The Love Shack
“What’s that?” the bartender asked, stepping closer. “I didn’t hear you, friend.”
“That’s what we were supposed to be,” he told the man. “Me ’n’ Skye. Friends.”
Someone slid onto the stool beside his. His head still bent over his watch crystal, he pitched his voice toward the newcomer. “Are you another pretty woman? ’Cuz there were two...no, three sitting there before you.”
“Is that what you’re waiting for?” a voice said, low.
“Apparently not,” Gage grumbled, “since I’ve sent three—or was it four?—on their way.”
“So many,” the person beside him murmured.
The bartender spoke up, a helpful note in his voice. “It was Ladies’ Night. He kept opening his wallet.”
“And yet I still couldn’t cinch the deal,” Gage added glumly. With bleary eyes, he stared at the TV screen over the bar. When had Letterman lost so much of his hair? “I must be getting old, too.”
“Or maybe more discerning.”
The moralistic tone sent Gage’s head swinging to the side. His mood, already on morose, slid straight to grim when he saw it was Skye on the next-door stool, wearing another of her circus-tent sweatshirts and a pair of jeans. “What the hell are you doing here? I declared you off-limits.”
“I didn’t get the memo.”
“Blame me, bud,” the bartender put in. “I knew you were staying in the cove and I called her when I wasn’t sure you were good to drive to your cottage.”
“I walked here,” Gage said.
“Okay. But I’m not sure you’re good to walk to your cottage, either.”
“Of course I...” His voice dropped off. To be honest, he couldn’t feel his toes.
“Give us a couple of coffees, will you, Tom?” Skye asked. “Black, a little sugar?”
When the mugs were set in front of them, she picked hers up and gave him a sidelong glance. “I’m off-limits?”
“In more ways than one,” he muttered, taking his own long swallow of the strong brew. Even if she smelled like damn heaven, he wasn’t interested in her in the way he was interested in other women.
“What’s that?”
He took another drink of coffee. “Look, I didn’t want you around when I...when I...”
“Went on a gorge?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “We discussed that terminology, didn’t we?”
“Sorry—”
“Because it’s probably what ruined my evening. I had Updo in the palm of my hand. Halter Top claimed she could tell I was going to get lucky tonight by reading the foam on my beer. Tiffany—”
“Oh, so at least you bothered to find out one of their names.”
He frowned at her. “It was engraved on the heart-shaped pendant she wore around her neck.”
“What a guy.” Skye rolled her eyes. “That’s not her name, that’s the jeweler it came from.”
“As I was saying,” Gage continued, “every time I was on the verge of suggesting we retire to No. 9 for some private...conversation, I would hear your goddamn prissy voice in my head.”
“I thought it was the margaritas,” the bartender said, pausing to top off their mugs. “That’s what you blamed it on before.”
“Skye can take responsibility for that, too,” he said, using the logic of the inebriated. “Because it had to be a woman who decided to screw around with the perfection of tequila, triple sec and lime juice. Flavored margaritas are clearly a female invention.”
“What are you talking about?” Skye asked, looking between him and the bartender.
“Mango margaritas were the special tonight,” Tom explained. Then he plopped a glass in front of her and poured inside the last icy dregs from a blender. “I don’t think they’re half-bad, myself.”
Gage stared at the orangeish concoction as if it were a snake. He could smell the sticky sweetness from here. Just as pumpkin could take him back to Thanksgiving and peppermint to Christmas, breathing in the mango-redolent air sucked him straight to another time and place. He closed his eyes and felt the grit of dirt on his palms and the sick, uneven thud of his pulse in his ears. His throat closed, rebelling against swallowing, and his belly cringed as he imagined the thick liquid splashing into its aching depths.
“Gage? Gage!”
His eyes flew open and he stared, uncomprehending for a moment, into Skye’s face. “I imagined you a million times down there,” he said absently, “but never could pinpoint your features.”
“What? Down where?” Her brows drew low. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head, as if he could shake off the memory like a bad dream. “Never mind.” That glass of mango marg still sat there, mocking him, and he slid from the stool. “It’s time for me to get out of here.”
At his first step, he stumbled a little. “Gage.” Skye put out her hand.
He brushed it aside, heading for the exit. “I’m fine.”
She dogged his footsteps. “I’ll go with you to No. 9.”
“Forget it.”
“Then you escort me to my place,” she suggested.
His feet slowed. Damn. “You walked?”
At her nod, he resigned himself to a few more minutes in her company. By the time they were out of the restaurant and onto the sand, the combination of coffee and chilled air went a long way to sobering him up. He sucked in another long breath and tilted back his head to take in the stars flung against the dark sky. His brain only spun a little.
“You okay?”
“I’d be better if I was with another woman,” he said darkly, starting off down the beach.
