"Is there something seriously wrong with it?" Paige asked, raising her voice to be heard over the noise.
"Could be," Chad said, acting as though the motor's ills didn't concern him. But as the handyman, you'd think he'd do something about the motor, thought Paige. The boat and its motor were the aunts' only link to the outside world, living as they did on their secluded island.
Undaunted, Chad pushed off from the dock and turned the Marsh Mallow northward. They headed past the northern edge of St. Simons Island and rounded the tip of Little St. Simons, a private island much like St. Albans but larger.
Chad steered the boat eastward toward the sea, and ahead of them Paige saw her initial glimpse of St. Albans. As always, she thrilled to her first view of the island.
Like the other Golden Isles, it was bordered with lush green marsh grass. Beyond the marshland the island rose above sea level, deeply forested with moss-draped live oaks. Her aunts lived in the home that the family had always called the Manse, a big two-story house that had been home to generations of Paige's ancestors since the first, a French Huguenot, established a cotton plantation on the island over two hundred years ago. And beyond the marshes and the tangled forests and the wide white sandy beach was the Atlantic Ocean. If there was ever a paradise on earth, Paige thought, it was scenic St. Albans.
She had been facing front in the bow, watching for the island, letting the wind whip her dark brown hair back from her face. But now, curious, she turned toward Chad Smith, and from under the cover of her eyelashes, she studied him surreptitiously, this time concentrating on the details that she had missed because of their most unorthodox greeting.
He was a tall man, wide-shouldered and strong, and his skin was tanned dark by the sun. An outdoor man, one at home with boats, at ease at the tiller. Too, he was older than she had been led to expect—the aunts had referred to him as a boy, yet she would judge him to be in his early thirties. His hair under the breezy blue cap was lighter than she had at first thought, bleached several different shades of blond by the sun and salt air. His eyebrows were thick, also lightened by the sun, and his lashes were long and sandy. Beneath the lashes his eyes, an uncommon shade of amber flecked with brown—or were they brown flecked with amber?—were alert as they scanned the horizon.
The roar of the motor, punctuated by a series of ominous knocks, precluded conversation, so Paige swiveled back around and looked toward St. Albans. All at once, she felt self-conscious about the way she looked. She should have tied her lustrous hair back with her scarf instead of letting it blow about her face like that of a wild woman, she should have checked her make-up to make sure that her lipstick was intact and that her nose wasn't shiny. And then she caught herself up short—her aunts would be happy to see her no matter how she looked, and what did she care about impressing Chad Smith, anyway?
The rickety dock—why hadn't it been replaced?—hove into view, and with a surge of joy Paige recognized Aunt Biz and Aunt Sophie hurrying down the steep winding path from the Manse. Aunt Biz was tall and spare and moved with slow deliberation, while Aunt Sophie seemed as plump as ever, drying her hands on her apron and looking distracted as usual.
Chad slowed the boat and edged it up to the dock, turning off the motor and securing the boat with swift efficiency. Paige, not caring about her suit any more, scrambled out of the boat and was enveloped by the aunts.
"But you're so pretty!" Aunt Sophie exclaimed. "Just like dear Elisabeth at your age. Don't you think so, Biz?"
Aunt Biz held Paige at arm's length and studied her calmly. "A bit taller than Elisabeth, perhaps, but the same dark brown hair with a hint of red. And those eyes—no, Elisabeth's eyes were never sea green like yours, Paige. And your face is more oval. Still, you're very much like her. Always were."
With this observation, Aunt Biz bent to pick up Paige's larger suitcase.
"Oh no, Aunt Biz, I don't want you to carry that," protested Paige.
"That's what I'm for," said Chad, insistently tugging at the big suitcase until Aunt Biz released it. He hoisted the smaller one too, then stood back, waiting for them to lead.
"You see, he takes such good care of us," said Aunt Sophie, looking earnestly up at Paige. Aunt Biz just smiled and led the way up the path of crushed oyster shells, evidently agreeing.
Paige, with an uncertain look at Chad, who grinned and waggled his eyebrows at her, turned and followed the aunts, increasingly conscious of Chad's eyes on her hips as she preceded him toward the Manse.
