Hello, It's Me

  Copyright © 2005 by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Excerpt from Bride Needs Groom copyright © 2005 by Wendy Corsi Staub

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Warner Forever is a registered trademark of Warner Books.

  The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Diane Luger

  Cover illustration by Andrew Condron

  Book design by Giorgetta Bell McRee

  Warner Books

  Time Warner Book Group

  Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue,

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: March 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55131-1

  Contents

  Blurb

  Prologue

  Part One: June

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two: July

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Three : August

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Four: September

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  A Preview of "Bride Needs Groom"

  The Editor’s Diary

  STATIC. THERE’S SO MUCH STATIC, ANNIE CAN BARELY MAKE OUT THE WORD. BUT IT WAS THERE. SHE HEARD IT. SHE KNOWS SHE HEARD IT.

  Hello?

  She is certain, in this moment, that her life will never be the same again. That something incredible—something impossible—just happened.

  Hello.

  It’s just a word. She clutches the receiver hard against her ear, shock waves echoing through her brain along with the two syllables she couldn’t possibly have heard just now. But she did.

  She knows she did, dammit. She heard it.

  Yes, it’s just a word. A word everyone says when they pick up the phone. But nobody—nobody—says it quite like he does.

  PRAISE FOR WENDY MARKHAM’S THE NINE-MONTH PLAN

  “A wonderfully touching romance with a good sense of humor.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Touches upon the simplest of pleasures, the purest of joys, and the most complicated of human emotions.”

  —Heartstrings

  “A winner! . . . loved these two people.”

  —Romance Reviews

  Please turn to the back of this book for a preview of Wendy Markham’s upcoming novel, Bride Needs Groom.

  Also by Wendy Markham

  The Nine Month Plan

  Once Upon A Blind Date

  This book is dedicated to the 9/11 widows and widowers, in solemn memory of their lost loved ones.

  And, with love and gratitude, to Mark, Morgan, and Brody.

  Prologue

  Hey, you’ve reached Andre. You know what to do. Wait for the beep and don’t forget to leave your number.”

  Clutching the phone between her shoulder and her ear, Annie Harlowe dabs some hot glue onto the straw wreath frame she’s working on. This seashell wreath was a brilliant idea, if she does think so herself. Tomorrow, she’ll take the kids back down to the bay beach with bigger buckets and get—

  Beep.

  “Hey, babe, it’s your lovely wife.” Annie plops a sun-bleached oyster shell into the glue. “Where the heck are you? I made dinner and I’m waiting for you, so get your butt home before I eat without you. I fed the kids already. We were on the beach all day and I’m starving to death. Love you.”

  Her stomach punctuating the good-bye with a ferocious rumble, she disconnects the call and sets the cordless phone aside.

  The rice and seafood dish she concocted earlier is probably drying out in the oven. She made up the recipe herself, as she often does, based on ingredients she happens to have on hand. Sometimes, the results are disastrous; other times, sheer brilliance. This risotto-ish paella-ish concoction will most likely fall somewhere in between—although given her appetite, the hot glue would probably taste delicious right about now.

  Shouldn’t Andre be home by this time? What time is it, anyway?

  Annie never knows, and usually doesn’t care. She hasn’t owned a watch in years, and the only clocks in the house are on the microwave in the kitchen and the nightstand upstairs.

  Too lazy to leave the screen porch with its view of the dunes and the Atlantic, she glances at the sky. The sun set a while ago, and it’s getting dark.

  Today is the longest day of the year, isn’t it? The summer solstice. Or was that yesterday? Or tomorrow?

  Annie frowns, as uncertain of the date as she is the time. Sometime in mid-June, that’s for sure. She meant to buy a calendar back in March when she saw them on clearance in White’s, but it slipped her mind. Boring, organizational things always seem to slip her mind.

  Oh, well.

  It’s safe to say that it’s past eight o’clock, summer solstice or not.

  Andre should have been home a while ago. He called after he got in from fishing earlier and said he was stopping by the beach for a swim before heading home. That should have taken him an hour, maybe a little longer at the most.

  Annie shrugs off a chill that has nothing to do with the ocean breeze and the fact that she’s wearing only a bikini top and shorts. Her husband has been known to lose track of everything while he’s in the water.

  What if . . .

  Nah.

  Annie reminds herself never to watch Jaws again, even if the only other viewing options at three A.M. are decades-old sitcom reruns and infomercials.

  Shaking her dark curls, she turns up the radio again, having muted the volume before making her call.

  She smiles, hearing the opening chords of an old Todd Rundgren song. She and Andre saw him in concert a few summers ago, when she was pregnant with Trixie. She likes to tease Andre about his affinity for seventies pop music, everything from Rundgren to Barry Manilow to disco.

  “Hello, it’s me . . .” Annie sings along with Todd.

  She selects another shell, this time the delicately sculpted interior of a whelk. She squints at her masterpiece, deciding where it should go, then squirts more hot glue onto the wreath frame.

