“I’m not arguing,” he said as he transferred the plate back to the little nightstand before coming back to her. “You are definitely dangerous.”
SUPping turned out to be great fun for Derek, mostly because he got to watch Jaycee’s mini freak outs more than once as the little paddle boarding craft tested her balance and her courage.
“You know, I could get used to this,” he called to her as she carefully made her way across the glass-calm water only yards away from him. He had no trouble guiding his own vessel and watching her at the same time.
“Oh, yeah?” she asked as she worked to stay on her feet. She tipped once, barely catching herself.
“Yeah,” he said, taking in the sight of her, the loose black cover-up partially concealing her bathing suit underneath. “How about you?”
“I’m deciding.”
Amused, he couldn’t keep the love for her from overflowing his heart. “On what?”
“On just how sore I’m going to be when we get back.” The board tipped a fraction, and she tipped with it, struggling to hold her balance. “I’m glad we didn’t try the ocean. I would’ve been shark bait by now.”
“Yes, but you would be such cute shark bait.”
Turning her craft in front of him, she dipped the paddle into the water and flung it his direction, a move which drastically threatened her equilibrium.
“Hey now.” He brushed the water droplets from the front of him. “That was uncalled for.”
She pointed her paddle at him. “Then you should be nice.”
“I thought was being nice. I said you’re cute. What’s wrong with that? What, did you want? Gorgeous, heart-stopping, amazing, stunning, beautiful?”
“Stop.” She splashed more water at him. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“Shouldn’t be embarrassing if it’s true.”
Jaycee shook her head at him. “So, what’s after this, Romeo? You got plans for the evening?”
“I could think of a few things that would keep us busy.” His grin held all kinds of mischievousness.
“Oh, yeah? Anything in those plans about eating?” She was getting better, more stable, less balance-challenged now. He could always tell when that happened because once her current task was in hand, her mind would start lining up the next thing on the agenda. It was one of the things that had attracted him to her in the beginning—her ability to simultaneously handle life and line it out in front of her and him.
“What, the strawberries weren’t enough?” he asked, paddling close enough to be able to watch her and be mesmerized by her as he always was.
“My heart says yes, my stomach says no.” Going ahead of him, she wisped the paddle one way and then the other through the gentle water.
“How about steak?” And he laughed when she whipped her gaze over to his.
She shook her head. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”
“What? I feed you chocolate, you feed me steak. I call that a win-win.”
Her laugh said she wasn’t mad. “They said there’s going to be a luau down on the beach tonight. I was thinking that sounded like fun.”
“Will they have steak?”
“You and your steak habit. I think you’re addicted to that stuff.” Coming around so she went past him the other direction, she caught his gaze and held it. “I think I should buy stock in the beef companies.”
“And you wouldn’t have me any other way.”
Softening, her gaze held him. “Well, you’re right about that.”
The gentle island breeze held nothing of December as Jaycee sat back next to him on the beach later that evening. His shirt was open, and she couldn’t deny what that simple fact did to her ability to stay pleasantly social with the others gathered there.
“Christmas in Hawaii,” she said as she watched the dancing fire. “I could get used to this.”
“Yep.” He put his arms all the way around her and tightened them. “What do you say, we chuck it all and just stay here forever?”
Snuggling up into his arms, she couldn’t disagree. “I’m with you on that one.” She closed her eyes, feeling the tinges of soreness from the paddle boards. “Ugh.”
“What?” he asked in alarm.
“My back. That one muscle is definitely not happy with me.”
Without asking, he put his hand on her back and the warmth of it melted into her. “This one?”
“Ugh. Uh, yeah. That one too.”
Carefully setting them both to swaying to the soft music that was wafting down the beach, Derek continued to work on her back. Usually on-point with everything, Jaycee had a hard time not relinquishing all control and just surrendering to the lulling movement. “Mmm. That’s good.”
He laid his lips next to her ear. “It’s supposed to be.”
“Mmm.” Her eyes went closed, and she gave up the fight. “You keep that up, and we’ll still be here tomorrow morning.”
Without reply, he let his hand smooth out over her back and hold there as the last shreds of holding herself up disintegrated. She took in a long breath, which settled her even further. “I never want to go home.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said softly. “Wherever I’m with you, that’s where home is.” Another second, and he shifted just slightly. “What do you say? One more dance and we call it a night?”
Although part of her wanted to argue, another part didn’t. “Okay.”
When Derek helped her to her feet, he could hardly contain the feelings that zigged and zinged through him. Jaycee West. His wife. Without so much as moving from where they stood on the sand, he took her in his arms and pushed them to swaying. To have and to hold from this day forward… No doubt about it, he was the most blessed man on the planet.
Sunday afternoon came all too soon for both of them as they checked out of their room and headed back into real life.
“You’re sure you got the pre-boarding passes?” Jaycee asked as Derek drove to the airport, his hand in hers on the console.
“Verified them this morning.”
She sighed and put her head back before letting her gaze go over to him. “So have you thought anymore about Brent’s offer to produce a new show on H&H?”
They had both agreed to table the discussion until after the wedding and honeymoon. Unfortunately, that moment was now arriving with surprising speed.
