One Distant Summer

by Serena Clarke

  “Professional diver. I went through the whole of university and never came up with a better idea.”

  “Just like you planned. That’s cool.”

  “Yeah. It’s mostly commercial maritime stuff though—salvage, checking ships for customs, that kind of thing. The occasional missing person. Haven’t gone on any treasure hunts yet.”

  “Never say never.” Liam looked at the two of them. “You two turned out pretty impressive in the end.”

  “He doesn’t think so,” said Connor, jerking a thumb in Dane’s direction. “He always wanted us to get fit, and now I have, he’s totally unimpressed. Can’t please some people.”

  Dane grinned and turned to Liam. “Good to see you haven’t withered away in front of your computer screen either.”

  Liam laughed again. Why had he let these guys slip out of his life? It was surreal in the best way to all be sitting here, falling so easily back into the old ways. The three geeky musketeers—but maybe not so geeky anymore.

  “How’d you find out I was here, anyway?” he asked, twisting the top off the bottle Dane handed him.

  “Riley told my sister,” Connor said. “She said you’ve been avoiding everyone.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve just been busy. You know.”

  Connor and Dane looked at each other, and he knew they weren’t buying it. But Dane nodded. “Web design going well?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got some big clients in the States, and a few in the UK, as well as the Aussie ones. I’m only limited by the hours in the day, really.” Or night.

  “Maybe you should hire someone,” Connor suggested.

  He took a slug of beer and shook his head. “Nah. Then it becomes a whole other thing. Right now I’m all care, no responsibility.”

  “Oh, shit.” Connor stood up suddenly. “I left the steaks in the car. Be right back.”

  “No care, no responsibility,” Dane said, and Connor flashed him a middle finger as he went out.

  “Some things never change,” Liam said, smiling. “Still the absent-minded professor.”

  Dane laughed. “Yeah. I always thought he’d end up in some ivory tower. Now he’s building them instead.”

  “Would you trust a high-rise he put together?” Liam asked.

  He shrugged. “Someone does, because he’s making crazy money.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  They clinked their bottles together.

  The afternoon rolled into evening as they caught up on the years they’d spent apart. Firing up the barbecue to grill steak and sausages and ribs, Liam wondered if Jacinda would notice the noise over the hedge. If she did, she stayed away, and he slowly relaxed. The collection of empties grew, and the night crept in, until the stars were out and the crickets were singing. Sitting on the steps running down to the lawn, they could have been seventeen again, drinking too much and talking shit. He hadn’t realized how much he needed it.

  “Let’s go have a drink at the double K,” Connor said. “Your cover’s blown now anyway.”

  Liam shook his head. He had no intention of ever going to the Kelp and King again—that was Ethan’s turf. “No thanks.”

  “Saturday night though—they’ll have a band playing.” Connor lifted his eyebrows expectantly.

  “It’ll be great,” Dane said. “We should go, for old times’ sake.”

  “Old times?” He looked at them. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  The mood changed abruptly, and there was silence for a minute. Liam rubbed the back of his neck, and Connor picked at the label on his bottle.

  Then Dane spoke. “Have you been to see him yet?”

  Liam thought about the graveyard on the hill—the uneven rows of headstones, the yew trees left to grow gnarly in the wind, the view over the sea. The sea that had taken his brother.

  “No.”

  Connor leaned forward. “Did you ever…do you know what happened to her?”

  He knew who Connor meant, but fixed him with a glare. “Her?”

  “Jacinda.”

  “Why?”

  “I just thought…” Noticing Liam’s expression, he cleared his throat. “Nothing. Just wondered what happened to her. That was the best summer, until…”

  Liam nodded. “Yeah, it was good. Until then.”

  “All I remember is being at the beach, or being here at your place,” Dane said. “Did we ever go home?”

  Connor laughed. “I don’t think so. Not that my mother was complaining.”

  “Your mother never complained either,” Dane said to Liam. “I don’t know how she put up with us.”

  Liam shrugged. “She used to say she’d rather have us here, than getting into trouble somewhere else. Not that we were allowed to get into trouble, with Dad so high up in the police.”

