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It occurred to Drew that Becky was the kind of woman who brought out things in a man that he would prefer to think he didn’t have. Around a woman like this a man could find himself wanting to protect himself—and her—from disappointments. That’s all he wanted for Joe, too, not to bully him but to protect him.
He’d hated that question, the one he hadn’t answered. Had he bullied his brother? He hoped not. But the sad truth was Joe had been seven when Drew, seventeen, was appointed his guardian. Drew had floundered, in way over his head, and he’d resorted to doing whatever needed to be done to get his little brother through childhood.
No wonder his brother was so hungry for love that he’d marry the first beautiful woman who blinked sideways at him.
Unless he could talk some sense into him. He cocked his head. He was pretty sure he could hear the plane coming.
“How hot is it supposed to be on June third?” she asked. He could hear the reluctance to even ask in her voice.
“You know that expression? Hotter than Hades—”
“Never mind. I get it. All the more reason that we really need the pavilion,” she said. “We’ll need protection from the sun. I planned to have the tables running this way, so everyone could just turn their heads and see the ocean as the sun is going down. The head table could be there, at the bottom of the stairs. Imagine the bride and groom coming down that staircase to join their guests.”
Her voice had become quite dreamy. Had she really tried to tell him she was not a romantic? He knew he’d pegged it. She’d had some kind of setback in the romance department, but inside her was still a giddy girl with unrealistic dreams about her prince coming. He had to make sure she knew that was not him.
“Well, I already told you, you can’t have that,” he said gruffly. He did not enjoy puncturing her dream as much as he wanted to. He did not enjoy being mean as much as he would have liked. He told himself it was for her own good.
He was good at doing things for other people’s own good. You could ask Joe, though his clumsy attempts at parenting were no doubt part of why his brother was running off half-cocked to get married.
“I’m sure we can figure out something,” Becky said of her pavilion dream.
“We? No, we can’t.”
This was better. They were going to talk about practicalities, as dream-puncturing as those could be!
The plane was circling now, and they moved toward the airstrip.
He continued, “What you’re talking about is an open, expansive structure with huge unsupported spans. You’d need an architect and an engineer.”
“I have a tent company I use at home,” Becky said sadly, “but they are booked nearly a year in advance. I’ve tried a few others. Same story. Plus, the planes that can land here aren’t big enough to carry that much canvas, and you have to book the supply barge. There’s only one with a flat enough bottom to dock here. An unlimited budget can’t get you what you might think.”
“Unlimited?” He heard the horror in his voice.
She ignored him. “Are you sure I’d need an architect and an engineer, even for something so temporary?”
He slid her a look. She looked quite deflated by all this.
“Especially for something so temporary,” he told her. “I’m sure the last thing Allie wants is to be making the news for the collapse of her wedding pavilion. I can almost see the headlines now. ‘Three dead, one hundred and eighty-seven injured, event planner and building contractor missing.’”
He heard her little gasp and glanced at her. She was blushing profusely.
“Not missing like that,” he said.
“Like what?” she choked.
“Like whatever thought is making you blush like that.”
“I’m not blushing. The sun has this effect on me.”
“Sheesh,” he said, as if she had not denied the blush at all. “It’s not as if I said that while catastrophe unfolded all around them, the event planner and the contractor went missing together.”
“I said I wasn’t blushing! I never would have thought about us together in any way.” Her blush deepened.
He watched her. “You aren’t quite the actress that your employer is.”
“I am not thinking of us together,” she insisted. Her voice was just a little shrill. He realized he quite enjoyed teasing her.
“No?” he said, silkily. “You and I seeking shelter under a palm frond while disaster unfolds all around us?”
Her eyes moved skittishly to his lips and then away. He took advantage of her looking away to study her lips in profile. They were plump little plums, ripe for picking. He was almost sorry he had started this. Almost.
“You’re right. You are not a prince. You are evil,” she decided, looking back at him. There was a bit of reluctant laughter lurking in her eyes.
He twirled an imaginary moustache. “Yes, I am. Just waiting for an innocent from Moose Run, Michigan, to cross my path so that in the event of a tropical storm, and a building collapse, I will still be entertained.”
A little smile tugged at the lips he had just noticed were quite luscious. He was playing a dangerous game.
“Seriously,” she said, and he had a feeling she was the type who did not indulge in lighthearted banter for long, “Allie doesn’t want any of this making the news. I’m sure she told you the whole wedding is top secret. She does not want helicopters buzzing her special day.”
Drew felt a bit cynical about that. Anyone who wanted a top secret wedding did not invite two hundred people to it. Still, he decided, now might not be the best time to tell Becky a helicopter buzzing might be the least of her worries. When he’d left the States yesterday, all the entertainment shows had been buzzing with the rumors of Allie’s engagement.
Was the famous actress using his brother—and everyone else, including small-town Becky English—to ensure Allie Ambrosia was front and center in the news just as her new movie was coming out?
Even though it went somewhat against his blunt nature, the thought that Becky might be being played made Drew soften his bad news a bit. “This close to the equator it’s fully dark by six o’clock. The chance of heatstroke for your two hundred guests should be minimized by that.”
