Page 38 of Love At The Shore
He pointed at her with the pen. “Yes, but you thought it.”
Okay, so maybe she had. But it wasn’t as if she’d seen any bookshelves in his bachelor pad on the one occasion she’d ventured across the fence.
Besides, he was the one in the wrong here. It wasn’t even a contest. “And you thought it was okay to just reach over and grab it?”
“All I’m saying is that the sailors I know are just normal people who love sailing.” He gestured to her typewritten words, which were beginning to seem more and more ridiculous the more Lucas spoke. “They don’t run around wearing brass buttoned jackets and ridiculous…”
She didnotneed this right now. Her confidence was shaky enough as it was.
“Okay, we’re done here.” She snatched the pages from his hands. “Thank you very much.”
“Besides that mess of a character, I think you’ve got yourself a really good story.” He leaned against the picket fence and grinned at her.
How was it possible for someone to be so incredibly frustrating and yet charming at the same time? It was a lethal combination.
She scowled at him. “You’re impossible, you know that?”
“What? I’m giving you a compliment.” His dimples flashed, and Jenna thought about reaching across the fence to strangle him.
Instead, she turned on her heel and walked away. Why hadn’t she seen this coming? He’d been arrogant from the start, which is exactly why she’d built the fence to begin with. Yet somehow, she’d actually started to like him, despite her every effort not to.
“You’re welcome,” he called after her.
She turned to glare at him one last time, but her heart gave a foolish tug at the sight of those dimples again.
And that’s when Jenna realized just how much trouble she was in where Lucas McKinnon was concerned.
Jenna stomped through the sand on her afternoon beach walk with Maureen the next day, brimming with furious adrenaline.
The more she thought about Lucas reading her manuscript without her permission, the angrier she got. Who did he think he was, with his darling dog and his flirty dimples and hisliteralboy-next-door charm? Maybe, just maybe, she didn’t dislike him quite as much as she had when they’d first moved into the duplex, but did that give him the right to pore over her pages?
No, it did not.
He’d even made red notes all over the margins. It was afirst draft. First drafts were always sort of terrible, which was exactly why she hadn’t let anyone look at it yet.
The worst thing about his scribbled red notes—theveryworst thing—was that his comments were surprisingly insightful. He’d honed in on all the problem areas, and after going through his notes, she’d actually come up with a kernel of an idea for an ending. At last.
If it had been anyone else, she might have been thrilled, perhaps even grateful. But it hadn’t been anyone else. It had beenhim.
“It’s like a total invasion of privacy, am I right?” She threw her arms in the air and waited for Maureen to agree with her, but her friend suddenly wasn’t walking beside her anymore.
“Do you think you could slow down?” Maureen said.
“That’s the problem, I can’t. Not even a little bit because I’m already like fifty pages behind, and my neighbor is so not helping.At all.” Jenna’s tongue was moving even faster than her footsteps.
She passed the lifeguard stand and continued her rant. “Every time I sit down to work, bam! He’s right there. He’s like that annoying insurance commercial that’s on every time you turn on the TV.”
Somewhere behind her, Jenna heard wheezing.
“Maureen?” Jenna turned around and found her friend standing completely still with her hands on her hips, gasping for breath. “Are you okay?”
“I think I missed that last bit.” Maureen was so far behind her that her words were nearly swallowed up by the crash of the waves on the shore.
Jenna backtracked and shot her friend anI’m sorrygrimace. “See, I’m out here, not even close to the house, and he’s still driving me nuts.”
It crossed her mind that maybe she couldn’t realistically blame Lucas for the fact that she’d left Maureen behind and nearly speed-walked right off the end of the island, but she didn’t care. She was ready to blame everything on her neighbor at the moment—bad weather, her aching calf muscle, all of it.
“Well, if you guys are anything like my seventh graders, you taunt the ones you like.” Maureen sounded so calm. So rational.
