Anything But Vanilla

by Ellis, Madelynne

  She set off, fully expecting Ric to find Zach first. They’d known each other for years, and presumably knew all the hiding places and contemplation spots each of them favoured. Plus, presumably the dogs could follow Zach’s scent.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The sky had greyed over and spots of rain were already falling by the time Kara reached the bay. She’d exchanged a couple of text messages with Ric. Neither of them had seen so much as a glimpse of Zach. Kara wondered if they would. She’d tried calling and sending him messages too but his number came up as unavailable. Perhaps that was for the best, for she wasn’t quite sure what to say to him. She didn’t really owe him an apology. She hadn’t even known about the request he’d made of Ric, nor did she understand his motives. If Zach was so set upon him and Ric pairing up then why had he been so interested in fooling about with her?

  Heavier raindrops began to splash into the rock pools as she descended the cliff path. The typical gaggle of tourists was absent from the shingle, presumably chased away by the incoming weather front. On the mainland, the sea-front lights were just bursting into colour, the reds, greens and blues blurring in the coastal water. Below her, a set of yellow headlights blinked into life, revealing the pebble-strewn bank of the causeway. An engine growled, then Zach’s ice-cream van began to slowly trundle forward.

  ‘No. Oh, no. Zach, wait up.’ Kara broke into an unsteady run, wary of her footing on the loose shingle. Her hair lay plastered against her cheeks by the time she reached the shore. Zach was already halfway across the causeway, and the sea was looking choppy, stirred up by the thickening downpour. ‘Oh, shit!’ Now there’d be no chance to talk to him until tomorrow. But a moment later he stopped. Perhaps he’d seen her waving. Kara trekked a few paces along the causeway, only for a wave to wash over her feet, leaving her deck shoes completely soaked and her feet cold.

  The lights on the van went out. Zach got out of the driver’s side door and walked round to the front of the van. He lifted the bonnet. What the heck? That was one crap place to break down. Kara splashed forward another few paces through the icy water. The wind was steadily rising and pushing the waves up against the sides of the ramp so that they lapped over the top with increasing vigour.

  Kara still hadn’t mastered the rhythm of the tides. She wasn’t sure when high tide was, or how deeply the path to the mainland was submerged. Was this tide coming in or out? She did know that unless Zach got the engine started again soon, he was going to get swept away. She watched him hit something – the starter motor? – under the bonnet. The van made a very brief choking sound, then nothing.

  ‘Fuck!’ Zach’s exclamation carried to her on the wind.

  Damn. What could she do? Who could she contact? There weren’t any useful local numbers in her phone besides Ric’s. He was apparently out of range. Reception had always been crap on this craggy lump of rock. Kara’s mouth went dry as Zach continued to tinker under the bonnet. She could tow him, except she hadn’t brought her car keys. ‘Leave it,’ she yelled. ‘The tide’s coming in.’

  It was definitely coming in. Each successive wave pushed further up the beach.

  Either Zach didn’t hear or else he plain ignored her. If there’d been a boat she’d have rowed out, but the only thing of any use was the life ring on a board by the water’s edge. Kara grabbed it. She pushed her head and one arm through the centre, and then began to wade. The sea had reached knee level by the time she reached Zach. It stood halfway up the wheel arches of the van.

  He finally saw her when he poked his head up from the inner workings of the vehicle. He frowned in a most unwelcoming way that drew his eyebrows down low over his puppy-dog eyes. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You need to get out of here.’

  ‘Yeah, think I figured that one out for myself.’

  ‘No, I mean leave it. You’re going to drown.’

  ‘You leave. I just need to …’ He lifted his hand as if to strike another blow with the hammer, but Kara grasped his arm.

  ‘You’re not getting it,’ she said. ‘We need to run. It’s just a van. It’s insured, right?’

  Zach nodded, though he still tried to dodge around her to get back to the engine.

  ‘Seriously, Zach. Don’t make me hurt you.’

  ‘More than you already have?’

  Kara sucked in gasp. ‘Look, I’m sorry you got such an eyeful. It’s not what I invited you over for. Ric was waiting when I got home, and things happened. I didn’t realise you had a problem with that. You hadn’t had a problem with it in the past.’

