A Month at the Shore

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "You know what your problem is?" she finally said, snapping his reverie in two.

  "No. What?" He wasn't aware that he had a problem, but if anything, she was the damn problem.

  "It's this: you have a very formal-looking house, but it's in a woodland setting. In my mind, you have two choices: knock off the third story and turn the house into a cute little Cape, or formalize your landscaping a little."

  "Hmm. Why do I think the second option would be more doable?"

  She laughed—actually laughed!—and said, "You think so? Wait till you see what it costs to dig out a stump."

  She was so pretty; her smile lit up her face in a way that made him think of Christmas morning, waterskiing, and a double-overtime basketball game: you just never wanted to let it go.

  "So ... there's hope?" he asked, bemused. God only knew what he meant by that.

  "Sure there's hope. I'm not talking about creating an eighteenth-century maze or anything," she said, still trying to reassure. "Just some selective pruning and planting."

  She seemed so cost-conscious; did she honestly think he couldn't afford it?

  Apparently so. "Although, I have to warn you," she went on. "Mature andromeda don't come cheap. Not to mention, you'll want a good-sized shade tree to get a jump-start on the two remaining oaks. The sky's the limit, there. You could spend upward of fifty thousand dollars, depending how in love you are with the idea of a tree. I know: it's crazy. But people do it."

  He shrugged and said, "All of your suggestions so far make perfect sense. I plan to have Corinne coordinate the effort—unless you change your mind and decide to stay and make landscape design your real job, which you should—so I hope you won't have any objections to writing up your recommendations for her."

  When she looked dismayed, he said quickly, "Or, you can just talk your ideas into a recorder. I'll have my assistant transcribe them later."

  "Ken, I'd love for you to order everything through the nursery—I'd be ecstatic," she admitted with a sweet, earnest smile. "But I also really believe you'd be better off having a professional landscaper run the show."

  As soon as she said it, he realized how not better off he'd be. "Come around to the back," he said, ignoring her confession, "and tell me what you think." He turned to head off in that direction.

  For some reason, she dug in her heels and wouldn't move. She was staring at him, looking so baffled, so conflicted. He could not understand what the problem was.

  "It's not very far," he said lightly.

  She started to say something and then stopped. After compressing her lips in a hapless smile, she said, "Lead on."

  Whatever it was, he would deal with it later. For now, he wanted simply to hear her voice and share her dreams for a place he was fond of.

  Right. Who was he kidding? He wanted so much more than that. He wanted to slide his hands through her hair, draw her close, breathe her in. He wanted to kiss the freckle on her cheekbone ... run his tongue across the fullness of her upper lip ... nip the place where her neck curved into her shoulder. And that was just for starters. It shook him, the degree to which he wanted different things from her.

  That undeniable, painful surge of longing—where the hell had it come from?

  "—too much?" she was asking him.

  "Not at all," he said, so bemused by his fascination with her that he'd missed what she'd said. He was going to have to get a grip on himself, and he didn't exactly know how.

  Obviously something about her had seeded itself in his soul. He hadn't had any contact with her since she was—what? Thirteen?

  And even then, he, at fourteen, had made a spectacle of himself, getting so soundly whupped. He could only hope that she'd forgotten the incident.

  "A deer will eat almost anything if it's hungry enough," she was saying, "so I can't offer you any guarantees—but you should be safe with the Japanese andromeda in front, which aren't very tasty to them. Your rhododendrons seem to be surviving, after all."

  "Yeah. It's back here that the deer prefer to camp out. I imagine that they like the view."

  They were standing on the patio in the shade of a towering hickory, with a view that slid past the sulking lawn and ravaged garden, under a canopy of tall pines, and out to the water. It was a sublime evening, with a soft breeze and a benign sea ... perfect, just perfect, for an evening sail.

  But all Ken could think about was how much more fun it would be to be rolling around his bed with the woman beside him, having mad, passionate, sweaty sex.

