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Finally, unable to force himself to lie still any longer, he slid out of bed and moved silently to avoid rousing Kim. After donning a pair of khaki shorts and a polo shirt, he tiptoed out of the bedroom.
Their hushed voices rippled down the hall like a gentle current. The bathroom was empty, so he made use of it before heading to the kitchen.
The kid was seated at the small table, a heaping bowl of cold cereal before her. Gina stood leaning against the counter, holding a bowl of what appeared to be yogurt and sliced bananas. The room was filled with the soul-stirring aroma of freshly brewed coffee. He and Kim should have bought coffee yesterday when they’d stopped at a local convenience store to purchase beer, imported bottled water, macadamia nuts, cheese and other such necessities. Kim had insisted they wouldn’t need coffee, since they would be meeting her parents for breakfast every morning. But right now, inhaling the fragrance of Gina’s coffee, he realized that Kim had been wrong.
“Good morning,” Gina greeted him. From her, the word came out mawn-ing.
“Good morning,” he responded, rubbing his hand through his hair. He should have brushed it while he’d had access to the mirror above the bathroom sink, but he’d left his brush in the bedroom. Gina and her niece had monopolized the shelf space in the bathroom.
His eyes took a moment to adjust to the sunny brightness of the kitchen, and then went to work processing the sight of Gina, dressed today in a lime-green T-shirt and short white shorts. She was barefoot except for the silver ring circling one of her left toes. The sight of it jolted him in some way, and he lifted his gaze to her face. She’d pulled a hank of her hair back from her face and clasped it with a large barrette, the way a child might wear her hair. On her, it didn’t look childish.
“I hope we didn’t wake you up,” she said. “We were trying to keep quiet.”
“You were very quiet. Thank you.” He gestured toward the hallway. “Kim’s still dead to the world.”
“You want some coffee?”
Desperately, but he should decline. If he drank her coffee, it would represent an unseemly mingling of their vacations. Yet when he watched her reach for the large ceramic mug on the counter beside her, lift it to her lips and take a sip, he couldn’t resist. “I’d love some.”
“Help yourself. The cups are in that cabinet.” She gestured toward the cabinet above the coffeemaker. “I bought a pound of ground beans and there’s no way I’m going to finish it all by myself in one week. So really, help yourself whenever you want some. I found a stash of filters in the cabinet with the napkins and paper towels.”
“I’m too young for coffee,” the little girl announced as she patted the cereal flakes beneath the surface of the milk in her bowl. “We’re going snorkeling today.”
“Are you?” Okay. He could handle this—drinking Gina’s coffee and making small talk with her niece. Despite his lack of experience with children, he figured that discussing snorkeling with a spunky little girl couldn’t be any harder than discussing politics with Ross Hamilton.
“Aunt Gina says it’s easy.”
“Aunt Gina knows what she’s talking about,” he confirmed as he filled a mug with coffee for himself. The fragrance flooded him like an elixir, sparking inside him the notion that sharing the condo with Gina and the kid was actually a stroke of luck. If they hadn’t been there, he would be having his first conversation of the day with Kim’s father—after having spent the night on the couch.
“You could come snorkeling with us,” the girl said.
He glanced sharply at Gina, who shrugged noncommittally. “They rent gear at the cabana on the beach. There’s milk in the fridge, by the way. No sugar, though. I don’t use it, so I didn’t buy any.”
He sipped his coffee, then shook his head. “I drink it black. Thanks. It’s wonderful.”
“They have good water here,” she said. “Coffee tastes different depending on the water you brew it with. This—” she raised her mug toward him, as if proposing a toast “—is delicious. Must mean the water is good.”
He thought of the bottled water Kim had insisted on buying, even after he’d pointed out that St. Thomas was part of the United States and he was sure its water had passed U.S. health standards.
“So, you wanna go snorkeling with us?” the child insisted.
“Ali, he’s here on his own vacation,” Gina reminded her. “He’ll be doing things with the people he came with.”
“They could come, too. They could get snorkeling stuff at the casino.”
“Cabana.”
“Yeah.” The girl scooped a mound of cereal into her mouth, chewed and gave him a toothy grin. “Aunt Gina says we’ll see fish. I wanna see an octopus.”
“I don’t know how many fish come to this beach. There’s another beach about a mile up the coast that’s supposed to be incredible for snorkeling,” Ethan informed them.
Gina’s dark eyes widened with interest. “Really?”
