by Hope Ramsay
“Hello. You actually showed up.”
He turned, finding the woman with the pretty hair standing behind him. How the hell had she sneaked up on him? And was she wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday? “Of course I showed up,” he said, annoyed that she’d been thinking the same thing he’d been thinking.
Her mouth twitched at one corner, and the sun glittered in her eyes. “But you didn’t set up the boat.”
Sure enough, she was onto him. Like maybe she could read his mind or something. “Did you bring cash?” was his lame and rude comeback.
The comma at the corner of her mouth deepened. “I did, as a matter of fact.” She dug into the pocket of her shiny, threadbare pants and pulled out a small collection of bills. “I assume hundreds are okay with you?” She counted out five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.
Well, damn. She was not what she appeared to be. Which opened up a whole passel of questions, starting with: who was she really, why did she want to go out to the inlet, and why was she wearing clothes that looked as if she’d found them in the Salvation Army’s giveaway bin? And how could she afford to pay five hundred dollars in cash for a two-hour sailing lesson that would have cost her a fraction of that on the mainland?
He took the money and stuffed it into the zippered pocket of his board shorts. “I reckon I should know your name, then.”
“Jenna. Jenna…Fairchild.”
Interesting. She’d hesitated between the first and last names, as if she didn’t want to give up that last name or something.
“Okay, Jenna Fairchild, you can help me get the canvas off the boat. And I need you to pay attention. Because I’m not really a sailing instructor. I’ve never taught anyone how to sail. So I may not be very good at it. I’m going to start by teaching you how to crew.”
“Crew?” She seemed unhappy about that.
“Yeah. The person in the front of the boat who sails the jib.”
“Oh.”
“I can teach you a lot about sail trimming up there. Stuff you’ll need to know before you get in the back of the boat and manage the tiller.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“And the thing is, if you took lessons over in Georgetown, you’d get the handouts with all the written instructions about points of sail and boat rigging. I didn’t have time to put that stuff together. I help my daddy run a charter business, but mostly we take people out to fish, not to sail.”
“Okay. That’s fine. No need to apologize.”
“I wasn’t apologizing. I was just saying.”
She nodded and smiled. He liked her smile, dammit.
“I like to learn by doing,” she said. “I think it’s sometimes the best way to learn. You know, like being thrown into deep water in order to learn the dog paddle.”
“Well, I guess there is something to be said for that. But sailing is a lot more complicated than the dog paddle.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Okay, let’s get Bonney out on the water as fast as we can. Your two hours starts when the hull hits the water.”
Something deep inside Jenna recognized Jude St. Pierre, as if she’d known him in a past life. Not that Jenna completely believed the whole reincarnation part of Buddhism, even if she had come to embrace the idea that there was an order to the world and that her actions and intent affected her future. But gazing at Jude St. Pierre, she was willing to suspend her disbelief.
She followed his directions as they set up the boat while simultaneously admiring him. The tight band of his white golf shirt displayed his dark bronze biceps. His baggy blue board shorts hung provocatively on his hips while simultaneously exposing a pair of sturdy legs covered with wiry but sun-bleached hair. His wraparound iWear Sport sunglasses fit his face as if they’d been made for it. In fact, he looked so good in those glasses she ought to phone Milo and tell him that she’d found the perfect sunglass model for the Sport line.
With all that beauty on display, it was hard to concentrate on the information he rattled off in a delightful drawl. He had an odd accent. Not merely Southern but overlaid with a lilt and rhythm that sounded almost Caribbean.
She could listen to him talk for hours and not get bored.
He pointed from one rope to another and named them all. There were sheets and lines and shrouds and a thingy in the bottom of the boat that moved up and down that he called the centerboard. It was almost too much when he started explaining port and starboard and something called points of sail.
“You getting all this?” he asked, almost as if he could read her confused and overloaded mind.
“Yup,” she said with false confidence.
“Okay, let’s put her in the water. But first you need a PFD.”
