Brody tried not to chuckle bitterly at her compliment, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t see anything about himself as attractive. He’d never liked his eyes. They were exactly like his father’s. When he looked in the mirror, all he could see was his father’s dark, angry, blue gaze fixed on him when he did something wrong. And as for the parts of his face he did like, his father had ruined that, as well.
“What’s so funny?” Sam asked, wrinkling her nose with irritation.
“Nothing is funny. I just have no idea what it is about me that you’re attracted to,” he admitted.
“Everyone has flaws. I hate my nose,” Sam complained. “I took a soccer ball to the face when I was nine and it’s bothered me ever since then. It didn’t heal right. I also have troll feet, so I wear cute shoes to disguise them. I won’t even get started on my hips.”
“You have excellent hips.”
“Thank you, but I’ve never been happy with them. I jog constantly, but there they stay. The point is that you are always going to be your own biggest critic. But everyone has at least one attractive feature. The key is to make the most of your best features. At the wrong angle my nose might make me look like I’ve lost a boxing match, but when I’m having a good hair day, I feel great about myself. The more confident you are, the more attractive you appear to others.”
That was a nice idea. And given that Sam was nitpicking her minor imperfections, that might work for her. But if he had to see beauty in himself for others to see it, he was doomed. He shook his head and looked back at the horizon. He was uncomfortable with the way she was studying him. Even knowing that for some unfathomable reason she was attracted to him, he wanted to squirm under her gaze.
“Look at me, Brody.” Her hand rested against his scarred cheek and turned his face back to her. “You don’t see anything but the scars, do you?”
He swallowed hard but couldn’t avoid her question. “I do. Usually the scars are the last thing I notice. Mostly, I see the drunk, angry face of my father. Sometimes I see my mother’s mouth, tight with disapproval and stone-silent when child protective services asked her questions. But the worst is when I see how I used to look before this happened and what I might look like today if I hadn’t startled him that day in the garage.”
His words were harsher than he intended them to be, but he needed Sam to understand. There was nothing beautiful about him in his opinion. He was broken.
“What happened to you, Brody?”
He didn’t want to talk about it. Not here in this magical place where he could escape from his past. He never should’ve said the words to lead them to the conversation he dreaded. He should’ve nodded and accepted her compliment. And yet, he knew he needed to tell her. After sharing something as intimate as they had, she deserved to know why he was the way he was. That didn’t mean he had to like it.
Brody’s hands dropped from Sam’s waist and he turned to walk back into the house. He heard her come in behind him and slide the glass door closed.
“Brody, please.”
He sank onto the edge of the bed and dropped his head to look down at the polished wood floors between his feet. The bed sagged as Sam sat beside him. She placed a reassuring hand on his knee.
“My father was the best-looking guy in Goshen, Connecticut. He also had a raging temper and was an alcoholic by the time he was twenty-three. My mother was an enabler with no self-esteem. She always thought she wasn’t good enough for a man like him. Probably because he told her she was fat and ugly at every opportunity. Why they got married, I’ll never know, but at least they bothered to. My mother thought that having his son would be the best way to win him over.”
Sam’s sharp intake of breath beside him was enough to let him know she knew it was a bad idea. “What she didn’t realize was that any child she had would be just as big a disappointment to him as she was. I could never do anything right. Sometimes I think my father only wore a belt so he would always have something handy to hit me with.”
Her hand tightened on his knee, but she didn’t speak. “I didn’t believe it was possible, but he got meaner as he got older. When the belt didn’t make me scream loud enough anymore, he switched to fists. Or burning cigarettes. My mother looked the other way and would lecture me about angering him while she bandaged my wounds. By the time I reached fifth grade, I was certain it was coming down to a final fight. Him versus me. I was finally getting big enough and strong enough to fight back.
“One day I came home from school and he wasn’t at work like he should’ve been. His car had a dead battery, so he was in the garage working on it. I don’t know why I went out there that day. I should have just gone into my room and hid like I usually did. When I opened the door, it made a loud squeaking noise and startled him. He hit the back of his head on the hood of the car and dropped the car battery he was pulling out. Somehow, it spilled some of the acid on his hand and he started yelling.”
The rest of the day was a sketchy composite of memories and things that people told him. “I remember my father screaming and hitting me. I remember slumping against the wall and sliding to the ground, fighting to stay conscious. I opened my eyes at one point and saw him walking toward me with something in his hand. I tried to shield myself, but it was a pointless effort. After that, I only recall hearing someone screaming and realizing it was me. I blacked out and woke up in the hospital a week later.”
“Oh, my God,” Sam said.
Brody turned to look at her and saw the tears welling in her eyes. “Please don’t cry. I don’t want to upset you. This was twenty years ago. It’s too late to cry now.”
“What was it?” she asked, her voice almost too quiet for him to hear her.
“After he beat me, he poured the acid from his battery into an empty quart-size can we’d recently used to paint the bathroom. Then he threw it at me. The neighbors called the cops when they heard me screaming.”
