Hannah eyed Meghan speculatively as she came into the sugar shack, her face still flushed, her blood still heated. Goodness, but Quinn Freeman could kiss. And other things. The man was a fast mover, no question. She’d barely had time to register his mouth on hers before his hands had been all over her. And they had felt good.
“So, lunch?” Meghan asked brightly. Hannah was stirring the stew set over the woodstove and Polly was sitting on the dirt-packed floor, singing softly to Daisy who had resigned herself to her lap.
Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “How many trees have you guys tapped?”
“Um, one?”
“One?”
“We’re new to this.”
“You’re a local—”
“We didn’t do syrup when I was growing up,” Meghan answered with a defensive shrug. She felt as if Quinn’s brand was on her, a blazing signal of what she’d been up to.
“Sam’s probably tapped twenty,” Hannah said, her hands on her hips.
“Like I said, we’re new to this. Be happy for the help. Not,” she couldn’t keep from adding, “that you invited me here to help.”
Hannah looked at her, innocence personified. “Why do you think I invited you?”
Meghan just rolled her eyes. Hannah gave her an abashed grin. “Come on, he’s cute.”
“Cute? Cute? Quinn Freeman is not cute, Hannah.”
Hannah’s eyes lit up with mischief. “Sexy, then.”
“Who’s sexy?” Sam’s voice rumbled from the doorway and both women stiffened, eyes wide in surprise as they stared at each other.
“You, of course,” Hannah said swiftly, but Meghan could tell Sam wasn’t fooled. She busied herself retrieving paper plates and napkins, and hoped Quinn was making himself useful, drilling holes far away. God help her if he heard the word sexy. He’d have no problem knowing whom they were talking about.
Hannah gave Sam a quick, placating kiss, and being a man who knew his priorities, he dropped the question and returned the kiss. Meghan kept her eyes on the plates.
Polly looked up from playing with Daisy, her eyes widening as she took in Sam and Hannah. “Ew,” she said with deep disgust, and they broke apart, laughing.
“Sorry, Polly,” Hannah said with a little smile. “Too much PDA.”
Polly wrinkled her nose. “What’s PDA?”
“Public displays of affection,” Hannah explained.
“Do you mean sex?” Polly asked in her blunt way, and Meghan winced.
“Polly...”
“Yes, that’s what we mean,” Sam answered easily enough. “But not in the sugar shack with people present.”
Polly nodded in understanding. “That’s not appropriate behavior,” she said, a sentence that Meghan had drilled into her long ago. She was used to her sister’s bluntness, but the talk of sex with the memory of Quinn’s hands on her body made her break out in an all-over prickly flush.
“I’m going out to tap a few more trees,” Sam said. “Call me for lunch?”
“Will do,” Hannah promised, and after scooping up a handful of spiles, Sam disappeared outside. Hannah raised her eyebrows at Meghan. “So what was that about?”
“What was what about?”
“You’re the color of a cherry tomato.”
“It’s cold outside.”
“Meghan. Seriously. Is something going on between... you know?”
Meghan shot a pointed look at her sister. “Not right now, Hannah.”
Hannah grinned in delight. “So something is!”
“No. I mean... no.” She shook her head, the tingling excitement that had been coursing through her since Quinn’s kiss starting to trickle away. “I don’t know.”
“That’s different than a straight no.”
Daisy scampered off Polly’s lap and Polly got up to follow the dog outside. “Stay by the sugar shack, Poll,” Meghan called, and Polly turned to give her an indignant look.
“I’m not a baby.”
“I know.” With a defeated sigh, Meghan slumped into the shack’s one chair. Now there was nothing to keep Hannah from giving her a grilling. Sure enough, Polly had barely made it through the doorway before Hannah turned on her.
“So something is going on between you and Quinn?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
Meghan lifted her head to pin her friend with a pointed look. “Why are you so curious?”
“Because I’m happy and I want the people around me to be happy.”
“And you think I can be happy with Quinn?” Meghan heard the disbelief in her voice, and so did Hannah, because she gave her a questioning look.
