But this time, he whirled around before she managed to get the gun out of sight. A reluctant smile broke free of his lips. “Is that what I think it is?”
“You looked a little hot up there,” she said with an attempt at reason.
He smiled then, the kind of smile that reached his eyes, put crinkles at their corners. The kind of smile that made her heart do a little spin. “You know what they say about paybacks,” he said.
Unfortunately, she did.
* * *
AFTER THE RIDE, they all changed into swimsuits and went down to the pool. Everyone except Cole.
Kate and Margo sat under an umbrella sipping at fruit drinks the waitress brought them in coconut shells that served as cups. They talked about Margo’s love of teaching, and Kate envied her passion and dedication. It made her even more aware of the current aimlessness in her own life.
Margo spotted Harry across the pool, and suddenly she became absorbed in the book on her lap. Kate pulled one from her own beach bag, trying to get interested in it, but finding herself mostly just watching for Cole.
When he didn’t show up after an hour or so, she told herself he’d been bluffing about the payback. She’d kind of expected a dunk in the pool or maybe a glass of water over the head. But then he didn’t really seem like the type for pranks or silliness.
“I wonder what that is,” Margo said.
Kate lowered her sunglasses and took a look. Two young boys were setting up a microphone and a platform on the other side of the pool. They ran cords to a pair of speakers and soon upbeat music began to throb from them.
“Looks like they’re having some kind of entertainment,” Kate said.
A couple of minutes later, a man wearing wild swimming trunks and an orange T-shirt with Ocean Breeze Beach Resort written across the front got up on the platform and tested the mike. “Hello, everyone! I’m Randy Hartman, formerly from Michigan where winter and I did not get along. I finally left her for this beautiful place you made such a wise choice in picking for your vacation. Welcome to paradise! Am I right? Is this paradise?”
Someone let out a wolf whistle, and the crowd began to clap and cheer.
“All right, then,” he said, throwing a fist in the air. “Let’s get started with some fun. Good-looking group of folks out here today. Especially, you ladies! I can tell this is going to be a great contest.”
The microphone made a squawking noise, and he adjusted it before saying, “We’re going to start out this afternoon with a little Tango Island Idol.”
Taking the cordless microphone with him, he walked around the pool, eyeing people as he walked by. He stopped beside Kate’s chair, looked down at her and smiled. “Our first contestant this afternoon is Ms. Kate Winthrop. I understand she’ll be singing a song of her choice for us.” He reached for her hand, tugging her up from her seat.
“What?” she said, hanging back.
“Come on, now,” he said, smiling. “No changing your mind. Thanks for being the first to sign up, Kate. It’s always good to have a brave soul out in the audience. Come on over. You’ll start today’s lineup.”
“Wait,” she said, holding up one hand. “I didn’t sign up—”
“Now, now, don’t go shy on me,” he said. “You’re going to give the rest of these ladies the courage to enter.”
Margo began to clap. “Let’s hear it, Kate!”
She sent a glance around the pool, spotting Cole where he now stood with Harry at the bar.
Cole smiled at her, then raised his glass in salute and mouthed the word, Touché.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, THE whole group met for dinner at a restaurant just down from the hotel.
Lyle and Lily insisted that they all wear their new dresses, and as they headed down the beach to meet the men who had gone on ahead, Kate was glad they had. She liked the casual feel of it. She carried her sandals in one hand, enjoying, too, the squish of sand between her toes. The island life had begun to grow on her.
They arrived at the restaurant just as the sun dropped in a fireball burst of color against the blue horizon. The hostess went off to check their reservation, and they stood outside in the balmy evening air, chatting like four women who had known one another for much longer than the few days they had.
“You would have won if it hadn’t been for that guy from Jersey.”
She turned around to find Cole looking down at her with amused eyes. Harry and Dr. Sheldon stood just behind him, both staring at Margo in her sarong dress with very different expressions on their faces. Harry’s resembled something close to wow while the professor merely looked worried. Margo walked past them into the restaurant, and they both turned and followed her as if on cue.
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Kate asked, refusing to acknowledge the smile in Cole’s voice. “Consider me repaid.”
“Oh, I do,” he said, his smile entirely too appealing. And even if she’d wanted to stay mad at him, she didn’t think she could have.
* * *
COLE HAD EATEN at the Sand Dollar too many times to count. The food was known as some of the best in the Caribbean, but tonight, his mind wasn’t on the food.
His thoughts were consumed by Kate.
Kate, whose laughter had become a familiar sound in the past few days. He looked forward to hearing it, found himself listening for it.
Kate, who looked like a goddess in that dress. He could barely keep his eyes off her, trying to look anywhere but in her direction.
For all the good it did.
From his chair across the table from hers, he caught the scent of her perfume as the sea breeze wafted it in his direction.
She was getting under his skin.
The question? What was he going to do about it?
