Hot & Heavy

by Tracy Wolff

  Despite my best intentions. Despite the million talking-tos I’ve given myself since I met him. Despite the years and years of experience I’ve got with protecting myself, courtesy of my mom.

  Despite it all, I’ve gone and fallen for this man, this adrenaline junkie who never met a dangerous situation he didn’t love…or one he could walk away from.

  It’s a sobering thought, and a terrifying one. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, tell myself that he’s been better since we started dating. Except for that one rock-climbing incident right before he came to the yoga studio, there have been no crazy, impulsive moves. No inexplicable bruises or cuts on his body. No middle-of-the-night trips to God only knows where.

  But I see it in his eyes sometimes, the leashed desire to do something wild. Something crazy. Something dangerous. I don’t know why it’s there, but I know it is.

  Too bad I don’t also know if it’s something I can live with.

  I’ve spent my life with my mother, who loved nothing more than to pull the rug out from under me. My mother, who has spent her life doing one stupid, dangerous thing after another for one inexplicable reason after another. Once I went to college and got out from under her thumb, I swore I’d never live like that again. Swore I’d never let my peace of mind rest in the hands of someone who cared so little for it.

  And yet here I am, completely infatuated with Shawn freaking Wilson. It’s bad enough that he plays football and can be injured at any second in the game. It’s another thing altogether to think of him deliberately doing something reckless just for the adrenaline rush.

  I don’t know what I’ll do the next time he does it, don’t know if I’ll stay or if I’ll go. But something in his eyes, something in the way he holds himself, tells me we’ll find out soon enough.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks some time later, when Hunter finally slows the boat on the far side of Coronado and drops anchor.

  I am, but I’m comfortable right where I am and don’t want him to move, so I shake my head. It works for several more minutes, until Emerson grabs my hand and pulls me across the deck to the ladder on the other side of the boat.

  “Last one in is on cleanup duty,” she calls right before launching herself over the edge of the boat.

  There’s a mad scramble behind me and before I know it, I’m caught up in it. In fact, I barely get my cover-up off before Tanner picks me up and throws me over the edge and into the water.

  He follows seconds later with the kids, leaving Hunter and Shawn alone on the boat. At least until they both make a mad dash for the side.

  Seconds later, Shawn’s wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling me under. I go with him easily, luxuriating in the warmth of him even in the cold ocean.

  The group of us spend the next forty-five minutes or so fooling around in the water. I stay pretty much to the surface, paddling around with Lucy and Emerson while the guys act like idiots.

  Eventually I get cold and start thinking about climbing back into the boat. But when I swim over to the guys to tell Shawn, I realize he’s nowhere around.

  “Hey, Hunter,” I call, trying to ignore the sudden clench of my stomach. “Have you seen Shawn?”

  The Lightning’s star quarterback shoots me a strange look. “He was just here a second ago.” But he starts glancing around, too.

  We wait a few more seconds and then a few more seconds after that, but there’s still no Shawn. The tightness in my stomach gets worse and I dive under the surface to look for him. The salt water’s hard on my eyes, though, and I can’t see much so I come back up.

  It’s been nearly a minute and a half since I started looking for Shawn—which seems like nothing and like forever all at the same time. A quick look at Hunter and Tanner tell me they’re suddenly as concerned as I am.

  And when Hunter shouts, “Emerson, take the kids!” I start counting even as I do my best to ignore the fear stalking me.

  Tanner dives under the water and I follow him, all the while counting in my head. We’re coming up on close to three minutes now and there’s still no sign of Shawn. Two more minutes and—

  I cut the thought off as soon as it can form. He’s a strong swimmer, stronger than me certainly, and I’m okay. He’s fine, I tell myself as I surface again. Fine, I say again as I gulp in a couple big breaths of air.

  It makes no sense. One second he was right there and the next he was gone.

  I dive back down at three minutes and twelve seconds. By now, panic is a live wire inside of me, tearing at my nerves and making it harder and harder for me to hold my breath as my heart rate spins out of control.

  I surface again at four minutes. Usually I can hold my breath longer, but fear has me practically hyperventilating. Thoughts of sharks and God only knows what are tearing through my brain and even though I tell myself that we would have noticed a predator swimming around these waters, it does nothing to stop the images invading my head.

  I glance around wildly, but Tanner and Hunter are both still under the water. Emerson is halfway up the ladder, Brent and Lucy in front of her.

  “It’s okay,” she calls to me.

  I nod back, trying to calm down enough that I can take a breath and dive again.

  But as I pull air into my lungs and prepare to go back under, something grabs at my legs. I scream, kick out, but whatever it is pulls me down, deep and fast and hard.

  I full-on panic now, kicking and thrashing around in a desperate bid to get free.

  Whatever grabbed on to me lets go as fast as it took hold, and then I’m being dragged toward the surface…by Shawn.

  “Hey, are you okay?” he gasps out when we break through the waves. “I was just fooling around—”

  Rage swells deep inside of me, and I stop him with a fist to the gut. “Fuck you,” I scream as Hunter and Tanner surface several yards away from us and each other.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” Shawn reaches for me, but I swim backward. If he touches me now I know I’ll hit him again.