“I don’t know the guy well enough to say that definitively, but he seems nice and he’s certainly easy on the eyes. Why not have a little fun?”
“Now you’re sounding like him.”
“Oh, I am, am I?” Hannah looked intrigued.
Meghan decided to ’fess up. Her friend was going to drag the truth from her eventually anyway. “He asked me to have a—well, a one-night stand, I guess.” She made a face and Hannah raised her eyebrows.
“You turned him down, I take it?”
“Yes—but that was before he came back.”
“Things have changed?”
Yes, because he kissed me and my lips are still tingling. “I don’t know,” Meghan said slowly. “Maybe.”
Hannah turned to the stove to stir the stew thoughtfully. “Well, you know Sam and I started out as a one-night stand.”
“TMI, Hannah.”
“That is not TMI. I’m just saying, there are worse things.”
“So you, a happily married woman, are advocating for me to have no-strings sex with a stranger? Shall I tell that to your children one day?”
Hannah laughed, the sound both wry and uncertain. “Please don’t. I don’t know, Meghan. To be honest, I wouldn’t normally suggest such a thing. I’m definitely more of a relationship kind of girl, but...”
“But?” Meghan prompted when Hannah, her expression clouded, seemed reluctant to go on.
“But I think you deserve a little happiness,” Hannah said quietly. “You’ve had some tough breaks. Why not snatch a little pleasure while you can? And he is hot.”
“Yes, he is.” Meghan schooled her expression into one of pleasant neutrality. She didn’t want Hannah to see how deep her words cut. Snatch a little pleasure. The implication being, naturally, that a little pleasure was all that she could get. But maybe Hannah was talking sense. Why hold out for something that might never happen?
“Let me ask you this,” Hannah said. “What’s keeping you from it, really?”
Meghan thought of the reasons she’d given Quinn. Because he was a Freeman and the last thing she wanted was the town talking about her. Again. They’d talked when her mom had left for Arizona, and when her dad had gone into rehab. They talked about Polly all the time, none of it mean-spirited, most of it sympathetic. But still, talk. The subject of pity or judgment, it didn’t matter which. Meghan didn’t like either.
“I don’t want to be gossiped about,” she told Hannah.
“Sweetie, you can live your life like a nun and you’re still going to be gossiped about. That’s just Creighton Falls. Nobody means it maliciously. They just care.”
“I know, but...” Meghan sighed. It wasn’t the gossip that was keeping her from leaping off that ledge with Quinn. It was something else, something more and yet less definable. “There’s Polly to consider,” she said.
Hannah’s mouth twitched. “Polly seems like she knows the facts of life.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t really understand about relationships. If Quinn became important to her and then left, it would be hard.”
“So don’t let him become important to her. We’re talking a fling, not a commitment, right?”
“That’s exactly right.”
“Maybe,” Hannah suggested quietly, “it’s not Polly you’re worried about, but yourself.”
Meghan’s head jerked up at that. “What do you mean?”
“That’s how it was for me and Sam. I cared about too much, too quickly. It felt unreasonable and yet also right.”
Meghan shook her head. “I don’t care about Quinn,” she said stiffly.
Hannah grinned. “Perfect, then you can have a fling.”
Hannah’s words were still rattling around in Meghan’s brain as she drove home that evening, Polly humming happily to herself in the passenger’s seat.
It had been a pleasant afternoon, all told, a fun afternoon. Quinn had come in for lunch having drilled a respectable twenty-five trees; he’d shaken his head when he’d learned Sam had done double that.
“You’ll learn,” Sam had said as he clapped him on the shoulder. Quinn had smiled and then pretended to rub his arm as if Sam had hurt him; Meghan had wondered just when Quinn would learn. Everyone knew he wasn’t sticking around.
