Love Me if You Dare Page 24

  So all he could really do was . . . tell her. As best he could.

  “I was twenty-five. Lisa was twenty-one and had just come home after graduating from the University of Florida. She wanted to take the boat out to celebrate. Both of us were dating people seriously at the time, but she wanted it to be just the four of us, the family. I remember joking with them . . .” His mind drifted back and he could hear them all laughing together in the kitchen of the cottage on Sea Shell Lane. “I was saying, ‘It’s always Lisa, Lisa, Lisa.’ But I really didn’t feel that way at all. I was proud of her.

  “Anyway, my uncle Barry had just died about six months earlier—heart attack at forty-nine. I’d moved into his old apartment at the Crab to officially take over as manager—but we were all still getting over that loss and she thought the outing would be good for us, as a family. It was the first time since he’d died that things were starting to feel kind of normal and happy again.”

  He let his gaze drop to the blanket they sat on, to the fabric that stretched between them. “But it didn’t turn out very happy after all.” Then he took a deep breath. Damn, this sucked to remember. Why wasn’t he used to it now? Why wasn’t he immune to it after all this time? “Because I let them down.”

  Her voice came in a whisper, like it pained her to ask him. “How?”

  It still shamed him, even now. “I forgot. I just fucking forgot. Everything. First off, I was supposed to check the weather. It was my job when we sailed, always—I checked it to make sure it was okay. But I forgot and didn’t do it, and they assumed it was fine. And then I even . . .” he stopped, shook his head “ . . . actually forgot to show up. Just plain forgot we were going. I was with my girlfriend, having fun, not paying attention to the time. And so Lisa left a note telling me they’d waited for an hour and were going without me since I obviously didn’t care enough to be there. I was . . . a little less responsible back then. And if I’d shown up on time, they wouldn’t have died.”

  “But . . .” It was clear that last part had thrown her—she wasn’t sure what to ask now.

  And since he’d started this, he owed it to her to tell her the rest without making her any more uncomfortable. “A storm came. A bad storm. They might have known about it from the weather radio on the boat, but the Coast Guard thinks they just couldn’t outrun it. They were capable enough sailors—they had the safety equipment. All three of them were found wearing their lifejackets and Lisa’s safety line had even been attached, but had broken.” He stopped then, shook his head. Still, after all this time, it was hard to believe they’d died. His dad and Lisa had both been good sailors. And storms in the gulf weren’t usually that big, or deadly.

  “But my dad had a bad knee from an old injury,” he explained, “and he was walking with a limp at the time—he’d twisted it somehow the week before. And Mom, like I said . . .” He shook his head again. “She’d never learned anything about sailing.

  “And as for Dad and Lisa . . . I’m not sure, they might have just panicked. When you head out on the boat on a sunny day, the same as dozens of times before, you don’t think about freak storms. You’re not ready for it mentally. We’d seldom gotten caught out in storms, and never a really bad one. I’ve spent a lot of time imagining what that might have been like, thinking about how freaking powerful nature can be.” His heartbeat increased again just remembering the sobering horror of how helpless they’d surely felt, how frightened.

  Only then did he raise his eyes back to Cami.

  “We’d been on the water our whole lives—and so this shouldn’t have happened. But it did.” His stomach went hollow as he sank a little deeper into the memories. And he had to pull in another deep breath and let it back out to go on. He let his eyes drop away from hers again, let himself peer blankly past her, past the boat’s railings, out to sea. “And if I’d remembered, if I’d been on time, if I’d been out there with them, they wouldn’t have died.” His chest tightened as he sank a little deeper into guilt.

  “But . . . why are you so sure of that? Why are you so sure you could’ve saved them all?”

  Another deep breath, in, out. “I wouldn’t have panicked. I could’ve reacted quicker. I knew exactly where the safety lines were and could have gotten everyone hooked to the boat.”

  “But you said Lisa’s was broken,” she interrupted.