  “Where were you?” I try to modulate my voice but the words come out on another scream. “We looked everywhere—”

  “I’m sorry. I was free diving. I didn’t think—”

  “Free diving? You were free diving? Do you know how dangerous that is?”

  “It’s fine—”

  “It’s not fine. You worried everyone out here. That’s the opposite of fine.” I’m half-crying, half-yelling at this point and I can’t seem to stop.

  “I’m sorry,” he tells me. But he doesn’t look sorry when he reaches for me. He looks confused and embarrassed and more than a little bit pissed off. “I didn’t think—”

  “No, you didn’t think!” I tell him as I evade his hands. “And that’s a really dick move.”

  He reaches for me again, and this time I knock his hand away. “Don’t you dare fucking touch me right now.”

  “Sage, baby—”

  “Don’t you ‘baby’ me! You’re an asshole, and I really don’t appreciate you pulling a stunt like this when I’m in the water with you. Free diving? Seriously?”

  My head feels like it’s going to explode and suddenly the only thing that matters is getting away from Shawn—and out of the water—before I really start to cry.

  Too bad he’s not the kind of guy to take a hint.

  Chapter 21

  Shawn

  “Hey, Sage! Can we talk about this please?” I demand, keeping pace with her as she swims away from me.

  Her only answer is to flip me the bird over her shoulder, right before she starts climbing the ladder that will drop her back in the boat.

  I start to lay on the speed so I can catch her, but Tanner stops me with a firm hand on my shoulder. “Let her go, man. Give her a couple minutes to cool off before you try to fix this shit.”

  Normally he’s got pretty good advic
e when it comes to women—it comes from being the oldest brother to a shit ton of sisters—but right now everything inside me is screaming that I don’t have a couple of minutes. That if I don’t fix things with Sage right now, then I’ll never get the chance.

  But Hunter’s there, too, on the other side of him. And he looks—if not as pissed as Sage, then definitely put out. “Free diving, Shawn? Have you lost your damn mind? You scared the hell out of her—out of all of us, really, but your woman was freaking the fuck out. What you did, it’s not cool, man.”

  Maybe there’s a part of me deep inside that knows he’s right. But the rest of me is pissed as shit about being called on the carpet like this. Especially when I don’t feel like what I did was any big deal.

  “I was just diving, man. Just having a good time. I don’t get what all the fuss is about.”

  Hunter looks like he wants to beat the shit out of me, and I brace myself for a punch. It doesn’t come, though. Instead, he settles for a scathing, “Well, that’s the problem, then, isn’t it? You’re so caught up in your own shit that you can’t see what you’re doing to the people who care about you. Jumping off cliffs in Mexico, free climbing by yourself, free diving just for the fuck of it. You’re a selfish jackass, Shawn, and if you can’t figure that out then I don’t know what the fuck to tell you.”

  I open my mouth to tell him to go to hell, but he’s already gone, swimming toward the boat with a series of powerful strokes that eats up the distance.

  “You want to lay into me, too?” I demand, looking up at Tanner.

  “What for?” comes the laconic answer. “It won’t do any good. Besides, when you get back in that boat, your woman’s going to kick your ass better than I ever could. Who am I to take that pleasure from her?” Still, there’s something in his eyes that belies the words, something that tells me he’s just as pissed as Sage is, maybe even more.

  Still waters run really fucking deep with Tanner and it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking at the best of times, let alone when he’s mad. The fact that he doesn’t get mad often is just one more indicator that this isn’t just Sage overreacting.

  I really screwed up here, whether I understand why or not.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I tell him.

  He just stares back at me, then swims away without another word.

  I’m left treading water and wondering why I suddenly feel like a total dick when I was just having a little fun. Sure, free diving can be risky, but so is driving a car, and you don’t see any of them stopping that behavior, do you? It’s not like the cliff, when I was climbing alone because I needed the rush. I just…

  I don’t know what I wanted or what I was thinking this time. I was diving and got caught up in the feel of the water all around me, the push and pull of the ocean. So I went deeper and deeper, not thinking about how Sage would feel. Or anyone else, for that matter. But that’s no excuse. I owe my friends an apology and I sure as shit owe Sage one. Once I get past her mad, we can talk about this. I can explain that I do things like this sometimes, but it’s no big deal. She’ll listen, tell me off, and then we’ll be fine.

  I’m expecting Sage to go off on me the second I make it into the boat—it’s what most of the women I know would do. Lose their shit and then wait for me to pet them out of their bad mood. Throw in a few gifts or a shopping spree and I’m usually golden.

  But once I’m back on board, Sage doesn’t even bother to look my way. Instead, she stays where she is, sitting on one of the benches near the front. Knees drawn up, arms wrapped around her legs, cheek resting on her knees. If ever there’s a pose that says she wants to be left alone, this is it.

