A Season of You Read online

  He’d never believed in love at first sight.

  Now he knew better. And he knew that love at first sight didn’t mean rainbows and unicorns and happy endings. Because while he’d been standing there on the dock, trying to muster up the courage to walk over to her and introduce himself, the ferry had arrived. And he’d watched her grow even more beautiful as a grin spread over her face at the sight of a dark-haired guy walking down the gangway before she’d run toward whoever the lucky bastard was and the pair of them had practically set the dock on fire with the kiss they’d exchanged.

  He still wasn’t sure he’d recovered from that moment. The moment he realized that his mystery girl was well and truly in love with someone else. And then he’d found out she was married—and that she was a Harper—and he’d decided he was shit out of luck.

  If he could have figured out a way to convince Stefan that they’d made the wrong decision coming to Lansing and that they should get the hell out of town and back to Oregon, he would have. But they’d sunk almost every penny they had into Salt Devil, and he’d been stuck.

  Luckily it turned out that starting a business—two businesses really—took up a hell of a lot of time and apart from the odd time their paths crossed either at the bar or in town, he’d been able to mostly put Mina out of his mind. Not to change his useless, doomed crush to any real degree but he’d managed to box that up somehow and keep it locked away in a back corner of his brain where it didn’t bother him too often.

  But then Adam had died. Driving home from a friend’s birthday party. A party held at Salt Devil. He hadn’t been drunk. Will was a master at separating anyone who got messy at his bar from their car keys and, besides, he’d never known Adam Clark to drink more than a couple of beers in a night. But it had been late and the tourist who hit his car had been drinking, and that had been all. Mina, who’d stayed home, was a widow at twenty.

  He’d stopped seeing her around the island much at all after that. She’d never set foot in the bar again. Making her feelings on the matter of how she felt about the Fraser brothers fairly clear. He couldn’t blame her for that.

  Yet three years later, here they were. And he knew that if she gave him any sort of opening, he wasn’t going to waste a second chance.

  “So do you know what you want to do with it now?” he asked.

  “It?” she said absently, still drawing.

  “Your art. You said you hadn’t told anyone because you didn’t know what you wanted to do with it.”

  She looked up again, squinting slightly against the light shining into her face. “Maybe. Trouble is, when it comes to art, wanting to do a thing and being able to do a thing aren’t necessarily the same.”

  “Isn’t that true of any job?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, my mom always told us that you could never go wrong doing something you love. Following a passion is a good thing.”

  “Sometimes you can go down a wrong path, though. Or your passion can turn selfish. Consume you. Music was like that for my dad, I think. I mean, he loved us but the music was always first. Same thing for my mom. She left him because she couldn’t give up her photography. And he—well, you’ve probably heard all the Grey Harper stories.”

  “A few,” he admitted. Rock star. Legendary party guy. Alcoholic. Absent father. Sex god. The mythology surrounding Mina’s father was exactly that. Mythic. Epic. But Mina had been dealing with the real man, not the legend. “Doesn’t mean any of them are true.”

  One side of her mouth quirked. “Knowing my dad, a lot of them probably are.”

  “Doesn’t mean that you would be that way if you took the art world by storm. After all, you’d know what to watch out for. Plus, if you have to be cooped up in your studio arting a lot of the time, how much trouble could you get into anyway?”

  She smiled. “Arting?”

  “Whatever the technical term is. I wouldn’t know a watercolor from an oil painting.”

  She twisted back toward the wall of paintings. “I can help you with that. Those”—she pointed at the paintings—“are watercolors.”

  “Good to know. So watercolor. If that’s what your passion is, then my advice would be to just go for it. That’s true about most things in life actually.”

  chapter eight

  “Just go for it? Is that the reasoning behind you and Stefan starting your business?” Just go for it. She’d had that attitude once. Leap before you look. She’d done it when she’d married Adam. But that had been a different Mina.

  “Something like that.” Will said.

  In the bright light of her studio, his eyes were more green than hazel. A deep cool shade, brighter than the sludgy green of the shirt he wore. It would be hard to find the color if she painted him. She didn’t keep many greens in her palette, preferring to mix them, but she had a few. Malachite might get there, if she darkened it. Or apatite maybe. That was a little closer. But neither was quite right.

  The green was an unsettling shade. Perhaps that made sense when she was starting to realize that Will was an unsettling man. His face was forming on the page beneath her hand effortlessly. As though she’d known its planes and contours all her life. When exactly had her brain memorized his face? She didn’t want to know. She drew another line, smudged it with her finger, trying to deepen the shadow beneath his bottom lip. His mouth made her nervous. She wasn’t ready to think too hard about why just yet. She twirled the pencil for a moment, wondering if it was worse to stare at him or the drawing.

  Trying to remember how to act normal when sitting three feet away from him was making her … well, that was another thing she wasn’t ready to think about.

  “Why whiskey?” she asked, glancing up. “Not exactly a common thing to want to do. Not unless you grew up in Kentucky, maybe.”

  “That’s bourbon,” he said. “We’re trying to do Scotch. Though you can’t call it that if it’s not made in Scotland.”

