“Don’t worry yourself,” Amelia told him. “I got this.”
“Sure. I know that.” Daniel swallowed again, then added, “Thanks for bringing her home tonight. She’s a good little actress, but I know she was frightened about it all. It must have been scary to see her fall like that.”
“It was,” Amelia breathed. “But she’s a trooper. She got right back up and clearly improved enough to get me all ready for my not-date. She’s as strong as they come.”
“As strong as you, maybe,” Daniel said. He then tapped the front of her car and added, “Have a good time tonight. You deserve it.”
“I don’t deserve anything,” Amelia said. “And he probably just wants to sue me for driving out in front of his car or something. That’s my luck, isn’t it?”
Chapter Four
Amelia drove toward Oak Bluffs in a kind of meditative state. Night had fallen, and just one of her lights shone brightly out across the road. She cursed herself for this; however, she hadn’t had a single moment to fix it that afternoon or evening — and now, she was headed right toward the source of the accident. About a block from the bar, she parked and stepped out of her car, just as an icy breeze rushed out from the Vineyard Sound and ruffled her hair. She felt so youthful, so self-conscience in these moments that she very nearly shot back into her car to wipe off the makeup.
But just before she could, she heard her name.
“Amelia!” Nathan Gregory appeared beneath the nearest street lamp and lifted a hand. He looked just as handsome as he had that morning, and his smile was as arrogant as ever.
Amelia’s stomach did another little jump as she greeted him. “Hello.” Her eyes found his and hunted for a trace of disappointment, which she’d somehow expected to come off of him, as though maybe, he’d remembered her differently. But she found none of that. She found only excitement.
“Thanks for coming all the way over here,” Nathan said as they walked across the street toward the bar. “Although it must have been treacherous, with that light broken.”
“I’ll have it fixed tomorrow,” Amelia said.
“Well, let me buy you a drink. Or three,” Nathan said, his smile mischievous.
Once they were inside, Nathan and Amelia walked toward a back table, where Nathan asked for her coat. Amelia nearly dropped her purse to the ground as she handed her coat over, proof of how nervous she was. Could he know that this was her first date in ten years? Could he smell it on her? Nathan disappeared to hang up their coats, and Amelia studied the bar around her. Toward the far wall, she recognized Lola Sheridan and her boyfriend, Tommy Gasbarro. Lola had her hands pressed over her eyes and her shoulders hunched. Tommy, a rather famous sailor who’d arrived on the island permanently only last year, comforted her. Amelia wasn’t sure what was wrong, but she knew better than to stare. She dropped her eyes to the table.
“What can I get you to drink?” Nathan asked as he appeared beside her again.
“Um. Hmm. What about a gin and tonic?”
“Sounds great. I’ll have one, too.”
Nathan ordered from the bar. Amelia both hated and loved that he kept disappearing, although it only delayed the inevitable. Very soon, they would be engaged in light banter, she hoped. Very soon, she would have to perform the great ritual of “dating.” If only Mandy had read from one of her teenage magazines to give Amelia some tips on how to be smooth and collected.
They clinked glasses and made eye contact. Amelia forced herself to say, “I never imagined I’d get a free G&T out of a little fender-bender.”
“Life is a strange thing, isn’t it?” Nathan quipped.
“Sure is.” Amelia swallowed a gulp of gin and tonic. “So, how do you find Martha’s Vineyard so far?”
Nathan shrugged. “I mean, it’s not the season for it, is it? March isn’t known for its sailing or its beaches. But it’s still something special.”
“I don’t have a favorite season on the Vineyard,” Amelia said. “I need all of them. Spring brings growth, and summer brings all the beautiful beach activities, and then autumn is the comedown from summer ...” She paused in the midst of her ramble, suddenly growing embarrassed.
“To everything, there is a season,” Nathan said. How was it he seemed to always know what to say?
“A time to live and a time to die,” Amelia blurted out. But immediately after she said it, she blushed horribly. A time to die? What the heck was she rambling about?
