The Way Back to Erin
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Cerella Sechrist
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HarlequinChapter One
WHEN THE CLOUDS first rolled in, Burke had felt disappointment. Thirty minutes later, he wondered if the weather had known what was coming well before he did and had conspired to provide an appropriate backdrop to the day.
As he stood there with the June rain pouring down, soaking through his tuxedo and slipping down the back of his neck, he shivered. The guests had retreated, taking shelter in the tent where the reception was to be held. He felt like he should take charge, make an announcement, tell them to go ahead and enjoy the dinner that had already been bought and paid for. But his father-in-law...no. He brought that thought up short.
Allan Worth would not be his father-in-law after all. Not since Tessa had failed to show up, disappearing from the Delphine Resort where their wedding was being held.
She was gone, as completely as the sun. The rain pelted his face, but he stubbornly remained outside, welcoming the hammer of the elements. It soothed his disappointment, his embarrassment, his confusion.
Tessa didn’t want to marry him. Or so the note in his clenched fist claimed. It was a paltry offering with no excuses. Just two simple lines.
I can’t marry you. I’m sorry.
Burke raised his eyes and looked toward the portico of the hotel where his and Tessa’s closest family members and friends congregated. Paige, Tessa’s oldest sister, was gesturing wildly. Though he couldn’t read her lips, they were moving at a fast clip, probably worrying more over the blow to the family’s reputation that a runaway bride would deliver rather than the fact that Tessa had disappeared. Harper, Tessa’s other sister, had her arms wrapped around their mother and was staring at her cell phone screen, as though willing it to ring.
Allan Worth was nowhere to be seen. Tessa’s father was likely doing damage control among the guests, apologizing for the inconvenience, offering refreshments. Like Burke should be doing. But he didn’t have the strength to face the expressions filled with sympathy, the strange condolences for someone who hadn’t died yet had disappeared just the same.
He shifted his gaze from the small crowd on the portico and caught sight of Molly Callahan, Tessa’s niece by marriage, playing tag with several other children, oblivious to how the rain stained their fine dress clothes. His lips tugged upward at the sight, and he wished he could abandon his dark mood and join them.
He searched the group of children for his nephew, Kitt, and wasn’t surprised when he didn’t see the little boy among them. Ever since his father’s death two years before, Kitt had become a very serious child. Running through the rain wasn’t something he’d take part in.
Burke moved his eyes back to the portico and found his nephew seated at Great-Aunt Lenora’s feet, the old woman’s hand absently stroking his hair. She leaned down and said something to the boy, but he didn’t respond.
Burke’s heart twisted anew. Not for his own loss but for his nephew’s. Would Kitt never laugh again?
Then again...would he? Between his brother’s death almost two years ago and now Tessa’s defection, he didn’t think there was much to smile about these days. His eyes continued to scan the group gathered on the portico, the kids scattered around the lawn, and the guests huddled in the tent, drawing into the center to avoid the rain that was blowing in through the open flaps.
It wasn’t until he saw her approaching that he realized he’d been looking for her in particular.
Erin. His brother’s widow, braving the downpour to get to him. Funny that no one else had bothered.
When she reached his side, she held out an umbrella, and he almost—but not quite—laughed at the sight. She’d picked her way across the grass, letting the deluge soak her, and hadn’t opened the umbrella. What good would it be to either of them now?
“Aunt Lenora says you should come in out of the rain.”
He could only blink in reply. Erin took a step closer.
“Burke, I’m sorry. But she’s not coming back. There’s no point in standing out here, waiting for her.”
“I’d rather be out here than in there—” he gestured toward the tent “—where they can all stare at me.”
Erin took his hand, the warmth of her fingers startling him. His own were chilled straight through to the bone.
“No one’s staring, Burke. You have nothing to be embarrassed about.”
Her words penetrated, and he laughed, an empty, bitter sound. “I’ve just been stood up by my fiancée on my wedding day, which was already ruined by this freak rainstorm. I kind of think I have something to be embarrassed about.”
Erin’s eyes sparked. “Well, I imagine standing out here in the rain like an idiot only makes it worse.”
His jaw sagged. “You know, most people would be feeling sorry for me right about now.”
She sighed. “I do feel sorry for you, Burke. But I don’t pity you. Tessa’s not a cruel woman. If she didn’t want to marry you, then I suspect she had a good reason. Now, are you coming in out of the rain or not?”
He swallowed, shifting his gaze from Erin and to the arbor that had looked so festive and fresh only an hour earlier. Now, the boughs of greenery were sagging, dripping water in rivulets down the white columns. The flowers had lost quite a few petals, beaten from their stems by the rain and littering the ground in a soggy mess.