  She didn’t want a lecture on the different types of whiskey. Though to be fair to Will, she’d asked the question. Maybe to remind herself exactly why he was a bad idea. Her fingers tightened around the pencil, and she saw his gaze drop to her hand.

  “And I’ll shut up about that part now. Sorry. Habit.” He looked guarded, but when she made a little “go on” gesture with her pencil, he did.

  “As to why, I guess it’s kind of in my blood. My grandfather was Scottish. His family owned a small distillery. But they closed it during the Second World War. Grandda always wanted to start it up again, but in the end things were too hard after the war and he decided to come to America. He was trained as a mechanic in the army, so those are the skills he used to get a job when he came to the U.S. Worked at garages and factories, fixing cars and trucks. He always wanted to start a distillery. He and Dad were supposed to do it together but then Dad died and Grandda stepped in to help Mom out. No money for pipe dreams.”

  No money for pipe dreams. At least she was lucky enough that money was never going to be a problem. Grey and the other members of Blacklight had been ordinary suburban kids. Maybe that was why they’d all enjoyed the perks of the wealth they’d found so much. But even their extreme partying hadn’t managed to dent the money they’d made with their talent.

  Unless Mina and her siblings and the other Blacklight kids were really stupid, there was money to last a few generations. Sometimes she wished there wasn’t, stupid as that was. And she tried to do good with her share. Adam had been stubborn about her money—and she hadn’t been old enough to get her full share of the trust when they’d married—so they’d lived fairly simply. But knowing the money was there if they ever needed it had definitely made things easier.

  They hadn’t struggled. She hadn’t struggled. Maybe that was why she had been so reluctant to take the next step with her art.

  “So you wanted to do what he couldn’t?” she asked. Maybe she had the opposite problem. Fear that she could never succeed the way Grey had.

  “Not exactly,” Will s
aid. “But Grandda always drank the best single malt he could afford and he used to tell Stefan and me stories about whiskey making and Scotland. I guess his brainwashing stuck.”

  She knew a little bit about family brainwashing. Or expectations. Being the child who hadn’t met her father’s.

  “He must be proud of the two of you,” Mina offered.

  “He died before we bought the property here,” Will said. “But he got to see Stefan get his first job at a distillery. And he knew what we wanted to do. So yeah, I guess he was happy.”

  There was a note of loss in Will’s voice that she understood far too well. And she knew words didn’t always help, but she wanted to ease that loss for him somehow. It might not be fresh, but that didn’t make it any less painful. “He would have been. Following in his footsteps. My dad … I don’t think he ever really understood me. Not being musical like Faith and Zach. We never had that thing in common, you know?”

  Will shook his head, slowly. Trying not to mess with the pose, if she had to guess.

  “I bet he was proud no matter what you did. Did he draw?”

  Mina frowned at the sketchbook and deepened another shadow. “No. Not unless you count stick figures.”

  “Then your mom? Is that where you get it from?”

  Had Will ever met Emmy? She tried to think. Probably not. Emmy had come back to the island for Adam’s funeral but the Fraser brothers hadn’t been there. She would have remembered that. Since then, Mina had only seen Emmy a couple of times, all off-island. “Tammy’s a photographer. Who knows where these things come from?” She looked back up at Will and caught him rubbing his thigh.

  Was he getting a cramp? Or tired? She had no idea how long they’d been sitting there. The drawing was three quarters done. “Do you need a break?” she asked, with a little shake of her head.

  He looked like he was going to be manly about it and refuse. But she’d posed for her high school art class once and remembered how quickly muscles could get painfully stiff. “Take a break. I told you, I get lost in it.” Lost in his face flowing onto the paper. She had him mostly captured now but wasn’t quite ready to let the picture go.

  Will stood, and the relieved noise that escaped him as he started to lift his arms in a stretch told her she’d been right. He’d been uncomfortable. She started to put her sketchbook to the side so he wouldn’t feel compelled to sit down again straight away but then froze as he completed the movement, his arms and body forming a line of such unadulterated male beauty that her mind went blank for a moment.

  But then everything focused in on Will like a spotlight following a lead man. “Stay right there,” she ordered, flipping the page over on her sketchbook—the unfinished face forgotten. She didn’t know exactly what it was. The light. The angle of muscle and bone. Or maybe, just maybe, the man himself. But she didn’t care. She couldn’t have stopped her fingers sending the pencil rushing over the paper if she tried. She propped the sketchbook between her arm and her torso and started to draw, not even stopping to sit.

  Will looked startled but stayed mercifully still. She made a grateful noise, not wanting to waste time talking. He wouldn’t be able to stay like that for long. She needed to work fast. So she forgot about who it was she was drawing in such a frenzy and just gave herself up to it.

  Stopped thinking and just chased the light and shadow over the page, trying to capture the curve of skin over muscle and the way the light wrapped around him. For a second she wished she had her paints, to try and get the late afternoon sun and the color it gilded his skin and eyes and hair onto the page, but she could always add that later.

  She had a feeling the image he made was going to be stuck in her head for a very long time.

