Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish by Cara Colter Page A

stuck it in an envelope, scrawled his name across it. Not bothering to dress, she crossed the lawns between the two houses in her housecoat, but didn’t knock on the door.
    She followed his lead. She put the envelope under a rock and walked away. When she got home, she inspected the canoes, saw which one he had been using, and shoved a life jacket underneath it.
    * * *
    “What’s this?” Mama said, handing him the envelope.
    Mac looked in it and sighed with irritation. Trust Lucy. She was always going to have the last word.
    Except this time she wasn’t, damn her. He folded the envelope, tucked it in his pocket and went out the back door. The last person he would ever accept charity from was Lucy. He owed her for the canoe, fair and square, and the days of her—or anyone in this town—feeling superior to him were over.
    He lifted his hand to knock on her back door to return the money to her. Raised voices drifted out the open French doors and he moved away from the paint and peered into Lucy’s house.
    “You’re wrecking the neighborhood!” someone said shrilly.
    “It’s just a sample.” That voice was Lucy’s, low and conciliatory.
    “Purple? You’re going to paint your house purple? Are you kidding me? It’s an absolute monstrosity. When Billy and I saw it from the boat the other day, I nearly fell overboard.”
    Lucy had a perfect opportunity to say, too bad you didn’t, but instead she defended her choice.
    “I thought it was funky.”
    “Funky? On Lakeshore Drive?”
    No answer to that.
    Mac tried the door, and it was unlocked. He pulled it open and slid in. After a moment, his eyes adjusted to being inside and he saw Lucy at her front door, still wrapped in a housecoat, her hands folded defensively over her chest, looking up at a taller woman, the other woman’s slenderness of the painful variety.
    Now, there was a face from the past. Claudia Mitchell-Franks. Dressed in a trouser suit he was going to guess was linen, her makeup and hair done as if she was going to a party. Her thin face was pinched with rage.
    Lucy was everything Claudia was not. Fresh-scrubbed from the shower, her short hair was towel-ruffled and did not look any more sophisticated than it had fresh out of the drink. She was nearly lost inside a white housecoat, the kind that hung on the back of the bathroom door in really good hotels.
    Her feet were bare, and absurdly that struck him as far sexier than her visitor’s stiletto sandals.
    “And don’t even think you’re renting canoes this year! Last summer it increased traffic in this area to an unreasonable level, and you don’t have any parking. The street above your place was clogged. And I had riffraff paddling by my beach.”
    “There’s no law against renting canoes,” Lucy said, but without much force.
    This was the same Lucy who had just pushed him into the water? Why wasn’t she telling old Claudia to take a hike?
    “I had one couple stop and set up a picnic on my front lawn!” Claudia snapped.
    “Horrors,” Lucy said dryly. He found himself rooting for her. Come on, Lucy, you can do better than that.
    “I am not spending another summer explaining to people it’s a private beach,” Claudia said.
    Shrilly, too, he was willing to bet.
    “It isn’t,” Lucy said calmly. “You only own to the high-water mark, which in your case is about three feet from your gazebo. Those people have a perfect right to picnic there if they want to.”
    Mac felt a little unwilling pride in her. That was information he’d given her all those years ago when he’d thumbed his nose at all those people trying to claim they owned the beaches.
    “I hope you don’t tell them that,” Claudia said.
    “I have it printed on the brochure I give out at rental time,” she said, but then backtracked. “Of course I don’t. But can’t we share the lake with others?”
    The perfectly coiffed Claudia looked as if she was going to have apoplexy at the idea of sharing the lake. Mac was