Riding the Storm

by Joanne Rock

  “There’s a Murphy crest?” She shifted, her shoulder brushing his in an incidental touch that belied all the ways they’d caressed one another the night before.

  He answered it by grazing her thigh with his.

  “Unofficially, yes.” He relished the way her eyes flicked down to his leg. He was tempted to palm her thigh and follow through on the teasing brush of legs, but he reined himself in for the sake of continuing the game. Instead, he doled out a bit of Murphy family lore for entertainment value. “On the day of the annual Murphy Turkey Bowl, my dad flies his high-school football jersey from a post for a golf-flag post. He claims old number thirty-four is the family standard.”

  Not just in the medieval-crest sense, either. Dad truly figured his business achievements had set the bar for all his sons. Good thing Keith wasn’t thinking about that, and had Josie’s delectable body beside him to concentrate on. He leaned forward in his seat, ostensibly to check a gauge, to give himself a reason to increase the sweet friction between them.

  “I remember reading an article in a regional business magazine about your dad, and it made some reference to a strong competitive streak.” Her voice was a little breathless.

  “You could say that.” Keith steered to the starboard side to give an oncoming yacht more room. “One year my oldest brother, Ryan, wore that jersey of Dad’s in the backyard game and I tore it when I tackled him. Tunnel vision prevented Dad from seeing the great play, focusing his attention solely on the shredded bit of his past glory.”

  “Uh-oh. Was your dad furious?” Josie edged closer to Keith as the wind picked up, and he wondered if she was onto the game he was playing. The side of her breast skimmed his chest for the briefest moment, making him forget about everything but the feel of her.

  “Mostly there was a lot of grief about me not knowing the fundamentals of form tackling.” The ass-chewing he’d received hadn’t prevented Keith from playing hard in future games. “But it helped me to see that unless I made one hell of a big deal about my achievements, my father would never see them, anyhow. Since I don’t have my youngest brother’s finesse as an athlete, I turned to the business world to make my mark.”

  “You’ve certainly accomplished that,” she assured him as a big superyacht cruised past them. Bass pumped from a sound system on the pool deck, where a couple of girls in bikinis danced in the sun.

  They were nothing compared to the woman beside him, Keith thought. He couldn’t even play a game of sexy touches with her without getting too turned on to win. Steadying the sailboat in the wake of the yacht, Keith tried to recall what they’d been discussing, instead of thinking about the feel of her next to him. Oh yeah, his “accomplishments.”

  “You don’t know my family,” he told her finally.

  “Seriously? With a company like Green Principles to your name, how can anyone dispute your success?” She frowned at the very idea.

  Keith didn’t need anyone to stand up for him. Never had. But he’d never guessed how cool it would be to know that someone would.

  “My father owns properties all over the world. He’s not easily impressed.” Although a contract with Wholesome Branding would help. Their global ties would enable Green Principles to expand abroad.

  Unfortunately, Keith knew he wouldn’t be able to meet with the owner of Wholesome Branding during this trip as he’d originally hoped. Between Jack’s about-face on the sale of the Vesta and Josie’s limited time, a stop in Virginia was no longer an option.

  “Well, that’s ridiculous. He should be insanely proud to have raised someone with the foresight and business acumen to start a profitable company during a recession, and grow it by leaps and bounds in just a few years.”

  When the sailboat bounced on a choppy wave of the superyacht’s wake, Josie slid into him, her hip soft against his. Her proximity made him slow to process what she’d said.

  “Did I tell you about the growth margin?” Though it was true, he didn’t remember bragging to her.

  Her cheeks brightened. “I might have looked you up on Google while we were in Nantucket.”

  He told himself that was normal. Natural. People did it all the time with individuals they were dating, or doing business with. And yet…

  Experience with Brooke had made him wary. Their families did business together, but Brooke had pushed for the first date to strengthen the tie and further her social connections. She’d admitted as much later in their relationship, never suspecting how off-putting he found it to be singled out for such superficial reasons.

  “Are you offended?” Josie seemed surprised by his silence, straightening in her seat.

  “Of course not.” He scavenged for words that would smooth over the moment, and couldn’t find the right ones.

  “But it obviously makes you uncomfortable to think I was checking you out.”

  “No.” Damn it. With an effort, he forced Brooke’s shallow behavior from his mind. “You’re smart to find out what you can about a guy who invites you for a date in the middle of the Atlantic. I only hesitated because I have an ex who researched her dating prospects. She wasn’t looking out for her safety, though. She was looking for a good time. Brooke was more of a jet-set party girl.”

  Josie’s face drained of color, and for a moment, Keith thought maybe the choppy wake had brought back her motion sickness.

  “Are you okay?” He let go of the controls, allowing the customized self-steering mechanism to kick in while he rested a steadying hand on her shoulder.

  She shook her head, the tail of her silk scarf brushing her cheek. “There’s something you ought to know about the whole jet-set, party-girl thing. Because the truth is, I have that in common with your ex.”

  JOSIE WATCHED as Keith’s expression hardened.

  His mouth flattened into a line. The hand that had been resting on her shoulder disappeared. And was it her imagination, or had the sky grown darker, too?

