Just when he started to hope he wasn’t going to spend the day thinking about Olivia, she came hiking up the path. She carried a big crate in her arms, and Barkis trotted at her heels. Just the sight of her made his body tense up. She was so damn clean and fresh, like a flower, still moist with early-morning dew. Her face was scrubbed, her blond hair shining. She was dressed for work in jeans and a tank top, but oh, man. Lolly in a tank top. Now his tool belt served a new function—to hide his reaction.
“Hey,” he said, hoping he sounded nonchalant.
There must have been something in his gaze, because she stopped and rested the crate on the porch railing. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” He took out a folding rule and tried desperately to find something to measure. The doorjamb? The distance between him and Lolly? The length of his erection, the depth of his desire?
“You’re staring,” she pointed out.
“Sorry. I, uh, I like your outfit. You look like…” Damn. He had no idea what to say.
“Like what?”
“Like you should have your own home-improvement show.” He paused. “That’s a compliment.” If she watched HGTV, she would know that for a fact. The women on those shows always had good hair and toned little bodies in tight jeans and clingy shirts that showed some skin.
“Oh,” she said. “Thanks, I guess.”
When she bent to set down the crate, the skimpy top rode up a few inches, and that was when he saw it. On her lower back, just above the waistband of her jeans.
She had a tattoo. Lolly Bellamy had a tattoo. It was his favorite kind, too—a tiny butterfly in his favorite spot—the small of her back, right where his hands rested when he danced with her. Right where he wanted to touch her this very minute, maybe even kiss her there. Definitely kiss her there.
A tattoo. Connor was in trouble. If he’d known about it the other night, he would’ve kept her in his trailer, probably chained to the bed.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” She straightened up, hooked her thumbs into her back pockets and blew a wisp of hair out of her eyes.
He wondered if women understood that this particular posture made their boobs stand out. She had to know. She was doing this on purpose.
“I’m sure.” He cleared his throat. He heard the sound of an engine in the distance, coming closer. The work crew would be here soon. “Listen, Lolly. About that night—”
She held up a hand to silence him. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
Well. There was a switch. Usually a woman wanted to parse every waking second of a date, as if they were forensic investigators. Yet Olivia seemed perfectly willing to let the matter drop.
“All right,” he said. “I just want to make sure you know why we didn’t—why I—”
“I know. Believe me, I understand.”
The truck engine crescendoed as the vehicle made its way up the logging road leading to the clearing. All right, thought Connor. He wouldn’t press the issue. Olivia had always been uncannily smart and intuitive. She was a psychology major, too. She got it, then.
Good. She understood why he had pushed her away, even when she’d been willing to stay. It would’ve been a huge mistake, and they both knew it. She was raw and vulnerable, her emotions exposed and unprotected after the revelations about her father. She was in no position to sleep with a guy. If he’d taken advantage of her that night, she’d probably always wonder if she’d slept with him for the right reasons, or because she’d suffered a series of emotional shocks and needed someone to cling to. In her state of mind, she would associate him with trauma and crisis, secrets and betrayal.
That was no way to start a relationship with a woman.
And there—he was now admitting that what he wanted with Olivia Bellamy was a relationship.
Maybe he even wanted to fall in love with her—all over again. But this time as a man who knew where his life was going, not as a confused and scared boy.
It was enough to scare his hard-on into submission.
Not a moment too soon, his foreman and crew arrived, pouring out of the truck—the guys, the radio, the water station, the tools and equipment. Connor greeted them with a wave, indicating the work order posted by the main doorway of the structure. “Excuse me,” he said to Olivia, and went to talk briefly to the crew. He spent more time than he needed to going over the list with the foreman. They knew each other’s rhythm, and the experienced crew didn’t need a lot of supervision. Connor lingered, helping one of the guys fix a saw motor. He felt Olivia watching him the whole time and eventually, he ran out of ways to avoid her.
While he used a rag to wipe the grease from his hands, she narrowed her eyes, hooked her thumbs into her pockets again. “Good job fixing that motor. You’ve got a lot of hidden talents.”
