by Various
“Hang on,” he said as he joined her. He pulled off his baseball cap and wiped his forehead. “Damn. Thought I was in shape.”
She laid a hand on his chest as it rose and fell. “I take Latin dance classes when I’m not filming. Five days a week. It’s great cardio.” Her hair fell over her cheeks as she laughed up at him, and it took all he had not to pull in her for another kiss. Instead he tucked her hair behind her ears, letting his fingers rest on one temple for a moment.
“Let me.” He reached past her and shoved open the heavy door.
Together they stepped onto the platform surrounding the top of the structure. A railing ran around the perimeter, though anyone could see it wouldn’t stop a grown man from jumping onto the rocks below. About the only thing it might stop would be someone who turned too fast, took a step in the wrong direction and needed to catch himself. For the first time, he wondered what had happened the night Petey and Miranda died. He knew the story inside and out–but stories had their own weird mix of truth, and he suspected that telling and retelling them only took a person farther away from ever knowing it.
Sophie hugged herself against the wind. Gooseflesh broke out on her arms, and he pulled her into him almost without thinking. He rubbed her bare shoulders to warm her up.
“God, it’s beautiful,” she said.
“Sure is.” Funny. He’d seen the ocean from about every point in town. Main Street, various rooftops of buildings, kayaks in the middle of the bay, even the plane ride he’d taken Shannon on to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. But never from the lighthouse, which was kind of funny when he thought about it, since this was Lindsey Point’s claim to fame.
The sky went on forever up here. The stars hung over the ocean and the beach and reflected their light in every direction, millions of tiny dots that made him feel about a centimeter tall. Below them, the water rushed against the rocks, muted but still a steady beat, a rhythm that never went away, Lucas realized, but became a part of the town itself. Like a heartbeat ingrained into every single person who lived within hearing distance of it.
Like the heartbeat in his arms right now, the steady pulse beating inside his embrace. He stopped looking at the stars.
“I think I feel a little unsteady.” Sophie turned to look up at him.
“Yeah?” He kind of felt the same way.
A few drops of rain fell, and she shivered. He lifted her chin with one hand. Her lips opened and she sighed, the smallest breath that nearly knocked him to his knees. God, she tasted–she smelled–she felt–so good next to him, this firecracker he could barely hold between his hands who set him to burning every time he touched her.
Raindrops scattered around them and wet their hair and their clothes. They didn’t move. Her hands found his face, her fingertips brushing the curls from his forehead and tracing their way from his earlobes to his neck, and still he kissed her, long and slow and not nearly as gently as the seconds passed. He couldn’t get enough of her. She was a drug more powerful than the damn night air, than the moon or the stars or anything nature herself could have slipped into his veins.
My God, this woman is amazing, was Lucas’s last thought before he caught the soft spot of her throat and she laughed under the touch of his tongue.
Chapter 15
Sophie’s cell phone buzzed. One hand emerged from under the covers, and she fumbled around on the bed stand until she found it. Memories from the night before flooded her, and she squinted at the screen to see if it was him. Damn, his kisses had left her half-blind before a goodbye nearly brought her to her knees.
It’s late. I should go, he’d whispered into her temple. You need your sleep.
She’d agreed, even with his hands in her hair and the weight of him pressed tight against her. Every atom in her body had wanted him to stay, and she wished she’d never breathed a word about needing a damn eight hours of sleep when she was shooting. She was pretty sure in this case she could have stayed up all night and floated into morning.
“’lo?” she croaked.
“You’re late,” Lon announced on the other end.
She turned over and pushed her face into the pillow. “Late for what?” Feathers scratched her cheek, sticking through the thin pillowcase, but she didn’t move. She balanced the phone between her cheek and the bed and wished she’d let voicemail pick up instead.
“The interview with the crazy lady. Nellie Something. Remember? We’re meeting her in twenty minutes. And unless you’re here in five, we’re gonna be late.”
Sophie eyed the clock beside the bed. “Ah, how ’bout I skip this one?”
