by Edie Claire
Oh, my.
Judging from the way he’d been looking at her lately, if she did anything like that, she would get far more action than she bargained for. Which brought her to the second thing he was doing for her. He was inviting her to be more physically comfortable, even if her comfort came at his own expense. She’d given him no indication that she wanted a romantic relationship, and she was certain now that he would make no move in that direction unless she did so first. Which was sweet. And commendable.
But also unsustainable. Which was almost certainly why he had been putting extra distance between them this morning.
She had seen it happen so many times. With all the nicest guys. They were her friends as long as the relationship showed some chance of developing, but once convinced her feelings would never change, they politely disappeared. The defections had always aggravated her, but looking at Kai now, she felt an unaccustomed jolt of sympathy for the men. If their roles were reversed, would she act any differently?
Probably not. But it didn’t matter. Her Kai would not be defecting anywhere.
She smiled back at him, and the lust in his dark eyes shone through, strong and unmistakable. Another unwelcome tremor of nervousness coursed through her, and she sighed to herself with disappointment. Madalyn Westover: Tarzan brave!
Right. She supposed she was afraid of feeling guilty. The intangibles in life had always been the most fearsome.
“The beach sounds good,” she agreed.
“Let’s go, then,” he said, leading her back towards the truck. “We can have our talk there.”
He made an attempt to sound light-hearted, but Maddie could tell that he dreaded whatever he still had to tell her as much as she dreaded hearing it.
Last night he had held her while they talked. She didn’t think she’d be so lucky today.
Unless…
Unless she could get a grip on herself and get over feeling like such an ignorant babe in the woods beside him. So what if they had always been equals before? In everything?
They reached the truck and opened the doors. It was two hundred thousand degrees inside.
Kai’s eyes flickered over Maddie as he started up the engine and turned on the AC. He looked distinctly hopeful.
Her mind flooded with images of countless girls and women taking one look at those gorgeous eyes of his, those broad shoulders and strong limbs, and offering themselves like candy.
Her stomach flip-flopped.
She left the jacket on.
Chapter 26
Kai looked out over the crowded beach lot with chagrin. So much for finding a private stretch of sand to wade along. They had to find water somewhere. Maddie would clearly die of heat stroke before she’d take that damned jacket off.
He didn’t understand it. It couldn’t be that she didn’t trust him. He knew she did.
It must be just one more way of saying no.
“Why don’t we walk up and check out the keiki pools?” he suggested as he parked, trying not to think about it. “We’ve got a bunch of old shoes in the back of the truck.” He had his usual sandals on, but he had noticed that — not expecting to wind up at the beach — she was wearing a decent pair of running shoes.
Maddie threw him a skeptical look. Her red hair was limp and her skin was shiny with sweat and he hated her jacket with an abiding passion and she still looked ridiculously, incredibly desirable. “Whose old shoes?” she asked, pulling up a foot. “Unless they’re yours, I’m out of luck. You seriously think these dogs could fit in any other Nakama family footwear?”
Kai looked, but not at her shoe size. Her perfectly formed ankle and sexy calf were way more interesting. “We’ll figure something out,” he assured, recognizing that she had a point; the rest of his family did have small feet. But trying to walk barefoot on lava rock and coral was a recipe for pain and suffering.
They got out of the truck. Maddie pulled out her phone, cooed over having a good signal, and headed off to get a quick drink from the water fountain. Kai fished around in the truck bed and found a pair of men’s sandals he suspected might be Dylan’s. Perfect. When Maddie was done with them, he would throw them away.
He leaned against the front of the truck to await Maddie’s return. She wandered back through the trees with excruciating slowness, her face buried in her phone. When she was about ten feet away she stopped, looked up, and stared at him wide-eyed. Her expression made his heart skip. She gave him one of the most brilliant smiles he’d ever seen.
“Um… Did you find me any shoes?” she asked.
Kai swallowed. She gave him a smile like that, then asked about shoes? “Yeah,” he replied. “Try these.” He held out the sandals.
Maddie stepped over and took them, smiling at him all the while. Her gray eyes sparkled knowingly, and her lips drew into a grin.
What the hell?
She walked around and sat down on the passenger seat to switch her shoes. In a few seconds she reappeared with the sandals on. “Ready!” she said with enthusiasm.
Kai stood up. She was no longer wearing the jacket. She was wearing an excruciatingly form-fitting yellow cotton shirt which dipped low at the neck, revealing an expanse of perfectly delicious skin and fantastical curves straight from heaven. Or hell, depending on your perspective.
He was aware that he was staring.
Maddie smiled at him. “It’s your own fault, Nakama,” she said wryly.
Kai forced himself to blink normally. “More comfortable now?”
“Much,” she said with enthusiasm. “In fact, I’ve never felt better. Let’s go!” She took a step forward, swung her arms, and bounced a little.
Kai sucked in a breath and followed.
Maybe that BYU dress code had its good points.
They walked through the picnic area and on across the sand to the trailhead. With his eyes glued to her form ahead of him, he had to concentrate to keep focus. He had promised to tell her the whole unpleasant story, and he was going to get it over with right now.