They’d eaten lunch outside, sitting on old tree stumps that Sam intended to split into firewood, paper plates of beef stew on their laps. Quinn had seemed totally at ease, and Meghan wondered how he could seem so relaxed in such an unfamiliar setting; he belonged on a yacht or the ski slopes of Switzerland, not slumming it in the backwoods of upstate New York.
And why wasn’t he as affected by their kiss as she was? He’d looked completely relaxed while all afternoon her nerve endings had been feeling as if they were scraped raw. It was a painful feeling, but it made you feel alive.
Just like Quinn’s kiss had.
Her hands tightened on the wheel as she remembered that kiss in exquisite detail, as she’d been doing all afternoon. Every time she looked at him, every time he spoke, a shiver of longing had run through her. She’d thought of what Hannah had said, how simple she’d made it seem. Why not grab some happiness? Having a fling with Quinn didn’t preclude finding something bigger and better later. It didn’t have to be selling out.
And it could feel so very good.
As for her worries about town gossip and the fact that he was a Freeman... Meghan sighed. It was a concern, yes, but the town was going to talk no matter what she did. She might as well have some fun while they were at it.
“Can I have a cheese and pickle sandwich when we get home?” Polly asked, leaning forward in her seat.
“Yes, Poll.”
“And a Coke?”
Meghan gave her sister a quick smile. “Yes, Poll.”
“And watch Amazing Wedding Cakes?”
“Yes.”
Polly let out a sigh of contentment and leaned back against the seat. Meghan wished she could be as easily satisfied as her sister.
A couple of hours later Polly was settled in bed and Meghan was prowling the house, restless and uneasy. And burning, because that brief, hot kiss had lit her up inside like a firework, and it wasn’t going out anytime soon.
With a gusty sigh Meghan slumped onto the sofa and stared at the blank screen of the TV.
The phone rang, and hope leaped inside her even though she knew Quinn didn’t know her phone number. But he could have found out...
“Hello?”
“Hey, pumpkin.”
The sound of her father’s jovial voice, as always, made Meghan feel a tangle of sorrow and hope. “Hey, Dad.”
“I thought maybe you could stop by sometime? It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?”
“Yes...” She and Polly visited their dad the last Sunday of every month. Meghan unloaded four weeks’ worth of food into his freezer and left written instructions about how to reheat the meals-for-one. Then she deep cleaned the bathroom, changed the grimy sheets on his bed, and did a vacuum round the tiny living room. After about two hours Kevin O’Reilly was always at the end of his resources when it came to dealing with Polly, and so they left, another month gone by.
“We’re coming tomorrow, Dad,” Meghan said. “Like we always do, remember?”
“Oh.” Her father sounded as if this was a change in plans. “Right.”
“I’ll bring some meals.”
“You don’t have to...” Her father trailed off half-heartedly, and Meghan didn’t bother replying. She always brought meals. If she didn’t, her father would live on beer and cold cereal, or forget to eat at all.
“Maybe we can go to a game sometime,” her father suggested. “The Watertown Bucks are starting preseason...”
“Are they?” Meghan kept her tone noncommittal. Her father was often suggesting they do things together; he never followed through.
“You both all right, though?” Meghan heard a thread of desperation, of loneliness, in his voice now that made her close her eyes.
“Yeah, Dad, we’re all right.”
“And Polly—”
“She’s fine.”
Her father sighed, a long, low release of breath that could have meant anything. Satisfaction, sadness, disappointment, regret. Meghan had never been able to tell how much her father felt, whether he regretted ambling away from them both when they’d needed him most.
“Okay, then,” he finally said. “See you Saturday.”
“See you Saturday,” Meghan echoed, and then she hung up the phone.
She sat there for a few more minutes, staring into space, when a knock sounded on the door. A light yet purposeful knock, three brief, hard taps. And Meghan knew bone-deep who it was.
A smile was already spreading across her face as she walked to the door, her whole body starting to tingle. She put her hand on the knob of the front door, the metal cool under the heat of her palm. She waited a few seconds, deliberating whether she wanted to do this. Then she realized there was no question, and she opened the door and stared straight into Quinn’s smiling face.