Sherryl Woods - Harbour Lights

“Absolutely. Got it,” Shanna said. “You’re welcome to keep looking around, if you can maneuver around the stacks of books. Shelves are coming in the morning, so hopefully the floor will be clear by this time tomorrow and this place will be starting to look the way I’ve envisioned it.”

Bree somehow found her way straight to the gardening and flower-arranging books. She picked them up, all but cooing her enthusiasm over each one. “Mind if I put a stack aside for myself?” she asked. “There are three here I absolutely have to have.”

“By all means. I’ll put them in back with your name on them.” She decided now might be a good time to get some of her questions about Kevin answered. “By the way, your brother Kevin was here earlier. Did he find you?”

Bree looked startled. “Kevin was here?”

Shanna nodded.

“Was he civil?” she asked worriedly.

“Of course. Why?”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said it like that. It makes him sound, I don’t know, unpredictable or something. It’s just that he’s been going through a tough time. He pretty much keeps to himself these days.”

“Why?” Shanna asked, then could have kicked herself. “Sorry. I’m being nosy.”

“It’s okay. Most people around here know, and they’re pretty understanding about his need for privacy and his moods. His wife died a while back, and I guess you could say that he’s lost his way.”

“That explains it,” Shanna said. “I inadvertently mentioned his wife, and he shut down. I had a feeling something awful had happened.”

“She died in Iraq. One of those improvised explosive incidents. It just about killed him. If it weren’t for his little boy …” Bree shrugged. “I’m not sure what would have happened, if he didn’t have Davy in his life. He’s only two, so he still needs a lot of attention. At least Kevin knows he can’t go completely underground and brood.”

With her guesswork confirmed, Shanna felt another burst of sympathy. Here were two people who needed mothering, one of them practically a baby, the other a grown man who’d been through his own personal hell. The situation was right up her alley. Once again, she warned herself to steer clear.

But when she thought of Kevin’s sad eyes and what a difference it had made the few times he’d smiled, she knew in her gut she wasn’t going to be able to resist, not if he gave her half a chance. He might be lost and needy, but she had a void inside that she’d been trying to fill for years. It had made her love well, but not wisely. Not wisely at all.

Kevin sat in an Adirondack chair in the yard, his bare feet propped on a stool, a beer in his hand as he watched Davy play with his trucks. Thank heaven he was the kind of kid who, even at two, could entertain himself, at least for short stretches of time. They were waiting for dusk and the arrival of the fireflies, which Davy found endlessly fascinating. Then they’d go inside, Davy would get a quick bath and a story before bed, and finally, Kevin would have the rest of the night to himself.

As Charles Dickens had once said about something else entirely in the opening to A Tale of Two Cities , “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Those few hours before sleep claimed him were too often filled with memories, good ones, yes, but painful because of it.

“Hey, Davy, look what I caught,” Bree called out from somewhere behind him.

Davy looked up from his trucks, squealed with glee and took off toward his aunt, who had two fireflies trapped in a jar with holes punched in the lid. If Kevin wasn’t mistaken, that was probably the very same Mason jar they’d used as kids to gather lightning bugs on evenings just like this one—humid and thick with the promise of a storm in the air. Whitecaps were already stirring on the bay and the leaves on some of the huge old trees were turned inside out in the stiffening breeze.

With Davy’s hand tucked in hers, Bree came over to join him, plopping down on the grass and setting the jar where Davy could watch it, his brow furrowed now in concentration.

“I can see lightning in the distance,” she commented, her gaze directed toward the bay. “Heat lightning, most likely.”

“Maybe,” Kevin said.

“Then, again, it could storm in an hour or two,” she said, clearly making small talk. “I hope so. We could use a good rain.”

Kevin didn’t respond, just waited, wary. Bree rarely dropped by for no good reason now that she was married. She had better things to do with her evenings than to sit with him and chat about the weather. Usually if he kept quiet, she’d eventually get to the point.

Tonight, however, the tactic didn’t seem to be working. Bree just sat there, gazing out at the water, seemingly content. He knew better. Like him, she was biding her time.

“Why aren’t you home with Jake?” he asked eventually, hoping to forestall whatever had brought her over here by guiding her toward what was usually her favorite topic, her new husband.

“Mrs. Finch had a lilac emergency,” she said with a smile.

Mrs. Finch’s obsession with her lilacs was legendary. She nearly drove Jake crazy with her insistence on overseeing the annual mulching and trimming he did for her, but she was one of his landscaping business’s best customers, so when she called, he went. Kevin grinned. “Better him than me.”

Bree laughed. “That’s right. I’d forgotten you used to do lawn work for her when you were a kid.”

“I only helped Jake, so he’d finish sooner and we could go out chasing girls,” he corrected.

“You and my husband chased girls together?” she asked with a narrowed gaze. “I don’t remember that.”

“Oops!” Kevin replied, trying to inject a note of contrition into his voice. He couldn’t quite manage it. If he’d just thrown Jake to the wolves, so be it. Maybe it would get Bree’s focus off him.

Apparently, though, she was more than capable of multitasking, because she turned her attention right back to him.

“I met Shanna today,” she said, all innocence. “She said you’d been looking for me.”

“I was.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I mentioned I might go into town and Gram immediately claimed she wanted a few flowers to fill in an arrangement.” Gram’s request had been a blatant lie, and they’d both known it.

“But you never picked up any flowers,” Bree said, looking confused.

“Because her garden’s in full bloom,” he said. “I know a manipulation when it slaps me in the face. She just wanted to be sure I kept my word and got out of the house. It’s her latest mission in life.”

Bree grinned. “She’s not half as sneaky as she likes to think she is.”

“Never was,” he said, waiting for another shoe to drop.

“I hear you hung out for a while at the bookstore,” she finally said, her tone oh-so-casual.

He shrugged. “I was waiting for you. Shanna was having trouble with her cappuccino machine, so I offered to set it up for her. It was like the one I used to have at home. No big deal, certainly nothing to bring you running over here with all these questions.”

Her brow lifted. “She didn’t mention that you’d helped her out.”

“Like I said, it wasn’t a big deal. Is there some point you’re trying to get to?”

“Not really,” she said, sitting back in companionable silence just long enough to lull him into a false sense of complacency before asking, “What did you think of her?”

“Who? Shanna?”

She rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that who we’ve been talking about?”

He regarded her evenly. “A second ago we were talking about Gram.”

“Oh, please. I know what you think about our grandmother. Yes, Shanna, dolt. She’s attractive.”