Seth wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard the squeak of teeth being ground together.
Meg gave her brother a stare that could have probably bored holes in cement.
Stephen just pushed his sunglasses up his nose and grinned.
Disarm her.
Slowly, Seth reached his hand toward her right wrist and drew her attention toward him. There was a bit of a flinch in her eyes, but then her face smoothed to a blank.
What was going through that mysterious head of hers?
“Before the waitress goes, do you want something to eat?”
She stared at him a moment as if the question was somehow offensive, or else foreign, then scanned the table, likely assessing the remnants of their food. She shook her head. “No. I’ll just have the coffee, and I’ll probably take Toby back to the room to shower the sand off.” She squinted at the boy. “Toby, is that zinc oxide on your nose?” With her thumb, she rubbed off an errant white smudge.
“I dunno.” Toby shrugged and hopped on Erica’s lap, eliciting a grimace from her at the impact. “Seth put it there so I wouldn’t burn, so that means I can go back out after breakfast and play some more.”
“No, that’s not what it means, but thank you, Seth.” She said that last bit so quietly that he was pretty sure it was meant for his ears only.
She looked down at his hand, still on her wrist, and he drew it away. As soon as the connection was broken, he missed it. Such a casual little touch. He’d never known a small interaction could be so fulfilling.
The waitress paused at their corner, and he said, “Could she have a pot of coffee to take back to her—our bungalow? And perhaps some cheese and fruit?”
Meg’s forehead furrowed. “I don’t—”
“Shut it,” Stephen said, tipping his head over the chair back. “Friggin’ eat something, for crying out loud, or you’re going to be a rampaging battle-ax all day. Come on, don’t kill my island mojo, little sister.”
She cocked her head to the side and squinted down to the other end of the table. “Why are you even here? Certainly I didn’t invite you. I’ve done some really insane things the past few weeks, but I don’t have any memory of that particular one.”
Insane?
Erica caught Seth’s gaze over Toby’s shoulder and shook her head at him. The warning was clear: Don’t say anything. The best response is no response.
He nodded and locked his stare onto a cantaloupe wedge.
“Please bring what my sister’s husband ordered,” Stephen said to the still-lingering waitress. “Oh, and, uh, is the concierge around? Can you send her over? Thanks.”
Finally, the waitress shuffled away, and Stephen continued, “Hell, I don’t know who invited me. Carla? Sharon, maybe? It was smart of them, don’t you think? For you to have me be in the know so I know all the right lies to tell Mom and Dad?”
“Oh, shit.” Seth closed his eyes and ground them with his fists. Her parents didn’t know. Of course they wouldn’t. Well, they would soon enough, depending on how fast the gossip mill churned.
“Hey, big guy, it’ll be fine,” Stephen said. “I think this time she actually married up.”
When Seth opened his eyes, he found Meg staring at her empty plate and chewing on her bottom lip.
Toby chose that exact moment to bounce from Erica’s lap to Meg’s, giving his mother a loud raspberry on her jaw before resuming his game play.
She grinned, and maybe only Seth saw it, but her eyes were a bit too wet and cheeks too red. Unlike Toby, she hadn’t had any sun that morning. Her coloring had come about from other things.
A brown-skinned woman with braided hair pulled back in a stylish bun, wearing the pleated white skirt and navy jacket uniform of the resort, appeared at the table clutching a leather portfolio to her chest. She nodded at them all. “I didn’t get to congratulate you yesterday, Mr. and Mrs. Raj-cough,” she said with an obsequious bow. “I heard the ceremony was lovely.”
“It was, thank you,” Seth said, feeling somewhat duplicitous for expressing pride about such a thing. “However, the name is pronounced roash-cof.”
Her pretty face scrunched and she closed one eye as if she were trying to picture the spelling. “Roash-cof?”
“There you go. That sounds so much sweeter.”
“Roash-cof,” Meg whispered against Toby’s back.
Had she not known how to pronounce it, either?
“If I had a do-over, I would have picked a different spelling for my US documents,” he explained to the concierge. “Or…a different surname.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Rozhkov. Or Sergei, for that matter,” Meg said, but she didn’t look at him. Her attention was on Erica’s phone and Toby’s manipulation of it.