“What’s a hurry-cane?” Helen asked, squirming with uncharacteristic shyness.
David snorted and rolled his eyes, clearly mortified by his sister’s ignorance, but Brasher put his hands on his knees and stooped down so that his face was nearly on her level. “That’sa bi-ig ba-ad storm, little missy,” he said in his thick, deep voice, in that strange-sounding cadence. “Wind howls like ten thousand demons, an’ the air turns to water, an’ waves come roll ovah the land-blow down trees an’ blow ’way houses an’ blow all the boats up on the shore. Hurricane comes, you don’ wanna be down here, child.” He straightened with one gnarled hand on Helen’s soft curls to wink at Riley. “But don’ you worry, this boy here been through the hurricane, he’ll take good care of you. He knows what to do. You be safe with him. You go on to the island now, have a good time on the beach. Be a good day for the beach. Been some nice shells this summer…” He threw them a wave as he walked back up the jetty toward the house.
“Island?” Summer asked in a low voice as Riley ushered them through the fishing shanty and onto the landing. “We’re going to an island?”
He answered her with a nod, his focus on getting them all into the small wooden rowboat equipped with an outboard motor that was tied up to the landing. He felt curiously detached as he lowered their gear into it, then climbed down and braced himself with feet planted wide apart in the bottom of the boat and one hand on the ladder, but he knew it was a protective kind of withdrawal, a shield against vulnerability.
“Okay, David, you’re next…there you go. Life jackets are under the seat in the bow-that’s the pointed end. Put one on and get one for your sister while you’re at it.” Then came Helen, her mother handing her halfway down the ladder, Riley lifting her the rest of the way. And it was Summer’s turn. He tried not to watch her as she came down the ladder…first those long, tanned legs of hers right at his eye level, then that fanny, nicely rounded and firm in blue denim shorts…but his breathing quickened, anyway, and his body stirred with natural and unavoidable responses. When he put his hands on her waist to steady her into the boat, he knew he had to pass her on and release her quickly-too quickly, almost as if he’d found touching her unpleasant-or he would be in grave danger of lingering too long and giving himself away.
“Do you row?” Summer asked him as he was stowing the oars out of the way in the bottom of the boat. Her voice was casual, if slightly breathless, but when he glanced up at her he saw that her eyes were focused on his arms and shoulders, and with a look that gave him a sudden and rather adolescent urge to take off his shirt and flex his muscles.
“I do when the tide is right,” he said, turning his concentration upon the outboard motor instead. “It’s less intrusive, and-” now he couldn’t resist acknowledging that feminine appraisal with a frankly masculine grin “-I like the exercise.” He was inordinately pleased at the blush that spread across her cheeks. And even more pleased that she did not look away, but instead held his gaze with an acknowledgment of her own, clear and plain as the light in her sky-blue eyes.
It took all his willpower, that time, to turn away from her and back to the motor. And when he had it started up and throttled down to a throbbing growl, he was well aware that the vibration he felt inside did not come from the engine.
He cast off the line and headed the boat into the channel on a course he’d followed countless times before-and yet now it seemed different to him somehow, as if he were seeing everything for the first time. What would she think, he wondered, if she knew she was the first living soul he’d ever taken to his island? What did he think?
Once again the veil of detachment settled around him, protecting him. He did not want to think.
“Is it really an island?” Summer wasn’t sure why she was whispering. Riley had cut the engine as they approached so that they drifted into a tree-shaded inlet with the oars and the tide, and there was something a little intimidating, almost sacred in the silence, like being inside a church. The only sounds were the hum of insects, an occasional birdcall, and the shushing of waves on the sand. “And no one lives here?” she asked when he’d replied to her first question with a nod. “No one at all?”
“No-and no one ever will.” There was something grim about his smile.
“Are you sure it’s all right for us to be here?” She was whispering again; she’d seen several Private Property-No Trespassing signs already, posted on the dunes and tacked to the trunks of trees.
For a few minutes he said nothing while he nudged the boat’s bow up to a wooded embankment, jumped out and snugged the line to a small tree stump, then pulled the stern in close to the bank and held it so that the children could easily hop from boat to shore. But when it was Summer’s turn, he offered his hand to steady her and said for her alone, with that same enigmatic little smile, “It’s all right-I know the owner.”
“Brasher?”
He shook his head, the smile darkening. “Brasher takes care of it-chases away trespassers and poachers and such. But he doesn’t own the island. Not anymore.”
Understanding came as they walked along a barely discernible pathway between banks of scrubby vegetation, and she gave a small gasp. “You do. You own this island, don’t you?” He nodded reluctantly, as if it was something to be ashamed of. “Oh, my God-it’s really yours? All of it?” The idea that someone could own an island seemed incredible to her, the most impressive of all the impressive things she knew about Riley Grogan.
But he shrugged, and once again a look of discomfort crossed his face. “I hold the deed, but I don’t consider that I own the island. I think of myself as…more of a guardian-like Brasher.” He was quiet for a few moments, watching the children run ahead between seagrass-tufted dunes, then said in a soft, almost musing voice, “It was deeded to Brasher’s great grandmama after the War-that’s the Civil War, of course-by her former master, who was also Brasher’s great granddaddy. That was on his daddy’s side. Brasher was raised in Jamaica where his mother’s people were. I don’t believe anybody ever actually lived on the island. I used to come here when I was a child. It was…kind of a refuge for me, I guess you might say.” His lips flicked briefly with that dark, bitter smile. “Then a few years back, Brasher’s kinfolk got to fightin’ over whether or not to sell out to the developers that’d been circling around like buzzards for years, half thinkin’ they ought to take the money and the other half wantin’ to keep it wild like it is. Anyway, I got wind of it and…I had a few assets I felt I could live without, and the upshot of it is, I was able to make Brasher and his family an offer they could all live with. First thing I did was take the necessary steps to ensure that the island will never be developed, no matter what happens to me. That’s one hundred per cent guaranteed.”
They had come through the last of the dunes, and suddenly there it was, a pristine expanse of sand stretching away from the inlet to a distant point far to the right-to the south. A glistening sheet still wet from the retreating tide, it reflected the silvery blue of the summer sky and made mirror-like images of the stilt-legged birds that pecked and played tag in the lacy froth of the gently rolling waves. Riley checked suddenly, his brow furrowed with concern and his eyes on the children, who were already far down the beach, dancing and chasing each other barefoot through the shallow surf, their cries and laughter carried back on the warm sea breeze. “Are they-”
Summer laughed. “Don’t worry about them-they’ve been coming to the beach since they were babies.”
Riley nodded and started forward again, reaching for her hand in such a natural way that it would have seemed unnatural not to give it to him.