by Hart, Hanna
“Hey, are you busy?” she asked Beckett as she tapped on his office door.
“Nope,” he said.
She stepped further into the room and realized, based on the cellphone game he was playing in the practically pitch-black room, that no, he was not busy.
“Come, sit,” he offered and turned on a bronze lamp that sat on his large dark walnut desk.
Fiona took a seat in the outrageously comfortable club chair and bit her lip, wondering exactly how she could bring such a topic up without making things awkward.
“So…?” Beckett said with a laugh. “What is it?”
"Hey, did I do something to make you uncomfortable? Because the last thing I want to do is jeopardize my job
"What?" Beckett winced. "What are you talking about?"
"I mean," Fiona babbled and twiddled her fingers. "The lunch and the guys night?" She shrugged.
"Oh, that," he said.
“Yes,” she repeated. “That.”
Beckett took a long pause before responding, so she knew a lie was about to leave his lips.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s nothing about you or anything you did. I loved my lunch. If anything, I was a little jealous of your skills,” he said with a wink in his tone. “I’ve just been really busy. My father giving me my position at the restaurant again is, well, huge. So I just don’t want to screw it up, that’s all.”
Okay, she thought, maybe not such a bad lie.
“That’s a pretty good excuse,” she said gamely.
“I thought so,” he laughed. “But I didn’t want to make you feel left out.”
“Yeah,” she said with a shrug, “It’s fine. I guess I just didn’t think this was how life was going to be but… I guess I didn’t really know what I was expecting.”
"And what do you want from life, my wife? Where do you see the next two years taking us?"
"I don't know," she giggled.
In truth, all she wanted to be in two years was alive.
"I didn't think too much about it, really," she smirked. "We'll be here, I assumed?"
"Here? No, no, no! We'll be galivanting around!"
Fiona laughed. "Galivanting? Okay, grandpa!"
"Shh," he chuckled, bringing a finger to his lip. "My father owns restaurants in Vegas, New York, Colorado, Cali, and Paris."
"Just Paris?" she mocked.
"The lady is not impressed with six magical locations?"
Fiona shook her head. "I just assumed you'd have more European pull, that's all!"
"Paris is all the Europe you will ever need. So where do you think you want to go? Since I'm back in his good graces once again, I assume he'll be handing a restaurant over to me to run."
"You up for the challenge?" she laughed.
"I'll let you try my Aude cuisine and let you ask that again," he dared.
She rolled her eyes playfully, but he caught her. He stood from the desk and squatted slightly, raising both his hands toward her like a mummy. From his stance, and past experience, she knew he was about to tickle her. She began to squeal and run through the door but purposely slowed down as Beckett got closer to her just so that she could feel his hands on her body as he tickled her.
Yeah. Putting her feelings on the back-burner was going to be harder than she thought it would be.
Chapter Nine
Beckett
The Queen Lanai, simply called “The Queen” by the locals, was a floating restaurant and bar located far off from the resort and neighborhoods. In fact, it was in the middle of the water.
To get access to The Queen, you had to sign a waiver and take a water taxi or boat service provided by the restaurant.
The ship was two-tiered. The bottom level was a more casual, relaxed atmosphere. It had white tables and trendy benches and served pub fare and other island favorites.
But with a lively tiki bar, hammocks, white linens and canopies, string lights, and oversized beach beds, the top tier was where Beckett liked to go.
He decided to stay away from drinking tonight but had no problem when Fiona ordered a mojito.
The two of them danced to the pop-style island music that blared from the floating restaurant, and when the music died down, Fiona asked if she could go and get a water.
He followed behind her up to the tiki bar and watched with a laugh as the bartender gave her a funny look when she ordered a water. She turned her profile to Beckett and rolled her eyes playfully at him.
Beckett sat a few stools down from where Fiona was standing. It gave him the perfect view of the stunning redhead, and then quickly the tall, muscle-bound rower who crept up next to her.
The man had a shaved head and was wearing swim shorts and a collared top.
“Hey there, pretty girl.” Muscle-man leaned in close to Fiona and Beckett could distinctly hear him say, “You got a boyfriend?”
Beckett felt his heart still at the man who was hitting on his friend but buried the feelings so deeply he swore he could feel them in his feet.
“Je ne parle pas anglaise,” Fiona responded and gave the man smile along with a confused shrug.
“Ah, you don’t speak English, huh?” muscle-man asked.
Fiona offered him another shrug and then leaned far over the bar to swipe one of the maraschino cherry garnishes and a paper drink umbrella to drop into her water.
"Yeah? Well, my mom's French and your accent is terrible, so I'm assuming you don't actually speak the language."
Fiona laughed. It was a heavenly, throaty laugh that he hadn't heard before. "You caught me."
"You're funny. Where are you from?"
"France," she teased and then flattened the tip of her drinking strap between her teeth.
Muscle-man tilted his head to the side playfully and said, "Where, really?"
"Georgia," Fiona finally admitted.
"I don't hear a Southern accent," her new suitor said, nodding toward her.
"Hm. Funny. You seem to be from Can't-Take-a-Hint-ville, and I can hear your accent as clear as day," she said with widening eyes.
