she’d once been.
“...so I could use you,” Teague was saying. “It might be beneficial to you, too.”
She set her scissors in her lap. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying that weddings and all the attending hoopla put people in a romantic mood. Makes ’em want to pair up. You could get some potentials out of it.”
“Potential...?”
Teague shook his head. “You haven’t been listening. I’ve been laying out all the good reasons why you should go along with what I asked.”
Caught up in her memories, she’d apparently missed a chunk of conversation, because she didn’t recall him asking her anything. “Why don’t you start over?”
“You’re not afraid to date, are you?”
“What are you talking about?” She bristled. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
“C’mon,” Teague scoffed. “What about heights? Movies with ax murderers? You know you have that thing against clowns.”
“Everybody has a thing against clowns.”
“True. But my point is, you’ve been on a man hiatus for...what? How long has it been?”
“I have men in my life.”
“They’re between five and six years old, Polly. That doesn’t count.”
“And there’s you,” she heard herself blurt out.
“But I don’t count, either.” He waggled his eyebrows. “I’m talking men who want to...” His words died away, and a strange expression overtook his face.
“Men who want to what?”
“To do things to you that I suddenly realize make me extremely uncomfortable to picture in my mind,” he finished, frowning.
“Oh.” Funny, now Teague couldn’t look at her. “I’m not averse to that kind of man.” It’s what she told herself she needed. A new guy. A focus other than Teague.
He was squeezing the ball of scrap paper. “So agreeing to be my plus-one will be perfect for both of us.”
“What?”
“Is there cotton wool in your ears? I explained it to you. There’re all these wedding things coming up. I need a date.”
“Ask somebody else.”
“Somebody else might think I’m interested. But you’re aware that I’m still hung up on...”
“Tess.”
“Yeah. I’m going to be around her all the time. I need you nearby to stop me from looking like an idiot.”
The idiot was Polly, her resolve already eroding. I need you.
“You can meet some new people, maybe find your Mr. Right.”
Attending social events with Teague at her side? How would that help her goal of walking into kindergarten class come September without the wrong man firmly dug into her heart?
“Please, Pol,” he said. Then his eyes sharpened, and he lifted his hand to her face, using his thumb to rub at a spot between her brows. “No, never mind.”
His hand dropped, but she caught his wrist without thinking. It was hard, strong, and her fingertips could barely meet her thumb. “Teague...”
“I made you frown. I wouldn’t ask you to do anything that made you unhappy.”
His skin was warm against her palm. She should release him, but it felt so good to even have this small piece of him. Her pulse thudded in her throat and she felt a dizzying lack of air. Shutting him out of her life, she suddenly realized, wasn’t going to shovel him out of her heart.
That was going to require a more proactive effort.
And being his plus-one for the next month would give her a chance to track her progress. She could establish a mental grade book like the paper one she kept for her kids, where she marked the date they could tie their shoelaces and recognize the letters of the alphabet.
She’d work toward not jumping at the sound of his voice.
Not longing for his clean, citrus scent in her lungs.
Getting through one night without an erotic dream of his whiskered cheek against her breasts.
* * *
THE PLACE WHERE SKYE felt safest at the cove was not her house—where she’d grown up—but the small property management office that was no more than one room and a door that led to an attached half bath. She’d spent a lot of time in the office during the past few months, surrounded by four walls and the sound of the surf outside. Sometimes she brought her dinner there, as she had tonight, and ate a sandwich and drank a soda while sitting at her desk.
The darkness started to deepen and she lit the bookkeeper’s lamp at her elbow, then got up to move around the room, turning on another light sitting on the small table by the leather recliner that had been her father’s favorite, then the overhead fixture in the bathroom. The drapes covering the two windows were already drawn. They featured a thick, insulated lining as protection against the sun, and she supposed that from the outside the little building would appear empty.
Uninteresting.
Nothing to see here.
Nobody inside to bother. To terrify.
Skye moved about the room again, surveying different items, touching them, as if they were good luck charms. First there was the movie poster from The Egyptian, the last picture made at Sunrise Studios by her great-great-grandparents, Max Sunstrum and Edith Essex. She’d been the actress and he’d been the director-producer of a quiver-full of popular movies that had been filmed at the cove into the late 1920s. Why Max had shut down the studio had been a mystery until last month when film student Addy had found a letter from Edith to her husband. Exhausted by the Hollywood gossip and innuendo, she had requested that they retire from the business. Rumor still persisted, however. Edith had been given a magnificent, maybe priceless piece of jewelry by one of her leading men. It was said to be hidden somewhere at the cove, though no one had caught a glimmer of it in over eighty-five years.
Mounted on the opposite wall from the movie advertisement was one of Skye’s mother’s plein air paintings—its “on location” style popular with the artists who flocked to the cove. She stood before it now, admiring how her mother had captured the sand, surf and a stretch of the cottages in impressionistic strokes the colors of summer. Way in the distance, at the far end of the beach depicted on the canvas, two children labored over a sand castle. You almost had to squint to see them, but Skye knew the boy was black-haired and sturdy, while the girl was more birdlike, with long brown tresses waving down her back. It was Skye and Gage.
Turning away from her mother’s work, she went to the bookshelf where her collection of sand dollars sat in a glass candy jar. “‘I’d be rich if I had a penny for every dollar you girls brought
