“I only heard it once—besides the night we were trapped up on top of the lighthouse,” he said. “The next night I didn’t hear it, so I thought it stopped after that.”
“It didn’t. I heard it every night except the one night you didn’t hear it. Always at one thirty on the dot. Hard to miss.”
“You didn’t say anything about it.”
“Nor did I come running over to your side of the cottage to make sure you weren’t being tortured to death,” she replied teasingly. “Or vice versa.”
Well, that shut him up. She grinned to herself.
“After the second night, I wore earplugs and played white noise,” he replied as he navigated the Jeep off the main road onto the narrow, bumpy path that led to the Stony Cape island bridge. Trees arched overhead like a green tunnel, casting the road into an eerie darkness. “So I didn’t hear it. In case it happened again.”
“Classic avoidance,” she said.
He rolled his eyes, then glanced at her. “Did you hear it the first night you were here?”
“Not the first night. I’d had a few too many B-Cubeds at dinner, and I put earplugs in and slept like a log. Which is how I’m going to sleep tonight—the sleep of the innocent…or, in this case, the sleep of the author of the finished book.”
“But it’s not really finished,” he reminded her. “Technically.”
Why did he keep mentioning that? “It’s close enough for me to sleep the sleep of the author of the finished book.”
“Got it.” He turned the wheel, and the Jeep bounced onto the rut-filled road that led to the island. “Well, again, congratulations. Really. I’m very happy for you.”
It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet, so it was still very light out. The sun wouldn’t set for at least another hour.
“I think we should go up to the top of the lighthouse and look around,” she said impulsively.
He glanced over with a look that clearly said,Are you crazy?and she began to laugh.
“Don’t you want to see if the ghost comes back again? With that amorphous, phosphorescent greenish-blue glowy stuff you claim is algae?”
“Not particularly.”
“But it would be your chance to take a sample—that way you couldproveit’s just algae and not some ghostly specter.”
He clamped his lips shut, and Teddy continued to smirk at him.
“Well, if you don’t want to do that,” she said, lowering her voice to a purr, “maybe we should walk back over to the hot springs. Have an evening soak. I’m still in celebration mode. You have to understand—fifty thousand words in six days, with no human interaction…I feel as if I’ve been freed from solitary confinement.”
She saw his Adam’s apple bob sharply in his throat, and her lips curled in a satisfied smile.Marcie Schmarcie, she thought…and realized, suddenly, that it wasn’t just a joke.
She really liked the guy. And he was pretty hot for a nerd. Plus he was smart and dry-humored. And she thought he should definitely be ready to move on from Miss Marcie the boring schoolteacher.
“Um…” He pulled into the parking place next to the cottage and stopped the Jeep with a little jolt. Turning the key, he said casually, “All right,” and shocked her into speechlessness.
As she climbed out of the vehicle, she was still reeling a little, but she wasn’t a writer—and good with snappy dialogue—for nothing, so she said, “Okay, I’ll go change. Suits or no suits?”
Oscar tripped, stumbling as he caught himself, and sent a few rocks skittering over the parking area. But he didn’t look at her as he started for the cottage. Teddy was certain he was pretending he didn’t hear her, and that made her smirk even more.
“Meet you back here in a few minutes,” he said before ducking into the cottage.
He was as good as his word—which were points in his favor, Teddy decided; he could have taken a lot longer or even “forgotten” about the plan, getting distracted by his lab work. Instead, he was waiting for her with a towel slung around his neck.
“I see you opted for a suit,” she said, glancing at his dark gray swim trunks and a soft, slightly wrinkled button-down shirt that made him look more like a tourist than a college professor. “And then some.”
“I figured protection against the mosquitos would be a good plan. What about you?” he replied, eyeing the loose, knee-length coverup she was wearing.
* * *
