Read Online Back To Us (Shore Secrets 3) by Christi Barth - Free Book Online Page B

himself.
    The urge was strong to flip up the hood on his black jacket. Stupid. Instead, Ward shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Angling sideways through the thick line of trees that hid Seneca Lake’s worst-kept secret from the road, he made his way down the well-trodden dirt path to the tiny point of land that poked out into the lake like a grassy hangnail.
    Not for the first time, Ward felt like an idiot walking across the carpet of wildflowers. Like he was in a cartoon. The multicolored blooms that pooled around the simple metal mailbox on a wooden post came almost to his knees. He jerked open the door, pulled out the red leather-bound journal and sank onto the wrought-iron bench.
    Didn’t mean he was ready to start writing. Stalling sounded good. Ward turned to the first page. He recognized Dawn’s loopy scrawl of the same words her parents wrote, and her grandparents, all the way back to the Korean War widow Agnes Cosgrove, who first placed a journal in the mailbox in memory of her dead husband:
    For the use of everyone who comes to the shore of Seneca Lake.
Please share your secrets.
We’ll keep them safe.
    God, he hoped that was true. Because he was taking one hell of a risk writing his problem in this thing. A ton of people in this town still held a grudge. He thought back to May, when three idiots started a bar fight with him for no reason other than they were still pissed about the events of ten years ago. Maybe
grudge
was too soft a word. Okay, some people still had a stick up their collective asses about him. But the journal was supposed to be anonymous. In theory. So he’d take a shot.
    He flipped deeper in to the spot held by a pen and thumbed off the cap. That was progress. Enough so that he lifted his head to stare out at the flat grey expanse of water that gently lapped at the shore. The sky had already lightened from black to the color of pencil lead. With a sigh, Ward put pen to paper.
    I
was in love with a girl.
Screwed it up.
Now I’ve got a chance to get her back.
What do I do?
What date do I take her on to make her fall for me again?
    Pathetic. Not just his attempt at writing out the plea, but the whole damn situation he’d gotten himself into. Ward reached down, picked up a rock and winged it at the lake. The tiny
sploosh
didn’t do much in the way of easing his frustration. So he picked up another rock, took more careful aim and sent it spinning into the mailbox. The loud, metallic
thunk
as it careened off and boomeranged back toward the path was much more satisfying.
    “Hey! Cease fire!”
    Ward jumped. Well, his stomach jumped into his throat, for the nanosecond it took to recognize Zane’s voice. He swallowed hard, to push it back down where it belonged. Oh-so-casually turned over his shoulder to look at Zane, comically frozen midstep at the edge of the wildflowers. “Sorry, man. Didn’t know you were there.”
    Zane walked the rest of the way to the mailbox with exaggerated care. “I thought the whole point of this mailbox journal was that anyone could use it. Yet here you are, defending it like it’s Custer’s Last Stand.”
    It was crack of ass early. Still no coffee. And he’d written an almost laughable plea in the journal, with no better ideas scratching at his brain. Ward needed privacy. He needed not to have any witnesses to his entry in the journal. Zane’s arrival annoyed the hell out of him on several levels.
    “I said I was sorry. Do I have to suffer through an entire lecture on the Civil War as punishment for flicking a damn rock?”
    Zane sat down heavily next to him. “It was a joke, not a lecture. Although you clearly need a lecture so you learn that Custer’s Last Stand was against the Sioux, and not the Confederacy. Maybe you should go back to bed until you’re ready to interact with humans.”
    “If I wanted to interact, I wouldn’t be hunched over a journal on the edge of the lake before the sun rises.” He was being a first-class jerk. Knew it.