by Susan Wiggs
They rounded a deep curve in the shoreline, leaving the driftwood logs behind. The stones thinned to sugar-fine sand the color of ground almonds. The cove formed by a jagged rise of rocks was a place of enchantment, with a spring trickling down the stone face and creating a shifting stream across the sand, down to the water.
“A salmon stream,” she said, quickly noting it on the topographical map attached to her clipboard. “God, it’s fabulous here.” Unable to resist, she slipped off her canvas sneakers and sank her feet into the warm sand, savoring the almost orgasmic feel of it.
He sent her an odd look. “Just a little farther to the site.”
“I’m in no hurry,” she said.
He grinned. “It didn’t take you long to adjust to island time.”
“What’s island time?”
“A misnomer. There is no sense of time on the island. No one’s ever in a hurry around here.”
“Except you,” she said, unable to keep a faint note of accusation from her voice.
“Yes, well, someone has to get things done.”
Five
Mitch told himself he shouldn’t have been surprised by Rosie’s reaction to the proposed marina site. Everything about Rosie surprised him, and this was no different. Instead of getting right down to work as he’d expected her to, she spent the day in some sort of weird Zen-like trance, exploring the area around the site to get a “feel” for the place.
This was something he’d never done, never seen the point of doing. To him, places didn’t have any sort of feel. They just were. And most places, this island included, could stand some improvement.
The next morning, admitting that her way was a lot tastier than his, he waited for her to come down and make lattes. Bending over the table with the sunlight streaming in, they looked over maps and elevations and her pages of scribbled notes.
“When did you do all this?” Mitch flipped through the pages covered with her scrawling handwriting in peacock blue fountain-pen ink.
“I guess I did it on island time,” she said, a teasing note in her voice.
He had to smile. So she was a hard worker, after all. He pushed a triplicate form toward her. “That’s the first document the planning commission needs from us. It’s a bunch of questions. I’ve filled in where I can, but it gets technical about habitat and populations and so forth. I figure that’s your department.”
She studied the paper for a moment, taking a thoughtful sip of her latte. “I’ll have to take a lot more readings before I can complete that.”
“Can’t you just give your best guess on some of this stuff? I mean, do we really need to document the distance to the nearest foot? Or record bird-population density?”
She set down her mug and faced him squarely. “You hired me to do a job, Mitch. I intend to do it right. I won’t gloss over this study. I’ll do it correctly down to the last detail.” She hesitated, biting her lip in that unconsciously sexy way of hers. “And, Mitch, I think you should know, I’ll withhold my approval if it appears your marina will have a negative impact on the area.”
He gritted his teeth. Over the entire course of his career, he had never let a client down, never abandoned a project. He prided himself on building, creating jobs, shaping communities and doing a damned good job of it. He could do the same thing here, and he wasn’t about to let some self-righteous scientist stand in his way.
“This area is dying, Rosie. People are leaving the island in droves because they can’t make a living here. The marina will add a dozen jobs, and indirectly, dozens more.” Scowling, he got up from the table. “I didn’t ask for this project. The island residents came to me.”
“I understand that. I don’t want to stand in the way of progress, Mitch. But the islanders are the stewards of this place. I know for a fact they wouldn’t want to introduce something detrimental to the environment just to drum up a few jobs. They could put a copper smelter here and employ a thousand people, but would it be the best thing for the island?”
“This isn’t quite the same as a copper smelter,” he said peevishly.
“Okay, I’m sorry. But I just want you to know I really intend to look at this.”
“Fine.” But he wondered if he meant it.
He watched her from afar that day. He worked in the front room with its bay window, glancing up too frequently from his computer screen. She walked with a strong purposeful stride, but she also had a way of slowing down that fascinated him. She’d be striding briskly along the waterfront; then she’d nearly stop as she inspected something or other.
And when she sat at the water’s edge at sunset, with the fine evening mist coming down over her, he noticed a curious stillness about her. She was, at her center, as tranquil as the quiet tide pools they’d found on their explorations. Just being near her had a calming effect. He discovered he was in no hurry to be somewhere, that his normally impatient nature somehow found the patience to stand back and let her do her work in her own way.
You’re good for me, Rosie.
The thought drifted through his mind, as enticing as her laughter while she clapped her hands to summon the Chihuahuas. Rodentlike, they streaked down the yard toward her, and she gathered them up in her arms. For the briefest of moments Mitch entertained a fantasy—that he and Rosie were together like this, really together. Not just working on a project but spending time getting to know each other, talking and laughing, totally at ease.
He chased the fantasy away, slapping at it as if it were a mosquito about to bite him. He and Rosie Galvez were too different. She wasn’t his type, much as he wanted her to be. In fact, he didn’t have a “type” at all. Miss Lovejoy had been pointing that out for years as if it was some flaw in Mitch. He was too exacting, she’d say. His standards were unrealistically high.
Forcing his gaze back to the computer screen, he tried to put the thought out of his mind, but it nagged at him, this sense that he was incomplete and would always be that way because he made sure the perfect woman for him didn’t exist.
