The Love Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

back stairs ( Service stairs! Action’s voice cried out), brushing by Mr. Rogers, who was still intent on his acrobatics, and burst out the side door. Beautiful day.
    “Hey,” a voice said. Renata whipped around. She had thought that she and the cat were the only ones home, but there, among the hydrangeas, was Miles, holding a hose.
    “Oh, hi!” Renata said. She had been awed by Miles’s good looks when he came to fetch her and Cade at the airport, and once she’d acknowledged this attraction to herself, she was doomed to be tongue-tied in his presence.
    “Where’re you off to?” he asked.
    “Oh…,” Renata said. “I’m going running.”
    “Perfect day for it.”
    “Yep,” Renata said. She bent down and touched her toes; then she lifted her leg to the railing of the porch and touched her toes, hoping for a ballerina-in-a-Degas-painting effect, but she felt like a complete idiot. “What are you doing?”
    “Watering,” he said, and then in a whispered falsetto he added, “the precious hydrangeas.”
    “Are you in school?” Renata asked. He looked older than her but younger than Cade. Though maybe not. Cade could already pass for thirty.
    “School?” Miles said. “No. I graduated from Colby three years ago.”
    “So what do you do now?” Renata asked.
    “Work my ass off for these people,” Miles said. “And in the winter I travel.”
    “Travel where?”
    “You name it.”
    “Tell me where,” Renata said.
    “I’ve been to South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania. I climbed Kilimanjaro twice in one week.”
    “You did?”
    Miles laughed.
    “You did not.”
    “Enjoy your run,” Miles said.
    Renata set off down the white shell driveway, hoping and praying that Miles wouldn’t watch her. She turned around to check. He was staring right at her ass. Renata was mortified and thrilled. She waved. Miles waved back. On a scale from one to ten, her guilt was at an eight.
    She headed down the street toward the Beach Club, her father’s former business. Daniel Knox had started his career in Manhattan, trading petroleum futures in the 1970s, which, he liked to tell people, was akin to striking oil himself. In five years he had a bleeding ulcer and had made enough money to retire. He took a sabbatical from the business of petroleum futures and moved to Nantucket for the summer to relax. He bought the Beach Club on a whim; he had played tennis with the son of the man who was selling it. At that time, the club was long on history and short on charm. Dan proceeded to renovate, restore, upgrade.
    He added a fitness center—the first of its kind on Nantucket—and a hot tub, a sauna, a room for massage. He bought a hundred and twenty beach umbrellas from the company that supplied the most exclusive establishments on the Cap d’Antibes. He built a lunch shack, where families could sign for grilled hamburgers and ice-cream bars. For seventy-five years the members of the Beach Club had packed sandwiches wrapped in plastic; they had suffered with cold-water-only showers; they had lounged on rickety beach chairs and threadbare towels. Many of the members liked things this way; they were reluctant to embrace the improvements and the rate hike that came with them. But Daniel Knox won in the end. Not a single member quit, and, in fact, many had clamored to join. To hear him tell it on a night when he’d had a few scotches (which was whatit took to get him to talk about Nantucket at all), he had single-handedly saved the Beach Club.
    These endeavors ate up a good chunk of his capital, but he was happy. His bleeding ulcer healed. He had told Renata of the members’ attempts to marry him off—to their single niece visiting from Omaha, to a career girl they knew from Boston. He’d endured five hundred blind dates in his estimation—dinners at the Club Car, picnics on Dionis Beach, movies at the Dreamland Theater—all a complete waste of time. The members concluded that he was too picky, or gay.