by Cara Colter
So, when they left the cabin he took her hand again, despite the fact he wanted to shove his into his pockets, defending against what had been in there. Strangely, holding her hand seemed to still the uncertainty in him.
The island was small. They walked around the whole thing in an hour. He soon forgot his discomfort in the cabin, and found himself making it about her with amazing ease. But then, that’s what being with her was like: easy and comfortable.
With just the faintest hint of sexual awareness, tingling, that added to rather than detracted from the experience of being together.
Finally they returned to the beach and opened Sally’s picnic basket. She had sent them hot dogs and buns, matches and fire starter.
They gathered wood, and he lit the fire, feeling that thing again, the shouldering of the ancient role: I will start the fire that will warm you.
Obviously, the corniness from the cabin was catching!
With hot dogs blackening on sticks over an open fire, and the magic of the cabin behind him, he found himself taking a tentative step forward, wanting to be more but also to know more. Soon she would go her own way, and he would go his. It made the exchange seem risk-free.
“Tell me why you’re content to raise other people’s children,” he said, touching the mustard at the edge of her mouth with his finger, putting that finger to his own lips, watching her eyes go as wide as if he had kissed her.
“I told you, it’s a job I love. I never feel as if I’m working.”
“But doesn’t that make you think you are ideally suited to be a mother yourself, of your own children?”
Maybe that was too personal, because Dannie blushed wildly, as if he had asked her to be the mother of his children!
He loved that blush! Before her, when was the last time he had even met a woman who still blushed?
“It’s because of the heartbreak,” he guessed softly, looking at the way she was focusing on her hot dog with sudden intensity. “Will you tell me about it?”
This was exactly the kind of question he never asked. But suddenly he really wanted to know. He knew about things you kept inside. You thought they’d gone away, when in fact they were eating you from the inside out.
“No,” she said. “You’re burning your hot dog.”
“That’s how I like them. What was his name?”
She glared at him. Her expression said, leave it. But her voice said, reluctantly, “Brent.”
“Just for the record, I’ve always hated that name. Let me guess. A college professor?”
“It’s not even an interesting story.”
“All stories are interesting.”
“Okay. You asked for it. Here is the full pathetic truth. Brent was a college professor. I was a student. He waited until I wasn’t in any of his classes to ask me out. We dated for a few months. I fell in love and thought he did, too. He had a trip planned to Europe, a year’s sabbatical from teaching, and he went.”
“He didn’t ask you to go?”
“He asked me to wait. He made me a promise.”
Joshua groaned.
“What are you making noises for?”
“If he loved you he would never, ever have gone to Europe without you.”
“Thank you. Where were you when I needed you? He promised he would come back, and we’d get married. I took the nanny position temporarily.”
“No ring, though,” Joshua guessed cynically.
“He gave me a locket!”
“With his own picture inside? Thought pretty highly of himself, did he?” It was the locket she’d worn when he first met her. That she’d put away. What did it mean that she had taken it off?
That it was a good time for her to have this conversation? He knew himself to be a very superficial man, the wrong person to be navigating the terrifying waters of a woman’s heartbreak. What moment of insanity had gripped him, encouraged her confidences? But now that she’d got started, it was like a dam bursting.
“At first he e-mailed every day, and I got a flood of postcards. It made me do really dumb things. I…I used all my savings and bought a wedding gown.”
Her face was screwing up. She blinked hard. Maybe wheedling this confession out of her hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
“It’s like something out of a fantasy,” she whispered. “Lace and silk.” She was choking now. “It was all a fantasy. Such a safe way to love somebody, from a distance, anticipating the next contact, but never having to deal with reality.
“Can I tell you something truly awful? Something I don’t even think I knew until just now? The longer he stayed away, the more elaborate and satisfying my fantasy love for him became.”
She was crying now. No mascara, thank God. He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, and when that didn’t seem to give her any comfort, or him either, he threw caution to the wind, and his hot dog into the fire. He pulled her into his chest.
Felt her hair, finally.
It felt as he had known it would feel, like the most expensive and exquisite of silks.
It smelled of Hawaii, exotic and floral. This was why he was so undeserving of her trust: she was baring her soul, he was being intoxicated by the scent of her hair.
“Actually,” she sniffed, “Brent was the final crack in my romantic illusions. My parents had a terrible relationship, constant tension that spilled over into fighting. When I met Brent, I hoped there was something else, and there was, but it turned out to be even more painful. Oh, I hope I don’t sound pathetic. The I-had-a-bad-childhood kind of person.”
“Did you?” he asked, against his better judgment. Of course the smell of her hair and her soft curves pressed into his body made him feel as if he had no judgment at all, wiped out by sensory overload. And yet even for that, he registered her saying she’d had a bad childhood and he ached for her. There were things even a warrior could not hope to make right.
“Terrible,” she said with a defeated sigh. “Filled with fighting and uncertainty, making up that always filled us kids with such hope and never lasted. It was terrible.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re so invested in children. Giving them the gift of happiness that you didn’t have. You do have that gift, you know. So engaged with them, so genuinely interested in them.”
