Summer by the Sea Read online

  Sometimes even lifeguards need saving...

  Lifeguard Sam Logan is always cool under pressure. But his laid-back nature is put to the test when his daughter begrudgingly comes to live with him for the summer. Luckily, his new neighbor, Silicon Valley tech guru Sarah Buckley, agrees to mentor her. In return, Sam teaches Sarah some much-needed meditation.

  Brash and self-centered, Sarah is not the best influence for eleven-year-old Lucy. Yet Sam can’t deny he’s attracted to Sarah’s drive—and the vulnerability she starts to show him. It’s no secret that at the end of her sabbatical, Sarah is heading back to California. So why does this feel like more than just a summer fling?

  “Do you mind if I ask you a favor?” Sarah said impulsively. “May I bring over a steak for you to grill for me?”

  Sam shook his head, appearing as if he was trying hard not to laugh. “How do you know I’m up to your fine standards?” he teased.

  She eyed the steaks he was putting onto a plate. “Because I know quality when I see it.”

  He barked out a laugh.

  “And I was so determined not to like you.” He shook his head as he set the plate down and sank into an Adirondack chair beside her. He laughed again.

  “Excellent,” she said cheerfully. “Let me go get the steak I bought.” She rose. “I can bring over a salad for you and Lucy to share with me.”

  “Already taken care of. Plus, grilled corn on the cob will be coming later. But tell me.” He leveled his gaze at her, suddenly serious. “Why should I even do this? All you seem to do is insult people, and frankly, I’m not up for that when it comes to my family.”

  “But...I apologized to you,” Sarah said.

  “Oh, boy!” He gave her a mock cheer.

  “Look, I never apologize, Sam! Apologies admit weakness. So this is a first in the history of the world for me—be flattered.”

  “You’re quite self-centered.” Sam paused and grinned at her wickedly. “And I never insult people—be flattered.”

  Were they flirting?

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to Summer by the Sea, a new Wallis Point, New Hampshire, story set in the fictional seaside town first described in The Long Way Home and continued with The Secret Between Them and The Undercover Affair.

  Sarah Buckley is a driven type A tech entrepreneur who is at first enraged to be banished to a rustic beach cottage for a quiet summer sabbatical.

  All Sarah wants is to return home to her busy Silicon Valley company, where she can continue her quest to conquer the tech world. First, though, she needs to prove that she’s learned to relax and “become more Zen” in her relations with others.

  So, is her beach neighbor Sam Logan, a laid-back lifeguard without any apparent life goals—and his genius eleven-year-old daughter, whose future he and Sarah conflict over—the person to teach her?

  A summer by the sea can work wonders and heal any wounded hearts. I hope you enjoy Sarah and Sam’s spark-filled romance!

  All the best,

  Cathryn Parry

  CATHRYN PARRY

  Summer by the Sea

  Cathryn Parry is the author of ten Harlequin Superromances. Her books have received such honors as the Booksellers’ Best Award, HOLT Medallion Awards of Merit and several Readers’ Choice Award nominations. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and their entertaining cat, Otis. Please see Cathryn’s website, cathrynparry.com, for information about upcoming releases and to sign up for her reader newsletter.

  Books by Cathryn Parry

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  The Undercover Affair

  The Good Mom

  The Secret Between Them

  Secret Garden

  Scotland for Christmas

  The Sweetest Hours

  Out of His League

  The Long Way Home

  Something to Prove

  Other titles by this author available in ebook format.

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  For Megan Long. Every book that you edit you make better. Thank you for being a blessing in my life!

  Acknowledgment

  A special thank-you to Cape Cod lifeguard Sarah P. for answering my questions and teaching me about torps, rip currents and—in an unplanned encounter—how to treat a jellyfish sting.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM FIRST CAME BABY BY KRIS FLETCHER

  CHAPTER ONE

  SAM LOGAN’S SUMMER plans were turned upside-down in a single phone call.

  Twenty-four hours later, his eleven-year-old daughter, Lucy, stood in his tiny bachelor kitchen, surrounded by her suitcase, her iPad, and a ragged and well-loved stuffed bear that he hadn’t even known she still slept with.

  Sam stared at it—and her—in shock. Seeing that teddy bear made him realize he really had no idea what was going on with his daughter. He felt completely inadequate to the task of being Lucy’s full-time dad.

  Ironic, considering Sam worked with kids her age every day. He taught environmental science to middle school students. Sam was known as a laid-back teacher. A guy who could handle whatever came his way without getting his feathers ruffled or ruffling feathers. It was his great strength, his inner Zen.

  But the panic rose from deep in his chest and clutched at his throat, affecting his ability to breathe. This must be what swimmers felt like when they were caught up in a giant, sucking rip current.

  Sam had never been caught in a rip current himself. As a professional lifeguard at Wallis Point beach in summer, he knew the signs and avoided the trap. A few times per season, he rescued people caught in the grip. He even taught the younger guards—college-aged men and women—to notice the signs so they could warn others, too.