They took a path through some dense vegetation. On the other side was the airstrip.
“Great,” she said testily, though she was obviously relieved they were going to discuss benign things like the weather. “Maybe I can create a kind of ‘room’ feeling if I circle the area with torches and dress up the tables with linens and candles and flowers and hope for the best.”
“Um, about the torches? And candles?” He squinted at the plane touching down on the runway.
“What?”
“According to Google, the trade winds seem to pick up in the late afternoon. And early evening. Without any kind of structure to protect from the wind, I think they’ll just blow out. Or worse.”
“So, first you tell me I can’t have a structure, and then you tell me all the problems I can expect because I don’t have a structure?”
He shrugged. “One thing does tend to lead to another.”
“If the wind is strong enough to blow out the candles, we could have other problems with it, too.”
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Tablecloths flying off tables. Women’s dresses blowing up over their heads. Napkins catching fire. Flower arrangements being smashed. There’s really a whole lot of things people should think about before planning their wedding on a remote island in the tropics.”
Becky glared at him. “You know what? I barely know you and I hate you already.”
He nodded. “I have that effect on a lot of people.”
He watched the plane taxi toward them and grind to a halt in front of them.
“I’m sure you do,” she said snippily.
“Does this mean our date under the palm frond is off?”
“It was never on!”
“You should think about it—the building collapsed, the tablecloths on fire, women’s dresses blowing over their heads as they run shrieking...”
“Please stop.”
But he couldn’t. He could tell he very nearly had her where he wanted her. Why did he feel so driven to make little Miss Becky English angry? But also to make her laugh?
“And you and me under a palm frond, licking wedding cake off each other’s fingers.”
At first she looked appalled. But then a smile tickled her lips. And then she giggled. And then she was laughing. In a split second, every single thing about her seemed transformed. She went from plain to pretty.
Very pretty.
This was exactly what he had wanted: to glimpse what the cool Miss English would look like if she let go of control.
It was more dangerous than Drew had anticipated. It made him want to take it a step further, to make her laugh harder or to take those little lips underneath his and...
He reminded himself she was not the type of girl he usually invited out to play. Despite the fact she was being relied on to put on a very sophisticated event, there didn’t seem to be any sophistication about her.
He had already figured out there was a heartbreak in her past. That was the only reason a girl as apple pie as her claimed to be jaundiced about romance. He could tell it wasn’t just dealing with people’s wedding insanity that had made her want to be cynical, even as it was all too evident she was not. He had seen the truth in the dreamy look when she had started talking about how she wanted it all to go.
He could tell by looking at her exactly what she needed, and it wasn’t a job putting together other people’s fantasies.
It was a husband who adored her. And three children. And a little house where she could sew curtains for the windows and tuck bright annuals into the flower beds every year.
It was whatever the perfect life in Moose Run, Michigan, looked like.
Drew knew he could never give her those things. Never. He’d experienced too much loss and too much responsibility in his life.
Still, there was one thing a guy as jaundiced as him did not want or need. To be stuck on a deserted island with a female whose laughter could turn her from a plain old garden-variety girl next door into a goddess in the blink of an eye.
He turned from her quickly and watched as the door of the plane opened. The crew got off, opened the cargo hold and began unloading stuff beside the runway.
He frowned. No Joe.
He took his phone out of his pocket and stabbed in a text message. He pushed Send, but the island did not have great service in all places. The message to his brother did not go through.
Becky was searching his face, which he carefully schooled not to show his disappointment.
“I guess we’ll have to find that spot ourselves. Joe will probably come on the afternoon flight. Let’s see what we can find this way.”
Instead of following the lawn to where it dropped down to the beach, he followed it north to a line of palm trees. A nice wide trail dipped into them, and he took it.
“It’s like jungle in here,” she said.
“Think of the possibilities. Joe could swing down from a vine. In a loincloth. Allie could be waiting for him in a tree house, right here.”
“No, no and especially no,” she said.
He glanced behind him. She had stopped to look at a bright red hibiscus. She plucked it off and tucked it behind her ear.
“In the tropics,” he told her, “when you wear a flower behind your ear like that, it means you are available. You wouldn’t want the cook getting the wrong idea.”
She glared at him, plucked the flower out and put it behind her other ear.
“Now it means you’re married.”
“There’s no winning, is there?” she asked lightly.
No, there wasn’t. The flower looked very exotic in her hair. It made him very aware, again, of the enchantment of tropical islands. He turned quickly from her and made his way down the path.
After about five minutes in the deep shade of the jungle, they came out to another beach. It was exposed to the wind, which played in the petals of the flower above her ear, lifted her bangs from her face and pressed her shirt to her.
“Oh,” she called, “it’s beautiful.”
She had to shout because unlike the beach the castle overlooked, this one was not in a protected cove.
It was a beautiful beach. A surfer would probably love it, but it would have to be a good surfer. There were rocky outcrops stretching into the water that looked like they would be painful to hit and hard to avoid.
“It’s too loud,” he said over the crashing of the waves. “They’d be shouting their vows.”
He turned and went back into the shaded jungle. For some reason, he thought she would just follow him, and it took him a few minutes to realize he was alone.
