One More Summer

by Liz Flaherty

  Neither diamonds nor cranberry nail polish matched the Grace he knew, but Dillon understood why she wore them. That was how she bargained with God. He could almost hear her prayer. I’ll wear nail polish and a dress the way Promise likes. I’ll even keep her diamond for her while she’s in surgery, if You’ll just take care of her while I can’t.

  “What did I say?” she asked.

  It took him a befuddled moment to remember where they were in conversation. He seemed to have absolutely no control over his mind these days. “About my reader mail.”

  Her eyebrows raised. “What? You’re going to read some of it?”

  “I thought I would. The readers are my bread and butter, after all.”

  “It’s about time you realized that,” she said tartly.

  “I thought maybe Prom would help me go through it while she recovers. It might keep her from bouncing off the walls until she’s back on her feet some.”

  “That’s a good idea. It would keep her from overdoing too.”

  She didn’t need to sound so surprised, he thought, but immediately realized she probably was surprised. She didn’t respect him very much.

  And he wanted her to.

  “You should wear dresses more often,” he commented.

  Her spice colored eyes widened. “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they get in the way, and you always have to twitch them around so they’ll hang right. Cat hair shows up on them something fierce and there’s it’s a foregone conclusion that if I’m wearing a dress I’ll spill things.”

  “Oh, that all makes sense. I can see you in the nineteenth century. You’d have been Tennessee’s answer to Calamity Jane, wearing pants and chewing and spitting and skinning mules with the best of ’em.”

  Grace knew what he was doing with his nonsense, and she was grateful for it even if she wasn’t about to tell him so. Instead, she endeavored to swallow the muffin he’d ordered for her. Men always wanted women to eat in times of stress.

  Her father had been that way, urging Debbie to eat to build her strength. He’d never accepted that his wife’s heart was damaged and weakened beyond repair. When she died, he raged endlessly against the incompetence of doctors and the cruelty of God. He blamed the Tennessee weather for Debbie’s lack of energy and appetite. If she’d exercised more and eaten more she might have lived, he insisted.

  He blamed Grace too. Even more than she blamed herself. That was why, although she’d never put it into words, she’d never been able to leave after her father got sick while Steven was still in medical school. She’d owed it to her mother to take care of the husband Debbie had left behind.

  She took a drink of coffee to force down the buttery bread that suddenly took on the consistency of sawdust. “I want to go back now,” she said, pushing away the plate.

  “Okay.” He stood, leaving some bills beside his saucer, and offered his hand to help her from the booth. Like she needed help, for God’s sake, but she left her hand in his.

  They went to the surgery waiting room when they reached the hospital. Another family waited there, and Grace recognized the same expression on the woman’s face as she’d seen on her own in the mirror that morning. Hope and dread made a strange combination.

  Two little girls, probably about four and five, shared a vinyl love seat and fussed at each other over the children’s books.

  “Would you like me to read to you?” Grace hadn’t meant to ask them. She should have spoken their mother first. With a mute apology to the woman, she went to sit between the children. “Oh, Thumbelina. I just love her, don’t you?”

  She began to read, the two little girls tucked themselves in closer to her sides. Their mother made hot chocolate from one of the packets offered by the hospital. Carrying her cup, she took a seat near Grace. When Thumbelina was finished, she handed Grace another book. “Would you read this one? I remember it from when I was their age.” She nodded at the little girls, her face soft.

  Grace took the book with a smile. “I do too.”

  A man wearing green scrubs came into the room midway through the second book, held up a thumb and forefinger in a circle to the mother of the children, then leaned against the doorframe and listened.

  “Breathtaking,” he murmured to no one in particular when the story was finished, and approached the woman he’d come to see.

  Grace put down the book and sketched a farewell wave to the woman and the two little girls when they left the room. Dillon crossed the room and sat beside her. She lifted a piece of the cotton of her skirt, pleating the material between her fingers and releasing it. How did people sit still in here? The room was airy and bright, but still suffocating.

