“Take a right at the end of the street. That is Egret Hollow. Do not turn onto Sandpiper Circuit until you learn to drive much better than you presently do.” With that she climbed into her car, clearly ready for him to move along.
He just didn’t know if he dared.
“I’ll give you a hand,” a man called out from a driveway on the other side of the road. He paused to pat two seriously cute twins on the head and plant a very thorough kiss on the knockout wife that was the spitting image of her children. Or the other way around. Devin’s thoughts were getting decidedly scrambled.
“Don’t let Dragon Winslow spook you,” he called out as he headed down the road ahead of Devin and waved him forward.
“I heard that, Vincent McCall,” she called from her open car window.
“Wouldn’t have been any fun if you didn’t, ma’am,” Vincent said it with absolute respect.
Devin found first gear and eased away from the two driveways. With Vincent’s help, he navigated the turn without landing in any ditches or running over Vincent. Unwilling to try any of the higher gears or try to fit the big machine into a single lane, Devin walked the road grader mostly down the center of the road and held up traffic in both directions.
“You grow the most beautiful vegetables, Tiffany.”
She kept her silence as Greg sorted her produce atop one of the big steel prep tables in the back of the Puffin Bay Diner. Greg and his father the Judge always made her a bit nervous. The Judge was an austere, silent man, and she felt like a trespasser every time she entered his kitchen. Greg was an amazing chef, or so everyone said; she’d never eaten one of his dinners. And he always complimented her produce.
“Winter beets, spring leeks, fresh spinach, and snow peas. I can’t believe you grow snow peas. This gives me some great ideas for tomorrow night, you really must come at least once.” Greg had recently added a Tuesday night dinner at The Puffin.
His father served breakfasts at the Puffin Bay Diner five days a week. His son turned it into The Puffin on Friday and Saturday nights—fixed menu, fixed price (very high). But not wanting to shut out the locals who had helped him get started, he’d recently added a “locals only” Tuesday night. It was back to the original tradition: stuff a twenty in the jar, if you can afford it, and Greg took care of the rest.
“Seriously, Tiffany. No charge. Anytime you want.”
She nodded, a little abashed by his generosity couldn’t figure out how to explain that she had no need of charity, however kind.
When he didn’t continue, she tipped up her head enough to see his face beyond the brim of her hat. He was waiting.
“I—” she waved a hand to the south. “My farm. Long way at night.” She sounded like a babbling fool, typical of her when in town. It was as if by being silent for so long she’d forgotten how to talk to people at all.
Tiffany heard the big truck engine.
“Will you look at that?” Someone called from the front of the diner. Soon everyone was moving to stare out the front windows. Laughter was beginning to sound throughout the diner.
Not wanting to join the crowd as Greg and the Judge were, Tiffany slipped out the back door and saw the problem…or at least half of it.
The back end of Peggy’s road grader was still in the street beside the diner. The front end was out on Beach Way. It sat at a dead stop. Even as she watched, it jerked forward about two feet, slammed to a stop, then stalled.
Devin leaned forward over the steering wheel as if he was going to cry.
Through the open back door into the kitchen, she could still hear the laughter and exclamations from the crowd in the dining room. She could see others gathering on the street to watch him.
Tiffany knew how that felt. The creeping truth that you could do nothing right and the sick feeling that came with it and pressed in while others watched. Her heart couldn’t bear to watch his pain.
She closed the back door and slipped up to the open door of the grader’s cabin.
“Devin?”
“Just shoot me now, Tiffany. Please?”
“I’ll bring my bow and arrow next time.”
He raised his head and looked down at her. “You have a bow and arrow?”
Apparently, she wouldn’t have said so if she didn’t.
“Uh, I’ll remember not to upset you. Do you hunt with it, too?”
“Elk and deer. Coyotes if my dog doesn’t scare them off. Though I only started carrying it when I had an argument with a bear.”
“You argued with a bear?” What planet created women like this? Rebecca Monica Monash of Sheridan Road never argued with anything bigger than a designer label at Fields. “Dare I ask who won?”
Tiffany simply looked at him.
“Okay, you’re here. Where’s the bear?”
“Salted jerky. I don’t have a freezer, so I had to preserve it another way. And I sold some to Greg, a chef in town.” She waved to the building behind her. A careful glance and she saw that the audience was no longer pressing up against the glass and the street was emptying once more as people went back to their meals and errands.
“Can I go back to Chicago now?”
“I don’t think Peggy would like it if you don’t return her grader first.”
Devin rested his head back down on the steering wheel. “If that’s the case, then I’m not sure I can ever leave.”
Devin watched as Tiffany walked once around the grader before coming to stand once more by the cabin door. Her eyes were the soft blue-gray of a hazy summer sky. Unlike Rebecca’s coolly perfect blue eyes the color of a frozen winter sky. He felt as if Tiffany was seeing him, actually looking at him rather than her own reflection in his face.
“I think…” she glanced along the vast length of the grader. “I think you should teach me how to drive that machine.”
“But I don’t know how to drive that beast. I can’t even turn it.”
“I saw,” and her smile lit up her face more brightly than the music had yesterday.
