by Cara Colter
“Just close your eyes, then, and tell me what comes. Your perfect day.”
And suddenly he wanted to know very, very badly, because it seemed like it would tell him secret things about her.
“Nothing so grand as elephants or helicopters,” she said tentatively, not closing her eyes, but taking a fortifying sip of her wine before she bared her soul to him. She gazed out at the water, and then said, “You see those kids playing over there? Swimming out to the float and jumping in the water? That looks darn near perfect to me.”
It had become quite hot in the last hour. Her blouse was sticking to her in the nicest places, and the skirt, which was about the most flattering straitlaced outfit he had ever seen, seemed to be causing her grief. He probably should not have suggested lunch outside.
He’d given her a chance to choose anything, and she had chosen that? It did tell him just about everything about her.
Except for her one Ferrari fantasy, she was just as she seemed. Wholesome. Without airs. Why did that seem kind of refreshing instead of just boring?
“That’s too easy for a perfect day,” he chided her. “We could have that today.”
“I’ve already had days like that,” she said, a little wistfully. “We used to have the cottage on Mara Lake. Not the multimillion-dollar kind you see today. A real cottage—ramshackle, falling down, no power, an outhouse. And all I remember there are perfect endless summer days.”
“I remember your family heading out to that cottage, your station wagon packed to the roof.” He did not say anything about that funny little twist of envy he would feel when he watched them depart, the longing to be part of something like that.
And, oddly, at the same time he had longed for it, he had refused every invitation Graham had offered him to join them there.
He’d felt as if he had to resist ever tasting something he knew he could not have.
People from perfect families matched up with other people from perfect families. He had known that before he’d gone away to war and become even more hard and more cynical than he had been back then, and that had been plenty hard and cynical for a kid.
It suddenly seemed that this was a demon he needed to face: punch a hole in that illusion of a perfect life or a perfect day.
“Let’s have it today,” he said. “We’ll put on some swimsuits and jump in the lake before we go home.”
And he would find the wholesomeness of it hokey and boring, and somehow break free of the spell she was weaving around him.
“No. It’s perfectly all right. I’ve already had a perfect day. Thank you for the car. It really was an incredibly sweet thing to do.”
“Ah, I’m a sweet guy,” he said, and wagged his eyebrows at her fiendishly.
But she didn’t buy it. “What do you think you are?”
He could distract her with charm. Why ruin a light moment? But something overtook him, had been overtaking him ever since he remembered the perfect Day family leaving for their cottage, had been overtaking him ever since he had seen her again herding the damn ponies.
It was as though he was driven to show her what was real about him, driven to see if she could handle it.
It was the perfect time to tell her how he had failed her brother, but somehow he was not ready for that.
“Who I really am? Cynical. Dark. Aggressive when the situation calls for it.”
He hated that he had said that. It made him feel as vulnerable as if he had told her the whole truth about her brother. He had exposed a wound to her that he had succeeded in hiding from the whole world. And so he finished with just a touch of sarcasm, “In other words, Gracie, not your type. At all.”
As he had hoped, she was insulted. “Whoever said you were my type?” she said with a bit of heat.
“No one. Just to keep you from getting ideas.”
“I would not ever get an idea about you!”
“Great. Let’s go swimming before you sweat to death in the skirt you didn’t put on for me.”
“I don’t have a bathing suit.” Her voice was stiff with indignation. So, she had picked out that delectable, sexy and too warm suit just for him.
“Is that wool?” he said leaning over the table to get a better look. It was sticking to her, and she tugged it away.
“Very lightweight wool,” she said, annoyed. “We should leave now.”
“We should go swimming. What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything! I just don’t happen to carry a bathing suit in my purse. Though I’m sure your type would.”
“And what is my type, Gracie?”
“Bimbo,” she said, without any hesitation at all.
He lifted his water glass to her. “Touché.”
She gulped back the rest of her wine. Her cheeks had pretty red spots on them. He was right. One glass and she was practically soused.
She tossed the glossy wave of auburn hair that he had been dumb enough to set free, looked him straight in the face and said, “There are all kinds of stores here at the resort. I guess I could find a bathing suit.”
He could tell it was not in her plan for the day, and that it did not come naturally to her to be spontaneous.
And maybe spontaneity between them had some dangerous overtones, given the startling intensity that had unfolded between them.
She wanted to move away from it.
And so did he.
And at the same time, he wanted to see if he could be immune to her. If he could burst the myth that he had always had surrounding her family.
He supposed she’d buy a one-piece suit, about as sexy as the uniforms of the East German girls’ swim team, pre-Wall collapse.
And even though that was exactly what he wanted, he goaded her.
“When you buy that bathing suit? Be the girl in the red Ferrari,” he suggested, “not an old stick-in-the mud.”
Instead of looking offended, she looked suddenly sad. “Graham used to accuse me of that.”
