Page 2 of The Summer We Started Over

“On Pine Street.”

“Oh, Pine Street on the island?”

Jeff was standing next to the counter with the computer. “Yeah, I know it seems odd to give him a book of photos about Nantucket when he lives here, but…”

Eddie leaned on the counter, gently pushing a pile of books aside. “I think it’s wonderful. It must be amazing to live in a place you love so much that you want a book about it.”

“Nantucket’s special.” He cocked his head. “You must be new here.”

He’d missed a spot shaving his smooth, tanned, beautiful neck. She wanted to reach out and touch it. “I am. New here. We just moved here two weeks ago.”

“We?” He drew back slightly.

“Oh, no, not that kind of ‘we.’ I’m not married. I moved here with my sister and my father. We moved to the farm off Hummock Pond Road.”

“Nice.” He was tall, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed.

She took a deep breath. “I’m Eddie Grant.”

“I’m Jeff.” He held out his hand. “Jeremiah Jefferson, actually, butJeremiah makes me seem like a prim old Puritan wearing a hat with a buckle on it.”

“I doubt that anything could make you seem like a Puritan,” Eddie said, and shook his large, warm, callused hand.

Another customer entered the shop, an older woman with hair like a frozen meringue.

Eddie forced herself to be professional. “Our coffee-table books are upstairs. Lots of gorgeous books about Nantucket.”

“So I should go upstairs,” he said.

“You should.”

“Could you come with me? I mean, to help me choose?”

She nodded toward the other customer. “I need to be here.”

“Okay. I’ll be back.”

“I’ll be right here. I won’t go away,” she told him.

“He’s not exactly leaving for the moon,” Meringue Woman snapped from her spot in the nonfiction aisle.

Eddie straightened her shoulders. “May I help you?”

“Just browsing,” the woman replied.

Eddie managed to maintain some kind of poise as the man went up the stairs to the second floor. The shop had other customers, and Eddie attended to them happily, knowing the man had to come downstairs sooner or later, and the other clerk was on her lunch break.

He came down after a few minutes, carrying a heavy coffee-table book about Nantucket.

“Beautiful book,” Eddie said, ringing up the sale and putting the book into a paper bag.

“Beautiful,” Jeff had agreed, his eyes meeting hers.

“Would you like a bookmark?” she asked.

“Sure. And I’d like to take you to dinner tonight.” As he reached for the bag in her hand, his hand touched hers, and he kept it there.

He was steady, and warm, and confident, Eddie thought. She wanted to turn her hand over and slide her palm against his. Of course that would mean she had to drop the book, and she wouldn’t do that.

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