Page 24 of An Island Summer
“I’m sorry,” she said to Toby, as they headed out of the room.
“You’re good with him,” Toby said once they were in the hallway. “I almost believed you too.”
“It’s intense, isn’t it?” she replied, shaking her head, relieved that he hadn’t been upset with her response to Rupert. He held the door to the lobby open for her and she passed through. “I think I need to do a lot more research on this Hester Quinn before I see him again, so that I can keep up with him. Did you know he even knew her management company? I just read about that earlier. He nailed it. Does he sit up on the internet all night or something?”
“No,” Toby said with a disbelieving chuckle. “He doesn’t even have a cell phone. It’s probably in one of his books.”
“Well, I’d better get to studying tonight,” she said as they stepped out into the sunshine.
Toby stopped her, placing his hand on her arm, his gentle touch sending an electric current down her spine. “I still don’t know if this is a good idea…”
For an instant, she wondered if he meantthem. But that made no sense at all. She shook the thought free. “I don’t know either,” she said honestly. “All I know is that your grandfather lights up when Hester comes into a room, and I feel like I’m doing something right when I see the happiness on his face.”
In that moment, a glimmer of fondness sparkled in Toby’s sad eyes, and she knew he understood. “We’ll see how it goes,” he said gently. He reached into his wallet. “Here. This is my card. It’s got my cell phone number in case you need me.”
“Okay,” she said, taking it and reading his name across the top:Toby Meyers, Bridgeway Properties. She slipped it into her handbag as the two of them locked eyes once more. He opened his mouth as if he were going to say something but then decided against it. “I’ll see ya,” he said.
“See ya,” she replied to his back.
TEN
“Sometimes, Rupert’s so convincing I really feel like Hester,” Meghan told Tess as they sat outside on the inn’s back deck during their break between the lunch and dinner shifts. Seagulls squawked overhead, casting shadows across the hot sand, the restless Atlantic pounding into the shore in front of them.
“That poor old man has nothing to do but read about her,” Tess said. “And the whole world has moved on. But on the bright side, if I were stuck in my own head, I’d like to be twenty years old too.”
“True,” Meghan said. “I wish just once he’d snap out of it and really talk to me.”
“Yeah… Does he ever talk to Toby? Does he recognize him?”
“He seems to,” Meghan said, the mention of Toby causing the thought of his touch to come back to her suddenly, sending a tingling sensation down her arm.
“What’s that face?” Tess said, surprising her.
“What face?”
“You weren’t thinking about Rupert just then.”
“Yes, I was,” she lied.
“Oh, I hope not!” Tess clapped a hand over her mouth and laughed. “Not with that dreamy expression I just saw.” She doubled over, her back heaving with laughs.
“Was it that obvious?” Meghan asked, mortified. Had that same look surfaced when she was with Toby? Her cheeks burned at the thought.
“Were you thinking about Toby?” Tess asked.
Meghan rolled her aching shoulders. “It isn’t like that. I just feel drawn to him. I can’t explain it.”
“Not everything has to be explained,” Tess said.
Meghan didn’t respond, the idea whirring in her restless mind.
The wind unrelenting, Tess tucked a runaway tendril into her bun at the back of her head and stood up. “We should probably get back in. Dinner starts in ten minutes.”
While Tess set tables with the dinner candles and cloth napkins, Meghan stacked the menus at the hostess podium and cleared the wax pencil from the wipe-off table map while Tabitha leaned on the wall beside her, embroiled in a deep, whispered conversation with Milton, one of the bellmen at the inn.
“Everything okay?” Meghan asked Tabitha when Milton walked away.
“We’re working our fingers to the bone, bursting at the seams,” Tabitha said from behind a manufactured smile as a group of tourists walked by happily. “And we’ve heard that the locals are quietly protesting the expansion of Mariner’s Inn. They’re pushing back on the zoning.”
