So Damian was one of Nate’s friends. The one Rachael meant to introduce her to? She’d almost forgotten how people’s lives wove themselves together in small towns like Whispering Pines, how everyone belonged to everyone else. Each person became a puzzle piece that locked together to make the town the living thing it was. No secrets here, and no strangers either.
“Hi again, Summer.”
Rachael’s eyes widened. “Again?”
“Damian’s working on the house with Mac.” He took my arm when I fell the other day. And looked at me the same way he’s looking right now. Tingles she hadn’t felt in a very long time started up around her toes and zipped to her belly. Then to her arms and hands and the base of her neck. Her cheeks. Probably her eyes too. She shoved her sunglasses into place. Stop staring at him like a schoolgirl.
“Oh, right. I forgot you guys probably already ran into each other.”
“Almost literally,” Damian said under his breath, just loud enough for Summer to hear, and she smiled.
Rachael took her place behind the wheel, revved the boat’s engine and pulled the rope from the dock. “So who’s water skiing?”
Summer stumbled as they accelerated across the lake. “Not me. I’ll watch.” She sank into the seat across from Damian and tried to read his expression. Surprise upon seeing her? Pleasure? Or resentment, that she was only in town to sell the house where he lived? She still needed to talk to him about that. Renters knew houses might change hands over the years, didn’t they? She hoped he wouldn’t blame her for needing to put it on the market.
Rachael offered her the skis twice, but Summer shook her head. She was content to watch the others skim across the water’s surface before they crashed into the waves. And she was more than content to watch the way Damian made them all look like amateurs as he cut in tight arcs across the boat’s wake on a single ski.
Rachael laughed as she spun the boat in circles, trying to make him fall, and Summer relaxed in slow degrees. She’d been right to come. Some part of her had missed this tradition of summer on the lake. She’d missed her best friend smiling, the laughter ringing on the wind, the houses rushing by. She’d missed the way an afternoon on the water turned to a night filled with bonfires and drinking, until everyone’s stomachs were warm with alcohol and friendship and desire.
Summer ran her hands in the wake. After a while, Damian stretched out on the floor of the boat beside her. Once he offered her a beer, and she took it. Their fingers brushed. Nothing touched but the space between them, yet the afternoon hummed with possibility.
Chapter Nine
“Race you to the water!” Rachael shouted, and pulled off her bikini top.
“Oh, no.” Summer watched Rachael dart away and buried her face in her hands. Eight, eighteen, or twenty-eight, her best friend didn’t seem to have a problem taking off her clothes. Maybe that came from growing up near the water.
Dinner was over. Beer bottles lay scattered around the lawn. They’d barbequed over the open fire and toasted marshmallows as the sun and moon traded places in the sky. After dinner Summer had thought about driving back to the motel to work on some press releases for the museum, but two margaritas later she’d abandoned the notion. Press releases could wait until tomorrow.
A few others followed Rachael, and soon six or seven naked behinds bounced across the lawn and into the starlit lake. In another minute, the sounds of splashing and laughing echoed through the darkness. Summer smiled. Truly, some things never changed. There was something sensual about warm water splashing over bare skin. She’d tried skinny dipping a few times, but only on the cloudiest of nights, when Nate and his friends were far from the house. Tonight she had no intention of baring anything.
She sat on the bottom porch step and leaned back on her elbows. The bonfire smoldered close by, and darkness wrapped her in comforting arms.
“Summer?”
She jumped.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” Damian materialized from the driveway and sat down beside her.
“Oh.” She let out a breath. “You didn’t. Not really.” She bit her bottom lip, distracted by the heat from his arm so close to hers.
“You’re not swimming?”
“I do my swimming with a suit. And I forgot mine.” Summer stuck her hands under her thighs. “What about you?”
“Not in the mood.” He studied her. “Not that I really want to ask, but have you made any decisions about the house?”
“Ah, well, I’m trying, you know, to make sure...” She couldn’t lie to him. Sadie had told her that selling the place with a rental contingency could take twice as long as without it. “I think you might end up having to move. I’m sorry.”
He dug in the dirt with a stick. “We’ve been there for over two years.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s a lousy deal.”
“Yeah.” He paused. “You ever think about keeping the whole place for yourself?”
No. Never. She could never live in Whispering Pines again. “Honestly, it makes more sense to sell it. I mean, I know my father bought it for me, but I’m not really sure why. I haven’t lived here in a long time.” She shifted on the step and wondered if the warmth on her cheeks bloomed from the fire or from something else.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” Damian said after a minute.
“Thanks. I wasn’t close to him, though. He had cancer for a while, a couple of years at least. But he didn’t tell anyone until the end. He spent the last week in intensive care, over in Albany.” She paused. “So I heard.”
“You weren’t in touch with him at all?”
“My mom died when I was really young, and Dad and I...” She took a deep breath. “We didn’t talk much after I left town.”
“After your brother died?
So he’d heard the story. “Yeah.”
Damian stretched out his legs. In the firelight, the blonde hairs on his ankles glowed. “Can’t imagine going through something like that.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“How old was your brother?”
“A week past thirteen.”
