by Karen Booth
He wore my favorite jeans and a black dress shirt, sleeves rolled up and an extra button undone. The ubiquitous sunglasses were swiped away once he saw me, causing me to hold my breath as his eyes lit up and worked their way into mine.
“Hello, beautiful,” was all he said as he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me in for a kiss. He hesitated for a second, holding me close, and the heat between us was highly inappropriate given that there were old people and babies around.
“Hi, handsome,” was my not-so-clever reply. Like a shot of good tequila, he killed off a bunch of my brain cells. My entire body felt like it was on fire.
Chris took my hand while we walked down the concourse. “I got your message last night. I’m glad everything went well when you turned in your story,” he said.
I was so disoriented by being in his presence again that the article had slipped my mind, completely. “Oh, it went great. Patrick called me this morning before we left for the airport and it’s definitely the cover. Did anyone talk to you about an exclusive?”
“Yes, I got a text about it before we left New York.” He glanced at me and smiled. “I assured them that I’d only spill my guts for you.”
“Did you really say that?” I asked. “That’s the kind of thing that got me in trouble in the first place.”
“Don’t worry,” he said as we approached our gate. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
Waiting to board, I glimpsed a couple with two girls around Sam’s age. The wife seemed to recognize Chris, directing her husband to take a picture with his phone. I turned away, fearing another surprise. Chris either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
Chris and I huddled in the last row of First Class with Sam in the seat in front of me. He stretched his legs into the aisle and held my hand. He eyed me once when he raised my fingers to his lips, driving a splendid shock through me. I thought about telling him to cut it out, but decided that part of giving in, a skill I was working like crazy to master, was to sit back and allow him as much influence as he wanted.
The flight attendant, with pert brown hair and crinkles around her eyes, offered airplane wine in her drawl. She watched us, resting her hand on the back of the seat in front of Chris, looking as if she might burst. “Let me guess. Honeymoon?” She wore the convinced grin of a professional.
Chris replied quickly, “Guilty, as charged.” She giggled at his goofy response while he patted the back of my hand. “Although, to be honest, this is a second honeymoon. Fifteen years. It seems like yesterday. Right, honey?”
Sam overheard the exchange and glanced back, snickering at Chris. He muttered the continuation of his charade, nodding at Sam, “Our daughter. We adopted her from a Swiss orphanage. Her parents were killed in a tragic skiing accident. They both ran into a low-hanging branch.” He made a slow slashing motion across his neck and I covered my mouth.
The flight attendant’s eyes flew open and her face paled before she stuck out her lower lip. “I’ll be sure to bring her an extra cookie,” she whispered.
“Swiss orphanage?” I asked under my breath, when she’d finally gone.
“I told you I’m unable to read or sleep on the plane. This is my only source of entertainment.” He arched one eyebrow, driving me crazy.
“I can’t wait to see your villa.” With no previous experience, I had nothing by which to measure. I’d imagined a few things, all of which were probably ludicrous.
He gathered my hand again, rubbing his thumb over the tops of my fingernails. “This is my second place on the island. As I’m sure you know, since you were president of the Banks Forest fan club, the band used to spend a lot of time there.”
“I was not president of the Banks Forest fan club.”
“Please, Claire, I’m trying to talk.” He smiled at me and softened my heart a bit further, with no real effort on his part. “After Elise and I got married, she made me get rid of the first house. She thought it would remind me of the other women who’d stayed there.”
It was another example of Elise’s paranoid manipulation, but there was a part of me that would’ve done the same thing. If he were mine, truly mine, I wouldn’t want to imagine him with anyone else.
“It was a pain in the ass because the really good houses are hard to come by, but now I like this one better. It’s up on a cliff. I can’t wait for you to see the view from the shower in your room.”
He’d made a point of giving me my own room, to be sensitive to how Sam might feel about it. Nearly every man I’d dated had viewed her as an inconvenience; never before had one considered her feelings above his own.