  “Mommy?”

  She looks up to see Milo standing in the doorway in his pajamas, his tattered blue blanket trailing from one hand. His green eyes, the same translucent sea-glass shade as Annie’s, blink sleepily above freckled sun-pink cheeks. He’s always wiped out after a day at the beach, poor guy. She shouldn’t have promised him that he could stay up until Daddy gets home.

  “Can you fix my cape?” he asks, hiding a yawn behind his little hand.

  “Sure. C’mere.” Annie quickly plunks the whelk into the rapidly setting dab of glue, then turns to help her son.

  “Why don’t you go up to bed, buddy?”

  “I want to see Daddy. I have to tell him about my tooth.”

  Annie smiles, tucking one edge of the blanket into the back of his pajama top at the nape of his neck. Milo lost his first tooth today. He almost swallowed it, but Annie saw bright red blood against the white flesh of the apple he was munching and realized what had happened. The tooth was
safely rescued from his mouth and is already under his pillow, waiting for the tooth fairy.

  “Okay, you can wait up,” Annie promises, finishing with the blanket and bending to kiss his tousled, sun-streaked brown hair.

  “Thanks, Mommy. Is my cape back on?”

  “Yup. You’re all set, Superman.”

  “I’m Batman,” he protests.

  “Oh, right. I almost forgot.”

  Annie grins, watching him “fly” out of the room, arms straight out in front of him, “cape” flapping behind. Milo has been one superhero or another on a daily basis for a few months now, ever since Andre rented the Spider-Man DVD and let him stay up late to watch it.

  “Isn’t this too scary for a five-year-old?” Annie had asked, poking her head into the living room to find father and son cuddled on the couch, munching popcorn, riveted by the action scene on television.

  “Nah, he’s fine.”

  He was fine. Milo, unlike Trixie, doesn’t have nightmares.

  His younger sister has been waking up screaming on a regular basis pretty much all of her three years. When she was an infant, the pediatrician told Annie and Andre she was probably just hungry, or collicky, or teething. But when she failed to outgrow it, he informed them that it was night terrors.

  “She’ll probably grow out of it,” Dr. Blythe promised.

  So far, she hasn’t.

  Night terrors. Poor Trixie, Annie thinks, perusing the array of shells scattered across the table. At least by day, her daughter is as happy-go-lucky as the rest of the family.

  Yup, life is good. Married to her college sweetheart almost ten years, living in a seaside town where they both make a living doing what they love, with a boy and a girl and a roof over their heads. A leaky one, but nothing’s perfect. Annie figures her life is about as close as you get to that.

  In spite of—or perhaps, because of—her contentment, she can never quite shake the sense that it could all be snatched away in a heartbeat.

  Especially now, with Andre late and no word. Knowing she’s a worrier, he always calls to check in when he’s been delayed.

  Well, maybe he stopped by their spot for a while. Did he have the metal detector in the truck when he left this morning?

  Probably. He keeps it close at hand these days, certain he’s closing in on the treasure he’s spent years searching for on a lonely, rugged stretch of coast called Copper Beach, not far from here.

  “You’re searching for buried treasure?” Annie asked incredulously when he first told her. A more logical woman might have dismissed him as a loony tune, but not Annie. She was captivated by Andre’s tale of a ship that wrecked off the coast a hundred and fifty years ago, carrying a fortune in gold. According to Andre’s grandfather, one of the sailors managed to haul a chest full of doubloons off the sinking ship and rowed it to shore. He buried it in a secluded spot near a stand of copper beech trees—hence the contemporary name for the place—but died before he could ever retrieve it.

  Even Annie, gullible as she tended to be, had to ask, “What proof do you have that this ever even happened?”

  “My grandfather told me,” Andre replied, “and his grandfather told him.”

  For Andre, that’s proof enough. The Harlowe family goes back many generations to the seafaring days of eastern Long Island. They’re as much a part of this place as the boulders, tide pools, and surf.

  Whenever Andre has spare time, he’s out there on the beach, combing the sand and rocky crevices and roots of the trees with his metal detector. Sometimes Annie and the kids go with him. They like to fantasize about what they’ll do when Daddy finds the treasure.

  “Money can’t buy the most important things in life,” Annie always feels obligated to caution.

  “No, but it can buy time. Time, and freedom,” Andre likes to say. “Time and freedom to be together, babe. There’s nothing more important than that.”

  True. It seems as though their entire relationship has been about craving togetherness.

  If they had more money, Andre wouldn’t have to leave the house in the wee hours of the morning to head out to sea on his commercial fishing boat, usually just as Annie is crawling into bed after a long night of working on the handicrafts she sells at boutiques.

  “Why can’t you come to bed early and get up early with me?” Andre likes to ask, though he knows her reply by heart.

  “Because I’m not a morning person. I do my best work at night.”

  When Andre’s feeling romantic—which he typically is—he’ll reply to that with a quirked eyebrow and a suggestive, “Oh, yeah? So do I.”

