Free Nathan's Child by Anne McAllister

stages of progress. She had twenty or thirty sketches that she should be working from.
    She started to work on a painting of some children playing on the quay. But the children made her think of Lacey. Lacey made her think of Nathan. Nathan made her remember last night, made her remember the kiss.
    She couldn’t think—or paint—for remembering that kiss.She set aside that painting and tried another, this one a landscape of the windward beach. It was a wide-angle painting done from a photo she’d snapped when Hugh had taken her up in his seaplane. But her eye was drawn to the rocky promontory where she and Nathan had once stood together, hands clasped, hearts beating as one.
    And that brought her to Nathan again. And the kiss.
    So she moved on to a landscape of higgledy-piggledy houses perched on the hillside above the harbor. But somehow even the houses reminded her of days long ago when the two of them had walked side by side through the narrow streets, when they’d shared an ice cream, licking madly before it melted in the Bahamian summer sun.
    Everywhere she looked, there was Nathan.
    Desperate, she got out her sketchbook and tried to figure out other ideas she wanted to develop. She flipped through the photos she’d taken last week, hoping for renewed inspiration. She had shot several rolls of film and had easily half a dozen island scenes that she could work on—children playing in the street; a cricket game on the “cricket grounds” with Daisy the resident horse-and-lawn-mower watching the game; a bunch of happy diners at the Grouper, sitting under palm trees decorated with tiny, colored fairy lights; a shot of two little boys riding the old cannons that had sat on the point, defending the island, for almost 350 years.
    They were nothing fancy—just bread-and-butter shots—but they had always captured her imagination before.
    Not now.
    Now her mind’s eye didn’t see cricket players or children in the street or little boys swinging their legs on the cannons. It saw Lacey’s grin as she’d followed Nathan out the door. It saw Nathan’s broad shoulders and strong back. It saw Nathan’s back as it had been thirteen years ago, bare and tanned and smooth—
    â€œArgh!” Carin flung the photos aside and raked both hands through her hair.
    My God, it was nearly two o’clock and she had nothing— nothing! —to show for her day’s work. Fiona had asked when Carin brought her the sandwich and Carin had said, “It’s coming.”
    But it wasn’t coming. All she could see in her mind was Nathan.
    Damn it! Even when he wasn’t here, he was here!
    Well, fine. If she couldn’t be creative, she’d go for a walk. She’d do leg work, make some sketches, get raw material. In the wide-open spaces she’d have other things to distract her.
    She put on a pair of sandals, grabbed her sketchbook and her sunglasses and set out.
    The air was stifling, steamy and hot, like getting slapped in the face with a hot wet towel—minus the towel. There wasn’t a tiny bit of moving air anywhere. The flag hung limp. Even the water in the harbor was flat and still.
    Carin headed toward the beach on the far side of the island. If a breeze existed, that’s where it would be. The tarmac road burned through the thin soles of her sandals as she walked up the hill. She wasn’t outside three minutes before the sweat was running down her back and making damp patches on her shirt.
    â€œYou crazy, girl? What you doin’ out in the noonday sun?” Carin’s neighbor, Miss Saffron, who was eighty if she was a day, looked up from her rocking chair on her shady front porch and shook her head as Carin passed.
    â€œJust out for a little inspiration.” She lifted her sketchbook in salute.
    Miss Saffron chuckled. “If I be you, crazy girl, I’d be gettin’ all the inspiration I need from that man was