* * *
COLE SPOTTED HER from the edge of the beach, just out from the hotel. It was late, but he was too restless to go to bed. He’d headed outside, thinking a walk would deplete some of the energy that felt like a rocket in his chest.
He let his heels sink into the sand and shoved his hands deep into the front pockets of his jeans, studying her profile in the night-shadowed stillness. Common sense told him he should turn and walk away. Leave her alone. Drawn to her, he couldn’t find the will to turn back.
He walked across the beach, stopping just behind her. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself,” he said.
She glanced up. He’d expected surprise on her face, but it wasn’t there, and he wondered if she had somehow known he would come. “The sea air felt good,” she said. “I wasn’t quite ready to go to bed yet.”
“Me, either,” he said, sitting down beside her. “The ocean is addictive, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s so peaceful. Out here, my real life seems very far away.”
He didn’t answer immediately, then finally admitted, “Maybe that’s why it suits me so well.”
“Nothing permanent? Just keep moving?”
“Something like that.”
“I guess that works except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You can’t escape what’s inside you.”
The waves lapped at the sand in a gentle melody of whish-whish, slap-slap. They sat in silence for a while. He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that Kate was right, even though he knew she was. He carried the loss of his daughter around inside him, guilt for his own mistakes the noose around his neck. “What you did for that woman and her baby this afternoon,” he said. “It was nice. Real nice.”
She stared out at the dark ocean. “Do you ever wonder why some of us get such great lives and some of us don’t?”
“Sometimes.”
She leaned forward, propping her arms on her knees, not looking at him. “I look at people like her and I think how crazy it is that I’ve—” She broke off there, pressing her lips together.
“That you’ve what?” he asked.
She made a small sound that wasn’t quite a laug
h, more like a sob. He waited, quiet, until she said, “Oh, that I’ve made such a mess of what I’ve been given.”
He heard her attempt at lightness and recognized her failure. “It couldn’t be that bad,” he said.
She did laugh this time, running a hand across the back of her neck. “No. It is. Trust me.”
“Maybe you’re being a little hard on yourself.”
She shook her head. “Actually, that’s the problem. I haven’t been hard enough. When you don’t let yourself look too closely at something, it’s easy to go along buying your own B.S. And then one day, someone holds up a mirror, and you see exactly what you haven’t been letting yourself see. That’s what that woman was for me this morning. A mirror.” She hesitated, and then said softly, “I didn’t like what I saw.”
Of all the conversations he might have imagined the two of them having out here, this would not have been one of them. He thought about the woman who’d arrived in Miami at the beginning of the trip, a little jarred to realize this Kate barely resembled her. “What is it you regret?” he asked.
“Most? Letting myself believe that it didn’t matter what I did with my life because regardless of the choice, I was never going to live up to my father’s expectations.”
“What exactly did he expect?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, and then said, “I think he expected me to be him. To walk the same path he walked. He grew up poor. Really poor. His dad was a coal miner. He died of black lung disease when my father was twelve, and he had to grow up fast. He was determined to have a different life, and he did. At twenty-four, he patented this bottle capping system that made him a multi-millionaire by the time he was thirty.”
“Impressive,” he said.
“He was an impressive man. But he could never stop working, you know? I guess what happened early in his life shaped him so completely that he couldn’t be anything other than that same driven-to-succeed boy.”
“And he wanted to see the same drive in you?”
She lifted a shoulder. “I’m not really sure what he wanted. My grades were never high enough. My choice in colleges not up to par. The fact that I wanted to be an artist not worthy of a conversation.”
“That’s tough,” he said.
“For a long time, I was just mad. And then I think I decided to prove him right. So I became the spoiled little rich girl he never wanted me to be. And basically just completely screwed up my life.”
“You don’t look very screwed up.”
“Don’t let the package fool you.”
“So what kind of artist are you?”
“I used to paint.”
“And you don’t anymore?”
She shook her head. “Not for a long time.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure if I was afraid I wasn’t any good. Or afraid that I was.”
“You know, people spend thousands of dollars in therapy trying to answer questions like that.”
She smiled.
“I suspect you already know the answer though,” he said.
She looked at him, and he could see the surprise in her eyes. He wondered how long it had been since she thought someone might believe in her.
The night cloaked them in darkness, the hotel lights casting shadows behind them, across their faces. It made for an incredible sense of intimacy, as though they were the only two people there.
They looked at each other for a long time. For the life of him, he couldn’t look away. He reached out and touched her cheek, brushed away a single tear. Time seemed suspended in motion, the silence punctuated by the sound of their breathing. He remembered what it was to want a woman, the way need slowed the blood to a steady throb.
“Cole?” His name was part question, part plea.
He put a finger to her lips, not trusting his voice. He lowered his head, and her eyes slid closed as his mouth settled onto hers.
She kissed him back, her hands slipping up to link around his neck. He pulled her close, and there was none of the awkwardness he remembered from the other first kisses in his life. This seemed like something both of them had been expecting, something that demanded exploration.
