they’d gone away, when in fact they were eating you from the inside out.
“No,” she said. “You’re burning your hot dog.”
“That’s how I like them. What was his name?”
She glared at him. Her expression said, leave it. But her voice said, reluctantly, “Brent.”
“Just for the record, I’ve always hated that name. Let me guess. A college professor?”
“It’s not even an interesting story.”
“All stories are interesting.”
“Okay. You asked for it. Here is the full pathetic truth. Brent was a college professor. I was a student. He waited until I wasn’t in any of his classes to ask me out. We dated for a few months. I fell in love and thought he did, too. He had a trip planned to Europe, a year’s sabbatical from teaching, and he went.”
“He didn’t ask you to go?”
“He asked me to wait. He made me a promise.”
Joshua groaned.
“What are you making noises for?”
“If he loved you he would never, ever have gone to Europe without you.”
“Thank you. Where were you when I needed you? He promised he would come back, and we’d get married. I took the nanny position temporarily.”
“No ring, though,” Joshua guessed cynically.
“He gave me a locket!”
“With his own picture inside? Thought pretty highly of himself, did he?” It was the locket she’d worn when he first met her. That she’d put away. What did it mean that she had taken it off?
That it was a good time for her to have this conversation? He knew himself to be a very superficial man, the wrong person to be navigating the terrifying waters of a woman’s heartbreak. What moment of insanity had gripped him, encouraged her confidences? But now that she’d got started, it was like a dam bursting.
“At first he e-mailed every day, and I got a flood of postcards. It made me do really dumb things. I … I used all my savings and bought a wedding gown.”
Her face was screwing up. She blinked hard. Maybe wheedling this confession out of her hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
“It’s like something out of a fantasy,” she whispered. “Lace and silk.” She was choking now. “It was all a fantasy. Such a safe way to love somebody, from a distance, anticipating the next contact, but never having to deal with reality.
“Can I tell you something truly awful? Something I don’t even think I knew until just now? The longer he stayed away, the more elaborate and satisfying my fantasy love for him became.”
She was crying now. No mascara, thank God. He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, and when that didn’t seem to give her any comfort, or him either, he threw caution to the wind, and his hot dog into the fire. He pulled her into his chest.
Felt her hair, finally.
It felt as he had known it would feel, like the most expensive and exquisite of silks.
It smelled of Hawaii, exotic and floral. This was why he was so undeserving of her trust: she was baring her soul, he was being intoxicated by the scent of her hair.
“Actually,” she sniffed, “Brent was the final crack in my romantic illusions. My parents had a terrible relationship, constant tension that spilled over into fighting. When I met Brent, I hoped there was something else, and there was, but it turned out to be even more painful. Oh, I hope I don’t sound pathetic. The I-had-a-bad-childhood kind of person.”
“Did you?” he asked, against his better judgment. Of course the smell of her hair and her soft curves pressed into his body made him feel as if he had no judgment at all, wiped out by sensory overload. And yet even for that, he registered her saying she’d had a bad childhood and he ached for her. There were things even a warrior could not hope to make right.
“Terrible,” she said with a defeated sigh. “Filled with fighting and uncertainty, making up that always filled us kids with such hope and never lasted. It was terrible.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re so invested in children. Giving them the gift of happiness that you didn’t have. You do have that gift, you know. So engaged with them, so genuinely interested in them.”
“Did you have a good childhood?” she asked, and her wistfulness tore through the barriers around his heart that usually kept him from sharing too deeply with anyone.
“Camelot,” he said. “I can’t remember one bad thing. I often wonder if every family is only allotted so much luck, and we used ours up.”
“Oh, Joshua,” she said softly.
“My parents were crazy about each other. And about us. We were the fun family on the block—my dad coaching the Little League team, my mom filling the rubber swimming pool for all the neighborhood kids. And it was all so genuine. I see parents sometimes who I think are following a rule book, thinking about how it all looks to other people, but my folks weren’t like that. They did these things with us because they loved to do it, not because they wanted to look like great parents.”
“And because of that they were great parents.”
“The best,” he remembered softly. “Every year for three weeks they rented a cottage on the seashore. We had these long days of swimming and playing in the sand, we had bonfires out front on the beach every night. There wasn’t even a TV set. If it rained, we played Monopoly or Sorry or cards.”
He realized he had never felt that way again. Ever. Not until he had come here.
And to feel that way was to leave yourself open to a terrible hurt.
Was he ready?
A sudden sound made him jerk up from her. Without his noticing, so engrossed in protecting her and comforting her, and sharing his own secret memories with her, the wind had come up on the lake.
Some warrior. Some protector! He had not tied the canoe properly. It had yanked free of its mooring, the sound he had heard was it crashing into a rock as it bounced away from the small island.
He ran for the water, plunged in, could not believe the cold and stopped.
“Leave it,” Dannie cried.
Good advice. He should let the canoe go, but everything about Moose Lake Lodge said the Bakers were operating on a shoestring. He’d been entrusted with their canoe.
“I can’t,” he shouted at her, moving deeper into the water. “Can you imagine how the Bakers will react if the canoe drifts back there, empty? What about Susie?”
He took a deep breath and moved deeper into the water, felt her movement on the beach behind him.
“Stay there,” he called. “I’ve got it under control.”
He
