by Cara Colter
“According to what I read in Lakeside Life,” Kayla said, “you have better things to do than help me with my messes.”
“Don’t believe everything you read.”
He got a chair and climbed up on it and began to tackle the mess on her ceiling. She saw his shirt lifted and she saw the hard line of his naked tummy.
That hunger unfolded in her, even more powerful than before.
“You should go home.” It was self-protection and it was desperately needed!
“I’ll just give you a hand with this first.”
Kayla wanted to refuse and found that she couldn’t. It had been so long since she had had help with anything. Someone to share a burden with was as least as seductive as the sight of his naked skin. For so long she had carried every burden, large and small, all by herself.
An hour later her kitchen had been restored to order. Every surface shone. David had even ferreted out yellow cream in the toaster and wiped it from the inside of the light fixture.
But if the kitchen shone, they were a mess!
“I hope that isn’t a Slugs and Snails shirt,” Kayla said, but now that she was looking, she could see the distinctive small snail over the left breast.
“Of course it is,” he said, glancing down at the yellow blotches that she was fairly certain had already set on his very expensive shirt and shorts. “My company was their start-up investor. I always use the products of the companies we invest in.”
A reminder that the man standing here, in her kitchen, covered in yellow stains, was the CEO of a very prestigious company!
He misread her distressed expression. “I’m sure the stains will come out.”
“You don’t know the first thing about dandelions, do you?” she said, sadly. “When you do your laundry, that stain is not an easy fix.”
“I don’t do my own laundry,” he said, a little sheepishly.
It was a further reminder of who she was sharing her kitchen with. “Well, you could tell whoever does it to try lemon juice.”
“Is that why you smell like lemons?” he asked. “Because this is not your first experiment with dandelions?”
He had noticed her scent. Somehow it was headier than dandelion wine.
So when he said what he said next, she should have resisted with all her might. But she didn’t have a single bit of might left in her.
“I was on my way down to the lake to swim. Why don’t we just go jump in? Like the old days?”
A small smile was playing across the sensuous line of the mouth she had been foolish enough to touch.
She knew exactly what he was talking about. The last day of school, every year, all the kids in Blossom Valley went and jumped in the lake, fully clothed.
And suddenly he did not seem like the CEO of one of Canada’s most successful companies. David seemed like what she needed most in the world and had tried, pathetically perhaps, to find in a dog.
He seemed like a friend, and nothing in the world could have kept her from going and revisiting the most carefree time of her life by jumping in the lake with him!
“Hang on,” she said, “I’ll grab my lemon juice.”
They didn’t go to the public beach, but snuck down a much closer, but little-known lake access, between two very posh houses.
He stood patiently while she doused the stains on both their clothes with lemon juice. She set down the empty bottle and then rubbed the lemon into the stains. His skin beneath the fabric struck her as velvet over steel.
She heard his sharp intake of breath and looked up. He was watching her, his lips twitching with amusement but his eyes dark with something else.
Kayla gulped, let go of his shirt and backed away from him, spinning.
“Race you,” she cried over her shoulder, kicking off her flip-flops and already running. With a shout he came up behind her, and they hit the cold water hard. He cut the water in a perfect dive, and she followed. The day was already so hot that the cold water felt exquisite and cooling.
The water had been her second home since she had moved here. Beaches and this lake were the backdrop to everything good about growing up in a resort town.
It seemed the water washed away the bad parts of their shared past, and gave them back the happy-go-lucky days of their youth. They gave themselves over to play, splashing and racing, dunking each other, engaging in an impromptu game of tag, which he won handily, of course. He tormented her by letting her think she could catch him, and then in one or two powerful strokes he was out of her reach.
Kayla had known, when she had seen David run the other night, that he had lost none of his athleticism. But the water had always been his element.
His absolute strength and grace in it were awe-inspiring.
That and the fact his wet shirt had molded to the perfect lines of his chest. His hair was flattened and shiny with water, and the beads ran down the perfect plane of his face.
But the light in his eyes was warmer than the sun. That awareness of him that she had been feeling all morning—that had been pushed to the breaking point when she had scrubbed at his lemony shirt—was kept from igniting only by the coldness of the water.
Finally, gasping from exertion and laughter, they rolled over and floated side by side, completely effortless on their backs, looking up at a cloudless sky, the silence compatible between them. Even the awareness that had sizzled seemed to have morphed into something else, like the rain after the electrical storm, calm and cooling.
Finally, she broke the silence.
“I know you didn’t lie about him,” she said quietly. “David, I’m sorry I called you a liar.”
It felt so good that he said nothing at all, rolled his head slightly to look at her then rolled it back and contemplated the blueness of the sky.
