Cirque du Soleil was unnecessary.
All you needed was a manly man.
And the courage to be vulnerable, and let him take over, if that turned you on.
And, apparently, for her, it did.
The boat rocked gently as the sounds of quiet waves lapped the side of the hull.
“Drew’s going to kick my ass,” Evan said into the quiet air. He rolled toward her and touched her hair, stroking it off her shoulder. “If he had any idea what I was thinking . . .”
“Which is what?” she mumbled into the sheets.
His hand ran down her back, over her bottom, between her thighs. “About five more ways I’d like to ‘use’ you before I leave this week.”
Lia giggled and found the strength to lift herself and turn toward him. “Permission granted.”
His face lit up. “To board?”
She laughed and pushed at his chest. “Give me a minute, dude. Sheesh. I thought men were the ones that needed recuperation breaks.”
“It’s been a while, remember?”
“That’s your excuse, huh?”
He chuckled while Lia moved slowly toward the side of the bed—a sloth came to her mind—and finally managed to snatch one of the blankets off the floor. She rolled back toward Evan and threw it at him. She’d love to explore those five more ways. And she meant to do so later in the week. But, for now, she needed to leave. She wasn’t in the habit of spending the entire night with a man—it smacked of neediness and dependence—and if she left any later, she’d be like a sloth trying to drive a car, draped over her steering wheel.
She inched her way to the side of the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to leave.” She found her underwear on the other side of the cabin.
“You don’t need to leave.”
“I do.”
“Lia. It’s dark and it’s late. Just stay here.”
“I don’t make it a habit to spend the night.”
“You also said you don’t make it a habit to orgasm. And you broke that rule. Four times, I might add.”
She hurled a pillow at him, and he caught it and grinned.
“So tell me about this,” he said.
She found her dress and stepped into it. “Tell you about what?”
“Why a beautiful, sexy woman like you is not out there having great orgasms. . . . Outside of this cabin, anyway.”
He caught a second pillow and chuckled.
She didn’t quite recognize the lightness and the teasing in his voice—she hadn’t, until now, heard him speak in a way that hadn’t sounded like he was weighted down by a ton of bricks—but she liked it. A lot.
“Maybe you were right about that control thing.” She found her dress belt.
“Lia, come back to bed. Take off your clothes. Let’s explore this.”
She laughed but tugged her belt through the loops.
Damn. If she took one look at him, she might very well stay. That had been incredible. And fun. Evan was a great lover. But she didn’t want to “explore” why she’d never found that kind of joy out of sex before. Maybe it was because she dated men that were too urbane. Maybe it was kind of sexy that Evan took control. Maybe she kind of liked being vulnerable. Maybe she liked being protected. . . .
She pushed those last thoughts away. That couldn’t happen. And damn, where was her cell phone?
“Lia.” Evan sat up in bed. “Stay.”
“I have to feed Missy.”
“Missy will be fine. She has the extra bowl of dry food in the laundry area.”
Lia bit back a smile at Evan’s memory. “Well, I’ll take your card and swipe it through the exit gate for you so you can stay here all night. Harry James will think you’ve left and will be none the wiser.” As she finished buckling her belt, she glimpsed her purse and her phone sticking out, and made a move toward them.
“Lia.”
She didn’t want to look at him. If she turned around, all she’d see—even through the dark—was a man who knew exactly what she was doing right now.
They were two people who were staying removed, who both knew how to do it, who had both perfected the maneuvers—Evan probably since his wife had died, and Lia all her life. They both knew that if you opened your heart a crack, you could let too much emotion come in. And Lia knew that if the emotion began flowing, you could become dependent on someone else, lose your footing.
But Evan was in her camp on this one. He didn’t want to get too close, either. He probably wanted someone to stay who understood all this. Who he could hold all night, the way he’d held his wife, but who wouldn’t read too much into it the next day.
And Lia might enjoy that, too.
They could both—with their simultaneous understanding—possibly bring each other peace, and one night of a feeling they both wanted. Temporarily.
“Yes?” she asked, her hand still on the back of a chair, her phone still untouched.
“Please stay.” His voice had now dropped into something husky and embarrassed.
As the water lapped the sides of the boat and a fog horn sounded somewhere in the far distance, Lia ignored her phone and took off her clothes in the darkness, under Evan’s watchful gaze, and crawled back into his bed. He wrapped his arms around her, kissed the part in her hair, and pulled her toward his chest.
“Too tired for another go-around?” he whispered.
“I am pretty tired.”
“It’s okay.” He stroked her hair in a way that felt more comforting than sexual. “I just want you to stay.”
“Good night, Evan,” she finally whispered.
“Good night, Cinderella.”
And Lia, for the first time ever, fell asleep in the arms of a man, who rested his lips against her temple and breathed softly into her hair.
* * *
The next morning, Lia awoke to the sounds of a marching band drifting from a distance, followed by distant applause and toy horns blowing. The scent of pancakes and cotton candy seemed to float into the bed around her, but—more immediately—she could smell coffee. When her eyes peeled open, she sat up with a start, remembering she was in Evan’s bed.
