Chesapeake Blue Read Free Page A

reached out, touched Cam's arm. "I want to come home. Not just for a few days or a couple weeks. I want to stay. Can I stay?"
    Cam drew off his sunglasses, and his eyes, smoke-gray, met Seth's. "What the hell's the matter with you that you think you have to ask? You trying to piss me off?"
    "I never had to try, nobody does with you. Anyway, I'll pull my weight."
    "You always pulled your weight. And we missed seeing your ugly face around here."
    And that, Seth thought as they walked to the car, was all the welcome he needed from Cameron Quinn.
    THEY'D KEPT his room. It had changed over the years, different paint for the walls, a new rug for the floor. But the bed was the same one he'd slept in, dreamed in, waked in.
    The same bed he'd sneaked Foolish into when he'd been a child.
    And the one he'd sneaked Alice Albert into when he'd thought he was a man.
    He figured Cam knew about Foolish, and had often wondered if he'd known about Alice.
    He tossed his suitcase carelessly on the bed and laid his battered paint kit—one Sybill had given him for his eleventh birthday—on the worktable Ethan had built.
    He'd need to find studio space, he thought. Eventually. As long as the weather held, he could work outdoors. He preferred that anyway. But he'd need somewhere to store his canvases, his equipment. Maybe there was room in the old barn of a boatyard, but that wouldn't suit on a permanent basis.
    And he meant to make this permanent.
    He'd had enough of traveling for now, enough of living among strangers to last him a lifetime.
    He'd needed to go, to stand on his own. He'd needed to learn. And God, he'd needed to paint.
    So he'd studied in Florence, and worked in Paris. He'd wandered the hills of Ireland and Scotland and had stood on the cliffs in Cornwall.
    He'd lived cheap and rough most of the time. When there'd been a choice between buying a meal or paint, he'd gone hungry.
    He'd been hungry before. It had done him good, he hoped, to remember what it was like not to have someone making sure you were fed and safe and warm.
    It was the Quinn in him, he supposed, that made him hellbent to beat his own path.
    He laid out his sketch pad, put away his charcoal, his pencils. He would spend time getting back to basics with his work before he picked up a brush again.
    The walls of his room held some of his early drawings. Cam had taught him how to make the frames on an old miter box at the boatyard. Seth took one from the wall to study it. It showed promise, he thought, in the rough, undisciplined lines. But more, much more, it showed the promise of a life. He'd caught them well enough, he decided. Cam, with his thumbs tucked in his pockets, stance confrontational. Then Phillip, slick, edging toward an elegance that nearly disguised the street smarts. Ethan, patient, steady as a redwood in his work clothes.
    He'd drawn himself with them. Seth at ten, he thought. Thin, narrow shoulders and big feet, with a lift to his chin to mask something more painful than fear. Something that was hope.
    A life moment, Seth thought now, captured with a graphite pencil. Drawing it, he'd begun to believe, in-the-gut believe, that he was one of them. A Quinn.
    "You mess with one Quinn," he murmured as he hung the drawing on the wall again, "you mess with them all."
    He turned, glanced at the suitcases and wondered if he could sweet-talk Anna into unpacking for him.
    Not a chance.
    "Hey."
    He looked toward the doorway and brightened when he saw Kevin. If he had to fiddle with clothes, as least he'd have company. "Hey, Kev."
    "So, you really hanging this time? For good?"
    "Looks like."
    "Cool." Kevin sauntered in, plopped on the bed and propped his feet on one of the suitcases. "Mom's really jazzed about it. Around here, if Mom's happy, everybody's happy. She could be soft enough to let me use her car this weekend."
    "Glad I can help." He shoved Kevin's feet off the suitcase, then unzipped it.
    He had the look of his mother, Seth thought. Dark, curling hair,