He lifted his shoulders, feigning bafflement. “Don’t ask me. It wasn’t something I planned. Hell, you’d always been just another of the cousins from next door, all pigtails and big brown eyes. The kid I’d taught to swim when she was about five. Then you...changed.”
“Are you saying it was my fault that time, too?”
In a way, yes, he thought, but he could hardly come out and tell her that, over the preceding winter, she’d grown into a leggy adolescent with breasts. Or that they had been the first thing he’d noticed when she’d come to Belvoir that particular summer.
A couple of his brothers had noticed, too. “Emily Jane’s grown hooters,” fifteen-year old Sean had whispered, bug-eyed with awe. “Man, hand me my catcher’s mitt!”
Ted, who at seventeen had thought himself vastly more experienced in such matters, had scoffed, “They’re not big enough to fill a bra let alone a baseball glove. Save your energy, kid!”
But Lucas, who’d turned twenty the previous November and had, at their age, been prone to much the same kind of irreverence, had known an inexplicable urge to flatten both brothers. Feigning lofty indifference, he’d stalked inside to catch up on the reading requirements for his second year of university, due to start that September.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said now.
“Well, thank you for that much,” she said. “Particularly since I remember that summer as being one of the happiest I spent at Belvoir.”
“For me too,” he admitted. And it was true, up to a point. As the days had gone by, the phenomenon of Emily’s breasts had gradually ceased to elicit wonder among the brothers at Roscommon House and by the middle of August the old, easy camaraderie between the younger members of the two families had re-established itself.
“It marked the end of an era,” he went on. “We were never that carefree again.”
“No.” Her voice was soft, her brown eyes hazy, as though pictures from that summer were unrolling in her mind. “We clowned around every day, shoving each other off the end of the diving pier or cannonballing into the river, and sat around a bonfire nearly every night. One big, happy family, with no hidden agendas or undercurrents to spoil things.”
“Until the night I kissed you,” Lucas said. “Nothing was ever the same after that. It was the last day of the summer vacation, as I recall, and the last year that we were all together like that. We’d gone swimming after dark, my brothers and I, and you and all your cousins from Belvoir, and we were making one hell of a noise.”
“And your grandmother came out and hammered on the old ship’s bell hanging from the back porch of Roscommon, and told us to get inside before we were all arrested for disturbing the peace!”
“She bribed us with gingerbread and fruit punch,” he said.
“Right. And in the rush to get up to the house I slipped and fell among the reeds lining the river bank.”
And he’d been right behind her and had leaned down and yanked her to her feet more roughly than he’d meant to, and somehow she had crashed into him, and he’d had his arms around her to steady her, and she’d looked up at him with her big brown eyes and her lips had been parted and shining with water....
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