The Girl From Summer Hill (Summer Hill 1)

“I am up.”

Casey gave a giggle. “Not like that. Stop kissing me.” She was leaning her head back as his lips began to move down her shoulder. “Tate! We don’t have time for this. You have a plane to catch.”

“It’ll be a quickie.”

“You don’t like quick. You like long and slow and…” She was sliding down in the bed.

“I’m an actor. I’ll pretend I’m your last boyfriend and it’ll all be over in seconds. Just lie very still and think about tamarind and cilantro.”

Casey started to laugh, but he kissed her as he moved on top of her.

Jack and Tate reached the car at the same time and they grinned at each other across the car’s roof. It had taken a lot more than seconds to get there. Inside, they sat on opposite ends of the leather seat and told the driver to go.

“So where’s your suitcase?” Tate asked.

Jack shrugged. “I left everything here, maybe even my heart. What about you?”

As the car pulled onto the street, Tate looked out the window. “Mine but not hers.” He turned back to Jack. “I practically asked her to move in with me in L.A., but she just wanted to know what the grocery stores carried.”

“That sounds good. Maybe she is thinking about living there.”

“No, she isn’t,” Tate said. “What about you and Gizzy?”

Jack took a moment before answering. “You know how I was glad she didn’t ask me a lot of questions? Now I’m a little concerned that she doesn’t want to know anything about me.”

In spite of himself, Tate remembered the photo Haines had shown him of Gizzy kissing a fireman. “What’s her boyfriend history? Has she had a lot of them?”

Jack frowned. “I don’t know. As much as I love her nonstop action, sometimes I wish we could have a heart-to-heart. What do you know?”

Tate hesitated. Should he show Jack the photo that Haines had sent him or not? Maybe it was all a lie, but he and Jack had been duped by ambitious women before. He took out his cell and clicked on the photo. “I was told this was taken two days ago, but that could be wrong.”

Jack glanced at the picture, then handed the phone back to Tate. “That’s what I was beginning to suspect.”

The two men looked at each other.

“We’ll see how things stand when we get back,” Tate said, and Jack agreed.

“So how have you been?” Olivia ask

ed Casey. “Anything interesting happen?” They were wearing pretty Regency-era dresses and sitting on chairs that had been set up outside the gazebo. Onstage, Lori was flitting around Gizzy and teasing about how wonderful the soldiers were. She seemed very young but at the same time quite seductive.

“That girl is really talented. I hope she does something with it,” Casey said.

“I found out that she’s staying in a lake house with her grandmother, Estelle, who I knew in high school. I want to talk to her about getting Lori into Juilliard.” She took a breath. “How lucky Estelle is to have a granddaughter like her.”

Casey reached across to squeeze Olivia’s wrist.

“Actually, I was asking about you and Tate,” Olivia said. “He’s been gone for a whole twenty-four hours. How are you holding up?”

“Very well. I don’t have three meals a day to cook, and I don’t have him hanging around my kitchen all day. He isn’t bugging me to go everywhere with him in his little red truck. Did I tell you that one day he went to the grocery with me? It was a fiasco! He bought three dozen grapefruits and challenged me to make a pie with them. I didn’t, but when we got back I put up some jars of a rather nice marmalade with a stalk of tarragon in the middle. Using the whole stalk was his suggestion, and he cleaned the grapefruit for me. Well, anyway, I can now do my summer canning without him underfoot.”

Olivia was smiling. “You told me that story. Twice. You miss him a lot, don’t you?”

“I do, but I wish I didn’t.” She blew out her breath in exasperation. “I’ve always prided myself on functioning on my own. Even when I lived with someone, I stood on my own feet.”

She paused, then said, “I’m confused about what’s going on between Tate and me. Before he left he talked about my being his cook in L.A. I guess I’d be his sleep-in chef. But I—” She put her hands over her face. “I really, really like him and I miss him—but I don’t want to. I like being independent. I grew up with a mother who was gone all the time, and I learned to rely on myself. But then, that’s what drove my ex-boyfriend crazy. He used to say he didn’t feel needed.”

“When you were a child, there must have been times when you wanted your mother to be there.”