Windswept (18 page)

Lots of words, she knew, from a man who preferred few. A good man who was trying very, very hard to set the record straight.

Ryan
, she nearly whispered,
I get it.
She looked at him.
Enough.

He stared at the camera long and hard, his soul shining in his eyes, begging for forgiveness.

Somewhere off by her left elbow, Hans cleared his throat. Gerta, his wife, sighed.

“I did a lot of things wrong,” Video Ryan continued. “I’ll probably mess up a lot more. But I want you to know that I won’t mess up the same way. Not twice.” He looked straight at the camera. “I swear.”

His cheeks ballooned a tiny bit as he let out a puff of air, and the camera panned to show five bashful men, looking chagrined and penitent and sincere. Then the camera clicked off, and the screen went black.

Rick’s Bar was quiet as the dead of night, like the times she woke up and came on
Serendipity’s
deck to look at the stars and wonder.

Ryan sat there on his backward-facing chair, saying nothing, doing nothing. He rubbed a hand against his cheek and stared at the blank screen.

And Mia, she couldn’t quite move or think.

It was Hans who broke the silence. He stepped to the bar and came back with two drinks. One, he put on an empty chair by Ryan’s knee, and the other he raised in a silent toast. Ryan looked up and managed a pencil-thin imitation of a smile, and gradually, the bar patrons started whispering again. It was over, Mia realized. Except for one thing.

She stood up on shaky sea legs, wobbled over to his chair, and took his hand. It was slow motion at first, because she wasn’t sure what to say or do, but then she got a little momentum going. Enough to pull him out of that chair and over by the water, away from the others. She sat him down and pulled out a second chair to face him, then thought better of that and sat in his lap, because she needed that proximity.

She looped an arm over his shoulders and leaned in until they were nose-to-nose like a couple of dogs or dolphins or whatever kind of animal that knew how to communicate without words. She rubbed her nose slowly up and down the length of his. Once, twice, then over his left cheek. She followed the line of his jaw right around to the other cheek. When she continued on that side, he nuzzled back and tightened his arms around her waist.

He opened his mouth, but she raised her fingers and beat him to it. “I think you’ve made it up to me, Ryan.”

He shook his head. “I can never make it up. Not the way I want to.”

She shook her head right back. “There are lots of things I would do differently if I could go back in time.” She ran one finger down his cheek, bringing his mouth up for a kiss. “But some things, I wouldn’t change at all.”

She kissed him, open and honest and as sure as she’d ever been of anything in her life. She kissed until his mouth was moving, too, and everything was all right again.

“So now that you’re done apologizing,” she murmured, once they’d come up for air. “You think you might find time for funner things?”

The corners of his mouth turned up two or three degrees. “Funner? Like what?”

“Like some more of this,” she mumbled, catching his lips again. “And this,” she said, running a hand down the flat planes of his chest, along the rocky terrain of his stomach, and then barely, just barely into the top edge of his shorts. They were in public, after all. But not for long, she hoped. God, did she hope.

His green eyes were filled with smiles and ideas and hopes, like so many mysterious packages wrapped under a tree.

“And this,” he added, pulling her against him in a crushing hug. His nose ruffled her hair when he mumbled again. “Just this.”

One week later…

“Coming?”

Ryan popped his head out of
Serendipity’s
cabin, looking toward the stern where Mia stood dripping on the swim ladder, urging him along.

“Hurry up!”

Like he was going to hurry a morning like this, even though he’d had a whole week of them now. Mornings waking up to no alarm but the sun, with nothing to rush off to except for Mia. And she was always right there, where she’d fallen asleep the night before, waiting for him.

“Such a New Yorker. Always in a rush,” he scolded, coming up on deck.

He had to squint, not just from the morning sun bouncing off the water but because she’d been skinny-dipping. Her skin was glistening and her hair too, and Christ, how was a guy supposed to get excited about snorkeling when he could just look at that? To look at that and know part of her glow was his doing, and that he could keep right on doing it, because they had trust and understanding and a lot of other words that hadn’t been in his vocabulary before Mia came along.

“The fish are calling you,” she giggled, motioning toward the water.

His dick was calling him, too, but it would have to wait just a tiny little bit.

Serendipity
floated over water so clear it was like drifting in air, soft and dreamy and filled with a thousand dancing particles of light.

“Coming.” He stripped off the shorts he’d put on so that at least breakfast was a halfway civilized thing. But there was no point swimming in them, because they’d only get wet, and there was nobody around. Not for miles, it seemed.

She pushed backward, splashed into the water, and came up in that head-tilted-back move he loved so much, sending a hundred salty rivers streaming down her face. “You think we can talk Hans into letting us use this mooring forever?”

He chuckled, because Mia had Hans wrapped around her pinky, and she didn’t even know it. Hans had permits for a dozen moorings around Bonaire and wasn’t planning on bringing a group out to this particular one any time soon.

“Maybe he’ll let us use it for five more weeks.” He grinned, because five weeks off work felt like a cardinal sin. But getting shot, even thousands of miles away from New York, had to get you something. Between medical leave and the two weeks of unpaid personal leave he’d been granted, he and Mia had plenty of time to sort things out.

He jumped into the cool water feet first because he couldn’t get his arm all the way over his head yet, even if the wound had closed up enough to let him swim. No scuba diving, but neither of them was in any rush for that.

Mia paddled in a circle when he came up, looking up at the boat. “I wish my granddad could see this,” she sighed.

He chuckled and gave her a little pat on the rear. “Maybe not all of this.”

She splashed him. “Okay, maybe not skinny-dipping with Officer Love, but the rest.”

