Up To Me (Shore Secrets #1)

Chapter Five

On a scale of utter awkwardness, this morning was suddenly right up there with Ella’s annual trip to her gynecologist, her first day at school with braces, or the time her bracelet caught on her professor’s toupee and ripped it off his head at a pep rally. The good part about not wanting to date for three years? Not having to explain the sad patheticness of her emotional state. A nice restaurant, two glasses of velvety Shiraz, candles—nothing about that setting would’ve enabled Ella to blurt out what she’d been through to an interesting, handsome man.

So it helped that this wasn’t an official date. Yes, an interesting and drool-worthy hunk of a man had his big hand wrapped around hers. Someone whom she’d wanted to stay up all night talking to every bit as much as she’d wanted to stay up all night kissing. To be on the safe side, however, Ella made sure Gray was the only date-like ingredient to the morning. Her yellow bra in no way matched her black-and-white-striped panties. No perfume, not even scented lotion. And the bright morning light glinting off the lake forced her into what had to be an unattractive squint. All of that should make it easier to give a straightforward recitation of the facts.

She led Gray down the well-trodden dirt path through the trees to the tiny point of land that poked out into the lake like a grassy hangnail. A thick line of trees hid it from the road. Just a black, wrought-iron bench, some green stubble that would become a smattering of wildflowers in about a month, and a simple metal mailbox on a wooden post.

“Here we are,” she said, needlessly. But it was better than diving right in, seeing as how Ella had no idea how to start. Would he be turned off? Think their town’s heartwarming tradition to be more weird than quirky? Think of her as weird, or worse yet, somehow broken?

Gray approached the mailbox hesitantly, hands shoved into his jeans pockets. “From the way you all talked about it, I expected something more. Maybe a rainbow arcing across the top of it, or a fire-breathing dragon to guard it. Or a couple of virgins standing watch. Although I don’t know where you’d scare those up nowadays.”

“You hit the nail on the head.” She nodded, and stuck her own hands into her back pockets. “When the combination of free love and reliable birth control hit in the sixties, we had to give up on the round-the-clock mailbox tending by virgins.”

“The times, they are a-changing,” he intoned.

Funny. Gray was super easy to talk to. She should stop her mental dithering and get on with it, because Ella really did want a night of candlelight and wine with him. The sooner the better, since he’d be gone in two weeks. All the more reason why it shouldn’t matter what she said now, or how she said it. Gray would be gone in two weeks. Period. If she scared him off today, she’d just be that much better practiced for the next hot guy that caught her eye.

Ella put her hand next to his, fingertips grazing. Except she didn’t want the next hot guy. She wanted this one. Here. Now. How had her life turned into an algebraic equation? A (the truth) + B (telling Gray) = hopefully, a whole bunch of XXXs and OOOs. God, she’d always sucked at algebra. A deep breath. A concerted focus on her red sneakers.

“Burt Cosgrove died in the Korean War.” She exhaled, looked up.

Gray ran a hand through his hair. He sat down on the bench and crossed his long legs at the ankles out in front of him. “History intrigues me. You’ve got my attention.”

Now that she’d begun, this part was easy. Ella had heard the story so many times, it flowed off her tongue automatically. “Before basic training, he’d never left Seneca Lake. Burt just never saw any reason to go. He thought this was his little slice of heaven on earth, and nowhere else could measure up.”

Shading his eyes to look out over the sparkling water, Gray said, “You do basically live in a picture postcard.”

“Burt grew up working in the general store. On weekends at first, and then after school when he was old enough. He always crossed the road to take his break right here. Sometimes with a cigarette, sometimes a sandwich, but every single day, Burt crossed to this spot and looked at the lake. He planned to take over running the store, but—”

“But then he was drafted,” Gray guessed, in a flat tone.

“Yes. He did marry his sweetheart, Dawn’s grandmother, before he left. Even got her pregnant. It’s said that Burt didn’t take well to being a soldier. He missed Agnes, and home.” Oh, how that resonated with Ella. She still missed her parents with a physical hollowness in her heart every single day. “Two years in Korea didn’t change his mind. Burt wrote to her every single week. No matter what else he said, how short or long the letters were, two things always showed up in them. How much he missed Agnes, and how much he missed standing here, looking at Seneca Lake.”