“A what?”
“Personal flotation device, otherwise known as a life vest.” He reached into the cubby in the front of the boat and pulled out a bright yellow vest. “Here, try that on.”
She pulled the big puffy life vest on and zipped up the front. Jude stepped closer, sending her body into awareness hyperdrive as he grabbed the shoulders of the vest and gave them an upward yank.
She almost came off the ground.
“Not tight enough,” he said, and began messing with the plastic buckles around her chest and waist. As he fiddled, tightening down the straps until the vest hugged her chest, she got a chance to breathe in Jude St. Pierre’s scent, salty, overlaid with sunblock and something else she couldn’t quite name. Whatever it was, someone should bottle it because it was an aphrodisiac.
For an instant, she felt like the awkward teenager she’d once been on that day when Randy Gordon, the gorgeous, popular, suntanned lifeguard at the public pool, had smiled at her. She wanted to giggle as Jude gave her PFD another tug, nodded, and stepped away from her.
Like Randy Gordon, he hadn’t noticed that she was having a full-core meltdown. He was a professional boatman, and she was a paying client. She needed to get a grip, and not on him.
“Let’s go,” he said, pulling his own life vest on and zipping it up.
Jenna helped Jude push Bonney Rose’s trailer down the boat ramp, and in a matter of moments, she found herself standing on the pier, holding the mooring line, pulling the boat along while he raised the mainsail. The wind caught the canvas, and the boat responded, giving the mooring line a sharp yank, as if to say Bonney Rose was ready to go. The pull on the rope tugged at her heart in a strange way. A prickly excitement jumped in her belly and sent goose bumps up her arms.
When the sail was all the way up the mast, Jude turned toward her, the sun reflecting in the mirrored surface of his sunglasses. She longed to see his eyes in that moment. To connect with him, the way she was trying to connect with the sailboat. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll need you to give the bow a push and then step off the dock and get to the cockpit quick. This is a Buccaneer Eighteen; she’s a tippy boat—almost as bad as a canoe. So don’t hang out for too long on the edge. You got that?”
She bit her lip as her heart rate spiraled. The jump from dock to boat seemed ginormous, but she wasn’t going to wimp out now. She shoved the boat away from the dock and jumped with eyes open. Somehow she managed to get into the forward portion of the cockpit without mishap. Wow. There wasn’t much room up in the front of the boat. She had to straddle the doohickey in the bottom of the boat. And every surface seemed to bristle with equipment and thingies that held ropes that she didn’t have names for.
The sails stopped flapping, and the boat turned, heading out into the harbor, the wind trying to blow it over.
“Remember what I told you,” Jude said from the back of the boat. “Get to the high side.”
It made sense now, since the boat was leaning over. She shifted her weight to the molded seat on the side of the boat that was raised up in the water. Her weight immediately helped the boat to sit flatter in the water.
“Tuck your feet under the straps,” he directed. She studied the bottom of the boat until she found the three-inch webbed strap. She tucked
her feet under it.
“That’s it,” he said. “Now put your butt over the side.”
“What?”
“You heard me. No one sits on the seat unless it’s a windless day. You need to hike out.”
She did as she was told, extending her legs and sitting up on the edge. The boat flattened even more, and the wind caught her hair. It was almost like flying.
God.
No wonder her father had loved sailing.
Chapter Three
Jude stifled a smile as he watched Jenna tentatively sit her butt up on the gunwale. Good thing the winds were light this afternoon. She probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. So he wouldn’t want her crewing for him in a big wind. She didn’t have enough counterweight to throw around.
She was cuter than Tim though, with all that glorious hair, unbound and flying in the breeze. He pushed that thought out of his head as he adjusted the main sheet and headed out into the harbor on a starboard reach.
He’d already given her the dry-land explanation of points of sail—a topic no one really understood until out on the water.
“Okay, Jenna, it’s time to unfurl the jib.”
