Free The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True by Eileen Goudge

doorway as anxiously as if she’d been a toddler taking her first steps. An odd feeling quivered in the girl’s belly, a feeling she couldn’t recall ever having before—that of being watched over. She remembered her dream and all at once seemed to grow weightless, as if flying.

Chapter 3
    S AM FROWNED AT THE CLOCK on her nightstand. Six-thirty in the morning and she was as wide awake as if the alarm had gone off. Hadn’t the wedding, followed by the lingering of her brother and sister and their respective spouses well into the evening, been enough to wear her out for a week? She ought to have slept until noon. But today wasn’t just any Sunday. There was Ian. Picking her up for their date in just four and half hours.
    Not a date, she corrected.
    So why hadn’t she mentioned it to anyone? Laura, the least likely to jump to conclusions, or even her brother, Ray, who analyzed stock quotes and futures, not other people’s lives. If it was all so innocent, a passing remark would have saved her from…
    … feeling like a teenager sneaking behind my parents’ back.
    Sam rolled onto her stomach with a groan, burying her face in the pillow. Alice and Wes were in Maui by now, too far away to give their permission, if that’s what she was looking for.
    A vestige of teenage rebellion stirred in her now. Permission? My God, I’m forty-eight years old! She didn’t need anyone’s blessing to spend a pleasant afternoon with someone who was practically a member of the family. Never mind that he was a man, and an attractive one at that. Had Alice asked her permission before taking up with Wes?
    Sam groaned anew at the comparison. Of course, it was flattering that Ian found her attractive; she was only human after all. And except for Tom Kemp, whom she’d never even kissed, there’d been no one since Martin. The idea of getting involved with someone young enough to be her—well, Ian’s age—was ludicrous.
    At the same time, it left her glowing as if she’d just stepped out of the bath. She felt both restless and strangely indolent, acutely aware of her nightgown twisted about her hips and the pale sunlight soaking into her bare limbs. She closed her eyes and imagined Ian running a hand up her leg. She could almost feel the light brush of his fingertips tickling the tiny hairs along the inside of her thigh, bringing to life what she’d believed dead.
    She jumped out of bed as if goosed. It seemed disloyal to Martin’s memory somehow…not so much as if she were cheating, but because she’d never felt that way with him; she’d never burned at his touch. What she’d fallen in love with were his quick mind and easy laugh, how he’d light up a room merely by walking into it. Martin had had a way of making her feel not just like the only woman in the world, but the only other person. Even his proposal had been one of a kind, as unique as Martin himself. They’d been sitting cross-legged on the bed in his dorm room surrounded by Chinese takeout cartons, when she cracked open her cookie to find a fortune that read, Will you marry me?
    She hadn’t known whether or not to take him seriously until Martin rose, wobbling, to his knees and slipped the paper ring from his chopsticks onto her finger, saying solemnly, “I’ll buy you a real one soon as I can afford it.”
    What she hadn’t realized at the time, looking into his broad Irish face flushed with impish delight, was that everything there was to know about Martin had been summed up in that single gesture: the wild romantic leaps with nothing to back them up, the grand gestures that were like the wedding ring he’d never gotten around to buying. It was her grandmother’s gold band, given to her by her mother, that she’d worn her entire married life.
    Her gaze fell on a photo of Martin in a pewter frame on the bureau, taken just before he became ill. He stood poised at the helm of his sailboat, squinting into the sunlight: a handsome, middle-aged man grown a bit soft