Her Christmas Wish (The Cottages on Ocean Breeze #1)

Chapter Twelve

L eigh ran up to Sage as she was coming back from gathering up dessert supplies and tools. “Mommy, Mommy... Mr...” The child stopped, saw the bag hanging over Sage’s wrist and the tools in her hand. “It’s s’mores time! Yay!” Leigh ran off—to tell any number of people that it was time for dessert, Sage was sure, when suddenly the child turned back around.

“Mr. Buzzing Bee isn’t mad at me!” she announced gleefully and headed back to the crowd.

Not everyone wanted the toasty snack. On the contrary, most didn’t. But people pitched in to help create Leigh’s favorite treat, and Sage caught several smiles in Leigh’s direction from the residents settling down to their lawn chairs, as conversations broke up to twos and threes, and quieted.

That was when Sage noticed Gray, sitting in the chair Scott had loaned him, a bit closer to the beach than anyone else. Sipping his beer.

Having clearly pulled his chair back after everyone else had settled.

Iris jumped up from the chair next to Scott’s empty one. “I’ve got this,” she said to Sage, nodding toward the marshmallow Scott was grilling, and Leigh, who, with chocolate on her face and sticky fingers, was waiting to carry a plate with the beloved treat to Dale, who’d asked for one.

The photographer nodded toward Gray and said, “Go.”

She couldn’t go.

Didn’t want to go.

Iris nodded toward Leigh’s empty chair. And back toward Gray. As if to say, scoot.

Leaving Sage the choice to make enough of a scene that someone, worst of all Leigh, would catch on that something was going on. And included in that choice, leading Iris to believe that Sage couldn’t handle a few minutes alone with their new neighbor.

Or, pick up her chair and join Gray for a couple of minutes of casual beach chat.

With a mental promise to verbally decimate her twin for telling anyone about her past with Grayson Bartholomew, Sage picked up her chair.

Gray saw her coming. He could have prevented a quiet conversation in the dark, with nice people gathered in front of them, and the ocean flowing in steady, soft waves behind them.

But it was time to man up. To realize that the love he’d felt for Sage in the past had been the real thing. Ill-fated, yes. But not going to die.

He hadn’t left her because he hadn’t loved her. He’d left her because he couldn’t be the man she’d needed.

And still couldn’t.

It was time to come face-to-face with that fact. Put it right there between them—a solid, unbreakable wall.

She didn’t ask if she could join him. Just unfolded her chair and set it next to his.

He took a sip of his beer. To appear nonchalant. And for liquid bravery. It was only his second. He’d never been all that big of a drinker.

“Where’s your wine cooler?” he asked, building up to making the wall. Wine and wine coolers were all he’d ever known her to drink. And neither any more heavily than he’d ever imbibed.

“I left it in the house when I went for the s’mores,” she told him. “I only ever have the one, and rarely finish that anymore. Being a parent...changes things.”

Bingo. Bullet to the target.

Or, more accurately, plaster to the two-by-fours. Wall construction complete. And he hadn’t had to lift a finger.

He took another sip of beer. Painting the wall, he told himself. He wasn’t changed. Still had his two beers.

“She told me you weren’t mad at her,” Sage said from next to him, facing the same crowd he was. Probably seeing it all very differently. She was part of a family there on Ocean Breeze.

He was a stranger in a very nice land.

She’d said she . Not Leigh. As though they both knew that the existence of that child was proof that he’d made the right decision to walk out on their wedding.

“I’m Mr. Buzzing Bee,” he offered, with a motion of his beer bottle in her direction. Like throwing up a hand.

Or...throwing in the towel. Topping the wall with it.

“I’m sorry about that...”

“No,” he interrupted. “I don’t mind. Seriously.” The wall was high enough. “Truth be told, I kind of like it.” He didn’t grin, but in another world, he might have. “You’ve done a great job with her,” he continued. “She’s bright, and aware. Self-confident...”

He stopped himself before he went too far. Said too much.

Sage nodded. Didn’t even look his way. But said, “It does my heart good to hear you say that. Thank you.”

Her heart.

He couldn’t go there.

Had somehow started to climb that wall between them. He needed to get himself back down to the ground. Lock himself in place there. Permanently.

Sage had an ex someplace. Or, at the very least a co-parent.

Perhaps even still in her life.

He hadn’t been around enough to know if Leigh saw her father on a regular basis. Perhaps the man had had her for the night one night that week even. Or would get her for the entire next weekend. It wasn’t like Scott would ever say so.

It wasn’t any of Gray’s business, of course. But that was the absolute best material for wall building.

“I have to ask...just because...it’s like the old elephant in the room... Where’s her father in all of this?”

He expected Sage to stiffen, at the very least, and maybe issue a very professional pronouncement that he was crossing the newly established line between them.

A line that seemed to keep moving, somehow.

Not because he wanted it to. And he was damned sure that she didn’t.

“I have no idea.” Her words were...shocking. Horrible.

His heart stopped as he considered that she’d been forced. By a stranger. “Wait...you weren’t... Oh, my God...”

“I don’t know because her birth mother didn’t say...” Sage’s words kept falling next to him. As hard as he was trying, he couldn’t quite catch up with them.

