“I understand.” For Alex’s sake she wouldn’t make a scene. She smiled at the little girl with the big spirit. “You check that copyright page when you get home.”
She extended her hand to Sean, determined to show him his brush-off didn’t faze her. “Thanks. For your help.”
“Seems like you could use more,” Alex offered. “I could come down tomorrow and help you spread this stuff out to dry.” She stared up at her father. “That would be community service, Dad. Not a picnic.”
Kit looked around at Babe’s soggy possessions, now mostly piled on the front porch. She didn’t know if anything was salvageable, if it ever had been in the first place.
“What are you planning to do?” Sean asked, his voice brusque and his body poised to get the heck out of Dodge.
Kit glanced at him. She didn’t like the look in his eyes. Pity, maybe? She didn’t need anyone’s pity, least of all his.
“I’ll just call a junk man to haul it all off,” she declared airily. Maybe a junk man would give her something for the lot. Seafaring Cecil had only recently begun to make a real, if modest, living for Kit. She didn’t have a cushion to soften the fallout from her mother’s defection. “Yeah. A junk man.”
“See.” Sean looked at his daughter. “All taken care of.”
Kit got the impression he wasn’t only speaking of Babe’s junk.
Alex seemed unconvinced, but she remained silent. An interesting kid. There was more to her than met the eye.
The downpour stopped as quickly as it had begun, leaving the yard awash in mud. The few stray belongings they’d failed to retrieve and the yard sale sign had been swept into the street. There was nothing to keep Sean McCabe and his daughter any longer, and Kit felt an unexpected and unwanted twinge of disappointment.
She tried to shrug it off by picturing an adoring wife and mother waiting for them back home. His high-school sweetheart perhaps. The one he’d stood her up for.
“Come on, Alex.” Sean put his hand protectively on the back of his daughter’s neck. “We have to check in with Aunt Emily. Then I’m taking you to the pound where Pop and Uncle Jonas can help me keep an eye on you.”
And where was the wife? Kit wondered, forced to remind herself she didn’t care.
Sean made a move toward the porch steps, landing on one of the cowboy boots Kit had kicked off earlier. There wasn’t much maneuverability in the heavy boots he wore and he grabbed at the rickety railing. It gave way under his weight. In seconds, he toppled backward off the porch and into the rain-drenched hydrangea.
“Dad!” Alex shrieked and flew off the porch, landing in the muddy front yard. She lost her footing, too, and slid down the sloping yard.
Kit didn’t know where to help first until Alex sat up with an enormous mud-spattered grin. Sean, however, lay flat on his back.
As quickly as she could without becoming a casualty herself, Kit made her way down the two shallow front steps barefooted. If she weren’t so concerned that he’d broken or ruptured something, she might find the situation funny.
Mud oozing between her toes, she slipped, then fell to her knees. She crawled the rest of the way to Sean. “Are you all right?”
“My ego’s shot to hell,” he muttered. Flat on his back and vulnerable, he looked far sexier than upright and in charge. He glowered at the offending red cowboy boot that teetered on the edge of the porch. “That nearly killed me.”
Gingerly, Kit stood, dug her bare feet into the mud, then extended her hand.
He eyed her doubtfully.
“I’ll help!” Alex materialized at Kit’s side.
Taking a hand each, Sean braced his boot heels in the mud.
“One, two, three!” Alex crowed.
They pulled as he heaved himself out of the bush, slamming against Kit. Gleefully, Alex danced away as the two adults fell once again.
Before they hit the ground, Sean grabbed Kit to him and rolled to his side. They slid like two harbor seals in a long mucky embrace down what once was—a very long time ago—a lawn. The wind knocked out of her, Kit couldn’t move, although she hated to think of the shape she’d be in if Sean hadn’t broken their fall—her fall—by flipping to his side. Pancake came to mind.
She felt the corded strength of his arms around her, felt the rise and fall of his rock-hard chest. Heard his ragged breathing and something else…something strange. The low, rusty beginnings of a laugh. The crinkles around his eyes told her she wasn’t mistaken. Holding her tightly, he threw back his head and roared. His teeth flashed stark white against his mud-daubed face.
His laughter proved infectious.
Return to Pritchard’s Neck had put Kit on edge, and the man who now held her hadn’t eased her sense of unbalance. This unintended pratfall pushed her over the brink. She flung back her head and gave herself over to a marvelous belly laugh as Alex performed a noisy dance around the two fallen adults.
“You’re a sight.” A broad grin lighting up his face, Sean brushed a clump of hair from Kit’s eyes. His mud-slick fingertips raised goose bumps on her flesh.
“No one’s about to ask you to tea at the Ritz,” she replied, picking a hydrangea blossom from behind his ear.
He caught her wrist, his merriment transferred into longing. A shiver of reciprocal desire ran down her spine.
“Alex! What are you doing?” A woman’s voice rang out with crisp authority.
Alex froze.
A look of horror on his face, Sean released Kit, and struggled to get up.
“Who’s she?” Kit asked as he helped her up. The woman wore a neat business suit and was standing beside a sedan, her arms crossed. She did not appear amused by what she saw.
“Candace Simmons,” Sean replied. He had the look of a schoolboy caught smoking behind the gym. “Alex’s principal. And my sister-in-law’s best friend.”
When the woman recognized Sean, her face registered disappointment. Slowly, with a long glance at Kit, she got in her car and drove away. And Kit saw her chances of getting out of town without starting any new rumors evaporate like fog before the morning sun.
“HOW COULD YOU?” Nine months pregnant and angrier than a hornet in a car wash, Emily McCabe leaned against her front door, her hands supporting her back. She stared at the two mud monsters. “How could you?”
Sean had stopped to tell his sister-in-law he’d found Alex and was going to take her to the lobster pound with him. Unfortunately, Candace had come and gone before them with the news of the spectacle in Babe’s front yard.
“Alexandra, do you have any idea how worried I was when I couldn’t find you?” Emily pushed a strand of lank hair out of her face. “Do you know how difficult it is for me to get around to look for you?”
“Yes’m.” Alex scuffed one toe of her boot against the other. She didn’t look at all sorry, Sean thought.
With difficulty, Emily knelt before Alex. “Honey, you scared me. If anything had happened to you…”
Sean felt guilty. He shouldn’t have bothered his sister-in-law in the first place, but he’d nowhere else to turn for child care. His sister, Mariah, was working overtime at the local landscape nursery to pay for night school. Pop and Jonas were working above and beyond their regular carpentry jobs to get the lobster pound open before the tourist season peaked. His oldest brother, Nick, and his family were in the process of moving back to Pritchard’s Neck, but they wouldn’t be settled in until the