Passion in Secret

My lovely…that’s what he’d called her in the days when they’d been in love; when they’d made love. And the sound of it, falling again from his lips after all this time, brought back such a shock of déjà vu that she trembled inside.

Late August, the summer she’d turned seventeen, just weeks before he started his junior year at university, two hundred miles away…wheeling gulls against a cloudless sky, the distant murmur of the incoming tide, the sun gilding her skin, and Jake sliding inside her, with the tall grass of the dunes whispering approval in the sea breeze. “I miss you so much when we’re apart,” he’d told her. “I’ll love you forever.”

But he hadn’t. Thirteen months later, she’d spent two months studying art in France. When she returned, she found out from Penelope that he’d been seeing a college coed while she’d been gone.

She’d been crushed, although she really shouldn’t have been. As her weeks abroad passed, there’d been signs enough that trouble was brewing. His phone calls had dwindled, become filled with long, awkward pauses. He wasn’t there to meet her as promised, when she came home again. He didn’t even make it back for Thanksgiving. And finally, when there was no avoiding her at Christmas, he’d shamelessly flaunted her replacement in her face.

“Jake Harrington’s a two-timing creep,” sweet sympathetic Penelope told her, “and you’re too smart to let such a worthless jerk break your heart. Forget him! There are better fish in the sea.”

But she hadn’t wanted anyone else. As for forgetting, it was a lot easier said than done for an eighteen-year-old who’d just discovered she was pregnant by the boy she adored and who’d passed her over for someone new.

The spilled assignments at last cradled in her arms, Sally struggled to her feet with as much grace as she could muster and crammed the papers into her briefcase. “We went over all this on Saturday. I’ve told you everything there is to know.”

“Okay.” He shrugged amiably. “Then I won’t ask you again.”

Elation flooded through her. “I’m glad you finally believe me.”

“Of course I do,” he said. “You’re not the kind of person who’d hold out on me about something this important, are you?”

Guilt and suspicion nibbled holes in her relief. “Then why did you come here to begin with?”

“Mostly to find out if you’ve forgiven me for landing you in such a mess an Saturday. If I’d known Colette was going to go after you like that—”

“You had no way of knowing she’d react so badly. Consider yourself forgiven.”

“A lot of women wouldn’t be so understanding,” he said diffidently. “But then, you never were like most women.”

Diffident? Jake Harrington?

She’d have laughed aloud at the idea, had it not been that the hair on the back of her neck vibrated with warning. He was up to something! She could almost hear the wheels spinning behind that guileless demeanor! “And?”

“Hmm?” Doing his best to look innocently virtuous, he traced a herringbone pattern over the floor with the tip of his cane.

“You said ‘mostly’—that you were here mostly to find out if I’d forgiven you. What’s the other reason?”

He tried to look sheepish. Would have blushed, if he’d had it in him to do such a thing. “Would you believe, nostalgia got the better of me? When I heard you were on staff here, I couldn’t stay away.” He leaned against one of the cabinets holding supplies and sent her a smile which plucked unmercifully at her heartstrings. “This is where we met, Sally. We fell in love here. I kissed you for the first time next to the lockers right outside this room. You had blue paint on the end of your nose.”

“I’m surprised you remember,” she said, warmth stealing through her and blasting her reservations into oblivion.

“I remember everything about that time. Nothing I’ve known since has ever compared to it.”

The warmth turned to melting heat. Against her better judgment, she found herself wanting to believe him. “You don’t have to say that. You shouldn’t say it.”

“Why not? Don’t I have as much right to tell the truth as you do?”

He sounded so sincere, she found herself wondering. Was he playing mind games with her? Trying to trip her up? Or was she seeing entrapment where none existed?

Deciding it was better to err on the side of caution and put an end to the meeting, she indicated the bulging briefcase and said, “I should get going. I’ve got a full evening’s work ahead.”

He eased himself away from the desk. “Me, too. I’m still sorting through Penelope’s stuff and deciding what to do with it, and the house. I don’t need all that space.”