She was soft beneath his hands, and all he could think was that he didn’t want to stop kissing her, that he’d like it to go on until he could figure out why this felt so different.
* * *
HARRY WAS ALL stirred up, and he didn’t even know why.
He meant what he’d said to Kate about signals getting crossed and mixed messages where Margo was concerned. Even though it made him sound like a complete jerk. Even though he probably was one.
But then what was worse? Pretending to be something other than what he was and surprising everybody with it after someone’s feelings got hurt? Or just being up front about it? No harm, no foul.
To Harry, this was completely logical. It didn’t explain, though, why something in his midsection dropped when he walked through the lobby of the hotel and spotted Margo outside on the veranda. She sat on one of the wicker couches with a book in her lap. Her eyes, though, were focused on something off in the distance.
He stopped for a second and looked his fill unobserved. Wow. She did look amazing tonight. It was the same Margo, just a brighter, more polished version. She wore her hair pulled back in a ponytail that hung to the middle of her back, her only jewelry a simple pair of pearl earrings.
The Granger sisters mentioned earlier that Kate had given Margo a little makeover, and the results were indeed spectacular. The bookish Harvard professor had been replaced with a knockout of a woman.
In all fairness, he should leave her alone, but he found himself walking over to stand by her chair. “Hey,” he said, faltering under a moment of uncertainty.
She jumped a little, looking around and blinking once. “Hi,” she said, closing the book in her lap.
“Care to have a drink or somethin’?” he asked, wondering why that suddenly sounded so lame.
She looked at him, started to shake her head, then said, “Oh, why not.”
He pulled up a chair next to hers. “Under that enthusiastic response, I, of course, am buying. What’s your pleasure, ma’am?”
“My pleasure,” she said, the words soft and low. Something unexpected tightened in his gut, and again, he experienced an uncharacteristic moment of floundering. Knowing how to talk to women had never been one of his hang-ups. He’d figured out somewhere along his path to recovery from being dumped at the altar that not caring will do that for a person.
A waitress came outside and asked if they would like anything. Margo ordered an orange juice. He followed her lead and asked for pineapple juice.
“Good dinner tonight,” he said once the waitress left.
“Yes. It was,” Margo replied. “You took off kind of fast once it was over.”
“Yeah,” he said, not sure how to explain what he wasn’t sure he understood himself.
She studied him for several seconds, then exhaled a quick sigh, as if she resented having to say what she was about to say. “Look, Harry, I get it, okay? You’re not a permanent kind of guy. I may not have been around the block too many times, but even I could see that from moment one. You don’t need to worry. I have no expectations. That really isn’t such a bad place to be. It makes things much simpler. So the next time you’re hit with the urge to avoid me, just remember that I’m not chasing you.”
He opened his mouth to respond, but closed it just as quickly because he had no idea what to say. She had so nailed him that to deny it would be an insult to her considerable intelligence. “Margo—”
The waitress was back with their drinks. She placed them on the small round table in front of them, moisture beading the sides of the tall, skinny glasses. He thanked her, and she moved to another couple who had just sat down on the other end of the veranda.
“As a matter of fact,” Margo said, standing, “I think I’ll head up. I’m feeling a little tired from all that sun today.”
&n
bsp; Harry did a poor job of hiding his surprise. His eyes widened and his mouth went slack.
“Good night, Harry,” she said and headed down the steps onto the walkway that led to the guest rooms.
He stood, too late, resisting the urge to call her back. Once she was out of sight, he sat back down, propping his elbows on the sides of the wicker chair and making a tepee of his fingers. He forgot about their drinks until the ice in the glasses had melted and watered the juice down so he no longer had any desire for it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Every path has its puddle.
—English Proverb
KATE GOT UP early, long before the sun reclaimed its spot in the Caribbean sky. Actually, she wasn’t sure she’d ever gone to sleep. She lay in bed with her eyes closed, lingering somewhere between full consciousness and a dazed state of fatigue in which her brain refused to shut down.
And little wonder.
Kissing Cole Hunter. That, she had not anticipated. And had no idea what to do about it now.
She left the room in search of coffee, and after purchasing a cup from the breakfast bar just off the lobby, she sat in a chair by the pool, replaying the night as she had a dozen times since he’d walked her to her room and left her at the door.
A single moment stood out in her mind. Standing there in front of him, the sconce light next to the door illuminating his face clearly enough that she could see something different in his eyes. A new awareness. A new interpretation of who he thought she was.
She’d shown him a piece of herself last night that she’d never really shown another living being. Let her guard down so completely, that even now, remembering it, she felt as if she had just run out in the middle of a New York City intersection without any clothes on. Just her. Right there for everybody to see.
It was painful to think about. She was tempted to sit here all day with her eyes squeezed shut, refusing to look at any of it. And yet, deep down, there was a little spot of something that almost felt like relief.
She thought about her relationship with her father. For so long, it had been the monster in her closet. She’d piled every large boulder she could find in front of it because letting it out wasn’t an option.
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