Nantucket Romance 3-in-1 Bundle (2 page)

Sam rummaged through her drawers, pushing aside the nightgowns her mom had bought, and pulled out her favorite long T-shirt and a stretchy pair of shorts.

A few minutes later, Sam entered the kitchen and took a towel from the drawer, then wiped up the mini puddles. The bones of her knees knocked against the wood floor as she crept along, swiping in wide arcs.

“Why do you wear that ratty old thing? You look like a boy, Samantha.”

“It’s comfortable.” Sam slung her wet ponytail across her shoulder.

“You missed a spot.” Her mom pointed toward the door.

Sam backtracked and dried the area. By the time she finished, her mom had left the kitchen, so Sam tossed the towel in the washer and returned to her room, shutting the door. The doorknob was the old-fashioned kind, cut glass with clear angles. She’d thought it beautiful when she was little. When the sunlight flooded the room and hit the glass, it splayed prisms of light across the wall. Now she wished for a plain old metal doorknob, the kind with a lock.

Sam turned out the light and slipped under the quilt. Before she lay against the pillow, she reached into her bedside drawer and withdrew the flashlight. The switch flipped on with ease, and she set it on the wooden sill of the window. She turned on her side and tucked the covers under her chin.

She lay that way for a long time, hearing the sounds of her mom getting ready for bed. She knew it would be a while before Emmett came home, but still she listened for the sound of his car, for the crunch of gravel under his work boots. She listened until her ears were so full of silence it seemed they would burst.

Sometime later she startled awake to the sound of the front door opening. She
heard her mom talking; then Emmett’s voice rumbled through her closed door. “She didn’t pull the weeds like I told her to.” He cursed.

“Well, she can do it tomorrow.” Her mom’s voice was fading. “How much did you lose tonight?”

The sound of their bedroom door clicking shut resonated in her ears.

“Get up.”

Sam’s arm stung with the sharp slap, and she shot up in bed. Dawn’s light filtered through the window, gray and dim.

Emmett was already walking away. “Go pull the weeds like I told you yesterday. No breakfast until you’re done.”

“I already did.” In her fog of sleep, the words slipped out.

He turned and hauled her out of bed, and her knees buckled as her feet hit the floor. Fully awake now, she realized it was Saturday and her mom was at work. “I’ll do better.”

He straightened, and she noticed tiny red veins lining the whites of his eyes. She looked at the rug beneath her feet. He released her burning arm.

When he left, she traded her long T-shirt for an old, faded one and set to work in the flower beds, pulling the weeds she’d missed the day before. The sun was nowhere to be seen, hiding behind a thick curtain of angry clouds. She’d emptied two bucketfuls and was back on her knees when Emmett opened the back door. The squawk of the hinges made her jump.

“Since you didn’t do what you were told the first time, you can pull the dead blooms and trim the hedges too.” With that, he disappeared into the house.

She sat back on her haunches and brushed the hair from her face with dirty fingers. She scanned the rows of lilies, and she pictured all the rose blooms in the front yard and the hedges lining the yard. With a sigh, she leaned forward and grabbed a dandelion, wrapping it around her hand and yanking hard. She tossed it, roots and all, in the bucket.

The rain started then, first a drop on her hand, then one on her cheek. Within a minute, a steady shower fell. She planted her knees in the dirt and began pulling wilted blooms from the lily plants. By the time she’d finished the first one, the dirt under her knees was mud, and her empty stomach twisted. She scooted toward the next plant and went back to work.

Sam didn’t see Landon until he fell to his knees beside her. Wordlessly, he plucked a bloom and then another, tossing them in the bucket. When he finally looked at her, his hair hung in wet, dark strands over his eyes and a clump of dirt smudged his cheek, and Sam knew she looked no better.

His lips turned up on one side, and she couldn’t stop her own smile.

They worked until the beds and hedges were done and their clothes were soaked clean through. Landon reheated the pancakes his dad had made that morning, then they watched TV with his younger brother, Bailey, until lunchtime. By then, the sun had come out again, and the threesome played all afternoon, passing a football and fishing off the end of the Reeds’ pier.

At supper time, Landon headed inside, and Sam said she had to go in too. But when she got home, her mom and Emmett were gone, so she had a bowl of Lucky Charms and a handful of peanuts. When she saw Landon in his backyard again, she joined him, and they tossed his football until it was too dark to see.

Later, Landon stood at the water’s edge, the cool water nipping at his toes, while she stood poised barefoot on the first plank of the pier like a 747 aimed at a runway. At the end, the light glowed against the black sky.

Even in the dimness, she saw his hard, flattened lips and knew they suppressed a reprimand, just as he knew a scolding would not stop her.

Sam smiled impishly at him, then darted forward, building speed in just a few long strides. At just the right spot, she sprang into a round-off and followed it with four back handsprings.

Her hands and feet alternately punched the boards, making a rhythmic
thud-thud, thud-thud
. She landed solidly in the spotlight four planks shy of the water. Nearly a record. She was no Mary Lou Retton or Julianne McNamara—she was too tall and big-boned to be nimble—but she didn’t care so much about form.