She turned over her shoulder with an adorable frown. “Is that the sail up there?” She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb.
Damn. She really knew absolutely nothing about sailing. “This is your first time in a sailboat, isn’t it?”
Her Mona Lisa smile reappeared, so enigmatic and mysterious. But her eyes lit up and she nodded. “It’s wonderful.”
That look tugged at him. What the hell was it about this woman? She had a kind of magic. So much so that his Old Granny might have said she’d bewitched him. But then Old Granny’d been the daughter of a root doctor and believed in all that Hoodoo stuff.
“The jib?” he asked again. “That’s the little sail out there. In the front.”
“Oh. That. Oh. Okay.” She shifted her gaze to study the jib sheets coiled in the bottom of the boat. “That’s these ropes down here, right?”
“Yes. But the ropes are never called ropes. In this case, they are called sheets.”
“Sheets?”
“Yeah, I know. Makes no sense. But on a sailboat, a rope is a ‘line’ or a ‘sheet.’ So grab those ropes, which are called sheets, and unfurl the little sail out there in the front, which is called a jib.”
She glanced around. “To unfurl the sail, I uncleat this…sheet?” She pointed to the correct cleat for unfurling the jib.
“Yup. But that’s a line, not a sheet.” He smiled.
She scowled back at him but uncleated the line, and the jib unfurled but on the windward side, so it didn’t catch the wind. The boat rocked, and Jenna blew her cool. “Yikes,” she squeaked. “What did I do wrong?”
He adjusted the tiller so the boat rode a little flatter in the water. “No worries. Just flip it so it opens on the same side as the big sail, which is called the mainsail. And, by the way, the mainsail is on the starboard side.”
A muscle pulsed in her cheek. “Um, I forget which is port and starboard?”
He explained port and starboard again while she messed around with the jib sheets, getting slightly tangled up in them at one point, but eventually she managed to get the jib unfurled on the correct side. Once she figured that out, he gave her a short lesson in how to check the wind vane at the top of the mast and the telltales, which were small tassels attached to the jib that aided sailors in trimming the sails to make the most of whatever breeze might be blowing.
She listened intently and seemed to soak up every word. Teaching her wasn’t nearly the chore he’d thought it might be.
“We need to come about. Are you ready to tack?”
“Uh, yeah, maybe. I guess.”
He explained tacking again and then said, “When I ask the question ‘ready to come about?’ you are supposed to say, ‘ready, aye,’ but only when you’re really ready.”
“Okay.”
“All right. Let’s try it. Ready to come about?” he said.
“Um, ready, aye?”
He pushed the tiller away from him. The mainsail boom slid from the starboard to port side, almost knocking Jenna out of the boat. “Ack!” she squealed as she sprawled across the centerboard cap, the jib flapping wildly in the wind.
“Well, that needs improvement,” he said.
She gave him an adorably mutinous look. “You should have warned me.”
He stifled a smile. “I did warn you. That’s why I asked if you were—”
“Okay, I was ready with the ropes, but not for the whatever that is.”
“The boom.”
“The boom. You didn’t warn me about the boom almost taking my head off.”
Maybe he hadn’t warned her. “Sorry. That’s what happens when you come about.”
She clambered to the starboard side and started untangling the jib sheets again. She eventually got the jib out where it belonged.
“Want to try it again?” he asked.
“Coming about?” Her big brown eyes grew wide.
“Gotta tack to get from one place to another. It’s a fact of life in a sailboat. Most of the time you can’t sail in a straight line from here to there.”
She nodded, and he verbally walked her through the tacking lesson one more time. They tacked again, and this time she made it from the starboard to the port side without risking her head. She even managed to get the jib over.
“Good work,” he said, and she gave him a smile that lit up his day.
The breeze filled in as they practiced their tacks, so much so that he had to get Jenna to hike all the way out, letting her butt hang way over the side of the boat.
