If only she hadn’t promised Phoebe, she’d make some excuse to get herself off the hook. But when she opened the door to the salon, all was normal.
She started by strumming a few chords and soon commenced playing a song that she thought Phoebe would like, singing along with the harp as she hadn’t done in a long time. Phoebe clapped loudly at the end.
“Play more,” she begged.
Molly couldn’t help noticing that Eric was staring at her, and she avoided his eyes. “Here’s one about Ireland,” she said, tossing her hair back and making herself concentrate on the song. This time she played a chord wrong at the beginning and had to start over, but Eric didn’t comment. It was a plaintive song, one of Emmett’s favorites, and it always put her in a contemplative mood.
“Well, now,” she said when she’d finished. “Isn’t it about time for everyone to start thinking about bed?” Sometimes when she played the harp, she slipped into an Irish way of speaking, like Emmett, and this was one of those times.
“Isn’t it, though?” Eric said, flashing those white teeth of his.
She might have thought he meant something indecent by that statement if he hadn’t scooped Phoebe into his arms and carried her off for a bath.
“I’M GETTING TIRED OF THIS,” Phoebe had said after a few days. “I like being out on the ocean, not in this narrow little Intracoastal.”
“So do I,” Molly had told her fervently. As she had often remarked to her grandfather and brother and sister, a sailboat should sail. Period. She didn’t like using the engine any more than Eric did, and he made it clear that he didn’t like it much.
Fiona was capable of traveling only seven or eight miles per hour, so it was slow going. But this gave Molly the opportunity to see some of the small towns along the way: Southport, North Carolina. Beaufort, South Carolina. Brunswick, Georgia.
“It sounds wonderful,” said Mrs. Brinkle when Molly checked in at her office by phone in midweek. “What are the people like in those places?” Mrs. Brinkle had never been anyplace outside of Chicago except Milwaukee, where she sometimes visited relatives.
“We only stop to get fuel,” Molly told her. “I don’t get a chance to meet anyone.”
“Well, enjoy” was the reply. “I sure wish I could be there on Fiona. Do you know how cold it is here today? Twenty-seven degrees.”
“I don’t miss the cold—but am I missing anything else? Anything important?”
“Your grandfather called from the clinic.”
“How did he sound?”
“Like always, and with that Irish brogue of his. Flirting shamelessly. Teasing me about wanting your job. Don’t worry, though—I’m looking into a promotion to Legal.”
Molly felt a prickle of apprehension. She didn’t want to lose Lorraine Brinkle and her many skills.
“Oh, don’t threaten me with Legal. We need you in Accounting.”
“Mmm-hmm. But now that I’ve got my college degree, I’m ready for bigger and better things. That’s what your grandfather says, anyway.”
Molly could imagine Mrs. Brinkle rolling her eyes.
“I’ll have to speak to him about undermining our department. What’s Frank doing?”
“He’s working on the annual report. We’re busy little bees with you gone, Molly. I’m juggling five hundred things and loving every minute.”
“Great,” Molly told her, wondering why she didn’t feel the slightest tug of emotion pulling her back to work. The fact was that McBryde Industries seemed so far removed from her life at the moment, she could hardly picture the skyscraper building, her office, or even her desk.
“Don’t you worry about anything, Molly dear. Anything at all.”
“I won’t,” Molly assured her.
“I mean it,” Mrs. Brinkle said.
“So do I,” Molly replied.
THE SLOW PROGRESS of Fiona down the Intracoastal Waterway didn’t bother Eric. He liked it. Sometimes he even sat on the bench behind the wheel and steered the boat with his feet.
When she saw him doing this, Molly narrowed her eyes. “Is that proper procedure for a licensed captain?” she asked.
Eric stayed right where he was. “You can try it if you like.”
“Never mind,” she said quickly. She sat down, but not too close. She watched the birds following a nearby fishing boat, hoping for cast-offs. “You had to study to become a captain, I take it.”
