Kiss the Moon by Carla Neggers Page A

giggled into her wineglass. She couldn’t help herself. Andy McNally knew about her fantasy. Everyone in Cold Spring did. Most didn’t believe it, of course. That was to be expected. It didn’t matter to her—it was her fantasy, her life. Her parents had never discouraged her from finding a way to make sense of being left on a church doorstep on a chilly April night. “Yes,” she said primly. “Brandon Sinclair’s son, Wyatt, came up from New York today.”
    “He talk to Penelope? Think he believed her?”
    “I didn’t ask.”
    “Ask,” Andy said. “Last thing I need is a Sinclair stirring up trouble in town. Bad enough we’ve got Penelope. Look, Harriet—” He took a breath and shook his head. “Never mind.”
    She smiled. “It’s okay, Andy. I won’t make a fool of myself. I promise.”
    “It’s not that,” he said, awkward.
    But it was, and they both knew it. He asked her to put his beer on his tab, as he did every night, and she told him to tell Rebecca and Jane hello, as she did every night. When he left, she poured herself another glass of chardonnay—an indulgence—and sat in the empty bar, sipping her wine and imagining.

Six
    P enelope was up, dressed and ready to go by seven o’clock. At 7:05 it hit her that she had nowhere to go. Her father had called last night and told her not to show up at the airport for a few days. “Take a break. Get used to terra firma. Then you can reacquaint yourself with washing planes and sweeping out hangars.”
    She turned on the “Today” show, turned it off again. She still had plenty of wood after last night’s panic. She built a nice fire in her potbellied stove and listened to it crackle for a few minutes before she was climbing the walls again.
    What was she going to do for three weeks?
    She didn’t want to get on her computer. Maybe the weirdo would be there again. She’d reassured herself overnight that her nasty message was a simple prank from some nutcase. She would dismiss it. She needn’t mention it to anyone.
    She walked onto her deck. It was cold this morning, maybe not even twenty degrees. Twenty-degree nights and forty-degree days were perfect for sap. It’d be running by midday. At least she had Rebecca and Jane McNally coming over this afternoon to help her boil sap.
    What to do until then?
    This part of the lake was still, silent, motionless beneath the layers of snow and ice, which glistened in the bright sunlight. Here, there were no fishing shanties and few other year-round houses. She breathed in the cold air, imagining summer, boats humming on the water, kayakers and canoeists paddling along the shoreline, neighbors opening their camps for the season.
    She envisioned herself in her kayak on the cool, clear water, staring straight down to the sandy, rocky bottom. There was plenty to do in the lakes region during the summer. Even in the dead of winter, she could ski and snowshoe. Now her options were more limited. Maybe she could talk her father into postponing her grounding until warmer weather.
    “Fat chance,” she muttered and went inside.
    She checked the weather channel. Yes, it would get into the forties this afternoon. Satisfied, she flicked off the television.
    It was seven-forty.
    She contemplated her options. Spring clean her house. She glanced at the simple furnishings, peered into the kitchen, her bedroom, her study. Well, yes, she could spring clean, but it wasn’t a spring kind of day, not with the thermometer stuck at nineteen Fahrenheit. And who could spring clean with a fire in the wood stove?
    She could drive into town and offer to help Harriet and her mother at the inn. There was always something to do. They’d put her straight to work. She could clean, paint, water plants, help in the kitchen.
    She could spy on Wyatt Sinclair.
    That settled her down. She flopped onto her couch and pictured his black eyes and skeptical frown, the shape of his chest and shoulders under that black leather jacket. He must have