A Wedding on Lilac Lane by Hope Ramsay (best book clubs .txt) 📕

was six, I had a tiny violin. I couldn’t play a full-sized fiddle, so…”

He shook his head. “Brenda started you at six?”

“Yes, and your mother started you sailing at ten.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And you still enjoy sailing. You’re a member of the club, right?”

He nodded. “I like fly-fishing more,” he said. “But it is true that there are times when…” His voice trailed off as his throat got tight. He didn’t like talking about Mom, especially in emotional times like the present. How had he even started this conversation?

No, wait, he hadn’t really started it. Ella had.

“When what?” she coaxed.

He dragged in a breath of air filled with the scent of the bay. Funny how he rarely shared any of this. Lauren had never even asked about his mother. She’d accepted that Mom had died when he was young, and therefore Mom was a part of his past. Lauren had never much cared about his past because she’d been too busy planning his future. But the past mattered, didn’t it?

It mattered a lot.

He closed his eyes and actively remembered that summer before Mom died. She’d sit out on the yacht club deck wearing a knitted hat over her bald head, even in the heat of the summer. She’d wave at him every time he looked in her direction, as if watching him sail in that puny little dinghy had made her day.

God, he wished he’d pleased her. He wished he’d done better. But that summer he’d been too little. Nothing about sailing had come easily. And Mom had never said a word about his failures.

But what if he’d been good? Would Mom have given him pointers? Would he have taken the advice or seen it as criticism?

He didn’t know.

“What’s going through your head, Dylan?” Ella asked.

“Nothing,” he said, anxious to shut down the conversation. It seemed wrong to compare his mother to Brenda. Except he’d been doing it for weeks, hadn’t he?

“I should never have tried to compare Mom to your mother,” he said. “That wasn’t fair.”

“True, but probably inevitable. Since you’re human. You are human, aren’t you?”

“I’m trying.”

“Good.” She turned away, staring out over the bay.

“And what are you thinking?” he asked, employing the question as a cheap trick in order to keep his thoughts private.

“To be brutally honest, I was thinking about my father.”

“What?”

She blew out a sigh and glanced at Dylan out of the corner of her eye. “I was thinking that we both have an absent parent.”

“Yeah. But your father is still alive, isn’t he?”

She shook her head. “No. He died right before Christmas. I looked him up a few years ago. We had a relationship for a little while.”

“I’m so sorry, Ella. Was that this past December?”

She nodded.

“Right before you came home?”

“Dylan, Magnolia Harbor isn’t my home. It’s yours. It’s Mom’s. I grew up in Indiana, but I don’t have any family or real connection there. For a long while, I wanted Cody to settle down on this piece of land near El Paso. But that didn’t happen either. I’m starting to think I’m the proverbial rolling stone.”

He studied her as Synchronicity Too’s engines fired to life, and the crew went to work on the mooring lines. It seemed important, suddenly, to remember that Ella was only visiting Magnolia Harbor and would leave one day. She needed to go someplace where she could play her violin and make a living at it.

So they were having a summertime fling. And maybe it wasn’t worth it in the end. He’d like to believe they’d end up friends, especially if she came visiting on holidays or in the summer.

The thought deepened his depression, just as the yacht slipped away from its berth and headed through the channel markers. The crew got busy raising the gaff-rigged mainsail, so the yacht was moving under wind alone by the time they reached the channel.

“Oh my goodness. It’s amazing,” Ella said in a bright, happy voice, bending backward to look at the wind-filled sails. The yacht shot forward, heeling a tiny bit to leeward, and Ella stumbled as the deck shifted beneath their feet.

Dylan caught her by the shoulders for the second time that evening, the heat of her body flowing through his palms and into his core. Desire almost blew him over. But his hunger for this woman was tempered by something else much stronger.

He wanted to keep her safe right here beside him. But she was more like Lauren than he’d thought, the dress notwithstanding. Neither Lauren nor Ella would ever be happy living here in Magnolia Harbor.

Chapter Nineteen

The cruise had been lovely, the bay had been calm, and the sunset had been gorgeous, lighting up the sky in shades of yellow, pink, and magenta. But Dylan’s melancholy seemed to hang over it. What was wrong with him?

As the schooner turned back toward the harbor with the day turning toward twilight, a deep exhaustion seeped through Ella. She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but even a simple question like that seemed dangerous, especially after the conversation they’d had about his mother and her father. They needed to keep it light between them.

So when Jude St. Pierre handed the ship’s wheel over to one of his crew and strolled over to where Dylan and Ella stood, she was thankful for the interruption.

“If y’all would like to take a tour below decks, feel free. I left a couple of brochures on the table in the salon about evening party rentals and catering details. You better jump quick though because I only have a couple of evening sailings available. Charter sailings can be booked any Tuesday or Wednesday evening.” He shook their hands and then strolled away to chat with other passengers, like any good ship’s captain.

“Come on,” Dylan said. “I’ve seen the salon, but you should take a look. If you think the decks are beautiful, wait until you see the woodwork down there.” Dylan snagged her hand and pulled her toward the ship’s ladder.

Damn. Holding his hand was nice, even