At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(42)

Noah crouched down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. "Let them do what they need to do, Gracie. I'll be here with you."

"No!" She pushed him away. "She's sleeping. She took too much of her medications. They could wake her up if they just tried harder."

"They did try." He sounded so tired, so sad. She wanted to clap her hands over her ears to block out the sorrowful sound of his voice. "Your grandmother is gone, baby, and they need to take care of her now. You know that. It's time to let her go."

"I can't," she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. "What am I going to do without her?" Noah held her as she cried. Gently he led her out into the yard so she wouldn't see or hear what was going on in Gramma's room.

"Here," he said, taking off his shirt. "Put this on. The mosquitoes are biting."

The cotton shirt was warm and soft and it smelled like him. "Thanks," she managed. She shivered. "It's cold out tonight."

He led her down toward the docks as the car from Walker's backed up to the front door. She didn't want to think about what was happening. If she thought about it for even a minute, she would fall apart.

Her father had arrived home minutes after Noah and Gracie, in time to see Gracie crying in Noah's arms, to see the grim expressions on the faces of the cops and emergency crew. Too late, always too late. She had turned to her father to comfort and to be comforted but he had looked through her as if she were made of glass. Now there would be nothing holding the family together.

He wouldn't stay for Gracie. He never had. Years and years of promises. Next month, Gracie. You can come up here to live with us next month. Next month. Next year. Next decade. He moved from town to town, job to job, wife to wife, and never, not once in all that time, did he make room for his daughter.

Why would he start now? Gramma Del was dead. His last tie to Idle Point was severed. He would probably sell the two tiny houses and move someplace warm and Gracie would come home from school each summer to a rented room and no family.

The thought filled her with such dread that she could barely speak. She didn't want to become one of those people who lived alone and volunteered to work holidays so the folks with real families could be home with their loved ones.

"Hold me," she whispered to Noah as the hearse from Walker's crunched its way toward the main road. Hold me and don't ever let me go.

She moved against him, desperate to be held, to be made love to until she couldn't think of anything but the way his body fit with hers, couldn't feel anything but the way the heat gathered deep in the pit of her stomach every time he touched her.

"I need you," she said, then in words shockingly blunt with need she told him how and why. She needed to know she wasn't alone.

He couldn't help himself. He knew they were taking a chance, that making love on the dock behind her house was asking for trouble but she was so hungry, so needy, so warm and wet with desire, so beautiful to him in the moonlight that his brain shut down and desire took over. He was never sure where he stood with Gracie. No matter what she said, no matter how many times she showed him how much she loved him, he always sensed there was a part of her that remained beyond his reach.

Tonight all of her barriers were down. She was naked in every way possible. Her long slender limbs gleamed in the moonlight. She straddled him, eyes closed, body arched like a bow and moved in ways that surprised them both. He came almost immediately but she didn't seem to notice. She continued to move against him, hungry for sensation, and he rolled her onto her back then buried himself between her thighs. She cried out when he found her with his lips and tongue, tasting her, letting her taste them. The sounds she made when she climaxed from the deepest part of her soul.

Finally she cried. He shielded her with his body and held her as she wept. She begged him not to stop holding her and he swore he would be there until the stars fell. She was his. He believed it finally. This was more than sex, more than making love. This was communion, a sacrament of the flesh. Nothing would ever separate them now.





#





And that was how everyone in Idle Point found out about Noah and Gracie.

Pete Walker, the funeral parlor owner's son, happened to be working that night as a lifter and he saw Noah and Gracie on the dock behind her Gramma's cottage. He wasn't sure but it looked like Noah was pulling on his jeans and Gracie had the look of a girl who'd had herself a good time. He was friends with Jake Horowitz whose brother Paul worked at the newsroom and gossip being what it is, the news hit Simon Chase's breakfast table along with his copy of the Gazette.