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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 home,’” she murmured, repeating her father’s favorite phrase. She and her sister had never tired of finding them, believing they were the currency of the merfolk.
It had been a childhood perfect for such fancies, living at the cove. There was the bustle and excitement of summer, energized by the families moving in and out of the cottages, not to mention the day visitors who came to play at the sand and water. In the off-season, the surrounding beach houses most often stood empty, but the minds of Skye and her sister did not. They’d exercised their imaginations no matter how tranquil the cove became.
Which likely only added to the disquiet she’d experience at this summer’s end. Her ancestors had made movies, she and her sister had made up a thousand stories and this winter she could see herself conjuring up a bogeyman around every corner.
She’d have to leave to save her sanity. Then the other Alexanders, who loved the cove but had left it behind, would tell her it was time to place their property on the market. Even if they wanted to hold on to it for a few more years, that wouldn’t make it easier on Skye, who would be miles away.
If she couldn’t live here, it was no longer home.
Sighing, she returned to the chair behind the desk. In a minute or two she’d go back to her cottage, set all the locks, hang the cowbell on the doors designed to warn her of an intruder. Then she’d settle in for another night of fitful sleep. Until then...
She pulled open the right bottom drawer. Behind a stack of files was an old wooden box that had washed up onshore when she was a child. It was of some sort of resilient wood—it hadn’t warped from its bath in the salt water—and it used to hold a little girl’s treasures: a baby doll the size of her thumb, the shell of a turtle, a book of funny rhymes Rex Monroe had once given her. A packet of letters had been added to the contents.
As she reached for the container, her cell phone chimed. Skye started, cursed her jumpiness, then picked up the device. It was a text message, and the number wasn’t familiar to her. When she tapped to open it, a photograph appeared on the screen.
An open ibuprofen bottle, a ginger ale can tipped on its side and a washcloth folded into a compress.
It could only come from one person, the man she hadn’t seen since he’d walked her home last night.
She texted back: Ouch.
And Gage responded, Ur talking to me?
Feeling sorry for u.
May not deserve ur pity, but will take it. & I apologize.
Smiling a little, she stared at the cryptic sentiments. After last night, she’d wondered—worried—how their first encounter would go after the incendiary exchange at her front door.
No apology necessary, she typed. Wasn’t sure u’d even remember.
She’d hoped he’d forget, actually, because then she wouldn’t have to explain her reaction to what he’d said. He’d been teasing her, of course, and hadn’t been subtle about it, but his words had poked at her all the same. On my honor, I’d make you come twice before entering you.
She was aware she’d gone big-eyed and still, stunned to her marrow.
Gage texted back, U looked as if I’d promised rats to eat ur entrails.
Making a face, she moved her thumbs over the keyboard. Game of Thrones reference?
U betcha, baby.
He’d called her that last night, in a raspy, masculine tone. “Baby. I swear I’d do right by you, baby.” A shiver worked its way down her back and she stared at the screen, mesmerized by the memory. He’d been teasing and sexually frustrated and none of it was really aimed at her personally, but part of her, somewhere deep beneath the layers of clothes and nerves and nightmares, responded to him on a purely female, physical level. Maybe she should be glad about that, she thought.
But those tears stinging her eyes didn’t feel like gladness. They felt like loss. No matter what was stirring deep inside, there was too much ice and fear between it and any man.
She’d never be able to get close to one in that way again.
Her phone pinged again. Skye?
Here.
R u ok?
Sure! The exclamation point was added for emphasis. To cover up any awkwardness he might pick up between them. She wanted him to think she was normal. Like the sanctuary of this little building, the friendship she had with Gage was another thing that made her feel secure. Normal, even.
Her damage had to remain hidden from him.
C u 2morrow? she typed.
C u then.
Her phone went quiet and, letting out a sigh, she slumped back in her chair. If these were her last weeks at the cove, then she wanted to enjoy them as best she could with the pen pal who would be on his way again soon. She’d hide her weakness, her unruly responses and anything else that might reveal too much.
On another sigh, she let her head rest against the seat cushion and wrapped her fingers around her phone. It felt warm to the touch, and she tightened her hold on what seemed like a tangible connection between herself and Gage. Maybe it was dangerous to want to hold even such a small piece of him. After all, she knew he wasn’t going to stay. But then she didn’t have what it took to follow up on the ache she had for him, anyway.
What if he’d arrived last summer? she wondered.
But he hadn’t, and perhaps that was a boon. Perhaps this poignant pain served to underscore how futile it would be to care for a man who would never settle in one place. With one woman.
Maybe she dozed. She must have, because she was suddenly alert, heart galloping in her ears. The phone had fallen from her lax fingers to the desk. Was that what had woken her?
Her breaths were unsteady and loud in the room. Outside the office, the ocean spoke shh shh shh, and she struggled to heed its warning. Something was tickling at her primal brain and she carefully moved her head to look about.
All seemed normal, these four walls still her safest haven.
