Passionate Kisses

by Various

  “Ah, if I could make a suggestion,” Tom Allen began. He sat in the chair beside Sophie, though she’d angled hers away from his and pulled her arms in close to her chest. Lucas couldn’t believe Lon had invited the guy to join them, but then again, he played the pathetic but honest town loser well.

  Lucas got up, helped himself to a cup of coffee from the pot in the corner, and slid his chair two inches closer to hers when he returned. He took a long sip of the overly strong stuff and rested his free arm on the back of Sophie’s chair. He hoped it looked like a cross between casual, which it sort of was, and protective, which he absolutely intended it to be.

  “Go ahead,” Lon said. “Please. Gimme something to work with.”

  “Maybe ya need more background.” Tom Allen coughed, and Sophie cringed and moved another two inches to her left. Two inches closer to Lucas. Almost into the crook of his elbow. Now he could smell her perfume.

  Terrific. Just what Mr. Happy needed after a sleepless night broken only by the hottest fantasies he’d had in years. Seriously. Sophie up against his living room wall, eyes half-closed and mouth open to his. Sophie in the front seat of his truck, head thrown back, neck damp with perspiration, telling him exactly what she wanted him to do as he worked his way down her body. Sophie naked in his bed, fingers clutching the sheets while she moaned his name.

  Holy hell, he needed to get a grip. Or take a cold shower. Not having the latter option, Lucas shifted in his chair and instead thought about the Sox’s chances versus the Yankees. Pitching wasn’t half-bad. The new rookie up from the farm team was batting close to four hundred. If they could keep their other top hitters healthy, they might make it to the playoffs this year. Maybe even the Series.

  Mr. Happy retreated a fraction of an inch. Not nearly enough, though, not with Sophie’s hair within his reach and her perfume, that damn perfume, filling every breath he took. Lucas started reciting stats in his head.

  “You’re telling the story of a haunted lighthouse,” Tom Allen went on, “but the only thing you got Sophie sayin’ right now is two people died there, and now there might or might not be ghosts on the beach.” His gaze moved to Sophie and settled there. “You ain’t got enough of a personal story.” Another cough. “If you know what I mean.”

  Lon tapped the arm of the chair in rhythm to his gum-chewing. “You’re saying we need to play up Petey and Miranda Smith as regular people. Young lovers gone wrong.”

  Tom Allen grinned and revealed two missing teeth. Lucas yanked at his baseball cap.

  “Do we know any more about their relationship?” Terrence asked. He ticked off on his fingers the points they’d already covered. “High school sweethearts. Married two weeks after graduation. Baby boy a couple years later. Then some kind of jealousy. Talk of a buried treasure.” He looked at Tom Allen. “We haven’t done much with that. What’s the story?”

  Tom Allen’s hand scrabbled against his thigh. Probably looking for a pack of smokes that isn’t there. Lucas felt kind of bad for the guy, truthfully. He’d worked for the same school as Lucas’s father for a while, until he ruptured a disk hauling garbage to the dumpster. Now he lived on unemployment and collected worker’s comp. Lived in a run-down trailer outside of town with cats crawling around the place. Mean-looking dog tied up outside, too. No friends. Parents gone. Little life to speak of, which meant this visit by Sophie and the crew was one life-altering experience for him.

  “My dad said Petey always talked about an inheritance that was gonna make him the richest man in Connecticut.” Tom Allen shrugged. “No one knew what he meant. Sure didn’t buy himself a fancy car or travel around the world or anything. He and Miranda lived in the keeper’s house. Some people got to thinking he had a big ol’ treasure chest of gold or jewels or something. Hid it all in the lighthouse, and someone went looking for it the night they both died.”

  “Any truth to it?” Lon asked.

  “Dunno. Whole lotta people looked for it in the months after the murders, before my dad moved in, but no one found anything. Most people figured it was a story Petey made up.”

  Lucas frowned. He’d heard those rumors too. Hell, they were chapter two of the story, right after the dramatic opening scene of the husband and wife dying. Lucas thought the truth lay somewhere in between. A huge inheritance? Doubtful. But some kind of family heirloom? That sounded closer to the truth. There had to be something. All rumors had a seed of truth to them.