It was Sunday. No work today . . . She repeated the mantra about five times, until her heart started beating normally.
She looked around the cabin. Evan was nowhere to be seen.
She wrapped a sheet around herself and padded into the galley, which was also empty but where the glorious scent of the coffee originated. A single cup steamed in a tiny coffeemaker for one. Through the open galley door she spotted him, out on the fog-filled deck, fully dressed, a beanie pulled onto his head and morning stubble still across his jaw. He wound a rope around his arm and stuffed it into a bag.
While she admired his masculine movements, at peace with the world as he moved deftly through the fog, he spotted her and came shuffling back in.
“Mornin’,” he said.
“Good morning.”
“Coffee’s for you.”
Her hand reached thankfully for the single cup. “We can share.”
She took a life-affirming sip and handed the cup to him. He smiled and took the second sip while his eyes took in her toga-style bedsheet. “Now, that’s a nice sight in the morning.” He handed the coffee back.
“What are you doing out there?” She nodded toward the deck.
He didn’t seem able to look away from her sheet, but finally tore his eyes away long enough to glance down at the bag he’d just filled. “Just getting together some things to take out today in case we spot Valentine’s baby and she’s tangled.” His gaze went back to her shape. “But now I’m regretting getting up so early.”
He dropped the bag into the dinette bench and moved toward her, yanking the beanie off his head and removing the coffee cup from her hand to se
t it on the counter. “You have to be anywhere this morning?” His trajectory was still coming right at her.
Lia giggled. “I just need to get ready for the festival booth today.”
His fingertips tugged the sheet out of her hand. “We have plenty of time for that.”
* * *
Lia made it down to the booth around nine-thirty, a half hour late, and mumbled her apologies to the folks sitting to the left and right of her, even though they certainly didn’t care.
Evan plopped the box of bookmarks into the grass, along with the whale teeth they’d had to pick up from the Duke, since that’s where they’d left them in what was starting to feel like her trail of irresponsibility.
Lia caught him grinning at the way she offered apologies, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he set up the tables and chairs and adjusted the awning so the sun didn’t beat right on her.
“Beautiful day today,” she said too loudly to the folks in the next tent over. They were an older couple, there to sell rubber ducks for the Rubber Ducky Derby to be held in the ocean that afternoon, and Lia had the strange feeling they could see straight through her clothes, straight into her most vulnerable self, straight into her secrets. Although she didn’t know what secrets she was afraid of people seeing. That she’d finally had an orgasm? That it was with that pirate-looking guy back there? That she was falling into some kind of weird traditional female role, admiring a man using a screwdriver to adjust awnings, even though her mother had always told her to “be her own man”?
The older couple nodded and went on to set up their own booth, stacking yellow ducks, while Lia adjusted her dress and began setting up the bookmarks. Luckily she had changed clothes last night and no one would recognize she was wearing the same thing. Cora would be there any minute. And luckily she’d had the sandals in her bag, which she tugged on this morning for the festival. Unfortunately, she’d left one of the blue shoes on Evan’s boat in her haste to scoop up her discarded clothing, but she’d get it later. She was always going to think of those as her “sex shoes.” Break them in, indeed.
At noon, she and Evan took the last weekend tour out on the cat. They left Cora in the booth, despite the fact Lia had wanted to leave Cora and Douglas alone together. But Evan needed Douglas to help with the deckhand duties. Lia felt a bit superfluous, but Evan insisted her narration was terrific. Once or twice, he turned to grin at her. “Very good, Cinderella,” he’d say, low, so it couldn’t be picked up in the microphone.
Much to her surprise, her knees went a little weak each time.
The only time Evan seemed distant and unreachable was toward the end of the tour, when he went about ten minutes off course.
Lia pulled herself up the steps to the bridge to check.
“The baby.” Evan thrust his chin out toward the horizon. “I thought I saw her, but maybe not.”
“Are we off course?”
Evan glanced down at the gauges. “Not really. We’ll be fine. I just thought I saw her. . . .”
“We should get back, Evan.”
He nodded absently and lifted the binoculars, seemingly forgetting she was there. But after another minute, he pulled the boat around and grinned at her as if he’d just remembered.
After the tour, she, Douglas, and Evan spent a couple of hours cleaning up the boat—they needed to do a good job for the charter the next day. Evan kept trying to get her to take off, but she insisted she wanted to help. The physical activity, out in the bright sun, with the seagulls cawing overhead, was strangely edifying.
In the evening, once the booths closed up, Cora joined them, and the four of them grabbed dinner at the festival after wandering through the sandcastle-building contest.
After they said their good-byes to Douglas and Cora near the grassy knoll, Evan grabbed Lia’s hand and tugged her back to his boat just as the sun set, where they enjoyed two more of the five positions, to the distant sounds of the new Band in the Sand, which was supposed to sound like the Rat Pack.
