Garrett wasn’t the least bit ashamed to be the first out on
the beach because, for one, they really didn’t want him to be responsible for
dinner, and for another, he was able to get everything ready for the three of
them to spend the rest of the afternoon on the sand.
He arranged three lounge chairs, complete with small, round
tables in between and two beach umbrellas behind them to give the perfect
amount of cool shade. Plugged into a portable speaker, his phone doubled as an
MP3 player, which he’d taken care to program with all of his and Riley’s
favorite music before they left home. The crashing surf rumbled not twenty feet
away, tumbling over and over in frothy, sea-foam-green waves.
The set-up—and the view—was perfect.
Loaded down with an oversized tote bag while wearing what
had to be the skimpiest—and sexiest—black bikini Garrett had ever seen, Riley
raced toward him through the scorching sand in her bare feet, muttering a few
eee
’s
and a couple of
oww
’s along the way. “Hot, hot, hot,” she said, jumping
into a small corner of the umbrella’s shade.
Hell yes, she was, but in his world that went without
saying.
She came around the end of the chair and dropped the tote in
front of the small table. “Lotion me?” she asked, digging through the bag until
she came up with a bottle of sunscreen.
Huh, she didn’t have to ask him twice. He straddled the
chaise and patted the spot in front of him. “Of course I will. Hop on, baby.”
She grinned and slid onto the end of the lounge chair.
“You’re the best.” After a moment of looking out at the water while he
slathered the sunscreen on her back, she peered at him from over her shoulder.
“I mean that, you know.”
He slipped his fingers under the string tie of her bikini
top to rub more lotion on her skin. “Ah babe. I love you. I’d do anything to
show you that.”
“There are so many people who just wouldn’t understand. So
many of our friends—”
“Who are not us. We don’t owe anyone an explanation for how
we live our lives.”
“I know. And I agree. I just wanted you to know, though.”
She huffed out a chuckle. “I want to scream it at the top of my lungs,
actually.”
He laughed. “No one’s stopping you.”
“You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, I think I would,” he teased.
“Okay then.” She cleared her throat and cupped her hands
around her mouth. “Garrett Watson is the absolute best!” she shouted to no one
but a few seagulls, who flew away before she stopped yelling.
“Well, obviously the birds aren’t buying it.”
She faked a put-out look and moved to elbow him, but he was
faster. He wrapped his arms around her and drew her back to plaster her against
his chest, laughing right along with her while she struggled in his hold to try
to nail him in the ribs.
“No fair,” she squealed.
“Oh it’s totally fair,” he said in between attempts to hold
her sunscreen-slick and wiggly body still. He shamelessly copped a feel at the
same time, which made her laugh and shriek that much louder.
God, what this woman did to him. Her laughter lit him up,
her playful screams spurred him on and their skin-on-skin contact, no matter if
it was sensual or playful, never failed to wreak havoc on his entire body. He
was getting hard again just from slicking that lotion all over her back, just
from wrestling with her to try to keep her elbows away from his stomach. He was
getting hard again just from being near her.
Evan came around the edge of the umbrella then, saying,
“Yeah, hold on a second,” before chinning his phone. “You okay there? Need any
help?”
“Yes please!” she screeched before letting out another
high-pitched yelp when Garrett dug in and tickled her side.
“I was talking to Garrett,” Evan said through a smirk of his
own. “Need a hand, bro?
Garrett stopped his torture and squeezed his arms around
Riley, smacking a kiss on her shoulder before letting her go. “Nah, two against
one would be totally… Wait, what am I saying? Get back here,” he said to her,
but this time she was the quicker one. She scooted off the end of the chair,
grabbed the bottle of sunscreen and moved down to the lounger at the other end.
“No, no, no. You snooze, you lose.”
She was still grinning from ear to ear as she squirted a
healthy dose of the sunscreen in her hand and started smoothing it up and down
her legs. Her simple yet seductive movements held him transfixed—until Evan
plopped down on the end of the lounge chair in between them and distracted him.
