Destiny Bay Read online

  She cried out, grabbing at the wheel, images of the cliff’s edge flashing in her mind. Instinctively, she hit the brake. The car spun out of control, twirling sickeningly as it skidded ever closer to the edge of the cliff. She pawed the wheel, too terrified to breathe. The back tires skidded off the gravel road, tearing up grass.

  By the time it stopped, the car had come to a rest in the ditch opposite the cliff.

  Abby’s heart galloped in her chest; spots danced before her eyes. She rested her head on the steering wheel and simply breathed. She was alive!

  Surf thundered at the bottom of the cliff, an ominous suggestion of what might have been had she not been lucky.

  She straightened slowly, grasped the steering wheel and pressed the gas. The wheels spun uselessly. “Oh no,” she whispered.

  A quick peek at her cell phone told her she was in a dead zone—no service whatsoever.

  Abby peered in the rearview mirror. No one. She looked out of each window. As far as she could tell, she was alone.

  Cautiously, she stepped out of the car to survey the damage. There appeared to be none, but the rear tires were a good three inches off the ground. If she wanted to get out of the ditch, she’d need traction.

  With her back to the car, she looked into the woods. She had no choice but to gather branches to jam under the tires. No way was she staying out here until another car happened along—not with that maniac in the woods!

  She scurried into the brush and started gathering branches to push under the tires.

  Why hadn’t she seen a sign warning of that deadly turn in the road? And what kind of maniac lurks around in the bushes?

  A snapping of twigs made her heart stop.

  Very carefully, she inched backward, eyes darting from tree to tree as she made her way back to the safety of her car. Her heel hit something solid and she toppled over, landing hard on her rump.

  “What on earth…”

  Abby looked down at the stump that had once been a road sign. Near it, the top half of the sign lay in a tuft of grass. It read: REDUCE SPEED, 20 MPH. SHARP TURN AHEAD. The sign had been sawed off near the base—and recently, if the sawdust and woody smell were any indication.

  “Bloody kids could have killed someone!” she muttered, righting herself and wanting very much to believe that the sawed-off sign was the product of teenage mischief.

  Quickly, she jammed the brush under the back wheels. It was just enough.

  A chill snaked down her spine as she jumped back into the car and locked the doors, eyes scanning the road, the trees, anywhere a person could hide.

  She stared into the woods. No sign of the face that had snagged her attention at such a crucial and dangerous bend in the road. As unlikely as it seemed that someone would be out here in the middle of nowhere, just staring at cars drive by, Abby knew she hadn’t imagined it.

  She needed to get out of here. Fortunately, the branches beneath her tires did the trick. A gentle nudge of the gas pedal had her back on the road.

  Immediately, her thoughts went to the painting in the trunk. If the jostling she’d heard in the slow-motion terror ride was any indication, her things had been tossed around and good.

  What if she’d come all this way, risked everything she had to follow the clues in a painting, and she’d gone and ruined it before even reaching her destination?

  She shook her head at the thought. The painting had to be fine…it just had to be.

  And Abby—the least superstitious woman around— began to wonder if landing her rental car in the ditch before she even found the cottage could possibly be a bad omen.

  Chapter Two

  Ryan Brannigan had never liked surprises. Surprises, by their very nature, robbed a person of control in any given situation, and above all, Ryan Brannigan was determined to be in control.

  Slowly, he inhaled through his teeth. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  His mother looked at him over the rim of her glasses, as if allowing him a moment in which to rephrase the demand, if not withdraw it altogether. “I beg your pardon?” she asked, brows all but disappearing into her hairline.

  “I said, ‘Tell me you’re joking’. Tell me that you didn’t rent the cottage to Celeste Rutherford’s daughter.”

  Cora Brannigan’s eyes narrowed menacingly.

  Ryan was undaunted.

  “I’ll do no such thing,” she said with characteristic brusqueness as she bustled around him. “I’ve never been known as a tease, much less a liar.”

  She swept into the back office, and Ryan followed, a gust of sea breeze at his heels as the door of Brannigan’s General Store swung open to admit another patron.

