Carla Neggers - The Harbor

Her favorite was the print of beach roses.

It went on and on and made her laugh every time, made her miss him, but she knew he wouldn't come back until the month was up. He'd decreed it. She needed time.

She ran the three-mile loop in the nature preserve two mornings a week. It wasn't easy at first, but she did it. And she kayaked. She and Christina went at high tide and paddled between the islands where Stick had run aground. They saw a hawk perched atop a spruce tree, as if there just for them.

Zoe also got another tattoo. A tiny orchid on her ankle. She drove down to Connecticut for it and stopped to see Charlie and Bea Jericho. She showed them her scarf, which she'd finished at night by the fire, and out on the porch when the autumn winds weren't howling. Bea said she had potential as a knitter. Zoe took that to mean her scarf still looked like a dead snake.

The leaves had dropped. The tourists had gone home. The summer people had left. Luke Castellane, in town late while he sorted out his legal problems, donated Sutherland Island to the nature preserve in Olivia's memory. Zoe tried not to look at it as a ploy to get probation.

Every day, Zoe wrote. It was still her secret. She bought more pillows and a more comfortable rug-just in case-and tried a fountain pen, gel pens, Flairs. All she asked of herself was to have fun. Whatever came after that-well, so be it. But her Jen Periwinkle was something else. She'd come to life in Zoe's mind, and on paper. The granddaughter of Olivia's agent had been in touch, just to check in-Zoe suspected Special Agent

J. B. McGrath had had something to do with it.

Then an antique rose pin Olivia West and Posey Sutherland might have worn as teenagers arrived in the mail, and Zoe couldn't stand it anymore. She decided to pack up her car and find her way to Washington,

D.C., and McGrath's door. She'd been good at tracking down people at one time. But she didn't get very far. The next morning when she was ready to leave, Bruce's truck turned up her driveway and J.B. got out. "My spies were in touch." He walked toward her in his jeans and leather vest. "I had to fly up here."

"Bruce. That big mouth."

J.B. smiled. "I never reveal my sources."

" Sources is too polite. He's a snitch. You two-"

"We're distant cousins."

"I wasn't running. I was going to find you."

"That's what Bruce thought. He was worried you'd get arrested in D.C., or get me in trouble again."

"Uh-huh. Like you need my help getting in trouble."

"No more undercover work for me," he said. "I train undercover agents now. I show them the scar on my throat. If they don't run, they're in. If they don't get scared, they're out."

"Why do I never know when you're serious?"

"Because I like to keep you off balance." But he was in front of her now, close enough that he could slip an arm around the small of her back and kiss her. "Miss me?"

"You have no idea-"

"But I do. I spent this last month alone, too."

"J.B.-"

He touched her mouth with one finger. "Before you go any further, I want to tell you that I'm not done with the bureau yet. I'm not going back undercover, but I'm not standing down. I need you to understand that."

She nodded. "It's what I've been expecting. I've been fantasizing about life in Washington. Hydrangea. Prowling the Smithsonian. It sounds like an adventure." She smiled, kissing him this time, and she whispered her only secret. "I want to write, J.B."

"I know."

"But I'm not ready to sit up here for the next seventy years and do it. This'll make a great second home, don't you think?"

"Zoe-"

"I love you. My God, J.B., I love you so much. Do you want me to stand on the bluff and yell it across the harbor?"

He inhaled sharply, caught her up with both arms and lifted her. "And I thought I was going to have to drag that out of you. Bruce said-"

"Since when are you discussing me with Bruce?"

"He knows I love you. He's known it from day one. Ah, Zoe." He swung her in a circle in the driveway and laughed in a way she hadn't heard before, then set her down. "I flew out to Montana and brought Olivia's letters to my grandmother back with me."

Zoe stared at him. "What?"

"I'm giving them to you. You can burn them if you want. They had a grand sense of adventure, the two of them, each in her own way. Posey married and went off to Montana and died young, Olivia stayed here and never married and lived to a ripe old age. It's what happened."

"J.B.-"

"I thought we could bring the letters up to that attic nook of yours and read them." He smiled. "Or not."

"I put a new rug up there."

"Did you? Like minds and all that, because that's your present for today."

And he went back to Bruce's truck and got the letters and a rug that he flung out right there in the driveway. It wasn't as soft as the one she picked out, but it had a big fat red rose right in the middle of it.

"Spies, ha. You bought that rug and couldn't stand it anymore yourself."

He winked at her. "As I said, like minds."

Zoe scooped up the rug and followed him onto the side porch, pausing to look out at the ocean churning under the gray November sky. She remembered how she and her sister had stood on the rocks and scattered Olivia's and her father's

Carla Neggers lives in rural Vermont with her husband and their two children. Since completing her first novel at the age of twenty-four, she has written over forty books and has appeared on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists.