by Anna Lowe
Maybe Kyle’s lifestyle and job weren’t choices but inheritances — the kind you didn’t necessarily want. Like debts. Debts to family expectations. To ghosts.
Hannah knew a thing or two about that. More than she’d care to admit.
A good thing Luc came along and dragged Kyle off for the male version of the boat tour: into the engine room and over the control panels. Hannah hung back to help Marie clean up.
Marie gave her a wink. “He’s cute!” Her eyes sparkled. “And sweet!”
Hannah nodded. Definitely cute. Sweet? That, too. Too bad he was Prince Charming and not the simple carpenter of her dreams.
Or maybe that was a good thing, since he’d be leaving soon anyway. Hannah wasn’t sure what to think any more. Only that her mind was spending far too much time thinking about him, in all sorts of colorful ways.
Then the men came back for a last glass of wine, and Kyle’s smile warmed not just her cheeks, but something deep inside her, too.
The subject of work came up: Marie was a psychologist, Luc was an architect, Kyle, a consultant. That much Hannah knew.
“Yes, but back on summer breaks from college,” Kyle told Luc, “I helped my other uncle with his business. That was a lot of fun.”
“Yes? More consulting?”
“No, carpentry,” Kyle laughed.
Hannah gulped and took a long, deep breath. Maybe Kyle was closer to her blue-collar dream guy than she’d thought. A guy who worked with his hands and sweated under the sun. A guy who knew when to laugh, when to buckle down, and when to unwind.
Imagine that.
Soon, too soon, it was time to call a beautiful evening to an end.
“Nice kids,” Hannah said, nodding back at Imagine as she steered the dinghy toward the dock.
“Very nice kids,” Kyle agreed. His hair tossed lightly in the breeze, his profile sharp in the pale starlight. “A nice family.” He said it softly, even reverently.
She glanced at him, then snapped her eyes forward again, straining in the dark. Robert would kill her if she grounded his dinghy on the reef — at night, not exactly the safest time to navigate. And worse, with a man she barely knew as a passenger. It would be the sailors’ scandal of the month!
Enough with the dreamy eyes. Her night in good company was over. Tomorrow, she’d be back to being alone.
A sea gull cawed overhead, almost as an echo. Always back to being alone.
Something inside her gave a sharp twinge, and it was all she could do not to look Kyle’s way. She puttered carefully up to the dock and steadied the boat while he climbed out.
“Hey,” he said, his voice a hush in the darkness. A spectacular night sky silhouetted his body, and he stood still as a statue in a darkened museum. “Thanks for a nice night.”
She nodded, letting the image imprint on her mind. “A very nice night,” she echoed.
They stood in mutual silence for a moment, facing each other in the dark. Kyle crouched on eye level with where Hannah stood below. Maybe even lip level. All she would have to do was tilt forward and pucker up.
His eyes were shining; his lips opened just a crack. Hannah held her breath as his hand reached out toward her shoulder. She was about to lean forward when a wave slapped the shore, sending a reprimanding splash between the two of them. It might as well have been the warning glare of a matronly chaperone at an old-fashioned dance.
Hannah pulled back on instinct, and Kyle straightened with a barely audible sigh.
“Goodnight, Hannah.” He stood looking at her quietly.
“Goodnight, Kyle.”
She gazed right back for a dumb minute.
“Guess I better go,” she whispered, more to herself than to him.
“I guess you should,” he replied, sounding hopeful that she wouldn’t.
Finally, after another quiet minute, Hannah forced herself to push off from the dock. Then she puttered away, feeling his eyes on her the whole way.
Chapter Ten
Kyle stood, watching Hannah go like a mermaid slipping back to the sea. Starlight twinkled in the dinghy’s wake as she puttered away, mixing with phosphorescence like a magical trail. A trail his soul was screaming at him to follow. But he was a mere landlubber; she lived on the sea.
Kyle pushed the thought away for the hundredth time that night and went back to ruminating on a safer theme as he walked to the hotel: sailors, and the strange lot they were.
