was trying to do, ignoring her disclaimer, he took the bowl himself.
“Is this everything?” he asked.
She hesitated. “I could heat some baked beans if you want. There’s canned goods in the pantry. Or I have some yogurt. Except for cereal, this is all I have. I didn’t buy much at the store.”
Confusion flashed in his eyes. Seconds later, comprehension replaced it. “I’m not talking about what you’re fixing for dinner, Amy. Whatever you have here is fine. I mean to take outside. There’s no reason for you to carry all this by yourself.”
“Oh,” she murmured, aware of the brush of his hand against hers as he took the chips and salad. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he murmured in return, and moved ahead of her so he could hold the door.
The sun had just dropped below the horizon, the pale light of evening turning the pine trees a dusky shade of blue. The calm water of the lake reflected nothing but shadows, crickets called to each other and from the rocks along the water’s edge the deep croak of frogs filtered through the balmy air.
Amy was acutely aware of the twilight stillness as she took what Nick carried for her and placed it on the old redwood picnic table that sat halfway between the house and the water. It was a time of day she had once found welcoming and restful. Since she’d been in Cedar Lake this time, it had simply seemed lonely.
She attributed the unfamiliar feeling to the isolation of the place, and the fact that she was there by herself. She was accustomed to feeling isolated when it came to her family, but this was different. She’d never been at the lake house alone before, and it felt odd without her grandmother around. As Nick lowered himself to the long bench opposite her seat, she had to admit it felt even more strange to be alone there with him.
Her glance caught his across the table. The way he was watching her, he didn’t look all that certain about being there, either.
Refusing to let her gesture turn uncomfortable for them both, she handed him the relish plate. “Help yourself,” she said, and reached for the salad she really didn’t want.
He immediately took her up on her suggestion, piling tomato slices on his cheeseburger. “I always thought it would seem like one long vacation living in a place like this. On the water, I mean. I used to really envy the kids who could hang around a lake during the summer.”
“You make it sound as if you never had access to one. There are dozens of lakes around here.”
“That doesn’t mean I had the time,” he informed her, adding lettuce. “I spent every summer from the time I was ten years old working construction with my uncle. We’d go out to Blue Springs for a Sunday picnic once in a while,” he said, speaking of one of the public lakes in the area, “but there was never time to spend a whole day just hanging out.” Adding the top bun to the three-inch-high sandwich, he nodded toward the water. “It’s nice here.”
His tone was conversational, his manner less guarded than it had seemed just a short while ago. She figured that had to do with the fact that she was feeding him. It would be rude of him to be sullen.
“You worked construction when you were ten?”
“From then through college,” he confirmed, taking the container of salad she handed him.
“That’s awfully young.” It was also unconscionable, she thought. A ten-year-old was merely a child.
An image of him as a young boy wavered in the back of her mind as she watched him spoon pasta salad onto his plate. She could easily imagine the fresh, eager faces of her male students and all that budding manhood trapped in their energetic little bodies. But there was too much of an edge to the man sitting across from her for her to imagine him that innocent.
He handed the salad back.
“I was hardly an abused child, if that’s what you’re thinking.” From the troubled look on her face, Nick had the distinct feeling that it was. The woman was as transparent as window glass. She always had been. “I had to beg Uncle Mike to take me with him at first. If I remember right, I promised I’d wash his truck for him if he’d let me go.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want to stay with my aunt and cousins while my mom was at work. It’s not that I didn’t like my relatives,” he qualified, in case she got the wrong idea there, too. “It was just that they were all female. There was more appeal to being with the guys and wearing a hard hat than being around a bunch of girls.”
Realizing she was still holding the salad, she set it aside and absently reached for the tomatoes herself. She had no problem imagining a young boy preferring the company of men over girls. She just couldn’t imagine a responsible adult allowing a child to deliberately be where it wasn’t safe. “But wasn’t that dangerous? A child being at a construction site, I mean?”
“It sounds more dangerous than it was.” Nick took a bite of burger, wondering as he did if she realized how much of her guard had slipped. By the time he swallowed, he’d decided she hadn’t simply forgotten to be wary. He actually detected real concern. “Mike had a partner back then,” he explained, wanting her to know there was no way his uncle would have put him in jeopardy. “And the company was bigger. He and Roy, his partner,” he clarified, “supervised the jobs, rather than actually working on them the way Mike does now.”
The way he’s had to do since his partner retired last year, Nick mentally muttered, hating how hard his uncle was working just when he should be slowing down himself. But Mike couldn’t slow down. He’d borrowed to buy out his partner’s interest in the business and he’d also lost money on contracts because it was taking him longer to complete them with less help.
Feeling his stomach knot with the thoughts, Nick glanced across the table and met the quiet interest in Amy’s guileless eyes. Drawn by that interest, distracted by it, he felt the quick surge of frustration fade.
“He would let me watch some of the craftsmen as long as he was nearby,” he told her. “The rest of the time, he stuck me out of the way with a stack of wood and a hammer. Or I’d sit in the truck after he explained what they were working on that day and try to figure out where they were on the blueprints. He didn’t really put me to work until I was a little older.”
“And you really liked it,” she quietly concluded.
“I couldn’t learn enough fast enough. Building something from nothing fascinated me. That’s when I first decided to become an architect,” he admitted, eyeing his hamburger again. “Except I wanted to live in a city and build skyscrapers.”
He offered his last comment casually, as if his ambition were a mere aside in life, and turned his attention to his meal. It didn’t seem to Amy that it bothered him to be working once again for his uncle. If anything, he seemed completely accepting of it. Yet, as curious as she found that, considering the brilliant future her parents and Paige had once thought he had ahead of him, what struck her most was what he’d said about his family.
She knew nothing about them. Though he and Paige had gone out together for nearly a year in college, he had been around the Chapman house only for a few months—mostly on weekends because he’d taken the job in New York by then—before he’d disappeared from their lives. If mention had been made of his family, it had never been around her.
She told herself it was only to keep the silence from growing awkward that she asked about them now.
“I didn’t realize you have so many relatives here.”
“I don’t have anymore. Just Uncle Mike, Aunt Kate and one cousin. The rest have moved away.”
“Your mom, too?”
It occurred to Nick that she had yet to touch her meal, something that struck him as odd, since she’d had him do all the talking. Reaching across the table, he nudged her plate closer to her and told her that his mom had taken a transfer to Florida a