“Did you have a good childhood?” she asked, and her wistfulness tore through the barriers around his heart that usually kept him from sharing too deeply with anyone.
“Camelot,” he said. “I can’t remember one bad thing. I often wonder if every family is only allotted so much luck, and we used ours up.”
“Oh, Joshua,” she said softly.
“My parents were crazy about each other. And about us. We were the fun family on the block—my dad coaching the Little League team, my mom filling the rubber swimming pool for all the neighborhood kids. And it was all so genuine. I see parents sometimes who I think are following a rule book, thinking about how it all looks to other people, but my folks weren’t like that. They did these things with us because they loved to do it, not because they wanted to look like great parents.”
“And because of that they were great parents.”
“The best,” he remembered softly. “Every year for three weeks they rented a cottage on the seashore. We had these long days of swimming and playing in the sand, we had bonfires out front on the beach every night. There wasn’t even a TV set. If it rained, we played Monopoly or Sorry or cards.”
He realized he had never felt that way again. Ever. Not until he had come here.
And to feel that way was to leave yourself open to a terrible hurt.
Was he ready?
A sudden sound made him jerk up from her. Without his noticing, so engrossed in protecting her and comforting her, and sharing his own secret memories with her, the wind had come up on the lake.
Some warrior. Some protector! He had not tied the canoe properly. It had yanked free of its mooring, the sound he had heard was it crashing into a rock as it bounced away from the s
mall island.
He ran for the water, plunged in, could not believe the cold and stopped.
“Leave it,” Dannie cried.
Good advice. He should let the canoe go, but everything about Moose Lake Lodge said the Bakers were operating on a shoestring. He’d been entrusted with their canoe.
“I can’t,” he shouted at her, moving deeper into the water. “Can you imagine how the Bakers will react if the canoe drifts back there, empty? What about Susie?”
He took a deep breath and moved deeper into the water, felt her movement on the beach behind him.
“Stay there,” he called. “I’ve got it under control.”
He was used to speaking, and people listened. Naturally, Dannie did not. He heard her splash into the water, her shocked gasp as the icy water filled her shoes.
It made him desperate to get that canoe before they were both in deep trouble. He was up to his waist, he lunged forward, and just managed to get the rope that trailed off the bow of the boat.
He pulled it back toward shore, grabbed her elbow as he moved by, steering her in the right direction.
“I told you not to come in,” he said.
“I was trying to help!” she said, unrepentant.
“Now we’re both wet.” But what he was thinking was it had been a long time since he had been with the kind of woman who would plunge into that water with him. He knew a lot of women who would have stood on shore, unhelpfully hysterical or more worried about her haute couture than him!
Still, they both could have got in trouble and it would have been his fault. He was aware of freezing water squeezing out of his shoes and that, wet up to his chest, his teeth were chattering wildly and in a most unmanly way.
Except for the fact it might save the Bakers some distress, his rescue was wasted. When he inspected the canoe it had a hole the size of his fist in the bottom of it from where it had smashed into a rock.
He inspected her, too. She was wet past her waist, had her arms wrapped around herself. She was reacting to the cold in a very womanly way, and he did his best not to whistle with low appreciation.
Think, Joshua snapped at himself.
He was stranded on an island. With a beautiful woman. Who was shivering, and who had hair that smelled of Hawaii.
They were both going to have to get these wet clothes off quickly. And not in the way any red-blooded man wanted to have the first disrobing happen.
But because the May wind was like ice as the spring day lengthened and chilled, if they didn’t get out of these wet clothes, there was a real chance of hypothermia.
There was only one option.
They were going to have to seek shelter in the honeymoon cabin.
Just his luck that he was going to end up half-naked in the honeymoon cabin with Dannie Springer. Maybe it was because he was shaking with cold that he couldn’t quite figure out if he had landed in the middle of a dream or a nightmare.
CHAPTER SIX
DANIELLE SPRINGER had been in a few awkward situations, but this one definitely rated as Most Embarrassing, especially given the fact she was in the company of Most Sexy. If she hadn’t known that about him before, she certainly couldn’t miss it now that she had seen his soaked clothes mold every inch of his fine male body.
What had started off as a day full of potential, was now quickly declining toward disastrous, as quickly as darkness was sweeping over the small island.
She had broken down in front of him, shared confidences she never should have shared. When the canoe had ripped away, she’d been devastated. He had been in the middle of telling her important things, real things about himself. Thankfully, his own confidences had snapped her out of her self-pitying recital of woe.
Watching him push out into the water to save the canoe, she had thought sadly, only Dannie Springer would be alone on an island with a man like that, lamenting her last, lost boyfriend. It was no excuse that Joshua had encouraged her. That’s what men who were successful with women did. That was their secret weapon. They listened.
Except it was becoming increasingly difficult to see Joshua in the light of his playboy reputation.
