Starting Over by Judith Hudson

Author:Judith Hudson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Small Town Romance
Publisher: Tall Trees Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

That night at dusk Lily returned to the resort, left her car in the parking lot and took the lakeside path around the point to the cottages. Sweetie trotted happily at her heels, up for a nighttime adventure. The sun had dipped below the mountains half an hour ago and darkness was falling fast. At the boat dock, white and blue boats glowed in the fading light, bobbing on the gentle swells. Lily blushed to remember Johnny’s conspiratorial wink when she left him at the dock and wondered if he thought she was having a romantic tryst.

And maybe she was. Excitement bubbled inside her. Marshall was surprisingly sweet, and she needed this. Needed confirmation that at thirty-eight she was still a desirable woman, not a washed up, uninteresting ex-wife.

Was a summer fling between consenting adults wrong?

Well, yes, she had to admit, it may be a bad idea between these particular consenting adults, one just getting out of a long-term relationship and one struggling with depression. She stopped in her tracks and closed her eyes. What was she thinking?

Then she opened her eyes and started walking again. But nothing wrong with helping a fellow human being, a friend, take the first steps out of a lonely dark place.

She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the difference between the man on the videos and the man Marshall had become since the accident. Or had that man – the boy who played with his brothers on the raft on the lake – always been there, lurking beneath the Nashville and L.A. glitter and glam? The glitter and glamor were intriguing, but she wanted to know about his childhood, too. And what had happened in the accident that had brought him to where he was now. She wished they could talk about it. Keeping the past bottled inside wouldn’t help him heal. She picked up her pace. Maybe they would start tonight.

An almost-full moon rose at the end of the lake, reflecting on the water as the stars began to glimmer overhead. The perfect night for a moonlight row. As she passed the eight-plex condo pods, sounds of a family settling their children down for sleep drifted out the open sliding doors. It was only the beginning of the season. More families would arrive in force in a few weeks when the kids were all out of school.

She was curious about Marshall’s children. She didn’t think of him as a family man, but he’d sure looked like it in the pictures. In one, he’d been throwing his daughter up in the air. What would she have been? Four? Maybe five? And that heart wrenching photograph of her crying on his shoulder. That had been taken during the divorce, one short year ago. What a terrible year for those children, for that family, having their world blow apart. He must miss them so.

Moonlight lit the path and as she took the last turn through the trees she saw the rowboat bobbing on the water.

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