The cold of the water finally forced them out. On the shore, she inspected his dripping clothes. The dandelion stains were unfazed by her lemon treatment.
“That will have to be your paint shirt,” she said, just as if he was a normal person who actually painted his own home when it needed it.
“Good idea,” he said, going along with her. Then, “For two relatively intelligent people, one of us could have remembered towels.”
“Watch who you’re calling relatively intelligent,” Kayla said, and shook her wet hair at him.
“This is a private beach,” a voice called.
They looked up to see a woman glaring at them from her deck.
In their youth, they would have challenged her. They would have told her there was no such thing as a private beach. That the entire lake and everything surrounding it to the high water mark—which would take them up to about where her lawn furniture was artfully displayed—belonged to the public. In their youth, they might have eaten their sandwiches on her manicured lawn.
But David just gave the sour-faced woman a good-natured wave, took Kayla’s hand, scooped up the empty lemon juice bottle and walked her back out between the houses.
They began the walk home, dripping puddles as they went. Somehow, David didn’t let go of her hand. They laughed when her flip-flops made slurping sounds with every step.
She tried to remember the last time she had felt so invigorated, so alive, so free. Oh, yeah. It had been just the other night, lying beside him in the cool grass, looking at the stars.
A siren gave a single wail behind them and then shut off.
They both whirled.
“Oh, no,” Kayla said. “It’s the same guy.”
“She called the police because we were on her beach?” David said incredulously.
Kayla could feel the laughter bubbling within her. “You and I have become a regular two-person crime wave,” she said. “Who would have thought that?”
The policeman got out of his car and looked at them
. And then he reached back inside.
Kayla squealed.
“Bastigal!”
She raced forward and the dog wriggled out of the policeman’s arms and into her own. Her face was being covered with kisses and she realized she was crying and laughing at the same time.
But even in her joy it occurred to her that her dog had been returned to her only when she had learned the lesson: Bastigal was no kind of replacement for human company, for a real friend.
“Did your daughter find him?” David asked. Kayla glanced at him. He was watching her with a smile tickling the edges of that damnably sexy mouth.
“Yeah.”
“I guess she’s going to be getting that new bike,” David said.
“She’ll have to find another way to get her new bike.”
“What? Why?”
“I told her she can’t take the reward. You do good things for people because it’s right, not because there’s something in it for you. To me, teaching her that is more important than a new bike. Though at the moment, she hates me for it.”
“I’m going to buy an ice cream parlor,” Kayla said, the tears sliding even faster down her face.
“Maybe you’re going to buy an ice cream parlor,” David growled in an undertone.
Kayla ignored him. “Tell your daughter she gets free ice cream for life.”
The policeman lifted a shoulder, clearly trying to decide if that was still accepting a reward. Finally, he said, with a faint smile, “Sure. Whatever. Hey, by the way, you were called in for trespassing.”
“Really?” She shouldn’t be delighted, but what had happened to her life? It had surprises in it!
“As soon as I heard two fully clothed people swimming, I somehow knew it was you,” he said wryly. “I told the complainant she only owns to the high water line.”
And then all of them were laughing and the dog was licking her face and Kayla wondered if she had ever had a more perfect morning.
The policeman left and they continued on their way, Bastigal content in her arms.
David reached over and scratched his ears. “He’s so ugly he’s cute,” he said.
“I prefer to think that he’s so cute, he’s ugly,” she retorted. “I think that nice policeman should let his daughter have the reward.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. That kind of stand reminded me of what my dad was like,” David said quietly.
“I never met your dad,” Kayla said.
“No. I think he died a year or two before your family moved here. Completely unexpected. He seemed in every way like a big, strong guy. He had a heart attack. It was instant. He was sitting there having his supper, joking around, and he got a surprised look on his face and keeled over.”
“Oh, David.”
“No sympathy, remember?” he said. “But keep that in mind. Bad genetics.”
He said it lightly, but there was something in his eyes that was not light at all. As if she had been considering him as partner material, that should dissuade her.
How could she address that without making it seem as if she were looking at him as partner material?
She didn’t have to address it because he went on, his voice quiet, “In the last little while, I’ve actually felt grateful that he didn’t live to see my mom like this.”
She wanted to say Oh, David, again, but didn’t. She was so aware that he was giving something of himself to her, sharing a deeply private side that she suspected few people, if any, had ever seen.
“My dad,” he went on, “would have been just like that policeman. He knew right from wrong and he taught me that, and he didn’t care if I was happy about it or not. My happiness was secondary to my being a good person.”
“Mine, too,” she said, “now that I think about it.”
“It’s nice to see you looking so happy, Kayla,” David said quietly, as if they had spoken Kevin’s name out loud, as if he knew how desperate she had often felt in her marriage.