  For the first time since she punched me in the gut, worry starts gnawing away at my insides. Because this isn’t the look of a woman who wants to talk, and it sure as shit isn’t the look of a woman who wants to work things out. No, with her defensive body posture and her eyes focused far out to sea, Sage looks like a woman who wants to be anywhere but here.

  A woman who’s already regretting whatever decisions she made to get to this point.

  It’s that thought more than any other that galvanizes me, that has me crossing the deck at pretty close to a run. I have no idea what I’m going to say to her, I just know that I have to say something. I can’t stand that she feels so far away from me, that she’s right here in front of me and somehow completely out of reach.

  I call her name, but she doesn’t look up, even when I’m standing right in front of her.

  I wait for several excruciating seconds, but when she doesn’t say anything—when she keeps staring out at the horizon—I finally say the only thing I can think of to make things better. “I’m sorry, Sage. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  When she doesn’t respond, I crouch down next to her, put a hand on her leg. “I wasn’t thinking. I just wasn’t. I dove under just to do it, then I started wondering how deep I could go. So I just kept going down until I was almost out of air, just to see how far I could get.” I don’t tell her just how far below the surface I went, or that I ran out of air about a hundred feet before I made it back up.

  “It’s not like it’s my first time,” I continue when she still doesn’t speak. “I’ve been free diving for a couple of years now. I even took a few classes, learned some mind-body techniques to help me go longer without breathing while underwater. It’s not like I just went down and didn’t come back up.”

  She does look at me then, her eyes a fiery nearly electric green that seem to see all the way through me. “You don’t really think telling me you’ve been doing this for a while is actually going to improve your case, do you?” she spits out.

  “I just wanted you to know that I wasn’t unprepared. I didn’t just swim down without knowing how I was going to get back up.”

  “Well, good for you for having a plan.” It’s a snide comment, one that’s crackling with indignation right below the surface. “Kind of like you had a plan when you climbed that mountain and nearly fell off, right? Like you had a plan when you dove off that ridiculous cliff in Acapulco.

  “Turns out there was nothing to worry about, guys,” she says, raising her voice so the others can hear her. “Because the mighty, indestructible Shawn Wilson had a plan.”

  Everyone hears her but no one says anything, so she goes back to looking out at the ocean. The first stirrings of anger come to life inside of me. “I’m a grown man, Sage, not a recalcitrant child, and I’d appreciate being treated like one.”

  Her eyes snap back to mine. “If you want to be treated like a man and not a child, you should probably start acting like one.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means you’re a spoiled little boy who wants everything his own way and to hell with the consequences. And that may be how it works on the football field, where everyone worships the great and amazing Shawn Wilson, but that’s not how it works in the real world.”

  “You think you live in the real world?” I hiss as fury explodes inside me. “You, who spend your days hiding in a yoga studio with a bunch of freaks.”

  If possible her eyes go even more molten. “You know what? I think we should probably stop talking for now.”

  “I don’t want to do that.” I move to sit beside her on the bench. “I want to have this out so we can move on.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t. Not here, not in front of your friends who are trying really hard not to listen. You need to back off.”

  “Look, you’re making too big a deal of this—”

  She shoots a hand out, slaps it onto my chest. “You don’t get to tell me when I’m making too big of a deal, and you sure as hell don’t get to tell me that my feelings aren’t valid because you’ve ‘taken some classes.’ If you want to talk, we’ll talk when we get back to land and can have some privacy. I am not having this conversation in front of other people. I’
m just not.”

  I start to argue again, not because she isn’t right but because I can’t stand the idea of waiting forty-five excruciating minutes to clear this up. But one look at the expression on Sage’s face tells me that I don’t get a vote. On this, her way is the only one that matters.

  Normally that’d be enough to piss me off all over again, but her dead serious tone has frissons of unease working their way down my spine. Sage isn’t just pissed off, she’s quietly, coldly furious. More, she’s obviously rethinking some things about our relationship and that makes me nervous as fuck. Because no matter how irrational I think she’s being right now, I can’t help wanting her. Can’t help needing her.

  “Fine,” I tell her after several long seconds have passed. “But I’ll be right here if you change your mind and want to talk.”

  She snorts. “Yeah, well, don’t hold your breath. Even free divers can only go so long before they suffocate.”

  There’s nothing I can say to that that won’t cause a bigger problem, so I do as she asked and back off.

  It’s harder than it should be, way harder than I imagined it would be considering I’m just on the other side of the boat. But the longer I sit here watching her, the more I see her withdrawing from me. And I hate that, hate feeling like I’m losing her before I ever really had a chance to have her. Hate even more that she won’t even give me a chance to explain.

  Hunter finally docks the boat back at the marina, and it takes every ounce of self-control I have not to grab Sage and yank her off the thing like some kind of Neanderthal. Instead I wait patiently as she says her goodbyes before finally being able to follow her off the boat.

  “Want to get some food?” I ask as we approach her car in the parking lot. “You didn’t eat anything on the boat.”

  “I’m not hungry. In fact, I think I’m going to head home. I’m beat and I have a lot to do tomorrow.”