  Annie exhales through a puffed out lower lip, blowing the sticky tendrils of hair from her forehead. It’s muggy for June, and for this time of night. Time to put the air-conditioning units in the bedroom windows. She’ll have to remember to have Andre drag them out of storage this weekend. She hates to hit him with a lengthy to-do list every time he turns around, but there’s always so much to keep up with around the house.

  There’s something money can buy, she thinks, shaking her head. A handyman. And a maid.

  “Come on, Andre, where are you?” she mutters, poking through the pile of shells.

  Suddenly, it occurs to her that he might have found the treasure. Maybe that’s why he’s so late. Maybe he’s loading doubloons into the truck bed.

  Annie grins, picturing her husband tossing shiny gold coins gleefully into the air.

  Nah. Too far-fetched, even for her wild imagination. People don’t actually find pirate treasure on Long Island in this day and age.

  As she strains for the familiar noise of tires crunching on gravel that announces the arrival of Andre’s truck in the driveway, Annie’s ears capture instead an unsettling sound.

  At first it’s more faint than the crashing surf in the distance, but it quickly grows louder, closer.

  A siren.

  Annie stands with a razor clamshell poised in her hand, head cocked, listening.

  The siren passes, and she pictures the ambulance racing along the highway a few blocks from the house, headed east. It can’t go far. There are only a couple of miles and relatively few houses between here and the spot where the tip of Long Island’s South Fork gives way to the Atlantic.

  A couple of miles, a few houses, and the stretch of coast where Andre likes to surf. And Copper Beach.

  Annie’s heart races.

  Something’s wrong. She can feel it.

  Calm down, babe, she can hear her husband saying. Don’t let your imagination carry you away.

  I can’t help it, Annie retorts, using the back of her wrist to shove a black curl away from her face. Imagination is my forte.

  She frequently says that to Andre, and he always grins and agrees. Imagination is her forte. Her best friend—and occasionally, her worst enemy.

  When she was pregnant, every abdominal twinge was the start of a miscarriage. When one of the kids got their first case of the sniffles, it was a potentially deadly respiratory infection.

  It’s not like she can chalk up all her worries to a common case of novice maternal anxiety. If anything, her imagination has grown more vivid over the years. Whenever their old house creaks in the night, she’s certain it’s a ghost or a serial killer on the prowl; if a mosquito bites her, she’s convinced it’s carrying West Nile disease.

  It’s almost enough to make her wish for the uncreative psyche that ran in her family until she came along.

  Almost.

  When you come right down to it, Annie wouldn’t trade her unconventional life for the lives of her staid and stable nine-to-five Upper East Side dwelling older brothers, or her widowed, remarried father, now retired to a microcosm of golf and bridge in Boca Raton.

  She’ll take a weathered three-bedroom Montauk cottage, a treasure hunter/fisherman husband, a superhero son, and a night-terror-plagued daughter over anything the rest of her family has. Give her flexible self-employment and freedom any day, even if it comes with a vivid imagination and a te
ndency to imagine all sorts of unlikely scenarios.

  Like Andre being eaten by a great white shark while swimming.

  Annie should never have doused her clams with so much hot sauce at dinner last night. A wicked case of heartburn led to wee hour channel surfing, which led to Jaws, which led to her being deathly afraid for her husband’s safety now.

  Which, of course, is ridiculous.

  Andre is at home on—and in—the sea. He grew up out here; grew up sailing, swimming, surfing. He’s fine.

  Of course he’s fine.

  He’ll be home soon, Annie promises herself, ignoring the chill creeping along her spine as she goes back to her hot glue and her shells.

  Part 0ne

  June

  Chapter 1

  Hey, you’ve reached Andre. You know what to do. Wait for the beep and don’t forget to leave your number.”

  Clutching the phone between her shoulder and her ear, Annie pipes another stripe of red icing along a rectangular sugar cookie, wondering how many stripes an American flag has, anyway.

  Not that it matters. There aren’t fifty white dabs of icing on the square of blue to the left of the stripe. Who cares whether a flag cookie is historically accurate, as long as it tastes good?

  Beep.

  Annie sets down the tube of icing and presses a button to disconnect the call.

  Someday, maybe she’ll leave a message, just for the hell of it. Even though Andre’s phone, its battery long dead, is lying useless in a drawer, along with the other personal effects the hospital handed her that awful day.

  Or maybe someday, she’ll stop calling Andre’s cell phone just to hear the sound of his voice. Yes, someday, she’ll stop paying the bill just so she can do that.

  After all, it’s not as though she can afford it. She can’t afford much of anything these days. The Widow Harlowe is in dire straits, reduced to decorating cookies for some wealthy Hamptonite’s Flag Day soiree tomorrow night, just to earn enough cash to keep her kids in Fritos and Lunchables.

  She’s lucky, she supposes, that her friend Merlin’s catering business has taken off so quickly. With the summer season about to kick into full swing, she can probably count on enough cookie-decorating gigs to carry them through the summer.