Ella sat down next to Gray, let her fingers seek his out to twine together in comfort. “After he was killed in action, Agnes bought this very bench. She put it here, without any fanfare, along with the mailbox. And inside the mailbox, she placed a journal. On the first page, she wrote about her husband’s love for this place. That in his memory, she wanted other people to be able to sit and enjoy the serenity of his favorite surroundings.”

“Romantic. Sad. Bittersweet.” Gray gave her a double squeeze, like he was letting her know that he got it. Whew.

“Oh, it gets better. When she came back the next day, Agnes checked the mailbox. Other people had written in the journal. They’d shared memories of Burt, of the lake. As time passed, people just wrote anything and everything in it. Poured their hearts out, actually. It became a safe place to say what troubled them—anonymously. To vent their anger, cry out their anguish, dare to voice their deepest dreams. People came to the shoreline to share their secrets. And they’ve never stopped.”

This was the point where Gray might stop being intrigued by the history and start getting weirded out. But she’d gone too far to leave the story hanging half-finished. Ella got up and opened the tin door to the mailbox. She pulled out a red leather-bound book and carried it back over to the bench. “I forget which volume we’re up to by now. They’re shelved on the second floor of the general store, all the way back to the first one from 1953.”

He blinked once. Then shook his head. “You’re pulling my leg.”

Uh-oh. That didn’t bode well. Ella plastered a smile on her face. “Nope. This is far from a joke. We all take the journal very, very seriously.”

Gray’s eyebrows shot up to his scalp. “People air their dirty laundry in that thing? For any random person to walk by and read?”

Big, big uh-oh. Strangers always fell—strongly—into one of two camps about the mailbox journal. Either they thought it was a physical manifestation of small-town charm, or they thought it was nuts. It was usually impossible to shift their opinion one way or the other. And she’d really, really wanted this man to get it. “Yes.”

“That’s quite a tale.” He snorted. “Whoever does that is flat-out crazy. Can’t be that many head cases in this small a town, though.” Gray pulled it onto his lap and thumbed through a few pages without really looking at them. “But I still don’t see what it has to do with you and me.”

“Oh. I’m getting to that part. First, I needed you to understand that the entire town comes here and uses the journal. Often, people pose questions, ask advice. And the answers flood back.” Ella let a trio of ducks paddling at the water’s edge finish quacking before she blurted out the rest. “So I come here, and I write in the journal, to get advice.”

Gray half laughed, half snorted. “On dating? Because what, your Ouija board is broken?”

Rats. That was enough for her to be able to tell this conversation was already off the rails. That Gray didn’t understand the immensely strong ties interweaving the town to this mailbox and its journal. How it wasn’t just a sweet story, but a way of life on Seneca Lake. Their way of life. Ella sat up a little straighter, trying to let her posture and the determined jut of her chin convey the seriousness with which they all took this unspoken social contract.

“Yes, on dating. On everything. Everything big, anyway.”

Gray slammed the journal shut with another snort. Pretty soon she’d have to offer him a tissue. “You actually listen to anonymous advice on big issues in your life? And follow it? And you’re freely admitting this to a guy you barely know? I thought we were hitting it off. Now it seems like you’re trying to scare me away.”

Okay, she didn’t blame him for being skeptical. But if he’d stop interrupting, she could finish her explanation. Ella stood. This part of the story definitely called for pacing. “You see, I’ve made a couple of really, truly bad decisions. Bad enough to convince me that I should leave all the serious decision-making up to somebody else.”

“Hang on. What could be so bad?” His voice now lacked both the lilt of teasing and the less-than-faint hint of derision it had carried only moments before.

Nope. Pacing didn’t work after all. Pacing was too peppy. Far too energetic for her maudlin tale of woe. Ella sank cross-legged onto the ground and began to run a long blade of grass between her fingers. “My career.”

“What’s wrong with your career? I mean, that was one hell of an impassioned speech you gave the other day. Extolling the virtues of massage? It convinced me to put myself at your mercy.”