  He reached for her hand, forcing the fabric from it, and held it firmly against his thigh.

  Grace curled her fingers into his and, with a sigh, relaxed against him. She’d love to be in his arms again, to have him hold her close and whisper against her ear the way he’d done earlier. Truth be told, she’d like to be even closer. She’d like to pluck at the strands of sexual tension that strung between them.

  “No decent man in his right mind’s going to want you, girl. Why can’t you get that through your thick head?” Robert Elliot’s voice echoed in her mind.

  The words might have been true, but they didn’t stop Grace’s wants and wishes, didn’t stop frissons from tracing a squiggly path up her arm where Dillon’s lay alongside it.

  When you grieve, she had heard somewhere, there’s a part of you that needs the kind of closeness only achieved by making love. But she wasn’t grieving—that would mean Promise was more ill than they hoped. It would allow that she might not get better.

  Grieving was not an option.

  Then Dillon’s arm came around her. “They’re here.”

  Dr. Jake Sawyer, flanked by a woman Grace assumed was the surgeon, stood in the door of the waiting room.

  “She’s in recovery,” Jake said. He took a deep breath. “Sit down, Grace, so we can talk about what comes next.”

  Chapter 10

  “She’ll sleep for several hours, Ms. Elliot. Why don’t you go home and try to get some rest too?” The nurse spoke in a hushed voice as she darkened Promise’s room. “Or at least get something to eat.”

  Grace nodded and followed the tall black woman from the room. “Are you sure she’ll rest?” she asked.

  “Positive, though we’ll keep an eye on her anyway. She’ll be better tomorrow. The pain is pretty bad the first day, but it eases fairly quickly.”

  Grace nodded. “Thank you.”

  She went down the wide, low-lit corridor toward the elevators, stopping at the entrance to the lounge. “I thought you went home.” She was surprised to see him. And glad.

  “I did.” Dillon rose and came to join her. He’d changed into faded jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. “Everyone is fine there. Maxie and Jonah are in bed. I just came back to take you home.”

  “My car’s here.”

  He grinned at her, the skin around his eyes crinkling into lines she wanted to smooth with her fingers. “Your car was here. When Faith and Grant came over to check on Promise, Grant drove it back.”

  “Grant hates my car. He says he’s always afraid the bottom will rust through when he’s in it and he’ll end up sitting on the pavement on a torn-up bucket seat with a gear shift knob still in his hand.”

  “He mentioned that.”

  The elevator doors opened as soon as Dillon punched the button lit with an arrow pointing down, and they stepped into the cubicle. His hand was on her back, and she was conscious of it where his fingers wrapped lightly around her ribcage. She knew what he’d do if she turned into his touch. He’d close both arms around her and hold her full-length against him, his breath whispering over her hair. Maybe he would bend his head and touch his lips to her ear again, sending delicious sensations rippling down her spine even as he gave comfort.

  The longing was so much a physical dema
nd that Grace blamed it on tiredness and moved away from the hand that still rested above her waist. She’d stood alone most of her life—she certainly didn’t need to start leaning on anyone now. Especially not if that anyone was Dillon Campbell.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said as they walked across the parking lot, “but I’m starved to death. I wasn’t hungry when Maxie and Jonah ate, but I am now.”

  “I’m not, but I’ll fix you something when we get home if you like.” The words had no more than left her mouth when her stomach growled with leonine volume, and she said defensively, “Well, maybe I am a little hungry.”

  He stopped at a bar and grill that served food twenty-four hours a day. They sat in a window booth, their knees close enough Grace fancied she could feel the weathered denim of his jeans against her bare skin.

  When the waitress came, he ordered for both of them, and Grace frowned at him. “I can speak for myself.”

  “Put a lid on it. You’re so tired you can hardly sit up straight. Drink.” He gestured toward the wineglass that had appeared between them and pulled his coffee toward him. “How’s Promise tonight? She was pretty groggy earlier.”