“Officer who?”

She doggie-paddled closer and gave him a sloppy kiss. “Officer you.”

Their legs intertwined, and for a minute, he contemplated throwing her over his shoulder and dragging her back to his lair.

“You mean I have to suffer through five more weeks of this?”

She shook her head. “No, you only have to suffer through three more weeks of this. For two weeks after that you get to help Meredith and me sail
Serendipity
to Grenada. If you’re still game.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for my life, lady.”

Grenada. A month ago, he couldn’t have aimed a dart at a map. Now, you could blindfold him and he’d be able to point the way because, yes, he and Mia had managed something other than long coffee breaks between marathon sex sessions these last couple of days. They’d studied the map and weather charts like they were the Bible, which to sailors, they were. So he knew exactly where Grenada was and what lay in the four hundred miles in between. A week, give or take, of sailing into the wind on a thirty-two-foot boat with Mia and her sister.

Yes, her sister. Which was okay, because it still beat what he’d put up with in the Navy by a fair bit. And anyway, by then he and Mia would have burned off some of the primitive energy force that had them shagging like bunnies day and night, right?

She brushed up against him and he caught a breath. Maybe. Maybe not. But they’d at least have burned off
enough
of it to last to landfall. And anyway, Meredith was a true champ, letting him and Mia play house on
Serendipity
for a while.

“Seriously, I’m happy house-sitting for a little longer,” Meredith had said, and it even sounded true. “It lets me really experience Bonaire. You know, get to know the island a little better.”

“Seriously?” Mia had asked.

“Sure.” Meredith assured them again and again. So often, he wasn’t all that sure any more. But then she’d perked up and whispered to Mia, “Celeste set me up on a date with her cousin. You think I should go?”

Mia had squeaked and given her two enthusiastic thumbs up. “I think you definitely should go.”

So Meredith had set off on her own little adventure. A tamer adventure, Ryan hoped, than the one he and Mia had just survived.

“God, I hope she does okay this time,” Mia had sighed, watching Meredith go.

“This time?”

Mia just shook her head. “It’s a long story. A sad one.” Her eyes followed her sister. “I hope she finally…well…”

He let her leave it at that. Meredith was allowed to keep her secrets, even if he and Mia had sworn off their own.

“Five weeks with you, wherever they are, are good with me,” he murmured, pulling Mia into another slippery hug. “As long as I get lots of weeks after that, too.”

“Weeks?” she protested.

“Months. Years.” He kissed her between every word. “Decades.”

“Sounds good,” she whispered into the little space between their faces.

Yeah. Decades, at least.

He went to kiss her again but she was talking again.

“I hope the guy at City Divers wasn’t kidding when he said they’d have an opening.”

“Mia, the owner is pregnant. She can’t dive, and they have a load of summer courses lined up. So yeah, I’m pretty sure they’ll have an opening. They know you’re great, and you’re getting a great recommendation from Hans.”

She laughed. “Getting a recommendation from Hans is like getting a recommendation from my dad. It hardly counts.”

“It counts. Believe me, it counts. And it sounded like City Divers wants to run more trips to Bonaire if they could staff them.”

Her eyes shone. “Yeah, that would be cool. A trip down here from time to time. You think you could swing it?”

He tucked his face alongside hers. “From time to time.”

She hugged him tighter. “I could do that for a while. City Divers. Regular trips to great locations. A decent enough salary…for now.”

“For now?” He cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Until you’re ready to leave New York and try out that job in Florida.” She knew about Plan B because he’d told her, because he’d made damn sure not to keep minor details from her any more.

He squeezed her hands. “Two more years, baby. Two more years.” Two more years ought to be enough to truly deserve being called New York’s Finest and gracefully bow out. Two more years of both of them saving, and they ought to have just enough to buy in to his buddy’s salvage operation. He and Mia both.

But they’d cross that bridge when they came to it. This was perfect for now. More than perfect, in fact.

When she breathed in, her whole body rose, and when she exhaled, it was in another happy sigh that ended with her slipping backward just a little bit. She held up the masks and snorkels dangling in one hand as she treaded water beside him. “Maybe we ought to get snorkeling.”

He pulled her back into a kiss. A full-body kiss that ran from his lips to his toes, because really, what was the rush?

“Eventually,” he breathed at some point into another marathon kiss.

Her lips curled under his as she mumbled semicoherently. “Eventually.”

Yes,
eventually
was the kind of clock he’d be happy to work by for the next month or so.

“No rush,” he managed.

“No rush,” she sighed and wound a leg around his, squeezing her hips to his.

“You kill me, Mia.”

“In the best possible, way, right?”

He wanted to laugh, but his chest was all tight. It seemed like one of those times he ought to tell her just how good life was, but he struggled — as usual — to find the words.

Mia, though, seemed to read his mind again, because she smiled into his lips. “I get it, Ryan,” she mumbled. “I get it.”

<<<>>>

Thank you for reading
Windswept
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Adrift
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Uncharted
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Entangled
, earlier books in this series.

I hope you’ve enjoyed your adventure on Bonaire! In case you’re tempted to pull out a map, let me fess up to the facts. While some places in this story are described just the way you’ll find them on your next trip to the Caribbean, others stem entirely from my imagination. So you can send me a postcard from Kralendijk and enjoy the festivities at Rincon (every year on April 30th), but don’t spend too long searching for Wilhelm’s Baai or the wreck of the
Henry Aalders
, except in the pages of this book. Otherwise,
bon voyage
— on your trip to the Caribbean, or on your next armchair adventure romance!

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Windswept
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