It was a beautiful afternoon with a steady wind and not too many wind shifts. Before too long, his love of the sport took over, and he forgot about everything but the wind and the water and the woman learning fast in the front of the boat. That was the thing about sailing. You could find balance out here. Even tranquility in a spot that was never quite tranquil.
But all good things come to an end sometime. When they’d been out for about an hour and forty-five minutes, he tacked toward the dock in a lazy sail while he enjoyed the view of his crew from the back of the boat. They were both hiked out, and Bonney Rose was making her easy way across the bay when suddenly his hiking strap let go, and he found himself tumbling backward heels over ass into the drink.
He surfaced, his PFD doing its job. He still held the main sheet, which momentarily acted like a towline, dragging him through the water like a wakeboarder as Bonney Rose sailed on. Jenna sat in the front, still hiked out and flying the jib as if nothing were wrong.
Until she turned around and realized she was alone in the boat.
“Shit!” she hollered in a panicked voice. “Shit.”
“Uncleat the mainsail sheet,” he hollered, but the moment these words left his mouth he realized she didn’t have a clue what the mainsail sheet was, and in any case, he still had the sheet in his hand, so uncleating it would be impossible. As this thought crossed his mind, a small wind shift caught the boat, and she went over.
Jenna hadn’t gone through a capsize drill, so she didn’t have any clue what to do. Instead of climbing over the gunwale and trying to stand on the centerboard, she fell forward, into the mainsail, her weight pushing the sail and the mast down.
Damn, damn, damn. Bonney Rose hadn’t merely blown over in only eight-knot winds; she’d gone all the way mast-down within sight of the Magnolia Harbor dock and a fairly large afternoon crowd watching from Rafferty’s terrace.
He was never going to live this down.
Riding Bonney Rose with her feet tucked into the hiking straps and her body flung over the water thrilled Jenna in a deep, personal way. Was this written in her genes? Is this how her father felt the first time he sailed in a boat?
But when bay water began spilling over the edge of the boat across from her, Jenna’s sense of connection and joy disappeared. When she lo
oked over her shoulder and discovered that Jude had fallen out of the boat, all her joy transformed into absolute terror.
Just then, the boat heeled all the way up on its side and flipped over, tossing her into the big sail. She would have been okay if the boat had simply stayed on its side. But no. The minute her body hit the sail, the mast continued its downward rotation, bringing the boat over on top of her.
Ironically, the buoyancy of her life vest made it hard for her to escape the capsizing boat. The PFD pushed her up in the water while the weight of the boat pushed her down. The only way out of this conundrum was to dive deep and swim away—an impossibility wearing the big life vest.
She knew a moment of dizzying panic before time slowed and a deep inner voice that came from somewhere inside her whispered that she needed to unzip the PFD in order to save herself.
She did what the voice told her, and it worked. Once the vest was off, she could dive under the boat and the rigging and swim clear. When she surfaced, she put the vest back on and zipped it up.
Boy, bad things could happen fast in a sailboat. Is this what had happened to her father?
The thought was chilling, even though the water in the bay was quite warm. She lay there in the water, letting the PFD keep her above the surface, lost in her thoughts for a moment until she realized Jude was calling her name, a note of panic in his voice.
“I’m all right,” she called.
“Thank God. Do you have the jib sheet?”
What the hell was a jib sheet? Oh, wait, it was that rope she used to control the jib. What made him think she still had the rope? She’d just almost drowned.
“No,” she yelled, her annoyance bleeding through.
“It’s okay,” he called back.
She caught sight of him then, swimming around the boat, trying to get the mast to come back up, which had to be a hopeless task for one man. “What happened?” she asked. “Why did you leave me alone in the boat?”
“My hiking strap broke,” he said as he unzipped his PFD. “Here. Take this. I need to swim under the boat and uncleat the main sheet and see if I can find the jib sheet.” He floated his life vest in her direction, and she had to stifle the urge to tell him to put it back on.