  Terrence dropped his hand. “Even if we include a segment on it, we still have no thief, no money, not even a clue about where a mysterious buried treasure might be. Right? We got two people who ended up dead and a place with some unexplained lights and voices every once in a while. Honestly, unless the local police can give us something else, I think we’re pretty much done.”

  “What about the guy who took over after your father?” Lon asked Tom Allen. “The part-timer?”

  Lucas’s knee started jiggling. Nothing to say there. Nothing to mention at all. He willed Tom Allen to keep his mouth shut.

  “Mitch Talbot?” Tom Allen’s voice rasped out the syllables.

  Something in Lucas’s chest went stone cold. The name. Just like all the other names, it had the power to chill him in an instant. Didn’t matter that Talbot wasn’t one of the six kids from school. He’d gone down with them. His was a scar in the flesh of Lindsey Point, same as all the rest. Lucas’s leg shot out almost before he realized it and kicked Tom Allen in the shin.

  “Ow! What the hell?” But his eyes cut to Lucas’s, and when he turned back to the group, he shook his head. “Don’t think he found anything either. Looked around, same as all the rest, but nope. I never heard nothing ’bout him finding anything.”

  “And he’s passed on now too?” Terrence was writing something on a notepad.

  “A-yep.”

  Lon chewed. Terrence scribbled. Sophie stared at her manicure.

  “You know, there might be one other person you could talk to,” Tom Allen said after a long moment. Every face in the circle turned to him. “Nellie Fortunado.”

  “She’s senile, isn’t she?” Lucas asked. “Has been for years.”

  “But she might know something,” Tom Allen went on. “She’s almost eighty, lives with her daughter outside of town. She taught at the high school for years until she started losing her eyesight. Think she had both Petey and Miranda as students.”

  “Why the hell haven’t we talked to her?” Lon jumped up and nearly knocked over his straight-backed chair. “Can we get a number? Maybe see if she’ll talk to us tonight?”

  “No,” Sophie said in a low voice.

  Everyone looked at her.

  “Listen, we’re done. Terrence already said we have enough.”

  And there it was, Lucas, thought: the fear there was truth to the rumor about her relation to the Smiths. All rumors have a seed of truth to them...

  “I don’t see how talking to some crazy lady who was alive a hundred years ago is going to change anything.” She pushed her hair behind her ears.

  “Fifty years, sweetheart,” Lon said in response. “And we’re ahead of schedule. We can afford a day of digging around.”

  Sophie whipped out her phone and started texting. Lucas tried to catch her attention, but she might as well have been alone in the room. Her thumbs moved over the keypad in a blur.

  Probably should have squashed the idea of Nutty Nellie the minute Tom Allen brought up her name, he thought as they folded up the chairs a few minutes later and called it a night. But strange connections bound them all together in Lindsey Point, like it or not. Nellie Fortunado was one of them. She’d mourned, she’d lost, she’d helped pick up the pieces. Better than some. Better than Lucas himself. Suggesting her as a source made sense.

  Sophie wouldn’t like it, but maybe the crew needed to do some digging and find out more about Petey and Miranda and Sophie’s possible relation to them. Sometimes you couldn’t keep things to yourself, like it or not, Lucas figured. Sometimes they came ou
t, linked to you in ways unimaginable, before you could stop them.

  Chapter 12

  “Hey, stranger.” Lucas slid onto the bar stool next to Sophie.

  She looked up from her drink. “Hey yourself.” She glanced at the door. “Did you follow me here?”

  “Oh, boy.” He shook his head. “No. I did not follow you here.”

  The bartender, good-looking, dark-skinned, with biceps the size of small tree trunks, filled a pint glass and handed it to Lucas without a word. Sophie was pretty sure it was the same guy who’d interrupted them in the parking lot the night before, and while that hadn’t won him any points in her book, it hadn’t scared her off either. She needed a drink. He was pouring them. End of conversation. Now his eyes moved over her and lingered a second on her cleavage before he went back to washing glasses.

  “How you’d know I was here?”

  “Only bar in town within walking distance of Francine’s. And the only place where I know the bartender personally.”