“My buddy says we can use his boat tomorrow. He doesn’t need
it until next weekend, so it’s no problem if we want to keep it overnight. He’s
got all the gear on board too. He’ll even provide the chum for the sharks, so
all we’ll need is a little food for ourselves and we’ll be ready to go.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Garrett said as Riley groaned.
“I still don’t like the idea of doing this at night,” she said.
“It’ll be fine, I promise,” he said. “We came all the way
down here to enjoy ourselves. Seems a shame not to take advantage of a sweet
deal like this while we can. I swear you’ll have a good time, babe. Scout’s
honor.”
“You were never a Scout,” she replied.
“But I was,” Evan tossed in. “So you can take my word for
it.”
She didn’t get the chance to protest any further before Evan
stood and shifted his attention back to the phone at his ear. “We’ll be at the
docks sometime tomorrow evening, then. Yeah, thanks man. I owe ya one. Later,”
Evan said, then disconnected the call. “It’s all set. Tomorrow night, at the
docks down in Destin. Everything will be ready when we get there.”
Even though Riley wasn’t fully on board with the whole
deep-sea fishing expedition, Garrett was fired-up and ready to give it a try.
Out of all the high-octane activities he’d ever participated in, he couldn’t
count shark fishing as one of them. Sure, most of the time spent waiting around
for a tug on the line was going to be boring as hell, but once they got their
first bite… He could already feel the adrenaline as if it were a living
creature inside him, eager to be set free so it could run wild through his
system. He loved the jacked-up rush he got just from doing something even the
tiniest bit dangerous. It was one of the things Riley had never really
understood about him, but a trait he could see he had in common with Evan.
“Awesome,” Garrett said as he settled back in the lounge
chair and stuck his sandy feet out in front of him.
“Yay. Awesome,” Riley said, not doing a damn thing to hide
the sarcasm in her voice. She tossed the sunscreen bottle back into the tote
bag, adjusted her bikini bottoms and, without another word, stalked off toward
the water.
“Is she really upset?” Evan asked him. “We don’t have to go,
you know. I just thought it’d be something a little different for you guys.”
Garrett reached inside the cooler he’d brought down with
him, dug out two bottles of water from the ice and chucked one to Evan. “No,
she’s not upset. If she was, she would’ve given us a flat-out ‘no’ and told us
she wasn’t going with us. Riley’s probably the strongest woman I’ve ever met,
but by nature she’s also a world-class worrier. Remember what I said before
about her being vicious when it comes to the ones she loves? Well, she doesn’t
feel complete unless she’s worrying about them too. She’s told me she wasn’t
always that way, that it started when she met me. Through the years, though,
I’ve come to learn it’s how you know you’ve worked your way into her heart.
When she loves, she loves deep. She loves all the way.”
“I don’t want to make her worry,” Evan said after a moment,
which made it more than obvious he was completely skipping over that whole
being-loved-by-Riley part Garrett mentioned. “It’s only fishing. It’s just the
fish you’re trying to catch are a bit bigger than normal.”
“And with more teeth.” Garrett laughed, his gaze glued to
Riley’s sexy backside as she waded knee-deep into the surf. “If we don’t push
her to go, I can guarantee by next weekend she’ll be giving me hell for it. She
loves the thrill just as much as I do, it’s just that she needs a little more
of a nudge to get there, especially when there’s any sort of risk involved.”
Evan sat back on the middle lounge chair and slid his phone
onto the table beside him. “Did you nudge her for this? For us?”
Garrett never took his eyes off her. “Not really. She
thought that by wanting to be with you, she’d end up hurting me.”
“But that’s not the case?”
“No, it’s not. I learned a while ago to take life as it
comes at me. There’s not enough time in any of our lives to waste even a minute
of it being hung up on what some in society say is the right or wrong way to
care about or enjoy someone.”
“There’s still a risk in something like this.”
Garrett peeled his stare off Riley and nailed Evan with it
instead. “Of her getting hurt, yes, there is.”
Evan took a long sip of his water. “You’ve got a hell of a
woman there,” he said after he swallowed. “The last thing I’d want to do is
hurt her.”
“But you will anyway.”
Evan flashed him a look.
