The One Who Changed Everything

Chapter Three

Present Day

Out in the yard, Daisy saw Tucker in worn jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up his arms the same way—although it was not the same shirt—as they’d been in the photo on the wall inside.

He was shifting a large paving stone into place in an open-air alcove that formed one of Reid Landscaping’s displays. There were five of these alcoves, each designed to show what could be achieved with barbecue areas, ponds and fountains, raised garden beds and a dozen other features.

He straightened, stepped back to judge his work and was apparently satisfied. He paused for a moment to stretch his shoulders and check his phone, then turned to begin striding across the large yard, sliding the phone into his back pocket as he caught sight of her. She waved at him and came forward to meet him before he got too close to the building. She really didn’t want to end up back inside, with the possibility of their conversation being overheard.

Just in case Mary Jane was right about the kind of person he was—the nasty kind, like Mary Jane’s ex. After her long experience with Alex Stewart, maybe Mary Jane was a really good judge of scumbag men. Maybe there really was a good reason, even after all this time, not to contract Tucker’s company to relandscape the Spruce Bay grounds, and it was all bound up in Lee’s accident and Tucker’s response.

Daisy wondered again about the second reason, the one Mary Jane hadn’t spoken.

The one that had put a stubborn, shuttered look onto her face, as if the second reason was something she wouldn’t confess even under torture.

Tucker saw her and stopped to wait until she reached him, watching her with a steadiness that unnerved her, given how uncomfortable she was already feeling. Those memories of his unreadable presence ten years ago were fresher and more vivid than they should have been.

She hadn’t been too impressed with strong and silent back then, but she’d learned to appreciate it in the years since, and the Tucker Reid of today was even more impressive in the flesh than he’d been in the photos on the main office wall, hard and solid and strong, with the kind of maleness that only belongs to a man who works hard with his body in the open air.

Daisy knew she would be incredibly disappointed if she couldn’t manage to like him, if he was exactly what Mary Jane claimed him to be, or worse.

Superficial. Unkind. A womanizer. All of the above.

“Daisy,” he said when she was close enough. He gave her a brief smile, but it didn’t last. She started to hold out her hand, but he turned his palm up and showed the dirt and they both gave an awkward shrug and dropped the idea. “It’s been a while.”

“It has.”

“Jackie says you’d rather talk out here?”

“Oh, she—?”

“Sent a text about ten seconds ago. Weird how we do things now, isn’t it?” Most people would probably have smiled with that line, but he didn’t.

“Weird...” Daisy echoed. “Convenient.”

“Want to sit here?” he offered. “It’s a sun trap. Beautiful today. Better than inside.”

“That’s what I thought.” He wasn’t giving her much, she decided. Short phrases, an offhand observation about phones. Their exchange seemed familiar, a flashback to their brief acquaintance in the past.

She settled herself a little stiffly on the wide wooden bench seat he’d indicated. In a sheltered, sunny position it was warm to the touch even in October, and the splash of an ornamental fountain nearby brought a sense of natural tranquility that contrasted uncomfortably with the rather less peaceful feelings inside her.

Who were we back then, all of us? Mary Jane, and Lee, and Tucker, and me? What’s Mary Jane not telling me? Why am I feeling so tense about this, now that I’m here?

“What can I do for you today?” Tucker asked, sitting down beside her. He kept to his own body space, their hips a good two feet apart, with a safe stretch of smooth, sunny bench in between. Did they really need that?

“You mean because I’m actually supposed to be meeting you tomorrow at the resort?”

He shrugged and smiled. The smile was too tight. “I guess that’s what I’m asking.”

Suddenly, she realized that she didn’t know how to handle this. It had seemed easy on her way here, but maybe it wasn’t going to be.

Face-to-face, with Tucker understandably expecting her to take the initiative since this meeting was her idea, she felt her poise evaporate like spilled water on hot pavement. She couldn’t exactly accuse him of breaking up with her sister for nasty reasons ten years ago, and then ask him if he was still the same kind of man.

And yet she had to say something, or he wouldn’t know why she was here.

With no other option, in the end she just said it the best she could. “Mary Jane thinks it’s inappropriate for Spruce Bay Resort to hire Reid Landscaping for the work on our grounds because you were once engaged to our sister.”

“Ah,” he said.

Which gave her just about as much as he’d given her ten years ago—one handshake, a few words and a couple of looks that disappeared too fast.

She waited for more.

After a moment, it came, but it wasn’t much help. “And what do you think?” He shifted a little on the bench. Farther away, not closer. Still, the movement made her more aware of him, of just how strong and solid he was, of just how well those jeans fit his muscled legs. He was intimidating.

“I—I didn’t think it should be a problem. Which was why I set up the appointment without consulting her first.”

