Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling

by Pamela Browning

  “You see, you have to release emotional energy to free the body from its grip,” Karma said, marching along to the beat of a steel-drum band playing reggae on the street corner.

  “I don’t think my emotional energy needs to be released,” he ventured.

  “That’s what people think. But we all have repressed emotions.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m not so different from everyone else,” Karma said seriously, though this was a statement he could have refuted. There was no opportunity, though, because they had reached the delicatessen. He opened the door for her, and she sailed through, hair bouncing, breasts ditto. A guy on the way out gaped at her.

  “Would you look at that,” the guy said to his friend. “Would you look at her!”

  This was a compliment, but Slade was sure that Karma hadn’t heard it. Or if she had, she was playing it cool.

  Once they were seated in the restaurant booth, Slade studied the menu. He was in the mood for a big broiled steak, but there wasn’t anything remotely resembling one on this menu. Instead there were things like a corned beef-with-chicken liver sandwich on pumpernickel, and cheese blintzes, and humongous desserts with names like Double Chocolate Disgrace. On the table were two bowls in a metal holder, one containing small whole pickled green tomatoes, the other containing sauerkraut.

  The waiter returned, and Karma ordered a veggie-and-cream cheese sandwich.

  “Are you ready to order, sir?” The waiter stood with his pencil poised.

  “What do you recommend?” Slade said, throwing himself on the waiter’s mercy.

  “We just made a batch of fresh chopped chicken livers. The chicken liver sandwich is very good.”

  The idea of eating a whole sandwich made of chicken livers made Slade slightly sick to his stomach, so he glanced wildly at the menu and chose the first thing he saw, corned beef on rye.

  When the waiter had left, Karma ladled sauerkraut into one of the small bowls stacked on the table. “Want some?” she asked.

  Slade shook his head. “I never liked sauerkraut, and I can’t imagine eating green tomatoes.”

  Karma pulled a face. “I can’t imagine not eating them. I’m a vegetarian, so maybe that’s why.”

  “You don’t eat any meat?” He’d never known a vegetarian before; he’d always thought such a person must be slightly deranged. Not to scarf down a thick prime rib, drowned in natural gravy? Not to sink your teeth into a big juicy burger with all the trimmings? Never to know the joys of pork tenderloin cooked on a grill, or leg of lamb, or succulent spare ribs?

  “Nope, no poultry, no mammals. I eat fish, though. I love fish.”

  Fish. He’d been known to eat catfish in the Glades, and he liked a tuna sandwich now and then, but he couldn’t imagine fish as a steady diet.

  “I’ve never eaten in this place,” he said, looking around at the clientele, who ranged from jewel-encrusted elderly matrons with shellacked hair to sunburned tourists whose skin looked like raw hamburger.

  “My uncle—you met him this morning—and my aunt used to like to bring me and my sisters here when we visited as children. I guess I came by my liking for Kosher food naturally, since my mother was Jewish.”

  He welcomed the chance to know more about Karma’s personal life; he couldn’t imagine what could produce a woman like this.

  “With a surname like O’Connor, your father was Irish, right?”

  “Mmm-hmm. He and my mother married in college. Both families predicted the marriage’s immediate failure, but my parents had four daughters, including me, and lived happily for years. Until my mother took up cake decorating, that is, and they split up. She changed her name to Saguaro, like the cactus, and moved to Arizona.”

  “They divorced because she became a cake decorator?”

  “Kind of.” Karma seemed reluctant to elaborate.

  “I’ve heard of many reasons to divorce, but that one takes the cake.” He grinned at her, pleased with his play on words.

  The corners of her mouth twitched as if she were suppressing a smile. “Dad didn’t approve of Mom’s new occupation. You see, she worked for a bakery that specialized in cakes that look like body parts.” She looked embarrassed and seemed as if she expected him to be shocked, but he was still operating in the dark.

