A surge of surprised bliss coursed through her, leaving her schoolgirl-giddy at his apparent proposal. She arched her neck, offering it for him to explore; there was teasing laughter in her voice as she said, "Is this one of those male, before-we-have-sex assurances?"
"Marry me and find out."
Oh—no ambiguity there. She bit her lip against a stinging rush of unexpected tears. In the back of her heart was the realization that this was how it should feel when a man wants a woman forever. Happy and right.
But she wanted to be fair—because she really did know about men before sex—and so she said, "Ask me again ... afterward."
"Too long to wait." He pinned her in a new, fierce kiss that thrilled right through her and left her gasping for breath.
"Yes, then. I will," she said. "Yes. Yes."
"I'll take that as a yes," he said, smiling against her cheek. He picked up the blanket and threw it over his shoulder again, and they half-walked, half-stumbled the rest of the way to the beach, grabbing at buttons and stopping for passionate kisses along the way. By the time he snapped the blanket open and let it float down to the sand, her bra was undone, her breasts loose and feeling sexy under her tee. His own shirt was half in, half out of his waist; the belt that circled it was completely unbuckled.
They were a laughing, disheveled pair, an embarrassment to the neighborhood. Laura was gleeful at the prospect of making love under the stars on a Chepaquit beach. She had fantasized about it since puberty—such a doable fantasy, and still not done.
Ken took her in his arms and they kissed, then kicked off their shoes and fell to their knees, exploring, reaching, snagging fabric and pulling it up and away. His shirt went sailing, and her top, and when he slid her bra from her shoulders and tossed it aside, she felt the cool night air across her naked breasts and her desire went ratcheting higher, it was all so fresh, so new, so glorious.
"Take me, I am yours," she said, laughing and falling on her back. She threw out her arms and spread her legs. "X marks the spot," she added wantonly, happy and reckless in this respite of passion.
"I'll make a note of it," Ken said, grinning. He bent his head over her and kissed the zipper of her jeans and said, "Yeah, I think I can find my way back here."
He stripped away his slacks and underwear and she thought, Almost there. His nakedness was shadowy and alluring; even in the jet-black night, she could see how aroused he was.
He undid the brass button of her jeans, and then the zipper, and she lifted herself to help the disrobing. Peeling away her jeans and undies to just below her knees, he paused to slide his hands up the sides of her thighs, circling inward, heading for the spot marked X.
She held her breath as he lowered his head again over her, this time kissing the soft curls there. "I shall return," he promised, and he finished undressing her.
He came back to lie alongside her after that, and the thrill of her bare skin against his was made more so by the exquisite beauty of their surroundings.
"I've dreamed of you ... this, with you," he said simply. He kissed her, slowly at first and then again and again, warm, wet minglings of her mouth and his. Between kisses she murmured his name, murmured her love, and he answered in kind, the low, sweet cry of one lonely creature for its soulmate in the scary vastness of the universe.
Down he trailed, heating her with kisses everywhere: her throat, the curve of her neck, the tip of one breast and then the other, then a hungry detour back to her mouth before resuming course again. But always, always, she knew that he was bound for the X.
He arrived. Writhing under the hot caresses of his tongue, she gripped the blanket's edge, found sand, rolled it through her fingers. Breathing deep, she sucked in the tang of the ocean. She opened her eyes: the scattering of stars had become a thick spill of glitter across a bolt of velvet. So much beauty, so much pleasure, all for her.
She was on that beach at last. Her heartbeat became a drumbeat and her moans crumbled into whimpers as he took her to the next level, and the next after that. She was burning all over, her eyes glazing as she arched herself into his kisses. It became an effort to draw in breath. The starry swath in the sky above her pulsed blue and then red and then burst, showering her with licks of flame, consuming her completely.
She lay in a state of inertia, too spent to move.
Ken came back up alongside her and kissed the tip of her nose. "So. What do you think of making love on the beach?"
She sighed and said, "Oh ... you know what they say: location, location, location."