Not quickly enough. He was too busy fighting off the need to go find and strangle any man who would have forced himself on Sage.

“She’s adopted.”

Adopted.

Adopted.

But...that couldn’t be.

It could not be.

For an entirely different reason. Gray felt like a racquetball, bouncing around a small, enclosed room, hitting wall to ceiling, wall to wall, wall to floor...

When he’d freed Sage from himself, she hadn’t gone out and found the man she’d needed? The one who would...

So yeah, he’d figured that there’d been a bump in that road...the woman was living alone, raising a child, but...marriages broke up for various reasons.

He glanced at her. Saw her following Leigh’s antics playing with the collie, Angel. Smiling. The first true Madonna smile he’d ever seen in real life.

And when Sage started talking about the advent of her very special daughter into her life, Gray saw just how much having a family had meant to her.

Way more than he’d even realized.

More than he ever had, for sure.

“I’d been on an adoption list for a couple of years,” Sage said, “and then one night I get a call. A woman had picked me just that afternoon. She’d gone into premature labor, had signed necessary papers and had died giving birth. A blood pressure thing. The baby was mine if I wanted her. There’d be some legalities, of course, but, if I was interested, they needed me to get to the hospital right away. Because...”

She stopped. Couldn’t go on.

She’d thought telling Gray about Leigh would cement the closure. Sever whatever thing kept trying to bud up inside her.

But as it turned out...she couldn’t let him see her that deeply. That clearly. Not anymore.

“Because why?”

The tone in his voice, the soft depth that had always reached her...pulled her gaze away from her very safe and happy child, to peer into the eyes of the man who could have been her child’s father.

“They didn’t think she was going to make it. I...um...wasn’t going to lose my place on the adoption list if I took her. They just wanted to let me know...because technically, and more, morally, I had the right to be with her...and they didn’t want the baby to die alone if she didn’t need to do so.”

“You went.” He didn’t guess. Or ask. He told. They’d been apart for ten years, and she’d changed some, but the type of person she was...he knew that person almost as well as she knew herself.

She nodded. “Scott didn’t think I should at first. It was the middle of the night, and my call woke him up. But when I told him that they expected the baby to live for a month or more, not just a day or two, he supported my decision to be there for her. And...there was a chance that she was going to make it to a more normal lifespan. What kind of mother would I be if I just presented myself for the sure thing? The celebration? Without being willing to be a part of the fight?”

She couldn’t read Gray’s glance. She saw no approval there. Or disapproval, either. No judgment. Not even a knowing, like he’d have expected her to make the choice she had. It was almost as though he was studying her. Which made no sense at all.

He’d started the conversation.

And she finished it. “I lived at the children’s hospital for almost three months. Took a leave from my job. Touched her when I could. Learned how to change tubes, how to reinsert them, how to read monitors and finally, how to hold a baby hooked up to so many life-maintaining machines. I talked to her all day. Kissed her good-night every night, even when they could only be blown through glass. They’d said she’d probably have brain damage. Would be slow to develop. And for the first year, they were right. About the development part.”

She could be done. The happy ending, Leigh, was yards away in front of them, looking as though she was trying to employ all her cuteness to coax one more treat out of her uncle. At the moment, Sage didn’t care if Scott gave in or not. One more piece of sugar before bedtime wasn’t going to hurt the little girl.

Leigh had fought so hard, been through so much...

“She had to have six surgeries that first year,” she said softly. “But they didn’t seem to faze her. Every time I’d smile at her, she’d smile back. And now, she doesn’t even remember that year. She calls her scars her birthmarks...”

Sage didn’t pay attention to the tears on her cheeks. Didn’t care.

Until Gray reached over to softly wipe them away.

What in the hell was he doing? Walls were in place for reasons. You didn’t reach through them.

In the dark, with friendly people right there, with Sage’s daughter right there, he didn’t feel the danger.

Rather, he saw a new beginning. A place where he and Sage Martin could be friends.

Because Leigh was the wall between anything else that could have tried to re-blossom between them.

And she was as much of a guaranteed constant as they’d ever get, right there in Sage’s world day and night.

She’d glanced over when he touched her. Was still looking at him. And he couldn’t look away from her, either. As though they were signing another document, seeing each other anew, in different capacities to each other than they’d been. “It was your gestation period.” He told her what seemed obvious to him. “She wasn’t inside you, but you were wrapped around her as she developed. Your voice was her everyday constant. Your love for her probably grew every day, as I imagine it does when a woman has a baby in her womb. By the sounds of things, you were focused on her, as a woman has to be when a baby has taken over her body, and she kind of changed all of your normal choices, too, since you were spending days sitting in a hospital for her, eating hospital food, changing your normal physical habits...”

Tears formed in Sage’s eyes again, and Gray stopped talking. Figuring maybe more had changed about the two of them than he’d known. He didn’t know her as well as he’d thought. Had lost his ability to read her.

Until she said, “Thank you, Gray. I think that’s the most incredible thing anyone has ever said to me.”

And he swelled up like a geeky high school kid who’d just been kissed by the head cheerleader.