She sniffed, trudging beside him. Light from the moon made her face seem to glow. “If your heart was really in it, I doubt anything I might have said could change your mind. Or mango margaritas.”
He didn’t want to go into the whole mango thing. “My heart really isn’t into it. That’s not the body part looking for company. You get that, don’t you, Skye?”
She lifted both arms. “So find some solo relief. What’s the big deal?”
He stared at her.
Her gaze caught on his, skittered away. “What? I think the hairy palms thing is just a myth.”
His laughter snorted out. “Still, honey, it’s not the same.”
One of her shoulders jerked a shrug. “It’s all overrated,” she said under her breath.
But he heard her. Was that what she’d meant when she said she and Dagwood had physical problems?
“All men aren’t selfish in the sack,” he said, guessing at the difficulty. “I make certain my partners have as good a time as I do.”
“I’m sure,” she said, dismissive.
They’d reached her place. She pulled a key from her pocket, reached to insert it into the lock. The mechanism made an audible click, and then she turned toward him, her expression concerned. “Are you sure you don’t need my help getting home? It’s not far and you appear less, uh, inebriated, but...”
Her mouth was moving, but he didn’t absorb any of the words with her insulting I’m sure still echoing in his ears. Her unconvinced tone rubbed him wrong, itching at his skin and worming its way under just like her angel scent, her long lashes, her nude earlobes, that unpainted mouth. It was her fault he was alone tonight, and now she was impugning his ability as a lover?
He took an aggressive step forward, forcing her shoulders against the surface of the door to avoid the brush of his body. They stood so close he could feel her hitching breath against his throat. “I swear I’d do right by you, baby. On my honor, I’d make you come twice before entering you.”
Her head jolted, thudding against the wood. Eyes wide, she stared up at him. The pale silver of the moonlight couldn’t cool the wave of color flagging her cheeks.
On my honor, I’d make you come twice before entering you. Jesus! What had made him speak such a thing out loud? There was horny and then there was clumsy, crude, boorish, and...
...and God, he could see it in his mind. He’d conjured her in his imagination so many times that she slid easily into his bed, under his hands, against his tongue.
“That’s never going to happen,” she whispered, her eyes almost as big as the monster she probably now considered him to be.
“Of course it’s not,” he said, stepping back. His bed, his fantasies, his sex life were all—now and forever—Skye-free zones. The other ways he needed her were just too important.
CHAPTER FIVE
POLLY WAS PUTTING SCISSORS to brown paper bag when Teague White breezed through her open front door. He stopped short, taking in the stack of bags, the scraps of paper scattered at her feet, the tagboard pattern and pencil that lay on the coffee table in front of the love seat where she sat. “What’s up?” he asked.
My pulse rate. But, accustomed to hiding her physical reaction to him, Polly aimed a casual smile at his shoulder—she had to avoid looking too hard at the beautiful face above it. The stark, masculine bones framed by layers of short hair the same color as his almost-black eyes had the power to rock her world. She cleared her throat to answer his question. “I’m making Australian bush hats.”
“Huh,” he said. “Brown bags stand up to the harsh conditions?”
She went wooden as he approached, preparing for his usual kiss on the cheek. He hadn’t shaved and his whiskers prickled her skin, little needles of sensation that pierced her heart as if it were a pincushion. Pressing her knees together, she kept her gaze averted from him as he lifted the pile of cut pieces on the cushion beside her and took its place.
“Polly?”
Intent on not noticing how close he sat, how she could feel his body heat reaching across the few inches between them, she’d missed his question. “Uh, what?”
“I asked again about the bush hats, sweetheart.”
“Oh.” A little laugh burst from her lips. It did not sound nervous. After all this time, it was ridiculous to be nervous around Teague. Their years of friendship had inured her to him by now. “They’re for my class, as you should be able to guess.”
“I’m always surprised at what you kindergarten teachers can do with scissors and paper. Not to mention yarn. I remember the finger-weave belts the kids made last year.”
She felt a dimple dig into her cheek as she smiled, gratified he’d remembered. “Those came out pretty well, I admit.”
One of his long legs crossed over the other. “You’re harshing on my midsummer buzz, though, by prepping for September so soon.”
“I hate to break the news. It’s no longer midsummer. In three weeks I’ll be back in the classroom.”
“Then we’d better make the most out of the time we have left.”
Polly’s scissors paused, midcut. No, there wasn’t going to be any “we” about the next weeks. There shouldn’t be. There wouldn’t be.
She’d made that decision after her coffee with Skye. Her best friend’s words had slapped her like a palm to the face. “We both know your biggest stumbling block to a fulfilling love life is Teague.” How had she guessed? It was Skye who also called her “Very Private Polly.” If her feelings for Teague were wearing through her usual deep reserve, then she was in trouble.