He focused on the same birds. “Right,” he said. A stiff breeze was whipping into the cockpit, making him thirsty. He supposed it would be too much to ask Molly to bring him a beer from the galley below.
“Just wondering.”
“You thinking of becoming a captain yourself?”
She stared at him. “I have an M.B.A. I’ll have to go back to my job as a corporate accountant when this is over.”
Was he mistaken, or was that a tinge of regret in her tone? He took his time answering. “I have an M.B.A. too, but one thing I’m not going to do is give up this life for one I didn’t like much in the first place.”
He thought her jaw started to drop, and he enjoyed watching her recover from what he figured must be something of a shock. “I—well, I didn’t realize that you—” She stopped talking.
“That I had an education?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
He chuckled. “I guess that might surprise a lot of people.” She didn’t say anything, and after he’d looked away, he glanced back and caught her staring at his beard. Self-consciously he ran a hand over the stubble. He hadn’t shaved for, what, a month? Maybe more?
Her gaze was assessing, not critical. He raised his eyebrows, but she didn’t comment.
He removed his feet from the steering wheel, stood up and stretched. “How about taking over while I go check on Phoebe, get a beer?”
“Okay,” she said. She stood and positioned herself behind the wheel.
He went below, approved Phoebe’s completed social studies assignment and cadged a beer out of the fridge. Before he climbed back up the ladder, he ducked into the forward bathroom and took a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the sink. The crosshatching and fine lines around his eyes made him look older than his thirty-five years, and then there was the beard growth that emphasized rather than diminished the grooves at the sides of his mouth.
“It’s definitely been more than a month,” he said to himself, rubbing his beard again. It was starting to itch, but he’d thought it was well past that stage.
He set the beer down on the edge of the sink. “What the hell,” he muttered, and then he reached for his razor.
Chapter Four
That night they anchored off a marina near Jacksonville, Florida. After dinner, Molly gave Phoebe a manicure while they all watched Jeopardy! together. Eric proved to be a trivia expert, calling out most of the questions before the on-screen contestants even buzzed in. He was in a good mood afterward, teasing Phoebe about her Cinnabar Red nail polish.
“I love it,” Phoebe said, holding her fingers this way and that to admire them before climbing into her bunk. “It makes me feel grown up and girly.”
“You’re my best girly,” Eric told her before kissing her and turning out the light.
After Phoebe was in bed, Molly and Eric went up to the cockpit so that their conversation, if any, wouldn’t keep Phoebe awake. Eric rolled up the clear vinyl side curtains to admit a balmy breeze, and Molly busied herself sorting sheet music into folders that she’d brought along. The radio played soft music, and the faint laughter of folks at the marina floated across the water.
Eric seemed to be studying her, and she was doing her best to remain aloof and nonchalant. She had been surprised this afternoon when he had suddenly shaved off his beard, appearing in the cockpit without his baseball cap, for once, and freshly showered. As she’d suspected, he did have a strong chin, and moreover, there was a cleft in the middle.
She cast around for some safe topic of conversation. “How’s the engine holding up
?” she asked.
“Okay, I hope,” he said cautiously.
She sent him a covert look from under her lashes, trying to come up with small talk.
“What are you gawking at?” he demanded abruptly and with mock outrage.
She wished she didn’t have a tendency to blush. “Nothing,” she said.
“Is it because I shaved?” he asked, treating her to an impish grin.
“Maybe it’s the clean clothes. Or because you’re not wearing a hat,” she shot back, but she couldn’t restrain the smile that turned up the corners of her mouth.
“It has to be because I shaved. I could be mistaken, though, right?”
“You have made mistakes about a lot of things so far,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Well, there was the Queen Molly mistake.”
His eyes widened perceptibly. “You know about that?”
“Phoebe told me. Don’t be angry with her,” she said hastily. “She was only repeating what you said.”