  He turned a baleful eye on the unabashedly curious stares of the staff and customers alike. Faces lowered, one by one, as Ryan closed the office door behind him. He was more than accustomed to being the topic of conversation in Destiny Bay, but that didn’t mean he liked it.

  “Can you at least tell me why I had to hear this news from Gerald Blake, and not from you?”

  Cora smiled pleasantly. “Perhaps for the same reason I learned that you and Jennifer were getting a divorce from your Auntie Joan, and not from you.”

  Ryan blinked—an infinitesimal break in the poker face that he immediately rectified. “That was four years ago. And stop trying to change the subject—I’m not interested in discussing the past.”

  “Oh, you’re not interested in the past, is it?” She closed the ledger that sat in front of her with a thud. “If that’s true, you’ll leave this business about Abrielle Lancaster be—what’s done is done, and neither you nor I can change it, son.”

  “Abrielle Lancaster is not welcome here, any more than her mother was before her.”

  Cora shot him a gaze fit to render any other man incapable of further comment. He’d seen it strike other men speechless. Unlike other men, however, he’d spent the better part of his misspent youth building up resistance to that very glare.

  “Not welcome?” said Cora. “Says who? I’ll wager her money is as good as anyone else’s, and the cottage has been vacant for close to a year.”

  “I’ll rent it.” He snatched his wallet from a back pocket, spread the supple leather, and began thumbing through the bills. “I’ll double the damage deposit, and pay you an extra fifty a month.”

  His mother threw her head back and laughed. “Why, I’ve never heard of anything so foolish. Vengeance doesn’t become you.”

  “Make it one hundred.” He held a fan of bills out for her inspection.

  “Put your money away, son. I’ll not break my word with the girl, and I’m offended you’d suggest it.”

  He brought his hand down hard on the desk where she was seated. “I’m offended you’d rent to her in the first place!”

  Cora lifted a warning finger. “I’ll not have you berate me in my own store, Ryan Brannigan. I raised you better, and well you know it. As for the cottage rental, might I remind you that Franklin O’Donnell gave her my number because I own seventy-five percent of the rental units in this town, and you own the other twenty-five percent. Who else was he going to refer her to, might I ask? When Franklin found out who she was, he thought it would be nice for her to stay in the cottage her mother lived in. She jumped at the chance.”

  Cora leaned back in her chair, her tone guarded. “It’s time you moved on, son. Time you took a risk and dared to live and love in spite of the blows life dealt us all those years ago.”

  Ryan’s blood began to boil. “Move on? Move on? Remembering is what makes me strong.”

  “No, son. Remembering makes you less than you could be.” She rounded the table and smiled gently at him. “Let it go, Ryan. You weren’t born to be shackled.”

  His jaw flexed beneath burnished skin; his eyes fixed on the horizon beyond the window. “I’m not going to let it go. Ever.”

  Cora smiled sadly. “Keep hold of some things, yes. Keep hold of what made us who we are today. I’m a self-made woman and you’re a well-educated, sel
f-made man. We’ll never want for anything. Not ever again.” She placed her hand on top of his.

  “Hardship brings its own blessings, my boy. Just think, Ryan…without them, I’d never have become a fighter, a survivor! I would have never had the strength to pull myself out of my poverty. And you, well, you would have never had such a fire in your belly.” Cora patted his hand. “But fires burn hot, son. Hot enough to destroy.”

  Ryan rubbed along the length of his jaw. “And hot enough to temper steel. This fire only makes me stronger.” He rose from the corner of the desk and strode toward the door. “I don’t want her here, Mom. Mark my words, no one will.”

  He slammed the door in his wake.

  Ryan strode past the gaping customers, glaring at any who dared make eye contact and, at the same time, scorning the cowards who began digging in purses and industriously studying the labels of soup cans, instead.

  He would be fodder for the gossip mill—of that, there could be no doubt. Among the faces that had gawked up at him, he had seen both Winnie Small and her meddling cousin, Geraldine.

