and a life preserver by the door. For the Fourth of July they hung bunting and handed out flag stickers,” he said, memories rushing back. He’d loved the Fourth as a kid. Lying on his back in the grass to watch the fireworks over the sound. Or better, being out on the water in a boat, watching them explode overhead.
“And every fall,” he continued, thinking her little boy would probably like it, too, “the porch would be full of pumpkins and hay bales and they’d serve cups of cider.”
With her dark eyes intent on his, she seemed completely captivated by the small-town customs he hadn’t considered in years. She also appeared totally unaware of how close she’d drawn to him as he spoke. As near as she’d come, all he’d have to do was reach out and he would know for certain if her skin felt as soft as it looked.
As his glance slid to the inviting fullness of her bottom lip, he wondered at the softness he would find there, too.
Her lips parted with a quietly drawn breath.
When he looked back up, it was to see her glance skim his mouth before her focus fell to his chest and she took a step away.
“What about Thanksgiving and Christmas?” she asked, deliberately turning to the file on the counter. “Aside from the kayak.”
Forcing his attention back to her question, he stayed right where he was.
“Thanksgiving was just the fall stuff. But the day after, Gramps would string lights along all the eaves and porch posts and set up a Christmas village with a giant lighted snowman.” There had been a time when he and his dad had usually helped. That was back when Thanksgiving dinner had always been here. Christmas had been at his parents’ house, around the bend and in town a couple of miles. After the aircraft company his dad worked for had transferred him to San Diego a few years ago, he’d headed south for that particular holiday.
“The store was closed for the season by then, so I don’t think they gave anything out. At least, not the past several years.” He hadn’t been around to know for sure. Seattle was only twelve miles as the crow flew, but he lived his life what felt like a world away. Unless his grandparents had needed something before they’d moved south, too, he’d given this place and the areas around it as little thought as possible. And he’d never given it as much thought as he had just now. “But a lot of people drove by to see the light display.”
Whatever self-consciousness she’d felt vanished as she glanced back to him. “Where are the lights now?”
“They were sold.”
“The snowman, too?”
“Everything. They had a garage sale before they moved.”
For reasons he couldn’t begin to explain, he wasn’t at all surprised by her disappointment. What did surprise him was that he actually felt a twinge of it himself.
“Tyler would have loved to have a big snowman out there,” she said. “And the village. He gets so excited when he sees Christmas decorations.”
Threading her fingers through her hair, she gave him a rueful smile. “Unfortunately, I’d thought I was moving somewhere a lot smaller, so I sold everything for outside except a few strings of lights.”
With the lift of her shoulder, she attempted to shrug off what she could do nothing about now, anyway. “What else is there I should know?”
From the pensiveness in her voice, there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that she was still thinking about how her little boy would have loved what his grandparents had done.
“I can’t think of anything right now.” Wanting to get her mind off what she couldn’t do for her son, and his thoughts off her mouth, he rose from his perch. “But if I do, I’ll let you know.”
“One more thing,” she said as he turned to his briefcase. “Everything I’ve heard so far tells me this will be a good place to live. But what do you think about it? The community, I mean.”
Just wanting to get to work, he opened the case with the snap of its lock. “It is a good place. I grew up in town, but I was around here a lot, too. I even came back after college.” Paper rustled as he pulled out a sheaf heavy enough for a doorstop. “Pax and I first went into business about a mile down the road.” The stack landed on the counter. “You and your son should be fine here.”
Considering that Erik had apparently lived much of his life there, it seemed to Rory that the entire area had to mean a lot to him. “Why did you leave?”
He pulled another stack of paper from his scarred briefcase. For a dozen seconds, his only response was dead silence.
“Didn’t your business do well?” she prompted.
“The business did fine.”
“Then if this is a good place to live and your business was doing well, why did you go?”
The defenses Erik had attempted to ignore finally slammed into place. He knew her question was entirely reasonable. It was one he’d want answered himself were he on the other end of their agreement. Yet as valid as her query was, it bumped straight into the part of his life that had led to an entirely different existence than he’d once thought he’d be living by now.
His plans had been unremarkable, really. No different from half the guys he knew: a good marriage, build boats, a couple of kids, maybe a dog. The one out of four he did have was 90 percent of his life. It was a good life, too. The rest he’d written off completely years ago.
“It has nothing to do with here.”
“What did it have to do with, then?”
“Nothing you’d need to be concerned about.”
“How can I be sure of that if I don’t know what it is you’re not telling me? If you were getting your life established here,” she pointed out, “it’s hard for me to imagine why you’d leave. You seem too much in command of yourself and everything around you to do that if you’d really wanted to stay. That’s why your reason for leaving is important to me.” She tipped her head, tried to catch his glance. “Was this place lacking something?”
She’d stated her conclusions about him more as fact than compliment. As if she saw his influence over his surroundings as basic to him as his DNA. He’d have been flattered by her impression of him, too, had it not been for how much control he’d actually given up to save the marriage that had ultimately ended anyway. He could see where she deserved something more than he’d given her, though. After insisting his business had been fine there and that she would be, too, he did feel somewhat obligated to explain why he hadn’t stuck around himself.
“It didn’t lack for anything,” he admitted. At least, it hadn’t as far as he’d been concerned. “I left because my ex-wife wanted to teach in the city for a few years before coming back to raise a family. Those few years led to a few more and she changed her mind. About coming back and about the family,” he admitted, making a long story as short as possible. “When we left here, the business had barely gotten off the ground. But by the time I realized we weren’t coming back, Pax and I were established in Ballard. We had a good location. We had good people working for us. So it made sense to stay there. Like I said, my leaving had nothing to do with anything around here.”
Thinking he’d covered all the bases,