  The whole day felt a little more ominous somehow.

  They still sailed fast through open water, the boat recovering an even keel after being bounced around by the mammoth yacht. But Josie’s insides continued to flounder, her nerves taut after Keith’s surprise admission about his ex.

  She could only imagine what he was thinking. She was struggling enough with the abrupt shift from totally turned on to stunned by Keith’s news.

  “I don’t understand.” He backed up a fraction, inserting a space between them where there hadn’t been any before. “You’re a hardworking, ambitious business-woman—”

  “With a past reputation for being a fixture on the society pages.” She didn’t say it to brag, since her former presence there had nothing to do with her and everything to do with her wealthy family.

  “In that case, I’m surprised I didn’t recognize your name.”

  She could see him trying to relax, shaking the tension out of his shoulders. But even his tone of voice told her that his guard was still up.

  “I changed it legally three years ago when I started the interior design business. Passano is my mother’s maiden name. My father’s name is Davenport.” Josie didn’t miss the light of recognition in his eyes. “That rings more bells, doesn’t it?”

  And—she’d be willing to bet—not in a good way.

  “It’s a well-known family name,” he hedged, possibly looking for something positive to say. “I think there were Davenports in my fifth-grade history book.”

  “There probably were.” She felt a hot, itchy sensation up the back of her neck and wondered how many people in the world could claim a discussion about their parents made them break out in hives. “I have to look back that far on the family tree to find any evidence of ambition, but obviously it existed at one time for Cornelius Davenport to have accumulated enough of a fortune to finance the next five generations of trust-fund babies. Excuse me, make that four generations, since I’ve weaned myself off the family gravy train.”

  In the distance, she thought she heard a rumble of thunder, but she wa
s no longer so concerned about the storm catching up to them. A nice cold downpour might ease the self-consciousness that came with introducing her past to Keith now that she understood he had an aversion to pampered jet-setters.

  She’d thought she’d been safe to indulge in this time with him as long as they kept it private. She hadn’t thought that Keith would find her a pariah once he learned her true identity.

  “Access to the family fortune doesn’t put you in the same category as my ex,” he insisted, apparently still giving her the benefit of the doubt.

  “No. But club hopping with vacuous trendsetters in the hope of getting some attention in the press—that qualifies, right?” No sense putting a happy face on it. She’d done just that to promote her fledgling fashion career, prowling around the clubs in her designs, initiating conversations about clothes wherever possible.

  The growl of thunder increased until Keith rose to his feet for a better look at the sky to the north. She turned, too, seeing the clouds there—swiftly changing ones that even as she watched seemed to be rolling closer. The air crackled with the tension between them, but that would have to wait until more practical concerns had been addressed.

  “This is coming up quicker than I expected. I’ve got to hoist the storm sail.” He checked some gauges and then tapped a screen on the helm that looked like radar or GPS. “While I take care of that, I need you to keep us on course, okay? I’ll be able to see any oncoming traffic, so don’t worry about that, just steer toward this dark spot on the map. It’s shallow there. A little island off the coast.”

  She was about to remind him she’d never driven a boat before, but he’d already leaped out onto the deck to tend to the complicated spiderweb of lines that corresponded to the various sails. His haste as he moved from one spot to the next made her think he had his hands full with storm prep, so she kept her eye on the dark blob on the map, and tried to make sure she steered toward it.

  He worked quickly and efficiently, raising one sail and lowering another, his broad shoulders and defined arms flexing with the constant movement. He angled the storm sheets to take full advantage of the wind from the oncoming storm, so their speed continued unabated. Josie didn’t know anything about sailing, but with the way he moved from one task to the next, she guessed he was damn good at it.

  If she hadn’t known he was only waiting to dock to give her a premature heave-ho, now that he’d recognized her as exactly the kind of woman he did not want, she might have actually enjoyed the day. Unlike those scary times on the boat with her parents, now she was with someone who knew what he was doing. Someone who could take on Mother Nature and win.

  What a hell of a time to realize how much she admired Keith’s ambitious desire to conquer the world—or the sea—with his own two hands. Their race through the water didn’t require big engines or high-end technology, although as a newbie navigator she was grateful for the blinking map to guide her steering. This trick with the sails had been done the same way by people for thousands of years, harnessing the wind to skim over the water. What a thrill to take on the wild gusts whipping across the deck.

  But as much as she liked the electric spark in the air, she regretted that the storm’s arrival meant they’d have to go ashore, mark an end to a crazy adventure. And now that Keith knew about her past, he wouldn’t even spare her a backward glance. Though that had been the plan all along, she realized she would sorely regret not getting to know Keith Murphy much, much better.

  8

  THE DARK CLOUDS CAUGHT UP to them at the perfect time.

  Keith was only too glad to race around the deck like a madman, raising the storm sail and squeezing every last bit of speed from the boat to make it to a marina on the coast of Block Island. Hell, he was an expert at burying his problems in work, after all. That tendency was one of the reasons he headed up his own multimillion-dollar company now.