He felt absurdly proud of his knowledge. “Paul—the friend who owns a share of this unit—mentioned a beach to me. Coki Beach, I think it’s called. There’s even better snorkeling on St. John, but you have to take the ferry to get there.”
“Coki Beach?”
She looked so interested, so grateful for his knowledge. His ego inflated a bit more. “Just a mile or so west of here.”
“Can we go?” The girl twisted in her seat and gazed eagerly at her aunt. “Can we go there?”
“I don’t know. We’d have to get a cab, I guess. Or there might be a public jitney.”
“What’s a jitney?”
“Kind of like a bus.”
“I could—” Ethan cut himself off before completing the sentence: I could drive you there. Maybe he could; maybe he couldn’t. He’d rented the car for the convenience of the Hamiltons, not a strange woman and her niece.
Of course, if he and Kim went snorkeling with Gina and the kid, they could all drive there together, and leave Kim’s parents to fend for themselves. Why not? The Hamiltons were residing at a luxurious hotel. They could get massages and drink Absolut vodka martinis while lounging by the pool. Or they could hit the links. Given a choice between snorkeling and golf, Ethan couldn’t imagine choosing golf—and he couldn’t imagine Ross Hamilton choosing snorkeling.
Maybe this whole time-share disaster would turn out to be a huge blessing. Ethan and Kim could do things with Gina and her niece and ignore Kim’s parents. The time he’d spent with them on the flight to St. Thomas and last night at dinner was enough to convince him that an in-law relationship with them would never be a close, loving bond. He really ought to withhold judgment until he’d spent more than one day in their company, but where people were concerned, his instincts were usually pretty accurate. He’d known, within minutes of glimpsing Kim, that they would wind up in bed together, and that the experience would be spectacular. They had, and it was. And here he was, having spent a grand total of less than an hour in Gina Morante’s company, and he knew…
He knew they would get along. Beyond that, he didn’t want to know what he knew.
So they’d go snorkeling together. He’d sacrifice his evenings to Ross and Delia Hamilton, but surely he didn’t have to sacrifice his days to them, too.
The sound of footsteps padding down the carpeted hall caused him to turn. Kim, clad in a tennis skirt and top, her hair pulled into a bouncy ponytail, materialized in the doorway.
“Good morning,” Gina greeted her in her distinctive New York accent.
Kim managed a cool smile, then turned to Ethan. “You aren’t eating breakfast, are you? We’re supposed to meet Mom and Dad at the hotel at nine.”
“Just a cup of coffee,” he said, then nodded toward Gina. “Gina generously offered me some.”
Gina glanced toward the coffeepot, which was nearly empty. “I could make some more,” she said.
“That won’t be necessary,” Kim assured her. “But thank you for offering.”
“He’s going snorkeling with us,” the kid announced.
One of Kim’s eyebrows ascended and the other dipped, enabling her to look simultaneously quizzical and skeptical. “Is he?” she asked, her elegant blue eyes boring into him.
“We were just talking about it,” he said, refusing to succumb to her potent stare. Others quaked and quailed in the icy potency of her disapproval, but he never did—which, he suspected, was one of his main attractions for her. “Paul mentioned a place called Coki Beach, where the snorkeling is supposed to be phenomenal.”
“We’re meeting Mom and Dad for breakfast,” she said.
“Breakfast isn’t going to take the whole day. We could go snorkeling after breakfast.”
“I was hoping we could go to Charlotte Amalie.”
“Kim, we’re not going to spend this entire week shopping.” His voice was gentle, but he hoped she’d heard the warning in it.
She pursed her lovely pink lips, indicating that she had. “I know that,” she said crisply. “I thought we could go downtown today and get a feel for the place. We don’t have to go snorkeling on these people’s schedule.” She waved her hand vaguely toward Gina and the kid.
Ethan knew she didn’t intend to be rude. But the strangers they’d been accidentally thrown together with were irrelevant to her. They might as well not even exist, as far as she was concerned.
They existed for Ethan, though. He felt their warmth in the air, he heard the clinks of their spoons against their bowls, and he knew they were assessing Kim and giving her very low marks. He didn’t blame them.
Yet, in a way she was right. Their schedule shouldn’t dictate his and Kim’s. He was under no obligation to drive them to Coki Beach or anywhere else. They could take the jitney.
And he’d be stuck with the Hamiltons.
It was enough to make him wish he were a jitney driver.