His idea of the perfect woman was Barbie with a brain, but not a mind of her own. Yet now—his gaze wandered again—he kept looking out the window, seeing a tranquil dark-eyed woman and wondering, what if…
“I want to go out in the kayak,” Rosie announced late the next morning.
“We both have work to do,” Mitch said automatically.
“Yes. In the kayak.”
Feeling his eyebrows descend in a scowl, he looked up from the letter he was composing to a financial group. “Going kayaking is work?”
“That’s what I said, jefe.”
“Quit calling me that. It’s insulting.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
“So explain to me about this kayak business.”
“We need to go out and explore the shores and reefs. The sea kayak’s the best way to do it, because we’ll be low to the water, and we’ll be so quiet we won’t disturb any of the wildlife.”
He studied her for a long time. He, who had been ruled all his life by discipline, suddenly didn’t want to have anything to do with discipline. He wanted to go kayaking with a beautiful woman. And because he wanted to go so badly, he said, “No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I’ve got work to do, Rosie. Whatever needs to be done in the kayak, you’ll have to do by yourself.”
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, drawing his attention there against his will. “It’s a two-man kayak.”
“I said I was busy.”
A dangerous anger flickered in her eyes. He had the swift impression that her sweet nature could quickly detonate into a fiery temper.
But the expected outburst expressed itself as a brilliant smile. “Fine, then. I’ll wait until you’re finished working.”
“That’s not what…”
She was gone before he finished his protest. Muttering under his breath, he went back to what he was doing. A few minutes later he saw something—a glint of movement—from the c
orner of his eye. Knowing it was Rosie, he ignored the movement. For as long as he could.
Which amounted to about ten seconds. He looked up from his computer and saw her walking across the yard, heading down toward the beach.
His eyes nearly popped out of his head. She wore an iridescent bikini that pretty much ensured he wouldn’t get another lick of work done. She sat in a chaise longue, took out a bottle of sunscreen and applied the gleaming polish to her long limbs, shoulders and stomach. Watching the languid stroke of her hands over her sun-warmed skin, Mitch groaned aloud. By the time she finished, he was pretty sure he was half-insane.
She stood and went to the end of the dock, the dogs capering at her feet. When she dove off the end, they started yapping furiously. She broke the surface, her inky hair slicked back from her face, and began paddling lazily through the water. And as he watched, he acknowledged that he wouldn’t even look at his computer as long as Rosie was wearing a bikini and cavorting in the water.
He snapped his laptop shut and went down to the dock, pausing at the chaise to pick up a thick green beach towel. “You win,” he called. “We’re going kayaking.”
She laughed, the bright sound dancing across the water to his ears. “Thank God. I’m starting to freeze in here.” She swam to the wooden dock ladder and climbed out.
Mitch stared, even though he knew it was rude. “I guess that water is pretty cold,” he remarked, holding out her towel.
“Pervert.” She stepped into it, and just for a moment his arms came around her in an embrace, circling her from behind, wrapping her lush but shivering form in thick terry cloth. She smelled of seawater and sunscreen, and when she turned her head to look back at him, he nearly forgot to step away.
“This moment,” he confessed, “is about one heartbeat shy of awkward, wouldn’t you say?”
She shrugged, hugging the towel around her. “I’ll be down at the boathouse in about fifteen minutes.” As she started up toward the house, she turned to him. “Hey, Mitch, the answer to your question is no.”
“No what?”
“No, it wasn’t awkward. I thought you’d want to know that.”
He couldn’t stop a grin. He didn’t even try.
Six
As Rosie dipped her paddle into the placid crystalline water, a glorious feeling of well-being washed over her. Sure, she was broke, jobless and homeless, but not at the moment. At the moment she was paddling through paradise with a gorgeous man behind her and a pair of bald eagles soaring overhead.
“God, I love this,” she said, dazzled by the natural aquarium. “I haven’t been spending enough time in the field.” There. She’d found it. The silver lining. She knew she’d find it if she looked hard enough. “I’ll have a lot more time for that now.”
“How do you mean?” Mitch asked from behind her.
She gave a guilty shrug. “Being up here,” she hedged. “For the past couple of years I’ve been in the classroom. It’s nice to be out in the field once again.” She trailed a hand in the water as they passed over a rocky undersea wall. Anemones in rainbow colors waved lazily in the watery sunlight. “I spent a summer up here as an undergraduate, studying the reproduction habits of tube worms.”
He laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, not at all. It was a great summer. My first away from my family.”
“So where’s your family?”
She was pleased to hear a personal question from him. He usually seemed so remote. She’d been shameless in trying to get his attention, but shamelessness often worked. “Wenatchee, just over the Cascades. My parents work in the apple industry.”
“Everyone in Wenatchee does.”
“Just about. Including my five brothers and sisters. I turned out to be the black sheep of the family, being fascinated by marine life, of all things. My folks kept thinking I’d grow out of it, but instead, I decided to make it my career. It was a little scary going off on my own.”
