“Thanks. I do love roses.” She looked back over her shoulder and thought about which colors she'd pick. Definitely the light pink ones, and some of those lavender ones as well.
“Let's take our lunches down to the pond house and eat there,” he suggested. “It'll be shady, and cooler than the house.”
“Sounds good. Should we lock up the house?”
“There's no one around to break in. Let's just walk.”
He held out a hand to her and she took it, matching him stride for stride. They walked through a field that sloped downward toward a large pond. A tiny cabin sat on its bank and a narrow dock jutted into the water.
“This is beautiful,” she told him. “So quiet it's almost scary. How do people sleep out here?”
“Very soundly.”
“I guess I've gotten used to hotel noise over the past few weeks. Our room overlooks the parking lot and the main road into Conroy, so there's always road noise. And there's always someone coming in around one or two who slams the door to their room. And the elevator pings when it hits our floor whether it stops or not. We're two rooms down from it, so I hear it all night long.”
“Sound to me as if the whole hotel thing is wearing thin.”
She braced herself for the slope, tugged at the hem of her short skirt, and tried not to lose her footing in her sandals.
“I'm not really dressed for this,” she muttered when they reached the dock.
“I think you look great,” he said, making no effort to pretend that he wasn't looking at her legs. “This is the pond house my granddad built for Wendy, but she'd outgrown it by the time I came along. It was the best playhouse you could imagine.”
“Did you have playmates here?”
“Just my granddad.” He smiled. “He made for one hell of a pirate.”
He pushed the door open. “It needs a lot of work, as you can see. One of the estimates Herb dropped off was for this place.”
“Are you going to go to the expense of renovating it? I mean, since no one's used it in a long time.”
“It's not my first priority-that would be the house-but yeah, I'm going to take care of it. Someday maybe there will be kids to play in it again.” He backed out of the doorway and she followed. “Besides, my granddad built it himself.”
He handed her the bag holding the food and said, “I'm going to run back to the house and get us a blanket to sit on. I'll be right back.”
“Can't we sit on the dock?”
“Sure. If we want to spend the afternoon picking splinters out of each other's butts.” He smiled. “Which, maybe on second thought, might not be so bad…”
“Go get a blanket.”
He took off up the hill at a trot. Emme sat the bag on the wooden planks that formed the dock and watched a duck and her ducklings bob and weave between the reeds.
“I didn't realize how much of Gramma's stuff Wendy kept,” Nick said, making his way down the slope. “For some reason, I assumed she'd gotten rid of most of the old stuff and replaced it with new things of her own.” He held up a mostly blue quilt. “I found this at the foot of one of the beds. I remember it from when I was a kid.”
“Why would you assume your sister would have gotten rid of it?” She helped him spread the blanket on the dock.
“I guess because everything else about her was very hip, very contemporary. It surprises me that the second floor looks just the way I remember it.”
He knelt down and reached for the bag and opened it. “I hope this is okay. I figured burgers would be good, since everyone likes burgers, but then I thought they'd get cold on the way out here. So I went with cold sandwiches.”
“I'm sure whatever it is will be fine. Thanks.” Emme sat opposite him on the blanket and opened the foil packet. She stared at the contents for a moment, then asked, “Ah… just for the record, what is this?”
“Chicken, avocado, field greens, and sprouts on whole grain.” He stared at her. “What's it look like?”
“That, what you said.” A tiny smile played at the corners of her mouth and she peered into the bag as if searching for something. “Did you get chips, by any chance?”
“That's them, in that foil bag.” He held it up, then tore it open.
“Let's see that. Oh. Sweet potato and beet chips. Yum.”
“Don't knock ′em till you try them.” He laughed and twisted the top of his water bottle.
“What, no soda?” she asked innocently.
“Soda is the invention of the devil.” He spoke solemnly, but his eyes gave him away. “It's loaded with high fructose corn syrup.” He handed her a bottle of water.
“You and Trula would get along just fine,” she told him. “She is militant about what goes on in that kitchen of hers. Everything's organic, and comes from local farms. She's totally indoctrinating Chloe, who asked the waitress this morning which local farm her eggs came from. She'll be really proud when I tell her what I had for lunch today.”
“You can let her think it was your choice. I won't give you away.”
A pair of dragonflies danced on the air between them before chasing each other across the pond.
“All kidding about the quiet aside, it is very peaceful here,” she noted.
“I don't come back as often as I should, but it's where my heart is.” He took a bite of his sandwich, chewed thoughtfully, then asked, “Where's your heart, Emme?”
“In terms of a place?” She shook her head. “There's no place I have any attachment to.”
“How ′bout the house you grew up in?”
“There were way too many of them, and none of them particularly memorable for anything I'd want to hold on to.”
“Your family moved around a lot?”
“Actually I had no family.” She hesitated for a moment, debating with herself before telling him her story-selectively edited-in the most nonchalant manner she could muster. When she finished, it occurred to her that she'd told that story more in the past few weeks than she had in the past ten years. The thought was both comforting and unsettling.
“So you really never had a home.”
She could tell by the look on his face that this disturbed him, so she said, “It's okay. I turned out okay.”
“You turned out just fine, from everything I can see. But that doesn't make it okay.”
“It's one of those things you don't get to change, you know?” She tried to make light of it, but feared her attempts were falling flat, so she added, “The only thing I can do to make the past not matter so much is to try to make the future better. To make Chloe's childhood better than mine was, to give her the security and love I didn't have.”
“She's one of the most confident and self-assured kids I've ever met, so I'd say you were doing a great job.”
“Actually, I am doing a hell of a job.” She thought then about telling him everything, about Anthony Navarro and the reward he'd put on his child's head, about changing one false name for another, but he reached out for her, one of his big hands wrapping around her forearm and sending a current through her entire body.
“I'm glad you recognize that,” he said, just before pulling her closer and covering her mouth with his own.
The buzz was back, filling her head and flowing through her like live current. His tongue teased the corners of her mouth and she took his head in both her hands and urged him to explore more. He tasted salty like the chips and smelled like the summer day, and when he eased her back onto the quilt, she drifted down willingly. His hands made fists in her hair for a moment, then slid along her sides, one elbow coming to rest on the dock to take his weight, the other hand seeking her breast with a light caress.
She hadn't expected that heat could overtake so quickly, or that want could swell like the tide, without control and without limits, but the feel of his hand on her skin set her senses into overdrive. When his lips led a hot trail from her mouth to the side of her face, to the warm spot under her ear, to her neck, her throat, she arched her body to encourage him to keep going. When he reached the place where her shirt impeded his progress, she slid a hand between them and unbuttoned it, his eager mouth following each inch of skin as each button came undone until his mouth closed over the thin lace that covered her breast. He eased the strap over her shoulder and feasted on her flesh, his tongue's sure flickering stoking the flame right to her core. He covered her body with his and she moved against him, wanting him closer. The only thought resounding inside her was More.