“Please tell me that he’s in jail.”
“He is, at least for now. If he had stuck with beating me as usual, the maximum sentence in Connecticut is a year, but the prosecutor nailed him with first-degree assault against a minor ten and under and he got twenty years, the maximum sentence. I went into foster care after that.”
“What about your mother?”
For some reason, this was the part of the story that always bothered him the most. His father was a bastard. He’d come to terms with that long before the accident. But her… “She chose him.”
“She what?” Sam’s voice was sharp and angry. He wished his mother had shown half as much emotion for him.
“She blamed me for my father going to prison. I brought the worst out in him, you see. To this day, she goes to every parole hearing and begs them to let him out. That’s the one public place I do go. The judge usually takes one look at me and sends him right back to the prison. She hates me for that, but it’s only fair since I hate her for choosing a man over her child. I might not have gone into foster care, but she never came to the hospital to claim me, so social services had no choice.”
“What a horrible mother.”
“You’d think so, but it turned out to be the best thing she could’ve done for me. I would’ve done nothing with my life if I had stayed with her, but my foster home was amazing. My foster family is my real family now. Wade, Xander and Heath are my brothers. Julianne is my sister. Molly and Ken are my parents. They never looked at me like I was different. They gave me the faith and drive to make something of myself. Without them, I wouldn’t have built my company and I certainly wouldn’t be flying in jets to my private island. My life is so much better because of the Edens. That’s why I took their last name when I turned eighteen. If it weren’t for these damn scars, I might even forget that my biological parents ever existed.”
Sam sat quietly for a moment, absorbing everything he’d told her. “I’m glad you fou
nd people who cared about you, Brody. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, especially so young. But thank you for sharing this with me. I know that was hard for you.”
Brody covered Sam’s hand with his own and gave it a gentle squeeze. It was done. He’d put everything out there. And now he wouldn’t have to talk about it again. Ever.
Hopefully, now, they could start to enjoy their vacation. “Now that all that unpleasantness is out of the way, what do you say to putting on our swimsuits and taking a dip in that fantastic ocean?”
Ten
“Where exactly are we going again?” Sam clutched her flashlight and followed Brody down a dim, gravel and sand path.
“I didn’t say.”
Sam would normally say that she liked surprises, but Brody seemed full of them. She never knew what they were doing. But considering his last surprise included a luxury jet and a private island, she needed to just go with it. They’d spent two days on the island being decadently lazy. After dinner, he’d eyed the darkening sky and told her to put on her swimsuit. She couldn’t fathom what she would do in the dark in her swimsuit, especially when he handed her a flashlight.
Walking through the dark to the far side of the island made her even more nervous. The path they traveled was narrow and went straight through his private rainforest. There were strange trees and potentially poisonous plants and unseen things living in them. She could hear something rustling in the branches, but she couldn’t find it with her flashlight. Hopefully it was a bird and not some big scary lizard or snake.
“We’re almost there,” Brody said, rounding a thick, knotted tree trunk. He was clutching a camping lantern in his hand.
The path curved ahead of them and opened to a small oval lagoon ringed with a dark tangle of trees and vines. It was almost entirely enclosed from the ocean except for a narrow inlet. There were no sandy beaches on this part of the island. At least that she could see. By now the sun had fully set and there was only a touch of purple lighting the night sky. There was no moon tonight, but there was enough light left to see two kayaks and paddles lying along their path.
“We’re going kayaking?” That wasn’t exactly what she had in mind.
“Yes.” Brody hung the lantern on a sturdy branch and bent down to pick up a paddle. “Have you ever done it before?”
“No. I’m not particularly outdoorsy.”
“That’s okay. It isn’t hard. The water is calm tonight. These are open kayaks, so you don’t have to worry about rolling it.”
Sam swallowed hard and eyed him with renewed concern. She hadn’t considered that until he mentioned it. “Great. Any particular reason why we’re doing this in the dark? No one will see us.”
“I know. But we have to go in the dark. You’ll see why.” He grabbed one of the kayaks and hauled it to the edge of the water. “Come here and step in.”
Sam made her way over and kicked off her flip flops. Brody braced the kayak and held it steady as she climbed inside and sat down. It rocked slightly, but she kept her balance.
Brody handed her the two-ended paddle. “I’m going to push you off so I can put mine in the water. Just sit still and don’t paddle around until I get out there with you.”
She braced herself for the push and glided out into the lagoon. A few minutes later Brody pulled up alongside her. “Let’s paddle out into the middle. It’s almost dark enough.”
Sam dipped her paddle into the water on one side of the kayak, then the other. She was surprised at how easily she moved across the surface. It only took a few moments to reach the center of the lagoon. She let the kayak glide to a stop and held her paddle across her lap. The night was silent and still around them. She looked up to the dark sky and gasped. With no sun, moon or city lights, the stars were like a thick blanket overhead. There were millions scattered across the darkness instead of the fifty she was lucky to see in Boston. Suddenly, the mysterious hike through the dark was worth it.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
Brody looked up at the sky and laughed. “Yes, it is. But that’s not why we’re here.”