  “I never got into any of the trouble I really wanted,” Connor said. “Remember Kate? God, I thought she walked on water.”

  “You were tragic about her,” Dane told him.

  “No worse than you about her big sister,” Connor shot back. “She was never going to look at you. Not when she had that boyfriend at university.”

  “That asshole.” Dane grinned. “We were all tragic about girls that summer.”

  They both glanced at Liam.

  “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “But you were the only ones who knew about that.”

  He got up and went inside. Maybe more beer would drown that same old ache of wanting. In the kitchen, he paused in front of the open refrigerator. They’d known about his feelings for Jacinda then, because he’d had to tell someone. And now, the nearness of her was burning him up again. He went back out and handed each one of them another bottle, then sat down.

  “I know where she is,” he said in a low voice.

  They both stared at him. “Where?” Dane asked.

  He pointed toward the hedge, and number ten. “There.”

  Connor almost choked on his beer. “What?”

  “Next door?” Dane asked. “Jacinda?”

  “Could you say it a bit louder? Because it’d be great if she heard.”

  “Shit, sorry.” He looked over to the house. “What’s she doing here?”

  Liam shrugged. “I don’t know. Well, she’s looking after Nana Mac’s cat, and its kittens. But I don’t know why she’s come all this way just to do that.”

  “All the way from the States?” Connor asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe she’s on holiday,” Dane suggested.

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you know what she does over there? For a job, I mean.”

  He hesitated. “She’s a rock star, I suppose.” At the sight of their faces, he nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

  “Are you kidding?” Connor said. “I have to see.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket.

  “She doesn’t use her own name,” Liam told him. “Google ‘Cin Scott’. C–I–N.”

  “Cool name,” Dane commented, as he looked over Connor’s shoulder.

  “Whoa,” Connor said, scrolling through the search results. “Look at that.”

  But Dane was frowning. “That’s Jacinda? It doesn’t look anything like her.”

  “I know,” he said again. He was fighting the urge to knock the phone out of Connor’s hand, and the appreciative expression off his face.

  “And she’s next door?” Connor said. “What are you doing sitting here then, wasting time?”

  “She doesn’t look like that now,” he said. “She’s changed her hair.”

  Two skeptical faces looked back at him.

  “You’re an idiot,” Connor said. “You should be over there. This is your second chance.”

  He shook his head. She’d already made an idiot of him—he wasn’t going to give her the opportunity again. And he didn’t want any kind of chance with her. “No. You know why.”

  “That was in the past,” Dane said. “You’re still here. She’s still here.”

  “Don’t you remember anythi
ng? She was his. He’s my brother.” He stumbled over the words. “He was my brother.”

  Connor’s voice was gentle. “You’re allowed to be happy, you know.”

  “Jesus, give it up.” He didn’t want to see the pity in their eyes. “I am happy.” He tipped his bottle back and drained the last dregs of beer.

  “We were there,” Dane pointed out. “We remember how you felt about her.”

  “I was a kid,” he said, a hot tension rising in his chest. “Everything has changed.”

  “It sure has,” said Connor, looking at his phone again.

  Liam stood up abruptly, the tension threatening to erupt hotter than the volcano in the bay, but Dane put a firm hand on his arm. Liam didn’t miss the warning glance Dane shot Connor, who put the phone back in his pocket.

  “We remember how you felt about Ethan too,” Dane said, as Connor backed down a step. “But it’s not betraying him if you move on.”

  He shook Dane off, the flare of anger back down to a smolder. “I’m moving on fine. Just not with her.”

  “Okay, man, that’s all good.” He looked at his watch, then gestured to Connor. “We’d better hit the road if we want to catch the band.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Connor asked.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Liam replied.

  They all went back through the house. At the front door, Connor grabbed his hand and pulled him close enough to slap him on the back. “Good to see you, man. I mean that.”

  “And you.” He meant it too.

  Dane gave him the same hug, and a smile. “We’re here for a few days. See you again?”

  For all the years apart, they still knew each other too well to let any bullshit linger. “Yeah, definitely.” He paused. “Thanks.”

