Free The Tide Can't Wait by Louis Trimble

T., honey. It’s just that you don’t sound quite the same now when you say ‘Leon.’ There’s no smoke of passion coming out with the word.”
    â€œTommy!”
    He was not at all gay now. “This is the day I’ve been waiting for, and I’m bumbling again, as usual.”
    She put a hand on his arm. “You’re very sweet, Tommy.”
    He was grinning again, apparently having thrown aside his brief mood. “Yep, I’m the guy they coined the phrase ‘I love him like a brother’ for. But on to more cheerful things. How goes the work?”
    That was easier. Lenny leaned back, letting the warm air flow over her, enjoying the leisurely ride that took them now along the coast, now inland through groves of trees, through tiny villages, across rolling stretches of farmland and pasture.
    Tommy Price could talk well when he wished, and before she knew it, Lenny found lunchtime had come. Tommy swung the car from the highway; wound down a gravel road and then onto a dirt track that deposited them in a thick forest of beech and oak.
    â€œRobin Hood’s hangout,” he said. “A little to the south, but I swear it looks just like it. Come on, fair Maid Marian, and gnaw a haunch of venison with old Friar Tuck.”
    Reaching behind the seat, he produced a great hamper that he carried easily in one large hand. She scooped up a car robe and they walked along through a grove of trees to where a rivulet of water was partially dammed by a fallen log, making a small pond. Tommy spread the robe on sun-dappled grass nearby and deposited the hamper in the middle.
    â€œNow if I haven’t forgotten everything as usual,” he began cheerfully.
    Lenny felt a sudden surge of quite childish delight. Kicking off her shoes, she went on her knees to the hamper and began rummaging through it. Lifting a frost-damp silver jug from the hamper, she set it down, dipped in again. It was like a treasure hunt. He had provided everything. Bread-and-butter sandwiches, a pair of small roasted chickens, a tremendous thermos of coffee, a meat pie, tarts, and a sack of assorted fruit.
    â€œThis comes first,” he said. Undoing the lid of the silver jug, he slipped two cups from it and poured them full. “The world’s most innocuous cocktail. Pineapple juice, sugar, a couple of beat-up old eggs, and a faint dash of rum to give it flavor. Sip.”
    She sipped. It tasted wonderful, cool and fruit-flavored. Tommy tipped his cup to her.
    â€œMay your success be mine e’en though our hearts ne’er entwine.”
    â€œYou’re still a rotten poet, Tommy.”
    He beamed and drank. Lenny followed suit. The rum in this was certainly faint, as he had said, just enough to give it flavor. They used over half the contents of the jug as an
aperitif,
and then attacked the chickens and meat pie. Lenny found that she was tremendously hungry and ate ravenously.
    â€œAre you writing anything, Tommy?”
    â€œDoing research,” he said, around a chicken leg. He grinned. “Best excuse in the world. I can do research forever.”
    â€œI have to publish if I want a better job,” she said. She felt broody about it. Taking a bite of meat pie, she washed it down with a gulp of cocktail. “I have no Uncle Harry.”
    â€œNeither do I any more. But you do have an Uncle Tommy.” He licked his fingers with concentration, then wiped them on a paper napkin. “And Uncle Tommy means it.”
    â€œUhm.” When he got this way, with the glint of humor gone from his pale eyes, she always felt slightly uncomfortable. She evaded the issue by holding out her cup.
    Tommy drained the last of the jug’s contents into their glasses. “Dessert?”
    â€œNot right now.” She was thirsty and she drank the cocktail. “A little coffee, maybe.”
    He produced it, poured her a cup and then, in the manner of an amateur magician drawing a rabbit from