“He’s here to pick up Lacey.”
Fiona stared. “Lacey? Since when is Lacey going out with gorgeous guys old enough to be her father?”
“He is her father.”
Fiona’s jaw dropped. “That’s Lacey’s father? That gorgeous…I didn’t know Lacey’s father was coming,” she said accusingly.
“Neither did I.” And she wouldn’t have announced it in any case. “Lacey will be right back,” she said to Nathan, not bothering to invite him in. “She went to borrow some fishing gear from Thomas.”
“Good.” He didn’t wait for an invitation. He stepped into the kitchen and smiled at Fiona, who looked at Carin expectantly.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us?”
Carin introduced them. Fiona didn’t only admire his looks, she was disgustingly flattering about Nathan’s photos and his books and articles and how pleased she was to meet him. And Nathan was his most charming, too, saying he’d noticed Fiona’s sculptures in Carin’s shop. He’d thought they were eye-catching and appealing—even the weird ones made out of stuff Fiona had found on the beach. They were well on their way to forming a mutual admiration society when Lacey at last appeared.
“Hey, wow! You’re early.” She beamed when she saw Nathan already there. “I got some stuff from Thomas.” She waggled the rod, coming dangerously close to decapitating Fiona. “I thought I’d bring my camera, too. So I can take pictures. And maybe afterward you could show me some of yours?”
“Don’t pester,” Carin warned Lacey, who seemed about ready to offer yet another suggestion.
“I never pester,” Lacey said indignantly. “All set?”
Nathan nodded. “All set.”
They started out the door.
“Wait.” Carin snagged Lacey’s neon-lime-green ball cap off the hook by the door and thrust it at her daughter. “And don’t forget sun screen.”
“I won’t.” Lacey rolled her eyes.
“And wear your life jacket. You do have life jackets?”
Nathan nodded.
“And don’t stand in the boat and—”
“If you’re so worried that we can’t manage without you,” Nathan cut in, “why don’t you come along, too.”
“No! Thank you. I have work to do.”
“Mom paints on Wednesdays,” Lacey said. “She’s got a lot to do ’cause she’s having a show.”
Nathan’s brows lifted. “A show? Where?”
“In New York City,” Lacey said proudly.
The brows hiked even further. He looked at Carin for more details.
She shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”
It was a huge deal, and sometimes she thought she’d made a mistake agreeing to it. A successful one-woman show in New York City would take her to a whole new level. She’d had a couple of shows in Nassau and one in Miami. But Stacia hoped to broaden her market.
But if the critics panned her work or the sales weren’t there, Carin knew she would regret it. She had agreed to the show only because the offer had come after Dominic had discovered her whereabouts. There was no longer any point in keeping a low profile. And she’d hoped that the show would result in more money in case she needed to fight Nathan in court.
She didn’t imagine she would have to—couldn’t believe he would want custody of Lacey—but it would be better to have a nest egg than not.
“Where?” Nathan asked now.
She told him. It was just a small gallery in Soho. But he’d heard of it.
“I’ll have to go,” he said. Which would be fine with her because she had no intention of going.
“Dad,” Lacey said impatiently. It amazed Carin how she could say the word so easily, as if she’d been saying it all her life.
“Coming,” Nathan said just as easily. “You won’t mind if I don’t bring Lacey back until after dinner, then? Since you’re going to be painting all day.”
Hoisted by her own petard. Carin pressed her lips together. “Fine. If that’s what you want.”
“It’s what we want, right, Lace?” Nathan took the ball cap Lacey held and clapped it on her head. “Come on, kid. We’ve got dinner to catch.”
Giggling and grinning over her shoulder at her mother, Lacey followed her father out the door.
“Welllllllll,” Fiona said when the door shut after them, “I can certainly see why you went to bed with him!”
Carin flushed. “I was young and foolish and it was a mistake. Except for Lacey.”
“Of course.” Fiona nodded, then slanted Carin a glance. “You had very good taste. He’s lovely.”
“It’s purely skin deep,” Carin said. Of course that wasn’t entirely true, but she was not getting into a discussion about what had attracted her to Nathan in the first place.
