The Kiss on Castle Road (A Lavender Island Novel) Read online

It was a little girl.

  And, if his contacts weren’t deceiving him, a very sexy woman with long, tanned legs in very short shorts, who snatched an old man’s snap-brim hat off her head to lean into the glass with her hands cupped around sharp, beautiful eyes.

  His full attention was finally captured.

  CHAPTER 2

  Natalie almost face-planted through the slider when the dark glass opened, but her trajectory was stopped by a youngish man with a golf club in one hand.

  From Lily’s earlier description, Natalie had been expecting a Carl Reiner sort—maybe softly shaped, with a bucket hat and a smart, grandfatherly grin. Kind of like Dr. Johnson. But this man wasn’t out of shape at all, nor was he bespectacled or fisherman-hatted. And he certainly wasn’t “old.” Maybe to Lily anyone over twenty was old, but this guy was late twenties, tops, with a long, lean face and startling blue eyes. He had a swath of sandy hair that fell over his forehead and an embarrassed, playful look that belied his serious chinos and button-collar shirt. A stuffy sweater added about ten years to him, though.

  He gripped Natalie’s elbow, where he’d caught her fall, and frowned into her face, seeming concerned and awed and baffled by her all at once, as if he were looking at a unicorn.

  “Doyouhaveaphonewecanuse?” she burst forth, still a bit breathless from the climb up the hillside.

  “Are you okay?” He glanced at Lily. “Is someone hurt?”

  “Not us. Some, uh, sea lions. Down there. We need to call. I lost my phone. The tide’s coming in, and we’re hoping someone can come—”

  Before she could finish the sentence, he stepped past her to the patio and scanned the beach below. “Sea lions? Where?”

  “They’re behind the rocks, just past the tide pools.”

  “They look distressed?” He already had his phone out of his pocket.

  “Yes.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Three.”

  “What makes them look distressed?”

  “They’re very small and rather discolored, and—”

  “Hi, Jim?” he said into his phone. “We’ve got three down here, right at the tide pools . . . Yeah, just north of my place.” His eyes went back to Natalie, but any unicorn-gazing he’d had in them before was now replaced by Sea Lion Emergency mode.

  “How big were they?” He squinted at Natalie.

  Natalie held out her arms to show him.

  “Color?”

  “They looked kind of . . . whitish.”

  “Yeah,” he said back into the phone, turning away. “Let’s get someone down here. Come in around from the north. I’ll meet you.”

  He slid his phone into his back pocket and, without a backward glance, began gingerly climbing down the hill among the ice plants. The vines tangled almost all along the hill, and he carefully stepped around the bulbous green buds, making his descent awkward at best.

  Suddenly, he stopped. “Oh,” he said to himself. He turned abruptly and inelegantly climbed back up.

  Landing on the patio in front of Natalie and Lily, he motioned toward the house. “Could you tell—”

  Whatever he was going to ask was interrupted by the arrival of a neatly put-together woman who stepped out of the darkness of the house and through the patio door. She looked about his age—or maybe a little older—and had the patient, wide-eyed face of a kindergarten teacher.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, glancing at Natalie and Lily.

  “Caren! Yes. I, uh . . . I have to go. I’ll be back, but there are some sea lions stranded, and I have to . . .” His hand swept back toward the tide pools. “Do you want to come?”

  “No.”

  He looked momentarily confused by her answer, then a bit desperate. “But I have to—”

  “Yes, go,” she said.

  A look of relief washed over his face.

  Natalie peered over the edge of the patio, watching him sidestep the plant vines a second time. The vibrant hot-pink flowers of the ice plants were still closed, shivering on the edge of readiness for their annual spring debut, which would create a vivid carpet of color. But now they were just a mass of bulbous green being protected from the scuffed dress shoes of this determined man.

  Lily’s little shoulders relaxed, and Natalie was able to let out a relieved breath herself. The sea lions would be fine.