“It’s not?”
“No. I wanted to show this place to you. It’s a secret. No one knows this is here. I don’t even think the previous owner knew. I found it by accident. There are only a few locations like this in the whole world and mine may be the only privately owned one.”
Sam looked around herself, searching for what made it so special. She didn’t see anything but some weird trees. And then she saw it. A fish darted through the water beside her. It glowed a bluish-white, leaving a streak behind it like a trail of stardust. After a moment it faded away. “What was that?” she asked. “You have glowing fish.”
Brody smiled. “It must be dark enough now. It’s not the fish that glow. Watch.” He dipped his paddle into the water and agitated it. It stirred up a swirl of glowing white clouds beneath the surface.
Sam did the same with her own paddle. Every movement generated the blue glow in the inky black water. It was eerie and hauntingly beautiful. She’d never seen anything like it before. “What makes it do that?”
“This is a bioluminescent bay. The mangrove lagoon and warm, calm water creates the perfect environment for the tiny little creatures to thrive. They put off a blue-green glow as a defense mechanism when they’re agitated by movement.”
“Is it safe to put my hand in the water?”
“As long as you don’t have on any bug repellant. It will kill them.”
“I don’t.” Sam let her fingers comb through the water, making squiggly green designs like she was drawing in the air with sparklers on the Fourth of July. When she pulled her hand out of the water, it glowed for a moment. “Wow. This is really incredible.”
“I thought you’d like it. Do you want to get in?”
Sam smiled. “Can we?”
“Yeah.” Brody laid his paddle inside the kayak and threw his legs over the side into the water.
Sam watched him slip beneath the surface of the water in a haze of blue-green clouds. She could follow his every movement through the dark water. He swam under her kayak coming up on the opposite side. When he surfaced, his whole body was dripping with iridescent green water.
“Come on,” he said, holding his hand out to her.
She was nervous about swimming in the ocean at night, but she couldn’t pass up this opportunity. She’d try to forget there might be sharks or other creepy creatures nearby.
Sam took his hand and followed his lead, throwing her legs over the side and slipping into the water. She was too nervous to stay under for long and immediately reached for the surface. When she reopened her eyes, she was amazed by the glow of her every movement as she treaded water.
Brody watched her with a soft smile curling his lips. It was a curious expression considering their circumstances. “What?” she finally asked as she pushed a wet strand of hair out of her face.
“You’re even beautiful when you’re green.”
Sam chuckled and shook her head. If she looked anything like Brody did, it was more likely that she looked like a human glow stick or space alien. Of course, Brody looked handsome even as the drops of luminescent water dripped down his cheeks. The glow of the water around them was bright enough for her to see his face clearly in the darkness. Nothing about him had physically changed, and yet he looked like a completely different person here on his island. It had taken until today for her to really notice the change, but it was definitely there. He was relaxed. Open. She dared say he even looked happy. He didn’t have the same countenance in Boston. Not even at his home, which should’ve been a place he could relax and be himself.
It was as though a massive burden had been lifted from his shoulders coming here. Maybe telling her about his past and his parents had helped, too. That was a huge secret to carry around. He had his f
oster family, which was wonderful, but who else could he talk to? Confide in? Not Agnes. But he could tell Sam. And she was glad to be that for him.
As she watched him here, in this beautiful, magical moment, she realized she wanted to be more to him than a confidante. More than just his secretary. Sam wanted to be with Brody. And not only physically. The shy, mysterious charmer had stolen her heart away.
Temporarily stunned by the turn of her thoughts, she stopped swimming and her head slipped under the water again. It was too deep in this part of the lagoon. She pushed herself back up, turned and started swimming closer to the shore where they’d come in. She stopped when she could feel sand and stones scraping against her toes. It made her feel more stable physically, if nothing else. “That’s better.”
“Was the water too deep?” Brody asked, coming up behind her.
Sam turned to him and smiled. She didn’t want him to know she was having thoughts about her feelings for him. “Not usually. But it’s so amazing and romantic out here, and I want to kiss you so badly. I’m afraid I’ll get distracted touching you and drown.”
Brody chuckled, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her against him. She moved easily through the water, colliding with his chest. “I’ll keep your head above water, don’t worry.”
She was sure he would. His hands glided over her bare back. He’d grown so much more confident since that first night. He was a quick learner, she was pleased to discover. Like a true left-brainer, he had set his mind to learning every inch of her body, memorizing every response. She’d never had a man figure out so quickly how she liked to be touched.
When his lips met hers, she felt a chill of excitement run down her spine. With a little hop and a luminescent cloud following her movement, she wrapped her legs around his waist and pressed her body into his. Brody groaned against her mouth as her center made contact with the firm heat of his arousal. The thin fabric of her bikini bottoms and his swimming trunks did little to disguise how badly he wanted her.
A Beauty Uncovered Page 12