He checked her out again. She was making no secret of
her
talents. “You think?” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
“There’s a lot more where that came from.” Like, he thought, I bet I can make you scream when you come. He tossed the rag aside. “I’m lucky to have them.” He gestured at the crate she’d brought. “So what have you got?”
She was all business as she took out a series of sketches she and Freddy called design sheets and handed them over. “We’ve got the bent-willow furniture and the hanging bed for the front porch,” she said, nudging the glider with her foot. “Freddy’s bringing over more of the stuff we bought in Phoenicia.” She stepped inside. The kitchen and living room adjoined each other, with the oversize fireplace at one end and a Vermont Castings woodstove at the other. Light flooded in through picture windows oriented toward the lake, and through the half-round windows that illuminated the sleeping loft above.
In the master bath, there was a claw-foot tub, which was currently strung with cobwebs and furred by sawdust. The adjacent bedroom was nearly bare, except for an old double bed frame of peeled logs. A new mattress and box spring leaned against a wall. “I want this to turn out really well,” Olivia said. “I want it to be luxurious for them.”
“The honeymoon suite,” he said.
She smacked him with her steno pad. “Don’t make my mind go there.”
“Come on,” he teased her. “They’ve been lovebirds for fifty years. You think any couple can go that long without having the hots for each other?”
“It’s much more complicated than that, I’m sure.”
“Are you sure? How do you know it takes anything besides sexual chemistry for a marriage to succeed long-term?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Any couple can conjure up a bit of sexual chemistry.”
Yeah, he thought. Like that night at his place. He should have taken what she’d offered, no more Mr. Nice Guy. She would have slept with him.
“It takes a lot more than that to hold a marriage together for half a century,” she insisted.
“Nope,” he said bluntly. “You’re wrong. You’re overcomplicating the situation. If they can seriously ring each other’s chimes all night long for all those years, then they’ve got everything they need.”
“That’s just plain silly.”
“Yep, that’s me. Silly,” he said, “but I’m not the one turning this place into a palace of lust for a couple of geezers.”
“Screw you, Connor.”
She’d always been easy to tease. “Don’t you worry, Lolly. We’ll get this fixed up just the way you want it.”
“I don’t know how you’re going to deal with this door,” she said. The door to the dressing room looked as though it had been kicked in.
“Not a problem,” he said. “I’m taking it out. You don’t need it.”
“That’s nuts.”
“The hell it is.” He could show her more easily than telling her. “See, let’s say your grandmother—er, the bride—is in here, primping and doing all that stuff women do.” He took Olivia by the shoulders and walked her to the old, pitted mirror above the sink, which was set into an old-fashioned marble-topped washstand.
“And then,” he went on, “the dude gets impatient because she’s taking too long—”
“Wait a minute.” She met his gaze in the mirror. “What is she doing that’s taking so long, brushing her teeth?”
“No clue. I just know she’s taking too long. Chicks always do.”
Her lips twitched a little. “Right.”
“So the dude figures he can start whining and complaining, which is not a turn-on—”
“Finally you got something right,” she said.
“Or he can just grab her and carry her off to bed.” And with that, he scooped Olivia up in his arms.
She gasped in surprise and clung to his neck.
“See, with a wide doorway,” he explained, angling her through, “this would be a snap.” And damn, he thought, standing by the bed, what I wouldn’t give for this to be real. It was the lack of a mattress, and nothing else, that saved her virtue now.
At that moment, Freddy walked in, barely giving them a glance. By now, he seemed resigned to catching them off guard, with lust thick as smoke in the air. “Working hard again, I see. Never seen anyone work as hard as you kids do,” he deadpanned, brushing past them.
The spell broken, Connor set her down.
“Wise guy,” Olivia muttered.
Twenty-Eight
T
he heat wave continued unabated, shimmering like quicksilver on the roadways and turning the fields and meadows to seas of buff-colored grass. Around Avalon, the fire department set up fire-advisory signs, banning outdoor burning and fireworks. The hardware store sold out of box fans, and vacationers poured into the area from the city, seeking relief in the cool green wilderness of the mountains.
Olivia stood with her father on the porch of a small, clapboard house on Maple Street in Avalon. She thought her father looked pale and tense, though she didn’t know if that was due to the trip he’d made to get here, or the stress of meeting Jenny Majesky for the first time.