  He watched them go down the steps in the dark, like he had so many times in the past. Apparently some things were solid enough to withstand time and distance, and his own bad temper. As he was closing the door, he heard Connor call something from the road.

  “Don’t be an idiot, remember.”

  Connor’s definition of being an idiot was the exact opposite of his own. He shook his head and went to clean up.

  Out on the deck again, he looked up at number ten. The upstairs windows were dark. Maybe she was out enjoying her Saturday night with Riley and the Sweet Breeze girls. Maybe she was downstairs, watching TV or something. Or maybe she was in bed. For a moment, he let his mind go there. Her curves beneath him, her legs around him, her eyes meeting his as he…

  He shook the image from his mind, left the empties where they sat, and went to pour himself a whiskey.

  Whatever the definition of idiocy, he was falling into it deeper by the minute.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jacinda closed the laptop and shut her eyes. She’d worked late enough, and these chapters were turning out even harder to write than she’d thought. She looked at Velvet, snug in her cat bed, surrounded by sleepy kittens, and wished she could shrink down and hide in there with them, warm, purring, and oblivious to the world. Then Velvet looked up, suddenly alert—and a second later, there was a knock at the door.

  “Good ears,” Jacinda told her, getting up from the sofa. Maybe it was Riley, stopping in after closing at Clarion Call. She wondered if Kerry or Jess had mentioned the incident last night. Jess’s blunt, revealing comment still echoed in her head. He obviously couldn’t live without you after you disappeared like that.

  She opened the door, and her heart twisted in her chest. Liam.

  “Jacinda.”

  The rasp in his voice hit her low in the belly. A slow, dangerous burn. Oh, God. She put a hand on her hip. “What?”

  “I…” He passed a hand over his face, where stubble darkened his jaw. There was a matching darkness in his eyes, and whiskey sweetness on his breath.

  “You what?”

  He stood on the threshold, wavering, not meeting her eye. Finally she grabbed his arm and pulled him through the door. “For God’s sake, come in.”

  In the living room, he stood on the rug, looking anywhere but at her, running a hand through his already rumpled hair. The whole rugged, tormented thing was stupidly attractive on him. She stood by the wingback chair and waited, trying not to think about kissing him again, or him kissing her again…feeling that stubble against her skin, running her own hands through his hair. Eventually, he cleared his throat and spoke.

  “How’s your foot?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Is that what you came to say?”

  “No.” He looked toward Nana Mac’s old-fashioned drinks cabinet in the corner. “Do you have anything to drink?”

  “Probably.” She went and opened the cabinet. Amongst the sherry and port and brandy, she spotted an almost-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and grabbed it out. There were heavy, cut crystal glasses on the cabinet’s mirror top, so she sloshed a generous helping into two of them. He wasn’t the only one who needed it.

  He took the glass and emptied it by half in his first sip. She matched him, the liquid hot and bracing as it went down. If he was ready for another round of whatever this was, she was too. Just…thank God he had a shirt on this time.

  “What then?” She didn’t bother making it sound encouraging.

  He shifted his weight. “Connor and Dane came to see me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You remember them?”

  Where was this going? “Yeah.”

  “They remember you.”

  “Okay.” Her voice was wary. “And…?”

  “They remember that summer.”

  “Well…so do I. As you know.” His cryptic sentences were like pebbles before a rock fall, warning of something bigger on the way. She couldn’t stand it anymore. “Just tell me why you came over.”

  He finished his drink, then took the bottle from the cabinet top and refilled his glass. She held hers out too, and he topped it up. Then he began to talk.

  “When Ethan realized you’d gone, he disappeared.”

  Instantly, her heart started pounding.

  “The same night you left. We called him, looked for him, asked around, but no one had seen him. My mother was worried, but I told her he’d be okay.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, memories etched into his face.

  “Dad said we couldn’t report him missing—if he was old enough to go out drinking, he was old enough to get himself home. So she walked the whole of Sweet Breeze Bay, searching, until we convinced her to go home and wait there. He could have gone over to the Other Side, or anywhere. Better if she was there when he came back.”

