Make My Wish Come True

by Fiona Harper

  Really? Still ten minutes of her thirty-minute session to go? Time really dragged here in St Lucia, whether you wanted it to or not.

  She sat up and studied the other people on the beach. They looked totally in the swing of things. There were a couple of people who hadn’t moved on their sunloungers all morning. If they were still in the same flopped-out positions after lunch, she might have to alert someone to go and check they were still breathing.

  While the thought of having something interesting to do gave her a little surge of excitement, she couldn’t help feeling a bit jealous of those boneless sunbathers, even if they were going to end up with the skin tone of an elephant.

  She checked her watch again. Eight minutes left.

  With a snort she collapsed back onto her lounger and closed her eyes. Surely relaxing wasn’t supposed to be this difficult? Honestly, she’d been here four days now and while everyone else ambled, Juliet strode. Where everyone else drifted lazily in the pool, she did laps. And she’d tried all sorts of activities to wear herself out and get rid of some of this nervous energy—tennis, aqua aerobics, yoga—but nothing seemed to work. How could she have the perfect relaxing holiday, if she couldn’t relax perfectly? It was most frustrating.

  When her beeper went, and not before, she gathered up her belongings and headed off to the dive shack. It was four o’clock and time for her snorkelling session. She’d done it once before in Majorca with Greg. He’d dashed off and left her struggling with a pair of flippers that hadn’t wanted to stay on her feet. As a result, she’d spent more time trying to get them to stay put than watching any actual fish.

  The man at the shack stored her bag and kitted her out with a mask and snorkel in the right size and showed her how to fit it properly. She gave the flippers back to him, saying she’d rather do without, thanks. Other guests began to arrive too. The small boat took twelve on each session and the places started to fill up. Most people had booked, but a few stragglers came along to fill up the couple of empty slots.

  The last person to arrive was someone she hadn’t anticipated. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she’d decided the Italian from the villa next door was a vampire or anything, but somehow she just hadn’t expected to see him in the daylight.

  She tried to look unconcerned as he strolled up in a pair of swimming shorts and not much else. Crikey. She’d thought abs like that were only for the kind of men Gemma was always bragging about working with, men who had hours every day to work out with personal trainers; she hadn’t realised real men could be made of the same stuff.

  Juliet had never really thought herself the kind of woman who went a bit gooey over some male muscle. She considered herself above that. She liked wit and intelligence, that kind of thing. But as she stood trying not to look at her new next-door neighbour’s taut thighs and shoulders she discovered they reduced her to marshmallow as effectively as the next female.

  She was also very glad she’d decided to put on a long T-shirt over the polka-dot bikini she’d dared to wear for the first time today. She hadn’t been going to, but her one-piece had been leaving nasty strap lines and was threatening to spoil her perfect tan-in-progress. He probably wouldn’t even look her way, but if he did, she didn’t want to feel all wobbly-bellied next to all that rock-hard perfection.

  But then he did. Look her way.

  And it wasn’t just her belly that felt wobbly. Her knees joined in too.

  He frowned slightly, and after a second he gave her a little nod and a smile. Juliet tried to smile back, but she found a tic in her left cheek was stopping it being a symmetrical affair. She must look slightly demented! And how on earth had he recognised her after a handful of shadowy greetings in the dark?

  She’d seen him again the last two nights, and sensed that going out onto her balcony, acknowledging his presence before disappearing inside again, was becoming a ritual they both expected. She was probably just imagining things.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said in that beautiful voice of his. ‘We are neighbours, yes?’

  Juliet nodded—her only avenue of communication, as her tongue seemed to have doubled to twice its usual size. That would explain her current state of speechlessness and the overwhelming urge to drool.

  He waved his hand towards the bit of ocean they were about to head off into and his mask swung from his fingertips. ‘Have you done this before?’

