Rose opened her mouth to offer her a seat when Robert cleared his throat.
“Surely, I can getyousomething from the Spa,” he offered.
Claire and Rose exchanged a glance.How wonderful!Perhaps Robert wouldn’t need her matchmaking help after all.
“Why, you’re only a tad fatter than my sister,” he finished.
Fatter! Dear God.Rose nearly groaned aloud.What an imbecile!
Maeve gasped, and Claire swatted her brother with her handbag. Rose knew her own eyes must be as wide as dinner plates because Maeve’s were certainly bulging. The young woman looked positively apoplectic, and Rose couldn’t blame her. For Robert to even comment on Maeve’s body at all was utterly beyond the pale.
Taking a deep breath, Rose tried to think of something to help the situation.
Claire simply took Maeve’s hand and said, “If only I had your figure, I’d be in heaven, so feminine and shapely.
Maeve seemed to take that well.
“Perhaps I will have a lemonade,” she said, not offering Robert any money for her drink. She merely stared hard at him until he turned and went inside.
Rose breathed a sigh of relief. At that moment, she saw Finn emerge from the door across the street and head down Washington Street away from her.
“I’ve just caught sight of an old friend with whom I’d lost contact,” she told Claire and Maeve, hoping her best friend understood her meaning. “I’m going to run and catch up. Excuse me, ladies.”
Without waiting for a reply and admitting to herself she was behaving impulsively, Rose took off at an unseemly trot. She didn’t want to lose sight of Finn on the busy street. After he turned right onto School Street, she feared she had, indeed, lost him. Scanning the crowd of pedestrians, she spotted him cutting through the old Granary Burying Ground. She did the same.
Giving a nod to Paul Revere’s statue as she had since she was a child, she increased her pace as Finn crossed the street and entered the Common proper. She could go no faster, not with her fashionable corset and heeled shoes, so when he began to outpace her, she gave up all sense of discretion and called out to him.
“Finn.”
He stopped and turned at once. When he saw her, he rushed back toward her.
“Is something wrong?”
Wrong, indeed!She realized that in a moment of impetuousness, she’d done precisely what he’d asked her not to — demonstrate to anyone watching that she knew him.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Nothing actually. I simply saw you and ...,” she trailed off uncertainly when his face became a scowl of disapproval.
“Good God, woman. It’s not safe,” he muttered, already looking around them. “Haven’t I told you that?”
He did not want to see her anyway, and now he was angry.
“Where can we go?” he asked suddenly.
So hedidwant to see her. That lifted her heart. She considered.
“I’ll walk toward the Frog Pond, there’s a thick clematis bower there. We can see if it’s deserted.”
He nodded. “You go first then, and I’ll join you.” Minutes later they stood in close confines, the leaf-covered trellis above them like a protective arch.
“I saw you on Washington Street,” she told him.
“I went to thePost’s archives to read about the sinking. I wanted to see who said what.”
She nodded. “I have every one of the local paper’s coverage for weeks after the sinking. I saved them all.”
His eyes widened momentarily as he realized what that meant. Did he understand how she had scrutinized every line for information of him?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Truly, I am.”
