Fate Actually (Moonstone Cove #2) - Elizabeth Hunter Page 0,53

events there?”

Pamela smiled. “With his plans? Absolutely.”

“So he was really talking about expanding the place, huh?”

“The level that he was talking about was just…” Her face nearly glowed. “It was so beyond anything offered in Moonstone Cove currently. Right now we’re kind of a quirky beachside town. Whit’s plans would have put us on some lists. The kind that Silicon Valley money would have eaten up.”

“He thought there was that much potential in the area, huh?”

“Whit had big plans,” Pamela said. “But he had the money and drive to follow through with them. There were just a few obstacles that he had to smooth out, and then the sky was the limit.” Something about Pamela’s mouth turned bitter. “I suppose it might just come to nothing now. It’ll all depend on what his fiancée decides.”

That brought Toni up short. “Sorry, what?”

Megan asked, “Did you say his fiancée was in control of the estate now?”

“I didn’t know he was engaged.” Toni played innocent. “Are you sure?”

“Oh yeah. He told me when it happened.” She wrinkled her forehead. “Honestly, it seemed more like a business merger than a marriage. Angela Calvo was an equal partner in the investment company with Whit. That was the deal.” She looked a little uncomfortable. “I know people speculated about me and Whit, but it honestly wasn’t like that. He thought it was funny to insinuate we were sleeping together.”

“Seriously?” Toni could feel the woman’s embarrassment and deep-seated shame. “That’s messed up. What a shitty thing for him to do.”

Pamela shrugged, but Toni could tell it bothered her. “I’m not like that.” She turned to Jackie. “You know me. I’m not. I may not have the best track record, but I steer clear of married men. Engaged ones too.”

Jackie reached across the table as the server appeared with her wine. “I know that.”

“Besides” —Pamela held out her glass as Jackie poured the wine— “I met Angela Calvo once, and trust me, I would never try to poach on that woman’s fiancé. Crossing her seemed like a good way to ruin your life.”

Chapter 18

Megan, Katherine, and Baxter followed Toni at a polite distance as they walked up the gravel driveway toward her brother’s sprawling ranch house on top of the hill overlooking the dunes and the Pacific Ocean.

“Your brother’s property is beautiful,” Baxter said. “Has he lived here a long time?”

“It’s a family house,” Toni said. “This is actually where I grew up.”

She’d been a country kid, running on dirt roads, playing in the creek, and rolling down hills on her bike when she was barely old enough to walk. Her parents had been old-fashioned: little to no TV and don’t bother Mom in the kitchen unless you were helping cook.

Toni had run wild on the hill and the small family farm her father and uncles managed, munching on figs and tomatoes in the garden and learning from her uncle Martin how to take apart an engine when she was only ten years old. She’d hated school but had been utterly fascinated with how mechanical things worked.

Within a few years, she was taking apart anything her mother didn’t nail down, and Rose Lanza Dusi begged her husband to take the little girl with the freckles and the dark brown curls to the car shop they ran in town.

At fifteen, Toni rebuilt her first engine. At eighteen, she started working for her dad and her uncle. And at twenty-one, she stood at the front of the church as her brother married her sister-in-law, Jackie, and Toni got to breathe a sigh of relief.

Jackie was awesome, and even better from Toni’s perspective, she wanted a bunch of kids, she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, and she wanted to host all the holidays at her house.

Which let Toni off the hook.

Jackie and Frank moved into the house a few years later, Luna and Toni having little to no interest in it, and promptly started filling it with numerous small Dusi grandchildren. Rose and Bobby moved into town, closer to the beach and the bocce ball club where they liked to hang out with their friends.

“So” —Toni finished a short summary of the house just as they reached the driveway— “it was kind of understood that whoever had kids first got the house if they wanted it. Which we were all fine with. Luna and her husband Rani always lived in Monterey, so it was just me and Frank, and he has four kids so…” Toni shrugged. “There’re a couple of