Homeplace by Joann Ross Page A

catching him in midscowl. “Let’s show our daughter what a blissfully perfect kiss looks like.”
    In the end, of course, she’d won. After steadying the camera atop a stack of bleached logs, she held out her arms to him. And, as always, he found it impossible to resist.
    The staged kiss wasn’t all that long. Neither was it as hot as the earlier, unplanned one had been. But it was sweet enough to make his eyes burn as he relived it in heart-wrenching detail.
    Then, without warning, memories of kissing Peg battled with unbidden images of taking Raine Cantrell on the rough wet sand, like Burt Lancaster rolling around in the surf with Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity that had been broadcast on The Movie Channel the other night.
    It didn’t matter that he didn’t particularly even like the New York lawyer who’d riled up hormones he’d almost forgotten were lurking inside him. The fantasy had caused a painful stirring in his loins and Jack didn’t need to look down to know that although his mind might not want anything more to do with Ida’s mouthy granddaughter, another, more vital part of his body was literally throbbing with the need to bury itself inside her.
    “Goddammit!”
    He pushed himself up from the sofa, jerked the tape from the VCR and locked it away in the chest again. Then went upstairs and stripped off his clothes, tossing them uncaringly onto the floor since there was no longer anyone around to complain. Jack’s last thought, as he drifted off to sleep, was a strict command to both his mind and body to forget about Raine Cantrell.
    When he awoke the next morning stiff, sore, and painfully horny, Jack reminded himself that a man couldn’t hold himself responsible for his dreams. But that didn’t make him feel any better as he showered, the stinging, ice-cold needles of water designed to chill any lingering desire.

6
    R aine awoke to the clear, sweet song of a morning bird. Momentarily disoriented, she lay in the tester bed, looking up at the dancing dots of water-brightened light on the white plaster ceiling. It was when her gaze shifted to the square of sunshine on the bedcover that she remembered where she was. The familiar quilt was a living history of her family. Raine remembered her grandmother pointing out the pieces of her own mother’s blue-serge church going dress stitched next to the red-and-black-checked flannel shirt Raine’s great-grandfather John had worn while logging.
    There was a pink square from the dress Ida had worn to her first day at school, two dotted Swiss triangles from the dress she’d worn to receive her medical degree, and a piece of lace, once white, now aged to the hue of old parchment, that had been cut from her wedding dress. Raine thought it ironic that although her grandparents’ marriage had ended in divorce, the memory lived on, along with others, the fabric of so many lives sewn into this brightly colored family quilt.
    Pushing herself out of bed, she made her way into the adjoining bathroom, which seemed smaller than she remembered it, brushed her teeth, ran her fingers through her hair, and decided to put the coffee on before her shower. Before going downstairs, she paused to look out the bedroom window.
    Last night’s rain had moved eastward toward Seattle, leaving the air as clear as crystal and from her window, located at the very top of the house’s tower, Raine had an eagle’s-eye view of the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains in one direction, the town and bay in the other. In the distance, a white ferry chugged from the dock toward Seattle. Three small skiffs—one with an eye-catching red sail—skimmed over morning-still water like butterflies over rippled blue silk.
    Closer to home, Raine could see Coldwater Cove waking up. Kathleen Walker, pharmacist and the third generation of Walkers to run the Walker Drug Emporium, was on the sidewalk outside her redbrick, brass-plaqued storefront, unfurling blue-and-white awnings. The