Jack was putting the mop bucket away in the storage room when he came back inside. "I don't need help. Mr. Sims trusts me."

Boone grinned, trying and failing to surprise an answering smile out of the boy. "I trust you too. But if you're able to get the johns cleaned, I won't have to, which is good for me."

"I thought I was working till closing. I can. My mom doesn't care. And I can use the money."

"You'll still get paid, but football season's coming on fast. Aren't you doing two-a-days? Those used to wear me down to not much more than a grease spot."

"Coach gets it that some of us need to work. He busts our a.s.ses when we're there, but there's no penalty for having a job. It p.i.s.ses off some of the guys who don't have anything to do but play football, but them's the breaks." Jack shrugged, then hurried out when a car pulled up.

When he came back in, he put cash into the electronic register that Sims had fought acquiring for years. "Did Mr. Sims get to come home?"

"Yeah, and it was his idea to give you the night off. He doesn't want you working too many hours."

"But I need-"

"He's the boss, Jack, and he's no dummy. He respects you and he appreciates your work. There's not a whole lot more you can ask from an employer." Oh, Lord, could I possibly sound any more like a high school princ.i.p.al taking his job way too serious? Boone did a little internal eye-rolling. "Except more money, that is. Remember that raise I mentioned? By all means, ask Sims for one from time to time. It gives him a good chance to blow off some steam. He might give you one eventually, but not until he calls you s.h.i.t-for-brains and tells you you're the worst pump jockey he's ever had."

There was just a glimmer of a smile in the boy's eyes. "I've already heard that a couple of times. Scared the h.e.l.l out of me the first time. I thought he was firing me because I had to be taught how to do an oil change. I'd never even lifted the hood of a car before. My dad always-" He stopped, his face going sullen again in the blink of an eye. "He used to bring his car in here for maintenance stuff, and I never learned how to do any of it."

"My dad died when I was twelve," Boone said, "but Uncle Mike-that was Gert's husband-taught Crockett and me how to check and change oil. Not that we wanted to learn, but he didn't offer us a choice. After he died, Sims took over." He laughed conspiratorially. "He wasn't a real nice-guy teacher, either, but I'm not telling you anything you don't know there, am I?" He checked the time. "Now, you need to get out of here, or Sims'll have my a.s.s. Your pay won't be docked, but it's early enough to spend some time with whoever you hang with."

Boone sent Jack on his reluctant way and drew comics between customers. By the time he locked the station, he had "Eight Hours Work" ready for Micah. He'd even started on the other strip, always the more labor-and imagination-intensive of the two. "Elmer and Myrtle" had supported him in fine style for ten years, but he was nearly ready to let them ride their vintage Harley Davidson off to the retirement home. Not that he was tired of them-that would be like saying he was weary of Sims and Gert-but he was having trouble with storylines.

Although Micah had been writing much of the new strip, he was reluctant to volunteer input into the content of "Elmer and Myrtle."

"You don't want to change its voice," he'd said when they talked about it one evening over Sam Adams and a plate of cookies someone had dropped off at the newspaper office. "We've done 'Eight Hours Work' together from the start. No one knows where you leave off and I start, but it would be different with this one."

Boone was still thinking about "Elmer and Myrtle" when he got home. He sat at a table in the back parlor and drew while Lucy arranged silk flowers in bud vases. "What do you think?" He watched her for a moment where she sat a few tables away near the bay window. "No fresh flowers?"

"We don't have any now that smell good. And if I use artificial ones, I don't have to wait till just before serving time to put them on the tables. Mornings are busy enough without that." She tied ribbons around the necks of the vases, her brow knit in concentration. "What do I think about what?"

"Do you think 'Elmer and Myrtle' have had their day?"

She lifted her head, her expression startled. "Good heavens, no. Why?"

He thought a minute, drawing with bold, minimalist strokes. "Well, we've done Sims's broken leg. A few years ago, I did the thing when Gert had to have a hip replacement. That was one of the most popular storylines ever, but I'm afraid it's going to become a hospital strip, one illness after another, because the protagonists are aging."

