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Down on the pebbled beach below the terrace at the head of the pier, a girl was playing alone. She was building some kind of fort out of driftwood and flat rocks. She poked flowers in between the rocks to give it some color. He figured she was about his age, maybe a little younger, because she still enjoyed making beach forts. Or maybe he was just old for his age—a concept he’d just begun to consider.
He wondered why she was playing alone, and felt a kinship with her.
Then he dismissed it. Him and some blond girl on a beach had no kinship. Besides, he had bigger and more important things to think about.
Alvin Carter. That was the name his mother had asked about. Alvin Carter.
He’d carefully filed the name away in his brain. Every few weeks, or months, he used to repeat it to himself. Alvin Carter. Is that my father? After a few years, life distracted him from the subject. But when he became buddies with Kirk Williams while they were both serving in the Army, the town of Lake Bittersweet came up, and it all came back to him.
He’d never mentioned his visit to Lake Bittersweet to Kirk, because of all the mystery that still surrounded the incident. Why had his mother dragged him all the way to Minnesota, only to turn around and leave after one night? What exactly had happened between her and Alvin Carter? Who was Carter to her? Who was he, if anything, to Granger?
So when Kirk had reached out about his situation with young Timothy Price, Granger had decided the time had come to return to Lake Bittersweet. Maybe he’d find some answers. Maybe not. But he was in a much better position to solve the mystery as a full-grown FBI agent than as a confused ten-year-old parked on a dock.
He needed to know who his father was. It was part of the plan he’d recently formulated for his life. Once he had that missing puzzle piece, he could think about things like a wife and a family. He could move forward with his life.
He closed the laptop and thought about heading out to Alvin’s Burgers and Blues right now. But there was a blizzard going on out there, and the fragrance drifting from under Bliss’ door was actually quite soothing. Sage, huh? Who would have thought. He tilted his head back and breathed it in.
Hashing out ground rules with Bliss turned out to be the most fun Granger had had in some time. She brought out a journal adorned with bright painted flowers and jotted down notes in her loop-de-loop handwriting.
“Let’s start at the beginning of the day,” she said. “I hate alarm clocks, probably because my life is usually ruled by them. So I like to sleep in when I can.”
When he opened his mouth to respond, she held up a hand. “Consider the ‘yes, Blondie’ to be implied. You don’t have to say it every time.”
He chuckled. “What I was going to say was, I sleep like a rock, so if you need me in the middle of the night you have to call my phone. I have to set the ringer to max for it to wake me up. I wish someone would invent an alarm clock that literally pokes you in the ribs.”
“Noted.” She wrote that down in her journal. “I hate alarm clocks, you love them. We’re off to a great start.”
That smile…good God.
“You know what we should do? We should try to find at least one thing we can agree on.”
“Sure,” he said promptly. “No pets.”
“No pets?” She wrinkled her nose. “Does that even need to be said? Obviously neither one of us has a pet. But if you did, I bet it would be a falcon.”
“Afalcon?”
“Yes, like a hunting falcon. I can picture you riding across the prairie with a falcon perched on your leather sleeve.” Dreamily, she tapped her pen against her cheek. It was no ordinary pen, of course. It had a feathery tip that brushed against her skin. Distracting as fuck.
“That is some imagination. I don’t ride. Never been to a prairie. I do have leather sleeves, though.”
She had some kind of reaction to that, but he couldn’t quite decipher it.
“I know what pet you would have,” he added thoughtfully.
“I can’t have a pet. I travel too much.”
“Exactly. That’s why you’d have an imaginary pet.” He grinned at her, and she burst into laughter.
“Touché. I probably would. I used to have imaginary friends, so why not a pet?”
The sound of a large engine pulling up outside had him hurrying to the window. A fire engine had parked in front of the inn and several firefighters were hopping out.
“Something’s going on,” he told Bliss. “Stay here, I’ll check it out.”
Her luminous gray eyes went wide. “Do you think it’s—“
“Something to do with your reason for needing me? How would I know that, when you…never mind. I have to get down there.”
