“Wait till you see,” Abby said as she withdrew the black velvet cases from the box and handed them to her cousin, who was the rightful owner of a good deal of the contents of the box.
“Oh, my sweet heaven, as Gramma Sarah used to say.” Sunny whistled a long, low sigh of admiration. “These are the sapphires Serena wears in the portrait. God, Abby, they’re magnificent. Here, help me fasten the necklace. I want to feel these babies on my skin.”
Abby laughed and aided Sunny, then fished in her purse for the hand mirror she had brought for just this purpose.
“Abby, you thought of everything.” Sunny grinned. “Oh, my, Abby, did you ever see anything so blue in your life?”
“Not that color blue,” Abby conceded, and she watched as Sunny fitted the earrings to her ears and slipped the ring upon her finger. “I took one of the rings”—she pointed to the sapphires—“home with me, before I knew it had been left to you. Remind me to give it to you.”
“And last, the bracelet…” Sunny appeared to have barely heard. “Oh, God, but they’re handsome. Fit for a queen. Let’s see what else we have here. Ah, the amethysts… do you know that Aunt Leila and I shared a February birthday? Valentine’s Day, the fourteenth. She always told me that someday she’d have something special for me, because we shared that birthday. I never in a million years could have imagined all this.” Sunny nodded slowly, turning the purple stones over and over in her hands. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Belle told me that Thomas gave them to Leila on their wedding day.”
“Then that makes them all the more special, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, here.” Abby reached into the box and pulled out the last envelope. “There’s one more, and wait till you see…”
“Oh, wow.” Sunny’s eyes widened. “Good Lord, Abby, I’ve never seen anything like this outside a museum.” Sunny lifted the gold necklace from the table and held it up to the light. “It’s the single most exquisite piece of jewelry I have ever seen in my life. Look, Ab, there’s little figures on the leaves. It’s hard to tell what they are… some kind of animal with a funny head, maybe?”
“I can’t tell, either.” Abby shook her head. “But it is pretty incredible.”
“Now, where,” Sunny puzzled as she fingered the long golden leaves, “would you buy something like this?”
“I don’t think it was a purchased piece.” Abby chose her words carefully. “I think Thomas discovered it on one of his forays. Belle told me that Thomas had given it to Leila as a symbol that he loved her more than the life he led before they married. I think this may have been something Thomas found… on the last trip he’d taken before he met her. Did you ever hear of anything so romantic?”
Sunny placed it on the table between them to study it. “Do we know where he’d gone, that last time?”
“Belle said someplace in Asia. One of the countries that ended with a ‘stan,’ she said once.”
“We should try to figure out which one,” Sunny said, adding reluctantly, “because maybe it should go back. It’s obviously rare and probably belongs in a museum. I love it, and I love that Aunt Leila wanted me to have it, but it really isn’t the kind of thing you keep.”
“That’s very noble of you,” Abby told her.
“Not as noble as you telling me about these things when you could so easily have kept them,” Sunny said bluntly. “Especially since you need the money right now. No one would ever have known, Abby.”
“Aunt Leila obviously wanted you to have them, and she trusted that I would give them to you,” Abby said simply.
“Well, if you don’t mind, I would like to leave it all right where it is. At least until my divorce is finalized. It would be just like Justin to want me to sell it and throw the money into the common pot to be split up, and I have no inclination to sell or to share.”
“I don’t mind at all.” Abby shrugged. “At least you’ll know where they are and that they are safe.”
“And maybe between now and the time I decide to take them, we’ll have figured out where the necklace came from.” Sunny slipped everything back into the folders and packed the metal box. “Did Thomas leave any notes we could look at?”
“Yes, but even better…”
“Of course, his books!” Sunny exclaimed.
“I’ve looked through them,” Abby told her, “but there was nothing that referred to anything like this. There may be other books I haven’t found, or there may be something in his notes. You ready to leave?”
