Meet Me in Barefoot Bay

by Roxanne St Claire

  “Don’t come up here,” Will said.

  The older man frowned, then adjusted his crooked glasses. “I just wanted to know if you like what I’m wearing.”

  What? What the hell was he wearing, anyway? Bright-yellow pants and an orange sweater.

  “You look like a Creamsicle.”

  Guy tried to laugh, but it came out more of a cough. “That good or bad?”

  “Why are you dressed up?” he asked, wishing he didn’t care or even want to know.

  “For the party!”

  “What?”

  “They’re having a party at my house tonight,” he said, his voice implying that everyone who was anyone would know this. “The whole Clean House crew will be there, is what Blondie told me.”

  “Blondie?” Zoe, of course.

  “And you know who will be there.” He wiggled his finger and sang the sentence like a second-grade tease.

  He knew who.

  “C’mon, William.” Guy took a few more steps, each one an effort, but he was clearly driven by happiness. That was what really irked.

  He looked like a great big orange-and-yellow splash of happiness.

  Wonder how happy he’d be when he found out what the “Clean House” crew was really planning? How happy he’d be to take a good long look at those pictures of “Missy” and be told flat-out that it was his hands that had battered her?

  How happy would the old fucker be then?

  Will waited for the words to form, the accusations to fly, but he stood stone silent, his whole body itching and sweating.

  “You do like her, don’t you?” Guy asked. “I mean I might be old and have more holes in my brain than a sponge, but I can see what I can see, and you two like each other.”

  “It’s none of your business,” Will said brusquely.

  That earned him a flicker of surprise as Guy held up his hands and then wobbled as he lost his balance.

  “Jesus,” Will muttered, lunging to make sure the old man didn’t fall.

  “Oh, oh! I’m okay.” Guy stabbed in the air, finally finding the railing and righting himself. “Not the first time I nearly went down today.”

  “It’s not? You fell today?” Why, oh Good Christ, why did he care?

  “Capsized, I mean.” He grinned, his teeth nearly the color of his pants. “In the boat, William. My old rowboat! We took it out today!”

  “Who did?”

  “The girls and me.” He shrugged both shoulders in a fake giggle. “I bet we’re not supposed to call ’em girls anymore, but that’s what they’ll always be to—”

  “What girls?” Surely Jocelyn hadn’t gone out in a boat with him today? Surely she hadn’t left Will—kissing her and holding her and making all kinds of emotional breakthroughs—to take Guy out on a boat ride? After—

  “Blondie and Missy, of course.” He clapped his hands. “And we saw Henry the Heron, William! Oh, I’m going to have a surprise for you soon. Not yet, but soon. I’m starting a new project.”

  Exhaustion pressed and forced him up the stairs backwards, still facing Guy so he could be sure the old man didn’t follow.

  “I can’t come to your party,” he said gruffly. “I have too much work to do.”

  “Work?” Guy whined. “You worked all day, son. You have to learn to have a little fun. To…” He made fists and a pathetic attempt at some kind of dance. “Let loose once in a while.”

  Will inhaled slowly, and then shook his head. “Can’t, sorry.” Why was he apologizing?

  “What work?” Guy challenged.

  “Your bills, for one thing,” he shot back. “Your insurance forms and Medicare. Your mortgage and your utilities. You’re a full-time job, Guy!”

  Guy’s happy face fell like whipped cream thrown against a wall. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

  No he didn’t, but Will didn’t feel a damn bit better after that outburst. He felt like shit on the bottom of a heel, which he was.

  The pictures. The bruises. The pain.

  “Just let me get a workout and a run in, Guy,” he said quickly. “I’ll check on you later.”

  “Zoe actually doesn’t know how to throw a bad party.” Tessa sidled up next to Jocelyn on the cracked vinyl cushion, setting the swing in motion and looking up at almost threatening skies. “Even if it rains, she’ll figure out a way to take this thing inside, bring out the games, and have your father playing Truth or Dare before nine o’clock.”

