Under the Boardwalk: A Dazzling Collection of All New Summertime Love Stories (62 page)

"Mr. Noble," the pretty young desk clerk called to him as they entered the lobby. "A Mr. Dawson has been trying to get in touch with you all day. He said it's urgent that you call him as soon as possible."

'Thank you," he said, then turned to Jody and frowned. "I wonder what that's about. I better stop back at my room and call him."

"I'll go on to my room and change. I'll meet you out by the pool and we can take that walk."

"Okay," Jeremy nodded tersely, already contemplating any number of possible emergencies as he headed up the steps. "I'll see you in a few minutes."

A few minutes turned out to be closer to thirty. Jody was just beginning to think that perhaps she should call Jeremy's room when she looked up and saw him making his way around the pool. In his right hand was his suitcase, in his left, the bag from the shop on the boardwalk where he'd bought T.J.'s tacky gifts.

"Jody, I'm really sorry. I have to leave." His jaw was tight and his eyes guarded.

"Leave?" she repeated.

"There's a case I worked on… something has come up. Sometimes things come up and… I'm sorry, I can't go into detail, but I have to go
now
." He dropped his bag on the ground and took her into his arms and kissed her.

She stood on her tiptoes and drank him in, savored the curve of his mouth and the taste of his lips.

"I'll call you when it's done." He skimmed the side of her face with his thumb.

"What do you mean, when it's…"

He kissed her again. "I'm sorry, Jody. I can't tell you anything else. I have to go. I promise I'll be in touch as soon as I can."

And in less than the blink of an eye, he was gone.

"Well." She took a deep breath, still trying to understand exactly what had just happened. "That was short and sweet."

Folding her arms across her chest, she stood at the top of the steps leading down to the sand. Only a few souls remained on the beach, and those were now shaking out their towels and blankets and gathering their belongings, heading for the boardwalk, hoping to keep ahead of the tain. Fat plop of water began to pelt the ground, lightning cracked across the ocean, and thunder rattled the sky. Feeling defeated by even the weather, Jody turned back to the hotel and returned to her room.

Dressed in a wide-brimmed hat to shelter her face from the sun, Jody walked the beach close to the wrack line early the next morning. She'd barely slept the night before, wondering if her days with Jeremy had really happened at all. He'd left so unexpectedly, with so little explanation, that she almost felt as if she'd been struck. What could have been so important that he'd leave at the drop of a hat?

Was there really an important job that he needed to tend to?

Maybe he'd just been overwhelmed by his trip back into the Pines and didn't know how to handle it Maybe whatever it was that had been happening between Jody and him seemed, well,
insignificant
in comparison to standing in the spot where his family had died.

Maybe he just wanted to be alone.

Jody kicked a piece of driftwood and tried to roll a clamshell with her toes. Finding a dry spot on the sand, she sat down and viewed the wreckage left on the sand by the storm the night before.
The beach looks the way I feel
, she sighed,
tossed and confused and devastated
.

Overhead a hot-air balloon drifted, and Jody closed her eyes, remembering how it had felt to ride the wind in an oversized basket, wrapped in Jeremy's arms, and to gaze down on the early morning sea.

Maybe some breakfast
, she thought, having forgone dinner the night before. After Jeremy left, so had her appetite. She wandered into a small luncheonette on the boardwalk and surveyed the menu, but nothing seemed to appeal. After ordering a coffee to go, she bought a newspaper and took bom in search of an outside table where she could sit and read and stare at the beach; Twenty minutes later, the cardboard coffee cup empty and the paper having been scanned, she dumped both into a nearby receptacle and strolled aimlessly down the boards. She stopped at a newsstand and perused the new paperbacks, but nothing seemed to entice her.

Next, she poked into a series of shops that were just opening for the day, thinking to find souvenirs for Laura and Ally, Laura's daughter, but everything looked the same. Sighing, she kept walking until she found herself at the end of the boardwalk. She followed wooden steps to a sidewalk that led to the main street and walked into town without noticing where she was going.

It was almost noon by the time Jody decided that Ocean Point, without Jeremy, was just another vacation spot, and a very lonely one, at that.