He laughed at that and smoothed her hair and seemed in no great urgency at all. But she knew he was, and so she said, "You do realize that you yourself are zero for two now?"
"Not by my reckoning; I look at it as two for two," he said gallantly.
To die for. Any man who put a woman first was one you didn't let go. She said softly, "Hey, how about letting me drive now?"
"Uh-h, sure ... let me get the keys."
She could tell he was startled, and that gave her yet more pleasure. She nudged him gently on his back, and he didn't seem to have any problem with it. At all. She leaned over him and with her tongue brought him to a rock-solid state, reveling in the aroused pace of his breathing.
"Better ... slow ... down," he said, his voice breaking on the breaths outward.
"Yessir." Immediately she straddled him, fitting herself over him, filling herself with him. Her nerve endings flamed back up, after all; she was aware that with this man, the fire would probably simmer deep for the rest of her life.
He cupped her behind with his hands and said, "You are so beautiful."
She laughed, because he couldn't possibly see more than a shadow of her on the dark beach, but she knew what he meant: she was just as aware of his own beauty.
"Don't look at me," she said. "Look at the stars. Aren't they wonderful?" She began a slow, tentative rhythm over him.
He groaned softly as she picked up the pace, and he said, "You are the stars." She moved faster, again and again, leaning forward so that she herself could savor the strokes, stealing pleasure when she had meant only to offer it to him.
"The stars, the moon, the sun ... ah, Laura," he said in her fierce, pumping race to the finish. "I love you, love—"
Suddenly he pinned her to him, plunging deep inside, taking her; and Laura felt herself slide into her own satisfaction, more gently this time.
After a long, quiet, perfect moment, she rolled off him and lay on her back, nestling on his arm to gaze at the stars with him. There seemed, now, no need for words ... just a sigh or two, a touch, a kiss.
The night was truly spectacular, the beauty of the star-studded sky crushing in its magnitude. She and Ken were as insignificant, in the grand scheme of things, as any two grains of sand on the beach. But in the smaller world that they had just made their own, how vastly important they were, each to the other.
Chapter 29
Because she wasn't used to walking around strange houses naked, Laura donned one of Ken's white T-shirts. The sleeves came down to her elbows, and the hem came down to the top of her thighs, but it did the job. More or less. She was staring into the refrigerator, looking for something unhealthy to eat, when Ken caught her from behind and slid his hands under the shirt. He pulled her to him as he nibbled the lobe of her ear, something Laura hadn't a clue that she loved until the night before.
"Mmm," she said, still thrilling to his touch. "Morning. I'm starved, and there's no chocolate cake in here. Orange juice, eggs, whole wheat bread—that's it? What gives?"
"Who knew?" he said, rocking her lightly in his arms. "I haven't had anyone stay here overnight since—well, how about that? I've never had anyone stay here overnight."
She looked up over her shoulder at him and said, "You lie."
"Honest. I bought the house from my mother only a couple of years ago, and ...." He shrugged off the rest of an explanation.
Which Laura was only too happy to supply. "And when you dated, you wer
e the one who was invited inside for—shall we say—coffee, am I right?"
"Are you jealous? Cool," he said, burying his face in her hair. He nipped at the back of her neck, confident and possessing. "I'm seriously flattered."
"Can I be jealous retroactively?" she asked, sighing happily. "If so, then put me down for some of it."
He turned her in his arms and said, "That's one emotion you will never have to know. And that, lady, is the God's honest truth."
She had no doubt; she could see it in his eyes. "I do love you," she said, lost in that emotion for him. "Here's an awful cliché: I didn't know it could be like this."
Her gaze was drawn to the gold band with its high-pronged setting of a single, small diamond that she was wearing on her ring finger. Ken had got up in the middle of the night and had come back with it to bed; he'd had to wake Laura up to give it to her.
Bemused and enchanted and droopy with sleep, she had murmured, "Where did this come from?"
"I caught the last shooting star before we came in from the beach," he'd told her, and at the time it seemed like a lovely, plausible explanation.