“Wow.” He didn’t ask anything else, and for that she was glad.
She reached down and picked up a twig, twisting it until it shredded. “That’s another reason I can’t stay. It’s too hard to be here.”
“I’ll bet.”
But Damian didn’t know the worst of it, which was that she didn’t remember most of what had happened that night. Or that pieces of the accident had started coming back when she least expected them to. She’d come to terms with Donny’s death long ago. She wasn’t sure she could bear to live it all over again.
Summer brushed her hair from her face. “What about you? You didn’t grow up around here.”
“Nope. Try a place called Poisonwood, about a hundred miles west of Philadelphia.”
“There’s nothing west of Philadelphia but farmland.”
“Exactly. Which is why I think of Whispering Pines as a thriving metropolis. It has a movie theater, two grocery stores, a separate elementary and high school...classy place, I’m telling you.”
She laughed. “Sure. Classy. So how’d you end up here?” It was a strange place to make a home, if you hadn’t been born in Whispering Pines. Single twenty-somethings, especially those who looked as good as this guy did, didn’t exactly flock to its county seat.
His expression sobered. “Long story. Save it for another time, maybe?”
“Okay.” Summer knew about long stories, and keeping them close to the heart. She rose and stepped closer to the fire.
After a minute, Damian came to stand beside her. “What is it you do, anyway?” He held his hands above the flames.
She studied his fingers and the way they threw shadows in the dark. She thought of how he’d touched her with them, feeling her wrist after she fell, and a lump of desire rose in her throat. “I’m the director of the Bay City Museum in San Francisco.”
“Mm...I don’t think I’
ve heard of it.”
“Probably not. It’s pretty small. But it has a lot of great artifacts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Gold Rush, railroads, stuff like that. Plus we display traveling exhibits from all over the country.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Sounds like a cool job.”
Her elbow brushed his, and electricity radiated up to her shoulder. “It is. I love it. I could spend hours reading about the past, about lost civilizations, cities and empires and the way one person, or one event, changed everything.”
“I know what you mean. Makes you wonder how different our lives would be if, say, just one thing had ended up different. If the South had won the Civil War. Or JFK had lived. Things like that.”
Summer stared at him. “Exactly.” The same crazy wonderings about the world kept her up many nights. She’d flip through the archives at work and think, What would the world be like if we were still a colony of the British Empire? Or she’d stare at a piece of needlework in its glass case and wonder about its creator. Who were you, really? Did you love? Did your heart ache at a sunrise? What was the world like, then?
A breeze lifted the hair at her neck, and she shivered. Faint shouts floated up from the lake. The flames burned lower.
“Course, present day has its moments too,” Damian said. “Tomorrow, next week, next year, all this is history too. It keeps shaping itself while we’re just passing through.”
“I know. But somehow it’s different when you’re living in the middle of it.”
He cocked his head, and Summer wondered if she’d said something wrong.
“Are you involved with someone back home?”
Her heart skipped. “No. I mean, I was dating a guy a few months back, but—”
Damian caught her mouth with his before she could finish the sentence. His hands wound themselves in her hair, and she staggered against him, tingles in her palms. He smelled like soap and sawdust and the faint spice of aftershave. She ran her hands along his biceps, iron beneath her fingertips. Something inside her wanted to peel away his T-shirt and feel skin against skin.
Their tongues met and he slipped one hand from her hair to the small of her back. After a long moment, he moved his lips to her cheek before resting his forehead against hers. “I’ve wanted to do that since yesterday.”
“Yeah?” She laughed, a ragged, breathless sound in the silence. “Trying to make me change my mind about the house?”
He pulled away from her and frowned. “No. Is that really what you think? ”
“I was kidding.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets and backed away. “Sure about that?”
“Damian, please. I’m sorry.” Somehow she’d ruined things. Her mouth ached with the absence of his.
“Listen, I should probably go. Early day tomorrow.”
“Wait. Let’s talk about this.”
But he was gone without even a glance over his shoulder.
Summer crossed her arms as disappointment flooded her. Sparks jumped in the dying fire, and a piece of wood toppled into ash. She’d been joking. She’d just made a stupid comment to fill up the nervousness inside her stomach. He’d understand that. Wouldn’t he? But he didn’t turn around, and he didn’t return, and after a long while, she crawled into bed in the Hunters’ guest room in search of sleep.
Chapter Ten
Late the next morning, Rachael rapped on the door of the guest room. “You alive in here?”
Summer rolled over and squinted into the sunlight pouring through the blinds. “What time is it?”
“A little after ten.” Rachael sat on the edge of the bed.
“You let me sleep that late?”
“Figured you needed it. I thought a party and conversation with a certain good-looking someone would be good for you.” Rachael crossed her legs. “So? Tell me what happened last night.”
Clad in a tank top, Summer tossed off the sheet, swung her feet to the floor and reached for her overnight bag. “Nothing happened. I came to your party, had dinner, and watched while you and some other fools ran around naked. Then I went to bed.”
Rachael looked around the room. “Did you sleep with him?”