  As she watched the stuffy young man take off running, she couldn’t help but wonder why he was so quick to respond to such a strange request. And why he seemed to have the rescue center on speed dial. And why he’d seemed to have forgotten she existed as soon as she’d said “sea lions.” With a stab of embarrassment, she realized that seconds had ticked by and she was still staring at the chino-clad backside of this woman’s husband or boyfriend or something. She turned and forced a polite smile that had a bit of an apology in it.

  “Does this happen often?” she asked into the uncomfortable silence.

  “All in a day’s work, I think,” the woman said. She stepped inside the dark house and closed the slider on Lily and Natalie with a nod good-bye.

  Well. So much for that. Natalie turned to Lily with a shrug. People on Lavender Island were usually friendly, but there were some exceptions.

  She reached for Lily’s hand. “I think we did okay, kiddo.”

  “Can we go watch?” Lily looked up hopefully, bouncing on her toes.

  “It’s getting late. I think your mom will be worried.”

  “I want to see him rescue the sea lions!”

  Natalie glanced at Nerdy Awkward Guy, who was now running nimbly toward the tide pools. He kicked his shoes off about ten yards out and carried them as he continued at an even more amazing pace. The orange sun sat on the horizon. It was probably seven or so. The tide would be too high for them to follow him and get back over the tide-pool rocks without getting trapped. She wondered how he was going to do it, but then she realized that might be why he’d told “Jim” to come from the north—there was another opening on the other side of the cove where they could probably drive a golf cart or use nets or cages or whatever they did.

  It would be fun to see how it happened. She was a little curious about Nerdy Awkward Guy, too, and his ability to help. He had a bit of a Clark Kent thing going—shy and stuffy on the outside but then looking like some kind of superhero once he took off his shoes and hit the sand running. But she needed to make the responsible decision for Lily. Turning new leaves and all.

  “I think we need to get back. It’s getting dark.”

  Lily gave her the exact look she remembered from her own childhood—that expression of exasperation kids gave adults who wouldn’t let them have the fun they wanted.

  Natalie tamped down the surprising realization that she was now on the other end of that look and averted her eyes.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get back to your mom.”

  She continued to avoid Lily’s gaze all the way back down the succulent leaves of the dormant ice plants.

  Damn, being responsible kind of sucked.

  Elliott dragged himself up the steps to his place hours later.

  He entered the back kitchen door, half hoping Caren would still be there so he wouldn’t have to report to his sister that his dating behavior had been as deplorable as ever.

  But then he half hoped she wouldn’t be there so he could escape to the bedroom, where his notes were.

  He didn’t usually get to see the rescues—ever since becoming the youngest microbiologist on the West Coast to win the Harbor Fellowship, he’d been a specialized scientist who shuffled from center to center and typically saw pups once they were in the ICU or starting recovery in pools. But now that his buddy and brother-in-law, Jim, had called him to Lavender Island to help set up the new sea lion rescue center during the next year, it was all hands on deck. And he got to actually see them s
ick in the wild. And help.

  It was exhausting. But exhilarating. For the last three years, Lavender Island and the rest of Southern California had been seeing epidemics of dehydrated sea lions washing up on shores in the spring, and the regular veterinary centers couldn’t handle the large numbers. No one knew what was causing the epidemics, but Jim, as a veterinarian, knew that Lavender Island needed a center of its own to provide rescues. And he knew Elliott could help him with the scientific research through the Harbor Fellowship. He’d called Elliott down from Monterey to see if he wanted to build the center with him, and Elliott had leaped at the chance. He’d published a series of papers on bacteria in marine environments, and this would give him the opportunity to work with the animals right in the field. Not to mention be near family again. For at least three months anyway—before Jim and Nell moved to Italy. After his fellowship year was finished, Elliott figured he’d take one of the many jobs waiting for him at the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  Tonight, though, had reminded him how much he missed fieldwork. It had been just Jim and young Garrett and him, since the call had come in so late. But it had been so rewarding getting those tiny pups rescued.

  Not to mention he’d had the pleasure of meeting the Good Samaritan.

  He ran his hand down his face, embarrassed that his thoughts had gone there for at least the fiftieth time that night, especially because he should be thinking of poor Caren and her cold spaghetti with no cheese.

