Too Darn Hot (8 page)

She turned on the lamp, swung her legs off the bed, and located her slippers. She knew from experience that the best way to purge a disturbing dream was to get fully awake and apply her gray matter to the rigors of work. She made a pot of coffee and finished polishing her review of The Cookhouse—in retrospect, a less-than-ideal distraction.

Later that morning when she opened her apartment door to retrieve the Sunday
Times,
she found a white bakery box sitting atop the newspaper. Inside was an entire bourbon pecan tart.

Chapter Seven

A gull glided overhead, its black-tipped wings outstretched, its white and gray body stark against the deep azure of a warm, cloudless morning. It swooped low over the white sand before a few powerful beats of its wings caught an air current and its sleek body soared skyward once more. Its fellows reconnoitered in a cluster near the water’s edge, scavenging for breakfast. Their sharp cries and the muffled snore of the waves were the only sounds as Lina made her way across the beach.

A lively ocean breeze tossed her hair and molded the soft cotton of her sleeveless white T-shirt and cutoff shorts to her body. She carried her white canvas sneakers, luxuriating in the feel of warm sand under her bare feet.

When she’d tried calling Eric at his home in Rocky Bay, Adam had answered the phone. He’d told her his dad had escaped on his usual solitary Sunday morning sojourn to the local beach. Within forty-five minutes Lina was pulling into the tiny parking area next to Rocky Bay Beach. She’d parked her new gold Subaru next to a battered blue Volvo station wagon.

She’d peered into the Volvo’s littered interior: an empty chips bag and soda bottle, two cardboard coffee cups, and a couple of unfolded maps. The contents of the trunk were more revealing: a baseball, wooden bat, well-worn mitt, insulated chest, tackle box, three fishing poles, and a cardboard carton containing model rocket parts.

Certainly looked promising. She’d sobered thinking how difficult it must be for a widowed father to raise two active teenage boys on his own.

Scanning the beach now, she saw an elderly couple ensconced on sand chairs, fully dressed and soaking up the warmth of the sun, and a well-oiled redheaded, red-skinned youth broiling himself on a beach towel.

But no Eric Reid.

The bourbon pecan tart Eric had sent to her apartment—or had he left it there himself?—sat on the floor of her car. This was a first for her—never before had she been wooed with baked goods. As touched as she was by the gesture, she had no choice but to return it. She’d always been so conscientious, scrupulously avoiding even the appearance of favoritism.

As she crossed the sand, Lina nodded good morning to the couple on the sand chairs, with their paperbacks and matching Mets caps. She shielded her eyes from the sun and peered to the left, at the uninhabited expanse of white sand on this small, out-of-the-way beach.

To the right the shoreline curved around a beach-grass-studded dune. She ambled in that direction, carefully avoiding the more dangerous-looking shell shards. Rounding the dune, she watched three gulls squabble over a crab carcass. A flash of blue about a hundred yards down the beach caught her attention, and she stopped. She squinted to make out the form loping toward her.

“Good Lord,” she whispered.

As Eric closed the distance between them in ground-eating strides, jogging along the tide line, she stared, mesmerized. Her greedy eyes took in every detail, from his sun-burnished, breeze-ruffled hair to his long, powerful legs and bare feet. Above royal blue running shorts hugging lean hips, his broad chest was bare. A wave broke and surged onshore, to tease his toes and lick away the footprints stretching behind him in the wet sand.

Although his eyes were shielded by dark glasses, Lina could tell he hadn’t yet noticed her. All concentration was on his run. She stood close to the dune, out of his direct line of sight. As he neared her, she noticed the graceful motion of his arms, the sleek ripple of shoulder and chest muscles, the way his sweat-sheened body gleamed in the sunlight. Not once did he falter, his body as smoothly efficient as a well-oiled engine.

Make that a warm, supple, thoroughly male engine, Lina thought, remembering all too vividly the intoxicating thrill of his aroused body pressed against hers during their stolen minutes behind The Cookhouse...the whisper-soft seduction of his lips against her bare shoulder under the starless cloak of night.

Groaning, she tried to redirect her thoughts to the purpose of this excursion. When he was about fifty feet from her, she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and pushed her hair behind her ear.

