Page 9 of Love At The Shore
“I’m not avoiding it. I’m just approaching it with a much more critical eye this time around.” She had to. Hers wasn’t the only heart at stake anymore. She had Nick and Ally to think about now.
“That sounds so romantic.” Maureen fluttered her eyelashes mockingly.
Why on earth was she going down that road?
“Either way, this is a neighbor thing.”Nota romance thing, even though Jenna wondered if she was being slightly unfair to Lucas. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who judged people, and after all, it had only been one night. Maybe the loud music was the exception rather than the rule.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t. She’d been right on the other side of the wall. He had to have known she’d hear it. “And trust me, he’s totally Mr. Slack.”
Maureen gave Jenna one of her teacher stares—the kind that never failed to make her middle school students admit the dog hadn’t actually eaten their homework.
And just like an eighth grader, Jenna folded beneath the weight of the teacher stare. “Okay, fine. I’ll give it two weeks.”
Isn’t that what she’d tell her kids to do? Yes, it was.
She glanced at Ally, splashing around the shallow end of the pool with a group of girls who looked to be about her age. Making friends already…probably because she always gave new people a chance.
Maureen nodded. “Good.”
Good.
Jenna just hoped that the next fourteen days weren’t anything like the past twenty-four hours. Otherwise she’d never get her book finished.
The next morning, Jenna got Nick and Ally off to summer camp and returned to the beach house ready to work. She set her laptop in the center of the picnic table on the deck, along with a cup of coffee, her hardback thesaurus, and yes, her trusty antique typewriter. Desperate times called for desperate measures. She didn’t actually use it much for typing, but she’d inherited it from her grandfather, who’d written four books on the clunky old thing—cowboy stories in the vein of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Since he’d definitely managed to avoid the one-hit-wonder problem back in his day, she considered his typewriter her good luck charm.
Jenna took a deep inhale of salty sea air. She could do this. The few pages she’d managed to write before the summer move to the beach house were printed out and held in place with a giant conch shell. Her deck sat just behind the dune, affording her a perfect view of the gently tumbling ocean. Early morning sun glittered on the water, and there wasn’t a soul on the beach this early in the day. She couldn’t have asked for a more tranquil writing environment.
Time to get to work.
She took a generous sip of coffee and began flipping through the manuscript. The story was in better shape than she’d thought, thank goodness. She just needed to incorporate the changes she’d marked in the margins with red pencil, and then she could start writing the second half.
But as soon as she opened her laptop, a familiar streak of white leapt onto the table. “What the…?”
Tank!
The dog’s wagging tail sent the conch shell flying and Jenna barely had time to slam her hand down on top of her pages to protect them from the wind. “No, no, no, Tank.”
He pawed at her hand, clearly thinking they were playing some kind of game. Then he went for the coffee cup as if it were a dog bowl.
Please, no.The last thing he needed was caffeine. “Aw, come on, man.”
He looked up to give her a puppy kiss, knocking the coffee over in the process. Dark liquid poured over her pages. “Not the book!”
Her notes were fading before her eyes. Now she was going to have to re-read everything and start the editing process all over again. So much for spending the afternoon plotting out new material.
Jenna looped a finger beneath Tank’s collar and helped him hop off the table. “Let’s go. Time to go home.”
She guided the dog down the white wooden staircase toward Lucas’s front door and as luck would have it, he stepped outside just as she and Tank reached the bottom step.
His porch was every bit as messy as the last time Jenna had seen it. Half-empty bottles of water were scattered about, and the swing was littered with surf magazines. While he’d somehow managed to hang his wet suit on a hook, a damp towel lay piled into one of the chairs.
Jenna bit back the mildew lecture she gave her kids every time she found a towel on the bathroom floor.
“Hey.” He gave her a lopsided grin, which made Jenna feel like he might actually be happy to see her.
Odd…
And completely irrelevant.