  But he couldn’t stop thinking about Hot Citizen.

  He wondered if that was her little girl she was with, if she was married. He’d forgotten to look for a ring. And he should’ve asked for her name. He’d seen the little girl before, but he’d thought she belonged to another couple who lived up the beach. But, then again, he wasn’t very observant about such things. People didn’t interest him as much as his work did.

  Except some people.

  Like beautiful, long-legged, fiery-eyed Good Samaritan people.

  He sighed.

  As if he’d ever get a woman like that to look at him.

  It had never happened before, and it sure wasn’t going to start now, according to his sister. Especially as he got older and “weirder,” Nell said. A twenty-year-old college guy could get away with a bedroom filled with stacks and stacks of scientific journals, she said, to maybe attract an equally nerdy, nice college girl. But a nearly-thirty-year-old man would just spook a woman—any woman—if he kept his shades drawn all day and used his bed to hold reams of notebooks of scratchy handwriting and gene sequences. And regularly let his mind drift to equations instead of the woman sitting in front of him.

  His best hope, Nell said, was to meet someone soon, someone equally cerebral, maybe a professor or another scientist, definitely someone over thirty. Nell was pleased that the island had a shortage of twentysomethings, telling Elliott that he should set his sights on older women anyway. She was disgusted by the young spring-break crowd, which Elliott still managed to get swept up with. They’d taken one look at him, one look at his rented beach house, then nuzzled up to him long enough to get him to invite their sorority sisters over on the ferry to party in the house overlooking the Pacific. It had happened twice already. The first time he’d managed to get Dr. Johnson’s house robbed of two irreplaceable vases before the women left in the morning. He’d mailed off a check to Dr. Johnson the very next day. The second time he’d at least gotten laid, but it had also required $1,500 worth of alcohol and hors d’oeuvres, taken from his new inheritance. And he’d managed to pass out afterward to boot. He was a smooth operator, all right.

  He sighed and entered the dark house, glanced at the table still set with his and Caren’s uneaten food, and barreled past it to the bathroom, where he took out the torture lenses—worse now with saltwater spray aggravating his eyes—and changed into his more comfortable running clothes. He tore a new notebook out of the cellophane wrap and found a pencil that had rolled onto the floor.

  He fell onto the bed and propped himself up to write:

  April 16, 7 p.m.: Direct observation: three sea lion pups found alive, washed ashore in Diver’s Nook, north side of Lavender Island. Displaying standard behavior of dehydration. Will continue to observe over next few weeks.

  He stared at the paper, tapped the eraser against his bottom lip, turned the page, and then added, for some strange reason:

  April 16, 7 p.m.: Direct observation: met the woman I want to marry. Probably Nell’s worst nightmare.

  CHAPTER 3

  Natalie brought her sister a steaming mug of tea and a plate of unbuttered toast, setting them on the coffee table in front of Olivia’s new couch/bed setup, then returned to the kitchen to pour Lily a bowl of cereal.

  “Is this all you have?” she whispered to Lily, scanning the selections of fiber-filled and whole-wheat circles and shapes. “Nothing good, like Fruity Pebbles?”

  “I can hear you,” Olivia called from the couch.

  Natalie held up each of the disappointing choices for Lily until she got a nod of approval, then rummaged around the fridge for some strawberries, for at least a little flavor. Olivia and Jon were already turning into nutty island health-food types.

  “So, what are your plans for the day?” Olivia asked.

  “That’s up to you,” Natalie said over her shoulder. “I can take Lily to school, then come back and help you with”—Natalie glanced back at Olivia, who was staring at her unbuttered toast—“whatever.”

  Olivia sighed. “This bed-rest thing is going to kill me. What am I going to do all day?”

  Natalie had no idea. Bed rest sounded like the worst possible thing in the universe. She poured milk into her and Lily’s bowls. “Want me to buy you some magazines or something?”

  “Maybe I’ll design some baby announcements.” Olivia stared at her laptop on the fireplace hearth and sighed again. “I do need to go through Gram’s boxes in the back room. Maybe you could drag them out here, and I can look through them throughout the day?”