"Well, of course they are," Lucy said, a note of Myrtle-like long suffering in her voice, as though she were talking to someone who was challenging her last nerve, "but that's not who they are. You have to put in things like the pills they take in the morning and the broken leg. You need to show how hard it is for Gert to walk downstairs in the morning when she's stiff, but what's important is that they keep on going. They don't go to bed and let age happen to them."

Her hands went still, and even though she was gazing in his direction, he was pretty sure she didn't see him. "I used to try to remember that Dad was more than the disease." She started working with the flowers again, but slowly, thoughtfully. "Every now and then I was able to convince myself he was a nice man who liked to cook and just happened to live in my father's body."

Boone nodded. "Sometimes I get them mixed up in my mind." He drew the curved slash that was Myrtle's hair. "I'll call Gert by Myrtle's name and she just shakes her head."

Lucy laughed. "She should talk. She goes through the whole list of your names whenever she talks to you, Crockett, or Kelly. I loved it when she started including me in that roll call-made me feel like part of the family. Not that I'm trying to take anyone's place," she added hastily.

"Speaking of Gert, where is she?"

"Over at Sims's. She's spending the night there to make sure he doesn't fling himself down the stairs or something. He's so happy to be mobile again, I think she's afraid he'll try that stair-step dance Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson did in the old movies."

Boone laughed. "There's a visual that will show up in the funny papers."

"Will I get a commission?" Lucy grinned and got up when the phone in the foyer rang.

He made a note on the back of his sketchbook and started another frame. He loved the drawing part of what he did-there just weren't enough hours in the day to do it the way he wanted to. The time had come to make changes in a life that had already been altered too radically too often.

The question was, which changes should he make? Which ones did he want to make?

Lucy came back into the room, wearing a bemused expression. "That was the realtor from Richmond. She has a buyer for the property where Dolan's was. He just now faxed her an offer."

"Is that good news or bad?" When she would have walked past him, he caught her hand so that she sat at the table where he was working instead of returning to her flowers.

"Oh, it's good, I guess. I can finish off Dad's medical bills and have a little nest egg set aside for when the van goes belly-up and Sims p.r.o.nounces her dead."

"Do you need to go to Virginia?"

"Maybe to sign the papers, although I probably wouldn't have to. Everything's electronic now." She smiled, but her eyes were shadowed. "It's the end of my life there. I spent thirty-three years in Richmond, but the truth is I never need to go back, and it feels weird. Kind of lonesome."

He put down his drawing materials and got to his feet, pulling her up. "Let's take a walk."

They sauntered through the neighborhood, stopping to talk to Stan Morgan, who was in his garden. "It was my own fault," he said, gesturing toward the charred remains of his garage. "I had flammable stuff in there, and there were aerosol cans in my wife's things. It wasn't a good combination." He shook his head. "All the old wiring in the houses around here-it's a wonder there aren't more fires."

Boone felt Lucy stiffen beside him. He reached for her hand. "It's lucky you were awake," he told Stan.

"I wasn't. I'd have slept through the whole thing if it had been left to me. I'd probably be an old and soggy French fry. I guess someone was driving by and saw the smoke. Called 911. It was a good thing for me, I'll tell you." He leaned on the handle of his hoe. "Blessings come in strange packages sometimes."

"They sure do," Boone agreed cheerfully, winking at Lucy. "Let us know when you're ready to clean up, Stan. We'll be down to help."

"Will do. I appreciate it. And that lunch you brought down too, young lady. That was awful good." The old man extended his hand to shake both of theirs. "My wife always said I wasted more time holding onto things than I did enjoying them. I think maybe she was right."

As they walked back toward Tea on Twilight, Lucy frowned up at Boone. "Am I mistaken or did you just take the back door to referring to me as strange?"

"Why, no, ma'am." They stepped into the back yard and he pulled her into his arms, drawing her full length against him so that the heat and scent and motion of her became an instant part of him. "I was referring to you as a blessing."

Lucy didn't recall having been called a blessing before, but she liked how it sounded. It went right along with how it felt being in Boone's arms. She remembered what Stan Morgan's wife said to him about hanging onto things. Is that what Lucy did? Did she cherish the dreams in her jar so much that she didn't recognize others when they came along?

