“I thought we were lost,” Maddie said. “I thought we were building our castle and forgot about you and got lost.”
She thought she’d been left.
“Hey,” Lynn said, both hands on Maddie’s shoulders as she faced the other woman. “We aren’t ever going to leave you, not anywhere, you got that?”
Maddie nodded.
Lynn persisted. “You know that, right? Alan was very, very bad to take you out to that cabin and leave you there, Maddie. Good people would never do that to you. Remember?”
Maddie nodded again. “I remember,” she said, sounding as if she had more marbles in her mouth than usual. Then she grinned. “I was just being a dope, wasn’t I?”
She looked back at Darin.
“No, you weren’t,” Darin said. “It was dark and we couldn’t see them and neither of us can drive.” He turned to Grant. “I asked you to let me talk to Maddie alone because it was a date and you did and I’m glad,” he said. “Thank you. Now do you want to see our castle?”
“Of course,” Grant said. He was a step back from the three of them.
“Yeah, we came to find you so we could show you our castle.” Maddie grinned up at Lynn.
Knowing that this was what real life was all about, Lynn took Grant’s hand and went to marvel at a castle in the sand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
HE DIDN’T HAVE SEX. But he was going to.
As soon as Darin had retired to his room on Saturday night, Grant picked up the phone.
“I was wondering if you’d call.” Lynn’s sexy drawl greeted him after one ring.
“It’s such a waste.” With his phone to his ear he walked through his room into the adjoining bathroom.
“What is?”
Shrugging out of his shirt, he tossed it into the clothes hamper. Which was overflowing.
“You there, without Kara for the night, and me here.”
“Maddie stayed here tonight. By the time we got back, all the lights were out in the girls’ bungalow where she has weekend sleepovers. Remember I told you that Gwen has Friday and Saturday nights off and Maddie either stays here or with a group of young girls who like to do makeup?”
“Right. I forgot.” He lobbed his pants over to cover his shirt. “Is she sitting right there?”
“No. She’s in her room.”
Stepping out of his underwear, Grant tossed them, too, turned off the light and, penis hard and heavy, walked back to the bedroom, pulled back his covers and lay on top of the sheet in the dark.
“We need to figure out when we’re going to finish what we started.”
There was a long pause. “Where are you?”
“Home.”
The moon cast shadows on his ceiling, creating shapes. One looked like the silhouette of a woman’s breast. And that one…a thigh. Or maybe a butt… “I figured you were home. I heard Maddie talking and suspected she was on the phone with Darin. Are you in bed?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“Yes.” Her tone dropped.
“What do you wear to bed?”
“A nightgown.”
“With panties underneath?”
“No.”
His penis was ready to explode.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Kara’s due back by noon. And Sundays are grocery, laundry and cleaning days.”
“Darin and I do laundry on Sundays, too.”
“He can do laundry, then?”
“He can’t sort the clothes but he’s obsessive about listening for the dryer to stop and changing loads—I put a chart on the washer that tells him what temperature to set for what color. And the soap dispenser is marked for how much soap to put in. I just always make sure I sort the loads first. And I made some wooden signs that I put on the loads after I sort them that tell him the color.”
“Is he color blind?”
“No, but if something’s plaid, or striped, and has white and blue, for instance, he freaks out over which color to call the load.”
He wasn’t going to have sex tonight. And talking was better than lying in the dark with nothing to distract him from his hard-on.
“He’s also a whiz at folding and hanging. He’s good at pretty much anything that’s done the same way every time. Which is fine because I like a neat closet.”