“I can’t imagine you being scared of anything, Rosie.”
“Thank you. Being brave is something I work on. What about your family?”
“You’ve got me beat in the family department. Haven’t seen my dad since I was nine years old. A few years after that, my mother remarried. She lives in La Jolla with a securities analyst. Between the three of them, they managed to keep me in therapy until I got tired of ‘processing my emotions’ for someone who charges 375 an hour.”
He spoke jokingly, but Rosie stopped paddling and twisted around to look at him. Her gaze probed his lean face and chilly blue eyes, trying to see the abandoned boy he’d been, the boy with too much money and too little love. “I’m sorry, Mitch.”
“Don’t be. It’s ancient history. And after all that psychoanalysis, the answer turned out to be pretty simple.”
“Really? Then I wish you’d tell me what it is.”
“This job,” he said simply. “Building things. It’s amazing how your own problems shrink when you don’t have time to think about them. I never was that comfortable being the whining overprivileged kid, anyway,” he added with a self-deprecating grin.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Rosie asked, incredulous. “You really think staying busy is the answer.”
“Sitting around wringing my hands and processing my emotions sure as hell wasn’t.”
“But what happens when the work’s over, Mitch? What happens then?”
“I don’t have to worry about that. I’ve got enough irons in the fire to keep me hopping until I keel over.”
“Don’t you ever worry about that? About keeling over?”
“No.”
She turned back, puzzled and vaguely saddened by him. “Let’s head for the President Channel,” she said. “A marina would increase the boating traffic there, so we should check it out.”
They paddled in a comfortable rhythm. Summertime meant smooth clear water and sunlight strong enough to penetrate to three fathoms. Rosie felt the wind ripple through her hair, and she put her head back, trying to take everything in. It was glorious, all of it, the marshes and meadows running down to the water’s edge, the slow-moving boat traffic passing idly by, the flocks of auklets and cormorants nesting in the hillsides, the dark flashes of fish schools below the kayak.
She refused to let herself be depressed by what Mitch had told her. That he owed his mental health to unceasing hard work.
If that was the case, she was doomed.
The thought of returning to Seattle and starting the demoralizing process of job hunting depressed her even more. She enjoyed teaching. She was good at it. But the past couple of years the classroom walls had pressed in on her. Now, rafting along a glittering channel of Puget Sound, she knew what had been missing. The fieldwork. Being at sea, not in a lecture hall; studying habitats, not lab samples.
Landing a position in the field was even harder than a tenured teaching position. Sure, she could find something at a commercial aquarium, but the contained controlled environment had always made her feel claustrophobic. She might find seasonal work giving tours for tips at the Mermaid Whale Watching Expeditions. She’d heard the tips were good, particularly for guides in bikinis.
The very thought made her shudder, so she tossed it off and refused to let it spoil the day. They glided on, their silence companionable in the way it had been from the start. She wondered why that was, why she felt so relaxed and comfortable around this man who was so different from her, who held all but the very surface of himself away from the rest of the world.
In the distance, near the shore of Waldron Island, shadows flickered just beneath the surface of the water.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mitch said quietly.
She nodded, her chest filling up with the thrill of discovery. “Three family groups have been identified in this area. This is a pod of about twenty individuals.” A trio of dorsal fins broke the surface, and her breath caught.
“Will we scare them?” Mitch asked.
“Not if we�
�re slow and easy.”
“Will they eat us?”
“Not unless we’re easier to catch than a salmon.”
The kayak glided nearer, and they saw more whales, mostly females and calves at varying stages of maturity. “Wow,” he said. “Look at them all. They’re colored like golf shoes.”
“You would say that.” Rosie would never tire of the beauty of the orcas. She loved their coloring, their family groups and the way their mouths lifted in a perpetual smile. She loved the way they hunted, swiftly and purposefully.
“Hey,” Mitch said. “Look at that—Whoa!”
A large female shot out of the water, breaching only a few yards from the kayak. A tidal wave of water sprayed up, drenching them.
“My God,” Mitch exclaimed. “Did you see that? It was the size of a bus!”
Rosie watched the trail of bubbles in the whale’s wake and suddenly she felt overwhelmed. She couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop herself, and even though her back was turned from Mitch, she knew she couldn’t hide her darkening mood. She laid her paddle across her lap skirt and lowered her head, wishing the month could go on forever, wishing she didn’t have to go back to her real life.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Mitch sounded vaguely suspicious and fearful.
“It’s…just…s-so beautiful,” she said, feeling foolish and trying to keep control.
“The whale, you mean?”
“Just…everything.”
“I agree with you, Rosie. But hey, get a grip. It makes me nervous as hell when people get emotional.”
She heard him rifling around beneath his lap skirt; then he handed her a navy blue bandanna. “Here, Rosie. Please don’t cry.”
His gesture only made things worse. He muttered impatiently under his breath, and then the kayak began to glide swiftly to the nearest shore. Moments later he’d beached it and climbed out, undoing Rosie’s lap covering and taking her by the shoulders, helping her to stand.