An Unexpected Suitor (13 page)

“I wasn’t aware we were fighting, Harry,” she said sweetly. “I thought we were out for an afternoon stroll along the beach.”

Harry laughed. “Excellent point, my lady. Shall we?” He offered his arm.

Nola hesitated then accepted his peace offering. Inside she felt a tremor of pleasure as she considered how it must look from the bluff above—the two of them walking across the sand to the beach chairs. She glanced back and saw the unmistakable figure of Oliver Franks watching them. And although she was well aware that Oliver and Minnie Franks had joined the ranks of those who disapproved of her associating so closely with Harry and his troupe of actors, she could not help feeling relief that it was Oliver and not Rose.

O
n the day of the clambake, the men and boys were the first to arrive on the beach to deliver the stones, logs and potato sacks. Next the girls came to gather the seaweed so vital to the proper preparation—and to have an excuse to flirt with the boys. They wore their best summer dresses in spite of the need to climb over rocks and scour the shoreline for just the right variety. The local girls showed the summer girls how to look for rockweed, favored because it had pockets that allowed the best combination of air and water to create the steam necessary to cook the meal. The girls wore their hair braided and interwoven with colorful ribbons or piled atop their heads like crowns. The boys watched them even as they pretended to focus on the work of delivering the logs and rocks for the large fire pit they would dig later.

“Look at them,” Ellie sighed as she helped Nola set up the stand for serving her ice cream samples. “The potential for romance is so thick you can almost smell it. Ah, to be young again and in love.”

Nola had been watching a group of men digging the first
of the cooking pits. Harry Starbuck was at the center of that group, wielding the shovel as the other men shouted encouragement and waited their turn at the digging. At Ellie’s comment she forced her attention up the beach to where the girls were giggling as they carried mounds of rockweed in buckets of sea water over to where the boys had gathered. “It’s a bit like a dance—a kind of ballet,” she said wistfully.

“Why, Nola Burns, you are such a romantic,” Ellie teased. “So, tell me, when you were that age, was there one boy?”

No!

Yes. The incorrigible Harrison Starbuck.

Nola shrugged and turned her attention back to attaching bunting to the table of the stand.

“There was,” Ellie guessed, moving around so that Nola had no choice but to face her. “You’re blushing.” She popped herself onto the edge of the table and leaned closer. “Tell me everything. Was he quite handsome?”

Nola laughed. “Oh, Ellie, at that age all older boys are attractive,” she said.

“Ah, so he was older—unattainable?”

“This is ridiculous. I don’t really recall.” But she did. Suddenly every detail of the clambake the summer that her brothers and Harrison Starbuck graduated came rushing back. The fact that commencement exercises were scheduled for the following day and that everyone knew of Starbuck’s plan to leave the island for New York made that clambake seem more bittersweet than any that had come before—or after. For in spite of the fact that she and Starbuck had barely encountered one another on more than a dozen occasions, she had felt so keenly the agony that she might never see him again.

“Oh, dear Nola, how sad you look. Did the cad break your heart?”

“Of course not,” Nola replied and tried to cover her snappish answer with a laugh. “How could he when he barely knew I was alive?”

“And you never had the chance to let him know? Did he marry?”

“He moved away,” Nola said. “Ah, here come the others.” She had never been so happy to see Judy and the troupe of actors as they pulled up in a box cart loaded with the supplies needed for serving the ice cream.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a jug of your famous limeade in that cart, would you, Mrs. Lang?” Harry asked.

Nola wheeled around. He had removed his hat and was mopping sweat from his brow with the ever-present bandanna. She tried focusing her attention on anyone but him. Still, she felt her cheeks burning at the very real presence of the boy who had once haunted her girlhood dreams.

“You’ll have to ask Nola,” Judy replied. “She’s in charge.”

“I see.” Harry turned his attention to Nola, a twinkle of amusement lighting his eyes. “Should have known,” he added. “Here, let me give you a hand with that, Mrs. Lang.” He moved to the cart and helped with the unloading, chatting with the others and flirting with Judy in the process.

