Ahead in the Heat

by Lorelie Brown

  “I don’t see you out there pushing him into the lineup to get the waves he needs.” She kept the smile, even as she waved the porter down. She needed a drink. Some kind of fruit juice with a shot of rum if she was going to have to listen to this bitch for the next four hours of surfing. “Honey, you seem to have an inflated idea of what you do for Nate’s career.”

  “I do whatever I need to,” Gloria said, with what approached a snarl. She pulled her ponytail forward over her shoulder, twirling her fingers through the end. Her nails were blunt but carefully polished.

  Annie just nodded along with her, looking back toward the guys out surfing. Unless Gloria was willing to blow judges to guarantee Nate perfect tens, she had no idea what the other woman could possibly be doing for the guy’s career. After all, even oral sex wouldn’t help much. There were three judges per heat, and that would be a lot of inappropriate contact to guarantee a boost in scores. A lot.

  Annie ordered a drink from a porter with a gleaming white polo to match his smile. She wasn’t sure if the guy really liked his job, or if he was just a really cheery person, but either way she enjoyed chatting with him for a few minutes about the local fruit and which would go best with rum. He was a nice balance to Gloria’s hard-to-navigate personality.

  But as soon as Annie turned back to watch the surfing, Gloria was chattering away again. She knew a lot about the surfers, both the few pros who’d turned up to try out the waves a few days early, and the local guys. She pointed out the guy who’d won a wild card by placing first in a local event, just as he nailed a barrel and bounced out as smooth as butter. “But then, at least these aren’t tow-in waves today. Must seem small to him.”

  “Tow-in?” Annie shuddered. She figured that if the waves were so big that surfers had to be pulled by a Jet Ski to get enough speed, maybe humans should stay out of the water temporarily. “Yeah, I don’t think I’d even be here on the boat on a day like that.”

  “Why?” Gloria looked at Annie and did something suspiciously like fluttering her lashes. A faux-innocent blinking thing that Annie wanted to ask her to rewind and do again because did women really do things like that and mean it? “At least on tow-in days they wear safety rigs. Today, Sean could get slammed on the reef just as easy as anything. Be a shame if he wrecked that pretty face.”

  Chapter 31

  Sean’s first barrel of the morning was the best wave he caught all day.

  The wave closed over him, the perfect glass of the blue water closing over his head and then his right side. He put his left hand out and trailed his fingers through the water. The move regulated his speed, so that he didn’t pick up too much and shoot out before the perfection was used up, but there was something heady in the act. He was one with the wave. The heavy slab owned him, but he was part of it too. If the opening closed, he could be slammed by thousands of pounds of water, pushed with the weight of an entire ocean behind it.

  He leaned forward, increasing his speed so that he shot out through the contracting eye of the barrel. He could have kept carving the front, maybe add a switchback, but there was nothing better than getting barreled, so he cut up the front and dropped down the back. Let the rest of the wave go by him.

  He was in paradise. He was somewhere more perfect than he’d imagined. Knowing Annie sat on the white-sided boat that floated in the middle distance only made it more perfect. He wondered if she’d spotted him on that wave.

  The photographers had. One of them waved to him from her position in the water. He paddled over to the only female photographer with a lens trained on the lineup. “Hey, Avvie. Where ya been?”

  Her nose wrinkled, and she gently sculled through the water to maintain her position with one hand. Her other hand had a firm grip on a camera in a waterproof casing with a safety strap attached by Velcro to her wrist. “You know Tanner hates it when people call me that. Jack never should have started it.”

  “I don’t see Tanner out here.”

  “I hate it too.”

  “Well that’s different, then.” He flicked water at her, but she was already soaking wet. “How you doing, Avalon?”

  “So damn awesome.” She beamed at him, and he got the feeling that she’d have levitated out of the water if only happiness counted. “Things are going really well.”

  “I guessed. Never seen you out here before.”

  It was difficult for female photographers to get assignments to Fiji. They could go on their own, in the hope that maybe they’d sell photos to a magazine and make their investment back, but the outlay was high. Economy tickets started close to two thousand bucks, and that wasn’t even counting accommodations. Sharing bunk style with communal bathrooms didn’t work as easily for women, and it really didn’t work for photographers with thousands of dollars of equipment to protect.

  “I’m on assignment.” Three simple words, but Sean knew the weight they carried. And Avalon did too, because she was ecstatically happy.

  “Proud of you, chickie.” He’d give her a hug, but he was still floating on his board and there was no reason to drown them in the middle of a hard-core wave. “I’ll stand you a pint later.”

  “You’ve been hanging out with the Aussies too much. Pint?” she teased.

  “Eh. Beer. Drink. Whatever you want.” He reached out quickly and scrubbed his knuckles across the top of her head. “Not every day a chick gets a deal so big.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Tanner would kick your ass if he heard you say that.”

  She and Tanner had been dating for five months now, since about the period when Tanner had nailed his championship with the San Sebastian Pro. Word was that they were happy, even with Tanner home most of the time while Avalon traveled the globe. They went together occasionally, but often Tanner was too busy painting and otherwise improving the school he planned to launch. “Still don’t see him. Besides . . . I’ve got a girl with me.”

