Summer on Mirror Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  “There’s this patron... Larry Franklin, owner of Franklin and Sons Hardware. After being widowed last year, he got hooked on watching documentaries. He’ll watch any one I order, then gives me a detail by detail review. He was in the other day to tell me all about the courting techniques of birds.”

  “Sounds riveting.”

  “You’d be surprised. There’s this songbird in New Guinea and Australia, called a bowerbird, who has a very complicated courtship ritual. It begins with the males building nuptial bowers—a tower of sticks which other males try to destroy. If they can protect them from being torn apart, they decorate them with exclusively blue objects. They’ll steal anything blue, often from other bowers. It doesn’t matter what the object is. It can be natural, like a flower, or a ribbon or even a piece of plastic. So long as it’s blue. After they’re finished, the female will go around and inspect them.”

  “Pressure time.”

  “Like being a contestant on Cake Wars,” she agreed. “But instead of $10,000, you’re out to win sex.”

  “Those are really high stakes.”

  “Indeed. But even then it’s not over. If the female approves of the blue bower, the male has to dance for her.”

  “Proving once again that females of all species hold the power. I wonder if they line up and compete like avian Chippendales?”

  “I don’t know.” She laughed. “Probably not, because Larry would have definitely mentioned that. But he did tell me that there’s some sort of selection process going on because researchers tried putting red objects on the bowers and every time the females chose the males who removed the red items.”

  “So while the bird wars suggest the survival of the fittest selection process, the females were choosing the more intelligent ones.”

  “They seem to be.”

  “Thereby giving an entirely new meaning to bird brain. And remind me never to play Trivial Pursuit with you.”

  She smiled and tilted her head. “You’re turning out to be very different from the man I met in the shop.”

  “Like I said, I’m supposed to spend the summer finding my Zen. Which is going a lot better at the moment than it was before I came over here.”

  “That’s what I love about old movies. They provide an escape from real life.”

  “That’s what my mom would say. But in this case, I think it’s more the company.”

  “Just because I’m a small-town girl doesn’t mean you can get away with a line you’d never try on a New York woman.”

  “That’s because I’ve met very few New York City women with a Zen vibe.”

  “I can’t decide if that’s a backward compliment, or you just called me boring.”

  “The one thing you could never be would be boring.” He leaned over, and although for an instant, she was hoping he’d risk the plague and kiss her again, he merely picked up her phone on the bedside table and clicked in some numbers. “I’ll take this tray into the kitchen. Now that you have my number, you can call me later if you want another delivery for dinner.”

  What Chelsea really wanted him to deliver was another orgasm. Or two. No. Bad, bad mind! Apparently the cold medicine was making her as loopy as the time she did tequila shots at a going away party for Fran, who’d left town for the sunshine beaches of Costa Rica after selling her bakery.

  Why on earth did she bring up bird sex? Oh... Her mind must’ve circled back to her ovaries doing the mating dance, which had, in turn, brought up Larry. And once again, as so often happened around Gabriel, her thoughts had gone directly from her head to her mouth, without passing through a filter first. She’d really have to work on that.

  “I’ll be fine. And thanks again. That was more than I usually eat for lunch.”

  “Okay. Get some sleep then,” he said. “I’ll call tomorrow, and if you’re feeling better, we can discuss ideas for the personal library book club plan.”

  “Hopefully I’ll be at the library tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow evening, then. I haven’t had Cajun food for years. How about we discuss it over dinner?”

  “Are you asking me out on a date?”

  “Do you want me to ask you out on a date?”

  “No.” Now she was as big a liar as Cary Grant in Charade. “It just sounded as if you might be.”

  “We could call it a working dinner. You have to eat. I have to eat. We can kill two birds with one stone. And Cajun spices should be good for your cold.”

  “I think this is where I tell you that I need to take a step back.”

  “Okay. How big a step back?”

  “I don’t know...just a step. Maybe two. Do I have to be so specific? It’s just that I wasn’t planning...”

  “How about I promise no door sex?”

  “I’d think that’s a given, considering we’d be in a public place and I doubt you’d want your brother arresting us.”

  “Good point. How about I swear not to have sex with Chelsea Prescott during or after said business dinner at Sensation Cajun?” He lifted his right hand.

  “You left out before.”

  His laugh was short and definitely more amused than she was feeling. “Maybe you’d be happier with Quinn. You both think like lawyers.”

  She’d been quite happy with Gabriel. No. That didn’t come close. Ecstatic? Euphoric? More like intoxicated. And wasn’t that part of her problem? She needed him to be with the stepping-back program because she couldn’t entirely trust herself.

  “How about kissing you good-night at your door afterward?”

  “There’s a logistical problem with that idea because I’d be driving myself home in my car. Which would be parked out in front of the restaurant.”

  “Since I suspect you don’t want to be caught kissing on a public street—yet—I could follow you home in mine.”

  She frowned, considering the idea. “Now you’re starting to sound a little stalkerish.”

  “We do happen to live in the part of the country with the most serial killers. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you on the way home.”

