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She glanced at him from under her arm and smiled. Tendrils of hair were curling around the nape of her neck from the heat and her sweat. “Great idea. I’ve got three more to go. I’ll meet you down at the lake.”
As he looked into the flashing blue of her eyes, a shaft of yearning pierced his heart.
“Go on, now. Shoo,” she said laughingly. “You’re distracting me.”
“If you need any help getting into your bathing suit, let me know.”
“Maybe you can get me out of it after we’re done swimming.”
“Lady, it would be my pleasure.”
He ambled down the lawn. When he got to the end of the dock, he jumped into the water, feeling the cooling rush over his skin. He floated on his back, sculling with his hands, staring up at the blue sky and the white clouds and the blinding yellow sunlight.
“Hey, mister?”
Nate looked over to the right. There was a seven-year-old boy standing at the shore, a brilliant orange life jacket hanging cockeyed from his little body.
“Mister, can you help me? I’m not allowed to go on the dock without this thing, but I can’t get the things right and if I don’t get them right my brother’s going to tell on me because I put toothpaste in his shoe last night, and I want to see the fish because they were there yesterday and I need to know if they are still there and I can’t see them from the shore—”
Nate blinked and treaded water as the sentence went on and on.
It ended with, “So will you, huh? Please?”
Nate looked around. There were no other grown-ups in sight so he swam over to the dock’s ladder, climbed out of the water, and dried off his face and hands. He approached cautiously, like the kid was of a different species entirely and maybe of the stinging variety. He fiddled with the straps and snap hooks, got everything where it should be, and rose to his feet. It was like passing a test, he thought.
“Thanks, mister. My name is Henry. I come from New York City. I’m six and a half. My brother’s nine and he’s a pain, but I kind of like him sometimes except when he’s mean, which is not really all that often. My mother says she’s happy that she had two boys but that she doesn’t want any more kids, which is too bad because I want a sister…”
Henry followed Nate back out to the end of the dock, chattering all the way. When they got to the end, Nate sat down and the boy plopped right next to him. Which was not exactly what Nate had had in mind.
“Although, I don’t know, maybe she wouldn’t like SpongeBob SquarePants and then I don’t know if I would like her and I wonder whether there would be fewer presents…”
Nate couldn’t help but stare at the kid. He had rosy cheeks and bright green eyes and his hands flew around as he talked like a sparrow’s wings.
“Do you?” Henry demanded.
Nate shook himself. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Know anything about fish?”
“Ah, yeah.”
There was a pause and Nate had to wonder if Henry was finally oxygenating his blood. The kid hadn’t taken more than two breaths since he’d stepped off the grass.
“So?” Came the sturdy prompt. “Whadayaknow about them?”
Nate cleared his throat. And then something odd happened. He started telling Henry about the different ways a chef could cook fish and before he knew it they were in a conversation.
Henry was a sponge, all rapt eyes and smart questions. The kid was going to grow up to be an intellectual and that maybe explained why his head seemed so large on his thin shoulders. He probably needed extra room for that brain of his.
When footsteps approached, Nate looked over his shoulder.
Thank God, replacement troops.
“Hi,” Frankie said gently. Her voice was even, but her eyes were concerned, as if she feared he’d been trapped by the boy. “What’s going on?”
Henry looked up. “Hi. I’m Henry, I met you yesterday, remember? I’m learning about fish. Did you know that he’s a chef?”
Frankie smiled. “Yes, I did.”
“He knows everything about fish.”
“Does he?”
Henry nodded gravely, as if he were a medical resident who’d had the chance to spend time with Jonas Salk.
Frankie looked back at Nate and he gave her a small smile. He couldn’t say that being with Henry was easy. But it wasn’t painful, either, probably because he was so distracted by all the talk. And the weird thing was, he kind of liked passing what he knew along to such a captivated audience.
Frankie sat down on the other side of Henry, dangling her bare feet in the water. Nate stared across the boy’s dark head at her. She had a grin on her face while she listened to Henry regurgitate what he’d learned, like a little tape recorder.
Unexpectedly, Nate felt the urge to laugh as his own words drifted out into the summer air, spoken in a much higher octave and with a slight lisp.
At the end of the night, Frankie turned off her desk lamp. Nate had gone upstairs already and she could hear him moving around above her. She sat in the dark for a few minutes, just listening to him.Sitting on that dock with Henry between them had been a joy and a torment. She could tell Nate had felt awkward because his voice had been strained and his back stiff. But by the time the boy’s mother had called him inside to change for dinner, Frankie could have sworn Nate was almost enjoying himself. That was the good part.
The more awkward thing was that the scene made her think of having a child with him. She just couldn’t help testing the fantasy and seeing if it fit. And boy, did it ever.
Well, at least in her mind it did.
Except he’d already told her he didn’t want marriage or a family and one conversation with a seven-year-old about ichthyology wasn’t going to change all that.
And hell, even if he did want to get down on one knee, and he’d given her no reason to expect that he ever would for anybody, there was still the little inconvenience of them being separated by hundreds of miles.
