Chapter Five
“I love this place,” Diana said.
The Lobster Shack was the antithesis of the Ocean Bluff Inn’s fancy dining rooms, and of any Boston restaurant she’d ever dined at with Peter. It was located in a small converted warehouse across Atlantic Avenue from a wharf lined with commercial fishing boats, back in port after a day’s harvest. The restaurant’s walls were paneled in splintery shingles draped haphazardly with woven ropes and trawling nets. Its tabletops were unvarnished planks topped with butcher paper. Its lighting was uneven, some bulbs in the ceiling fixtures emitting a glaring silver light and others a softer amber glow. The lobsters were served boiled to a bright red, accompanied by a cup of drawn butter, a saucer of coleslaw and a basket of greasy French Fries. The waitress had brought glasses along with their bottles of beer, but she hadn’t bothered to pour the beer, and when Nick took a slug straight from the bottle, Diana decided not to bother with her glass, either.
He looked ridiculous wearing a plastic bib with a cartoon drawing of a smiling lobster on it—ridiculous but adorable. She’d donned a bib, too. He was a lot more adept than she was at cracking lobster shells with the hinged metal nutcrackers the waitress had provided for them, but then, Diana wasn’t used to eating lobster this way. Peter always argued that eating boiled lobster straight out of the shell was too sloppy and uncivilized. To make him happy if they were dining out together, she would order a “lazy man’s” lobster, the meat already removed from the shell.
Breaking the shell and wrestling the steaming pink and white flesh out with a tiny fork was challenging and messy, but it was fun. It also kept Diana and Nick too busy to talk about anything other than how delicious the lobster tasted. Prying chunks of succulent meat from the claws required her full attention. It distracted her from thinking about her argument with Peter an hour ago.
He’d phoned her while she’d been staring blankly at some of the inn’s catering menus and wondering why none of the elaborate descriptions of the food tweaked her appetite. She ought to have been starving, since she hadn’t eaten lunch. The thick slice of toast she’d consumed with Nick that morning had filled her up, and once she’d hit the road, she hadn’t wanted to stop for food.
She’d gone to three antiques dealers Claudia had suggested to her, all of them located on a winding country road leading northwest out of town. The first two had been stocked with glorified trash—as she and her colleagues at Shomback-Sawyer always joked, these were the sorts of shops that ought to have signs reading, “We Buy Junk—We Sell Antiques” hanging above their doors. The third dealer had operated out of a barn not far from the New Hampshire state line, and it was there that Diana had scored a major coup, purchasing a pair of authentic Tiffany lamps for eighty dollars apiece. They were dusty and their bronze bases were crusted with dirt, but they were genuine. Given the price the dealer had charged her, he apparently hadn’t known how to tell a real Tiffany lamp from a reproduction. But Diana had rubbed enough crud from them to spot their Tiffany Studios stamps and numbers. The dealer had rolled his eyes when she’d asked him to pad them with yards of bubble-wrap. She’d offered to pay extra for the wrapping, and he’d pretended he was doing her a big favor by charging only twenty bucks to wrap the lamps and nestle them into a sturdy box.
She’d driven about a mile back toward Brogan’s Point before pulling off the road and phoning her boss. “Really? The lamps had Tiffany stamps?” James Sawyer had said.
“Stamps and numbers. They aren’t the most magnificent specimens I’ve ever seen, but they’re the real thing.”
“In that case, stay up on the North Shore as long as you want. Maybe you’ll find some more treasures for us. Use the company card. Good job, Diana.”
After stashing the lamps carefully in her room at the inn, she’d strolled down the hill toward town until she’d found herself at the entry to the Faulk Street Tavern. She’d gotten lucky with the lamps; maybe she’d get lucky with the jukebox, too.
She hadn’t, and she’d left the bar bewildered and strangely edgy after her conversation with Augusta, the tall, lanky bartender who had implied that the jukebox was somehow magical. Turn to face the strange, she’d recited, song lyrics that must have lodged themselves in Diana’s soul on Saturday night. Her day had certainly turned strange.
And then Peter had called and turned her day from strange to infuriating. He wanted her to come back to Boston. He didn’t like her “wasting time”—his words, not hers—in Brogan’s Point. He’d decided he didn’t like the inn at all. He wanted to have the wedding at that ostentatious mansion in Newport. He thought Diana was too stubborn. Her parents were worried that she hadn’t come home with him. He didn’t care that James Sawyer had urged her to stay on at Brogan’s Point and check out some more antique dealers in the area. She needed to come home. Now.
She’d ridden an emotional rollercoaster all day. From the high of discovering the Tiffany lamps hidden in that gloomy barn full of mediocre Depression glass and not-quite mint-comic books to her bewildering conversation with Augusta at the bar, to her phone conversation with Peter…to this moment, eating the simplest, freshest, most delicious lobster she’d ever tasted and wearing a plastic bib. If Peter saw her in this bib, in this eatery, he’d probably break off the engagement on principle. No future wife of his ought to be seen in public wearing a plastic lobster bib.
