Rainshadow Road (Friday Harbor #2)(12)

Sam watched his brother walk to the BMW parked on the graveled drive. “Dipshit,” he muttered affectionately as the car drove off. Setting his back against one of the sturdy porch columns, he looked from the closed front door to the planted fields beyond the house, where a former apple orchard was now crossed with rows of young vines.

He couldn’t help agreeing with Alex’s view of marriage—it was a losing proposition for a Nolan. Whatever genetic combination was required for a person to maintain a lasting relationship, Nolans didn’t have it, with the possible exception of their older brother, Mark. As far as Sam was concerned, however, the risks of marriage far outweighed the potential benefits. He genuinely liked women, enjoyed their company, and he had a hell of a great time in bed with them. The problem was that women tended to attach emotions to the sex act, which always messed up the relationship. And so far even the ones who had claimed to share Sam’s desire for a simple, uncomplicated affair eventually got to the point when they wanted commitment. When it became clear that Sam couldn’t give them what they wanted, they broke up with him and moved on. And so did Sam.

Luckily he’d never found a woman who had tempted him to give up his freedom. And if he ever did, he knew exactly how to handle it: Run like hell in the opposite direction.

Four

As the rain worsened, Lucy headed to the place she always went when she wasn’t sure where to go. Her friends Justine and Zoë Hoffman ran a bed-and-breakfast in Friday Harbor, just a two-minute walk from the ferry terminal at the port. The bed-and-breakfast, named Artist’s Point, was a converted mansion with wide porches and picture windows with views of Mount Baker’s blunt crown in the distance.

Although Justine and Zoë were cousins, they were nothing like each other. Justine was slim and athletic, the kind of person who liked to test herself, see how far she could bike, run, swim. Even when she was sitting still, she gave the impression of being on the move. She was incapable of coyness or dishonesty, and she approached life with a kind of cheerful fortitude that some people found slightly off-putting. When confronted with a problem, Justine didn’t like to dither, she took action, sometimes before she had thought everything through.

Zoë, on the other hand, measured her decisions as precisely as the ingredients she used for her recipes. She loved nothing more than to loiter at open markets or produce stands, choosing the most perfect organic fruits and vegetables, buying jars of berry jam, lavender honey, crocks of freshly churned butter from an island dairy. Although she had earned a culinary degree, she also relied on instinct. Zoë loved hardcover books and classic movies, and writing letters by hand. She collected vintage brooches and pinned them on an antique dressmaker’s mannequin in her bedroom.

After Zoë had married and divorced a year later, she had let Justine talk her into helping her run the bed-and-breakfast. Zoë had always worked in restaurants and bakeries, and although she had toyed with the idea of starting her own café, she didn’t want the responsibility of management and accounting. Working with Justine was a perfect solution.

“I like the business side of it,” Justine had told Lucy. “I don’t mind cleaning, and I can even fix the plumbing, but I can’t cook to save my life. And Zoë’s a domestic goddess.”

It was true. Zoë loved being in the kitchen, where she effortlessly turned out confections like banana muffins topped with snowy mascarpone cheese frosting, or cinnamon coffee cake baked in an iron skillet with a melting crust of brown sugar. In the afternoons, Zoë set out trays of coffee and sweets in the common areas. Tiered plates were piled with pumpkin cookies sandwiched with cream cheese, chocolate brownies as heavy as paperweights, tarts heaped with shiny glacéed fruit.

Zoë had been asked out by various guys, but so far she had refused them all. She was still getting over her disaster of a marriage. To Zoë’s chagrin, she had been the only one surprised by the revelation that her husband, Chris, was g*y.

“Everyone knew,” Justine had told her bluntly. “I told you before you married him, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Chris didn’t seem g*y to me.”

“What about his obsession with Sarah Jessica Parker?”

“Straight men like Sarah Jessica Parker,” Zoë said defensively.

“Yes, but how many of them use Dawn by Sarah Jessica Parker as an aftershave?”

“It smelled like citrus,” Zoë said.

“And remember when he took you to Aspen on that ski trip?”

“Straight men ski in Aspen.”

“During g*y ski week?” Jessica persisted, which Zoë had admitted had probably been a giveaway.

“And remember how Chris always said ‘everyone has a little g*y in them’?”

“I thought he was being sophisticated.”

“He was being g*y, Zoë. Do you think any straight guy would say something like that?”

Unfortunately Zoë’s father was against divorce for any reason. He had insisted that everything would have worked out if they had gone into counseling, and he’d even suggested that Zoë should have done more to keep Chris interested. And Chris’s family had also blamed Zoë, saying that Chris had never been g*y until he’d gotten married. For her part, Zoë didn’t blame her ex-husband for being g*y, only for having made her an unwitting casualty of his sexual self-discovery.