They reached the keiki pools, and he was relieved to find no one else in the immediate area. They walked down the steps and out on the lava rock across the maze of tide pools until they found a cool, private spot where they could wade or sit and dangle their feet in the water.
Concentrating was a difficult task with this newly uninhibited version of Maddie before him. Not only had she taken her jacket off, she had rolled her Bermuda shorts halfway up her thighs. At some point along their trek she had unbraided her hair, and at this very moment she was combing through it with her fingers while she splashed her toes in the water like a friggin’ mermaid.
He indulged himself in another long, unabashed viewing of her person, and she acknowledged his interest with a sly grin. He shook himself. He didn’t know what had brought about her change of heart with regard to covering up, but as long as the traffic signal stayed on red, his own situation remained unaltered. If he had half a brain, he would have waited to give the wear-what-you-want speech till five minutes before the ferry docked. But they were here now. And he still had “the unpleasantness” to deal with.
“Maddie,” he began tiredly. “You know I don’t want to talk about this. I wish we could spend the rest of the day goofing off and acting like kids again, just like yesterday. But you need to know that… Well, your mother’s death was difficult for me, too, as it turned out.”
Maddie stopped splashing. “So I understand,” she said softly. “But why, Kai?”
He blew out a breath. The images were coming back. He had hoped they wouldn’t, but if it was going to happen, he’d just have to power through it. That was okay. He’d be fine.
“You remember, the afternoon it happened, you didn’t go straight home from school, right?”
Maddie nodded. “I went to Christina’s house to work on a project,” she said. “Your Aunt Maria came and got me there.”
“You didn’t think that project was going to take very long,” Kai reminded, a detail she had no doubt f
orgotten, but which was emblazoned on his own memory. “You and I had planned to meet afterwards and hang out. I waited around at Nana’s, but you didn’t show up, and I decided to walk down and wait out in front of your house instead.”
Maddie drew in a breath sharply. “Oh, Kai,” she said in a whisper. “No.”
Kai’s heart pounded. She didn’t need to know the details. It would serve no purpose, other than to give her nightmares of her own.
“I’m afraid so.” He caught her eyes. “It was me who found your mother that day, Maddie.”
Not right away, as it turned out. No, and that was part of the nightmare too, wasn’t it? For at least fifteen minutes he’d sat on the Westovers’ front step, wondering what the odd creaking noise was that came from her living room window whenever the wind kicked up. It had taken him a long time to get bored enough to peer through the glass louvers and try to find out. If it were anyone else’s house, he would have knocked on the door right away, but Maddie’s mother was strange, and he didn’t want to bother her. Jill Westover wasn’t unkind, but she was unhelpful, and he knew that even if she did bother to get up and answer the door, she would have no more idea where her daughter was than he did.
The glass louvers had been tilted down, and he couldn’t see clearly into the middle of the room. But he could see something that disturbed him. He saw a cup on the floor. And a book. And a splash of bright red.
His ten-year-old heart had begun to race then. Maddie? Mrs. Westover? Was someone hurt? He had knocked on the door. No answer. He had pounded on it harder.
“Kai?” Maddie said gently. She had materialized at his side. He could feel her warmth. “You don’t have to relive it again for my sake. I can tell it was bad. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry you had to go through that.”
He had put his hand on the doorknob and found it open, as he knew he would. Hardly anybody locked their doors in the middle of the day on Lana'i. Mrs. Westover? He had stepped in and turned around and with that one action he had seen it all. She had hung herself with the aid of a scarf, a light fixture, and a coffee table, and she’d done it many hours before. All of which was more than enough to horrify him, even if she had not been his best friend’s mother. But no, there was more, because hanging had not been Jill Westover’s preference. Her first attempt had been to slit both her wrists and her neck with a kitchen knife, and while those wild swipes were not sufficient to render her unconscious, much less end her life, the picture they painted in the small living room had been more than gruesome enough to batter his young mind.
“That must have been awful for you,” Maddie whispered.
Her face was close to his. Her hair was loose and flowing about her cheeks. She’d grown up to be so amazingly lovely. But she was a beautiful girl, too, in her way. How Jill Westover could be so far gone as to look at her daughter and never see her had always amazed him. What amazed him more, what appalled him even now, was what would have happened if he hadn’t walked into the Westovers’ living room that day. Maddie’s mother had to know — as she was pulling out that knife and tying on that scarf and kicking away that table — that there was a damn good chance her cheerful little girl would be the first one home.
Kai took a step back and cleared his throat. “It was awful,” he admitted. “And I didn’t handle it the greatest. I had nightmares for a while. I had trouble sleeping, and I missed some school. My family had a hard time of it, too, because they were worried about me.” He tried to smile. “We all got through it, of course. But you can see why my mom and Nana, as happy as they were to see you, had their reservations about my seeing you. They were afraid of what it might dredge up again.”
“But you’re okay, aren’t you?” Maddie asked anxiously.
Kai hesitated. “I’m fine.”
Her shoulders slumped. “You’re such a liar.”
Dammit. How was he ever going to make it in negotiations?
“Kai!” Maddie protested. “Talk to me! What’s going on with you?”
