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But maybe not. Radiators overheated and hoses broke all the time in heat waves like this.
    Willie iced the rest of the coffee and drank it on the terrace while she put away the luminarias. The sense of peace she’d always felt at Beaches settled over her like warm, strong hands on her shoulders. The sea hissed, “You’re safe, you’re safe,” beyond the dunes, and made Willie smile.
    Whit said its unending murmur drove him nuts and kept him awake nights. He used to wake up crying when they were kids, certain he’d seen something in his room.
    “Monsters in the closet, Granma had said with a wink.
    Willie had winked back and kept her mouth shut about her pirate, the imaginary friend she’d dreamed up for the game of buccaneers she and Whit played on the beach.
    Some days, when the sun hit the water just right, she could almost see him. A tall man in breeches and knee boots, with long dark hair and a white shirt with sleeves that billowed like sails in the wind. Just like the man she thought she’d seen on the porch last night.
    Whoa. Willie put her glass down with a clunk and rubbed a shiver of gooseflesh on her arms. Was that weird or what? She hadn’t thought about her pirate in years, not since she and Zen had found the Andrew Wyeth print Giant in a gallery in Soho on their lunch hour. It showed six kids on a beach watching a giant spun out of clouds and surf stride across the sky with a club on his shoulder. She’d bought it and hung it in her office at Material Girl. On bad days it worked better than tranquilizers.
    She’d tried to tell Whit how the painting made her feel: safe and watched over, the way she felt at Beaches. He hadn’t understood, but Zen had. She’d tell Zen about the man on the porch the next time she called, but she wouldn’t tell Whit. The boy who’d seen monsters in the closet always told her she had too much imagination for her own good. Go figure.
    Willie thought briefly of asking Frank to go with her to Stonebridge, but decided against it. There was enough talk about them already. Unfounded talk, since they’d known each other since they were fifteen, but Willie didn’t want to stir up gossip. It might get back to Raven; who just might be interested in more than Beaches.
    And maybe the national debt was just a subtraction error. But a girl could dream. Willie hummed “Some Day My Prince Will Come” while she pulled the yellow Jeep Wrangler she’d bought used when she’d moved to Beaches out of the garage and parked it next to the terrace.
    Her father had really thrown a fit about her plans for a garage, so of course she’d gone ahead and built it. Whatever Whit Senior wanted her to do, Willie did the opposite.
    That sent her Raven fantasy up in flames, since her father still dreamed that someday she’d marry a rich doctor. What girl in her right mind wouldn’t love to, but Willie would rather eat cranberries, which she loathed, than admit it to her father.
    She ought to at least admit to herself that her libido was stuck in overdrive, that it had been since she’d watched Dr. Jonathan Raven stretch out of his red Corvette. The thought of watching him do that every night when he came home to his darling, devoted little wife—namely, her—made Willie’s pulse thud in places she didn’t even know she had a pulse. He was a doctor, so he’d know all those secret little pulse points, and he’d make them trip-hammer when he kissed her hello and asked her what was for dinner. He would never ask about dessert; they’d both know what that would be.
    “Down, girl,” Willie told herself sternly. “You are absolutely nuts to even think he’s interested in you. The only thing he wants is Beaches. Period.”
    Maybe that was why she wanted him, because he didn’t want her. She hadn’t spent her life being contrary and dating oddballs because it drove her father up a wall for nothing. And that was exactly what she had to show for it—nothing but a string of dead-end