  “You don’t mean—”

  “I do mean,” she said. “The body parts weren’t arms and legs, if you get my drift.”

  He did. He tried to picture in his mind a cake that looked like a pair of breasts or—well! He cleared his throat.

  “So, uh, what does your father do?” he asked, sensing that they had reached a conversational cul-de-sac.

  “My father found a new life after Mom left. He works on a cruise ship, plying wealthy widows with booze and blarney while pretending to enjoy teaching them the tango.”

  Slade chuckled. “We should all be so lucky.”

  Their food arrived, and they dug in. Once the corned beef sandwich had taken the edge off his hunger—and it was a delicious sandwich—Slade managed with some difficulty to overcome his aversion to the subject of his chakra.

  “Suppose you tell me more about my second chakra. Like, where it is, for example.”

  “Your second chakra is located in your abdomen.”

  “Why would it have problems?”

  Karma inhaled a deep breath, and looking as if she doubted the wisdom of explaining, she plunged ahead anyway. “Well, you know how these days we store information on disks—with computers, I mean? I told you that chakra means ‘disk.’ So it stores information, too. If a chakra is blocked, it needs reprogramming.”

  “Reprogramming,” he repeated, thinking that this was worse than he thought.

  “The issues of the second chakra are change, movement, pleasure, emotion. If the chakra is blocked, it can be difficult to form attachments, difficult to experience the right emotion. I can match you up with the perfect person,” she said, “and if you can’t change, or get no pleasure out of the relationship, or can’t emote—”

  “Emote?” Slade said, wary about this new direction she was taking. All he wanted was a wife. He didn’t expect to have to change, and he wasn’t sure where movement fit into this whole thing, and he wanted to feel pleasure, but wouldn’t that come naturally when he found the right person?

  “You want to run that by me again?” he said.

  “Emotion is a building block,” Karma explained before she took the last bite of her sandwich.

  “I see,” he said, turning this over in his mind.

  “Are you sure you don’t want one of these tomatoes?” Karma said, shoving the dish across the table at him.

  “No, thanks. And just between you and me, I think this whole chakra stuff is a bunch of nonsense.”

  Karma stopped conveying a tomato from the dish to her plate and let it drop with a weary thump back into its dish. “Great,” she said. “Fine. See if I try to help you any more.”

  “You’re supposed to find me a wife,” he said, losing patience.

  Karma started to slide out of the booth. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you understand that this is what our conversation is all about? Don’t you think the fact that you haven’t managed to turn up a likely candidate so far might have something to do with some kind of—of mind block?”

  “I don’t see the connection,” Slade said honestly and a little desperately as he slapped a large bill on the table and followed Karma as she charged out of the restaurant.

  “You wouldn’t, since your chakra has for all intents and purposes shut down,” Karma said. Her long legs ate up the sidewalk as she barged her way through bunches of blondes and a gaggle of tourists all gawking and talking excitedly.

  Slade caught up with her. “You told me that I’m supposed to express emotion. Wouldn’t you say I’m expressing emotion by telling you how I feel about all this chakra-babble?”

  She slanted a look toward him. “What do you think emotion is?” she shot back.

&nbs
p; He had to think about this for a moment, but the answer seemed clear enough. “Well, I’d say that emotions are instinctual reactions,” he said.

  She seemed taken aback, surprised at his response. “Okay. At least you know one when you see one,” she conceded. “That’s a start. To take it a bit further, our feelings are our unconscious reaction to situations or events. We organize our feelings through emotion. We can choose the way we react to emotions, but the feelings themselves are quite separate.”

  Karma had slowed her pace was now walking almost sedately at his side.

  “My emotional response to all this is that you and me should go in one of these bars and discuss this over a drink or two.” Karma looked at him with rank skepticism. “So I can learn more about this,” he amended.

  Ahead of them, a group of people spilled out onto the sidewalk from a neon-lit doorway. “How about here?” he said.