“I have nowhere to go,” he said, more to himself than to Erin. He’d lived for so long without a home that he hadn’t realized how much he was looking forward to finally settling down.
All of his possessions were boxed up in Tessa’s garage. He was supposed to move in with her after their honeymoon. He felt a pang at the realization that he wouldn’t have a home after all.
“You can stay at the Moontide,” Erin told him. “Aunt Lenora already said so.”
“I can’t stay at the inn,” he replied, almost defensively.
Erin frowned. She was a mess, the rain having washed her mascara in black lines down her cheeks. He felt a twinge of guilt that she was standing out here, in the rain with him, when no one else had bothered.
“Why not?” she demanded.
He couldn’t explain it to her, couldn’t give voice to his feelings on the subject. There were so many reasons for him to stay away from the bed-and-breakfast. Despite the fact that it had been his permanent home for four years as a teenager, he had never felt like he belonged there. And even less so now, knowing it was the house where Erin and Gavin had made their home, even though his brother had been deployed in the army for much of that time. Maybe it shouldn’t have mattered, given that the inn was over two centuries old and had housed hundreds, maybe thousands, of guests during its lifetime. What was one more?
But it wasn’t that simple. Not for him.
While this internal argument ensued, Erin’s fingers tightened on his, the heat of her skin briefly bringing some feeling back into his own.
“It’s either the inn, or we ask Allan to put you up in the Delphine.”
This snapped some sense back into him. “I am not going to ask my fiancée’s father to put me up at the resort he owns after she ditched me.” He coughed. “Ex-fiancée,” he corrected.
Erin frowned. “You said it yourself, you have nowhere to go.”
He closed his eyes at the reminder. How had he ended up here? Just an hour ago, he’d had everything he ever wanted—he’d been about to become a husband, hopefully within the next year or two, a father, and he’d finally felt a sense of belonging. At peace. Settled.
But now all his dreams had washed away with the coming of the rain...and Tessa’s desertion.
The Delphine and the Moontide were the only two hotels in town. The Lodge had boarded up its doors last year. So he could either drive an hour outside of town and use his credit card to put himself up at a motel on the outskirts until he could figure out his next move, or he could go begging Allan Worth for a free room at the Delphine.
He was sure his father-in-law—correction, his ex-fiancée’s dad—would have let him stay in the suite he and Tessa were meant to have for their wedding night, but no way did he want to set foot in that room now. Nor did he want to stay at the Delphine at all, where the staff and Tessa’s family could take note and whisper about him behind his back.
That only left the Moontide.
Erin stood there patiently, letting him sort through his options before she spoke up once more.
“It would make Aunt Lenora happy,” she pointed out. “She’s always said that the years you lived there were some of her happiest.”
He hadn’t lived at the Moontide since he was eighteen years old. Other than a handful of visits, he hadn’t spent any length of time at the bed-and-breakfast since he and Gavin had lived there as teenagers.
“She’s missed having you under her roof,” Erin added.
He swallowed, not daring to voice the question that rose unbidden.
And you, Erin? Did you ever miss me?
He quashed the thought as quickly as it came. There was no point in thinking along these lines. He had spent several long years burying that question as deeply as he could. The only reason it surfaced now, he told himself, was because he was feeling vulnerable and betrayed. But he would not even consider the subject because it no longer mattered.
His heart protested, whispering, It does matter. It’s always mattered.
But he ignored his heart’s cry and tugged his hand free of Erin’s.
“All right. If Lenora has a room to spare, I’ll come to the Moontide.”
Erin looked at him so intently that he shifted away from her.
“But only tonight, Erin. Just until I get things sorted out.”
Erin didn’t argue with him, and no matter how hard he tried to bury the feeling, part of him wished she would.
* * *
THE UNEXPECTED STORM had blown over, but it left behind a few threadbare clouds and an unseasonal chill in the summer air. Erin laid out Kitt’s long-sleeved pajamas and left him to dress for bed before checking in on Burke.
Her brother-in-law had collapsed onto the bed in the Galway Room, one of the Moontide’s middle-size bedrooms, as soon as they had returned home from the Delphine.
As she peeked inside the door he’d left ajar, she could see he hadn’t moved from where she’d left him, and the gentle rise and fall of his chest told her he’d fallen into a sound sleep. She moved into the room and opened the armoire, pulling out one of the family afghans, knitted years ago by Aunt Lenora’s grandmother.