“Great.” Exactly what his ego hadn’t needed.
“Teach me anyway.” Then she climbed up beside him.
The bench seat wasn’t all that wide. Even though she was slender, they were touching shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. And rather than being totally distracting, he found it to be a calming, focusing feeling.
“I’m ready.”
At a loss for what else to do, he started on the far left and began explaining each control and what it did. And the more he explained, only occasionally redirected by her quiet questions, the better he understood how they interacted.
For half an hour they sat there, blocking the main intersection in town. There were no honked horns. No shouts of complaint. People backed up and went around the block to get by him. He didn’t know where he was, but it definitely wasn’t Chicago, where he’d be ticketed, towed, and possibly shot by this point.
Gina waved as they edged by the B&B. It had taken Devin another half hour to drive the two miles from town and news traveled much faster in Eagle Cove than that.
Tiffany had considered having him shift up to third gear, but if second was all he was comfortable with, she wouldn’t push him.
He set the blade at the base of the road up to the lighthouse. It barely knocked down the small bushes and it certainly never touched the soil. After fifty feet, she nudged the blade-depth lever with one finger until it bit in.
“You sure?” Devin asked tightly.
Tiffany glanced down at the blade now scraping across the grass. It clanged loudly on a rock. “I was going to suggest we go even deeper, but I’m not sure.” By halfway up she was sure but wasn’t willing to change anything as they reached the first switchback.
Devin negotiated it without driving them off the edge and down into a stream’s deep ravine.
As they broke into the high meadow in front of the lighthouse, Jake the eagle swooped very low along the other side of the grader to see what had invaded his territory.
“Yikes!” Devin practically dove into her lap in his effort to get out the door on her side. His abrupt exit had including popping the clutch and stomping on the brake. The engine stalled and the grader lurched, tumbling him out into a windrow of freshly scraped soil.
Tiffany couldn’t help herself. The laugh started somewhere deep and simply burst out of her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed.
“Oh, you should see yourself, Devin.”
“What was that?” He was scanning the sky from where he lay in the dirt as if the zombie apocalypse was about to land on him.
“A bald eagle. Jake is more show than substance. He only fledged a couple years ago. Bald eagles take a while before they become majestic.”
Jake decided they were of no interest and caught a thermal to climb up above the ridge.
“He’s harmless if you’re bigger than a salmon,” she reassured Devin who still hadn’t moved.
“Am I bigger than a salmon?”
“Most of them,” Tiffany managed to keep her voice normal as she told the fib.
Devin slowly climbed to his feet, leaving his dignity in the dirt.
Tiffany sat in the cab as if ready to drive the machine herself. Probably could, and better than the mess he was making of it.
“I thought it was a dragon right out of myth and fable. I’ve never seen one before and definitely not that close. They don’t look so big in documentaries.” He squinted up at the sky, but the eagle was now little more than a black dot.
“They look small on the backs of coins, too.”
That made Devin smile. Ms. Forthright. “Right. The ones on the backs of coins must be a very small breed. Maybe they should put moths on the backs of quarters; they would fit better.”
“Moths are lousy at looking noble. Perhaps we need bigger coins.”
“Life-size currency? You’d need one of these,” he kicked the grader’s tire, “to carry it around.”
“Graders don’t carry things. They scrape things.”
That stopped him. She was speaking perfectly seriously. Again that simple woman showed through the fancifully complex one.
“I think I’ve got this thing figured out now, if I could arrange for eagles to not interrupt my train of thought.” He circled around and climbed back in the other side of the cab so that he didn’t have to crawl over her lap again. The smell of her was overwhelming as he sat once more beside her. In a world of dirt and a hint of motor oil, she was like a fresh breeze. His train of thought was headed in a direction that had nothing to do with this machine.
“If so, show me.”
He almost took her command as an order to kiss her, but caught himself at the last moment and turned back to the controls.
He’d finished the meadow and cut the road. Tiffany was no more sure than he was about how to cut ditches and widen turns, but between them, they figured it out. When it was all done, he drove out to the lighthouse and parked the road grader with its nose pointing toward the sea. The engine turned over a few final, thudding times after he’d shut it down, then there was only the pinging of hot metal and the ringing in his ears.
Again, the infinite expanse of water spread before him. As his hearing recovered, the low roar of the ocean filled in the background. Then Tiffany’s soft breathing in the foreground.
He turned to face her and they were nearly nose to nose.
“Well done,” her voice was a whisper of praise that felt greater than any he’d received before.
“I couldn’t have done it alone,” which was true. She’d pushed him to learn and to be better than he thought he was.
She shrugged as if dismissing the compliment.
“No, really,” he raised a hand to her cheek when she tried to turn away. His fingers buzzed from the strong vibrations of handling the big machine. But through his fingertips he could feel the impossible softness of her skin. Her thick hair slid across the back of his hand like cool water soothing a hot day.
Then he leaned in and kissed her.
There was a muffled sound of surprise, but she didn’t pull away or push at him. For a long moment they held the kiss, his whirling thoughts stilled by the soft warmth and the simple acceptance.
Then between one eye blink and the next, she was gone. Out of the cab, on the ground, and moving away.
