As she fingered it behind her ear, she became aware of someone's gaze on her. At the weight of it, her heart stuttered, then kicked into a rapid beat. Him? Swallowing hard, she lifted her lashes and glanced right.
Her pulse decelerated like a motorboat brought to a sudden halt. It was a stranger who stared at her from his place eight feet away on the sand. A stranger staring at her, she realized now, with a look of blatant interest. Her heart gave another - though milder - kick. And she didn't look away.
Before this week, Tess Quincy, mother of four and wife of more than thirteen years, would have ignored the man. But Tess Quincy, woman with a shambles - or was that a sham? - of a marriage, found herself unwilling to pretend she didn't notice his speculative - and yes, admiring - gaze.
So sue her, it felt good.
The man appeared to be around thirty, which made him a little younger than Tess, and his faint smile topped lean muscles and knee-length swim trunks in bright green. "It is you, isn't it?"
For a moment she was speechless, then words spilled easily from her own now-smiling lips. "It depends on who you think I am." With a little thrill, she registered the flirtatious note in her voice and wasn't ashamed of it. It had been months since she'd been noticed as a woman.
"The gum," he said, certain enough now that he strolled closer to her. "Brand name, OM. The green tea gum. You're her."
You're her. Another man had said those words to her once. She glanced down at the sleeping child beside her and fussed with the fish-patterned towel covering his napping body. The man who'd said those words originally had hardly looked at her since the precious ten-month-old was born.
The stranger came yet closer and took to one knee, holding out a hand. "Teague White."
She didn't linger on the handshake, but her smile stayed in place. "Tess Quincy. I was Tess Lowell when I made those commercials."
"After all these years, they still play."
Her shoulders lifted, expressing her own surprise over it. She'd filmed them at eighteen, and they'd hit the small screen as she turned nineteen, a long-legged girl in belly-baring yoga pants and a tiny tank, leading a class in meditation. The cause of the ad campaign's sustained popularity wasn't clear. It could have been her nubile teenage body, the gleam of mischief in her eyes when she told the camera that "OM will tame a wild mind," or, more likely, the continued heavy airplay. Frequency plus reach had meant success for both OM and Tess. She still sank residuals into her kids' college funds.
If she and David divorced, she supposed she'd be using those checks to help support herself.
Teague White's appreciative expression took some of the sting out of the thought. "You look exactly the same."
"I've had four kids since then."
"No," he said, shaking his head.
She felt her dimples dig deep in her cheeks. "Yes." Maybe that last pregnancy hadn't completely taken her out of the realm of attractiveness, after all. She plugged the Pilates DVD into the player twice a week and ran with Russ in the jogging stroller every other day. Night and morning, she brushed, she flossed, she glossed what she could gloss and she moisturized the rest.
Yet her husband, David, didn't look at her the way this stranger did. Her husband, David, barely looked at her at all anymore. This unknown man recognized that eighteen-year-old girl in the wifely shell, and he seemed pretty pleased about it. She cocked her head, the moves not so hard to remember now. "What is it you do, Teague?"
"I'm with the fire department," he said.
"Doing...?" Not that she couldn't guess.
A grin popped out, as if he couldn't hold it back. "I'm a firefighter."
She figured then that he got his own share of appreciative glances with all those manly muscles and the studly occupation. "Day off?"
He nodded. "We wanted surf and sand. You're an added bonus."
It was heady stuff, the attention of an attractive member of the opposite sex. She had plenty of close encounters with males in her daily life, but mostly they wanted to wipe their noses on the tails of her shirt or use her limbs for climbing like a jungle gym at the park.
Down the beach, someone yelled the handsome stranger's name. Both he and Tess looked toward the surf, where a handful of equally muscled men were tossing around a football. They