The retirees he could understand. They had time and money, so to set out for a year or two — or even ten — didn’t strike him as that strange. His uncle had grand plans for retirement, too, even though they revolved around golf courses. But the other sailors? Luc and Marie were in their thirties, and they’d simply stopped working, midcareer. A little time out, they called it — for two entire years! Hannah, too.
He shook his head as he walked. Didn’t they know anything about saving for retirement and for their kids’ college funds? About interest rates and 401(k)s? About health insurance and family responsibility and all that? Were they crazy?
Or was he the crazy one?
The Bad Boy half of his soul stuck his hand up in a silent vote for the latter.
Overhead, palms danced in the sea breeze, more sound than sight in the inky night. His footsteps tapped onward, and his mind meandered with every bend in the road.
He’d always seen sailors as escapists from the real world, like organic gardeners who lived in the backwoods of Vermont raising chickens and practicing tai chi. People without long-range plans or goals. Irresponsible people. But Luc and Marie didn’t seem to be any of those things. They were a perfectly normal family with a perfectly reasonable plan. Hannah, too. Hadn’t she said something about not letting the rat race hijack their lives? Well, Hannah was obviously not one to get hijacked by anything or anybody. A piece of work, that woman.
One who was increasingly on his mind, and not always in gentlemanly ways. Especially not that night, when he’d finally reached his bungalow at Le Beau Soleil. His sleep was peppered with heated dreams, the kind that hadn’t been inspired by any specific woman in a long, long time.
The next morning, he chomped on a croissant, feeling strangely fresh despite a night of unrest.
“Did you sleep well?” Tiri asked.
His inner caveman let out a little yowl at the images still dancing in his mind, and he went a little pink thinking back on the dreams that had featured him and Hannah in very tight clutches in various corners of a boat and in various parts of the world.
“Um…yes. And you?”
A good thing Tiri disappeared around the back again, because Kyle slipped right back to his thoughts. Since when did he fantasize about doing it on a beach with the waves tickling his feet? Or on the deck of a boat at sunset? He wasn’t even sure the jagged islands in the background existed. He didn’t know if all women had sex dreams, but if they did, that’d be the type Hannah might have. And there she’d gone, whisking him off onto her own turf, not his. What was it with that woman?
And what was it with him?
The thought clung to him like a determined fly. The night before had sent a tiny tremor through his well-ordered life, like an earthquake somewhere far, far away.
Well, today he’d get himself back on terra firma. Somehow.
He spent an endless hour trying to relax by the sea. Even tried meditating, like Cindy had always bugged him to do. Obviously, his ex-fiancée had had an easier time emptying her mind than he did, because it just didn’t work.
Eventually, he gave up and took one of the rusty hotel bikes — a free perk of Le Beau Soleil; he really had to give Tiri some advice on running a profitable business — and headed to the shop for a snack. Well, that was his cover story, anyway. That his head swiveled to the lagoon the whole way, studying the sailboats, picking out the red one — okay, that might have given him away.
Maybe it was the speed of the bike, but it seemed to Kyle that the air was richer that day. Extra sweet with the aroma of a thousand exo
tic fruit. The dense foliage seemed to pull the island inward and keep it from tipping into the sea. The earthy fragrance washed over him as he pedaled along the waterside road.
“Iaorana!”
“Bonjour!”
People kept waving to him, like no day was as promising and beautiful as this.
Kyle biked along, considering the island paradise. Maybe, just maybe, they were right.
He smiled and waved and rang his bell and tossed out a couple of vowel trains himself, something closer to Iayourana than Iaorana, but hey. He was so lost in it that he nearly sped right past the figure crouched at the side of the road.
Hannah, filling her battered water bottles at the public water spigot.
“Hi,” he called, bringing the rusty three-speed to a screeching stop.
She looked up and broke into a wide smile that might have made him laugh if he hadn’t nearly lost his balance and tipped off the bike completely. At least she had the good grace to cover her laugh.
