by Sarah Morgan
After that, she’d walk across the fields to the Ocean Club and meet Emily and Ryan for breakfast. The sea air would wake her up.
Turned out that undressing with her wrist in a plaster cast wasn’t easy.
Inside the bathroom she pulled her T-shirt over her head and lost her balance. Steadying herself against the wall, she dropped it on the floor, followed by her shorts and underwear. Who would have thought that stripping one-handed could be so hard? Or that taking a shower while trying to keep her cast dry required something close to gymnastics. Making a mental note to buy more shampoo on her trip to the harbor, she was congratulating herself on how well she’d managed and was about to reach for a towel when she noticed something on the floor of the bathroom.
And screamed.
ZACH HAD KNOCKED on the door, prowled around the house and had reached the conclusion Brittany wasn’t home when he heard the scream. It was like something from the most gruesome horror movie and it froze his blood.
Cursing under his breath, he vaulted over the fence and used skills he wasn’t supposed to have to open her back door.
It took him a matter of seconds, and he wondered not for the first time why islanders were so lax about their security. She might as well have left the door open with a notice saying All Welcome.
His heart was pumping, his hands clammy as he anticipated what he might find.
Fire?
A masked intruder?
For Brittany to be scared it must be something truly threatening.
He strode through the kitchen, noticing with a frown that it looked as if an intruder had been having a party. A couple of unwashed dishes were stacked on the counter and the table was covered in bags. Following the direction of the scream, he took the stairs two at a time and reached her in under a minute.
She was flattened against the wall of the shower, naked and shivering. Her body was gleaming wet, droplets of water clinging to the rosy tip of her breasts.
“Christ.” Distracted by the lean lines of her glorious body, Zach banged his head on the low door frame and saw stars. He remembered too late that he’d done the same thing the last time he’d set foot in Castaway Cottage.
She’d been naked then, too. At the time he’d taken the blow to the head as punishment for his sins, which had been considerable.
This time the sin was all in his head, but the pain was real enough.
Her gaze connected with his as she finally registered the identity of her rescuer.
“Zach! What the hell are you doing here?”
“You screamed.” It took effort, but he hauled his gaze up to her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
Shivering, she pointed to the corner of the bathroom.
“That.”
He turned his head from smooth, golden limbs and raw temptation and saw the thong on the floor. He’d seen more substantial dental floss. Heat uncurled inside him. “You dropped your underwear?” And then something moved and he saw the problem. An intruder, but the not the sort he’d been expecting. “It’s a spider.”
“I know what it is.” She spoke through her teeth. “Get rid of it. Please.”
If he hadn’t been trying to will his libido into sudden death, he would have laughed. He’d never met a woman more capable of looking after herself than Brittany. If a man had broken into her house, she probably would have knocked him unconscious with the nearest heavy object, but a large insect left her quivering and helpless.
Forgetting his intention not to look at her again, he shifted his gaze back to her. “So it’s still spiders.” He noticed that her hair was longer. Or maybe it just seemed that way because it was wet. It lay over one shoulder in a dark heavy mass, leaving the other bare. “You always were scared of them. Nothing else. Just spiders.”
“If you don’t stop talking and catch the damn thing it will run away and then I’ll have to move out because there isn’t room in this house for both of us.”
It wouldn’t make any difference if he looked away because the image of Brittany’s naked body was imprinted on his mind.
He wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to end up in a small, steamy bathroom with his naked ex-wife but he was sure he deserved every moment of the punishment.
That brief glance had been enough to show him that she’d lost the angular lines of girlhood, the awkwardness of inhabiting a body that developed at its own time and pace. It had been right here in this house that he’d taught her what her body could do, used his skill and experience to extend her education into areas not covered by school.
As in everything, she’d proved a quick study.
She’d been an eager pupil, lying on the bed with her hair spilling over her naked body, doing everything he’d demanded of her and more.
If he’d been filling out her report card, he would have given her top grades.
Her reward had been a broken heart.
He dragged his eyes from sun-kissed skin and lean muscle and focused on the spider. To be fair it was too big to fit comfortably under a teacup, which he knew to be the favored way of dealing with anything born with more than four legs. “Probably thinks it’s a good place to raise a family.”
“You’re not funny. Please get rid of it.”
The fact that she hadn’t even reached for a towel told him how freaked out she was.
For his own sake, he grabbed the nearest towel, threw it to her and dealt with the spider.
When he returned to the bathroom, she was still in the same place, the towel clutched to her chest with her good hand.
Turned out it was a hand towel, and she didn’t seem to realize that clutching it across her breasts left most of the lower half of her bare. Or maybe her priorities were elsewhere.
Her teeth were chattering. “Is it dead?”
“No.” There were plenty of humans he would happily have flattened under his boot, but when it came to animals and insects he preferred a more sympathetic approach. “Didn’t see the point in killing it. I relocated it somewhere it might be more welcome and comfortable.”
