The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge (50 page)

He’d told Paige that Dallas had always been pretty, but pretty didn’t tell the whole story. Her physical beauty was one thing, and yes, she’d had that for as long as he could remember. When he looked at photos of her when she was in her teens, he could see the beautiful woman she’d one day become. But there was something more there, something he’d never been able to define. Charisma didn’t quite say it, though that certainly was a factor. It was something more fundamental, something that even as a teenager he’d felt, something that pulled him to her like the moon pulled the tide. Back then, he’d believed that it was fate, pulling them together, making them inevitable for then and for forever.

Until, of course, that last summer, when she’d come late to St. Dennis and stayed only two weeks because she had summer theater back in New Jersey and needed to get home in time to audition for the female lead in
Romeo and Juliet
. That had not been the first he’d heard of her acting ambitions. Berry had run a summer theater group for the kids in town for years, and he’d joined to be with Dallas, even though he had no talent and she always won a leading role. But that summer—the summer she’d only stayed for two weeks—had been the first time he realized just how serious she was. He’d never felt he had a rival for her affection, had been confident he could ward off any guy who tried to come between them. But her love of acting had been something he hadn’t counted on, something he never had understood and probably never would. In the end, he’d had to admit it was something he’d never be able to compete with. He’d believed he was her first, her only love. Realizing he
was wrong had hurt more than anything else he’d ever experienced, and the hurt had lasted for a very long time. Even now, he couldn’t recall anything that had given him more pain than having to admit, at eighteen, that the girl he loved—the girl who’d sworn she’d always love him—was out of his life and wasn’t coming back.

It still stung to remember how it had all unraveled.

“What do you mean, you’re not staying for the summer?” he’d asked, shocked when she told him that she’d be leaving after two weeks.

“I have an audition,” she’d told him excitedly, “for a summer theater production. It’s for
Romeo and Juliet
, one of my favorite plays.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“I can hardly believe it myself. Me, playing Shakespeare.” Dallas had positively beamed. “Wish me luck, Grant.” She’d paused. “You do wish me luck, don’t you?”

“Sure,” he’d replied sourly. “About as much luck as I’m gonna have for the rest of the summer.”

“Oh, don’t be that way,” she’d pleaded. “It’s hard to explain how important this is to me. It’s what I want to do, not just this summer, but always. I want to be an actress, Grant. I want to make movies and be a star. A
for real
movie star.”

“Swell.” He’d rolled his eyes.

“Isn’t there anything you want more than anything else, Grant?” She’d grown very serious. “Isn’t there something that means more to you than anything else?”

“Yeah, and I’m looking at it.”

“I don’t mean a person, I mean something for yourself.”
She paused as if collecting her thoughts. “Something that frees you up inside to be yourself, that makes you know that’s what you were born to do.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t feel that way about anything except you.”

“You will someday,” she’d told him solemnly. “You’ll find something that you want to do forever, and you’ll be so good at it that you’ll know it’s meant to be.”

“I thought we were meant to be, Dallas.”

“Well, we are. But we have to do something with our lives. We have to have goals.”

His only goal that night had been to get her out of her shorts and her T-shirt, but he’d had the good sense to know that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“Isn’t there something you know inside you were born to do?” she’d asked.

“Yes,” he’d replied without hesitation. “I was born to love you, Dallas.”

“I love you, too,” she’d assured him. “I always will. And I’ll be back, I promise. And you can come for a week to visit. I already asked my mom, and she said it would be okay if it was okay with your mom.”

All these years later, Grant’s cheeks still burned when he recalled how that visit had turned out. The only week he could take off from his lifeguard job was smack in the middle of Dallas’s rehearsals for her play. He’d spent the entire week watching the guy who was playing opposite her smugly gloat as he monopolized her time. Grant had wanted nothing more than to beat the crap out of him. By the end of the week, he returned to St. Dennis knowing it was over,
even while he insisted to himself that it would never be over between them.

Maybe he’d been right, back then, if the way his heart had thumped and his pulse raced and his head swam when he first saw her in Scoop meant anything.

