Cassidy reached out a hand toward the bow of his boat. Nutcase was perched on the very end of the bowsprit that rode just a foot or so from the dock. The cat sniffed her extended hand for a second and then launched herself across the water into Cassidy’s arms. Rather than withdrawing as Melanie had or simply dodging the scruffy beast, Cassidy caught her and let her snuggle right into her arms and rub her head under Cassidy’s chin.
Well, she’d certainly passed the cat test. His father came down the finger pier between his boat and the next to meet the visitor.
But would she survive the parent test?
# # #
Russell aimed the bow into the wind and set the engine to idle. With the ease of a half year of practice he raised the main and cleated off the sheet. He still hadn’t run the jib halyard back to the cockpit and he hurried forward to haul it up before the boat slipped off the wind. The big foresail unfurled with a loud snap.
The breeze was fresh without being strong or cool, a near perfect sailing day.
Tying off the line, he hung the loose tail in a quick coil and trotted back to the cockpit. He killed the engine and kicked the tiller over with his knee.
In one smooth sweep the Lady slid from loud vibrations and diesel fumes into the solid, silent pull of the world’s winds. She heeled over and surged forward—a tug deep in his gut that made him feel everything would be okay. He’d come a long way from his first scary solo out to the Lime Kiln light and back.
His father watched him closely. He’d always been tall and patrician, and would look completely in place as an English lord advising a Queen. His hair was grayer, the lines deeper, but it was still a commanding face.
Russell’s mother was in her usual Liz Taylor mode. Blue jeans that cost more than most evening gowns and a cashmere sweater showed off the success of her personal trainer’s perseverance on a body nearing sixty. A silk kerchief of royal blue kept her thick, brown hair under perfect control. Large, round-eyed sunglasses were pushed up on her forehead as she eyed Cassidy—who was the only one at ease on the whole boat. Other than Nutcase.
The fur beast had checked in with him on her way to her perch on the boom. In moments the ball of black fur lay curled up in the foot of the sail atop the boom. Far enough out that nothing lay below except ocean waves. Did she enjoy the danger? Or not see it? They’d tried a kitty life preserver: an unsuccessful and painful experiment. The scratches on his arms had taken a week to heal from that one.
Cassidy sat across from his parents on the low side of the cockpit, a plastic tumbler of iced tea held easily in one hand. A tiny fleck of sunscreen remained on the edge of one ear that he longed to rub in, but he didn’t dare. They didn’t have that kind of a relationship.
Stupid. They didn’t have any relationship, other than bumping into and despising each other for six months. Without even knowing they knew each other. But they did—Angelo was gonna shit. And he was also going to kill himself for not taking the day off to join them and watch.
Unless Angelo already knew, but hadn’t told him. Maybe he’d begged off so he wouldn’t be swimming ashore right about now.
“I didn’t know you were a model, though I should have guessed.”
At Cassidy’s words, he dropped the tiller and had to grab for it again as the boat slewed into the wind. Nutcase popped her head up and stared at him. She slowly resettled as he didn’t call “helms a’lee.”
“You were a model?” he blurted it out.
His mother blushed a moment.
“Miss Puerto Rico,” Cassidy informed him.
His dad nodded in agreement and threw an arm around his wife’s shoulders giving her a quick hug. That was news as well. They were always so formal and separate; as cold to each other as they were to him. Maybe cold wasn’t quite right. Perhaps always on show was more accurate.
“Yes. I took the prize money and moved to New York. Worked the catalog pages and runways to put myself through NYU. Close your mouth, dear. You look foolish.”
He clamped his mouth shut and clipped the end of his tongue.
“You didn’t know?” Cassidy gave him a puzzled expression. How was he supposed to know everything about his parents’ past? She probably knew every detail about her own from the moment she exited the womb until…now. He didn’t even know where her parents were.
He shook his head.
She opened her mouth. This was it. He was about to be torpedoed. He really didn’t need a lecture from the person who was supposed to be his buffer.
“So, John,” Cassidy turned back to his parents, “how did you two meet?”
Russell had to blink. Not only had she slipped in a perfectly natural subject change, but she hadn’t sold his soul either. Some day he’d stop underestimating her.
“The opera,” his mother answered. There were times he wondered if his father could even speak. She always ran every social occasion, with immaculate finesse and warmth; one he’d always thought a bit artificial.
The look she turned on her husband was electric. They actually held hands; there was another one Angelo would never believe. Russell certainly didn’t.
“Well,” his father’s voice was gruff from lack of use. “I was at a fundraiser for the Met.”
“I was in marketing.”
“Damn prettiest thing I’d ever seen came walking up to me at the hors d’oeuvres table.”
“I had no idea who he was,” his mother said off-handedly. “I’d just finessed a million-dollar donation from a usual hundred-thousander and decided to take the rest of the evening for me.”
“Walked right up to me.”
“I was headed for the bar.”
“Walked right by me.”
Their sentences were overlapping, their voices soft. Russell glanced at Cassidy who was enraptured by the story. Her body shifting so easily as the boat slid over the waves it was as if she’d spent her life afloat. The sun discovered the hint of red in her hair and made it warm and alive.