Derek said nothing for a long minute. “A little bit.”
Concerned that he might think she was mad, she lifted her head and held him with her gaze. “You gonna fill me in, or is this some big, company secret?”
He smiled over at her. “I thought we were waiting until after the honeymoon.”
She let her gaze fall as she smiled as well. “Yeah, well, humor me. It’s not like I haven’t been thinking about it too.”
“Oh, really?” As they pulled up to a stoplight, he leaned over and kissed her gently. “Isn’t that against the rules?”
Jaycee laughed. “Hey, hon? I think we left the rules way back there.”
Squeezing her hand, he chuckled and drove on through the light. “So what’re you thinking? You got any brilliant ideas?”
“A couple, but I wanted to hear yours first.” She pulled her shoulders up to her ears as she looked over at him. “What’re you thinking about all of it?”
He checked her with a short look before exhaling. “Okay, this is completely off the grid, and honestly, I have no idea if it could even work, but the thing I keep getting when I think about it is Caleb.”
Confusion marred her face. “Caleb? But he’s not even with H&H anymore.”
“I know. And I know it’s a total long-shot. Except that it isn’t.” He shook his head. “Look, we know Caleb. We’ve worked with him. We’ve seen what he can do, and it’s downright amazing.”
“I’m not arguing with any of that, but he’s with Rachel now. In North Carolina.”
“I know.” Derek nodded again, his face growing serious under the dark sunglasses he wore to thwart the
shimmering sunshine. “But I talked to him. I went to see the stuff he’s working on, and to be honest, I really think he’s the one.”
Slowly Jaycee ratcheted down her instinct to fight, to defend her friend from being hurt any more. The very fact that Rachel and Caleb had connected and fallen in love was a miracle. No way was she going to do anything to jeopardize that, even if it meant standing up to Derek to defend it. “We can’t ask him to do that. They’re getting married, and he’s just getting settled.”
Again, Derek nodded. “I get all of that. I really do, but it’s not like his show would have to be like ours is.”
Ours. Jaycee smiled at that word as it brushed across her heart.
“Plenty of the other shows are filmed in just a few locations, and,” he said as if he was holding the winning card, “I think we might even be able to talk Rachel into getting in on the fun.”
“Rachel?” Jaycee asked with more concern. “But she works at the school, and she has the kids to think about...”
“Caleb and I talked about it, and he said Rachel’s thinking about quitting and going to help him full time anyway. She’s already done a couple of pieces for the jobs he’s working on, and I have to say they’re remarkable. Not to even mention what she did on that ramp-bridge thing at the church. The way I see it, his show could easily be set in North Carolina. He could fix up old houses. It’s not like there aren’t enough of them in that area, especially with Gabriel.”
Gabriel. The hurricane that had literally changed the course of history for all of them. “So, how would this work then? He would get his own crew, and they would do the designs together?”
Derek glanced over at her. “You saw the footage. They’re magic on camera together.” He shook his head slowly and changed lanes. “Think about it, Jayc. This could be the idea we’ve been praying for.”
Praying for. The other thing that had literally changed the course of her life. She exhaled, wanting to argue but feeling how right this could be for all of them. “Okay. But what if they say no?”
He nodded twice. “Well, I think we’ve got to at least give them the chance to decide that for themselves, don’t you?”
Thinking it through, Jaycee had to agree. “When are you planning on telling them?”
“We’ve got a meeting with Brent on Wednesday to line out the next few shows. He had said he’d like for us to have a few options in mind for the new show by then. I think we talk to him first, and then we make the offer while we’re in Ridgemount over Christmas.”
“Right before their wedding?”
“I know. The timing ain’t great, but we’d better make the offer before he gets going too hard in another direction.”
Jaycee nodded. “You’re right. Boy, are they going to be surprised.”
Chapter 4
Eric & Dani
“They called from the bank about Attabury yesterday,” Danisha Richardson said as she slapped together a sandwich for her daughter and went to the pantry to get the juice. Morning in Raleigh, North Carolina had hit with an utter vengeance. Why mornings had to be so utterly impossible, Dani had no idea. “Looks like everything’s finally gone though. It’s ours.”
At the table her husband, Eric nodded over his orange juice. “About time.”
“Tell me about it. I can’t wait to call Mr. James so we can get going on it.” She added an apple and then thought better of the placement and rearranged all of it one item at a time. “The Christmas program thing is tonight. Six-thirty at the school.”
“Six-thirty?” Eric sighed and shook his head as he went back to his eggs, swiping across his NotePad that lay on the table even as he did so. “Why can’t they make those things at seven? And it would help if I wasn’t all the way out in Greensboro today.”
“Again?” Finishing the lunch, Dani rolled up the bag and hustled to the table where her daughter, Jaden was hunched over her cereal. One look at the twists, kinks and curls of her daughter’s natural hair, and Dani knew she should have taken the time to braid it the night before. Her mother would have a conniption tonight if it was anything less than Anglo-fied. Maybe the bow would be enough to tame it down a little though she wasn’t sure it would be. “Hurry up, Ja. The bus is going to be here any second.”