His head pivoted in her direction. His churning legs lost their rhythm and the well-oiled engine stumbled to a graceless stop. A slow smile spread on his face. Gesturing for her to follow, he turned and jogged away from her, disappearing behind the dune.

She followed the curve of the beach, emerging at last in a secluded nook tucked into the sheltering embrace of high, sloping ridges of sand. The breeze was minimal here, the sun now almost directly overhead, bathing the entire cove in the crystalline light of early summer.

Here Eric had left a large yellow beach towel and a small plastic cooler, along with a gray T-shirt and white sneakers. His back was to her as he removed his sunglasses and wiped his face and chest with the towel. He extracted a bottle of ice water from the cooler and tipped back his head for a long swallow.

Lina hated the way her breath grew shallow at the sight of Eric’s barely covered body, hated the way she couldn’t keep her gaze from dropping to zero in on his well-shaped buns. The thin blue nylon of his shorts served more to enhance than conceal what lay beneath. With merciless acuity she recalled their encounter behind the restaurant, and the way his denim-clad muscles had tightened and flexed when she grabbed his bottom to pull him closer.

She dropped her sneakers to the sand and shoved her hands in the pockets of her cutoffs, fighting a crazy impulse to reacquaint herself with the feel of him. A gull shrieked and swooped in low, startling her, and she laughed nervously. He dropped the bottle back into the cooler.

She broke the silence. “This is a lovely little cove. Do you come here often?”

He gave her that toe-curling smile. “If you’re trying to pick me up, you’ll have to do better than that.” He squatted beside the cooler and struggled with the release catch. “I hate using this contraption, but when I don’t, the gulls have a feast. The minute I turn my back, bags and wrappers get torn open, food goes flying. It’s not a pretty sight.” He fished out a foil-wrapped parcel and wagged it at her. “Have you had breakfast?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll share my Fluffernutter with you.” He unwrapped the sandwich.

“I don’t believe it.” Peanut butter and sticky white goo—Marshmallow Fluff—oozed from between slices of white bread. “It
is
a Fluffernutter! I didn’t think they even made that stuff anymore.”

She joined him on the large towel, facing him cross-legged, and accepted the half sandwich he offered. “Chef Reid’s secret ingredient revealed at last.” She turned it this way and that, sniffed it, and took a tentative bite. It was delicious. “Takes me back to my youth.”

He said, “When you have kids, you rediscover the damnedest things.” His gaze lit on her mouth. She stopped chewing. He reached across and scooped a bit of fluff from the corner of her mouth with his index finger. He touched it to her lips, and she opened them.

The stuff stuck to his skin like glue. Lina would have liked nothing better than to take his fingertip into her mouth and suck it clean. Opting for a more dignified approach, she nibbled ineffectively at it. His skin tasted better than the marshmallow.

Eric appeared amused as he examined the inadequate results of her efforts. He finished the job, licking his finger clean. When he dropped his hand, her eyes remained riveted on the faint scar on his bottom lip. At last she raised her eyes to his.
Say something,
she commanded herself.

“How did you get the scar?”

He touched the tip of his tongue to the vertical line on one side of his bottom lip. “A bike accident. On my tenth birthday.”

“Ouch. Happy birthday.”

“It could’ve been worse. I was lucky. Got skinned up pretty bad, though. Nothing serious, but I looked like hell and scared the bejesus out of my folks.”

In the unforgiving sunlight and so close to him, she could see every crease in the spray of little lines that framed his eyes. She liked those creases.

He chucked the last bit of his sandwich across the sand, where a gull quickly pounced on it, and leapt to his feet. “Let’s go for a swim.”

Lina followed Eric’s lead and fed the last of her Fluffernutter to the voracious birds. “Aren’t you supposed to wait a half hour after eating?” She let him pull her to her feet. “Won’t our guts twist up or something?”

“What can I tell you? I like to live dangerously. Good thing you wore a suit.”

He was staring at her white T-shirt, where the outline of her bikini top was clearly visible. He raised his eyes to her face and grinned shamelessly.

“Okay, but if I turn into shark bait—” she pulled off the shirt “—I’m dragging you down with me.”

“Fair enough.”

