Florida Knight

by Blair Bancroft

  “I’d like to make off with the whole litter,” Kate admitted, “but one cat is about all a mobile home can stand.” She made soothing noises to the momma cat, a coal black long-hair who, from the mixed colors and fur quality of her offspring, had probably mated with an orange alley cat. “Pretty babies,” Kate cooed. “Pretty, pretty babies. We’re not going to hurt them, you know.” Carefully, Kate stretched out her hand, petted the mother cat’s head. Equally slowly, she touched an index finger to the soft body of one of the kittens. The mother cat watched intently, but didn’t move, recognizing Kate as a cat person.

  She sighed. “Oh, Michael, they’re so beautiful.”

  “I’m not sure Mom would agree with you. That’s a pedigreed Persian who broke through a window screen to get to freedom. And a really mixed-up litter.”

  “True romance,” Kate murmured.

  “Hormones.” Shit! That was the last thing in the world he should have said. Kate was actually feeling sentimental, and he’d interjected the ugly face of pure lust. “They are cute,” he added hastily. “Babies are always cute.” Did he actually believe that? Had he even looked, really looked, at Gayle’s children when they were babies?

  Michael didn’t care for the upheaval tearing at his ordered life. The feeling that he’d strayed from the comfortable world he’d known for so long, opening a door into some terrifying new plane of existence. A world he’d thought a deep abyss to be scrupulously avoided, and which was suddenly glowing with warmth and light, enticing him in. Hell, he was as terrified of what was happening as Kate was. And yet . . . neither of them seemed to have much choice.

  Kate moved her finger to the runt of the litter, a tiny scrap of orange, still rooting around its mother’s fur, trying to find a source of milk. Gently, she pushed aside a larger kitten, making sure it didn’t lose its grip on its meal, then positioned the runt on a newly exposed nipple. Eagerly, it seized hold, its little jaw working away at its slim hold on life. “I guess . . . I can’t resist that one,” Kate sighed. “Do you think Ace will use him for a football?”

  “Probably, but six or seven weeks from now when he’s ready to leave his mother, he’ll be used to scrapping for food, know how to hold his own. So I wouldn’t worry about it. In fact, he’ll probably end up chasing Ace. That cat of yours is not exactly the bravest feline on the block, you know.”

  Kate tossed him an anxious look. “Maybe I shouldn’t?”

  “Go for it,” Michael commanded. “Nobody should live alone.”

  Michael heard his words only when it was too late. He and Kate stared at each other, jaws agape. Horrified, each looked away, eyes blindly fixed on the kittens. But the words were said, their meaning unmistakable. Kate could only wish Michael didn’t look as if he’d just pronounced a death sentence.

  Abruptly, she stood up. “I’ll ask your mother if the runt is spoken for,” she said, and headed for the door.

  “Kate, you want to go fly a kite?” Michael called after her.

  She halted, swung round to face him. “Wha-at?”

  “I’ve got a couple of kites in the ’Runner. We could go down to the beach and fly them.”

  “Like this?” Kate waved a hand at her flowered silk dress and high heels.

  “I brought some shorts. We can change at your house.”

  “I’m so full I can hardly move,” Kate demurred, but not very strongly. If Michael wanted to treat his gaffe as a mere hiccup in his plans for the afternoon, she was strangely loathe to fight about it. “And I’ve never flown a kite in my life.”

  “At the beach the kite flies itself. You won’t have to do anything but hold it.” Okay, so he was close to pleading. Dropping Kate off at home to brood about his incautious remark was definitely not on the agenda. He’d made plans for today, and they didn’t stop with his mother’s dessert or an injudicious remark about kittens.

  “What about the dishes?” Kate wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

  “You heard Dad. He, Gayle, and Dean are doing dishes, and that’s enough butts in the kitchen.” His words, remember, not mine.”

  Kate looked past him toward the kittens, finally nodded her head. “All right. After I ask about the kitten, say thank-you to your parents, and tell everyone goodbye.” She disappeared down the hallway.

  Michael eyed the mama cat, winked and grinned. “Ye–es!” he exclaimed, pumping his fist in triumph. “Yes!”

