a way that reminded him of the awkward little girl she'd once been, all gangly limbs, skinned knees, and carroty hair. Marcus confined himself to a grunt in reply, sternly quashing any curiosity about what prompted her to approach him after weeks of the silent treatment.
There was a long pause. Marcus picked up Patty's glass and focused on polishing it dry while he waited for Quinn to get frustrated with his lack of response and give up.
He should've known better.
"The new job at Windy Corners is going well," she said abruptly. From the corner of his eye, he caught the movement of her hand propping on one cocked, rounded hip. "Thanks for asking."
Marcus steeled himself for their first real conversation since she accused him of being too big a coward to keep up their relationship.
The key was to keep it short and to the point. "I didn't ask because I don't care."
"You can be a real jerk sometimes."
Marcus said nothing. This was not news to him.
After a minute, Quinn turned on her heel and stalked away. It was a win, but Marcus couldn't dredge up much triumph. Mostly he felt tired.
Tired and angry, his default setting these days.
He was so busy brooding over his feelings like a ridiculous teenager, it took him a full ten seconds to realize that Quinn hadn't left the bar. Instead, she'd walked over to the wall switch by the door and flipped off the neon signs that proclaimed the Buttercup Inn open.
"What the hell are you doing?" Marcus demanded, conveniently ignoring the fact that he'd been about to do the exact same thing before she marched in. "It's another hour until closing time."
Quinn's stubborn little chin lifted. "No one is going to show up, no matter how long you wait. You might as well close up now. We need to talk."
We need to talk. There wasn't a man alive who could hear those words without an instinctive shudder. Marcus didn't let it show on his face, though.
"You're right. No one is going to come in if you lock the door," Marcus agreed sardonically, twisting to slide Patty's now-clean glass onto the shelf behind him with the other, untouched glasses.
"No one is going to come in here because everyone in town is mad at you."
Marcus jerked his head around to see Quinn staring him down, an unreadable expression on her pretty face. Used to be, he could translate every flicker of expression just by looking at her, but not these days. He'd done that to her, Marcus knew. It was because of him that sunny, open, sweet-natured Quinn Harper had finally learned to put up walls around her heart.
"They're mad because you broke up with me," she pressed into the taut silence. "I'm sorry about that. I didn't ask anyone to boycott your bar."
There it was, the elephant in the room. Marcus ignored the way it felt like this elephant was poised to stomp all over his future, and walked over to the nearest table to start upending chairs. If he was closing up early, he might as well get started on cleaning.
"They'll come around," he said, sliding the heavy wooden chair onto the tabletop. He sounded more certain than he felt, so that was a plus.
"Or they won't. Or it'll take too long and you'll end up losing all your money. Face it. You're in a pickle."
He moved on to the next table and picked up a chair. "What would this town full of doting honorary aunts and uncles think if they could hear the glee in your voice when you talk about my ... pickle."
"Don't get nasty." Quinn circled the table until she was in his line of sight, giving him a look full of injured dignity. "I'm here to help you, Marcus. Not that you deserve it."
Truer words. Marcus rolled the guilt right off his shoulders. "Don't bother. I'll get by without help. Always do."
"But you don't have to." Quinn blew out an exasperated breath that lifted strands of her red-gold hair off her forehead. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. I have a proposal."
What, a marriage proposal? Everything inside Marcus went still and quiet. He tried to tell himself it was pure terror — the fear of giving up his freedom to hitch his life forever to someone like Quinn, who was destined to leave him in the dust one way or another — but Marcus had never been good at lying to himself.
If she got down on one knee on the floor of this bar, he was going to say yes. Even knowing it would be the dumbest damn mistake of his life.
Silence stretched between them and held for a long, aching moment before Quinn's brilliant blue eyes went wide. "Oh! No, no, don't worry. Not that kind of proposal. 'Proposal' was a bad word. Proposition, maybe. Or, crap, that sounds bad, too — I have a plan! That's it. A plan."
Marcus refused to acknowledge the clutch of disappointment in his guts. Of course she wasn't proposing to him. He'd ripped her heart out and thrown it away like it was garbage, and he'd done it on purpose to get her to move on with her life. Quinn might be too generous and forgiving for her own good, but she wasn't a masochist. No way she'd ever get herself mixed up with Marcus again.
His lack of response must have made her nervous, because she followed him to the next table with a jitter in her step. "Don't you want to hear my plan?"
