Three Little Words

“You might like this one.”

Tess stepped forward. “No, please, sit,” she said, when Connor’s grandfather saw her and started to rise from his chair by the window.

He didn’t listen, and straightened slowly with one hand clenched on the head of a cane. His forehead pleated with a deep scowl.

Connor steadied his grandfather’s stance. “Grandpa, this is Tess Bucek, from Alouette. Tess, my grandfather, Addison Mitchell.”

“Mr. Mitchell.” Tess offered her hand, hoping the lighthouse keeper wouldn’t bite it off.

The old man clasped it briefly, but with a strong pressure. He peered at her with eyes that were sharply blue beneath eyebrows like fuzzy caterpillars. “Bucek? Don’t recall any Buceks in Alouette.”

“Right now, I’m the only one left. My parents were Tony and Annabel Bucek. I doubt you’d remember either of them, sir.”

“Good people?”

She blinked. “Acceptable, sir.”

“Sir?” He snorted. “I s’pose you can call me Sonny. Take a seat if it suits you, there.” He lowered himself to the padded chair, letting out a rusty chuckle as Tess sat and crossed her legs. “Still a ladies’ man, eh, Connor?”

“Tess is—” Connor shrugged, looking to her for help.

“Just a visitor,” she said, smoothing her skirt. No need to embarrass the old man by baldly pointing out the reason for her visit. “I met Connor today in the library. I work there.”

Sonny grunted.

Connor excused himself and went out to the hall to find another chair. His grandfather stared out the window, ignoring Tess. She looked around the room. Besides a hospital bed, there was a TV bolted near the ceiling and a small desk with a few framed pictures on it and nothing else. No reading material.

She cleared her throat.

Sonny’s eyes swiveled to her.

“Connor asked me for help,” she confided, leaning toward the old man. He was probably the prideful type who’d need reassurance that she could be discreet. “Just between us.”

Sonny’s speckled bald head wavered with a nod. “Fine by me. The boy’s been on the rocks.”

“Oh. Actually, I didn’t mean his, um, dilemma.”

“Dilemma?” Connor said, coming back in the room carrying another chair. He set it down beside his grandfather’s.

“Nothing,” Tess said brightly.

Connor glowered.

“You look just like your grandfather,” she said, teasing him a bit. In his heyday as cantankerous Old Man Mitchell, she silently added, continuing to smile sweetly as Connor got settled.

“Thanks.” He slumped back in his chair and his knee touched hers.

She sat up even straighter, edging away slightly. And got another black glower. There was no decent way to explain that she wasn’t disgusted by him—she was magnetized. Disturbed, too, in every sense.

Sonny’s lips had folded inward into a secretive sort of smile. For being nearly ninety and on death’s door, he appeared to be in fairly good shape. A silvery fringe of white hair ran from ear to ear, his eyes were clear and active, and his posture was only slightly hunched even though he moved with the deliberation of old age and arthritis. He had a lean physique like his grandson, gone to scrawniness and skin and bone. Thin, age-spotted skin stretched taut over the knobs of his knuckles where he continued to grip the cane propped beside his chair.

Either he kept up with current events on his own via the television news or he’d been told about Connor’s troubles. Tess thought it was cute how the old man had presumed she was “comforting” his grandson.

Wrong, but cute.

Although, if ever a man had looked in need of comforting…

She shifted around in her chair. Connor gave her a glance, but he kept talking with his grandfather, telling him about the trip back to Alouette and checking in to Bay House.

Sonny shook his head over the idea that the once grand house had become a bed-and-breakfast inn. “Shame. The Whitakers still there?”

“Yes, they are,” Tess said. “Emmie and Toivo. Sister and brother,” she explained to Connor, in case he didn’t realize. She’d been halfway positive he’d back out of the decision to stay at Bay House once he’d been introduced to its homey comforts and familiar hosts. He didn’t seem like a homey and familiar guy.

“Bossy and goofy, them two,” said Sonny with a scowl that was mostly for show.

Tess smiled. “You make them sound like the eighth and ninth dwarfs.” She’d have called them energetic and endearing. But then she’d only had long-distance grandparents, so that was a soft spot for her. Soft, sore…same thing.

“What about the lighthouse?” Sonny asked.

Connor made an apologetic sound. “It’s not looking so good, Grandpa. Really run-down.”

Sonny huffed. “That’s the government for you. I’da stayed if they’d have let me. Instead, I’m wasting away, good for goddamn nothing.” He deliberately turned his head to stare out the window, exuding a deep dissatisfaction.

Tess was uneasy, even more so when suddenly the old man glared at her. “I ever run you off Gull Rock?” he accused.

She gritted her teeth. When she was a child, it had been a prank among the older kids to dare each other to sneak onto the lighthouse grounds. They would make bets of how far they’d get before the lighthouse keeper caught sight of them. One boy had been famous for getting swatted in the behind by the old man’s broom.

“No, sir,” she said.

Sonny squinted skeptically.

“When you were still the light keeper, I was only—” she calculated “—about six or seven.” And frightened silly by the other kids’ stories of the legendary lighthouse hermit. No one had ever mentioned that Old Man Mitchell’s grandson had been visiting only several years back. It was probably more fun to scare each other.

“Buncha brats,” Sonny said. “Always screaming like a pack of gulls.”

“They were just being kids, Grandpa,” Connor said. “I made friends with a few of them, my summers up here.”

“Hooligans, the lot of you,” the old man groused. “Came to no good, I betcha.”

Conner smiled, though his expression remained somber. “Yeah.” He sighed. “You could be right about that.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“HE LIKED YOU,” Connor said, glancing at Tess over the top of his menu.

“The whitefish is good—” She stopped and wrinkled her nose, giving a little laugh at Connor’s faulty assessment. “Sonny liked me? How could you tell?”

They’d spent less than a half hour in the elderly man’s room, with the conversation progressing in fits and starts. Sonny Mitchell had seemed bent on being disagreeable, although Tess had detected signs of grudging approval whenever she refused to be bullied by his gruff treatment.