“You won’t do it intentionally,” Garrett went on. “And
she’ll play it cool all week long, as if saying goodbye isn’t going to be a big
deal for her. But I know my wife. When you leave her—when you leave
us
—it’s
going to hurt her.”
“Ah God. You have to know that’s not my intention. She’s
just so…” Evan sighed. “I can go, before things get—”
“Are you kidding me? No way. That’ll only make things worse.
Give her the week. Let her have at least that.”
“And what’s in all this for you?”
The question was one he expected, and the answer he had to
give was a simple one. He set his sights on his wife again, who was now up to
her shoulders in the clear, emerald waters. He watched as she hopped up to stay
above each wave rolling at her and laughed gently as she sputtered when one
finally splashed over her head.
“That’s easy. I get to see her happy. I did a lot of stupid
stuff for a lot of years and took chances that would make even the most
adventurous man think I was just a little insane. I was a spoiled rich kid
whose parents really didn’t give a rat’s ass about him, and figured there was
no better way to escape than by losing myself in the rush all that reckless
shit created. There were so many years where I didn’t care if I lived or
died—and believe me, I came this close to cashing it in on more than one
occasion. But then I met Riley. She was the one who showed me that the biggest
thrill I can get is not by taking careless chances, but by putting everything I
have into living. And yeah, I get how corny that sounds. But it’s true. That
woman out there? She saved me and I’ll spend the rest of my life repaying her
for that.”
“You’re still a thrill-seeker, though. That, I can tell.”
“Sure I am. But nowadays I look for the rush in things that
won’t potentially kill me. Big difference there.”
“So you avoid things like whatever led you to lay your bike
down all those years ago?”
“Among other stupid shit, yeah.”
Evan gestured toward Garrett’s legs with his water bottle.
“I noticed your scars there. Impressive.”
Garrett glanced down to the eight-inch Frankenstein scar
that slashed vertically through his right knee, along with the other puncture
marks further down his leg from where his surgeons had implanted a metal rod
and eight screws into his tibia. “Not so much impressive as it was idiotic.
Take it from me, it’s never a good idea to listen to a friend who says he wants
to borrow a private plane and take it for a joyride. Especially when said
friend had only half the hours under his belt required for his pilot’s license.
”
“Sounds like a serious case of clouded judgment.”
Garrett blew out a sardonic chuckle. “More like no judgment
at all.”
“I hate to ask what happened.”
Garrett set his water on the table next to Evan’s phone
before lacing his fingers behind his head. His knee picked that exact moment to
throb, as if the thing had a mind of its own and knew Garrett was going to talk
about the night of the crash. Goddamn thing always did that, as if the physical
reminder was the only way he’d be able to remember all the details.
Yeah, right. As if he’d ever forget exactly what happened in
the first fucking place.
“Not much to tell, really. It was a cloudy night. Windy as
hell too. But my buddy assured me he knew what he was doing. He promised me a
rush like none other and, well, he certainly delivered on that.”
“You crashed?”
The temperature on the beach had to be close to eighty-five,
but Garrett shivered anyway. He crossed his arms over his chest and fought back
the cold that wasn’t the result of an icy breeze or a quick-moving storm front,
but was born from a series of terrible memories now clawing at his insides to
get out. “We did. Less than a minute after take-off.”
“Jesus,” Evan murmured.
“To this day, I don’t know what Derek did to make us go
down. And before you ask, yes, he was stone-cold sober that night. Hell, we
both were. But it was dark and the weather was turning, and he was just so new
to it all…”
Garrett kept watching Riley jump around in the surf,
counting on his love of her to ease the pain that twisted around inside him
whenever he talked about the crash, just as it had so many times before.
“He didn’t make it?” Evan asked.
Garrett clenched his jaw as the images from that night
replayed like a slow-motion horror flick on the edge of his memory. There’d
been so much blood. So many screams. And then there’d been nothing but silence.
“No. He didn’t. And I barely pulled through. I suffered some
internal bleeding which made it pretty touch-and-go there for a while. They
operated on me twice in the first twenty-four hours before they were able to
find all the bleeders and get them stopped. And then afterward with my knee…
They weren’t sure if I was going to be able to keep my leg or not.”