  “She was in a lot of pain.” Enough that she had cried, and the memory still hurt Grace. Promise didn’t weep any easier than she did.

  “Did Jake tell her—”

  “That the cancer was in the lymph nodes too? Yes. She wasn’t surprised.” Grace could see her reflection in the mirrored wall behind Dillon. Her face was drawn with weariness, the makeup she’d applied that morning a distant memory. “She was hoping she wouldn’t have to have the chemotherapy after all, even though Jake had told her it was a pretty sure thing.”

  “We all hoped that.”

  Grace nodded and reached for the wineglass to drink deeply. It was the good stuff that Steven bought, and she wished she could drink enough of it to forget what the doctors had said. “It was worse than they thought. She’ll have chemo over six months, then radiation. If we’re very, very lucky, that will be all. She can have her reconstruction and put it behind her. If not, there are more extreme measures that can be taken. But Jake told me to remember that Promise is strong.”

  She’d been trying to do just that. She tried when hospital staff wheeled Promise into her room looking more dead than alive. She tried when Promise lifted her right hand and laid it where her left breast had been and said, “It’s gone, isn’t it?” She tried extra hard when tears leaked from beneath Promise’s closed eyelids and slid into the short hair at her temples before Grace could catch them with a tissue.

  It was midnight when Dillon left her at the back door of the house on Lawyers Row. “Get some sleep.” When she would have stepped inside, he caught her hand. “Promise will be fine,” he said quietly, and bent his head.

  The kiss was light, almost like the “fairy kisses” Debbie Elliot used to drop on her children’s cheeks before they slept. His mouth was soft, and the tip of his tongue a mere suggestion at the seam between her lips.

  Grace sighed before she could stop herself, and willed her eyes to open. If she didn’t scowl and tell him not to do that again, he might take it as a sign she liked it and kiss her a second time. Maybe even a third, by which time the languorous heat that seemed to be overtaking her limbs would probably have melted her down to nothing more than an oil spot on the kitchen floor. How had they gotten inside with the door shut anyway? She distinctly remembered—

  Sure enough, he kissed her again. He framed her face with his hands and laid his lips across hers, allowing them to linger. His tongue was more than a suggestion this time, but less than a demand. The motion was like an unspoken question, and her lips opened of their own volition as she answered the silent query in the same manner.

  Because her knees were too wobbly to hold her up, she placed her hands at his waist, feeling the warmth of his skin through the material of his shirt. She wished his shirt wasn’t there.

  His arms came around her as the kiss ended. His heartbeat was a steady thrum against her ear, and she thought she could likely stand there forever, the cool air of the kitchen lending comfort to her heated senses.

  Cool air?

  She raised her head. The window over the sink was closed, as were the ones in the corner where the table sat. She knew the door was closed, because Dillon was leaning on it.

  “Dillon, why isn’t it hot in here?”

  What the hell does she mean, not hot? I’m on fire. Dillon drew back and stared down at her. “Not hot?” he parroted. “Are you serious?”

  Then he remembered.

  “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “It’s air conditioning.”

  “Air conditioning?” Grace’s brows rose until they disappeared into the curly bangs that drifted across her forehead. “I don’t have air conditioning, Dillon. I’m probably the last person living in Peacock, Tennessee, who can leave her windows open all summer long.”

  “You still can,” he said quickly, “though you might want to turn the air conditioning off first.”

  Her hands had left his waist and become fists on her hips. “What gave you the right to install it without my permission? Last I heard, this is my house.”

  He opened his mouth to blame Steven, then closed it again. That wouldn’t be fair.

  When, he wondered, had fairness become so important? It was all because of her, the woman standing before him with her hands on her hips and fury making her eyes dark and luminous.

  “I didn’t do it for you.” That wasn’t a lie. Not exactly, anyway. “Prom will be miserable enough without stifling in the heat too. It’s also hard on Jonah and Maxie. Maybe she wouldn’t get those headaches if she didn’t get so damn hot. Surely you’ve noticed how gray she is sometimes?”