“Nothing’s wrong with my career. Not now, that is. I love being a massage therapist.” Ella pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them tight. If he kept asking questions, she’d be in the full-on fetal position by the time she finished. “But my parents raised me to take over running Mayhew Manor. They sent me to college for a degree in hotel and restaurant management. I hated it. Just never wanted to do it, from the start. Mom and Dad wouldn’t listen. The hotel was my legacy, and I needed to learn how to handle it. My great-grandparents kept it going through the Depression. My grandparents kept it going through wars. For generations, my family worked hard to share the beauty of the Manor with the public. Apparently, if it didn’t pass down to me, their sacrifices, their work meant nothing.”

“Bullshit.” His heated response snapped her head up. Gray’s full lips thinned into an incensed, bloodless line. After his laconic amusement so far, the change in his demeanor, the sudden rigidness to all his muscles, surprised her. Even though it was painful, it looked like she’d found a topic where they truly connected. “Those people made a choice. Why the hell shouldn’t you get to make your own choice? Your life’s not determined on the basis of shared DNA.”

Even with all the years that had elapsed since Ella last waged that particular argument, it felt good to have someone in her corner. “That’s kind of what I said. It didn’t make any difference. We fought for the entire four years, it seemed.”

He skimmed a gentle hand down her forearm. “What was that like?”

“Horrible.” Ella’s stomach clenched, the same way it had during every circular, useless argument. “I’ll be the first to admit that I had a pretty idyllic childhood. I adored my parents. Fighting with them was never on my radar. I trailed them around Mayhew Manor and had fun.” She laughed at the disbelief that pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, that’s right. Not every teenager is full of angst and rebellion.”

“Speak for yourself,” he muttered down towards the grass.

Okay. Gray clearly had family issues. But even though curiosity pinched at her with the tenacity of a tiny crab, Ella didn’t have the energy to ask him for details. It would take everything in her just to finish her own tale. “I honestly enjoyed spending time with my parents. Right up until college night at the start of my senior year of high school. The night they had to explain three times over—because I just didn’t get it—that they’d only send me to a college with an HRM program.”

Now he looked befuddled. Which was funny to see on this man who rocked a solid core of confidence. “Why did you go?” he asked.

Ella rolled her eyes. “I’m not an idiot. Come on, who turns down a free college degree? Even if it’s the wrong one. But I came up with a plan. A stupid, selfish plan, as it turned out. When I turned twenty-one, I got control over all my shares in the family trust.”

Gray sucked in a short, sharp breath. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t take away one-hundred-percent family ownership by selling your shares.”

Oh, how she wished she could deny it. Wished that she could go back in time and undo her complete idiocy. But thanks to budget cuts, NASA didn’t even have the space shuttle program anymore. Chances were slim that anyone was throwing millions of dollars at the possibility of time travel. Or that if there was a secret lab for it somewhere, they’d use it to solve her very first-world problems instead of going back and bitch slapping Hitler.

“I did. It took me a few months, but I secretly found a buyer. The day I graduated from college, I used that money to enroll in massage therapy school.” She’d felt so free and empowered in that moment. Which made the anger and disappointment that followed all the more painful in contrast.

Another dagger-stab of a breath from Gray. “Did your parents find out?”

“Of course. There are always consequences, especially to stupidity. Mom and Dad found out within an hour of the sale. But by then it was too late to stop it. My choice?” She let the word hang in the air, a toxic bubble of memory. “It almost destroyed them, and the hurt and betrayal they felt almost destroyed us as a family. You see, they’d already extended themselves financially to make renovations on the Lakeview Lodge. For the first time ever, they took on a mortgage in order to expand. Buying back my shares stretched the coffers pretty darn thin.”

“Why’d they bother? Didn’t your parents still hold the majority interest?”

Whatever Gray did for a living, he understood business. “That whole ‘legacy’ thing again.” She put air quotes around the word with her fingers. If there’d been a way to indicate bold and italics, maybe with her toes, Ella would’ve done that too. “Mayhew Manor belongs to Mayhews, and only Mayhews, now and forevermore.”

“Do you agree?” His blue eyes bored into her, a truth-seeking dowsing rod. Funny how her answer today was completely different than it had been at the time.

“The thing is, I kind of do, now.”