HE FINALLY MADE IT to the beach at a little past one-thirty. The sun was high and white, like an incandescent bulb in the sky. The beach smelled of coconut oil and sea salt, and the wind gusting off the water was warm.
Okay, so the Hamiltons wanted to shop. He didn’t want to shop, and there was no reason on earth that he should have to. If he and Kim wound up married, he wouldn’t be obligated to accompany her every time she went shopping. Why accompany her here?
After breakfast—another long, profusely caloric meal, this time lubricated by mimosas and spiced with a contentious debate on the current administration’s environmental policies—he’d driven Kim and her parents into Charlotte Amalie and arranged to meet them at five o’clock at a shaded kiosk by the wharf where all the cruise ships docked. During their initial excursion—“This is reconnaissance, not serious shopping,” Kim had explained—they would scout out some interesting eateries, and when Ethan met up with them they’d choose a restaurant for dinner.
He’d agreed to everything Kim said. As long as he didn’t have to do reconnaissance with her, he’d go along with whatever dinner plans her family wanted.
He did intend to do a little shopping at some point that week—not so much that preliminary recon was called for, though. If watches were as inexpensive as the guidebooks said, he might pick one up for his father. Maybe one for himself, too. But he couldn’t imagine spending more than one day roaming the streets, alleys and arcades of Charlotte Amalie in search of bargains. It wasn’t as if he and his father needed watches. And how could a person prefer shopping to lounging on the sand with a cold beer and a good book? Or snorkeling at Coki Beach.
He wondered if Gina and Ali had made it over to Coki Beach. If they hadn’t found their own transportation there, it was probably too late for him to offer them a lift now.
He touched the cold surface of his beer bottle to his forehead and scanned the beach—looking for a spot to settle in the shade of a palm, not looking for a leggy, dark-haired tourist from New York. When he didn’t spot her, he convinced himself he wasn’t disappointed.
And when he did spot her niece, he convinced himself he wasn’t elated.
Ali the Alley Cat knelt in the sand, molding and sculpting it with her hands. He watched from the walkway bordering the beach as she labored over what appeared to be a sand castle of some sort. She peered toward the water, then grinned and waved. Following the line of her gaze, he saw Gina striding across the sand, carrying a beach pail so full of water it splattered droplets with her every step.
Her bikini was as revealing as the one she’d worn yesterday. Today’s was turquoise, the same color as the sea. The bottom was cut high and the top was cut low.
Kim is beautiful, he reminded himself, but that truth didn’t seem particularly germane at the moment.
He ambled over the hot sand, figuring he’d just say hello and then find another location to settle. But when Alicia saw him, she eagerly waved him over. “Hey, come see what I’m making!” she hollered.
He reached Alicia the same time Gina did. She lowered her bucket to the sand carefully, and he tried not to stare at her bosom as she bent over. God, she looked great in a bikini. Ethan had never met a woman who didn’t—any size, any shape, he happened to think women’s bodies were wonderful—but Gina was definitely one of the most satisfying sights on the beach today.
“What are you making?” he asked. Up close, Alicia’s efforts didn’t resemble much of anything.
“The Brooklyn Bridge,” she told him.
“That’s a pretty ambitious project,” he said, shooting a grin at Gina as she straightened up.
She grinned back. “You’re standing in Staten Island, in case you were wondering.”
“You can help,” Alicia told him, her tone firm enough to convey that this was an order.
“Alicia, he came down to the beach to read,” Gina chided the kid. “See? He’s got a book. Let him be.”
“No, I don’t mind,” he said, although he wanted to build the Brooklyn Bridge on a beach about as much as he wanted to shop for discounted liquor in Charlotte Amalie. He tossed down his book beside a pile of what he guessed was Gina’s gear, propped against the base of a palm: the colorful canvas tote he’d seen her carrying yesterday, and mesh drawstring bags filled with snorkeling masks, tubes and flippers. Then he hunkered down next to Alicia. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“We have to dig,” she said, pointing to a narrow trench she’d already carved into the sand. “This is the East River or New York Harbor. I forget. Aunt Gina says if we dig deep enough, the water won’t disappear.”
“You want me to dredge the harbor,” he said, shooting Gina another look. She towered above him, her lanky body casting a long shadow across him.
“You don’t have to do this,” she called down to him.
Viewing her from his ground-level perspective, he couldn’t imagine choosing his book over a few minutes with her—even if he had to pay for those minutes by digging in the sand with her niece. “I’ll see how it goes,” he said, refusing to commit to more than that.