“That means it’s going to find its way back into the house.” She took a step back, and he turned his head, desperately searching for a bigger towel.
“Last time I looked, spiders didn’t come equipped with GPS. They don’t have spiders in Greece?”
“Not ones that size. Or maybe I managed to avoid them.” Distracted, she pushed damp hair back from her face. “What are you doing here anyway?”
Finally, now the crisis was averted, she was registering exactly who had come to her rescue. He had a feeling that up until that point he could have been anyone. “You left your backpack. Thought you might need it.”
“But how did you get in? I locked the doors—” Her voice faded and her eyes widened. “You broke in? Why would you break in?”
“You screamed.”
And he was trying not to examine the reason he’d felt the fierce need to protect something that wasn’t even his to protect.
She stared at him, lips parted, breathing shallow. “Right.” Her mouth closed and she swallowed hard. “I guess I should be grateful breaking and entering is still one of your party tricks.”
It had been years since he’d used anything other than a key to open a door, but he knew there were many who would have shared her assumption. Usually it didn’t bother him. People could believe what they wanted to believe; the only difference was that in the past she’d been the first one to defend him.
He could hardly blame her for recalibrating her expectations.
And if part of him was unsettled by how quickly he’d been driven to gain access to a locked property once she’d screamed, he ignored it. He’d believed her to be in trouble. Any man would have done the same.
Silence, tense and awkward, spread between them.
Her body was lightly tanned, the bronze glow of her shoulders intersected by paler strap marks. The uneven marks told him she’d gained that color while doing the job she loved, not by lying on a beach, soaking up the
sun.
Now that the spider had gone, there was nothing between them but the past and the electricity that shimmered and crackled in the air. The way she stayed flattened to the bathroom wall made him wonder if she saw him as a threat worse than the spider.
She lifted a shaky hand to her damp hair. “I’m grateful for the whole knight-in-shining-armor routine. You said you came to return my bag. Where is it?”
“Kitchen.” And he knew she wasn’t grateful. She was livid that she’d needed help and that he’d been the one to give it.
“Thanks. Do I need to count the money?”
It was a question she never would have asked before, and he stared at her for a long moment, watching the flush build in her cheeks.
Although that was one crime he wasn’t guilty of, he knew he was guilty of plenty of others so he didn’t bother defending himself.
Instead, he looked at the clothes strewn haphazardly on the floor of the bathroom where she’d obviously struggled to strip them off. He was no detective, but it seemed to him that she’d slept in the clothes she’d traveled in.
Dragging his eyes from the thong, he eyed her plaster cast. “You having trouble managing with that thing on your arm?”
“No. No trouble.”
It was her right hand. She was right-handed. It had to be a problem, but he guessed she would rather have faced another spider than admit to him that she was struggling.
He glanced from the mess on the floor to the cast on her wrist and told himself it wasn’t his business.
“You’ve got people you can call if you need help?”
“I don’t need help. Goodbye, Zach.”
His legs refused to move. “You need to think about getting a new bolt on your back door.” The cottage was isolated. Her nearest neighbor was a mile away. The thought sent his tension levels rocketing.
“My lock is fine. This is Puffin Island.”
“Last time I looked there was nothing stopping the criminal element stepping aboard the ferry.”
“I guess you’re proof of that.”
Zach’s eyes met hers. He’d always assumed that his less-than-clean-cut past had been part of the attraction for her, at least initially. At the time it had amused him that a few nasty secrets had the upside of making him more interesting to the opposite sex. He’d milked it for all it was worth. Why wouldn’t he? If the gutter had a silver lining, then he figured he might as well wrap himself in it.
Those days were long behind him, but clearly not forgotten. Not by him and not by the residents of Puffin Island. And, it seemed, not by his ex-wife.
With a brief nod, he turned and walked out of the house, this time leaving by the front door.
If she chose not to buy a better lock for the back door, that was her business. At any rate, he was willing to lay bets that there wasn’t a decent lock to be had in any of the stores since he’d landed back on the island.
“HOLY CRAP, he saw me naked. Could it be any more humiliating?” Brittany lay on her back on the bed, talking to Skylar on the phone.
“He heard you scream and broke in to save you. That’s so romantic.”
“It’s not romantic, it’s the sign of a misspent youth. Would you know how to break through a door without damaging the lock?”
“No, but we all have different skills and you’re missing the most important point. All these years you thought he didn’t care, but he obviously does.”
“I don’t know how you draw that conclusion.”
“He thought you were in trouble, Brit! You screamed and he came. A knight in shining armor.”
“He was wearing black jeans.” An old pair of Levi’s and a black T-shirt that had fitted him perfectly, molding to every contour of his muscular frame. “He looked like a ninja not a knight.”
“Yum.”
“Not yum! I don’t want him.”
Sky chuckled. “You mean you don’t want to want him.”
Remembering the sizzle of awareness when their eyes had met, Brittany bit her lip. “Why did this have to happen? Why did he have to pick this moment to come back here?”
