He noticed that, too. Misinterpreting the reason for her distress, he said, “Are they hurting that badly, Jane?”
“Uh-uh.” She swallowed and shook her head. “It’s just that I’m not used to having someone be concerned about me. It’s usually the other way around.”
Raising his eyes, he subjected her to a brief, intense scrutiny before dropping her hand and turning the wheelchair toward the door. “Then go put some salve on your scrapes and look after yourself for a change. You’ve wasted enough time on me for one day.”
She felt his gaze following her all the way along the path. Before climbing the steps to her own front porch, she looked back and sure enough, he’d stationed himself beside the post at the edge of the porch. When he saw her turn, he lifted his hand in a salute. She did the same and, fanciful though it might be, it was as if a small flame sprang alive in the cold, empty wasteland which for so long had been her heart.
That simple gesture set the pattern for the days which followed. Whenever they happened to see one another from a distance, they’d mark the occasion with a wave, an acknowledgment which, though wordless, nevertheless conveyed a sense of cautious awareness of each other.
Once, she saw him seated at the wheel of Steve’s eighteen-foot runabout and heading across the stretch of water separating Bell Island from Clara’s Cove on Regis Island. Another time she caught sight of him hauling driftwood up the ramp from the beach. But though her every instinct screamed for her to go over and make sure he was coping by himself, she honored their pact and kept her distance.
The heat wave softened to the more typically temperate warmth of early July, with cool, refreshing nights and mornings cloaked in milky haze. The leisurely days worked their magic and Jane found the healing, the sense of contentment and peace within herself, which had for so long evaded her.
She spent evenings sitting on the porch in one of the wooden Adirondack chairs her grandfather had made years before, and watching the first stars come out. Early each morning she left a trail of footprints along the newly-washed sand at the water’s edge. She swam in the sun-warmed waters of the cove, and hiked the lower slopes of Bell Mountain to pick wild blueberries. She taught Bounder to sit and stay on command.
Her skin took on a sun glow and she gained a pound or two because her arms and legs no longer seemed quite so scrawny. She slept like a child—deeply, dreamlessly—and rediscovered a serenity of spirit she’d thought she’d lost forever.
Sometimes, she thought she could live like that indefinitely, hidden away with only Bounder for company and the bald eagles and killer whales to witness her comings and goings. But nothing stayed the same for very long. Time, life—they moved forward. Change occurred.
For her, it began the morning she went outside and found a pail of fresh clams at the foot of her porch steps. He didn’t bother leaving a note, but she knew Liam had to be the one who’d left them there, though how he’d found the stamina to navigate the rutted path from his place to hers she couldn’t begin to fathom.
In return, she waited until she saw him take the boat from its mooring, then sneaked over and left a loaf of freshly baked bread outside his door.
And so they established another tenuous line of communication: half a small salmon from him, a bowl of wild strawberries from her; apple pie still warm from her oven as thanks for prawns the size of small lobsters which he hauled out of the deep water of the mid-channel. And all done furtively so as not to contravene the terms of their pact of peaceful but independent coexistence.
Then, one time, she noticed his unoccupied wheelchair leaning drunkenly against the post at the top of the ramp leading to the house. Afraid that he’d somehow lost control of it, she sneaked over and crept up the ramp to his cottage, dreading what she might discover.
She found him stationed on the seaward side of the porch. Using the railing for support, he was testing his weight on his injured leg.
Be careful! You can’t rush recovery! she wanted to cry out, because he was a big man, tall and powerfully built. And the fact that he was trembling with the effort it cost him to put himself through the exercise told her he was pushing himself too hard, too soon.
Her concern wasn’t entirely altruistic. She knew a tiny disappointment, too, because as his recovery progressed, the likelihood that he’d call on her for help grew increasingly remote. And solitude, she was beginning to learn, had its drawbacks. There was only so much intelligent conversation one could hold with a dog, even one as smart as Bounder.
Apparently, Liam McGuire reached the same conclusion because a few days later, instead of leaving an offering of food, he left a note.
You can come for dinner tonight, if you want to, and bring the dog. Seven o’clock.
Not the most gracious invitation, perhaps, but a gilt-engraved summons issued by royalty could not have thrilled her more. “See you at seven,” she scribbled back, anchored the reply under a rock on his porch railing, and, in a fever of anticipation, rushed home to make wild raspberry tart.
While it baked, she hauled the big tin bath tub in from the back porch to the middle of the kitchen floor, filled it with water heated in a pail on the stove, and soaked luxuriously. She shampooed the sea salt out of her hair, then rinsed it in cool water from the rain barrel outside. She creamed perfumed lotion all over her sun-dried skin and fished out the meager supply of cosmetics which hadn’t seen the light of day since she’d arrived on the island. She ironed one of the few dresses she’d brought with her, a sleeveless, delphinium blue cotton affair with a full skirt and fitted waist.
After all that, when seven o’clock rolled around, she knew the most frightful attack of nerves, wiped the lipstick off her mouth, threw the dress to the back of the closet, and put on a clean pair of red shorts and a matching top.
“As if it matters what I wear,” she told Bounder. “I could show up stark naked and he probably wouldn’t care, as long as I don’t presume too much on his hospitality.”
He’d acted against his better judgment and was living to regret it. Had regretted it, if truth be known, ever since he’d slunk away from her front step after leaving the note. Cabin fever must have taken hold without his realizing it. Why else would he deliberately sabotage his well-ordered life by inviting her and her demented dog to intrude on it? And why would he waste the better of the afternoon trying to tart the place up to look more than it really was? The picnic table on the grass below the porch had seen better days, and paper towels hardly qualified as fine linen.
He poured himself a glass of wine from the ice chest at his side and wheeled himself over to the railing overlooking the beach. It was almost a quarter after seven and she struck him as the punctual type, so the odds were she’d changed her mind about joining him for dinner, which was fine by him. It wasn’t as if her share of the food would go to waste. The energy it had taken for him to organize the meal had left him ravenous.
Funny thing, though, how a man’s mood could shift. That afternoon, while he’d readied the outdoor fire pit for action, he’d found himself whistling under his breath. He’d believed he was looking forward to the evening, to watching her face break into a smile, to hearing her laughter.
After a while, a guy got sick of the sound of his own voice, and sicker still of the same old thoughts chasing around inside his head. Was he ever going to walk under his own steam again? Was he finished as the expert everyone called on to design a new offshore project?
He needed distraction and