She buried her face briefly into the soft, worn cotton, inhaling the scents of lavender and cedar from the armoire’s interior before she unfolded it and stepped toward the bed. She draped the blanket over Burke’s sleeping form, arranging it carefully, the same as she did for Kitt when he fell asleep on the couch while reading.
She lingered in the room, tidying up small details like centering the pair of porcelain songbird figurines sitting slightly askew on the fireplace mantel, pushing the ceramic pitcher and basin on the bedside table away from the edge and tugging a stray cobweb free of the wooden desk chair.
At one time, Aunt Lenora kept a girl on the payroll to come in twice a week for detailed cleaning of the rooms at the B&B. But in the last year, the inn’s revenue had dropped so much that she’d been forced to try to clean the rooms herself. At eighty-nine, scrubbing floors and washing windows had taxed the older woman to her limits. When Erin had come upon her one day, leaning on the wardrobe in the Killarney Suite and heaving for breath, she had known it was time to take over.
The next day, she’d given Connor her two-week notice at the restaurant and began working at the inn full-time. She booked the reservations (though there were fewer than there once had been), made the morning breakfast (and lamented how much food was wasted), kept up with the piles of laundry that a B&B generated and cleaned the rooms, all while raising Kitt on her own and keeping an eye on Aunt Lenora.
The older woman had reluctantly given over much of the B&B’s maintenance to Erin, but that didn’t mean she’d retired. On any given day, Aunt Lenora could be found outside in the garden, tending to vegetables and flowers or crawling up into the attic to go through the expansive mementos stored in its rafters.
Erin had found her there just last week, after hours of searching. She’d fallen asleep in the attic’s drafty environment, curled up in a pile of blankets with her arms wrapped around an album. After waking Aunt Lenora, Erin returned to the attic to restore order and found the album lying open.
It was a scrapbook of Gavin’s life with pressed clippings of his high school wrestling career, a copy of his graduation program, the Findlay Roads Courier’s article about his time in the army and then, at the back, his obituary.
Erin hadn’t needed to read the words. She knew each one by heart.
Sergeant Gavin Daniels passed into eternal rest this past week at the age of thirty-two.
She and Aunt Lenora had decided to leave the specific details of his passing out of the paper, for Kitt’s sake more than anything. It had been bad enough that her son had lost his father. She wanted to shelter him as much as possible from the senselessness of Gavin’s death by a drunk driver.
The obituary had gone on to list Gavin’s various accomplishments in the army before detailing what Erin considered the most important part of his life’s summation.
Gavin leaves behind his wife, Erin, and his son, Kitt, as well as a great-aunt, Lenora, and a brother, Burke, along with many friends who will forever miss his spirit, laughter and kindness.
In the stifling air of the attic, Erin had started to cry, and even now, recalling the words, she had to blink back tears. That final statement had been truer than she might have known. She missed Gavin more with each passing day.
Her grief was cut short as Burke groaned in his sleep, and Erin turned back toward him. His face was lined with emotion, his brow furrowed in slumber.
She bit her lip, her feelings a tangled mess. On the one hand, she felt sympathy for the way the day had gone. He and Tessa had seemed like the perfect couple. She was petite and blonde, cute and sweet, and a lovely foil to Burke’s tall, muscular physique, brown hair and blue eyes. They were easy around each other. Burke would often drape an arm around Tessa’s shoulders as she leaned into him. The sight had always pierced Erin with a pang of envy, and she told herself it was the residual grief of losing Gavin.
But after today, she was forced to admit she wasn’t so sure that was the only reason. Because at the root of her jumbled emotions about this day, there was one she hadn’t expected to feel.
Relief.
She was relieved that Tessa had fled, pleased that she wasn’t going to be Burke’s wife. And that feeling frightened her. She had buried whatever she once felt for Burke. She’d convinced herself her feelings for him were long dead. She had loved Gavin, had married him, borne him a son, had been faithful during his years deployed overseas with the army and had grieved him every single day since his death.
And yet...she couldn’t ignore how her heart had thumped with joy when it became apparent that Tessa had bolted.
Burke stirred, curling his fingers into the afghan she’d placed over him. She felt herself flush as she watched him.
She shouldn’t have felt relief. She shouldn’t have been happy about what he’d lost. She shouldn’t be feeling anything for Burke at all, except to think of him as Kitt’s uncle, her brother-in-law. She had loved Gavin. She still missed Gavin.
But as Burke sighed in slumber, she felt that same rush of relief once more. Biting her lip in frustration, she quickly turned and hurried from the room, down the hall and refused to look back.