She felt as if the tears were going to start again, so she bit the side of her cheek and buried her face in her dog’s fur and said nothing.
“It’s your turn,” he said quietly, as if it were an order. And then, as if she might have dismissed it the first time, he said it again, even more firmly. “Kayla, it’s your turn for happiness.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HER TURN FOR HAPPINESS?
“I feel guilty when I’m happy,” Kayla blurted out.
David nodded. “I remember feeling that way after my dad died. How dare the world hold laughter again?”
She nodded. That was how she felt exactly, but it was layered with even deeper confusion because her feelings about her husband’s death were not all black and white.
“But then I remembered something my dad said to me,” David said thoughtfully. “My dad said you could never be guilty and happy at the same time. Or afraid and happy at the same time. That’s why he was such a stickler for doing the right thing. That’s what he saw as the stepping stones to building true happiness. And that’s what he would have wanted me to do. To choose happiness. And that’s what I want you to do, too.”
She stared at David. He could have said a million things, and yet the thing he had said was so right.
Despite herself, she shared something else.
“David?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m scared of happiness. Remember you said wishes are for children? I’m afraid that the things you wish for just set you up for disappointment. And heartbreak.”
They had arrived in front of her house, and he glanced at his and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, went and sat in his wet clothes on her front step. He patted the place beside him.
“It was awful, wasn’t it?” he asked.
And she was going to say “what?” as if she didn’t know what he was talking about, but she did know, and she could not bear to bring dishonesty between them.
She had known this time was coming when they would have to address the history between them.
And she had expected that exploration would be like there was an unexploded mine buried somewhere in the unexplored ground between them.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Being married to Kevin was awful in so many ways. I mean, there were good things, too, don’t get me wrong.”
“Tell me,” he said.
And she knew he didn’t mean the good things. She ordered herself not to, but she could not disobey the command in his voice.
And so she found herself telling him. Slowly at first, like water that was seeping out a hole in a dam, the steady, small flow making the hole larger until the water was shooting through it with force, faster and faster.
She told him about the late nights waiting for Kevin, not knowing where he was, about the terrible houses they had lived in and the bills not paid. She talked about working as a waitress and a cleaning lady, about babysitting children and raking leaves, trying to hold it all together long after she should have let it fall apart.
And the more she worked at holding it together the more Kevin seemed to sabotage everything she had done, lose interest in her, treat her shabbily, at first in the privacy of their own home, and then in front of other people.
“Sometimes,” she said, finally, “I feel relieved that he died.”
It should have been her biggest secret. But it wasn’t. There was one left, still.
She waited for him to react with horror to this revelation that she had never admitted out loud to anyone.
Instead, they sat silently on the front steps with the sun pouring down hot on their heads, drying their clothes so that the lemon stains and wrinkles would probably never come out. Her dog snoozing in her arms, Kayla w
as aware she did not feel judged at all.
There. They were out. Her shameful and most closely guarded secrets. It was like a mine exploding, but instead of feeling destructive, it felt like a relief.
Before it exploded she waited. And wondered. And every step was guarded. And every breath was held.
Suddenly it felt as if she could breathe.
And suddenly it felt as if she were free to walk across the field that was her memory without being caught in an explosion.
Instead of rejecting her, David put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her into the solidness of his body.
And Kayla, in that moment of shared strength and sunshine, realized it had not been so much Kevin she had withheld forgiveness from.
In fact, she had forgiven Kevin again and again and again.
Except when he had died, taking with him any chance that they would find their way, that the love she still had for him would somehow see them through, would fix things—then she had felt angry and beyond forgiveness.
Betrayed by his carelessness in a way she could no longer fix. But now she could see most of her anger was at her own powerlessness.
She realized that more so than with Kevin, it was herself she had never forgiven. She had never forgiven herself for her own bad choices, for making everything worse instead of better.
But there, with David’s arm around her shoulder, she felt strong and warm, and for the first time in very, very long, optimistic.
And not in a superficial way. Not about starting an ice cream business or saving a house from ruin. She felt changed in a way that went to her soul.
“Why did you marry him?” David asked, his voice hoarse with caring, knowing instinctively somehow there was one last thing she needed to tell.
She shuddered. The last secret. The thing no one had ever known. Not her parents. Or Kevin’s. Not her best girlfriend.
“I was pregnant.”
“Shoot,” he said softly.
“You would have been proud of him,” she said. “He wanted us to get married. He wanted to do the honorable thing.”
But wasn’t this also what she had to forgive herself for? That she had accepted his attempt at honor instead of love? That she had allowed it all to go ahead, when there had been a million signs that maybe it would have been better to let it go, even if there was a baby, maybe especially if there was a baby?