He wondered if any of it meant anything at all.

It was funny, but after she left that last summer, he’d told himself that he’d been wrong about her, about them. He’d rationalized that it had probably only been something sexual in nature that had bound them, and for years, that’s what he kept telling himself. But twenty minutes ago, he’d walked into Scoop, and there she was, and he’d felt it all over again. That
ping
to his heart, that
zap
to his nerves felt exactly the same as it had almost twenty years ago. He felt that same sense of having been bewitched that he’d felt the first time he’d met her. Back then, he’d looked into her eyes and had fallen hopelessly in love. There was no doubt in his mind that Dallas MacGregor could still in fact lead a man to distraction, that gazing into her eyes would be like looking too long at the sun.

And that, he warned himself, was something he needed to avoid.

Yeah, right. Let me know how that works for you
.

Grant tossed his empty ice-cream dish into the tall trash receptacle at the end of the path and headed back to the clinic for his afternoon appointments.

“So, Dallas.” Berry sat on one of the new Adirondack chairs. At her direction, the deliverymen had placed the chairs right at the edge of the lawn, where they could sit and look out at the Bay beyond the river’s mouth. “I think that went well today.”

“What went well?” Dallas sipped her after-dinner coffee and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Oh, wait. Is this going to be about running into Grant? Because if that’s what you’re wanting to talk about …”

“Why, Dallas, what makes you think I want to talk about Grant?” A mischievous glow danced in Berry’s eyes.

Dallas glared at her aunt.

“Though I was wondering if you were all right about seeing him.”

“Of course I was all right seeing him. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Other than the fact that my palms sweat every time I think about him. Or that I’ve been deliberately not thinking about him since we left Scoop
.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Berry shrugged. “Maybe because he was, at one time, the center of your life.”

“I was very young then,” Dallas said from between clenched teeth. “That was decades ago.”

“They say that your first love is the one you always compare others to,” Berry mused. “How did Emilio stack up?”

“Berry …,” Dallas warned.

“Oh, all right, dear. But you have to admit that he’s grown up awfully nicely. He was always a handsome boy, but my goodness, he’s grown into an exceptionally good-looking man.”

When Dallas fell silent, Berry prodded her. “Admit it, Dallas. You know you agree with me.”

“All right. Yes. Grant’s grown up to be a very handsome man. Are you happy?”

“Almost.”

“Berry, he’s a married man. And I would never, ever—”

“Not anymore.”

“What?”

“Didn’t I mention that he was divorced?”

“No, you did not.”

“I was sure I had …”

“I would have remembered.”

“Really?” Berry’s face brightened.

“As I would any of my old friends.”

Berry laughed at loud. Dallas chose to ignore her.

“That’s what you wanted to talk about?” Before Berry could respond, Dallas said, “Anything else you want to know?”

“I think that will do. For now.”

Out on the dock, Cody was doing one of his favorite things, lying on his stomach and gazing into the water, the bottoms of his bare feet white below his now-tanned legs.

“He’s having such a good time here,” Dallas noted. “He loves everything. Even the bats.” She smiled. “I can’t remember when I last saw him having so much fun.”

“He reminds me so much of Wade, when he was a little boy,” Berry reminisced. “Always around the water, always catching bugs and frogs and finding baby birds and such. I swear that boy lived for the summer.”

“We all did, back then.”

“Oh, yes, dear, even I looked forward to having you both here. I never scheduled work for the summers so I didn’t have to miss a day with the two of you. Of course, you both did keep growing older, and
once you became teenagers, you had other interests. But when you were little, you were both all mine.”

Dallas turned to Berry, whose face was beaming with memory.

“Remember the theater we had in the old barn?” Berry glanced at the empty space where their barn had once stood. “We’d put on a different play every month. None of them very good—I have to admit that after having watched your debut performance I’d have bet against you ever making it as an actor.”

“Rapunzel.” Dallas remembered. “Was I really that bad?”

“Dreadful, even considering your young age. I am happy to say that you’ve since redeemed yourself. And of course, by the time you were in high school, it was obvious that you were born to be a star.”

