Keeper of the Light

Olivia sat up and moved next to him, resting her chin on his shoulder, her hand on his back. “Maybe if you moved back in,” she said. “If we tried to build a life together again. Maybe then you could forget her.”

“It’s no use, and it wouldn’t be fair to you.”

“Let that be my choice. I’d like to try, Paul. It was so wonderful making love just now. That’s what we need to do to—” the word exorcize slipped into her mind “—to help you forget her.”

“It won’t work, Liv.” He pulled on his shorts and stood up, staring at the dark sound through the window. “When we made love just now, I couldn’t get into it until I imagined you were Annie.” He turned to face her. “Is that what you want?”

Her tears were immediate. She pulled the blanket around her to cover her nakedness. “What was so extraordinary about her?” she asked. “What did she have that I’m so horribly deficient in?”

“Shh, nothing.” He bent down, patronizing her with a quick hug. “Don’t cry, Liv. Please.”

She looked up at him. “Was it ever any good for you with me? Have you just been pretending it was good all these years so you didn’t hurt my feelings?” He had been her first and only lover, and although she’d been far past the age when most women first made love, she’d been terrified. Paul’s patient encouragement had made it easy for her, though. He’d fed her confidence with loving praise, tender compliments, and he’d told her, in the most flattering tone, that she had become an animal in bed. It relieved her to know she was capable of passion and desire when she’d long thought those emotions were impossible for her.

“Of course it was good,” he said. “This has nothing at all to do with sex.” He turned his head to the window, letting out a long sigh and rubbing his hands tiredly over his face. “I’m sorry I said that about Annie, Liv.” He shook his head, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick. “You didn’t deserve that. I’m really sorry.”

She did not know what to say. She had no idea what words she could use to save the little scraps of whatever they had left together. And so she watched in silence as he finished dressing, as he bent low to kiss the top of her head, as he left the room. She listened to him hunting in the study for whatever it was he needed. Then she heard him leave the house, closing the door quietly behind him, but closing it all the same. She listened to him pull the car out of the driveway, and she could still hear it as he turned the corner onto Mallard Run. It was another hour before she shut her eyes, and an hour after that before she slept. And it was just a few short weeks before she knew that the seed Paul had imagined himself planting in Annie had started a new life in her.

Alec wasn’t surprised to find Randi still waiting for him in his office. He had avoided seeing her these past six months. He’d bumped into her a couple of times, once in the grocery store, once at the Sea Tern, but he’d kept those meetings brief, shifting away from her when he saw impatience replace the sympathy in her eyes. Now, though, he was cornered.

“Sit down, Alec.” She was sitting in the chair Olivia had vacated, and he sat down once again behind his desk.

“It was so great to walk in here and see you in that chair,” she said.

“Look, Randi, I was here because we were talking about something too heavy for a restaurant. This was the best place to meet. Don’t read so much into it.”

“When are you coming back, Alec?”

He hated being asked that question so directly. It made it impossible to dodge. “I don’t know,” he said.

She sighed, exasperated, and leaned forward in the chair. “What the hell are you living on? How are you keeping your kids fed? How do you plan to get Clay through four years at Duke?”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Isn’t your brain disintegrating?”

“I like the time off, Randi. It gives me loads of time to work on the lighthouse committee.”

She sat back, scowling. “Alec, you’re pissing me off.”

He smiled.

“Don’t give me that condescending smile,” she said, but she was smiling herself. “Oh, Alec, the bottom line is I miss you, and I worry about you. But you just dumped everything on me. You said it would be one month, and here I am nearly a year later doing it all.”

“It hasn’t even been six months, and you’re not alone. Isn’t Steve Matthews working out?”

She waved her hand impatiently through the air. “That’s not the point.”

He stood up and walked around to the front of his desk, leaning back against it, working his way toward the door. “Randi, if it’s really too much for you, tell me and we’ll get someone else in to help out. I don’t want you to be overextended.”

She sighed and seemed to deflate in the chair. “I’m all right. I just thought playing on your guilt might work.” She stood up too, and he was pleased to see she was surrendering. She walked over to him for a hug, which he provided, stunned for a moment by the way her breasts felt against his chest, by the way her hair lay warm and fragrant next to his cheek.

He pulled away from her, gently. “Wow, do you feel good. It’s been a while since I hugged a woman.”

There was a sudden glint in Randi’s eyes. “I’ve been dying to fix you up with this friend of mine,” she said.

He shook his head.

“You’d love her, Alec, and it’s time you went out. There’s a world full of single women out there, and you’re a free man.”

He was irritated by the word free. “It’s way too soon,” he said.

“What about that doctor? She’s pretty and…”

“And married and pregnant.”

“Don’t you miss sex?” she asked bluntly.