But in the hour before dawn, when they awoke and made love again, he explained that the ring had belonged to his grandmother, and then to his mother, and that his mother had given it to him after his father had died.
"Because you never know when you might need it," she'd told him at the time. "You have to be ready to strike when the iron is hot. That's how it was with your father and me."
A simple, motherly remark. It gave Laura hope that someday, despite the obvious differences between them, she and Camille Barclay would be friends.
****
Over a breakfast of juice, toast, and eggs and no chocolate cake, the talk turned, as it had on and off all night, back to the ongoing investigation. Despite her euphoria—maybe because of it—Laura was more deeply concerned than ever about Snack.
"It's the knife that I'm worried about most," Laura said.
Ken had told her everything he knew about the investigation so far, and part of what he knew was the knife.
"Yeah," he conceded. "I was hoping it was your father's."
Laura shook her head morosely.
She said, "I'll have to tell them—won't I?—that I personally saved up to have it engraved for Snack's graduation present. He must have given it to Sylvia as a gift."
"Or lent it to her for the day. You don't know. You all use knives."
"Yes, but when I think back ... Snack really did have a fierce thing about her. There's no point in denying it. And the knife was a proud possession. You know? Kind of a little like—?" She held up her hand with the ring on it.
"I understand," Ken said, nodding.
"I hate this," Laura moaned. "I feel as if I possess all the testimony they need to string my brother up. I know who the knife belonged to. I know about the horrible fight Snack had with my father late that awful night—the same night that, earlier, Billy says my brother fought with Sylvia. I know that Snack ran away from home right after the beating my father gave him. And I remember, now, that I wondered if maybe he'd eloped with Sylvia. Which is your fault, by the way," she added glumly.
"Come again?"
"After last night ... after the beach ... all kinds of dams seemed to break," she said. "Things came flooding back that I haven't let myself think about in years and years. And one of them was the quaint idea that Snack had eloped with Sylvia after she said that she was thinking of quitting her job at Shore Gardens. Snack was only fifteen, then; but never mind. The point is, why would I even have had the thought if he hadn't been wild about her?"
Ken smiled and said, "Maybe because you like happy-ever-afters?"
She laughed. "Oh, yeah. Snack and Sylvia. There's a wedding-cake couple. Actually, do you know what kind of woman Snack really needs? Someone who'd be half girlfriend, half mother to him. That would work. But a bad boy and a bad girl ..." She snorted and said, "That's not generally a recipe for success."
"Have it all figured out, do you, Miss Lonelyhearts?" He reached over and gave the ring on her finger a tug. "As soon as we get ourselves properly wed, we'll find someone for your brother. It can be done. He's a good kid."
"With a rap sheet. Which is another thing."
Laura sighed and broke off a piece of toast, but each piece had been going down harder, and she was merely playing with her food now. She folded the bread onto itself over and over until it was a tight little ball of gluten, ready to string on a hook for fish bait.
"Add to that, Billy's account," she said, going down the list of damning circumstances. "Oh, and let's not forget Uncle Norbert's homicidal genes. A jury sure won't."
Ken said quickly, "Now, that's the kind of fact that would never be allowed into evidence."
"But it's a fact that everyone knows!"
"Some people know it. In Chepaquit. You're much too puffed up over your notoriety, lady," he said, polishing a broken yolk with the last of his bread. "Few people know, and fewer care."
She smiled forlornly and said, "You're just saying we're nobodies to make me feel good."
"Ha. If I wanted to make you feel good," he said with a Groucho Marx jiggle of eyebrows, "I'd go a different route altogether." He pushed his chair back and went around to her side of the table to clear her plate, and then suddenly he stopped.
"It doesn't make sense," he said, frowning. "Miss Widdich claimed—and I believe it—that Sylvia wanted to get back at her. That Sylvia wanted to put her in a cardboard box. That money wasn't what Sylvia was after."
"So—?"
"So why would Sylvia say thank you very much, and then be content to pack her bag and start to walk away?"