Pause. She could almost see Lon staring at the phone, jaw moving up and down as he chomped on the stupid nicotine gum he thought was going to cure his addiction. “Skip it? Are you sick? Got a fever or something?”
“I’m fine, why?”
“You haven’t missed an interview in three years.” He made a sort of choking sound. “And now you want to skip it?”
“Stop being dramatic. Not sick. No fever. I’m fine.” She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. She was more than fine, actually. Giggly, bubbly, schoolgirl-silly, filled up to bursting–all words and phrases she’d never normally use to describe herself, except every time she thought of the kiss in the rain, of Lucas’s broad palms on her face and her hips and her everything, she couldn’t think of any better descriptors to use. “We’ll meet for lunch. At the diner. You can fill me in there.”
“Hmph. Terrence isn’t gonna like it.”
“Terrence’ll be fine with it.” Lon was the one with the problem, and they both knew it.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. You don’t need me there. Take good notes.”
Another pause. More chewing. “All right, Sophie. This time only.” Like she was a child. His child.
“Call me later,” she said, but he’d already hung up. “I love you too,” she said to the air. And she did. She just didn’t need to be connected to him every waking hour of every workday.
Sophie rolled over and returned to the fantasy he’d interrupted. Well, not a fantasy so much as an extension of last night’s kiss, which turned into a visit to Lucas’s bed, complete with multiple orgasms and a foot massage and maybe a candlelit bubble bath before they finally crashed near dawn. She tucked an elbow behind her head. Hmm. With two days left on assignment here in Lindsey Point, she doubted any of that had a prayer of coming true. But hey, a girl could dream a little, right?
“Mm. Yes.” She sat up and considered what she wanted to do with her morning off. Lon was right. She didn’t usually take them. In fact, she never did. She wondered what Lucas had planned. They hadn’t talked about it. Honestly, they hadn’t talked at all, just gotten a little lost inside the kiss. Okay, more than a little. All she could remember now were his hands in her tangled hair and his voice whispering fragments of want in her ear, leaving her jittery as a teenager on her first date.
Work for a widow who lived outside of town, she recalled him saying. She reached for her phone, thought about texting him, but left it on the bed stand. Maybe later.
She padded to the bathroom, ran a shower and stepped under the hot spray. What she wouldn’t give for a companion right now, someone to soap her back and maybe rinse out her hair and ease the warmth still growing in all the places Lucas hadn’t yet touched. Her hands slipped over her nipples and down the smooth skin of her belly. Circles. Tingles. She closed her eyes and raised her face to the water. Sweet guy, taking care of the neighborhood widows, filling in for the emergency call center and for her cameraman and, by the sounds of it, anyone who needed an extra hand.
A hand. Correction. Two hands, strong and callused and able to raise fire on her flesh. Hands on her cheek. Slipping to her neck. Circling her waist, grounding her to the safety of the lighthouse even though it seemed like the sky swayed above them and she might lose her balance with every kiss. The fantasy returned tenfold.
Sophie stood there until the water turned c
ool. Weird. She’d gone out with a few guys over the past two years, here and there, no one special. No one in the city. Usually just fans scattered around the country who were more excited about getting an autograph and posting her picture on their Facebook page than getting to know her. She had fun. They had fun. Never turned into anything serious.
She reached for a towel. So what the hell about Lucas Oakes wouldn’t leave her mind? She tried to figure it out from a reporter’s point of view. It wasn’t his body, or the hands or the mouth he clearly knew exactly how to use. Maybe the way he hadn’t trailed her like a puppy dog the moment they met? Or the fact that he didn’t seem to care whether he pissed her off or not? His comment about her hair still rankled her a little. Helmet. Goddamn him.
She wound the towel around her head. Nope. Could explain some of it, but it wasn’t the main thing. She pulled on jeans and a t-shirt and ran a comb through her hair. It was the strange humming sensation that vibrated across her skin every time she looked at him. Thought about him. And touching him turned the humming into a full-blown vibrato with the power to knock her off her feet.