  “Oh. Right.” She played with the tiny red straw in her rum and Diet Coke. Not a terribly exciting drink, but she wasn’t sure Mr. Slick behind the bar could make a decent martini. “And this is...” She looked from one to the other and waited.

  “Finn.” Lucas took a long drink of his beer. “Friend of mine from elementary school. And yes, you might also recognize him as the lout from the parking lot last night.”

  Finn held out a hand to Sophie. “Nice to meetcha. Officially, that is.” He winked.

  “Mm. Likewise.”

  Lucas shifted on his stool and rested an elbow on the bar. “That bother you, back at Francine’s? The idea of talking to Nellie?”

  She shrugged and spun the straw some more. “A little. I guess. Lon isn’t one to hang around once we’ve wrapped a shoot. I don’t get why he’s bothering.”

  “Guess he thinks there’s more.”

  “There’s always more.” She exhaled sharply. “We don’t ever get all the details. It’s a half-hour episode. How could we? I guess it’s the fact that this time–” She stopped.

  “It hits a little close to home.”

  She didn’t answer. Nothing about home here, as far as she was concerned.

  “Are you still thinking there’s a chance Tom Allen’s right?”

  “Nope.”

  He turned away and spent a long few minutes watching the game on the TV hanging over the bar. The next time he spoke, it was quieter, and she almost missed his words. “Having second thoughts about coming here? To Lindsey Point, I mean?”

  He hadn’t turned around, so she answered to his back. “No. I love my job. And I like visiting new places.”

  “I didn’t ask that.”

  She stared daggers into his neck. “It’s a little tricky, I guess. But do I wish I’d never come?” She thought for a minute.

  In part, yes, she was sorry she’d ever come to Lindsey Point. She was sorry she’d heard of the Lindsey Point Lighthouse and doubly sorry she’d listened to a local idiot like Tom Allen make up stories about who she might be related to. As a matter of fact, part of her reason for coming to this lousy hole-in-the-wall bar, for pulling on her tennis shoes and walking almost a mile in the dark, was to figure out a way to leave town as quickly as possible.

  She sucked down the last of her drink and bent the plastic straw in half until it cracked in her hand. Because here was the thing, the true thing that hadn’t stopped eating away at her for the last twenty-four hours: if she considered the possibility that a local idiot like Tom Allen was right, and she was in fact related to the poor, sobbing baby on the beach, then she would be happy to live without knowing all the details. She’d done fine without a father for thirty years. Why did she need to start thinking about having one now?

  Sophie shook out a piece of ice and chewed on it. Hell’s bells. Being faced with her own history was all kinds of frightening.

  She looked at Lucas’s broad back, the way his shirt tightened a little as he moved and his hand wrapped around his beer mug. No. She didn’t have one single regret about that part. That part–the one sitting so close to her she could touch him, kiss him, bury her face in his chest and let him run his lips over the ridge of her ear until she turned to liquid– she wouldn’t trade at all. She just wished she could have discovered one without the other. Or wished she could take him, transport him, to midtown and have her way with him while Lindsey Point turned into a distant memory behind them.

  She sighed and rolled her head, trying to loosen the tightness pinching the back of her neck.

  Finn took her empty glass. “Another?”

  She started to say no and changed her mind. “Oh, what the hell.” She wasn’t driving back. And walking the rolled-up sidewalks of Lindsey Point had to be less dangerous than negotiating the Upper East Side after dark.

  “So are you married?” she asked Finn as he poured her drink. “Kids?” He looked around the same age as Lucas. Didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything.

  “No to both questions.” He handed her a new drink–stronger than the last by at least a shot, Sophie noticed on first sip. Hmm. She’d better nurse this one.

  “Really?” She looked back at Lucas. “You guys are a couple of rarities around here, aren’t you?”

  “Meaning?” Lucas said. The game switched to a commercial, and he turned back to her. Eyes on hers. Down to her mouth. Up again.

  Oh, God. Parts tingled. Good, yummy parts that needed his attention right now. Sophie swallowed. “Isn’t that what people do in small towns? Get married and have babies?” She glanced at the television. “Not too many bachelors over twenty-five running around Lindsey Point, are there?”