The muscle-bound rower chuckled. In a tone that sounded like he had just decided to be charmed by her rudeness, he said, "I like you."
"Thanks," she said evenly.
"You got a boyfriend?"
Fiona looked the man over, and Beckett could feel his stomach tighten. Come on, Fiona. Don't be taken in by a gym-shark.
The redhead raised her left hand to reveal her shimmering engagement ring and solid gold wedding band, and she said, "Married."
"Faithful?" the man asked, and Beckett felt himself starting fume.
"Yep," she said.
A new song began blaring through the sound system on the ship: a deep base of drums with a choir of voices singing something so deeply catching it was almost annoying. It was the type of song that created unity in a group like this.
As Beckett looked around, he could see everyone around him had started to dance. This contagious action also seemed to take hold of muscle man as he came up behind Fiona and began to dance against her. To say his movements suggested what he wanted to do with her was an understatement.
"But can you dance?" the man asked.
"No," Fiona laughed and began to push away from him.
Beckett knew there was some new-age, unspoken rule about letting a woman take care of herself, but he couldn't stand it anymore. Who comes onto someone with a wedding ring? Why keep trying when she already said no? Not in all his single years did he ever try to force some girl to go out with him.
He hopped off his stool and walked up over to the pair, slipping his hand down to the small of Fiona's back.
"Thanks for keeping my wife company, but I'm here now so..." Beckett said pointedly and wasn't surprised to realize he was being drawn into a staring competition with the rower.
"I don't think the lady was done, if you ask me," the man said in response.
"Hm," Beckett scratched his chin and looked at Fiona. "You done?"
She grinned back
at him and said, "Yup."
"'Kay," he said and looked pointedly back toward muscle-man. "So, goodbye."
Fiona burst into laughter and Beckett brought his arm up around her shoulder, pulling her close as they went back toward their table by the ship's railing.
"Everywhere I go, my adoring fans await me," she said with a put-on exasperation. "Oh no, wait, that's you."
"Yeah, right," he rolled his eyes.
"I'm serious! The waitress asked if your dad is Colton Davenport," she said. "I'm pretty sure she wanted your autograph."
"Yeah, well, you don't have to answer that, Sunshine," he said, unamused. "I don't."
"I'm pretty sure people know who you are. People in that world, anyway."
"That world," he repeated. "Like I live on another planet?"
And then he realized that to Fiona, he probably did. She probably thought he was spoiled rotten and completely beyond relating to.
“Do you think I’m…” he began but stopped short. He wasn’t sure how to finish the question without sounding utterly full of himself.
“What?” she laughed.
Beckett cleared his throat and ran a hand through his wet hair. “Do you think I’m spoiled?”
Fiona’s eyes immediately went skyward with flecks of blue and then creamy white. A sheepish grin began creeping at the corners of her red lips and Beckett winced comically.
“Ouch,” he said, hitting his hand against his chest. “Really?”
“Well, you don’t have it rough, I’ll tell you that,” she said.
“I don’t want to be spoiled,” he said. “I don’t want you to see me that way.”
“How do I know what you are?” she asked.
He knew she’d said it as a way to back-peddle, but somehow that statement hurt even more than her last one.
“What I mean is,” she said quickly as she saw the dawning look of embarrassment across his face, “I don’t know you that well. Do I think you’re spoiled? I mean, you have a lot of money. But being rich doesn’t mean being spoiled. Your parents took care of you, like anybody’s would if they had that much money. But, it also sounds like you worked hard in school and managing restaurants and stuff, so…”
“So, you think I’m spoiled,” he snorted.
“No!” she laughed.
“Yes!” he said.
“Well,” she said in a tone that sounded more like a proclamation than the beginning of a sentence, “I think it’s cool that your dad is famous.”
“Cool?” he scoffed. "Try being sixteen and trying to sneak out of the house without your parents knowing when your dad is literally a celebrity."
She snapped her fingers and giggled out, "You got nabbed."
"Yeah, something like that,” he said.
But it was exactly that.
As it turned out, his bad-boy days of embarrassing his parents publicly didn’t begin after Lynne died. It started way younger than that, at fifteen, when he snuck into his first nightclub in New York.
The worst part was, sneaking in wasn’t even worth it. The club was utterly boring, and he ended up getting sick after just one shot of tequila.
“What about you?” he asked. “You ever sneak away from your parents?"
"No," Fiona said.
"No? Just no? No wild streak for Fiona?"
"Ah, that happened later, thankfully. Legal age," she shrugged. "Parents can't freak out that way."
"Nah. They still do. How old are you, again?"
"Okay, well, aside from the fact that you're pretty much never supposed to ask a girl that unless you're carding her," she needled him. Then, with a wink, she finished, "I'm twenty-five."
"Well, trust me, when you're almost thirty, they still find ways to lecture you."
"Sounds like a blast," Fiona said with raised brows. She took a sip of her drink and looked out over the painfully clear, turquoise waters.
"Just you wait, missy."
The two of them watched the way the sunset was making the waters glow. Beckett had lived here practically his whole life, save for his college years and various travel for work, and he was still mesmerized by the stunning sights out on the ocean.