One of the notes in her pickle jar said, "Marriage. Children. Red SUV with a luggage rack." Was she holding out for that even though Boone had already had the marriage with someone he adored, had already grieved a child, would probably drive an SUV as terribly as he drove everything else on four wheels?

While the knowledge that she was in love with him rocked and danced around her heart, she was just as certain he didn't return that love. However, he liked her, he wanted her, and he thought she was a blessing. She could, for the time being at least, live with that.

She lifted her face to his.

Kinsey was asleep in the sunroom when they went inside. She raised her head, accepted chin-scratches as her due and tucked her nose back into her tail.

They walked up the back stairs together without talking, but it was what Lucy had seen referred to in books as a "speaking silence." She understood that when they reached her room, he would go inside with her.

He did, and in the confines of her little sitting room, he took her into his arms and kissed her breathless. "Do you know how long I've been wanting to do that?" he asked, running his hands down her back until they came to rest on the curve of her hips.

"No. Tell me."

"Since the last time."

"Then maybe you should do it again."

"Now, there's an idea."

"I need a shower," she said a few minutes later, moving restively as his hands did an investigative foray inside her clothes. "I'm sticky with August."

He unfastened her shirt, concentrating on the small white b.u.t.tons. His smile reached into her, sending delight cavorting right along her nerve endings. "That's a lot worse than sticky with July."

"It is," she said, "because I never really get dry before I'm sweating again."

"Well, then." He slipped her shorts down. "I'm probably sticky too. How are you about sharing showers?"

"Does sharing mean I get my back washed?"

"Uh-huh."

"Then I'm good with it." At least she thought she was. She'd never shared a shower outside of P. E. cla.s.s before, and she thought it would be different standing under the spray with Boone than it had been with a cl.u.s.ter of other eighth-grade girls.

The water was warm and soft as it sluiced over them. Boone turned her so that her back was to him and lathered her washcloth with scented bath gel. He stroked the soft terrycloth over every inch of her back before re-soaping and kneeling to wash her b.u.t.tocks and legs, his hands slipping casually between her thighs so that she gasped and leaned against the shower wall. "That soap stuff smells good," he said, seeming not to notice that she was turning into a quivering ma.s.s. "Turn around and rinse off."

She turned, feeling as though she were in a lovely kind of dream.

"Wow," he said, setting the cloth aside and reaching up with soapy hands. "Sticky b.r.e.a.s.t.s, too. You're just a mess." He soaped and circled, teased and taunted, before straightening enough to take first one stiffened nipple in his mouth and then the other. "Oh, gosh, yes," he said, "just an August sticky mess." He knelt again, licking her soft belly, dipping his tongue into her navel, and then lower still, tracing a light kiss the length of her appendix scar before using his thumbs to part her l.a.b.i.a and dip his tongue yet again. Deeper.

Lucy thought she just might die right where she stood. Tried to stand. Her legs were going to give out any second. She'd never climaxed this way, not orally and not standing up. Was it even possible?

It was. Oh, dear, sweet Lord, it was.

She also found out multiple o.r.g.a.s.ms didn't only happen in books and in hushed conversations during which she'd always been silent. She thought she might still be silent, but no longer because she didn't have anything to add. No, she would be still because if there was even the slightest possibility that sharing the joy of this night would mean lessening its magic, that wasn't a chance she was willing to take.

Exhausted and a little sore, she fell asleep spooned into his long body, his arm lying heavy across her waist. When she woke, in that soft, inky darkness just before dawn, he was still beside her.

Chapter Twelve.

August, unexpectedly and blessedly, cooled as it meandered along. By the middle of the second week, when entire departments of schoolteachers were meeting for long working lunches in the tearoom, the temperature and humidity had become downright easy to live with.

Lucy sipped coffee left over from lunch and reread the letter in her hand. "Maybe I should go to Virginia," she said. "The buyers want to reopen the restaurant as 'Dolan's' and I haven't even met them. Andy-he started out bussing tables and ended up as the chef-called me this morning and said they asked him to come back to work there."

