“I don’t know if you’d describe it as coping. I just got up every day and did what needed to be done. I helped get them up in the morning before I went to school and came home at lunchtime to give my grandmother some respite. Bedtime was fun. The twins slept in bed with my grandmother for months, which left me with Rachel. She clung to me like a monkey for the first two years after our parents were killed. In the end I dragged her bed into my room because I was getting no sleep, and my grades were dropping.”

She studied those broad shoulders, her mind trying to construct the boy he was then from the man he was now. She imagined him cradling his little sister while struggling with his own loss. “Lizzy has been sleeping in the bed with me.”

His glance flickered to hers. “Yeah, she probably feels safer that way. She’s afraid you might disappear, too.”

Emily didn’t say that sh

e felt like a fraud. Unworthy of the trust Lizzy had placed in her.

“But you had three siblings—so much for you to manage.”

“We weren’t on our own with it. The islanders pulled together. We didn’t cook a meal for the first year. They set up a rotation, and every day something would appear. Things got easier once Rachel started school and the twins were teenagers. Thanks to our background, they were pretty independent, and there was always someone to turn to if they had problems.”

He’d had a web of support. He’d suffered, but he hadn’t been alone.

Her first experience of loss had been suffered alone.

Disturbed by her own feelings, she took her cappuccino to the French doors that opened from the kitchen on to the pretty garden. Lizzy was chasing around the grass with the dog.

Not in a million years would she have thought to give Lizzy a pet. The grief counselor had advised her not to make any changes, to allow Lizzy time to adjust, but watching child and dog rolling around the garden simply proved there were no rules for handling grief. You did whatever helped you get through another day.

She turned and looked at Ryan. “Where are they now? Your siblings?”

“Rachel is a teacher at Puffin Elementary. She loves island life. Loves the water and loves kids. In the summer she works at Camp Puffin on the south of the island. She teaches kayaking. Sam is a doctor in Boston, and Helen works as a translator for the United Nations in New York. They turned out okay, considering all the mistakes I made.” He said it with humor, but everything he told her somehow served to underpin her own sense of inadequacy.

“Did you read a lot of parenting books?”

“None. I relied on intuition and, as a result, screwed up repeatedly.”

And yet it had been intuition that had driven him to return the bear and bring the dog for a visit, something she was sure would never have occurred to her. There had never been a place for animals in her life.

“Did you ever think you couldn’t do it?” The words tumbled out, revealing more than she’d intended to reveal, and Ryan gave her a long, steady look.

“Is this about me or you?”

Her hand shook on the cup, and she put it on the nearest countertop. “Did you ever worry that you wouldn’t be able to keep them safe?”

“Safe from what?”

“Everything.” Her mouth felt as if she’d run a marathon through the desert. “There are dangers everywhere.”

“I made plenty of mistakes, if that’s what you’re asking. Fortunately, kids are resilient. They survived the culinary disasters, the laundry mistakes, the fact I couldn’t sew and didn’t have a clue about child development. Rachel followed me everywhere. I think she was afraid I might disappear like our parents.”

She tried to imagine it. The teenage boy and the little girl. “It must have been a wrench when you left to go to college.”

“Are you kidding?” He gave a short laugh. “After spending my teenage years with three kids crawling all over me, I was so desperate to escape this place I would have swum to the mainland if that was the only way to leave the island. By then I had my bedroom back, but I was looking forward to a night that didn’t start with reading Green Eggs and Ham.”

“You didn’t miss them?”

It was a moment before he answered. “I loved them, but, no, I didn’t miss them. I badly needed to get away and have a life that didn’t include school plays and parent-teacher conferences. My grandmother had help from the other women in her group and several of the islanders. In a way, they were an extended family. They had rotations for babysitting, collecting from school. When there were school events, Rachel had all of them in the front row.”

It made her smile. “This was the same group who were meeting for book club the other night?”

“Yeah. And Kathleen, of course.”

“You had a great deal of responsibility at a young age. That’s why you’re not married?”

He laughed. “Let’s just say I value my independence. The ability to come and go as I please. I don’t plan on giving that up anytime soon.”

Tags: Sarah Morgan Puffin Island Billionaire Romance
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