A moment of silence passed between them. Was this what happened on dates? It had been so long that she had no idea.
“But I have pretty good memories here from summers as a kid,” Nathan said. He seemed totally at ease with himself, as though whatever came out of his mouth was a-okay with him. “Sailing. Swimming. Flirting with girls.”
“Oh! So you’re familiar with this place,” Amelia replied, swirling the ice in her glass.
“Sure. We came here every summer until I was eighteen or nineteen. I came for a meeting with my father’s good friend, an investor who lives between Oak Bluffs and New York.”
Amelia nodded, asked relevant questions, and sipped her gin and tonic — admittedly, a bit too quickly. She sucked down the first and then the second and soon found that it was much easier to laugh at Nathan’s half-funny jokes. She certainly found it easy to gaze into his cerulean eyes. She imagined herself through the eyes of the other bar-dwellers. Probably they just saw two mature individuals, drinking and flirting. She was on a date, or so she thought. Literally, this was what people did. On purpose. With their time.
She couldn’t help but think of about fourteen things on her to-do list that she could have done with this time.
Still, sometimes, she did catch the genuine smile that would stretch across her cheeks every now and then. It was nice to know that someone new found her attractive and interesting and was actually a person outside of work-related issues.
She thought of her sisters — Camilla, Jennifer, Mila, Olivia, and even Michelle. God bless her. Had they seen her out with this guy, they would have been impressed with her boldness. Wasn’t it good to just act on a whim? Or was she too old to be acting on impulse?
After the third gin and tonic, Amelia stood up on wobbly legs. She was reminded of baby giraffes, who were birthed into the world and forced immediately to stagger across the land.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she told Nathan.
She headed into the bathroom to look at her reflection and talk some sense into herself. It had been a long day, one of the longest in recent memory, and there was nothing stopping her from calling a cab and getting herself back to her thousand-count sheets. She’d always slept alone, stretched out in the center of her queen-sized bed and she’d often told herself just how privileged she was to have that life. How often had her friends complained of boyfriends or husbands snoring through the night?
“You did it. You went on a date. Now, go home,” she told her reflection. She was reminded of her own mother and hated to admit that sometimes, when she spotted her reflection, she looked a whole lot like her mother, about twenty years before. She’d caught up.
When Amelia stepped out of the bathroom, however, she found Nathan Gregory waiting for her near the door of the bar. His smile was enormous, welcoming, and his eyes glittered wonderfully. He looked at her like she was the only woman in the world. She no longer compared herself to whatever Boston beauty he had back home. She was it, right now in the present.
Suddenly, it felt as though she could fly.
She knew it would happen before it did.
He placed his hand across the small of her back. The alcohol encouraged her to bring her chin upward, brave for whatever came next. Then, she closed her eyes as his lips swept over hers. Suddenly, the world spun around her as she kissed him softly, then with her lips slightly parted. When was the last time she’d even kissed anyone? It felt like heaven.
He broke the kiss a few moments later and swept a strand of hair behind her ear. In a whisper, he said
, “Can I invite you back to my room for a nightcap?”
Amelia had seen enough movies to know what that meant. She felt yanked in two different directions. On the one hand, she wanted to tell him to call her another night — to do the whole “dating” thing properly. On the other hand, he was headed back to Boston, and she had no idea when he would return.
She nodded. She felt like an innocent young woman, not a forty-year-old. She wasn’t a virgin, but she felt like one at the moment.
They walked through the chilly dark night. Silence fell over them until Amelia finally asked, “Where are you staying?”
“The Sunrise Cove. Do you know it?”
Amelia had stayed there years before, when she and Camilla, Mila, Jennifer, and Olivia had decided to pledge their forever allegiance to one another in the wake of Michelle’s death. But Amelia didn’t want to think about such dark things, not now.
“I do. The Sheridan family has owned it for generations,” Amelia said, as though this meant anything to him.
“Huh.”
They stepped into the foyer at the Sunrise Cove. A young man sat behind the counter, playing solitaire. The moment he heard them, he snapped to his feet and greeted them with a sleepy smile.
