Page 100 of Tempest at Annabel's Lighthouse
“What are you doing?” She drew back, questioning.
He tightened his hold. “Hi.”
“Oh, hi...” The butterflies that rose in her were unusual and rare. It’d been years since Pete had been the cause of them.
His ice-blue eyes were like melting bergs, and Shea had the sudden thought that she was okay with drowning in those eyes.
“I’m sorry.” Pete’s words both stunned and confused her.
“For what?” Shea asked.
“For not listening to you. For working on my cars all the time. For being so busy taking care of thingsforyou, that I forgot to take careofyou.”
“Oh.” Shea’s voice was small even to her own ears.
Pete’s fingers grazed the side of her face. “I don’t want to love you for me, Shea. I want to love you for you.”
His words stung and healed simultaneously. Shea sucked in a steadying breath, bracing her balance by taking hold of his waist. “I haven’t been exactly fair to you, Pete.”
He waited.
She tried to gather her thoughts. “I came here to find myself, and I’ve realized that ... well, with everything that’s happened, with Annabel’s story and her family’s legacy, I see now that pursuing taking care of myself first isn’t necessarily balanced. I need to take care of you too. Of us.” Shea pressed forward. “Not that I don’t need to take care of myself. I mean, my health, my emotions, yeah sure, but what I mean is ... it’s not just me. I didn’t fall in love with you for me either, but that’s sort of what it’s become.”
Pete nodded. He leaned forward, and Shea’s breath caught. His lips touched her jaw. “It’s become that for both of us, I think. In our own ways.” He pulled back. “Should we have a do-over?”
Shea gave a little laugh. Gosh, if he kept acting like this, she’d fall in love with him all over again. But, she reminded herself, this time she’d do it with the intent of making him her teammate, her love, and someone she would serve. Love—true love—required humility and sacrifice. That was the long and short of it. Romance ebbed and flowed like the waves outside the lighthouse, and yet love for another carried through the storm. It shone like a light across the tempest, and it beckoned the loved one home to safety.
Love wasn’t about her. It was about them.
As Shea leaned into Pete and tasted the first real kiss in a longtime, she wondered briefly if there had ever been true love in this lighthouse. Or if it had always been thwarted by heartache and haunted by the ghost of a woman who had never really known what it meant to be truly, wholly, and completely cherished.
Either way, Shea decided as she laid her head on Pete’s shoulder, breathing in the essence of him, she would start again. She would examine her intentions. She would rethink her motivations. She would consider Pete in all her decisions. Most of all, she would love as if their lives depended on it ... because they did. And that was good and pure and everything that was right.
40
REBECCA
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Annabel Lee
ANNABEL’S LIGHTHOUSE
SPRING, 1874
THEY STOOD SIDE BY SIDE,Edgar’s stone propped upright, his name etched as best as Abel could manage into its face.
Rebecca stood, careful to leave some space between her and Abel. Niina bent and laid a bouquet of fern and wildflowers at the base of the stone.
“To think,” she mused, “your mother lies here, and now Edgar.” Niina met Rebecca’s eyes. “He thought he kept it secret, but I know he loved her.”
Rebecca couldn’t shake the niggling feeling in her heart. Thekind that still hurt and made her question everything. Her father, Hilliard, had been arrested for fraud, and supposedly they would be pressing charges against him for conspiracy to commit murder against her. Aaron would be coming to live at the lighthouse too. He would be safe, though they would have much work to do to mend what Hilliard had broken. Rebecca knew in her soul that if Hilliard had been okay in allowing Mercer to kill her on Hilliard’s behalf, it was no stretch of the imagination to picture him standing along the shore as her mother, Annabel, fought against the lake’s waves and the force that pulled her under. Had he been indifferent to her death? Had there been a storm that kept him from saving her?
But what was worse were Edgar’s words that would not leave her alone.“I saved us from him,”Edgar had said. Us. But Annabel had died. So how had they both been saved?
Niina’s hand trailed along Rebecca’s arm, and Rebecca snapped free of her thoughts to meet the woman’s eyes. “Take your time. We’re here for you, my dear.”
It was a gift, the words Niina extended to her. Niina had shown her nothing but a mother’s true love and concern, and that didn’t slip past Rebecca as she considered how she would learn to love her own child.