Frankie went upstairs and got into the shower, thinking she needed to get away from her morose thoughts. The water pressure was pathetic, barely enough to get the suds out of her hair, and she wondered whether Alex was out of bed. Maybe now that the house was quiet, he’d ventured from his room and was washing his hair in the sink or taking a sponge bath.
When she got to her room, Nate was in bed. His book was open on his lap, but his head was back against the pillows and his eyes were closed. With his cheekbones even more prominent than usual, he looked exhausted and as if he’d lost some weight. He’d been working so hard in that hot kitchen and they’d been…busy during the nights. Although she was also tired, from Alex’s disappearance and worrying about the business, at least she hadn’t had to cook a hundred meals every night on top of it all.
She tiptoed over to him, slid the book from his hands and turned off the lamp. As she got in next to him, he let out an unintelligible sentence, dragged her body as close to his as he could get it, and started to snore softly. She’d gotten used to the sounds he made. To the way his body weighted down the mattress so she always ended up in a hole next him. To his warmth and his smell.
With cold dread, she imagined herself having to adjust to sleeping without him.
Hours later, she must have had some kind of nightmare. She woke up in the early morning, damp with sweat, tears on her face. Nate was stroking her hair, looking worried. When she reached for him, they made love—the sweet, slow gentle kind.
They were laying together, with her body draped boneless and utterly satisfied over his, when he asked her what her dream had been about.
“I don’t know.” She stroked his chest. “I think I was in an old house. Going from room to room. There was someone I was supposed to find, but I just couldn’t get to them.”
“I’ve had dreams like that. The searching variety. I had a lot of them after…” He hesitated. “After Celia left.”
Celia. Her name had been Celia.
Frankie was tempted to ask all sorts of questions, but what was the point? The events had marked him and doing a postmortem on what had caused the scars wasn’t going to change anything.
Instead, she found herself wanting to tell him that she loved him.
The realization that she had fallen for him didn’t really seem sudden or out of the blue. It had been emerging for a time, slowly inching free of her unconsciousness, coming to the forefront of her mind.
She loved him.
The words were so close to breaching her lips, carried up out of her heart on a complicated wave of awe and bittersweet sorrow. So her mouth would stay closed, she kissed him, and lingered, keeping their lips together.
Chapter Fifteen
N ate had just gone down to start breakfast when Frankie thought she heard him cursing. She froze, her pants halfway up her legs. Yup, that low rumble was him letting loose a few good ones. Yanking a shirt on over her head and throwing on some shoes, she quickly descended the stairs and nearly tripped on her own feet when she walked into the kitchen.
At first, she couldn’t even comprehend what she was looking at.There were two inches of water across the floor and more was coming in from a huge hole in the ceiling. Sheetrock covered the stove and the counters.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed in horror.
Nate climb up onto a countertop and peered into the rafters. “A pipe must have burst hours ago and the damn thing has to be hooked into the supply line. You need time and a constant supply of water to make this kind of mess.”
Of course. Her shower last night. No pressure.
“You better check the walk-in,” Nate said. “If the compressor got wet, it’s probably shorted out.”
She crossed the room, splashing as she went, the water soaking into her sneakers. Sure enough, the compressor wasn’t working and there was a faint burning smell in the air.
This cannot be happening, she thought. It just couldn’t be real. Any minute now the alarm clock was going to go off and they’d have a chuckle about her vivid imagination.
Any minute.
A sloshing noise cut through her stupid optimism.
George looked worried as he came into the room. “I turned the sink off last night. Really, I did. At least I think I did.”
Hearing his voice helped her flip into crisis mode. She went to her office and called the plumber and the electrician. When she came back to the kitchen, Nate had gotten out mops and buckets, but was shaking his head.
“We need a water pump. Is there a U-Rent-It place around here?”
She got lost for a moment looking into the rafters. Water was relentlessly snaking into her house. How much was this going to cost to repair? Thousands. Tens of thousands. Her stomach rolled. She had a home owner’s insurance policy, but old, rotting plumbing fell into the act of God category.
Actually, those rotting pipes were more like Lucifer’s territory.
“Frankie?”
“Ah, there’s one in the next town over. The plumber said he’d be here in fifteen minutes. If you can watch him, I’ll go and get the equipment.”
Nate nodded. “This doesn’t smell like sewage, but the crud in that ceiling is nasty. I’m going to have to disinfect everything before we can serve food out of here. You should assume we’re closed down at least until tomorrow afternoon. Probably longer.”
She thought of all the income they were going to lose. The guests were going to be due a refund for some of their payments. White Caps was a bed and breakfast after all. And they’d been making money hand over fist in the dining room, but that was going to stop, effective immediately.
As Frankie stared at the dirty puddle she was standing in, she realized it was all over. There was no way to meet the mortgage payments now. White Caps was lost.
She must have moaned or something because suddenly Nate was pulling her into his shoulder. As all of the fight left her, the only thing keeping her standing was his strong arm around her waist.