  Zach grunted at her in response.

  ‘Damn it, you idiot man, another few minutes and it’s going to be up to my thighs.’ She slammed down the bonnet lid, nearly trapping his fingers. He seemed to see her properly then, wet hair, sodden clothes, life ring and all. Maybe it was because the water level rose higher up her legs than it did on him that the peril became real. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t really understand, but I never intended to hurt you. If you’d explained how it was between you and Ric …’ Her words petered out. ‘Let’s get back to the shore and discuss this. Leave the van. Even if you get it started, how far are you going to get before the engine floods?’ And then a wave crashed over them, filling her ears with the roar of the ocean.

  She surfaced screaming. Icy wet clothing clung tight to her skin from her toes to the band of her bra. Her sputtering seemed to galvanise Zach into action. He grabbed hold of her hand and took the lead in wading back to shore. It wasn’t far. They’d easily make it. Only the weight of her clothing dragged upon Kara’s shoulders, as though she were carrying an army-sized backpack instead of nothing at all. The life ring got in the way of swinging her arms. Each wave seemed to come in a little stronger too and find a new way to seep inside her clothes. Still, panic never entered the equation until one big wave knocked her sideways so that she lost her footing and got pushed off the causeway into deeper water.

  The life ring lifted clean over her head. Thank God, Zach held her arm tight. He pulled her close to his body when she surfaced, spluttering seawater into his face.

  ‘Kick your shoes off and swim,’ he insisted. He’d followed her off the ramp and was also out of his depth and treading water.

  Kara toed off her deck shoes. They were sodden enough that gravity helped tug them away, but the rest of her clothing clung to her. There was no way she could take it off. Each minute in the water made doing anything beyond shivering a supreme effort.

  ‘Swim.’ Zach released his hold to free her arms. ‘Keep at it. It’s not far.’ He kept behind her, so that he could propel her forwards and use his mass to stop the waves from pushing her further off course. ‘Come on, kick.’

  No matter how hard she strove to propel herself forward, the shore seemed to grow farther away. She’d never been a strong swimmer. She wasn’t even a great lover of sitting on the beach. Wave after wave crashed over her head, making her blind to the direction she should be following. Zach remained with her, tugging at her, encouraging her. If they lived long enough she’d owe him for ever.

  If they lived long enough …

  Something sharp grazed her knees. Kara winced, brought her arm down and her hand hit the wall of pebbles that lined the shore. They slipped and slid beneath her fingers and toes, but they were out of the depths and into the shallows. Zach dragged her the last few metres up on to the beach.

  For several moments, Kara lay face down, panting. Her lungs refused to expand properly. Seaweed clung to her ankles as though the ocean meant to drag her back into its embrace, and her muscles burned from the cold.

  Zach knelt beside her, his bare knees level with her ear. Somehow he’d managed to strip off his trousers while they were in the water. He tugged his shirt over his head as she watched and cast it on to the stones. Out to sea, the ice-cream van bobbed just above the water like a giant pink and cream hippopotamus. It was hard to imagine it would ever go again.

  ‘Come on, up.’ Zach disentangled her from the seawee
d clinging to her legs, and then supported her attempt to stand. The sharp wind clawed at her waterlogged clothing. The steady rain added to the weight. ‘Let’s get inside and get dry.’

  ‘Your van,’ she managed to mumble.

  Zach hugged her tight to his body. He cast one last forlorn look out to sea. ‘There’s nothing I can do about it now. If she’s still there at low tide, I’ll call out a tow truck, but she could be half a mile down the coast stuck in a mudflat by then.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault. At least I have stock still at the Bunker. I’ll just have to serve from out of there.’ Being dowsed with icy water seemed to have knocked some of the wind out of him, but perhaps his anger would spark again later. She cast a shivery glance back at the choppy sea, and then followed Zach towards his shop.

  Zach retrieved the keys from the breast pocket of his discarded shirt. Hell knows what sort of craziness was going through his head about her, Ric and the situation with the van, but somehow he’d managed to maintain enough of a level head to hang on to his keys and not leave them in the van or let them go along with his trousers.

