Time After Time (19 page)

The sea-blue eyes froze
over; she could've ice-skated across them. "The kind who prefers
logic to intuition."

"You know what?" she said
impulsively. "I think you're holding Caroline against your — her —
father."

Immediately she regretted
it.

"I didn't know you were
intimately familiar with the branches of my family tree," he said
in a calm, cold voice.

She turned and resumed
walking at a nervous clip. "I'm not, but ... Mr. Eastman dotes on
her so much ... and you resent her so obviously ... and ... and
then, too—"

Liz didn't want to
implicate Netta, so she finished with a lame, "I just had a
feeling, that's all."

"Really. I thought it was
Victoria who was the psychic over there."

It was Liz's turn to look
surprised. "How did you know about Victoria?"

His voice was dry as
toast. "She told Netta through the fence that she's the
reincarnation of a nineteenth-century spiritualist who used to live
in your house."

"No," said Liz, correcting
him. "She's a walk-in."

He laughed contemptuously
and said, "But we digress. The point is, your suspect isn't
necessarily any more likely than my suspect. Can't you see
that?"

"No, dammit. The
comparison is absurd," she said, refusing to argue
further.

They'd reached their
destination: a huge corrugated-aluminum shed, not unlike an
airplane hangar. This was it? She felt as if she'd been handed a
lump of coal, with two weeks to turn it into a pear-shaped diamond.
Her spirits sank lower and lower as he explained the traditional
setup: a couple of folding tables with salads and grilled fish,
burgers, whatever, that they could carry inside quickly if it began
to rain. If she preferred, she could arrange a New England
clambake, he told her, only without the hole in the sand, the
heated rocks, or the seaweed. In short, without the New
England.

"As a rule, the men end
with a game of soccer while the women and kids watch," he finished
up.

It sounded dismal. "But —
but you said you wanted
magic,"
she said, utterly dismayed.

"And so I do. What have
you got in mind?"

He opened a door that was
dwarfed by the height of the shed. Liz stepped through, and he
followed her, letting the door swing shut behind them.

After the blinding light
outside, the hangar-size shed seemed dark, despite the fiberglass
upper walls that let in a limited amount of daylight. Without
waiting for her eyes to adjust, Liz went trotting forward across
the hard-packed dirt floor and instantly tripped on a block of wood
that lay across her path.

With a yelp of pain, she
stumbled sideways into Jack's arms. He caught her handily, just as
he had when she fell from the ladder on her upstairs landing. But
this time he wasn't inclined simply to stand her up straight
again.

He let his hands linger on
her upper arms, sliding them slowly up and then down. She felt his
callused palms through the thin sleeves of her salmon-pink blouse.
An odd, irrelevant thought popped into her mind:
Hardly the hands of an artist.
But she felt the power in them, a strength that
she found almost intimidating.

"I say again," he murmured
as he lowered his face closer to hers, "what did you have in
mind?"

"M-magic," she repeated,
aware of his warm breath wafting over her cheeks.

"Can you be more
specific?" he asked, his voice low and amused, as he lowered his
mouth gently onto hers, catching her lower lip in a soft,
tantalizing caress.

Her eyes fluttered closed
as she struggled against the temptation to enjoy what he was doing
to her ... with her... for her.
Specifics,
she told herself.
He wants specifics.

"I—I wanted a fairy tale
of a picnic," she whispered, turning her mouth a little away from
his. "A ... castle," she said, catching her breath as he slid his
mouth across the line of her jaw, dropping nibbly, exciting kisses
along the curve of her neck.

Kiss me,
she thought dizzily.
Kiss me and be done with it so that I can act hurt and
outraged and we can get on with this ... this — oh, God —
magic.
His mouth was pure
magic.

He lifted his head and
caught her chin gently in one hand, turning her face back to his
for the very kiss she desired and dreaded.

"I can't," she murmured,
her mouth half a breath from his.

"Can't?''

"Make a castle out of a
shed. No one can. This is all wrong."

She wasn't even sure she
was talking about the picnic. But at least she was talking; her
brain had begun functioning again on some minimal level. She lifted
one shoulder in an attempt to ease out of his grip. Jack understood
the signal, childish as it was, and let go of her
instantly.

A gentleman, after all. Or
not too terribly interested.
Just her luck
either way, she thought with a sad, wry smile.

In the meantime, he was
taking her at her word. "So you don't think you can do something
with cardboard turrets and an asphalt moat?"

"I thought I could," Liz
admitted, "but now I see it would be idiotic to try."

She had a thought — she'd
had the thought since the day he'd first suggested the event — and
now she threw it out to him, letting her words soar upward like
barn swallows in the great, cavernous expanse of the nearly empty
shed.

"Picnics are for
kids,"
she said in an
earnest, coaxing voice. "I don't want them to go away from this
with some memory of a bunch of grown-ups playing soccer. I want
them to take the memory of my picnic into their
own
adulthood; I want them to wonder
why no twenty years from now knows how to throw a shipyard picnic
as good as the ones in the good old days."

He laughed sardonically.
"There may not be a shipyard, much less a picnic, in twenty
years."

"All the more reason!" she
shot back.

"I can't afford to rent
one of Newport's castles on a Saturday in July," he
warned.

"Of course not," she said,
detecting a certain responsiveness in his answer. "East Gate will
do fine."

"East Gate!"

She could see he was
scandalized by the idea. People like him simply didn't throw their
doors open to — well, people like her.

"What if it rains? Where
do you think I'm going to put a hundred people and a soccer net?"
he asked incredulously.