  “I would have saved her anyway,” he insisted too forcefully. “I would have saved them all!”

  Reece met Cami’s gaze just briefly then, but pulled it back down. There was something about sharing this—sharing it so completely—that left him unable to look into her pretty eyes. So he let his fall shut again—like some sort of defense mechanism that made it all seem a little more like a dream, a little more like he was alone just thinking through it than actually telling someone. Telling someone, seeing their reaction . . . now he remembered why he didn’t do it often. Telling it made it so real. Telling it made it happen all over again.

  And yet he went on. He was almost done. And deep down he knew there was some value to purging it from his soul a little more, even if it wasn’t easy.

  “When they weren’t back by dark, I knew something bad had happened. I remember sitting on the dock behind the Crab, watching, waiting, my stomach tied in knots because I knew they hadn’t planned to be out that long. I’d checked the weather by then—I knew there’d been storms offshore. But I still kept waiting to see the boat’s lights coming in to the bay. I waited and I waited. Only they never came.”

  Letting out another breath, he ran a hand back through his hair. The water was so calm now, the surface as close to glass as the sea ever got. Hard to believe it was the same ocean that had swallowed up his parents and sister in some unpredictable fit of rage that had served no purpose.

  That was it—the end of his story, all he wanted to say about it. The aftermath didn’t matter. Seeing the boat towed in with broken rigging and a tattered sail . . . the outpouring of compassion and love from the community . . . the empty months that followed where he hadn’t quite known what to do with himself and couldn’t even fall asleep to escape the reality . . . the fact that slowly, somehow, life had gone on and he’d pulled himself together and just started acting normal again, like the guy he’d been before it had all happened. And he was that guy—he just had a lot less now than he’d started out with.

  Cami reached out to touch his hand. “You know, don’t you,” she began, “that there’s no way to know if you could have made a difference.”

  “I was young, strong, able-bodied, quick-thinking.”

  “But you can’t know how bad that storm was. You can’t know exactly what happened. You can’t be sure. So you should stop blaming yourself.”

  “I could have at least checked the fucking weather. And I’m still pretty sure if I’d been there that—”

  “Reece, sometimes things just happen,” she cut him off. “And it’s nobody’s fault. Just like that engine not starting. You couldn’t have predicted it. You couldn’t have changed it. It’s not your fault. The motor not starting isn’t your fault, and what happened back then, that wasn’t your fault either. And your family wouldn’t want you to blame yourself.”

  He stayed silent for a long moment . . . because he felt the truth in her words. A little anyway. “Probably not,” he replied, his voice so low it was barely audible.

  “Reece, I really am so sorry about asking you to take me on the boat,” she burst out then. And she looked so remorseful that he felt compelled to put a stop to it. He didn’t mind a slight change of subject, either.

  “No, seriously—if I’m gonna keep the boat, I should use the boat. Otherwise, I should get rid of it. I went to the trouble of getting it repaired back then, I’ve kept up with the maintenance on it, and I should take it out.”

  “But you . . .”

  He met her gaze. “I what?”

  She hesitated, then spoke more softly. “You kept your family’s house, too, didn’t you?”

  When he di
dn’t answer right away, she looked a little guilty and said, “Juanita mentioned she cleans a house for you that no one lives in, that’s all.”

  He felt . . . caught at something. But that was ridiculous. “I just . . . never decided for sure what to do with it. For a while thought I might want to move back in.” He shook his head. “But then I just kind of stopped thinking about it.”

  Her eyes stayed locked with his. And he could almost read her unspoken thoughts. You’ve paid someone to clean it for ten years but you stopped thinking about it?

  “Maybe you . . . just don’t want to let go of the past, leave it behind,” she said gently. “I can understand not wanting to give it up. I mean . . . it sounds like such a good past.”