Is that how you see me?
Nola wondered, her high spirits of earlier crushed by the realization.
Am I eternally the bossy one? The one always in charge?
She turned away and looked for something to occupy her, something that would block out his laughter, his deep velvety voice, his very presence.

“Here.” Harry thrust a paper cup filled with limeade under her nose and then gulped down another cupful in practically one swallow. “You’re looking quite well today, Nola. No aftereffects from the accident?”

“I’m fine,” she said, still unable to tear her eyes away from his.

He plopped his hat on her head and pulled it down so that the brim shaded her face. “Still, that sun’s hot today. We wouldn’t want to mar that beautiful skin of yours with freckles and such.”

“I have a hat,” she protested, touching the brim of his.

“This one suits you, I think. Hang on to it for me. I’m going for a swim.”

And before Nola could further protest he took off running across the beach, pulling off his shoes and socks and shirt at water’s edge and leaving them in a pile as he plunged into the water.

“Was it Harry?” Ellie asked, coming alongside her and watching Harry swim against the current. “That boy from long ago?”

Nola choked on the last of her limeade. “Whatever would make you think that?”

Ellie wrapped her arm around Nola’s shoulder. “It doesn’t matter, really. If it was, maybe God’s given the two of you a second chance and if it wasn’t maybe God’s decided it’s high time you had your first chance at true love.”

“I doubt God has time to concern Himself with such trivial matters,” Nola said primly as she turned away and began organizing the dishes for the ice cream.

Harry swam as if his very life depended on each stroke. He pounded the water with his power, fought against each current, every wave that threatened to carry him back to shore. Back to her. When he had exhausted himself he rolled to his back and floated just beyond the breakers as he looked up at the cloudless sky.

What is it about this woman? What do You want from me when it comes to her? Leave her alone? What?

It had all started so innocently—a simple business transaction. He’d gone through hundreds of them in his lifetime and admittedly some had run their course more smoothly than others, but this one was different.

Because she’s a woman?

“Because she’s
this
woman,” he corrected himself. With anyone else he would have long ago walked away or turned the entire project over to Alistair to handle, but he’d found it impossible to leave her alone. When he wasn’t face-to-face with her, he was thinking about her, reliving some moment they had shared. If he didn’t know better he’d think he was falling…

In love? Impossible. Nola Burns and me? I know You’ve got a sense of humor, Lord, but this? I’m all wrong for her—vagabond theater guy meets uptight New England spinster? It’s classic melodrama, and forgive me, but bad melodrama at that.

He studied the sky for a sign that he was right. Maybe a sudden gathering of cumulus clouds spelling it out for him. But the sky remained clear, cloudless, calm. Harry closed his eyes and slowly backstroked his way down the beach.

What was it Rachel had advised? Listen?

With a frustrated growl he rolled over and swam back toward shore until he could stand. And as he emerged from the surf, the first place he looked was to where he had left her, but the stand was deserted.

The other men had completed the task of lining two long pits with carefully selected stones the size of grapefruits, then added hardwood logs that would be set on fire. Now he saw the fires to heat the stones had been lit. Nearby the boys
and girls had joined forces as they washed and sorted the mounds of clams that had been dug the evening before. Not ten feet away sat a group of mothers and older women, shucking corn and washing yams, all the time keeping a watchful eye on the young people.

“I’m going to change,” Harry called to his cohorts, receiving a wave in return as he retrieved his cast-off clothing and walked toward the stairway. He’d left his bicycle on the bridge and as he pulled on his damp shirt scratchy now with sand, he refused the inclination to glance up toward the tearoom or rather the windows he now knew were her private quarters. Instead he raced up the stairs and mounted the bicycle then pedaled past Nola’s place as if some demon were chasing him.

