Where Dreams Books 1-3 Read online

  You’ll find the right man, Ice Sweet.

  That was a laugh. She was thirty now and the “right man” was a myth. She did require at least “compatible” though, and Jack James hadn’t even been that.

  I know you don’t believe me, but you will. Until then, don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. My life never did.

  Love you, Ice Sweet.

  “Love you, Daddy.”

  # # #

  “Damn you, Angelo.”

  His friend didn’t answer. Probably because he wasn’t there, but that was a lousy excuse.

  “Too busy redesigning your damn restaurant to take four days off to go sailing.” Russell grabbed for the jib sheet as he came about, but missed it. And he hadn’t tied a knot in the bitter end. The line shot out of the cockpit, nearly snagged Nutcase as it whipped past the cat, making her jump straight up like a furry fireworks, ran out the pulley block, and was over the side trailing in the water.

  He brought the boat up into the wind, forcing the sail back over the boat. Then he sprinted forward, snagged the line dripping with freezing water, and ran back for the cockpit letting the rope slip through his fingers. He added a cold rope burn to his list of complaints against Angelo.

  The boat fell off the wind again before he could run the line through the block. He whipped a couple turns around the winch and let it draw all wrong while he got control of the tiller again.

  The line burned in his sore hand as he got the boat moving again. Once he had some speed up, he brought her into the wind again to take the pressure off the line. This time he got it through the block and around the winch. With the tiller between his knees, he tied a quick figure-eight knot in the end of the line so it couldn’t go overboard again. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  He was almost back to the lighthouse by the time he had it under control.

  He’d gone out twice now with Angelo along just for the ride while he practiced single-handing the big boat. Angelo had kept up a running commentary that amused himself no end as Russell scrambled about the boat. But he’d done it.

  Then he’d set off alone for the Lime Kiln lighthouse on San Juan Island. On the first morning out, he’d thought it was fun plunging through the steep wake of a big tanker. The Lady had driven her bow deep into the third wave and water had come running down the deck and sluiced out the scuppers he’d only cut-in a week before. So sweet.

  It wasn’t until he’d anchored and tried to bunk down last night that he’d discovered his mistake. He hadn’t latched the forehatch. The hinged wood must have floated up when the wave came aboard and a two-foot square chunk of wave had poured into the center of the stateroom bed. Everything was sopping. He’d now spent two very uncomfortable nights trying to sleep on the main cabin floor underneath a spare sail. One foot kept slipping through the missing floorboard and thudding down onto the concrete bilge.

  Nutcase had curled up on his chest and been perfectly content to snore her way through the night with occasional flails of her tail across his nose during particularly good dreams.

  She also hadn’t minded Russell’s mistake of anchoring that first night right next to a bell buoy. Each tiny swell that ran under the boat made every line slap against the mast with a sharp clack. And then it would reach the buoy and a piercing ring would echo through the boat. Nutcase had snored on.

  It was a good thing Melanie wasn’t along, roughing it on the floor wouldn’t have made her happy.

  As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure what would. She’d liked the penthouse well enough, and the sex had been pretty spectacular. She’d appeared to enjoy the sail with Dave and Betsy, even the scenic plane flight. The pilot had let him take the controls for a few minutes, he definitely had to learn to fly someday. Such a feeling of freedom. It didn’t have the peace of sailing before the world’s winds, but it was a close second.

  Russell managed to jibe the boat without losing any lines overboard and ran out from shore a ways before turning back to find a good angle for his photo of the lighthouse.

  All through Valentine’s Day weekend he’d thought everything was great…right until he’d found Melanie on their last morning together. She was sitting on the shower’s floor crying. He’d almost closed the door quietly and let her be, but there was too much between them for that.

  Instead, he climbed in beside her and sat down with his back on the opposite wall. She tried to push him out, but he wasn’t going to leave that easily. She kept her arms wrapped tightly over her breasts. He reached out to stroke her wet hair, but she slapped his hand aside.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Her voice was sharp with accusation.