  He nodded, just a bit. About the last part, not the first. “It was a good past.” Then he really thought through what she’d said. “I guess it’s just that . . . it was their lives. Their lives are in that house. And in the motel. And in this boat, and the catamaran, too. I guess it just feels . . . wrong—disrespectful or something—to . . . go dismantling their lives that way.”

  “I get it,” she said. “I guess . . . if you leave everything the way it was, it’s kind of like . . . things haven’t changed completely. Kind of like your own . . . Never-Never Land.”

  Cami couldn’t tell how he’d taken that. She was still reeling from the horrible story he’d shared with her, and she wasn’t sure she was doing, saying, the right things. She was trying, though. So she added more—her own truth. “Loss is hard. I get wanting to hold on to all the leftover pieces. There are things . . . things I wouldn’t know how to let go of, either.”

  He tilted his head. “Like what?”

  She pursed her lips, felt a little weird saying it, comparing the two things. “My job.” She shook her head. “I know a job isn’t like a family, but . . . like I said, it’s the closest thing I have to that—it’s pretty much everything to me because I left my family behind. I mean, we keep in touch, but not closely. And I send them some money—paying my dad back, you know.” She grimaced slightly, admitting that. “But . . . I guess everybody has to care about something, so my job became the thing I care about, the place where I put all my emotional marbles.”

  And now, now that she’d said it, she felt kind of pathetic. And maybe it would be different if her job was something meaningful. But it wasn’t—not really. Not enough for the loyalty she’d invested in it, the importance she’d placed on it.

  “I’m sorry,” Reece said then, squinting a little from the sun. It was setting now, sending bright blasts of orangy rays across the boat.

  She tilted her head. “Sorry?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Tink,” he told her, “but I guess that just sounds kind of sad to me.”

  Yep, she was pathetic. But she tried to explain by saying, “No, my life before—that was sad.”

  Now he peered at her from beneath shaded lids. “I don’t like to think of you being sad.”

  She tried to lighten the moment. “What will be sad is if I lose my job over you not selling.” But then she immediately shook her head. “God, I’m sorry—I didn’t say that to try to make you cave or anything. It’s because I feel so comfortable with you now—I think I just forgot who I was talking to for a second.”

  “I’m sorry my decision affects you so much, Tink, I truly am—but I really can’t sell. You know why now.”

  “Can I say something honest,” she asked him, “without you thinking it’s about my job? Something I really mean from the heart?”

  He hesitated slightly, and it made her think—hell, maybe I shouldn’t go there—but then he said, “Okay.” And she felt she had no choice but to follow through with what she’d started.

  “I understand now why the Happy Crab is special, but . . . I’m not sure it stays special if it’s not serving the purpose it was supposed to. And it’s none of my business but . . . it seems like you’re not moving on. If you keep holding on to the past, you’re holding on to the bad parts just as tight as the good. And I promise that I’m not saying that to try to get you to sell, Reece. I’m saying it because you’re a pretty incredible guy. And I think you could be living a better, happier life. You deserve a life as wonderful as you are.”

  She touched his hand again, but she couldn’t read his expression. And she worried about the things she’d just said. Maybe they hadn’t come out right. There was nothing wrong with the life he was living—she just didn’t want him to make big decisions for the wrong reasons. She didn’t want his past, his loss, to hold him back in any way. “I just see . . . so much light in you,” she went on, trying to get closer to the truth of what she’d intended. “I wouldn’t want anything to keep it from shining as brightly as possible.”

  She squeezed his hand in hers then—and when he squeezed it back, her heart lurched with relief and affection and a whole other host of happy emotions. And when he looked into her eyes now, she realized his were glassy with emotion. “I appreciate that, Tink—I really do. But the thing is . . . I’m not ready for that. I’m not sure I ever will be. Because the motel is . . . the cornerstone of my life, the foundation. All the other cornerstones are gone—they died. So without it . . . I don’t know who I’d be anymore.” He stopped, sighed, and she felt how much he was opening up to her. “Can you understand that at all?”

