Deadline

“Don’t leave!” Grant shouted over his shoulder as Stef propelled him up the boardwalk.

Neither she nor Dawson spoke until the trio had topped the dunes. Then he said quietly, “I meant only to surprise them. I thought I’d be finished before they came outside. They caught me putting on the final touches.”

“I asked you, more nicely than warranted, to stay away from us.”

“My house shares the beach with yours.”

“But you picked this spot for your…your dragon. What made it so ideal? As if I didn’t know.”

“I’m not going to interview your children, Amelia.”

He

r tummy fluttered in reaction to his using her first name, and in such a low and infuriatingly reasonable tone. But she didn’t address it, not wanting him to know that she had noticed.

He said, “I don’t see the harm in my spending some time with the two of them.”

She dragged back a strand of hair that had defied her hat and blown across her mouth. “Well, let me tell you what the harm is. Aside from the fact that I don’t know anything about you.”

“That’s not true.”

“Okay, you’ve got credentials. They don’t speak to the kind of person you are.”

“I—”

She held up her hand to stop him. “Secondly, Grant is too young to remember much, but Hunter can recall when his grandfather died. Then—”

“They lost their father.”

“That’s right.”

“So they could use a little man-time, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely. But not with a man I know virtually nothing about. Not with a snake-oil salesman who will be here today and gone tomorrow. Not with a man who’s ingratiating himself with them only in order to get to me so he can write a big, juicy story for his magazine.”

“That’s not why—”

“Save it. I already know you’re a liar.”

Angrily, he whipped off his sunglasses. “A liar? How’s that?”

“Hey, Dawson!” The boys came charging over the dunes, toting pails and shovels. Hunter was the first to reach them. “Can we build the battleship now?”

Grant was bouncing again. “No, I want to build the castle first.”

Dawson, his angry gaze still locked with Amelia’s, arched an eyebrow by way of asking permission.

She said, “What choice do you leave me?”

He told the boys to start filling their buckets with wet sand. As they raced off, he replaced his sunglasses and said to her, “You and I aren’t done with this discussion.”

“You’re damn right we’re not.”

* * *

She returned to her office and finished the e-mail even though there was no urgency to it because George wouldn’t read it until after the holiday. Attached was a proposal for a new exhibit that she’d been thinking about for a while. She expected resistance to the idea. It would require a combination of diplomacy and arm twisting to convince him and the board of directors that it would be a viable and important addition to the museum. She’d wanted to draft the memo while her thoughts were still fresh.

But also she’d come back from the beach shaky and angry and very much in need of putting some distance between herself, Dawson, and his intrusion on her family.