He could probably put them
all in his entry hall, if it came to that. But she didn't want him
to feel cornered, so she said, "I absolutely, positively guarantee
it's not going to rain. And if it does, we can empty your carriage
house of vehicles and carry on there. Half the people wouldn't
show, anyway, if it rained."

She glanced around the
empty shed. A couple of yachts sat forlornly in their cradles, like
rich kids left behind at their boarding school for the
holidays.

"Not here," she said at
last. "I simply can't do it."

He hooked his thumbs in
his front pockets and glanced at the roof, then at the dirt floor.
"Just what I need," he said, half to himself. "A prima-donna party
planner."

"Events
coordinator."
Yes!
He was going to say
yes!

"You'd better
damned
well pray for
sun," he growled as he turned and headed outside.

Liz fell in beside him
with a satisfied spring in her step. "You won't be sorry, Jack,"
she said with a sideways taunting look. "I'll probably end up
working for free again."

He smiled at the memory,
then took out the cigar he'd been given and began peeling away the
cellophane. "Why do you do it, then?" he asked. "Just for the
pleasure of my company?"

He bit off the tip of the
cigar, pulled out a pack of matches, and turned away from the wind
and from her, cupping his hands around the stogie while he made a
couple of attempts to light it.

He couldn't see her face,
which was just as well: Liz was blushing furiously. The
pleasure!
of his
company!
That was like
saying she had a cavity fixed for the pleasure of the
novocaine!

Jack turned back around,
blue eyes squinting in the sun, cigar rolled jauntily to one side
of his mouth. Amazingly, he seemed to be waiting for her to tell
him just how much pleasure he did give her.

Plenty, dammit,
she realized with a sinking heart. His kisses had
left a white-hot trail on her neck that — now that the shock of the
encounter in the shed had worn of — was beginning to throb in
earnest. Involuntarily she raised her hand to the spot, as if she'd
been scratched by a bramble.

"Thanks for taking the
barbed wire down," she suddenly said, free-associating like crazy.
"The view is so much prettier now."

"For me, too," he said
with a smile that was oddly wistful.

He stroked her cheek
lightly with his fingertips, then let them trail lazily along the
scorched route of his kisses.

Yowch. Liz turned her
cheek away, embarrassed by the low threshold of her pain. What was
going
on
here?

"Well!"
she said briskly. "That's it, then. Don't worry
about a thing. It'll be a day to remember."

He gave her a wry look.
"Didn't you say something along those lines about Caroline's
birthday party?"

Liz was saved from having
to come up with a smartalecky answer by the sight of Cornelius
Eastman shepherding her daughter in their direction. Susy was
skipping her happy-skip; the child-size life jacket she clutched in
her hand probably had a lot to do with it.

"Where'd you get the life
jacket, sweetie?" asked Liz when her daughter drew near.

"Mr. Eastman gave it to
me," Susy said, hardly able to contain her joy. "He said that if
it's all right with you, we can all go see his family's boat. Even
you, Mommy! It's right over there! Not for a ride, though," she
added in a stage whisper. "But sometime soon. He
promised!
It has a
bathroom and a TV! And a kitchen — no, a galley! Isn't that right,
Mr. Eastman?" she asked as Cornelius caught up to them. "The room
with the stove is a galley, isn't it?"

"That's right, Susy," said
Cornelius. "And the bedrooms are called staterooms. And the
bathrooms are called heads."

Susy said, "I know. I
remember from what you said!" and kept on happy-skipping in the
direction of a stunning antique motor-yacht that was tied up to a
dock not far from where they stood.

Liz, who thought she was
beyond being impressed by Eastman status symbols, was impressed all
over again. My God! A sixty-footer with all that varnish, all that
brass
—
what must
it cost to keep it up? Even if you
did
own the shipyard.

"Pretty snazzy," she
conceded, repressing a surge of bluecollar resentment.

Cornelius said gruffly,
"That old bucket of rot? She's been around forever; more trouble
than she's worth." But he complained in a voice that was deep with
affection.

Even Jack was smiling. It
was obvious that here, at last, was something the two men agreed
on.

In the meantime Cornelius,
with a good-natured grimace, was saying, "I didn't realize how
enthusiastic Susy was about boats. I hope I haven't made things
awkward for you by promising a tour."

"Not at all," Liz said
with a smile of her own. "I'm sure she just took your hint and ran
with it. I have no idea where she gets this love of the sea. Hardly
anyone in the family is into boats," she explained, without adding
that hardly anyone could afford to be. "The Portuguese side has
always been heavily into agriculture, and as for the Irish side —
no sailors there, either."

In other words, she
descended from a line of farm help and houseworkers. Why couldn't
she just say it?

Maybe because both Jack
and Cornelius were looking so damned aristocratic, poised alongside
their family yacht. There was no denying it: everything about the
two, from their Waspy good looks to the offhand way they carried
themselves, suggested that they were to the manner born.

"You strike me as a
superconscientious mother," the older of the men ventured to say to
Liz. "Which is why I fished out a life jacket. I assumed you wanted
Susy wearing one for the tour."

"You assumed right;
thanks," said Liz, fitting the orange vest over her daughter's
head. It was a long way down from the deck to the water, and Susy
couldn't swim. That was Liz's fault; she'd never really encouraged
her to learn.

Cornelius unhitched a
heavy nylon line that was roped across the gangplank and led them
down it. The slope was steep—it was low tide—and Susy was forced to
take little mincing steps. Liz hovered behind her, ready to grab
her if she tripped or fell. She was aware, all too aware, of Jack
behind
her,
obviously impatient to get down the darned thing. What
did
he
know about
children and drowning?