“You didn’t think it should be a problem. But now you do?” He’d narrowed his eyes against the bright light, but the glint of blue was still strong. She was very glad not to know exactly what he might be thinking.

“No, I—” she began, then stopped and started again. “Well, I just thought we should explore the idea. Mary Jane is pretty sensible...” She gathered herself and sat up straighter, determined to take a little more control of the conversation. “Seriously, though, on this occasion I think she’s wrong. I’ve also talked to Lee on the phone, and she says she’s fine about it. But still, I thought we should get it out in the open. You were engaged to Lee, and then the wedding got canceled. I want Reid Landscaping because I know you’re the best in the area, and I don’t see that having a personal connection so long ago is going to be an issue. I want to be able to reassure Mary Jane that you and I have talked about it and dealt with any concerns.”

He was silent for a moment, and she wondered if this meant he thought the same way as Mary Jane. Then he took a deep breath. “Tell me how Lee is,” he finally said. “She’s still in Colorado? Is she married? Kids?” He took another breath. “Is she happy?”

This was easy, thank goodness. “She’s still in Colorado. Yes, she’s really happy. I don’t think marriage and kids figure on her agenda.”

“No?” He slid her a sideways glance.

“That’s what she says. I’ve visited her there a couple times. From what I can see, she has everything set up just the way she wants, and she’s not pining for change.”

“That’s good,” he answered. “That’s really great.”

“Well, we all think so, yes.”

“Meaning it’s none of my business because I took myself out of her life at the wrong time?”

“That’s Mary Jane, not me,” she said quickly.

“Mary Jane thinks it was my fault, you mean, that the wedding got called off?”

“Apparently.”

“Mary Jane needs to find something better to do with her time than making judgments about something that happened so long ago,” Tucker growled, and it was so close to what Daisy had just been thinking that she almost groaned out loud.

“It won’t be a problem,” she said quickly. “She’s going to Africa tomorrow.”

“Africa?”

“She loves to travel. She’ll be gone for three weeks. I mean, I’m not sure how booked up your schedule is...”

“Pretty booked up.”

“Right.”

“I’ll see what I can squeeze in. You mean, if we could have the design and budget and timetable all locked in by the time she gets back, she’d realize everything had been worked out with no difficulties?”

“I’d been wondering if you might even have started on the actual work by then.”

Ah. No.

“Not possible, I’m afraid.” The look he gave her clearly said, Reid Landscaping is way more in demand than you realize, and she was embarrassed at being caught out in such a mistaken assumption. It seemed arrogant on her part, entitled, and she was quite horrified about how well he could get his meaning across without words.

She backpedaled politely, aware that this improvised meeting had not achieved very much. She’d been too impulsive in coming here, hadn’t thought it through. “In that case, if we’re lucky enough to have an estimate and plans by then, that would be great.”

“So I can leave you with Jackie, then?” He didn’t try to hide that he needed to end this meeting. In fact, he was so cool about it that she wondered if he wanted Spruce Bay’s business at all.

She stood, and said even more politely than before, “Of course, since you’re busy.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then let out a sigh between his teeth. “I’m sorry, that sounded rude.”

“You are busy.”

“Jackie’s been with us since we started. She knows more than I do about prices and delivery times, and she has a great eye. I have an appointment I need to get to. Shouldn’t have sounded so impatient about it. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

He smiled, and she felt a rush of relief that the intimidating distance seemed to have shrunk to a much more manageable level. “You can have a browse around here,” he offered. He made a gesture of casual ownership that hinted at his sense of success. “Take a look through our gallery of past projects and gather some ideas, get Jackie to show you the brochures from our suppliers.”

“Sounds good. Please go to your appointment and leave me to it, and we’ll meet as planned at Spruce Bay tomorrow.”

“Looking forward to it.”

But he wasn’t. She could see it in the guarded expression that had appeared again on his face, and she didn’t know why it was there.

Ten years earlier

“We have to pick up the tuxes from the hire place,” Lee said to Tucker in their usual corner of their usual bar, “finalize the seating arrangements and write out the place cards, work out the checks we’re going to need to give to people on the day and write those out. We should probably call the hotel to confirm our reservations—”

“Lee,” Tucker cut in quietly. “Is this really why you wanted to get away and talk? To go through our to-do list for the millionth time? We can talk about this stuff anywhere.”

She got that frightened, doubtful look on her face. “But we weren’t talking just now, were we? We weren’t saying anything. I was...filling the silence.”

“There’s allowed to be silence, isn’t there?”

“Not when—” She stopped and took a breath, lifted her strong chin. She had the strongest face of the three Cherry girls, determined and full of courage. Tucker was so grateful that the burning oil hadn’t splashed more than an inch above her jawline to change those contoured planes. She began again. “Not when all I can think about when we’re silent is that I can almost feel you wanting to call this off.”