“So,” Nick said, leaning back in his chair. His hair was tousled, his cheeks and chin wearing a day’s growth of stubble. His eyes were unfathomable, so dark. She had to avert her gaze so as not to be drawn in by their beauty. “You took off your ring.”
Right. She was wearing the bib, and she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring. She’d been so angry with Peter after his phone call, she’d taken it off and hidden it inside a pair of rolled socks in a drawer when she’d gone to her room to fetch her coat. She hadn’t considered whether Nick would notice.
How could he not notice? The stone was three carats, as ostentatious as the Newport venue where Peter wanted their wedding to take place.
“I was annoyed,” she said, hoping that was enough of an answer to satisfy Nick. She didn’t want to think too much about the implications of her not wearing her ring while she ate dinner with an irresistibly attractive man who wasn’t her fiancé.
He remained silent, gazing at her.
His silence forced her to acknowledge that, in fact, she did want to answer the questions he was too polite to ask. Something in his piercing gaze, something in the angle of his head and the set of his jaw and those strong, rugged hands of his, hands that just that morning had lifted her off the beach and into his world, compelled her to open up to him. “My fiancé can be kind of…domineering. That was who I was talking to when you showed up at the Ocean Bluff Inn. And he was…well, being domineering. It ticked me off. So I removed my ring.” It doesn’t mean I broke off the engagement, she wanted to say. But the words wouldn’t come.
“You must feel ten pounds lighter,” Nick joked.
Despite the fury inside her when she thought about Peter’s imperious attitude, his judgmentalism and his downright bossiness, she laughed. “It’s a silly ring, isn’t it.”
“Silly isn’t the word I’d use for it. That ring could pay for my after-school tutoring and rec programs for a year.”
“Well, it’s much bigger than anything I would have picked out. But Peter didn’t want me to pick it out. He likes to make the big decisions.” And even the smaller decisions, she thought indignantly. Like when she should go back to Boston. And how she should eat lobster.
Nick tilted his head slightly, as if viewing her at a different angle might clarify things for him. “You don’t strike me as the sort of person who wants other people making big decisions for you.”
“I make my own decisions,” she said. “It’s just…” She sighed, nudged back her plate, and took a sip of beer. “Peter and I have been together forever. We grew up together. Our parents are close friends. I
know the way he can be.”
“Generous to a fault,” Nick joked, flicking his fingers at her naked left hand, where her too-generous ring should have been.
She laughed, then faltered. Peter could be generous, and he could also be mean, especially when he didn’t get his way. She had learned, after the many years they’d known each other, that life was a lot easier if she simply let him get his way—or at least believe he was getting his way—most of the time.
That understanding stirred a mix of emotions inside her, worry and anger and guilt. “I shouldn’t talk about him behind his back,” she said. “It seems disloyal.”
“When is the wedding going to happen?”
Never. The word rose up into her mouth like a neat, round bubble, just waiting to pop. Startled, she swallowed, forcing the bubble back down. Of course she was going to marry Peter. They were planning on their wedding a year from June. The families had discussed it. Everyone had cleared their calendars and worked out their schedules. An engagement announcement had run in the Boston Globe. All she and Peter had to do was reserve a venue—if they could agree on one.
She realized Nick was waiting for a response. He appeared curious and probing, as if he could see more than she wished to reveal. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “We haven’t set a date yet.” Feeling even more uneasy, she plunged her hands into her lap, as if that would make her less keenly aware of her ringless finger. “What can you tell me about the jukebox?”
He gazed at her for a moment longer, then accepted her change of subject with a crooked smile. “At the Faulk Street Tavern?”
She nodded.
“It’s been there forever. Some people think it’s magic.”
“I don’t believe in magic,” she said, wishing she sounded more certain.
“I don’t either.” He shrugged. “They say it tells people what they need to hear.”
Apparently Augusta had told him the same thing she’d told Diana. Or else the legend of the jukebox was beyond Augusta’s control, and everyone in Brogan’s Point knew about it. “Did any of the other people in the bar need to hear David Bowie on Saturday night?” she wondered aloud. Perhaps Peter should have listened more closely to the song. It wouldn’t hurt him to change his overweening attitude and become more open-minded. But he hadn’t seemed to be paying attention to the music that night, any more than Diana had paid attention to the other songs the jukebox had played. She couldn’t even remember what they were. She just remembered people singing along, and then filling the dance floor at the center of the room, and then…Changes.
Nick drank some beer, his eyes never leaving her. “Here’s the way I understand it—and again, this assumes you believe in magic and all that. The jukebox plays a song that someone in the bar needs to hear, and that person hears it in some special way. They know the song is sending a message to them. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.”
“And you don’t believe that?”
He shrugged again. “Magic? I don’t think so.”
“But that song, ‘Changes’—it was talking to us, wasn’t it? You sang it to me this morning at the beach.”
