Authors: Pamela Browning
Morgan hadn't intended to ride the ferry to Yaupon Island with Kate that morning, but when he saw her feet crossing the wooden ramp to the deck, his feet followed of their own accord.
"I thought you were going back to Charleston." Kate stared up at him from the outside seat where she sat, her hair whipping in the breeze, a package of Joanna's discarded maternity clothes balanced across her knees.
"I changed my mind," he said, sitting down beside her.
She looked away toward the island, her eyes squinting slightly in the sun. A group of tourists trooped aboard and filed along the railing to the bow of the ferry, where they stood snapping selfies.
"Why?" she asked.
He wasn't accustomed to explaining himself or his actions to anyone. "Curiosity," he replied.
Her expression reflected mild disbelief. "About the island? Or about me?"
"I've been to the island before. So it must be about you." The truth was that ever since Kate's precipitous run for the rest room yesterday, he had been in the process of realizing how difficult it must be to be pregnant. He couldn't imagine what kind of woman would volunteer to bear a child for someone else, and he wanted to know if the decision had resulted from strength or weakness. He couldn't say why he wanted to know this, only that at the moment it seemed important.
A man who wore a scruffy captain's hat limped up the ramp and said sternly to Kate, "I missed you when you didn't come back last night. Waited for you. Almost missed my supper." His voice was gruff but kind.
"I couldn't get back in time," she said.
"Next time call and let me know. You have my cell phone number," he said before stumping away.
"Is he a relative or something?" Morgan asked.
"Gump? Well, you might say that," she said wryly.
He waited for her to explain, but she was watching as the man loosened the ferry from its moorings. Who was this guy to her, anyway? Morgan knew that her father was dead, but was this old fellow an uncle? Third cousin twice removed?
"You know, you don't give much away," Morgan said testily, regretting his tone of voice immediately. After all, he reminded himself, a pregnant woman was not to be handled in the same brusque way as a recalcitrant builder or ineffective apartment manager.
She focused wide eyes on him. "What does that mean?" she asked.
"When I ask a question, it might be a good idea to give me a complete answer, especially since you want something."
Inwardly Kate acknowledged the truth of this, but that didn't stop her from rolling her eyes upward for a moment. She sighed deeply. "Okay. All right. Gump is the father of the man my mother ran off with when I was nine years old. They never got married, so I can't call him my step-grandfather. What would
you
have said in my position?"
Morgan was taken aback. In his family, things were done properly. People became engaged, announced their engagement at a large party, and they married six months later in historic St. Philip's Church where all Rhetts married. Rhetts did not have extramarital liaisons. He could not recall any married member of his family "running off" with anyone else within the family's history in this country, which preceded the American Revolution.
He delivered his answer thoughtfully. "I would have told you straight out. Aside from that, what an awful blow it must have been. For your mother to leave you, I mean."
The space between the ferry and the dock was widening now, and the boat's motor settled down to a steady thrum. Two other passengers sat down on the narrow bench seat beside Morgan, and he inched toward Kate.
Kate ignored the length of his thigh pressed against hers. "The day that my mother left was one of the worst days of my life," she said. "Afterward Gump helped us—my father and me. Gump felt awful, you see, because if he'd been a better father, maybe Johnny wouldn't have persuaded my mother to leave Dad and me. Personally I don't think Johnny had that much to do with it. My mother wanted to be free of the island, my father and me. She hated living at the lighthouse."
"And how about you?"
"I love the island. And living there. I wish I never had to leave," Kate said quickly. The wind was now blowing her hair off her face, and he admired her strong profile—the squared-off chin, the straight nose, the fine line of her forehead. It was a face of great character—presuming that you could read character in faces, and he'd always thought he could.
"So it was just you and your father after your mother left?" he asked.
She nodded. "I lived with a family on the mainland when I was in high school, and after that I went to college in Maine. When Dad got sick, I took care of him so he wouldn't have to go to a nursing home. He loved Yaupon Island and wanted to die there. He got his wish. Why are you so interested, anyway?" she asked. She noticed that one of the women sitting on the other side of Morgan was ogling him, and her breast was flattened against his biceps.
Morgan decided to take his time about answering Kate's question. The woman next to him leaned closer, so he moved nearer to Kate and slid one arm around the top of her seat.
"I want to know a lot of things about you," he said. "How you live, why you let Courtney manipulate you into this surrogate mother scheme—"
"Courtney did not manipulate me."
"Nevertheless, my ex-wife has a way of getting what she wants," he said with more than a tinge of irony.
"She said the same thing about you," Kate said, but he only laughed ruefully.
To their left a fishing boat with bright blue nets suspended from its outriggers bobbed gently on the waters of Tookidoo Sound. The sea air smelled of salt, a scent that Morgan hadn't noticed in all too long. In Charleston he was never far from the harbor, but air-conditioning in his home and office dehumidified and filtered the air so that it lacked—well, substance.
Like the women I know,
he thought irrelevantly.
"What are you going to do on the island today?" Kate asked in a subdued tone.
"Follow the other tourists around, I suppose," he said. "I didn't bring a swimsuit, so I can't go swimming. Maybe I'll pick up a few shells on the beach to take to my nephew Christopher."
Kate had an idea that Morgan wouldn't be lonely for long. The buxom brunette who had pressed up against him looked predatory and not the least bit shy. Kate didn't know how Morgan would feel about the woman's intense scrutiny, but there was no doubt in her mind that he would know how to further the acquaintance.
The dark blur of vegetation on the horizon rapidly took on discernible features. Yaupon Island was a low-lying mass of tidal marsh bordered by maritime forest on one side and sand dunes on the other. The ferry landing came into sight, a weathered wooden dock below the promontory where Yaupon Light stood sentinel.