  She shook her head, then realised she really ought to make an effort to speak. He was going to think her simple otherwise. ‘Yes... I mean, no. I mean... I tried it once but didn’t really...’ She trailed off. This was not the right time to be giving the poor man her life story. He was only being polite.

  He gave her a smile that only lifted one corner of his mouth. It was possibly the sexiest thing she’d ever seen.

  And then it was time to get in the boat. Juliet was all hot and flustered and the boat driver had to tell her twice where to sit. Thankfully—maybe—the Italian ended up at the front end of the boat, while she sat in the stern, and it gave her a chance to regulate her breathing. That sort of thing was important while you were snorkelling, wasn’t it? Now was really not the time to forget how.

  Once all the passengers were aboard, the driver and other crew member made sure everyone was ready then the small speedboat motored slowly away from the wooden dock and headed north, round the headland that marked the end of the main beach and into another, smaller bay. They picked up speed once they were out of the shallows. The wind blew Juliet’s ponytail back and each time the hull of the fibreglass boat smacked against the waves every bone in her body jarred. She gripped onto her seat and tried to look relaxed.

  Thankfully, it was only a five-minute trip to the snorkelling spot. There wasn’t much of a beach in this cove, just low cliffs with large boulders at the bottom, and the water was so clear she could see that the ocean floor fell away fairly steeply from the land at first, before flattening further out into a blanket of pale sand.

  There was a frenzy of activity while shoes were discarded, masks fixed in place, T-shirts removed. Juliet kept hers on. Some of the others, including the Italian, exited the boat by tipping over backwards, like she’d seen people do when scuba-diving on television, but Juliet and a couple of the other novices chose to use the ladder at the back of the boat.

  Even though the sun was lower and less fierce than it had been earlier in the day, the water was heavenly. Cool, but not too cold. She wedged the rubber mouth piece of her snorkel behind her lips, took a deep breath, and stuck her face under the water.

  Wow.

  There were little silver fish with dark stripes that ran from head to tail, swimming in shoals that danced with the underwater tide, sometimes flowing with it, sometimes coquettishly turning en masse and then shooting away. She saw a strange, long, ugly fish with blue spots and one that flapped along the sandy floor. And there were others with yellow and black stripes that kept to the shallows. She was even lucky enough to spot a tiny, delicate seahorse bobbing close to a lump of coral that resembled a giant underwater brain.

  There was a tap on her shoulder, and Juliet found one of the instructors beside her. She lifted her head out of the water to see what he wanted, but he shook his head and stuck his face back in again. She copied. He pointed to a shoal of iridescent squid darting in and out of the larger rocks, changing direction every few seconds, and it was so beautiful that Juliet almost forgot to breathe through her snorkel.

  She grinned at the instructor, did a thumbs-up sign, and went off to explore further. The group didn’t stay together the whole time, but spread out across the small bay. Every now and then there’d be a shout and they’d all gather to see something unusual—a bright fish or some coral or a fat starfish—and then they’d all drift apart again, letting their curiosity choose their path.

  She lost all sense of time, allowing the currents to take her where the
y would, trying to remember all the different kinds of fish she’d seen so she could find out what they were when she was back on dry land. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw a flash. The squid again? She really hoped so. The forty-five-minute session must be up soon, and she would love one last look before they headed back to the resort. She kicked and headed off in the direction of where she thought she’d seen the shoal, but it was difficult to tell. The water was a little murkier here and it was harder to see properly.

  And then she looked down and realised why the water was murkier here. The bottom was incredibly close, not far beneath her feet if she let them dangle down, and instead of smooth sand there were only jagged-looking rocks and mounds of razor-sharp coral. Juliet lifted her head out of the water and realised she could only just see the boat. She must have drifted a lot further than she’d thought.

  Don’t panic, she told herself. They wouldn’t have brought the group here if it was properly dangerous. She put her face back in the water so she could see what her legs were doing and kicked harder, aiming to propel herself away from the rocks and out into deeper water. It worked. For about five seconds. And then the swell just pushed her back to where she’d started. Her heart began to pound.