She desperately wanted the Manse to look as she remembered it, and she wasn't disappointed, not much anyway. The Manse was constructed of tabby, a material impervious to time and unique to the area. On old plantations like St. Albans, tabby had been manufactured from a mixture of oyster shells, sand and lime, which was poured into wooden forms and left to harden into a kind of mortar. The Manse, a prime example of tabby construction, was built on a high basement so that the front door must be reached by climbing a graceful flight of stairs. Two chimneys surmounted the low hip roof, and the portico was delicately proportioned and supported by white columns.
The Manse's gray tabby exterior appeared much the same as it always had, but the white paint on the portico and porch railing was dirty and crumbling. Without thinking, Paige reached out and touched her forefinger to the paint on the railing. A good-sized hunk of it flaked off and fell among the azalea bushes surrounding the house. She turned and saw Chad watching her, but when the paint chipped away he didn't even have the good grace to seem embarrassed. She shot him a boldly accusatory look and followed the aunts inside.
Inside, the Manse was dingier and dustier than she remembered. A central hall divided the downstairs into two halves. On the right was a parlor, on the left a dining room. Surely those velvet draperies at the parlor windows had once been a soft shade of green, not gray. And the lackluster hardwood floor had, in other days, always been polished to a high sheen beneath the priceless Bokhara rugs.
But the aunts seemed not to notice anything amiss about the Manse. "Chad, please take Paige's suitcases to the bedroom at the back of the house," said Aunt Biz. And to Paige, "We've given you your old room back."
This, at least, was good news. Paige had always loved the room the aunts designated hers so long ago when she used to spend summers at St. Albans with her mother. It was a long room, and one wall was composed almost entirely of French doors which led to a narrow balcony overlooking the tops of trees with the sea rippling beyond.
Chad disappeared up the stairs with her luggage, while Aunt Sophie bustled off toward the kitchen to check on dinner.
Aunt Biz settled down on the opposite end of the couch from Paige and folded her hands in her lap. "So," she said, her plain face radiating welcome, "you're here."
"Yes," said Paige warmly, reaching over and patting Aunt Biz's hand, "I'm here. And it's been much too long. I never meant to stay away so long."
"Well, I know how it is with young people, especially you with your flight schedule. Here one day, gone the next. I must say that working for the airline sounds exciting."
This seemed to be an ideal time to take Aunt Biz into her confidence, to pour out her heart about the decision she knew she had to make before returning to New York.
"Oh, Aunt Biz," she began in a rush, "working for the airline is exciting when it affords the chance of meeting someone like Stephen McCall." Here she paused, and her aunt's eyebrows lifted in interest. "He's a pilot," Paige went on, more uncertainly now. "We're, um, dating." As she became increasingly unsure of her aunt's reaction to what she was about to reveal, her words dwindled away at the end of the sentence. She'd begun to have serious misgivings about discussing Stephen's demands with either aunt.
She had thought, perhaps unrealistically, that she'd be able to use the aunts as uncritical sounding boards in order to think things through about Stephen in a more realistic way. Yet now, confronted with the chance to talk about him, and with Aunt Biz regarding her so expectantly, her head cocked to th
e side like an alert sparrow, Paige realized how ridiculous that idea was. How could she ever have thought that she'd be able to get sound advice from two elderly maiden southern-bred ladies about whether or not to set up unmarried housekeeping with affable, handsome, don't-tie-me-down Stephen McCall?
"So you have a young man! How nice, dear. I'd like to meet him." Her brown eyes twinkled at a sudden thought. "You haven't come to tell us that there's a wedding in the offing, have you, dear?"
Paige felt the color rush to her face. She shook her head ruefully. "No... no, I most certainly didn't come to tell you that," she said, but the irony in her voice seemed lost on Aunt Biz, who had a faraway expression on her face as she said, "I remember when Elisabeth, your mother, was married here at the Manse. We strung Japanese lanterns up on the veranda and..."
