Retreat to Love Read Free Page B

and looked out at Wren, who scraped a long branch of deadwood against the pane. She dropped it and waved, then headed towards the front door.
    I met her with the log cabin quilt around my shoulders.
    “Did I wake you?” she asked, entering.
    “Do you always do this?”
    “No, I swear I won’t make a habit of it. But I’ve been up for two hours and I’m bored and breakfast won’t be for another forty-five minutes.”
    “Maybe you should have tapped on the windows of Team One to make sure they’re going to serve you on time.”
    She sat on the love seat and tipped her chin towards the road. “I saw Angelica walking out by the lake already, so I figured we were okay. She’s bound to wake up that Theo guy if he’s not up already.”
    I went through the bedroom to the studio. “Make yourself cozy. I’m going to shower.” Yawning, I shut the bathroom door behind me.
    The hot water heater, at least, was working well. It seemed the coldest room in the cabin was the bedroom, and I regretted leaving my clothes behind in the chilly bureau. Once I’d figured out the arcane neo-Victorian shower controls, I rapidly shampooed and conditioned my hair and scrubbed myself with the oatmeal body bar I’d found in a basket of toiletries on a shelf above the commode. The shower was in a garden tub with a window looking into the woods, and if Wren hadn’t been sitting in my cabin I would have slept past breakfast then soaked in a bathtub of bubbles long enough to be almost late for lunch.
    As it was I made quick work of my morning ablutions, threw on yesterday’s jeans and a Berkeley sweatshirt I’d stolen when Zach was a freshman, and went back into the sitting room with my hair in a towel and my sneakers and socks in my hands.
    “Is the heating in your cabin this screwy?” I asked, sitting beside her.
    “In a word, yes. I was wondering if it was the goal of the HVAC engineers, to keep us working till all hours instead of lying abed.”
    “I guess it worked for you this morning.”
    “I’m an early bird on East Coast time, so I woke up just after five with enormous hunger pangs. I went to the Main House to get coffee, but Margie was in the kitchen so all I did was grab a cup and retreat.”
    “You’re from Connecticut, right?”
    Half-shrug. “It’s where I live now.”
    “Oh. Where’s home?”
    “Everywhere. Nowhere. Military brat, you know? That’s what I’m trying to do now, really.”
    “What is?”
    “Defining home. Or creating it, maybe. My brain is full of images of homes—of houses—and I’m sorting them out, trying to categorize what makes them the same, or keeps them distant.”
    “Wow.”
    A slight snort, and Wren said, “Well, wow if it works. If it doesn’t ….”
    “Did you get any work done this morning?”
    Wren laughed. “Yeah, right. I’ve just been wandering around, thinking, getting oriented. I’ve found two shortcuts to the Main House from my cabin, and one from yours to Caleb’s, plus I’ve been along the river bed until it headed uphill pretty steeply.”
    I went to drape the towel in the bathroom and comb out my hair. “We’ve still got half an hour until grub,” she called. “I’ll show you around if you want.”
    “Sure. Let’s go.”
    Wren waited by the front door for me to join her. As she opened it, I glanced back at the huge east-facing windows of the studio, and saw the growing light land upon a fat, probably pregnant, whitetail doe in a clearing twenty feet from the cabin. There was a salt lick set up there, and she stood rather confidently enjoying it in the otherwise still landscape. By the time we’d gone outside and rounded the wall of ValeSong, she was gone.
    The clearing was edged with cypress and pine trees, which crowded out the view of Wren’s porch across the creek. Turning away from the water, she led me to a path with an almost overgrown entrance, but which widened out and was lined with pine bark once we were on it.
    “This is the way to