“Then she looked back over her shoulder at me.”
She smiled up at him, “You were staring.”
“She never got her drink.”
“He forgot he was holding a piece of shrimp until I stole it from him.”
Cassidy’s hand shifted over her heart as if she were about to melt.
He ducked to peek under the sail. They were off Edmonds already, this lighthouse was so close. They’d be there in no time. Another hour to the lighthouse if the wind held off the beam. They might go the whole way up the coast on a single tack, Nutcase would appreciate the long nap without the boom swinging about. And it was far too deep off the lighthouse to throw out an anchor. Lunch aboard would get them most of the way back to dock. He might survive the day yet.
“Did you really?” Cassidy was busy looking amazed. What had he missed?
“What else was I supposed to do with him? He had talked my ear off until the hotel kicked us out into the lobby. It was three in the morning. They’d already cleaned everything in the room except the two chairs we were sitting on.”
He looked at his father who noticed his scrutiny. He shrugged and nodded with a silly smile on his face.
They’d slept together on their first date. People didn’t…well, he had often enough. But parents didn’t…his couldn’t…had.
“Where did you find a place?”
It was a friggin’ hotel, Cassidy. Lots of beds there. His own mother—the little beauty queen-social climber that she was—had climbed right into his father’s lap and his fortune.
His mother reached out and touched Cassidy’s hand like a best friend emphasizing a point.
“It’s New York. There’s always someplace to dance.”
Dance?
“We found the seediest little dive,” John tapped his feet on the cockpit floor. “Smoking dark jazz.”
“We slow da
nced past sunrise.”
He was so glad that Cassidy was doing the speaking. He’d have screwed up the conversation eight different ways already. Maybe he could understand some of his father’s silences. Julia Morgan had clearly charmed Cassidy Knowles and he suspected that wasn’t as easy as his mother made it look. Maybe his mother really was that charming and it hadn’t been the act he’d assumed all these years.
When had he decided that anyway? Anne? No, Kristi. His mother had been ever so kind to a coed named Kristi he was about to break up with later that night. His mother totally screwed that up and he’d been so pissed. He’d been stuck with her for another three months before he figured out how to let her down easy. By then he’d totally missed his chance with... Was he really that shallow?
“That first week we went out dancing every night,” Former Miss Puerto Rico leaned up against his father. “John, we need to take that up again when you retire.”
“You’re retiring?” It blurted out of him and lay there on the deck like a week-old fish.
“I’ve got some bright young men who are ready to move up. You were never interested in the business and they’re ready for me to let it go. Finally I realized, so am I.” He shrugged off forty years as if it had been a three-month gig.
“The business?” Cassidy took the conversation back before he could fumble it overboard.
“Morganson Shipping. I made up the name even before Russell came along, but the boy was never interested in the business. Perhaps you’ve heard of us.”
Cassidy laughed, that dancing musical sound of a thousand bells. He couldn’t help smiling.
“I’ve seen enough of your shipping containers on my daily run down along Seattle’s waterfront.”
“Could have bowled me over too,” Julia poked a finger into his father’s ribs. “He, the jerk, didn’t tell me who he was, at least not until that weekend when he casually invited me over for dinner to meet his parents. Herman and Alicia Morgan. I was so scared I almost fainted.”
“You were magnificent and almost as beautiful as you are now. Simply amazing, Russ. She out-niced even your grandmother and that took some doing in those days.”
Russell was glad for the tiller. It was the only reason he didn’t collapse entirely. Not only hadn’t his mother been a gold-digger as he’d finally decided she was, but they’d just told Cassidy he was worth millions. Actually hundreds of millions. Far above and beyond his own comfortable success.
She hadn’t reacted.
At least not yet.
He certainly wasn’t looking forward to their next time alone. He could count on one hand with all his fingers folded up the number of women who hadn’t gunned for him the moment they found out who he was. Even Melanie had originally been drawn by his fortune and it wasn’t until after it was over that he understood that she’d moved beyond that.
Shit!
He had liked Cassidy.
Did like her.
# # #
“Catching up on your reading?”
Cassidy rammed the letter in her pocket and looked up, shielding her eyes against the sun.
Russell stood over her, moving easily with the sway of the deck. He looked like the statue of Rhodes: tall, powerful, and gazing out over the harbor and the world that was his domain. One of the seven wonders of the world.
And he was, in an odd way. Once he’d relaxed a bit, he’d been funny, even charming. But there was none of the false, pickup-line smoothness that she’d heard too many times on too many first dates. Perhaps it was because of their history, it was now too late for that.
“A bit,” she kept her hand on the letter—it felt as if it might jump out and bite her if she didn’t keep it trapped in her pocket.
Russell glanced back at the cockpit. She did too and saw John with a leisurely hand on the tiller. Julia leaned back against him as the boat slid easily over the sparkling water.
