Cara Lockwood - Island Of Second Chances

The worst part was that she felt like the heartache, everything she’d lost, was a punishment from God. She’d done the wrong thing, and this pain was what she’d earned.

She lay down on the bed, feeling as if she’d never be whole again, wondering if she could ever heal.

* * *

AFTER STARING AT the ceiling for an hour, unable to fall back asleep, Laura decided she wasn’t going to waste a beautiful day in the Caribbean and quickly donned her sturdy black one-piece suit and her newly purchased floppy straw hat.

After walking at least a mile to reach a spot of desolate beach, she couldn’t hear Mark’s buzz saw anymore, thank goodness. Beside her sat a brand-new cooler she’d found in the condo that she’d filled with drinks and snacks. She’d wanted to get away, and get away she had. Not a single sail dotted the blue-green horizon as the sun blazed down, coating everything in a thick warmth. Down the beach, she saw a figure walking—a woman in a shawl?

Laura tilted her head back on her bamboo mat and let the sunlight warm her cheeks. She inhaled deeply the smell of the ocean breeze and listened to the gentle rustling of palm tree leaves near her. She could almost feel the beach healing her from the outside in. This was why she came. To get away from it all.

She imagined her problems existing far, far away, and now the only thing she’d have to worry about was when high tide might come and wash away her cooler. This is what she needed...the absence of stress, nothing here to remind her of Dean. Just the gentle roll of waves against the beach.

Then came a distant cry.

A seagull? she wondered. She propped herself up on her elbows and glanced down the beach. The sound came from the woman walking along the water. Laura realized now that the woman wasn’t wearing a shawl at all. It was a baby sling. She held a baby, probably no older than three months, who was now wailing as the mom adjusted the baby in the fabric against her chest.

Laura felt her stomach tighten.

In her mind, she saw herself that morning she’d taken the pregnancy test. The positive filling her with both dread and excitement all at once. She was going to have Dean’s baby.

Then, she remembered Dean’s reaction. How he yelled, blamed her for the accident. Then she remembered the sudden cramping, the bright red blood. The trip to the emergency room in the ambulance as she miscarried.

Her sister had been there in the hospital when she woke up. Maddie told her she dodged a bullet, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like the bullet hit her right in the chest.

She felt like she couldn’t breathe as she watched the mother and baby coming closer.

Anytime she saw a baby, she thought of her own, who would now never be born, the baby she’d carried inside her for a slight twelve weeks. How could something so small have changed her life forever? She knew it sounded irrational, but to her, the minute she’d found out she was pregnant, everything changed. She became a different woman, her life suddenly veering down a different path. With every baby she saw, she saw her own laughing back up at her.

I lost a baby. I lost my future. I’m thirty-five. I won’t have another one. Hell, maybe my body doesn’t even know how to make one the right way. The man I thought loved me didn’t at all. Of course I’m not fine.

She wished her mother was still alive. She wanted to hug her, wanted to ask her what she should do now.

She couldn’t look at a baby without feeling that profound sense of loss, because something deep inside her told her that she’d never be a mother now. She was thirty-five, and she’d had one chance at being a mom, and her body failed her.

She glanced at the happy mother, cooing to her baby. She wouldn’t be able to stay here, watch this, see the life she would never have.

Laura knew she couldn’t ask the woman to leave. It wouldn’t be fair. It wasn’t the baby’s fault. Or the mother’s.

In a rush, Laura packed up her things. She threw on her ankle-length cotton cover-up sundress and began walking. The buzz saw would be better than the baby crying. If she listened to the baby much longer, she knew she’d burst into tears.

After she’d walked a bit, she could hear the buzz saw again. She gritted her teeth. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

She thought about marching in there and giving Mark Tanner a piece of her mind, when she suddenly saw a gray tendril of smoke rising up from his workshop. An acrid, unmistakable smell filled the air.

Was that...a fire?

Chapter Three

SOMETHING WAS BURNING. At first, Mark thought it might be just his imagination, just sawdust flying from his saw as he hacked into the planks before him. Then he thought it might be someone grilling, except the fire smelled decidedly closer. He cut the buzz saw and turned around to find that the manila folder his brother brought had landed near his gas generator, and somehow had managed to catch alight. Smoke poured from the folder and heavy bits of sawdust that coated his small workspace.

Mark spun around, looking for something to douse the fire. He tried to kick sand on the flames, but that only seemed to add more sawdust to the fire, fueling it, making the flames grow.

He rushed into his kitchen, looking for a towel or a blanket, anything he could use to suffocate the flames. But before he could, a blur in a dark cover-up rushed past him and dumped a cooler full of ice on the fire, as well as two cans of some soda, and the small flames went out in a sizzling hiss.

She also happened to douse his saw, too, which now had pieces of ice covering the blade. And the flying soda cans knocked over one of the boards on his sawhorse, which clunked against his nearby worktable and sent Timothy’s bronze booties flying in the air. They landed with an awkward thump in the sand. The picture of his boy as a baby also came loose, fluttering down to the ground.

“Hey!” he cried, lunging at the photo and the bronze booties. If they were dented, so help him... “What are you doing?” He scooped up the small bronze shoes from the sand, clutching them protectively in his hands.

“Helping you,” she said, putting a hand on her hip.

She wore a muumuu, that was the only way he could describe it. The ankle-length sundress exposed only her elbows and left absolutely everything to the imagination.

She was too young to be so...dowdy, he thought. He knew she had a good body; he’d seen her legs earlier and knew the woman kept in shape. So why was she wearing a blanket out on the beach? Must be shy. Or timid. Or worse, conservative. Very, very conservative. Straitlaced, clearly. Even her outfit annoyed him.

She thrust her oversize sunglasses upon her head, pushing back her short dark bob and glared at him, her eyes looking greener than the Caribbean in the sunlight.

“Help?” he cried, sweeping his arms wide to encompass the disaster before him, even as he noticed that one of the soda cans opened on impact, sending a spray of sticky liquid onto his bare feet and all over the expensive blade of his saw. Great, just great. “Why don’t you just punch me in the face next time? You’ll create less damage.”

An annoyed wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows. “Don’t tempt me,” she shot back, clutching the new empty cooler beneath one elbow, her green eyes shining like emeralds with just barely contained anger. “Maybe I should have. You were running around in a panic instead of dealing with the fire.”

Oh, good grief. He wasn’t panicked. He was calm and collected. He never panicked. What was she talking about?

“I wasn’t panicking,” he said. “I was going to get something to put the fire out.”

“By running around like a chicken with his head cut off.” A knowing smirk tugged at her mouth.