“Hey, Kyle. How are you?” she called.
Music to his ears: the mermaid, in friendly mode, no less.
“Good, and you?”
“Good.”
“Good,” he echoed and did a quick count. She had at least a dozen gallon-sized bottles to fill. He eyed the boats in the distance, then the bottles, then her again.
“What?” she demanded, seeing his look.
He rested his elbows on the handlebars. “I guess I never thought about how boats fill their tanks. Do you always do it like this?”
She topped off one jug and thrust a new one under the spout with a practiced hand. “Yep. If there’s no marina where you can tie up — and there aren’t that many marinas out here in the South Pacific. None on Maupiti, that’s for sure.”
“How many gallons do you need?”
“A hundred to fill up by the time we go.”
He eyed the distance to the dinghy dock: a good hundred yards, maybe more. How many round trips did that make? Then she’d need to haul them all up into the boat. “And you’re filling them all today?”
“No, I figured I’d do a couple every day.”
He nodded as if he knew this very well, even though he had never in his life hauled water except maybe the two times he’d been camping. That and the time he’d been pledging a fraternity and they’d made him fill a bathtub with a thimble, not that that really counted. He stood there, vaguely aware that he was staring. So much for the myth that sailors were laidback and lazy. That didn’t seem true at all. They just danced to their own drums.
But a hundred gallons? By hand?
He opened his mouth, and the words nearly came out. Let me help you.
Hannah was looking up at him, her eyes narrow and wary.
Kyle leaned forward, as if the weight of the words might tip him over. They were armed and ready on the tip of his tongue, his finger on the red button, knowing full well that launch meant all-out war.Why, oh why, did she have to be so independent?
Hannah’s eyes weren’t blue now; they were ice. She was waiting for him to say it. Daring him. Come on, offer to help. I’m ready for you, buster.
The birds that had been singing seemed to have gone into hiding like all the peace-abiding citizens of a Wild West town who ran at the sight of two gunslingers facing each other down.
Kyle wrestled the words away from the tip of his tongue. Squeezed his lips tight to show just how serious he was about not — um, what was it she had accused him of? Patronizing her. Right. No patronizing. Even if he didn’t intend to be patronizing, he wouldn’t. Even if it killed him. He would not open his mouth.
The corner of her right eye ticked as she stared him down.
Okay, she didn’t want help. But he could try another tactic, couldn’t he?
He kept his lips sealed and let his eyes trail a slow and woeful path between the water jugs and the dinghy as if it pained him to see all the work ahead of her. Played out every detail of it in his mind. Filling each and every one of those bottles, feeling them get heavier and heavier under the spout. Closing the caps. Then the trudging would begin. She would take, what? Two at a time? No, four. If he’d learned anything about Hannah by now, it was that she was a four-bottle woman. Four bottles across the road, then down into the dinghy. A short break on the walk back. Another four, as the sweat started dripping slowly down her brow. Across, back. And so on and so on, until her shirt was clinging to her back and her throat was dry and her arms sore and…
He went on and on, imagining it while Hannah eyed him warily.
Then he took a different tack and stopped caring, stopped imagining. He got off the bike, leaned against the frame, and enjoyed the puffy clouds in the sky. So white, so pure. There was a bird shape over there, and little flicking lines over here, like foam tossed from wave tops. It was beautiful. He might even be able to spend an hour watching new shapes form, all relaxed and—
“Want to help?”
He blinked and looked down, barely holding back a smile. Wow, she’d actually said it. It had taken a deep breath and an awfully quiet voice, but yes, Hannah had asked for help.
“Pardon me?” he asked, all innocence and charm.
She made a face, like she was about to sign a forced surrender. “Do you want to help?”
“Thought you’d never ask!” He leaned his bike against its kickstand and hooked four jugs with two hands. “Over there?” he asked, pointing with an elbow.
“Over there.” She nodded.
