Читать книгу Summer's Child - Diane Chamberlain - Страница 18

“SO,” ANDY SAID, “IF YOU TAKE CARE OF THE WALL UNIT, I’LL make the pantry they wanted for the kitchen. Deal?”

Daria barely heard him. She and Andy were sitting on the Sea Shanty porch, going over the designs for a house in Corolla, but her eyes were fixed on Rory. He and a woman had walked from the beach into his cottage. They’d been in there ten minutes or so, and now he was walking her to her car. He’d been bare-chested from the beach to Poll-Rory; now he wore a broadly striped white and blue short-sleeved shirt. The woman was tall and slim and had the gait of a model. Her dark bathing suit was cut high on her shoulders; her long legs probably bore no trace of cellulite. Damn.

“Earth to Daria,” Andy said. He stood up and slipped the drawings into his portfolio.

Daria smiled at him. “Sorry,” she said. “Yes, I’ll do the pantry.”

“No, you’ll do the wall unit,” he said. “I knew you weren’t listening to me.”

“Was too,” she lied. “I was just teasing you.”

Rory touched the woman’s arm, and Daria felt a strangely familiar sense of loss, the same loss she’d felt when she was eleven and he started hanging around with the older kids. She was losing him again, and she’d never even had him to begin with. She’d be the first to admit this obsession of hers was nuts.

“Do you teach your EMT class tonight?” Andy asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Wish I was in it.”

She smiled at him again. “I wish you were, too,” she said.

“See you tomorrow?” He pushed open the screen door.

“Okay.”

Rory was walking back toward his cottage now, but when he spotted Daria sitting on the screened porch, he waved and turned in her direction.

“Good luck,” Andy said to her with a grin as he closed the door behind him.

God, everybody knew she was in heat.

Rory and Andy exchanged a greeting as they passed each other in the Sea Shanty’s front yard, then Rory opened the screen door and stepped onto the porch. He stopped short and smiled.

“I walked in here just like when I was a kid, without knocking first,” he said. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” Daria said, motioning toward one of the rockers. “Have a seat.” She knew he had taken a walk on the beach with Shelly a few days earlier, and she wanted to be irritated with him for it. She should be; he had intentionally discounted her concerns. But how could she be angry with him when he’d sent Shelly home in such excited good spirits? Shelly had talked of nothing else that night other than Rory this and Rory that and how she felt certain he could find her mother. This yearning for her birth mother was brand-new…at least to Daria. If Shelly had been feeling it, she’d kept it to herself all these years. Daria had talked with her sister about the possibility that Rory might fail to uncover anything new—a very real possibility, since Daria was going to do her best to make sure that was the case. Shelly had merely shrugged. “What will be, will be,” she’d said. It was an expression she’d picked up from Chloe, and Daria wondered if Shelly truly understood its meaning.

“So,” Rory asked as he sat down in the rocker, “was that someone you’re seeing?”

Daria was not certain what he meant at first. Then she understood and laughed. “No, that’s Andy. He’s a bit too young for me.” She wasn’t certain exactly how old Andy was, but he couldn’t have been more than twenty-six or-seven. “He’s a carpenter. We work together.”