“I do when the tide is right,” he said, turning his concentration upon the outboard motor instead. “It’s less intrusive, and-” now he couldn’t resist acknowledging that feminine appraisal with a frankly masculine grin “-I like the exercise.” He was inordinately pleased at the blush that spread across her cheeks. And even more pleased that she did not look away, but instead held his gaze with an acknowledgment of her own, clear and plain as the light in her sky-blue eyes.
It took all his willpower, that time, to turn away from her and back to the motor. And when he had it started up and throttled down to a throbbing growl, he was well aware that the vibration he felt inside did not come from the engine.
He cast off the line and headed the boat into the channel on a course he’d followed countless times before-and yet now it seemed different to him somehow, as if he were seeing everything for the first time. What would she think, he wondered, if she knew she was the first living soul he’d ever taken to his island? What did he think?
Once again the veil of detachment settled around him, protecting him. He did not want to think.
“Is it really an island?” Summer wasn’t sure why she was whispering. Riley had cut the engine as they approached so that they drifted into a tree-shaded inlet with the oars and the tide, and there was something a little intimidating, almost sacred in the silence, like being inside a church. The only sounds were the hum of insects, an occasional birdcall, and the shushing of waves on the sand. “And no one lives here?” she asked when he’d replied to her first question with a nod. “No one at all?”
“No-and no one ever will.” There was something grim about his smile.
“Are you sure it’s all right for us to be here?” She was whispering again; she’d seen several Private Property-No Trespassing signs already, posted on the dunes and tacked to the trunks of trees.
For a few minutes he said nothing while he nudged the boat’s bow up to a wooded embankment, jumped out and snugged the line to a small tree stump, then pulled the stern in close to the bank and held it so that the children could easily hop from boat to shore. But when it was Summer’s turn, he offered his hand to steady her and said for her alone, with that same enigmatic little smile, “It’s all right-I know the owner.”
“Brasher?”
He shook his head, the smile darkening. “Brasher takes care of it-chases away trespassers and poachers and such. But he doesn’t own the island. Not anymore.”
Understanding came as they walked along a barely discernible pathway between banks of scrubby vegetation, and she gave a small gasp. “You do. You own this island, don’t you?” He nodded reluctantly, as if it was something to be ashamed of. “Oh, my God-it’s really yours? All of it?” The idea that someone could own an island seemed incredible to her, the most impressive of all the impressive things she knew about Riley Grogan.
But he shrugged, and once again a look of discomfort crossed his face. “I hold the deed, but I don’t consider that I own the island. I think of myself as…more of a guardian-like Brasher.” He was quiet for a few moments, watching the children run ahead between seagrass-tufted dunes, then said in a soft, almost musing voice, “It was deeded to Brasher’s great grandmama after the War-that’s the Civil War, of course-by her former master, who was also Brasher’s great granddaddy. That was on his daddy’s side. Brasher was raised in Jamaica where his mother’s people were. I don’t believe anybody ever actually lived on the island. I used to come here when I was a child. It was…kind of a refuge for me, I guess you might say.” His lips flicked briefly with that dark, bitter smile. “Then a few years back, Brasher’s kinfolk got to fightin’ over whether or not to sell out to the developers that’d been circling around like buzzards for years, half thinkin’ they ought to take the money and the other half wantin’ to keep it wild like it is. Anyway, I got wind of it and…I had a few assets I felt I could live without, and the upshot of it is, I was able to make Brasher and his family an offer they could all live with. First thing I did was take the necessary steps to ensure that the island will never be developed, no matter what happens to me. That’s one hundred per cent guaranteed.”
They had come through the last of the dunes, and suddenly there it was, a pristine expanse of sand stretching away from the inlet to a distant point far to the right-to the south. A glistening sheet still wet from the retreating tide, it reflected the silvery blue of the summer sky and made mirror-like images of the stilt-legged birds that pecked and played tag in the lacy froth of the gently rolling waves. Riley checked suddenly, his brow furrowed with concern and his eyes on the children, who were already far down the beach, dancing and chasing each other barefoot through the shallow surf, their cries and laughter carried back on the warm sea breeze. “Are they-”
Summer laughed. “Don’t worry about them-they’ve been coming to the beach since they were babies.”
Riley nodded and started forward again, reaching for her hand in such a natural way that it would have seemed unnatural not to give it to him.