  Chapter 12

  "It's a wonderful view," she said, envying his deer. "It's more charming, more intimate than our windy, wide-open one."

  "Mm."

  "It's nice to see so many bird feeders—and even nicer that they actually have seed in them."

  "Mm-hmm."

  She didn't dare look at him. Her heart was beating too hard, and she was afraid that he'd see it thumping against her rib cage.

  What was going on? She'd looked up, seen him sauntering down the drive, and that was it. Something got knocked off balance in the gyroscope of her emotions, and she'd been trying ever since to set it right again. Without success.

  "Did you say that you'd like a garden back here? Have you figured out what you want?"

  "Oh, yeah," he said. He shot her a look, then let it drift back out to the barren border where a few six-foot stakes leaned like a row of drunken sentries.

  "You planted tomatoes, I take it?"

  He nodded. "They lasted a day. Deer couldn't gobble 'em up fast enough. You should have seen me in my underwear, running after them with a rake one morning."

  She couldn't help a smile. "Well, at least you tried."

  "I'd do anything for a ripe tomato."

  She was picturing him in his underwear much more vividly than she was picturing him with the rake, and that easy leap of her imagination made her incredibly uneasy.

  "If ... if it's any comfort," she said, feeling the heat in her cheeks, "you don't really have enough sun here to grow tomatoes. I'd leave that job to the farmers and just buy from a stand."

  She found herself sucking a deep lungful of air, for no other reason than to slow down the beat of her heart. "But there are a lot of ... shrubs and perennials that would still grow here ... and that the deer would ... leave alone. Probably."

  He turned to face her, and she saw a new interest in his eyes. "Like what?" he said.

  Laura, even Laura, knew that the look she saw there had nothing to do with shrubs and perennials.

  "Oh ... like astilbe, for instance. They're colorful ... feathery ... reliable ...."

  "I like reliable," he said softly. "Tell me more."

  "Well ... four-o'clocks would work. So would Jacob's ladder."

  "Charming," he said, smiling. "Pretty. Tell me more."

  Clearly he wasn't talking about flowers.

  He drew a tiny gasp of pleasure from her when he reached up to tuck her hair behind one ear.

  "Li ... ly of the valley. And foxglove ..."

  "Foxglove?" he said with languid surprise. "Isn't that poisonous?"

  "Very," she said on a sigh as he tucked her hair on the other side.

  "I'm not that mad at the deer," he said. "Actually, I owe them. I wouldn't have you, if they hadn't had my garden."

  "Goatsbeard," she said, catching her lip between her teeth. "Ajuga." She was racking her brain now, trying to think of deer-proof plants. It was so much easier than focusing on what was happening. "If you had more sun—"

  "Then what?" he said, lowering his head to hers, feathering her lips in a kiss that took the rest of her breath away.

  "Verbena," she whispered, closing her eyes. "The fragrance—"

  "You smell much better than any verbena ever could," he said, nuzzling his lips below her ear.

  Her head was ringing with the nearness of him. "There's always coreopsis; they hate coreopsis..."

  "I'll never remember the name."

  She was still clutching her clipboard.
He slid it out of her hand, and she heard him lay it on the wrought-iron table next to them. He threaded his fingers through hers, pinning her gently in place, and slid his lips in a series of kisses along the curve of her neck, bringing her to the edge of a swoon.

  She was completely, utterly in shock. "Bee balm," she moaned.

  "I like the sound of that. Yes," he said, and she could hear the smile, hear the confidence.

  She fought back with her arsenal of ideas. "Helio-oh ... trope, damn it," she whimpered. He was tonguing the hollow at the base of her throat.

  "I've been wanting to do that," he said with a sigh of longing that tore through her.

  She was standing absolutely still. "Barberry."

  "Is it edible?" he asked softly. He came back to her ear, licked the edge.

  "Potent ... potentilla."

  "And how. Lots of it."

  He released her fingers, then cradled her face in his hands. "Laura," he whispered, "something very obvious is going on here."

  She tried to joke. "Besides your disappearing garden?"