  The silk dress rippled, sounding a mocking rustle as Kate stripped it over her head. She shouldn’t be angry because Michael’s harsh features had softened when he saw her in the dress. Why be annoyed because he’d openly showed his approval of a more conventional Kate, a softer, sweeter Kate?

  Sweet. Never! Kate tossed the dress on the bed, glared at its muted sunset colors. It wasn’t the dress’s fault it represented everything she hated about her childhood. Sighing, she hung it on a hanger, tucked it into the far corner of her closet. Someday she’d have enough confidence in herself to wear it without feeling she was flying false colors. But not today. Not yet. The hurt child she had thought long gone had surfaced with a vengeance, to become inextricably tangled with the raw emotions evoked by Michael Turco.

  At the moment, standing almost nude in her bedroom, knowing Michael was changing in the bathroom only one thin wall away, was enough to send shock waves to all the secret places she had so long repressed. Even her scalp prickled, as if sensitive to the jumble of emotions rushing through her brain. If Michael so much as looked at her sideways, she might go up like a rocket. Ruthlessly, Kate grabbed up an elastic band, corralled her long hair into a narrow cascade of silver blond at the back of her neck. If only lust were as easily controlled.

  The outside door banged against its frame. Michael, Kate realized, beating a fast retreat. Had he felt it too, this overwhelming urge to forget about putting on shorts and Ts—just open their mutual doors and jump each other’s bones? Or was he lazily content with the beautiful April day and mom’s Easter dinner, thinking of nothing but beach and kites?

  Mechanically, she slipped on denim shorts, a plain white polo shirt, and thong sandals. Blast the man! Herself as well. She was angry with him for making her buy the dress. And angry because he so obviously regretted his remark about not living alone. Yet here she was, disappointed because she’d been deprived of an opportunity to fight him off.

  Only because she liked to fight, she amended hastily. That was it. She wanted a good battle with Michael, a chance to pin his ears back.

  And he, damn him, had escaped to the ’Runner. The miserable man actually wanted to go fly kites.

  Kate stalked out of her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Michael took one look at her thunderous expression and his welcoming smile died. Wordlessly, he turned the key in the ignition. The sport utility kicked up sand and shell as it shot backwards down the driveway.

  “Ah, the Exodus has begun,” Michael breathed as they actually found a parking space at the far end of the narrow road that ran along several miles of gulf-front beach.

  “The snowbirds fly the week after Easter,” Kate agreed. Somewhere in the course of the ten-minute drive to Michael’s favorite beach, her anger had dissipated in the beauty of the day. She wasn’t just a fool, she was a damn fool. An ungrateful, self-centered wretch. A man—a strong man with a surprisingly gentle soul—had taken her home to meet his parents. She’d been accepted into the family, treated like royalty. And she? She’d given Michael nothing but a hard time since the day they met. It really wouldn’t kill her to be a little more gracious. If he wanted to talk about Golden Beach’s migrating seasonal residents . . . if he wanted to go fly a kite, why should she be difficult?

  “Get to the beach much?” Michael asked as he rummaged through the contents of the 4Runner’s rear compartment.

  “Not much.”

  Michael straightened up, handed Kate a plastic grocery bag. “Why not?” he challenged.

  Kate scuffed sand with one thong sandal. “Too busy, I guess. Besides,” she added
, seizing on what seemed a legitimate excuse, “it’s impossible to find a parking spot during the Season.”

  Michael shook his head, pointed toward a sandy road heading east, bordered by a tangle of cabbage palms and sea grape almost large enough to qualify as trees. “Back parking lot,” he said. “You could camp an army there. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about it?”

  Kate struggled for a response, gave up. She hadn’t known about the back parking lot because she never came to this beach at all, and only rarely to the beach nearer her home.

  “Kate,” Michael demanded, “do you know how much money people pay to come to this town so they can use the beach?”

  “I have to work for a living! And I spend most of my weekends at LALOC events. So I’m not a beach hound, so what?”

  “So you need to learn to be lazy occasionally.”

  “So how often do you get to the beach?” Kate challenged.