Without protest but dragging herself along, Jaden slipped from the table and wordlessly went to get her school things.
“I’ll be glad when it’s the 22nd,” Dani said, grabbing up the dishes and heading to the sink. “I talked to Mrs. McGuire down the street about watching Ja over the holidays. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“Um-hm.” His gaze narrowed at the screen.
“I’m just glad Christmas is on a Saturday this year.” At lightning speed, Dani put the dishes into the dishwasher and went over to retrieve Eric’s as well. “You done with this?”
“All except the coffee,” he said, still swiping.
“I talked to Mom yesterday for about five minutes.”
“Oh, yeah?”
The sigh hurt, but Dani was used to them by now. “They’re meeting with the lawyer on Tuesday to sort out the retirement money issues. They got the house on the market finally, not that she was overly thrilled about that, but what does she need with 4,000 square foot now that it’s just going to be her, you know?”
She shook her head as her hands flitted over the cabinets, wiping them down for the last time before she would see them again that evening. “I sure hope this part goes smoothly. I can’t take much more of them arguing all the time. Oh, and I talked to Mitchell the other day. Him and Kim are probably going to come down for a little of Christmas, but I figured, you know, with Mom boxing everything up, we probably should just have them all over here.”
“Whatever you think.”
“Of course, I don’t know how to do that exactly. I mean, I don’t think having Mom, Dad, and Celeste here all at the same time is a good idea. I can’t leave Mom out, but you know how she gets when Celeste is around.”
Movement at the window jerked her attention up. “Ja! The bus is here! Ja!” Waving to the bus driver for one more second, she tossed the rag into the sink to go find her daughter just as the child came out from the back, her backpack dragging along behind her. “There you are. The bus is here.”
Hurrying the two of them to the door, she grabbed her daughter’s coat and put it on her. “Now, you be good at school today, you hear me? Get your homework done because we have that program tonight.”
Jaden nodded.
“Okay. Off you go!” Dani turned her daughter and pushed her to the door as her mind kicked back into gear. “Oh! Your lunch!” She raced back into the kitchen, grabbed up the little sack, and ran back, following Jaden down the generous sidewalk to the edge of the cul de sac.
The child took the sack of lunch and head down, walked out to the bus. Dani waved again at the bus driver.
“Thank you!”
Opening, the bus door collected her daughter into its waiting jaws, closed, and let out a satisfied belch as it moved on. Dani afforded herself one more second to stand there as her hand went to the back of her neck, just below the tight bun, and rubbed. Her mind raced on ahead of her through the coming hours and over the to-do list filled with issues and problems. Another day in the dream she’s always thought she wanted to live, so why did it feel like such a nightmare?
The commute never got any better, and by the time he was headed in to Raleigh, Eric wondered if this was even worth it. His attention was split somewhere between the road and his phone. With nearly 12 years with SPE, the biggest civil engineering firm in the state, behind him, Eric had thought he would have moved up the food chain a little farther by now. Something more than a cubicle and being the one sent out to supervise the state jobs no one else wanted to deal with. Still, he knew he was lucky to have a job, owing mostly to the fact that he could straddle the line between infrastructure and construction. Construction design was his first love, but his background in infrastructure had certainly come
in handy when the housing market crashed.
Glancing at the time on the phone, he calculated his day once more in his head. The meeting this morning to track the current phase and lay out the next of the Interstate bridge project, followed by the meeting in Greensboro with the firm that was actually doing the work. He would have to be out of Greensboro by four to have any prayer of making it back for Jaden’s concert-program thing. Four meant taking off early from the I-40 project, which meant questions he really didn’t want anyone to ask. It was always a fine-line between doing the job and not being there for his family. Still, he would rather push the company than Dani. She had enough trouble to navigate with her parents’ divorce and now the purchase of the vacation house out in Ridgemount.
As always, Eric couldn’t help but wonder how much either of them would even use the thing. If his schedule was crazy, hers was downright insane-asylum-producing. As the junior corporate attorney for Drake System, Inc., his wife represented the multi-billion dollar global resources company. She hobnobbed on a daily basis with some of the richest CEOs and CFOs in the country. Oil and gas, wind, solar—there wasn’t an energy source not represented somewhere in their portfolio. Her area of expertise, contract negotiation, put her on the frontlines of some of the biggest deals on the planet.
The traffic got thicker and thicker still on all sides of him until finally he put the phone down to concentrate on the final few turns. Downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. There was nothing like it in the whole world.
Problems and people. Dani’s days were a mix of the two such that from the time she hit the office just before eight until often well into the evening hours she barely had time to breathe much less think about anything other than work.
At noon, she texted Eric to make sure he remembered the concert. With him out in Greensboro working on the bridge reconstruction, Dani knew as well as anyone he might well forget. Text sent, she went back to the paperwork on the negotiations with the little city in Scotland. If the deal went through, Drake Systems would be stepping into the new world of solar paneled thoroughfares. Of course, if the research team’s calculations were correct, this new way of pulling solar power out of the sky could well be the wave of the future.
A Moment Like This: A Contemporary Christian Romance Prequel Novella (The Grace Series Book 4) Page 2