Page 84 of These Summer Storms

Fire exploded in her belly—desire. It took everything she had not to do it. Not to lift her hand and set it on his chest, broad and warm and so familiar for all the time she’d spent imagining it when she absolutely shouldn’t have been.

“I know you don’t trust me. I know it’s too much for me to ask you for that. But I swear…” A pause. “I’m not the enemy.”

It was somehow both the exact right thing for him to have said and the absolutely wrong thing at the same time. Because if Alice knew one thing, it was that trust was not part of whatever game this was. Trust was how everyone got hurt.

Wasn’t it how she’d been hurt again and again?

And still, when Jack looked down at her, his gray eyes seemed to be full of something that was a rare find in the circles she’d run in—honesty.

Or maybe he was just really good at the lie.

Sam

“Istill don’t understand whywe have to be here.”

Saoirse Storm didn’t look up from her phone as she cycled cellular access off, then on again, in the futile search for a pocket of service never before found on Storm Island.

As she groaned her frustration to the world, her father dipped a cloth deep into the can of lubricating oil stored in the corner of the island’s fog bell house and returned to his task. “The situation hasn’t changed; we’re here because your grandfather asked us to be.”

A delicate snort from Sila. “We’re here because wehaveto be.”

Sam clenched his teeth and focused on the grease he was cleaning from the large gear, which was a critical piece of one of the island’s most curious features.

“Ew. What isthat?” Nine-year-old Oliver spoke at his shoulder.

“Do you want to help?” Sam offered a rag in Oliver’s direction.

“Don’t get dirty, Ollie,” Sila said, fixing her hair in the front-facing camera of her phone.

“It’s summer,” Sam said, as Oliver ignored his mother and sat on the dusty floor to assist. “They’re supposed to get dirty.”

“I know you think this is romantic or something, Dad, but there are so manyspidersin here,” Saoirse said, staring up at the corner of the bell house.

“You could clean the cobwebs off the windows,” he offered.

“Absolutely not,” Sila said.

The categorical refusal shouldn’t have surprised him, but Sam stillgritted his teeth and worked his way beneath the cast-iron base of the fog bell machine wishing, for the first time since he’d opened the letter from his father, that it was an odd-number hour, so that he would not be required to speak.

“I hate it here,” Saoirse said, dropping her phone to her side for the first time in—was it possible it had been years since Sam had seen his daughter beyond the glow of her phone? “There’s no cell service and the Wi-Fi doesn’t reach over here and I’m missing everything at home and we’ve been stuck hereforever.”

“None of us are having a good time, Saoirse,” Sila snapped.

“Why can’t we go home and come back tomorrow? That’s what helicopters are for!”

She sounded like her mother.

“You know, when I was your age,” Sam began, the cliché making everyone in the bell house groan. “There were no helicopters taking us to and from the island.”

“What’d you do?” Oliver teased. “Ride a dinosaur to get here?”

“Funny,” Sam said. “We figured out something to do. We went swimming. We…explored the island.” He stopped, embarrassed by the way the words made it seem like this place was anything more than a prison they’d been desperate to escape during the summer, Elisabeth and Franklin barely ever there, and the kids barely interested in each other. Emily and Alice were young enough that they were just pains in the ass, and Greta had never been much fun. He wiped down the cast-iron legs, checking the bolts. “We took a boat to the mainland.”

“Cool. Canwetake a boat to the mainland?” Saoirse wasn’t giving in. “And stay there?”

“No,” Sam replied, sliding back out and grabbing the rag from Oliver, moving more quickly to clean the gear. “But you can help me with this if you’d like.”

“Pass,” Saoirse said.