by Nora Roberts
“Oh.” She looked back, blowing at her bangs. “You should have told me. I’d have hurried things up.”
“This pace works for me.” He took a pull from the bottle. “You want a drink or something?”
“No, I’m fine. I was going to use that salad dressing Phillip made up. It looks so much prettier than the store-bought.”
The rain was letting up, petering out into slow, drizzling drops with watery sunlight struggling to break through. Grace glanced toward the window. She was always hoping to see a rainbow. “Anna’s flowers are doing well,” she commented. “The rain’s good for them.”
“Saves me from dragging out the hose. She’d have my head if they died on her while she’s gone.”
“Wouldn’t blame her. She worked so hard getting them planted before the wedding.” Grace worked quickly, competently as she spoke. Draining crisp potatoes, adding more to the sizzling oil. “It was such a beautiful wedding,” she went on as she mixed sauce for the meat in a bowl.
“Came off all right. We got lucky with the weather.”
“Oh, it couldn’t have rained that day. It would have been a sin.” She could see it all again, so clearly. The green of the grass in the backyard, the sparkling of water. The flowers Anna had planted glowing with color—and the ones she’d bought spilling out of pots and bowls alongside the white runner that the bride had walked down to meet her groom.
A white dress billowing, the thin veil only accentuating the dark, deliriously happy eyes. Chairs had been filled with friends and family. Anna’s grandparents had both wept. And Cam—rough-and-tumble Cameron Quinn—had looked at his bride as if he’d just been given the keys to heaven.
A backyard wedding, Grace thought now. Sweet, simple, romantic. Perfect.
“She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” Grace said it with a sigh that was only lightly touched with envy. “So dark and exotic.”
“She suits Cam.”
“They looked like movie stars, all polished and glossy.” She smiled to herself as she stirred spicy sauce into the meat. “When you and Phillip played that waltz for their first dance, it was the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen.” She sighed again as she finished putting the salad together. “And now they’re in Rome. I can hardly imagine it.”
“They called yesterday morning to catch me before I left. They said they’re having a good time.”
She laughed at that, a rippling, smoky sound that seemed to cruise along his skin. “Honeymooning in Rome? It would be hard not to.” She started to scoop out more potatoes and swore lightly as oil popped and splattered on the side of her hand. “Damn.” Even as she was lifting the slight burn to her mouth to soothe it, Ethan leaped forward and grabbed her hand.
“Did it get you?” He saw the pinkening skin and pulled her to the sink. “Run some cold water on it.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just a little burn. Happens all the time.”
“It wouldn’t if you were more careful.” His brows were knitted, his hand gripping her fingers firmly to keep her hand under the stream of water. “Does it hurt?”
“No.” She couldn’t feel anything but his hand on her fingers and her own heart thundering in her chest. Knowing she’d make a fool of herself any moment, she tried to pull free. “It’s nothing, Ethan. Don’t fuss.”
“You need some salve on it.” He started to reach up into the cupboard to find some, and his head lifted. His eyes met hers. He stood there, the water running, both of their hands trapped under the chilly fall of it.
He tried never to stand quite so close to her, not so close that he could see those little gold dust flecks in her eyes. Because he would start to think about them, to wonder about them. Then he’d have to remind himself that this was Grace, the girl he’d watched grow up. The woman who was Aubrey’s mother. A neighbor who considered him a trusted friend.
“You need to take better care of yourself.” His voice was rough as the words worked their way through a throat that had gone dust-dry. She smelled of lemons.
“I’m fine.” She was dying, somewhere between giddy pleasure and utter despair. He was holding her hand as if it were as fragile as spun glass. And he was frowning at her as if she were slightly less sensible than her two-year-old daughter. “The potatoes are going to burn, Ethan.”
“Oh. Well.” Mortified because he’d been thinking—just for a second—that her mouth might taste as soft as it looked, he jerked back, fumbling now for the tube of salve. His heart was jumping, and he hated the sensation. He preferred things calm and easy. “Put some of this on it anyway.” He laid it on the counter and backed up. “I’ll . . . get the kids washed up for dinner.”
