LITMIR.BIZ

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womanly skill. She looked up at him. “They both look like you, Clay.”

      Clay and Lacey laughed. “They both look like Olivia, our stepmom, actually,” Lacey said. “Jack isn’t even my dad’s son.”

      And Lacey was not even her dad’s daughter, Clay thought. Lacey didn’t share that little detail with people quickly or easily, though, and he thought he knew the reason why: it made their mother look bad.

      “Jack’s from Olivia’s first marriage,” Lacey continued. “But my dad adopted him.”

      “Ah,” Gina said, touching the pictures with the tip of her finger. “Do you see them much?”

      “We do things with them all the time,” Lacey said. “They’re the cutest kids.”

      Clay felt antsy. The last thing he wanted was to get into a conversation about marriage and relationships. He stood up, and Sasha immediately ran to the door.

      “Taking Sasha for a walk,” he said. “Then I’m going to work on the cistern. Gina, holler if you need anything.”

      Chapter Six

      ALEC O’NEILL PULLED THE BEDROOM SHADES against the midday view of the sound and lit the five jasmine-scented candles Olivia had set on the dresser. From the corners of the room, Bocelli sang in wistful Italian, and Alec was pleased he’d finally had the speakers repaired. He and Olivia had sold their separate homes and moved into the house on the sound when they were married nine years earlier, and the bedroom speakers had never worked. Clay fixed them just last month after Alec had mentioned their useless existence, and now he knew what he and Olivia had been missing. If they’d had Bocelli singing in their bedroom all these years, who knows how often they would have gotten around to making love?

      He could feel Olivia’s presence behind him as he lit the last of the candles in the stained-glass holders Lacey had given them years ago. Olivia was already in their bed, already naked, having nearly torn her clothes off as she walked from the living room to the bedroom. She’d made him laugh, as she often did. An impatient lover. He could barely remember a time she’d held off long enough to actually let him be the one to undress her. Her eagerness this afternoon only made him take his time with the candle, pretending he could not get it lit, because he liked teasing her.

      “Alec, don’t worry about the candle,” she said from the bed.

      “Got it,” he said, blowing out the match.

      It had been, what? Two weeks? Maybe longer. When you had kids, it was sometimes impossible to carve out time together. That’s why he had rushed home after his morning appointments at the animal hospital and why Olivia had swapped her day off with one of the other docs at the E.R. Jack and Maggie were at day camp, and now he and Olivia had a couple of hours free for lovemaking.

      He walked toward her, pulling off his T-shirt. Olivia’s arms were folded beneath her head and her eyes were on his, a small smile on her lips. She was the sort of woman who became more beautiful with the years. He liked the laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was still the same soft brown it had been when he first met her, although now the color came from a bottle. He would have been equally as happy if she’d let it go gray, but at nearly fifty and with two young kids, she feared looking more like their grandmother than their mother, so he understood. His own hair was more gray than black now, and he still felt an occasional jolt when he looked in the mirror, expecting to see the dark hair he’d once possessed. He still felt like that younger man inside. Most of the time, anyway.

      He began to unbuckle the belt on his jeans, but Olivia stretched an arm toward him.

      “Come here,” she said. “Let me do that.”

      He lay down next to her, and she kissed him, her hand freeing the end of his belt from the buckle just as the doorbell rang. Olivia’s fingers froze, and she groaned, burying her head in his shoulder with a laugh.

      “Let’s ignore it.” He pressed his hand over hers where it rested on the snap of his jeans.

      Olivia nodded in agreement, then unsnapped his jeans and curled her fingers beneath the waistband. The bell rang again.

      “What if it has something to do with the kids?” she asked, leaning away from him. Her pretty, green eyes were wide open, the desire that had been in them only a moment earlier already gone. She was mother now, all of a sudden. Not wife. Not lover. She would not be able to ignore the bell.

      He nodded and sat up, pulling on his shirt. He knew she was right. Their house stood alone, at the tail end of a small, out-of-the-way road that ended at the edge of the water. No one came out here unless they had a real purpose.

      He bent over to kiss Olivia’s temple, then walked out of the room, buckling his pants. The bell was ringing again by the time he reached the living room, and he opened the door to find a young woman standing on the wooden front porch.

      “Yes?” He tried to place her. Some of his patients occasionally brought their sick pets to him when he was off, and he didn’t always recognize them out of the context of his office, but he doubted he’d ever seen this woman before. He would remember her if he had. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, with long, very dark hair, milky-white skin and eyes the color of charcoal. In short, the sort of woman you could not see once and then forget.

      “Are you Dr. O’Neill?” she asked. She was wearing dark-blue shorts and a light-blue shirt, open, over a white top of some sort.

      “Yes,” he said.

      “I’m Gina Higgins, a friend of your son and daughter’s.”

      With his mind already on Jack and Maggie, his heart did a nervous little dance in his chest until he realized she was probably not talking about his two youngest children. “Oh,” he said. “Do you mean Clay and Lacey?”

      She nodded. “That’s right,” she said with a smile. “I should have made that clear. I forgot you have younger children.”

      He felt awkward, if not downright rude, standing in the doorway without inviting her in, but this did not appear to be an emergency, and he was anxious to get back to Olivia. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

      “I was wondering … May I come in for a moment?” She looked past him into the living room. “Is this a good time?”

      “Actually, it’s not,” Alec said, but Olivia walked into the room in her khaki shorts and white shirt, and he figured there was nothing to get back to, at least not at that moment. He opened the door wider. “It’s fine,” he relented, stepping back to let her walk past him into the living room. She was wearing a green backpack. “Olivia,” he said, “this is Gina Higgins. Right?” He looked at Gina to check his memory.

      “Right.” She held out her hand to Olivia, who shook it, smiling her usual gracious smile.

      “Gina’s a friend of Lacey and Clay’s,” Alec explained.

      “It feels so good in here,” Gina said, taking in a deep breath and smoothing her dark hair back from her damp forehead. “The air conditioner’s broken in my car.”

      “Have a seat, Gina.” Olivia motioned toward the sofa. “Can I get you something to drink?”

      Gina sat down, slipping her backpack from her shoulders to her lap. “No, thank you. I don’t want to take that much of your time.” She looked up at Alec, who was still standing in the middle of the room. “Lacey and Clay suggested I talk to you,” she said. “I’m a lighthouse historian in the Pacific Northwest. I came to the Outer Banks to do some exploration of the Kiss River light. I hadn’t realized that it had been demolished.”

      Alec felt his smile freeze at the mention of the lighthouse. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Olivia lower herself to the other side of the sofa, and he knew she was watching him, waiting for his reaction to this news. He rarely thought about the lighthouse anymore. His long-ago fight to save it had been misguided and had sapped far too much of his time and energy.

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