“My mom—” Fiona began to say but was interrupted as a waitress came up and delivered a single glass of champagne to Fiona’s side of the table.
“These are from that man over at the bar,” the peppy waitress said and set the glass down.
Beckett looked in the direction the waitress had pointed and spotted a deep skinned man with slicked-back hair smiling expectantly in Fiona’s direction.
Fiona pushed the glass back toward the waitress and said, “No thank you.”
“But… it’s already paid for,” the waitress said.
She was one of those women who’s every statement sounded like a question.
My name’s Tammy?
I live on the island?
I’m not a natural brunette?
“You take it,” Fiona offered, and the waitress shook her head with a laugh.
“I can’t do that,” the woman said.
“Just take it back, then,” Fiona said with a sigh.
The waitress offered an awkward smile and turned back to the male patron who had bought the drinks. “I know him,” she reasoned, looking back and forth between Beckett and Fiona. “He’ll just send more.”
Fiona offered Beckett a pleading look, and he began to laugh. He stared down at the bubbling flute of champagne and then raised it toward the man at the bar before drinking it down in four large gulps.
“Thanks!” he shouted, and the man at the bar looked back at him with a derisive smile before shaking his head.
Fiona laughed at that and set her hand on top of Beckett’s. He looked down at the contact and was suddenly lost. It was as though the loud music had faded into a blur—a haze of noise that permeated the air without any real purpose.
“You were saying?” he asked.
Fiona shook her head. “My mom bailed when I was two,” she said with a half-hearted shrug. “So, she never gave me a hard time about anything.”
“Oh,” he said with a frown. “I see we’re battling for mother of the year.”
“No, I think you have to actually have a mom present in your life to hand out awards.”
“Fair enough,” he smirked. “I’m sorry. That must have been rough.”
“I had my dad,” she said with a carefree ease, like she’d been through the subject of her mother enough times not to let it bother her.
But of course, that couldn’t be true. Girls need their mothers.
Children, he corrected himself, need their mothers. He knew that first hand from his own son.
“I mean,” Fiona continued, “there were things I wish she were around for, you know? Just to ask her what to do or get some advice from a woman. It’s not really the same asking your dad about tampons and birth control.”
Beckett winced. “Poor guy,” he sympathized. “You grew up in Georgia?”
“Colorado,” she corrected. “Around Vail.”
“Like it, hate it?”
“It was good,” she nodded enthusiastically. “Loved Vail.”
“Love Vail!” Beckett agreed. “Quaint, pretty. Full of community. It’s the perfect little town.”
"Yeah, it was great. Lots of cultural festivals. Me and my dad would go fly fishing in the summer. It was pretty great. I did a lot of skiing."
"I bet," he laughed. He could remember one year he'd gone there with some college friends. They'd stayed in a ridiculously expensive ski lodge and spent the whole weekend trying to best one another on the slopes. "Your dad big into that scene?"
Fiona laughed and shook her head. "My father worked at the ski lodge, so…" she shrugged. "We sort of had an in."
"Nice. Did you live there long?"
"'Til I was thirteen," she said.
"Thus why no Southern accent," he said with a smile. "I'd been wondering that, though I detect... something?"
"My dad's Scot
tish," she said. "He came to the states from Inverness."
"Southern Scotland?" he asked.
"Northern," she said.
"I know nothing of Scotland," he laughed.
Fiona waved him off. "So that's why, you know, my speech is sort of this Scottish, American, Southern muddle."
"I like the muddle," he said. "It makes you interesting."
The compliment hung there, and he could see Fiona's freckled skin pinken.
"What happened then? Lose your love for skiing?"
"My dad passed away, actually. He had a..." Fiona trailed off, stirring the bamboo umbrella against the ice in the bottom of her glass. She looked up at him with an embarrassed smile and inhaled sharply. "Well, anyway," she began but tapered off again.
"Aw, I'm sorry to hear that. That's tough."
She knew loss, he thought.
Not just breakup loss, but real, gut-wrenching devastation.
Beckett licked his lips and continued to listen to Fiona’s stories of getting on a plane at thirteen and moving to Georgia to live with her father’s brother. She talked about how much she loved the south and all the while all Beckett could think was how much he was truly starting to like her.
Her loss had made her more of a possibility for him. Like there was something only the two of them knew about.
Not since Lynne’s death had Beckett ever felt this way.
The feelings overwhelmed him. In one breath, the connection he had to Fiona made him feel like he was betraying Lynne. But in the next breath, he felt alive.
And now he could no longer deny the feelings he had for Fiona.
Chapter Ten
Fiona
The island was like a paradise. Yet, every day that Fiona got to enjoy the beautiful skies and warm sand, she began to feel immensely guilty.
She imagined Ruby in Kathleen’s care and how confused she must have been to wake up without Fiona there with here. Even when she was cleaning rooms for the motel, Fiona had the ability to take Ruby with her in her bassinette.
Even as a one-year-old, Fiona knew Ruby could feel the lack of her presence.
How would she fare when two years passed? Would she even know who Fiona was anymore?
