The memory circled around her mind, nearly skipped away, then popped clear. Hot summer afternoon, the shock of cool water, head going under. And coming up swinging. “You're Mr. David's boy.” The warmth spread in her stomach and up to her heart. For a moment her eyes reflected it and made his pulse trip. “Which one?”
“Nathan, the older.”
“Of course.” She skimmed her hair back, not with the studied seductiveness of her sister but with absentminded impatience. “And you did push me. I never fell in the river unless I wanted to or was helped along.”
“You slipped,” Nathan corrected, “then I helped you along.”
She laughed, a quick, rich chuckle, then took the mug Brian offered. “I suppose I can let bygones be, since I gave you a fat lipâand your father gave me the world.”
Nathan's head began to throb, fast and vicious. “My father?”
“I dogged him like a shadow, pestered him mercilessly about how he took pictures, why he took the ones he did, how the camera worked. He was so patient with me. I must have been driving him crazy, interrupting his work that way, but he never shooed me away. He taught me so much, not just the basics but how to look and how to see. I suppose I owe him for every photograph I've ever taken.”
The breakfast he'd just eaten churned greasily in his stomach. “You're a professional photographer?”
“Jo's a big-deal photographer,” Lexy said with a bite in her voice as she came back in. “The globe-trotting J. E. Hathaway, snapping her pictures of other people's lives as she goes. Two omelettes, Brian, two sides of hash browns, one bacon, one sausage. Room 201's having breakfast, Miss World Traveler. You've got beds to strip.”
“Exit, stage left,” Jo murmured when Lexy strode out again. “Yes,” she said, turning back to Nathan. “Thanks in large part to David Delaney, I'm a photographer. If it hadn't been for Mr. David, I might be as frustrated and pissed off at the world as Lexy. How is your father?”
“He's dead,” Nathan said shortly and pushed himself up from the stool. “I've got to get back. Thanks for breakfast, Brian.”
He went out fast, letting the screen door slam behind him.
“Dead? Bri?”
“An accident,” Brian told her. “About three months ago. Both his parents. And he lost his brother about a month later.”
“Oh, God.” Jo ran a hand over her face. “I put my foot in that. I'll be back in a minute.”
She set the mug down and raced out the door to chase Nathan down. “Nathan! Nathan, wait a minute.” She caught him on the shell path that wound through the garden toward the trees. “I'm sorry.” She put a hand on his arm to stop him. “I'm so sorry I went on that way.”
He pulled himself in, fought to think clearly over the pounding in his temples. “It's all right. I'm still a little raw there.”
“If I'd knownâ” She broke off, shrugged her shoulders helplessly. She'd likely have put her foot in it anyway, she decided. She'd always been socially clumsy.
“You didn't.” Nathan clamped down on his own nerves and gave the hand still on his arm a light squeeze. She looked so distressed, he thought. And she'd done nothing more than accidentally scrape an open wound. “Don't worry about it.”
“I wish I'd managed to keep in touch with him.” Her voice went wistful now. “I wish I'd made more of an effort so I could have thanked him for everything he did for me.”
“Don't.” He bit the word off, swung around to her with his eyes fierce and cold. “Thanking someone for where your life ended up is the same as blaming them for it. We're all responsible for ourselves.”
Uneasy, she backed off a step. “True enough, but some people influence what roads we take.”
“Funny, then, that we're both back here, isn't it?” He stared beyond her to Sanctuary, where the windows glinted in the sun. “Why are you back here, Jo?”
“It's my home.”
He looked back at her, pale cheeks, bruised eyes. “And that's where you come when you feel beat up and lost and unhappy?”
She folded her arms across her chest as if chilled. She, usually the observer, didn't care to be observed quite so clear-sightedly. “It's just where you go.”
“It seems we decided to come here at almost the same time. Fate? I wonderâor luck.” He smiled a little because he was going to go with the latter.
“Coincidence.” She preferred it. “Why are you back here?”