“The bones aren’t bad, either,” Fiona said with a grin, “speaking as a sculptor, of course. Still got the hots for him?”
“Of course not!”
Fiona’s grin turned wicked. “Protesting just a bit too much?”
Carin clamped her mouth shut.
Fiona added a little more coffee to her cup and settled against the kitchen cabinet. “When did he show up?”
“Yesterday.” Pointedly Carin glanced at her watch. “I think you might want to head on over to the store. Turk brought paperweights by yesterday. You can price them and put them out in a display.”
“Okay.” Fiona nodded, sipping her coffee. “How long’s he staying?”
Carin sighed. “Who knows? Who cares? Tommy Cash is supposed to be bringing some toys into the shop this morning. You’d better get a move on.”
“You’ll feel better if you talk about it.”
“I’ll feel better if you go open my shop and I can get to painting!”
Fiona tut-tutted. “So testy this early in the morning.”
“I’ve got work to do.”
“Fine.” Fiona took one last swallow of coffee and poured the rest down the sink. “If you ever want to talk about it. About him—”
“I will certainly let you know,” Carin said. Not. “Now I really have to get to work. I need eight more paintings at least.”
Fiona picked up the box of paperweights and, shaking her head at Carin’s one-track mind, pushed her way out the screen door. “Down, Zeno.”
He was waiting on the porch, angling for breakfast. But when Carin shut the screen again, he followed Fiona toward the gate.
“I’ll bring you a sandwich for lunch,” Carin called after her. “Ham or grouper?”
“Ham.” Fiona opened the gate. Zeno, spying Carin’s neighbor’s cat, forgot all about breakfast and shot through the gate after it. The cat took one look, darted under the fence and hid. Zeno barked, paced, prowled, hovered.
Ordinarily Carin found his antics amusing. This morning, feeling hunted herself, her sympathies were all with the cat.
She took a cup of coffee with her and went out back to her tiny studio. She had three paintings in varying stages of progress. She had twenty or thirty sketches that she should be working from.
She started to work on a painting of some children playing on the quay. But the children made her think of Lacey. Lacey made her think of Nathan. Nathan made her remember last night, made her remember the kiss.
She couldn’t think—or paint—for remembering that kiss. She set aside that painting and tried another, this one a landscape of the windward beach. It was a wide-angle painting done from a photo she’d snapped when Hugh had taken her up in his seaplane. But her eye was drawn to the rocky promontory where she and Nathan had once stood together, hands clasped, hearts beating as one.
And that brought her to Nathan again. And the kiss.
So she moved on to a landscape of higgledy-piggledy houses perched on the hillside above the harbor. But somehow even the houses reminded her of days long ago when the two of them had walked side by side through the narrow streets, when they’d shared an ice cream, licking madly before it melted in the Bahamian summer sun.
Everywhere
she looked, there was Nathan.
Desperate, she got out her sketchbook and tried to figure out other ideas she wanted to develop. She flipped through the photos she’d taken last week, hoping for renewed inspiration. She had shot several rolls of film and had easily half a dozen island scenes that she could work on—children playing in the street; a cricket game on the “cricket grounds” with Daisy the resident horse-and-lawn-mower watching the game; a bunch of happy diners at the Grouper, sitting under palm trees decorated with tiny, colored fairy lights; a shot of two little boys riding the old cannons that had sat on the point, defending the island, for almost 350 years.
They were nothing fancy—just bread-and-butter shots—but they had always captured her imagination before.
Not now.
Now her mind’s eye didn’t see cricket players or children in the street or little boys swinging their legs on the cannons. It saw Lacey’s grin as she’d followed Nathan out the door. It saw Nathan’s broad shoulders and strong back. It saw Nathan’s back as it had been thirteen years ago, bare and tanned and smooth—
“Argh!” Carin flung the photos aside and raked both hands through her hair.
My God, it was nearly two o’clock and she had nothing—nothing!—to show for her day’s work. Fiona had asked when Carin brought her the sandwich and Carin had said, “It’s coming.”