"Interesting point," Laura said. Unexpectedly, she began to take heart again. "After all, Sylvia was planning to have a really fun time hanging around Chepaquit and sticking pins in Miss Widdich. So to speak. At the very least, she could have got more money out of her."
"Lots of it."
"But ... would Miss Widdich kill her own daughter?" asked Laura. The woman in her refused to believe it.
"She left her in a cardboard box. In the snow."
"But she hung around until Sylvia was found."
"True," Ken conceded. "And then there's the matter of how Miss Widdich would have killed her. You said yourself that Sylvia was tall and in her prime. Miss Widdich could not have been a match for her, physically. No matter how big a hole she can dig."
"But she does know everything about herbs," Laura admitted. "She easily could have poisoned Sylvia. She—no, no, what am I saying? We all know a lot about poisons," Laura blurted, distressed that that was true, because it was just one more thing to worry about. "I want to believe that Miss Widdich did it—but I can't. I can't believe that any woman would murder her own flesh and blood."
"Ever hear of a lady named Medea?" Ken said grimly. "You don't have to go back to the Greeks, either; just pick up a paper nowadays."
Laura nodded. "Still, in the myth, Medea was spurned by Jason. People kill from a jealous rage, I'll grant you that. But not from a fear of embarrassment."
"Point taken," said Ken. He took her mug and his over to the coffee machine for refills. "All right. Who, at the time, might have gone into a jealous rage over Sylvia?"
"Besides Snack, you mean," she said, forcing herself to think like Chief Mellon.
She said hesitantly, as if she were picking rubies out of a box of broken glass, "Billy claims that he heard Snack arguing with Sylvia. And that may be. But I heard my father blistering Snack late that night. It was my father, not Snack, who was the enraged one. Who was the violent one when he took Snack out to the shed. Who could easily have been acting out of jealousy. My father, not Snack."
Ken was deeply interested in what she had to say. "Snack didn't put up a fight?" he asked, setting her newly filled mug in front of her.
Laura shook her head. "I think he was so used to submitting to my father's fury that it never occurred to him. Snack would always just co
ver his head and hunker down. He was a boy. Whatever he felt for Sylvia, he was still a boy."
"And he never said what the beating he got was about?"
"Never," she said. "He's always refused to talk about it."
Ken kissed the top of her hair and pulled her gently up from her chair. "It's time you asked him, then. Because the road to proving Snack's innocence may well lead back and not forward."
****
Even bankers worked once in a while, Laura learned: Ken actually had a meeting to go to that morning. He dropped Laura off at O'Doule's to get the pickup, and he continued on to work.
Laura headed straight back to the nursery to try to force her brother to confide in her. She was surprised to see that Corinne was in the shop and that Snack was back at work on the Deere, moving trees to the site of the old compost pile.
"Great news!" Corinne informed her. She was madly running around, watering everything in sight with a wand-end hose. "They're done, at least for now, and we have the garden center back."
Laura glanced at the parking lot outside and said, "Now all we need are our customers back."
"We have built it; they will come," said Corinne with serene optimism.
Her mood rubbed off on Laura like fairy dust. "Does this mean that they're done with us, too?"
Was it possible?
It was not. Corinne looked sheepish as she said, "They want to talk to Snack again. He's going down to the station in an hour or so. No pressure, though. Really, it's just routine. Chief Mellon said whenever it was convenient. I think that's a very good sign, don't you?"
"It certainly sounds that way," said Laura, fudging confidence.
"That's exactly what I told—Laura! What is that?" Corinne said, grabbing her sister's hand for closer examination. "Ohmigod. It's a diamond ring. Ohmigod. Laura—you didn't. You aren't." She let out a squeal of joy. "You're engaged? To a guy from Chepaquit? This means you're staying? You're staying here? Oh, my God!"
"Well, Ken and I did talk about that," Laura said, laughing between life-threatening squeezes. "And we decided it was easier for me to move my computer than for Ken to move his bank."
A Month at the Shore Page 27