pocket to pull free a slim camera. Still juggling his coffee, he managed to bring the viewfinder to his eye and snap a shot. “I’ll call it ‘Guilty as Charged.’”
“That’s an invasion of privacy,” she said, frowning at him.
“I think that blush indicates that you’ve been mentally invading mine.”
“Gage!”
He laughed. “Relax. Nobody will see the photo but the two of us.”
“I don’t want you looking at me,” she grumbled.
Ignoring her, he took a slow perusal of the living room. “What’s going on?”
She swallowed a mouthful of coffee. “I’ve been planning on repainting some rooms, rearranging the furniture in others. Sort of...”
“Reclaiming your territory?”
“Yes,” she said, grateful that no more explanation was necessary. He understood her so well. “Yes, exactly.”
“You should have written to me when it happened,” he said, his voice low. “I would have done something, anything—”
“Gage, you were thousands of miles away.”
“I know, but—” He blew out a frustrated breath. “But I can do something now. Let me help. Let me help you paint. I’m the best furniture mover you’ll ever meet.”
She sent him a skeptical glance. “Don’t you have better things to do?”
“Actually, no. You’d be doing me a favor. I get tired of my own company pretty quickly these days.”
It was her turn to study him. “That’s a surprise. As you’ve pointed out before, your job means you spend a lot of time alone.”
He lifted a shoulder. “Too much time, it seems. Give me a paint roller, Skye, I’m begging you.”
What could she do when her pen pal put it like that?
And the fact was, his assistance helped her in more ways than one. Not only was he tall, skilled with tools and willing to do whatever asked, but being around him leached the awkwardness she’d been feeling over the kiss, even though they started work in separate rooms. She took the kitchen and he the living room.
They expected to meet in the hallway.
But before that, she caught him taking more pictures. “What are you doing?” she said, craning to look at him from her place on a stepladder.
“Just practicing. I haven’t held a camera in weeks.”
Weird. Because she remembered him never being without one since he was nine or ten. “Why not?”
He shrugged, and snapped again. She thought he’d focused on the back of her hand, speckled with pale yellow paint freckles. “That can’t be pretty,” she said.
“In the eye of the beholder,” he commented as he wandered off.
Half an hour later, she brought him a cold glass of iced tea. He’d opened the front door so that the breeze cleared out some of the paint fumes. Her gaze was drawn to it, and she tried to quell her instant quake of worry. Usually it was double-locked and dead-bolted. At night she hung a cowbell from the knob.
“I’m between you and your nightmares,” he murmured, taking the glass she proffered.
As she glanced away from the concerned look in his eyes, her gaze snagged on the camera he’d left on top of the sheet-draped sofa. She cleared her throat. “I never asked—how did professional photography come about?”
He pursed his lips, appearing to think. “I suspect it all begins with Rex Monroe.”
“Rex?” He was ninety-something years old, and a longtime resident of the cove. A Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent, he’d complained about the Lowell twins every year they’d summered at Beach House No. 9.
“He was annoyed with me and Griffin one fog-shrouded afternoon. We were wrestling and yelling at each other in his yard. If I remember correctly, he yanked us into his house by the scruff of our necks and told us we needed to better ourselves instead of batter our brother.”
Skye laughed. “He has a way with words.”
“In his study, he had an old manual typewriter and sitting next to it, a Kodak Brownie camera. It was a classic even then, something he’d had since the 1950s, but he...he let me touch it. Showed me how to use it. Griff was engrossed with putting letters onto paper, but that Brownie...the world looked different to me through its lens.”
“Different how?”
“I controlled it.” He finished off his tea and set the empty glass on the windowsill. “I could cut away the parts that didn’t fit my vision. I could focus on the subjects I thought needed to be seen. The appeal of that never left me.”
“So in college...”
“I studied political science, not photography. But one spring break I went with a philanthropic group to Mexico with the intention of building a school by day and drinking tequila