  He swallowed the contents of his glass in one go, then set it down. She held her breath, waiting, needing to know but not wanting to hear the words.

  “About three in the morning, I went to the only other place I thought he might be. There’s a tiny bay around the bottom of Mount Clarion that we always used to go to as kids. It was like our secret place. You can only walk there at low tide, but I swam around. The moon was really bright.”

  She remembered how she’d looked out at the moon from her window seat on the plane that night. The same moon that hung over Sweet Breeze Bay, and watched as everything fell to pieces.

  “There was a bottle of vodka smashed on the rocks. And I found him…washed up.”

  The beginning of a sound escaped her lips, but she swallowed it back. Nothing she felt now could compare to what that must have been like for Liam, or to the fear that must have overwhelmed Ethan as the sea—once his playground—dragged him down into its cold, churning blackness.

  “You brought him home?”

  He nodded. “The water was high by then. He was heavy.”

  The image of Liam struggling through the water, bearing Ethan’s body, taking him home, imprinted itself in her mind. She knew then that it would never leave—Ethan’s last journey and Liam’s moment of horror and loss would be a scar on her heart, forever. But it was so much worse for him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whis
pered.

  He nodded again, just once. “I know.”

  It was the nearest thing to forgiveness she’d had from him, and she held it close. She wanted to hold him close too, find some way to make the unthinkable somehow bearable. But he stood in front of her, unmoving, his gaze fixed on the wall over her shoulder. She bit her lip, and asked the question that had been tormenting her all week.

  “It was an accident though, right? He would never…”

  “I don’t know what was in his mind.” Finally, he looked at her, his blue eyes as dark as the deepest ocean. “But yeah…I think it must have been.”

  At that, something broke inside her, or healed, and the pain and relief welled up. She reached out a tentative hand, not knowing what she was offering, or reaching for, only that the distance between them was too great.

  He took one long step and collided into her, the momentum carrying them backward as he crushed her close, her empty glass falling to the floor. With one swift movement he lifted her up, and she wrapped her legs around him. For the first time, their mouths met with equal intention—a blind, urgent need to swamp the past with something here and now, real and hot and overwhelming. Still in the middle of the room, they clung to each other, an island of broken hearts and seeking tongues and rising heat.

  When they paused for breath, she slid down to her feet, a blur of emotion, each one fighting with another. Desire and regret. Remorse and hunger. Pain and hope.

  “We shouldn’t.”

  But he said nothing. He took her hand and led her to the stairs, his grip firm and his purpose clear.

  She didn’t resist.

  In the doorway of her bedroom, she hesitated, and he turned back to look at her.

  “This room…” she said.

  But he pulled her in, and pulled her closer. He took her head in his hands, his fingers tangled in her hair. Reflected in his eyes, she saw the longing of her own heart—connection, comfort…and lust. Each of them was off limits to the other, but their common ground was where need and desire met.

  She grasped the hem of his t-shirt and pushed it up, exposing the chest that had distracted her so unexpectedly, and inappropriately. He was sun-kissed and broad and strong, and she lay her hands where they’d wanted to go the first time she saw him again over the gate. He tugged the shirt over his head, and then reached for her blouse. She leaned over slightly to help him pull it off, not bothering to undo the buttons, and when she straightened up his eyes were fixed on her bust. He lowered his head and kissed her neck, his lips traveling steadily lower until he was at her cleavage, breathing her in, losing himself in the lace-clad curves. She threaded her fingers in his hair as his warm mouth roamed the soft skin, one hand cupping each breast, his thumbs finding the hardened buds of her nipples under pale pink satin. As he brushed against them, an answering hot tension intensified between her legs. Suddenly impatient, she reached down, and he stood back to give her room as she undid his belt. Then the button of his jeans. Then the zip. With one determined push, she shoved the jeans down, and he shucked them off and kicked them away. Inside his fitting boxer briefs, the evidence of their game-playing rose large, and hard, and so damn tempting. Her pulse kicked up another notch. Off limits, and out of her mind, nothing but a mess of need. But if he wasn’t stopping, she wasn’t either.