by Tracy Brogan
“Ohmygosh, thank you!” Chloe’s arms closed around her, and the hug was very much appreciated. Less so was the ice cream that Chloe got in Emily’s hair. They were in the process of trying to wipe it out when Ryan showed up. He’d made a habit of that the last couple of days. Showing up. He’d come back to the cottage three days in a row since they’d first made those drawings on the front porch. He’d brought her a few more sketches and told her all about the stuff he and his father were doing for the Clairmont Hotel. She had him assist her with cutting some trim wood just so she could show off how well she could manage a table saw, and she told him that Gigi used a regular old spiral-bound notebook to keep track of her reservations—which made him cringe in a distinctly comical fashion. They’d talked about all sorts of other things, too, like how the remote location of the island created unique challenges for getting things like new carpet and appliances delivered, and she’d explained to him that the best way to receive any goods in a timely fashion from the boat docks was to bribe the dray drivers with a case of beer or a nice bottle of whiskey. It wasn’t corrupt, exactly. Just effective enough to move your cargo to the front of the line.
The chats had been friendly, flirtatious, but not overtly so, yet the butterflies in her stomach seemed to be growing exponentially. He’d nearly kissed her the other day, right on the front porch. And she’d nearly let him, which would have been a terrible idea, but oh so appealing, and tonight just the sight of him sent her body into quiver, sizzle, throb territory. It was getting tougher and tougher to remember why a fling with Ryan was such a bad idea. But it was. It really was. There was the Tag/Lilly connection, for starters, but Emily was also starting to realize that her other hesitation revolved around liking Ryan too much. The truth was, she liked him too much to have sex with him. Or, at least, too much to have sex with him and then forget about him. She knew this was the kind of feminine logic that made men think women were crazy, but it was the truth.
“Hi, Ryan,” Chloe said, waving that ice-cream cone around again.
“Oh my goodness, Chloe. You are a hazard with that thing. Move farther away before you hit me in the nose,” Emily said, laughing.
Chloe slid her bottom down to the other end of the bench.
“Ah, perfect,” Ryan said, settling comfortably between them. “So, what are you two up to?”
“Mom says I can take riding lessons and go camping,” Chloe answered.
“Sweet,” he answered, earning him a high five from Chloe’s non-ice-cream-covered hand. “That sounds very fun. I think my horse-riding days may be over, but I love camping.”
“I’ve never camped before.”
“You haven’t? Why not?” He looked at Emily as if this was a gaping hole in her parenting résumé.
“There just hasn’t been an opportunity, I guess.”
He turned back to Chloe. “Well, I’m glad you’ll finally get to try it. Watch out for grizzly bears because they can unzip tent flaps and they’ll come in when you’re sleeping.”
Emily chuckled under her breath, and Chloe had the good sense to not believe him.
“First of all, no. They can’t unzip zippers. No thumbs, but nice try. Second of all, there are no bears on the island.”
“Really? Are you sure? Because I was hiking with my dad, and I’m sure I saw one. Either that or it was a humongous man-eating badger. With fangs. It might have been frothing at the mouth.”
“Man-eating, huh? No problem then. I’m a girl.” Chloe gave a sassy little toss of her head, making him laugh and give up.
“All right. Fine. But don’t come crying to me when that badger shows up at your campsite.” He turned back to Emily. “Are you going camping?”
She shook her head and wished she’d taken a little time to change into something nicer before heading out with Chloe. She had on a striped T-shirt dress that should have been retired from her closet ages ago. He had on tan shorts and a Trillium Bay T-shirt that was obviously brand-new.
“Nope. No camping for me this time. I’ll be working at the cottage, no doubt. There is fifty-year-old wallpaper that someone must have shellacked to the wall. I’ve been scraping it off for days. Of course, I had to take a break yesterday to help Tiny with his dance steps, and he’s insisting I go to the square dance on Wednesday night to lend moral support because he’s finally ready to make his move on Gloria Persimmons. He chickened out last week.”
