Dixie Browning - More To Love

About all Rafe could do at this point was damage control. Fly in unannounced, apologize for missing out on all the festivities and cook Stu his favorite holiday dinner, which happened to be the only family-style dinner Rafe knew how to prepare. It would serve as a birthday treat, a reminder to Stu that he had family standing squarely behind him, and a similar warning to the bride. It would also tell him a lot about this paragon the kid had married. If she could be bought off, he’d be better off without her.

Rafe wondered how much Stu had told her about his wildly dysfunctional family. There was the father who couldn’t be bothered to keep in touch. The mother who sent extravagant birthday gifts on the wrong date. Somewhere there were some half siblings who might or might not know him personally—not to mention a big brother who had invested a lot of years into keeping him on the right track.

At the moment Rafe was more concerned with the woman. On the way north he had settled on a test he used often in business: the element of surprise. Setting things up, then observing the way people reacted to the unexpected. Having a stranger drop in out of the blue with an armload of groceries to commandeer a woman’s kitchen might not be quite as effective a test as being stranded together in a leaky cabin cruiser, but it should do the trick. He could hardly come right out and ask the bride if she was more interested in the trust fund Stu stood to inherit at the age of thirty-one, or the shy, good-natured guy with a good mind, a heart of gold but damned few social skills.

While he secured the plane, taking extra precautions against the wind, Rafe ran through a few old chestnuts about brothers’ keepers and no man being an island in an effort to rationalize his guilty conscience for having dropped out of sight at a time when Stu had needed him. He didn’t do guilt well. When he’d found out the honeymooners would be spending a few months on one of the islands off the North Carolina coast, it had seemed like the perfect chance to mend a few fences and at the same time see how much trouble Stu was in with this bride of his and what it was going to take to sort things out. Happy marriages did not run in their family.

Unfortunately marriage did. Stella, the mother they shared, had been married four times to date. A six-foot-tall ex-Vegas showgirl, she was still a beautiful woman at age fifty-nine-and-holding.

Rafe’s father had been married three times to successively younger women, and was currently working out prenuptials with number four. Probably a high school cheerleader this time. Rafe didn’t know about Stu’s old man, but figured he was probably in the same league, marriagewise.

It was when Stella had been about to set out on honeymoon number three a few days before Thanksgiving that she’d turned up at the door of Rafe’s condo with the kid. Once he’d gotten over the shock of finding himself unexpectedly landed with the care and feeding of a half-grown boy, Rafe had scrambled like crazy not to blow it. He’d canceled a nine-day trip to Vancouver with Linda—or maybe it had been Liz. He had taken a crash course in basic cooking and started reading every book on adolescent psychology he could lay his hands on. Over the next few years they had weathered countless minor mishaps and a few major ones. He liked the kid.

Hell, he loved the kid.

He’d done a good job of raising him, too, if he did say so himself. Stu was no athlete—they’d both reluctantly faced that fact after half a dozen or so spectacular failures. He was a fine young man, smart as a whip when it came to books. Trouble was, he was dumb as a stump where women were concerned.

That was where Rafe had always come in. Sifting the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Unfortunately it had mostly been chaff up to now, but at least he’d managed to keep Stu out of major trouble until the call had come a couple of months ago. Rafe had been within hours of leaving the country on another unofficial fact-finding trip. As a small-time Gulf Coast resort developer with a modest charter boat fleet, he had the perfect excuse to explore the coastal regions of Central and South America. Having served a hitch in the Coast Guard before Stu had come to live with him, he was well aware of the fact that DEA was undermanned, underfunded and overwhelmed.

Which was how he’d happened to miss the wedding. Thanks to a small misunderstanding with a bunch of entrepreneurs in a little fishing village in Central America, he’d been out of circulation for the next several weeks, but at least he was going to make the kid’s twenty-fifth birthday.

What he hadn’t figured on was the size of Ocracoke Island in relation to the concentration of tourists. Wall-to-wall fishermen, according to the fellow who’d driven the rental out to the airport to meet him. He should have made advance reservations, in case the honeymoon cottage lacked a guest room.

The airport was little more than a paved landing strip with a phone booth and an open pavilion, all within a few hundred yards of the Atlantic. It was crowded and exposed, but adequate. He’d seen a lot worse. Knowing the weather was likely to deteriorate before the low moved offshore again, he took his time with the tie-downs and chocks. Hatteras Lows were notorious, even in Florida. Once he was satisfied, he slung his gear, which included several large grocery sacks, into the only available rental vehicle, an SUV with a gutted muffler and rusted-out floorboards.

He dropped the driver off at the rental place after learning the location of Yaupon Cottage and roughly how to find it, and toyed with the notion of checking into a hotel first. He decided against it. The turkey needed to go into an oven, or else they’d be lucky to dine before midnight. And while that didn’t bother him at all, Stu and whatsername might have other ideas.

Mission underplanned.

Traffic was bumper-to-bumper. Locating Yaupon Cottage wasn’t quite as easy as it had sounded. The village was laid out as if someone had tossed handsful of confetti into the air and then built something wherever a scrap of paper landed. With the low cloud cover, there was barely enough light left to see his way up and down the narrow, winding roads with vehicles parked haphazardly on both sides.

He managed to find the place, and then had to squeeze in between a picket fence and a tan sedan. By then the rain had started coming down in solid, wind-driven sheets. Hatless, coatless, he jogged up the path to the front door and knocked. And then he pounded again and waited. There was no light on inside. It might not be wise to walk in unannounced on a honeymoon couple, but dammit, his backside was getting wet. The grocery sacks were melting. So he pounded a few more times, then tried the doorknob. Finding the door unlocked, he opened it and called, “Hey, kids? Stu? Anybody home?”

Dammit, they couldn’t be too far away, or else they’d have locked the place. Pushing the door open, Rafe shoved the groceries and his battered leather bag in out of the rain. He should have called first. He should have called before he’d ever left Florida.

Too late now. After a quick look around, he set to work on the surprise birthday dinner. He preferred to think of it as that rather than as a test for the bride, but he was beginning to have a funny feeling about this whole affair. If things didn’t work out, Stu was going to take it hard. From some unknown ancestor, the kid had inherited the genes for vulnerability and sensitivity. Thank God those had skipped Rafe. If there were two things he was not, it was vulnerable and sensitive.

The place was a dump. If there was a level surface anywhere, it wasn’t easily discernible. It was small to the point of claustrophobic, and the two refrigerator-size birdcages in the room across the hall didn’t help. Stu had mentioned that his bride had a couple of birds. Rafe had pictured budgies. Maybe canaries.