“They’re going to be.” He scooped up some cake, sampled it. “God, woman, you sell this on the open market, you’d be a millionaire inside of six months.”

“I don’t need to be rich.”

“Got your back up again,” he observed and kept right on eating. “I don’t mind that. Some men look for a woman who’ll buckle under, tow the line, whatever.” He shrugged, speared a fat strawberry. “Now, me, I wonder why. It seems that would get boring fast for both parties involved. No spark there, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t need sparks either.”

“Everybody does. People who set them off each other every time they turn around, though, well, that would just wear you out.” Something told her he didn’t wear out—or wear down—easily.

“But if you don’t light a spark now and again,” he went on, “you miss the sizzle that comes with it. If you cooked without spice or seasoning, you’d come up with something you could eat, but it wouldn’t satisfy.”

“That’s very clever. But there are some of us who stay healthier on a bland diet.”

“My great-uncle Frank.” Zack gestured with his fork before he dived into the cake again. “Ulcers. Some said it came from pure meanness, and it’s hard to argue. He was a hardheaded, miserly Yankee. Never married. He preferred curling up in bed with his ledgers rather than a woman. Lived to be ninety-eight.”

“And the moral of the story?”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of morals. Just Great-uncle Frank. We’d go to dinner at my grandmother’s the third Sunday of every month when I was a boy. She made the best damn pot roast—you know, the kind circled around with the little potatoes and carrots? My mother didn’t inherit Gran’s talent with a pot roast. But, anyway, Great-uncle Frank would come and eat rice pudding while the rest of us gorged. The man scared the hell out of me. I can’t look at a bowl of rice pudding to this day without getting the shakes.”

It must be some kind of magic, she decided, that made it so impossible not to relax around him. “I think you’re making half that up.”

“Not a single word. You can look him up in the registry at the Island Methodist Church. Francis Morris Bigelow. Gran, she married a Ripley, but was a Bigelow by birth and older sister to Frank. She lived to just past her hundredth birthday herself. We tend to be long-lived in my family, which is why most of us don’t settle down to marriage and family until into our thirties.”