  ‘There’s not much in the way of light in here.’ He pushed her inside the Bunker as two spotlights flickered into life. They lit up the rack of postcards, while the rest of the gifts remained bathed in shadows. ‘Get your clothes off.’ He scooped up a heap of beach towels out of a basket marked £8 for 2 and then busied himself with getting the gas heater lit. ‘Everything. We don’t want you catching your death because of sitting around in wet knickers.’

  Kara managed a feeble snicker through her chattering teeth. Apparently determined to lead by example, Zach rolled off his underwear, which did elevate her mood a little, even if all she got was a two-second glimpse of shiny wet skin, before he wrapped a towel decorated with an angel fish around his waist.

  ‘I’ll make us a drink.’ He disappeared into a room out back.

  Still trembling, Kara managed to peel off her clothes. She threw them as far away as she could, before wrapping herself in the pile of towels and hunching right before the heater. Zach stooped down beside her a moment later. He offered her a huge mug to wrap her palms around. ‘Coffee. I hope you like it strong.’

  As of now, she liked it any way it came.

  Zach rubbed a towel over his hair, leaving it standing on end. ‘What were you doing on the beach? Were you looking for me?’

  Kara gave him a nod. ‘I wanted to talk. Ric’s out looking for you too.’ Her teeth chattered when she spoke. She ought to phone Ric and let him know.

  ‘Oh?’ Zach discarded the towel. He looked at her with his brows furrowed.

  ‘I should let him know that I found you.’ She shuffled over to where she’d thrown her clothes and fished her phone out of her trouser pocket. The screen had turned a dirty grey, and nothing happened when she pressed the buttons.

  ‘Good,’ said Zach. ‘I’m not sure I want him here.’ He cast her dead phone away from her. Maybe it would dry out.

  ‘Zach, I’ve heard Ric’s side, so let’s hear yours. One minute you’re fine with the fact I’m fucking him, even encouraging it, and then –’ she spread her fingers wide ‘– what? And if you’re so in love with him, why were you coming on to me? Were you using me?’

  Zach’s expression froze into dour lines. His beautiful lips pursed so tightly that they’d lost some of their colour.

  ‘I – I was looking for a way out. I didn’t mean to use you. I genuinely like you. I just had some mad idea the night we met that I could find someone else to love. Only then you turned up here and Ric had you, and that wasn’t fair, because you were supposed to be nothing to do with him.’ He covered his face with his hands, and then peeped at her through the gaps between his fingers. ‘I was wrong to use you the other day. I wanted to make a point. I thought I could make him jealous. All I succeeded in doing was highlighting the fact that he cares more about you than he does about me.’

  Kara gave an almighty splutter, causing coffee droplets to fly. They hissed as they hit the heater. ‘Zach, that’s so not true.’ She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him against her body. Somehow, she ended up kneeling between his legs. ‘Ric loves you –’

  ‘Is that what he said?’ Zach asked, looking her straight in the eyes.

  ‘It’s true.’ She wasn’t sure if he’d said it specifically or not. ‘He’s just afraid that if you’re together like that it’s going to mess things up.’

  ‘He said that?’

  Kara turned so that she sat side on to Zach, her legs curled over the top of one of his hairy ones. ‘I’m not interested in creating a rift between you. I’m just out for some fun. If my actions are going to cause heartbreak then we can stop doing this right now.’

  Zach’s gaze strayed down to her ankle, where he placed a hand over the ridge of bone. Kara looked down at her legs, and for the first time noticed a graze on her knee. One long scratch traversed her patella. Around it, the skin looked raw but clean. The wound reminded her of the close call they’d had in the water, which immediately tightened all her muscles.

  ‘That won’t change anything. It doesn’t matter what I want, he won’t compromise. It just means I’ll lose any chance I have of being with either of you.’

  ‘Either?’ she quietly echoed. She pulled the towel more tightly around herself, covering her injured knee with the bright-blue cloth. ‘Are you saying you’re still interested in me?’