“Coffee, Miss Smithwaite?” her hostess offered when she walked into the kitchen a few minutes later.
“Sophie, please. But no thanks. I’m not a caffeine person.”
“Oh.” Francine’s smile faded, and she sat back down on a stool near the stove. “Tea, maybe? I have some pastries.” She gestured at a basket of scones on the butcher’s block. Her hair frizzed from its graying ponytail, and for a moment Sophie wondered what Francine’s story was, how a woman not much older than herself had ended up in such a dead-end life.
“Sure.” She reached for a scone and broke off the end. Cold. And hard. But she made herself swallow it. “Did you make these?”
Francine shook her head. “They’re from the bakery downtown. I got them day before yesterday. They’re a little stale, aren’t they?”
“No, they’re fine.” Sophie leaned against the butcher’s block and looked around the kitchen. More patchwork in here, with dried flower arrangements catching dust on the walls. “You have a nice place.”
Her hostess’s face brightened. “Thank you. Thank you so much. It was hard, to be honest. I wasn’t sure when I came back, when I first opened it, that anyone would want to stay here. But people do come. It’s been slow, but every month I get a few more.”
“I love it,” Sophie lied. “It’s much closer to the lighthouse than any of the places downtown.” That, at least, was true. “When did you open it?”
“Ah, almost a year ago.” Francine pushed her hair from her eyes. “Lucas tells me I should have a one-year anniversary party in December.” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Sounds like a nice idea.” Sophie paused. “You said ‘when I came back.’ Did you grow up here?”
Francine nodded.
Sophie thought a minute, trying to figure out a way to ask without sounding like a reporter. “Did you know the kids who died in the plane crash?”
For a long moment, Francine didn’t answer, and Sophie wondered if she hadn’t heard the question. She was about to repeat it, maybe in a different way, when Francine nodded. “Of course. We all did.”
We all.
“Did you know Lucas in school?”
She nodded. “I think he took it the hardest of anyone.”
“Why?”
Francine wound her fingers together. Stubby nails. Torn cuticles. There they were, Sophie thought, more scars. Smaller but still visible.
“He was one of those guys who’s friends with everyone, you know? It wasn’t like they were all from the same group of friends or anything. But Lucas–he knew them all. Had a story about something he’d done, or someplace he’d gone, with every one of ’em.”
Sophie’s heart squeezed in sympathy.
“And he kind of took care of everyone after,” Francine said.
“What do you mean?”
“He stayed with Gladys Nunez for a week in her spare bedroom ’cause she was afraid to go to sleep at night.”
Gladys Nunez. The woman who’d lost both her daughter and her nephew in one single, horrible moment.
“And he organized the first memorial. It was his idea to put up crosses around town, in all the places we remembered them the most.”
Sophie thought of the grass growing up around the cross outside town. “There’s more than one?”
Francine nodded. “There’s one for each of them. You know when you’re coming in from the highway? That’s for Barbie Cummins. Her mom went into labor right there, and Barbie was born in the back seat of a taxicab on the way to the hospital up in Bluffet Edge about ten minutes later.” Francine smiled. “I like her story best, maybe ’cause it’s more about her being born than about her dying.”
Sophie swallowed, but pieces of scone remained stuck in her throat. Or maybe it wasn’t scone at all. Maybe it was the way Francine was telling the story, numbering off each life and death. How did they drive past these places every day and remember?
Or maybe that was the point. Remembering.
“And there’s one over past Milbrook Dam, on the other side of town, because that’s where Frankie Thomasen always hid when he was tryin’ to get away from the cops. He’d sit there and smoke and wait for one of ’em to find him and then he’d always say, ‘Hey, I wasn’t goin’ that fast, was I?’”
“He ever get arrested?”