  Jocelyn smiled as she watched Guy claw his way through a game of Egyptian Rat Screws with Lacey’s teenage daughter, Ashley. “I can’t believe she still loves to play that game and keeps teaching it to people. It’s like she’s spreading a sickness.”

  “I refuse to play it with her,” Tessa said. “And let me tell you, when I lived out there in Flagstaff with Zoe and her great-aunt, they’d play four-hour Rat Screws marathons.”

  “I have a feeling this card game is Guy’s favorite new pastime.”

  Tessa looked around. “Then Will ought to learn the game. Where is he, anyway?”

  “I have no idea,” Jocelyn said, but of course she knew exactly why Will wasn’t here. He was too angry with Guy to come to the impromptu party. But that wouldn’t last. He’d forgive and forget, too warmhearted to hang on to hate.

  But she could, and would. Even if that meant she never had a chance to explore her feelings for Will or wallow in the sweetness of the confessions he’d made this morning.

  He’d been her everything.

  She stared at her father, the thief of her happiness.

  Across the patio, Clay and Lacey stood arm in arm by the barbecue, laughing as they flipped burgers, punctuating almost every sentence with a kiss, a touch, a shared look of affection. No one had stolen their happiness, she thought glumly.

  “You want to go try and find Will?” Tessa asked. “You’d think the aroma of cooking meat alone would get a bachelor out of his house and onto the lawn.”

  Jocelyn attempted a careless shrug.

  “Hey.” Tessa put her hand on Jocelyn’s arm. “Go find him. You’re staring at his house.”

  She looked away. “I am not.”

  Puffing out a breath, Tessa popped off the swing and nearly knocked Jocelyn on her butt.

  “Excuse me,” Tessa said, walking over to the table. “Guy, have you seen Will?”

  Jocelyn watched her father, expecting his usual blank stare, his big bear shrug. But, instead, emotion flashed in his eyes, so fast probably no one else saw it. Only a person who’d spent every minute of her childhood watching that face for a clue to when it would happen would see it.

  They’d talked. Jocelyn knew it instantly. What had Will said to him? And was that why he was conspicuously absent?

  “He was in his house last time I saw him,” Guy said.

  “When was that?” Tessa asked.

  Now he went blank and lifted a shoulder.

  “In the last hour or so?” Tessa prodded.

  “I saw him out jogging,” Ashley said, her next card poised over the playing table. “He was running up toward the high school when we got here. Okay, you ready? Slap!”

  Ashley threw down a card and Guy was right there with her, the conversation forgotten as Tessa came back to the swing.

  “It’s going to rain in the next half hour,” Tessa said. “Probably when we’re eating, so I better see about setting a table inside.”

  Jocelyn stood. “I’ll help you.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I don’t want to just sit here, Tess.”

  Tessa gave her a look. “Go find him. Tell him whatever it is that has you sighing and staring upstairs at what I can only assume was once his bedroom.”

  “I—”

  “I’ll cover for you. Go, quick before it rains.” She held out her hand to help Jocelyn up, adding a knowing smile. “I saw you two arguing on the beach this morning,” she added softly. “He’s probably waiting for you to invite him to our little party.”

  Jocelyn just laughed
softly. “Secrets are so overrated around here.”

  “They are with me.” She bent over to the cooler of drinks that Clay and Lacey had brought, snagging a beer. “Take him this as a peace offering.”

  “We’re not at war.”

  Tessa just lifted her brow and gestured for Jocelyn to go.

  A few minutes later, Jocelyn had escaped out the front, unnoticed. Tucking the beer in the pocket of her white cargo pants, she traced her old familiar route toward the high school.

  If she knew Will—and she did—she knew exactly where he was.

  Twilight hung over the Mimosa High baseball field, and the clouds that had rolled in from the east made it even darker.