“Good evening, Mr. Gregory,” he said. “I hope the bar was an okay recommendation?”
“It really was, Sam,” Nathan said. Again, he placed his hand at the base of Amelia’s back. “Of course, had a few too many gin and tonics. They really know how to make them there.”
“That’s the truth. My friend Amanda and I tend to push ourselves a little too far there,” Sam said.
Amelia didn’t recognize Sam, even as she recognized the name “Amanda Sheridan,” who he called his “friend.” Perhaps Susan Sheridan had hired new staff members since she’d decided to build back up her criminal defense career. He was certainly handsome. He had that Sheridan glow to him, despite not being related.
“As you should. You’re still young,” Nathan said with a wink.
He then led Amelia up the stairs to his suite, with its broad bay window that overlooked the Vineyard Sound. The minutes after he clipped the door shut were some of the most anxious of Amelia’s life. She no longer remembered herself, or her career, or what people said to one another when they wanted to seem intelligent or beautiful.
But very soon, she realized that none of that mattered. She’d come into a man’s room, and she’d done it for one reason and one reason only.
She didn’t get much sleep. That’s for sure. But as she drifted off, she thanked herself for this one-in-a-million evening. It wasn’t like these nights came around for her all the time. Once a decade, if that. She wasn’t fully sure if that was pathetic or not. But she did know one thing: her sisters would want to know every detail. And at least, for once, Amelia Taylor was the one with the gossip. What a change.
Chapter Five
As Amelia Taylor dressed in yesterday’s clothes, her head threatened to explode with the horrors of her gin and tonic hangover. She paired buttons incorrectly, picked at a strange stain on her dress, and furrowed her brow at the reflection in the Sunrise Cove mirror. Was this really the ever-professional, ever-together Amelia Taylor?
The man who’d been her great and mysterious date didn’t look so wonderful in the morning, either. He pressed his hands against his forehead and muttered something about a shower. Before she headed out, he dotted a kiss on her cheek and the kiss seemed like a signal. It seemed to say, “Don’t call me. This was nice, but never again.” Amelia wondered if she’d really been that bad or if this was just the ways of the world. One and done.
Ugh. It turned her stomach. As she passed through the hallways of the Sunrise Cove, she prayed that Mandy would find a kind and upstanding man to date and then marry without messing around with all these dating rituals over the next five to ten years. She didn’t want Mandy to even touch heartache.
When Amelia appeared in the foyer of the Sunrise Cove, she, of course, nearly stumbled into Susan Sheridan herself. Susan’s smile wasn’t as electric as it normally was, and her coloring was strange, as though she’d gotten sick again. Of course, Amelia didn’t look like herself, either.
“Amelia! I had no idea you were staying with us,” Susan said.
Amelia gave a light shrug. “It was a surprise for me as well.”
Susan’s lips formed a round O. Behind her, Amanda Sheridan wrapped an arm around her cousin, Audrey Sheridan — who, Amelia saw now, was no longer pregnant. She’d had her baby. But there was something about the air between all of them that told Amelia not to say a single word about the baby. Congratulations were clearly not in order.
What had happened?
Amelia excused herself and said, “Have a good day, Susan,” then rushed out into the chilly air of the March morning. Her heart thudded with intrigue and sorrow. What on earth had happened with the Sheridan baby? For a long moment, as she staggered back toward the center of Oak Bluffs, she hardly thought of her own sorrows. It was clear: whatever had happened with the Sheridan baby was much, much heavier than a strange one-night stand.
Amelia found her car, just where she’d left it. On the windshield, a parking ticket fluttered. She grumbled inwardly, annoyed with herself for not paying attention to the signs. None of this was like her.
She drove swiftly back to her tiny house at 37 Peases Point Way. She parked in the driveway, hustled inside, and stripped herself bare in the bathroom. The shower stream was razor-sharp and incredibly hot; it was the only thing that drove out some of her thudding headache. Fatigue remained, however, and threatened to destroy her entire day.