By two, Jody had seen everything there was to see in town. She'd walked to the park and watched young mothers push their little ones on the swings or wait at the bottom of slides to catch the toddlers when they reached the bottom. She'd walked past the house her family had rented, years before, and smiled at the little girl who sat on the front step trying to tie a baby bonnet onto the head of a cooperative dog. Reaching the bay, Jody had gone all the way to the end of the old fishing dock and stood, hands in her pockets, watching the charter boats return from their day at sea. Not knowing what else to do, she sat down on the weathered boards and took off her sandals and dangled her feet over the water. Barnacles grew on the piles of the dock, and if she looked closely enough, she might see a small school of tiny fish darting just under the surface of the water. She just didn't feel like looking for them. She didn't feel like doing much of anything, now that Jeremy was gone.

"I can't even sit in the sun," she grumbled as she rolled down the sleeves of her cotton shirt. "Not until this sunburn heals, anyway."

Jody stood up and slipped her feet back into her sandals. She didn't fish and she didn't crab. She couldn't lie on the beach or swim in the pool. She couldn't do much of anything down here that didn't make her miss

Jeremy. She might as well go back to Bishop's Cove. At least there she had work to do. People to talk to. Things to do.

Might as well, she concluded as she headed back toward the other side of town, thinking that at least she'd had a few good days here.

Who am I kidding? They were great days. Maybe the best days of my entire adult life. Jeremy Noble is the best man I've ever known, and even if I never see him again, I'll never forget…

Unthinkable
. She shook her head as she walked along, her pace quickening. That couldn't happen.
He said he d call, and he will He will
!

There had been too much between them in all too short a time, too much left to explore, too much left unsaid. When he was finished with whatever it was that had taken him away, he'd come back. And he'd know right where to find her.

Certain of it, Jody returned to the motel, packed her bags, and checked out.

"Mommy, will you take me for my dancing lesson now?" Ally, Laura's six-year-old daughter, flew into the kitchen through the back door.

"Is it time already?" Laura frowned.

"Yes. See"—the little girl pointed to the big clock over the stove—"the little hand is on the one, and the big hand is on the twelve."

"So it is, sweetie. Go get your dancing things and meet me out by the car."

Ally cheered and ran like a rabbit up the back steps of the inn.

Laura turned to Jody. "Do you need any help here?"

"No, I'm fine," Jody smiled absently. "Kevin will be here any minute now. He's been a big help. Hiring a couple of students for the summer was a great idea. I don't know why I resisted it for so long."

"Do you have everything you need for dinner? Any last-minute things I can pick up for you?"

Jody grinned, one of the first real smiles Laura had seen since Jody had arrived back at the inn from her vacation several weeks earlier. "I have everything under control, and you know that I always have everything I need before I start to cook."

"Just checking." Laura smiled back.

It was good to see Jody's good humor starting to return. She'd been far too somber when she'd arrived at the inn, several days before Laura had expected her. Jody had sported a wicked sunburn, but Laura couldn't help but think there was more behind Jody's listlessness than a few blisters. Other than to say that her reunion with her friends had been fine, Jody had barely responded to Laura's attempts to discuss it. Whatever had happened during Jody's stay at Ocean Point, it had left her distracted and saddened.

Just the night before, Laura had paused in the kitchen doorway and watched as Jody had chopped onions, constantly wiping her eyes on her sleeves. Somehow, Laura suspected that it was more than the onions that caused Jody's eyes to tear.

And of course, it would have something to do with Jeremy Noble.

That much had been clearly established when Laura asked if she had bumped into Jeremy and Jody had merely nodded in response and changed the subject. Something in her eyes had warned Laura not to pursue it, and so she had not. Still, Laura hated to see Jody so unhappy, and it encouraged her to see a bit of the old Jody flash in that brief smile.

"Mommy, I'm ready!" Ally hopped off the bottom step and, waving to Jody, bounced immediately out the back door.

"Have fun, Ally," Jody called over her shoulder as the screen door slammed.

"We'll be back well before dinner," Laura said as she searched her handbag for her car keys. "Kevin should be here soon."

