The ache came, but she pushed it aside. “Why should it?” she countered. “He was entitled to his own life, his privacy.”

“But you weren’t.”

She felt the chill come and go. Crossing the deck, Kate dropped her bottle beside Ky’s before reaching for her shirt. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean.” He closed his hand over hers before she could pull the shirt on. Because it would’ve been cowardly to do otherwise, she lifted her head and faced him. “You know,” he said again, quietly. “You just aren’t ready to say it out loud yet.”

“Leave it alone, Ky.” Her voice trembled, and though it infuriated her, she couldn’t prevent it. “Just leave it.”

He wanted to shake her, to make her admit, so that he could hear, that she’d left him because her father had preferred it. He wanted her to say, perhaps sob, that she hadn’t had the strength to stand up to the man who had shaped and molded her life to suit his values and wants.

With an effort, he relaxed his fingers. As he had before, Ky turned away with something like a shrug. “For now,” he said easily as he went back to the helm. “Summer’s just beginning.” He started the engine before turning around for one last look. “We both know what can happen during a summer.”

CHAPTER 5

“The first thing you have to understand about Hope,” Linda began, steadying a vase the toddler had jostled, “is that she has a mind of her own.”

Kate watched the chubby black-haired Hope climb onto a wing-backed chair to examine herself in an ornamental mirror. In the fifteen minutes Kate had been in Linda’s home, Hope hadn’t been still a moment. She was quick, surprisingly agile, with a look in her eyes that made Kate believe she knew exactly what she wanted and intended to get it, one way or the other. Ky had been right. His niece looked like him, in more ways than one.

“I can see that. Where do you find the energy to run a restaurant, keep a home and manage a fireball?”

“Vitamins,” Linda sighed. “Lots and lots of vitamins. Hope, don’t put your fingers on the glass.”

“Hope!” the toddler cried out, making faces at herself in the mirror. “Pretty, pretty, pretty.”

“The Silver ego,” Linda commented. “It never tarnishes.”

With a chuckle, Kate watched Hope crawl backwards out of the chair, land on her diaper-padded bottom and begin to systematically destroy the tower of blocks she’d built a short time before. “Well, she is pretty. It only shows she’s smart enough to know it.”