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Faith’s older brother. The one boy—man, these days—she wasn’t supposed to want.
The one man she really, really did.
Crap. Had he left? It didn’t seem likely. Zach liked a party and really, this party was partly a farewell for him and Faith too. They were headed out on the road to play their first shows in one short week. Neither of them had wanted a going-away party, despite their dad wanting to throw them one. Leah suspected that might have been part of the reason that Grey had offered to let Leah throw her birthday party here on the Harper estate. Which was big and right on the beach. A far prettier location than her parent’s backyard or the town hall. Not that she would have minded having her party there either. But it had been nice of Grey to offer—after all her dad had worked at the Harper Inc. recording studio here on the island for twenty years as the main sound engineer—working on all of Blacklight’s albums over that time.
It was a pretty cool place to have a party. The Harper house was beautiful, as were the gardens, and the weather had cooperated and been spectacular. The day had been warm, but not too hot, and now the night was gorgeous, the sea breeze keeping everyone cool.
Of course, nowhere on Lansing was really far from the ocean, and even her house, in Cloud Bay, was only a ten-minute walk to the beaches that curved around the harbor. But the beaches up here on this part of the island, more private and a little wilder than those in town, were her favorite.
And, she realized, that she probably knew where Zach was. She closed her hand around the neck of the bottle of very nice champagne—well, she assumed it was nice, she wasn’t much of a drinker and tonight she’d limited herself to one glass, wanting to keep her head—and tried to ignore the nervous energy sliding around her stomach.
Now or never.
A simple choice.
Leave the tent and go find Zach and tell him what she had in mind, or stay here and be safe and watch him leave in a week’s time and never know.
So. Brave or safe?
She was eighteen today. She’d spent almost all of her life on this small island. Who knew, maybe she’d spend most of the rest of it here too.
So screw safe.
There was going to be plenty of time for that. She swigged a mouthful of the champagne—a little extra courage couldn’t hurt—and walked out into the night.
No one saw her go. And she didn’t pass anyone on the path that led from the garden down to the old lighthouse that guarded the headland. The Harpers kept the building maintained and the light operational, but no one lived here.
But the view from the small yard in front of the light looking out over the ocean was amazing and it had always been one of Zach’s favorite places.
Her steps slowed as she walked around the lighthouse. For the first time, it occurred to her that if Zach was here, he might not be alone. She stopped, listened. No voices. Then, as she waited, the sound of an acoustic guitar—very soft—floated into the air.
She recognized the song. One of Faith and Zach’s.
Seemed like everywhere she’d turned for the last few months she’d heard it. Faith humming the melody or practicing the piano part. Or this sound. The sound of Zach’s fingers bringing a guitar to life.
He was playing it slower now, so that the melody twined around the sound of the waves in the distance, the rhythmic whoosh of them forming an odd sort of backbeat. She paused to enjoy it, wondering idly how she’d mix it, if she could capture it in the studio. But that thought brought back reality a little too fiercely. In a week Faith and Zach would be gone, and then in another month she’d be going to live in L.A. for a year to do an intensive course in audio engineering before coming back to Lansing to work at the Harper studio with her dad. She’d been helping him unofficially for a long time and hanging around the studio since she could toddle, but he’d insisted that she go get an actual qualification.
Just in case, he kept saying.
She wasn’t sure what the scenario was he was imagining. Her wanting to leave the island? Go get a job somewhere else? Even then, with Harper Studios on her resume and being able to say she was trained by Sal Santelli, she figured she’d be able to get work without the piece of paper.
But she was still going. Partly for the challenge of it, partly to live somewhere else for a little while—though that part made her stomach churn—and partly because she’d figured that maybe if she was away from here, it wouldn’t be so obvious that Faith and Zach were gone too.
Zach had been gone before. At college in New York because Grey, like Sal, had been big on education. Leah still wasn’t sure how Faith had managed to weasel her way out of going this year. At a guess, she’d promised that she’d go next year. But somehow, Leah didn’t think that was her plan. But even from the East Coast, Zach had managed to come home regularly, turning up randomly on weekends.
Easy enough when you were as rich as the Harpers. He’d been home for every holiday and even spent most of the summers here when he wasn’t at a music festival or tagging along with the Blacklight juggernaut if the band was touring. But this. This was different. If Faith and Zach were successful—and why wouldn’t they be?—then they’d have a whole new life outside Lansing. One that didn’t involve her.
Lifting the bottle, she took one last mouthful. No thinking about tomorrow. Tomorrow was not the Leah of tonight’s problem. The future Leah could deal with that one.
Bubbles tingled down her throat as she swallowed. She wasn’t entirely convinced she liked champagne. Her parents drank Prosecco sometimes and she’d tasted that—sort of sweet and fruity—but this was dry and almost reminded her of … toast. It had an edge she wasn’t quite sure she was ready for. She set the bottle down. Zach didn’t drink champagne as far as she knew. Didn’t drink much of anything. Neither did Faith. And the small amount she’d had was just enough to give her a little more courage.
She was finally eighteen. There was nothing stopping her doing what she wanted.
Other than the man she wanted.
She moved around the lighthouse and there he was. Zach Harper, sitting cross-legged on the grass, guitar in his lap, staring out to sea. The perfect picture of the moody musician. It should have been a cliché. It would have been a cliché except he looked too damn good to be a cliché.
It was weird. Zach looked like a surfer on the surface, longish brown hair streaked from sun and salt water, skin always looking slightly tanned—and now in summer actually tanned—easy smile, seawater eyes. You’d think the sun was his element. But really, he was a creature of nighttime and moonlight. Something in him only came truly awake after sundown. In the silvery light, the angles of his face—that she’d seen morph from boy to something older over the last few years—were sharper, the lines of them adding up to something more than just the handsome guy he was in daylight.