"Why don't you go? To Virginia, I mean, not to work at the new restaurant." Gert sat at the island with her calculator and the account books for Tea on Twilight. "You haven't taken two days off in a row since you got here in February. We have a strong backup crew when we need them. I'll be fine." Her eyes widened and she tore the paper strip off the calculator, pa.s.sing it over to Lucy. "My goodness, we should give ourselves a bonus. This is the best week we've had all summer."

Lucy was tempted to take her partner up on the vacation-time offer. The last six months had been eventful and busy, so there had been little time for homesickness, but she'd like to see Richmond again, to visit her parents' graves and leave flowers for Isobel Dolan. She could meet Andy's new wife and visit with the other wait-staff who had been at the restaurant long enough to be family.

"Take Boone with you." Gert's eyes twinkled at her over the top of her reading gla.s.ses. "He's worked hard this summer. You could both do with a vacation. Spend a little time with Crockett. Maybe even drive over to the ocean for a couple of days."

"But you and Sims-"

"Will be just fine without anyone babysitting, though as soon as Kelly knows you're gone, she'll probably move in for the duration."

Lucy took a deep breath. "Gert, Boone and I-"

"Are adults." Gert closed the account book and pinned Lucy with a direct blue gaze. "What you do in your free time is your business."

"I'm afraid we'll hurt each other," Lucy admitted, "and put you in the position of siding with one or the other."

"You probably will hurt each other. That's what happens in relationships. But I'm going to love you both, just like I love Kelly when she's being awful and Crockett when he's being melancholy, and I'm not taking sides. Period."

"Then I think I'll ask him. He won't go all macho on me and want to do the driving, will he?"

"Fly," Gert advised. "He never bothers the pilot. At least, I don't think he does. You might want to talk to him about that before you make reservations and then take a separate plane if necessary."

"Oh." Lucy's stomach began to quiver. She'd never been on a plane. Not that she was afraid to fly. At least, not really. She and her father had just never taken vacations beyond the very occasional weekend at Virginia Beach-a habit she'd continued as an adult. When she was engaged, she and Scott planned to honeymoon in Gatlinburg, an easy-enough drive from Richmond. The trip to Atlantic City in her early twenties had been on the train.

Well, there was no time like the present to change that. "We could, couldn't we? If Boone wants to go, that is?"

"Go where?" He spoke from the doorway, and she glanced up, startled. When had he come in? The last time she'd seen him, he'd been in the back yard with Kinsey and his laptop.

"Richmond," Gert said, "and maybe the beach if Lucy can detach herself from the tearoom long enough. You should check on Crockett while you're there. I worry about that boy."

Boone rolled his eyes. "That boy's pushing thirty-seven, Aunt Gert."

"So are you." His aunt whacked him with the account book. "Though you're a few months behind him. You're also close enough to keep an eye on right now. He's not."

Lucy held up the papers she'd received from the realtor. "I wonder if Kelly would go over these. I'm afraid she'll get mad if I ask her to and even madder if I ask someone else."

"That's probably how it would go," Boone agreed unhelpfully. "So when are we going to Richmond?"

"This weekend?" Lucy asked. "Come back Tuesday? We don't have to go to the beach."

"I'll get the plane tickets," he offered, "but I want to go to the beach. It's been too long since I've seen an ocean."

"Take the whole week," Gert suggested. "We're going to be busy for a while when you come back. Everyone whose kids go back to school is going to be having lunch here over the next few weeks."

"Everyone?" Lucy raised an eyebrow. "Do I sense some wishful thinking going on?"

"No, you sense a newspaper ad. Twenty percent off the last week of August and the first week of September. The beauty shops, the nail salon, and that store that sells makeup and bath and body products are all doing the same thing. We're going to split the cost of a full-page ad in the Trib. Micah offered it at a back-to-school special price." Gert's eyes shone and she was once again the woman Lucy had met when she'd first come to town, before Sims's injury. Energy bundled in Birkenstocks. "I know I should have run this past you, but I feel as though you do the lion's share in this partnership anyway."

Lucy snorted. "I do the grunt work, which is exactly what I'm suited for. It takes a much sharper mind than this one to do the business parts."

"So, are we going?" Boone's gaze caught Lucy's, and she stopped moving, unable to break the connection.