  “Usually, when a pretty girl invites me,” Michael shot back. Maybe Kate needed to know there were some women in this world who found him attractive.

  Kate uncurled her fingers from the plastic bag Michael had handed her. It wasn’t easy. Her grip on it was so strong her fingers ached. With fierce deliberation she peered inside. Anything to avoid Michael’s taunting face.

  The miserable rat . . .

  If he thought he could make her jealous . . .

  He could. Yes, damn him, he could. She’d given him nothing, absolutely nothing of herself, yet somehow he was hers. Heat surged from head to toe in a searing wave. She’d done everything she could to push Michael away. She had barely lifted a finger toward establishing so much as neutral coexistence, while Michael had made a genuine effort to adapt to their awkward situation. She’d balked, and balked again. So by what magic had they recognized they were a match? That Barbara Falk had gotten it right?

  “Kate . . . look, Kate, I’m sorry. Truth is, I don’t get to the beach much either. Last time was maybe six months ago. I’m turning into an old curmudgeon. Must have caught it from the retirees.” Michael’s hand closed over hers. He peered down into the bag. “Those are kite string reels with pivoting handles,” he explained, grasping at simple fact to cut through Kate’s icy silence. Oh, to hell with it! He was tired of finding his way through a mine field. He dug a beach blanket and two long nylon bags out of the 4Runner. Tucking everything under one arm, he held out his free hand to Kate. She was either going to fly a kite or blow his plans, maybe his life, to hell and gone.

  Green eyes flashed. Do you take all your women kite-flying, Lieutenant Turco? Then defiantly, almost belligerently, she grasped his outstretched fingers, which immediately clasped tight around hers. A perfect match. Strong, competent, full of life. Each combatant holding the power to singe the other’s soul, they headed south along the beach, away from parking and people. Neither noticed the posts that barred the road where it deadended, washed out in a long-ago storm. Nor the strip of cabbage palms, sea grape and beach grass to their left. Not even the soft shimmering white caps on the brilliant azure of the gulf on their right. They walked on clouds, not sand, gliding—like the kites they were about to launch—into a new era. For better or for worse, they would be more honest with themselves as well as with each other.

  Fifty yards down the beach, Michael edged back to reality. “Keep your eyes peeled for shark’s teeth,” he said. “They’re black. Fossilized. At least seven million years old. This beach is famous for them. Let’s get rid of our shoes,” he added. “If we walk in the surf, we might find one as the waves bring it ashore.”

  Leaving their shoes in the lee of a battered gray log half buried in sand, they walked along the edge of the low breaking surf. Although the temperature was flirting with eighty, the winter’s chill still lingered in the gulf waters. Kate gasped as cold salt water splashed over her bare toes. The shock brought the world back in focus. In heaven’s name, why didn’t she come to the beach more often? She loved the beach. The foam at the edge of the waves, the masses of seashells, the tang of salt, the shrill call of seagulls swooping over their domain. The sheer natural peacefulness of it all.

  Not to mention the incredible sensation of being at the beach with a friend. With Michael . . . who was more than a friend. With Michael, who just might be strong enough to deal with her foibles, her fears and failures . . .

  “Okay, this is far enough,” he declared. Carefully slipping a kite from one of the bags, he attached the cross-piece, then instructed Kate to watch while he tied on the string. “Now you do yours,” he added encouragingly.

  Not ready to admit she had been looking at the strength of his hands, at the Celtic knotwork design on his diamond-shaped kite rather than how Michael attached his string, Kate cautiously pulled her kite from the second bag. It was black, with some white on it. She was too absorbed in the challenge of her task to notice the design. With the cross-piece finally in place, she reached for the double-handled reel that held the kite string. Kate frowned at the two loops confronting her, the one on the kite and the one on the end of her string. Michael had attached them in about ten seconds flat, but she hadn’t the slightest idea how. Something about a figure-eight . . . but the technique was gone on the soft salt breeze.