“Yes.” Sunny handed the box to Abby to put away. As she did so, the light danced from the purple stone on her right ring finger. “Oh, I forgot to take off this ring. Well, you know what? I think I’ll just take this one piece with me. I do love it.”
They stopped at Foster’s to pick up something for dinner. “The sea trout is fresh this momin’, Abby,” Young Foster assured them. “Dan Bridges caught these hisself out off the Point, brought them in by ten, all cleaned and ready to go.” After a short stroll around the center of town, they loaded their purchases into Sunny’s car and took the long way back to Cove Road, so that Sunny could drive past the town green. Abby leaned back against the soft tan leather seat and closed her eyes.
Monday was almost over, and Abby had made it through. Alex would be on his way back from Atlanta, and whatever had happened between him and Melissa over the past four days was done. She wondered if the next time she saw him, he’d be announcing his engagement. The very thought of it stabbed at her until she could barely breathe. Thank God she’d been smart enough to keep her feelings to herself. Imagine how much worse she’d be feeling if Alex knew…
She opened her eyes as she felt the car slow down to pull into the drive.
“Looks like you have company, Abby,” Sunny told her. “Know anyone who has a red Saab convertible?”
The owner of the Saab was found in the morning room with his grandmother and two little girls who laughed as he held a piece of cookie just inches above Meri P’s nose to entice her into “dancing” halfway across the room on delicate hind legs with all the grace of a tiny ballerina. The owner of the Saab was totally charming to Sunny, whom he remembered and welcomed warmly. The owner of the Saab followed Abby into the kitchen while she prepared the fish for the oven.
“So”—he cleared his throat—“how’d things go this weekend?”
“Fine. Everything was fine,” Abby said without looking at him. And I should be asking you that question, she thought.
“Were you all right? I mean, were you able to work? On the bathroom, I mean. Since I hadn’t really finished up in there…”
“I wasn’t working on the bathroom.” She turned the dial on the oven to set the temperature. “I was working on the side bedroom.”
“I thought you finished that last week.”
“Not quite. I had a little bit more painting to do.”
He nodded as if in deep thought. “Well, I guess next weekend, I’ll finish the bath, and then you can paint in there. If you want to. Paint, that is.”
Abby put the fish into the pan and seasoned it. Why doesn’t he just say it and get it over with?
Alex cleared his throat again, then poured a glass of water. He leaned back against the sink and sloshed the contents of the glass around absentmindedly. Finally, Abby could stand it no longer.
“Alex, you obviously have something to say to me, so would you please either say it or get out of my kitchen?”
He set the glass on the counter and folded his arms, and indecision seemed to prod at him. Finally, he said evenly, “I was just wondering if I could stay for dinner.”
As if we would have refused to feed him, she later grumbled to herself as she finished the cleanup in the kitchen. In her distracted state, she had sloshed soapy water onto the front of her long denim jumper and forgotten to pull up the sleeves of the T-shirt she wore under it. Exasperated with herself, she dabbed at the front of her skirt with the end of a towel.
Sunny had taken a sle
epy Lilly to her bed, and Belle had gone up to her room an hour ago, but Alex had taken his coffee to the back porch, where he sat on the rocker, obviously deep in thought. After dinner, he had brought Abby’s radio downstairs, and now the sweet strains of a country tune wafted through the back window along with honeysuckle-scented breezes.
Abby poked her head out the back door. “If you’re planning on staying over, I’ll put clean sheets out for you.”
“Come sit and talk to me for a few minutes first,” he asked softly.
Warily, she came outside and paused before sitting on the step, about three feet from his chair. In the dim light, she could barely see his features, but she knew them by heart. She waited, knowing that whatever it was that he wanted to say would be said now. Abby steeled herself for the worst as she leaned against the railing. He rocked rhythmically in time with the ballad on the radio.
Finally, he said, “Do you remember my grandfather, Ab?”
“Granger? Of course.”