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  “Then why don’t you just explore today?” Olivia said. “I could definitely use your help picking Lily up from school, but other than that, just have some fun. I’ll come up with more of a schedule starting tomorrow.”

  “I do have to find a new phone.” Natalie served Lily her cereal. She was crushed about the extra expense. It would set her back several weeks, and she was already behind financially as it was.

  “Can we visit the sea lions after school?” Lily bounced in her chair with her pretty-please grin.

  Natalie leaned against the kitchen counter and took up her own bowl.

  “Lily, you have a Brownie Scout meeting,” Olivia reminded her from the couch. “Maybe tomorrow?”

  Lily slumped into her chair as if she’d just been told Christmas was canceled. But Natalie nodded to her, and her silent smile returned.

  Natalie herself had been obsessing about the sea lions since last night, wondering if they’d all been safely rescued. And, if she wanted to be honest with herself, she’d been thinking about Nerdy Awkward Guy, too. Last night, when they’d entertained Olivia with the story of their adventure as they’d unpacked Natalie’s things in the guest room, Natalie had tried to press Olivia for details about her new neighbor. She wasn’t sure why she was so curious, but something about his Clark Kent persona, the sincerity of his eyes, the way his passion had lit up about the sea lions as soon as she’d mentioned them, the way he was so young but in Dr. Johnson’s old house—it all intrigued her. She’d caught a glimpse inside the darkened house of columns, a baby grand, and elaborate furnishings that looked as if they’d been there forever. Were they Dr. Johnson’s things? Nerdy Awkward Guy seemed awfully young to have amassed all that. And he seemed too absentminded to have such good taste. Maybe the kindergarten teacher look-alike had decorated for them.r />
  And, if Natalie was really being honest with herself, maybe her interest was partly because he didn’t seem interested in her. It was kind of a novelty to have a man’s eyes never land on her breasts, to not stare at her as if he was thinking of eight different ways to get her into bed. Nerdy Awkward Guy definitely didn’t seem as though he’d know. And there was something kind of sweet about that.

  Natalie had tried to slip in a few sly questions, but Olivia didn’t know much about him. Said he’d been there only a few months. When Natalie threw in the phrase “and his wife,” Olivia had frowned. “I’m not sure he’s married,” she’d said.

  Although all Natalie’s synapses began firing at that comment, she’d concentrated instead on hanging her favorite hats along the guest-room wall.

  “Where would they have taken the sea lions?” she asked now, focusing on scooping tasteless wheat circles into her mouth. She had to buy some better cereal. And get Nerdy out of her mind. But she did want to see the animals again.

  “Probably the Friends of the Sea Lion center,” Olivia said. “It’s a new little rescue place on the south side of the island.”

  “Do they allow visitors?” Natalie asked.

  “I think so. They have a full veterinary hospital and outdoor pools where you can see the sea lions that are healthy enough to be released back to the wild. You should check it out.”

  “Take me! Take me!” Lily bounced.

  Natalie smiled at Lily and put her bowl in the sink. She might. It embarrassed her that she half hoped Nerdy would be there, too.

  What was the matter with her? She’d barely gotten rid of clingy David of the Broken Motorcycle in LA, and now her mind was already wrapping around someone else? She was supposed to be on a “mancation”—no men for at least three months. She just needed to step back, reevaluate her life, and figure out why it had stalled at twenty-seven. Growing up, she’d always pictured herself having, by this age, a strong career, a decent apartment, a well-stamped passport, like-minded friends, and a fabulous boyfriend. Marriage and kids had never been on her life’s agenda—the phrase settling down had always made her feel rebellious—but she did hope to have some kind of exciting, forward momentum by now. A purpose. A goal. A life philosophy. Instead, all she had was a long string of disappointing dates, three pink slips, two eviction notices, five engaged girlfriends who could talk of nothing but wedding dresses, and a constantly packed suitcase. Which was now at her mother’s house. Under her childhood bed. Waiting for the next move.