But it wasn’t coming. All she could see in her mind was Nathan.
Damn it! Even when he wasn’t here, he was here!
Well, fine. If she couldn’t be creative, she’d go for a walk. She’d do leg work, make some sketches, get raw material. In the wide-open spaces she’d have other things to distract her.
She put on a pair of sandals, grabbed her sketchbook and her sunglasses and set out.
The air was stifling, steamy and hot, like getting slapped in the face with a hot wet towel—minus the towel. There wasn’t a tiny bit of moving air anywhere. The flag hung limp. Even the water in the harbor was flat and still.
Carin headed toward the beach on the far side of the island. If a breeze existed, that’s where it would be. The tarmac road burned through the thin soles of her sandals as she walked up the hill. She wasn’t outside three minutes before the sweat was running down her back and making damp patches on her shirt.
“You crazy, girl? What you doin’ out in the noonday sun?” Carin’s neighbor, Miss Saffron, who was eighty if she was a day, looked up from her rocking chair on her shady front porch and shook her head as Carin passed.
“Just out for a little inspiration.” She lifted her sketchbook in salute.
Miss Saffron chuckled. “If I be you, crazy girl, I’d be gettin’ all the inspiration I need from that man was kissin’ you last night.”
Her blush came hotter even than the beating sun. Carin wished the tarmac would open and swallow her up. Instead she listened to Miss Saffron’s cackling laughter all the way up the road.
She walked past the cemetery and the library, then turned up Bonefish Road, which led round past the cricket ground, over the hill and through the trees, eventually turning into a path that led through the mangroves down to the beach.
There she found a breeze at last. Tiny waves broke against the shore. To her right there were signs of civilization—a half dozen strategically placed beach umbrellas sat in front of the newly refurbished and gentrified Sand Dollar Inn, an island institution recently turned yuppie since Lachlan McGillivray, Hugh’s brother, had added it to his hotel empire.
Carin turned away from it, started to walk, and found no more focus than she’d found trying to paint. The only thing that would help was exertion—making so many demands on her body that she couldn’t think of anything at all.
It wasn’t smart. She could die of sunstroke. But it was better than spending the rest of the afternoon trying not to think of Nathan. So she ran.
She ran. And ran.
She ran until sweat poured down her face. She ran until her breaths came in painful harsh gasps. She ran until she reached the rocks. Two miles. Maybe more. She was exhausted, bent over, gasping for breath. But her mind was clear. She felt calmer, steadier, stronger. Her demon had been exorcized.
Carin shut her eyes and breathed a long, deep cleansing breath. Yes!
Then she straightened, turned and began to amble back the way she’d come—and saw, for the first time, the tall dark-haired man and the slender girl in a lime-green cap coming toward her.
Damn!
So much for steadier, stronger and calmer. All Carin’s sense of emotional well-being vanished as she realized she’d run right past Nathan’s house. Now he would think that she’d come to spy on them!
“Mom! Hi! What’re you doing here?” Lacey waved madly, then came running up to her.
“I finished early,” she said, struggling to breathe easily. It wasn’t really a lie. She had finished. Just because she had nothing to show for it, didn’t mean she hadn’t tried. “So I thought I’d come for a run.”
“In this heat?” One of Nathan’s brows lifted.
“I’m quite used to it.”
“We finished early, too,” Lacey told her. “Dad said we’d caught enough fish to feed an army and he didn’t want to clean them all. He knows a great fishing spot! Better’n the one Thomas took me and Lorenzo to!”
“Really?” Now it was Carin’s turn to raise a brow. It didn’t seem likely that Nathan would know any such thing, just having returned to the island yesterday.
Nathan shrugged modestly.
“We’re goin’ for a swim now,” Lacey went on. “An’ then we’re gonna cook the fish. Dad says he’s good with a grouper.” She grinned. “You can eat with us if you want to, can’t she?” Lacey turned eager eyes on Nathan.
“I wouldn’t want to intrude,” Carin said quickly, not looking to see what Nathan’s reaction to Lacey’s impromptu invitation was.
“You wouldn’t be,” Lacey said.