“I really need to go home this time,” she said, as “That’s Amore” came drifting down the cove. Her head hung over the side of his bed.
“Why?” He rolled toward her and ran his hand down her backside.
“The charter is tomorrow, and I have to get ready—at least wear fresh clothes, feed Missy.”
“You look fine.”
“Fine enough to fuck?”
Evan raised an eyebrow.
“I’m sorry.” She waved her hand. “I didn’t mean to say that. Sometimes my mouth filter doesn’t work.”
“You do have quite a mouth on you, Cinderella.”
“Not very Cinderella of me, is it?”
“It’s not.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Not at all. I think I love it, in fact.”
The word “love” fell so beautifully from Evan’s lips, so naturally, so right for him, that Lia rolled over and stared. Although the word sometimes gave her the heebie-jeebies, and she knew he didn’t mean it in a serious way, Lia felt a strange, sudden bolt of jealousy toward the wife who heard this from him for real. She rolled away from him.
Her head lolled toward the drawer where she remembered Evan shoved that photograph that first morning.
“Evan, what was Renece like?” she whispered. “Can I see her picture?”
He hesitated for what felt like an eternity while the boat rolled gently. Finally, he leaned over to open the drawer.
Lia lay flat and held the silver frame between her palms. She stifled a gasp—she hadn’t expected Luke to be in the picture. He looked exactly like Evan—adorable, with Evan’s blue eyes and high cheekbones. His hair was a tumble of curls, like his mom’s, but the color of Evan’s. He had his mother’s smile. Lia let her gaze slide up and down over Renece’s face. Avery did look quite a bit like her—Evan had been absolutely right about that.
“They’re beautiful,” she said when she found her voice. Tears pricked the backs of her eyes. “He looks just like you.” She tried to smile.
Evan nodded. Words seemed beyond him.
“What was he like?”
“Happy,” Evan said. “Energetic. Curious. A little introverted, but once he trusted you, he was so loving. He’d throw his arms around your neck and cling like a monkey. He liked to draw. He loved animals.”
Evan leaned over again and pulled a piece of notebook paper out of the drawer. “Here’s his drawing of Valentine. We used to see her in San Diego.”
Lia took the paper with the crayon drawing. Luke had even gotten her flukes right, with a heart drawn right in the center. The whale was smiling with red crayon lips.
“This is lovely.” Tears threatened again, and Lia laid the drawing on the tabletop. “We should get you a frame for that, so you can keep it out.”
Evan’s eyes had become gentle. He nodded.
“What was Renece like?”
Evan took longer to answer this time. He tenderly tucked Luke’s drawing back into the drawer. “I’m not sure what you want to hear.”
Lia sat up. “You don’t have to worry about what I want to hear. I’m not competing with her.” She laughed, but her laugh sounded hollow, even to her. “I just get the sense that you don’t talk about them very often. But it’s probably good to talk. It helps people heal.”
Evan’s mouth was set in a line that made it clear he didn’t think so. But Lia wanted to help. Part of the obvious guilt he carried around, and carried into the bedroom, was probably the assumption that any woman he took to bed would want him to forget Renece. But Lia didn’t. She thought it was good that he remembered.
“Was she talkative?” she prompted.
He thought that over while the waves lapped the dock pylons outside and the boat rocked slowly. “No,” he said. “She was quiet.”
“Not like me, huh?”
He chuckl
ed. “Not like you.”
Bolstered by the answer, Lia shifted onto her elbows and tried again: “Was she funny?”
He shrugged. “Not in an overt way, but she made me smile.”
“Was she fun?”
“Yes.”
“What did you love most about her?” Lia held her breath. And, when she did so, she realized that she was asking these questions for herself.
She had to suck in some extra air and look away toward the pillowcase once the realization hit. She wanted to know what Evan loved. And, more importantly, she wanted to know how close she came to that description.
The shock of it all—the fact that the word “love” had come into her awareness with this man—made her want to jump out of the bed, jump out of her skin. But her curiosity kept her firmly in his bed.
She stared at the pillow seam and waited for his gravelly answer. And she knew, suddenly and without warning, that she was waiting to see if Evan Betancourt could ever fall in love with her.
“Let’s do this another time.” He took the frame out of her hands and put it back in the drawer.
Disappointment warred with relief in her chest. On the one hand, she could start breathing again. But on the other hand, she really wanted to know.
She knew she had crossed a very dangerous line in what she wanted from this man. She wanted him to love her.
But she didn’t know why. She frowned into the dim cabin. He wasn’t staying, and she couldn’t ask him to. They were just too-different people. She was filled with ambitions he would never understand, and he lacked any ambition at all, which she would never understand. . . .
With the picture tucked back into the drawer with the drawing, and the door slammed shut, he turned toward her.
“You don’t want to talk about Renece anymore?” Lia asked into the silence.
“If I’m going to ‘use’ you, I’ll be damned if it’s going to be as a shrink.”
Lia couldn’t help but laugh.
Ten Good Reasons Page 28