“Damned if I know.” He exhaled between his teeth, then looked at her again. He wanted to soothe that sorrow and worry from her eyes, hear that laugh again. He was suddenly very certain it would ease his soul as much as hers. “But since I am, why don't you walk me back to the cottage?”
“You know the way.”
“It'd be a nicer walk with company. With you.”
“I told you I'm not interested.”
“I'm telling you I am.” His smile deepened as he reached up to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “It'll be fun seeing who nudges who to the other side.”
Men didn't flirt with her. Ever. Or not that she had ever noticed. The fact that he was doing just that, and she noticed, only irritated her. The inherent Pendleton Fault Line dug between her brows. “I've got work to do.”
“Right. Bed stripping in 201. See you around, Jo Ellen.”
Because he turned away first, she had the opportunity to watch him walk into the trees. Deliberately she shook her hair so that it fell over her ears again. Then she rolled her shoulders as if shrugging off an unwelcome touch.
But she was forced to admit she was already more interested than she wanted to be.
SEVEN
N
ATHAN took a camera with him. He felt compelled to retrace some of his father's footsteps on Desireâor perhaps to eradicate them. He chose the heavy old medium-range Pentax, one of his father's favorites and surely, he thought, one that David Delaney had brought to the island with him that summer.
He would have brought the bulky Hasselblad view camera as well, and the clever Nikon, along with a collection of lenses and filters and a mountain of film. Nathan had brought them all, and they were neatly stored, as his father had taught him, back at the cottage.
But when his father hiked out to hunt a shot, he would most usually take the Pentax.
Nathan chose the beach, with its foaming waves and diamond sand. He slipped on dark glasses against the fierce brilliance of the sun and climbed onto the marked path between the shifting dunes, with their garden of sea oats and tangle of railroad vines. The wind kicked in from the sea and sent his hair flying. He stood at the crest of the path, listening to the beat of the water, the smug squeal of gulls that wheeled and dipped above it.
Shells the tide had left behind were scattered like pretty toys along the sand. Tiny dunes whisked up by the wind were already forming behind them. The busy sanderlings were rushing back and forth in the spume, like businessmen hustling to the next meeting. And there, just behind the first roll of water, a trio of pelicans flew in military formation, climbing and wheeling as a unit. One would abruptly drop, a dizzying headfirst dive into the sea, and the others would follow. A trio of splashes, then they were up again, breakfast in their beaks.
With the ease of experience, Nathan lifted his camera, widened the aperture, increased the shutter speed to catch the motion, then homed in on the pelicans, following, following as they skimmed the wave crests, rose into their climb. And capturing them on the next bombing dive.
He lowered the camera, smiled a little. Over the years he'd gone long stretches of time without indulging in his hobby. He planned to make up for it now, spending at least an hour a day reacquainting himself with the pleasure and improving his eye.
He couldn't have asked for a more perfect beginning. The beach was inhabited only by birds and shells. His footprints were the only ones to mar the sand. That was a miracle in itself, he thought. Where else could a man be so entirely alone, borrow for a while this kind of beauty, along with peace and solitude?
He needed those things now. Miracles, beauty, peace. Cupping a hand over the camera, Nathan walked down the incline to the soft, moist sand of the beach. He crouched now and then to examine a shell, to trace the shape of a starfish with a fingertip.
But he left them where he found them, collecting them only on film.
The air and the exercise helped settle the nerves that had jangled before he'd left Sanctuary. She was a photographer, Nathan thought, as he studied a pretty, weather-silvered cottage peeking out from behind the dunes. Had his father known that the little girl he'd played mentor to one summer had gone on to follow in his footsteps? Would he have cared? Been proud, amused?
He could remember when his father had first shown him the workings of a camera. The big hands had covered his small ones, gently, patiently guiding. The smell of aftershave on his father's cheeks, a sharp tang. Brut. Yes, Brut. Mom had liked that best. His father's cheek had been smoothly shaven, pressed against his. His dark hair would have been neatly combed, smooth bumps of waves back from the forehead, his clear gray eyes soft and serious.