  She started kicking in earnest, keeping moving, backing away from the rocks so she could tell how close she was, but it was hard to get enough power behind her leg movements, because she had to keep them small enough to save her feet from hitting the coral and boulders only centimetres away. She made a little progress, then lifted her head out of the water and tried to wave at someone, but they were all getting back into the boat and everyone’s attention was fixed there and not on the shore.

  She was getting tired now. A quick check of her watch revealed they’d been out almost an hour. The wake of another larger speedboat, which had powered through the bay a minute or two before, joined with a particularly large wave and Juliet let out a little gurgle of a scream as she found herself rushing towards the rocks again.

  But then a strong arm gripped her around the waist and pulled her backwards. She coughed and spluttered, having swallowed a little seawater when she’d opened her mouth to scream, but she joined the instructor in kicking to propel them both away from the shallows.

  It was only when her heart rate subsided and she stopped frantically churning the water up with her legs that she looked down and realised the strong muscled limbs in the water beside her own weren’t the dark skin of the instructor’s, but a lovely shade of Mediterranean gold.

  * * *

  ‘LET’S SEE WHAT THEY look like,’ Gemma said as she plugged Polly’s snowflake fairy lights into the wall. Finally, they’d had some time to set them up and they’d spent the last ten minutes winding them through the bars at the head of her Victorian-style bed frame.

  Polly dashed across the room to flick the main light switch off then jumped back on her bed and stared at the plastic snowflakes, looking much more like a ten-year-old than she usually did. There was something about her wide eyes and barely held breath that grabbed Gemma somewhere deep down inside. She clambered onto the bed behind Polly and scooted in close so they could witness the turning-on ceremony together. Polly instinctively leaned back into her.

  ‘Turn them on!’ Josh called from the doorway, jumping up and down in time with his brother. Polly had insisted they try her lights out first, and she’d allowed the boys to act as audience, even if she hadn’t yet consented to them crossing the threshold into her territory.

  ‘Go on, Polls,’ Gemma whispered into her ear, finding the contact of the small, warm body against hers strangely comforting.

  Polly took a deep breath then reached for the little switch near the base of the lights.

  For a moment the snowflakes glittered, shadows danced, and the whole room was flooded with a bluish light, transforming it into a snowy grotto. Both boys gasped and Polly, still transfixed by the lights, reached for Gemma’s arm and squeezed.

  But then the flickering grew stronger, there was a popping sound and it went dark again. In fact, everything went dark. Including the landing light and the glowing red display of Polly’s digital alarm clock.

  The boys screamed, then ran across the room and dived onto Gemma and Polly on the bed, much to Polly’s displeasure. From somewhere along the landing, she heard Violet shout, ‘Hey! Who turned off the Wi-Fi?’

  Oh, crap.

  This was what you got for buying fairy lights from the pound shop, she supposed.

  ‘We’re not allowed to say that word, Auntie Gemma,’ Polly said beside her, but her voice was thin and shaky.

  ‘What word?’ Gemma asked, scrunching up her forehead. Why on earth wouldn’t Juliet let them say ‘Wi-Fi’?

  ‘Crap,’ Jake said helpfully, more than a hint of a giggle in his tone.

  Uh-oh. She’d said that out loud?

  ‘Poop, then,’ she said, correcting herself, and the twins fell about laughing, making the mattress bounce.

  Gemma sighed. ‘I don’t suppose anyone knows where the fuse box is, do they?’

  Polly clutched her harder and Gemma could feel her shaking her head against her arm. ‘I don’t like the dark,’ she whispered. ‘It’s too big.’ Gemma could feel the little girl quivering against her, so she wrapped her arm around her and held her firmly, surprised by the rush of warmth and determination that surged through her.

  ‘Who’s got a torch in their room?’ Gemma asked cheerfully, careful not to sound worried herself in case it made Polly worse.

