Rainshadow Road (Friday Harbor #2)(76)

As the window took shape on her worktable, Lucy was aware of a peculiar warmth in the glass, a glow that had nothing to do with heat transferred from soldered metal. One evening as Lucy was closing up shop, she happened to glance at the unfinished window, lying flat on the worktable. The glass glowed with its own incandescence.

Her relationship with Sam had remained platonic since the night he’d slept with her at the condo. Platonic, but not asexual. Sam had done his utmost to seduce her, with sweltering kisses and passionate interludes that made them both feverish with unsatisfied desire. But Lucy was afraid of the very real possibility that if she were to have sex with him now, she would blurt out how much she loved him. The words were there, in her mind, on her lips, most of the time, desperate to be said. Only her sense of self-preservation gave her the strength to refuse Sam. And although he had received her refusals with good grace at first, he was obviously finding it more difficult to stop now.

“When?” Sam had asked after their last session, his breath hot against her mouth, a dangerous flare of heat in his eyes.

“I don’t know,” Lucy had said weakly, shivering as his hands stroked her back and hips. “Not until I can be sure of myself.”

“Let me have you,” he had whispered, resting his forehead on hers. “Let me make love to you all night. I want to wake up with you again. Just tell me what you need, Lucy, and I’ll do it.”

Make love. He had never called it that before. The two words had clamped around her heart like a vise. This was the torture of loving Sam—that he was willing to get so close, but not quite close enough.

And since the thing that she needed most—for him to love her—was impossible, she refused him once again.

* * *

Lucy finished the window two days before Alice’s wedding. People had started to arrive from out of town, most of them staying in cottages at the Roche Harbor resort, or taking rooms in the Hotel de Haro. Lucy’s parents had arrived that morning, and had spent the day with Alice and the wedding coordinator. Tomorrow Lucy would have lunch with them, but tonight she was going to have dinner with Sam. And she would tell him that she was leaving Friday Harbor.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the studio door. “Come in,” she called. “It’s unlocked.”

To her surprise, it was Kevin.

Her former boyfriend gave her a vaguely sheepish grin. “Luce. Got a couple of minutes?”

Lucy’s heart sank. She hoped this would not be an attempt to make peace, to discuss their shared past and smooth things over so that his wedding day with Alice was untarnished. It was entirely unnecessary. Lucy was over him, thank God, and she was willing to let bygones be bygones. The last thing she wanted to do was to autopsy their past.

“I’ve got a couple of minutes,” she said cautiously, “but I’m kind of busy. And I’m sure you must be even busier with all the wedding stuff going on.”

“Actually, there’s not all that much for the groom to do. I just show up when and where they tell me to.” Kevin was as handsome as ever, but there was an odd look about him. He had the blank, bemused expression of a man who had just stumbled on the sidewalk and turned to see what invisible object had tripped him up.

As he approached, Lucy found herself pulling spare pieces of paper over her tree window, feeling the need to shield it from his view. She went to the side of the worktable and leaned against it.

“Your brace is off,” Kevin remarked. “How’s the leg?”

“Great,” she said lightly. “I just have to be a little careful with it. No high-impact stuff for a while.”

He stopped a little closer to her than she was comfortable with, but she didn’t want to back away.

Contemplating him, Lucy wondered how a man she had once been so close to could now seem like a stranger. She had been so certain that she had been in love with him … and it had been a good approximation, just as silk flowers could look very much like real ones, or cubic zirconium could sparkle just like diamonds. But their version of love had been a form of playacting. All their love-words and cozy rituals had been a way to cover up the emptiness beneath. She hoped that he had found a deeper, more genuine relationship with Alice. But she doubted it. And that actually made her feel sorry for him.

“How are you?” she asked.

Something in her tone caused Kevin’s shoulders to lower. He sighed deeply. “It’s like being caught up in a tornado. The color of the flowers, the guest favors with personalized ribbons, the photographer and videographer and all that crap … this thing is way more complicated and crazy than it should be. I mean, it’s just a wedding.”

Lucy brought herself to smile at him. “It’ll be over soon. Then you can relax.”

Kevin began to pace around the studio, which was familiar territory to him. He had been in there countless times when they had lived together. He had even helped to install the vertical storage racks for the glass. But Lucy felt uneasy as he intruded farther into her studio. Kevin didn’t belong there anymore. He no longer had the right to wander through her workplace in such a cavalier way.

“The weirdest part of all of it,” he said, inspecting a shelf of finished lampshades, “is that the closer the wedding gets, the more I find myself trying to figure out what happened with us.”

Lucy blinked. “You mean … you and me?”