Natural, yes…but so were lightning, and electricity, and fire. Her hand tingled where it met his; heat raced up her arm and flooded her body, her heartbeat quickened. With a mumbled “Just a minute…” she slipped out of her shoes, one by one, then scooped them up in her free hand while he waited. “Thanks…” Breathless, she straightened, and she could feel his eyes on her, narrowed with a puzzling frown.
“Someday,” he said on an exhalation as they walked on, leaving their own footprints beside the children’s smaller ones, “I imagine this will be the only wild beach left on the southeastern coast.”
“It’s beautiful.” But Summer felt a heaviness inside, a yearning ache behind her smile. She could go no farther but instead halted and raked her hair back from her face and lifted it to the sun and the breeze in an almost defiant gesture, as if by sheer will she could hold the loneliness at bay.
“I sense a ‘but’ in there,” said Riley softly. She glanced at him in surprise and guilt, wondering how he knew.
She took a deep breath and shook her hair free, letting the warm wind have it-and to hell, she thought, with the frizzies. “It’s funny,” she said with an attempt at a laugh, “but it reminds me of the desert-the Mojave Desert, you know?-where I grew up.”
He looked at her with curiosity in his smile. “That is funny-our beach reminds you of your desert? How so?”
She tried another laugh that failed, then gave it up and walked along in silence for a time, smiling at her bare feet making footprints in the wet sand and thinking, How is it people smile most determinedly when they are trying hardest not to cry? But Riley didn’t press her-again, she wondered how he knew-and after a while, when she felt quiet enough inside, she lifted her eyes to the horizon and said softly, “My sister Evie used to say it gave her a case of ‘the wild lonelies.’ The desert, I mean. It’s beautiful, you know, in a wild sort of way, and there are things about it I still miss-the huge, endless vistas, the way the colors change from day to day, hour to hour. You know, the desert never looks the same way twice-the flowers in the springtime…the enormity of the sky. But it can suck the life out of you, too. And the hope. Evie always says the desert is a great place to be from. I’d have to agree with her about that, but about the loneliness, I guess I never really knew what she meant until…”
“Until now?” She nodded, and once more felt his look, this one more penetrating than curious. “What about this place makes you feel lonely?”
She shook her head but found it easy enough to answer him-too easy. If this keeps up, she thought, I will have no secrets left! “I don’t know why, really-the openness, maybe. The quiet…the wind…the marshes. And yes, it does make me feel lonely.”
Riley was silent for a long time, and she was afraid she might have wounded him somehow-as if she were inappreciative of his generosity in bringing her to his special place, for she knew that was what it was. But again he surprised her, when after a while he said in a voice as quiet as hers had been, “Or…maybe it’s not that the place makes you feel lonely, so much as it makes you know you are. There’s an…absence of distraction out here. Nothing to hide behind. No shelter, no choice but to confront who you are…all the things that are inside you-the thoughts and feelings, the hopes and dreams, the lies and truths. As beautiful as it is, this place can do that to you.” And then it was his time for introspective silence and hers for patient waiting, before he drew a deep breath and murmured, “And beautiful as it is, like your sister said, it’s a great place to be from.”
She threw him a quick, startled look, surprised not as much by the revelation, which she’d already begun to suspect, as by the fact that he’d shared it with her. “You are from here, then?”
“Well, not from here here, but…around here, yeah, I am.” And his smile grew enigmatic once more. “As I said, this island has sheltered me more than once. Brasher taught me how to drift in on the tide when I was still too small to row very far. He taught me how to fish for crabs…taught me a lot of things, Brasher did.”
“Is he the one?” Summer asked, casting him a sly, sideways glance.
“The one…what?”
“The one who taught you to make biscuits.”
And he laughed out loud and didn’t answer her. Instead, they walked together, holding hands like lovers, trading surreptitious glances and hiding them in discoveries of shells and sand dollars. Summer understood that they had each come as close to admitting to loneliness as the constraints of pride and personality would allow, and she was certain Riley knew it, too. She felt a trembling inside that was not of fear or exhaustion or excitement or desire, but more like the wobbliness of a vulnerable newborn creature, standing for the first time on uncertain legs and gazing at the world in wide-eyed wonder. The world seemed miraculous to her, and all things new.
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