Aunt Biz's reverie gave Paige the chance to escape on a reverie of her own. Stephen, an altogether personable, black-haired and blue-eyed devil-may-care Irishman, was pleasant to be with and clearly enamored of her. But, much to Paige's dismay, even though she liked Stephen, their relationship was lacking that certain something that she'd always expected to share with the man she loved. Try as she might, as fond as she was of Stephen, she couldn't manufacture any feelings for him beyond simple affection.
As for moving in with him, she had reluctantly promised him, against her better judgment, to consider it.
His blue eyes had sparkled winsomely at her when he broached the subject a few weeks ago over a dinner cunningly complete with candlelight and wine. "Just think of living together as one of the many alternatives open to us," he'd urged.
Many alternatives? Well, so was marriage, but he had never mentioned that. Paige knew, at this point, that it was either move in with him or lose him entirely—Stephen took pride in not being the marrying kind. She was well aware that other women considered him a good catch and that many would jump at the arrangement he was offering her.
Furthermore, he knew how attractive he was to women, and he seemed supremely confident that she'd say yes. It had advantages for both of them, he'd pointed out. Maybe, but it would mean sharing the TV's remote, and she'd be the one who always had to clean out the fridge, where the vegetable drawer was a terrarium breeding several new life forms, she was sure of it. Those were hardly arguments she'd shared with him. Instead, she'd fled, promising that she'd think over his interesting proposition.
She'd hoped she'd be able to put the whole problem of what to do about Stephen in perspective while she was here. Long ago she'd made up her mind not to settle for less than marriage, but she'd been immature then and unwise in the ways of the world.
Her friends in New York told her that these days, everyone was living together before they got married and that she was foolish not to understand that sharing space was the best way to find out if someone was a good match. Maybe, but abandoning her scruples for Stephen didn't feel right in the place where it mattered most, her heart. And why would it matter if they were a good match when he was notoriously marriage-shy? But Stephen could be persuasive, and the idea of being a couple, married or not, was compelling.
Finally, noticing how Paige was staring off into space, Aunt Biz stopped talking about weddings and said understandingly, "Well, I suppose you're not ready to give up the freedom you enjoy working for the airline."
Paige had not yet replied to this when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Aunt Biz turned toward the doorway. "Ah, here's Chad," she said with pleasure. "Won't you join us for a glass of sherry before dinner?"
"No, I don't think so. I need to change my clothes. But what's this I heard about working for an airline?" He turned to Paige and lounged against the doorframe. There was no doubt about it—Chad radiated an aura of raw sexuality. It was evident in the angle at which he held his head, the tilt of his torso, the tight fit of his jeans. "Is that what you do?"
Paige fought to retain control of her poise. She didn't want him to see the overwhelming effect he had on her, nor did she want her aunt to recognize it, either. "Yes," she blurted out finally. "I'm a flight attendant."
"And where are you based?"
"New York City. I work on overseas flights—Paris to New York, New York to Brussels."
"You speak French?"
Paige met his eyes levelly. "Yes, fluently." Too late, she realized from his intent gaze that he was recalling her enthusiastic reponse to his kiss earlier. Quickly her gaze dropped, but not soon enough to avoid noting the amused self-confidence in his. He was playing with her as a cat plays with a mouse.
"Paige majored in French in college," chirped Aunt Biz, oblivious to the seductive interaction between them.
Chad lazily removed his shoulder from the doorframe and stretched, showing his long, lean muscles to advantage. He smiled and winked at Aunt Biz. Oh, he was a charmer all right. He probably charmed snakes out from under their rocks—in addition to little old ladies. He obviously expected Paige to fall swooning at his feet. And that was one thing, despite his undeniable attractiveness, that she would not do.
"I'm out of here," he said. "That is, unless you can think of anything else requiring my attention."
"No, no, you've been quite helpful already," Aunt Biz insisted as she waved him away.
"Fine," he said. "See you later." They could hear him whistling as his feet crunched away along the oyster-shell path.
Paige was just about to blurt out, "Who is he, anyway?" when Aunt Biz, watching him through the deeply recessed window behind them, said fervently, "Thank goodness for Chad. I don't know what we'd do without him."