Ryan chuckled. “He’s got his eye on a woman? Well, I hope she’s . . . sturdy.”
Chloe stood up and tossed the little bit left of her waffle cone out into the water and the ducks pounced. “I think Tiny and Gloria would make a perfect couple. I think it’s sweet and romantic.” She turned back around. “Ryan, you should go to the square dance, too. That’s where Aunt Lilly met your dad, you know. She told me they put up twinkle lights and it’s all magical and stuff.”
Her kid was about as subtle as a foghorn, but Emily didn’t want Ryan to think she and Chloe had been plotting ways to lure him in. One Taggert/Callaghan combination was more than enough.
“I probably won’t be there very long. As soon as Tiny asks Gloria to dance, I’ll be scooting on out,” Emily added.
Chloe pulled her phone from her pocket and looked at the screen for a second. “Speaking of scooting on out, can I go meet Susie and Carrie and those guys? They just texted to say they’re swimming over at Leo’s house. He has a pool.”
“We’re on an island surrounded by water and the kid has a pool?” Ryan said.
“The lake water is cold most of the time. You’ve been in it. You should know. Anyway, Mom, can I go?”
Emily wanted to say no because, quite frankly, being alone with Ryan made her nervous. At the cottage, there were always other people around, but if Chloe left, it would be just Emily and Ryan, and there was no telling what might happen. She didn’t exactly trust herself, but she couldn’t very well explain that to her daughter.
“We were supposed to take a walk, though. I was going to show you the old lighthouse and the place where Brooke and Lilly and I had a tree fort.”
The level of disinterest in those things was apparent in Chloe’s expression. She’d been excited about the prospect earlier, but it seemed Emily’s plan had been trumped by a kid with a pool. “But, okay. We can do that another time. Be home by eight o’clock, though.”
“Nine o’clock?”
“Seven fifty-five. Want to keep going?”
Chloe giggled and turned to sprint away. “Okay, got it. See you at eight o’clock.” She got about ten feet away, then sprinted back for a hug, and Emily knew she hadn’t really been trumped by the kid with the pool. Not permanently anyhow.
“See ya, Ryan. Go for a walk with my mom, will ya? She doesn’t have anything to do.”
Damn that kid.
Ryan sure liked that kid. She knew how to make him laugh, and then she knew just when to scram. The perfect combination of charm and intelligence. She must take after her mother. He smiled over at Emily, looking at her expectantly.
A smile played around the corners of her mouth. “Um, well, this is a little embarrassing because it appears my date for the evening just stood me up.”
“Kids these days. So . . . want to show me the lighthouse?”
“Would you like to see the lighthouse?”
“I believe I would.” He definitely would.
They left the park and headed away from the bay and all the shops and restaurants of Main Street. They passed the bright blue library and the riding stable and the kite store. The conversation was easy and not about anything in particular.
“Did you know my father played geezer night poker with your father last Thursday?” Ryan asked.
“Heaven help us. Did anything interesting happen?”
“Not that I heard of, so I guess that means everyone is still keeping a lid on it. Maybe the old dudes are the last demographic on the island to not hear about Tag’s May/December romance.”
She gave a rather unladylike sn
ort, which he somehow found endearing. “More like February/December. How are things at the Clairmont?”
He hadn’t really done much for the Clairmont project. He’d been too busy researching Bridget O’Malley’s place. Of course, he couldn’t tell her that. “Not bad.”
Talk turned to more personal things, like good movies they’d seen, least favorite subjects in school, and beloved pets.
“I had a dog when I was fifteen,” he found himself telling her as they discussed childhood pets. “The thing was ninety-five pounds of pure, drooling moron. He ate everything he could get in his mouth, including the certificate from his obedience training.”
Emily laughed, and every time she did that, he found himself feeling more uncertain about the future in general, but very certain about at least one thing. He was not leaving this island without kissing her at least once. Where that might lead was anybody’s guess, but Ryan was tired of fighting against it. The pull was inevitable, and he was an opportunities kind of guy. He just couldn’t let this night pass by without creating one.