“It’s fate.”
“I hate it when you say that.”
“Finish the story. You saw the spider, screamed and then he appeared. And you weren’t wearing anything at all. Not even a teeny tiny thong?”
“I was wearing a teeny tiny thong fifteen minutes before he arrived. It was on the floor.” She heard a sound and frowned. “Are you laughing?”
“I might be. Look, maybe he didn’t notice.”
“He noticed. He smacked his head into the door frame.”
“Oh, poor him. That must have hurt. I always said that door was too low. I can’t walk into that bathroom in heels.”
Brittany gave a murmur of exasperation. “Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, of course, but I do sympathize that he banged his head and I’m not going to be angry with him for looking out for you. So he saw you naked—then what?”
“He threw me a towel and got rid of the spider.” With those big, calloused hands that could break down a door or the defenses of a woman with equal ease.
“Well, there you go. The actions of a perfect gentleman.”
“It was a hand towel. And I can think of lots of different ways of describing Zachary Flynn, but ‘perfect gentleman’ isn’t one of them.”
“Did he, or did he not, get rid of the spider?”
“He did, but—”
“And he came back to check you were okay?”
“Yes, but—”
“It wasn’t his fault the closest thing was a hand towel. So then what? You stood there looking at each other and all you were wearing was a plaster cast. That must have been awkward.”
“It was a little more than awkward.” And hadn’t been made less so by the fact the incident had played out on the same stage as their intense affair. They’d had sex in that bathroom. They’d had sex in almost every room of the house.
“Just awkward? Not sexy? He didn’t push you up against the wall and press his heated body against yours?”
“No! And you need to rein in your imagination.” And she needed to rein in hers.
“Can’t do that, I need it for my job.”
“So keep it for your art and don’t get creative with my sex life, especially not where Zach is concerned.”
“I always thought he’d be the kind of guy to take what he wanted without asking permission.”
“I think we’ve already established he didn’t want me.” And it shouldn’t bother her. It really shouldn’t bother her.
“It must have been hard for him to commit to someone, given he’d been alone all his life.”
“You sound as if you’d like to adopt him.”
“Now you mention it, he’s like one of those stray dogs who have been badly treated and no one ever wants to give a home to because they’re afraid of being bitten.”
“Not every stray dog can be tamed.”
“Agreed. So what happened after he’d performed epic spider removal? He left?”
“Right after I virtually accused him of stealing from my purse.”
“You didn’t! Brit? Why would you do that?”
“Because—because—I don’t know.” She was upset with herself. “I was feeling vulnerable. And he had just broken into my house.”
“To save you! Do you want to know what I think?”
“No.”
“I think seeing him really messed with your head and you wanted to see the worst in him.”
“Of course it messed with my head. I was naked! And I have no idea what I’m going to say next time I see him.”
“You say ‘thank you for removing my spider.’ What are you doing this morning?”
“I’m supposed to be meeting Em for breakfast. She’s in love.”
“I know. Can you believe it? And Ryan is gorgeous. How come we never met him when we came to stay?”
“Bad timing, I guess. Up until four years ago, he was
always traveling. How do I handle the fact that Zach is here?”
“How do you think you should handle it?”
She went through the options. “Anger would imply I still care, happy would be too hard to play, so I was going with indifference.”
“Indifference sounds perfect to me.”
“But he saw me naked.”
Sky laughed. “Honey, it’s not the first time.”
CHAPTER FOUR
BRITTANY TOOK THE PRETTIEST route to the harbor and the Ocean Club, walking up the coast path and then cutting across the fields that skirted the wooded interior of the island.
With the sun shining and the air filled with the scent of grass and wildflowers, it was impossible to feel anything other than pleased to be home.
The spectacular coastline of Maine matched anything she’d seen in the Mediterranean. From the lush, emerald perfection of Acadia National Park to the granite islands inhabited only by puffins and cormorants, Penobscot Bay was a wild, unspoiled paradise.
From high up on the bluff she could see fishing boats bobbing in the sheltered harbor and yachts and windjammers dotted across the bay.
It took her a little over an hour to walk to the Ocean Club. She arrived to find Ryan and Emily already sitting on the deck along with Lizzy, Emily’s six-year-old niece who was now living with her. The little girl was clutching a wooden boat to her chest and the moment she saw Brittany she moved closer to Emily.
Brittany watched as her friend scooped the child onto her lap and murmured words of reassurance.
She knew how hard the past few months must have been for Lizzy, but she also knew how hard it had been for her friend who had always vowed never to have children.
“That boat,” she said slowly, “looks exactly like the Captain Hook. Can I take a look? Where did you get it?”
Lizzy hesitated and then handed it across the table. “John made it for me.”
“He did? I’ve never known him to make anything like this for anyone before.” She turned it in her hands and read the words on the side. “The Captain Lizzy. This is beautiful. You’re lucky. John must think you’re very special to have made you this.”