From up here on the foredeck, Cassidy had a splendid view of the way ahead and to the left. The big foresail blocked her view to the right. Whidbey Island towered ahead: rocky cliffs, conifer-covered headlands. There were a few small power boats anchored in a narrow cove and they passed a brightly painted buoy over a dozen feet tall that rang its deep bell with each wave that rolled by.
Russell squatted down.
“I wanted to say, thanks. You’re great with them.”
He didn’t even reach out a hand for balance, as if he’d been born on the boat. She’d felt off balance all day. Ever since she’d woken up with her stomach in a knot of nerves that refused to be explained away.
She nodded her head, it was all she trusted herself to do.
He was so close she could easily reach out. See if his hair was truly as soft as it looked, or touch her fingers to his smile.
“I don’t know how you do it. I’ve never seen them so comfortable.” He glanced aft again. “And how did I know so little about my own mother?”
Her hand was still on her father’s letter, crumpled in her slacks pocket. He’d found work as a carpenter and a field hand and who knew what all. Odd-job man to all the Kitsap Peninsula and Bainbridge Island as well while his wife tended ailing parents and an unhappy toddler. Rebuilding the well house at a tiny, island winery had led to a job as vintner, horticulturist, and general repairman all rolled into one. When the old owner had died, he’d left the whole winery to her father. He’d given up everything to be with his family, and gotten everything in return, just in a different form.
You never know where opportunity lies, Ice Sweet.
You never know.
“Your parents are charming. I like them a lot.”
“And they like you, which may be a first among the women I’ve brought home.”
She’d never met a man with more skill at saying the wrong thing. At first it had made her angry, now she was finding it rather sweet. He was forthright with no games and no filter. His feelings turned into speech before they turned into thought and were carefully groomed and sanitized. He was a lot like his cat in that way—a sweet mess and a bit scruffy around the edges.
“Is that what I am?”
“What?” he looked worried as he reviewed his last comment in his head.
“Am I a woman you’ve brought home? Konked with a club and dragged to your boat like some mighty Viking?” If a Viking like this kidnapped her, maybe she’d want to go along with it.
He opened his mouth and then thought better of it and closed it again. He shook his head ruefully.
“Porcupines.”
She laughed. He’d really grabbed onto that image. He was so close that she could smell him despite the sailing breeze. His sleeves rolled up to reveal powerful arms—big, safe arms to be wrapped in. Her hand reached out, of its own accord, and rested on his knee.
The muscles were shifting easily beneath the denim, working unconsciously to keep his balance on the rocking boat. His eyes were watching hers and she could feel herself melting. Would he kiss her? She finally knew the answer to her much earlier question: if he tried, she certainly wasn’t going to resist.
Her body shifted as the boat thumped off a wave and she leaned a little closer to him. Her hand on his knee steadying him as well. They were so close that her head was spinning…oak—he smelled of oak and mahogany and teak and ocean waves. Of heady reds at their prime and of soft, cool whites sipped late at night in front of a warm fire.
She leaned closer. If he wasn’t going to kiss her, she’d kiss him.
“ ‘I didn’t realize Tuesday was the first.’ ”
His words didn’t make sense. This was a moment for—
“You’ve been to every lighthouse.”
“Yes,” she had, but what did that have to do with a kiss under the midday sun.
“You have the same calendar.”
She nodded her head and leaned forward again.
/> “You lied.”
No she hadn’t. “About what?” She didn’t ever— “Oh.”
“Oh, she says. ‘Haven’t been to a lighthouse before,’ she said.” He pushed a strong finger against her shoulder. Hard enough to tip her away.
“You lied.”
“No, I evaded.” Evaded the most exasperating man on the planet.
“You lied.”
If he said it one more time, she was going to smack him.
“Didn’t.”
“You said, and I quote, ‘Yes, I am a lighthouse virgin.’ ” He looked immensely pleased with himself. She shoved his knee hard enough that he tipped back from his squat and landed on his behind against the lifelines.
“Do you catalog everything everyone says so that you can throw it back in their face? I didn’t want you of all people to know about…” There was no way she was going to explain her own father to this irritating man.
He stared off across the water for a moment. Looked up at the sails as if he might find a clue up there. His smile twisted slightly to one side and his eyes twinkled as his gaze returned to her. Deep, ocean-deep eyes.
“Nope. Just you. Just everything you’ve ever said. I’d bet I could repeat every word.”
“There you go, doing it again.” Her heart rate had definitely jumped, it was all she could hear.
“The jerk being charming?”
He was so full of himself, and he was absolutely right. It was one of the nicest, back-handed compliments she’d ever had.
“Hey, up there.” John shouted to make his voice carry above the wind. “We’re almost there.”
Russell stood with the grace of the wind and stepped out onto the narrow bowsprit to look beyond the sail. He paused for a long moment and then turned to her with a positively wicked grin.
He offered his hand. His grip was warm and firm as he helped her to her feet, and with the slightest little tug he could pull her into his arms whether she wanted to or not. Instead of having the decency to take advantage of the moment, he turned and placed her hand on the lifeline so that they could head back to the cockpit.
Where Dreams Books 1-3 Page 21