  Despite the steam and pounding hot water, he could see the running tears and snot. He tried to think of what he’d missed. They’d had fine meals, tickets to the ballet, and a some good fun.

  “You really don’t,” she was shaking her head. She looked up into the pounding spray for a moment as if seeking god. One of those perfect hands reached out and she stroked her thumb down his cheek. He turned his head to place a kiss in her palm, but she pulled back before he could.

  She sat up straighter.

  “You really don’t. Oh, Russell.” Her soft accent gone, replaced by the flat slap of New York. She wiped at her eyes, her gray eyes filled with infinite sadness.

  “I’m sorry for me, but I’m more sorry for you.” She rose from the floor, rinsed her face for a moment under the hot spray and stepped from the shower. He’d watched her through the glass door. Sat under the spray while she dried off that gorgeous body. Applied moisturizers. Baby powder. Added makeup. Dried her hair in a roar of blow dryer that didn’t penetrate the shower’s patter but sent forth long billows of blond.

  Even now, two weeks later, he could feel the power of her parting kiss at the airport. She pressed her body to his so that every curve fit—her hold so tight it almost knocked the breath from his body.

  Then she was gone, a head of blond sunlight sailing through the crowds at security. Never once turning to see if he was still watching.

  He blinked and turned the boat sharply. If he didn’t pay more attention, he’d play moth to the lighthouse and ram himself right up on her rocks. Once he had his heading settled, he grabbed his camera and snapped a few quick shots off the stern.

  A loud splash sounded beside the boat, and he spun about looking for Nutcase. The cat stood with its nose pressed against the safety netting he’d added to the lifelines, staring down into the water off the starboard side. As he leaned over to follow her gaze, a massive wall of black-and-white whale shot out of the water then splashed down beside him. He shouted in surprise as the orca crashed back into the water less than twenty feet away.

  A wave of spray showered onto the boat. Nutcase howled and scrambled below, her coat dripping with seawater.

  Russell caught half a dozen photos of the orca before it sounded and disappeared.

  Damn!

  Angelo was going to be so jealous.

  Excellent!

  # # #

  Russell shook any errant sawdust off the paper towel and wrapped it around his sandwich. He grabbed a beer from the cooler and a box of crackers. He set his lunch on the table he’d just finished making. Once more he lifted the top to admire the chart drawer built right into the tabletop. Room for four around the settee or drop the table down level with the benches and it could sleep two. Especially if they were feeling cuddly.

  He pulled out his laptop and set it beside his dinner just as Nutcase crawled out from behind a pile of books. He plugged in a mouse and booted the machine while she ambled over to check out his roast beef sandwich. When he flapped a hand at her, she just moved to the other side of his beer and plopped her butt down on the table. Then she started on the impossible task of bringing order to her fur.

  Russell took a bite of the sandwich and shoved a Springsteen CD into the car st
ereo mounted in its little cubby. He flicked a switch to turn off the speakers in the cockpit so that he didn’t disturb anyone else in the marina.

  Once the laptop was up, he wiped the mustard from his fingers, and plugged in the chip from his camera. It started transferring the pictures automatically. Almost three hundred. Shit! He hadn’t done this in a while.

  While the copy bar chugged along, he started sorting them out. Lighthouses. Boat remodel. Nutcase. Angelo. More Nutcase. Melanie. Flying. Melanie.

  Then one stopped him. It was a shot of just Melanie’s face—her watching him as she lounged in the rooftop hot tub with the steam rising into the chill Valentine’s Night. A vase of a dozen long-stem roses floated nearly rim deep beside her. A glass of wine perched on the edge of the tub behind her. But it was her eyes he couldn’t get away from.

  She was right.

  There was something he didn’t get.

  The computer dinged that it was done and he went back to his filing. The last was a series of shots he’d taken of Angelo cooking, plating, greeting customers, visiting tables. And close-ups of many of his dishes.

