When he felt her stiffen in his arms, he immediately released her, remembering that she had never been comfortable with close physical contact. Even where he had been concerned, he recalled sadly. She had always been the first to pull away whenever one of them had needed holding.
He let her move within arm’s length of him, but no farther. For long moments they only studied each other wordlessly, lost in thought, memory and speculation.
Jack McCormick, Georgia marveled. What on earth was he doing back in Carlisle? He was quite possibly the last person she might have expected to see after all this time. But even two decades had not diminished her memory of him. He was still breathtakingly handsome, still touched by roughness and softened with gentleness.
Still able to make her heart race by his mere presence in the room.
It was as if something inside her that had been chained down for centuries suddenly broke free and soared toward the light. All the adolescent longing that had gone unassuaged, all the needful yearning left unfulfilled, all the tentative joy she’d never found elsewhere in her life... All of it rose to the surface in a swift, stormy rush of emotion, and she felt all over again as if she were fourteen years old and would die without Jack McCormick in her life.
His hug had been almost too much for her to bear. How many times in their youth had she been forced to push him away before he somehow discovered just how desperately in love with him she’d been? His embraces back then had resulted from his need for comfort after his foster father’s overbearing bullying. But hers had gone beyond a desire for comforting. Hers had been because she simply wanted to be as close to Jack as two people could be.
What would he say now if she told him how often she had fantasized about making love with him, even at the tender age of fourteen? What would he do if she confessed right now that she’d wanted nothing more in her young life than for him to be the man who made her a woman?
But someone else had performed that service years ago, and Georgia had always regretted not asking Jack to be the one. He would have been more gentle, more tender, more loving. The event might even have been special if Jack had been the one sharing it with her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him.
He didn’t answer right away, and Georgia felt a tingle of apprehension shimmy up her spine.
“I needed to talk to someone.”
She chuckled a little nervously. “Don’t tell me you’re so alone that you have to look up a friend from twenty years ago when you want to have a conversation.”
“It’s about my brother and sister.”
Georgia sobered immediately. She wondered if she was still the only person he’d ever confided in about his family, then decided she must be if he’d risked a time warp back to Carlisle just to have someone to reminisce with about them.
“Is there someplace we can talk?” he asked.
“What’s wrong with right here?”
He looked around, and seemed to realize for the first time that the place was empty except for the two of them. Apparently unmoved by the knowledge, however, he said, “Maybe your house would be better. I’d rather not talk about them in public.”
“But—”
Her objection was cut short, because Rudy chose that moment to appear behind the counter, and he was clearly suspicious of the scene that greeted him.
“Georgia?” he asked in an aged, anxious voice. “This guy buggin’ you?”
She almost laughed out loud. Bugging her? Jack McCormick had been bugging her since she was thirteen years old, when he had sent her pubescent hormones into a frenzy.
“No, Rudy,” she told the old man softly. “This is Jack McCormick. You might remember him. He used to live in Carlisle. But only very briefly.” Too briefly, she added to herself.
Rudy scratched his grizzled chin. “McCormick, eh? Yeah, I remember you. Got in a lot of fights, right?”
A small, irritated sound erupted from the back of Jack’s throat. “Yeah, that was me. I’ve changed quite a bit since then, though.”
“What?” Rudy asked. “Ya don’t fight no more?”
Jack glanced down at the floor, and Georgia got the feeling it wasn’t so much to avoid Rudy’s gaze as it was to avoid hers. “I didn’t say that,” he told the other man. But he didn’t elaborate further.
Rudy nodded, but still seemed wary of the no-longer juvenile delinquent. “Where’s Molly?” he asked Georgia.
At the mention of her name, the big yellow dog on the floor lifted her head from her paws and wagged her tail. She, too, had been eyeing Jack since he’d entered the restaurant, but seemed to harbor considerably less concern about his character than Rudy did.
“She’s right here,” Georgia told the old man, trying to hide a smile. “So don’t worry. Molly will protect me if Jack starts to become his old beastly self.”
Rudy nodded slowly, but added, “I’ll be here all night if ya need me. Supper crowd will be comin’ in any time now.”
Georgia smiled at him. This time of year the “supper crowd” consisted of maybe a half-dozen people, but she took comfort in Rudy’s obvious concern, and his assurance that the entire community would rush to her rescue should Jack try anything funny.
“Thanks,” she said as she lifted a hand in farewell. “Molly? You coming, girl?”
As the couple turned to leave, the big dog ambled after them. The moment the restaurant door closed behind them, the wind assailed them with bitter cold. Georgia braved a glimpse at Jack as they strode toward his car, trying to assimilate the boy of seventeen and his sloppy jalopy with the man of forty who drove something sophisticated and expensive. He’d sold his beloved, beat-up Nova just before leaving town, and although he’d never mentioned it, she knew it was because he’d needed the money. Now, however, judging by his chosen mode of transportation, money wasn’t much of a problem for him.
Jack McCormick had changed, she realized. A lot. And she wasn’t sure whether change was something she wanted to see in him or not. With a wistful sigh, she folded herself into the car after Molly and told herself not to think about it.
Two
They drove the mile to her house in silence. Molly sat in the back seat, leaning forward between them, her heavy panting the only sound interrupting the quiet. Jack gazed with interest at his surroundings as they made their journey. He’d spent less than two years in Carlisle as a teenager, and it had been only one of a dozen locations where the state had placed him. But the small town had always been stamped indelibly at the front of his brain, never to be forgotten. Because this was where he had known Georgia Lavender.
Since his parents’ deaths when he was seven years old, Jack had been shuttled and shunted from group home to foster home to correctional home and back again. He’d been a discipline problem from day one, fighting and backtalking and being generally bad tempered. That’s what happened when a boy was ripped from his home and his family without warning or concern. But no one had ever bothered to address that fact. No one had much cared. Not until he had come to Carlisle.
The place had changed a lot, he noted. It had grown outward and upward, and looked to be quite prosperous for a small coastal community. Georgia lived in a subdivision that hadn’t existed when Jack had last been here, in an area well away from town, where the beach and ocean were too treacherous for swimming, but breathtaking to view, and made less accessible by jagged dunes.
As they drew nearer, he saw that the houses were built up on stilts, unoccupied