Page 33 of Escape to Lighthouse Cove

In fact, when he’d come outside to find Grace, he’d been debating with himself whether he even wanted to invite her to dinner. Coffee or tea was one thing, but dinner meant commitment. Hours of socializing. Honesty, at least of a sort.

And he was really pretty rusty at that kind of thing. More importantly, he didn’t trust himself to do it properly. And he wasn’t even sure he wanted Grace to get to know him, because then she might not like him anymore. She probably didn’t like him now, but still. Why make things worse?

And yet somehow the words had come out of his mouth. And he found he meant them. He wanted her and Jacob to stay. He didn’t, he realized with a frisson of shocked awareness, want to be alone.

“Dinner would be nice,” Grace said quietly, her gaze scanning his face like she suspected some of his thought process. “Thank you.”

“Okay, great.” A wave of relief broke over Noah, so his knees felt weak, which was kind of pathetic, but whatever. She was staying. “Great,” he said, and the sun sank lower in the sky, dipping behind a bank of clouds so it felt as if the temperature had just dropped at least ten degrees. Maybe twenty. That was Maine for you, especially on the coast. “Isaiah and Jacob might be finished by now. Shall we go back inside?” he suggested, and wrapping her arms around herself with a shiver, she nodded. Noah had the urge to put his arm around her, which he did not act on even though she was clearly cold.

Back inside, they headed upstairs, where Isaiah and Jacob were still deep into their game.

“He’s winning,” Isaiah said ruefully, his cheeks pink with delight, no doubt at seeing Noah and Grace together. The old man was, unfortunately, obvious.

“How are you, bud?” Grace asked gently. She slid her fingers through Jacob’s hair in a way Noah had seen before, like she was anchoring him to her. He glanced up at her fleetingly, a smile barely touching his lips, before he turned back to the game.

“I think he’s concentrating,” Noah said, and then he did touch her, just a brush of her shoulder, barely more than a glancing fingertip, because he couldn’t resist any longer. But even that seemed too much, because she startled at the touch of his fingers, her body tensing, her eyes widening as she turned to give him a sharp look.

It was an overreaction considering how lightly he’d touched her, and she recovered quickly, giving him a swift smile, color coming into her cheeks that made Noah think she realized she’d overreacted, too.

All of it made him wonder… as well as decide to tread carefully, because God knew he needed people to tread carefully around him. They’d both be walking on broken glass, at this rate, barely able to say boo.

“Why don’t we see what’s going on in the kitchen?” Noah suggested, like this was a game of Clue and there might be activity elsewhere, rather than just looming emptiness.

Grace nodded, giving Jacob a quick, reassuring smile. “Okay.”

She followed him down the hall and then the back stairs, which had once been only for servants, emerging in the kitchen which spanned nearly the whole length of the back of the house, a yawning space that no amount of furniture or crockery could make cozy, not that anyone had really tried.

“Wow,” Grace murmured as she took in the twenty-foot-long worktable of scarred oak, the huge range that looked like it was from the nineteenth century with a modern oven from the 1970s, in avocado green, crammed next to it.

“You might have noticed,” Noah remarked as he headed for the fridge—also in avocado green—“that Grayhaven hasn’t been updated in about fifty years.”

She braced one hip against the worktable, her arms folded, her eyes glinting. “Why is that?”

Noah shrugged as he scanned the contents of the fridge, which were definitely on the depressing side. “Why change perfection?” he quipped.

Grace laughed softly. “I suppose different people have different definitions of that word.”

“True… but the Lawrence family has history here, and no one wanted to change so much as a tablecloth. It became its own thing.” He took out a wilting head of lettuce and a few slightly desiccated mushrooms. Isaiah hadn’t been to the mainland in nearly a week.

Grace glanced at the offerings and a bubble of laughter escaped her. “I think my fridge is better stocked than yours,” she remarked, and Noah sighed.

“It’s official, then. Isaiah likes you better than me.”

“He does your shopping?”

“I haven’t been off the island in six months.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but he was all too aware of how much that revealed.

Grace, however, didn’t remark on it. “It was strange,” she mused, “being in Eastport after just a week here. I felt like I’d gone to the booming metropolis.”

“I can’t imagine how I’ll feel,” Noah replied. “Better not risk it.” He turned to the pantry to root around for some pasta, but he could feel that his comment had not gone unnoticed.

“But you will eventually?” Grace asked, a note of uncertainty in her voice. “Go off island, I mean?”

“Why should I,” he quipped, “when Isaiah does everything for me?”

He felt her disappointment like a burn. This was why he didn’t socialize, he reflected. He was terrified of taking anything seriously. Of beingseen.

“I mean, I suppose I’ll have to go eventually,” he acknowledged as he liberated a packet of spaghetti and a can of chopped tomatoes from the cobwebby depths of the pantry. “For my biannual teeth cleaning, at the very least.”