He scooped up the laundry basket on his way and was gone.
With deliberate movements, Grace shut the water off, then turned and rescued her fries. Satisfied with the progress of the meal, she picked up the salve and smoothed a little on the reddened splotch on her hand before tidily replacing the tube in the cupboard.
Then she leaned on the sink, looked out the window.
But she couldn’t find a rainbow in the sky.
TWO
There was nothing like a Saturday—unless it was the Saturday leading up to the last week of school and into summer vacation. That, of course, was all the Saturdays of your life rolled into one big shiny ball.
Saturday meant spending the day out on the workboat with Ethan and Jim instead of in a classroom. It meant hard work and hot sun and cold drinks. Man stuff. With his eyes shaded under the bill of his Orioles cap and the really cool sunglasses he’d bought on a trip to the mall, Seth shot out the gaff to drag in the next marker buoy. His young muscles bunched under his X-Files T-shirt, which assured him that the truth was out there.
He watched Jim work—tilt the pot and unhook the oyster-can-lid stopper to the bait box on the bottom of the pot. Shake out the old bait, Seth noted and see the seagulls dive and scream like maniacs. Cool. Now get a good solid hold on that pot, turn it over, and shake it like crazy so the crabs in the upstairs section fall out into the washtub waiting for them. Seth figured he could do all that—if he really wanted to. He wasn’t afraid of a bunch of stupid crabs just because they looked like big mutant bugs from Venus and had claws that tended to snap and pinch.
Instead, his job was to rebait the pot with a couple handfuls of disgusting fish parts, do the stopper, check to make sure there were no snags in the line. Eyeball the distance between markers and if everything looked good, toss the pot overboard. Splash!
Then he got to toss out the gaff for the next buoy.
He knew how to tell the sooks from the jimmies now. Jim said the girl crabs painted their fingernails because their pincers were red. It was wild the way the patterns on the underbellies looked like sex parts. Anybody could see that the guy crabs had this long T shape there that looked just like a dick.
Jim had shown him a couple of crabs mating, too—he called them doublers—and that was just too much. The guy crab just climbed aboard the girl, tucked her under him, and swam around like that for days.
Seth figured they had to like it.
Ethan had said the crabs were married, and when Seth had snickered, he lifted a brow. Seth had found himself intrigued enough to go to the school library and read up on crabs. And he thought he understood, sort of, what Ethan meant. The guy protected the girl by keeping her under him because she could only mate when she was in her last molt and her shell was soft, so she was vulnerable. Even after they’d done it, he kept carrying her like that until her shell was hard again. And she was only going to mate once, so it was like getting married.
He thought of how Cam and Miss Spinelli—Anna, he reminded himself, he got to call her Anna now—had gotten married. Lots of the women got all leaky, and the guys laughed and joked. Everybody made such a big deal out of it with flowers and music and tons of food. He didn’t get it. It seemed to him getting married just meant you got to have sex whenever you wanted and nobody got snotty about it.
> But it had been cool. He’d never been to anything like it. Even though Cam had dragged him out to the mall and made him try on suits, it was mostly okay.
Maybe sometimes he worried about how it was going to change things, just when he was getting used to the way things were. There was going to be a woman in the house now. He liked Anna okay. She’d played square with him even though she was a social worker. But she was still a female.
Like his mother.
Seth clamped down on that thought. If he thought about his mother, if he thought about the life he’d had with her—the men, the drugs, the dirty little rooms—it would spoil the day.
He hadn’t had enough sunny days in his ten years to risk ruining one.
“You taking a nap there, Seth?”
Ethan’s mild voice snapped Seth back to the moment. He blinked, saw the sun glinting off the water, the orange floats bobbing. “Just thinking,” Seth muttered and quickly pulled in another buoy.
“Me, I don’t do much thinking.” Jim set the trap on the gunwale and began culling crabs. His leathered face creased in grins. “Gives you brain fever.”
