She waited, hoping he’d come nearer. She fantasized that he’d let her put her arms around him and all the lost years would vanish. Instead, he bent to pick up one of the pinecones lying on the ground.

“We had a TV in the basement. I went down there every week to watch your show. I always turned the volume low, but they knew what I was doing. They never said a word about it.”

“I don’t suppose they would have.”

He rubbed his thumb over the scales. His hostility was gone, but not his tension, and she knew the reunion she’d dreamed of wasn’t going to happen.

“So what am I supposed to do about all this now?”

The fact that he had to ask the question showed that he wasn’t ready to give her anything. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t tell him she’d loved him from the moment of his birth and had never stopped. Instead, she only said, “I guess that’ll be up to you.”

He nodded slowly, then dropped the pinecone. “Now that you’ve told me, are you going to leave?”

Neither his expression nor his tone gave her a cue how he wanted her to respond, and she wouldn’t ask. “I’m going to finish planting the annuals I bought. A few more days.”

It was a lame excuse, but he nodded and turned toward the path. “I need to take a shower.”

He hadn’t ordered her to leave. He hadn’t told her this had come too late. She decided it was enough for now.

Kevin found Molly perched in her favorite spot, the glider on the back porch of the cottage, a notebook on her thighs. It hurt too much to think about Lilly’s earthshaking revelations, so he stood in the doorway gazing at Molly instead. She must not have heard him come in because she didn’t look up. On the other hand, he’d been acting like such a jerk there was a good chance she was ignoring him, but how was he supposed to behave when Molly kept hatching up all these zany adventures without a clue how being near her affected him?

Did she think it was easy watching her splash around in that skimpy one-piece black bathing suit he’d had to buy her to replace the red one? Did she ever once glance down to see what happened to her breasts when she got cold? The legs of the suit were cut so high they practically begged him to slip his hands underneath so he could cup those round little cheeks. And she had the gall to be mad at him because he’d been ignoring her! Didn’t she understand he couldn’t ignore her?