He dodged a long curtain of slippery kelp that lay across the pebbles like an abandoned nightgown. The tide was halfway in, rising fast. Each wave left curls of white foam on the rough sand, only for the next wave to wash them out. Perfect time for a quick dive, then he could ride the current back in.
Perfect, that is, if you didn’t mind getting an all-body ice bath.
Steeling himself for the shock, he waded into the fifty-degree water. His entire body went on red alert. Danger, danger. Unacceptable conditions. He ignored the screams of his nervous system and forged onwards. Ice cream dripped from his hair onto his shoulders. He wasn’t sure which was colder, but he knew which was stickier.
Hauling in one last breath, he consigned his soul to the Lord above and quickly crossed himself. He wasn’t especially religious, but like many fishermen, he was plenty superstitious.
Then he dove.
Instant brain freeze. Skin freeze. Bone freeze. Possibly inner organ freeze too. With part of his brain, he knew that blood was leaving his extremities and pumping toward his heart and lungs, the organs essential to continued life. The rest of him was basically straight-up screaming.
He surfaced and howled up at the sky. “Wooooooo!!”
Then he dove back down because the chilly air blowing off the bay cut against his skin like knives of ice. Underwater, he shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair to get the ice cream out.
And despite everything—the debate, dropping out, the cold, the shock, the possibility of hypothermia—he laughed.
Ten
“It’s official,” Lulu told herself. “You’ve put your life in the hands of an insane person.”
There was no other explanation for why someone would voluntarily subject themselves to that water.
Quite possibly, this would be a good time to part ways with Tristan. She could take his keys from his pocket and borrow his truck. She could drive it back to the Desperado and then right to the airport. She’d leave it there for him with a nice note and maybe a cappuccino maker.
Her plans got a little foggy at that point. Perhaps find the British embassy, if there even was one in Alaska? But still, it might be a safer option than continuing to associate with a clearly deranged dude.
Even if he did look like a work of art chiseled from the finest Italian marble when he took off his clothes. She’d barely taken a breath after he’d undone the first button of his shirt. Or even blinked. She’d watched him every step of the way, savoring the flex of his thighs in those Calvin Kleins and the strong lines of his shoulders and back. His was a working body, with tan lines at his neck and upper arms.
Finally she’d managed to tear her gaze away and that was when it occurred to her that she could leave. Of course she could leave at any point—no one was keeping her prisoner—but without a vehicle it was more difficult.
She palmed Tristan’s keys and craned her neck to look beyond the breakwater at the vehicles whizzing past on the road above. Tristan had parked in a small pullout. It wouldn’t be hard to climb up there. She could be at the Desperado before he managed to get his clothes back on.
Sure, it would be a shitty way to repay his kindness, but this wasn’t just about her. She had someone depending on her and that was more important than anything else. Tristan could take care of himself.
As she gazed up at the road, a movement in the rocks caught her eye. She couldn’t see whether it was a person or an animal of some kind, but it looked furtive. What if it was Mr. Bad Guy trailing her, waiting for a moment when she was all alone?
What if she got into Tristan’s truck and he followed her and ran her off the road and no one ever heard from her again?
Or…what if she managed to get away and Mr. Bad Guy went after Tristan when he was half-naked, mostly frozen, and without a vehicle?
She caught the movement again, this time with a swish of a bushy brown tail. Relief surged through her, leaving her a little lightheaded. It was a squirrel or a chipmunk or whatever little rodents lived in Alaska. It wasn’t Mr. Bad Guy. She wasn’t in danger, at least not immediately. Neither was Tristan. And of course she wasn’t going to sneak off with his truck. That wasn’t her. She was the kind who stayed until the end; if she knew nothing else about herself, she knew that.
How many times had her mother lectured her about getting on with her own life? Too many.
She grabbed Tristan’s clothes and picked her way across the beach, which was strewn with piles of seaweed, long strands of kelp, and even a stranded jellyfish. Tristan’s hoots and hollers got louder the closer she got to the shoreline. At least he was still breathing.
“You coming in?” he shouted to her as she reached the water’s edge. A wave broke on the sand and rippled toward her. She skipped back, not wanting to get her new trainers wet.
“Absolutely not. But I have your clothes right here. Should I go hunt down a defibrillator as well?”
“I just got defibrillated. Or fibrillated, whichever one means you get an electric shock right to the heart.” He swam closer to her, everything but his head staying under the surface. His eyes shone with a wild gray light. With his hair wet with seawater, his bone structure stood out more. He had bold features; prominent cheekbones, a wide jawline, a square face. Each rough plane of his face conveyed solidity and strength, and in the midst of it all, the eyes of a dreamboat.
“Are you all right? Shall I call the emergency number?”
“What for? Feels great.” He lifted one hand above the surface and turned it this way and that. “Oh good, my hand is still attached. I couldn’t feel it. Had to check.”
“Tristan. Get out of there. I’m sorry I dumped my ice cream on your head. That was very childish of me.”
“Yes, and we can’t ever tell Trixie about that. She’d be very hurt. She takes a lot of pride in her product.” He put his hand back underwater and took another stroke through the waves.
“It was fabulous,” she said. “Five stars on Yelp, I promise.”
He swam closer. “Sure I can’t tempt you?”
Oh, he tempted her, all right. In ways she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. If ever, really.
On the cruise ship she mostly spent time with other performers, who were mostly young and free-spirited partiers. Back in England, she’d been surrounded with health care professionals, who were mostly women. She’d had a secret crush on one of the male nurses, but he’d turned out to be married with a child on the way. Once in a while she’d ridden her bicycle to the butcher shop and lusted after the butcher’s assistant, a young man from Turkey with the most rippling musculature she’d ever seen.
But that was all fantasy, and Tristan was very much reality. Everything about him—his blunt approach, his basic kindness, his comfort in his own skin—spoke to her on a visceral level.
But none of that meant that she was getting anywhere near that water. “You cannot,” she told him. “If you want revenge for the ice cream, I’d prefer if you think in terms of running me over with a truck rather than getting me in that water.”
He laughed, water streaming down his face. “Your loss. But I get it. You probably want to wait for the Polar Plunge in January.”
She was about to explain that unless “Polar” and “Plunge” referred to something sex-related, she had no interest, when he rose up out of the water. Her words wound up caught in her throat, because who could speak when they were presented with a sight like a wet, nearly naked Tristan Del Rey?