“Shit,” Seth said, leaning over to study the catch. “That one’s starting to molt.”
Jim grunted, held up a crab with a shell cracking along the back. “This buster’ll be somebody’s soft-shell sandwich by tomorrow.” He winked at Seth as he tossed the crab into the tank. “Maybe mine.”
Foolish, who was still young enough to deserve the name, sniffed at the trap, inciting a quick and ugly crab riot. As claws snapped, the pup leaped back with a yelp.
“That there dog.” Jim shook with laughter. “He don’t have to worry about no brain fever.”
Even when they’d taken the day’s catch to the waterfront, emptied the tank, and dropped Jim off, the day wasn’t over. Ethan stepped back from the controls. “We’ve got to go into the boatyard. You want to take her in?”
Though Seth’s eyes were shielded by the dark sunglasses, Ethan imagined that their expression matched the boy’s dropped jaw. It only amused him when Seth jerked a shoulder as if such things were an everyday occurrence.
“Sure. No problem.” With sweaty palms, Seth took the helm.
Ethan stood by, hands casually tucked in his back pockets, eyes alert. There was plenty of water traffic. A pretty weekend afternoon drew the recreational sailors to the Bay. But they didn’t have far to go, and the kid had to learn sometime. You couldn’t live in St. Chris and not know how to pilot a workboat.
“A little to starboard,” he told Seth. “See that skiff there? Sunday sailor, and he’s going to cut right across your bow if you keep this heading.”
Seth narrowed his eyes, studied the boat and the people on deck. He snorted. “That’s because he’s paying more attention to that girl in the bikini than to the wind.”
“Well, she looks fine in the bikini.”
“I don’t see what’s the big deal about breasts.”
To his credit, Ethan didn’t laugh out loud, but nodded soberly. “I guess part of that’s because we don’t have them.”
“I sure don’t want any.”
“Give it a couple of years,” Ethan murmured under the cover of the engine noise. And the thought of that made him wince. What the hell were they going to do when the kid hit puberty? Somebody was going to have to talk to him about . . . things. He knew Seth already had too much sexual knowledge, but it was all the dark and sticky sort. The same sort he himself had known about at much too early an age.
One of them was going to have to explain how things should be, could be—and before too much more time passed.
He hoped to hell it wasn’t going to have to be him.
He caught sight of the boatyard, the old brick building, the spanking new dock he and his brothers had built. Pride rippled through him. Maybe it didn’t look like much with its pitted bricks and patched roof, but they were making something out of it. The windows were dusty, but they were new and unbroken.
“Cut back on the throttle. Take her in slow.” Absently Ethan put a hand over Seth’s on the controls. He felt the boy stiffen, then relax. He still had a problem with being touched unexpectedly, Ethan noted. But it was passing. “That’s the way, just a bit more to starboard.”
When the boat bumped gently against the pilings, Ethan jumped onto the pier to secure lines. “Nice job.” At his nod, Simon, all but quivering with anticipation, leaped overboard. Yipping frantically, Foolish clambered onto the gunwale, hesitated, then followed.
“Hand me up the cooler, Seth.”
Grunting only a little, Seth hefted it. “Maybe I could pilot the boat sometime when we’re crabbing.”
“Maybe.” Ethan waited for the boy to scramble safely onto the pier before heading to the rear cargo doors of the building.
They were already open wide and the soul-stirring sound of Ray Charles flowed out through them. Ethan set the cooler down just inside the doors and put his hands on his hips.
The hull was finished. Cam had put in dog’s hours to get that much done before he left for his honeymoon. They’d planked it, rabbeting the edges so that they would lap, yet remain smooth at the seams.
The two of them had completed the steam-bent framing, using pencil lines as guides and “walking” each frame carefully into place with slow, steady pressure. The hull was solid. There would be no splits in a Quinn boat’s planking.
The design was primarily Ethan’s with a few adjustments here and there of Cam’s. The hull was an arc-bottom, expensive to construct but with the virtues of stability and speed. Ethan knew his client.