  Finn disappeared into the kitchen. Lucas didn’t answer for a minute. Sophie frowned. What the hell had she said wrong? She’d spent a lot of time in towns identical to this one. Nothing wrong with her observation, as far as she was concerned. Unless maybe Finn had a broken engagement in his back pocket too?

  Lucas finished his beer, then leaned over the bar and poured himself a glass of water. “You’re still wondering why I never left. After Shannon broke up with me. Or maybe before. Why I didn’t stay in New Haven or move to Boston where the job market’s better? And now you’re wondering the same thing about Finn.”

  “Sure. I guess. I mean, it’s a valid question.”

  He pointed at a series of newspapers, front pages it looked like, behind the bar. All framed.

  “Those things? Those stories?”

  She read the headlines, one by one. The first two didn’t ring any bells, but the last one looked familiar. A plane crash. A bunch of dead teenagers. Two days before the first anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center.

  “I think I remember hearing about the plane crash.” Something clicked into place. “Oh. Your friend Sarah. That’s how she died?”

  His face changed. Not a lot. If she hadn’t been sitting so close and looking right at him, she would have missed it. Just a darkening of the eyes, and a straightening of the mouth, as if sealing in any thoughts that might have spilled out if he opened it.

  “Oh my God, Lucas, that’s horrible. Why didn’t you tell me before?” Death by plane crash was infinitely more tragic than a car accident or suicide or anything else she’d imagined.

  “It’s not something I talk much about. None of us do.”

  “But it’s so awful. I mean, I can only imagine how heartbreaking it must have been. How old were you?”

  He cleared away something in his throat. “Eighteen. Seniors in high school. All of them were too, except for Sarah.” He paused, and the next time he looked at her, she saw nothing but pain. “And you can imagine all you want, but you won’t for one second know what it was like to find out six fucking people, friends you’d known since you were all in diapers together, died in the middle of a cornfield somewhere in Iowa. Try to imagine what it’s like to find out your best friend isn’t ever gonna talk to you again, or laugh at you, or tell you the shirt you’
re wearing is shit and thank God she’s taking you shopping because you can’t ever pick out clothes for yourself. Imagine the guy who used to outrun the cops on his motorcycle when he was sixteen isn’t ever riding his bike again. Or that Gladys Nunez, a woman who raised a daughter and a nephew by herself–no college degree, three part-time jobs, English as a second or third or I don’t even know what language–lost both of ’em in a single second. Is she even a mom anymore? Or an aunt? Do those things change when people die?

  Sophie opened her mouth to say she didn’t know, but he wasn’t stopping for her. He wasn’t even slowing down.

  “Then deal with the fact that there weren’t any fucking remains to ship home because the plane disintegrated when it hit the ground. So you don’t even have a place to go when you want to say a goddamn prayer or tell them how much you miss them or wish it had been you instead.”

  She laid a hand on his wrist. Tendons tight as steel beneath the surface. Cold. Almost bloodless.

  He wiped his face and took a long drink of water.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I’m sorry too.”

  Sophie folded her cocktail napkin into tiny squares.

  “That’s why I stay,” he said. “Why a lot of us do. Because we can’t imagine being anywhere else.”

  Even with everything they’d lost? She would have left town the minute she could. How did Lucas, Finn, any of them, live in a place where every time they turned around, something reminded them of the friends they’d lost? Where every corner held pain?

  “You wonder about the depth of grief?” he asked.

  She frowned, confused. Then she remembered her own words. “...I couldn’t understand it. I had no mechanism for dealing with any of it. All I knew is that I was fascinated by the depth of their grief...”

  His jaw tightened. “You can’t measure it. And you sure as hell can’t imagine it. The only thing you do is experience it and ask God why the hell you had to.”

  Sophie’s cheeks flamed. She pushed back her stool and stumbled, catching herself the instant before she fell. “I get it, Lucas. Loud and clear. You’re sad, your friends died, and you’re living here to honor their memory. Or because you can’t bring yourself to leave because it’ll mean you’re actually moving on. You’re living and they’re not. Right? Or something else I can’t ‘imagine.’”