Dixie Browning - Two Hearts, Slightly Used

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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It might as well be the end of the world. There wasn’t a ferry slip, much less a bridge. Frances Smith Jones, surrounded by the bulk of her worldly possessions, stood at the edge of the weathered pier and stared across at the dusky smudge on the horizon that was Coronoke Island, waiting for the boy from the marina to bring around a boat.

Only a few days ago, burning her bridges behind her had seemed like a terrific idea. Now she was beginning to wonder if she hadn’t made one more king-size mistake.

Massaging the pucker between her eyebrows, she pushed back the headache that had been threatening all day, then discreetly rubbed her sore bottom. One thing was certain: if she had to start over again—and she did—it would most definitely not be as a long-haul truck driver!

“I can tote part of that stuff over for you, ma’am, but you’ll have to leave the rest here. All I got in the water right now is the thirteen-footer, and she don’t have a lot of freeboard. Choppy as it is today, we’d take on too much water.”

His name was Jerry. She had caught him just as he was locking the tiny marina office for the day and asked him where the bridge to Coronoke was located. “Bridge to Coronoke? Ma’am, that thing washed out back when I was in sixth grade. There was talk of rebuilding it for a while, but the state wouldn’t spend the money, and the cottagers over there sorta liked the privacy. I can run you over, but you’ll have to wait till tomorrow evening for the rest of your stuff, unless you want to take one of Maudie’s boats and haul ‘em yourself. I got a date tonight and school tomorrow.” He grinned self-consciously, big white teeth gleaming in a perennially tanned face.

Frances put his age at about seventeen, though he looked younger. She herself was thirty-nine, and at the moment she felt every single minute of it.

Indicating her smallest suitcase, the groceries she’d bought in the village and her laptop computer—things she could not do without—she locked the rest in the trunk of her car. She could get through the night on the bare essentials and worry about the rest tomorrow.

Dusk was falling rapidly, thanks in part to the heavy layer of clouds that had moved in late in the afternoon. She hadn’t counted on having to find her uncle’s cottage in the dark. According to him, there were five cottages and a sort of lodge on the island. No street numbers, no street lights, no streets.

“Ask Maudie,” he had told her. “You’ll find her at the Hunt.”

Well, first she had to find Maudie, and to do that she had to find something called a hunt. Or was it a hut? Probably the lodge he’d mentioned.

It had all seemed so simple when she’d handed in her resignation, met with the lawyer to sign over the house to the Joneses, called Uncle Seymore in Philadelphia to ask if he still had that cottage some-where down South and, if so, was it rented and, if not, could she please possibly borrow it for a few weeks, just until she decided what she was going to do with the rest of her life?

She had offered to pay rent and utilities, although it would’ve eaten into her cash reserve, but Uncle Seymore wouldn’t hear of it. “Bake me something tasty for Christmas,” he’d said, and she had promised, without the least notion of where she would be in a year’s time. High on a heady mixture of optimism, outrage and blind determination, she had managed to convince herself that, free at last, she was embarking on the adventure of a lifetime.

But somewhere between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Coronoke, North Carolina—after two flat tires, numerous wrong turns, half a bottle of aspirin and a near miss from a driver who evidently suffered under the misassumption that the entire Indiana highway system constituted the Indianapolis Speedway—her taste for adventure had begun to dissipate.

And then she’d had to pick up that small-town weekly paper in a fast-food restaurant in Manteo, with the picture of a buck-toothed, hair-ribboned child and the too-cute headline of Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s Forty!

Who needed reminding?

Clutching her precious laptop computer as they roared across the rough expanse of open water, Frances wondered at what point her brain had begun to atrophy. The eldest of five, she’d always been considered the sensible member of the rowdy Smith brood. Sweet, docile Frances, practical to the core.

For docile, read doormat!

Apprehension grew as they neared the small, wooded island. The only sign of habitation was the pier, and that was deserted. Club Med, this was not!

She settled up the tab, hoping she wouldn’t need to call on Jerry’s services too often. “Where will I find someone named Maudie?” she asked, once she and her belongings had been set off onto the narrow pier. She was shivering with cold, her hair was dripping with salt spray and her poor derriere had been pounded flat on the unpadded aluminum seat.

“Utah. Gone to see her new granddaughter.”

“Utah! Oh, marvelous. Then perhaps you can tell me where to find the Seymore cottage. I think it’s called Blackbeard’s Retreat, or something like that.”

“Hole. Old Teach weren’t one to do much retreatin’, not even when Lieutenant Meynard come at him with a head-remover. Whole thing happened just a little ways down the sound, right abreast—”

Frances was in no mood for a blow-by-blow of some dead pirate’s Waterloo. “Well, whatever it’s called, where do I find it?”

“Sorry, ma’am. Some folks likes hearing about that kind of stuff, some don’t. You take that there path through the woods—” he pointed at an all-but-invisible thinning of the dense, shadowy forest “—and then hang a right. Cottages are all on the other side of the island. Blackbeard’s Hole’s the one on the end. Green striped storm blinds. Can’t miss it.” Mission accomplished, he jumped back into the boat and prepared to cast off.

Standing forlornly on the pier, surrounded by her assorted belongings, Frances was sorely tempted to toss it all into the boat and go back with him. She could spend the night at a motel on Hatteras. Things were bound to look better in the morning. They could hardly look worse.

“Jerry, do you think—” she began, just as he opened the throttle and flipped her a jaunty salute.

“See you later, ma’am! Gotta go pick up my date!”

“Oh, for pity’s sake! If that’s Southern hospitality, they can just—just stuff it!” she muttered as the roar of the outboard diminished in the distance.

The first indication that she was not alone came when she felt the vibration of heavy footsteps on the sturdy wooden pier.

“If you’re looking for the Keegans, they’re not here. If you’re looking for a motel, we don’t have any. If you’re looking for hospitality, Southern or otherwise, we’re fresh out of that, too. Sorry, lady. You got off at the wrong stop.”

Her first impression was of a tall man who could easily have carried another fifteen or twenty pounds on his rangy frame. A nondescript sweatshirt hung from a set of wide, square shoulders. Worn jeans loosely covered lean hips and long legs. His boots, the thick-soled, step-in variety, showed signs of long, hard wear. Even without the extra weight he needed, he was a big man, towering over her own five foot eight, which had recently gone from slender to downright skinny.

A matched pair of Jack Spratts, she thought, with a wild urge to giggle. Frances had never giggled in her life. At least, not since she’d left the third grade. “The Keegans? Would that, by any chance, include a Maudie?”