Beach House No. 9. Christie Ridgway

the bag at her feet, then spun on her flashy sandals, heading back inside his house. The last he’d ever see of her, Griffin thought, was her cute ass. Not a bad way to go, but he didn’t like the idea of her going away—forever—mad. “No goodbye?”

      Her feet halted. She glanced over her shoulder. “Why? I’ll be back in a minute. I’m just going to put my things in one of the guest rooms.”

      His jaw dropped. The coot started cackling again.

      “Now that you’ll have a computer, you’re ready to work, Griffin. And since you claim you have confidence in my ability to do my job, it will be much easier for us with me living over here.”

      “But…but…” Jesus. He couldn’t think. Living here? “What, uh, what about Tess and the kids?”

      “They’ll have more room next door without me underfoot.” She started walking again, then took another look back. “Oh, and they’ll be coming over tonight for dinner.”

      The coot’s cackling only got louder.

      Jane smiled at him. “Why don’t you join us, Mr. Monroe? Griffin will be barbecuing.”

      And the day had started out so happy, Griffin thought, when his reeling brain finally settled. But she’d once again upended him, and he was no longer confident he had the skills to either wait her out or keep her out.

      Damn. The enemy had infiltrated, putting the heart of the camp at risk.

      * * *

      FROM HER PLACE beneath the shade of a tropical umbrella, Tess Quincy made a bargain with herself. Twenty more minutes. That’s how much longer she’d wait for her husband to meet her as she’d requested. She’d specified “lunchtime” and “on the beach” in her text to his phone, and had—wrongly—assumed he’d show up just minutes after noon. That had been two hours ago. If he didn’t appear before the big hand touched the six on her wristwatch—worn in an effort to teach Duncan and Oliver about analog time—she’d retreat back to her cottage. Waiting a second more than that would only be another blow to her ego. It had taken enough hits.

      Closing her eyes, she settled more deeply into the old-fashioned beach chair she’d found in a closet at No. 8. A tripod of light wood strung with striped canvas, it didn’t lift her rear end off the sand, but it supported her back at the perfect angle for magazine-reading. As a girl, she’d spent hours just like this, paging through People and Us Weekly, imagining herself as one of the SoCal celebrities so often pictured on the glossy pages.

      Nowadays, if she had time for any reading, it was for her moms’ book group. They read about tiger mothers and free-range mothers and mothers who managed to start up sexy small businesses. Tess wondered now if she should have been studying up on husbands and wives or how to survive a failed marriage.

      A breeze blew her hair across her face. As she fingered it behind her ear, she became aware of someone’s gaze on her. At the weight of it, her heart stuttered, then kicked into a rapid beat. Him? Swallowing hard, she lifted her lashes and glanced right.

      Her pulse decelerated like a motorboat brought to a sudden halt. It was a stranger who stared at her from his place eight feet away on the sand. A stranger staring at her, she realized now, with a look of blatant interest. Her heart gave another—though milder—kick. And she didn’t look away.

      Before this week, Tess Quincy, mother of four and wife of more than thirteen years, would have ignored the man. But Tess Quincy, woman with a shambles—or was that a sham?—of a marriage, found herself unwilling to pretend she didn’t notice his speculative—and yes, admiring—gaze.

      So sue her, it felt good.

      The man appeared to be around thirty, which made him a little younger than Tess, and his faint smile topped lean muscles and knee-length swim trunks in bright green. “It is you, isn’t it?”

      For a moment she was speechless, then words spilled easily from her own now-smiling lips. “It depends on who you think I am.” With a little thrill, she registered the flirtatious note in her voice and wasn’t ashamed of it. It had been months since she’d been noticed as a woman.

      “The gum,” he said, certain enough now that he strolled closer to her. “Brand name, OM. The green tea gum. You’re her.”

      You’re her. Another man had said those words to her once. She glanced down at the sleeping child beside her and fussed with the fish-patterned towel covering his napping body. The man who’d said those words originally had hardly looked at her since the precious ten-month-old was born.

      The stranger came yet closer and took to one knee, holding out a hand. “Teague White.”

      She didn’t linger on the handshake, but her smile stayed in place. “Tess Quincy. I was Tess Lowell when I made those commercials.”

      “After all these years, they still play.”

      Her shoulders lifted, expressing her own surprise over it. She’d filmed them at eighteen, and they’d hit the small screen as she turned nineteen, a long-legged girl in belly-baring yoga pants and a tiny tank, leading a class in meditation. The cause of the ad campaign’s sustained popularity wasn’t clear. It could have been her nubile teenage body, the gleam of mischief in her eyes when she told the camera that “OM will tame a wild mind,” or, more likely, the continued heavy airplay. Frequency plus reach had meant success for both OM and Tess. She still sank residuals into her kids’ college funds.

      If she and David divorced, she supposed she’d be using those checks to help support herself.

      Teague White’s appreciative expression took some of the sting out of the thought. “You look exactly the same.”

      “I’ve had four kids since then.”

      “No,” he said, shaking his head.

      She felt her dimples dig deep in her cheeks. “Yes.” Maybe that last pregnancy hadn’t completely taken her out of the realm of attractiveness, after all. She plugged the Pilates DVD into the player twice a week and ran with Russ in the jogging stroller every other day. Night and morning, she brushed, she flossed, she glossed what she could gloss and she moisturized the rest.

      Yet her husband, David, didn’t look at her the way this stranger did. Her husband, David, barely looked at her at all anymore. This unknown man recognized that eighteen-year-old girl in the wifely shell, and he seemed pretty pleased about it. She cocked her head, the moves not so hard to remember now. “What is it you do, Teague?”

      “I’m with the fire department,” he said.

      “Doing…?” Not that she couldn’t guess.

      A grin popped out, as if he couldn’t hold it back. “I’m a firefighter.”

      She figured then that he got his own share of appreciative glances with all those manly muscles and the studly occupation. “Day off?”

      He nodded. “We wanted surf and sand. You’re an added bonus.”

      It was heady stuff, the attention of an attractive member of the opposite sex. She had plenty of close encounters with males in her daily life, but mostly they wanted to wipe their noses on the tails of her shirt or use her limbs for climbing like a jungle gym at the park.

      Down the beach, someone yelled the handsome stranger’s name. Both he and Tess looked toward the surf, where a handful of equally muscled men were tossing around a football. They gestured to him and one threw the ball, a perfect spiral that landed at Teague’s feet. With a show of reluctance, he picked it up, then clambered to a stand. “You going to be here awhile?”

      “I…” If she agreed, she could tell herself she wasn’t staying put for David. She could pretend to herself that she was instead waiting for the handsome stranger to return and make her feel desirable again. “Maybe.”

      His grin flashed on. “And later this week? My friends and I have some time off. We’ll be here again.”

      “I…I