  That’s when the idea caught up with him. He did a quick Internet search—there it was. The Bite of Seattle. Twenty-five years old, now one of the major trademark festivals of the city. A Seattle institution. It was perfect.

  He popped up his layout software and began tinkering. The first ad came together so fast it worried him a bit, but the first draft was good. It had sharpness. It had edge. He’d have to run the comps past Angelo, but it was the right answer. Seattle, Tuscany, great food, all in one pitch. Angelo’s –a bite of Tuscany.

  No, not homey enough. Angleo’s remodel had turned his Pike Place Market address from the American cliché of a modern Italian restaurant into a cozy Tuscan family room.

  When Russell was there the worries of the world felt far away. It was safe…comfortable. He tried to picture a lady just beside him. He’d be content. As if sitting with his feet stretched toward—

  Angelo’s Tuscan Hearth.

  Bloody perfect! Damn he was good.

  He e-mailed it off to a print shop to run a full-size for Angelo.

  Another bite of his sandwich and he cranked up the Bruce a bit before turning back to sorting the images, an action almost automatic with the years of practice. Contact sheets were a thing of the past, which he didn’t miss at all, but he did miss the darkroom work. Now it was all load ‘em up and crank ‘em out.

  Nutcase’s folder grew faster than he expected. The kitten afraid to leave its box that first night. The kitten discovering that there were things worse than crawling into the bilge, like being washed with soap afterward to remove the muck. Sleeping on the boom was her latest trick. Russell had almost catapulted her overboard when he came about one day. Now he knew to check the boom and Nutcase had learned to dive for the deck when he shouted, “Helms a-lee!”

  Nutcase was about halfway through her preening. He reached over and mussed her fur as thoroughly as he could until the cat batted at his hand, rolled over on her back and started to wrestle.

  He recovered his hand with only a few scratches and knocked back the rest of his beer.

  He created subfolders for each lighthouse. There. That was the shot he’d print out to give to Angelo’s mom. Lighthouse blurry with its distance off the stern. Angelo sitting with the tiller in one hand and a stainless-steel travel mug of cocoa in the other. Rain hood blown back off his dark, curly hair, a smile of sheer bliss on his Mediterranean-dark face.

  Russell started marking the best images for printing. He’d ship them to Arnie in New York. No one else could do what she did with digital-to-paper; the woman was a magician.

  West Point lighthouse was easy. His favorite shot of the Alki light had a red blemish in one corner. It distracted the eye from the lighthouse and ruined the balance of steadfast lighthouse and transitory, upscale homes clustered about it.

  Maybe he should check his camera.

  The next image had the same red mark. But it wasn’t in the same spot in the frame. He flipped through half a dozen before he found one where the mark was a different shape.

  He zoomed in. The mark wasn’t a blemish, it was a person. They wore a bright red coat, but he didn’t have enough resolution. The blemish might have brown hair, or maybe red, or maybe neither. A head made up of three pixels wasn’t enough information for any detail.

  “Well, man or woman, you’re messing up my picture.”

  Nutcase stuck her nose around the corner of the screen to peer at it intently. As Russell pulled the mouse to select the more recent Lime Kiln lighthouse photos, she pounced on the mouse’s wire. He almost picked up the camera, but he already must have a dozen shots of her doing just this.

  He opened everything in the Lime Kiln folder. Not many shots of the lighthouse, about as many as of the whale. There were far more of the stupid cat.

  He reached for his beer, but his hand never made it there.

  “Red coat.”

  Nutcase ignored him, watching the mouse intently and waiting for movement.

  Again no close-ups, though better than Alki, brown hair, rich russet-brown and long. This was not a guy and a guy wouldn’t wear a calf-length red coat.

  The hair.

  Long enough to reach well past her shoulders if it weren’t being blown about. He zoomed in, but her face was just a tiny cluster of tan pixels in a sea of russet.

  Lime Kiln in March and Alki lighthouse in February.

