“Spend the night here.”
Her expression stiffened. “What?”
“I don’t want to take you home. I will, if you want me to, of course.” When she didn’t speak, he continued as if he thought he was making up for a dire mistake. “We don’t have to…you know. Not if you’re not ready. You can have the guest room.”
“Liam…you say the strangest things sometimes,” she said, disbelieving.
“You think it’s strange that I don’t want you to go home?”
For a few seconds she just stared at him, her mouth open. “No,” she whispered. She turned her chin. “No, I don’t think that part is strange.”
“Which part, then?”
The glow from the lights in his kitchen allowed him to see her elegant throat convulse as she swallowed. He hated the separation of the table between them.
At that moment, he despised all the barriers between him and Natalie.
“You never told me what Jack Andreason told you,” she said so quietly he almost didn’t hear her.
“You never answered me about staying here with me tonight,” he countered in a voice just as hushed.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet. Now tell me about Jack.”
Liam sighed and leaned back in temporary defeat. He could tell by the hint of steel in her soft voice he shouldn’t push the topic for now. He forced his mind to focus on the conversation he’d had with Jack Andreason that afternoon.
“I drove over to St. Joseph—that’s where Jack lives now. He bought a little restaurant on the beach. Jack was tending bar when I got there. He actually recognized me right away.”
“He did? Did you know him well when you were young?”
Liam shook his head distractedly as he played with his napkin. “Nah. He said he recognized me because I looked like Dad.”
“Oh.” After a pause, she asked hesitantly, “Do you? Look like Derry, I mean?”
A vivid memory came to him: his father holding out a color photo. The boy in the picture might have been Liam himself, standing on a Harbor Town beach when he was twelve years old, so lean he was almost more bone than flesh, his skin darkened to a golden brown, a cocky little half-smile ghosting his lips.
Of course it hadn’t been Liam, but his father at the same age.
He remembered glancing up from the photo to see the knowing sparkle in his father’s eye; he recalled the rush of pleasure that filled him in that moment…the intangible bond he’d felt with the man who stood before him.
“I look a little like him, yeah,” Liam muttered.
“And you asked Jack about what you saw on the tape?”
Liam nodded. “He said he’d never seen my dad the way that he was on that night.”
“And he knew Derry fairly well, right?”
“My father had belonged to the Silver Dunes Country Club for seven years. He and Jack were friendly.”
“Did he give any theories about why he thought your father was so upset?”
Liam gave her a wry glance. “He said something similar to what Roger Dayson said the other night. Apparently Dad’s bad mood had the same effect as a cornered dog baring its teeth. Jack remembered the way my father barked at him to leave the television alone when he started to change the channel.”
“Did he have the impression that it was just that segment your father was interested in?” Natalie asked.
“He couldn’t recall for sure. The next thing he knew, he saw my father getting up to go. He did say one thing that struck me.”
“What?”