  “They haven’t complained.”

  “Of course they haven’t complained. They think the sun rises and sets in your ass. But haven’t you seen them sitting with the sweat pouring down their faces?”

  “It’s a hot summer. We all sweat.”

  Her bottom lip stuck out like that of a mutinous child, and he wanted to kiss her again. Damn! “We’re not all old,” he said quietly, “and we’re not all sick.” He looked at her intently, trying to force her to meet his eyes. “Independence and strength are great things, Grace, but sometimes you need to measure the cost against the profit.”

  Dillon wasn’t big on having to have the last word, but he left the house before she responded. She was pissed at him most of the time, anyway. Why did leaving her standing stiff and furious behind him put such an ache in his gut?

  He flopped into a chair on his porch and squinted through the trees at the house. Her bedroom light hadn’t come on yet. What was she doing in there? She needed to get some sleep. The power nap she’d taken in the car on the way home from Kingsport wasn’t going to get her through the night.

  Though he wasn’t sleepy—wasn’t even particularly tired—he didn’t feel like writing. What he really felt like was kissing Grace some more. Or shaking her till her teeth rattled. Maybe both.

  There was a freshness to her kisses that he hadn’t experienced in a long time, if ever. Almost innocence—with enough banked heat behind it to make him want to stroke the embers into open flame.

  Had there been many men in her life? Steven never said and Dillon never asked. He wouldn’t mind asking now. Only he’d ask Grace, then he’d watch those eyes darken with rage again before she started tearing strips off his hide.

  It didn’t matter to him whether she had loved other men or not. She was thirty-three, after all. Unless one or more of those hypothetical men had hurt her, and had caused the wariness in her eyes and the pain he sometimes sensed was tamped down behind her irascibility. Then it would matter.

  He wouldn’t like for someone to hurt Grace.

  “You let Grant drive my car and now it won’t start and I don’t remember where Promise’s keys are. Will you drive me to Kingsport?” Grace stood at the door of the guesthouse, her arms folded under her breasts and
her expression just short of pugnacious.

  Dillon almost expected to see her toe tapping. It wasn’t, but she was barefoot, and she still had cranberry-colored toenails. He liked that polish, had liked rubbing his thumb over it the night they sat on her front porch. He guessed he liked her feet too. Or else he was just getting used to them. The woman almost never wore shoes.

  He raised his eyes to meet her frowning gaze. “When?”

  “Now.”

  She was wearing—holy balls, Grace Elliot was wearing shorts, and they weren’t long and baggy, either. They were white denim and she had on a blouse thing the color of wheat right before harvest. The shirt stopped at her waist, and every time she moved a slice of tanned skin showed between the blouse hem and the top of her shorts.

  She really should move more.

  “Come in,” he invited, opening the door of the guesthouse wider. “I should probably wear a shirt and shoes.”

  “It’s customary in public places.”

  He picked up a heather green Henley shirt from the back of a chair and pulled it over his head. “You’re a shrew, Grace,” he commented, and looked pointedly at her feet.

  Her gaze followed his, and he watched color climb into her cheeks. “I believe,” she said, “you writer types refer to that as being hoisted by my own petard, or words to that effect.”

  He nodded, holding back the grin that pushed at his cheeks. “I’ve seen that expression used.”

  “You’ve used it yourself. In The Garnet Horseshoe, you wrote—” She stopped. “Never mind. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  He didn’t examine too closely the pleasure her knowledge of his work gave him. If he did, he was afraid he’d be not only embarrassed but overcome with a pride of adolescent fervor. “Hey.” He tossed her his keys. “Put the top down. You probably need some fresh air after spending the night in all that depraved air conditioning.”

  Pushing his feet into topsiders, he watched her stride across the grass. Even stiff with attitude, she had a walk that could make grown men weep. That slice of skin at her waist showed with every step. He shifted uncomfortably before following her to the car.