He rolled his eyes and stared up at the canvas canopy for a moment. “She say anything else?”
“Not about that. I don’t think I’m royalty, by the way. A goddess, maybe. But not royalty.” She barely suppressed a smile.
Eric threw back his head and laughed. “I was miffed when you waltzed aboard Fiona with your talk of firing me and how you don’t cook and—”
She waved her hand in dismissal. “Please. The past few days have changed my mind. I didn’t think much of you, either, to tell the truth.”
“And now?”
“I’ve learned that you’re a fine sailor.” She paused, then continued. “Also a caring father.”
“Thanks,” he said thoughtfully. “Praise coming from you is sweet.”
“Mmm,” she said, wishing he would stop looking at her like that. She stuck a few more sheets of music in her folder and stood up. At that moment, the radio began to play a slow song with a throbbing beat, one she recognized from her teenage years. In those days, she’d been a true romantic, and she recalled dancing with her boyfriend to that same tune at her high school’s sophomore hop.
To her surprise, Eric stood, too. “One more thing, Molly Kate McBryde, before you go below.” He paused as if to assess her mood.
“I—” As she backed away, the folder fell from her hands and the sheet music scattered across the floor of the cockpit. “I’d better pick those up,” she said.
“Not yet,” Eric murmured, taking her hand in his.
Then, somehow, her other hand came up to rest on his shoulder. He pulled her closer. She tried to take a deep breath, but the air seemed to have grown thinner, the space between them more electric.
“May I have this dance, Queen Molly Kate McBryde?” he asked, his lips so close to her ear that his breath disturbed the wispy tendrils there.
“I never dance,” she murmured.
“But you have music in your soul,” he said.
“I can play the harp. That’s all.”
“And you can dance,” he said as her feet began to move. “Don’t tell me you never learned.”
“It was long ago,” she said helplessly as her temple came to rest against his cheek.
The song had already awakened memories of a time when she’d been in love with her first boyfriend. Now she felt a stirring of something that she hadn’t felt in a long time—nostalgia, perhaps, or maybe it was the lingering regret that she had sometimes felt in the past after love had gone. Whatever it was, it was a bittersweet emotion, and she cautioned herself not to read too much into the way Eric was slowly massaging her back as they danced. Or the way he held her, so carefully, as though she would break.
Another song began as soon as that one ended, and Eric didn’t release her. Instead they segued effortlessly into the new rhythm, which was slower than the last one. Around them, the night seemed to pulse with starlight, shimmer with moonlight, the water below them reflecting myriad possibilities, one of which was that she wouldn’t mind kissing Eric Norvald, who most definitely was not her type.
She pulled away. “Eric, I really should get some sleep. I need to pack in a few more zees before—”
He refused to release her hand. “Before you do something you’ll regret?” he shot back, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.
“Yes,” she whispered. She fled down the companionway, stopped outside Phoebe’s room to check on her, and realized that her heart was thudding crazily against her rib cage.
She didn’t remember until she was behind the closed door of the master stateroom that she had left her sheet music scattered all over the floor of the cockpit. For a moment, she debated whether to go back up there to get it, then finally decided that Eric would think her reappearance was a capitulation. So she crawled into bed, pushing aside the thought that sleeping would be far more pleasant if she didn’t have to sleep alone.
When she woke up the next morning, the folder containing the sheets of music had been slipped beneath her door. Attached to it was a brief note: Take a look at the top sheet of music, it said. A prophecy of things to come?
The title of the piece was First Kiss.
FIONA’S UNPREDICTABLE ENGINE began to make ominous noises somewhere south of St. Augustine.
Eric pulled panels out of the floor in the salon, spent time in the engine room cursing at the engine and soon admitted defeat. “There are a couple of things wrong, and I can fix all except one. It looks like the fuel injector pump is shot, and it will have to be specially ordered from Germany. In half an hour or so, we’ll pull into a little marina at a small town called Greensea Springs. I can check things over more carefully there.”