  She bit her lip, thinking of cornerstones, foundations. And yes—she could understand. Because that was how she felt about her job. That was the cornerstone of her life. And maybe that sounded shallow to people who had great families or close, lasting friendships, but for her, her job was her life, her job was her family, her job was her security, her job was the thing her existence revolved around.

  So in that moment she understood, in a way she hadn’t before, even after the story of his family’s deaths, exactly how much the Happy Crab meant to him, and that it was a part of him, and that it was the thing that held his life together and gave it meaning and purpose. She understood it to the marrow of her bones, to the core of her soul.

  And she understood it so wholly, so deeply, that she knew . . . she knew she had to let it go.

  No matter what it meant for her, no matter what the loss might cost her. Whether or not she thought it was practical, or in Reece’s ultimate best interest, or anything else—she had to let it go.

  And she heard herself whisper the words. “I’ll stop now.”

  He looked up. “What?”

  “I’ll stop trying to buy the motel. I’m done trying to take it from you.”

  At that, his face took on a confused look, pure puzzlement, and she knew why. She’d wavered in certain ways with him—she’d let him see sides of her that detracted from her strength, and she’d made herself vulnerable with him over and over without that ever being part of the plan—but she’d never wavered on intending to purchase the Happy Crab. She’d never wavered on being sure she’d find a way to make him sell. Until now.

  “I mean it,” she told him. “You love it too much. I get that now, really get it, in a way I didn’t before. I’m giving in, backing down. Because it’s the right thing to do. And because I want you to be happy.”

  His eyes narrowed slightly then as he leaned a little closer. “But what about you, Tink? What does this mean for your job?”

  She blinked, thought, blew out a breath as the reality hit her, a whole new reality. “I’m not sure yet. I might lose it.” She suffered a sense of uneasiness then, because it made certain things—like her feelings for him—startlingly clear.

  “You’d do that for me?” he asked.

  And she pursed her lips, gathered another bit of courage, and whispered, “Looks that way.”

  She glanced down, feeling oddly bashful now, until he reached out, using one bent finger to lift her chin. When their gazes met again, his face close to hers, he said, “That’s the biggest, nicest gift anyone’s ever given me.”

  She was having trouble breathing now. Because he was right—it was an enormous gif
t. And it was from her heart. Which she felt like she’d just reached into her chest and pulled out to hold in her palm between them, for him to do with whatever he would. Talk about feeling vulnerable. But she tried for a smile, and said softly, “Do I get a thank-you?”

  His eyes warmed on her and he leaned in to give her a slow, tingly hot kiss that reverberated all through her body. “How’s that?” he asked deeply.

  “It’s a good start,” she said. “Now keep going.”

  “ . . . I mean to keep you.”

  J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy

  Chapter 19

  AS REECE smoothly laid her back on the blanket, she glanced toward the horizon, now ablaze with streaks of pink and a dusky, darkening sky above, and said absently, “We missed the sunset.”

  “Doesn’t matter—the sun sets every night.” And hovering over her, he pointed a finger up and down her body to say, “Right now I’m a little more interested in what’s going on over here.”

  “Oh . . .” she breathed, liking the sound of that, just before his mouth melded back to hers, setting off a fresh flare of desire in her bikini bottoms.

  Of course, when his palm covered her breast and his thumb began to stroke its way across her nipple through her top, pleasure erupted there, too. And oh Lord, she wanted him. She’d always wanted him, and God knows every time they’d done it she’d wanted him, but something about this time, now, surpassed all that. Maybe it’s because of what you just gave him. Maybe it’s about surrender. Maybe surrender and the way you want him are the exact same thing.

  She threaded her fingers through his hair, then ran her hands over his shoulders, arms, as she kissed him back with all the passion inside her. She let her fingernails scrape lightly across his skin and loved the hot, low groan it drew from his throat. And when he untied her bikini top behind her neck and drew it down, baring her breasts to the evening air, she felt . . . free.