Seduction on the Sand (The Billionaires of Barefoot Bay #2)(30)
Author: Roxanne St. Claire

“You’re lucky, you know that?” he asked.

“Because I don’t have that pesky pied-à-terre in Paris or the nine-thousand-square-foot place to keep clean?”

“Because you found a place where you…belong. I want that. I don’t care if it’s fancy or impressive or what people think I should be living in. I just want it to be a place where…” He shook his head, laughing. “This is cheeseball, but I want it to be a place where my heart is.”

Her own heart took a dip and a dive. “That’s where the person you love is,” she whispered.

“Like your Nonno was.”

Not exactly what she was thinking, but he’d opened a door she needed to step through. “Speaking of Nonno…”

She felt his gaze on her as she stared ahead, not willing to look in his eyes.

“What?”

“That promise I made?”

He shifted a little closer. “Yeah?”

She turned flat on her back and stared up at the ceiling, aware that her heart thumped with the need to be honest. She’d asked for him to be real and now she had to be, too.

“Frankie?”

“That night that I talked to my grandfather…” Biting her lip, she let the words fade with her next breath.

“Yeah?” He took her hand and gently, softly rubbed her knuckles with his much-larger fingers. She lifted their joined hands to look at his.

“Have I told you how attractive I find your hands?” she asked.

He squeezed her fingers. “Illegal change of subject.”

She nodded, building up more courage. She owed him this truth. “It was about four in the morning, and I was with him in the ICU. The halls were so quiet and still. I wouldn’t leave his side even though he was deep in a coma. There were no nurses in the room, just Nonno and me.”

She closed her eyes, her whole focus on the warm place where their hands touched, transported back to that dark hospital room, the only sounds the steady beep of the machines monitoring Nonno’s heart. She’d held his hand, too, just like this. But instead of the strong, young, powerful hand of Elliott Becker, she’d grasped the frail, wrinkled, sunspotted fingers of her Nonno. “I remember bending over to put my head against his chest, just to close my eyes for a moment and hear his heart. I knew his time was…close.”

For a moment, neither spoke as she remembered the slightly antiseptic smell of Nonno’s hospital gown and the thin bones of his old chest against her cheek. “And then he said, ‘Don’t ever let our land go, piccolina.’”

“When he woke up?”

And there was the rub. She looked up at Elliott. “I…think so. Maybe. I’m not sure.” She took a slow, long breath. “He never opened his eyes, but his voice was clear and so was our conversation. But…he died.” She swallowed hard. “I think he died before we had that conversation.”

Elliott just looked at her, clearly not quite getting where she was going.

“I fell asleep after we talked…” At least, she thought she had. “And I woke up when the nurses came running in, and they said…he was gone. They told me he’d never come out of the coma because they would have known it. They told me…I imagined the whole conversation, but I talked to him, I know I did. I heard him and he heard me and we…talked.”

Hadn’t they? Sometimes it was hard to be absolutely certain.

And if it had never happened, how much weight could she put on that promise?

“Then the nurses were wrong,” he said, at least acting like he believed her.

She sighed. Deep in her heart, she knew that they couldn’t have been, but… “Sometimes, I think that he was already…gone.” She shook her head, the memory of that conversation so vivid it couldn’t have been a dream.

“So…” He got up on his elbow, looking down at her. “What you’re saying is you aren’t sure if you really made that promise or not?”

She didn’t answer for a long, long time, then finally, she nodded. “It might have been, you know, my imagination.”

He stroked her cheek, silent, thinking. “No, it wasn’t. And you’re lucky, then.” He leaned closer and kissed her. “You’ve talked to angels.”

Her heart folded in half and then burst in her chest. “Yes,” she said, fighting tears. “I have.”

“I’m lucky, too.”

“So you’ve said a million times.”

He smiled at her. “You talk to them. I get to fall in…”

She waited. What would he say? In love? In bed? In—

On the floor, her cell phone rang inside the bag she’d brought in, shredding the moment. She huffed out a breath of frustration, but he gave her a nudge.

“You can get that.”

“No, I—”

“Really, you can get it.” He leaned over the bed and snagged her bag, flipping it up on the bed. “It’s the middle of the day and…it could be Jocelyn.”

Did he want this intimate conversation to come to a crashing halt? It sure seemed so.

“Plus, I have something important I have to do today.” He pulled her phone out of the side pocket and handed it to her, pushing himself off the bed.

Had they gone too far? Revealed too much? Bewildered, she took the phone and barely glanced at the screen, half-registering that it was Liza Lemanski from the County Clerk’s office.

Before she could sit up to answer, Elliott was halfway across the room, and then he disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door. Frowning and ignoring the punch of disappointment in her chest, she tapped the screen and answered the phone.

“Hi, Liza.”

“If you tell anyone I made this call, I will deny it until they tie me up and hang me in red tape.”

Any other time, she’d have laughed. But… Frankie stared at the closed door and reached behind herself to hook her bra, a flush of embarrassment rising even though Liza couldn’t possibly know where she was. “Your secret’s safe. What’s up?”

“I found the will. And the property deed.”

“That’s go—”

“And the multimillion-dollar offer from a third party that is set to close in forty-eight hours.”

“What?”

“I’m not kidding, Frankie, someone has made a cash offer, and it is going through fast, fast, fast. That Burns guy has a one hundred percent legitimate will that your grandfather must have signed in a moment of weakness. He works for some seedy company that preys on old people who don’t have official wills.”