Molly had never heard of the place. “Shouldn’t we try to go a little farther? There might be better repair facilities farther south,” she said anxiously.
“I’d rather stop before the engine quits altogether” was Eric’s terse reply.
“You can’t talk with him when he gets in this kind of mood,” Phoebe said sagely after Eric returned to the cockpit. “The best thing is to feed him some Chunky Monkey ice cream.”
“He can get his own ice cream,” said Molly, tired of riding out Eric’s moods. Phoebe’s mouth formed into a surprised O, and Molly regretted her sharp tone. She looked around the salon for something to do. “What do you say I fix us some sandwiches?”
“It’s only ten o’clock,” Phoebe reminded her.
“Hmm. What would be fun for you?”
“I know,” Phoebe said, brightening. “Maybe you could wash my hair and blow-dry it.”
“I’ll teach you to do it yourself,” Molly said.
“Could I, do you think?”
“Of course.”
Phoebe followed her back to her stateroom. “You and I could take our sandwiches ashore and have a picnic when we get to Greensea Springs,” she said.
Molly could only imagine how it felt to be a child confined to a boat, for days at a time unable to run and play on dry land. “Good idea,” she said warmly, as Phoebe draped a towel over her shoulders and leaned over the tub.
Later, after Molly’s hands-on blow-dryer lesson, Phoebe admired her own reflection in the mirror. “I like my hair better this way than the way my dad does it,” she said. “I’ll be glad when you’re really my mommy.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Molly murmured.
“What?”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Molly amended, hurrying into the galley and opening the cabinet where they kept the peanut butter.
Phoebe hiked herself up on the table and swung her legs while Molly prepared the sandwiches. “Don’t you like my dad?” she asked.
“Of course I do. You have to like someone quite a lot for what you’re suggesting.”
“He likes you a bunch.”
Molly stopped spreading peanut butter and looked askance at Phoebe. “You’d better jump down off that table. Your dad will be annoyed if he comes down and sees you there. How do you know how much he likes me?”
/> “He shaved off his beard. He wants to be handsome for you. Do you think he’s handsome?”
“Um, yes. Do you want jelly on your sandwich?”
“No, and why don’t you want to talk about my dad?”
“Because I’m busy, and besides, you ask too many questions.”
Phoebe hopped off the table. “That’s what he says.”
She climbed the ladder to the cockpit and Molly exhaled a long sigh of relief. She shuddered to think of the conversations that Phoebe must have been having with Eric on the same subject.
ERIC GREETED PHOEBE HEARTILY when she came on deck. “I like your hair that way, Peanut,” he said. It was fluffy, not spiked, and the bangs fell softly across her forehead.
“Molly is teaching me to do it myself.”
“Good. I don’t know much about little girls’ hairdos,” he said, noting that the Greensea Springs marina was coming up on their starboard side, Bottlenose Island to port.
“Molly knows lots of useful things. Hey, Dad, I believe she really likes you.”
“How do you know that?”
“She said she thinks you’re handsome.”
“She said that?” Good thing he’d shaved off his beard.
“Uh-huh. I told her I think you’re handsome, too.”
Eric tried to see if there was a big enough slip at the marina for Fiona; otherwise they’d have to anchor out and dinghy into the marina, which would be a big nuisance. Too soon to tell; they were still too far away.
“I’m the most handsome fellow on this boat, anyway,” he said distractedly, and Phoebe laughed at that.
“You’re the only fellow on this boat,” she said.
“And how,” Eric said under his breath, as Molly started up the companionway wearing a shirt with a scoop neck, which showed off a couple of her ample female attributes.
“You can help me dock,” he said to her, hoping she’d notice that he’d given up barking out orders and was making an effort to soften his commands.
“I’m going to vacuum your room,” Phoebe said, looking pleased with herself. She disappeared down the ladder, leaving the two of them alone.
The Mommy Wish Page 5
