Contents ( 66)
- Cover
- Books by Valerie Fraser Luesse
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Map of Florida
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- forty-nine
- fifty
- fifty-one
- Epilogue
- Keep Reading for a Preview of Valerie Luesse’s Next Book!
- Prologue
- one
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Back Ads
- Back Cover
Peyton thought it over. He was anxious to find Lisa and then get to Key West, but he knew if he kept riding hard, he’d just end up sidelined for several days, doctoring sores and rashes. “Yes, ma’am. I think I do. Thank you.”
Matilda clapped her hands together. “Well, that’s just wonderful. I can’t remember when I’ve had comp’ny from the mainland. Let’s go get you settled in, and you can rest yourself until supper. Oh, this is just a treat!”
Matilda’s fishing shack was a tiny cracker-style house made of cypress—just one room and no electricity. A sink on the front porch held a hand pump for water from the creek just a few yards away. Tall screened windows offered cooling cross breezes and kept the bugs out.
He and Matilda shared a supper of pan-fried trout, fresh greens, new potatoes, and cornbread before he helped her with the dishes and retired to the shack, where he sat on the end of an old pier that jutted out into Sykes Creek. The sun had already set, and the sky was quickly growing dark. Peyton could see the rising moon reflected in the water below. A few minutes more and that’s all there was—dark sky above, dark water below, and a lone traveler suspended like the moon between the two.
His father likely loved this place—the quiet and the solitude. But Peyton had realized something on his coastal odyssey: Unlike his dad, he wasn’t escaping but seeking—riding to something, not away from it. He was making his way to answers about his father for sure, but just as important, he was closing the distance that separated him from Lisa. If she were here, Merritt Island would be heaven on earth. But she wasn’t. So it wasn’t. And he couldn’t wait for morning.
twenty-seven
Peyton awoke with a painful cramp in his right calf. It gripped him with such excruciating pain that all he could do was thrash about in bed, barely able to catch his breath till it subsided at last and he could rub it with liniment and walk off the soreness, pacing back and forth in Matilda’s fishing shack.
He left just after daylight, dousing himself with the last of Aunt Gert’s bug lotion and putting new inner tubes in his tires before slipping a hastily scribbled thank-you note under Matilda’s kitchen door. Then he put on the leather gloves that were saving his hands and pedaled down the highway.
Even as the sun climbed high and the scattering of small Florida towns dotting A1A began to wake up, this stretch of highway was quiet. It threaded the waters of the Atlantic on one side and the Indian River on the other. Looking to the ocean, Peyton could see nothing but dunes, water, and sky. On the river side, he saw the weather-worn docks of marinas that had been here forever, where sport fishermen loaded coolers of ice onto their boats and prepared for a day on the water. Tonight they would gather in pubs, swapping tall tales about the one that got away.