Here with Me - Holly Jacobs

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Not in a no-clothes sense, but rather in a she-could-see-all-the-things-he’d-rather-keep-hidden sort of way.

      She’d always made him feel like that.

      But this was slightly different. Her study left him feeling more than a sense of coming home. It left him wanting to reach out and pull her into his arms.

      He wondered how she’d react.

      He doubted she’d melt into him and cover him with kisses.

      No, he rather thought she’d deck him.

      The thought made his smile broaden.

      “Well?” he prompted.

      She nodded slowly. “Yes, Adam suits you. It’s who you are. Matthew Adam Benton.”

      “Adam Mathias Benton.”

      “Oh, la-di-da,” she said with a laugh. “To be honest, that suits you even better.”

      “And you, Lee instead of Mary Eileen.”

      “Mary Eileen was a bit too long to fit on my artwork, so I started signing Lee and by the time I got to college it just stuck.”

      “It suits you as well.”

      “So, Adam,” she smiled as she said his name, “what brings you back to Erie from New York?”

      How to answer that.

      There were a dozen different ways, and all of them would be accurate up to a point.

      “Da!” Jessie cried in a voice so loud it was hard to believe it came from such a tiny body.

      “Pardon me,” he said, running into the cottage before Jessie tried to get out of the crib herself.

      “Da,” she repeated as he came into her room.

      Da.

      Short for Adam.

      He was swept away by the memory of Cathie working with Jessie, trying to get her to say Adam. Da was as close as she’d come.

      He tried not to think of his uncle’s wife. Cathie had had a sense of happiness that had simply radiated in everything she’d done.

      As he lifted Jessie out of the crib and she smiled at him, he was hit with a wave of regret that Paul and Cathie had missed that smile, just as they’d miss so many things in the coming years.

      “Da,” Jessie said and started a string of babble that he couldn’t understand, but seemed of the utmost importance to Jessie.

      “Come on, short stuff. I want to introduce you to someone.” He took the baby to the porch, but Lee was gone.

      “Maybe later then,” he murmured to the baby.

      Chapter Two

      A baby was crying. But Lee was lost in her art. She was working on a new piece. Though she knew she should attend to the baby, she continued working. Ignoring everything but work…

      Lee awoke from the nightmare drenched in sweat. She’d had variations of the dream before, but not in months. She didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to figure out hearing Adam’s baby today had triggered tonight’s foray into the past.

      Knowing she wouldn’t be going back to sleep until she wound down, she got out of bed and stood at her bedroom window. It faced the other cottage.

      Normally, the memories here in her grandmother’s cottage helped keep the nightmares away. She looked at her cottage’s twin. When she was very small, her great-aunt had lived there. Now, behind its door was Adam Benton.

      Matty.

      He must be why she’d been working on that particular piece of jewelry in her dream.

      She turned away from the window and opened a small chest at the foot of her bed. It was stuffed with childhood mementos.

      She pushed aside a high-school pennant, an old diary, and some photographs before she finally found what she was looking for. The small seashell-covered Popsicle-stick box she used to keep trinkets in was exactly as she remembered it. Inside was the first piece of beach-glass jewelry she’d ever made. The worn chip of clear glass was shaped like a heart. The piece she’d been working on in tonight’s dream.

      As she fingered it, she couldn’t help remembering that last meeting with him so many years ago.

      She got up and went back to the window. Eighteen years ago. She smiled remembering her grandmother’s story about the dew. But no prince had ridden to find her that day, just Matty Benton announcing he was leaving for New York.

      He’d left this small piece of glass on the fence post that day.

      And now he was back.

      Everything always happens for a reason.

      Her grandmother had believed in things like destiny and magic. Even if she’d never set foot on the Irish shores, she’d been at heart an Irish woman with a gift for the blarney.

      Magic does exist, she’d told Lee.

      While her parents had been busy with work, busy chasing after their next big deal, her grandmother had told her stories of Ireland. She’d always had time for Lee.

      Her mother and father had built big careers, while her grandmother had built love. Her parents were in Philadelphia now, still working day-in and day-out.

      To Lee, career should be a four-letter word.

      To this day, her parents frowned on Singer’s Treasures.

      After all, it wasn’t a real job. She kept very short hours at the shop—noon to five—preferring to do most of her work here at the cottage. And recently, she’d hired someone to help out part-time.

      Not a real job, was her parents’ refrain. Her mother’s lecture the other day had been much the same as all the others. There was no future in her work.

      Try as she might, Lee had never been able to make them understand she worked to support her living; she didn’t live to work.

      There was a difference.

      It was a difference they had never been able to appreciate.

      A movement caught her eye. A curtain billowed at Adam’s cottage.

      Maybe the baby was up, scared to wake in the dark in a strange house. Maybe it had cried, prompting her dream.

      Lee slid her window open, so she’d be able to hear any noise, but all she could hear was the familiar sound of waves lapping the shore.

      She slipped a throw over her shoulders, made her way through the dark house that hadn’t really changed since her childhood, and out onto the porch.

      Still nothing.

      It must have been her imagination.

      She sank into one of the rocking chairs. Creaking it back and forth as she gazed out over the star-studded sky and the last traces of her nightmare faded, she lost herself in the natural beauty of the lake, remembering why she loved it here.

      “Can’t sleep?” came Adam’s voice from the step.

      She jumped. She hadn’t heard him coming over. “You startled me.”

      “Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t sound overly contrite. He took the other rocker without waiting for an invitation.

      They rocked together in companionable silence for quite a while.

      Finally Lee said, “Won’t your wife miss you?”

      “I don’t have a wife, Lee.”

      She wanted to ask who the woman in the park was then, but she didn’t. She simply asked, “Is your baby all right by herself?”

      “The cottages sit so close to one another that I’m

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