Especially after the way he had looked talking about his family, the tenderness in his voice, he seemed like the most real man she had ever met. Poor Brent seemed like a comic book character in comparison. Joshua Cole seemed genuine. That’s why the trust element was there, despite the fact she had known him only a matter of days. That’s why she had let her guard down, when she of all people, jilted, should have her guard up higher.
When had she decided it would be okay to trust him with her heart? It was the way he looked at her, compassionate intensity darkening the shade of green of his eyes. Something she interpreted as interest, hot, male and intoxicating was brewing just beneath the calm surface.
Yet for all that male energy—sure and strong—the way he had conducted himself over the past few days was nothing short of admirable. He was a man navigating a foreign land with the children, and yet he was doing it with grace and openness.
Even the way he plunged into the water after that canoe spoke to character. It was him, supposedly the self-centered bachelor, not her, the supposedly compassionate nanny, who had considered how others would react to the empty canoe showing up somewhere.
Dumb to plunge into the water after him, because what was she going to do? But somehow, ever since they’d gotten in that canoe together, she had felt the delicious sense of teamwork. She had plunged into the water almost on instinct. They were in this together.
But she was paying for her altruism now.
They were in the honeymoon cottage where hundreds of couples had shyly taken off their clothes for each other for the very first time.
And not a single one of them like this, she thought dourly. Not a single one of them because they were in imminent danger of shivering to death.
“Embarrassing,” she muttered out loud.
“Forget embarrassment,” he said, glancing back at her from where he was crouched in front of the fireplace, feeding little sticks into it, coaxing a bright blaze to life.
He had peeled off his sodden trousers as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Of course, for him, World’s Sexiest Bachelor, it probably was.
Except for the part where he’d warned her he was doing it, giving her time to turn around.
Except for the part where he’d unearthed a container full of bedding, snapped off the lid, and tucked a blanket around himself.
He should have looked like an idiot with his flowing red tartan blanket tied in a knot at his taut stomach. Instead he looked like a chieftain, his shoulders and chest bare, his arms rippling with sinewy strength. There was a warrior cast to his face, remote and focused, as he had turned his attention to getting a fire going in the old stone fireplace.
“I can’t get my jeans off,” she wailed.
“What?”
“I can’t get them off,” she said, annoyed he was making her say it again. He had heard her the first time!
The soaked denim, which had probably been a touch snug to begin with, was stuck to her now. Her hands were so cold she couldn’t make them do one thing she wanted them to do.
He turned and looked at her. “Are you asking me to help you get your pants off, Miss Pringy?”
“No!” Then with sudden rueful understanding, she said, “You like making me blush, don’t you?”
“If I was considering a new hobby that would be it. I could while away hours at a time thinking up things like—”
“Now is not the time for games, Joshua! I’m just telling you I’m stuck. Just hand me a blanket.”
He came across the room toward her, without the covering she had ordered, and his own blanket slipped. She held her breath, shamelessly hopeful, but he stopped and reknotted it, moved toward her.
“Just relax,” he said soothingly, looking at the situation with what struck her as an annoying bent toward the analytical. She had the button undone on her jeans, an
d the zipper down. She had wrested the uncooperative, sodden, freezing fabric about three inches down her hips and there it was stuck, hard.
“It’s because you’re tense,” he decided.
Taking off my pants in a room with the World’s Sexiest Bachelor, and I’m tense. Go figure.
“It’s because my hands are too cold.” It was true her hands felt as if they had turned into icy basketballs at the ends of her wrists. But there was another problem. She was just going to have to admit it and get it over with.
“The jeans might have been a little too tight to begin with. Marginally.”
“They looked fine to me,” he said, apparently thinking about it. “More than fine. Great.” She might have been thrilled that he’d noticed in different circumstances.
As it was, the jeans had been a bit of a challenge to get on, and that’s when they’d been dry. What little devil of vanity had made her think her rear end looked good enough in them to put up with a tiny bit of discomfort?
“Look, no matter how reasonable a choice they were when they were dry, they won’t come off now. They won’t fit over my hips. There, am I blushing enough for you?”
His lips twitched.
“Don’t laugh,” she warned him.
“I won’t,” he said, but she could tell he was biting the inside of his cheek. Hard. He didn’t speak for a minute, containing himself. “Let me help,” he finally managed, and then choked. “I sound like a butler.”
“Only one of us here would know what that sounded like,” she warned him, but it was too late.
He was laughing, moving toward her with singleness of purpose written all over him.
“Don’t touch me!” There. Self-preservation finally rising to the occasion. Where had that fine attribute of character been when she had been sobbing her heart out in his seemingly sympathetic ear?
“I can’t help you without touching you.”
“I don’t need your help.” That was a lie obvious to both of them. “You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“Try harder.”
“Okay.” He crouched down, and was looking at the area where the soaked jeans were bound up around the wideness of her hips. Oddly enough, the way his eyes rested there, briefly and with heat, before returning to her face did not make her feel like a whale. At all. In fact, his laughter seemed to have died, too.