He balanced his elbows on his knees, letting his hands dangle, loose as his teasing grin. “You mean, now that you’ve gotten your way, along with your massage school certification?”

“Actually, yes. I fought so hard because I cared. A little maturity helped me see that my ancestors worked just as hard at keeping the hotel going. Selling off my shares was the same as thumbing my nose at their decades of hard work. It was thoughtless and selfish and I wholly regret it.”

No, that wasn’t all of it. Her ex-therapist Dr. Takeuchi would be disappointed if she couldn’t reveal the whole truth, after all their years of hard work. Ella scrubbed her hands across her eyes and whooshed a deep, cleansing breath in and out.

Gray gently tugged her hands down. He looked at her, but not with the pitying concern she was so darn sick of, the knowing looks people exchanged across the top of her head if she so much as blinked twice, which wordlessly said Ella’s too fragile for this conversation, or Ella’s too emotional for this conversation. Nope, Gray’s eyes held nothing but honest, basic curiosity. It made it so easy to talk to him. No judging, just two people, sharing.

“What is it?” he asked. His warm hands still cradled hers.

“I guess it’s that a connection to family—any connection, no matter how tenuous—became so much more precious to me once my whole family was gone. I still don’t want to run it, but I don’t want to let it go, either.” There. No bursting into tears, just a flat declaration of a belief she’d mocked, or at best, ignored, almost her entire life. One that she now clung to with the vise-grip determination of someone dangling by their fingernails from the edge of the Grand Canyon. “It took their deaths to make me see that I’d do anything to maintain that legacy. To uphold the Mayhew name and tradition. I’m all that’s left. I can’t let their memory down.”

Gray seemed to absorb that for a few moments. “What happened? With your parents, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Her hands clenched around his. But Ella wanted to get it all out. If this man was the first in three years she actually wanted to date, she wanted to do it right. Be totally upfront. So what if he was only here for two weeks? It could be the best, most intense two weeks of her life. It could set the tone for all her dating relationships going forward. Although that felt too portentous. Probably unwise to heap all those expectations onto him. This was all about her. How Ella wanted to move forward. How she didn’t want to tiptoe—or worse, have him do it—around the truth of her past. Gray’s response, good or bad, wasn’t the point. Mostly.

“Funny you should ask. That’s the final part of my story. Are you sure you want me to keep going?”

The corners of his mouth twitched. “I’m sure I want to take you out on a date, and this appears to be the only way to make that happen.” Sliding off the bench, he leaned back against it, with one arm draped along the seat. Gray beckoned her over.

Whether he was being sweet, or just polite, she didn’t want to squander the opportunity to touch more of him. Ella didn’t hesitate to scooch into the warmth of his side. She deserved some reward for revisiting this emotional battlefield, didn’t she? And it was too early for her usual go-to: a triple scoop of chocolate ice cream with dark chocolate sauce, four cherries, and as much whipped cream as she could squirt directly into her mouth. But cuddling with Gray might just be better. His hand curled around her shoulder in a comforting, miniature version of a hug.

“My parents and I achieved an uneasy peace once I agreed to work as a massage therapist in the spa at Mayhew Manor.”

“Really? They just rolled over?”

Hardly. “After a three-month battle during which they tried to convince me to run the place. But I held firm. I’d be a massage therapist, either here or elsewhere. That was the only choice. So they decided agreeing meant I’d at least be under their roof, so to speak. My interpretation was that I needed to get out from under at least one of their roofs, and get my own apartment.”

“I’m surprised you lasted that long,” he mumbled.

“Why, when did you move out?”

The rhythmic stroke of his curled fingers stopped cold. “It’s, uh, complicated. Sooner, let’s just say.”

Yup. It was definite. Ella wasn’t the only one with a thorny past. But that would be for another time. If Gray decided both that she wasn’t crazy-pants, and that there would be another time. “I found a great little place. Dad shot it down. Insisted the complex was at an unsafe corner. A dangerous blind entrance. I don’t know if you noticed, but big stretches of the road that hugs the lake don’t have streetlights. Locals don’t care, and tourists don’t know enough to care. Or they’ve visited eight wineries in three hours and are way past caring about anything.”

“You guys should put up streetlights.”

