world. She walked for a long time, cutting a path well away from the water, taking a moment here and there to pick up a fragment of seashell for inspection. But none of the pieces she found was any different from the ones she had amassed over the past four years, so she left them for someone else to find.
When they reached the pier at the Carlisle Yacht Club, Georgia turned around to head back. The chilly air had numbed her fingers and face, and her ears ached where the wind had whipped about them. A cup of hot chocolate would really hit the spot right now, she thought as she gazed wistfully at a ramshackle building near the entrance to the pier.
It was as gray as everything else seemed to be that day, but the sign in front, proclaiming Rudy’s Local—The Place For Fish, looked cheerful despite the dingy day. Rudy himself was a very colorful fellow, she thought further with a smile, and she looked forward to whiling away an hour or so with him before heading home. With a quick whistle, she summoned Molly back to her side, and they made their way toward the restaurant.
“Rudy! It’s Georgia!” she called out as she entered the deserted building. She plopped down on a stool at the counter, and Molly stretched out on the floor behind her. It was a familiar place, a familiar position. “Rudy?” she tried again when she received no answer.
“I’m in back!” a ragged voice finally shouted in reply from somewhere beyond the kitchen. “Be out in ’bout fifteen minutes, soon as I get this freezer unit fixed. Help yourself to hot chocolate—I know that’s what you’re here for. Vandermint’s under the cash register for spiking it the way you like.”
Rudy knew her too well, she thought as she rose to move behind the counter and follow his instructions. After fixing herself a large mugful of the concoction, Georgia began to wander restlessly around the room to wait for him, humming under her breath a slow number from her teenage years, and sipping her hot chocolate carefully.
Gazing out the window, she watched as a spotless, gunmetal gray Jaguar sedan with a Washington, D.C., license plate eased to a halt in a parking space in the lot outside. She wondered what would bring a traveler to a summers-and-weekends community like Carlisle in the dead of winter and the middle of the week.
The person who emerged was tall, broad shouldered and very male, with coal black hair that the wind immediately caught and danced with. He had apparently been on the road for some time, because while she watched him, he began to stretch, flexing his arms out to his sides before curling them back in toward his exquisitely formed body.
He still had his back to her and had not put on his coat, and Georgia could almost swear she saw the muscles in his back bunch and ripple beneath his dark blue sweater every time he moved. When he leaned forward, she couldn’t help but notice how well he fit his jeans. He reached back into the car and extracted a leather bomber jacket, carelessly thrust his arms into the sleeves and turned toward the restaurant.
It was then that her breath caught in her throat and, almost involuntarily, she moved closer to the window. It wasn’t so much because the man was one of the most handsome she had, ever seen. And it wasn’t because his gaze was so utterly fixed on hers as he approached. It wasn’t even because of the way his appearance had suddenly roused feelings and sensations in her that she knew were best ignored.
It was because he seemed very familiar somehow.
She wasn’t sure, but she thought his steps faltered somewhat when he saw her watching him through the window, but he recovered quickly and kept coming. She lifted a hand to flatten her palm against the pane, her eyes never straying from the man as he neared the front door of the restaurant. The wind shoved his hair down over his forehead, preventing her from seeing his eyes clearly, but he watched her in return as he drew nearer, his expression puzzled and wary.
She lost sight of him as he entered, but she turned away from the window and spun around to find him pushing through the second set of doors that would bring him into the restaurant’s main dining room. In the dim light she could scarcely make out his face, but her heart hummed and skipped as she studied him. He looked roguish and gentle at the same time, and definitely very familiar.
The man took a few measured steps forward, bringing his tall frame out of the shadows, but leaving his face still hidden from the light. When he spoke, his words sounded as if they were filled with something almost akin to...melancholy ?
“Don’t you remember me?” he asked softly, his voice sounding thunderous in the otherwise silent room.
At first, Georgia shook her head slowly in response. Then he took one more step forward and brought his face into the light, and she saw his eyes—eyes of a dark blue color she had never quite seen anywhere else, as often as she had searched to find an adequate comparison. Expressive eyes, compelling eyes. Eyes that had once looked upon her full of laughter and a languid kind of affection.
Georgia bit her lip. Now Jack’s eyes were sad and fatigued and framed by shadows. In many ways, it seemed to her then, he was indeed a man she didn’t remember.
“Jack McCormick,” she said on a shallow breath.
As soon as she spoke his name, his eyes cleared of their troubling clouds and his lips turned up slightly at the corners, hinting at a smile she remembered only too well. Her stomach clenched into a tight fist when she realized how much she had missed him all these years.
“So you do remember,” he replied quietly, approaching her with slow, uncertain steps. His voice had deepened over the years, but was still a little rough and youthful. And, as it always had, the sound of his voice made her smile.
Jack laughed then, low and strong, and for a moment she could detect a trace of the boy she had known for a little over a year more than two decades before. Something in him relaxed, the shadows left his eyes and he looked at her with the same puzzling expression he had always seemed to reserve for her alone. For a long time they only gazed at each other silently.
Georgia studied the face above her, comparing it with the one she had known so long ago. Essentially, they were one and the same, yet there were so many differences. His tousled curls, the curls she had thought made him look so rebellions and that she had always had to force herself not to wind around her fingers, were gone. Now his hair was cut casually short. Lines fanned out at the corners of his eyes and slashed along the sides of his mouth, and his cheeks were rough from a half day’s growth of beard.
He’d barely been shaving the last time she saw him, she thought—that morning of his eighteenth birthday, just before he had slipped away from Carlisle without a care, without a plan, without a backward glance.
Without even telling her goodbye.
Before she realized what she was doing, she set her hot chocolate down on the nearest table, then lifted her hand to cup his cheek, skimming her thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone as she had done the first day they’d met. She didn’t know what made her do such a thing. For some reason, it just felt right. Somehow, the years slipped away, and she felt as if she were thirteen again, seeing Jack up close for the first time.
Jack McCormick closed his eyes when Georgia Lavender touched him so tenderly. The gentle motion was nearly his undoing. It was going to be more difficult than he’d anticipated, he thought, seeing Georgia again after all this time. He wished they could go back for just one day—one hour, even—just long enough that he could tell her so many things he wished he’d said to her when he’d had the chance.
He had always regretted not telling her goodbye. It had left him feeling incomplete somehow, unfinished. All these years, he’d just never quite come to terms with the way Georgia had always made him feel. Mainly because he’d never