He opened his mouth and then shut it. Magic or not, he seemed to acknowledge that the song had connected them somehow. “Maybe it just happened to play when I was in a reflective mood on Saturday night. I can’t really think of much in my life that needs changing. Nothing important, anyway. I’m happy. Life is good.”
“You told me you were pissed off, and you thought seeing me would cheer you up.”
“It did. It does.”
“But you were pissed off.”
“That was about…someone else. Someone I can’t change. I can only change myself—if I need to change. Which I don’t.”
She was tempted to quote the Shakespeare line about protesting too much. “Who’s the someone else?” she asked, figuring she deserved to know as much about him as he knew about her. “Have you got a fiancée, too?”
He snorted, then shook his head. “No fiancée. I was pissed off at my mother.”
She smiled. “Forgive her. Mothers can’t help but piss us off sometimes. I’m sure your mother loves you.”
“I’m not,” he retorted, then shook his head. His voice was gentle even though his eyes were hard and cold when he added, “Forget it. It’s not worth talking about.”
That alone convinced her his problem with his mother was worth talking about. But she wouldn’t pry. It wasn’t her business.
The waitress appeared at their table. She handed them foil-wrapped wet-wipes and stacked their dishes, somehow managing not to spill the precariously balanced pieces of empty lobster shell piled on their plates. “You folks want any dessert?” she asked.
Diana had devoured an entire lobster and more French fries than she should have. “I’m full,” she said.
“Just the check,” Nick said.
“My treat?” she asked. She earned a good living, and she believed in equality. It irritated her that Peter would never let her pay for their dates, even though once they got married his money would be hers and her money his. “The man pays,” he would declare, as if it were one of the Ten Commandments, whenever she pulled out her wallet at a restaurant.
She hoped Nick wasn’t that rigid. More important, she hoped he understood that this wasn’t a date.
“Next time,” he said, implying that he was indeed more open-minded than Peter—and also implying that there would be a next time.
She should have been concerned. Maybe she should have spelled out that, the absence of her ring notwithstanding, she was engaged to Peter, and any encounters she had with Nick had to take that fact into account. But she was too pleased, too wickedly, inappropriately thrilled by the thought of a next time with him, to say anything.
Once the bill was settled, they left the restaurant. Night surrounded them, cool and dark. Lights along the wharf etched the sailing boats in silhouette. The clang of chains and metal hooks against masts sounded like bells as the boats bobbed in the water. The sea air had a briny scent, salty and lush. “Boston Harbor doesn’t smell like this,” she pointed out.
“That’s a harbor. This is the ocean.” He folded his hand around hers and headed toward the wharf. Once again, she thought about saying something, reminding them both that his holding her hand implied nothing, that they were only friends, could never be more than friends…
Except that deep inside her, she didn’t believe that. She didn’t believe his holding her hand implied nothing. She didn’t believe they were only friends.
Did this mean she was turning to face the strange? Did it mean she was changing?
They strolled in silence to the end of the wharf, where the breeze was stronger, the ocean’s fragrance thicker. Her hair tangled in the gusts and he shifted slightly, angling her so the wind would blow her hair away from her face. When one thick lock snagged on her nose, he caught it and brushed it back, tucking it behind her ear.
Her ear tingled. Her scalp. Her hand, enveloped in his. Her entire body. The wind was chilly but she was warm. Too warm. She shouldn’t be feeling this way, not about Nick Fiore. She should say something, tell him not to pivot to face her, tell him not to give her hand a quiet tug, pulling her closer to him. Tell him not to lean in, not to lower his head until his lips were a breath away from hers, then less than a breath away. Then touching hers.
She should say no. But her mind scrambled. Her heart pounded. Her soul said yes.
She reached up with her free hand, steadying herself as the heat of his mouth on hers caused her legs to weaken and sway. She might have been standing on one of the boats rather than the dock; the earth seemed to rock beneath her feet. But Nick was solid and secure. The world could be churning with wild waves, hurricane tides, whitecaps and undertows, but as long as she clung to him, she would be safe.
Through the worn leather of his jacket she could feel the firm bone and muscle of his shoulder. The tips of his hair grazed her knuckl
es, cool and silky. He slid his arm around her waist, embracing her as if he knew she needed protection from the storm, as if he feared that one powerful wave might sweep over them and carry her off.
It occurred to her that he wasn’t the solid ground she was counting on. He was the powerful wave, carrying her off. He was the storm, surging around her, inside her.
His mouth clung, coaxed and conquered. When her lips parted in a faint moan, his tongue stole inside, claiming her. She’d never experienced anything like this before. She’d kissed, of course, and been kissed, but she’d never been so totally, utterly turned on by a single kiss.
Her brain tried to inject some rationality into the moment. You hardly know him. He’s a stranger. This is wrong. You’re engaged.
No. It was right. Maybe later, when she thought about it, she’d decide it was wrong. But at that instant, standing on the wharf with Nick, his arms holding her, drawing her against him, the warmth of him enveloping her as the heat of his kiss burned through her body and deep into her soul…
Nothing in her life had ever felt more right.