Come Morning Read Free Page B

forget.
    “Actually, he’s in a nursing home now and …” Briana’s voice trailed off as she remembered her last visit here in the spring. Gramp had already been slipping, having memory lapses, but he’d so enjoyed fishing with Bobby and strolling on the beach after dinner.
    A sick grandfather was undoubtedly the reason there was such a sorrowful look about her, Slade decided. “Where do you want these?”
    “I can manage from here, really.” She hated being thought a helpless, hapless female.
    “Where do they go?” he asked again, his patience straining.
    Far be it from her to interfere with his need to be macho, Briana decided. “In the garage, if you don’t mind.” She held the porch door open for him as he picked up two shutters, then led the way around back, yanking up the garage door. “Over there will be fine,” she told him, indicating a space in front of Gramp’s blue Buick Riviera.
    Briana stood aside as he walked past her with his heavy load, then waited while he went back for the others. She was about to close the door after he finished, but he reached past her and pulled it shut himself. Apparently, he thought her not only clumsy but totally inept to boot. “Thanks, I appreciate the help.”
    “No problem.” Slade started back toward her porch, the pain in his stomach a sharp reminder of his antacid. “I left my glass in there.”
    Following him, she glanced at the solid brick house next door. “Where’s Jeremy? I haven’t seen him around.”
    Slade paused at the porch steps. “Jeremy died about a month ago. He left his house and everything in it to me.” Hearing himself say the words out loud still shocked him. He stepped onto her porch and picked up his glass, came back out.
    “Died? I’m so sorry to hear that.” Briana remembered the last time she’d seen Jeremy. It was on Easter week. He’d been teaching Bobby to play chess on his porch, their two heads bent over the board, one gray-haired, the other so very blond. “How’d it happen? Had he been ill?”
    “Heart attack, so they tell me. His lawyer phoned with the news.” Uncomfortable with the conversation and with being here, he shifted his weight to the other foot. He wanted to go lie down, try to get rid of his headache. But he found it difficult to turn his back on her stricken look. “Did you know him well?”
    “Since I was a little girl. He was a real gentleman, unfailingly kind and very talented.”
    Everything he wasn’t, Slade thought without rancor. Maybe if Jeremy Slade had stuck around and helped raise his son, things would have turned out a lot differently.
He
would be different.
    “Forgive me for prying, but we never heard Jeremy mention anyone other than his Nantucket friends. You must have known him in another life.”
    So his father hadn’t told his closest neighbor about him, not in all those years. Slade wished the knowledge didn’t hurt so damn much. “You could say that. I’m his son, though I haven’t seen him since I was ten.”
    Ten. There had to be a story there, Briana thought, but it was none of her affair. A private person who disliked personal questions from near strangers, she decided to drop the whole thing. If Jeremy’s son wanted her to know more, he’d tell her himself. Instead, she glanced at the glass he held, the inside stained with some thick white liquid. “I see you’ve switched drinks.”
    About to walk away, Slade turned back. “How’s that?”
    “From beer. I ran across you yesterday while I was walking on the beach by the lighthouse. You were … napping on some rocks.”
    Terrific. Didn’t she have anything better to do than to track his movements? “Yeah, I went there to think, to be alone. Guess it didn’t work, since you found me.”
    Chagrined, she nodded. “Point taken. I’ll butt out.”
    “Good idea.” Angrier than the incident called for, Slade marched up onto his father’s porch and went inside, closing the door with a resounding thud.
    So much