Nola was halfway back down the stairs to the beach when she remembered that she’d left Starbuck’s hat on the kitchen table after going home to get more spoons for scooping the ice cream. She could picture it lying there, its honey color in sharp contrast to the dark wood of the table. She had stood right in the middle of her kitchen staring at the thing and the way it seemed to dominate the room in exactly the same way that Harry Starbuck dominated any room he entered. How could she have forgotten it?

She considered going back for it, but then she saw Judy trying to haul a heavy block of ice by herself and decided Starbuck—and his hat—could wait until tomorrow. After all, by the time the clambake was ready the sun would be setting and the shadows would lengthen. He wouldn’t need his hat at all. She’d send it along with one of the actors when they went to rehearsal the following day.

“Judy, put that down,” she called as she hurried toward the stand. “Where are Jasper and Billy?”

“I moved blocks of ice long before those two showed up,” Judy fumed, but she set the block of ice down and took a moment to steady her rapid breathing. “You look nice,” she said, eyeing Nola from head to toe.

“I look exactly the same as I did before I went to get the spoons.” Nola was reluctant to admit, even to herself, that she had taken a moment to repin her hair before heading back down to the beach. She thought about explaining that Harry’s hat had caught on several of her hairpins when she removed it. Either she had to put her hair up properly or have it falling down in the midst of serving the ice cream.

“You did your hair up different,” Judy observed. “Looks nice. Better than Starbuck’s hat.”

Nola couldn’t be sure but she thought she heard Judy chuckle as the older woman walked away and scanned the beach for her helpers.

By the time Harry cleaned up and returned to the clambake, the beach was already filled with locals and tourists who had looked forward to the event for weeks. The area was so crowded that it was easy to avoid Nola as he joined the other men to prepare for the closing of the bake. Someone handed him a pitchfork and he worked in tandem with a partner to clear his area of the pit that ran fifteen feet in length, three feet across and two feet deep. Carefully they lifted out the charred and glowing remains of each log to reveal the stones, now white-hot. Trading pitchforks for brooms, the men swept away debris and ash from the stones.

Next the men guided the boys as they gently deposited bushels of clean, damp clams onto the rocks. The sizzle and rise of steam tickled Harry’s nose and brought back memories of other clambakes, times when he and his
buddies had been the ones responsible for making sure the clam shells did not break or crack as they were deposited onto the rocks.

Home
, the sizzling clams seemed to whisper.

Next came a layer of lobsters followed by a layer of corn and then pans of spiced dressing were emptied over the length and width of the large pit. Harry laughed with the others as the girls squealed in dismay over the dying wriggles of the large lobsters. Finally the pile was lined with long baskets layered with tripe and bluefish and potato sacks. The last act in the ritual of preparing the bake was to cover the huge steaming mass with a large canvas soaked in seawater and then cover that with masses of the wet and tangled rockweed until every crevice through which steam might escape was sealed.

“Half an hour till chow time,” one of the men bellowed and the crowd cheered, then returned to whatever activity had caught their fancy. There were games and races for the youngsters as well as impromptu sing-alongs for the adults. But most people preferred to simply chat with their neighbors or help prepare the tables for the feast. It was there that he spotted Nola.

She was laughing and he thought it might actually be the first time he had seen her so completely open to the moment. Usually she always seemed to be examining the words of others for some underlying trap. But it was obvious that she and Ellie had developed the kind of trust where each accepted the other without reservation.

He turned away and then back again, his feet seeming to have a mind of their own as he made his way through the crowds of people toward her. She looked beautiful; something about the way she’d arranged her hair in a looser style held the promise that it might easily escape the usual pins
and combs and cascade down her back. Harry sauntered in her direction, taking care that he appear simply to have wandered by.

You’re acting like some lovestruck teenager.

Struck by that thought, he paused and considered veering off in another direction.

“Harry! Over here,” Ellie called. “Come, make yourself useful.” She held up a roll of oilcloth that the women were using to cover the long tables.

Harry risked a glance at Nola but she had turned away and was walking back toward the ice cream stand with Judy.