"Okay." Jody nodded.

The kitchen fell silent except for the hum of the ceiling fan and the
chop chop chop
of Jody's knife as it ate its way through carrot after carrot. Jody welcomed the quiet, welcomed the solitude. She'd had so little to say to anyone over the past few weeks that it was a relief not to force conversation.

She'd stopped straining her ears to listen every time a phone rang and was answered, stopped thinking that
this
call would be for her. At a loss to understand why he had left so abruptly in the first place, how he could have forgotten her in three short weeks, Jody tried her best to convince herself to chalk it up as that summer fling she'd never had. It had seemed like so much more than that at the time, but, well, maybe that's how summer romances were. Maybe they all seemed like the real thing.

It was the real thing
, she protested.
It was
.

Well, she sighed, she'd wanted to be swept off her feet, just once in her life, and she had been that. Totally. Completely. Incredibly.

There had been a time when she thought that that would be enough. She had been wrong. One night with Jeremy had not been enough. A lifetime with Jeremy might not be enough…

Jody wiped weepy eyes on the short sleeve of her tee-shirt.

"Hey, Jody," Kevin swung the back door open, startling her. "Since when have we used frozen fish?"

"What?" She frowned.

"Frozen fish." Kevin went straight to the refrigerator, looking, no doubt, for a cold drink. "There's a guy outside, says he's got one hundred and twenty pounds of frozen tuna to deliver."

Jody froze in mid-chop.

"What did you say?"

"I said there's a guy outside with…"

"One hundred twenty pounds of frozen tuna," Jody whispered.

"Yeah."

"One hundred twenty pounds of frozen tuna," Jody repeated.

"Unun… Are you all right, Jody?" Kevin leaned tentatively toward her. Jody's eyes had taken on a strange sort of glow.

"One hundred twenty pounds of frozen tuna!" She ripped the apron off over her head and flew out the back door.

The Maxima was parked next to her old Buick, its trunk standing open and its owner leaning against the driver's door.

"You!" she yelled as she took the steps two at a time. "Where the hell have you been?"

Jeremy stepped forward and caught her in his arms as she hit the bottom step.

"I had a job to do."

"And I suppose there were no phones on this job?" She sought—half-heartedly—to disengage herself.

"No. There were none." He'd taken off his sunglasses, and gray eyes now bore into her own.

"Where were you that there were no phones? There are phones everywhere, Jeremy."

"Have you been watching the news these past few weeks?" he asked patiently, refusing to let her go.

Jody paused.

"Did you watch the news yesterday morning?"

"Yes…"

"What was the big story, yesterday morning?"

These past few weeks the news had been dominated by the kidnapping of a congressman's only son by the boy's mother, who had fled to the Canadian Rockies, taking the child with her. The story had had a happy ending just yesterday, when it was announced that the toddler had been found and returned to his anxious father by Canadian and American law enforcement officers. The rescue team had been led by two unidentified investigators hired by the family to track the child into the wilderness.

"You helped find that little boy," she said softly.

He nodded as he drew her closer. This time, she did not protest.

"I'm very sorry, Jody. I couldn't call. But I came as soon as I could."

"After a quick trip to Ocean Point," she noted, "to pick up your fish."

"Well, yes, but I wanted to drop off some aloe for Miz Tuesday."

"
Boughten
aloe?" Jody leaned back and stared up at him. "You took
boughten
aloe to Miz Tuesday?"

"I did."

"What did she think of it?"

"She appeared disdainful at first, but when I told her I'd return it, she wouldn't give it back."

"Was it easier, going back the second time?" Jody asked, watching his face.

"Maybe a bit." He nodded. "There's still a lot I have to work through."

I'll be there with you, every step of the way
, she wanted to say. Instead, she merely said, "I'm glad you stopped to see Miz Tuesday."

"So am I. She asked about you. I see the blisters are gone," Jeremy noted as he lowered his mouth to hers for one very satisfying, very long overdue kiss.

"I missed you, Jody. Every day." He kissed her again. "Every night."

"I missed you, too, Jeremy. I was beginning to think that maybe…"