“Who?” Edges of a memory began to sharpen behind her eyes. Smiles over firelight. Damian’s hand reaching across a step and touching hers. A breathtaking kiss, and a mistake on her part. Then nothing.
“Damian. Who’d you think?”
“Of course I didn’t sleep with him. I barely know him.”
“Bummer.” Rachael sighed. “That never stopped me. Best way to get over sadness is a friendly little romp with someone who looks as good as Damian does.”
“Well, I’m not you. And I’m not sad.”
“Whatever. Did you at least kiss him?”
“Do I have any privacy around you?”
“Not since I showed you how to use a tampon back in seventh grade, no.”
Summer picked up her toiletry bag. She needed to fix her face, head back to the motel and meet with Sadie in less than an hour. She couldn’t sit here with her best friend and debate the finer points of kissing Damian Knight. “I’m not telling you. Use your imagination.”
“Geez, lighten up.”
Summer ducked into the bathroom and splashed water on her face. Stop thinking about him. So he kissed you. So what? She pulled her hair back from her face and dabbed concealer on the circles beneath her eyes. She had calls to make. Paperwork to take care of. And certainly, she had more important things to worry about than the lips of the guy she was about to evict.
LESS THAN A HALF HOUR later, Summer was driving back to town. She adjusted the radio station and hummed along. “Ooh, don’t you got what I need now baby...”
Damian’s face popped into her brain yet again. So much for not thinking about him.
Makes you wonder how different our lives would be if, say, just one thing had changed...
Her cheeks grew hot and she had to tell herself to unclench her hands before she squeezed the steering wheel in two. Sometimes when she told people what she did, they looked at her as if she were crazy, dwelling in the land of yesterdays and making her living among ghosts. But not this guy. He got it. The hairs on her forearms lifted at the memory of his expression as he watched in her firelight.
She slowed at the stop sign where Sycamore Road met Main Street. A dangerous intersection shrouded by woods, this crossroads witnessed a few accidents every year as drivers blasted past the sign half-hidden by bushes. One winter when she was a child, a group of teenagers had collided with a snowplow. Four deaths, all under the age of eighteen. Whispering Pines had mourned for months.
“Summer, I can’t find Donny. Where is he? Do you see him?”
She blinked. That was Gabe’s voice inside her head. But why had he been looking for her brother? They’d all stayed in the car until the cops came. Hadn’t they?
Her hands shook. Stop thinking about it. The accident was long since over, her brother in the ground, Gabe Roberts a distant memory. She pressed her lips together until she tasted blood. After a long moment, the thoughts and the voices receded again. But how long would it haunt her?
Today the sun blazed in the sky, and both roads stretched to the horizon without a car in sight. This was not the same intersection, and this was not ten years in the past. She was twenty-eight, stable and strong. She was not a girl lying in a hospital bed trying to understand why her brother wasn’t standing beside her cracking jokes.
Summer turned right and headed for the motel. After her meeting with Sadie, maybe she’d try to find Damian at the house. She’d explain away her stupid comment of the night before. She could probably give him his last month rent-free to make up for the hassle of selling the property. Maybe that would calm him. Or convince him to kiss her again. Or—
Out of nowhere, a red sedan careened into the lane in front of her. A horn blared, and adrenaline poured into her veins, triple-time. With her heart frozen, she stomped on the brake pedal and slammed it t
o the floor.
“What the—”
She didn’t have time to honk her own horn or check her mirrors or wonder who the driver was or where he’d come from. With both hands clutching the wheel, she held her foot to the floor and prayed.
Time slowed. Every movement of her car seemed magnified a hundred times. The distance between them closed. Could she pull off? Swerve around? Thick oaks lined the road, with almost no shoulder. The metallic tang of fear rose up on her tongue. The distance between her hood and the red sedan narrowed to a few feet. Bracing herself for the impact, she bit her lip, and her back teeth ground together in panic.
Crashing glass and the blunt smack of metal against metal filled the air around her. Her car jolted to a stop. Then everything went silent.
I hit someone. Or maybe hurt someone. She closed her eyes and counted to ten, then twenty. She heard nothing. After another moment, she forced her eyes open and ordered herself to breathe. In. Out. She wiggled her toes. All there, all accounted for. She touched her forehead, her chest, both arms. All okay. She eyed her car, assessing the damage. No cracks in the windshield. The hood seemed smooth, with no splintered metal.
Summer frowned. She had hit the other car, hadn’t she?
But as she looked around, she saw the dented bodies of two other cars, one the sedan, the other a large extended-cab pickup truck which had collided with it. Glass covered the road. Steam poured from the hood of the truck. Her own car had stopped after all, short of hitting either vehicle.
She climbed out and stared at the mess in front of her. Silence. Skid marks. Horribly crunched metal. This stretch of road never saw much traffic, certainly not on a Sunday morning. She rubbed both temples and forced herself to squint at the sedan and truck. No one emerged from either vehicle. With trembling hands, she picked up her cell phone and dialed 911.
Chapter Eleven
“Are you okay?” Rachael asked on the other end of the line.
Summer turned away from the accident scene and listened for the ambulance siren’s wail. “I’m fine. Just a little shaken up.”
Second Chance Summer Page 6