"No." Marcus didn't want to hear anything. He wanted to pour himself a glass of bourbon to take upstairs and nurse all night long, in the dark, by himself. That didn't seem like too much to ask.
But apparently, it was.
Quinn's gaze narrowed and her chin went up. Marcus's eyes caught on the slight dimple in that chin — the dimple he'd kissed. More than once.
"Well, you're going to hear it anyway," she said, commanding his attention the way she always had without even trying.
God help him, but Marcus loved strong women.
Straightening, he picked up another chair and tried not to picture himself holding it like a lion tamer in a circus. He couldn't afford to let Quinn get close again. "Let's get this over with. I have plans for tonight."
She arched a delicate brow in the direction of his favorite bottle of bourbon — the only bottle on the bar that was half empty after a week in business — but generously decided not to call him on his bull. Instead, she looked him square in the eye and turned his life upside down with a few little words.
"I can bring in customers for the bar — get the townspeople here to stop boycotting the Buttercup Inn. And all you have to do is pretend to be my boyfriend for the next four weeks."
CHAPTER 2
Quinn held her breath and laced her fingers together in front of her to hide their trembling. She couldn't wait to find out how Marcus was going to react. Although she was pretty sure he'd laugh her out of the bar, which was fine. She'd been laughed at before. She could survive that.
But if he refused to help her ... well, she'd survive that, too. But her parents' marriage might not.
Panic compressed her ribs around her lungs, squeezing off her air supply. It happened every time she thought about the conversation she'd had with her parents that morning.
When Quinn had pulled up in front of the charming, shingled cottage where she grew up at the tip of Lantern Point, the jagged edges of her heart immediately felt smoother. Smiling at the peaked roof and the tidy shutters, it had taken her a moment to notice her mother crouched in the flower bed under the front bay window. Ingrid Harper's long, flowing skirts spread around her and a light jingle sounded from the belled anklets she wore above her rubber garden clogs.
"Pretty morning for gardening," Quinn had called, climbing out of her car and starting down the stone path she and her father had laid in by hand about ten years ago.
Ingrid knelt up with a hand to the small of her back. Her other glove-covered hand went up to shade her eyes. "I'm doing what I can, but these beds are a wreck!"
Quinn winced, guilt pricking at her skin like the thorns spiking the tangle of rosebushes. She had kind of let the flowers go while she was house-sitting. "Sorry. I didn't inherit your green thumb, I guess."
Waving away her apology, Quinn's mother gave her a vague smile as she turned back to her rosebushes. "Don't worry about it, sweetheart. I know how busy you are with all your volunteering."
Congratulating herself on having held her spaced-out mother's attention for a whole thirty seconds, Quinn stepped up onto the porch. "Is Daddy inside?" "In the kitchen, heating up the griddle. Tell him he can start pouring batter whenever he wants. I'm just going to wash up and I'll be right behind you."
Quinn nodded and let herself into the house, breathing deeply of the mingled scents of the old books on the shelves lining the living room walls, lemony wood polish, and buttermilk pancakes.
Home.
That feeling returned even more strongly when she entered the kitchen to find her father standing over the stove, flicking droplets of water to sizzle on the cast-iron griddle. Quinn ducked under her father's arm, smiling at the familiar weight across her shoulders and the swift press of a kiss to the top of her head. "Mother's right behind me," she told him.
"Good. We're all ready to go here," Paul Harper said distractedly as he reached for the bowl and ladled out a spoonful of ... something lumpy and grayish.
"What is that?" Quinn demanded, leaning closer to sniff at the bowl of glop, which looked nothing like the pale, foamy buttermilk pancake batter of her childhood.
"Gluten-free pancakes made with ..." He paused and picked up a small plastic bag of meal the same iffy gray as the batter. "Rice bran? Don't get your hopes up."
Quinn gaped. Her whole life, her mother had gone through these phases, getting obsessed with one hippy-dippy idea after another. But even when she'd made the whole family go vegan, Saturday-morning buttermilk pancakes had been sacrosanct. A frisson of alarm skittered up Quinn's spine.
Sighing, she opened the fridge and grabbed the pure maple syrup — no high-fructose corn syrup colored with brown dye number four in this house — from the top shelf and popped the cap to pour it into the ceramic pitcher shaped like a curly-tailed pig. It was the one they always used for the syrup, and Quinn was unreasonably fond of the ugly little thing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Home at Last by Lily Everett. Copyright © 2017 Lily Everett. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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