We switched planes in St. Maarten for our final leg to St. Barts, which Chris said would be short and “exciting”. I thought nothing of it until we stepped onto the tarmac and identified the plane we were to board, which looked more like a rusty tuna can than an air-worthy means of transportation.
“You’re kidding.”
“Think of it as an adventure.” Chris pulled me along while Sam was so excited she was like a shaken can of soda.
A scraggy man with dark greasy hair in an airline uniform stood at the bottom of the metal stairs leading to the airplane door. He puffed on a cigarette, squinting while he took tickets. His long sleeves were rolled up to reveal a topless tattoo and several gold bangle bracelets. As we passed him, Chris said, “That’s our pilot.”
“Very funny.”
“If you say so.”
Chris had to stoop to get through the door and make his way to our seats. I followed, with a glorious view of his backside in those jeans. There was room for about forty passengers, two on each side, but it wasn’t a large plane—the seats were tiny and close, made for the miniature people of an era that pre-dated us all.
Next to a salt-streaked window, I tried to focus on what was waiting for us after we landed if we were all still living. Chris plucked my hand from my lap and settled it in his own.
“It’ll be fine,” he said again.
The final passengers boarded and as Chris predicted, greasy hair guy climbed aboard with another uniformed man, and they took the seats in the cramped cockpit. You could see them flipping switches and checking gauges, which wasn’t reassuring in the least. The plane door squeaked and strained when the crew outside closed it.
Our pilot slid a tiny window open to flick his cigarette ashes. With it hanging from his mouth and smoke billowing about his head, the plane began to taxi. We sputtered down the runway and were ultimately airborne.
The plane dangled over the sprawling Caribbean Sea, swinging as if we are at the end of elastic, dipping and bouncing. Chris and Samantha were having a grand old time, chatting across the aisle while I focused on keeping my lunch down. Mere minutes later, we were over land again, but we were ascending, flying straight up the side of a mountain, precariously close to the tops of trees.
“This is the exciting part,” Chris said.
As if I needed more excitement. The plane crested at the top of the rocky slope and abruptly pivoted, nose down, swooping over a twisted roadway with cars a scant ten feet below us. Ahead was a landing strip that looked like an abandoned parking lot—it was far too short for slowing down, let alone stopping. A brilliant white sand beach sat at the end of it, with ocean beyond.
I closed my eyes, I couldn’t watch, but before I knew it, Chris patted my knee triumphantly and we bounced along, stopping shy of the beach. I opened my eyes, relief washing over me, and peeked out the window. A man sunbathing in the sand looked up from his book, took a drink of water from a plastic bottle and returned to his pages.
“We’re here.”
Chapter Seventeen
Delighted to be on terra firma, I relaxed now that the adrenaline had worked its way through me. We hurried to the tiny airport terminal, painted a chalky turquoise with a red tile roof. The air was warm and supple, yielding to sweep against my skin, like Chris’s hand in mine.
We zipped through customs and wheeled our bags outside. An earnest young man approached us
; Jean-Luc, I presumed. Chris had mentioned him when we planned the trip, saying that he was nineteen, the caretaker’s son, and that he might hit it off with Sam. After meeting him, I was sure that would be the case, at least from Sam’s side of things.
He was neither tall nor short, with a capable air and an extra dose of charisma—deep tan with sun-bleached light brown hair. His smile was as blindingly white as the shorts he wore while his icy blue eyes conveniently coordinated with his shirt.
Chris shook Jean-Luc’s hand and clapped him on the back as he introduced us. I surveyed Sam’s reaction to our new acquaintance. Jean-Luc was doing quite well for himself, enchanting her by heaving luggage into one of the waiting jeeps.
“I had a friend drive over the second car, Monsieur Penman. I thought we would need both vehicles.”
“Please, call me Chris. I know your dad likes you to be formal, but Monsieur Penman makes it feel like I’m not on holiday.”
“Of course, I forget. Chris.”
We took the first jeep and Jean-Luc took Sam in the other. “I hope he’s a good driver,” I said, irked that I sounded like a mother hen.
