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  “I don’t!” His accusation had shocked her. “I don’t pity you, Nick. God! If what you say is true—”

  “Why would I lie?” He gave her a shark-toothed grin. “Unless I’m just messing with you.”

  “No wonder you don’t have an easy time trusting anyone, is all I’m saying.” Bess let go of his hand to put hers on her hips. “But it’s not an excuse to be an asshole.”

  “I am an asshole,” he said, as if it were his astrological sign.

  “I don’t care,” Bess insisted.

  Nick shook his head. “You should.”

  “I don’t!” She laughed, suddenly, and tipped her face up to the night sky and the stars sprinkled there. “I don’t care if you’re an asshole, I don’t care what anyone says, okay? I don’t care!”

  Nick laughed, too, after a minute. “You’re out of your fucking head, you know that?”

  “I know it.” Bess leaped into his arms and covered his face with kisses, but it was all right, because Nick caught her. He caught and held her and they both twirled around until he lost his balance and they fell in a tangle of arms and legs onto the sand. “I’m out of my fucking head, Nick.”

  For you.

  She didn’t say it aloud, but not because she didn’t trust him. Because she wanted him to trust her, and something like that couldn’t be forced. It would come or not come.

  He kissed her, rolling, and she didn’t care about the sand in her hair or in her clothes. She kissed him back and held him close, and they laughed as they looked up at the stars.

  “Orion.” Nick pointed. “That’s the only one I know.”

  “The Big Dipper.” Bess scanned the sky, then pointed. “And the little one. You know what the best part of the stars is?”

  “What’s that?”

  She rolled on her side to face him, and he did the same. Nick reached to tuck her hair behind her ears. Bess took the chance to kiss him again, just because she could.

  “They’re the same no matter what sky you’re standing under. I mean…yeah, they might move or look like they’re in a different place, but they’re the same stars.”

  Nick tilted his head to look up. “Yeah? So?”

  “So even if you’re apart from someone you want to be with, you can look up at the stars and know they’re looking at the same ones.”

  Nick blinked and gazed at her, his face solemn. The bonfire had died down and the moon was no more than a fingernail, so not all of his features were clear, but Bess didn’t need to see every line of his face to picture it.

  “That is such a bunch of romantic crap,” he said, but laughed and pulled her closer when she tried to pinch him.

  “There’s nothing wrong with romantic crap every once in a while,” she retorted.

  Nick buried his face in her hair and breathed deep. “Your hair smells good. I can smell you on my pillow when you’re not there. When I’m not with you, I can’t stop thinking about how good your hair smells.”

  A spate of shivers tickled her, but he wasn’t finished.

  “I think about you when I hear songs on the radio, too.”

  Bess burrowed into his arms, her face against his chest. Under them, the sand was chilly, and above them, the ocean breeze, but in Nick’s arms she wasn’t cold. He squeezed her.

  “And fine, now I’ll think about you when I look at the stars, too. Are you happy?”

  She pulled away to look at him. “Yes.”

  “Jesus. Girls,” he said in a disgusted voice.

  “Boys,” she said with a roll of her eyes.

  He kissed her until she couldn’t breathe. “It’s getting late. You’d better go home. I’ve got to work early tomorrow.”

  “Me, too.” They climbed to their feet.

  He walked her back to her house, stopping to pick up the plundered six-pack along the way. At her door he set down the beer and tied the bandanna around her hair. He kissed her, pressing up against the stucco wall, his hand going easily beneath her knee to lift it so he could move against her.

  “Go inside,” Nick whispered hoarsely into her ear. “Before we do it again, right here. We already took a stupid chance tonight.”

  So he had been thinking of it, too. “I know.”

  He let her go. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Nick!” she called after him.

  He topped and turned.

  “You can trust me,” Bess told him. “I mean it.”

  He came back to her. She thought he meant to kiss her, and had already tilted her mouth for it, but Nick instead just looked.

  “Everyone says that, Bess.”

  “I know,” she told him without lowering her mouth, still tempting him to touch it with his. “But I mean it.”

  He kissed her then, soft and slow instead of hard and fast.

  “I believe you,” he said, and left without looking back.

  It wasn’t until she was in her bed, showered and dressed in warm pajamas, that Bess allowed herself to wonder what he believed. That he could trust her? Or just that she meant it?

  And did it matter, in the end?

  CHAPTER 33

  Now

  Vacations, when the boys were small, had been less than relaxing. Andy was fond of “big” trips to places like the Bahamas, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park. Even when Connor and Robbie were too young to appreciate the nuances of beauty in the places they visited, Andy had insisted that if he was going to take a trip, he wanted to go somewhere he’d never been. By the time the boys reached high school, the yearly vacations had ended. Andy had apparently decided the sights he hadn’t seen weren’t worth the effort to share with teenage sons who didn’t appreciate them any more than they had as children, but who were more vociferous about their lack of desire to go. He and Bess had gone on exactly one couples vacation, to an all-inclusive resort in Mexico. She’d gotten badly sunburned and he’d come down with food poisoning.

  Neither of them had ever really talked about their reasons for not taking advantage of the beach house Bess’s parents had finally inherited from her dad’s parents. Andy, in fact, never spoke about the beach house at all, not even when Bess’s parents died within a few months of one another and the house officially passed to her. Bess hadn’t brought it up, either, though upon discovering it, both Connor and Robbie were more excited about it than they had ever been about Mount Rushmore.

  Though they’d been to many different beaches in their lives, now both of Bess’s sons took to the Atlantic water as if born to it. Within three weeks of arriving both had picked up as many work hours as they could, but when they weren’t at work or asleep, Connor and Robbie spent their days toasting themselves on the sand. They met girls, of course, and Bess had expected no less. Both her sons had always been popular with the girls. They made friends and brought them home to hang out on the deck, eating the burgers she bought for them to grill. The beach house had become “the” place to hang out among the local crowd of young people working there for the summer.

  Bess didn’t mind, exactly. It had been the same at home, where their house was the place for all the neighborhood kids to play. She was the Popsicle mom, the one who kept a drawer full of spare toothbrushes for impromptu sleepovers. She’d always been the mom the kids could count on to pop corn and order pizza during monster movie marathons, and to give anyone a ride home who needed it.

  She didn’t speak of the relief it brought her to see Connor and Robbie recreating here the life they’d had at home. It was the surest sign, to her, that they were going to be all right, despite the upheaval she and Andy were putting them through.

  The drawback to hosting the town’s youth was, of course, the complete lack of privacy. So far neither Connor nor Robbie seemed to have noticed Nick never really left the house or the small patch of beach in front of it. Caught up in their own jobs and new friends, they didn’t pay much attention to him. Bess, however, was constantly aware of Nick’s presence as more part of the crowd than she was. He joined the boys occasionally for a