She strode back toward Landon and stepped into the dark water, making sure to keep her clothes dry.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Landon said before compressing his lips into a tight line again. His olive green eyes looked almost black in the nighttime shadows, and she could see the shimmering lights from the water reflected in them.

“I haven’t fallen yet,” Sam said as she worked her toes into the silty sand until the tops of her feet were covered.

“When you do, don’t come crying to me.”

Sam smirked at that because Landon knew she never cried, and if she ever did, he’d be the first one to scoop her up and sweep away her tears.

When the moon was high in the sky, Landon’s mom called him in, so they said good night and Sam went home. She could hear the TV blaring in her mom and Emmett’s room, so she crept into her bedroom and shut the door. After getting ready for bed, she lifted her window to invite the night breeze inside and set the flashlight on the sill.

Sam curled up on her side and closed her eyes. Sometime later, she heard her mom and Emmett talking on the back porch. She strained to hear them.

“The flower beds look nice,” her mom said.

“Took the better part of the day.”

Sam heard a rush of exhaled breath and envisioned the puff of cigarette smoke from her mom’s mouth.

“What are our plans for tomorrow, baby?” Emmett asked.

Sam pictured her mom crossing her arms, shrugging him off.

Sam thought she must have missed her answer because there was such a long pause. Then she heard her mom’s reply. “We don’t have any.”

There was a haunting tone in her mother’s words that Sam hadn’t heard before.

Their voices lowered to low mumbles she couldn’t interpret, so Sam listened to the nocturnal orchestra outside her window. A loon called out over the buzz of the insects, and the water licked the shoreline. If she concentrated hard, she could hear Mom’s boat knocking against the pier bumper. A breeze rattled the tree leaves and carried the sweet scent of salt-spray roses through the air. Her body began to relax. Her thoughts slowed and her breaths deepened.

Sam opened her eyes. Darkness blanketed her room, and outside her window, a thick fog swallowed the moonlight. A sound had wakened her. The distinctive
clunk
that sounds across the water when an oar strikes the hull of a boat. The numbers on her clock read 4:37, an odd hour for a boat to be out.

She untangled herself from the quilt and decided to investigate. When she pushed open the screen door, it squeaked, and she cringed. Very carefully, she set it against the wooden frame. Her bare feet grabbed grits of sand as she walked across the rough boards of the porch.

Sam crossed her arms against the cool air and tiptoed across the damp, stubby grass. The fog glowed under the light from their pier. She stopped on the beach and listened.

The water slapped restlessly against the piles, and the wind teased Miss Biddle’s flag, making the hardware ping against the metal pole—sounds so familiar and constant that she sometimes heard them in her dreams.

Maybe she’d dreamed the sound. She sighed, and her shoulders drooped with resignation as she turned to go back.

Another sound stopped her. One that was absent from her usual backyard symphony. She stepped onto the pier and walked the length of it, feeling her heart punching her rib cage with each step. When she reached the end, she stared at the vacant spot on the water.

She tilted her head downward. The cleat that held the lines of her mom’s boat was empty. She studied the water under the light and saw on its surface the remnants of a disturbance: ripples,
gradually weakening as they rolled toward the barren shoreline.

I will never leave you nor forsake you.

JOSHUA 1:5

One

“Y
ou can just drop me off, you know. I’m not a baby.” Eleven-year-old Caden flipped her mom a look, then stared out the passenger window.

“I like watching you.” Sam pulled the Ciera into the parking lot of the Boston Academy of Gymnastics and was about to expound on the thought, but Caden interrupted.

“The other moms don’t stay.”

It wasn’t true, but Sam had a feeling this objection had less to do with Caden’s assertion of independence and more to do with her.

“Did Bridget tell everyone about me?” Sam asked.

Caden crossed her arms, her warm-up suit rustling.

“If I didn’t clean the gym, we wouldn’t be able to afford lessons, Caden.”

Though her daughter frowned, her jaw and shoulders rigid, Sam knew the stubborn front concealed a wounded little girl. Knew it because Caden was so much like her.

“They all know now. Bridget has such a big mouth. She thinks she’s so hot just because her mom owns the gym.”

Sam turned off the ignition and withdrew the keys, then glanced at Caden, who made no move to leave. The clock on the dashboard read 7:02. “Honey, let’s finish this later. You’re late for class.”

“So you’re staying?”

Sam’s parental pride shrank two more sizes. “By the time I got home, I’d just have to turn around and come back. I promise to sit in the back and keep my hood up to conceal my identity.” Sam regretted the sarcasm instantly.

Caden discharged her seat belt, and it sprang upward, clanging against the door frame. “Whatever,” she said, then exited the car, not quite slamming the door.

Sam grabbed the day’s mail from the dashboard and tucked it in her purse. As she entered the gym, the familiar odor of sweaty little gymnasts assaulted her nostrils. She walked past the office and up the stairs to the balcony, where she found a seat in the back row. She smiled at a woman seated there, the mom of one of Caden’s classmates. From her pantsuit and trendy heels, Sam guessed she didn’t scrub bathrooms for a living or work a side job to afford her daughter’s lessons.