One Last Chance

by Shelby Gates

  She hadn’t given it much thought. The shore excursions were expensive and she’d known when she signed up that the most she would probably do was de-board and walk around the port of call. Cabo San Lucas wasn’t a huge town, but, from what she’d researched, she could shop a little and walk the dock area and wander down to one of the beaches nearby.

  He didn’t wait for her to respond. “There’s room on the parasailing excursion. It leaves in thirty minutes. I took the liberty of signing you up.”

  “I can’t parasail!”

  “I know. But you can watch. And the beach is pretty fantastic.”

  She muttered an oath under her breath and he chuckled.

  “It’ll be fun,” he said. “I promise.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Pretty sure you won’t.”

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  “Because I think you wanna see me out over the water. And I’m pretty sure you’re gonna be hoping my sail malfunctions and I go flying into the great beyond. Or into the mouth of a great white. I’ll have to make sure you don’t sabotage any of the equipment.”

  Claire smiled despite herself. “Good idea.”

  “So you’ll come?” Griffin tried to sound nonchalant, like he didn’t care what choice she made.

  She nodded.

  A broad smile stretched across his face. “Awesome. We’d better get going. With that ankle of yours, it’ll probably take us a half-hour just to get to the elevator.”

  Claire reached for her cover-up.

  “You do know that swimsuit you’re wearing covers up less than what I stripped you down to last night, right?”

  She froze.

  “Oh, wait,” he said. “That was before I undressed you with my eyes. The swimsuit does cover up more. Never mind.”

  She knew her cheeks were as red as Emily’s bikini, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Claire,” he said.

  “What?” she said through clenched teeth.

  “I turned the lights off last night,” he said. “Before I got you changed. I didn’t see a damn thing and I’m just messing with you because I want you to lighten up.”

  “A good way to get me to lighten up would be to stop making jokes at my expense,” she said.

  Her response caught him off-guard and it looked to her like he almost winced.

  He sighed. “Look, I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I’ll knock it off. I’ve just…I’ve missed being around you. We always screwed around. Teased one another. I missed that with you.” He hesitated. “But I’ll stop. Sorry.”

  She remembered that. His incessant teasing. She’d both loved and hated it in high school. And she didn’t know what to do with the response she still had to it. Hated that he might really be picking on her, but loved that she was the center of his attention.

  “We should go,” he said. “I’ll go hold the elevator.”

  He headed toward the bank of elevators before she could say anything.

  EIGHT

  “Weren’t you afraid of heights?” Claire asked.

  They were sitting on a pristine, mostly deserted beach in Cabo San Lucas. A cloudless blue sky played host to a brilliant sun and Claire was positioned on the sand, her face tilted skyward while Griffin waited his turn to parasail.

  “Still am.”

  “Well, this should be interesting then.”

  He nodded, lost in thought. He glanced at the sky over the dark blue water and saw a pair of legs hanging from a harness, a shout of excitement coming from somewhere above the legs.

  But he wasn’t thinking about his fear of being up high or who was in the harness or what they were screaming at.

  He was thinking about Claire.

  He’d been stung by her reaction to his teasing. He’d always teased her when they were kids. Always. He was a smart-ass and so was she. It was what they did. And he only did it because she could give it right back, which he’d always liked. He thought she did, too.

  But now she definitely seemed less than thrilled with it. And with him.

  This wasn’t the plan, he thought.

  “Have you done it before?” she asked. “Parasailing?”

  He turned to look at her and his stomach did a little flip-flop, just like it had when he’d first seen her at the reservation counter. He still couldn’t believe he was sitting next to her after not seeing her for ten years. Everything about her made his knees turn to jelly, made his heart catch in his throat. But he couldn’t let her know that. Not yet.

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t. Always wanted to, but never had the chance. Or maybe not the guts.”

  “Even with all the places you’ve been?”

  He smiled, squinting up at the sky. “Okay, so maybe it was more about the guts. But you know what? It’s not that I have a fear of heights.”

  She looked at him. “No?”

  He pushed himself up and shook the sand from his hands. “I have a fear of falling.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Right.”

  “You gonna be okay while I’m up there?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “I know you’ll manage,” he said. “But do you need anything?”

  She thought for a moment. “I need to know how long a stupid sprained ankle takes to heal.”

  He took off his shirt, tossed it in his backpack and pulled out his cell phone. “You can research it on this. Google it or something.”

  She took it. “Okay. Thanks.”

  He took a step toward the boat dock, then stopped. “Hey, Claire. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For teasing you,” he said. “And for getting you changed. If I overstepped my bounds, I’m sorry. I apologize.”