“Seeing that big fish at dinner made me think of all the times he took me fishing when I was little, before he got sick. Gran used to pack this huge lunch for us and make us wear straw hats to keep the sun off our faces. You’d have thought we were taking a charter out into the ocean instead of taking that little whaler of his out into the Sound.”
In the dark, she could sense his smile, and she smiled, too, remembering Belle’s husband. Granger was a dear man, one who had doted on Alex and worshipped the ground his diminutive wife walked on. The epitome of the true Southern gentleman, Granger Matthews had always had a kind word for everyone he met. In Abby’s mind’s eye, she would forever see the man trudging to the river’s edge in the earliest hours of the day, dad in a crisp red-and-white shirt, a fishing rod in one hand and a tackle box in the other—and Alex by his side. The business of the town’s banking could always wait, it seemed, where Alex and fishing were concerned.
“I remember a couple of times, when I was about eight or nine, he took me to the Outer Banks to surf-fish. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get that damned line out into the ocean, but one quick flick of his wrist would send that hook twenty feet or better from the shore.
“And we never took bait. Grampa always said the best bait was waiting for us right there in the sea. First, he’d catch spots offshore—shiny little fish with a dark spot—and use them to bait his hook, then he’d set about the task of some serious fishing. One time, he decided we’d camp out there on the beach. He’d caught a big sea bass that day and cooked it over an open fire right there, fifteen feet from the ocean. You know, I’ve eaten in some of the finest restaurants in the world over the past few years, but I’ve never had a meal I enjoyed more than I enjoyed that fish. And we stayed right there on the sand that night, in sleeping bags, under the stars, with the surf pounding away and the smell of salt so thick in the air.” He paused, as if seeing it all in his mind, then he laughed softly. “I didn’t get a wink of sleep for worrying that those damned little crabs that scurry around the sand at night would get into my sleeping bag and bite their way out.”
“Ghost crabs.” Abby nodded to the dark. “That’s what we used to call them.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it, how some things stay hidden inside you for so long, and then, in less than a heartbeat, some one little thing will bring back a memory so powerful it can knock the wind from your lungs as cleanly as a fist to the chest?”
She nodded, then realized that he probably had not seen the gesture, there in the dark, but she knew it did not matter. A few minutes passed before he spoke again.
“My grandfather was the finest man I ever knew,” he told her. “He was what I wanted to be when I grew up. He was everything I would ever need to be.”
Abby could feel the stillness settle around them.
“I had almost forgotten how much I loved him.” Alex spoke just barely above a whisper, his voice cracking just the slightest bit. In the dim light from the kitchen, his face appeared to shine with a soft, wet glow.
Swallowing the sudden lump in her own throat, Abby rose quietly to return to the house to give Alex a few moments to mourn the man he had loved so dearly. As she opened the door, he called her name.
“Yes?” She replied.
“I’m sorry I argued with you last week. About Drew.”
She stood in the doorway for a long minute. “I’ll leave your sheets on the end of your bed.”
“Abby?”
“What?”
“Listen.” He turned the radio up. “Isn’t this is one of your favorites?”
Patsy Cline. “Crazy.”
“Yes.”
“Dance with me.” He stood up, walked slowly toward her, and held out his hand.
“Here? On the porch?”
“No. Out there. On the grass.”
“I’m not wearing shoes.”
“I’ll carry you.”
As easily as Sunny would lift Lilly, Alex picked her up and carried her to the grassy area between the house and the garden. Lowering her body until her feet touched the ground, he wrapped one strong arm around her and slowly pulled her as close to him as she could get. He hummed with his lips at the side of her head as he led her around the moonlit yard in a sort of waltz. Abby’s toes skimmed the carpet of new grass, damp with the evening dew, and her head spun as if she had polished off the entire bottle of dinner wine on her own. If she stood on tiptoe, her head rested on his hard chest just below his shoulders. They swayed in the shadows of the pines and the rose arbor, the thick scent of honeysuckle perfuming the air and the gentle whoooo of an owl punctuating Patsy’s vocals. Pine needles pricked softly at the soles of her bare feet as she looked up into Alex’s face, but she knew that her life had never held a moment of more pure romance.