He’d designed the shape of the bow with this in mind and had decided on a cruiser bow, attractive and, again, good for speed, buoyant. The stern was a counterdesign of moderate length, providing an overhang that would make the boat’s length greater than her waterline length.
It was a sleek, appealing look. Ethan understood that his client was every bit as concerned with appearance as he was with basic seaworthiness.
He’d used Seth for grunt labor when it was time to coat the interior with the fifty-fifty mix of hot linseed oil and turpentine. It was sweaty work, guaranteed to cause a few burns despite caution and gloves. Still, the boy had held up fine.
From where he stood, Ethan could study the sheerline, the outline at the top edge of the hull. He’d gone with a flattened sheerline to ensure a roomier, drier craft with good headroom below. His client liked to take friends and family out for a sail.
The man had insisted on teak, though Ethan had told him pine or cedar would have done the job well enough for hull planking. The man had money to spend on his hobby, Ethan thought now—and money to spend on status. But he had to admit, the teak looked wonderful.
His brother Phillip was working on the decking. Stripped to the waist in defense against the heat and humidity, his dark bronze hair protected by a black cap without team name or emblem and worn bill to the back, he was screwing the deck planks into place. Every few seconds, the hard, high-pitched buzz of the electric driver competed with Ray Charles’s creamy tenor.
“How’s it going?” Ethan called over the din.
Phillip’s head came up. His martyred-angel’s face was damp with sweat, his golden-brown eyes annoyed. He’d just been reminding himself that he was an advertising executive, for God’s sake, not a carpenter.
“It’s hotter than a summer in hell in here and it’s only June. We’ve got to get some fans in here. You got anything cold, or at least wet, in that cooler? I ran out of liquids an hour ago.”
“Turn on the tap in the john and you get water,” Ethan said mildly as he bent to take a cold soft drink from the cooler. “It’s a new technology.”
“Christ knows what’s in that tap water.” Phillip caught the can Ethan tossed him and grimaced at the label. “At least they tell you what chemicals they load in here.”
“Sorry, we drank all the Evian. You know how Jim is about his designer water. Can’t get enough of it.”
“S
crew you,” Phillip said, but without heat. He glugged the chilly Pepsi, then raised a brow when Ethan came up to inspect his work.
“Nice job.”
“Gee, thanks, boss. Can I have a raise?”
“Sure, double what you’re getting now. Seth’s the math whiz. What’s zip times zip, Seth?”
“Double zip,” Seth said with a quick grin. His fingers itched to try out the electric screwdriver. So far, nobody would let him touch it or any of the other power tools.
“Well, now I can afford that cruise to Tahiti.”
“Why don’t you grab a shower—unless you object to washing with tap water, too. I can take over here.”
It was tempting. Phillip was grimy, sweaty, and miserably hot. He would cheerfully have killed three strangers for one cold glass of Pouilly-Fuisse. But he knew Ethan had been up since before dawn and had already put in what any normal person would consider a full day.
“I can handle a couple more hours.”
“Fine.” It was exactly the response Ethan had expected. Phillip tended to bitch, but he never let you down. “I think we can get this deck knocked out before we call it a day.”
“Can I—”
“No,” Ethan and Phillip said together, anticipating Seth’s question.
“Why the hell not?” he demanded. “I’m not stupid. I won’t shoot anybody with a stupid screw or anything.”
“Because we like to play with it.” Phillip smiled. “And we’re bigger than you. Here.” He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet and found a five. “Go on down to Crawford’s and get me some bottled water. If you don’t whine about it, you can get some ice cream with the change.”
Seth didn’t whine, but he did mutter about being used like a slave as he called his dog and headed out.
“We ought to show him how to use the tools when we have more time,” Ethan commented. “He’s got good hands.”
“Yeah, but I wanted him out. I didn’t have the chance to tell you last night. The detective tracked Gloria DeLauter as far as Nags Head.”