“I’m dumping the water so Aunt Gina can get more,” Alicia announced before emptying the bucket of water into the trench.
“Maybe you should get the water and let your aunt sit for a minute,” he suggested, hoping Alicia and Gina wouldn’t interpret his words as anything other than an attempt to earn a fellow adult a few minute’s rest.
Alicia sprang to her feet. “Okay! You guys dig and I’ll get the water!” Before Gina could object, the kid had grabbed the bucket and was racing down to the sea.
Gina lowered herself onto the sand, not too close to Ethan. Her gaze remained on her niece. “She spills half the water,” she told Ethan. “That’s why we thought it would be better if I got it.”
“This doesn’t look anything like the Brooklyn Bridge,” he commented, scrutinizing the span constructed of damp, packed sand above the trench.
Gina chuckled but refused to shift her attention from the little girl at the water’s edge. “You’ve seen the Brooklyn Bridge?”
“I’m from Connecticut,” he told her. “And you’re from…Brooklyn?”
Still smiling, she shook her head. “Manhattan. I grew up in the Bronx.”
He knew midtown Manhattan, where all the Broadway theaters and famous restaurants and office towers were, and the downtown business district. The Bronx was just a borough he passed through—and the punch line of jokes.
“I live down in Chelsea now,” she told him. “You know the city?”
“Sort of.” He smiled sheepishly and hoped she wouldn’t quiz him. “I live in Arlington. That’s in the northwest corner of Connecticut.”
“Yeah. I know it.” She used the plastic shovel to dig the trench deeper. A murky puddle of water lingered at the bottom. “So where’s the rest of your group?”
“Shopping. I thought I’d come back and enjoy a little beach time.” He glanced toward the snorkeling gear by the palm tree. “Did you visit Coki Beach?”
“Not today. We just snorkeled around here. They rent equipment for the whole week. The guy at the cabana said we should try to get over to St. John. There’s this underwater snorkeling trail there. I can’t imagine snorkeling along an underwater trail.”
“It’s supposed to be amazing.” He wondered whether he’d be able to separate Kim from her Visa card long enough to take her snorkeling at Trunk Bay on St. John. Paul had told him he had to go there. He’d hate to go alone, though.
And he couldn’t go with Gina. Not when she looked the way she did in a swimsuit.
“I’m figuring we’ll try Coki Beach tomorrow. We saw some fish here. Not a lot, but Alicia was pretty excited.”
Ethan did a little desultory one-handed digging while he sipped his beer. “You want some?” he asked, extending the bottle to her.
She flickered a glance toward the bottle, then zeroed in on Alicia again. “Thanks,” she said, letting him place the bottle into her hand so she wouldn’t have to look away from her niece. “It’s hot out here. We brought some sodas down to the beach, but we finished them a while ago.”
“Beer is better,” he said. She smiled her agreement.
Down by the water, Alicia straightened up, clutching the rim of the bucket. Gina handed the bottle back to Ethan and watched her niece pick a path across the beach, sloshing water with each step. By the time she reached them, she looked upset. “I spilled too much of it,” she said, a sob making her voice wobbly.
“That’s okay, sweetie. Pour it in and I’ll get the next one.”
Ethan wanted to argue. He’d barely begun talking to her; he wasn’t ready for her to run off. And he definitely wasn’t ready to shoot the breeze with a little girl. But who would be the water carrier wasn’t his decision to make. Gina rose, lifted the pail from Alicia’s hands as soon as she’d emptied it into the trench, and stalked across the beach, her hips swaying as her heels sank into the sand.
Alicia threw herself back into the labor of digging. Ethan took another sip of beer and observed her. “We snorkeled today,” Alicia told him as she flung sand to one side.
“Your aunt told me. She said you saw some fish.”
“They were white. Kind of silvery. The color of angels,” Alicia told him. “I wanted to snorkel forever, but I swallowed some water and started coughing, and Aunt Gina said we had to take a break.”
“You’ve got a whole week,” Ethan pointed out. “You can go snorkeling again tomorrow.”
“Where’s the lady?” Alicia asked.
He assumed she meant Kim. “She’s in Charlotte Amalie. That’s the big town on the other side of the island.”
“Do they have snorkeling there?”
“No. What they have there is shopping.”