“I know,” he said softly. “Break loose, Gracie.”
And then he wondered what the hell he was playing with, and why. He looked after the check, and they separated in search of swimwear. He purchased a pair of trunks from one of the hotel stores in about two seconds, left them on, and went and sat on a bench where she would see him when she came out of the store she was in.
He had turned off his phone just before picking Grace up this morning, and now he turned it back on and sorted through his incoming messages.
Only one interested him. From Slim McKenzie, the cowboy who had accompanied Serenity home.
Rory glanced toward the store. Through a plate-glass window he could see Gracie holding up a very Gracie bathing suit. It probably had a matching bathing cap with a flower over one ear.
He listened to Slim’s message and taking one more glance at the window to make sure Gracie would not materialize while he was in the middle of the call, he called back.
“Sorry, Mr. Adams. The kid tossed the soda can out the window before I could grab it.”
“Never heard of littering?” Rory asked.
There was a pause. “Littering? I think that kid would laugh at the concept that that was a bad thing to do. He’s pretty streetwise. Anyway, they were camped in an area off Bixby Road about six kilometers this side of
Grumbly. The property was clearly marked No Trespassing. I don’t think they had permission to be there. There was a creek to water the horses, but I didn’t see much in the way of grass, and I didn’t see any hay.”
“The ponies looked fat to me.”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, horses who aren’t on a proper parasite-control program can look fat. That’s called worm belly. Also from eating poor-quality feed. That’s called hay belly.”
“You’re telling me the horses
were hungry.” Or full of worms. Way more than he’d ever wanted to know about an equine’s belly.
“I think they were hungry. That’s why they broke loose at the park and were so hard to catch.”
Rory did not want to get involved in this. And yet how could he not be involved? If the horses were hungry, chances were the kid was, too.
He hung up the phone, frowning, and not just because his soda-pop-can plan had failed, either. He glanced at the window. Grace had disappeared from sight.
He could just call the authorities. There were people whose job it was to look after things like this and he was not one of those people. But even though he couldn’t see Gracie, it seemed like just being around her required him to be a better man.
He sighed and called Bridey.
“Mr. Adams, sir.”
“I need some good-quality hay delivered to some ponies. And a couple of days’ worth of groceries for a kid and his mom. I need you to track down a landowner and get permission to use his land. Offer him whatever it takes to get that permission. You can use Slim again to deliver the food and the hay. He knows the situation and the location.”
He hung up and glanced again at the window.
Gracie was back in view, wearing a huge white robe, and peering at a rack of bathing suits as if it were the enemy. Her tongue, as she flipped rapidly through hangers, was caught between her teeth in fierce concentration. Obviously she was torn between being a stick-in-the-mud and shocking the hell out of him.
He hoped she would be a stick-in-the-mud and at the same time he didn’t hope that at all. He was not used to being a man divided. He was used to being a man who knew exactly what he wanted.
Rory sighed, aware he did not want Gracie Day to know anything that he had just found out about Tucker and Serenity. If ever there would be a sucker for starving ponies, it would be her. Throw in the kid and that remote possibility that Tucker was Graham’s, and she’d be mortgaging her business to save them.
He had no choice. He had to protect her. And the catch? She could never know he was protecting her.
* * *
Break loose, Gracie.
Those words echoed in Gracie’s head as she studied the bathing-suit rack. How could a girl back down from a challenge like that? How could any woman in the world not rise to the bait? She needed to show him he had it all wrong.
That she was no stick-in-the-mud.
She selected a navy-blue tank-style, planning to defy his instruction to break loose. She held it up, studied it, silently declared it perfect. The matching bathing cap, with its huge plastic rose over the ear was a little silly, but the bathing suit would definitely do.
Except that it wouldn’t. As soon as Grace took it to the change room and tried it on, she knew it was all wrong. The bathing suit, on, while definitely practical, made her look about as sexy as a refrigerator box. Just the kind of suit a stick-in-the mud would choose in a pinch!
So, going way out of her comfort zone, she wrapped herself in the robe provided by the shop and peeked out of the change room.
She could see Rory sitting on a bench on the open-air walkway, talking on his cell phone, comfortable in his new swim trunks, looking at the lake.
Life was so unfair sometimes! When a guy needed a bathing suit, he just went and grabbed one off the rack and put it on. There was no twisting and turning and looking at it from this angle and that, no self-doubt, no feelings of not being perfect!
While she watched, he hung up the phone, put it back in his pocket. He gazed out over the lake, and she was taken by his stillness while he waited, a man who had learned to appreciate quiet moments—that lull before the storm—when he could get them.
What he wasn’t expecting was that she—little Gracie-Facie Day—was going to be his storm!
She looked back at the rack of suits, and this time refused even to look at the huge offering of one-piece suits. Taking a deep breath, she picked a half dozen of the skimpiest she could find!
A few moments later, she stared at herself in the change-room mirror.