  “I live three blocks from the restaurant, with streetlights all the way. Yet... I suppose, since my house is on the way out of town, meaning you’d be passing it anyway, a kiss would be okay.” There was that quirk again. Chelsea folded her arms. “I’m glad I’m proving to be a source of amusement.”

  “Make that enjoyment and I’ll cop to it. Because I can’t think of anything I don’t enjoy about you, Ms. Prescott. Especially when you talk like a librarian. It gives me ideas of ravishing you in the stacks.”

  “There will be no ravishing.” Hadn’t he already done that? “Even bringing up that word isn’t helping.”

  “Okay. I’m here for the summer. And you’re not going anywhere, right?”

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to. Because of the—”

  “Reading adventurers. So, we’ve plenty of time for you to decide whether or not you’re up for a fling.”

  The sensible thing to do would be to cancel the entire idea of the boat shop visit and just stay on her side of town and away from Mirror Lake. But Chelsea had spent her entire life being sensible. And wasn’t sensible a close cousin to boring?

  “Why don’t you call me tomorrow afternoon?” she suggested. “I may just come home and collapse.”

  “You need to take care of yourself,” he said agreeably. “For all those reading adventurers.”

  “I’m not going to let them down.”

  “Of that I have no doubt. Lock the door behind me.”

  With that he took the tray into the kitchen. Chelsea heard water running. Then the dishwasher open and close, then start. Finally, the door to her apartment closed.

  Since she had the feeling that he wouldn’t leave until he heard the click of the lock, she climbed out of bed, padded into the living room on her orca slippers and turn
ed the lock.

  “There’s also a deadbolt,” she heard him say.

  “We’re not the city.”

  “I grew up here,” he reminded her. “With a brother who also happens to be police chief and who told me all about the multi-county-wide manhunt last winter.”

  She thought about asking if Aiden had also mentioned that said manhunt happened to be due to a domestic abuse arrest warrant, which wouldn’t have proven a danger to her. Then decided it wasn’t worth arguing about.

  She turned the handle for the second lock.

  “That’s better.”

  She was just about to go back to bed when she heard another voice drifting up the stairs. Mrs. Moore, her landlady again. The deep baritone responded with something that had the woman laughing again.

  The man was a chick magnet. Which so wasn’t her type. On the rare occasion she did date, she preferred easygoing men. Like that cute fireman, who’d only been up for fun times. Or Duane, the county auditor who droned on about analytical procedures, compensation balance and lockboxes from the appetizers through dessert. Or Bruce, the county’s IT guy who’d gotten the library’s computer system going again after last winter’s storm. He was cute, trending toward hot, but her mind had started drifting after twenty minutes of tech talk. The last two had proven boring. All three had been safe.

  Gabriel Mannion was neither.

  He was the type of man a woman might have a fling with. Which was becoming more and more seductive. It could be a once in a lifetime experience. Something she’d still remember when she was an old white-haired centenarian, rocking in a chair on the porch of Harbor Hill, waiting for a volunteer to read her Harry Potter.

  He’d already warned her that, just like Cinderella at the ball, her romance would come with a countdown clock. Or more specifically, a countdown calendar. As long as she could remember that she’d be okay.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WHAT THE HELL was he getting into? She wasn’t his type. At all. But the thing was that, damn, he liked her. Not only in a want-to-drag-her-off-to-bed caveman style and keep her there until September, which, yeah, he did. Even when she was wearing ice cream sundae pajamas covered in flour.

  The attraction had been near instantaneous when she’d walked into his shop, which was one reason he’d been so rude to her. He’d known that if he searched Manhattan for a decade, he’d never find any woman less his type.

  He was city. She was happy in a hometown so small it had all of three stoplights. And one didn’t count because it existed only to direct traffic boarding the ferry. His work was his life and his life was his work. Since landing on Wall Street, there’d never been any distinction between them, and although this forced time off wasn’t turning out to be as excruciatingly boring as he’d feared, Gabe knew that as soon as his plane landed at JFK, his phone would explode with texts and calls. Catching up with work, especially after Carter’s death, would require even longer hours than before the funeral.

  In stark contrast, Chelsea Prescott, who was as dedicated to her work as anyone he’d ever met, still somehow managed to have time for a life outside those library walls. Not only had she created the reading adventurers, he’d skimmed through the photos on the town’s Facebook page and saw her auctioning off books to raise money for school supplies, packing boxes of holiday food at the food pantry and delivering library books to patients at the hospital, along with creating a library at Harbor Hill nursing home. Factoring in all her volunteer work, she probably worked as many hours a week as he did. But her time actually made a difference in people’s lives. While he made money.

  “Which is important, too,” he reminded himself. It wasn’t as if he hoarded his wealth like Scrooge. He was a firm believer in philanthropy, and if it weren’t for people like him who made the money in the first place, how could the recipients of his charities ever have their scholarships, hospital wings and school computers?