  Avoidance of danger had always been key in Sam’s world.

  Sam wiped sweaty palms on the back of his shorts. Lucy was here, sitting at his kitchen table, pushing her light brown hair from her eyes and staring at her luggage, probably as uncomfortable as he was. Her mother had decided to head to Alaska for the summer to work as a singer on a cruise ship, so Sam was now responsible for her. For ten long weeks. Alone. During lifeguard season.

  Shaky, he wondered what he should do with her—feed her lunch, maybe? Usually she came to his house for two Saturday afternoons per month—had ever since she was a toddler—and before they left for whatever fun activity he’d planned that day, Lucy always sat and ate a peanut butter sandwich and drank an orange soda. That was their tradition.

  So he opened his refrigerator door. No orange sodas. Instead, one whole shelf was filled with a batch of craft brew he’d made earlier in the week. He bent and felt past the beer bottles, finding two cold cans in the back of the fridge. “Luce,” he said, straightening, “I’m out of orange soda. Would you like a ginger ale?”

  His daughter regarded
him stoically. “Yes, please. I’ll make my own sandwich.”

  “Okay. Good.” Feeling a little more hopeful, Sam popped the two cans open then passed her one. Without any drama, she stood, got a plate, bread, peanut butter and knife and began making lunch for herself.

  He should calm down. He and Lucy would be fine—they could figure out this new arrangement as they went. He saw her often enough to know the basics of caring for her according to the rules Colleen had insisted upon since Lucy was a baby.

  Sam had been blindsided when she’d been born. Though he and Colleen hadn’t been together anymore and Sam had been a young father—just twenty-one at the time—he had coped. He would have preferred to see Lucy more often, but the lawyers had told him what was best for the three of them, and Sam had rolled with it. He would roll with it now.

  He seated himself across from Lucy and took a long drink of the almost medicinal-tasting ginger ale. Even if he had no idea what he was going to do with her for the next ten weeks—and he couldn’t take Lucy to a movie or a museum or a theme park or even his brother’s house near Boston every day, like he usually did when he had her—he wasn’t going to freak out. Neither was he going to put the burden on Lucy. The situation wasn’t her fault. Sam didn’t want to be like his own parents and force inappropriate decisions on her the way they had with him and his brother when they were kids negotiating a difficult divorce.

  Be Zen. Be detached. Stay cool.

  That’s what Sam had learned young. Dealing with other people’s kids in the public school system reinforced the lesson for him daily. It was best to keep calm under pressure. Have non-emotional and non-threatening conversations. Use humor whenever possible.

  Sam gave Lucy his easiest smile. “It’s all good, Luce. There are worse places we could be stuck together for the summer, right?”

  She gazed up at him with her serious brown eyes. “Maybe,” she replied calmly. Then she went back to cutting her sandwich precisely in half with a serrated bread knife.

  The most grown-up kid I’ve ever known, Sam’s brother had once said. Sam had been proud of it at the time. But now he glanced at Lucy’s teddy bear leaning forlornly against her adult-looking black luggage, and he wondered if there was more to her stoic behavior than was apparent on the surface.

  Too bad he couldn’t just let her be a free-range kid like he and his brother had been during their carefree, predivorce summers on the beach. But nowadays, the powers that be frowned on unsupervised kids, especially in a high-traffic tourist town. Even at eleven years old, Lucy needed somebody to watch her and be responsible for her. He worked as a lifeguard full time. What was he supposed to do?

  Sam gazed over Lucy’s head and out the window toward the seashore where he’d spent most of his life working and playing during the short-but-sweet New England summers. He loved his summers here. He would never live anywhere else. He liked waking up to the smell of salt water outside his bedroom window and the sounds of rolling waves and cawing seabirds. Beyond a long expanse of sand was the deep blue Atlantic Ocean, and all he had to do was stare at that horizon whenever he needed to find peace.

  “Do you remember when you were little, and you used to sit up on the lifeguard chair with me?” Chair ten, right outside his window. It wasn’t set out for the season yet, but it would be soon. “You used to love spending time on the beach.”

  Lucy stopped chewing and stared at him. “I can’t sit on the beach with you while you’re working, Sam.”

  Sam. That about killed him. He smiled anyway. “Yeah, I know. And I know this isn’t what you had planned for your summer vacation, either, but don’t worry, we’ll figure it out and make it work for us.”

  He took another long drink from his ginger ale can. “Are there any day camps you might be interested in for the summer?” He figured he should ask—maybe she had something in mind that he didn’t know about. As a local teacher, maybe he could use his connections to get her a last-minute slot. “Wallis Point has a swimming program and a sailing academy. Then there’s always tennis lessons—”

  “No, thank you, Sam.”

  He winced and glanced back at the beach. His friend Duke drove by on one of the two open-roof all-terrain vehicles that the Wallis Point lifeguards employed. During the school year, Duke was vice principal of the high school in town. In summer, Sam often drove with Duke on patrol. Today, though, was the day after classes had let out for the summer, and if not for Lucy, Sam would have been flying out of Logan Airport for his yearly backpacking vacation before he started his lifeguard job. This year, trekking through Scotland for a week.