He reached over now, tugging on the end of her ponytail. “You okay?”
“I’m good. I’m always good.”
“Then let’s make you gooder and finalize our August calendar. We’ll make it one to remember.”
“Gooder?”
He grinned. “Hey, I’m just a dumb firefighter.”
She glanced away from that flash of white teeth. He wasn’t dumb. It was her, who had never managed to shut him out of her life. For four and a half years she’d wanted him, wanted him to see her as more than a friend, and even when their physical relationship never went beyond ponytail tugs and busses on the cheek, she hadn’t been able to stifle the yearning in her heart.
Maybe it was because they’d slept together on the first night they’d met, she mused. Just slept. They’d both attended a New Year’s Eve party at Skye’s place, here at the cove. Teague was her childhood friend. Polly had met her in an Asian poetry class in college. The end-of-year celebration had gone on way past midnight and everyone had been invited to crash rather than risk driving home. Accustomed to a much earlier bedtime, Polly had gratefully found her way at 3:00 a.m. to a dark bedroom and an empty pillow.
In the morning, she’d opened her eyes to discover herself sharing a bed with the most handsome man she’d ever seen. Staring into his dark eyes, she’d started in alarm, drawing back so far she’d almost rolled off the mattress. The stranger had rough-whispered, “Easy,” and Polly, who was never easy when it came to men, had found herself settling back.
That had always been the strange dichotomy of her reaction to him. He made her pulse jitter at the same time that he calmed her innate wariness. It was a seductive contradiction, and after that morning when together they’d made breakfast for all the other overnighters, they’d become close friends.
But she wanted so much more.
She needed to look for it elsewhere, though, she knew that.
“I’m going to be seeing Tess a lot this month,” he said now, his dark eyes going bleak.
Polly needed to look elsewhere because of that desolate expression in Teague’s eyes. Because of Tess, the woman he loved.
“Why don’t you just avoid her?” Polly asked, acutely aware of how difficult it could be to stay away from the object of one’s affection. She was going to do it now, though. Really.
Teague sighed. “I would—do you think I want to torture myself? But there’s a lot of events leading up to Griffin and Jane’s wedding. I’ll be expected to attend, since we’ve become so close. She’ll be there, too, of course, as sister to the groom.”
Married sister to the groom. Married sister who was also happy with her husband of almost fifteen years and four kids. According to Teague, there’d been a bump in the couple’s connubial bliss earlier in the summer, which was when he’d had a brief reason to hope, but that had smoothed out now.
“I’m never going to get her, am I?” he asked, his voice low.
Polly kept her gaze on her scissors. “No, you’re never going to get her.” From what she’d been told, it wasn’t as if Tess had even led him to believe there was a chance, not really. But he’d seen the beautiful woman on the beach, remembered her from their childhood summers at Crescent Cove and fallen like a stone in the sea. It probably had something to do with the fact that she’d been the famous face of OM, a chewing gum touted to “tame a wild mind.” More than one adolescent boy had pinned Tess’s yoga-pose poster on the inside of his closet door.
Teague bent for the scraps of paper at her feet, gathering them into a ball that he squeezed between his big hands. “So...what do you want to do before school starts?”
Find another focus besides you. It wouldn’t be easy, but she figured cold turkey was the only way to go. “I’m pretty busy,” she said. “I’m not sure I can commit to anything with you.”
She could feel Teague’s frown. “All work, no play.”
“Hey,” she protested. “I’m not dull.” Though what else would you call four and a half years of pining after someone who only saw you as a buddy?
“Pol...” He waited until she looked over at him. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m good,” she said, her automatic reply. “I’m always good.”
His dark brows met over his strong, straight nose. “You’re Fort Knox, is what you are. Are you hiding something beneath that cheerleader disguise?”
Now it was her turn to frown. “You know I don’t like it when you throw that in my face. Yes, I was on the squad. But I also ran track and was secretary of the chess club.”
“What moves can the knight make?”
Shoot. Busted.
He laughed at her. “I debunked that myth on our ski trip two years ago, remember? You tried telling me then you were more than pom-poms and herky jumps.”
“I think it’s weird you even know what a herky jump is,” she muttered.
“Sweetheart, I played football. If a cheerleader had a move, all the guys on the team knew exactly what it was. Didn’t you figure that out?”
“I avoided dating football players.”
He tossed the softball-sized ball of scraps from hand to hand. “Now, this is getting interesting. You’re always so reticent about these kinds of details. If you didn’t date football players, who did you date?”
“Nobody from my high school.” Nobody in high school. Polly Weber had held secrets then, too. Confident all-American teen on the outside. On the inside, a vulnerable girl looking for validation in disastrous places. So damn needy.
And even if Polly Weber now loved a man who didn’t love her back, that didn’t make her the same as the insecure, self-destructive child 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 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.