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But her lack of awareness still made her uncomfortable.
“Hi, Lynnie—sorry!” Brandon sounded out of breath as he picked up on the fourth ring.
“Bran? Is everything okay?” Darin and Maddie, sitting across from her at the linen-covered table, had stopped eating and were watching her, as if they could hear what Brandon was saying.
Grant took a sip of wine. It was white and dry—a perfect complement to their pasta. He’d ordered a bottle.
“Everything’s fine,” Brandon said. “I got her in the bath by 7:45, just like your chart said, but it’s a double-wide tub and she was laughing and swimming so I let her stay in an extra ten minutes. She’s in her jammies now and we were getting ready to call you but I left my phone out in the family room and had to run to get it.”
Bless him for being so sweet. He was trying so hard to please her. And she was too unbending.
Aware of the eyes trained on her, she said, “Can I talk to her?” After she’d heard all about the bumpy plane ride and Daddy’s bathtub and Douglas’s cast, she told her precious little girl that she loved her and to sleep well. As she hung up the phone, she felt like crying.
“Is she okay, Lynn?” Maddie asked.
“Why were they late?” Darin wanted to know.
She put the phone back in her purse and felt Grant’s fingers lightly brush her shoulder. She sat there, frozen for a second. It was the barest of touches, but it was enough to bring song back into her night.
He brought his hand down from her chair, and she was disappointed. Until she felt it brush her thigh through the ankle-length black-and-white cotton skirt she was wearing
The cotton was plentiful, pulled together at the elastic waist to give the skirt fullness. But the fabric was light. And she could feel the warmth of his hand through it.
She looked over at him and he returned her gaze.
“Why are you two staring at each other like that?” Maddie asked.
“I think they like each other,” Darin replied.
Lynn coughed. Took a sip of wine. And relayed Kara’s phone conversation word for word.
She didn’t mention Brandon at all.
He wasn’t her family anymore.
* * *
THE FLOWING SKIRT might have, technically, hidden her body from his view, but it only served to ignite his imagination, to tease him, to draw his mind to what lay beneath. Her tight white T-shirt, on the contrary, showed him smooth, luscious, feminine curves that brought his eyes back to them again and again. Made him want to skim his hands over them. And more.
But with Darin and Maddie within sight of them, Grant had to settle for strolling barefoot beside Lynn, hands in his pockets. Every now and then the water would touch their toes, as the waves ebbed and flowed.
It wasn’t all that warm out, maybe sixty, on that first Saturday night in March, but he was hotter than summer.
Lynn and Maddie had brought zip-up hoodies and were both wearing them now—the jackets, not the hoods. Definitely not the hoods. Lynn had left her hair down, and it curled softly around her shoulders to the middle of her back.
He ached to run his fingers through it.
She’d left the jacket unzipped, too.
The shore was mostly beach, with a cliffside or two thrown in, and they lost sight of Darin and Maddie for a second as the front two went around a jutting cliff’s edge.
He considered pulling Lynn into the alcove the cliff provided, to see if she was as eager to get naked with him as he was to get naked with her.
But he hadn’t even held her hand yet.
“You and your ex seem to be good friends,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the surf.
If anything would cool his ardor it would be thoughts of that kiss he’d seen the other man give Lynn earlier that day.
“We are,” Lynn said, her hand brushing close to his.
She might be Brandon Duncan’s ex-wife, but she was his date. “Brandon has been my best friend since junior high,” she continued, her voice softening in a way he hadn’t heard before.
“You dated in high school, then?”
“I never dated anyone but him,” she admitted. “Not until after the divorce. I went on a couple of dates that first year. Dinner or a movie—never both, though, because I didn’t want to be away from Kara that long.”