Watching as he limped to the door, she knew an inexplicable regret that he accepted his dismissal so easily. So what if his smile left her insides fluttering? They weren’t teenagers anymore. First love didn’t survive an eight-year winter of neglect to bloom again at the first hint of spring.

Still, having him show up so unexpectedly had unsettled her almost as badly as seeing him at the funeral. He stirred up too many buried feelings.

His voice, the curve of his mouth, the latent passion in his direct blue gaze, made her hungry for things she shouldn’t want and certainly couldn’t have. So, rather than risk running into him again, she waited until his footsteps faded, and the clang of the outside door shutting behind him echoed down the hall, before she ventured out to retrieve her coat from the staff cloakroom.

The sky had been clear when she left for work that morning and she’d enjoyed the two-mile walk from the guest cottage at the end of her parents’ driveway and through the park to the school. Sometime since classes ended, though, the clouds had rolled in again and freezing rain begun to fall. The ramp beyond the Academy’s main entrance was treacherous with black ice.

Twice, she’d have lost her footing, had it not been for the iron railing running parallel to the path. But the real trouble started when she gained the glassy sidewalk and found it impossible to navigate in shoes not designed for such conditions.

Turning right, as she intended to do, was out of the question. Instead, with her briefcase rapping bruisingly against her leg, she lurched into the dirty snow piled next to the curb, three days earlier, by the road-clearing crews.

It was the last straw in a day which had started badly and gone steadily downhill ever since. Exasperated, she gave vent to a stream of unladylike curses which rang up and down the deserted street with satisfying gusto.

Except the street wasn’t quite as deserted as she’d thought. A low-slung black sports car, idling in the lee of a broad-trunked maple not ten feet away, cruised to a stop beside her, with the passenger window rolled down just far enough for Jake’s voice to float out. “Faculty members didn’t know words like that when I was a student here,” he announced affably. “Come to think of it, I’m not sure I knew them, either.”

“Are you stalking me?” she snapped, miserably conscious of the fact that she cut a ridiculous figure standing there, ankle-deep in snow.

“Not at all. I stopped to offer you a ride home.”

“No, thanks. I prefer to walk.”

“Oh,” he said. “Is that what you were doing when you came sailing into the gutter just now?”

“I temporarily lost my balance.”

“Temporarily?” He let out a muffled snort of laughter. “Dear Ms. Winslow, if you insist on wearing summer footwear in the kind of winter which Eastridge Bay is famous for, it’ll be anything but temporary. Stop being stubborn and get in the car before you break your neck. I’d come round and hold the door open for you, except I’m having enough problems of my own trying to get around in these conditions.”

She debated telling him what he could do with his offer, but her frozen feet won out over her pride. “Just as well you’re not inclined to play the gentleman,” she muttered, yanking open the door and climbing in to the blessed warmth of the car. “I might be tempted to knock your cane out from under you!”

“Now that,” he remarked, stepping gently on the gas and pulling smoothly out into the road, “is why some people—people who don’t know you as well as I used to—talk about you the way they do.”

“And how is that, exactly? I’m living in the guest cottage on my parents’ estate, by the way. You turn left on—”

“I remember how to get there, Sally,” he said. “I’ve driven you home often enough, in the past. And to answer your question, unflatteringly. They say you came back to town and brought a bagful of trouble with you. Are they right?”

“Why ask me? You’ll find listening to their version of the facts far more entertaining, I’m sure.”

“As a matter of interest, where have you been for the last several years?”

“At university on the West Coast, and after that, down in the Caribbean.”

He didn’t quite snicker in her face, but he might as well have. “Doing what?” he inquired, his voice shimmering with amusement.

“Well, not weaving sun hats from coconut palm fronds or singing in a mariachi band, if that’s what you’re thinking!”

“You have no idea what I’m thinking, Sally. None at all. And you haven’t answered my question. What kept you in the sunny Caribbean all this time?”