  But Jocelyn didn’t need the field lights. She just followed the familiar ping of a baseball knocking against a metal bat. Rhythmic, steady, a whoosh of wind, a ding of noise, and the soft plop of a ball hitting the outfield.

  Was he batting alone?

  She walked behind the home dugout, pausing as she always did at the numbers painted on the back wall, each circled with a baseball and a year. The Mimosa Scorpions’ most valuable players.

  And there was none more valuable than the superstar of 1997, number thirty-one, team captain William Palmer.

  Whoosh, ping—that was a long ball—thud.

  She trailed her fingers over the red paint of his name, then walked around the dugout, staying far enough from the chain-link fence to see him but not be in his field of vision.

  Speaking of visions.

  He wore nothing but hundred-year-old jeans, hanging so low she could practically see his hipbones and the dusting of dark hair from his naval down to his—

  She forced her eyes up, only to stop on his chest, bare, damp with sweat, every muscle cut and corded as he took his swings.

  Low, deep, and inside her belly, desire fisted and pulled.

  He held the bat on his right shoulder and tossed a ball up—she spied a white plastic bucket full of baseballs next to him—then, in one smooth move, he’d grip the bat and take a swing, sending the ball high in the air or straight down the middle. There was a name for this practice. Fun something? She couldn’t remember, but the sight of him swinging took her back in time, when the same sensations of need and want had rocked her young body.

  She’d nearly given in to them. What would have happened if Guy hadn’t walked in on them that night? How different would their lives be? Would they have made it in the long haul? Or would she still be living in L.A. and so, so alone?

  Foolish even to think about it, she chided herself. The past couldn’t be changed.

  Still, it could be remembered. For at least ten swings of the bat, she just stood next to the dugout and drank in the sight of Will at the plate, his swing a little different now, a little slower, a little less confident than when he’d been a cocky high school superstar. So much was different about Will now.

  His hair had curled at the ends from sweat despite the black bandanna he’d wrapped around his head. His body had lost that sinewy look of youth, but had grown into broader planes, more mature muscles, even better shoulders to lean on.

  Without thinking, she took a step forward, closed her fingers over the cool metal of the chain-links, and—

  Instantly got his attention.

  For about as long as it took a fly ball to reach the fence, they stared at each other.

  “I brought you a peace offering,” she finally said, holding up the beer bottle.

  He leaned over and picked up another ball, tossed it left-handed, then took a powerful swing. “That’ll go down nice after hitting infield fungoes.”

  Fungoes. That was the word. “Haven’t heard that term for fifteen years.”

  He smiled and slammed another, far and long, the ball bouncing along the ground until it came to a stop deep in center field.

  That was no infield fungo. “Hitting ’em a little hard tonight, aren’t you?”

  “There’s a glove in the dugout if you want to field,” he said.

  A smile pulled. “You think I can catch those fungoes?”

  “I’ll hit puff balls for you, Bloomerang.” He grinned and used the bat to gesture to the dugout.

  Bloomerang. The girl who always comes back.

  She stepped down into the dugout, set the beer on the bench, and grabbed the brown baseball glove. “They just leave this stuff out here?” she asked.

  “My key still works the equipment room.”

  That made her laugh. “Seriously? They haven’t changed the locks in fifteen years?”

  “They haven’t changed a lot in fifteen years.”

  As she stepped out onto the field, she slipped the mitt on her left hand. “But you have, Will.”

  “We all have, Jossie.”

  She trotted out to center field, her thin, flat sandals all wrong for baseball. “Hang on,” she said, kicking them off. “Okay, batter.”

  She got into position behind second base, hands on knees, butt stuck out. “Bring it.”

  He popped her a slow and easy grounder, rolling the ball so gently she had to walk forward to get it before it stopped. “You can do better than that, Palmer.”

  “Let’s see your arm.”

  Grabbing the ball, she straightened, held it up, and threw it straight into the dirt.

  “Ah, the perfection of the female throw.”

  “Screw you.”

