Love on Lavender Island (A Lavender Island Novel Book 2) by Lauren Christopher Page A

herself toward the room she’d been assigned.
    She put a few of her things away in the drawers, then flopped onto the bed and closed her eyes. It had been a long, outrageous day. She should fall asleep now and get ready to wake up early and get back to work on Gram’s place.
    This was going to be a strange week.
    And Adam was definitely looking like he remembered things.
    And Paige didn’t know how he was going to feel about that when he put all the pieces together.

    At half past midnight, weary and exhausted from his toes to his scalp, Adam pushed back from his desk. His eyes lit on the remains of the cold enchiladas, still sitting in the tinfoil container from Rosa’s Cantina. He picked it up and scraped at the bottom with a plastic fork, wondering if Paige had eaten hers. At least he’d ordered something for her. Damned if he was going to be responsible for her collapsing from hunger as well as possibly getting attacked by an intruder in the house he was supposed to be watching.
    He couldn’t believe he’d let Helen’s house get invaded again, and this time with an innocent occupant inside. He was off his game. He’d always yelled at his father and brother and ranch hands for even one moment’s slip into irresponsibility—you had to be constantly alert on a ranch this big—but now here he was, doing the same thing. He needed to concentrate.
    Of course, it was harder these days with everything going on. Deaths. Wills. Memories. Ghosts from the past . . .
    The late-night silence of the office crept up around his ears—an office that had grown eerier and lonelier as time marched on. The depression that wanted to settle around his shoulders was something he instinctively kept staving off—every time the sense of loss entered his head, he shoved it out of the way. He knew he’d need to address it at some point, but for now he’d put one foot in front of the other, sell this damned place, leave this damned island, and then let reality catch up with him.
    He tossed the foil container into the trash and let a new level of irritation rise that he’d thought of Paige Grant again. He’d gone almost the entire evening staying focused on other concerns. But for the last half hour, his mind kept drifting to her. He wondered if it would be weird if he went to check on her.
    It would.
    And he shouldn’t.
    She was none of his business.
    But she’d rattled him. That was the bottom line.
    She felt like a strange, long-lost, hazy, shifting piece of an unfinished puzzle. And the worst part was that she wasn’t the only piece. Between her and Amanda, his world was shifting on its axis.
    Not that his world was engaging to begin with, but at least he used to know where he stood. He knew his land, his animals, his ranch hands, his family history. He was like those massive old trees out in the perimeter of his ranch—bent, scarred, gnarled, and sometimes leaning, but still standing, anchored by powerful roots the size of branches.
    But Paige was definitely an anomaly and felt like another lightning strike. He’d never had a very good memory for sentimental details, and he dismissed plenty of elements from his brain at the end of each day so he could concentrate on the ranch. So when he’d first seen Paige, he’d had trouble even conjuring the right era to place her in. But then, slowly, he began to remember: She was Ginger’s daughter. She’d been one of the young campers. She’d been there the night of the first fire. She’d been there when he got home from jail after the second one, too, sitting at his father’s dining table. Or maybe that was the next day. He wasn’t sure. But she’d been there that summer, with her goth eyeliner, staring at him as if she wanted him to combust. He remembered the townspeople had talked about her that summer and said she’d “saved” him from the first fire, although he’d never believed that, caught up as he was in everything that was going on with Samantha. He remembered