“Your dog ate his obedience certificate?” Emily laughed as he told her that story. “That’s a bad dog. Of course, our dog ate that library book I told you about, remember?”
Now it was his turn to laugh. “Oh, that’s right, and the scary librarian banned you from the library.”
Emily shook her head. “No, not me. It was Brooke. I wasn’t in the library often enough to get banned. I was too busy getting into trouble doing other stuff. Want to see the scene of some of those crimes?” Her smile was playful, and the chance of him saying no was zero point zero percent.
“Absolutely. Lead the way.”
They walked another few yards and then turned, taking a well-established path into the woods. This looked promising if he was hoping for that kiss. She led him to the mouth of a small cave.
“Hello?” she called into it. No response. “Do you have a flashlight on your cell phone?”
He pulled it from his pocket and lit it up before handing it over.
She looked mischievous, and it was damn near killing him.
“We are way above the age limit for going in here, but I’m alumni so I think it’s okay.” She walked into the cave, and he followed close behind. The interior wasn’t very big, maybe twenty feet long and about ten feet wide, but the entire thing was littered with tool chests and duffel bags and boxes of various sorts, each with a padlock, and each with a word or two scrawled across the surface.
She looked back over her shoulder, smiling. “Good to know some things never change. Welcome to the booze bank.”
“The booze bank?”
Emily was chuckling. “I can’t believe they still keep stuff here, but it looks like they do. I guess you could say this is like the vault, and these are safety deposit boxes. See the labels? Everybody has a code name, and these bins are full of illicit contraband. Liquor, weed, whatever. The cardinal rule is that you never, ever mess with someone else’s stash, and you never, ever reveal anyone’s code name, especially to an adult.”
Ryan laughed and fully appreciated the moral flexibility of these law-breaking teens, since he’d been one himself back in the day. “Honor among thieves, huh? I love it.”
“Every once in a while, when I was a teenager, a couple of deputies would come thrashing around in the woods near here, making a shitload of noise so we all had plenty of time to run, and then they’d pretend like they couldn’t find the cave.” Emily’s laughter made her breathless, which somehow seemed to leave him a little short on the breath factor, too. She had a great laugh. That’s not something he’d ever noticed in a woman before, and he wondered if he liked her because he liked her laugh, or if he liked her laugh because he liked her. Either way . . . he liked her and he liked her laugh.
“Of course, I realize now my dad totally knew where this place was. It’s probably the same place he and Judge Murphy and Father O’Reilly hid their booze back when they were hell-raisers.”
“The chief of police, the judge, and the priest were hell-raisers? That’s sounds like the beginning of a joke.”
Emily nodded, still snickering. “My father likes to act all holier-than-thou, but Gigi admitted to me the other day that Harlan was no angel. Somehow that makes me like him a little better.”
She was still smiling, yet Ryan was struck again by the fact that she and her father didn’t get along. As much as Tag might aggravate Ryan or his brothers, they genuinely were one big, happy family. Nothing would ever change that. Not even his father having a fling with someone far too young.
He and Emily left the cave and the woods and strolled along the road again. Every now and again their shoulders would graze each other or her hand would oh-so-accidently brush against his, and like a kid, he had the unquenchable urge to hold her hand. He didn’t. But he wanted to.
Ten minutes later a red lighthouse came into view. It was short, as lighthouses went, maybe three stories tall, and it looked as if it had been out of commission for a very long time. A rusted ladder ran along one side, leading up to a small catwalk.
“Ready to see another glimpse into my checkered past?”
“Of course.”
“This is not the tour I was going to take Chloe on, by the way. I would have told her about all the times I rescued injured animals and how I collected wildflowers to press between the pages of my diary.”
“I get the impression that your diary might be a very entertaining read.”
“Count on it. Go on up that ladder.” She pointed at the rusty rungs.
“Me first?”