  He slipped on his sunglasses, grateful for the iota of disguise they afforded his emotions, and strode out of the store.

  In the growing light of morning, the sound of burgeoning engines filled the air, mingled with the lonely call of seagulls wheeling above the trap-laden decks of lobster boats.

  Ryan quickened his pace as he caught the first whiff of sea-touched air, heard the beckoning hiss of surf upon sand.

  Before him, the harbor basin cradled the liquid silver of the sea, offering the quiet magnificence of its wind-ruffled surface to any who would accept its gift. The morning sun was golden, yet somehow purest white as it tripped over wavelets and fell headlong into the ocean.

  Another glorious day in Destiny Bay, and he had fouled it up royally.

  There was no way around it. His mother deserved an apology. Not his strong suit, to say the least—and if it were anyone other than Cora, the offended would have had better luck coaxing a prison guard into a tutu.

  Too forgiving for her own good, she might be, but Cora Brannigan deserved much in this life, not the least of which was kindness and respect from the boy she had single-handedly raised to manhood.

  What he needed was to cool down.

  He rethought his intention of completing some paperwork and made a sharp left onto Brigantine Way, heeding the call of the sea that sang in his veins.

  He rounded the corner of the restored saltbox that served as office and packing facility of Brannigan Fisheries— a company he had built from scratch with nothing but determination and the winnings from a lucky hand of poker.

  The building had cost Ryan a small fortune to restore and convert, but such was the price of conducting business on the historic waterfront. Even the tattoo parlor had not been spared the relentless mandate of the Historical Society, and had grudgingly set up shop in a prim little Cape Cod.

  Ryan shook his head at the incongruous sight of tangled rosebushes, picket fence, and garish neon sign that read: BODY ART AND PIERCING. “Only in Destiny Bay,” he muttered under his breath as he pushed through the gate leading to Brannigan Fisheries’ private dock.

  The sea surged rhythmically, placid as a summer’s sigh as it rose up the length of barnacle-encrusted pylons beneath the dock, then hissed in retreat. Ancient-looking ropes draped the underside of the weathered wood, lifted on the current and heaved mussel-bound, glistening tentacles into the sunlight, their backs as smoothly humped as an emerging pod of whales.

  Ryan surveyed the scene, glanced at the vessels moored at Brannigan Fisheries, and spied the decidedly unsophisticated-looking Carrie-Rose—a lobster boat with an unparalleled knack for plowing through nor’easters. She lifted and beckoned seductively on the swelling breast of the sea, and without a split second’s thought, he leapt from the dock and landed in a neat squat on her deck.

  A flock of gulls took flight, squawking their protest into the wind, but the sturdy Carrie-Rose barely registered a shudder in response.

  A head peeked over the stern of the trawler Fish Tale, brow ruffled at the commotion. “Ryan, I didn’t expect you today. You needin’ something, man?”

  “Yes. Keys.” He lifted both empty palms, smiling crookedly. “Do you have a set?”

  Terry Friars, captain of the Brannigan Fleet, looked curiously at his employer. He ran his hands over the sides of his coveralls, fished into a bulging pocket, and withdrew a jangling set of keys. They skittered across the deck of the Carrie-Rose and landed at Ryan’s feet.

  “Thanks. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  The man nodded and turned back to the engine of the Fish Tale.

  Ryan hardly spared him a thought. Didn’t so much as indulge the realization that for some unknown reason, his finest lobster boat wasn’t at sea, filling her bowels with the flapping green-backed treasure of Destiny Bay. Right now, he was content that she was there, like the perfect lover: ready, willing and able to provide an escape.

  He steered her carefully around the sandbars, through the north passage that led into the undulating Atlantic, and pressed her engines forward as he plowed into an oncoming wave.

  Before him, the ocean glistened; a jewel of countless, shifting facets and immeasurable bounty—the only woman who had ever caught him, hook, line, and proverbial sinker.

  She had lapped at his feet in playful childhood, had raged with him in the anger of his youth, had washed over his flesh when he made love on her shore.

