Skye, in boyish chinos and a short-sleeved sweatshirt with a kangaroo pouch pocket, sent her a smile. "I haven't seen you around much."
"Sorry. Doing work."
"Me too," the other woman said. She drew out some mail from the oversize pocket. "Want to save me a delivery?"
A postcard. Jane reached for it. "For Griffin?" The back was covered in a slapdash of dark-inked handwriting.
Skye nodded. "From Gage. Everybody got mail from him today."
"Including you?" Tess asked the younger woman, looking up from a sheet of paper in her lap, covered in the same distinctive lettering.
Her face turned pink. "That's right. You know we correspond." She worried the ribbing on the hem of her sweatshirt, then turned to Jane. "It's really nice of him to answer my letters."
Tess snorted. "Nice? Skye, Gage is not a nice man."
"Of course he is!" Skye protested. "I mean, well, he's nice to me."
"He's a reckless daredevil who cares about his next adventure more than any woman in his life."
"I'm not just any woman in his life," Skye said, then her face went redder. "What I'm trying to say is that I'm not a woman in his eyes. I'm a friend from home, that's all."
"You keep reminding yourself of that, okay? The Lowell boys are not good romantic bets." Tess's gaze touched Jane. "Isn't that right?"
Especially the Lowell boy who was in love with a dead woman. Jane lowered her eyes. "You know Griffin better than I do."
"And I know my romantic bets gone wrong too," Tess muttered. "It's men that I don't understand at all. Do you know my sons have been practicing eating Cheetos with their toes? Why would they want to do that?"
"Maybe for some reason we don't understand." Jane's gaze moved to the cliff at the end of the cove. Jumping from it had seemed inexplicable to her until she'd been told that the resulting adrenaline shot had an anesthetic effect. It made some sense now. "Though Griffin tells me that the best part of an Oreo is the white stuff in the middle, which does not compute and never will."
It gratified her that the other two women concurred. The female companionship calmed her, and she was able to relax a little and think about something other than dark hair and broad shoulders. She sighed.
Tess glanced over. "Uh-oh. From the sound of that, do I take it that my bro is still evading the task at hand?"
Jane wished she hadn't used that word. It made her think of Griffin's hands. All day, she'd been watching them move on the laptop, the long, nimble fingers working the keyboard like a piano. It reminded her of his fingers playing along her skin, stroking her hips and opening her thighs. She swallowed a little whimper and remembered the question hanging in the air. "He's actually knuckling - "
Grr. She stopped herself, plagued by more images. She remembered him running the back of his hand along her cheek. One of his curled fingers stroking the slope of her nose.
"He would never talk about it with me, you know," Tess said. "That year in Afghanistan."
Jane looked over. "Somehow I'm not surprised."
"Since he came back he's avoided his entire family, which I don't like at all. David and I tried to get him over a dozen times when he first returned, but he's given excuse after excuse. Mom and Dad are living in Hawaii, yet he's resisted even a short tropical visit." She glanced down at the letter in her lap. "I've been thinking of sending an SOS to Gage. Getting him to the cove for some kind of intervention."
"Don't," Skye said quickly. Then she jumped to her feet, clearly flustered. "Sorry. It's none of my business. I have to go."
Tess frowned. "Skye?"
"He can't see me," she said, lifting a hand. Then, distress in every tense line of her slender body, she rushed away.
They stared after her, the too-loose clothes flapping around her as she ran up the beach. "What was that about?" asked Jane.
Tess looked grim. "I hate to think it's another woman who's fallen for the wrong man." She slumped in her chair, her hands draped over its arms, her long legs splayed. "What a summer. Disaster abounds."
Considering she was still living at the cove with her kids and without her husband, Jane assumed the other woman included her marriage in that gloomy statement. "It's not all bad," she said. "Your daughter's more consumed with her history project than pregnancy these days. Duncan and Oliver may have discovered