  ‘We have!’ the boys said in unison, and started to climb off the bed.

  ‘Hang on!’ Gemma shouted. ‘I think I’d better go with you.’ There was no telling what danger these two could get themselves into in a darkened house.

  Polly held on tighter. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she whimpered.

  Gemma rubbed her back. ‘I won’t, but you’ll have to come with us. Can you be brave and do that for me?’

  Polly shook her head. ‘I want to stay here.’

  Gemma’s eyes were getting used to the dark a bit now, and she looked between the boys, who were on the verge of making a break for freedom, and Polly, who was doing her best to cement herself to the bed. ‘If we don’t move, we can’t turn the lights back on,’ she told Polly. ‘It’ll be okay.’

  Gemma didn’t wait for an answer, guessing the more time Polly had to think about it, the more she’d freak herself out. She stood up, intending to offer her niece her hand, but Polly clung on to her like a large and rather heavy baby monkey, and she had no option but to carry her. Gemma ignored the extra weight and led the boys along the landing to their bedroom, where after much searching and almost as much silliness they eventually produced three torches.

  ‘Why don’t you let Polly have one?’ she asked the boys. ‘You two can share and I’ll take the third.’

  ‘I don’t want that one,’ Polly said, rebuffing the first offering and sounding much more like her usual self. ‘It’s Thomas the Tank Engine and I hate Thomas the Tank Engine.’

  ‘Here,’ Gemma said, thrusting the colourful but plain torch in Polly’s direction. ‘The boys can have Lightning McQueen and I’ll have Thomas.’ Honestly, she really didn’t care what the stupid thing looked like, as long as it worked.

  ‘Violet?’ she called as they emerged from the boys’ bedroom.

  Violet appeared with her mobile phone held up, using its dull glow to light her path. Gemma discovered she was also ignorant to the location of the fuse box. Oh well, there was only one thing for it, then.

  ‘We’re going to have to go downstairs and find the place to turn the lights back on,’ she told them. Polly began to cry. And she was starting to become such a dead weight that Gemma didn’t think they’d make it down the stairs without the pair of them toppling over and reaching the bottom in a heap.

  Come on, Gemma! You
’re usually good with last-minute hiccups and complications. Think!

  ‘I know,’ she said brightly, letting Polly slither to the floor. ‘Why don’t we have a treasure hunt? It’ll be fun in the dark.’

  ‘What’s the treasure?’ Polly said sulkily, never one to miss picking up on the holes in a plan.

  Gemma racked her brains. ‘How about we raid the tin of Quality Street as a reward after we find the fuse box?’

  The boys cheered. Even Violet smiled. Polly looked less than convinced.

  ‘And I’ll tell you what,’ Gemma said, crouching down and looking her niece in the eye. ‘Every good expedition needs a leader, someone to be chief explorer and keep everyone else in line. Do you think you can do that for me?’

  The boys groaned, but Polly stood up straighter, set her jaw and nodded.

  ‘Okay, then,’ Gemma said, and she made them join hands in a Taylor family crocodile. ‘Let’s go and have an adventure!’

  * * *

  JULIET ALMOST CHOKED ON seawater all over again. It was him. The Italian!

  They were far enough away from the rocks now for the current to have eased. She stopped kicking.

  The plan had been to wriggle free, turn round and give a breezy word of thanks, then make her way back to the boat, but she discovered that being held against a firm physique as the water lapped round them was something she was not in a hurry to get away from.

  He must have noticed she’d stopped swimming, because he stopped too. She held her breath as he loosened his hold on her and twisted her round to face him.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She felt herself redden, and it had nothing to do with the power of the sun. ‘Yes... I’m fine... It was just the current was a little strong over there and I was getting tired.’

  He frowned. ‘When we were getting back into the boat, I realised you were missing.’ He nodded in the direction of the speedboat. ‘It was not good for them to let you wander so far away, especially if you are not a strong swimmer.’