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

what a lovely time they’d had. By the time she hung up on the last caller it was nearly ten-thirty. She jumped into the shower and was tucking her shirt into her jeans when the doorbell rang. She dashed downstairs, but Lupe got there ahead of her, casting Ian a long, coolly assessing look before Sam could hustle him off.
    “You’re early,” she said.
    He glanced at his watch. “Actually, I’m right on time.”
    “Guess I’m used to being kept waiting.” Martin had always been running late.
    “My military school training,” he joked as they made their way up the path.
    Climbing into his van she was pleased to notice he’d tidied up except for a pair of binoculars resting on her seat. Ian stowed them in the glove compartment, explaining, “There’s an osprey colony about a mile or so from my place. I thought we’d take a look.”
    Oh God, she thought. As a long-standing member of the land conservancy, her pet project, so to speak, had been the preservation of the golden eagle, now making a spectacular comeback. If Ian shared her passion, she was really in trouble.
    “How far to your place?” she asked.
    “Half an hour or so.” He started the engine and coasted to the bottom of the drive, turning left onto Chumash. “We can stop for lunch along the way. I know this great little hole-in-the-wall.”
    “Sounds good.”
    She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Ian looked far more at home in chinos and a navy T-shirt than in a tuxedo. She could see the damp comb tracks in his hair. On his sockless feet were a pair of well-broken-in boating shoes. The silver stud glinted in his ear, and about his wrist was a braided leather band.
    She felt herself grow warm. Did he have any idea of the effect he was having on her? It was as if time had taken a U-turn, and she was suddenly reliving the tumult of her teenage years: the wild crushes on boys, the intense yearning stirred by a lingering glance, the brush of a sleeve against a bare arm, the scent of a certain aftershave.
    She made small talk in an effort to appear no more interested than she would be in any member of Wes’s family. They talked about Ian’s growing up in Malibu and his years at UCLA earning a master’s in art. Sam, in turn, tried to convey to him what it was like living in the same place her entire life.
    At the overlook on Pratt Bluff, off Highway 33, she asked him to pull over. “See that?” She pointed out the old highway that twisted up through the foothills above Sorrento Creek. “My great-grandfather owned one of the valley’s first orange groves. He built that road with the help of Chinese laborers. It was the only way he could truck his crops out.”
    “I thought he was a shopkeeper,” Ian said.
    “That came later; after a frost killed off most of one year’s crop. He figured it’d be more profitable to import dry goods.”
    “Sounds like a sensible guy. You must take after him.” Ian’s voice was deep and musical, a voice she could never grow tired of hearing. He reached to brush a strand of hair from her face, his fingertips igniting a trail of fire along her cheek. As she stood rooted to the spot, her heart pounding, she wondered how sensible she was being right now.
    Sensible people aren’t the ones having fun, a voice whispered.
    Fifteen minutes later they were turning onto the coast highway. Fog had left the ocean a tarnished silver that glittered in patches where polished by the sun. As they traveled farther north, the dockyards and eateries that clung like barnacles to the shoreline began giving way to sandstone cliffs and wind-scoured dunes. A few miles east of Purisima Point, Ian pulled onto an unpaved road where they got out to peer through his binoculars at giant osprey nests perched like wicker baskets atop a row of telephone poles. As Sam watched, a female osprey circled about, crying her shrill tewp-tewp-teeaaa before settling onto her nest.
    By the time they reached Pinon, a tiny Portuguese fishing