He could feel her eyes on him as he crossed the street with his first load. Imagined her shaking her head the whole time — either at him or herself. She was back to filling the bottles when he came back for a second load, and she met him halfway across the road with the final run — refusing, of course, to let him take two of the four bottles she carried. Still, a victory was a victory, right?
Hannah stowed the final bottles in the dinghy and wiped her hands on her shirt. She looked at him, then out at the water, then back at the road. He figured he knew what she wanted: a way to get rid of him at last.
“Um…want to come over for lunch?” She patted her backpack, indicating the fresh baguette poking out the top.
Kyle caught a breath. Had Miss Frost finally thawed? “You mean…on the boat?” His eyes swung out to the water. “Cool,” he murmured.
“Yes, on the boat.” The corners of her mouth curled up.
Pretty smile. He couldn’t help but notice. “The owner won’t mind?”
“The owner isn’t here, and his guests finally left so, no, they won’t mind.”
“That’d be great.” He nodded.
And just like that, they were off.
Chapter Eleven
Hannah started the dinghy outboard with a firm tug and made for Windfall, telling herself she was just being polite to the man who helped carry her bottles.
Her eyes slid to him, then darted away again. Back to the very handsome man who carried her bottles. The one with the gorgeous mocha eyes. The one who did the occasional carpentry in his spare time.
Right. Just being polite.
Stuck for something intelligent to say, she busied herself bailing the water out of the dinghy as she steered. Robert’s dinghy was a little low on the waterline; waves were always splashing over the sides. A good thing it was so calm out today, because it wouldn’t do to get her guest too wet. She had to admit, though, that Kyle was looking a little more relaxed today. His usual I’ve-got-a-meeting-in-five-minutes, get-me-the-report-in-three aura had worn off, and the faded T-shirt helped, too. Not to mention the mussed hair. Hair she would run her fingers through, if only she could. Hair she could smooth and sniff and muss even more. Hair she could wake up to—
Hannah cleared her throat gracelessly and covered it by calling out to the catamaran they were passing. “Bonjour, Imagine!”
Three little hands waved an enthusiastic hello as a trio of high voices squealed Kyle’s name. He waved back with both hands.
“Claire! Caroline! Constanc
e!”
Hannah laughed. “What a fan club. Do you have that effect on all women?”
He put his hands up. “Only the under-ten demographic.”
Right, she thought. Under ten, over ten, all the way up to one hundred.
After another minute of puttering along, they reached Windfall’s stern. She grabbed the ladder and made the line fast. “Can you go up and I’ll hand you the bottles?” She pointed out the handholds and the radio cable. “Just don’t pull on that. Robert will kill me if something happens to the antenna.”
Kyle was up in three easy steps. “Robert doesn’t sound like the nicest guy.”
She handed up the first bottle. “I think Captain Bligh would be easier to serve under.”
“What’s his wife like?” Kyle asked, taking the second bottle.
Hannah shook her head. “No wife. I think he’s divorced. Maybe even twice. Wouldn’t surprise me, anyway.”
She swung the next bottle up and found a very still Kyle.
He blinked. “He’s not married?”
Hannah pushed the bottle into his hands. “Uh, no.”
“He sails alone?”
“Yeah, that’s why he wants crew. What?”
“You’re sailing with a single guy.” It was a statement, not a question. “A stranger.”
“It’s not like that—”
“How can you be sure?”
She sighed. “There you go again, Sir Galahad. I checked, okay? The last woman who sailed with him said he’s a control freak about his boat, but that was it. He didn’t try to pull anything.”
“What if he tries to pull something on you?”
“God, you sound like my mother. Will you take this bottle already?” She pushed it under the rail. “Why would he be after me, anyway?”
“You’re a woman,” Kyle started.
She shoved the next bottle at him. “So is half the world’s population.”
“A beautiful woman.”
She snorted. “Watch the false compliments, Galahad.” She was far from beautiful. Her nose was too round, her chin too sharp. And her hair was always a mess. She heaved the last bottle hard enough to knock Kyle back on his heels, then climbed aboard. “So,” she announced. “New topic. Would you like a tour of the boat?”