  He thought he might be becoming more sensitive to others’ emotions when he recognized a whole raft of them flitting across Karma’s mobile features. Confusion, distrust, sheer terror—not to mention a brief blip of yearning over-laid with what he thought might be desire. But desire for what? For a beer? For his company? For more, even, than that?

  “We can stop for a drink,” she said. “I don’t want to be out late, that’s all.”

  He took her elbow, and she tensed as if she might shake his hand loose although she did not. They made their way into the club, where hot salsa music accompanied scantily clad bodies gyrating on a minuscule dance floor. Karma slid into a booth, and he slid in beside her.

  “How do you know so much about all this chakra stuff, anyway?” he asked her after they’d ordered drinks.

  She smiled at the waiter as he slid her glass of white wine toward her. “I guess you could say I was born into the territory. My parents met on a commune in the late sixties. My sisters and I were raised on soybeans, sprouts, tofu and a lot of other things that you’ve probably never heard of. Chakras, yoga, the freedom to be you and me, and so on. Commune life ended when we all had to go to school and they moved us to Connecticut where my father got a job in an aircraft factory.”

  “That sounds normal enough,” he allowed.

  “Oh, but there’s more. Life in suburbia was modified by my parents’ history. Jewish woman married to an Irish Catholic and spending their marriage’s first years grubbing around in an organic garden equals not just your ordinary family.”

  “Are your sisters like you? Do they have unusual names like yours?”

  “My oldest sister is named Azure, the youngest one is Isis, and the middle one is Mary Beth.”

  “Karma, Azure, Isis, and Mary Beth?” he said, smothering a chuckle at the incongruity of it.

  Karma picked up on his amusement. “Go ahead. Laugh if you want to. We’re used to it.”

  “Where did the Mary Beth come from?”

  “Mary Beth was named after the midwife who rode five miles on a snowmobile to deliver her. Consequently, Mary Beth has always considered herself lucky that she was born in the middle of the worst winter storm to hit upstate New York in twenty-three years.”

  “Are their occupations as interesting as yours?”

  “Isis is married to a dentist and they’re raising his three sons by his first wife, all model students and soccer enthusiasts. Azure is a management consultant based in Boston. Mary Beth is a rabbi. I love to ride by her synagogue and see ‘Mary Beth O’Connor, Assistant Rabbi’ on the sign outside. I imagine that the unexpected juxtaposition of our Irish surname to the title of assistant rabbi merits a few second glances from passersby.” Karma grinned.

  Slade laughed. He couldn’t help but be charmed by this woman with her tumultuous hair, offbeat personality, and unusual background. It occurred to him that he hadn’t met an interesting woman in ages. Years. It was why he had come to Miami Beach. It was why he had signed up with a dating service.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “I’d say we’ve pretty much covered that during the interview.”

  “Not about your childhood. Or your family,” she pointed out.

  Slade took a sip of his beer before answering. “Grew up in Okeechobee City, went to college, worked the rodeo circuit for a while and eventually came back to run the family ranch. My dad is ready to retire from ranching. He and Ma can’t wait until I come home with my fiancée so they can do some traveling.”

  “This fiancée you hope to find,” Karma said carefully. “Do your parents have right of refusal? I mean, what if they don’t like her?”

  “They’ll like anybody who decides to put up with me. They’re so eager for a daughter-in-law that they’d accept the bride of Frankenstein if she’d marry me.”

  “I hope I can do better for you than that,” Karma said seriously.

  He was about to say, I hope you can, too. However, he looked at Karma, really looked at her in that moment, and something in her expression made him bite back the words. He thought she looked regretful, even a trifle upset.

  “Now about the way I move,” he said after they had watched the dancers for several minutes. “Why don’t you let me show you that I know how?”

  She regarded him with a puzzled expression. “Excuse me?”

  “Let’s dance. In the interest of freeing up my chakra, of course.”