  He silenced her with a kiss, a question at first, and then, with his tongue, a statement of fact. She answered in kind, tasting him, loving what she tasted, pressing for more. He made a sound in his throat, low, hungry, ready.

  With a wrenching effort, she pulled back.

  "I'm not like this!"

  He laughed, a shaky sound.

  She was staring into his blue eyes, trying to understand what she was seeing there—and what she was seeing there was confusion. Of course he was confused. He'd just taken a running leap over the railroad tracks and had landed in the middle of shantytown. It must have come as a surprise.

  "Well, we're obviously under a spell," she said in a wobbly voice, and she forced herself to snap her fingers in front of his face and smile. "There. All broken."

  He blinked at the jarring gesture and studied her hard, his dark eyebrows pinched down, his lips parted as though he were about to say something cutting and trying not to.

  Turning almost primly away from him, she resumed her review of his garden. "Here's an idea: why not lay down a path of bluestone, interplanted with foamflowers and periwinkle and mosses?"

  "Laura—" he said, turning her back around to face him.

  "Okay," she said sharply, pouring all of her frustration into the word. "Pachysandra. Even you couldn't kill pachysandra."

  "Good grief, who cares?"

  He took her by her shoulders and kissed her hard and deep, pounding some silence into her. No more play, no more evasions; this was for real. His mouth dragged across hers, nipping, teasing, diving in again and again, leaving her senseless.

  She gave as good as she got, returning fire for fire, the drumbeat of her pulse filling her head and blotting out thought. Her hands were as restless as his, pulling, tugging, trying to disrobe. There was a chaise longue on the patio, thickly cushioned and hidden by the encircling stone wall. They half-stumbled onto it, lying close along its narrow length. He kissed her again and again, leaving her senseless. "Here?" she said between ragged kisses, dizzy with the thought of him, crazed with the illogic of him. She opened her eyes to a high canopy of leaves. "Out here?"

  "Here, right here, right now, Laura, right now—" The words tumbled from him in a rush, exploded from him, as though they'd been building like seas that became breakers on a rocky shore.

  "Ken, Ken... why did you ... why—?"

  "No, not here, what am I saying, here," he said, suddenly propping himself up over her. His breathing was hot, heavy, coming from the place where passion simmered and then boiled over. "No—not out here."

  He staggered to his feet and pulled her up, urging her along with a string of kisses, then levered down the brass latch of a heavy French door that he shouldered inward. They were in the master bedroom now, a room as serene and well-mannered as they were hot and unrestrained.

  The bed was steps away. He pulled her down onto it, and they renewed the insane frenzy of their kisses, relishing, feasting, hungry for more. His hand slid under her dress and up the inside of her thigh in an electrifying trail, halting over the thinnest of lace. He hooked his thumb into the slender elastic of her panties, tugged them down; she helped the process, wild to be rid of the barriers.

  She let out a sultry moan when he slipped his hand onto warm flesh. She was lifting herself to him, offering herself to him, and suddenly she was hit with déjà vu: her response was a physical version of her naive offer of two decades before.

  You are my knight.

  "Wait ... wait, Ken," she said, turning aside, breathless from his kisses. "We have to talk."

  "Into the night if you like, but later," he said. He tried for a chuckle, managed a groan.

  He began to kiss her again, but she turned away again. "No, wait ... you have to wait. This goes back some," she said unhappily. She did not want to bring it up—she did not—but it had to be done.

  His hand relaxed and came to rest against her thigh, and she felt the poorer for it. He lifted his head but stayed inches from her mouth, close enough for her to feel the warm flow of his breath as he said, "How far back?"

  "I was thirteen," she said softly.

  "I was a year older."

  "You do remember, then."

  "The woods."

  She nodded, not quite trusting her voice. She felt absurd, dragging out a twenty-year-old trauma from the closet of her life. Girls nowadays probably went through worse pawing while they waited for the school bus. But she was what she was because of that trauma—and the letters they had exchanged in its aftermath—and it had to be said.

