Tides of the Heart by Jean Stone

Author:Jean Stone [Stone, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780307785312
Google: d7l6eaelA3oC
Amazon: B004KABEEC
Barnesnoble: B004KABEEC
Goodreads: 10419106
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The following year he came back. Again, he was alone. She decided he must be a writer—one of those independent, solitary types who could not stand interruption while he was hard at work. He wrote in the summer; perhaps in the winter he went to cocktail parties in the city where important people talked about his books and he told them that all his inspiration came while he was away on Martha’s Vineyard.

“I brought you something, Yank,” he said one day while she sat in an Adirondack chair on the porch, snapping green beans to go with his dinner.

She brushed the long hair from her eyes and looked up from her work.

He handed her a small white box.

Setting down the old tin colander, she crossed her bare feet and wiped her hands on the apron that covered her blue-flowered sarong. She looked into his eyes—for another brief moment, they locked on hers. Then she took the box and slowly lifted the lid. Inside was the beautiful cobalt piece of sea glass, rimmed with a pure silver border and strung from a fine silver chain. “Oh,” she said, because she did not know what else to say, because she did not know if this was meant for her or if he was showing it to her to see if she thought it was good enough for someone else.

“It’s yours,” Brit said. “I had it made for you.”

“Oh,” she repeated.

The next day he asked if she played tennis. Well, of course, she hadn’t since they’d moved here to the island; there was no time for tennis in the summer and no place to play in winter. But here in West Chop private tennis courts were set among the pine trees, exclusively tended for the summer people, for people who had nothing else to do unless you counted playing golf.

“Can you have dinner with me tonight?” he asked while she was folding linens. “After dinner we can play a game or two. I’ve come across some old racquets in the closet in the hall.”

For the next few weeks, they played tennis nearly every evening before the sun went down. She darted around the court, her dark hair flying, the sea glass pendant bouncing lightly between her breasts. When they finished they said good night and she rode off on her bicycle, back to Mom and Dad and Richard and Mellie and the life she really led, not the one in West Chop in the big house on the beach.

Then one night there was a thunderstorm that crept up unexpectedly, the way island storms so often did. He urged her to stay until the rain and lightning stopped, and before she knew what or how or why, the thing that she’d been craving finally happened.

He said he didn’t know she was a virgin. And yet he took her clothes off with all the tenderness she needed; he caressed her breasts and kissed her throat and grazed his hands there and there and there with all the patience she had ever imagined a lover would—should—have.

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