Right. Like nobody from the mayor all the way down to the trash collectors had thought of that. “Well, if you’ve got a spare five hundred thousand dollars to implement that plan, feel free to stick around and present it at the next Town Council meeting.”

A soft chuckle, and his hand resumed its stroking. “Message received.”

“I put down a deposit on the apartment. Mom and Dad both kept calling, trying to get me to change my mind. I said if it was really that dangerous, somebody would’ve died already, or there’d be a stoplight, and they just couldn’t stand the thought of me reaching for a little piece of freedom.”

“Typical boundary stretching for someone your age.”

“Exactly. How many people get crappy apartments in the seedy part of town right after leaving college? It’s almost a required rite of passage.”

“Like eating ramen noodles four times a week to save money for Margarita Madness Mondays?”

Gray had a knack of expertly tickling her funny bone. “I knew you’d understand. So I begged them to just come over and see the apartment. See the adorable bow window and the breakfast nook. The pretty, deep blue tiles in the bathroom. I knew if they saw it for themselves, they’d fall in love just like I did.”

“Did they?”

“A little. Mom thought it was adorable. Dad kept his stubborn chin point going on the whole time, but stopped grousing.” Ella refused to pause. Refused to give herself the chance to not say the words that always cut through her like a jagged shard of glass. “And then they turned out of the parking lot and got T-boned by an SUV. Right in front of me. The SUV pinned their little Jaguar against a wall. Mom died instantly. Dad, well, I ran to him, talked to him while we waited for the ambulance, but he died just a few minutes later.”

The lazy hand on her shoulder pulled Ella into a full, tight embrace. No words, just the comforting thump of his heart beneath her cheek. It might be pity, or sympathy, or just plain good manners. Ella didn’t care. She just let the warmth of his chest beneath her and the sun on her back bring her back into the peace of the moment.

“My bad decision led to them emptying their savings to buy back my shares. Even worse, it was my bad decision in choosing an apartment that directly led to their death.”

Gray’s breath stirred across the top of her hair. “That’s a lot to take on yourself. You didn’t force them to buy your shares back. You weren’t driving the car that killed them.”

Funny, that’s just what her therapist had said on day one. And at every visit thereafter. “Grief clouds rational thought. You could say I freaked out for a while. My therapist called it an intermittent fugue state. The bottom line is that I didn’t trust myself to make decisions anymore. Not at all.”

“Couldn’t you just lay low for a while? Not think about things?”

“I wish. But once my parents died, I suddenly became the sole owner of Mayhew Manor. Business decisions were thrust upon me, whether I liked it or not. Smaller things, too. Like whether or not to sublet the apartment I’d never even moved into. It was all too much. So I did what felt natural. Habitual. Safe. I came out here to the mailbox, wrote down my problems, and asked for advice.”

Gray tilted her chin up to glare straight at her. “That’s insane. You let the town barber or, or nursing-home bedpan washer or whoever, make decisions that affected the day-to-day running of your midsized boutique hotel?”

Yep. There it was. The tight, barely controlled screech in Gray’s voice that labeled her one-hundred-percent, certifiably bonkers. “Yes. I mean, no. The management of the hotel wasn’t affected by my epic indecision. Eugene, our manager, has been in place for years. He kept the day-to-day stuff running smoothly. All my friends you met today? They kept everything else in my life going.”

He dipped his head in a nod of appreciation. “Those are some amazing friends you’ve got.”

“Don’t I know it.” But as much as she relied on them, they relied on her, too. Ella couldn’t let Gray think that she just sat back and let other people handle her like a marionette. “Let me be clear—I could make decisions. It’s just that I questioned them. On a daily basis. I didn’t second-guess myself. I quadruple-guessed myself every third second. Reading what people wrote calmed me. Soothed me. Dr. Takeuchi, my therapist, noticed the change right away. He called the mailbox a coping mechanism. Not something I should turn to forever, but a way to get out from under the crushing, immobilizing grief.”

Gray smoothed her head back into the hollow of his collarbone and resumed running his fingers languidly through her hair. God, she could let him do that all day, every day, it felt so good. “Then I’m glad it helped,” he said.