  Ken was waiting for her to go on. When she hesitated, he decided to fill the silence himself. "I'm sorry for that," he said. His face was the picture of painful remorse.

  "You are?" She was oddly thrilled to hear it.

  "Of course I am." He sounded offended that she was surprised. "When I saw them surrounding you, all I could think of—" He stopped himself and said, "You probably won't appreciate the comparison."

  "Tell me anyway."

  "You looked like a terrified fox, cornered in a hunt."

  He had it about right. Laura had no doubt that the group was getting ready to pin her to the ground and take it from there.

  "I was terrified."

  She saw the muscles in his jaw working in anger. "I know it. I wish I'd been able to do something."

  "But ... you did! You came at them swinging and howling. Who knows what would have happened if you hadn't seen us?"

  He shrugged off the idea that he'd behaved heroically, and she asked out of curiosity, "Why were you in the woods, anyway? I've always wanted to know."

  His groan was almost comical. "Hell. Are you going to make me say it?"

  "Yes," she said, smiling now.

  "I was bird-watching. There was a report of a snowy owl in the area. Not that I'd know. The assholes took my binoculars after they used them to knock me out before they ran."

  With the pain of remembrance, she said, "They did beat you up pretty bad."

  "Mere flesh wounds," he said lightly. "I was easy pickings for that bunch. I doubt that I weighed a hundred pounds back then."

  "But look at you now."

  Again he shrugged off the compliment. "After that debacle, I started lifting weights—well, not real weights. I was forced to improvise. I stole a few ten-pound ballast pigs from the bilge of my dad's boat, and I worked out with them on the sly in my room. My dad wouldn't have approved of bodybuilding," he explained. "Back then it was still considered vulgar."

  He said softly, "Why were you in the woods, Laura? I've always wondered, as well."

  She could understand that. She searched his face, under its tumble of thick hair, and wondered whether she could be candid with him.

  "Will Burton," she said. "For whatever reason, he suddenly began paying attention to me. I was so flattered. When he asked me to go with him on a walk in the woods—"

  "You actually said yes?" Ken asked.
/>   Mistake. "You think it was a slutty thing to do," she said with an edge in her voice.

  "Come on; you were thirteen. But ... Will Burton! God. Everyone knew he was a bully and a pig."

  "I didn't. He was a doctor's son."

  "And that impressed you?"

  "It did back then."

  "I hope you've learned a little since that time," he said, incredulous.

  "Obviously," she answered in a strained voice. But she was thinking, And yet here I am with a banker's son.

  Was she still just a sucker for flattery?

  Ken shifted his weight, and with it, the position of his hand. Instantly she felt the loss of its warmth.

  "So," he said quietly. "Three cheers, I guess, for the snowy owl."

  The hideous episode in the woods was a huge chapter of Laura's life. Ken Barclay had finally filled in some of the missing pages from it.

  But not all of them. "I was so grateful to you," she said, studying one of the opened buttons of his shirt. "You'll never know. Or maybe you do. Lord knows, I poured it all out in that letter to you. I'm surprised that I didn't write it in my own blood. You were such a hero to me. My knight in shining armor, I believe I called you."

  She was sure he had picked up on the disappointment, even disillusionment, in her voice, because for a long moment he said nothing.

  And then: "What letter?"

  Surprised, she looked up into his eyes. She was searching for truth there, and she found it: he certainly didn't remember.

  Painful as the effort was, she felt obliged to jog his memory. "You know. The letter to which you wrote the three-sentence response?"

  He sat up. "What response?"

  "You honestly still can't remember?"

  She was humiliated by that. She had let his adolescent rejection of her define who she was in life, and he couldn't even remember writing it. Well, why would he? He probably had got tons of letters from girls that he felt he had to answer. It had to have been hard to keep them all straight.

  She kept her gaze steady and tried to keep the emotion out of her voice as she said, "The response that went, and I quote: 'You shouldn't be writing to me. Don't do it again. And don't ever try to see me.' "