Summer Love: The Best Mistake / Impulse

“I love it!” she shouted over the wind and the noise of the engine. “It’s wild and old and incredible. Like no place I’ve ever been.”

Still laughing, she lifted her camera and snapped his picture as he drove. He wore sunglasses with amber lenses and had a cigar clamped between his teeth. The wind blew through his hair and chased the smoke behind them. He stopped the Jeep, took the camera and snapped a picture of her in turn.

“Hungry?”

She dragged her tousled hair back from her face. “Starving.”

He leaned over to open her door. A current passed through her, sharp and electric, strong enough to make him pause with his arm across her body and his face close to hers. It was there again, he thought as he waited and watched. The awareness, ripe and seductive. And the innocence, as alluring as it was contradictory. In a test—a test for both of them—he lifted a hand to stroke her cheek. It was as soft as her scent.

“Are you afraid of me, Rebecca?”

“No.” That was true; she was nearly sure of it. “Should I be?”

He didn’t smile. Through the amber lenses she saw that his eyes were very intense. “I’m not entirely sure.” When he pulled away he heard her release an unsteady breath. He wasn’t feeling completely steady himself. “We’ll have to walk a little first.”

Confused, her mind churning, she stepped out onto the dirt path. A woman on a simple date didn’t tremble every time a man got close, Rebecca told herself as Stephen lifted the picnic basket out of the back. She was behaving like a teenager, not a grown woman.

Troubled by his own thoughts, Stephen stopped beside her. He hesitated, then held out a hand. It felt good, simply good, when she put hers in it.

They walked through an olive grove in a companionable silence while the sun streamed down on dusty leaves and rocky ground. There was no sound of the sea here, but when the wind was right she could hear the screech of a gull far away. The island was small, but here it seemed uninhabited.

“I haven’t had a picnic in years.” Rebecca spread the cloth. “And never in an olive grove.” She glanced around, wanting to remember every leaf and pebble. “Are we trespassing?”

“No.” Stephen took a bottle of white wine from the basket. Rebecca left him to it and started rummaging in search of food.

“Do you know the owner?”

“I’m the owner.” He drew the cork with a gentle pop.

“Oh.” She looked around again. It should have occurred to her that he would own something impressive, different, and exciting. “It sounds romantic. Owning an olive grove.”

He lifted a brow. He owned a number of them, but he had never thought of them as romantic. They were simply profitable. He offered her a glass, then tapped it with his own. “To romance, then.”

She swept down her lashes, battling shyness. To Stephen, the gesture was only provocative. “I hope you’re hungry,” she began, knowing she was talking too fast. “It all looks wonderful.” She took a quick sip of wine to ease her dry throat, then set it aside to finish unpacking the basket.

There were sweet black olives as big as a man’s thumb, and there was a huge slab of sharp cheese. There were cold lamb and hunks of bread, and fruit so fresh it could have been just plucked from the stem.

Gradually she began to relax again.

“You’ve told me very little about yourself.” Stephen topped off her wine and watched her bite into a ripe red plum. “I know little more than that you come from Philadelphia and enjoy traveling.”

What could she tell him? A man like him was bound to be bored with the life story of the painfully ordinary Rebecca Malone. Lies had never come easily to her, so she skirted between fact and fiction. “There’s little more. I grew up in Philadelphia. I lost both of my parents when I was a teenager, and I lived with my aunt Jeannie. She was very dear, and she made the loss bearable.”

“It’s painful.” He flicked his lighter at the end of a cigar, remembering not only the pain, but also the fury he had felt when his father had died and left him orphaned at sixteen. “It steals childhood.”

“Yes.” So he understood that. It made her feel close to him, close and comfortable. “Maybe that’s why I like to travel. Every time you see a new place you can be a child again.”

“So you don’t look for roots?”

She glanced at him then. He was leaning back against the trunk of a tree, smoking lazily, watching carefully. “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“Is there a man?”

She moved her shoulders, determined not to be embarrassed. “No.”

He took her hand, drawing her closer. “No one?”

“No, I…” She wasn’t certain what she would have said, but could say nothing at all when he turned her palm upward and pressed his lips to its center. She felt the fire burst there, in her hand, then race everywhere.