Alicia wrinkled her nose. She obviously didn’t think much of shopping. “Is she your girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Ethan said, feeling noble and virtuous for having gotten that established, even if he hadn’t established it with Gina. She’d surely figured it out. And now the kid knew, too.
“My daddy has a girlfriend,” Alicia said, bringing him up short.
“Does he?” Perhaps her mother was dead, or her parents were divorced.
Or perhaps they weren’t. “It makes my mommy very mad,” Alicia said.
“I would imagine,” he agreed faintly.
“I don’t think she’s as pretty as your girlfriend,” Alicia continued matter-of-factly. “I haven’t seen her, but the way my mommy talks about her…Sometimes my mommy uses bad words. I hate that.”
“I remember.” Ethan recalled Alicia’s howls yesterday when anyone uttered a damn or a hell. He toyed with the label on his bottle and searched the water for Gina, eager for her to return. Compared with this conversation, his political debates with Ross Hamilton had been a piece of cake.
“Aunt Gina is my mommy’s sister,” Alicia went on. “That’s what an aunt is—your mother’s sister. Or your father’s sister. Do you have any aunts?”
“Yes.” He spotted Gina straightening up, clutching the replenished bucket. Good. In less than a minute, she’d be back to rescue him.
“Are they as nice as Aunt Gina?”
“No. Aunt Gina seems extra nice.” Every step that carried her toward him made her seem even nicer.
“She is. Extra extra nice. Extra extra extra.” She greeted Gina’s arrival with a big smile. When Gina emptied the water into the trench, Alicia let out a whoop. “Look, Aunt Gina! It’s staying. We dug deep enough! The water isn’t all soaking in!”
Ethan rose onto his knees and peered into the trench. A nice pool of water stretched below the bridge. “Hey,” he said admiringly.
“All right!” Gina slapped Alicia’s hand in congratulations, then slapped Ethan’s, too. Her touch startled him. Her palm was slick and cool with water, her fingers slender, her wrist graceful. She wore a ring on her thumb, braided strands of silver in a pattern identical to the ring on her toe.
The brief contact obviously meant nothing. She was just celebrating their engineering feat. Because Ethan was there, she included him in the celebration. That was all.
Yet the cool texture of her skin and the exuberance behind her gesture stayed with him, long after she and Alicia had moved on to bolstering the bridge, decorating it with shells and strands of grass, analyzing the feasibility of importing some of those angel-colored fish to swim in their tiny version of New York Harbor.
Sipping his beer and listening to their bubbly chatter, Ethan felt the impact of Gina’s hand against his and contemplated the tide as it tugged the sand, shaped the shoreline and left beach reconfigured, rearranged—almost unrecognizable. Tides could be dangerous, he thought. Extra extra extra dangerous. He’d better be careful.
Yet he closed his hand, as if he could hold Gina’s touch inside it forever.
CHAPTER FOUR
EVER SINCE HER RUN-IN with the nuns at Our Lady of Mercy at the age of thirteen, Gina hadn’t been particularly religious. But she believed in God—and if she hadn’t, snorkeling at Coki Beach would have turned her into a believer.
The beach itself was nothing much, just a strip of sand, a few picnic tables, a man operating a kiosk from which he sold grilled sausages and citrus punch, and a couple of local women who’d set up a hair-braiding enterprise in the shade of a looming old tree. Alicia had asked if she could have braids done, and Gina had paid one of the women to add two delicate braids, tipped with beads the color of the sea, to the hair behind Alicia’s right ear. Another kiosk offered snorkeling equipment for rent, but Gina had brought the gear they’d rented at Palm Point.
She’d also brought Ethan and Kim—or, more accurately, Ethan and Kim had brought her and Alicia. Grateful for the lift, Gina had packed extra peanut-butter sandwiches, fruit-juice boxes and grapes, happy to cater lunch for everyone in return for the free ride.
Kim hadn’t seemed overjoyed with the plan, but she’d gone along with it. Her parents were apparently spending the day playing tennis and golf, and Kim had seemed torn about having to choose between those activities and snorkeling. Ethan had told her that whether or not she joined him, he intended to snorkel—“I can play tennis at the club in Connecticut, for God’s sake,” he’d argued, just loudly enough that Gina couldn’t help overhearing him, even though he and Kim were in their ocean-view bedroom and Gina and Alicia were in the kitchen when this quarrel had taken place. By the time Kim had emerged with Ethan from their room, she’d been wearing a swimsuit and a resentful pout.