“No. We all loved Frankie.” Pink colored Francine’s cheeks. “He was nice to everyone. Everyone he met. He ate lunch with me sometimes at school, and he didn’t have to. He had a table full of girls who waited for him every day.” Her fingers grazed the hollow of her throat as her voice softened. “But he said he liked talking to me.” Francine held up one hand and ticked off on her fingers. “Gladys put up the two for Erinn and Sal right in her front yard. She still lives outside of town, so if you drive by you can see ’em. They’re in the middle of her flower garden.”
So something grows from the tragedy. Sophie could almost hear the lines inside her head, could almost see the camera holding still on the center of each cross, framing each name. What a hell of a story this would make, she thought. Screw the lighthouse. This loss is more real by a hundredfold.
“And Tommy Perkins’s is down by the football field at the high school. Lucas spoke at that memorial, the only time he did. They were such good friends. What’s that position, the main one on the team? The important one?”
“Quarterback?”
“Yes. Tommy was the quarterback. He and Lucas had played together since grade school. They went to the playoffs for the state championship the year before. They lost, but Lucas always said they’d come back the next year and win.”
“Did they?”
Francine’s face closed. “After the plane crash, they lost every game except one.”
Sophie didn’t say anything for a minute. She tried to imagine what the school must have been like in the days and weeks following. Hell, what the town had been like. She couldn’t. “Wait, that’s only five crosses,” she said. “Where’s Sarah’s?”
Francine dropped her hand to her side. “Sarah doesn’t have one.”
“What? Why not?” Lucas had arranged for all the other crosses, but not one for his so-called best friend?
Francine’s head swung back and forth. “It was terrible. Her mom died a few months after the crash. She’d had cancer a few years before, and everyone said losing Sarah made it come back. She didn’t even want to fight anymore. She kept saying she wanted to be with Sarah. Afterwards, her dad didn’t want anything to do with putting up a cross. Said it’d be a target for vandals. He’s a cop,” she added.
“But what about her sister? Or Lucas?” Sophie still couldn’t believe he wouldn’t have wanted his friend to be remembered the same way as all the others.
“Shannon couldn’t even function,” Francine said. “I mean, her sister, and then her mom... She was on meds for a while so she could get up and go to school
and take exams. Lucas basically took care of her. I think she might even have stayed at his parents’ house for a while. Lucas’s mom, she’s a good person. Takes care of people same way he does.”
Sophie blinked back emotion. Hell of a way to forge a bond. Grief to love to engagement in the blink of an eye.
“And then he was dealing with so much guilt, he said he didn’t want a cross, he didn’t want anything at all to remind him Sarah was gone. Said he was the reason why.”
“The reason why what?”
“Sarah was the only junior on the trip,” Francine said. “Everyone else was a senior. They were chosen to go on this week-long trip out to California. They were supposed to visit other schools and meet a bunch of politicians and stuff.” She rubbed her forehead. “I think it was for student government. Like an east coast meets west coast sort of thing.”
“I still don’t get why Lucas felt guilty.”
Francine rubbed her forehead. “He got hurt in football practice the week before the trip, and the doctors said no traveling. Someone else had to go in his place.”
Slow understanding chilled Sophie’s blood. “You mean–“
“Sarah wasn’t ever supposed to be on that plane. Lucas was.”
Chapter 16
Lucas finished checking the pipes and ran a towel around the floor to clean up the last of the mess from the broken water heater. Finally he tossed everything into a bucket and jogged upstairs. “Mrs. Henderson? You’re all set.”
The heavy older woman sat in her rocker with a mismatched knit creation between her gnarled fingers. “Oh, honey, thank you.”
“No problem.” He loved Antoinette Henderson. He loved all the women he took care of. Half the time they paid him in baked goods or woolen mittens and hats. In fact, it looked as though Shelia might be working on another one right now. But he couldn’t complain. They made him feel good, important, needed. He couldn’t imagine a better way to spend his days.
Check that. Without warning, a small pliant waist, brown curls, and a willing, laughing mouth appeared in his mind’s eye. Now that would be a better way to spend an afternoon, for sure. Or a long night. His fingers twitched at the thought of Sophie, and he dropped his tape measure. It rolled across the floor and under the piano.