They got along too well, she thought, both pleased and disconsolate. Pleased because she liked getting along well with people, especially smart, handsome men, and very especially someone whose intervention had helped keep kept her career from plummeting off a cliff. Disconsolate because Caleb had agreed to let her treat him to dinner only to settle a debt.
She was settling that debt in a rather unorthodox way, though. If all he’d wanted was payment for getting rid of her citation, he could have sent her a bill. His explanation about not wanting to run her case past his partners… She supposed that was plausible. But he was a lawyer. He’d voided a ticket for her and refused to bill her. Her father and brother billed their clients in fifteen-minute increments. They were not above accepting a free meal—in fact, they were both wined and dined by their wealthy clients quite often. But being wined and dined was never a substitute for being paid in cold, hard cash.
The seafood platter before her was delicious, but a larger portion than she could handle. Her mother would probably scold her for requesting a bag to take home the luscious-looking shrimp still sitting on her plate—the Benoit matriarch considered requesting a take-home bag gauche in the extreme—but among the things that made Meredith the family rebel, along with moving north and reaching her thirtieth birthday without a diamond solitaire on her ring finger, was that she thought taking home what she couldn’t finish from a restaurant meal was more sensible than letting food go to waste. Caleb had polished off everything on his plate except for a few lonely lettuce leaves, but she couldn’t offer him her shrimp. That would be too…familiar.
She asked him if he wanted dessert, but he patted his flat tummy and shook his head. “I’m stuffed. That was great.”
“It was.” She handed the waitress her credit card and decided that, take-home bag notwithstanding, her mother wouldn’t fault her too much for her behavior over dinner. She’d conducted herself demurely. She and Caleb had exchanged pleasant chitchat about his affinity for ocean beaches, a recent client he’d successfully defended against an erroneous drug charge, and his courage—or perhaps recklessness—in remaining a Yankees fan while living in Red Sox territory. She’d refrained from questioning him about anything personal. Was he married? Attached? Divorced like so many of her neighbors in Brogan Heights? If he was divorced, was there a good reason, as there was with the neighbors she’d dated?
She hadn’t asked. She couldn’t. Bill or no bill, he was her lawyer. She was his client. And rebel or not, she’d been raised to know where the line lay between polite conversation and prying.
The waitress returned with her charge slip and her shrimp in a small container. Meredith added a generous tip, and she and Caleb left the restaurant.
The sky still held a bit of daylight. June evenings stayed light so late—much later here than in Georgia, she’d learned, just as she’d learned that during the winter months, darkness arrived earlier in Massachusetts than in Georgia.
“It’s finally cooled off a little,” Caleb said. He had his jacket clutched in his hand. Meredith stifled the urge to shake it out and drape it neatly over his arm so it wouldn’t get wrinkled. “Want to take a walk down the dock?”
She shouldn’t want to, but she did. As Caleb had noted, the day had finally lost its scorching heat, and the breeze rising off the water felt refreshing. Given how full she felt, she could use a stroll before returning to her car.
They ambled side by side down the concrete pier, Caleb holding his jacket, Meredith her leftover shrimp. Between two docked fishing boats, he paused and peered north, where a beach stretched out along the water’s edge, the sand pale and undulating, a day’s worth of wind and footprints molding gentle ripples into its surface. “Was that where your incident occurred?” he asked.
“A little further north,” she told him. Brogan’s Point’s public beach stretched on and on, abutted by a stone and concrete sea wall. Further away from the fishing wharves, the sand was paler, more pristine. In the very far distance, she could just barely make out a collection of smaller docks protruding into the water, a marina where private boats were tethered, luxury cruisers and sailboats. The beaches around the marina were private; the northern end of Brogan’s Point was an enclave of mansions. People who lived there didn’t need to mingle with the riffraff on the town beach. They didn’t have to risk being exposed to the naked bosom of a harassed local school teacher.
She wondered if Caleb lived in the northern end of town. He was a lawyer, after all, and she supposed most of his clients didn’t pay him with Lobster Shack meals. He might have a wife waiting for him in one of those mansions. He might—
“I know it was humiliating for you,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have minded being on the beach that day. You must have put on quite a show.”
She shot him a sharp look. He was grinning mischievously.
His smile turned sheepish. “Out of line,” he apologized, holding up his hands as if to ward off a slap. “I’m sorry.”
She felt her shoulders relax. The breeze rising off the ocean cooled her cheeks. “My audience was unfortunately large. You would have been just one more gawker.”