“Call it off,” he echoed blankly, as if he didn’t know.

“Yes. Cancel. End it. Tell me it’s been a mistake. I keep waiting for you to say it, and you don’t.”

“Because I didn’t want to hurt—” Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Her eyes narrowed and she went white. “That’s why? That’s why? I thought you might not be sure about what you were feeling. Wedding jitters. I’m having them, too, and the other stuff, the sense that we’re not connecting, and I haven’t known if it was temporary— But now you’re saying— You’re telling me you knew this wasn’t right, knew it for sure, but you were just going to go ahead with it anyhow?”

“Not for sure. I was— I kept—” But he couldn’t say it. He didn’t really know, himself, what he’d been going to do. He didn’t feel as if he understood anything right now. He kept thinking about his dad, and his own determination never to do anything even remotely similar to what he had done. You had to consider your family’s happiness, not just your own. You couldn’t let your emotions blow you every which way like leaves in the wind.

She said it for him. “You were going to marry me, because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Do you have any idea how insulting that is?”

It went downhill from there.

And then, eventually, after quite a long time, with a lot of silence, some tears, some words, it came partway back up. “It’s a relief,” Lee said quietly. “I’m relieved.”

But when they got back to the house she didn’t even wait for him to kill the engine before she jumped out of the car, gabbled something he couldn’t catch and disappeared inside. By the time he reached the porch, he could hear through the open front door her feet clattering up the stairs toward the privacy of her room.

He didn’t go inside.

He couldn’t. Not yet.

He needed some space. They’d decided not to say anything to anyone else until tomorrow. “Daisy only arrived six hours ago,” Lee had said. “I don’t want to hit everyone with this news until she’s settled in a little.”

“It’s not about Daisy, is it?” he’d answered, and the words had felt like a lie in his mouth.

Was it about Daisy?

Hell, he definitely wasn’t going inside right now, because Daisy would probably be there.

He sat on the porch steps instead, hunching over to rest his elbows on his spread knees and brooding in the dark. A slew of different emotions roiled inside him, as choppy and confusing as the waves on the lake when the weather was changing.

This whole thing felt like a change in the weather, a change in the season. That unsettling feeling at the end of summer when the leaves rattled down from the trees in a sudden wind, and the temperature dropped forty degrees in an hour, only to come back up into the seventies again the next day.

He didn’t run his life on these kinds of emotions. He didn’t blow hot and cold. There’d been no place for that kind of thing after the lymphoma had finally claimed his dad eight years ago, when Tucker was just sixteen. No place, and even less motivation.

He’d had to grow up fast, with no time to waste. He’d had to put his family first. He’d needed two part-time jobs to help his mom with money. He’d been the one to sit up with her late at night while they talked about how to keep Mattie in school and whether Carla was old enough for a serious boyfriend. He knew the value of caution, and of thinking things through. He knew the honor in it, even more.

“It’s meaningless, isn’t it?” he asked the universe, on a mutter. This sense of changed destiny, of an unlooked-for miracle, it was just nonsense.

What am I asking for? A damn sign, or something?

He heard footsteps behind him.

It was her, Daisy, and his crazy heart told him that this was the sign he’d been asking for.

He turned around too eagerly, already half on his feet on the lowest porch step.

And of course it wasn’t her.

It wasn’t even Lee. It was Mary Jane.

“Oh.” The energy slumped out of him. The slump was so obvious that Mary Jane couldn’t miss it.

“Everything okay?” she asked with a lightness he didn’t buy for a moment. She knew something was wrong. Maybe she’d seen Lee disappear upstairs and close the door of her room. There was no light coming from Lee’s window, he saw. She was in there in the dark. Daisy’s room was next to hers, and from there the light shone brightly, spilling down onto the porch roof.

“Everything’s fine,” he growled, almost too low for Mary Jane to hear. She said nothing, and he let her silence prod him into saying more, still on a reluctant mutter. “Lee and I have been talking. We’ve worked it out. It’s okay.”

“Good.” It was firm, almost aggressive. She hesitated for a moment, as if she might have said something more, then turned to head back inside. She’d been waiting all evening for Alex to call, and Tucker guessed that he still hadn’t. He would be full of apologies when he finally did, and would probably bring her flowers the next time he saw her, but Tucker still wasn’t impressed by his ex-future-sister-in-law’s boyfriend.

“Mary Jane, is that you down there?” Daisy’s voice came from her window.

She lifted the sliding screen and stuck her head out, her hair haloed by the lamp on the desk nearby. Tucker took the last step down off the porch, looked up at her and felt like Romeo to her Juliet.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks, if you can believe that nonsense!