  Since there were no lucrative deals to close on board the Vesta, he spun his excess energy—his gut-twisting response to Josie’s revelation—into sailing the vintage vessel for all it was worth. Because damn, once they dropped anchor at the marina, he’d be faced with either saying his goodbyes to Josie or digging deeper with her to see what she meant about her partying lifestyle.

  As he trimmed the storm jib a bit more and felt the first fat raindrop hit the back of his hand, he admitted that both options sucked. He would have preferred to wait out the weather holed up in some coastal cottage with Josie, exploring every conceivable pleasure they could dream up in the next twenty-four hours, until he had to face facts.

  That she manipulated friends for the sake of their connections? That she wanted to be the center of attention everywhere she went so people would remember her name?

  That didn’t sound like Josie. Yet by her own admission…

  The rumble of thunder yanked his thoughts to the present as a wall of rain moved toward them.

  The weather was changing fast.

  “Keith!” Josie shouted from behind the helm. She stood, her blue-and-yellow scarf whipping in the wind as she pointed to the gray torrent marching across the waves, closer and closer.

  The water swelled beneath the Vesta, lifting the fiberglass hull high before smacking it back down, sending Keith’s feet out from under him.

  Crap. His knees hit the deck with a thud. He rose to his feet in time to see Josie still standing, clinging to the steering mechanism, which must have been what kept her upright.

  “Are you all right?” He scrambled beneath the rigging to reach her, finding the deck drenched from spray.

  Her knuckles were white where she clutched the wheel, her clothes drenched with seawater. He dug inside a locker to retrieve floatation devices for them as a precaution. Yanking one over his head, he slammed the door shut and brought the other to Josie. He reached her in time to bolster her through another high wave, his body cleaving to hers instinctively, shielding her from the worst of the vicious back spray.

  When the wave tipped the boat down again, he was ready for it, anchoring them with one hand on the rail while he locked her waist to his hips. He kept his knees bent, ready for impact.

  “Can you believe it?” Josie gasped, turning to peer up at him, her dark eyes alight.

  Almost as if…she was enjoying this?

  “Are you okay?” he asked again, realizing how tightly he gripped her, his hand molded to her ribs through the thin fabric of her wet blouse.

  The feel of her delicate curves reminded him that he needed to keep her safe. Belatedly, he dropped the other floatation device over her head and buckled the straps securely.

  “I’m fine.” She nodded quickly, turning to look back out to sea while Keith took over the steering. “Here it comes!”

  She pointed toward the rainstorm moving steadily toward them like a cloud of locusts. She gripped his forearm, her fingers clenching hard as if to hold him tight through the storm.

  He followed her gaze and watched as the downpour hit the rail, the seat cushions, and then drummed into their skin. It enveloped the boat in moments, sweeping in like a wet curtain.

  With a squeal and a laugh, Josie tipped her face to the deluge, taking the onslaught head-on as they bobbed and dipped over the waves. She opened her mouth, tasting the torrent on her tongue as it soaked their clothes.

  Keith watched her, absorbing the sight of her tucked under his arm. A rivulet of water streaked from the corner of her closed eye down her temple; her lashes were soon spiked with rain. Her scarf went limp, clinging damply to the dark strands of her hair.

  With nothing to do but to ride the storm until they caught sight of safe harbor, Keith turned her in his arms, drawn to her in spite of the secrets she’d kept from him. Right now, there was just the two of them, fused together by shared body heat against the cold seawater splashing overboard and the downpour beating on their shoulders.

  The realization that she enjoyed the adventure shook him harder than the incessant waves. The quirky fashion designer turned decorator did
n’t mind an occasional storm. In fact, judging by the gleam in her dark eyes, Keith would guess she was savoring it.

  “These waves ought to put to rest any question of motion sickness for you,” he said finally, too rocked by this new view of her to share any of his real thoughts.

  Wind whipped across the deck, tugging at the damp scarf in her hair until she peeled the silk off and pocketed it.

  “I feel more in control now than when I used to go out on the water with my parents. I think that helps.” She gripped his shoulders as the boat lurched sideways. “At least, I know you’re in control.”

  He recalled her story about her parents mixing cocktails on the deck of their boat and her worrying about them going overboard when she was a kid. That would account for enough anxiety to make her ill on a boat in the past. For that matter, remembering that story gave him an idea where her jet-set lifestyle came from. Maybe those choices weren’t of her own making if she’d grown up in that kind of environment.

  “Not just me. You’re helping,” he acknowledged. “I couldn’t have raised the storm sails without you here.” They made a good team, he thought, even if he didn’t say it. Even if they couldn’t carry their collaboration over into the real world.

  The next wave hit with no warning. The deck dropped away beneath their feet and they fell together.

  Keith kept his arm around Josie, buffering her. He watched the mast tilt awkwardly.

  “What can I do?” Josie shouted through the din of rain.

  He raced to snag a tether line and anchor it to her life vest. Sailboats were great in heavy weather, but he wasn’t taking any chances with her.

  “Try to stay on course.” He gave her a quick squeeze before he released her. “And make sure to keep one hand on the rail to steady yourself.”

  “Got it.” Nodding, she focused on the helm while he rushed toward the rigging to adjust the storm sheets.