Liam hurried me out. “She’s a tiger,” he said, opening his car door for me.
“I think she’s very fond of you and just wants the best for you,” I told him.
He looked surprised, and when he got in, he just sat there for a moment. “Do you really think that about her?” he asked, still looking forward.
“Yes, why?”
“She’s never given me that feeling. Sometimes I felt it was because she saw more of my mother in me than my father, and I know how she felt about my mother. She rarely misses an opportunity to tell me.”
“Sometimes people want to feel differently and look for ways to do just that if you give them the chance,” I said.
He turned quickly and smiled. “You know, if you keep this up, I’m going to believe I’m with a sixty-year-old wise old lady in a beautiful eighteen-year-old’s body.”
“And?”
“Nothing. I’ll take you any way I can,” he said, and started his engine.
Would you? I wondered. I doubt it.
“How is Julia this morning?”
“She didn’t come down to breakfast. Mrs. Wakefield brought it up to her, and you can be sure sh
e wasn’t happy about that.”
“Who? Julia or Mrs. Wakefield?”
“Both,” he said. “Mrs. Wakefield is a tough old bird, but she has a genuine fondness for us, as close to the love a mother would have for her children as possible, I suppose. My father was lucky to have found her at the right time. Her husband had been killed in a boating accident when she was in her late thirties. She never remarried, and they didn’t have any children of their own. We were a good fit, I guess, but she’s what you might call overprotective. Any woman my father might bring into that house is scanned better than by the scanners they have at the airports.”
I laughed. “I guess that will be true for me, too,” I thought aloud.
“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”
“Will you?” I asked, but it was meant to be almost rhetorical, a question that would be carried off like a leaf in a breeze.
“Damn right. Every chance I get,” he said. To punctuate his determination, he took my hand and squeezed it gently. “Let’s have a helluva good time and not dwell on the past,” he added, just as Julia had said. We drove on.
I really had nothing to compare to this day I spent with Liam. My times with Buddy were always in secret and confined. By necessity, my sisters and I had been closed in, our lives cloistered. Even on the brightest days, I had felt as if I were moving in shadows. We had worn them like second skins. The instructions were clear. Unless my sisters and I were involved in a hunt, we were to avoid spotlights and not draw too much attention to ourselves. How different this day was. It was as if I had been reborn in the sunshine. Automobile tops down, hair blowing in the wind, voices excited and loud, no hiding of faces, no smothering of smiles and laughter—all of it was part of a world I had dreamed of being in but never thought I would.
We went directly to the dock where the Dolans’ boat was kept.
“My father is always threatening to sell it,” Liam told me as we parked near the boat, a Stingray sport boat. “Boats need a lot of attention, and he doesn’t think I give it enough. Supposedly, he bought it for me. We went out together a few times, but I can’t tell you when the last time was. It was that long ago. Julia never uses it, of course. I gave it a total overhaul this past week,” he continued as we got out and walked to the dock. “I guess I was dreaming of taking you out. Did you do any boating in California?”
“No. I’ve never been on a private boat.”
“Really? I thought you California girls did it all.”
He helped me onto the boat.
“I’m not really a California girl, not in the sense you mean,” I said. “I wasn’t born there, and we lived in other places.”
“Right.”
He got the boat untied and started the engine.
“I thought we’d go to Salem for lunch,” he said. “The town’s about a fifteen-minute walk from the dock. I know a great pub restaurant, the Witches’ Brew. Get it? Salem, witches?”
“Yes, I get it,” I said.