  It was the sea that breathed a wisp of silent remembrance, sent tendrils of mist from her foaming crests to lure him out of himself and beckon him home from sterile, inland cities that reeked of diesel and concrete.

  He eased the engines to a halt a few hundred feet from shore, drew the salty air past the constriction of anger in his throat, felt the involuntary flex of his jaw.

  Of all people to rent the cottage, why her?

  Ryan furrowed his brow, wondering if there was anything to the laws of karma, and if so, cursing the misstep that had brought this specter from his past to the island.

  Not that it was much of a stretch to begin with. Destiny Bay was a quiet town, where the voice of the past was always heard. One voice, in particular, resonated like no other—that of an artist’s muse; a young woman of such rare beauty as to make the very landscape envious, if rumors were to be believed.

  Often, Ryan had imagined her, this woman that people still spoke of. Whatever happened to the artist’s woman?

  That was what irked him the most about Destiny Bay. People never forgot a bloody thing.

  To their credit, they never forgot one of their own, either, and Ryan had been raised and nurtured by a village who considered him one of theirs.

  That’s not to say that he didn’t have his share of run-ins with his elders—his infamous youth was the stuff of legends, even still. And he had had the dubious distinction of being escorted to Cora’s door by more fathers, farmers and fishermen than he cared to recall, and warned to stay away from their daughters in no uncertain terms. Still, they had been patient, and when they whispered behind his back that the lad could hardly help himself with the father that he had, he had done his level best to keep from taking swings at the men, even as his blood raged in his veins, revolted at the very mention of his father’s name.

  The folks of Destiny Bay loved him, of that there could be no doubt. And more than a few of the very fathers who had warned him off their daughters now seemed eager to offer them up on a silver platter.

  As if to quell the rising indignation he felt, he breathed slowly and deliberately, focusing his thoughts on the swells that surged beneath the heaving deck.

  There.

  Like magic, the sea worked like an elixir on his rankled soul.

  He opened his eyes at the precise moment the sun caught Abandon Bluff in a wash of amber light—gilded heather and stone touched rolling earth with strokes of violet. On the far horizon, a pale, reluctant moon paused and dangled like
a pearl on the morning sky’s gray bosom. Artist’s Cottage was not visible from this vantage point.

  The uncultivated beauty of the place was breathtaking. Even to a jaded soul like me, Ryan thought silently.

  He stared as if he’d never before witnessed the particular shade of light unique to Destiny Bay at midmorning; as if he’d never before seen the colors of sand and sea and sky enshrouded in an illusion of gauzy whiteness.

  A gentle gust of wind fluttered the pages of the captain’s logbook, catching his attention. Ryan scowled at the curled and dog-eared corners, pulled his eyes away, and did his level best to ignore it.

  The wind grew, rattling the weighted cover, refusing to be ignored.

  An indrawn breath all but exploded from his lips in exasperation. He yanked the cover open and ripped a sheet of paper from its binding. A quick rummage produced a serviceable—if rather gnawed—pencil, and, ignoring every instinct of the islander he was, Ryan turned his back on the ocean, faced the town perched on the edge of the Atlantic, and began to sketch.

  With the swiftness of one who knows his subject thoroughly, he drew the village across the bay. It was perched on the edge of an island shaped like a sliver of moon; a village that had thrived in spite of gale, loss of fathers, sons, and livelihoods; a town that had been built from the sea-soaked wood of scuttled ships. He drew streets that followed the shore, and some that soared up the vast hills of Destiny Bay, drew brightly colored homes that wore the leftover paint of boats with names like Siren’s Song and Lucky Lady.

  He drew quickly, almost frantically, sketching in the bench in front of Brannigan’s General Store, as well as a few of the ancient fishermen who polished it to a shine with their rumps.

  Ryan looked down at the sketch he had created and couldn’t deny the quality he saw.

  He clutched the drawing in a ruthless grip. Then he hurled the sketch into the sea, watching as the salty water saturated the paper and at last, swallowed the picture into its briny mouth.

  Ryan swore under his breath.

  Why her? Why now?