  Avalon’s eyes went wide. She pushed wet bangs off her face, sinking a little in the water as she did so. Then she popped back up again. “No, I didn’t hear that right. You brought a girl? To a competition?”

  He shifted on the board, but that made him bob. His toes dangled in the water, which had felt warm initially. Now the chill was getting to him. His stomach pulled tight. “I brought her to Fiji. Major seduction points.”

  “You brought her to a competition, dude. Don’t be dense.” Avalon was one of those girls who said things exactly how she saw them. No bullshit between her brains and her mouth.

  A lot like Annie, as a matter of fact, but Sean had never wanted to pin Avalon against a wall and kiss the hell out of her. “Don’t be jealous. You’ve got the love of your life.”

  She laughed, and, kicking to keep herself floating, started to push herself away from him. He paddled closer. “Do you mean she’s the love of your life? Because I really think that’s what you just implied.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” he muttered. “You’re acting like you’re twelve.”

  “Nah, I already asked my boy to go steady.” She stroked to keep herself even on a slightly larger-than-normal swell. “You’re the one who swore since Gloria that you’d have no steady chicks during the season.”

  “The season is eleven fucking months long. Maybe I got a little tired of that rule,” he muttered.

  “What’s that?” She hadn’t been able to hear him over the constant roar of the breaking wave. At this distance, Cloudbreak was so big that it became a constant sweeping engine of sound in the background that had to be shouted over.

  “Nothing,” he said in the necessary louder tone. “Drinks. Later. Promise me?”

  “You got it, hot stuff. I can’t wait to meet the girl.”

  “She’ll probably get pissed as hell if you call her a girl.”

  Avalon’s smile went wide. Her round cheeks were pink with the amount of sun she was getting. She had on a racerback bikini
top of some sort, because he could see the straps wrapping around her shoulders and behind her neck. “Then she’s my kind of woman, and I double can’t wait. Now go surf something that I can take a picture of.”

  “Aye-aye, girlie,” he said with a sardonic tip of two fingers to his eyebrow in a lazy salute.

  Avalon flipped him the bird. Of course she did. That was what happened when you teased little-sister types, after all.

  And little-sister types were also prone to pointing out things that you didn’t want to look at. Like his blithely having brought Annie along when he had Ackerman to shut down. Then they’d spent most of yesterday afternoon in bed. Well, on the back patio, and then in bed, coming until he’d been so tired that his knees had been wobbly as he walked across the room to the bathroom.

  What kind of training was that? What kind of concentration?

  The kind that would lose him the world championship before he even got a crack at it.

  He wouldn’t allow that. He couldn’t.

  The last fifteen years of his life had built to this. Every time he’d hidden a board from his mom at a friend’s house, so that he’d actually know where it was when it came time to surf. Every time he’d washed off in the locker room at the high school rather than go home. Every time he’d ridden his bike to the beach and stayed. Occasionally, he’d stayed for more than one day. Once he’d even hidden out underneath the San Sebastian pier, just to be able to surf the next day, because he’d known if he went home, his mom would have him. Would trap him. He’d have to go with her to thrift shops and yard sales, standing there while she bought more shit they didn’t need.

  More shit there wasn’t anywhere in their house to keep.

  He had fought hard for his career. He believed in his career. Hard work got gains. Got the things worth having in life.

  He didn’t trust things that came easily.

  It was time to get his head in the game.

  He paddled out toward the break, watching the sun glimmer off the bright blue ripples of the water. There was bright and then there was bright as diamonds. The water was the latter. It sluiced over his hips and thighs as he lay on his board. Each stroke brought him closer to the lineup. A half dozen men were out there. Fewer than any given day at San Sebastian or anywhere in Santa Barbara. But more than there’d be for the competition.

  Then, it would be four men at a time to make up a heat. Round by round. Wave by wave. The weak would be cut.

  Which meant he had to work it.

  He threw himself into practice. Snatching every wave he lined up for, because when it came down to the semifinals, he would have only thirty minutes to surf. Only his two highest scores would be counted, so there were two schools of thought. Wait for the perfect wave, and hope he got two prime specimens, or take everything he could catch and trust that two of them would be good.

  At Cloudbreak, everything was heavy. For most of them, he concentrated on cutbacks and did a pretty decent layback snap. There was too much power behind the waves to gain the speed necessary to catch air at the top. But he wanted another barrel. He was chasing it. The need rode on the back of his heels and pushed him out into the water again and again, even after a hydration break.

  Near four o’clock, he thought he had it. He had a perfect drop-in on an eleven-foot wave. He slipped down the front, digging his back rail into the heavy water. Nothing blocked him ahead. The barrel closed in from behind and he shouldn’t have fucked it up.

  But he did. He threw one hip into the switchback, trying to squeeze just a little more speed out.

  Instead, he dug the nose of his board right into the wave. It jerked out from under him. He flew free. He sucked in air as quickly as he could. The air and the wave and the moment froze around him. Everything went into second-by-split-second breakdown. He wasn’t leashed to his board. The wave was coming up behind him.