  He pulled the mouse back from Nutcase’s grasp and pulled up the West Point photos from January.

  No red coat. No one at the lighthouse. That would be too much of a coincidence. He pulled up the spoiled images from the trashcan.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Then the one where he’d misjudged a wave and snapped more of the north shore than he intended. He’d discarded the shot because mostly he’d caught the wastewater treatment plant.

  Huddled among the lee-side rocks there was a banner of dusky red hair caught in the wind. She wore a tan coat and black pants, but it was definitely the same hair. And she was very slender.

  Someone had the same calendar he did. He double-checked the file dates; the first of every month which proved he wasn’t losing what little remained of his mind.

  He pulled Angelo’s calendar off the bulkhead and flipped to April. Slip Point lay out on the Olympic Peninsula, and most of the way down the straits of San Juan de Fuca. Treacherous water there, but it would be good practice, especially if he was going to go deep sea by year end.

  He buzzed through the calendar and looked at the last lighthouse. He dug around until he found a pen and put a note on December first.

  Wow! He was really going to do this. He was going to unplug from society and sail into the dream that his thirteen-year-old brain had painted across a New York City bedroom ceiling. Russell reached for the beer, but it was empty.

  He’d go to each lighthouse first—by then both he and the boat would be ready. It was taking longer than he’d expected. But there was no real hurry anyway and he wanted to be around until Angelo was really up and rolling. Then who knew where his next port of call would be.

  He checked the December note once more before he closed the calendar.

  “Leave.”

  # # #

  “I’m telling you, Angelo. It sucks out there.”

  “What does?”

  “This.” Russell turned around his bottle of Birra Morena aiming the label in Angelo’s direction. The beautiful Italian girl on the label was impossibly beautiful: black hair, blue eyes, perfect skin.

  “Vecchio mio. You are so sad. You know this. That’s my sister.”

  “You don’t have a sister.” Russell considered heaving some of the tiramisu at Angelo, but his kitchen staff was mostly done with clean
ing up for the night, so he ate it instead.

  “You worry too much. She is a pretty Italian and probably a very nice girl. Nice like your Melanie and almost as pretty.”

  Melanie. Shit! He still couldn’t figure out how he’d screwed that up. He dug at the edge of the label with the rough edge of his thumbnail.

  Angelo stopped clowning and pulled up a stool next to his.

  “Russell, my old friend. What’s up? This is me, Angelo. Every time I mention her since you bring her here two weeks ago, you clam up like an oyster. Come on, buddy. Give.”

  “I don’t think she had much fun here.”

  “Duh!” Angelo took a sip of Russell’s beer and set it on the stainless-steel prep table.

  “What do you mean?” Russell grabbed his bottle back and took a deep pull that did nothing to slake his thirst.

  “Please tell me that you didn’t show her the boat?”

  Of course he had. Why wouldn’t he? He shrugged and finished the bottle.

  “Shit, man! You’ve never been dumb about a girl before. Think, amico. Think about Melanie.”

  Every time he did that he saw her eyes watching him from across the hot tub. Eyes filled not with lust, nor was it playfulness, though that was there…

  “That boat is what you want. What do you think she wants?”

  He planted the bottle back on the table with a crash and started to get off his stool. Angelo grabbed his arm and jerked him back down to his seat before he could turn away.

  He pushed his face so close to his that Russell wanted to pound a fist into it.

  “I know what she wants. Even if you’re too damn stupid.”

  He let fly and caught Angelo on the point of his jaw. Angelo flew backwards off his stool and crashed against a rack of storage shelves.

  Seconds later a dozen hands had grabbed him and shoved him down on the wet, tile floor. He tried to fight back but they had him pinned until all he could do was scream out his frustration.

  They let go of him so abruptly that he didn’t move for a moment. He regained his feet to face Angelo who was rubbing his chin. A circle of dishwashers and cooks stood to either side of him; all ready to tackle the bull who’d wandered into their fucking china shop.