  If there were times that it occurred to him, especially when he considered the number of homes, yachts and cars of those whose net wealth equaled more than the GDP of many countries, that a more equal distribution of that wealth would be a good thing, Gabe assured himself that when he reached that lofty level of what many were, not precisely wrongly, referring to as modern-day robber barons, he’d be different. He’d never been in it for the money. It was all about keeping score. No different from Burke’s football rankings.

  That was his story, and he was sticking to it. Even though he had a niggling feeling that Honeymoon Harbor’s librarian might disagree.

  Which brought his uncharacteristically wandering mind back to Chelsea. It was hard to imagine what she’d gone through. His family was intact, and although, except for Quinn, he and the rest of his siblings hadn’t come home as often as his parents probably would’ve liked, every single one of them knew that they were always welcome at home. When Dr. Doogie had strongly suggested him taking some time to regroup to save his life, rather than escaping to some tropical island, or going summer skiing in France, Gabe knew that like the swallows signaling the return of spring every year, this lush green land with its towering trees and impossibly blue lakes—formed more than ten thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age receded—was precisely where he’d needed to be.

  Despite his plan to hole up at the cabin for the prescribed three months, he’d ended up having to engage with regular people, like the guys at Cops and Coffee, locals he’d run into at the bar at Mannion’s—a part of the relaxation thing he hadn’t considered along with Honeymoon Harbor’s slow pace.

  Then there was also Megan, owner of The Clean Team, who insisted on supervising her team to ensure that the cabin was left as clean as the fir-and salt-scented peninsula air. He and Megan had dated for a few weeks in high school, but had an amicable breakup because he was determined to make his fortune in New York, while she’d chosen to remain a hometown girl. Divorced after what she’d casually brushed off as a bad choice in husbands, she occasionally brought her three-year-old daughter to work. Although he wasn’t usually all that into kids, he had to admit that the little girl with the double blond ponytails was pretty cute. And well-behaved.

  After Jarle and Quinn had pressed him to tackle the faering, he’d set up shop in an old storage building on the school’s property, and reconnected with men who’d known him since he was a kid. Guys who’d taught him how to cut chines and inwales from the same pieces of timber to ensure that both halves bent with the same uniform pressure, to patch every screw rebate and even the smallest space with epoxy putty and that he could never do too much sanding.

  Just like the anxiety attack that had been the impetus for this journey home, Chelsea Prescott had hit like a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky. Even as every instinct kept warning him that the cute girl-next-door librarian was trouble, Gabe knew that he wouldn’t be able to stay away from temptation.

  “It’ll be okay,” he assured himself. “Be honest about your intentions, only take it as far as the lady wants to take it, and you could have one helluva summer to remember.”

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH HER HEAD still felt stuffed up, and she was drinking gallons of honey and lemon tea from the coffee cart to soothe her throat, Chelsea was feeling much better Tuesday morning. Although Friday should have been the last day of the school year, Monday and Tuesday were school makeup days lost to a surprise February snowstorm. Not much stuck on the ground in this part of the country, but neither parents nor school district employees were willing to send children out in buses on icy roads. Especially when so many of those roads were deeply shaded by trees, unwarmed by any winter sun that might manage to break through the clouds.

  She stayed busy all day, catching up on acquisitions, ordering from the requests list and also some of the books that had gotten good reviews and looked like ones readers would enjoy. Following Mrs. Henderson’s lead, she also chose a number of both fiction and nonfiction books by writers wi
th different voices. While Washington might not lead the nation in diversity, her mentor had argued forcefully at town council meetings that a well-educated population needed to read about cultures other than their own. In full agreement, Chelsea had continued that policy and was proud of the fact that many books in Honeymoon Harbor’s library were routinely requested by others through the state’s interlibrary loan program.

  Gabriel had, as promised, called at three, to see if they were on for dinner. “I have something to do after work,” she’d told him. “But I could be there by seven.”

  “I’ll have Bastien hold a table,” he said. “Inside or out?”

  The outside courtyard, with its aged stone floor, lush plants and fountain in the center was lovely. Quiet. And, she warned herself, romantic.

  “Outside,” she said before she changed her mind. “It’ll be more quiet and make it easier to talk.”

  Even as she heard the words leaving her mouth, she knew that she wasn’t fooling either of them. Nor, she suspected, would the dress she’d brought to change into before leaving work. It was carnation pink, sleeveless with a V-neck with just enough show of cleavage that she’d brought a cardigan to put over it in case she chickened out, and a short flounce skirt. She’d bought the dress on impulse after seeing it in the window at The Dancing Deer last year and, until this morning, it had still had the tags on it. Throwing caution to the wind she’d also left a pair of royal blue heels in the car. It had been so long since she’d had any occasion to wear heels, she hoped she could walk from the car through the restaurant to the patio without falling over.

  “Outside it is,” he agreed.

  “Hot date?” Farrah asked on her way out, after Chelsea had changed clothes in the staff restroom.

  “It’s a working dinner,” she insisted, not fooling either of them.

  “Well, whatever you’re after, you’re going to definitely get it in that dress.” She blew Chelsea a kiss, then breezed out the door.