“I wouldn’t have gawked,” he said. His voice was softer, almost tender. “I would have tossed you a towel—before Sulkowski did. I would have kept you from getting that stupid citation in the first place.”
“My hero,” she said, her tone swoony enough for him to understand she was being sarcastic.
He was still smiling. “I’m going to be out of line again,” he warned, “but you’re…” His smile faded and he turned away, staring out at the darkening horizon. “Never mind.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “Way out of line.”
A wave of heat swelled inside her, one that had nothing to do with the mild evening air. Burning in her heart. Tearing her apart.
Why did that song suddenly start spinning through her mind? Why did her heart start pounding in the song’s driving rhythm? Why did her cheeks warm again, not from embarrassment but from yearning?
A yearning for Caleb. Her lawyer. With a possible wife in a mansion on the north end of town.
Way out of line, indeed.
She gazed at his back, the contours of his broad shoulders beneath his shirt, the sleek lines of his torso, his narrow hips. His free hand was barely an inch from her free hand. She fell back a step, then forced her eyes toward the restaurant, the solid ground beyond it, the asphalt of the small parking lot. Which car was his? What kind of car did his wife drive?
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Whether or not he was married was irrelevant. He’d made a silly, flirty comment about the show she’d put on when she’d run topless down the beach, and he’d apologized for it. He was a man. Most men were hung up on women’s breasts. Heterosexual men, anyway. All she could conclude from the past couple of minutes was that Caleb was heterosexual.
That, and the fact that that song she’d heard at the Faulk Street Tavern yesterday was still thundering through her head. Tearing her apart.
“I should get home,” she said, her voice harsher than she’d intended. She needed to jolt herself out of the wistfulness that had overtaken her, her wholly inappropriate awareness of Caleb’s sex appeal. When he turned back to her, she forced a lame smile. “I have a stack of student essays to grade.”
“You’re making your students write essays this close to the end of the school year?”
“I’m a sadist,” she said. Her smile felt a little less forced.
“Yeah, I can tell. That steely look of yours has me quaking in my boots.” He had dimples. She wished she hadn’t noticed that.
Her gaze dropped to his free hand, and then to hers, their fingers so close a twitch would have them touching. She shifted her leftovers from her other hand. Better to keep those fingers occupied with a container of shrimp.
She started walking up the wharf toward the parking lot, and he fell into step beside her. The wind caught in her hair, blowing a few strands into her face. It tangled his hair, too. His hair was a chestnut brown, long enough for a woman to twine her fingers through. She wished she hadn’t noticed that, either.
What had happened to make her so painfully aware of him? They’d eaten dinner, that was all—eaten dinner and exchanged idle chatter. They’d talked about the song from the jukebox in the tavern yesterday, and that should have qualified as idle chatter, too. But for some reason, it didn’t. Simply thinking about it had skewed things. It had cast everything in a different light, as if a tinted lens had been placed between her and the world.
Heat Wave. The evening had cooled down. Yet by the time they’d reached the lot, Meredith felt ridiculously warm. Caleb stayed with her as she strolled to her Prius. He stood patiently as she unlocked the door and swung it open. Then he spoke. “Thanks for dinner. It was delicious.”
“I’ve never had a bad meal at the Lobster Shack,” she said.
They faced each other, the heat of her car’s interior spilling out into the evening and augmenting the heat she felt inside her. She was tall, but Caleb was taller. Tall and lean, his features sharp, his dark eyes intense as he met her gaze. “The company wasn’t so bad, either,” he said.
As compliments went, that was pretty mild. Yet her body temperature seemed to spike another few degrees. “Well. I’m still willing to pay you a fee, if you’d send me a bill.”
“I think we’re all squared away,” he assured her.
“Most lawyers would prefer payment.”
“I’m not most lawyers.”
Was his face really so close to hers? His mouth so near? Was it his breath she felt on her cheek, or just a wisp of wind sweeping off the water?
Whatever she might be thinking, or bracing herself for, fearing or hoping for, didn’t happen. He thrust his right hand out to her for a shake. “Thanks again.”
A handshake. Right. That was the way an attorney and his client parted ways. She slipped her hand in his and told herself she was just imagining that he squeezed hers slightly as they shook. Then he grinned—those dimples again—nodded, pivoted on his heel and strode across the lot to a shiny black Audi.
She slid behind the wheel of her car, closed the door, and started the engine. Through the windshield, she watched Caleb climb into his sporty car, rev the engine, and peel out of the lot. She remained where she was, waiting for the air conditioner to kick in. It hissed, it sighed, but it didn’t cool her down.