  “You don’t need to apologize. And I probably overreacted.”

  In the past, he would’ve made some crack about how stunning it was for her to overreact because she always overreacted. But now he was feeling gun-shy and didn’t want to tease her anymore. She was clearly sensitive to it and even though he wasn’t sure why, he didn’t want to push it.

  “Go fly,” she said. “And come back in one piece.”

  “You want me in one piece?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Should I take that as a sign that you aren’t totally sick of me yet?”

  She adjusted her sunglasses. “You should take it as a sign that I need you to help me gimp around on these crutches and having both of us injured would be hugely pathetic.”

  He laughed, shook his head. “I guess I’ll take that.”

  NINE

  Claire watched Griffin trudge off across the white sand, his tan torso sending a small quiver through her stomach.

  She clenched his smartphone in her hand, trying to talk herself out of what she knew she was going to do. He’d given it to her to research the ankle. She hadn’t lied about that. She wanted to know when it was going to feel better and when she could ditch the damn crutches.

  But she also wanted to know more about Griffin.

  He’d told her some things the night before but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he had held some things back. She wasn’t sure what they were, but she thought he had been a little too quick in summarizing what he’d been doing the last ten years. Something didn’t feel right.

  And now she had his phone and access to the Internet.

  She knew she could probably find things he’d written, but she was wondering if she could find more.

  She watched him step on the dock and shake hands with the boat handlers. He was so at ease, so comfortable in his own skin. She envied him in that way. He’d always been like that, brimming with confidence, just a shade shy of arrogance. She had no idea what that felt like. None.

  They strapped the harness around his chest and midsection and he looked in her direction. He gave a little shrug and a smile, then a wave.

  She hesitated, then waved back.

  How could he still make her feel like that eighteen-year-old girl from ten y
ears ago just by waving at her?

  The dangerous part was that he could probably just as easily bust open her heart again.

  She wanted to ask him why he’d done it. They’d never talked about that then. In fact, they’d never spoken after he’d broken up with her. About anything. Everything disappeared with one conversation and she remembered how difficult it was to have him uprooted like that from her life, like a gardener snipping a weed. Gone.

  The boat’s engine roared to life and pulled away from the dock. Griffin went out over the water and the parasail blossomed above him, carrying him up and away. Claire watched, her heart swelling with pride and just a touch of envy. He wasn’t afraid of anything.

  She glanced at the phone. Now or never.

  She punched a button, bringing the screen to life. She found the browser and opened it. She typed his name into the search bar and waited for it to bring back the results.

  The first few hits were from articles he’d written and she was immediately jealous. He’d written for several major magazines and been to more countries than she could count. His words were out there for the entire world to see. She scrolled through a couple of the articles and immediately found his voice in them, telling a story as if he were sitting next to her, whispering it in her ear.

  But the last item on the first page was what caught her eye.

  “Pro Surfer Calls Off Engagement” was the headline and she immediately clicked on it, wondering if he’d written the article.

  He hadn’t. He’d been one of the subjects.

  She clicked on the embedded photo and grimaced. Sarah Polk was some beautiful professional surfer from Sydney who was apparently a national hero in Australia. It was big news when she’d broken off her brief engagement to the guy who’d first profiled her in Surfer Magazine.

  Griffin Benson.

  Her heart thumped in her chest as she scrolled down further. They’d been engaged for three months. She checked the date of the article.

  June 14. Last month.

  She stared at the screen. That explained everything. Why he was single. His last-minute booking of the reunion. His focus on his career. And why he was even talking to her.

  “How long?”

  Claire looked up, startled.

  Griffin loomed over her, his dark hair slicked back, his wet body glistening in the sun. She swallowed back down her heart.

  “What?” She hit the home button on the phone and dropped the device on the sand like it was on fire.

  He sank down next to her, spritzing her with salt water. It felt good on her heated skin. “Your ankle. How long before it feels better?”

  Was she really going to lie to him? Make up some random time period? Because she hadn’t had a chance to look.

  “It depends,” she hedged.

  He nodded, his gaze focused on the ocean. “Yeah, probably. Depending on how bad you twisted it.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. She scooped a handful of sand and sifted it through her fingers. “But it also depends on whether or not I actually looked it up.”

  He turned to her, his eyebrows raised. “You didn’t?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I looked up you instead.”

  TEN

  “Me?” Griffin’s voice almost squeaked.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “You looked me up?” He grinned. “Really?”

  Claire gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I wanted to see stuff you’d written, I guess.”

  It was a half-truth, she knew, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she’d been looking for more. She’d been looking for everything.

  He laughed. “Oh, I get it. You didn’t believe me. That I wrote.”