He scrambled after her before she could do her disappearing act again. “Tiffany! I—”
“Don’t!” She commanded him to silence, but at least she stopped her determined retreat a single step from the edge of the forest. Standing with her back to him and her head down, she stood still for a long time before turning. It was hard waiting, but he knew it was the right thing to do.
When she did turn, her hair covered much of her face, but he could feel as much as see her steady gaze upon him. There was no sign of the seemingly simple, overly direct woman now.
“I—” he tried again, but she held up a hand to stop him.
“What were you thinking?” She didn’t make it an accusation, rather a literal question.
“I wasn’t,” but that wasn’t a sufficient answer. “I was thinking how kind you are to help me learn that thing,” he waved a hand back at the grader. “And how heady a mixture it is to find someone so beautiful yet so powerful.”
“So you took me out parking on Lover’s Lane in a Cat 112F road grader, hoping for second base or a home run?” There was a dead flatness to her tone.
“No, I—” then he turned to look at the grader. This would be an ideal spot for lovers. In fact, he should install a couple of park benches for guests who wanted to sit together and admire the view. Just there, with concrete pads so that it would last. He mentally rearranged the parking lot for the cottage to make a couple of spaces to park facing the view just as the road grader now stood. “No. I didn’t kiss you for that reason.”
He turned to see her reaction, but was alone in the midst of the scraped-smooth meadow. Tiffany had stepped beneath the trees and had almost faded away completely.
He took a step into the cool shade to follow her, but stopped after that single step. She had changed in the woods.
She now held a vicious looking bow, nearly as tall as she was, with a half dozen arrows in a holder built onto the frame. It was complex, painted in camouflage forest colors, and looked super dangerous.
“You really know how to use that thing?”
In answer, she pulled an arrow from holder to string in a smooth, practiced motion. Faster than he could follow, she drew, aimed, and let fly. The arrow whistled dangerously as it passed over his shoulder.
He turned to follow its flight.
It struck a tree on the far side of the meadow, close beside the grader. It made an audible Thwap! where it stuck hard and vibrated. He definitely was no longer in Chicago.
“Uh, I’ll remember not to upset you while you have that. I kissed you because you are—”
He turned back, but she was gone. In that single moment she had slipped away as if she’d never been there at all.
“—so amazing.” He told the listening forest.
When it didn’t answer, he stepped back into the meadow. He would respect her privacy and not go looking for her. Especially not when she was armed with that bow.
Only two things proved that he hadn’t lost his mind and hallucinated her. A line of woman-sized boot prints upon the pristine soil from the grader to the forest. And an arrow driven into the heart of a tree.
Chapter 3
Tiffany was tired of running away. It seemed as if she’d been doing it her whole life prior to Eagle Cove. And now she was doing it here.
Devin’s kiss had been…lovely. She’d spent much of the night trying to find another word for it, but had been unable to.
For a long moment she’d given in, aware only of the lovely kiss. Then she’d snapped out of it as if slapped. Next would come grab, pin, and take! She wasn’t going to go there again. Wasn’t going to let some man have his way with her against her consent ever again.
Yet Devin’s kiss had been…lovely.
Great-gran Lillian’s journal didn’t help matters either. When needing advice, Tiffany had taken to opening it at random and reading whatever passage presented itself.
March 1900
Ernest is a common sailor, who has just delivered fresh news from San Francisco. My daughter’s business efforts on our behalf continue well.
Unknowingly, she has given me the greatest gift when she chose him as the messenger. He may be an unlettered man, but he is wonderfully handsome and such hands he has.
When he unlaced my corset and scooped his rough palms over the most private areas of my bare torso, it was but the beginning of what I discovered that my poor Clarence could never give me while he still lived.
Tiffany slapped the journal closed. She did not need the romance portion of Lillian’s long journal. The next weeks of entries, Tiffany knew, would read like the best steamy romance novel, filled with tantalizing snippets and moments. Clarence, the good man, had provided home, daughter, and been a fumbler in bed. Ernest had been the handsome lover who came to her when she was a lonely woman of forty—while her daughter celebrated her twentieth year in San Francisco.
“I’m losing my mind,” she’d told Fitz, who hadn’t argued the point.
Neither had Tall Guy nor the goats.
But she wasn’t going to run any more.
So, when it was time to head down into town for the Tuesday knitting group, she didn’t shy off. She also didn’t take the path that could have avoided the cottage clearing.
“I’ll just wave politely and continue down the road. I’m mature enough to do that.” A part of her wanted to take the bow and arrows in case Devin became unruly, but she hid it in the usual spot.
No Devin to be seen. Tire tracks marked the departing grader but no other sign. Nor was there any vehicle parked at the “Lover’s Lane” spot beside the lighthouse. Instead there was only the cottage and a half acre of unblemished earth. It would need a flower garden and perhaps an herb garden to make it homey. The arrow that Devin had left in the tree would definitely have to go. Though it was nice that he’d left it in place. He’d probably forgotten about it the moment she was gone…but some part of her knew that wasn’t true. He might even be upset if she took it down.
Keepsake for Eagle Cove Page 6