As she dressed, she realized for the first time that her phone was dead. How had she forgotten it? Hurriedly, she charged it. A frantic ping-ping-ping told her she’d missed a number of messages, as well—two from her boss, Zane, and one from Mandy.
MANDY: OMG! Tell me everything! How did it go?!
ZANE: We moved the meeting to 8:30. Need you there fifteen minutes before to go over everything.
ZANE: Amelia. Where are you? It’s 8:20, and you’re late. This isn’t like you.
Amelia’s stomach dropped. It was now 8:45. According to her schedule, which had basically been tattooed to the back alleys of her mind, she hadn’t had a meeting until 10. Zane had clearly altered it late in the night, maybe even as a way to get her into some kind of trouble. Annoyed and panicked, she shot toward the door, her wet hair flung out behind her. In a flurry, she drove toward city hall — daring every car to crash into her. “Make me even later,” she growled. “See if I care.”
Oh, but she cared. She cared a lot. And when she finally burst into city hall, tears threatened to roll down her cheeks. Her secretary, Clara, hustled up to her, wide-eyed, and stammered, “I tried to call you! Your phone was off! Your phone is never off!”
“I know,” Amelia said as she rushed forward without making eye contact. “I just had a late start this morning.”
“You never have a late start!” Clara cried. “Zane’s in there killing time, but you’re the one to speak to about these bigger development issues. You know very well that Zane doesn’t have a real grip on many of the laws around here.”
Amelia placed her purse on her desk and gave her secretary a crooked smile. “Funny that my boss has no idea what he’s doing, isn’t it?”
Clara didn’t have time to make jokes. All the color had drained from her cheeks. “The developer is angry. I heard him demanding why he couldn’t begin his presentation yet. Another one of these big-whig, super-rich city types.”
“Another? I really think we should kick them off the island,” Amelia grumbled. Somehow, the idea that Zane was currently panicked had calmed her nerves. She glanced into the mirror near her desk and saw a woman with nearly-perfect makeup, slight bags under her eyes, and wet hair. “I think I need to improvise,” she told both her secretary and her reflection. Hurriedly, she grabbed a scarf and wrapped it around the top of her forehead, then allowed her dark curls to
spill down. Some of them had dried into coils.
“Not half bad,” Clara said, clearly surprised. “It’s not your typical look, but I guess it will have to do.”
Amelia gathered her notes, lifted her chin, and marched toward the boardroom. As she stepped in, she spotted Zane in conversation with yet another ritzy-looking, handsome city-guy. How tired she was of these guys, especially after her night with Nathan.
“Ah! Here she is.” Zane’s eyes tore over her slightly-different hair as he stood. “Oliver, this is Amelia Taylor. She’s a force of nature around here. Amelia, this is Oliver Krispin.”
Amelia placed her notepad and folders on the mahogany table and stretched her hand across the space between them. “Oliver. Lovely to meet you.”
“You as well.” His eyes were bright green, and his smile was sure yet difficult to read. Probably, he wasn’t so pleased that she’d made him wait a full half-hour and she’d arrived a half-mess.
“Apologies for my tardiness,” Amelia said as she sat across from him. “I had some technological difficulties, and I didn’t receive the news that the meeting time had been changed in time.”
“Technological difficulties! In this day and age?” Oliver said with a laugh.
“I know. Hard to believe,” Amelia said. Her nostrils flared with anger. Why couldn’t he just take her excuse and let it go? He was just like Nathan. Just another guy, prepared to take advantage of her or belittle her, armed with his money and his self-assurance.
“I just hope it isn’t the kind of thing I have to get used to here on Martha’s Vineyard,” Oliver said. “I have to keep a pretty strict schedule since I’m so often between here and New York.”
“Of course you are,” Amelia said. There was just the slightest disdain to her voice; she couldn’t fully cover it up. “And let’s not waste any more of your time now. I would love to hear more about your project. We just love when creative minds come to our island and broaden our horizons.”
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