  Score one for the male sex. Kate grimaced as she looked up to discover Michael’s dark eyes glinting with barely repressed humor. “Show me again,” she said. Keeping his eyes on the knot—Kate knew his lips were twitching—Michael once again instructed her on how to tie a line to a kite. “You were a Boy Scout,” she accused as she eyed the knot which, even in slow motion, had taken him all of three seconds. And she still didn’t understand how he had done it.

  “Just hold it up in the air,” Michael told her, ignoring her chagrin. “The wind will do the rest.”

  Kate did as she was told, gasping as the wind took the black kite, lifting it so fast she had to scramble to unwind enough string to keep up with it. Once she got the feel of the pivoting handles, she only had to move her wrists to allow the string to unroll. At last she could look up and see her kite majestically rising overhead. Her spirits rose with it, swooping on currents of air like the seagulls above the tops of the rustling cabbage palms, out over the sparkling gulf, up, up, up toward the brilliance of the sun itself.

  Kate took a less enraptured look at her kite. Two rows of shiny white teeth glared down at her from the long black creature above, its tail flapping in the breeze. “It’s a shark!” she exclaimed.

  “I thought you’d like him,” Michael said.

  “I love him!” Kate admitted. “He’s wonderful.”

  “Good.” Michael moved up the beach, well away from Kate, before launching his own kite. They continued walking south, Kate still allowing her bare feet to flirt with the incoming waves, Michael inland, between Kate and the line of palms and sea grape.

  Flying a kite was insidious, Kate decided. With a breeze like today’s and no visible obstacles, it was all too easy to soak up the beauty of the day. All too easy to compare this moment with the rest of her life. Was this what it was like to have fun? To do something totally frivolous, something that wasn’t going to earn her daily bread, perform a service for others, or come under the category of duty? What was she doing out here? All those pearls for the queen’s gown, the search for a solution to Bubba’s problems rose up before her, blotting out the shark’s sharp teeth, imprinted on his flapping body of black ripstop nylon.

  But only for a guilty moment. She was here because there wasn’t any other place in the entire world she would rather be. She was here because Michael was here. Because having fun wasn’t a sin.

  Kate stumbled, nimbly retaining her balance as one foot strayed into a hole dug by an overzealous sharks’ tooth hunter. Her kite dipped, swooped, soared back into the sky. If she’d been paying attention to what she was doing instead of thinking about sin . . .

  Kate checked Michael’s kite. He was ahead of her and well upshore on the broad beach, the long tail on his diamond kite whipping the ai
r at least thirty feet higher than her shark. Of necessity, he kept his distance so their lines wouldn’t tangle. But when they left the beach . . . ah, yes, when they left, Kate strongly suspected Michael had further plans. There was just something about him today . . . an aura of power. What was the old expression? An iron fist in a velvet glove. Michael was a keeper of secrets. A man ever-so-slightly smug, pleased with himself. Michael had plans. Kate was certain of it.

  Far above, the shark’s sleek black body rippled in the wind, sharp white teeth in the wide-open jaw gleamed in the sun. The better to eat you with, my dear.

  The day cooled rapidly as the sun sank toward the horizon, far out where the azure of the gulf met the blue of the sky. Kites abandoned, Kate and Michael lay side by side on the beach blanket, attempting to be lazy. Not easy for two people who didn’t know the meaning of the word. And who were far too aware of each other to relax. Michael groaned. They were so close they were practically joined at the hip. His nerves were dancing over hot coals. As an FHP officer, he wasn’t supposed to have nerves, but he was off-duty and knocked ass-over-backwards by this woman who was so close, yet so far away. If he just had some magical can opener to pry away the layers of armor she’d built up over the years. Or some of Mark’s charm? Or more patience? Some knowledge, however tiny, of humble supplication. Instead, the best he could manage was a classic maneuver to get her back to the condo. He’d have to wing it from there.

  “Time to call it a day?” Michael asked. “I think there’s a pizza with my name on it out there somewhere.”

  Kate’s head, which had been resting on her arms, shot up off the blanket. “How can you possibly be hungry after all that food?”

  “I’m a big boy. I need lots of fuel.” He couldn’t very well admit his hunger was of a different sort. He hauled out his cellphone. “We can order, then pick it up on the way back to the condo.”