In the face of this unabashed enthusiasm for the handyman's presence on St. Albans, Paige prudently decided to hold her tongue. Fortunately Aunt Sophie chose that moment to arrive with three glasses of sherry.
It was an evening custom at the Manse that Paige well remembered, this gathering in the parlor before dinner. She recalled her mother and her aunts and Uncle John participating in the ritual when she was growing up, and she herself had tasted her first glass of alcoholic beverage here. In the summer before college, she had been included in the ceremony as an equal, and it was then that she'd first felt completely grown up.
A sense of peace settled over her, and Paige realized suddenly how very much it meant to her to be back on St. Albans Island and staying at the Manse, her family's ancestral home, with the aunts. They were all she had in the world, these two, her last remaining direct tie to her roots.
Aunt Sophie sneezed, and Paige looked at her sharply. "You're not catching a cold, are you, Aunt Sophie?" she asked, full of concern. Aunt Sophie, about to sneeze again, shook her head frantically and dug in her pocket for a handkerchief.
"It's her allergy," explained Aunt Biz. "You remember, it always acts up this time of year."
Paige did remember. Aunt Sophie's allergies to myriad pollens and insects were a hard-to-forget feature of summer on St. Albans. Often Aunt Sophie would dither into her room for days at a time to nurse her runny nose or headache, emerging only to supervise the preparation of dinner and to sneeze helplessly while watching everyone else's activity.
This time Aunt Sophie managed to control her sneezing, finally excusing herself to see to their meal.
"Bless her heart," Aunt Biz said. "If only she doesn't sneeze in the gravy."
To that Paige could think of no adequate reply.
After several minutes of chatting and catching up on family gossip, Paige left Aunt Biz and climbed the stairs to her room, where she washed and changed into a softly flowing scooped-neck dress in shades of blue and green, one of Stephen's favorites. It had a wide flounced skirt, and Paige pushed the low neckline off her shoulders. The dress's clear colors made her eyes, which Aunt Biz had called sea green, seem even greener.
Her hair, that was the problem. By letting it flap in the breeze she had allowed it to become coated with sticky salt spray. She brushed it and pinned one side high above her ear with a gold barrette. A new shade of lipstick, one with a coral cast to it, and she was ready
to go down to dinner.
Aunt Biz and Aunt Sophie were already seated at the big dining-room table when she arrived. The overhead chandelier was missing three flame-shaped bulbs, and Paige made a mental note to ask Chad to replace them. The food was already in place, but the aunts seemed to have dispensed with household help. Curious, and influenced by the thin film of dust on the nearby sideboard, Paige asked, "Whatever happened to the housekeepers you used to have? You know, they all seemed to be named Pearl."
Aunt Sophie crinkled her eyes in laughter. "Oh, there were only Big Pearl and Little Pearl. And I'm afraid they and their families have all moved away."
Paige remembered the tiny fishing village on the north end of the island, settled long ago by descendants of the slaves that used to work the St. Albans cotton plantation.
"Moved away? Where did they go?"
"Some hired on with shrimp boats working from the mainland. Others found good salaries and more convenient living conditions elsewhere. Many of the young ones went off to college and never returned. Little Pearl's daughter is president of some company on the mainland. Real estate, I think."
"Oh," said Paige in surprise. She could scarcely imagine St. Albans without the fishermen and their lively families in residence.
She started to remove the white linen napkin from its tarnished silver ring, but Aunt Biz reached out a hand and rested it on her wrist. "Not yet, dear," she said. "We're waiting for Chad."
"Chad?"
"Of course. He eats his meals with us," Aunt Biz told her, as though their handyman's presence at their dining-room table were the most natural thing in the world.
The light was so dim that Paige hadn't even noticed the extra place set across the table from her. She blinked at Aunt Biz, then decided against questioning their inclusion of Chad. After all, she could understand that her aunts were lonely with just the two of them to converse, day after day. Chad probably provided them with a welcome diversion.
The Beach Bachelors Boxset (Three Complete Contemporary Romance Novels in One) (The Beach Bachelors Series) Page 18