“Oh, Tucker, sorry,” she sang out breezily. “I thought it was Mary Jane.”

It was. Dragging his gaze from the upper window, he found that Mary Jane had heard her sister’s voice and had stopped on the porch. She was looking at him as if she’d read the whole Romeo-and-Juliet thing in his body language, clearer than Shakespeare’s words.

“She’s here,” he told Daisy, his voice catching roughly in his throat.

“Or if you don’t mind, Tucker, I left my hairbrush in her car. Could you grab it for me and toss it up? Is it locked, Mary Jane?” she called a little louder.

Mary Jane cleared her throat, and called back, “No, it’s open. I can get it for you.”

“But I bet Tucker can throw better than you.”

“I could bring it up to you, Daisy,” Mary Jane said tetchily, starting across the porch and down the steps. “Nobody has to throw it!”

“I got it,” Tucker said quickly. The car was parked only yards away. He found the hairbrush on the front dash and held it up for Daisy to see. “You really want me to...?”

“Sure, why not.” She reached out for it. He threw it neatly, and she caught it even more neatly, laughing.

He thought he would remember that moment for the rest of his life.

Present Day

And he did, damn it, he still remembered it.

Abandoning the crooked paving stones, he went out the side entrance to his car, parked in its designated space at the front of the private parking lot, while Daisy began to browse the display areas. He could see her as he sat in the vehicle waiting for the engine to warm, in her bright blue biker-style jacket and black pants. She walked slowly, pausing every time something caught her attention.

She stepped back to appreciate the effect of the morning sun on the splashing water of a fountain, stepped forward again to run her hand across a piece of blue-gray slate. She picked up a glazed black pot planted with miniature bamboo and set it on the slate as if testing the blend of colors, and then she put it carefully back exactly where she’d found it.

This was what had drawn him so strongly ten years ago—the intensity of her response to beauty, the creative energy that ran through her, the bright light she seemed to give off, when the darkness of his father’s illness and its aftermath had still been hanging over him.

The car engine was warm. He had no reason to still be sitting here. He had to take himself off before she noticed...except that her browsing made her oblivious, the way she’d been oblivious that very first day.

The one thing he could be proud of, possibly. He’d kept his cataclysmic thunderclap of feeling to himself.

Lee hadn’t guessed. Marshall and Denise had had no idea. They’d gotten it all wrong. Marshall had accosted him in the privacy of the resort office after all the phone calls had been made—canceling the reception, the photographer, the flowers, the guests.

“I cannot believe you’re doing this, Tucker. My incredibly brave, beautiful girl is pretending she wants it, too, but I’m not fooled. This is coming from you. Maybe she doesn’t even know that. Maybe she genuinely thinks this is a mutual decision, but I’ve seen you withdrawing over the past few weeks. You’ve frozen her out until she thinks it’s coming from her, as well. I know what a man looks like when he’s truly in love with the woman he’s going to marry. You haven’t looked that way, and if it’s because my girl is disfigured after the—”

“Marshall, she’s not—” He hadn’t been able to say it. Disfigured. He’d never said that in his head, never felt that way.

“You don’t want that word? It’s too blunt for you?” Marshall had used it as a punishment and an accusation. “You don’t like facing the truth about your own motivations?”

It hadn’t been a pleasant conversation, and Tucker had come dangerously close to saying Daisy’s name but he’d managed to stop himself, and if that meant that Marshall went on thinking that it was Lee’s accident at the heart of the problem, then this was collateral damage that he couldn’t avoid.

He didn’t want Daisy dragged into this. He didn’t want any additional hurt to Lee, or a mess worse than the mess they had already.

He would wait, he had decided. He would just lay low and do nothing, and in a few months when things had died down and when he had some perspective, he would take action, seek Daisy out, see if he still felt...and if she felt...and if there was any way they could possibly...

Hadn’t happened.

He drove out of the lot, remembering the shock he’d felt when he’d run into a very bubbly Daisy at a local convenience store just a few days after the canceled wedding. Hiding his pleasure behind dark sunglasses, he’d drawled, “You’re looking happy today.”

She’d told him, “Happy and really thrilled. I’m flying out to California tomorrow to start an internship with an amazing pastry chef. The opportunity came up so fast, I haven’t had time to breathe! Someone else canceled, and it turned out I was second on the list. I can’t believe it! Um...it’s good to see you, Tucker, but I have to run.”

And that was that.

Gone.

He’d never pursued it. Why would he trust in signs that pointed in two different directions at once, when he didn’t believe in signs in the first place? Why would he chase after something his head didn’t even want? Something that might only ever have been a symptom of the deeper problem between himself and Lee? Something nobody in either family would want? Something that fate had chosen to take out of his hands?