She grabbed her surfboard and marched up the path toward home without another word, leaving a long, awkward silence in her wake.
15
Nate
There it was.
The H word.
How many times had he flung it at his own father when he was frustrated at some rule or other?
Raising a teenager was hard. He wasn’t sure if he had the stamina to make it through another five years of Sophie flaunting the rules and then snapping at him when he called her on it.
Okay, maybe he had freaked out a little when he saw her surfboard gone and couldn’t reach her, imagining all sorts of grim scenarios. It was just Sophie’s bad luck that a college student had drowned just a few weeks earlier while surfing alone down the coast, leaving Nate slightly more paranoid than usual about water safety.
“Sorry,” he said now to Jess. “We’re having some boundary issues, if you couldn’t tell. Namely that Sophie seems to be pushing against every single one of them.”
“For what it’s worth, she never did get in the water. I didn’t want to let her come down alone so we decided to build a sandcastle as a diversionary tactic because I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Thank you for that. None of this is your fault.”
“Do you like our sandcastle?” the smaller of the girls asked him.
“It’s only the best sandcastle in the whole world,” her older sister declared.
She reminded him of Sophie at that age, with her blond braids and gap-toothed smile. “It looks like a great one,” he agreed. “I especially like the moat you’ve built there.”
“I want to build another one at my house,” the smaller one said, “only Grace says we don’t have enough sand in our sandbox and our brother will smash it anyway.”
“Brothers can be like that,” he said. Their brother had some unique challenges, or so he had heard.
“Do you have a brother?” the youngest girl asked.
“Nope. I’m an only child.”
“Our mom doesn’t have brothers either,” Grace informed him. “Only one sister. Aunt Jess. Our dad has two brothers, though, and one sister. Uncle Dallas and Uncle Wade. Uncle Wade has two kids and lives in the country and Uncle Dallas has one baby and lives by us.”
He knew both men as they worked with Cody in the family roofing company, but didn’t know how he was supposed to respond to this recitation of the family tree. To his relief, Jess stepped in.
“Let’s take a picture of the sandcastle so we can send it to your mom, then we need to go find some dinner.”
She took a few pictures of the girls beaming in front of their creation, teasing and smiling with them.
This was the first he had seen her since earlier that day when they had shared that incredible kiss. As he had told her, he hadn’t been able to get it out of his head.
Every time he thought he was over it, that he could now simply move on, he remembered the way her mouth had softened beneath his, how her breath had come in sexy little gasps, how she had thrown her arms around his neck as if he had just rescued her from a thirty-foot swell.
As he watched her with her nieces, he was astonished at how different she seemed from the woman he had met over these past several days as she helped his mother.
There was a sweetness about her he didn’t usually see, a gentleness that took his breath away.
She was a complicated woman, Jess Clayton. One minute she was tough, independent, bordering on prickly.
The next, she could be hamming it up for the camera as her older niece took a picture of Jess holding the younger girl.
She was beautiful, her eyes bright and amused as she posed for the camera, and it was hard to look away.
“Let me take a picture of all three of you. This grand castle was obviously a team effort.”
“Too bad Sophie left already. She helped us a ton,” Grace said.
“Why did she have to go?” Ava complained.
Good question. He had come down too hard on her. He knew it. Seeing that empty spot on the wall where her surfboard should have been had sent him into a panic, which was his only excuse.
He had calmed somewhat when he saw she was down at the cove with Jess and her nieces, instead of on her own as he had feared. Still, he found it concerning that she would even consider breaking the major family rule that she wasn’t supposed to get into the ocean by herself.
Every time he wanted to have a real conversation with his child, she chose to escape rather than talk to him.
Maybe he hadn’t picked the best venue here with an audience. He had been upset and worried about her, which might have made him respond more harshly than normal.
That didn’t mean she had to stomp off every time he annoyed her.
He had to figure out a way to reach her, but not right now.
He took Jess’s phone from her. “Turn this way so I can get the sun on your faces.”
He didn’t know much about photography. Not like her sister, Rachel, anyway. But he did like the way the sun hit them and the clear affection between the three of them.
“Thanks,” she said when he handed her phone back to her. Their fingers brushed and he felt the electrical jolt down his spine. Did she? He couldn’t tell for sure but was almost positive her breathing accelerated a notch.
Good. He liked knowing this attraction wasn’t only one-sided.
Was she remembering their heated kiss, too?
“Let me take one with my phone so I can show Sophie.”
He wanted to capture her like this, with her features open and happy. He took one of her and the girls but also one of Jess alone. She didn’t have to know that, right?
“It really is a wonderful sandcastle.”
“Can we come visit it tomorrow? I want to show Mommy,” the younger McBride said.
“You can come anytime your parents want to bring you,” he assured her and was rewarded with a wide smile.
“Thanks, mister.”
“You can call me Nate, if you want.”
“Thanks, Nate.”
“Girls, should we go?” Jess said.
He could tell neither of them wanted to leave but they helped her gather up containers and slip them back into the bucket she had emptied.
She picked up her beach blanket and shook out the sand then folded it and slung it over her arm.
“What can I help you carry?”
“Maybe Ava.”
“I can walk,” the girl insisted.