  “I like the library,” Lucy suddenly said.

  Sam turned around. “The library, in summer?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She really was a serious student. If he was honest with himself, he was worried about that. Lucy was eleven years old, and she didn’t have fun easily. It occurred to him that she was a throwback to his own mother. That was the only conclusion Sam could come up with.

  Lucy finished the last bite of her sandwich, so Sam reached for his sunglasses. He gave her another bright smile. “Okay, Luce. How about we take a walk on the beach and discuss this some more?”

  “No, thank you. I’m going to see Cassandra,” she said simply, and stood. Lucy never asked permission. She just did whatever the inner force inside her told her to do.

  “Okay, sure,” he said reasonably. Cassandra was Sam’s next-door neighbor. Seventy-something and eccentric, she was a bona fide working artist—an internationally famous children’s book illustrator. Lately, Lucy had taken to ending their Saturday visits with a stint at Cassandra’s cottage. Sam hadn’t interrupted them. The relationship was good for Lucy, he thought. Lucy seemed to love visiting Cassandra, and that was what mattered to him. Besides, a couple of hours every two weeks hadn’t seemed as if it would be a burdensome interruption for his neighbor.

  He leaned back, watching Lucy clear away her lunch dishes and load them neatly into his dishwasher. Lucy just did things like that. She was independent and capable, but there was no getting around it. Somebody needed to be here for her full time, and that somebody needed to be him.

  And wasn’t this his opportunity to get closer to her, scary as that seemed?

  He slipped on his sunglasses and stood. He might ruffle feathers for what he was about to say, but... “I’ll walk over with you. I need to see Cassandra, too.”

  Lucy looked him straight in the eyes and nodded. “Okay.”

  “Just so you know, if it’s all right with Cassandra that you hang out with her a little more often than usual this summer, then it’s cool with me.”

  “Good.” Lucy seemed more animated and hopeful than she’d been when she first arrived. “Last time I saw her, Cassandra said she would be home today.”

  “Great.” Sam opened the glass slider that led to the porch. “Before we go over there, though, could I ask you something?”

  Lucy slipped her hands into her jacket pockets as if bracing herself.

  “We need to figure out something for, ah...” He didn’t want to say “childcare,” but that was the only word he could think of, so he swallowed his reticence. “Someone to take care of you. I, ah...” He took a breath. He’d never wanted to face this. And it pained him to say so, but he’d made a monumental decision. He was going to sacrifice something for her, his only child, that he’d never thought he could ever sacrifice for anybody. He needed to resign his lifeguard job. There really wasn’t any other way out of it.

  “Sam, I want Cassandra to watch me this summer.”

  He blinked in surprise. “Do you really think it’s fair to ask Cassandra to do that?”

  “We already discussed it, she and I.” Lucy set her chin.

  How was that possible? “Cassandra doesn’t have a phone,” he pointed out.

  Lucy used the toe of her sneaker to outline the edge of his b
reakfast bar in the kitchen. “We talked about it the last time I was here.”

  He willed himself to breathe easily, in and out. He would not care. Would not get upset.

  “You were here almost a week ago.” Four days before Colleen had called him. “We didn’t know then that your mother was going to go off to Alaska for the summer.” He’d tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, he really had.

  “Mom knew she was going,” Lucy said in a small voice.

  “She told you?” he asked softly.

  “No.” Lucy shook her head vehemently. “I heard her on the phone with the cruise ship people.”

  “By accident?”

  Lucy moved her wispy bangs to one side. “I listened on the extension because I thought it was a call from my teacher.”

  Okay, should he be concerned? With his students, he only rarely called their homes. Usually because there was a problem with the child. “Why do you think your teacher would be calling your mom?”

  “That’s not important,” Lucy said.

  Yeah, it was. And he was going to lose his patience if he wasn’t careful. “Okay. We’ll go see Cassandra,” he said simply.

  He grabbed his windbreaker from a hook and put on a ball cap. They stepped through the sliding door onto his deck overlooking the beach. In mid-June, it was windy and cool. Cassandra’s cottage was only about twenty yards away, but despite the nearness, they didn’t talk often. They usually just waved when they saw each other. Most days, he caught glimpses of her working on her paintings. A bit of a bohemian, the lady often dressed in Indonesian batik and straw hats. She smoked imported cigarettes that smelled like clove and cinnamon spices, and she seemed more detached and easygoing than even he was. Every now and then she stopped by Sam’s house parties in summer, and nothing seemed to faze her. Yet she didn’t seem irresponsible. She taught art classes to teens regularly at the local library, and she was a popular teacher.

  Lucy adored her.

  She always had. The first time Lucy had toddled over to greet Cassandra, she’d been three, and Cassandra had given her an ice pop and let her play with her paint brushes. His serious, stoic daughter had been hooked on the woman ever since.