“I had one nightmare, okay?” he admitted. “Last night. But it wasn’t because I can’t handle gore. I mean—” He looked up at her, mortified. He hadn’t meant to say it like that.
“Don’t,” she insisted. “I understand. What are you trying to say?”
Kai bit his lip. He ran his hands through his hair. There. His catalog of procrastinating gestures was exhausted. “After I… found your mother, I went to Nana’s house, and then somebody took me home. I guess I was close to hysterical. A doctor came to the house and gave me some kind of sedative. God only knows what it was — I didn’t know up from down for a long time.”
Maddie let out a huff. “I think we had the same doctor. I’m sorry. Go on.”
He met her eyes again. This was the hard part. Especially now. “I was so mixed up about everything. Disoriented. I still think the drugs that doctor gave me had a lot to do with that. I remember that I wanted to see you. I was worried about you. I kept imagining you walking in on that same scene, even though everyone explained to me that it didn’t happen that way, that you never saw what I saw. Still, I had nightmares where it was you instead of me.”
“Oh, Kai,” Maddie’s soft, sweet voice threatened to undo him, tempting him to grab onto her and not let go. The sun on his face and arms was hot, but the water around his feet was cool and soothing. Waves splashed on the rocks and the sound of people playing on the beach drifted around the bend, but hidden in their little pool he felt as if they were alone.
She moved closer to him. Her side pressed against his. Her shoulder. Her hip. Her curves. He took another step back.
“And then everything got worse,” he continued. “Because everyone started lying to me. And I knew that they were lying. I kept asking to see you and they kept giving me excuses why I couldn’t. You weren’t feeling well, you were taking a little vacation on Maui. Stuff like that. I think that was the worst part — being lied to by everyone I loved. I couldn’t understand why they were doing it, and I started getting paranoid and coming up with all kinds of crazy theories. For whatever reason, the one that made the most sense to me was that you were dead, too. You had died along with your mother, and now my whole family was in some conspiracy to keep the bad news from me.”
Maddie kept inching closer to him as he talked, and he kept backing away from her. But eventually he backed into the wall of the tide pool. He sucked in a breath as Maddie wrapped her arms around his waist, cuddled into his side, and laid her head on his shoulder.
Holy hell. She was trying to comfort him. The irony.
Kai realized he was holding his arm stiffly away from her, and he wrapped it around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. He could do this.
“I don’t know how long it was before they decided to tell me the truth,” he continued. “But eventually they did tell me that you had gone back to Ohio with your grandparents — and that you were never coming back. They said they were sorry for lying and that they had delayed telling me only because they didn’t want to upset me any more than I was already upset. But the damage was done. In my mind you were gone forever either way, and the nightmares kept coming. Sometimes I even dreamed…” He paused a second, then finished roughly. “Sometimes it wasn’t your mother I saw hanging in those nightmares, Maddie. Sometimes, it was you.”
Maddie raised her head. Her eyes were moist, her face flooded with misery. “I’m so sorry,” she breathed. “I had no idea. No one ever told me any of that. It makes me heartsick. Surely my father—”
Kai shook his head. “Don’t blame your father. He didn’t know anything about what was happening with me, and it wasn’t like he didn’t have enough of his own grief to deal with.” He looked at her. He lifted a hand and brushed a strand of red-gold hair across her temple and behind her ear. “This may all be new to you, Maddie, but I’ve had a long time to think about it. And while I know that from our perspective it seems like the adults in the situation totally screwed up and made both our lives miserable, it really wasn’t that si
mple. Your dad didn’t understand how close we were, much less how close you were to Nana and the rest of my family. And my family was following a therapist’s advice; my dad and Nana in particular weren’t happy about the lies but they genuinely believed at the time that they were doing what was best for me.”
Maddie stiffened. “That’s charitable of you. And I hope that someday soon I can make a similar statement about my dad, saying that I’ve forgiven him for cutting me off from everyone on Lana'i and then for lying to me my entire freakin’ life. That I understand he was grieving then, that he made the best decisions he could, and that just because he isn’t the bravest person in the world doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me.” Her voice lowered to a growl. “But I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to call him up and yell at him first.”
Kai chuckled with relief. He wrapped both his arms around her and held her tight. “You’re going to be fine, Maddie,” he assured, resting his cheek on top of her gorgeous red head. “And I’m already fine. I told you that. It’s in the past now.”
He wanted to keep on holding her. But she seemed tense. He loosened his hold, and she took a step back and studied his face. “Did you miss me, Kai?” she asked quietly. “Aside from being concerned that I was dead, I mean. And aside from worrying that I was okay. On a day to day basis, as time went on… did you miss my company?”
Kai’s heart skipped a beat. He was missing her company right now. He wanted to feel her body next to his. “Of course I did. I told you that. I missed you very much.”
“Then why didn’t you answer my letter?”
Her gray eyes swam with torment. That damned letter of hers. Again. So he was right. His failure to reply had meant more to her than she let on. She’d probably been nursing a grudge over the stupid thing this entire time. And she probably had no more idea of what she’d actually written than he’d had.