He caught her staring at him. “You don’t have to stay, you know,” he said. “I mean, if you’d rather not be here, I can do this alone.”
“Of course I want to be here.” Although she hadn’t created this situation, Olivia had brought it to light. On the way over here, her father insisted that it was his mistake to address, not hers. Yet she was a part of this, and Lord knew, she understood about making mistakes. She punctuated her conviction by knocking smartly on the door.
“Just a sec,” called a voice. The door opened, and there stood Jenny.
There was a moment, just a subtle beat, in which Olivia saw the young woman’s soft brown eyes lock with her father’s. With
their
father’s. It was so obvious, now that she saw them together. Although Jenny was the image of her mother, the resemblance to Philip Bellamy was there, too, in the innately patrician tilt of her face as she looked up at him, in the subtle press of the dimple in her chin and the elegant shape of her hand on the doorknob.
“I’m Philip Bellamy,” her father said. “Thank you for seeing us.”
“You’re welcome,” said Jenny. “I confess, I was a bit mystified by your phone call. If it’s about the wedding cake, I can assure you—”
“It’s not strictly about that,” he said. “May we come in?”
“Of course. How are you, Olivia?” Jenny stepped aside and held the screen door wide open.
“Fine, thank you.” Olivia tried to decide if the two of them looked like sisters, but the thought was so overwhelming that she couldn’t see Jenny as anything but a pleasant-looking, unsuspecting woman.
A box fan in the window blew fresh air into a room that was crowded with knickknacks and outdated furniture. In a wheelchair sat an old woman wearing a housedress and pink scuffs. Her hair had been carefully done, and a touch of lipstick colored her mouth. On the phone, Jenny had explained that her grandmother, a widow for ten years, was disabled from a stroke and could neither walk nor speak. Olivia’s heart constricted as she thought of her own grandparents—both the Bellamys and the Lightseys—still so vital and happy together. She tried to remember Mrs. Majesky from years past, but could only ever picture the boxy white truck with its hand-painted logo. She wished she’d paid more attention back then. It was sort of eerie to think that, in years past, she and Jenny might have crossed paths, never knowing about their connection.
“Grandma, this is Philip and his daughter, Olivia Bellamy,” Jenny said. “You remember the Bellamys from Camp Kioga.”
The woman’s mouth twisted and she made an inarticulate sound.
“Mrs. Majesky, it’s good to see you,” Philip said.
The old woman’s dark eyes seemed to clear with comprehension, as though she was trapped behind soundproof glass. “My grandmother will want to pay you a visit when she comes up next week,” Olivia said, taking Mrs. Majesky’s hand. Her thin skin was dry and cool despite the heat.
“I thought we’d go out on the back porch,” Jenny said. “That’s where we get the best shade this time of day. Grandma, would you like to join us?”
Mrs. Majesky made a sound that Jenny took as a no. Olivia glanced at her father, saw his shoulders ease with relief. Explaining the situation to Jenny would be difficult enough. Doing so in front of her grandmother would be that much more awkward.
“All right.” Jenny picked up a remote control and turned up the volume on
Oprah.
Then she led the way into an old-fashioned kitchen with Formica countertops and glass-front cabinets stacked with china. She fixed three tall glasses of iced tea and set them on a tray with a platter of cookies. “Lemon bars,” she said. “I brought them from the main bakery in Kingston today.”
A laptop computer and stacks of paper littered the kitchen table. “We must have interrupted your work,” Philip said.
“Oh, it’s not work. Not paying work, anyway.” She ducked her head, as though bashful. “I’ve been doing some writing.”
“You’re a writer?” Philip asked.
“I’m writing a…I’m not sure what it’s called.” She seemed flustered, but in a charming way. “I suppose you’d call it a collection of stories about growing up in my grandparents’ bakery. And recipes. Some of them are so old, they’re written on school paper my grandmother brought from Poland.” She showed them a collection of brittle, yellowed pages covered in a foreign schoolgirl scrawl. “Grandma helped me translate a lot of them, but after the stroke…” Jenny carefully set the handwritten stack aside. “Anyway, it’s one of those projects I’ll probably never finish.”