Under the Moon Gate by Marilyn Baron Page B

from the teapot into the Wedgwood bone china cups. When her hands began to shake, he realized she really needed to eat something.
    “Let me help,” he said as he stilled her hands and took the teapot. When he touched her, all the nerve endings in his body went haywire.
    He placed a lemon slice on the saucer, then spread preserves on a scone he’d found in a pastry box on the kitchen counter, and passed it to her on a delicate china plate. She refused with a wave of her hand.
    “You don’t have to serve me,” she said.
    “You were kind enough to let me stay last night, so—” He had the urge to rub his thumb tenderly under each of her eyes to remove the dark shadows, as an artist might do with the stroke of a brush.
    “But that was…” She gazed uncertainly into the distance.
    “When’s the last time you ate?” he prodded gently. His breath caught as he responded to the intimacy in her voice. He wanted to touch her again but held back, not ready to weaken her defenses further as she looked at him and a tear slipped down her cheek, then another, until they came in a steady flow. Despite her night’s sleep, he knew she was too exhausted to stop them, too despondent to care she was crying in front of a total stranger. She had been stoic at the funeral, hadn’t shed any tears. Maybe she was overdue.
    “I don’t want to eat,” she said.
    When her tears became unmanageable, Nathaniel offered his linen napkin solicitously so she could wipe her eyes.
    “Please, don’t cry,” he pleaded. He didn’t know what to do about the tears. An only child raised without a mother, he had grown up cared for by his grandmother. Gran was a rock, the most in-control woman he’d ever known. And the most beautiful. More beautiful than any movie star. All his friends had said he had the hottest grandmother around. But it was her strength he really admired. She’d always been there for him. He suspected she had dark secrets, a past life she never talked about. But she didn’t ever fall apart, and she never let him fall apart. In fact, he had never seen her cry. Soft and gentle? No one could accuse Gran of being either.
    After Gran’s death, he had wandered the globe aimlessly, all summer, without reason to put into any port more than a few days at a time, until now. With nothing to show for all that wasted time. He’d barely made a dent in his dissertation.
    Nathaniel missed Gran. He tried to reach for memories of the past, a mother’s tender kiss or comforting words spoken to heal hurts. He couldn’t dredge up any. Perhaps he had once longed for them. Now they only existed in his imagination. He remembered his grandmother singing him French lullabies; that was all.
    Yet, strangely, something deep inside of him responded to Patience, and he wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to her frailty.
    “Here, you need to eat something now. Have this scone. I insist.”
    She still didn’t trust him, but, in all fairness, he was being polite. He had manners, when he chose to use them. She shook her head, but he lifted the scone to her mouth anyway and coaxed her to take a bite. It smelled heavenly, and though she must have been ravenous, she nibbled on the pastry slowly. When she was finished, he wiped the sugar-coated crumbs and preserves from her mouth efficiently with the napkin. He wanted to skim his fingers across her lips, to let her taste him; he refrained.
    “I think you should go down to your boat now,” she said. He wanted to kiss her and realized from the warm gleam in her eyes she might kiss him back, and who knew where that would lead?
    “And I think you should eat something else before I go,” Nathaniel said.
    Patience relented.
    Patience had beautiful hands to match that beautiful heart-shaped face of hers, so delicate and expressive as she finished her breakfast in silence. Her green eyes reminded him of the color of water in a calm sea.
    ****
    “The food is delicious,” she said. “Where did you learn to cook like