He leaned in. “This feels like a pass, Katie.”
“You wish.”
“I do.” He didn’t laugh. Didn’t back off. Didn’t even flinch.
They breathed in unison for a long minute. His gaze dropped to her mouth, and the urge to surrender became more powerful with each passing second.
He seemed to guess what she was thinking. “We won’t stop this time,” he warned.
She knew that.
If he kissed her, they’d tear off their clothes right here in Sadie’s sitting room.
Sadie’s sitting room.
Kaitlin cringed and drew away.
Zach’s expression faltered, but she forced herself to ignore it, pretending to be absorbed in the furniture and the decorations, moving farther from him to peer through the door into Sadie’s bedroom.
It took her a minute before she thought she could speak. “Sadie seems like she was an incredible person.”
“She was,” said Zach, his tone giving away nothing.
Maybe Kaitlin had imagined the power of the moment. “Do you miss her?”
“Every day.” There was a vacant sound to his voice that made Kaitlin turn.
She caught his unguarded expression, and a lump formed in her throat.
For all his flaws, Zach had obviously loved his grandmother.
“Back then,” Ginny informed Kaitlin and Lindsay from where she lay on a deck lounger, head propped up, beside the Gilbys’ pool, “Sadie was a pistol.”
While Lindsay was chuckling at Ginny’s stories of growing up on Serenity Island, Kaitlin had been struggling to match the seemingly meticulous, traditional Sadie who’d been in charge of the Harper castle for so many years, with the lively young girl who’d apparently run wild with Ginny.
Both Kaitlin and Lindsay were swimming in the pool. Right now, their arms were folded over the painted edge, kicking to keep their balance while Ginny shared entertaining stories. The water was refreshing in the late afternoon heat. A breeze had come up off the ocean, and dozens of birds flitted in the surrounding trees and flower gardens.
Kaitlin was beginning to think Serenity Island was paradise.
“It wasn’t like it is now,” Ginny continued, gesturing widely with her half-full glass of iced tea. “None of these helicopters and the like. When you were on the island, you were here until the next supply ship.”
“Did you like living here?” asked Lindsay, stretching out and scissor-kicking through the water.
“We constantly plotted ways to get off,” said Ginny, with a conspiratorial chuckle. “Probably ten kids in all back then, what with the families and the staff. We were seventeen. Sadie convinced my daddy that I needed to learn French. Mais oui. Then I convinced him I couldn’t possibly go to Paris without Sadie.”
“You went to Paris?” Lindsay sighed, then pushed off the pool wall and floated backward in her magenta bikini. “I love Paris.”
Kaitlin had never been to Paris. Truth was, she’d never left New York State. Shelter, food and education were the top of her priority list. Anything else would have to come after that. Though, someday, she’d like to see Europe, or maybe California, even Florida.
“We took one year of our high school in France,” said Ginny, draining the glass of iced tea. “Came home very sophisticated, you know.”
One of the staff members immediately arrived with another pitcher of iced tea, refilling Ginny’s glass. She offered some to Kaitlin and Lindsay, filling up a fresh glass for each of them. They thanked the woman and set their glasses on the pool deck in easy reach.
Kaitlin had spent several hot hours today prowling through the castle. The dusty attic rooms were particularly hot and stuffy. Now she was grateful for the cool water of the pool and the refreshing glass of iced tea.
Ginny waited until the young woman left the pool deck and exited back into the main house.
Then she sat up straighter, leaning toward Kaitlin and Lindsay. “Zachary’s grandfather, Milton Harper, took one look at Sadie in those diaphanous Parisian dresses and, boom, she was pregnant.”
Kaitlin tried to hide her surprise at learning such an intimate detail. Back in the 1950s, it must have caused quite a scandal.
Lindsay quickly returned to the pool edge next to Kaitlin. “They had to get married?” she asked.
Ginny pointed a finger at Lindsay. “I’m not recommending it to you,” she cautioned. “You girls want to know how to catch a man nowadays?”
“Not necessar—”
Lindsay elbowed Kaitlin in the ribs. “How?”
“Withhold sex,” Ginny told them with a sage nod. “They can get it any old place they want out there—” she waved a hand toward the ocean, apparently including the world in general in her statement “—but you say no, and he’ll keep coming back, sniffing around.”