“That’s hilarious coming from you.” Chris punched the gas and sped out of the parking area.
The salt air pulled my hair straight up in a twist that flopped over before spiraling again. We jerked over the bumpy road at what felt like record speed. I clung to the handgrip above the doorframe, if only to remain upright. Chris and the other drivers seemed unconcerned with speed limits. St. Barts might be the perfect place for a bad driver, if that was what I was.
We began zigzagging on a dirt road up a mountain, littered with rocks and boulders. The island was more arid than I’d imagined, more like Arizona than Hawaii. The sky was a gauzy blue-green and the sun beat down fiercely, even though it was quite late in the afternoon. I watched Chris, the smile on his face was crystal clear, and I felt thankful for the chance to dig my hand into the back of his hair with a minimum of hesitation. I glanced back at the other car to see Sam smiling so wide at Jean-Luc that I wondered if she was explaining that she’d once had braces.
We pulled into a narrow parking area with a tall white stucco wall and a red wood door at one end. There was no other sign of a house—the door was the only indication that there was anywhere to go. An unpredictable cacophony of wind swirled tropical, salty smells around us.
Beyond the door and down a massive stucco staircase, was a large central courtyard with palm trees planted in circular voids in the tile-edged concrete. The villa was a series of small buildings, all with red tile roofs. Chris had said that each room was separate to make it easier to keep them cool.
The kitchen and living area were in one open building near the bottom of the stairs, with vast windows on the ocean side. When facing the courtyard, the window openings had only cobalt blue storm shutters. A shaded outdoor dining area sat beyond the kitchen, next to the pool. The breathtaking view Chris had mentioned was now apparent, through towering slabs of glass spanning the gaps between the buildings and one at the far end of the pool, to keep the wind at bay.
“Jean-Luc, will you show Samantha to her room, please?” Chris asked.
The pair scurried away, Jean-Luc carting everything she’d brought, at his insistence.
Chris led me across the courtyard to the farthest building. Beyond a knotty wood door was a quaint bedroom with terracotta tile floors. There was a carved wood bed, spread with an intricate white quilt. A picture window framed the vista and the stirring sea.
The hall led to a spacious bathroom decorated with blue and green hand-painted tile. The infamous shower was open to the room on two sides, sunken several steps down into the floor. At the far end was a floor-to-ceiling window and this part of the house was cantilevered over the cliff—you could see straight down to the rocks and water.
“Wow.” I stepped into the shower and pressed my forehead to the glass to get the full effect of the view. “Not for the faint of heart.”
“You’ll love it. I promise.” Chris’s voice came from behind me.
“I don’t want any strange men to see me naked.” It was a joke, but the heat was building again, especially now that we were alone. I turned to see in his eyes that I’d just stoked the fire.
He didn’t bother with flirtation, folding me into his arms and kissing me with great intensity, raw and pleasantly unrefined. My hand grabbed the back of his neck, pulling his head toward mine to close the tiny gap between us. His hand nimbly slid from the back of my sweater to the top of my leg. I went limp when he walked his fingers, one by one, to gather up the side of my dress. Once he reached the bare skin of my thigh, I felt as if I might flare into a plume of smoke, wispy and blue. I was so swept away that my body was triumphing over my brain—for once.
He gave me a few hesitant kisses and stopped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to start that now.” He shook his head. “I mean, with Sam here, in the middle of the day.”
I leaned against his chest. “If it wasn’t you, it would’ve been me.” When I looked back up at him, my jaw stuck, caught by his eyes. He looked as if he was resisting every temporal instinct. “Tonight?”
“Right. No excuses. I don’t care if there’s an earthquake.”
I kissed him and we both sighed at the same time, the only source of relief. Retreating to the picturesque courtyard was certainly better than my kitchen at home, but I couldn’t help but feel the same defeat I had the first time it’d happened.