  “Don’t make fun of it,” Karma said sharply. “If you don’t believe in the theory, fine. Lots of people do, that’s all.”

  “I guess I need to know more about it before I make up my mind. But for now, what about dancing?”

  Karma bit her lip. “Well,” she said. “I was thinking it was time for me to go home.”

  “You won’t turn into a pumpkin, Cinderella. Humor me.”

  “Any reason why I should? You’re my client. I’m not supposed to—”

  “But that’s exactly the point. I am your client.”

  “I should be finding the perfect date for you. I shouldn’t be out having a good time and forgetting that this is a business relationship.” She seemed troubled.

  “Are you having a good time, Karma?” he asked softly, letting the words sink in. Because I am, too. I’d have a better time if you’d dance with me.”

  After a moment’s hesitation during which Karma seemed to weigh the pros and cons, the pros must have won out. She got up and Slade followed her onto the crowded dance floor. No sooner did they get there than the song that was playing stopped and segued into a smooth ballad.

  He took her in his arms, liking the solid feel of her, liking the way she melted into him. She was lighter on her feet than he would have expected, and he led her to the center of the floor where lights from a revolving glass ball overhead played across her features.

  “So, Karma, tell me—do I move all right?” he asked after they’d been at it for a few minutes. He was teasing her to see what she’d say.

  He expected a saucy retort, maybe a challenge. But she surprised him. “Oh, yes,” she murmured.

  “So do you. But in case I don’t express myself enough to bring my most repressed feelings out into the open, what should I do?”

  “Our previous discussions make me suspect that this is an insincere question.”

  “Insincere is as insincere does,” he said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that I asked for advice, and if I take it, you’ll know that I’m far more interested than I’ve let on.”

  “This is a verbal sparring contest.”

  He tightened his arm around her waist. “At the moment, it’s more physical than verbal as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Yikes,” was Karma’s inelegant remark. “Double yikes.”

  “So?”

  “Well, if you really want to do something about movement and gain a little inner peace as well, you could try yoga, like I mentioned before.”

  “And where would I learn this yoga?”

  “We hold yoga classes on the roof at the Blue Moon on Tuesday nights. Eight o’clock shar
p.” She spoke with a breathy little hitch in her voice that he found unbelievably sexy.

  He pulled her even closer, felt her breasts pushing against his chest. “And you will be there, I suppose.”

  “I suppose. I mean, definitely. Unless I have something else to do.”

  What would this woman do in her spare time? he wondered. Make tofu-cilantro goodies such as the ones she’d lost at the bottom of the bay along with her bicycle? Hang out with Goldy in the lobby of the Blue Moon? Go on a date?

  It occurred to him that Karma O’Connor might have a boyfriend. Or worse. She might be engaged. If she ran a dating service, she could have her pick of clients.

  “You’re not taken or anything, are you?” he demanded out of the clear blue, surprising himself as well as her.

  “Taken?” She moved away and blinked at him. He noticed that her eyelashes were curly and long.

  “As in going steady. Or engaged. Or something,” he said, stammering around and feeling stupid.

  “No.” She moved closer now, tightening her arm across his shoulders. This gave Slade an exultant feeling that he would have been hard put to describe. He knew she wasn’t his type. But he also knew that he might have a chance to get lucky for tonight. Or maybe the next few nights, if he played this right.

  Not that it was only sex he was interested in. He wanted to know what made Karma O’Connor tick. He wanted to know why she thought the way she did, why she danced with her eyes closed. He wanted to know why she was running a place called Rent-a-Yenta and what she’d done before that. He wanted to know—

  “You could come tomorrow night.”

  He had to think for a few seconds to put this statement in its proper context. “To yoga class, you mean.”

  “Yes, it would be good for you.”

  “If I promise to be there, will you leave here with me now?” he said, sounding more urgent than he intended.

  “And where would we go?” she asked. In another woman, this might have sounded coy, but he didn’t think Karma was capable of coyness.