Suddenly Kate knew she wasn't willing to abandon Morgan Rhett to the pleasures of the woman who was even now leaning halfway across his lap to snap pictures.
"You could come to the house for lunch," Kate said, not looking at him.
"Is that an invitation?" he asked. He wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly.
"If you don't mind eating a sandwich," she said.
He flashed a grin and blocked the brunette with his elbow. "A sandwich sounds great," he said.
"I mean, it'll only be something out of a can," Kate said.
"You don't have to apologize. Not after the oyster fiasco," he told her. The ferry approached the landing, and Gump let down the ramp.
Kate called an offhand goodbye to Gump, under whose challenging gaze Morgan felt less than comfortable, and once off the ferry, Kate led him toward the steepest of the three paths. Over her protest, he relieved her of the package of clothing.
The path she had chosen climbed past a stand of palmettos toward the lighthouse and was so narrow that they could barely walk two abreast. They heard their fellow passengers clamoring close behind them. Kate walked slowly. It was a hot day, and perspiration slicked her forehead. At a twist in the path, she stopped.
"I should let the others go on ahead," she said, pulling him into the green-dappled shade beneath a live oak. Something happened when she touched his arm; a tiny jolt of electricity rippled through him. Suddenly Morgan was conscious of the swell of her breasts beneath the demure jumper, aware of them in a new way. At that moment, Kate seemed extraordinarily womanly.
Well, of course, she was a woman. She was
pregnant,
for Pete's sake. Nevertheless, he studied her covertly, taking in the sweet curve of her upper lip, the downy softness of her skin. If he had thought she was gawky or rawboned before, he'd been wrong. Despite her unusual height, he saw now that her wrists were delicately fashioned and her limbs were lithe as well as long.
"Do you climb this path often?" he demanded after the people had passed and they resumed their climb. Ahead of him he could see the brunette who had been so aggressive. She had enormous hips.
"I have to go to the landing once a day to pick up my mail," Kate said.
"Couldn't Gump bring it to you?"
"I've never asked," Kate said, and as she spoke, it occurred to Morgan that the path was fraught with peril. Little tree roots clutched at Kate's feet, and widespread branches of dwarf wax myrtle clung to her skirt. He thought about her tripping and falling. He thought about her alone in the lighthouse keeper's quarters with no one to call if she were hurt.
"If you didn't show up, would Gump come looking for you? If you were sick, would he know?" he asked.
"If I had an emergency, I'd hoist an SOS up the flagpole at the lighthouse, and Gump would come to see what was wrong. He doesn't climb this hill very often. He limps," Kate said patiently.
"Kate," Morgan said, "what if something happened to you?" He was pretty sure that cell phones didn't work on the island, and he wasn't sure about Internet.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said, clipping the words off sharply, whether due to annoyance or shortness of breath, he couldn't tell. She continued to plant one foot in front of the other, and he took hold of her elbow to steady her. She tried to wrest her arm from his grasp and nearly toppled over in the process.
"You see? This path wasn't made for expectant mothers. You shouldn't live here," he said firmly.
"Maybe you're right, but the question is moot. I'll have to move out in September anyway."
A canopy of moss-hung live-oak branches arched a momentarily dark tunnel over them before they emerged into the sunny clearing, the lighthouse towering above them. A sign proclaimed: Yaupon Light—Established 1859.
Kate led him past two circular beds planted with exuberant yellow marigolds. She pulled a key out of her purse and opened the door. He followed her inside.
He found himself in the kitchen of the small cottage attached to the lighthouse tower. One window overlooked a magnificent view of the ocean, another framed a view of the ferry dock, and under it sat a small table covered by a red-and-white checked tablecloth. A huge enamel coffeepot and a sugar bowl were on the table. The rest of the kitchen was spartan. Morgan had never seen a stove that old outside of a museum.
"Please sit down. Oh, push those envelopes aside. Here, give me a handful," she said, and when she reached for them their hands touched.
Morgan would have thought nothing of it if she hadn't blushed. She turned away so he couldn't see her face and opened the refrigerator and peered into it, her maternity dress falling forward so that the curvy shape of her hips was clearly outlined. He followed the line down her thighs to her calves and to her ankles, which were trim and shapely.
When she had finished assembling it, Kate slid a tuna sandwich across the table to him and pushed the coffeepot aside. He liked the way her hair was shot with gold sparks from the beam of sunshine angling through the window.
Kate wasn't somebody who had impressed Morgan as beautiful before. But now, with the sun streaming on her hair, with her clear gray eyes scanning his face and waiting for him to say something, with the lush curve of her breasts so evident under that jumper she was wearing—yes, she was more than pretty. He wished he knew what she'd looked like in her nonpregnant state.
"Back to our discussion about your safety," he said.
"You were discussing it. I was not," she said aloofly.
"Are you the only one who lives on Yaupon Island?"
"Yes, except for occasional groups of people who visit the Oates hunting lodge for a week or two at a time." She bit off some bread and chewed it, gazing out the window. He wished she would look at him.
"I'd almost forgotten about that place," he said.
"How did you know about it?" she asked him with upraised eyebrows.
"I came here with a group of guys from college one spring break," he told her.
"Oh, so what happened? The bunch of you got your kicks out of shooting Bambi and Thumper?"
He looked her straight in the eye. "I don't hunt. As I recall, most of the hunting took place on the mainland, and it was strictly boy chasing girl."
"Oh," she said. "Sorry."
"I doubt it," he said.
She blinked at him, and he downed the last bit of sandwich. Suddenly he'd had enough—of her and of the confines of this kitchen. She was from a different world than he was and might as well be wearing a No Trespassing sign around her neck. What she wanted from him only
seemed
personal, and he would do well to remember not to get emotionally involved.