“You made the reservations, didn’t you?”
She took a few steps to her desk in the corner of the kitchen and looked at the printout. One double room at the Sweet River B&B in Janes Creek, Maryland, for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, this coming weekend. Carla had said she thought Dave was planning to propose to her while they were there. It was true that he’d pretty much invited himself to go with her.
“I’ve only known him for six months,” Kim had said, frowning. “He asked to go with me because he wants some time off from his catering business.”
“Uh-huh,” Carla said. “You’re forgetting that I know his last girlfriend. He never took off a weekend for her, and they were together for over two years.”
Kim had said she needed to . . . She couldn’t think of an excuse, but had just left the room.
“Kim?” Dave asked. “Are you still there?”
“Yes. It’s just that a childhood friend of mine has shown up and is staying in my pool house.”
“That must be nice for you,” Dave said, “but, Kim, no playdates this weekend. I want you all to myself. For our own playdate.”
“Okay,” she said, and after a few more murmurings, Dave said he had to go, as thirty pounds of shrimp had just been delivered.
She’d put her phone in her pocket and set about cleaning the kitchen—and looking at the clock. It didn’t make any sense that she’d be nervous about how long Travis was spending with his mother, but she was.
An hour went by, then two. At the start of the third hour she was sure she’d never see him again. When he tapped on the back glass door, she jumped, then gave him her best smile.
He didn’t look to be in the best mood, which was confirmed when he sat down on a stool by the bar and said, “You have any whiskey?”
She poured him a shot of McTarvit single malt, a drink she kept on hand for her male cousins.
He downed it in one gulp.
“You want to talk about it?” she asked gently. When he looked at her, she saw pain in his eyes.
“You ever have a feeling that the thing you dread most in life is coming true?”
She wanted to say that she feared being a fifty-year-old businesswoman with no private life, and so far, that’s where she was heading. “Yes,” she said. “Is that what you think is happening to you?”
“My mother seems to think so.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t say any more. When they were kids he’d always said as little as possible, and it had been her job to pull him out of himself. “So what are you planning to do tomorrow?”
He looked at her for a moment and smiled. “Not what I’d like to do, but I’m open to alternate suggestions.”
“What does that mean? That you can’t do what you want to?”
“Nothing,” he said. “What are you going to do tomorrow?”
Kim felt the tension in her chest release. She’d been afraid that now that he’d seen his mother he’d say he was leaving. “Work,” she said. “What I do every day. You’re the one with open plans. Did your mother tell you to leave town?”
“Actually, just the opposite. Is there anything to eat? I burned off a little energy after the mom-talk.”
Kim had been so concerned that he was going to leave that she hadn’t noticed that his shirt was torn and dirty, and there was a leaf in his hair. Just like when we were kids, she thought. “What in the world did you do?” she asked as she opened the fridge.
“A little climbing. That’s a nice cliff you have at Stirling Point.”
“How’d you get so dirty going up that trail?”
“Didn’t use the trail,” he said as he went to the cabinet and withdrew a couple of plates.
She halted with a bowl in her hands. “But that’s a sheer face.”
Travis gave a half shrug.