It was just her skittery nerves, she told herself. Keep it together. Breathe through the anxiety. Don’t be such a ridiculous goose.
It was still summer and she couldn’t afford to let the fear get the best of her so soon.
Then a new noise came from outside. It was a scraping sound. Maybe metal against wood? Like someone prying at the locked door.
Someone was trying to get in!
Her brain screeched the words in her head, and her flesh went cold. Rigor mortis seized her muscles as her gaze glued to the entrance. There was no inward sign of tampering, but that noise came again.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
This time, she lurched out of the chair. Her half-paralyzed body moved with clumsy jerks as she Frankenstein’d toward the bathroom. She could lock herself inside there, she thought in urgent panic. There was a hook and an eyebolt—
—that wouldn’t stop anyone.
She knew it wouldn’t stop him.
Frozen again in fear, Skye stood in the middle of the office as horror dried her mouth and seized her lungs. That other night, she’d managed one scream before his hand had been there, fleshy and foul with bitter sweat, and then he’d gagged her with a kitchen towel. Later, she’d realized she could have yelled until she was hoarse and it wouldn’t have mattered. It had been off-season and there was no one near enough to hear her over the ceaseless surf.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
The sounds grated against her hypervigilant nerves. Skye’s skin twitched and she stared down at her feet. Move, she commanded them. Move!
Move where? a dull voice in her head countered, resigned to what she’d been dreading all these months. He’ll just find you. He’ll just touch you again. He promised he’d finish what he started.
And then she thought of the last man who had touched her. It wasn’t him, that disgusting bastard with his stinking sweat. It had been Gage, dancing with her at Captain Crow’s, making her feel like a normal woman for the first time in a very long while.
Gage. Gage!
She found herself by her desk, unaware of how she’d made it there. Snatching up the phone, she fumbled with the buttons. The screen lit, and then she managed to tap Call. His voice sounded in her ear.
Relief and fear made her head spin. “I’m at the office,” she choked out. “I need you.”
“What?” he said. “Skye?”
She swallowed, and then revealed everything she’d vowed to keep from him. “I don’t feel safe. Help me.”
CHAPTER SIX
GAGE SPRINTED UP THE BEACH. His phone was in his pocket, but he didn’t pause for a 911 call, though the thought flitted through his mind. Not only was he unsure of the exact emergency, but he knew he could reach Skye way before any patrol car.
All looked quiet ahead of him. Some of the cottages had their roof-mounted canister lamps, trained to spotlight the surf, turned on, but the sand itself was shadowed and empty of people. There was a glow coming from the direction of Captain Crow’s at the northern end of the cove, but Skye’s office was a quarter mile south...and appeared dark and deserted as he drew closer.
As unease bubbled in his belly, he redoubled his pace while trying to maintain his calm. During his career he’d faced dozens of dire situations and always managed to keep his head. But it felt near to exploding now—his chest, too, as his heart thundered against his ribs.
“Skye!” he shouted as he leaped onto the office step. His knuckles thumped against the door. “Skye? Are you all right?”
Silence. His composure fractured, and he found himself hammering the wood with both fists. “Skye!”
More silence.
He yanked out his phone and started jabbing at the display to dial her number. Was she hurt? Had she left?
A dozen questions whirling through his fragmented mind, he almost missed the crack in the door. A yellow edge of light leaked out. “Gage?” a voice croaked.
He shoved at the wood to make room for himself. Skye gasped, but the sound didn’t register over his vital need to assess the situation. Inside the brightly lit room, he blinked, getting his bearings.
Everything appeared fine. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Upended furnishings? A threatening stranger? But the room looked cheerful, with everything in its normal place...
Oh, shit.
Everything in its normal place except for Skye, who’d retreated to the far corner. She slid to the floor and curled into a self-protective ball, her knees to her chest, her arms wrapping her shins, her head tucked low. The pose was so disturbing he felt a clutch at his throat.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded in a harsh voice, then winced as she cringed, her body folding tighter as if she was trying to disappear.
His gaze sped around the room again, still finding nothing alarming. In quick strides, he made it to the bathroom doorway. The closet-sized space was empty of anything other than toilet, sink, soap and towel dispenser.
But ghostly feet were tapping up and down his spine and Skye hadn’t moved. Anxiety shook his insides again, but he tried to smooth his expression as he hunkered near her. “Skye?”
She jolted as if in fear, shaking him to the core.
Keep your head, he reminded himself. Keep her calm.
“Skye. Honey.” This time she didn’t twitch a muscle, and it felt like progress. “Was...was someone here?”
He could feel her struggle to find her voice. Finally she spoke, the words low and thready. “I don’t know.”
Ignoring his yammering pulse, he studied what he could see of her. Sloppy, oversize clothes. Bare feet shoved into a pair of shoelace-less sneakers. Her person didn’t seem to have come to any harm, but her body shuddered with a fine tremor.
“Why did you call me?” he asked.
“I want to feel safe.”