Melissa be damned.
Abby reached her left hand up behind his neck and drew his face down to hers. He leaned slightly forward to meet her mouth and seemed to all but devour her with a kiss that had been years in the waiting. His lips were soft and warm, and the kiss was hard and hot. Abby’s head began to buzz loudly like a disturbed hive, and her toes were curling at the ends of her bare feet.
For a very long moment, Abby thought perhaps he had drawn her very soul through his mouth and breathed it out again. She knew she was still alive because her toes were damp and cold in the wet grass—all other systems seemed to have momentarily shut down—but she wasn’t aware of having inhaled anytime recently. He tasted exactly the way she remembered, and his kisses were the same as the kisses that had haunted her for the past ten years. The only kisses that had ever turned her inside out. The same ones that years ago had fanned a living flame that had never been extinguished and had never burned for anyone else.
He kissed her eyes, and he kissed her mouth, and he kissed her chin, and he kissed her throat, and she knew if he kissed any lower, she’d be lost forever. When his lips traced a line down her throat to her collarbone, she knew it was all over.
He whispered her name into her throat, and her name became an invocation for everything that was necessary to sustain life on this planet. All she could do was to redirect his mouth to hers, knowing that if she didn’t return his kisses, she would die right there in Leila’s backyard, with pine needles stuck in her feet and the sweet trace of honeysuckle flooding her senses. Every inch of her body began to smolder and melt into his. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a faint alarm tried to sound, but she muffled its warning and blocked it out. She did not want to hear, did not want to know, did not want to feel anything other than Alex. After all these years, the hunger had been growing. Now that she could feed, she would.
He lifted her from the ground, and she felt her legs wrap around his hips as if they possessed a life of their own. She knew that if ever there would be a moment in her life when she would lose her head, it would be here and now.
“Abby…” He sighed into her ear, her hair, her throat. “I can’t stand it anymore…”
“Neither can I,” she whispere
d.
“I’ve wanted you since I was sixteen years old.”
“Seventeen,” she corrected him. “You were seventeen that year. I was sixteen.”
“It started the year before that,” he said between kisses on her neck. “I was afraid to let you know.”
“So where do we go from here?”
The question seemed to throw him momentarily off guard. He looked toward the house, where his grandmother and her cousin and daughter lay sleeping. Maybe.
“Back to where it all began.” The smile spread slowly, and he lifted her completely off the ground and began to walk toward the river.
She felt deliciously light-headed, and wanted nothing as much as she wanted to hold that feeling and let it continue to enfold her. She prayed that nothing would spoil the mood or the moment or the feeling of how right it was, how right it had always been between them.
“Where are you going?”
“To the carriage house, of course.” He grinned. “To finish what we started half a lifetime ago.”
She giggled into his neck, and he laughed as he stumbled along the worn path. There had been no need to ask or any need to grant permission. This night had been a long time in coming for both of them. It had never been a question of if but merely of when. They had always belonged together and, deep in their souls, had always known exactly that.
Whatever it was that had brought him to recognize this fact did not seem at that moment to be of any consequence. He walked along the dock in the moonlight and, with his right hand, pulled open the door. He had been prepared to have to tug on it, and the ease of its opening sent him back a step or two.
With the ease of a dancer, he stepped into the dark carriage house and let the moonlight lead the way, as he had done many times so long ago. He set her feet upon the ladder’s wooden rungs and, with one hand on her hip, guided her from behind up the steps to the loft. Halfway up, her foot missed a step, and she slipped back against him. He held her there for a long moment, absorbing her nearness. His lips found the back of her neck, and his left hand dragged slowly down the length of her, feeling every inch of her from the base of her throat to her thigh.
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