  Heat rolled off his body, warming her, and the stubble around his jaw grazed the skin of her shoulder as he snuggled closer. ‘I don’t know what to wish for any more. If you’ve any brilliant ideas … I just know that it’s not going to work out how I want it for Ric and me.’ His chest hair tickled as he moved. His lips gently nuzzled her shoulder. ‘I know you prefer him to me.’

  ‘That’s not …’ she gulped. It wasn’t true. She had no preference for either man; they were different and she’d been enjoying living in the moment. Zach was earthy and genuine. If they’d been neighbours while growing up, they’d have been best friends and she’d have crushed massively on him, whereas Ric almost felt like an alien being, his interest in her kind of amazing and otherworldly. The other thing was: she liked the fact that Ric wasn’t looking for commitment, as she didn’t want to fall into another claustrophobic relationship, after spending so long marooned on Planet Gavin. Matter of fact, she rather liked being a butterfly, having both Ric and Zach to fly between. ‘It’s not fair or true. I’m not looking for anything more than fun from either of you. Zach, I only just escaped getting hitched. I’m not interested in making any sort of commitment yet.’

  Zach scraped a hand through his wet hair so that it lay slicked back against his skull. ‘OK. But you can’t deny that there’s real chemistry between you and Ric. I should know. I’ve seen you fuck often enough.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Zach held her gaze, almost daring her to argue the point, but failing to discern the cause of her outburst.

  ‘You’ve seen us once … twice,’ she corrected, recalling what had prompted this meeting.

  ‘Three times,’ Zach countered. ‘I lied about being stuck on the mainland that night I was supposed to call.’

  Christ! He’d seen her. What had she and Ric been doing at the time? She didn’t even bother wasting thoughts on hoping that he’d just seen them fooling about on the beach. The glitter in Zach’s dark eyes said he’d watched the lot, and that he’d seen her bent over that rock having her bottom thoroughly warmed. ‘Fuck!’ The exclamation escaped her lips as a string of colourful expletives echoed inside her head. It was her turn to hide her face in her palms.

  ‘Kara.’ Zach’s fingers gently curled around her shoulder. ‘I know you didn’t plan it, and I know how persuasive he can be. I know it, because I love him. I don’t blame you. We barely knew one another, and I was late.’

  ‘And I knew I was doing something wrong.’

  He continued to shake his head. ‘No, you weren�
�t. It wasn’t a date. It was just coffee.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She wrinkled her nose into a grimace, and then buried her face in her coffee cup. The hit of caffeine made her heart thump. ‘Just like this is coffee, I suppose.’

  Zach gently batted her arm. He glanced away and then back at her.

  ‘There is one way.’ Kara brushed away Zach’s continued caress, which knocked the towel from around her shoulder. ‘But I’m not sure you’ll like it. I don’t know that it’ll even work.’

  ‘Go on.’

  This was madness; it wasn’t so much a plan as stating her desire, but the possibility of actually having a threesome with him and Ric was too delicious to be ignored. The mere prospect of it set her heart pumping nineteen to the dozen. All those fantasies she’d entertained since meeting the two men were suddenly at the forefront of her thoughts. In some ways it made sense. Why not, as they were all already intimate. Even if it was just the once, so they could see what it was like and if it would work.

  Kara opened her mouth and closed it a few times. ‘We could all be together,’ she muttered. ‘He might be more prepared to commit if there were three of us involved. It wouldn’t be so claustrophobic.’ She didn’t know Ric very well, but the few glimpses she’d had into his heart suggested that he did actually care for Zach. He was likely still out looking for him. God only knows what he’d think if he saw the van out to sea.

  Zach gave a sharp cough, and then back-pedalled on to his knees. His brown hair whipped back and forth spraying droplets of seawater as he shook his head. ‘One of us would get burned.’ From his look she knew he thought it would be him.

  Kara reached out and placed her palm against the diamond of hair upon his chest. His heart pounded beneath her fingertips.

  ‘Is that what you want?’ he asked warily.

  ‘Maybe.’ She felt her cheeks burn and turned away. ‘Look, forget it. It was a silly suggestion.’

  Zach took her coffee cup off her and then tugged her down on top of him, so that she lay pressed against his torso, her hips straddling his loins, with nothing but a few bits of towelling between them. It was far too intimate a position for serious conversation.