She didn’t know what to expect when she pushed the playback button. Jerks were good at apologizing. But listening to his voice didn’t send shivers of dread up her spine. Maybe she had overreacted.
She needed this job. But she’d have to set limits. She would not tolerate his rudeness or his anger, even if he was going through a bad time in his life.
And she’d need to fully understand where she’d gone off the tracks with the design. Because even though the concepts hadn’t been fully fleshed out, she’d been pretty certain that she’d captured what he wanted.
She sucked in a big breath and called him back. Of course she got his voice mail, which was supremely frustrating considering how much courage it had taken to dial his number.
She left a message and then got up from the kitchen table and paced around the room, her mind as flighty as a caged bird.
Maybe this was one of those times when she should just take the bull by the horns and face her demons head-on.
Without thinking too hard about it, she jumped in the car and headed toward Howland House. Twenty minutes later, she opened the garden gate and stepped onto the footpath leading to Rose Cottage. It was after six o’clock, and she was pretty sure Topher would be home. She hurried up the porch steps and knocked on the door.
“He’s not there.”
Jessica turned to find Ashley standing in the middle of her rose garden. The innkeeper’s body language was anything but welcoming. She’d been cutting flowers and putting them in a wicker basket. But she stood now, with shoulders squared and chin up.
“Your flowers are pretty,” Jessica said, trying to be sociable.
“They’re for the house. The Piece Makers are meeting tonight.”
Oh, great. Jessica checked her watch. She had about an hour before Granny would be arriving for the weekly quilting bee. Did the old biddies gossip about Topher? Did they think she was crazy for helping him build a house in the middle of nowhere?
Probably.
It was a universal truth about her life that, no matter what she did, she could never win widespread approval. She fought the urge to turn and head for the garden gate.
“So, uh, do you know where Topher has gone?” she asked instead.
“He’s down at the beach,” Ashley said, pointing toward the other end of the inn’s expansive lawn.
“He’s sunbathing?”
“He’s swimming.”
“Oh. Thanks,” Jessica said, turning in the direction Ashley indicated. She followed the path across the lawn to a set of concrete stairs, which led to a ribbon of sand. The small beach was deserted except for a striped towel with a walking cane and an eye patch lying across it.
She cast her gaze over the bay and found Topher about fifty yards offshore doing a fairly strong freestyle. She leaned against the stairway’s metal railing and watched him for a while.
She should go. Trying to win back a client when he was dripping wet and without his eye patch went too far. She headed back up the stairs.
But something made her stop and look over her shoulder. A strange foreboding, or maybe just one last glimpse. She would never know.
But it was a good thing because something radically changed in his swimming rhythm. He pulled up abruptly, and then his head dropped below the surface.
Decades-old training kicked in. She’d been a swimmer all her life and had earned her certification as a lifeguard at the age of sixteen.
She moved without thought, shucking her ballet flats and grabbing the emergency life ring from its spot on the stair rail. She took the rest of the stairs two at a time and hit the water at speed.
His head bobbed above the waterline again just as her feet splashed into the bay. Hope flared, but his head went down again.
She dived, the water cold against her skin, and her chinos and blouse dragging at her as she swam toward the spot where he’d gone down.
He bobbed again, thrashing.
She corrected her bearing, making sure to approach him from behind. He went down again, but she managed to grab him under the arms, the buoyancy of the water helping her even as he fought her touch.
“Stop fighting me,” she yelled into his ear. “Take this.” She shoved the life ring into his chest and tried to haul his big body onto it. He resisted her efforts.
“Ow, ow, ow,” he screamed.
“What’s wrong? What hurts?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, but his body posture suggested that one of his legs had cramped up.
There was nothing she could do about that. But she went to plan B. The best way to save a panicked swimmer was to get him to lie back on the flotation device.
She grabbed him around the waist and used the life ring to raise him out of the water. He was utterly incapable of kicking, so she continued to hold him under the arms, letting the life ring buoy him. She began towing him back to shore using a sidestroke.
She was a long way away, and the task seemed daunting, but she focused on making slow, easy strokes. A minute or ten later, as the adrenaline left her system, she registered the warmth of his skin next to hers. He’d stopped resisting her efforts.
Had he lost consciousness? Did she even remember how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? It had been a long time since her training. But she’d done it once on a boy at the yacht club. The EMTs said she’d saved the kid’s life.
She turned her head, ready to panic, but she found him looking up at her out of his one good eye. The other was naked.
She hadn’t known what she expected to see under his mysterious eye patch. An empty socket? Something so horrible it might make her look away.
But it wasn’t like that at all. The cornea of his injured eye was cloudy, and the skin around it puckered with scars. The sight of it didn’t horrify her at all.
“You scared me,” she said, redoubling her efforts to get them to shore. It still seemed a long way to the beach. She swam laps regularly, but here she had to fight wind and current.
“Shame on you,” she continued, looking away from his intense stare. She took another long pull against the water. “Don’t you know better than to swim alone?”
“I was trying to get stronger,” he said, “so I could climb the lighthouse stairs.”
His words hit with the force of a hurricane, rocking her to the core and sending a chill through her body. What if her truthful but ultimately unkind comment about the lighthouse stairs had led to his death?
What then?
Chapter Seven
He was stupid. Stupid to think he could make himself stronger. Stupid to have come out here in a fit of rage and remorse. Stupid to have pushed the leg farther than it wanted to go. And yes, stupid for swimming so far from shore without anyone there to help him when the crap hit the fan.
Which begged the question: Where the hell had Jessica Blackwood come from? Like an angel of mercy, she’d appeared in his hour of need.
And he’d been so sure that she’d left him forever this morning after he’d let his emotions get away from him.
“Why are you here?” he asked, as the last shred of pain faded away, leaving the offending limb quivering where it trailed in the water.
She didn’t reply. Typical.
“Answer me. Why are you here? Why did you come to my aid, especially since I was such a jerk this morning?”
“You were drowning this afternoon,” she said in an infernally logical tone. She had a way of speaking the truth in a blunt, unemotional way. He found it refreshing…and annoying.