  “That’s not true.” She shifted in the sand, trying to get comfortable. “I just wanted to see what you wrote.”

  “I would’ve shown you,” he told her. “I have most of it on my computer. Files and stuff.”

  “OK.” She changed the subject. “How was it?”

  “Amazing.” His smile encompassed his face, his eyes wide and bright. “I wanna get you out there. When you’re better. If we ever find out when that will be.”

  She smiled. “Don’t think it’s going to be better by five o’clock.”

  “Five o’clock?”

  “When we head back to the ship,” she reminded him. “We’re at sea all day tomorrow. And then back home Monday morning.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, his voice laced with irritation. “So we’ll do it when we get back.”

  We? She couldn’t find her voice to speak so she just nodded.

  There hadn’t been a “we” with Griffin Benson in ten years. Ten years ago, it had been the best “we” she’d ever known. Better than any relationship she’d had in college, better even than her brief marriage to Jared. Their friendship had blossomed effortlessly into a romance. A relationship. And then he’d gone and broken her heart. Claire wasn’t sure she’d ever recovered.

  A high-pitched scream startled her. Her gaze shot to the water. Emily was floundering in the waves, about fifteen yards out.

  Griffin leaped off the towel and raced toward the ocean, diving headfirst into the surf. Claire watched as he cut clean strokes through the water, his arms like knives as he sliced through the surf toward Emily. She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his neck. He swam back with one arm, his other looped securely around her. They got to shore and he scooped her into his arms. A crowd of onlookers had gathered by the water’s edge.

  “Is she OK?” Molly, Emily’s best friend, was in a panic.

  “She’s fine,” Griffin said. He set her down on the sand, a few feet from Claire. “Stepped on a shell.”

  “And saw a shark!” Emily said, her eyes filled with tears. “And it was a sharp shell. Just look at my foot!”

  She held out a perfectly pedicured foot. Claire craned her neck to see. A thin slice dissected less than an inch of her heel. It looked no deeper than a paper cut.

  “You’ll be fine,” Griffin told her. “But you probably wanna stay out of the water. And get some antibiotic cream on it when you get back to the ship. Just in case.”

  She nodded. “OK. Thank you.” She looked up at him and Claire was certain she saw her flutter eyelashes. “For rescuing me.”

  “You were chest-deep, Em,” he said. “You didn’t need rescuing.”

  “I could have died from shock,” she said. “From the shark.”

  Griffin shook his head. “I’ve surfed these beaches for years. No sharks here. Out in the open blue? Sure. But they don’t come in to shore. Trust me.”

  Claire watched as Emily pouted. She should have been an actress.

  “I really thought you’d have more sympathy for me,” she complained. “The way you fawn all over her.”

  Griffin glanced between the two women parked on the beach. “Uh. She sprained her ankle. And she’s sharing my room.”

  “Yes, I’m aware she’s staying with you,” Emily said, frowning. “But it’s not like you guys are together. I mean, that didn’t even work out back in high school.”

  Griffin’s expression clouded and he turned to Claire. “We should maybe get you back to the ship.”

  “Why? We don’t leave for like…”

  “The heat,” he said. “Might not be good for your ankle.”

  “I’m fine, Griffin. We don’t have to…”

  But he’d already gathered their things into his backpack and his arms were already lifting her off the sand. He made sure she was upright, shook the sand from her crutches and put her arm around his shoulders. “The crutches won’t work in the sand. Just hang on to me.”

  His hand wrapped around her waist, his fingers touching her bare skin and her stomach did that old familiar flip-flop.

  Emily’s mouth puckered from an invisible lemon. “I can walk back with you guys. And, y
ou know, help or something.”

  “We’re fine,” Griffin said and there was no mistaking his tone. He was dismissing her.

  Claire turned away from Emily so she wouldn’t see the smile on her face.

  When they were far enough away from Emily, Claire said “We don’t have to go back.”

  “Oh, we’re not.”

  “We’re not.”

  “No,” he said, chuckling. “Your ankle is fine. I mean, I know it hurts. But the sun isn’t doing anything to it. I just wanted to get away from her.”

  “Glad I’m good for something.”

  “You’re good for a lot of things,” he said, grinning at her. “And before you take that the wrong way, I mean that in a good way and not in a perverted, sleazy way.”

  She smiled again. She had been about to take it the wrong way. And she really liked that he knew that about her. That he remembered that.

  They made their way slowly down the beach, following the shoreline as it curved, revealing a small inlet. The waves lapped gently here, the calmer water a sublime aquamarine.

  Griffin looked back over his shoulder. “I think we’re far enough away that she won’t come looking for us. You wanna sit for awhile?”