Somehow, without planning it, maybe even against her will, she had become a totally different woman from the one who had walked into her office this morning.
“Not too late to put on the blue tank,” she whispered to herself.
But she knew she wasn’t going to.
CHAPTER FIVE
“MY, my,” Rory said, rising to join her as she came out of the shop, “Could you have found a bigger towel?”
He looked wickedly amused and Grace realized the huge towel she had purchased to wrap herself in only confirmed what he had suspected earlier when she had shared her skinny-dipping experience with him.
Goody Two Shoes. She was in a no-win position. If she dropped the towel now, she would feel like an idiot, displaying herself to him. If she didn’t, she would feel like the prude he so clearly thought she was!
“My skin is sensitive to the sun,” she said. “I haven’t been on the beach yet this year.” Shouldering her freshly purchased beach bag with her turquoise suit crumpled up inside it, she moved by him onto the flagstone pathway that wound down to the beach.
“You’re going to have to take it off sometime,” he said. “I wonder what you have on underneath it?”
She wished fervently for the blue suit that she had hung back up with a certain pride in the new her. She was not feeling nearly so bold now. In fact, she was feeling well out of her league.
“I have on the kind of suit a girl who rides in a
Ferrari would wear,” she said with as much sophistication as she could muster.
“Ah, here’s the rub, my Gracie, the girl in the Ferrari wouldn’t have bothered with the towel.”
My Gracie?
“Unless she burned easily,” she retorted stubbornly.
“Tanning beds have a way of eliminating that problem.”
“Hasn’t your fictional Ferrari girl ever heard of melanoma?”
“Mel-a-nom-a. Is that three syllables?”
“Four.”
He laughed. “That would be a no, then.”
“Bimbo.”
“Touché,” he said, and somehow she found herself smiling.
They reached the hotel beach and she shuffled through the hot sand to the water’s edge.
“Not going to lie in the sun and heat up a little first?” he asked smoothly.
She decided not to share with him that the wool suit she had so foolishly worn for precisely the reason he had guessed had heated her up quite enough for one day.
Sending him a little sidelong glance, she unhooked the towel from where it was clamped under her armpits. Unnerved by his frank anticipation of the towel dropping, Grace plunged into the water before the towel was even done slithering to the ground.
She couldn’t help the little shriek at the cold, but still she did not stop until the water was up to her neck.
“Come in,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
“Liar. Your teeth are chattering.”
“Chicken.”
His eyes narrowed. “No one calls me a chicken and gets away with it, Gracie.”
“Bok-bok-bok-bok-bok.”
He hit the water running, dived cleanly, was nearly at her in one powerful stroke.
But she had grown up swimming and playing in these ice-cold waters, and she turned quickly from him and swam with expert strokes for the float.
She made it to the float a breath ahead of him, and clung to the side, scared if she got out of the water, the bathing suit might not come with her.
“Some suits,” he growled in her ear, “are not exactly designed for swimming are they, Gracie?”
She pulled an errant strap back on her shoulder. This was turning into a repeat of yesterday!
He
began to hum Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini. Deliberately defiant, trying to find a red Ferrari girl in herself somewhere, Gracie hauled herself up, thankful the children who had been there earlier had departed and did not catch a glimpse of all the parts of her slipping from her suit. She quickly adjusted and then turned back to face him.
He was laughing so hard he was having trouble treading water. That was not exactly the effect she had intended.
“I’m coming to get you, Gracie. Nobody calls me a chicken.” He switched from his Yellow Polka-Dot
Bikini humming to a much more sinister tune, which she recognized as the theme music from Jaws.
Then he launched himself at the float. When he tried to pull himself up on the water-grayed wooden planks, she waited until he was precariously balanced on his forearms, placed all her weight on his shoulders and shoved.
He fell back in the water with a splash, and she barely had time to register how lovely his shoulders, skin and muscle had felt under her touch. She bounced on the balls of her feet, waiting for his next attempt.
He trod water for a moment, and she became aware he wasn’t laughing now. She fought the urge to cover herself. With what, after all? Why not just enjoy the gleaming appreciation in his eyes? Why not play with it? Why not be the fun and flirtatious kind of girl who would wear a suit like this and ride in a red Ferrari?
“I’m giving you one chance to surrender,” he told her.
“No. I hold the high ground and I intend to keep it.”
“Ha. You haven’t a hope, Gracie-Facie.”
“Maybe you haven’t a hope.”
He came again, lifted himself up. She placed her foot solidly on the slickness of his wet chest and pushed. He fell back again, but this time he grabbed at her ankle and she slid forward before shaking free.
He came again, and this time she went for his head. She leaned out precariously, shoved and he went under the water easily.
Too easily, because just as she was congratulating herself on repelling another attack, a hand snaked out of the water and locked on her wrist. He tugged and she flew off the float and over his head, landing with an ungracious splash.