  From forty feet away, she could see him grin.

  “Is this what you’ll do as a coach?” she asked.

  “At fielding practice.” He hit another one, a little harder down the middle, and she managed to stop it.

  “Ugly,” he said. “But you got the job done.”

  She threw it back. “What about all those balls all over the outfield?”

  “I’ll clean up when I’m done.”

  “When are you going to be done?”

  He slammed a fly ball. “Go back, go back,” he called, and she did, wanting to be that woman who just turned the mitt and caught it and not the one who cowered behind the glove hoping it didn’t bop her in the head.

  She stuck out the glove and missed the catch.

  “Oh, man,” he said, disgusted. “Run the bases, scrub.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Run the bases. Complain and you do it twice.”

  She put her hands on her hips and opened her mouth to—

  “Three times around.”

  “Hit the ball, Palmer.”

  “Catch the next three and I’ll let you go.”

  She laughed, spreading her feet for balance, the grass soft and cool on her toes, so utterly grateful for this moment of pure pleasure. The air was thick with the rain that would surely come and the unspoken truce that they were just here to play.

  “Fun job you have,” she said just as he was ready to toss a ball and hit it.

  “Throwing balls in the air?”

  “Playing. Just relaxing.”

  “Well, I don’t actually have it at the moment.” He tapped another softie right to her. “That’s one,” he said.

  She threw it in the general vicinity of home base and he jumped to the side and snagged the ball before it hit the dirt.

  “Still a great catcher,” she said.

  “Passable and my knees are screaming at me. Ready?” He hit this one a little harder, but she dove for it and went sailing on the grass and caught it, holding up the ball with far more drama than the situation called for.

  “Uh, you have to throw a grounder to a base or you didn’t make an out.”

  She waved the mitt. “Details.”

  He had the next ball, but instead of tossing and hitting it, he stood very still, looking at the field. It was so dark she couldn’t quite read his expression, but she knew Will’s body language.

  “You’re not mad anymore,” she observed.

  “That’s not what I was thinking.”

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, a funny, unholy tendril of anticipation curling up through her c
hest at the intimacy in his tone.

  “I was thinking that…” He hooked the bat on his shoulder and held out the ball. “You’re even prettier than you were when you were a teenager.”

  Her heart hitched.

  “And you were really pretty then.”

  She smiled, knowing he couldn’t see her in the dark but giving him thanks for the compliment anyway. “You’re prettier now, too,” she said.

  Laughing, he threw the ball in the air, flipped the bat down, and whacked that ball long and high and all the way to the fence.

  She didn’t even try to get it. Instead, she just turned and watched it bounce off the centerfield fence.

  “First one there gets the beer!” he said, throwing the bat and starting to run.

  The instant she realized it was a race, she took off, but he caught up to her in seconds, slowing down so they reached the ball at the same time, both of them diving for it, both of them hitting the grass.

  And because it took no thought to do the most natural thing in the world, Jocelyn reached for Will and he pulled her close and kissed her with the same power he’d used to hit that ball.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Oh, man. The only thing better than the tangy, fresh smell of outfield grass was the bone-deep pleasure of rolling in it with Jocelyn Bloom.

  The instant their mouths connected, Will tried to ease her down and get above her, over her, on her. The need was swift and desperate and so pent-up he let out a groan.

  She pushed him on his back and leaned over him instead. “My white pants are going to get grass stains,” she murmured into the kiss.

  “You’re right,” he said with mock concern. “Better take them off.”

  She laughed, still kissing him but maintaining all the control, on top, hands on his face, her every muscle taut. “One of us half undressed is enough.”

  No it wasn’t. He flipped her firmly on the grass, looming over her, liking it so much better up here. “Every once in a while, you’ve got to let go of control.”

  “Who said?”

  “I said. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  Her lips curved up as she placed one finger in the dead center of his bare chest. “Came to see you half undressed.”

  “You can do that anytime,” he said. “Just ask.”