She felt his eyes on her as she dropped her cutoffs to the towel. It was the first time she’d worn the bandanna-printed red and white bikini. With its ultra-high-cut legs, it showed more of her bottom than she was accustomed to displaying.

“Isn’t the water cold this early in the season?” she asked as they strode toward the ocean. When her toes encountered the wet sand, she scuttled back.
Yikes!

“Don’t think cold,” he said. “Think bracing. Invigorating.”

“Right.”

“Last one in—”

She didn’t wait for him to finish, but barreled into the ocean at full speed. The shock of the freezing water nearly unbalanced her. Sheer momentum—and pride—kept her legs moving even as the “bracing” cold squeezed a howl of outrage from her lungs. Not one to back down from a challenge, she set her sights on the wave cresting a few yards away and dived headlong into the curl of water.

In that moment she knew they were all wrong about hell.

Hell is cold.

*

Eric surfaced near Lina, gasping for breath. Okay, he thought, so perhaps “bracing” didn’t quite cover it. “Startling,” maybe. “Coronary-inducing” was probably closer to the truth.

His arms and legs churned the water, more to generate heat than to keep him afloat.

Huff, huff, huff.

He looked at Lina, huff-huffing nearby. God but she looked cute with her short, dark hair wet and clinging to her head. She was grinning widely. Then again, perhaps that was a rictus of agony.

Their bit of ocean surged, like an ice-cold living thing, lifting them, pulling them shoreward like rag dolls as a wave cartwheeled onto the sand. The two of them simultaneously turned and began swimming vigorously away from shore, taking advantage of the undertow. They had to get past the breakers before the next wave formed. There they could relax and ride the swells.

He watched her strong, smooth arm strokes, the flawless economy of motion—the way her bottom looked in that little red bikini.

Eric was no slouch when it came to ocean swimming, and he was pleased she was able to keep up with him. He was also pleased at the wordless cooperation they enjoyed. They began treading again, slowly, almost effortlessly in the buoyant salt water, letting it rock and caress their bodies. Eric moved closer to Lina.

“Warming up?”

She laughed. “I’m getting some feeling back in my extremities.”

“You’re a good swimmer. You must’ve grown up near the water.”

“I did, but my parents weren’t really beach-goers.” She flipped wet strands of hair out of her eyes. “But after I married Steve, we spent practically every weekend at the beach. Made up for lost time.”

As the ocean urged them back toward shore, they scissor-kicked farther out, staying within touching distance.

“Were you married long?” He was unapologetically curious.

“Eleven years.”

A question popped into Eric’s head—and remained there. He wasn’t rude enough to ask how eleven years added up to zero children.

“That’s a long time, eleven years,” he said. “Was the breakup amicable, or one of these knock-down-drag-outs I hear so much about?”

“It was as amicable as these things can be, I suppose. We both knew it wasn’t working. We still see each other occasionally, at social functions.”

Are you still in love with him?
“That’s nice that you’re, uh, on good terms with—”

“You want to know if I’m still in love with him, don’t you?”

“No.” He hoped his expression reflected the appropriate level of umbrage. “It’s none of my business.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes and tipped her head back as if to drink up the stark sunshine after the long, bleak winter. Her arms continued to etch slow, graceful arcs in the water. She appeared serene and untroubled.

The little witch.

He muttered a curse. “So are you still in love with Steve or what?”

She smiled. “No.”

Eric couldn’t repress a grin of relief.

She looked at him then, her eyes bluer than the sky, and something sparked in a long empty place deep within his chest. Had he forgotten just how sweet it could be to spend time with a beautiful woman?

Eric realized how very little he knew about Lina.
By the way, now that we’ve had a skirmish or two, and came darn near close to doing the nasty behind my place of business, do you think you could tell me your last name?

She leaned back until she was floating faceup. Her arms had probably gotten tired, but his hadn’t, and he moved closer. Gentle swells lifted them and rocked them. Her eyes were half-closed against the glare.

They felt the ominous surge at the same moment. Their heads snapped around just in time to see the ocean rearing, pulling itself into a whitecap, lifting them like so much flotsam.

The force of a wave this size could easily drag them into shore, tossed end over end, finishing up with a good scraping on the bottom. Obviously Lina was familiar with this particular experience. She stiffened and seized Eric’s arm in a killer grip.