After today, with his all-too-public reaction to her participation, he didn’t want her on either side of the easel with this group. He wondered if she even had anything on under that outfit.
She touched his cheek with her fingertips. Her eyes flashed mischief. “Were you about to carry me off, Nick?”
“If you were nude, yes.” He felt like one of his students caught doing something rash and adolescent. And totally uncool.
“How politically incorrect,” she sighed. “How impulsive. How almost romantic. Against my better judgment, I’m flattered.”
She thought his actions romantic? She was flattered?
Comprehension dawned.
“So this is how you’d have me spice up our marriage?” he demanded. “Cut out of work early? Spend my last twenty on a cab? Barge like a fool into a group of residents, three of them with kids in my school?” Prickly heat rose up the back of his neck.
“You spent your last twenty on a cab?” she asked as if she hadn’t heard anything else. “That’s something my boyfriend Nick would do.”
“Well, boyfriend Nick didn’t have three mouths to feed.” He gestured toward the closed door. “That seems beside the point now. What are those people thinking?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake. They only know you’re upset. We have two teenage daughters. It could be anything.”
“But it was you.”
“Yes.” A dreamy look crept into her eyes. “You came for me—in a cab that wasn’t in the budget, no less—because you were, what, intrigued? Jealous? Hot to get behind one of those easels yourself and take up a new career?”
“I was—am—ticked.”
“That’s better than preoccupied.”
Suddenly weary, he turned away. “Don’t expect me to play the town fool again to inject some fizz in a marriage that you, for some reason, seem to think has gone flat. I’m going home.”
Chessie reached for him. “Just when we’ve begun to get to the heart of the matter?”
“Is that what you call it?” Eluding her touch, he started downstairs. “I thought we’d reached an impasse.”
“You can’t walk away, Nick!” She opened the door to the meeting room and called, “Sorry, folks. Family emergency. See you next week,” then followed her husband down the stairs and out the door into the town square.
Nick winced. Although he didn’t pause to look over his shoulder, he could imagine how she looked, barefoot and determined, with that…that…toga flapping.
It was just his luck that Eban Hoffman, one of the local lobstermen, stood at the hardware store gas pumps, filling his pickup, watching with taciturn interest every movement on the square. Six hounds in the truck bed stood at attention as they spotted Chessie, who padded up alongside Nick.
“Would you slow down?” she asked, breathless, clutching fabric to her chest. “My sheet’s unraveling.”
Sure enough, great swaths of the makeshift robe flapped like pennants in the brisk coastal breeze. She was in danger of exposing more than shoulders and arms.
What did she have on under that thing?
Eban’s dogs, excited by the movement, began to bark and pace the truck bed, eager to get out and join the fun. Their owner, more interested in the drama playing out before him than in controlling his dogs, stood staring and scratching his head.
Nick refused to prolong this public entertainment. With authority, he swept Chessie into his arms and began marching for the privacy of home, the sheet billowing out behind them.
“Oh, my,” Chessie said as if this was just the afternoon’s activity she’d had in mind.
Not about to waste breath explaining to her that his actions did not in any way constitute romance or a harbinger of marital changes to come, he picked up his pace. He simply wanted to get her off the square before disaster struck.
Too late.
“Come back he-ah this instant!” Eban shouted.
Nick heard the playful canine whines, heard the scrabble of claws on asphalt, heard the jingle of rabies tags before the dogs surrounded them. Yapping, jumping, snapping and intent on seizing whatever loose fabric they could reach in a frenzied game of tug o’ war, they probably hadn’t had this much fun since that crate of spider crabs got loose at the pier.
Chessie shrieked as two dogs, their toothy grip firm in a corner of trailing sheet, their eight combined feet planted in the roadside grass, threatened by sheer dog-headedness to unwrap her.
Nick broke into a jog.
Just as Eban and Hamilton Quick, owner of the hardware store, caught up with them, one of the dogs, leaped up and snapped. Instead of coming away with a prized hunk of fabric, he sank his teeth into Nick’s left buttock.
CHAPTER FOUR
WERE HER PARENTS TRYING to screw up her life totally?
It sure seemed that way.
Having escaped to Keri’s room, Gabriella wanted to disappear from the face of the earth. Pushing herself back into the mound of stuffed animals on her friend’s bed, she tried to erase the awful memory of them in the square just now. Tried to focus on the perfectly normal trip to the mall beforehand. Focus on her new flavored lip gloss. On running into Danny Aiken, Keri’s boyfriend. On Danny saying how phat Gabriella’s haircut was…
Not on the ride home when—excruciating minutes ago— Mrs. Weiss had driven into the square and there they were: Dad carrying Mom. Mom wearing a sheet. That dog taking a bite of Dad’s butt. Everybody running out of the hardware store. Yelling. Pointing.
At her parents.
They looked like they were trying out for some lame reality show.
Now, as she heard Mrs. Weiss’s SUV pull out of the driveway below, taking Mom and Dad to the emergency room, she tried to think how she could make sure her parents’ behavior didn’t cross her new friends’ radar.
Her new cool friends, thanks to Keri.
“Parents can be so…gross.” Keri wasn’t helping matters. If she thought Mom and Dad were gross, what would Danny think? Or Baylee Warner? Or Margot Hensley? Or anyone else in Danny’s group. And now Keri’s group by association.
Gabriella wanted this new crowd to be hers, as well. No such luck with her parents acting whack.
“Do you hear what I’m saying?” Keri was right in her face. “You have got to, like, prove you’re not just as weird.”
“As who?”
“As your parents.” Keri made a face. “Wake up. You need damage control here.”
As if she needed to be told.
“This is our freshman year coming up, Gabs. Do you want to be in, or do you want to be out?”
She’d been so close to being out for the past year since moving to Pritchard’s Neck. Keri had been her only real friend. Now Keri had moved into the winner’s circle as Danny’s girlfriend, and Gabriella knew Keri was trying not to leave her behind.
What scared Gabriella more than anything in the world was the thought of being left behind.
“Well?” Keri poked her in the ribs.
“Do I even have to answer that?”
“You’d better come up with some answers before we both find ourselves on the outside looking in.” There was something like fear in Keri’s eyes.
Gabriella