  But no. Stop thinking. Just draw. Ride the rush of it. The adrenaline of something just working. It didn’t happen often. But it was like a small moment of perfect when it did. She’d wondered sometimes if that was the feeling Grey had felt out there on stage, standing under the lights soaking up the adoration of all those fans. Only she didn’t want the fans, just the feeling.

  It bubbled through her.

  Sheer delight. An emotion she wasn’t that familiar with anymore. Intoxication. The good kind. The safe kind. Though whether from the art or the man, she didn’t know. Hopefully the former, as the latter would be a long way from safe.

  But she wasn’t going to let that spoil the moment. No, for now she was just going to enjoy the sensation. Remember how it felt. Hope that it wouldn’t take so long for it to visit her again.

  She made one last sweeping gesture with her pencil and then nodded to herself, satisfied. It was good. Better than good.

  Will on the page—arms reaching for the ceiling, head thrown back—looked loose and somehow wild. Wild in a way that made you want to move closer even though you knew it would be foolish. Like the urge to reach through the bars and pet the fur of a caged tiger.

  An urge she had no intention of giving into. The last man she’d been irresistibly drawn to had been Adam. That kind of fascination led to the kind of feelings she couldn’t risk having again. But as she looked up and Will started to lower his arms, she couldn’t help herself. She rose up on her toes and kissed him. Just a brief press of her lips against him but it was enough that she felt him jolt and felt the answering zing of something deep in her gut. “Thank you,” she murmured, feeling slightly untethered.

  “You are more than welcome,” Will said, voice rumbling softly. The sound vibrated through her, chasing the aftershock of the kiss and skimming over her nerves and bringing all of them suddenly, shockingly, awake. She wanted.

  And that particular sensation, as unfamiliar as happiness, was simply shocking. As though she’d doused herself in a bucket of the icy seawater pounding the beach outside her window.

  She’d kissed him. Will Fraser.

  God.

  The sketchbook fell to the floor as she stepped back, stomach clenching. “Sorry,” she said, her face heating even as a chill shivered down her back. “I’m sorry.” The words came too fast. “That was a mistake.”

  * * *

  “Fresh mistletoe?” Mina asked, staring up at the decorations draping the ceiling inside Faith’s front door. Where had Faith even found fresh mistletoe? “It’s not even Christmas yet.”

  Not that you’d know it from looking at the house. Nope. Sometime in the last two days, someone had come and dropped a Christmas bomb on the place. She’d painted instead of helping Faith and Caleb decorate. Tried to drive Will’s face out of her head with wild seas. It had worked for a while until she’d realized there was a boat on one of those seas and a man on the boat. A man who looked an awful lot like Will. She’d given in then, and let herself sketch him again, even added a little to the portrait she’d started earlier. That hadn’t really helped either and she’d gone back to the seas. Still, she’d gotten another painting—maybe two—that she was happy with out of the work.

  And while she’d been painting, apparently Christmas had exploded over Faith’s house.

  Where there was a surface that could hold tinsel or candles or decorations or greenery, it did. It all somehow worked but in a completely over-the-top way. Growing up, they’d often spent Christmas away from Lansing—if Blacklight were touring or recording. But when they’d been home, Grey—or Lou or Emmy or whoever Grey’s latest girlfriend was—had spared no expense decorating, but their efforts seemed tame next to this. She blinked, kind of dazzled.

  “Caleb likes Christmas,” Faith said. The smile that spread over her face as she patted the belly of the nearly life-size Santa standing by the door was indulgently goofy. “It’s our first Christmas together.”

  “Right now it’s still Thanksgiving.”

  “Close enough according to Mr. White.”

  “That much is clear,” Mina said, still trying to adjust to all the red, white, green, and silver. It could be worse. Caleb could have done everything in pumpkin orange for Thanksgiving. And a Santa statue was better than a giant turk
ey. Just.

  “You just need to get into the festive spirit. Come on, Lou made cookies.”

  “Lou’s here already?” Mina started following Faith toward the kitchen.

  “Been and gone.” Faith said. “She brought approximately eleventy billion cookies, left a bunch of instructions for things we could start doing, and said she’d be back when school gets out.”

  “Am I right in assuming, that list includes peeling all the apples and pumpkins?” Lou was in charge of pastry, but she was happy to let Mina and Faith do a lot of the grunt work when it came to filling prep.

  “Got it in one.”

  “Well, at least there are cookies.”

  “Many many cookies. She brought a whole batch of rejects she claims have botched icing and said we could eat as many of those today as we wanted.”

  “Just trying to stop us wanting to eat one of the pies later.” Zach had always tried to steal one of Lou’s pies the day before Thanksgiving. Often he’d succeeded. But Mina had learned from a young age that stuffing one’s face with pie the day before meant that one couldn’t completely enjoy the total food orgy that was one of Lou’s Thanksgiving dinners.

  Faith grinned as they entered the kitchen and grabbed a bright red apron off the counter. “Here.” She tossed it to Mina before picking up a second for herself. Mina tied hers on, expecting the worst. but instead of some bad Christmas pun, the words printed across the chest simply read KEEP CALM AND COOK ON. “I was expecting naked Santa or something.”

  “Gotta save something for Christmas,” Faith said, donning her own apron which proclaimed MMMM, GRAVY.