Dallas laughed. “I remember being onstage and completely forgetting my lines. I had such stage fright.”

“I’m glad you’ve managed to overcome it, dear.”

“Actually, I never have. I don’t like to perform live. A few years ago I was offered a role in a play that was to open on Broadway, but just the thought of it made my stomach churn.”

“Well, then, I suppose we’re lucky that you’ve found film more to your liking. I always did, too, though I had my share of stage triumphs,” Berry confided. “Once done, a stage performance is … well, it’s
done
. Gone forever. Unless of course it’s filmed, but then it’s no longer live. I prefer that my performances be available to the ages.”

“Mom! Aunt Berry! Look out at the Bay!” Cody
called excitedly. He was jumping up and down and pointing out toward the horizon, where a schooner was sailing across the water, driven by the wind in her sails. “Isn’t it cool? Isn’t it pretty?”

“It is, indeed, Cody,” Berry called back to him, and Dallas walked down to the water to watch with him.

“It’s a reprer … repo …” Cody looked up at his mother. “What’s the word?”

“Reproduction.”

“A
reproduction
of an old ship.” He pronounced each syllable carefully. “Berry told me about it, and at the library one day Mrs. Anderson read us a story about a schooner that used to sail right out there for real.”

“You’re really enjoying the story group at the library, aren’t you?” Dallas ruffled his hair. She knew one day he’d become an age when he’d no longer tolerate such displays by his mother, but for now, he accepted such gestures in the spirit in which they were made.

“It’s neat, Mom. Every day we read a new book and then we get to talk about it. I wish we had it in California.”

“They have children’s hours at the libraries there, too. We can sign you up when we go back.”

The joy drained from his face as quickly as water seeped from a sieve.

“It wouldn’t be the same. The kids wouldn’t be the same.” He turned his face, but not before she saw the look of disappointment.

“What’s different about them?” Dallas sat on the grass near where he stood.

“The kids here are nicer. They aren’t mean.”

“You mean about your dad?” she asked softly.

He nodded. “No one knows about that.”

“And you like that? That you’re sort of anonymous here?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that they know your name is Cody, but they don’t know that your dad makes movies and your mom acts in them.”

“Some of the kids know that you’re a movie star but no one seems to care much.” He paused. “Except Mrs. Anderson. She knows Aunt Berry, and she said she knew I was Cody and that I was your son. Berry asked her not to talk about it to the other kids, and she didn’t.”

“You said that some of the kids knew, though. How’d they know, if Mrs. Anderson didn’t tell them?”

Cody shrugged. “They just knew.”

“Is that okay with you?”

“Sure. It’s no big deal. The kids are more fun. Things are different here.”

“You said that and you gave one example, that they’re not mean about your dad.”

“They’re not mean about most things. Not when kids mess up when they’re reading or when you … when
some
kids don’t know stuff. And they don’t talk about their moms and dads all the time and where they go and what they do. They talk about other stuff. Fun stuff.”

“I see.”

The first lightning bug of the evening flashed at the end of the dock, and it caught Cody’s eye. He sped off
to catch it, the conversation apparently over as far as he was concerned.

“Careful,” Dallas called after him. She watched as he stalked the insect, which flew out over the water. Cody turned back to the grass and went on the hunt. Dallas returned to her chair and sat with a sigh.

“What was all that about?” Berry waved her hand to the place where Cody and Dallas had been chatting.

“Cody was talking about the story hour at the library.”

“Oh?” Berry sat up straight. “Is something wrong? He always seems to enjoy it so much.”

“He does. He loves it.”

“I thought he did. Well, he always says he’s having fun there. And he interacts with the other children nicely, and they all seem to like him. He seems as if he’s almost making friends.”

“Almost?” Dallas frowned.

“He seems to be holding back, as if he’s afraid to get to know any of the other children too well. It’s as if he’s afraid to make friends.” Berry paused again. “I overheard the little boy he sits with every day invite him to come to his house to play one day next week, but Cody immediately declined. When I asked him why, he said he doesn’t know if he’ll be here next week.”