  He could see the fucking reef beneath his feet, under the too-clear water.

  Screwed.

  The wave smashed him in the back first. Heavy-handed. A crushing blow took him down, then down farther. His shoulder screamed. He let the water flip him. Waves worked in a circle. If he let it do what it needed to, the pounding would be the worst of it. He’d get tossed out the back. Air then. Not now. Holding on. He fought for calm.

  He only knew he hit bottom by the slight sting across the elbow of his bad arm. Then he was being sucked back up.

  He ignored the burn in his lungs. This was pure adrenaline. When he broke the surface, he gasped for air. He tossed his head back. Water flicked out of his eyes.

  Adrenaline had his blood surging. The air he sucked down his throat was damp with spray and burned him. Salt stung his eyes. He was better than this. He surfed better than this.

  There was getting pounded by a big wave because sometimes shit happened, and then there was getting pounded by fucking Cloudbreak because he’d been a jackass and done something stupid. This was stupid. He’d earned the beating. That his elbow hurt and leaked a faint cloud of pink into the water was only exactly what he deserved. His shoulder ached in a sharp, painful way.

  He’d fucked up. Not just on the wave. By not keeping his mind where it needed to be. He was on the World Championship Circuit. It wasn’t the same thing as being a kid on the Prime circuit and thinking he could have anything. Look how that had turned out. His mom had gone into the hospital for mold-borne respiratory issues, but that hadn’t been enough for her. She’d gone back to that shitty house.

  Nothing easy was worthwhile. He had to remember that.

  Chapter 32

  Annie knew something was wrong with Sean. That was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out what it was.

  The restaurant at the resort was beautiful. Floral-patterned linens covered the small tables. Black china offset the woven-palm place settings. The stemware was all pure crystal. Annie held her wineglass in one hand, the bowl against her palm. Swirling the rich red wine, she watched the sheen cling to the sides of the glass.

  Sean looked amazing. Leaning over the sink earlier in the evening, he’d buzzed his own head with a set of clippers so that his hair was the same length as when she’d met him six weeks ago. It made her want to rub her hands and wrists and cheek over him so she could feel the prickle. His long-sleeved button-down shirt should have been too fancy for their casual beach surroundings, but the way he’d negligently buttoned it and rolled the sleeves back to show off tanned forearms made it work.

  Of course, it also showed off the gleaming white bandage covering his elbow. It had nearly killed her to keep her hands to herself. She’d cut their official, business ties, and unfortunately that meant no going back. But she’d completely hovered as the Coyote team doctor checked out Sean’s range of motion and pain. Plus she’d kind of nudged for a precautionary X-ray, convincing herself she made the suggestion on a concerned-lover basis, not a former-doctor basis.

  She took a sip of the wine. It was fine, so rich that it rolled over her tongue and had none of the bitterness that she’d often disliked about reds. Sean had picked it, naturally. He’d had a smile when he ordered, and he had a smile now, something little that tucked the finely carved planes of his cheeks tight.

  But she didn’t think he meant it.

  “That wipeout today must have sucked,” she said.

  His lips parted and his gaze dropped to the plate of fish he’d already decimated. All that remained were a few shreds of palm fronds that had once been wrapped around the flaky white fish. Sean burned hot when he surfed; she’d realized that. She was half-tempted to push the uneaten portion of her food across the table toward him, but he was a grown man. He’d figure out how to obtain more food for himself.

  “It wasn’t great,” he said, picking up his glass of ice water. He downed half of it in one swill, giving lie to his casual words.

  Watching him wipe out on a wave like Cloudbreak had been in
tense. She’d been on her feet and at the rail in moments, willing him to come up. To pop out of the water. But when it came down to it, she’d had absolutely zero power to make him survive, to make him do better than just survive. Her heartbeat had been trilling like a bird’s call, it was so fast.

  For the second time since she’d known Sean, she’d wished she’d renewed her Ativan prescription. She’d had to talk herself down from the edge as he’d swum up to the boat and clambered up the dive platform. “It was pretty intense, the way you were dripping blood.”

  He glanced at the white bandage on his arm, but then shrugged. “Not a break, at least. That one hurt worse. This is nothing.”

  Her teeth snapped together. He was being so casual about something that could have easily meant a new rupture of his previous injury. Or worse. He could have died out there. It wasn’t that she wanted him to stop, but she wanted him to at least give a fucking damn. She pressed her lips into a smile. “Maybe next time you’ll attract a shark. That’d be something, yeah?”

  “I’m mostly pissed I broke my board. It was a good gun. I’ve taken that one around the world half a dozen times.”

  “Can you order another?” The words were right. He was talking. But something . . . Something was wrong. Maybe the way he looked at her. She wasn’t used to his gaze feeling that . . . flat.

  “Yeah, totally. Sage Wright made it for me, and she keeps the stats on all her customers. The boards she makes for them. Won’t be here in time for the competition, but it’ll be waiting for me when I get back home.” He was being so casual. The pitch of his voice said he might as well be giving an interview. She could have been anyone.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He flashed her a smile and sipped his wine. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  She put her glass down but left a finger on the base. She turned it around and around. “So what’s your plan for next week?”