Chris fetched us each a beer and I vowed to no longer question my good fortune as I watched him—or at least, not as much. Sam bounded into the kitchen and immediately ran to sling her arms around his neck, pecking him on the cheek.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you! This is so amazing. Mom, you have to come and see my room.”
Chris was smiling, but overwhelmed, unused to sudden bursts of teenage enthusiasm. “You’re welcome.” He blinked. “Please, make yourself at home. Swim, sleep, eat, whatever you want.”
Sam was all over it, eager to put on her bathing suit and drag me along to check out her new digs. Her room was much like mine, but with her stuff strewn all over the place.
I picked up the mess she’d already made while she changed, and checked out the book on her bedside table, a zombie version of Pride and Prejudice. When she emerged from the bathroom, I had to broach the subject. “So, Jean-Luc, huh?”
“Mom, he is so cute. I can barely look at him he’s so cute.”
I chewed on my thumbnail. “I’m sure he’s a nice boy, but be careful. He’s a few years older than you.”
“I’m fine. I just want to have fun.”
She skipped past me in her aqua and yellow tropical print bikini that seemed much skimpier in broad daylight than it had at the mall. The audience waiting downstairs had me second-guessing the choice.
I didn’t even make it to the bottom of the stairs before Sam was in the pool. The seductive shake of her hair when she broke the surface was likely completely innocent, but I could’ve sworn I heard Jean-Luc swallow from across the courtyard. He fetched a floating pool lounger and slipped it into the water, nudging it over to her. She tilted her head and granted him an extra-sweet “thanks” and managed to gracefully climb on board.
Chris was in the kitchen, making himself a snack of French bread and cheese. “I was hungry. Want some?”
“Of course you’re hungry. I’m good.” I figured the beer would loosen my opinion of Jean-Luc faster on an empty stomach. “What are we doing for dinner?”
Chris held his finger in the air while he finished chewing, flashing goofy eyes at me. “We have a cook coming, somebody new, her name is Mary or Meredith or something like that. She’ll come for breakfast every day, too.” He inched next to me and drew my chin up with a single finger. “Does that work for you?” He kissed me on my nose and smiled. Despite my ready acceptance of every wonderful moment, my patience for our waiting game was wearing thin.
Chris and I lounged in the teak deck chairs
poolside while Sam floated with eyes closed. A smile spread across her face, scooping her hand into the water and allowing it to spill out between her fingers.
The door upstairs clunked twice. Chris and I turned to see a pretty, young woman making her way down the stairs with bags of groceries. She had black pixie hair and a graceful, angular jaw, stepping with perfect posture. Jean-Luc rushed to help her with the bags and Chris returned to the kitchen, presumably to discuss the details of dinner.
One thing I found amazing about Chris, on a very long list, was that he was so calmly in control of everything. It was such a luxury and not because everything in his world was expensive. It gave me permission to do nothing. As a single parent, I’d spent years in charge of everything. There was nobody to swoop in and take over. I’d been so annoyed with him the first time I experienced this aspect of his behavior, but now I understood it was the way he did things.
Marisol made a perfect dinner that night, pan-roasted snapper, sautéed vegetables and basmati rice. A light breeze flickered the candles on the table and Chris, Sam, and I enjoyed each other’s company, laughing at times more than I thought possible.
“So, Mom.” Sam cleared her throat. “Jean-Luc invited me to go with him to the beach tomorrow and tour the island. Is that okay?”
I raised my eyebrows at Chris, as if it was somehow his fault. “Doesn’t he have to work tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Not on Saturday,” Chris interjected. “He usually comes by in the morning to check on things.”
“Yeah, Mom, it’s fine.”
I rearranged a few grains of rice on the plate with my fork. “I guess it’s all right.”
We remained at the table, Sam and Chris enjoying a fruit tart for dessert while I dwelled on the topic of Sam and Jean-Luc. I looked up and had never seen the sky so dark; pin-dots of light the only sign that there was anything above us. It was remarkably quiet, with just the soft roll of waves, far out of reach.