He turned and looked. The delectable Miss Becky English was nowhere to be seen. He went back along the path, annoyed. Hadn’t he made it perfectly clear they had time constraints?
When he got back out to the beach, his heart went into his throat. She had climbed up onto one of the rocky outcrops. She was standing there, bright as the sun in that yellow shirt, as a wave smashed on the rock just beneath her. Her hands were held out and her face lifted to the spray of white foam it created. With the flower in her hair, she looked more like a goddess than ever, performing some ritual to the sea.
Did she know nothing of the ocean? Of course she didn’t. They had already established that. That, coming from Moose Run, there were things she could not know about.
“Get down from there,” he shouted. “Becky, get down right now.”
He could see the second wave building, bigger than the first that had hit the rock. The waves would come in sets. And the last wave in the set would be the biggest.
The wind swallowed his voice, though she turned and looked at him. She smiled and waved. He could see the surf rising behind her alarmingly. The second wave hit the rock. She turned away from him, and hugged herself in delight as the spray fell like thick mist all around her.
“Get away from there,” he shouted. She turned and gave him a puzzled look. He started to run.
Becky had her back to the third wave when it hit. It hit the backs of her legs. Drew saw her mouth form a surprised O, and then her arms were flailing as she tried to regain her balance. The wave began pulling back, with at least as much force as it had come in with. It yanked her off the rock as if she were a rag doll.
CHAPTER FIVE
BECKY FELT THE shocked helplessness as her feet were jerked out from under her and she was swept off the rock. The water closed over her head and filled her mouth and nose. She popped back up like a cork, but her swimming skills were rudimentary, and she was not sure they would have helped her against the fury of the sea. She was being pulled out into what seemed to be an endless abyss. She tried frantically to swim back in toward shore. In seconds she was as exhausted as she had ever been.
I’m going to drown, she thought, stunned, choking on water and fear. How had this happened? One moment life had seemed so pleasant and beautiful and then...it was over.
Her life was going to be over. She waited, helplessly, for it to flash before her eyes. Instead, she found herself thinking that Drew had been right. It hadn’t been a heartbreak. It had been a romantic disappointment. Ridiculous to think that right now, but on the other hand, right now seemed as good a time as any to be acutely and sadly aware of things she had missed.
“Hey!” His voice carried over the crashing of the sea. “Hang on.”
Becky caught a glimpse of the rock she had fallen off. Drew was up there. And then she went under the water again.
When she surfaced, Drew was in the water, slashing through the roll of the waves toward her. “Don’t panic,” he called over the roar of the water pounding the rock outcropping.
She wanted to tell him it was too late for that. She was already panicked.
“Tread,” he yelled. “Don’t try to swim. Not yet. Look at my face. Nowhere else. Look at me.”
Her eyes fastened on his face. There was strength and calm in his features, as if he did this every day. He was close to her now.
“I’m going to come to you,” he shouted, “but you have to be calm first. If you panic, you will kill us both.”
It seemed his words, and the utter strength and determination in his face, poured a honey of calm over her, despite the fact she was still bobbing like a cork in a ravaged sea. He seemed to see or sense the moment she stopped panicking, and he moved in close.
She nearly sobbed with relief when Drew reached out and touched her, then folded his arms around her and pulled her in tight to him. He was strong in the water—she suspected, abstractly, he was strong everywhere in his life—and she rested into his embrace, surrendering to his warmth. She could feel the power of him in his arms and where she was pressed into the wet slickness of his chest.
“Just let it carry you,” he said. “Don’t fight it anymore”
It seemed as if he could be talking about way more than water. It could be a message about life.
It seemed the water carried them out forever, but eventually it dumped them in a calmer place, just beyond where the waves began to crest. Becky could feel the water lose its grip on her, even as he refused to.
She never took her eyes off his face. Her mind seemed to grow calmer and calmer, even amused. If this was the last thing she would see, it told her, that wasn’t so bad.
“Okay,” he said, “can you swim?”
“Dog paddle.” The water was not cold, but her voice was shaking.
“That will do. Swim that way. Do your best. I’ve got you if you get tired.” He released her.
That way was not directly to the shore. He was asking her to swim parallel to the shore instead of in. But she tried to do as he asked. She was soon floundering, so tired she could not lift her arms.
“Roll over on your back,” he said, and she did so willingly. His hand cupped her chin and she was being pulled through the water. He was an enormously strong swimmer.
“Okay, this is a good spot.” He released her again and she came upright and treaded water. “Go toward shore. I’ve got you, I’m right with you.”
She was scared to go back into the waves. It was too much. She was exhausted. But she glanced at his face once more and found her own courage there.
“Get on your tummy, flat as a board, watch for the next wave and ride it in. Watch for those rocks on the side.”
She did as she was told. She knew she had no choice. She had to trust him completely. She felt the wave lift her up and drive her toward the shore at a stunning speed. And then it spit her out. She was lying in shallow water, but she could already feel the wave pulling at her, trying to drag her back in. She used what little strength she had left to scramble to her knees and crawl through the sugar pebbles of the sand.
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