She pointed at her hips. “Dress.”
“Damn. There goes my chance to get a little peek.”
She might talk a big, wild game, but Emily Chambers still blushed every time he said anything the least bit suggestive. She just wasn’t as bad and bold as she seemed to think. He’d dated a few barracudas in his day, and Emily was nothing like them. She was nothing like any of the women he’d ever dated, come to think of it. What that meant he had yet to determine, but he wasn’t analyzing or second-guessing. He was just taking a walk with a girl and climbing up to the top of a lighthouse to see whatever he could see.
He got to the top and had to climb under the railing, and then he reached behind him to help Emily do the same, not that she seemed to need it. She popped up next to him and immediately looked into the center of the lighthouse where he imagined a big light used to be. Most of the surrounding windows were now broken, and inside the little room were hundreds of rocks scattered across the floor.
“Wow,” she gasped. “Looks like the kids have been busy.”
“Meaning what?”
She laughed and the wind caught her hair, whipping it around her head. She lifted her arms to catch it in both of her hands, which made the hemline of that dress lift several more inches up her thigh. A gentleman might not notice such a thing, but it was hard to miss. Those legs of hers went all the way up.
She kept her hair captured in one hand and lowered her other arm. “I’m not sure when the tradition started, but for my generation, if you lost your virginity, you were supposed to throw a rock in the center. Some kids even put their initials on there. Usually the boys. Girls like to be a little more discreet.”
Ryan looked down at all the stones again and saw that many of them did indeed have initials. Some even had two sets, indicating the couple, no doubt.
“Wow,” he said, nodding with respect and awe. “That is quite the shrine to premarital fornication. Is one of those stones yours?”
“Of course not,” she said, but her laughter indicated otherwise, and his urge to kiss her quadrupled. She moved around to the other side where the wind wasn’t quite so strong, and the setting sun was nearing the horizon. The sky was full of pinks and blues and even purple. If he’d seen those colors in a painting, he would have thought the artist overdid it, but it seemed to be an almost nightly occurrence here.
They leaned back against the one window that wasn’t
broken, and a little bit of ledge provided a place to sit. Emily tugged the hemline of her dress down, proving her bad-girl persona was mostly exaggerated. Too bad. Too bad she wasn’t the type for a meaningless fling, but then again, the fact that she wasn’t the type made her that much more appealing. This was a bit of a problem, but he’d figure that out later. He was at the top of a lighthouse under a magical sky and next to a beautiful woman with a smile that was starting to make his heart ache. Shit. This really was a problem.
He turned his head to look at her, trying to think of ways to plead his case. Some way to dazzle and beguile her and make her glad that it was him she was here with. Something witty and persuasive, but she turned at precisely the same moment he did, with invitation in her eyes, and all he could come up with was, “God damn, I really want to kiss you.”
Her hesitation was a mere fraction of a second. “Me too,” she whispered.
It was all he needed to hear, and in an instant she was in his arms. He kissed her, hard, with no prelude, no artful negotiations or seductive machinations. Just hungry kisses that sent his mind spinning and his body following. She kissed him back with equal enthusiasm, with one hand on his chest and the other wrapped tightly around the back of his neck, pulling him closer. Her mouth was sweet, as sweet as he’d imagined, with lips so soft he could have fallen over the edge of that lighthouse and thought the sensation was just from her touch.
But then the hand against his chest pushed instead of pulled, the hand behind his head let go, and she leaned away with a breathless gasp.
“Um . . .” She pressed her lips together, as if to capture the kiss. “Um, yeah, I wanted to kiss you, too. Obviously.” Her short laugh was self-conscious now. “But you live in Sacramento.”
“What’s wrong with Sacramento?” Why was she talking about Sacramento?
“Nothing, it’s just that I live in San Antonio, and they’re really far apart. And your father is screwing my sister.” Her eyes met his, big and uncertain. “Sorry. That sounded really crass, but it’s also the truth. It just seems to make everything else a little more complicated, you know?”