Always respect your equipment, Nate. You may want to make a living from the camera one day. Travel the world on it and see everything there is to see. Learn how to look and you'll see more than anyone else. Or you'll be something else, do something else, and just use it to take moments away with you. Vacations, family. They'll be your moments, so they'll be important. Respect your equipment, learn to use it right, and you'll never lose those moments.
“How many did we lose, anyway?” Nathan wondered aloud. “And how many do we have tucked away that we'd be better off losing?”
“Excuse me?”
Nathan jerked when the voice cut through the memory, when a hand touched his arm. “What?” He took a quick step in retreat, half expecting one of his own ghosts. But he saw a pretty, delicately built blonde staring up at him through amber-tinted lenses.
“Sorry. I startled you.” She tilted her head, and her eyes stayed focused, unblinking, on his face. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” Nathan dragged a hand through his hair, ignored the uncomfortably loose sensation in his knees. Less easily ignored was the acute embarrassment as the woman continued to study him as if he were some alien smear on a microscope slide. “I didn't know anyone else was around.”
“Just finishing up my morning run,” she told him, and he noted for the first time that she wore a sweat-dampened gray T-shirt over snug red bike shorts. “That's my cottage you were staring at. Or through.”
“Oh.” Nathan ordered himself to focus on it again, the silvered cedar shakes, the sloping brown roof with its jut of open deck for sunning. “You've got a hell of a view.”
“The sunrises are the best. You're sure you're all right?” she asked again. “I'm sorry to poke, but when I see a guy standing alone on the beach looking as if he'd just been slapped with a two-by-four and talking to himself, I've got to wonder. It's my job,” she added.
“Beach police?” he said dryly.
“No.” She smiled, held out a friendly hand. “Doctor. Doctor Fitzsimmons. Kirby. I run a clinic out of the cottage.”
“Nathan Delaney. Medically sound. Didn't an old woman used to live there? A tiny woman with white hair up in a bun.”
“My grandmother. Did you know her? You're not a native.”
“No, no, I remember, or have this impression of her. I spent a summer here as a kid. Memories keep popping out at me. You just walked into one.”
“Oh.” The eyes behind the amber lenses lost their clinical shrewdness and warmed. “That explains it. I know just what you mean. I spent several summers here growing up, and memories wing up at me all the time. That's why I decided to relocate here when Granny died. I always loved it here.”
Absently, she grabbed her toe, bending her leg back, heel to butt, to stretch out. “You'd be the Yankee who's taken Little Desire Cottage for half a year.”
“Word travels.”
“Doesn't it just? Especially when it doesn't have far to go. We don't get many single men renting for six months. A number of the ladies are intrigued.” Kirby repeated the process on the other leg. “You know, I think I might remember you. Wasn't it you and your brother who palled around with Brian Hathaway? I remember Granny saying how those Delaney boys and young Brian stuck together like a dirt clod.”
“Good memory. You were here that summer?”
“Yes, it was my first summer on Desire. I suppose that's why I remember it best. Have you seen Brian yet?” she asked casually.
“He just fixed me breakfast.”
“Magic in an egg.” It was Kirby's turn to look past the cottage, beyond it. “I heard Jo's back. I'm going to try to get up to the house after the clinic closes today.” She glanced at her watch. “And since it opens in twenty minutes, I'd better go get cleaned up. It was nice seeing you again, Nathan.”
“Nice seeing you. Doc,” he added as she began to jog toward the dunes.
With a laugh, she turned, jogged backward. “General practice,” she called out. “Everything from birth to earth. Come in for what ails you.”
“I'll keep it in mind.” He smiled and watched her ponytail swing sassily as she ran through the valley between the dunes.
Nineteen minutes later, Kirby put on a white lab coat over her Levi's. She considered the coat a kind of costume, designed to reassure the reluctant patient that she was indeed a doctor. That and the stethoscope tucked in its pocket gave the islanders the visual nudge many of them needed to let Granny Fitzsimmons's little girl poke into their orifices.