by night. We were there when the region was shaken by a magnitude-7.9 earthquake. The photos I took were the first that made it out...and they were the beginning of making my reputation.”
“And you continued globe-trotting and taking photographs,” Skye said. She didn’t know why the words made her melancholy. Gage had found his place in the world, just as her place was here at the cove. Or had been at the cove.
Okay, melancholy explained.
A crease dug between his eyebrows. “What’s wrong, honey?”
She didn’t want to say the words. This all ends here. We’ll never again be at this place together.
Once summer’s over, we’ll never again be together anywhere.
Still frowning, he approached her slowly. She didn’t move; her feet felt weighted to the floor, made as heavy as her heart by the notion that this was the aching end of everything. “Skye,” he whispered, and his fingers were just as gentle as his voice when he pushed a wisp of hair off her forehead.
“Don’t,” she whispered back, feeling as if she were teetering on the edge of the tall bluff at the south end of the cove, with only cold water and jagged rocks to welcome her at the bottom. Don’t push me. I’ll never survive the fall.
Instead of obeying her unspoken words, Gage stepped closer.
She jerked back, her pulse rocketing.
He only smiled. “Sweet Skye. Don’t worry, I’m not going to kiss you again.” Then he leaned around her to grab a rag draped on the sheet-shrouded wing chair behind her.
“I didn’t... I don’t—”
His second smile held more mischief. “Unless you ask me to, that is.”
Pulse still racing, Skye stared after him as he returned to work, unsure of her reaction to his provocative statement. Was it relief...or disappointment?
CHAPTER SEVEN
TEAGUE WHITE WAS ZONED OUT, staring into his beer, when a voice found its way into his consciousness. “Hey, you okay?”
He looked up, coming back to the present. August evening. Captain Crow’s deck. Tables pushed together and a big gathering of friends drinking, laughing, talking, as part of the ongoing dual celebration of Gage Lowell’s vacation and his twin Griffin’s impending nuptials.
His gaze slid to the questioner. It was the bride-to-be, Jane Pearson, who was seated near him along with her fiancé. Skye, Polly and Gage were gathered at his table, as well. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little out of it. Didn’t get much sleep last night.” There’d been no down time during his last twenty-four-hour shift.
Polly studied his face. “Work was tough?”
He grunted, then took up his beer for a swallow.
“I don’t know how you do it, Teague,” Jane said. “You go from ‘tough’ hours on the job and slide right into party time.”
Griffin leaned back in his chair. “I once did a story on Doctors Without Borders,” he said. “The men and women engaged in that kind of work are experts at leaving the dark stuff on a high shelf.”
“I suppose you have to separate yourself in some way,” Jane murmured.
Teague was saved from examining his psyche by the sound of female laughter at the other end of the conjoined tables. They all looked over to see Tess Quincy pulling her recalcitrant husband up by the elbow. His grumbles only made her laugh harder.
God, she was beautiful, Teague thought.
At thirty-three, she was no longer the long-legged girl he’d admired from afar when they were both kids summering at the cove. And she wasn’t the gorgeous nineteen-year-old star of TV commercials who’d become the unexpected darling of the country. He’d had her poster hanging in his bedroom. Her image had been the screen saver on his very first laptop.
When he’d run into her on the sand in front of No. 9 in June, he’d almost thought it was the beach house’s purported magic that had conjured her there. For him. He’d fallen fast.
Now, as he watched her husband, David, follow her onto the dance floor, he didn’t wish that the two of them hadn’t reconciled. Clearly, the man doted on her. Tess radiated happiness. But he couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for himself.
“Hey, honey pie,” Griffin said to his almost-bride. “It’s your song.”
“As covered by Teague’s first love,” Skye put in.
“What?” Curiosity sparked in Polly’s big blue eyes. “Do tell.”
Teague shifted in his chair and cursed the DJ who’d decided to play The Jewels’ cover of Cowboy Junkie’s cover of Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane.” “Can we talk about something else?”
“Not while I’m alive,” Polly said, flashing him one of her brilliant smiles. Then she turned to Skye, whom