“You’re welcome to eat with us,” Nathan seconded.
But Carin didn’t want to eat with them. “I’m…having a guest for dinner,” she improvised.
Lacey looked surprised. “Who?”
“Hugh.”
She only hoped he was home. If he was, there was no doubt that Hugh McGillivray, Pelican Cay’s “best-looking bachelor”—his own description—would say yes to pulling up a chair to her table tonight. Hugh was notorious for trying to wangle dinner invitations. He also made no secret of his attraction to her—an attraction that Carin generally discouraged.
Well, one meal wouldn’t get Hugh’s hopes up. She just prayed he wasn’t already eating at someone else’s house.
“Bring him,” Lacey said promptly. “Hugh’s just a friend,” she explained to her father. “Remember, I told you about him. He’s the one who flew Lorenzo to Nassau.”
“Right.” Nathan looked at Carin. “Bring him along.” There was an edge to his voice. Still Carin hesitated.
“Come, Mom. Please,” Lacey begged. “It’d be fun.”
It wouldn’t be fun at all. But maybe if she brought Hugh, Nathan would think she and Hugh were an item. Maybe he’d realize that he didn’t need to stay around Pelican Cay, that Lacey didn’t need a full-time father.
“I’ll ask Hugh,” Carin said. “I’ll let you know.”
“Seven o’clock,” Nathan said. “I can pick you up.”
“Hugh has a car. Or we’ll walk.”
Nathan looked as if he might argue, but Lacey grabbed his hand. “C’mon, Dad. Let’s swim. And I want to show you how I can stand on my hands.”
Carin swallowed the temptation to tell Lacey not to brag. She should be pleased that daughter and father were forming a relationship, forging bonds, making connections. But she turned away at the sight of Nathan’s fingers curling around their daughter’s as he allowed himself to be led toward the water. She couldn’t look. It made her wish…
She didn’t want to wish.
“Dinner?” Hugh looked amazed, then delighted at Carin’s invitation.
“You’re inviting me to dinner?”
A grin cracked his handsome face as he looked up from the boat engine he was working on. Hugh McGillivray had dancing blue eyes and thick dark hair, cheekbones to die for and a once-broken nose that merely added to his appeal. And even with a streak of engine grease on one cheek and another on his bare muscular chest, it was true, what he always claimed—that he was the best-looking bachelor on Pelican Cay.
Or he had been until yesterday, a tiny voice piped up in Carin’s brain.
“Yes, dinner,” Carin said firmly, ignoring the traitorous voice, not wanting to admit that, even now, in her eyes Nathan was far more appealing. “Tonight. If you don’t have other plans.” Please God, don’t let him have other plans.
“Sounds great,” Hugh said cheerfully. “I’ll bring the beer.”
“Not necessary,” Carin said quickly. At Hugh’s look of surprise, she shifted from one foot to the other. “It’s, um, it’s not at my place. Well, it was going to be, but…there’s been a change in plans. My, um…that is, Lacey’s…father…is on the island…visiting…and he took Lacey fishing and they asked if we’d like to come to dinner.” She said all this in sort of a jerky stop-and-go jumble and wasn’t surprised when Hugh cocked a brow.
“Invited us?” Clearly he was reassessing the invitation and didn’t believe her one bit. Carin couldn’t blame him.
“Invited me,” she clarified. “But I didn’t want—I said I was inviting you to dinner—” she flushed a little admitting that “—and Lacey said bring you, and Nathan said yes, do. And, well…you know.”
Hugh knew. “Right,” he said. “So you want me to go as your boyfriend?”
Carin felt the heat in her cheeks increase. “I don’t—I mean, it’s not what you think,” she said lamely.
Hugh tilted his head. “Oh? And what do I think?”
She put her hands on her hips. “You think I’m still attracted to him. I’m not!”
Hugh’s silence told her what he thought of that remark.
“Of course he’s attractive,” Carin allowed, because it was impossible to deny that Nathan was a damned attractive man. It was the fact that he didn’t love her and had left her that she found unattractive! “But I’m not attracted to him.”
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