Belinda walked over to him.
Oh no! he thought. He didn’t like where this was headed. Belinda was no dummy; she knew what she was doing. The blush traveled up his neck, to his cheeks, involuntarily. It was the curse of an Irishman, along with the ginger hair, the freckles—his fair skin gave every emotion away.
“Very hard to believe,” she said. She gently pried the beer out of his hand and set it down on the counter. She then wound her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. He couldn’t help himself; he groaned. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman, and, although he in no way wanted anything to happen with Belinda Rowe, he couldn’t ignore her naked body pressed up against him, nor her long, strawberry-blond hair and her intoxicating scent. She shifted her hip so that it grazed his erection.
Okay, this is awful, he thought. But that got rolled over when she dropped to her knees before him and undid his zipper.
Belinda, no, he said. Or maybe he didn’t say that. Maybe he just thought that as she took him in her mouth and licked and sucked him until he came in explosive bursts, crying out quietly twice.
Belinda returned casually to her stool and re-secured the towel around her body.
Buck hurried to zip his pants. “I thought you were married,” he said.
“I am,” she said.
Buck was suddenly exhausted and very, very disappointed in himself. He couldn’t bear to think of Laurel in the hushed, rarefied atmosphere of the bookstore, selecting a novel off the shelves, reading the blurbs on the cover, and carefully replacing it before selecting another novel. If she found out what had just happened, she would… lose all respect for him? Call him base? No, she would understand; that was the crushing thing. Laurel had it in her head that Belinda was prettier and more desirable, certainly more famous and celebrated. She would say, Of course you let her, Buck. It’s okay.
But it wasn’t okay.
It made Buck love Laurel all the more.
Buck started cleaning up the food and putting it away. He said, “I don’t usually drink in the middle of the day.”
“No, me neither,” Belinda said. “But desperate times call for desperate measures.” She finished off her beer, then set the bottle down for him to clear. “I’m off to shower.”
ANGIE
They took the four o’clock fast ferry. When Angie saw the church steeples and the gray-shingled buildings and the sailboats in the harbor bathed in the late-afternoon sun, she felt a little better. She was home.
They disembarked and walked down the wharf. Hayes hailed a taxi; taking care of travel arrangements was his specialty, she knew, but still, she envied his confidence. He was comfortable in the world; she was comfortable in the kitchen.
The taxi was a black Lincoln Continental with suicide doors. Their driver was dressed in a long velvet coat and wore a three-cornered hat with a plume; he had a patch over one eye. He stuck his hand out to Hayes. “My name is Pirate,” he said.
Angie thought, Oh dear God, let’s find another taxi. But Hayes’s face lit up. He was a big fan of street theater, Angie remembered now. He always volunteered.
“No way,” Hayes said. “A pirate on Nantucket.”
“The one and only,” Pirate said. He opened the back door with a flourish and bowed deeply, indicating that Angie should climb in. “Where you headed?”
Hayes said, “Hoicks Hollow Road.”
Pirate headed through town. The top on the Lincoln was down, and Pirate commanded so much attention that Angie felt as if she were in a parade. Everyone on the street waved. Little kids cried out, “Pirate! Pirate!”
Hayes said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before, man, but you seem like a local celebrity.”
Pirate was too busy showboating to answer. Angie sank down in her seat, but over the top of her sunglasses, she checked out the surroundings. Pirate turned them up the cobblestones of Main Street. They passed the white-columned Hadwen House and the Three Bricks, which in Angie’s mind always evoked the nineteenth century, men heading out on whaling expeditions, women wearing hoopskirts. People were everywhere, just as they were everywhere in Manhattan, but the Nantucket crowd was as homogeneous as the cedar-shingled buildings. Nearly everyone was blond, tanned, attractive, well dressed.
“What number on Hoicks Hollow?” Pirate asked.
“Thirty-three,” Hayes and Angie said together.
Pirate hit the brakes, and Angie grabbed the seat in front of her.
Pirate eyed Hayes in the rearview mirror. “Are you a friend of Deacon Thorpe’s?”
Hayes put his arm around Angie. “We’re his kids.”
Pirate puzzled over this, taking a glance at Angie in the rearview.
“I’m adopted,” Angie said.
Pirate frowned skeptically, the way people had been doing all of Angie’s life. She’d had one instructor at the CIA who hadn’t believed Angie was Deacon Thorpe’s daughter until Deacon had shown up at graduation.
Pirate said, “I’m very sorry for your loss. Your father was a good man, a generous man. I drove him from the ferry to the house when he came out the last time.”
“You did?” Hayes said. Hayes was in a chipper mood, but of course he had slept for the entire drive, laid out in the backseat, his head resting on his soft suede travel duffel. Angie had tried to snooze on the ferry while Hayes smoked cigarettes and drank Bloody Marys with a very sophisticated couple who owned a cheese shop in Yountville, California. Angie had heard Hayes say, I adore Auberge du Soleil; really, there’s no other place that compares in Napa or Sonoma. A glass of Stags’ Leap chardonnay on that deck in the four o’clock sunshine—well, I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t get any better than that. And she thought, The man can talk to anybody about anything. Hayes leaned over the seat so that he could more easily converse with Pirate. “Really? So you were one of the last people to see our father alive, then?”
“That, I wouldn’t know,” Pirate said. He seemed suddenly uncomfortable, and Angie realized he might not want that distinction.
She was happy to get out of the cab, much as she dreaded all that lay ahead.
Hayes said, “Do you have a card, man? So we can party with you later?”
“Party with you later”? Angie thought. Was Hayes on drugs? There wasn’t going to be any partying later. All that was happening later was a lot of painful interaction with family.
Pirate handed Hayes his card—it had a skull-and-crossbones motif, very original—and then made a grand production of extracting their luggage from the Lincoln’s trunk.
“Please call me,” Pirate said. “I would love to be your driver while you’re on-island.” He and Hayes shook hands, Hayes gave him thirty dollars, and then Pirate leapt over the driver’s side door, into the seat. Angie rolled her eyes, then turned to stare at the front of the house with dread.
She suffered a positively dismaying memory of her father and Scarlett’s wedding. Angie had been sixteen years old and had not wanted to attend. She had loved and worshipped Scarlett once upon a time. But in Scarlett’s second appearance in Angie’s life—as her soon-to-be stepmother—she had had far less appeal. Angie’s nanny—who had let her swim in Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and helped Angie throw a full-blown Halloween party in the middle of April—was now the same woman making all the screaming sex noises coming from her father’s bedroom.
The wedding had been held in Scarlett’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia, during the sweltering first week of July. The air in Savannah had smelled like a swamp, and the trees had hung heavy with Spanish moss, which Angie had never seen before; it reminded her of hair tangled in a drain. The fountains in the squares were dry; the river was stagnant and a breeding ground for mosquitoes the size of sparrows. The old mansions in town were pretty, but Angie couldn’t get past the fact that they had most likely been built by slaves. Scarlett’s parents lived in the prettiest house in Savannah; even Angie had to admit that this was true. It was a yellow clapboard Victorian with gables and a magnificent wraparound porch, complete with lush hanging ferns—possibly the only greenery thriving in the entire city—and a swing and a line of rocking chairs. When Deacon and Angie had knocked on the formidable front door, a black maid in a turquoise uniform and a pristine white apron had answered.