“It did. I’m much better now. Stronger. More sure of myself. But it’s hard to just quit the habit of turning to the mailbox. The entire town pulled together to help me. To comfort me. To guide me by the hand through the worst experience of my life.” There was a freedom in talking to Gray, a complete outsider. Ella could admit to him what she’d told no one else. “Except that now, I’m kind of stuck in a rut with it. When too much time elapses between my journal entries, people swing by to check on me. What used to be reassuring is becoming smothering.”

“Because they care so much.”

“Mmm-hmm.” But she couldn’t tell anyone that. It would sound ungrateful. Hurtful.

“That’s why Brooke texted everyone yesterday? To give you a group consensus on dating me? And now you’re compelled to let the whole town weigh in, too?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Yesterday Ella hadn’t been sure she was ready to ask Gray out. She’d caught herself willing to rely on the mailbox, just like always. But after their chat—and other things—on the stairs, she’d spent a considerable portion of the rest of the night thinking about it. This—the sexy temptation that was Gray—was her line in the sand. It was time for her to stand entirely on her own two feet, decision-wise. She’d still ask for advice in the journal until she could figure out a way not to, but she’d also find a way to move forward without waiting for a reply.

His chest heaved in a deep sigh beneath her cheek. “Well, on the bat-shit-crazy scale, it isn’t quite up there with eating chalk. Or collecting those hideous porcelain figurines with big eyes.”

“You’re setting a pretty low bar for me. I appreciate it.” His teasing whisked away her pensiveness. This emotional outpouring had been exhausting. Which meant her experiment had failed, at least partially. No way could Ella possibly go through this every time she met an attractive man. But her only other option—besides marrying Gray, and how insane was that—would be to only date men who lived on Seneca Lake. Men who already knew the story. Too bad she couldn’t think of a single, viable candidate.

“It comes from a good place.” He paused. “Everyone wanting to help you. I see that. God knows I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.” Another pause, as if he fighting with himself to look past his knee-jerk response. “But it seems to work for you. Who am I to judge?”

Could he really be that easygoing? Gray’s initial reaction had angled much more towards shocked ridicule. The whole death thing probably squeezed the snickers right out of him. But she didn’t want him to only see a broken woman leaning on a town. The beauty of the mailbox was that everyone leaned on each other, in equal measure. She pulled out of his embrace to pin him with an accusing glare. “Is it possible you’re humoring me a little bit? Are you worried I’ll fall apart on you? I know that women’s tears are like acid-laced Kryptonite to men.”

“Nope.” His eyes slid down, and to the side. A definite tell. “Look, I’m not worried you’ll fall apart. From what I can tell, you’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever met. Am I humoring you?” Gray waved his hand back and forth. “A little. Maybe a lot.”

“You don’t believe in the mailbox. You are being judgey,” she accused.

A long push of his hand through his thick hair, down the line of his cheek to wipe across his lower face, specifically those lips Ella really, really wanted to kiss again. He ended by gripping his chin in a thoughtful pose. Oh, he was thoughtful, all right. Probably racking his brain for a way to skirt her question.

Finally, he said, “I believe it works for all of you. Heck, if the whole town does this, who am I to judge? No skin off my nose either way. I just know it could never work for me. My life, my choices. Nobody else gets a vote.”

Ella had to admit, he’d come up with a fair response. But she didn’t want to settle for just fair. Fair was a C grade. Her beloved town and its wonderful tradition deserved nothing less than an A from Gray.

“Now you’ve thrown down the gauntlet.” She pulled the journal off the bench onto her lap. “You have to write in it. Just to see what sort of response you get.”

“You’re really going to make me do this?”

“We’ll both do it.” Ella flipped through the pages to get to the last entry. “Oh, look. It’s the secret romance.”

“It doesn’t sound like anything in this town’s a secret,” he grumbled.

“This is. It’s been going on for a year. Two people, conducting a love affair, from what we can tell, solely in the pages of this journal.”

“Must lead to some nasty paper cuts.”

Ella thwacked him on the leg. “This is no joking matter. Apparently somewhere in town are a man and a woman who desperately care for each other, but can’t be together.”

“Married? To other people?” he suggested, leaning over to peer at the page.

