She’d just arrived back at her site when she heard a vehicle accelerating up the main road and a horn beeping, followed by another. It sounded like Rob’s family were starting to head out, and she smiled as she imagined him flopping face-first on his bed, utterly exhausted.
Imagining Rob on his bed wasn’t going to lead her to anything but more sexual frustration, so she went inside and grabbed her book. After settling into her nest, she tried to convince her brain the story was more interesting than imagining things she really shouldn’t allow herself to think about.
But the book wasn’tthatgood.
Chapter Twelve
Rob had just finished skimming the pool when he saw the twins from site twenty-eight headed toward the store. Their mom said they could come in once per weekend for ice cream, but they’d had ice cream during the cookout yesterday with all the other kids. And he was sure Melissa once mentioned them not having sugar before the long drive home on Sundays.
Also, they weren’t running, but were doing that weird fast walk-skip thing kids did when they were in a hurry, but an adult had told them not to run. After hanging the skimmer on the hooks looped on the fence, he left the pool area and took the second to reset the lock. Then he met them by the door of the store.
“Do you have a ladder?” Red asked before Rob could even say hello.
“What kind of ladder? How tall?” It seemed weird Scottie would send the boys down rather than coming himself.
The boys looked at each other and then Blue shrugged. “Tall like to get up on a roof, I guess.”
“Okay.” Maybe Scottie needed to get on the roof of his camper to seal a leak or something. “I can bring one up and give your dad a hand.”
“Dad’s not here.”
He was confused. “Your mom needs a ladder?”
Red shook his head. “She’s not here, either.”
Okay, that wasn’t great. They weren’t old enough to be here alone, and he definitely wasn’t going to give them a ladder so they could go on a roof to retrieve a ball or Frisbee or whatever got stuck up there. “Back up. What’s stuck on the roof?”
“Hannah,” they said in unison.
His heart skipped a beat. “Hannah’s on a roof?”
“Yep.” Blue nodded. “She climbed up a tree and hopped across and got the boomerang, but she said jumping onto a tree branch is scarier than jumping onto a roof and then she said...what did she say?”
“She said, ‘I didn’t really think that through,’” Red replied, doing a decent imitation of an exasperated woman. It was a tone he probably heard a lot from their mother, actually. “We’re supposed to ask Brian and not you, though.”
“Brian’s not here.” He went to talk to a guy about the price of having cordwood delivered already split to bundle for resale to campers versus splitting it themselves. They were both hoping to make the former work, but the two brothers whoweren’ton-site or doing the work were only looking at the dollar signs. “Where are your parents?”
“Mom got stung and she has an allergy pen, but Dad said she still had to go to the doctor. It’s super boring there, so Hannah said she would keep an eye on us. And we told her we’re allowed to come to the store, but she made us promise not to run and to look before we cross the road even though it’s dirt and nobody drives through the campground fast, and we had to come straight here and not talk to strangers and we had to find Brian.”
Rob smothered a chuckle. She’d really covered the nervous babysitter bases there. As far as he could tell, the Scott rules for the twins were stay off other people’s sites and don’t go out on Route 3. “Since Brian’s not here, I’ll get the ladder and be right there. Wait, which roof?”
“The bathhouse on the hill,” Red said, and then they headed back, doing the same not-running half trot.
It took him a couple of minutes to get the key to the UTV and write a “be right back” note for the door, which he locked. Then he had to go into the walk-out basement under the house and get the ladder to strap to the rack on the UTV.
When he got to the small bathhouse on the hill that served the cabins on that side of the campground—new since they were kids and Uncle Joe and Aunt Keri had to walk all the way to the big one in the middle of the campground—the boys were trying to throw something up to Hannah. Red would throw it up and Blue would catch it. They’d switch and try again.
“We’re trying to give her a snack,” Red told him when he turned off the UTV.
“Huh.” He looked up at Hannah, who was sitting on the eave of the roof with the flats of her sneakers braced against the shingles. “How long have you been up there?”
“Long enough to want a snack,” she said. “Plus, if they’re standing here trying to throw me a snack, I know where they are.”
“True.” He put his hand out. “Let me try.”
“Just get me down and I can eat it on the ground.”
“I don’t know.” He tilted his head up to grin at her. “The boys said you only wanted Brian.”