“No. You can see them fall in love with each other as they write. I don’t think they even know who the other person is in real life. Just think, they might walk past each other every day and not realize the object of their affection is five feet away.”

“Sounds like a waste to me. Why not stop hiding behind a ballpoint and get on with it? Get some balls and get your woman, is what I’d write in there.”

She unhooked the pen from the cover, and pointed with it. “Look at this. ‘Your sweet spirit shines through these pages like the sun streaking through a bank of clouds.’ He’s romancing her.”

“Maybe he’s a soldier, and got a ball shot off.” Gray grimaced comically. “That would explain why he won’t just ask her out.”

“You’re terrible.”

“Hey, you like someone, you feel that click, and no matter how complicated it may be, you ask them out. So. Ella. I’d like to take you to dinner.”

She put pen to paper. I met a guy. Gray grabbed the pen, drew a tiny arrow, and inserted the word handsome above . Ella grinned. I want to go out with him. I’m ready. I think I’ve been ready for a while. Should I let him take me to dinner? He grabbed the pen again, scratched out the last half of the sentence and replaced it with romance me? Wow. If only she could remember that fancy term from the Summer Olympics when the divers rolled through three somersaults and ended on a twist. Gray made her stomach do that.

Signing her name in a big, loopy scrawl, Ella pushed the journal over onto his thighs. And wished she was the one sitting atop all the hairy muscles she remembered peeking out from between the flaps of his robe last night. “Your turn.”

“Can’t I wait and see how this turns out? One big question at a time?”

“Don’t be a scaredy cat. I told you this can be anonymous. Take a chance. Ask something big and bold that you’d never risk asking your friends or colleagues.”

He sucked in a short, sharp breath at her words, then turned away for almost a full minute, staring out at the glimmer of the lake. Ella was just about to ask him what was wrong when he bent and whipped the pen across the page.

Should I quit my job? The pay is good. I don’t have a plan or even an idea of what else I could do. But I think it’s slowly crushing my soul. Gray dropped the pen. Looked away.

Wow. Ella didn’t know what she’d expected, but it wasn’t that. “I guess I should jump ahead to a standard first-date question. Just what is it exactly that you do, Gray? Because right now I’m guessing either hit man for the Mafia or a casino craps dealer. Definitely a soul-crusher, handling all that money and never getting to keep any for yourself.”

He thumbed the top of the ball-point pen. In. Out. In. Out. “If I don’t tell you, if I make you wait to find out on our first date, does that come off as creepy, or just confident that the town will vote yes?”

“A little creepy. Since you didn’t deny the whole hit-man thing.”

“You can have the hotel maids search my room for weapons. Will that put you at ease?”

“I suppose.” But now she wondered. Why the caginess? What sort of man didn’t want to talk about his job—whether to complain or brag? The secrecy set off a tiny alarm bell. “Besides, we should have an answer soon.”

“How soon? I’m only here for two weeks, remember.”

Ella didn’t intend for that to be an issue. She’d formulated a work around to waiting for a response. “A day or two. But we can spend time together while we wait for the answer. As long as it isn’t anything officially date-like.”

“Isn’t that cheating?”

Technically. “I call it bending the rules, not breaking them. I’m slammed with back-to-back massages until eight tonight—Saturday’s always our busiest day. How about we meet up again tomorrow for breakfast?”

A slow, conspiratorial smile spread across his face. “If that’s your best offer, I’ll take it.” Gray cupped her cheek in his big, warm palm. “I’m sorry I made you dredge up those painful memories.”

“They’re a part of me, now. I can’t shy away from the past. But I can focus on the future.”

“You really are remarkable, Ella.”

His words warmed her as much as his touch. If she didn’t break the bubble of sensual tenderness building around them, she’d probably cover him in kisses in about two seconds. And Ward was right—this was the least private spot on all of Seneca Lake. It was definitely not the spot for a secret make-out session.

Ella stood. “Now put the journal back in the mailbox, spit on it, and turn in a circle on one leg three times.”

His jaw dropped open. “What does that do—initiate some magical bat signal letting everyone know we left a question?”

“No.” She dissolved into peals of laughter. Oh, but this was going to be fun. “I just wanted to see if you’d fall for it.”